No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  And without being asked, the Camp Commandant of the training area had stood by a section of his normal maintenance squad, eager to co-operate. Kenworthy accepted them. They might be able to lay their hands on equipment that could save the day.

  Kenworthy himself marked out the area of their immediate operation, extending a yard or two in all directions from the slab on which he and Derek had found the grenade. An owl flew off to find darkness and seclusion elsewhere, not a ghost with muffled wings, as one had been the other night; a mere owl, flying away from the unaccountable activities of men.

  There was a moment of preparation, detailing the men, four of them, who were going to be the first to attack the soil. Greatcoats and tunics were folded over a wall and hung on the snag of a tree. The work was to be done within yards of the window in which Sally had sat. Even Kenworthy did not give it a second glance.

  The first thump of a pick into soft earth: but within a minute their tools were ringing metallically. The area was, in fact, flagged all over: such soil as there was consisted only of weed-bound wind-sweepings, nowhere more than a foot deep.

  ‘We ought to have brought a dowser,’ someone said. But they hadn’t; and no one was in a mood to be patient with otiose suggestions. They were going to have to lift the flags one by one. Kenworthy directed them to start with the one on which the grenade had been lying. There was no guarantee that whoever had put it there had known exactly which stone covered the well: it was extremely unlikely that he would have done. But a start had to be made somewhere, and once one flag was up, it would be easier to get at the edges of the others.

  Kenworthy stood back to let the work go on. He was taking no part in the labour himself, tempting though that was, it would at least have helped him to be patient. He moved back under the shadow of the wall, began to fill his pipe.

  Late this afternoon, he had called on Brian Hammond, successfully timing it to reach the house within minutes of his arriving home from work. Not unexpected, he had been treated with a respect in a house whose comfort and mise en scène were almost uniformly twenty-five years old.

  Brian Hammond was a pale and embarrassed nonentity: embarrassed by the presence of his mistress, known to be such to an impersonally distinguished caller; embarrassed by what he had to admit about his collision with a tree.

  ‘An appalling error of judgment on my part, the whole affair,’ he said.

  ‘Against which your wife had warned you.’

  ‘I have chased that about my brain until it has become a fact of life.’

  The woman who was living with him was ordinary enough: smart, but wearing nothing new, neither attractive nor unattractive. She seemed to have progressed from home-help to part-time housekeeper, thence to full-time and eventually to sitting tenant. It was difficult to know how much love she had for Hammond. They both behaved as if they expected Kenworthy to accept their situation with a carefully unspoken distaste for it: which was more or less the case.

  Deadly dull, both of them: though hardly to be expected to scintillate in anticipation of some of the questions that he might have thrown at them. He let them off lightly, satisfied after a few minutes that they were roughly as honest as they were uninteresting. They told him nothing that advanced the case. They confirmed, unwittingly in many instances, a good deal of subsidiary detail; but much of which was irrelevant. Nothing they said contradicted, or even seriously qualified, the major impressions that Kenworthy had formed elsewhere. He felt some sense of relief as he drove away from their concrete drive: a little haven of suburbia, imported into the Norfolk rural scene. He did not know how Sally had managed to tolerate it as long as she had: how on earth she had drifted into moulding her entire life into this amorphous mediocrity.

  Kenworthy put a match to his pipe. Smoking was strictly taboo to his lower echelons tonight, and he did not usually indulge in patrician dispensations. But he needed his pipe.

  ‘Bit like a scene from Hamlet, Bert.’

  ‘At least, they were supposed to be there for comic relief.’

  Sorely tempted to tell them to cut the small talk, Kenworthy took a grip on himself. They weren’t in any danger; they weren’t in a tearing hurry; now that the job was under way, they weren’t notably pushed for time.

  He watched their silhouettes lever up the first stone, manoeuvre it to its edge, and after some fumbling and jocular cursing, carry it out of their way. One man, working alone, then applied himself to the patch of earth that had been uncovered. After a short while, Kenworthy emerged to stop them.

  ‘We’re looking for an old well, not digging a new one. There’s nothing here. Move on to the next flag.’

  The next one was easier to shift, but equally unrevealing. The third required a double attack, because it split into two from a stray blow with a pick. The man who was digging struck stubborn resistance.

  ‘Another bloody flint.’

  ‘Flint-knappers’benefit, tonight.’

  ‘No, look, it’s a brick.’

  It was. In the further corner of this newest space lay brick and not simply loose brick. It was the outside edge of a circular coping.

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Well, don’t look so bloody surprised. We’ve never doubted that there is a well. It’s just been a question of locating it. Now that you have, let’s waste no time getting into it.’

  It was relatively easy to uncover it.

  ‘Mind you don’t fall in, then.’

  ‘Not likely to do that, sir, there’s an iron grille across it.’

  ‘So there is.’ Kenworthy said it with forced angelic patience. The grille was less than a foot down from the top of the coping, well and truly embedded in concrete. It must have been put in as a precaution when the military first took over.

  ‘Whoever did this,’ Derek said, ‘must have come across the cache or at least have disturbed it.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Kenworthy examined the mouth of the well. ‘No, and this is not simply wishful thinking on my part. If they had had something valuable to put away, even the Pascoes wouldn’t have hidden it as near to the surface as this. We’ve got to ask ourselves just how deep or shallow they would have worked, combining speed, comfort and reasonable safety. I’m afraid, however we look at it, the grille’s got to come away.’

  ‘Hacksaws.’

  ‘That’ll take’a long time. There are twelve widths to get through.’

  ‘We need an oxy-acetylene cutter.’

  ‘Perhaps the R.E.s …’

  And here the army was able to help. They had the implement. They had the man who could operate it. Only he didn’t happen to be amongst tonight’s detail. He could be roused; and he was duly roused. The store-key could be located, signed for, and the equipment brought out to the scene. It all took time: foot-stamping, chest-belting, finger-blowing time. Kenworthy fell his policemen out for a smoke. He had the feeling that the steam had gone out of the operation. At last the cutter had his goggles on; the more recklessly inquisitive were ordered to stand back from the edge of the well. The next spell of the work began.

  It was interrupted by a sudden hellish racket on the perimeter of the training area: small arms fire, explosions and yells of Red Indian high spirits. Something heavy thumped into the vestigial eaves of the Carvers’cottages. Bricks splintered. Something flew past Kenworthy’s cheek.

  ‘A dummy,’ he said.

  ‘Great relief!’ Derek murmured.

  The khaki members of the working party were the first to throw themselves flat to the ground. The rank and file of the police were quick in following their example.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong with the staff-work,’ Derek said.

  ‘You don’t say!’

  Another dummy shell. The man with the cutter abandoned his equipment unceremoniously, the jet of blue flame stabbing upwards into the night, and ran for cover.

  There were the unmistakable signals of an infantry advance from a semi-circular line beyond the scrub-land behind them; light machine-guns, sub-ma
chine-guns, and non-lethal but uncomforting thunder-flashes.

  ‘There must be some way of telling them!’

  ‘Surely the duty-officer in the camp knows what’s going on.’

  To have stood up and tried to signal would be to have courted several hundred times the odds that Lance-Corporal Davies had faced.

  Then suddenly three balls of red fire shot up and floated gently down. The firing stopped almost simultaneously, except for a single belated rifle-shot. An armoured scout-car came tearing across the area that Kenworthy and Derek had called the prairies.

  A young officer in a beret leaped out, a tough, squat man, webbing equipment over a ribbed sweater with leather padded shoulders. He was bursting with the energy of happiness and success, spoke in rapid, fluent, faultless English with continental vowels.

  He pointed to one after another of the men who were raising themselves from the ground. ‘You’re dead! You’re dead! You’re dead! You’re wounded in the chest! You’ve just lost your left leg! You will all please lie exactly where you are until the arrival of the stretcher-bearers, when you will be used to exercise the medical support services.’

  One of the E.E. C. contingents taking part in the NATO exercise. For the moment, any interpretation of events was chaotic. The course of time revealed that the commander of this task force had been swanning across country all the previous evening, had broken through a cordon by a tactical trick, and had bashed through to storm his next objective without reference to the march-table.

  Kenworthy walked up to him. ‘Now look, sir.’

  ‘You, my friend, are already dead. Please to lie down.’

  ‘I am not dead. I’m buggered if I’m dead. I am a police officer.’

  ‘What is this, police officer? This is Exercise Resolution, is it not?’

  ‘Kindly take me to someone empowered to make a decision.’

  ‘You are a spider, sir.’

  There seemed to be infelicitous gaps in this man’s knowledge of the language.

  ‘I am not a bloody spider.’

  ‘I make decisions. I make decision you are dead. You will please to lie down. I shall call umpire.’

  A situation of prolonged and intolerable farce was saved by the simultaneous arrival of another scout-car and the duty-officer on a motor-cycle. A liaison officer with a white brassard eventually succeeded in drawing the Dutch officer from his world of professional fantasy.

  There were salutes, hand-shakes, apologies and far too enthusiastic an interest on the part of all present to the job in hand.

  The Dutch major seemed capable of putting his bounding energies into two worlds at once. ‘First we consolidate. We prepare to meet counter-attack. Then we call for a tank to come and tear the grating from your well.’

  ‘Counter-attack?’ Kenworthy said. ‘You don’t mean to tell me …’

  The liaison officer had been appointed precisely for his ability to achieve compromise without deflating fictional enthusiasms. ‘The counter-attacking force is still somewhere in Lincolnshire: it is unlikely to arrive on schedule, let alone get here early.’

  A county inspector had a bright idea. ‘Sir, instead of getting at the walls of the well from the inside, why don’t we tackle it from outside the coping? It looks pretty solid, but I’m sure it’s a botched job really. It shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Inspector, but we shan’t improve our marksmanship by changing targets. That chap with the cutter was doing all right. All I want is the grating removed.’

  ‘I call forward the tank now.’

  ‘Tell him we don’t want his bloody tank. Where’s he going to get it from, anyway? Salisbury Plain?’

  Someone passed a hand microphone out of the scout-car. There was a spate of quick-fire Dutch. And already second waves of the assault force had begun to arrive and were casting off equipment to dig themselves in. More transport drove up. A motor-cyclist, standing on his foot-rests, bounced over the rough terrain. His engine sounded powerful enough to propel a battle-ship.

  Chaos.

  Kenworthy button-holed the liaison officer. ‘Tell him he’s free to do anything he likes. All I want is peace and quiet within a twenty-yard radius of this hole.’

  The sapper signalled to those who were watching him that he was through another of the bars. The Dutchman came away from his scout-car, efficient, sweetly obliging. ‘The tank will be here in five minutes.’

  ‘We don’t need a tank.’

  But it came. It came thundering across the prairie and charged to a halt on the edge of the flagged yard, its engines idling with a roar that frustrated conversation and made the mere act of standing by a physical misery. The Dutch major waved to its driver to throttle down, but his signal bore no fruit.

  The sapper, engrossed in his work as if he were aware of nothing happening around him, got up from his haunches to tackle the next part of the grating from a fresh angle.

  ‘We need hooks and a tow-rope.’

  ‘We need sod-all. We’re doing very nicely as we are.’

  ‘Here! Bloody hell! Look where you’re going!’ A constable leaped frantically for his life. The driver of the tank, pursuing some stratagem of his own, had decided to reverse and turn. With one track stationary, the other pulverised stone and rubble, crushed like a match-stick a spade that someone had left lying on the flags. The sapper leaped across the well, holding his roaring jet above his head.

  And so the churning track thrust down over the brick coping of the well. The partially severed grating gave way under its weight. The nose of the tank pointed up to the stars as the rear sank deeper into the hole.

  ‘We’re going to need Heavy Recovery to get that out of here.’

  But this was unduly pessimistic. The driver went into forward gear. His exhaust blasted out black, sickening fumes. His left-hand track was still on level ground, with perfect purchase. The right-hand track tore savagely at the coping, throwing fragments of brick in a shower across the yard. The tank pulled clear.

  ‘Get it right out of here. Tell him to switch his engines off. Give him a cup of tea and a bloody medal and tell him to get out of my hair for just five minutes.’ Kenworthy approached the damage. The whole orifice of the well was destroyed. The concrete that had held the tines of the grating had crumbled like dust. Whole chunks of it had pitched down into the bowels of the well, taking with it great wedges of the soil that had lain behind it. And even as he looked, a portion of the lower brick-work came away, depriving the upper layers of all support. Kenworthy jumped backwards. The whole mouth of the well caved in. There was an avalanche of soil and small solids, a splash of water, a stench of brackishness and corruption.

  For one last moment of clinging optimism Kenworthy surveyed the remains of the night’s work. It was all gone. Any cache made by the Pascoe boys had been disembowelled and its contents thrown down into the depths. Emma Pascoe’s secret lay seventy feet down, under water, earth and rubbish, at the bottom of a shaft in which a man could not be asked to work until its walls had been thoroughly revetted. The task had moved now into the realms of mining engineering. At a rough estimate, it would take at least a week.

  ‘Chief Inspector Stammers!’

  ‘Sir!’ The only formal moment in the whole of their collaboration.

  ‘Form the men up and get them home.’

  It was half past three when Kenworthy and Derek arrived home themselves. Diana was sitting up for them with hot cocoa and sandwiches which they were almost too tired to eat. She was wearing a long, heavy dressing-gown, severely tight at the neck. But she did not have much to say. She was in a mood quite different from usual: quietly sympathetic, asking no questions. It was almost as if she had had some sudden insight into the sort of thing that had been going on.

  Elspeth was asleep, one out-stretched arm and a raised knee in his half of the bed. He did his best not to wake her.

  But first he sat out on a chair to look through his notes. It was a habit of which he had never been a
ble to cure himself, pushing himself on to more work, long after he was too tired to do any justice to it.

  There were a lot of things that he could cross out now on his general check-list.

  Threeways garage—Brian Hammond—Julian Hammond: There was no immediate need to have any more to do with them, unless something completely fresh blew up. He scribbled down a new agenda:

  Sally Hammond:

  Elspeth continues to visit.

  Milner:

  Elspeth to see.

  Emma Pascoe:

  Wait and see.

  Tommy Pascoe:

  Wait and see.

  Sammy Pascoe:

  See personally. Priority one.

  Robert Whittle:

  See personally, not in presence of Prudhoes.

  Priority two.

  Prudhoes:

  See personally.

  Isolate father.

  Priority three.

  Grenade:

  Keep looking.

  Austin Cambridge:

  Area to be searched for tracks when possible.

  Little hope.

  He laid his notebook on the dressing-table, drew back the sheets. Elspeth stirred. Gently he lifted her arm. She woke, blinked once, and was wholly alert.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked him.

  ‘None whatever!’ Then almost as an after-thought, ‘You?’

  ‘A lot of spade-work. We spent a useful day with Sally.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Diana and I.’

  ‘Diana? Good God!’