To follow him and come up on his left was awkward, but Nur Jehan’s behaviour was perfect. He danced just enough to disguise the fact that the edging to the left was deliberate. We rode on over the turf, both breaking from canter to walk a little abruptly but not so unreasonably as to be unnatural. I had an irrelevant and vivid vision of some gymkhana or riding school – so long ago that I could not remember which and certainly did not try – at which I had to turn an obstinate pony among posts. This despairing exercise upon which I was now engaged had equally simple rules. Come up on your companion’s right, and you are dead. But you must not be caught avoiding it, nor he trying to force you into it.
The icy sweat which had been dripping down my ribs and over my too imaginative liver was under control. I was a trifle more confident. This man, as I suspected, was not a gambler; otherwise he would have brought his hand up and across the saddle. He had the experience to know it was not so easy as for the cow-hands of fiction. At the appearance of the pistol, the target would start, the horse between the target’s legs following the movement of alarm enough to throw off the aim. I myself could have taken the risk. I would have waited for horse and man to steady and still been sure of killing even if the range had opened to ten yards.
That one advantage – though largely imaginary – cheered me a little. And now came another. The man was losing that patience of which he had boasted.
‘A wonderful spot for a gallop,’ he invited.
It was. Nur Jehan was most unlikely to hold off the challenge of that powerful mare. From my companion’s point of view nothing could stop him overhauling his victim close enough to touch the unsuspecting back with the barrel. But I was not unsuspecting, and he had given me a slim chance. I had to take it, and hope for an opportunity to change direction – down to the farms and human eyes.
I had allowed Nur Jehan a few healthy gallops, but never before had I ridden him flat out. My little Persian Arab was off like a greyhound from a trap, a start with which the heavier mare could not compete at all. My low voice and knees must have communicated to him an urgency which demanded response.
After a hundred yards I looked round. The mare was coming up on my left and ten to twenty paces behind. Nur Jehan seemed to be holding his own, though how much of it he had gained at the start I could not tell. Three hundred yards. Nearly four hundred yards. And then a stone wall, new and without a gap, which meant that I must pull him up.
But away to the right were the chimneys of a cotttage and safety. Could Nur Jehan jump? What could he jump? At least he had managed to get over the untidy hedges of Gillon’s Glebe meadow. But if he hit a Cotswold wall it was the end of the pair of us. A pistol shot wouldn’t be necessary. A stone while I was lying on the ground would do the job neatly and leave no evidence of murder.
I did not dare to steady the stallion. I made my intention plain and sat still. Nur Jehan, wildly excited, took off a couple of yards too soon. There was only the faintest click as a hind shoe touched the wall, and he was away again in his stride.
I swung off to the right into a wide grass track leading down hill between wire fences. Once there I could dictate the closeness and position of my companion. I looked over my shoulder in time to see him check the mare and jump compactly. Then he broke into an easy canter as if waiting for me to come back and join him.
I pulled up Nur Jehan and also waited. I was safe. A farmer and some white-coated vet or inspector were examining bullocks in the next field. The upper windows of the cottage which had showed only a tall chimney were in full view. I leaned forward to pat Nur Jehan’s neck, and under cover of the movement extracted the Mauser from its awkward holster and tucked it inside my shirt with the barrel down the waistband of my breeches. It was very uncomfortable and hindered riding at any pace but a walk. I felt confident, however, that from then on if the tiger drew any kind of lethal weapon he would still have his paw in plaster when he came up for trial.
As I showed no sign of moving from where I was, he joined me.
‘A remarkable burst of speed for an untrained Arab,’ he said genially. ‘I thought you were down at that wall. But, my dear sir, what a risk to take!’
‘He was bolting,’ I replied. ‘He might have charged right into it.’
That earned me a slow, penetrating look, but I had the answer ready to avert suspicion.
‘I have no curb, you see,’ I explained. ‘He is not accustomed to it. But of course we should not have allowed you to tempt us.’
I asked him to come down and have a drink with me. Now that I was momentarily safe, contact had to be maintained. I might be able to manoeuvre him into making an attack before witnesses, or I might discover his identity and regain the initiative.
We walked our horses down to the village below. The only evidence of its existence was a carpet of great tree-tops, the roof of a Jacobean manor and the church tower which I had pointed out to Benita in, as it now seemed, some former life. My companion chatted easily and amicably. He was a superb actor. I should have been left unaccountably dead upon the empty turf above us if I had not been able to take that long look through the hedge on the road from Stoke to Hernsholt and watch his face when it had been undisguisedly intent upon revenge.
The village street was fairly deserted. It was broad enough to hold a small country market and gently curving, with perhaps thirty houses on one side, divided by the inn, and twenty on the other, divided by the church. All were of stone and none – except for a village school in false Gothic – was later than the eighteenth century. The low sun brought out the gold of the Cotswold masonry and tiles.
‘They are the most beautiful villages in Europe,’ said my companion.
I answered at once that they were, and was surprised that my reply had not been in the least conventional. The Tyrol? Spain? Alsace? Would I have agreed unhesitatingly the day before, or was this the influence of Benita? I confirmed that the essential button of my shirt was undone and the butt of the Mauser free. It would be disgraceful to die just when my eyes had become English.
A short lane led us along the side of the inn to its yard. There was a garage but no stable. We hitched our horses to the railings and went into the yard, where the flagstones had been roughly diversified by a few rock plants and stone troughs. There were two iron chairs and a rustic table for any customers who preferred to drink in the open.
My companion walked straight to the table and sat down. I remained standing and asked him what he would take.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he answered, and then, as if aware of the oddness of his reply, added with more animation: ‘Whisky. Scotch, if you will be so good.’
I had to turn my back on him in order to enter the garden door of the pub. I didn’t like it, but hoped the windows which overlooked us would keep him out of temptation. When I returned from the bar with a tray, both hands occupied, I carefully observed the position of the other pair of hands. They were both on the table and looked a little unnatural. Left alone to do some thinking, he may have come to the conclusion that I did not accept strangers so trustfully as it appeared. That jumping of the wall, that bearing to the right and safety could well have been deliberate.
With drinks on the table, I pretended to drop my matches and stooped to pick them up. The Mauser was now on my lap. I was sitting opposite to him and it could not be seen. My coat hid it from the bar window. I drank half my whisky and noticed that my fellow horseman merely touched the glass to his lips.
‘Your name is von Dennim, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Dennim. I have dropped the von.’
‘Yes, I can understand it. When you have finished your drink may I ride back with you to the top of the hill?’
I asked him if that was his way home. He replied, still quite pleasantly, that it was not, but that he wished for more of my company. He stressed the word ‘wish’. If I were thinking of escape, I should recognize it as an order. If
I were still unsuspicious, there was nothing to frighten me in the slight arrogance of tone.
This was the end. The tiger had committed himself. I could act.
‘Lower your head to pick up, for example, your handkerchief,’ I told him, ‘and you will observe that I too have you covered. My legs are crossed and I am sitting sideways. From under the table you can only give me a painful wound. If I see the slightest sign of you raising that pistol above it, I will kill you. Is that clear?’
He looked at me with such a blaze of hatred that I was on the very edge of firing. Very gradually madness died away and was replaced by an ironical detachment far more in keeping with the face.
‘So you know what I have to say to you?’
‘What you said to Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber. But the game is up.’
‘The game is not up, von Dennim. As you say – or did you say it? – you dare not shoot first.’
I pointed out that he had an automatic in his hand, that I should be justified in killing him and acquitted.
‘Perhaps,’ he answered coolly. ‘Only perhaps. It is going to be very hard to connect me with any of those executions. However frightened you are, I do not think you will shoot first.’
I was astonished to find that I was no longer particularly frightened.
‘If this is stalemate, as you think,’ I said, ‘you may as well tell me what you have against me. You were never in Buchenwald.’
‘No – but my wife was.’
‘There were no women.’
‘Except by invitation.’
I could not understand. My expression must have been exasperatingly patronizing.
‘Have you forgotten, von Dennim? Did it mean so little to you? Very well, I will remind you. I like each one of you to know why you are going to die. The Buchenwald officers used certain women from the camp at Ravensbruck for their amusement, did they not? You yourself once fetched a little party of them.’
It was perfectly true. I had conceived the scheme and timed it carefully and at last got the opportunity of fetching such a party from the women’s concentration camp. But I still did not see what it had to do with him or his wife. This was the incident which had brought Olga Coronel over to London after the war to thank me, when she and Georgina decided – rightly, I expect – that I was not in a state to see anyone who could remind me too vividly of the past.
It had been the custom of that unspeakable swine, Major Sporn, to borrow occasionally these unfortunate creatures from Ravensbruck. Besides the political prisoners awaiting the Ravensbruck gas chamber, there were plenty of common criminals utterly demoralized and only too glad of a break in their half-starved lives and a chance to drink themselves into a stupor.
On the afternoon when I myself went to Ravensbruck I slipped into my busload of gipsies, thieves and prostitutes, Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel. They knew that they were to trust me, and that was all. Twelve women had left for Buchenwald, filthy, dishevelled, gaudily painted. But was it ten or twelve who arrived?
Sporn, already drunk, didn’t know and didn’t care. I, pretending also to be drunk, had juggled with the two extra – subtracted them, added them, done everything but multiply them. Forty-eight hours later Dessayes and Coronel had been picked up at a secret landing-ground and were in hospital in London. Meanwhile I was under arrest; but they couldn’t see how I had worked the trick and they shot the wrong man. At least he was the wrong man from their point of view. Otherwise they could not have chosen a more deserving candidate.
‘Your wife could not have been among those women,’ I said.
‘She was, von Dennim. I know something of what they did to her in every week from her arrest to her death. The men who interrogated her were hanged as war criminals – all but one whom I hanged myself. With Major Sporn and Captain Dickfuss I had the pleasure of dealing when they had served their sentences. And in the course of my conversation with Dickfuss I learned that I had a debt to pay to Weber and you. It took me some time to find you. I should have guessed you were the type to save yourself by making friends with British Intelligence.’
‘What did she look like?’ I asked, ignoring this.
‘She had long, dark hair,’ he said. ‘Her skin was very pale and transparent even in health.’
The corners of his heavy, mobile mouth twitched twice. He glared at me across the table with eyes in which the obsession of blood-feud had long taken the place of sorrow.
I remembered. The hair had been cut short, but the transparency of the skin was unforgettable. They had housed her, I suppose, among the dregs of the camp in order that she should disappear from all human knowledge. God alone knew how they had drugged and broken her before she was ever interned in Ravensbruck. When I saw her she did not seem to know where she was or to care. She was already dead, though physically in apparent good health.
‘What had she done?’
‘Done! What had she done? You scum, does the name of Savarin mean anything to you?’
I asked him peaceably if he were Savarin.
‘I was.’
Presumably some of the French knew to whom that cover name belonged. London never did, nor, I believe, did the enemy. A leader of the Resistance, incredibly astute and merciless, Savarin had carried on his own private war against the German occupiers. His every act of bloodshed and sabotage carried the stamp of his own temperament – a sardonic savagery which belonged to some sultan of the Arabian Nights.
‘But those women,’ I began, ‘were …’
I stopped. I was only making matters worse. And I found unbearable the thought of the revenge which the Gestapo had taken when they suspected that they had caught the wife of Savarin. Dessayes and Coronel could never have known of her presence in Ravensbruck since she was not interned among the politicals. If those two gallant women had guessed that she was in the bus, one of them would have insisted on her escape and given up her own life instead.
‘Dickfuss and Sporn I can understand,’ I said. ‘But why did you kill Hans Weber?’
‘He went with you and drove the bus.’
Accurate again. Weber was the officer in charge of transport. I had persuaded him to drive for the sake of his quite remarkable stupidity. If a total of ten were repeated to him often enough he could be trusted to swear to it.
‘You might as well have executed the man who made it!’ I exclaimed.
I was overwhelmed by the cruelty and pity of the thing. I knew I could never kill Savarin in cold blood. To take revenge for acts of revenge was merely to extend the horror and call it justice.
I suppose no man who has given great love to a woman worthy of love could ever guarantee that he would not kill the devils who destroyed her. But on the spur of the moment. To wait ten years without losing, in spite of the wear and tear of sane daily life, the compulsion to avenge her must be rare. And yet not so rare a few centuries ago. I am no psychologist, but I think the true parallel is religious mania. In Savarin’s case the wrathful god was his own very real but perverted sense of honour. He felt that he ought to kill, that he was morally bound to kill and that he must never permit himself to fall into any backsliding. To that, of course, must be added a pleasure in killing. He must always have had a powerful streak of sadistic cruelty – perhaps sublimated in youth but during the war magnificently released and justified by patriotism.
I was tempted to turn my back on him and ride away. That was how my father would have dismissed him, ignoring his existence at the possible expense of his own. A contemptuous and honourable way out of the dilemma. Pride, Benita would call it. The day before I, too, might have turned my back. But the future was no longer my own to relinquish.
I told him that it was the end, and that he must surrender. I disclosed to him all I knew – how he had tried to poison me in my cottage, how he had watched me from the old air-raid shelter and left his horse with Fred Gorble, how I had so n
early trapped him before a witness at the badger sett.
His face hardly changed. I had the impression that he had considered all that over and over again, but rejected it as unlikely.
‘Watching badgers down wind,’ he said to himself more than to me. ‘I should have known that even the Gestapo could not be so stupid.’
So that was why he had instinctively suspected something wrong and avoided the obvious line of approach!
‘You might have known, too,’ I retorted, ‘that an authority on squirrels can spot the difference between the French and English varieties.’
That, I could see, at last disturbed him. The purchase of the squirrels which he had let loose in the Wen Acre Plantation was just the sort of evidence which police could trace.
‘Do you understand now, Savarin,’ I asked, ‘that if you force me to shoot I can plead self-defence?’
He understood all right, but he was beyond caring. This was the tiger I predicted, who would still come on even if a bullet had raked his body.
‘I should be sorry not to be present at your trial,’ he answered with a calm which was no less deadly for being artificial. ‘I am half English and was educated here. I know the English criminal law. No one will believe you, von Dennim, and my friends are influential enough to see that you are tried for murder. There will be several weeks – separated by a period in gaol – while your past comes out. It will interest the charming girl to whom you were very properly saying good-bye. I should think you will have to change your name. A von Dennim in the Gestapo! The head of your distinguished family should kill you if I do not.’
‘I am the Graf von Dennim,’ I answered.
He jerked forward his body and spat in my face.
From that point on it was another person who took command. I neither approve nor disapprove of him. What he did is what I should do again in similar circumstances. But my normally quiet self recognizes him with difficulty.
Watcher in the Shadows Page 15