A Time to Kill

by Geoffrey Household

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  A Time to Kill

  Geoffrey Household

  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal.

  Ecclesiastes, 3

  Roland had telephoned me to look him up the next time I was in London and, when I answered that it wouldn’t be for a month, had asked me casually, but insistently, if I couldn’t drive up some time during the week-end and have lunch with him.

  So there I was in his flat with a silent, Sunday London outside. I fear I was very smug with self-satisfaction, warmed by the strength of the pink gins before lunch and a pleasurable sense of being wanted by a man who didn’t lightly give his confidence. That I was wanted a deal more elsewhere did not, then, impress me at all. When Cecily and the children showed themselves a little hurt that I should use a free Sunday to go to London, I remember pointing out – I hope not too pompously – that I was still on the Reserve, and that an order, however it was given, was an order.

  ‘You’ll never believe who has had the cheek to come and see me,’ said Roland.

  ‘Somebody I know?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think you ever actually spoke, but you certainly knew each other. It was Pink.’

  Pink wasn’t a man against whom I bore any malice. True, he had fired a few shots in my general direction, but even in them there was a certain style. He wasn’t a treacherous, slinking, brilliant pansy like his former boss, Colonel Hiart. He was just a disappointed, simple-minded romantic, who had made the country too hot to hold him.

  ‘Where’s he living?’

  ‘Alone on a boat,’ Roland said. ‘And he thinks it safe enough – what Pink would call safe enough – to lie low in the Essex marshes. He has grown a beard and nobody knows that he’s in England. I ought to hand him over to the police. They want him for attempted murder and illegal landing of aircraft. But they would have more trouble in getting a conviction than he’s worth.’

  Roland always talked of the police as if they were a body of incalculable experts whose opinions must be respected but could only be guessed. I’ve heard a general discuss a cabinet minister in much the same tone. He seemed on excellent terms with Scotland Yard, and an inspector of the Special Branch had treated him, in my presence, with a grim and humorous deference. That indeed was all I knew of Roland, except that he had financed Peter Sandorski’s underground. The only time I ever asked him a direct question – whether he belonged to the Foreign Office or the War Office – he laughed and said he didn’t know himself.

  ‘I’ll put you in the picture,’ he went on. ‘Sandorski had a most valuable week in Vienna, and on the strength of his report we were able to act. The new fascism is just as dead abroad as Heyne-Hassingham’s People’s Union in England.

  ‘But if you don’t let political lunatics have one toy to play with, they’ll soon find another. Members of the People’s Union and its allied parties abroad have split like this: chaps who were trying to escape from monotony have taken to religion or societies with comic hats and chaps who just wanted to be ordered about have drifted towards communism. That seems incredible to us, but there it is! You’ll remember that ex-communists made some of Hitler’s toughest Nazis; and today in Germany it’s the ex-Nazi who makes the toughest communist.

  ‘Now friend Pink is a Brer Rabbit – allus some-whar, whar he ain’t got no bizness. He’s been in bad company, and on one such occasion he heard a couple of drunk German fellow-travellers blabbing away, all full of German tears and hatred, when they thought they were alone. So he came to me. He’s an old-fashioned patriot, is Pink, and born a couple of hundred years after he should have been.

  ‘How far what he heard is a genuine plan or a dream of a plan or just pot-house talk worked up by Pink’s imagination, I don’t know. But this is it – Plot with the deepest, darkest P for communist agents to go round this country spreading foot-and-mouth disease.’

  I said it was just the sort of yarn that any stalwart of the People’s Union would think up to frighten old ladies and get their subscriptions.

  ‘And the old lady writes her cousin, the general,’ Roland added, ‘and he to me, and I have to send him a note of thanks which doesn’t look like a printed form. Oh, I warned Pink that he must think up a better yarn than that one, and told him to get back on board quick, or I’d let the police know he was in London. I wish now that I had had a little more patience. You’ve seen this, I suppose?’

  He passed me a newspaper cutting. It joyfully reported the preposterous story put out by East German communists that American aircraft had dropped Colorado beetles on their potato fields.

  ‘They must have minds like Pink’s,’ I said.

  ‘Pink? Not a bit! He’s thrashing the air all the time. Whereas these people – well, the only sure thing is that they calculate every move to the last place of decimals. And not a fault in the arithmetic – except, thank God, that their axioms are all wrong!

  ‘According to our experts, Roger, this beetle story can only mean that they themselves have committed, or intend to commit or might intend to commit some very similar crime. Then, if they are caught, they can say it was justifiable retaliation.

  ‘Of course, experts are always too ingenious, and I’m utterly unconvinced. The game wouldn’t be worth the candle, you see. It’s true that Pink’s story fits their policy of pinpricks in sore spots. But they’d be caught, and they must know it. And when they were, the fury and contempt in the Western world would be out of all proportion to the nuisance value of the epidemic.’

  ‘Well, that rules it out,’ I said.

  ‘It should, and it does,’ he answered. ‘And yet I wish I had heard of this Colorado beetle stunt before I turned Pink out of my office.’

  Pink had put himself completely into Roland’s power – proof, at any rate, that he had made himself believe his own story. He had told Roland both the false name that he was using and the name of his little cruiser. She was too small and unimportant to be registered anywhere; and so long as he kept to quiet anchorages and didn’t visit yacht clubs, nobody was likely to bother him until the end of the summer.

  There was a warrant out for him, however, and if he drew any attention to himself he was pretty sure to be picked up by the police. Roland couldn’t and wouldn’t guarantee him freedom from arrest, and was most unwilling to have any direct dealings with him. So he had conceived the unprincipled idea that Pink should communicate with him through me. Had I any objection?

  ‘But why me?’ I protested.

  ‘Well, he was going round at once from Essex to Poole on the track of his precious plot,’ Roland answered, ‘and as he won’t be far from you and knows your part of Dorset well, I thought it would be easy for him to hop on a bus or a bicycle and see you after dark if he had anything further to report.’

  I didn’t receive Roland’s proposal with any enthusiasm. The last thing I wanted was that bandit Pink turning up in the middle of the night and upsetting Cecily. I suggested that Pink’s feelings towards me could hardly be those of a friendly caller.

  ‘Good lord, he’s too much of a fighting man to resent defeat,’ Roland insisted. ‘And anyway, he must think you were always obeying my orders. Love me, love my dog!’

  ‘Look here,’ I said, the dog taking one last wriggle towards freedom, ‘if this tale were true, Pink couldn’t have got hold of it. I’ve no idea what his contacts have been, but I’ll bet anything they are just nasty, international small fry, who
wouldn’t be trusted by a responsible communist any more than by you.’

  ‘My dear Roger, you’re perfectly right,’ he replied. ‘But life would be very simple if I only used people I could trust. And the same goes for them. So be a good fellow, and let me tell Pink that he can call on you if he must.’

  Thinking it all over on my drive home, I came to the conclusion that Pink was unlikely to bother me. His whole story was an extravagant effort to put himself right with the police, and I was surprised that Roland even thought him worth an envelope and stamp. He was certainly giving him no more – no help, no money and no faith. Pink could be counted on to compromise any organization which used him.

  I made good time – considering the road was full of Sunday evening traffic going in the opposite direction – and arrived home before Jerry’s and George’s bedtime. It was a glorious June evening; so, to give them a treat, Cecily and I pretended to make a picnic out of their simple supper, and drove them up to Hardy’s Monument to eat it. We could see a hundred miles of the Channel, all the way from the Needles to Start Point.

  The slim, grey streaks of the warships in Portland Harbour made me feel more kindly towards Pink. Somewhere he was in all that blue, alone in his boat, a white speck lost at five miles distance, without wife or children and looking back on his broken career as a sailor. But if he would think he was Nelson, what did he expect? You can’t disobey orders and get away with it – at least, you can’t if you’re a bullheaded lunatic like Pink. And then, after that, to take up with the People’s Union and run the risk of being tried for high treason! No, his thoughts while he cooked and lived and slept in his twelve-by-six cabin must have been dark as the mud beneath his keel.

  The children were dashing about, picking up spent cartridges from the heather, when Cecily asked me how the interview with Roland had gone. I said that he wanted to use me as a post-box – which, so far as it went, was true. There was no point in worrying her with Pink’s morbid inventions.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s all he’s going to get,’ I answered positively.

  I meant it, too, as I watched my boys tumbling after each other in and out of the hollows, their faces glowing in the last rays of the red sun. Then Cecily began to fuss because they hadn’t enough sweaters on; so we chased and caught them, and took them home to bed.

  I gave little more thought to Pink and Roland, except to wish in moments of disgruntled self-analysis – the ten minutes, for example, while one shaves a solemn and far too familiar face – that I hadn’t gone rushing off to London so easily. I knew very well that my motive had been sheer vanity, for I needed nothing, and least of all Roland’s complications, to put more interest into my life.

  After all the excitement on my bit of rough shooting, I was for a few months a minor celebrity in South Dorset. Everyone knew that I had been wanted for murder – though only for a single night – and that I had come out of it all with a mysterious and official pat on the back. So, of course, it was generally decided that I was Something in the Secret Service, and Mr and Mrs Roger Taine began to receive a crop of unwanted invitations from people who felt it their duty to know what had happened, and whether there was any connexion between the aircraft which had landed on the Downs, and the suicide of Heyne-Hassingham. I told them to ask the local police (who knew very little, but certainly weren’t going to admit it) and my value as a county curiosity soon fell off. It was good for business, however. I got a lot of new clients among the builders and builders’ merchants who merely wanted to have a look at me, and I managed to keep most of them – thanks to the first-class stuff our group produces, for I’m never any good at talking a man into ordering what he doesn’t want. So all was well at home, and trade so steady that I actually managed to save a little capital from the income tax collector. I was a contented man, and knew it.

  About three weeks after my lunch with Roland, Pink called me up at the office. He was discreet, though hearty, and I couldn’t make out who he was until he said that I owed him a motor cycle. I apologized for smashing it, and assured him, feeling a tactless barbarian, that I had hoped it belonged to the Party. No, he replied, his; but it really didn’t matter. That we could have so polite a conversation amazed me; yet I ought to have known that Pink’s manners – however detestable his character – would come out of the top drawer.

  He asked me to drive over and see him. I was to leave my car at a point near Lytchett Minster, and meet him at the head of an obscure creek where he would pick me up with the pram, and take me on board his boat. I must have hesitated, for he said in rather the tone of a sulky schoolboy:

  ‘Look here – give you my word of honour!’

  It was a grey afternoon, with the chill north wind of a beastly summer day, when I followed the cart-track down to his creek. Poole Harbour was at its most melancholy. It is a queer place of moods, with the four tides and the still mud-banks, bald or rush-grown, that disappear, imperceptibly, under the sea. It can be a gay, closed, little yachtsman’s paradise of blue and white, or a sunlit lake among golden heath, or, as it was that afternoon, a dull, endless marsh that made me conscious of the mud at the bottom and the reeds waving up from it like dead men’s hair.

  Pink was at the rendezvous, standing in his sea-boots as still as a heron. Our earlier meetings, in dusk or at night, had never really shown him to me. He was an uncompromising figure in his shabby blue jersey, slim at the hips and broad as a fallen angel across his shoulders. His nose was slightly twisted to one side and his forehead was scored with deep puzzled wrinkles. The brown beard gave him distinction. Without that, I might have found his face a shade brutal.

  He held out his hand as if we had just met in Piccadilly after long absence. I would have shaken it more warmly if he had not been quite so casual.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ he said. ‘I thought you were a smaller man.’

  ‘The light, no doubt,’ I answered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes—’ and gave a short, despairing choke of dry laughter. ‘Well, come along!’

  I sat cautiously in the stern of his eight-foot pram, while he filled all the rest of it and paddled us down the creek. His boat, Olwen, lay at anchor in a brown pool which the scour of the tide had bitten out of the flank of a reed-covered island. There were two narrow channels on either side of the island up which the flood was making, and would have to make for another hour before Olwen could twist a snipe’s course out into the harbour. She could only be seen from the farmlands to the north. The anchorage was even lonelier than any I had imagined for Pink.

  She was a thirty-foot boat with a turtle deck forward, an open cockpit, and no virtues to my landsman’s eye except that she was obviously meant to be used in all weathers. When we were on board, I could see that she drew a foot or two more water than I had thought. There was good headroom in the single cabin.

  I had expected to find the disorder of a lonely and demoralized man; but I had forgotten Pink’s naval training. Olwen was packed so tight with stores and gear that one seemed to be standing in the middle of an expensively fitted dressing-case. The lids and doors of innumerable lockers were all closed and all neatly painted. There was a fairly clean, dark-blue cover on the settee, and very clean curtains framing the ports. Two shelves of books – mostly nautical almanacs and such-like – had been built around the shining brass chronometer. Drinks were laid out ready, the bottles reflected in the teak of the little cabin table.

  Pink was very cordial. I might have been visiting any well-bred eccentric who chose to live alone on a boat. I hated to refer to business (which had inevitably to involve some reference to the past), but Roland would certainly want, besides whatever message for him Pink might have, some kind of report from me on the man.

  ‘You’ve lived on board ever since …?’ I began.

  ‘No. Portugal at first – till it got too hot. Some of the leaders of our Movement began to play around with communists. You know all about that.’

 
I didn’t. But there was no point in disillusioning him if he chose to think that I was and always had been in Roland’s confidence.

  ‘You got tarred with the same brush?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. God, what a lot of scum! They approached me directly. They knew all about my past and had the impudence to sympathize. Said they wanted chaps of my sort. The leader class.’

  His beastly fascist phrase nearly drew a protest from me, but I turned it into a grunt of understanding.

  ‘They do,’ he went on, ‘badly. But they won’t keep ’em alive a day longer than they can use ’em. Well, I did some jobs for them. I thought I might find out a thing or two. That was the only reason. I expect you to believe it,’ he added, looking me hard in the eyes.

  I had no difficulty in believing it. If there ever was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist, it was Pink.

  ‘Didn’t they suspect you?’ I asked.

  ‘Less than you’d think. They can’t understand a man being a patriot when he’s been as badly treated as I have. And then – I don’t know whether Roland told you – they framed me. One of the jobs I did – well, no need to go into details, but it was an extraditable crime. Anywhere. They took the trouble to show me the evidence they would use if I ever turned nasty.’

  That seemed a powerful proof of Pink’s good faith – if it were true.

  ‘They know what you have found out?’

  ‘Impossible. It was a pure accident, my overhearing those chaps. And no one saw me enter or leave.’

  ‘And where you are – I suppose they know that?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely. I bought this old lady’ – he patted the white-painted curve that separated us from the sea – ‘for cash, and filled her up with fuel and made England in one hop. Then I began to follow up the tip I had got. I’m ready now. I’m going to use my own methods. And you’re just the man I’d like to have with me.’

  I thanked him for his good opinion – there was no point in telling him that his own methods were certain to be disastrous – and said I was there to help him.