A Time to Kill

by Geoffrey Household

  I returned to the well and reported that we had, at last, a certain moral superiority.

  ‘Back we go, then, and bust him,’ said Pink. ‘Courage, Roger!’

  He put Olwen in the race for the second time. A great, formless ghost of foam crashed on the turtle-deck forward, and streamed away. Then the stern and half the length of the ship lifted clear out of the water. I never heard the screw race. Pink was a superb seaman, quick in anticipation.

  ‘Short-circuit somewhere,’ he announced. ‘Do you mind working the hand-pump a bit before you talk to Losch?’

  I worked that beastly pump for a quarter of an hour and showered upon it, I swear, long-forgotten meals. I still didn’t care. Even when the swoop of Olwen seemed to leave me suspended in mid-air, stomach and mind were determined to outlast Losch. Seasickness, yes – but none of that fearful listlessness and depression which go with it. I might have only been suffering from a bad tummy upset on land.

  ‘Have another try at him now,’ said Pink, ‘before he goes unconscious on us.’

  That glory-hole was a hell of movement. For Losch it was like a butter-churn, except that he was never actually upside down. He had slid off his folded awning on to the floor. It was no place to lie; but his self-respect was finished.

  ‘You said there wouldn’t be any more. You said there wouldn’t be any more,’ he accused me.

  ‘One never knows,’ I answered, and gave him the rest of what I had, though God knows where it came from.

  That was the last straw.

  ‘I am dying,’ he moaned.

  The sweat and tears burst from him as he tried helplessly to relieve his nausea.

  ‘A better death than Yegor Ivanovitch would have given you,’ I suggested grimly.

  ‘No, no. I am of value. He said so.’

  ‘Nonsense. You would have a gun at the back of your neck the moment you stepped into that black van.’

  ‘The black van,’ he wailed. ‘Leave me alone. I know nothing of the black van. I’ve never seen it, I swear to you. It was to pick me up at the Haven Ferry.’

  ‘When did Ivanovitch tell you that?’

  ‘This morning on the telephone. Leave me alone, man! I don’t know anything. I only met him the night before last. Leave me alone!’

  I kept on questioning him while he grovelled in filth and begged for peace. He hadn’t expected any caller at all; he had told me that merely as a precaution. Ivanovitch had telephoned him half an hour before I did, and ordered him to be at the Haven Ferry at eleven, where, on the far side, he was to get into a black, plain van. After that he was to accompany Ivanovitch abroad. He swore that he did not know how, nor from where. I was convinced that at last he was whimpering out the truth. Ivanovitch was not a man to give away unnecessary information.

  ‘Got anything?’ asked Pink on my return.

  ‘Get us out of here and let me think.’

  The fact that the black van was to be on the far side of Haven Ferry meant – as soon as we were peacefully rolling again in sane water – a great deal to me. Assuming that Yegor Ivanovitch didn’t want his van to be seen at Losch’s house or in Bournemouth, there were still dozens of possible rendezvous on the outskirts, from which the roads fanned out to all Dorset and Hampshire. The ferry, however, was the nearest way from Bournemouth into the Isle of Purbeck, and a very long and unnatural way of getting anywhere else. Thus there was a strong presumption that the house where my children were held was somewhere on the peninsula.

  Now, as county agent for my firm, I knew all the roads of Dorset, and at once I asked myself whether the few scrappy details I had picked up on my journey in the van could fit Purbeck. They did. The steep hill with hairpin bends could have been on the road from Corfe to Kingston. The short, level run was then east or west of Kingston, and the rough road downhill either dropped to the sea near Worth or Worbarrow, or perhaps dipped into the vale behind Swanage.

  It wasn’t much to go on. I had limited the possible area to perhaps twenty square miles of country, but those miles were full of lonely farms and cottages. Then I had an inspiration. Why had they put cotton-wool in my ears? What was I not supposed to hear? The sea. The answer could only be the sea.

  I put my argument to Pink, saying that the only flaw in it which I could spot was that the van must have gone through Wareham, and I was sure we hadn’t passed a town.

  ‘If you drove in from the north and went slap down the main street,’ he answered, ‘you wouldn’t have noticed it. Now what about those oil lamps you mentioned? Any help there?’

  So far as I remembered, the Isle of Purbeck was pretty well electrified, but certainly the cottages and farms which lay down by the sea at the end of cart-tracks had no electric light.

  ‘It’s a nearly sure bet,’ I said. ‘If we can get any sort of confirmation on the ground, I’ll set Roland and all the police in Dorset on it.’

  We decided not to put back to West Bay and pick up my car. For one thing, my grey saloon would be far too conspicuous in the enemy’s country; for another, West Bay was too small a harbour to risk leaving Losch alone on board, however tight we tied him up. Any small boy or holiday-maker might climb on board Olwen in our absence.

  The glass had been rising steadily since dawn, and the wireless prophesied an anti-cyclone with light easterly winds. Pink thought he could risk anchoring at Swanage. We would then explore inland on foot.

  He turned up Channel, cutting across the tip of the race, now comparatively innocuous as the time of slack water approached.

  ‘Mackerel and bacon sound all right?’ he asked. ‘You take the wheel while I cook ’em. Keep her straight for St Alban’s Head.’

  He went below and routed out Losch with a roar that reminded me of hard-case American mates in the sea stories. He stripped him to his shirt and hurled his revolting outer garments overboard. Then he gave him two buckets and a scrubbing brush, and set him to cleaning out the glory-hole.

  I began to feel faint stirrings of optimism. The sea had turned a summer blue, and against it, ten miles to the east, St Alban’s Head stood up like a vast, misty, yellow mountain. The smell of bacon from the galley was glorious to a stomach as empty as mine, and a pleasant accompaniment was the sound of Losch’s scrubbing brush, measured by growls from Pink and once the whack of a rope’s end and a yelp. I couldn’t help feeling that my luck had touched bottom and was on its way up.

  Losch wouldn’t eat; he only wanted to sleep. So we moved the stores down from the bunk to the now spotless floor, and let him climb up. Then Pink and I did justice to the mackerel, and smoked and watched the grim Purbeck coast open up to port. I had never seen those grey cliffs from the sea before, and I said that they must have been terrifying in the old days of sail.

  ‘Lord, no!’ Pink replied. ‘If a skipper had weathered Portland and St Alban’s Head, there was nothing here to bother him. And in calm weather it’s been a pretty busy coast in its time.’

  That was true. The sheer face of the cliffs and the terraces and ledges beneath them were largely the work of quarrymen. From the inaccessible caves cut in the rock-face, like the holes and perches of a dovecot, blocks of Purbeck stone had been lowered into barges and taken by sea and river to build the cathedrals of southern England and London itself, long before there were roads which could bear such giant traffic.

  ‘Good smuggling coast, too,’ said Pink. ‘Some of those ledges are like quays. On a calm day I’d take Olwen alongside and let you walk ashore.’

  ‘If Yegor Ivanovitch is using someone like’ – I was a bit embarrassed – ‘well, the sort of thing you met at Tangier, could his skipper send a boat ashore at Seacombe or Winspit or any other of those ledges?’

  ‘Of course he could, given a dark night and fair weather and a hand in the dinghy whom he could trust. I’d rather use Poole. Only Poole – well, the quieter places are a bit tricky even for Olwen’s draught, and the port control has been tightened up recently. It’s such a dam’ obvious place for any sort of racket. But lo
ok here – if the job was urgent and there wasn’t much sea running, I’d guarantee to take half a dozen chaps off any of those ledges’ – he waved a hand at the forbidding and apparently sheer face of the cliffs – ‘and pick up my dinghy and be off to sea in twenty minutes without a single bloody coastguard being any the wiser. And if he did see me and wonder what I was doing so close in, he couldn’t read my name.’

  When we rounded Peveril Point into Swanage Bay, Pink stopped the engine and fell upon the sleeping Losch. We tied up his hands and feet, and gagged him with a field-dressing strapped across his mouth by plenty of adhesive tape. We had to make a port, we told him, for repairs to the engine, and he could go to sleep again without fear. Then Pink put into Swanage, and, finding no safe anchorage for craft of Olwen’s size, persuaded a local fisherman to let us tie up to his moorings.

  We dressed ourselves from Pink’s wardrobe to resemble a hearty pair of holiday-makers. I put on sun glasses, and Pink concealed the shape of his nose with a pad of lint and sticking-plaster. In Swanage we bought two knapsacks, and stuffed them to a proper bulkiness with loaves and sweaters. Neither of us could possibly be recognized at a distance, and that was all we wanted. The occupants of the house, whoever they were, were bound to be so used to summer traffic that they would pay little attention to hikers on the cliff paths.

  All this took time, and it was four in the afternoon before we left Swanage. There were still five hours of daylight, however – enough, if my theory were correct, to identify the house or the black van or both.

  We strode fast over the bleak uplands between the main road and the coast, stopping only to investigate scattered farms and cottages. Often their upper windows looked out upon a horizon of empty sea, but they were set back too far from and too high above the cliffs to hear the waves in the strong wind of the day before booming into the quarrymen’s cuts and over the flat edges. I was sure that the sound which I was not allowed to hear had been the roar of the sea. It could be nothing else. Yegor Ivanovitch didn’t seem to mind my hearing any conversation of his, and the house itself must have been too isolated for him to worry whether I heard neighbours’ voices.

  No house would really fit my guesswork; and those which might just be possible were so obviously innocent – desolate farms with their cows and dogs and dung-heaps, or farm cottages with the labourers’ wives feeding their poultry or chasing their children out of the peas.

  We struck a little inland and followed the road to Worth. There the pub had just opened. We sat down in the bar and ordered a couple of pints. As it was a Saturday evening, three or four quarrymen were quenching their thirst already, and a couple of obvious summer visitors were starting early on their gin.

  The landlord seemed to be a cheerful and communicative soul, so I told him that a friend of mine was staying somewhere in the neighbourhood, but I didn’t exactly know where. Had he seen a shabby old black van going through the village the day before, and down to the sea?

  ‘Don’t come down for lobsters, do ’e?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not that van.’

  ‘Then there’s only Mr Firpin’s van, what sells vegetables,’ said one of the quarrymen positively. ‘’E goes down to Mr Fallot regular.’

  That wouldn’t do either. It seemed to me to stand to reason that the black van couldn’t be a regular visitor to the village. Yegor Ivanovitch must have whistled it up on that desperate morning when he called in his agents and decided to flit.

  This Mr Fallot, however, appeared to have a house on just the sort of site I wanted. I asked who he was.

  ‘Come down for week-ends. Ah, and any time he can get off, I reckon,’ answered the landlord. ‘Big Birmingham jeweller he is, they tell me.’

  ‘Does he have people to stay with him?’

  ‘Not as you might say, stay. He ’as ’is friends, though.’

  He gave me an intolerably vague description of the man and of a servant whom he sometimes, but not always, brought down with him, which might equally well have fitted Pink and myself.

  ‘My friend might have sent his children down in a grey saloon,’ I suggested.

  ‘Big grey motor car, was it?’ asked the quarryman.

  I gave him the number.

  ‘Couldn’t tell ’ee,’ he said, ‘but I saw a big grey motor car down to Mr Fallot’s this morning.’

  ‘Sure it wasn’t yesterday?’

  ‘’Course I’m sure it weren’t yesterday.’

  ‘Children in it?’ I asked.

  The quarryman didn’t know, but one of the summer visitors took his pipe out of his mouth and remarked:

  ‘There was one child in it. I saw the car go through the village.’

  I remembered George’s habit of always going to sleep curled up on the back seat during a long journey; he couldn’t be seen.

  The evidence was muddled, inexplicable, illogical, as any other attempt to make clear sense out of human activities, yet it was somehow promising. Pink and I finished our pints and went away over the fields to have a look at this Mr Fallot’s house from the other side of the valley in which it lay.

  The house had been built in the between-war years, when anyone who chose to foul the cliffs of England by fastening his suburban nest on them was perfectly free to do so. This one, however, must have been planned by a first-class architect; little could be seen but a belt of shrubs, and behind them a squat face of Purbeck stone which was as natural a part of its surroundings as any quarrymen’s cutting. Indeed the house looked as if it had been built on the floor of a shallow quarry. That was hopeful. Underground rooms or cellars could easily be formed out of the old diggings.

  From the end of the valley track, above which the house stood, a narrow gully led down to a ledge of rock. This was surrounded by a crescent of cliffs, about three hundred yards across the horns. The ledge, formed by the cutting away of all the overlying stone, fell in a series of low steps to the sea – the lowest of all being about on a level with the mean high-tide mark. Old iron rings, cemented into a roughly squared slab and rotten with rust, showed that the place had once been a handy quay to those who knew how and when to use it.

  So much we saw during a casual walk along the cliffs and a scramble out to the edge of a low promontory from which we could look into the crescent. To keep watch on Mr Fallot’s house was far more difficult. Those Purbeck uplands, bordering the sea, were a bright green desert. The steep side of the valley opposite the house was smooth enough for a man to slide down two hundred feet without tearing his trousers. A few stunted trees and thorns crouched in the hollows, and on the slopes were sparse patches of gorse and bramble; but there was no real cover except the loose stone walls that bounded the fields – typical moorland fields, empty and windswept.

  It took a good deal of innocent wandering and lying about in the sun to find the shelter we wanted – an old home-guard trench cut precariously on the edge of the cliff, from which there was a fine view, through friendly grass and thistle, of Fallot’s drive and front door. Pink wanted to plunge straight into it, but, as a once skilled infantryman, I wasn’t having any. The strongest position isn’t much use if the enemy has watched you occupy it.

  And so I wasted more precious time. We pretended to admire the evening light on the water, and lay around like ecstatic townsmen, and not once did we look at Fallot’s house until we had gradually disappeared into dead ground and so into the trench.

  The house leapt close in the field of Pink’s magnificent glasses. There was nobody about. On the drive, which perfectly fitted my memory of a short, sharp slope, I could see the recent tracks of cars. A chimney was smoking. The place had no electricity or telephone. It looked innocent and respectable, even charming.

  After about twenty minutes a man and a boy came out of the front door and went to the garage. I sprang on to the parapet to get a better view, but the boy wasn’t Jerry or George, and the man I had never seen before. He took a large grey car out of the garage. He then stood at the front door saying goodbye to hi
s host, and him, too, I had never seen before. They made a happy group together. I turned to Pink, yelping curses and obscenities. We had wasted an hour and a half of daylight, since we were at Worth, keeping watch on an obviously inoffensive house.

  ‘Come on, old son! Let’s not miss a lift!’ said Pink.

  We raced down the slope and were standing on the valley track when the man and his son drove past. He willingly gave us a lift up the hill. They were so happy, those two, excited by the wind and sun of the day. I asked, hopelessly, if he had seen another grey car with children.

  ‘Odd that you should ask that,’ he replied. ‘We certainly did, didn’t we, Jo?’

  ‘That poor little chap who was frightened,’ said Jo.

  He was only about nine himself, but a thoroughly fatherly small boy.

  ‘When?’ I snapped.

  The father looked at me with surprise.

  ‘When we were driving down yesterday. Just like a grown-up, I said what a naughty boy he was. And Jo explained that he wasn’t naughty; he was frightened.’

  ‘Where? For God’s sake, where?’

  This admirable chap stopped his car and turned to me.

  ‘They were parked by the roadside near Kingston, and we passed them about midday or a little after. Two men and two boys in a grey car. I say, is there anything wrong?’

  I pulled myself together. There was nothing to be gained by starting a vast deal of local excitement until I had a direction in which to lead it.

  I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘The fact is I’m a bit overwrought. A spot of trouble in the family. Would you mind running us up as far as Kingston?’

  At Kingston we easily got on to the track of my car. It had been parked on a quiet bit of road outside the village between twelve and two the day before. What had happened was now clear. After dropping me at the house, the black van had returned to Kingston; and the children, when they arrived, had been transferred from car to van. Enquiries about a plain, black van led us only to Mr Firpin again.