A Time to Kill

by Geoffrey Household

We offered a drink to our kindly driver and ice-cream to his son. They had both been fascinated by all this mysterious asking of questions.

  ‘Look here,’ said the man, ‘don’t think I want to butt in or anything, but aren’t you police?’

  Before I could reply, Pink took his nose out of his pint, and whispered:

  ‘Revenue.’

  You couldn’t have doubted him. His tough face, brown above and red below, where two days’ sun and salt had whipped the skin long protected by his beard, could only have been that of a criminal or some adventurous officer of the state; and since he had never lost his naval eyes nor his general air of authority, criminal was out of the question.

  ‘After smugglers?’ whispered our friend, and his son’s eyes glowed in the setting sun.

  ‘And bigger than that,’ Pink answered. ‘Now, sir, I think you yourself could help us a bit.’

  The man seemed somewhat startled.

  ‘Fire away if you’ve anything to ask,’ he said.

  ‘When did you arrive at Mr Fallot’s?’

  ‘This morning about ten. We stayed last night here at Kingston.’

  ‘He asked you to come today?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. Any Saturday, he said, if I liked to bring the boy down to the sea and have some lunch. So I thought …’

  ‘Did he look at all worried when you arrived?’

  ‘No,’ said the man doubtfully, ‘not worried, really. Busy, perhaps. He didn’t have his servant with him, and kept us waiting a long time before he opened the door. But then he was cordial as you could want. You don’t think there’s anything wrong with Fallot, surely?’

  ‘Lord, no!’ Pink lied. ‘I just wondered if he would be the right sort of chap to help us. Might be useful with a house right on the sea. Have you known him long?’

  ‘Off and on, since the war. I buy a bit of stuff from him, you see. Theatrical jewellery and such-like. That’s my business – masks, fancy dress, fireworks, comic tricks and high-class used clothing.’

  ‘I always thought that was a Jewish trade,’ said Pink.

  ‘I am one,’ replied our friend with delightful simplicity.

  Pink’s face pleased me, even among all my troubles. He had evidently liked this helpful and wholly English shopkeeper as much as I did, and just couldn’t make him square with his favourite fascist theories. I felt certain that he was going to say you don’t look it. He avoided that insult with an effort, but the next question rang too sharply.

  ‘Do you buy watches from Fallon?’

  ‘I do not,’ the man answered. ‘But if ever you wish to prove it, here is my business card!’

  ‘Is Fallot a Jew?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Does he sell watches?’

  ‘Yes, naturally. Well, gentlemen,’ he said rather sadly, ‘I must be getting on.’

  I tried to cover Pink’s sudden change of manner by the sincerity of my thanks. There was no more I could do without giving away his offensive imitation of a suspicious revenue officer.

  When the grey car had driven away, I fear I showed temper. Self-control was growing a bit thin, in any case, as the sun went down.

  ‘Can it, Roger!’ Pink said, unmoved. ‘This is what I was after. Fallot may be in the same sort of jam that I was. Suppose he is smuggling in a big way, and suppose some old cloak-and-sickle got to know of it. Right! Then, Mr Fallot, you’re going to run what we like when we like, as well as your bloody watches. Or else!’

  I told Pink it was absurd conjecture, and demanded evidence.

  ‘Firpin’s van,’ he answered. ‘Look here – we’ve asked about the black van till we’re hoarse. Nobody’s seen it, and everybody’s seen it. Now, I’m a chap who likes to accept what’s under his nose without looking any farther. It’s Firpin’s van that you and your children travelled in. It must have had false registration plates when you saw it, but I’ll bet it hadn’t as soon as you were out of sight.’

  I said wearily that I couldn’t believe in my fellow Dorset-man, Firpin, Fruit and Vegetables, Deliveries Daily, handing over his precious old van to the Soviet Secret Police.

  ‘It’s a damn sight easier than believing Yegor Ivanovitch is God Almighty,’ said Pink, ‘and can whistle up ships and plain vans whenever he likes, and use ’em without any cover. I tell you he’s got Firpin in his pocket. Why? Because Firpin has been running up and down to the sea and carrying whatever Fallot gave him under the vegetables.

  ‘Lord, Roger, it’s just like those communists! They blackmail two perfectly decent smugglers, and before the poor chaps have time to look round they find they’ve become proper criminals and are doing whatever they’re told to do. Even so, I bet you anything, they don’t know it’s a political gang they are working for.’

  Well, it was possible. Indeed, it was nearly certain that the black van was Firpin’s. But was Firpin’s chief or partner Fallot? If Pink was right and if his smugglers had to accept any yarn that was served up to them and didn’t know in whose power they were, then any of those seemingly innocent cliff-top farmers were as likely as Fallot.

  Pink had to agree, but stuck to his Birmingham jeweller. It was well known, he said, in Tangier that a man could soon retire on the proceeds of running watches and jewellery into England.

  It was now half-past eight. We dared not waste time looking for Firpin – who, if he had any sense, would be providing himself with an alibi far away from home – and we could not call in the police. Help from them on any scale big enough to be effective was inconceivable; we had not the evidence to be convincing, and we had not the time. About all we could do was to get the local cop or coastguard down to Fallot’s house – just enough to forewarn Ivanovitch into final disposal of the children.

  We had, at any rate, details sufficient to take action ourselves. Pink could not prophesy any hour for the arrival of whatever craft was coming. He himself would choose, he said, half tide or low tide, when the pattern of the ledges would be clear and a dinghy could be paddled in as easily as to a quay. Our objective was to delay the embarkation by frightening off the ship. I was to watch Fallot’s house, and meanwhile, Pink would take Olwen to sea and watch the two or three miles of coast to eastward, where there were other possible houses, even lonelier than Fallot’s, and other rock ledges accessible from the cliffs. We reckoned that we could upset the nice timing of their arrangements – merely, for example, by holding any strange boat in the beam of Olwen’s Aldis lamp – and that by dawn we would have proof solid enough to bring in the police, and search and cordon the whole district.

  Pink jumped on a bus and went down to Swanage. I struck across country in the last of the light, aiming for the side of the valley above Fallot’s house. There was no one about. The quarrymen had gone home or to the pubs. The farmers were enjoying their Saturday night. There weren’t even any campers along the cliffs, which were too bleak and windswept to be inviting.

  First of all I fixed in my memory the exact point on the cliff path which was directly above two huge cavemouths cut by the quarrymen. Pink knew their position and thought he might even be able to pick them up in his night-glasses. He was to keep one eye on the skyline above the caves for my flashes of light in case I wanted to signal to him.

  When it was already deep dusk, I wriggled silently down over the turf slope until I was on the edge of the rough cutting in which Fallot’s house had been built. Lying there – with my heels rather higher than my head, but firmly anchored – I looked down on the garden and the yard outside the back door. The front of the house was hidden from me, but I could see anyone who stepped away from it into the drive; and over my right shoulder I could watch between the headlands a black arc of sea. It was a perfect position – murderous if I had had a rifle and a legal right to use it. As it was, I had no weapon but Pink’s Norwegian knife which he had insisted on leaving with me.

  Fallot’s house seemed abnormally quiet and dark for a place where the owner was at home and presumably enjoying whatever after-dinner
relaxation he fancied. There wasn’t a sound until, about eleven, somebody opened the back door and put the cat out. This innocent, domestic act gave me a moment of utter despair. There was I, fooling about on a dark hillside when my boys were in imminent danger.

  The unknown lit a cigar and took a couple of turns round the garden and down to the gate, where he stood listening. There was nothing to listen to. The sea down on the ledge was so calm that at this distance its splashing was indistinguishable from the faint hiss of utter silence. Then he returned to the backyard and picked something up. I couldn’t see what it was. There was haze high up in the atmosphere, and the night was black velvet.

  He strolled down to the gate again, and out. I thought that he might be going down to the ledge to finish his cigar by the edge of the sea; but instead of following the little ravine he turned right and started to climb the cliff path. He was using a torch to see his way. As he came up to my level and passed within fifty yards of me, I watched the narrow pool of light travelling briskly along the ground.

  The cliff path seemed an unnecessarily difficult route for an evening stroll, so I decided to follow him. Here at long last was a bit of a movement from Fallot’s house which might repay investigation. I squirmed back from the awkward slope where I was lying, and then struck straight up the escarpment over the soundless turf. From the top I looked down on to the path, but there wasn’t a glimmer of torch or cigar. I crept a little nearer to the cliff, and very cautiously – for although there was a stout wire fence to prevent one walking out into a hundred feet of space, the whole hillside was terraced with unexpected quarries.

  After a bit, I heard a crackling of sticks well below me and to my left, and moved towards it. The unknown struck a match. I dropped to the ground and tried to resemble a large lump of darkness, for I was within thirty feet of him. Paper caught, sticks flared, and a fire of small logs began to waver and grow. The man then threw a handful of some chemical on the fire, and the flame and column of smoke turned reddish, yet not so red as to be wholly unlike an ordinary fire. Twice he fed it with his powder, then gathered the logs together to give a steady flame, and cleared off down the hill as if the devil was after him. I saw his face clearly in the glare; he was Fallot, the man I had watched saying good-bye – no doubt very thankfully – to our friend and his boy.

  I had no doubt what that fire was for. The site of it was cleverly chosen – a flat platform set back into a second step of the cliffs. The fire couldn’t be seen at all by the coastguards on St Alban’s Head to the west, and was fairly sheltered from the east. And if it were seen, if even it were investigated, what was it but a summer camper’s fire over which to grill his sausages? Very well that camper had made his fireplace, too, out of flat chippings of Purbeck stone, protected from the wind and with a primitive but satisfactory draught beneath. The stones were well blackened, showing that the beacon had frequently been lit.

  I let the light of Fallot’s torch disappear over the edge of the hill, and then I rushed down and kicked those logs out of the fireplace and stamped on them. I thought I saw two sudden and questioning flashes of light from the sea, but they were so quick and so far from the direction in which I had been looking that I could not be sure. A rough compass bearing showed them to have been west-south-west.

  It was now my turn to do a bit of signalling. I trotted along the cliff path until I was above the two great caves, and found a long, low gorse bush which would prevent my light being seen from the south-west. Pink’s position was east by south of the caves.

  It was hard to decide what to send him. A single flash meant that he was to come in quietly and join me. Three flashes in quick succession would tell him to hang about in the offing as publicly as possible, with all lights lit. That, I reckoned, would certainly cause the strange craft to sheer off, but what might happen up at the house? If the party in Fallot’s cellars – for I was now sure it was there my children were held – chose to escape in the black van or on foot, what on earth could I do to stop them? When we had decided that frightening-off was the game to play, I had not realized the awful blackness of the night. I could pass within twenty yards of my boys, and neither they nor I would know it.

  I came to the conclusion that I needed Pink, and needed him quietly. I sent him single flashes. At the fourth my signal was acknowledged by a double speck of light impossible to notice unless one were staring out to sea along a compass bearing. In so vast an emptiness that tiny flick of humanity was comforting as fireplace and friend.

  I made my way down to the ledge. As soon as I was past Fallot’s house and off the turf, I had to feel twice with each foot before I dared set it down. Loose stone, old scraps of wire and slippery shale in the gully made vile going for a man who didn’t want to be heard or show a light. The thought occurred to me – and I wish I’d paid more attention to it – that if I had to shift parcels of watches and jewellery I would choose an easier route. It must have taken me as long to reach the sea as for Pink to creep in two miles to his anchorage.

  Close to the water there was a little more light, a spectral glimmer provided by the swirl and suck of the waves. I could distinguish the miniature dock, half natural and half split by Purbeck quarrymen, where Pink, if he could find it, intended to land. I walked out along its western arm, and then as far on as I could get over a spit of rock left bare by the falling tide.

  I distrust the sea. Its romance in a sunlit, summer haven may pass; its reality, its own dark life among the recesses of a coast, is melancholy and alien. The steps of the ledges behind me, though Ivanovitch and his whole company might, for all I could discern, be squatting on them like gulls, were land and were friendly. But the sea which crept in out of the night and lifted the long strands of weed and plunged back with a smooth, gurgling surge of force was menacing and incalculable.

  After a long wait among all these swirlings and reachings for me, I heard at last the plain, familiar sound of oars. It came from the west, the direction in which I did not want to show a light; so I returned to the solid footing of the ledge and tried to get within speaking distance. I was just going to risk a low call to Pink, when a voice from the sea muttered:

  ‘Verdammte Fallot!’

  I hoped that the unknown German was cursing Fallot because the beacon fire had gone out just when most needed.

  The dinghy followed the gleam of lightly broken water into a narrow passage that opened between the ledge and the western horn of the cliff. I came up close and, when I heard the sculls shipped and the crunch of the rope fenders, dropped into a handy crack among the limpets and sea anemones. I could just distinguish a tall figure in a white yachting cap who came ashore. He seemed to know where he was, and his footsteps padded away in the direction of the ravine and Fallot’s house. He left behind him a seaman in charge of the boat.

  When all was quiet again I went back to the little rock basin and showed a light low down on the water. I could only pray that Pink would approach from the east and land where he should. If he did, I thought it unlikely that the seaman, sitting two hundred yards away, alone in his dinghy among all those noises of bottomless drainpipes, would hear him.

  I needn’t have worried. When Pink came I didn’t hear him myself. He was paddling the little pram with a single stern oar, and had muffled the gunwale over which it passed. There wasn’t a creak or a splash as his head came to rest within a couple of feet of my own. He certainly knew his business a good deal better than the man who had landed from the dinghy.

  I told him quickly what had happened. He agreed with me that the skipper of the craft lying somewhere in the outer darkness – whose engines he thought he had heard, but wasn’t sure – had come in to get some sort of beacon going again, if it was only his own electric torch. Since his ship didn’t dare to show any lights, he couldn’t find his usual anchorage without help from shore; and more, said Pink, if he couldn’t guide her in to where he wanted her, he would have a tough time finding her at all when he tried to return on board in the ding
hy.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Olwen?’

  ‘Close in under the cliff,’ he replied. ‘Give us a clear sky, and you’d pretty near see her from here.’

  I said that I had never noticed the beat of the Diesel, and he chuckled with satisfaction. It was his seamanship, I think, which gave him self-respect enough to carry him through personal loneliness and disaster. He explained that he had never used his engine once he was round the point, and had nicely calculated that what wind there was and the set of the ebb-tide would carry him close in to the ledge. He had unshackled his anchor and bent a cable on to it instead of the chain, and the two had gone down without a sound.

  ‘Roger,’ he said, ‘it’s unlikely, you know, that your friend in the yachting cap has more than one dinghy. And if he has, he’ll have a high old time trying to lay his hands on it.’

  ‘We’ll give the general alarm if we pinch it,’ I objected.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. The night is so bloody dark, and their plan has gone wrong, and nobody knows where anyone else is. Muddle ’em some more – that’s the game! Skipper is on shore. Dinghy and hand vanish. No way of finding out what’s happened without flashing enough lights to make even a coast guard put down his pipe and think! It might take ’em till dawn before they clear it all up. What was the chap in the dinghy doing when you left him?’

  ‘Just sitting.’

  ‘Well, you know how to get up close to him, so you’d better do the job. And I’ll be handy in case of accidents.’

  He took a cosh from under his sweater and handed it to me. It was just a steel bar wrapped round with tow.

  ‘That’s all I could make on board,’ he said apologetically. ‘Now, don’t kill him. He’s earning his living like the rest of us. Just a flick will do.’

  Pink moored the pram to what remained of an iron ring, and followed me silently over the ledge. Given patience and slow movement, the job was easy. The man was still sitting in the dinghy with his head on a level with the rock. I didn’t hit him quite hard enough, and he came round soon after we had worked the boat out into the open sea. Pink, however, quickly lashed his hands together with the painter, and threatened urgent death if he opened his mouth.