A Rough Shoot Read online

  I drove on and lunched very late at a remote pub overlooking the Blackmoor Vale, where the landlord, who was a friend of mine, always had something solid to eat which food controllers had never heard of. On this occasion it was a badger ham, and very good it was. I was amazed at my appetite, and ashamed–but then I realized that my mind, all unknown to me, had been making deductions. Somebody was as yet unwilling to call in the police; and that could only mean that my shot was–well, not justified from any legal or moral point of view, but at least the sort of accident that did occur in the world to which the dead man had belonged. The instancy of his companion’s escape bore it out. Why run, unless he had a very guilty conscience or had been prepared to be shot at? Any normal citizen, however timid, would have protested then and there (though keeping, perhaps, carefully under cover) and would have gone to the police that very night.

  So my conscience was easier, and my appetite made me realize it. I wasn’t quite in the position of a drunken driver who kills a man on the road and hides the body. I was more like the householder who shoots at a burglar and accidentally kills him. The law would take a serious view of such a crime, but the householder himself would not; and, if he could easily get rid of the body, he might be fool enough, as I was, to try.

  I was strongly tempted to leave well enough alone; but then I should be at the mercy of the merest accident all through the winter–Blossom’s inquisitive sheepdogs, the rain or the rabbits themselves. No, the body couldn’t be left where it was. On the other hand it could no longer be removed by road. The only solution was to find a better hiding place on the shoot itself.

  That wasn’t going to be easy. Hedges and coverts were thick with all the dying vegetation of summer, and I couldn’t dig in such stuff–apart from the physical difficulty of it–without leaving a patch of beaten ground which would be conspicuous to any determined searcher. Digging in the open and leveling off so that nothing suspicious remained was, at any rate at night, quite impossible. At last, in my after-lunch meditation, it occurred to me that I needn’t do either.

  In the northeast corner of the shoot, at the top of the boundary hedge, was a tumble-down piece of dry stone walling which had once surrounded a barn or cottage, and now contained only a clump of beeches and a jungle of brambles. On the south side, just off Blossom’s land, was a field which had been freshly plowed and harrowed. I intended to pull down a short stretch of wall, dig a shallow hole and replace the stones when I had finished. The earth could be scattered on the new-turned earth of the field, and raked over with a branch. The nettles and bramble on the inner side of the wall would be undisturbed, and, if the job were neatly done, the two persons most concerned could rest in peace.

  In the afternoon I drove back along the upper road and still saw nothing to disquiet me. I stopped for an instant to hide the spade in a ditch where I could pick it up later. When I reached Dorchester I put my car in the public car park and collected my bicycle at the little shop which had mended the puncture. I kept to the back streets, for I didn’t want to run into Cecily, who might be in town, or any of my friends.

  After dusk I approached the shoot, very cautiously and without lights, along the upper road. I was prepared to give up the whole plan if I passed a single stranger, but I didn’t. For three miles, without either village or cottage, this narrow, well-metaled byroad switchbacked up and down across the high ground. There were several ways of scrambling across country from the road to Blossom’s land, but only one regular track–if you can call a couple of ruts in the grass a track.

  I carefully reconnoitered the point where the track met the road. The man who ran away had taken this route the previous night. By bending close to the ground I could just make out the print of tires in the mud where his car had been parked. Then I rode on up the road, collected the spade, hid my bicycle and worked my way silently across the fields to the clump of beeches and the wall. There I was fairly close to the pit, but a good half mile from the corner of the hedge where the accident had happened.

  It was a gusty night, with thin clouds whose lower edge occasionally touched the top of the downs and enveloped them in mist. The trees within the wall creaked and whispered, and the thorn and holly and elder of the great hedge rattled their branches and dying leaves. There was enough noise to cover any that I might make myself. Even so, before I started to remove the stones I sat still and watched and listened. The clouds were often tenuous enough to show the shape of a half-moon, and then I could see a hundred yards into the milky and uneasy world that surrounded me.

  One by one I removed the flat stones of the wall, placing them on the bare earth of the field so that I would know in what order they went back. I hadn’t, of course, taken on the impossible task of replacing a neat wall in position. I wanted only to leave the tumble of stones, the wall-shaped object, looking much as it had before. While I worked I had my back towards the length of the boundary hedge, and I can’t say I liked it. With my back unguarded, with such a beastly task in front of me, and in not too deep a darkness, across which flitted the wisps and wraiths of cloud, I had to keep a tight hold on imagination.

  I kept too tight a hold. Any balance was impossible.

  Either I had to investigate every cracking branch, every inexplicable sound, or none at all. And so it was that I didn’t pay attention until the final rush of feet.

  I ascribe my safety to sheer animal panic, for I am no athlete. All my suppressed fears exploded instantaneously and I jumped sideways and off, like a hare out of her form. As my pursuers stumbled over the stones, I increased a lead of five yards to twenty. I led them towards the road and then dived–literally dived, headfirst–over a gap in the hedge which I knew was closed by five strands of barbed wire. They crashed into it as I picked myself up, and gave tongue loudly in oaths that certainly weren’t those of local men. There were two of them. One had a cultured accent, and a loud and hearty voice. The other was a foreigner. Their speed and energy made me certain that neither was the man I had seen at Blossom’s gate. Dense cloud was moving over the ground, and in that foggy darkness I could get no impression at all of height or build. It was a comforting thought that to them too I must have been nothing but a piece of night which moved.

  By the time they got clear of the wire and were able to listen to anything but themselves, I was safe. I dropped to the ground and waited. One of them produced a torch that he hadn’t had time to use before, and flashed it halfheartedly around. I noticed that he held it away from him at the full stretch of his arm. It was obvious that he thought I might fire at the light. This was a cheering reminder that I was not dealing with police, and that my pursuers, whoever they were, expected a more formidable enemy than an innocent and hitherto respectable salesman.

  They gave up the search for me and returned to the wall. There of course they found my spade and walked off with it. That was a disaster. There would be some wonderful sets of my fingerprints on that spade. The Englishman said to the other:

  “Hold it by the blade, man!”

  So that was that, and the end of me if ever they chose to go to the police. I could never produce any convincing story to explain what I was doing with a spade in that corner of the shoot.

  They walked away diagonally across the fields, aiming– I had to gamble on it–for the cart track. As soon as I was sure, I ran straight to my bicycle, tore silently up the road and reached the junction a little before them. They had no waiting car. They turned left and walked along the stretch of road I had just covered, one of them carrying the spade over his shoulder and still holding it by the blade. I followed, trailing them by the sound of their footsteps.

  When they got over the brow of the hill I decided to take a chance. The road was good and my cycle well oiled. It made no more noise than dead leaves blowing over the tarmac. They were talking together as I swept down behind them, and when they heard me it was too late. I passed them at about fifteen miles an hour, swerved, grabbed at the spade and wobbled twice across the road– but I
had it, and the torch was flashed too late. I heard them begin to run, and I put on speed.

  Further on I came to a motorcycle and sidecar, parked just off the road without lights. I don’t suppose anyone else would have noticed it, but I was looking for their transport, and I knew all the gates and gaps where it could be. I had about a couple of minutes to deal with it. I caught carburetor and petrol pipe a devastating swipe with the spade f wrenched off the clutch cable, and then saw a handy billet of wood with which I wrecked the spokes of the back wheel. I lost my temper with that motorcycle, and I left it looking as if I had. Then I rode peacefully back to Dorchester, recovered my car, and was home before midnight with a story that I hadn’t had to stay at Salisbury after all.

  It is now time to say something of my silent Cecily. She seldom says what she thinks. On the other hand, unless she is talking to fools who expect it of her, she never says what she doesn’t think. This apparent quiescence–a reluctance, one might call it, to disturb the status quo–makes her very easy to live with; too easy, perhaps, for I am inclined to accept her longer silences without inquiring into the cause as closely as I ought.

  Such masculine laziness was now useful. I could pretend I didn’t notice her mood. She, on her part, was much too proud to ask me the reason for my odd behavior two nights running. I don’t want to give the impression that I had to explain all my movements to her. Of course I didn’t. I was a hard-working quarry agent, frequently on the road at short notice. No, I mean that ours was as good a marriage as you could find. If I was anxious or excited, she always knew it; if it was she who went through some silent crisis, I usually knew it. But we were both quite capable of feigning to see nothing wrong until the cloud over the other, whatever it was, had passed.

  This peace which she created in our home helped me through the next forty-eight hours. When Cecily found a report in Thursday’s evening paper of an abandoned motorcycle on the upper road, which had had its number plates removed and seemed to have been in a smash, I was able to grunt and answer, with complete lack of interest, that I suppose it was stolen. I wanted, of course, day and night, to go up to the shoot and see that the rabbits in their pit were undisturbed, but somehow I managed to control myself until the week end.

  On Saturday I took a full day off, and went over the ground with a determined unconcern calculated to deceive any watcher. The knowledge that I might be in the field of somebody’s glasses made me concentrate very nervously on my shooting–with the odd result that I couldn’t miss.

  I was careful not to go straight to the pit. When at last I did go there, in the normal course of walking the length of the down for a hare, the slope looked so natural that I wondered at my fears. Then I remembered that there were only nine inches of earth between me and discovery, and I thought of the cowardliness of my act and the cruelty of this lonely death. Yet it was certain that powerful friends knew of his death or disappearance, and would do whatever had to be done.

  The stones from the wall were on the plowed field where I had left them. I don’t know what the next-door farmer, to whom this field belonged, made of them. Possibly he assumed that Blossom, with whom he was on very neutral terms, had needed some stones for walling and would clean up the mess in due season. Which of them owned this worthless little plot, with its trees and ruins and nettles, I never found out.

  I sat down and ate my sandwiches at the top of the shoot, and as I let my eyes wander over the loved, familiar rise and fall of the land, I became aware that there was a question to be put to it. Those two men who nearly caught me– what were they doing in the northeast corner of the shoot? There was no reason why they should look for me at that end of the boundary hedge, and I was sure I hadn’t made enough noise to attract them. Then suppose that they were not looking for me at all–had given it up, and were on their way back to the road? On their way back from what?

  I found enough of their tracks to prove that they had come from the west, along a cattle-proof hedge that divided Blossom’s down. Beyond it, the down ran on in a great expanse of close rabbit turf which had never been plowed. Close to the hedge were dense, rounded thickets of bramble that looked like the huts of a kaffir kraal. They repeated so exactly those domes and bastions where the dead man had been at work that I wondered if the same mysterious activity might not have been carried on.

  On my way home I felt, with a vague soldier’s instinct, that the clue to the action must be found in the lie of the land. Yet never was there a more innocent patch of geography. Before me, to the south, was a great semicircle of rolling country, ending in the coastal hills. The smooth hogback where I was gave no impression of height and rose so gradually that it was not conspicuous or in any way a landmark; it was merely the highest point, level, spacious and remote, in a green bowl of farms and villages.

  A week passed and nothing happened. I could almost accept an unexpected ring at the doorbell with equanimity. At any rate I had no longer to force myself into unnatural calm. The weather was vile. There were two days of gale with torrents of rain, and then a thick fog came up from the Channel. This suited me well. I went on foot to the pit, not even risking a bicycle in case it should be seen and recognized, and created the appearance of a landslip which had dragged a thorn tree lose from its roots. Thereafter the spot was covered by enough earth and tangled vegetation to discourage man or dog.

  The following Saturday afternoon I went out again with my gun, and came on old Blossom and one of his men carting hay from a stack in the southern meadows. He called me over when I shouted a good-afternoon, and on the other side of the cart I found his landlord, Robert Heyne-Hassingham. Blossom introduced me as the man who had taken his shooting, and Heyne-Hassingham at once turned on the charm.

  He had plenty of it, part hereditary and part acquired as a practicing politician. He was an excellent landlord and a man of considerable influence in the county–indeed, in all the West of England. During the war he had been chosen, it was said, as the underground leader for a very wide area in the event of a successful German invasion.

  After the war, however, he became a slightly comic figure to the average citizen, for he began to take politics as seriously as any ardent socialist. He founded the People’s Union which had a lot of publicity till the newspapers grew tired of it. It was a sort of Boy’s Brigade for grownups, full of Ideals, Service and Religion. Any religion would do. It appealed to disgruntled ex-servicemen, and was supposed to have a following among regular officers of the Army and Navy–a threat that we hadn’t known since Cromwell’s day. To the plain Englishman, however, who keeps his Ideals, Service and Religion packed away in the gun room, well-oiled and ready for use but emphatically out of reach of the children, the People’s Union was offensive. It had a somewhat fascist smell of hierarchy. It paid lip service to democracy, of course, but there was no doubt that if Heyne-Hassingham and his choirboys ever came to power –which no one thought remotely possible but themselves –Parliament would be even more of a rubber stamp than it is.

  As I say, he turned on the charm, and naturally enough I was flattered and began to think–as one usually does on meeting an eminent public man in the flesh–that I had greatly misjudged him. He discussed gun and game, talked of old days when his father and the gamekeepers had brought up thousands of pheasants by hand, and asked me if I thought the pheasant was establishing itself successfully as a purely wild bird. I had no doubt that it was.

  He knew his countryside, though I had the impression that he was entertaining me with what he had heard rather than what he had observed. That thin, rather ascetic face didn’t really belong to our wealth of slow life.

  “Your grandfather was a great friend of our family, Colonel Taine,” he said.

  “Mr. Taine,” I corrected him.

  Inverted snobbery, I suppose. But it’s ridiculous for an ordinary businessman to go walking about as a colonel.

  “I was only thinking,” he smiled, “how proud the old boy would have been of a grandson who commanded his ba
ttalion and collected all your gongs on the way.”

  I didn’t believe that my grandfather had any connection with the Heyne-Hassinghams–except that he sold them a famous ram of his own breeding–but I accepted this lush suggestion of friendship. Grandfather, if he visited their house at all, would certainly have made some memorable inroads on the Heyne-Hassingham cellar before parting with his ram.

  “The country needs men like you,” he said.

  That was an invitation, but I wasn’t having any.

  “We are a bit short of plain, contented chaps,” I answered.

  “That is you?”

  “It is.”

  “You’re rare then, and you’re very lucky,” he said. “But, believe me, in too many other cases content grows into self-satisfaction.”

  He asked us both to stroll as far as his car with him, playing the busy man who did not want to part from agreeable company but had to account for every minute of his time. His conversation was now mostly with Blossom, and about the high down. In answer to his questions Blossom, I remember, told him that the growth of grass had been disappointing that dry summer, and that he wasn’t putting any cattle or sheep on the down till the spring.

  The car had been left on the upper road, so we passed that fatal angle of the boundary hedge. It was exactly as I and the dead man had left it, except that rain had cleared away the blood, if there ever was any, and restored the grass.

  “By the way, Mr. Blossom,” Heyne-Hassingham asked, “have you agreed with your neighbor to leave that gap open, or is there a right of way?”