October Men (2 page)

Suddenly the foot stopped searching, thirst was forgotten and Mrs. Clark was wide awake, staring breathlessly out of her window.

There it was again, only longer this time!

Decisively she reached across the bed and shook her husband by the shoulder.

“Charlie, wake up!”

Charlie Clark groaned unbelievingly.

Mrs. Clark shook the shoulder again. “Charlie, there’s someone up at the Old House—someone breaking in! Wake up!”

Charlie rolled on to his back, blinking in the darkness, grappling with the unpalatable sequence of information.

Finally he computed an answer, or at least a delaying question. “ ‘Ow do you know? You can’t see nothing, surely?”

“I can see a light, a flashing light—like a torch going on and off.”

“Car lights, that ‘ud be.”

“That it’s not!” Mrs. Clark insisted hotly. “You don’t get no reflections all that way, and there are those trees in the way. And besides—“ she overrode his murmur of disagreement triumphantly “—there aren’t no cars on the road, or I’d ‘uv heard ‘em. I tell you there’s someone up at the Old House. Someone as don’t dare switch the lights on.”

Charlie grumbled under his breath and heaved himself out of bed, reaching for his pullover.

“I reckon it’ll be some of those tearaways from the town,” Mrs. Clark said to him over her shoulder, the outrage quavering in her voice. “A gang of them broke into a big house down Midhurst way last week—it was in the paper. They said there’d been seven robberies round there in the last month.”

Charlie felt his way round the bed until he was standing beside his wife. As he bent down to peer out of the little window she pointed quickly.

“There! You see where the flash came—“

“Yes, I see’d ‘un.” Charlie was not given to believing half he was told or a tenth of what he read, but he always believed his own eyes. And there had been no doubt about that pale light. “It’ll be they young buggers right enough—young buggers they are.”

Mrs. Clark nodded at the vehemence in her husband’s voice. It frightened her to think of them loose in the beautiful house she had scrubbed and polished for a lifetime—scrubbed and polished so much that she almost felt it was partly hers and she was part of it.

But also it angered her, and the anger grew steadily, crowding out the fear.

Charlie moved away from her.

“What you goin’ to do?” She could hear him fumbling in the darkness. “Don’t you put the light on, Charlie!”

“I ain’t a fool. I’m lookin’ to put me trousers on, an’ then I’ll get on down to the police house. Let ‘em sort it out.”

“What!” Mrs. Clark rounded on him fiercely, her sense of outrage now dominant. The police house was at Upper Horley, two long miles away, and half of that uphill. “You’ll not do that! You do that an’ they’ll be out an’ gone by the time Tom Yates gets ‘ere—out and gone.”

A terrible vision of destruction rose in her imagination, compounded of all she had heard and read. They weren’t like the old-time burglars she had known in her youth, men who knew the value of things and were interested only in what they could sell—they were destroyers now who did unspeakable, senseless, wasteful things. They were the invaders from a world she could not comprehend, the city jungle spilling into the quiet, ordered countryside.

Charlie stared towards her in the blackness, one pyjama-clad leg half stuffed into his trousers.

“You don’t mean for me to go up there—?”

“That’s just exactly what I do mean. An’ I’ll go and get Tom Yates meantime.”

“Ah—and they’ll make mincemeat of me meantime, too, woman. Them’s young an’ I’m not.”

“Then you just take your old gun with you. They won’t ‘ave the guts to tackle you then, not if you stand up to them.”

Charlie had the gravest doubts about the validity of this theory of his wife’s—it was not the first time he heard her voice it, that young hooligans had no courage. But he could recall the way the rats had behaved at threshing time, in the days before the combine harvesters when there was still plenty of work to be had on the land: if you left the rats alone they soon made themselves scarce, pests though they were. But if you cornered them—they fought, rats or no, snapping at the stick as it broke their backs.

And that, it seemed to Charlie, was what she was asking him to do to these young buggers—to corner ‘em.

“I dunno about that,” he began doubtfully.

“Well I do,” Mrs. Clark snapped back, through the rustle of clothes pulled hurriedly over her head. “And I knows something else too: that I promised Master David that I’d look after the house while he was away—and so I will. So if you won’t go up to it, then I shall have to. And you can go and wake up Tom Yates.”

Charlie swore under his breath and wrenched at his trousers. Somehow he had been manoeuvred into a corner himself, a corner from which there was no escape except by doing his wife’s bidding. He never could fathom how she managed it, but it was a position with which he was all too bitterly familiar.

He was swearing still, steadily and bitterly, as he edged his way up the lane towards the Old House five minutes later.

Of all the nights of this rotten summer, this was the worst for such tom-fool behaviour. It was pitch black and chilly and sopping wet, without a breath of wind. The rain must have stopped an hour or more since and the heavy summer foliage had had time to drip off its surplus moisture, so that everything was quiet enough to hear a mouse stir.

It was this stillness that made him swear now. He had tried two or three steps on the gravel drive, but the scrunch of his iron-shod boots had deafened him. His only chance of a silent approach to the house was by the rough strip of grass beside the high hedgerow on his right.

He thought he knew both the grass and the hedge like the back of his hand; he had walked beside the one and picked blackberries and hazelnuts from the other innumerable times. But now he stumbled awkwardly, his trousers already soaked to the knee, his face lashed every now and then by unseen twigs and sodden leaves.

And yet, perversely, this discomfort aroused in him a determination to do the job his wife had thrust upon him. When he had blundered out of the cottage he had been half decided to save himself the unpleasantness—and very possible danger—of catching the little sods in the act by warning them of his advance with a bit of well-judged noise. But now, as he moved silently from the grass verge to the springy turf of the lawn, the smouldering irritation inside him ignited into a murderous rage.

He
’
d learn they little buggers!

There was a lot in life that irritated Charlie Clark: big cars and noisy motorcycles, long hair and short skirts, letters from government ministries asking him questions he didn’t want to answer or telling him things he didn’t care to know about, and the high price and the low strength of beer. And most of all being bullied by anyone in the world but his wife—he didn’t like that much either, but he reckoned it was more or less covered by the promise he’d made to the vicar when they’d gone to the altar together.

But always the enemy had been either intangible or plainly beyond his reach—always except those two times.

It was queer that he could never remember either of those two episodes in any detail. He could really only remember what had happened before and what had happened after.

There had been the quick, clever boy at the village school, who had mocked him once too often. And then there had been blood on Charlie’s knuckles afterwards, and no more mocking.

And the second time had been more like tonight, even though he had had a rifle in his hands then, not a cranky old twelve-bore.

Not unlike this very night, though it had been much warmer, as was only to be expected in foreign parts. Almost as dark, anyway, except that they’d been fools that time too, and showed a bit of a light to guide the patrol.

Charlie’s eyes picked up the glimmer of the torch inside the Old House the moment he came out from the lane on to the springy turf of the lawn. They’d drawn the curtains now, but it was a powerful bright light, that was sure. Only trouble, it was in a first-floor room—he knew the downstairs pretty well, but wasn’t so sure of the lie of the upstairs.

And there’d been more smell the last time, the rich smell of farmyard middens. But then it’d been a farmhouse, longer and lower than this one, huddled into the ground almost. There was talk in the platoon that the farmers kept all their money in boxes under their beds, not trusting the foreign banks—which showed they had some sense, Charlie had thought, seeing as he didn’t trust the banks at home either—and also that it was all in gold francs, too. By the time of the raid Charlie had privately searched several farmhouses with those gold francs in mind, but either it was an old wives’ tale or someone had been there before him; personally he doubted the story, for all the farms seemed to him poor and rough, without a decent suite of furniture between them, not at all like those he was used to in Sussex, where farmers were usually men of substance and very often gentlemen, too.

Still, they didn’t ought to have treated that old farm the way they had, throwing the grenades through the windows and kicking in the doors, all shouting like savages.

Charlie knew he had shouted with the rest, and kicked too, but that had only been because he’d been angry, red, raging angry at being drilled and marched one way, then marched another way, and forced to cower in ditches in terror of bombs and bullets, with never a chance to get his own back. But it’d never do to kick in the door of the Old House, even the old kitchen door and even if it hadn’t been solid seasoned oak, which he reckoned wouldn’t reward anyone’s boot. And anyway—she’d given him a key, he had it somewhere, thought Charlie confusedly, fumbling for reality in his mind while he searched his jacket with his free hand.

He had to get it right, just like the sergeant had taught him, making him repeat it until he had the meaning by heart:
First you creeps up quiet-like, to take
‘
em by surprise—then you goes in noisy, to frighten the bollocks off
‘
em
!

And first he did get it right, with the key hardly scratching the keyhole it entered. But no amount of care could stop the lock clicking unmistakably, or the latch clattering or the hinges creaking—it was as though the whole door had turned against him, bit by bit, damn it.

Charlie clutched the twelve-bore against his chest and stood irresolutely, listening to the absolute silence of the house ahead of him.

It was a silence which confused him far more than it frightened him, until the memory of the flashing light in the upstairs room came back to him—the evidence of his own eyes.

The time had come to be noisy!

With a furious growl and in total darkness Charlie launched himself across the kitchen. The first chair in his way went spinning; he banged into the edge of the table, driving it back so that it overturned another chair. But the table’s position orientated him to the passage door. Three more skidding paces, hobnails skittering on the stone floor, brought him against it. Behind him something breakable crashed to the floor.

Four more paces took him down the passage to the foot of the stairs—the last footfall was muffled by the carpet with the eastern writing on it that his wife had told him never to put a boot on. Well, he’d got both boots on it now!

The tingling silence abruptly descended around him again. And yet not a true silence any more, but the moment when the gamekeeper and the poacher sensed each other’s presence in the same covert, the moment of held breath and stretched senses.

It had not been like this in the farmhouse, it had been just how the sergeant had wanted it, all noise and terror.

Charlie reached out for the light switch.

“I knows you’re up there,” he said in a loud voice. “You just come on down quiet, an’ don’t make no trouble. Police is comin’. So you just come on down.”

He clicked the switch.

There was bursting paper-bag noise—that had been the farmhouse noise he’d never been able to recall—and a hornet stung his ear.

Same noise with same result: as the man at the head of the stairs sighted the pistol again, this time on Charlie’s heart, Charlie shot him dead.

VILLARI
’
S MANNERS, OR
more exactly his attitude towards those whom he considered inferior to himself, had not improved, that was evident.

First the fellow had idly fingered the files and envelopes on Boselli’s desk, disarranging their mathematical relation to one another. Then he had admired himself in the little round mirror beside the door, patting the golden perfection of his hair and checking his flawless complexion. And then he had sauntered over to the window to gaze without apparent interest over the roofscape towards the Vittorio Emanuele monument. And finally, when he deigned at last to speak, he didn’t even bother to turn round to face Boselli.

“Who’s this guy Audley then?”

Boselli stared at the well-tailored back with hatred. If looks could kill he felt that his would have materialised into six inches of steel angled slightly upwards just beneath the left shoulder blade.

“Audley?” The anger blurred his voice.

“The guy you’re getting steamed up about, yes.”

It was typical of Villari to use that aggravating and unfair “you,” even though he’d come running across a heat-stricken Rome obediently enough himself. But then Villari had always known when to temper his native insolence with a shrewd instinct for the whims of his superiors. The feet that kicked the Bosellis of the world at every opportunity trod very carefully on the carpets of men like Raffaele Montuori.

“We’re not getting steamed up.”

“So you’re not getting steamed up—fine.” Villari moved across the airless room, back to the mirror again. “You’re not getting steamed up, but you’re here.”

That “here” carried the same disparagement as the earlier “you,” turning Boselli’s own beloved sanctuary, with its rows of battered steel cabinets and its signed portrait of John XXIII into an unspeakable slum.