Operation Pax (3 page)

Routh’s impulse was to turn and retrace his steps – to get back, muddy as he was, to the two-stroke, and chance finding water for a clean-up later on. His legs, however, carried him unsteadily and inexorably forward. The man made a very slight movement and a wisp of smoke floated upwards. He was smoking a cigarette as he waited. His immobility was hypnotizing. Against the clamour of his every nerve, Routh found himself quickening his pace.

The man was standing in front of an iron-sheathed, stone-coloured door set flush in the wall. His eyes took one sweeping glance up and down the lane and then settled themselves upon Routh. Tall and with square shoulders carried high as if in a frozen shrug, he was dressed in what Routh knew to be a high-class tailor’s job in home-spun tweed. You could tell he owned whatever lay beyond that wall. But you could tell, too, that he was a townsman. His features were irregular and ugly, but they had the controlled mobility that tells of a mind schooled to work swiftly through complex issues. He belongs, Routh thought, at the top of one of the big-money professions – a leading surgeon, perhaps, or a successful KC Boss class. And a gentleman.

Well, that’s what
you
are – see? Routh – muddy, dusty, torn, scratched, and with the toes hurting in his thin, pointed shoes – Routh braced himself to fill out the role. A gentleman taking an afternoon stroll in unfamiliar country. That was the formula. And better pass the time of day.
Good
afternoon
.

The man made no reply. In his silence the uncertain flame of confidence that had leapt up in Routh flickered and went out. The man was looking at him steadily. He was putting two and two together about the shabby figure now sliding past with averted eyes. But at least, Routh told himself, you are past. He isn’t really interested. Just keep on steadily. Only you’d better get back to the two-stroke another way.

‘Come here.’

The words, quietly spoken behind him, had, in his already shaken state, the effect of a needle thrust into his spine. He knew that his only safety was to run, and chance making a race for it. But for the second time that day his legs were powerless, and nothing would race but his own heart. Oddly the world pivoted on him as he stood, and he found himself confronting the man who waited before the stone-coloured door.

The man beckoned, without again speaking. He beckoned, strangely, with a downward pointing figure – as one in a circus ring might beckon at a cowed and uniformly obedient brute creation.

Resentment rendered Routh articulate. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘ – what do you think I am?’

But his legs were carrying him back to the waiting man. The feeble truculence he had heard in his own voice gave him no encouragement to rebel.

‘I think you are the ruffian who has attacked a girl in my employment.’ The man was well over six feet, and he contrived to look down at Routh as at a cur. ‘I suppose you know the sentence you’d get for a criminal assault of that sort?’

‘She did it. She assaulted me.’ Routh panted as he spoke. The absurdity and indignity of his words were only emphasized by the element of truth in them.

‘Where do you come from? What are you?’

Routh took a quick, desperate glance about him. Somehow he had the impression that this scene was being watched, that the tip of his senses, whether of sight or hearing, had detected some presence that might succour him. But nothing he could now see gave any support to this fancy. So he must face it out. At least these were a sort of question that he could always answer after a fashion, and he judged it well to do so now. ‘I’m a clerk, and out of work. I’ve come down from the north.’

‘Do you think you’re likely to get work in the heart of the country?’

‘I’m going through to Reading.’

‘Motor bicycle?’

Routh blinked. Very faintly, as if some hatch had been opened deep down in his mind, cunning stirred beneath his rage and terror. There was something queer in the way that, underneath, the brute was interested in him. He resolved in a flash that he must at all costs conceal the existence of the Douglas. He plunged at it boldly. ‘I’m walking. I’ve hardly any money left.’

‘And no possessions?’

‘A chap took my suitcase on a lorry. I’ll pick it up at the station.’

‘Let me see your identity card.’

‘It’s in the suitcase. And you haven’t any right–’

For the first time the tall man faintly smiled. ‘A deserter on the run – eh? Your people help you at all?’

He was softening.
Hard luck. Let the poor devil off. Give him a hand. A square meal and ten bob
. It was a stage in the well-to-do man’s triumphant detection of petty crime that was familiar to Routh. Automatically he played up to it. ‘I haven’t any people. I’m an only child. My father’s in a mental hospital and won’t ever get better. My mother’s gone to New Zealand with another man. I haven’t heard from her for five years.’

Routh became aware that the tall man, whose hand should now be going to his pocket, was once more swiftly glancing up and down the lane, as if he too had a momentary sensation of being watched. Then the man’s eyes met his. Fear leapt anew in Routh. There
was
something queer about him. That he was softening was dead off the scent. On the contrary, there was some hard design in him. And it was only for a second that Routh thought he understood it. No, the man was looking at him simply as a carpenter might look at a plank which he would presently give himself the satisfaction of sawing into sections in the pursuance of some clearly apprehended design.

But even as Routh grasped this, the man’s manner changed. Expression had come into his face. It was an expression of weighed or judicial contempt – a sort of judgement that had been impassively deferred until Routh in all his seediness, weediness and cowardice had been bared before him. He took a step forward and made a movement that Routh momentarily interpreted as the prelude to an iron handshake. Instead, he slapped Routh’s face, paused, slapped it again backhanded. ‘I don’t know about your father being a lunatic,’ he said, ‘but I certainly believe that your mother–’

Routh sprang at him, screaming – groped for him through a red haze in which the external world had suddenly bathed itself. When he came to he was on the other side of the wall.

‘I apologize.’

At first the words seemed to come to Routh from very far away. There was a burning sensation in his throat that ran deep down into his body. The words repeated themselves and the tall man swam into focus. He was standing over Routh with a brandy flask in his hand, and looking down at him with an appearance of whimsical benevolence. He screwed the top on the flask and thrust it away in a hip pocket. ‘A bit of a test,’ he said. ‘Don’t take it hard, my good fellow. Something of a test – no more.’

Routh, helpless on the grass, wished that he had a revolver or a knife. But hatred and the brandy now coursing in him sharpened his faculties and he realized that he
had
a weapon. Trapped on the wrong side of that formidable wall – it was now a shadowed concavity towering above him and stretching around him – he felt obscurely and paradoxically in control – in control of a situation that as yet he didn’t remotely understand. He had only to lie low, and never let his cunning sleep, and he would come out of this on top. He sat up. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said, and his voice was shaky by necessity and plaintive by design. ‘I don’t care who you are. You can be gaoled for this.’

‘Then it looks as if we are about quits, my friend.’ The tall man laughed shortly and produced a cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’

Routh, although himself shaking like a leaf, observed with exultation a tremor in the tall man’s hand. His irrational conviction grew that in the unknown game that had been violently forced upon him he would himself be a winner and take all. He had concealed the existence of the two-stroke, and to this for some reason he attached a vast importance. Then – mysteriously – the enclosing wall exhilarated him. He had got inside what hitherto he had always been kept outside of – the world where both honest man and knaves had large views and big chances. Yes that was it. For good or ill he had left the world of seventy-bob swindles behind him.
No need whatever for a deposit to secure delivery
. He would never say that again… Routh laughed aloud.

The tall man was startled. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked sharply. ‘Want more brandy?’

Routh shook his head. He mustn’t do anything unpredictable like that again. But his confidence took another leap. If only ever so faintly, his captor was unsure of himself. He was uncertain, standing there like an arrogant lout over a whipped cur, that he hadn’t been precipitate, that he hadn’t acted out of turn, in grabbing Routh as he had done. This uncertainty was tremendously important – but tremendously important too was the necessity that it shouldn’t be let grow. Routh must be no more than the worthless and pliable lump of clay that the brute designed him for. The one thing that Routh must desperately conceal was any potentiality in himself for making a move or springing a surprise.

The tall man was holding out a match. Routh, swaying, managed to get his cigarette drawing. ‘What do you mean – a test?’ he demanded.

‘I think I can put you on rather a good thing.’ The tall man now smiled easily. And he took without a trace of hesitation the transition from country gentleman and outraged moralist to a world of evidently shady proposals and dubious confederacies. ‘Only it needs guts. I don’t mean that it’s particularly risky – nothing of the sort – but it does need a
man
. I liked the way you came at me. It was damned plucky.’ He paused. ‘There’s big money in what I’m thinking of.’

Routh felt his always facile resentment stir in him. He had evidently been graded as of very low intelligence indeed. And yet it
had
been a test. But of what? Whatever had flung him at this swine out in the lane, it hadn’t been anything deserving a certificate for pluck. ‘Big money?’ he said – and managed to get quickened interest into his voice. He was certain that if there was indeed a gold mine in his present situation he himself would have to do all the digging. He remembered that at the moment his note was weak querulousness. ‘And look here,’ he added, ‘who are you anyway?’

‘You can call me Squire. And now, come along. We’ll get up to the house.’

Routh got painfully to his feet. He began moving by the tall man’s side. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Mr Squire? Or just Squire – of all this?’ And Routh waved his hand at the park through which they were walking.

The tall man looked down at him slantwise. ‘Whichever you please,’ he said.

Routh bit his lip. The brute couldn’t mask his contempt for a couple of minutes on end. It came into his head that he was going to be in some way enslaved, cast into thrall. Or that he was going to be killed. Very conceivably he was going to be killed in order to supply a body for, say, some insurance swindle. Routh’s eyes widened on these conceptions as he walked, and his breath came faster than need be, considering the easy pace which his companion set. But still his mysterious and unaccustomed confidence failed to desert him. It was about him like a borrowed garment, unexpectedly bestowed and of surprisingly good fit.

He puzzled over the kind of racket that could support such wealth as he had stumbled upon. The park was large and there were deer in it. To encounter such creatures outside the zoo was, in Routh’s mind, to be on the fringes of a magnificence positively ducal, and he stared in wonder at the creatures as he walked. He noted that Squire too watched the deer, but with a glance in which there was something faintly enigmatical – something of purely practical reference. No doubt – Routh thought – he eats them. No doubt he’s deciding which to cut the throat of and get his teeth into next… And then it came to Routh that the manner in which Squire looked at the deer was precisely the manner in which he looked at
him
. For a moment his confidence dangerously flickered.

They had come to a halt before a tall wire fence. It was the sort of thing that runs round a tennis court to keep the balls in. Only this fence ran off indefinitely in either direction with just the same air of formidable enclosure as the high wall bordering the park. Squire had produced a bunch of keys on the end of a flexible silver chain and was proceeding to unlock a gate. Routh looked at the keys covertly. One of them had already been used on the stone-coloured door behind them. It looked as if the man who would get off Squire’s property in a hurry must have that bunch of keys at his command.

‘Short cut,’ said Squire briefly. They went on, and he pointed to a grassy slope on their left hand. ‘See anything moving?’ he asked.

Routh looked. The slope had the appearance of a deserted rabbit warren. ‘No,’ he said,‘–nothing at all.’

Squire nodded. ‘No more are you likely to. Jerboa.’

‘What d’you mean – jerboa?’ Routh remembered again his scared, sulky note.

‘The most timid mammal yet known on this earth. We’ll go through here.’

Once again there was a high wire fence. But this one appeared to define a paddock of moderate size, across which Squire struck out diagonally. The ground here was uneven and there were considerable outcrops of rock. As they turned round one of these Routh stopped dead and gave a faint cry. There was a lion in the path.

There was a lion standing straight in front of them. For a second it was quite still except for a tail that waved slowly in the air. Then it turned round and made as if to slip away.

‘Deilos – come here.’ It was Squire who spoke. He spoke much as he had spoken to Routh in the lane. The result too was very similar. The lion turned again and reluctantly approached. As the beast came nearer the two men his belly came closer to the ground until he was creeping forward like a scared terrier. Presently he was lying quite still, his great jowl tucked between his paws, and a single eye looking slantwise upwards as if he expected a whip.

‘The lion, you see, is prepared to lie down with the lamb.’ Squire leant forward and tweaked the animal by the ear. ‘So what about it?’