The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (34 page)

Their own side of the embankment was safer as the search of the strip of field between houses and railway had been abandoned. They silently followed the boundary wall of the gardens and were very nearly spotted by some officious citizen who popped his white face over it and searched the neighbourhood with a powerful acetylene lamp. The greenhouse, two gardens back, was the obvious method of dealing with him. Bernardo crawled along the foot of the wall, found half a brick and produced another satisfying crash. The white face disappeared. The beam of the lamp was thrown across the gardens, and someone yelled:

‘Oy! Got ’em! Police!’

The cop on the line shouted something down to the other side but his companions were uninterested, probably accustomed to being thrown off the right scent by too enthusiastic members of the public. Bernardo and Nadya crept on under the shadow of the wall and returned to the foot of the embankment as soon as they were safely past the sentry. They could now be fairly sure that there was no trouble ahead of them, so they trotted along the metals for a mile before stopping to rest and think.

The night was utterly silent. There was no pursuit. Bernardo again found it difficult to accept his own importance. He was not a bank robber, merely a desperate and suspicious character with a record of comparatively minor offences. It was an effort to remember that he was wanted in Spain for the murder of some princely crook. But there it was, and the police were not at all likely to give up. They seemed to ignore railway lines but one could bet they had blocked all likely roads. And what about bridges over the railway which would allow them to keep an eye on both?

The first bridge loomed up after another mile. He treated it with proper caution, taking to the fields in order to circle round it. When they had slipped across the road which the bridge carried he stealthily reconnoitred the approach. He could make out a car standing just short of the parapet. A few more yards along the line and it would have been all up.

The railway itself had proved too risky, so they ploughed across the damp meadows alongside it until they came up against a wood surrounded by a low barbed wire fence. The moon was now getting up in a clear sky; the wood offered a return to the darkness which nerves, badly shaken by their narrow escape, demanded. It might be a belt of trees with little cover or it might offer refuge for a day or two.

After worming under the wire they pushed their way through a tangle of ash, thorn and overgrown laurel. The
centre of the wood was open, but too rough to be called a glade. The moon showed a sandy waste of mounds, holes and bramble bushes with knee high growth between them. There was a strong smell of fox. A startled roebuck bounced into cover.

Stumbling and tripping across the moonlit mess they found on the other side a stand of larches. Beneath the trees was pitch darkness and a soft, dry bed of needles. They had a place to rest and—up the easily climbed trees—a possible hiding place in emergency. Beyond the larches a rutted, overgrown track led out into the open past what looked like a disused hut.

Both were enchanted by the copse and its promise. Inexplicable England! On its own small scale the place was wilder, more tangled, more full of hidden life than any Romanian forest Bernardo had seen, yet it was within four miles of a busy town and bordered by the railway. The damp and warmth of May had accumulated in a mere thicket—so far as he could judge it was not more than twenty acres—lush growth and a concentration of animal life which would be scattered far and wide in the great woods of Europe and seldom seen.

They settled down under the larches, prepared to spend the rest of the night there and explore ways of escape in the morning. Anyone entering the copse could be heard and avoided. Even half a dozen searchers would think the place empty while the pair they wanted were hidden among the dark stems of the laurels or with bodies half way down a badger sett and head and shoulders invisible unless stepped on. It was futile to look forward to London or anywhere else, but for the moment they were safe.

Some time after one they heard movement through the bushes too clumsy to be that of an animal. Then there was a thud followed by a string of curses which Bernardo recognised as Hungarian. He signalled to Nadya to remain under the larches and crawled silently forward until he could
distinguish anything moving in the open centre of the wood. Moonlight caught on white hair. The intruder was undoubtedly Sigismond Pozharski mopping his forehead. He sat down in full view on one of the little tumps thrown up centuries ago by the spade of man or quite recently by the claws of badger.

‘Bernardo, dear boy,’ he remarked to nothing, ‘if you are roosting here along with somebody’s pheasants, will you kindly come out?’

He lit a cigar and remained squatting on his tump like an amiable troll.

‘The police, so far as I know, are nowhere near the bridge where you so wisely avoided them. The car was Kalmody’s. He picked you up with night glasses.’

Bernardo preserved complete silence. The glasses were now hanging on Pozharski’s chest, unpleasantly reminding him of Bobo’s.

‘Whenever we meet, you always assume I am ill-disposed. I am not. Nor is Istvan. It’s a long story how we were able to trace you. Meanwhile I may point out that my housekeeper was seriously alarmed by an absolute procession of lice hatching out from a Romanian cabman’s hat.’

Bernardo rose to his feet and strolled out into the open.

‘My dear fellow! It was only a fifty-fifty chance. How glad I am! And now present me to this clever Miss Andreyev.’

Nadya came forward uncertainly and suspiciously, for Pozharski must be aware of her history as far back as the Moş. He took both her hands, treating her at once as if she were the daughter of an old friend.

‘You never told me what she was like, Bernardo.’

‘I have hardly had a chance.’

‘Istvan will be as enchanted as I am. He insisted on expecting a Russian refugee all pearls and tears and sensibilities. I told him we should find a muddied little oaf at the bottom of a bramble bush. How wrong we both were! To see you, my dear, is to wish to serve you. Never be afraid again!’

‘I am sorry I never noticed the hat when I cleaned up. Mr. Pozharski.’

‘And she can laugh! Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, swiping the key from Whitehall’s waistcoat pocket? Sweet seventeen against sixty odd is not fair, Nadya. I only wish it was up to you to get us out of this one, but only Kalmody can.’

‘I saw him in Buckingham the day before yesterday,’ Bernardo said. ‘Obviously on my trail! I don’t trust him.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. Having convinced himself that you are innocent, he is now furious with the Romanians for daring to harass a guest of his. A typical Hungarian, dear boy—arrogant, illogical and quixotically gallant! You couldn’t be in better hands. And by the way—in case we are suddenly interrupted—you had better know that I am the foreign correspondent of
Az Ujsag
, an excellent Budapest daily in which his party holds fifty-one per cent of the shares. Anybody who fools the Romanians is a natural hero. So the Hungarian people must have the low-down on you before you get extradited to Spain. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.’

‘I don’t see how it helps.’

‘Later! Later! What I’m afraid of is that the police may guess your movements just as we did and borrow a dog off the nearest farmer. Come on!’

By way of the dark avenue of larches they entered the track which led across a long open field to another copse. As they passed the dilapidated hut, one corner of it quietly detached itself, swept off its hat to the startled Nadya and kissed her hand.

‘I am at your feet, Miss Andreyev. To you, Mr. Brown, I owe a thousand apologies. My correspondence with the Vatican....’

‘Damn the Vatican! Come out of the eighteenth century, Istvan, and tell us where you left the car!’ Pozharski interrupted.

‘Off the track in the wood over there. All’s clear. What’s the hurry?’

‘The hurry is that I don’t want to go to gaol.’

‘Oh, they’d only put you inside for a couple of months. Mr. Brown, the futility of apologies ...’

‘Why don’t you call him Bernardo? We always do when we talk about him.’

‘Well, if he will accept it from an older man whom he has no reason to like.’

‘But I did like you, Count Kalmody. Who wouldn’t? Only that vast place of yours was a nightmare.’

‘Of course. I should have seen it. I thought you would be so impressed that you would stick it out. But I could not cage hills and the sea along with you. I also thought—my very worst mistake—that you were too experienced to take very seriously—well, er, such distractions as were provided. Again I apologise, Bernardo. Now, to settle an argument with Sigi here. Did you or did you not have a fine toy railway at an early age?’

‘I did. And my father made a quay for it. And cranes.’

‘You see, Sigi?’

‘Yes. And I think I saw a blink of headlights in the trees there.’

‘Off this track then! Bernardo, you take Sigi and go round by the right hand hedge! Miss Andreyev and I will go by the left. We meet in four minutes precisely where the track enters the trees. Don’t cross it and keep in cover!’

Kalmody’s manner had changed completely. He had taken Nadya’s arm and both were already indistinguishable against any background. Bernardo and Pozharski trotted straight down towards their hedge, quite content not to improve on darkness.

‘I still don’t see the newspaper correspondent,’ Bernardo said.

‘Simple, dear boy. What the police know, we know, given Istvan’s introductions and—not to put it too crudely—his
lavish entertainment of them. I think they assume that Magyars live in tents on mare’s milk and are easily offended. We make them feel like the Bunga Bunga colonial police arsing about in khaki shorts and condescending to take the native gifts. So Istvan’s special pal calls us up and says he has got you cold. We shot down to Bletchley to see if we could help but came too late. They said you had both broken away and taken to the brickfields.’

‘Aren’t you talking a little loud, Mr. Pozharski? And keep into that hedge!’

‘Thank you, Bernardo. Experience teaches. Now I know why Istvan split us up like that. His only real passion in life is stalking animals. Sometimes he is so pleased to have outsmarted one that when he gets him in his sights he lets him go. He didn’t believe in the brickfield. He said he knew your mind from your movements. You used the railway to escape from Hungary. You bolted for it in London when they were minutes behind you. What you did then nobody knows, but somehow it must have been the railway. So he was sure you had gone up the line and betted me you had played with puff-puffs as a child. We looked at the map, made a bee-line for that bridge and his hunch paid off. Then we scouted around on foot and he swore you would have made for that copse and stayed there whether you had four legs or two.’

They dived into the ditch as headlights flickered over the grass. A police car bumped out of the trees with four men and a dog inside it. When it had crossed the meadow and stopped somewhere near the hut, Kalmody stood up on the other side of the track. He held up a hand for silence and beckoned them on, himself leading the way with Nadya. About a hundred yards from the end of the wood and the good, metalled road which bordered it he turned into a rutted opening in the undergrowth where timber had been hauled out. His black car was there, invisible under hazels.

‘I’ll go forward and see if it’s safe to move,’ he said. ‘You stay here.’

He was back quickly, moving over the grass of the ride as if he knew where to put his feet in spite of darkness, and reported that there were two men on the road. They could easily be rushed, but the car would be recognised.

‘I’ll try and draw them off to the north corner. Once they are rooting about in there we can risk it.’

He vanished again. In a few minutes they heard a man rushing desperately and clumsily through the hazels to break out at the north corner. The reaction was two piercing whistles: one from the direction in which the Count was creating his diversion, the other from the junction of road and track. Kalmody was an exasperatingly long time returning. Meanwhile they heard the police car start up far away across the meadow.

‘Drawn off one of them,’ Kalmody reported, appearing at the bonnet of the car. ‘The other fellow must have had strict orders. He never moved from his post.’

The police car had already entered the track and stopped. It sounded as if some of the men in it had got out and were beating half the wood—the correct half—towards the two stops on the road.

‘Get us out of this, Istvan!’ Pozharski exclaimed. ‘Damn it, you were once a captain of Hussars!’

‘Of course. One forgets. Covering fire!’

He drew an automatic from his pocket and checked it.

‘For God’s sake, this is England! You’ll get us all twenty years.’

‘Nonsense! If I hit one I can always give him a pension.’

Bernardo protested that they would accuse him, not Kalmody.

‘Well, they can’t prove it if you aren’t here.’

‘We used to draw off the police by starting a fight,’ Nadya said.

‘What sort of a fight?’

‘If they thought someone was getting killed, they dropped whatever they were doing and broke it up.’

‘She’s got it. Quick!’ Kalmody whispered.

He disappeared with her across the track into the other half of the wood, racing against time and not caring whether the advancing party of police heard them or not. Then there was a silence, suddenly broken by Nadya screaming:

‘No! No! Help! No, don’t!’

A shot cut the scream short. A few seconds later there was another shot—the cold finish of something still alive.

Old Mr. Brown said that never in the whole of his Grand Tour had he been so frightened. It had been utterly convincing. One could be sure—after a moment of agonising doubt—that Kalmody was reproducing the scene from past experience. Nobody had ever said much about the recovery of the estate from the communists with Nepamuk’s loyal assistance.

‘It worked like dynamite,’ he went on. ‘The beaters changed direction. One of them nearly ran into us in his hurry to get to the other side of the wood. Orders were shouted. The two fellows on guard in the road came charging up. And then Istvan Kalmody and Nadya were at the car. Don’t ask me how they got there! Nadya and I were bundled into the back under a rug and two suitcases and we were out of the hazels and in the track with one awful moment when the wheels wouldn’t grip in a rut. Then into the road and a right turn and Kalmody cornering through the lanes like a snipe he’d missed with the first barrel.’