A Time to Kill (2 page)

After all the excitement on my bit of rough shooting, I was for a few months a minor celebrity in South Dorset. Everyone knew that I had been wanted for murder – though only for a single night – and that I had come out of it all with a mysterious and official pat on the back. So, of course, it was generally decided that I was Something in the Secret Service, and Mr and Mrs Roger Taine began to receive a crop of unwanted invitations from people who felt it their duty to know what had happened, and whether there was any connexion between the aircraft which had landed on the Downs, and the suicide of Heyne-Hassingham. I told them to ask the local police (who knew very little, but certainly weren’t going to admit it) and my value as a county curiosity soon fell off. It was good for business, however. I got a lot of new clients among the builders and builders’ merchants who merely wanted to have a look at me, and I managed to keep most of them – thanks to the first-class stuff our group produces, for I’m never any good at talking a man into ordering what he doesn’t want. So all was well at home, and trade so steady that I actually managed to save a little capital from the income tax collector. I was a contented man, and knew it.

About three weeks after my lunch with Roland, Pink called me up at the office. He was discreet, though hearty, and I couldn’t make out who he was until he said that I owed him a motor cycle. I apologized for smashing it, and assured him, feeling a tactless barbarian, that I had hoped it belonged to the Party. No, he replied, his; but it really didn’t matter. That we could have so polite a conversation amazed me; yet I ought to have known that Pink’s manners – however detestable his character – would come out of the top drawer.

He asked me to drive over and see him. I was to leave my car at a point near Lytchett Minster, and meet him at the head of an obscure creek where he would pick me up with the pram, and take me on board his boat. I must have hesitated, for he said in rather the tone of a sulky schoolboy:

‘Look here – give you my word of honour!’

It was a grey afternoon, with the chill north wind of a beastly summer day, when I followed the cart-track down to his creek. Poole Harbour was at its most melancholy. It is a queer place of moods, with the four tides and the still mud-banks, bald or rush-grown, that disappear, imperceptibly, under the sea. It can be a gay, closed, little yachtsman’s paradise of blue and white, or a sunlit lake among golden heath, or, as it was that afternoon, a dull, endless marsh that made me conscious of the mud at the bottom and the reeds waving up from it like dead men’s hair.

Pink was at the rendezvous, standing in his sea-boots as still as a heron. Our earlier meetings, in dusk or at night, had never really shown him to me. He was an uncompromising figure in his shabby blue jersey, slim at the hips and broad as a fallen angel across his shoulders. His nose was slightly twisted to one side and his forehead was scored with deep puzzled wrinkles. The brown beard gave him distinction. Without that, I might have found his face a shade brutal.

He held out his hand as if we had just met in Piccadilly after long absence. I would have shaken it more warmly if he had not been quite so casual.

‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ he said. ‘I thought you were a smaller man.’

‘The light, no doubt,’ I answered.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes—’ and gave a short, despairing choke of dry laughter. ‘Well, come along!’

I sat cautiously in the stern of his eight-foot pram, while he filled all the rest of it and paddled us down the creek. His boat,
Olwen
, lay at anchor in a brown pool which the scour of the tide had bitten out of the flank of a reed-covered island. There were two narrow channels on either side of the island up which the flood was making, and would have to make for another hour before
Olwen
could twist a snipe’s course out into the harbour. She could only be seen from the farmlands to the north. The anchorage was even lonelier than any I had imagined for Pink.

She was a thirty-foot boat with a turtle deck forward, an open cockpit, and no virtues to my landsman’s eye except that she was obviously meant to be used in all weathers. When we were on board, I could see that she drew a foot or two more water than I had thought. There was good headroom in the single cabin.

I had expected to find the disorder of a lonely and demoralized man; but I had forgotten Pink’s naval training.
Olwen
was packed so tight with stores and gear that one seemed to be standing in the middle of an expensively fitted dressing-case. The lids and doors of innumerable lockers were all closed and all neatly painted. There was a fairly clean, dark-blue cover on the settee, and very clean curtains framing the ports. Two shelves of books – mostly nautical almanacs and such-like – had been built around the shining brass chronometer. Drinks were laid out ready, the bottles reflected in the teak of the little cabin table.

Pink was very cordial. I might have been visiting any well-bred eccentric who chose to live alone on a boat. I hated to refer to business (which had inevitably to involve some reference to the past), but Roland would certainly want, besides whatever message for him Pink might have, some kind of report from me on the man.

‘You’ve lived on board ever since …?’ I began.

‘No. Portugal at first – till it got too hot. Some of the leaders of our Movement began to play around with communists. You know all about that.’

I didn’t. But there was no point in disillusioning him if he chose to think that I was and always had been in Roland’s confidence.

‘You got tarred with the same brush?’ I asked.

‘Yes. God, what a lot of scum! They approached me directly. They knew all about my past and had the impudence to sympathize. Said they wanted chaps of my sort. The leader class.’

His beastly fascist phrase nearly drew a protest from me, but I turned it into a grunt of understanding.

‘They do,’ he went on, ‘badly. But they won’t keep ’em alive a day longer than they can use ’em. Well, I did some jobs for them. I thought I might find out a thing or two. That was the only reason. I expect you to believe it,’ he added, looking me hard in the eyes.

I had no difficulty in believing it. If there ever was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist, it was Pink.

‘Didn’t they suspect you?’ I asked.

‘Less than you’d think. They can’t understand a man being a patriot when he’s been as badly treated as I have. And then – I don’t know whether Roland told you – they framed me. One of the jobs I did – well, no need to go into details, but it was an extraditable crime. Anywhere. They took the trouble to show me the evidence they would use if I ever turned nasty.’

That seemed a powerful proof of Pink’s good faith – if it were true.

‘They know what you have found out?’

‘Impossible. It was a pure accident, my overhearing those chaps. And no one saw me enter or leave.’

‘And where you are – I suppose they know that?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely. I bought this old lady’ – he patted the white-painted curve that separated us from the sea – ‘for cash, and filled her up with fuel and made England in one hop. Then I began to follow up the tip I had got. I’m ready now. I’m going to use my own methods. And you’re just the man I’d like to have with me.’

I thanked him for his good opinion – there was no point in telling him that his own methods were certain to be disastrous – and said I was there to help him.

‘Then you’ll come with me,’ he ordered – I swear it was an order – ‘to burgle a house in Bournemouth.’

Sorry!’ I said. ‘No!’

‘A communist’s house. You can’t refuse.’

‘But how the hell am I to know it’s a communist’s house? And even if it was!’

My broad grin spoilt his fantasy. He saw himself for the moment, I think, as a gallant, outlaw captain whose commands could only meet with instant acceptance or cowardly refusal. It was a shock to him that I should find those commands merely comic.

‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘Damn it, why should any of you trust me?’

I explained apologetically that it was just the idea of Bournemouth communists which I couldn’t take seriously.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Oh, it’s so blasted full of gentility.’

‘Wherever the leader class is, you’ll find its enemies,’ he insisted.

‘Me, for one,’ I answered, ‘if they call themselves that.’

But of course, he might be right. A residential town would be enough to turn anyone into a communist. I could live in the blackest industrial area, and never for a moment believe that revolution would make it any pleasanter; but long residence in any of the south-coast Blankmouths, full of folk with a sense of their own importance and nothing much to show for it, might make a communist of me in desperation.

‘Anyway, if you want to burgle a desirable, pine-clad villa,’ I said, ‘you’ll bloody well have to burgle it by yourself. And don’t imagine for a moment that we’re going to keep you out of quod.’

‘You can go to hell, Taine,’ he answered superbly. ‘All I want from you is to pass on what I shall give you.’

As he paddled me back up the creek, I was convinced of the absolute futility of Pink. We were as silent and sullen as the brown water which had flooded the banks while we talked. I loathed the jargon which he used instead of thought. Would he ever understand, I wondered, that the proudest claim any man could make was to belong to the Servant Class? But of course, at bottom, he did. That was what was wrong with him and his former friends of the People’s Union. They were ready enough to be Servants, but nobody wanted their services.

Nobody, nobody at all, wanted them. Oh, I don’t know what it was which overwhelmed me with pity for the man – whether the motionless melancholy of Poole Harbour, or just his loneliness, which was emphasized, like that of some old maid, by the scrupulous neatness of his living-quarters.

However it was, I made one of those irrevocable remarks which change the course of a life. They are nearly always charitable remarks. One impulsively slaps someone else’s burden on top of one’s pack, and there it sticks for good. The irrevocable remark which destroys a relationship and eases one of responsibility for the neighbour as effectively as a kick in the face – well, that, too, stays for life, but on the conscience.

‘Pink,’ I said, ‘what’s the latest you can put me on shore?’

‘Three hours from now.’

‘Look here, if you care to take me back on board and spend those three hours telling your story – all of it, not just hints – I promise not to be hasty.’

‘All of it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think you’d be much interested.’

‘From your arrival in Portugal, I mean.’

‘Oh … well, yes, I see your point.’

He swung the little pram round on her own axis, and paddled me back to
Olwen.
Till we were on board he didn’t say a word except to mumble that there was plenty of gin.

I shall try not to put down anything that Pink did not tell me or imply, and I shall leave out his political asides. It is enough to say that he disliked socialists, communists and all other professional politicians, as well as Jews, Freemasons, Catholics, the Admiralty and the War Office. The only type of man that met with his approval was the chap selflessly doing a job in a Kiplingesque manner. Of this rare but admirable creature he felt that his own country had a monopoly, and that if foreigners and the masses could only be brought to see the value of him, the world might be run like a healthy public school.

You must imagine such a man standing on the waterfront of Lisbon with a valid passport, money enough, and some letters of introduction to friends whom he felt to be dubious. When he was organizing the rough stuff for the People’s Union, he may have felt the romance of a movement which passed all frontiers – generally illegally – and he was quite at home with the bad characters of several nations. But he hadn’t felt himself to be one of them. He was no internationalist, and he didn’t much care for the society which was awaiting him.

He liked it a lot less that first night. After plenty of drinks and mutual commiseration, he came to anchor in a quiet restaurant with an Italian, a German and a Portuguese. They spoke German. It was Pink’s only foreign language. He found it necessary to apologize to me for speaking it well. He had, he said, learned it – as a matter of duty – in the Navy.

Pink’s reputation had preceded him; those letters of introduction, too, had been fulsome in praise of his audacity. Consequently the German and Italian felt free to talk. Their conversation played over the incidents of exile and after-war agitation – abortive plots, provoking of strikes, the personal weaknesses of intelligence officers, kidnappings to and from the Russian zones; and, as the red wine, for which the Portuguese was paying, slid down into their bellies, they were frank in discussion of ways for a bold man to earn his living on the fringes of politics. It shook Pink badly to see that these two comrades took him to be as ruthless a soldier of fortune as they. That wasn’t his picture of himself at all. He was an English gentleman, exiled for the sake of his opinions.

The Portuguese had little to contribute beyond the drinks. He remained smiling and courteous, and, towards the end of the dinner, turned his attention exclusively to Pink. He assured him that Portugal was honoured by his presence, that he would have no trouble whatever with the authorities, and that if he, Pink, would obligingly keep an eye on British seamen and officers, and report from time to time …

‘My God!’ said Pink. ‘He wanted me to be a copper’s nark!’

He took credit for not smashing a plate on the secret policeman’s head. Restraint of that sort he called tact.

In the weeks that followed, Pink, idly and morosely trailing between flashy bars and secretive cafés, began to appreciate where he stood. He did not doubt the idealism of his late leader, Heyne-Hassingham – and in that he was possibly right – but he had gained vision of the scum that every fascist wave carries along with it. He was far from admitting that he himself was part of that scum, but all the same he couldn’t avoid some unpleasant hours of self-revelation.

A sensible man with Pink’s private income, who couldn’t return to his own country, would have bought himself a little sunny estate and settled down to a new life. Pink, however, couldn’t keep out of mischief. His scheme for rehabilitating himself in his own eyes was to dive a bit deeper into the scum, with the vague intent of being on duty as a one-man secret service.