The Secret Vanguard (10 page)

Sheila arrived at this resolution as she lay prone on the heather; she stood up and saw something that confirmed it. Perhaps four miles ahead, and at what was now the farthest limit of sight, rose a tall column of smoke. And slowly the column canted over as she looked, the base of it edging from the perpendicular and with increasing momentum flowing into a horizontal line. She had seen a railway engine moving off from a halt.

And then the mist descended. It was rolling towards her from a distance; it was forming itself about her as she stood. But she had set the compass on the smoke before it disappeared and she paused to consider what, without landmarks, this meant. She had to hold the instrument so that the letter
N
lay exactly under the tip of the needle. The lubber point would then be set in the direction where the smoke had been. In other words, she would be holding in her hand a tiny arrow along an imaginary four-mile continuation of which she had to travel. Once off this line she had no means of regaining it; the most that the lubber point could then give her would be a parallel course. But even so she might be pretty sure of somewhere striking the railway; she could then either work along it in search of a station or remain in hiding until she saw a chance of stopping a train. Sheila buttoned Dick’s raincoat close round her neck – for the mist was now raw and chill and seeping – and walked slowly forward.

She walked slowly, trying always to sight the compass on some forward clump of heather. It was like a spectral Girl-Guiding out of her past; she glanced down almost expecting to see a blue tunic and black cotton stockings wrinkled on lanky legs. But it was the surest method of progressing. And she kept it up until she heard the voices behind.

The voices of three or four men: the house must be a veritable garrison. The voices of three or four men, far behind, calling to each other sharply, regularly, without attempt at concealment. Sheila felt her heart swell and pound within her; at the same time her brain quickened to something significant in the manner of the calls. Her brain, racing, dipped into oblivion and fished out a slab of darkness, a strain of music, a cinema screen. A man on an elephant, with a solar topi and a gun. A line of black men beating a jungle with long sticks, yelling for all they were worth. It was like that. The voices behind were calling not to keep contact each with each. They were calling to unnerve and drive blindly forward some hunted thing.

They were trying to drive her upon their fellows who had gone ahead. Would it not be safest then to double back, to slip through the voices behind, and then to go straight north or south, trusting simply to losing both them and herself on the moor? But perhaps their plan was more subtle. Perhaps they were reckoning on her mind working as it was working now. She was not an elephant or a tiger; perhaps they were banking on her reacting in a different way… For seconds Sheila stood still and thought. Dick, she decided, would say that direction remained paramount. Abandoning the attempt to move tump by tump of heather, she glanced at the compass and marched rapidly ahead.

She marched for forty minutes by her watch. The voices, perhaps because blanketed in thickening mist, were fainter; the ground beneath her feet was rising; it was rising sufficiently steeply for her to feel the effort of keeping an even pace. Two or three times she stumbled, and once with a sense of strain that seemed to catch not at her body but at her mind. Pictures, vaguely associated with her situation, floated before her with increasing vividness: the boy Wordsworth stalked by invisible presences on the fells, an escaping convict and judge on holiday talking together by a stream – something from a play of Galsworthy’s this. The images were vivid, hallucinatory; they lured her eye from the grey flux, indefinite and fatiguing, through which she strode. It was with an effort of attention that she realized something was happening to the mist.

The mist was parting in a new way. Instead of rifts and pockets there were drifting tunnels of visibility. Where there hung at one moment a mere wall of vapour she was looking the next down an evanescent vaulted aisle at some prospect infinitely remote. And somewhere still there were fleeting patches of sunlight, and when such a tunnel opened on one of these it was like a lighted room at the end of an uncertain corridor. It was thus that, hard to her left, she saw the railway line.

Momentarily a watery sun had gleamed on the metals. She realized that the sense of infinite vista was a trick of the atmosphere and that these odd little tunnels did not in reality stretch far. The line was less than half a mile away, over there and below on her left.

She had been climbing steadily and was not surprised to be thus looking down. But the direction was disturbing and she glanced at the compass. The line had somehow contrived to swing itself to the north. She turned round, uneasily aware that the mist was once more thinning dangerously about her. What she saw made her catch her breath. The trick of tunnel-like vista had repeated itself to the south. And there, too, the steel track gleamed. What was before her must be a bold curve of line formed by the railway’s skirting the shoulder of high ground on which she stood, and near the centre of this loop must be the spot where she had seen the smoke.

The voices behind her were louder and she saw that a crisis had come. Were this treacherous mist to lift again as it threatened she might well be effectively trapped – trapped between the curve of steel which lay before her and the line of hunters who were closing in behind. For the first time she realized fully the significance of a railway line over such country as this. Unlike the undulating and heather-covered moor it was something which, granted any sort of visibility at all, it would be virtually impossible to cross unobserved. And where a straight line might give scope for manoeuvre this half-circle of track was like a pair of open jaws.

Sheila looked up at the sky, trying to tell what the elements were preparing behind this shifting curtain of vapour. Though there was sunlight somewhere and the mist was lifting the day darkened steadily the while; she pictured leaden storm-clouds gathering invisible overhead; it occurred to her that something like a cloudburst might save her even now. The voices were less than a hundred yards away. She could distinguish that each spoke in order regularly up and down a line. Suddenly one of the voices spoke out of turn and loudly. Silence fell.

It was like a calculated trick in some war of nerves. Sheila dropped to the heather, trembling. But she still had the final resource of the little gun. She would go forward still, but at a crawl; she would go forward and take her chance of breaking across the arc of steel…

She had almost cried out. For from directly in front of her as she crawled a hare had started from its form. It vanished and – hideously – she felt the need to cry out still. She lay motionless. She bit the heather, knowing hysteria. Her lips opened, as if compelled. And then, instead of a cry in air, words formed themselves silently deep in her mind. Helpless harried hares. Helpless harried hares. She spoke them to herself again and again, fighting to control her nerves. Helpless harried hares. Snares. Lairs. A nice-minded poem by one of the Georgians. Philip Ploss – that was it. A comfortable man, sitting somewhere now with a morning glass of sherry in the sun. The hell he knew. Hopeless married mares, Sheila said to herself – and was again calm.

The mist was withdrawing – rapidly, like scene-shifters hurrying into the wings after setting the stage for a tempest. There were black clouds above, and a single ray of sunlight shot upwards through them like a sword. Sheila saw the railway line; it ran, as she had supposed, in a great curve round this higher ground, falling as it did so towards lower ground to the south. She saw, straight before her, the halt or station where the smoke had been; it lay on her side of the line and consisted of a long barn-like structure of two low storeys – an affair for trucking sheep. She saw – unbelievingly for a moment – the smoke of another train.

North of the shed projected an empty freight truck and the tail of a second. And from behind the shed at its farther end there rose the leisurely puff upon puff of an engine at rest. A goods train. But at least with the engine there must be two men – men capable of whirling with their locomotive rapidly down the line. And at any moment the train might begin to move. Sheila broke cover and ran.

She ran down a steep slope and jumped a ditch. She rounded the shed. She saw two solitary trucks on a little siding. In the middle of an empty line smouldered a sodden peat fire and over it two men manipulated a sheet, so that puff upon puff of smoke rose leisurely in the air.

It was the trap.

‘I don’t know of any Garden,’ said the tall man by the window. ‘Your garden’s an Orchard, if you ask me.’

Appleby raised his eyes from the paper before him. ‘Rodney Orchard, sir?’

The tall man turned quickly. ‘Rodney Orchard – no less. And now read that thing again.’

‘Yes, sir.’ And Appleby looked up at the ceiling – it was painted all over with some riotous occasion on Olympus – and recited:

Deep in a garden

Far to the north–

‘No, no.’ The tall man snapped an impatient finger and turned to pace the long room. ‘I mean what comes out of it. Wait… I can remember.
Garden fled north warn Forth branch
. That right?’

‘Yes, sir. You get it – if you substitute
warn
for
warm
– by taking the last word of each line in the order Ploss discovered: 162543.’

‘It’s plain enough. But I never came across just that trick before.’

‘Nor I, sir. But it’s close to what we call cant: a criminals’ language that can be used before outsiders. And it has a touch of rhyming cant, too: like
twist and twirl
for
girl
. That’s Cockney originally – and now we’re getting it back from Australia by way of America.’

The tall man halted. ‘You’re a damned academic policeman. Sit down and take a cigarette.’

‘Thank you, sir. The point is that the same trick – or a variant of it – was used in the presence of this girl who disappeared from the train.’

‘The devil it was. But never mind your girl. Plenty of them in the country still, praise God. There’s only one Orchard.’

‘No doubt.’ Appleby looked curiously at the tired man who was pacing up and down before him. ‘But Orchard and this girl are mixed up. She stumbled not only on the same trick as did Ploss. She stumbled on that trick being used once more to convey information about Orchard. From Perth she telephoned to a Colonel Farquharson, a relation with whom she was going to stay in Inverness-shire. She said something he didn’t quite understand about a poem of Swinburne’s.’

‘Not that thing about a
garden
?’

‘Yes, sir. She named it. And I’ve got it here.’ Appleby produced a book from his pocket and laid it on the desk before him. There was a pause. ‘Rodney Orchard,’ he asked, ‘is important, I suppose?’

The tall man stopped abruptly in the middle of the room. ‘Orchard is a great mathematician. For some reason – I don’t understand such things – that makes him the best chemist in the country. We’ve been trying to rope him in for years. No good – a very abstract scientist indeed. But he walked into the Ministry the morning after Prague.’

‘I see.’

‘He is
very
important. And quite a bit mad. In Germany his opposite numbers have a bodyguard and travel behind four-inch glass. We don’t need all that – if a man has some sense. Orchard has none – only genius.
Garden fled north warn Forth branch
. In other words, Orchard has gone off on a walking tour by himself in Scotland and the tip is to be given to a foreign intelligence organization based somewhere between Stirling and North Berwick. And then this girl of yours disappears after some involvement with a poem on a garden between Edinburgh and Perth.’ The tall man strode over to the desk and picked up a telephone. ‘We can make sure about Orchard.’

There was coming and going – rather a lot of it, Appleby thought, but efficient enough in its somewhat hierarchical way. And in the upshot it was found that Rodney Orchard had indeed disappeared. Ten days ago he had drawn fifty pounds from the bank, told his housekeeper that he would be away for a fortnight, and strolled out of the house with a briefcase and a rucksack. Nothing had been heard of him since.

The tall man brusquely dismissed the last of the suave youths who had unearthed this information. ‘There,’ he said, ‘you see? A brief-case. He’s gone off with lord knows what.’

‘Quite so.’ Appleby, watching the tall man return to a window and drum softly on the glass, guessed that behind this vagueness there lay some specific apprehension. But what the briefcase might contain was at the moment no business of his. ‘Orchard’s household here in town?’ he asked.

‘Unmarried. A big house in Earls Court or somewhere like that. Mostly turned into labs. Housekeeper, servants, and assistants coming in. They’ll be carrying on, knowing nothing.’

‘There will be outside contacts to check: friends, club, a mistress or a mother in Scotland – all that.’

‘To be sure.’ The tall man, straddled on a large chair, received this professional readiness impatiently. ‘Well, it’s business for the Intelligence. They’ll contact you over your girl, no doubt.’ He frowned, nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said dismissively, ‘that’s it.’

Appleby rose. As he did so a door opened at the far end of the room and a slight, silver-haired figure entered – entered with a gentle smile which seemed designed to admit a consciousness that he was doing quite the wrong thing. The tall man sprang hastily to his feet. The smile intensified itself. Muhammad, Appleby thought, coming to the mountain.

‘It’s about Orchard,’ said the newcomer. ‘I forgot to mention it. We shall want to have him in at the Council on Thursday. Would you arrange that?’

‘Orchard has – well, gone away on a holiday, sir. Scotland probably, but we don’t know where. And I have just learnt that he is being trailed by an espionage organization.’