Mr. Calder raised his head. During the time he had been asleep the wind had risen a little and was now blowing up dark clouds and sending them scudding across the face of the moon; the shadows on the bare down were horsemen — warriors with homed helmets — riding horses with flying manes and tails. Rasselas was following them with his eyes, head cocked. It was as if, behind the piping of the wind, the dog could hear, pitched too high for human ears, the shrill note of a trumpet.
“They’re ghosts,” said Mr. Calder calmly. “They won’t hurt us.” He lay down and was soon fast asleep again.
It was five o’clock and light was coming back into the sky when he woke. It took him five minutes to dress himself and roll up his sleeping bag. His movements seemed unhurried, but he lost no time.
From the back of the car he took out a Groener .25 bore rifle, and clipped on a telescopic sight, which he took from a leather case. A handful of nickel-capped ammunition went into his jacket pocket. Tucking the rifle under his arm, he walked cautiously toward the brow of the hill From the brow, a long thin line of trees, based on scrub, led down to the barn, whose red-brown roof could now be seen just over the slope of the hill.
Mr. Calder thought that the arrangement was excellent. “Made to measure,” was the expression he used. The scrub was thickest round the end tree of the windbreak, and here he propped up the rifle, and then walked the remaining distance to the wall of the barn. He noted that the distance was exactly thirty-three yards.
In front of the barn the path, coming up from the main road, opened out into a flat space — originally a cattle yard, but now missing one wall.
“She’ll drive in here,” thought Mr. Calder, “and she’ll turn the car, ready to get away. They always do that. After a bit she’ll get out of the ear and she’ll stand, watching for me to come up the road.”
When he got level with the barn he saw something that was not marked on the map. It was another track, which came across the down, and had been made, quite recently, by army vehicles from the Gunnery School. A litter of ammunition boxes, empty cigarette cartons, and a rusty beer can suggested that the army had taken over the barn as a staging point for their maneuvers. It was an additional fact. Something to be noted. Mr. Calder didn’t think that it affected his plans. A civilian car, coming from the road, would be most unlikely to take this track, a rough affair, seamed with the marks of Bren carriers and light tanks.
Mr. Calder returned to the end of the trees and spent some minutes piling a few large stones and a log into a small breastworks. He picked up the rifle and set the sights carefully to thirty-five yards. Then he sat down, with his back to the tree, and lit a cigarette. Rasselas lay down beside him.
Mrs. Lipper arrived at ten to six.
She drove up the track from the road, and Mr. Calder was interested to see that she behaved almost exactly as he had predicted. She drove her car into the yard, switched off the engine, and sat for a few minutes. Then she opened the car door and got out.
Mr. Calder snuggled down behind the barrier, moved his rifle forward a little, and centered the sight on Mrs. Lipper’s left breast.
It was at this moment that he heard the truck coming. It was, he thought, a fifteen-hundred-weight truck, and it was coming quite slowly along the rough track toward the barn.
Mr. Calder laid down the rifle and rose to his knees. The truck engine had stopped. From his position of vantage he could see, although Mrs. Lipper could not, a figure in battledress getting out of the truck. It was, he thought, an officer. He was carrying a light rifle, and it was clear that he was after rabbits. Indeed, as Mr. Calder watched, the young man raised his rifle, then lowered it again.
Mr. Calder was interested, even in the middle of his extreme irritation, to see that the officer had aimed at a thicket almost directly in line with the barn.
Three minutes passed in silence. Mrs. Lipper looked twice at her watch. Mr. Calder lay down again in a firing position. He had decided to wait. It was a close decision, but he was used to making close decisions, and he felt certain that this one was right.
The hidden rifle spoke; and Mr. Calder squeezed the trigger of his own. So rapid was his reaction that it sounded like a shot and an echo. In front of his eyes Mrs. Lipper folded onto the ground. She did not fall. It was quite a different movement. It was as though a puppet-master, who had previously held the strings taut, had let them drop and a puppet had tumbled to the ground, arms, legs, and head disjointed.
A moment later the hidden rifle spoke again. Mr. Calder smiled to himself. The timing, he thought, had been perfect He was quietly packing away the telescopic sight, dismantling the small redoubt he had created, and obliterating all signs of his presence. Five minutes later he was back in his car. He had left it facing outward and downhill, and all he had to do was take off the handbrake and start rolling down the track. This was the trickiest moment in the whole operation. It took three minutes to lift the gate, drive the car through, and replace the gate. During the whole of that time no one appeared on the road in either direction.
“And that,” said Mr. Calder, three days later to Mr. Fortescue, “was that.” Mr. Fortescue, a square, sagacious-looking man, was manager of the Westminister branch of the London & Home Counties Bank. No one seeing Mr. Fortescue would have mistaken him for anything but a bank manager — although, in fact, he had certain other, quite important functions.
“I was sorry, in a way, to saddle the boy with it, but I hadn’t any choice.”
“He took your shot as the echo of his?”
“Apparently. Anyway, he went on shooting.”
“You contemplated that he would find the body — either then or later.”
“Certainly.”
“And would assume that he had been responsible — accidentally, of course.”
“I think that he should receive a good deal of sympathy. He had a perfect right to shoot rabbits — the area belongs to the School of Artillery. The woman was trespassing on War Department Property. Indeed, the police will be in some difficulty concluding why she was there at all.”
“I expect they would have been,” said Mr. Fortescue, “if her body had ever been discovered.”
Mr. Calder looked at him.
“You mean,” he said at last, “that no one has been near the barn in the last four days?”
“On the contrary. One of the troops of the Seventeenth Field Regiment, to which your intrusive subaltern belongs, visited the barn only two days later. It was their gun position. The barn itself was the troop command post.”
“Either,” said Mr. Calder, “they were very unobservant soldiers, or one is driven to the conclusion that the body had been moved.”
“I was able,” said Mr. Fortescue, “through my influence with the army, to attend the firing as an additional umpire, in uniform. I had plenty of time on my hands and was able to make a thorough search of the area.”
“I see,” said Mr. Calder. “Yes. It opens up an interesting field of speculation, doesn’t it?”
“Very interesting,” said Mr. Fortescue. “In — er — one or two different directions.”
“Have you discovered the name of the officer who was out shooting?”
“He is a National Service boy — a Lieutenant Blaikie. He is in temporary command of C Troop of A Battery — it would normally be a Captain, but they are short of officers. His Colonel thinks very highly of him. He says that he is a boy of great initiative.”
“There I agree,” said Mr. Calder. “I wonder if the army could find me a suit of battledress.”