But, anyway, there was no sound from above now. The echoes of the explosion and the ringing in his ears had both died away into an unnatural silence.
Yet he wasn’t dead—he could move his legs and his arms and his hands and his fingers—he could feel the leaves and branches beneath him, and he could hear them rasp and crunch beneath him . . . against that other silence—
God damn! It hadn’t been a shot at all—there was no one up there, above him. God damn!
He shook the blasphemy from his head and sat up, fumbling in his pocket for his torch.
Of course there were other pits like this—other man-traps waiting for their quarry. But they couldn’t cover all of them, so they had rigged up a trap-within-a-trap: the convenient rope-ladder offering its help to any thinking animal which might fall into the pit by day or night. . . Only the other end of the ladder wasn’t anchored at all dummy1
—it was simply attached to some sort of explosive device, set in the same fashion as a trip-flare, but attached in this case to a warning maroon which would betray the intelligent prisoner as soon as he put his full weight on it.
Benedikt ground his teeth in anger with himself—and with Audley
—Colonel Butler had warned him that Audley would be tricky—
and then with Colonel Butler, and everyone from Herzner at the Embassy— just a little job for Colonel Butler, Captain Schneider—
to Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Benje’s Dad . . . and even Thomas Wiesehöfer—
Thomas Wiesehöfer—
Now they would be coming, summoned by that ear-splitting warning— and coming quickly—
Still no sound from above.
He brushed the dirt from his face. There was an egg on the back of his head which was tender to the touch of his fingertips—and . . .
and a slightly raised contusion on his cheekbone, where the lump of chalk had hit him: it even boasted a sticky crater where the chalk had cut into his flesh—
But there was no more time for thought: someone was coming—he could hear voices—
“Help!” shouted Thomas Wiesehöfer, lost on his evening stroll in a dummy1
foreign country and trapped in an incomprehensible pit.
And now there was light as well as sound above—and he must get rid of his own tell-tale torch—
“Help!” He stuffed the torch under the debris beneath him, and stood up on top of it, steadying himself on the nearest wall.
“Help!” He achieved a note of desperation which was too close to the truth for comfortable analysis.
The light intensified, finally shiningdown directly into his eyes.
“Grüss Gott!” exclaimed Thomas Wiesehöfer fervently. “Please! I haff fallen into—into this place—this hole in the ground! Please to help me—I am wounded and bleeding.”
The beam of the torch explored him.
“Please to help me!” appealed Thomas Wiesehöfer.
There was a pause above.
“Please—”
“It’s that bloody Jerry.” The voice ignored his appeal.
“What?” Another voice.
“That Jerry—from this afternoon . . . the one that was nosing around . . . the one that was in the Bells.”
“What?” A second light entered the pit, fixing itself on Thomas Wiesehöfer. “You’m right.”
“Please!” Thomas Wiesehöfer was running out of steam.
“What’ll us do with ‘im, then?” The rich country voice behind the second torch also ignored his appeal.
“Knock the bugger on the ‘ead an’ fill in the bloody ‘ole, I would, dummy1
if I ’ad my way,” said the first speaker uncompromisingly.
“Looks like someone’s already given ‘im one for starters. See ’is face there?”
“Ah, I see’d it. Must ‘a done that when ’e went in. Serve ‘im right!” The first speaker was clearly unmoved by the state of their captive’s appearance. “Serve the bugger right!”
Thomas Wiesehöfer decided to get angry. “You up there— do you not hear me? I haff fallen in this hole—you will help me out at once, please!”
“Arr! So you fell into the ‘ole, did you now, Mister?” The first speaker echoed him unsympathetically. “An’ what was you doin‘
out ’ere in the first place, eh?”
“Poachin‘ on the Old Squire’s land, that’s Miss Becky’s now, mebbe?” The second speaker chuckled grimly. “Bloody foreigner—
poachin’ on Miss Becky’s land! This’ll learn ‘im, then!”
“What?” They were playing with him, the swine! “I do not understand—?”
“Arr? Nor you don’t, don’t you?” The first speaker chipped in.
“Well then . . . you just bide where you are, Mister—you just bide there—see?” The torch flashed out. “Keep clear of anyone we catches, is what they said—just make sure they stays where they are ‘til we can cast an eye on ’em—so that’s what us’ll do.”
They? Damn them!
“You down there—” the words descended through the darkness, which was once again complete “—I got a 12-bore an‘ I knows how to use it. So you stay quiet then . . . understand?”
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Benedikt suddenly understood all too well. If the situation in the Chase was as Colonel Butler had believed it to be ... and everything which had happened to him confirmed that now beyond all doubt . . . then this trap had been built for a very dangerous animal, and the night-guards would have been warned to take no chances with it. Of course, being the amateurs they were, they had forgotten half their instructions immediately and had taken a careless look at their catch, chattering like monkeys; but now native caution had reasserted itself, edged with apprehension.
So ... however Thomas Wiesehöfer might have reacted to that threat in all his injured innocence, Benedikt Schneider wasn’t about to argue with a shot-gun in the hands of a nervous peasant.
Even the prospect of crossing swords at a disadvantage with Audley was to be preferred to that: here in England, with Colonel Butler as his last resort (however humiliating that might be, and more so than his present predicament), he could survive failure there. But a shot-gun was something else, and there would be no surviving that.
So ... better to use what time he had to compose himself, and to rehearse the Wiesehöfer story, weak though it was.
Audley wouldn’t believe it, of course. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t accept it, if he judged the risk of turning the mysterious Wiesehöfer loose more acceptable than detaining him, which carried the equal risk of alerting whoever had sent him to—
No. That was wishful thinking, because the risks weren’t equal—
because he already knew too much about the Chase’s defences.
dummy1
So Audley must detain him ... at least so long as he stuck to his Wiesehöfer cover . . . until the real target came into sight.
Therefore, at the right moment, he would have to abandon Wiesehöfer for Schneider, in the role Colonel Butler had prepared for just such an emergency—
Benedikt frowned in the darkness as the thought struck him that Colonel Butler might have reckoned all along that his tricky Dr David Audley would catch him. In which case—
His ears, attuned to the slightest variation in the pattern of occasional sounds from above, caught something different, diverting him from further contemplation of the idea that Colonel Butler might have been playing a deeper game: someone else was whispering up there—but stretching his hearing to its limits he still couldn’t make out individual words, only the contrast of the new sound with the gravelly undertones of the two countrymen—it was softer, almost liquid . . .it was a sound which, if amplified, would become a clear, high-pitched cry, where theirs would become an Anglo-Saxon bellow.