He said sharply, "Is this your best tea-service, ma'am?" wincing ever so slightly at the gaudy Prussian blue.
"Put it down," Mrs Bellairs implored, but he had already smashed the cup against the wall. He explained to his man, "The handles are hollow. We don't know how small these films are. You've got to skin the place."
"You'll suffer for this," Mrs Bellairs said tritely.
"Oh no, ma'am, it's you who'll suffer. Giving information to the enemy is a hanging offence."
"They don't hang women. Not in this war."
"We may hang more people, ma'am," Mr Prentice said, speaking back at her from the passage, "than the papers tell you about."
It was a long and gloomy ride. A sense of failure and apprehension must have oppressed Mr Prentice; he sat curled in the corner of the car humming lugubriously. It became evening before they had unwound themselves from the dirty edge of London, and night before they reached the first hedge. Looking back, one could see only an illuminated sky -- bright lanes and blobs of light like city squares, as though the inhabited world were up above and down below only the dark unlighted heavens.
2
It was a long and gloomy ride, but all the time Rowe repressed for the sake of his companion a sense of exhilaration: he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago. He was helping in a great struggle, and when he saw Anna again he could claim to have played a part against her enemies. He didn't worry very much about Stone; none of the books of adventure one read as a boy had an unhappy ending. And none of them was disturbed by a sense of pity for the beaten side. The ruins from which they emerged were only a heroic back-cloth to his personal adventure; they had no more reality than the photographs in a propaganda album: the remains of an iron bedstead on the third floor of a smashed tenement only said, "They shall not pass," not "We shall never sleep in this room, in this home, again." He didn't understand suffering because he had forgotten that he had ever suffered.
Rowe said, "After all, nothing can have happened there. The local police. . ."
Mr Prentice observed bitterly, "England is a very beautiful country. The Norman churches, the old graves, the village green and the public-house, the policeman's home with his patch of garden. He wins a prize every year for his cabbages. . ."
"But the county police. . ."
"The Chief Constable served twenty years ago in the Indian Army. A fine fellow. Has a good palate for port. Talks too much about his regiment, but you can depend on him for a subscription to any good cause. The superintendent. . . he was a good man once, but they'd have retired him from the Metropolitan Police after a few years' service without a pension, so the first chance he got he transferred to the county. You see, being an honest man, he didn't want to lay by in bribes from bookmakers for his old age. Only, of course, in a small county there's not much to keep a man sharp. Running in drunks. Petty pilfering. The judge at the assizes compliments the county on its clean record."
"You know the men?"
"I don't know these men, but if you know England you can guess it all. And then suddenly into this peace -- even in wartime it's still peace -- comes the clever, the warped, the completely unscrupulous, ambitious, educated criminal. Not a criminal at all, as the county knows crime. He doesn't steal and he doesn't get drunk -- and if he murders, they haven't had a murder for fifty years and can't recognize it."
"What do you expect to find?" Rowe asked.
"Almost anything except what we are looking for. A small roll of film."
"They may have got innumerable copies by this time."
"They may have, but they haven't innumerable ways of getting them out of the country. Find the man who's going to do the smuggling -- and the organizer. It doesn't matter about the rest."
"Do you think Dr Forester. . .?"
"Dr Forester," Mr Prentice said, "is a victim -- oh, a dangerous victim, no doubt, but he's not the victimizer. He's one of the used, the blackmailed. That doesn't mean, of course, that he isn't the courier. If he is, we are in luck. He couldn't get away. . . unless these country police. . ." Again the gloom of defeat descended on him.
"He might pass it on."
"It isn't so easy," Mr Prentice said. "There are not many of these people at large. Remember, to get out of the country now you must have a very good excuse. If only the country police. . ."
"Is it so desperately important?"
Mr Prentice thought gloomily, "We've made so many mistakes since this war began, and they've made so few. Perhaps this one will be the last we'll make. To trust a man like Dunwoody with anything secret. . ."
"Dunwoody?"
"I shouldn't have let it out, but one gets impatient. Have you heard the name? They hushed it up because he's the son of the grand old man."
"No, I've never heard of him. . . I think I've never heard of him."
A screech owl cried over the dark flat fields; their dimmed headlights just touched the near hedge and penetrated no farther into the wide region of night: it was like the coloured fringe along the unexplored spaces of a map. Over there among the unknown tribes a woman was giving birth, rats were nosing among sacks of meal, an old man was dying, two people were seeing each other for the first time by the light of a lamp; everything in that darkness was of such deep importance that their errand could not equal it -- this violent superficial chase, this cardboard adventure hurtling at seventy miles an hour along the edge of the profound natural common experiences of men. Rowe felt a longing to get back into that world: into the world of homes and children and quiet love and the ordinary unspecified fears and anxieties the neighbour shared; he carried the thought of Anna like a concealed letter promising just that: the longing was like the first stirring of maturity when the rare experience suddenly ceases to be desirable.
"We shall know the worst soon," Mr Prentice said. "If we don't find it here" -- his hunched hopeless figure expressed the weariness of giving up.
Somebody a long way ahead was waving a torch up and down, up and down. "What the hell are they playing at?" Mr Prentice said. "Advertising. . . They can't trust a stranger to find his way through their country without a compass."
They drew slowly along a high wall and halted outside big heraldic gates. It was unfamiliar to Rowe; he was looking from the outside at something he had only seen from within. The top of a cedar against the sky was not the same cedar that cast a shadow round the bole. A policeman stood at the car door and said, "What name, sir?"
Mr Prentice showed a card, "Everything all right?"
"Not exactly, sir. You'll find the superintendent inside."
They left the car and trailed, a little secretive dubious group, between the great gates. They had no air of authority; they were stiff with the long ride and subdued in spirit: they looked like a party of awed sightseers taken by the butler round the family seat. The policeman kept on saying, "This way, sir," and flashing his torch, but there was only one way.