Free A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household Page A

the track, and singing in a low, but not nearly low enough voice some preposterous chorus:
    One day in October I wasn’t so sober.
    “For the Lord’s sake!” I protested. “English folk song,” he answered. “Learned it from my governess. They’re miles away and busy. Have a cigarette!”
    “Where are they?”
    “Looking for the beacons, all four of them.”
    “That won’t take them long.”
    “Won’t it, ha? One is halfway down the hill, and the other on its side under a pile of cabbage.”
    “Kale.”
    “Well, whatever damned kraut you feed to cows in this country. Next thing, Colonel, my lad, is to restore your temper.”
    “What’s the matter with it?”
    “Our friend under the daisies. Dig him up, and you’re a free man.”
    Even in the midst of this excitement I wasn’t very ready to give away the place. So long as I kept my precious secret to myself, it was secure.
    “You bloody fool!” he said. “Now’s your chance to do what you ought to have done the first time. Burn their car and burn him in it. They’ll think the corpse is Lex. That’ll keep Hiart quiet! That’ll make him stay at home. Suspicion? Nonsense! Why you? Life’s wide open to inspection. Decent bourgeois selling tombstones. No connection whatever with Poles and such. Continent isolated, ha?”
    It did look, I must admit, as if I were on to a good thing. I led Sandorski to the rabbit warren. It was a little close to the hedge where the beacon lay under its pile of kale, but Hiart’s party were at the far end of the down still searching for the other.
    At the bottom of the pit we could safely use a torch. We dug him out with our hands, and I left him to Sandorski for I didn’t want to look. I smoothed back the earth and arranged the fallen thorn in its old position.
    Sandorski flashed his light on what had been the face. It didn’t tell him anything but the common fate of man. He looked further, and found a tattoo mark on the right arm and a locket or identity disk on a light chain round the neck. He took it and put it in his pocket.
    “So that is the end of Riemann,” he said.
    It was he who had the courage to deal with the corpse, he who was glad to see the man dead. Yet there was a sob in his voice.
    “What had he done?” I asked.
    “Despaired. Wanted a short cut and thought we were too patient. Went over to these people and broke open my organization, for I had trusted him. Not for money and not for country, but just because he thought they were the saviors of the future. Taine, I find myself against every kind of idealism.”
    It was a terrible confession to cry out, but, in this world of passionately sincere political creeds, it was true. He was in opposition to them all. Yet he had an ideal, and it was Christendom, the holy and forgotten unity of Europe. Only in such a Europe, where politics were seen to be a mere expedient compared to the beauty of the common heritage, could his people live.
    He took out a knife and removed all traces of lead pellets from the body. I could see none, but we had to expect the microscopes of a police laboratory. Then he pulled the leg of the beacon from Riemann’s heart, and buried it again.
    “Hang onto his heels,” he said.
    We trotted along the boundary hedge to the gap, and when we reached the upper road followed it down to the patch of woodland where they had left their car the previous night. We took to the ditch once when the headlights of a lorry, climbing the hill, swept and wavered through the sky. Otherwise we didn’t see a sign of man.
    The car was again unguarded. Hiart must have been very nervous about it, but he had no reason to suppose we knew where it was. And in any case he couldn’t spare a man.
    We wrenched off the main petrol lead, bent it and soaked Riemann and the floor mats. Then we put him in the driving seat, and Sandorski threw a lighted cigarette into the pool of petrol beneath the car. The result was spectacular. We were only just far enough