Free The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes Page A

would have plantations, a garden, some sort of drive. Or it would be smaller and stand near a river or stream. Searched, her memory told her so much.
    This house was sinister because in the wrong place. And that – despite Dick Evans’ rational sense of the plumb craziness of the game – was why Dousterswivel had to be resisted, had to be resisted personally, immediately, head on. A foreign officer whose heels clicked ironically in the darkness of a Highland railway station, he was profoundly in the wrong place. The follies of governments, the obsoleteness of controlling minds, the responsibility which two hundred million people bore for letting such control be: all these things were but a difficult penumbra round an immediate situation which was mercifully simple and clear. The activity upon which she had stumbled on the Forth Bridge was something to smash if smash it she could. For it was a challenge to the very soil on which she lay. And she turned her head and whispered, ‘It’s them, Dick. I know it is.’
    He nodded, as if taking her word for it; his glance was not on the house, but was going carefully over the whole terrain which the dispersing mist had revealed. Their route from the croft must have lost them considerable altitude and the mountains had dropped with them: these were now only a girdle of blue on the horizon, low and displacing little of a sky still clouded and grey. No sheep could be heard or seen; Sheila remembered that they had started neither grouse nor pheasant as they walked; not even a peewit called remotely over the great saucer of moor near the centre of which the house before them appeared to lie. Loneliness. And she recalled the man – a shepherd at all points, Dick had called him – who had trudged up through this solitude to their prison. These people – it was to put it mildly – were bracingly efficient. Dick, she saw, was frowning. For him perhaps the challenge lay in that: efficiency that had taken craziness as its bride.
    His glance was moving steadily from where they lay towards the eastern horizon. Perhaps – she thought, disconcerted – his problem remained obstinately her own personal safety. If that was so she knew it would be impossible to move him. He was that sort of young man. She wished he would speak.
    He completed his survey carefully, and with an appearance of qualified satisfaction. When he did speak it was to whisper: ‘It’s wonderful to be alive.’
    She was startled. ‘I suppose it’s always that.’
    He shook his head, absently and as if in the presence of an enigma. Then he spoke rapidly. ‘It’s a big house – looks as if it might be back of a lot. And we’ve got them by surprise and we’ve got a gun. With luck we might clean up the whole place.’ He put the gun on the heather beside Sheila. ‘But first I’m going to reconnoitre. We can’t risk our whole force – and your information – against an objective of unknown strength: you understand?’
    ‘Yes, Dick.’ Sheila was helplessly under orders.
    ‘And the first thing is to make sure they’re our friends. You see that pump? It shows they store their own gas – and that means they do their coming and going by car. I’m going to search the outhouses for the car that was at the station: I’d know it, and if it’s there we’ll know . Then I’m going to try and get an idea of who’s about. Have you got a watch?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Give me twenty minutes from the time I disappear. If I’m not back by that, well – it will be just too bad.’ He smiled grimly into the heather.
    ‘But, Dick–’
    ‘And now the important part. The moment my time’s up you start moving east . I can’t figure out where we are and there just isn’t a landmark to make guessing worth while. But in the north of Scotland that policeman is more likely to be in the direction of the North Sea than of the Atlantic Ocean. See?’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘The mist has left us in none too good a spot. But there’s