Free The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes Page B

this bit of ridge we’re behind now: follow it and you’ll make that dark patch most part of a mile on.’ He pointed steadily. ‘That’s a long hollow, foreshortened: it’s dark because it is a hollow and the sun isn’t yet into it. At the end of that’ – he was looking at her dark suit – ‘put on the raincoat and walk slowly on in a zigzag. And stop a bit every dozen or twenty yards.’
    ‘Why ever–’
    ‘Because you’re being a sheep to any naked eye at the house. And binoculars you must just pray against. It won’t be for very far; in a short mile I think you’ll be able to manoeuvre the house out of sight and keep it so. Then go east till you’re ready to drop. Nothing short of a village will be quite safe; ten to one a croft or cottage would be, but this looks like headquarters and they may have their outposts here and there. Can you talk like a duchess?’
    ‘I could try.’
    ‘Don’t waste many words on policeman Dugal or Alec when you find him. Make him produce a telephone and get right through on long-distance to the bigwigs. Are your relations here important folk?’
    ‘Tolerably that.’
    ‘Then the sheriffs or chief constables or whatever they are will be the less inclined to think your most unlikely story phony. But that’s all just in case be. I feel we’re going to fix this ourselves, Sheila Grant.’
    He was gone. A wriggle of slim khaki-clad hips; the glint of a long bare leg; heather, cautiously displaced, falling again over the sole of a large shoe: for a moment there were these things – and he was gone. It was less than an hour since she had seen him for the first time.
    Sheila looked at her watch. It had stopped. She made a guess and set it at eight o’clock. The second hand began to jerk laboriously round the dial, as if time were a sticky element through which consciousness had to drag itself step by step. A minute passed. She decided that she must collectedly survey both the situation and the scene.
    In a sense these were one. Like a child sunk in the part of a hunter or an Indian brave, she had to think and act sheerly in terms of a surrounding physical world; the swell of a hillock, the drift of a cloud, guesses at distance, at direction, at the intentions and dispositions of enemies lurking and unseen: these, abruptly, had become her life. She parted the heather and looked again at the house. Its east façade presented itself obliquely to where she lay; early sunlight glinted on windows which appeared for the most part curtained and closed. Of life there was no sign save in the single column of bluish smoke which rose slowly and as if heavy with sleep from offices at the back. An indication perhaps that the inhabitants were not numerous… She tried to trace the route which Dick Evans must be taking to the house. There was a ditch, and a broken dry dyke which looked as if it might have bounded a previous property less considerable than this – perhaps another croft. These gave something like cover as far as the outbuildings, but the house itself looked formidable indeed. With an effort she stayed her glance from going back to the watch on her wrist and looked instead at the depression in the heather where Dick had lain. Close by his rucksack she saw the pistol. He had left it behind.
    Deliberately. For she knew that this acquaintance of a night didn’t make mistakes of that sort. He had left the gun and his leaving it was only part of something secret about him, a step in some ulterior intention of which she had been uneasily aware as he had slipped from her. She frowned and raising her head scanned the horizons. Folk would be up now; everywhere countryfolk would be up; somewhere surely a drift or smudge of smoke would give evidence of at least a hamlet – a clachan nestling in a fold of the moors.
    There was nothing. She tried to form a rational estimate of the degree of loneliness, the possible acres or square miles of solitude, which the highlands of Scotland