A Rough Shoot Read Online Free PDF Page A

most dislikes but from whom one cannot withhold respect. Heyne-Hassingham introduced him as Colonel Hiart.
    “This is Mr. Taine,” he said, “who rents the shooting up here.”
    There was a hardly perceptible note of mischief in his voice as he gave me my civilian title. He guessed just what I was going to think of Hiart, and let me know–if I were clever enough to see it–that the contrast between us amused him. He was a subtle and likable creature. Natural enough, I suppose. If he hadn’t been, he could never have founded and held the devotion of his People’s Union.
    Hiart shook hands. His narrow, dark eyes were laid on me as directly and expressionlessly as the guns of a tank.
    “Do you shoot?” I asked him.
    “I fear,” he said, “that I find it noisy and unnecessary.”
    “I’d find it unnecessary too,” I retorted, “if I still had army rations. But I must admit I enjoy it. I’ll also admit that I think I ought not to.”
    That was a perfectly sincere remark; I wasn’t acting. Afterwards, when I knew a little more of Hiart, I saw that I couldn’t have answered better. He had intended deliberately to provoke some reaction, probably brutal, which would give him a line on my character. I wouldn’t like to say what he made of the reaction that in fact he got, but he must have thought it unlikely that I was a man to shoot strangers and remove their bodies.
    When the car had driven away and Blossom had returned to his hay carting, I started to tramp through the roots for partridge. It was merely to put up a show of activity. The coveys were far too wild at the end of October to be walked up.
    I was perplexed, and in the blackest depression. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt that Heyne-Hassingham and his tame colonel had come over to Blossom’s farm on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of finding me, that they considered me a possible suspect, or, alternatively, a possible ally. All the tripe Heyne-Hassingham had talked about my grandfather’s friendship for his family seemed to indicate that he wanted my own.
    Ally in what? That I couldn’t answer. I was shocked and alarmed to discover that Heyne-Hassingham, prominent, patriotic and above suspicion, was connected with the runaway Hiart, with the violence of that nocturnal attempt on me, with a motorcycle so compromising that it had to be left abandoned and unclaimed.
    I pulled myself together by remembering that only a week before I had expected every hour to be hauled in by the police for questioning. Well, that hadn’t happened and seemed unlikely to happen, but I began to think I would prefer the police to this fog of uncertainty. I didn’t know whom to protect myself against. I even wondered whether I had interfered by my mysterious, unaccountable shot with some private action of the Intelligence Services. That, if it were so, made my guilt a thousand times worse.
    When I got home, there was further evidence that somebody was interested in my movements.
    “Have you got a cigarette case that doesn’t belong to you?” Cecily asked.
    “No. Why?”
    She said that a man had called up and wanted to know if I had found his case. She replied that I hadn’t told her anything, and asked him where he had lost it. When he dined with me the week before last, he said, and added:
    “Let’s see. When was that?”
    Now, this is a cautionary story for children on the virtue of never having secrets from one’s wife. Cecily knew perfectly well that if I dined with anyone at all, I should have come home full of it.
    “Wednesday, of course,” he said.
    That disastrous Wednesday, October 19th, when I had ostensibly been in Salisbury, was the only day I could have dined out. Any other wife, piqued at the fact that my doings had been exceptional and puzzling, would have eagerly swallowed the bait; but Cecily smelled something wrong with it.
    “No,” she had answered instinctively. “The only night he was out was Saturday.”
    She saw the relief in my face. It