A Rough Shoot Read Online Free PDF

may be that she even heard a gasp of tension freed. By sheer good sense she had ruled me out as a possible suspect.
    “Darling,” she asked anxiously, “you haven’t… ?”
    “Yes? What?”
    “Well, done anything against the law. But it’s impossible.”
    I avoided the direct answer.
    “He was trying to find out if I came home late that night,” I said.
    I told her, on the spur of the moment and very unconvincingly, that I was investigating a racket in building materials for my firm, and trying to get evidence that the police could not. She accepted it, but she knew very well that I would have told her that much long before, even if I didn’t give the details. And she knew that I knew. There was nothing whatever hidden from either of us, except a bit of prosaic fact.
    Cecily went upstairs to put the children to bed, and I gave myself a stiff gin. It did so much good that I had two more. The evening story turned out to be rather more imaginative than usual.
    I was always allowed a wild twenty minutes with the children after their bath and before they were finally tucked up. This period was spent in some romp or other–suppressed by Cecily if it promised to be too exciting for sleep –or in stories. My two sons, Jerry aged seven and George aged five, had a taste, which I tried to satisfy, for improbabilities. Not fairies, but something near the shaggy dog story was what they liked. That night I started one about a nest of ants in the garden. When petrol was poured down the hole to destroy them, out they all came, saying thank-you-very-much and driving a communal car.
    Cecily listened to the end of the story, and then we had supper in rather less silence than had been the custom for the last ten days. I warned her that if anyone seemed anxious to find out where I had been after dusk on the eighteenth and up to midnight on the nineteenth, she was to remember that I had been at home. And–as these people seemed clever at misusing the telephone–I suggested a code for our personal service. If I myself were on the telephone and I carried on with the ant story for the children, it meant that I was on this secret job and she must be wary. Anyone purporting to give her a message from me would also mention ants.
    It was no good to worry, no good to break in any way from my routine. Routine is a powerful drug, helping a sufferer to live on condition that he accepts a slightly deadened existence. So I worked hard and regularly during the week, and took my Saturday afternoon as usual on the shoot. It was the fifth of November, two and a half weeks from the death of the unknown.
    The warren was still undisturbed. So, apparently, were my nerves, for I shot a hare almost on the edge of the pit. Then I walked back the length of the down, getting nothing at all on the way, towards the stacks and richer fields at the southern end of the farm.
    I was just turning into the track which led past the barn and down to the valley, when, some way ahead of me and on the other side of a gate, I saw a small, tweedy, sporty-looking man earnestly watching the long grass in front of him.
    “Hi, you!” he shouted. “Stay just where you are!”
    “Why?”
    “Wait and see!”
    He accompanied this order with a cheerful wave of his stick, and made gestures with his free hand in the direction of the field. He doubled round the angle of the hedge and disappeared.
    His commanding voice had sounded thoroughly friendly, so I obeyed. Then I saw him crash through one of Blossom’s neatest fences, as if he had had a horse between his legs, and up got the partridges. He was astonishingly right in his judgment. They skimmed across my front into the turnips, and I got a quick right and left which must have looked quite showy from where he was standing.
    “Thank you” I said when he came up. “How on earth did you know what they’d do on strange ground?”
    “Brought up with ‘em,” he answered. “Liked ‘em for breakfast. One for me, brace for