There were three of them in that corner of the kitchen garden, Royale, Larry and the butler whose range of duties appeared to be wider than that normally expected of his profession in the better class English country houses. Larry and the butler were busy with spades. Digging, I thought at first, because Royale had the light hooded and even at ten yards in that rain it was difficult to see anything, but by and by, judging more by ear than by eye, I knew that they were filling in a hole in the ground. I grinned to myself in the darkness. I would have taken long odds that they were burying something very valuable indeed, something that would not be remaining there very long. A kitchen garden was hardly the ideal permanent hiding place for treasure trove.
Three minutes later they were finished. Someone drew a rake to and fro across the filled-in hole — I assumed that they must have been digging in a freshly turned vegetable patch and wanted to conceal the signs of their work — and then they all went off together to the gardening shed a few yards away and left their spades and rake there.
They came out again, talking softly, Royale in the lead with the torch in his hand. They passed through a wicker gate not fifteen feet from me, but by this time I’d withdrawn some yards into the wood and had the thick bole of an oak for cover. They went off together up the path that led to the front of the house and by and by the low murmur of voices faded and vanished. A bar of light fell across the porch as the front door opened, then there came the solid click of a heavy door closing on its latch. Then silence.
I didn’t move. I stayed exactly where I was, breathing lightly and shallowly, not stirring an inch. The rain redoubled in violence, the thick foliage of the oak might have been a wisp of gauze for all the protection it afforded, but I didn’t move. The rain trickled down inside oilskin and overcoat and ran down my back and legs. But I didn’t move. It trickled down my front and into my shoes, but I didn’t move. I could feel the tide rising up to my ankles, but I didn’t move. I just stayed where I was, a human figure carved from ice, but colder. My hands were numb, my feet frozen and uncontrollable shivers shook my entire body every few seconds. I would have given the earth to move. But I didn’t. Only my eyes moved.
Hearing was of little value to me now. With the high moan of the steadily increasing wind through the topmost swaying branches of the trees and the loud frenetic rustling of the rain driving through the leaves, you couldn’t have heard a careless footfall ten feet away. But after three-quarters of an hour standing there motionless, eyes became perfectly accustomed to the dark and you could have spotted a careless movement ten yards away. And I spotted it.
A movement, that is, but not careless. Deliberate. I think it must have been a sudden furious flurry of wind and rain that finally broke the patience of the shadow that now detached itself from the shelter of a nearby tree and moved away silently up towards the house. If I hadn’t been watching, staring into the darkness with eyes sore and strained from staring, I would have missed it, for I certainly would have heard nothing. But I didn’t miss it. A shadow moving with the soundlessness of a shadow. A quiet deadly man. Royale. His words to Larry had been so much bluff for the benefit of any listener. Royale had heard a noise, al right, and the noise must have been just sufficiently off-beat to make him wonder if someone were there. Only enough to make him wonder. If Royale had been certain he’d have remained there all night waiting to strike. The strike of a fer-de-lance. I thought of myself going into that kitchen garden immediately after the three had left, getting a spade and starting to investigate, and I felt colder than ever. I could see myself bending over the hole, the unseen, unheard approach of Royale, and then the bullet, just one, a cupro-nickel jacketed .22 at the base of the skull.
But I had to go to get a spade and start investigating some time, and no better time than now. The rain was torrential, the night as dark as the tomb. In those conditions it was unlikely that Royale would return though I would have put nothing past that cunning and devious mind, but even if he did he would have been exposed to the bright lights inside and it would take him ten minutes, at least, to re-adapt his eyes to that almost total darkness before he would dare move around again. That he wouldn’t move around with a torch was certain: if he thought there was still an intruder in the grounds, then he thought that intruder had seen the digging operations but had still made no move: and if he thought there was such a man, then he would assume him to be a careful and dangerous man to move in search of whom with a lighted torch in hand would be to ask for a bullet in the back. For Royale was not to know that the intruder had no gun.
I thought ten minutes would be enough to find out what I wanted, both because any burial of anything in a garden was bound to be temporary and because neither Larry nor the butler had struck me as people who would derive any pleasure from using a spade or who would dig an inch deeper than was absolutely necessary. I was right. I found a spade in the tool shed, located the ‘freshly-raked earth with a pin-point of light from my pencil flash, and from the time I had passed through the wicker gate till I had cleared off the two or three inches of earth that covered some kind of white pine packing case, no more than five minutes had elapsed.
The packing case was lying at a slight angle in the ground and so heavy was the rain drumming down on my bent back and on top of the case that within a minute the lid of the case had been washed white and clean and free from the last stain of earth, the muddy water draining off to one side. I flashed the torch cautiously: no name, no marks, nothing to give any indication of the contents.
The case had a wood and rope handle at each end. I grabbed one of those, got both hands round it and heaved, but the case was over five feet long and seemed to be filled with bricks: even so I might have managed to move it, but the earth around the hole was so waterlogged and soft that my heels just gouged through it and into the hole itself.
I took my torch again, hooded it till the light it cast was smaller than a penny, and started quartering the surface of the packing case. No metal clasps. No heavy screws. As far as I could see, the only fastenings holding down the lid were a couple of nails at either end. I lifted the spade, dug a corner under one end of the lid. The nails creaked and squealed in protest as I forced them out of the wood, but I went on anyway and sprung the end of the lid clear. I lifted it a couple of feet and shone my flash inside.
Even in death Jablonsky was still smiling. The grin was lopsided and crooked, the way they had had to make Jablonsky himself lopsided and crooked in order to force him inside the narrow confines of that case, but it was still a smile. His face was calm and peaceful, and with the end of a pencil you could have covered that tiny hole between his eyes. It was the kind of hole that would have been made by the cupro-nickel jacketed bullet from a .22 automatic.
Twice that night, out on the gulf, I had thought of Jablonsky sleeping peacefully. He’d been asleep all right. He’d been asleep for hours, his skin was cold as marble.
I didn’t bother going through the pockets of the dead man, Royale and Vyland would have done that already. Besides, I knew that Jablonsky had carried nothing incriminating on his person, nothing that could have pointed to the true reason for his presence there, nothing that could have put the finger on me.
I wiped the rain off the dead face, lowered the lid and hammered the nails softly home with the handle of the spade. I’d opened a hole in the ground and now I closed a grave. It was well for Royale that I did not meet him then.