Read Online A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online

and that I hoped this would be the last night of the investigation. She didn’t know quite what to make of my mood, for I was in good spirits. It seemed to me more and more unlikely that I should ever be in the dock for manslaughter. Anything else that was coming to me I could handle.
    Soon after half-past seven I was with Sandorski, tucked into the hedge above the southern beacon. An hour later the party arrived, and stood quite close to us while they checked and switched on the beacon. Pink and Hiart we recognized beyond doubt. The other two were unknown to either of us. They were not as careful as they had been the night before. Growing familiarity with the job, perhaps. And really there was no reason why they should be careful. It was a million to one against anybody being out of doors on the open ground of Blossom’s and the adjoining farm.
    The night was clear, with a niggling northwest wind which was damp and cold out of all proportion to its strength. The four men didn’t lie out again on the edge of their airstrip; they retired to the comfortable shelter of the boundary hedge.
    It was their distance from the beacons and the top of the down that gave Sandorski his crazy inspiration. He suddenly slapped me on the back.
    “Why not?” he asked me in a yell of a whisper. “Why not?”
    His tone was all full of irresponsible cavalry tactics. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he suggested chasing Hiart over the downs with a lance. I replied that I’d tell him why not at once, if I knew what he was proposing.
    “Why not shift the beacons?”
    “Wreck the plane?”
    “Hell, no! Welcome it! Reception committee, ha? We ought to have three minutes. Might have much more.”
    I protested at the outrageous gamble.
    “Gamble? What gamble? They can’t know the plane is coming down in the wrong place till it’s down there.”
    “But why? What’s the objective?”
    “Muck ‘em up! What else? Sit on our backsides in a bramble bush? Just see him land and take off again? Pah! That’s what Hiart would do. We want to know what or whom they are flying over. Well, go and grab the lot. Can’t do any harm.”
    “Oh, can’t it!” I said.
    “What? Still thinking of Riemann’s home from home? Good God, man, are you going to put your miserable private affairs before service to your country?”
    I never in my life heard such a lousy argument. I was still by no means convinced that I was serving my country, and even less that his wild scheme would benefit anyone but the four men waiting in the boundary hedge. Yet he left me with no possible reply. I didn’t wonder the Poles made him a general. He could only be that or a trooper. All other ranks are supposed to think with their brains.
    “Now where shall we make the poor beggar land?” he asked cheerfully, as if it were all settled.
    “There’s only one possible place. Where the down continues the other side of the northern hedge. But there are cows there.”
    “Well, if he hits one, he hits one. What do you know about radio beacons?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Stands to reason that if they work in one place, they work in another. Ha? Doesn’t it? And they can be dropped -by parachute and work–I know that. So if we carry ‘em carefully and level ‘em up, we ought to be all right.”
    “Suppose they come and look at them again?”
    “Well, they didn’t last night, so why should they tonight?”
    “Have we time?” I protested as a last effort.
    “Not if you stand there,” he hissed, “arguing in bloody whispers all night.”
    We lifted the southern beacon and its supports, and made a detour round the landing strip, following the grass track along the edge of the down below which I had sat with Sandorski on the day of our meeting. The lights twinkled in the village below, and the headlights of cars flicked their white sheets over trees and stream. All the time I listened for the plane. Once we both cursed, but it was an air liner on its way to the north.
    We set up