“What rank?”

“Lieutenant colonel of sorts.”

“Didn’t I say so? Once a colonel, always a colonel,” he decreed. “Commanded your battalion?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Staff jobs too?”

“Never!”

“Decorations?”

“Damn you, what business is it of yours?” I retorted. “Who the hell are you?”

“Me? A murderer.”

I thought I had got him placed at last. The Dorset Mental Hospital wasn’t far away, and they used to let out the less eccentric inmates for quiet country walks.

“First or second?” I asked.

“Eh? First, of course! Who wants to be a second murderer?”

“All the risk and none of the fun,” I agreed soothingly. “What did you do to your victim?”

“Shot him. Shot him in the back right here somewhere.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what I don’t know. I’ve been looking for a chap like you to tell me.”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Why I am supposed to have killed a man hereabouts,” he answered, staring me straight in the eyes with a flash of the sanest and grimmest humor I ever saw.

So he wasn’t a lunatic. So he knew that someone had met his death on my shoot. Was he a detective, or one of Heyne-Hassingham’s people? How much did he know, and how did he know anything at all? Was it true that he himself had been accused of firing the shot?

It was impossible to answer any of those questions, so I tried to keep my face in its same casual and friendly expression, and play for time. I decided to carry on in his own chosen atmosphere of eccentricity.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot of people I’d shoot on sight. Back or front, ha! Which of them was this?”

“But did you kill him?”

“No. Did you?”

“Do I look as if I’d shoot a man in the back?” I replied with all the indignation I could pretend.

“Yes. Don’t be a hypocrite! Never shot a German in the back? Must happen. Law of averages. Sometimes they’re coming. Sometimes they’re going. Colonel, I have watched the face of every man who visits this hilltop. You are the only one who would stick at nothing, and whose aim I’d trust–and, if I may say so, whom I’d trust myself.”

“Shall we tell your story to the police?” I asked.

“Think they’d understand it, do you, ha? I don’t!”

“Will you tell it to me, then?”

“Certainly. Let us sit down.”

“Not here,” I said.

“Why? Wind too cold, or-?”

“Or,” I answered, taking the gamble.

I led him through the gate and over onto the steep western slope of the down. A narrow sheep path twisted into the heart of one of the clumps of furze, and opened out onto a patch of turf the size of a small room. There we were safe from observation, and overlooked the lower road that wound along the stream, past Blossom’s farm, from village to village.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“To hell with it!” he answered as if taking a sudden decision. “General of Cavalry Peter Sandorski of the Polish Army.”

“You’re in one of these resettlement camps?”

“Resettle my backside!” he replied.

“I was only wondering where you picked up English,” I explained.

“English governess.”

“She must have been an exceptional woman.”

“We had English grooms, too. Pay your penny, and take your choice.”

“Whom did you fight for?”

“Poland,” he answered drily.

“I meant–with what army after the defeat?”

“The partition,” he corrected me. “Oh, first the Russians, then the Germans. No other way of killing both, was there?”

“And you live in England?”

“Under the sky, my sympathetic colonel. Under the sky.”

Then he told me as much of his story as he thought fit for me to hear. I don’t know how many secret organizations he served when it suited him–indeed I doubt if he knew himself–but one was his own, formed by him and led by him. This private intelligence unit of his had picked up in the Western Zone of Germany an S.S. man with whom they had a seven-year-old account to settle.

Now, the real reason why Sandorski’s people–who, he insisted, were plain nonparty Polish officers and good Europeans–had kidnapped this brute was punishment, revenge, whatever you like to call it; and in due season they quietly dropped his weighted body into the Danube.

“I am a Pole, not a judge at Nuremberg,” Sandorski said to me sharply, noticing my shocked and–now I come to think of it–hypocritical expression.

Before they disposed of him, however, they interrogated him. He talked quite freely. Being a foolish and sentimental German, he didn’t think anybody would bother to kidnap and punish him for crimes he had committed seven years earlier. He assumed that these free-lance Poles had picked him up because they wanted to question him about his recent doings, and he was ready enough to answer. He probably hoped they might employ him as a professional thug. And so he confessed a story that no one had ever suspected.

He had just returned, he said, from England.

What had he been up to there? He had been flown over, he replied, for a special job, landing he didn’t know where; nor did he know–for plans had been changed–what the job was to be. Immediately after his arrival he had been given a temporary assignment–and that was to catch Sandorski with the body of a man he had murdered the previous night.

The S.S. man was asked who told him that the killer was Sandorski. He replied that the dead man had had a companion who escaped, and that the companion had said it was Sandorski. He didn’t know the name of either the dead man or his companion.

From whom, then, did he take his orders, the interrogator asked. From an Englishman, he replied, with the cover name of Pink. A former naval officer, he believed. Pink was his contact, and Pink and he had gone out together to discover what Sandorski had been doing, and to catch him if they got a chance.

Had they seen him? Yes, and chased him. But Pink had been very doubtful if it was Sandorski at all. They had only got a glimpse of his back, once bent down as he ran and once leaning over the handlebars of a bicycle. He had wrecked their motor bike and sidecar, and vanished.

“Now then,” said Peter Sandorski, cutting short his narrative, “I have friends everywhere. Even in your British Intelligence Services, when I behave myself. I asked them where, on the nineteenth of October, a motorcycle was abandoned. No driver. No claim. The answer was precise. Of military exactitude, with a map reference. So here I am. I have watched. I have listened. I think I have identified the wall which was being pulled down when Pink and his late friend interrupted the person they thought was me. Colonel, if you could tell me whom I am supposed to have killed, you would do a service to your country. I tell you that–” he jumped up among the furze bushes and stood to attention–”on my honor as an officer.”

I had no intention of confessing to him that I myself was the killer; nor, I think, did he then suspect it. He had been silently watching and weighing all the local people who could conceivably be mixed up in any sort of violent action, and had quite rightly assumed that I was the only one. Thereupon he had at once found–or forced, rather –a common sympathy.

I determined to measure out the information I would give. I had nothing to go on but liking and disapproval of him. This gallant little eccentric seemed to have a disregard for human life that was two hundred years out of date. But it could have been worse. He might have had a wholly modern disregard.

“Age about forty,” I said. “Solid build and especially broad across the hips. Dressed in a windbreaker and tweed trousers. I can’t tell you much about his coloring.”

“Height?” he asked.

“Medium. About an inch taller than you.”

“That is tall,” he insisted severely. “Nose? Chin?”

“Nose, nothing in particular. Jaw, square.”

“Can I have a look at him?”