Appleby Plays Chicken (7 page)

It wasn’t painful, but it was sufficiently sobering, all the same. And now, too, he had to make a sharp detour to get round that awkward tongue of bog. If his pursuers had spotted it sooner than he had – and they might have done this – then they would stand to gain quite a bit by having altered their own course first. And this would then immediately help them in another way, making it possible for them to skirt quite a steep ascent which he must take head on.

Once more David crammed on a bit of extra speed. And the rising ground proved heavy going underfoot as well, for some accident of soil or exposure made the heather on it thick and high. When he reached the top of this short rise he was glad to see an easy drop to the track, for his breath was coming shorter than, at this stage of the proceedings, was altogether reassuring. And the place really was damned lonely. There was the little track and nothing else – like a neat parting down the spine of some unnaturally well-groomed furry monster. And suddenly everything that was secure and familiar in David’s life – and particularly the recent tranquillities of the George and old Pettifor, Timothy and the infant Ogg and the prosperous fishermen from Lombard Street and Westminster and Pall Mall – seemed dauntingly far away. They seemed far away both in time and in space. He had a glimpse of what it would be like to lose his courage; it would, strangely enough, be quite a different thing from being in the hell of a funk. Hurtling downhill at a pace he recognized as now far too fast for prudence, he had to reason with himself about the special dimensions of the melodrama that had reached out at him. There wasn’t – there just wasn’t – miles and miles and miles of this, although from the top of the rise, just as from the summit of the Tor, it had been precisely this that it looked like. Let him just keep going as he was doing, and he’d be out of this brute solitude in no time.

But just how? What must he come up with in order to be reasonably secure? David had reached the track by the time this question struck him forcibly. He had remembered from his map that there was a village of sorts straight ahead. But it might be no more than a hamlet – and would there be much security in that?

Abruptly, as sometimes happened with David’s mind, the answers to his questions began to come not in words but in pictures – vivid and almost hallucinatory pictures, of the kind that will sometimes create themselves in the darkness when one is on the verge of falling asleep. He saw himself frantically interrogating a group of small children on the whereabouts of a non-existent police station, volubly explaining himself to a silver-haired vicar out for a stroll, diving – and this was the most shocking vision of the lot – frantically under a bed in the first cottage he could enter. All this was extremely ludicrous, but it did reflect one quite sober fact, worth getting clear. If there is a fellow after you with a gun, and if he is convinced that it is pretty well your life or his, the point at which you can reckon upon assured safety isn’t exactly easy to hit. This bleak persuasion grew upon David as he ran.

Of course the beastly little pistol wasn’t inexhaustible, and it wasn’t assured that the gentleman with the good shoes and the nicely trimmed moustache had a pocket bulging with spare cartridges. As soon as he was out of ammunition he was done for – and so was his obscurely glimpsed confederate. If David could have been sure that the last shot had been already fired, he would quite confidently have stood in his tracks now.

His conviction of this was surprising. After all, it would still be two to one, and he wasn’t himself a particular star in a rough house. But it did quite unchallengeably come to him that he would get enormous satisfaction from turning round and doing his best to lay out the two of them. He was still bolting – but at this new thought he felt blood going to his head. And once more the thought turned into pictures. He saw himself deftly dealing with his pursuers so that they went down writhing and howling. This vision was so satisfactory – particularly as coming after the others – that it must have usurped upon reality for some seconds. When David, still running, returned to a proper awareness of his actual surroundings, it was to find his situation transformed. Straight in front of him on the narrow road stood a stationary car.

It was odd that he hadn’t seen it sooner; and odd that, whether approaching or already arrived, it hadn’t been visible from the summit of the Tor. But at once he saw the explanation. The track took a sharp dip here and ran for some fifteen yards between steep banks. The result was a particularly sheltered spot, which made a pleasant trap for the mild noon warmth. And the single occupant of the car – it was a large open car – seemed to be making the most of this. It was a young woman. She was reclining lengthwise on the front seat and contentedly eating a sandwich, while at the same time exposing to the gentle influence of the sunshine a generous stretch of bare legs which were already unseasonably brown. It wasn’t exactly an elegant spectacle; but even in his extremely preoccupied situation David was faintly aware of it as a pleasing one.

The girl turned her head and stared at him. That was natural. Pounding down this lonely track in a state of near exhaustion, he must be a puzzling, if not positively an alarming spectacle. But what on earth was he to do? This hadn’t been one of the imaginary situations lately mirroring themselves in his mind. It contained quite a new element, which it took him only a second to identify. He himself wasn’t merely in danger; he was dangerous. In this isolated place, and with those two thugs still after him, he just wasn’t healthy to associate with. If the young woman had been a young man – or even an infant like Pettifor’s bearded nephew, Ogg – it would be different. It would be fair enough to make another chap take his chance. But you couldn’t very well ask a girl to join you as a target even for the silliest little pistol. It wouldn’t be the thing at all.

As David was revolving these commonplace chivalric notions the girl rapidly withdrew her legs from view and then spoke. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

It was a comically incongruous question – the kind with which somebody advances upon you in a shop. Not that the girl seemed out of a shop; she was what David with his large and innocent social assumptions thought of as an ordinary sort of girl – meaning the sort he commonly met. Well, he had met this one; she had uttered; and there was one plain point that must be decided in a split second. Either he must say ‘Yes’ and stop, or ‘No’ and run on. He could hear no sound behind him at the moment, but in no time his pursuers would be on the road and almost within range again. There certainly wasn’t leisure for what could be called conversation. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m quite all right.’ And he ran on.

The thugs wouldn’t, he supposed, sock her as they passed. At least she had a better chance of being left entirely out of it than if he had started explanations and asked her to drive him to the nearest town. But here, he saw, had been a problem that might recur. A gaggle of old women, for instance, would have to be given the same answer. He ran on. And then he heard the car’s engine start to life behind him.

He hadn’t thought of that. She was curious, or intrigued, or genuinely concerned. And here she was. He hadn’t covered a further fifty yards before she was slowing down just abreast of him. This time he did halt. There was nothing else to do. And the halt told him how fagged he was. He could, he supposed, tell his legs to get going again. And they’d probably obey. But they wouldn’t like it, all the same.

‘Are you running away from something?’ The girl looked straight at him as she asked this. Her eyes were a deep, deep blue. She seemed seriously puzzled.

‘Yes – I am.’

It was a mere matter of breathing that constrained David to this brevity. He saw her look back along the road, which was still empty, before speaking again. ‘Are you a convict?’ she asked prosaically.

He didn’t know whether to laugh, or to damn her silently for an idiot woman. And even if she was a bit dumb, she was extremely good looking. But his perception of this was for the moment entirely by the way; it had nothing to do with the urgency with which he suddenly said, ‘No, I’m not – I promise. But I’ve got to get away, all the same. Will you take me?’

‘Yes, certainly. Get in.’

He was beside her in a flash. Granted that they could get away instantly he was convinced he had taken the right course. Once they were travelling, she could be in no danger at all, and no more could he himself – which, after all, remained a consideration of some moment. But to leave her in his wake, so to speak, by taking again to the moor, or to go on down the road and have her tagging along making helpful noises, was to expose her to at least some unknown degree of risk. ‘Drive straight on,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll begin explaining.’

The girl nodded, and tugged at the starter. David was conscious of a sudden fresh anxiety. He hadn’t noticed that she’d stopped the engine. Still, it was a big modern car, and there oughtn’t to be any trouble. But, for the moment, the engine didn’t fire.

‘Damn.’ The girl was aware of trouble. And she wasn’t looking at the controls, although her hands were moving over them confidently. Her eyes – those really lovely eyes – were fixed on a driving mirror on the windscreen. ‘Is that them – the people who are after you?’

David turned and looked back along the road. His pursuers were farther back than he had expected, and only just identifiable. There could be no doubt of them, all the same – and they were coming along hard. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s them.’ And he added: ‘Are we going to go?’

‘Of course we’re going to go.’ The girl spoke sharply. ‘The carburettor floods a bit, if you muck it. And I have, I’m afraid. But we’ll do it – with seconds in hand. Only we must give it a few seconds now.’

‘All right.’ David spoke as casually as he could. He felt that, after all, he had done quite the wrong thing. ‘But they’re not very nice people, I’m afraid. If the worst comes to the worst, will you lie down in the car when I tell you to?’

‘Yes – if it will ease your mind.’ The girl’s voice was cool and faintly ironical so that he guessed she’d not easily lose her head. But her body was tense, and her hand hovered over the starter. She might have been counting. ‘Now,’ she said, and pulled. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ The engine had turned over, and again nothing had happened.

David looked back. It wouldn’t do. The position, in fact, was desperate. He had involved this thoroughly commendable young woman in disgusting danger after all. And now she was looking at him inquiringly, so that their eyes met. And instantly he was moved by some quite inexplicable prompting – an instinct, a perception, a calculation: he didn’t know what. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. And he jumped from the car and ran.

Of course they wouldn’t pause to hold any reckoning with the girl; there would be no conceivable sense in that. Indeed they would probably deviate from the road in order to avoid her, and he would himself gain quite a number of yards as a result. There could be only one reason why the stranger was persisting in this desperate pursuit: he just couldn’t risk David’s getting away and being in a position subsequently to identify him. And his whole instinct would be to avoid the observation of anybody else. He would certainly give the girl – and whatever other casual wayfarers might come along – as wide a berth as he could.

So David ran on with a tolerably easy mind, and with an imagination less inclined to extravagant flights about the immediate future. They couldn’t, surely, follow him into even the most miserable hamlet, because as soon as they attracted any sort of notice the whole basis of their present operation lapsed. And it was impossible that he now had far to go. The track was rising steeply before him, and he guessed that when he reached the top he would look down a corresponding slope upon a scatter of chimneys and rooftops perhaps no more than half a mile away. He’d certainly make that. For he had been wrong about his legs. They were still not in the least indisposed to do just what he intended them to. He shortened his pace to cope with the gradient and went up it not too badly. And sure enough there was the little village, in full view below. Beyond it he could see fields and trees. He had got to the verge of the moor.

Well, he never wanted to see it again. Remembering to think about his breathing, he opened out a bit, as he might have done at the end of a big cross-country effort. And then, behind him, he heard a car. It sounded as if it was coming at a great speed, although the road certainly wasn’t a good one for fast driving. Indeed it wasn’t much of a road for motoring at all – a fact that had made the presence of the girl rather surprising. But no doubt it cut off a corner of the moor, and got a certain amount of traffic on that account.

David glanced over his shoulder as he continued to run. But the brow of the hill he had just come over cut off his view, and the car was almost upon him as soon as it was visible. It wasn’t an unknown car; it was the girl’s. She must have got it going after all, and be proposing to make up for its previous failure by coming on rapidly to pick him up. David drew to the side of the road, halted and turned. It was only then that he had a full view. And he saw that it wasn’t the girl who was driving. It was the stranger.

The next seconds were completely confused. The car swerved on the road. David was just supposing that the stranger’s pace had caused him to lose control of the steering when he found himself acting in a way that seemed utterly uncontrolled itself. Entirely without conscious calculation, he had flung himself off the road and head over heels down a gentle slope that flanked it. There was a roar in his ears, and heather whipped his face as the wheels missed him by inches. He scrambled up, breathless and bewildered. The car was thirty yards ahead, stationary and canted over in what seemed a shallow ditch. The stranger and another man were climbing out. There was no sign of the girl.

For an instant the affair took, for David, one of its unpredictable dips into the ludicrous. His assailants, heaving themselves to the ground after just failing to bring off another murder, looked merely absurd, like unfortunate minor actors compelled to hazardous roles in some slapstick comedy. But if this persuasion suggested that David had gone a bit light-headed, the attack fortunately didn’t last. He got himself on the road again – which was something the car didn’t look likely to manage – and ran. He ran, rather faster than he had yet run, back the way he came.