Appleby Plays Chicken (8 page)

For there was something he must discover at once. Had they merely tricked that girl, or had they used violence? In either case, his own encounter with her had been unfortunate, to say the least, and he owed it to himself to investigate. Anyway, the thugs were now between him and the village, so there was nothing that could be called quixotic in his changed direction. It was true he hadn’t a great deal more running in him – but there wasn’t the slightest reason to suppose that his enemies had either. He turned and took a look at them as he made once more for the brow of the hill. If they proposed to come after him, they hadn’t yet got down to it. They were still standing beside the car, and the stranger seemed to be rubbing or feeling his leg. With any luck, they’d both got a much worse jolt out of the late proceedings than David had.

He was back on top of the rise, and for a moment he thought he had spotted the girl, walking towards him a little more than two hundred yards away. But it wasn’t the girl. It was a man.

David stopped. He was discovering that he didn’t any longer like men. He distrusted them. And particularly when they were equipped with firearms. Perhaps this man wasn’t. But perhaps he was. David could see something under his arm. It might be a fishing rod. It might even be no more than a walking stick. But there could be no doubt that it
might
be a gun.

The man was sauntering down the road. If he had seen David, he gave no sign. He was tall. He was in knickerbockers – and already you could guess that those garments, although rural, were not rustic. A country gentleman, you would say… At this point it was revealed to David that he had come to dislike gentlemen even more than just plain men. He suspected the figure advancing upon him of having another well clipped moustache and a disposition to murmur that this was a good or that was a bad show. And now he was certain of what was under the chap’s arm. Or rather he wasn’t. Probably it was a shotgun. But it might very well be a rifle.

The man – gentle or simple – steadily advanced. Sometimes he looked to his right and sometimes to his left – as if, David thought, in some hope of a hippo or a tiger. What he didn’t seem to do with any intensity or even interest was to look ahead. Already David felt himself being rather pointedly ignored. And this, somehow, was an attitude he didn’t at all like.

He tried to take hold of himself and make some contact with common sense. It was really inconceivable that here could be another of
them
. Since he left Nymph Monachorum that morning the English countryside couldn’t suddenly have been given over en bloc to desperadoes. The vast probability was that this approaching figure was harmless. And that was to put it too mildly. Here, almost certainly, was a law-abiding citizen – but one, happily, who was at the moment bearing arms. Whether rifle or shotgun, his weapon could certainly give that idiotic little pistol points.

David moved forward again. As he did so, the advancing figure took his gun from under his arm and appeared casually to examine it. That ought to be all right. But for some reason it wasn’t. David, although not particularly expert at that sort of thing, felt there was something wrong with the approaching sportsman and his actions. And there was now not much more than a hundred yards between them. That made him, he supposed, already a sitting target for anybody who knew one end of a rifle from another.

Clearly he must do his best to find the girl as soon as he could. That was only common decency. But, even if he could get round this fellow in knickerbockers, he wouldn’t be in much of a position to help. Supposing no harm had come to her yet – which remained the substantial probability – it might be disastrous to lead these fellows back to her. In fact his only reasonable course seemed to be immediate evasive action. If he was wrong about the man in front, and that action robbed him of a perfectly respectable potential ally – well, it was just too bad.

David looked behind him. His first enemies, he saw, were now on the move again. He looked to his left. Here, on the edge of the moor, there was really a good deal of cover: broken ground with here and there a thicket or a spinney, running down to a shallow valley in which a stream appeared to run through long, narrow plantations. David swung round and raced for a promising little gully he had spotted no farther off than a stone’s throw. Something whined past his head. He thought it must have been an insect close to his ear – until a fraction of a second later he heard a crack behind him.

Well, he hadn’t been wrong. Doubled up and racing as he hadn’t raced before, he told himself there was some satisfaction in that. But there was small satisfaction in anything else. A rifle – even a light sporting rifle – entirely altered the complexion of things. In skilled hands it meant nothing else than quick death – or it certainly meant that if he were driven back towards the open moor. His best chance lay in taking substantial risks in order to work rapidly round to the village. They couldn’t – they just couldn’t – pursue him into that with guns blazing. This that he’d strayed into wasn’t a 3D western. There was – there just must be – in every sense a limit to how far they could go.

The next stage of David’s flight was curiously insubstantial and shadowy. His brain didn’t seem to have much control of it. And yet it wasn’t blundering or precipitate. Indeed what it now for the first time chiefly required was a great deal of wariness and calculation. The terrain – almost before his noticing it – had entirely changed; he moved behind the cover of high earthen dykes, crawled through thickets, lay listening in a ditch for sounds that didn’t come.

Slowly he realized that – perhaps just by letting something primitive to the point of mindlessness take over – he had shaken off his pursuers entirely for a time. He didn’t know for what sort of time, because it was chiefly his sense of time that had gone queer. What he did sharply retain was a sense of direction. He knew just where that village was. Over a field, up the stream, round a bend, and there it would be. Indeed he could see what must be the first of its cottages, white-walled and grey-thatched, just where the stream wound out of sight. It was hard not to believe that he had a clear road to safety. There were sheep in the field; he could hear a dog barking; and from a direction hard to fix there came the low throb of an engine – he supposed it must be some sort of pump. His enemies seemed to belong to a past he couldn’t very clearly remember. Probably they had gone home to tea.

It was when he caught himself with this childish thought in his head that David realized the possible danger of a treachery within. Quite suddenly he had become rather shamefully fagged out. That was it. If he wasn’t careful, he’d simply be sitting down in the middle of that field and counting the daisies. Chaps like that don’t go home to tea. As soon as you give them the slip, and they can’t any longer actually come pounding after you, they start thinking ahead. They start doing your thinking for you. That means they know it’s the village there that you’re trying to make. So they form a screen before it.

Crouched by the side of a gate, peering cautiously into the utterly peaceful field beyond, David told himself he hadn’t got that quite right. It was almost a certain bet that they were indeed between him and the village – but, after all, there wasn’t a whole troop of them. They couldn’t be, as it were, manning a line. They would be at vantage points. And they’d give him credit by this time for a good deal of cunning and caution. They’d be watching the tricky approaches, the clever ways in, the sequences of adequate cover one used to be made to trace out on field days. So the best thing to do would be to get up and walk straight and openly ahead.

David stood up. The visible scene for some reason rather swam before him, but he was solemnly sure that his muzzy head had really evolved a masterpiece of tactics. He clambered over the gate – it was something he would have vaulted earlier in the day – and marched diagonally across the field. He found himself counting the sheep. That was masterly too. It kept you awake. Or was that what it didn’t do? He was across the field. And – as he had been so rightly confident – nothing whatever had happened.

It was a nice stream. It clucked and burbled. The pulse of the engine was louder. It would be pumping water up to cattle troughs. All this was settled country farmers, shepherds, barking but friendly dogs. And here was a cottage. He would go in and explain himself. The people might be surprised. But he would make everything perfectly clear.

He was inside the door of the cottage – a solid two-storey building – before he realized that there wasn’t in fact a door there. Nothing, that was to say, you could shut. There was just the doorway. The cottage was abandoned and partly ruined. He remembered there were a lot like that, often scattered in rather isolated positions about this countryside. Some change in its rural economy had resulted in a sort of abandoning of outposts. You got the same effect, he remembered, in the fens – right on the other side of England. Cottages disintegrating and sinking into the soil. Not because of a declining prosperity, but because of buses and motorbikes. The effect was very dreary, all the same.

David knew that these were desperately irrelevant thoughts, but for a few seconds he continued to wander over rotten floorboards amid a smell of damp. He tried to remember what the stuff was called – the stuff places like this were built with. Cob – was that it? He stopped and listened. The stream clucked. Just a sort of clay and gravel. Probably a discovery of primitive man hereabouts, and chaps had gone on building that way ever since. It would be very good stuff for stopping a bullet…

The derelict cottage was suddenly unfriendly, even sinister. He wondered why. It was something about stopping bullets. David went out into the open again and walked upstream. There was a little path, and farther on he could see another building, with signs of a road or track leading away from it. That would take him straight into the village. He had – he reflected without alarm – rather lost grip of things during the preceding few minutes. But he was quite on top of them again now. There was this plan of walking openly and straight ahead. Because the enemy would be looking for somebody lurking and skulking. That was it. And he had almost won through already. He could hear children’s voices, faint but indubitable, from somewhere dead in front of him.

Now there was a road – in bad repair, but quite capable of taking a car or lorry. It made a loop to take in this other building, which was now straight before him. He could see no sign of life in it either, and he remembered there would be no point in going in and wandering about. But it was an odd building, small but of complicated design, as if built for some technical purpose. The stream ran past it – or rather through a wing of it, as if it were some sort of mill. David was curious about it. And so, he noticed, was somebody else. There was a man standing looking at it. David remembered he didn’t like men. And then he saw that this was one of the men he particularly didn’t like. It was the man in knickerbockers.

Only the length of the building separated them. The man turned round, and their eyes met.

The suddenness and directness of this encounter quite woke David up. He ceased to believe he was on top of things. He accurately estimated the largeness of the probability that in a few minutes he would be dead. And this contemplation of mortality was enlivening. He made a dash for the shelter of the building. Not that it felt like dashing. His sensation was of having been launched from a catapult. Anyway, for the moment he had gained comparative safety.

This building too appeared to be deserted and derelict. He was in a bare, square room with a concrete floor punctured here and there by broken and rusted iron pipes; and in one corner a cast-iron spiral staircase mounted through a square hole in the ceiling. On one wall there was an array of switches and fuse boxes suggesting some quite elaborate electrical installation, but the wiring had been ripped away as if somebody had gone through the place in an insane resentment. All the windows were broken, and in the middle of the floor were the remains of a large cask which appeared to have been battered to pieces. On a door leading to some further rooms there flapped a printed notice about minimum wages in the cider industry. It was all acutely dismal, and David revolted against the notion of ending his days in it. He ran to the spiral staircase and climbed.

It turned out that this was a hazardous action in itself. The staircase clearly suffered from a badly fractured spine; it swayed alarmingly as David went up; and when he reached security on the next storey he was prompted to turn and give it a vicious kick. It went down with a crash, and dust and rust rose in clouds about him. There would have been great satisfaction in the spectacle of the staircase’s coming down on the man in knickerbockers. But he didn’t seem yet to have appeared on the scene. And David couldn’t hear anybody moving. The only sound was of a motorbike engine, growing fainter on a road that couldn’t be very far away. This wretched little failure of a factory – if that was the word for it – couldn’t really be remote from the fringes of civilization.

This room was much like the one below. But on one side it had an open archway leading to another derelict room a good deal larger; and opposite this there was a big opening which gave on a narrow cement platform jutting out into open air. Above this hung the remains of a derrick, which meant that the set-up must have been for loading or unloading lorries down below. The adjoining room contained some large chunks of abandoned machinery; and there appeared to be both a substantial staircase and the remains of a lift or hoist at the far end. The room David found himself in had nothing but hundreds – perhaps thousands – of small, empty bottles. These were stacked in crates, or piled, broken and unbroken, on the floor. Many had labels, and David picked one up mechanically and looked at it. It seemed that the bottle had contained, or been destined to contain, something called pineapple nectar. A shameful end, he thought, for honest apples. The nasty little place deserved its failure. David was about to drop the bottle when he heard a sound in the farther room, and swung round. There was the stranger’s assistant – the fellow who had sprung up out of the moor. He was just emerging from the staircase at the far end, and was already visible from the knees up. He didn’t seem to be carrying any sort of gun. David flung the bottle as hard as he could at this displeasing figure, and it smashed on the wall immediately behind his head. The man ducked, sank and vanished. It was one up to pineapple nectar.