Paul handed him the kit, and opened the bonnet. Petrov started detaching the leads, his head bowed over the engine. Paul stealthily took a large spanner from the kit lying on the floor . He had never hated a man so much as this cruel giant. He marked the spot on the back of the thick neck where he would strike the first blow, and raised the spanner.
The next instant he was sent flying at the garage wall. One powerful hand gripped his lapels, and the other struck him savagely three times, fracturing a cheek-bone. Paul slumped against the wall, writhing and whimpering.
Petrov did not even bother to look up again. Neatly, he began to remove the plugs and clean them. His movements were as unhurried as if he had the whole morning for it: he whistled through his teeth, every now and then taking a cautious look from inside the garage door. No one was approaching along the track. A man drove a tractor from the farm down towards the village. Icicles hung from the garage eaves like the teeth of a huge broken comb.
In five minutes the plugs were replaced. Petrov pressed the starter. The engine turned, broke into life. He let it warm up for a couple of minutes. The gauge showed that the petrol tank was three-quarters full. Petrov switched off and got out. He inspected the chains on the rear wheels: they were secure. He inspected Paul Cunningham, sitting against the wall nursing his cheek, meditated whether to finish him on the spot, and finally, opening the rear door, slung him into the car instead.
‘You stay there. We’ll be out soon.’
The young man, utterly cowed, gave a sickly smile and nodded. Petrov took the ignition key and walked back into the cottage… .
‘Road’s blocked good and tight,’ said Nigel, returning to the Citroën.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ Clare asked.
‘Sparkes’s men’ll have to walk the rest of the way. We’d better do the same. Wait a minute, though.’ He turned to the sergeant. ‘You know this bit of earth well. Can we do it cross-country?’
‘Walk? Well yes, sir, but——’
‘No, drive. Through that gate. Could we cross a field and get back on to the road ahead of the block?’
‘She’d never make it.’
‘This car,’ said Clare, ‘will go over anything except a river or a house.’
The sergeant’s eye lit up. ‘It’d be a matter of several fields, I reckon, and old Tom’s farmyard.’
‘O.K., tumble in. Hey, Sparkes!’ he shouted. The Superintendent came pounding back along the road. ‘We’re going to try through this gate. Open it up, will you?’
‘You must be crazy.’
‘The blizzards have blown a lot of the snow off the slopes into the lanes. Fields mayn’t be too deep with it.’
Sparkes flung the field gate open. Clare put into its top notch the lever beneath the dashboard which raised the body of the car from the ground, paused a minute while the Citroën elevated till its passengers felt as if they were sitting in an elephant’s howdah, then bumped over the ditch, shallower here, into the field.
‘Wait a minute, I’m coming with you.’ Sparkes bellowed at his men up the road. One crew was to double along to the village on foot; the other he ordered to reverse their car and follow the Citroën.
Nigel’s sergeant, sitting by Clare now, had a good memory or an X-ray eye. ‘Follow the track, missus,’ he said.
‘What track?’
‘Goes diagonally across the field. Gate at far corner.’
In bottom gear they bumped and bucked over the pasture. Yes, there was a gate. Sparkes leapt out from the back and opened it.
‘Now you can see Tom’s farm. Beyond the next hedge. Make for the hedge just below that chimney. Another gate there.’
Looking back before he jumped in again, Sparkes saw the police car stuck in the middle of the field. It had followed in their track, but with its low clearance had been arrested by a snow-deep little hollow through which the Citroën had clawed its way.
‘If you can’t get it out, follow on foot,’ he shouted to the crew.
Clare reached the gap in the hedge. Another gate was opened, and she drove through it, the car shaking like an ague-patient as it negotiated the bit of ground where cart ruts and the pock-marks of hooves had hardened to iron under the snow.
‘Round the corner of the barn there, miss. Keep to the edge of the yard, it’s Tom’s midden. That’ll bring you on to the drive, and we’re back on the road in fifty yards.’
As they turned past the barn, disturbing a drift of hens and geese, and sending five piglets flying before them, an aged red- faced man bellowed at them, inarticulate with shock and rage. He looked as if he might charge the car with his pitch-fork and toss it into the ripe-smelling midden.
His gaping mouth at last managed to frame words—‘What the bloody hell you’m doing here? Get off my land!’
The sergeant stuck his head out of the window. ‘Morning, Tom. Sorry you’ve been disturbed. Had to take a short cut. Police business.’
‘Well, I’ll be buggered! Young Charlie Deacon, isn’t it? Haven’t seen you for a tidy long time.’ The farmer advanced towards the car, lowering his pitch-fork. ‘Who’s the young lady?’
‘My chauffeur. Got Superintendent Sparkes in the back. Load of V.I.P.’s.’
The farmer stood in front of the bonnet, struggling to get some mental grip upon this extraordinary visitation.
‘We’re in a hurry, Tom. Can’t stop. Drive on, miss.’
Clare put the car in gear and crawled towards the immobile farmer, who at the last moment stepped out of the way into the midden. As they passed him, the sergeant, who was showing signs of acute euphoria, stuck his head out of the window and remarked, ‘See you later, Tom. We’re off to blow up Smugglers’ Cottage.’
‘Don’t make sense,’ said the farmer to his wife a few minutes later. ‘Young Charlie didn’t have no cannons in the car.’ But by this time, the Citroën was entering Eggarswell.
‘Where’s that bloody patrol car?’ asked Sparkes.
‘Far end of the village, sir. You told Enticott to wait there.’
Outside the village shop a huge tractor stood, drumming quietly away to itself: as they approached, the driver emerged from the shop—a man wearing Wellingtons, an old army great-coat, and a red knitted hat with a bobble.
‘Stop!’ Nigel ordered.
Clare executed a long, dead-straight glissade, skating the Citroën to a halt a few feet from the tractor while the sergeant averted his eyes and went pale.
‘Are you Jim?’ asked Nigel, leaping out.
‘That’s right.’
‘We want your tractor.’
‘Mebbe you do. But you’re not getting her,’ said Jim eyeing this tall, thin maniac cautiously.
The sergeant got out and explanations were soon made, while Sparkes hurried down the village street to find his patrol car. Yes, Jim was the chap Lucy had described: he worked at Mr Thwaite’s farm. No, he had not seen the child at Smugglers’ Cottage for the last day or two. At this information, Nigel’s heart sank. He told Jim rapidly how Lucy had been substituted for the boy ‘Evan’. Jim told him that this supposed boy had run into his employer’s farm the other night and had been taken back by the ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, who said he was delirious.
‘It was you who picked up a paper dart thrown from the window.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And posted it?’
‘No, mister. Shoved it in my pocket and thought no more of it. My own kids started playing with it, I remember. They must have read the message and put it in the post, without telling me or their ma.’
They’ll get a reward for that.’
By this time every woman and child in the village was standing at the cottage doors, obscurely aware that something momentous was afoot: to have had a police patrol car in the village for two hours, filled with grim-looking and uninformative men, was sensation enough. Now they saw the heavily-built man in dark overcoat and felt hat pounding back down the street.
Rumour grew wings and flew round
the village uttering an ever weirder selection of gossip—Jim had been arrested for murdering his employer; the squire had been caught red-handed taking part in an orgy with four beautiful Russian spies.
‘Sparkes, Jim here will take us up to the farm on his tractor,’ said Nigel.
The Superintendent, breathing heavily, stared at him. Then he got the point. ‘Good for you. The only vehicle they won’t suspect if they’re on the lookout.’
Jim climbed into the driving-seat. Nigel got on at the back. Sparkes rattled off a series of instructions to his sergeant, telling him what to do when the reinforcements arrived, then climbed up, gave a hand to Elena Wragby and hauled her after him on to the narrow platform at the rear of the tractor, an area already congested enough with iron stanchions, the apparatus of the winch, two oil lamps, several containers of milk, and other miscellaneous fixtures and cargo.
‘Standing room only,’ remarked the Superintendent.
Nigel looked down at Clare. ‘You stay here. Shan’t be long,’ he shouted above the thumping of the engine.
Her LIps formed the words, ‘Good luck. Be careful. Darling.’ She was wearing the secretive, charmingly sly look Nigel knew so well: he doubted if she would stay put here, but there was no time to argue about it.
The great tractor rolled down the street, followed—it seemed—by the whole of Eggarswell (Pop. 532).
‘The bodyguard’s awkward,’ said Nigel.
Sparkes made gestures at them, like swatting a cloud of flies, and received a ragged cheer in response.
‘Try making a speech instead.’
‘Bah!’
The procession was halted a hundred yards on by the crew of the patrol car who, letting the tractor past, lined across the road and shooed the population of Eggarswell back towards their houses. Jim at once turned sharp right on to the track that led to the farm.
In the car and in the village it had been sheltered. Now, high up on the huge machine, unprotected, they felt the north-east wind tearing and chewing at their faces like a wild beast. The tractor reeled slowly uphill, with its enormous tyres scrabbling on patches of ice, lurching sideways like a small boat struck by a wave, when a wheel went in and out of one of the deep, bone-hard ruts.
Nigel, his foot painfully jammed between two iron fixtures, put his arm round Elena to steady her. He could feel her body shivering: her face was white and set. She gripped his hand, her rings digging into it. ‘If only she’s alive,’ Elena kept muttering, like a prayer.
Half-way up the track, Nigel said, ‘This is where we become invisible. Let’s hope.’
The roof of a cottage began to appear above the bleak skyline ahead. The passengers bent low as they could behind the stalwart frame of their driver. If anyone was on the lookout, he would see the familiar sight of Jim returning to the farm on his tractor.
Jim turned right into the farmyard, stopping behind an outbuilding that cut them off from view of Smugglers’ Cottage. They got down and hurried into the farmhouse, where they were met by the patrol-car man who had been ordered to keep the cottage under observation.
‘Anything moving?’ asked Sparkes.
‘No, sir. But you’re only just in time. A big chap—I reckon he’s the one whose description you circulated—came out with another man, fifteen or twenty minutes ago. They went into the garage. Trouble starting their car, maybe. The big chap’s only just gone back into the house. The other one must be in the car or the garage still.’
‘Good. That’s two of them. Did you see any others?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No sign of the child?’
‘Afraid not, sir.’
‘Right. Back to your post.’
The constable ran upstairs.
Sparkes turned to Nigel. ‘Looks as if they don’t suspect anything yet. We can’t do anything till my chaps get here. That’ll be ten minutes, maybe. We don’t know how many of them there are in the cottage. All we know is they’re going to make a break for it any minute. If the child’s alive——’
‘The child is alive. We’ve got to act on that assumption.’
‘Right. They’ll try to take her out with them. They can’t get very far, but I daren’t risk her being involved in a gun battle. On the other hand, if they saw us moving in on them now, I’d be equally afraid for her life.’ He turned to Elena. ‘Mrs Wragby, it’s all yours now. Try to keep them talking as long as you can. And try to keep them away from the windows. We’ll be with you as quickly——’
‘Don’t worry. I understand you.’
Sparkes hesitated a moment, then shook his prisoner’s hand, wished her good luck and let her free.
From a bedroom window they watched her walk unfaltering up the track, knock at the cottage door …
‘Go and answer it,’ Petrov ordered Annie. ‘I must keep out of sight.’ He had not seen the figure of the woman pass the sitting- room window: Annie had, and assumed it to be some visitor from the village come to inquire about ‘Evan’s’ health. So, when she opened the door and the visitor said, ‘Good morning, I’ve come to ask about——’ Annie interrupted fulsomely, ‘Oh, that’s very kind of you. Evan’s better. His father’s come to take him back to London. We’re just off. I’m afraid I must ask——’
Annie’s voice trailed off, for the visitor’s pale face froze into an expression so formidable, so fierce that it might have been the Medusa confronting her.
‘Ivan’s father? Ivan’s father has been dead for years. I am Ivan’s mother.’
Annie stared at her in bewilderment. Petrov had never told her the exact provenance of the boy. But she recognised now the visitor’s voice: it was the voice of the woman who had telephoned to her from the Guest House—Mrs Wragby.
She tried to shut the door, but Elena thrust her aside and stepped into the hall. ‘It’s Lucy I’ve come for. Where is she?’
Annie’s face turned a sicklier yellow. Before she could speak, Elena flung open a door and made an entrance grander and more dramatic than ever she had made on the stage.
‘So it’s you,’ she said to Petrov.
‘How the hell did you get here, Mrs Wragby?’
Elena crossed to the window-seat—thank God there’s only one window, she thought—and sat down. ‘I drove to the village, inquired for this house, then walked up.’
‘And how did you know about this house?’ Petrov’s voice was a silky rumble.
Elena explained about the message Lucy had managed to smuggle out. ‘The letter reached me this morning. It was addressed to my husband. I opened it.’
‘You opened it?’
‘My husband could hardly do so, being in hospital.’
‘Hospital?’
‘You did not quite succeed in killing him,’ said Elena in a cold, matter-of-fact voice. She glanced at Petrov contemptuously. ‘You need not look so alarmed. He is unconscious still. He has told the police nothing. I don’t understand why you thought it’d be necessary to kill him, once you’d got the information from him.’
Petrov’s little, wild-boar eyes probed at her. ‘That is none of your affair,’ he said at last. ‘You informed the police about this letter from Lucy, no doubt?’
‘Informed them? I?’ Elena’s voice was weary and exasperated: she did not make the mistake of sounding indignant. ‘What on earth do you take me for? I’m in this too deep to go running to the police.’
‘Then how did you find your way here alone?’
‘The envelope had a Longport postmark. I remembered seeing a cottage, like the one Lucy described, while my husband and I were motoring around here last year.’
‘Well, go on.’
‘I was allowed to go into Belcaster this morning. I said I wanted to visit my husband in hospital. I was not allowed to see him—he’s too ill. Then I drove over here.’
‘With the police following you. That was a stupid thing to do. Stupid, or worse.’
‘I made quite sure there were no police cars behind me. I’m quite used to throwing off shadower
s—from the old days.’
‘When you tried to betray the People’s government.’
Elena shrugged. ‘I’ve paid enough for that, haven’t I?’
‘You may yet have to pay more. And I’m still asking, what have you come here for? Make it snappy. We’ve got to get off.’
Elena reached for the handbag on the window-seat beside her. Petrov pounced, with fantastic alacrity for so cumbrous a man, tore it from her hands, opened it, shook out the contents on the floor.
‘No revolver. What a nervous man you are, my poor Petrov,’ said Elena pityingly. ‘Perhaps you should take off your overcoat. You’re in a muck-sweat, as the English say.’
‘I asked you a question.’
‘What have I come here for? To ask you two questions. First, where is Lucy? Is she alive?’ Elena raised her magnificent, carrying voice on these last six words. Upstairs, Lucy faintly heard them, recognised her step-mother’s voice. The past week had taught her caution. She repressed the impulse to call out, and reached for her skipping rope.
‘Lucy?’ babbled Annie, who had been listening to all this with hypnotised attention. ‘Oh, she’s not here any longer. She was moved elsewhere last night, she tried to run away, and we thought——’
‘Shut up!’said Petrov.
The faint thump of feet skipping could be heard from somewhere overhead.
‘That answers my first question,’ said Elena. Her impassive face gave not the slightest inkling of the joy that flooded her heart. Lucy is here, and alive. But somehow I must keep her alive. Time, time, play for time. She dared not even glance out of the window to see if the police were closing in. ‘My second question is, why did you kill Ivan?’
‘I did not kill Ivan.’
Elena gave him a look that would have made anyone but a Petrov quail. ‘Do not add futile lying to your other despicable qualities.’
‘Annie, we must be off in five minutes. You were going to get us a drink. Bring one for Mrs Wragby too.’ When the woman had gone out, he turned to Elena. ‘Ivan’s death was a mistake. I regret it very much.’
‘You regret it!’ she said in a searing tone.
‘Yes. A stupid young man, who was helping Annie over this affair, took him to the station. There was a blizzard, it seems: the car stuck in a drift, quite near Longport, and this young fool lost his head and told Ivan to walk the rest of the way.’
The Sad Variety Page 20
