‘And my motive for murdering Fosworthy?’ I asked, returning to the main point.
‘That’s for the police to say when they find his body. Accounts will prove you bribed him. What for, if not to show you the cave? Aviston-Tresco and I tried to interfere but were brutally attacked by you. We were all alarmed at the thought of you and Fosworthy underground together—one of you unbalanced and the other violent. So we came down to the rescue. We found neither of you.’
‘Why didn’t you report it?’
‘We thought you had both left. It was only when we came back after twelve days that we suspected you had killed him. And you then tried to kill us.’
‘It won’t stand up for a moment,’ I said.
‘Are you sure? While you were away—’ I could have torn him apart for that “away” ‘—Aviston-Tresco’s arm has been amputated. Then you blew me up with a land-mine. You can’t deny either. Won’t that suggest to a jury that you stick at nothing? If you talk, Yarrow, you’re in for a difficult case in which the evidence of respectable, local citizens will be stacked against you. You and your counsel may convince the jury that your story is true and ours is invented, but is it worth the gamble? Is it worth awaiting trial in gaol? So dangerous a man will not get bail.’
I was not up to arguing. It was highly unlikely that I could not get the lot of them convicted. On the other hand it was true enough that I should be in for many unpleasant and anxious months.
‘So you will leave me alone if I leave you alone?’
‘Of course! Why should we start anything up? I don’t want all the scandal and fifteen years in gaol at the end of it.’
From my unrevealing darkness I replied that I should do my best to get it for him and that I was not going to spend the next year or two looking over my shoulder. Their interest in my death was too strong. It would solve all their problems.
‘For God’s sake, we’re a small band of harmless countrymen or were till you turned up!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re not assassins trained to take risks. A bungled attempt on you would be the end of us. You are quite safe so long as we are.’
I agreed to think it over, but refused to give my word.
‘I don’t want …’
His face had gone dead white. That he had been able to force out so many words before collapse impressed me with his argument, perhaps too strongly. He pulled himself back from unconsciousness for a last retort:
‘I don’t want your word, damn you!’
I never worked with more anxiety to bring anyone round. I went back to the changing-room to get a coat, and packed him in that and my own. No sugar, hot tea or alcohol. Nothing but water colder than he was. As a last resort I loosened the bandage above his knee and let him bleed a bit. To my surprise that worked. He opened his eyes and murmured:
‘I shall not dissolve. He’s bound … to open up … soon.’
It was all of an hour before very cautiously he did.
I raved at the Bank Manager that his friends were lost in the darkness and that Jedder would die if he couldn’t get help quick. He threw the hatch wide open, shone a torch down the shaft and saw that I was telling the truth.
‘Drop that ladder at once, you fool!’
This only reduced him to dithering.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he wailed, more to himself than to me. ‘I don’t know what to do. All this! It will be the end of me.’
I heard him pacing round the rim of the open hatch, and stop suddenly as if he had forced himself to a decision.
‘I won’t come down until you are out,’ he said.
I had to accept that, though I was suspicious. The ladder came down far too readily, all in a nervous rush which nearly landed the foot of it on Jedder. Had it occurred to him that when my head came up to ground level I should be at his mercy? Well, if it had, there was little I could do about it. I could only trust to his character. He was a peaceable, very white-collared citizen, needing his office chair to take decisions. His fear of the Law and of insecurity was desperate enough to screw him up to hit, but he was sure to do it inefficiently. The game was to play on his nerves.
I climbed within two feet of the top and stopped to listen. He, too, was silent, which again suggested that I shouldn’t trust him. We had arrived at another impasse. He could not now withdraw the ladder, but he could, if I tried him too hard, slam down the hatch on the top of it. His somewhat bronchial breathing revealed that he was waiting for me near the edge behind the ladder, where the back of my head would come into sight first.
Naturally I had taken the gun with me. Quickly raising it in one hand so that the barrels were just in the open and the butt against the wall of the shaft, I fired. Of course I missed him, but probably not by much. In any case this was altogether too brutal a business for him. I shot out of the hatch, and there he was crouching in the hay, trying to dissociate himself from the huge beam of wood at his side. I cannot believe that he could ever have raised and dropped it in time. Perhaps he meant to swing it at me like a battering ram.
I had no use for him at all. I ordered him to get his friends out first, and then telephone for an ambulance. This was quite instinctive and showed that for the moment I had accepted Jedder’s proposal. I wanted them to have the hay bales back on the hatch and Jedder laid out on the floor of the barn before public authorities arrived. What story they told was their own business.
The key was in the door. When I had turned it and was out on the open hills, I felt relief too overwhelming for anger or revenge. The night sky, intolerably welcome, was dark blue to my eyes, and the red and white of the stars were vivid as candles on a Christmas tree.
I trotted away between the shadowy barrows of the dead and over the springing turf of the sheep lands on much the same route that Fosworthy must have taken when he was just a jump ahead of Aviston-Tresco. Remembering his appearance, I stopped somewhere above The Green Man and its hamlet wondering what I in my turn must look like. I had never gone to the trouble of hanging up a lantern in the changing-room to find out. The inside of me was alarming enough without bothering about the outside.
My unthinking intention had been to take the first available public transport back to London. That now seemed unwise. Whether Jedder was dead or alive, his injuries were curious enough to interest the police, however firmly his friends stuck to an improbable story. Suspicious characters—and I certainly was that—were likely to be asked to account for themselves.
So I could not reach London as I was, nor did The Green Man offer safety. Well-disposed though the Gorms were, I was not capable of inventing a story which would explain my appearance. The only possible friend to whom I could go was Dr Dunton. He would be inclined to believe me, since he knew something of the human background.
His house was down in the plain, only five miles off across the valley as the crow flies. But I was no crow. As soon as I started to stumble down the steep escarpment I was overcome by exhaustion, tripping over obstacles which, when I looked at them, were barely visible. The grey dawn showed a melancholy field of wheat surrounded by grey dry-stone walls. I crawled into it.
When I woke, the sun was well up and breakfast of a sort was all round me. I rubbed the ears of wheat between my hands and licked up the little piles of kernels. Perhaps I was not so hungry as I thought, or else I kept closing my eyes against the sun which hurt them. However it was, I went fast asleep again.
In the afternoon I was sharply woken up by a dog which jumped the wall, raced barking towards me and then retreated cautiously to its master who had stopped alarmingly near, pretending a mistake had been made. Its nose may have distinguished at close quarters what my recent diet had been. I was uneasy at setting up a presumption of guilt by being discovered in hiding, and decided that there was no object in hanging about till nightfall. The best bet was to strike straight across country while I could see where I was going and to reach Dunton’s house soon after dusk. I was probably right. The easier route was round by the road through nearly linke
d villages and the outskirts of Wells, but at that time of year, even after dark, it was far too public.
North of Westbury I slipped across the Cheddar road, crossed the railway and was soon in trouble on Westbury Moor. Seen from the hillside, the fields and hedges of the rich valley looked easily passable. I ought to have noticed the willows. There was not a hedge without a stream beneath it or a field which was not cut by a deep drain. It was as bad as being tied up in irrigated paddy fields. Movement would have been simpler in the Dark Ages when the damned place was an estuary instead of splendid pasture at nearly sea level. At high tide Arthur and the mourning women could have sailed straight off from Glastonbury to the Western Isles.
So I had to wade to a causeway and follow the little lane on top of it. I could not help being conspicuous. A farm tractor chugged past me and nearly stopped, but the driver thought better of it. Some children took one look and bogged themselves to the knees in their anxiety to get off the track and away from me.
This forced me to take more serious stock of myself. I had a fortnight’s growth of beard, matted with filth. The bruise on my jaw had gone down, but beneath it was a jagged wound in the neck which, my fingers told me, had healed at the bottom and was still open at the top. It was leaking a little and must have looked disgusting. I couldn’t hide it, for the buttons had gone from my shirt. The state of the collar was, anyway, worse.
My appearance was more forbidding than I had ever realised. My clothes were not torn as badly as Fosworthy’s, but were stiff with a cement of limestone dust, earth from the gallery and blood—streaks of mine down the front of my coat, streaks of Doberman’s down the back and spots of Jedder’s. From the knees down, I was soggy with the black mud of the ditches.
And now there was a second main road which had to be crossed with no chance of avoiding people and houses. My lane led me slap into the village of Henton. Since I could not get round it without swimming, I elected to make a dash for the telephone box and ask Dunton to drive out and pick me up. Then I found that I had not got four pennies. Pound notes, yes. But all loose change had fallen out of my pockets when I was upside down or collapsed.
Who the hell ever has four pennies except a rep. prepared for telephoning? If you want to telephone in this island you must first go into a shop and get change. Buy something for twopence—if you can think of anything which only costs twopence—offer sixpence, ask for pennies and not the halfpennies you are sure to be offered, and then find a public box in working order. For the returned exile or the foreign visitor it is easier to back a horse than to telephone.
While I hesitated, a man strode briskly round the corner towards me. He had a mass of wind-blown white hair and an ash plant for a walking stick. I could not avoid him and summed him up as best I could. He seemed to be one of the mild, exaggeratedly healthy people by whom that part of the county was infested. At a guess, retired and sixtyish, though appearing in his late forties. Probably a militant atheist or devoted to some local religion. But on that point I was prejudiced.
I hoped that he would take me for a singularly disreputable tramp and pass by. But tramps are no longer recognised as a normal and picturesque decoration of the countryside. The very few who wander from place to place do so from choice rather than necessity and are well enough dressed to pick up a lift if they want it.
He stopped and wished me good evening.
‘You shouldn’t be walking in that condition,’ he said with severe benevolence.
‘I know I shouldn’t. Can you give me four pennies to telephone with?’
‘Haven’t got them,’ he replied, ‘but we will get change in the village. You should have that wound attended to immediately. I am afraid you have been fighting.’
There was a Fosworthian echo in that. I did not want him to disapprove of me, since he might be useful, so I said impulsively that I had been in a car accident.
‘An accident? When?’
‘About a week ago.’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised the mistake. My appearance was quite consistent with being hurled out on to a very dirty road. But what had I been doing ever since and why had nobody patched me up?
‘Come with me, my dear chap!’ he urged. ‘This must be looked into. I am sure you have no reason to be alarmed.’
There was nothing else for it. I walked slowly towards the village with him. It was not difficult to drag my feet and play even tireder than I felt. He offered to leave me where I was and telephone for me.
What was I to do? I was not going to give him my name and have it officiously batted about the district, and I would not drag Dunton and his family publicly into my affairs. He had too much to lose if things went wrong.
I asked this unreliable altruist if he had a car. He replied fussily that he had never found any necessity for one. This confirmed my instinctive guess that he was a devoted pedestrian and about to tell the nearest policeman that there was a wandering man who had been knocked senseless and had probably killed someone else into the bargain.
In my condition the complications were beyond me. I gave him an imaginary telephone number, and then sat down on the edge of the drain and let him carry on. As soon as he was safely out of sight I waded across to the meadow, found no cover, waded another ditch into somebody’s orchard and took refuge in the branches of an apple tree. I was very wet and cold, but beyond caring. I found some comfort in the green of the mass of leaves and the red of a clear sunset down the valley. I still could not take light for granted.
After twenty minutes my old hearty returned, beat about a little and shouted ‘Hi!’ A little later a cop arrived on a motor-cycle. Neither of them thought of looking for me on the other side of the water. They assumed that I had gone back up the lane and could easily be overtaken. The walker continued his walk, fuming a little and waving his ash plant impatiently. The cop shot off towards Westbury.
I proposed to let twilight deepen before I moved. Sitting in my tree, I cursed myself for a coward who preferred to be hunted by police rather than go boldly to them with my story. Yet it was undeniable that life, as soon as it became recognisable, would be easier and pleasanter if I could manage to clear out and leave no trace of my existence. Suppose they did gang up and swear I killed Fosworthy? Suppose the hospital, picking bits of teak and detonator out of Jedder, started asking how an explosion could peal off a neat ribbon of skin? Whoever went on trial in the end, I was in for a packet of trouble. I had no intransigent desire to bring them all to justice. They were the least likely people in the world to repeat their crime. And any way rough justice had been done.
For God’s sake get out of here! was all I could say to myself, but I knew I was not capable of any prolonged physical effort. I had to steal something to eat, since I could not buy it without attracting pity and questions. A likely spot was a large lowland farm with extensive outbuildings close to the point where I had disentangled myself from the drains of Westbury Moor.
I went back up the lane, and approached the house up wind. It was blazing with light behind curtains and there was not a soul in the yard. An old, half-boarded window opening which faced the marshland gave access to a building in which were a couple of sows about to farrow. Their quarters, so far as I could tell by feeling about, were far too clean and scientific. No edible scraps had been left to rot.
I let myself out into the yard and looked for the cowshed. Either there wasn’t one or I couldn’t find it. I came across two battery houses for hens, but both were locked. The farmer did not eat battery eggs himself, however, for I disturbed a few chickens roosting on the tractors and machinery in an open Dutch barn. I searched all likely crannies and corners in the hope of discovering where they laid—hard enough in daylight—and eventually came upon two eggs in the chaff at the bottom of an old fodder bin. To my bitter disappointment one was a china egg. The other I gulped down.
What in the world to do next I did not know. The only solution was to keep going if I could and try to pass through He
nton in the silence after midnight. While I was brushing myself down with wisps of straw—more with the object of keeping myself awake than of making any noticeable difference to my clothes—a car drove into the yard. It was evidently the owner of the farm coming home from his favourite pub at closing time. He put the car away in a shed, chained and locked the farm gate and entered the house.
I had a feeling that he was a confident, busy man who would have left the keys in the car, and sure enough he had. The chance was too good to be missed. In the obscurity of a car I could pass as a scruffy individual rather than a wreck. I saw myself driving straight to my London flat where I could wash, shave and change, afterwards sending an anonymous letter to the owner telling him where his property was parked and enclosing some money for compensation. It was a gift from heaven. To judge by what one read, the police seldom seemed able to trace stolen cars.
But first I had to get that gate open. The chain was padlocked tightly round the gatepost and upright. The only way of getting it off that I could see was to saw through the wood. Whatever I did had to be quick. Once the house lights were out and the TV silent, there was no hope of sawing without being heard.
One is always hypnotised by the fastening of an object and forgets the other end. I had gone off to search for tools before I remembered that gates have hinges. So I returned with a brick and a length of stout timber. With these I easily levered the gate off its hinges, and foot by foot cleared it out of the way, for my strength was not equal to dragging it aside by hand. It was the lever, too, which persuaded the car out of its shed. The slight slope of the yard did the rest.
There was no traffic in the lane and I turned into the main road at Henton feeling that my troubles were at an end. I passed sedately through Wells and then put my foot down. Fifty was all that my farmer’s rattletrap would do, but she sounded in good heart and able to land me at my flat within three hours.
The Courtesy of Death Page 11
