From London Far

by Michael Innes

  He was still in the larch wood. And again there were voices, this time on the edge of it. He moved quickly through the last fringe of trees, and it seemed to him that he now avoided their unyielding trunks less by sight or touch than by the exercise of an emergency sense summoned for the purpose. He climbed a wire fence that twanged alarmingly in the stillness as he too-abruptly let it go. At once there was a shout from the larch wood. But he knew now, with the confidence of a former visual impression sharply recalled, that before him lay broken but unprecipitous ground falling straight to the murmuring Carron. He would wade some fifty yards in water and then make the climb from the farther bank. For the first time he looked behind him and saw that he had already dropped a considerable distance. A bright glow showed where several lights must be burning in Don Perez’s stronghold, but the house itself was invisible behind the trees. If he saw it again he hoped it would be in company with the assembled strength of the county constabulary. And Meredith ran for the burn.

  Bounding o’er the heather is an athletic exercise frequently described in song. The actuality is not easy, even in daylight. And darkness makes a tumble certain every so many yards. The stuff is either curiously elastic and acts like a smooth but swift pneumatic brake, or it is absolutely strong-rooted and resistant, bringing one down at once. Meredith, by trial and error, quickly found the sort of out-thrusting, high-stepping stride best suited to this invisible terrain; it was no doubt the kind of movement that Captain Maxwell of the Oronsay described as louping. And presumably his pursuersr could loup too; moreover, they would have torches to light them on their way.

  Again he looked behind him. And, sure enough, some two hundred yards back several short beams of light flickered here and there, probing the heather. The Lodge had come into sight again as a row of dull lights behind Properjohn’s absurd tartan curtains, with here and there a brighter shaft from some unguarded window. But it was another and fainter illumination that held Meredith’s gaze – one faintly suffusing the eastern sky, cloudless and starry in a great band across the moor. There could be no doubt of it. The lowest stars were paling. Presently there would rise an untimely midnight moon.

  And a moon, Meredith remembered, something like three quarters full. Unless the eastern heavens clouded over, visibility would presently be substantial. This, surely, must be far more in favour of pursuers than pursued. It robbed him of what had hitherto been an almost certain last resource, that of simply staying put and moving no farther than was required to avoid one wandering torch or another. But meanwhile there was perhaps half an hour to go before the actual moonlight came. And already he had gained the burn. He was wading in it something more than ankle-deep.

  Suddenly, and in the middle of speculations wholly cool and confident, he found that his sense of direction had left him. The bank was steep; neither stars nor hint of moon nor Lodge was here visible; he was standing in this brawling little stream and could feel the stir and thrust of it about his calves – nevertheless he was unable to tell which way it flowed, or even in which direction lay its banks.

  He cursed his own confused and urban senses. He bent and experimented with dipping first one and then another finger in the water. No certainty resulted. It was like that sort of sudden waking-up in which his bed or bedroom was for seconds mysteriously disorientated and he had a disconcerting sense of the universe as turned inside-out. Meredith wondered if he was losing his head again – and even as he did so direction returned to him. The burn thrust strongly against his legs with a prompting there was no mistaking. He turned and moved off downstream. But only to halt – more abruptly than he had done yet.

  Fifty yards below him a great beam of light had sprung into being against the darkness. It looked like a small searchlight. Perhaps it was only one of those peculiarly powerful spot-lights which form part of the equipment of large cars. However this might be, the shaft of light cut the burn like a knife and ran far up the farther bank. There was no road that way.

  He turned – half expecting what he saw. At an equal distance upstream another great beam spanned the water. Meredith saw that the situation was very bad. And where he had before been merely cool he was now angry as well. He was furious at the odds against him – at the resources the rascally Society could bring to bear against a single law-abiding citizen in these solitary recesses. There were voices again now – incisive, almost triumphant – and among them he could recognize the cultivated accents of Don Perez – the same that had discoursed on the violets of Catullus and the vine-leaves of Anacreon. And at this memory Meredith’s indignation against the pretentious and spurious scoundrel mounted even higher. But indignation, he told himself grimly, is not in itself an adequate reply to rifles, revolvers and searchlights. Where did his best chance lie?

  The two beams of light radiated from a centre some two hundred yards away, and he was thus caught in a funnel the blinding sides of which it would be fatal to attempt to cross. And at any moment these sides might contract, the two shafts of light sweeping towards each other and raking the intervening stretch of burn and lights were mounted on motor vehicles, and although these could manoeuvre somewhere on the farther bank he doubted their being able to cross the burn without a considerable detour. Thus the further he could get in the next few minutes the less powerful would be the beams presently hunting for him again, and the larger the sector of moor over which they would have to play. Meredith ran straight ahead. And he was aware that the ground beneath his feet, though rough, was level.

  But it ought to be rising. Had he turned, then, without noticing it, so that he was still following the burn? This could not be, for the sound of the water was growing faint behind him. And the only other explanation was a blessed one. He must have found the opening of some gully or minor valley that here joined the main valley of the Carron. And if this took an early turn or two in its course and did not rapidly rise to the general level of the moor it meant that he would be secure from those groping fingers of light until their reach was exhausted. Meredith looked overhead. The sky was now ever so faintly suffused with moonlight. It was just possible to discern that he was indeed in a sort of narrow canyon. And no sooner had he concluded on this than he was brought up with a jolt against earth and rock. This sunken way had turned sharply. Fortune could have brought him no better gift. He went ahead steadily, the ground rising only gradually beneath his feet. Overhead there was now an irregular play of light and darkness. The searchlights had been moved and were raking a wide arc of moor. But he was safe from them here – and safe not merely when lurking but when moving away from them with the best speed he could summon. His confidence grew.

  Distance was hard to reckon. He had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile from the burn, which it had looked as if he would never do alive again. Unfortunately, he had been thwarted in his plan of making immediately for the coast by way of the Carron. The burn could no longer be heard and he judged himself to be moving somewhere between north and east. Moreover, the ground had begun to rise sharply, which meant that the little gully must be moor. The inequalities of the ground, it was true, and more particularly the slope down to the burn and up again, would leave numerous pockets of darkness in which he would be momentarily secure. But if he had to get along by diving from one to another of these the hide-and- seek would be desperate enough. And even as Meredith, still standing in midstream, confronted this fact the searchlights swept simultaneously towards him.

  The two beams of light swept remorselessly towards him, like a scissors closing upon some helpless insect at the will of a wanton boy. He watched, fascinated, as clump after clump of heather sprang first into silhouette, then into full definition, and then abruptly vanished into the darkness beyond. Another thirty degrees and he would be like one of those tumps of heather himself – and no marksman could ask for a simpler target. The burn was here perhaps eighteen inches deep. His best chance would be to submerge himself in it as best he could. And Meredith was about t
o fling himself face downwards in the water when first one and then the other light faltered and vanished.

  There was an angry shout, a voice cursing in reply, and the unmistakable sound of a self-starter being tugged and tugged again in the effort to turn over a sluggish engine. As he had conjectured, the lights were mounted on lorries or cars. And they had been so sited that some intervening rise masked them just as they came to bear on the vital sector where Meredith stood. Once more the International Society had muddled matters at a crucial moment. Presently, no doubt, they would find more favourable ground. Meanwhile Meredith ran – ran without thinking twice about it, since running was now pretty well his métier. As naturally as if he were making his way through a lecture room to discourse on Lucretius or Virgil, he scrambled from the burn and dashed straight ahead. The powerful flattening out to the moor. He moved more cautiously, conscious that the beams of light, though very faint now, were closer above his head. And presently the immediate darkness withdrew. A wide, dimly discernible horizon was about him. The searchlights were still at play – but far behind him, and he could see that they were not such powerful affairs after all.

  He lay down, breathless and feeling again the discomfort occasioned by his rash leap from Don Perez’s window. But it had been worth it. He had got away.

  Meredith lay and watched the little probing, uncertainly circling lights. A deadly menace only a little time ago, they now seemed an altogether futile and inadequate challenge to the immense and saving darkness about them. And on this the lights themselves seemed ready to agree. For they went out even as Meredith watched them. And neither could any pursuing voices be heard. About him there was nothing but silence and darkness, with that great band of stars to the north and east, and in the clouded sky above a barely distinguishable sense of the moonlight to come.

  The moonlight might be awkward yet, but a little reflection could make an ally of it as well. For when it came Meredith would have a shadow as company. And if he regarded that shadow as the hand of a great clock pointing to noon, and himself moved steadily towards nine, he could scarcely go far astray in his quest of the island and its beleaguered castle. Pleased with this Boy Scouting aspect of his new life, Meredith set off. But he was scarcely on his feet and moving when he was constrained to pull up and listen. A new sound – or rather a medley of sounds that invited disentangling – was coming to him over the moor.

  Two motor engines: that was it. And during several minutes in which he intently listened the noise neither rose nor ebbed. There were two cars or lorries, and they were neither approaching directly nor drawing directly away. The place was too solitary to let him suppose with any reason that these were not Don Perez’s forces still. Could they manoeuvre with any freedom over the moors? Meredith doubted it – unless, indeed, these were some species of tank-like vehicle that were on the hunt for him. That gentlemen now trundle over the wilds of Scotland in such contrivances in order the more effortlessly to come up with grouse or deer was a vagary of modern sportsmanship unknown to him. And he was therefore less apprehensive than he might have been.

  But that there were two cars of a sort somewhere prowling the darkness was a conclusion which did not in itself complete the analysis of what was now coming to his hearing. Mingled with these, but yet coming from a different and (he sensed) higher quarter, there was a thin vibrant sound, like the plucking of a great string on some note almost beyond the compass of the human ear. Not dissimilar distant auditory effects one had been uncommonly suspicious of in urban places not so very long ago. Could they be firing – firing at some supposed refuge where he lay – with a weapon silent in itself, but the projectiles from which produced this strange twang in air? He frowned, dissatisfied. And then, suddenly, he was aware that the motor engines were very much nearer.

  He was aware, too, of a new factor in his environment, and one thoroughly puzzling on this great expanse of open moor. Close in front of him there rose what appeared to be a high square crag – an obscure form which was at first like a great hole cut in the heavens, a black void space swept clear of stars, but which then immediately revealed itself as a substantial and menacing mass not fifty yards away. Meredith stared at this, perplexed. And as he did so the queer vibration above his head swelled to a loud hum with clanks and creakings intermingled. And at the same moment, too, part of the mass before him seemed to detach itself and plunge towards him, as if some gigantic bird of prey had launched itself from its eyrie to hurtle like a thunderbolt upon its prey.

  And that, of course, was it. Here, once more, were the Flying Foxes of Moila.

  XII

  With the departure of Captain Maxwell in the Oronsay and of Meredith and the lad Shamus for the mainland tedium and suspense had beset the castle. The hereditary Captain retired to a late-afternoon repose. Miss Dorcas, after providing Jean with a copy of Life and Work (which appeared to be a journal devoted to the views and occasions of a Presbyterian clergy), applied herself to the science of tunnelling as expounded in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where she was endeavouring to master the complicated third phase in the construction of the Boston Subway. Mrs Cameron could be heard singing metrical versions of the Psalms in the banqueting hall – a chamber to which she regularly repaired for this exercise because of the extraordinary resonance it provided. The man Tammas, impressed by the unwonted hospitality to which his employers seemed inclined, was killing a calf in the base-court with more than his usual ritualistic deliberation. In none of these activities was there much cheer, and even those comparatively skittish pages in which Life and Work broke into a serial story failed to make Jean feel other than bad. To sweep up Richard Meredith himself and carry him off on a joint adventure was one thing; to sit tight among a gaggle of ancient women while letting him depart on a reconnaissance of the utmost hazard was quite another. Jean wondered how she could have brought herself to do it – and found the answer in the simple fact that Meredith, after all, was running the show. She would not, for that matter, have asked him had she been other than certain that he would. But now here she was relegated to a role as circumscribed as even the true Teutonic Vogelsang could have desired.

  Küche, Kirche, Kinder… Of Kinder Castle Moila knew nothing – unless the Misses Macleod in their old age were tending a bit that way. Kirche was represented by the ululations of Mrs Cameron and the sober reading in Life and Work. But Küche at least suggested a feasible exploration. And if she had been invited to inspect a privy and a tiled bathroom it was not presumably discourteous to have a look at the kitchen and the other offices as well. Idly prompted to this investigation, Jean left the solar and fell to wandering about the castle.

  The domestic arrangements of Moila turned out to hold little of interest, Mr Properjohn’s cheques having achieved most of the amenities commonly found in a well-appointed villa – the only difference being that these were built into the manifold vastnesses of the castle rather after the fashion of so many swallows’ nests plastered about a barn. Mrs Cameron’s kitchen, though by no means on the small side when absolutely regarded, had once been a fireplace and nothing more. The laundry was much like anybody else’s, except that it was fifty feet high. There were few passages or corridors, and such as there were extended to little more than two feet in breadth while being apparently as topless as the towers of Ilium. The room in which Jean was to sleep was admirably appointed for some sixth of its length and then merged into a vaulted chamber of undressed stone, dimly discerned – so that inhabiting it would be rather like playing in some cosy bedroom scene with the curtain up upon a gigantic and deserted auditorium.

  Half an hour of this wandering proved mildly unnerving, and Jean was soon feeling much like Lady Macbeth somnambulating through a set executed on a scale worthy of Mr Cecil B De Mille. The open air in the first chill of evening would be less oppressive. Miss Dorcas was clearly of another opinion, and had left the Boston Subway only to take refuge in the New York Rapid Transit Tunnel. Jean, a
fter one or two polite remarks which the depth of Harlem River rendered altogether inaudible, climbed to the battlements of the keep. Here was the ruin’s highest accessible point, and she had some hope that from this vantage ground she might be able to descry Meredith returning through the fading light.

  The sun was touching the horizon and below her the curve of the castle was like a monster’s jaw cast on a desolate shore and jagged with carious teeth which cast elongated shadows across the empty courts and the darkling waters that flanked the causey. The sea was calm and a fading silver; Inchfarr was a white ghost; Moila was very quiet and empty, sparely traversed by black-faced sheep that nosed their own distorted shadows; beyond the hidden Sound the mainland spread featureless beneath the obtuse mass of Ben Carron. Carron Lodge was the only visible habitation, and a dark line winding past it marked the course of the Carron burn. Perhaps this watercourse offered the easiest route to the coast, and a man following it would move unseen. It was possible that Meredith might in this way be hidden and yet nearing the island.

  Jean stood very still by the parapet. Her glance, so absent as to be wholly unperturbed, travelled down the sheer wall of the keep and the almost as sheer precipice to the dark arm of water that curled round the castle’s north-eastern side to break upon that narrow neck of land which linked island and stronghold. Doubtless the portcullis was down and her own security entire. But Richard Meredith – and for all the world as if something as familiar as the North Library of the British Museum were his objective – had gone off to meet the people who had murdered their way to that Viking hoard among the gentle Pentland hills, who had grotesquely hounded the wretched Higbed to distraction, who were familiarly disposed to put inconvenient people in sacks and drop them in the sea. And it was her doing that a mild and markedly courageous man had gone on this fated errand. She herself had discovered a taste for danger which gave her no shadow of moral distinction; it was a mere indulgence, such as rock-climbing is in a person who unaccountably finds relief and expression that way. But Meredith had no need of danger, or anything but a disregard of it when it was incidental to arriving at a truth. And she had used the mystery of Bubear and Properjohn and Moila to draw him into an escapade in which – though she had not thought of it so – there was almost a certainty of the greater hazard being his.