Dictator's Way

by E. R. Punshon

  “Where’s Clarence?” demanded Ulyett.

  “He’s not here now, sir,” Bobby answered. “He cleared off.”

  Ulyett greeted this information with a formidable scowl.

  “Didn’t you stop him either?” asked Simmonds in a very surprised tone.

  “He took an opportunity when my back was turned and I was occupied with Miss Farrar,” Bobby explained, flushing again.

  Ulyett continued to scowl.

  Bobby perceived that the official report was going to be that he had handled the situation badly. Simmonds said:

  “Oh, well, of course, if you were busy with the young lady – pretty girl, too.”

  Sergeants do not answer inspectors, so Bobby said nothing, though not all the discipline and duty in the world could prevent him from going first very red and then very white. The worst of it was that he did not feel quite sure that Simmonds’ sneers were altogether groundless. If it had been some other girl or woman – or a man – would not his attention have been more generally alert, less exclusively occupied than it had been?

  “Then the young lady wasn’t quite so done in all the time as she seems now?” growled Ulyett. “What about Yates? Doctor, will you come in here?”

  The doctor, who had prepared a restorative he had been trying, without success, to get Olive to swallow, said crossly:

  “It’s shock, she’s quite dazed, coma.”

  “You keep an eye on her, Simmonds,” Ulyett ordered.

  He and the doctor went into the lounge. Bobby stood in the doorway, waiting to be questioned. Inspector Simmonds looked curiously over his shoulder. The doctor knelt down by the still unconscious Yates. Ulyett occupied himself with examining the signs of conflict. He looked at the bullet hole in the ceiling and said:

  ‘‘Good sized revolver bullet, I should think.”

  Then he looked into the kitchen and saw the tray with the coffee and two cups on it. He said:

  “Who had this?”

  “Miss Farrar made it for herself, sir,” Bobby answered. “She said she felt she needed it. She poured out the second cup for me.”

  “I suppose it was while you were having your coffee with her that Clarence slipped off,” Simmonds observed from behind.

  “The lady was all right then, was she?” asked Ulyett. “Dazed condition came on later, I suppose? Did she say anything before it came on, Owen?”

  “She made no actual statement, sir,” Bobby answered, thankful he had time to think what to say and to choose his words. “She told me she would refuse to answer any questions. What she did say, though, gave me an idea of what was in her mind. But it is only a guess, not anything she actually said. What I thought was that she was afraid Mr. Peter Albert might be the man who killed Macklin. But there again I didn’t gather that she had any real reason or knew any direct evidence. It seemed rather that she was just afraid it might be him.”

  “Well, that doesn’t amount to much,” grumbled Ulyett. “We knew before it might be Albert all right – or anyone else almost. Anyhow, we had better see what she has to say for herself now and if she isn’t fit to answer questions yet, she’ll have to go to hospital with some one to see she stops there. If we have to, we can charge her – suspected assault. She may have knocked Yates out and then been shoved in the garage by pals of his. I suppose this Yates bird had better go to hospital, too, doctor, hadn’t he? We can charge him with being a suspected person found on enclosed premises. How long will it be before he can talk?” ‘

  “Oh, he should be all right before long,” answered the doctor. “He’s concussion. The girl’s a shock case – hysteria condition.”

  “Hysteria – that’s kicking and screaming, isn’t it?” Ulyett asked doubtfully.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s passive,” the doctor explained. “It might pass off quickly. You called me away before I was quite satisfied. I’ll have another look, shall I?”

  “Right,” said Ulyett, but when they returned to the small entrance hall, there was no sign of Olive.

  “Hullo, what’s this?” Ulyett demanded, glaring round.

  “I had a suspicion the coma wasn’t so deep as it appeared,” said the doctor with satisfaction. “Up and off,” he added to Ulyett.

  “Simmonds,” roared Ulyett, “didn’t I tell you to keep an eye on her?”

  “I thought I thought stammered Simmonds, “I thought...”

  Discipline and duty are discipline and duty, but Bobby had his full share of normal human nature and though he said nothing he made little effort to conceal a certain complacence that stole into his expression as he watched the unhappy, floundering Simmonds.

  Nobody had seen her go. They had all assumed her incapable of movement. Ulyett was a dreadful sight as he stood there, almost literally swelling with indignation. As for Inspector Simmonds, he was almost literally shrinking where he stood. Fortunately for him, Ulyett could not say all he wished, since he felt he himself had shared the general impression and should have issued more explicit instructions. With an unconscious man, badly knocked out, and a girl in a state of apparently complete collapse, further precautions had certainly seemed unnecessary. But Ulyett knew well he would have accepted no such excuse from any subordinate.

  ‘‘She may be anywhere by now,” he muttered, half aloud.

  “Funny thing,” observed the doctor, “women often seem to know instinctively how to put it on. When a man wants to do a bit of malingering he works it all out beforehand – difference between the reasoning and the intuitive qualities.”

  But the interesting and instructive discourse thus begun, for the doctor was evidently warming to his theme, was interrupted by a fresh roar from Ulyett and the sound from without of a departing car.

  “She’s got that car of hers, she’s off in it,” he cried.

  They all rushed in a body out of the cottage and along the garden path to where the cars had been left. Respect for his superiors satisfied Bobby’s conscience that his place was in the rear. As he ran he wondered what Olive hoped to effect. An hour or two’s respite perhaps, but what good would that be? Or did she not understand how widespread and effective would be the search for her that now of necessity would be begun. He experienced a horror of the prospect, he knew too well what it meant for those who become the object of a nation-wide hunt. He tried to think what he could do, as they all rushed down the path, Ulyett’s bulky form leading, for he had been nearest the door and first through it when the sound of the departing car had given the alarm. In the distance they saw Olive’s tail-light disappear and heard her sound her horn, as if in a final message of farewell and defiance.

  “Get after her, get started, get the car going,” shouted Ulyett. “Hurry. Marks, jump to it.”

  Marks was the police chauffeur. He said:

  “Yes, sir. It’ll take time, her nose is the other way. Have to turn her, sir, and it’s very narrow here.”

  Olive’s car had been left headed towards town in the direction whence both she and the police had come. She had turned it on her arrival with the intention of backing it into the garage. But the police car was still headed as it had been left when they reached the cottage. Evidently by the time the car had been turned round and pursuit was practical, Olive would be far away.

  Ulyett expressed himself in fluent but unofficial language. It relieved his feelings but not the situation. Bobby said:

  “Beg pardon, sir. I came on my motor-bike. I left it just behind the cottage. I could try to catch up with Miss Farrar.”

  “Right. Get on with it,” said Ulyett promptly.

  Bobby raced away. Ulyett wiped his forehead and said to Simmonds:

  “He may be a pet and a favourite and all that, but somehow he’s always there when he’s wanted.”

  The head-light of his cycle was still on, so Bobby had no trouble in finding it, and a motor-cycle has the advantage over a big car that to swing it round in no matter how narrow a path is perfectly easy. In a moment Bobby had mounted and was flying along a
road – a narrow lane, rather – that was however quite straight, so that he could still see a rear-light in the distance.

  He supposed it must be hers. He felt he must overtake her at all costs. She must be persuaded it was useless to try to evade the police, much better in every way for her to go to them voluntarily than to await inevitable discovery and arrest.

  He supposed that probably her intention was to warn Peter Albert. But that was no good either. Warning him only meant directing fresh suspicion on him. Indeed what could she say except that he was one of several suspects and must be prepared for severe questioning by the authorities? But he must know that already, couldn’t help. Anyhow, there was no real evidence against him. His occupancy of a flat in the block also inhabited by Macklin might have a dozen satisfactory explanations. Yates lived there, too, for that matter. Besides, Bobby felt instinctively that Peter Albert was no murderer. He had not the air. That missing hundred pounds seemed to Bobby’s mind to prove his innocence. Of course, instinct can deceive, one can never be sure. Human nature is too strange a thing ever to be certain of. The most unexpected people do the strangest things. But then again there was always that missing hundred pounds. Peter Albert had plenty of money and in any case was certainly no thief. The fact of the stolen money seemed definitely to let him out. Also, and even more important, Olive was his friend and plainly trusted him still, in spite of all her fears.

  Only, he reminded himself once more, anyone can be deceived and place his trust, her trust, wrongly.

  Bobby told himself that all the same it would take quite a lot to make him see Peter Albert in the character of a cold-blooded murderer.

  The exhilaration of speed began to possess him. This new cycle of his had a pretty turn of speed and now he was roaring through the night at something like a mile a minute.

  But he did not seem to be gaining much.

  Luckily it was night and on the road there was no other traffic.

  By this time though they ought to have been right in the town again, if Olive was making for her home in London as he had assumed.

  The road itself, for they had not turned out of it, must have swerved eastward somehow, for now they appeared to be running north-east by east. He could tell that by the position of the north star, shining on his left.

  What did that mean, he wondered?

  He became aware that another car was following them. It was close behind. It was travelling at the same outrageous, reckless, magnificent speed. It must be in pursuit of them since no other reason could explain such a speed or adherence to the same route.

  If it was a police car, pretty quick work.

  Only was it?

  CHAPTER 18

  PURSUIT

  They had come into a main road now, one of those main roads where modern conditions have abolished the nocturnal pause and decreed that though the night cometh man must still work. Here all through the twenty- four hours, the great lorries rumbled to and fro, all the twenty-four hours the coffee-rooms and the garages were open, ready to give aid and refreshment to man and machine, and all through the hours of darkness, too, here and there by the roadside flickered small furtive fires as signs that by them less legal rest and refreshment could be obtained.

  Fortunately tonight most of the traffic seemed headed London-wards, probably in order that delivery might be made in good time in the morning. It was therefore largely confined to one side of the road; so that Olive in her small, fast car, Bobby following behind, behind them both the unknown following car, had a comparatively clear way, since they were travelling in the opposite direction.

  Even so, time and again, they all missed disaster by fractions of an inch as they fled on, scraping in narrow places by huge laden lorries with less than the thickness of a hand between them and the utter destruction the merest touch at that speed must have involved.

  “She’s crazy, crazy, crazy,” Bobby thought again and again as he saw the risks she took, risks greater for her who led, less for him who followed, less, too, by the fact that his cycle took up less space than her car; as he heard too the startled lorry drivers shouting their anger as he flashed by after Olive’s car had missed them so narrowly.

  As for the larger car, leaping in pursuit behind, Bobby had no idea how its driver managed to avoid catastrophe. Perhaps the lorries warned first by Olive’s frantic passage, then by his own, scarcely less frantic, drew in further to one side to give more room to the next madman.

  Once or twice Bobby fancied that this third car was obliged to slow down. If so, it soon caught up again, for it kept steadily in its place about two hundred yards in the rear.

  “They’ve speed in hand,” Bobby thought; “they don’t want to overtake us – yet. Why not?”

  And then again he thought:

  “Who are they?”

  But to that question there was no reply.

  Nor had he much time to consider it, as they rocketed through the night, this strange, bizarre procession, cheating catastrophe with every mile it traversed, the coffee-houses and the garages tossed behind almost as soon as they became visible, the lorry drivers with hardly time to shout their anger and their fear before light car, motor-cycle, bigger car, had flamed by and were gone.

  Many a garage, many a coffee-house, heard the tale that night, in many the tale of that wild race through the night is still told – with additions.

  In an earlier age indeed the story would soon have been that those cars and their drivers were of no mortal breed or make, so far indeed did it seem that they passed the limit of the possible, so little did it seem such dangers could be run, such risks taken and evaded, by those of the common race of man.

  “The girl’s mad,” Bobby said to himself once more.

  He was extracting from his cycle every ounce of speed, even the rosy optimism of the manufacturer had boasted it could give. But though he held the light car ahead he could not overtake it, and always at the same distance behind, roared the bigger pursuing car.

  Bobby was fairly sure it couldn’t be a police car. It had speed in hand, too, as was proved by the way in which if it ever dropped behind, it quickly recovered position again.

  “There’s going to be an almighty smash before long,” Bobby said to himself as there came wild shouting from a coffee-stall they rocketed by.

  A couple of lorries drawing up, one just starting off again, left here small room for passage. Olive only got past by ripping away fifty feet or so of fencing of which the impact sent her car literally leaping in the air, so that for two and twenty measured yards its wheels were off the ground.

  That it did not turn a complete somersault was sheer miracle; that in fact it alighted on four wheels and went speeding on its way, was yet another. The keeper of that coffee-room still tells the tale, still shows the spots he marked and measured, where the wheel tracks showed exactly how the car had left the ground, shot through the air, come down again on the level roadway to continue its wild onward rush – and often indeed does he get called a liar for his pains.

  “It’s the speed done it,” he retorts, “at a speed like that, no one knows what’ll happen – smithereens most like, of course, but times it’s all too quick even for a smash to catch up.”

  On his cycle that took up so much less room Bobby ran less risk in getting by. The big following car slowed down by necessity, since even on this night of miracle there had to be a limit to the possible. For a time Bobby thought it had been shaken off. But presently it was there again, keeping as before its old position, two hundred yards or so behind.

  “Speed to spare,” Bobby thought.

  A little to his own surprise he was finding a fierce joy in this madness of speed, this juggling with disaster, this drawing lots with death, this awareness of the night and all things in it flung behind as smoke tossed on the wings of the storm. It was physical life lived at its utmost. It was as though they had exceeded Nature, defied her laws, flung her a challenge, as in triumph they escaped the poor limits she thought she
had imposed when she gave to man but one poor pair of legs, and let the greyhound and the deer mock him with their swiftness, and the darting birds scorn his immobility.

  But what greyhound or deer had ever fled or pursued like this? what in comparison with this was the swiftness of the swoop of the falling bird?

  Speed! The intoxication of it ran through his veins, fired his brain, laughed in exultation with every throbbing pulse all through his being.

  Speed! It was speed, the madness, the wonder, the folly of it, that had made him almost forget his errand, forget indeed everything but itself, as it was speed, too, he supposed, that had made Olive mad.

  Speed! Well, if it ended in death, as he knew was more than likely but hardly cared, at least they would have lived as none had ever lived till these days, as few indeed knew life even to-day.

  Speed! How lovely, how fond, how foolish a thing when the joy of it seemed worth the purchasing even at so great a risk. He wondered a little if the soaring birds, too, thrilled to this beauty of swift motion, or the earth itself as it swung on its path through space at a speed to which his own was as though he stood still and dreamed.

  Yet none the less, for he was not quite drunk with speed, he was aware of a considerable relief when he found they had turned into a quieter road, one without lorries, coffee-rooms, bungalows, one where it seemed that they fled on through an uninhabited land, where they had perforce to go less recklessly, compelled at last to some show of caution by the twistings and turnings of the road.

  None the less Olive still kept the lead, Bobby still found himself unable to overtake her, the stranger car behind still kept its self-appointed place, some two hundred yards in the rear.

  “She can drive all right,” Bobby found himself muttering as he watched how Olive swung round bends, cut corners, avoided the traps laid continually by tangled hedge or hidden ditch.