Storm Island
Page 21
of years because of the ever-stricter petrol rationing, and people who
had cars for essential journeys were liable to be prosecuted for going
a few yards off their necessary route for personal reasons. Faber had
read of a famous impresario gaoled for using petrol supplied for
agricultural purposes to take several actors from a theatre to the
Savoy hotel. Endless propaganda told people that a Lancaster bomber
needed 2,000 gallons to get to the Ruhr. Nothing would please Faber
more than to waste petrol which might otherwise be used to bomb his
homeland, in normal circumstances; but to be stopped now, with the
information he had taped to his chest, and arrested for a rationing
violation would be an unbearable irony.
It was difficult. Most traffic was military, but he had no military
papers. He could not claim to be delivering essential supplies because
he had nothing in the car to deliver. He frowned. Who travelled,
these days? Sailors on leave, officials, rare holiday makers, skilled
workmen ... That was it. He would be an engineer, a specialist in some
esoteric field like high-temperature gearbox oils, going to solve a
manufacturing problem in a factory at Inverness. If he were asked
which factory, he would say it was classified. (His fictitious
destination had to be a long way from the real one so that he would
never be questioned by someone who knew for certain there were no such
factory.) He doubted whether consulting engineers ever wore overalls
like the ones he had stolen from the elderly sisters but anything was
possible in wartime.
Having figured all that out, he felt he was reasonably safe from any
random spot checks. The danger of being stopped by someone who was
looking specifically for Henry Faber, fugitive spy, was another
problem. They had that picture They knew his face. His face!
and before long they would have a description of the car in which he
was travelling. He did not think they would set up roadblocks, as they
had no way of guessing where he was headed; but he was sure that every
policeman in the land would be on the lookout for the grey Morris
Cowley Bullnose, registration number MLN 29.
If he were spotted in the open country, he would not be captured
immediately, for country policemen had bicycles, not cars. But the
policeman would telephone his headquarters, and cars would be after
Faber within minutes. If he saw a policeman, he decided, he would have
to ditch this car, steal another, and divert from his planned route.
However, in the sparsely populate Scottish lowlands there was a good
chance he could get all the way to Aberdeen without passing a country
policeman. The towns would be different. There, the danger of being
chased by a police car was very great. He would be unlikely to escape:
his car was old and relatively slow, and the police were generally good
drivers. His best chance would be to get out of the vehicle and hope
to lose himself in crowds or back streets. He contemplated ditching
the car and stealing another each time he was forced to enter a major
town. The problem there was that he would be leaving a trail a mile
wide for MI5 to follow. Perhaps the best solution was a compromise: he
would drive into the towns but try to use only the back streets. He
looked at his watch. He would reach Glasgow around dusk, and
thereafter he would benefit from the darkness.
Well, it was not satisfactory, but the only way to be totally safe was
not to be a spy.
As he topped the one-thousand-feet-high Beattock Summit, it began to
rain. Faber stopped the car and got out to raise the canvas roof. The
air was oppressively warm. Faber looked up. The sky had clouded over
very quickly. Thunder and lightning were promised.
As he drove on he discovered some of the little car's shortcomings.
Wind and rain leaked in through several flaws in the canvas roof, and
the small wiper sweeping the top half of the horizontally divided
windscreen provided only a tunnel-like view of the road ahead. As the
terrain became progressively more hilly, the engine note began to sound
faintly ragged. It was hardly surprising: the twenty-year-old car was
being pushed hard.
The shower ended. The threatened storm had not arrived, but the sky
remained dark and the atmosphere forbidding.
Faber passed through Crawford, nestling in green hills; Abington, a
church and a Post Office on the west bank of the River Clyde; and
Lesmahagow, on the edge of a heathery moor.
Half an hour later he reached the outskirts of Glasgow. As soon as he
entered the built-up area, he turned north off the main road, hoping to
circumvent the city. He followed a succession of minor roads, crossing
the major arteries into the city's east side, until he reached
Cumbernauld Road, where he turned east again and sped out of the
city.
It had been quicker that he expected. His luck was holding.
He was on the A8o road, passing factories, mines and farms. More Scots
place-names drifted in and out of his consciousness: Millerston,
Stepps, Muirhead, Mollinsburn, Condorrat.
His luck ran out between Cumbernauld and Stirling.
He was accelerating along a straight stretch of road, slightly
downhill, with open fields on either side. As the speedometer needle
touched forty-five there was a sudden, very loud noise from the engine;
a heavy rattle, like the sound of a large chain pulling over a cog. He
slowed to thirty, but the noise did not get perceptively quieter.
Clearly some large and important piece of the mechanism had failed.
Faber listened carefully. It was either a cracked ball-bearing in the
transmission, or a hole in a big end. Certainly it was nothing so
simple as a blocked carburettor or a dirty sparking-plug; nothing that
could be repaired outside a workshop.
He pulled up and looked under the bonnet. There seemed to be a lot of
oil everywhere, but otherwise he could see no clues. He got back
behind the wheel and drove off. There was a definite loss of power,
but the car would still go.
Three miles farther on, steam began to billow out of the radiator.
Faber realized that the car would soon stop altogether. He looked for
a place to dump it.
He found a mud track leading off the main road, presumably to a farm.
One hundred yards from the road, the track curved behind a blackberry
bush. Faber parked the car close to the bush and killed the engine.
The hiss of escaping steam gradually subsided. He got out and locked
the door. He felt a twinge of regret for Emma and Jessie, who would
find it very difficult to get their car repaired before the end of the
war.
He walked back to the main road. From there, the car could not be
seen. It might be a day or even two before the abandoned vehicle
aroused suspicion. By then, Faber thought, I may be in Berlin.
He began to walk. Sooner or later he would hit a town where he could
steal another vehicle. He was doing well enough: it was less than
twenty-four hours since he had left London, and h
e still had a whole
day before the U-boat arrived at the rendezvous at six p.m. tomorrow.
The sun had set long ago, and now darkness fell suddenly. Faber could
hardly see. Fortunately there was a painted white line down the middle
of the road a safety innovation made necessary by the blackout and he
was just about able to follow it. Because of the night silence he
would hear an oncoming car in plenty of time.
In fact only one car passed him. He heard its deep-throated engine in
the distance, and went off the road a few yards to lie out of sight
until it had gone. It was a large car, a Vauxhall Ten, Faber guessed,
and it was travelling at speed. He let it go by, then got up and
resumed walking. Twenty minutes later he saw it again, parked by the
roadside. He would have taken a detour across the field if he had
noticed the car in time, but its lights were off and its engine silent,
and he almost bumped into it in the darkness.
Before he could consider what to do, a torch shone up toward him from
under the car's bonnet, and a voice said: "I say, is anybody there?"
Faber moved into the beam and said: "Having trouble?"
"I'll say."
The torch was pointed down, and as Faber moved closer he could see, by
the reflected light, the moustached face of a middle-aged man in a
double-breasted coat. In his other hand the man held, rather
uncertainly, a large spanner; seeming unsure of what to do with it.
Faber looked at the engine.
"What's wrong?"
"Loss of power," the man said, pronouncing it "Lorse of par."
"One moment she was going like a top, the next she started to hobble.
I'm afraid I'm not much of a mechanic." He shone the torch at Faber
again.
"Are you?" he finished hopefully.
"Not exactly," Faber said, 'but I know a disconnected lead when I see
one." He took the torch from the man, reached down into the engine,
and plugged the stray lead back on to the cylinder head.
"Try her now."
The man got into the car and started the engine.
"Perfect!" he shouted over the noise.
"You're a genius! Hop in."
It crossed Faber's mind that this might be an elaborate Ml5 trap, but
he dismissed the thought: in the unlikely event they knew where he was,
why should they tread softly? They could as easily send twenty
policemen and a couple of armoured cars to pick him up.
He got in.
The driver pulled away and moved rapidly up through the gears until the
car was travelling at a good speed. Faber made himself comfortable.
The driver said: "By the way, I'm Richard Porter."
Faber thought quickly of the identity card in his wallet.
"James Baker."
"How do you do. I must have passed you on the road back there didn't
see you."
Faber realized the man was apologizing for not picking him up everyone
picked up hitch-hikers since the petrol shortage.
"It's okay," Faber said.
"I was probably off the road, behind a bush, answering a call of
nature. I did hear a car."
"Have you come far?" Porter offered a cigar.
"It's good of you, but I don't smoke," Faber said.
"Yes, I've come from London."
"Hitch-hiked all the way?"
"No, my car broke down in Edinburgh. Apparently it requires a spare
part which isn't in stock, so I had to leave it at the garage."
"Hard luck. Well, I'm going to Aberdeen, so I can drop you anywhere
along the way."
Faber thought fast. This was a piece of good fortune. He closed his
eyes and pictured the map of Scotland.
"That's marvelous," he said.
"I'm going to Banff, so Aberdeen would be a great help. But I was
planning to take the high road, because I didn't get myself a pass is
Aberdeen a Restricted Area?"
"Only the harbour," Porter said.
"Anyway, you needn't worry about that son of thing while you're in my
car I'm a JP and a member of the Watch Committee. How's that?"
Faber smiled in the darkness. It was his lucky day.
"Thank you," he said. He decided to change the subject of the
conversation.
"Is that a full-time job? Being a magistrate, I mean."
Porter put a match to his cigar and puffed smoke.
"Not really. I'm semi-retired, y'know. Used to be a solicitor, until
they discovered my weak heart."
"Ah." Faber tried to put some sympathy into his voice.
"Hope you don't mind the smoke?" Porter waved the fat cigar.
"Not a bit."
What takes you to Banff?"
"I'm an engineer. There's a problem in a factory ... actually, the job
is sort of classified."
Porter held up his hand.
"Don't say another word. I understand."
There was silence for a while. The car flashed through several towns.
Porter obviously knew the road very well, to drive so fast in the
blackout. The big car gobbled up the miles. Its smooth progress was
soporific. Faber smothered a yawn.
"Damn, you must be tired," Porter said.
"Silly of me. Don't be too polite to have a nap."
"Thank you," said Faber.
"I will." He closed his eyes.
The motion of the car was like the rocking of a train, and Faber had
his arrival nightmare again, only this time it was slightly different.
Instead of dining on the train and talking politics with a fellow
passenger, he was obliged for some unknown reason to travel in the coal
tender, sitting on his suitcase radio with his back against the hard
iron side of the truck. When the train arrived at Waterloo, everyone
including the disembarking passengers was carrying a little duplicated
photograph of Faber in the running team; and they were all looking at
each other and comparing the faces they saw with the face in the
picture. At the ticket barrier the collector took his shoulder and
said: "You're the man in the photo, aren't you?" Faber found himself
dumb. All he could do was stare at the photograph and remember the way
he had run to win that cup. God, how he had run: he had peaked a shade
too early, started his final burst a quarter of a mile sooner than he
had planned, and for the last 500 metres he wanted to die and now
perhaps he would die, because of that photograph in the ticket
collector's hand ... The collector was saying: "Wake up! Wake up!" and
suddenly Faber was back in Richard Porter's Vauxhall Ten, and it was
Porter who was telling him to wake up.
His right hand was half way to his left sleeve, where the stiletto was
sheathed, in the split-second before he remembered that as far as
Porter was concerned James Baker was an innocent hitch-hiker. Then his
hand dropped and he relaxed.
"You wake up like a soldier," Porter said with amusement.
"This is Aberdeen."
Faber noted that 'soldier' had been pronounced 'sol-juh', and recalled
that Porter was a magistrate and a member of the police authority. He
looked at the man in the dull light of early day: Porter had a red face
and a waxed moustache, and his camel-coloured overcoat looked
expensive. He was wealthy and powerful in this town,
Faber guessed. If
he were to disappear he would be missed almost immediately. Faber
decided not to kill him, Faber said: "Good morning."
He looked out of the window at the granite city. They were moving
slowly along the main street with shops on either side.
There were several early workers about, all moving purposefully in the
same direction: fishermen, Faber reckoned. It seemed a cold, windy
place.
Porter said: "Would you like to have a shave and a bit of breakfast
before you continue your journey? You're welcome to come to my
place."
"You're very kind ' "Not at all. If it weren't for you I should still
be on the A8o at Stirling, waiting for a garage to open."
' but I won't, thank you. I want to get on with the journey."
Porter did not insist, and Faber suspected that he was relieved not to
have his offer taken up. The man said: "In that case, I'll drop you at
George Street that's the start of the A6, and it's a straight road to
Banff." A moment later he stopped the car at a corner.
"Here you are."
Faber opened the door; "Thanks for the lift."
"A pleasure." Porter offered a handshake.