Storm Island
Page 38
powerful neck bulged with the strain.
Suddenly she knew what she had to do.
She took her hand off the wheel, reached through the open window, and
poked him viciously in the eye with a long-nailed forefinger.
He let go and fell away, his hands covering his face.
The distance between him and the jeep increased rapidly.
Lucy realized she was crying like a baby.
Two miles from her cottage she saw the wheelchair.
It stood on the cliff top like a memorial, its metal frame and big
rubber tyres impervious to the incessant rain. Lucy approached it from
a slight dip, and saw its black outline framed by the slate-grey sky
and the boiling sea. It had awounded look, like the hole left by an
uprooted tree or a house with broken windows; as if its passenger had
been wrenched from it.
She recalled the first time she had seen it, in the hospital. It had
stood beside David's bed, new and shiny, and he had swung himself into
it expertly and swished up and down the ward, showing off.
"She's light as a feather made of aircraft alloy," he had said with
brittle enthusiasm, and sped off between the rows of beds. He had
stopped at the far end of the ward with his back to her, and after a
minute she went up behind him and saw that he was weeping. She had
knelt in front of him and held his hands, saying nothing.
It was the last time she had been able to comfort him.
There on the cliff-top, the rain and the salt wind would soon blemish
the alloy, and eventually it would rust and crumble, its rubber
perished, its leather seat rotted away.
Lucy drove past without slowing.
Three miles farther on, when she was half way between the two cottages,
she ran out of petrol.
She fought down the panic and tried to think rationally as the jeep
shuddered to a halt.
People walked at four miles an hour, she remembered reading somewhere.
Henry was athletic, but he had hurt his ankle, and even though it
seemed to have healed rapidly, the running he had done after the jeep
must have hurt it. Therefore she must be a good hour ahead of him.
(She had no doubt he would come after her: he knew as well as she did
that there was a wireless transmitter in Tom's cottage.) She had plenty
of time. In the back of the jeep was a half-gallon can of fuel for
just such occasions as this. She got out of the car, fumbled the can
out of the back, and opened the petrol cap.
Then she thought again, and the inspiration that came to her surprised
her by its fiendishness.
She replaced the petrol cap and went to the front of the car. She
checked that the ignition was off and opened the bonnet. She was no
mechanic, but she could identify the distributor cap and trace the
leads to the engine. She lodged the petrol can securely beside the
wheel arch and took off its cap.
There was a plug spanner in the tool kit. She took out a plug, checked
again that the ignition was off, and put the plug in the mouth of the
petrol can, securing it there with tape. Then she closed the bonnet.
When Henry came along he was certain to try to start the jeep. He
would switch on, the starter motor would turn, the plug would spark and
the half-gallon of petrol would explode.
She was not sure how much damage it would do, but she could be certain
it would be no help.
An hour later she was regretting her cleverness.
Trudging through the mud, soaked to the skin, with the sleeping child a
dead weight over her shoulder, she wanted nothing more than to lie down
and die. The booby-trap seemed, on reflection, dubious and risky:
petrol would burn, not explode; if there was not enough air in the
mouth of the can it might not even ignite; worst of all, Henry might
suspect a trap, look under the bonnet, dismantle the bomb, pour the
petrol into the tank and drive after her.
She contemplated stopping for a rest, but decided that if she sat down
she might never get up again.
She should have been in sight of Tom's house by now. She could not
possibly have got lost even if she had not walked this path a dozen
times before, the whole island just was not big enough to get lost
on.
She recognized a thicket where she and Jo had once seen a fox. She
must be about a mile from the shepherd's home. She could have seen it,
but for the rain.
She shifted Jo to the other shoulder, switched the shotgun from one
hand to the other, and forced herself to continue putting one foot in
front of the other.
When at last the cottage became visible through the sheeting rain she
could have cried with relief. She was nearer than she thought perhaps
a quarter of a mile.
Suddenly Jo seemed lighter, and although the last stretch was uphill
the only hill on the island she seemed to cover it in no time at all.
"Tom!" she called as she approached the front door, "Tom, oh, Tom!"
She heard the answering bark of Bob.
She went in by the front door.
"Tom, quickly!" Bob dodged excitedly about her ankles, barking
furiously. Tom could not be far away he was probably in the outhouse.
Lucy went upstairs and laid Jo on Tom's bed.
The wireless was in the bedroom, a complex-looking construction of
wires and dials and knobs. There was something that looked like a
Mdrse key: she touched it experimentally, and it gave a beep. A
thought came to her from the depths of her memory something from a
schoolgirl thriller the Morse code for SOS. She touched the key again:
three short, three long, three short.
Where was Tom?
She heard a noise, and rushed to the window.
The jeep was making its way up the hill to the house.
Henry had found the booby-trap, and used the petrol to fill the tank.
Where was Tom?
She rushed out of the bedroom, intending to go and bang on the outhouse
door. At the head of the stairs she paused. Bob was standing in the
open doorway of the other bedroom, the empty one.
"Come here, Bob," she said. The dog stood his ground, barking. She
went to him and bent to pick him up.
Then she saw Tom.
He lay on his back, on the bare floorboards of the vacant bedroom, his
eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, his cap upside-down on the
floor behind his head. His jacket was open, and there was a small spot
of blood on the shirt underneath. Close to his hand was a crate of
whisky, and Lucy found herself thinking wildly, irrelevantly: I didn't
know he drank that much.
She felt his pulse.
He was dead.
Think, think] Yesterday Henry had returned to Lucy's cottage battered,
as if he had been in a fight. That must have been when he killed
David. Today he had come here, to Tom's cottage, 'to fetch David' he
had said. But he had known David was not there. So why had he made
the journey?
Obviously, to kill Tom.
What drove him? What purpose burned inside him so fiercely that he
would get in a car, drive ten miles, stick a knife into an old man, and
drive back as
calm and quiet and composed as if he had been out to take
the air? Lucy shuddered.
Now she was on her own.
She took hold of the dog by its collar and dragged it away from the
body of its master. On impulse, she returned and buttoned the jacket
over the small stiletto wound which had killed the shepherd. Then she
closed the door on the corpse. She said to the dog: "He's dead, but I
need you."
She returned to the front bedroom and looked out of the window.
The jeep drew up in front of the house and stopped; and Henry got
out.
THIRTY-FOUR
Lucy's distress call was heard by the corvette.
"Captain, sir," said Sparks, "I just picked up an SOS from the
island."
The captain frowned.
"Nothing we can do until we can land a boat," he said.
"Did they say anything else?"
"Not a thing, sir. It wasn't even repeated."
The captain thought a little more.
"Nothing we can do," he said again.
"Send a signal to the mainland, reporting it. And keep Listening."
"Aye, aye, sir."
It was also picked up by an MI5 listening post on top of a Scottish
mountain. The R/T operator, a young man with abdominal wounds who had
been invalided out of the R.A.F and had only six months to live, was
trying to pick up German Navy signals from Norway, and he ignored the
SOS. However, he went off duty five minutes later, and he mentioned it
casually to his Commanding Officer.
"It was only broadcast once," he said.
"Probably a fishing vessel off the Scottish coast there might well be
the odd small ship in trouble, in this weather."
"Leave it with me," the CO said.
"I'll give the Navy a buzz. And I suppose I'd better inform Whitehall.
Protocol, y'know."
"Thank you, sir."
At the Royal Observer Corps station there was something of a panic. Of
course, SOS was not the signal an observer was supposed to give when he
sighed enemy aircraft, but they knew that Tom was old, and who could
say what he might send if he got excited? So the air raid sirens were
sounded, and all other posts were alerted, and anti-aircraft guns were
rolled out all over the east coast of Scotland, and the radio operator
tried frantically to raise Tom.
No German bombers came, of course; and the War Office wanted to know
why a full alert had been sounded when there was nothing in the sky but
a few bedraggled geese?
So they were told.
The Coastguard heard it, too.
They would have responded to it, if it had been on the correct
frequency, and if they had been able to establish the position of the
transmitter, and if that position had been within reasonable distance
of the coast.
As it was they guessed, from the fact that the signal came over on the
Observer Corps frequency, that it originated from Old Tom; and they
were already doing all they could about that situation, whatever the
hell that situation was.
When the news reached the below-deck card game on the cutter in the
harbour at Aberdeen, Slim dealt another hand of pontoon and said: "I'll
tell you what's happened. Old Tom's caught the prisoner-of-war and
he's sitting on his head waiting for the Army to arrive and take the
bugger away."
"Bollocks," said Smith, and there was general agreement with that
sentiment.
And the U-sos heard it.
She was still more than thirty nautical miles away from Storm Island,
but Weissman was roaming the dial to see what he could pick up and
hoping, improbably, to hear Glen Miller records from the American
Forces Network in Britain and his tuner happened to be on the right
wavelength at the right time. He passed the information to
Lieutenant-Commander Heer, adding: "It was not on our man's
frequency."
Major Wohl, who was still around and as irritating as ever, said: "Then
it means nothing."
Heer did not miss the opportunity to correct him "It means something,"
he said.
"It means that there may be some activity on the surface when we go
up."
"But this is unlikely to trouble us."
"Most unlikely," Heer agreed.
"Then it is meaningless."
"It is probably meaningless."
They argued about it all the way to the island.
So it was that within the space of five minutes the Navy, the Royal
Observer Corps, MI8 and the Coastguard alhphoned Godliman to tell him
about the SOS. And Godliman phoned Bloggs.
Bloggs had finally fallen into a deep sleep in front of the fire in the
scramble room. The shrill ring of the telephone startled him, and he
leaped to his feet, thinking that the planes were about to take off.
A pilot picked it up, said "Yes' into it twice, and handed it to
Bloggs.
"A Mr. Godliman for you."
Bloggs said: "Hello, Percy."
"Fred, somebody on the island just broadcast an SOS."
Bloggs shook his head to clear the last remaining clouds of sleep.
"Who?"
don't know. There was just the one signal, not repeated and they
don't seem to be receiving at all."
"Still, there's not much doubt now."
"No. Everything ready up there?"
"All except the weather."
"Good luck."
"Thanks."
Bloggs hung up and turned to the young pilot who was still reading War
and Peace.
"Good news," he told him.
"The bastard's definitely on the island."
"Jolly good show," said the pilot.
THIRTY-FIVE
Henry closed the door of the jeep and began walking quite slowly toward
the house. He was wearing David's hacking jacket again. There was mud
all over his trousers, where he had fallen, and his hair was plastered
wetly against his skull. He was limping slightly on his right foot.
Lucy backed away from the window and ran out of the bedroom and down
the stairs. The shotgun was on the floor in the hall, where she had
dropped it. She picked it up. Suddenly it felt very heavy. She had
never actually fired a gun, and she had no idea how to check whether
this one was loaded. She could figure it out, given time; but there
was no time.
She took a deep breath and flung open the front door.
"Stop!" she shouted. Her voice was pitched higher than she had
intended, and it sounded shrill and hysterical.
Henry smiled pleasantly and kept on walking.
Lucy pointed the gun at him, holding the barrel with her left hand and
the breech with her right Her finger was on the trigger.
"I'll kill you!" she yelled.
TDon't be silly, Lucy," he said mildly. How could you hurt me? After
all the things we've done together? Haven't we loved each other, a
little... ?"
It was true. She had told herself she could not fall in love with him,
and that was true too; but she had felt something for him, and if it
was not love, it was something very like.
"You knew about me this afternoon," he said, and now he was thirty
yards away, 'but it made no difference to you th
en, did it?"
That was true. For a moment, she saw in her mind's eye a vivid picture
of herself sitting astride him, holding his sensitive hands to her
breasts, and then she realized what he was doing We can work something
out, Lucy, we can still have each other ' and she pulled the trigger.
There was an ear-splitting crash, and the weapon jumped in her hands
like a live thing, its butt bruising her hip with the recoil. She
almost dropped it in shock. She had never imagined that firing a gun
would feel like that. She was quite deaf for a moment.
The shot went high over Henry's head, but all the same he ducked,
turned, and ran zigzagging back to the jeep. Lucy was tempted to fire
again, but she stopped herself just in time, realizing that if he knew
both barrels had been emptied there would be nothing to stop him