The man took the keys with a curt nod and then seemed to reflect a moment. Finally, half-dismissing Claire, he turned to the boy and jerked his head towards the door. To Claire his meaning was quite clear. John was to accompany him, presumably as a hostage, and when she realised this she reacted violently, concern driving out shock and indignation.
‘No!’ she shouted, ‘leave the boy and take the car! You have petrol—enough petrol to get you sixty miles, and if you want money …’
With a kind of frenzy she whipped up her bag again and emptied it on the table. A lipstick clinked into a saucer and a spread of letters and papers cascaded to the floor. Their flutter roused Thirza somewhat and she half raised herself on her elbows but when the man gestured with his gun she subsided again. John, without fuss, got up, swallowed his cake and reached out a hand towards his mother, but then the man acted quickly and savagely. He stepped swiftly over the prostrate Thirza, spun the boy round by the shoulder and propelled him towards the open door with his knee. Then they were gone and the door was shut. Claire heard their steps in the passage and then a sharp, metallic sound followed by a loud crash.
The noise galvanised her into action. Shouting protests at the top of her voice she scrambled over Thirza and flung her weight against the door. It gave but only an inch or so. In the absence of a key Shratt had placed a hall chair under the outer handle. Still shrieking she wasted several seconds wrestling with it before turning and running through into the estate office with some idea of throwing open the garden door and reaching the forecourt via the terrace. She had her hand on the door when she remembered the man’s eyes, and paused.
From the library behind her she heard Thirza retching but the sound had no significance. Very rapidly she was coming to terms with the immediate situation in the forecourt, a car, a potential killer with the gun, and young John being carried away God knew where or for what purpose. With a tremendous effort she was able to concentrate on possibilities and her first thought was the telephone in the hall. Then she related the sounds she heard immediately after the door had been barred. On the way out the man must have ripped out the installation and the crash she had heard had been the wall-box striking the tiled floor.
The next sound she heard was more definitive. It was the growl of the self-starter and the asthmatic cough of the old engine. Something had to be done at once and clearly it would have to be done by her. Remedies began to pour through her mind like a shower of balls bouncing down a long flight of stairs but each of them escaped into an area of improbability. She stared through the glazed half of the garden door and saw the car in the act of turning. The young man was trying to make the turn in one but the narrowness of the drive and the steep camber of its surface made this difficult. John, sitting nearest Claire, still looked blank, almost as though he was sleep-walking, but his expression must have deceived both Claire and Shratt for when the car was reversing, and the German’s head was turned, he suddenly jerked himself upright and half-projected himself over the edge of the nearside door. The German reacted very quickly. Lifting his left hand from the wheel he struck the boy’s cheek with his open palm and the sound of the impact, and the cry that followed it, reached Claire where she stood with her nose pressed to the pane.
It might have been this action on Shratt’s part that decided her next move in that it raised the level of her indignation high above that of her fear. Out of the tail of her eye she saw the means of combating the man’s outrage, the sleek, brown stock of Paul’s deer-rifle, the weapon she had given him for his sixty-first birthday present about the time of Dunkirk.
He no longer carried it on patrol, preferring to wear his Webley revolver and she was, as it happened, fairly familiar with the weapon. During the invasion scare, more from a sense of fun than with serious purpose in mind, Paul had taught her to use it, practising on marks in the orchard, and although by no means proficient she had at least learned to sight it correctly and to squeeze rather than jerk the trigger. She reached up and tore it from the peg, balancing it in her hands and experiencing a kind of demoniac pleasure in having the means to challenge a bully on his own terms. It was in fact, a far more formidable rifle than Shratt’s having a magazine containing eight rounds operated by a bolt action. She knew that Paul did not keep it loaded but she also knew where he kept a full magazine, in an old tobacco tin beside his inkwell, and when she tore open the tin the magazine was there, half-buried in paper clips, screws and discarded fountain pens. She clipped it on and worked the bolt in the five seconds that it took Shratt to straighten out and point the car towards the topmost curve of the drive but even so she was almost too late. The car was still warm from the drive home from Paxtonbury and responded vigorously to the thrust of the accelerator, shooting off at what seemed to her a prodigious speed. Without waiting to wrestle with the catch of the garden door she jabbed the barrel through the glass and fired, aiming at the offside rear tyre.
She must have missed for the car shot round the laurel clump and continued its rapid descent of the drive but she was not beaten yet and when it reappeared on the far side of the laurels she fired twice in rapid succession before the first chestnut tree could mask the target. This time one of the shots must have struck home for there was a subdued explosion and the Morris lurched on to the grass verge, careering along within inches of the palings and then regaining the gravel with a long, grinding scrunch. After that, however, it continued on down the incline and Claire, thrusting wide the door and running on to the terrace, glimpsed its passage between the narrowly-spaced chestnuts of the drive. Seconds later there was a confused outcry from the direction of the gate and after that a prolonged uproar, culminating in a clatter like a pile of empty paint tins being tossed on to a stone floor. Silence followed as Claire, reloading as she ran, moved across the drive to a point beyond the laurels where she could survey the avenue as far as the twin stone pillars.
She could see little enough for the lower half of the drive was shrouded in a cloud of dust but what she did see filled her with a mixture of relief and dread. The car’s offside wheel was clear of the ground and still spinning, and beyond it, clear of the dust, stood the solid figure of Henry Pitts, feet astride and arms outspread, as if in the act of coaxing an obstinate heifer into a pen.
V
In the many post-war Valley inquests held to determine who, in fact, played the major role in checking Otto Shratt’s career as escaper extraordinary, no final decision was ever reached. The Morris was checked and rechecked (before being demolished for souvenirs), the participants questioned so frequently and at such length that they grew impatient with the subject. Various on-the-spot written accounts were scrutinised by Valley sages for flaws and discrepancies and, years later, by radio and television pundits, projecting ‘We Were There’ programmes to audiences who were beginning to think of Hitler in terms of Napoleon and Kruger. The truth was, of course, no one person achieved the honour of restoring Shratt to his indignant escort but three—Claire Craddock, Henry Pitts and young John—each made independent contributions to what occurred at the foot of Shallowford House drive that July evening. The contribution of the two former could be described as deliberate; that of the latter involuntary.
When Henry Pitts reached for his rook-rifle outside Sam Potter’s gate and found nothing more lethal than a bunch of stinging nettles he did not, at first, suspect theft but was inclined to attribute the absence of the gun to his own absent-mindedness and Sam’s homebrewed scrumpy. The latter consideration did not engage him for more than a moment. He had been drinking cider all his life and had been known to down eleven pints at The Raven on national occasions, such as Mafeking Night and the collapse of the General Strike in May 1926. Sam’s cider, of course, was powerful stuff but he had only swallowed three half-pint mugs and his head was clear and his gait steady.
After a moment’s puzzled reflection he returned to Sam’s kitchen and made a thorough search and when it failed to produce the miss
ing weapon he went down on his hands and knees and crawled the length of the picket fence. Then, growing more puzzled every moment, he crossed the path where his countryman’s eye noted a fresh tear in a rhododendron stalk exactly opposite the gate. Muttering ‘the bliddy young thief’, and suspecting now that his gun had been borrowed by one of the youngsters following him as rearguard beaters, he pushed into the bushes where he found a far more sinister clue in the marshy ground adjoining the lake.
It consisted of four patterned depressions, two round and shallow and two, a calf’s-length away, sharper and deeper. Henry had floundered in mud for nearly three years on the Western Front and he recognised the tracks for what they were without any difficulty at all. The shallow depressions were made by knees and the ones behind them by toecaps. They told him that whoever had taken his rifle had been crouching there when he put it aside to open the gate and from this fact he deduced that the theft had been furtive and deliberate and not a casual act of borrowing as he had at first supposed. Having decided this he made an identification in a single leap. Only a hunted man would crouch in the bushes and watch for a chance to steal a weapon and the realisation of what his carelessness had achieved made him break out in a cold sweat.
‘By Christ!’ he said aloud, ‘tiz that bliddy Nazi! He’ll do mischief and I’ll be to blaame vor it.’
The certainty of being pilloried up and down the Valley as an accessory to nameless Nazi outrages acted as a spur to his powers of deduction. Having, albeit innocently, armed a truculent escaped prisoner, Henry took upon himself the full responsibility for recapturing the miscreant. On the assumption that Shratt would have turned away from the line of beaters he waddled along the margin of the lake looking for evidence of route and because the ground here was soft his search was rewarded by a whole series of footprints that recrossed the track about two hundred yards west of the cottage.
He was about to tackle the long timbered slope to the ridge when it occurred to him that he was weaponless so he hurried back along the path hoping to find one of the fire brooms stacked close to the fence and thinking he could use the stave as a quarterstaff. On reaching the rack, however, it struck him that Sam might have a much handier weapon in his tool shed and so he had, a massive, six-foot pitchfork, with curved wooden prongs, the kind of agricultural implement that had been out of fashion in the Valley when Henry was a boy. He seized it gratefully and returned to the islet at a stumbling trot, plunging up the overgrown slope without the customary breather that he accepted as obligatory between all bursts of energy these days.
The ascent nearly killed him. At the point where the trees fell away his heart was pounding against his ribs and he was bathed in sweat but he saw something that made him redouble rather than slacken his pace on the easier slope down to the Big House. It was the stealthy retreat of Otto Shratt from the forecourt to the stableyard after his initial reconnaissance of the car.
Henry Pitts knew his limitations. He was sixteen stone and badly out of condition, even for a man nudging sixty-five, but he also knew his duty and was aware that, in the absence of visible allies, he must tackle this man alone, notwithstanding the disparity between a loaded rook-rifle and a wooden-pronged pitchfork. At the same time the lessons of the Somme and Passchendaele returned to him in his hour of need and he checked his pace somewhat, deciding on the indirect approach. Instead of setting up a view-halloo and rushing upon his quarry he took advantage of the eastern side of the hedgerow and worked his way down through the Shallowford rose-garden and across the edge of the eastern paddock to the double gates at the foot of the drive. There was no doubt in his mind that Shratt intended to steal Claire Craddock’s runabout and that he was even now searching the stables for petrol. There was only one vehicular exit from Shallowford House and for this reason the big iron gates had never been closed in Henry’s memory. He would shut them, wait in ambush for Shratt to get out of the car, and then attack him before he could regain it, preferably whilst his back was turned.
Laying aside his pitchfork he grabbed hold of the rusted ironwork on his side of the drive but he had not bargained for the seals of the years The heavy gate, sunk on one hinge and disconnected from the other did not yield an inch. Weeds anchored it to the ground and its sagging weight had dug a deep furrow in the gravel. Desperately he ran across the drive and put shoulder to the other gate reasoning that half a barrier was better than none but this was as rooted as its fellow. Lacking crowbar there seemed no hope at all of implementing his plan.
At that moment, when he was exerting his not inconsiderable strength on the lodge half of the gate, his attention was distracted by an outcry from the head of the drive. A woman was shouting and a second or so later there was a crash of glass and a single shot backed by the thin roar of a motor-engine. The sounds injected guilt into Henry with the thrust of a blunt hypodermic needle. Someone—Claire Craddock most probably—was being shot down in her own house by a Nazi, and that Nazi had been equipped to kill by his—Henry Pitts’—carelessness. The realisation of this caused him so much dismay that he stopped heaving and stood forlornly in the centre of the gateway staring up the drive and at a loss what action to take.
Then the decision was made for him. Two more shots and a soft explosion prefaced the appearance of the bull-nosed Morris as it lurched round the first curve of the drive, mounted the grass verge and regained the roadway in a matter of yards. It approached him uncertainly but at a surprising speed and it is to his credit that he did not leap behind the gate pillar but stood his ground, as though he intended to use himself as a living barrier to the car’s further progress.
Then another unexpected thing happened. The car began to lurch, first to its offside then to its nearside, and finally appeared to continue its descent almost broadside on to within about five yards of where Henry stood. Lacking even his pitchfork Henry resorted to the only means of aggression left to him. He began to make threatening gestures and hurl abuse at the approaching enemy, prancing up and down like an elderly witch-doctor in personal combat with a legion of devils. Improbably his incantations seemed to have some effect for the car, now seen to contain not only the German but also young John Craddock, sheered away to Henry’s right, mounted the verge again and crashed broadside on into the gate pillar after which it bounced back and canted over at an angle of forty-five degrees.
To his immense relief Henry saw John scramble out, duck through the paddock railings that were now supporting the car, and run diagonally across the paddock at what Henry later described as ‘a bliddy hell of a lick’. At the same time the German bobbed up from the shattered offside of the car and he too seemed to be unhurt for he glared at Henry and at once reached back into the debris for his rifle.
Henry himself was never specific on what occurred from that moment on. All that is certain is that Henry found his pitchfork and the German found his rifle so that they confronted one another at a range of about twelve feet. Something made the German hesitate. Either he was dazed by the impact or sufficiently clearheaded to reflect upon the dire penalties of shooting a civilian whilst on the run. Whatever the reason he turned aside, scrambled from the wreckage of the Morris and made a dash for the hedge abutting the lodge. Henry knew that pursuit on foot was out of the question. Even had he not been blown by his previous exertions he would have lost his man in a hundred yards. So he did what seemed to come naturally to him and used his pitchfork as a javelin, hurling it across the width of the drive with the full strength of his arm.
It was the luckiest toss imaginable. Its prongs enclosed Shratt’s neck just as he was gathering himself for a leap down from the hedge and the terrible weight of the blow not only precipitated him head over heels into Maureen Rudd’s delphiniums, but almost broke his neck into the bargain.
Henry, hardly able to believe his good luck, gaped at the hedge for half a minute before running across to the gate and entering the garden. When he saw his adversary flat on his face, and Smut’s roo
k-rifle backsight-deep in the soft soil of the aster bed, he roared with triumph. He had every right to exult. Shratt was the first man brought down by a javelin hereabouts for more than a thousand years.
Claire, still holding the deer-rifle, was beside him in a moment and together they stared down at the prostrate foe. He noticed that her face, ordinarily a pleasing pink, was the colour of clotted cream and that her hands shook so violently that they had no business to be holding a loaded firearm. Taking the rifle he said quietly, ‘Did ’ee do any mischief upalong?’
‘No,’ Claire said, ‘the boy is all right and Thirza just fainted. He is a German, isn’t he?’
‘Aar,’ Henry said, ‘’Er jumped a train backalong but I dorn reckon he’ll try it again for a spell.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘No, he baint dead but he’s out cold. I’ll watch un while you go an’ ring the Command Post an’ police.’
‘I can’t. He ripped the phone out when he took John away.’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 12
