by Jo Bannister
The rifle clattered across the concrete and came to rest somewhere behind me, but I ignored it. I had a weapon I was effective with, and I wasn’t turning my back on my enemy to exchange it for another I was less familiar with, which might anyway have been damaged by my attack. I followed the impetus of the fork round the corner, without giving Sally time to anticipate the move or myself time to think better of it, and found her standing there, somehow flat-footed, her hands apart. She was staring at them in surprise, as if she knew something had changed but hadn’t yet worked out what, and a fraction of a second after I saw her, she saw me and her expression changed.
To fear. For the brief, glorious moment before she turned tail and ran, I looked into her eyes and saw that she was afraid. Sally Fane, who had the courage to ride the arrogant Gilgamesh at speed across fixed timber, who had the iron nerve necessary to plot and execute the means of wresting him from his owner, who had the cool command to lie low in her own house for weeks while the police combed the countryside for her and then come here with this parting gift for me before finally escaping the country and the pursuit. All that spoke of courage—of a strange kind, perhaps, but a high order.
And whatever happened next—whether she triumphed or justice did, whether she got clean away and made a comfortable new life for herself down the street from Ronnie Biggs, or was picked up and spent the next eight or ten years behind bars, and whether either Harry or I lived to see it—for that brief, glorious moment the sight of me lurching round the corner at her, bruised and bloody and pretty near mad with rage, whirling a stable fork as if in some esoteric eastern death ritual, struck sheer primitive fear into the very heart of her. If she had run away from nothing else in her life before, she ran away from me then. She thought I was ready to kill her, and the terror and helplessness of that, which she had already visited on me and Harry and David Aston, came home to roost.
And she was right. I could have killed her, even with that messy close-quarters weapon. When your back’s against the wall, you can manage all sorts of actions not necessarily sanctioned by church and state. You do what you have to in order to survive, and your mind helps you out by tapping into some reservoir of atavistic passion, so that you actually want somebody wriggling bloodily on the tines of your fork. Great-great-aunt Wilma, with the bone through her nose and the nice line in mastodon cutlets, was in there swinging with me and would have joined me in a rousing cheer if the murderous weapon had connected with anything better than fresh air.
Wilma was out of luck. The murderous swipe was too long in the building: by the time it arrived, Sally had jumped back out of range, turned, and was pelting hell for leather up the top yard. With the gun on the ground behind me—ditto my husband—I pursued her only with a bellow of unusual volume and obscenity. Then I turned to see to Harry.
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even unconscious, but it was nasty enough. The hole was on the right side of his chest, two inches above the nipple, and the fact that it wasn’t bleeding much on the outside was no guarantee that it wasn’t bleeding inside. One lung seemed certain to be damaged, and the danger with that was not that he couldn’t breathe adequately with the other but that air escaping from the punctured lung into the pleural cavity could force the collapse of the good one. The bullet hole should allow any such leakage to escape, but you couldn’t be sure. Guns inflict notoriously unpredictable wounds.
In the old days, of course, when policemen all chain-smoked and were required to meet the stringent standards set by the Guild of Tobacco Processors before taking their sergeant’s exam, he’d have had a cigarette-case in his breast pocket, ideally situated to deflect that bullet harmlessly into a stable door. So much for the Government Health Warning.
As I bent over him he cranked his eyes up to look at me, and there was shock and pain in his face, as well as that distinctive, indefinable something that made him Harry Marsh and no one else: a characteristic cocktail of fortitude and impatience, deep seriousness and wry self-mockery.
He said, “According to the police manual, that’s not supposed to happen.” His voice was soft and breathy, with a low murmur that could have been blood; but he didn’t sound to me like a man at death’s door.
A lump arrived suddenly in my throat and was only pushed down again by some determined blinking and swallowing. The biggest thing in my world just then was my desire not to lose him. “Shut up and lean forward.”
That hurt, enough for his breath to catch and then hurry on laboriously, but he rested his forehead heavily on my aching shoulder while I checked his back for a second hole. There wasn’t one; the bullet was still in his chest. The good news was that there was no exit wound four times the size of the entry pumping blood out of sight down the stable door.
He wasn’t by any clinical assessment fit to be left, but I had no choice: he needed a ride to the hospital more than he needed my attentions. There was no prospect of a convenient passer-by, and anyway he wasn’t going to come to much harm in the time it would take me to break Ellen’s window and use her phone. Really the only thing that bothered me was that I didn’t know where Sally had gone. She ought to have been heading for the rendezvous with her plane as fast as her athlete’s legs could carry her, but we’d come unstuck before, trying to predict what Sally would do.
I retrieved the rifle and laid it across Harry’s knees, pressing his hand over the stock. His attention was wandering. I spoke sharply to get it back. “Listen you. Stay awake for the next five minutes. If Sally Fane comes round that corner, put a hole in her. Also if that horse does. But if something short, dirty, and waving a bloody hanky does, hold your fire—it’ll be me.”
His fingers gripped mine with a kind of frail tenacity that was an echo of his sapped strength. “Be careful.” Pain was beginning to chisel through the shock, tensing the facial muscles which had at first lain slack under the pallid skin. There was more stress in his breathing too.
I put his hand back on the rifle. “I’ll take my trusty fork, and I’ll be back before you know I’ve gone.”
I went back to where it all began, jogging stiffly round the big, gently mouldering house to the study. The glass panes in the French window were small and not old, and when I broke one, I could make an aperture I could walk through instead of having to scramble. The way I felt, that mattered, but it would also be quicker. If I triggered the alarm, so much the better.
I never reached the phone. I broke the glass with the handle of the fork, reached carefully through to the latch, and pushed the window open. No alarm rang out, though it could have been one of those silent ones reporting to the local nick. And then, as I went to step inside, I sensed or saw—perhaps reflected in the glass as the French window swung open—an explosion of movement behind me, and instead of doing the intelligent thing, which would have been to dash inside, run upstairs, and lock myself in the bathroom, I turned round to see what it was.
It was Gilgamesh, still wearing nothing but a rope halter and a knotted rein, reunited with his crazed Valkyrie of a rider and coming at me like a cavalry charge. They must have come up the field while I was vandalizing Ellen’s window, but I hadn ‘t seen them until they were within a stride or two of the terrace. I just had time to thank God for the sheer four-foot rise from the field up to the paved promenade, which would keep the horse away from me even if it didn’t deter Sally, and then they jumped it.
As the horse soared before me, filling all my vision with his great bulk and his fallen-angel grace, my mouth dropped open and I would most certainly have screamed if terror hadn’t paralysed even that function. I thought I was dead. I thought there was nowhere for that horse to land except on me, and after that, they’d have trouble getting together enough bits for a decent funeral.
He had no intention of touching down on anything as squishy and insubstantial as a human being. The clatter of hooves on pavement was like a brief barrage of heavy artillery, then he had his feet under him and full control of his actions, and his shoulder, as he rocketed
past, knocked me into the wall beside the French window and left me rolling in his wake across the terrace. I suppose that was when I lost the fork. I didn’t see where it went and knew only that I was unarmed again.
Paving stones aren’t like grass: the momentum of his passage took more killing when he couldn’t dig his heels in and slide to a halt. The extra seconds it took Sally to rein him back and turn him gave me thinking space—not much, but all I was going to get. I had to get this right first time.
I could still get inside, but I’d get no chance to use the phone. I could probably lock myself where she couldn’t get at me, but I could do nothing about summoning help from there. And if she couldn’t get at me, she’d go down the yard and have another go at Harry. She knew he was injured. Since I hadn’t got it, she probably knew he had the gun, but both of us knew his ability to use it at all accurately must be suspect. There was a strong possibility that he was lying there unconscious by now, in which case I had no doubt she would take the gun out of his limp hands and, helpless as he was, kill him with it. Even if he got off a shot first, there wasn’t much prospect of him stopping her before she reached the gun. If she left me, it would be to kill my husband.
I was well below par myself, but I was a long way off helpless. I wasn’t going to send her to Harry. I rolled away from the house, over the edge of the terrace.
She seemed to lose track of me for a moment then and rode back up the terrace and peered into the study. I crept quickly along the front of the house, hidden under the face of the retaining wall. I knew where I was heading, the one battlefield where I might have some kind of an edge, but it was a long way for someone on foot to keep ahead of someone on horseback and every inch of a head start I could manage was worth having.
With some regret I looked down the field to the fuchsia hedge enfolding my own house, but I couldn’t go there. It was even further, she’d run me down half-way across the field, and if by any chance I made it, she’d come back for Harry. She had to follow me, and somehow I had to dispose of her. The only hope I had was in the wood.
I was just beginning to think I’d have to attract her attention when she spotted me. She let out a view halloo that struck chill to my heart, wheeled the horse in his own length, then clattered him across the terrace and dived him off onto the grass once more. The point of my concealing crouch gone, I abandoned it and bolted like a rabbit for my next covert, the sand school.
I reached the open gate with hot breath on the back of my neck and slammed it behind me. The horse pulled up short, and I swear there was disappointment in his long face. Sally’s, in the brief moment that I saw it before she turned away, was aglow.
I knew, of course, that Gilgamesh could jump that gate. He’d done it before and nearly mowed me down that time too. In fact, I was hoping she would jump him into the school, because I was going out over the fence on the far side, which was higher. The fact that the rails were nicely spaced for climbing was no help to a horse, and the field gate was closed and set at an impossible angle for jumping.
I stood in the middle of the sand, surrounded by strange letters posted round the sides and bits of jumps piled in the corners, and tried to look scared and indecisive. Well, indecisive anyway: the other came naturally. I wanted her to think that I’d painted myself into a corner, had allowed her to push me in here and this was the end of my flight. If she thought that, she’d follow me inside. Then, while I scaled the fence, she’d have to either jump out again and work round via the terrace again or dismount to open the field gate. Whichever she did would earn me fifty yards of a head start. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was all I could think of.
For long seconds that I used to gasp some air into my lungs, Sally watched me over the gate, almost unblinking, considering the situation, assessing what I might do next. She appeared entirely to have forgotten the plane that was meeting her. She sat there so long and so still that I began to think she had dismissed the gate as impossible with neither saddle nor bridle and was wondering whether to come down and meet me on foot. I wondered how I should react if she did. Then, without warning, she clapped heels to the muscled flanks and set sail at the gate.
As soon as I saw she was committed, I turned my back on her and sprinted for the fence, springing at it out of my stride more like a ring-tailed lemur than a middle-aged writer with a bloody leg. It was an extravagant gesture, and it startled me at least as much as Sally, but it was the right move at the right time because a moment later the horse’s shoulder cannoned off the rail immediately below my foot with all the velocity of his sprint and jump behind him. If he’d caught me, he’d have smashed my leg in pieces.
The fence shook with the impact as if it would fall under me. I didn’t hang around to see: I was over the top rail and dropping down the far side, old bones and bruises notwithstanding, before it had made its mind up one way or the other. So it stood, for which I was grateful. If she could have ridden over it, she’d have ridden me down within a stride or two.
I think she did try to jump it, and I think the horse finally refused. Perhaps he could have done it: the fence was maybe a foot higher than the gate, pushing six feet, but nothing I had seen of him so far suggested he acknowledged limits to his ability. Maybe he was getting tired of being shoved around, scared, and yanked about and run into things, and with only a rope between them Sally couldn’t compel his obedience. I heard her swearing behind me as I ran, but I didn’t look back.
I ran with my fingers crossed. If he wouldn’t jump the fence, maybe he wouldn’t jump the gate again either, so whichever way she came she’d have to dismount. She could lead the horse through the field gate then, the shorter route, but she’d have to get on him again. It had to be worth time to me.
Many times since, I’ve walked along the hedge between the school and Foxford Wood, and wondered what the hell I was doing that I couldn’t find some bolt-hole, if not into the wood itself then into the rough ground this side of it, in the time it took Sally to negotiate one gate or the other and get after me again. It was a doddle. Your arthritic granny could have done it.
But the truth was, I was tiring rapidly, the pummelling I’d already had from Gilgamesh was catching up on me, and even with my own safety and Harry’s depending on it, I was running slower and slower, my feet held by invisible but ever more-viscid toffee. She was running me into the ground. Fight her? I wasn’t going to stay on my feet long enough.
And now here they were again, racing over the turf behind me with a rumble like an orchestral climax. I couldn’t hack it. The lungs were bursting out of me; my limbs were leaden and my head light. I was sobbing as I ran, only hoping that she couldn’t hear. I could hardly hear it myself over the piston-hammering of my heart, and my tears were lost in the sweat that bathed me.
According to my mother, ploughboys sweat; gentlemen perspire, and ladies merely glow. Glowing enough to make a small desert bloom, wondering abstractly whether my heart or temporal artery would give way first, I ran on. When my legs wouldn’t run any further, I walked; then I stopped, and after that, I sank to my knees. I was beaten and knew it. My only consolation, as I waited to be mauled, was that I’d brought her a fair way from Harry, and with any luck she wouldn’t go back.
The horse stopped behind me. His shadow blotted out my sun. Still I waited, head bent—with exhaustion, not abjection, and I hoped she knew that—and nothing happened. At last, with my heartbeat easing up and my calves beginning to cramp, since one of us had to do something or we’d both die there of old age, I looked up.
There was absolutely nothing you could call an expression on Sally Fane’s face. I got more response from eye-contact with the horse. It occurred to me that maybe her temporal artery had given way, but it wasn’t a serious theory, more a forlorn hope. Right enough, at length she spoke.
“Is he dead?” There was no more feeling in her voice than in her face.
“Damn you.” I began to cry. It wasn’t a deliberate stratagem. I’ve never been the sort of woman
who achieved anything by crying: I just look crumpled and dirty like one of Harry’s handkerchiefs, so I do my best not to do it in company. I still think it was more down to tiredness than anything. But nothing I could have said at that juncture would have stood me in as good stead. If I’d lied, I believe she’d have known it. If I’d told the truth, God knows what she’d have done.
So I swore at her and began to cry, and finally she smiled quite gently and said, “There’s just you, then.”
Chapter Six
It was probably a mistake using the siren. There’s not, after all, much point having a silent alarm if the police car responding to it can be heard coming a mile away. All the same, I was never so glad to hear something in all my life.
Sally, of course, heard it at the same moment. Anger flooded into her eyes. Even allowing for the stress she was under, the wild vacillation of her moods was extraordinary. She made mercury look phlegmatic.
She leaned down at me over the withers of the horse and hissed aspishly, “I thought you said he was dead.” She managed to sound as if she was accusing me of something dreadful.
Actually I hadn’t, but that was beside the point. “Harry didn’t raise the alarm; I did. I opened the study window just before you knocked me off the terrace. It must be a silent alarm, reporting direct to the police station. I didn’t know that.”
“I did.” Naturally; she would have made it her business to find out. “Is Harry dead?”
The squad car would be there in just a minute. There was no time for her to go back. “Not when I left him. But he wasn’t up to making phone calls either.” Actually I knew more than that, and I knew it without knowing how but with absolute certainty. I knew he was going to be all right. The load on me lightened. The hurts dulled, the bruises paled; even the weariness withdrew from the brink of utter exhaustion. The tears and the sweat were both drying on my cheeks.
