‘I came out of the spring like you did, Mike.’
‘He threw you down the well?’
‘No. He hid on top of me in the fox’s earth and it all collapsed. And then he gave up chasing me and got away.’
‘My poor darling!’ Janet Prowse exclaimed, gathering her up. ‘Jack, run and get the car rug! Mike, fetch her parents out from all those news hounds!’
Mike approached the ring of excited, bobbing heads. Rupert and Mary had arrived only five minutes earlier. The photographers around the Prowses had immediately dispersed to take pictures of the film star. That had given the family time to slip away to the cloisters and longed-for privacy.
He thought that the Falconers, too, and especially Carrie, would like to be reunited without people looking on who had no business to look. So he found the Sergeant and whispered to him that Carrie was safe and in the ruins. Could he get Mr and Mrs Falconer a moment’s peace?
The Sergeant half let out a whoop of relief and turned it into a cough. He extracted Rupert and Mary, led them towards the ruins and there told them the good news. But Mike’s efforts were all in vain.
‘Carrie! Carrie is safe!’ the actor shouted, turning round to his audience.
Carrie ran to her parents, dropping on the way the car rug in which she was wrapped. Rupert and Mary knelt on the grass beside her, and all three were alone for a moment to show their love and joy. Then Rupert picked her up and posed for the cameras. Mary had to do the same and they all had to kiss each other over again.
A TV man pushed a microphone at Carrie.
‘Tell us all about your escape! Don’t be shy! Come on, sweetie!’
‘Get out! Get out, all of you!’ she screamed. ‘Rupert, tell them to go away!’
The Sergeant rescued her and put back the rug, saying:
‘We need her statement at once, gentlemen, and want her to be in a state to give it.’
‘Of course she can give it,’ Mike told him. ‘It’s only that Beard used to call her sweetie.’
Mr Midwinter was back with his coil of rope. He had a word with the driver of the police car and again screamed off in the direction of his village. The speed, the rope and his sudden disappearance fascinated a reporter who shot off after him in the hope of a story which none of his competitors would have.
The Inspector led the Prowses and Falconers into the cottage and shut the door. Screw and Chauffeur had been driven off with blankets over their heads. The living-room was empty. Somebody had thrown a tablecloth over the bloodstains. Carrie and Mike were given chairs opposite the Inspector.
‘Couldn’t you wait?’ Mary Falconer asked. ‘The child is exhausted. She needs a hot bath and a hot drink.’
‘I’m afraid we cannot wait, madam.’
‘Well, you’ll bloody well have to!’ replied Janet Prowse, and the two mothers carted Carrie off before the startled Inspector had time to protest.
Meanwhile Mike told his story and answered questions as best he could.
‘You must be very proud of him indeed,’ the Inspector said to Jack Prowse.
‘Well, all in the day’s work! And would you believe it? A chap out there has just offered me five thousand quid for his exclusive story.’
‘I shouldn’t let that bother you. You take it! He’ll write it himself or one of his pals will.’
‘A pack of lies, I suppose?’
‘Most of it. So what do you care?’
‘I hadn’t looked at it that way,’ said Jack Prowse. ‘Then as long as we can have a good laugh, there’s no harm done. What do you think, Mike?’
‘We could buy that ten acres of scrub and put ’em down to grass.’
‘But it’s your money.’
‘Well, we’ll always be partners, Dad, won’t we?’
‘I’ve always hoped so, son.’
‘You should use it to give him a good education,’ Rupert Falconer said.
‘Anything wrong with what he’s had, Mr Falconer?’
The invaluable Mr Midwinter put his head round the door.
‘Clothes for her,’ he announced. ‘Been through the wife’s stock again! Best I could do in a hurry. A pity she’s out.’
He laid on a chair a boy’s jeans, shirt and two sweaters, coolly asked Rupert Falconer for his autograph and remarked that he would be outside if he was wanted.
The clothes were sent upstairs and soon afterwards the two women brought down Carrie, looking like a pale but composed young boy instead of the pitiable drowned kitten who had been hurried away. The Inspector had already heard the main facts of her story from Mike and now quickly concentrated on the end of it.
‘So the last you saw of Botswinger – Beard, as you call him – was climbing up the fall to get out. We’ll go and see how he did it. And you keep them all off till we’ve finished, Bill! I don’t want that ground trampled worse than it is. Carrie, do you feel up to it?’
Carrie answered cheerfully that she did, but that she hadn’t any shoes.
‘Oh, I’ve got those,’ the Inspector said. ‘We picked them up by the spring where you told Mike to leave them. And that was a bright idea if there ever was one, young woman! It saved the pair of you.’
Down again in the hanger, she showed them where the surface had slipped. The police had only been interested in the fox’s earth, and anyone standing by the mouth would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary beyond it – even Mike had not, though now he spotted the change.
‘Those two elders have got all tangled up with each other,’ he said. ‘They must be leaning.’
They were. So were most of the others, growing thickly over rank ground disturbed by generations of foxes and badgers. The surface had sunk not quite in a circle as Carrie had described it, but in an oval along the course of the underground stream. Where the slide had started, it had opened a chasm easily wide enough for Beard’s escape. When the Inspector shone a torch down it the beam showed an irregular pile of earth and stones up which a man could have crawled with ample room for his head. The flow of water beneath it could be heard.
He left a constable on guard to see that nothing was disturbed, and the rest of them began to return up the hill. Meanwhile Jack Prowse was pacing out distances with all the gravity of a farmer.
‘Do you mind if I just run over the ground with my son?’ he asked. ‘I want to see how on earth he managed to lie low when they were beating out the hanger.’
‘Certainly, Mr Prowse,’ the Inspector agreed.
‘Oh, come on, Jack!’ Janet said. ‘Mike doesn’t want to go through all that again.’
But Mike was already pointing out the ivy where he had taken refuge and the strip of bramble which had hidden Carrie.
‘And now show me the spring!’ his father asked.
Mr Prowse was so interested in it that he waded in and tried the round boulder by the side of which Mike and Carrie had managed to squeeze out.
‘Well, nothing but a crowbar is ever going to move that again,’ he said. ‘Tell me all about that awful journey of yours out of the well and down the channel!’
They sat on the bank above the fox’s earth. Jack held his hand while Mike tried to recapture far more details than he had had time to explain to his father or the police and told how the way had been blocked and how he had climbed over and down the sloping, fallen rock to regain the stream.
‘Did you ever look in the hanger for that opening which gave you a little light? The triangle?’
‘Not a chance, Dad! Too busy.’
‘Well, we have time now. Let’s see!’
They quickly found it, not far from the bank and between two moss-covered rocks.
‘Dangerous, that!’ Jack Prowse remarked. ‘When the hunt comes through here, a horse could easily break its leg in this hole.’
He found a fallen hazel with the mat of earth still attached to its roots, dragged it out and shoved it down the hole. Then he went to look at the crack by which Beard might have escaped.
‘Where most of that new l
ot slid down must have been a bit upstream from the earlier fall,’ he said.
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Well, we can leave it to the police to catch him. You’re my only son, Mike, and I shall never feel sorry, not for a moment, if this Botswinger chap gets all he deserves.’
They returned to the Abbey. The crowd had thinned. The TV camera had gone, and so had the Falconers. Mr Midwinter was still there. He said that the police were exploring the cellars and had gone down the well. He was waiting to see that he got his rope back.
‘You’ll want your boy’s clothes back, too,’ Janet Prowse said.
‘Any time that’s convenient. Parcel post. The wife will be glad to have them.’
‘Where is he? At school?’
‘Captain in the Army, Mrs Prowse. Time passes. No getting away from it. I never did like that Botswinger. But he was a neighbour and so we only spoke ill of him among ourselves, if you see what I mean, though a funny lot of men they were who used to drive up to see him from time to time. They’re the chaps who will know where he is, and I’ve told the Inspector so.’
Mike was bitterly disappointed that her parents had dragged Carrie away to hospital, alarmed by her bruises and the state of her feet; but he saw plenty of her in the months to come when they met in the law courts and had to tell their stories over and over again. Maximum sentences were handed out to Screw and Chauffeur. Beard himself remained at large, though the police were sure they knew the route by which he had escaped from England, and Interpol kept watch on the ring of international crooks for whom they believed he had worked. The only other person in trouble was Rupert Falconer who had no right at all to have a Swiss bank account. It took him three more successful films before he could settle the fine he got for not paying his taxes as well as the taxes themselves.
The Prowses and the Falconers drifted apart, having nothing much in common; but Mike and Carrie never lost touch and were free at last to see as much as they liked of each other when Mike was studying estate management and Carrie in her first year at university.
They never talked much about those terrible days six years earlier. They had had quite enough of that in the witness box and among their friends. But at a dance in Mike’s college Carrie spoke of it all again when after supper they were walking in the garden before the disco started up once more.
‘I wonder what did happen to Beard,’ she said.
‘I wondered too – for a long time.’
‘You know, Mike?’
‘I think I know and I think my father did. After we were left alone in the hanger he tested that boulder in the stream and he asked me a whole lot of questions. I couldn’t see the point of them at the time.’
‘What were they about?’
‘Oh, he was working out the distance between the old landfall and the new one which carried you and Beard down with it. You remember the dome with the triangle of light in it and the sloping rock?’
‘I’ll never forget them.’
‘Just before I got there, the roof of the channel was only a little above my head and very shaky. That was what fell down, and you were lucky that most of it was behind you.’
‘So was Beard!’
‘And it was straight downstream that he chased you.’
Carrie shivered.
‘The beast! Mike, I came alive again when he turned back and I saw him climbing out!’
‘But you didn’t hang around to see if he got out. And I don’t blame you!’
‘Well, he could easily have reached that big crack. The police were quite sure.’
‘Yes, he could easily have done it if he had been upstream on the Abbey side of the fall. But he wasn’t, Carrie darling.’
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by Geoffrey Household
Map copyright © 1976 by The Bodley Head Ltd
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-4804-1107-4
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY
EBOOKS BY GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Escape into Daylight Page 11
