Appleby Plays Chicken

by Michael Innes

  Not that the stranger appeared dangerous. He turned away and took a little stroll towards the body and back, with an incongruous air of one merely concerned to enjoy the mild sunshine. ‘Aren’t we getting this a bit wrong?’ he presently asked. ‘Can’t we take it that we’ve both stumbled on this affair – and realize that there’s nothing at all we can do about it? The man’s dead. We can’t help him in any way. Getting involved in some elaborate police inquiry will be highly disagreeable and inconvenient. I don’t know who or what you are; but at a guess I’d say you are an undergraduate on vacation. Well, this business is likely to mess up things for you for weeks. And the same consideration applies to myself. So why not just walk off – you in one direction and myself in the other? There’s no conceivable means by which we can be pitched on.’

  David, although he had expected pretty well anything, was aware that he must be staring at the stranger round-eyed. The man’s speech had been the most complete giveaway that could be conceived – and yet he appeared to be utterly unaware of the fact. There had already been hints of an attitude that was distinctly what Timothy Dumble would call off-white; and now here was a proposal utterly at variance with the character in which the stranger had begun by presenting himself. Gentlemen of military cut, who take a glance at violent death and murmur some shibboleth like ‘Bad show’, don’t propose to bolt from it fifteen minutes later. David now had no doubt that he was dealing with a complete crook. The gentleman before him was a criminal and an enemy.

  This simplified matters. David presumably took no pains to conceal the conclusion to which he had come from appearing on his face. The stranger, as if belatedly conscious of crisis, had turned pale; and David could sense his body as taut and waiting. He really was dangerous now. And there was something – David felt his mind reaching for it – that he mustn’t be let do. There was some simple physical action that he mustn’t be allowed to take.

  What the stranger did was once more to turn and stroll away. This time he moved to the periphery of the rock, so that for a moment David wondered whether he was going to make a bolt for it. But he only mounted a boulder and once more scanned the moor below. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the question’s academic now, anyhow. There are a couple of men making straight for the Tor.’ He stepped down and strolled back. ‘Or perhaps they’re girls. I’m not sure.’

  It seemed to David that the point was an important one. Girls are all very well, but it isn’t very feasible to call upon a brace of them to collar a thug. So he moved to the edge and made his own inspection.

  The moor was as empty as before.

  He swung round, already knowing what he’d see. For now – too late and when he had been fooled – he had identified that simple action that the stranger mustn’t be allowed to perform. It was stooping over the body and possessing himself of that gun. There was going to be another corpse.

  And of course it had happened now. The stranger was straight-ening himself as David turned to him, and the weapon was in his hand. There couldn’t be much doubt about what he intended. Then, quite unexpectedly, he spoke. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and took a step forward, holding out the pistol – which seemed very small – as if for inspection.

  This time David tumbled in a flash to what was happening. The stranger did mean murder – a second murder – and not consultation or parley. But this gun was a miserable affair, not fit for much more than crime passionnel in a boudoir. It would be reliable only at very close quarters indeed. And that was what the stranger was trying to make sure of now. David didn’t propose to oblige him. He needed almost miraculous speed – and some adequate internal chemistry gave it to him. In an instant he was over the lip of rock behind him. There was no time to discover whether this was a possible point at which to descend; he simply had to let his toes and fingers feel for what they could find. Bare stone scraped his chest; a fragment of stone whipped past his ear and he heard a bang from above; he had just realized the incredible fact that he had really been fired on when he felt his feet touch ground. For a moment he couldn’t believe this either; it was impossible that he should have come down that short but formidable descent in just no time at all. But it was true. He turned from the face of the rock without looking up, and took to his heels down the steep slope of the Tor.

  There was another bang. It came just after he had felt a queer jar in one of his feet. He wondered whether his pursuer had scored a lucky hit. They said you sometimes didn’t feel the pain for quite a time. But he was continuing to run all right – and now he heard nothing but the sounds of his own flight. It was ignominious. Still, he was retreating in fairly good order – very literally watching his step in this treacherous ground, and using his wits about the best course to choose. At the same time he was extremely frightened. The thought passed through his mind that it wasn’t in the least like any feeling he’d experienced in Timothy’s car the night before. Yet his present danger must be much less, for the stranger’s pistol was next to useless to him at this range, and he himself had a lead that an elderly man wasn’t at all likely to reduce, even if he attempted pursuit at all.

  Making sure that there were no pitfalls for a few yards ahead, David glanced over his shoulder. He hadn’t done the fellow justice. He must have got down from the rocks quite as quickly as David had; and now he was coming on with what one could see at a glance to be an athlete’s movement. David speeded up. At the same time he found himself doing odd sums: calculating the square miles of actual solitude available in this part of the world for the fantastic hunted-man affair he seemed to have become involved in; calculating the stranger’s age and correlating it with his likely stamina.

  And slowly – so that he must have covered several hundred yards during the process – David’s unworthy funk did a little drain from him. He had nothing to be afraid of now except carelessness or bad luck. A heavy tumble, a twist of an ankle, and he was done for. But if he was so soft that he was actually overtaken by his pursuer in a straight race, then he just deserved whatever came to him.

  He looked back again. The stranger had neither gained nor lost ground. He seemed to be fumbling in a pocket as he ran, so that David wondered if he were reaching for cartridges to reload his beastly little pistol. Then the stranger put his hand up to his mouth and blew a shrill blast on a whistle.

  It came to David chiefly as outrageous, as enormous cheek. It was what a policeman would do if you snatched a fellow’s watch and ran. Yet it was the stranger who was a criminal – and a criminal of the lethal sort. David looked ahead. The moor fell away from him in gentle undulations, and in the distance he could just distinguish a line of posts. On every fourth or fifth post there would be a hawk… The memory seemed to represent security – and indeed he knew that a couple of miles along that track there was a metalled road and then a village. At the moment, he had only to go straight ahead.

  Suddenly, he realized that this was just what he couldn’t do. That whistle had effected something. Dead in front of him, although several hundred yards away, a man seemed to have arisen up out of the moor. And there was no mistaking his movements. He had answered a summons to join in the pursuit. The chase, David realized at once and grimly, took on a different character instantly. Two to one. That made it hare and hounds.

  7

  It was nonsense, David told himself as he swung sharply to his right. To come upon a crime of violence, hard on its commission, was in itself an unlikely adventure enough. Still, such things did happen; and one man had pretty well the same remote chance of becoming involved as another. As far as the theory of probability went, David had, so to speak, nothing much to complain of. It was like winning a lottery at very long odds, or gaining some vast sum on the Pools; there was nothing in it to be surprised at. That was what Pettifor, no doubt, would point out with his easy lucidity if the matter was put to him.

  Keeping a wary eye on his new antagonist, David found himself irrationally disposed to laugh
as he ran. Whether this meant that he was further recovering from his funk, he didn’t know. What was laughable was the spectacle of his own mind continuing, in this queer exigency, to function in the fashion of a serious reading man’s. The only probability he should be concerned with at the moment was whether they were going to get him. If this second chap had a gun too, and if they were absolutely out for his life, then the prospect wasn’t too good.

  Again he made a quick swerve. He had just spotted an unhealthily green area in the moor in front of him. They order these things better in the highlands of Scotland, he thought. There you get large stretches of moor just right for this sort of thing, and very little of it boggy… He heard a shout behind him. Presumably the stranger now felt himself within hail of his assistant, and was bellowing some instruction. And it was nonsense. That was what he had been telling himself. Stumbling upon a murderer strolling away from his crime was one thing; finding that he had an accomplice lurking in the middle distance was quite another. It removed the whole affair into a realm of the wildly improbable… At this point in his reflections David allowed his flying feet to take a false step with the result that he went head over heels in heather.

  He picked himself up, uncomfortably breathless, and heard a further shout, now alarmingly close behind him. He ran on – and with surprising speed. There was no doubt about the state of the funk now. It had mounted again and he had the fear of death on him. For the moment, that seemed to help. He cleared a trickle of water, treacherous on its either side, with an ease that would have done credit to a gazelle. Still, he wasn’t sure that his knees felt too good. Perhaps that was because of the tumble he’d taken. Or perhaps it was the funk. The important thing was to realize that life was enormously desirable… He made another swerve.

  This time it had been a litter of boulders that didn’t suggest too good going. He was still managing to head for the road – if it could be called that – from which he had finally turned off to climb Knack Tor. But now there was a long tongue of soggy terrain dead in front of him. He remembered being told that in places there were patches of bog that could be really dangerous. Down you’d go. And after some weeks you’d begin to send up a bubble or two. But nobody would ever find you – unless, hundreds of years later, your body was dug up, perfectly preserved in peat.

  That – come to think of it – simplified matters for his friends behind him. If they could just pick him off with a gun – or come up with him, David grimly added to himself, and batter him efficiently to death – then they just had to find the right sort of boggy place for him, before going comfortably home to dinner. But why hadn’t they done something of the sort with the corpse they already had on their hands? Perhaps the bogs were a bit too bouncy, buoyant, sticky. Your head or your feet, say, would continue obstinately in view. An attraction for carrion crows… David found his speed increasing. He realized that there was much to be said for terror. It got you along.

  There was another shot. It was a feeble sort of pop, and he decided that the only firearm available to the enemy was still the pistol he had first seen in the dead man’s hand. That was encouraging. He took the risk of glancing over his shoulder. There was the stranger, still hanging on, and with the second man now shoulder to shoulder with him. That was encouraging too. He had entirely avoided being cut off, and two chaps dead behind him were no more dangerous than one. And the interval was still such that this second shot had been no more than a demonstration. Perhaps it could even be called an acknowledgement of defeat. For now the track was no distance off – and as soon as he reached it his footing would be secure as he fled. That had been their only chance, really – that he should take a second and disabling tumble. Once on a safe surface, he should be all right. The stranger had clearly been a climber, and his middle-age was of the sort that is athletically well-preserved. But David’s distance had been the mile, and he didn’t think he’d gone exactly flabby. Unless the second man was young and a tolerably good long-distance chap – or unless there was now some quite unlooked-for misfortune – his escape was pretty well in the bag. The realization of this went suddenly to David’s head. Without venturing to look round again, he raised one arm in the air and gave a defiant wave. There was yet another pop from the silly little gun. He brought his arm down and noticed an incredible thing. Its index finger was covered in blood.

  It wasn’t painful, but it was sufficiently sobering, all the same. And now, too, he had to make a sharp detour to get round that awkward tongue of bog. If his pursuers had spotted it sooner than he had – and they might have done this – then they would stand to gain quite a bit by having altered their own course first. And this would then immediately help them in another way, making it possible for them to skirt quite a steep ascent which he must take head on.

  Once more David crammed on a bit of extra speed. And the rising ground proved heavy going underfoot as well, for some accident of soil or exposure made the heather on it thick and high. When he reached the top of this short rise he was glad to see an easy drop to the track, for his breath was coming shorter than, at this stage of the proceedings, was altogether reassuring. And the place really was damned lonely. There was the little track and nothing else – like a neat parting down the spine of some unnaturally well-groomed furry monster. And suddenly everything that was secure and familiar in David’s life – and particularly the recent tranquillities of the George and old Pettifor, Timothy and the infant Ogg and the prosperous fishermen from Lombard Street and Westminster and Pall Mall – seemed dauntingly far away. They seemed far away both in time and in space. He had a glimpse of what it would be like to lose his courage; it would, strangely enough, be quite a different thing from being in the hell of a funk. Hurtling downhill at a pace he recognized as now far too fast for prudence, he had to reason with himself about the special dimensions of the melodrama that had reached out at him. There wasn’t – there just wasn’t – miles and miles and miles of this, although from the top of the rise, just as from the summit of the Tor, it had been precisely this that it looked like. Let him just keep going as he was doing, and he’d be out of this brute solitude in no time.

  But just how? What must he come up with in order to be reasonably secure? David had reached the track by the time this question struck him forcibly. He had remembered from his map that there was a village of sorts straight ahead. But it might be no more than a hamlet – and would there be much security in that?

  Abruptly, as sometimes happened with David’s mind, the answers to his questions began to come not in words but in pictures – vivid and almost hallucinatory pictures, of the kind that will sometimes create themselves in the darkness when one is on the verge of falling asleep. He saw himself frantically interrogating a group of small children on the whereabouts of a non-existent police station, volubly explaining himself to a silver-haired vicar out for a stroll, diving – and this was the most shocking vision of the lot – frantically under a bed in the first cottage he could enter. All this was extremely ludicrous, but it did reflect one quite sober fact, worth getting clear. If there is a fellow after you with a gun, and if he is convinced that it is pretty well your life or his, the point at which you can reckon upon assured safety isn’t exactly easy to hit. This bleak persuasion grew upon David as he ran.

  Of course the beastly little pistol wasn’t inexhaustible, and it wasn’t assured that the gentleman with the good shoes and the nicely trimmed moustache had a pocket bulging with spare cartridges. As soon as he was out of ammunition he was done for – and so was his obscurely glimpsed confederate. If David could have been sure that the last shot had been already fired, he would quite confidently have stood in his tracks now.

  His conviction of this was surprising. After all, it would still be two to one, and he wasn’t himself a particular star in a rough house. But it did quite unchallengeably come to him that he would get enormous satisfaction from turning round and doing his best to lay out the two of them. He was s
till bolting – but at this new thought he felt blood going to his head. And once more the thought turned into pictures. He saw himself deftly dealing with his pursuers so that they went down writhing and howling. This vision was so satisfactory – particularly as coming after the others – that it must have usurped upon reality for some seconds. When David, still running, returned to a proper awareness of his actual surroundings, it was to find his situation transformed. Straight in front of him on the narrow road stood a stationary car.

  It was odd that he hadn’t seen it sooner; and odd that, whether approaching or already arrived, it hadn’t been visible from the summit of the Tor. But at once he saw the explanation. The track took a sharp dip here and ran for some fifteen yards between steep banks. The result was a particularly sheltered spot, which made a pleasant trap for the mild noon warmth. And the single occupant of the car – it was a large open car – seemed to be making the most of this. It was a young woman. She was reclining lengthwise on the front seat and contentedly eating a sandwich, while at the same time exposing to the gentle influence of the sunshine a generous stretch of bare legs which were already unseasonably brown. It wasn’t exactly an elegant spectacle; but even in his extremely preoccupied situation David was faintly aware of it as a pleasing one.

  The girl turned her head and stared at him. That was natural. Pounding down this lonely track in a state of near exhaustion, he must be a puzzling, if not positively an alarming spectacle. But what on earth was he to do? This hadn’t been one of the imaginary situations lately mirroring themselves in his mind. It contained quite a new element, which it took him only a second to identify. He himself wasn’t merely in danger; he was dangerous. In this isolated place, and with those two thugs still after him, he just wasn’t healthy to associate with. If the young woman had been a young man – or even an infant like Pettifor’s bearded nephew, Ogg – it would be different. It would be fair enough to make another chap take his chance. But you couldn’t very well ask a girl to join you as a target even for the silliest little pistol. It wouldn’t be the thing at all.