Appleby Plays Chicken

by Michael Innes

  As David was revolving these commonplace chivalric notions the girl rapidly withdrew her legs from view and then spoke. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  It was a comically incongruous question – the kind with which somebody advances upon you in a shop. Not that the girl seemed out of a shop; she was what David with his large and innocent social assumptions thought of as an ordinary sort of girl – meaning the sort he commonly met. Well, he had met this one; she had uttered; and there was one plain point that must be decided in a split second. Either he must say ‘Yes’ and stop, or ‘No’ and run on. He could hear no sound behind him at the moment, but in no time his pursuers would be on the road and almost within range again. There certainly wasn’t leisure for what could be called conversation. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m quite all right.’ And he ran on.

  The thugs wouldn’t, he supposed, sock her as they passed. At least she had a better chance of being left entirely out of it than if he had started explanations and asked her to drive him to the nearest town. But here, he saw, had been a problem that might recur. A gaggle of old women, for instance, would have to be given the same answer. He ran on. And then he heard the car’s engine start to life behind him.

  He hadn’t thought of that. She was curious, or intrigued, or genuinely concerned. And here she was. He hadn’t covered a further fifty yards before she was slowing down just abreast of him. This time he did halt. There was nothing else to do. And the halt told him how fagged he was. He could, he supposed, tell his legs to get going again. And they’d probably obey. But they wouldn’t like it, all the same.

  ‘Are you running away from something?’ The girl looked straight at him as she asked this. Her eyes were a deep, deep blue. She seemed seriously puzzled.

  ‘Yes – I am.’

  It was a mere matter of breathing that constrained David to this brevity. He saw her look back along the road, which was still empty, before speaking again. ‘Are you a convict?’ she asked prosaically.

  He didn’t know whether to laugh, or to damn her silently for an idiot woman. And even if she was a bit dumb, she was extremely good looking. But his perception of this was for the moment entirely by the way; it had nothing to do with the urgency with which he suddenly said, ‘No, I’m not – I promise. But I’ve got to get away, all the same. Will you take me?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. Get in.’

  He was beside her in a flash. Granted that they could get away instantly he was convinced he had taken the right course. Once they were travelling, she could be in no danger at all, and no more could he himself – which, after all, remained a consideration of some moment. But to leave her in his wake, so to speak, by taking again to the moor, or to go on down the road and have her tagging along making helpful noises, was to expose her to at least some unknown degree of risk. ‘Drive straight on,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll begin explaining.’

  The girl nodded, and tugged at the starter. David was conscious of a sudden fresh anxiety. He hadn’t noticed that she’d stopped the engine. Still, it was a big modern car, and there oughtn’t to be any trouble. But, for the moment, the engine didn’t fire.

  ‘Damn.’ The girl was aware of trouble. And she wasn’t looking at the controls, although her hands were moving over them confidently. Her eyes – those really lovely eyes – were fixed on a driving mirror on the windscreen. ‘Is that them – the people who are after you?’

  David turned and looked back along the road. His pursuers were farther back than he had expected, and only just identifiable. There could be no doubt of them, all the same – and they were coming along hard. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s them.’ And he added: ‘Are we going to go?’

  ‘Of course we’re going to go.’ The girl spoke sharply. ‘The carburettor floods a bit, if you muck it. And I have, I’m afraid. But we’ll do it – with seconds in hand. Only we must give it a few seconds now.’

  ‘All right.’ David spoke as casually as he could. He felt that, after all, he had done quite the wrong thing. ‘But they’re not very nice people, I’m afraid. If the worst comes to the worst, will you lie down in the car when I tell you to?’

  ‘Yes – if it will ease your mind.’ The girl’s voice was cool and faintly ironical so that he guessed she’d not easily lose her head. But her body was tense, and her hand hovered over the starter. She might have been counting. ‘Now,’ she said, and pulled. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ The engine had turned over, and again nothing had happened.

  David looked back. It wouldn’t do. The position, in fact, was desperate. He had involved this thoroughly commendable young woman in disgusting danger after all. And now she was looking at him inquiringly, so that their eyes met. And instantly he was moved by some quite inexplicable prompting – an instinct, a perception, a calculation: he didn’t know what. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. And he jumped from the car and ran.

  Of course they wouldn’t pause to hold any reckoning with the girl; there would be no conceivable sense in that. Indeed they would probably deviate from the road in order to avoid her, and he would himself gain quite a number of yards as a result. There could be only one reason why the stranger was persisting in this desperate pursuit: he just couldn’t risk David’s getting away and being in a position subsequently to identify him. And his whole instinct would be to avoid the observation of anybody else. He would certainly give the girl – and whatever other casual wayfarers might come along – as wide a berth as he could.

  So David ran on with a tolerably easy mind, and with an imagination less inclined to extravagant flights about the immediate future. They couldn’t, surely, follow him into even the most miserable hamlet, because as soon as they attracted any sort of notice the whole basis of their present operation lapsed. And it was impossible that he now had far to go. The track was rising steeply before him, and he guessed that when he reached the top he would look down a corresponding slope upon a scatter of chimneys and rooftops perhaps no more than half a mile away. He’d certainly make that. For he had been wrong about his legs. They were still not in the least indisposed to do just what he intended them to. He shortened his pace to cope with the gradient and went up it not too badly. And sure enough there was the little village, in full view below. Beyond it he could see fields and trees. He had got to the verge of the moor.

  Well, he never wanted to see it again. Remembering to think about his breathing, he opened out a bit, as he might have done at the end of a big cross-country effort. And then, behind him, he heard a car. It sounded as if it was coming at a great speed, although the road certainly wasn’t a good one for fast driving. Indeed it wasn’t much of a road for motoring at all – a fact that had made the presence of the girl rather surprising. But no doubt it cut off a corner of the moor, and got a certain amount of traffic on that account.

  David glanced over his shoulder as he continued to run. But the brow of the hill he had just come over cut off his view, and the car was almost upon him as soon as it was visible. It wasn’t an unknown car; it was the girl’s. She must have got it going after all, and be proposing to make up for its previous failure by coming on rapidly to pick him up. David drew to the side of the road, halted and turned. It was only then that he had a full view. And he saw that it wasn’t the girl who was driving. It was the stranger.

  The next seconds were completely confused. The car swerved on the road. David was just supposing that the stranger’s pace had caused him to lose control of the steering when he found himself acting in a way that seemed utterly uncontrolled itself. Entirely without conscious calculation, he had flung himself off the road and head over heels down a gentle slope that flanked it. There was a roar in his ears, and heather whipped his face as the wheels missed him by inches. He scrambled up, breathless and bewildered. The car was thirty yards ahead, stationary and canted over in what seemed a shallow ditch. The stranger and another man were climbing out. There was no sign of the girl.r />
  For an instant the affair took, for David, one of its unpredictable dips into the ludicrous. His assailants, heaving themselves to the ground after just failing to bring off another murder, looked merely absurd, like unfortunate minor actors compelled to hazardous roles in some slapstick comedy. But if this persuasion suggested that David had gone a bit light-headed, the attack fortunately didn’t last. He got himself on the road again – which was something the car didn’t look likely to manage – and ran. He ran, rather faster than he had yet run, back the way he came.

  8

  For there was something he must discover at once. Had they merely tricked that girl, or had they used violence? In either case, his own encounter with her had been unfortunate, to say the least, and he owed it to himself to investigate. Anyway, the thugs were now between him and the village, so there was nothing that could be called quixotic in his changed direction. It was true he hadn’t a great deal more running in him – but there wasn’t the slightest reason to suppose that his enemies had either. He turned and took a look at them as he made once more for the brow of the hill. If they proposed to come after him, they hadn’t yet got down to it. They were still standing beside the car, and the stranger seemed to be rubbing or feeling his leg. With any luck, they’d both got a much worse jolt out of the late proceedings than David had.

  He was back on top of the rise, and for a moment he thought he had spotted the girl, walking towards him a little more than two hundred yards away. But it wasn’t the girl. It was a man.

  David stopped. He was discovering that he didn’t any longer like men. He distrusted them. And particularly when they were equipped with firearms. Perhaps this man wasn’t. But perhaps he was. David could see something under his arm. It might be a fishing rod. It might even be no more than a walking stick. But there could be no doubt that it might be a gun.

  The man was sauntering down the road. If he had seen David, he gave no sign. He was tall. He was in knickerbockers – and already you could guess that those garments, although rural, were not rustic. A country gentleman, you would say… At this point it was revealed to David that he had come to dislike gentlemen even more than just plain men. He suspected the figure advancing upon him of having another well clipped moustache and a disposition to murmur that this was a good or that was a bad show. And now he was certain of what was under the chap’s arm. Or rather he wasn’t. Probably it was a shotgun. But it might very well be a rifle.

  The man – gentle or simple – steadily advanced. Sometimes he looked to his right and sometimes to his left – as if, David thought, in some hope of a hippo or a tiger. What he didn’t seem to do with any intensity or even interest was to look ahead. Already David felt himself being rather pointedly ignored. And this, somehow, was an attitude he didn’t at all like.

  He tried to take hold of himself and make some contact with common sense. It was really inconceivable that here could be another of them. Since he left Nymph Monachorum that morning the English countryside couldn’t suddenly have been given over en bloc to desperadoes. The vast probability was that this approaching figure was harmless. And that was to put it too mildly. Here, almost certainly, was a law-abiding citizen – but one, happily, who was at the moment bearing arms. Whether rifle or shotgun, his weapon could certainly give that idiotic little pistol points.

  David moved forward again. As he did so, the advancing figure took his gun from under his arm and appeared casually to examine it. That ought to be all right. But for some reason it wasn’t. David, although not particularly expert at that sort of thing, felt there was something wrong with the approaching sportsman and his actions. And there was now not much more than a hundred yards between them. That made him, he supposed, already a sitting target for anybody who knew one end of a rifle from another.

  Clearly he must do his best to find the girl as soon as he could. That was only common decency. But, even if he could get round this fellow in knickerbockers, he wouldn’t be in much of a position to help. Supposing no harm had come to her yet – which remained the substantial probability – it might be disastrous to lead these fellows back to her. In fact his only reasonable course seemed to be immediate evasive action. If he was wrong about the man in front, and that action robbed him of a perfectly respectable potential ally – well, it was just too bad.

  David looked behind him. His first enemies, he saw, were now on the move again. He looked to his left. Here, on the edge of the moor, there was really a good deal of cover: broken ground with here and there a thicket or a spinney, running down to a shallow valley in which a stream appeared to run through long, narrow plantations. David swung round and raced for a promising little gully he had spotted no farther off than a stone’s throw. Something whined past his head. He thought it must have been an insect close to his ear – until a fraction of a second later he heard a crack behind him.

  Well, he hadn’t been wrong. Doubled up and racing as he hadn’t raced before, he told himself there was some satisfaction in that. But there was small satisfaction in anything else. A rifle – even a light sporting rifle – entirely altered the complexion of things. In skilled hands it meant nothing else than quick death – or it certainly meant that if he were driven back towards the open moor. His best chance lay in taking substantial risks in order to work rapidly round to the village. They couldn’t – they just couldn’t – pursue him into that with guns blazing. This that he’d strayed into wasn’t a 3D western. There was – there just must be – in every sense a limit to how far they could go.

  The next stage of David’s flight was curiously insubstantial and shadowy. His brain didn’t seem to have much control of it. And yet it wasn’t blundering or precipitate. Indeed what it now for the first time chiefly required was a great deal of wariness and calculation. The terrain – almost before his noticing it – had entirely changed; he moved behind the cover of high earthen dykes, crawled through thickets, lay listening in a ditch for sounds that didn’t come.

  Slowly he realized that – perhaps just by letting something primitive to the point of mindlessness take over – he had shaken off his pursuers entirely for a time. He didn’t know for what sort of time, because it was chiefly his sense of time that had gone queer. What he did sharply retain was a sense of direction. He knew just where that village was. Over a field, up the stream, round a bend, and there it would be. Indeed he could see what must be the first of its cottages, white-walled and grey-thatched, just where the stream wound out of sight. It was hard not to believe that he had a clear road to safety. There were sheep in the field; he could hear a dog barking; and from a direction hard to fix there came the low throb of an engine – he supposed it must be some sort of pump. His enemies seemed to belong to a past he couldn’t very clearly remember. Probably they had gone home to tea.

  It was when he caught himself with this childish thought in his head that David realized the possible danger of a treachery within. Quite suddenly he had become rather shamefully fagged out. That was it. If he wasn’t careful, he’d simply be sitting down in the middle of that field and counting the daisies. Chaps like that don’t go home to tea. As soon as you give them the slip, and they can’t any longer actually come pounding after you, they start thinking ahead. They start doing your thinking for you. That means they know it’s the village there that you’re trying to make. So they form a screen before it.

  Crouched by the side of a gate, peering cautiously into the utterly peaceful field beyond, David told himself he hadn’t got that quite right. It was almost a certain bet that they were indeed between him and the village – but, after all, there wasn’t a whole troop of them. They couldn’t be, as it were, manning a line. They would be at vantage points. And they’d give him credit by this time for a good deal of cunning and caution. They’d be watching the tricky approaches, the clever ways in, the sequences of adequate cover one used to be made to trace out on field days. So the best thing to do would be to get up and w
alk straight and openly ahead.

  David stood up. The visible scene for some reason rather swam before him, but he was solemnly sure that his muzzy head had really evolved a masterpiece of tactics. He clambered over the gate – it was something he would have vaulted earlier in the day – and marched diagonally across the field. He found himself counting the sheep. That was masterly too. It kept you awake. Or was that what it didn’t do? He was across the field. And – as he had been so rightly confident – nothing whatever had happened.

  It was a nice stream. It clucked and burbled. The pulse of the engine was louder. It would be pumping water up to cattle troughs. All this was settled country farmers, shepherds, barking but friendly dogs. And here was a cottage. He would go in and explain himself. The people might be surprised. But he would make everything perfectly clear.

  He was inside the door of the cottage – a solid two-storey building – before he realized that there wasn’t in fact a door there. Nothing, that was to say, you could shut. There was just the doorway. The cottage was abandoned and partly ruined. He remembered there were a lot like that, often scattered in rather isolated positions about this countryside. Some change in its rural economy had resulted in a sort of abandoning of outposts. You got the same effect, he remembered, in the fens – right on the other side of England. Cottages disintegrating and sinking into the soil. Not because of a declining prosperity, but because of buses and motorbikes. The effect was very dreary, all the same.

  David knew that these were desperately irrelevant thoughts, but for a few seconds he continued to wander over rotten floorboards amid a smell of damp. He tried to remember what the stuff was called – the stuff places like this were built with. Cob – was that it? He stopped and listened. The stream clucked. Just a sort of clay and gravel. Probably a discovery of primitive man hereabouts, and chaps had gone on building that way ever since. It would be very good stuff for stopping a bullet…