A Rough Shoot (11 page)

I came to a cow-trampled mud hole where the ruts petered out. Beyond the hole were two roughly stopped gaps. Both led to cultivated fields. This looked uncommonly like the end. I turned off my lights and got out of the car, waiting to recover my night sight. It was the usual dirty, damp November night. We might have been on some exotic plateau of Rockies or Andes instead of a hill in populous England four hundred feet above the sea. There wasn’t a signal from humanity, except the faint smell of wood smoke drifting up from the village on the southwest wind.

The car behind us had stopped to go through the gate. I heard it shut again behind them. I let them drive on towards me, for the ruts leading into blackness would take their attention away from anything that might be happening in the outer dark. Then I turned my car to face the open grass and shot off into the night like a plane taking off. It sounds dangerous, and it was. On the other hand one somehow knows, in a countryside that forms part of one’s blood, what the sweep of the land is likely to be. I merely mean that I knew I should meet an obstruction before I went over the edge of anything, and that the obstruction would be soft. I also felt sure that I wasn’t going to meet anything at all immediately. That may have been due to the feel of the grass or the wind, or, less mysteriously, to rum. One in the car and three more, unwanted, on an empty stomach undoubtedly made my driving optimistic.

We had the devil’s own luck. I missed a pond by inches, and then went slap through a barbed-wire fence into a field of kale. It couldn’t have been better The kale was high enough and formed a dark enough mass for me to begin to brake in time. When we hit it, we merely crashed for a few yards through the soft stalks.

On the damp plowland it took time to reverse and turn. Lex and Sandorski jumped out to push. I doubt if they made much difference, but I wouldn’t like to underrate the sheer nervous will-power of Sandorski in a crisis. What really saved us were the fibrous stumps of the kale, which gave just enough purchase for the back wheels.

When I had pulled out, and back through the gap in the fence, I stopped for the two to get in. Meanwhile Hiart and Pink had followed up the ruts to the mud hole. There they picked up our tracks in their lights, and came nosing along them. They were now something less than three hundred yards away. They couldn’t see us, for the bushes at the edge of the pond I had just missed were partly in the way, and the background and skyline were broken; but undoubtedly they would pick us out as soon as we moved. Sandorski told Lex to lie on the floor, and folded himself into a small tense spring between the dashboard and the front seat.

I started rolling gently over the field towards the lane. The movement, as I feared, attracted attention, and the two great eyes of the following car swiveled round until they were full on my side. They rested there a couple of seconds as Hiart’s driver swung round in a quarter circle to keep me in view. Then he quickly turned the full semicircle, and lit up the rolling field ahead.

“He’s going for the gate!” yelled Sandorski.

Of course he was. I might have bet Hiart would think of that. Once he had his car across the gate or in the lane, there was no way out for us except on foot. We might have tried it, I suppose, and played another successful hide-and-seek in the darkness, but dawn and the police and dogs would soon have settled us.

My course into the kale had taken me more or less diagonally across this great field or down. I now had to run parallel to its lower boundary in order to reach the gate, and at some time I had to swing well out into the field in order to go through. What the boundary was, I don’t know. The thick black shadows looked like a young plantation. At any rate it was something impassable to cars, and I had it looming fifty yards to my left. To my right and about two hundred yards away was Hiart’s car. I call it Hiart’s, but remembering this moment of violence I am sure Pink had taken command, and that he was thinking in terms of a naval engagement.

On went my headlights. They showed good grass ahead, and I pulled up level. For a second or two we were racing on lines not quite parallel that would intersect at the gate. Then our courses rapidly converged. I couldn’t avoid it. I was driving along the obstruction to my left, and it was curving and forcing me closer to Pink.

I had one vast advantage over Pink’s driver. I was running for my life, and he wasn’t. A split second before I got jammed against the edge of the plantation, I braked hard and passed behind them and took the outer berth. My car had terrific acceleration in second, and I pulled up level again at the cost of two leaves of a spring. There weren’t more than twenty yards between us, and Pink took a shot at me. I think it must have been meant for the tires, for he would find it hard to satisfy the police that a shot at obvious fugitives was in self-defense. It went through the rear window and nearly got Lex, who was being tossed under his coat from floor to air and back again. It was a good bit of gunnery from one moving car to another. He was only three feet high and left.

I don’t suppose we ever went much above thirty miles an hour, but over that surface the speed was as alarming as eighty on a bad road. I closed in on them from the outside in order to wreck the driver’s nerves and force him into the plantation I had just escaped. Then I heard Pink’s quarterdeck voice:

“Ram him, Jimmy!”

The driver must have been a naval man too. His quick response was worthy of the service. I turned away and skidded, and he just touched my back bumper. I heard Pink open up with his forward turret. This time he only scored the number plate and a ricochet off the wing which starred my driving window and frightened me into an extra burst of speed.

Pink was so pleased to have something to shoot at that he stayed on my tail a second too long. He allowed me to get so far out into the field that I could go for the gate. If he had raced straight for the objective, he would have had his car across it before I could complete my turn.

I could distinguish the gate now. It was shut. I’ve seen a galloping horse miss his jump and shatter a five barred gate without breaking his legs. I prayed that my car would do the same and roared straight at it. Pink, too late, cut across behind. He was only three or four lengths away, and it seemed certain that this time he must ram me broadside on before I could be through. By how much he missed me I don’t know. There was a crash and a lot of flying wood; then another crash as Pink’s car hurtled into the hedge; and I found myself shooting down the lane, fighting to control the car as it bounced from one bank to the other.

Near the bottom of the lane I slithered and scraped to a stop, and told Sandorski that we were out. He uncurled himself, and straightened painfully into the front seat. Lex remained groaning and muttering in the bottom of the car. I began to feel sorry for the poor man. Ever since we had picked him up, he had had the life of a sack of potatoes going to market.

“What happened?” the general asked.

I told him that the deviationists were in the middle of a hedge and probably upside down, that we had a minute or two at least before they could disentangle themselves, and that I’d explain it all later. The question now was: should we turn left at the bottom of the lane into the unknown, or right and up to the main road through Hinton Fitz-Paine?

“I low many people were there in the car?” he asked.

“The two you know and the driver.”

“Not the man you call Teddy Bear?”

“No.”

“Then they left him behind to telephone the police.”

“If he did, we’re mighty near the end,” I said. “One of the springs is on its last legs, and we must be nearly out of petrol.”

He bounced into the lane, and beckoned me to join him where Lex could not hear what we said.

“Why not telephone for a car?” he suggested.

“And some oysters too.”

“Hadn’t thought of it! Just what we need! But would the Teddy Bear’s Picnic have oysters?”

“Meat loaf,” I said. “Pigs lung and soya bean. Ministry of Food Special. What the hell are you talking about?”

‘Telephoning for a car, Colonel my lad. Mr. Heyne-Hassingham’s secretary speaking–ha? Hiart’s car smashed up. Wants another to take him to London at once. Heil People’s Union! Off we go! Why not?”

I looked at my watch and shook it. It was working all right. What I couldn’t believe was that only some fourteen minutes had passed since I rejoined Sandorski and started up the lane. Still, it was enough for a patrol car to have arrived, if one was coming at all.

“Isn’t it possible that Hiart saw his chance to settle accounts with us alone?” I asked. “It would be a god-send to him if he could keep the police out of it. Suppose he just sent Bear home to stand by for orders?”

“Home? Pub after all that excitement! I’ll get him out of it. It’s a bloody awful gamble. Come on!”

We drove hard through the village, seeing no one on the way, and stopped a little distance up one of the tracks at that cross where Bear had met Hiart and Pink. Sandorski jumped out and ran back to Hinton FitzPaine.

He went straight to the pub and hauled out Bear, who of course didn’t know him and had no description of him. It was touch and go, for at any moment somebody from the wrecked car might be down in the village. Bear didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t possibly doubt any man who knew as much about his recent movements as Sandorski did; and

I expect he remembered Hiart’s remarks on getting used to obedience.

They came striding past the crossroads, with Bear chattering away in a state of tremendous excitement. I cleared my car of all possessions and followed with Lex at a reasonable distance. We walked along the main road until Teddy Bear’s Picnic came in view. Then I parked Lex behind a tree, and went forward to reconnoiter. I had his brown paper parcel. He was no longer worrying about it. He had resigned all responsibility into our hands.

Teddy Bear’s Picnic consisted of three loathsome arches facing the petrol pumps and the main road. It had pleased Mr. Bear and his builder to disguise the nakedness of concrete with a vast thickness of plaster decoration–now cracked–representing boughs, wattle and odd chunks of rock. The righthand arch contained the cafe, and the left the office. Both were closed. The doors of the center arch were open, and the blaze of light revealed a too ambitious and untidy workshop, with Mr. Bear pouring oil into a six-seater limousine.

Sandorski was strolling up and down the road, giving an excellent imitation of an important and impatient politician. He was keeping a careful watch on the hedgerow, and when I waved a handkerchief he came over and whispered the news.

It was good and bad. Hiart’s driver had telephoned to the garage for a car and had been answered, after much delay, by Mrs. Bear. That put our bona fides beyond a doubt. It was a safe assumption that he had also telephoned the police, so that a patrol car could be expected any minute.

The driver must have been in the telephone box when Sandorski and Bear came out of the pub. He had left it to Mrs. Bear to get hold of her husband. We couldn’t understand why he had been in such an unthinking hurry. The explanation–as we found out afterwards–was that Pink and Hiart were both hurt, Hiart badly, and the driver didn’t want to leave them alone at the mercy of a desperado who might return any minute.

I was hesitant about car stealing and knocking out Bear. Even if we were eventually proved innocent of major crimes, the police couldn’t overlook gangsterism of that sort.

“People’s Union require me to drive!” Sandorski assured me. “And People’s Union pay cash down for hire. Where’s the stealing?”

“You can get away with that?”

“Why not–ha? Shan’t we want good men at the People’s Ministry of Transport? Ruthless men like Bear! Obeying orders without question! Nip up the road with Lex and bundle in when I come abreast of you.”

“How are you going to account for starting out the wrong way?”

“Pick up a parcel!” he snorted. “Chaps who want reasons for everything don’t join the People’s Union.”

Sandorski kept Bear occupied while we sneaked past the garage along the grass verge of the road. Lights came tearing towards us, and I shoved Lex down in the ditch and joined him. A black saloon whistled smoothly past us, and I saw inside it the peaked caps of the police. We hadn’t much time–perhaps five minutes before the cops joined Hiart and Pink at the top of the lane, and anything up to a quarter of an hour before somebody got onto Bear to find out why the car hadn’t arrived. Meanwhile the alarm would go out for my gray car, or, if they found it, for a man or men on foot. Twenty miles to Salisbury. We might just have time to reach the town before the make and number of our limousine reached the patrol cars and the constables on point duty.

When I had experienced a few minutes of Sandorski’s driving, I had no doubt that we should make Salisbury if we didn’t die horribly first. He seemed to forget that the

English rule of the road was the left, or perhaps he was merely holding the middle at all costs. When I protested, he had the ignorance to say that he was a damn sight safer than I was. It was not true. I am a most careful driver. I resented it very strongly.

Salisbury streets were comforting, and not only because at last I could relax. The pubs were just closing. There were people about, people with whom we could mix, among whom we could be lost. We were plain citizens, not outlaws, for the moment; but it would be a short moment.

“Where to?” the general asked.

I directed him out of the center into quiet residential streets. A dark house with a longish drive looked tempting. We ran the car into the drive, turned off the lights and left it. That was a good choice. We could count on all the car parks and streets being searched immediately; but in a private garden we were safe until the owner discovered our car next morning. And if he were out and returned that night, he would probably be content to curse the impudence of unknown persons for parking in his drive.

What to do now? Sandorski was all for stealing a car, but I wouldn’t have it. Hiring was too dangerous, for the police would certainly do the rounds of garages. Hitchhiking? Well, if Sandorski and I had been alone, we might have tried to stop a friendly lorry driver on the outskirts of the town. But Lex was nearly finished–so done that we desperately considered putting him in a hotel and hiding ourselves wherever we could. Lex kept on saying he was sorry but that he wasn’t used to such exertion. Again I found myself liking the man. He might fairly have blamed us for using drugs on him, but he didn’t; he just blamed himself.