Gibraltar Road (11 page)

Some vague twitch at the back of his mind now made him uneasily aware that something dreadful might happen before long if he didn’t get back to somewhere or other . . . and then, back again like a treadmill, his confused thoughts returned to Ernie Spinner and his lank, oily sideboards. The trouble was that by this time even young Spinner wouldn’t stay still in Mr Ackroyd’s mind, and every now and again he seemed to get caught up with the trams which clanged, in Mr Ackroyd’s mind, past the Adelphi Hotel, or turned left by Lime Street station to go down to the docks, banging and clanging along with Ernie until they too faded and whirled, whirled and faded into a Clan liner coming out from the Bidston Dock over on the Birkenhead side; the Clan liner faded incongruously into the big backside which had belonged to Mrs Siddlewick, who had been Mr Ackroyd’s mother-in-law until overweight had weakened her heart-muscles and carried her off.

Mr Ackroyd then thought of his schooldays, when the other boys had teased him practically out of his mind, and indulged in a good bit of physical bullying on the side. In some ways that had been the start of it all. Instead of toughening him up, his daily ordeals of terror had driven Mr Ackroyd into a very thick shell indeed, and constant habit had made him run a mile from pain or the threat of pain. It hadn’t been much better at home. Mr Ackroyd had loved reading, an exercise, however, which had had largely to be carried out by torchlight under the bedclothes at night, for Mr Ackroyd senior had nourished a rooted objection to reading at any time, and also had a very thick leather belt. Mr Ackroyd senior had said that his son was an obstinate little cuss, and so he was; to his credit, he had a certain underlying determination to stick to his guns and get on, and there was an unsuspected toughness somewhere in his make-up. All the same, life—or rather such aspects of it as took place outside the actual school classroom—had been sheer unmitigated hell for Mr Ackroyd; and even when diligent application to work had earned him a scholarship to a grammar school, where he had done brilliantly on the science side, things hadn’t been much better.

After that, he’d gone on to Leeds University on a scholarship to study physics, and things had changed—up to a point. It was no longer a question of the boys not wanting to be chummy with Mr Ackroyd; but it was very much a question of Mr Ackroyd wanting desperately to play with the girls, and finding an almost total lack of co-operation. Young manhood had struck Mr Ackroyd a sudden and vicious blow in Leeds University, and his frustrated desires had nearly driven him out of his mind; he had in fact practically made up his mind to do away with the skinny, undernourished, undersized body topped by a pale and spotty face which inhibited all his approaches to the opposite sex. But, at the last moment, as he’d crouched, in an agony of indecision, half-way down a cutting, the London express out of Leeds had thundered by in a steamy whirl of gigantic wheels and pistons and a derisive shriek of its whistle and a rattle of carriages and a blur of yellow light with expensive-looking diners momentarily glimpsed in the restaurant-car . . . Mr Ackroyd had watched the train go with a terrifying feeling that he hadn’t even the courage to end his misery. Perhaps he didn’t himself suspect that underlying toughness—a toughness which even in extremity wouldn’t quite let him give up.

It was in such a trough of his life that the lady who was to become Mrs Ackroyd had found him, and, for the span of a longish courtship, had lifted him high to the crests. However, after a year or two of marriage to Mrs Ackroyd, the physicist had given up in the face of what had become her determined sexlessness after the creation of Annie had justified the union, and Mr Ackroyd had become totally absorbed in his work—for which England had cause to be thankful.

Mr Ackroyd at this moment was having periods of lucidity, but they were very short, and then the mad whirl began all over again . . . Annie, AFPU ONE, young Spinner, the trams, the incredible backside of old Mrs Siddlewick being so mysteriously formed out of the bluff stern of that Clan liner; then the juke-box which they’d got in the little pub off Water Street last time he’d been back in Liverpool—all mixed up, and hateful. His head burst into a myriad stars, and he didn’t know where he was. Most of the time since the pain had started there had been a nasty drumming in his head, but it wasn’t always there, and nearly every time it stopped something else filled his ears, filled them, in some peculiar way, from within. A rhythmic sound, a drumming again only different:
Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da
. . . he knew that sound, but somehow he couldn’t quite place it. And where was it coming from?

As Mr Ackroyd broke through the clinging mists of his pain for a little he realized that the noise was coming from his own mouth, and quite loudly too. He kept on with it, because for some reason which he didn’t understand it pleased him; after a while the pitch-dark of the room was broken by a streak of yellow light which made his head ache and sent stabs of pain through his red-rimmed eyes.

When Mr Ackroyd caught the smell—the perfume of
Je reviens
—he cringed back.

“No,” he cried hoarsely. “No—no—no. Not again! Please.”

The woman came up to him. In the light from the open doorway he could see the thin, tight line into which she had compressed her lips, could see the soft gold of the skin which covered arms whose steely strength he had reason to know. Mr Ackroyd tried instinctively to lift an arm in defence as two stinging slaps took him across the face, but, of course, he couldn’t move because he was tied down to the bed. The light now showed the big raised weals which criss-crossed Mr Ackroyd’s body, thick with congealed blood.

The woman’s eyes flashed a warning. She said, in a low voice, “Stop your noise, mad Englishman.”

Mr Ackroyd whimpered. A jumble of words came from him. Tears sprang to his eyes as memories of what he had endured in this room in the last few hours flooded back into his mind. That woman had wanted to know something, and when he’d got on his dignity and refused to tell her she’d turned into a devil.

The woman slapped him again, viciously, twice, three times, and he subsided into incoherent sobs. She went out of the room, locking the door behind her again. The perfume faded, the corrupt smell of neglect and dirt took its place again.

Some time later the woman came back.

This time she had two men with her, to whom she spoke in Spanish. She told them, though Mr Ackroyd couldn’t understand what she was saying, that the Englishman was mad. For the present, he was useless both to his own people and to her. Nevertheless, he might recover his sanity, and her orders were clear: Mr Ackroyd had to be taken out of Spain, and taken out of Spain at the first opportunity he would be. And the first step, as the two men already knew, led out of La Linea to Ronda.

Mr Ackroyd was untied, lifted stiffly to his feet. He was washed and cleaned up, and his wounds were roughly bandaged; he was dressed in Spanish-style clothing. Then the woman spoke again. She said to the bigger of the two men, “Before you reach the control post at San Roque . . Her hand came down in a striking motion. "You understand,
amigo
?”

“Perfectly, señorita.” It would not do to have this small mad Englishman gabbling in his own tongue at the armed
carabineros
guarding the control post. The woman took something—a small, flat piece of metal which Mr Ackroyd seemed to recognize at once, though he could not have said why—from a vanity bag and gave it to one of the men with instructions to hand it carefully on when the Englishman was delivered to the next link in the chain; and then a gun was pushed into Mr Ackroyd’s back, making him cringe with the pain, and he was taken downstairs, walked along an alleyway with his escort on either side of him, and pushed into a powerful looking American car, a Studebaker, which was waiting in the street beyond. The smaller of the two men slid in behind the wheel.

The moment Mr Ackroyd and the bigger man were in the car glided swiftly away, turned into the Plaza Generalisimo Franco, and headed out of La Linea on the San Roque road. The lights of Gibraltar three miles away winked at it as it passed fast along the shore-line of Algeciras Bay. There were British fuelling-hulks lying off in the Bay, the nearest little more than a stone’s-throw distant; and also not far off, before Gibraltar’s North Front, sentries of a British regiment of infantry stood their watch. But none of that was much comfort to Mr Ackroyd, sitting in the back of the car with that gun pressed to his side as he moaned softly to himself.

The other man was driving fast, driving grimly on his horn, and scattering men and women and children and mangy livestock as the big car swept along the main road out of La Linea, past the little cafes and bars, out into the brown, scorched country, night-shrouded now, beyond the frontier town. The driver was tight-lipped, intent behind the wheel, his headlights dipped to the sandy verge to his right upon which loomed frightened, white-faced pedestrians who leapt aside for cover as the vehicle sped out of the soft Spanish night and roared past in a rush of wind and grit and soaring, choking dust, belting along even by Spanish standards.

The Studebaker was well sprung but the road even here was not too good, and the bumps and lurches made Mr Ackroyd whimper with the pain from the freshly bleeding weals across his back. He felt sick and giddy, and his brain whirled round and round as the pain bit into his body.

The driyer eased down for the speed-trap outside the town.

He was impatient, short of time; the rest of the human pipeline along which the mad Englishman would pass was waiting for action from the La Linea end. But the driver knew he had to be careful, not get caught up on some footling speed charge and finish, like so many driving offenders in Spain, in the calabozo. He eased down again for the control post on the outskirts of the village of San Roque, and as he did so the big man in the back withdrew his gun from Mr Ackroyd’s side, lifted it, reversed it, and brought it down smartly on the little physicist’s head. Mr Ackroyd gave a small, tired, startled sound and- slumped into the corner. The big man propped him up, opened a flask, and slopped conac over his face and clothing. The car halted. A
carabinero
approached the driving window and looked in.

“Where for, señor?”

“Jerez, on business.”

“Papeles?”

The driver produced the necessary papers, including those they’d faked for Ackroyd; the
carabinero
scanned and returned them, glanced in at the big man in the back, looked at Ackroyd slumped in his seat and breathing harshly. The big man made a gesture of hopelessness and shrugged his shoulders. The
carabinero
sniffed brandy. He smiled—he understood perfectly. The señor was drunk, of course . . . he said simply:

“The boot?”

The driver jumped out. The
carabinero
went round to the back, in company with Ackroyd’s captor. Back in the car, the hot night-scents of Andalusia stole in through the windows. The big man sat tapping his fingers on the top edge of the down-wound window-glass. He knew there was nothing in the boot; but time was precious. The official came back with the driver, waved him on as he got in.

"Gracias, señor.”

“Buen viaje.”
The driver let in his clutch.

The Studebaker went ahead and took a left-hand turn at the control post; and when he was well out of sight the driver’s foot pressed down hard on the accelerator and the Studebaker shot on. With a screech of tyres they took a sharpish right-hand turn, the springs sagging and bouncing, digging the gun hard into the unheeding side of Mr Ackroyd as they swept on to the straight. The Studebaker wasn’t heading for Jerez; five miles beyond the village it roared over the level-crossing gates at San Roque station, swathed in clouds of dust which rose up in the headlights’ glare, heading onward for the mountain city of Ronda, some eighty kilometres north-north-east of Gibraltar. It was driven on through the night along roads which became rougher and trickier and void of other traffic and even of pedestrians. The road was soon to degenerate in places into a mere track, a bumpy nightmare onrush over lumps of grit and deep potholes. But despite the shocking surface of the track that led up into the mountains to Ronda, the Studebaker scarcely slackened speed. The three occupants took a tremendous shaking, and Mr Ackroyd, who had recovered consciousness but had a splitting head, felt the hot, sharp tang of bile rising to the back of his throat, and he retched. He felt again the wicked pain in back and legs, felt the bruised flesh tear beneath the bandages; he wished the men would say something, anything, rather than drive on in this frightening aloofness with its background of the rushing wind created by their passage, of the subdued engine-sounds and the click-click-click of the whirling grit which rained upward against the under-sides of the wings. And after a while, when he could stand this grim unspeakingness no longer, Mr Ackroyd began humming to himself through the growing mists of pain, and the sound that came out was rather like
dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

Mr Ackroyd’s head lolled; saliva ran from his mouth.

The revolver ground painfully into his side, making him gasp. The big man said, “Quiet,
hombre
.” The eyes glittered into Mr Ackroyd’s face and the reek of garlic slid into his nostrils as the man leaned close. “It is bad for my nerves, that noise of yours. This gun might go off.”

Mr Ackroyd subsided. The car rushed on.

La Linea’s bars and pavement cafes exuded sleek, prosperous businessmen drinking their coffee or conac, rubbing shoulders with
hombres
making do on the cheap vino of the house. Waiters darted, collecting up their little piles of pesetas, their movements and the rapid voices and gesticulations of the patrons bringing the only signs of animation to a scene from which the day’s burning sun seemed, by this early-evening hour, to have drained all physical energy.

Shaw sat in one of those bars, feeling the air heavy and slumbrous.

He was a somewhat more affluent-looking Shaw now than the
hombre
who had crossed the border the night before, when he had used the gear supplied so short a while ago by Captain Carberry back in London. He sat there in a clean lightweight suit which he’d bought locally that morning, apparently listless, though his eyes were alive and watchful and his nerves were tautly warning him of every little piece of information that might prove valuable. For, as that hot sun declined after burning the cabbage-trees in the Plaza Generalisimo Franco to nothingness, seeming to exacerbate the many stinks of La Linea, and bring them out in a crescendo of insanitariness which offended the nostrils, Shaw had discovered something.