“A perfect parachute drop, without a parachute,” he said. He was winded, but undamaged. He scrambled to his feet and trotted off down the cinder track which led to the fence.
He located the swinging plank without difficulty and pressed it outwards. Halfway up it seemed to stick.
As he crouched down and put his shoulder to it, a bright light came on in the road outside, and a motor horn blew three short, three long and three short blasts.
Cursing under his breath, David went into retreat, trying to think as he stumbled back down the path. He had not gone far when he stopped. Trombo, as always when an emergency arose, had taken charge. He was speaking through a loud-hailer.
“We know he’s somewhere in here,” said the booming voice. “And he can’t get out. The gates are guarded, and there are cars outside. There’s nowhere he can climb the fence without being spotted. What we’re going to do is beat this whole area and drive the Welsh rabbit on to the guns.”
A rumble of laughter.
“We’ll have three men on the cross tracks at the west end. You, you and you. The rest of you spread out, starting at the east end. Keep in touch and move as slowly as you like. The trucks can keep in front of us, one on each track, with headlights full on. Any questions? Right. Then, let’s get moving.”
David thought about it, and the more he thought about it the less he liked it. He had explored the area by daylight and he knew that the high fences of small meshed wire were impossible to climb without tackle. And even if he could get over, a car in the road outside with headlights on would pick him up at once. Alternatives? He could try to hide, in or under one of the piles of rusty machinery, but forty men, with torches, would be sure to find him sooner or later.
The voice boomed out again. “I’ll give you something to play for, lads. There’s two hundred for the man who first spots the rabbit. And five hundred for the man who lays the first hand on him.”
It had become a game for them. A game played on a board half a mile square, full of rusty machinery and deep pools of stagnant water and crossed by rutted tracks. A scientific game. Not quite chess, perhaps. Fox and geese, with himself as the poor, bedraggled fox.
While he was thinking this out, he had been moving, keeping parallel to the main cross path, but edging slowly towards the western fence. He could see the lights behind him now. The firefly flicker of the torches and the tigers’ eyes of the headlights.
He stopped. He had come to the first of the cross tracks, and a man was standing there. David recognised the stunted figure he had seen before in the Rayhome office. It was McVee.
It would be easy enough to creep past him, in the rain and darkness, but what good would that do? He would be pinned against an unclimbable fence, in the headlights of the advancing trucks. Probably the only result would be to put seven hundred pounds into McVee’s pocket.
It was when he was thinking about this that the plan came to him. It was a plan born of desperation. It depended on split-second timing and was based on greed and surprise. It contained a dozen imponderables. All that could be said for it was that it was better than no plan at all.
Just beyond the point where McVee stood was one of the largest of the abandoned pools, fifty yards across and brimful of water. McVee had his back to David and was standing on the far side of the track staring down into it.
If David was going to do what he had in mind, he had to wait until the advancing truck was on the point of swinging round the bend twenty yards away.
Not a second too soon. Not a split second too late.
One eye on the truck, one eye on McVee.
Wait for it.
Count five.
McVee had shifted his position, half turning to look at the truck, whose headlights could be seen.
Just beginning its swing round the corner. Now.
David took three quick steps forward and kicked McVee in the middle of the back. He shot forward, teetered for a moment on the slippery edge and then fell with a splash into the water.
The van was round the bend now and coming towards him, accelerating and breaking sharply as it came up.
David was standing in the middle of the track, waving his hands in the air. “I saw him,” he shrieked. “I saw him. I was first. Then he went into the water, and I couldn’t get him. He’ll try to swim for it, and I can’t swim.”
The driver was already out on the path.
“I can,” he said briefly.
McVee was floundering in the water, splashing feebly, three yards from the edge. The driver jumped straight into the pool. But no more quickly than David jumped into the cab of the van.,
It was an old Bedford Woodman, of the sort he had driven as a boy on his father’s farm. He slammed it into gear and was moving before the man in the water had had time to turn his head.
“No stopping now,” he said. The van had both accelerator and hand throttle. “Made for the job.” By the time he rounded the last bend and sighted the gate, he was moving fast.
“Slow it a little, boy. No need to risk a broken leg.”
Through the bars of the gate, which was a massive, padlocked affair, he could see the radiator of a car and a man standing in front of it.
He twisted the hand throttle, feeling it take over from the accelerator, opened the door and put one foot on the step. Then he aimed the truck at the middle of the gate, opened the throttle wide and dropped to the ground. The truck leaped forward and hit the gate squarely. There was a scream of metal on metal as truck, gate and car went over together in a thrashing heap, and David was across the road and over the fence beyond.
He had landed in long, wet grass, and he crouched there for a minute getting his breath and his senses back. He could hear sounds from the other side of the fence. Someone alternately retching and cursing. He guessed it was the second man, behind the car, hit by some fragment of the general convulsion. The man who had been standing in front was almost certainly finished. A second car was coming up fast. It was time to move.
He started to crawl. It was not good ground for crawling, the long, sodden grass being full of thistles and dwarf thorn. But David persevered. The thing that mattered now was keeping out of sight. If he was spotted and had to run, he’d be done.
He was a long way from being out of the woods. The streets round the dock area would be patrolled by Trombo’s mercenary army, and he was now such a conspicuous figure—muddy, bedraggled and tattered—that he would be identified at sight. He wondered if they could pick up his trail. A lot depended on whether the second man had seen him go over the fence. Anyway, it was a possibility that would be explored as soon as Trombo had the pursuit reorganised. He did not underrate that bald Napoleon.
A second fence.
David examined it. He was becoming an expert on fences. This one was diamond mesh, but the meshes were larger and offered a toehold. He scaled it cautiously. The wires at the top had been twisted upwards and formed an uncomfortable obstacle. He left further fragments of his trousers in it. A plain trail for the hounds, but it might not be picked up in the dark.
The bank on the other side was steep and slippery. He turned over on his back and slid, feet foremost, clutching at tussocks to slow his progress. It was quite a long drop. As his feet grounded on what felt like rough stones, he realised two things simultaneously. He was on a railway line, and a train was coming.
He flattened himself on the flint beside the track. An electric train rattled past a couple of feet above his heElectric train? Live rails. Dangerous at any time. Murderous when wet.
Try to think.
Were the live rails on the outside of the ordinary rails, or were they together on the inside, and, if so, how far apart?
David decided that it would be stupid to electrocute himself and that he must wait for the next train. Its lights would show him what he wanted to know.
He waited for ten minutes. It was a bad ten minutes. Twice he thought he heard voices in the field above his head, and twice he decided that it was his imagination. His head was full of strange sounds, buzzing and clacking and, behind them, in a swelling diapason, the glorious hymn which he had heard rolling round Cardiff Arms Park.
“Feed them till they want no more.”
Yes, indeed.
Here came the train. By its lights the position was made clear. There were two live rails, between the tracks and less than three feet apart.
“You’ll have to step like a bloody ballet dancer,” said David. “An
entrechat
or
pas de deux.”
He advanced towards the live rail, lifted one foot over, felt himself sway, said, “Don’t be bloody silly, now. A child could do it.” Lifted the other foot over. Repeated the process. Cleared the second live rail. Took two quick steps forward, tripped over the outside rail and fell flat on his face against the far bank.
Compared with what had gone before, this seemed a minor matter.
“Nearly out now,” he said. And no sooner said it than he realised that there was a difference between sliding down a steep, muddy, twelve-foot embankment and climbing up one.
There were moments in the time that followed when he nearly decided to give up and spend the night beside the railway. For every six inches he went up he seemed to slip back five. His nose was never more than an inch from the slimy surface. Handholds came away as he grabbed at them. He discovered one unexpected advantage from having no caps to his boots. His bare, protruding toes could seek out and dig into the smallest crevices, and it was this, in the end, which enabled him to lever himself on to the top of that nightmare bank and climb the fence beyond it.
He found himself on a rough track which parallelled the railway running past the ends of a number of small back gardens. He guessed that there must be side roads or alleys leading from it into the High Street, which cut across at this point. The important decision now was whether to turn right or left. He tried to visualise the map that Len Mullion had showed him. He thought that he would go left and take the next opening that offered. If he was wrong he would have to go back and try again in the other direction. His wristwatch, after he had scraped the mud from its glass, showed the time to be ten minutes after midnight.
The High Street, fronted by rows of locked shops, was silent and empty, the rain slanting down under the yellow neon lights and bouncing back off the black surface of the road. As David peered out, like some troglodyte intruder, from the mouth of his alleyway, a car turned the corner and cruised towards him.
He drew back and waited, counting slowly.
When he had reached fifty, a second car appeared and followed the first.
What David was looking for was one particular turning off the High Street on the other side.
A third car came past. The patrolling was regular and unrelenting. As soon as the car was out of sight, David scurried across the road and started to trot down the pavement. The side road ahead of him looked as though it might be the one he wanted. Another car. He dived into the entrance of a jeweller’s shop and pressed himself back into the darkness.
For a heart-stopping moment he thought that the car was slowing. Then it was past him and driving away.
As soon as he reached the corner he knew that this was the road he had been looking for. It was a cul-de-sac, leading down past the Borough Primary School, which loomed up on the right, locked and empty. Two more fences now, but easier ones. The first let him into the school playground. He padded across and turned the corner of the building. The low roof of a bicycle shed gave him a leg up over the second fence, and he was in the smallest of the three Rotherhithe public parks.
Len Mullion’s instructions had been clear. Follow the path along the north side of the park, nearly to the end. Turn right and you’ll find it, tucked away behind a clump of bushes.
It was a tiny, cylindrical building, like a pepper box in brick and tile. It was the place where the park keeper kept his tools and spare equipment. David had been carrying the key, strapped by sticking plaster to his leg. There had been times that night when the feel of it had been almost the only thing which had given him the courage to go on.
He pulled off the plaster, took out the key and unlocked the small door. It was stoutly made, with wrought-iron hinges, like the door of a vestry.
There was one thing he had to do before he went inside, and it took an effort of memory and will to do it. He retraced his steps until he found a wire-mesh refuse basket beside the path. He unhitched it, carried it out and dumped it, in full view, on the grass. Then he went back to the tool shed.
He went in, locked the door behind him, sat down on the floor and took six very slow, deep breaths. When he took out his torch he found that it had expired. He discarded it and clicked on his cigarette lighter.
Len had done everything that he had asked him.
The single small window had been carefully blocked with brown paper pasted on the inside. There was a hurricane lamp on the bench beside the sink. David lit it, putting it down on the floor to avoid any chance of the tiniest chink of light showing.
Under the bench he found a bulging kit bag and an old army bedroll.
In the kit bag was an outfit of coat, trousers, shirt, shoes and socks. Len’s taste was a little more dashing than David’s, but they were new and clean. There was a washing and shaving kit and a pair of pyjamas. Flannelette and striped, not silk and Cambridge blue. How long ago had that been? There was a thermos which turned out to contain soup, almost too hot to drink, and a small flask of brandy. There was a large, rough towel.
“Len,” said David, “you are all the angels in Heaven rolled into one. Gabriel. Azrael. Ithuriel. Michael.”
He stripped off every stitch of his sodden and filthy clothing and towelled and pummelled his naked body. Then he put on the pyjamas which were too large for him, sat down on the floor and drank the soup, cooling it with alternate mouthfuls of brandy.
The desire for sleep was overpowering. He unstrapped the bedroll, for which there was just room among the flowerpots on the tiled floor, crept into it, blew out the lamp and dropped down into a black pit, full of ghosts and shadows, men and half-men who wept and giggled, and one ghost in particular who said, “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t,” to the rhythm of an electric train.