With the painting finished except for a few out-of-the-way corners, which never ever did get painted, and Prudence not due to start work at the Federal Hotel until Monday, the three of us (that is, Prudence, Les and me) had a few days of just mooching about. Most of the time Angela Potroz mooched with us. We walked along the railway track in both directions (on different occasions, that is); we explored gullies and looked for eels in creeks that flowed in the shadow of the willows; we crossed the creeks on fallen logs, we sat on a monument in an over-grown Domain; we climbed trees, we found a little cave. A favourite place of ours became a bracken-covered bank high over the main road south, and from here we looked down on the hoods of passing automobiles and, I may as well admit, spat on them or tried to. We must have become a familiar foursome mooching about the back streets of Klynham. Sometimes we sat in the
gutter and chewed straws. We were all broke.
We had four days of this glorious existence, the only interlude being on Saturday afternoon when Prudence and Angela played basketball and Les and I went to the cinema and plunged down the peril-strewn jungle trails in quest of the Fire God’s treasure. We called for the girls after the matinee and I think we both kicked ourselves for not having spent the afternoon watching the basketball games. I know I did, and it is significant that Les suggested that, as, in his opinion, one got more for one’s money at the evening session, we should attend the cinema at night on Saturdays from now on. Watching basketball was hardly an approved pastime for the boys of the village, but Les and I had a wonderful alibi in sister Prudence and friend Angela.
All the girls wore long black stockings and the most abbreviated gymnasium frocks imaginable. Most of the girls wore stockings that were almost transparent, they were so threadbare, and this inadvertent sheerness of texture enhanced the allure of the ripe, blooming flesh on calf and thigh. Josephine McClinton had a new pair of stockings, which was a pity, but her frock was in open competition with the others for skimpiness. The inch or two of upper leg, which was all the frocks attempted to conceal, got very little privacy in the heat of the game, and moreover the girls seemed to be forever adjusting their garters or suspenders and yanking at their stocking tops. Believe me, it was better than the can-can. Leaning over the fence watching the basketball, Les and I cheered as lustily as anyone, but we knew not who was winning, or what they were trying to do.
Prudence started at the Federal on Monday and we missed her badly, but we kept on mooching. She had not reproached Herbert or me in the slightest way for having been really responsible
for her final disastrous encounter with Len Ramsbottom. She seemed to be past caring. She told me that Flash Freddy had bought two tickets for the little train which went through Klynham at ten o’clock at night to link up with the express at Te Rotiha. She had got on the car with him and then, at the last minute, got off again. As simple as that. What a girl!
On Saturday afternoon, the last Saturday in the holidays, Les and I leaned over the wire fence again and watched the basketball games. Prudence finished work for the week at midday on Saturdays. The days were still fine after frosts, but it was beginning to get very raw and cold as early as mid-afternoon. Winter was bringing up the big guns. A whole afternoon of watching the basketball players took a lot out of Les and me—more, I would not be surprised, than if we, ourselves, had played Rugby for the same period of time. I know Prudence and Angela seemed full of beans and skylarked the whole way on the walk back to town, but Les and I just ambled along. We were half-way along the main street which was practically deserted, as was usual with the shops closing at midday, when a bicycle corps swept silently up beside us, dismounted and propped their machines along the kerb. We were in the hands of the Philistines. Nearly the whole Lynch gang surrounded us.
‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ said Les, very pale.
‘You know what the idea is, Wilson,’ said Victor Lynch menacingly. ‘Poindexter knows too, so don’t try any tricks.’
‘Got yourself a couple of sheilas, eh?’ said big Clem Walker.
‘Look at Prudence’s legs,’ I heard Peachy giggling. ‘Oh boy! They’re better than skinny ole Potroz’s.’
‘We’re going down to the shed,’ said Lynch. ‘All of us. Nobody’s gunna get hurt. We’re just gunna have a little fun.’
‘Think you’re the only guys in Klynham got any right to sheilas,’ said Skin Hughson. ‘Y’got another think coming. Get on the bikes and we’ll double the four of yuh down to the shed.’
‘Yeah, get on the bars of these bikes and no tricks,’ said Lynch.
‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ squeaked Peachy. ‘C’mon, c’mon. I’ve never seen a sheila’s—’
‘Shut up, Peachy,’ said Lynch. ‘If you don’t shut up, you won’t get a turn.’
‘Oh, Vic,’ said Peachy. ‘Please, Vic, yuh wouldn’t do that would yuh, Vic, Vic?’
It seemed to me he was on the verge of tears.
‘Get on those grids and hurry up,’ snapped Lynch.
‘You get on the bar of my bike, Prudence,’ said D’Arcy Anderson, softly. He put his arm around her. I hit him on the nose with everything I had and he sat down hard. I had knocked someone down. I could hardly credit it. I had actually knocked someone down. Just like a film star in a serial picture.
‘By hell!’ yelled Skin Hughson, making a grab for me and I hit him too. Then I hacked his shins and hit him again. Down he went. Prudence pushed Lynch and he tripped over Hughson. As Lynch fell he barged over one of his henchmen, who in turn fell over a bicycle. The whole row of bicycles ranged along the kerb crashed to the road one after the other. I heard a smack beside me and there was Clem Walker lying on his face, neatly tripped by Les. Les put the boot in hard and then off he went after Prudence and Angela, already scuttling for safety. Someone dived and tried to collar me low, but they misjudged and stopped a kick in the face. Like the wind the four of us raced along the main street of Klynham.
We ran the whole length of the street before we stopped outside the White Hart. There were some people hanging around the doorway and we felt safe here. To our dismay, Angela was not with us. She had been headed off by a Lynchite on a bicycle.
To dodge her pursuer, Angela had cut across the road to dive down the alley between Charlie Dabney’s and the Federal Hotel, but two other Lynchites on flying bicycles had reached the mouth of the alley first. They dismounted and grabbed her. Angela wriggled like an eel and, as she wrenched away, we heard the rip of her frock, clear to where we were standing. They grabbed her again, and again she wrenched herself loose. This time the poor kid lost her frock altogether.
The Lynchites stood around Angela immobilised by the spectacle of their prey clad only in stockings, knickers and singlet. Suddenly Angela darted up the alley and out of sight. With a whoop the Lynchites set off in pursuit, leaving one of their bicycles propped against the hotel and the others lying on the footpath.
‘The dirty swine,’ yelled Prudence. ‘The dirty pack uv barstids.’
I cannot say just how much of the events across the road had been witnessed by the three or four men standing around, but when Prudence yelled at them to come and help, they followed us willingly enough, though not at top speed. I heard them laughing among themselves.
‘Hurry, hurry,’ cried Prudence.
Peachy Blair was coming back down the alley but, when he saw the gang of us arrive, he fled up it again and vanished around the bend.
We hunted everywhere, even called out from the top of the
quarry. It gives me the creeps remembering how we called out ‘Angela! Angela!’ and the echo in the quarry answering,
Angela! Angela!
It is quite probable that she heard our hallooing, but was either too ashamed to emerge, or did not recognise our voices. Just exactly where she was hiding we were never to know.
Prudence was still white and shaking with rage when the three of us arrived at our place. Prudence was carrying Angela’s torn gym frock, which she had picked off the footpath. With a rock she had started in to smash up the Lynchites’ bicycles, but one of the men who had come to our assistance had restrained her. Quietly Les and I had put our shoes through a few wheel spokes and smashed a headlight. War had been declared.
Prudence changed and said she was going to Angela’s place. Les and I went with her. Angela had not arrived. We told her father what had happened. Grim faced, he went back into the Potroz’ little cottage, got his hat and a big walking stick and away we went, ducking under an arch of rambler roses half-way along the narrow, dirt path. Again we searched the alleyway and peered into the quarry.
‘Angela! Angela!’ called Mr Potroz.
Angela! Angela!
the echo answered.
It was getting gloomy and, without Mr Potroz, Les and I would have lacked the courage to investigate. The grim windows of the Dabney chapel presided over the scene. Prudence shuddered.
‘Well,’ said Mr Potroz, ‘there’s only one thing to do. The police. That’s what the police are for. If anything has happened to Pet, I’ll take the skin off those louts, myself. I’ll beat them black and blue.’
Happily we followed him. When we arrived at the police station, Prudence plumped for waiting outside.
‘No, no, Prudence, come on in,’ said Mr Potroz. ‘We want to know all we can about this. I’ll tell you what one of us could do, and that’s just run home and see if Angela has turned up.’
‘I will,’ said Les.
We told the whole story to the sergeant. While we were in the office gabbling it all out, Len Ramsbottom arrived. He managed not to look at Prudence while the sergeant relayed the story to him.
Les arrived, puffed out. Angela was not home.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr Potroz. ‘It’s getting late, I don’t like this a bit.’
‘Take the big car,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ll ring Syd to pop back and take station duty and I’ll come myself.’
Having the sergeant with us and all must have given Mr Lynch a nasty turn when he answered the door. He overlooked asking us inside. He came back and said, ‘According to Victor he knows nothing about it. Some of his friends apparently—’
‘I want to see the boy himself,’ snapped the sergeant, who was a tough character. ‘I don’t want to hear the cock-and-bull stories he tells you. Bring him out.’
In the dusk, Prudence and Les and I nudged each other gleefully.
Victor Lynch looked about as much like an all-powerful gangleader tonight as a duckling looks like a black hawk. However, he stuck to his story. He admitted bailing us up in the main street ‘for a joke’ but after that he had come straight home, he averred.
We piled into the Hudson sedan again and continued our inquiries.
Peachy Blair, Skin Hughson and Don Butcher all told the same story. They admitted chasing Angela ‘for a joke’ but said she had ducked them somehow, down the alley-way. Only the presence of the police, in my opinion, stopped Mr Potroz from waling into them with his walking stick.
As we climbed into the Hudson, Les had a rush of brains to the head. ‘What about the shed?’ he cried. ‘That’s where they said they were gunna take us.’
Fitzherbert’s old shed looked sinister and forbidding. In the car Prudence took my hand.
‘You wait there,’ the sergeant said roughly to us youngsters when we were half-way up the path. Mr Potroz groaned. They shone their torches around inside the shed while we waited in fear and trembling. They found nothing.
‘Do you think there’s any chance she might be home by now?’ we heard Mr Potroz say to the sergeant and Len Ramsbottom as they came down the path to where we were standing.
‘We’ll go round and see,’ said the sergeant. ‘I hope she is.’
‘My God, so do I. My God, where could she be? Poor little Pet.’
I feel positive it is no exaggeration to say that, if any of us had suffered from a weak heart, he or she would have been in extreme danger at that moment of passing in their cheques. I had a heart like a Leyland ten-tonner, but all the same its timing gear slipped badly for a moment or two. There wafted to us from somewhere behind the shed the most blood-curdling wail to ever assail my ear-drums. Then it came again, even more eerie and terrifying than before. Prudence took off for the car with a cry of terror.
‘Look after Pru,’ I said and bolted after the cops, whose torches were already picking a way across the meadow towards the pine belt. The scream came again. It seemed like the sobbing rising and falling wail of an unhinged mind. Right then my blood would have delighted a vampire who preferred his on the rocks.
‘Wait for me, wait for me,’ I heard Prudence moaning, and I waited while Les and my sister floundered through the long grass to where I was standing. We could see the torchlights picking around among the trees of the orchard. The police and Mr Potroz had found the stile and used it. The shuddering scream sounded again and we hung onto each other. We were all shivering.
‘It’s up at the big house,’ said Les. ‘It’s Madam Drac, gone right off her crumpet at last.’
‘Look! Look!’ said Prudence, pointing. The sneering, omniscient moonlight framed her upturned face, a portrait of anyone but Prudence.
‘Fire!’ said Les.
What we had taken to be drifting cloud against the moon was now plainly smoke. It was tinged with red and, as we listened, we heard the ominous crackle of flame devouring the ancient timber. In the sudden, unholy glare, the pines, prisoners of their own mother, stood aghast.
A torch played on our eyes and Len Ramsbottom came blundering down the slope on top of us.
‘Into the car,’ he snapped. ‘All of you. Quick now.’
He let the clutch in and accelerated so violently we were pitched back into the seat squabs. It was a blind street and the way he spun the car around won my admiration. It was such a big, long car, with such a clumsy lock, we only just made it. Half
the width of the tyres on my side—repeat,
my
side—must have been over the deep ditch. I had clambered into the front seat. First I was pitched against the door I had just slammed, and then over I went against the driver’s mighty bicep. Gravel flew and the motor roared. The bonnet alone looked bigger than Len’s little Austin seven tourer. Around the bend we howled on two wheels—my side again, of course. The old car was not equipped with a klaxon, but, with Len’s elbow clamped hard on the horn button, emitted a fearsome and continuous
ger-oogah
,
ger-oogah
sound. We rocked along the straight like a berserk monster. We rose and fell over the crest of a short but steep hill and swooped down on a sharp bend at an impossible speed.