When he had gone, Ellis and the girl approached the clubhouse.
“Stay here,” he said to her, “and keep your eyes skinned. If you see anyone, let me know at once. I’m going to try to get in.” He took hold of her arm, pulled her close. “No tricks,” he said, staring at her intently. “You stay here and watch. You’ll be sorry if you try any tricks.”
He left her standing by a clump of bushes, screening her from the lane, and walked cautiously round the building. He peered into the darkened rooms. There was no one in the building.
He tried the front and back doors, but both were securely locked, so he selected a convenient window, broke a pane of glass with a stone, put his hand through the opening and lifted the latch. He swung himself through the window and dropped to the floor.
Crossing the room, which appeared to be the Secretary’s office, he opened the door and stepped into the passage leading to the front entrance.
There was a Yale lock on the front door and he opened the door without difficulty. He went quickly down the path to where he had left Grace. It came as a shock to him when he found she was no longer there.
He stood looking round, a cold light in his eyes, his mouth half open. She couldn’t have gone far. It was unlikely that she had returned to the station. He looked at the sandy ground, saw her footprints. He judged from them that she had run off towards the little wood, half hidden by a line of bunkers, in which he had played so often as a child. Looking in that direction, he suddenly spotted her, a dark outline running blindly away from him.
He went after her. As he pounded across the close-cut grass of the fairway, a murderous fury swamped his reason. He wanted to get his hands on her, beat her, stamp her into the ground, make her bleed. He shouted once or twice, then remembering that she couldn’t hear him, he saved his breath. He was surprised how quickly she moved. Most girls didn’t know how to run, but this little fool seemed to have wings on her feet.
Before he had run more than a hundred yards, he was panting, and twice he stumbled. This sign of poor stamina increased his fury. He’d make her pay when he caught her, he snarled to himself; she’d be sorry she’d made a monkey out of him!
He kept on, his teeth gritted, his elbows close to his sides. It dawned on him that he might not catch her if he didn’t put on a spurt, but although he made a desperate effort, he could not increase his speed.
Then suddenly she glanced back over her shoulder and saw him pounding along behind her. She threw up her hands, swerved, lost ground. He heard her thin wail of fear, and encouraged, he stretched his legs and somehow closed the distance between them. Now only twenty yards separated them, and he thought he had got her. The desire to close with her, to strike her, to teach her that he wasn’t to be played with filled him with vicious anticipation, but she just managed to dodge his questing hands, swerve, and run on. Her feet now seemed scarcely to touch the ground, and with a feeling of frustrated fury, Ellis saw the distance between them once more lengthen.
Blood pounded in his head, breath whistled through his open mouth, his lungs seemed to be bursting. He couldn’t see where he was going, but he kept on, running blindly, furious, determined to catch her. Then suddenly he seemed to step into a void, and with a startled yell he plunged head first into a deep trench that had been cut half-way across the fairway.
He hit the bottom of the trench with tremendous force, his legs twisting under him. The shock and violence of the fall stunned him, and for a few moments he blacked out, then a sharp, sickening pain in his right leg made him cry out. He caught his breath, tried to sit up, but the pain pounced on him again. Frightened, he lay still, sweat pouring off his face. He waited, trying to regain his breath, horrified at the possibility of a serious injury. He stared at his right leg. It was bent back at an awkward angle, and he knew then that it was broken. Black despair seized him. It was all up with him now. He was finished — trapped like a snared rabbit, stuck here until they came for him. He cursed at the top of his voice, in English and then in German. His face was dark with frustrated rage and fear, his eyes wild, the veins in his neck like thick cords. He pounded the sandy soil with his clenched fists, and then dug his fingers into the ground until tiny particles of sand, wedged under his finger-nails, drew blood.
To be caught like this! To be pinned down in this damp trench until someone stumbled across him. They’d find the broken window and they’d know he had done it. They’d send for the police and he’d be recognised. Then he’d be finished —
kaput
!
After a few moments he exhausted his rage, and gained control of himself. Sitting up, he gingerly touched his leg. It was painful and was already beginning to swell. In a link while, it would be bad. The thought of lying in this trench all night, the pain getting worse, flung him into a panic. He began to shout for help, not caring now if they did catch him so long as he wasn’t left alone in the dark with the pain getting worse and the leg swelling as each hour crept past.
His shouts, dwarfed by the great stretch of open ground around him, were snatched uselessly away into space by the rising wind. No one heard him.
He took hold of his broken leg and tried to straighten it. The moment he moved it pain bit into his body like the teeth of a savage animal, making him cry out. He fell back against the side of the trench, sick with pain and fear, and lay still, the sweat of exertion growing cold on his face and neck, and the pain sucking away his strength. He felt himself dragged down, helpless, through a cold, silent darkness.
“Are you hurt?” Grace called down to him.
He heard her voice, and for a moment could not believe that she had returned. He made a great effort to keep himself on the edge of consciousness, and raising his head, he looked up. He saw her; a small dark shape against the night sky, standing on the edge of the trench, peering down at him. The relief that he wasn’t going to be left alone, that she was going to help him, was almost too much for him. As she clambered into the trench he caught hold of her hands and pulled her down by his side.
“Don’t leave me,” he implored, too anxious to realise that in the darkness of the trench she could not read his lips. “I’ve broken my leg. You’ve got to help me. I gave you food. I saved you from that woman. You can’t leave me here. They’ll catch me.” He clung to her hands. “If you don’t help me I’ll tell them it was you who killed Mrs Wheeler.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The wind had stiffened and great swollen clouds came up from the west, blotting out the clear sky, the stars and the moon. A few minutes after ten o’clock it began to rain.
Lying in the trench, Ellis cursed the rain. It fell lightly at first, but as more clouds climbed the horizon it began to pour: sheet after sheet of grey, cold water, chased by the wind, soaking into the open ground.
He wished he hadn’t let Grace go. Now it was raining she would probably stay under cover and leave him out in the open to get on as best he could. She had been calm and tender when she realised that his leg was broken. It was odd that she should have behaved like that, Ellis thought. Now that she had him at her mercy she seemed to lose her fear of him, and instead of jeering at him and leaving him as he would have done in her place, she had actually made him comfortable and had straightened his broken leg so efficiently that he had scarcely felt any pain.
“I’ll go to the clubhouse,” she had said. “Perhaps I can find something I can use as a splint.”
He couldn’t understand how a girl of her type knew anything about broken limbs, and when he asked her, she explained that she had been a nursing orderly in the W.A.A.F. and had passed a number of tests in first aid.
He didn’t want her to go, but he knew something had to be done. He couldn’t stay in the trench. Before long he would have to make an effort to climb the steep bank, and to crawl somehow or other to the wood. At the moment he was too frightened to move, but if she set the bone and strapped it up, he might be able to make the attempt.
So she had gone. He had listened to her speeding footfalls as she ran lightly across the grass, but when the sound of her running had died away, he immediately lost confidence and cursed himself for letting her go.
She wouldn’t come back. After the way he had treated her, she would be a fool to come back. In her place he wouldn’t have hesitated. It would have been a perfect opportunity to have ditched her. Ditched in a ditch, he thought, and thumped the moist soil, furious and fearful.
It was now cold and wet in the trench. Rain poured down on his head, cold against his feverish skin. It would rain, he thought bitterly: this ghastly country and its treacherous weather. You never knew. He could have stood the pain and the worry if it had been dry and warm, but this insinuating wet and cold unnerved him.
Minutes ticked by. He had taken off his wrist-watch and stowed it in his wallet to protect it from the wet. Unable to resist looking at it, he brought it out once more and saw she had been away twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! What was she doing? Was she coming back? He tried to raise himself to look over the top of the trench but pain forced him to lie still. All he could see was the dark sullen sky overhead and feel the rain on his face.
A new sound came to him as he lay there. The sound of an approaching train. It rattled along the track, slowed down, and finally stopped at the station. He immediately imagined the girl waiting on the platform, getting into the train and settling in a corner seat. He could picture her white, anxious face as she peered through the window to make sure that no one had seen her. The train began to move again. He imagined her being carried away from him, and he clawed at the wet soil, trying to pull himself up, fearful of being left on his own.
He heard a distant signal thump down as the train moved off. Somehow the sound reminded him of the noise the trap would make when they hanged him. He shivered, his hand going to his throat.
Then, just as he was about to give up hope, he heard her coming, and saw a light flickering over the edge of the trench.
“Put it out, you fool!” he raved. Was the girl crazy to wave a light like that for anyone to see? But, of course, she couldn’t hear him, and when she climbed down into the trench, he knocked the torch violently out of her hand.
“It’s all right,” she said quietly, picking up the torch and kneeling in the wet beside him. “No one can see us. I had to have a light. It’s dark and wet out there.”
The torch lit up the trench, and he saw the sand, dark with rain, his twisted leg, his wet trousers, the girl also wet through, her hair like rats’ tails, the awful little hat wilting.
“I’ll try and fix your leg,” she said.
She had with her a big suitcase and two brightly-coloured golfing umbrellas. Although she was breathing hard, she was calm, and he felt more confident now she was with him.
“It would rain, wouldn’t it?” she said as she opened one of the umbrellas. Unconsciously she had adopted the cheerful tone a nurse has in a sickroom.
He nodded, watched her. She wasn’t such a fool, he decided. He doubted if even he would have thought to look for an umbrella.
She fixed the big umbrella across the sides of the trench so that it formed a roof over his head. It was a relief not to feel the rain, and he nodded approvingly when she opened the second umbrella and set it up beside the first. The two umbrellas formed a gay and complete roof to the trench, shutting out the rain and making the trench almost cosy. It was now just the kind of place a child would have loved to have been shut up in; and lying there, the rain and the sullen sky blotted out, the light from the torch on the brilliant colours of the umbrellas, Ellis went back into his childhood, and for a moment or so was actually moved.
Grace was unpacking the suitcase. She produced two large mackintosh sheets which she spread out on the wet soil.
“You’ll have to move on to that,” she said, “or you’ll get rheumatism.”
He pointed to his leg. “Fix my leg,” he said impatiently. “Never mind about rheumatism. Do you think I want to stay here all night?”
But she was busy unpacking the suitcase and she wasn’t looking at him so she did not know he was speaking. This threw him into another rage. (To be at the mercy of this deaf bitch, he raved.) He tried to touch her, but she was just beyond his reach and he was forced to lie still, hating her, waiting for her to turn.
“Can you help yourself?” she asked, coming to him and kneeling over him. He smelt the wet flannel of her skirt and drops of water fell from the stupid little flower in her hat on to his face.
He grabbed her arm, shook it. “My leg,” he shouted. “Get on with it! Never mind about the wet. Fix my leg!”
But she couldn’t have been watching his lips, for she said calmly: “Raise yourself. I’ll steady your leg while you get on to the mackintosh.”
He was going to argue, telling her he didn’t give a damn about the damp, but he suddenly hadn’t the strength. He hated to let her dominate him, but in his present condition it was so much easier to do what he was told.
He finally worked his way on to the mackintosh. She was remarkably efficient the way she handled his leg. Tenderly she held it just off the ground and she seemed to anticipate his movements so he managed to inch on to the mackintosh without great pain. But he was sweating by the time he was stretched on the sheet, and he felt he was going to be sick. She saw his deathly pallor and his glistening skin and she pressed him down, her small brown hand firm on his shoulder.
“I have some brandy here,” she said, twisting round to the suitcase.
He stared at her narrow arched back as she bent over the suitcase, at her beautifully shaped legs. It was a pity she was so plain, he thought. She had a beautiful body. A tiny spark of lust rose up inside him, but sparked out immediately as he felt a twinge of pain.
She came over to him, a tumbler containing brandy in her hand.
“Drink this,” she said, raising his head.
The brandy helped. He felt it going down inside him, spreading a comforting warmth, pushing away the deadly sickness, giving him courage.