Appleby Plays Chicken (16 page)

Arthur Drury, the quiet man who didn’t get on with Timothy, had seen the fugitive too. He turned to David. ‘Is that the chap?’ he asked. ‘He’s got a queer notion of making a bolt for it, if he is.’

This was true. The man in knickerbockers was zigzagging across the open moor as if it were a rugger field with a dozen players to weave through if he was to score a try. For a moment David supposed that this strange course really did represent some sort of calculated evasive action, as when a ship tacks about when under threat of assault by torpedoes. Then he saw that there could be no sense in that. Even if the man had been brought under fire by the police – which was unlikely, since he didn’t seem to be giving battle – there could be no advantage in such a technique.

‘He’s been hit on the head, if you ask me,’ Arthur Drury went on. ‘And he’s in a bit of a daze. I don’t see why we shouldn’t collar him.’

‘That’s not David’s orders.’ Timothy produced this opposition promptly. ‘So back we go.’ He turned to Pettifor. ‘Isn’t that the drill, sir?’

‘Quite right. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.’ Pettifor had a trick of these silly tags and quotations that would never desert him in any exigency. He seemed quite unconscious of them and always brought them out as if they had never been uttered before. And now he showed no sign of budging himself. He had uncased his ancient field-glasses and was focusing them. ‘Dear me!’ he exclaimed, ‘the fellow’s covered with blood.’

‘Blood-bolter’d Banquo.’ Ogg thought it enormously amusing to echo this habit of his uncle’s.

Tom Overend spoke for the first time. He was usually rational, and David had some hope of him. ‘Total gules,’ Tom said.

David despaired of them. The man in knickerbockers had now taken a tack that was bringing him at them head on. And he was certainly a bloody sight. Perhaps there really had been a gun battle farther back, and one of the police had put a bullet in him. Or perhaps he had been shot at as a justifiable preventive measure. Only David hadn’t heard a single report.

‘Taken a tumble,’ Timothy said. ‘Was he up Knack Tor?’

David shook his head. ‘The Loaf.’ Timothy, he felt, had got it right. In beginning his getaway the man in knickerbockers must have come down with a crack, and he was in some badly confused state. This certainly didn’t make him any less dangerous – quite the contrary. And now he had spotted them. He had spotted the mild archaeological field party: three elderly men and a gaggle of talkative youths. He was coming unsteadily to a halt. And he was raising his rifle.

‘Get down! Get down, all of you!’ It was Farquharson who gave this yell – and as he uttered it he pitched himself with unexpected agility at Ogg’s knees. A damned good mark for him, David thought.

There was a sharp crack. The man had opened fire. David found that his own nose was buried in heather. There was no longer the slightest hope of safety in retreat. He flattened himself on the earth and simply hoped that everybody else had done the same. Not that there was much help in that either. If the man in knickerbockers was seeing red, he could produce a holocaust. David waited for a fusillade. But it didn’t happen. Nothing made itself heard except shouts. They were coming nearer. But they were a good long way off, all the same. He put his head up cautiously. The man in knickerbockers was running again, and had left them on his flank. His course was straighter now. He was making for the track and the cars.

‘Gone away!’

It was Ogg’s shout, and it brought David to his feet with an instant sense of fresh crisis. The others were getting up too, and he saw a circle of startled faces around him, mostly attached to bodies still on all fours. The effect was of a small perturbed herd of unlikely ruminants, and he would have laughed aloud if he hadn’t at once been appalled by a realization of what the new disaster was. The incredible Ogg was fifty yards away, and hotfoot after the man in knickerbockers. He was advertising himself as he ran by cries borrowed from the hunting field. ‘Gone away!’ Ogg yelled again. ‘Tally-ho, chaps, tally-ho!’ He had been vastly affronted, David guessed, by the indignity, as he conceived it, of Farquharson’s timely tackle, and now he was showing that he was a man to be taken seriously. David remembered the infant’s excitement the night before. This was the same thing; it was valley-of-death stuff again.

And Pettifor’s lot, of course, responded as they must. They scrambled to their feet, cursed Ogg roundly, and went tearing after him. David found to his fury that he couldn’t quite keep up with any of them. His effective running was over for that day. But no more could the others keep up with Ogg. The large-limbed infant had an incredible turn of speed. It was his line, David remembered; he had been some sort of stripling champion; and this strong card had clearly made him the readier to take his present utterly rash action. He was overtaking the man in knickerbockers hand over fist.

It looked, David thought, thoroughly ugly. The police, indeed, had now appeared. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see several of them up with Pettifor, Faircloth, and Farquharson already. But they didn’t look like getting very effectively into the picture, all the same – or not unless a fresh bunch of them made their overdue appearance on the track ahead.

The man in knickerbockers was nearing the track now. And David realized that he had a plan. If he had brought any transport of his own it must have been somewhere on the farther side of the moor, so that he was now cut off from it. He was going to take his chance of getting away in one of the empty cars waiting straight in front of him. It looked as if Ogg had some prospect of overtaking him as he ran, or at least of coming up with him as he was trying to start one car or another. And if Ogg managed that, the unfortunate youth’s chances of survival were slim.

The others were trying to stop Ogg by shouting. But either he took their cries for encouragement, or he was determined to pay no attention to them. And the man in knickerbockers knew how closely he was being pursued; David had seen him give a glance over his shoulder and take the situation in. At any moment he might pause, turn, and simply pick Ogg off. Unless he was pretty well blinded by his own blood – and certainly, at close range, he had looked bloody enough – there was no chance of his failing to bring off such a shot.

But now there was a new factor in the situation. Appleby had appeared as if from nowhere and was coming up on the flank of the crazy pursuit. He must quickly have followed David down from the summit of the Tor and taken his own rapid route towards the track. He still had his shooting stick; he still had his pork-pie hat; doubtless he still had his little cardboard label. He hadn’t anything like Ogg’s speed, but he looked as if he could hold his own with the man in knickerbockers. But that didn’t look quite good enough. The man was now on the track, and making for Timothy’s car. Ogg wasn’t fifty yards behind him. David prayed that Timothy had left the ignition key in the Heap, and that the wretched old contraption would start like a bird. It would mean the man’s getting away. But it would mean that Ogg wouldn’t provide this beastly day’s third corpse.

There was a wrathful shout from immediately ahead. It was Timothy; even in this grim situation he had an additional indignant bellow for the spectacle of somebody actually proposing to liberate his car. And the man in knickerbockers had, in fact, now jumped into it. He was pitching his rifle down on the front seat and furiously attacking the controls. And nothing happened.

Nothing was happening. David knew that even at this distance one would decidedly hear the sound the Heap made when it started into life. And Ogg was making straight for it; he wasn’t a stone’s throw away; either he was completely crazy or the world’s most courageous infant. The man in knickerbockers was keeping an eye on him; he straightened up, seized the rifle, and took aim. If he shot Ogg, and then Appleby, he would have a couple of minutes in hand. Appleby was still running. He had raised his shooting stick – rather as if trying to hail an elusive taxi, so that for a second there was the effect of a grotesque, a macabre farce. Then the rifle seemed to spin itself out of the hands of the man in knickerbockers and vanish. There was a faint report, and from Ogg a faint triumphant shout. But the man wasn’t giving in. He had sat down again at the wheel – and suddenly there was a roar and a clatter as the engine fired. He flung it into gear and the car went off with a jerk. Ogg, springing up, just failed to make a successful grab at the hood. The man in knickerbockers was making his escape. But Ogg remained alive.

And he remained resourceful as well. He ran on, and within seconds had hurled himself into Pettifor’s Land Rover. He had it started in a flash. With a fantastic effect of unreality – of the unashamedly cinematographic – the pursuit and flight were continuing. In a whirl of dust the two cars disappeared down the track.

The group of pursuers ahead had halted. There was nothing more to do. David ran on and joined them. And Timothy turned to him, panting. ‘What frightful cheek! But I’m glad it’s not the other way on.’

‘The other way on?’

‘Not the brat that’s in the Heap. It’s temperamental today. The steering. I think it was one of those potholes last night.’

‘We’ll see them again in a second.’ Arthur Drury was pointing. ‘There, by the next rise. If the frightful old thing lasts that far.’

‘What d’you mean – lasts that far?’ With some inconsistency, Timothy was at once indignant.

‘There they go!’ Tom Overend gave a shout.

‘Sure – there they go!’ And Leon Kryder pointed. ‘Gone away and tally-ho!’

They were all wildly excited. But David didn’t feel that way at all. He supposed he’d had enough. As he watched the two cars shoot into view again in the middle distance he felt that interest had drained out of him. He didn’t want Ogg to come to any grief, but otherwise he couldn’t care less… And then suddenly he found that his nerves were tingling, and that his eyes were glued in fascination on the leading car. It was going at a great pace – and it was swaying queerly. The movement lasted only for a fraction of a second, but it was entirely horrible. And so was what instantly followed. The Heap spun strangely round on its own tail, rolled over and over, and vanished.

Everybody gasped, and began to run. A few seconds later, they gasped again. Ogg had brought the Land Rover safely to a halt. But close by where the other car had hurtled from the track there was black smoke and leaping flame.

The Heap, when they got to it, was a smouldering mess. Ogg, very quiet and pale, was sitting on the grass, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the thing that he and Appleby had hauled from the fire. His hands would need attending to. But he wasn’t hurt.

‘Did you recognize him too?’ Presently David managed to ask Appleby this in a tolerably steady way. What had been the man in knickerbockers didn’t look at all nice. But the body didn’t in the least approximate to a cinder.

Appleby shook his head. ‘I never saw him before.’

‘Do you think it was the steering, or the crack he got when he began to bolt?’

‘Perhaps a bit of both. Anyway, he’s dead. So our very restricted cast has grown smaller still.’

‘I think it’s awful. I suppose I should be relieved, since there can’t be anyone left who wants to come after me with a gun.’ David managed to smile wanly. He felt he wanted to get away from everybody and go to bed. ‘But I just feel it’s all awful.’

‘Is it? It’s certainly all very mysterious still. Which is unsatisfactory, you know. There’s quite a lot to be done.’

David contrived to brace himself. ‘All right. Straight away, if you like.’

Appleby smiled. ‘Good. But I think, as a matter of fact, we can conveniently ring down the curtain for a bit of an interval. Unless there’s something you want to go at immediately yourself.’

And suddenly David remembered. ‘Yes, please,’ he said. ‘It’s about how the chap lost his rifle when he was just going to shoot Ogg. How did it happen?’

Appleby looked surprised. ‘I managed to shoot it out of his hands.’

‘To shoot it!’ David stared – and then his glance went to the ground beside Appleby. ‘You mean to say–?’

‘Precisely.’ And Appleby picked up his shooting stick. ‘Doesn’t it seem reasonable that a shooting stick should shoot?’

‘I suppose so.’ David was so astonished that he offered this reply in entire seriousness. And then he grinned. ‘Is it a standard issue to high-ups at Scotland Yard?’

‘Dear me, no. It’s private enterprise – and I’ve no doubt unique in England. As a matter of fact, it was invented for me by my eldest boy.’ And Appleby glanced round Pettifor’s lot. ‘A quiet, serious lad. We’ve sent him to Cambridge, as a matter of fact.’

JOHN APPLEBY

Appleby drove into Nymph Monachorum after dinner. Presumably the reading party had by this time recruited itself after the hazards of the day, and some members of it at least could stand up to a little questioning. Appleby’s own meal had been hasty; there had been, not unnaturally, various local authorities to see; and there had also been certain crucial telephone inquiries to make in London. When he got to the George he asked for Pettifor.

And Pettifor appeared at once and led him into a deserted smoking room. ‘I hope you don’t want young David Henchman,’ he said. ‘The boy’s tired out. He lacks the season of all natures, sleep. I’ve packed him off to bed.’

‘Quite right.’ If Appleby thought this manner of speech mildly strange, he said nothing. ‘And you must understand, Mr Pettifor, that I have no official concern with this affair. But as I got mixed up in it, I think I ought to try and see it through. I think you know the Chief Constable down here?’

‘Dear me, yes. We’re distantly related.’ Pettifor smiled. ‘This is my part of the world, you see – and we’re all in some sort of relationship with each other.’

‘No doubt. Well, I was only going to say that I’ve been in touch with him, and he quite agrees to my looking into this affair. As for Henchman, I’ve no desire to rout him out of bed. But I’d like a word with you about him. This has been a bad business, and he’s been right in the thick of it.’