Gordon Williams (9 page)

Karen and Lucy went over to where Mrs Hedden sat with her arm round Janice’s shoulders. When Mrs Hedden saw what the two girls wanted to do, she was almost pathetic in her blushing gratitude.

The three women talked together for a few moments, until they heard Janice screaming. They turned to see what had happened. Janice had one end of a cracker and was trying to hold it against her chest, yelling when Lucy and Karen tried to take hold of the other end.

“She doesn’t understand,” Mrs Hedden apologised. They went over to the little girls. They told Karen and Lucy to pull one cracker to show Janice what she was meant to do. Janice refused to give up her cracker. Louise sensed that the other women in the hall were looking unsympathetically. They probably didn’t like the idea of Janice being there at all. She felt the need to make some gesture. She sat down beside Janice and put her arm round her shoulders.

“It’s all right, darling,” she said, “we’re not going to take it away from you.”

Janice stopped screaming, but she held on to the cracker.

“Santa Claus will be here in a moment,” said Jean Knapman to the girls. They’d seen the Rev. Hood leave to change into the Santa suit. “I wonder what’ll he have for you from the tree.”

Children were already crowding round the tree in the corner near the door.

“Why don’t you and Lucy take Janice to see Santa Claus, Karen?” said Louise. “Take care of her, won’t you?”

“I should go with her,” said Mrs. Hedden, doubtfully.

“They’ll be all right,” said Jean Knapman. “Lucy is very responsible for her age.”

Louise was on the point of saying that Karen was just as responsible as Lucy, but she stopped herself.

They watched the three little girls walk to the edge of the crowd, trying to find a gap in the semi-circle of excited children.

“Time for a cup of tea!” said Jean Knapman. She introduced Louise to some of the other mothers who stood at the opposite end of the hall from the Christmas tree, enjoying a brief respite. For the first time Louise felt there was a chance of becoming part of
the life of Dando Monachorum. She but wished there was some way George could be introduced in the same way. Maybe she could ask Jean Knapman if her husband wouldn’t take George down to the Inn some night. It was
very
important – to be introduced by someone the villagers accepted as one of their own.

The scream rang out above the hubbub. The mothers turned, cups held between saucers and mouths. There was another scream. Then they saw the door open and slam shut. Santa Claus had just stepped among the crowd of children, like a man wading through a field of corn. He stopped, his hooded head turned to the door. Some of the mothers sensed trouble. It took them some moments to push through the press of clamouring children. Neither Lucy nor Karen were to be seen.

‘Where’s my Janice?” Mrs Hedden asked the children. They didn’t seem to hear her in the excitement of Santa’s arrival. Louise shoved children aside to reach the door. The small porch was cold – and empty.

She opened the outside door, a blast of wind smacking her face, snow whirling into the little vestibule. Jean Knapman and Mrs Hedden came behind her.

They went out into the miniature storm of snowflakes that danced under the light above the porch door.

“Karen! Karen!”

Louise ran across the playground, the soles of her boots slipping on hard-trodden snow. The three mothers stood in the road, shouting the names of their daughters. Then Karen and Lucy appeared, two small shapes out of the driving snow.

“Oh, Mummy, Janice ran out and we couldn’t see where she went,” said Lucy.

“She was frightened when Santa came in,” said Karen. “We couldn’t stop her.”

The three mothers ran a few yards either way up the road but it was dark and as soon as they were out of range of the school lights, the darkness was solid, a cold wall of down-pouring snow. Jean Knapman ran back to her car for the torch in the dashboard compartment. Mrs Hedden stood in the middle of the road, shouting “Janice! Janice!” Jean Knapman ran to the nearest cottage.

Karen Magruder burst into tears.

The first police car which attempted the road from Compton Wakley to Fourway Cross struggled for a mile down the narrow lane before it ran into a wheel-high drift and came to a halt. The two constables got out of the white Mini and decided there was no hope of pushing on. The wind plastered their uniforms white as they bent their backs and strained to shove the Mini backwards out of the drift. They radioed that they were turning back.

At Compton Wakley Police Station it was decided that it didn’t matter. Henry Niles was in bad health and even a strong man would have had great difficulty in getting off the Moor in that kind of weather. They decided to put car patrols on the main roads on both sides of the Moor so that he couldn’t cross over and lose himself in the rabbit warren of narrow lanes and small villages of Dando. Other police cars drove up and down the road across the Moor until fast-falling snow made this impossible.

“You’d have to feel sorry for the poor bugger,” said a police sergeant staring at snowflakes eddying thickly in the beam of the headlights. “He’ll freeze to death.”

“Won’t be much of a loss,” said the constable. “Lunatics like that shouldn’t be in a position to get out.”

“You’d hang him, would you?”

“Maybe not hang him. An injection. He’s a liability – to himself much as anything.”

“The Two Waters folk say he’s not dangerous any more. Bad health.”

“Can’t be bad enough for my taste. You ever see the photographs of the kids he done in? Gave me nightmares for months, they did.”

“Aye, I know. But he’s no better than a kid himself. He isn’t responsible.”

“That’d be a lot of comfort to they kids. And their mothers.”

In the morning, it was decided, policemen and soldiers could make a sweeping search of the part of the Moor where the ambulance had crashed.

“I don’t suppose we’ll find the body till the snow melts,” said an inspector. “They say you die peaceful enough when it’s this cold. Just go to sleep in the snow.”

It seemed an ideal solution...

When George Magruder walked towards the door of the school two men stopped him.

“It’s that American from Trencher’s,” said one.

“What’s going on?” asked George. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You better get your wife and kid home quick’s you can,” said the other. “Niles the maniac’s escaped from Two Waters.”

“He could help look for Janice Hedden,” said the first man.

“What’s going on?” George demanded. “I want to see my wife.”

“Little Janice Hedden’s disappeared,” said the other man. George didn’t understand. He pushed past them into the porch. Opening the inner door he was confronted by groups of white, strained faces.

“What’s going on?” he asked Louise. She told him about Janice Hedden.

“Mr Hood’s gone to phone round the nearest farms,” she said. “We need search parties but the mothers won’t leave their children.”

“I’ll drive you back to the house,” he said. “The road may be blocked if we wait much longer. I’ll come back and help them once I’ve got you and Karen safe home. Come on.”

“I should stay and help. Mrs Hedden’s in a terrible state. They’re fetching the doctor.”

“There’s plenty of people to help her. Just get Karen and let’s go. Some maniac has escaped from Two Waters.”

He was speaking loudly and she felt conspicuous.

“Everybody else is waiting,” she said, quietly, pulling him close by clutching the elbow of his jacket. “They’ll think it funny us going off.”

“Don’t argue. It’ll look funnier if I go off on my own. Do you want to walk two miles in this damn snow?”

Trying to avoid the faces of the other women, she told Jean Knapman that they were going home and that George would be coming back to join the search parties. Jean Knapman said it was the best thing they could do, but Louise felt ashamed. They were the only people leaving the hall. Karen sat between them in the car. The clicking of the windscreen wipers formed an insistent rhythm which seemed to grow louder and louder as their mutual silence lengthened. At last Louise could no longer keep her temper bottled up.

“I don’t appreciate you being bossy in public,” she said.

“Bossy? With some sex-maniac on the loose and the road closing up? Use your commonsense, Louise, you –”

“Don’t talk to me about commonsense, you bastard!”

“Louise! Not in front of Karen!”

“Yes, in front of Karen, it’s time she knew, there’s no use letting her grow up in a bloody dream-world. You had to come and spoil everything, didn’t you, just as –”

“Louise, for the last time, will you –”

The snow was a steeply-angled cascade of white feathers. Out of it, into the beam of the headlights, came the figure of a man.

Instinctively Louise grabbed Karen with both arms.

“George!”

She felt a bump. George shouted something she didn’t catch. He stopped the car.

“We hit him, we hit him, I couldn’t stop at that distance, I couldn’t –”

“For God’s sake! Get out and see what’s happened!”

She and Karen watched through the windscreen as George walked round to the front of the car, his shoulders hunched against wind and snow. He bent down out of sight: Then he stood up and shouted. Louise opened her door, immediately shivering with a cold whip of wind on her legs. George came round towards her.

“Back up,” he called. “He’s underneath. Back up about a yard.”

She pulled Karen across her lap and got behind the wheel. The thought of getting the wrong gear made her feel even more hysterical. The car seemed to jump backwards. George waved. George bent down and they saw him come up with the dark shape in his arms. Staggering slightly he came round to the rear door. Louise leaned back to open it from the inside. George struggled to lift the man on to the back seat. Louise twisted round, trying to see his face.

“Is he –”

“We’d better get him to the house, I don’t think I hit him too hard.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go, huh?”

Once or twice the car looked as though it might stick in snow but by reversing and starting forward again Louise forced it through the drifts.

“His eyes are open,” George said from the back seat. “I’ll carry him inside, you get the car into the garage. Karen, you stay in the car till your mother parks it.”

As he carried the man – who was almost worryingly light – up the path, George tried to remember what he knew about First Aid, but the only lesson he could remember from the Boy Scouts was not to move an injured person. The man was so light he was able to hold him up with one arm while he felt for the keys. Then he picked him up and carried him in both arms into the sitting-room, where he laid him on the couch.

Louise came in.

“I couldn’t get the garage doors open, there’s so much snow lying,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter, we won’t be going anywhere in the car. Look, his eyes are open but he doesn’t seem to be looking at anything.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I hit him too hard, not hard enough to knock him out.”

“How could you tell?”

“I just
know
, that’s all. We’d better get those clothes off him, he’s
wet.
What the hell was he doing out in the snow without a coat? Louise, get some blankets, will you?”

“Shouldn’t we give him brandy – or something?”

“In a minute. Karen, see to the fire, will you? Turn it all the way up.”

Karen seemed ready to burst into tears. Since coming into the sitting-room she’d stood on one spot in the middle of the floor.

“The fire, Karen!”

She turned the air gauge up to eight, its limit, and worked the lever which shook dead ash into a tray. Louise ran upstairs and pulled blankets off one of the spare beds. Her hands trembled.

When she went downstairs George had pulled off the man’s shoes and socks and trousers and was unfastening the buttons of his shirt. When he was down to his vest and pants – which to Louise’s relief seemed quite clean – he rubbed the man’s thin legs and small, white feet with a bathroom towel. Louise kept thinking she’d have to wash the towel and the blankets. She could hear her mother – library books and coins and strange men, they were dirty, they carried germs and disease. The little man’s mouth opened and closed several times, but his eyes showed no life. George tucked the blankets round his body and under his feet.

“I’ll phone the doctor,” he said. “I don’t know what we should give him to drink. There isn’t any brandy anyway.”

“There’s whisky and gin – and some sherry.”

George grinned.

“He might like ice with it. You’d better hang up his clothes in the drying cupboard.”

“I’m not touching
his
clothes.”

“All right, I’ll do it.”

The drying cupboard was upstairs in the bathroom. As he shook out the man’s clothing, George tried to give Louise the benefit of
the doubt. He was sure she hadn’t always been like this, yet when he tried to think of what she
was
like before he couldn’t remember the actuality. The man’s jacket was a wet, cold lump. He opened it out and shoved his hand down the sleeve, to turn it inside out. Maybe some farm-worker dressed up in his best. Clean enough. His eye was caught by a white patch on the inside of the collar. He pulled the sleeve out and held up the jacket to look at the patch. The white material was soggy and wet and for a moment he couldn’t make out what letters were formed by the red cotton stitches.

He moved over to the light.

He saw then. The stitching made five, run-on letters.

NILES.

Niles?

Niles the –?

He heard footsteps on the stairs. Where was Karen?

“Louise!” he shouted, running to the bathroom door.

He pushed past Louise on the stairs, ducking his head as he came down through the sitting-room doorway.

Louise was behind him.

“George! Have you gone mad?”

Karen was at the window, her head bent so that her face was hidden. The man lay still, as before, on the sofa.

“Karen?” He walked across. She wouldn’t look up. He took her head in both hands and lifted her face up. She was crying. “What’s wrong, honey?”