Operation Pax (29 page)

‘Telegram from London?’

‘No. It was from Jane, here in Oxford. Listen.’ Appleby glanced at the note he had made. ‘Man weedy scratched face first observed upper reading-room now being taken
non sponte sua
in ambulance to Milton stop left Radcliffe Square 11 a.m. stop am following in hired car investigate.’ He threw the paper on the desk. ‘And it’s signed “Jane”. What do you think of that?’

‘That your sister has the rudiments of the Latin tongue. Though why she should break into it–’

‘She felt that to say in English that a man had just been carried off against his will from Radcliffe Square might provoke questions and hold her up. Well, these people have got Routh again. And they may presently have this impetuous sister of mine as well. I’d better be off.’

‘I agree.’ The Provost rose. ‘Does it occur to you that they must know that you
know
?’

Appleby nodded grimly, ‘It certainly does. Of course the only positive fact they have is that I have talked with Routh, and they probably suspect nothing of our having tumbled upon other evidence pointing their way. They may reckon now on extorting fairly reliably from Routh just what he did tell me. But – unless we have the whole picture wrong – Milton Manor now contains a large and quite ruthless criminal organization, who have been up to heaven knows what, and who now confront a state of emergency. In fact, they are preparing to pack up. And that’s what I don’t like.’

‘I don’t see why not. It means that, even before you know what their game is, you’ve got them on the run.’

‘No doubt. But people driven to hurried packing sometimes decide to travel light. They even scrap things.’

The Provost pursed his lips. ‘I hope you return in time to dine, and if you bring back our missing undergraduate – well, his dinner too awaits him – such as it is.’

Just short of Witney, it occurred to Jane that the young man styling himself ’Enery might eventually find her behaviour odd. She had very little to go upon. Indeed, all she could do was to poke about Milton Porcorum inquiring for an ambulance. And that must be a proceeding that would strike anyone as a little out of the way. She had better, therefore, do some explaining. On the other hand it would not do to explain too much. If she announced that it was her aim to track down and interview a number of men who had just carried out a highly criminal abduction, he might suppose her to be mad or at least unwomanly. He would probably suggest applying to the police. But she had done that – she was sure in the most effective way possible – by sending John the telegram; and now it was a point of honour to push straight in herself. If the ambulance led to Geoffrey, and to piercing the dark veil that had made a nightmare of her life week after week for what seemed an eternity, she must follow it at any hazard whatsoever, and with all the speed that a hired car could muster.

Jane determined to reopen communications. She therefore leant across the front seat. ‘May I explain a little?’ she asked.

‘Does a romantic secret cloud your birth too?’

Jane ignored this. ‘What I’m looking for,’ she said, ‘is an ambulance.’

‘Isn’t that a trifle pessimistic? I’m quite a careful driver – although you
are
making me go at a fair lick.’

‘It’s impossible to talk to you.’

‘Not a bit. I’m attending. And I’ll find you an ambulance if I possibly can. Any particular sort?’

‘I want to
trace
an ambulance. It left Oxford – Radcliffe Square, to be exact – at eleven o’clock, and I think it’s going to this Milton Porcorum, or to somewhere near there. There is somebody in it that I want to keep in contact with. Only I wasn’t told just where it’s bound for.’

The young man received this in silence. But he had the air of giving the matter a good deal of thought. When he did speak, it was with some appearance of irrelevance. ‘My name is not ’Enery.’

‘I didn’t think that it was for a moment.’

‘My name is Roger Remnant. I was up at Balliol. And doubtless you and all your acquaintances
did
see me at lectures. I didn’t think much of them.’

‘I’m sure my acquaintances would all be very much upset if they knew.’

‘Not your acquaintances – the lectures. That was the trouble. I didn’t manage to see much in the lectures, and eventually the chaps giving them weren’t able to see much in me. Fair enough. But I thought I’d like to stop about Oxford for a bit, so here I am. Who are you?’

‘My name is Jane Appleby. I’m up at Somerville.’

Roger Remnant bowed gravely towards the windscreen; he was driving much too fast to take his eyes even for a moment from the road. ‘How do you do.’

‘How do you do.’ Jane judged it discreet to comply with this fantastic observance of forms.

‘Our association is now on an entirely different basis.’ The late ’Enery made this statement as if he wholly believed it. ‘And we had better get back to this ambulance. You say it left Oxford at precisely eleven o’clock. We left at eleven-ten. There would be a point at which it was no more than two miles ahead. But it would increase that lead when it got into more or less open country and we were still nosing out of Oxford. An ambulance can get away with a lot. I’m afraid we are not likely to catch up with it. And, of course, it may have gone out of Oxford by the Woodstock Road. I reckon Witney and Burford to be best, but I can see that there’s a case for Chipping Norton and Stow-on-the-Wold.’

‘I see.’ Jane was impressed by this professional clarity.

‘So it looks as if our best course will be simply to inquire for it when we get into the neighbourhood you think it’s making for.’

‘That’s what I think.’ Jane was relieved. Roger Remnant appeared disposed to take it as all in a day’s work.

‘Is it really an ambulance, or is there something queer about it?’

Jane jumped on her swaying seat. She hadn’t expected this swift perspicacity. ‘It – it’s something queer.’

‘I expect we’ll find it. Do you know the country?’

‘Not very well.’

‘There are some maps in the pocket on the door on your left. You’d better sit back and do a bit of work on them.’

The map that looked most hopeful was an ancient one on a scale of eight miles to an inch. Jane learnt what she could from it. Finding the area involved, she ran to earth, despite the jolting of the car, a small black point marked ‘Milton’. Towards this, and from a secondary road some miles away, an unobtrusive scratch moved indecisively before petering out. The place must be decidedly in what is called the heart of the countryside. She looked about her and saw that they were already in rural solitude. There was an empty road before them, with nobody in sight except two trudging women with rucksacks. It was good walking weather. The autumn day was like a great cup of sunlight. She thought of the wretched little man shut up in the near-darkness of the bogus ambulance, of the sinister power that had edged him out of the security of the upper reading-room, of the alarming efficiency with which he had then been dealt with in what could have been no more than a few seconds free from public observation. And she suddenly felt cold. The Cotswold air, perhaps, was chilly despite the clear sunshine.

The drive seemed endless. But eventually she was aware that they had left the high road, and were plunging down what was no more than a lane between high hedges. The proximity of these magnified her sense of the speed at which the car was travelling; sometimes a projecting branch whipped its sides with the effect of a momentary hailstorm; she wondered what would happen if they met a farm wagon, or a straying horse or cow. Roger took a right-angled turn almost without slackening pace, so that the racing wheels and strained chassis gave a squeal of protest. ‘No call for alarm,’ he said. ‘Tyres just a trifle in need of air… Here’s another one.’ They cornered again by a small half-obliterated signpost that Jane failed to decipher. It had a look of local enterprise, and suggested recesses of the region so obscure as to be beyond the interest of any county authority. They rounded a bend and a scattering of cottages appeared before them. ‘My guess,’ Roger Remnant said, ‘is that this is it.’ And he brought the car to a halt.

The place consisted of no more than six or eight cottages. Jane jumped out. The car had been travelling so fast that her feet for a moment felt unsteady under her.

‘There doesn’t seem to be much life.’ Roger Remnant too had got out and was surveying the hamlet. ‘And we’re too early for tea – or too late by about twenty years.’ He pointed to a board, depending by one remaining nail from the side of the nearest cottage, which forlornly announced the presence of this facility. ‘Not a tourist centre. Nothing ye olde. But there’s a school farther down the lane. That means there are probably other little places like this round about.’ He sniffed. ‘It
smells
of pigs.’

Jane moved to the side of the lane and peered into the garden of the cottage with the superannuated sign. It was a wilderness of weeds from which protruded, like wrecks in a fabled Sargasso sea, the rotting remains of a few home-made tables and benches. ‘It’s a sort of shop,’ she said. ‘And a post office as well. I’ll go in.’

‘Give a shout if you want help.’ Remnant spoke humorously – but Jane, looking at his eyes for the first time, saw that they were grey and serious. ‘Now or later.’

‘I will.’ She walked to the front of the cottage and pushed open the door. A small cracked bell feebly tinkled. There was a little room with a counter, and a surprising variety of wares exposed for sale. These latter all contrived to look thoroughly dreary. The place was so dismal that it was possible to feel the dismalness seeping even inside the tins. And there was still a smell of pigs.

The bell had been without effect. The little shop was untenanted. Jane tapped on the counter. Presently there was a response to this from some interior recess: the sound of an unwieldy body moving low on the ground, accompanied by a loud and displeasing snuffling.

Jane had a moment of panic. Milton Porcorum… Perhaps she was really in the middle of a nightmare, and it had brought her to the land of the pigs. The whole hamlet would prove to be veritably inhabited only by Pigling Blands – by little pigs going to market, and little pigs staying at home. She would find nothing but a dumb and bestial rout…mute inglorious Miltons with trotters and curly tails. Or perhaps she had come to the land of Circe and her swine…

‘Yes?’ The old woman who had appeared in a doorway was lumbering and stout; she snuffled; and she had a mottled and unwholesome complexion, definitely suggestive of a Gloucester Old Spot. But at least she was endowed with speech.

‘Is this Milton Porcorum?’

‘It be.’ Any faint suggestion of cordiality that might have been read in the old woman’s expression decidedly faded. ‘You’ll have lost your way.’ She spoke with sombre conviction, born, no doubt, of many similarly unremunerative tinklings at her bell and tappings on her counter. ‘Just go straight on.’

‘But,’ said Jane, ‘if you don’t know where I want to go–’

‘Go straight on.’

It was like something particularly exasperating in
Alice in Wonderland
. Jane tried again. ‘I’m not quite sure of the place I want. But it’s where the ambulances go.’

‘I never heard of any ambulances. We’re all healthy here.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ Jane hastened to declaim any reflection upon the salubrity of the Milton Porcorum air.

‘It’s at Canonicorum you’ll find folk going sick. They’ve an ill wind at Canonicorum.’

‘Canonicorum?’

‘Milton Canonicorum.’ The old woman enunciated the words with perceptible distaste.

‘I see. But I’m thinking of ambulances that bring people – patients from quite a long way off. Is there some hospital–’

‘There’s nothing of the sort here. Canonicorum’s the place for carryings on. There’s talk of a cinema.’

‘You don’t happen, in the last hour or so, to have
seen
an ambulance? An ambulance with–’

‘You’d better try Canonicorum.’

Jane decided it was hopeless. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I
will
try Canonicorum. But how do I get there?’

‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? Go straight on.’

The old woman turned and vanished – snuffling, as she had come. Jane had for a moment the disordered fancy that she heard a rustling of straw.

She left the little shop and the bell tinkled behind her. She was baffled, and for a moment felt discouraged to the point of hopelessness. The ambulance had vanished; there was no more to it than that; and she might as well return to Oxford. But at least she could go to Milton Canonicorum first. Not that she had any faith in it. Just as Milton Porcorum contained nothing but porcine old women, so would the answering village be populated exclusively by monkish and uncommunicative old men. They would have nothing to say – except that there was an ill wind at Porcorum, and that she should go straight on.

She returned to the car and reported her lack of success to Roger Remnant. He listened attentively. ‘The old lady sounds a rich type,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll have a go at her myself.’ And he walked over to the shop.

Jane looked about her. She ought to make her inquiry of anybody she could see. But Milton Porcorum seemed the next thing to a deserted village. The few remaining cottages constituting it were unpromisingly blank and silent; the only sound was a distant, shrill shouting from the school some way on; the only wisp of smoke, even, was from a farmhouse a couple of fields away.

Remnant was back again. ‘She’d farrowed,’ he said.

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Nothing but a small, fat, sucking-pig of a child. She said that granny had been taken poorly. The shock of doing no trade with you has sent her to her bed. But I did a bit of trade myself. It’s all I got out of the place. A much better map. The one-inch Ordnance Survey.’

Jane took the map and they climbed into the front of the car together. ‘We’d better try Canonicorum,’ she said. ‘And I’ll have a squint at this as we go.’ She spread the map out on her knees. ‘What a tremendous difference this makes. One feels one could really find one’s way about with it.’