Prisoner of Fire (3 page)

After perhaps ten blows, there was a creaking noise. Then a section of the hedge fell forward, almost upon her. Oblivious of the sharp thorns, she tried to drag it clear, but it was still attached to the stump by a few annoying strands of wood.

She swung the axe once more with all the strength of frenzy and despair. She could hear dogs barking in the distance. In a few minutes, perhaps even in a few seconds, the guards would come. The last axe blow severed the remaining strands, and she was able to drag the clump of thorn hedge clear of the gap.

Now she had a clear run, provided she remembered to skip over the stump. She dropped the axe and found her vaulting pole. She could not grip it properly. Her hands were sticky with sweat and blood.

But it was now or never. She could see the dogs, and she could see the guards running after them, electric torches swinging from side to side.

Suddenly an icy coldness came over her. It was as if all emotion were banished, as if she had become physically detached from her body. Calmly she went
close to the fence, turned and paced her running distance from it. Then she turned once more, the pole held in both hands, testing its weight and attitude. The dogs and the guards were little more than a hundred yards away now. They would be upon her in seconds.

She gazed at the moonlight, shining upon the formidable barbed wires of the electrified fence.

“I can only die once,” she told herself coolly, as if it were a kind of consolation.

Even as she poised to start her run, she heard a woman’s voice in her head. It was not a voice she knew, but yet it seemed familiar. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

“I will do it!” shouted Vanessa aloud.

With practised grace, she started the run, taking long powerful strides, remembering to skip over the thorn stump in the gap in the hedge without disturbing her essential rhythm. Then all coherent thought was lost. Her body became a finely tuned machine.

She gathered speed, the fence loomed before her, she thrust the point of the pole down into yielding earth, and leaped. The pole bent under the impetus of her forward movement, responded to the lift, jerked back into its natural straight shape, and hurled her over the fence.

As she let go she was aware of sparks and crackling noises. Then she was falling on to soft earth. She picked herself up, turned and saw the guards and their dogs, impotent on the other side of the fence. It would take them a long time to reach the main gate; but perhaps they could radio for help. Vanessa turned and ran. There was only one direction in which to run, and that was away. She ran until she thought her lungs would burst. It was several hours until daylight. That was when the search would begin in earnest. During the
remaining hours of darkness, she must put as much distance between herself and Random Hill as possible.

In a luxurious penthouse flat at the top of an expensive block in London West One, Jenny Pargetter, née Jenny Smith, woke up screaming.

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

Simon, her husband, switched on the light and tried to comfort her.

“What is it, love? A nightmare?”

She was shivering and shaking. “Yes, a nightmare.”

Simon kissed her, held her close, attempting to dismiss it. “Not to worry, love. Too much lobster thermidor. Maybe too many pink gins. Serves me right for embroiling you with ghastly stockbrokers. Won’t do it again.”

Jenny tried to respond to his caresses and could not. “It was so real, Simon. So vividly real.”

“Tell me about it.”

She passed a hand over her forehead, gripped her temples tightly. “Well, I seemed to be a young girl, in some kind of institution, trying to break out. There was an electrified fence, and I was terrified of it because I knew I would have to pole-vault it.”

Simon got out of bed, put on his silk dressing-gown, went out of the bedroom and returned with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.

“One for you?”

“No, thank you, darling. As you say, too many pink gins.”

“It wasn’t an accusation.”

“I know it wasn’t.”

Simon poured himself a large brandy. “A young girl, you say?”

“Yes”

“Can
you remember anything else?”

“Not much. There were dogs and men in uniform. It was frightening.”

“Did you—or she—make the jump?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—or she—survive?”

“I—I think so.”

Simon took a deep draught of the brandy. ‘Hell,’ he thought. ‘Vandalism. One should sip this stuff and savour it.’

“A young girl,” said Simon. “How young?”

“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—I don’t know.”

“Vanessa?”

Jenny gave a shrill laugh. “You read too much into nightmares.”

“Vanessa?”

“It could be—I suppose.”

Simon poured himself more brandy. “Darling, you underestimated me. I would not have resented her. At least, I don’t think I would… I’ll make enquiries tomorrow. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“Well, then. Have a brandy and snuggle close. No more nightmares, I promise.”

V
ANESSA
RAN UNTIL
she could not even feel the ache in her rubbery legs any more, and only knew that she was still alive because the aching pain in her chest would not go away and because she seemed to have to muster a gigantic effort of will to draw in each sobbing breath to power the worn-out, overworked engine of her body.

She ran like a mindless automaton, through woods, across ditches and ploughed fields, through a small stream whose icy water had refreshed her temporarily. At first, she had heard the dogs behind her; and the sound of their eager barking had supercharged the adrenalin pumped into her bloodstream. For a while her feet seemed to have barely touched the ground. Presently, the sound of the dogs was left far behind. They could travel as fast as she could, faster. They were more efficient, more tireless; but they were held back by the men. The guards were stronger than Vanessa; but they lacked her will. For them the chase was not a matter of life and death. For her it was. And so she outdistanced them easily in the first hour of pursuit.

As she ran, a mindless song repeated itself endlessly in her head; Ten green bottles hanging on a wall… It went on and on; and as soon as the last green bottle
had fallen there was a new wall with ten more green bottles to take its place.

Instinctively, she travelled south. She crossed two main roads and a motorway, almost oblivious of the blinding lights, the blaring horns. She climbed fences and fell across ditches. She ran on through the night until the stars winked out one by one and the moon danced crazily like a yellow balloon in the wind. She ran herself into the ground, and lay where she had fallen, unconscious, spent. She did not know it, but another fifty paces would have taken her to a barn where there was plenty of hay to make a soft, warm bed.

She just lay where she had fallen in a field of winter wheat. She lay on her face while tiny spiders crawled over her unconscious body and while dew formed on her hair.

She returned to consciousness shortly after daybreak. She awoke because her body was one great, terrifying ache. She tried to stand up, and cried out aloud with pain. Slowly, pitifully, she compelled her limbs to obey her. She forgot all about mental blocks. Let who would probe her mind. All they would discover would be agony. Rather than preserve secrecy, it was more important that she concentrated on making her limbs obey her, that she concentrated on finding food and something to drink.

Luck was with her. There were free-range hens on the farm. One had made a nest in the wheat field and had laid eggs there in the sublime belief that she would be allowed to rear a clutch of chicks. Vanessa saw the nest and started cracking eggs. Fortunately, the hen had never been allowed to run with-a cock. The eggs were infertile. Vanessa sat cross-legged, cracking the eggs and swallowing their contents greedily while the
hen strutted about, raised her neck feathers and swore mightily. Vanessa tried to make soothing noises; but the hen was not impressed.

In the same field she found an old stone drinking trough, doubtless belonging to the long-dead days when farmers once used horses to draw ploughs. The trough was encrusted with moss and lichen; but there was still some water—probably rainwater from recent showers—in it.

Vanessa cupped her hands and drank greedily. The water tasted faintly brackish but it also tasted good. With the raw eggs, it seemed to pour life and energy into her resilient body. As she was finishing drinking, she heard a voice. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a man near the barn. He was beckoning her.

She panicked. The receding pain in her limbs forgotten, she began to run once more. Across the field, over a five-barred gate. South… South …

The sun had risen above the horizon. She began to hear voices in her head.

‘Vanessa, come back. Come back! You won’t be punished. Dr. Lindemann promises that you won’t be punished.’

She recognised Dugal’s pattern. Dear, simple-minded Dugal. He was transmitting what they wanted him to transmit. Doubtless the fee would be a chocolate bar.

She didn’t try to say anything to Dugal. There was no point in trying to say anything. Whatever thoughts she uttered would only make him more unhappy. He would not be able to understand why she had run away; he was far too young, far too trusting, to be able to comprehend tyranny. There was no point in putting doubt into his mind, setting him in conflict with the people who controlled his destiny.

So, wearily, as she ran, she set up the insane mental
block once more: Ten Green Bottles. If they could not persuade Dugal to probe beneath it, they would try Meriona, or Thomas or Greg. Meriona was almost the same age as Vanessa and hated her. Meriona was plain, Vanessa was pretty. But, fortunately, Meriona didn’t have much of an esfactor. There was little to fear from her. Nor was there much to fear from Thomas or Greg. Dugal was the only dangerous one, and he was Vanessa’s friend.

Automatically, Vanessa kept away from villages. She travelled across farmland and through wooded country. Even in 1990 much of southern England remained unspoiled. Apart from the incursion of superhighways, telephone poles and the occasional phalanx of pylons, the countryside had changed little in a hundred years.

Running soon tired her, and brought the aches back. After a time she tried a routine of running one hundred strides, then walking one hundred paces. It helped; though it was hard at the end of the walking session to start running again. Frequently, because of sheer fatigue, she had to relax the mind block; and then the whispers were in her head. ‘Come back! Come back!’ Sometimes the transmission patterns were Dugal’s, sometimes they were unrecognisable.

She kept her eyes open for people. When she saw them—chiefly farm employees—she would saunter along as if she were just taking a leisurely walk.

The sun climbed up towards its zenith. Shortly before noon, Vanessa saw a helicopter. It was not making the usual kind of straight-line journey that helicopters make from point A to point B. It was circling, weaving, hovering. It was looking.

She was in a field of young barley when she saw it coming from the north. She was not more than twenty
paces from the cover of a substantial patch of woodland. She ran faster than she had thought she could run, leaped a gate, fell in a heap, picked herself up and staggered into the cover of the trees.

There she fainted.

When she became conscious once more, she found that she was cold and shivering.

There were stars in the sky, and a pale watery moon. She shivered and cried. Presently, she picked herself up and tried to go on. She did not get very far.

D
R
. R
OLAND
B
ADEL
had
been a recluse for almost a year. He liked his solitary existence, although he noted with clinical detachment the withdrawal symptoms of the hermit. The scars on his face had healed well, and the thin white line that showed where his throat had been inefficiently cut was more or less permanently concealed by a cravat; though there were very few occasions when anyone else was likely to see it. But once a day, at least, Badel had to look at it, when he shaved. He still had the nightmares; but he no longer trembled or felt the sweat break out when he saw the scar. And that, certainly, was a good sign.

He was a trained psychologist. For nearly ten years he had worked for the National Psychological Laboratory on the development of personality-reshaping programmes. He had been head of a team that tested such programmes on anti-social persons. Or, as he himself used to put it bluntly, he had been head mechanic in a human repair shop. Chiefly, he had tested his programme on criminals, psychopaths, anarchists, subversives and sexual deviants. Upon such flotsam, he and his team had tried aversion therapy, psychoanalysis (Jungian and Freudian), twilight sleep, deprivation sequences, suspended animation, stress stimuli, lobotomy, electroplexy, controlled starvation programmes
, hypnotherapy and plain brainwashing. Sometimes, some of the treatments had worked—or had appeared to work—with some of the specimens. Sometimes, nothing had worked. Sometimes, after sustained treatment, the end product was a cabbage, not a person.

The aims of the project were laudable. If you could use psychological techniques to rehabilitate anti-social persons, you could do away with prisons and a frighteningly large number of nut-houses. Capital punishment had already been discarded as a means of dealing with violence, and the conventional prison system had already proved its own inadequacy. Therefore something new had to be tried. Personality reshaping had appealed not only to the popular imagination but to the government also. It was supposed to be humane. And, anyway, if it worked it would save a great deal of the taxpayer’s money.

The trouble was sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And there was no certain means of predicting the result. Roland Badel had hoped that his researches would have yielded rehabilitation formulas for different psychological types. They didn’t. They left him with half a face and a white line across his throat.