The Camelot Caper (13 page)

“Not again, thank you. Why do you think I chose that hotel? It has its own garage, and I tipped the attendant specifically.”

He yawned. “Too much food. It's made me sleepy.”

“Let's go back to the hotel. I don't know why, but—I'm uneasy.”

“I know why.” David smothered another yawn. “Whenever Cousin John is on the prowl I'm uneasy. On general principles.”

They got as far as the courtyard before he collapsed.

At first Jess thought he had stumbled, though the manner of his fall was not characteristic; he folded up like a stacked deck of cards which someone had prodded with a forefinger. When he failed to rise, she dropped down beside him and took his face between urgent hands. He blinked up at her like a placid owl.

“What's wrong, David?”

“Nothin' wrong. Sleepy.”

“Get up. Please!”

“Sleepy,” David murmured. “Li'l nap…”

“Not here! David…”

A small crowd had collected, and one helpful bystander went in search of a doctor. David's eyes were shut, but his face wore a gentle smile and he was snoring. When the doctor arrived, he needed only one look under David's heavy eyelids.

“A barbiturate of some sort. Is the young man in the habit of taking sleeping medicine?”

“No, never. I can't imagine…”

“Hmmm. Well, I don't think he's had enough to be in danger, but we'll just make certain.” The doctor rose, fastidiously dusting his knees. “Can two of you gentlemen carry him? My office is just there.”

Jess stayed in the outer office while the doctor made certain; from the sounds which issued from the inner sanctum she was glad she was not present. Eventually a green-faced, swaying David emerged, supported by the doctor and his nurse.

“Shouldn't he go to the hospital?” Jess gasped.

“No, he'll do quite well now. Light diet, plenty of coffee, then let him sleep off the remnants.
and you, young man, be more careful in future.”

David's bleary eyes focused in a glare of such malevolence that the nurse almost dropped him.

“Don't worry. I shall.”

 

“No,” Jess said for the third time, “I will not go around to their hotel. What do you expect me to do, challenge them to a duel?”

David sighed. Propped up on pillows, in the cold formality of the hotel room, he looked sad and misunderstood. Secretly Jess was relieved that he had recovered enough to be resentful. She had spent the night in his room, curled up in a chair; she had done nothing, really, except listen to his placid snores, but she had been afraid to leave him alone and helpless.

“I suppose,” she said thoughtfully, “that the dope was in the tea.”

“I think not.” David looked sheepish. “I didn't give them a chance at my tea, if you recall. But—well—now that I look back, some of the nuts in that bun had a bitter taste.”

“If you didn't gulp your food—”

“Let's not indulge in recriminations.” David hoisted himself higher on the pillows. “Is there more coffee? Jess, I've been doing some thinking. There is something very odd about this.”

“I'm glad you finally noticed.” Jess poured the coffee.

“No, I mean about the last few days. It's degenerated into pure farce, Jess, this whole pursuit. From here to there and back again. All around the mulberry bush. We've been asking ourselves what the point of these incidents could be. Now what precisely have they succeeded in doing for the last three or four days?”

“Messing up your car,” said Jess literally. “Drugging you. Getting us all went and muddy crawling around in the grass. Stealing my—”

“Yes, but what does it all add up to? What, generally, have we been doing?”

“Wasting an awful lot of time,” Jess said grumpily. “In—”

She stopped, staring, as the sense of what she had said finally penetrated. David nodded.

“Precisely. Do you suppose that, if the ring were really their goal, they couldn't have had it by now? That nasty-looking character we call Algernon has kept conspicuously out of our way. I hate to admit it, but if that lad wanted to put me out of commission he could do it with one hand.”

“You mean it's not the ring they're after?”

“They may want the ring, but they want something else more. Delay and distraction,
that's what they want. What is it they want to distract us from? What are they trying to keep us from doing?”

“There's only one possible answer,” Jess said slowly. “It should have dawned on me before. From the moment I got off the boat they've been trying to head me off. There's only one place—”

“Cornwall,” David finished. “And your loving grandparent.”

“Then—then he isn't one of the villains.”

“It's beginning to look that way. Another piece of the puzzle makes sense here, too. You said he asked you to come to see him—‘before he died,' or words to that effect. Is he dying? Or seriously ill?”

“Why…I don't know. I thought it was a sort of general, sentimental appeal; he's very old.”

“It might have been an attack, or illness, a specific threat, that caused him to write to you For all you know, he could be breathing his last at this moment.”

“I suppose he could. But—”

“But me no buts.” David flung the bedclothes back. “Hurry and pack. We're leaving for Cornwall as fast as we can go.”

 

The road to Cornwall—or rather the first part of it—lay clear and straight ahead. David was
driving a good deal faster than he should, and audibly crowing over his cleverness in eluding the enemy. Jess hunched over the road map, muttering.

“We have to go through Glastonbury. Maybe we'll have time for another visit to—”

“Don't be a mutt.” David overtook and passed a Volkswagen. “We are heading for—where is this house, anyhow?”

“Cornwall.”

“Cornwall is a good-sized place. Where in Cornwall?”

“Near St. Ives. I remember that because of the nursery rhyme.”

“It would be; that's way down near the end of the peninsula. Never mind, we'll do it nonstop, and you can forget about the sights. You are the absolute limit.”

“One thing about Cousin John,” Jess said nastily. “He did show me lots of nice places.”

“And you know why.”

“I don't care why. At least I'll have seen something of England before I die. Which—ow, look out!—which may be quite soon. I expect to be killed in an automobile accident.”

David indicated offense by scowling and sticking out his jaw. They drove on for a while in silence, while Jess admired the peaceful mead
ows occupied by grazing sheep, and the clouds of apple trees in full blossom.

She was roused from her reverie by the intensity of David's curses; he had gotten stuck behind a procession of trucks, which were proceeding at a placid thirty miles per hour.

“Why the hurry?” she asked lazily. “We saw them go tearing out of Bath in the opposite direction.”

David brightened.

“Yes, we were rather clever about that. Lurking conspicuously outside their hotel until they left, so that they would think we were going to follow them. I wonder where in Hades they were taking us this time? Gloucester? Oxford? Scotland?”

“I myself wonder how long it will take them to find that we aren't following them.”

David's grin disappeared.

“There is that.”

“And you shouldn't have stopped for gas at that town,” Jess went on. Fast driving made her nervous, and when she was nervous she became critical. “Radstock, that was the name of it. Once they know our general direction they'll be able to guess where we're going.”

The trucks had turned off onto a construction site; David increased his speed until the wind
lashed Jess's hair about her face. His own face was as long as that of the ruminating sheep that had stared, amazed, over the fence as they roared by.

“Jess, take another look at that map. Is there a smaller road out of Wells, that doesn't go through Glastonbury?”

“There's a little thin line,” Jess reported, after a while. “To a town called Burnham.”

“I know those little thin lines,” David said pessimistically. “Hell. I haven't been this far west in years. I suppose we'd best stay on main roads; until we reach Taunton, or Bridgwater, we're more or less limited unless we go considerably out of our way. Cornwall itself is a maze; we can lose ourselves there.”

He pulled out on a blind curve, as if any more delay would be intolerable; Jess covered her face with her hands and did not uncover it until the violent swerve of the car told her that they were back in their proper lane.

“Might be wise to disguise ourselves,” David said, cheered by his narrow escape from annihilation. “How do you think I'd look in a beard?”

“Like the Matterhorn towering out of a forest of scrub pines.”

“Spoilsport. Then you can be my prim, bespectacled companion and I'll be a nasty old
lady—one of those fierce matriarchs with Roman noses.”

“Driving a bright-red Jaguar?”

That ended the question of disguise. Jess knew that David would rather cut off his nose than abandon the car.

They reached Taunton without incident, though Jess's neck ached from looking back. David had settled down and was driving with skilled concentration; he displayed neither exhilaration nor anger, but she sensed, and shared, his frustration. It was maddening to have all that power under one's hands and be unable to use it. The roads were too narrow and too heavily trafficked for consistent speed.

Jess liked Taunton, and would have liked to have seen something of it. Having been a devoted reader of
Captain Blood
in her youth, she felt she knew all about the Monmouth Rebellion, the Bloody Assize, and Judge Jeffreys. But she knew better than to say anything to David, whose sober mood she had come to share; she only stared wistfully at the pretty black-timbered houses on the traffic circle in the center of town. It was while she was looking back at one such house that she saw another, more pertinent, sight—a pale-blue convertible.

The top was up, so that the occupants were
not visible, but she knew that car as she knew their own.

“There they are,” she said calmly.

“Doing what?” David did not take his eyes from the road.

“Just…there. Following.”

He nodded, without commenting, and proceeded at a sedate pace through town, following the signs that read “Exeter.” Jess leaned back and tightened her seat belt. She didn't know what he planned to do, but from the angle of his jaw she was sure he meant to do something, and she didn't want to distract him with inane questions.

They had left the town behind and were on a country road before David acted. Long ago Jess had decided that he was a reckless driver. Now she realized that she had underestimated him; she had never seen how reckless he could be. The car seemed to gather its haunches under it and leap off, like the animal it was named after. Jess's eyes were too blurred, with the pounding wind and with terror, to see the speedometer, but she knew that the speed remained constant; neither curves nor turns nor other vehicles slowed David one iota.

Jess looked back, partly out of curiosity, but mostly because she couldn't bear to watch what
was coming at them. The blue car had fallen far behind; David's burst of speed had taken the pursuers by surprise. But the other driver was no amateur; as Jess watched, the blue car began weaving in and out, taking advantage of the consternation left in David's wake. It did not gain on them, but it did not lose appreciably either.

She knew David well enough by now to read his mind. He realized, he must realize, that he couldn't keep this pace up for long. He was simply trying to get far enough ahead of the other car so that he could take evasive action without being seen. A hill, or a curve, or a copse of trees between him and the pursuers, and a road or turnoff properly placed, that was all he needed. So far he had not found it; and Jess knew that it was simply a matter of luck as to whether he did find it before the inevitable disaster occurred.

The inevitable happened too soon. They were roaring up a hill, in the wrong lane, when a huge truck appeared at the crest. It hovered against the sky for a second and then seemed to fall straight down on them.

David tried to slide back into his own lane, but the driver he was passing had taken offense and refused to give way. The truck was so close that Jess could see the driver's face, fixed in hor
ror as he roared toward them; his foot was surely on the brake, but the momentum of the heavy vehicle was too great.

David did the only thing he could do. Slamming down on the brake he went off onto the shoulder of the road. The truck skimmed by, missing them by inches, and the Jaguar slid, screaming, with David fighting the wheel.

Jess wasn't even frightened. She had resigned herself to death, and was only mildly surprised when it failed to materialize. They were still going at a good clip when they hit the treacherous surface alongside the road, and David played the car beautifully. He was a trifle white around the mouth, but his face was impassive; the only time he winced was when the side of the car scraped a stone wall. Then, miraculously, they were bouncing along, under control, with only a faint stench of scorched rubber to remind them of their brush with death. David didn't even stop. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and swung the car back onto the road, picking up speed.,

“That was stupid of me,” he said evenly. “Sorry if I frightened you.”

“You are,” Jess said, through stiff lips, “a very good driver.”

David glanced at her and grinned.

“That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me—under the circumstances. Will you marry me?”

“Probably,” Jess said. “Ask me again sometime. If we survive. David—they've caught up. They're right behind us.”