The Runaways (9 page)

Mrs Lakey told Smiler to sit by the fire. She went to the desk, rummaged in it, and found a pencil and a piece of very creased paper and came back and sat down opposite him.

She put the paper and pencil on the table, took a tomato from the tray, bit into it, and said, ‘ Cold snack, today. Milly's away shopping. I've got a lot to do this afternoon so, with your permission, boy –' She gave him a smile which suddenly took all the sternness out of her face. ‘I'll victual up while I take your particulars. Name?'

In the barn the day before Smiler had gone over in his mind – when he had decided he must go for a job – the answers to all the awkward questions he knew he would be asked, and he had his replies ready.

‘Pickering,' he said without hesitation. ‘Johnny Pickering.'

Mrs Lakey wrote it down, and said, ‘Age?'

‘Fifteen and a half.'

‘Address?'

‘I live with my aunt, Mrs Brown, at Hillside Bungalow, Crockerton. My mother and father … Well, they're dead. They was killed in a car accident three years ago.'

‘Sorry to hear it. Damn cars. They're just murder on the roads. Horse and trap – you got a tumble and a bruising and that was that. Never mind. Times move. Can't alter that. Any previous job? References?'

‘No, Ma'am – I mean Mrs Lakey. I left school Christmas.'

‘Any experience with animals?'

‘No, Mrs Lakey. But I like ' em. And I had a dog once.'

‘Willing?' Mrs Lakey raised the glass of stout to her lips and watched him over the top as she drank.

Puzzled, Smiler said, ‘I don't really know what you –' Then understanding dawning, he went on quickly, ‘Oh, yes, I'm willing to take the job. I'd like it.'

‘No, boy. I mean are you willing to work hard? Sober, industrious, clean and tidy? Always cheerful and no clock watching? Can't have you if you're not all that – and cheerful. Milly hates a gloomy face around the place. Likes boys that whistle and sing and look like the whole day is just one glorious top of the morning to you. And you've got to have a good appetite. Milly can't bear cooking for those who pick and scratch and don't enjoy their victuals. So what do you say?'

A little out of his depth, Smiler said, ‘I think so, Mrs Lakey.'

‘Good.' Mrs Lakey finished her stout. ‘You seem a likely number to me. Anyway, the advertisement's been in for two weeks and you're the first. Wages – seven pounds a week. Free lunch. Sundays off. Half days to be arranged as work permits. Start at seven-thirty. Finish at five this time of the year. Later, as the sun god stays with us longer. Twenty-five pence an hour overtime. Working overalls provided. Anything in that frighten you?'

‘No, Mrs Lakey.'

‘Well, it would most of the young lay-abouts these days who want a four-hour day, meals off golden plates, two months' paid holiday a year, and then wonder why the country's going to the dogs. Which is the biggest slander on dogs ever uttered. And talking of dogs, let me tell you, my bark is not worse than my bite. My bite is terrible!' She winked at him suddenly.

Smiler, who, it must be confessed, was a bit confused and uncertain about her was warmed by the wink. He said, smiling – and Smiler's smile, Sister Ethel had always said, could charm the birds from the trees – ‘You seem very nice to me, Mrs Lakey.'

Mrs Lakey looked at him, slowly grinned and then cried heartily, smacking her thigh, ‘ Well now, it's a compliment I'm getting! The first for ten years. Right now, run along with you.

Let yourself out. Be here at half-seven tomorrow and we'll see how you shape up.'

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Lakey. I'll do my best.'

‘You'd better. No less is accepted.'

Smiler let himself out and was chased all the way down the drive by the Jack Russell snapping at his back wheel. But Smiler didn't mind.

Going down the valley road to Heytesbury he began to whistle to himself. Everything had gone perfectly. Samuel M., he thought, you carried it off like a hero. You've got a job, as easy as kissing your hand. Milly? Who was Milly, who didn't like gloomy people, only big and cheerful eaters? Well, he'd soon know. And soon know, too, what he had to do. Crikey! – seven-thirty! That meant he would have to be up by six-thirty. Ought he to buy himself an alarm clock in Warminster? Yes, he'd certainly have to do that. If he turned up late, he knew he'd have Mrs Lakey on his tail, biting worse than her bark. In high spirits he began to swerve from one side of the road to the other. Free lunches and seven pounds a week. He was in clover.

In the rough pasture on the plateau at the valley top, Yarra put up a rabbit and killed it within three yards. She carried it into a clump of wind-dwarfed thorn trees and ate it. It was a small, winter-lean rabbit and nowhere near satisfied her hunger.

She moved out of the trees and began to quarter the ground eastwards across the rough amber-coloured grasslands. A hundred yards from the edge of a Forestry Commission plantation of young, waist-high firs she put up a hare. The hare laid its ears back and went like the wind. Yarra raced after it, the memory of the hare she had lost by the river giving her a fierce determination to catch this one. The hare reached the edge of the plantation and found its way blocked by a three-foot high, small-meshed wire fence. It turned right along the fence ten yards ahead of Yarra. She swung across the angle at top speed and leapt for it. Her forepaws smashed down on its back, talons gripping into the fur, and her hindquarters skidded round to crash into the fence. She bit clean through neck and vertebrae, and lay where she had made her kill to eat.

As she began to worry and chew at the soft belly of the hare, a black and white striped Land-Rover came over the ridge of downland away to her right. Yarra heard and saw it simultaneously. She looked up from her meal and watched it. The Land-Rover was moving towards the top end of the fence which ran down the plantation side. Two hundred yards away it turned and began to bump and sway slowly along the fence. Her strong jaws clamped across the belly of the hare, Yarra stopped eating and watched the Land-Rover. For the moment there was no fear in her. The Land-Rover was exactly the same as many she had seen in Longleat Park. She had chased meat trailing on a rope from behind one of them. She had jumped to the cab roof, and even gone to the open cab door of the Cheetah Warden's car when he tossed her a lump of meat which hid worming or other medicines.

She lay watching the Land-Rover come down towards her. As it neared her she let go of the hare, opened her jaws, and gave a slow, warning spit and hiss. She wanted to eat undisturbed.

When the Land-Rover was within forty yards of her, the driver and the man beside him saw her. The driver stopped the car. The man beside him began to speak into his walkie-talkie set. Over the air the news of Yarra's discovery and her location went out to the police cars on the roads and to the policemen who were with the line of beaters now moving slowly up through Southleigh Wood.

The top boundary of the wood lay a few hundred yards down the slope from Yarra. She watched the Land-Rover for a while and, when it did not move, she began to eat. Almost immediately, from behind her, Yarra's quick ears caught the growing sounds of men moving up through the wood. A few of them – who had not yet received the warning of Yarra's discovery – were still beating and rattling their sticks against tree trunks and thickets. The noise disturbed Yarra. She was hungry still and she wanted peace and quiet in which to eat. She stood up, gripped the big hare in her jaws, and leapt over the wire fence into the plantation of young firs. She began to trot fast across the plantation, northwards towards the road that ran from Crockerton, down across the River Wylye and on to Sutton Veny. The noise of men and rattling sticks followed her faintly, so she decided to keep going until she was free of it altogether.

Five minutes later she was across the Crockerton–Sutton Veny road. The noise died away and she padded into a tall clump of wild rhododendrons and couched down to eat her hare. As she did so, from the leaden sky above, the first fat flakes of snow began to drift down, slanting a little in a cold wind that was rising fast.

Smiler did not go back to Ford Cottage along the Heytesbury–Sutton Veny road. His anxiety not to be late for work in the morning decided him to return to Warminster and buy a cheap alarm clock in Woolworth's. The girl assistant at the counter was a bit amused when he paid for it all in fivepenny pieces.

‘I been saving up,' said Smiler.

‘Just for an old clock?'

‘Present for me mum,' he said.

Riding away down the Crockerton road, Smiler thought that it would be nice if it had really been a present for his Mum. He had never known her because she had died a year after his birth. But he knew a lot about her from his father who worshipped her memory.

Before he reached the cottage it began to snow and blow hard. Large, heavy flakes filled the air, whirling and spinning in the wind, and he was glad to pull up the hood of his anorak for protection. Now, as he neared the cottage, he began to think of Yarra. He had to leave the barn door open and, if she came back, he had to do something about her. Yarra, it seemed, was his last problem to tackle before he could start at Danebury Kennels and begin to work his passage for the next nine months.

He hid his bicycle in the orchard at the back of the barn and then slipped round, keeping his eyes open in case Yarra was about already, and opened the barn door. The courtyard had an inch covering of snow. The fast falling flakes rapidly obliterated the footprints he made in crossing to the back door. He shut himself in, leaving the key outside, and then went upstairs to the bathroom to keep vigil on the barn door. He took up with him a packet of biscuits and a pork pie which he had bought in Warminster for his supper. He washed them down with drinks of cold water from the basin tap while he sat on the broad window ledge, one curtain drawn partly back so that he could watch the door.

He kept his fingers crossed that Yarra would not come back. For two reasons he wished this: one, because giving her away when she was on the run like him seemed the act of a traitor, though he knew he had to do it for the safety of other people, especially small children; and two, because it was going to give him a lot of trouble. He didn't want to have to turn out and cycle somewhere to find a telephone because he knew it would mean that he wouldn't be able to come back safely to the cottage until Yarra had been taken. The thought of a night out in the cold made him far from happy. However, Samuel M., he told himself, if she ever comes you have just got to do it.

But Yarra did not come. Smiler watched the barn door until it got dark. There was no sign of Yarra. Some time after nightfall the snow stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky cleared. With the reflection from the snow on the ground and the clear starlit sky, it was quite bright outside. Smiler could easily have seen Yarra if she had come round the barn to gain her shelter. He waited dutifully until the eight-day clock in the hall struck nine (Mrs Bagnall wound it up once a week when she came). Then he gave up his vigil. He found himself a couple of blankets in one of the spare bedrooms, rolled himself up and went to sleep. He had set the alarm clock for six o'clock in the morning.

The snow saved Yarra from being caught. While she was eating her hare, the beaters came out on to the pasture behind the plantation and met up with the Land-Rover. Messages were sent to the police patrol cars. The hunting line was reformed and swept forward through the young firs as the snow began to thicken.

Yarra was disturbed by the sound of the men crossing the Crockerton–Sutton Veny road fifty yards behind her. She was sighted as she left the cover of her clump of rhododendrons. A couple of the men – unwisely – gave loud shouts that alarmed Yarra even more. She went away at a gallop northwards. She cleared a hedge into a field of young winter wheat, and followed the line of the hedge. The snow falling on her coat melted fast and made her uncomfortable. She hated the wet. As long as she could hear the noises of men behind her she kept going steadily. When the noises died she slackened her pace, but still kept going.

She was in strange country now and her movement was dictated by the lie of the land. She kept close to the hedges and over open ground trotted fast from the cover of bush clump to bush clump. When she met a small wood or coppice she went through it just inside the boundary so that she could break to open ground if danger threatened. Always, when she had the choice, she kept to the high ground rather than the low. Before she crossed any road she waited and watched for the sign of humans before passing over. The snow was so thick now that she could only see about ten yards ahead. The darkness was deepening every minute. The snow and the approach of night were her allies. The snow rapidly filled the tracks she left and made fast going hard work for the men who followed. After an hour they had lost all contact with her. When darkness finally came, with the snow still whirling and beating down, the hunt was called off except for the police patrol cars on the triangulation of roads. If the patrol car men could have known it, they were wasting their time. Yarra had long crossed the side of the triangle which was formed by the Longbridge Deverill–Sutton Veny–Heytesbury road. She had crossed it a few yards short of the point where a road bridge spanned the River Wylye.

Yarra had found the river by hearing the noise of a small waterfall above the bridge. After crossing the road she followed the river downstream. Since missing the heron it was the first time that day that she had seen the river. The river reminded her of her barn shelter. Half a mile down the bank a black shape loomed up out of the darkness and the now thinning snow. It was a dilapidated fishing hut with a large plank seat inside for fishermen to rest on and have their lunch. Drifting snow had melted on the earth floor and formed a shallow puddle of mud and water. Yarra turned into the hut, sniffed around at its smells, and then leapt on to the broad seat. She sat on her haunches, facing the narrow open doorway. She began to groom and clean herself, licking at the inside of her muddy, wet thighs and nibbling at her swelling dugs where the restlessness inside her seemed to be lodged. She had no hunger, but she was tired and bad-tempered. Once, for relief, she uttered an angry, snarling rumble, jaws wide, her face crinkled and her eyes blazing. If anyone had come to the door of the hut at that moment they would not have had a very warm welcome.