“They’re holed up in a farmhouse,” Keith said, “with the guns nearby. They’re being watched now, and we’ll soon have an idea of how many there are and at what intervals they’re changing over their guards. They seem to be keeping two men outside, one at the back and one at the front, and the reliefs come out before the guards go in. So what I want to do, just before the change, is to take out the two men outside; and then take out the reliefs when they emerge.”
“But?” York said.
“This object,” Keith said, “is my brother-in-law. He’s a hard nut. So am I. He can move very quietly when he wants to. I can, too. His night vision is superlative. And here’s the snag: mine’s no more than average. I was reckoning that Ronnie would have to go after each man in turn, with me as a back-up; but that could be disastrous, if one of them managed to make a squawk. The alternative was a crossbow with a night-sight, which I could put together out of stock. But that means killing.”
“And you don’t want to kill anyone?”
“Let’s be quite clear about this,” Keith said. “I don’t give a fart about killing any of these scum. But I don’t want to spend the rest of the year taking fuss and flapdoodle from the law. In fact, if I had to kill one or two sentries, I was going to kill the lot and use the farmer’s tractor to bury them. But I can see that that wouldn’t do. So a second man to deal with the sentries would be a godsend. Then, when all’s done, you deliver the prisoners to Munro and take charge of the stolen guns. Are you on?”
“Oh, yes,” York said. “If your plan is workable, I’m on. But let me give you a piece of advice.”
“I’m knee-deep in advice. Munro gave me a lot of it.”
“Mine can be contained in one word. Succeed. If you pull this off, you’ll be too heroic a figure for the law to pick nits over your taking it into your own hands. But if you blow it you’ll be the scapegoat.”
“I know it,” Keith said.
For York’s benefit, he went over his plan in detail.
If York was impressed, he refused to show it. “It’s wild,” he said. “But it may work. That’s little or no skin off my nose. I’m acting under duress.”
Chapter Eleven
Dusk that evening progressed with the agonising slowness of a healing wound. Time and again Keith thought that the light was almost gone, only to find that there was yet another degree of darkness to which his eyes could adjust so that he could still see the faces around him, the trees beyond, the trailer which had brought the bales and the farm road running down towards where, invisible in its dip, Lairy Farm crouched beyond the town road. The lights of occasional traffic gave his night vision an occasional setback, feeding his impatience with illusion.
Now was the hardest hour. All day he had cocooned himself in urgent activity and talk, but now he had time to think of the dangers to come and of the unthinkable penalties of failure. It would be as bad for the others, he knew, and worse for Molly, but there was nothing he could do to help. He could only wait, and hope that his bowels would not betray his fears.
At long last the light was all but gone from the northern sky. Keith rapped on the side of the foresters’ van, where Ronnie and York had been protecting their eyes from passing lights. Each was dressed in black and with a blackened face. He could barely make them out as they emerged, flitted across the road and were gone.
He settled down to wait again. Around him he could sense the presence of the foresters, but all was remarkably quiet. There was no traffic up on the main road; Munro was holding it back on pretext of a faked accident. Keith kept one eye on Sir Peter’s position, but no signal showed.
Cyril Todd peered out from the darker shadows of the Dutch barn and scanned where he knew the courtyard must be. He had a torch but its use had been banned except in emergencies. Instead, he fingered the pistol in his belt and thought about what he would do if some fool dared to come poking around the farm. He wanted action, or sleep. He got both. Before he was aware of any presence, there was a whisper in the air behind him and a chop from a hardened and practised hand put him out cold. When he came to, some time later, his wrists and ankles were tied, his mouth was sealed with tape and he was quite unable to move his head for the agony in his neck. He was the bald man with the Mexican moustache whom they had first seen in the hedge.
Jim O’Donnell was the long-haired youth who had been in the Dutch barn. He wished that he were back in its comparative comfort now, but Joyce had ordained that places should be exchanged in the interests of fairness. The hedge was full of unexpected thorns, so he stood on the path. Who, after all, was there to see him? He was minding his own business and whiling away the time until his relief with daydreams of rape and torture when Ronnie rose silently from the grass beside him. O’Donnell was holding a comb with the intention of tidying his hair before re-entering the farmhouse. In the dark, the comb was easily mistaken for a pistol-barrel. Ronnie lacked York’s finesse and he was disinclined to take chances. O’Donnell found himself flat on his back with an appalling pain in his groin and a great weight centred on the knee in his solar plexus, while one big hand twisted his wrist to an angle that nature had never intended to be possible and another maintained a grip on his throat which slowly deprived him of a consciousness which was already a burden to him.
Keith saw the blink from a carefully shrouded torch. He closed his eyes and acknowledged the signal by blinking the van’s sidelights. The luminous clock in the van read twenty to twelve. According to Munro and Wallace, the guards had changed again at four and at eight, so it was a safe bet that they would change again at midnight.
It was time to move closer. He passed the word and picked up his own burden — two short, metal ladders, lamps, a torch, a shotgun and a pick-handle. A long file of laden figures trudged quietly after him. They crossed the town road and walked on grass as far as the back of the Dutch barn where a clump of trees stood on a triangle of cropped grass. Keith, Janet and Wallace went on while the other men thankfully put down their heavy bales and sat on them.
Keith looked at his digital watch by its self-illumination. Ten to twelve. The diversion was timed for ten past the hour. If nobody had come out by then they would go ahead regardless, and God help them if the doors opened just as the men approached the house. Six men had been counted doing guard duty, but the woman might be inside and there might even be a man or men excused sentry-go. Two had been dealt with. Two more and the odds would be improved, from desperate to merely difficult and dangerous. While Wallace cut the strings which held the ladders together and silent, Keith set about fixing the lamps.
Two minutes into the new day and Keith was worrying in earnest. The doors of the house stayed shut. The time for changing the guard might have altered, or the reliefs might be waiting for the others to come in. But already he could hear the distant drone of the plane, and a deep rumble suggested that Munro had released the north-bound traffic on the main road.
But their luck held. Discipline, for once, was its own worst enemy. At three minutes after the hour the front and back doors opened, spilling light momentarily into the darkness.
Paul York waited in the barn, sitting on the bumper of the farmer’s car to disguise his height. But Nigel Higmott, Cambridge graduate and the hardest man in the group, was not expecting trouble and felt more than capable of dealing with it if it arose. He was doubly wrong. Paul York rarely felt free to practise the less defensive moves in the martial arts and so, rather than waste an opportunity which might never recur, contrived a complex sequence of seven different thrusts and chops before Higmott’s knees buckled.
Ronnie, on the other hand, saw no reason to vary a successful technique. Sol Dorney, the tubby man with spectacles, was in any case a talker rather than a fighter. Ronnie came out of a clump of rhubarb beside the path and began with his knee-to-the-groin gambit (“Just to take his mind off other things,” Ronnie explained later). And that, disappointingly, proved to be more than enough.
Keith picked up the blink of the two to
rches and relayed the signal. The noise of traffic was growing and the aircraft was nearer. Two crocodiles of men plodded cautiously into view, darker shapes against the dark night; but for the paleness of the straw, he could not have picked them out at all. The men had been well rehearsed and those with the best night vision had been appointed foremen. Keith darted from one corner to the other. The lines of light up the sides of the doors were disappearing.
The plane was almost overhead. On the main road, a file of traffic was beginning the climb, its noise dominated by the rumble of Sir Peter’s low-loader.
Men began to gather at the gable. Janet climbed into the seat and they grunted softly as they put their shoulders to the heavy machine and turned it into position. Then, as they melted away to guard the windows, Ronnie’s big form loomed out of the darkness.
There was no more time to spare. The low-loader was at its nearest point and, according to his instructions, the pilot of the plane was beginning to turn and climb. Keith could hardly hear himself think. The noise might awaken some or all of the enemy, but it should buy them a few seconds by covering the first sounds of the attack.
He shone his torch on the wall, the signal to go.
The three men slung their guns and prepared to mount the ladders.
As Janet switched on the ignition, the lamps taped to the forks came ablaze. She pressed the starter. The lamps dimmed and the engine turned over without firing. Janet switched off to rest the battery, and darkness returned for ten seconds. Then she tried again, and again the starter ground. Suddenly, the machine fired, the lights came back to full brightness. Janet raised the forks and jerked the big machine forward until it had a grip under the eaves of the flat roof. Then the big fork-lift was straining up and forward. The roof refused to give. Keith, on his ladder, put his whole being into willing the machine to win. Janet closed the throttle and jerked it open, and the whole roof groaned and grated, assumed a curve and then came free of its fixings and rose in one piece, complete with its ceiling, as if it had been a door hinged to the gable of the house proper. The lights of the house went out.
As planned, Wallace found himself looking down into the empty bathroom and he concentrated on covering the door. Keith and Ronnie were over the bedroom. Keith’s first impression was that the room stank from occupation by too many people for too long and with the window heavily boarded. In the big bed, four people were waking in fear. For a moment he thought that the room was otherwise empty, then a head moved immediately below him as a man who had been dozing in a chair against the wall stumbled sleepily to his feet. Dazed by the noise and the sudden light, he was staring at the group on the bed. He was holding a pistol which Keith thought was either the Remington 51 or the French MAB.
The shotgun was unnecessary, and its use would have told every enemy in the house where to look for trouble. Keith let it fall back on its sling, steadied himself with his stomach and right hand on the wall-head and with his left hand he swung the pick-handle as hard as he could. The blow pulped the man’s left ear and he staggered but stayed on his feet. Keith swung again and caught him over the temple. The pistol jerked and landed on Mrs McLelland’s patchwork quilt, but still the man would not go down.
The McLelland family seemed paralysed with fear and surprise, but Deborah kept her head. She rolled forward on the bed, picked up the pistol in the two-handed grip which her father had taught her, and took aim on the man’s chest. Keith was shocked to see that half her face was covered with a blue and purple bruise.
Even at his best, Sean Baxter was not bright. Joyce retained him because he never knew fear and because his virility was inexhaustible; since her widowhood, she had been glad of a man about the house. A sudden awakening and two stunning blows to the head had scattered what wits he had. He could only perceive, through the thickening mists, that the Calder child was pointing his own shooter at him.
Deborah’s face, and the disfiguring bruises which looked black in that cold light, had distracted Keith. Now, he found that his mind could not think at the speed of events. The man must be stopped, and if anyone had the right to shoot him it was surely Deborah; but he did not want her to carry the mark of the killer for all her days. A stumbling pace towards the bed had put the man on a line between himself and Deborah, so that Keith could not use his gun.
He saw Deborah brace herself to fire, and realised that the bullet might well pass through the man and continue towards himself. He ducked down behind the wall-head.
Wallace James, although beyond the bathroom partition, could see the action. “Deborah,” he yelled, “throw it to me.”
Deborah blinked against the light and then swung her arm, throwing the pistol in the general direction of the voice. It landed in the bathroom and fired, shattering the toilet bowl and spraying Wallace with water.
At the same moment Ronnie, from his safer angle, decided to fire, but as he raised his gun it proved unnecessary. The man’s knees folded at last, he bounced on the end of the bed and rolled to the floor.
Time had become precious. The shot, and Wallace’s shout, would have raised the alarm. Keith’s mind went into gear again. Five men had been accounted for. Six had been seen. And there was the woman. There might be other men. While part of his mind did these fruitless sums, Keith already knew that they were back on one of his contingency plans.
He dropped his pick-handle into the room and rolled over the wall-head, the gun swinging awkwardly on his back. A nail tore at his clothing, then his feet came down on Mrs McLelland’s dressing-table and it was a long step to the floor.
Deborah, in an unfamiliar nightie, threw herself into his arms. “Who did that to your face?” he asked.
“The lady.”
“Don’t say lady, say woman. Go up to Uncle Ronnie.”
As Deborah’s chubby bottom vanished over the wall-head Keith jumped for the door. It was locked and the keyhole was empty. The key must be in the pocket of the unconscious man. In a farmhouse, a duplicate was unlikely. Good!
He turned back into the room. Little Jean McLelland was already vanishing over the wall-head in the wake of Deborah, and Mrs McLelland was preparing to climb onto her dressing-table. Neill, haggard-looking with the strain, paused to give Keith a quick pat on the shoulder.
“Any more hostages?” Keith asked.
“Not that we know of.”
“How many men?”
“We’ve only seen three and the woman.”
“Up you go,” Keith said. “Wallace James will take you to safety.”
Inside the house, the rumble of traffic was felt rather than heard and the noise of the plane was fading rapidly away. Keith heard somebody try the door and then throw his weight against it. But the door was heavy transferred, Keith guessed, from some greater house that was being pulled down. He knew what to expect next. He recovered his pick-handle and tucked himself against the bed, just beyond the swing of the door. He nodded to Ronnie and even against the lights he could see the shotgun steady on the door.
“You’re too late, my friend,” Keith said softly. Already, Wallace would be on his way with the hostages and Molly would have received the signal to fetch Superintendent Munro.
The sound of the shot was lost in the noise of the hammer-blow. The lock jumped half out of the woodwork. When the man outside put a shoulder to the door again, Keith began his swing; and as the door flew back and the man followed through, already lifting a heavy pistol, the pick-handle took him in the face. The lower jaw went and a tooth pattered against the wall.
Take six from an unknown number and you have another unknown number. Neither of the men on the floor showed signs of stirring. “Am I clear?” Keith asked.
Ronnie lowered his head for a view along the passage. “Nobody in sight,” he said.
Keith kicked the pistol under the bed, dropped his pick-handle, climbed onto the chest of drawers and rolled over the wall-head, the shotgun cradled carefully in his right arm. From the far end of the farmhouse came the sound of breaking glass, b
ut others could deal with whatever was happening.
“You’re due to go and relieve Paul York,” he told Ronnie.
It was time for a change of tactics. Keeping his eyes firmly on the gap between the wall and the roof, Keith felt in his pocket for a whistle. It was the loudest whistle in the shop, guaranteed to stop a bolting dog in its tracks and bring it trembling to heel. He blew a series of rapid blasts and heard a patter of running feet as the men guarding the windows pulled back. Immediately, light began to glow as torches came on and were placed on walls and hedges and on the ground, all shining towards the house. It had been Keith’s view that a single shot could put out a floodlight but that a hundred torches would present an insoluble problem to a group of men firing against the light while themselves under fire. Molly had been to Edinburgh that afternoon and had cleared out several of the larger shops.
The fork-lift was still throbbing gently. It put a new thought into Keith’s head and he decided to modify his plans. He explained to Janet and provided her with the ball of string which was in his pocket for no more reason than that he never went without it. He placed his torch at the base of the wall and stood guard, with as much patience as he could find, until she was safely established behind one of the tractor’s big wheels.
Then and at last he was free to go and oversee the general position. He made his way round the back of the house, careful to keep behind the ring of torches and stumbling occasionally over the legs of a prone watcher. Prisoners were to be held in that end of the Dutch barn screened from the windows of the house. At the corner of the barn a tall figure loomed up. Paul York shone a torch on Keith’s face and on his own blackened features.
“I’ve handed over the prisoners to your brother-in-law,” York said. “I’m going to take charge of the trailer.”
“Hang on a minute,” Keith said. “It won’t vanish again, and I may need your help. How many are we holding here? Four?”
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