by Sheila Burns
‘I’m going to stop the car and put you down,’ she said and her voice had the acid ring in it, the sting which once one of the patients had told her ‘showed that one day she would be a Sister’.
She felt him make a small movement, and too late realised that she should have stopped him, but now had missed the opportunity. Doubt, distrust of herself, and the fear of suspecting an entirely harmless person, had all herded together and held her back. She felt something harsh and cold rammed hard against her left ribs. The harshness of the impact was almost bruising, and with it came a cold tumultuous terror, for although she could not believe that this was really happening to her, she knew with a quite deadly certainty that he was ramming her with a gun.
‘Stop the car and you die for it,’ he told her. ‘You drive on. I’m telling you where to go and what to do. I’m the master.’
Lorna had never before felt so entirely alone in life. She took her foot automatically off the brake, and the car began to move forward again. The pulse ceased; the effects of her training asserted themselves, and she steadied.
‘Faster!’ commanded the abrupt voice beside her, and he held the gun still pressing. ‘Much, much faster! I’ll make you go on, and if you don’t it’ll be the last thing you ever do.’
She drove on.
When at last she spoke, she asked quite quietly and with a remarkable composure, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Where I want. I tell you, if I want you as well, I shall take you. If you fight, I kill you, and there isn’t any way that you can get out of it, no way at all, see?’
She ignored the dull throbbing in her ears, a throbbing that had the warnings of Indian tom-toms, and might be the first suggestions of faintness, at a moment in her life when very definitely she must not faint. ‘I see.’
‘I do this often.’
‘Do you, indeed?’
‘Yes, I do, and I take girls this way. I do ’em in if I don’t want them. You’ll be one of the lucky ones if I do want you.’
She knew now that he was mad!
She had worked for a month, lent to a mental institution in the early stages of her training, and now she recognised the signs and knew that he was mad. It was probably one of those very temporary madnesses which come and go, leaving the victim quite sane. In fact she had remarked on the fact that men thus afflicted were quite nice people in between the attacks. She remembered that he would be better if she could make him cry; if she could gain some control over him; if she could break through the triumphant resistance that he offered. For the moment she herself was so scared to be entirely alone with him, and so hurt by the proximity of the round barrel of the gun at her ribs, that she could do nothing. She had not even got full command of herself, let alone of him.
She said, ‘You must tell me where to go.’
That appeared to please him. He wavered, then he asked, ‘How much juice have you?’
‘About four gallons.’
‘Then we’ll go to Scotland.’
‘We shall never get there on four gallons.’
‘We shall if I say so,’ and quite viciously he rammed the barrel closer. It had danger in it. It hurt.
‘Please be careful, that thing’s hurting me.’
‘I could hurt you so much that you would never be hurt again, see? I could destroy you. You’re going to kiss me, and the way I tell you.’
‘I shall do nothing of the sort,’ and the words whipped out before Lorna thought; he caught her left wrist and twisted it. For one agonising moment she thought that he had broken the wrist, for the pain went searing up her arm like a flame. She gave a moan. He laughed at that, it probably amused him that he had achieved that much from her, for he was a sadistic maniac, she knew.
‘Where do I go?’ she asked again. Though she did everything to rob her voice of any inflection which might betray her terror, she knew by the sound of it that it showed that she had weakened already. The wrist still throbbed.
‘Move into the shadows of those trees.’
They had come down the hill along this rather lonely stretch of road. There was a wood alongside, pitchy within it, dark enough against the broken paling, and it had that rather horrifying darkness which any woodland can give at night. Lorna recalled with horror, woods where people had been murdered and left; bodies buried under the bracken, and bushes, and hidden for weeks, to be found later by some wretched child who carried the memory of that fear throughout his or her life.
But she slowed down.
A big car with searching headlights came fast down the road towards her; she flicked her own lights in an attempt to convey to the driver that something was wrong. Nothing happened. He flew past her at a cool seventy, ignoring her.
‘Get into the shadow of that wood, if you want to get anywhere alive, see?’ said the man with the gun.
If he rammed it any harder she felt that she would die of pain. She could not bear it. It would be shocking if she now passed out, for then most certainly he would kill her. It would be the triumph of his life, and the only possible way to fight this was to maintain the appearance of some strength. She had learnt that in the mental institution.
‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said, but all the same the car passed gently into the lay-by.
The wood was on Lorna’s left now, dense and very dark; she distrusted it. The man himself sat between her and it. If he shot her and she fell, it would be to slump into her seat and would attract no attention. Purposely she opened the window beside her.
‘If you think of calling for help, save your breath,’ he said.
He talked through clenched teeth, so that at moments he slurred his words, and the sound was disarming.
‘I shouldn’t call for help. Who is there to hear me?’
‘Then kiss me!’
She turned to him and saw the face suddenly nearer.
It was strangely podgy, almost bloated, a face with a lardy look to it, a certain glistening that could be sweat or the moonlight, she did not know which. The eyes were dark, she imagined, and as she had noticed before, she could see the whites in a complete ring round them. The lids did not conceal the whites at any time. At this moment the sight of his face, a blurred, uncertain face, exaggerated by the moonlight, was almost maddeningly uncertain. The nose was flat; perhaps he had been a boxer at some time, and she remembered that they had often had men in the ward from an adjacent boxing ring. Their noses had been flattened, too. He is a boxer, she told herself, and he is punch drunk! That could explain it all.
‘Kiss me again,’ he told her.
Now he was stabbing her almost mercilessly with the muzzle of the pistol, ramming her ribs, and using the ferocity with which he would have thrust a knife into her heart.
She dared not deny him.
Summing up every atom of courage that she had, Lorna turned and kissed him. There was something completely horrible about the contact of her lips with his mouth. It was a grasping mouth, full-lipped, moistly warm, and intensely demanding.
Instantly he grabbed her, and kissed her with a savage rapacity, and the force almost took the breath away from her body. He was exultant and defiant in one. In a daze she thought how she had wanted something to happen, something with which she could forget the wretchedness of loving Michael, drifting in an unreal dream of disillusionment, and now it had happened. This was something that she could not believe was true.
A car raced past them; she knew that the headlights would illuminate the inside of her car, but the people would only think that this was some young couple who had turned the little car into the shadows for a spoon. There was nothing that she could do.
The man’s hands began to tear at her frock in a crazed way; she had seen madmen before! He had drawn the pistol back (that was one comfort), and she wondered where he had put it. On the seat beside her? On the floor? Where? Could she get at it? she asked herself, but his arms were terribly strong, with that insistent strength which came to madmen. He tore at her coat and the collar gave in th
e clutch with a screech and lay ragged at her throat.
‘The gun?’ she asked him.
‘I’ve got that. Leave the gun to me, because I’ll know what to do with it, and you’ll never know it happened. Kiss me again?’
Again she had to do what he said.
The tide of the madness would accelerate, she knew, her medical training had taught her that, for it was the type that works to a crisis before it ultimately abates ‒ into tears ‒ and this was the most dangerous kind of all.
The second kiss was sheer agony, with those demanding, moist lips, big curls of flesh which made her quite sick. They closed over her own mouth, brutally insisting, and it was sheer agony to bear. When he released her, Lorna felt that her mouth was almost broken. She could feel that she was losing the strength to fight him, for the pain in her ribs was increasing even if he had removed the gun point. She felt the dizzy purring in the distance, a throb in her ears which could easily progress to actual faintness, and if once she did faint, she would never come out of this alive.
She looked at him, in a last desperate attempt to see his face and remember it. Perhaps he guessed what she was doing, for the gun was at her ribs again. It had returned, and he grinned mischievously as her startled eyes revealed the fact that she could feel the pain of it.
‘Hasn’t this gone far enough?’ she asked.
‘It has only the one end and you know that I’m going to kill you. I shall shoot you and beat your brains out. I shall make such a mess of you that your own mother won’t be able to identify you. Do you know that?’ He laughed a little, and the laughter was unrestrained, the same hideous sound that she had found so particularly disturbing when she was at the mental institution. ‘I’ve done it before,’ he boasted.
‘You know that you’re not well?’
‘I’m well enough, thank you. You sound like my aunt, she is most insistent about that, whenever I get one of my moods. I have moods, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘I like having my own way. I was born to conquer, to get what I want, take it where I can. I don’t mind killing.’
She felt horribly sick.
It was at that moment, when she assumed that she had reached the end, that she heard the pleasant cultured voice of another man.
‘I say, could you possibly tell me the way to Oxford? I seem to have missed the road.’
A car had come alongside, and had drawn up almost soundlessly by her open window. She turned and saw the man, in the early forties probably, bare-headed, a man who had run straight into peril, for which he could pay with his life.
‘The Oxford road?’ she asked, and the pistol in her ribs relaxed its pressure.
‘Yes, if you could? And have you a match? My lighter’s playing me up.’
Lorna turned to the man beside her. Pulled up short by an ordinary everyday event, she realised that he was bewildered. ‘Have you a match?’
‘Yep.’
He spoke differently, almost as if he were afraid. The interruption had taken him by surprise. Lorna waited for him to fire the gun, she was convinced that he would, waited for it, strained to the uttermost like a violin string just before it snaps. She had been almost sure that given another moment she would snap.
That was the moment when the man beside her wrenched open the door and in a single instant had gone. The stranger who had brought his car alongside to ask the way and then for a match, was quick on it. Lorna knew that he must have been suspicious, and had stopped for that reason. Aware of the dilemma, he had made a dash after the man.
‘Don’t! He has a gun!’ she shrieked.
The man was crashing through the undergrowth. That pudding face which seemed to gleam had gone for ever, he must have taken fright as a madman can, Lorna remembered a lecture at the mental institution on the moment of collapse from an attack. What had happened to unnerve him so suddenly? Had he recognised some suspicion in the stranger alongside? Had his nerve given way?
For an agonising minute Lorna listened; she was terrified that the madman would turn and fire, then she would not know what to do. She could hear only the sound of breaking undergrowth, then the stranger returned to her.
The moment that she saw him coming back, and with him some sense of security, the whole of her body seemed to relax and she gave up any attempt to stay it. She gasped, ‘How good of you!’ and then began to shake.
The man had come to the door of the car. The moonlight touched the hair lightly frosted at the temples, the dark suit that was well cut, and the outline of a thickening figure. He was very tall.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
She had dropped her face into her hands. She had to cry. It was the hysterical outlet which comes after a supreme moment when horror is all-compelling. The horror was easing, now she had to give vent to the aftermath.
The man laid a kindly almost fatherly hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s all right now. Try to check those tears. They aren’t going to help, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘Tell me what he did?’
‘He was thumbing a lift, and I stopped for him. I don’t know why. I’ve never done it before, but it was getting late and I did. Then after a bit he seemed to change; there was some rather strange talk, and he ‒ he had a gun.’
‘We ought to warn the police.’
She did not want that and shrank from it, but her training told her that it was the only thing to do. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I shall lock my car and leave it here, and drive with you. The sooner you leave this infernal lay-by the better it will be for you. I have some brandy in my car, and that should help you.’
‘Please don’t leave me.’
‘Of course not! Count twelve, and I’ll be back with the brandy.’
It was like some anaesthetic. One injected it and said ‘Count twelve’. The patient never got to twelve, of course, but it diverted his attention and gave him something to think about, which was all that was necessary. The man was quicker than Lorna would have expected.
He got into the car with a flask of brandy in one hand, and in the other a tiny glass which was fitted into a small leather container. ‘Don’t worry about driving. I’ll drive you into Stansley, it’s the nearest police station, but before we start, drink this.’
She drank it with a trembling mouth, and her hand shook so badly that he had to guide it. ‘I’m being most awfully silly, I’m afraid.’
‘Not at all. You’ve had a frightful experience. At first I thought you were having a lovers’ tiff, then I was so sure that something was wrong that I came back on a silly pretence. Too late I rumbled that it was real trouble and that was how he got away. Now we must report this.’
‘Must we really?’ For thinking about it had made her demur. Lorna did not want to talk about it, and was terrified at the prospect of thinking about it. She only wanted to go home to her own room, take a couple of Soneril and sleep the clock round.
‘We have got to do our duty,’ the man was saying. ‘If we don’t some other poor girl may find herself in the self-same mess, and it is quite possible that she might die for it.’
He had got into the driving seat and mechanically she had shifted into the passenger’s. He started up, driving out of the lay-by with an experienced touch. Lorna felt that now she was even more dazed by the brandy that he had given her, and she glanced uneasily at him. She had had the nightmare foreboding that everything would change, and he with his hatchet face might alter into being the one with the white-ringed eyes, and the pouchy lardy jaw. He saw her.
‘Perhaps I’d better explain myself? My name is Lionel Strong, and I am a novelist.’
The name had a certain familiarity; she had seen it on the librarians’ trolleys, and knew that the novels were in vigorous demand in the wards. ‘My name is Lorna Vane, and I am a nurse.’
‘You’ve been very brave, I can’t think how you managed to be so restrained. I had come out for a little drive around, the night was so l
ovely, and I am staying in the neighbourhood. I don’t live here, I live in Cornwall not too far from St. Ives.’
The name rang a bell in her brain. She found that she was starting to talk again, surprised to find that the brandy after its first impact was now making everything easier for her. ‘You don’t happen to know a lady called Liskeard near there? She advertised for a nurse-companion.’
‘I do indeed. She’s a darling.’ His tone was enthusiastic, and the fact that they were talking naturally like old friends helped her to pull herself together.
‘I thought of applying for the job.’
‘You’d love it. It’s an enormous place, and Mrs. Liskeard is alone there except for the servants, and she needs someone nice like you.’ He had stopped the car under the glimmer of a blue lamp. ‘Here we are.’
Chapter Two
Now that they had got here, Lorna knew that she did not want to go inside. Lionel Strong took her hand, not with familiarity, but compellingly, and at this particular moment it seemed to be the only thing to do. She knew that her knees were shaky. Not from fear of the police, after all in hospital one often got them in, sitting beside the bed of some unconscious patient waiting for evidence, or coming for news of an accident case, so that she was not afraid of them.
But now she was well aware of the physical strain that she had suffered, and the extreme weakness of her body once the crisis had passed. When one is young and strong, one does not appreciate the weakness of a body and the way it can refuse to obey the reasoning of the mind because it has gone limp, until one actually faces the ordeal personally.
They went inside, past the sergeant at the desk, into a private room beyond, and sat down on hard varnished chairs. Whilst a man in uniform took down notes from both of them, a young policewoman brought her a cup of tea, and that did far more good than the brandy had done. The young woman smiled at her, almost as if she knew what it felt like.
Lionel Strong was doing a lot of the talking for Lorna. The difficulty lay in a description. The sergeant explained that there had been other complaints of something of the sort, and there was some connection, in the fact of the eyes with the whites actually ringing the iris. He was mad, of course; a maniac who worked up into the mood which did this, and one day would fire the gun. That would be murder.