by Tom Sharpe
‘Save? Save?’ yelled her husband, still too deafened to hear at all clearly. ‘Of course we’ll have to save. It’ll take ten years to save enough to buy another effing Jag. You don’t think that crumpled conglomeration of craftsmanship was comprehensively covered? All we had was third-party insurance and for your beastly benefit, the only third party is that fractured flipping fir tree.’
In the bushes the authentic third party shuddered. Not only had he wrecked the wrong car but he had just remembered the oil cans. He had left them in the wood and his fingerprints would be all over the things. Under cover of Mr Blowther’s demented alliteration, Slymne slipped back into the forest rather more successfully now that his eyes weren’t blinded by the headlights, and had reached the cans when the Bentley appeared. Slymne slid into the undergrowth and prayed it would emulate the Jaguar. But his hopes were dashed by Mr Blowther who scampered round the corner and was endeavouring to flag down the Bentley when he encountered the oil slick. For a moment he waved frantically, before losing his foothold and slumping down on the road. By the time he had got to his feet four times, had fallen three and had rolled into the ditch, he was not a sight to inspire confidence. Even Slymne could see that. Glodstone could evidently see more. He brought the Bentley to a halt and stared at Mr Blowther suspiciously.
‘Don’t make another move,’ he called out. ‘You see we’ve got you covered.’
Mr Blowther took umbrage. ‘Move?’ he shouted. ‘You must be out of your bleeding mind. I can’t even shuffle without falling arse over elbow. And as for being covered, I don’t know what you think I am now but the way it feels to me I’m a human Christmas tree. That flaming holly—’
‘That’s enough of that,’ shouted Glodstone, for whom Mr Blowther’s North Country accent was further proof that he was a gangster and the whole thing an elaborate trap. ‘Now get your hands above your head and walk backwards. And remember, one false step and you’re a dead man.’
Mr Blowther stared into the darkness behind the great headlamps incredulously. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said, ‘if you think I’m going to stick my hands in the air and try to walk anywhere on this grease pan and not be a dead man, you’ve got another think coming.’
‘I shall count to ten,’ said Glodstone grimly. ‘One, two …’ But Mr Blowther had had enough. He had been through a terrible car crash and was now in the middle of a second inexplicable nightmare. He moved. To be precise, he slid sideways and landed on his shoulder before rolling back into the ditch. As he went the Bentley started forward into the oil and, skidding this way and that, disappeared round the corner. Thanks to this veering and the erratic swing of the headlamps, Glodstone was spared the sight of the wrecked Jaguar among the trees and of the distraught Mrs Blowther searching in the debris for her handbag and a handkerchief with which to blow the nose of a little Blowther. All his energies were concentrated on keeping the Bentley on the road.
‘By God,’ he said, when the car finally steadied itself, ‘that was a damned near thing. It only goes to show the sort of swine we’re up against.’
‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’ asked Peregrine hopefully, toying with a revolver.
‘Certain to,’ said Glodstone, ‘but we’ll give them a run for their money. There’s a crossroads coming up and I’m going to go left. From now on we’ll drive straight through the night.’
Behind them, Slymne was struggling with two empty oil cans and his conscience. From Mr Blowther’s vehement opinions and Mrs Blowther’s complaints about using foul language in front of the children, he had gathered that, although he had been responsible for wrecking a very fine motor car, the occupants had somehow managed to escape unhurt. It was small consolation. The police would undoubtedly be called to the scene and it would be extremely difficult to explain his presence there or his possession of the oil cans, two kilos of sugar and a large quantity of nails. Worse still, he had the crested notepaper and the notes he had made for Glodstone’s premeditated adventure in his suitcase. In the circumstances it seemed wisest to make himself scarce as quickly as possible.
Under cover of the Blowthers’ acrimony, he stumbled back to the Citroën, put the cans in the boot and, driving without lights, followed the road by the gap of night sky between the trees. Ten miles further on, he wiped the oil cans clean of fingerprints, dumped them over a bridge into the river and buried his handkerchief in a ditch. To make doubly sure, he poured the sugar into the river too and drove on another mile before disposing of the nails. Finally he burnt the rest of the notepaper and the envelopes, and drove back to Mantes considering extradition treaties. For the first time in his life, Slymne was definitely against them. He was also very much against remaining in France. Whatever Glodstone might find when he reached the Château and even if he still had the forged letters in his possession, Slymne had no intention of spending time in a French prison for destroying a car and endangering life. It seemed best to leave the Citroën at the garage and drive like hell for Calais in his own Cortina. With any luck, he would be across the Channel and safely home in Ramsgate before the police had made any headway in their investigations. And so Slyme drove quietly into Mantes and spent the rest of the night trying to get some sleep in the forecourt of the rent-a-car garage. At eight that morning, he was on the road for Calais.
*
Far to the south, the Bentley was still covering ground. Glodstone finally pulled into the side of a very minor road and yawned.
‘We seem to have lost them,’ said Peregrine, who had spent the night peering over the back of the car in the hope of taking a shot at their pursuers.
‘Not the only thing we’ve lost,’ said Glodstone, gloomily looking at the map. ‘I suppose we can find where we are when we come to the next town. All the same, we’re not out of the woods, yet.’
‘Aren’t we?’ said Peregrine, too literally for Glodstone’s taste. ‘I mean, we can see for miles around and they don’t know where we are.’
Glodstone took out a pipe and lit it. ‘But they know where we’re heading,’ he said. ‘And if I were in their shoes I’d concentrate my forces on the roads leading to the Château. I mean I wouldn’t waste my time any further afield when it is obvious where we’re going.’
He laid the map out on the grass and knelt beside it. ‘Now here’s the Château and as you see it’s devilish conveniently placed. Five roads lead into Boosat but only one leads from the village and past the Château. The drive must come from that road and by the look of the ground I’d say it goes up here. But first it has to cross the river and that means a bridge. That shows they’ve only to watch the road from Boosat to the north and Frisson to the south and guard the bridge to have us neatly in a trap. In short, if we drive there we’re entering a killing ground. And so we won’t. Instead, we’ll go south on this road here to Floriac. It’s about twenty miles away with empty country in between and no connecting road to Boosat. If we can find a base somewhere there we can travel on foot to these heights overlooking the Château. They may be guarded but I doubt it. All the same, we’ll have to move cautiously and take our time. And now let’s have some breakfast. After that we’ll lie up for the day and get some rest.’
Peregrine climbed back into the Bentley and fetched the camping-gas stove and the picnic hamper and, when they had breakfasted, Glodstone unrolled a sleeping-bag. ‘We’ll take it in turns to keep watch,’ he said, ‘and remember, if anyone stops, wake me. And stop toying with those damned revolvers. Put them away. The last thing we want is to draw attention to ourselves.’
While Glodstone lay on the far side of the Bentley and slept, Peregrine kept vigil. But the road was little more than a track and the country flat and quiet, and nothing passed. Seated on the running-board, Peregrine basked in the morning sun and was intensely happy. In a less literal person, the thought might have crossed his mind that his dreams had come true; but Peregrine had accepted dreams as reality from his earliest childhood and had no such gap to bridge. All the same, he was excited, and endo
wed the countryside around him with dangers it didn’t obviously possess. Unlike Glodstone, whose heroes were romantic and born of nostalgia, Peregrine was more modern. Seated on the running-board, he was not Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay, he was Bond and The Jackal; a man licensed to kill. Even a cow which peered at him over a gateway seemed to sense its danger and retreated to browse more safely further afield.
So the morning passed with Glodstone snoring in his sleeping-bag and Peregrine eyeing the world for lethal opportunities. The afternoon was left to Glodstone. Leaning on the gate and sucking his pipe, he planned his campaign. Once the base was found, they would need enough supplies of food to keep them off the roads and away from towns for several weeks if necessary. He took out a notebook and made a list, and then, deciding that their purchases should be made as far from the Château as possible, he woke Peregrine and they drove on to the next town. By the time they left it, the back of the Bentley was filled with tinned food, bottles of Evian water, a comprehensive first-aid kit and a quite extraordinarily long strand of nylon rope.
‘And now that we are well prepared,’ said Glodstone, stopping to study the map again, ‘we’ll make a detour so far to the south that no one will suspect our destination. If anyone should ask, we’re on a mountaineering holiday in the Pyrenees.’
‘With all these torches and candles I’d have thought potholing would be more likely,’ said Peregrine.
‘Yes, we’d better get them out of sight. What else? We’ll need a good supply of petrol to see us there and out again without using local garages. And that requires two jerrycans as a reserve.’
That night, they took the road again but this time their route was further east and through wider and more barren country than any they had seen before. By four in the morning Glodstone was satisfied they had come sufficiently far to turn towards the Château again without risk.
‘They’ll be watching the north–south roads,’ he said, ‘but we are coming from the east and besides, the Floriac road is off the beaten track.’
It was. As the sun rose behind them, they breasted a hill and looked down into a shallow wooded valley beyond which a panoply of oaks and ancient beeches rose to a crested range before falling again. Glodstone brought the Bentley to a halt and took out the binoculars. But there were no signs of life on the road below them and no habitation of any sort to be detected among the trees.
‘Well, now we have our route in and out secure and if I’m not mistaken, there’s a track down there that might prove useful.’ He let in the clutch and the Bentley slipped forward almost silently. When they came to the junction, Glodstone stopped. ‘Go and take a look at that track,’ he said, ‘see if it’s been used lately and how far it leads into the woods. By my reckoning it points towards the Château Carmagnac.’
Peregrine got down, crossed the road and moved through the trees with a silent expertise he had learnt from Major Fetherington on the survival course in Wales. He returned with the news that the track was almost overgrown with grass and ended in a clearing.
‘There’s an old sawmill there but it’s all tumbled down and no one has been down there for ages.’
‘How can you tell?’ asked Glodstone.
‘Well, if they have, they didn’t use a car,’ said Peregrine. ‘There are two trees down across the path and they’d have had move them to get past. It’s not difficult because they’re not heavy but I’d swear they had been like that for a couple of years.’
‘Splendid. And what about turning room?’
‘Plenty up by the sawmill. There’s an old lorry rusting outside the place and you can put the Bentley in a shed behind it.’
‘It sounds as though it will do for the moment,’ said Glodstone, and presently the Bentley was stealing up the track. As Peregrine had said, it was overgrown with tall grass and the two fallen trees were light enough to move aside and then replace. By the time they reached the disused sawmill, Glodstone was convinced. An atmosphere of long disuse hung over the crumbling buildings and rusty machinery.
‘Now that we’re here, we’ll use the track as seldom as possible and for the rest we’ll move on foot. That’s where we’ll score. The sort of swine we’re up against aren’t likely to be used to fieldcraft and they don’t like to leave their cars. Anyway, we came here unobserved and for the moment they’ll be occupied watching the roads for a Bentley. I’d say they’ll do that for two days and then they’ll start to think again. By that time we’ll have proved the ground and be ready to take action. What that action will be I don’t know, but by nightfall I want to be in a position to observe the Château.’
While Peregrine unloaded the stores from the Bentley and put them in neat piles in what had evidently been the manager’s office, Glodstone searched the other buildings and satisfied himself that the place was as deserted as it seemed. But there was nothing to indicate that the sawmill had been visited since it had closed down. Even the windows of the office were unbroken and a calendar hanging on the wall and portraying a presumably long-dead kitten and a bowl of faded flowers was dated August 1949.
‘Which suggests,’ said Glodstone, ‘that not even the locals come here.’
Best of all was the large shed behind the ancient lorry. Its corrugated-iron doors were rusted on their hinges but by prising them apart it was possible to berth the Bentley under cover and when the doors had been shut there was nothing to show that the place was inhabited again.
‘All the same, one of us had better sleep beside the car,’ said Glodstone, ‘and from now on, we’ll carry arms. I doubt if we’ll be disturbed but we’re in the enemy’s country and it’s foolish to be unprepared.’
On that sober note he took his sleeping-bag through to the office while Peregrine settled down beside the Bentley with his revolver gleaming comfortingly in a shaft of sunlight that came through a slit in the door.
12
It was mid-afternoon before Glodstone was prepared to leave for the Château.
‘We’ve got to be ready for every eventuality and that means leaving nothing to chance,’ he said, ‘and if for any reason we’re forced to separate, we must each carry enough iron rations to last us a week.’
‘I can see why they’re called iron rations,’ said Peregrine as Glodstone stuffed another five cans of corned beef into his rucksack. Glodstone ignored the remark. It was only when he had finished and was trying to lift his own rucksack that its relevance struck him at all forcefully. By then each sack contained ten cans of assorted food, a flashlight with two sets of spare batteries, extra socks and shirts, a Calor-gas stove, ammunition for the revolvers, a Swiss army knife with gadgets for getting stones out of horses’ hooves and, more usefully, opening bottles. On the outside was a sleeping-bag and groundsheet, beneath which hung a billycan, a water bottle, a compass and a map of the area in a plastic cover. Even the pockets were jammed with emergency supplies: in Peregrine’s case four bars of chocolate, while Glodstone had a bottle of brandy and several tins of pipe tobacco.
‘I think that’s everything,’ he said before remembering the Bentley. He disappeared into the garage and came out ten minutes later with the sparking plugs.
‘That should ensure nobody steals her. Not that she’s likely to be found but we can’t take risks.’
‘I’m not sure we can take all this lot,’ said Peregrine who had only just managed to get his rucksack on to his back and was further burdened by a long coil of nylon rope round his waist.
‘Nonsense. We may be in the field for some time and there’s no use shirking,’ said Glodstone, and immediately regretted it. His rucksack was incredibly heavy and it was only by heaving it on to a rusting oil drum that he was able to hoist the damned thing on to his back. Even then he could hardly walk, but tottered forward involuntarily, propelled by its weight and by the knowledge that he mustn’t be the first to shirk. Half an hour later he was thinking differently and had twice stopped, ostensibly to take a compass bearing and consult the map. ‘I’d say we are about fifteen
miles to the south-east,’ he said miserably. ‘At this rate we’ll be lucky to be there before dark.’
But Peregrine took a more optimistic line. ‘I can always scout ahead for an easier route. I mean, fifteen miles isn’t really far.’
Glodstone kept his thoughts to himself. In his opinion fifteen miles carrying over half a hundredweight of assorted necessities across this diabolically wooded and hilly country was the equivalent of fifty on the flat, and their failure to find any sort of path, while reassuring in one way, was damnably awkward in another. And Peregrine’s evident fitness and the ease with which he climbed steep banks and threaded his way through the forest did nothing to help. Glodstone struggled on, puffing and panting, scratched and buffeted by branches of trees and several times had to be helped to his feet. To make matters worse, as the leader of the expedition he felt unable to complain, and only by staying in front could he at least ensure that Peregrine didn’t set the pace. Even that advantage had its drawbacks in the shape of Peregrine’s revolver.
‘Put that bloody thing away,’ Glodstone snapped when he fell for the second time. ‘All I need now is to be shot in the back.’
‘But I’m only holding it in case we’re ambushed. I mean, you said we’ve got to be prepared for anything.’
‘I daresay I did but since no one knows we’re here and there isn’t a semblance of a path, I think we can safely assume that we aren’t going to be waylaid,’ said Glodstone, and struggled to his feet. Twenty minutes and four hundred yards of wooded hillside later, they had reached the top of a ridge and were confronted by a dry and rocky plateau.
‘The Causse de Boosat,’ said Glodstone, again taking the opportunity to consult the map and sit on a boulder. ‘Now if anyone does see us we’ve got to pretend we’re hikers on a walking tour and we’re heading for Frisson.’