Buried in the Country
Page 18
TWENTY-ONE
Megan forced herself not to imagine Nick lying dead. She had to believe he was alive and that she could rescue him. Call for help first or find out what had happened, what was going on? She wasn’t even sure the square of light was the van they sought, though the odds were very much in favour. She shuffled the pieces in her mind.
“I could reconnoitre,” Tariro volunteered. “They wouldn’t see me.” He took off his yellow hat. In the dark, he would all but vanish.
“I’m supposed to be keeping you safe.” Megan hesitated, looking at him. “Besides, you don’t know the moors.”
“I do,” said Aunt Nell. “And I’m small. I can hide behind a gorse bush.”
“Not likely! You’ll stay here, Aunt Nell, and keep Teazle quiet. Barnicot, call in and report the situation. Close the windows and keep your voice down. Launceston will be listening on three. And don’t mention Mr. Tariro.”
“Right, Sarge.”
“Okay, Tariro, I’m trusting you to do this right. Follow me and don’t take a step without my say-so. Let’s go.”
The breath of air had died as quickly as it came up. The fog had closed down again, hiding the van, but also hiding their approach. They knew the direction roughly, and Barnicot was sure it had gone off the main track, so Megan set off, followed by Tariro, keeping to the left side, with her torch directed at the ground to her left. She shielded it with her hand to make it less visible from a distance, though Stone and his partner were not necessarily near the van. They could be anywhere within ten to fifteen minutes’ walking distance.
The track was edged with boulders of all sizes and shapes, some in heaps, some scattered at irregular intervals. Walking was an irritating process, as the sleepers were just too far apart for Megan’s natural stride. In between, the ground was a little bit lower and softer, and she kept almost stumbling. It wasn’t far, though, before she came to a gap wide enough for a vehicle to drive through.
She stooped to look for signs. Tariro crouched beside her.
The extra pair of eyes was not needed: The muddy morass was pocked with sheep hoof marks, with nary a trace of tyre ruts. They walked on. A twisted hawthorn bush, bent and contorted by winds sweeping over the moor, loomed out of the mist, a black silhouette against the all-pervading grey. Beyond it was flat, grassy ground in all directions as far as Megan could see.
“This looks a likely place to go astray,” she said in a low voice. “Seems to me, with no obvious route they’d probably have driven straight ahead. Let’s have you explore straight ahead while I stay here to keep our bearings. Look back every few steps to make sure you can still see me. When another step would take you out of sight, come back.”
“Whatever you say, baas.”
Tariro walked away. After four strides, he glanced back. She pointed. Correcting his course slightly, he went on. After four more steps, his figure was hazy. Megan must have looked hazy to him, too. He paused, as if calculating, before taking another pace, and another.
A dark shadow, he stopped. As far as Megan could make out, he was examining his surroundings. He turned and waved to her, then took several steps to his right and bent down. He waved again and backtracked, going off to her left, westwards, in the direction of the van. If it was the van. They had no evidence but a fleeting glimpse of an unidentified light in the fog. She refused to believe they were wasting precious time following a will-o’-the-wisp.
Tariro obviously shared her sense of urgency. He came running back towards her. “They went thataway!” He pointed to the northwest.
“Did you actually see tyre marks, or are you guessing?”
“I’m theorising, based on Constable Barnicot’s report that they didn’t stay on the railway. It curves the other way, over there. You can tell by the sleepers, of course, even in the fog. The path I found is wide and forks off to the left. If they weren’t paying attention to the bumps, they’d have had no reason to choose one branch over the other.”
“Or perhaps they thought they’d be safer leaving the main track.”
“Yes! Then either the path they took curves back towards the village or they drove off it.”
“On purpose or by accident,” Megan agreed, “or it petered out. A lot of paths on the moors just sort of fade away. But no tyre marks.”
“Not that I saw. It’s very short grass—grazed by sheep and ponies, judging by the—uh—droppings. I didn’t see hoofprints, though, so the ground must be pretty hard.”
“I expect there’s bedrock under a thin layer of soil just here. Good enough.” Megan set off at a swift walk in the direction Tariro had come from.
He lagged behind. “So what next?”
“We find the van. It should be quite easy now, unless they turn off the light.”
“Yes. But … I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but how will we return to your car? It’ll be pitch-dark in quarter of an hour, not to mention the fog.”
“We’ll find it, or they’ll find us, sooner or later,” Megan said impatiently. Anxiety and the need for haste drove her on. “You needn’t come.”
“Of course I’ll come, but just wait half a tick while I tie my handkerchief on that bush.” He darted back to the hawthorn.
“Good idea. I’m sorry I snapped.”
“You’re worried about your friends. I understand. It can’t be far now.”
They soon found proof of Tariro’s theory in a muddy patch: tyre marks overlying the prints of sheep and ponies and what might have been a fox. The path veered more and more to the north, away from the village, rising steadily.
“It’s not going towards where we saw the van,” Megan said in dismay.
“Shall we turn back?”
“Yes. But not all the way to the hawthorn. That’d be pointless. Turn off your torch for a moment. It’s so dark now, we might be able to spot the light even through the mist.”
After a few seconds, their eyes adjusted. The fog seemed less impenetrably dark. Megan checked her luminous watch dial. Though the sun had set, the faint afterglow filtered down, directionless, the particles of moisture scattering the light. They stared down the slope.
“There!” Again, Tariro was the first to spot the van. They were facing its side, not the rear, but the light inside cast a pool of illumination on the ground and reflected dimly from the nearby mist. “It doesn’t look as if the headlamps are on. I wonder why they left the doors open and the light on. The battery must be running down.”
Megan started off in a straight line towards the van. “Let’s go and find out. Come on.”
“No torches?”
“No torches. We don’t need them to follow a track now. There’s still just enough light to see obstacles.” She promptly tripped over a stone.
Tariro caught her arm. “Careful!”
“I was talking instead of looking. Thanks.”
He switched on his torch and shaded it with his hand. Beyond the stone was a dark pool bordered by mire pocked with pony-hoof prints. Megan would have landed flat on her face in it if he hadn’t saved her. She didn’t comment when he kept his torch on.
They circled the muck, widdershins because on its left were a bank of reeds and a massive boulder. By the time they cleared it, the fog had thickened between them and the van and it was once more invisible.
“That way,” said Tariro.
“I think it’s more that way. We’ll split the difference and we should end up close enough to see the damn thing.”
The downward slope was steeper than Megan recalled having walked up. It took them into a narrow valley they had certainly not crossed before. Along the bottom, a belt of sedges marked the presence of a bog or a small brook. A rift in the fog gave them a view of a drystone wall marching across the farther slope. From beyond came the sleepy bleats of sheep settling down for the night.
“Oh hell,” Megan said wearily. “They couldn’t have driven through that lot.”
“Unless there’s a bridge and a gate. Which way now?”
“Not to worry,” said Tariro, infuriatingly cheerful. “It’s a side of England I haven’t seen before. Though perhaps seen is the wrong word, as I haven’t seen anything much but fog. Experienced would be more accurate.”
Megan nearly snapped at him, but after all, he didn’t have a friend in deadly peril. He had never even met Nick. Aware that he might be marching into danger, he had volunteered to help. Why shouldn’t he regard it as no more than an interesting expedition?
“I just hope we find your friends safe and sound,” he added, heaping coals of fire, especially as, in her fear for Nick, she had almost forgotten Freeth. “We should have brought Teazle with us. I bet she could have led us straight to the van.”
“She may have caught a trace of Nick’s scent. She knows him very well. Or it might have been just a rabbit.”
“What we need is the hound of the Baskervilles. Don’t the police have search dogs?… Ouch!” He had heedlessly brushed against a gorse bush. “Dammit, what’s that?”
“Gorse. ‘Furze,’ some people call it. A hazard Aunt Nell didn’t warn you about. No leaves, only prickles. It looks like a big patch. We’ll have to go round it.”
By the time they had circled the thicket, Megan was more disorientated than ever. If the guv’nor sent for the canine team—which sounded like an excellent idea—they would have to search for her and Tariro as well as the villains and their victims. She could just imagine the flak she’d take for that, from both Scumble and her colleagues.
The brow of the hill was visible ahead, a dark curve against the fog. The contrast was greater than Megan would have expected. A pallid luminescence suffused the veils of mist. On the far side of the ridge, a light was shining, a light brighter than the van’s interior.
“Headlamps? Theirs or ours? I said to keep them off, but at this point I wouldn’t quibble.”
They reached the top.
“The moon!” Tariro exclaimed.
“So that’s east. I wouldn’t have guessed. Which way is the van from here, would you say?”
He shrugged, then turned slowly through a full circle, as if estimating the route they had walked. “Southwest? But it’s pure guesswork.”
“We don’t seem to have any choice.” Megan stretched out her arm in front of him. “We’re on the edge of a quarry. Don’t take a step forward. Look.”
The ground in front of them levelled off for a few feet, then came to an abrupt end.
“Whew! Lucky we stopped to take our bearings. And lucky the moon has risen! Is this the Cheesewring that Mrs. Trewynn and the constable were talking about?”
“Could be, but I rather think not. There are several quarries in the area. The Cheesewring is cut into quite a high hill and I don’t think we’ve climbed that high. Also, it has two or three tors at the top. I would have thought we’d be able to see at least one. There seems to be a sort of path here, parallel to the edge. We’d better follow it, but for goodness’ sake, walk carefully.”
“Don’t worry, I will. What’s a tor? And, come to that, does Cheesewring mean something?”
“A tor is a stack of enormous, flattish boulders balanced in a pile at the crest of a hill. The legends say they were heaped up by giants. They sort of look like an old cheese press, or at least the biggest local one does. That’s wring with a w, as in squeeze out the whey. That’s whey with an he.”
“Little Miss Muffet … I learned that at school and always wondered what curds and whey are, but never wondered hard enough to look it up.”
“Now you know as much as I do. Careful, there’s some loose stones here. It’s a bit slippery.”
They safely negotiated the bad patch. The path became steeper. The sheer edge came to an end, but the slope on that side was too steep and rocky to walk down.
Ahead, the ground flattened. The footpath widened slightly and continued in more or less the same direction. It wound about a good deal, skirting outcrops, narrowing between banks of dead bracken, sometimes hard to distinguish from the grass it crossed. When in doubt, Megan kept to her right. Sooner or later, whether they came across the van or not, they would reach the road and at least would know where they were.
A shadow moved. Startled, Megan gasped, then realised they had come upon a small herd of ponies. In the diffuse moonlight, they stood with drooping heads, seemingly drowsing on their feet. One was alert, a large piebald that stopped cropping the grass, stamped a hoof, and whickered. The dozers raised their heads; a couple lying down awoke and scrambled to their feet.
“They’re bigger than I expected,” Tariro whispered. “Do they bite? Will they stampede?”
“They’re used to people,” Megan said hopefully. “They usually just move aside if you get closer than they like.”
The two of them must have looked singularly unthreatening, because the ponies just stared at them, scarcely twitching the odd ear. Megan took a step forward. They shifted uneasily. She walked slowly and steadily forward, Tariro close at her heels, and they parted before her, ambling to one side or the other.
The last two moved apart to let them through.
“The van!” they exclaimed in unison, Tariro’s voice as hushed as Megan’s, to her relief. She had instinctively ducked behind a gorse bush, and he followed suit.
The white van was no more than twenty yards away, facing them. Megan saw it plainly through the straggly gorse. The headlamps were off, so she couldn’t see whether one was yellow glass, but there was little doubt in her mind.
Nothing stirred except the ever-shifting mist. The only sound came from the ponies cropping grass.
“You’re not a copper,” Megan whispered. “I can’t tell you what to do. But I would very much appreciate it if you would go and see if anyone’s in the cab of the van.”
“Of course. I offered, didn’t I?” He dropped to his knees and started to crawl round the bush. “I’ll circle round and approach on driver’s side.”
“Go carefully!”
And then a piercing shriek sliced through the quiet night.
“Ye gods!” Tariro stopped in his tracks. “What was that? Not…”
“I hope it was a rabbit caught by a fox or stoat.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” Urgency gripped her. “Go on. Count off fifteen seconds, then stop and watch the van while I catch up. If anything moves, give a pssst. Got it?”
“Got it.”
He slithered away. Counting, she kept her eyes on the van. Nothing moved. The only sound was the tu-whit of an owl. She hoped it wouldn’t catch a rabbit within earshot. Another scream like that would shred her taut nerves to tatters.
Fifteen. On hands and knees, she set off after Tariro, glad she was wearing gloves.
Once past the gorse, she looked for him. Hatless, in jeans and a dark pullover, he was invisible. Guessing, she crawled onward. She managed not to put her hands in any pony droppings, but sheep and rabbit pellets were unavoidable.
How far could he go in fifteen seconds? Either farther than she’d expected or she had missed him. Should she change course?
So still was he sitting, cross-legged, that she almost bumped her nose on his knee.
She straightened up and gauged the van’s position. From here she couldn’t see the offside headlamp. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“All right, make it ten seconds this time.”
He pointed the way he intended to go and then was gone, melding into the darkness.
… Eight. Nine. Ten. This time the hazard wasn’t animal droppings, it was random rocks strewn in Megan’s path. The larger ones were easy to avoid but she put her knee down painfully on a small one. If one could be said to
limp while crawling, she limped the rest of the way.
Tariro crouched at right angles to the side of the van, about halfway along. “I’ll approach the window from behind. Okay?”
“Perfect. Remember Stone’s an expert with a sandbag.”
“I’ll remember, but I’m not exactly sure what it is.”
“A long bag filled with sand. It may not sound like much, but he can kill with it. He won’t have much room to use it, though, and as far as I can see, the window’s closed, which will limit him still more. But watch out.”
“Yes, baas.”
“If you see someone, come straight back to me. Unless they see you, in which case get out of here as fast as you can.”
He grinned. “Yes, baas.”
The next she saw of him was a silhouette against the white door of the van, rising from the ground. She held her breath as the top of his head reached and passed the bottom of the window.
He stayed there, looking into the cab rather than racing for safety. Megan breathed again.
Half a minute later, he was back at her side, shaking his head. “Empty. That is, I can’t swear there’s no one hiding on the floor on the other side, but I’m pretty sure. The back now?”
“Yes. Will you go to the far side? Not that I ought to let you—”
“Try to stop me.”
“—but you crawl faster.”
“Boy Scouts. What are we going to do?”
“We’ll go up under cover of the open doors. Try not to touch the van.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Fingerprints. After that, it depends whether we can hear anything. If they’re in there and talking, we’ll listen. My ‘baas’ told me to find out the situation, not to rush in and grab them.”
“Pity!”
“If you hear nothing, wait for two minutes just in case. Then we’ll back away and move off. How far would you say we can go and still see who—or what—is in the back?”
“Standing?”
“Probably, though there’s an upward slope, so maybe not.”