Kicking her legs free, she got to her feet. He was crouched on the floor, moaning. Snatching up her bag, she shot out of the door as swiftly as though she had been thrown out, stumbled, fell, picked herself up and ran toward the road. Her struggles during the past terrible ten minutes had taken a lot out of her, but fear lent her wings. Fear of death, for she knew that it was no longer only a question of being brutally raped; if he caught her he would kill her.
The type of man he had shown himself to be would not hesitate to choke her to death once he had satisfied his lust on her. What had he to fear? Nothing. She had told him that she was running away from a man with whom she had come to the Rockies, and had lost her way. She might easily have failed to find the road, wandered about in the forest until nightfall, and died sleeping in the snow. It was a miracle she had not died that way the previous night. He had only to carry her body a few hundred yards further in among the trees, put it in a ditch and pile snow over it. No-one had seen them together, so he stood no risk of being connected with her death. The snow would not melt until spring, so her body would not be found until then even if, in this wild country, it ever was.
When she was half-way to the road she threw a swift glance over her shoulder. He had come out of the shack and was after her. Sheer terror gripped her heart. She raced on, now sobbing for breath, the skirt of her coat flapping round her long legs. No moving vehicle was within sight or sound. There was nowhere she could hide. He would run her down, stun her if need be, and carry her back to as awful a death as she could imagine.
She looked back again. He had one hand over his injured eye, but was coming on through the trees at a stumbling run, moving nearly as fast as she was. For her to keep up her present pace she knew to be impossible. But he might. With such powerful limbs he would. He would run her down, batter her face with his great, knobbly fists and drag or carry her, bleeding, back to a vile and agonising end.
As she reached his lorry, she looked first one way then the other, praying desperately that help would reach her in time. But for half a mile or more on either side the road was empty. Suddenly his voice came, shouting obscenities and, as she had feared, that he meant to kill her. Then still worse:
‘You bloody bitch! Yer done me eye in. I’ll larn yer to play with fire! I’ll shove a burnin’ faggot up yer. Yes, up yer as far as it’ll go.’
Terror gave her an inspiration. The lorry! Could she get away in it? She had driven Big Bear’s car only a dozen times. With him beside her she had found it easy. But to handle a six-ton lorry? It was her only chance. Wrenching open the door of the cab, she hauled herself up, grabbed the wheel and stared helplessly for a moment at the dashboard.
He was only thirty paces off. She jabbed her thumb on the starter. Nothing happened. Again she pressed it, this time keeping her thumb hard down. The engine came to life. She knew she must let it run for a minute, otherwise it would stall. Still yelling at her, he put on a spurt. Almost fainting she forced herself to wait until he was within six feet of the lorry, then she gently let in the clutch.’
The lorry began to run forward. He bounded up to it and grabbed the still-open door of the cab. Wild-eyed, she stared at him. His closed left eye and cheek were smeared with ash, and flaming red. Just as he was about to pull himself up, she kicked him hard full in his ugly mouth. His eyes boggled, he lost his grip and rolled away into the ditch.
Next second she was seized with a new fear. The lorry had been parked at an angle. It was running across the road and about to be brought to a halt by a steep bank. Her heart lurched. If it did, he would get her yet. With all her strength she wrenched round the wheel. Missing the bank by inches, the lorry careered toward the other side of the road. Heaving again on the wheel, she was just in time to check it.
Another minute and she had it more or less under control. But the heavy lorry proved infinitely more difficult to handle than had Big Bear’s car. All her efforts failed to keep it on the right side of the road. She was terrified that at any moment a vehicle might approach and she would collide head on with it. Yet she dared not stop and leave the lorry before she had put several miles between herself and that devilish man who had yelled that he meant to torture and murder her in such a fiendish manner.
Somehow she got the lorry round the first bend. That gave her more confidence. A long, straight stretch lay ahead, so she risked putting the engine into second, then top gear. On one side of the road there was a bank and the ground sloped steeply upward; on the other it descended to a valley, at times becoming a precipice.
A hundred yards before the next bend she meant to slow down, but she had left it too late to brake hard without risking disaster. To her horror a station-wagon suddenly emerged from round the corner, coming straight at her. She missed it by inches, then had to wrench the wheel right over to prevent the lorry from hurtling down into the valley. It again charged toward the bank, but she slowed it just in time. Ahead there proved to be a succession of bends. They came so closely one after another that she dared not take a hand off the wheel, even for a moment. The next ten minutes proved a positive nightmare. The lorry swerved wildly from one side of the road to the other. At every curve she expected to meet another vehicle and be unable to prevent the lorry from crashing into it. Entering another straight stretch gave her a temporary respite. But it did not last for more than two minutes. Concentrating entirely on keeping the lorry on the road, she had not even glanced in the mirror. Now, an insistent hooting from behind brought home the fact that someone was trying to pass her. She pulled in, but too quickly, so had to pull out again. The driver of the car in her rear could not possibly have anticipated this dangerous zigzag. As he shot past, she caught the sound of rending steel. The sides of the two vehicles had scraped harshly together. The impact threw the car out of direction. It shot toward the valley side of the road, crossed a ditch and, its speed checked by a steep bank on the far side, came to rest with the, bonnet against a tree-trunk. In passing, Linda glimpsed enough to be sure that neither the driver nor the woman with him was seriously injured. She was sorry for them, but had far too many anxieties of her own even to think of them for more than a few minutes. She still had all her work cut out to prevent the lorry from running off the road.
When the vehicle was running along straight stretches, her mind reverted momentarily to the desperate situation in which the arrival of the police at The Fisherman’s Paradise had placed her.
By suffering the most ghastly experiences during the past twenty-odd hours, she had so far managed to evade them; but how long could she continue to do so? She had no idea where she was, except that she could not be very many miles from The Fisherman’s Paradise. The police in every town round about would have been warned to keep a look-out for her; so, at the very first place she entered, she might be hauled off to gaol.
While wandering in the forest the previous afternoon, she had thought a lot about possible ways of escaping capture, and had decided that her best plan would be to try to cross the border into the United States.
When she had been in Vancouver she had learned that it lay only a few miles north of the United States frontier, and that the big town of Seattle could be reached by ferry from Victoria Island. While she was there, she had had no reason at all to wish to leave Canada. Recent events had altered the whole picture. The principal difficulty of carrying out the plan was that from Montreal she had come only to the eastern side of the Rockies. Even so, she felt that the frontier running through them was so long that no place on it could be frequently patrolled by the Mountics and American frontier guards; so, by working her way from valley to valley, she should be able to cross it. But she had not then realised how desolate the country was, and how slender her chance of securing food and shelter during a tramp that must take several days. Now, after she had spent many hours in the forest, nothing would have induced her to enter it again.
A mile or so further on from the scene of the accident, a single-line railway track emerged from a tunnel on
the side of the road away from the valley. Only a few minutes before, a train had come out of the tunnel. Linda could see it snaking away round a curve lower down in the distance. From experience she knew how slowly the trains meandered along through the Rockies. Suddenly it occurred to her that, if she could catch up with, then pass it, she might be able to board it at the next stop, and so get clear away from this district where it was certain that the police were hunting for her.
She had just topped a rise and was about to run down a long, straight slope. Daringly she put her foot on the accelerator. The lorry increased speed to sixty miles an hour. Half-way down the hill she became frightened and fought desperately to check its headlong rush. The weight behind her was so great that at such a speed the brakes had little effect. A screen of trees on the corner ahead loomed up with terrifying rapidity. She could not have escaped running into them had she not had the presence of mind to throw the engine into second gear. Just in time she wrenched round the wheel. The lorry tilted at an angle, then righted itself. She was safely round the bend and her spurt had brought her to within a hundred yards of the last wagon of the train.
Sweat was streaming down her face, but she felt that she could do it now. Five minutes later she was level with the engine. Another car came rushing toward her. By a nerve-racking swerve she managed to avoid it. Subconsciously she noticed that she was passing a few scattered clapboard houses. Quite suddenly the lorry entered a wide space, on the left-hand side of which was a small railway station.
To her horror she recognised it at once. It was the whistle-stop halt for Château Lake Louise, where she could have got off on her journey from Montreal, instead of at Banff, which was thirty miles further east along the line. During the past few days she had several times walked down to the little station, in order to buy biscuits and sweets at the small general shop only a hundred yards or so away from it.
Dare she pull up and take a ticket there? Knowing that she could not get far on foot, it was very likely that the police would think it probable that she would make for it, and have a man in the little booking office waiting for her. Yet what was the alternative? In the past twenty minutes she had narrowly escaped death or serious injury half a dozen times. If she drove on, it was as good as certain that before she was an hour older she would either have a crash or go over a precipice. Even if she survived the hour, by then the hateful lorry-driver would have got a lift to a place with a telephone, reported the theft of his vehicle and given its number, so the police would be on the look-out for it.
The train was slowly clanking into the station. The sight of it decided her to risk arrest now sooner than later. In his vile fumbling to get his hand between her thighs, her attacker had not come upon the flat silk wallet suspended a little higher up round her waist. Thanking her gods for that, she brought the lorry to a halt a little way beyond the station, then fished out from the wallet a twenty-dollar bill, grabbed her night case and jumped down from the cab.
Before entering the booking office she gave a fearful peep inside. It was deserted, and no-one was about. Slipping through the doorway, she took off her toque. Her hair was already in shocking disarray. Now she pulled it right down, shook it out over her shoulders and replaced the toque low down, so that it almost hid her eyes. Stepping over to the guichet, she thrust the bill in and, without looking at the man behind it, asked for a second-class return ticket to Calgary. Scooping it up with her change she ran out on to the platform. A number of hampers and boxes were still being loaded on to the train. Clambering up into it she found that there were very few passengers, so she was able to get a carriage to herself. Huddled in the corner furthest from the station building, she waited impatiently for the train to move out. At last it did. Heaving a sigh of relief, she relaxed.
She had taken a return ticket to Calgary, with the idea that when the police learned that a young woman had got on the train at Banff, they should not associate her with their quarry, as anyone seeking to escape from the district would not be thinking of returning to it. When the conductor came along, she asked how long the train would stop at Calgary and, as she had intended to travel much further east, learned to her annoyance that, being a local, Calgary was the terminus.
Exhausted by her twenty-four hours of fear, strain, terror and spent energy, she soon fell asleep, and so soundly that when the train reached Calgary she had to be wakened by an attendant. From the long, bleak, naked platform she went down to the underground booking hall and enquired about trains going eastward. The next was not due in for two and a half hours. For the greater part of the journey it remained one train. At Winnipeg a portion was detached that went to Quebec and at Sudbury Junction another portion went south to Toronto, while the greater part of the coaches went on to Ottawa and Montreal.
Linda had again become very hungry, so she went into the station restaurant and ordered a substantial meal. While she ate it she thought over her next step. Now that the Canadian police were in full cry after her, she felt again that her best hope of escaping capture was to cross into the United States. The border between the two countries ran for so many hundreds of miles that she felt it should not be too difficult to get across it undetected, and that, after all, the most promising place to make the attempt might be in a well-populated area where numbers of people were moving about; so she decided to go to Toronto.
Having taken her ticket she was careful to avoid coming face to face with the two policemen who, side by side, were patrolling the booking hall; then she quickly went up in the lift. Twenty minutes later she was installed in a second-class sleeper and happy to find that she had it to herself. Still very tired from her recent ordeals, she asked the attendant to make her berth up right away, and told him that she had some sandwiches with her so would not go along to the restaurant car for dinner.
After several hours’ sleep she woke in a sweat from a ghastly nightmare, in which she had again been struggling with the lorry-driver. The memory kept her awake for a long time, but eventually she drifted off into another lengthy sleep.
Next day, at Winnipeg, a girl of about eighteen was put in with her. She was going to the University of Toronto to study electronics. It was the first time she had left her native city, and she was thrilled with the idea of seeing something of the world. After breakfasting that morning, Linda had tried to read a paperback which she had bought in Calgary, but found that she could not concentrate, so she was glad to listen to the girl’s pleasant chatter, and to have her as a companion at meals in the restaurant car.
When the train at last reached Toronto the girl went off to get her heavy luggage from the van. Linda had none, so made straight for the exit from the platform. As she did so she was alarmed to see two policemen scanning the people descending from the train. Swiftly she mingled with the little crowd round the entrance, but kept an anxious eye on them. Just as she was about to pass the ticket collector, one of the policemen turned, caught sight of her, grabbed the other by the arm, and pointed. Instantly she knew that from her description she had been recognised.
Chapter 15
Sir Colin Galahad
Linda caught her breath, swallowed and felt her heart begin to hammer. All her striving, her fortitude, her endurance, had been in vain. She had been spotted and in another few moments would be arrested. Visions of prison—bad smells, indifferent food, awful monotony, evil companions—again coursed through her mind in a matter of seconds. During her long journey across Canada her mind had never been free from anxiety that she would be traced. She had hoped that the booking clerk at Banff had caught only a glimpse of her and that the police would not connect the lone woman who had taken a return ticket to Calgary with herself, but would believe that she had become lost and frozen to death in the snow. Now, the terrible ordeal she had gone through that night, and her still more awful encounter with the bestial lorry-driver, had been suffered for nothing. Had she surrendered to the police at Lake Louise, she could have saved herself from both.
But to surrend
er was not in Linda’s nature. Without losing a second, even while these thoughts came and went like flashes of lightning through her brain, she was forcing her way through the crowd at the exit from the platform. She was big, strong and, in her near despair, ruthless. Seizing a fat woman in front of her by the arm, she pulled her back. Dropping her night case, with her other hand she pushed aside a well-grown boy. Only two men now stood between her and the exit. With a swift ‘Excuse me,’ she thrust her way between them, dashed aside the outstretched hand of the ticket collector and, next moment, was outside.
Wildly her eyes sought the quickest way to get out of the station yard. They fell upon a car at the edge of the pavement. It was a long, low, open, bright red sports car. At the wheel sat a well-dressed young man. The other seat was unoccupied. The engine was ticking over. As her gaze took it in, he put his foot on the accelerator, and the car began to move. Dashing forward she flung herself flat on the long boot, grasped the back of the empty seat and began to pull herself over.
Taken completely by surprise the young man turned his head, his mouth agape. ‘What the …’ he began.
‘Drive on!’ she gasped, cutting him short, her big eyes imploring. ‘For God’s sake save me! I’m in deadly peril!’
In one glance he had taken in her lovely face, the fact that she was wearing a mink hat and toque, though both were soiled and rumpled; then, as she scrambled over the back of the seat, her long and shapely legs.
Recovering, he reacted swiftly. The car shot forward. She threw a quick glance behind her. A score of people, forgetful of all else, now stood blocking the entrance to the station. Some were staring after the car in amazement, others were laughing, no doubt having assumed that they had witnessed a scene in a lovers’ quarrel, in which a determined young woman had risked injury rather than allow herself to be abandoned by her boy friend. As the car swung round the corner, the two policemen had still not succeeded in forcing their way through the crowd on the far side of the barrier.
The Strange Story of Linda Lee Page 20