After this there was silence. It was my impression that the drive went on for a very long time and traversed varying ground. Sometimes there was the noise of other traffic, as if we were in an urban area. At other times there was the silence of what must be open country. Once or twice I thought I distinguished – and it was a strangely eerie effect – the faint bleating of sheep, the contented lowing of cattle. Perhaps we were on our way to some country retreat of the criminals across the breadth of England.
I tried to think coherently. The risky part of their exploit must have been at the moment of capturing me in Uptoncester. Even through that convenient blizzard, their action might by some chance have been detected. This must have been even more true of the first kidnapping. It, too, had presumably happened in Uptoncester, since it had been for Uptoncester that the boys had taken train. Perhaps they had arrived there after dark. But how had the criminals known of and seized their opportunity? Here was a mystery. And where would they then make for? Bundling the captives out of this van or a similar vehicle and into their prison was a manoeuvre they could better control. That, certainly, would happen in the dark – or if not in the dark wholly within private property screened from casual observation. I was the next parcel and would be similarly dealt with. Perhaps I wasn’t being driven over great distances, but only round and round until darkness fell. I had a sense that this conjecture pointed forward to another one. But I couldn’t make out what it was. My head was still working not at all well. Perhaps my brain had been damaged for good.
This sort of dismal rigmarole terminated abruptly when abruptly the van came to a halt. It hadn’t, so far as I could remember, done so even once before – which suggested that we couldn’t have been through anything like a town with numerous traffic lights. This useless piece of detective-work was my last before the door at the back of the van was flung open. I had a glimpse of wintry sunshine and of three men positioned alertly in front of me. Then instantly something – a bag or blanket – was flung over my head, and I was hauled and heaved I didn’t know where. Moments later I was dropped, neither viciously nor gently, on what must have been a bare stone or concrete floor. Very briefly there were voices, then the sound of a heavy door closing, and after that I thought I heard, although I couldn’t be certain, the van or another vehicle driving away.
‘Cold.’
The word – but it was half word and half sob or snivel – came out of a darkness that was not quite entire. The bag or blanket must have been removed from my head – positively as an act of courtesy, it was possible to feel – and a world of faint shadows was around me.
‘Cold.’
I wondered about my bonds, and found I was still in some fashion tethered to myself, although I couldn’t yet quite make out how.
‘Cold.’
It was certainly very cold indeed. I was already registering the fact, so that the reiterated assertion was unnecessary and also frightening.
‘So cold.’
‘S-s-sh.’ This, a sharp low command, came from my other side. So there was a third in my dungeon, and I knew very well who both my companions were. ‘Who’s that?’ the second voice – Robin’s voice – whispered. ‘Who’s there?’
‘Robin, it’s me: Robert Syson. They’ve caught me too.’
‘Whyever . . .?’ The single word revealed Robin Hayes as strained, exhausted, but in command of himself as the unfortunate younger boy was not.
‘They’ve taken me for a snooping policeman. I was prowling around Uptoncester some days ago – and again today. If it still is today.’ I paused to collect myself. ‘Robin, we’re not gagged. Is it no good shouting?’
‘I’m cold.’
‘Definitely not. I’ve tried. Sammy just comes and clobbers you. Sammy has some other nasty tricks as well. But Sammy’s soft, all the same.’
‘Soft?’ The word seemed to echo something I’d heard from Owen Marchmont aeons before.
‘I’m hoping so. I’m working on him. I’d like to work on him the way he has once or twice worked on me. But it’s cajolement that’s the thing. Every dishonest promise I can think of. I believe he’s stupid. Or I hope he is.’
‘Is he the only one on guard?’
‘I think so—sometimes. I think the others go away to feed. Fat of the land, probably. Sammy’s lowly – just their hey-you. He feeds us. After a fashion. From time to time. It’s not the bloody Ritz.’
‘I suppose not.’ I felt Robin to be speaking out of a forlorn hope. But I was thanking heaven for him, all the same.
‘I’m so cold.’
‘David, belt up for a bit. Mr Syson, I apologise.’
‘You what, Robin?’
‘For the way I spoke to you. I was a bit off my head.’
‘We must forget about it. But, Robin, tell me all you can about what happened. Was that uncle of yours . . .?’
‘It did begin, in a way, with wicked Uncle Jasper. He tanked me up well, didn’t he? And there was masses of money, and this marvellous plan. David and I would really show the flag. Go off to heaven knows where. Timbuctoo, perhaps. But, for a start, just to a small, out-of-the-way country pub.’
‘I see.’ I felt I did see – and thought it just a further touch of the bizarre that there would thus have been two Hayeses lurking in pubs simultaneously. ‘But you thought better of it?’
‘Of course. I don’t, you know, go all that dippy for all that long. So I decided just to take David home with me, and then get at that grandfather of his and tell him about the goings on . . .’
‘In School House. All that, Robin. But those people nabbed you both, all the same – even although you didn’t go to that out-of-the-way pub?’
‘Yes, in Uptoncester itself. They have a nerve. I give them that. And luck.’
‘You realise that your uncle must be – well, one of them?’
‘Not quite that, I think. They just have a hold on him. A pretty stiff hold from dubious episodes in times past. Something like that.’
‘But he can’t have intended that his own nephew . . .’
‘Well, perhaps he thought they’d only take David, and not bother with me. I just don’t know. You haven’t seen him lately, have you?’
‘Cold.’
‘Yes, I have. He called on me again in Heynoe – pretending to know less of what it was all about than he actually did.’
‘About those people wanting money?’
‘They don’t, Robin – although your uncle was out to persuade me he believed it was that. He was trying to distance himself from the whole thing. What those people really want is to exchange the two of you – and now, I suppose, me – not for ransom money but for some of their friends who are in gaol.’
‘That just couldn’t happen, could it?’
Robin’s voice as he asked this was perfectly steady. And I gave an honest answer.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it could.’
This cautiously half-whispered conversation between us went on for some time. David Daviot, although he had ceased his plaint, made no contribution to it. Perhaps he had fallen asleep. I was even more sorry for David, to whom I had never spoken, than for Robin. Robin had his sustaining plan. I wasn’t sanguine about it, but was as yet without material for a fair judgement.
After what was perhaps a couple of hours, this deficiency began to be made good. A door opened and there was a chink of light. The beam from an electric torch was at play on us each in turn. It wavered a little during the process, as if held in a not quite steady hand. Through its faintly diffused radiance I had an uncertain glimpse of the man called Sammy. He seemed a meagre little creature – not at all what is known in the underworld as a heavy.
‘Hullo, Sammy,’ Robin said cheerfully.
‘Hullo yourself.’ Sammy’s immediate note was of a kind of jocular truculence which somehow revealed a good deal. He wasn’t quite up to his job. Robin’s intuition, in fact, was right. Here was a weak link in the chain.
‘Sammy, have you thought abou
t it? Like I said?’
‘Clam up, you. Remember, can’t you, what I hand out when you get saucy-like?’
‘Yes, I remember, all right. But when this is over I’ll forget about it, Sammy. For your sake. I kind of like you, Sammy – although you’re a rotten cook.’
‘Cooking’s dames’ work. And you’ll be down to dog biscuits – the three of you – if you don’t clam up. Or puppy meal for the kid.’ Sammy produced an uneasy chuckle at his own witticism. ‘And that only in my own good time. This is just a routine visit, like. To see if those knots need a turn on them.’
‘They don’t – so it will be wasted effort. Listen, Sammy. Listen again. They go away, don’t they, for hours at a time? So it’s quite safe. And what do you get out of it all, anyway? Puppy meal, pretty well. They don’t think much of you, Sammy. No respect.’
‘It’s none of your business, Master Bloody Upper-Class. Clam up, I say.’
‘Okay, Sammy. Another time, perhaps. No hurry. Or is there?’
‘What you mean – is there?’
‘They may make their next move at any time, mayn’t they? Fob you off with a few fivers, and perhaps a kick up the arse as well. When it might be thousands.’
‘What you mean – thousands?’ There was now distinguishable uncertainty in Sammy’s voice.
‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? By this time there’s sure to be a big reward out. Just for a quiet tip-off they’ll pay it – believe you me. And see you safe to wherever you want to go. The States, Sammy. Chicago, say. There’s real scope for a man of your wits in Chicago.’
‘I’m loyal, I am.’
‘You’re a bloody liar there, Sammy. That’s crap, and you know it. Treated you like dirt often enough, haven’t they?’
‘They fucking have.’
‘Okay. Wait only till there’s a clear couple of hours again. Untie these ropes, leave that door open, and make off to the nearest police station. You’ll be safe as houses the moment you’re with the pigs. You dictate something and sign it – for that’s their drill – and those thousands are in your pocket in no time. They’ll come straight from the Queen.’
There was a brief silence, in which I had the anxious thought that with that last stroke Robin had perhaps overplayed his hand. Sammy was certainly no genius. But that bit about the Queen was surely treating him as pretty well E.S.N.
‘I’ll think,’ Sammy muttered. The torch went out. The door banged. He was gone.
‘That takes us just a little further. Robin’s voice, only moments before strong and confident, suddenly owned utter exhaustion. ‘I’d close for a dog biscuit like a shot,’ he said.
XV
I don’t intend to enlarge on the later course of our captivity or the severe discomforts it imposed upon us. It had its phases or stages. Only Sammy ever appeared, although we heard the voices of our more important tyrants from time to time. Occasionally Robin went to work on him again. More frequently – and I thought with remarkable judgement – he left his subversive ideas to incubate slowly in Sammy’s dim mind. There were small physical ameliorations now and then, and some sudden brutalities as well. Whether I bore myself well or ill, I don’t know; what I can alone recall with any satisfaction was eventually coaxing the terrified little Daviot into speech. It was a sufficiently slender achievement, but it brought to all three of us in some obscure way a considerable measure of relief. I suppose we differed one from another in our private fears. My own concerned the likelihood (failing a successful suborning of Sammy) of protracted stalemate in the situation, and our captors, although not run to earth, coming to realise that the other side wouldn’t play; that letting convicts out of gaol simply wasn’t on. They wouldn’t kill us, since to do so would increase the penalties attending ultimate disaster if it came to them, and would be without any practical advantage meantime. Nor would they liberate us, since that would too quickly give away too much. They would simply quit. We’d hear some powerful car departing, and that would be that. My last days and hours would be like those of Ugolino and his sons in their dungeon.
There was an element of muddled thinking in this, which my circumstances might perhaps excuse. When I thought about Robin’s thinking I saw no muddle at all. At first I questioned the wisdom of one condition he consistently sought to impose in his palaverings with Sammy. Sammy was to free us from our bonds and leave an unlocked door behind him before departing to seek the security and sadly imaginary reward awaiting him in that police station. But then I saw how significantly it would be a constraining of the dull-witted creature to a sense that he had burnt his boats behind him. On his way to that citadel of law and order he was only too likely to lose his nerve and hurry back to restore the status quo. But once he had left three freed prisoners behind him his only policy would be to make his own virtuous appearance among the police before we walked in on them ourselves. Once more there was a hazard of judging Sammy to be even more thick-headed than he was. It was sound psychology on Robin’s part, all the same.
And it worked. On what was my own third day in the place, it worked. Only it didn’t work quite as we might have hoped.
The powerful car did depart. But it did that regularly, Robin said, once, or sometimes twice, a day. We had no expectation that anything dramatic would follow. Our minds, I think, were working slowly by this time – and how weakened and stiffened were our limbs we had hitherto known only when, cautiously one at a time and for humble purposes, Sammy had partly undone our fetters.
Now, perhaps half an hour after his bosses had driven away, he did the whole job. Or we thought he’d done that, although later a small but awkward snag was to appear. He said not a word, and he worked still almost in darkness. We said not a word either – feeling, I suppose, that it might be the wrong word if we uttered it. The whole thing was like a criminal deed. Sammy clearly felt that way: that here at last he was committing a thoroughly immoral act. David, I imagine, scarcely thought at all. But with both Robin and myself Sammy’s state of mind was catching. We were guilty men. This extraordinary fact of mind appears worth reporting.
Sammy crept away, still without a word. He left a chink of light behind him, so we knew we weren’t locked in again after all. Robin insisted on our letting some ten minutes pass; if Sammy saw us hard upon his heels, he said, he might imagine we were intent on double-crossing him – and it was just possible that he was lethally armed and might utterly lose his head. He had lost most of it already, or he would never have permitted this extraordinary state of affairs. It will be clear that, by this time, I was as entirely in Robin Hayes’s hands as David Daviot was. Robin, for weeks now Heynoe’s problem pupil, had taken command of our situation to quite staggering effect.
Staggering in the more literal sense now turned out to be the condition of all three of us. Gropingly, holding out a steadying hand each to the other, we stumbled out of the half-light of our prison without a glance at it. There was a narrow corridor, fabricated out of breeze-blocks and lit by two broken windows. Beyond this, we were in a very large, low-ceilinged room in which were a few pieces of furniture and some utensils – a cooking-stove, a camp bed, two or three kitchen chairs and the like – but which was mostly given over to bits and pieces of broken and rusted machinery. There was something queer about the daylight, which seemed to come mostly from the dirty roof over our heads. It was our long spell in almost utter darkness, I told myself, that had somehow disordered our vision. But at least before us was an open door, and one giving on open air. Strength came to us to run – uttering, I seem to remember, senseless cries. We were outside and in a free universe. It was a universe of snow.
Under a dull grey sky the snow was everywhere. It topped and sheathed and almost obliterated an endless disorganised huddle of derelict and crumbling and long-deserted buildings. Although the entire forlorn and sinister scene was swimming before me I recognised it at once. It was Uptoncester’s luckless and ruined industrial estate. And we were as alone in it as if we had been pitched down on the surface
of the moon.
But it was only for a moment that this impression, reassuring, even comforting after a fashion, held. There were four figures at a middle distance, and some way beyond them, barely visible through falling and eddying snow, was a large car, stationary and slanted sideways on what must have been a road. It appeared to have slewed or skidded on the treacherous surface and bumped into a wall. The four men were plodding in our direction. Their movement suggested a slow menacing ritual dance of savages as step by step they extricated their feet from what must have been eighteen inches of snow. I remembered that bit about there not having been such a winter for years.
They were the enemy. We hadn’t a doubt of that. They were the enemy, who had for some reason been making an untimely return to their private prison. It occurred to me to wonder whether they had come upon Sammy, and dealt with him, on their way. Certainly they were going to deal with us now. There wasn’t a doubt of that either. Even as we looked, aghast, they had spotted us. Faintly through the muffling downpour there came to us what must have been an enraged bellow. The oncoming dance turned energetic, phrenetic. They looked to be powerful men. It was unsurprising that Sammy was dead scared of them.
‘Run!’
This was Robin’s shout, and we ran. We ran in the only direction open to us, although it was probably clean away from Uptoncester and into a void and friendless countryside. Within a minute I was finding it difficult to keep up with the boys, and this puzzled me. Though elderly, I knew myself to be in reasonably fit physical trim. Then the explanation appeared. I wasn’t running but hobbling. I was hobbling because, still tied firmly round one ankle, was a trailing length of Sammy’s accursed rope. Quite how this impeded me, I don’t know. But trying to cope with it as I moved, I came an abrupt cropper in the snow. There ought to have been nothing fatal about this, and I picked myself up in a moment. But now something nasty had happened to the ankle itself, and I lost further ground on Robin and David. Correspondingly, our pursuers gained upon me. I wondered whether I could effectively delay them by turning and putting up a fight. But it certainly wouldn’t need four men to dispose of me as their fancy took them, and two of them would probably be enough to recapture the boys.
An Open Prison Page 20