by Bob Shaw
“Just a minute! Is the Inspector here now?”
“No, sir. He had a long day yesterday and has gone home to sleep. He’ll probably be here in the afternoon.”
The door closed on the constable’s final word before Hutchman could put the tray aside, and he realised it had been set on his knees deliberately to immobilize him. He slid it onto the bedside locker and went to the door. It was locked. He walked around the featureless perimeter of the room, arrived back at the bed, and sat down. The strips of bacon looked underdone, the fat still translucent, and too much butter had been used in the scrambled eggs, making them a greasy yellow mush. Hutchman lifted the mug of tea and sipped it experimentally. It was over sweet and much too strong, but hot. He held the mug in both hands and slowly drank the brown brew, deriving satisfaction from the tiny thrill which coursed through the nerves in his temples at every sip. The tea had no food value but at least it helped him to think.
Monday afternoon would probably be time enough to post the last of the envelopes, but what guarantee was there that he would be out by then? The constable had said Crombie-Carson would probably be at the station in the afternoon, and even if he did show up nobody was obliged to report his presence to Hutchman. And, going one step further, the Inspector could at that stage put his cards on the table and say he intended to hold onto Hutchman for several days or longer. Hutchman vainly tried to recall his own legal rights. He knew that the powers of the police, including that of detaining without showing cause, had been extended recently as part of the Establishment’s tougher measures to combat epidemic violence. In the security of his previous existence he had approved of the police having more authority, on the rare occasions when the idea crossed his mind, but now it seemed intolerable.
The galling thing was that he knew why he should have been held, and had no idea of why the police thought they were holding him. Welland was dead, Andrea had been snatched from her apartment, and an innocent third party had been murdered on the street. All these things — as Crombie-Carson’s intuition so rightly told him — were a direct result of Hutchman’s activities. And what was happening to Andrea at this minute? If the Russians — or anybody else, for that matter — had got hold of her she would soon tell all she knew. Once that happened they could communicate with Whitehall, because Hutchman had put himself beyond mere international rivalries, and a detachment of faceless men would come to Crymchurch for him.
Hutchman finished the tea, grimacing as the undissolved sugar silted into his mouth. By building the machine he had declared open season on himself. No matter who disposed of him there would be drinks in brown rooms in Whitehall, in Peking and Paris. And all he was doing was sitting quietly in Government-issue pyjamas, like a trembling moth waiting to be dropped into the killing bottle. They could come at any minute. At any second!
With a convulsive excess of energy, he leapt to his feet and looked for his clothes. His slacks, sweater, and brown-suede jacket were hanging in a built-in closet. He dressed quickly and checked through his pockets. All his belongings were intact, including a roll of money — remainder of what Vicky had given him to deposit in the bank — and a tiny penknife. The blade of the latter was about an inch long, making it a less effective weapon than fist or foot. He looked helplessly around the room, then went to the door and began kicking it with the flat of his foot, slowly and rhythmically, striving for maximum impact. The door absorbed the shocks with disappointingly little sound, but he had been doing it for only a few minutes when he heard the lock clicking. When the door opened he saw the same young constable and a thin-lipped sergeant.
“What’s the game?” the sergeant demanded indignantly. “Why were you kicking the door?”
“I want out of here.” Hutchman began walking, trying to breast the sergeant out of his way. “You’ve no right to keep me locked up.”
The sergeant pushed him back. “You’re staying until the Inspector says you can go. And if you start kicking the door again I’ll cuff your hands to your ankles. Got it?”
Hutchman nodded meekly, turned away, then darted through the doorway. Miraculously, he made it out into the corridor — and ran straight into the arms of a third policeman. This man seemed larger than the other two put together, a tidal wave of blue uniform which swept Hutchman up effortlessly on its crest and hurled him back into the room.
“That was stupid,” the sergeant remarked. “Now you’re in for assaulting an officer. If I felt like it, I could transfer you to a cell — so make the best of things in here.”
He slammed the door, leaving Hutchman more alone and more of a prisoner than he had been previously. His upper lip was throbbing where it had come in contact with a uniform button. He paced up and down the room, trembling, trying to come to terms with the fact that he really was a prisoner and — no matter how righteous his cause, no matter how many human lives depended on him — the walls were not going to be riven by a thunderbolt. This is crazy, he thought bleakly. I can make neutrons dance — can I not outwit a handful of local bobbies? He sat down on the room’s only chair and made a conscious effort to think his way to freedom. Presently he walked across to the bed and pulled the sheets away from it, exposing a thick foam-plastic mattress.
He stared at it for a moment, then took out his penknife and began cutting the spongy material. The tough outer skin resisted his efforts at first but the cellular interior parted easily. Fifteen minutes later he had cut a six-foot-long, coffin-shaped piece out of the center of the mattress. He rolled the piece up, compressed it as much as possible and crammed it into the bedside locker, closing the door on it with difficulty. That done, he got into the bed and lay on the area of spring exposed by his surgery on the mattress. It depressed a little with his weight, but the plastic mattress remained on approximately its original level, an inch or so higher than his face. Satisfied with his achievement, he sat upright and pulled the sheets up over the mattress again. Working from underneath, it was an awkward task to get the pillows and bedding disposed in such a way as to resemble normal untidiness, and he was sweating by the time he had finished.
He lay perfectly still, and waited, suddenly aware that he was still very short on sleep…
Hutchman was awakened from an involuntary doze by the sound of the door opening. He held his breath to avoid even the slightest disturbance of the sheet just above his face. A man’s voice swore fervently. There was a rush of heavy footsteps to the bed, into the screened-off toilet facility in the corner, to the closet, and back to the bed again. The unseen man grunted almost in Hutchman’s ear as he knelt to look under the bed. Hutchman froze with anxiety in case the downward bulge of the spring would give him away, but the footsteps retreated again.
“Sergeant,” a dwindling voice called in the corridor, “he’s gone!”
The door appeared to have been left open, but Hutchman resisted the temptation to make a break. His scanty knowledge of police psychology was vindicated a few seconds later when other footsteps, a small party of men this time, sounded in the corridor, running. They exploded into the room, carried out the same search pattern as before, and retreated into the distance. Hutchman’s straining ears told him the door of the room had not been closed. His plan had achieved optimum success so far, but had reached a stage at which some delicate judgment was required. Would the police assume he had escaped from the premises, or would a search of the building be instigated? If the latter, he would be better to remain where he was for a while — yet there was a definite risk in remaining too long. Someone had only to come in to make up the bed…
He waited for what felt like twenty minutes, growing more nervous, listening to the sounds of a building in use — doors slamming, distant telephones ringing, occasional blurred shouts or laughs. Twice he heard footsteps moving unconcernedly along outside the room and once they were those of a woman, but he was lucky in that the corridor appeared not too frequented at that time of the day. At last he was satisfied that the building was not being systematically combed. He t
hrew off the sheet and climbed out of the bed. Stepping out into the corridor seemed a hideous risk, but he gathered all the bedding up into a great ball and carried it out of the room. The group of men who had searched for him had come from the right, so Hutchman turned left. He moved along the corridor, scanning doors from behind his carapace of white linen. At the very end he found a graypainted metal door with “FIRE EXIT” stenciled on it in red. He opened the door and, still carrying the bedding, went down the narrow stairs of bare concrete. At the bottom he pushed open a heavy door and found himself looking out at the steely light of mid-morning streaming across a small car park. There were few cars in it, and no people.
Hutchman walked boldly across the park and through an open gateway into Crymchurch High Street. The police station was on his left. He turned away from it and went along the street, restraining himself from breaking into a run, his face buried in the flapping linen. At the first corner he turned right, only then permitting himself the luxury of feeling he had got clear. The sense of partial relaxation did not last long.
I’m miles away from home, he thought. And that’s where the envelopes are.
He considered looking for a taxi, then remembered they were a rarity in Crymchurch. The idea of stealing a car was somehow more shocking, on its own level, than anything else he had done since he had broken all ties with society. It would be his first outright criminal act — and he was not even certain he could do it — but there was no good alternative. He began examining the dashboards of the cars parked along the street on which he was walking. Two blocks further along, where Crymchurch’s business section was shading into a residential area, he spotted the gleam of keys in an ignition switch. The car was not the best sort for his purpose — it was one of the new Government-subsidized safety models, with four high-backed aft-facing seats and only the driver’s seat facing forward. All such cars had a governor on the engine which limited the top speed to a hundred kilometers per hour.
On consideration, Hutchman decided he would be better not to break any speed regulations anyway. He glanced around to make sure the owner was not in sight, dropped the bedding on the footpath, and got into the car. It started at the first turn of the key, and he drove away smoothly but quickly. Not bad for a big soft amateur, he thought in a momentary childish glee. But beware of hubris, Hutch, old son!
He circled the outskirts of the town, gradually adjusting to the feel of the unfamiliar controls, and once was shocked when he glimpsed his unshaven face in the driving mirror. It was a tired and desperate face, one which belonged to a hunted stranger. On reaching his house he drove slowly past it, satisfying himself that there were no police around, then halted and backed into the driveway. His own car, windows opaqued with moisture, was sitting where he had left it. He parked the stolen car close to the shrubbery and got out, staring nostalgically at the house and wondering what he would do if he saw Vicky at a window. But the two milk bottles still sitting on the doorstep told him she had not returned. Symbols. Two quotation marks which signified the end of the dialogue with Vicky. His eyes blurred painfully.
He searched in his pockets, found the ignition key of his own car. It, too, started at the first turn of the switch and a minute later he was driving northward, toward winter.
CHAPTER 10
The whole broad back of the country lay before him, daunting in its size, complexity, and possibilities of danger. He had been accustomed to thinking of Britain as a cosy little island, a crowded patch of grass which scarcely afforded a jetliner space to trim for level flight before it was time for it to nestle down again. Now, suddenly, the land was huge and misty, crawling with menace, magnified in inverse proportion to the number of human beings to whom he could turn for help.
Hutchman drove steadily, aware of the consequences of a speeding offence or even the slightest accident. He watched the mirror more than usual, cursing the other cars which hung near his offside rear wheel, bristling with kinetic energy, always about to overtake yet paradoxically frozen in formation with him. Other drivers, secure and separated in their own little Einsteinian systems of relative movement, met his eyes with mild curiosity until he put on his Polaroids, investing the windscreen with a pattern of oily blue squares. He crossed the Thames at Henley and drove northwest in the direction of Oxford, stopping at isolated mailboxes to post small bundles of his envelopes.
By midday Hutchman was deep in the Tolkein-land of the Cotswolds, swishing through villages of honey-coloured stone which seemed to have grown by some natural process rather than artifice. Domesticated valleys shone in pale tints beneath veils of white mist. He surveyed the countryside in detached gloom, his brain seething with regrets and reconsiderations, until the mention of his name on a newscast brought him back to the minuteby-minute business of living. The car radio crackled as he turned up the volume, causing him to lose part of the item.
“…intensive police activity centered on the house in Moore’s Road, Camburn, where two men died yesterday, one of them as a result of a fall from an upper window, the other shot dead when the biology lecturer Andrea Knight was abducted from her apartment by three armed men. The man who fell to his death was Mr. A ubrey Welland, a schoolteacher, of 209 Ridge Road, Upton Green; and the man who was shot during the gangsterstyle abduction was fifty-nine-years-old Mr. Richard Thomas Bilson, of38 Moore’s Road, Cam burn, who was passing by at the time and is understood to have tried to prevent the three men from pushing Miss Knight into a car. The police have no known clues as to the present whereabouts of Miss Knight, but both she and Welland were members of the Communist Party, and it is thought that her disappearance may have some political motivation.
“Latest development in the case is that thirty-nine-years-old Mr. Lucas Hutchman, of Priory Hill, Crymchurch, a mat hematiclan with the guided-weapons firm of Westfield’s, is being sought by the police, who believe he can materially assist with their inquiries. Hutchman was taken to Crymchurch police station last night, but disappeared this morning. He is described as six-feet tall, black-haired, slim-built, clean-shaven, wearing gray slacks anda brown-suede jacket. He is thought to be driving apale-blue Ford Sierra, registration number B836 SMN. Anybody seeing this car or a man answering to Hutchman ‘s description should contact their nearest police station immediately…
“Reports of a serious fire on board the orbiting laboratory have been denied by…”
Hutchman turned the radio down until it was producing background noise. His first thought was that somebody had beenfast. Scarcely three hours had elapsed since he had walked out of Crymchurch police station, which indicated that the police had not waited for reporters to uncover the facts but had gone to the BBC and enlisted their aid. He did not know much about police procedures, but memory told him that outright appeals on the public broadcasting system were fairly rare events. The signs were that Crombie-Carson, or somebody above him, had an idea that something really big was taking place. Hutchman glanced in his mirror. There was a car a short distance behind, belatedly rising and sinking on the irregularities of the hedge-lined road. Was that silvery flash an aerial? Had the driver been listening to the same newscast? Would he recall the description of the car if he overtook? Hutchman depressed the accelerator instinctively and pulled ahead until the following vehicle was lost from view, but then found himself drawing closer to another car. He fell back a little and tried to think constructively.
The main reason he needed transport of his own was so that he could diffuse his mailings over a wide area, and do it quickly. All the envelopes had to be in the mails before the last collection of the day. Once that was done he could abandon the car — except that it might be found almost immediately, giving the police an accurate pointer to his location. His best solution seemed to be to examine the main points of the broadcast description and decide which of them really were invariants…
Reaching the outskirts of Cheltenham he parked the car in a quiet avenue and, leaving his jacket in it, took a bus into the center of the town. S
itting on the upper deck he took the roll of notes from his pocket and counted it. The total was £338, which was more than enough to take care of his needs until D-Day. On descending from the bus in the unfamiliar shopping center he found himself shivering in the sharp November air, and decided that walking about in slacks and a worsted sweater could make him too conspicuous. He went into an outfitter’s and bought a zippered gray jacket. In a nearby general store he acquired a battery-powered electric razor and while trying it out trimmed his stubble into the beginnings of a signoral beard. It was only three days old, but the blackness and thickness of the growth made it acceptable as a beard which would register as part of his appearance.
Feeling more secure, Hutchman found an auto-accessory shop which supplied reflective number plates on a while-you-wait basis. He composed an unremarkable license number, ordered two new plates bearing it, and — after a five-minute delay during which the digits were bonded to the base — emerged in chilly sunlight with his purchase under his arm.
A sharp pang of hunger startled him, then he remembered that his last food had been taken with Andrea, back in another existence. The thought of a hot meal in a restaurant was tempting but he could not spare the time. He bought a plastic shopping bag and partially filled it with six aerosol cans of black automobile paint and a bottle of thinners. These he obtained in small lots in three different shops to avoid giving any perceptive sales assistant the idea that he was going to paint a complete car. Topping the bag up with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and cans of stout — the odd craving of the previous night had not entirely left him — he caught a bus back out of town along the same road.
Disembarking from the bus he approached his car warily. The whole expedition had taken little more than an hour, but there had been plenty of time for the car to have been observed and reported. When satisfied there was no unusual activity in the area he got into the driving seat and drove eastward into the hills, looking for a quiet spot in which he could work without attracting any attention. Nearly thirty minutes had passed before he found a suitably secluded lane. It led toward a disused farm building and was well screened with hawthorns. He parked out of sight of the main road and at once went to work with the aerosols, spraying the paint on in great cloudy swathes. To do the job properly he should have masked the glass and chrome before starting, but he contented himself by cleaning them with a handkerchief soaked in thinners each time a wisp of paint went astray. By spraying thinly and not being too particular about details he transformed his pale blue car into a black car in less than twenty minutes. He threw the empty aerosols into the ditch, took a screwdriver from the car’s tool kit and changed the number plates, throwing the old plates into the boot.