Harry said, ‘I’m sorry, chaps. If I’d known what it was going to be like, I’d never have agreed to help. But we’ll have to stick it out for the afternoon. Then I’ll tell that feller we’ve had enough. It’ll take hours even to get clean again.’
‘It’ll take longer to get this stink off us,’ Peter said. Simon said, ‘Some holiday this is. It’s worse than slavery, doing this.’
‘Just this one afternoon,’ said Harry. ‘I wish we’d never agreed to help, but we did agree, and we’re bound by it.’
Simon said, ‘We didn’t agree. I didn’t, nor did Pete.’
‘I agreed, for you,’ Harry told him in some surprise. ‘That’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
Peter said, ‘No. Not the same thing at all.’
At a tangent Simon said, ‘They’re loading those sheep into that truck: the one that’s marked “Farmfresh Oven-ready Chickens”. Not “Farmfresh Oven-ready Sheep”. I think there’s more to all this than meets the eye.’
Harry said, ‘Now don’t be silly, Simon. Let’s get this next lot on the way. He may be a bit of a hard man, but he’s in business, and you’ve got to be tough in business. He’s a decent enough feller, though. I can tell. If he’s a subcontractor, he’s subcontracted that truck, likely as not.’
Grunting and straining, they sent three more sheep on their way, the buzz of the ToteGote faint in their ears.
Peter said, ‘The only thing about this is it’s good weight training. I think I will have a try for my black belt in the winter.’
*
Ray walked past the Kombi, and wondered in passing whether to let all the tyres down, but decided against it. Ships that pass in the night don’t fire torpedoes at one another. He humped his rucksack along the little road, then paused in a clump of alders, looking downhill.
The freezer truck was still parked, and a man with bloodstained overalls was loading the carcasses of sheep into it, helped by a huge man with a lumpy face. The sheep were coming in small batches down the ropeway, and Ray realised that he had seen this happening before, when he had been on his way down to fetch Harry’s spade the previous evening. Ray’s mind followed exactly the same path as Simon’s: wondering why people would be stacking sheep into a chicken truck, he inched forward through the greenery at the roadside.
‘…A doddle,’ the first man was saying. ‘If only I could keep ’em at it for a couple of days. All our problems solved, Lumpy boy. But the trouble is, how can I keep ’em at it? I bet one day’ll be quite enough for that creep and his two merry men. And the girls’ll be getting restless too. If I offer more money, that wouldn’t do: they won’t take money as it is. I’m in a cleft stick, Lump, straight up I am. I need the help, but I can’t keep it.’
The other man said nothing, but worked stolidly until the batches of sheep stopped coming down. The first man stood looking up the ropeway, then turned back to the truck and closed the rear doors.
‘The production line has stopped,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s wander up and see what isn’t going on.’
The two men walked uphill, following the line of the ropeway. Ray wondered about all this. ‘That creep and his two merry men,’ and the references to the girls could only mean the LYF. Ray had no intention of joining up with them again, but he told himself that a quick way to the coast lay in a traverse over the plateau, and would be preferable to taking the road and limping along it in the hope of getting a ride from some sympathetic driver. As he had found out, this part of the world was short on sympathetic drivers. So, if he followed the two men discreetly, he would find himself back on the plateau, and he might extract some amusement from observing the LYF on his way. He moved cautiously out of cover, then headed uphill.
At the top of the ropeway, and a little to one side, was an abandoned mine-working. All that was left of it were a few short and rusty lengths of rail, and a hole in the ground almost hidden by vegetation. At one time, Ray thought, ore from the mine would have been taken along a short and primitive railway in hoppers to the ropeway, then sent down it and transported from the bottom to be crushed and smelted elsewhere. Lead, he thought, or copper, screwing up the environment even then.
Beyond, he saw a small pile of dead sheep, and beyond that again, in a depression in the plateau, the LYF. Just as he had thought. They were standing in a small group with the two men he had followed, and a third. Harry was the focus of attention. As Ray crept closer he could see that the male members of the LYF were dishevelled and filthy, their clothes covered with bloodstains and tufts of wool.
‘…Quite enough,’ Harry was saying. ‘We offer you an inch and you want to take a yard. We’ve worked like tractors all the afternoon, and now we just want to clean up and get going. We’re having a holiday, not working in a labour camp in Siberia or something. We’ve been happy to help, but you got to draw the line.’
The first man said, ‘Look, you’d be helping the country, not just us. Try and see it that way.’
Harry shook his head stubbornly.
‘If there’d been any fun in it,’ he said. ‘But no: it’s just plain nasty, and we’ve had it. We didn’t come up here just to get stunk up with dead sheep and brassed off to blazes.’
The third man said, ‘Digging his heels in, Eego. You was me, I would persuade them, get them singing to their work.’
‘What d’you think I’m trying to do?’ the first man said. ‘Can you do any better than me?’
Harry said, ‘There’s no point in going on with this. Can’t you see I’ve made up my mind?’
But the third said, ‘When I was up here, Eego, where did I lay my head? Six times I came up here, bad weather and good, and did I sleep in a little tent? I did not.’
The first man looked worried.
‘I follow you,’ he said. ‘Serious, that’d be. Could be very serious, that could. But you might be right. It might be the only possible way.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Harry demanded.
The first man said to the third, ‘No harm’d come to them.’
‘No harm.’
‘And it’d only be for a couple of days.’
Peter said to Harry, ‘Come on, Harry. Let’s get out of here. We’ve had enough already.’
The first man nodded to the second.
‘All right,’ he said.
The second man bent down and picked a rifle out of the heather, holding it on the LYF. Cheryl screamed, and they all bunched more closely together.
Harry said tensely to the first man, ‘You’ll regret this, you see if you don’t. There’s such a thing as law and order.’
And the first man smiled; he said, ‘Not up here. Only what I make. Listen: I do regret this, but it’s the only way. Now just you move along, and don’t think my pal here won’t pull that trigger if you do anything silly.’
6
Egan thought of himself primarily as a businessman and only in a secondary way as a thief; even in the latter aspect he believed that he was a businesslike thief, catering for the laws of supply and demand. In the matter of the sheep, he did not particularly enjoy killing them, but nobody he knew of had ever succeeded in eating a live sheep. Like many people of rigidly limited intelligence, he knew he was very bright, being incapable of imagining anything beyond those limits. In some ways he bore a resemblance to the sheep he was killing. On these high, open mountains and plateaux a hereditary instinct keeps the stock broadly within farm boundaries. Contrary to Egan’s belief, it is only the ewe lambs which are sent down for wintering, and when they return they have to learn the boundaries in company with older animals. If the whole stock were sent down, then they would all lose the knowledge, and chaos would result, apart from which the sheep would never survive the weather conditions: weather that would kill a lowland sheep very quickly.
Now Egan was slaughtering sheep within a fairly limited area, all belonging to one farm. When the farmer discovered his loss, it would not be a matter of going along to some market and buying replacements. That
flock, with its ingrained knowledge of perhaps four hundred acres of high country, was simply not replaceable. In Ray’s terms, Egan was screwing up the environment with a vengeance.
By about six in the evening, Ray invisibly in attendance, Egan and his men brought the LYF to a building in a small hollow sheltered from both south-west and north — the quarters which bring along the worst weather: gales and torrential rain from the south-west; blizzards from the north — and said, ‘So this is the home from home. Very cosy, too.’
It looked far from cosy to the LYF. The walls were of thick but crumbling stone, and half the roof had fallen in. The door had gone, rotted or blown or burned away, and there were no windows that they could see.
Egan said to Harry, very reasonably, ‘Now look here. You’re going to help us for two more days whether you like it or not. It isn’t all that much to ask. You’ll be fed and looked after, and the birds can do some cooking for all of us. Then when we’ve finished we’re going to tie you all up in here and leave you. The way we’ll tie you up, it’ll take you three or four hours to get loose. Then you can go, and it’s up to you what you do after that. I’m going to leave fifty quid with you. Payment for services rendered, see?’
Harry said, ‘I’m dreaming. I must be. You’re going to try to pay us, after this?’
‘Who’ll believe you?’ Egan said. ‘All that about bringing you up here at gunpoint. I can just see you standing telling your story! And what’ll I’ll say? I’ll say you wanted more money, and I wouldn’t give it to you, so you cooked up a load of old codswallop.’
‘You’ll never get away with it,’ Harry said, but his voice was doubtful.
Linda said, ‘They’d never dare to shoot us.’
Egan said, ‘Young woman, I would never shoot you, but my friend here would. It means nothing to him, no more than swatting a fly.’
Cheryl began to weep sniffily.
She said, ‘I want to go home.’
Egan said, ‘And so you shall, my love, because nobody’s going to do anything stupid. You can all sleep inside there at night. One of us’ll be awake all the time.’
‘What about their gear?’ Genius asked. ‘If they’re camping out, we should fetch their stuff. Nothing funnier than tents and things with nobody in them. The right way to call attention.’
‘You’re right, mate,’ said Egan. ‘One of them said they saw the stream turn pink on the way up. So they’ll be somewhere beyond where it empties out. Go and get the stuff.’ He turned to Lumpy. ‘You too; you can pack it all on the Gote; I’ll take the gun.’
Genius said, ‘Should have kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I?’
*
Harry and his companions huddled together in a windowless room, as far as they could get from the doorway where Egan squatted comfortably with the gun; and they talked quietly about what had happened to them, with undertones of shock and hysteria in the girls’ voices. Cheryl was the worst affected, the most scared.
She said, ‘We’re miles from anywhere. They could kill us, and no one would know!’
Protectively, Harry said, ‘I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Don’t worry, we’ll be all right?’
Peter and Ann were holding hands miserably.
Ann said, ‘But we aren’t all right, are we? Just look at us, stuck in here with that maniac sitting there holding a gun. I mean, we’re not in America or somewhere, are we? You and you’re not going to let anything happen. Well, it’s happened, hasn’t it?’
‘Sssh,’ Harry cautioned. ‘Look, they’ve no more intention of shooting us than jumping over the moon. You can tell. We’ll be all right, like I say, just as long as we keep calm and don’t make any of them lose his temper. That’s the danger.’
‘So what do we do?’ Simon asked.
‘We do what they want: work for them for a couple of days. If that’s the price, then we’ve got to pay it. The girls won’t have to do the work, except a bit of cooking. Just spare a thought for us, sweating ourselves to bits with those horrible sheep.’
‘You mean give in — just like that?’ Peter said. ‘Just tell them we’ll do what they say?’
‘Can you think of a better idea?’ Harry looked at Peter and Simon. ‘Shall we jump them, and really risk getting shot? I don’t think so. We’ll memorise their nasty faces, and everybody keep a full description, and then we’ll see what happens when we get down to civilisation again. What we’ll do is get this little lot behind bars, but all in good time.’
Linda said to the others, ‘I think Harry’s right. You can see the fix they’re in. They haven’t enough labour, and they’ve had some drop into their laps. They think they’re very clever, but we can get even with them.’
Simon groaned, ‘Two days, carting those filthy sheep!’
Peter thought, This is stupid, surely? Those other two are away. If we rush this one we could have him before he could fire. Really go at him: that would be the thing. He’d never have a chance to raise the gun, especially if somebody created some kind of diversion.
Leaning over and whispering, Peter tried to persuade Harry into this course of action, but Harry vetoed it.
‘You must be out of your mind, Pete,’ he said. ‘It’s much too dangerous. All we’ve got to do is two days’ work. We’re going to do that, and soon all this will be a thing to look back on: just a bad memory.’
Peter said, ‘But if I can pin him down, I can put him out like a light.’
‘No, Pete. Forget it.’
Peter shrugged, but then, slowly and insolently, he looked Harry up and down, and said, ‘I think you’re chicken, Harry.’
Harry said earnestly, ‘Then you’re a silly twit. I’m not scared; I have to think what’s best for you all, can’t you see that? What happens if we do what you want, then that feller does get his gun and looses off — and hits Ann? Would you really like that, Pete? It might be a chance in a million, but we can’t afford to take even that.’
So Peter subsided for the time being, and brooded. In his mind’s eye he had Harry, not Egan, down on the ground in a kesa-gatame on the carotid, and was driving the life out of him; but the fantasy lasted only a moment.
Harry stood up and moved casually towards the doorway until Egan waved the gun at him, uneasily and holding the weapon inexpertly. Just for a second Harry wondered whether Peter had been right, and he felt a prickle of excitement, then dismissed the thought.
Egan said, ‘Don’t waste your shoe-leather coming any closer.’
Harry said, ‘That’s all right. But I wish you’d give up all this playing around with guns. It’s childish. You’ve got the wrong idea about us. We’re not violent people.’
‘You don’t know whether you are or not,’ Egan said. ‘Not until you’ve been pushed.’
‘Yes, we do. We’ve just agreed we’ll work for you tomorrow and the day after.’
‘Well, thanks very much,’ Egan said equably. ‘Now get back inside.’
Harry said, ‘Wait a minute. I wanted to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘I mean, when you said that about bad language, I thought you…well, I didn’t think you’d be…’
Harry stopped short, confused and annoyed with himself, then began again.
‘I thought we’d got something in common,’ he said lamely.
‘We have. We don’t like bad language,’ Egan said. ‘But if I was to search till I was blue in the face, mate, I couldn’t find anything else.’
*
Eventually Genius and Lumpy returned, hot and tired, pushing the ToteGote with its burden of camping equipment. From his nest in the heather Ray watched them approach, and saw Egan rise from his post in the doorway of the ruined building. Lumpy let the bike fall on its side in a litter of tents and bedding, pots and pans, the gas stove and cylinder, the spade, and numerous personal belongings.
Ray wondered what he should do, if anything. At first he had followed the LYF out of amused curiosity, but the amusement had been wiped out as so
on as he had seen the rifle. Interest now hovered on the brink of involvement, which he was hesitant to accept. Should he act by opting out in a positive way, by going back down to the road and bringing in the police? Then he decided against this, basically out of a healthy concern to keep himself out of contact with the law. (He didn’t really think the British police were pigs, from all he had heard; but he was not about to push his luck to the point of finding out. He thought, After Appomattox head west, baby. After Kent State, keep that profile low. Soldiers or National Guard, State Troopers or cops; the US Cavalry pouring over the skyline in the final sequence of the movie…he’d be some place else.)
And yet Ray had to admit to himself that there was an obligation, an imperative indeed, in this situation: his bond with Cheryl arising out of the initiative which he had taken with her. Not the embrace behind the boulder, nor the date which sleep had broken, but that first open reference to her disability. He accepted this imperative, but certainly did not welcome it. Where Harry and his friends took Egan’s explanations at their face value because of inexperience and naivety, Ray’s first assumption was that Egan and his men were criminals, and he liked the idea of tangling with them as little as with the police. He had to do it, but he didn’t have to enjoy it; and ruefully he saw that in the end he was himself cast in the role of the US Cavalry, even down to being on the skyline at the present moment.
Ray watched in the fading light. Nothing very much seemed to be going on down there. The tents and other equipment had been taken inside the building, and he could just discern some regular activity within, where one of the men was constructing a kind of wall with rubble, blocking off an inside doorway which led to an unroofed part of the structure. That was the big man. The other two men were checking out the ToteGote, the rifle lying nearby on a flat rock. Inside, the big man finished the rough wall, then came to the outer doorway and built a similar obstruction to half its height. He climbed out over it, wiped his brow, then inflated an igloo tent in front of the half-wall. There was no evidence of criminal activity beyond the fact that Harry and the others were very certainly under duress.
Harry Doing Good Page 8