He put on the hat again, back to front. He paced the floor, chewing his knuckles, pounding his fist into his hand, while the lid chuckled on the boiling kettle, and the others waited, their nerves strung tight, waited for something - they didn’t know what.
When the knocker banged, they jumped like electric eels.
The something was Arthur, the boy from the Post Office, leaning on his red racing bicycle and chewing gum.
‘Note for Fielding.’ He held out an unstamped envelope. Uncle Rudolf snatched it. ‘Who gave you that?’
‘Well, it’s like this.’ Arthur blew a bubble of gum, and popped it. ‘There’s this political meeting going on up the village, see. Joker with a jaw full of marbles telling about how this country is gone down the drain. So I’m there listening, see, and this bloke in the crowd comes up to me and he goes, “Want to make a bit of money?” “Do what?” He goes, “You know the Fieldings?” I go, “Yeah.”’ Arthur blew a huge disgusting bubble of pink gum that obliterated his face, and popped it with his tongue.’ “Worse luck.” “Take this letter,” he goes. I go, “Why not post it?” and he goes, “It’s urgent, see,” and crosses me palm with silver.’
‘Well then.’ With an effort, Uncle Rudolf kept his voice calm. ‘You’ve been paid. What are you waiting for?’
‘For you to open it.’ If the letter had not been sealed down tightly, Arthur would have read it as he rode down the lane.
‘Right away.’ Lester took the envelope, and before Rudolf could stop him, he tore it open with a nonchalant thumb. He turned his back to scan the letter, then turned round with a big grin and said, ‘Well, that’s good news, everybody. Your cousin Maud had twins.’
‘Big deal.’ Arthur’s face fell. He pushed his bicycle round the side of the house and rode off over the lawn, mutilating a clump of daffodils.
‘What on earth—?’ Rudolf snatched the letter from behind Lester’s back.
‘Throw him off the scent. If Arthur knew he’d carried a ransom note, you might as well climb the church steeple with a megaphone and tell the whole neighbourhood.’
Uncle Rudolf read the note. He raised his head with a stricken look of horror. The paper dropped from his shaking fingers.
Carrie picked it up. Lester had been right about the police. The ransom note, made from letters cut out of newspaper, said:
‘Smallest one.’ Michael gave a shudder of excitement, and squared his shoulders. ‘That’s me.’
‘We can’t let Mike go!’
Carrie turned to Rudolf, but her uncle spread his hands with the same blank, stricken look.
‘Our only hope is to do as they say. We’re helpless.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ Michael said cheerfully. ‘I’ll take Gilbert.’
The great hound panted wetly, and swept his long wiry tail across a low table, knocking a teacup and a milk jug to the floor.
‘Grinning Gilbert, everybody’s pal,’ Em said. ‘Fat use he’d be. I’ll go with you.’
‘It says smallest.’ Michael wanted to do the deed alone.
‘Smallest one. One what? One girl. I’m going with you,’ Em said.
‘Listen then.’ Carrie knelt in front of them, and put her face close to theirs, like Mother when she wanted to say something important. ‘You must leave the money where they say, and go away at once. At once, darlings, do you understand?’ She even sounded like Mother.
But Michael stuck out his lip and said, ‘Well hide in that scrap metal dump behind the garage, and when they come for the money, we’ll see who they are, you see.’ Too young to understand properly the mortal danger Valentina was in, he was getting very excited over the adventure. ‘And then I can spot them in the idensity parade.’
‘There won’t be an identity parade,’ Rudolf told him. ‘They won’t be caught, unless we can call in the police. And if we do that, my poor Val, my poor beloved girl—’
He covered his face with his long bony hand for a moment. Then he pulled himself together, shook back his shoulders, reached for his hat, and said, ‘I must go and try to raise the cash. God knows how, but I’ll try. You all stay here. Do nothing. These criminals are probably desperate and dangerous. Stay here and lock the doors and windows. Promise me.’
They did not say Yes or No. Carrie and Lester had exchanged the message of their secret look, expressionless, unblinking. As soon as Rudolf left, they were going to start searching for Aunt Val. Poor Val, my poor beloved girl.
They had never thought of her as anyone’s beloved girl. But she was, and she might die.
Twenty-Nine
‘She might be dead already,’ Lester said, as he and Carrie hurried out to the stable.
Val dead. Lively, noisy, highly coloured, ridiculous Valentina dead, the clucking, clacking voice silenced for ever?
Since she disappeared, Carrie had been forgetting the bad things about her, remembering the good things. There weren’t many, but those were what she remembered.
The crust on her steak and kidney pies, with the thick gravy seeping out under the pastry flower in the middle. The way she drove a car, fast and reckless, singing songs from her giddy youth, and yelling at other drivers. Even the giant metal rollers in her hair at breakfast, because Val banging about the kitchen in a shocking-pink housecoat and rollers meant bacon and sausages and fried bread.
Normally, Carrie dreaded hearing the voice or the heels approaching, because they spelled trouble. But now she would give a year of her life to see Val racket through the stable yard, kicking out at hens, and wrinkling her nose at the manure heap.
Someone was coming through the yard. The Vicar climbed over the broken wall from the back field path, wearing baggy slacks and a rough old sweater, but still looking like a vicar.
‘Where’s Rodge?’ he called, as Carrie looked over John’s half door.
‘He went to the church.’
‘He didn’t. I’ve been waiting there. Not like him to forget.’
‘He was worried about—’ Carrie began, and stopped.
To tell the Vicar about Rudolf’s fake accident would mean telling him about the kidnapping, and that would be as bad as telling Arthur. The Vicar would broadcast it from the pulpit, and tell the police.
‘About what?’ he asked, but Carrie changed the subject by bringing John out and mounting. Lester got on Peter bareback, by his patent method of sitting behind the ears and sliding down the neck when the chestnut raised his head.
‘Bit late to go riding.’ The Vicar looked up at the darkening sky, where clouds were closing down the day. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Oh - round about.’
Val might have managed to throw something out of the kidnap car - a scrap of paper from her handbag, a handkerchief, a hairpin, one of her big red nerve pills - when she realized that she was not being taken to the hospital. A chance in a million, but they were going to search the local roads, looking for clues.
They waited impatiently for the Vicar to leave, but he said, ‘Give me a lift back then, Carrie. My knee’s playing me up.’
He stepped on to Michael’s mounting block, and put a leg across John’s back behind the saddle. They rode through the fields and across the patch of waste ground where children built forts and tunnels. Because of these hazards, Wendy always took Rodge along the same path through here when they went to the church. Now some joker had built an elephant trap across that path.
‘Gregory Ferris,’ Lester said. ‘I know his style.’ He knew the specialities of all the local boys. ‘Good thing Rodge did forget to go to the church. He could have broken a leg.’
While Lester got off to clear away the branches and fill in the hole, Carrie and John took the Vicar through the gap in the hedge and down the bank into Church Lane.
The Vicar went into the church to turn off the lights and lock up. Carrie waited for Lester by the churchyard wall. Grey gravestones glimmered in the half light, the older ones leaning, as if they had got tired of commemorating people no one was alive to remember.
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In the far corner of the wall, she could just make out the curve of the angel’s wings over Charlotte Fraser’s grave, and her hand went of its own accord to the locket round her neck, which held John’s picture and the small curl of Charlotte’s hair.
It had brought her luck once, at the circus when they had rescued Roy.
Help me to rescue Val. Bring me luck again.
On an impulse, Carrie rode to the unlatched gates. John pushed one side open with his nose and shoulder, and they went in, and threaded their way between the tombstones to the corner of the wall where the angel wept over ‘our beloved little daughter’.
Bring me luck again.
The evening wind stirred in the tops of the trees, and the Vicar clanged shut the iron gates.
Shut the gates! He had locked up for the night, and shut Carrie in. ‘Hey!’ She went to the gate, swerving John round tombstones, and saw the back of the Vicar’s car driving away.
The wall round the churchyard was too high to jump. So was the fence at the bottom of the vicarage lawn. Carrie shouted, but there were no lights in the vicarage. Nothing.
Carrie began to shout for Lester, the old stones of the church returning the vibrations of her scared voice. It was getting dark. She was locked in, trapped and helpless, among the dead.
‘Lester!’
‘You rang?’
Beyond the stone curve of the angel’s wing, Peter’s head appeared, then Lester.
‘Come on out, quick,’ he called. ‘That dog barking miles away—’
‘I didn’t hear it.’ But Lester could see and hear and smell farther than anyone.
‘It was Wendy. Something’s happened. Come on, quick.’
‘I can’t—’ Carrie began, but he had swung Peter round to ride back to the road.
John trampled, and called after Peter. The tomb with the angel was lower than the top of the wall on either side. If they were going to jump, it would have to be here. It was a high jump and wide, over the tombstone slab and over the angel.
Peter’s hoofs clacketted out on to the road, trotting away fast. Carrie turned John, and gave him as much run as she could on the path between the graves. One - two -and he stood back and took off over the tomb, over the angel. The white curve of the wings flashed below, and they landed, they were free, and John turned like a whip to follow Peter.
Lester had pulled over to the grass verge, and was cantering far ahead. He turned, and swung his arm at Carrie, and she galloped after him along the edge of the straight old Roman road that ran like an arrow towards the darkening hills.
Thirty
‘Where were you?’ Lester pulled up.
‘Locked in. We jumped out over Charlotte Fraser’s angel.’
‘Some jump!’ He turned back to grin at her, and Carrie said, ‘It was John, not me, he—’
‘Listen.’ Lester turned his face into the wind. The horses raised their heads and pricked their ears.
‘I thought I heard … Wendy!’ Lester called.
There was nothing. Beyond the hedges, the greening wheat fields lay still and shadowed. There were no houses on this part of the road, only some old buildings left when the smaller farms were taken over by the wheat combine. Very few cars came this way, into the hills, because there was a quicker road through the valley.
‘Wendy - speak!’
‘You can’t have heard her.’ Rodge always went to the village. He never walked along this lonely road.
‘I did. It was that double bark.’ Lester’s face was taut and keen, straining into the rising wind that flung spatters of rain.
‘Why would Rodge go so far?’ Carrie screwed up her face against the rain. ‘Is it something about Val?’
‘He doesn’t know about Val. He thinks she went to the hospital.’
‘Why would he come out here? I don’t understand. Where is he, Lester? What’s happening?’
Carrie felt exhausted and confused. But Lester reached across from his horse and pressed her hand with his thin strong fingers.
‘That,’ he said, his dark eyes eager for adventure, ‘is what we’re going to find out.’
* * *
They cantered on down the side of the road. Last time they had cantered together, on the stubble strip at the edge of the long ploughed field, it had been like a fantasy of flying. Tonight it was real, intent with urgency and danger, and Carrie suddenly knew that she and Lester would not dream together again of flying, downstairs or anywhere. Was this the beginning of growing up?
Lester stopped dead, and John ran into him. A rutted, weed-grown track led off to the right through a tangle of trees, overgrown with thorn and bramble hedges. It used to be the drive to a farm house, long since abandoned and falling to ruin.
‘Nobody has lived here for years,’ Carrie said.
‘I saw a light,’ Lester whispered, although there was no one to hear.
‘You couldn’t.’
‘Through the trees - look.’
A tiny wink of yellow light as the branches moved.
‘Rodge couldn’t be here,’ Carrie said.
‘I know, but—’ Lester raised his voice and called, ‘Wendy!’
They listened. The wind blew the trees like hair, and the horses snorted, getting their breath back after the canter.
‘Wendy - speak!’
There it was. Not her clear double bark, because the second part of it was suddenly muffled in a yelp of pain, but unmistakably Wendy.
‘I’m going in.’ Lester’s face was set and grim.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No, you stay with the horses.’ Lester started down the overgrown track.
‘We can tie them in the trees. I’m coming with you,’ Carrie said.
‘No.’
If it had been anyone else, Carrie would have argued, or gone anyway. With Lester, you let him take charge.
But Carrie did follow him part of the way up the drive, leading the horses between the tangled hedges, to where she could see the house without being seen. It was a small crumbling brick house, part of the roof gone, the chimney fallen into the grass, the windows boarded up or broken, the front door rotted and sagging.
The door was slightly pulled back now on the dark interior, and a man was looking through the opening.
‘What do you want?’ he called out. ‘Who’s there?’ That voice! Now Carrie remembered where she had first heard it. It was the voice of the man she had stumbled against outside Val’s house, and who had cursed her.
Lester walked boldly across the rank grass and weeds that had once been the farmhouse garden. Confronting the man, he looked smaller than usual, but brave.
‘I’m selling tickets for the Boy Scouts’ picnic,’ he said in the clean, innocent voice which he used on his mother when he was up to something secret.
‘Get out of here,’ the man said hoarsely, ‘and take the bloody Boy Scouts with you.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Carrie saw Lester give the Boy Scout salute, although he had been thrown out of the Scouts for being too bossy. He turned smartly on his heel and walked casually back through the long grass, whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’ in his clear blackbird’s whistle. But as soon as he was out of sight beyond the bushes, he ran.
As Carrie led the horses back to the road, Lester panted out through the brambles with his wet shirt torn and his face scratched.
‘He’s armed,’ he said. ‘I saw the gun. They’re in there all right. I whistled to let them know we’d found them.’
‘Them?’
‘That man -I knew his voice.’
‘So did I. He was hanging about outside Val’s house in London. He heard her say she was coming to World’s End.’
‘And he’s the one who came to tell her about the accident. Val is in there too.’
Val and Rodge! Somehow he must have found her. Gentle, timid Rodge in there, helpless, confused, unable to see his captors, Wendy tied up, even killed perhaps -she had obviously been struck when she barked - Val dead…
‘What are we going to do?’ Carrie shivered. Her shirt was soaked and her hair streaked round her face. The rain ran down her cheeks like tears.
‘I’m going round to the back of the house,’ Lester said. ‘It’s a rickety place. There may be a way to get them out.’
‘But if he’s armed - Lester, no! You might get shot.’ Carrie grabbed his torn sleeve.
‘Not me.’ He pulled away. He always thought he couldn’t be hurt. When he broke his arm riding Roy, the shock of finding that he was breakable had been worse than the pain.
Carrie grabbed him again. ‘Rodge and Val will get shot. Lester, please - it’s too dangerous now. We must tell the police.’
‘You’re right.’ He suddenly yielded, took the halter rope, and vaulted on to Peter’s back. As Carrie scrambled into John’s saddle to follow him, he turned and grinned. ‘You’re always right, Carrie.’
It was the first time he had ever said that.
Thirty-One
After they made the telephone call, they hurried back to the derelict farm through the wet night. They tied up John and Peter in an open cattle shelter across the road, and hid in the loft of the barn near the house, where they could watch and be ready to jump down if they were needed.
The policemen came stealthily to surround the house. Looking through a slit in the high loft door, Carrie and Lester only saw a hint of them - a shadow sliding behind a tree, a bush shaking, a man in uniform creeping through the long grass to crouch behind the kidnapper’s car at the side of the house.
The loft ladder creaked, and a policeman’s head and shoulders came through the opening in the floor, looking cautiously round. In the darkness, they could not see his face, but when he saw them kneeling by the door, he whispered, ‘Who’s there?’ in the voice of a very young man.
He was holding a rifle. Carrie and Lester turned with their backs to the loft door, as if he were a firing squad. Carrie’s throat was too dry to speak, but Lester whispered back, ‘It’s us. The ones who gave the alarm.’
‘Keep back then.’ The young policeman crawled over the hay dust of the shaky floor, and lay down on his stomach, with his rifle to the crack in the door. He was very tense, and you could sense the tension outside too, men hidden and waiting, watching the house. The desperate men inside perhaps were watching too, straining their eyes into the darkness.
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