Appleby Plays Chicken

by Michael Innes

  The derelict cottage was suddenly unfriendly, even sinister. He wondered why. It was something about stopping bullets. David went out into the open again and walked upstream. There was a little path, and farther on he could see another building, with signs of a road or track leading away from it. That would take him straight into the village. He had – he reflected without alarm – rather lost grip of things during the preceding few minutes. But he was quite on top of them again now. There was this plan of walking openly and straight ahead. Because the enemy would be looking for somebody lurking and skulking. That was it. And he had almost won through already. He could hear children’s voices, faint but indubitable, from somewhere dead in front of him.

  Now there was a road – in bad repair, but quite capable of taking a car or lorry. It made a loop to take in this other building, which was now straight before him. He could see no sign of life in it either, and he remembered there would be no point in going in and wandering about. But it was an odd building, small but of complicated design, as if built for some technical purpose. The stream ran past it – or rather through a wing of it, as if it were some sort of mill. David was curious about it. And so, he noticed, was somebody else. There was a man standing looking at it. David remembered he didn’t like men. And then he saw that this was one of the men he particularly didn’t like. It was the man in knickerbockers.

  Only the length of the building separated them. The man turned round, and their eyes met.

  9

  The suddenness and directness of this encounter quite woke David up. He ceased to believe he was on top of things. He accurately estimated the largeness of the probability that in a few minutes he would be dead. And this contemplation of mortality was enlivening. He made a dash for the shelter of the building. Not that it felt like dashing. His sensation was of having been launched from a catapult. Anyway, for the moment he had gained comparative safety.

  This building too appeared to be deserted and derelict. He was in a bare, square room with a concrete floor punctured here and there by broken and rusted iron pipes; and in one corner a cast-iron spiral staircase mounted through a square hole in the ceiling. On one wall there was an array of switches and fuse boxes suggesting some quite elaborate electrical installation, but the wiring had been ripped away as if somebody had gone through the place in an insane resentment. All the windows were broken, and in the middle of the floor were the remains of a large cask which appeared to have been battered to pieces. On a door leading to some further rooms there flapped a printed notice about minimum wages in the cider industry. It was all acutely dismal, and David revolted against the notion of ending his days in it. He ran to the spiral staircase and climbed.

  It turned out that this was a hazardous action in itself. The staircase clearly suffered from a badly fractured spine; it swayed alarmingly as David went up; and when he reached security on the next storey he was prompted to turn and give it a vicious kick. It went down with a crash, and dust and rust rose in clouds about him. There would have been great satisfaction in the spectacle of the staircase’s coming down on the man in knickerbockers. But he didn’t seem yet to have appeared on the scene. And David couldn’t hear anybody moving. The only sound was of a motorbike engine, growing fainter on a road that couldn’t be very far away. This wretched little failure of a factory – if that was the word for it – couldn’t really be remote from the fringes of civilization.

  This room was much like the one below. But on one side it had an open archway leading to another derelict room a good deal larger; and opposite this there was a big opening which gave on a narrow cement platform jutting out into open air. Above this hung the remains of a derrick, which meant that the set-up must have been for loading or unloading lorries down below. The adjoining room contained some large chunks of abandoned machinery; and there appeared to be both a substantial staircase and the remains of a lift or hoist at the far end. The room David found himself in had nothing but hundreds – perhaps thousands – of small, empty bottles. These were stacked in crates, or piled, broken and unbroken, on the floor. Many had labels, and David picked one up mechanically and looked at it. It seemed that the bottle had contained, or been destined to contain, something called pineapple nectar. A shameful end, he thought, for honest apples. The nasty little place deserved its failure. David was about to drop the bottle when he heard a sound in the farther room, and swung round. There was the stranger’s assistant – the fellow who had sprung up out of the moor. He was just emerging from the staircase at the far end, and was already visible from the knees up. He didn’t seem to be carrying any sort of gun. David flung the bottle as hard as he could at this displeasing figure, and it smashed on the wall immediately behind his head. The man ducked, sank and vanished. It was one up to pineapple nectar.

  David grabbed another bottle and ran to the open platform. The road, as he had guessed, ran directly below. On its other side, leaning against a low stone wall with a great air of quiet musing, was the man in knickerbockers. He was smoking a pipe, and his gun wasn’t visible. He looked up. It was the second time his glance had met David’s. The man in knickerbockers looked, but didn’t move. There was something extremely offensive about this, and David instantly took a shy at him. It wasn’t a very good shot, but the bottle did at least catch the chap on the knee. He gave a yelp, and seemed to reach for something concealed behind the wall. Then he thought better of this and simply stayed put, keeping a wary eye aloft the while. David couldn’t afford the luxury of having another go. He swung round again.

  The other man had reappeared. This time he was clear of the staircase. But there was no sign of his boss; and David had a notion that, left alone, he wasn’t too keen on his job. But he was advancing at a run, so it seemed an ugly moment, all the same. David had nothing but the bottles. The trouble about flinging bottles is the difficulty of keeping up any sort of quick-fire action. David grabbed a whole crate of them and lobbed that. It wasn’t much of an idea, and hardly deserved the success it achieved. The crate flew to the ceiling and produced a very good imitation of a fragmentation bomb. Bottles rained, alarmingly if rather harmlessly, on the enemy. And the man, with a lack of tenacity which confirmed David’s impression of him, once more retreated down the staircase.

  For the moment, the affair had taken on a tepid character that David couldn’t account for. There were no bullets flying, and this last advance upon him had been distinctly irresolute. It was almost as if his pursuers were now rather doubtful about what they could do with him if they got him. Keeping an eye on the staircase, David made another cautious move to the concrete platform. The man in knickerbockers was still negligently posed by the wall. Chiefly by way of keeping his spirits up, David sent another pineapple nectar at him. But the shot went wide, and the man in knickerbockers didn’t deign to notice it. He might have been a person of philosophic inclination, pausing in the course of a rural walk to meditate upon the mutability of human affairs. But now there was a sound of footsteps, and the second man appeared round an angle of the building and joined him. The two held what appeared to be a casual wayside talk. David felt he now knew why there was no more shooting. The village with its miscellaneous populace was really just round the corner, and his friends below felt themselves to be virtually in the public eye – and within range of the public ear. The row made by the collapse of the spiral staircase must have distressed them very much. They knew that any further little murder they had on hand must now be given effect to in a quiet and unobtrusive manner. David’s own line, correspondingly, was to create all the uproar he could.

  Here was a purpose for which the bottles seemed simply ideal. David picked up another whole crate and sent it hurtling from the platform to the road. The racket was pretty good. Then he tried the hole in the floor where the spiral staircase had been. That was much better; the reverberation in the large enclosed space below was really terrific. He followed up with several more crates. The exercise was altogether e
xhilarating, and he was astonished that only a little time before he had felt pretty well dead to the world.

  Then he paused to listen. Nobody had attempted to come up the surviving staircase again, but he could hear sounds from that direction suggesting that some new move might be going forward. But presently these fell silent again, and he made another survey of the road. The two men were conferring together once more – and this time with what was a distinctly uneasy air. Still, they were sticking to their post; and the heroic row David had contrived didn’t appear to have alerted the neighbourhood. This was disappointing. He doubted whether he could step up the general effect of disturbance further; and his having made such a pandemonium without in fact drawing any attention from the surrounding countryside would surely embolden the enemy to finish their job with firearms after all. David had just arrived at this less cheering view of things when he heard a rumble from up the road.

  It was a haywain. At least it was that if you can so describe an affair trundling along behind a motor tractor. The tractor was small and so was its driver – a lad who might have been fifteen but looked no more than twelve. But the load of hay on the wagon behind was enormous, and David had only to take one glance at it to see that deliverance had come. The boy indeed couldn’t be appealed to – whatever his years, they were too tender to be put in any jeopardy – but that was a circumstance that didn’t matter. Within seconds the wagon was going to be directly beneath the little platform from which David was making his observations, and if he kept low he could certainly tumble into its load while secure from the observation of the two men below. It was true that they might suspect what had happened. But before they could verify this by hunting through the derelict cider factory he would be riding triumphantly into the village, as secure as a rajah in a howdah.

  This last image, suddenly popping up in his picture-spinning head, so amused David that his jump when he made it was a slightly uncontrolled affair. He hit the hay all right – it would have been impossible to miss that – but contrived to wind himself to a point of quite surprising agony. He didn’t, in consequence, know how many seconds, or minutes, had passed during which he took no further effective interest in the proceedings at all. He simply had a vague awareness of the wagon trundling on and presently of a warm, dusty quality in the air that he was endeavouring to gulp back into himself. When he did recover, it was to find that his escape wasn’t going entirely according to plan.

  He had taken it for granted that anything moving down this road was bound to pass through the village which lay, quite certainly, no distance off. He hadn’t reckoned that there might be a turning which led elsewhere. But now when he sat up and looked about him he found there wasn’t a building in sight. He was being trundled along between open fields. This was discouraging. He’d had quite enough communion with nature and solitude for one day. What he wanted was a crowd.

  At this stage in his reflections David got a really unpleasant shock. He thought he heard a crowd. This was clearly impossible; he might as well have imagined he heard the sea – which the low murmur his ear believed itself to be catching did a little resemble. The only explanation he could think of was mere auditory hallucination. He was, as they said, hearing things. And to hear things is thoroughly sinister – an aberration altogether worse than that represented by seeing things. His late adventures had unhinged his mind.

  For some seconds this extravagant persuasion really held David in its grip. He then decided, very sensibly, that it would be worth considering whether there might not be some objective basis to his experience, after all. He sat up, and at once the apparently distant murmur grew louder. Moreover he now quite certainly heard another and quite different succession of sounds. Somewhere, not very far away, a rapid succession of cars was passing along a high road. And then he discovered something else. Neither this, nor the tractor chugging in front of him, accounted for all the mechanical noise he now heard. He looked behind him. The hay wagon was being trailed by two men on motorbikes.

  10

  At this point, and for the few remaining minutes that the whole first phase of his adventure lasted, David Henchman has to be recorded as rather failing in that role of cool and resourceful hero which fate had for some hours so unremittingly thrust upon him. Not that he didn’t presently make some quick decisions and do one or two enterprising things. There was still available in him plenty of response to challenge. Only the challenge had lost outline and definition in his head, and he was ceasing to be at all clear about what wasn’t menacing.

  He didn’t indeed believe that the crowd he could now so definitely if unaccountably hear murmuring somewhere in the middle distance had called itself together to seek his blood. Nor did he suppose that the many cars – the tops of which he could now just see over a distant hedge – were bringing up large reinforcements of men in knickerbockers. On the other hand he just didn’t pause to consider the possible harmlessness of the two motorcyclists. He didn’t reflect that they were perhaps keeping behind the hay wagon only because it was too broad to pass on this narrow road. Conceivably Jean Cocteau’s film, which had been recalled to his mind in alarming circumstances the night before, had now some responsibility for his jumping to conclusions. Certainly the men looked sinister. They were both dressed in black leather garments, with black crash helmets and large black rubber goggles. It was impossible to tell whether they had an eye on him or not.

  David crouched down in the hay again, wondering vaguely why the stuff was thus being transported about the country at this time of year. It was musty, and he was rather inclined to think that it was soporific. He had felt drowsy not long ago, when walking across a field and counting sheep. Then he had been broad awake during the battle of the bottles. And now he wasn’t sure that he mightn’t any moment –

  Very strangely, a bell was clanging in his ear, and he sat up with a start. He thought he was back in his private school, where it was precisely in this fashion that he had been wakened in the morning. Then he realized that the clangour came from at least a couple of fields away. It was an irregular clangour – the kind produced by a hand bell rather than from any sort of belfry. At the back of his mind he knew its significance, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of it. In some way it connected itself with old Pettifor, with the reading party at the George, with that whole life which seemed aeons of time away. More particularly, the bell connected itself with Ian Dancer. Perhaps it was only that he and Ian had been at the same prepper… The hay wagon slowed down and came to a stop.

  David crawled to the front to see what was happening. The boy on the tractor had risen in his seat and was staring ahead. There were two more men on motorbikes – dead in front, this time. They had signalled the boy on the tractor to a stop. David felt a queer mixture of terror and relief. At least it wasn’t a sudden bout of paranoia that had persuaded him England was suddenly teeming with his enemies … Then he saw that the motorcyclists in front were both policemen. At least they had ‘Police’ in white paint on their crash helmets.

  David shouted. But the policemen either didn’t hear him or weren’t interested. There was now a good deal of noise. And then on the right, and out of the tail of his eye, David caught sight of something that he took a second to interpret: a line of coloured blobs, like children’s balloons, bobbing almost simultaneously over a hedge. Somewhere there was mild cheering, but only as a background now to the pounding hooves of the advancing horses. For that, of course, was what it was all about. The murmuring crowd, the bell, the stream of cars still driving up, the motorcycle police controlling the traffic where the course went across this road: they were all explained by the fact that it was a Point to Point. That was why the bell had made him think of Ian Dancer. Ian was riding in a Point to Point today. Perhaps in this one.

  Just in front of them, the course must cross the road. There wouldn’t be a jump in such a position. So presumably there were gates. Yes, there they were – directly opposi
te each other, and just in front of the tractor. They had been taken off their hinges, and between them the metalled surface of the road had been strewn with bark. Presently the riders would come galloping through, talking unconcernedly to each other if they were near enough, but at the same time going hell-for-leather for the next jump. But what David wanted to go hell-for-leather for was the police. To have started shouting was quite idiotic. He must get down and run – run until he was positively behind them. It wasn’t dignified. In fact it would have every appearance of being craven and ludicrous. But David felt he didn’t at all mind about appearances now. He just wanted his own skin to be quite, quite safe for an unspecified distance ahead. If the cops led him off as a lunatic – well, that would serve very tolerably. He’d been running a one-man show for hours. He’d had quite enough of it.

  This was a thoroughly sensible resolution, but unfortunately David distinctly fell down in putting it into execution. Indeed he literally fell down, for in his haste to scramble from his perch he tripped and just escaped arriving on the road head first. The result was much what it had been when he jumped from the cider factory to the wagon; at least some seconds passed in which he was too dazed and winded to do anything much. He was aware of the riders thundering by as he expected; and when he got to his feet he had to duck to avoid a riderless horse that came wide over the hedge and for an alarming moment appeared to blot out the sky. Then, as the thud of hooves faded, he heard engines starting to life. The tractor was moving again. It had been waved forward by the policemen. And as he himself staggered to his feet and ran ahead he saw that both policemen had swung their bikes round and ridden rapidly off. In an instant they had vanished in a cloud of dust – and even the trundling hay wagon was retreating at a pace greater than he could make up on.