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Where are they? Tell me when to fire. Where are they—where are they?
MR. NATHANIEL WINKLE
There was no time for gallantry. He pushed Arabella away with great force and got to his feet once more.
Thank God it had been Traherne not Sawyer! he thought. He’d have shot his own mother if she’d got in the way. And he’d be at this very window within seconds.
Seizing Arabella’s hand, he dragged her upright and set off at a sprint towards the barn. For a second she resisted, clearly (and reasonably) feeling they would be better off getting round the side of the house out of the field of fire offered by the window. But equally clearly she acknowledged this was no time for debate and, gathering up her skirts, she matched him stride for stride.
Rapidly the snow deepened and began to catch their feet. Boswell remembered the agonising slow motion of Dave’s last few strides. Then they were on the path his fatal run had broken. Boswell pushed the girl in front of him to take advantage of the flattened snow. Any second now he expected to hear the chatter of automatic fire behind them. Perhaps not hear it. Perhaps the red-hot bullets would burn their way through his clothes and flesh before their sound could travel to him from the house.
As they reached Dave’s body, he risked a glance back. Framed in the window was Sawyer. It was too quick a glance to give more than the most general impression. Yet for ever afterwards a picture remained imprinted in his memory, ready for instant recall, of the man’s face, twisted with fury and yet at the same time alive with tremendous pleasure and excitement, as he brought the sub-machine gun to bear.
‘Down!’ he screamed, thrusting at Arabella’s back with all his might. She hardly needed the extra encouragement, but flung herself in a racing dive under the snow-covered protection of the tractor, turning instantly to drag Boswell after her as his own dive left him short. Behind him the snow flurried in a miniature blizzard as the Sterling began its excited chatter.
‘What the hell did we have to come this way for?’ demanded Arabella irately. ‘There’s far more cover round the back.’
‘You got a gun?’ enquired Boswell.
‘No,’ she said, surprised. ‘You?’
‘No, but I soon will have.’
He looked towards the little huddle of clothes and cold flesh that had been Dave.
‘Of course!’ She was quick. But no compliments.
‘For Godsake, get it!’
He pictured once again the scene as Dave fell, arms flung out, gun slowly spinning forward to be swallowed up by the snow.
Sawyer had disappeared from the window, probably confident he could spare a moment to ensure that order was fully restored in the dining room. If they remained unarmed he could afford forever in this snow. Not only did it make speed impossible and escape to the village a long, fatiguing and dangerous job, but it also provided an undisguisable trail.
They needed that gun badly. Pushing first his arm, then the whole of his upper body beneath the snow, Boswell cast around for the weapon. For a moment he thought he had got it first go. Cold metal burned against his hand. He grunted in disappointment, choking in a mouthful of snow as he did so. It was only the hook at the end of the length of chain by which the tractor hauled the trees down from the hillside.
It took two more plunges before he found the gun.
When he surfaced from the snow he found Arabella making snowballs.
‘What the hell!’ he expostulated.
‘Are you going to let me have the gun?’ she asked.
‘Certainly not!’
Then I’ll make the most of what I’ve got!’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ he snapped. ‘You start making tracks for the village. I’ll take care of things here. Go on. Move!’
‘And get myself shot? We’ve got company.’
From the house, with only minimal caution, emerged one of the Martlets. Boswell thought he recognised him as the redhaired bass guitarist. There was something about the way he carried his gun.
He stopped about forty feet from the barn.
‘Mr. Boswell,’ he called. ‘Please come out and return to the house.’
‘They’re all very polite anyway,’ murmured Arabella. ‘Do we accept his invitation?’
‘Not if you want to write your Christmas thank-you letters. Look at the window there.’
Dimly visible in the bay was a dark figure.
‘Sawyer?’
‘That’s right. Fairly itching to let loose with that little toy of his again, I shouldn’t be surprised.’
She looked thoughtful, then nodded.
‘You could be right. He doesn’t seem quite sound in the head somehow. What’s he hope to achieve by all this?
‘God knows, but I’m going to be around to find out. Come on, let’s move.’
He began to wriggle away round the side of the barn. The girl looked at him curiously.
‘Why don’t you shoot him?’ she gestured with a flick of her head towards the man standing before the house.
‘Two reasons. First, I’m a rotten shot and that thing he’s got pumps bullets out a damn’ sight faster than this pop-gun. Second, I don’t really want to. He’s done me no harm and he plays a fair guitar. Come on. Once we’ve got the barn between us and the house, we can make a run for it.’
It wasn’t as simple as that. They made it round the back of the barn easily enough and Boswell was just about to make a dash for the line of trees, which like a child’s painting seemed to lie flat and black, against the snow, when a sudden flurry of flakes on to his head made him look up. For a second he thought the blizzard must be returning. Then he saw above him the stiffly opening door of the hayloft. Next second, the pale drummer emerged.
Damning himself for a fool for forgetting the man was in the barn, Boswell flung himself against the side of the building; his feet went from under him and he crashed to the ground with a force even the blanket of snow couldn’t muffle. Memories of John Wayne drawing, shooting, and killing two or three men as he fell off his horse, filled his mind. It plainly required a special gift. He was quite unable to find a way of pointing his gun, no matter how vaguely, in the right direction. Perhaps up presented special problems.
Fortunately down too presented its own difficulties, and the drummer looked most uncomfortable as he attempted to aim his sub-machine gun without falling out of the barn. But Boswell had little doubt who would succeed first. He was already trying to form his spread-eagled limbs into a hieroglyph of surrender when the drummer’s head jerked back and a new whiteness erupted on his natural pallor.
Arabella, more primitively armed than either of the men, but firmly braced on her own two feet, had joined the fray. The second snowball was just as accurately aimed as the first, taking the drummer full in the mouth. Boswell shuddered as he thought of the cannonball-like consistency the snow had achieved under the shaping pressure of the girl’s hands.
Above him, the drummer tottered crazily on the brink of the loft door. For a moment it seemed impossible he would not crash down on top of them. Then with a gargantuan effort, using the weight of the machine gun like a wire-walker’s pole, he managed to pull himself back from the edge. But he had overcompensated and a third snowball, catching him a glancing blow on the shoulder, was enough to send him toppling backwards into the barn.
‘Come on!’ said Arabella, pulling Boswell to his feet. ‘For Godsake, when are you going to start using that gun?’
‘You’re not so hot yourself,’ he grunted. ‘You almost missed with your third shot.’
But clearly the time had come to take her advice. The bassguitarist, attracted by the noise behind the barn, had moved in a wide circle to his left and suddenly came into view. Boswell aimed the automatic and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked most satisfactorily in the snow-silence and the guitarist, shocked to find himself so unexpectedly under fire, set off at a scrambling sliding gallop to find cover.
Putting another shot up into the hayloft just to d
iscourage any activity there, Boswell hurried after Arabella, who had already started on a painfully slow-motion run towards the trees.
It seemed to last for ever. It wasn’t thoughts of John Wayne that filled his mind now, but of all those—cowboys, Indians, soldiers, civilians—who had ever run in terror, knowing that any moment might bring burning metal to quench its heat in the fragile flesh.
As he plunged headlong behind the solid comfort of the nearest tree, he heard a gun start up, whether from the hayloft or the house he did not know. Nor care to find out. There was a series of solid, chunky noises—like tent-pegs being hammered into hard ground—and something whipped across his forehead, leaving a thin, bloody trail for his finger to trace.
He looked at the blood in disbelieving wonderment. The reality of being hit was strangely different from the fear of it, but no less a burden to the mind.
‘Boz!’ hissed Arabella from somewhere much deeper in the trees.
Bravely he turned towards her and smiled so that the sight of his wound should not be too great a shock.
‘For Godsake, stop lying there! Another burst like that will chop that blasted tree down!’
There was no trace of sympathy in her tone. He crawled towards her through the snow which became thinner and patchier as he got deeper into the copse.
‘OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Just a scratch,’ he murmured.
‘I saw. A splinter. By God, those choppers they’ve got certainly make the wood fly! Do you reckon they’ll come after us?’
‘How the hell should I know?’
She looked surprised.
‘Well, you’re the big secret agent expert, aren’t you? Me, I’m just a plain working girl on holiday.’
More than that. Much more than that, he thought, looking at her.
He began to smile. She returned first his gaze, then his smile. The smiles broadened into grins, then broke out into loud and only distantly hysterical laughter.
‘What’re you laughing at?’ she gasped.
‘You! I mean, us. What an extraordinary pair … to be … doing this!’
Indeed they were. Arabella’s beautiful satin gown was ruined, but she still looked very much the early Victorian maiden. Her exertions had dragged her decolletage even lower than it was originally, and her exquisitely rounded shoulders and breasts were very exposed to the elements. She was pure Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, were it not for the strength of the chin and the deep gold suntan of all the exposed skin.
Boswell stopped laughing and pulled off his long-tailed jacket.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You’ll freeze.’
He put it round her shoulders, ignoring her protests.
‘They wore plenty of padding in their waistcoats then,’ he said. ‘Nice and warm. It gave the impression of being broadchested.’
‘So it’s all a pretence,’ she said with a smile.
‘True. Not an accusation I could make of you,’ he replied, glancing down at her bust.
‘Thanks for the jacket,’ she said ironically, wrapping it tightly round her. ‘The cold will do you good.’
‘The cold with kill us both if we don’t keep moving,’ he answered, taking her hand and setting off more purposefully than he felt on a line roughly parallel to the long drive leading away from Dingley Dell.
‘Will they come after us?’
‘I don’t know. One perhaps. Sawyer won’t want to leave himself understaffed back there.’
She looked at him doubtfully.
‘I don’t know. Take away your men and there’s precious little resistance there. Especially after the way he dealt with poor old Herr Bear.’
She shuddered, partly at the memory and partly at the cold, as a thin wind soughed its way through the branches above them, spilling snow on to their heads.
‘What would you do if you were Sawyer? Or rather what did Traherne call him? Tarantyev?’
If I were Sawyer, he thought, I would … Well, first of all I’d damn’ well know what I was trying to do! The Home Counties … Christmas Day … sub-machine guns … no escape route… what did it all add up to?
Precious little that made sense. Wardle staring up at him from under the green ice; Swinburne breathing shallowly like a puny kitten that can’t make up its mind to live or to die; Himmelstor falling over the table, his face ripped open like a peeled blood orange.
And, most immediately important, Arabella and himself, ill-clothed and ill-equipped, being pursued like hares through the snow.
‘If I were Sawyer,’ he said aloud, ‘I would give in gracefully. There’s no way out for him.’
‘You don’t look like a graceful giver-in to me,’ she answered.
‘Neither does Sawyer. So we’ll assume he’s sent at least one man after us just to make sure we don’t reach the village.’
The wisdom of this assumption became apparent a few minutes later. The copse thinned out and finally turned into a mere line of trees spaced at thirty-foot intervals. A parallel line some twenty feet away marked the other side of the road, though there was nothing about the unbroken surface of the snow to indicate this. This democratic effect of the snow, reducing bog and tarmac to apparent equality, was a matter of some concern. Boswell knew the land surrounding Dingley Dell pretty well, but this dramatic change of colour scheme, the more subtle shift in contouring, and the complete disappearance of some low hedgerows, all combined to make him hesitate about leaving the line of the drive.
Beside him Arabella was gently bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet. He didn’t need to ask why. The thin shoes she was wearing must give even less protection than his own, and he knew how cold his feet felt. Once more he carefully scanned the terrain they had just covered. The real problem might after all turn out to be how to surrender without getting shot.
‘How long do you reckon?’ asked Arabella, her teeth chattering.
‘Till what?’
‘Till we get there.’
‘The village?’ God, she was an optimist! ‘Perhaps a little longer than we thought.’
‘To hell with the village!’ She laughed derisively. ‘Dressed like this, I’ve got as much chance of walking ten miles as of finding sixpence in my Christmas pudding. Less. No, the cottage will do me fine. We are making for the cottage, aren’t we?’
The cottage. Of course! The old gate-cottage at the end of the drive. It was absurd. He must have seen it a hundred times, Arabella only once as she arrived the previous day. Yet its existence had faded completely from his mind.
True, it was sadly dilapidated now. But it would provide shelter, warmth. Perhaps more. He knew the gamekeepers (both his and the genuine ones) used the place for shelter and storage. There might be a shovel there, perhaps even a pair of gumboots.
‘That’s right,’ he said easily. ‘We’ll use it as a base camp for our final assault. Come on.’
Masterfully taking her hand, he stepped out of the cover of the trees.
There was an instant chatter of gun-fire and snow spurted up some five or six yards away as the bullets ploughed into it. It was difficult to say who jerked who back under cover, but they lay in an undignified tangle for a moment, breathless, each feeling as if an arm had almost been wrenched from its socket.
‘This is what you meant by the final assault, is it?’ she whispered vehemently.
Boswell ignored her and released the safety-catch on his automatic. It was some small comfort to realise that his enemies, no matter how well in theory, were as inexpert in the field as he himself was proving. Sawyer, he felt certain, would have let them move another twenty yards out of the protection of the copse. Nor would he have let the odd perspective of the snow make him miscalculate his range.
He had no doubt their pursuer (Singular? There had only been one gun firing, certainly) would learn fast. He would just have to learn as well.
He turned to Arabella and began whispering.
‘He must have reckoned on us following the drive. I place him on the other side abo
ut fifty, sixty yards back, so it’s no contest if I try to take him on with this thing.’
‘We could try snowballs again,’ said Arabella.
‘Shut up. Flight is always the better part of fight. We’ll break off at right angles here. That’ll keep the copse between us and the drive. There’s a hedge about fifty yards over there, if I remember right. Once on the other side, it’ll give us cover right down to the back of the cottage.’
He paused, half expecting dissent.
‘What are we waiting for?’ she asked.
Once out of the copse, the going was very tough. The snow was always a minimum of three feet deep and as they approached the ridge of whiteness which marked the line of the hedge, it grew deeper. Boswell led the way, using his arms like a ‘butterfly’ swimmer, until one downward stroke met with sudden thorny resistance. They had reached the hedge.
It was a good thick mixture of hawthorn and beech and it was plain impossible to force a way through. Boswell bent forward, braced his hands on his knees and grunted, ‘Over you go.’ Arabella vaulted on to his back, if not lightly at least with more agility than he felt capable of, scrambled up on to his shoulders and jumped gracefully over the hedge. There was a satisfying thump as she landed. Satisfying not just on the basis of personal malice, but because it confirmed his hope that the considerable drifting on this side meant there was relatively little snow on the lee-side.
His own traversing of the hedge was an undignified process and painful with it. The thump he made as Arabella finally dragged him free from the clinging hawthorn seemed even more solid. But he had been right. The ditch on this side was only scattered with snow, though a couple of feet further out, it was as thick as ever.
Arabella was picking up great armfuls of the stuff and tossing it over the hedge.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked.
‘A break in the snow-line along the hedge will stick out like a palm-tree in the desert,’ she answered.
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