Snatch Crop

by Gerald Hammond

  Then there was nothing to do but wait for the light to die. I thought of telling her about her father’s crash, but decided not to add to her burdens.

  Dusk comes slowly in northern latitudes but we needed the cover of near darkness. The timing was delicate. Delay might bring rescue; or it might bring Farquharson and his hired help with the Land Rovers. My only comfort was that Nigel Farquharson intended to wait for the rising of the moon. I hoped that he had his timings right, but I thought that a yachtsman ought to know things like the times of sunset and moonrise.

  Somewhere nearby, I heard the mutter of a motorcycle engine and I remembered the bike that had nearly rammed me near Briesland House. The sound died and there was silence again.

  After about twenty minutes, I decided to move. There was still a dull grey light outside. It might be too soon, but if we waited our chance might be gone. I lay down flat on the floor and pushed the bottom of the door out, very slowly, until I could make out, faint in the gloom, an empty yard, some black trees and a corner of the house.

  I beckoned to Delia. She must have seen me because she crawled out after me and I pushed the door back into place.

  We rose to our feet, each carrying one of the steel bars. To our right, I remembered from my brief moment of flight, the yard seemed to be enclosed by buildings. I moved forward. There was light diffused beyond the corner of the house and we had only taken a few steps before I saw the tailgate of a Land Rover. That way lay disaster. I turned left, towards a shrubbery backed with trees. A high wall extended from the garage, evidently a walled garden. The shrubbery it would have to be.

  We slipped between two rhododendrons. The leaves rattled and Delia, following me, seemed to be breathing like an asthmatic but the men at the Land Rovers would have the sound of their own work and breathing in their ears. Daylight was further gone than I had thought but our time in the dark garage had brought us our night vision. I could make out a sort of pathway, probably the result of pruning forays by a gardener, and we moved along it, crouching.

  After fifty yards, and at about the same distance from the lights around the castle door, the shrubbery finished at a great spread of lawns. I turned away, towards the trees, and came up against a wire fence. The top strand was barbed and when I touched one of the lower wires it squeaked like a wounded rabbit.

  Chapter Seven

  We squatted behind what I think, from the scent, must have been a mock orange and I took another look around while I thought. Neither process was easy. My left eye was almost closed and, on top of a pounding headache, I found that the blow had done something to my neck. Turning my head one way sent pain shooting up the long neck-muscle while any attempt to turn it in the other direction came up against a physical barrier.

  All too near, almost within shotgun range, the Land Rovers stood in a pool of light. Figures moved around them and in and out of the big door but, rather than spoil my night vision, I tried not to look at them.

  We had to move, and move soon. When we were missed, it would take only seconds to reason that there was only one direction in which we could have gone. There were dark clouds around the horizon but the sky was clear overhead. A moon that rose after dusk must be opposite the sun and therefore full. We had better get well away from the house before it turned the night into a pale imitation of day.

  Should we risk the noise of the fence or the open of the grass? The breeze had dropped and the night was very quiet. Daylight was reduced to a lingering trace in the western sky and a slight softening of the darkness around us. I decided that the men were going in and out of lit rooms and their eyes would be night-blind. They would hear more than they would see. Only the backs of Delia’s knees would shine – and her hair. I pulled her towards me and whispered to take her blazer off and wear it as a hood. She managed clumsily, still hugging the steel bar to her chest.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said softly.

  ‘Never mind,’ I told her. ‘You’ll soon be warm now.’ I meant that we would almost certainly have to run for it, but if she took comfort from thinking that I was promising her a hot bath and a cosy bed, so be it.

  We walked softly, following the line of the fence away from the house so as to get as far as possible before we lost the screening of the shrubbery. We had made a hundred yards or more before there was a change to the light spilling from the house. My shadow was joined by its twin. There was a shout. The words were unclear but the meaning was obvious. Our absence was discovered.

  The relief of precarious freedom turned into the terror of the hunted, but at least we were free to run. The time for pussyfooting was over. ‘Come on,’ I said. And we took to our heels, crossing the last of the grass towards the trees beyond. We made very little sound on the turf.

  Would they waste precious time in coming after us? As we ran, I forgot my pains. I was pleased to discover that my mind was still functioning even if I did not like the answers it was giving me. There would certainly be pursuit. We had only to make contact with the outside world and mention Dunbar for Mr Farquharson to be up the proverbial creek without the Venturer to sail him out of it.

  We reached the trees. Delia was ahead of me. She had lost her blazer along the way. Either she was very fleet of foot or her fear was even greater than mine. I cannoned into her in the darkness, catching my knee a crack against the steel bar that she was still hugging to her, and paused to recover my breath. I turned my head incautiously to snatch a look backward. There was a sharp click and the pain in my neck began to subside into an ache. Already there was a torch flickering in the shrubbery and voices were calling to each other. I heard the motorcycle engine splutter into life.

  We plunged on, stumbling through low undergrowth in near-darkness. Brambles clutched at us, tearing skin and nylon. Pigeon, disturbed in their roost, rattled out of the branches overhead. The men would only have to stand still and listen and the birds would get their revenge for the afternoon’s shooting by betraying us.

  We were leaving the castle gardens for the less cultivated part of the estate which, further out, interwove with farmland. There was an open space in front of us and then more trees. The motorbike was moving fast, somewhere to our right. For the moment, we were still clear of our pursuers. The trees ahead had a blackness suggesting a more substantial woodland.

  ‘Come on.’ We said it together.

  Just as we darted forward to cross the open, a flood of light grew around us. We stopped on the brink. Nigel Farquharson had got his sums wrong. The moon was already up but it had been behind the dark clouds to the east.

  I hurled hate at the moon before I saw that it had saved us from running headlong into water. It was not, unfortunately, the flight pond that we had passed on our way to Birken Wood, which would have meant that we were back within a few hundred yards of where there would surely be police activity. This was larger, an acre of water among the woods.

  Immediately, I could have pinpointed our position on an estate map. I remembered the lake from my previous visit. The road where I had left Dad’s jeep was a long way off, somewhere to my right. Would help be waiting there? Probably, but not for sure. Mr Taylor’s house was a little nearer, to the left. It came to me that he must be as ignorant of the kidnapping as he had seemed. If he had been one of the enemy he could have led us to some other release pen and we would never have known that we were being misled.

  It was against my instincts to turn away from where Ian might be waiting, but enough time had elapsed for the police to have removed the jeep and themselves; and the sound of the motorbike had died away in that direction. The biker was searching there, or was lying in ambush in some strategic position.

  We turned and ran to the left, along a rough path that I remembered. The guns had been placed at intervals along it and we beaters had come down the slope from the further side through a thick plantation of spruce. The going had been hard, even downhill, and I had ended up with scratchy needles down the back of my neck.

  Thinking of the jeep had remind
ed me of poor Sam. If Ian was anywhere around, Sam would be with him. If, on the other hand, my husband had given me up, I hoped to live to have words with him.

  I have few natural talents but one that I do have is unusual. Curling my tongue into a seemingly impossible shape, I can whistle loudly at a pitch at the very limit of human hearing. Dogs and children can hear it; women occasionally; men, especially those whose hearing has been damaged by shooting, almost never. It was a risk, but weighed against the chance of conveying a message through Sam it seemed worthwhile. I slowed, gathered my breath, rolled up my tongue and whistled with all my might. To me, it seemed deafening. Delia squeaked in protest and from the water a paddling of duck took fright and wing, but there was a good chance that nobody else had heard it.

  The moon went in again behind a stray remnant of cloud. It was pitch-dark at ground level now and I had to lead the way almost by memory, gripping Delia’s spare hand with mine. The lake showed clearly, reflecting the light of the stars, and an outline of the trees overhead helped me to keep my bearings. We had cleared the end of the lake when we saw the quick flash of a torch a long way ahead.

  I turned off, away from where I thought the castle lay, pulling Delia after me. Bushes rustled as we stumbled through them, but there was water burbling ahead to cover our sound. The stream had cut a deep path between its banks and we had to climb down. We could have tried to jump across, but at the risk of a great splashing if we jumped short. We waded through and climbed out with wet feet. We were climbing a slope and soon we came to the small conifers. To push through would have fetched our pursuers to the noise; but they had been planted on ridge-and-furrow. We got down and crawled. It took time, but at least we were still moving and in comparative silence. I thought that we were heading back roughly along the route I had followed as a beater and that we would come out on an estate road not far from Mr Taylor’s house.

  We came out of the conifers at the crest of the slope just as the moon, still rising, cleared the fringe of cloud and emerged finally into open sky.

  My sense of direction had betrayed me. The moon was not where I had expected it to be and the long clearing looked totally unfamiliar. Or perhaps I had passed that way before but could not recognise it by moonlight. I was trying to orient myself from a faint memory of the estate map when we heard a stick break not far away. We froze. The sound was not repeated. It might have been made by a deer, but to our nervous imaginations it was the footfall of a man.

  We turned away from the sound and headed along the clearing, only to see the flash of a torch ahead of us. We stopped. I repeated my supersonic whistle – at least, I hoped that it was supersonic – and turned to push through scattered gorse-bushes towards the trees from which we had come.

  A man came out of the trees. It was the thin man with the hot eyes, although under the moon his eyes were dark sockets in a white face. He was pointing a large revolver at me. Every detail showed clearly in the moonlight. It looked like the Smith and Wesson Distinguished Combat Magnum, a powerful and accurate weapon, and he was holding it as though he knew how to use it. I froze.

  He groped towards me, feeling with his feet for level ground free of roots and rabbit holes, never taking his eyes off his point of aim which was somewhere in the vicinity of my navel. He came to a halt when the revolver was only a few inches from the middle pop-stud of Dad’s coat. The hammer was cocked and his finger was on the trigger. My stomach tried to crawl up and hide in my rib-cage.

  ‘Drop it,’ he said.

  I let go of my steel bar.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  I had thought that Delia was still behind me. Moving very slowly in case a sudden movement caused him to clamp on the trigger, I cocked an eye over one shoulder and then the other. I seemed to be alone with him. If Delia had taken off for the hills, I could hardly blame her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  The revolver lifted until it was pointed between my eyes. ‘It’s a waste of a juicy piece of tail,’ he said harshly, ‘but if we’ve got to look for her it’ll be quicker without you. Tell me now or kiss yourself goodbye.’

  ‘She was here a minute ago,’ I said feebly. Why couldn’t the moon go in again? And where the hell had Delia gone? Miserable, cowardly, feeble infant!

  ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

  I was braced to make a futile run for it when Delia – blessed, brave, beautiful Delia – rose out of a gorse-bush behind him and swung the steel bar. She must have taken my words to heart, because she swung it with all her might. I ducked hurriedly to the side, as much as anything to avoid her swing which seemed capable of taking both our heads off. The whack of steel on bone merged with the stunning slam of a .357 magnum cartridge fired just above my head and I felt a slap from the hot gasses on the back of my neck. He folded down at my feet.

  ‘Have I killed him?’ Delia asked hopefully.

  ‘With luck,’ I said. ‘Well done! Come on.’ I grabbed up the revolver. My steel bar I left where it was. The revolver alone weighed more than three pounds and anyway Delia was a better hand at head-butting than I would have been. I had spent many hours target-shooting with Dad and the revolver felt comfortably familiar to my hand.

  There was a shout not far away and the sound of somebody crashing through undergrowth.

  We ran across the clearing and plunged between thin pine-trees. There was a shot from behind us and I felt a dozen stings, but they were so far apart, ranging from my ankle to my shoulder-blade, that I knew, without having to think about it, that the shotgunner was out of serious range. I made up my mind that he was not going to get any closer and live. Delia seemed to be untouched.

  The ground fell away again steeply, and we went down in one great leap and slither, sometimes rebounding from tree to tree but unwilling and unable to slow down until we arrived at the bottom. We ran out onto one of the estate roads but, disoriented and by moonlight, I didn’t recognise it. I was totally lost.

  A man was skittering down the hill after us, appearing and vanishing in the shadows between the trees. The moonlight flickered back from some sort of firearm. He would reach the bottom before we could be out of shotgun range. I cocked and hefted the revolver. Dad owned a similar model but with the four-inch instead of the six-inch barrel. The balance was slightly different.

  If I killed him, the law would not blame me. But something inside me rebelled at taking a human life, even the life of a man who had just taken a shot at me. I took aim just in front of his feet and fired, expecting to hit him about the knee.

  The weight and balance absorbed much of the heavy recoil. The revolver failed to kick up and I hit the ground at his feet, throwing up a spray of twigs and pebbles. The result was almost as satisfactory as if I had shot his leg off, because his involuntary jump cost him his balance and he finished the steep descent in a long tumble and roll, finishing ten yards from us. It was quicker to run towards him than away. I reached him before he could recover himself. He sat up slowly. The barrel of a shotgun was underneath him.

  The man who had goosed me, twice grabbed me and then slapped me, now stared back at me. Even by moonlight he must have seen my swollen face and the hatred in my one open eye. My compunction faded away. I brought the revolver up and pointed it between his eyes.

  This time, he did not smile. He put his hands over his face as though to deflect a bullet. And in the silence, while I was still nerving myself, I heard a small sound as his bowels let go.

  That evidence of his fear was so human that my determination lapsed again. If I had not been quivering with nerves and high on adrenalin, I would have broken down and howled with laughter. Instead, I swung the revolver. Through his fingers he saw the blow coming and tried to turn his head. I caught him across the bridge of the nose. Blood sprayed and I heard the cartilage break. He moaned but he was still conscious and a hurt man may still be a danger. I swung the revolver back and caught him on the side of the head.

  He rolled over and lay still. If he w
as not out cold he was remarkably good at ‘playing possum’.

  My hands and knees were quivering, but I managed to pull the shotgun out from under him. It was a cheap repeater. If the magazine capacity had been reduced to suit the new legislation, there could not be more than two rounds in it, but I did not feel like waiting around to search the recumbent man. I told Delia to drop her bar and handed her the shotgun.

  ‘Two down and two to go,’ I added.

  ‘I couldn’t shoot this,’ she said.

  She certainly couldn’t have handled the revolver. (What, I wondered, do they teach girls in school these days?) ‘You won’t have to do anything clever,’ I said. ‘Just point it and pull the trigger. The gun will do the rest. But whatever you do, keep it pointing away from me.’ My mouth had gone dry. I worked up a little saliva and gave another whistle, held it for as long as my breath would allow and, on a blind guess, led us away to the right.

  For the moment our remaining pursuers seemed to have lost touch with us, but they must have been homing in on the sound of the shot. I decided to cover some distance and then get off the road and go to ground. Two men would not be enough for a thorough search and Farquharson must know that he was running out of time.

  Several minutes later I thought that we had come far enough, but the estate road was running between mature pines and the ground beneath them offered little cover. There was a sound in the air. It took me a few seconds to recognise it as the beat of the motorbike, throttled down for silence. It seemed to come from all around but it was growing louder every moment. Soon I was sure that it was coming from up ahead.

  I gave Delia a push. ‘Get behind a thick tree and stand still.’