Be Shot For Six Pence (25 page)

There was also, as I saw by the light of the lamps, a very formidable fence. This was prison camp standard, too. First a fence of single strands, taut and close together and topped by an additional section bent back at such a sharp reverse angle as to make climbing almost impossible. Behind that a second similar fence with the top leaning the other way. In between them, bundles and rolls and sheaves of loose barbed wire.

I sat in a giant coreopsis and contemplated it sourly.

The technique for dealing with such an obstacle, as I knew, was to attack it from underneath. Prisoners (working sometimes with foolhardy courage under the very eyes of their guards) would lie, in the shadow, alongside such a fence, snipping a strand here and there, and propping up the loose wire on small forked sticks, until a tunnel had been made through which an agile man might worm his way to freedom.

I had no guards watching me. But, equally, I had no wire cutters.

Given long enough undisturbed there was a chance that I might tunnel underneath the bottom strand; then use the forked stick technique to get through the middle part; and finally dig my way under the outer fence. One more use for my hard-worked piton. The soil looked loose and easy.

And so it proved, for the first six inches. Then I struck the concrete.

I retired to my coreopsis. I was conscious of anger and frustration. To have got so far and then to be held up. It was the feeling I had had as I stood, poised ballet-like on one toe, eighty feet above Dru’s pincushion. I wanted to attack that fence with my bare hands. Before I could do anything silly, I heard the guard coming and retreated fast. He was a young man, and looked pretty alert. There’s nothing like shooting a sentry from time to time to keep people on their toes.

He came slowly past, his eyes on the fence. For a terrible moment I thought he was going to see the mess I had made with my digging. The moment hung, stretched, broke. Then he passed on.

I was already on my way back. The house seemed safer than the garden.

Keeping under cover, I made my way round towards the north-west corner. It was here that most of the activity seemed to be centred.

A gravelled drive ran up to a paved courtyard. There were two cars standing in the courtyard, and I looked at them covetously; but the doors and windows were all shut and I suspected that they were locked. Also, there was ten yards of lighted courtyard to cross, right under the eye of the main entrance.

As I watched a third car drove up. The driver seemed to have a grudge against his gear box, and was in a hurry, or a bad temper, or both. In fact, there was an air of activity and urgency about the whole place. Lights on in most of the ground floor rooms, and people coming and going inside the building.

Look at this! He hasn’t locked his car. He hasn’t even removed the ignition key. In too much of a hurry.
And
he’s parked it on my side of the courtyard.
And
I could turn it in one straight sweep, without backing.

The thought was no sooner in my head than I was in the driving seat.

The engine was still warm. Switch on. One touch of the starter, slam her into gear, and get going.

The guard on the inner courtyard was just shutting the gate. He’s seen me come in, in a hurry, a minute before. Now he’s going to see me going out again. He just got the gate open again in time, and I caught a glimpse of him in my driving mirror standing under the light, staring after me, his mouth open.

I was on a short, steep, gravelled driveway, with a twist in it. Ahead of me, at the bottom of the hill, hidden for the moment by the bend, was another line of lights. And, no doubt another gate.

Suppose it was shut? Drive straight through it, boy. Hit anything hard enough and it’ll go down.

I swung round the bend. The gate was not shut. On the contrary, it had just been opened to admit another car; which was half filling the open space. In the other half was standing Colonel Dru. He had got out of his car to talk to the guard.

I aimed at him with great precision; he spoiled things a little by moving at the last moment, so that it was only my left side head lamp that hit him, and the left-hand front wheel that went over him.

The great car rose for a moment, like a tug on the crest of an oily wave, then came to earth again with a jerk all four wheels scuttering in the dust, as we went on our way. Hit anything hard enough, and down it goes.

As I bowled down that road between the pine trees, the darkness on either side of my headlamps expanding and contracting in an alarming manner, I tried to marshal my thoughts. It wasn’t easy. The fact is I was over-driven. I had eaten nothing for more than thirty-six hours, and was already in the sharp grip of fever. I had the stars to steer by. The Austrian-Yugoslav frontier line lay due west, and I had a very limited time to make the most of the enormous slice of fortune that had dropped into my lap.

Expressions such as “Sealing all exits” and “Warning all posts” flashed into my mind and I tried to consider them dispassionately. How quickly, in fact, could road blocks be set up around a given area? First of all they would have to pick up what was left of Colonel Dru; then the guards would have to telephone the headquarters; and a plan would have to be made; and instructions sent out. It was not as if they were expecting anything of the sort to happen.

I decided that I had at least half an hour in hand. Very probably more. I looked at my watch. It was ten past one. Say I had been going for ten minutes. I then glanced casually at the speedometer and noticed that it registered ninety. Kilometres, not miles, but it was a lot too fast for a blindish road, at night and I eased my foot on the accelerator.

The frontier would lie between twenty and thirty miles away. Clearly I could not drive right up to it. But with any luck I could break the back of the journey.

Road fork. Locate Orion. Fork right.

Twenty minutes.

Scattered light ahead. A village. No, a town. Steady, boy. This is one of the places you don’t want to go through. Even if there’s no one briefed to stop you. Towns have ears.

I brought the car down to a crawl, and turned out the headlamps. We were already in the outskirts. A road lined with tall, solid houses set back in their gardens; just like the Banbury road where it runs into Oxford.

What I wanted was a turning. Not just something that was going to lead me a dance through the residential quarter and back into the main road again, but a real turning, that turned. Preferably to the right, for in that direction lay the frontier.

It was whilst I was worrying about this that the petrol gave out. The car gave a warning cough. I looked at the gauge, and the next minute there I was, coasting slowly down the road, with nothing behind me but the power of my own momentum.

Luckily we were on a gentle slope. On my left I saw an open drive way, swung across the crown of the road, and put the car in. We made perhaps ten yards before we crunched to a final stop. Around me the silence was complete. Such noises as there were came from inside my own head.

It was only when I got out, that I realised just how shaky my legs were.

I tottered back to the entrance. It was a Private Sanatorium. Doktor Coloris. Pathology and Remedial Exercises. Quite so. Since my car was blocking the Doctor’s front drive I could only hope they didn’t get up too early at the Sanatorium.

My legs came back to me a little with use. I recrossed the main road, took the first turning to the right, and set my course westward. It took an infinity of time to shake off that town. First the big houses gave way to small houses. Then the small houses degenerated into shacks and bungalows. And finally, at about the turn of the century, I struck the allotment belt.

Don’t stop now. All you’ve got to do is lift one foot and put it down. Then lift the other one and put it down in front of the first. If you do it long enough it gets you somewhere in the end.

As I dragged myself up on to the shoulder of the hill, out of the town, up into the woods and fields, a breeze began to blow against my hot face. It was the little, old, cold wind that heralds the dawn.

Most of the time, Colin was walking with me. I could hear his voice, bland and reassuring, just behind my left shoulder.

“The Shah, of course, has a personal distrust for the Kaiser.” Of course, of course. “The Kaiser, despite their comparable family background, has little use for the King of Spain.”

When I got to the top of the ridge, and the down slope started helping my legs, I started on another instalment of thinking.

Ahead of me lay the frontier. In the growing light I could see that same line of hills that I had looked on, in reverse, from the ramparts of Obersteinbruck. It seemed attractively near and I could get up to it, if my legs would keep on working.

And once I got there, I should be recaptured. In my present condition if a girl guide jumped out and said Boo to me I should fall flat on my back.

When I got over the crown of the ridge, I saw that attaining the frontier line was not going to be as easy as it had looked.

About a mile ahead of me, hidden before by the swell of the ground, was a broad cleft. Occupying the cleft were a river, a railway line, and enough houses to make a long village or a short town.

My legs carried me a hundred yards or so closer before my mind ordered me to stop, and I sat down on a rock.

This was no place for me. Lights were coming up in the windows, an engine was shunting on the line, and, even as I watched, some hooter began to blow.

The sound seemed to blow a small measure of sanity back into me.

What I had to do was to get back into the open country behind me and lie up for the day. At the same time, since any search must start from the car, the greater distance I put between it and me the better. My best course would be to go along my side of the valley, until I was clear of the town ahead of me, and there find shelter.

I wanted a lateral path, and after a short cast I found one going in the right direction. Perhaps I ought to have been warned by the fact that it was going downhill. For ten minutes later I turned a corner and the path became a roadway among houses.

And there was at least one man in the roadway.

I swung quickly to my left, saw an opening, and went up it. It was a steep place, with rock steps cut in a clay gulley; probably a spate of water ran down it in the winter months. I turned the bend, and squatted down, my heart bumping.

I heard the man pass by the entrance, and move on up the road. His pace was unhurried and I guessed he had not seen me.

The gulley was too public for me to think of stopping in it. I prayed it might lead me out on to the hillside.

I went up it slowly. At the top it opened out, on to a small plateau, on which stood a square, stone building. What I was in was a short cut or back entrance to this building.

The main road continued on round the side of the hill and served the front of the house which looked like a farm house. No it wasn’t. It was a shop. There was a board, with something written on it.

I crawled closer and read “Josef Radk. Importer of and Dealer in Fine Wines” and in smaller letters, underneath, was something which brought the blood to my face: “Agency Schneidermeister.’’

It was an outside chance, but any chance was better than the certainty of discovery. My legs would take me no further. And if I sat where I was, the first village child using the path as a short cut to school would fall over me.

I scrambled up, and shambled across the open space in front of the house. The front door was open, and I fell through it.

Sitting on a high stool, at a desk littered with papers, a cup of coffee in one hand and a pen in the other, was a man.

He looked up quickly as I came in, put down his cup, and said: “You look as if you have come far and fast.”

I had an impression of a square white face and of steel-rimmed glasses, behind which lived a pair of watchful eyes. His manner was reserved, but I noticed that he did not seem unduly surprised or alarmed by my irruption into his counting-house.

“Yes,” I said. “I have come far and fast. Not that I am unused to travelling. A recent journey with young Franz Schneidermeister—’’

“Ah, yes,” he said. “You know Franz. Might I suggest that you sit.”

He pushed a chair quickly under me and I folded into it. Waves of fatigue were billowing up round me like smoke clouds, and the fever was playing tricks with my eyes. I heard a clinking behind me and a glass was pushed into my hand.

“Drink it,” said the man sharply. “All of it. Don’t play with it.” It was schnapps, half a tumbler of it.

“Now,” said the man, “tell me no more than I must know if I am to help you.”

I said, “I got away last night from Police Headquarters. I don’t know exactly when it was. I stole a car and drove for about fifteen miles. Then I left it, in a town.”

“How far away?”

“Hard to say. Perhaps four or five miles. It is over the crest, and in the next valley.”

“Feuering, yes.”

“Then I walked.”

“Who has seen you?”

“So far as I know, no one.”

“You are English?”

“Yes.”

“Your name?”

I told him.

“I thought it might be you. How is Lisa?”

“Miss Prinz,” I said, “was quite well when I saw her last.”

I tried to think about Lisa and was alarmed to find that I could not see her face. As I tried desperately to focus her, she turned into Henry, sitting, foursquare, on one of the terrace seats at Twickenham.

And they were playing now. The stands were packed from floor to roof. There go the forwards, working the ball down the field, a check, then out, scrum half to centre, centre to wing, streaking for the line, the crowd roaring; rising as one man and roaring, roaring.

My next clear memories are of the pinpoint flashes from a torch, coming and going between long ages of blackness; blackness in which my mind wandered free, mostly traversing the past few weeks of my life; sometimes I woke for a moment at the sound of a scream, realised that I was listening to my own voice, and dropped back again into the hinterland of illusion. Then there was the taste of soup, which I drank from time to time; and over all, pervading the darkness, assaulting my eyes and ears and nose until it became so much part of the background that I came to accept it, the sour smell of the lees of wine.