Evie (18 page)

While she covered the short distance from the bridge, over the hill and then down into the village street, Alice formulated a plan of action for her return journey to the farm. First she slowed the car, pulled the cuff of her gloves up and the sleeve of her coat down, so that her injured wrist was invisible. Then, telling Evie and Rose that Mr Bayliss was anxious to begin the drive to London as soon as possible, Alice cut short their farewells and soon had Evie safely beside her, with her suitcase in the boot and a travelling rug over her knees.

‘I don’t need this, Mrs Bayliss,’ Evie said. ‘It’s not that cold.’

‘Just leave it there, Evie,’ Alice said firmly, taking the car rapidly down the street. ‘And wave goodbye to Mrs Crocker, there’s a good girl.’ Picking up on Alice’s tension, Evie did as she was told.

Alice’s plan, should she encounter Norman Clark in the lane, was to make Evie conceal herself under the rug and to take the car, fast, and hopefully without killing him, past him. If he was not in the lane she would continue up to the
higher farm and insist that Evie moved into the back seat and waited while she fetched her husband and the journey to London could begin. She considered it essential that, if possible, the fact of Norman Clark’s reappearance and his physical attack on herself, should be kept from Evie until the day’s mission had been accomplished.

As she entered the higher farmhouse Alice made sure that her injured wrist was concealed. Despite this, it was immediately obvious to Roger that something was distressing her. His first instinct on hearing her brief account of the incident was to cancel the trip to London. Alice emphatically opposed this, insisting that too many arrangements, here, in Naples and even in New Zealand, depended on it. Instead they would notify the police, and telephone the lower farm where Ferdie Vallance and Dave Crocker would by now have arrived. Edwin Lucas would also be warned, but as Clark did not know that Evie had been living at Rose Crocker’s tea shop, she herself was not in any danger.

Within five minutes the calls were made and the car left the yard, turning north into the lane which would take it eventually to the London road.

Evie, in the back seat, sat regarding Alice’s profile.

‘There’s something up, isn’t there, Mrs Bayliss?’ She announced, solemnly. She was not insensitive to the small signs of anxiety she had seen that morning. There was a brief silence while the car puttered on, along the lane which, at this point, was hardly more than a cart track. They were now beyond the point that Norman Clark could possibly have reached had he headed uphill, past the higher farm, and there had been no
sign of him. Alice turned round in her seat and smiled.

‘There certainly is “something up”, Evie,’ she said, as brightly as she could. ‘Somebody we know is going to make a long sea voyage and meet a tall, handsome man!’ Evie smiled. Roger and Alice managed to laugh briefly, before settling down for the long hours of driving that lay ahead.

After Roger’s call, Edwin Lucas telephoned Ledburton police station and informed Constable Twentyman that Norman Clark had been seen in the area and had caused an affray involving Mrs Bayliss. Twentyman undertook to contact his superiors and asked Edwin to report any new sightings or incidents. When, an hour later, Norman appeared in the Lucas yard, demanding to know where ‘the Eyetie POW’ was, Edwin told him, perfectly truthfully, that Giorgio had been repatriated weeks ago, along with the last of the Italian prisoners. Norman had stood, swaying slightly, glaring at Edwin, blinking his small eyes, his powerful arms hanging at his sides, clenching and unclenching his huge fists. Then he made a strange sound that Edwin Lucas later described to his wife as something between a threat and a moan. Or possibly a sob and a blasphemy, he wasn’t sure. He had watched Norman turn on his heel and stumble off, through the veils of rain. Then he dialled Twentyman’s number and reported the new sighting.

‘Where’s he heading?’ Twentyman wanted to know.

‘Couldn’t say, Constable,’ Edwin had replied. ‘Looked to me like he hardly knew himself.’

In the barn of the lower farm Dave Crocker had taken Roger’s call, warning him that Clark had been seen in
the lanes between the village and the farms, how he had threatened Alice Bayliss and that she was concerned by his overexcited and violent state.

Hanging the police whistle round Hester’s neck, Dave told her to keep an eye on the lane and the yard and to blow the whistle, loud and long, if she saw any sign of Clark. Its piercing sound would be easily audible to him and Ferdie in the barn where they would be working, he in the loft and Ferdie in the yard below him, where he was loading the mangels onto a cart, neither man more than fifty yards from the Crocker cottage.

Norman Clark was wet, tired and hungry. He had been living from hand to mouth for some weeks, earning a few pounds here and there in Coventry and sometimes sleeping in the sad little house he had once shared with Evie and her mother. Returning to it several nights previously, he had found the locks changed and an estate agent’s sign on the gate advertising the fact that the property was for sale. He had broken in, smashing the glass in the kitchen window and slept, one last night, in the bed he had shared with Evie and in which his infant son had been stillborn. Next morning he had stuffed his few remaining belongings, including a wallet containing a snapshot of Evie and her mother, taken on Blackpool seafront, into his knapsack. He retraced his footsteps, the soles of his boots crackling across the splinters of glass on the kitchen floor and eased himself out through the narrow window. Leaving the gate swinging behind him he slouched, without looking back, down the street.

It had taken him two days of hitch-hiking to reach the Post Stone valley. By the morning of his encounter with Alice
he was not only light-headed with hunger but stiff and cold following a night spent in the musty lee of a damp hayrick. He watched her car vanish into the tunnel-like entrance to the lane where it rose steeply away from him. His decision to search for Evie at the Lucas farm was based on the fact that he knew it was where Giorgio had once worked. Persuaded by Edwin Lucas, and in no uncertain terms, that Giorgio was long gone, he allowed gravity to return him to the valley floor and to the bridge where he had encountered the warden. Here he hauled himself over the parapet, and dropping down into the shallow river bed, followed it, half a mile further upstream, to where, at Lower Post Stone Farm, it was spanned by the next, small, humpbacked bridge.

Breathing hard, wet, cold and hungry, he crept in, under the arch of the bridge. The shallow stream was already discolouring as storm water made its way down the valley. Needing to rest, he hauled himself up onto a ledge inside the apex of the arch and ate the last of a packet of ginger biscuits which was all that remained of a small selection of edibles that he had pilfered from a grocery shop in Tiverton on the previous day. The food soothed him but he was almost overcome with exhaustion. Wedging his knapsack under his head and stretching his aching legs along the length of the ledge he slid into a light sleep.

The frustrations and deprivations of Norman Clark’s life had reduced him to a point where he had relinquished all of his ambitions but one. One, which was arguably more an obsession than an ambition. On this single objective he focused what was left of himself. Both emotionally and physically, he
was driven beyond reason by his overwhelming determination to find and take possession of Evie. Quite why she had come to represent this sole, remaining objective was hard to define. Theirs had never been a love story. As she had grown from child to adolescent it had been her mother who had insisted on regularising the relationship between her daughter and her lodger. The papers had been signed and Evie had become Norman’s wife. He had reacted to the loss of his son with a bitter, accusative anger, blaming Evie for it and treating her with increasing hostility. His war, most of which had been spent in an internment camp in northern Germany, had been, for him, an isolating experience. He shunned the camaraderie which kept most of his fellow prisoners as occupied and as high-spirited as was possible. Instead, confining himself to a solitary regime of physical exercises, which, despite the limited amount of food available to him, had transformed his bulk into muscles and earned him the nickname ‘Tarzan’. His ponderous brawn had protected him from any confrontation which, triggered by his malevolence, might have resulted in physical violence. Perhaps, if when he had been discharged from the army and made his way back to the little house in Coventry, he had found Evie waiting for him, docile and compliant, he might have recovered himself and resumed a life similar to his pre-war existence, an outcome which would have been happier for him than for her. Instead he had found Evie gone, working as a land girl, two hundred miles away.

‘She’ll not come back,’ his mother-in-law had told him, tersely. Enid sat wheezing, her head over a bowl of steaming water laced with Friar’s Balsam. ‘I wrote her a letter when I
heard you was comin’ ’ome. All I got was a postcard of Exeter cathedral saying she’s stoppin’ where she is ’cos she likes it there. ’Spose she might of got herself a bloke after all this time. She never did ’ave much time for you, Norman.’ She bent closer to the bowl, draped a towel over her head to keep in the steam and began to cough.

It had been on the following day that Norman Clark had caught a train to Ledburton Halt, found his way to Higher Post Stone Farm and, brandishing his marriage certificate, forced Roger Bayliss to tell him where he would find his wife. Then he had almost forcibly removed her from the hostel at the lower farm and taken her with him, back to Coventry.

The rain clouds had lifted revealing a watery sky. Two hours had passed since the news that Norman Clark had been seen near the village had reached Dave Crocker at the lower farm. Hester looked at her clock. It was time for elevenses and needing the reassurance of a chat with her husband and Ferdie Vallance, she decided to take cups of tea across the yard to them, together with a couple of her mother-in-law’s currant buns. While she buttered the buns, set out the mugs, brewed and poured the tea, added milk and stirred in the sugar, she stooped, every so often, to check the view from her low window for any sign of Norman Clark. She had anticipated that if he approached at all it would be via the lane, so was taken aback to see a figure, which she instantly recognised as his, haul itself up, over the low wall that separated the water meadow from the yard. Locking her door and with Thurza under one arm, Hester ran up her narrow stairs, opened her
bedroom window, took a deep breath and expelled every vestige of it into the police whistle. The sound reverberated weirdly round the yard, bouncing off one surface, slamming into another, echoing and rebounding, so that, combined with the noise of the wind and rain and the cackle of alarmed jackdaws, it was impossible to identify its source. Hester, realising this, withdrew slightly and watched the yard as the jackdaws flapped into the sky above the farmhouse chimneys.

Norman Clark’s only reaction to the sound of the whistle was to stand, motionless. Whatever part the sound of the whistle was to play in ensuing events, he needed to get his bearings. The yard was familiar to him. He had been here twice before – once in high summer, to fetch Evie home, and later, after she had escaped from the house in Coventry, in his first, abortive, attempt to find her.

The lower windows of the deserted farmhouse were shuttered now and the roses and creepers that covered the porch had not been pruned since summer and now hung in great swags across the door, adding to the overall impression of desertion. Then, through a veil of rain, Norman saw, near the entrance to the barn, the half-loaded cart and Ferdie Vallance, shovel in hand, standing, open-mouthed beside it.

Seeing Norman stumbling towards him, head down, shoulders hunched, fists clenched and gaining momentum with each heavy step he took, Ferdie threw aside his shovel, grabbed a long-handled, two-pronged hayfork, faced the intruder and assumed a defiant and threatening stance. Dave Crocker, who had been working in the loft when the first whistle blast had penetrated the noise of the gale, shinned
down an interior ladder and unarmed and breathless, took his place solidly beside Ferdie.

Hester, for good measure, supplied a second, even more emphatic blast from the police whistle that had waited so long to be useful and now fully vindicated those who had, all those weeks ago, suggested its use for this specific purpose.

Norman rolled up to Dave Crocker with the kinetic energy of a Sherman tank, took him by his shirt front, slammed him against the barn wall and all but knocked the breath out of him before being caught, more by chance than judgement, by a wild swing from Dave. This split the skin above Norman’s right eye. Blood ran, unnoticed, down his cheek and dripped from his jaw as the two men, fists raised, circled each other like a couple of bare-knuckle fighters.

Hester, trapped in her cottage and unable to reach the yard phone, dumped Thurza into her playpen and hesitated, just inside her door, her heart thumping, watching the scene and then wincing when it developed into a full-scale brawl involving all three men. Dave and Norman, almost equally matched, ran at each other like stags in the rutting season while Ferdie, half their size but nimble and fearless, leapt and nipped, tripped and grabbed, using all the methods of attack that his injured leg had forced him to employ as he had grown from boy to man.

Later, remembering the scene, Hester was to compare Norman with the enraged and cornered bull she had recently watched in a film about matadors. She had ‘never seen anything like it, not in the yard of the lower farm!’ Blood had coursed down his face. He snorted and ranted and pawed the ground, howling like a wild animal and making unintelligible
sounds. The only word Hester had been able to distinguish had been his wife’s name. ‘Evie!’ he had bellowed. ‘Tell me where Evie is!’ The three men rolled on the ground, sprawling one moment and then staggering to their feet, slipping in the mud, throwing punches and grabbing each other in unlikely headlocks. Ferdie Vallance persistently tackled Norman by launching himself at the huge man’s ankles, once succeeding in bringing him down like a felled tree.