Longshot (38 page)

Time to go. I pulled out the compass, held it horizontally close to my eyes, let the needle settle onto north, looked that way and mapped the first few feet in my mind.

Putting thought into action was an inevitable trial. Everything was sore, every muscle seemed wired directly to the arrow. Violent twinges shot up my nerves like steel lightning.

So what, I told myself. Stop bellyaching. Ignore what it feels like, concentrate on the journey.

Concentrate on the Sheriff . . .

I pulled myself to my feet again, rocked a bit, sweated, clung on to things, groaned a couple of times, gave myself lectures. Put one foot in front of the other, the only way home.

Knocking the arrow seemed after all not to have been the ultimate disaster. Moving seemed to require the same amount of breath as before, which was to say more than could be easily provided.

I couldn’t always see so far ahead by moonlight and needed to consult the compass more often. It slowed things up to keep putting it in and out of my jeans pocket so after a while I tucked it up the sleeve of my jersey. That improvement upset the old fifty-yard rhythm but it didn’t much matter. I looked at my watch instead and stopped every fifteen minutes for a rest.

The moon rose high in the sky and shone unfalteringly into the woods, a silver goddess that I felt like worshiping. I became numb again to discomfort to a useful degree and plodded on methodically, taking continual bearings, breathing carefully, aiming performance just below capability so as to last out to the end.

The archer had to have a face.

If I could think straight, if every scrap of attention didn’t have to be focused on not falling, I could probably get nearer to knowing. Things had changed since the arrow. A whole lot of new factors had to be considered. I tripped over a root, half lost my balance, shoved the new factors into oblivion.

Slowly, slowly, I went north. Then one time when I put my hand in my sleeve to bring out the compass, it wasn’t there.

I’d dropped it.

I couldn’t go on without it. Had to go back. Doubted if I could find it in the undergrowth. I felt swamped with liquefying despair, weak enough for tears.

Get a bloody grip on things, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. Work it out.

I was facing north. If I turned precisely one hundred and eighty degrees I would be facing where I’d come from.

Elementary.

I stood and thought and made the panic recede until I could work out what to do, then I took my knife out of its sheath on my belt and carved an arrow in the bark of the tree I was facing. An arrow pointing skyward. I had arrows on the brain as well as through the lungs, I thought.

The tree arrow pointed north.

The compass had to be somewhere in sight of that arrow. I would have to crawl to have any hope of finding it.

I went down on my knees carefully and as carefully turned to face the other way, south. The tangle of brown foot-long dried grass and dead leaves and the leafless shoots of new growth filled every space between saplings and established trees. Even in daylight with every faculty at full steam it wouldn’t have been an easy search, and as things were it was abysmal.

I crawled a foot or two, casting about, trying to part the undergrowth, hoping desperate hopes. I looked back to the arrow on the tree, then crawled another foot. Nothing. Crawled another and another. Nothing. Crawled until I could see the arrow only because it was pale against the bark, and knew I was already farther away than when I’d taken the last bearing.

I turned around and began to crawl back, still sweeping one hand at a time through the jumbled growth. Nothing. Nothing. Hope became a very thin commodity. Weakness was winning.

The compass had to be
somewhere.

If I couldn’t find it, I would have to wait for morning and steer north by my watch and the sun. If the sun shone. If I lasted that long. The cold of the night was deepening and I was weaker than I’d been when I set out.

I crawled in a fruitless search all the way back to the tree and then turned and crawled away again on a slightly different line, looking, looking, hope draining away yard by yard in progressive debility, resolution ebbing with failure.

One time when I turned to check on the arrow on the tree, I couldn’t see it. I no longer knew which way was north.

I stopped and slumped dazedly back on my heels, facing utter defeat.

Everything hurt unremittingly and I could no longer pretend I could ignore it. I was wounded to death and dying on my knees, scrabbling in dead grass, my time running out with the moonlight, the shadows closing in.

I felt that I couldn’t endure any more. I had no will left. I had always believed that survival lay in the mind but now I knew there were things one couldn’t survive. One couldn’t survive unless one could believe one could, and belief had leaked out of me, gone with sweat and pain and weakness into the wind.

T
ime ... unmeasured time ... slid away.

I moved in the end from discomfort, from stiffness: made a couple of circling shuffles on my knees, an unthought-out search for a nest to lie in, to die in, maybe.

I looked up and saw again the arrow cut into the tree. It hadn’t been and wasn’t far away, just out of sight behind a group of saplings.

Apathetically, I thought it of little use. The arrow pointed in the right direction, but ten feet past it, without the compass, which way was north?

The arrow on the tree pointed upwards.

I looked slowly in that direction, as if instructed. Looked upwards to the sky: and there, up there, glimpsed now and then between the moving boughs, was the constellation of the Great Bear ... and the polestar.

 

 

NO DOUBT FROM then on my route wasn’t as straight or as accurate as earlier, but at least I was moving. It wasn’t possible after all to curl up and surrender, not with an alternative. Clinging on to things, breathing little, inching a slow way forwards, I achieved again a sort of numbness to my basic state, and in looking upwards to the stars at every pause felt lighter and more disembodied than before.

Lightheaded, I dare say.

I looked at my watch and found it was after eleven o’clock, which meant nothing really. I couldn’t reach the road by half-past midnight. I didn’t know how long I’d wasted looking for the compass or for how long I’d knelt in capitulation. I didn’t know at what rate I was now traveling and no longer bothered to work it out. All that I was really clear about was that this time I would go on as long as my lungs and muscles would function. Survival or nothing. It was settled.

The face of the archer ...

In splinters of thought, unconnectedly, I began to look back over the past three weeks.

I thought of how I must seem to them, the people I’d grown to know.

The writer, a stranger, set down in their midst. A person with odd knowledge, odd skills, physically fit. Someone Tremayne trusted and wanted around. Someone who’d been in the right place a couple of times. Someone who threatened.

I thought of Angela Brickell’s death and of the attacks on Harry and me and it seemed that all three had had one purpose, which was to keep things as they were. They were designed not to achieve but to prevent.

One foot in front of the other ...

Faint little star, half hidden, revealed now and then by the wind; flickering pinpoint in a whirling galaxy, the prayer of navigators ... see me home.

Angela Brickell had probably been killed to close her mouth. Harry was to have died to cement his guilt. I wasn’t to be allowed to do what Fiona and Tremayne had both foretold, that I would find the truth for Doone.

They all expected too much of me.

Because of that expectation, I was half dead.

All guesses, I thought. All inferences. No actual objects that could prove guilt. No statements or admissions to go on, but only probability, only likelihood.

The archer had to be someone who knew I was going to go back for Gareth’s camera. It had to be someone who knew how to find the trail. It had to be someone who could follow instructions to make an effective bow and sharp arrows, who had time to lie in wait, who wanted me gone, who had a universe to lose.

The way information zoomed around Shellerton, anyone theoretically could have heard of the lost camera and the way to find it. On the other hand the boys’ expedition had occurred only yesterday ... dear God, only
yesterday
... and if . . .
when
. . . I got back, I could find out for certain who had told who.

One step and another. There was fluid in my lungs, rattling and wheezing at every breath. People lived a long time with fluid... asthma... emphysema ... years. Fluid took up air space... you never saw anyone with emphysema run upstairs.

Angela Brickell had been small and light; a pushover.

Harry and I were tall and strong, not easy to attack at close quarters. Half the racing world had seen me pick up Nolan and knew I could defend myself. So, sharp spikes for Harry and arrows for John, and it was only luck in both cases that had saved us. I’d been there for Harry and the arrow had bypassed my heart.

Luck.

The clear sky was luck.

I didn’t want to see the face of the archer.

The sudden admission was a revelation in itself. Even with his handiwork through me, I thought of the sadness inevitably awaiting the others; yet I would have to pursue him, for someone who had three times seen murder as a solution to problems couldn’t be trusted never to try it again. Murder was habit-forming, so I’d been told.

Endless night. The moon moved in silver stateliness across the sky behind me. Left foot. Right foot. Hold on to branches. Breathe by fractions.

Midnight.

If ever this ended, I thought, I wouldn’t go walking in woodland for a very long time. I would go back to my attic and not be too hard on my characters if they came to pieces on their knees.

I thought of Fringe and the Downs and wondered if I would ever ride in a race, and I thought of Ronnie Curzon and publishers and American rights and of Erica Upton’s reviews and it all seemed as distant as Ursa Major but not one whit as essential to my continued existence.

Grapevine around Shellerton. A mass of common knowledge. Yet this time . . . this time . . .

I stopped.

The archer had a face.

Doone would have to juggle with alibis and charts, proving opportunity, searching for footprints. Doone would have to deal with a cunning mind in the best actor of them all.

Perhaps I was wrong. Doone could find out.

I tortoised onwards. A mile was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty inches. A mile was roughly one point six kilometers or one hundred and sixty thousand centimeters.

Who cared.

I might have traveled at almost eight thousand inches an hour if it hadn’t been for the stops. Six hundred and sixty feet. Two hundred and twenty yards.

A furlong! Brilliant. One furlong an hour. A record for British racing.

Twinkle twinkle little star...

No one but a bloody fool would try to walk a mile with an arrow through his chest. Meet J. Kendall, bloody fool.

Lightheaded.

One o’clock.

The moon, I thought briefly, had come down from the sky and was dancing about in the wood not far ahead. Rubbish, it couldn’t be. It certainly was. I could see it shining.

Lights. I came to sensible awareness; to incredulous understanding. The lights were traveling along the road.

The road was real, was there, was not some lost myth in a witch-cursed forest. I had actually got there. I would have shouted with joy if I could have spared the oxygen.

 

 

I REACHED THE last tree and leaned feebly against it, wondering what to do next. The road had for so long been the only goal that I’d given no thought to anything beyond. It was dark now: no cars.

What to do? Crawl out onto the road and risk getting run over? Hitchhike? Give some poor passing motorist a nightmare?

I felt dreadfully spent. With the trunk’s support I slid down to kneeling, leaning head and left shoulder against the bark. By my reckoning, if I’d steered anything like a true course, the Land-Rover was way along the road to the right, but it was pointless and impossible to reach it.

Car lights came around a bend from that direction and seemed not to be traveling too fast. I tried waving an arm to attract attention but only a weak flap of a hand was achieved.

Have to do better.

The car braked suddenly with screeching wheels, then backed rapidly until it was level with me. It was the Land-Rover itself. How could it be?

Doors opened. People spilled out. People I knew. Mackie.

Mackie running, calling, “John, John,” and reaching me and stopping dead and saying, “Oh, my
God
.”

Perkin behind her, looking down, his mouth shocked open in speechlessness. Gareth saying, “What’s the matter?” urgently, and then seeing and coming down scared and wide-eyed on his knees beside me.

“We’ve been looking for you for
ages
,” he said. “You’ve got an arrow . . .” His voice died.

I knew.

“Run and fetch Tremayne,” Mackie told him, and he sprang instantly to his feet and sprinted away along the road to the right, his feet impelled as if by demons.

“Surely we must take that arrow out,” Perkin said, and put his hand on the shaft and gave it a tug. He hardly moved it in my chest but it felt like liquid fire.

I yelled ... it came out as a croak only but it was a yell in my mind . . . “Don’t.”

I tried to move away from him but that made it worse. I shot out a hand and gripped Mackie’s trouser leg and pulled with strength I didn’t know I still had left. Strength of desperation.