Operation Pax (10 page)

He must find another clot of steadily moving traffic. That was the next thing. It would at least give him breathing-space to think another move ahead. No good trying to make for London on the Douglas now – not with their knowing how he was mounted and which way he was heading. Better abandon it and get a long distance bus for somewhere else. Once break the trail like that and he would be pretty safe. It takes the police to find a man who may be in any one of half a dozen large towns. And he had actually had thoughts of giving in! Indomitable Routh. Slippery Routh.

Going all out, he caught up with two furniture vans. As he slipped past the first in order to tuck himself between them he managed to glance into the cab. It contained just what he hoped to see – three hefty men. These two vans together were as good as a bodyguard. If the convoy held to the first decent-sized town he would be all right. He was on A417. Wantage wouldn’t be bad, but Newbury, if he could make it, would be better. Oxford, Reading, Basingstoke, Winchester, Salisbury, Bristol: let him only get on a bus for any one of these and he would be as good – or as bad – as a needle in a haystack, so far as Squire was concerned. It meant dropping the two-stroke – but what did that matter when he was on the verge of a fortune?

His mind began to work on the problem of Formula Ten. How could he find bidders for it when he really didn’t know what it was about? He could do one of two things. Either he could seek out contacts who would know the right method, or he could take some means – newspaper advertisements, perhaps – of communicating safely with his defeated enemies, and simply sell back to them. This last was the cautious and moderate thing to do. Twenty thousand pounds, say, quietly handed over in one-pound notes compressed into a small suitcase…

The second furniture van was no longer close behind him. He twisted his head and saw it at a stand still a hundred yards back. He could see, too, a puff of steam from its radiator. Presumably it had been obliged to stop and cool off. He faced forward again and saw that the first van was going steadily ahead. He had better do the same. For a couple of minutes he looked straight before him. When he again glanced backwards the stationary van was no longer in sight. It was hidden by a bend in the road – a bend round which there now swung a long, grey Lagonda.

They had lost no time in changing that wheel, or in their dealings with the police. His best chance was to get in front of the remaining van. He swung out – and as he did so became aware that the front van was now slowing to a stop. Presumably it was going to wait for its companion. Routh peered in as he swerved past. And his heart sank. Of this van – as if by some special malignity of fate – the driver was the only occupant. He was an elderly man who looked as if he would be of very little use. Routh had just made this alarming discovery when he heard the first throb of the car coming up behind him.

There was nothing for it but to accelerate in the hope of picking up some more effective protection before he was overtaken. He swung round a bend and knew that he was lost. Ahead of him was nothing but a long stretch of empty road. Within a couple of minutes it would all be over. They would simply force him into the ditch – perhaps send him into it with a nicely calculated glancing blow – and then collect him.

Routh knew that he ought to stop and take to his heels across country. That would at least put the enemy and himself on more or less equal terms. But he couldn’t do it. His muscles, if called upon for any such decided action, would simply not obey his will. The Lagonda was coming on very fast – far too fast, he suddenly knew, for the deft accomplishment of what it was after. The driver – whether Squire or his companion – had either lost his head, or –

A grey shape loomed for a second on his right. He was in the ditch with the world tumbling over him and the sound of a great crash in his ears. His consciousness, although momentarily reduced to a mere flicker, registered the knowledge that the crash represented some objective happening in the outer world, and that no impact upon either a human body or a single motor bicycle could account for it. A second later he was sitting on grass, as if at a picnic, and staring past the buckled front wheel of the two-stroke at the Lagonda across the road. Only the Lagonda’s back was visible. Its bonnet had gone through a substantial stone wall. Routh found himself laughing weakly. Squire had once more made an ass of himself. And this time, with any luck, to the actual destruction of himself and his companion.

Fear like a cold finger touched Routh between the shoulder blades and ran down his back. He had heard a sound – it might have been a curse or a groan – from across the road. A second later first one human head and then another rose up behind the folded hood of the Lagonda. Squire and his accomplice were staring at him.

They weren’t dead yet. But no more was he. Routh moved his limbs cautiously. He was bruised and shaken, and there was a cut across the back of his left hand – nothing more. And his pursuers, even if equally unscathed, had certainly derived no advantage from the crash. The odds were considerably closer than they had been a few seconds before.

Routh looked up and down the road. It was still quite empty. But it was a substantial high road, all the same, and it could only be a few minutes – perhaps no more than seconds – before something came along.

But meanwhile Squire was making to climb painfully over the side of his wrecked car. Routh thought he had better get to his feet. But this took him longer than he expected. When at length he was standing on the road Squire and the bearded man were standing on it too. They were supporting each other like a couple of drunks. But they looked quite formidable, all the same.

Routh moved off. The effort to get on his feet had taken all his energy. He seemed to have none left to think with. But neither did his enemies. Routh shambled off down the road, and they shambled after him. Painfully his sense of the need to plan returned to him. They couldn’t very well kidnap him here and now. The wrecking of their car had dished that. And until they knew that he hadn’t cached Formula Ten somewhere on the route of his flight they couldn’t bring out guns and shoot him. Or not to kill…

Something had happened to the sounds behind him. There was only one man running. He turned his head. Squire was down on one knee in the road. Routh thought joyfully that he had collapsed. Then he saw that Squire’s left arm was up oddly before his face, and that there was something resting on it. A spurt of dust flew up beside Routh’s feet. There was a sharp report. Squire had tried to wing him. They’d do that, fake him up as part of their car accident, and then manage somehow to smuggle him away – perhaps in a relief car of their own.

And still A417 was wickedly empty. Squire was running again, but presently he would take another shot. The ditch on Routh’s left had vanished, and in its place was a grass verge and a low stone wall. Beyond were trees. Routh stumbled to the wall and threw himself over; he blundered his way forward, staggering from tree to tree like a ball on a bagatelle board. A bullet won’t wind its way round a lot of bloody trees. He went on and on. There was silence all round him.

He stopped, not believing it. No pounding feet. His eyes were drawn down to his own feet, which ached beneath him. They rested on a thick carpet of pine needles. The enemy might be quite close, after all; they might be moving up on him in perfect silence, Nor was the cover so very good. This sort of tree was in too much of a hurry to reach the sun. It scrambled upwards with indecent speed, leaving nothing but a spare, businesslike trunk behind it. Routh stood for a moment at bay, radiating futile malevolence upon the straight, still presences around him. He hated the wood. It wasn’t natural – a place that was nothing but trees and silence. People shouldn’t make such places. He longed for the street, for four walls and a roof, for a tough crowd that would see fair play.

Squire and the bearded man were close to him. The silence, as if retorting upon his dislike of it, allowed itself to be shattered by their voices. The sound seemed to be all around him. Wherever he moved it was in front of him as well as behind. If he turned half-left or half-right it was the same. Perhaps it was a trick of the place; perhaps among trees sound always behaved like that. Or perhaps – he thought in sudden horror – he was dying. Perhaps he was going to die of sheer long-drawn-out nervous tension. Perhaps this confusion of voices was simply the decay of the senses before death. He floundered on.

The trees thinned and vanished. In front of him stretched a low stone wall. Surely he had seen it before? What lay behind the wall, however, could not be the high road, because he was looking directly at the roof and windows of a small, single-storeyed house. It was far from being a substantial refuge; nevertheless Routh saw in it his last hope.

But the wall was unexpectedly hard to surmount. His last vestiges of physical strength were leaving him. When he did get to the wall he could do little more than claw at it blindly. One moment it seemed an insuperable barrier; at the next he was lying along the top of it, his head swimming. The drop was steeper on the other side. He glimpsed a hard surface beneath him, and in front of him a pale wall, a blank window of the little house. And then he fell. He was aware of pain, of voices, of two obscurely familiar forms bending over him. Hands were laid on his body, and at their touch he fainted.

When he recovered consciousness it was to find himself lying on the floor of a small bare room. He was certain that very little time had elapsed, and he wondered how his enemies had conjured up this prison out of vacancy. His limbs were free; he flexed them cautiously and then, rolling over on his stomach, managed to raise himself to his hands and knees.

The place was tiny and smelt of fresh plasterwork; it had a single casement window, unbarred. Sudden hope leapt up in Routh. This was simply the tiny house in which he had hoped to find refuge, and it was not his enemies who were responsible for his being in it now. It was not
they
who had laid hands on him. He had been carried in here by a friendly, not a hostile power. But in that case his pursuers must still be close by. He got unsteadily to his feet. Why had his rescuers simply dumped him here? He must find them. He must explain the danger. Routh’s eye, proposing to search the bleak little room for a door, fell once more upon the window. Squire and the bearded man were framed in it.

Without consciousness of the movement, he tumbled again to his hands and knees. And so he remained – looking up and out at his enemies, like a cornered dog. Squire’s hand was on the window, and it was plain that he could force it in an instant. He was trapped. Only a miracle could save him now.

Routh prayed. He prayed for the miracle that would take him from these implacable men. And as he did so the faces of Squire and the bearded man moved queerly and unnaturally across the window – glided smoothly and laterally away. They were replaced by a telegraph post. And that glided away too. There was a tremor under Routh’s body. The little house was moving. It was because he had been on his knees, he thought.
Darling, darling Mummy
–

This time he was unconscious for much longer.

Somebody was bending over him. It was the lad to whom he had given the handkerchief to wipe the coffee from his face and mop his hair. Behind him was his companion, the hairy man who had begun the talking about the pools. ‘I wouldn’t ’ave thought it of ’im,’ the hairy man was saying. ‘Law-abiding little beggar, ’e looks to me.’

‘They might ’ave been crooks or they might ’ave been cops. But whichever they was, we didn’t ’arf get ’im away from them nicely.’ The lad laughed cheerfully; then, looking down at Routh, saw that his eyes were open. ‘That’s right, mate. Sit up and take a bit of notice. We must get you out before they check us in. No passengers allowed in these bleeding travelling Ritzes.’

Routh sat up. The hairy man stepped forward, fished the remains of a cigarette from behind his ear, and thrust it companionably in Routh’s mouth. ‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘no ’arm in a puff of tobacco in the Louis Cans lounge.’

The Louis Cans lounge was the same bare little room in which Routh had lost consciousness. There was the window through which Squire and his confederate had peered at him. Routh got to his feet and staggered to it. He looked out on a landscape of trodden mud, dotted for as far as he could see with prefabricated houses. They were the kind that arrive in three ready-made sections which simply bolt together. He had seen these sections on the road often enough. And of course he was in one now.

The miracle was explained. Routh felt a momentary resentment against providence for not having, as he had supposed, suspended the natural order of things in his favour. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

The hairy man held out a match. ‘We’d pulled up to fill in the log, mate, when you came tumbling over the wall like a sack. So we nipped out and took a look over, and there was your commercial gent coming after you with a gun, and a nasty-looking beggar with a beard beside him. So we bundled you into Buckingham Palace here, and carried you off under their bleeding noses.’

‘How do I get away from this?’

‘Straight down the Mall, mate.’ The lad advanced to the window and pointed. ‘There’s a bus service at the other end.’

The hairy man had opened a door through which one could drop to the ground. Routh looked at the two men awkwardly. They looked back at him, benevolent and elaborately incurious. All words of thanks had for him connotations of insincerity, dislike, dishonest design. He could speak none of them. ‘Hope you win that treble chance,’ he mumbled. The lad gave him a hand down.

Workmen were tinkering at a score of prefabs on either side of him. There were acres of these, laid out in unbroken parallel lines. If you were in an aeroplane, and got your height a bit wrong, it would look like one of those awfully military cemeteries. Routh shivered. It would be horrible to live in such a place. It would be like annihilation. You would come to think that you were just like other people. There could be nothing worse than that.