The Camelot Caper (3 page)

Jess relaxed, feeling pleased with herself. Now, at least, she had something with which to bargain, if bargaining became necessary. Again her neighbor's elbow caught her in the ribs and a sibilant whisper came to her ears.

“They're all going up there. What should we do?”

“If you want to take communion…” Jessica began doubtfully.

“I'm a Baptist,” said her companion, as if she had suggested a small Black Mass.

“Well, then, let's just stay here.”

The other woman nodded, watching the proceedings with a disapproving eye. Jess joined in the Lord's Prayer, trying to drown out the odd noises her stomach was making; she was nervous, not hungry, and the qualms in her interior increased as the stream of communicants began to thin out. Soon the service would be over. She had disposed of the ring; but what was she going to do with her own palpitating person?

All too soon the celebrant turned to the congregation.

“The Lord be with you.”

Jess missed the response; she was busy tensing her leg muscles.

“Go forth in peace,” the celebrant intoned.

Jess thought it was a splendid idea. She acted upon it while the congregation was muttering the final “Thanks be to God.” Before anyone else had moved, she was out of her chair and through the doorway into the cloisters, leaving behind several disapproving ecclesiastics and—she hoped—two frustrated villains.

It wasn't far to her hotel, and ordinarily she would have walked. Under the circumstances, she hailed the first taxi she met. As it chugged off through the calm streets she knew she had found only a temporary haven. Salisbury boasted no
more than a dozen hostelries; she had looked at the list the previous night, when deciding where to stay. They—the Enemy—could call each hotel in turn, and simply ask if she were registered. If they knew about the ring, they must know her name. In fact—her breath caught as the realization dawned—they might already have located her hotel. Pursuit could be hot on her heels, seconds away instead of minutes.

In her haste she gave the driver a ten-shilling note and waved away his shocked remonstrance: “Here, now, miss, the fare's only two and six! You don't—”

The hotel desk was unoccupied. After a second Jess pounded on the bell, and a man appeared, carrying a napkin and looking annoyed. Breathlessly Jess plunged into her story; and her heart sank as she saw the change in the man's expression.

“But, my dear young lady—”

“Don't you believe me?”

“Why—certainly I believe you. Only—isn't it possible that you are exaggerating an incident which—er—”

“It wasn't like that at all,” Jessica said, with as much dignity as she could command. It wasn't much; her five feet, two inches, and 105 pounds were not impressive.

“Well! Naturally, if you insist upon the police…However, the sort of thing you have described simply doesn't happen here. Not unless…”

His voice trailed away, meaningfully, and Jess stared at him, feeling cold and more than a little sick. He didn't believe her. No one would believe her. Why should they? The man was right, the things she had described didn't happen to people—unless…Unless they were criminals, trying to double-cross other criminals, or under-age females trying to escape guardian or parent, or sick people suffering from delusions of persecution. Unless, in short, they were undesirables who were not entitled to the protection of the law.

Jess gripped the edge of the desk with cold fingers as the full helplessness of her position struck her. A stranger in a strange land, she knew no one who could vouch for her character or mental stability. Her tale of pursuit and persecution was rendered unbelievable by the very fact that she could give no logical reason for her predicament. The men who were after her, one of them, at least, was English and a member of a respectable class of society, to judge by his speech. Presumably he knew what this was all about; certainly he would have provided himself with identifica
tion and with a story plausible enough to deceive casual strangers who would not, in any case, want to get involved. If she went to the police they would pat her on the head and call a doctor. She had no witnesses. The man had not actually threatened her; in fact, it would be her word against his that he had said anything at all.

All this passed through her mind in a flicker of thought; she saw her conclusions mirrored in the desk clerk's inimical stare. She turned away, and stumbled up the stairs.

As she had hoped, he had returned to his interrupted lunch when she came back downstairs, on the tips of her toes. The bell at the outer door jingled when she opened it, but she darted out and was gone before anyone could appear.

The street outside held no sinister strangers; apparently they had not located her hotel. She ran at first, but the suitcase was too heavy to permit such a pace for long. She had no map of the town and remembered only vaguely the location of the bus station. She had to stop a pedestrian and ask directions. It was unlikely, she reassured herself, that the pursuers would find a person met so casually.

The bus station was crowded, not only with tourists but with local people on Sunday excur
sions and visits. Standing on the platform, Jess looked uncertainly from the glass window of the buffet to the shabby waiting room. Where was she going?

There were about a dozen numbered loading platforms; buses stood waiting in four of them, the others were empty. Where
was
she going? Instinct provided the answer: London. The anonymity of a huge city, where, in hiding, she could catch her breath and try to find a clue to this insanity. The American Embassy. It was silly to assume that they would be any more inclined to believe her, but at least they were Americans. For what that was worth…

Yes, London. She searched the station for a bus schedule, found it incomprehensible, and then caught sight of an elderly man in some sort of uniform who seemed to be answering questions put to him by travelers. She went up to him.

The next bus for London did not leave for an hour.

Jess was unable to hold back an exclamation of distress. The man looked at her benevolently.

“From the States, are you? Americans are always in a hurry. You'd find the train quicker, miss, I expect; but the express doesn't go until six.”

“Thank you.”

He would have pursued the subject, out of sheer benevolence, if Jess hadn't retreated into the waiting room. She stood inside the door biting her lip in agitation. This would never do. They would soon be on her trail. Locating her hotel would take next to no time, and if the clerk, alerted by her odd behavior, inspected her room, he would realize that she had gone for good. The money she had left on the table would prevent any legal action on the part of the hotel, but the pursuers would immediately head for the railroad and bus stations. Good old reliable instinct had led her to the latter rather than the former; there was only one railroad line, but buses went out in all directions.

But, if this fact was to be of use to her, she would have to give up the London bus and take one almost at random. London was a logical destination, and the bus official would remember her question. The thought of an hour's delay, huddled in the waiting room or the ladies' wash-room, with mounting suspense weighing at her nerves, made up her mind. She walked straight out of the waiting room to Platform Six, where the driver had just gotten into the bus, and climbed on after him.

“Just in time,” he informed her, with a cheer
ful grin. “Here, let's put your case under the steps; no room for it in the aisle.”

As the ponderous vehicle backed skillfully out of its niche Jess had a panoramic view of the bus station and found it free of suspicious men with bushy mustaches. There was only one problem. She hadn't the faintest notion where the bus was going.

N
ow, as the afternoon sunlight deepened from gold to copper, Jess still didn't know where the bus was going. It had picked up other passengers on its way out of Salisbury; when they left the town behind, a pimply youth came to collect the fares. Unluckily for Jessica, she was unable to overhear the name of a single town on the route. The other passengers knew, not only where they were going, but the price of the ticket, and handed over the money without comment. When the young man reached Jess, in the farthest seat of all, she was speechless. She simply proffered a ten-shilling note and a feeble smile.

“All the way?” the boy inquired, and gave her back four shillings.

Jess could have kissed him, pimples and all. However, she still had no idea of her destination. She could tell from the sun that their general direction was northeast. That was good;
London lay northeast of Salisbury. But this was obviously a local bus, and the fare to London would certainly be more than six shillings.

The bus ambled along; its meditative pace should have been calming to the nerves. When it stopped, in villages whose names, when she caught them, meant absolutely nothing to Jess, it sat chugging asthmatically for long minutes, while the driver helped an old lady off and walked her down the street to her house, or delivered parcels to shops. Once he ducked into a doorway under a sign bearing the legend, The Cross and Anchor, and came out five minutes later wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, amid a chorus of good-natured jeers from the passengers. They all seemed to know him by name.

Jessica's stomach made sympathetic noises. She hadn't eaten since breakfast, and panic, she had found, dried one's throat. A nice cup of hot tea would have been more to her taste than the beverages on tap at The Cross and Anchor, but at that point she would have settled for a glass of water.

In her capacious handbag, bought especially for the trip and almost as big as her suitcase, she had a general guide to England and a map. She had already examined the map and found it
useless; the villages on their route were too small to be mentioned.

They passed a church and a scattering of small thatch-roofed houses, then the bus jerked to a stop in a village somewhat larger than any she had yet seen. It possessed a marketplace, with an ancient stone cross, and a particularly appetizing tea shop. Jess's mouth would have watered if she had had any extra saliva. For a moment she considered getting off the bus, but she knew such a move would be folly. Eventually her pursuers would pick up her trail. Someone might have seen her board this bus, and even if she had not been seen, there could not be more than half a dozen buses that would have left the station before the trackers reached it. All they had to do was to follow these buses, and if the pace of this one was typical, that process wouldn't take forever.

Three of the passengers got off in the marketplace; there were now only seven people left in the bus, including herself. No, she couldn't leave the bus in this sleepy hamlet without being observed. She would have to stay on the bus, “all the way”—wherever that might be.

The driver finished his philosophical discussion with an elderly native who was sitting by the market cross, looking as if he had grown
there, and the bus started off again. The little boy on the other side of the fat lady said something in a soft, plaintive voice, and the woman—his mother?—said robustly,

“Well, you can hold it in a bit longer. We'll be home soon.”

Jess was sorry that subject had come up. Almost too tired and uncomfortable to worry, she leaned her head against the windowpane and idly contemplated the lurid cover of the thriller in her lap. She had pretended to read it, not only to occupy her mind—it hadn't worked—but to put off the lady beside her, who looked as if she might enjoy a chat. From her sole bus trip before the debacle, Jess had learned that the standoffishness of the English was a myth; they were the friendliest souls in the world, especially when traveling, and loved to talk to foreigners. On the Southampton-Salisbury trip this trait had given her much pleasure, but she wasn't in the mood for idle chitchat now.

She opened the book again, noting that she seemed to be on page forty-six; at least that was where her thumb had been inserted as a book-mark. Not surprisingly, she couldn't remember anything of the first forty-five pages. “Althea crouched against the wall, her heart pounding.
How long had she been entombed in this dark, dank hole? Four hours? Five? It seemed like an eternity.”

Jess wondered who Althea was. The heroine, clearly; only heroines crouched in dark dank holes for that length of time. She didn't remember how Althea had gotten into the hole, or why, and she didn't care. Silly wench, Althea. She swallowed, through a dryness that felt like a patch of the Sahara, and tried to ignore her other distressing discomforts, and wondered how on earth the heroines of these stories managed to get around the simpler, more basic necessities of life. Four or five hours was a pretty long stretch, and when you were as nervous as all that…

It was useless, she couldn't keep her mind on Althea's troubles. Silly woman, she thought again, and wondered if her predicament would sound as absurd to an outsider as the dangers of Althea and her fictional sisters usually sounded to her. It was difficult to describe peril unless it consisted of something as concrete as a bullet or a bloody knife. But she had learned that danger could be implicit in a look, and that the movement of an arm could convey a threat.

She sighed, and closed the book on poor Althea and her pounding heart. Once again she half turned, to scan the road behind. But this
time the road was not innocuous. How long had the car been there? It was an open car, a convertible, and it was close—dangerously close—to the bus. She could make out the features of the two men quite clearly. The brown mustache was unmistakable.

For several seconds Jess was too paralyzed to move. Pounding hearts indeed, she thought; hers was banging around like a loose pebble in a box. Could they see her? She thought not. Thanks to the fat lady's bundles she was jammed into the corner, where a stretch of blank wall separated the back window from the one on the side. This was not one of the new all-glass sight-seeing buses, and she had to look sideways as well as back to see out the window. It was pure reflex that made her shrink back, with a little gasp of terror.

The fat lady leaned over and put a firm hand to her arm.

“Now then, love, what's the matter?”

“The matter?” Jess squeaked.

“Why, child, you're as pale as a ghost. Don't be afraid. This isn't the States, where the gangsters and hippies are shooting people down in cold blood all over the streets; no doubt they'll have followed you from home, those two back
there, but you're in England now, don't you fear; we don't let such things happen here.”

“How did you know?”

“Haven't I watched you, nervous as a cat, peering out that window the whole time and not being able to read your little book? I'll tell you what we'll do; you'll just get off the bus with me and we'll fetch Thomas Babbitt. I knew you were an American, of course. My niece married one, naturally he was a man, but I know what it's like over there.”

Out of this morass of inconsequentiality and shrewd analysis, Jessica's reeling brain focused on one point.

“Who,” she asked feebly, “is Thomas Babbitt?”

“The constable, of course. He'll get rid of those two. He's my sister's boy. Mrs. Hodge, that's my name, Mrs. Edward Hodge.”

“How do you do. But, Mrs. Hodge—you're very kind, but…Those two back there. I'm afraid one constable wouldn't be—”

“Armed, are they?” Mrs. Hodge had pale-blue eyes, just the color of the glass eyes of a doll Jess had once owned. They widened with delighted horror. “With guns? Pistols?”

Jess got a grip on herself.

“I don't know. They may be. But I can't risk
your getting hurt, you or anyone else. They may not even wait till I get off. They may stop the bus. They can't be sure I'm on this one, you see.”

Mrs. Hodge pressed her lips tightly together and nodded till the blue flowers on what was surely her “Sunday hat”—as opposed to her “other hat”—wobbled insanely.

“There, I knew it, a nice girl like you wouldn't be involved in anything criminal. That Bonnie and Clyde, now, I thought of that at first: gangsters rubbing out the one that double-crosses them, eh? But it's not that. No, you don't need to tell me; it'll be—” She glanced at the little boy, who was staring in fascination, and lowered her voice. “It'll be the white slave trade. Well!” She nodded again, and the flowers danced. “They can't do that sort of thing, not in England.”

Kindness and sympathy, however muddle-headed, had the wrong effect on Jess, who suddenly felt she might burst into tears.

“But you can't stop them,” she faltered. “I can't get out without being seen, they'll follow us, and if they—”

“Not in England,” Mrs. Hodge repeated. She raised her voice in a ladylike bellow.

“Miss Aiken—Mr. Woodle—Sam—”

Jessica jumped several inches; the other passengers, now four in number, turned casual
faces toward the back seat. Evidently they were familiar with Mrs. Hodge's voice and her habits.

Light-headed with hunger and nerves, Jess began to feel as if she had slipped out of the real world into some sideways dimension, as Mrs. Hodge, in a cheerful shout, outlined her version of her problem. It was quite in keeping with the mad logic of this unreal world that all the other passengers accepted the improbable story with perfect equanimity. The red-faced man in baggy tweeds—Mr. Woodle—expressed the general sentiment.

“Americans,” he snorted. “Gangsters. Can't have that sort of thing here. Let 'em come.” He brandished his stick, a heavy gold-headed affair, and narrowly missed hitting himself in the nose as the stick bounded off the low luggage rack above his head.

“We can't fight 'em,” yelled Mrs. Hodge, “They've got tommy guns. Maybe bombs.”

A disembodied voice floated back from the driver's seat. Sam never took his eyes off the road, but he hadn't missed a word.

“Trick 'em,” he shrieked. “Not very bright, these gangsters.”

“Quite right,” shouted the genteel maiden lady midway down the bus. “Do I understand that the young woman believes that these vil
lains do not know with absolute certainty that she is presently within this vehicle?”

“I don't think so,” Jess muttered dazedly. The information was passed on to the audience by Mrs. Hodge, and an animated discussion followed, at the top of everyone's lungs.

“We none of us seed her,” bawled the fourth passenger, a wizened little old man who might have been a farm laborer. “She never was here.”

“But I am here,” yelled Jessica, entering into the spirit of the thing. “How can I hide, on this—”

“Better to say, I think, that she got off the bus earlier,” howled the maiden lady.

“Wow,” said the shrillest voice of them all. “Mum, look there.”

Master Hodge, probably the most sensible member of the crowd, had been keeping an eye out the back window. He drew Jess's attention to the road just in time for her to see the car pull out and pass. Moments later came the driver's warning yell:

“Watch ouuuuuuut!”

The words blended harmoniously with the squeal of the brakes as the bus shuddered to a halt, twisted half across the road in a wrenching movement. Jess knew what had happened even before the maiden lady screeched, “They've
stopped…blocking the road…They are getting out of the automobile. They are coming—”

Then Mrs. Hodge—five feet tall, 160 pounds, bespectacled and on the wrong side of forty—achieved her finest hour.

“She got out at Woodhole,” she called; simultaneously her large pink hand clamped on Jessica's shoulder and forced her down onto the floor of the bus.

There was very little floor available, not more than a foot and a half between the last seat and the back of the one ahead; but Jess was amazed to find how much of her own small person could be crammed, with Mrs. Hodge's vigorous assistance, into that space. Moving with the skillfulness of a housewife shaping a loaf of bread, Mrs. Hodge's hands tucked a good deal of Jessica under the seat. The part of her that protruded was, at least, down below seat level.

Speechless and snorting in the dust, Jess's distorted view of the outside world was obliterated by a rain of parcels, all of which landed on top of her—Mrs. Hodge's parcels, topped off by Mrs. Hodge's large coat. She felt the seat above her sag, heard a surprised squeak, and deduced, correctly, that Master Hodge had just been added to the agglomeration on top of her. Though she could see nothing, except a dimly
lit collection of cigarette butts, candy wrappers and one banana peel (fresh), she heard every word. Sam had stopped the engine.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said one of the most cultivated voices she had ever heard off the screen. “My abject apologies for stopping you so abruptly—”

“Watdidja do it for then?” Sam asked unpleasantly. “Stealing buses, now. Think you can get to Cuba on this here?”

He cackled; the passengers joined in loyally, the maiden lady's shrill chuckle and Mr. Woodle's bass guffaw rising over the rest.

“Jolly good,” said the voice, unconvincingly. “Yes indeed.”

“But I'm late now,” said the maiden lady indignantly. “For the bowling league. The rest of them will never forgive me.”

“Illegal,” said Mr. Woodle. “Against some sort of law. Several, possibly.”

Mrs. Hodge decided to enliven the proceedings.

“Don't you come near me,” she howled. “Take my poor little savings, if you must, but don't lay a hand on me or me child!”

“Don't worry, madam,” said Mr. Woodle stoutly. “If he takes another step toward you, I'll—”