Peter May - Runaway

‘Here he comes!’ Luke shouted from the back.

I could see the approaching headlights in the wing mirror. I saw Jeff tensing, and at the last moment he swung the wheel hard right and crossed the centre line into the other lane. The Cortina swerved to avoid us, and I saw its lights veer left and right across empty spring fields, as the driver tried to keep it on the road.

We were on the wrong side of the road now, and the Cortina tried to accelerate through on our inside. Jeff swung left, and there was a deafening bang as the side of the van made contact with the front wing of the car. The Cortina braked, and fell back, lurching violently.

Jeff hung on to the wheel, grimly trying to bring the Thames back under control without braking. But we all knew that he couldn’t keep this up. The Cortina came screaming up again on our outside.

And I shouted, ‘Left, Jeff! Go left here.’

There was a narrow country road, cutting off at an angle just ahead. A signpost to a place called Thorner. Jeff braked fiercely, then pulled hard to the left, and we slid more than turned off, the back of the van snaking behind us, before Jeff regained control.

The Cortina overshot the turn, and I saw its brake lights as we turned. Its wheels had lost their grip on the wet surface and the car was sliding sideways down the middle of the road. Then I lost sight of it behind the hedgerows.

We were now on Thorner Lane. But there was no sign of Thorner itself. Just a long, straight road that disappeared beyond the reach of our headlights. Jeff accelerated to a dangerous speed.

And Luke’s voice came from behind us. ‘They’re back again.’

I could see the lights of the Cortina in the mirror. It was still a long way behind us, but there was never any doubt that it would catch us up. This, though, was a much narrower road, and if Jeff stuck to the middle of it, then there was no way for the Cortina to overtake.

Which is when I saw the lights of a car coming in the opposite direction.

I glanced at Jeff. His teeth were clenched, his jaw set and his focus dead ahead. He made no attempt to slow down.

‘Jeff,’ I almost shouted at him. ‘You’ll never get past him at this speed.’

His face was lit up by the lights of the oncoming car. Rachel put her feet up on the dash again to brace herself, and the driver of the approaching vehicle flashed his lights several times

‘Jeff!’ I almost screamed at him, but it still made no impression. Now I could see the faces of the driver and his passenger ahead of us. ‘Jesus! They’re cops!’

At the last moment Jeff pulled the van to the left and the oncoming police car swung to our right, mounting the verge and losing control as we passed it. We all turned to look out the back to see what had happened. The police car slewed to a stop, side-on in the middle of the road, and the braking Cortina slid sideways into it. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. By the time the Cortina hit the police car it couldn’t have been going at any more than five or ten miles an hour — not enough for anyone to get hurt — but I could imagine only too well the panic in one car and the fury in the other.

I looked over at Jeff again, and saw what I could have sworn was a smile on his lips. There was madness in his eyes.

‘You’re insane,’ I shouted at him. ‘Aff your bloody heid!’

He kept his foot to the floor, and through a copse of black trees we saw the lights of Thorner twinkling in the darkness ahead.

‘We need to get off the road.’ Luke’s voice was very close behind us, and I turned to see the fear blanched in his face. ‘The cops’ll be coming after us now.’

Jeff eased off on the accelerator as we drove into the village. A long street of old honeycomb-yellow stone cottages and newer brick-built houses lost among rolling wooded country. There was blossom on some of the trees, caught pink and white in our headlights, along with the spring green of an enormous weeping willow. Yet more trees stood winter stark and glistening against the blackness beyond them. We passed the stone gables and bay windows of the Mexborough Arms, set back behind an empty car park, and at the foot of the hill I saw the bell tower of the village church standing square at the corner of a sharp bend in the road. We were still going too fast to take it comfortably.

‘Slow down, Jeff.’

He ignored the low imperative in my voice.

And so I shouted now. ‘For God’s sake, slow down!’

I don’t know where his head was, but it was only at the last moment that he seemed to realize he wasn’t going to make it and stood on the brakes. The wheels locked and simply slid on the wet tarmac, as if on ice, and we sailed almost gracefully, turning as we went, to plough straight into the church gates.

The noise was ear-splitting. A deafening bang followed by the screaming of metal on metal. Then a strange, almost eerie silence. The engine had stalled, and the only sound was the hiss of steam escaping from a fractured radiator. Nobody spoke. I looked at Jeff and saw that he had cracked his head on the door column. Blood was trickling down his forehead. Rachel was almost on top of me, but miraculously neither of us was hurt. The back of the van was a chaos of bodies and equipment.

‘You okay back there?’ I don’t know why I was whispering.

But Dave whispered back. ‘No, we’re not. I’m gonnae kill that eejit!’

‘We’ve got to go!’ It was the urgency in Luke’s voice that shook us out of our state of shock. ‘Take only what you can carry.’

He pushed the back doors open, and I felt cold, damp air flooding in. The three in the back jumped down on to the road. I could see lights coming on in houses all around us.

Jeff still seemed dazed. ‘What about my drums? My dad’ll kill me.’

‘You’re already dead, Jeff.’

I climbed out of the van and ran round the back to get my bag and my guitar in its hard black carry-case. Heavy, but I wasn’t leaving it behind. Dave grabbed his, too.

Luke went and pulled Jeff down from the driver’s side. ‘Come on, man, we’ve got to get out of here.’

And as startled residents, so rudely awakened from their sleep, started to emerge from doorways and paths, the six of us ran back up the road in the rain towards the pub. Several voices called after us, but we never looked back.

At the Mexburgh Arms a road turned off to the right and there was a sign for Thorner Station.

Luke said, ‘If we can get to the station, then we can follow the track out of here without touching the road.’

The distant sound of a police siren drifted through the damp night, hastening our progress away from the main street. The road curved to the right beyond the pub, past a bowling green that lay mired in shadow. On the other side of the street a collection of stone-built farm buildings clustered in the dark. Past them, on the rise, stood the low silhouette of Thorner Victory Hall, and Station Lane cut off to the right. The sweet scent of warm manure filled the night air as we ran silently past Manor Farm towards the arch of a stone bridge and a railway cutting that ran beneath it.

The lane then rose steeply upwards to the station itself, which stood in darkness at the top of the embankment. The gate to the platform was padlocked, and all the windows of the brick station house were boarded up. There was a weathered poster pasted to the wall. Station Closed due to Beeching Cuts .

I said, ‘Maybe we can lie low here for a few hours out of the rain, then head off before it gets light.’

‘Well, we’re no’ gonnie meet any trains, that’s for sure,’ Dave said.

I climbed over the gate, and the others passed their bags and guitars across to me before climbing over themselves. By what little ambient light leaked through the trees from the village, we could see that the platform was littered with debris. The rails themselves had already been lifted, and were laid along the side of the track awaiting collection. There was a sad sense of abandonment about the place, haunted by the imaginary ghosts of all the passengers who must once have passed this way, the distant echo of forgotten steam trains lost in the mists of railway history. An old timetable pasted to the wall listed all the stations from Leeds to Wetherby. Scholes, Thorner, Bardsey, Collingham Bridge...