Peter May - Runaway

They knew the coach had arrived when the pensioners’ party from Newcastle flooded noisily into the hall, gaggles of women and groups of men finding their seats at separate tables as if there were some unspoken ban on integration of the sexes. Almost immediately, volunteers started serving up the soup, a thick vegetable concoction of lentils and barley.

Jack supped his, and dipped in some bread. Then he said mischievously, ‘Our Ricky here’s a bit of a soldier, Mr Maltby.’

The old man looked at Ricky, surprised, and cast an appraising eye over him. ‘Really? You don’t look very fit, son.’

Ricky blushed.

‘That’s because he’s an armchair soldier, Mr Maltby. TV screens and remote controllers. It’s all a game to him.’

Mr Maltby shook his head gravely. ‘War’s no game, son. It’s a bloody tragedy. Just be grateful you’ve never had to do it for real, and I pray you never will.’

Ricky glared at his grandfather in wordless fury, and they finished their soup in silence.

The main course was roast beef in gravy with Yorkshire pudding and mashed potato. As he ate, old Mr Maltby wiped away a dribble of gravy from his chin with the back of his hand. Miraculously, the drop of mucus still clung to the end of his nose.

Then out of the blue he said, ‘Poor bastard.’

‘Who?’ Maurie said.

‘Ricky.’

Jack frowned. ‘My Ricky?’

‘No, Harrods Ricky.’

And when it seemed as though he wasn’t going to elucidate, Jack said, ‘What happened to him?’

Mr Maltby sat with his fork raised halfway to his mouth, roast beef dripping gravy back on to his plate, and he appeared to drift off in space and time to a place only he could see and hear. Then he lowered his fork back to his plate.

‘I killed him,’ he said.

And although the babble of voices raised in chatter and laughter rose up like mist all around them, there was a strange pall of silence at their end of the table that none of it could penetrate.

Finally, Dave said, ‘How dae ye mean?’

Jack could see emotion welling up inside the old man. A tremble of his lower lip, the shaking of his hands as he gripped the edge of the table.

‘You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to, Mr Maltby.’

If he heard, he gave no sign of it. He said, ‘We hadn’t slept for two days. Ricky had learned not to scream or we would sit on him again, but he were still bloody useless. Finally the shelling had stopped, and there were a right unnatural sort of silence on the battlefield. So we took the chance to try and snatch some sleep.’ He shook his head. ‘It were raining, and there was debris everywhere. You know, abandoned jeeps and busted gun emplacements, and more than a few bodies. And Ricky, the stupid bloody bastard, crawls under this burned-out tank without telling anyone. Just so he’d be out of the rain. Well, the rest of us wake up with him screaming again. Took us a minute to find him in the dark. And there he is, pinned under the tank. The bloody thing’s sinking into the mud.’

‘Jees!’ Maurie’s voice punctuated the story and prompted a dramatic pause.

Old Mr Maltby sat lost in his memories, the pain of them only too visible in his eyes.

Finally, he said, ‘Of course, we tried to pull him out. No good. And we tried digging under him, but there were no space. It were just impossible. And the damn thing just keeps sinking. Slow as you like. But crushing him to death, a fraction of an inch at a time.’

He lifted his head and looked around the faces of Jack and Dave and Maurie and Ricky. And he seemed suddenly to return to the present. ‘What would you have done? I mean, he’s screaming. Not just wi’ fear now. But in agony. And not a damn thing any of us could do.’

‘What did you do?’ Ricky’s face was milk white, eyes like saucers, gazing in horror at the old man.

‘I took out me gun, lad. I put it to his head and I shot him.’

The horror of the moment sat among them like the ghost of the Harrods hat salesman himself.

‘The look in his eyes in that moment before I pulled the trigger—’ Mr Maltby’s voice choked itself off. And there was a moment before he found it again. ‘It’s a look that’s lived wi’ me every moment of every day since.’ He swallowed, and Jack saw tears tremble then spill from bloodshot rims. ‘Went through that whole bloody war without killing a single soul, except for Ricky Tyson. And he were on our side.’

Dessert was some kind of cake in pink custard, which made Jack think of school dinners in the sixties.

The tears had dried up on Mr Maltby’s face by now, although that mucus drip still clung stubbornly to his nose. Almost as if he couldn’t stand it any longer, Ricky took out a clean handkerchief, placed his hand on Mr Maltby’s back and wiped his nose for him.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s better.’

Old Mr Maltby turned and gazed at him, a curious look in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Ricky,’ he said. ‘I’d have done anything to get you out from under that bloody thing. We tried. We did.’ And his eyes filled up again. ‘I hope... I hope, son, that one day you’ll be able to forgive me.’

Ricky looked stricken, and for several long moments seemed at a loss for what to say. Then, in a small voice, he said, ‘Nothing to forgive, Mr Maltby.’

And the old man pressed Ricky’s hand between his two. ‘Thank you, son. You don’t know how much that’s appreciated.’ He paused. ‘You might have been a great hat salesman, but you were a bloody awful soldier.’

The coach driver counted them all on to the bus after the meal was over. ‘You must be the Leeds lot,’ he said to Jack, and cast his eyes over the group of them. ‘A couple missing.’

‘Last-minute cancellations,’ Dave told him, with a surreptitious glance at Jack.

The driver looked at Ricky. ‘And who are you, son?’

Ricky took Maurie’s arm. ‘Mr Cohen’s nurse,’ he said boldly. ‘He wouldn’t be able to make the trip without me.’

‘Fair enough.’ The driver nodded them up the steps. ‘Plenty of seats up the back.’

Ricky helped Maurie all the way to the back of the coach, and they found themselves seats in the back two rows.

‘Quick thinking, Ricky.’ Dave put his hand on Ricky’s shoulder. ‘Very convincing. Especially since you were a doctor yesterday.’ And he laughed.

Ricky sighed theatrically, rolling his eyes, and Jack said, ‘Aye, the boy’s learning.’

Five minutes later the coach pulled away and trundled down the hill towards Leeds. From the ring road they got on to the M621, and finally the M1 itself. Jack sat by the window, gazing out into the afternoon sunshine as urban landscape gave way to suburbs and finally open country.

He wondered about the group whose places they had taken on the coach and what on earth had happened to them. They must have realized long ago that they had missed their pick-up and were going to miss out, too, on their three days of sightseeing in London. He had a momentary pang of conscience, then pushed it aside. Neither Jack nor the others had set out to deceive anyone. It had been a simple case of mistaken identity which had worked in their favour. They were owed a bit of good fortune.

He checked his watch. It would be a three-and-a-half-hour drive, he reckoned. Maybe four, with stops. They would be in London by this evening.

We watched in wonder, and not a little disappointment, as the train made its final approach to King’s Cross Station in London. The last few miles gave on to the backs of dilapidated terraces, mean and blackened by smoke, ugly high-rise flats, and factories pumping their poison into a cold grey sky. London had not earned its moniker of the Big Smoke for no reason.