Dick Francis - The Danger

With luck, I thought, Giuseppe-Peter and I would in the end negotiate a reasonable price for Morgan Freemantle, and the Senior Steward would return safely home: and that, I supposed, was what I had basically come to America to achieve. After that… for myself… it depended on how certain Giuseppe-Peter was that he could vanish… and on how he felt about me… and on whether he considered me a danger to him for life.

Which I would be. I would be.

I didn't see how he could possibly set me free. I wouldn't have done, if I had been he.

I thrust the starkly unbearable thought away. While Morgan Freemantle lived in captivity, so would I… probably.

'Tomorrow," Giuseppe-Peter said, 'when I come, you will say on the tape that one of Freemantle's fingers will be cut off next week on Wednesday, if three million pounds are not paid before then.'

He gave me another long calculating stare as if he would read my beliefs, my weaknesses, my fears, my knowledge; and I looked straight back at him, seeing the obverse of myself, seeing the demon born in every human.

It was true that we were alike, I supposed, in many ways, not just in age, in build, in physical strength. We organised, we plotted, and we each in our way sought battle. The same battle… different sides. The same primary weapons… lies, threats and fear.

But what he stole, I strove to restore. Where he wantonly laid waste, I tried to rebuild. He crumbled his victims, I worked to make them whole. His satisfaction lay in taking them, mine in seeing them free. The obverse of me…

As before he turned away abruptly and departed, and I was left with an urge to call after him, to beg him to stay, just to talk. I didn't want him to go. I wanted his company, enemy or not.

I was infinitely tired of that clearing, that tree, that mud, that cold, those handcuffs. Twenty-four empty hours stretched ahead, a barren landscape of loneliness and discomfort and inevitable hunger. It began raining again, hard slanting stuff driven now by a rising wind, and I twisted my hands to grip the tree, hating it, trying to shake it, to hurt it, furiously venting on it a surge of raw, unmanageable despair.

That wouldn't do, I thought coldly, stopping almost at once. If I went that way, I would crack into pieces. I let my hands fall away. I put my face blindly to the sky, eyes shut, and concentrated merely on drinking.

A leaf fell into my mouth. I spat it out. Another fell on my forehead, I opened my eyes and saw that most of the rest of the dead leaves had come down.

The wind, I thought. But I took hold of the tree again more gently and shook it, and saw a tremor run up through it to the twigs. Three more leaves fell off, fluttering down wetly.

Two days ago the tree had immovably resisted the same treatment. Instead of shaking it again I bumped my back against it several times, giving it shocks. I could feel movement in the trunk that had definitely not been there before: and under my feet, under the earth, something moved.

I scraped wildly at the place with my toes and then circled the tree and sat down with a. rush, rubbing with my lingers until I could feel a hard surface come clear. Then I stood round where I'd been before, and bumped hard against the trunk, and looked down and saw what I'd uncovered.

A root.

One has to be pretty desperate to try to dig up a tree with one's fingernails, and desperate would be a fair description of Andrew Douglas that rainy November morning.

Let it pour, I thought. Let this sodden soaking glorious rain go on and on turning my prison into a swamp. Let-this nice glorious fantastic loamy mud turn liquid… Let this stubborn little tree not have a tap root its own height.

It rained. I hardly felt it. I cleared the mud from the root until I could get my fingers right round it, to grasp. I could feel it stretching away sideways, tugging against my tug.

Standing up I could put my foot under it; a knobbly dark sinew as thick as a thumb, tensing and relaxing when I leant my weight against the tree trunk.

I've got all day, I thought, and all night.

I have no other chance.

It did take all day, but not all night.

Hour by hour it went on raining, and hour by hour I scraped away at the roots with toes and fingers, baring more of them, burrowing deeper. The movement I could make in the trunk slowly grew from a tremble to a protesting shudder, and from a shudder to a sway.

I tested my strength against the tree's own each time in a sort of agony, for fear Giuseppe-Peter would somehow see the branches moving above the laurels and arrive with fearsome ways to stop me. I scraped and dug and heaved in something very near frenzy, and the longer it went on the more excruciatingly anxious I became. Given time I would do it. Given time… Oh God, give me time.

Some of the roots tore free easily, some were heartbreakingly stubborn. Water filled the hole as I dug, blocking what I could see, hindering and helping both at the same time. When I felt one particularly thick and knotty root give up the contest the tree above me lurched as if in mortal protest, and I stood up and hauled at it with every possible muscle, pushing and pulling, wrenching, thudding, lying heavily against the trunk, digging in with my heels, feeling the thrust through calves and thighs; then yanking the tree this way and that, sideways, like a pendulum.

A bunch of beleagured roots gave way all together and the whole tree suddenly toppled, taking me down with it in rough embrace, its branches crashing in the rain onto a bed of its own brown, leaves, leaving me breathless and exultant… and still… still… fastened.

Every single root had to be severed before I could get my arms out from under them, but I doubt if barbed wire would have stopped me at that point. Scratching and tugging, hands down in water, kneeling and straining, I fought for that escape as Pd never thought to fight in my life; and finally I felt the whole root mass shift freely, a tangled clump of blackly-sprouting woody tentacles, their grip on the earth all gone. Kneeling and jerking I got them up between my arms, up to my shoulders… and rolled free into a puddle, ecstatic.

It took not so very much longer to thread myself through my own arms, so to speak, bottom first then one leg at a time, so that I ended with my hands in front, not behind my back; as unbelievable improvement.

It was still raining and also, I realised, beginning to get dark. I went shakily over to the laurels on the opposite side of the clearing from where Giuseppe-Peter had appeared, and edged slowly, cautiously, between two of the glossy green bushes.

No people.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself, trying to make my knees work efficiently instead of wanting to buckle. I felt strained and weak and in no shape for barefoot country rambles, but none of it mattered. Nothing mattered at all beside the fact of being free.

I could hear only wind and rain. I went on and came shortly to a sketchy fence made of strands of wire strung between posts. I climbed through and walked on and suddenly reached tie top of an incline, the wood sloping away in front; and down there, through the trees, there were lights,

I went down towards them. I'd been naked so long that I'd stopped thinking about it, which was somewhat of a mistake. I was concerned only to get away from Giuseppe-Peter, feeling that he still might find me gone and chase after. I was thinking only, as I approached what turned out to be a very substantial house, that I'd better make sure it wasn't where Giuseppe-Peter was actually staying before I rang the doorbell.

I didn't get as far as ringing the bell. An outside light was suddenly switched on, and the door itself opened on a chain.

A pale, indistinguishable face inspected me and a sharp, frightened female voice said 'Get away. Get away from here.'