Алистер Маклин - The Lonely Sea

Michael hasn’t had his operation yet – but the last letter from John said that the preliminary tests were almost over. And when it does come – well, I know he’ll carry with him the hopes and prayers of every soul in Inverglas.

It wanted almost an hour to sunset when I took the hill road out of Tarnford, but already the brief spring twilight was all but gone. The sky above was dark not with the coming of night but with deeppiled banks of thundercloud that stretched its purple-black shroud over hills and valleys to the limits of the horizon. The rain, thick gleaming metallic rods in my headlights, battered against the windscreen, bounced inches high off the smoking roadway ahead, and churned into a miniature boiling cauldron, the water trapped in the upturned hub-cap of the spare wheel on the engine bonnet.

I didn’t really care about the weather, about the rain, about the dazzling electric blue of the lightning that left the outline of its jagged path imprinted on the retina of the eyeball long seconds after the flash had gone or the continuous artillery rumble of the thunder overhead. I didn’t care, because I was too tired to care. I’d been up all the previous night trying to save one of the Colonel’s thoroughbred mares, and had just reached home when a panic call from Tarnford, where the big cattle fair had been held that day, had had me on my way again. Foot-and-mouth, they had suspected. A false alarm, but I hadn’t taken any chances. Eleven solid hours in the pens, and now I was exhausted.

Perhaps it was because of the exhaustion, perhaps because of the rain streaming down the windscreen, that I didn’t see the swinging red lanterns on the road before me until it was almost too late. I stamped on the brake; brought the Land Rover to a sliding halt, and stuck my head through the side-screen.

‘What the devil are you fools trying to do?’ I said angrily. ‘Get yourselves killed or what?’ I peered at the approaching figure, caught a gleam of wet cape in the reflected light from my headlamps. ‘Police, is it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The voice was curt, impersonal. ‘May we see your driving licence, please?’

‘My driving licence?’ I suppose my voice sounded a bit testy, but as a vet I’d been too long accustomed to share with doctors and ministers of religion a comparative immunity from the attentions of the police. ‘Why on earth –’ I broke off, as memory came flooding back. ‘Of course! Sellers and Riordan.’

Sellers and Riordan. They’d talked about nothing else in the market all day, even the foot-and-mouth had come a very poor second as a topic of interest. With reason. In six short days Sellers and Riordan had become the most talked-about pair in England. In seven brief days they had established themselves the reputation of the two most ruthless, most murderous criminals at large in Britain. In seven brief days they had held up a bank in Stepney, killed the manager, wounded a cashier, shot down a policeman who had tried to stop their escape, been arrested after a desperate struggle, remained in custody exactly 24 hours, then escaped, leaving behind them a dead warder, and another who might live or die.

And now they were supposed to be in the neighbourhood. They had been traced through Amesbury and Frome, had been seen in Glastonbury and now all Devon north of the Moor and Somerset west of the Quantocks were alive with police and an estimated 1200 troops, every man armed. But on Exmoor, in this weather, 12,000 wouldn’t have been too many.

‘Yes, sir, Sellers and Riordan.’ The policeman’s voice, more friendly now, brought me back to the present. ‘Your licence, please.’

I handed it over and he nodded.

‘Mr Cartwright. Thought I recognized you, sir. Going far?’

‘Home. Lipscombe.’

‘Lipscombe, eh? It’s a fair way.’ He looked at me, but I couldn’t see the expression on his face. ‘You’ll watch your step, sir?’

‘They’re as near as that, you think?’ Instinctively, I peered into the surrounding darkness, trying to pierce the slanting curtains of rain.

‘Near enough,’ he said grimly. ‘A constable saw them outside Tiverton, just over an hour ago.’

‘He could have been mistaken.’ I was trying to reassure myself, I knew. ‘Five hundred others are supposed to have seen them today also.’

‘The other 500 didn’t get a bullet in the shoulder,’ he said unemotionally. ‘So be careful, Mr Cartwright. No stopping. No lifts – not even to your own grandmother.’

‘The level crossings?’ I tried to keep the anxiety out of my voice. ‘Three of them between here and Lipscombe. If the gates are shut…’

‘No.’ The policeman shook his head positively. ‘Too obvious. Riordan’s far too cagey to try to board a stopped car there.’

‘But if he does…?’

‘Then it’s curtains for Riordan. There’s a platoon of soldiers with machine-pistols at every crossing in North Devon. You won’t see them. But they’ll be there all right.’

No doubt the policeman was right. No doubt there were hidden guards at the first crossing I came to, but as I sat there in the darkness and lessening rain, engine turned off so that I could listen the more intently while I waited for the goods train to come through, the knowledge didn’t make me feel any the more happy. I kept turning and twisting constantly in my seat, pulling my muffler high around my neck. I could not forget how the warder had died: he had been garrotted. It would have been just as easy for them to knock him out, but they had garrotted him. That would have been Riordan’s work. A wild animal, many called him, an animal devoid of all pity and humanity and fear.

The train took an eternity to pass, but pass it eventually did, and I was on my way even as the gates opened, accelerating to maximum revs through all the lower gears. I kept to the middle of the road, occasionally swerving to right or left as some imaginary figure or shadow appeared to resolve itself vaguely in the rain still lancing diagonally down through the glare of my headlights. I was rattled. I was more than rattled. I was scared, badly scared.

The second level crossing was open and then I was on the twisting, hilly five-mile stretch that lay between there and Hurford, the station that served Lipscombe.

The road was absolutely deserted. I hadn’t seen a cyclist, a car, or pedestrian since I’d left Tarnford. The reason wasn’t far to seek. The western regional radio programme had been interrupted by constant warnings throughout the day, and no one was abroad that night. Fear lay heavy over the land. Even the houses looked afraid, the front doors shut – and doubtless barred – with the windows heavily curtained.

It was near the top of that long rise before you dip down to Hurford that I saw him – first an indistinct barely moving blur by the roadside, a blur that, as I approached, resolved itself into the figure of a man crawling slowly, painfully along the side of the road. Crawling, I realized in horror. He was coming downhill towards me, his head hanging low and shaking stupidly from side to side. Even as I approached, my hands ivoryknuckled on the wheel and staring at him in a kind of sick fascination, he flopped over on to the grass verge and lay quite still, one arm outflung on the road, his face up to the night sky.

Anger overcame fear. I could not doubt that Riordan and Sellers had passed this way, and left their mark. I braked violently, jumped out of the Land Rover while it was still moving and bent over the still pathetic figure.

‘The good Samaritan,’ a jeering voice said behind me. ‘Just stand up, sucker, and keep quite still.’

I stood up and I kept quite still. A tall thin man had appeared from nowhere, and he was standing now in the light of my headlamps, a pistol in his hand: I was enough of a movie addict to know that the clumsy cylinder attached to the muzzle of the pistol was a silencer. I was aware that the man I had seen crawling along had jumped briskly to his feet behind me.