Colin Watson - Bump in the Night

Leaper watched him cross the pavement and stroll off along a road that would lead him into East Street. He was tempted at first to follow, but baulked at the thought of being lured into a second encounter that night with the bland, yet oddly intimidating Mr Hoole.

While he hesitated and listened to the gentle, unhurried footsteps of the departing optician he heard another sound. It was the click of a front gate latch.

Moving round the island, he looked along the radial streets. The first two were empty. The third also seemed so, but as he was about to turn away he thought he noticed a movement twenty or thirty yards along. He stared at the spot and soon saw, a little further away, a shape detach itself from the darkness of a wall, cross a patch of moonlit pavement, and merge into the shadow beyond.

Leaper launched himself gratefully into the role of the silent pursuer.

Adopting a crouching half-run and almost brushing the walls and fences that gave him cover, he reduced the distance between himself and the other traveller on the long, straight street until he was able to slacken pace and keep about twenty yards behind.

Whoever it was he followed seemed to be taking care to walk quietly, but rather in consideration of the hour than in fear of being observed. He maintained short, steady steps and did not glance behind or to either side. He was short, of slim build, and swung only one arm. Beneath the other was a narrow case or package of some kind. Leaper wondered if it were primed.

Almost at the end of the street, where it became a lane serving only a sewage farm and a rose nursery, the small, purposeful figure turned to the right. Leaper reached the corner just in time to see it disappear through a narrow opening between a hedge and a high corrugated iron fence.

Leaper knew this fence; it surrounded the yard and transport bays of the Chalmsbury Carriage Company. The entrance, though, was further along; the path taken by his quarry merely skirted the fence. He could not think where it might lead, unless it was to the canal that cut through the fields about quarter of a mile away. Leaper did not greatly care for canals. They ran lovers’ lanes a close second as the haunt of stranglers, slashers and assailants with staring eyes.

It was with slightly diminished enthusiasm, therefore, that he peeped round the hedge. The path, a cindered track bordered on one side by bushes and rank grass and flanked on the other by the iron fence, was deserted. He ventured a few yards along it and stopped to listen. A lorry engine rumbled spasmodically somewhere fairly close at hand; it probably was one being warmed up in the Carriage Company’s garage. He went on, glancing warily at the bushes on his left.

About a hundred yards from the road, the fence turned off at a right angle. Here the path appeared to end before a wooden barrier. When he came closer Leaper found this was a stile. He looked over into the meadow beyond. In its far corner a grey rectangular shape stood out against the darkness of a group of trees.

Leaper clambered over the stile and made his way through the clinging, dew-soaked grass towards what he soon distinguished as a large trailer caravan. Light shone through the two curtained windows on its nearer side.

He walked slowly round the caravan, like a diver seeking signs of life in a stranded submarine.

It had five windows in all and behind one of them the curtain was not quite fully drawn. He stooped and edged himself below it. There were voices inside the caravan, but Leaper could make out no words. The murmurous exchange seemed to be between only two people. As he listened, it became increasingly desultory and indistinct.

Crouched against the smooth panelling, Leaper grew cramped and dispirited. If the trail he had picked up with such high hope half an hour previously was to end in nothing more dramatic than a goodnight chat between two invisible occupants of a caravan—harmless holidaymakers, probably—he might as well have gone home to bed. Perhaps this was not the Bombing Terror’s night after all. Or could the person he had followed be a decoy, charged with drawing him away from the site chosen for number three in the outrage series? Not even Leaper’s self-esteem could persuade him of this possibility.

He made up his mind at last that he would risk taking a look through the window. If he were spotted he could dash for cover in the copse at the foot of the field or else double back the way he had come and seek sanctuary in the Carriage Company’s yard, where a few drivers or mechanics were bound to be at hand.

He straightened up until his head was level with the small square of glass and a little to one side of it. Then slowly he craned forward. Through the inch-wide curtain parting there came first into view a broad shelf on which were bottles and two glasses. A handbag lay beside an ashtray in which a crumpled half cigarette smouldered.

As these things passed out of his narrow field of vision, a chair entered it. On the chair was a scarf. Then, quite suddenly, the scarf disappeared beneath something else. Leaper decided this to be a jacket or short coat. He waited. A long, dark, flapping shape hit the back of the chair and fell into a heap on the floor. Leaper frowned. Trousers, his mother had always impressed upon him, should be folded even were the heavens to fall. He watched to see if the owner of these trousers would regret his impetuosity and pick them up again.

Instead, a very strange thing happened.

Following the same trajectory as the trousers, a small fawn bundle sailed before Leaper’s eyes and unfurled in mid-air into two slim, translucent pennants that floated down to join the jacket.

At first, Leaper was dazed by this so wildly incongruous arrival of a pair of nylons. Then slowly he began to realize that in assuming the person he followed to be a man he had been deceived by scarf-bound hair, masculine jacket and slacks.

Once the truth dawned that he had only to move his head a couple of inches to glimpse some latter-day Salome at the sixth veil, his cautious reasoning died as a candle flame in the gust from a furnace. He thrust his face against the window with such avidity that his long nose threatened to snap, like a carrot, on the glass.

The woman stood in the centre of the floor, about three feet to Leaper’s left. She seemed to be having difficulty with the fastening of her penultimate garment. Her back was towards the window and she was looking down over her left shoulder, apparently at the owner of the long and hairy arm that Leaper could discern in the lower corner of his view.

The arm was extended in an eagerly helpful attitude, but the woman remained just beyond its reach, frowning slightly as her fingers struggled with a strap.

She was not, in Leaper’s estimation, a young woman. Her face was of the kind he was accustomed to seeing at doors when he sought funeral details: it was a married daughter’s face.

Where had he seen her before? If only she were wearing a normal complement of clothing, he felt sure he would recognize her. As it was, the strange, shocking, but irresistable circumstance of near-nudity somehow rendered her anonymous.

Leaper’s memory was not helped even by the full view of her features that was presented a moment later when, her brassiere having yielded at last, she spun round in a kind of triumphant abandonment and with a brisk, matter-of-fact peeling action, achieved that state which Leaper had wistfully seen advertised outside fairground booths as Beauty Unadorned.

The watcher, whose pressed-brawn visage against the glass had miraculously escaped the woman’s notice, found the revelation an anti-climax. Marriage with the light on, he decided, would be rather awful. He stepped back from the window, feeling weak and sour.

The moon had set and Leaper’s only guide back to the stile was the outline of the Carriage Company’s iron stockade against the faint luminescence of the summer night sky.