Dark Side of the Street

Youngblood looked out over his shoulder at the rain. 'Rather you than me. I'll search the house. There might be a gun around the place.'

'You'll be lucky,' Chavasse said. 'Crowther may be primitive, but he has all the cunning of the fox.'

He took an old oilskin coat down from behind the door and went outside, buttoning it up to his chin. There was a pile of rusting tin cans against the outhouse wall, the accumulation of the years, and he kicked one of them across the yard and followed it into the barn.

It was in the same state of decay as the rest of the place, planks missing from the door, rain drifting down through several holes in the roof. An old cattle truck which still seemed to be in working order was parked by the rear door and the tractor beside it, its metal parts red with rust in the damp atmosphere, looked as if it hadn't functioned for years.

Chavasse kicked the tin can carelessly out of his path. It landed in a pile of mouldy hay in one corner and a couple of brown rats shot into the open to poise in the centre of the floor watching him. Strange how you could never get over some things. His face wrinkled in disgust and he picked up a stone and threw it with all his force, sending them running for the shadows on the other side of the barn.

He went out through the other door, passed through a wilderness of brambles and nettles that had once been a kitchen garden and found the beginnings of a path beyond the crumbling boundary wall.

It lifted through a scattering of alder trees, following the curve of the hillside, climbing steeply to the summit. Quite suddenly he found that he was enjoying himself. There was a fine fresh smell to the rain and the hard physical exercise was something to be enjoyed for its own sake after the long weary months of prison life.

He negotiated a high drystone wall by climbing an ingenious stone stile and found himself on the final slope. Sheep wandered amongst a jumble of great boulders and outcrops of stone, carved by the winds of time into a thousand strange shapes. Above him to the rear of the hut, a clump of thorn trees stood together, their branches twisted and unnatural and pointing, like the fingers of a gnarled hand, in the same direction, forced by the prevailing wind.

The hut was larger than it had looked from the farmyard and in reasonable condition. There was fresh hay inside, dry and sweet and sacks of feedstuffs, probably for the sheep. He lit a cigarette, went back outside again, and crossed to the scattering of rocks that formed the spine of the hill.

From there he had a clear view of the main road in the valley below shrouded in mist, a gleam of water beyond. A reservoir, perhaps a lake? He turned away and with something of a shock, found that Molly Crowther was standing watching him.

She made a strange melancholy figure, fitting perfectly into that dead landscape in an old black coat with the padded shoulders fashionable during the war years. A scarf was bound tightly around the strong peasant face.

'Hello there,' Chavasse said, walking to meet her. 'Did everything go all right?'

She nodded with a curious indifference. 'The priest didn't waste much time. He was getting wet.'

'Where's your father?'

'Gone into the next village with Billy. He dropped me down there on the road. It's quicker to walk over the hill and I wanted to check on the sheep.'

'Do you look after them?'

'Most of the time. Billy helps me when he's in the mood. The trouble is he doesn't know his own strength. One minute he's fondling a lamb, the next its neck is broken. He isn't very reliable.'

'I see your point.' Chavasse hesitated and went on, 'I'm sorry about your mother.'

'I'm not,' she said with brutal frankness. 'She had cancer of the stomach during the last year of her life and refused to go to hospital. I had to look after her. It wasn't much of a time for either of us. She's well out of this place anyway.'

'Don't you like it here?'

She turned on him in surprise. 'Who could like a place like this?' She flung out an arm that seemed to embrace the whole wind-swept landscape. 'Even the trees grow crooked here. It's a dead world. I sometimes think the only living things in it are the sheep and they're like Billy-witless.'

'Why don't you leave?'

'I couldn't before-there was my mother to consider. Now it's too late. I'm squeezed dry. I wouldn't know where to go.'

There was real pain in her voice and Chavasse felt genuinely sorry for her. 'Perhaps your father could help. He may intend to now that your mother has gone.'

'There's only one thing he wants to do for me-God knows he's tried that often enough.' She laughed harshly. 'My father died when I was three. He was a gypsy like my mother. She met Sam Crowther at Skipton Market ten years ago and married him within a week. The worst day's work she ever did in her life.'

'You sound as if you hate him.'

'And this place-all I ever wanted was to get away.'

'Where would you like to go?'

'I've never really thought about it.' She shrugged. 'Some place where I could get a decent job, wear nice clothes, meet people-London, maybe.'

From her vantage point it must have seemed as remote as the moon and just about as romantic. 'Distance lends enchantment,' he told her gently. 'London can be the loneliest place on earth.'

'I'd take my chances.' They had reached one of the boundary walls and she leaned against it, arms folded under her breasts. 'It must be marvelous to be able to go places-do exciting things-like Mr. Youngblood, for instance.'

'Five years in gaol,' Chavasse said. 'Another fifteen to go if they catch him-perhaps more now. Nothing very romantic there.'

'I mean before that,' she said with a slight trace of impatience. 'He was a smuggler, you know.'

'Amongst other things.'

She rushed on, looking animated for the first time since he had known her. 'I read an article about him in one of the Sunday papers last year. They said he was a modern Robin Hood.'

'I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Depends what the original was like.'

'But it's true,' she insisted. 'They published an interview with an old lady who'd been treated with eviction because she couldn't pay her rent. Somebody told Mr. Youngblood. He gave her a hundred pounds and he'd never even met her before.'

Chavasse could have told her that the incident had taken place just after a successful payroll snatch in Essex which was known to have netted Youngblood and his associates thirty-two thousand pounds and had put two armoured car guards in hospital, one with a fractured skull, but he knew when he was wasting his time.

He grinned crookedly. 'He's certainly quite a man.'

She nodded. 'I hope he gets away, clear out of the country. I hope you both do.'

'Do you get many people through here like us?' he said.

'About half a dozen this year.'

'What about George Saxton and Ben Hoffa, Harry's friends? Did you see anything of them?'

Suddenly it was as if shutters had dropped squarely into place and when she glanced at him, the eyes were blank, the face devoid of all expression. 'Yes, they were here.'

'For how long?'

She hesitated and then said slowly, 'I don't know. I didn't see them go.'

Chavasse was aware of a sudden coldness in the pit of the stomach and his throat seemed to go dry. 'Was that unusual?'

'Yes-yes, it was,' she said hesitatingly. 'The others were here for two or three days. I always saw them leave. My step-father took them in the car.'

'Let me get this straight,' Chavasse said. 'You met Saxton and Hoffa down there on the road at night just like us and you brought them up to the farm?'

'That's right.'

'Did you ever see either of them again after that?'

'Never.'

They stood staring at each other dumbly in the rain, the ceaseless sighing of the wind the only sound.

'What happened to them, Molly?' Chavasse said.