The man cried out each time, but the third yell was much weaker than the first. Miss Butters concluded that the security of her handbag was no longer in doubt. She released her grip on the man’s neck and prepared to demand that he identify himself and give an account of his behaviour.
He staggered a little away from her and remained stooped, his head averted, while he recovered his breath.
Miss Butters charitably allowed him a whole minute for this purpose. It was a mistake. At her sternly boomed “Well?” the man launched himself into flight with such suddenness and vigour that the stolidly built Miss Butters knew that pursuit would be not only undignified but almost certainly useless.
She watched him career back along the path towards the river road, an amorphous shape that soon merged with the darkness.
There was one thing about his mode of escape which much intrigued her. After his first five or six paces of fairly straight-forward sprinting, he appeared to turn through ninety degrees and yet fully to maintain speed, even in that highly unconventional relationship to the axis of his escape route, by a series of sideways leaps and scuttles.
He runs like a scalded crab, reflected Miss Butters. How very queer.
The rest of her walk was uneventful and she spent the half hour it took her to reach the lighted streets of Flaxborough in mental formulation of a lucid and practical report of her experience. That was what the police would expect, and that was what she, a conscientious citizen, would give them.
It did not occur to Miss Butters, as it might have done to a more timid or a more devious woman, to avoid by silence the inconvenience and distress of involvement in a criminal inquiry. Assailants in woods were, to her mind, in exactly the same category as gas leaks and unfenced pits and maltreated horses. Dealing with them was what Authority existed for.
She tapped firmly on the ‘Inquiries’ window just inside the entrance to the Fen Street police station.
The window was slid up noisily by a rather surprised-looking young constable. The top four of his uniform buttons were undone. He gave the impression of a householder getting ready for bed.
“I wish to report having been accosted by a footpad,” Miss Butters announced.
The policeman wrinkled his nose—not very attractively, thought Miss Butters—and said: “You what?”
“I have been accosted. I wish to report it.”
The constable stared at her dubiously for some seconds, then rubbed his jaw with one hand and with the other dragged nearer an enormous ledger on the shelf beneath the window.
“Name?”
“Butters. Miss Brangwyn Butters.”
She spelled this out for him while he wrote it in one of the columns of the ledger. He had all the dash of a monumental mason with arthritis.
“Age?”
She told him. He began the task of recording her address. The night was young.
“Now then,” he said at last, “what’s this you said happened?”
Miss Butters sighed. “I told you I’d been accosted. In Gorry Wood. By a footpad.”
The constable stared at her. “A what?”
“A footpad. I can’t think of any other way to describe him. A footpad is somebody who lies in wait to rob people.”
“Never heard of it.”
“In that case, you are very ignorant. It is a perfectly ordinary dictionary word.” The constable looked a little hurt. She relented. “Like highwayman, you know. Only without a horse.”
“Ah, he hadn’t a horse, this...what was it you called him?”
Miss Butters was very nearly at the end of her patience. “We’ll just call him a man, shall we? Then perhaps we shall waste no more time. I am late home already and my mother will be getting anxious. All I ask is...”
A shadow fell across the open pages of the report book.
“Is there anything I could do to help this lady, Mr Braine?”
A tall, very fair-haired man in civilian clothes had arrived to tower (rather god-like, Miss Butters thought) over the constable’s shoulder. She gave him a small, grateful smile.
The uniformed man moved respectfully aside and indicated what he had written so far. “She says she’s been having some trouble with”—his glance flickered disbelievingly to Miss Butters—“what she calls a footpad. Is that right, madam?”
Miss Butters nodded. (Braine, she was thinking—no, surely too good to be true.)
Into the tall man’s benignly watchful eye came sudden concern. “You’ve been attacked?”
“Yes, I suppose I have.”
At once he was at the door of the office, beckoning her in, taking her arm. He gave her Constable Braine’s chair and sent its late occupant to fetch her a cup of tea from the canteen.
“You’re not hurt?”
“No, oh no, he didn’t actually hurt me. Rather the other way round.” She permitted herself a tiny nibble at the sin of pride.
