anything. We just don’t know.”
“It won’t be a taxi,” Leslie said with certainty. “He’s done something to make things happen.’ It sounds like a man-to-man business.”
“And we don’t even know that they’ll be coming by this road, it could be the main road.”
“If it comes to that, we don’t know they’ll be on either. Anyhow, the police are covering both. What more can we do? I can only take this thing one way at a time, and this is the quietest and loneliest. Headlights ahead there, keep your eyes open.”
The approaching lights were still two or three coils of the winding road distant from them, and perforated by the scattered trees, but they were coming fast. One dancing turn carried them into the intervening double bend, and a second brought them out of it and into full view on one of the brief short stretches. Leslie left his headlights undipped, checking a little and crowding the middle of the road, setting out deliberately to dazzle and slow the other driver. The approaching lights, already sensibly dipped as they turned into the straight, flashed at him angrily, and failing to get a response, stayed up to glare him into realisation of his iniquity. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus beyond the dazzle on the windscreen of the car. Only one face in view there, and not much hope of distinguishing whether man or woman. In a lighted road it might have been easier.
A horn blared at him indignantly. He said: “Oh, lord!” as he pulled aside just far enough to let the long car by. Driven well and peremptorily, and going fast, going with purpose.
“No boy,” said Jean, and instantly gasped and clutched at the dashboard as he braked hard. “Leslie! What are you doing?”
It was instantly clear what he was doing, and he didn’t bother to answer her in words. He was in close under the trees at the side of the road, hauling on the wheel to bring the van about.
“What is it? What did you see? He wasn’t there.”
“Not in sight,” said Leslie, and ran the van backwards with an aplomb he would never have achieved in ordinary circumstances. “Didn’t you recognise the car?” They came about in an accelerating arc that brushed the grass, and whirled away in pursuit of the vanishing rear lights. “Hammie’s! That couldn’t be a coincidence. Thank God I know that car so well it can’t even hoot at me in the dark without giving itself away. And she doesn’t know this van. She’s used to seeing me driving various missiles, but not this.”
Jean huddled against his arm, shivering, but not with cold. “Leslie, if it is her, suppose he isn’t with her any more? Suppose something’s happened already?” She didn’t say that it was unthinkable to suspect Miss Hamilton of crime and violence, because now nothing was unthinkable, every rule was already broken and every restraint unloosed. “Could she have left him somewhere back there on the road?”
He hadn’t thought of that, and it shook him badly. The Riley could be as lethal a weapon as any murderer would need. But he kept his eyes fixed on the receding rear-lights, and his foot down hard. “The police car will be coming along behind.”
“Yes, but the road’s so dark, that black surface, , , “
“She’s turning off,” he said abruptly and eagerly, and stamped the accelerator into the floor; for why, if she was alone and upon innocent business, should she turn off this road to the right? There was nothing there but the remotest of lovers’ lanes, a dead end going down to the river-bank. Not even a lane, really, just a cart-track through the belt of trees, once sealed by a five-barred gate, though it hadn’t been closed for a year or so now, and hung sagging in the grass from its upper hinge. Leslie knew the place well enough from summer picnics long ago. There was a wide stretch of open grass by the river there, where cars could drive right down to the water and find ample room to turn. But what could a woman alone want down there on a frosty October night?
He swung the van round into the mouth of the track, and pulled up. “You get out and wait here for the police car.”
“No,” she said in a gasp of protest, clutching at his arm, “I’m coming with you.”
“Get out! How will they know, if you don’t? They’re nowhere in sight. Oh, God, Jean, don’t waste time.”
She snatched her hand away and scrambled out. He saw her face staring after him all great wide-set eyes in an oval pallor, as he drove down into the darkness between the trees. She didn’t like letting him go without her. They were loose among murders and pursuits and all the things that didn’t normally happen, who could be sure there wouldn’t be guns, too? But what sort of a team were they going to be in the future if they pulled two ways now? She watched the van rock away down the rutted track, and then stood shivering, watching the road faithfully. Leslie’s ascendancy was established in that one decision, when he wasn’t even thinking about their partnership or their rivalry, and it couldn’t have been won in the face of a stiffer test. The hardest thing he could possibly have asked of her was to stand back and let him go into action alone, now, when she had newly discovered how much he meant to her.
The frozen ruts of the track gripped the wheels of the van and slewed it in a series of ricochets down into the rustling tunnel of trees. He couldn’t see the rear-lights of the Riley now, he couldn’t hear its engine; he had all he could do to hold the van and drive it forward fast towards the faint glimmer of starlight that flooded the open river- bank. The trees thinned. He slowed, killing his headlights altogether in the hope of remaining undetected until he got his bearings, and cruised to the edge of the copse.
She had driven the car right out on to the low terrace of rimy grass above the water, sweeping round in a circle to be ready to drive out again. Both doors hung open like beetle-wings spread for flight, and midway between the car and the edge of the bank she was dragging something laboriously along the ground, something limp and slender that hung a dead weight upon her arms. Beyond the two figures moving sidelong like a crippled animal the flat breadth of the river flowed pallid with lambent light, at once swift and motionless, a quivering band of silver.
All down the rough ride under the trees Leslie’s mind had been working coolly and lucidly, telling him exactly what to do. Don’t leave the escape route open. Broadside the van across the track, there’s no other way out. Make sure she shan’t get the car out again. But in the end he didn’t do any of the things his busy brain had been recommending to him, there was no time. She had such a little way to go to the water, and he knew the currents there and could guess at the cold. He didn’t stop to think or consider at all, he just let out a yell of which he was not even conscious, slashed his headlights full on and drove straight at her, his foot down hard. Let her get away, let her run, anything, as long as she dropped the kid in time.
The front wheels left the track and laboured like a floundering sea-beast on to the bumpy shore of the open turf. Rocking and plunging, he roared across the grass, and his headlights caught and held her in a blaze of black and white. She was hit by noise and light together, he saw her shrink and cringe, letting the boy fall for a moment. She wrenched her head up to stare wildly, and he saw a face carved in light, as hard and smooth and white as marble, with panting mouth and gaunt eyes glaring. The eyes had still an unmistakable intelligence and authority, he couldn’t get a finger-hold on the hope that she might be mad. Then she stooped and seized the boy beneath the
