armpits, wrenching him up from the ground with furious determination, and began to drag herself and him in a stumbling run towards the water’s edge. Heavy and inert, he slipped out of her hold and she clawed at him again, frantic to finish what she had begun.
Only at the last moment, as the van swerved and braked screaming to a stop a few yards short of her, did she give up. She flung the boy from her with a sudden angry cry, and ran like a greyhound for her car. Her hair had slipped out of its beautiful, austere coil, it streamed down over her shoulders as she ran, shrouding the whiteness of her face. Leslie, tumbling from the van before it was still, snatched vainly at her arm as she fled, and then, abandoning her for what was more urgent, plunged upon the boy who lay huddled where she had thrown him.
She had all but done what she had set out to do; a few seconds more and he would have been in the river. His head and one arm dangled over the downward slope of grass, the limp fingers swinging above the edge of the water. Leslie fell on his knees beside him and hauled him well ashore, turning him so that he lay face upwards in the grass. Under the tumbled chestnut thatch Dominic’s face was pinched and grey, the eyes closed. He was breathing with a heavy, short, painful rhythm through parted lips, but at least he was breathing. Leslie felt him all over with hasty hands, and began to hoist the dead weight into his arms. He was just clambering gingerly to his feet under his burden when he heard the Riley start up and soar into speed.
He’d forgotten that she had a lethal weapon still in her hands. She hadn’t finished with them yet. There was room between the water and the standing van for her to drive round and come upon them at speed, and what was there now to restrain her from killing two as readily as one? He was one man, apparently alone, there was room for him in the river with the boy.
The Riley’s headlights whirled round the bulk of the Bedford, straightened out parallel with the river’s edge, and lunged at him in a blinding glare. Caught off balance, staggering beneath the boy’s weight, he broke into a lurching run. He couldn’t hope to get into the trees, where she couldn’t reach them, but he jumped for the van and tried to put a corner of its bulk between him and the hurtling car. She wouldn’t crash the van, she wouldn’t do anything to wreck her own means of escape; she was sane, appallingly sane, and at least you can have some idea of what the sane will do. The blaze of light blinded him, he couldn’t see the van or the ground or the starlit shape of the night any more, he could only hurl himself straight across the car’s path into the dark on the other side.
He caught his foot in the tussocky grass and fell sprawling over his burden beneath the back wheels of the Bedford. The car missed his scrabbling feet by inches, he felt the frosty clumps of the turf crunch close to his heels. Then the light and the rushing bulk were past, and his cringing flesh relaxed with a sob of relief. He eased his weight from the boy and put his face down into his sleeve for a moment, and lay panting, sick with retrospective terror.
The roar of the car receded, swaying up the rutted track towards where Jean waited. Leslie struggled out of his weakness and came to his feet and began to run, but what was the use? A couple of minutes and the Riley would be out on the road. He cupped his mouth in his hands and bellowed in a voice that shook the frost from the trees: “Jean, look out! Stand clear!”
She surely wouldn’t try anything crazy? Would she? How could you be sure with Jean, who couldn’t bear to be beaten, and would die rather than give in?
Winding along the complex curves of the road from Comerbourne came the headlights of two cars, late but coming fast. Jean was standing in the middle of the road waving her arms peremptorily at the first of them when she heard the labouring sound of the Riley climbing back up the lane, and started and quivered to Leslie’s shout. She ran back to stare frantically into the tunnel of the trees. Not the van, the car. What had happened down there? Where was Leslie? What was he doing? The Hamilton woman shouldn’t get away now, she mustn’t, she shouldn’t, even if it made no difference in the end. Jean ran like a fury and wedged her shoulder under the top bar of the drunken old gate, and dragged it protesting out of its bleached bed of grass. She staggered across the track with it supported on her shoulder, and slammed it home against its solid gatepost on the other side. There was a great wooden latch that still dropped creakingly into place; she lodged it with a crash, and flung herself aside under the hedge as the Riley drove full at the barrier.
The impact burst the bars and sent the weaker gatepost sagging out of true. Wood and glass flew singing through the air, and splinters settled with a strange noise like metallic rain. The car had not the impetus to drive straight through the obstacle, it was brought up shuddering and plunging in the wreckage of the gate, the windscreen shivered, one lamp ripped away. The engine died. Jean crouched quivering in the midst of a sudden teeming activity that shuddered with movement and purpose, but made no more sound.
She opened her eyes and uncovered her ears and crawled shakily out of the hedge. Beyond the impaled Riley the van came rocking gently up the slope; she saw Leslie’s disordered hair and anxious face staring over the wheel, and in the passenger seat beside him Dominic’s unconscious head lolled above the fringe of Barney Wilson’s old utility rug. Both the cars from Comerbourne were drawn up along the edge of the road, and five men in plain clothes had boiled out of them and taken charge of everything. Two of them were closing in one on either side of the wrecked car. Two more were dismembering the ruins of the gate and hoisting them aside to clear the way. And the fifth, who was George Felse, had made for the Bedford and climbed in beside his son, easing the dangling head into the hollow of his shoulder and feeling with gentle fingers through the tangled hair.
Dominic came round upon a rising wave of fear and pain, to feel himself held in someone’s arms like a baby, and someone’s ringers tenderly smoothing out the frenzied ache that hammered at his head. Making the inevitable connection, he settled more closely and thankfully into the comforting shoulder, and feeling the rush of tears stinging his eyelids, hastened to cover himself.
“Mummy, my head hurts!” he muttered querulously. But it was his father’s voice that said gently in reply: “Yes, old lad, I know. You lie quiet, we’ll find you something to stop it.”
The discrepancy jolted him seriously, and he opened his eyes to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, but closed them again very quickly because the effort was very painful. However, he’d had time to see the face that was bending over him, and there was no doubt about it, it was his father. Well, if that was how he felt about things it didn’t look so bad, not so bad at all. Dominic had expected at the very best to find himself in the doghouse. Maybe if you’re really going to kick over the traces in a big way it pays to get yourself half killed in the process. Even if it does hurt.
Drifting a little below the surface of full consciousness, he remembered the one thing he had to get settled, the only thing in the world that really mattered.
“It wasn’t Kitty,” he said, not very distinctly but George understood. “You do know now, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dom, we know now. Everything’s all right, everything’s fine, you just rest.”
He was sinking unresisting into a stupor of weariness and relief, tears oozing between his closed eyelids into George’s shoulder, when a sudden appalling sound startled him into full consciousness again. Someone had laughed loudly and angrily, a discord harsh as a scream.
He opened his eyes wide, his wrung nerves vibrating, and beyond George’s head and Duckett’s solid shoulders, beyond Jean and Leslie clinging hand in hand, he saw a wild creature in a torn black suit, her cheek cut by flying
