with the faintest of metallic sounds, and tested it and found it locked. After that they had more freedom to move, more insulation between themselves and their enemies, and they could concentrate on saving time, which was the most vital factor of all. They had to be well down the slate staircase to the inlet before the hunters found their way round the corner of the house to the rear terrace and the faint, lambent plane of the seascape beyond.
The boat was the only card they had left. Why, oh, why had she listened to her tidy, housekeeper’s mind, and sent him to lock it away in the boat-house again? If it had still been riding at the jetty it would have saved them minutes now.
Out through the kitchen, out past the store, and Luke spared a moment to turn the key of the back door behind them. It slowed their retreat, but it completed the picture of an empty cottage, if only they could be far enough down the path to be out of earshot. There was no moon yet, but a faint starlight that brushed the flags of the tiny terrace, and gleamed on the level places in the pathway down the cliff. Thank God for the twists and turns in that erratic descent, that would take them out of sight within seconds. Sound would be a more dangerous betrayer.
Luke plunged to the edge of the terrace and led the way down in the dusk. He was on a path he knew, and could make good speed on the descent, but out of that complex of rocks the smallest rattle of a stone displaced would start a volley of rising echoes; and those characters out on the gravel weren’t going to waste much time getting into the house. A shot will open a lock, if there’s no other means at hand.
Luke put all thoughts out of his head for the moment, and concentrated on keeping his footing at a crazy speed, and bracing his left arm steadily to give Bunty a safety barrier from falling as she leaped and slid and bounded after him, and a grab handle whenever her foot stepped askew on the slates. The way was narrow as well as steep, his body would prevent her from crashing down towards the sea, even if she lost her footing. Whenever they reached one of the more level stretches he took her hand, but on the patches of broken shingle, laid with loose slate slabs for steps, she pressed close at his back and held by his shoulder. And at every step he quivered to the touch of her fingers with delight and agony, and wished her away, miles away in safety out of this mess in which he had involved her. But even then wishing her away was almost more than he could manage.
They were half-way down when he heard the back door of the cottage crash open above them, and at the same time the sound of running feet on the paved path that led round the house to the seaward side. One man had come round; two, probably, had gone through. Round the other end of the house it was impossible to go, it was built out to the edge of the drop. You could climb below safely enough if you had a fairish head for it, but not in the dark. Luke gripped the key of the boat-house in his pocket, his knuckles pressed for comfort against the gun. A finger of light from a torch fumbled down into the crevices of the rocks. They were sheltered from it by the tortuous turns, and close to the jetty now, but the pursuers could not fail to see the path, and the roof of the boat-house a sheen of grey in the sudden beam. With a light they could cover that descent only too quickly.
He was so intent on the movements of the men above that the movement below took him by surprise, bringing him up shocked and short like a blow to the heart.
A fourth man rose out of the shadows and bulked in their path darkly, blocking the way. The large, square- shouldered shape, neckless and muscular, closed the passage between the rocks solidly. A flat grey voice like the flat grey slates said: “Hold it right there, mate! Stay put, and get your hands up!”
Luke, arrested in mid-flight on steps steeper than average, pulled up with a suddenness that jarred him from heels to head, and cost Bunty her balance. Her foot slipped on a shifting stone, an unstable slate tilted forward as she stepped on it, and she was down on hands and knees, clinging to the rock, the displaced slab hard and heavy against her side. Some of the stones that supported its forward edge had rolled out of position and made it treacherous. She shoved her shoulder under it and heaved it back to its proper level to free herself of its weight, and the moment of confusion and alarm dissolved in understanding at that instant, and she knew they were not going to get away. They’d underestimated their opponents. The lay-out had been surveyed from the seaward side before ever the car drove up to the house. And this way, too, was closed to them.
She scrambled to her feet again, covered by Luke’s body. She heard the hard voice below say impatiently: “You heard me, chum. Let’s see your hands.”
Luke fired from the pocket of his coat on the last word. He hadn’t known he was going to do it, he hadn’t even realised that his thumb had already shoved off the safety catch. Still less consciously had he calculated the angle of the drop before him, and tilted the thing well down in his pocket, to startle and cripple, perhaps, but not to kill. At this distance even he couldn’t miss, the whole crevice between the rocks seemed to be full of the bulky body, with the lambent native silver of the sea outlining it clearly. He and Bunty had the dark and solid rock behind them; but even so, he reached for her with his left hand as he fired with the right, and drew her close to his back, covered from sight by his body.
The report was sharp and loud between the rocks, and followed closely by a gasping grunt and a curious, waspish whine. The dark shape before him buckled suddenly sideways, clutching at its knee, and went down in a toppling fall on to the stones, sliding downhill a yard with scrambling feet before it found a stable resting-place. What astonished Luke most was that the other gun didn’t go off, but he had no time to speculate on the reason. Without a word he launched himself forward down the path, swung Bunty before him past the grovelling, groaning, cursing man on the ground, and charged after her.
The threshing shape heaved suddenly, as if the rock had risen under him; an arm came up and reached for him. He hurdled the body blindly, felt the fingers claw at his ankle and miss their hold. Then he came down by ill luck on shifting stones that rolled away from under his foot and flung him on his back, knocking the breath out of him, and half the sense with it. The hand that had missed his ankle scrabbled after him hungrily, and found a grip on his hair. A solid weight rolled over on top of him, holding him down; the hand shifted to his mouth. Not to his throat, his mouth! That was it, that was why no shot, either, he realised, struggling to free his arms from the weight that pinned them. They wanted no sound carrying for miles up-coast and down over the sounding-board of this placid sea. This back-gate guard had been told to threaten, not to fire. In that case Luke had good reason to be glad of his own single shot; someone, somewhere, might have heard. Bunty, he thought desperately, wrenching one arm clear and jabbing upwards viciously under a thick jaw, scream,
An arm swung at his head, and he rolled aside from the blow and felt something hard graze his temple and clang like metal on the rock. Whalebone fingers ground deep into his cheeks, clamping his lips against his teeth. He fought for breath, and heard his opponent pumping in sobbing gasps of air and spending them in incoherent, monotonous curses, hissing with pain between the words that were hardly words. When the weight on top of him shifted for another attempt at clubbing him with the gun, he heaved up one knee and tried to throw his incubus from him, but it was too heavy to be lifted or unbalanced so easily. And from somewhere above, a crazy accompaniment to this disordered scene, came the busy, absorbed sound of feet descending endlessly towards them, like the Goons padding along some impossibly long radio corridor to open the door to one more visitor to Bedlam.
It was Bunty, however, who reached them first, Bunty with a sizable stone in her two hands, and some furious atavism stirring in her that made fear of secondary importance. It was not a particularly well-chosen stone, but she had had to grope for it in the dark. Nor was she very deft at using it; perhaps she was right, and they both of them had some built-in prohibition against killing that handicapped them badly in a situation like this. But she did her
