best. The stone thudded against the back of a classically Alpine skull, low towards where the neck should have been if there had been any neck, and rolled down hunched shoulders to bounce away down the slope. The throttling hand slackened, the weight slumped with a grunt over Luke’s threshing body. Bunty, taking what she could find, reached over the wide shoulders to seize the lapels of the man’s raincoat, and drag it back with all her strength to pinion his upper arms. Luke heaved himself clear with a convulsion that sent them all three slipping and staggering downhill; and Bunty caught at his hand and helped to pull him to his feet.
They were at the edge of the jetty, hand in hand, the injured man dragging himself along after them half- stunned and moaning, when the three men from above overtook and fell upon them. Luke, swinging to fight them off a shade too late, went down heavily beneath two of them, and stayed down. Bunty, turning at the edge of the water, watched the small, murderous black eye of a revolver advance at leisure until it touched her breast.
“All righ’t, sweetheart,” said the small, murderous, black-avised man behind the gun, in just the mild, metallic, indifferent voice the gun might have used, “upstairs again, and see and be a lady on the way. Your boy-friend here can’t afford no slips on your part. He’s got enough troubles as it is. Walk!”
Bunty walked, at an even and sedate pace, leading that procession up the cliff-path and back to the house, with the gun not a yard from her back, and a torch pricking her consciousness occasionally to remind her that every step was watched. She walked with the same erect stride she always had, stretching her long legs to the steeper steps without slackening speed. There was nothing she could do, except make it clear that she had no tricks to play. Luke was only a few yards behind her, and the enemy, though reduced to three against two, had now four guns at their disposal, and none ranged against them. There was no sense in provoking death.
Far behind them among the rocks, the wounded man hoisted himself painfully from stair to stair, dragging one leg and leaving a long smear of blood behind him. When the prisoners were safely in the house and under guard, perhaps one of his fellows would help him to finish the journey. Now it seemed that he was of no importance. His thin, quiet cursing followed them up to the terrace, and behind it like a backcloth rolled the soft, absorbed night- singing of a calm sea.
How queer, thought Bunty involuntarily, I still don’t know where we are. Somewhere on the east coast of Scotland. North of Muirdrum, I remember the policeman there thought he’d recognised Luke’s car passing through. Luke mentioned going into Forfar. Her mind sketched in, with lightheaded clarity, a map of the Angus coastline. Somewhere between Arbroath and Montrose? Up the coast there must be Lunan Bay, and farther north are the Bullars of Buchan, where Doctor Johnson insisted on sailing into the rock cauldron in a small boat. You can only do it when it’s calm.
Luke came up the path after her between two guns. The key of the boat-house had been taken from him along with the gun from the same pocket. All their evidence lost. He was bruised, sore and sick with chagrin; but most of all he raged that he had not sent Bunty home or taken her to the safety of the nearest police station in the morning, while there’d been time, time they’d frittered away in supposing that they had only the police to contend with. Now they knew better, and now was too late.
But at every step he felt that there was something wrong, that something about Bunty was not as he had expected it to be, and his battered and confused mind could not run the discrepancy to earth. Not until they were hustled and prodded through the back door into the kitchen, and there penned in a corner until someone found the fuse-box. The wounded man, out in the darkness, laboriously groaned and fumbled his way up towards the terrace, and no one seemed to care. If you’re incapacitated, you’re finished with. Throw the broken one away and get a new one. The modern trend even with human beings, it seemed. Luke shivered, but even in the middle of this horror there was a grain of comfort that glowed securely, so clear was the division between himself and these people with whom, for a while, he had been confusing himself.
It was worth finding out, even if it was the last thing he did.
“Draw the curtains,” ordered the irresponsibly cheerful voice from inside the broom-cupboard. “Don’t want to embarrass the visitors, do we? Neighbours are nosy enough without encouraging ’em.” A curious, high-pitched giggle echoed brassily out of the enclosed space.
“They’re drawn,” said the small, dark, deadly one. “Get on with it.”
“All right, the current’s on.”
The third man flipped down the light-switch, the round fluorescent fixture blinked its daylight eye once, and then glowed steadily. And there they were, all five of them, two prisoners and three captors. No, six altogether, the lame man was just fumbling his way through the doorway, holding by the latch with all his weight. They hauled him inside not out of any concern for him, but so that they could close the door and keep the light within.
It was then that Luke realised at last what had been wrong with Bunty. How could she have used both hands to heave up that rock and crack this wretch on the head with it? She’d been carrying something when they set out. She wasn’t carrying anything now, except the handbag that swung from her wrist. She had both hands in the pockets of her light grey coat, and was looking round at them all measuringly and warily, her face stonily calm. She met even his eyes, and her expression didn’t change, was significantly careful not to change.
Somewhere, at some moment which he could not locate in his frantic recapitulation, Bunty had disposed of the better part of fifteen thousand pounds. The package of banknotes and Pippa Gallier’s passport and air ticket had vanished without trace.
CHAPTER X
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Nothing else on either of ’em,” reported the giggler, shoving Luke back into the corner of the wicker settee with a careless vigour that made the white frame creak indignantly. “Never thought there would be. I told you these babes are sharper than he reckoned.”
So there was another he, not so far present. They had been gradually coming to some such conclusion. Why should all hands have kept off them so indifferently, otherwise? The one who called the tune wasn’t here yet. These four were merely waiting, and filling in time with the necessary preliminaries while they waited.
Bunty and Luke sat side by side in the two-seater settee, pushed well back into the window embrasure, as far as possible from the door of the living-room. It was easy for one man to control them there. The third man, the youngest, the dimmest, but perhaps the most vicious, too, sat on a chair placed carefully before them, far enough away to be out of their reach, close enough to have them both infallibly covered. He held his gun as though he loved it, as a call-girl might hold diamonds, and his eyes above it were like chips of bluish stone, flat and impervious, a little mad, the cunningly inlaid eyes of a stone scribe from later Egypt, built up with slivers of lapis lazuli and onyx and mother-of-pearl to give a lifelike semblance of humanity. He was dressed in what his kind and generation would certainly classify as sharpish gear, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. Bunty, watching him, sat very still indeed. The little dark man would kill for what seemed to him sufficient reason, and without any qualms except for his own safety afterwards. The other two would probably kill if they were ordered to. But this young one was the kind that might go off without warning, like a faulty grenade, and kill to ease his tension, or relieve his boredom, or simply because it occurred to him momentarily as something it would be fun to do, and no consideration of his own
