Gunner Kelly

kinder to him, increasing the gap: he was not so much beginning to run to fat as to bulk, which his height and build minimised. When young, with those prize-fighter’s features . . . features contradicted by the fierce hawkish eyes ... he would have been a nasty customer to meet on a dark night lurking in a side-street, with that brawn moderated by the brains behind those eyes.

“So!” He nodded again, and tried to hide his thoughts behind the thick lenses. “There is—” he gestured uncertainly, as though searching for words “—there is at Duntisbury Royal an hotel ... a public house?” He blinked. “With rooms?”

“With—” Audley’s mouth opened, but the renewed roar of the tractor’s engine cut him off.

“STEADY! AHH—!” Cecil’s voice graduated from warning, through anger to despair, summoning both of them.

Benedikt watched, fascinated, as the tractor twisted the trailer out of the field. It was strange how the tractor was all noise and speed, its huge rear-wheels spinning madly, while the trailer appeared to follow more slowly in what seemed like its own silence, to catch the gate-post with the last metre of its frame. The post shuddered, then bent forwards and sideways, distorting and buckling the rails which met it, as the trailer scraped its way to freedom.

“Jeesus-kee-rist-God-damn-and-blast-it-to-hell—” Cecil snatched the cloth-cap from his head and slapped it against his leg in rage.

For a moment Benedikt thought he was going to dash the cap to the dummy1

ground and stamp on it.

“I think I’ve just won a pint,” murmured Audley. Then, without taking his eyes off Cecil, he bent down to Benedikt’s level. “Your best bet is the Eight Bells, just beyond the church on the left when you get to the village. They don’t really have rooms, but if you tell the landlord I sent you they might put you up—” He straightened as Cecil turned towards them, and spread his hands eloquently.

Cecil stared at them darkly for a second or two, then jammed the cap back on his head and set off after the trailer, which was already hull-down in the next undulation of the road in the distance.

Benedikt watched him for another second or two, and then found to his surprise that Audley was no longer beside the car, but was back inside the field again, Striking across it with long strides, as though he had urgent business elsewhere.

He stuck his head out of the window hastily. “Sir—if you please, sir

—!”

Almost without checking, Audley half-twisted in mid-stride. “The-Eight-Bells . . . just-past-the-church—” he waved cheerily “—you-can’t-miss-it.”

After Audley had disappeared into the dead ground of the same slope which had swallowed up the trailer and tractor, Cecil stamping behind, Benedikt sat unmoving for a while. He had encountered David Audley, the legendary David Audley, unexpectedly. But he could not have avoided the encounter— and Audley, on the other hand, could have avoided it, very easily.

Therefore . . . although Audley, equally, could not have expected dummy1

him, but was expecting someone . . . ?

No. Alternatively, he was not expecting anyone, but he wanted to take a good, close-up look at anyone—any unaccountable stranger

—who did appear in Duntisbury Chase . . . ?

Or ... had it been pure accident? And how, indeed, could it be anything else, to combine Audley, appearing from nowhere in the thirty square miles of the Chase, which contained nowhere of importance—nowhere of human importance, anyway—except Duntisbury Royal itself, and its few isolated farmsteads ... to combine Audley with Cecil and the youth on the tractor, to detain Thomas Wiesehofer at this precise point in nowhere?

It could hardly be anything else but pure accident, however curious and inconvenient. Yet all the same, logic notwithstanding, such a pure, curious and inconvenient accident disturbed him when he set Audley’s vast experience and known eccentricity against his own much shorter service. It was not simply that the man was a foreigner—the British, and especially the English, were not all that different, and the differences had been studied and codified—but rather that the man was in some sense a foreigner among his own people, a wild card in his own pack. So, knowing that, he must take nothing for granted.

So ... taking nothing for granted as he shifted the gear change into drive ... he took one keen look round in the rural emptiness of Duntisbury Chase.

There was nothing on the high naked ridge to his right, with its grass as close-cropped asan American pilot’s head; while on his left the undulations he had already noted were broken only by dummy1

those carefully placed individual trees, some tall and well-spread with age, some matire but still youthful, with here and there newly-planted saplinjs, until the ridge fell away finally into the bed of the stream itself.

Across the stream the pattern repeated itself. And what it was, what it all added up to, partly by its own topography, partly by what man had made of it, and finally by the descriptive noun attached to it, was marvellous hunting country: a chase not for pursuing gane on foot, in the more popular European manner, but in the glorious English style, in the red coats which they so oddly (and typically) characterised as ‘pink’—he could almost hear the hounds baying, and the sound of the horn, and the huntsman’s view- halloo as the quarry broke cover—

A loud horn-sound, unmelodious and angry, startled him half out of his seat, hitting him from behind, reminding him even before he could look in his mirror of the farm Land Rover at his back, which he had quite forgotten.

His foot automatically depressed the accelerator, and the big car surged away, leaving the sound echoing behind him. Down and up, down and up—the trees and the empty pastures and the ridge flashed past on each side—down and up, and down and up.

There was a horseman on his left, galloping parallel to the road at full speed, ducking down under the branches of a tree and then emerging, with the clods flying from the horse’s hooves. For a moment the horseman was ahead—not a man, but a boy ... or a man, but jockey-size—then horse and rider vanished behind another tree, and the superior horse-power of the Mercedes left dummy1