“Yes.”
To Carole the ensuing silence felt very long. Agonizingly long.
“So we have to kill her?”
“Needn’t be as proactive as that.”
“You mean we just leave her here?”
“That’s right. We just leave her here.”
? Death on the Downs ?
Forty-Six
“No sign of Baylis,” said Ted Crisp gloomily. “I’ve phoned his office. They don’t know where he is. Or if they do, they’re not saying.”
He and Jude were sitting in his car by the village green in Weldisham. Her brow wrinkled with effort as she tried to make sense of what she’d heard. “Fort Pittsburgh…Fort Pittsburgh…I’m sure Carole said something about forts. Someone had talked to her about forts. I’ve heard someone talking about forts. Oh, damn, who was it?”
There was a long silence, finally broken by Ted. “If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Don’t worry, Ted. Carole will survive,” said Jude with a confidence she didn’t feel. Suddenly she slapped her hands to the side of her face. “Forts – yes! Harry Grant said something about him and Lennie Baylis playing with forts when they were kids. Maybe Fort Pittsburgh fits in with that!” She reached for her mobile. “I must get Harry Grant’s number.”
Directory Enquiries obliged, but when she called, the phone rang and rang. Jude wasn’t to know that Harry and Jenny Grant were at that moment getting off a plane in Portugal.
She and Ted Crisp exchanged looks of total despair.
There was nothing they could do. Both felt sure that Carole was somewhere close, but they had no means of tracing her.
Jude put her hands over her eyes and tried to focus on the scene in the Hare and Hounds when Harry Grant had mentioned forts. Her brow scrunched up with the effort. Then it cleared. She snapped her fingers.
“Nick! Harry mentioned someone else called Nick. He’d played their games with them.”
“But where are we going to find him?”
“He works on one of the farms. I’ll ask Irene Forbes. She may know.”
¦
When Ted’s car drew up beside him, Nick was on a tractor with a fork-lift attachment, lowering a huge cylinder of hay over a fence to a circling herd of hungry cows. He was aware of Jude and Ted’s presence, but ignored them till the bale was grounded. Then he climbed over the fence and used a knife to cut the string around the hay, forcing the eager animals back as he did so. Only after he had methodically coiled up the string round his hand and crossed back over the fence did he look full on at his visitors.
He folded the arms of his plaid working shirt and said nothing. His eyes, buried in weather-beaten folds of skin, were cautious.
“Nick?” A curt nod acknowledged that that’s who he was. “My name’s Jude and this is Ted. Look, I’m sorry to interrupt you like this, but I want to know if you’ve ever heard of Fort Pittsburgh.”
There was an aching silence. Jude was beginning to be afraid he was never going to say anything, when finally he spoke. “Long time since I’ve heard Fort Pittsburgh mentioned.”
“But do you know what it is, where it is?”
Again he left a silence before he said, “Chalk pit. Out on the Downs.”
“Could you tell us how to get there?”
“Why?” he asked, with a suspicion of strangers that went back through generations.
“Because I believe a friend of mine is being imprisoned in Fort Pittsburgh.”
The words sounded melodramatic, but Nick took them seriously. “Who’s imprisoned her then?”
“Either Lennie Baylis or Brian Helling.”
The effect of the names was instantaneous. “We’d better get out there!”
Ted Crisp began, “If you show me the way – ”
“We’ll go in the tractor. It’s cross-country.”
¦
The March sky was already darkening as the tractor lumbered off the track and started across fields. On the higher parts of the Downs the ground, though wet, was fairly firm. When they got into the dips, the going would be stickier. But the tractor’s high wheels rode steadily over the terrain.
In the enclosed cab, conditions for the three of them were cramped and stuffy.
“It’s a kids’ name – Fort Pittsburgh,” said Nick, suddenly loquacious. “If you were brought up in Weldisham, you used to go a long way out of the village to play. Lots of secret places you could find. All our kids’ games were kind of military…lots of building camps, having pitched battles, stalking your friends, trapping them. It wasn’t like in a city. We didn’t have many toys and stuff, so we…as the expression goes…made our own entertainment. Just a few of us…and some of the games we invented were pretty rough.”
Neither Jude nor Ted Crisp said anything. They were too anxious for words, and so they let Nick’s monologue roll.
“Anyway, all around the Downs we had our camps, forts we called them, and we invented names for them. Well, I didn’t do much of the inventing. Lennie and Harry did that. They were in charge. Lennie had heard of Pittsburgh and he thought it sounded American and flashy, so when we found this old disused chalk pit, it became Fort Pittsburgh.”
“A chalk pit?” said Jude.
“Yes. In the middle of some woods. Very overgrown. Great place to play and…” He seemed to lose impetus. “That kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Well, we…As I say, our games were pretty rough…cruel, you could say. I’m sure they’d be called cruel nowadays, but then…that’s how kids were…Like I said, Harry and Lennie were the leaders…And Brian Helling always wanted to play with us…and we didn’t want him to…you know, because he wasn’t from the village…he only spent time up there when his mum was working. His mum was a cleaner…and Brian was a mummy’s boy…and he was a bastard…and…Like I said, kids can be very cruel…”
“So one day Lennie said we’d play this trick on Brian. I wasn’t keen, because I knew what Lennie’s tricks were like, but you didn’t argue with him, nor with Harry. You just went along with them. So, anyway, Lennie told Brian yes, he could come and play with us. He could come to this special place we’d found which we called Fort Pittsburgh. So Brian came along with us, all innocent and, like, very cheery because he thought now he was part of our gang, and we…”
There was a silence. “What, Nick?”
“We tied him up and left him in a cave overnight. In what we called the Prison. The Fort Pittsburgh Prison.”
“How old was he then?”
“Seven…eight…I don’t know. It’s not something I’m proud to have been involved in, but Lennie had a very strong personality and, like I said, kids are cruel. So anything that happens between Lennie and Brian goes back a long way. They both got a really cruel streak and if they’ve captured someone, they – ”
But the farm worker’s narrative got no further. The tractor had reached the edge of a thick tangled wood. He brought it to a halt.
“We walk the last bit,” said Nick.
? Death on the Downs ?
Forty-Seven
“You can’t just leave me here,” said Carole, as she felt the nylon rope being tied around
