Behind the dank confining walls of Dartmoor Prison young Rory Macshane collected the strange items—sugar, needle and thread, bits of leather—that would aid him in his cleverly contrived break. Then on a foggy winter morning a fight in the work area distracted the guards, and Rory slipped into the chill mist that hung over the moors and disappeared.
Two months later the residents of the serene fell country to the north—where Superintendent MacDonald, C.I.D., had retired—were alarmed by scattered evidence of an unknown visitor, recalling a terrifying, long-forgotten past. It was a past from which there could be no escape—not for the retired MacDonald, not even for the elusive Rory Macshane.
DISHONOUR
AMONG THIEVES
by
E.C.R. LORAC
Copyright © 1959 by E.C.R. Lorac
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter One
WHEN RORY MACSHANE saw the raincoat, something inside him said, “This is it.”
It was a good, heavy man’s raincoat and it had been dropped in the toolshed by a thoughtless mechanic who was repairing the electric pump. In a flash, the raincoat was hidden and Rory walked back to rejoin his gang, carrying the angle irons the boss had sent him to fetch.
Rory had learnt, by a year’s imprisonment on the Moor, that it isn’t difficult to escape from a prison working party on Dartmoor. Several prisoners had bolted from their gangs in that period, bolted into the mist and simply disappeared: but all of them (with one notable exception) had been brought back within a few days: two had given themselves up, defeated by hunger and cold and rain: drenched, starved, shivering, they could not face another night of aching misery in the clinging mist and penetrating chill of the cruel Moor. A man needed more than the courage to make an initial dash if he were going to get away and keep away: he needed to use his wits to plan, to prepare over a period of months, to be quite clear as to what he was going to do and where he was going to do it. And he needed clothing, to conceal his prison uniform and to protect him from the cold; Rory favoured the winter months for escape: he believed in moving by night and lying up during the day, and the longer hours of darkness outweighed the cold to Rory’s mind.
Never was there a convict better equipped to weigh the chances of escape than was Rory Macshane. Fourteen years ago, in the winter of 1944, when he was only twenty-one, he had escaped from a P.O.W. camp in Lower Silesia and reached Switzerland two months later. During his year in the P.O.W. camp, Rory had learnt a great deal: it was there that he had first learnt to steal—from his captors, the hated “goons”; to steal swiftly, silently, cunningly. To steal was a comparatively easy technique to acquire: to hide the proceeds of theft was much more difficult. You could hide anything if you were skilful enough, and skill meant practice and preparation. Thousands of prisoners of war learnt how to hide things from their captors: the most improbable things: civilian clothes, faked Wehrmacht uniforms and spoof weapons: tools, documents, food, containers in thousands: and these had been hidden in huts liable to sudden searches. The Germans searched conscientiously and assiduously, but the P.O.W.S beat them again and again.
Rory Macshane remembered all his old skills when he was imprisoned on Dartmoor. It was much more difficult to hide things in an English prison than it had been in the huts of Stalag X, but it could be done if you were patient and observant enough. The warders were there to watch the prisoners, but some of the prisoners watched the warders even more closely.
2
Rory had given a lot of thought to his escape equipment. He had been a prisoner on Dartmoor for over a year, sentenced to a ten-year spell for robbery with violence. At first, he had been bemused, depressed, and sick at heart: robbery he had planned, collaborating with others whom he knew to be criminals. Violence had had no part in his plan, it had just happened when things went wrong. He had never talked about it, neither to the counsel who defended him in court, nor to the prison chaplain, nor his prison visitor. He remained obstinately silent and never told them how he was haunted by the memory of the old watchman who was lying, bloodstained, at his feet when he was arrested. He could have said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him”—but what was the good? He took what was coming to him in silence, including the biting words of the judge who had sentenced him.
As his natural resilience returned, Rory’s mind turned to escape: he knew he could get away. In the P.O.W. camp, neither searchlights nor wire nor machine guns nor guards had been able to stop men from escaping: the real problem came later; having achieved a temporary and precarious freedom, how to convert it into real freedom? To get out was one thing, to keep out was another.
Remembering back to his long trek from the Polish frontier to Switzerland, Rory listed his needs as “Kit. Food. Cover.” Kit included adequate clothing to protect a man from the cold and wet which might reduce his will: kit, also, which would not brand him as a fugitive at first glance, if anybody set eyes upon him. Food was also an essential: food to keep him fit for the first crucial period before he had developed his ability to “live off the country.”
“Cover” included enough knowledge of the immediate surroundings of the prison to convert the first dash into temporary security, whether by digging a burrow or crawling into thick undergrowth. Both these expedients were possible to a skilled fugitive; Rory knew. He had developed them to an art, the art of taking cover.
Food was a problem which
