Rory was going to travel north: he meant to travel on his feet, unless he was lucky enough to spot a wagon on a goods train later: he knew all about jumping trains; but he was quite prepared to walk all the way. What was two or three hundred miles odd to him? As he lay under the projecting rock in the mist on Dartmoor, he remembered some of the countryman’s tricks which had saved him from starving in Germany. He was good with beasts: accustomed to cows since he was a small child, he could creep up to any cow in the dark without alarming it, murmuring the “cush, cush, cusha,” which cows understand: he could get his fingers round the warm teats and direct a stream of milk into his can; no milking cow resents skilled, accustomed fingers on its udder. He could stalk farmyard fowls, and wring a bird’s neck before it had had time to let out a warning squawk: he could steal eggs from under a sitting bird. He had learnt all these things when he was a ragged barefoot urchin in Northern Ireland and the knowledge and practice of them had saved him from starving and would save him again. As he lay there, snug in his sacks, a powerful healthy man, unafraid of weather or pursuit, he laughed softly to himself: he had done it before and he could do it again and at the end of the long trail north there was a reckoning to complete.
Even while Rory Macshane laughed under his breath, warders and searchers cursed him as they groped their way in the blinding mist: roads were patrolled, cars searched, railwaymen alerted, bus drivers warned. (As though Rory would have been fool enough to risk travelling on a road.)
The prison chaplain said: “I’m sorry. I hope he doesn’t get himself into more trouble. I feel I failed with him: there’s something good in the chap somewhere.”
“So you say, Padre: I say we shall be lucky if there isn’t a murder before we catch him. He’s tough, a real criminal type.”
Neither chaplain nor warder thought of the escaped convict as a man who could creep up to a cow in the dark or get on terms with a nanny goat. Escaped convicts always took to the roads eventually, stole from cottagers or village shops: they had to have food and shelter. That’s why they were nearly always caught. Prison warders and officers get to learn a lot about convicts who try to escape: most of them are townsmen, some are skilled mechanics and housebreakers. Their minds turn to roads and transport, the chance of stealing food from houses or shops, stealing a car from a garage, stealing a ride on a passenger train. Very few of them are countrymen and fewer still face a walk of over two hundred miles cross-country, living “off the land.”
Rory Macshane had concealed his past history, including his escape story. Nobody knew what he was capable of, and no one, for that matter, would have thought a chap who had been a farm labourer would have the wits to defeat trained guards and searchers. Rory had once been a Commando—but no policeman had ever learnt that: in short, Rory was more accurate in his assessment of the prison staff than the staff were about Rory Macshane.
Chapter Two
IT WAS NEARLY four years since Superintendent Macdonald, C.I.D., had confided to his friends Mr. and Mrs. Hoggett that he wanted to buy a small dairy farm in Lunesdale with the intention of retiring to farm his own modest holding when retirement was due. Giles and Kate Hoggett had warned him of the difficulties inherent in his project: the high cost of land (especially land fit for dairy farming), the high cost of good cows and of feeding stuffs and the drawbacks of having his land farmed by a bailiff in his absence. Macdonald’s legacy from his old uncle—£7,000—had looked a tidy sum to finance his modest project until he went into the matter in detail with the Hoggetts: they warned him that dairy farming was a skilled business and that as a tyro he was more likely to lose money than to make it.
Nevertheless, Macdonald stuck to his idea: he travelled up north to Lancaster whenever he had a fine weekend and inspected property after property in Lunesdale, under the careful guidance of Giles Hoggett. Giles was ageing now, but he knew a lot about cow pastures and meadows, about farmhouses and barns, about milking cows and store cattle, and even a bit about sheep and fell farming.
It wasn’t until Macdonald saw Fellcock Farm that he made up his mind that this was the property he wanted and that he was going to have it somehow. Fellcock was a hill farm to the south of Lunesdale: the sturdy stone house was on the eight-hundred-foot contour line, the highest farm in the rural district. The pastures and meadows sloped down from the level of the ancient stone house, from whence the River Lune could be seen far below, its serpentine coils shining across the vivid green dales, backed by woodland. In the far distance, beyond the woods and hills of Lunesdale, shone the wide waters of Morecambe Bay, and on the northern skyline were the craggy heights of Furness and the Lakeland mountains: Scafell and the Langdale Pikes, Helvellyn and Great Gable.
It was an enchanting prospect: Macdonald loved the view and the loneliness, the chequer of green fields and the wild fell country behind the house; he enjoyed the fact that the stone house caught the last rays of the setting sun long after the valley was in shadow and he liked looking down on the steadings on the lower slopes and across the Lune to distant Wenningby, where Giles Hoggett’s
