Pain and fear are good companions. They go together well. Back each other up like a good doubles pair at tennis. I had both of them with me when I regained consciousness after Chalky Teacher’s scientific assault. The pain was in my head, hands and feet and just about everywhere else in between. I tried to move to ease it and found out the main cause-I was tied at the wrists and ankles with my hands behind my back and my legs drawn up. Spasms of cramp shot through me as I tried to move. I lay still, waiting for the agony to settle back into ordinary pain. The fear was internal and external. I was sweating; there was a foul taste in my mouth which was taped shut, and my bowels were agitating fitfully like an off-balance washing machine.
I opened my eyes and experienced a surge of panic. I couldn’t see anything. Had Chalky blinded me? Then I realised I was in an enclosed, lightless space. Or almost lightless. I blinked and let my eyes adapt. Inside the blackness were patches of grey, some paler than others. I felt rather than saw the confinement, but I knew it was very close. A big box? A cupboard? I tried not to think of a coffin-it was bigger than that. Then an engine started and the prison began to move. I felt the wheels under me bumping along. I was in the back of some kind of vehicle, a small truck, a van or a station wagon. The windows were blacked out and the doors or hatch were a tight fit.
Trussed up like that, I felt like a thing, a non-person, an object being transported to some unknown destination. After a while I could move slightly without bringing on the cramp, but there was no point to it. I couldn’t move enough to gauge the dimensions of the space, and what the hell difference did it make anyway? I was tied so tightly I couldn’t get leverage of any kind. There was no possibility of rolling over or sitting up without dislocating several joints. Suddenly, I was aware of another sensation-cold. I was naked apart from my jockettes and small draughts were blowing over me and making me shiver.
At first I couldn’t understand that. It was a warm day, wasn’t it? Then I realised I had no idea of the time. Warm days change to cool nights. How long had I been unconscious? In a way that lost time, and not knowing its duration, was the most frightening thing of all. It gave me the feeling that I was already dead. I closed my eyes again and concentrated on trying to get some movement in the lashings around my ankles and wrists.
Nothing, not the fraction of an inch. I probed with my tongue against the tape across my mouth, but it was wide, heavy-duty stuff, generously applied. I panicked again, almost choked, and forced myself to breathe regularly through my nose. I was pretty sure I was experiencing the hard way another one of Chalky Teacher’s great talents.
I eventually decided I was in a panel van. The engine noise was muffled, meaning that there was a solid barrier between me and the front of the vehicle. Not a station wagon therefore, and some branches brushing the roof overhead gave me an idea of its height. Too low for a truck. I settled on the van-a matter of the quality of the ride and the pitch of the rattles and squeaks. I tried to listen to the traffic outside to get an idea of time and place, but wheels on roads sound much the same. The vehicle stopped and started, turned left and right, rode rough and smooth. I heard an occasional truck rumble and air brakes like those on a tourist bus. I heard no train noises or jet engines. I didn’t have a clue where I was.
Then I did in a very general way. The road got rougher and narrower to judge from the way the left side wheels dipped off the bitumen from time to time, and the traffic was definitely lighter. The country. I’m a city man who prefers pavements to paddocks, and I never preferred them more strongly than at that moment. It’s too easy to lose things and citizens in the country. There’s too much space and not enough people to notice. Another opinion is that everybody knows everybody else out there and nothing goes unremarked. A nice debating point, but I couldn’t see that it was going to make much difference to me one way or the other.
All this mental activity diverted me from my aches and pains, if not from my terrors. I doubted that they’d torture me to extract the name of the person who’d tipped me off about Teacher or to get a line on Virginia Shaw. It takes a special kind of nastiness to do that. I’d seen it in Malaya in Australians, Brits, Malays and Chinese-I didn’t see it in Teacher or Gallagher. Mario was a possible candidate. It was more likely that they were just tidying up and that was quite frightening enough. I tried to think of something I might bargain with, some threat to worry them. There was nothing. Fear of dying is ignominious. Life itself becomes precious, whatever its quality. I just wanted the impossible-for the painful, cold, humiliating ride to go on and on.
A jolting stop and I knew it was the final one. Doors opening and closing. Voices, and then the sound of something being taken down from a roof rack. A rustling noise and then the clank of metal. It wasn’t a surfboard. The opening of the back of my box confirmed my guess about the sort of vehicle I’d been travelling in. A strong torch beam lit up the interior, danced around and hit me, blindingly, in the face. I shut my eyes against it and it moved away. I blinked and looked past it, out at the dark shapes of trees outlined against a starlit night sky.
‘I think it’s going to rain,’ a voice I didn’t recognise said. Mario?
‘Good. Make the fuckin’ ground softer.’ That was Teacher.
A match flared and I smelled tobacco smoke. ‘Let’s just get on with it, eh?’ Ian Gallagher was nervous. Maybe it was his first time at a coldblooded execution and interment. If so, I had to hope he wasn’t the one to do the job. A pistol shot at close range can go terribly wrong. I was feeling calm now, registering every little thing as if my system was working frantically for the short time it had left to function, but resigned. My feet were grabbed and I was pulled out of the van without any regard for my well-being. I lost skin, suffered wrenched joints and my head banged painfully as it crossed the gap between the van floor and the flap of the bottom half of the door. A final heave and I collapsed onto cool, damp, sweet-smelling grass.
I fell on my face and struggled to roll over. It hurt everywhere, but I managed it. I looked up into the pale, troubled eyes of Ian Gallagher. One part of my brain was telling me that it was better they should leave the tape across my mouth. It meant they weren’t going to get out the bolt-cutters. I was worried about that clank from the roof rack. But I didn’t want to die like a dumb animal, I wanted to speak. Gallagher drew on his cigarette and looked away.
‘Here?’ Mario said. He glanced at the sky. It had been him worrying about the rain. I would have welcomed a few drops. I was hungry for sensation, experience, touch and sound as my time ran out. I wanted to stretch the moments, suck just a little more of the juice of life, even though it had turned sour and scary.
‘Why not here?’ Teacher said.
The next sound I heard was a familiar one- my. 38 cocks smoothly and softly if you know how to handle a weapon. Teacher did. I kept my eyes open even though the blood pounding in my head threatened to burst through my eyeballs. I wanted to see things, hear things! Mario was holding the torch and in its glancing beam I saw what he held in his other fist-a short-handled shovel. That’s when I closed my eyes and said my goodbyes to Cyn and my sister and Joanie Dare and everybody else I’d loved and hurt.
When the heavy, booming shots sounded I knew the bullets weren’t for me and I experienced sheer joy. Teacher was hit twice. He jerked the gun up and fired wildly but another shot got him somewhere vital and he crumpled and lay still. Mario was hit too. He yelled, dropped the shovel and the torch and started to run towards the trees. Two more bullets stopped him in his tracks. He groaned, fell awkwardly and twitched. I heard him scratching at the ground. The torch was on its side, still throwing light. I twisted my head around to see Gallagher. As I did a voice came from the darkness:
‘One fuckin’ move, Ian, and you’re off.’ Another light showed and Colin Pascoe came slowly forward carrying a carbine and a large flashlight. The beam reached Gallagher, who stood white-faced and shaking. His jacket was buttoned. He hadn’t tried to reach his pistol.
‘I knew you were a gutless wonder,’ Pascoe said. He walked up to Gallagher and clouted him hard in the face with the metal flashlight. Gallagher reeled back and hit the open door of the van. He grabbed at it for support. Blood trickled down his face. ‘Col, I…’
‘Shut up, prick! Put your weapon on the ground.’ Gallagher eased the pistol out slowly and dropped it on the grass. It landed only a foot or so from my head and the sound reawakened my fears. Three enemies out of action, but what about Pascoe? I squinted up at him but the light wasn’t on him and all I could see was a big dark shape. Then I was blinded by the strong beam and I heard Pascoe’s rumbling laugh. ‘I wondered why your big mouth wasn’t working, Hardy. Now I see.’
The light danced away again. Pascoe picked up Gallagher’s gun and shoved it into a pocket of his combat jacket. He had to juggle the other things he was holding but he did it deftly. This was the moment for him to swing the carbine around and make it a hat trick, if that was what he had in mind. Gallagher was fumbling for a cigarette.
‘Light me one, too, Ian,’ Pascoe said. ‘You should be able to manage that.’
Pascoe put his torch on my chest. Gallagher passed the lit cigarette over. They were virtually on top of me
