“No,” he cried hoarsely. “No — no — no. Not again! Please.”
The woman came up to him. In the light from the open doorway he could see the thin, tight line into which she had compressed her lips, could see the soft gold of the skin which covered arms whose steely strength he had reason to know. Mr Ackroyd tried instinctively to lift an arm in defence as two stinging slaps took him across the face, but, of course, he couldn’t move because he was tied down to the bed. The light now showed the big raised weals which criss-crossed Mr Ackroyd’s body, thick with congealed blood.
The woman’s eyes flashed a warning. She said, in a low voice, “Stop your noise, mad Englishman.”
Mr Ackroyd whimpered. A jumble of words came from him. Tears sprang to his eyes as memories of what he had endured in this room in the last few hours flooded back into his mind. That woman had wanted to know something, and when he’d got on his dignity and refused to tell her she’d turned into a devil.
The woman slapped him again, viciously, twice, three times, and he subsided into incoherent sobs. She went out of the room, locking the door behind her again. The perfume faded, the corrupt smell of neglect and dirt took its place again.
Some time later the woman came back.
This time she had two men with her, to whom she spoke in Spanish. She told them, though Mr Ackroyd couldn’t understand what she was saying, that the Englishman was mad. For the present, he was useless both to his own people and to her. Nevertheless, he might recover his sanity, and her orders were clear: Mr Ackroyd had to be taken out of Spain, and taken out of Spain at the first opportunity he would be. And the first step, as the two men already knew, led out of La Linea to Ronda.
Mr Ackroyd was untied, lifted stiffly to his feet. He was washed and cleaned up, and his wounds were roughly bandaged; he was dressed in Spanish-style clothing. Then the woman spoke again. She said to the bigger of the two men, “Before you reach the control post at San Roque. Her hand came down in a striking motion. "You understand, amigo?”
“Perfectly, señorita.” It would not do to have this small mad Englishman gabbling in his own tongue at the armed carabineros guarding the control post. The woman took something — a small, flat piece of metal which Mr Ackroyd seemed to recognize at once, though he could not have said why — from a vanity bag and gave it to one of the men with instructions to hand it carefully on when the Englishman was delivered to the next link in the chain; and then a gun was pushed into Mr Ackroyd’s back, making him cringe with the pain, and he was taken downstairs, walked along an alleyway with his escort on either side of him, and pushed into a powerful looking American car, a Studebaker, which was waiting in the street beyond. The smaller of the two men slid in behind the wheel.
The moment Mr Ackroyd and the bigger man were in the car glided swiftly away, turned into the Plaza Generalisimo Franco, and headed out of La Linea on the San Roque road. The lights of Gibraltar three miles away winked at it as it passed fast along the shore-line of Algeciras Bay. There were British fuelling-hulks lying off in the Bay, the nearest little more than a stone’s-throw distant; and also not far off, before Gibraltar’s North Front, sentries of a British regiment of infantry stood their watch. But none of that was much comfort to Mr Ackroyd, sitting in the back of the car with that gun pressed to his side as he moaned softly to himself.
The other man was driving fast, driving grimly on his horn, and scattering men and women and children and mangy livestock as the big car swept along the main road out of La Linea, past the little cafes and bars, out into the brown, scorched country, night-shrouded now, beyond the frontier town. The driver was tight-lipped, intent behind the wheel, his headlights dipped to the sandy verge to his right upon which loomed frightened, white-faced pedestrians who leapt aside for cover as the vehicle sped out of the soft Spanish night and roared past in a rush of wind and grit and soaring, choking dust, belting along even by Spanish standards.
The Studebaker was well sprung but the road even here was not too good, and the bumps and lurches made Mr Ackroyd whimper with the pain from the freshly bleeding weals across his back. He felt sick and giddy, and his brain whirled round and round as the pain bit into his body.
The driyer eased down for the speed-trap outside the town.
He was impatient, short of time; the rest of the human pipeline along which the mad Englishman would pass was waiting for action from the La Linea end. But the driver knew he had to be careful, not get caught up on some footling speed charge and finish, like so many driving offenders in Spain, in the calabozo. He eased down again for the control post on the outskirts of the village of San Roque, and as he did so the big man in the back withdrew his gun from Mr Ackroyd’s side, lifted it, reversed it, and brought it down smartly on the little physicist’s head. Mr Ackroyd gave a small, tired, startled sound and- slumped into the corner. The big man propped him up, opened a flask, and slopped conac over his face and clothing. The car halted. A carabinero approached the driving window and looked in.
“Where for, señor?”
“Jerez, on business.”
“Papeles?”
The driver produced the necessary papers, including those they’d faked for Ackroyd; the carabinero scanned and returned them, glanced in at the big man in the back, looked at Ackroyd slumped in his seat and breathing harshly. The big man made a gesture of hopelessness and shrugged his shoulders. The carabinero sniffed brandy. He smiled — he understood perfectly. The señor was drunk, of course… he said simply:
“The boot?”
The driver jumped out. The carabinero went round to the back, in company with Ackroyd’s captor. Back in the car, the hot night-scents of Andalusia stole in through the windows. The big man sat tapping his fingers on the top edge of the down-wound window-glass. He knew there was nothing in the boot; but time was precious. The official came back with the driver, waved him on as he got in.
"Gracias, señor.”
“Buen viaje.” The driver let in his clutch.
The Studebaker went ahead and took a left-hand turn at the control post; and when he was well out of sight the driver’s foot pressed down hard on the accelerator and the Studebaker shot on. With a screech of tyres they took a sharpish right-hand turn, the springs sagging and bouncing, digging the gun hard into the unheeding side of Mr Ackroyd as they swept on to the straight. The Studebaker wasn’t heading for Jerez; five miles beyond the village it roared over the level-crossing gates at San Roque station, swathed in clouds of dust which rose up in the headlights’ glare, heading onward for the mountain city of Ronda, some eighty kilometres north-north-east of Gibraltar. It was driven on through the night along roads which became rougher and trickier and void of other traffic and even of pedestrians. The road was soon to degenerate in places into a mere track, a bumpy nightmare onrush over lumps of grit and deep potholes. But despite the shocking surface of the track that led up into the mountains to Ronda, the Studebaker scarcely slackened speed. The three occupants took a tremendous shaking, and Mr Ackroyd, who had recovered consciousness but had a splitting head, felt the hot, sharp tang of bile rising to the back of his throat, and he retched. He felt again the wicked pain in back and legs, felt the bruised flesh tear beneath the bandages; he wished the men would say something, anything, rather than drive on in this frightening aloofness with its background of the rushing wind created by their passage, of the subdued engine-sounds and the click-click-click of the whirling grit which rained upward against the under-sides of the wings. And after a while, when he could stand this grim unspeakingness no longer, Mr Ackroyd began humming to himself through the growing mists of pain, and the sound that came out was rather like dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da…