Headlights pierced the mist and bathed them in a flood of uncanny yellow light, and Charlotte practically gasped as the oncoming car swept past them. It was travelling far too fast for such a night and such a spot, and Hannah, too, gasped:
“The man must be out of his mind! Or else he’s in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere -” “It was Richard Tremarth!” Charlotte had glimpsed him only for a moment, and she had also recognised his gleaming, expensive car. “He’s probably hungry and hoping they’ve kept some dinner for him at the Three Sailors.”
“He’ll never reach the Three Sailors if he continues on his way like that!” Hannah was peering backwards through the rear window at the disappearing tail light of Tremarth’s car, caught up in a pocket of mist. “He’ll go over the cliff! ”
“Oh, don’t!” And Charlotte shuddered so much that she decided it was her own fear of going over the cliff that was affecting her. They were very close to the edge here, and in fact the wall of Tremarth rose up like a bastion on the other side of them and provided her with the uncomfortable feeling that it was literally thrusting them into the sea. The road was quite wide, but allowing for the various indentations in the cliff it was not so wide, and her heart had been in her mouth when Tremarth swept past them.
She sighed with relief when she recognised the tall piers of a pair of gates ahead of them, and knew that once inside the drive they would be comparatively safe. And if they wanted to avoid crashing into a tree-trunk they could always walk up the drive.
The next moment vexation rolled over her, for the car had stalled as a result of the crawling speed at which they were proceeding. They had come to rest in a comparatively clear stretch of the road, with the red brick wall of her own house on their right hand and the sea making mystical splashing noises on the beach at the foot of the cliff on their left. The noise of the sea seemed strange in the otherwise clammy stillness, and she was about to remark that it was a most inconsiderate moment for an engine to go out of action when that same curious stillness was shattered by a sound like a violent explosion.
Hannah blenched visibly and stared at Charlotte.
“What… do you suppose that was?”
“It sounded as if something blew up! ”
“What could blow up in a place like this? On a lonely stretch of coast like this?”
“A car accident?”
Their eyes met and held for a moment, and then each was scrambling out of the car and on to the wet grass of the cliff top.
“It’s no use my attempting to turn the car,” Charlotte panted. “I couldn’t do it in a place like this, with so little visibility!”
“Then don’t try.” Two years of hospital training, and with memories crowding back on her of some testing experiences she was unlikely ever to forget, undoubtedly affected Hannah’s thinking just then, and without considering it necessary to explain her intentions she started to run back along the road they had crawled over only a minute or so before. Long before Charlotte had started to break into a trot after her she had disappeared into the darkness and the mist, and Charlotte called frenziedly in fear lest she too should become the victim of an accident that would mean that her body would be found the following day at the foot of the cliffs, if it had not already been carried out to sea by the tide.
“Keep away from the cliff edge! It’s dangerous and crumbling in places -! ”
Her voice came back to her like an empty echo on the moistureladen air, and she realised that the only thing she could do was follow Hannah and hope that, by some miracle, disaster refrained from claiming them both, and that when they finally caught up with one another again the shock would not be so great that it would pulverise their wits.
If an accident had happened they would need their wits. Not that she had any doubt at all that Hannah would keep hers. Hannah might think she was an artist, but she should have stuck to nursing.
Her instincts were quite obviously the right ones, and it was Charlotte who allowed her feet to drag became she was horrified of what awaited her at the end of a fairly peaceful and reasonably convivial evening. And the knowledge she had that, unlike Hannah, she was never at her best in a crisis made her feel slightly sick.
Ahead of her the blanket of mist was pierced by an angry light. It was like the damped-down glow of a bonfire, and as far as she could judge it was on the cliff top, and most certainly not on the beach.
So, if the car that had speeded past them had overturned, it had done so without rolling over and over down into the inky blackness of the sea.
But if that really was a conflagration…”
Hannah’s voice came back thinly to her through the mist.
“Stay where you are! There’s nothing we can do… and the heat’s too great to get really near.”
Charlotte came to a standstill within a foot or so of her friend. She put both hands to her face to protect it from the intense heat, and in her ears an angry roar like the howling of a gale in an old-fashioned chimney, and a continuous crackling that was even more horrifying than the hollow roar.
“Is it – is it the car that passed us?” she barely whispered to Hannah.
The latter nodded.
“It must be. As far as I can make it out it hit a projection of your wall, but it didn’t go over into the sea although it must have turned somersault several times.” She was tinning her glance in all directions, seeking with a very faint hope in her heart for some evidence that the driver – Richard Tremarth – had been thrown clear, and was in need of some attention from her and reasonably close at hand. But every time her fascinated gaze was drawn back to the glowing wreck of the car the hope died, and she knew that what she was feeling was a forlorn hope, and that no one could live who had been involved in such a catastrophe.
Charlotte said as much as she stood there with her hands pressed against her face, her gaze equally fascinated.
“Why, oh, why was he travelling at such a speed?” she demanded of the bleak unfriendly night.
But Hannah didn’t answer.
“We must make absolutely certain,” she said, a minute later. “I’ll grope my way along this end of the verge, and you retrace your steps. If he was anywhere on the road we’d have stumbled over him before this.”
Charlotte turned mechanically to return by the way she had come, and then out of the strange and ghostly night a voice spoke to her
– a little plaintively, but quite strongly:
“You don’t have to search! I’m here! Luckily, for once, I didn’t fasten my seat belt… I was thrown clear! I’ve just climbed up several feet from somewhere down the re… He indicated the rocks below them, and then folded up on the grass and lay almost touching Charlotte’s feet. “Sorry!” he apologised, before he became unconscious.
Hannah took charge in a way that proved her to be a considerable loss to the nursing profession. First she ascertained that the victim was breathing, and had not passed out altogether, and then she ordered Charlotte to stay with him while she returned for their car and drove it back along the road to the spot where Tremarth was stretched out silently on the soaking wet grass of the cliff top.
“But wouldn’t it be better if we left him undisturbed until we can get an ambulance?” she protested, with memories of the one or two lessons she had received in first-aid rushing up over her.
Hannah answered immediately: “If we do he’ll die of pneumonia. So far as I can judge he’s not badly hurt, but he is concussed. If we can get him into the car he’ll be all right, provided we’ve enough strength to get him into Tremarth!”
“Thankfully we’re on the telephone,” Charlotte breathed with relief. “The Emergency Service will get you a doctor.”