“Come on, Anthony,” Pakeshi urged, now very calm.” Climb out of the window and jump when I tell you.”
“No—please! Have you gone mad?” I managed to say. But, still holding me with his free hand, he pushed me closer to the window. There was a gunshot that shattered the window of the compartment door. I felt the bullet go straight past my head into the darkness outside.
“I have the window open,” I somehow found the voice to shout. “I only have to let go, and you can forget about your document.” There was another bullet. This one seemed to brush the collar of my overcoat. There was an incredibly loud crash as Pakeshi fired back. I looked at the window blind. Holed now in three places, flapping slightly in the breeze from our open window, it was all that separated us from the men outside. But there were no more shots. The men must have stepped back along the corridor.
“Come on, Anthony,” Pakeshi urged in his best bedside manner. “It’s now or never. We must go before they think to get the window open in the next compartment.” I let him guide me through the little window. It was a tight fit, and I thought I’d go out of it in exactly the same was as the dead man. But I held on hard to the window frame, and kicked about till I felt my feet touch on a ledge of some kind. We must have been moving no faster than twenty miles an hour. From inside, it had seemed as if we were creeping along. As I clung to the outside of the carriage, the cold wind hitting me like a hurricane, it was as if we were back on the magnetised line and were going at full speed. Inside the compartment, there was another shot—I don’t know whose.
“Go now!” Pakeshi shouted. He jammed a hand against my chest, and pushed with a force that dislodged both hands from the window frame. I fell backwards into what seemed an infinite void. Then, I hit the ground. I landed on both feet, but went straight over to my right. I’d twisted round as I fell, and landed on my back. I felt myself lifted up again and went head over heels. I tried to curl into a ball, but felt a sharp pain in my back, and then I bounced on something hard. I rolled again and again, and then bounced off what might have been a little mound. My last clear recollection is of the railway train rumbling further and further into the distance, and of a burst of light in my head as I hit against something very hard.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The leaden skies of England out of the summer months don’t easily tell what time of day it is. But I opened my eyes in what seemed to be the late morning. I was on my side and half out of my overcoat in a thorn bush. I’d had the impression, after I was pushed, of having bounced alongside the railway line. In fact, I’d come to rest a good twenty yards away from the line. How I’d avoided the broken down fence and the line of stumps of the cut down telephone and power distribution poles that lay between me and the line was a miracle I wasn’t able to explain. To be sure, if I’d hit against them, I’d have been killed at once.
As it was, I lay covered in scratches everywhere my bare flesh had made contact with the ground, and bruised and bruised and bruised. There was a bump come up on the back of my head that would make wearing a hat painful for days. But I was alive. And apart from a stiffness in my right leg, I wasn’t even much injured beyond the superficial. I rolled myself into a seated position, and pulled ineffectually to get my overcoat free of the thorns. It was raining steadily, and I was soaked through.
“Courage, old boy, and shuffle the cards,” I called out in a surprisingly clear voice. Carefully, I got onto all fours and then tried very slowly to stand up. My right leg gave way under me at first, and I found myself sitting again. But I made another effort, and now was able to stand and look about me. About a mile further back along the line, I could see a couple of low buildings. Otherwise, the line cut through a countryside of fields separated by clumps of trees. I took an uncertain step forward. My leg hurt, but wasn’t now giving way. Slowly, and still searching for evidence of substantial injury, I walked over to one of the telephone pole stumps and sat down. As you might imagine, my cigarette packet was crumpled and a little damp. But the matches were dry enough. After much striking in hands cupped against the steady breeze, I got a flame going and lit a cigarette. Something to eat or drink would have been nice. But the tobacco would do, and perhaps more than do. I blew out a cloud of smoke that dispersed immediately in the breeze, and tried to put my thoughts into some kind of order.
Where was Pakeshi? I looked vaguely round. I couldn’t say where I’d come off the railway train. It might have been a few dozen yards back along the line. It might have been a hundred. Let’s suppose Pakeshi had jumped a few seconds after he’d pushed me—I turned and looked in the other direction. There was a patch of scrub that went right up to the line and continued for thirty or forty yards in the direction of Lincoln. Had he landed there? I tried and failed to imagine Pakeshi in that lot with his neck broken. A man like that was surely reserved for a more significant end. But inability to imagine something isn’t proof of its impossibility. I’d be sorry if he were dead. That aside, there was the matter of the Churchill Memorandum. If I were to take myself back to Sleaford Police Station, I might as well go with all relevant materials.
If he was in that lot, however, Pakeshi would need to have rolled into the most impenetrable undergrowth. I must have spent an hour picking my way through the bushes, looking about and calling his name. The rain was coming on heavier, and the sky was turning a still more depressing grey. I could easily spend all day rummaging about here. I’d probably find nothing, even if there were anything to find. I pulled out a damp handkerchief and rubbed as much of the brown makeup as I could feel from my face. It had served it purpose, and I saw no point now in shambling about like a nigger minstrel. I buried my head deeper into the collar of my soaked overcoat and turned myself back in the direction of Sleaford. There was no point hanging about. The sooner the police could take over the search, the better it would be for everyone.
I’d been in Lincolnshire many years before. That was when I was still a schoolboy, and the whole class had been packed off for a camping holiday to toughen us up. It was the year when we and the Germans had finally pressured the Japanese to halt their advance into Russia and consent to a League of Nations administration of Canton. Then, the sunny skies overhead had been filled with military airships and small aeroplanes. We’d all lain for hours on the grass, counting the airships and trying to write down their numbers. We’d made one trip to Sleaford, to look at the water mill and at the Wren altar rail in St Denys Church. It was before the ending of the agriculture subsidies, and had then been a prosperous little country town. Cheap food from Germany’s Eastern Territories might have dented its cheerful bustle. But I wasn’t going there today as a tourist. I picked my way across muddy but unploughed fields. Eventually, I came to a road that still had a few patches of tar from the old days. If I turned right along it, I might find myself in Sleaford. If not there, I’d find myself soon in some other place of habitation.
I’d have felt better with the Churchill Memorandum in my pocket. Without it, I was really just a wanted man with a tall story. I thought of the look on Pakeshi’s face when I’d insisted on the good faith of the authorities. I couldn’t feel the same conviction now as I had in that heated argument. Why were they after me? Were they really that separate from the men who were trying to kill me? What had Pakeshi jeered about a propensity to impose patterns on disparate events? All I really knew was that I’d been used to get a document into the country that simply shouldn’t have existed. Why I’d been used, and why I was now being pursued, were things that I hadn’t the information—or the spiritual peace—to think properly through.