Roger’s voice split the night again, but incisive now and sober: “All-right!”
The first shot came before the final word, and two others followed while it was still in the air. John still stood, with his rifle aiming, as the three figures slumped into the dazzle of the road. He did not move until he saw Pirrie, having advanced from his own position, stooping over them. Then he dropped his rifle to his side, and walked on to the road himself.
Roger got out of the car. Pirrie looked up at John.
“I must apologize for poaching, partner,” he said. His voice was as cool and precise as ever. “They were such a good lie.”
“Dead?” Roger asked.
Pirrie nodded. “Of course.”
“Then we’ll clear them into the ditch first,” Roger said. “After that, the barrier. I don’t think we’re likely to be surprised, but we don’t want to take chances.”
The body that John pulled away was limp and heavy. He avoided looking at the face at first. Then, in the shadow at the side of the road, he glanced at it. A lad, not more than twenty, his face young and unmarked except for the hole in one temple, gouting blood. The other two had already dropped their burdens and gone over to the barrier. They had their backs to him. He bent and kissed the unwounded side of the forehead, and eased the body down with gentleness.
It did not take them long to clear the barrier. On the other side equipment lay scattered; this, too, was thrown into the ditch. Then Roger ran back to the car, and pressed the horn button, holding it down for several seconds. Its harsh note tolled on the air like a bell.
Roger pulled the car over to the side. They waited. In a few moments they heard the sound of cars approaching. John’s Vauxhall came first, closely followed by Pirrie’s Ford. The Vauxhall stopped, and Ann moved over as John opened the door and got in. He pushed the accelerator pedal down hard.
Ann said: “Where are they?”
She was looking out of the side window.
“In the ditch,” he said, as the car pulled away.
After that, for some miles, they drove in silence.
According to plan, they kept off the main roads. They finished up in a remote lane bordering a wood, near Stapleford. There, under overhanging oaks, they had cocoa from thermos flasks, with only the internal lights of one car on. Roger’s Citroen{83} was convertible into a bed, and the three women were put into that, the children being comfortable enough on the rear seats of the other two cars. The men took blankets and slept under the trees.
Pirrie put up the idea of a guard. Roger was dubious.
“I shouldn’t think we’d have any trouble here. And we want what sleep we can get. There’s a long day’s driving tomorrow.” He looked at John. “What do you say, chief?”
“A night’s rest—what’s left of it.”
They settled down. John lay on his stomach, in the posture that Army life had taught him was most comfortable when sleeping on rough ground. He found the physical discomfort less than he had remembered it.
But sleep did not come lightly, and was broken, when it came, by meaningless dreams.
SIX
Saxon Court stood on a small rise; the nearest approach to a hill in this part of the county. Like many similar preparatory schools, it was a converted country house, and from a distance still had elegance. A well-kept drive—its maintenance, Davey had confided, was employed as a disciplinary measure by masters and prefects—led through a brown desert that had been playing-fields to the two Georgian wings flanking a centre both earlier and uglier.
Since three cars in convoy presented a suspicious appearance, it had been decided that only John’s car should go up to the school, the others being discreetly parked on the road from which the drive diverged. Steve, however, had insisted on being present when Davey was collected, and Olivia had decided to come along with him. Apart from John, there were also Ann and Mary.
The headmaster was not in his study. His study door stood open, looking out, like a vacant throne-room, on to a disordered palace. There was a traffic of small boys in the hall and up and down the main staircase; their chatter was loud and excited and, John thought, unsure. From one room leading off the hall came the murmur of Latin verbs, but there were others which yielded only uproar.
John was on the point of asking one of the boys where he might find the headmaster, when he appeared, hurrying down the stairs. He saw the small group waiting for him, and came down the last few steps more decorously.
Dr Cassop was a young headmaster, comfortably under forty, and had always seemed elegant. He retained the elegance today, but the handsome gown and neatly balanced mortar-board only served to point up the fact that he was a worried and unhappy man. He recognized John.
“Mr Custance, of course—and Mrs Custance. But I thought you lived in London? How did you get out?”
“We had been spending a few days in the country,” John said, “with friends. This is Mrs Buckley, and her son. We’ve come to collect David. I should like to take him away for a little while—until things settle down.”
Dr Cassop showed none of the reluctance Miss Errington had at the thought of losing a pupil. He said eagerly:
“Oh yes. Of course. I think it’s a good idea.”
“Have any other parents taken their children?” John asked.
“A couple. You see, most of them are Londoners.” He shook his head. “I should be most relieved if it were possible to send all the boys home, and close the school for the time being. The news…”
John nodded. They had heard, on the car radios, a guarded bulletin which spoke of some disturbances in Central London and in certain unspecified provincial cities. This information had clearly only been given as an accompaniment to the warning that any breach of public order would be put down severely.
“At least, things are quiet enough here,” John said. The din all round them increased as a classroom-door opened to release a batch of boys, presumably at the close of a lesson. “In a noisy kind of way,” he added.
Dr Cassop took the remark neither as a joke nor as a reflection on his school’s discipline. He looked round at the boys in a distracted unseeing fashion that made John realize that there was more to his strangeness than either worry or unhappiness. There was fear.
“You haven’t heard any other news, I suppose?” Dr Cassop asked. “Anything not on the radio? I have an impression… there was no mail this morning.”
“I shouldn’t think there would be any mail,” John said, “until the situation has improved.”
“Improved?” He looked at John nakedly. “When? How?”
John was sure of something else; it would not be long before he deserted his charges. His immediate reaction to this intuition was an angry one, but anger died as the memory rose in his mind of the quiet, bloody young face in the ditch.
He wanted only to get away. He said briefly:
“If we can take David…”
“Yes, of course. I’ll… Why, there he is.”
Davey had seen them simultaneously. He dashed along the corridor and hurled himself, with a cry of delight, at John.
“You will be taking David to stay with your friends?” Dr Cassop asked,”—with Mrs Buckley, perhaps?”
John felt the boy’s brown hair under his hand. There would very likely be more killings ahead; that for which he would kill was worth the killing. He looked at the headmaster.