John whipped open the door at his side. He had the automatic from Roger’s car; leaning across the bonnet of the Citroen, he fired a short burst. The shots rattled like darts against the shield of the placid summer afternoon. Then, in the distance, there were three more shots. Silence followed them.
Roger was still in the car. John said:
“I’m going through the hedge. You’d better stay here.”
Roger nodded. The hedge was thick, but John crashed his way through it, the blackthorn{94} spikes ripping his skin as he did so. He looked back along the field. There were bodies on the ground. From the far end of the field, Pirrie was sedately advancing, his rifle tucked neatly under his arm. Listening, John heard groans. He began to run, his feet slipping and twisting on the ploughed ground.
Ann held Mary cradled in her lap, on the ground beside the car. They were both alive. The groans he had heard were coming from the three men who lay nearby. As John approached, one of them—small and wiry, with a narrow face covered with a stubble of ginger beard—began to get up. One arm hung loosely, but he had a revolver in the other.
John saw Pirrie lift his rifle, swiftly but without hurry. He heard the faint phutting noise of the silenced report, and the man fell, with a cry of pain. A bird which had settled on the hedge since the first disturbance, rose again and flapped away into the clear sky.
He brought rugs from the car, and covered Ann and Mary where they lay. He said, speaking in a whisper, as though even the sound of speech might hurt them further:
“Ann darling—Mary—it’s all right now.”
They did not answer. Mary was sobbing quietly. Ann looked at him, and looked away.
Pirrie covered the last few yards. He kicked the man who lay nearest to him, dispassionately but with precision. The man shrieked, and then subsided again into moaning.
At that moment, Roger came through the gap from the road, revolver in hand. He examined the scene, his gaze passing quickly from the huddled woman and the girl to the three wounded men. He looked at Pirrie.
“Not as tidy a job as last time,” he observed.
“It occurred to me,” said Pirrie—his voice sounded as out of place in the calm summer countryside as did the scene of misery and blood in which he had played his part—“that the guilty do not have the right to die as quickly as the innocent. It was a strange thought, was it not?” He stared at John. “I believe you have the right of execution.”
One of the three men had been wounded in the thigh. He lay in a curious twisted posture, with his hands pressed against the wound. His face was crumpled, as a child’s might be, in lines of misery and pain. But he had been attending to what Pirrie said. He looked at John now, with animal supplication.
John turned away. He said: “You finish them off.”
With flat unhappy wonder, he thought: in the past, there was always due process of law. Now law itself is a casual word in a ploughed field, backed by guns.
His words had not been directed to anyone in particular. Looking down at Ann and Mary, he heard Roger’s revolver crack once, and again, and heard the gasp of breath forced out by the last agony. Then Ann cried out:
“Roger!”
Roger said in a soft voice: “Yes, Ann.”
Ann released Mary gently, and got to her feet. She clenched her teeth against pain, and John went to help her. He still had the automatic strapped on his shoulder. He tried to stop her when she reached for it, but she pulled it from him.
Two of the men were dead. The third was the one who had been wounded in the thigh. Ann limped over to stand beside him. He looked up at her, and John saw behind the twisted tormented fear of his face the beginning of hope.
He said: “I’m sorry, Missus. I’m sorry.”
He spoke in a thick Yorkshire accent. There had been a driver, John remembered, in his old platoon in North Africa who had had that sort of voice, a cheerful fat little fellow who had been blown up just outside Bizerta{95}.
Ann pointed the rifle. The man cried:
“No, Missus, no! I’ve got kids…”
Ann’s voice was flat. “This is not because of me,” she said. “It’s because of my daughter. When you were… I swore to myself that I would kill you if I got the chance.”
“No! You can’t It’s murder!”
She found some difficulty in releasing the safety catch. He stared up at her, incredulously, while she did so, and was still staring when the bullets began tearing through his body. He shrieked once or twice, and then was quiet. She went on firing until the magazine was exhausted. There was comparative silence after that, broken only by Mary’s sobbing.
Pirrie said calmly: “That was very well done, Mrs Custance. Now you had better rest again, until we can get the car out of here.”
Roger said: “I’ll move her.”
He got in the Vauxhall, and reversed sharply. A back wheel went over the body of one of the men. He drove the car through the gap, and out on to the road. He called:
“Bring them, will you?”
John lifted his daughter and carried her out of the car. Pirrie helped to support Ann. When they were both in the car, Roger sounded the horn several times. Then he slipped out He said to John:
“Take over. We’ll get clear of here before we do anything else—just in case the shots have attracted anyone. Then Olivia can look after them.”
John pointed to the field. “And those?”
Through the gap the three bodies were still visible, sprawled against the brown earth. Flies were beginning to settle on them.
Roger showed genuine surprise. “What about them?”
“We aren’t going to bury them?”
Pirrie chuckled drily. “We have no time, I fear, for that corporal work of mercy.”
The Ford drove up, and Olivia got out and hurried to join Ann and Mary. Pirrie walked back to take her place at the wheel.
Roger said: “No point in burying them. We’ve lost time, Johnny. Pull up just beyond Tadcaster—O.K.?”
John nodded. Pirrie called:
“I’ll take over as tail-end Charlie{96}.”
“Fair enough,” Roger said. “Let’s get moving.”
SEVEN
Tadcaster was on edge, like a border town half-frightened, half-excited, at the prospect of invasion. They filled up their tanks, and the garage proprietor looked at the money they gave him as though wondering what value it had. They got a newspaper there, too. It was a copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press—it was stamped 3d and they were charged 6d, without even an undertone of apology. The news it gave was identical with that which they had heard on the radio; the dull solemnity of the official hand-out barely concealed a note of fear.
They left Tadcaster and pulled into a lane, just off the main road. They had filled their vacuum flasks in the town but had to rely on their original stores of food. Mary seemed to have recovered by now; she drank tea and had a little from the tin of meat they opened. But Ann would not eat or drink anything. She sat in a silence that was unfathomable—whether of pain, shame, or brooding bitter triumph, John could not tell. He tried to get her to talk at first, but Olivia, who had stayed with them, warned him off silently.
The Citroen and the Vauxhall had been drawn up side by side, occupying the entire width of the narrow lane, and they had their meal communally in the two cars. The radio jabbered softly—a recording of a talk on Moorish architecture. It was the sort of thing that almost parodied the vaunted British phlegm{97}. Perhaps it had been put on with that in mind; but the situation, John thought, was not so easily to be played down.