She scrambled to her feet again, covered by Luke’s body. She heard the hard voice below say impatiently: “You heard me, chum. Let’s see your hands.”
Luke fired from the pocket of his coat on the last word. He hadn’t known he was going to do it, he hadn’t even realised that his thumb had already shoved off the safety catch. Still less consciously had he calculated the angle of the drop before him, and tilted the thing well down in his pocket, to startle and cripple, perhaps, but not to kill. At this distance even he couldn’t miss, the whole crevice between the rocks seemed to be full of the bulky body, with the lambent native silver of the sea outlining it clearly. He and Bunty had the dark and solid rock behind them; but even so, he reached for her with his left hand as he fired with the right, and drew her close to his back, covered from sight by his body.
The report was sharp and loud between the rocks, and followed closely by a gasping grunt and a curious, waspish whine. The dark shape before him buckled suddenly sideways, clutching at its knee, and went down in a toppling fall on to the stones, sliding downhill a yard with scrambling feet before it found a stable resting-place. What astonished Luke most was that the other gun didn’t go off, but he had no time to speculate on the reason. Without a word he launched himself forward down the path, swung Bunty before him past the grovelling, groaning, cursing man on the ground, and charged after her.
The threshing shape heaved suddenly, as if the rock had risen under him; an arm came up and reached for him. He hurdled the body blindly, felt the fingers claw at his ankle and miss their hold. Then he came down by ill luck on shifting stones that rolled away from under his foot and flung him on his back, knocking the breath out of him, and half the sense with it. The hand that had missed his ankle scrabbled after him hungrily, and found a grip on his hair. A solid weight rolled over on top of him, holding him down; the hand shifted to his mouth. Not to his throat, his mouth! That was it, that was why no shot, either, he realised, struggling to free his arms from the weight that pinned them. They wanted no sound carrying for miles up-coast and down over the sounding-board of this placid sea. This back-gate guard had been told to threaten, not to fire. In that case Luke had good reason to be glad of his own single shot; someone, somewhere, might have heard. Bunty, he thought desperately, wrenching one arm clear and jabbing upwards viciously under a thick jaw, scream, now, while you’ve got the chance, and keep on screaming. They might cut and run yet. But what was the use, she wasn’t a screamer. Not a sound from her!
An arm swung at his head, and he rolled aside from the blow and felt something hard graze his temple and clang like metal on the rock. Whalebone fingers ground deep into his cheeks, clamping his lips against his teeth. He fought for breath, and heard his opponent pumping in sobbing gasps of air and spending them in incoherent, monotonous curses, hissing with pain between the words that were hardly words. When the weight on top of him shifted for another attempt at clubbing him with the gun, he heaved up one knee and tried to throw his incubus from him, but it was too heavy to be lifted or unbalanced so easily. And from somewhere above, a crazy accompaniment to this disordered scene, came the busy, absorbed sound of feet descending endlessly towards them, like the Goons padding along some impossibly long radio corridor to open the door to one more visitor to Bedlam.
It was Bunty, however, who reached them first, Bunty with a sizable stone in her two hands, and some furious atavism stirring in her that made fear of secondary importance. It was not a particularly well-chosen stone, but she had had to grope for it in the dark. Nor was she very deft at using it; perhaps she was right, and they both of them had some built-in prohibition against killing that handicapped them badly in a situation like this. But she did her best. The stone thudded against the back of a classically Alpine skull, low towards where the neck should have been if there had been any neck, and rolled down hunched shoulders to bounce away down the slope. The throttling hand slackened, the weight slumped with a grunt over Luke’s threshing body. Bunty, taking what she could find, reached over the wide shoulders to seize the lapels of the man’s raincoat, and drag it back with all her strength to pinion his upper arms. Luke heaved himself clear with a convulsion that sent them all three slipping and staggering downhill; and Bunty caught at his hand and helped to pull him to his feet.
They were at the edge of the jetty, hand in hand, the injured man dragging himself along after them half-stunned and moaning, when the three men from above overtook and fell upon them. Luke, swinging to fight them off a shade too late, went down heavily beneath two of them, and stayed down. Bunty, turning at the edge of the water, watched the small, murderous black eye of a revolver advance at leisure until it touched her breast.
“All righ’t, sweetheart,” said the small, murderous, black-avised man behind the gun, in just the mild, metallic, indifferent voice the gun might have used, “upstairs again, and see and be a lady on the way. Your boy-friend here can’t afford no slips on your part. He’s got enough troubles as it is. Walk!”
Bunty walked, at an even and sedate pace, leading that procession up the cliff-path and back to the house, with the gun not a yard from her back, and a torch pricking her consciousness occasionally to remind her that every step was watched. She walked with the same erect stride she always had, stretching her long legs to the steeper steps without slackening speed. There was nothing she could do, except make it clear that she had no tricks to play. Luke was only a few yards behind her, and the enemy, though reduced to three against two, had now four guns at their disposal, and none ranged against them. There was no sense in provoking death.
Far behind them among the rocks, the wounded man hoisted himself painfully from stair to stair, dragging one leg and leaving a long smear of blood behind him. When the prisoners were safely in the house and under guard, perhaps one of his fellows would help him to finish the journey. Now it seemed that he was of no importance. His thin, quiet cursing followed them up to the terrace, and behind it like a backcloth rolled the soft, absorbed night-singing of a calm sea.
How queer, thought Bunty involuntarily, I still don’t know where we are. Somewhere on the east coast of Scotland. North of Muirdrum, I remember the policeman there thought he’d recognised Luke’s car passing through. Luke mentioned going into Forfar. Her mind sketched in, with lightheaded clarity, a map of the Angus coastline. Somewhere between Arbroath and Montrose? Up the coast there must be Lunan Bay, and farther north are the Bullars of Buchan, where Doctor Johnson insisted on sailing into the rock cauldron in a small boat. You can only do it when it’s calm. Calm! Like to-night. You could do it to-night.
Luke came up the path after her between two guns. The key of the boat-house had been taken from him along with the gun from the same pocket. All their evidence lost. He was bruised, sore and sick with chagrin; but most of all he raged that he had not sent Bunty home or taken her to the safety of the nearest police station in the morning, while there’d been time, time they’d frittered away in supposing that they had only the police to contend with. Now they knew better, and now was too late.
But at every step he felt that there was something wrong, that something about Bunty was not as he had expected it to be, and his battered and confused mind could not run the discrepancy to earth. Not until they were hustled and prodded through the back door into the kitchen, and there penned in a corner until someone found the fuse-box. The wounded man, out in the darkness, laboriously groaned and fumbled his way up towards the terrace, and no one seemed to care. If you’re incapacitated, you’re finished with. Throw the broken one away and get a new one. The modern trend even with human beings, it seemed. Luke shivered, but even in the middle of this horror there was a grain of comfort that glowed securely, so clear was the division between himself and these people with whom, for a while, he had been confusing himself.