CHAPTER XXIII THE TERRIBLE DEDUCTION
When Barney had been seized in the chapel he had instinctively fought back, but the odds assembled there against him were so overwhelming that he knew his struggles to be hopeless. With the Great Ram's denunciation ringing in his ears he knew, too, that his life was not worth a quarter-of-an-hour's purchase.
Then, as he was facing the altar while swaying wildly between his two antagonists, he had seen Mary throw the crucifix. The blinding flash, thunderous crash and heaving of the floor that followed had stricken all the Satanists with instant terror. The one holding on to Barney's left arm let go. Swinging round he had kneed in the groin the other man who was clinging to him, and wrenched his right arm free. The rest of them, by stepping forward, could have barred his path to the open end of the chapel; but it had been plunged into darkness and they had been thrown into a panic. He cannoned into one and brushed by another; next moment he was out in the body of the Abbey and running for his life.
It was a nightmare dash, for out there fog combined with the darkness to prevent his seeing where he was going. Several times he ran slap into sections of wall and twice tripped to fall at full length among the weeds and brambles. Yet it was that spell-induced fog that saved him from determined pursuit and recapture.
After four or five minutes of staggering blindly about, he got clear of the ruin and could vaguely make out the trunks of big trees as he ran on now dodging between them. Another five minutes and both the wood and the fog-belt ended. He had no idea of the direction he had taken but there was no sign of a track or the cars in which the Satanists had arrived, and as far as he could see ahead of him lay only a ploughed field.
Pulling up on the edge of it, he stood gasping for breath and striving to collect his thoughts. He owed his life to Mary; he had no doubt about that. But what about her? Unless she too had got away in the darkness and confusion they would inflict a terrible vengeance on her. She was no fool; she must have known the sort of penalty she would have to pay for throwing a crucifix in the Great Ram's face. That meant that, despite the bitter abuse she had hurled at him not much over an hour ago, deep down she must love him. Courageous men and women will take great risks to rescue children, and often complete strangers, from fire or drowning, but they do not voluntarily invite a terrible death for themselves in order to save the life of someone they hate. And after what had passed between them there could be no halfway house. If she did not hate him, then she loved him. At the thought that she must almost certainly still be in the clutches of the Satanists, he groaned aloud.
As his breathing eased a little, he swung round to plunge back into the wood. But he had taken only a few steps before he pulled up. The ruined Abbey must be anything between a quarter and half a mile away. In the fog and darkness nothing but a fluke could lead him back to it direct, and he might wander about in the wood for an hour or more without finding it.
Besides, when he did, what was he going to do? His gun had been taken from him by one of the American's coloured boys. He had intended to ask for it back after supper; but Lothar's arrival had precipitated a series of events which had denied him the chance to do so. Even if Lothar had been rendered hors de combat by the blaze as the crucifix hit his face, there was still the giant American and the dozen men who made up his coven. Barney was far from being a coward and he had the greatest difficulty in resisting the urge to make an immediate attempt to rescue Mary; but he knew that on his own he could not possibly succeed.
He groaned again, leant against a tree and, covering his face with his hands, endeavoured to make up his mind about the best course to take. To bring the police on the scene was the obvious answer; but how could that be done most quickly? After a moment he decided that the best bet would be to get hold of one of the Satanists' cars and drive in to Cambridge. Even if he could have found a house with a telephone fairly quickly, it might prove difficult to convince the police that he really needed the help of at least a dozen of them, and urgently; whereas if he went to a police station he had only to show his official pass to secure immediate assistance.
At a run he set off along the edge of the trees, but he had completely lost his bearings and actually was on the far side of the wood from the track along which the cars had come to it. After he had been running for several minutes, the wood ended in a right angle. Turning the corner he ran on, only to find that this side of the wood seemed longer than that on which he had come out; but having covered some distance along it he struck a path. To the right it led into the fog-shrouded wood, to the left to a cottage some hundred yards away, of which against the paler sky he could just make out the chimney and the roof line.
Realizing now that he must have come out on the opposite side of the wood from the cars, and might yet have to run a long way to reach them, he decided to find out if the cottage had a telephone. Two minutes later he was hammering loudly on its door, and shouting, 'Wake up there! Wake up!'
In response to his shouts a tousled head was thrust out of an upper window. Without waiting to be questioned or abused he cried, 'I'm a policeman. This is urgent. It's a matter of murder. Have you a telephone?�
'No, I haven't,' angrily replied the man at the window; then, as the reason for his having been aroused from his sleep sunk in, he added, 'Sorry I can't help. But there's one at the vicarage. Turn left and straight up the road. It's just past the church; you can't miss it.'
With a murmur of thanks Barney, still panting, dashed down the garden path to the lane on which the cottage faced, and up the road. After another gruelling run, now gasping for breath and sweating profusely, he reached the vicarage. The same tactics there led, after a few moments, to the front door being opened by a tall, middle-aged man in a dressing-gown, who said he was the vicar.
Using 'murder' again as the best means of getting swift action, Barney was led to the telephone and induced the desk-sergeant at the Cambridge police headquarters to put him through to the night-duty Inspector. To have mentioned Black Magic might have aroused scepticism; so Barney gave the code name by which his office was known to the police, and said that he was on the trail of a wanted enemy agent who was a known killer. Even so he had the greatest difficulty in persuading the Inspector to send more than one police car and also come out himself with a strong force of constables.
The vicar, his eyes on stalks as he listened, supplied the name of his village, which lay just over the crest of the hill; but this produced a new snag, as it was well across the county border, in the north-western corner of Essex. All Barney's persuasive powers were needed to induce the Inspector to cut red tape and enter another county but, by promising to take the responsibility if there was any trouble, he succeeded.
At Barney's request the vicar produced a map of the district. From it he quickly memorized the way to get back on to the other road from which the track led to the ruined Abbey; then he gratefully accepted the vicar's offer of a whisky and soda.
Twenty minutes later the Inspector arrived with three car-loads of police. Barney was waiting for them on the doorstep. Hastily thanking the vicar he showed the Inspector his special identity card, told him the direction to take and got into the back of his car. While they drove the better part of two miles along roads that went round the wood, he gave the Inspector the bare facts of the situation, then they bumped up the track to the place where the Satanists had left their cars.
The cars were no longer there but the sight of their fresh tracks, thrown up in the headlights of the police cars, dissipated the Inspector's suspicions that Barney was suffering from overstrain and had brought him out on a wild-goose chase. The wood was still dank and eerily silent, apart from the constant dripping from the trees; but the fog had cleared a little and they made their way as quickly as they could towards the Abbey.