'Augustus… what have you done?' she wailed, the words torn away by the howling wind.
Maurice knelt on both knees beside her and tugged at her shuddering shoulders.
'Please,' he shouted over the noise of the storm, 'we can't stop! There's nowhere to hide!' He meant nowhere to take cover, but it came out as hide.
She beat at the rough roadway with the heels of her fists, her back juddering as she sobbed. Then, without another sound, she rose to her feet, swaying with the wind. She stared at the boy, but again it was with wide vacant eyes.
'Where are we going?' Maurice pleaded.
But Magda just turned away and walked on as if there had been no interruption to their journey. He quickly caught up and clung to her elbow.
They stopped only twice after that, once when a stout tree branch fell into the lane before them, and again when Maurice tripped over some soft and sodden creature—a rabbit or small fox—lying dead in a puddle on the ground.
Although their weather-hindered journey must have taken several hours, Maurice had lost all sense of time and was surprised when they reached the outskirts of a town. There were no streetlights or gaslights in this part of the country and only a few upstairs windows were lit as they made their way along the road. Magda's bent body was stiff and she seemed to be walking mechanically, like a wind-up toy. She spoke not a word to him, but when they came upon the deserted railway station, he at last understood that this had been their destination all along. The station master's quarters and the ticket office were closed, for these were now the very early hours of the morning, but Magda led Maurice through a side gate and along to the very end of the platform where there was a backless bench. Despite the exposure, she sat them both down and Maurice huddled against her for protection. She remained stiff, upright now, her back ramrod straight, ignoring the boy, lost in her own breakdown.
Leaning close to her ear, Maurice asked, 'Are we catching the train? Are we going to London?'
There was no response, but he assumed that was the idea, to get back to the city where no one would find them and no one could blame them for what had happened in Crickley Hall—and he was, after all, only a child. Maurice saw no future beyond that.
As the hours moved on to dawn, the storm abated and the winds died. They weren't to know that the gorge and Hollow Bay had been flooded and that there was no one left at Crickley Hall to bear witness to what had taken place there. No, Maurice and Magda were in their own world, Maurice drenched and shivering, hunched up as close to Magda as he could get, she still staring straight ahead, also drenched but her body rigid, her face expressionless, features hard as if made of stone.
As often was the case in the aftermath of a heavy storm, the morning was bright and clear, the smell of raw damp earth heavy in the air. Somewhere in the distance there came the clang-clang of a fire-engine bell.
Still they waited and the sun began to dry out their clothes a little. Eventually, someone strolled out of the ticket office onto the platform, but it was too far away for the man to see them properly. As the hours went by, more people arrived on the platform, but none wandered down to the far end. Only Maurice was looking—Magda was still in a place of her own—and he saw a uniformed station master or guard step out of his office and check his pocket-watch, then glance towards them.
Maurice, sitting on Magda's right-hand side, sat back so that he was shielded by her body. He felt guilty, because they hadn't bought tickets.
All the uniformed man saw was a lone woman dressed entirely in black waiting for the morning train at the far end of the station. She was too far away to make out her features, although he could tell her face was very pale. He checked his watch again, a piece that had served him well for twenty years with its large sharp numbers and fine black hands, then peered in the opposite direction to the single woman, towards the west. He sensed the rumble on the railtracks before he actually heard it, a trick he'd picked up over the years—it was as if the rails were trembling ahead of the sound—and his eyes squinted as he waited for the London train to appear round the bend half a mile away.
For the benefit of the waiting passengers on the platform, he barked out the train's ultimate destination and the major towns it stopped at along the way.
Maurice heard the station man call out London and he ducked his head forward to see the train's approach. It soon chugged in and with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes the engine and first carriage came to a halt just past him. Doors began to open and slam shut again. No passengers alighted, for this was the train's first stop after leaving its departure point of Ilfracombe.
He looked at Magda, but she was not paying attention, she was just staring at the cream and dark-red carriage that was opposite them. He tugged urgently at her elbow and she took no notice.
'Magda,' he said in a quick hushed voice as if others might hear, 'we must get on. It'll take us to London. Please, Magda, before it starts up again.'
No response though. She was like an alabaster statue sitting there, so white was her colour, so still was her body.
'Please, Magda!' He was desperate now.
And then, when she wouldn't move, wouldn't acknowledge him, a coldness flushed through Maurice. He was completely alone again. The alliance between himself, Augustus and Magda was over. Augustus would be sent to jail for what he'd done—even hanged—and Magda would lose her job. No, worse than that. For murdering the teacher, Nancy Linnet, she would be put in prison for the rest of her life. Unless she told the police and the judge that he, Maurice, had struck the fatal blow that killed Miss Linnet, and she had only helped him get rid of the body. She wouldn't tell them it was she who had pushed the teacher down the stairs, she would blame it all on him!
He slid a few inches away from Magda on the bench and searched her profile. Would she tell on him? She didn't seem right in the head, it was as if something had closed down inside her. Why wouldn't she speak to him, why did she just sit there?
The slamming of the doors had finished now and he peeked past his silent companion to see the station man looking in the opposite direction, checking all the carriage doors were shut and there were no more passengers trying to board at that end.
Maurice knew he had to make a decision right then. If the police caught him they'd send him to Borstal, where all the bad boys went; or maybe, even worse, they'd put him in a grown-up prison because that's what they did with anyone who had murdered another person. Perhaps they'd even hang him, like Augustus. How old did you have to be before you got the rope?
Maurice ran for the carriage as a whistle blew and, once aboard and the train was slowly moving out of the station, he looked through a window at the solitary figure sitting there on the platform bench. Magda did not seem to see him as he passed.
•
Maurice Stafford—the older Maurice Stafford, no longer a boy but a man of seventy-five years who now lived under a different name—tried to flex his left knee in the limited space beneath the Mondeo's steering wheel. His leg always felt worse when the weather was cold or wet, a flaw in his otherwise healthy body, and he thought back to when the injury had occurred.
•
The accident had happened when he was still a boy scavenging in the ruins of the bomb-blasted city, stealing from grocery shops whose owners displayed their wares—fruit (limited) and vegetables (basic)—outside in boxes on the pavement, or from barrows in the markets. At night he slept in partially demolished houses, and on particularly cold nights he went to the underground shelters that some families still used even though the bombing appeared to have stopped (this was before the flying bombs, the V-1s and V-2s, Hitler's newest weapons, began their reign of terror). Most of the families shared their rations with him after he had explained that his father had died overseas and that his mother was an ambulance driver on call that night—he would tell anxious women that his mother always dropped him at a shelter before she went on to do her duty. It was never difficult to attach himself to families or women.