It marked a stage. They looked at each other. David’s hands had been in his trouser pockets, but now he took them out. They were handier that way. He tried to remember such modest instruction in unarmed combat as the Army had seen fit to give him. He didn’t recall much more than that it was a nasty field of knowledge.
Not that the stranger appeared dangerous. He turned away and took a little stroll towards the body and back, with an incongruous air of one merely concerned to enjoy the mild sunshine. ‘Aren’t we getting this a bit wrong?’ he presently asked. ‘Can’t we take it that we’ve both stumbled on this affair – and realize that there’s nothing at all we can do about it? The man’s dead. We can’t help him in any way. Getting involved in some elaborate police inquiry will be highly disagreeable and inconvenient. I don’t know who or what you are; but at a guess I’d say you are an undergraduate on vacation. Well, this business is likely to mess up things for you for weeks. And the same consideration applies to myself. So why not just walk off – you in one direction and myself in the other? There’s no conceivable means by which we can be pitched on.’
David, although he had expected pretty well anything, was aware that he must be staring at the stranger round-eyed. The man’s speech had been the most complete giveaway that could be conceived – and yet he appeared to be utterly unaware of the fact. There had already been hints of an attitude that was distinctly what Timothy Dumble would call off-white; and now here was a proposal utterly at variance with the character in which the stranger had begun by presenting himself. Gentlemen of military cut, who take a glance at violent death and murmur some shibboleth like ‘Bad show’, don’t propose to bolt from it fifteen minutes later. David now had no doubt that he was dealing with a complete crook. The gentleman before him was a criminal and an enemy.
This simplified matters. David presumably took no pains to conceal the conclusion to which he had come from appearing on his face. The stranger, as if belatedly conscious of crisis, had turned pale; and David could sense his body as taut and waiting. He really was dangerous now. And there was something – David felt his mind reaching for it – that he mustn’t be let do. There was some simple physical action that he mustn’t be allowed to take.
What the stranger did was once more to turn and stroll away. This time he moved to the periphery of the rock, so that for a moment David wondered whether he was going to make a bolt for it. But he only mounted a boulder and once more scanned the moor below. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the question’s academic now, anyhow. There are a couple of men making straight for the Tor.’ He stepped down and strolled back. ‘Or perhaps they’re girls. I’m not sure.’
It seemed to David that the point was an important one. Girls are all very well, but it isn’t very feasible to call upon a brace of them to collar a thug. So he moved to the edge and made his own inspection.
The moor was as empty as before.
He swung round, already knowing what he’d see. For now – too late and when he had been fooled – he had identified that simple action that the stranger mustn’t be allowed to perform. It was stooping over the body and possessing himself of that gun. There was going to be another corpse.
And of course it had happened now. The stranger was straight-ening himself as David turned to him, and the weapon was in his hand. There couldn’t be much doubt about what he intended. Then, quite unexpectedly, he spoke. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and took a step forward, holding out the pistol – which seemed very small – as if for inspection.
This time David tumbled in a flash to what was happening. The stranger did mean murder – a second murder – and not consultation or parley. But this gun was a miserable affair, not fit for much more than crime passionnel in a boudoir. It would be reliable only at very close quarters indeed. And that was what the stranger was trying to make sure of now. David didn’t propose to oblige him. He needed almost miraculous speed – and some adequate internal chemistry gave it to him. In an instant he was over the lip of rock behind him. There was no time to discover whether this was a possible point at which to descend; he simply had to let his toes and fingers feel for what they could find. Bare stone scraped his chest; a fragment of stone whipped past his ear and he heard a bang from above; he had just realized the incredible fact that he had really been fired on when he felt his feet touch ground. For a moment he couldn’t believe this either; it was impossible that he should have come down that short but formidable descent in just no time at all. But it was true. He turned from the face of the rock without looking up, and took to his heels down the steep slope of the Tor.
There was another bang. It came just after he had felt a queer jar in one of his feet. He wondered whether his pursuer had scored a lucky hit. They said you sometimes didn’t feel the pain for quite a time. But he was continuing to run all right – and now he heard nothing but the sounds of his own flight. It was ignominious. Still, he was retreating in fairly good order – very literally watching his step in this treacherous ground, and using his wits about the best course to choose. At the same time he was extremely frightened. The thought passed through his mind that it wasn’t in the least like any feeling he’d experienced in Timothy’s car the night before. Yet his present danger must be much less, for the stranger’s pistol was next to useless to him at this range, and he himself had a lead that an elderly man wasn’t at all likely to reduce, even if he attempted pursuit at all.
Making sure that there were no pitfalls for a few yards ahead, David glanced over his shoulder. He hadn’t done the fellow justice. He must have got down from the rocks quite as quickly as David had; and now he was coming on with what one could see at a glance to be an athlete’s movement. David speeded up. At the same time he found himself doing odd sums: calculating the square miles of actual solitude available in this part of the world for the fantastic hunted-man affair he seemed to have become involved in; calculating the stranger’s age and correlating it with his likely stamina.
And slowly – so that he must have covered several hundred yards during the process – David’s unworthy funk did a little drain from him. He had nothing to be afraid of now except carelessness or bad luck. A heavy tumble, a twist of an ankle, and he was done for. But if he was so soft that he was actually overtaken by his pursuer in a straight race, then he just deserved whatever came to him.
He looked back again. The stranger had neither gained nor lost ground. He seemed to be fumbling in a pocket as he ran, so that David wondered if he were reaching for cartridges to reload his beastly little pistol. Then the stranger put his hand up to his mouth and blew a shrill blast on a whistle.
It came to David chiefly as outrageous, as enormous cheek. It was what a policeman would do if you snatched a fellow’s watch and ran. Yet it was the stranger who was a criminal – and a criminal of the lethal sort. David looked ahead. The moor fell away from him in gentle undulations, and in the distance he could just distinguish a line of posts. On every fourth or fifth post there would be a hawk… The memory seemed to represent security – and indeed he knew that a couple of miles along that track there was a metalled road and then a village. At the moment, he had only to go straight ahead.
Suddenly, he realized that this was just what he couldn’t do. That whistle had effected something. Dead in front of him, although several hundred yards away, a man seemed to have arisen up out of the moor. And there was no mistaking his movements. He had answered a summons to join in the pursuit. The chase, David realized at once and grimly, took on a different character instantly. Two to one. That made it hare and hounds.