I don’t intend to enlarge on the later course of our captivity or the severe discomforts it imposed upon us. It had its phases or stages. Only Sammy ever appeared, although we heard the voices of our more important tyrants from time to time. Occasionally Robin went to work on him again. More frequently – and I thought with remarkable judgement – he left his subversive ideas to incubate slowly in Sammy’s dim mind. There were small physical ameliorations now and then, and some sudden brutalities as well. Whether I bore myself well or ill, I don’t know; what I can alone recall with any satisfaction was eventually coaxing the terrified little Daviot into speech. It was a sufficiently slender achievement, but it brought to all three of us in some obscure way a considerable measure of relief. I suppose we differed one from another in our private fears. My own concerned the likelihood (failing a successful suborning of Sammy) of protracted stalemate in the situation, and our captors, although not run to earth, coming to realise that the other side wouldn’t play; that letting convicts out of gaol simply wasn’t on. They wouldn’t kill us, since to do so would increase the penalties attending ultimate disaster if it came to them, and would be without any practical advantage meantime. Nor would they liberate us, since that would too quickly give away too much. They would simply quit. We’d hear some powerful car departing, and that would be that. My last days and hours would be like those of Ugolino and his sons in their dungeon.
There was an element of muddled thinking in this, which my circumstances might perhaps excuse. When I thought about Robin’s thinking I saw no muddle at all. At first I questioned the wisdom of one condition he consistently sought to impose in his palaverings with Sammy. Sammy was to free us from our bonds and leave an unlocked door behind him before departing to seek the security and sadly imaginary reward awaiting him in that police station. But then I saw how significantly it would be a constraining of the dull-witted creature to a sense that he had burnt his boats behind him. On his way to that citadel of law and order he was only too likely to lose his nerve and hurry back to restore the status quo. But once he had left three freed prisoners behind him his only policy would be to make his own virtuous appearance among the police before we walked in on them ourselves. Once more there was a hazard of judging Sammy to be even more thick-headed than he was. It was sound psychology on Robin’s part, all the same.
And it worked. On what was my own third day in the place, it worked. Only it didn’t work quite as we might have hoped.
The powerful car did depart. But it did that regularly, Robin said, once, or sometimes twice, a day. We had no expectation that anything dramatic would follow. Our minds, I think, were working slowly by this time – and how weakened and stiffened were our limbs we had hitherto known only when, cautiously one at a time and for humble purposes, Sammy had partly undone our fetters.
Now, perhaps half an hour after his bosses had driven away, he did the whole job. Or we thought he’d done that, although later a small but awkward snag was to appear. He said not a word, and he worked still almost in darkness. We said not a word either – feeling, I suppose, that it might be the wrong word if we uttered it. The whole thing was like a criminal deed. Sammy clearly felt that way: that here at last he was committing a thoroughly immoral act. David, I imagine, scarcely thought at all. But with both Robin and myself Sammy’s state of mind was catching. We were guilty men. This extraordinary fact of mind appears worth reporting.
Sammy crept away, still without a word. He left a chink of light behind him, so we knew we weren’t locked in again after all. Robin insisted on our letting some ten minutes pass; if Sammy saw us hard upon his heels, he said, he might imagine we were intent on double-crossing him – and it was just possible that he was lethally armed and might utterly lose his head. He had lost most of it already, or he would never have permitted this extraordinary state of affairs. It will be clear that, by this time, I was as entirely in Robin Hayes’s hands as David Daviot was. Robin, for weeks now Heynoe’s problem pupil, had taken command of our situation to quite staggering effect.
Staggering in the more literal sense now turned out to be the condition of all three of us. Gropingly, holding out a steadying hand each to the other, we stumbled out of the half-light of our prison without a glance at it. There was a narrow corridor, fabricated out of breeze-blocks and lit by two broken windows. Beyond this, we were in a very large, low-ceilinged room in which were a few pieces of furniture and some utensils – a cooking-stove, a camp bed, two or three kitchen chairs and the like – but which was mostly given over to bits and pieces of broken and rusted machinery. There was something queer about the daylight, which seemed to come mostly from the dirty roof over our heads. It was our long spell in almost utter darkness, I told myself, that had somehow disordered our vision. But at least before us was an open door, and one giving on open air. Strength came to us to run – uttering, I seem to remember, senseless cries. We were outside and in a free universe. It was a universe of snow.
Under a dull grey sky the snow was everywhere. It topped and sheathed and almost obliterated an endless disorganised huddle of derelict and crumbling and long-deserted buildings. Although the entire forlorn and sinister scene was swimming before me I recognised it at once. It was Uptoncester’s luckless and ruined industrial estate. And we were as alone in it as if we had been pitched down on the surface of the moon.
But it was only for a moment that this impression, reassuring, even comforting after a fashion, held. There were four figures at a middle distance, and some way beyond them, barely visible through falling and eddying snow, was a large car, stationary and slanted sideways on what must have been a road. It appeared to have slewed or skidded on the treacherous surface and bumped into a wall. The four men were plodding in our direction. Their movement suggested a slow menacing ritual dance of savages as step by step they extricated their feet from what must have been eighteen inches of snow. I remembered that bit about there not having been such a winter for years.
They were the enemy. We hadn’t a doubt of that. They were the enemy, who had for some reason been making an untimely return to their private prison. It occurred to me to wonder whether they had come upon Sammy, and dealt with him, on their way. Certainly they were going to deal with us now. There wasn’t a doubt of that either. Even as we looked, aghast, they had spotted us. Faintly through the muffling downpour there came to us what must have been an enraged bellow. The oncoming dance turned energetic, phrenetic. They looked to be powerful men. It was unsurprising that Sammy was dead scared of them.
‘Run!’
This was Robin’s shout, and we ran. We ran in the only direction open to us, although it was probably clean away from Uptoncester and into a void and friendless countryside. Within a minute I was finding it difficult to keep up with the boys, and this puzzled me. Though elderly, I knew myself to be in reasonably fit physical trim. Then the explanation appeared. I wasn’t running but hobbling. I was hobbling because, still tied firmly round one ankle, was a trailing length of Sammy’s accursed rope. Quite how this impeded me, I don’t know. But trying to cope with it as I moved, I came an abrupt cropper in the snow. There ought to have been nothing fatal about this, and I picked myself up in a moment. But now something nasty had happened to the ankle itself, and I lost further ground on Robin and David. Correspondingly, our pursuers gained upon me. I wondered whether I could effectively delay them by turning and putting up a fight. But it certainly wouldn’t need four men to dispose of me as their fancy took them, and two of them would probably be enough to recapture the boys.
I was still wondering about this, weighing the possibility of a rugger tackle, when all four men came abreast of me and laboured on without a pause. I just mightn’t have been there. They weren’t interested in the intrusive schoolmaster – or an insignificant snooping cop. Their original captives, the only important ones, were still ahead.
I remembered what lay immediately in front of us all: the enormous gravel pit which had been turned, with small success, into an Aquatic Leisure Park. Nobody was going to be leisured there now. I wondered whether the great expanse of dirty water was frozen over – and, if so, whether it would also be under a blanket of snow.
Then, with amazing suddenness, the entire situation was transformed.
The sound of an engine made itself heard behind us. Then the sound of many engines. It was as if a whole traffic jam had dropped out of the sky upon this empty terrain. Labouring uselessly in the rear of the desperate chase, I halted and looked behind me. There was a police car, now stationary, not a hundred yards away. There were more police cars following, and in an instant policemen were tumbling out of the whole lot. As if by way of variety, there was also what I thought of as a Black Maria, and a couple of men were tumbling out of that too. Closing the amazing procession was an ambulance. Its bell was clanging violently – possibly by way of intimating to the criminals that all was up with them, and that they would presently be inside it and in poor condition if they resisted arrest.
But the race went on regardless. David was out in front. Perhaps because lighter than Robin, and so sinking less heavily into the snow as he ran, he looked to be the first who would breast some imaginary tape. The four pursuers were in a clump together, but must have been by now conscious that they were themselves pursued.
‘Stop, David! Stop!’
It was Robin’s shout again. Robin, having become aware as David had not of the transformed state of the case, knew that flight was no longer required of either of them. They had only to stand their ground and the police would be up with them almost in the same moment as with the enemy. An Uptoncester boy, he also knew about the gravel pit – the gravel pit in which it had been possible to water-ski or to indulge in the fascinating new Planche à Voile. The kidnappers knew about it too. Even as I looked, two of them turned one way and two of them the other, proposing to skirt the great sheet of ice – for it was that – on opposite banks. No longer hunters but hunted, their aim was simply to escape amid the obliterating snows if they could.
David, still in blind terror, paid no heed to Robin’s cry. He ran straight ahead, and in an instant was in mortal danger. The snow his heels sent flying no longer covered solid earth. Beneath it was the ice – perhaps no more than a skin of ice – and beneath that again dark water of unknown depth. On this new surface the boy ought to have slipped and fallen almost at once. But for fatal seconds, for a score of paces, his balance held. Then disaster struck. The ice split beneath him with a sound like a pistol-shot, shattering into fragments for a wide space around. And the judge’s grandson had disappeared.
It was now the police that shouted – commanding Robin to stop. But Robin didn’t. He didn’t pause for an instant. He was in the water amid jagged stars of floating ice. Then he too vanished. When he reappeared he had David in his grasp. There were policemen – some of the policemen – in the water as well. Heavy-booted, they had plunged straight in. Others of them continued to pursue the criminals. I had a weird brief glimpse of them vanishing from the picture with unnatural speed, as in some grotesque episode of knockabout comedy on a screen. Robin was struggling with David towards the shore. There were policemen, up to their necks in water, only yards away. Then what seemed the final horror happened. The rescue went wrong, for the rescuer had succumbed to panic – just as in the Helmingham swimming bath on a day that seemed aeons remote. In a flailing confusion, both boys vanished.
There was a strange cry, and a new figure dashed past me. I recognised him as one of the men who had jumped from the Black Maria. I recognised, in fact, Robin’s father: Mr Hayes, that talented escapologist. He was in the water – and as a professional among amateurs. None of the policemen now gallantly floundering had ever played water polo and gained a half-blue for it. They did their job, all the same – receiving first one and then the other boy into strong supporting arms. His effort made, Mr Hayes himself was only a few strokes from shore. But suddenly he gave another, and yet stranger, cry. His head went under. It didn’t come up again. Perhaps his heart was dicky. Perhaps even, he’d had enough: one simply doesn’t know. When they recovered his body it was to be under thicker ice near the middle of the pool.
Surprisingly, I found that Owen Marchmont was standing beside me.
‘How on earth . . .?’ I asked.
‘That chap Ogilvy’s work. Smart fellow for a desk-wallah. Found a pal of one of the men in gaol – Kissack – had operated, and still seemed to own, some crack-pot concern in this – heaven save us – industrial estate. It was a lead. Then there turned out to be a council employee who patrols it once a week, and who had spotted some odd activities. It struck Ogilvy as worth piling in. As for the old sod, I thought to come over and pick him up quietly from the family home myself. The police van was to accommodate the real crooks as well.’
‘You wouldn’t call Hayes a real crook?’
‘He was a bloody small one. But I always thought there was some spunk in him.’ Marchmont said this with satisfaction. ‘And now he’s quit of another open prison.’
I didn’t much attend to this last philosophical remark. I was looking at the two survivors, stripped of their sodden clothes and huddled in warm blankets from the ambulance in which they would presently be carried away, certified as suffering from ‘shock’. Now they were sitting side by side on a bench, staring blankly ahead, unaware of one another. Robin seemed older, and his physical likeness to his dead father had increased oddly. David, barbarously bereft of his golden curls, had a head too small for his body. He had become rather an unattractive boy.