The Courtesy of Death

Days, I say; but of course there weren’t any. My watch kept ticking, and I cut a notch on the changing-room table for every period of twelve hours. From then on I had an accurate record of the passing of time.

One thing was certain: that nobody would return to the cave until positive that I was dead. They might or might not think of the saving carcass. I reckoned that it would never occur to them. However that might be, I had to face my loneliness for at least a week and probably more. I think now that I should have spotted the solution, although it would have been no earthly use to me since I had not the strength. The long, cool, workmanlike job would have become a mere hysterical tearing at brickwork followed by collapse.

But endurance I had. I put it down to being an engineer with experience of deep mines, for I have no exceptional force of character, only an obstinate desire to live. I refused to spend my time just sitting. I had to find myself things to do. After taking care that there was nothing in the changing-room or gallery which could reveal my presence at a glance, I chose for my headquarters an alcove some way along the passage, but near enough for me to hear any sound from the entrance. Well inside the cave, the air felt fresher than at the dead end. I was afraid that my fire, always glowing but seldom built up unless shivering became intolerable, might use up too much oxygen. It was my source of light as well as comfort. I never lit a lantern unless at work.

I was in two minds whether to mend the lighting system or not, dreading the disappointment when the storage batteries ran down. Of course I could not in the end resist the temptation. I found the break and repaired it and replaced the fuse. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead. Before leaving the changing-room Jedder had short-circuited the lot. It was another sign of his determination to finish with me.

Though I dared not move far from the track of the wired passage for fear of losing myself, I found an occupation in exploring details of geology. I was able to reconstruct a lot more of the story than Fosworthy had told me. Jedder had brilliantly used compass and measuring rods—his naval training—and established that an upward-sloping pot-hole must be nearly under his barn. When he and his friends, after the discovery of the paintings, went to work on it, they drove a rock drill up to the surface and found that Jedder’s dead reckoning was wrong by only about thirty yards. It was then easy to dig the shored gallery through broken rock and earth, and burrow straight up into the barn.

Often I returned to the painted cave, finding more and more in it. A lantern—better still, two lanterns—gave to the beasts more beauty and mystery than Jedder’s too naval lighting.

I had lively company there, for I plotted and analysed the movements of the conventionally drawn little men. It was like contemplating some spirited wallpaper when half awake; one sees designs of which the artist was hardly conscious. I came to know that group of families which had hunted its way up from the Mediterranean following the game to the colder rivers and the young forests. The paintings must have been made during a short interglacial. The ice-cap over Britain stopped short of the Mendips, but would have made the climate too harsh for palaeolithic hunters. Hot sun must be assumed and the conditions, say, of a high Swiss valley in summer.

The ritual of the Apology was plain as could be. And the mammoth deserved it. I could sense their respect for so rare and magnificent a source of meat with a spirit inside it. Could it have been a first arrival as the trees withered and the tundra began, or a last survivor as the interglacial brought up the warmth and the southern hunters?

I think I came nearer to emotional understanding of the effect which the paintings had on Fosworthy. In utter loneliness one begins to remember not only facts but one’s former memories of the facts. My train of thought started with a hungry night in the forests of Honduras. The two Indians with me caught a fat iguana. By the light of our fire I watched it killed, cut up and grilled. Nothing surprising in that. Any country boy has done the same to a rabbit.

But when, back in a modern city, I thought of this slow, pathetic and very welcome lizard I was astonished that the scene in memory seemed to me to have a deeper and purer significance than the mere filling of a belly. In that is a faint reflection of Fosworthy’s synthesis. To him the frigid inhumanity of the butcher’s shop and the slaughterhouse was revolting. So was the taking of life for sport. Like the vast majority of mankind in industrial civilisation, he had never killed in order to live. Even his imagination could not conceive the possibility. It took the paintings to reveal to him that the hunter experienced not only the sympathy with the animal which we all know, but an enrichment of the spirit which we have utterly lost.

Religion was very present in so after-death a place with its single, concentrated glory of art. Though I am not much of a Christian, I have carried for years my King James Bible and know much of it by heart as our grandfathers did. If it is not inspired, then what does inspiration mean? I do not, of course, refer to its historical accuracy or literal truth, but just to its superb language. It was great consolation to me to remember Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord though I have no more conception of what I was crying to than the mammoth in the moment of death. Fosworthy would have said that it did not matter, and I doubt if it does.

These journeys of mine around my tomb, pointless except for keeping up morale, were safe enough while it was day outside. Fosworthy had told me that his people only made their occasional visits in the late evening when all the fields were empty, to avoid attracting attention. The difference between day and night I knew from my twelve-hour notches on the table. So, towards what would be sunset, I came home to my alcove or the changing-room and remained there.

Trying to foresee the actual circumstances of my escape, I had to recognise that I should have more than Jedder and his twelve-bore to deal with and that I could expect no mercy. I think few of the sect would ever have agreed to remove me merely because of my knowledge of the cave; but now I was a witness to the death of Fosworthy and the attempted murder of myself by starvation, to which they were all accessories. Frightened men, able at a pinch to find justification for conscience, would come prepared to finish me off discreetly in case, against all expectations, I were alive.

To escape was going to be desperately difficult if their routine was always to leave a man at the top of the shaft; and it was prudent to reckon on at least one more on guard in or about the changing-room while the rest hunted far and wide for me or my body.

Against all this opposition I had to go up the ship’s companion, along the narrow, earth-cut gallery, up the aluminium ladder and through the hatch. One armed man could stop me anywhere. If he failed, his colleague in the barn had only to pull up the ladder, and there I was.

In the darkness I made vivid pictures of the action to come and forced my imagination to take them slowly and sanely. I saw that I had to create such confusion that everyone would be occupied sorting it out, and the man on top would rush down to lend a hand.

I sawed one of the steps of the companion ladder nearly through on the under side. Whoever stepped on it would crash down with his full weight on the hinder edge of the step below. On this edge I did some inlay work with detonators from the tool-store—ten of them set an inch apart. I tried one out in a small cavity. A flat stone weighing about a pound, dropped from a height of two feet, set it off.

The heavy tools available were designed for shoring, not marquetry, so my booby-trap was a clumsy job. Still, it could not possibly be detected by a man coming down the steps. Some sort of spectacular accident was bound to happen. I hoped it would happen soon, for the end of the paraffin was in sight and I was down to making soup of Doberman bones. A sinewy bitch she was, with little meat on her. I would have done better out of the fine, glossy beast which visited my flat.

On the twelfth evening after Fosworthy’s death I heard some dull sound which was not the last echo of a distant fall of rock. I went up the companion ladder—with considerable care—and into the dug gallery. Feet were trampling at the top of the vertical shaft as the hay bales were removed from the hatch.

That the crisis had at last arrived bewildered me. I had become to accustomed to blindness, silence and withdrawal. Shaking all over, certain that I was going to die, I went into the tool-store and chose a crowbar. I was quite incapable of making any more plans. I simply stood in the passage outside the changing-room, still trembling, and put out my lantern. All positions seemed equally objectless. A sound instinct. What was going to matter were their movements, not mine.

I heard the aluminium ladder go through the hatch and down. A whole platoon of feet, as it seemed to me, scuffled over the rubble of the gallery, and the leader began to descend the companion. There was an almighty crash as the sawn step gave way, but no explosion. The new arrival had somehow managed to miss the step below and the hand-rail as well. He yelled:

He must have picked up the fallen plank and placed it on the step below, on top of the detonators. A tidy fellow! Or perhaps he was so shaken and annoyed that he wanted to show up Jedder then and there as a lousy carpenter. He was very lucky not to have set off the detonators. Standing below the companion, his face and eyes were on a level with the mined step.

The next man, who turned out to be Jedder, came running down and took one flying stride over the gap. There was a flash which hurt my eyes, a report which sounded almost shrill, then a rumbling of echoes mixed up with the slither and thud of the falling body. I was afraid that the whole companion ladder had gone, though I knew well that the effect of the detonators must be local.

I let them come. What I had planned in the darkness had happened; and this reality, this hope of the sun, changed me from hunted into hunter. On hands and knees I felt my way round the cold corner of rock at the entrance to the changing-room and looked in. I need not have taken such precautions. There was a dim group of three around Jedder. A fifth person was up in the gallery asking if he could help. They told him to go back to the barn.

They were very careless. After all, they could hardly be expected to think of anything but the unconscious Jedder who had been stunned by the shock and his fall. The sawn step laid on top of the detonators had saved his foot from being blown to bits, but it was hedge-hogged with splinters of teak and scraps of copper, and bleeding profusely. Every flashlight was directed at him.

One obvious gun—unreachable—was leaning against what was left of the companion; a dark line, which could be another, was on the ground. I wriggled towards it and closed my hand on the smooth wood of a stock. Even if someone had looked up, I should have been invisible to his eyes.

As I broke the gun open to see that it was loaded, one of them heard me. I dare say he also heard the click of the safety catch. Two beams of light were concentrated on me.

I told them to come out from under the companion and stand with faces to the rock wall, hands raised. Having collected one of the dropped torches glimmering on the floor and stamped on the rest, I made them a very formal Apology, trusting that when they were dissolved they would realise that this was necessary and that I bore no malice. One of them fainted. The other two pressed themselves into the limestone as if they hoped to go through it, farther away from me.

This was sheer, satisfying cruelty, for I knew I could not kill in cold blood and never intended to. While they waited for death, I collected the second gun and swarmed up the outer edge and rail of the companion. I wasn’t out of the wood yet and I knew it. The fellow who had been ordered back to his post must surely have stopped to listen to what was going on. I arrived at the foot of the aluminium ladder just in time to see it disappear through the open hatch.

He did not put his head over the edge of the shaft. An unnecessary precaution. The man in control of that ladder was the last person on earth I would have shot.

I tried hard to appear reasonable and told him that it was hardly likely that I would wait to be last.

‘In any case they can’t move,’ I added, ‘because they haven’t any light.’

If I really believed that, I was quite wrong. Even in pitch darkness it was not difficult to climb the companion and crawl along the gallery.

I heard my cracked, unfamiliar voice warning him that if he did not drop the ladder I would go back and execute his friends one by one. He was not impressed.

‘Then I should close up the hatch and you would die with them,’ he said primly.

I recognised his style. He was that wretched Bank Manager. He was terrified, but it was still second nature to bargain with a client.

‘What are your minimum requirements?’ he asked, as if not prepared to go far on such dubious security.

‘I will not! I will not!’ he bleated. Naturally enough, he was not going to risk being shut up for ever with his friends. ‘I shall go and fetch the police.’

‘Like hell you will! And stand trial for murder? But if you let me out I shall allow you to telephone for an ambulance.’

‘If you all tell the same lie, you can,’ I answered, without any serious thought that this might indeed be true and very dangerous for my future. ‘You will have time to shut up the cave.’

My beam of light showed nothing but the yellow walls of the tunnel and its unsteady shoring. The speaker must have put his head up and bobbed down again.

‘Then listen to what I am going to do!’ I said. ‘They have no light down there. I have smashed their torches. I shall drive them far into the cave and leave them there. Only you can get them out.’

The hatch slammed shut for an answer, cutting off the very dim circle of light in which I stood.

Their moves seemed to me panic-stricken, leading nowhere. I felt for the second gun, which was on the ground, unloaded it and pocketed the two cartridges. Then I stood on the barrel and bent it. If I could not get out, nobody else was going to.

I was not very intelligent. It could hardly be expected of a man who was insane with longing for light and human society. A contradictory set of responses. I would have torn that Bank Manager to pieces if it was likely to do any good. Yet at the same time, because he talked to me, I could have embraced him with tears. Not a mood in which to deal with the unexpected. They may have calculated on it. They had had time to think.

I went back along the gallery to the top of the companion and shone my torch down into the changing-room. It was empty. The three men, carrying Jedder, seemed already to have retired into the darkness where I proposed to drive them. I did not see what they were going to gain by that and started down the companion. A crowbar slung with an underhand action whirled past my face and clanged against the rock.

Snapping off my light, I jumped back to safety in the gallery. So that was it. They were prepared to fight it out, three against one in the darkness—and such complete darkness that my trained night-sight did not count. I had no heart for anything of the sort. All my little store of nervous energy had been exhausted by the explosion and its sequel. I simply wanted to get out of that awful place and I nearly scurried like a rabbit back to the end of my burrow below the hatch.

But it was no good retreating to a pointless safety. Unless the ladder came down, I was trapped, and it was impossible to guess when or for what cause it would come down. The Bank Manager would presumably have to open the hatch from time to time to hear what was going on and to receive orders, if any. Or he might close it up and replace the hay bales when day returned outside.

Were they prepared to stick it out for twenty-four hours if necessary? Looking back on it, I don’t see how they could. Five persons missing from their farms or businesses would surely have been reported to the police. As it was, however, I could only think they were prepared to stay down, and was consumed by impotent fury and impatience. On that, too, they may have counted. They were far from fools except in the matter of their blasted metaphysical animism.

All of this was felt rather than reasoned out. I remember two things only were clear: that the rabbit might be a rabbit but had no more patience; and that they had everything to gain, all problems solved, by sending my body to join Fosworthy’s whereas I was no better off if I killed them.

So I scrambled down the companion without showing a light. They had another shot at the noise with a hammer and hit the rail. With such deadly accurate throwing one of them could have played cricket for Somerset. Obviously he was in the passage outside the changing-room, popping in and out of the entrance. My gun was not much use, though I had a cartridge for each of the three and one over for Jedder if he asked for it. I placed the flashlight under the barrels so that I could hold the lot in my left hand with thumb on the switch. A clumsy arrangement. I saw a head once, but it wasn’t there by the time the gun was up to my shoulder.

Feeling my way silently into the passage, I tip-toed along the wall of the cave, hoping that I was driving them all in front of me and that the gun barrels would soon touch something soft. It was soon clear that I was wrong. After sending a quick beam ahead of me, another lump of iron came at me from behind. I jumped round and fired. The flash showed my attacker only a few yards away. I missed him by miles but got a gasping yelp out of him. Probably shot had ricocheted off the rock face and stung him up.

I had one in front of me and one behind. The third had to be in the changing-room or the tool-store. They had worked it out well. Whichever I hunted, there was always another ready to dash in on the quick flash of the torch. It seems to me now that I should have had it all my own way since I was armed and they were not; but in fact one of them had only to creep or dodge within reach, and then whatever weapon he had found among Jedder’s store was more efficient than four feet of gun pointing the wrong way. Admittedly if it happened to be pointing the right way one of them was going to experience the unity of life in the happy hunting grounds.

I still liked the plan with which I had impulsively threatened the Bank Manager—of shepherding all of them in front of me into convolutions of darkness from which they could never escape without a light. Thinking about it—if it can be called thinking—I saw that I was being far too cautious. Since by now I knew the wired passage as a blind man knows his living-room, I could always move a little faster than they could. So I concentrated on the man ahead of me, cracking on the pace and no longer bothering about the noise I made.

I could not catch him, but he had to stumble away into nothingness a lot more recklessly than he liked. He passed the alcove with the still glowing ashes of my last fire and began to run, realising that I might be able to see him. I did just distinguish a hurrying shadow, but it was not worth wasting a shot. The job was done. I heard him tripping and panting. I heard him fall, pick himself up and patter on again. I kept up the pressure until I was fairly sure that he had taken a wrong turning. If he hadn’t, he was going to in the very near future.

I turned round and made for the changing-room, moving more cautiously. The man who had threatened my back and was now ahead of me had been outdistanced. It was some minutes before I heard his retreating footsteps. I stopped to listen but all was silent. He had arrived wherever he wanted to be.

There were three possible places: the changing-room, the tool-store or the dead end between them. First I made certain that the dead end was clear. I had to pass both entrances, which I did by approaching silently and then rushing them. Even with my perfect knowledge of every twist and obstacle I still managed to slam my shoulder against rock. Once at the end I had command of the situation and could return to the attack with torch and gun barrels pointing in the right direction, sure that no one was behind me.

I crawled into the changing-room, convinced that I must be heard and had better keep low. But there was no loose stone or patch of mud to give me away. Everything was silent. Everybody was listening. I got my back against the wall where I was safe from any of the cricketer’s missiles, stood up and swept the little cave with gun barrels and light.

No. 2 was there, defenceless except for a hammer. Without saying a word, I beckoned him towards me, then jumped behind him and stuck the gun in his back. There was no need for any light. I prodded him on ahead of me into the passage and into the tool-store, where I knew No. 3 must be. He was. He hurled himself at the entrance, thinking that the approaching steps were mine, and doubled up No. 2 with a knee which landed in the groin and a flying fist which hit limestone. I took a kick at the mess in passing and stood back. They cannot have seen much of me, but the lighted barrels were unmistakable.

That was the end. I stripped them of matches and lighters and made them march ahead of me up the passage and into the great cavern where Undine had innocently pulled her Delilah on Fosworthy. Just before we got there, No. 1 came running to the light shouting ‘Thank God!’ His thanks were cut short and he joined the procession.

When I had them in the middle of the cavern, I suddenly turned off the light and started to hit out in all directions with the butt of the gun. That effectively scattered them. In fact they ran farther than was necessary. I suspect that they were taking the opportunity to dive into cover. I doubt if they foresaw at all what was going to happen to them.

Since entering the great cave I had been carefully counting my steps, for I knew well that I could not take liberties with the place as soon as my torch was switched off. I about-turned very exactly, risked one flash to be sure that my feet were pointing in the right direction and tip-toed off. Even so I did not expect to hit the entrance. Experience in the dark had taught me that I always bore a little left. So, when the counted steps led me nowhere, I turned sharp right and—still with some anxiety—came to an angle of the rock wall. Once round the corner I could safely give myself light, and was soon back in the tool-store.

Jedder was lying in a corner, well out of the way of any trouble, with a sheepskin coat under him. When I was rounding up his two friends, my eye had been caught by the white bandage which had been twisted round his leg below the knee, but I had no time to investigate.

His eyes were open. He stared without saying anything while I lit a lantern. I think my filthy and savage appearance haunted him more than the fear of what I might do. I was a living corpse. I had no right to be alive.

He gave a sigh of relief, or perhaps merely of regret that he had never remembered the dog.

An unimaginative man. Evidently he had never explored without a light in his hand and a line behind him.

‘Because if you don’t, you will be begging for death before I’ve done with you.’

I regret what I did. It would not have been necessary to anyone who was less obtuse.

He had very little feeling in his leg below the tourniquet but plenty above. For a moment I could not think of any tortures. One needs to know the technique of these things, and one needs fire. Then I remembered that some Jedder-like character in history used to flay his political enemies alive with red-hot pincers. There may be some point in the heat. I found even a thin strip very difficult with cold pincers.

He agreed to shout for help, moaning in self-pity that he could not believe one human being would do that to another. Curious. I should have thought that shutting a man up in the dark to die of starvation was more vile—though less spectacular a crime—than ribboning his skin. But I didn’t argue. We had to get on. He might be right in assuming that his three companions could return.

I untied his hands and put him on my back. It was not easy to hoist him up the companion, but there again experience counted. I had done this before in my career—many times in practice and once in earnest when I had been just as weak from smoke as I now was from hunger. He complicated the lift by making a grab for the gun which I was foolishly trying to carry as well. I had no mercy on him after that. I dragged him along the gallery by his good leg, leaving myself a hand free.

When we were crouching below the hatch I told him to shout. He seemed unwilling. So I had to point out again that, though we both knew I could not kill him, I was prepared to go on working over him until there was nothing left but a voice.

He shouted all right at the first touch, but it did no good whatever. The Bank Manager may have replaced some of the hay and deadened sound. More probably he was in such a state of panic that he had left the barn and was skulking outside, all ready to bolt for safety if any stranger came along.

‘You’ve got me. I know it,’ Jedder gasped in the silence. ‘But listen to me! You have to keep quiet about all this. For God’s sake, don’t you see it?’

I told him to explain quickly what he meant, and that it was no use wasting time. If his friends got clear and came crawling along the gallery I should shoot them down without mercy.

‘I mean that if you go to the police, you will find yourself charged with the murder of Barnabas Fosworthy.’

I told him to go to hell, that it was no good trying to bluff me with such damned idiocy and that anyway Miss Carlis knew how Fosworthy died.

‘She thought he slipped until you terrified her,’ he answered. ‘And then her good Filk gibbering with hysteria! She likes to think that what killed Fosworthy wasn’t human. A thing! She doesn’t know it was you. She’s a shallow fool. You’d know it if you had ever met her.’

So they were not aware that I had. That could be useful, and worth exploring further.

‘Fosworthy confided in me that he intended to meet her at the Pavilion Hotel,’ I said. ‘What was she told when he never turned up?’

It suited his game to answer, and the story was credible. It all came pouring out between spasms of pain while I kept the beam of the torch on his nervously working face.

Miss Filk appeared at the hotel later that day and tried to patch up the quarrel. She explained to her Cynthia that Fosworthy had fits of believing that he had enemies and that his only safety was in disappearing. A very common delusion. I myself had at first wondered if that was his trouble.

Undine was not convinced and returned to Bath. Miss Filk kept after her. Her need for the wretched girl’s friendship overcame discretion. She told her that Fosworthy’s mind had given way completely, that he had gone down a cave and would not come out. This infuriated Jedder and Aviston-Tresco, but they had to submit to Miss Filk. She was too dangerous and unpredictable. She insisted that her ward should see Fosworthy and be cured of her interest in him. She knew that he would appear insane after days alone in the darkness, even if he was not.

‘And my motive for murdering Fosworthy?’ I asked, returning to the main point.

‘That’s for the police to say when they find his body. Accounts will prove you bribed him. What for, if not to show you the cave? Aviston-Tresco and I tried to interfere but were brutally attacked by you. We were all alarmed at the thought of you and Fosworthy underground together—one of you unbalanced and the other violent. So we came down to the rescue. We found neither of you.’

‘We thought you had both left. It was only when we came back after twelve days that we suspected you had killed him. And you then tried to kill us.’

‘Are you sure? While you were away—’ I could have torn him apart for that “away” ‘—Aviston-Tresco’s arm has been amputated. Then you blew me up with a land-mine. You can’t deny either. Won’t that suggest to a jury that you stick at nothing? If you talk, Yarrow, you’re in for a difficult case in which the evidence of respectable, local citizens will be stacked against you. You and your counsel may convince the jury that your story is true and ours is invented, but is it worth the gamble? Is it worth awaiting trial in gaol? So dangerous a man will not get bail.’

I was not up to arguing. It was highly unlikely that I could not get the lot of them convicted. On the other hand it was true enough that I should be in for many unpleasant and anxious months.

‘Of course! Why should we start anything up? I don’t want all the scandal and fifteen years in gaol at the end of it.’

From my unrevealing darkness I replied that I should do my best to get it for him and that I was not going to spend the next year or two looking over my shoulder. Their interest in my death was too strong. It would solve all their problems.

‘For God’s sake, we’re a small band of harmless countrymen or were till you turned up!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re not assassins trained to take risks. A bungled attempt on you would be the end of us. You are quite safe so long as we are.’

His face had gone dead white. That he had been able to force out so many words before collapse impressed me with his argument, perhaps too strongly. He pulled himself back from unconsciousness for a last retort:

I never worked with more anxiety to bring anyone round. I went back to the changing-room to get a coat, and packed him in that and my own. No sugar, hot tea or alcohol. Nothing but water colder than he was. As a last resort I loosened the bandage above his knee and let him bleed a bit. To my surprise that worked. He opened his eyes and murmured:

I raved at the Bank Manager that his friends were lost in the darkness and that Jedder would die if he couldn’t get help quick. He threw the hatch wide open, shone a torch down the shaft and saw that I was telling the truth.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he wailed, more to himself than to me. ‘I don’t know what to do. All this! It will be the end of me.’

I heard him pacing round the rim of the open hatch, and stop suddenly as if he had forced himself to a decision.

I had to accept that, though I was suspicious. The ladder came down far too readily, all in a nervous rush which nearly landed the foot of it on Jedder. Had it occurred to him that when my head came up to ground level I should be at his mercy? Well, if it had, there was little I could do about it. I could only trust to his character. He was a peaceable, very white-collared citizen, needing his office chair to take decisions. His fear of the Law and of insecurity was desperate enough to screw him up to hit, but he was sure to do it inefficiently. The game was to play on his nerves.

I climbed within two feet of the top and stopped to listen. He, too, was silent, which again suggested that I shouldn’t trust him. We had arrived at another impasse. He could not now withdraw the ladder, but he could, if I tried him too hard, slam down the hatch on the top of it. His somewhat bronchial breathing revealed that he was waiting for me near the edge behind the ladder, where the back of my head would come into sight first.

Naturally I had taken the gun with me. Quickly raising it in one hand so that the barrels were just in the open and the butt against the wall of the shaft, I fired. Of course I missed him, but probably not by much. In any case this was altogether too brutal a business for him. I shot out of the hatch, and there he was crouching in the hay, trying to dissociate himself from the huge beam of wood at his side. I cannot believe that he could ever have raised and dropped it in time. Perhaps he meant to swing it at me like a battering ram.

I had no use for him at all. I ordered him to get his friends out first, and then telephone for an ambulance. This was quite instinctive and showed that for the moment I had accepted Jedder’s proposal. I wanted them to have the hay bales back on the hatch and Jedder laid out on the floor of the barn before public authorities arrived. What story they told was their own business.

The key was in the door. When I had turned it and was out on the open hills, I felt relief too overwhelming for anger or revenge. The night sky, intolerably welcome, was dark blue to my eyes, and the red and white of the stars were vivid as candles on a Christmas tree.

I trotted away between the shadowy barrows of the dead and over the springing turf of the sheep lands on much the same route that Fosworthy must have taken when he was just a jump ahead of Aviston-Tresco. Remembering his appearance, I stopped somewhere above The Green Man and its hamlet wondering what I in my turn must look like. I had never gone to the trouble of hanging up a lantern in the changing-room to find out. The inside of me was alarming enough without bothering about the outside.

My unthinking intention had been to take the first available public transport back to London. That now seemed unwise. Whether Jedder was dead or alive, his injuries were curious enough to interest the police, however firmly his friends stuck to an improbable story. Suspicious characters—and I certainly was that—were likely to be asked to account for themselves.

So I could not reach London as I was, nor did The Green Man offer safety. Well-disposed though the Gorms were, I was not capable of inventing a story which would explain my appearance. The only possible friend to whom I could go was Dr Dunton. He would be inclined to believe me, since he knew something of the human background.

His house was down in the plain, only five miles off across the valley as the crow flies. But I was no crow. As soon as I started to stumble down the steep escarpment I was overcome by exhaustion, tripping over obstacles which, when I looked at them, were barely visible. The grey dawn showed a melancholy field of wheat surrounded by grey dry-stone walls. I crawled into it.

When I woke, the sun was well up and breakfast of a sort was all round me. I rubbed the ears of wheat between my hands and licked up the little piles of kernels. Perhaps I was not so hungry as I thought, or else I kept closing my eyes against the sun which hurt them. However it was, I went fast asleep again.

In the afternoon I was sharply woken up by a dog which jumped the wall, raced barking towards me and then retreated cautiously to its master who had stopped alarmingly near, pretending a mistake had been made. Its nose may have distinguished at close quarters what my recent diet had been. I was uneasy at setting up a presumption of guilt by being discovered in hiding, and decided that there was no object in hanging about till nightfall. The best bet was to strike straight across country while I could see where I was going and to reach Dunton’s house soon after dusk. I was probably right. The easier route was round by the road through nearly linked villages and the outskirts of Wells, but at that time of year, even after dark, it was far too public.

North of Westbury I slipped across the Cheddar road, crossed the railway and was soon in trouble on Westbury Moor. Seen from the hillside, the fields and hedges of the rich valley looked easily passable. I ought to have noticed the willows. There was not a hedge without a stream beneath it or a field which was not cut by a deep drain. It was as bad as being tied up in irrigated paddy fields. Movement would have been simpler in the Dark Ages when the damned place was an estuary instead of splendid pasture at nearly sea level. At high tide Arthur and the mourning women could have sailed straight off from Glastonbury to the Western Isles.

So I had to wade to a causeway and follow the little lane on top of it. I could not help being conspicuous. A farm tractor chugged past me and nearly stopped, but the driver thought better of it. Some children took one look and bogged themselves to the knees in their anxiety to get off the track and away from me.

This forced me to take more serious stock of myself. I had a fortnight’s growth of beard, matted with filth. The bruise on my jaw had gone down, but beneath it was a jagged wound in the neck which, my fingers told me, had healed at the bottom and was still open at the top. It was leaking a little and must have looked disgusting. I couldn’t hide it, for the buttons had gone from my shirt. The state of the collar was, anyway, worse.

My appearance was more forbidding than I had ever realised. My clothes were not torn as badly as Fosworthy’s, but were stiff with a cement of limestone dust, earth from the gallery and blood—streaks of mine down the front of my coat, streaks of Doberman’s down the back and spots of Jedder’s. From the knees down, I was soggy with the black mud of the ditches.

And now there was a second main road which had to be crossed with no chance of avoiding people and houses. My lane led me slap into the village of Henton. Since I could not get round it without swimming, I elected to make a dash for the telephone box and ask Dunton to drive out and pick me up. Then I found that I had not got four pennies. Pound notes, yes. But all loose change had fallen out of my pockets when I was upside down or collapsed.

Who the hell ever has four pennies except a rep. prepared for telephoning? If you want to telephone in this island you must first go into a shop and get change. Buy something for twopence—if you can think of anything which only costs twopence—offer sixpence, ask for pennies and not the halfpennies you are sure to be offered, and then find a public box in working order. For the returned exile or the foreign visitor it is easier to back a horse than to telephone.

While I hesitated, a man strode briskly round the corner towards me. He had a mass of wind-blown white hair and an ash plant for a walking stick. I could not avoid him and summed him up as best I could. He seemed to be one of the mild, exaggeratedly healthy people by whom that part of the county was infested. At a guess, retired and sixtyish, though appearing in his late forties. Probably a militant atheist or devoted to some local religion. But on that point I was prejudiced.

I hoped that he would take me for a singularly disreputable tramp and pass by. But tramps are no longer recognised as a normal and picturesque decoration of the countryside. The very few who wander from place to place do so from choice rather than necessity and are well enough dressed to pick up a lift if they want it.

‘You shouldn’t be walking in that condition,’ he said with severe benevolence.

‘Haven’t got them,’ he replied, ‘but we will get change in the village. You should have that wound attended to immediately. I am afraid you have been fighting.’

There was a Fosworthian echo in that. I did not want him to disapprove of me, since he might be useful, so I said impulsively that I had been in a car accident.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised the mistake. My appearance was quite consistent with being hurled out on to a very dirty road. But what had I been doing ever since and why had nobody patched me up?

‘Come with me, my dear chap!’ he urged. ‘This must be looked into. I am sure you have no reason to be alarmed.’

There was nothing else for it. I walked slowly towards the village with him. It was not difficult to drag my feet and play even tireder than I felt. He offered to leave me where I was and telephone for me.

What was I to do? I was not going to give him my name and have it officiously batted about the district, and I would not drag Dunton and his family publicly into my affairs. He had too much to lose if things went wrong.

I asked this unreliable altruist if he had a car. He replied fussily that he had never found any necessity for one. This confirmed my instinctive guess that he was a devoted pedestrian and about to tell the nearest policeman that there was a wandering man who had been knocked senseless and had probably killed someone else into the bargain.

In my condition the complications were beyond me. I gave him an imaginary telephone number, and then sat down on the edge of the drain and let him carry on. As soon as he was safely out of sight I waded across to the meadow, found no cover, waded another ditch into somebody’s orchard and took refuge in the branches of an apple tree. I was very wet and cold, but beyond caring. I found some comfort in the green of the mass of leaves and the red of a clear sunset down the valley. I still could not take light for granted.

After twenty minutes my old hearty returned, beat about a little and shouted ‘Hi!’ A little later a cop arrived on a motor-cycle. Neither of them thought of looking for me on the other side of the water. They assumed that I had gone back up the lane and could easily be overtaken. The walker continued his walk, fuming a little and waving his ash plant impatiently. The cop shot off towards Westbury.

I proposed to let twilight deepen before I moved. Sitting in my tree, I cursed myself for a coward who preferred to be hunted by police rather than go boldly to them with my story. Yet it was undeniable that life, as soon as it became recognisable, would be easier and pleasanter if I could manage to clear out and leave no trace of my existence. Suppose they did gang up and swear I killed Fosworthy? Suppose the hospital, picking bits of teak and detonator out of Jedder, started asking how an explosion could peal off a neat ribbon of skin? Whoever went on trial in the end, I was in for a packet of trouble. I had no intransigent desire to bring them all to justice. They were the least likely people in the world to repeat their crime. And any way rough justice had been done.

For God’s sake get out of here! was all I could say to myself, but I knew I was not capable of any prolonged physical effort. I had to steal something to eat, since I could not buy it without attracting pity and questions. A likely spot was a large lowland farm with extensive outbuildings close to the point where I had disentangled myself from the drains of Westbury Moor.

I went back up the lane, and approached the house up wind. It was blazing with light behind curtains and there was not a soul in the yard. An old, half-boarded window opening which faced the marshland gave access to a building in which were a couple of sows about to farrow. Their quarters, so far as I could tell by feeling about, were far too clean and scientific. No edible scraps had been left to rot.

I let myself out into the yard and looked for the cowshed. Either there wasn’t one or I couldn’t find it. I came across two battery houses for hens, but both were locked. The farmer did not eat battery eggs himself, however, for I disturbed a few chickens roosting on the tractors and machinery in an open Dutch barn. I searched all likely crannies and corners in the hope of discovering where they laid—hard enough in daylight—and eventually came upon two eggs in the chaff at the bottom of an old fodder bin. To my bitter disappointment one was a china egg. The other I gulped down.

What in the world to do next I did not know. The only solution was to keep going if I could and try to pass through Henton in the silence after midnight. While I was brushing myself down with wisps of straw—more with the object of keeping myself awake than of making any noticeable difference to my clothes—a car drove into the yard. It was evidently the owner of the farm coming home from his favourite pub at closing time. He put the car away in a shed, chained and locked the farm gate and entered the house.

I had a feeling that he was a confident, busy man who would have left the keys in the car, and sure enough he had. The chance was too good to be missed. In the obscurity of a car I could pass as a scruffy individual rather than a wreck. I saw myself driving straight to my London flat where I could wash, shave and change, afterwards sending an anonymous letter to the owner telling him where his property was parked and enclosing some money for compensation. It was a gift from heaven. To judge by what one read, the police seldom seemed able to trace stolen cars.

But first I had to get that gate open. The chain was padlocked tightly round the gatepost and upright. The only way of getting it off that I could see was to saw through the wood. Whatever I did had to be quick. Once the house lights were out and the TV silent, there was no hope of sawing without being heard.

One is always hypnotised by the fastening of an object and forgets the other end. I had gone off to search for tools before I remembered that gates have hinges. So I returned with a brick and a length of stout timber. With these I easily levered the gate off its hinges, and foot by foot cleared it out of the way, for my strength was not equal to dragging it aside by hand. It was the lever, too, which persuaded the car out of its shed. The slight slope of the yard did the rest.

There was no traffic in the lane and I turned into the main road at Henton feeling that my troubles were at an end. I passed sedately through Wells and then put my foot down. Fifty was all that my farmer’s rattletrap would do, but she sounded in good heart and able to land me at my flat within three hours.

I think I would have got away with it if not for the cop on the motor-cycle. I had forgotten him. He must have called at the farms and cottages between Henton and Westbury to ask people to keep an eye open for me and to report at once by telephone. So it may be that the farmer took a last look round when he ought to have gone straight to bed and promptly called the number which the patrolman had left. The police, for once, knew exactly what they were looking for within ten minutes of the theft without any of the usual delays in passing information through local stations.

On the outskirts of Shepton Mallet I passed a police car and in my mirror saw it stop abruptly and begin to turn. I shot into the first side road, which led me through some sort of housing estate into open country, switched out my headlights—adding crime to crime—and tried to throw off the pursuit. Luck for the moment was with me, probably because they thought they knew what my objective was, whereas I was actually twisting at random. When I was lost in a network of lanes and hamlets, I reckoned that I was safe and drove on the parking lights—not that being temporarily safe was going to solve my problem of how to reach London.

Having no map, I only knew that I was within the triangle formed by Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet. Arriving at a wild-looking lane to the west, I followed it with some vague hope of abandoning my stolen car where it would not be found quickly and of reaching Dunton’s house on foot. But my lane ran down a steep, little valley and came to a dead end at water with no continuation on the opposite bank. I bogged the car trying to turn, and the effort finally exhausted both mind and body. So I waded the water and climbed up a hillock beyond it, toppling over at last in a patch of woodland.

It was day again, with yellow shafts of sunlight occasionally piercing the rain clouds which blew up from the Bristol Channel. I was on top of Warminster Sleight—one of two rounded hills which I had seen too often from the road to mistake. I could see Wells and Glastonbury and the straight line of the Mendips. I could also see that a police car had joined mine down in the bottom of the steep valley. I wished to God that I had been one of the hunters looking down from my knoll upon deer drinking at the edge of the lake, instead of on too civilised meadows inhabited by nuts and policemen and children who rushed home to mother because a poor devil had a hole in his neck.

There was little I could do. Apart from my patch of cover, the slopes were bare. I dithered and my pursuers at the bottom of the valley peacefully smoked. After half an hour there was nothing whatever I could do. A van joined the car, and out hopped a police handler accompanied by a large and eager Alsatian. Ever since Fosworthy’s dog which didn’t exist I had been haunted by the creatures, alive and dead. More to my taste than ever was the sunlit, empty England of the hunters where there weren’t any—or, if there were, their assistance was not considered worth paint and a patch of rock.

In five minutes or less—to judge by the way that damned dog was pulling on his leash—I was going to be caught in the long grind of the Law. Mr Yarrow. Well known in the district. So what the devil is he doing hiding with plenty of money and a cheque book in his pocket? Why run away? Hold him on a charge of stealing a car till he answers! Tactful enquiries might be made of Aviston-Tresco and Jedder. What they would say the Lord only knew. It might be impossible for them to stick to the bargain; or, seeing that my case was already prejudiced, they might take the risk of going straight into action.

And then I saw the only card I could play: to become what that benevolent ass who hadn’t got fourpence thought I was. I ran over an inventory of my clothes. The suit I was wearing had been bought off the peg from a good, plain shop in the City which took cash and did not insist on a customer’s name and address in order to pester him thereafter with sales offers. Everything else was straight commercial stuff sold in hundreds weekly by multiple stores. It would take months of a detective’s time to trace my identity through my clothing; and since I was not—yet—accused of murder, it was unlikely that police would take the trouble.

All that could give away my identity were letters in my pocket and my wallet containing cards and a cheque book. I looked frantically round for a hiding-place as the cop and his dog started up the hill. There was an ash which had been split by lightning, and in the dead half a green woodpecker had been at work. The nesting hole she had started and abandoned was shallow but deep enough for my wallet and papers. On top of them I crammed in handfuls of rotten wood from the little pile at the foot of the tree. Then I ran round in a circle back to the place where I had slept, so that the dog, with luck, would not stop at the tree.

There were only seconds to spare, but at least I was now nobody at all. I had never had any dealings with the police. It was unlikely that I should meet anyone who knew me once I was safely in a cell. The only danger was the magistrate’s court where, shaved and cleaned, I risked recognition.

I broke cover out on to the hillside, assuming that I ought to make the futile gesture of running away. The cops firmly and painlessly detained me and took me down to their car where they put a few preliminary questions. Who was I? I was very sorry, but I didn’t know. What had I done to my neck? I thought it was a car accident, but couldn’t remember. Could I account for my movements? Well, more or less I could. I had been wandering about for some time and sleeping rough, hoping my memory would come back. I deeply regretted stealing a car, but I had been frightened and had found myself suddenly impelled to go somewhere else.

They were of course suspicious of the disappearance of any means of identification. It was obvious that I had either destroyed all papers myself or that I had been the victim of a crime. I had the impression that they were inclined to think I had attempted suicide, made a mess of the job and taken refuge in real or pretended loss of memory. The dog handler returned to the hilltop to see if his officious tyke could detect a spot where I had hidden anything. I thanked God for the woodpecker and her obliging hole eight feet above ground. If I had cut out a piece of turf or hidden my wallet under a stone, there might have been some triumphant tail-wagging.

I was driven down to the police station at Wells and charged with stealing a car, wilful damage and half a dozen driving offences. When they had taken my finger prints—which were merely going to make work for somebody—they locked me up with a cup of tea and a sandwich, and sent for the doctor.

He was just the right chap—a busy and impatient Irishman who had more respect for suffering than I deserved and a lot less for the police than they deserved. He made a very thorough examination of me and of course was interested by the recent scar on my backside. He wanted to know who had stitched it up for me. I pretended that I did not know what scar he was talking about, which may have been overdoing it. When he described it in detail, I put on a show of extreme agitation and said that I believed my wife had stabbed me. I hoped that would tie up with a domestic-trouble-attempted-suicide-lost-memory theory. At any rate it meant more complications and more time for me to play with.

When I had been supplied with a dressing-gown and was lying down, trying not to show the little intelligence I had left, the station sergeant came in and asked if I was fit to be interviewed by the C.I.D.

‘Almighty, man!’ this admirable doctor exclaimed. ‘He’s going straight to hospital. Can’t you see that he’s half starved?’

‘So what? Obviously from his behaviour he didn’t want to be found, and he couldn’t go into a shop.’

‘No. But it isn’t essential. He’s had a smack on the jaw which knocked out a tooth—quite hard enough to account for concussion and lost memory, though I think all that’s wrong with the boyo is that he just doesn’t want to remember. Besides that, the tissues of the neck need excising and I want an X-ray on the jaw.’

The sergeant asked if Detective-Constable Somebody could at least have a look at me before the ambulance arrived, to which the doctor replied that for all he cared they could take tickets at the door, but that I was to be out of there in ten minutes.

The C.I.D. man asked me a few formal questions: little more than had already been put to me in the police car. I tried to be helpful and remained deplorably vague. He was very young and out of his depth in a case of lost memory. It is possible that his senior officers were occupied elsewhere. I should have liked to listen to them taking down the Bank Manager’s statement on Jedder’s accident.

‘He couldn’t be this chap Fosworthy, could he,’ the sergeant asked, ‘what his housekeeper is anxious about?’

The station sergeant trotted out to look up the file, and returned to say that I was not tall enough and my hair was not fair.

Because I did not know who I was, all of them treated me as a sort of non-person, speaking more openly in front of me than, I suppose, they would have done in the presence of a plain car thief. The C.I.D. man collected my coat and trousers for analysis of the blood stains and asked to be supplied as soon as possible with my blood group. It was certainly going to deepen the mystery when they got down to putting that little lot through the test tubes. A geologist could have given them a more revealing report than a pathologist.

‘They’ll be jacking up the insurance premiums round here,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s a farmer been carted off to Taunton General who stepped into a wooden box of .22 cartridges and they blew up under him. Would you believe it? And then look at poor Tom Aviston-Tresco! Climbing over a gate with a pitchfork and slipping!’

‘Come in threes, they do,’ the sergeant replied. ‘We had four last time, not counting motoring offences.’

‘Drunk and disorderly in Gough’s Cave. Turned out he was an epileptic, you remember. Next day, rape. And after two bloody hours in the C.I.D. office she comes out that she wasn’t feeling like it in them clothes which was party. Same afternoon, chap leaves a suicide note in a tea caddy where you wouldn’t think to look for it, and the gaffer says it’s murder. Then half the night we’re up on a case of breaking and entering which was just the next-door neighbour clearing the dear little sparrows’ nests from the gutter which he hadn’t a right to. Coincidence, that’s what it is. Makes you think them bishops on the telly must have got something.’

One tends in trouble to be too self-centred. It was comforting to know that I was not the most exciting and enigmatic incident in weeks, and that Mysteries, as the local paper would call them, were considered routine rather than evidence of a serious crime wave.

I appreciated the sergeant’s point of view. The unlikely does occur in streaks. I remember how in West Africa the shaft broke through a most improbable formation of blue clay which we were all convinced was a diamond pipe; the same evening our foreman was chased into the bush by a leopard-man who turned out to be a hyaena with its head stuck in an empty twelve-pound tin of bully; and two days later a mad Russian walked into camp and got a grub stake out of us with a story of panning five hundred dollars worth of gold in two days—which we just laughed at, though it proved to be very nearly true.

I was taken to hospital, cleaned, shaved and fed. They didn’t go in for psychiatry. I was cheerfully assured that when I was in a presentable physical condition I should have to appear in court and would certainly be remanded for further enquiries. Meanwhile the Taunton specialists would get back my memory for me. I was not to worry.

I did worry. I was dead certain to meet the registrar who knew me very well after that cheerful evening together, and then Dunton would arrive as fast as his car could take him. It sounds irrational, but I dreaded that. It was one thing to tell him my story in secret and appeal to him to help me to disappear, and quite another to be forced into an uncontrollable situation in which the truth would have to come out publicly and he could hardly help at all.

A surgeon operated on my untidy neck and fussed about it, or perhaps about the jaw. I was not told. But I have never been an imaginative person where my own body was concerned—unless apologised to—and both neck and jaw felt comfortable enough to me. The stitches and dressings gave me an excuse for talking as little as possible and muttering when I did. It amused my hearty nurse that I was prepared to eat however much it hurt.

In spite of this comparative luxury, I was desperate. I could not make up my mind what to do. The old problem. Have some guts and come clean, or have some more and get clear. But I could see no hope. The hospital had my money. Some forensic laboratory had my clothes. I possessed nothing in the world but a pair of pyjamas and a dressing-gown—and those belonged to the County. It was enough to make a man feel he had lost his identity even if he hadn’t.

The ward was a small one, with cases—chiefly accidents—which were more painful than serious. We were encouraged to move about and cheer each other up. It was hard not to be friendly, but I thought melancholy would fit my part better. I don’t know if it was clinically correct; there must be cases of lost memory which would dance for joy at having lost it. However, nothing prevented me moving aimlessly about, so I used to stroll up and down the long, shiny passage outside my ward, deep in thought.

The passage ended at a T-junction, the left-hand arm of which led to the operating theatre. I watched the nurses and orderlies wheeling unconscious, healthy-looking patients in, and moribund, bloodless patients out. The orderlies, often hanging about between jobs and ready to talk, accused me of showing a morbid interest. They were anxious to satisfy me that surgery was miraculous. They said I ought to think of the skill—of the craftsman, in fact, rather than of his raw material.

So that was what I did and asked questions, preserving my character of a man who disliked his unknown self and his fellow human beings as well. I wanted to know why the surgeons strolled out of the hospital beaming, whereas the patients—to the eye of a layman—looked only fit for the morgue. Oh, there were showers and a changing-room, I was told, where the great men could freshen themselves up after the heat of the theatre. They needed it. Tomorrow, for example, two of them would be at it for four or five hours.

It was quite mad, impossible to plan properly, but lying awake at night I decided to risk it. After all, if I were caught, it was only one more charge to be added to the others for which the psychiatrists would have to invent motives—or motivations as they prefer to call them.

The operation was booked for 10.30 a.m. I hung about in and out of the lavatories until I was chased back to my ward by an angry assistant matron, but I managed to see the two surgeons come through the glass door at the end of the right-hand arm of the T-junction. One was too tall and the other running to a distinguished middle-age spread. The anaesthetist, however, was not far off my build and wearing a non-committal dark suit.

At eleven I had to be in or on my bed for a visit by the house surgeon and an unwanted cup of tea. After that, nobody would require my presence till lunch at twelve. Bolting my tea, I mooned off down the passage and sat on a window-sill from which I could keep watch—when not staring at nothing with melancholy eyes—on at least three or four doors to the left of the T. As soon as a moment came when nobody was busily dashing out of wards and offices, I padded down the corridor past the double doors of the theatre and jumped through the next door which had to be that of the room I wanted. I was all prepared to burble excuses, but it was empty.

Shirts and suits were hanging neatly on a rail. Shoes and socks were scattered around more untidily. I grabbed a shirt of the right size and had just time to slide into the shower-room as somebody opened the door and looked in. When it shut again, I took the anaesthetist’s suit and dressed in the shower-room. The pockets contained only his small change. Valuables, I think, were left in individual lockers. I did not try the locks, partly because I was racing against time—never did I dress so quickly—partly because I had an old-fashioned inhibition against stealing money, whereas sheer desperation permitted me to pinch clothes.

I took off the dressing from my neck and pocketed it. The mirror assured me that most of the wound was safely under the collar and that the stitches which showed above it were hardly visible if I kept my head down. Throwing pyjamas and dressing gown into a laundry basket, I covered them with an overall which was already there. Then I grabbed a fine black hat, the final touch of professional respectability, and opened the door an inch.

I could not see who was or wasn’t in the corridor without sticking my head right out. The place seemed a hive of industry, healing and trolleys. I had gained a lot by talking to idle orderlies but now every one of them would recognise me, besides all the nurses who served my ward. My chances of being able to pass the T-junction and reach the glass door to the open were slim.

With growing panic I waited. It then occurred to me that some other damned doctor might want to change, and I rushed at the first comparatively peaceful moment. My own passage, when I crossed the junction, had half a dozen people in it. I passed the end in two strides holding my splendid hat in front of my face as if I were about to put it on. A door opened and shut behind me. I did not look round. Two sisters were stuck on the threshold of a ward, having a difference of opinion in low, annoyed voices; they were too occupied with each other to give me a glance. A trolley of crockery was pushed at me from a pantry, but again I had time to hide my face from the pusher. I was through the glass door and out into the car park.

I was not going to loiter there and be caught trying door handles; so I walked out of the main gate and kept walking. I looked at the cathedral clock and couldn’t believe it. It was only half past eleven. I had a chance of safety if I could move quickly enough. Money did not bother me. I knew where I could get that—on condition that I was always one jump ahead of the police.

After an exasperating delay I picked up a taxi and told the driver to take me to Warminster. As we went along, I let him know that I was a Bristol surveyor and wanted to inspect a small parcel of agricultural land just outside the village. I stopped him in the middle of nowhere and then had to sneak half-way round Warminster Sleight before I could climb the knoll without being seen. By the grace of God my wallet was still in the woodpecker hole. So back again, running, to the taxi. It was ten past twelve, and the search for me in the hospital would be hotting up.

I directed my taximan to Glastonbury, but not through Wells as I wanted to see the country. It took him less than quarter of an hour. I think he wanted his lunch. It was fair to assume that the hospital orderlies would now be combing the lavatories, the basement and the gardens, and that the police would have been warned. But since nobody could know what I was wearing until the current operation was over the description of me would, with luck, be vague and might even mention that I had escaped in pyjamas.

Leaving the taxi in the centre of the town and telling the driver to wait for me, I dashed into a deserted alley and dealt with my smart, black hat. Having served to hide my face and impress the world with my professional standing, it had now become an embarrassing property. I could not be tracked by the anaesthetist’s dark suit, which was just a dark suit, but that hat would give me away all over the West Country if I continued to wear it. There was nowhere I could leave it with any certainty that it would not be found, so I flattened it and stuffed it half way down the seat of the anaesthetist’s trousers.

Then, hatless as I normally was, I went round a corner and into the Somerset and Dorset Bank. I kept the wounded side of my neck away from the counter and asked the clerk to tell the Manager that Mr Yarrow wanted to see him. I was shown into his office about as quickly as a stranger has ever been received in any bank, and he nervously slammed his door behind me.

‘I wonder if you would be good enough to cash me a cheque for thirty pounds,’ I said.

Naturally he knew nothing of my adventures after leaving the barn. I should love to learn why he thought I had called on him. Blackmail, probably.

‘Yes, really. Thirty in pound notes, please. After all, I am personally known to you.’

I wrote out a cheque, and he rang for his clerk to get the money. The man came in on the wrong side of me. I kept my head well down, undoing and doing up a shoe lace.

‘You are still thinking of settling here?’ the Manager asked, compelled by his training to say something.

I stressed the opening up. He got it, and gave a sort of pant of relief. He had evidently heard of the proposed gentlemen’s agreement, but doubted it.

‘About that Mr Fosworthy’s property which you recommended,’ I went on. ‘You had better know that his housekeeper has informed the police that she is worried over his absence.’

I heard the clerk at the door and changed the position of my chair. When he was out of the room again and I had my thirty pounds, I got up to go.

‘If you don’t mention this visit of mine, I shan’t either,’ I said. ‘You may have noticed that I did not let your clerk see my neck, and I was careful to hide it when I walked in.’

‘It may become clear in time. I hope it never will. But if enquiries are made, I promise you that there is no traceable connection between a man wanted by the police and Mr Yarrow who is well known to you and was expected this morning at the bank.’

‘I suppose you have appropriated someone’s clothes,’ he said with the first sign of intelligence I had ever seen in him. ‘I told them at the time that you couldn’t go anywhere in your condition. It’s not our fault. Really it was not the fault of the rest of us. I hope there is no ill feeling. You and Fosworthy—Oh God, I wish I’d never seen the place!’

‘Come! Come!’ I replied, shaking the limp hand which was held out to me. ‘Think of your spiritual development! And now you know you’ll never be any good as a murderer. All gain, my dear man!’

He let me out by a side door. It was twenty to one by his office clock. The police would certainly be looking for me now in Wells, Glastonbury and every neighbouring town. Still, if that poor patient—to whom I wish a long life without another hospital in it—did not go and die before the operation was over, it could not be known how I was dressed. I took out my hat, punched it into shape and paid off my taxi-driver. A nearby public lavatory enabled me to put the hat back in its uncomfortable hiding place.

I jumped on a bus which was just starting for Bridgwater. Up to then I had been intoxicated by speed and luck, concentrating always on the next five minutes. Now that I had time to think, I realised that I would never be any good as a murderer either. Just as soon as the police started to make enquiries of taxi-drivers and my man reported a customer who made a mysterious call at Warminster, they would be on my trail. I nearly jumped off the bus at the second village in a cold sweat, and had to tell myself firmly that the hell of a lot of good that would do. The taxi had driven away before I got on the bus. And, anyway, they would be looking for a man in a black hat, and I was sitting on it.

At Bridgwater I found a train leaving at once for Taunton and took it. Once clear of Taunton station, I felt more confident. After all, I was not so important that all Somerset police would be alerted in the first hour. So I went into a shop and fitted myself out with a cravat—grabbing it off the counter and instantly putting it on—together with a cheap blazer and a suit-case. I didn’t care whether the police traced that purchase or not. By the time they did, I should have vanished into London.

An express to Paddington. A carefree dinner on the train. A walk to my flat as a harmless, returning holidaymaker. That was that, except that I had not got a key. However, the fire escape and the cautious breaking of the bathroom window dealt with that problem. I have always longed to know how far ahead of the pursuit I really was. I am sure the police must have guessed I took that Bridgwater bus, leaving so conveniently, but they never got on to my visit to the bank. I waited with some anxiety to be asked to confirm that I, as Mr Yarrow, had been in Glastonbury and cashed a cheque for thirty pounds. However, the detective of my imagination never called.

It was, as always, from an entirely unexpected quarter that Fosworthy re-entered my life. After burning the blazer and the cravat—I of course wore another one continuously—and anonymously returning the anaesthetist’s clothes to the hospital, I spent a peaceful week getting my breath back and trying to convince myself that justice ought to be done. I did not succeed. I think I can honestly say that it was not only the inconvenience and possible danger to myself which counted. I was also dead certain that Fosworthy would have wished me to leave matters as they were.

Disengagement, however, was shattered by a letter. Noticing the postmark, I thought it was from Gorm. It was more disturbing.

Dear Sir,

I have been trying to telephone you but doesn’t answer. I am a friend of Mr & Mrs Gorm though do not myself visit public houses who said they was sure you’d not mind my putting you a question about what I am worried about. Would like much to call on you Wednesday afternoon if convenient.

Yours faithfully,

Emmanuel Hawkins.

I remembered the name as that of the farmer whose land adjoined the cart track behind The Green Man. It was he who had grown and wired the formidable hedge in which Fosworthy had been stuck. I knew he disliked fox-hunting, which gave a rather tenuous connection with Fosworthy.

It was no use funking the meeting. In any case this did not smell of blackmail or of any half-baked attempt on me. You are quite safe so long as we are Jedder had said. I took the simple precaution of arranging the meeting in a public place and wrote off at once asking Mr Hawkins to tea—since he did not like public houses—at a neighbouring café.

I felt at ease with him at once. He was an old-fashioned West Country farmer, probably the son of a farmer. Very properly he wore a bowler hat in London—a tradition much earlier than that of regular soldiers and civil servants with their rolled umbrellas and brief cases. To me, brought up with a respect for market towns, it did not seem eccentric. Indeed there was nothing extraordinary about him except that he radiated honesty and individualism. He was a contented man who could not possibly be one of Jedder’s tight-lipped associates.

He let me know his business within a minute of sitting down at the table. He was that sort of character: not abrupt, but promptly weighing up the other fellow, right or wrong, and going straight to the point.

‘I’ve come about a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Likely as not you won’t know him, but if you’re going to live down our way, as Mrs Gorm tells me you’ve a mind to, it won’t be long before you hear tell of him. I hope so. I hope indeed he’s not in any trouble.’

He told me that on the morning of September 3rd he had gone down early to have a look at an ailing ewe, and his eye had been caught by a red and yellow rag in his boundary hedge which, he was sure, had not been there the day before. ‘If that don’t belong to Barnabas,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m a Dutchman.’

His introduction was detailed and gave me time to compose my face and to avoid showing any sign of recognising the name. Fosworthy had evidently lost his handkerchief while squirming through the hedge; he always kept it in his left sleeve, and it was always of coloured silk with a Paisley pattern. I don’t know whether these expensive squares were his only luxury, or whether he had some theory that germs were more contented in silk.

‘Hedge looked a bit worse for wear,’ Mr Hawkins went on, ‘But he might be up to anything, Barnabas. Might have found a sheep stuck in the thorn, though there weren’t no bramble and not enough fleece this time of year. And the Lord knows what he was doing of any way.

‘Well, more’n a week later I was passing his house. When the woman as does for him comes to the door, I asks: ‘where’s his reverence?’ which is what we called him though he never set foot in church nor chapel. ‘Hopped it unexpected,’ she says. ‘Trust him to leave his toothbrush or such behind him, but not every blessed thing!’ Well, I asked if he was all right. He wasn’t what one would call touched, Mr Yarrow, but he had some ways which ain’t yourn nor mine.

‘I’ve ’ad a postcard from Reading,’ she says, ‘and another from London, so he’s all right in the flesh, but I’m not that sure of his head. You won’t believe it,’ she says, ‘but he’s running after some ’ussy.’ ‘You don’t say, missus!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘because I ’eard him walking up and down his little library whispering Darling! Darling! to himself.’ I told her it must have been something he read in a book. But she would have it that it was a different voice, not like him talking to the author and saying he’d got hold of the right end of the stick.’

I asked Mr Hawkins innocently if this Fosworthy hadn’t made arrangements for someone to look after his stock while he was away.

‘Oh, he don’t farm! Always with his books and such! A vegetarian, he is. I got to know him when he was holding forth about blood sports, as he called them. Myself I ain’t for ’em or against ’em. But on my land it’s live and let live. If I kills a fat capon for my Sunday dinner, that’s what fowls are for. And if fox kills one for his’n, that’s what foxes are for.’

He looked at me challengingly. In his own way he had just expressed the famous synthesis; but of course it begged far too many questions for Fosworthy ever to have noticed the resemblance.

‘He’s full of goodness,’ Mr Hawkins went on. ‘That’s why some folk think him not right in the head. They ain’t used to it. That woman who does for him, now—blowed if she hasn’t told the police that someone might shut him up by mistake!’

‘No! What worries me, Mr Yarrow, is that on the night he left his handkerchief in my hedge, why didn’t he call and see me? So just on the chance the Gorms might have set eyes on him, I asked ’em. Old Gorm looks up his book and says that was the night you stayed in his bungalow, and if there was anything to be heard at the bottom of my land you’d have heard it. And that’s why I’m here.’

I said I much wished I could help him—which was true enough so far as it went.

‘Well, now I’ve talked to you, I know you would if you could,’ he replied. ‘But what happened to the cat?’

‘They do hide themselves proper. I had a good look round the old stables to see if there was any trace of Barnabas. But there wasn’t no cat either.’

I saw the whole thing now. When Mrs Gorm mentioned the accident and the mess in my bed, Hawkins began to wonder just whose blood it was.

‘A mazy lot! Chap called Jedder is the only one that’s any use when he ain’t shooting or hunting. And look where that’s got him! And there’s the vet. But I don’t want to bother him with the trouble he’s in himself.’

I didn’t take up the reference to Jedder, but I did ask what trouble the vet was in, to see what Hawkins would say about him.

‘Lost his arm. Aviston-Tresco, his name is. Him and Barnabas Fosworthy was thick as thieves. But he gives me the creeps, he does. I won’t have him on the place. I’m all for a man being pitiful, if you see what I mean, but not when it comes to whispering to an old cow with the staggers that he’s sorry for what he has to do. Yet I’ve heard folk speak of him as if he was a sort of saint. And I’ll say this for him! He wouldn’t hurt a fly, no more than what Barnabas Fosworthy would.’

Cheerful, that was! I saw myself trying to persuade a hard-headed Somerset jury against the solid evidence of all the witnesses to character.

‘Are you seriously telling us, Yarrow, that these harmless citizens whom you attacked and maimed for life believed that murder was justifiable because there wasn’t any death?

‘And you say they were inspired by these remarkable paintings which you yourself hoped to exploit commercially?’

The scene was far too vivid in imagination. When I said good-bye to Emmanuel Hawkins, I was glad that I had not given way to temptation and told him what I knew.

That mood did not last when I was alone. I asked myself what Hawkins would have done in my position. The desperate Fosworthy could easily have called on him, not me. Well, of course he wouldn’t have stood for this nonsense a moment. On the other hand he would have been in the clear from the word go. Nobody could accuse him of plotting to cash in on the underground National Gallery.

I hate indecision. Time and again in my career I have lost patience with the dithering of managers and partners, and acted. That may be why I have never had steady success. I’m not a good committee man. I mention this only because I want to make it plain that I thoroughly disliked myself and could not recognise myself.

Though the horror of Fosworthy’s death and my imprisonment was fading, I could no longer carry it alone. After Hawkins’ visit and the suspicions which—for the time being—he had dropped. I had to ask for advice, or not so much advice as moral support. There was only one man from whom I could get it: Dunton. I called him up and asked if he would give me an hour or two of his evening. So long as I did not go through Wells and did not stop until my car was outside his front door, the chance of any policeman recognising me was negligible.

I drove down the following afternoon. There they were again in the evening light—the mother, the daughters, the ponies, the radiance. I felt inexorably separated now from this simplicity, as if the memories which I carried into the house were visible. It was not fair, for I could not put my finger on any guilt of mine or deliberate aggression. Yet I was dirtied.

‘I felt I might see you some time soon,’ Dunton said as soon as he had given me a drink. He had taken me into his study, not into the garden.

I replied that if there were anything at all in telepathy, he should have felt it pretty strongly, that I had spent twenty-four hours trying to reach him.

‘Remembering our last conversation. You were interested in Aviston-Tresco and Alan Jedder.’

He did not interrupt—psychiatrist’s training, I suppose—until I had finished and was floundering about in morals and the climatic effect of Ynys Witrin.

‘It has not quite healed yet, but it shouldn’t give any trouble. They must have intended plastic surgery later.’

It struck me that he was just wasting time while he made up his mind what to say.

He gave me actual physical comfort, putting his arm round my shoulders and hugging me. He had brilliant insight. I must have needed that touch, for I nearly burst into tears.

‘My dear boy,’ he said though he wasn’t much older than I, ‘I know no one more sane or less likely to commit violence.’

That relaxed me, so that I could sit on the opposite side of his desk and answer as factually as I could all the questions he put to me.

‘I get the impression,’ he said at last, ‘that you yourself half believe them justified.’

‘I meant the paintings: their influence on all of you. Would I see in the mammoth and the animals what Fosworthy saw and what you see?’

I could only answer that I didn’t know, that probably he would be so interested in analysing exactly what our associations were that he wouldn’t see the thing itself. Like a painter. A painter would be too busy trying to spot how a sinuous line could carry such emotion.

He insisted that was a most intelligent remark. Yet it’s obvious. Say, I am looking at a rock face exposed by open-cast mining. I should be absorbed by the technical difficulties of the ore and the reasons why the company’s engineer cut this way and not another. I couldn’t be expected to see the beauty of the exposed strata.

I don’t know what he expected me to answer. I could have said that the responsibility was mine for impulsively trying to help Fosworthy, or Fosworthy’s for denouncing his creed because he couldn’t find a place for love in it.

‘I see. You choose outside the circle. Well, she is still decisive. At least, her evidence is. She knows it was not you who killed Fosworthy, and she will tell the truth.’

‘Miss Filk will break down. I know her, as you guessed. She won’t stand up to ordinary police enquiries, let alone cross-examination. I don’t credit all that Jedder told you. Torture is most unreliable.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course. But you’re up in the light of day now with predictable human beings, not with a bunch of terrified religious maniacs in the dark. Let me explain Miss Filk for you! Leaving out technicalities, you know how brutal and cruel the maladjusted teenage boy can be. He creates a fantastic world, through which he proves to himself his manhood. Well, she is like that. She is not in fact as markedly homosexual as she likes to think she is. So you would not be far off the truth in imagining yourself coshed by a fifteen-year-old who had seen too much violence on the telly and assumed that for real he-men it was normal.’

That was significant so far as it went. If Dunton was right, I had little to fear from Miss Filk in court.

‘I can’t help feeling that you are still at your frontier of the imagination,’ he went on. ‘I admit the police will start with a prejudice against you, but the case cannot be as difficult as you think. I can give evidence that long ago you asked me to explain the Apology. And you have Miss Carlis and Hawkins as well.’

I pointed out that Hawkins’ evidence cut both ways. Aviston-Tresco would not deny that he was trying to catch Fosworthy who was off his head and might do himself harm.

We decided in the end that I should tactfully explore Cynthia Carlis. Indeed he offered to do it for me, but I flatly refused to have him drawn in when the consequences were unforeseeable.

What he could do and did was to call the Filk and find out what her movements were. When her number did not reply, he went to work through the grape-vine of various doctors.

‘She’s bolted,’ he said at last. ‘Gone to America by cargo boat with a dozen Dobermans for sale. I knew she wouldn’t face it. So Undine is all yours.’

He insisted that her indecisive romance with Fosworthy was of great importance to her, that she appeared to have liked and trusted me and that it was common sense to go and see her. I had no great trust in common sense as a guide through the Vale of Avalon. However, she had no connection with metaphysical animism, and Dunton was sure I had nothing to lose.

I stayed the night. The atmosphere of the house was good for me and healing. Since I hoped to attain in the future such peace for myself, I shrank more than ever from giving up a year of my life to the Law and newspaper publicity; but at least I found the moral courage to start safeguarding myself.

In the morning I drove to Bath and telephoned Miss Carlis. She remembered my name, but was very hesitant over accepting my invitation to lunch. Naturally she was. She knew that Fosworthy was dead and that she was in for an hour or two of explaining convincingly why she had not met him recently. But she could not refuse to see me. She suggested that I should have a drink with her at her flat before we went out. That suited me, too. From both our points of view, the preliminaries were better tackled in private than in a restaurant.

She had a charming flat and a window-boxed balcony in one of the old terraces. I wondered what eighteenth-century society would have made of her as she swept into the Pump Room; I can imagine the shady old beaux clamouring to the Master of Ceremonies for an introduction to such novelty. She had decided that for me she was going to be fragile and appealing. I reminded myself that if she had been some tattooed beauty of the South Seas I should certainly have been interested in the destinations and entertainment value of the patterns, and that it was ungallant to be put off merely because all that delicate lattice work was natural.

I started off by saying that I had lost touch with Barnabas and that I supposed she, at least, had seen something of him.

‘A friend told me that he is mentally ill,’ she said. ‘Could he have been taken to hospital, do you think?’

So far it had hardly been possible for the poor girl to say anything else but No. Aware that she was repeating herself, she made a desperate effort to be constructive.

She could not go any paler than she was. The skin under her right ear started to throb, a pulsation made noticeable by the willow pattern. She rested her head on her hand, which suggested that the tell-tale sign had given her away before in moments of anger and emotion.

‘Not yet. And if I am asked I shall simply say that I am as puzzled as everyone else. But I had better tell you that I know he is dead.’

I tried to calm her down. I said I knew very well that she had nothing to do with his death and that she was only present out of kindness and affection because she had been led to believe that he had hidden himself in a cave and would not come out.

‘I can’t bear it! I can‘t bear it! It was all dark and he was killed by a thing.’

It was a close shave, but thank heaven I avoided taking the plunge and saying that the thing was me.

She started making noises and tearing at herself. She looked as if she were going to bare her breast and beat it like some female in the Old Testament. I had not the slightest idea what to do. Probably Dunton could have carried on from that point and ended in complete command of her.

She clung to me for minutes, and even put up her tremulous, prehensile lips to be kissed. It was like kissing a butterfly which had determined to flutter the conventional movements of human passion. That, I suppose, was her intention. She was ready to let me play around with the willow pattern as far as I liked in the hope of creating some intimate bond which would keep me quiet.

At the time she seemed to me as stupid as a frightened prostitute. But I do not think I was fair. After all, I had been very full of compliments on our one previous meeting, and so she naturally put me in the class of desperate admirers rather than the opposition who were unaccountably averse to her. And I must admit that there was an appealing delicacy in her approach, all the more obvious because she was trying to overcome it. I felt pity, not—or hardly not—desire. I remember thinking what a shame it was that some lover, gentle and adoring as Fosworthy, had not taken over her life at an early age. How well they could have educated each other!

Having dried her tears, I got out before they could start again, for she could not face any lunch. My principal witness had collapsed under me; and, worse still, if Aviston-Tresco and his friends were ever forced to tell her that the Thing was Mr Yarrow, they had an independent witness of their own. The jury’s taste would probably be split fifty-fifty, but the Judge—if not a venerable antique—would be of just the right impressionable age to protect her from the severities of my unfortunate counsel.

I drove straight home without stopping to tell Dunton the result of his advice. Either he would reproach me for not tackling Undine with more sense and authority, or he would blame himself. I was alone again, and on the whole I thought it was better so.

Next morning I started to pack and pay my bills. I had felt worried and a coward, but fairly safe; now I felt far from safe. If that unreliable girl took an overdose of barbiturates or found her nightmares unbearable, she might spill the whole story to some comforting police matron. I proposed to be safely abroad when it happened. Fighting an extradition order at a distance would be more congenial than the relentless procession from Magistrates’ Court to Assizes either as prisoner or as a witness whom everyone was trying to discredit.

The telephone rang, and I picked it up with unreasonable apprehension that the caller was going to introduce himself as speaking for the Bath C.I.D. A perfectly calm voice said:

‘You’re a bloody fool, aren’t you?’ he remarked as if we were old friends.

‘Stumps are never pleasant to live with. But I assure you I bear no malice.’

‘And I assure you that if you ever again come within my reach …’ I began, persuading myself that I ought to feel anger, though I am not sure how deeply I really felt it.

‘I am going to come within your reach,’ he replied. ‘We must talk urgently. What on earth made you stir up our little friend?’

‘They wouldn’t believe you. They would tell you that there was no interglacial warm enough.’

‘I want you to recognise that our interests are the same. Surely you must have come across a similar position in the mining industry? Commercial greed versus the landowner’s rights, and regrettable incidents on both sides?’

I retorted furiously that I had never come across anything of the sort—which was not strictly true. Yet in spite of my loathing of him it was hard not to be impressed by his outward normality. One does not and cannot know the molten interior of a man. I remember a first-class accountant who was a keen Rotarian, a masterly tennis-player and carefully emanated a conventional, suburban conviviality; but the only thing he cared for was revelation of the future by the measurements of the Great Pyramid. His wife and children were nothing but respectable cover. His only reason for excelling in his profession was to have enough money for his research—about which his socially ambitious wife kept as quiet as if he had had an Egyptian mistress round the corner. He never tried to proselytise and never discussed his religion, if it was a religion. Nor did Aviston-Tresco. His normal, useful life revolved around a central, incandescent privacy.

‘We ought to talk at once,’ he said. ‘After all, we are two sensible professional men.’

‘That is over. I will meet you where you like and under any conditions, so long as we are alone, of course.’

I said that I would talk to him in Kensington Gardens and meet him at the Albert Gate in twenty minutes. That did not give him time for any preparations. Then I locked up my flat and gummed threads to the bottom of the door and the vulnerable window so that I could tell if anyone had visited the place in my absence.

I was a little late for the appointment. He was waiting calmly, not looking round him or showing any sign of anxiety. I hardly recognised his drawn, white face. The empty right sleeve shocked me. I wished that it had been somebody else who had made him pay a price for murder and attempted murder.

I carried two deck chairs under a tree, and pointedly seated myself on his right so that he could only reach me—if he had anything to reach me with—across his own body.

I had never quite seen it that way. When I talked to Dunton, the point I made was that she knew it wasn’t me. I may have misled him.

‘I doubt if she did. He switched off his light and followed the wall. All she knows is that poor Barnabas was pushed.’

‘I was not there, so I have only various descriptions of the scene,’ he said. ‘Nobody saw anything clearly. What Cynthia Carlis did see seems to have terrified her to this day—a woolly thing rising from the rocks, covered with mud and blood.’

‘But Miss Filk was a little way ahead with her two dogs,’ I protested. ‘It couldn’t possibly have been her.’

‘Couldn’t it? I have never quite understood the setup. But I see no reason why Filk should not have darted back when the lights went out. Look at it from Miss Carlis’ point of view! We were all close friends of Barnabas. Only Filk had a motive. Filk’s attitude to anyone who hurt her pride was that of a juvenile delinquent. Of course Miss Carlis assumed it was Filk, but rather than face it and accuse her she preferred the alternative of the unspeakable monster.’

‘Filk lost her nerve. She’s gone to America. Before she left, she told her Cynthia that if anyone started asking questions about the cave she was to get in touch with me at once. She did. Last night.’

‘But if she thinks Miss Filk pushed Fosworthy she’ll keep her mouth shut and we are safe.’

I see now that the ‘we’ committed me beyond recall—in my own mind, if not in fact.

‘She would, if you had not come along—an old friend of the Fosworthy family—and claimed to know all about it. She is terrified of what you might do.’

I replied that she would see sense soon enough, after I had sworn in court that Jedder cut off the light.

‘Or was it you who cut it off? What help do you think you’ll get from a shallow woman who is lonely and afraid? What sense as soon as she knows the monster was you? You killed one of Filk’s dogs and frightened her out of her wits. You blew up Jedder and tortured him. You shot at our popular and harmless Bank Manager. And your subsequent disappearance was a positive epic of petty crime. Who do you think she is going to say killed Barnabas?’

‘All very pretty!’ I answered as coolly as I could. ‘But you don’t want to put it to the test any more than I do. How’s Jedder? Or is that another of my murders on the list?’

‘They say he will recover. But I needn’t tell you the police are suspicious.’

He explained that Jedder’s three friends—the Bank Manager cleared off promptly after lighting their way out and telephoning for an ambulance—had succeeded in spite of their abject nervousness in faking an explosion before the police arrived at dawn. They found .22 cartridges in Jedder’s gun-room down at the farm and put some in a flat wooden box: the sort of box a man could conceivably stamp on by accident. They bored a hole in the lid through which they inserted one of the remaining detonators and a length of fuse. Enough of the cartridges blew up to be convincing, always provided that the story of accident was never questioned. If it was, laboratory examination would prove at once that neither wood nor brass matched the splinters in Jedder’s leg.

‘Not so far as I know. But the police are showing a tactful interest in our meetings, which they think may have been—well, bizarre in the extreme.’

‘Do I know? Mysterious rites. Black magic. Gunpowder and sulphur—’ it was the first time I had ever heard him laugh. ‘They must be thinking of pantomimes and the devil popping through a trap door in a cloud of smoke. But if Miss Carlis starts mentioning caves—just imagine the teams of ardent pot-holers and the finding of Fosworthy’s body! You can never make any money now, Yarrow.’

I told him that I never had any such intention. He shrugged off the words as if he appreciated that I had to practise my lie. He did not try at all to believe that I had helped Fosworthy simply from pity or whatever it was. I reminded him that Fosworthy aroused affection and concern in any decent human being, and asked him how he could have treated a man he loved so cruelly. I could understand shutting him up until he promised to keep quiet about their private chapel of the animals. I could even understand that the temptation to remove me—since it was almost without risk—had been very strong. But it was beyond me, I said, that he could have brought himself to murder Fosworthy merely because he was loyal to me.

‘Why? You give such strange importance to dissolution. To kill is only to deprive ourselves. A man is the same as any other higher animal. He is indestructible.’

What is one to call such a creed? All the religions insist to us that we must have faith; yet what these fanatics needed was a theologian to preach to them that they must not have too much faith. In fact, now that I come to think of it, that is about what Fosworthy did. As soon as he suddenly started to value romantic love, he lost interest in his mere survival; it was what he could take with him or rediscover that became important.

It was useless to argue with a man who felt as litde guilt—or as much—at putting down a human being as putting down an old cow, so I returned crudely to the problem of Cynthia Carlis and asked him what he had in mind when he telephoned me.

‘I have only one arm and no strength,’ he replied. ‘But if you agree I am going to put myself in your hands.’

‘I only see one way to calm Miss Carlis. I feel that Barnabas’ body should be found somewhere else—on an inaccessible ledge, say, in the Cheddar Gorge where he could have fallen and remained for weeks undiscovered.’

I saw, of course, that it would be helpful if nothing more than Jedder’s private, well-lit hobby were revealed whenever police investigated the cave. But removing the body did not seem to affect Undine’s apprehensions one way or the other.

‘The coroner’s verdict is accident. Barnabas used to take long walks alone, and the medical evidence will show that he was killed by a fall,’ Aviston-Tresco explained. ‘That puts an end to her sense of the thing being unfinished and dangerous. She would even be able to send some flowers. I’m not being cynical. She is a very conventional woman and she was fond of him. Flowers would act as a tranquilliser. And what then? Filk comes rushing back from America. They settle for the unknown person in the cave—neither of us are going to name him—and live happily ever after.’

I said that I certainly should not interfere and that he had better get on with it.

‘One. He can stay at the hatch. The other two—nothing will ever get them near the barn again.’

‘Of dissolution, yes. If it were still the law, I would not mind being executed. But to be imprisoned for years, to be without my friends, the hills, the animals—that I dread. Hanging settles nothing and is humane.’

‘Like the vet’s incinerator,’ I retorted in an attempt to get through his armour.

‘Yes, if the animal is very small,’ he answered, quite undisturbed except for a note of deep melancholy in his voice.

‘You are a man of great courage,’ he said, ignoring my remark as if it were both petty and in bad taste. ‘Come with me and get up the body!’

‘In that case it will be a long fight. I shall get a concession for the picture postcards to pay my legal expenses.’

‘I will accept any conditions you like. I shall be a hostage, completely at your mercy.’

That was true enough so far as it went and if I could devise absolute safeguards. So I asked him what the depth of the abyss was.

‘About seventy feet. We can use Jedder’s winch. If you lower me, I am capable of tying Barnabas to the rope with one hand. After you have pulled him up, you are free to pull me up or leave me there as you like.’

He knew as well as I did that I shouldn’t leave him there, much as I should enjoy it in principle. I told him to lay off the pathos, and asked how we were to get back through the hatch.

It seemed to me that I ought to be able to concoct some watertight conditions. I did not entirely accept his arguments. But once Fosworthy’s death had been officially accepted as accident, it became pointless to accuse me of anything. Besides that, there was a conventional streak in me which was in some sympathy with Undine. I, too, should be ‘tranquillised’ by knowing that the body was in a West Country churchyard rather than that vile place.

‘Among my other petty crimes,’ I said, ‘is the illegal possession of a .45 revolver. Any monkey business and I use it on you.’

‘As soon as Fosworthy’s body is in the gallery, the man on top will come down. I shall then go up the ladder and leave the rest to him.’

I then saw a possible catch. There would be only one man at the hatch when Aviston-Tresco and I went down, but there might be two or more when I was ready to come up.

‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ Aviston-Tresco replied. ‘I can only swear that there isn’t more than one. If there was, I would use him, not you. Look at it this way! You are a far more dangerous brute than any of us. Your hypothetical other man could very well fail to kill you, as the Bank Manager did. You would then be justified in using that .45 of yours, closing the hatch on the bodies and going away. You are unknown. If you had been presentable and unhurt last time, you were in the clear. This time—well, I suggest a clothes brush as well as your .45.’

‘Experience. I’ve done it. It just needs a crowbar to lever the wheels over ridges.’

‘Suppose your weight pulls it over the edge? The floor of the passage slopes towards the drop.’

I could not remember anything handy, and warned him that the job would take some time. I then cross-questioned him about their plans after I had left and the hatch was closed up again. He told me that his associate owned land close to the edge of the Cheddar Gorge. He was going to use a tractor and trailer, the wheelmarks of which would not be new to the field. He would lower the body by a rope and then go down himself to arrange it convincingly,

‘I think you ought to know a lot more about police procedure than you do,’ I said. ‘Mysterious falls are not accepted so easily.’

He talked me out of that. Anyway I did not greatly care. It was they, not I, who would have to stand the racket if they slipped up. One thing in all this was certain and constant: that they would never mention the cave if I did not.

Caution was wide awake; but, so far as his personality went, I was partly anaesthetised by him as if I had been that little animal he mentioned. Apart from his obsession with the insignificance of death, he was a man out of my own West Country childhood—able, quiet, welcome in any society. And pity counted. God knows he did not deserve it! But if we limit our pity to those who do, bang goes Christian civilisation.

We fixed the date for three nights later at 10 p.m. in the barn. He was too eager to discuss with me how I should travel and by what route I should reach Jedder’s farm, so I told him nothing. I was not going to allow him to count on any movements of mine beyond my presence at the appointed time.

In the course of the next two days I gave much thought to the question of whether I should take my car or not and decided against it. I did not want to leave the slightest evidence of my visit to the district. There was no large public car park except in Wells or Glastonbury—where I could not risk being seen—and a car left in a small village or by the side of a lane can always arouse curiosity.

So I went down by train from London to Weston-super-Mare and then took a tourist bus to the Cheddar Caves. When the pubs opened I ate a hearty early supper, unnoticed among the crowd of sightseers, and started to walk across the bleak top of the Mendips towards Jedder’s farm which was about six miles away. There was nothing on my back or in my pockets to show who I was. While I did not expect any trouble, I was taking no chances.

I was dressed in a stout windbreaker and cord trousers with a light knapsack on my back. It contained the revolver, a really powerful electric lantern and, as an insurance policy, a few cans of food and a flask of whisky. I had also the clothes brush which Aviston-Tresco had suggested and another windbreaker, dark blue instead of dark red, which I carried partly to soften the lumps in the knapsack and partly to change my appearance in case that should be advisable. I was confident that I should be in command of any trouble underground, but the more I thought of their vague plans for the disposal of poor Fosworthy, the more I distrusted them.

I soon wished I had taken the car, for it was a foul evening with sheets of cold rain swirling up from the Bristol Channel and water gurgling into the drains of the empty road. I skirted Jedder’s farm and had some trouble in identifying the right barn, which I had never seen in daylight. It was indeed on rising ground, but not easily visible, since it stood in a shallow bowl. This bowl, which I had hardly noticed as I ran away from it, was, I should guess, the result of subsidence. Beyond the end of the passage and the changing-room there may at some period have been a limestone dome which collapsed.

I had three hours to wait, so I tucked myself in between a twisted thorn and a dry-stone wall alongside the track to see what I could see. The rain at last eased up. A young brood of plovers rose from the grass while the parent birds, wheeling overhead, cried what must have been encouragement to their chicks but sounded to me like thin voices of the long-dead hunters. It occurred to me that they never drew a bird, feeling perhaps that, while earthbound creatures like themselves could live again beneath the earth, it was blasphemy to immure, down there in the silence where no birds sang, the freedom of the air. Then came the gulls, one wide, purposeful arrow after another marking the high limits of the dusk. And then came a solitary car with Aviston-Tresco beside the driver.

He dropped the vet at the barn and drove away. When it was already dark, he came back with a tractor and trailer, parked them outside the barn and went in, carrying a drum of paraffin. All was silent, and I was alone with the surrounding barrows. The millennia had worn them down to a height hardly more than that of a man, but in the scrappy moonlight they doubled their true size. It was probably the effect of that hardly perceptible bowl.

I took the .45 out of my knapsack and at ten knocked on the barn door. There was dark quiet inside and I had to say who I was. They then opened up. Aviston-Tresco looked intensely relieved so far as I could judge from the hidden pools of his eyes, and the stark black and white of his head in the light of the standing lamp. His companion was the man I had described to myself as the cricketer from his far too accurate missiles. I never knew his name. He had more guts than the rest, but even so tended to shy at the formidable weapon in my hand. I do not think Aviston-Tresco had warned him that the long, black barrel was going to precede me wherever I went.

I thoroughly searched the pair of them, turning out all Aviston-Tresco’s pockets in case he was carrying a syringe or other implement of his trade. I found nothing. He too was nameless and world-forsaken. He had only a small electric torch, a pocket knife, a few shillings, his cigarettes and matches.

The cricketer expected me to help him to remove the hay bales. I thought it best to carry on with the intimidation and remain at a range where I could not be thrown off my aim by sudden darkness or sudden movement. I reminded him that we had plenty of time and that Fosworthy had removed the bales single-handed. When he opened the hatch I told him that if at any time I found it shut, that was the end of Aviston-Tresco.

‘Give me half an hour’s grace,’ he replied. ‘Suppose police or one of Jedder’s farm-hands were trying to force the door, and I had to shut down.’

I agreed to that, but warned him that he would have to get rid of his visitors in half an hour if he wished to see Aviston-Tresco alive again.

Aviston-Tresco calmly supervised the lowering of the drum of paraffin and apologised for the lack of lights down below as if I had been a casual tourist, explaining that in the absence of himself and Jedder no one had dared to start up any activity in the barn.

He ignored my menacing attitude as irrelevant. As usual this moved me to give some consideration to him.

I looked round the barn for something which would make a cradle for him and found an old cart-horse girth of canvas and leather which was still sound. If he sat on that with a light line tied round it at the level of his chest, he would have his good arm free to fend off the rock face as I lowered him.

He made an impatient gesture which reproached me for being unnecessarily brash. The cricketer lowered the aluminium ladder. They appeared as if about to shake hands, but did not. At any rate a current of emotion passed between them—naturally enough, I thought, when the job was to pull up their once respected prophet whom Jedder had murdered.

Aviston-Tresco went down first. He was very shaky. It gave me an excuse to get him up on my back when we returned. That would provide certain protection at the one point—emerging from the hatch—where I was still not quite convinced that I was safe.

We passed through the yellow mud of that badly shored gallery which always offended me, and down what was left of the companion ladder into the darkness. Aviston-Tresco had not seen the damage before and did not expect it. I helped him down and he politely thanked me.

In the changing-room we filled and lit some lanterns, and then visited the tool-store to examine the winch. Aviston-Tresco was quite right; there was nothing very heavy except the wooden stand and the main cog. A lever and ratchet raised the stand on its wheels, which were a good foot in diameter, or lowered it to rest firmly on the ground.

I measured and tested the rope, which was first-class stuff. Jedder was no builder, but reliable in the mechanical tasks of a seaman. It was obviously impossible to keep Aviston-Tresco covered during all this preparation, so I made him sit down at a distance and shone my torch on him from time to time to see that he was behaving. When I had fixed the sling, I told him to walk slowly ahead of me holding a lantern while I trundled the trolley along behind with another lantern and some tools lashed to the winch. I was glad of the activity, for the passage began to oppress me as soon as we were engaged in it. A pigsty smell hung in the still air, undoubtedly left by me. The ghost of one’s own animal stench is an odd and disturbing thing to revisit.

Aviston Tresco stopped at my alcove and looked at the ashes of the fire and the bones and scraping of my revolting diet.

We passed through the great cave by following the wall and the useless wires of the lighting system. Even with our two paraffin lamps and my electric lantern, that was the only sure way. At this point I had an attack of shivering. Poor monster! He had only been desperate and frightened. He was still unduly nervous and would have shot at the first sound from nothingness.

I had never looked down the precipice on the left of the wired passage, having no interest in it before Fosworthy’s death and only paraffin lamps afterwards. Without lying on one’s stomach on the sloping, slippery track—which I had no intention of doing—it was hard to see anything but the irregular wall of the cave on the far side.

Keeping Aviston-Tresco well away, I explored the edge of the drop. Further along the passage, the lip curved out a little, forming a promontory which ended in a lump of rock. It gave an illusion of safety while kneeling alongside, for there was enough of it to lean against. I screwed up the lens of my fine, new light and threw a beam on the bottom of the cleft, more like eighty than seventy feet below. It was wider than the top, and dry. Boulders and rocks covered the floor, none of them water-worn. Plainly a cave roof had at some time fallen in. Among the smaller rocks was a long, narrow one with a white patch at the far end of it. It was Fosworthy’s body.

I now knew where to site the winch so that Aviston-Tresco would come down more or less in the right place. Its lack of stability bothered me; as an engineer I probably tended to fuss too much. In the end I squared off a crack in the cave wall at ground level, and pushed into it the back of the stand, supporting the front on chocks. My companion watched all this disinterestedly.

I made him sit in the girth and ran a line round the canvas and his chest, telling him to hang on to the rope with his good arm. Owing to the overhang he would not have to fend off the rock face, but he would probably spin. I promised him that there was no risk of the rope fraying since I had chosen a channel for it which was smooth with a film of deposit. He submitted resignedly to every one of my suggestions.

He wriggled over the edge, and I let him down slowly. The winch was so close to the cave wall that I had to work it with my back to the drop, shouting to him at intervals for a progress report. He said that he was spinning, yes, but not fast, that he was well out from the rock and could not bump into anything. He told me when he was near the bottom, and I let out rope gently until the weight came off it. Then I went out to my promontory to help him with a beam of light. He himself had only his pocket torch.

He had landed right by Fosworthy’s feet. So far as I could see, he was not at all shaken by the proximity. He slipped out of his lashing, and then to my alarm cast off the sling from the rope. I shouted to him to leave it alone since with only one hand he might not be able to attach it again by a secure knot, but he paid no attention. He tied the rope tight round Fosworthy’s waist and told me to go ahead. I wound the drooping bundle up as respectfully as I could, reminding myself that affection, even as casual as mine for Fosworthy, should not be disturbed by the results of decomposition.

When I had stretched the body out at some little distance, I lowered the rope again and returned to the promontory in order to direct Aviston-Tresco how to attach the sling if he was inclined to do it carelessly. He was sitting on a boulder smoking a cigarette and making no move towards the dangling rope.

He did not raise his voice. It came faintly echoing up in a clear, articulate whisper as if he were speaking from the darkness alongside me instead of eighty feet below.

‘No,’ he replied, fiddling with his shoe lace, ‘not very. But I am not coming up.’

I tried to encourage him. I thought he had merely given up, or perhaps had at last been overcome by guilt in the presence of what was left of Fosworthy. I was eloquent about his hills and animals.

‘You don’t understand, my dear Yarrow,’ he said. ‘There is nothing in this life to detain a man who loves his profession and can no longer follow it. I have left a note in my surgery that I intend to walk out into the mud of the Parrett until it has me. It will be hopeless to search for my body once the tide has come up and ebbed again. But I shall not hang about down here to embarrass you. This will release me in a second.’

He took off his shoe which of course I had never thought of searching. I could hardly see what he held between finger and thumb. At the end of the beam was just a tiny spark of reflecting glass.

‘But I can never get you up,’ I reminded him. ‘Think, for God’s sake, of Cynthia Carlis! Suppose she does tell what she knows and the place is full of police. It’s no good hauling up Fosworthy and leaving you.’

‘Miss Carlis will never talk, Yarrow. She believes Filk did it, and that is that. My explanation to you was deliberately a little complex.’

‘It was essential, you see, to keep you happily occupied. I have noticed that you are always entirely absorbed by any mechanical task.’

‘You might have kept an eye on the hatch. You might have decided that there was no reason why our friend up there should not be with us. I was afraid you would.’

Gone home! How could I guess? All my plans and precautions had been founded on the natural assumption that Aviston-Tresco wanted to get out alive. I took the man’s normal fear of death for granted in spite of so much evidence that this particular man had none.

‘I hope that you will soon forgive me,’ he said. ‘It will all seem so unimportant when you and I and Barnabas meet.’

The cave wall transmitted every sound. I swear that I actually heard the crunch as he put the capsule between his teeth. It took effect at once.

I did not yet go back to the hatch to see if he was telling the truth. I knew it. I realised that the draught in the passage had long since stopped. It was barely noticeable, a mere caress of ice on the cheek, but always there when the hatch was open.

I went and sat on the winch, bewildered that he would sacrifice his life to ensure my eternal silence, bewildered by his absolute, proved certainty of survival. What a creed for soldiers! Well, but there is nothing new under the sun. The fanatics of the early armies of Islam believed it and were unconquerable.

The thought passed through my mind that I might as well slide over the edge myself. But while I was considering this in all honesty, I put out one of the lamps. There was no avoiding the irony of that. Something in me wanted so badly to live that it was already economising paraffin. I must be the very opposite of Aviston-Tresco—a creature of simplicity, never seriously questioning instinct, never doubting that, whatever the purposes of life are, one of them is to live it.

It was no good sitting there. First, I rushed to the hatch in a wild access of optimism. Perhaps Aviston-Tresco had not in fact told the cricketer of his intention. But he had, and it was shut. Then I wallowed in many minutes of emotional despair. There would never be any opening of the cave by those spiritless, guilty cowards up above on the Mendips. Jedder might do it if he could limp his way down, but that day was far off. The Gate of the Underworld had closed on me as inexorably as on my only companions.

In order to generate in myself some sense of calmer acceptance, I decided to revisit them. In the Painted Cave I used, as always, only lanterns; they were still far brighter than the blubber lamp and its eddying pencil of smoke, on which the artist had counted to give the stir of movements to his hunters while they killed and were forgiven. There they were, as they had been for the last twenty-five thousand years, abandoning themselves to their environment with a gaiety which we have forgotten. The interrelationship between them, the deer, the horses and the accepting mammoth belonged to the science of ecology rather than anthropology.

Was it this to which Aviston-Tresco looked forward? Well, no. I cannot believe that he primitively wanted happy hunting grounds. Then what parallel, in his own terms, did he foresee? Some sort of unity with all other animals, I suppose, within which his own individuality could be expressed. I can go a bit of the way with him. We are all uneasily aware that man is on his way to the ant-heap community, and that he knew more of the true business of living when he was old and diseased at forty. We are too fascinated by the actual time we remain alive. Their life of forty years held just as much in it as ours of eighty, just as a year at ten is twice the length of a year at twenty.

‘What the hell shall I do now?’ I silently asked them. ‘Here I am with enough food to keep me fit for two or three days and allow me to work for a week longer. What would you have done with only your horn and bone and flints and bits of wood? You obviously thought of life and death as a kind of continuity, but I take it you didn’t give up until some other carnivore was asking you for forgiveness.’

Their answer was not very satisfactory. They were no more mystical than boy scouts. They suggested that I had steel tools and the knowledge to use them: in fact that I was about on a technical level with Arthur.

Arthur. His name incongruously came into my head because I was staring at him. Subliminal advertising.

At the back of a recess to the left of the overhang I made out a scratched engraving of four women—the exaggerated spear-heads of their breasts establishing sex—sitting upon a line broken by the conventional curves of water. No doubt about that. One cannot mistake that the deer of Lascaux are swimming. With the women was one recumbent man, dead or sleeping, wearing the head of a horse. Who was he and why was he being ferried in canoe or dug-out across the Lake of Avalon? Can a folk memory from the palaeolithic still exist as a fairy story?

An important discovery? My mind, stunned and taking refuge in the only companionship there was, thought so at the time. Now I doubt it. One might as well say the man with the horse head was the origin of the chess knight, which is manifest nonsense. No, I had merely joined the club of Glastonbury eccentrics. I have probably been nearer to them, all along, than I ever suspected.

But the Arthur/steel association stuck. Though nothing except explosives or millions of years of flowing water was going to be much good against the limestone of the Mendips, there must be other objectives if I applied a bit more imagination to the search for them.

When Fosworthy and I had been alone, we accepted the impossibility of either reaching or lifting the hatch and tried to find another way out. Afterwards, when I was alone, the right game was to keep hysteria under control and wait for the hatch to be opened. But now, at last, led on by my little friends—who reminded me that tools are tools—I saw that my best bet was to tackle the work of man. I had not been at all successful in tackling the work of nature, whether it was rock or the human minds of Undine and Aviston-Tresco.

I turned away from the hunters by the once warm waters of Avalon and set off to the hatch with all the lights I could collect. If Jedder had bedded the brick frame of the hatch into surrounding rock, I was done; if he hadn’t, there was a hope. But it was hard to find out what method of construction he had in fact used, since there was no ladder from which to inspect it. What was left of the companion ladder was firmly cemented in place and useless anyway. Only the outer handrail was intact.

The shaft was smoothly lined with brick. Fosworthy and I had already found that it was impossible to climb to the top by piling up bits and pieces, and I was now clean out of wood in useful lengths, having sawed it all up for my fire. As a last resort I could knock out the shores and props from the gallery, but I did not much care for that. The roof, as it was, had a tendency to spew bits of itself out.

I went back to the winch to fetch the pick and cold chisels. Then I started to test Jedder’s mortar. No trouble there! He had been using as much material as possible from the cave itself, and his sand was full of clay. Even so, it was a long, tedious job to knock out the bottom course of bricks, especially since I needed them and did not wish to break more than I had to.

By five in the morning—if there had been any morning—I had removed six courses and piled the unbroken bricks at the entrance to the gallery. By then my back was aching and hands beginning to blister, so I knocked off and ate a can of bully and a raw onion. I was thankful that I had packed a small store of food, though expecting to use it in the open, if at all. At the bottom of my knapsack was the clothes brush. How ingenious Aviston-Tresco had been! The suggestion of the clothes brush, which he knew I was never going to need, was a wonderful confidence trick.

I forced myself to rest, awake or not, for six hours. Sleep was less easy than during my first imprisonment. Then I wanted to get away from pain and terror; now, I was only suffering from an unaccustomed form of exercise. I was also conscious of the stench—partly of blood, partly of my rank former self—which my bed of sheepskins gave out when they were warmed up by my body. It reminded me that in envying the freedom of the hunters I was inclined to forget their living conditions. But we are fussy. It is said that we should be revolted by the stinking of even the eighteenth century.

When I resumed my task, it was much easier. I could now swing a pick at the level of my knees, get the point behind the bricks and often detach several at a time. As soon as I was working above the height of my head, I built a platform of sound bricks to stand on. Shifting the platform round the shaft began to take more time than the actual demolition, but that went fast—sometimes too fast at points where Jedder had not properly bonded his brickwork into the rubble of the shaft. When the whistle blew for supper, I was working twelve feet from the ground with eight or nine more to go.

Twenty-four hours had passed since I entered the cave with Aviston-Tresco. I was cautiously pleased with my progress, though aware that the next shifts were going to be far more complicated and dangerous. I had to make a sort of steep staircase out of the loose bricks; since there were not enough, the structure was too narrow and horribly unstable. Swinging a pick was impossible. Even using a hammer and cold chisel was alarming. I never felt secure on my teetering staircase unless I had one hand on the wall of the shaft. An uncontrollable fall in a shower of bricks was a nasty prospect when I could not afford a sprain, let alone a fracture.

However, I could now examine the underside of the hatch. Its frame was not let into rock or concrete; it simply stood on the top course of bricks. Under that were left some twelve more courses, completely unsupported. With all the weight of hay on top of the hatch, the brickwork might at any time come down with a wallop, dropping the hatch on me while I was chipping away underneath. I was none too happy, either, about the exposed rubble through which the shaft had been dug. There was a sizeable trickle of water in one place, and in another threatening little showers of pebbles and earth.

Some sort of scaffolding was essential, which would allow me to get both hands to the job and also check the falling hatch while I jumped for my life. But I could not see what to use nor how to support it. So I opened my last can of food, took a generous shot of whisky to help imagination and slept on the problem.

The solution was fairly clear in the morning—which turned out to be midday by my watch. Working down from the top, I changed my staircase into a pillar. Opposite, I built another pillar as high as I could reach. I sawed off the handrail of the companion ladder and cut it to fit the diameter of the shaft. My difficulty then was to build up the second pillar to the height of the first and hoist the beam up to rest on the pair of them. I felt hopeful that the pillars would hold once my weight was on the cross beam.

Meanwhile, hold they would not. When the top of the second pillar was beyond my reach, I carried on building by balancing single bricks on the end of a last piece of two by four timber, holding it up like a caber-tosser and sliding them into position. Twice the whole stack fell down. And when at last I had finished it I could not get my beam up.

The only possible method was to hoist it up by means of a hook driven into the wood of the hatch, but there was nothing at all in Jedder’s stores which would serve or could be bent to serve; nor had he got a drill. I cursed blind and sat on my knapsack, in which nothing remained except the damned clothes brush, some biscuits and the revolver. But that was it! There was my hook and there was my drill.

I dismantled the two pillars and turned them back into a stair. I fired a shot obliquely into the wood of the hatch, and hammered and twisted the barrel into the splintered hole until it was firmly jammed. The butt, turned upwards, then formed a neat and reliable hook. It was the only use I had ever found in all my life for that large, clumsy weapon.

When I had hung a length of rope on it, I changed the stair into two pillars again. That sounds simple; but it took six blasted hours of trial and error and repeated rebuilding before I had hoisted the handrail of the companion squarely into position on the bricks. I had just enough energy left to climb up the rope and sit on the beam, not caring greatly whether the whole crazy structure collapsed or not.

By this time I felt that I would rather be squashed than climb down again, probably bringing a pillar with me. So I knocked out the last courses with hammer and chisel, leaving the frame supported on only eight bricks. Three of them stayed where they were by the magic of inanimate bodies. Five on the other side were cemented—pretty well for Jedder—to a solid paving stone on the floor of the barn.

It looked as if I might now have a future provided that I got out from under quick. I slid down—half a pillar and the beam came down as well—and removed knapsack and tools into the comparative safety of the gallery. My watch surprised me. It was already afternoon in the outside world. As I thought it unwise to attempt the break-out when there might be people within earshot, I ate my biscuits and rested.

I could only doze uneasily, while obsessed by all the incalculable ways in which hatch, shaft and barn floor could collapse, as well as by the awkward evidence I was leaving behind: bloodstains, fingerprints, mess and a couple of bodies. I was sure that Aviston-Tresco had told the truth and really left a suicide note since his whole objective was to end once and for all the sequence of events which had started with his imprisonment of Fosworthy. When his body was found, analysis would show he had poisoned himself. But why hadn’t he drowned himself in the Parrett as he said he was going to? And who lowered him, alive or dead, down that hole?

Well, the question marks had to be left, but I could ensure that there would never be easy answers. I suddenly realised that with a bit of luck I could close the entrance so convincingly that no trace of it would remain. If at some future date an unknown pot-holer found his way into the cave by a new route, he could work out the tragedy for himself. Digging to see where the wires led beyond the companion ladder, he would come upon Fosworthy’s body. Then, or perhaps earlier, what remained of Aviston-Tresco would be discovered. Coroner and police could spend months trying to work that mystery out. Nothing fitted, but there was no suggestion of murder, no third person concerned. Fosworthy had apparently been overwhelmed by a landslide as he tried to get help.

So I left the winch where it was with the rope hanging down and I carried Fosworthy’s body into the gallery. I knew that he would have forgiven this. He was always so anxious to protect me. ‘A mere envelope,’ he would have said. ‘If you consider, my dear Yarrow, that it may relieve you from the grave embarrassments for which I was inadvertently responsible, it is entirely at your disposal.’

The next task was admittedly chancy; but every stress and strain of that gallery was familiar to me and I knew what I was doing. I began to knock out the props, starting from the top of the companion. The result was instant and spectacular. Access to the cave was already closed. Working backwards towards the shaft, I slammed out some more of the shoring over Fosworthy’s body. When I had prised loose a boulder in the roof, I jumped back to wait for the crash.

It worked. The gallery had ceased to exist except for some twelve feet at the entrance to the shaft, and Fosworthy’s body was buried. But while the dust was settling and I was shining my torch on the yellow wall which faced me, there was a roar like the end of the world behind.

At first I thought that I, too, was buried. My feet were knocked from under me and I felt drowned in dust and debris. But when my torch could show anything, it showed that the joists above me were still intact. What had happened was that the waves of my minor earthquake had brought down the hatch, with the hay and half the shaft as well.

I was caught in my bit of crumbling tunnel. I accepted dully that it might be anything from five minutes to a day or two days before I could dig myself out. By God, that vile hell-hole had trained me in patience!

Clearance of the entrance with pick and hands was very slow, since bricks, debris and hay bales had to be stacked in the gallery. Calculation on the back of an envelope showed that there must be more solid matter in the shaft than would fit into my twelve feet of space. However, I did at last arrive at a sort of working face, though there was very little room to work at it.

The whole mass settled as I drove my sap into the bottom and I could now see that it was composed of solid cubes—the bales—with loose rubble and brick between them. This pattern allowed some air to come through. I had been wondering for some hours why I was not gasping for breath. Jedder’s binder twine must have been exceptional stuff or else he specially tied these bales to resist frequent lifting. Few of the bales had split open.

I found it just possible to rearrange them in the shaft itself so that I could burrow upwards from one to another. Showered with rubble and now half asphyxiated, I twisted and turned and shoved though the darkness, feeling like an earthworm trapped under a haystack. It was impossible to take with me lanterns, knapsack or anything. At last I saw a crack of light between bales and pushed until my shoulders were through. As soon as I could free feet and legs from the various unseen bulks and weights which held them, I was out.

But the safety of night had gone. It was eight o’clock and there could be possible visitors to the barn unless the cricketer had locked the door and taken away the key. A shaft of early sunlight slanting through the glass panes in the roof and lighting up the golds of old wood and chaff cheered me as much as the food and drink for which I longed. Everything was silent, but somehow too breathless, too close to the absolute silence underground. I remained still, listening, in the shelter of what was left of the stack of bales. How can one recognise the stillness after sound when one has not actually heard the sound? Then someone unmistakably approached the door and rattled it.

‘If it were locked the first time, likely it be locked the second,’ said a dry Somerset voice.

Another, more standard-English voice replied that there was nothing to be gained, either, by looking through the window a second time.

What window? Well, it had to be in the room to which Jedder and Aviston-Tresco had retired to consider our fate when Fosworthy and I were tied up and helpless on the floor. I tip-toed across the barn and opened the door. There was a very dirty window, with a pane broken, screened by a piece of heavy chain-link fencing. I quickly shut the door and lay down beneath the window sill.

The two came round the barn and peered through. There was nothing much to see—an old roll-top desk and chair, and some shelves stuffed full of files and back numbers of farming magazines. I guessed at once that the room was a fake, rigged up so that Jedder could always have the excuse of paperwork for shutting himself up.

Its owner was probably a stockman on the estate. The other fellow sounded like a bailiff new to the place and taking over while Jedder was in hospital.

‘Used it as a chapel, some of ’em did. I seed ’em take some birds up ’ere once.’

‘Did you now? I wouldn’t have thought Mr Jedder was one for a bit of slap and tickle in the hay. Well, we’d better be getting along. You can see there’s no one there.’

‘Didn’t say as there was, did I?’ replied the Somerset voice. ‘What I said was that I ’ears a kind of big whoosh when I were walking ’ome last night. You wouldn’t ’ave thanked me for bustin’ in on your beauty sleep, but daylight’s daylight.’

It was also clear that both of them had heard some muffled noise while I was breaking out, and had been intently listening as I had.

They talked for a bit of Marty’s, which seemed to be a deserted cottage troubled by a poltergeist or similar nuisance. I could understand the underlying train of thought. Meetings. Spiritualism. And then the appearance of this mysterious, dusty, little room as seen through wire and a broken window.

‘They can say what they’ve a mind to. What I says is that he was emptying out No. 5 shot and filling of ’em up with No. 7.’

‘Because ’e didn’t like for it to be known, of course! What would you say yourself to a man what uses No. 7 for partridge and hare? Unsporting, you’d say! Won’t kill ’em clean, you’d say!’

‘Well, I’ll buy it,’ the bailiff replied. ‘Why wouldn’t Mr Jedder want to kill clean?’

‘Because he liked to look at ‘em tender-like when they was floppin’ about and then wring their little neckses. Watched ’im at it time and again I ’ave when I been out with the guns!’

An ingenious theory, and built out of accurate observation! I remember asking Dunton if one heard something like Bang, bang! Sorry, sorry! Well, I wasn’t so far out. I do not for a moment suppose that Jedder avoided killing clean—a most difficult thing to do, anyway—but when he had winged a bird or lamed a hare, he evidently did pick it up ‘tender-like’ and silently gave it the Apology.

What was of real importance was this talk of monkeying in some way with cartridges, not accidentally stepping on them. If that was local gossip, it must have been considered by the police. From their point of view, inflammatory substances could still be lying about. I was tempted. It was a risky game to reduce the barn to a charred heap of undefinable rubble in broad daylight, but I reckoned that I had nothing to lose and a more tranquil future to gain.

The pair outside the window decided that it was none of their business to break into the barn, but that the police had better be informed of the mysterious whoosh. As soon as they were safely out of sight, I began with the tractor which I knew must be in working order in spite of its dilapidated appearance, since Jedder used it to drive his dynamo. It took me five precious minutes to start. I became very uneasy lest I might be compromising my escape by an impulsive piece of foolishness.

At last it fired, and I drove it into the corner of the barn above the gallery. I was sure that its weight would prove to be the last straw for the last twelve feet of tottering shores. It was. The tractor sank into a yard-deep hollow, and the wall above it was instantly zig-zagged by a promising crack in the stonework. By the time that the tractor and the subsidence had been covered by a shower of roof tiles and charred beams, nobody but a fire assessor was likely to be curious about the difference of levels or even to notice it. And it was absolutely certain that Jedder would never put in a claim to his insurers.

In fact he could never take any action at all. He could not risk replacing the barn and allowing builders to explore the foundations. He could not reopen shaft and gallery without a lock-up building to hide his private excavations. I felt conscience-stricken at the main loss, the only important loss, and consoled myself by the thought that if the paintings had remained undiscovered for a thousand generations, they could well spend one more in the darkness. I suspect now that this consolation was too easy. Jealousy entered in—the same jealousy which was the simplest of all the motives of Jedder, Aviston-Tresco and their friends. I resented those lolly-sucking tourists who would file hour after hour past a beauty which should only be observed in silence and long contemplation.

I piled bales and hurdles against the tinder-dry wood of the old cow stalls, put a match to the bonfire and to what remained of the hay as well. Then I dashed into Jedder’s fake office, shutting the door against the inferno in the rest of the barn, ripped out the screen over the window, hurled shelves and papers to the floor, lit them and cleared out.

But I had left it too long, thanks to the obstinacy of that damned tractor. As I dropped to the ground, I saw a car turn into the track from the main road. It was all of three hundred yards away, and I hoped that the smoke beginning to billow from the window had obscured my outline. Edging along the wall until I had the building between myself and the car, I ran for it.

Almost at once I had to break into a casual walk. As my head came over the skyline of the little depression, I saw two chaps—presumably those whose conversation I had overheard—hurrying up the hill from Jedder’s farm. There was no cover of any sort, not even a dry-stone wall for quarter of a mile, so I played the conscientious taker of exercise and stepped out. They paid no attention to me until they were high enough to see the disaster. Then they let loose at me with shouts which I could hear above the crackling of the flames. I walked on, making my guilt certain. Anyone who showed no curiosity at the sight of a fire was plainly worth detaining.

A quick glance over my shoulder revealed the appalling fact that the car was a police car. Two peaked caps which had been helplessly watching the blaze bobbed back into the front seat. The car immediately returned up the track in order to patrol the main road and prevent me crossing it, while Jedder’s two employees began to pound after me over the downland. It was small comfort that I no longer faced a charge of murder. Arson would do nicely, forming a climax to all the crimes of the unknown when he was delivered to Wells police station.

My only chance was a belt of trees on the near horizon. Though my legs were too weary to run far uphill, I reached it a minute ahead of my pursuers. One end of the belt started from the road; the other ran towards more broken country with a few small coppices. Any hunted creature would have gone hard and straight for the cover, so I chose not to. Or it may have been that I refused to run any more.

I turned towards the road and dropped into a hollow hardly large enough to hold my body. Jedder’s two men took the obvious line and raced down the trees, one on each side of the belt. That allowed me a rest, but there was no chance of crossing the road and breaking away to the north-east. The police car was within twenty yards of me and remained there. I could imagine what its aerial was saying.

It was now only quarter past nine. The sun had gone, and low, black clouds drove across the moorland bringing sheets of bitter rain. I crawled off through the trees until it was safe to rise to my feet and take stock of my very nasty position. I could strike straight down the open escarpment into Westbury, but there was pretty sure to be something waiting for me by the time I hit the Cheddar road. Alternatively, I could work my way east through such cover as there was, but that would lead me far too close to the village of Priddy and its network of busy lanes. I was not torn and bleeding this time, but inevitably I looked at close quarters as if I had been buried alive, as indeed I had been. The only sound move seemed to be to lie up till nightfall on the top. It was open as a chessboard, but at least the squares had stone walls round them.

Looking back, I am sure that I ought to have taken advantage of the fact that contact with me was broken and to have slunk away quickly in any direction under cover of the walls; but I did not foresee that interest in me would be so intense. Lunatics who set fire to lonely barns and ricks are a pest and cannot be left at large. And the police, of course, being suspicious that there was more to it than that, wanted badly to talk to me. There was the doubt as to what had really happened to Jedder; there was the disappearance of Fosworthy; and there must have been a big question mark over the unknown fire-bug since his build corresponded to that of the car thief who had escaped from hospital.

I settled for a shallow pit where elder bushes gave a little shelter from the direct lash of the rain. About three in the afternoon I had to get out of there smartly. Four men—two of them the fellows who had chased me—were advancing well spread out across the moorland as if they knew the square mile in which I must be. It was certain that they would search such an inviting patch of cover. I was safer in the misery of the open.

I got away from my pit unseen, moved north across their front and found a curve of the road seemingly empty. The police car was round a corner watching the straight ribbon of wet tarmac. I nipped across but was seen by a motor-cycle cop concealed in a gateway only two hundred yards away. He spent a few seconds reporting my presence through his walkie-talkie, taking his eyes off the road and its verges. I accepted the crazy chance offered by his very proper devotion to routine, recrossed the road and hurled myself back into the ditch I had started from. The patrol car was on the spot almost at once, and the whole lot of them except the driver charged off on my supposed track. I never saw them again. For all I know they may have reached the low ground to the north-east before they were whipped in and returned to kennels.

With the police out of the way, I took to the open fields again but was sighted by one of the party of locals while jumping a gate. I tried to break back. It was no use, So I ran crouching under the cover of a wall, again at a right angle to the course of the party. The blasted elephant-grey world did not affect visibility. Morale finished, I cursed myself for ever thinking of settling in such country. Arthur, holy Glastonbury and its lunatic fringe were welcome to this half-world through which I scuttered from wall to wall like a bedraggled and exhausted hare.

I threw off the pursuit among the barrows, wishing to God that one of them would open, as our ancestors dreaded, and that the grinning Inhabitant would beckon me in. His stone home could not be much worse than where I had been. At last I found myself within fifty yards of the barn. It was a black shell, not even steaming in the rain. The wall against which the hay bales were stacked had fallen outwards. The depression was hardly noticeable, being partly filled with charred beams and shattered tiles among which was the gaunt, twisted frame of the tractor.

The police and the curious—if there had been any—had gone. The place stood derelict in the pouring rain as if it had been burned down years ago instead of that very morning. I cannot analyse what put it into my head to take refuge there. Shelter? There was none. Familiarity? Perhaps, in the sense that a ghost might be so lonely that it wished to return to hell. Warmth? That, I am sure, counted. A wave of warmth came from the site of Jedder’s office.

Yet it was the blocked shaft which attracted me. The surface of fine ash from the hay was soapy as scum on a pond, but underneath it was black, dry and powdery. The deposit looked as if it were evenly spread, but I knew that it could not be. The bales at the top of the shaft, between which I had pushed my way out, must also have caught fire, leaving a hollow. I burrowed into it backwards, smoothing the disturbance of the surface as I went. My head ended up in the shadow of one of the tractor wheels; it could not, I hoped, be recognised as part of a human being, being as black as the surrounding ash and camouflaged by fallen tiles. It was still very hot under the tractor, but my clothes were too soaked to be singed. I had to be careful not to expose bare skin or to touch anything solid.

In a few minutes two of my pursuers were also at the ruins. They searched perfunctorily among the fallen beams at the other side of the barn where the blackened wall still stood. That was the only spot which was not wide open for inspection. After one of them had burned his nose in the shadows, they decided it was far too hot for a hiding-place.

They sloped off up the track, all enthusiasm for the hunt gone, shoulders huddled under the lash of the rain. I stayed where I was, deliciously warm and waiting for darkness. I may even have dozed off, for I suddenly found my nose full of ash and had a fit of sneezing. There was nobody to hear. Except for the incessant patter of the rain, my resting place was as silent as Fosworthy’s.

In the west a strip of the leaden sky melted into a band of sickly yellow, the only sign that there ever had been and would be again a sun. I lay still while the twilight deepened. I was incapable of making any plans. My only comfort was that hands, face and clothes were black, and that I had become as nearly an invisible man as any fugitive could wish for.

I heard a car drive down the track in the last of the dusk. The occupant got out and quietly closed the door. From my position I could not see who it was, but I guessed by his stillness that we had met and that, hearing of the fire, he was paying a last, lonely visit either to mourn the dissolution of Aviston-Tresco or of the shrine where he had once found a spiritual security. He came round the ruins until he was looking straight at me across a tumble of fallen stones.

The chance was too good to miss. I stirred in my bed of ashes trying to get a sound foothold and at the same time to avoid touching the hot steel of the tractor. My clumsy struggles infuriated me when I wanted to leap straight for his throat before he could beat me to the car. But he did not wait. He gave one queer, choking cry and ran. I could not make it out at all until I myself was clear of the ashes and racing for the abandoned car. What he had seen was the closed shaft bubbling and seething as a black, blind, incinerated thing struggled to get out. Which of the supposedly dead he thought it was I do not know. His overwhelming sense of guilt must have aided the nightmare as well as more solid memories of my own monstrous refusal to die.

On the lip of the hollow he regained control of himself and turned to look back. It was too late. I was already sitting in his car. Ten minutes of frantic driving brought me over the northern slopes of the narrow Mendips and down to the shores of Chew Valley Lake. There I washed and shook out my clothes. I was dirty and famished, but too relieved to feel exhaustion any longer. It was certain that the poor, terrified disciple would never report the loss of his car and risk reviving the interest of police.

I stopped at a transport cafe and ate an immense supper. They looked at me oddly, but found me just presentable enough to be served. Then, with sleep the only enemy to fight, I drove temperately back to London. At one in the morning I was in bed, my own bed, thinking myself truly free at last, for I had slammed the Gate of the Underworld behind me. But memory has no gate, or else I am not the sort of man who can close it. Whenever the call is insistent, I am still forced to go down, alone, to the darkness and find in the reality of the hunters and the hunted my defence against the dead.