The Courtesy of Death (22 page)

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.

‘Aye, but I’ll just ‘ave another peep for luck.’

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.

‘Private office, like,’ the Somerset voice announced.

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.

‘Two sets of books, I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said.

‘Or ’ymn books and such.’

‘Hymn books?’

‘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.

‘Nothing wrong with the barn, is there? What you might call
wrong
?’

‘Not that I knows of. Not like Marty’s.’

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.

‘What was he doing when he was blown up?’ the bailiff asked.

‘Know what I thinks? Changing the shot in ’is cartridges !’

‘But they say it was a box of .22.’

‘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.’

This astonishing theory puzzled both me and the bailiff.

‘But what for, when he could go out and buy sevens if he wanted them?’

‘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.