Traitor's Purse (26 page)

The car was at the kerb with the engine running and, as he appeared, the door swung open to meet him. Amanda slid out of the driving seat and handed over the wheel.

‘That’s good,’ she said with characteristic understatement. ‘I say, God bless Hutch. That man hasn’t a grudge in his make-up, Albert. Rather a mercy in the circumstances, of course. He came at once when I phoned him from the hospital and Oates did the rest.’

Campion climbed into the car and slammed the door.

‘You found Oates pretty quickly,’ he remarked as he let in the clutch.

‘Well, naturally.’ She was astonished. ‘You told me where he was. Why didn’t you part up with the information before?’

‘I hadn’t got it.’

‘I thought you said he was with you in a fight before you went into hospital yourself? You were all right, you see, but he was knocked out completely. No one recognized him, as of course they wouldn’t, and it was assumed he’d killed the copper.’ She shot a dubious glance at him from under her eyelashes. ‘Anyway, he’s conscious and he’s recovering,’ she added, ‘but he’s practically out of his mind with worry. They were having to hold him down in the bed when I came away. He told me over and over again to impress it on you that every moment mattered. Turn here. We’ve got to go down to the paper shop.’

‘What for?’

‘A message from Lugg,’ she said calmly. ‘I got him to go over to the Nag at once. I went straight to him when I left you. We didn’t know what you wanted done there, so he’s just going to scout round and phone the paper shop if there’s anything to report.

Campion looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She was sitting placidly beside him with her slender brown hands folded in her lap. She might have been a self-possessed sixteen-year-old going to a race meeting. Her heart-shaped face was serene and her brown eyes clear and level. There was no telling what was going on in her mind. He must have taken her for granted for years now. The reflection sprang up in his head and shook him off his guard.

‘That was remarkably bright of you,’ he said, and knew as soon as he had spoken that it was not so. Amanda always was bright. There was nothing remarkable about it. Amanda was God’s own gift to anyone in a hole and always had been. He seemed to have become too used to it. However, she was entertained by the compliment.

‘Praise is always welcome,’ she observed, grinning at him. ‘Nothing fulsome, of course. I say, it’s pretty serious, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Not so hot. Time’s short. That’s the shop, isn’t it, over there?’

‘Yes. You wait. I’ll get the message if there is one. Keep the bus running.’

She was out before he reached the kerb and he watched
her
disappear into the dark entrance between the empty newsboards. As he sat waiting the familiar chime of the fifteen-minute clock reached him from across the housetops. Fifteen minutes: Minute Fifteen. It was a ridiculous little coincidence but, once it had occurred to him, he could not get it out of his mind.

Fif-teen minutes. Min-ute Fif-teen. Hur-ry hur-ry. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Late. Late. Late. Late. Late.

He counted the strokes. Five of them. Too late.

He
was
too late.

The sudden and startling reflection came like another revelation. He felt as if he had just opened his eyes to find that he was staring down into a well. Good God, he was not going to pull it off! Hutch and his men could never get there in the time. The secretly unthinkable was actually going to occur. They were going to lose. The police, including himself, were licked. The ultimate disaster was going to come off.

‘I say, don’t look so terrified. It’s bad for morale,’ said Amanda seriously. She had come back without him seeing her and now settled down beside him. ‘This is where we travel faster than light,’ she announced. ‘Lugg did phone, ten minutes ago. It was a message for you and the shopkeeper had the presence of mind to take it down verbatim. I’ll read it to you while you concentrate on the road. He says “The hornet’s nest is round the back of the hill on the old coast road. I expect you know that but they are. A railing over the entrance to the hill cave has been took down and I see several hundred jams inside.” Is “jams” right?’

Campion nodded. ‘Rhyming-slang. Jam-jar equals car. Go on.’

Amanda continued obligingly, the message gaining in piquancy from her clear, well-bred young voice.

‘“All our friends are there. Not half they are not and some more. There is strong signs of a move any minute now. The local rozzers have an idea that it is all some kind of Government work but it cannot be with all that gang on board or I am barmy. Have hid myself in garden of empty
house
bottom of coast road right side of hill. If you want to catch them, which I take it is what you are after, you will have to put your skates on. I am about as good as a bucket of nothing here alone.”’

Amanda folded the sheet and thrust it in her jacket pocket.

‘Of course he is, poor old tortoise,’ she said. ‘Coming from him, that’s by way of being an S O S, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Campion was taking the last of the town at speed. He had had some wild journeys on this road to Bridge, which was so anonymous and difficult without its signposts, but this evening, with the yellow sun streaming behind him and the dark flying shapes overhead, it had an entirely new quality. For the first time for what seemed a lifetime he was in full possession of all his senses and the condition seemed to have its disadvantages.

For one thing he was acutely aware that Amanda was beside him. Her share in his recent nightmare was very vivid in his mind. He remembered, too, exactly how he had reacted to it. In his lonely and terrified ignorance she had emerged as a necessity, a lifeline, heaven-sent and indispensable. Now, with the full recollection of a long and sophisticated bachelor life behind him, and the most gigantic disaster of all time looking just ahead, he was startled to find that she remained just that; static and unalterable, like the sun or the earth.

The recollection of her confidences concerning Lee Aubrey made him feel physically sick. He had been in love, he remembered, many times. This was not much like it. To say that he was in love with Amanda seemed futile and rather cheap. To lose her … His mind shied at the idea and his body felt cold.

‘Hurry,’ she said at his side. ‘Hurry and we’ll do it.’

He shook his head. ‘Sorry, old lady,’ he said heavily, ‘but to be honest I’m terribly afraid we’re sunk.’

‘What?’ She sat bolt upright in the seat beside him, her back stiff and her eyes scandalized. ‘But I say, Albert,’ she said, ‘you
must
pull it off. Oates made it so clear. He said everything depended on you. You can’t say you’re afraid we’re
sunk
. You’ve got to stop it somehow. Everyone’s relying on you. You can’t fail and go on living.’

Campion frowned and a faint colour spread over his face.

‘Oh stow the heroics,’ he said unpardonably, because he was wretched. ‘Some things are impossible, and for poor old Lugg and me to stop three hundred crook-driven lorries without police assistance is one of them. I can’t even appeal to the local Bridge police because the chances are that as soon as they see me they’ll pounce on me and stuff me in jug again. It’s all very well to be an optimist, my beautiful, but one doesn’t want to be a dear little nut, does one?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Amanda, unperturbed and without resentment. ‘All it means is that there are times when one has to do a miracle. This is one of those. You think one up.’

Campion did not answer. The request seemed to him to be unreasonable. He allowed himself to think of Amanda for a moment or two. This attitude of hers was typical. She never had and never would get it into her dear head that anything was impossible. Her optimism was childlike and unbounded, her faith in himself embarrassing. At the moment she was exasperating. Things could hardly be worse. Time was certain to beat him. If he was honest with himself, he saw no way round it.

Unless…

An idea slid into his mind complete.

He sat gripping the wheel while the suggestion turned over and over in his head. It was wild and probably suicidal, but it did contain one very slender thread of hope.

‘Are those gates where the sentry stands the only entrance to the Institute?’ he enquired.

Amanda cocked an eye at him. ‘None of those sentries would ever stop
us
,’ she said, catching his thought. ‘There’s only three of them. They take it in turns and they’ve all seen us about with Aubrey.’

It was like her not to ask any questions. As usual, her only concern was to further the project whatever it might turn out to be.

Campion took hold of himself. Losing Amanda was going
to
be like losing an eye. Life would be a little less than half itself without her.

Meanwhile, however, the car was speeding down the narrow roads. The wind roared behind it and overhead the dark blue clouds streaked out across the sky like dirty finger trails. It was a wild ride, leading directly towards almost certain catastophe. The rain in the air, the urgency of the wind, the tremendous drama of the skyscape, were all a fitting part of the great central situation. A spiteful energy rose up in Campion and he trod hard on the accelerator. If he was to go down it might as well be scrapping.

He drove straight to the Institute and, leaving the car outside the gates, went in past the sentry on foot. It was a ticklish moment but it went by successfully. Amanda creating a heaven-sent diversion by attempting to turn the car in a space six inches wider than its length. He left her graciously accepting both advice and assistance.

Five minutes later he came back, walking very fast. He was a little white round the cheekbones and he carried himself very carefully, but the new recklessness was still there and when she relinquished the wheel to him he took it eagerly.

He drove into the town with unusual caution and stopped at the top of the Pykle, the hill looming up over them dirty and grey in the evening light.

‘You take the car,’ he said urgently. ‘Go and find old Lugg and tell him from me to get Hutch to block the coast road both ways as soon as he comes, at the same time avoiding the actual entrance to the hill. No single lorry must get out. When both barricades are up they can play Annie Laurie or something else appropriate on a police whistle, but not before. The one thing that really matters is that no lorry gets by.’

‘Right.’ She nodded and took the wheel again. ‘They probably won’t get here in time,’ she said, catching his eye. ‘You’ve got a scheme in case of that, I take it?’

He grinned. His head was very sore and the prospects were about as bad as they could be.

‘I’ve
only
got a lucky bean plus a profound and lovely faith in myself,’ he said.

She echoed his expression, her eyes as affectionately derisive as his own.

‘Then I’ll pray,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Good-bye. See you at dinner or in the Elysian Fields.’

Campion hurried. Keeping one hand in his coat pocket, he swung down the narrow passage beside the little old-fashioned shop under the Nag where Hutch had taken him. It was not an easy journey to repeat in daylight, especially when any delay was certain to be disastrous and one was not at all sure one had not dreamt one’s directions in the first place.

He found the storeroom door standing wide and walked straight in, nodding briefly to the startled boy who stood weighing dried fruit in the back of the building. The fatal thing, he realized, would be to lose his way. One moment’s hesitation and he betrayed himself instantly.

He strode on, hoping devoutly for the best, and plunged down a dusty aisle lined with tea chests and bulging sacks of cereals. He heard the boy moving behind him, then a new step on the boards and a lot of whispering. He was going to be stopped. Now, at the eleventh hour, he was going to be held up, caught like a mouse, in a damned grocer’s shop.

There was a bundle of long, old-fashioned soft brooms hanging from a hook in the ceiling and he snatched one of them. The door leading into the Masters’ domain was unlocked, as before, and when he went through it he took the broom with him and wedged it between the door panel and the angle of the opposite wainscot. It was not a very effective barrier but it would certainly hold the door against the most determined shoulder for a minute or two, and it seemed most unlikely that any longer period was going to matter very much.

Once inside in the dark a new difficulty presented itself. He had no torch. Everything in his pockets except his cigarettes had been taken from him at the police station and
was
probably hanging up now in a little official bag outside the cell door.

He began to climb in the dark, praying against giddiness and keeping one hand tightly clasped over the things in his coat pocket. He was desperate with exasperation at his own slowness. Every moment counted. Every minute which galloped by might be the one which made all the difference between success and failure. His journey across the Council Chamber turned out to be a crawl through hell. Once he cannoned into the table, the hard wooden edge missing the burden in his pocket by inches, and all the time the seconds were racing by.

He found the farther door after what promised to be complete defeat, by observing a minute sliver of light showing just beneath it. He got it open, to discover that the corridor within was lit by a hurricane lantern standing at the entrance to the first of the Masters’ storerooms. Although Campion was profoundly relieved to see it from one point of view, it presented another danger. He had no desire to run into anyone before he reached the Nag’s Trough.

He went on, still with the same cautious haste which demanded every ounce of nervous discipline he possessed. His eyelids were sticky and his muscles hard and bunched against his bones.

There were lanterns in every vantage place and the damp stone had dried round them, indicating that they had been burning for some time. A great change had come over the Masters’ storerooms. The packing cases were empty and the great caverns in confusion, as if an army had been at work there. There was so much debris about, so many dark corners and unexplained machines, that he hardly dared move, convinced that at any moment a living figure must detach itself from the chaos and bar his way.