A Rough Shoot (12 page)

“We’re not far from the station,” I said. “Shall we take a chance?”

It was a pretty desperate chance, for Sandorski’s description as well as mine would now be known. I went first, leaving the general and Lex in the shadows behind the parcels office. If I were arrested, there was still hope that they might get through and do our business at 26 Fulham Park Avenue.

There were no police in the booking office or on the platform. Though we could never be sure of it, we were always a few minutes ahead of the pursuit. Organization . takes time and there aren’t enough police. I expect some overworked bobby was already on his way to the station-but with instructions to check up on car parks as he went. The ticket window was open, so there was a train for London due. I had borrowed Lex’s hat, glasses and overcoat, made my height as small as I could, and bought three tickets to London. I hoped that from inside the ticket office I looked the inoffensive citizen I felt, and wholly out of the murderous, car-wrecking character that had been forced on me.

As we crossed the bridge over the lines, a train came in from the west. There was another, apparently just about to start, going to Southampton. This was a gift, and singly and unobtrusively we entered it. That, we reckoned, would waste some more of the Wiltshire Constabulary’s time.

The cross-country train rumbled down to the coast untroubled, its few passengers gay or snoring. We had a compartment to ourselves. Lex, once more wrapped in his overcoat, dozed. Sandorski and I kept a careful lookout as the train stopped at the dim-lit country stations. None showed any curiosity about us. There was nothing we could have done if they had.

We were under no illusions. The police would surely have taken an interest in three tickets to London, booked just at the critical time, and three vaguely seen men, two of whom were of the right build. When they hadn’t found us on the London train, it seemed likely that they would put a routine check on Southampton station. If we weren’t there either, then we must be still in Salisbury. And so Sandorski took another of his cavalry decisions.

When the train stopped about a third of a mile outside Southampton Central, he gave a quick look up and down the line, and ordered us out.

As soon as I had lowered Lex to the ground, I felt that Sandorski had merely multiplied our chances of being caught. But he did nothing by halves. He dived between the wheels and lay flat on the permanent way, and we had to follow him. It was so swift and sensible, provided you could forget–as I could not–the chance of the train starting while one of us was wriggling over the rails.

The train pulled out over our heads, leaving Sandorski sputtering with indignant rage and all the monosyllables that his governess had taught him. He had been a little close to the outflow of the lavatory.

It wasn’t a promising stretch of line. On both sides of it were difficult fences and beyond them wide deserts of waste ground. The only cover was a line of coal trucks in a siding. A mile away were the flood-lit funnels of the liners. I had a lovely daydream of being on board with Cecily and the children. It was a depressing spot, that blank bit of railway.

“You’ve done it this time,” I said. “Easier to make New York than London.”

“We’ll take a boat train. Why not?” he answered cheerfully.

“Because there aren’t any at this time of night.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”–he patted the truck against which we were leaning. “It must go somewhere sometime.”

“But we don’t know where, and Lex would be frozen to death.”

“Then, Colonel, my lad, we’ll stop a train!”

“How?”

“Red light. Or do they use green lights in England? Hell! Drive on the left of the road, don’t you?”

“Suppose there’s an accident?”

“Nonsense! Why should there be? Eh, Lex?”

“Accident to other people, not so?” asked Lex hopefully.

“You’ll be in it too, my boy,” said Sandorski. “Got a bit of red paper, Colonel?”

“Is it Christmas?”

“Infantryman–ha? No hole in the ground–no morale, ha? Where’s that torch of yours?”

I stopped sulking, and began to think. If he stopped a train, there would be a determined search for the culprit, and the police might put two and two together.

“You always do the right thing,” I said, “and then go plumb crazy when it works. Look here, if we went to Southampton by train, that’s the only train we could have taken. Right! We weren’t on it, so the cops go home to bed. If we’re cautious we can use the station.”

The line was open and bare of possible cover. There was little chance of avoiding any railwaymen who might choose to walk along it at the same time as ourselves, or of bluffing them into believing that we had a right to be where we were. Assuming that the police had been chatting with stationmaster and staff, anyone answering the descriptions of Sandorski and myself would be under lively suspicion. No, it was absolutely essential to reach the station unnoticed. If we could, and if we found a place to wait for a London train, we should be clear of pursuit at last.

I went up the line to explore, leaving Lex and the general under cover of the coal trucks. My excuse was that I knew more of my own railways than Sandorski; but in fact I felt that his mood was too inspired for him to be let loose. Left to himself, he might easily have walked into the station-master’s office and ordered a special train. I don’t say he wouldn’t have got it, but at this crisis of our fortunes I was all for a hole-in-the-ground policy.

Quarter of a mile up the line was a signal box blazing with light, and beyond that the white gleam of the station and the dots of red and emerald on the tracks. I trotted from sleeper to sleeper, ready to drop flat at any moment, until I was under the wall of the box. That was the end of the advance. I might perhaps have tried to stalk the station if I had had only myself to consider, but there was no hope of getting the lumbering, overcoated Lex past the box and all the lights and onto the bare platform without some official shouting at us.

Even so I was confident that on a dark night, with all industry and transport–outside the station, that is–tucked up in bed or represented only by sleepy watchmen, it would be easy enough to find another route and to remain invisible. The little gods of luck, however–whom I may have offended by ascribing too much of our success to good management–were determined to show me to whom the gratitude was really due.

I went back down the line and started to climb the fence into the waste ground between railway and docks. The fence was only of split paling, but I got my trousers caught on the points. While I was trying to extricate myself, a locomotive passed, clanking lightheartedly home. The driver shouted something, and the fireman heaved a lump of coal–more, I think, by way of a cheerfully disapproving gesture than with any intent of hitting the target; indeed he might have tried for a month of journeys to score a bull and failed. The lump caught me on the back of the neck. The seat of my pants and the paling were smartly separated. Until I picked myself up I thought it was the locomotive itself which had hit me.

After crossing the waste ground and another fence I came out onto a road. It passed over the railway by a bridge, on each side of which were the approaches to the up and down platforms, spacious, well-lit and empty but for a solitary taxi. There were two massive cops outside the entrance to the up booking-office; the solidity of their overcoats made them look like a sculptor’s functional decoration for the concrete buildings. While I watched them,

they moved off. To us it didn’t much matter whether they stayed or not. The railwaymen, mildly busy on the platforms, had certainly been warned to keep an eye open for fugitive murderers.

I leaned over the parapet of the bridge. The tracks and the roofs over the platforms were immediately below me. The roofs were accessible, easily accessible, and couldn’t be seen from ground level. Was there any hope of a route and a refuge at the end of it? I saw several fantastic answers, and one that might be practical. In a bay alongside the down platform was a big, empty restaurant-car. If we could reach it, we could wait as long as we liked behind it or under it. The back of the car was close up against the wall of the station buildings, and in deep shadow.

Before I committed Lex and Sandorski, I decided to reconnoiter the route. The road appeared to be empty. I climbed onto the parapet, and let myself silently down to the roof of the platform, which was only some six feet below. I had just started to crawl cautiously along the roof, when a voice from the parapet called:

” ‘Ere you! Wotcher doin’ of?”

I shall never know how he managed to interrupt me. I think he must have been riding a bicycle without a light, or else had been watching me for some time from the shadows, as fascinated as any curious dog.

What to do? Take him into my confidence? Bluff? Climb back to the road and knock him out? I remember that all these alternatives went through my head, but I cannot have had time to formulate even mental words. How is it possible to think, I wonder, without the use of at least a few key-words in the brain? And yet, in an emergency, it is.

“Only getting a spot of free travel, mate,” I said.

“Doin’ the railways company, eh?” he asked with an aggressive sense of duty.

“It ain’t the company any longer,” I replied indignantly. “It’s the state.”

He thought that over.

“Ah, so it is,” he said. “Well, good night!”

He removed his head, and vanished as silently as he had appeared.

After all this interference by the citizenry, my nerves were shattered. I crawled along that roof, trying hard to persuade myself that it was safer than any other place I had been in for the last six hours–which, oddly enough, and at a distance of twenty feet from the bridge, was true. When I came abreast of the rear end of the restaurant-car, I saw that there would be no difficulty in dropping on to its roof, so long as feet didn’t slip on its sloping edge. There was a risk, of course, that the lower half of anyone walking along the top of the car would be noticed from the platform, but it had to be taken.

I returned to the bridge, crossed the road and the fence beyond, and disappeared into the waste ground. Lex and Sandorski were waiting where I had left them in the darkness of the coal trucks. The general didn’t much care for my route when I explained it, and asked whether I thought that Lex was a bloody circus performer. Lex, however, had cheered up a little. He insisted that if all he had to do was drop, the law of gravity would take care of him. It certainly would. What worried us was where he would land and how much noise he would make.

We passed Lex over the fence, and made a wide circuit away from the railway so that our clumsy progress wouldn’t be heard by anyone on the line. That journey was a violent strain on patience. The darkness was absolute–probably because there were so many lights in the distance to catch our eyes–and the surface was abominable. Holes, bricks, strands of wire, rusty cans and drums, all camouflaged by tall dead weeds, tripped us while we supported the stumbling Lex. It seemed all of a mile before we came to the road.

I went first to show them where to cross the parapet of the bridge. A minute afterwards Lex sprawled over the edge into sight, with the general hanging onto his hands. I grabbed and landed him, and Sandorski followed. Once Lex had got his breath back, it seemed the right moment to stimulate him; so we had a stiff tot of rum all round.

Our crawl in single file along the roof was easy enough. We halted above the black whale-back of the restaurant car. I asked Lex if he thought that–with help–he could drop to it and keep his footing, and then quickly climb down to the couplings by the rungs at the rear of the car.

The rum worked.

“I have militär training,” he said proudly.We couldn’t let him make an enthusiastic job of it then and there, because we did not know what was going on beneath us. The platform might be empty, or there might be a whole group of railwaymen discussing the next day’s football. I leaned over the edge of the concrete while Sandorski sat on my legs. With the top half of my body upside down, I surveyed the station. On our own platform no one was in sight; on the far platform there was some activity around the baggage office–not very strenuous, but sufficient to keep eyes from straying where they had no business.

“All clear for you, General,” I reported, wriggling back to the horizontal.

He dropped onto the roof of the car, and was off it again with first bounce. He could now keep watch on the platforms for us, and signal to me from the narrow space between the back of the car and the buffers at the end of the bay.

When he beckoned, I too dropped and told Lex to follow. Strength or nerve failed him at the last moment, and he stuck with his chest on the edge of the concrete and his legs kicking wildly in air–just where I couldn’t grab them without risk of falling off the top of the car myself. At that moment a porter chose to walk, whistling, round the corner of the station buildings. I caught Lex’s legs as they lashed back, and prayed that he wouldn’t let go his hold on the roof and that the porter wouldn’t look up. For long seconds we formed a leaning, living bridge between restaurant-car and roof until it was safe for me to whisper to him what to do and where to put his feet.

We dived under the van with, at last, no interested public but the station cat. She seemed to think that she could learn a thing or two from our movements, or perhaps considered us as promising kittens and was showing us how an experienced adult would have done the job. At any rate, she put up such a dance of misplaced enthusiasm between station roof and car and buffers that the porter at the far end of the platform was interested and came back and started to call for puss. Thank God cats don’t bark!

We didn’t have a long wait. The second train in was for London–one of those slow and weightily important trains, usually empty, which stop everywhere to pick up the mails. I poked up a very cautious head. The platform was sparsely populated by porters and post-office employees, and there was no convenient crowd of passengers alighting or boarding the train; it couldn’t have been worse. And then a light engine came along, banged into the restaurant-car, was coupled on, and prepared to draw our cover from over our heads.