The Green Gauntlet (13 page)
He had reached the bottom of the orchard that gave on to a kitchen garden when he saw the two-seater turn off the river road and tackle the steep, curving drive. It was an old bull-nosed Morris, driven by a middle-aged woman, and beside the woman sat a boy aged about eight or nine. The car crawled up the incline to the forecourt and stopped. The woman and the boy got out and went into the house. In less than a minute Shratt had sidled round the wall enclosing the stableyard, crossed a laurel patch, and approached the Morris from its offside. A glance confirmed his suspicions. The car had been fitted with a detachable ignition key. This had been removed.
It crossed Otto’s mind then that it might be wiser to move on across country and set up an ambush in a lonelier spot but then he reflected that privately-driven cars were not all that plentiful in wartime England and darkness might fall before a suitable one passed. During the interval all kinds of things might happen. The fat man would report the loss of his rook-rifle. The beaters might turn about and come down through the woods. And all the time his own progress, marked by raided vegetable patches, by footmarks, and the missing weapon, would be plotted on police maps. Viewed in the round it seemed to him that his chances of getting clear of the area in the car were more than even, providing he could get possession of the ignition key and, ideally, some reserve petrol. He decided to explore the petrol situation first. Returning the way he had come he regained the stableyard and poked about among the deserted sheds. It was clearly a day for bonuses. In the second shed was a tractor and beside it stood a two-gallon tin of petrol. He adjusted the rook-rifle under his right armpit keeping a finger on the trigger and carrying the petrol can in his free hand walked up the steps and into the big kitchen at the rear of the house.
Thirza Tremlett, the Craddocks’ nanny for time out of mind and now general factotum in a house deprived of all other domestic staff, was working at the sink. When the latch of the door was lifted she did not even look up, assuming the entrant to be the Squire who always came in this way after parking the tractor or stabling his grey. When Thirza felt a gentle prod in the small of her back she hissed with indignation and half-turned, meeting the steady gaze of a young, thick-set man with short fair hair and a day’s stubble on his suntanned face. She opened her mouth to scream but then closed it again. Something in the way the man looked at her warned her that it would be, wiser not to scream. Instead she gobbled and turned her face away, gripping the edge of the sink to offset a sudden loss of power in her legs.
The young man said, in a foreign accent so strong that she could only just catch his meaning, ‘The lady of the house?’ Nothing more, just those five words spoken as a query.
Thirza pushed herself away from the sink and tottered into the middle of the big room, her hands half-extended as though she had suddenly been deprived of vision. But the rifle barrel was still in close contact with her back and under its gentle pressure she moved through the swing door and into the dim passage beyond, the stranger keeping step with her.
She had heard nothing of escaped German prisoners and did not connect this young man’s presence with the war, supposing him to be either a burglar or a madman. Burglars were exceedingly rare in the Valley but madmen were not.
The Codsall family, over at Four Winds, had produced three madmen in three generations and she had known one of them personally, old Martin Codsall, who had killed his wife with a hay knife, fired his shotgun at the Shallowford stable-boy, and finally hanged himself in one of his own barns. There was nothing to be gained by arguing with a madman and she did not try. She responded, with faltering step, to the pressure of the gun-barrel. Her mouth opening and closing, and her false teeth performing a sympathetic undulatory movement, she led the way across the main hall and down another broader passage to a door that was ajar. She paused here for a moment but the man growled ‘Vorwarts!’ and she went on, pushing the door open with her knee.
Claire Craddock and her youngest son John were at the table having their tea and Claire, facing the door, was the first to see them enter. A second or so later John, his mouth full of cake, turned his head and saw them too.
For a long moment mother and son stared and John’s jaws ceased to champ. Nobody moved and nobody said anything. To an onlooker, glancing in from the terrace, the sunlit room might have contained four figures in a waxworks tableau. Then, grappling with amazement and indignation, Claire stood up and at that precise moment Thirza’s knees buckled and she laid herself full-length on the floor. To Claire the movement had, or seemed to have, a certain grace, as though Thirza was simulating the climax of a ballerina and going through a parody of the dying swan. The young man remained standing on the threshold his glance moving casually about the room. She said, at last, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ and the young man, his face twitching momentarily, replied, ‘I want the keys of the car. The car outside of the house.’
His English, apart from its accent, was near perfect but it was the accent that gave her her first clue. Each word was carefully enunciated, like a student trying to satisfy an oral examiner, and with part of her mind Claire pondered this perfection. It told her that this man was almost certainly a German and there was a logical reason for the guess. Away in a remote attic of her brain she heard again the guttural accents of old Professor Scholtzer who had lived in the Valley before the First War, and had all his windows smashed by a patriotic mob after the German excesses in Belgium in August, 1914. The young man’s ‘w’ and ‘s’s’ reminded her very sharply of the professor whom she had liked, and even more of his big, blond son, who used to ride out with the Sorrel Vale hunt and had been killed early in the war fighting against men like Will Codsall and Smut Potter. She had not heard about the hunt for the escaped prisoner, having driven over to Paxtonbury to collect young John at end of term but now she recalled having passed groups of Home Guardsmen on the main road and the man’s clothes gave the impression that he was attached to some kind of institution. It did not occur to her that he was mad, only that he was some kind of enemy and, to a degree, both dangerous and desperate. She could not recall ever having looked into a pair of eyes that were harder, bluer, or less expressionless. Without another word she picked up her handbag, extracted a bunch of keys and selected one. Holding the bunch suspended by this key she reached across the table. Thirza lay quite still on the floor, John, his eyes blank with amazement, sat without moving a muscle, his jaws still parted by a mouthful of unmasticated cake.
The man took the keys with a curt nod and then seemed to reflect a moment. Finally, half-dismissing Claire, he turned to the boy and jerked his head towards the door. To Claire his meaning was quite clear. John was to accompany him, presumably as a hostage, and when she realised this she reacted violently, concern driving out shock and indignation.
‘No!’ she shouted, ‘leave the boy and take the car! You have petrol—enough petrol to get you sixty miles, and if you want money …’
With a kind of frenzy she whipped up her bag again and emptied it on the table. A lipstick clinked into a saucer and a spread of letters and papers cascaded to the floor. Their flutter roused Thirza somewhat and she half raised herself on her elbows but when the man gestured with his gun she subsided again. John, without fuss, got up, swallowed his cake and reached out a hand towards his mother, but then the man acted quickly and savagely. He stepped swiftly over the prostrate Thirza, spun the boy round by the shoulder and propelled him towards the open door with his knee. Then they were gone and the door was shut. Claire heard their steps in the passage and then a sharp, metallic sound followed by a loud crash.
The noise galvanised her into action. Shouting protests at the top of her voice she scrambled over Thirza and flung her weight against the door. It gave but only an inch or so. In the absence of a key Shratt had placed a hall chair under the outer handle. Still shrieking she wasted several seconds wrestling with it before turning and running through into the estate office with some idea of throwing open the garden door and reaching the forecourt via the terrace. She had her hand on the door when she remembered the man’s eyes, and paused.
From the library behind her she heard Thirza retching but the sound had no significance. Very rapidly she was coming to terms with the immediate situation in the forecourt, a car, a potential killer with the gun, and young John being carried away God knew where or for what purpose. With a tremendous effort she was able to concentrate on possibilities and her first thought was the telephone in the hall. Then she related the sounds she heard immediately after the door had been barred. On the way out the man must have ripped out the installation and the crash she had heard had been the wall-box striking the tiled floor.
The next sound she heard was more definitive. It was the growl of the self-starter and the asthmatic cough of the old engine. Something had to be done at once and clearly it would have to be done by her. Remedies began to pour through her mind like a shower of balls bouncing down a long flight of stairs but each of them escaped into an area of improbability. She stared through the glazed half of the garden door and saw the car in the act of turning. The young man was trying to make the turn in one but the narrowness of the drive and the steep camber of its surface made this difficult. John, sitting nearest Claire, still looked blank, almost as though he was sleep-walking, but his expression must have deceived both Claire and Shratt for when the car was reversing, and the German’s head was turned, he suddenly jerked himself upright and half-projected himself over the edge of the nearside door. The German reacted very quickly. Lifting his left hand from the wheel he struck the boy’s cheek with his open palm and the sound of the impact, and the cry that followed it, reached Claire where she stood with her nose pressed to the pane.
It might have been this action on Shratt’s part that decided her next move in that it raised the level of her indignation high above that of her fear. Out of the tail of her eye she saw the means of combating the man’s outrage, the sleek, brown stock of Paul’s deer-rifle, the weapon she had given him for his sixty-first birthday present about the time of Dunkirk.
He no longer carried it on patrol, preferring to wear his Webley revolver and she was, as it happened, fairly familiar with the weapon. During the invasion scare, more from a sense of fun than with serious purpose in mind, Paul had taught her to use it, practising on marks in the orchard, and although by no means proficient she had at least learned to sight it correctly and to squeeze rather than jerk the trigger. She reached up and tore it from the peg, balancing it in her hands and experiencing a kind of demoniac pleasure in having the means to challenge a bully on his own terms. It was in fact, a far more formidable rifle than Shratt’s having a magazine containing eight rounds operated by a bolt action. She knew that Paul did not keep it loaded but she also knew where he kept a full magazine, in an old tobacco tin beside his inkwell, and when she tore open the tin the magazine was there, half-buried in paper clips, screws and discarded fountain pens. She clipped it on and worked the bolt in the five seconds that it took Shratt to straighten out and point the car towards the topmost curve of the drive but even so she was almost too late. The car was still warm from the drive home from Paxtonbury and responded vigorously to the thrust of the accelerator, shooting off at what seemed to her a prodigious speed. Without waiting to wrestle with the catch of the garden door she jabbed the barrel through the glass and fired, aiming at the offside rear tyre.
She must have missed for the car shot round the laurel clump and continued its rapid descent of the drive but she was not beaten yet and when it reappeared on the far side of the laurels she fired twice in rapid succession before the first chestnut tree could mask the target. This time one of the shots must have struck home for there was a subdued explosion and the Morris lurched on to the grass verge, careering along within inches of the palings and then regaining the gravel with a long, grinding scrunch. After that, however, it continued on down the incline and Claire, thrusting wide the door and running on to the terrace, glimpsed its passage between the narrowly-spaced chestnuts of the drive. Seconds later there was a confused outcry from the direction of the gate and after that a prolonged uproar, culminating in a clatter like a pile of empty paint tins being tossed on to a stone floor. Silence followed as Claire, reloading as she ran, moved across the drive to a point beyond the laurels where she could survey the avenue as far as the twin stone pillars.
She could see little enough for the lower half of the drive was shrouded in a cloud of dust but what she did see filled her with a mixture of relief and dread. The car’s offside wheel was clear of the ground and still spinning, and beyond it, clear of the dust, stood the solid figure of Henry Pitts, feet astride and arms outspread, as if in the act of coaxing an obstinate heifer into a pen.
V
I
n the many post-war Valley inquests held to determine who, in fact, played the major role in checking Otto Shratt’s career as escaper extraordinary, no final decision was ever reached. The Morris was checked and rechecked (before being demolished for souvenirs), the participants questioned so frequently and at such length that they grew impatient with the subject. Various on-the-spot written accounts were scrutinised by Valley sages for flaws and discrepancies and, years later, by radio and television pundits, projecting ‘We Were There’ programmes to audiences who were beginning to think of Hitler in terms of Napoleon and Kruger. The truth was, of course, no one person achieved the honour of restoring Shratt to his indignant escort but three—Claire Craddock, Henry Pitts and young John—each made independent contributions to what occurred at the foot of Shallowford House drive that July evening. The contribution of the two former could be described as deliberate; that of the latter involuntary.