The Runaways (2 page)

So Smiler got to his feet. Stark naked under the leaden, rain-deluging sky, he began to pull on his wet blue jeans. As he struggled with them, hissing with effort through his teeth at their awkwardness, there was a massive bellow of thunder from away to the west and the whole sky was lit with another blaze of lightning, slashing earthwards. This time, though Smiler could not know it, the lightning was doing exactly the same for another prisoner as the previous bolt from the blue had done for him. Ten miles away, northwest of the wood in which Smiler was dressing and about four miles a little southwest of the Wiltshire town of Warminster, was the large country estate and ancestral home of the Marquis of Bath. The mansion was called Longleat House and the estates around it Longleat Park. Part of the park had been turned into a wild animal reserve. Every day of the year cars rolled into Longleat Park bringing tourists to see the treasures of the beautiful Longleat House and also to see the Lions of Longleat and the other animals which were kept in huge, penned-in stretches of the parkland. Every day cars moved around the road which twisted and twined through the high-fenced animal enclosures.

The road ran first through the East African section which held giraffes, zebras, ostriches, and antelopes; and then on through the monkey jungle with its baboons that often cadged free rides on top of the cars; and so into the lion reserve where, the kings of beasts sometimes lay lazily across the roadway refusing to move out of the path of the cars until the mood took them. Finally the car procession entered the cheetah area.

Today because it was February, and a storm- and rain-filled day, there were no more than three or four cars in the whole animal reserve. At this moment there was none in the cheetah, section. In fact, there were few animals out in the enclosures either. They no more liked the rain and the storm than human beings. The baboons were in their dugouts and the lions in their wooden pens or stretched out on the sheltered verandahs of their huts. In the cheetah reserve all the cheetahs were under shelter in their huts – all, except one.

This cheetah was a female. Her name was Yarra. All the cheetahs in the enclosures had names … Apollo, Chester, Lotus, Suki, Tina and Schultz. Yarra was a full-grown female. She weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She stood nearly three feet high to her narrow, raking shoulders and from the point of her black nose to the tip of her long tufted tail she measured seven feet and one inch. Yarra was a good-tempered animal. She had been captured as a cub in Africa, brought to Germany and from there to Longleat Park.

She was a magnificent animal. Under the rain the spots on her tawny orange coat were as black as small wet coals. The dark lines of her face maskings, running from inside the eyes down around her muzzle, were boldly drawn charcoal lines. Her throat and underbelly were creamy white, and her eyes tawny gold. As she moved she swung her long tail from side to side, flicking little sprays of rain from the tuft at its end.

When the Cheetah Warden came into the enclosure in his Land-Rover and Yarra felt in the mood she could jump in one easy long-flowing movement to the top of the driving cab. Sometimes, to give the cheetahs exercise, the warden towed a trail rope from the back of the Land-Rover with a piece of meat tied to it for the cheetahs to chase. Even though he accelerated to forty miles an hour yarra could easily keep up. If he had gone at sixty miles an hour she could have held pace with the car for a while.

Today Yarra was strangely restless. The rain and the thunder and lightning had increased her restlessness. It was not the restlessness that overcame her and the other cheetahs when, from time to time, they marked with their keen sight the movement of guinea fowl, partridge, pheasant or young deer moving on the free slopes of the parkland outside the enclosure. At those times they raced to the wire fence, longing for the freedom of the hunt and the chase, only to turn back and stalk the length of the wire, stubby ears alert, the desire for complete liberty moving hot and strong through their powerful bodies.

Now, something else had made Yarra restless and she did not know what it was. All she knew was that where normally she would have taken shelter from the rain, she now wanted to remain outside, moving up and down the long line of the boundary fence. Up and down, up and down she stalked. The fence was strong and made of two-inch iron mesh. It was over twelve feet high with an inwards overhang at the top, and it was supported on strong wooden poles with here and there a large concrete support to give added strength. Inside the outer fence, a few feet from it, was another fence, about four feet high. Yarra and any of the other cheetahs could have jumped this inner fence easily, but they never did. What was the point of jumping this fence when it was clear that the outer one was a barrier that could never be overleaped?

There was a low rumble of thunder from above and a stronger burst of rain that slashed into Yarra's face. She sat down on her haunches close to the inner fence, shook her head and blinked her eyes against the rain scud. She remained there, sitting upright like a sphinx, her eyes on the long grass slope outside the high fence, marking the low flight across it of a bedraggled rook. The slope ran upwards to a patch of ploughed land and then on to a wood that marked its crest. Here and there a fir tree stood out stark, glossy green against the February blackness of the other trees.

Another rumble of thunder broke out above and Yarra moved on, her restlessness eating into her. She lowered her fore quarters almost to the ground. Raking with her hind legs at the wet and muddy grass, she sent little clods of earth flying into the air. She turned her head sideways, seeing the cheetah hut at the bottom of the enclosure. Closer was a great fallen oak tree which the cheetahs used as their playground. She opened her jaws, flexing the skin back over her teeth and gums, and gave a long half-snarling, half-hissing sound that ended in a short, snapping spit.

It was at this moment, as Smiler was pulling up his wet jeans over a wet shirt ten miles away, that the sky above burst with an earth-shaking roar of thunder. A great bolt of lightning was loosed through the low-hanging clouds, setting the grey day ablaze with vivid light.

The lightning hit the outer fence of the cheetah enclosure ten yards below Yarra. It ran in an exploding aura of blue fire the length of the wire mesh. It found the metal bolts in a concrete support and ripped fence and support from the ground as though a great hand had smashed and flung them down. The falling top half of the support flattened the low inner fence a yard from Yarra. She leapt, snarling with fright, into the air. Her nostrils were charged with the smell of burning from the lightning strike. She came down from her panic bound on top of the collapsed outer section of the boundary fence. As thunder rolled angrily again she was gone, her whole body, every nerve in her, impelled by fear and shock. She streaked away up the grassy slope towards the wood in a wild, fast-leaping run, moving like a tawny-gold streak at top speed.

Within thirty seconds of leaving the cheetah enclosure she was in the wood on the hill crest, the first burst of fierce speed dead in her. She found a small path and moved along it, trotting now. Fear and panic were easing from her. With her fright and shock gone, she now found the strange restlessness she had known all day still with her. She gave herself over to it in a way she could never have done in the enclosure because she was at liberty.

It was less than twenty minutes before the Cheetah Warden in his Land-Rover discovered that Yarra was gone. Over his walkie-talkie set he sent out a message to his headquarters and arrangements were immediately put in hand to organize a search party. By then Yarra was well away, beyond the wood, moving slowly down the lee of a small orchard of bare apple trees. The land dropped steeply below her. A mile away she could see the line of a road with cars speeding along it.

Yarra stopped, watched the road for a while, and then turned and began to work a line across country parallel to the road below.

If there was an instinct in Yarra to keep away from human beings and roads, there was the same instinct in Smiler. Dressed now in his own clothes, the blanket abandoned under a bush, since he knew it was too distinguishing a mark if he should be sighted with it, he half-walked, half-trotted along the down-lands that ran away from the wood. He kept just below the crest of all ridges because he knew, without having to think about it, that if he walked the crestlines he would be too easily seen. He had no idea where he was, not even the name of the county, nor of the nearest town. All he had known was that the policemen had been taking him to Salisbury. Salisbury meant nothing to him except that he vaguely remembered that there was a cathedral there.

His wet jeans, although they were warming up a bit with his body heat, rubbed him on the inside of his thighs. His wet shirt clung to him under the heavy, sodden weight of his jacket like a tight top skin. He was hungry and he kept thinking of all the second helpings he had refused in his life. Beautiful pictures of steaming sausages and beans, hamburgers and packets of golden potato crisps floated before his eyes until he sternly gave himself a smart talking-to and said, ‘Samuel M., keep your eyes open for danger not for food.'

He travelled for two hours across country and not for a single second did it stop raining. The thunder and lightning went gradually, sliding away into the east and finally dying out with a few muffled grumbles and a pale, distant streak of blue fire. The rain soaked into his thick tweed jacket so that it grew heavier and heavier on him. The water ran down his fair hair, plastering it to his head like thickly spread butter. It seeped down between his shirt collar and his neck and trickled over his naked body cooling down any heat his exercise was giving him. He shivered now and then. He began to feel miserable, too, but he told himself that misery was to be expected in the circumstances and the best way to beat it was to find shelter for the coming night.

He crossed three roads, one of them a main highway, hiding first in the hedges until the coast was clear and then darting across. The policemen, he knew, would have sent out a pickup call for him. The last thing he was going to have happen was to be picked up and taken back to the reform school.

Now and again he would sing quietly to cheer himself up. The songs were always ones his father had taught him, ones he had sung while his father played his mouth-organ. Sometimes when his father was home from sea they would go out on borrowed bicycles – Sister Ethel's for him and her husband's for his father – and they would freewheel down hills both of them singing madly. Once or twice his father had hired a car and taken them out. Each time when they were on some quiet road, his father had let him drive and he had soon picked up the knack.

He was trotting up a river valley, following a small partly overgrown path, the stream heavy with flood water to his right, when he saw ahead of him a low greystone bridge. Smiler came cautiously out on to the bridge and looked up and down the road. There was no one in sight. On the far side of the bridge, set a little back from the water's edge, was a long, low, thatched cottage. A board on the garden gate read – Ford Cottage. Farther up the road was a yard entrance. Rising above the thatch of the cottage he could see the corrugated iron roof of a barn that stood behind it.

Smiler eyed the cottage for some time. There was no smoke coming out of any of the chimneys. The curtains at all the windows were drawn. He whistled quietly, speculatively to himself for a moment and then trotted up the road to the yard entrance.

The big gate was shut and there was a padlock and chain on it. Beyond the gate was a courtyard with a well in the middle and beyond that the barn with an open bay at one end which clearly served as a garage. The back of the house showed no sign of life. For a moment or two he stood there as the rain poured down on him. He slowly licked his wet, cold lips as though the cottage were something to eat.

But Smiler was not going to be caught a second time. Things were not always as they seemed. Take that old farmer who had turned him over to the police – he could have sworn that the old man had never suspected that he had laid up each night in the warm hay of his barn – but he had known and had not let Smiler suspect it until the police car had swept into the farmyard just as he was coming out of the hen house with eggs in his hands.

So Smiler made a reconnaissance, right around the house and barn, peering through the chinks in the drawn curtains and going right into the barn and up the wooden ladder to the hay-filled loft. He noticed, too, that there were no recent car tracks on the soft mud at the entrance to the car bay. At the back of the car bay, covered by a ground-sheet, was an old bicycle.

A few minutes later Smiler was in the house. It wasn't a difficult procedure. Back in his home town there were certain boys he had mixed with who had a considerable knowledge of the ways of householders with their keys when they went away. Nearly everyone locked the front door and took the key with them, and nearly everyone locked the back door and hid the key somewhere handy where the woman or friend who came to keep an eye on things could find it. The back door key of Ford Cottage was tucked away on a low rafter that formed part of the support for the porch over the door.

The back door opened directly into a large kitchen. Smiler went in and locked the door behind him. It was a nice kitchen, though now a bit gloomy with the yellow and red curtains drawn. It had all the modern appliances, including a deep-freezer, and on one of the walls was a big picture of a group of pink flamingos standing in shallow water.

Smiler put out a hand and flicked the light switch by the door. The centre light came on. Smiler flicked the light off. He went to the sink and turned the cold tap. Water ran from it. He turned the hot tap. No water came from it. Smiler decided that if it became necessary he would puzzle that one out later. The most pressing need at the moment was to find some food and something warm to wear.