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As a matter of fact Mr. Mercer was drinking beer in the bar. He had recognised Hilary when she turned her head, and he had seen her through the half open door, but he had followed her no farther than the bottom step. The bicycle which he had stumbled into and knocked over was gone. That meant that Miss Carew had taken it. He wasn’t ru
About ten minutes later a car drew up in front of the i
The fog was deepening steadily. When she struck a bad patch Hilary had to get off and walk. It was better to walk than to run into a ditch or a tree. The prospect of getting hurt and lying out on a clammy road all night was too repellent. There began to be more and more bad patches, and she began to wish more and more fervently that she had never come on this wild goose chase. Her imp produced an appropriate rhyme:
‘If you want to chase a goose
That’s flying loose,
You really should take care
The goose is there.’
She rode a little way, and then had to get off again. It was fu
She found herself listening, straining her ears for any sound that would break the silence which the fog had brought. If she stood still she could hear her own breathing, but nothing else -not a bird’s wing, not a twitter, not a breaking twig or a leaf brushed aside by any moving wild thing. Nothing was abroad, nothing moved except Hilary Carew, who wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t an obstinate little fool who thought she knew better than anyone else. Anyone else meant Henry. She had actually come to the point where she felt that Henry had been right when he told her to leave the Everton case alone – in case of something worse happening. To whom? To Hilary Carew, on a dark foggy road where nobody passed, and where no one would know – for a long, long time.
‘Idiot!’ said Hilary to herself. ‘What’s the good of thinking of that sort of thing now? Stop it, do you hear – stop it at once! And you’re not to think about Henry either! It’s undermining. He isn’t here, and if he was he’d probably be hating you like poison.’
‘But he wouldn’t let me be murdered in the dark.’
This was another Hilary who was so afraid that she had no proper pride and would have flung herself with passionate relief into the arms of Henry Cu
It was at this point that she heard the car.
She felt so much relief that for the moment she was quite herself again. It was the silence that had been so horrid. The familiar, comfortable sound of traffic on the King’s highway broke into this paralysing silence, and with it Hilary’s fear. Even the fog didn’t seem to be quite so dense, and she had the bright thought that the car would probably be ru
She pedalled along carefully, making up her mind that she had better jump off when the car was near so as to be sure of getting well out of the way. There would be plenty of time, because, as she could hear, the car wasn’t going at all fast. It couldn’t, of course. About ten miles an hour would be anyone’s limit, unless they wanted to run off the road at the first bend.
Afterwards Hilary could remember everything quite clearly down to this point. She particularly remembered thinking that she would be able to keep up with the car if it wasn’t doing more than ten miles an hour, but after that there was a confusion. There was light -and a noise. The car must have had its fog-light on or its headlights dipped. The noise was the car roaring down upon her, rushing into sudden speed – a big car. And she had jumped. If she hadn’t had the plan ready in her mind she wouldn’t have had time to jump clear, but because she had pla
She came back to a pain in her head -to being lifted – to a voice that said, ‘Only stu
Something else came into this world. Grit – cold, wet grit against her mouth. Horrid. She moved, and touched something sharp, something that cut her hand. She wasn’t being lifted any more. She was lying on her face with grit in her mouth, her cheek on something wet, and hard, and cold. The road – she was lying in the road. She was lying on her face in the road. And she had cut her hand. It hurt. She had cut it on something sharp. She remembered the bicycle, and thought it was all smashed up, and how was she going to get into Ledlington now? ’
All these thoughts really took no time at all. Consciousness came back and they were there, waiting for the light to touch them. She became aware of two things simultaneously, and then a third. The car with its engine ru
The man at the wheel put the car into bottom gear and jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.
Hilary heard the sudden roar of the engine. It came to her as sound, as danger, as terror itself. The two men who had carried her from the grass verge had laid her on her face in the track of the car with the broken bicycle beside her. If you fall from a bicycle, you are more likely to fall on your face than on your back. The men had considered this, and they had laid Hilary on her face in the road. She would be found broken and dead in the morning, a casualty of the fog. If they had cared less for probabilities and had laid her on her back, the plan would have gone off without a hitch, but they had laid her on her face. A half stu
At that roaring sound Hilary raised herself upon her hands, stared at the orange foglight of the car, and saw it rush towards her. But as it rushed, she threw herself sideways – scrambling, slithering, thrusting herself up from the road. She got somehow to her feet and went blundering and stumbling across the grass verge until she was brought up short by a hedge. Blind terror has an instinct of its own. There were thorns which she did not feel, blackberry trails which came across her face, across her mouth, as she went down on her knees burrowing and groping to find a gap which would let her through. Her hair caught, her coat ripped, an interlacing tangle of twigs and branches held her back, but she pushed and struggled until she was through, and there on the other side of the hedge she crouched with her head on her knees and the stuff of her skirt clutched hard against her face to muffle the sound of her panting breaths. She was almost fainting, but not quite. Thought swung between oblivion and nightmare. Then steadied. They would come back. They would look for her. They mustn’t find her.