There was no sign of the girl.
‘You stay here,’ I said to Boyd. ‘I’ll circle the farm and see if there’s a handkerchief at any of the windows.’
He said, ‘Okay,’ and I moved off along the wall of the outhouse. My shoes squelched in a morass of wet dung. I felt the warm heavy-smelling liquid top the uppers of my shoes. But I dared not try and avoid it. There was still enough light for me to be seen if I moved out of the shadow of the buildings. The end of the outhouse abutted onto the farmhouse itself. On this side there were two small windows on the upper floor. They were closed and reflected the pale light of the sky like blind eyes.
Round at the back it was the same. All five windows were closed and there was no sign of a handkerchief. I circled the farm until I was gazing at the front door. This was open. But all the windows on this side too were shut. There was no sign of life.
I worked my way back to where I had left Boyd.
He was not there.
I thought perhaps I had made a mistake in the growing darkness. But a little farther on I found the same morass of liquid dung.
A cock crowed.
I felt the menace of the place all round me. One half of my mind was wondering where the hell Boyd could have got to. The other half was detached and thinking about who built the place and what dark scenes the old grey stones had witnessed.
The silence of the yard was shattered by the crash of an iron bar on stone. It sounded as loud as the gates of Hell being thrown back, and a dog began to bark. A door creaked and Boyd and Monique erupted into the yard from the outhouses on the other side. Some one shouted. And then a man’s figure appeared in the front of the house. He had a gun. But he did not fire. ‘Aspetti!’ he shouted and began to run towards them.
It was Mancini. Even in that dim uncertain light I could not mistake his thick powerful figure.
‘Run for the car,’ I called out to Boyd.
‘Okay,’ he replied, and he and the girl made for the track along the stream bank.
I crouched, ready to do something that I hadn’t done in years. Mancini was running across the yard now. Big though he was he ran well, with long powerful strides. As he reached the middle of the yard, I launched myself from the shadow of the outhouse. I made straight for his legs in a flying tackle and caught him nicely at the knees. I felt the solid bone of his leg against my shoulder and then he hit the stone of the yard with a thud that must have shaken him badly.
I dived for the shotgun which had fallen from his grasp. But his hand reached out and fastened on the collar of my coat. He was winded by his fall. But his hold was firm though I struggled desperately. He was breathing in great gulps of air with a sobbing sound in his throat. A moment and he would be fully recovered. I knew I hadn’t a hope against him at close quarters.
I kept free of his other hand which was searching for a hold and wriggled out of my jacket. A quick twist and I was free.
I reached the gun a moment before he did and then ran for the track.
He started to run after me. But he was too shaken. As I made the bank a confusion of shouts broke out behind me. He was calling for his horse. I settled down to run steadily and carefully.
I caught up with Boyd and Monique in the fields below the main road. ‘Thank God, you’re okay, sir,’ he panted. ‘I was a bit worried. ‘E ain’t hexactly Tom Fumb’s baby bruvver. Wotjer hit ‘im wiv — an atomic bomb?’
I told him about the tackle. I knew it would please him. He was a great boy for Twickenham. ‘Where did you find the girl?’ I asked as we clambered into the car.
‘She was locked in one of them outhouses,’ he replied. ‘A filthy stinkin’ bloody hole of a Calcutta. There was a little grating winder in it and she’d tied ‘er ‘anky to it. I caught sight of it across the yard just after you’d left me. The draw-bar on the door was secured by a padlock. But I managed to pick that. Then o’ course I went an’ spoilt it orl by dropping the bleedin’ bar. Still, orl’s well wot ends well, as ol’ Bill would say.’ He gave me a nudge with his elbow and speaking out of the side of his mouth, said, ‘Cor, stone the crows! She don’t ‘alf smell a treat though. The floor of the place were just like a ruddy sewer.’ His nose wrinkled and he grinned. ‘Pardon my mentioning it, sir, but you don’t smell so ‘ot yourself. I ‘card you walk into the muck as soon as you’d left me. Thort you was going to give the whole game away by swearing bloomin’ orful like wot yer does on the bridge when somefink’s gawn wrong.’
The car did in fact smell like a dung heap. I thought at first it was my shoes. But now I realized that by far the strongest smell emanated from the back of the car.
I switched the interior light on and looked round. The girl was sitting close up in the back seat — a tight bundle of filth that smiled at me apologetically, her teeth showing white in a dirty face.
‘All right?’ I asked.
She didn’t speak. She simply nodded. Her eyes were very wide.
I switched the light off and the swathe of the headlights seemed to leap out into the darkness of the winding mountain road again.
As we swung down the mountain road along the valley side to Vicovaro, I tried to figure out how she must be feeling. So far, I realized, I had only been thinking of myself. I had promised to find the girl, and then when I had discovered the circumstances in which she was living I had to satisfy my conscience and intervene. It had — I realized it now — been a game to me. There’d been a brutal farmer to outwit, a risk to be taken. That was all, as far as I was concerned. And afterwards the trouble of getting her back to England.
I hadn’t looked at it from her point of view at all.
Her wide eyes and slightly tremulous smile, and the way she sat tense and small in the corner of the car, were eloquent of her state of mind.
And as we drove down through the dark mountains I think I came near to understanding her mood.
However hateful Mancini had been, the farm was at least a home to her. She knew what it was like to be alone and a refugee. The village had given her friends and a background. And then two strangers had come with word of her mother. And now she was alone with them in a car, her dress all covered in filth where she had been flung on to the floor of a dung-strewn outhouse by the furious Mancini — and she was now realizing that she did not know these two strangers, did not know whether they could in fact get her back to England, did not know what was to become of her.
Later the trip might seem an adventure to her, for she was young and youth responds to the unknown. But just at the moment she was uncertain and a little scared. With every kilometre the car made down the valley, she was getting farther and farther from the life she knew and nearer and nearer to the outside world. She was intelligent enough to realize that the past few years had not equipped her to cope with that world. It made her very dependent upon us. And dependence upon people you don’t know is not very reassuring, even when you’re young and leaving a person you detest.
At Vicovaro we stopped just long enough to pick up the Italian driver.
He was very sleepy and disgruntled at being hauled out of bed at four in the morning. As he climbed into the driving seat and smelt the sickly-sweet farmyard stench of the car, he burst into a stream of furious Italian. He spoke so fast and so volubly that neither Boyd nor I could understand what he was saying. But I got the general idea, and I couldn’t really blame the fellow. It was a nice car and it would need a lot of cleaning and disinfectant before it was even fit to be hired by a Neapolitan tart.
‘You gonna drive or do we dump you here?’ Boyd asked threateningly in Italian.
The stream of words was suddenly dammed. He glanced quickly from one to the other of us. ‘I drive,’ he said, and climbed in behind the steering wheel. But as he let in the clutch he started again. ‘La mia macchina,” he cried, ‘e rovinata.’ ‘If you’re so worried about the way your car smells, why don’t you give up eating garlic?’ Boyd suggested. ‘Yer bref is so bleedin’ orful that it’s a wonder ter me you notice a nice clean smell like dung.’