‘What happened?’ Peter exploded with renewed fury. ‘Well, I was going a treat, as you probably heard. Pulling third on the straight, too, when just as I came into the new corner some suicidal idiot came flapping out at me waving his arms plumb in the middle of the road. It meant that I had to brake and alter course right in the middle of the corner, and it was no fault of his that I didn’t pile up the whole outfit. As it was, I just touched the bank on the outside, shot across the road, went up on the grass on the inside and eventually managed to get back on to the road again. By that time one engine had cut out; still, I think the car’s all right. We shall have to get up bright and early and get in a couple of runs tomorrow morning, that’s all, there’s not enough light in the wood for another run now.’
When the Blighs eventually arrived at the ‘Crown’ in Winchford where they had arranged to stay, they found Mr Nelson leaning on the bar, chatting to Camille and Butt, the number one B.R.C. driver. He looked up and smiled as they came in.
‘Well, how did you get on, Bligh?’ he enquired.
Peter grinned ruefully.
‘Oh, all right, thanks, as far as it went, which wasn’t very far, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re not going to tell me you had trouble on the new corner, are you?’ Mr Nelson implored. ‘Everyone seems to have been in difficulties there. I’ve heard nothing but complaints about it all day. The surface, the camber, the light—nothing seems to be right about it. It’s pretty disheartening for me after so much work. Even Volanti said he had a nasty moment there, although he put up an excellent time. Three people have hit the bank, fortunately without serious damage, and several others had their engines die quite unaccountably when they came to open up after the corner.’ Mr Nelson looked quite downcast.
‘Oh, no,’ Peter hastened to assure him. ‘I’ve got no complaint to make against the corner itself, but just as I came into it some fool popped out from nowhere right into the middle of the road, waving his arms like a lunatic. Result was, I had a very busy time indeed, and while I was motoring about on the grass and dodging trees I lost one engine.
Poor conscientious Mr Nelson looked more harassed than ever and swore under his breath.
‘I’m most frightfully sorry to hear about this, Bligh,’ he apologized. ‘I can’t think who can have done such a crazy thing. When you went up, the marshals had just come down and reported to me that there were no spectators left on the hill, and only Arthur Day was still up there, hanging on in the top timing-box until you had made your run. Tell me, what did this idiot look like?’
Peter thought for a moment before replying.
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘the light was pretty poor under the trees there by the time I went up, and anyway you can’t notice much detail when you’re “dicing”, but he seemed a tall, thin bloke wearing something white. It looked like an overall coat, or it may have been a very light-coloured mackintosh.
‘The odd thing that struck me, now I come to think of it, was that he didn’t seem to have the coat on properly—his arms through the sleeves I mean—but slung round his shoulders, so that it looked like—well—more like a surplice than anything else.’
He laughed.
‘I’m not trying to suggest, though, that it may have been the local padre in his war-paint or anything like that. Just as I got the car back on to the road,’ he went on, ‘I had a quick look round, but he must have made a lightning get-away, for I couldn’t see a sign of him. Anyway,’ Peter concluded, ‘I’m not worrying, it was my own fault for turning up so late. What’ll you have to drink?’ he asked.
The conversation became general and the usual topics that are raised on the eve of a speed event were discussed at length. Talk was of blowers and blower pressures, of gear ratios, suspension and braking systems and of twin rear wheels versus single.
Mr Nelson played his part nobly in this discussion, for he was secretly a prey to a vague feeling of uneasiness, a dim sense of foreboding, which began to get the upper hand later, when he found himself alone in his room for the night. That confounded new corner seemed to be at the bottom of everything, he reflected; what an unlucky job it had been from start to finish! A constant worry! At one time he had seriously doubted whether the road would ever be ready in time, they had had such a long chapter of accidents and irritating annoyances.
In the first place, the local wiseacres had been even more pig-headed and obstinate than usual, and had not only refused to help the work of the club in any way, but had actually seemed bent on putting obstacles in their path. None of the local contractors could be persuaded to take on the job, and he had been compelled to employ a London firm at much greater expense. All this because of some archaic superstition about a ring of old stones through which the road would pass.
To begin with, some foolish practical joker, presumably one of the villagers, kept moving the surveyor’s pegs and sights overnight, and once they had even been collected together and burnt. Next, a large oak-tree they were felling, thanks to an unexpected and violent gust of wind on an otherwise calm day, fell unexpectedly in the wrong direction. It trapped the foreman, seriously injuring him, while several of the men had narrow escapes.
The mechanical navvy broke down repeatedly, until finally a subsidence occurred beneath it, and it required days of digging and the erection of shear-legs before it could be extricated. Just when the excavations were nearly at an end, and they were preparing to lay the foundations of the road, a spring had been struck, which made the whole hillside a hopeless quagmire of mud.
Then the trouble began among the workmen. Several of them fell victims to a peculiar and singularly unpleasant complaint, from which two had subsequently died, and the remainder had become restless and uneasy, saying there was no luck on the job. No doubt local talk was responsible.
Seeing the work was so behind time, he had tried to persuade the contractor to put on a night shift, offering to provide them with flares, but the men had resolutely, refused to work after sundown. It was only by the dogged persistence of Mr Nelson himself that the road had been completed in time for the event, and it was with a sense of personal triumph that he had opened the course to competitors.
When beset by all these difficulties, he had actually begun to wonder at times whether there might not, after all, be some truth in local superstitions, but when the new road was at last finished and he toured up it at the wheel of his blue saloon Le Fevre, this disturbing thought had been forgotten. Now, the unfortunate mishaps in practice and particularly Bligh’s story had recalled his past uneasiness.
He recollected how he had dismissed impatiently the workmen’s talk of something or someone flitting about among the trees; never seen in broad daylight, but only after sundown, often glimpsed in the corner of an eye, but never directly seen. Strange, too, that both workmen and drivers had complained of the unpleasant stench that occasionally seemed to hang about the corner.
In an attempt to put a stop to these disquieting and unprofitable thoughts, Mr Nelson decided to indulge in his favourite relaxation of reading in bed. After a while the book slipped from his hand on to the coverlet and he fell into an uneasy sleep, which brought with it a very vivid and disturbing dream.
He was sitting in his favourite position in the lower timing-box at Longbury. It was evidently late in the day, for the light seemed subdued. Through the window he could see the Rheinwagen on the starting-line with Von Eberstraum at the wheel. For no apparent reason this perfectly normal spectacle seemed to inspire him with dreadful uneasiness. He felt as though he was the unwilling witness of some sinister sequence of events which he was quite powerless to interrupt.