None of the others, either, seemed over-talkative. Greene started the car and drove out into the city. Wexford stared at me with a mixture of anger and satisfaction: and Beetle-brows began twisting my free right arm behind my back in a grip which left no room for debate. He wouldn’t let me remain upright. My head went practically down to my knees. It was all most undignified and excruciating.
Wexford said finally, ‘We want our list back.’
There was nothing gentlemanly in his voice. He wasn’t making light conversation. His heavy vindictive rage had no trouble at all in communicating itself to me without possibility of misunderstanding.
Oh Christ, I thought miserably; I’d been such a bloody fool, just walking into it like that.
‘Do you hear? We want our list back, and everything else you took.’
I didn’t answer. Too busy suffering.
From external sounds I guessed we were travelling through busy workaday Friday morning city streets, but as my head was below window-level, I couldn’t actually see.
After some time the car turned sharply left and ground uphill for what seemed like miles. The engine sighed from overwork at the top, and the road began to descend.
Almost nothing was said on the journey. My thoughts about what very likely lay at the end of it were so unwelcome that I did my best not to allow them houseroom. I could give Wexford his list back, but what then? What then, indeed.
After a long descent the car halted briefly and then turned to the right. We had exchanged city sounds for those of the sea. There were also no more Doppler-effects from cars passing us from the opposite direction. I came to the sad conclusion that we had turned off the highway and were on our way along an infrequently used side road.
The car stopped eventually with a jerk.
Beetle-brows removed his hands. I sat up stiffly, wrenched and unenthusiastic.
They could hardly have picked a lonelier place. The road ran along beside the sea so closely that it was more or less part of the shore, and the shore was a jungle of sharply pointed rough black rocks, with frothy white waves slapping among them, a far cry from the gentle beaches of home.
On the right rose jagged cliffs, steeply towering. Ahead, the road ended blindly in some workings which looked like a sort of quarry. Slabs had been cut from the cliffs, and there were dusty clearings, and huge heaps of small jagged rocks, and graded stones, and sifted chips. All raw and harsh and blackly volcanic.
No people. No machinery. No sign of occupation.
‘Where’s the list?’ Wexford said.
Greene twisted round in the driving seat and looked seriously at my face.
‘You’ll tell us,’ he said. ‘With or without a beating. And we won’t hit you with our fists, but with pieces of rock.’
Beetle-brows said aggrievedly, ‘What’s wrong with fists?’ But what was wrong with Greene’s fists was the same as with mine: I would never have been able to hit anyone hard enough to get the desired results. The local rocks, by the look of them, were something else.
‘What if I tell you?’ I said.
They hadn’t expected anything so easy. I could see the surprise on their faces, and it was flattering, in a way. There was also a furtiveness in their expressions which boded no good at all. Regina, I thought. Regina, with her head bashed in.
I looked at the cliffs, the quarry, the sea. No easy exit. And behind us, the road. If I ran that way, they would drive after me, and mow me down. If I could run. And even that was problematical.
I swallowed and looked dejected, which wasn’t awfully difficult.
‘I’ll tell you...’ I said. ‘Out of the car.’
There was a small silence while they considered it; but as they weren’t anyway going to have room for much crashing around with rocks in that crowded interior, they weren’t entirely against.
Greene leaned over towards the glove compartment on the passenger side, opened it, and drew out a pistol. I knew just about enough about firearms to distinguish a revolver from an automatic, and this was a revolver, a gun whose main advantage, I had read, was that it never jammed.
Greene handled it with a great deal more respect than familiarity. He showed it to me silently, and returned it to the glove compartment, leaving the hinged flap door open so that we all had a clear view of his ultimate threat.
‘Get out, then,’ Wexford said.
We all got out, and I made sure that I ended up on the side of the sea. The wind was much stronger on this exposed coast, and chilling in the bright sunshine. It lifted the thin carefully combed hair away from Wexford’s crown, and left him straggly bald, and intensified the stupid look of Beetle-brows. Greene’s eyes stayed as watchful and sharp as the harsh terrain around us.
‘All right then,’ Wexford said roughly, shouting a little to bring his voice above the din of sea and sky. ‘Where’s the list?’
I whirled away from them and did my best to sprint for the sea.
I thrust my right hand inside my shirt and tugged at the sling-forming bandages.
Wexford, Greene and Beetle-brows shouted furiously and almost trampled on my heels.
I pulled the lists of Overseas Customers out of the sling, whirled again with them in my hand, and flung them with a bowling action as far out to sea as I could manage.
The pages fluttered apart in mid air, but the off shore winds caught most of them beautifully and blew them like great leaves out to sea.
I didn’t stop at the water’s edge. I went straight on into the cold inhospitable battlefield of shark-teeth rocks and green water and white foaming waves. Slipping, falling, getting up, staggering on, fining that the current was much stronger than I’d expected, and the rocks more abrasive, and the footing more treacherous. Finding I’d fled from one deadly danger to embrace another.
For one second, I looked back.
Wexford had followed me a step or two into the sea, but only, it seemed, to reach one of the pages which had fallen shorter than the others. He was standing there with the frothy water swirling round his trouser legs, peering at the sodden paper.
Greene was beside the car, leaning in; by the front passenger seat.
Beetle-brows had his mouth open.
I reapplied myself to the problem of survival.
The shore shelved, as most shores do. Every forward step led into a stronger current, which sucked and pulled and shoved me around like a piece of flotsam. Hip-deep between waves, I found it difficult to stay on my feet, and every time I didn’t I was in dire trouble, because of the black needle-sharp rocks waiting in ranks above and below the surface to scratch and tear.
The rocks were not the kind I was used to: not the hard familiar lumpy rocks of Britain, polished by the sea. These were the raw stuff of volcanoes, as scratchy as pumice. One’s groping hand didn’t slide over them: one’s skin stuck to them, and tore off. Clothes fared no better. Before I’d gone thirty yards I was running with blood from a dozen superficial grazes: and no blood vessels bleed more convincingly than the small surface capillaries.
My left arm was still tangled inside the sling, which had housed the Overseas Customers since Cup day as an insurance against having my room robbed, as at Alice. Soaking wet, the bandages now clung like leeches, and my shirt also. Muscles weakened by a fracture. and inactivity couldn’t deal with them. I rolled around a lot from not having two hands free.
My foot stepped awkwardly on the side of a submerged rock and I felt it scrape my shin: lost my balance, fell forward, tried to save myself with my hand, failed, crashed chest first against a small jagged peak dead ahead, and jerked my head sharply sideways to avoid connecting with my nose.
The rock beside my cheek splintered suddenly as if exploding. Slivers of it prickled in my face. For a flicker of time I couldn’t understand it: and then I struggled round and looked back to the shore with a flood of foreboding.