‘What, with running togs? Be your age! How could he carry a whacking great revolver on a cross-country run and not have it spotted?’
‘He could kid people he was the starter,’ said Gascoigne, grinning. ‘All right, I won’t play grandmother, but we’ll keep a weather eye lifting until we get him where we want him. I’ve conceived a dislike for the little ferret.’
The headquarters of the small but keen running club to which Gascoigne and O’Hara belonged was just over the Somerset border, but the club had no ground of its own and was dependent upon the local amateur football club (whose secretary happened to be one of the members) for changing-rooms and a field on which to practise.
During the winter, however, the football club’s ground and changing-rooms were not available, and the members who joined in cross-country running had to make the best of things in a small public house called the Horse and Hound which allotted them a sitting-room and a bathroom every Saturday afternoon between September and April.
To the Horse and Hound, therefore, Gascoigne and O’Hara repaired, there to exchange jests with the rest of the runners and to change into dark shorts and white running vests ready for the word to be given which should set them on the track of the mysterious and (they thought) criminal Mr. Firman.
‘He’s turned up all right,’ said O’Hara, as they stood dancing about on the pavement outside the public house waiting for the rest of the field. ‘He didn’t bat an eyelid when I greeted him.’
‘Probably quite a downy bird,’ suggested Gascoigne. ‘Wait until we catch up with him later on.’
They had decided upon the spot where they would contact Firman, and were anxious only that he should reach it.
‘No use making it too close to the start,’ had said Gascoigne; and O’Hara had agreed. The country they were to traverse was distant twenty miles or so from Yeovil, and the runners, changed, and with overcoats over their shorts and vests, made the first part of the journey by train.
It had been agreed between the cousins that they should separate fairly near the beginning of the course, and converge upon the quarry later. O’Hara was to shadow Firman, and Gascoigne, as the better runner, was to forge ahead for the first mile and a half and then gradually fade in again, as it were, towards the meeting-place.
The plan, as Gascoigne saw it, had this disadvantage; that if O’Hara were really a marked man, it was quite likely that the older Battle (who would have heard about the run from Firman) might have decided that the afternoon offered as good a chance as any of ambushing O’Hara and putting him out of the way without troubling Firman with this task.
He mentioned this to his cousin, but O’Hara, with a light-hearted reference to forewarning and forearming, refused to take the matter seriously.
‘Let’s concentrate on Firman,’ said he; and before there was time to say more, the word was given, and the runners cantered off. Gascoigne and O’Hara had no scruples about finishing or not finishing the run, although it was an inter-club match, for it was considered likely that the home team would get the first half-dozen places at least, unless there were unforeseen accidents, for the visitors were a very much younger team consisting for the most part of youngsters of seventeen. In fact, it was as much to put this club on its feet as from any desire to score at their expense, that the good-natured secretary of the home team had put his men into the field.
Gascoigne was a more sensitive and a more imaginative man than his cousin. He disliked intensely the thought that O’Hara, far from being one of the hunters, might as easily be tracked down and murdered; therefore he trotted alongside another member of the team, an old Cambridge Blue who had been a good man in his day, and apprised him, as they cantered over the common which formed the first part of their route, of the course which events had taken.
‘Good Lord!’ said the Cambridge man. ‘What fun!’
Gascoigne then bespoke his assistance, and, soon satisfied that he had a staunch ally, he lengthened his stride and went to the head of the field, and (not too obviously, he hoped) began to run at a pace which was foolishly fast if he had hoped to finish the course. O’Hara tagged on to Firman, and the Cambridge man stuck to O’Hara as he had promised. Firman was not much of a runner, and the trio was slow.
The course was a circular one, with the starting-point on the northern circumference, so that at no time during the run were the competitors at more than about four miles from their base. The route avoided roads as far as possible, and permission had been obtained for the teams to include two private parks in the course, one south and one east of the starting-point. Here and there along the course were friends of the clubs who possessed cars and motor cycles, and acted as guides and checkers-in.
Between the two private estates lay a fairly considerable wood. A long hill led up to it, and on the home side there was a stretch of sand and heather known locally as Punch Dripham. It was uneven, and contained deep hollows not dangerous unless one wandered into them in the dark, but large enough, for the most part, to hide, say, a patrol of Boy Scouts or four or five men, for the lips of these places were overhung with soft soil in which great roots of heather writhed, while in the holes themselves there were wild, labyrinthine bushes of ancient gorse and occasional clumps of bracken.
The rendezvous for Gascoigne and O’Hara was to be in the depths of the wood before they reached Punch Dripham, and Gascoigne, arriving, according to arrangement, well ahead of the rest of the field, plunged in amongst the undergrowth until he was about twenty yards north of the path, and thankfully—for the pace he had set himself had been a hot one—he lay down on the bank of a small brook which flowed through the wood and waited for the signal from his cousin. The last of the checkers-in had greeted him some mile and a quarter further back along the course.
The Cambridge man, Gascoigne hoped, had been able to stick to O’Hara. He glanced at the wristwatch he was wearing, and by which he had been timing himself, and decided that he could take ten minutes’ rest at least before the others arrived.
It was very quiet in the wood. It was so far from any road along which vehicles could pass that its selection as the place in which Firman should be interviewed had seemed obvious. Gascoigne dipped his hand in the brook. It was clear, and rippled pleasantly over sand. Time passed. He looked at his watch and wondered idly why the checker-in had mentioned that people were shooting on the estate. He had not heard a sound of it himself. At the end of a quarter of an hour he felt irritable; at the end of twenty minutes he was anxious.
The trouble was that he did not know what to do. If he left the wood and so missed the others, that would be unfair to them and a breaking of the agreement which had been made. On the other hand, there was always the chance that one of them had met with a mishap. O’Hara had turned his ankle on the previous run; such accidents were always liable to happen. It might even be something more serious ; one of the three spiked on a fence, through trying to vault it and slipping at the take-off, perhaps; or somebody helpless with a broken leg or badly-torn muscles.
Twenty-five minutes; and Gascoigne, in an agony of indecision—a state of mind to which, with his supreme, unegotistical self-confidence, he was entirely unaccustomed— began to walk through the woods to find out whether, by any possible chance, the others had arrived without his knowledge and were in another part of the wood.
The trees gave place, at one point, to a little clearing. He found Firman’s body half into a large clump of very tall, pink willow-herb. He would never have seen it but for the cloud of flies that rose with guilty haste at his approach. He would, even then, have walked on, but he could not help seeing the area of smashed, long stems and the welter of crushed, pink blossoms. The next sight, that of the gaping mouth and one wide-open, horrified, dead, glazed eye, filled him with nightmare horror. There was a hole through Firman’s skull where his other eye had been, and a blackening of powder and a scorching of skin round the wound. Gascoigne had never felt so ill in his life. The fine afternoon surged blackly about him. He turned and staggered away, and then fell down in a near-faint merely from shock.