"And here's the other one," said Margaret. "And the paperback of the one you've got there."
The Battle of the Ancre was slimmer, but although Elizabeth had already had her fill of carnage it offered her critical assessments of the first book.
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"Is this the Mitchell you want?" said Margaret doubtfully.
The critics appeared to have approved of Dr Mitchell's work; though of course the publishers would naturally have picked their quotations with care, for effect.
She looked at Margaret. "Do many people buy this sort of thing?"
Margaret shrugged. "About the same as for your father's books, allowing for the fact that Portsmouth's just down the road from here, so I expect to sell more naval books. It's surprising how well all the war books go—astonishing, even."
Margaret was CND—anti-Polaris, anti-Trident, anti-Cruise, anti-practically everything . . . Elizabeth had to make allowance for that, just as Margaret did her best to make allowance for Elizabeth being her father's daughter.
"And he's got another coming out in the autumn—I think I read about it in The Bookseller." Astonished or not, Margaret never let her principles get in the way of her bookselling. "I can't remember the title, but it has something to do with the Irish."
" Watch by the Liffey," said Elizabeth.
"That's it. But how—"
"I'll take the two hardcovers. Put them on my account, dear."
Margaret was still registering surprise at her unsuspected specialist knowledge, and the temptation to increase the score was irresistible.
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"It comes from what the Irish soldiers did in France in 1914—
the Germans were singing their 'Wacht am Rhein' in the trenches, so the Irish gave them back 'Watch by the Liflfey', Dr Mitchell says." She smiled sweetly at her friend. "And I need the books, you see, because he's taking me out to dinner tonight—"
There was no ticket on the car and no traffic warden in sight, and the street was still empty except for a car parked even more blatantly further down, where the yellow lines were doubled, no doubt encouraged by her example.
She sat for a moment, reading more of the dust-jacket blurb:
" Seventeen months later, when he next laid eyes on that same piece of the Hindenburg Line, Lieutenant Alfred Hannah of the West Hampshires failed to recognise it at first: the village of Fontaine-du-Bois had vanished off the face of the earth, and rust had dulled the barbs of the wire.
But the wire was still there, unbroken ..."
What was it, she wondered, which drew men like Dr Mitchell
—he wasn't much older than she was—to the contemplation of such horrors? With Father it had been different—it had all been part of re-living glory for him, as well as pain. But Dr Mitchell . . .
She drove homewards abstractedly, her mind hardly on the road but ranging more on that conundrum, and then on her own recklessness in allowing herself to be propositioned so dummy3
easily by a stranger. And such a strange stranger . . .
Then, suddenly and out of nowhere, a brace of leather-suited teenage motor-cyclists from Leigh Park roared past her, waking her up to the discovery that she was out of town already and on the edge of Father's woods— her woods, now.
Shocked by her own inattention, she checked her driving mirror carefully for further motor-cyclists before she turned into the concealed drive. But there was only a car way behind her, and that was pulling into the verge ... It looked not unlike the same car she had observed in the street below Margaret's, and she wondered for a moment if it might not be Dr Mitchell at the wheel solving the problem of locating her home simply by following her, since she had clean forgotten to give him any directions. But then she dismissed the thought as pure imagination: the Vicar could supply those directions just as well, and she couldn't see a man like Dr Mitchell worrying about such a small matter anyway.
She sighed as she searched in her bag for her key. It was no good dreaming dreams about Dr Mitchell merely because he was going to take her out to dinner. In another second or two she would step into the hall, and put her bag on the table under the mirror as she always did, and would look into the mirror to check her appearance, as she also always did out of pure habit. And the mirror would then tell her all she needed to know, as it too always did—and this time it would also remind her that it was Father's research in which Dr Mitchell was interested, not her . . . not her . . .
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She sighed again, and turned the key. Perhaps it would be better to vary the habit this time, and not bother to look in the mirror.
She put the bag down on the table—
There was a sudden flurry of movement in the mirror—she glimpsed something—and then darkness descended on her and arms crushed her—
"Don't scream, girl—an' don't struggle neither." The voice was as rough as the hands, but unhurried. "If yer do then I'll give yer somethin' to scream about—I'll break yer bleedin'
arm. Got it?"
Elizabeth wasn't aware that she had made any sound since the bag—or whatever it was—had descended on her head, surrounding her with impenetrable dark. Nor, for that matter, had she attempted to struggle, for the hands and the rock-like bulk of their owner left no scope for resistance: it was like being grabbed by a gorilla.
But perhaps she had cried out in surprise and pain, and the gorilla had misinterpreted both the sound and the weakness in her knees.
"Got it?" The voice grated in her ear and the pressure on her shoulder-blades increased agonisingly.
This time she heard herself cry out—almost as much in astonishment as in pain as her brain started to sort out the unbelievable signals it was receiving: nobody had ever done anything like this before to her— no one had ever held her dummy3
like this, hurt her like this!
"You're-hurting-me!" she gasped.
The pressure relaxed to its original implacable grip. "Just so you know this ain't nothin' to what I can do, eh?"
She was being robbed—freed from pain she fought against rising panic—she was being robbed, and she must keep her head ... or he would beat her into a pulp ... or ... she felt the fear of what he might also do to her spreading inside her—
the fear founded and fed on a hundred newspaper headlines
—
She must keep her head—she must remember what to do, even though the fear was choking her!
But she couldn't think straight any more. Was it better to fight, and risk injury—or did submission encourage them to do what they might not have intended to do in the first place?
But trying to fight this sort of strength would be sheer insanity—
"I've got 'er—an' she's got the message I reckon."
The voice outside the darkness wasn't directed at her: Oh, God help me! thought Elizabeth, despairingly—not him, but them!
"Bring her in here, then." The new voice wasn't rough, like that of her captor: it was educated, but at the same time unidentifiably classless.
Before she could deduce anything more about it—before even she could decide whether to derive hope or greater fear from dummy3
it—Elizabeth was man-handled round in a new direction and propelled forwards.
"Sit her down there," commanded the educated voice.
Again she was manoeuvred, until the back of her legs came up against something hard—the edge of a chair—and then forced down into it... on to it—a hard chair, with arms.
Inside the hood she hadn't known where she was, but this chair reduced the choice to the dining room or the study, though without sense of smell it was impossible to tell which.