He lay perfectly still, and waited, suddenly aware that he was still very short on sleep…
Hutchman was awakened from an involuntary doze by the sound of the door opening. He held his breath to avoid even the slightest disturbance of the sheet just above his face. A man’s voice swore fervently. There was a rush of heavy footsteps to the bed, into the screened-off toilet facility in the corner, to the closet, and back to the bed again. The unseen man grunted almost in Hutchman’s ear as he knelt to look under the bed. Hutchman froze with anxiety in case the downward bulge of the spring would give him away, but the footsteps retreated again.
“Sergeant,” a dwindling voice called in the corridor, “he’s gone!”
The door appeared to have been left open, but Hutchman resisted the temptation to make a break. His scanty knowledge of police psychology was vindicated a few seconds later when other footsteps, a small party of men this time, sounded in the corridor, running. They exploded into the room, carried out the same search pattern as before, and retreated into the distance. Hutchman’s straining ears told him the door of the room had not been closed. His plan had achieved optimum success so far, but had reached a stage at which some delicate judgment was required. Would the police assume he had escaped from the premises, or would a search of the building be instigated? If the latter, he would be better to remain where he was for a while — yet there was a definite risk in remaining too long. Someone had only to come in to make up the bed…
He waited for what felt like twenty minutes, growing more nervous, listening to the sounds of a building in use — doors slamming, distant telephones ringing, occasional blurred shouts or laughs. Twice he heard footsteps moving unconcernedly along outside the room and once they were those of a woman, but he was lucky in that the corridor appeared not too frequented at that time of the day. At last he was satisfied that the building was not being systematically combed. He threw off the sheet and climbed out of the bed. Stepping out into the corridor seemed a hideous risk, but he gathered all the bedding up into a great ball and carried it out of the room. The group of men who had searched for him had come from the right, so Hutchman turned left. He moved along the corridor, scanning doors from behind his carapace of white linen. At the very end he found a graypainted metal door with “FIRE EXIT” stenciled on it in red. He opened the door and, still carrying the bedding, went down the narrow stairs of bare concrete. At the bottom he pushed open a heavy door and found himself looking out at the steely light of mid-morning streaming across a small car park. There were few cars in it, and no people.
Hutchman walked boldly across the park and through an open gateway into Crymchurch High Street. The police station was on his left. He turned away from it and went along the street, restraining himself from breaking into a run, his face buried in the flapping linen. At the first corner he turned right, only then permitting himself the luxury of feeling he had got clear. The sense of partial relaxation did not last long.
I’m miles away from home, he thought. And that’s where the envelopes are.
He considered looking for a taxi, then remembered they were a rarity in Crymchurch. The idea of stealing a car was somehow more shocking, on its own level, than anything else he had done since he had broken all ties with society. It would be his first outright criminal act — and he was not even certain he could do it — but there was no good alternative. He began examining the dashboards of the cars parked along the street on which he was walking. Two blocks further along, where Crymchurch’s business section was shading into a residential area, he spotted the gleam of keys in an ignition switch. The car was not the best sort for his purpose — it was one of the new Government-subsidized safety models, with four high-backed aft-facing seats and only the driver’s seat facing forward. All such cars had a governor on the engine which limited the top speed to a hundred kilometers per hour.
On consideration, Hutchman decided he would be better not to break any speed regulations anyway. He glanced around to make sure the owner was not in sight, dropped the bedding on the footpath, and got into the car. It started at the first turn of the key, and he drove away smoothly but quickly. Not bad for a big soft amateur, he thought in a momentary childish glee. But beware of hubris, Hutch, old son!
He circled the outskirts of the town, gradually adjusting to the feel of the unfamiliar controls, and once was shocked when he glimpsed his unshaven face in the driving mirror. It was a tired and desperate face, one which belonged to a hunted stranger. On reaching his house he drove slowly past it, satisfying himself that there were no police around, then halted and backed into the driveway. His own car, windows opaqued with moisture, was sitting where he had left it. He parked the stolen car close to the shrubbery and got out, staring nostalgically at the house and wondering what he would do if he saw Vicky at a window. But the two milk bottles still sitting on the doorstep told him she had not returned. Symbols. Two quotation marks which signified the end of the dialogue with Vicky. His eyes blurred painfully.
He searched in his pockets, found the ignition key of his own car. It, too, started at the first turn of the switch and a minute later he was driving northward, toward winter.
CHAPTER 10
The whole broad back of the country lay before him, daunting in its size, complexity, and possibilities of danger. He had been accustomed to thinking of Britain as a cosy little island, a crowded patch of grass which scarcely afforded a jetliner space to trim for level flight before it was time for it to nestle down again. Now, suddenly, the land was huge and misty, crawling with menace, magnified in inverse proportion to the number of human beings to whom he could turn for help.
Hutchman drove steadily, aware of the consequences of a speeding offence or even the slightest accident. He watched the mirror more than usual, cursing the other cars which hung near his offside rear wheel, bristling with kinetic energy, always about to overtake yet paradoxically frozen in formation with him. Other drivers, secure and separated in their own little Einsteinian systems of relative movement, met his eyes with mild curiosity until he put on his Polaroids, investing the windscreen with a pattern of oily blue squares. He crossed the Thames at Henley and drove northwest in the direction of Oxford, stopping at isolated mailboxes to post small bundles of his envelopes.
By midday Hutchman was deep in the Tolkein-land of the Cotswolds, swishing through villages of honey-coloured stone which seemed to have grown by some natural process rather than artifice. Domesticated valleys shone in pale tints beneath veils of white mist. He surveyed the countryside in detached gloom, his brain seething with regrets and reconsiderations, until the mention of his name on a newscast brought him back to the minuteby-minute business of living. The car radio crackled as he turned up the volume, causing him to lose part of the item.
“…intensive police activity centered on the house in Moore’s Road, Camburn, where two men died yesterday, one of them as a result of a fall from an upper window, the other shot dead when the biology lecturer Andrea Knight was abducted from her apartment by three armed men. The man who fell to his death was Mr. A ubrey Welland, a schoolteacher, of 209 Ridge Road, Upton Green; and the man who was shot during the gangsterstyle abduction was fifty-nine-years-old Mr. Richard Thomas Bilson, of38 Moore’s Road, Cam burn, who was passing by at the time and is understood to have tried to prevent the three men from pushing Miss Knight into a car. The police have no known clues as to the present whereabouts of Miss Knight, but both she and Welland were members of the Communist Party, and it is thought that her disappearance may have some political motivation.