‘Did she?’ Alice asked vaguely. Yet she was thinking about something, concentrating on it sharply. ‘All away from the big bad world,’ she said at last. Then she was silent. Finally she picked up the camping gas burner. ‘That’s not really fair is it?’ she said.
‘No. But you can’t have a real fire up here. And anyway, I’m not out on a camping holiday, am I?’
‘What if it rains? You’ll need something overhead. There’s some polythene in the yard. The builders left it. That would do. I’ll bring it down.’ Alice gazed upwards through the topmost leaves of the oak into the burnished blue sky beyond. A breeze came just then, stirring the leaves minutely. She sighed.
‘It’s perfect, isn’t it,’ she said enviously.
‘Well, for a day or two. Or a game, for a child. I wouldn’t care to spend too long up here, though. I’m not exactly a hermit and it’s not a tropical island.’
‘You could make it bigger, though, couldn’t you? You could really build a whole house up in these trees and no one would ever know.’
‘I don’t expect to be here that long,’ I said.
‘No. And maybe you won’t have to. The Pringles are taking their summer vacation in a few weeks’ time. Going to Spain. You could both come back up to the house then.’
‘What about Mary? And the two gardeners?’
‘Mary leaves at mid-day. And they’re out and about all the time. We could get round that, hide you both up in the tower or something till Mary leaves each morning.’
‘What about Arthur, or your son, or some other friends? Someone’s bound to turn up.’
‘I doubt it. And anyway, you’ll probably be gone by then. You’re going back to Portugal, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a false beard? Or will you and Clare just walk away on the waters?’ Alice smiled. She was provoking a future, provoking choices, plans in me which I’d barely thought of. She had started, as I knew she would, thinking of herself. Where would she be, where would she find a place when all this music stopped? But there was no time to think about this then.
Alice had said she’d drive me to Banbury later that morning to scout out the ground, and I wondered just how she’d manage this, given the barbed-wire fence, the closed front gates and my theories about the real nature of the Pringles’ job at the Manor. Was Alice really trapped inside the estate?
We walked down a back drive, which ran through the trees behind the house, until after nearly a mile we came to a locked gate in the high barbed-wire fence at the northern edge of the estate. But Alice had a key to it.
‘What’s all this about?’ I asked innocently.
‘Oh, Arthur had this gross fence made all round the place. To keep robbers out, he thinks. But I have a car on the other side. I bought it myself, to get a little independence from him. He was always spying on me.’
She opened the gate and, sure enough, in an old tin cow-shed hidden among some overgrown bushes, was a new Ford Fiesta. Alice was trapped all right, by Arthur’s intention at least, and since she didn’t have to admit this, I certainly wasn’t going to remind her. She thought herself sane; her husband clearly thought otherwise.
Banbury General Hospital lay at the top of a hill on the main Oxford road leading half a mile east out of the Midland town. Beneath the hill, in the old market centre, beyond the cross, was the broad Horsefair with several hotels down its length. I noted the name of one of them: the Whately Hall. It would suit me fine. I’d play the role of businessman or visitor down from London for a week, starting a Cotswold tour. Stratford-on-Avon, after all, was not far down the road. No one would question my presence in this early summer tourist season, when already there were thousands of strangers in the area.
The hospital, Victorian redbrick where it fronted the main road, had been extended by a number of modern single-storey wards which ran away behind, like fingers, into an open space of gardens and a long car-park. If I found myself in any of these single-storey wards — and if Clare was in one of them as well — getting out and away via the car-park at the back shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought.
We parked there for ten minutes and looked around.
‘Here,’ Alice said. ‘If I wait for you around here, just facing the car park entrance, so that I can get away at once. All right? When you call me I’ll be here.’
The position Alice had suggested, at the end of the car park, was only thirty yards or so away from the end of one of the long ward buildings, not far from some big oil tanks and the back service entrance to the hospital. She was driving a small, almost new, black Ford Fiesta, a common enough car and colour, and speedy, too. Above all, it was just the right size for holding the narrow, winding roads which traversed all this part of the north Cotswolds, which we would have to travel on to get back to Beechwood Manor fifteen miles to the south. We studied a large scale map for the whole area.
‘When the police put blocks up,’ I said. ‘They’ll do it on all the main roads leading out of here and the Cotswolds first. Well, we won’t be on any of them. But they’ll put blocks up round the few towns in the area as soon as they can as well — Chipping Norton and Stow, which are between us and Beechwood. So we’ll need to bypass them on some minor roads. Let’s make a trial run back now.’
We drove southwards through the suburbs of Banbury and out into the country, marking our route on the map as we went along the smaller roads towards Chipping Norton. We avoided the town here by turning right a mile outside it at a roundabout and driving down a long valley towards Shipston and Stratford, before turning left up the wolds again towards Stow-on-the-Wold. We rode straight along a ridgeway here, where we could make good speed. And now in any case we made better time since these were roads Alice knew, nearer her home.
‘They’ll have the main road blocks out within about twenty minutes of our leaving the hospital,’ I said. ‘That will only get us as far as that roundabout back there.’
‘They can’t block all the roads as quickly as that. We’ll just have to be lucky.’
I looked at Alice. She drove well. She’d been driving in England for several years. But this was the full light of day. How would she manage at night? In the dark, which would almost certainly be the best time to get Clare out, if I could get her out at all? I asked her.
‘I’ll do the trip at night, that’s how, tonight, after I drop you near the hotel. I can make it several times.’
Again, I had doubts about the whole plan, which she sensed.
‘Look, it’ll either work, or it won’t!’ she said defiantly. ‘But I think it will.’
‘Why?’
‘Surprise, that’s why. They won’t be expecting it. How could they? We have the surprise element, completely.’
‘Yes….’
‘But come on, we’re not nearly there yet. We’ll have to stop at a call-box, just in case they’re tapping the Beechwood phone, and you can reserve your hotel. And then we’d better get back and fix up your suitcase and clothes.’
‘Arthur’s clothes.’
‘Yes. But we’ll have to take all the labels out of them and get you some papers, money. Make another new person out of you.’ She smiled. ‘Who are you going to be this time?’