"The Beekeeper's Apprentice" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Laurie R.)

SIX: A child gone from her bed

On the very outskirts of the town Holmes had me pull over and apply the brake.

"We need to do a thorough check on this equipment, I fear," he said. "The last time I hired one of these the wheel fell off. It would not be convenient this time. You strip the horse down, take a look under the traces, and I think you'll find a few sores. Currycomb, rags for padding, and ointment for the sores are in the calico bag." He disappeared beneath the caravan, and while I brushed and treated the puzzled horse, he tightened bolts and applied grease to dry axles. With the horse back in harness, I went around to see if I might be of help and found his long legs protruding from the back.

"Need a hand?" I called.

"No point in both of us looking like mechanics. I'm nearly finished." A minute passed, silent on my part, grunts and low imprecations on his.

"Holmes, there's something I must ask you."

"Not just now, Russell."

"I need to know. Is my presence — an embarrassment?"

"Don't be absurd."

"I mean it, Holmes. Inspector Connor today all but accused you — me — I just need to know if my presence is inconvenient."

"My dear Russell, I hope you don't flatter yourself that because you talked me into bringing you on this delightful outing, that means I am incapable of refusing you. To my considerable — Oh blast! Give me a rag, would you? Thank you. To my considerable surprise, Russell, you have proven a competent assistant and, furthermore, hold some promise for becoming an invaluable one. It is, I can even say, a new and occasionally remarkable experience to work with a person who inspires, not by vacuum, but by actual contribution. Hand me the large spanner." His next remarks were punctuated by grunts. "Connor is a fool. What he and his ilk choose to believe is no concern of mine, and thus far it has not seemed to harm you. You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool as well were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing."

"I see. I think."

"Besides," he added, his voice muffled now by the undercarriage, "a renowned bachelor such as myself, you probably would be more of an embarrassment were you a boy."

There really was no possible response to that statement. In a few minutes, filthy as a miner, Holmes emerged, cleansed himself as well as he was able, and we set off up the road again.

We wobbled along north in the colourful, remarkably uncomfortable little caravan, walking up the hills and whenever the sway of the high wooden seat and the jolts to the base of the spine became too much, which was most of the time. Holmes peppered me with information, badgered me mercilessly into my r#244;le, criticised and corrected my walk and speech and attitude, forced Welsh vocabulary and grammar down my throat, and pontificated between times on the Welsh countryside and its inhabitants. Were it not for the constant awareness of a frightened child's life and the fraying thread that held it, the outing would have been great sport.

Up through Glamorgan we walked and rode and walked again, into Gwent and then Powys, turning west now into the hilly greensward that curled up toward the Brecon Beacons, all hill farm and bracken fern, terraces and slag heaps and sheep. The shepherds eyed us with mistrust as we rumbled past, although their thin, black, sharp-eyed, suspicious dogs, lying with bellies pressed to the ground, as alert as so many pessimistic evangelists to snatch back a straying charge, spared us not a glance. As we passed through the villages and hamlets children ran shrieking to the road, and then stood in silent wonder staring up at our red, green, and gold splendour, their fingers in their mouths and their bare feet spattered with mud.

Wherever we went, we performed. While the children watched, I juggled, pulled colourful scarves from their colourless pockets and ha'pennies from dirty ears, and when we had the attention of their mothers, Holmes would come out of the pub wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and pull out his fiddle. I told the fortunes of women who had none, read the cracked lines on their hard palms and whispered vague hints of dark strangers and unexpected wealth, and gave them stronger predictions of healthy children who would support them in their old age. In the evenings when the men were present their wives looked daggers at me, but when their ears were caught by "me Da's" ready tongue, and when they saw that we were moving on for the night, they forgave me their husbands' glances and remarks.

On the second day we passed the police roadblock, receiving only cursory abuse since we were going into the area being guarded, not coming out. On the third day we passed the Simpsons' camping site, went on a mile, and pulled off into a side track. I cooked our tea, and when Holmes remarked merely that he hadn't thought it possible to make tinned beans taste undercooked, I took it that my cooking was improving.

When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us — the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator's staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family's coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.

Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer's night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, shambling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, before its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.

"Russell? Russell, are you all right?"

I sat up, and his hand fell away.

"No. Yes, I'm all right, Holmes." I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. "Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Nothing to be concerned about."

He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.

"Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?"

His concern raked at me.

"No! No, thank you, Holmes, I'll be fine in a minute. Go back to bed."

He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.

"I'll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep," I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.

Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy comer of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.

The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had begun with the death of my family, a vivid recreation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was considerably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.

In the morning neither of us mentioned the night's occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.

The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still standing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child's toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.

I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom. Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.

"How long have we?" I asked him.

"Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away until nine o'clock. A bit under two hours. Ah."

At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent's back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent's lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bedding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.

"You expected that?" I asked.

"Didn't you?" I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he'd have known.

"A tube, for sleeping gas?"

"Right you be, Mary Todd," he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.

The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bedding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crumpled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.

"Why don't you tell me what you saw that night, eh?" I addressed her. "It would save us a great deal of troubl#233;." "What was that?" asked Holmes' voice from a distance.

"Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?"

"I shouldn't think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs."

I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to the tent and fists on his hips, looking down the valley.

"Getting the lie of the land?" I asked.

"If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?"

I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.

"Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it's a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one's back, even for a strong man." I studied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. "Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn't they?"

"It's a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Overlooking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared."

I cringed away and whined at him.

"Aw, Da', it waren't me fault. I war lookin' a't'evidence."

"Harden your t more," he corrected absently. "So, which way?"

"Not towards the road; there'd be too much chance of being seen."

"Down the valley then, or over the hill?" he considered aloud.

"A pity we weren't here a week ago; there might have been something to see."

"If wishes were horses — "

"Detectives would ride," I finished. "I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it."

"We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I'll go up the hill; you take the base of it."

We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of "Oy, what's this then?" from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye — but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.

"Hol — Uh, Da'!" I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.

"Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier," he said magnanimously. "Let us see how far this might take us." We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.

Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered J.

"Was this an accident?" I wondered aloud. "Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn't have thought so."

We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.

"That's my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon."

We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.

"I'll take the uphill again."

"Wait. Down near those trees, is the ground scuffed up?" We went down, and there, in a little hollow, were indeed signs of some flurry of activity. Holmes walked around it carefully, and then bent down quickly, reaching for something invisible to me twenty feet away. He continued his scrutiny, picked up another object, and finally allowed me to approach.

"She jumped off the horse," he said, running his fingertips back and forth an inch above the trampled ground. "She had bare feet, although they had taken her shoes; they had not bothered to put them on her. Her hands were not tied. Here," he said, stabbing a finger at a clod of turf, "you see the short parallel lines? Her toes. And here, the longer lines that draw together? Her fingers made those as she gathered herself off the ground and sprinted toward those bushes." Once he had pointed out the signs I could see them, clear despite the intervening rains. He rose and followed the marks left by hoofs and heels.

"She made it this far before they caught her, by her night dress, which popped a button," he held out the object he had picked up earlier, "and by her hair, which was of course loose from having the ribbon removed." He held up several mud crusted strands of auburn hair.

"Dear God," I groaned, "I hope they didn't hurt her when they caught her."

"There's nothing on the ground that tells one way or the other," he said absently. "What was the moon doing on the twelfth of August?"

I was quite certain he did not need me to tell him, but I thought for a moment, and answered. "Three-quarters full, and it had stopped raining. She may have been able to see well enough to tell when the path split, or perhaps she was trying to make it to the trees. In either case, we know where she's come. Quite a child, our Miss Simpson. But I doubt that there will be any further signs."

"It is unlikely, but let us be thorough."

We followed the horse trail for another hour, but there were no more signs or marks of shod hoofs. At the next trail fork we stopped.

"Back to the caravan, Mary, my girl. A bite of lunch, and the gipsies will resume their itinerant musicale."

We got back to the wagon to find company, in the form of a large constable with a very dark expression on his face.

"And what might the two of you have been doing, on this hillside?" he demanded.

"Doin"? We been stayin' the night, I'd a thought that obvious," retorted Holmes, and walked past him to store the spade in its niche.

"And where have you been gone to all momin'?"

"Out diggin' for truffles." He jerked his thumb at the implement.

"What?"

"Truffles. Little roots, very expensive in the shops. The Lords and Ladies like 'em in their food. Find 'em sometimes in the hills."

"Truffles, yes, but they use pigs to find them, not spades."

"Don't need pigs if you've got the gift. My daughter here, she's got the gift of sight."

"You don't say." He looked at me with scepticism, and I smiled at him shyly. "And did this daughter of yours with the gift of truffles find any?"

"Naow, not today."

"Good. Then you'll not mind moving on. Within the hour."

"Want m'dinner first," said Holmes sulkily, though it was closer to teatime than the noon hour.

"Dinner, then. But gone in two hours, you'll be, or it's in a cell you'll find yourselves. Two hours."

He stalked off over the hill, and I sat down and giggled in relief. "Truffles? For God's sake, are there truffles in Wales?"

"I suppose so. See if you can find some food while I dig out the maps."

Holmes' maps were of the extremely large-scale topographical sort, showing the kinds of vegetation, the rights- of-way, and small black squares indicating houses. He folded the table up out of the way and chose a series of maps from a shallow drawer beneath my bunk. I handed him a sandwich and a tin mug of beer, and we walked across the paper floor-covering in our stockinged feet.

"This is our route," he pointed out. "The campsite, here, and the trail going away, roughly along this contour line." The tip of his brown finger followed the contour of the hill, dropped down into the hollow on the next map, and stopped at the Y junction on the edge of the third. "From here, where? She had to be inside, Russell, before light. In a building, or a vehicle."

"But not — under the ground?"

"I think not. Had they intended to kill her, surely they would have done so when she tried to escape, to save themselves further trouble. I saw no indication of blood there."

"Holmes!" I protested in dismay.

"What is it, Russell?"

"Oh, nothing. You just sound so — callous."

"You prefer a surgeon who weeps at the thought of the pain he is about to inflict? I should have thought you had learnt that lesson by now, Russell. Allowing the emotions to involve themselves in an investigation can only interfere with the surgeon's hand. Now, assuming the child was taken as early as midnight, and it is light by five o'clock; without an automobile, that would place the limits they could have ridden approximately here," and he drew a semicircle, using as its centre the Y where the trail had disappeared. "Within this area; a place where a telephone is to hand; a large enough village for the delivery of The Times out of London to go unremarked. You won't overlook the significance of the agony column?"

"Of course not," I hastened to reassure him.

He reached back into his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.

"There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they're in more privacy. I can't see that we'll make them all by tomorrow."

"No."

"We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid."

"I am aware of that," he said testily. "Get the horse in the traces."

We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone's home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a very dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation, in a Welsh that was much too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.

"Are you a gipsy then, lady?"

"What do you think?" I grunted.

"My Dad says yes."

"Your Dad is wrong." Shocked silence met this heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.

"If it's not a gipsy you are, then what?"

"A Romany."

"A Romany? There's foolish, there is! They carried spears and they're all dead."

"That's a Roman. I'm Romany. Want to give this to the horse?" A small boy took the oats from me. "Is there anyone in town who'd like to sell me a couple of suppers?" My crowd silently consulted, then:

"Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you." The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.

"Have you no pan?" asked a small person of one sex or another.

"I don't like to cook," I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. "Is there a telephone in town?" I asked the spokesman.

"Telephone?"

"Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It's too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?" The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.

"My Da' used one once, he did, when the Gran died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly."

"Where did he go to use it?"

An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.

"What for do you need a telephone machine?"

"To call my stockbroker." I continued before they could ask for a d#233;finition, "You don't get many strangers through here, do you?"

"Oh, many they are. Why, only at Midsummer's, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped, and drank a glass at Maddie's mam's."

"Just coming through don't count," I asserted loftily. "I mean comin' in and eatin' and drinkin' here and stop- pin' for a time. Don't get many of them, do you?"

I could see from their faces that they didn't have any convenient group of strangers to offer me, and sighed internally. Tomorrow, perhaps. Meanwhile —

"Well, I'm here, but we're not stopping long. If you want to run home and tell your people, we'll have a show for you to watch in an hour. Unless my Da' finds the beer here too good," I added. "I tell fortunes too. Run along now."

The supper was good and plentiful, the take from the fiddling and cards poor. Before dawn the next morning we jingled off down the road.

The next village had telephone wires but few isolated buildings. Neither my small informant nor the pub inhabitants could be gently prodded into revealing any recent influx of strangers. We moved on after midday, not pausing to perform.

Our next choice started out promising. Telephone lines, several widely scattered buildings, and even response to questions about strangers caused my pulse to quicken. However, by teatime the leads had petered out, and the strangers were two old English ladies who had come to live here six years before.

We had to backtrack to reach the road to the other villages, and as dusk closed in on us I was thoroughly sick of the hard, jolting seat and the imperturbable brown rump ahead of me. We lit the wagon's side lamps and climbed down with a lantern to lead the horse. I spoke to Holmes in a low voice.

"Could the kidnappers be locals? I know it looks like outsiders, but what if it was just a couple of locals?"

"Who spotted an American senator and thought up a gas gun and letters in The Times on the spur of the moment?" he drawled sarcastically. "Use the wits God gave you, Mary Todd. Locals are almost certainly involved but are not alone."

We crept wearily into village number four, where for the first time we were not greeted by a company of children. "Too late for the little ones, I suppose," Holmes grunted, and looked at the small stone pub with loathing.

"What I would give for a decent claret," he sighed, and went off to do his duty for his king.

I settled the horse, found and heated a tin of beans over the caravan's tiny fire, and slumped at the minuscule wooden table with the Tarot deck, sourly reading my fortune: The cards gave me the Hanged Man, the enigmatic Fool, and the Tower with its air of utter disaster. Holmes was a long time in the pub, and I was beginning to consider moving over to my bunk, travel-stained clothing and all, when I heard his voice come suddenly loud into what passed for the village's high street.

" — my fiddle, and I'll play you a dancin' tune, the merriest of tunes that ever you'll hear." I jerked upright, all thought of sleepiness snatched from me and the beans turning instantly to bricks in my stomach. The caravan's door flew open and in came me old Da', several sheets to the wind. He tripped as he negotiated the narrow steps, and fell forward into my lap.

"Ah, me own sweet girlie," he continued loudly, struggling to right himself. "Have you seen what I done with me fiddle?" He reached past me to retrieve it from the shelf and whispered fiercely in my ear. "On your toes, Russell: a two-storey white house half a mile north, plane tree in front and another at the back. Hired in late June, five men living there, perhaps a sixth coming and going. Curse it!" he bellowed, "I told you to fix the bloody string," and continued as he bent over the instrument, "I'll make a distraction at the front of the house in fifty minutes. You make your way — carefully, mind you — around to the back and see what you can without getting too close. Black your skin and take your revolver, but use it only to save your life. Watch for a guard, or dogs. If you're seen, that's the end of it. Can you do it?"

"Yes, I think so, but — "

"Me sweet Mary," he bawled drunkenly in my ear, "you're all tired out, ain't you? Off t'bed wi'you naow, don't wait up for me."

"But Da', some supper — "

"Nah, Mary, wouldn't want to be spoiling all this lovely beer with food, would I? Off to dreamland now, Mary," and he slammed heavily out the door. His fiddle skittered into life and, heart pounding and hands fumbling, I made myself ready: trousers pulled on beneath my dark skirts, a length of brown silk rope around my waist, tiny binoculars, a pencil-sized torch. The gun. A smear of black from the dirty lamp-glass onto my face and hands. A final glance around before shutting down the lamps, and the rag doll caught my eye, slumped disconsolately on the shelf. On sudden impulse — for luck? — I pushed her into a pocket and slipped out silently into the shadows, away from the pub, to make my way down to the big square house that sat well off the road, the one with no neighbours.

I crept up the road with infinite care but met no one and was soon squatting down among some bushes across from the house, studying it through my binoculars. The rooms on the ground floor were lit behind thin but effective curtains, and other than the voices coming from, I thought, the corner room on the far side, there was no way of knowing what the house concealed. Upstairs the front was dark.

After ten minutes the only sign of life had been a tall man crossing the room in front of the lamp, and coming back again a minute later. There were no indications of outside watchmen or dogs, and I continued up the road, scuttled across at a crouch, and worked my way back to a ramshackle outhouse, which smelt of coal and paraffin. The house's thin curtains allowed lamplight to escape so that the ground around the house was illuminated for night- adapted eyes; ten more minutes in that spot, and nothing moved, other than a fitful breeze.

I fell back from the outhouse and picked my painstaking way through an overgrown vegetable garden, over a fence in need of mending, behind a second outhouse (this one smelling faintly of petrol) and its attached chicken coop, under the branches of a small orchard where the plums rotted underfoot, and up to a third shed whose diminutive size and location would have declared its function even if its aroma had not. It also gave me a full view of the back of the house and its yard.

There was a light on in a room upstairs. From the arrangement of windows I decided there were probably two rooms on this side, with perhaps a small windowless lumber-room between them, and it was the room on the right, away from the tree, that was lit. To my distinct pleasure the house's general decrepitude came to a climax in the curtains of this room, which were either torn or simply not adequately closed, because a shaft of yellow lamplight fell across the sill. If I could get high enough I might see into that room, and I very much wanted to know what lay inside.

I looked around. Somewhere there was sure to be a hill, but in the darkness all I could tell was that it did not tower up immediately behind the house. I looked speculatively at the building beside me. It might give enough height, and the slates looked strong enough to hold my weight. I glanced around for something to step up on, to lessen the scrabbling noises, remembered a discarded bucket among the weeds in the orchard, and went to retrieve it. The bottom had a hole in it, but the sides were sound, and upturned with a board across it the makeshift step enabled me to reach the privy's ridge. I gained the tiny roof and had just begun to congratulate myself on the minimum of noise I had made when the back door was flung open and a very large man with a terrifyingly bright lamp in his hand was revealed on the steps.

Holmes' training held. The mad urge to leap off and dash into the covering darkness washed through me leaving little more than a set of absolutely rigid muscles and a desire to mould myself into the cracks of the roof slates, but before the man was halfway across the yard my mind had notified me that although he was coming towards me, he had nothing in his other hand, and nothing on his mind other than a visit to the room beneath me. I clung there in an agony of trepidation lest the slates creak, mixed with an almost unconquerable urge to hilarity, but when he finally took himself back inside the house (Seven minutes had passed, an eternity!), the amusement faded and left me feeling queasy.

Two other things came to me, slowly. The room he came from had been the kitchen, and, much more important, there had been no reaction to his presence in the yard. Nor, I decided, had he expected there to be one.

Therefore, no dog, no guard. Probably.

The sky was lightening with the moonrise, and as I stood slowly upright I felt as exposed as an elephant on a cricket pitch, and all for naught: The angle was wrong. All my binoculars showed me was the top of the door frame on the other side of the room. I let myself silently off the building, carried the bucket and board back to their resting places, and stood looking at the window, thinking.

Without a guard, there was nothing to keep me from that tree behind the house. From its thick, leafy, concealing, and comparatively safe branches I should have a choice of viewpoints into that lighted room, and although the ground around it and the first dozen feet of trunk were exposed, it was certainly safer than stumbling about the gravel yard waiting for someone else to come outside and step on me.

However, I had first to rid myself of encumbrances. Just beyond the drive a low shape rose, which proved to be a poorly maintained privet hedge, vastly overgrown but easily breached. I deposited my boots and the several skirts behind it, tucked the doll into the back waistband of my trousers and thrust the other belongings into various pockets, and crept across the drive to the wall of the house. Just under eight minutes until Holmes appeared with his diversion, and I spent two of them with my ear against the kitchen window before I was satisfied that all the activity — a card game, by the sound of it — was in the opposite end of the house.

The tree's first branches were too far overhead to jump for, and a straight climb would make too much noise. I unwound the rope from my waist (Always carry a length of rope; it's the most useful thing in the world.) and tossed it at a branch that faced away from the house. On the second try it looped over, and I walked it up the trunk. The crackles and creaks this made sounded like shouts in the night, but when no reaction came I gathered the rope up onto the branch and monkeyed myself up the tree for a view through the curtain.

And the fates were with me, because she was there.

At first all I could see was a bed and rumpled bedclothes, and my heart sank, but when I worked my way out to the precarious end of the limb and looked again I saw against the pillow a small head with auburn brown hair gathered into a rough plait. Jessica Simpson's hair. Jessica Simpson's face.

Half of my task was fulfilled: We now knew she was here. The other half, vastly the more important, was to explore ways to get her out. Unfortunately, there was no nice thick branch leading directly to her window, a fact that even my constipated friend could not have overlooked in the choice of the prisoner's room. However, the tree was much closer to the other room, the dark one. (There came a sudden and unexpected sound from the direction of the town — men's voices raised in song, a first inkling of the kind of diversion Holmes had in mind.) I clambered over to the dark side and saw that one of the branches did indeed nearly brush the house. Suggestive. But once to the house, I considered, what then? There was no convenient ledge connecting the two windows; the guttering was too far overhead; and I did not much care for the vision of Holmes dangling like a spider from a rope wrapped around the chimney pots. No, it would probably mean a surreptitious entrance through the dark room.

Five men, and the possibility of a sixth. Four were playing cards — four voices, I corrected myself, and one wild card for certain. Downstairs? or in with the child? or, in the dark room? It hardly mattered tonight, but tomorrow, when we returned —

It was then that the idea hit me, a mad flash of derring-do that I immediately squelched, shocked at myself. This isn't a game, Russell, I told myself in disgust. Do what you were told, then go back to the caravan.

But the thought had lodged itself like a thorn, and I could not help picking at it while I squatted motionless and attentive in the tree, my eyes open and my mind worrying at this crazy thought, examining it, turning it around, pushing it away, finding it persistent and unwilling to be discarded.

What if I did not wait for Holmes to effect the rescue tomorrow?

Madness. To take a child's life into my own absurdly inexperienced hands — I shook my head as if to discourage an irritating fly and settled myself more firmly into my post of observer. My assigned post. My vital and agreed-to post. The chorus of voices was growing, soaring in almost- audible song, outside the village now and starting up the road. In a minute now the men inside would hear — I shifted, to keep a closer eye on the lit room.

In a moment the niggling idea had returned, stronger, surer. How else could we do it, if not through the dark window with a distraction out in front? There was no point in a direct show of force; a hostage with a gun to her head is even more a hostage than when in a quiet room in bed. And how could Holmes hope to reach her but across these narrow branches? Holmes, approaching sixty and becoming just the least bit hesitant about risking his bones, would have to balance his greater weight and height on this same branch — and in the few days left us before the deadline (How terribly appropriate that word sounded.), while the five men inside were becoming increasingly wrought up, to say nothing of being on their guards for a second unusual happenstance such as the one that was fast approaching on the road.

Madness. Lunacy. I couldn't possibly carry it off, couldn't even carry her off, out the window, across the branch, down the tree and away, not if she fought me, which she would. Even a "self-contained, intelligent" child might well panic at being snatched from her bed by a strange woman with lampblack smeared on her face and carried off a second time into the night.

My mind veered wildly between obedient caution and reckless insanity, between a sensible preparation for future action and the hard knowledge that we might never have the chance to use it, between carrying out Holmes' direct orders and seizing what even common sense told me might be the only chance offered us, and I wished to God that Holmes might miraculously appear beneath my feet and take the choice from me.

They were Christmas carols, I decided with the portion of my mind that was not paralysed with indecision. Somehow me Da' had raised a drunken mob in this tiny place, had summoned thick voices in song, and was driving then down the lane with the goad of his mad fiddle — a magnificent Welsh chorus, singing Christmas carols, in English, in an infinitesimal Welsh village, on a warm August night. Suddenly nothing seemed impossible, and as if the thought had loosed the house from stasis there was movement within.

A shadow moved across the slice of yellow light before me. I hung precariously out and was rewarded by the sight of a man's back. He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat, with a dark knitted cap that covered his head down to his wide shoulders, and he was standing at the open door next to the head of Jessica's bed. He leant out into the hallway, paused (Was that a man's voice, shouting something unintelligible above the growing tumult?), opened the door wider, and went through it.

Had it not been for the vision of the broad back going through the door, I should never have done it, never have moved towards the dark window. Even as I moved, even as I looped the silk rope over an overhead branch with muscles and mind freed so blessedly (insanely!) from indecision, a small part still offered to be sensible, made a bargain with the fates that were controlling this night that, if the window did not unlatch, I should withdraw in an instant.

A thump and a series of raucous guffaws reached my ears above the song, and I stepped with one foot from the branch to the window, balanced in a triangle of rope, branch, and sill, took out my pocket knife and (A-here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green —) fumbled open its thinnest blade, slid it up between the window frames, and in a brief eternity felt more than heard the latch snick open. I waited, but there was no reaction from within, so I reached down (A here we come a-wand'ring so fair to be seen —) and eased the lower window up with barely a squeak. I stepped down onto the bare floor boards, taut for attack, but none came; the room was empty, and I let go a deep and shaky breath and moved quickly across to (Love and joy come to you —) the door. The hallway and stairs were empty, voices raised downstairs both inside and out, the door to the corner room slightly ajar. I pulled the doll from the waistband of my trousers and stepped into the horribly bright hallway. (Arui to you your Wassail, too, and God bless —)

"Jessica!" I whispered. "Don't be frightened. There's someone here to see you." I held the doll in front of me, pushed the door open, and looked down into a very serious six-year-old face. Jessica pushed herself slowly up onto her elbows, studying my black-smeared but evidently un threatening visage, and waited.

"Jessie, your mama and papa sent me to bring you home. We have to go right now, or those men will stop us."

"I can't," she whispered.

Oh God, I thought, what now? “Why not?"

Wordlessly she sat up and pulled the covers back from her foot, revealing a metal cuff and a chain fastened to the leg of the bed.

"I tried to get away, so they put this on me."

The riot outside was coming to a climax, with a crash and the tinkle of breaking glass, followed by furious shouts and a rush of drunken laughter. In an instant they would remember, and we had to be away before then. I had to risk a noise.

"Just a minute, honey. Here, you take the doll."

Her arms went tightly around the beloved object, and I knelt to examine the chain. It was new and strong, fastened at one end to her ankle cuff — which was padded, I was glad to see — by a sturdy padlock, and at the other end to the leg of the bed, held by a bolt the size of my little finger, which seemed to have been welded to its nut. The bed was a cheap one, but the wooden leg was a good three inches thick, glued and fitted into place. I could see only one option, given the time, and could only hope that I didn't break every bone in my foot.

I hoisted up the end of the bed, balanced my weight on my left leg, drew back my right foot, and then straightened it out explosively. The angle was awkward and the jar of it did, I later found, crack one bone, but it was a small price to pay, because the bed now had only three legs. She was free. Careless of noise now, I lowered the bed to the floor, scooped up child, chain, and the stub of the bed leg, and tossed her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

The key was in the lock, so I obligingly turned it as I went out and then pocketed it. Heavy boots sounded on the stairs as I ducked into the dark room. I closed the door, shot out the window, and had a bad moment when I stood balanced precariously between sill and limb and tried to close the window. I nearly dropped her, but she made no sound, just clung to my shirt with one hand and to her doll with the other. I caught up the end of the rope that I'd left hanging there and with it to support me, eased the window down with my aching foot, then half-walked, half-swung up the branch, and had just gained the trunk when the pounding came on Jessica's door. Shouts followed. I tossed the rope up into a branch so its trailing end might not give us away and prepared to drop. "Hang on really tight, Jessie," I hissed, and with her arms and legs wrapped around me we scrambled and fell down the tree, took five huge bounds to the privet hedge, and burst through, losing skin in several directions, and I just had time to place a hand across her lips when the back door slammed open.

This time the man who came out had a weapon in his hand, a massive shotgun. I pressed my fingers more firmly into the warm face and saw him walk out into the yard, under the tree that had held us ten seconds earlier, and look up at the lighted window. He shouted into the house, "She's not come out, Owen. The window's tight shut." I could not make out the answer from within, drowned out as it was by the angry shouts in the road, but the man walked towards us a few feet and peered up into the tree. The child and I breathed at each other and listened to each other's heart beat wildly, but she made no noise, and I did not move a hair for fear of rattling the chain or causing my spectacles to flash in the light from the kitchen. The man walked around for two or three minutes until a voice called at him from the house (It was quieter, I realised.) and he went inside. Immediately the door closed I snatched up child and boots, swung Jessica around piggyback, and trotted down the rough verge in my bare feet.

"You're doing fine, Jessica, just stay quiet and we'll have you out of here. Those men out in front are our friends, though they may not know it yet. We've got to hide very quietly for a little while until the police can get here, and then you'll see your parents. All right?"

I could feel her nod against my neck. I could also feel the rag doll, squashed between us. I moved rapidly ahead of the noisy mob (which was indeed beginning to break up), holding the chain and bed leg securely so as not to rattle. I kept to the blackest shadows, but when I looked back, against the glow from the house I saw an arm wave in wild salute from the midst of the carollers. Holmes had seen us; the rest was up to him. I stopped at the caravan just long enough to gather blankets and food, and took the child back along the road and up a dimly seen hill. My eyes had been in the dark long enough to distinguish vague shapes, and I stopped under a tree and let her slide to the ground. Keeping one hand in light contact with her shoulder I eased my spine, then turned to sit up against the trunk, pulling her, unresisting and unresponsive, onto my lap, blankets around us both.

The relief was overwhelming, and I could only sit, shivering with reaction and with the drying sweat that had soaked my clothes. I was struck by the sudden vision of the expressions on those men's faces when they managed to open the door, and began to giggle. Jessica stiffened, and I forced the incipient hysteria down, took a deep breath, and another, and murmured into her ear.

"You're safe now, Jessica, completely safe. Those men cannot find you now. We're just going to wait here for a while until the police come for them, and then your parents will come to take you home. Let's wrap this rug around you so you don't get cold. Are you hungry?" I felt her head shake side to side. "Right. Now, we'll have to stop talking and be still, as still as baby deer in the woods, all right, Jessica? I'll stay with you, and your doll is here now. By the way, my name is Mary."

She greeted this with silence, and I pulled the rugs around us, put my back against the tree, and waited. The thin body in my arms slowly relaxed, gradually went loose, and eventually, to my amazement, dropped off to sleep, I listened to the last sounds of the beery men returning home, and after half an hour several cars came swiftly up the road. Distant yells, two shots (the child twitched in her sleep), and then silence. An hour later came the sound of solitary footsteps on the road, and the light of a lantern through the trees.

"Russell?"

"Here, Holmes." I took the hand torch from the basket of food and flashed it. He climbed the hill and stood looking down at us. I could not read his expression.

"Holmes, I'm sorry if I — " I began, but the simple and immediate plea for understanding was not to be, for Jessica woke at my voice and cried out at the sight of Holmes in the lamplight, and I moved quickly to reassure her.

"No, Jessie, this is a friend; he's my friend and your mother's friend, and he's the friend who made all that noise so I could take you from the house. His name is Mr. Holmes, and he doesn't always look so funny; he's dressed up, like I am." This soothing prattle took the worst of the tension from her body. I bundled the rugs together and handed them to Holmes and walked down the hill with the child in my arms.

We took her to the caravan, lit a fire, and dressed her in one of my woollen shirts, which flapped around her ankles. The publican's wife produced a hot, thick mutton stew, which we wolfed and the child picked at. Holmes then put the kettle of water on the little stove, and when it was warm he washed and examined my sore foot, wrapped it securely to stop the bone ends from their tedious creaking, and finally used the rest of the water to make a pot of coffee and shave the bristle from his cheeks. Jessica watched his every move. When his face was clean he sat down and showed the child how his gold tooth came out, which was the cause for serious consideration. He then brought his ring of picklocks from his pocket and spread it on the table for her to examine, and asked if she wished him to take the chain from her leg. She cringed away from him and tucked as much of herself as she could get into my lap.

"Jessica," I said, "nobody's going to touch you if you don't want. If you like, I can take it off you, but you'll have to sit on the table — I can't do it with you on my lap." There was no response. We waited a while, and then Holmes shrugged and reached for the picklocks. She stirred, and then slowly pushed her foot towards him. Without comment he got to work and, touching her as little as possible, within two minutes had the shackles on the floor. She gave him a long, grave look, which he returned, and then gathered herself up against me again and put her thumb into her mouth.

We sat, and dozed, and waited, until finally there came another car on the road, which braked to a halt just outside the caravan. Holmes opened the door to the Simpsons, and Jessie flew into her mother's arms and glued her arms and legs around her as if she would never come free, and Mr. Simpson put an arm around both of them and led them to the car, and I found it hard to see properly, and Holmes blew his nose loudly.