The Anodyne Necklace(41)

Just once before she entered the wood did she look back over her shoulder to see some dark outline coming at her. If the dark outline was Julia's horse, Jupiter, Emily knew she wouldn't have a prayer on the flat because Jupiter was simply faster than Shandy, even if Julia, who was a boring rider, was up on him.

When she reached the scattering of trees that began the Horndean wood, she picked out the line of an old bridle path and slowed Shandy to a trot. Somewhere off to her left, she heard the other horse gallop by.

Now she couldn't keep going ahead, toward the end of the wall and the relative safety of the Hertfield-Horndean Road-because the rider would be up there. And if he were already starting back toward Rookswood, then doubling back might be the worst of all.
 
 

 

She could stand on Shandy's back and scale the wall. But if Shandy were found riderless, the other one would know and be on the other side of the wall and looking for her. And he'd be on horseback and she'd be on foot. Probably he still had his torch, while she had nothing except her crop, and what good would that do?

He could leave false trails. The words of Superintendent Jury came back to her just as she heard the crackle of twig and brush, the sounds of the returning rider, now moving more slowly.

Leave false trails: it was as if Jimmy Poole, before he got so sick (and almost died, she was sure), were out here trying to tell her what to do.

Quickly and quietly she moved Shandy to a section of the wall, climbed up on his back, balanced herself carefully and clambered up on the wall. From her neck she took the towel which she'd used to wipe down the tack, let it fall on the wall, where it caught on a protruding vine. Good. It looked like it got caught there as she went over. She walked along the wall a few feet, caught hold of the lower branch of the tree, and swung herself up.

She didn't have to wait long.

There was a thrashing through the branches and bracken, and the thin beam of a torch pointing into space below her, searching the outlines of trees before it.

The torch had picked out Shandy's rump. The other horse stopped; someone got down from the saddle, squelched through the wet leaves, came to a stop just below her.

For the first time in her life, Emily Louise Perk's curiosity hadn't got the best of her. She was frozen to the tree, her face pressed against it, unbreathing.

In the few seconds when she knew this awful person was inspecting both horse and wall, she knew she should have looked down, but she couldn't. She was too much of a coward.

Emily Louise had cried three times in her life: once, when her father had gone; once, when her cat had died; once, when Katie O'Brien had gone into the hospital.

This was the fourth time, and she was crying because she knew Jimmy Poole wouldn't have been that much of a coward.



The rain stopped. The dark closed in, even thicker than before. The person had gone, getting back on the horse (she was sure it must be Jupiter) and trotting off. The rider would be looking for her somewhere else.

She climbed down from the tree onto Shandy's back and wished she had something to give him for a reward for waiting so still and patiently.

Emily made for the end of the wall and the Hertfield-Horndean Road. At the point where the wall ended, the road was bisected by another road, narrower, going to the hamlet of St. Lyons.



Shandy was tired and breathing heavily, shaking his head as if he'd like to shake free of the bit. She was on the St. Lyon's road now, and off to her right across the hedges and long pasture, she could make out the row of lights from the rear of cottages along Littlebourne High Street. That pink, milky light was cast by the lamp Mary O'Brien always lit in her bedroom. Far off and screened by trees, the lights winked on and off like stars. In just another quarter of a mile she would be at the turning where the little St. Lyons road went straight on and a rutted country lane branched off to the right and led back to connect up with the road that finally became Littlebourne's High Street.

Emily was so exhausted that she just lay her face down on Shandy's mane and let him walk on. In the distance, she heard a car.

It drove past her, a dark blur in the night. There was little traffic on the St. Lyons road.

Her mind went blank with fear when she saw it stop a distance behind her, reverse in the narrow road, trying to maneuver itself by backing halfway into the hedgerow.

And then she knew. She started Shandy at a canter and quickly changed from a canter to a gallop. Shandy was fast, at least with Emily riding, but no horse in the Bodenheims' stable was fast enough to outrun a car.

She'd better outrun it, if she wanted to live through the night.

The car was now some distance behind her, but it was clear from the position of its headlamps that it had managed to turn and was coming straight on.

The fork in the road was just ahead. The turn to the right would screen her for a few seconds from the car. She slowed Shandy to a walk, took off her tweed coat and stuck the arms, one each side through the loops of the bridle. It was a silly ruse, but she remembered all those time she'd fooled her mum by stuffing pillows under her bedclothes to make it look as if she were still there after she'd crawled out the window on some midnight adventure. Right now, she wished she'd listened a little more to her mum over the years, though she still wasn't sure what her mum had had to say.

She could hear the car gaining on the St. Lyons road and it was very near to the turn. With Shandy at a walk, Emily slid off, yelled, "Go!" and slapped his rump. Shandy broke into a gallop, the fluttering coat atop the saddle.

Just as the beam from the headlamps illuminated the legs of the pony, Emily fell back through the hedge, crying and hating herself.

What a traitorous thing to do to Shandy.

IV

Mr. William Francis Bevins Potts was clearly so proud of his position with the rolling stock engineer's department that he hadn't minded at all having his favorite television program interrupted to talk about London Transport. Whilst he offered up a smorgasboard of mind-numbing details about the history and adaptation of tube stock and rolling stock, Jury looked at the lathering of colorful Underground posters on the walls of Mr. Pott's flat in the Edgeware Road-marvelous Edwardians being helped by equally marvelous London bobbies in their outings on the Underground. Indeed, Mr. Potts's flat rather reminded Jury of a tube station, with its huge hoardings, but otherwise spartan furnishings.

Jury let him talk on for a few minutes, for he believed that people who were obsessed with a topic needed an outlet for that obsession and would come round much more quickly and fix much more clearly on the actual questions Jury wanted answered. Occasionally through this morass of exquisitely boring detail would flash an intriguing fact like an exotic fish. He hadn't known, for instance, that the newer diesel hydraulic locomotives built in the late '60s had Rolls-Royce engines. Plant might be interested in that detail.

" . . . surface stock is used on the District, Circle and Metropolitan Lines, you see, and the tube stock is used on Northern, Jubilee . . . "

Any mention of the Jubilee Line brought a spark to Mr. Potts's eye. His description of the building of that sounded pretty much as if he'd been around at the Creation.

None of this seemed to bore Sergeant Wiggins, however; Wiggins had a mind for minutiae equal to William F. B. Potts-it was one of the reasons Jury found him to be invaluable, especially in the note-taking arena. When Jury finally felt he had to interrupt this getting-onto-ten-minutes of monologue, Wiggins looked at him almost reproachfully.

"That's all very interesting, Mr. Potts. But what we're concerned with here really has more to do with the stations themselves than with the actual stock. We came to you because we were told you probably knew as much as anyone about the technical details of the building-"

Emphatically, Mr. Potts nodded; apparently having had his fix for the day with his own special interest, he was willing to move on to broader matters. He ran his hands back over his sparse gray hair, made a tent of his fingers, and riveted his attention on Jury.

"If you had to dispose of something, something relatively small, by way of putting it in a safe place where you could come back and collect it later-where would you leave it in an Underground station?"
 
 

 

Mr. Potts, who seemingly could not be taken aback by any question related to the Underground, simply asked, crisply, "How small and how long left?"

Jury made a circle with thumb and index finger. "Maybe the size of a half-crown. And how long is questionable. I'd say from a day to . . . indefinitely."

That, Mr. Potts's expression told Jury, was a facer. "You mean hide some article so that no one else would come on it, either by design or accident?" Jury nodded. Mr. Potts thought for some time, looking from one to the other of them, looking at the posters on the wall, started several times to answer, drew his answer back, as it were, from the brink, shook his head, and then said, finally, "Odd as it seems, there'd be hardly anywhere. Except, perhaps, one of the grates."

"Grates?"

Mr. Potts nodded. "You've seen them; everyone has. You just don't notice them. Ventilation grates. Of course, it depends what station you're talking about-there're different sorts. You could probably stick something in there and it wouldn't be found for a year. A lot of them are down at floor level. Just walk through the tunnel, you'll see them. People never look down at their feet, do they?"

Jury rose and Wiggins slapped his notebook shut. "Mr. Potts, we're extremely indebted to you. Sorry we can't tell you any more."