In a flash, April turned and ran, away from the light, away from the cellar, away from the chauffeur who was tugging a gun from his waistband. Before she had gone three steps, light shafted into the darkness from the cell window, where Wright was climbing out with a torch in his hand.
A shot crashed out behind her and something whizzed into the dark above her head. Water, she thought frantically, I must have water... There was something dripping near the cellar, she remembered: it must have been a tap or a water butt. She clattered to a halt and looked around — yes, there it was! Just behind her. A main risertap with a bucket hooked over it by the handle, against the wall of the house.
"Don't shoot!" she cried. "I give up; I'm coming…"
Slowly, she walked back towards Wright. Beyond him, the chauffeur stood with his pistol cocked, full of suspicion.
"Put up your hands," Wright called. "Walk slowly towards the barn."
In her right hand, April was prising what looked like a life saver from the roll of mints which had been in her bag... but it was a disc that would have frightened the life out of anyone who tried to eat it! As she lifted her arms, she flipped the pellet neatly into the bucket of water and hurled herself to the ground.
The instant that the life-saver touched the surface, a vast outpouring of dense smoke surged from the bucket, rolled across the yard and blotted Wright, the chauffeur, the cars and the garage from sight.
Shots from two different guns thundered as the girl scrambled to her feet and began wildly running away from the life-saving screen. Wright was bawling something in the dark, a bell had begun ringing, ringing, and in the distance she could hear a woman's voice calling. She hurled herself through an arched doorway in a wall, ran along a brick path and blundered into a shrubbery. She knew she only had a moment before they rounded the house the other way to cut her off.
On the far side of the bushes, she found herself on a lawn. The front of the house, mullioned windows ablaze with light, was off to her right. And away beyond, the night sky was speckled with a rash of red lights warning low-flying aircraft away from the masts of Trewinnock Tor.
She realized she was running in the wrong direction, away from the town.
On an impulse, she dropped to her hands and knees and began crawling back the way she had come, behind a line of standard roses.
A moment later three figures ran round the corner of the house and fanned out across the lawn. "Gerry," a woman called, "I should go towards the South Gate if I were you: she may have a car in the lane."
"Good idea!" Wright's mannered voice replied. "I'll go that way. Mason — you head for the boathouse and cut her off if she goes that way."
"Very good, sir," the man in chauffeur's uniform called back.
Grinning, April rose to her feet at the end of the row and walked softly back through the archway into the yard. Most of the smoke screen had blown away, but there were still layers of it wreathing in the light from the garage.
She tiptoed across the swathe of brilliance and glanced into the building. The place was deserted. As she began hurrying back down the path she had taken with Wright earlier that afternoon, she could hear the voices of the pursuit growing fainter and fainter in the distance behind her. So far, so good, she thought... But the lord of the manor had said that there were two servants besides himself and his wife on the premises. There was still one unaccounted for. And there was still the possibility of trip wires, electric fences and other forms of man-trap before she was off the property... She would have to go carefully, especially as she was now out of range of the diffuse illumination from the house and it really was very dark. Later, there would be a moon, but just now it was positively Stygian!
The mystery of the second servant did not remain long unsolved. As she rounded a spinney at the entrance to a field she saw below her the stile over which she had entered silhouetted against the pale fury of the sea, giant hands plucked her from the ground as though she had been a baby.
"Ah, now! What have we 'ere?" a deep voice exclaimed. "You'm beant running away without sayin' thank'ee, be en?... Maister'd never hold with that. I think you'd better come over by the house along of me, my pretty one!"
Twisting in the remorseless grip, April saw that the man was gigantic. He must have been fully seven feet high, and he was muscularly built to match. She chopped a karate blow at his neck, twisted again and seized his wrist in a judo grip— but the giant just laughed, hefted her over his shoulder like a roll of bedding, and began striding up the hill towards the house.
All right, the girl thought, if that's the way you want it... Maybe it's better like this!
Her handbag was looped over one wrist by the handles. Under cover of a girlish thrashing about with hands and feet, she manoeuvred yet another article out of it: a small gold lipstick case.
The hypodermic needle shot out at the touch of a catch, and the point was plunged into the vast wrist holding her on the man's shoulder before he had gone another three paces. The barrel was filled with chloral hydrate, and however tough the man was, this particular Mickey Finn would bring him down long before they reached the house.
Her captor grunted with pain, shook his wrist a little, and then clamped the other more firmly still about the small of her back.
April's head bumped five more times against the giant's back as it hung down over his shoulder –– and then suddenly he was staggering, mouthing animal cries, lurching into bushes and trees. A moment later he crashed to the ground and lay like a man dead.
The girl rose shakily to her feet, picked up her bag, and retraced her steps. At the stile, she touched the wooden crosspiece with the bag before she dared to put a hand on it — but there was no shower of sparks, no shot from a booby-trap gun, no electrical discharge. Whatever the seaward defences of Sir Gerald Wright's house were, she was through them.
She climbed over and looked down. To one side, a finger of light probed the boathouse where the chauffeur was searching the cove. Below, breakers snarled in the dark — and round the corner lay the lights of Porthallow.
Then she was in the open, scrambling, running, her hair streaming in the wind, stumbling down the slope towards safety.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH
APRIL DANCER stopped three times on her way down to Porthallow to try and contact Mark Slate on the Communicator. Each time she drew a blank: the device's bleeping call- sign remained unanswered. She fell twice in the darkness along the rocky path, and ripped her sheepskin coat on a strand of barbed wire while trying to find a short cut from the cliff to the harbour. By the time she regained the circus field at the top of the town, she was breathless, bedraggled, bleeding from half a dozen minor cuts, and covered in burrs from some bush into which she had stumbled on her way.
The nagging worry she felt at Mark's inexplicable silence was resolved as soon as she had negotiated the noisy crowd thronging the sideshows and gained the comparative quiet of her own caravan. There was an envelope propped up on the table beside the bed, sealed, but with no name and no address on it.
The girl ripped open the flap and drew out the single sheet of paper it contained. He must have been in a hurry, she thought; he had written to her in clear! She read:
Having discovered something rather disquieting about the host of your tea party, I have driven up to see whether I can offer you a lift home. If you read this, of course, my journey will not have been really necessary!... In which case I shall merely make my excuses and leave. Dinner at the Crabber at nine?—M.