“Ruddy pocket Hitler! Ain’t this a free country? Can’t even take a nap without you’ve got a licence from police,” exclaimed the driver truculently. Georgia pressed her foot gently against his. He took the cue.
“Very well,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “Come on, yoong Albert, wake oop.”
Georgia answered the policeman’s questions in a husky voice, sneezing frequently and wiping her nose with her sleeve. The man appeared satisfied, and shortly roared away in front of them on his motor-bike.
“Has ter stolen a car really, Miss?” asked the foreman when they were on their way again.
“As a matter of fact I did. A Rolls-Royce.”
“Well, fancy that now. To my mind, we ought to have knocked that copper on t’head.”
“I’m not sure you’re not right. I’m afraid we’ll hear more of him to-night.”
They did. Their route lay through Stoke and Stafford towards Birmingham. Mr. Dickon had decided on this, rather than the more westerly road by Shrewsbury, because there was more traffic on it and therefore less danger of interference. As they hummed on through the towns of the Potteries, the dark sky lit up intermittently with furnace-glares, Georgia pondered the recent episode. The policeman had evidently been an E.B. agent. His searching of the van suggested that perhaps Mr. Dickon had over-reached himself. When Miss Jones made her diversion, and the E.B. discovered she was not the woman they were after, they might well suspect the pantechnicon which had drawn out of Hallam and Appleby’s yard just then.
They would assume she had contrived to hide herself somehow amid the furniture. But the mobile policeman, having found nobody there, had naturally become inquisitive about the third occupant of the driver’s cab. She hoped, but without much conviction, that her husky voice had taken him in. The fact that he pursued the matter no further at the moment was not necessarily reassuring: he could not cut up rough when there were those two stalwarts in the cab to support her. But his search had held up the pantechnicon long enough for more thorough preparations to be made somewhere on the road ahead.
“Yes,” said Georgia, “I think they’ll try a hold-up further along.”
“Let ’em try,” said the driver with relish. “We’ll boomp ’em off t’road. They’ll not stop this van, without they dig a hole in front.”
After a while Georgia suggested they might turn off the main road: even the E.B. would scarcely dig pits in it, but they could strew nails on the surface. The driver nodded towards his reflecting-mirror. “No use doing that, Miss. We’re being followed now. See those lights? I looked back at the curve just now. It’s a small van. It could easily pass us if they wanted to. Reckon they’re not starting owt yet. They’re following oop to make sure you don’t pop out of my van.”
It was now seven o’clock, and in an hour’s time they should have reached the outskirts of Birmingham. Georgia thought that, if she were to jump out of the pantechnicon somewhere in the city, the pursuers in the van would follow her, and she might slip them and rejoin the pantechnicon at a prearranged spot, thus throwing them off the scent. But she discarded the plan as quickly as she had made it. The risk of being cut off from her present comrades was too great. Instead, when they had reached the city, she told Joe to drive through the centre instead of taking the by-pass. He navigated the one-way-street maze of Birmingham with all the skill of a veteran skipper sailing his ship amidst an archipelago. The following van was following no longer. They had shaken it off.
Their joy was short-lived, however. Emerging on to the Worcester road, on the far side of the city, they soon found the headlights had picked them up again. The van had come straight through on the by-pass, or else another one had been waiting here to intercept them. There was nothing for it but to go on, and on they went along the broad, sweeping road through Warwickshire, drinking the coffee and eating the sandwiches which the provident Mr. Dickon had supplied so that they need not stop at any of the pull-ins for lorries.
Georgia was thinking how odd it was that the E.B. should content themselves with this waiting role, wondering what the object of these tactics might be, when the pantechnicon rounded a corner, entered a narrower stretch of road, and at that instant they saw a car drawn up across the road right in their path.
Joe had been driving fast and now he stamped the accelerator down to the floor. Whistling through his teeth, he drove the pantechnicon hard at the bonnet of the obstructing car, his own wheels bumping on the verge. “Duck!” cried Georgia, “they’ll shoot!” Their huge conveyance struck the car, flipped it aside like a cigarette-card. Faces had appeared in the stream of the headlights, were tossed, bobbed away behind them to a rattle of shots, as if they had been drowning faces swept past into a liner’s wake.
“Are we all here still?” asked Joe, chuckling. “Eh, but that was a warm bit of work.”
“That’s right,” said the foreman stolidly. “Now as I was saying, ever since the City signed on Sproston at full-back——”
“Just a minute, boys, before you return to the business of the evening,” Georgia interrupted. “I think it’s time we got off the main road. We can’t go on ramming obstructions all night without damaging this van. Can you find your way along secondary roads, Joe?”
“Can I find the mouth of a bottle of beer, Miss! But what about that van behind? It’s still following us.”
“I’ll settle the van. I’ll make ’em wish they had their feet up by the fireside at home. When you’re round the next corner, brake hard: but don’t stop; slow down, then speed up again.”
Georgia, who now felt altogether in her element, opened the cab door, scrambled out over the bonnet and hoisted herself on to the roof. As they rounded the bend, she crawled along the roof to the back of the pantechnicon. She felt it checking under the brakes. The pursuing van swung into sight, overhauling them rapidly. It was less than thirty yards away. Georgia levelled her revolver and aimed at its headlights. It took five shots to knock them both out. Not so bad, she thought, considering I’m a bit out of practice and the way this pantechnicon’s swaying. She fired the last shot deliberately into the windscreen of the yawing van, which at once slewed off the road and cocked itself up over the bank.
Feeling rather proud of herself, Georgia scrambled back into the cab. Her companions winked at her solemnly, in unison.
“Has ter been shooting goon?” inquired the foreman.
“Yes, I shot out their headlights. They’re ditched.”
“Ah. I thought I aird soomething,” the foreman commented, sucking his teeth. “Now, as I was telling yer, Joe: Sproston brings him down in t’penalty area, and——”
“If it’s O.K. by you, boys,” said Georgia humbly, “we’ll cut off cross-country now. Wake me up when you’ve won Coop-Final.”
Many sleepy villages, far off the beaten track, heard the thundering vibration of the pantechnicon that December night. To Georgia, dozing in the cab, the drive had all the inconsequence of a dream. Trees, steeples, petrol-pumps, sign-posts, owls, rabbits were picked out by the headlights and streamed continuously through her consciousness. Every hour with forty horse-power I’m getting nearer to Nigel. So what does referee do then, the great gorm? You wanted an adventure, Georgia, my dear. Chilton. That charming smile, that ice-cold heart. The smiler with the knife. Where does that come from? Chaucer. Good old Chaucer, he knew. Chaucer, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Chilton Canteloe. There saw I first the dark imagining of felony. Dark. Dark. Darker. . . .
“Wake up, Miss.”
“What’s——? Where am—where are we?”
“Evesham. Be in Gloucester soon. A chap on a motor-bike stopped us just now. Lost his way, he said. We didn’t like the look of him.”
The pantechnicon rolled on. Be in Gloucester soon. And then only fifty miles to Oxford. But Georgia felt anxious: it was incredible that the E.B. should have let her through so easily: it was, almost, an anti-climax. No doubt, at this ticklish time, they did not want to call attention to themselves more than w
as necessary, but——
“Look up there!” Georgia suddenly exclaimed.
At the top of a long rise which the pantechnicon was beginning to climb, against the skyline where the glimmering road surmounted the hill crest, lay a bulk of deeper blackness. The E.B. were making no mistake this time. They had blocked the road at a place where the lorry would be crawling so slowly that it would have no impetus to break through the obstruction.
“Drive straight on,” said Georgia urgently. “Tell them you dropped me off at Evesham. Good luck.”
The foreman held open the cab door, and she jumped out, landing with relaxed muscles in the ditch, where she rolled safely under cover behind the screen of the pantechnicon’s blazing headlights.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE EPISODE OF THE RADIANCE GIRLS
GEORGIA’S BRAIN ALWAYS seemed to work quickest in such emergencies. She knew she must get away from this place at once, find somewhere to lie low and change her disguise. But she must wait till the attention of the men in the E.B. ambush was distracted by the pantechnicon. She heard it whining up the hill in bottom gear, then a crash as it struck the obstacle, shouts, sounds of struggle. Driver and foreman were giving a good account of themselves, so that she might have a better chance of getting away. She slipped across the road, found a gate, ran across the field under cover of a hedge.
It was lucky for her that she had kept to this cover. Above the drumming of her heart she began to hear another noise—an engine roaring. At first she thought her companions must, by some miracle, have repelled their assailants and started up the pantechnicon again. Then the whole night suddenly flowered into a livid light, in which every detail of the landscape for a mile all round could be picked out. What she had heard was the noise of an aeroplane, and it had dropped this flare to light up the scene for the E.B. men.
Georgia froze against the hedge—a pitifully inadequate protection without its summer foliage. Eyes in the aeroplane, she knew, were searching the landscape for her. She felt as big as a haystack. Before the light died out, however, she had got her bearings. In front of her lay an orchard of young trees, and a mile beyond them she had noticed—generously flood-lit by the E.B. aeroplane—a steeple. She must reach that steeple before the cordon was completed.
It was like a vast, mad game of Musical Chairs or General Post. Once inside the orchard, she sprinted from tree to tree, pausing at each, sprinting to the next, hoping not to be caught in the open by one of the flares which the aeroplane sent down at intervals. She did not know whether the men from the ambush had spread out after her, for the roar of the aeroplane drowned all sounds of pursuit. As she neared the village, she realised how lucky for her the flares had been. Not only had they shown her the steeple, but they had awoken all the dogs in the neighbourhood and set them barking. Her pursuers could not reckon on the barking to tell them in what direction she had gone.
At last she reached the church and dodged into its porch to regain her breath. Another flare illuminated the scene. A cock in the farmyard opposite, considerably rattled by this succession of false dawns, crowed peevishly. Georgia found herself giggling: poor cock, it would never quite get its nerve back again. In the light of the flare, she saw a graveyard, an iron gate, an ivy-covered house just beyond. The vicarage, no doubt. When in trouble, apply to the vicar. She went through the gate and paused for a few minutes under the shadow of the vicarage wall, her brain racing to devise a plausible story.
There were no more flares. The sound of the aeroplane died out of the sky, giving way to a well-modulated voice from a window just over her head:
“Winter lightning, my dear. A very remarkable phenomenon. Remind me to write to the Times about it to-morrow. Unexampled brilliance. Now I think we may go to bed again.”
“But I’m sure it wasn’t lightning, dear,” said another voice, with a patient stubbornness that suggested the controversy had been raging for some time. “It was that aeroplane. It was trying to land, don’t you see?”
“Nonsense, Aggie. There’s no aerodrome round here, you know perfectly well. The phenomenon of lightning, unaccompanied by thunder, is, I grant you, at this time of year, unusual. But not unprecedented. Not, I assure you, unprecedented. I well recollect——”
“But it wasn’t lightning,” said Georgia, standing out from the shadow of the wall. “Honestly it wasn’t. It was me. My engine failed and I had to throw out flares. I managed to get down safely in a meadow just over there.”
“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the vicar. “An aviatrix!”
In the dark, Georgia’s white overalls might well have been a flying-suit. She had removed her moustache in the church porch, and the cloth cap was now concealed under her coat. The vicar’s wife, a kindly, plain woman, insisted on supporting Georgia indoors and brewing her a cup of Ovaltine, while her husband fluttered in the background, glancing at Georgia half-incredulously, half-complacently, as though she had been no less than an angel alighted out of heaven on his doorstep.
I’m sitting pretty for the moment, she thought; but, unless Joe and the foreman convince them that I dropped off at Evesham, the E.B. will go over this district with a fine-tooth comb. That story about the aeroplane has got me into the vicarage all right, but it’d be the finish of me as soon as it reaches the E.B.’s ears.
Georgia decided she must tell Mrs. Fortescue something of the real story. A certain amount of resistance had to be broken down, for the Fortescues had come to this village from a larger town parish, and she was up to all the tricks of professional beggars: indeed, she had become an adept at exposing people who tried to take advantage of her husband’s unworldliness and generosity. At first, therefore, Mrs. Fortescue lent a by no means ready ear to Georgia’s tale. But before long a gleam began to light her tired, kindly eyes: there was a romantic in her which had not been stifled by all these years of drudgery and good works. Romance, adventure had now landed out of the night on to her doorstep, disguised as a small, brown-eyed, magnetic woman in disreputable man’s clothing, and Mrs. Fortescue was transfigured. She agreed to hide Georgia in the vicarage till they had worked out the best method of getting her away. In the meanwhile she would impress upon her husband the necessity of saying nothing about their midnight visitor.
“And I only hope nobody asks him,” she added, smiling gently. “Poor Herbert is the most unconvincing liar I’ve ever known. I remember once when the bishop came to stay and our little dog ate the episcopal braces—but I mustn’t waste time with that. Luckily our maid doesn’t sleep in, so nobody but us could have heard you.”
Georgia slept late next morning in the attic where Mrs. Fortescue had made her a bed. She slept through the arrival of two men at breakfast-time and their discomfiture by the vicar’s wife. They claimed to be plain-clothes police inquiring about a young woman wanted on a charge of car-stealing and last seen in this vicinity.
“No,” said Mrs. Fortescue, firmly entrenched on her doorstep, “no one came here last night, I can assure you.”
“This woman might have got in while you were asleep. I suppose you have no objection to our searching the house?”
“Of course not. Provided you have a search warrant.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, madam——”
“You haven’t? I’m afraid, in that case——”
The men began to bluster. Mrs. Fortescue was not in the least alarmed by them, but she was on tenterhooks lest their voices should fetch her husband out from the dining-room, where he was deeply engaged with a boiled egg and the Church Times.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We get so many beggars and undesirable characters at the vicarage, I couldn’t possibly let you in until you’ve established your bona fides. Good day to you.”
She related the episode to Georgia when she brought up her breakfast tray. Evidently the village of Nether Cheype was in a state of siege. Not only would it be difficult for Georgia to be smuggled out, but there was great danger even in getting a message through to London or Oxf
ord. Mrs. Fortescue dared not leave Georgia alone in the house, and at the same time she had to keep a watchful eye on her husband lest his lips should become unsealed or his conscience, already irked by the duplicity in which she had involved him, should get the better of him.
They remained silent for a while. Glancing at the paper Mrs. Fortescue had brought up, Georgia noticed a bulletin about Sir John Strangeways: he was still in a critical condition, but hopes of ultimate recovery were now entertained. Well, thank God for that, she thought, and fell to wondering about the fate of her two companions of last night. Her thoughts were interrupted at last by Mrs. Fortescue who asked, with apparent irrelevance:
“Do you know anything about eurhythmics, dear?”
“Eurhythmics? I used to do them at school. I should think my kind must be out of date by now. Why?”
“I’m just wondering if the Radiance Girls wouldn’t be our solution,” said Mrs. Fortescue, tapping her teeth with a pencil and frowning down at the shopping-list in her hand.
“The Radiance Girls?” asked Georgia meekly. Nothing had any power to surprise her now.
“Herbert thinks it’s all rather pagan. But, as I tell him, if the morals of our village can’t stand up to a few strapping young ladies in magenta knickers, they’re past praying for. Besides, we get them free. And it’s such a pity we don’t make more use of that stage Lady Cheype presented to the village hall. Though it would be terrible if they broke it—they do jump about rather, don’t they?”
Nothing to the way you jump about, thought Georgia. But she let Mrs. Fortescue run on. The vicar’s wife was expanding almost visibly under the influence of Georgia and the extraordinary situation into which she had been plunged. Her flow of inconsequential talk made it difficult for one to remember that they were ringed round by danger and that every way out was probably blocked by desperate men, who would hardly allow even a black beetle to leave the district without subjecting it to their scrutiny.
Mrs. Fortescue might try one’s patience with her amiable ramblings, but she certainly got somewhere in the end. Georgia realised that, for the second time in two days, her safety was being catered for by a born organiser. Mrs. Fortescue’s plan was that Georgia should change places with one of the Radiance Girls when they visited Nether Cheype to-morrow night to give an exhibition of eurhythmics—or, as the leader of the Sisterhood of Radiance preferred to term it, “Psycho-physical Irradiation.” The Sisterhood, which throve in places where there was a superfluity of women with more time than sex-appeal on their hands, had a centre in Cheltenham whence they sent out parties round the countryside to propagate their particular blend of theosophy and physical jerks. They would be arriving at Nether Cheype in a small private bus and departing as soon as their show had finished.