The Valley of the Fox

Ten

I hadn’t forgotten Alice’s athleticism, but I was still surprised by the ease with which she shinned up the beech branches and across to my oak tree down by the lake later that morning. The child was mother to the woman here, I knew that. And I knew she kept herself fit, thrashing the waters and playing tennis. But this was quite another sort of agility for a woman, more in the circus trapeze department. And, indeed, she was like a girl happy under the big top that morning as she hooked her legs and arms over branches, swinging upwards through the green leaves into shafts of sun that filtered through them, moving into the light above like a swimmer rising effortlessly from the deep. And suddenly, after the confines and alarms of the house, in the clear, early-summer air of the trees, the smell of wood and moss and water all around, I felt as if I was coming home again, to a kind of freedom in this hidden place.

‘It’s up there,’ I’d said to begin with, pointing to my oak.

‘Why, even you couldn’t climb that.’ Alice had looked at the smooth fifteen-foot bole of the tree.

‘No. That’s the whole point. No one could climb it. I get across onto it from that copper-beech tree, higher up there.’

And we’d gone back up the steep side of the valley, to where the great sloping beech limb came to within a few feet of the ground, giving access to my oak.

‘I’ll go up first and let a rope down. Then you can tie that bag of things on and I’ll pull it up.’

We’d brought down two sleeping-bags from the Manor, along with blankets and some makeshift clothes for Clare to use, and some old toys, games and books as well from the Victorian nursery. I’d taken soaps, towels, a toothbrush, shaving gear and a hand-mirror from Arthur’s suite. There was a decent torch and some extra tools in the bag: a hammer, nails and a small sharp hatchet.

I had taken some books from the library, for the long evenings: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Conan Doyle’s The White Company among them and a lot of picture magazines for Clare. In the old days this had been part of her cure, lying on the cottage floor and thumbing through the pages of the colour supplements, picking out and concentrating for an hour on some unlikely photograph — the gaudy vicious picture of a gyrating punk rocker, some bloody battlefront scene, or a skyscraper collapsing. She had found a strange solace in such violent images before; they calmed her, and I expected she might need them again now, among much else in the way of a cure, for she would almost certainly have regressed in her autism since I had left her.

Alice had given me several large bottles of soda and lime juice for Clare, along with some good malt whisky and red plastic picnic tumblers. Food had been more of a problem, since Mrs Pringle had been in and out of the kitchen all morning. We’d only managed a package of digestive biscuits from the pantry and an expensive wooden box of Harrods’ liqueur chocolates which had been left in the drawing-room from the previous Christmas. On the other hand I knew I could pick up food, and anything else we needed, from the house at night, when Alice was there alone.

I pulled the big hold-all up to the top of the oak, along with Spinks’s bow and the two arrows which I’d brought back from the manor. Then Alice had come up after me and finally we were both together in the tree-house.

Everything was just as I’d left it: my muddy cord suit, grubby shirt and underclothes, the billy can with the flakey remains of the boiled perch still stuck to it, the transistor, the ex-army binoculars, along with Spinks’s bawdy paperback and the Good Beer Guide for 1979. Alice looked around, touching things, fascinated.

‘You see,’ I said, ‘this is how I get the water, and the fish.’ I let the canvas water bag over the side of the planks. ‘Of course, you’ve got to go along that lower branch there — out over the lake. But it’s no problem.’

‘No. Except for a child. Maybe I was wrong suggesting you brought her back up this tree: a child in some state of shock, too, if she’s been in hospital these two weeks.’

‘I’d thought of that myself. I can keep her out on the island for a few days, to begin with. That’s what I’d thought: out in the little mausoleum.’

‘Yes. I’ll put some clothes and food in there in any case, when you’ve gone.’

‘But Clare can climb all right,’ I went on. ‘Probably be part of a cure for her. She was always up and down the old elder trees in our back garden. And in Cascais last summer, there was a big cork tree in the garden there: she used to get right to the top of it in a flash. These children usually have extraordinary physical gifts; I told you. Clare certainly has — climbing, hiding, running, anything like that. Maybe she got it when she was very young, out in the bush, in east Africa. She lived practically wild out there, as far as I can gather, for months on end with her parents when they were fossilling about.’

‘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?’

Alice was thinking of everything, and so I was suddenly determined to think up a name for myself. ‘I’ll be John Burton,’ I said, ‘and I’ll come from 16 Bradford Road, London, W 2. How’s that?’

‘Fine. You’re getting the hang of things.’

We stopped at a call-box in Stow and I made the booking that night for a single room, for one night, at the Whately Hall Hotel in Banbury. There were no problems.

I’d committed myself at last. And suddenly I felt easier, more confident as a result: the enemy was in view once more, the long-delayed plan of attack under way. There were only two choices open to me now, to sink or to swim. And since it had once again boiled down to this, to a matter of life and death almost, I felt as I had when I’d waited for Ross’s vicious dog running up the valley towards me two weeks before, the bowstring tight against my cheek, just before the shaft transfixed the Alsatian: and I felt that strange surge of animal confidence as I got back into the car — something brutal rising in me, beyond thought certainly, a sort of blood-lust that surprised me. I suddenly had a vital will to succeed and I didn’t know at all where that will came from.

Back at the Manor after lunch we looked out some suitable clothes together in Arthur’s rooms — pyjamas, a suit, shirts, some casual wear — and carefully cut off all the labels on them.

‘I’ll need a dressing-gown maybe,’ I said. ‘If I’m to go walking round the wards.’

But Arthur had left only one dressing-gown behind — in surprising red silk, a Noël Coward affair that would surely call unwanted attention to me.

‘Take it anyway,’ Alice advised. ‘You may need it. And don’t forget some shaving things, toothpaste … They expect all that in hospitals.’

Alice finished the packing and then looked up at me, peering into my face. ‘That scar, it’s still there: a way of identifying you afterwards. We’ll just have to risk that, or find you a hat to cover it.’ She ran her finger gently along the mark on my temple. Then she was brisk again. ‘Now: some papers. You can have one of my wallets. I got it in Florence years ago. There’s nothing American about it.’

She handed me a lovely Florentine leather wallet, edged in gilt. Inside was a number of fairly grubby £5 and £10 notes. ‘I’m sure they can’t trace them,’ she said. I counted them. There was £100 in all.

‘Thank you. I’ll make a note of it.’

Alice said nothing until, as we left the room, she asked: ‘A weapon of some sort? Do you need one?’

‘Why? I don’t think so.’

‘I have a small hand-gun.’

‘You think I’ll have to fight my way out of the place? That’s nonsense. Besides, they’d spot it when I got undressed in the hospital.’

‘I know!’ Alice suddenly said. ‘There’s some old swordsticks downstairs. Arthur collects them.’

‘Come on —’

‘No. It could be useful. And you could keep it by you all the time. Pretend you have a limp.’

‘Yes, but why bother, if they’re not expecting me?’

‘You never know. They might try and stop you on your way out. Besides, a limp is a good disguise,’ she added brightly. ‘A man with a limp …’ She considered this conceit for a moment, as if contemplating a proposed charade in a Christmas drawing-room, before finding the idea good. But I didn’t.

‘A man with a limp and a swordstick and a Noël Coward dressing-gown,’ I said. ‘It’s too much, Alice. I’d be overplaying my hand.’

‘If you don’t overplay your hand a bit you won’t ever get into that damn hospital. Remember, you have to act as if your whole gut was on fire to begin with. Unless you really want to eat a cake of soap. And remember, too, the less you look like your old self the better. Who are you anyway? This John Burton from London?’

‘Well, with a gammy leg, swordstick and that tarty dressing-gown I’d better be a London antique-dealer. What do you think?’

Alice smiled. ‘You’re certainly getting the idea,’ she said.

Later she showed me the collection of swordsticks, kept locked up in Arthur’s gun-room at the back of the house. There were half a dozen of them — silver-topped, eighteenth-century canes for the most part. I chose the least antique and ostentatious: a stout Victorian bamboo walking-stick with an antler handle and a secret release catch. Inside was a long needle of engraved Toledo steel, double-edged, half an inch wide at the top and tapering to an extremely fine, sharp point.

‘I don’t like the look of it,’ I said.

‘Nor will they if you just bring it out. You won’t have to use it.’

I put the blade back and, using the stick as support, practised my limp across the gun-room. Arthur’s suit chosen for me this time was a lightweight tweed. And I had a hat to go with it now — a tweed pork-pie that came down over my scar. I looked too carefully, too expensively dressed for an antique-dealer. On the other hand I certainly looked nothing like my real self: the man the police would be looking for.

Alice, now almost carried away by her sense of the theatrical, was pleased with the result. She looked at me from a distance, head to one side, quizzically. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you,’ she said.

‘No. Just like the first time I got into Arthur’s clothes.’

Was it her wish that I should undergo successive transformations in this sartorial manner, each of which would take me further away from the chalk-dusted, badly dressed teacher I’d been with Laura, and closer to Alice — all changes which would make me more dependent on her, as puppet, as lover? In her eyes certainly I must have already fulfilled all her theatrical expectations, played the game well — changing from naked savage to tweedy countryman in little more than twenty-four hours. In my own eyes I felt less and less the actor and more the fool — who had still to assume a dangerous role. On the other hand, if Clare was to be freed … And I had to admit that Alice’s ideas here, simply because of their very drama, might well work. I was dependent on Alice; it was simply this dependence that I didn’t like.

‘Come on,’ she said, having watched me think for half a minute. ‘We’re ready.’ She kissed me, briefly. I still didn’t respond. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Sooner you than me. It’s difficult, changing your life. But you’ve done it so well already, Peter, you can do it again. I’ve been amazed, seeing you …’

She gazed at me proudly, as on a Knight Errant about to depart on some great cause in her honour. And I saw the madness of the whole scheme once more then — but saw equally that it was an escapade which Alice, in her own bizarre mind, now relied on me to fulfil. She expected my fidelity in this cause; we were brother and sister in arms. To fail her in it would be to betray her. And I realised it was she who was dependent on me now — her life on mine, and I was ashamed at my earlier thoughts of her manipulation.

‘Say goodbye to Mrs Pringle. And I’ll take you to your — London train.’

She turned away, busying herself with some last-minute detail, so that I was left with an image of Alice in the great house. An image of someone I wanted to kiss now, but couldn’t.

I threw a convincing fit, writhing in the hall of the hotel next morning in Banbury. I had earlier called the receptionist from my bedroom, complaining of severe stomach pains and cramps, so that this subsequent performance was not unexpected. The Manager offered me a doctor there and then — there was a surgery, he told me, just next door to the hotel, but I suggested a taxi to the hospital at once, and thus I left five minutes later, doubled up with my bamboo walking-stick and suitcase, a surprising casualty from the sumptuous Inn, stumbling out into the bright summer morning.

In the hospital waiting-room I repeated the performance, and having filled in a form, or rather dictated most of it to the receptionist, such was the imagined force of my pains just then, I was soon taken down a corridor to a consulting room where I was laid out on a raised couch and left alone.

Five minutes later a young Indian medico arrived in a white jacket with half a dozen ballpoints sticking up in his front pocket. He was a very small man, narrow-headed, with vague, heavy-lidded, apparently quite aimless eyes. His hair was dark and greased with a Disraeli kiss-curl neatly imprinted on his forehead like a bass clef.

He took one of the ballpoint pens from his pocket as if to make notes, though he had no paper with him.

‘What seems to be the matter?’ he asked, looking away from me towards the clouded glass window through which he could see nothing. He seemed sleepy, almost asleep. His English was perfect, almost without accent.

‘Pains,’ I said grunting. ‘Here. I don’t know — but I have an ulcer disposition.’

I had lowered my trousers and taken up my shirt.

‘Where?’ he asked, paying attention at last. I showed him. He prodded my stomach with the top of his ballpoint, as if keen not to sully his fingers.

‘Higher up,’ I said. ‘And don’t prod me with that pen. It hurts.’

The man said nothing. But next time he used his fingers when he probed me.

‘Sick — have you been sick?’

‘No. But I feel sick.’

‘Have you ever had a barium meal? With your London doctor?’

‘No.’ The man thought for half a minute about this, his head turned away from me, dreaming again. He seemed only just in touch with life. Perhaps he’d been up all night on duty.

‘It’s just there, the pain, is it? The upper middle of the stomach?’ He pushed me fairly hard, so that I had no difficulty in almost screaming.

‘Yes,’ I said breathlessly. ‘There. That’s it.’

‘Emm …’ he said. He took up his ballpoint again and flipped it in the air several times.

‘It’s as if a stake had been driven through me,’ I said.

‘Peritonitis, I should think, if the pain is that bad.’

‘What?’

‘Bad ulceration. You have an ulcer disposition? Well there’s a risk of a perforation. I told you, if it really pains like that.’

‘And?’

‘We should probably operate. Have you signed a disclaimer form?’

‘Operate? No, I’ve signed nothing.’

‘I’ll have one sent round. Meanwhile I’ll arrange for a barium meal and an X-ray.’

‘I don’t think I want an operation, surely. Just keep me in for observation, no?’

‘Yes. But if it bursts, well — we’d be too late,’ the Indian said offhandedly.

‘A second opinion? Could we have that?’

‘Yes.’ He turned away, in a dream again. ‘You’d have that anyway. But the consultant isn’t in just yet. Nor the surgeon. I’ll arrange for a meal and an X-ray meanwhile. Then we can operate — or not, as the case may be.’ He turned back to me. ‘The nurse will give you something for the pain. All right?’

I nodded and he left me. God, I thought, an operation. I had obviously overplayed my part. If they operated. But of course they wouldn’t — when the X-rays showed nothing amiss. They would then simply keep me in bed under observation for a few days. But could I be sure? Of course, I could simply refuse the operation and leave the hospital, release myself. But that wouldn’t serve my purpose at all. I had to stay in the hospital and find out where Clare was; that was the whole point. I was suddenly uneasy then, all my earlier confidence gone.

A nurse arrived and gave me a pain-killing injection, and soon afterwards the same nurse helped me into a wheelchair and a porter drove me down interminable corridors to the X-ray department. I still had my stick with me, and the suitcase. I felt like a very old man, incapable of anything. The pain-killer made me drowsy.

The barium meal — a nasty, cherry-and-milk flavoured concoction — together with the X-ray took up most of the morning as I had to wait my turn in line. And afterwards I was left to wait again in a cubicle nearly an hour while they studied the results.

But eventually I had the verdict. The Indian doctor saw me again. There was nothing wrong with my gut, he said. Nothing at all, as far as the X-ray plates went.

‘Just your ulcer disposition.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Or maybe a grumbling appendix.’

‘It still hurts, certainly.’

‘Well, we’ll keep you in for observation anyway. Just in case. And no food, in case we have to operate. All right?’

I nodded, relieved at last. And by lunchtime, though I was ravenously hungry, I was safely a-bed, sitting up in Arthur’s flashy dressing-gown, in one of the long modern wards that ran away at the back of the building towards the car-park, with my suitcase gone but with my bamboo stick still with me, as I’d insisted, leaning up against the bedside table.

I was halfway down one side of a general ward of about thirty beds, nearly all of them filled, with only two where the curtains had been pulled round in tactful silence. For the rest, the patients were a garrulous lot, when they did not hawk and cough and groan. The noise increased around lunchtime, some of the old men behaving with the excitement of predatory animals over their food. And afterwards, smacking their toothless chops, they talked to each other, loudly, often across several beds, swapping raucous notes on the past and future of their various complaints. The place was like a strange zoo, or some contemporary and unpleasant open-stage theatrical event. It was impossible to sleep.

The man immediately to my left, an elderly Cotswolds type who must have been in his eighties, swathed in bandages, soon got talking to me. He spent little enough time enquiring of my illness; his own misfortune entirely absorbed him and I was a captive audience. He was a passionate gardener, he told me, and had been out in his back patch a fortnight before where he had an old wooden-framed greenhouse. It had suddenly collapsed all over him, in a high wind up on the wolds — the same thunderstorm, I imagined, that had come up to me in the valley — and he had been badly cut about the head and neck by the falling glass.

‘I didn’t know what hit me,’ the old man explained. ‘I thought it were one of those Yankee bombers from the Heyford base, I did.’

‘Dear me,’ I commiserated with him. Though I hoped not to encourage him, for I could see he loved his mishap. And sure enough, almost immediately, he proceeded to repeat the misadventure in every detail, from start to finish.

By late afternoon, the old man still talking, I could bear it no more. I asked the nurse if there was a day-room for patients on the mend. I was feeling much better. There was, and she allowed me to go to it. So, wrapped up in my colourful dressing-gown, I limped out of the ward.

Once outside and moving towards the day-room, I had free run to explore all the many corridors and wards in the main part of the hospital. And it wasn’t long, wandering up and down these passageways, before I came on the children’s wards. There was two of them, both on the ground floor, both running back towards the car park. The first, with its high-sided white cots, was for the youngest of the children. The one next was for children of Clare’s age. The doors into both were open as I passed by. It was just after 5.30. Many relatives and friends were already inside the wards visiting, and many more were arriving immediately behind me as I walked along the corridor.

When I reached the end I turned sharply back. I decided to take the risk: just to walk calmly into the wards, with the crush of other visitors, take a look around, then walk out again. I could say I was lost if anyone stopped me.

But no one did, as I entered the first ward. Everyone, children, parents and the few nurses, was totally taken up with their own affairs. I glanced and smiled at the beds as I walked down the centre aisle. But Clare was nowhere to be seen. And then, right at the end of the ward, I saw four glass-walled, private rooms, for iller children I assumed, or private patients. Walking through another open door here I saw that three of the rooms were occupied. There were visitors in two of them. But in the third room, right at the back, at the very end of the corridor, through the glass partition, I saw Clare sitting up in pyjamas at the end of her bed. A nurse, a young Chinese girl, was playing with her, or trying to at least occupy her with some toys.

I turned away at once, in case she saw me. But I needn’t have worried, for when I turned back briefly and looked at Clare again, I could see her blank face, how her eyes were quite unfocused. But it was Clare all right, with the mop of golden colour all round the top of her head; Clare alive, if not well. But physically well, I thought, at least: capable of being moved. I wished I could have gone to her there and then, my heart jumping with excitement.

As I left these private rooms, I saw a fire-extinguisher by some half-opened curtains at the end of the corridor. Beyond was a metal-framed french window leading out somewhere to the back of the hospital. I could see trees and some tired summer grass in the late-afternoon light. The car-park must have been nearby. And there was a key in the lock of the door: here was my escape.

On the way back to my ward I stopped in the main hallway of the hospital. There was a public phone on the wall here, but it was engaged, and I had to wait ten minutes before I got through to Alice. We had agreed on a code before I’d left her.

‘It’s all arranged,’ I told her. ‘I’ve found the present we want. I’ll wait for you with it behind the station, from ten o’clock onwards, tonight.’

I wasn’t given any supper that evening and I was light-headed with nervous excitement as well as from lack of food. I tried not to look at the clock at the end of the ward. I tried listening to the radio instead, taking the headphones down from above my bed. At least this ploy kept the old man next door at bay, though I could still see him trying to talk to me, his lips moving soundlessly as I listened to “The Archers”.

And then, through nervous exhaustion I suppose, I must have fallen asleep with the headphones still round my ears, for the next thing I knew I was awake and on my side, with the curtains drawn all down the ward. It was 10.15 — the old man next me was still talking, I noticed, when I looked across at him.

But after a moment I saw he wasn’t talking to me. With my headphones on there was still no sound from his lips. He was speaking to someone else, I realised now, someone I’d not seen on the other side of my bed. I turned.

The Indian doctor was there, together with another older man I didn’t recognise, and beyond him a third figure, but one I knew: it was Ross, the man who’d stalked me two weeks before through the early mists in the valley by the lake, whose dog I’d killed and who now, much more certainly, had come to claim me.

I took the headphones off. The other man had a clipboard in one hand. He looked at it and then at my name on the end of the bed.

‘Mr John Burton? he asked.

‘Yes. I’m John Burton. What’s wrong?’

But Ross came in at once then. ‘You’re not “John Burton”,’ he said. ‘You’re Peter Marlow, aren’t you?’ He spoke quietly, very reasonably, with kindness almost.

‘I couldn’t find anything wrong with him, you see,’ the Indian piped in. ‘There was nothing wrong in the X-ray. Nothing whatsoever. I thought there was something strange then,’ he added, justifying himself.

The old Cotswolds gardener in the next bed was all ears, craning over towards us, trying to pick up our conversation. And others in the ward were awake or alert now, curious at this intrusion.

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming to the administrator’s office for a moment?’ Ross asked, looking about him uneasily at the disturbance they’d caused.

‘You don’t have to move, Mr Burton,’ the other older man said to me, the Administrator himself, I presumed. He looked at Ross very critically. ‘I’m afraid,’ he went on, ‘if Mr Burton denies he’s the man you want, he can stay exactly where he is. He’s a patient here, appropriately admitted for observation pending treatment. Your writ stops at the entrance.’

‘Of course, doctor; I’d no intention …’ Ross excused himself. ‘I’d just like to talk to Mr Burton privately for a few minutes, here in the hospital.’

‘Well, if Mr Burton agrees, that’s all right. But you can do it here. We can pull the curtains.’

I’d no wish to see Ross privately here or anywhere else. He’d probably try and get rid of me at once, in whatever circumstances, I thought. But I saw that if I wanted to get Clare out I’d have to move immediately in any case. With Ross so certainly on my trail again, yet with Alice waiting outside for me at that same moment, I knew I’d never get another chance of taking Clare. The best thing was to get out of bed, prepare myself, get ready to run … There was nothing to be gained by staying put, that was for sure.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll come to your office. We don’t want to go on making a fuss in the ward.’

I got slowly out of bed. I still had my dressing-gown on. The others made way for me as I stood up gingerly. Then I grasped my stick, taking it as support, before limping carefully out from between the beds.

The three men were moving slowly behind me now, as we all made our way towards the ward door. A night nurse had just arrived and was sitting at a table ahead of us, in the middle of the central aisle near the exit, a table which, I saw, would slightly block our progress. We would have to move past it, to either side, in single file. And if I were first through, as I would be, the three others behind me could well be delayed … And the sooner they were delayed in some manner the better, so that I could have the more time to lose myself in the tortuous corridors outside and reach Clare’s ward without their knowing where I’d gone. There was only one obvious way to ensure their delay. I had it in my hand.

As I moved through the gap by the night nurse’s table I started to release the safety catch beneath the antler handle on my swordstick. I’d have used the stick against them anyway. But Ross’s words just then, as he came up behind me, suddenly annoyed me, gave me added impetus.

‘A bad limp, Marlow?’ he said condescendingly. ‘So that’s your problem. I hope you haven’t hurt yourself, on the run these past weeks.’

I was through the gap now, the catch released. I turned and in the same movement I pulled out the long needle of steel and held it up, straight at Ross’s chest, blocking his way through.

‘Put that down, Marlow!’ he said. ‘I only want to talk to you: to explain things. With that bad leg you can’t get far anyway. Don’t play the fool!’

I touched Ross’s shirt with the tip of the sword. ‘Back!’ I said. ‘Back a little! Like you people played the fool with my wife.’ I had a sudden urge to stick the sword in him there and then — and give the meddlesome little Indian a jab with it too. But I controlled the impulse.

The nurse, who had got up to let us pass, turned to me now and gave a short, little delayed-action yelp, like a dog. I spun the table round so that it ran lengthways across the aisle, blocking the gap almost completely.

Ross tried to vault the table, throwing himself towards me. But he came straight onto the tip of the sword, which I’d raised again. It pricked him in the arm, so that he drew back hurriedly, clutching his shoulder, amazed. I think he thought I was simply pulling his leg with these theatrical props and antics. He put his good arm inside his jacket, reaching for a gun I thought.

‘Don’t!’ I said, moving forward towards him over the table, flourishing the swordstick at his throat this time. He withdrew and I backed away, the ward in some pandemonium now, as the shaded light on the table fell to the floor, the bulb breaking, leaving the whole room in darkness and confusion. But by then I had turned and was running furiously out the door. I was gone.

The corridor outside was deserted. I streaked along it, sword in hand, came to a T-junction at the end, and turned round one of two corners towards the children’s wards before anyone saw me from behind. I had just a head start on them; they couldn’t know exactly which route I’d gone. Speed was the only thing that mattered now.

And then, ahead of me, coming slowly along the next corridor and blocking most of it, I saw a prostrate patient, quite covered by a sheet on a raised trolley being wheeled by two porters. Perhaps at first they thought the building was on fire. But then, noting my flying red dressing-gown, swordstick and my pace, the two men froze with their silent passenger, and just stood there, straight in the middle of the passage.

In mounting confusion as I approached, instead of pulling over to one side, they started to turn the whole trolley in the opposite direction, as if to beat a retreat. They ended by blocking the corridor completely, the trolley stuck between the two walls.

I simply had to vault it — which I did, clearing the white-sheeted figure in one leap, while the porters backed against the walls like ambulancemen on either side of a dangerous jump at a steeplechase. At least, I thought, they might hinder the others behind me even more. And I ran on again, elated by my success, the sudden physical activity pushing the adrenalin sharply through my veins. I had that strange, sure animal feeling again: that I was going to win.

The children’s ward was in almost complete darkness when I got there, only a single light coming from the far end where the four private rooms were. The children were nearly all asleep. Few of them were disturbed as I closed the outer door behind me and tiptoed quickly down to the far end.

Clare was awake again, I saw through the glass partition. A nurse was still up playing with her, and I remembered how difficult, long-delayed or irregular her sleeping could be when she was disturbed.

I opened the door. Clare looked up. But she looked past me, not at me. The nurse turned. Clare was sitting up by her pillows, constructing some elaborate edifice with delicately balanced plastic bricks on her bedside table. The nurse saw the swordstick and immediately stood up, as if to protect the child.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m Clare’s father. I’m taking her away.’

‘No!’ the nurse said immediately. ‘No!’ But she was too stunned to say anything else.

Clare didn’t speak either. Having looked up in my direction to begin, she now calmly returned to her bricks. I knew I had very little time left.

‘Look,’ I said to the nurse, keeping her back from Clare with the swordstick. ‘I can’t explain now. But I promise you it’s all right. I am her father. She’ll be quite safe.’

I simply took Clare then, quite unresisting at first, picking her up in her pyjamas, until she saw that she was being taken away from her bricks, when she screamed, a short sharp scream, so that I was forced to take away as many of the bricks as I could with me as well, stuffing them into my dressing-gown pockets. Then I made off with her, lifting her up under my arm like a parcel and carrying her out the door with one of the yellow bricks still clasped firmly in her hand.

She made no other sound as I ran with her towards the french windows at the end of the ward corridor, turning the key and wrenching the door open. Then I was out in the night.

It was difficult to move fast in the gathering darkness over rough ground, and I could hear the nurse shouting behind me now. But suddenly there was a light round a corner, above some builders’ huts where they were making extensions to the hospital. And beyond these huts, right at the edge of the car park, I saw the black Ford Fiesta. The engine was running, the door open, while I was still ten yards away from it.

They never caught us. We only saw a police car once, lights flashing, tearing along the high road between Banbury and Chipping Norton, while we were half a mile away, down in the valley beneath, moving with dipped lights in a parallel direction along a winding cross-country lane. Alice had done her homework well, travelling these minor roads three times, twice at night, since I’d left her.

In little over half an hour, driving fast, we’d skirted Stow and were approaching the back entrance to Beechwood Manor, from another small by-road. There was no lodge here. The drive led to the home farm behind the Manor and there was only a cattle-grid between the stone gateposts. Turning off the drive, on to a narrow lane, we were soon hidden by thick undergrowth on either side. And half a mile further on we turned again, away from the farm, along no more than a grass track that had once been a back avenue leading round to the manor house itself. But this soon petered out, narrowing into a defile of thick brush, old elder trees and hawthorn bushes.

And here Alice drove the car into the old cow-shed hidden in the undergrowth, the bushes scraping the roof over our heads, until the headlights came up against the back wall. Then she turned everything off and we sat there, elated, exhausted, in the darkness and sudden complete silence of the deep midnight countryside.

‘We’ll stay here till first light,’ Alice said softly. ‘Then we can move. I’ll open the gate in the fence for you. When you get through you’ll find yourself just at the head of the valley. The sheep pasture runs away to the left: the chalk quarry on top, and the stream runs down from there to the lake. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

She spoke softly because Clare was sound asleep in my arms, asleep at last. I told Alice then what had happened in the hospital. And finally she said, ‘Well done. I wish I’d seen it all. I really do.’ Then she kissed me gently — a sweet reward, I thought, for a crusader home from his first successful campaign.