The Valley of the Fox

Three

Spinks, the games master, was sacked a week before half-term in my school that summer. And since no reason was given to the other staff by the naive Anglican cleric, phrases such as ‘gross indecency’ and ‘unnatural vice’ echoed wordlessly in our minds.

In fact, as one of the all-knowing school prefects told me privately later, it had been a simpler, entirely natural matter. The worse for drink one night Spinks had forced himself upon the school housekeeper, a pneumatic divorcee known by the boys as the ‘Michelin Woman’, down near her room by the garages.

There was, indeed, a decidedly motorised air about the whole business, since, as the boy explained to me, the assault had apparently taken place not only in one of these lock-up garages, but in or about Spinks’ own car, a small, ill-conditioned MG two-seater, the lady in question forced over the bonnet or some such. Though Spinks had vehemently maintained, the prefect who knew him went on, that the event had occurred with the lady’s full co-operation, while the two of them were actually seated in the passion-wagon — a proposition which, given the housekeeper’s girth and apparent decorum, had not convinced the Headmaster.

However it was, this matter, a farce in one way, turned out a blessing for me in another. Spinks had packed his bags at once and left. And since I had some athletic inclinations I was immediately given his job, pending a replacement. Yet Spinks, in his blind hangover, hadn’t taken everything with him. Going alone into the sports room the next afternoon I saw that he’d left a big backpack of his behind in a corner, hung up in a slovenly way, but complete with sleeping bag, a small camping gas burner, some iron rations and a lot of other jumbled-up camping equipment I didn’t bother to look at.

Spinks had been in charge of some senior boys on a mountaineering trip in Wales during the Easter holidays, and this was the unpacked remains of their week in the hills. I left the bag where it was, assuming that Spinks, when he’d sobered up, would return for it.

In the same room, behind a locked metal grill, was the school’s archery equipment, half a dozen junior flat bows, with arrows to match, and the same number of more powerful, fibreglass, recurve bows, 25- and 30-pounders, for the seniors. One of these, the biggest of them, belonged to Spinks, a 32-pounder which he used on the longer ranges and which I’d come to shoot with fairly well myself over the past year. I had duplicate keys now, both to this archery equipment and to the sports room itself. So it was that Spinks’ alcoholic and sexual excesses led directly to my own survival a week later.

But before then the headmaster had asked to see me.

‘About Spinks,’ he said, getting up suddenly from the big mahogany table. His study, the best front room of an older Georgian building in the school, looked out over the playing fields. A house cricket match was in progress on one of the far pitches, the white clad figures distant moving spots on the green sward. The headmaster, at the window now with binoculars, gazed at the players lovingly. He’d been something of a cricketer himself, apparently, in his youth, playing for his county.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about Spinks?’ I bad things to do, indeed I should have been out umpiring one end of the cricket match at that very moment. I liked my cricket, too.

The headmaster turned. ‘I don’t want it voiced around: that he was … drunk in charge.’

‘Oh, was he? I didn’t know.’

‘Yes. That wretched car of his.’

‘His car? I understood it all had to do with Matron — in his car.’

The Head looked at me quickly. ‘You heard that?’ he said, alarmed.

‘It’s a rumour.’

‘Worse still.’ The head pulled at one of his long earlobes mournfully.

‘I liked Spinks,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry he’s gone. He was very good with the boys, even when he was drunk.’

‘No good at cricket, though.’

I didn’t point out — and I should have done — that the Head himself, fanatic that he was, normally tried to deal with most of the cricket, certainly with the seniors, leaving Spinks and me to manage all the unwilling or incapable other boys. Spinks himself had told me he’d never been given a chance with the cricket.

I hadn’t respected the Headmaster much before. Now I suddenly disliked him. Spinks had had to do with life, at least, drinking and copulating and thumping most arrows into the gold at fifty metres on a good day. This man and his third-rate school were both concerned only with appearances.

I said to Laura when I got home that evening. ‘The Head’s a fool.’ She was out in the back garden by the stable, helping Clare with the pony.

‘And his school is worse,’ I went on. ‘If you can’t get into Eton or Winchester why bother with any of these other tatty sort of places at all?’

She said nothing. So I added, with a touch of annoyance, ‘I’ll have to get another job.’

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘What?’

It was the old story. Apart from the nonsense of espionage and now fourth-form English, I was unemployable. Oh, I might have held down some awful job in London in advertising or some such. But in the middle of the country?

‘You’ve almost finished that book, haven’t you? About your time in Egypt,’ Laura said.

‘Yes. But they don’t publish books like mine any more: colonial memoirs, amateur history. There’s no market. Only for sex or violence — or Edwardian country diaries.’

I looked out over the pasture behind the cottage, the fine, early evening light piercing through the great lime tree next the church, edging all the fresh green leaves with gold. More than forty I thought, with nothing, professionally, to show for it. A feeling of disappointed ambition came over me. But for what, I wondered? What had I ever really wanted to be? A taxi driver, yes, when I was a frustrated, motor-mad boy during the war and had noticed that, besides doctors, only taxi drivers could get petrol and drive freely all over the place. But apart from that, afterwards? I realised that I’d never wanted to do very much in the world as it had become. I’d fallen into my few jobs or, as with my work in British Intelligence, they’d been forced on me.

I’d seen behind the curtains of British political power — seen the moral vacuum there, the casual mayhem, the violence to no end. And since then I’d compromised with the public face of our morality, too, in the minor public school where I worked, and I saw that now in all its pretentious hypocrisy.

There weren’t any more dashing people left in England, I suddenly decided; only crafty ones. The idealists, the witty drunks, the eccentrics, they were all gone. Decent fools like Spinks, for example, they got the chop every day, while the cunning, the dull and the vulgar prospered. The small men had come to rule.

And since I wasn’t a crusader, lacking the heroic almost entirely, there wasn’t much left for me to do in England, I realised. Without Laura and Clare I would have sold up and gone out to the south somewhere, France or even further afield. But with them I had everything, I saw that then, and the school didn’t matter.

Laura said, ‘Well, you’ll have to stay where you are then, won’t you? For the time being.’

Our lazy Welsh pony leant against the stable door, dozing in the sunlight, almost asleep even though Clare was using the curry-comb, working it vigorously down its flank. She talked to the animal as she combed out the last of its winter coat. He was called ‘Banbury’.

‘Blueberry, Bunbury, Bellberry,’ she chanted with each stroke. She named him differently almost every day. Minty, our wire-haired terrier, had joined us and was lying out now, knowing it to be quite safe, in a sunny spot right beneath the pony’s belly.

Laura said, ‘Why don’t we have a drink when I’m finished here — and forget about the stupid school.’

With happiness, how easy it was not to care a damn in the end about failed ambition or the state of the nation. ‘For the time being,’ Laura had said. And that, certainly, I knew now, was everything.

Of course, what I’ve asked myself since is why David Marcus should have suddenly decided to kill me more than two years after I’d finished all my dangerous business with him. So why take so long to move against me?

I can think of only one answer: as Head of Service now, he’d got wind that I’d started to write about my chequered career in British Intelligence, and thought that I was about to join the ranks of those little sneaks, as he would have seen it, who told tales out of class. Yet there must have been more to it than this: many others, in fact and fiction, had thus publicly betrayed the faith and survived. And especially so, since I’d only written about the very beginning of my career in Cairo, as a schoolteacher, when I’d first become involved in the old Mid-East section there, more than twenty years before. I’d sent a few sample chapters about this to a London publisher some months before. I’d thought it was innocuous stuff, those early days in Cairo, the life of that burnt city just before Suez: how I’d met my first wife there: before she ended up in Moscow a few years later working for the other side. A broken marriage — as well as a smashed and betrayed British network in Egypt. But it was all very old stuff.

Well, it struck me that some publisher’s reader or editor must have seen this autobiographical material and chatted about it, in a London club, to a friend still in the game, who in turn had mentioned it to Marcus or someone close to him.

And that was the rub. If I’d started to talk about my wife, Marcus must have thought, I must one day talk about the other agents and worse, the double agents I’d dealt with. There were other horses from the same stable, later recruits still active, apparently in Moscow’s cause, but in fact serving the west — or what was left of the ‘west’. I knew at least one of their names and even though I’d no intention of ever actually writing about them, I suppose Marcus had decided he couldn’t trust me and my entirely quiet life had to go. Of course, as I see it now, I should never have sent those few chapters of my memoirs to London in the first place. It’s the only time I ever had enough vanity to betray me, for they weren’t very well written anyway, I see that too, now.

Clare was downstairs with us that evening, a Friday, just at the start of our week’s half-term. It was nearly eight o’clock. Had she gone to bed at her usual time she would have been saved some of the pain. But as it was we were all there together, Clare between us, on the big sofa in the drawing-room.

The record-player was on, which was why Clare was late going to bed. She loved music, all sorts, as long as there was a melody, however faint, or a rousing tune to hang on to. It calmed her. Instead of the smell of flowers or lavender stalks, it was the pure sound here which she absorbed in rapt silence, like a fastidious critic, her eyes quite still but alert, as though she was looking backwards into herself, opening channels into the blocked confusion of her mind where the music could flow, miraculously easing the congestion.

She withdrew deeply on these occasions. Indeed the child experts had previously forbidden her music for this reason. What fools they were: she went back into herself, yes, but only to find herself, to make amends, where the line of music could connect the broken circuits, and give her a good vision of herself which was what she most needed. Like all autistic children Clare lacked a sense of self. Oliver! could give this to her, or a good thumping, swirling version of ‘The Blue Danube’.

Our sofa backs onto one of the drawing-room doors, which leads out through a small corridor into the kitchen. Thus we were facing the wrong way. Indeed there would have been no warning at all but for Minty in his basket under the fire canopy, where he slept in summer.

He growled suddenly. I hardly heard him over the saucy duet between Mr Bumble and the Widow Dorney on the Oliver! LP. I was involved myself in any case, correcting an essay by one of my fourth-formers, my mind on the laboured banalities of his ‘Great Experience’, the theme which I had given the boys to write about the previous week. This one had chosen to discuss a rainy, scoreless football match he’d been to during the Easter holidays between Oxford and Banbury United. I remember wondering if his vision wasn’t a bit limited.

Then Minty growled again. I heard him properly now, since the music, at the end of the track, had stopped for a moment, though the others still took no notice. Laura was sewing and Clare was sucking her thumb, looking meek and absorbed, hoping to postpone her bedtime indefinitely. I turned and looked round.

Our drawing-room door has a habit of swinging wide, silently, unexpectedly, if someone opens the back door out of the kitchen and lets the draught through. And it opened now as I watched, as if touched by magic, giving me a clear view down the small corridor into the kitchen.

A thin, tall man was standing there at the end, surprised at his sudden exposure, holding an automatic in a gloved hand. He had a stocking mask pulled over his face, and the collar of an old mud-and-green army anorak rose about his neck. He lifted the gun.

There is always that first moment of total disbelief in a catastrophe — a sense of high farce almost, before one’s stomach drops like a rock and the gut turns over when you know it’s all going to be absolutely real.

But this latter knowledge had barely come to me before the man fired the gun and I could see at once how it had missed me and hit Laura, next to me, in the back, for she hadn’t turned, had never seen the man. She slumped forward, her round sewing-basket spinning like a broken wheel across the floor, just as I stood up, trying to protect her. For I knew, even in those first instants, that it was me the man wanted, not her.

Not her. Not her. My next thought was for Clare. But several seconds must have elapsed, for I don’t remember exactly what happened then. I can just see all the jumbled cotton-reels on the floor — and Laura on all fours like a dog sinking into them. Clare was nowhere. She was no longer on the sofa. She’d disappeared.

I remember it all clearly then — I was over by the drawing-room door, slamming it shut and flattening myself against the brick work. Laura had sunk right forward now on her stomach, lying straight out, her head almost touching the fireplace, and Minty was barking round her, in a panic, as though to wake her. The music was still on — some rousing chorus from the orphans. Then I saw Clare. She’d hidden between the wall and the sofa arm on the far side of the room by the window and was peeking out at us looking at her mother’s fallen body, amazed.

In my arms, I thought Laura must be dying. She couldn’t see me, though her eyes were wide open — eyes fresh as ever, but not seeing now, like a flower that appears to live as beautifully as ever the moment after its stalk is cut. She couldn’t see me and though her mouth was open too, she couldn’t speak; there was blood on her lips, no longer any words.

But I hadn’t the time to watch her die — or die with her, for the door opened and the calm tall man was there again, standing high above us, raising the gun once more.

I rolled out of his aim and kicked the door violently. It caught his arm. I stood up again, rushing the door, throwing all my weight against it, pinning half his body to the jamb. The force I brought to bear on the wood was incredible; the force of murder. The gun fell from his gloved hand as he pulled his body away. I tried to hold him. But I lost.

I could hear him running back through the kitchen. In a moment I had the gun in my hand and was after him out into the back garden with Minty at my heels. It was still twilight, so that I saw him vault the small dry-stone wall to the side of our garden, over into the back of the churchyard. I fired once, as I ran, but the shot went wild.

In the churchyard I could suddenly see much less. The shadow of the building blocked the last of the evening light. The old tombstones cut my shins as I ran. I thought I heard the church door open. But it wasn’t open when I came to it. I went in anyway and switched on all the lights. There was a dry smell of old wood and lime wash. The door leading into the vestry was open. I fired into the black space again as I ran. But I couldn’t find the switch inside and soon I was caught in the dark, surplices and vestments choking round my neck.

I was running then, down the village street — firing the last shots in the revolver wildly about the place, at anything that seemed to move, like a madman.

Laura was dead when the police came. I’d turned her over on the floor but hadn’t the strength to lift her. I was shaking violently, my head jerking about uncontrollably in a state of wild animation.

There was just one young constable, in a police van, who had come first — on his way home, in my direction apparently, when the call had come to him. Together we got the body up onto the sofa and I explained what had happened.

‘Well, go and look for him!’ I shouted at the man then, who did nothing but just look at me warily. ‘After him — in your car. Don’t just stand there!’ I started to clear up all the cotton-reels and buttons and thimbles off the floor, suddenly obsessed that the room should be meticulously clean. But when I came to the blister of congealing blood where Laura had been lying on our green carpet I stopped tidying up and started to shout again.

‘For God’s sake! Someone’s emptied the tea pot all over the floor. Look at this — the filthy pigs. Look at it. Clean it up!’

I remember the expression on the constable’s face then. It wasn’t one of sympathy or understanding. It was more a frightened enmity. And I realised for the first time: he thinks I’m mad. I’ve had the automatic in my hand. He thinks I’ve just killed my wife.

I turned to Clare, who was still crouching behind the arm of the sofa, immobile, her eyes firmly shut now, but her thumb still working furiously in her mouth.

‘Tell them,’ I said. ‘About the man who was here, with the gun, who shot Mummy.’

But Clare said nothing. And when I went to pick her up, to hold her in my arms, I found that her body, though quite unharmed, was absolutely rigid. She remained exactly as she had been against the wall, her legs up against her chest, one arm round her ear, thumb in her mouth: frozen solid.

I turned to the policeman. ‘He was here. In the kitchen, a tall man with a stocking mask. This is his gun. I don’t have a gun. Don’t you see?’ He didn’t.

I heard the ambulance coming then and other sirens behind it. The constable came towards me, diffidently, but with ice in his eyes. ‘Now, if you’ll just put the child down,’ he said. ‘Take it easy and come with us.’

I found calm then, out of the blue. I stopped shaking. I realised my own fingerprints were all over the gun now, that the man with gloves on had escaped and that Clare couldn’t speak or move. Laura was dead and I had killed her. What else could they think?

On impulse I put Clare into the man’s arms, edging round towards the door as I did so. As he took her I pushed the little frozen weight into his body so that he stumbled a fraction. Then I ran, out through the kitchen and into the deeper twilight that had come up all round now. I was across the back garden, over the wall into the pasture before I heard the first shouts behind me. But I knew my way here, the old Roman road leading four miles across country to the school, where the police, men from the bright lights of the local town, would be lost in the gathering dark.

Why did I run? To begin with, at least, I had doubts. It was an added admission of guilt. Besides, even though the man had gloves on, the police must surely have been able to find some other evidence of his presence in the cottage: the marks of violence on the door, fibres from his clothes, a footprint obviously not mine in the back garden.

It was the look on the policeman’s face at first: I knew he didn’t believe me. And in that moment I saw the whole thing clearly as a set-up, by British Intelligence, against me. I’d been framed by them once before — and that had taken me to four years in Durham Jail. Now it was my death they wanted. I was sure of that. And so, despite Clare, I had to run.

I hated doing it, leaving her — but my years involved with David Marcus and his various hit-men and ‘persuaders’ had told me, even in that shocked state, that unless I went, they would see me dead in any case, one way or another: a ‘scuffle’ in some local police station, or an ‘accident’ later in the cells beneath Scotland Yard. There were half a dozen ways. I’d witnessed one of them myself: a Soviet agent they’d taken in London once, whom they failed to ‘turn’. They had worked on him with black bags and wind machines — leaving him mindless at that point, with vomit marks running down the back of his jacket. Later they had put him completely out of his misery. And so, that night, I’d run to avoid any similar fate.

I hadn’t regretted it for long. The next morning and during the days afterwards up in the tree, I’d heard the news on the transistor: they never caught any tall man in an ex-army anorak. They were after me from then on, a brutal wife-killer, starting out then on a vast manhunt through the Cotswolds.

Of course, as I saw at once, that suited Marcus’s book just as well: they would never find his hit-man, so Marcus could now leave me to the ordinary police, the army, allowing them to think I was no more than the commonest sort of criminal. At best, they would kill me; at worst, Durham Jail would claim me again, but for much longer this time. Either way my ‘memoirs’ would not be continued.

But as I ran that night across the dark countryside I remember thinking: I must tell the truth. I must make these notes, as I have done. Thus, apart from Clare, it’s essential that I survive for the time being, which is the only curb on my anger at the moment. I want to get all these basic facts down before I start looking for Clare and before I see what I can do about Marcus and Ross and the others. ‘What I can do.’ What do I mean by that? I want to do to them what they did to Laura. It’s quite simple.

I made for the school because I knew it would be empty during half-term. I’d decided even then, out on the old Roman road, that this was the best means of survival. I thought of Spinks’s sleeping bag and backpack as I ran; I would lie up in the countryside somehow. I’d friends in London and there were other friends of ours in the immediate neighbourhood. But none of them would be any use. The police would see to that. However, if I moved fast, I thought I could get to the deserted school and then away into the more remote open land on the high wolds beyond, before the police thought of going there. And if I was careful, when they did arrive at the school they wouldn’t find any evidence of my visit there, and might perhaps never know I’d gone to ground in the country further afield. It was Spinks’s backpack after all, which wouldn’t be missed when school started again. And Spinks’s 32-pound fibreglass recurve bow as well. I thought of that, too, as I ran.

But the school wasn’t deserted when I got there, breathless, half an hour later. The housekeeper, seeming now to justify all Spinks’s earlier protests, was entertaining. Lights were on in her rooms down by the garages — and the sports room, next the gym, was just beyond her accommodation. An asphalt driveway led past her windows, which were curtained, but as I tiptoed by I could hear the nature of the party well enough: laughter, music, little shrieks, the tinkle of glass. Of course, it might have been the housekeeper’s sister or her maiden aunt inside, but the smart little Renault by one of the garages suggested otherwise — as did the giggling couple who came towards the sports room when I was inside it ten minutes later, just as I was about to leave with Spinks’s equipment and his bow.

I put my foot sharply against the bottom of the door and the rest of my weight against it — hoping they’d no intention of even trying to open it. Why should they in any case? What could these merrymakers want in the sports room?

They wanted something. A key was thrust into the lock and the handle turned an instant later. I lay against the wood, praying I wouldn’t slip.

A young voice spoke, north country, one I knew. ‘That’s funny. It’s stuck.’ It was Ackland, who took junior science, a vastly bearded, recently qualified, north-country youth who, it was rumoured, actually slept in the lab, so keen was he on his job. But he had some other job in mind now.

‘Won’t be a jiffy. You’ll see.’ He tried the lock again.

‘Come on then! Either in or out. Let’s not hang around.’ The young woman was impatient, bossy, with a slurred, partly cultivated voice I’d not heard before.

‘There’s a sleeping bag in here I’m sure. You could use it,’ Ackland whined, pushing at the door with some desperation now, I felt. One of my feet slipped a fraction. I was damp with sweat.

‘But I’m not staying anyway, I told you,’ the woman said, changing her tune. ‘No more one-night stands, thank you. Let’s go back.’

Ackland, like Spinks, was trying to have it away. I cursed him. If Spinks’s lechery a week before had offered survival, Ackland was now about to ruin me.

‘Come on, Ruthie, I’d break the door down, if you wanted me to. I’m sure there’s a bag inside.’

I held my breath. Ackland was a heavy fellow, a lot of puppy-fat beneath the beard. Luckily virtue, if such it was, prevailed. ‘No,’ the bossy woman’s voice came again. ‘No, not with you, in or out of any bag. You think I’m any Tom, Dick or Harry, don’t you, for your pleasure? Let’s go back.’

‘No, Ruthie, only trying to help …’

‘Only trying it on, you mean …’

Their voices faded as they walked away. I realised they must have been pretty drunk, the two of them, which was what made me risk stealing the transistor radio I saw on the top of the dashboard of the Renault as I passed it a few minutes later. The cock-teasing woman wouldn’t miss it until next morning, and when she did she probably wouldn’t bother reporting it. It was worth the risk anyway. Leaving the world, I knew I needed to keep in touch with it. I was coming back after all, I thought, as I made off fast across the school playing fields into the deep countryside beyond.

There was no moon, but with few clouds and approaching mid-summer, it was never completely dark that night. There was still some light away to the west, a fan of dying colour, and I knew my way in this direction, too, from school walks and cross-country runs I’d been in charge of with the boys the previous winter. Beyond the beech coppice where the archery range was, at the far side of the playing fields, I took a line north-west moving through open pasture at first along the top of the eastern ridge of the Evenlode valley. Soon there was a farm lane which sank slightly between hedges, making the going easier: part of an old ridgeway, it ran for several miles towards Chipping Norton, with the farm itself half way along, set high on the wolds.

I gave these buildings a wide berth when I came to the first of them, a big dutch barn looming up in the half-light, bearing off to the left down the valley, through sloping pasture, skirting the long dry-stone walls, streaks of crimson right down on the horizon which still just lit my way.

A flock of sheep stirred uneasily somewhere ahead of me. And then I walked right into them, losing my bearings at the same time. The light in the west disappeared completely and I seemed to be in some dell halfway down the valley, enclosed by the land or by trees, I couldn’t see which, as I moved blindly among the sheep, bumping into their great woolly backsides. They started to bleat and then to move; and then they seemed to mass in great phalanxes about me in the dark, going this way and that, as if increasingly hemmed in by something which I couldn’t see. Their own panic was as great as mine now as I thrashed about among them, trying to find the rise in the ground which would take me back up the valley and give me my original vantage-point. Suddenly the animals seemed to rush me in the dark, all together, pushing and butting as they went, and I went with them, thrust along, upwards at last, where the sheep scattered away all round me and I saw the west again, the dying smears of colour on the horizon.

I ran across the great field, keeping north this time, moving away from the dying light, and within minutes I could see the greater lights of Chipping Norton, isolated like a great ship, moored across the valley ahead of me. I was coming to the end of the ridge at last. The parkland I was making for wasn’t far now; I knew that. It lay a few miles to the south-west of Chipping Norton. There was only a small by-road to cross at the bottom of the valley.

I’d seen the great estate many times from this road, some thousands of private acres rising up to a plateau on another hill, run through with great stands of beech and oak, so thickly wooded, indeed, that it was impossible ever to see the house itself which, though on a rise, was shrouded, even in midwinter, by the huge trees.

This Beechwood Manor and the lands had been bought a few years ago, I’d heard, by some American shipping magnate with a great collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, paintings which the public were never allowed to view. I’d not been there. But I’d noticed these thick woods — and remembered, too, the little eighteenth-century bridge, the balustrades decorated with stone pineapples, which the road crossed as it ran along the borders of the estate. One of the most attractive streams in the Cotswolds rose somewhere in the vast privacy beyond. When the tracker dogs came after me, as they would, I could put the beauty of this brook to an entirely practical use, moving up the water so that the dogs would lose my trail.

A dog barked, several sharp yelps somewhere in the night to my left in the distance as I crouched in the ditch near the bridge. The road was strangely white, an almost luminous ribbon in the last of the light. Water gurgled over stones on the other side of the road, the stream coming from somewhere in the great cavern of trees beyond. Otherwise there was silence. The backpack, with the radio which I’d put inside, had been no trouble; nor had the quiver of arrows on my shoulder. But the long recurve bow, which I’d clutched in my fist all the way, was now an awkward weight in my hand.

I thought: what nonsense — a bow and arrow in this day and age. I saw the innocence of my plan then. England was no wild country now, nor was this Sherwood Forest. I felt the pain of a child suddenly, out too late at night, hopelessly astray, whose dare had failed, who could look forward only to punishment, to foolish disgrace, a loss of innocence.

But another sound came then, behind me from the hills, other dogs faintly calling, the noise hurrying down the still night air towards me.

Without thinking I ran across the road and stumbled into the water on the other side beneath the bridge, and then I was splashing madly up the stream through the canopy of dark trees, my shins bruised and cut once more as I fled. At first I thought it was water from the stream wetting my cheeks. But after a minute, when I’d gone some way into the twilit forest, I realised I was crying. They were tears of anger, though: not regret nor uncertainty any more: anger and annoyance, so that even the tall, closely meshed barbed wire fence that crossed the brook, and which I crashed into twenty yards further on into the woods, didn’t deter me. As soon as I realised it wasn’t electrified, I pushed my way under the lowest strand of wire, ducking right down into the water to do so, soaking myself completely, but wriggling through in the end like a fish escaping up-stream. So much the better for this great fence, I thought. It would deter, if not prevent the police from following me — while tracking away from them, keeping in the water all the time, would kill my scent for the pursuing dogs.