Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.bellobooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Victor Canning

  Dedication

  1. Lightning Strikes Twice

  2. Shelter For Two

  3. A Door is Closed

  4. A Door is Opened

  5. A Change of Colour and Name

  6. Yarra Moves On

  7. The Lost Village

  8. A Happy Event – and Others

  9. A Change of Lodgings

  10. Inquiries Are Being Made

  11. Two Mothers Meet

  12. Smiler Takes Charge

  13. The Sleep-Walker

  14. Hail and Farewell

  Victor Canning

  The Runaways

  Victor Canning was primarily a writer of thrillers, and wrote his many books under the pseudonyms Julian Forest and Alan Gould. Among his immediate contemporaries were Eric Ambler, Alistair Maclean and Hammond Innes.

  Canning was a prolific writer throughout his career, which began young: he had sold several short stories by the age of nineteen and his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934) was published when he was twenty-three. Canning also wrote for children: his The Runaways trilogy was adapted for US children’s television.

  Canning’s later thrillers were darker and more complex than his earlier work and received great critical acclaim. The Rainbird Pattern was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger in 1973 and nominated for an Edgar award in 1974.

  In 1976 The Rainbird Pattern was transformed by Alfred Hitchcock into the comic film The Family Plot, which was to be Hitchcock’s last film. Several of Canning’s other novels including The Golden Salamander (1949) were also made into films during Canning’s lifetime.

  Dedication

  For Duncan, now; and Hugo, later

  1. Lightning Strikes Twice

  It had been raining all night, and all the morning; raining hard all over Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. It was a cold February rain, filling the ditches, swelling the rivers, and stripping the few dead leaves that still clung to the trees. It made quagmires of the cow treads at field gates, spouted over blocked gutters, and flooded the low-lying roads so that passing cars sent up bow waves of spray and soaked unlucky passers-by. Now, at half-past eleven precisely, as Smiler was being driven in a police car under the escort of two burly patrol men, the father and mother of a thunder and lightning storm was brewing overhead. At first it was a few little murmurs, slowly rising to a full-scale roll and rumble of heavy thunder. Suddenly there came a great stabbing, downward sword thrust of lightning that turned the whole world into a blue and yellow dazzle of light.

  Smiler jumped in his seat and cried, ‘Blimey!’

  The policeman alongside him smiled. He said, ‘Nothing to be scared of, son. Just think – if we hadn’t picked you up, you’d be out in it soaked even more.’ He glanced at Smiler’s pile of wet clothes on the floor of the car and then at the blanket-wrapped figure.

  It was a red, yellow and green striped blanket and all that could be seen of Smiler was his head sticking out of the top, his fair hair still wet. Smiler – real name Samuel Miles – was fifteen years and five months old. He had escaped two weeks before from an approved school, and had been picked up that morning by the police. He had been caught because of a tip from a farmer in whose barn he had been hiding (and whose hens’ eggs he had been eating, sucking them raw).

  Smiler wasn’t scared. The lightning had just made him jump, that was all. It took quite a lot to make Smiler scared. Smiler could look after himself. He was tallish and well-built with a friendly, squarish face, a pressed-in smudge of a nose, and a pair of angelic blue eyes that, when he put on his special smile, made him look as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But if Smiler didn’t scare easily there were also a lot of things Smiler didn’t like.

  Smiler didn’t like school, for instance. Particularly he didn’t like approved school and he had run away from it after exactly thirteen days’ and four hours’ residence. Smiler didn’t much care for the country either – not because it scared him or he felt out of place there (Smiler could always make himself at home in new surroundings). He just preferred towns and cities where there were more opportunities for picking up the odds and ends of things that made living tolerable.

  After all, when you were mostly on your own, you had to eat and drink, have a bit of money in your pocket and be able to go to the cinema now and then and treat yourself to a Coke in a café when you felt like company.

  Most of all, he didn’t like the long periods when his father went off to sea. Then, instead of living in lodgings with his father and having a wonderful time, he was always dumped with Sister Ethel and her husband, Albert. Smiler didn’t like living with his married sister and her husband. Not because he didn’t like them. They were all right except when they were fussy about their house and their furniture and grumbled because his hands always marked the paintwork. Also, Smiler didn’t like being idle. He liked doing things. He liked to be busy. The trouble was that people made such a fuss about some of the things he did … Well, like pinching a bottle of milk from a doorstep if he was thirsty, or nicking a comic book from a shop if he felt like reading.

  The driver, eyeing Smiler’s reflection in the interior mirror, grinned and said, ‘You look like a Red Indian in that blanket. Little Chief Sitting Bull.’

  At that moment, two hundred yards ahead of the car, a streak of lightning flared earthwards. It seared itself into the top branches of a tree at the roadside, wreathed its way down the trunk and hit the ground with a crack that made the whole earth shake. A great branch was split from the top of the tree and crashed across the road, blocking it. The police car braked and skidded to a halt twenty yards from the obstruction. A small car coming in the opposite direction was not so lucky. The branch fell a few yards in front of the car. The driver braked hard and the car slewed sideways into the block.

  The two policemen, alert as all good policemen should be in an emergency, jumped out of the patrol car and dashed through the rain to give assistance to the driver of the other car who, as a matter of fact, was more shaken and shocked than injured. It took the two policemen a good three or four minutes to climb over the obstruction and to assure themselves that the driver was in no great distress. It took the driver of the patrol car another few minutes to get back to the car so that he could send out a call to headquarters reporting the road blockage and summoning assistance.

  As he sent out the radio call, he knew that the moment he had finished he would have to add another – reporting the escape again from custody of one Samuel Miles. In the car mirror as he sent his report the policeman could see the back seat. The only evidence that Smiler had ever sat there was a damp patch on the leather. Smiler had gone, his pile of clothes had gone, and so had the blanket!

  Smiler at that moment was three hundred yards away running barefooted along the side of a ploughed field, pelting up the slight slope to a crest of woodland which he could just glimpse through the driving sheets of rain. He ran holding his hands round the tucked-up edges of the blanket, his naked legs and thighs mud and rain splattered. All his clothes and his shoes were gathered in front of him in the blanket.

  As Smiler kept running he was smiling to himself because he was free. This time – because there were some lessons he only had to be given once to remember – he meant to stay free. Just what he would do with his freedom he didn’t know – except that he was going to enjoy it until his father got back from sea. When his father returned he knew he would quickly clear up the whole mess and misunderstanding that had sent him off to reform school. And heaven alone knew where his father was at this moment, somewhere on the high seas, cooking away for the crew or maybe giving them a tune from his mouth-organ on the after-deck.

  As Smiler disappeared into the rain-shrouded countryside, the second policeman returned to the car, took one look at the back seat and said, ‘He’s hopped it!’

  ‘Gone,’ said the other. ‘ With our blanket. Do we go after him?’

  ‘In this weather? And with this mess on the road? Not likely. Anyway, he won’t get far when the call goes out for him.’ The policeman grinned and said jokingly, ‘Wanted, Little. Chief Sitting Bull. Height five feet six inches, fair-haired, blue-eyed, age fifteen plus, wearing a red, green and yellow blanket – or wet blue jeans, grey shirt and brown jacket. Approach with caution. This man is dangerous.’ He paused, thought for a moment, and added, ‘I forgot. Addition to description. Wanted person’s face is heavily freckled.’

  ‘Funny thing,’ said the other, ‘you don’t often see boys with such freckled faces these days, do you? They seem to have gone out of fashion or something.’

  As the two policemen went back to the road block to try and clear it, Smiler reached the cover of the woods at the top of the hill. He crashed into the undergrowth like a rocket and put up a couple of pheasants that flew away, honking and screeching with alarm. The noise so startled Smiler that he slipped and fell flat on his face. Because of the effort of his clumsy running and the loss of the little win
d he had left from the fall, he lay there panting like a stranded fish. For the few moments while he rested, getting his breath back, Smiler gave himself a talking-to. He was a great one for talking to himself in moments of crisis. He lectured himself now, face close to the wet, leaf-littered ground.

  ‘Samuel M.,’ he said (Smiler was other people’s name for him and he didn’t care much for it. It was a silly kind of punning joke on his name. He preferred Samuel M. because that was what his father called him.), ‘you got to think this out. You’re wet and muddy and half naked. Your clothes is all soaked and your belly’s rumbling a bit now and then because all you’ve had in the last two days is them eggs just raw and nothing to write home about. You are wanted by the police. Like a real criminal, which you aren’t. It was never you that took the old lady’s handbag. Thing Number One, then. Them cops down there won’t follow you, not in this weather with that accident to look after. Good. Thing Number Two. You got to get warmed up, fed, and into hiding. You got to look for a safe and sheltered anchorage where you can get everything stowed shipshape and work out a new course. And, Thing Number Three is you’d better get them wet clothes on. Just wearing a coloured blanket is going to make you stand out like a Catherine wheel against a tarred fence.’

  So Smiler got to his feet. Stark naked under the leaden, rain-deluging sky, he began to pull on his wet blue jeans. As he struggled with them, hissing with effort through his teeth at their awkwardness, there was a massive bellow of thunder from away to the west and the whole sky was lit with another blaze of lightning, slashing earthwards. This time, though Smiler could not know it, the lightning was doing exactly the same for another prisoner as the previous bolt from the blue had done for him. Ten miles away, northwest of the wood in which Smiler was dressing and about four miles a little southwest of the Wiltshire town of Warminster, was the large country estate and ancestral home of the Marquis of Bath. The mansion was called Longleat House and the estates around it Longleat Park. Part of the park had been turned into a wild animal reserve. Every day of the year cars rolled into Longleat Park bringing tourists to see the treasures of the beautiful Longleat House and also to see the Lions of Longleat and the other animals which were kept in huge, penned-in stretches of the parkland. Every day cars moved around the road which twisted and twined through the high-fenced animal enclosures.

  The road ran first through the East African section which held giraffes, zebras, ostriches, and antelopes; and then on through the monkey jungle with its baboons that often cadged free rides on top of the cars; and so into the lion reserve where, the kings of beasts sometimes lay lazily across the roadway refusing to move out of the path of the cars until the mood took them. Finally the car procession entered the cheetah area.

  Today because it was February, and a storm- and rain-filled day, there were no more than three or four cars in the whole animal reserve. At this moment there was none in the cheetah, section. In fact, there were few animals out in the enclosures either. They no more liked the rain and the storm than human beings. The baboons were in their dugouts and the lions in their wooden pens or stretched out on the sheltered verandahs of their huts. In the cheetah reserve all the cheetahs were under shelter in their huts – all, except one.

  This cheetah was a female. Her name was Yarra. All the cheetahs in the enclosures had names … Apollo, Chester, Lotus, Suki, Tina and Schultz. Yarra was a full-grown female. She weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She stood nearly three feet high to her narrow, raking shoulders and from the point of her black nose to the tip of her long tufted tail she measured seven feet and one inch. Yarra was a good-tempered animal. She had been captured as a cub in Africa, brought to Germany and from there to Longleat Park.

  She was a magnificent animal. Under the rain the spots on her tawny orange coat were as black as small wet coals. The dark lines of her face maskings, running from inside the eyes down around her muzzle, were boldly drawn charcoal lines. Her throat and underbelly were creamy white, and her eyes tawny gold. As she moved she swung her long tail from side to side, flicking little sprays of rain from the tuft at its end.

  When the Cheetah Warden came into the enclosure in his Land-Rover and Yarra felt in the mood she could jump in one easy long-flowing movement to the top of the driving cab. Sometimes, to give the cheetahs exercise, the warden towed a trail rope from the back of the Land-Rover with a piece of meat tied to it for the cheetahs to chase. Even though he accelerated to forty miles an hour yarra could easily keep up. If he had gone at sixty miles an hour she could have held pace with the car for a while.

  Today Yarra was strangely restless. The rain and the thunder and lightning had increased her restlessness. It was not the restlessness that overcame her and the other cheetahs when, from time to time, they marked with their keen sight the movement of guinea fowl, partridge, pheasant or young deer moving on the free slopes of the parkland outside the enclosure. At those times they raced to the wire fence, longing for the freedom of the hunt and the chase, only to turn back and stalk the length of the wire, stubby ears alert, the desire for complete liberty moving hot and strong through their powerful bodies.

  Now, something else had made Yarra restless and she did not know what it was. All she knew was that where normally she would have taken shelter from the rain, she now wanted to remain outside, moving up and down the long line of the boundary fence. Up and down, up and down she stalked. The fence was strong and made of two-inch iron mesh. It was over twelve feet high with an inwards overhang at the top, and it was supported on strong wooden poles with here and there a large concrete support to give added strength. Inside the outer fence, a few feet from it, was another fence, about four feet high. Yarra and any of the other cheetahs could have jumped this inner fence easily, but they never did. What was the point of jumping this fence when it was clear that the outer one was a barrier that could never be overleaped?

  There was a low rumble of thunder from above and a stronger burst of rain that slashed into Yarra’s face. She sat down on her haunches close to the inner fence, shook her head and blinked her eyes against the rain scud. She remained there, sitting upright like a sphinx, her eyes on the long grass slope outside the high fence, marking the low flight across it of a bedraggled rook. The slope ran upwards to a patch of ploughed land and then on to a wood that marked its crest. Here and there a fir tree stood out stark, glossy green against the February blackness of the other trees.

  Another rumble of thunder broke out above and Yarra moved on, her restlessness eating into her. She lowered her fore quarters almost to the ground. Raking with her hind legs at the wet and muddy grass, she sent little clods of earth flying into the air. She turned her head sideways, seeing the cheetah hut at the bottom of the enclosure. Closer was a great fallen oak tree which the cheetahs used as their playground. She opened her jaws, flexing the skin back over her teeth and gums, and gave a long half-snarling, half-hissing sound that ended in a short, snapping spit.

  It was at this moment, as Smiler was pulling up his wet jeans over a wet shirt ten miles away, that the sky above burst with an earth-shaking roar of thunder. A great bolt of lightning was loosed through the low-hanging clouds, setting the grey day ablaze with vivid light.

  The lightning hit the outer fence of the cheetah enclosure ten yards below Yarra. It ran in an exploding aura of blue fire the length of the wire mesh. It found the metal bolts in a concrete support and ripped fence and support from the ground as though a great hand had smashed and flung them down. The falling top half of the support flattened the low inner fence a yard from Yarra. She leapt, snarling with fright, into the air. Her nostrils were charged with the smell of burning from the lightning strike. She came down from her panic bound on top of the collapsed outer section of the boundary fence. As thunder rolled angrily again she was gone, her whole body, every nerve in her, impelled by fear and shock. She streaked away up the grassy slope towards the wood in a wild, fast-leaping run, moving like a tawny-gold streak at top speed.

  Within thirty seconds of leaving the cheetah enclosure she was in the wood on the hill crest, the first burst of fierce speed dead in her. She found a small path and moved along it, trotting now. Fear and panic were easing from her. With her fright and shock gone, she now found the strange restlessness she had known all day still with her. She gave herself over to it in a way she could never have done in the enclosure because she was at liberty.