Free Appleby Plays Chicken by Michael Innes

he said. And he jumped from the car and ran.
    Of course they wouldn’t pause to hold any reckoning with the girl; there would be no conceivable sense in that. Indeed they would probably deviate from the road in order to avoid her, and he would himself gain quite a number of yards as a result. There could be only one reason why the stranger was persisting in this desperate pursuit: he just couldn’t risk David’s getting away and being in a position subsequently to identify him. And his whole instinct would be to avoid the observation of anybody else. He would certainly give the girl – and whatever other casual wayfarers might come along – as wide a berth as he could.
    So David ran on with a tolerably easy mind, and with an imagination less inclined to extravagant flights about the immediate future. They couldn’t, surely, follow him into even the most miserable hamlet, because as soon as they attracted any sort of notice the whole basis of their present operation lapsed. And it was impossible that he now had far to go. The track was rising steeply before him, and he guessed that when he reached the top he would look down a corresponding slope upon a scatter of chimneys and rooftops perhaps no more than half a mile away. He’d certainly make that. For he had been wrong about his legs. They were still not in the least indisposed to do just what he intended them to. He shortened his pace to cope with the gradient and went up it not too badly. And sure enough there was the little village, in full view below. Beyond it he could see fields and trees. He had got to the verge of the moor.
    Well, he never wanted to see it again. Remembering to think about his breathing, he opened out a bit, as he might have done at the end of a big cross-country effort. And then, behind him, he heard a car. It sounded as if it was coming at a great speed, although the road certainly wasn’t a good one for fast driving. Indeed it wasn’t much of a road for motoring at all – a fact that had made the presence of the girl rather surprising. But no doubt it cut off a corner of the moor, and got a certain amount of traffic on that account.
    David glanced over his shoulder as he continued to run. But the brow of the hill he had just come over cut off his view, and the car was almost upon him as soon as it was visible. It wasn’t an unknown car; it was the girl’s. She must have got it going after all, and be proposing to make up for its previous failure by coming on rapidly to pick him up. David drew to the side of the road, halted and turned. It was only then that he had a full view. And he saw that it wasn’t the girl who was driving. It was the stranger.
    The next seconds were completely confused. The car swerved on the road. David was just supposing that the stranger’s pace had caused him to lose control of the steering when he found himself acting in a way that seemed utterly uncontrolled itself. Entirely without conscious calculation, he had flung himself off the road and head over heels down a gentle slope that flanked it. There was a roar in his ears, and heather whipped his face as the wheels missed him by inches. He scrambled up, breathless and bewildered. The car was thirty yards ahead, stationary and canted over in what seemed a shallow ditch. The stranger and another man were climbing out. There was no sign of the girl.
    For an instant the affair took, for David, one of its unpredictable dips into the ludicrous. His assailants, heaving themselves to the ground after just failing to bring off another murder, looked merely absurd, like unfortunate minor actors compelled to hazardous roles in some slapstick comedy. But if this persuasion suggested that David had gone a bit light-headed, the attack fortunately didn’t last. He got himself on the road again – which was something the car didn’t look likely to manage – and ran. He ran, rather faster than he had yet run, back the way he came.

 
     
8
     
    For there was