Free Ossian's Ride by Fred Hoyle Page A

packing my rucksack. The sooner I could get away from the Unicorn Hotel and from Mr. Houseman the better. Three times I had been asked by the hotel staff for my passport. Each time I had stalled—I hadn’t the smallest intention of handing it over. I knew Houseman, with his own background to consider, would never bring in the police, but he must already be aware that I was someone to be watched.
    By a miracle Cathleen had managed to find what she wanted. She came in breathing fast, with a file of papers clutched in her arms.
    “Let me put them in the rucksack.”
    She handed them over more trustingly than she should have.
    “Come along quickly now. We can creep out by the back way.”
    Maybe we could and maybe we couldn’t. As it turned out, we could. The point of course was that at this hour, 10 P.M., Houseman was heavily engaged in the bar. It would be at least an hour before business became lighter, and maybe it would be another hour or two before he discovered the loss of the papers. Perhaps he wouldn’t even find out until morning.
    Cathleen had a couple of bikes ready in the lane outside. “Give over the rucksack to me, and you take this,” she said, handing me a spade. I noticed that she had a blanket in the carrier on the front of her machine. The next part of our joint enterprise was grimly obvious.
    We cycled silently out of the town. I led the way back without difficulty, for it is curious how easily one remembers every detail of a road along which one has walked, in pitiful contrast to the hurrying motorist who sees little and remembers little.
    We found the wood again, left our bicycles where the car had been parked, forced our way through the undergrowth. He was still lying exactly as I had left him. I held one of the cycle lamps for Cathleen to lift my sleeping bag. She made no cry, but looked for perhaps half a minute.
    “Poor Mickey boy,” she whispered, and then added in a small voice choked with passion, “I’ll get them for this.”
    In turn she held the light for me while I dug his grave. Once the spade had cut through the surface turf the ground was rich and soft. I guess it must have taken about an hour before I had excavated a trench about three feet deep. We wrapped him in the blanket and lowered him gently. She wept as I filled in the soil again and replaced the grassy turf.
    I put my arm around her shoulders and led her back to the bicycles. We started off along the road, but we hadn’t gone far before I saw that the girl was exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Clearly we couldn’t ride all through the night. Equally clearly we couldn’t go back to the Unicorn Hotel. It would be best to get a few miles away from the wood, and then lay up until morning.
    We rode along rather shakily for the first mile or two. I had of course discarded the spade and was able to give Cathleen a bit of a push, but it wasn’t at all easy in the blackness. Then surprisingly she began to go along on her own steam, and after a while she took the lead.
    “Have you any idea where you’re going?”
    “I want to go to Morag’s cottage” was the reply.
    Since I had no idea of the whereabouts of Morag’s cottage I had no choice but to follow along. We rode back almost into Longford, but cut away on the east side, crossed the wide main road to Mullingar, and a mile or two farther on started down an unsurfaced lane. There was a solitary cottage rather more than half a mile along.
    An old woman answered our knock. When she saw Cathleen she exclaimed, “Mother of God, what an hour to be on the road!”
    While Cathleen went inside and told the old woman whatever she wished to tell her, I stood outside examining the approaches to the cottage. I put the bikes where we could readily get them onto the road again if we should be in a hurry, for truth to tell I didn’t like this cottage business. When he found his papers to be missing, Houseman was certain to begin a frenzied search.
    I didn’t know of course