PURSUIT
Chapter 6 - Discovery
When I tried the handle, I was surprised to find that the window opened, albeit rather stiffly. As I poked my head outside, however, the first thing I noticed was the roof of the building sloping steeply away from me. Although I might have been able to get out of the window, it was quite impossible to scale that precipitous roof.
Below, in the yard, I could see two cars - the one in which we had travelled and, next to it, my own. Shifting position slightly and concentrating hard, I managed to make out that the ignition key was still in my car, presumably in readiness should my goalers needed to make a hasty exit. The knowledge that, not many feet below me but quite out of reach, my own vehicle was ready to flee in an instant made my predicament even more frustrating.
Then I looked beyond what I could see of the immediate grounds. The house, which seemed to be some kind of farmhouse, was fairly well concealed by a large number of tall trees but, this being late September after a recent fairly long, dry but windy spell, many of them had begun to shed their leaves and there were gaps where I could see further out. Through one of these gaps I could just discern part of a roadsign and, although it was some distance away, it still looked large. By its blue colour, I judged it was a motorway roadsign and, as I followed the level on which this appeared, I could make out part of another one, rather more distantly, though one of the other gaps in the early autumn foliage.
All the time I had been at the window, my subconscious had registered that there was an occasional low background hum and, with the discovery of the roadsigns, it dawned on me that the noise I could hear must come from vehicles, at a distance, travelling at speed. I realised then that the farmhouse was not remote at all but was actually fairly close to a motorway, possibly even - given the roadsigns I could see - a motorway junction. This knowledge both encouraged and angered me. The thought that my enemies had a hidden retreat, close to fast lines of communication and that, although my car was ready and waiting, I could not escape made me fume. I had to walk around the attic to calm down.
My prison was not as bare as I had at first thought. Over in one corner was a pile of what looked like chemical apparatus and, under some old dustsheets, a number of large, rusty, industrial type chemical drums. As I peered through the gloom in that corner and carefully examined my find, all the instincts of my pharmaceutical training and experience came alive. I was poking about further when a sharp, acrid smell from outside the room stopped me in my tracks. In a fraction of a second, though, I was again moving, this time diving across the room to the window to shut it. As I fumbled with the latch through watery eyes and managed to close the grubby pane, the choking effluvia became so strong I could almost taste it. I pressed my handkerchief up against my mouth and, retreating to the furthest recess of the room, tried to breath through the material for a few minutes. When, eventually, I took a tentative sniff of the air, the odour seemed to have diminished. I opened the window again and, sure enough, the air was now cool and fresh. I sat down on the bare boards to think.
What had just happened, when coupled with my discovery of the discarded instruments of chemical experimentation and that parcel of powder which my enemies had been so keen to obtain, could mean only one thing. I was in a drug making factory and a highly illicit one at that. The overpowering smell I had just encountered was obviously that of my enemies carrying out one of the periodic releases of pent-up fumes from their illegal operations. They had probably directed these up one of the chimneys of the building which was why I, up in the attic on chimney stack level, had caught the full effects of these noxious gases.
I began to speculate on how their operation was run and how they worked the link, clearly through Keith Rowdon, with my own employer. Was there a regular shipment sent up the motorway to this makeshift factory? If so, why had I been chosen as the carrier of their raw material? More pressingly, now that I knew about the gang and their criminal activities, what would they do with me? What would happen when "Mike" arrived?
This latter thought made me prospect again a possible escape route but the roof, when I peered out once more, looked - if anything - even steeper! What I really needed, of course, was a rope of some sort: that at least might help me lower myself across the tiles, over the edge and down the side of the building. Yet to wish for a rope seemed a forlorn hope. I looked around vaguely for some sort of inspiration. There were only the dusty floorboards, the stark walls and ceiling and, tucked away in the corner, that spent chemical paraphernalia.
Then I could sight of the dustsheets I had moved aside and immediately grasped their potential. I wrenched one up and, in doing so, upset one of the metal drums which toppled to the floor with a resounding bang and slowly rolled across the bare wood. I stood like a statue in the silence which followed, waiting for my captors to run up the stairs to see what I was doing. After a few moments of intense listening I relaxed a little; nobody was coming.
I now went to work in earnest on those sheets. A couple of the old drums, where they had rusted, held jagged edges along part of their circumferences and I hastily used these to start slitting the sheets into lengths. The hems were a problem for they were rather thick but by working them backwards and forwards over the sharp metal and then standing on one end of the material whilst pulling hard at the other, I managed to sever the threads and ended up with a number of respectable lengths of cloth.
If I were to twist these I thought they might prove a little stronger but, when I experimented, the twists would not stay in place so I merely tied each piece to the next with the strongest knot I could possibly manage. As the length of my self manufactured rope grew, I tested each knot and coiled the remainder at my feet. I was by no means certain that what I had produced would be sufficiently long to enable me to reach the ground. I therefore tied the end as firmly as possible around the window catch to give me the maximum length down - I just prayed that the catch would bear my weight.
Looking down, I could not determine just where I was likely to come to earth and, more importantly, whether my route of descent would pass any windows of rooms which might be occupied. I would just have to take the chance of being spotted from inside the building and hope that, if this happened, I would be able to jump the last few feet and race to my car before any weapons were pointed in my direction. With a last look round I knelt on the windowsill and slowly eased my legs out to sprawl flat on the pitching roof, holding the coil of material in both hands. Then I gradually eased the rope out and began to move down the gradient of the roof.
© Richard Farquharson, Maulden, Bedfordshire June 2017