PURSUIT
Chapter 7 - Disaster
As I slowly and awkwardly descended, for some reason I became aware of how hungry and thirsty I was. I had not taken any sustenance since my breakfast with Peter and the giddiness which I now felt and the dryness in my mouth were, I was sure, due as much to lack of food and drink as to my present, dangling, predicament.
I had a pang of indecision: had I been too hasty? Perhaps my captors had realised I might need some sustenance and maybe even now one of them was mounting the stairs to the attic to bring me some victuals. This thought made me redouble my efforts to get down as quickly as I could and I struck out again towards the guttering.
My thoughts had caused a momentary lapse in concentration and this made me strike my foot against a loose tile. With a sickening, grating sound it shot down the roof and over the edge. I did not hear it hit the ground; it must have landed amongst some plants but the noise it made whilst briefly bumping over the other tiles must, I thought, surely bring out a search party. I waited agonisingly for something to happen and, as I did so, heard one of the knots higher up in my makeshift rope begin to creak.
I could not afford to delay a moment longer - search party or no I must get to the ground before my lifeline broke.
A few seconds later my feet were dangling over the edge of the guttering and I began to let my rope out more quickly, hand over hand. I could see the front door of the farmhouse now and, mercifully, my path down would take me between it and the lower windows. There was no sign of any movement below me, so I dropped quickly to the very end of my rope, which suspended me only about three feet from the ground. As I jumped and landed on an untidy flower border, I heard a cry from high above me. Without looking up, I raced across the yard to my car, jumped in, slammed the door and held my breath while I turned the ignition key.
The car started first time. I rammed it into gear, began to pull away and slewed down the drive. As I did so, I caught sight in the rear-view mirror of the trail of sheeting handing from a high window in the dwelling's roof, of a man leaning out of this window and waving furiously and, just as I reached a bend in the drive, two men running from the house carrying guns.
There had been no time to allow me to disable the other vehicle in some way. As I reached the end of the drive, which adjoined a narrow country lane, I heard the sound of gunshot.
I turned left and, after a few hundred yards, saw that the lane I was in joined a wider road. As I wrenched at the steering wheel, I glimpsed in my mirror the other car turn out of the farmhouse drive in hot pursuit. Somebody was hanging out of the passenger side with a gun pointed straight towards me. Just as my car slid onto the the main road, I heard another shot - closer now.
The race was on. With my right foot flat down on the accelerator, I sped in the direction of the roadsign I had seen from my prison, all the time keeping half an eye on my rear-view mirror. Being a Sunday afternoon there was little traffic around, which was just as well for, although I had fleetingly looked for approaching vehicles when I had turned into the wider road, my momentum was such that I could not have stopped had there been any cars close by.
Then I saw it. A roadsign on my left flashed past and I just had time to see on it the words "M1 South". There was a roundabout up ahead which I made for but suddenly the car's wing mirror, just a few inches away to my right, shattered into a thousand pieces. The enemy vehicle behind me was now closing and a bullet fired from this had gone right into the offside mirror. The next shot was bound to be on target but I had reached the roundabout now and was just able to screech round this out of the direct line of fire. At that split second I made a decision which could mean instant death.
I realised that these were ruthless men behind who would stop at nothing to silence me, despite the dangers of being seen by other motorists. If I headed along the motorway, as had been my plan, they would only continue to follow me, perhaps taking pot shots when lack of surrounding traffic permitted. Also, I didn't know what other resources they might be able to summon to their support. To outdistance them I somehow had to go where they could not, or would not, follow. As I hared round that roundabout, I saw what I had to do. I threw the car into a sharp left hand turn and sped down a slip road onto the motorway. It was make or break time now alright, for the decision I had made and the deliberate action I had just taken was sending me along the motorway in the wrong carriageway - straight into the path of oncoming traffic.
It was the only thing I could do. I risked almost certain death from a head-on collision but, had I travelled along the motorway in the correct carriageway, my enemies would be determined to catch me and silence me before I could reach a police patrol. Now, every police car in the region would be alerted to the fact that some maniac was travelling the wrong way along the motorway, so there was at least a very slight chance that the police would reach me before an oncoming driver did. My choice also had one other benefit in that if my pursuers decided to follow me along the opposite carriageway, shadowing me by moving with the flow of traffic, I would be able to stop the car and hopefully try to manoeuvre it round, leaving them stranded on the other side of the motorway's central reservation.
However, as I glanced again into my mirror, I saw that my ruse had been a match for their tenacity because the other car, incredibly, had also turned behind me into the path of the oncoming traffic and was once again closing in.
Ahead, lights were flashing at me, horns were sounding and, at what seemed a fearsome speed, cars were slewing either side of me and streaming past. I simply had to try and shake my enemies off my tail for they were now, on the dead straight road, able to line me up in their gunsights exactly. As I quickly glanced backwards I saw a small flash of light and the next instant I knew their bullet had hit my car. The steering suddenly went haywire and I fought furiously to regain control of the vehicle, which was now swinging wildly across the carriageways. I had no further time to look back; there were cars and a van coming straight towards me, overtaking each other and taking up all three carriageways. I had no control over my car and was nearly on them when the van ahead suddenly saw me and took desperate evasive action. I closed my eyes for a moment and, when I opened them, I remember seeing the verge of the motorway and the steep bank racing straight towards me. As I frantically pulled at the wheel and tried to brake, my vehicle spun round and I had a fleeting glimpse of the enemy car ploughing full tilt into the van which had just missed me by inches. As a fireball from the collision reached out across the carriageways, my own car struck the bank and my head crashed against the steering wheel.
© Richard Farquharson, Maulden, Bedfordshire June 2017