[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter (электронная книга .txt) 📗

A moment later the sound of running feet receded into the distance.

"April! Are you all right, April?" Mark Slate was shouting. Before the voice had died away the bulk of his body had blotted out the faint rectangle of less intense darkness which marked the doorway.

"Yes, yes, I'm all right," the girl said quickly, taking his arm. "What happened?"

"Came up the side of the hut, feinted one way to draw his fire, closed with him — and then found he was more than a match for me... Unarmed combat," Slate panted. "Threw me against the wall... got away…"

"Which way did he go?"

"Towards the gates. Do we follow?"

"Of course we do. If he's heading downhill, for the town, I've learned a shortcut that may cut down his lead a bit," April cried. "Come on!"

From the booth, they raced out of the shadows and into the patch of light thrown by the street lamp, skirted the round about, and plunged into an alley of blackness between the Big Top and the caravans. Several of the trailers now had lights in their windows and in one of them a querulous voice, its owner obviously awakened by the shots, was raised in protest. In the other direction, a bobbing flashlight advancing from the gates charted the lumbering progress of the policeman who had been left on night duty. He must have seen them flit across the pool of light, for above the clamour of the wind they heard him call out to them to stop, and the torch altered course m their favour.

"Never mind about him," April panted. "Here, between these two tents and across the car park."

They pelted down between the rows of bulging fenders and tarnished chrome, to reach a wire fence which proved to be on top of a bank. Fifteen feet below them, the road curved around the end of the property and plunged on down towards the town.

Closely followed by Slate, April sprinted up to the fence, placed a hand on one of the concrete posts, and vaulted over. After a headlong rush down the bank, they pulled up in the middle of the road and listened. "If he did come this way, he should still be in earshot," the girl whispered. "If not — if he went on up hill towards the Falmouth road — we might as well give up and go home. . .

The wind was now blowing strongly and steadily into their faces. From below, reverberated the incessant booming of the waves. Above and behind them voices were shouting. To one side, something on a hinge creaked and swung as the breeze freshened then subsided.

And ahead, faint but unmistakable, there was the sound of running feet.

Without another word, they set off in pursuit. The road angled down between rows of thatched cottages, turned to burrow under a bridge that had once carried the railway to Porthallow, and slanted more steeply still past a line of shops whose stepped pavement was protected by an iron railing.

The dark patches which lay between the pools of light cast by the widely-spaced street lamps were not so shadowy that they could hide a human being, and they could see the street stretching emptily ahead all the way down to the central square with its bandstand. Yet the pounding of their quarry's feet was still clearly audible.

"I know!" Mark exclaimed. "There's an alley that runs parallel with this street. He must have cut through between two of the cottages and taken that. Come on!"

As they ran, the moon rode out from behind a cloud and the sea appeared improbably above the roofs in silver-grey. At the foot of the hill, a figure detached itself from the shadows, streaked across the square and disappeared behind the band stand. "There he is!" the girl called. "After him!"

By the bandstand, they pulled up and listened again. For a moment, they could only hear the wind and the sea, much louder now, and then again the sound of hurrying footsteps echoed into the night.

But which way had he gone? To their left, Fore Street stretched emptily towards the harbour, awash with yellow sodium light. Ahead was the evergreen foliage of the ornamental gardens, tossing in the breeze, with the bulk of the lifeboat station flattened into a cardboard cut-out by the moon. And on the right was Market Street, curving back up the opposite side of the valley.

Before they could make up their minds, the footsteps abruptly ceased.

"The beach, of course!" Mark cried. "He's gone down to the cove!... Look, if we can hear him, he can obviously hear us. Okay?... Right. Well, he'll realise we must be following him by ear rather than by sight, so what's he going to do? He's going to make sure he goes somewhere where his footsteps won't sound, isn't he?"

"I guess you're right at that, bright boy. And what better for deadening footsteps than a nice stretch of sand!"

"Exactly."

"How do we go, then? Which street did he take?"

"Not a street proper. Another of these alleys the amateur photographers find so enchanting. It twists down behind the Customs House and ends in a flight of steps leading to the bathing beach. There's also a way through to the harbour — past the pub I'm staying at."

"Okay," the girl said. "We'll give it a tumble. Once again: let's go."

They ran across the deserted square and into a dark passage cleaving a huddle of ancient houses. Parked cars choked the first hundred yards on one side, and then the thoroughfare became too narrow for wheeled traffic. Soon, they clattered on to a small space behind the Customs and Excise building and there was only a stone wall between them and the sea.

Mark ran to the steps leading down to the beach and halted. The wind snatched at his hair and he had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the waves. "He forgot that even though you can't hear footsteps in the sand, you can see them!" he cried. "Look!"

It was low tide, and the sand stretched, virgin and untrodden, to the line of breakers creaming against the cliff on the far side of the cove.

"Unless he's taken a dive and intends to swim for the Channel Islands, then, it's got to be the harbour," April said. "Watch out when we go down, though. He's probably reloaded and he may be lurking behind a boat, waiting to take a shot at us. We'd be sitting targets from below, silhouetted against this sky with the moon out, wouldn't we?"

Thirty years ago, there had been three dozen fishing boats in Porthallow harbour. Small coasters could tie up against the original jetty and a packet had plied between Falmouth, Porthallow, Penzance and the Scillies. Today, only five fishing boats remain and the harbour is too shallow even for the smallest coasting steamer. The rivers, foul with industrial pollution, which have driven away the fish from their inshore breeding grounds and robbed the fishermen of their traditional livelihood, have also silted up the cove. And now, despite Smiley's Pier, the second arm enclosing the tiny port built in 1938, the whole harbour is drained and empty at low tide.

There was a lacework of foam rolling to a halt between the two stone piers marking the entrance as April and Slate, seizing their opportunity while the moon was behind a cloud, scrambled down the steps opposite the Crabber's Delight. But the whole of the rest of the port was firm, dry sand, shelving gently down towards the one shallow channel of water which remained in the lee of the main breakwater.

From the foot of the stairway, they could make out a single line of footprints zigzagging away between the stranded hulls of yachts lying on their sides like beached porpoises.

Taking advantage of every scrap of shadow, they dodged from boat to boat, picking their way over hawsers and drooping anchor chains hung with seaweed, skirting the buoys which marked the moorings rented by the amateur sailors who were now the port's chief source of revenue, pausing by the dinghies the receding tide had left pointing in every direction. Down here, below the sheltering walls, the wind was only a whine in rigging slanted against the sky somewhere above their heads, and the sound of waves was a distant roar from the world out side. There was a moisture in the air and a pungent and fishy smell on every side.