Eye of the Needle(53)
“I hope you catch him,” Emma called.
Jessie saw him out. She was still clutching the shotgun. At the door she caught Bloggs’s sleeve and said in a stage whisper, “Tell me—what is he? Escaped convict? Murderer? Rapist?”
Bloggs looked down at her. Her small green eyes were bright with excitement. He bent his head to speak quietly in her ear. “Don’t tell a soul,” he murmured, “but he’s a German spy.”
She giggled with delight. Obviously, she thought, he saw the same movies she did.
17
FABER CROSSED THE SARK BRIDGE AND ENTERED Scotland shortly after midday. He passed the Sark Toll Bar House, a low building with a signboard announcing that it was the first house in Scotland and a tablet above the door bearing some legend about marriages which he could not read. A quarter of a mile farther on he understood, when he entered the village of Gretna; he knew this was a place runaways came to get married.
The roads were still damp from the early rain, but the sun was drying them rapidly. Signposts and nameboards had been re-erected since the relaxation of invasion precautions, and Faber sped through a series of small lowland villages: Kirkpatrick, Kirtlebridge, Ecclefechan. The open countryside was pleasant, the green moor sparkling in the sunshine.
He had stopped for petrol in Carlisle. The pump attendant, a middle-aged woman in an oily apron, had not asked any awkward questions. Faber had filled the tank and the spare can fixed to the offside running board.
He was very pleased with the little two-seater. It would still do fifty miles an hour, despite its age. The four-cylinder, 1548 cc side-valve engine worked smoothly and tirelessly as he climbed and descended the Scottish hills. The leather-upholstered bench seat was comfortable. He squeezed the bulb horn to warn a straying sheep of his approach.
He went through the little market town of Lockerbie, crossed the River Annan by the picturesque Johnstone Bridge, and began the ascent to Beattock Summit. He found himself using the three-speed gearbox more and more.
He had decided not to take the most direct route to Aberdeen, via Edinburgh and the coast road. Much of Scotland’s east coast, either side of the Firth of Forth, was a restricted area. Visitors were prohibited from a ten-mile-wide strip of land. Of course, the authorities could not seriously police such a long border. Nevertheless, Faber was less likely to be stopped and questioned while he stayed outside the security zone.
He would have to enter it eventually—later rather than sooner—and he turned his mind to the story he would tell if he were interrogated. Private motoring for pleasure had virtually ceased in the last couple of years because of the ever-stricter petrol rationing, and people who had cars for essential journeys were liable to be prosecuted for going a few yards off their necessary route for personal reasons. Faber had read of a famous impresario jailed for using petrol supplied for agricultural purposes to take several actors from a theater to the Savoy hotel. Endless propaganda told people that a Lancaster bomber needed 2,000 gallons to get to the Ruhr. Nothing would please Faber more than to waste petrol that might otherwise be used to bomb his homeland in normal circumstances; but to be stopped now, with the information he had taped to his chest, and arrested for a rationing violation would be an unbearable irony.
It was difficult. Most traffic was military, but he had no military papers. He could not claim to be delivering essential supplies because he had nothing in the car to deliver. He frowned. Who traveled, these days? Sailors on leave, officials, rare vacationers, skilled workmen…. That was it. He would be an engineer, a specialist in some esoteric field like high-temperature gearbox oils, going to solve a manufacturing problem in a factory at Inverness. If he were asked which factory, he would say it was classified. (His fictitious destination had to be a long way from the real one so that he would never be questioned by someone who knew for certain there was no such factory.) He doubted whether consulting engineers ever wore overalls like the ones he had stolen from the elderly sisters—but anything was possible in wartime.
Having figured this out, he felt he was reasonably safe from any random spot checks. The danger of being stopped by someone who was looking specifically for Henry Faber, fugitive spy, was another problem. They had that picture—
They knew his face. His face!
—and before long they would have a description of the car in which he was traveling. He did not think they would set up roadblocks, as they had no way of guessing where he was headed; but he was sure that every policeman in the land would be on the lookout for the grey Morris Cowley Bullnose, registration number MLN 29.
If he were spotted in the open country, he would not be captured immediately; country policemen had bicycles, not cars. But a policeman would telephone his headquarters, and cars would be after Faber within minutes. If he saw a policeman, he decided, he would have to ditch this car, steal another, and divert from his planned route. However, in the sparsely populated Scottish lowlands there was a good chance he would get all the way to Aberdeen without passing a country policeman. The towns would be different. There the danger of being chased by a police car was very great. He would be unlikely to escape; his car was old and relatively slow, and the police were generally good drivers. His best chance would be to get out of the vehicle and hope to lose himself in crowds or back streets. He contemplated ditching the car and stealing another each time he was forced to enter a major town. The problem there was that he would be leaving a trail a mile wide for MI5 to follow. Perhaps the best solution was a compromise; he would drive into the towns but try to use only the back streets. He looked at his watch. He would reach Glasgow around dusk, and thereafter he would benefit from the darkness.