The girl on the barstool wriggled back a bit so that her ample behind seemed to lap out like a pouting lip over the wooden seat and Roger Hartnell, sitting at a table across the room, was aware she'd done it for his benefit.
He looked down moodily at the fading froth in his glass. Usually he didn't go for tarts, but now he was so bored and dispirited that he recognized a distinct inclination stirring inside him. Besides she was very much of the better class type - in fact he'd been rather surprised at her suggestive movement - and was undoubtedly attractive.
For the last half hour she'd been sitting eyeing him in the long mirror behind the bar, and he'd been sitting staring at her back. Neither had made any previous advances except for the looking. It was rather amusing, he thought soberly, looking up once again.
If his years in the Air Force hadn't taught him to recognize this sort of woman by instinct he might not have thought she was one. Nobody else had approached her and the smart gray suit which nipped in tight at her waist and creased out around full hips gave her quite a respectable look.
More than anything else, he decided, it was their apparent lack of interest in anyone else while they took their time quietly and discreetly summing up who was interested in them and whom they were interested in.
He could see her face in the mirror, pale and clean-cut in its frame of unviolent red hair. She looked more like a strayed country type than a whore.
The bar, smart and respectable, was tucked away in Chelsea. It charged 2d extra on its beer to keep out "the roughs." It was not the sort of place to be harboring prostitutes. Hartnell was alone at his table; in fact the bar was not very crowded. There was just enough hum of conversation to drown individual words, with the occasional chink of glasses and swish of beer as the barman served.
His eyes moved around the jutting rim of her buttocks, seeing them white and plump without the skirt. His hands mentally closed on the slim waist and then he was deciding that he might as well see what the deal was. He was pretty low on cash.
The girl had continued to gaze at him steadily and now he smiled into the mirror at her. After a moment she smiled back. He raised an eyebrow and indicated the chair opposite him and after another moment she twisted around to look at him and then slipped off the stool.
He stood up politely as she crossed the space between tables and bar and she looked even less like a tart as he saw her more clearly. Her skin was good, she walked gracefully and her eyes were a bright, honest blue.
He pulled back a chair and she sat in it with a murmured "Thanks."
"What will you have?" he asked.
"A martini, please."
He called the waiter, ordered and then looked at the girl appraisingly. She looked about twenty-six but she could have been older or younger.
"A pleasant change to see you in the flesh," he said.
"Good," she said. "Mirrors are usually flattering."
"In fact, when you sat there with your back telling the bar to go to hell I began to think you were having an affair with the barman."
She laughed quietly and her long upper lip rose to show the tips of small, regular teeth.
"The barman has a squint," she said. "I like handsome men."
Hartnell grinned.
"I was about to blush prettily," he said. "But, of course, I don't know that you like me yet."
A faint perfume drifted to him across the table, but he couldn't quite place it. He was afraid she was going to be expensive. Too expensive probably. But now he could see the voluminous push of her breasts in the blouse under the suit and he saw his eating money going down the drain.
"Oh, I don't have to tell you you're handsome," she said with another quiet laugh. "You're no adolescent. But for the last half hour you've been looking so sad you've brought out the mother in me as well."
He grinned again.
"Unfortunately mother has to be paid the housekeeping money," he said. "And youngsters don't make much nowadays."
She looked at him for several seconds, a good-humored twinkle in her eye.
"You make yourself clear and I suppose I should be insulted," she said, "but you have such a nice face that I'm sure it must be an accident."
His brow furrowed, the smile still in his eyes.
"I'm afraid you're not making yourself clear," he said.
"My dear," she said, "I've been around but I'm not one of the girls and, on the odd occasions when a man really attracts me, I do it for love."
The smile didn't leave Hartnell's eyes.
"I owe you an apology," he said. "It was just my mood. All women look the same to me at times."
He was astonished. Astonished and then doubtful. He'd made mistakes before, but this really was insulting to the poor girl. He felt definitely embarrassed, but she didn't seem to have taken offense. And then he felt vaguely flattered and his desire shot up several degrees.
"Let's have another martini," he said.
"What were you looking so sad about?" she asked.
Her voice was modulated and clear, gave the impression of careful training. In his boredom it was suddenly quite pleasant to have someone to talk to, apart from the sexual side of it. He thought he might as well tell her.
"Nobody wants me," he said.
She raised a quizzical eyebrow and he went on:
"I've been trying to get a job since I came out of the RAF six months ago but there's too much unemployment."
"What can you do?" she asked.
"Pilot a plane and tell you anything you want to know about life and literature, neither of which is any good, it seems!"
"I should have thought that would have got you somewhere."
"I thought it gave me a fair chance, but all the jobs I'd like have too many after them and on the other hand they fight shy of putting me to make roads or something like that. I'm on my uppers."
"Poor boy," she said. "Maybe I can find you something. I have contacts. But we'll talk about that in the morning. Would you like to leave now? The mother in me's getting overwhelming."
So Roger Hartnell, the Cambridge Blue who had won decorations in the Battle of Britain and now couldn't get a job, followed her out into the warm London night, looking at that behind which still seemed to pout and wondering what the morrow had in store for him.
Chapter 2
Dora's flat - he knew her name before they got there - was in a smart mews still within the Chelsea area. It bespoke some modest luxury as she flicked on a couple of wall lights in the sitting room: carpets, rugs in warm colors, modern curtains, modern furniture and a big French window looking out onto the street.
"Nice place you have," he said appreciatively. It was certainly a contrast to his rather base bed-sitter with a gas ring on the floor for which he was charged an exorbitant rent.
"Yes, I've had it for quite some time - that's the secret."
She took off her jacket and flung it across a chair, motioning him to do likewise and now he really had an eyeful of her pinup-girl bosom. He felt a slight turbulence in his chest. Big, sharp breasts flowering out like a mushroom over a very slim waist always twisted him up inside.
She looked as if she knew the effect she was having and then she came over and placed her hands on his shoulders, half closing her eyes at him as she felt the muscles under the thin shirt.
"Would you like some whiskey?" she asked. He felt her hips move in at his in a comforting, exciting pressure as she leaned back, looking at him.
"I've had enough tonight," he said. "I've been drinking all week."
"I hope it hasn't made you impotent," she murmured.
The pressure of her hips had increased into the pressure of thighs, nearly the whole length of her legs a warm pressure. Her hands slid up to his face and then around his neck. The smooth, white skin came closer, the long upper lip pouting at him, that perfume he still couldn't place and the bright blue eyes, bright er and pinpointed like a drug addict's. The lips on his were warm and giving and the wet tongue that moved into his mouth seemed to want to reach the fingers that dug his neck. Through his shirt he felt the hard points of her nipples as the breasts flattened slightly, cushioning him with their warm support.
He moved his hands down to her bottom which had first pouted at him over the bar-stool and now it was in his hands, each separate buttock, large and tensed, now contained in a palm and being pushed in toward him. His desire had caught in his chest as he crushed her against him and she was breathing heavily into his mouth, squirming her hips against him, trying to catch the bulge at his loins between her thighs.
She moved her head back after a minute or two. Her eyes were almost completely closed and her mouth remained open. He bent and kissed her neck, sucking in the skin so that an angry red mark appeared on its whiteness. She gasped and pulled his head at her breasts.
"The bedroom's over here," she choked and pulled away from him to a door on their right.
He followed her in and caught her from behind as she switched on the light. He squeezed her breasts and kissed her neck again. She brushed her buttocks around his loins, pressing back at him, leaning back her head, eyes closed.
Without changing position she began unbuttoning the skirt down the side and let it fall to the ground. Underneath she had white silk panties and now he could feel the full outline of her bottom through his trousers. She pulled his hands away from the globes they were caressing and unbuttoned the blouse. He held her with one hand around her waist while he unclipped the brassiere. It fell away from her back and she slipped out of it after slithering from the blouse.
The bulge at his pants was big and hot. He needed something to sink it into desperately and now her hand moved around behind her, searched for it, found it and began to fondle.
His breathing was like an exhausted rugger player's as he clasped her naked breasts. He could see them over her shoulder. Regal, soaring orbs, crowned with their brownish jewels. They were elastic, exciting to his touch.
He let his hands wander down from them, pressing his hips at her all the time, wriggling at the touch of her probing fingers at his fly. Down over the taut ribs which whittled away from her breasts, down over the soft, slightly plump line of the belly and under the rim of her panties, over the girdle to rest at last on the soft down of her loins, thickening to a wasteland of curly hair at the undercurving between her legs.
She swiveled on the balls of her feet, panting, and her fingers began to pull urgently at his buttons. His stomach heaved. This was the moment he relished. The buttons sprang out of the button holes under her deft, feverish touch and in a moment they were undone from the belt to the crotch and her fingers were weaving inside, finding the opening in his pants and pulling the long, hot spear of hard flesh through it.
The breath swooned up deeply from his throat as her fingers touched his penis with cool, foreign tenderness. He began to edge her toward the bed, and, still without opening her eyes, she swayed before him toward it and collapsed on it.
Quickly he pulled off his trousers and then his shorts. She lay face down, her sides heaving as if in a faint while he slipped frantically out of his shoes, socks and shirt.
His foreskin had slipped back and the head was a bright red. It was burning and dry, demanding some moist relief.
She lay where she'd flopped as if unable to move and he knelt over her and started to peel her panties off her behind. He was all churned up inside and as the big, round mounds of flesh flipped into view he felt like raping her sadistically. He pulled the panties down her thighs which were split with a light down like a stocking seam, joining the seam, in fact, where the stocking started halfway down the thigh. He pulled them over her long, shapely calves and off her feet. He couldn't wait to take off the girdle and the stockings. They added to his desire as he looked down on her otherwise naked back.
He flopped down on her, body burning all over and she came to life, squirming under him and whimpering almost inaudibly.
For a few seconds he ground his hips around on the large dumpling of her bottom, pressing flesh against flesh in a passion-heat. He kissed her neck and bit it so that she gave a little scream and pulled his head harder at her, reaching backwards in a contortion.
And then he slipped down her, kissing shoulders, back, buttocks, thighs. He drew her thighs apart gently with his hands and then put his hands under her waist to pull her up onto her knees. He was lying with his head practically between her thighs and his eyes were on a level with the red folds of flesh from which a little moisture was glistening and slipping down the soft insides of her thighs.
He raised his head, placed his lips against the moist covering of her cavity and then pushed his tongue firmly between the creases. She was practically odorless - just a slight salty taste and smell - and he moved his tongue around in her vagina.
The breath had shot out of her in a gasp, swallowed in the pillow surrounding her head. At first she had jerked away, but immediately had rammed her hips back so that his nose was against her buttocks and the hole was opened wide to him. She was almost crying in her passion.
His searching tongue found the hard, little clitoris and licked it. He worked his lips closer and began to suck it while her buttocks seemed to sway around him like a moving sea.
"Oh, oh, oh oh!" He could hear her exclaiming into the pillow as her stomach hollowed and hollowed.
She became moister and moister and a thin swirl of fluid dripped from his penis onto the bed cover. He felt as if he were on fire, the hottest point being where his penis disappeared into his body and was swallowed in the internal fury of passion.
She moved her head on the pillow and her thighs quivered as if from cold.
"Now, put it in. Now!" she gasped at last.
His chest seemed frozen with the anticipation which had been building, building inside and he slithered up onto his knees, wriggling his hips in between her thighs, moving in behind her.
Now he was above the full hips and behind and could let his eyes feast on the way they curved sharply into the slim waist and how the waist sloped out gently to the shoulders.
On either side of his hips her thighs and calves, tightly clad in the silk stocking's, enclosed him.
Her calves swung up, playfully almost, to press across his buttocks, impelling him forward into her.
Between her unprotected vagina and his long, probing organ was a space of an inch. He spread her buttocks, so that he could see his target more clearly - he could also see the darker pucker of the anus. And then he moved his knees in as far as they would go, prodded with the head of his sex and thrust inexorably into her, surging in like a breaker between the junction of her thighs, feeling the soothing warmth and wetness inundating and enclosing his penis.
"Oh, oh, oh, oh!" she exclaimed again, the sounds coming to him, muffled and indistinct, from the pillow.
Her pale face, sometimes presenting him with its profile, sometimes lost under the flood of red hair as she moved her head, was flushed rose. She began to rotate her hips, pressing them back at him, wriggling her knees out and pulling them under her to push her passage further back at him.
He put his hands on her waist as he drove in and he felt the moisture in the corners of his mouth, the dryness around his tongue and on the roof of his mouth. His penis was sweet agony, pulling his mouth open, forcing the breath up from his lungs. Against his hips the soft skin of her white buttocks brushed and oozed. Around him he could feel the coarser texture of the stockings as she squeezed him.
She was gasping uncontrollably. He looked down, his eyes narrow and racked with sensuality. ' Another two inches. He leaned on her waist, digging his fingers into the firm flesh, holding her as if he possessed the whole of her there in his hands.
With a twist of his hips he rammed the last length excruciatingly into her. She gave a little scream and her behind-arch gave way and, falling with her, still in her, he almost slipped out. But with a furious and powerful jerk she had pushed herself up again, with him on top, into her former position.
He thrust right into her so that on the in-thrust his penis disappeared completely and his hips met her buttocks, his testicles swinging under her as if they were attached to her crotch.
She pushed her hands from the side of her head under her body and down to where the pendulums swung. She caught and caressed them with her fingertips, drawing sharp spasms of sensation from his bowels. Her hot face was flushed almost the same color as her lips and the long, soft mane of hair seemed to reflect rose tints in the blue of her eyes. Her whole body was given over to the delight she was experiencing, given over to him and their mutual ecstasy, a complete instrument of passion.
With every forward thrust now, his penis which filled her passage to bursting point, almost flung her forward over the head of the bed. It seemed to her that a bull was possessing her. She spread her legs to their utmost to draw him as deep as possible, reveling in the mingled pain and delight.
With his hands squeezing all over her buttocks, fingers digging at her anus, clasping her hips and pulling her back onto his rod, he swept and rammed into her with growing abandon. He could hardly think now. Her body was a maze of beautiful, tender flesh. However much he smashed his hot weapon into her belly he was met only with a groan which seemed to come to him from a distance. She would take all he could give her. He thrust and thrust savagely, a film of sadism veiling his mind, feeling free to mutilate as he liked this strange body that he had never seen before tonight, this body which was squirming and writhing now with its bottom jutting nakedly up under his eyes.
Her breath had become one long, continuous groan which droned vaguely in his ears as he jerked his loins at her, flexing them like the last flick of a throwing wrist as his staff disappeared.
All of a sudden the groan became a husky whine and her loins seemed to ripple in long waves. His penis seemed suddenly to be liberated and a surf of moisture broke over it as she exploded to her climax.
Her hands came back, reaching behind him, pulling his buttocks at her as she knelt on knees and face, begging him with a gesture to flood her now with his load.
The passage had become tighter again and his penis seemed to be itching along its length, itching and expanding in an agony which couldn't last He stabbed and stabbed rushing to be free of the itch, the agony. He felt the reservoir inside him break its dam and come sweeping in sharp, thin sensation through the inner tubes, felt his outer sensation through the inner tubes, felt his outer protrusion grow suddenly taut and searching, elongated to its utmost, rammed in as if he would split her body in two, force his way into the cervix and the stomach. His mouth opened in complete lack of control, the breath burst from him a great "Aaaaaaah" as at another opening the sperm burst in an echo and inundated her channel with its thick, mucous liquid.
As he strained into her, she pleaded: -
"Come darling, come darling come," as if in a renewal of her own passion.
He collapsed onto her at last, making a layer of flesh around her flesh, slimmer, more muscular, browner and longer than hers and they flopped in that position for nearly a minute, breathing fast, unable to move.
Eventually her thighs stirred under him and he rolled off her and stretched on his back on the bed. She let herself deflate slowly onto her stomach and then turned on her side, leaning on an elbow and looked at him.
"That's the first time for a long time," she said softly, contentedly, tracing the line of his chest with her fingers.
"Really? How so?" he said, disbelievingly. He still found her attractive in spite of his exhaustion and she was so easygoing, almost phlegmatic, that he decided he rather liked her as well.
"Oh, it's a long story," she said.
"We have all night," he said.
"Not all of it - in fact we're not likely to spend much of it talking. I have a lot of appetite to assuage."
He grinned. "Looks as if I've found a job at last," he said.
"Keep your cheek to yourself," she grinned back. "And have a whiskey now, if you like, while I go and get rid of the child."
She slipped off the bed and he felt the quick return of desire as he watched her walk unselfconsciously across the room. She looked elegant even out of her clothes and the pouting of those large buttocks as they protruded with each step gave him a strong dose of blood pressure. The red hair, he noticed for the first time, heightened the snowy texture of her skin - and then she had opened a door and passed out of sight. A minute later he heard the swoosh of a shower. All the modern conveniences, he thought and again compared her place with the austerity of his in some surprise. His curiosity about her began to increase. He would put her as a woman of the world, he thought, probably without much education and upbringing, who had, however, seen necessary to improve herself and done so rather haphazardly, beginning, and maybe ending, with an emphasis on voice production and a studied ease of manner which had eventually become natural.
He swung off the bed, arranged his clothes more neatly on a chair, poured himself, after a moment's doubt, a fair-sized whiskey and then looked at himself in the full-length mirror on a cupboard door.
There he was, long, lean and muscular, just like men were supposed to be in women's magazines. Most women found him handsome, he knew, but his face was hardly in the same magazine category. His nose was, perhaps a little too pronounced and his chin too long, his black hair, too, was receding further from his broad forehead every six months. Apart from that, his sensitive, daredevil mouth and his twinkling gray eyes with their black, bushy brows made up for the defects. They'd wanted him to stay in the RAF, with hints of quick promotion, but after the zip of the war he'd had no particular sympathy with the services. He had found his companions reliable and fun in the days when any day might be the last and one needed friends to stand by, but afterwards they'd seemed, on the whole, a little too narrow and unintelligent to be good company. So what? he thought. I'm here. And what about tomorrow?
She came back from the bathroom, wearing a silk dressing gown which left most of one breast in view with its careless wrap. She looked at him appraisingly, the way he'd looked at her in the bar and said: "You ought to be able to get a job in films showing off that torso."
He went over to her, smiling, kissed her lips and then the breast that he could see. She clasped him against her bosom, smiling and ran her hands over his shoulders as if she really loved the feel of their long, hard muscle.
"If you want something to eat there's all sorts of stuff in the refrigerator," she said.
"Oh, I have just enough to eat on for a few more days," he replied.
"Only a few more?" she asked. "Is that right?"
"Afraid so," he said. "After that I was heading for the Embankment to sit down on the pavement with a cap in front of me."
"Poor sweet," she said. "Well, I hope you're not out to make an honest penny because if you are there's not much I can do for you."
He raised an eyebrow, pretending that his surprise was only mock surprise.
"Well, I sometimes haven't paid my bus fare," he said. "And I had an aunt who was once pinched for an unaccountable incident of shoplifting which everyone put down to change of life. Apart from that. . . ."
"Well, this is a little bit more involved," she interrupted, "but, from some points of view it's not a terribly serious crime. But, now I come to think of it, perhaps we'd better wait a day or two while I get to know you better."
"A day or two!" he cried. "I want a job immediately. And if it doesn't involve murder, rape, arson or armed assault I'll give it serious consideration."
"Oh no, it's much, much less violent than any of those. But there's no hurry. You can stay here for a day or two and I'll find out what the position is."
"It all sounds very mysterious."
He was guarded as regards the prospects of the job, but her invitation to stay boosted his morale several degrees. What luck when he was so down in the dumps! A smart, modern, comfortable place to stay, with an attractive girl to look to his needs.
She poured herself a whiskey.
"You will stay, won't you?"
"It's very sweet of you," he said. "Are you sure you want me to?"
In answer she ran her hands down his chest and gently stroked his penis. "I've never been surer," she said.
His penis had begun to thicken without coming completely erect. He was ready for another session, but first he asked: "How is it you've been lonesome? You were about to tell me."
"Oh that." She sounded as if she was going to dismiss the matter, but instead, she swigged back her whiskey.
"It isn't very interesting really. Simply that I used to be the girl friend of the man you may be seeing about a job."
She stopped and looked at her glass, thinking of something. She put the glass down and walked over to the bed. She stretched out on it. Her breasts, twin cones pointing at the ceiling, the dressing gown falling back from one bent leg revealing calf and thigh vamp-fashion but without the intention.
"He's a tough boy in his way - very tough. When I got to know him I was a model. He had money and a certain verve and I was crazy about him in a stupid way. I could see he was no good, but nonetheless I fell for him - he represented a life of fun and luxury. His money was coming illegally - he was running a few rackets. This I knew, but I didn't know that he was going to treat me like dirt, that there were many other women, that he'd knock me around, that he'd involve me in his 'business.'
"Even so I put up with that, hating myself for putting up with it but unable to break from the spell he seemed to have cast over me.
"At least until about four months ago. That was just after Slim Bailey died - he was the financial brains behind the rackets. Francie - that's the man I'm talking about - was the Hitler. Well, Slim has a beautiful daughter, a nice girl, you know, and he'd been trying to do the best for her since her mother had died some years before. He tried to keep her clear of the gang and sent her to a private school and then a girl's college. He always thought there was something higher than just grubbing along in rackets for money.
"Well, that was all well until Slim died, but then the girl didn't have any money so Francie stepped in. I don't know where he'd seen her before. By telling her about her father and threatening to spill the beans he got her away from her college and tried to set her up as his mistress. That was when he got rid of me. Not that he wasn't generous." She waved her hand around the flat.
"Well, I gather he didn't succeed too well, but eventually with her general depression, need for money, fear for her dead father's name and everything, the poor girl gave way."
She looked over at him. He'd been standing watching her engrossed in the story.
"You're the best audience I ever had," she chuckled. "Anyway, I was pretty cut up - although deep down I knew it was the best thing and all that sort of stuff. So I've been sitting around recovering and not having anything to do with men until tonight when I saw you sitting, looking unhappy in that bar, I knew I'd recovered completely."
"Well, well." He came over and lay on the bed beside her. "I think it might be interesting to meet this group. After all, I have literary ambitions and it's all grist to the mill."
"Right now I want you to have other ambitions," she said softly.
"Oh, I have ambitions in all directions," he said with a grin.
She pulled his head down on hers, crushing his lips on her open mouth. He pulled the belt of her dressing gown undone and slipped his hand inside. The nipples were hard and the mounds of flesh seemed to strain up like cats being stroked. He bent over and kissed them, taking the nipples in his mouth and sucking them gently until he heard her gasp and felt her fingers come down and begin to massage his now stiff pike. His hips jerked automatically in towards her and she opened her legs and began to pull him to her.
"Don't bother about the preliminaries," she whispered. "We have all night."
Chapter 3
It was not until three days later that Hartnell was taken by Dora to a bar in Soho where he was to meet a man named Johnny, who was to look him over before the "boss" saw him.
In the meantime he had stayed on at Dora's place, finding her generous in every respect and seeing no need, as she was obviously fascinated by his company, to move back to his old lodgings.
The bar where they met was the private one of an unostentatious public house. Johnny was the only occupant. Having introduced them, Dora left, saying she'd see them later.
Johnny proved to be a shrewd and skinny little man, whose bright brown eyes never left Hartnell's as they talked. He wanted to know the broad outline of his history, how it was he couldn't get a job, whether he'd ever been charged in court, whether he should have been and what his attitude was to a little harmless black market in which there was no danger and plenty of money.
Hartnell answered his questions honestly until the last, when he said he was not concerned how he made a bit of cash, but made the mental reservation that the black market would have to be really "harmless" for him to be interested.
He bought Johnny another drink with his dwindling funds and then the little man said they'd better go as he didn't want to keep the boss waiting. They left the bar and got into a little green van which Johnny indicated. When they were weaving expertly and surprisingly quickly through the London traffic, Hartnell asked:
"What's he like, this boss of yours?"
"Francie?" said the little man as if to establish his identity. "Oh, he's a rum 'un. Likes to think he's class, you know, very fond of that line. Course he's no more class than I am - but it wouldn't do to let him see you thought that 'cos he's tough."
He glanced quickly, sideways at Hartnell.
"That's where you got a big advantage on him - you got what he hasn't so he's going to think of you as birds of a feather."
Johnny chuckled for a while, thinking of his boss, as they raced through the dismal streets of the East End.
"Where are we going?" Hartnell asked. "The boss's place?"
"Christ no," said Johnny. "He lives in a posh spot. No, we're going to one of the hideouts - that's all."
After a while he wasn't even sure where they were anymore. The streets had all become gray and bleak with little alleyways crisscrossing and children playing on bomb sites and thin stray dogs running around in twos and threes.
"'Ere we are," said Johnny, at last, turning sharply into a narrow side street, sharply down an even narrower one and sweeping into a double garage with a fraction of an inch to spare between the wall and the big lorry which was already there.
They got out and Johnny led the way down some stone steps at the back to a big iron basement door. He knocked and a grid opened.
"Johnny," he said.
After a moment the door opened for them and he followed Johnny into a cold, stone basement room lit by one naked bulb on a table.
The room was big and another one led off it. There were several chairs and a couple of narrow beds with old blankets against the walls. Lolling on the beds were a number of men while a surprisingly beautiful girl was sitting on one of the plain wooden chairs.
This he had time to take in with a glance before three of the men stood up - not, he thought grimly, from politeness, but probably to make sure he didn't pull a gun on them.
"This is the gentleman, Francie," Johnny said and he seemed to get some private pleasure from emphasizing the word "gentleman" ever so slightly.
"Well, come in, make yourself at home." The words came in a clearly enunciated twang of London accent. There was a slight mince to them - and there was also restrained violence.
Hartnell shook the hand that was extended to him and looked at the owner in the dim light. He was a tall man, slim with rather "spiv" square shoulders, long blond hair and an oblong face which was strong and rather sensual. The eyes were a bright, hard blue and Hartnell decided there was a shade of madness in them.
"I'm Francie," the other said, in his cutting twang. "I run this outfit. So, you're looking for a job. Have a whiskey, will you?"
Hartnell nodded.
"Jim," Francie said. "Pour Mr. Hartnell a whiskey."
A big, sullen-faced bruiser heaved himself from the bed and took a whiskey bottle and glass from a cupboard. Hartnell noticed they all had glasses. Whiskey was expensive and still not that easy to get. He was poured a generous shot.
Francie's eyes had not stopped taking him in and now he began to repeat several of the questions Johnny had asked earlier. After every answer he glanced at Johnny, as if checking.
"Well, you got class like me," he said eventually. "And we need a bit of class sometimes. Always good to have around. Can you drive a lorry?"
"Sure."
"Well, that's about all we'll want you to do."
"What's the line you're in?" Hartnell asked. "It seems like most people could drive a lorry."
"Oh, you'd be surprised," Francie said airily. "When it comes to a bit of illegal business there aren't so many and those there are have a tendency to get cold feet at the wrong moment. They haven't got the old school courage." He chuckled, as if sharing a joke with a former school friend.
"As for the business," he went on. "It's just a question of a little transaction in whiskey and 'fags.'"
Hartnell raised his eyebrows.
"It's a very paying game," Francie continued. "And there's practically no risk. We're doing a fiddly with a certain military gentleman who looks after some big stores. Now you know that in the NAAFI stores you can get whiskey and 'fags' dirt cheap. Well, we give him more than dirt and still have enough in hand to sell for less than the civilian price. You could almost say I'm a modern Robin Hood. 'Cos the boys in khaki don't even want all their rations and it's a terrible waste."
Hartnell grinned. He was genuinely amused at Francie's reasoning.
"How about the military gentleman?" he asked. "Isn't there quite a risk that he'll be discovered?"
"Nuts." Francie dismissed the possibility. "He's got everything in his palm. He's the big noise, knows just how far he can go and when to ease off. Nobody likes the military for not knowin' what's going on in their inner workings."
"Certainly something in that." Hartnell grinned again. It didn't seem such a bad business. He needed money badly and he'd been ready, at least, to consider something much worse.
"Well, your bit is simply to drive a lorry to a certain warehouse to pick up the stuff. We'll all be there, but we need a cool hand at the wheel."
"Sounds okay to me."
"Good," Francie said. "I knew it wouldn't take an ex-pilot long to make up his mind. 'Ave another drink and meet the boys."
Dropping one "h" in about every fifty, Francie chatted on to Hartnell, obviously rather pleased that a little "class" had been infused into his companions. He had a certain bumptious confidence and Hartnell realized that most of the time he actually considered himself as an old-school-tie type - or at least thought himself quite equal to the quality.
They were seven in all - excluding Hartnell himself. Apart from Johnny and Jim, there were two other big, sullen-faced bruisers named Jake and Bill, a bright-looking youngster of twenty or so named Lucky and a stocky fellow named "Smiler" who turned out to be the new financial brains of the gang. And, finally, there was the girl, who hardly looked at him, seeming to withdraw from the whole group.
"This is Gracie," Francie said proudly. She looked listlessly past him.
"Gracie." There was the trace of a snarl in his voice, which disappeared as soon as she looked at him. "This is Roger Hartnell. Nice company for you. He's got class - what poor old Slim tried to give you."
Hartnell glanced sharply at Francie and then looked back at the girl. She had flushed slightly, but when she put out her hand and said "How do you do," her voice was even.
Hartnell's heart went out to her in that moment. This was the girl Dora had told him about and the unhappiness was there on her hazel eyes as if it would never be erased. Her long blonde hair curled in at her shoulders and her features were firm and regular, which added to her beauty. Apart from her physical appearance there was about her an aura of dignity and tenderness which lingered even now. And her body in the gray woolen dress was slim, well formed without any outsize sexiness.
"How do you do," he replied, and for a second she glanced up at his eyes. Then her face had turned listlessly away again.
"Gracie has things on her mind," Francie explained with a grin. "She's not satisfied with life." His voice bordered on a snarl again, an elusive tone which left Hartnell wondering whether it had been really there right after the grin. "But, she'll change," Francie added.
"How do you find Dora?" he said suddenly, and without waiting for a reply, went on: "Very nice girl Dora. A little difficult at times, though. Hasn't got top quality." He looked down at Gracie, eyes narrowed and then he grinned once again with his sensual, mobile mouth which could change its expression so rapidly.
"Well let's have another drink and beat it," he said. "No point in hanging around."
He looked at Hartnell and there was no telling what was in the bright, hard blue eyes.
"Johnny'll drive you wherever you wanta go," he said. "We'll get in touch with you in a couple of days."
He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small wad of notes.
"And here's a little on account," he said.
Chapter 4
Johnny got in touch with him. He was still at Dora's place and still enjoying her company. The job, he was told, was for the next night and Johnny would pick him up and take him to the "hideout."
He felt a certain apprehension at his first venture into crime. But it seemed such an ordinary sort of crime that, apart from its degree, he tried to look on it as simply smuggling a bit of drink through the Customs the way every respectable tourist did. Morally he was not very concerned. A man who's spent some of the best years of his life with it in his hands, likely to die at any moment, bombing thousands, shooting down fellow human beings, isn't going to worry too much about passing on a little whiskey at an under-retail price.
At the hideout everybody was waiting. Only Gracie wasn't there.
"OK," Francie said. "Johnny and Jim can take the van, just in case there's more than we'd bargained for. The rest of us in the lorry."
It was just after midnight that they started through the dark streets, taking different routes. In the back of the lorry were a few items of furniture as a blind.
Hartnell drove easily, following Francie's directions. Lucky followed their progress through the little window separating the cab from the back.
"All right. Just on that corner'll do," Francie said after they'd been driving for about half an hour.
He pulled up just beyond the corner, away from the street lamp which yellowed the sooty wall of the last of a row of houses. They sat still and waited. Hartnell didn't ask what for. He was content to let things take their course.
In a few minutes the van skidded round a corner at the opposite end of the street, saw them and turned in the road, going up on the narrow pavement at one side to complete the operation.
"All right," Francie snapped. "Follow 'em."
Hartnell slipped into gear and the lorry sped off down the dim street and turned the corner after the van. They crossed a broader road one after the other and he saw the big black gates of a dock area, with high wire mesh stretching into the distance.
"How about the man at the gate?" he asked.
"That's okay," Francie said, with grim humor. "He's a friend of ours."
They swept through the gate and Hartnell glanced at the little sentry box of the guard. There was no guard.
He followed the van, feeling suddenly on edge. They dodged among a number of long, heavy wooden buildings and then along a concrete runway. He pulled into the shadow of one of the buildings just behind the van. Francie opened the door of the lorry and climbed down.
"Just hang on a moment," he said quietly. "We'll just see if the way is clear."
He disappeared round the building with Jim and Bill. The others remained in their respective vehicles.
Hartnell found his fingers were tapping nervously on the steering wheel and he was surprised at the difference in his nerve between now and when he felt he had right and approval on his side. He stared around at the little window to the back and Lucky grinned at him.
After several minutes, Francie reappeared and beckoned them as he climbed into the van beside Johnny.
Hartnell followed the van once again, round the building and past three more. The broad doors of the fourth were open and Jim and Bill were hauling crates to the concrete outside. The others jumped out and began loading them onto the lorry.
"Hurry up," Francie said, standing beside the cab. "The narks are at the other end now, but they'll be down this way before long." He looked inside at Hartnell.
"When we're ready to go," he said quietly, "just turn round this warehouse and go back the way we came."
"OK," he said. He felt some admiration for Francie's cool and organizational manner - a matter of habit, he supposed.
They worked rapidly for about fifteen minutes. By that time the lorry, with its blind of furniture, was full and a few extra crates were loaded into the van.
Hartnell was surprised that there wasn't a night watchman, or somebody like that, in the warehouse, but he didn't know anything about this sort of thing. Obviously Francie had it all planned.
The loading was finished, Jim was pushing the last crate straight and the rest were moving back to the lorry when Francie saw the two figures in the distance, up the long concrete lane, between the warehouses.
"Christ," he snapped. "Get out quick. The narks!"
As he spoke the van shot forward and disappeared round the building. Hartnell felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead and his palms. Now was the time to be cool, he told himself. He slipped into gear, drove towards the two figures which had now broken into a run and were flashing powerful torches down the lane - and then he, too, had turned round the building, accelerated and skidded back in the direction they'd come. There was the noise of an explosion in his ears and he was certain someone had fired a shot at them.
"Speed it up," snapped Francie, "or they'll get us at the gate."
He put his foot right down, swerving dangerously round the building, missing their corners by no more than a couple of inches. At the gate he had actually caught the van and they screeched through the narrow opening.
"Nice going," Francie said.
Behind them, somewhere, they heard a police siren and then they were racing at breakneck speed through the deserted streets. There was no trouble and they slowed down as they neared the hideout and drove at a respectable pace down the narrow road, turned into the narrower one, swerved into the garage and the doors closed behind them.
Francie chuckled as they sat sipping their second glass of whiskey.
"A nice clean job," he said. "It was the driving that did it. We were almost in a spot when those narks appeared."
"Enough stuff here to last for quite a while," Smiler said, appreciatively.
"Yep, we're in the money."
Hartnell was relieved it was over. Now he felt more involved with the gang than he expected to be. It seemed to be the result of the police chasing them. He felt, now, that he was marked down amongst the criminal class.
"We'd better stay here until morning," Francie said. "Then I'll start to get rid of the stuff. Quite a few classy people are going to be pleased." He chuckled wickedly.
He awoke in the morning, surprised that he had slept and wondering what time it was. They were still all there and Gracie was with them now.
Francie looked at him as he struggled up from the narrow bed.
"Just going to wake you up," he said. "It's time we were off."
Hartnell stretched and looked at Gracie. She was quite lovely, he thought. He wondered what her view on all this was.
Lucky and Smiler were chatting on the other bed and Francie got up to put something in the whiskey cupboard.
Hartnell picked up the first edition of the evening paper which Gracie must have bought. That meant it was after eight. He glanced at the headlines, aware that Gracie was following his movement. Usual sort of stuff he thought - and then his eyes caught the stop press and he gave a mental double take. Just a couple of paragraphs of tiny, black wording:
"Gang broke into section London Docks last night. Overpowered gate guard and watchman. Stole large quantity dangerous drugs. Chased by dock patrol. Escaped in lorry and van. Value drugs believed several thousand pounds."
He read it three times and then looked slowly up from the paper. The first eyes he met were the hazel ones of Gracie. They were looking at him with the first sign of interest he'd seen on her face. She was waiting for his reaction. Lucky and Smiler had stopped talking and were looking at him strangely. Francie had turned from the cupboard, seen him and was coming towards the table with a grin on his face.
"That's right," Francie replied almost gaily. "We weren't quite sure how to take you so we had to invent the whiskey business until we got to know you better."
Hartnell looked round at the others and then looked down at the newspaper again. Dangerous drugs! That wasn't what he'd bargained for. He didn't know what the penalty was but it could certainly be a nice long stretch and in any case he didn't approve of drugs being used for an unlawful purpose. They were just too dangerous.
"What sort of drugs?" he rasped.
Francie put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a little glass vial. He handed it to Hartnell, who looked at it and saw the white powder inside.
"Heroin!" he exclaimed.
"That's right," Francie agreed cheerfully. "It was going to the hospitals but they can get plenty more easily. Now it's going to some of our clients who like it so much they'll give and do anything to get it."
"It's swinish!" Hartnell exclaimed.
"Not at all," Francie said, unruffled. "We didn't give these people the taste for it. We're just doing them the favor of keeping up the supply."
"But it's a very serious offense."
"Anything that's worth money is a very serious offense."
"Well it's not my line," Hartnell said, finally. "That's the end of our little business together."
He looked at the others, as if to see if anyone else agreed with him, but he was met with blank stares.
"Oh, I wouldn't be so hurried about your decision, Roger, my dear chap," Francie mocked. "You're in this now, you know. You drove the lorry. You were chased by the police. Not too good for an old Cambridge Blue, eh? Look nice in the stop press, that would. And there'd be a great spread in the later editions."
He looked at Gracie and chucked her under the chin.
"He's like you," he said. "He doesn't know what's good for him." Gracie turned her face away.
"Why don't you let him get out while he can," she said softly.
"Ah, but that's the trouble," Francie's voice had the hint of snarl in it again. "He can't. He's already in too deep. And it's astonishing the way the narks have of finding out about people who try to get out."
Hartnell stared at Francie's long, sensual face and it seemed the hardest face he'd ever seen. Nothing would stop this man getting anything he wanted. He tried to clear things up in his mind, but for the moment he couldn't concentrate. He saw Gracie's face swing back to him. Her eyes were sympathetic - and hopeless.
"What do you think you can do if I just clear out?" he snapped.
"Oh, my dear chap, the police 'ave a way of finding anyone they want once they've had a few tip-offs - and we've found out a lot about you."
"Anyway, what good am I to you?" Hartnell pursued. "You couldn't trust me, now."
"Oh, I know my old school tie," Francie purred. "The only time when there is honor among thieves. And you are useful to us. You shouldn't feel unwanted. I told you how hard it is to find a good driver. And we need a cool, classy brain on our side. Always room for new, pedigree blood." He chuckled.
"For God's sake, Francie, let him go!"
It was the first time he'd seen Gracie at all animated. Her eyes were staring at Francie with hatred.
Francie stepped quickly across to her. His hard eyes were blazing, his mouth had twisted. This was the snarl in the tone, the subjugated violence. His hand slashed across her face and she swayed on the chair, almost sliding from it. He hit her again across the small, well-shaped bugles of her breasts, which strained against the woolen dress.
Hartnell stepped towards him.
"Leave her . . ." he began, but then he was held, not brutally but firmly by Jim and Bill who had been watching him for just such a reaction.
"You mind your bloody business," Francie almost screamed as he slapped her across the other cheek. She fell off the chair and the collapse seemed to calm him. He slashed her twice more across the buttocks as she lay on the floor and then he straightened and brushed back his long, blond hair from his face.
Gracie got to her feet and she, too, threw back her long blonde hair. A solitary tear trickled from an eye. Her face was flaming from the blows. She moved away and sat on a bed, fingers clenched, looking at the ceiling as if the fixity of her stare could alone keep back the tears.
Francie glared at her for a moment longer. His mouth and eyes were savage. When he turned around he seemed to become aware of the other little tableau for the first time.
He tucked his tie back into his coat staring at Hartnell with hard, shrewd eyes.
"All right. Let the gentleman go," he said to the others. "You shouldn't treat class that way."
They let go of his arms and he stood wanting to sock Francie, but feeling that the moment had passed and no good could come of it.
"You and me can be friends yet," Francie said to him. "Anyway we'll be seeing more of you 'cos you 'aven't got much option."
He went to the cupboard and opened a drawer at its foot. He took out a thick wad of notes and threw them on the table in front of Hartnell.
"That's just another little advance," he said. "There's a few hundred more when we've got rid of the stuff. And for the next job we'll have a business arrangement with you."
Hartnell looked at the money - all that money just for the taking, for a job he'd done, be it unwittingly. He was in this now, he supposed. Anyway he'd need to think when he got away from them. He reached forward and picked up the notes.
"Attaboy," Francie said, and everyone seemed to relax.
He turned to leave and his eyes met Gracie's. She was looking at him again, still trying to stop the tears. She looked brave and hurt - but she wasn't his business.
As he went to the door, Francie's voice followed him.
"Johnny'll be getting in touch with you in a few days."
Chapter 5
Francie leaned back contentedly in the sleek Riley as it sped out of London into Sussex. Beside him Johnny chewed gum over the wheel.
"'Ow do you like our new boy, Johnny?"
'"E's all right, Francie. Good bloke in a round he seemed to become aware of the other o' thing."
"That's right, Johnny. He's got what we all want and you know what that is."
If he doesn't stop talking about his bloody class, I'll go bleedin' well nuts, Johnny thought.
"And those that don't have it from birth, Johnny, they 'ave to acquire it. That's what we're going to do now: acquire a little class through our observation of the upper strata." He chuckled.
"That sort of thing's the same in any class."
The words had come from the back seat and Francie twisted around, good-humoredly to look at the person who'd uttered them. She was a tall, bony woman, unattractive but with strong features. She was about sixty.
"My dear Hilda," he said patronizingly. "What we're going to observe is not how they act, but how they break down." He chuckled again.
"You know, with their stiff upper lip losing its starch and hating to do anything that the gardener shouldn't see."
"I don't know why you want me to do it. Why can't you do it yourself?"
"Don't I pay you enough, Hilda dear?"
"Aw, shut up." Francie chuckled and Johnny echoed the chuckle.
The Riley purred through the outskirts of London and into the country like a smooth, fast-moving insect and silence reigned in the car for a number of miles. Before long they were racing along broad country lanes with ferns sweeping down to the very edges of the Tarmac road and the woods developing behind.
Dotted about in this area were big country houses with well-kept grounds and ivy over the walls.
"The aristocracy aren't as poor as they're supposed to be," Francie murmured. "Still, they're poor enough not to be able to pay the full price for their little presents in money."
"What does her husband think?" Johnny asked.
"Her husband's never there," Francie said contemptuously. "The Lady Anne will be pleased to see me," he mused. "She's rung me up eight times in the last fortnight. She's really getting desperate."
After another half hour's driving, Johnny pulled in through gates in a long ivy-covered wall and they climbed a sandy drive bordered by woods until they shot into open land and were confronted by a big stone house.
"They're getting cheaper and cheaper, these places," Francie said. "And, we're getting richer and richer."
He left Johnny in the car on the little gravel square in front of the house and went up the steps with Hilda, A butler answered their ring and conducted them into a spacious and comfortable reception room. Francie took out a cigarette and offered one to Hilda.
They were kept waiting only a few minutes before the door opened and a striking woman in riding breeches and blouse came in. She was about thirty and her face had frequently adorned the Tattler and the covers of better women's magazines. She was dark-haired, hair caught in a horse-tail, had the proverbial milk and rose complexion, heightened by outdoor activities and dark, soulful eyes. Her hips filled out the riding breeches and each buttock rounded nicely in the tight, confining material while above her breasts swept out from the flat line of belly and ribs to strain urgently at the blouse.
"Hello, Francie," she said as he stood up. "How nice to see you."
As she put down her riding crop on a table, he noticed that her hands were shaking visibly.
"Hello, my dear," he said. "You look better every time I see you."
She smiled and looked questioningly at Hilda.
"Oh, this is Hilda," Francie said. "Meet the Honorable Lady Anne," he added to the older woman. "We won't go into details."
"Have you er . . .?"
"It's all right, Hilda's a friend of mine - and you're going to know her much more intimately soon. Yes, I've brought the stuff."
He took a package out of his pocket.
"There's enough to last you a couple of months if you're not greedy."
Her eyes fixed on the package, avidly, and she stretched out a hand for it. Francie kept it firmly in his.
"The money's up in my bedroom," Lady Anne said, "I'll get it first, if like?"
"We'll come up with you," Francie said.
Lady Anne looked doubtfully at Hilda and then led the way through the door and they followed her up the broad carpeted stairway.
The bedroom looked out over the grounds at the back. It was large and light, fitted with pink, papered in gray. Lady Anne unlocked a drawer and took out a large bundle of notes, and then another, and a third. Francie flicked through them expertly.
"All correct, my dear," he said. "But we're getting a little tired of money. So, we want a little performance."
Lady Anne looked at him with fear lurking in her dark eyes. She recognized the power he had over her. She'd been in a cold sweat of yearning for three weeks - ever since something had gone wrong with the last delivery and it hadn't come about.
Francie saw the fear and it sent a surge of pleasure through him. This was his power over a titled woman, a woman of class.
"So, my dear," he continued. "You're going to give a little performance with Hilda."
"How dare you," Lady Anne said weakly. "I won't have any part of it. You have your money."
Francie stepped to the dressing table and picked up the package she'd laid there. In its place he flung down the money she'd given him.
"Okay by me," he said cheerfully. "Plenty of other clients on the waiting list."
Lady Anne's forehead was glistening, she felt hot under her eyes.
"No, no, you can't do that. We have an arrangement," she burst out. Her breasts heaved tightly against the blouse, her hands clenched.
"We have an arrangement just as long as I decide we have," he said nonchalantly. "If you don't agree to the conditions then we haven't time to hang around."
Hilda stood impassively watching. She needed the money, but apart from that she wasn't interested. She didn't see why Francie couldn't have got a Lesbian. There were plenty of them about. Some funny little quirk of his.
Lady Anne put a hand on her right breast and Francie followed the movement appreciatively. She removed the hand and put it on the dressing table to steady herself. Then she looked at Hilda and there were tears in her eyes.
Francie tapped the packet absentmindedly and turned it over in his hands.
"All right," Lady Anne said, just as he'd known she would. "What do you want me to do?" Her hands were trembling and there was an involuntary quiver to her lips.
"That's more like it," Francie said contentedly. "First of all, you have to get undressed. Then you have to lie on the bed. And then Hilda will do things to you. Not that she wants to," he added, maliciously. "But, like you, she needs something I have."
Lady Anne felt her head go dizzy and steadied herself against the dressing table. It was as if she were crying in her mind without tears coming from her eyes. This was terrible. Even with a Lesbian, who was going to be involved, it would have been better. But to have this woman, who also probably found the whole thing rather distasteful, mauling her about in front of this suave thug was revolting.
I can't do it. I can't do it! she told herself fiercely. But the package in Francie's hands and the craving in her body changed the "can't" to "must." She dug her nails into her palms and then looked up at Francie.
"Go ahead," Francie said, and his eyes were cruel and avaricious. "Get them off."
She put a hand uncertainly up to the top button on the high neck of her blouse. But the hand wouldn't seem to function.
"Help her, Hilda," Francie ordered.
The bony woman went over to her and pulled open the button. Lady Anne gave a little start and shrank back. But Hilda began to undo the other buttons and she submitted herself to the deftly moving fingers.
Francie sank into a big arm chair near the bed, watching them. There was a grin on his face and the sensual mouth was twisted.
Lady Anne allowed her arms to be slipped out of the blouse and shivered at the cool touch of the woman's fingers on her flesh as she unhooked the brassiere. She wanted to cry, but couldn't. Hilda whisked off the brassiere and flung it on the bed. The big breasts dropped into view and then tautened as Lady Anne pulled herself upright.
"Beautiful," Francie murmured.
Hilda tweaked the nipples. She was determined to give Francie his money's worth so that he couldn't complain and be mean afterwards; Lady Anne bit her lips.
"All right Hilda," Francie said. "Let's see what else she's got." The snarl was back in his voice, mixed with excitement.
Hilda pulled off the riding boots, having sat her victim on the bed. Lady Anne let her carry on, her bulbous breasts shivering slightly, her face pale.
After the boots, the breeches and then the pink briefs underneath. Francie licked his lips.
"Stand up, my dear," he said.
Lady Anne stood up and Francie thought how beautiful she'd look like that in the Tattler! Her figure was perfect, so perfect it seemed to call for destruction. Such perfection was too disturbing. The rib lines above the waist where the skin pulled in under the big bulge of the breasts. The little belly button with the thin line of down running down like a pointer to the sleek curls of black hair against which the white tops of her thighs pressed in an effort at concealment. The rounding of the hips with the slight bulge of the thighbones continuing up in a V. The thighs themselves, white and vulnerable with the well-shaped legs tapering below. She was all breasts, hips and thighs, made to be seized and crushed and destroyed in wild, tear-filled, legs awry, arms awry, belly-searing rape. Francie moved in the chair, his chest was rising and falling more rapidly than usual in spite of his attempt to appear nonchalant.
"Turn around," he snarled.
Without looking at him, Lady Anne turned slowly, profiling for a moment the forward jut, backward push of breasts and buttocks, the shallow S-shape of body and then her back was presented to him with the slimness from the shoulders into the waist accentuated by the tightness of the flesh over her frame and by the full, bulging of the behind into soft, warm-looking milk and white buttocks and the long, milk thighs tapering again below. She was shivering all over now.
"Beautiful," Francie murmured again between his teeth. "All right, Hilda - go ahead," he ordered.
Hilda stepped up behind Lady Anne, who shuddered again as the long, bony hands felt her behind, smoothing themselves over the buttocks whose flesh bulged out before them and then disappeared underneath.
"It's a beauty, Hilda, isn't it?" Francie gritted. "Don't you wish you had a prick to shove in it?"
Hilda grunted. "Smooth as wax," she said.
She passed her hands down Lady Anne's back as if feeling her for a slave market.
"On the bed, dear," she said at last, "and open your legs wide 'cos Francie and I want to see how big you've been stretched through the years of pleasure."
Obediently Lady Anne sat and then lay on the bed. A tear of shame was coursing down a soft cheek. She lay back, had to be told again to open her legs and then did so reluctantly a few inches.
"More than that, dear. We can't see your cranny properly," Hilda said quietly.
Lady Anne spread her thighs wider and then Hilda, as if losing patience, grabbed her knees and pressed them sharply apart, bringing a hopeless cry of protest from Lady Anne and exposing the raw flesh of the vulnerable spot between her legs.
"Don't cry, dear. It's not as if you're going to be fucked by some vile prick." Hilda heard Francie squirm on the chair as she spoke and she laughed coarsely.
"Wouldn't you love to, eh, Francie? Look at that soft, pink opening. It'll be getting all excited in a minute - just asking for something to split it an inch wider."
"Tell me what it's like, Hilda," Francie rasped.
Lying with her legs apart, feeling more naked and shamed than she'd ever felt before, Lady Anne didn't try to stop the tears rolling down her face. Her heart was pounding with a mixture of feelings. Her armpits and crotch were hot and moist. She knew Francie was staring at the bare flesh of her vagina, that Hilda was standing above her, fully clothed and foreign and was about to do things to her. She was no child, but she felt like one now, like an adolescent who has been trapped by some dirty old man and can't escape seduction, can only yield with bitter, inner tears and shame and accept his filthy, vile embraces.
And the next moment she cried out and jerked away as the bony fingertips brushed the little sacks of tender flesh on either side of the portal.
"Very sensitive, Francie," Hilda said. "Get her excited and she'd be a very good screw. Do a turn with real abandon."
"She looks a bit hurt about being mauled," Francie snarled. "She needs a lot more before she forgets everything but her body."
The bony fingers pursued her and Lady Anne forced herself to lie still. The sooner it was over the better, and it would be over the sooner if she didn't try to resist.
Slowly, expertly, the fingers insinuated themselves, hurting slightly at first so that she gasped and bit her lips again. And then they were smoothing round inside her and playing with her clitoris, while the other hand moved under her buttocks to hold them and push them towards the probing fingers.
"It's a lovely, soft behind to hold, Francie," Hilda was continuing. "Wouldn't you like to have a hand under each buttock so that you could feel your own prick moving in."
"You get coarser every day 'Ilda. That's no way to speak in front of a lady." Francie laughed harshly and stood up. He approached the bed and Lady Anne who had closed her eyes to shut out the sight of Hilda's face, opened them again and saw the sadistic twist to his mouth, the great erection which bulged against his trousers.
The fingers were working on her clitoris and she closed her eyes again to shut Francie out. Her face was burning. She would carry this shame with her throughout her life - and in spite of herself her vagina was moistening. She could feel the fingers wetly slipping against its walls.
Suddenly they plunged up - a couple of them - through the tight ring of flesh and into the cavity and she cried out and her legs strained away, but Hilda pushed her buttocks up, keeping a tight hold on them as she persisted in the penetration.
"Not all that big," she heard her say to Francie. "Be a nice fit for any man, I should imagine."
"She's getting excited," Francie said. "Bet she didn't know she 'ad such tendencies."
Lady Anne pursed her lips, biting on the insides. There was some perverse thrill in the shame of being treated in this way. The fingers had moved back to her clitoris and she had to fight down an urge to tense and untense her legs in rhythm with the gentle caressing. The coarse words from both her torturers began to have the effect of making her want to wallow in the shame, to think "to hell with them - why should I care." Her legs began to slither gently against the counterpane, outwards, wide, away from her open vagina.
She heard Francie's breathing.
"Yes, she's opening up wide now," Hilda chuckled, giving her clitoris a pinch which sent a shiver right up her spine. "She's beginning to enjoy it. I told you she'd be a good screw, Francie."
"Christ," Francie murmured. "Christ."
She tried again to control herself, feeling a sudden spasm of shame at her plight in front of these searching eyes, this obscene studying of her. And then it was no good. Her vagina seemed wide and longing, her clitoris was an ache of delight. Her buttocks began to strain together on the hand that was under them, her thighs to jacknife and squirm. Little moans began to trickle unwanted from her lips and her mouth opened in accompaniment to her vagina. Every word they said now only added to her desire. She was too far gone to fight against it.
"She's wet, very wet," Hilda said. And she poked a finger between her buttocks as they relaxed on her hand. It wormed itself into Lady Anne's anus. First knuckle joint, then second. Lady Anne didn't care. The pain doubled the perversity of the pleasure. It was as if a penis was moving in there, but a slim penis, not a great thick penis that would have split her apart.
"She has a nice little rectum, too, Francie," Hilda was saying. "I bet you wouldn't mind that either - a titled ass to go up."
Then lips were down on her breasts, sucking the nipples which seemed to strain up towards the lips and she could feel Hilda's face between the orbs. Her loins were squirming on the hand, under the hand around the hand. She had one more coherent thought that this was disgusting, terrible, unbelievable and then she was almost swooning. Her eyes opened in the swoon and she realized her body was all over the place, her legs flailing. She saw Francie had a little camera and was taking photographs of her. This, too, seemed to add to her passion, her abandon, as she watched him bend between her legs to snap her from vagina upwards, watched his twisted face rise up above to shoot down on her and Hilda.
"I'm lost, I'm lost," she thought, but she couldn't do anything about it. The growing pressure in her naked loins was intense. She heard Hilda talking, could hardly make out the words . . . "Told you, Francie . . . wonderful screw . . . real abandon . . . doesn't even know . . . why don't you? . . . she's coming now . . . Heh, heh . . ."
Then Francie's voice saying . . . "Look at that cunt . . . Christ is she wild . . . that's class . . . Heh, heh."
Her hips were forcing themselves up and up as the finger worked quickly and firmly in her vagina, the other moving in her behind making her strain as if to empty her bowels. She was lost, lost, no longer any shame, only an awareness that where shame should be it was contained in an overpowering desire to reach that point, the point that was coming, coming, vagina breaking, bursting, juices inside, coming, coming, hips forcing up, up, coming and . . . Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh on and on in a beautiful flowing relief as her eyes closed in bliss shutting out Hilda, Francie, the shame and disgust which played no part in this beautiful moment.
Watching her in her choking climax, Francie thought, with a strangled frustration at his loins that he'd never seen a woman so abandoned. She'd forgotten them, she'd contorted, convulsed as if she wanted to show herself off to them, show them just how wild it was possible to get. His mouth was dry, his penis, stuck against his pants, was turbulent. He wished he'd got stuck in her. But then, maybe, that was why she'd seemed so sublimely abandoned - because he wasn't actively involved, had nothing to cloud his view.
He looked at the thin, sticky liquid coming down her thighs. Hilda had straightened up now and he had the photographs. Lady Anne was in his power for ever. Francie watched her coming back to reality, with eyes opening, seeing them there and closing again, the shame flushing back over the face, into the mind. He motioned to Hilda and she went out quietly. Francie walked over behind her and locked the 'door. He went back to the bed where Lady Anne was lying with her eyes still closed, face pale. He took off his clothes and looked at himself in the mirror, wiry frame with a big, stiff, wiry penis. He touched himself and then looked back at the bed. Lady Anne was looking at him and there was new fear on her face. He grinned at her sadistically. He went over to the bed and slapped her across the breasts again and again. He put his hand over her mouth when she tried to cry out and slapped her belly, her hips, again, again, again, bringing out hot, red marks on her flesh. He forced her over onto her belly and slashed her bare buttocks and thighs, a thrill of pleasure running through his naked body and jerking his penis up every time his hand sank into the soft flesh. Lady Anne was crying into the bed, her cries muffled. He wished the riding crop had not been left downstairs. He glanced up and saw a hairbrush on the dressing table.
He crossed to the dressing table and seized it. When he turned she had jumped up from the bed and was moving to the door. But she was swaying dazedly and he caught her. He threw her back over the edge of the bed, stretching her so that he could see the rosy anus. He began to wield the brush down across her buttocks with fury, letting it sink in, pushing her face into the bed, holding her with a grip of surprising strength. This was class, here, he kept telling himself, and this was his hand holding the brush which was slashing her behind, beautiful behind, beautiful body, to be destroyed, too perfect, to be beaten and slashed and mutilated. She was fighting him, but he held her too hard. And then he forced her legs apart with his and jammed the handle of the hairbrush at her anus. He watched her squirming furiously, vainly as the handle began to penetrate. His teeth clenched and a savage grin twisted his face. Her muffled groans hammered on his ears like pleading for more. The brush was well in and he moved it savagely in and out like a saw, watching the incredible stretch of the slit in her behind with eyes that blazed.
At last, when she was coughing and practically vomiting over the bed, he pulled it out and flung it on the floor.
When he turned her over, her eyes were screwed up with fear and pain, but she made no attempt to resist when he dragged her thighs apart, climbed between them and thrust savagely into her vagina, losing his penis with the first stroke.
As his passion began to rise and he twisted her savagely this way and that, the old masochism rekindled and she began to writhe in abandon under him, groaning and mouthing.
Only this time he was not aware of it.
Chapter 6
Hartnell had not yet heard from the gang. It had been two, three days since the docks raid and since then he'd been feeling so criminal with the part he'd played and the money which was still in his wallet that he knew he'd go on with it for the time being. There seemed little alternative except to quit the country, which wasn't very practical, on a hundred pounds or so. He hadn't the slightest doubt that Francie would fulfill his threat to tip off the police about him if he tried to break - and the thought horrified him. The idea of being a hunted man was just too unpleasant to let the mind dwell on.
So what had he been doing with his money now that, at last, he'd got some? he asked himself. Eating, drinking, a theater, a film, nothing but escapes from boredom. And why the boredom? Because he had no purpose, nothing to give a pattern to his life - unless you could call crime a career.
He might just all well not have had the money, he decided. It did nothing for him, because it was the only thing he had. Just so much empty currency with no currency inside him. Nothing to make him feel he had any point in living. He almost looked forward to the next sortie with the gang. At least it was something to do, something exciting.
Dora no longer did him any good although he'd stayed on at her place. Beyond her body she didn't really interest him and now she was becoming so clinging and emotional that it was adversely affecting his appetite for her body. It was a relief to get away from her for a while, to escape those heartfelt looks of wanting which he couldn't return. If it could have been kept at that: liking each other, enjoying nights in bed, it would have been very pleasant. But now that the emotionalism had crept in, the wanting more than that on her side, it was ruined, the whole relationship was wrecked. He should have had the willpower to move out, he thought. It must have been his present general aimlessness that had induced him to stay on, as much as her pleadings.
So now, as usual, here he was wandering about the West End, feeling hungry. Remarkable, he thought, how boredom brought on hunger, or at least, a desire to eat. Something to do, he supposed.
Oxford Street was crowded with afternoon shoppers when he turned into the first restaurant he came to for a cup of tea.
He walked into the big, red-carpeted room, wishing he was in a country where he could get a strong drink at this time of day - and the first thing he saw was Gracie.
She was sitting alone at a table, with a smart leather bag at the side of her chair. Their eyes met and there was a moment in which both wondered if they could look away as if there had been no recognition. But they had recognized each other very definitely and their eyes seemed to lock as if the little windows of the soul were determined that they should not ignore each other.
He smiled, and she smiled back immediately. Still he hesitated. He could just pass on, having acknowledged her, and find another table. He wondered what she wanted him to do and it was probably because he looked so uncertain that she took the initiative and indicated the chair next to hers.
"I wondered whether we should just make a secret sign and then pass on," he said quietly, after he had sat down. At her rather wan smile he wished he hadn't made any reference to their shared knowledge.
"Are you shopping, or just looking?" he continued brightly.
"Just looking, until I come across something interesting," she replied. "How about you?"
"Oh I'm just wandering," he said.
There was a brief and rather awkward silence while the obvious gambit from there occurred to both of them. The waitress arrived with tea and cakes and took his order, creating a thankful diversion.
A few more pleasantries followed while they sat there: usual polite small talk about theater, films, books, likes, dislikes. They might have been any casual acquaintances having a cup of tea. Whereas, in fact, hanging over their conversation like some ignored but ever-present gauleiter was this unvoiced knowledge of their secret which cut them off from probably everyone else in the restaurant. That they were guilty, the lawbreakers, the criminals; the others the lawful, conventional, good, honest people. As they chatted, the knowledge gave Hartnell a sort of perverse pleasure, which he realized, suddenly, was because it brought the girl, Gracie, closer to him, made them completely alone together in this crowded room.
"How would you like to dine with me tonight?" He charged in, eventually, with a straight left.
She looked at him doubtfully and for a moment he felt she thought he was simply asking her because he thought she was an easy lay.
"Look," he said. "I know it's a terrible impertinence of me, but Dora has told me a little about you and I can't imagine anyone having a more unpleasant time than you've had. If you'd permit me, I'd feel it a great pleasure to be able to give you a little decent company and - I hope - a pleasant evening for a change."
For another long moment he wasn't sure whether she was going to burst into tears. She looked at him steadily, biting her lip and in that moment he suddenly felt that this was what he'd been looking for. This was hope, both for himself and her. She saw the look and perhaps the feeling communicated itself. She smiled.
"That would be very nice," she said.
Before dinner they had a couple of drinks. After the second she seemed to brighten up considerably and he remembered that she never touched the whiskey at the hideout. When she'd brightened, she talked much more readily, much better - about everything. He was quite astonished at her background of knowledge and perception. Slim Bailey knew his onions, he thought.
"Shall we have one more before we hop?" he suggested.
"Yes, please," she said, "It's a long time since I've felt so good."
By the time the third had gone down the hatch he was head over heels in love, with his good sense fighting against the danger signs which he knew were soon going to overwhelm him.
They dined at a little French restaurant in Soho, starting with sherries, good wine with the meal and finishing with liqueurs. He had intended a film or show, but it was too late by the time they'd finished. He wondered vaguely what Dora would be doing now.
He raised his liqueur and held it across towards her, saying, quietly: "Well, here's to a happier life for both of us." He managed with an effort not to say "together."
Her hazel eyes were warm as she clinked glasses with him.
"You're the nicest person I've met," she said softly.
He felt his heart contract and expand as he smiled at her. He would have to do something. He shouldn't let her go on like this. Then he told himself to get a hold of himself. This was a different set of circumstances than the usual. This would be he and Gracie against a danger-our gang - and without resources. Have to go slowly.
"You can't have met all that many," he said.
She took his remark seriously.
"There was really nobody before Daddy died," she said. "And after . . ." Her voice faded off and she put her hands to her eyes.
He took her hand across the table.
"You have to forget about afterwards," he said. "It doesn't matter to either of us. We'll have to go slowly, but we're going to find a way out of this."
She shook her head slowly, but her eyes were still warm.
"There isn't any way out once you get into this sort of mess," she said. "You just have to seize what chances you can of making things a little better."
"Gracie - ,"
"Yes? What is it?" she curled her fingers in his on the table.
"I just want you to know I fell in love with you tonight - and we're going to get out of this, the two of us together."
She leaned across the table and kissed him full on the lips, a warm soft kiss which took him by surprise so that she had pulled away before he had had time to respond. His heart went out to her. To have kissed him in the restaurant, not caring, warmly and sweetly.
"We never will," she said. "We're trapped. Normal lives aren't for us - ever again."
There was something in the way she said the words which caught at his stomach like some inevitable prophecy of doom.
"Let's go," he said. "We still have time for a drink and we can talk better in a quiet bar."
They found a bar in a big hotel. It was the quietest they'd seen - and there were a lot of people in it.
He felt full of an urgency now. There was a feeling of so little time.
"I can't get out," she told him, in reply to his demands that she flee the country with him, or that she take a job in some other part of the country. "You don't know Francie. He'd stop at nothing to ruin me if I walked out on him. He's done it before. Women have had their faces slashed horribly or they've been pulled out of the Thames. And he'd find me wherever I went. He knows people everywhere. I should be in fear wherever I went."
"Even with me with you?"
"Doubly. I'd be afraid for you, too. People like us are no match for people like them."
"So what? I hate to think of you in Francie's clutches."
"You mustn't think of it. It would be better if we just remained polite friends."
"Too late for that now as far as I'm concerned," he said. "We'll have to think of something."
They sat for some time, hand in hand.
"Where are you going when you leave here?" he asked. "Back to Francie?"
She looked at him, her long, blonde hair falling forward towards her cheek. There was all the sympathy of the woman who understood man's bitterness towards the other man in her look. She shook her head from side to side.
"You mean you don't live with him?"
"No," she said. She made an effort: "He got me a place of my own in Earl's Court - a room with kitchen and bathroom. He likes everything to be spread all over the place, then people don't have tabs on him so easily and he has more places to escape to in an emergency. He lives in Hampstead."
"How often does he ...?" He regretted starting the question - whose answer he didn't want to hear - as soon as he'd begun.
There were tears in her eyes as she looked at him.
"I don't want to talk about it - and you don't want to hear," she replied quietly. "He visits me sometimes - but he knows I'll never be his in the sense he wants me."
Hartnell felt a dull anger grow inside him at the thought of Francie visiting Gracie, stripping her, making love to her. The thought sickened him and he wished he could undo all that had happened. "The greatest tragedy in life is the utter impossibility of changing what has already happened." He thought of Galsworthy's truism and now he felt it truly for the first time. This would be with him and Gracie no matter what happened, the fact of her suffering at Francie's hands, this episode of her life and his which was now a part of them with all its repercussions, mental and material. But there was no point in trying to plan ahead. If he hadn't got mixed up with the gang, he'd never have met her. But again, perhaps that would have been a good thing. Good thing? What do I mean by a good thing, he wondered? What is a "good," respectable, comfortable, stagnating existence compared with this aching, minute-to-minute awareness of oneself existing?
"Let's go, Gracie," he said thickly.
"All right."
He paid and they got up and walked out into the neon-lit London night.
When Gracie had met Francie she'd been a virgin with all a teen-age virgin's romantic thoughts of love and the man she'd love. Francie had robbed her of her virginity - starting with threats and ending with half-violence even when she'd half yielded for fear of his power over her. Since then she couldn't remember how many times she'd suffered his embrace, accepting it, unfeeling, except for the pain and soreness and the shame he induced - and soon even the shame had been relegated to the subconscious as it does when habit makes an action lose its poignancy. But somewhere, deep down had been this cherished thought of the man she'd love and, although she'd hardly looked at Hartnell that first day at the hideout, she'd known that this was the man it could have been. It was shame and hopelessness that had kept her eyes vacant and uninterested.
But now she was with him, walking through the London streets with his arm around her, his mouth against her hair and she knew that even if he didn't mean what he was saying she was going to bed with him tonight. Before, it would have been impossible. She couldn't envision herself going to bed with a man on such short acquaintance no matter how urgent the attraction. But Francie had made it this way. She had suffered him. And now she would accept with joy a love which she desired and it would be as if it was the first time - without the physical discomfort.
She turned in towards him in the street, pulling his far shoulder round towards her with her hand and kissed him. Her breath almost sobbed in his shoulder as they broke away and the feeling inside was suddenly pain as well as joy.
Hartnell knew as well. There had been other women in his life, but they all seemed ordinary, the relationships naive compared with the desperation of this situation. The danger, the difficulty, accentuated the urgency, made them alone against a dangerous world. He felt a tingling joy throughout his body. He forced himself to forget about the circumstances which surrounded them like a wall of barbed wire. Just for now they had met in ordinary, conventional circumstances and were loving like any ordinary couple who held hands in the cinema.
"Where shall we go?" he asked, squeezing her upper arm through her dress, loving the arm, so slim and firm.
"We can go to my place," she said softly.
"And Francie?"
"He's gone to the country. He won't be back tonight in any case."
"I'm going to get you out of this, Gracie."
"Don't think about it, darling. I don't want to think about it."
He kissed her again in the street and her body pressed hard against his. She touched his face as their heads drew away and her eyes looked into his with all the searching, longing wonderment of someone who has found happiness that can't possibly last.
A group of soldiers passing on the other side of the street whistled and they moved on arm in arm. Hartnell hailed the first taxi he saw.
Back in her flat, they didn't even put the lights on. A glow from a street lamp filled the room so that they could move about, seeing objects and themselves darkly but distinctly. They didn't move about much, anyway. She went to the window and then turned back to him, eager but half shy now they were there.
He put his arms around her and felt her body trembling slightly against him. He was filled with an overwhelming tenderness for her. She was like some poor, lost little animal, which has had a bad time and needs someone to look after it. But as well as that she was a woman, a beautiful woman and her body was real, tangible, able to be caressed and loved while he loved her in his mind.
The thought flitted through his mind that he could spend the night, easily, just holding her in his arms, protecting her through the darkness.
He kissed her and she clung to him, her cheek locked against his.
"You don't have to if you would rather not," he whispered. "Just to be with you is enough."
The darkness seemed to add an intimacy to all their words.
She pressed against him, trying to look at his eyes in the dim light.
"I do want to," she whispered back - and her voice became fierce. "I do, I do. It's the first time I've ever felt like this."
"I'm going to get us out of this," he said, softly. "We're going to get away from here." He couldn't help repeating himself. He wanted to impress this fact on himself and her.
"If only I'd met you all that time ago when things were different," he said, fiercely.
"Don't, darling, don't," she whispered. "We're here. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter."
She kissed him again swaying against him and suddenly passion flared with the tenderness in both of them. Their kisses sought wildly to lose them from the world they were in, lips moved of their own will over eyes, cheeks, necks, inflaming breath so that it choked into half-uttered words.
They swayed together in the darkness to the bed and, as, with open, loving eyes she held his face in her hands, he began to stroke her body, rippling his hands over the summer dress, learning the contours, loving them, from neck to knees.
"Oh, darling," she whispered, and this thing which had sprung up on them so suddenly and surely needed continuity, gentle unbroken continuity without breaks and pauses to struggle out of clothes. And his hand continued to caress her, opening the buttons at her bosom, pushing up the brassiere and gently fondling the warm young breasts.
Her lips trembled on his neck, her hands squeezed his shoulders with all her force and his hand went away and ran up gently under her dress, caressing the knees, the thighs, like a butterfly fluttering between them. And she opened her thighs, not even remembering Francie, only knowing that she loved and needed. Then the hand was there under the briefs, brushing gently between her legs in an agony of sensation and she buried her face in his shoulder, pressing it hard there, feeling him pulling off those briefs in a movement whose smoothness did not mar the continuity. Between her legs and up inside her was a pool of aching, needing, straining out to him with greater and greater yearning as he learned more and more of her.
She moved her hands up to his head, eyes closed now, and pulled his lips down to hers. When the pressure became great she burst her tongue into his mouth, almost in tears.
Her dress was somewhere round her waist. Vaguely she wished they were both completely naked and then she couldn't think any more for the unbearableness of wanting in her loins as he caressed her.
"Darling," she whispered again. "Oh, darling!"
And, as if from deep inside him, a long way off, she heard him say: "I love you, Gracie. God, I love you!"
She held his face hard against hers, cheek to cheek, and she felt him move and come down on top of her, gently, always gently.
Her mouth opened to murmur something and instead uttered a gasp of delight as she felt him move into her. Her mouth remained open, her face tensed and stayed tense in the passion of feeling his warmth and size closing fleshily into her, fulfilling this need, making it a rhythmic ecstasy.
She opened her thighs and then closed them in against his hips, drawing him and the sensation into her, running her hands spasmodically over his back, pressing the small, tautening buttocks at her orifice.
Inside her, between her legs, a burning funnel of relief, of love, seemed to fan out throughout her loins, imparting extra sensation to the skin of her thighs and even her belly. Her whole body was a great warm, fluid prickle of sensation.
"Oh darling, darling," she continued to whisper as his long, relentless penis broke further and further into her like breakers on an incoming tide.
His mouth moved onto hers and off in a series of passionate, uncontrollable jerks. She wriggled her buttocks, which felt hot and moist. Little whimpering gasps swirled in her throat. She could think of nothing but her love and its fulfillment here in her body and his fulfillment in her.
His penis seemed to fill her now in an enormous hard mass. She felt his hands slithering under her buttocks and she raised her hips under his slightly, straining against him, feeling the sudden stiffening rush of pleasure in her loins with the movement. She relaxed again, moaning softly and could feel his hands holding her buttocks like footballs, his fingers digging into the soft flesh, savoring it, biting into it fiercely.
She put her arms around him and clung to him desperately, almost afraid that if she didn't hang on, her passion would make her squirm off the bed. Her breasts were heaving against his chest and she felt the ache at the nipples where his chest touched them.
His hands slipped down over her buttocks and in towards the clinging opening where his organ was penetrating with all its strength. With a jerk of near-delirium, she was aware of the fingers feeling along the lips of her vagina besides his in-thrusting rod.
She heard his breath breaking sharply from his lips as he muttered words of love to her. His hips seemed to cannon into her crotch with a fierce rapidity which slowed eventually as his gasps became more agonized.
Her loins seemed to be emptied of everything material, emptied and acting as a receptacle for pure sensation. He seemed to fill the whole of her body and it was wonderful that he should, that he should by filling her become her. Her hips were like a volcano and she couldn't think, couldn't see, could only know that the end was coming, an end which, it seemed, would be too acute to bear. The acuteness was sharper and sharper, growing ever sharper like the soft scraping of knives. She gasped and choked into his neck, unable to form words any longer. There was a tense excitement in her which was beginning to boil over in a saucepan. He was jerking into her with long, raking, slow piston movements, pushing at her as if he wanted to lose the whole of his hips in her vagina. Her vagina seemed huge and incredibly naked and the boiling was rising and rising in a faster and faster flood and she couldn't bear it.
"Darling, darling, darl . . ." she managed to utter in agony and then she convulsed under him and against him, hanging on as if she was on a mad roundabout as the flood swept down and out from her loins in excruciating relief.
She remained excited, jerking spasmodically under him for some time while his gasps grew hoarser and hoarser, his thrusts slower and more forceful until he uttered one long low exclamation and, as it seemed that his penis must grind into her womb, she clasped him passionately and held him while he shot a stream of hot sperm into her waiting loins.
Later they undressed completely and got into the bed. They were still making love off and on when the dawn began to turn the sky dull gray.
Chapter 7
The lorry was black, now, and the number plate had been altered. Nonetheless, Hartnell felt distinctly uneasy as he drove it east from London towards the coast.
It had been three days since he'd last seen Gracie and only a week since he'd first met her and taken her out to dinner. During that time Francie, it appeared, had spent quite a lot of time somewhere in the country and Gracie had not been bothered with him. But still she was not prepared to clear out. Hartnell had done his utmost to persuade her, but she was somehow numbed to the hope of success. And now she was afraid that he would cross Francie and that something terrible would happen to him.
So here they were hanging on, aimlessly, and here he was, with Johnny once more beside him, driving out on some unspecified job which he didn't want to do. It was as if some force outside himself had taken a hold on his life and was running it for him.
In front of them the Riley with Francie, Bill, Jake and Jim was nosing its way through the traffic, racing a long way ahead and then slowing down to wait for the lorry like an impatient terrier.
"What's the mystery about this one?" he asked Johnny when they were out in open country, heading southeast.
"Didn't Francie tell you?"
"No."
"I guess 'e doesn't trust you yet. Well, we're going to pick up some skirt!"
"Pick up some skirt?"
"That's right. Fresh from Gay Paree. High class French skirt."
"Don't talk in riddles, Johnny. What the hell do you mean?"
"Well, these girls are interested in the money what they can make in London, but they're all tabbed by the French authorities and they wouldn't be let out. So - trust Francie - we're going to pick them up from a fishing boat and they're going to join Francie's little business."
"Francie's little business?"
"Yeah. I guess you an' Francie ain't bosom pals yet. 'E doesn't tell you very much."
"What's Francie's little business?"
"Well, I don't suppose I'm breakin' any confidences. You'd know later on today anyway. 'E runs a call girl outfit."
Hartnell pursed his lips. Next, he'd be hearing that Francie ran an assassins agency. Whiskey and cigarettes! What a load of bull that had been.
"'Course it hasn't been doing too well 'cos it needs fresh blood," Johnny was continuing. "But these Frenchies should revive interest in it quite a bit."
The sooner I get out of this, Hartnell was thinking, the better. Sooner or later there's going to be a crash somewhere and then it's going to be just too bad for everyone.
It was growing dusk when they drove through the little east coast village to the big house back from the beach which Francie had rented a month before for this special purpose. The Channel was calm, dotted with lights from boats way out on its sleek surface. A white foam rolled gently up the narrow stretch of beach.
"Not much around here," Johnny said, as they drove over the dusty ground to the roughly fenced off grounds of the house. "Trust the boss to find the best spot for the job."
The Riley was already parked and lights flashed on in the house as they climbed down and walked towards the main door.
Inside, the other four were sitting smoking in the main ground-floor room. Francie was staring out to sea through the big windows which overlooked the beach. The house was sparsely furnished with enormous, old-fashioned furniture. There were heavy brocade curtains at the windows and covering the doors.
"Well, we've got quite a little while to wait," Francie said. "But, we'd better not show ourselves in the village just in case. We brought some food in the Riley." He looked around the room. "Hey, Jake," he said. "Go out and bring in the grub and the bottles - in the boot."
Jake ambled out of the room and Francie stared back through the window. Still staring he said: -
"Well, Roger old chap, here we are and it's just as well you should know what we're up to." He nodded out across the dim expanse of the Channel. "Somewhere out there," he went on, "is a little boat with 'alf a dozen beauties onboard. Not French racehorses, I don't mean, but French pros - high class mind you. They'll be pulling in here just down to our right about two in the morning. They're coming to make a bit of money for yours truly - and for the rest of us here."
"Another nice little racket, Francie."
"Not bad is it? Make us a mint of money they will. Nothing like a bit of Oh-la-la to make an Englishman's eyes light up."
"How'd you get hold of them?"
"Oh, I got friends everywhere. 'Igh class friends. I'm going to make it worth somebody's while over there to bring 'em over here. Suppose you might speak French?"
"Yes, I do."
"Thought you would. Well it's only the fishermen'll be bringing them so you might have to talk some French to 'em. Les girls are supposed to speak English, but you can never count on that - and it's not very important from our point of view."
Jake came in with sandwiches and the whiskey and they all began to eat and drink.
"Bring the cards, Bill?" Francie asked. "There, there boy. Don't look so bored, always worth the wait until they come, isn't it? Then you can 'ave one all to yourself." He chuckled and turned to Hartnell.
"We always try the goods out just to make sure we 'aven't been cheated," he explained.
The lights in the house were put out at one o'clock and they sat for a while in darkness, smoking and looking out over the water. There was a crescent moon and no sound apart from the gentle breakers.
"A good night," Francie commented. "We'd better go down in a few minutes in case they come ashore further down."
They left the house and walked over the rough ground past the vehicles. They jumped from the higher ground a few feet down to the sloping beach, their feet sinking deep into the silvery grains.
"You stay here, Jake," Francie said, when they'd reached firmer sand quite near the water's edge. "If they come in here and we don't see 'em, give a whistle."
As he walked beside Francie along the shore, Hartnell wondered vaguely about coast guards and people like that. But, as was usual with Francie, he felt the man would have left nothing to chance, that everything would be known beforehand and taken care of. He felt like a child in comparison.
One by one at distances of a few hundred yards the others stopped and waited until only he and Francie were left striding along the beach with the salt breeze in their nostrils.
"We'll go along as far as those rocks," Francie said, indicating a clump of boulders ahead. "If they come up any further away than that they'll have to find their own way to the house."
They sat in the shelter of the rock peering out to sea. Lights were still winking far out. There were no lights coming from the village about a mile away.
"Hope they don't keep us waiting," Francie said. "Some of the boys haven't had a bit of skirt for a long time. It'd be a shame to have them getting frustrated."
Hartnell was thinking of Gracie. He didn't dare look at Francie because every time he did he had to resist the temptation to sock him. How he wished he and Gracie could be out there now in the Channel, maybe heading for the French coast, or perhaps for Spain, anywhere away from this mess. He allowed his mind to dwell upon himself and he could hardly believe the reality of himself sitting here on this beach with this other man waiting for this strange, criminal arrival in this fantastic setup.
For a long time he sat there, not saying a word, thinking - of Gracie, of Dora who'd been upset when he'd moved out, but had let him go without too much fuss, of Gracie again, always coming back to Gracie, the charm of her lovely face and voice and the beauty of her breasts, her slim woman's body, the desire with which the thought of her choking breath when he loved her, always filled him.
Francie was silent, too, lost in his thoughts which were also of Gracie and that inner core which she had, which he couldn't get at, that something which kept unattainable, the only woman he'd ever really wanted.
There was a low whistle from up the beach and they both scrambled to their feet and began to run along the surf's edge.
The dim shape of a large rowing boat met them, growing out of the dimness into phantom near-reality and then substance. Bill and Jim were already there, helping to pull it in.
"Ask them if everything went okay," Francie said.
Hartnell addressed the nearest of the two French fishermen, asking what sort of trip they'd had.
The fisherman grinned and said it had been fine but the "young ladies" had suffered a little from sea sickness.
Hartnell told Francie and then he noticed the women, huddled in the boat.
"That's all right," Francie said. "They'll be suffering more than a little from prick-sickness soon."
Shivering slightly, in spite of the thick coats they were wearing, the girls began to climb from the boat, walking from seat to seat in their dainty high heels, helped by the fishermen as the boat swayed, and then jumping ashore.
"Well, well. Hello girls," Francie said. "Par-lez vous anglais?" It was one of his few expressions in the language.
"A leetle," said the first girl. "We all speak a leetle. We were seek, but it is better now."
"I trust you all know how to faire l'amour a leetle," Francie said with a coarse chuckle which was echoed by Bill and Jim and the others who had now arrived on the scene.
The girl giggled and rubbed her tongue along her lips at him.
As soon as they were all on dry land the fishermen pushed off and rowed quietly and rapidly back towards their boat, leaving a strange little crowd of people behind them on the beach. It was just two o'clock.
They walked in a body up the beach. When they came to a high step to the road, the women were helped up by the men and there were so many playful shrieks as hands held buttocks and ran up between thighs that Francie called out for quiet.
As soon as they were in the house, Francie pulled the heavy curtains across the windows. He switched on the light and leaned against the door with a smile on his face.
"Well, well," he murmured. "It couldn't 'ave worked out better."
Hartnell studied the women while Jake doled them out sandwiches and whiskey. The color began to come back to their pale cheeks as they ate and drank. They were certainly very attractive, he decided. Most of them had typical dark, French good looks, with a faint olive tint to the skin and prominent but delicate bone structure. They all looked astonishingly vivacious. When they began to remove their coats, the voluptuousness of their figures brought unrepressed whistles of appreciation from the men.
"Go and have a wash, dears," Francie said, after they'd eaten, "and then we'll see if you know your stuff."
None of the girls seemed the slightest perturbed by his words and they all trouped out quite happily after Jake who was to show them to the bathroom. Impatient at having to wait, Jake seized the last one to enter and mauled her big breasts as he kissed her. She bit his ear and pinched his penis through his trousers.
Half an hour later they had all returned to the main room where the men were drinking fresh whiskey. Eyes moved over them avidly as they came in.
Francie stood up and walked over to them. His sensual mouth was smiling, his eyes as hard as granite chips.
"I'm Francie," he told them. "And, I'm your boss. Tomorrow we'll all go up to London and start arranging for you to make a fortune. In the meantime, the boys here are anxious for a bit of continental screw an' I'm sure you must be a bit frustrated after that trip so tonight we're all going to get to know one another." He paused, looked around the room and saw Hartnell. "If there's anything you don't know how to say," he added, "then you can just ask the gentleman over there 'cos 'e's got class like me and he speaks your lingo like an onion boy."
The girls looked at Hartnell with interest and several glances remained fixed on him even when Francie resumed speaking.
"Now girls," he said. "We'd all like to see how you look folies bergere style, you know, nu - so starting with you" - he pointed to a petite brunette - "get those togs off and let's have a look at you."
"Togs?" the girl queried.
Francie glanced at Hartnell and then grinned.
"Bit of Old Blighty," he said. "Clothes, my dear - skirts, brassieres, knickers - you know."
The girl giggled, repeated the word "togs" to herself and began to strip.
She took off her clothes with the tantalizing technique of a professional striptease and when at last she was standing naked in front of them the gang were breathing very heavily.
"Get a load of that," Johnny muttered.
She had big breasts, almost too big for her size, with enormous, angry-looking nipples, her waist was slim and her hips were, also, broad for her size. They seemed to shine with an oily olive gloss and the tangle of dark hair at her thigh junction muffed out in glossy profusion.
"Yes, I think you'll do," Francie said, with a leer. "Let's 'ave a look at your behind."
Unabashed the girl swiveled round like a mannequin and playfully jutted a pair of glossy, olive buttocks at him, arching her back inwards to accentuate them.
"I see you've been sunbathing without any togs," Francie said and all the women giggled.
"All right," Francie said, pleased with his own humor. "Don't stop the show. Next buttocks please."
The pantomime continued until all the girls had slowly peeled their clothes from their bodies and paraded before the watching, desire-filled eyes. They all had bodies well worth any man's money. Some, like the first, were plump in the right places to the point of being exaggerated, others were elegantly well developed with long, svelte lines.
"Anybody who can't wait for privacy?" Francie asked, hopefully.
And Jake, who still felt the pressure where the girl had pinched his organ, stood up with a deep flush. He took another swig of his whiskey and then drained the glass with a grimace.
"Go on then, Jake. Give us a show," Francie encouraged.
Jake's eyes were fixed on the girl who had first stripped - the one he had kissed outside the bathroom - while he unbuckled his belt. She came over towards him, seeing from his glance that she was the one he wanted.
"You wan' me to 'elp you?" she asked and began to unbutton his trousers.
"Go easy or he'll faint and then we'll all be sorry," Francie said. Jake leered at them amidst the guffaws which followed.
With the help of the little brunette he got his clothes off. Towards the end she was taking them off for him alone, because he couldn't do anything with his hands except run them over every glossy portion of her body he could reach. The girl herself had begun to tremble and had jerked the last garments off him with some savagery.
"Go to it, Jake," Francie cried.
Jake had a bit of a paunch, which wasn't too big, considering his size, and his penis jutted out from under it almost vertically. His big hands caught the girl, who squirmed up close to him and rubbed his penis between her soft, glossy thighs. Jake uttered a couple of gasps which the laughs of the company did not affect. He kissed her and she clung to him passionately writhing, exploring his body with her fingers as he explored hers.
Suddenly, placing her arms up around his neck, she leapt up, twining her legs around his waist.
"She's a gymnast, as well," Francie declared in a torrent of fresh guffaws, guffaws which edge of lewd violence.
Jake placed his hands under the girl's stretched behind, played with her anus for a moment, found his rod waving near her open vagina and wormed it in.
With a little gasp of "Oh cheri!" the girl flopped down onto the fleshy mast and began to squirm on it, mouth open, murmuring in French and English.
With her jogging on him, Jake carried her to a rug, and flopped down on top of her. The company moved into a circle around them to watch, offering encouraging suggestions. One of the girls bent and gave Jake a couple of playful taps on his behind to a burst of fresh laughter.
The girl on the floor was squirming like a mad thing and Jake kept shuffling his knees further in between her widespread thighs, trying to stop himself from slipping on the rug. Panting, he leaned on her thighs, pushing them farther apart and the spectators had a perfect view of his big, white organ ramming into the red gulf, surrounded by its forest of black hair between her legs.
"Oh cheri, oh cheri," she kept murmuring as he split her apart.
Jake pushed her legs back now, pulling back the thighs against her big, trembling breasts, leaning forward on them so that she was bent almost double, holding out her nether portions to him as if she wanted only those parts to exist.
Jake leaned up off her and pushed forward his hips like a matador attracting the bull. His rod disappeared to the hilt with each thrust while the girl waggled her upturned bottom, whose glossy white roundness was there to further inflame those who watched.
Around the floor scene, some of the gang had caught hold of the naked girls as they watched, and, still watching, were fondling their breasts, running their hands over the svelte lines of bosom and belly, playing with buttocks. Without taking their dark eyes from the pantomime, the girls, too, were feeling for bulging organs, opening fly buttons, losing their relentless fingers inside protecting clothes.
With every stroke, now, Jake was belching forth a strangled gasp of breath, giving a final agonizing flick to his hips as his bulging, excited penis seared into the girl's moist vagina.
She had unwound her legs and wrapped them around his waist, squeezing them tight with every intrusion he made into her channel. Her grasping, clawing hands had made red weals across his back.
Jake held her buttocks, each in a cupped hand and lifted her slightly off the rug so that she rested on it only with her head and shoulders. The different position gave him even greater penetration and the girl gave a little shriek. Her eyes on the ceiling were unseeing.
"Fuck me, fuck me to death!" she pleaded.
"She certainly 'as a good grasp of the English language," Johnny said as he sucked the ear of a slim, dark girl who, standing with her back towards him, had taken out his weapon and was rolling it between her legs.
Jake was straining into the girl whose head slid back on the rug every time he jerked into her. He had a finger in her behind and was seeing how far he could lose it, while the girl kept clamping her buttocks together tightly around it.
"Hurry, hurry cheri," she spluttered. "J'arrive, I'm coming, hurry."
Jake let her fall back onto the rug and lowered himself onto the soft ramp of her hips, still pistoning into her. He leaned onto her and bit her neck. She bit his ear in return and bit it again in passion.
"Uuuuuug," Jake bellowed as she bit him.
His mouth had opened, his eyes were wild, full of sweet pain, his strokes slowed, grinding in like a thick, slow screwdriver.
The girl's loins were almost turning circles, rotating furiously, her buttocks brushing the rug, screwing it up under them. They were both gasping as if their lungs would burst.
Jake's mouth moved, his hands held her shoulders as if he would pulverize them.
'"Ere it comes," he cried. '"Ere it comes, now . . . Uuuuugh! . . ."
The girl gave a shudder. Her hips went into a paroxysm.
As they both began to subside in dwindling activity, Francie turned to the other girls.
"She'll do," he said. "Now we'll see about the rest of you."
The gang began to break up, each man leading a girl away into other rooms for a more private pleasure. Eventually Jake and his girl stood up and went off to find a bed for a fresh bout.
Only Hartnell was left, sitting on a table, his legs swinging nonchalantly to and fro. Across the room, the odd girl stood, undecided.
Hartnell, in spite of the show could not summon any great enthusiasm to make love to any of these professional women. He remembered his only too infrequent nights with Gracie, the torment they left inside him, the feelings of love, passion and protection they left within him. All this was cheap in comparison and he could only think of her.
He looked at the girl who remained and realized she was waiting for him to do something. She was a slim, dark girl with big breasts and a rather sharp, attractive face. He noticed she was not wearing lipstick and that her lips were a gentle shade of pink, well shaped and soft-looking.
"Go to bed," he said. "I don't feel like it."
She raised dark eyebrows in surprise and came across to him.
"'Ow is that, darleeng?" she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder.
Hartnell grinned inwardly at the situation. He thought of earlier occasions when he would have loved to have had just such an attractive girl standing nude in front of him asking why he didn't want to make love to her. Things have come to a pretty pass, he thought.
"I guess I'm just tired," he said.
"But I will make you wide awake again," she insisted. "Am I not beautiful enough?"
She made a little pirouette in front of him, displaying her curvaceous back view with the perkily protruding rounded buttocks, and giving a little laugh which brought out dimples in her smooth, brown cheeks.
Hartnell felt a sudden warmth down in his trousers.
"Oh, you're great," he assured her. "I just don't feel like it."
"Perhaps you are un'appy in love?" she suggested, putting her finger unwittingly straight on the wound.
"Perhaps I am," Hartnell agreed.
"Is true - this?" she asked.
"Is true," he said.
She moved closer to him, throwing back her head a little so that her firm breasts stood out towards his face, inviting.
"Then it is better that you make love - make you 'appier," she assured him. "I wish you were right," Hartnell said. She misunderstood his words a little and put her hand down on the bulge which had grown, without him being fully aware of it, in his trousers. She ran her fingers over it, feeling it, measuring it.
"You see - you want it really," she said. With her hand titivating his penis through a couple of thicknesses of material and her breasts so close under his face that he would only need to sway forward to kiss them, Hartnell felt a doubt in himself. He didn't really want her. But just for the few minutes of physical delight which would allow him to forget everything? Might it not be a good thing? But then he saw Gracie lying in the bed thinking of him, wanting him and the desire dissipated.
"Come. You come upstairs - or we stay here?" the girl asked. She was rubbing her thighs together, pressing against his legs, working herself into a state of excitement.
"No," he said. "No - not tonight."
"No? Why is no?" she asked.
She began to undo his buttons and he realized his erection hadn't gone down. He couldn't make the effort to get up or push her away.
She undid them all the way down and searched for the opening in his pants, found it and worked his organ out into view. She held it gently in her hand looking at the blunt cudgel of a knob, the thick white staff.
"Is big," she said appreciatively.
Her fingers on his penis had made a certain warmth of feeling gush into it and find an echo in his throat. He looked at her body, at the thin fingers stroking his flesh.
"You still not sure you want it?" the girl asked, but her eyes were twinkling with certainty.
She bent suddenly and took the knob in her mouth. The movement took him by surprise, sending a sharp pain of sensation through him, making his penis swell in her mouth to even greater size.
She glanced up at him quickly.
"I eat it," she said.
Her mouth went back to enclose him and he watched the top of her head with its short black curly hair jogging about.
She was using her tongue and he could feel it swiping around him, stimulating his rod to make little involuntary jerks in her mouth. Her lips were soft as they moved down the staff, taking all she could into her mouth, surrounding the flesh with the warmth of her breath, the moistness of her saliva.
Her tongue was like the suction end of a vacuum cleaner. As she licked his prick he felt as if this slender morsel of flesh, this tongue was drawing the very dregs of feeling out of him, electrifying his whole body.
She began to suck voraciously, rubbing her legs together all the time and he leaned back on the table, pushing his hips at her face, moving his penis farther towards her throat.
He wouldn't stop her now, he realized. It had gone too far now. He thought about Gracie and the thought was quite apart from what was happening down there under her moving head. It was easier to recognize the difference when it was happening and it didn't matter so much.
She bit him gently and he squirmed. He leaned forward and ran his fingers through her hair and then reached down to stroke her breasts. She didn't look up, but continued with her sucking, continued rubbing her thighs together and breathing heavily over his rampant phallus.
His heart began to pound. He wanted to tense his legs together and strain his hips at her. His loins were growing hot. He was sweating between his legs.
Releasing her breasts, he let himself fall gently backwards until he was lying across the table. She moved back with him, keeping his penis in her mouth, burying her head in his loins.
Now he was on his back and could sense himself. He did so and felt an immediate crush of feeling at that stiff protuberance which her tongue was working on like a mad thing. His lips moved apart and his breath made the only noise in the room.
He felt her hand exploring in his trousers and then she pulled out his testicles so that his genitals were all exposed in a neat little triangle. She stroked the loose sacks of flesh while she sucked and he felt a fresh intoxication run through his body, finding its extreme point at the head of his cudgel.
His breath shot in little explosions into the still atmosphere of the big room. His hips were grinding against her face. He glanced down and saw her engrossed in her sucking, eyes closed, fluttering every so often, her breasts pressed against his knees, her legs still tight against him and rubbing. He bit his lip and tensed his hips watching her pretty, unrouged mouth eating sensually on his penis.
The stem of his penis, that part which wasn't engulfed in her mouth, was dead white. In contrast, he knew, the knob would now be dark, flaming red.
It would be getting redder and redder, darker and darker, all the blood drawn into it just as the sperm was already tingling to move into it. He panted in a continuous stream, writhing his hips, gritting his teeth at the pinpoint of furious sensation lost in her mouth.
He wanted to grab her, twist her over and shove it in her with furious energy, but he couldn't move from his position. His passion had trapped him there, making him incapable of breaking the rhythm.
His fingers clawed at the polished tabletop, bringing out thin scratch lines on its smooth surface.
In his belly he could feel the imminence of the explosion, the boiling to great heat. He gasped, gasped loudly, so that the sound echoed in the big room and the girl renewed her tonguing with even greater energy.
Deep inside the boiling was under way. He could feel it growing and growing and the thought that he was going to flood into her mouth filled him with an overwhelming perversity of pleasure. He worked his hips, hurrying the climax for fear she would jerk away before it was reached.
He was lost now. It had to be finished. Not to finish now, for her to pull away now, was the equal of death, of torture and then death.
He gasped, uttering formless words. He looked down at her as he felt the flood start. Her face was flushed with passion, eyes still closed and fluttering, mouth working furiously. He forced his neck to stay in that position so that he could see her. His eyes screwed up with the effort. There were sharp spears running along the inside of his penis: an enormous flood of them hurtling along the tube with greater and greater velocity.
He cried out and her face didn't shift its position. She seemed to be entranced.
And as the sperm burst from his penis with agonizing gusts which were like the dragging of his entrails out into the light, he saw her swallowing gluttonously before he fell back, giving all his mind to the sensation and the effort of arching his hips at her face.
When he lay still, filled with lassitude, after it was over, she didn't let his deflated organ escape from her lips. She continued to suck it gently. She continued the gentle friction of her legs against each other. He lay back, letting her carry on, feeling momentarily exhausted, thinking that it had been one of the most acute feelings he'd experienced.
After a while his organ began to thicken again in her mouth. She licked it and bit it gently, reveling in her power to rejuvenate it after its collapse.
When it had stretched out, elongated to its full length once again, and he was starting to feel the desire rekindle in his loins, she took her lips off him for the first time.
"Are you going to make love to me now, darleeng?" she asked. "I need it very bad."
He slithered off the table and took off his trousers and shorts. She held his penis under his shirt and stroked his testicles.
"Let's have it here on thees table," she said.
He caught hold of her. His prick was an enormous itch now, wanting to bury itself into soft flesh.
"I wan to be spleet in two," she said.
She turned into his arms and stretched facedown across the table, so that its edge cut across the crease of her hips and her feet touched the floor. She spread her legs wide and reaching behind her caught his penis and dragged it at her open vagina.
With a grunt, Hartnell rammed it deep inside her. He leaned heavily on her while he shagged in and in and she clawed the table the way he had while her buttocks hollowed and filled under his eyes.
Chapter 8
It was a few days after the country expedition that the gang met again at the hideout. The French girls had already begun to get established and were proving popular enough to make life very cheerful for Francie and his boys. But there was one thing that was worrying Francie. One of the earlier girls in his "business" appeared to have more money than her cut guaranteed. She seemed to be living too high.
This, as far as Francie was concerned, meant one thing: that she was overcharging the clients and pocketing the extra. That annoyed him. It not only meant that the girl was doing a bit of double-crossing - flouting his authority - it meant also that she was either going to lose customers because her price was too high or else she was disregarding the contract with Francie which assured her protection for a large percentage of her takings.
It was how to check on her that had baffled him for a while until the obvious course had occurred to him: to send one of the gang under the guise of a client. And the obvious choice for the job was Hartnell, who was much more the type of man she would expect as a client and whom she was hardly likely to have seen in connection with the gang in view of his comparatively recent arrival.
He explained his plan while, as usual, they drank whiskey, lazing on the beds and in the chairs. Gracie had managed to keep away from these meetings which would have been a strain for herself and Hartnell.
"Rosie's been a good girl up to now," he sneered. "And after I've finished with her if she's been up to monkey business, she'll start being a good girl again."
He sipped his drink and his eyes had taken on the hard, callous look which was most common with him.
"Now, the sort of clients that Rosie 'as don't ask how much it is until afterwards. It doesn't matter to 'em. So they ring up 'Ilda and she makes the appointment for 'em. Afterwards they're supposed to give Rosie 20 nicker. Now it wouldn't surprise me if she'd been chargin' 30, or perhaps even 40 nicker and keeping back the odds for herself."
His lips twisted at the thought.
"The best way to find out without making her suspect what we think is for old Roger, here, to go and have a pennyworth. After 'is little dabble he can fin out just how much she wants and then let me know. 'Ow does that strike you gentlemen?"
"It doesn't appeal to me," Hartnell said.
"Oh, and why not? Found a new girl friend since you cleared out of Dora's? Want to be faithful and true?" Francie chuckled and Hartnell was slightly shocked at the way the news got around. He wondered if Francie had any way of finding out about him and Gracie.
"I don't go for that sort of women," Hartnell said. "It would be better if somebody else went."
"Oh, you shouldn't be like that about Rosie," Francie said, with a grin. "She knows her stuff and as I said before she's a nice girl - 'as been. Anyway bell marked 'Miss Rose Franklin.' I'm saying that you gotta go because she won't know you and you're the best one to pass as a pukka client."
Hartnell's teeth gritted. Was he to do everything this thug said just because he'd got in so deep with him that it was difficult to get out? But then the spasm of anger passed as the thought occurred to him that he might be able to save the girl from unpleasant consequences if it was true that she was double-dealing.
"All right," he said. "I suppose I must do what you say."
"That's right, Roger, me boy. You'll probably find it so good you'll become a regular client yourself." Francie chortled at his joke and the others guffawed.
"We'll make the date for tomorrow night," he went on. "That should give you time to start getting excited about the idea."
It occurred to him that he had had more sex in the past few weeks than he'd had for a year before.
The lift took Hartnell up to the fourth floor of the block of luxurious flats and he got out and rang the bell.
After a few seconds the door was opened by a slim, arty-looking girl in a close-fitting pair of tartan trousers and a Spanish-looking blouse with beautiful handwoven embroidery. She was wearing sandals and her blonde hair was pulled up on the back of her head in a small bun. Her eyes were rather heavily mascaraed. Otherwise the makeup on her small, delicate face with the large mouth which dominated it, was not noticeable.
"John Delaney," he announced, using the name which had been alloted him for the visit.
"I'm Rosie," she said with a smile. "Please come in."
She was rather charming, he thought, and she spoke nicely. Why didn't this sort of girl try and get in films or the stage or do modeling or ... but where would they get the same money for the same amount of leisure time? Perhaps they were right.
She led him into a small, pleasantly furnished lounge overlooking the street. It reminded him for a moment of Dora's place and he wondered if Dora had ever done a spot of this business.
"Would you like a Scotch?" she asked.
Francie really made these places worthwhile for the visitor, he decided, as he accepted.
They chatted pleasantly for an hour or so. There was no hurry and this was all part of the technique - to avoid the atmosphere of prostitution. To get to know each other a little, to flirt almost, before going to bed.
He passed himself off as a gentleman of leisure who dabbled in the arts and he was astonished when she took him up seriously and knowledgeably on the topics involved. She actually rummaged in a drawer and produced some quite fair poetry which she had written.
It was love poetry and as he read it softly, lounging on a divan, she drew her feet up under her beside him and nestled her blonde head against his shoulder.
"You read it beautifully," she said, when he'd finished. "You have a very nice voice."
He looked down at her and she was staring up at him with her lips apart.
So this is how the ball starts rolling, he thought.
He bent and kissed her and the large mouth seemed to envelop him like an octopus, drawing him into her, spiriting his tongue into her mouth as if by magic. Her hands closed on his face, tightly holding him, while her plump breasts jutted into him through the blouse.
Gently she uncurled as their tongues battled for possession of mouths, and pushed him back on the divan, coming over on top of him, half lying along him.
He thought once again of Gracie and how unimportant all this was compared with her, of how, after each woman his love for her increased in comparing them with her. And then he gave himself over to the present moment.
She was lying on him, wriggling her hips gently against his, kissing him, putting her wet, little tongue in his ear.
He reached over her and put his hands on her behind, feeling it warm and fleshy under the tight stretch of the trousers. He put his hands on her waist and it was so slim that for a moment he thought his hands might join.
"Oh, how delicious," she breathed in his ear as she stretched her legs on either side of him and rubbed her crotch against his loins. She spoke with the air of someone eating an oft-tried dish which is nonetheless exquisite.
He felt the hollowed curve of her leg junction rocking and rolling gently on the hump which his erection had formed. He dug his fingers between her buttocks, pushing the cloth of the trousers before him and she jiggled her behind so that his hand brushed over the two mounds.
"Oh, we must have it here, now," she whispered urgently. "The bed can wait."
With her crotch crushing his penis, he managed to think, in passing, that if any of this was simulated, it was so well done as to be equal to the real thing.
She certainly seemed to be thoroughly immersed in her sexual needs. Her big mouth fastened on his neck like a vampire and then she was feeling for the zip of her trousers and wriggling them down her hips and thighs.
He helped her, pushing them off her bottom. A thrill coursed through him at the contrast between the heavy material and the cool flimsiness of her briefs. The briefs slipped on her bottom and he could caress the buttocks, feeling the texture of the skin through the silk.
She unbuttoned the blouse and when it was off he undid the brassiere, pulling apart the hooks at the back and she leaned up to let him whisk it away and drop it on the floor.
He pulled her up to him and opened his mouth wide over a hard nipple, engulfing it and the hard point of her breast within his lips. He sucked hard the point of her breast within his lips. He sucked hard and she breathed quickly and excitedly through her nostrils, still rubbing her crotch on him, letting a leg fall limply on either side.
When he could no longer breathe from the smothering pressure of her soft breasts around him, he levered her down and pushed her briefs off her behind.
He stroked her buttocks, rubbing the palms gently and then hard across the skin, feeling it give way and then ooze back. He explored the crease between each fleshy globe, pushing them apart, exploring the tender skin around the anus, brushing against a little bed of down around it.
He rubbed his hand down over the buttocks, let it slip underneath the provocative curve, through a little jungle of hair and then he had found the long wet slit, opened it with his fingers and pushed in.
"Oh, oh. How beautiful," she murmured spreading her legs wide to make it easier for him to reach and rub her clitoris. The clitoris was hard and erect under his fingertips and it excited him that she was so excited. He had half expected a sort of lethargy on her part.
Suddenly she leaned up from him and began to untie his tie, working feverishly, jumping occasionally as he continued to masturbate her.
She got the tie off with considerable dexterity. He helped her get coat, shirt and vest off and then she caressed his hard chest admiringly before fiddling with the buttons of his trousers.
"You'll have to stop a minute or you'll drive me crazy," she whispered. "I can't even keep my fingers on these buttons."
He removed his fingers and contented himself with playing with her breasts, swinging above him like two ripe pears, while she flicked the buttons undone and pulled his trousers off.
His penis flipped starkly out as she removed his shorts and she bent and kissed it quickly before starting to caress it with her fingers, letting it ride up the front of her hips as she sat astride him.
His fingers trickled along her thighs, under them and then up again to the long fleshy ravine.
She threw back her head. Her eyes were tightly closed, her mouth hanging open. She looked as if she were saying a prayer to some pagan deity.
The changing expressions of passion on her face sent a chill down his spine, a chill which seemed to shoot straight to the tip of his penis where she fingered it.
His fingertips worked furiously on her clitoris which became more and more pronounced until suddenly she leaned up on her knees, grabbed his organ and tried to stuff it into the deep well in the ravine.
"Quick, stuff me with it, quick, oh, quick!" she gasped.
He caught hold of her waist, directed her up above his great, reaching stalk with its fiery mushroom head and then pulled her down with it.
She sank onto it with a low, joyful moan and he shot up into her like a jet of water with an equally exulting groan.
Flattening her knees out on either side of him so that they pressed against his hips on the divan, she sank lower and lower on the spear, moaning all the way as if he were killing her. Then she rose up on her knees so that his penis, moist from her vagina, came whitely into view. Up she rose until the rim of the knob was out of her and then with a soul-tearing gasp she sank down again, flattening her crotch onto his, containing the whole of his penis inside her up to the cervix.
He pressed his legs together and jerked his hips rhythmically up as she descended so that their bodies crashed together at the sexual junction, bringing a regular pattern of gasps and groans from their throats.
Most of the time she kept her eyes closed, but sometimes she opened them and looked at him with a deep, agonized look of passion as she screwed herself down with an extra twist, her breasts quivering to the points of the nipples.
He kept his eyes open, watching her dropping mouth, flared nostrils, creased brows, gaining extra pleasure from the sight of her abandonment.
Every time his prick rode firmly up into her, it felt so sensitive along its whole length that he felt he wanted to leave it there forever. She would squirm for a moment with it right in her to its utmost and then rise again bringing that same sensitivity along the thick tube of flesh.
He squeezed her thighs, smooth and slim on either side of him. He played with the hair on her abdomen running his fingers down so that he could touch the flanges of flesh on each side of the spot where his penis ran tightly into her.
She swayed on the end of his rod and he thought for a moment she would flop uncontrollably off the divan in her blind passion, but then like a bucking horse she had righted herself and with ever-increasing groaning was running up and down on his thrusting leg of sex.
Her knees dug into him ever tighter and tighter and he sensed that she was coming to a climax.
Every time she sank down on his loins, now, she gave a little shudder which quivered her breasts and the soft flesh of her belly.
"Oh, oh I want to die. It's too much ... too much," she said between gritted teeth.
She began to rise and fall more and more quickly, gasping and grunting, her head swaying from side to side as if only slightly attached to her neck.
He flexed his hips at her at the last moment with every descent she made and it seemed to knock the breath out of her body every time.
Her knees pressed tighter and tighter against his sides, shuffled, tightened, shuffled again. He knew he wasn't ready yet, but she was on the brink. Her breath rose almost to a scream, her head tensed back on her neck so that a vein and the tendons stood out. Her body was twirling like someone on the gallows in the wind and then with a sudden desperate convulsion which thrust her breasts forward in a magnificent projection she released a flood of liquid from her vagina and a flow of agonized "Aaaahs" from her mouth.
She collapsed on him for a moment, falling forward with her lips to his neck, but only for a second or two. Then she righted herself with a smile at him and began to work up and down, slowly on his aching organ.
The sight of her abandoned climax had filled him with an almost sadistic desire. He caught her hips just below the waist, digging his fingers fiercely, cruelly into the soft flesh and began to ram her up and down, directing her strongly down as he thrust up.
She spread her legs to allow him full entry and now her passage was a little tighter after her climax - which made penetration all the more exquisitely anguishing for him.
"Come darling, come, come," she said softly, entreating him to enjoy himself as she had.
His prick felt as if the skin was being chafed off it. It was excruciating - and delirious. If life could stay at this one point of ecstasy it would be beautiful to live every minute of it, he thought wildly.
She watched him now, watched his passion in the taut wrinkles of his face, the twist of his mouth, the agony in his eyes, the cruel strength with which he held her naked hips as if he would crush them through his own body.
The rigid member in her seemed immense, as if it would break some organ in her. She rode up and down feeling it huge inside her, imagining she felt it expand. She felt him suddenly cannon up into her vagina with an even fiercer barrage of thrusts, felt his hands clasp her with the strength of the death-grip, heard the breath spurt from between his clenched teeth, felt the convulsive heave as if he would throw her off him, forced herself down against his push and then felt the hot flood of fluid gushing inside her in a long series of spurts until he gradually calmed and lay quiet under her and she flopped down on him.
Later they moved to the bedroom and he found her so eager that he lost count of the number of times they made furious love during the night.
It was late in the morning that they got up. They had managed, at last, to have a few hours sleep.
She cooked bacon and eggs, wearing a dressing gown, while he had a shower and dressed. The time for the test was approaching.
The food tasted excellent and it was while they were eating he said:
"You're really so delightful, that it seems ridiculous to think that money's involved, but you have to live - so what little present can I leave . . ."
"It was very enjoyable," she said, smiling. "But the money is laid down - I'm not the only one involved. It's thirty pounds."
He looked at her steadily. So she was taking an extra cut. He wondered just what Francie would do to that delicate face, that excellent body if he knew. Well Francie wasn't going to have any fun through his information.
"Francie sent me," he said simply.
The girl stared at him and the color slowly left her face. She knew why he'd come and she knew he'd learned just what he'd come to learn.
He saved her the embarrassment of having to try and talk her way out of an impossible situation. He put his hands on hers and went on quickly:
"Francie thought you were overcharging, but it's a good thing for you that he sent me to find out. I got mixed up in Francie's affairs without realizing just what those affairs are. I don't like him and I don't intend to tell him what you've been doing. But I'd advise you to take advantage of the break and charge the right price in the future."
The girl had listened to his words as if she couldn't believe her ears. Now her eyes searched his to see if this was just the beginning of the torture, the false hope.
"Do you mean that?" There was a break in her voice. "You wouldn't kid about a thing like that."
"Certainly, I mean it," he said. "As far as I'm concerned you asked me for twenty. But you'd better cut down on your high living. That was what made Francie suspicious."
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and they flowed down over her cheeks. Her head sank to the table.
He came round the table and held her head against him, stroking her hair with his hand.
After a while she calmed down and looked up at him. Seeing his eyes, concerned and sympathetic, she smiled through the dregs of tears.
"I - I can't believe it," she said. "It - it's too fantastic."
"What do you mean?"
"That Francie should have sent someone to find out about me - and that that person should turn out to be you - and that you're not going to tell him."
He bent and kissed her head.
"I can't understand how someone like you came to be mixed up with Francie," she said.
"Well, it's a long story," he said. "But I don't want to stay mixed up with him much longer."
He moved away and picked up his coat.
"I'll leave the twenty just for appearances," he said. "And don't forget to be careful."
She got up, came to him and kissed him.
"I shan't forget you," she said. "And any time you care to, come round during the day. I would like you to because I think you're so nice - and it would be a pleasure that wouldn't involve money."
"That's very sweet of you," Hartnell said. He patted her behind just for the pleasure of it. She kissed him once again and then he left.
"I can't understand it," Francie said to Smiler. "I was convinced Rosie was cheating. Can't understand how she could run that car otherwise. Yet Hartnell says she only charged him twenty."
"Maybe he fell for her," Smiler said.
Francie considered this silently with more seriousness than Smiler had meant.
"You know, Smiler," he said, at last, "there may even be something in what you say. There are times when the old school tie thinks it has the right to tell a false'ood."
He thought for a little longer.
"Get me Ronnie on the phone," he said. "I've got a job for him."
Chapter 9
It was the usual tableau - except that Gracie was there today. Jake, Jim, Bill lying on the two beds, glasses in hands; Smiler, Lucky, Johnny sitting on chairs; Francie swinging one leg from a table edge. But there was an atmosphere.
Hartnell felt it as soon as he arrived. Every one looked up at him, held him with their eyes for a second too long. His glance flickered over Gracie, whom he'd been unable to see for a few days. Her replying glance told him nothing. Had Francie discovered, he wondered? Well, the showdown had to come sometime - and he wasn't afraid of Francie.
"Hello Roger, old chap," Francie said. "We were waiting for you."
"Oh."
Francie's eyes were. His sensual mouth was a slit.
"Yes. I have a friend we don't see very often. Helps with occasional jobs, you know. Sort of a specialist. Well'e went to see Rosie yesterday."
Hartnell's face didn't twitch. His mind was racing. So what? So what if this fellow had seen Rosie?
"Seems like you made a mistake," Francie went on.
"Mistake? What do you mean?"
"I think you know what I mean, Roger, old bean - and I won't pretend I'm not surprised at you. Don't know what the old club would think, I'm sure."
"What are you getting at, Francie?"
Hartnell already knew. He couldn't understand how it had happened - but he already knew.
"Well it seems she asked this friend of mine for thirty nicker, large as life, without batting an eyelash, without so much as a quiver of her teats."
There was an oppressive silence when Francie paused. Everybody was staring at Hartnell.
"So what I want to know, Roger, old boy, is what you've done with the rake-off she's been giving you for keeping quiet."
Hartnell's mind took a minute to put things in place. That stupid little fool of a girl had not been able to resist continuing to overcharge - probably thought she'd be safe once one of Francie's men had reported her as straight. But Francie thought Hartnell had demanded the cut for his silence. The thought was grimly amusing. Just the sort of thing one would expect Francie to think.
"Look, Francie," he said. "You're an out and out crook. Well I'm not and I didn't . . ."
Francie sprang from the table, eyes blazing, mouth twisted.
"Keep your dirty insults to yourself!" he rasped.
His hand made a quick arc through the air and slashed Hartnell across the face, knocking his head sideways with the force. Gracie gave a shriek. And then Hartnell had lunged forward and smacked Francie squarely on the side of the jaw. Francie swayed back, clasped at the table and then slid to the ground.
In an instant Jake, Jim and Bill had surrounded Hartnell and held him firmly - but not brutally - by arms and neck.
Gracie, looking at Hartnell, put a hand to her mouth and gasped. Francie, resting on an elbow on the floor, noticed her and his eyes flickered back to Hartnell quickly.
He got slowly to his feet. His eyes were hard, but he had recovered his composure.
"All right, Roger, me boy," he said, quietly. "We won't hold that against you. Only thing a gentleman can do if another one slaps him, eh?"
Hartnell said nothing. At a sign from Francie, they released him and the atmosphere in the room relaxed a little.
"So what were you about to say, Roger?" Francie asked.
"I was about to say that I certainly didn't take a cut, but that I warned her to stop overcharging."
"Oh, and why did you warn her, Roger? Sort of gallantry, I suppose?" His voice contained a hint of a sneer.
"You could call it that," Hartnell said.
"All right," Francie said. "We all admire a bit of gallantry in the right place. Only yours was really in the wrong place, old man." Hartnell said nothing. He was not sure what attitude Francie was taking towards him. "But then," Francie continued, "as you're fairly new to all this we'll overlook it this time."
"It was very strange that he was so conciliatory about it," Gracie said. "I don't like it at all."
"Look," Hartnell said. "After this trip's over I'll have about 50 pounds from the past month's earnings. We've got to get out then, Gracie."
"Where?" she asked. "It's so difficult, Roger."
"No it isn't. I've been thinking. And we won't stay in this country. We'll go to the States or to Canada. I'll get a job somehow once we get there. On that money we'd have plenty of time to look around."
"Oh, how wonderful it would be to live an ordinary life," Gracie said with longing. "To cook meals for you and wash your socks, go out together without having to keep to side streets. But it frightens me, Roger. Francie is so cunning and I have the feeling that something terrible's going to happen."
"That's just a woman's fear of change," he said decidedly. "That's what we'll do. It'll take about a week to make arrangements and then we'll just disappear overnight."
"Roger," she said. "I feel helpless. I'd have to leave it all to you. I'm sorry, darling."
"That's all right," he said. "As soon as this raid's over I'll get going. Don't you think about it and in no time we'll be away."
He had become quite elated at the thought. His mind was already racing over the things that would have to be done. He was already sure that this decision was going to be their salvation.
Gracie came over to him and kissed him tenderly.
"I love you, darling," she said. "And, I'm worried about you all the time you're not here. There's something I want you to promise to do for me."
"What's that?"
"Will you promise to do it?"
"All right."
She disengaged herself from his arms and went over to a chest of drawers. She pulled the bottom one open and rummaged under a pile of clothing. When she turned to him, she was holding a revolver and a little packet of cartridges.
"These belonged to Daddy," she said. "I want you to have them."
He overcame his surprise and smiled at her concern.
"Why darling? I shan't need them. How ridiculous you are."
"Please. You promised. And I don't trust Francie now that there's bad blood between you. I would feel much better if you took them. They're no use to me."
There was still a smile in his eyes when he slipped them into his pocket. He was touched.
"I'll throw them away as soon as we're off to Canada," he said.
Her reply was lost against his lips.
Chapter 10
Late that night Francie arrived at Gracie's flat. He had been very busy making inquiries. It was surprising how many people noticed things and how easy it was for a determined investigator to find out what had been going on anywhere.
He was savage with jealousy. His inquiries seemed to show, with little space for doubt, that Hartnell had been visiting her flat and staying for periods, sometimes all night.
Francie would have taken some convincing that his suspicions were not justified. For everything fitted - except exactly how it had started.
He recognized Gracie's superior education and intrinsic quality. Those were the things he lacked. Deep down he knew he wasn't and never would be a "gentleman." Normally he wouldn't think about it, for his admiration of class frequently mingled with and became a sort of contempt. But during the last few hours he'd really been working himself into a state about the things he'd lacked, the qualities he'd never had. And Hartnell had them - that was the rub. Hartnell was a natural for Gracie and she for him. Francie's feeling of inferiority had shot up by several degrees. What use was his authority with the gang, his toughness, his money compared with that breeding which Hartnell exuded.
His jaw was still sore from the blow Hartnell had given him. It had taken all his control to let that go. He had let it go because he'd noticed Gracie's concern. Something had clicked in his mind in a flash and he had wanted to find out in his own good time so that he didn't get excited about nothing and make a fool of himself.
Now he was certain and the certainty made him savage. Gracie had been a virgin when he'd had her, but he'd never succeeded in making her love him. He knew she hated him, but he'd always hoped that somehow the hate would change, do a volte-face and that one day he'd have her in the way he wanted her.
She was the person he had come nearest to loving in his own, ungiving way and although in his moments of desire he'd submitted her to him with violence, wanting to destroy her in the way he'd wanted to destroy Lady Anne so that he could make her vulnerable, he'd always regretted it afterwards. Even when he was humiliating her in bed, she made no response, suffering him with pained resignation, not cooperating one iota. And afterwards he'd felt defeated.
Otherwise he had treated her well, giving her money, leisure, her flatlet.
And now Hartnell had her. He had no doubt she had gone to him of her own will. Perhaps she even loved him. The thought drained him of all veneer of gentleness, leaving his hands twitching for a throat to encircle. He would punish Gracie and then he would wipe out Hartnell. That would avenge his defeat. And afterwards he would treat Gracie just how he felt, no more kindness.
It was some time since he'd been to see her, thinking perhaps his absence might make her change a little towards him, want him, perhaps. Seeing her this afternoon had given him a flush of desire for her and now his desire was sadistic, now that he knew she'd used that absence not to come closer to him, but to go away from him altogether.
She opened the door and he imagined she was a trifle nervous when she saw who it was.
"Hello Gracie," he said. "Expecting someone else?"
"Yes, I have so many visitors," she mocked. She had recovered her composure immediately.
"I thought maybe our friend Roger was due to arrive," he said savagely.
Gracie turned towards him and the color drained from her face, the fought-for composure lost in a second, everything given away.
"What on earth do you mean?" she asked. She couldn't keep the tremble from her voice.
Francie's face was a mask of fury. Her fear told him all he wanted to know.
"You know what I mean," he said softly. "I been checking up on your activities, Gracie. They haven't pleased me one little bit."
Her eyes were wide with fright. Just when it had seemed there was hope, everything was dashed like this. She tried to think clearly. But the only things in her mind were her fear and hatred of Francie, her love for Roger.
"So you've been having a little affair with our fellow crook, have you? Got class 'asn't he. Sort of thing you like, eh Gracie? But you don't think I've got it, do you?"
His voice was menacing, the edge of the snarl like a razor.
"How many times 'as he been here, Gracie? What does he mean to you? What are you like in bed with him, eh?"
His voice had risen and he followed her slowly across the room as she backed away from him.
"Answer me," he snarled. "What's between you two?"
Gracie was unable to utter a word and the blow for her silence slashed hard across her mouth.
"Answer me, answer me!" Francie's voice had risen almost to a scream and with the second blow something snapped inside Gracie. Her fear for this brute had continued so long that it was either forever, or it would break into rebellion.
"We love each other!" she hurled back at him.
Francie drew back as if he had been whip-lashed. His hard eyes blazed with something between horror, hatred and disbelief. Slowly they settled into pinpoints of hatred.
He stood over her, his whole body tensed as if at any moment he would start to beat and kick her until she was a mass of pulp.
"How did it start?" he breathed.
"We met in a restaurant," Gracie flared.
"And when did he first screw you eh, when did he first put his bloody prick in you?"
"The first night," Gracie screamed. "We made love that night because we were already in love that night." Her eyes had narrowed. Now she had rebelled there was no going back and she knew that each of her words was cutting into Francie like a knife. "I brought him back here," she snapped, "and we made love several times and it was wonderful, Francie. It wasn't like your masturbation in me Francie, with me hating your guts. No, it was wonderful because I was loving him."
Francie's hand slashed across her face. His eyes were bulging almost out of his head. He slashed her again and she caught at his arms, grasping, trying to defend herself.
His next blow hit her in the solar plexus, doubling her up and then she was on the floor and he was slashing her face with his hand again and again until she'd almost lost consciousness.
Francie wanted violently to hurt her, to humiliate her. He also wanted to rape her. There was a sexual side to his sadistic beating. Images of Hartnell making love to her crowded in his mind sending his penis up into erection with a jolt as his hands slammed into the smooth flesh. He wanted to sink his penis into her, submit her violently, painfully to him, but the thought of Hartnell having her gently, lovingly, filled him with a need to humiliate her in a way that would really bite deep so that she couldn't imagine it was her lover between her legs.
He began to tear at her clothes as she lay on the floor. He didn't care how they came off. He didn't undo any buttons. They ripped off one by one and he flung the rags aside.
He saw her body naked and prostrate, beautiful, as he remembered it, unchanged since the last time he'd had her - and yet all that happened to it since he had.
He picked her up in his arms, tingling at the feel of the soft flesh against his hands - the firm back and the long thighs.
Without effort he flung her on the bed and began feverishly to strip off his own clothes.
Gracie lay on the bed, winded still, eyes almost closed, face bruised and aching. She knew he was going to have her and the thought made her sick. But she felt too weak to move, too feeble to resist.
He came at her and his mouth was a fleshy snarl, his eyes crazy. His penis was taut. It looked like an enormous bud bursting into blossom on the end of a thick, woody stem.
She wondered, vaguely, how her words had had that effect on him. She wished she was dead. She wished she and Roger had cleared out when he'd first suggested it. She felt that she would die, that everything was over. And then Francie had seized her with such force that she screamed out. He was forcing her to her knees. There was nothing she could do against his maniacal strength. He held her at the waist in a grip of iron. She felt his steely penis push crudely against her. Felt it press against her anus. Realized in a rush of horror and humiliation that he was trying to bugger her.
She tried to struggle weakly, but her stomach was still tight with pain and his grip was too strong. His prick was jerking between her buttocks, his hands pressing down on her waist. She felt a dull discomfort between her buttocks and then a sudden spasm of pain so overwhelming that she screamed again and tried desperately to jerk away.
There was a thick, excruciating intrusion in her anus. It was filling her, moving coarsely, rapidly in with a searing possession. She could think of nothing but the pain as the thickness burst into her, moving up and seeming to spread out to tear the flesh from her anal passage.
Francie's mouth was uttering silent oaths. This was what he would do to the girl who had become Hartnell's. This was what he'd do to the demure, unwilling Gracie. This was the way he'd destroy her. By ravishing her virginal anus. That was what would humiliate her most, that was how he'd get at her.
He was right in it now. A few furious thrusts had taken him right in up to the hilt, making her scream and choke beneath him. It was the tightest passage he'd ever known.
He gritted his teeth, holding her waist in a pulverizing grip, pushing her down into the bed, punishing the bottom that reared up and billowed out toward his eyes. It was a beautiful bottom, he thought, wildly. Gracie was beautiful. But he'd ruin it, he'd ruin her. He'd make her his through sheer humiliation.
He jerked into her with long, hip-grinding crushes which made him bite his lips at the sensation.
When he rammed in, his skin was pulled painfully back in a sharp blaze of prickling crush. When he withdrew to the tip, her passage seemed to drag at his rod as if loathe to let it retreat.
"What would Roger think if he could see you now?" he grated, through his panting breath. "How do you like it in your ass, Gracie?" His eyes blazed with sadistic fury.
The pain was dull and consistent now and Gracie lay bent over under his heaving weight, with tears running silently down her face.
She had never thought of such humiliation. She felt she would never be able to look Roger in the face again. Her buttocks were thrust up at Francie. She could feel the heat of his body against her thighs and the ovals of her behind. He was joined to her body by this unused back passage, working into it without thought for the pain, mental and physical, she was suffering.
She thought dully that she would rather be dead. She felt the salt of her tears on her lips as her mouth opened in an involuntary gasp. Every time he smashed his phallus into her there was a confusion of pain as if she were being impaled on some enormous, sharp stake.
It seemed as if his organ was right up in her belly, tearing her entrails to pieces, as if suddenly he would tear some part of her and in a flare of pain and light and shame she would sink into death. She felt super-naked. She could hear his gasps, his muttered obscenities, his crazy references to Roger. She couldn't think of Roger in the same thought as this. Roger was another life. As Francie jerked extra hard she coughed into the pillow. She was sure she'd be sick, now, at any moment. She hoped her heart would cough up and leave her just an untouchable corpse.
Francie was in delirium. A crazy, hating grin was pulling his lips back from his teeth. For the moment, for the first time since he'd known Gracie, she was completely subjugated to him, completely in his power. He knew this, because he knew she had lost the power of thought, was aware only of the raping, the plunder of pain at her anus, her stretched yielding anus. The pain, the sensation he was inflicting was the only reality for her in this moment.
He jammed his penis into the softening moistening cavity, destroying her, annihilating her with every stroke. This was the shock which would make her remember him, indelibly, forever.
His staff was a weight of sensation, It was heavy, charged with a squeezing agony of rupture. He could hardly bear it. His prick in Gracie, in this secret place of hers. He was destroying her, she providing him with this sadistic ecstasy. If it could go on, go on. ...
But already the flush was burning his face, his thighs, was a simmering throb inside him.
His penis was palpitating like a beaten drum, seeming to grow huge with an audible pulsation. His loins were a fervor, his body swelling into a great burst of triumph. There was a fluster, a tingling, a wincing, a heaving, a burning inside him, a maze of shoulder-quivering below him, blonde hair awry scattering a pillow, waist curving, buttocks flowering. His eyes seemed to mist over, his mouth opened: this was triumph, this was subjection, owning, possessing, a gushing, a racing up to the brink, hesitating, agony and through - overflowing in a great, never-ending stream of passion into those softened, brown depths of her rectum, pouring his venom into her body.
And then it had dissipated and Gracie was lying sobbing quietly and there was no passion, only irritation and the knowledge that the moment had passed and she was still not his, but growing stronger and away from him with every cooling minute that passed.
Gracie had quieted. As he had discharged she had reached the point where she had thought she would faint, that this pain could not go on with her still conscious and aware of it.
But now it was over and there remained only the naked moistness at her anus, the feeling of enlargement, inflammation, the sensation that something huge and foreign was still in her back passage, the soreness and the shame. She couldn't look at Francie.
She heard him moving about and at last he; spoke to her. His voice was harsh.
"Get dressed. We're leaving."
She moved her face, turning it towards him without looking at him.
"Why? Where are we going?" she asked dully.
"To my place. And you're going to stay there, until we've dealt with your boyfriend."
"What are you going to do with him?"
She looked at him then and sat up, naked on the bed. She hated him.
It took several seconds for his words to sink into her mind.
"What are you going to do with him?"
Her stomach had frozen. She wouldn't have believed she could have forgotten her own shame and pain so quickly.
Francie grinned - an extremely unpleasant grin.
"When we get to the docks tomorrow night," he said, enjoying every word, "he's going to disappear. It'll be rather convenient because there's quite a lot of water there. When they find him he won't look quite the same as he did."
Gracie stared at him. She couldn't speak. She thought her world had collapsed earlier in the evening, but now she realized it was only at this moment it was collapsing.
"You can't . . . you can't," she breathed.
Francie chuckled. He had dressed and he smoothed a pocket handkerchief into place.
"We'll see," he said. "Anyway, I shouldn't count on seeing Mr. Roger bloody Hartnell again."
"I won't see him again," Gracie said with quiet intensity. "I'll do anything you like. I'll stay with you forever, Francie."
He sneered.
"You'll do that anyway," he snarled. "Until I want to get rid of you."
She stood up and padded over to him in her bare feet. Her eyes betrayed her desperate agony.
"Francie, please. Just get rid of him, let him go, tell him you don't need him anymore, please."
Francie glared at her.
"Very concerned aren't you," he snarled. "Want him to fuck you a little more do you?"
"I promise you, Francie, I'll never see him again. I won't even think about him."
Francie laughed mirthlessly. His eyes were narrow. He felt a returning flicker of sadism.
"You stupid bitch," he snapped. "Do you think you can bargain with me? Nobody bargains with me. I do what I want."
She stared at his eyes and saw the merciless gleam. She was all churned up, but there was nothing she could do. She remembered the revolver which, with astonishing intuition she had given to Hartnell that very afternoon. But it gave her little comfort. Francie was too old a hand at this sort of thing.
"Don't stand there unless you want another beating," he snarled. "I told you to get dressed."
Mechanically she did as he ordered and in a daze of fear she went down with him to the car and got in.
Chapter 11
Johnny was a little worried. He sat next to Hartnell in the lorry, staring stonily ahead along the road. He hadn't really understood what it was all about. Francie had referred to certain "reasons" which nobody had questioned.
So, now, they all had automatics in their pockets. All except Hartnell. He hadn't been there when they were doled out. He was to receive the bullets if anything went wrong and the knife failed. Francie had the knife and he knew how to use it. It should be quick and neat. But nonetheless Johnny did not like the idea of a killing. And apart from that he rather liked Hartnell. It was a long time since he'd imagined anyone standing up to Francie, thought himself to be a little tin god amongst them. He didn't really like Francie all that much. Francie was too hard and bossy and he could make people feel small with being able to answer back. So, on the whole Johnny had been rather pleased when Francie had had his - a knockdown blow, a crisp straight right from Hartnell. He'd been surprised that Francie had let it go the way he had. But that couldn't be the reason for the killing. There must be something else.
The lorry droned on into the night. In front was the van. It was pretty dark tonight except for the street lamps. Clouds were hiding the moon.
Johnny felt more and more jittery. At the wheel Hartnell was grimly silent. He wondered if he knew anything. He would have liked to have told him to stop the lorry, get out and clear off while he had the chance, but it was too late now.
"How d'you feel?" he asked suddenly.
Hartnell glanced at him sharply for a split second. He had been thinking of Canada.
"Fine. Why?"
"Nothing."
There was a silence.
"Something on your mind, Johnny?"
He was quick, too. Maybe if he hinted something Hartnell would clear off when they got to the docks. Anyone else could drive the lorry. It would give him a chance.
"What do you think of Francie?"
"Francie? Oh, he's all right."
Hartnell was very much on the alert now. There was something in Johnny's tone, some deeper significance behind these questions.
"Wouldn't say a word against him meself," Johnny said. "But I don't think's likes you - an' there's no moon. Maybe you'd sooner vamoose when we get there."
There was another silence. Hartnell's lips were pursed, his hands tight on the wheel.
"Like to be more explicit, Johnny?" he said, at last.
But Johnny was frightened, now, at the irretrievable step he'd taken. He wished he hadn't opened his mouth. He shook his head from side to side.
"Not necessary," he said.
The cab was suddenly oppressive. Johnny wished to hell they'd reach the end of their journey and that whatever was going to happen would happen quickly.
"Thanks, Johnny," Hartnell said quietly after a while.
The palms of Hartnell's hands were sweating when they reached the docks. He was remembering Gracie's apprehension the afternoon when he socked Francie. He wondered if Francie knew anything about them. If not what was the point of the warning Johnny had given him? Something was due to happen when they got there and it was Francie he had to watch. That could really mean only one thing. He was in a spot. Should he just turn off at the next corner, drive like hell and then hide out? But suppose Johnny was wrong or suppose he was exaggerating. He desperately needed the extra money from tonight's sally if he and Gracie were going to get away with comfort. Surely they couldn't be going to try and kill him. Why? He didn't think Francie could have discovered his liaison with Gracie. Johnny must be on the wrong track.
He was still uncertain about what he should do when he found himself driving into the docks. The same method as before had been successfully employed for entry. The guard now lay unconscious in the office near the entrance.
Francie must be well briefed by somebody in the know, he thought, as the little van weaved confidently between the warehouses, eventually pulling up in the shadow of one and dousing its lights.
He pulled up behind and did the same. It was difficult to see for a minute but then his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Francie appeared at the cab window.
"We're all going in this time," he said. "It's heavy work and we were nearly nabbed last time because we were too slow."
Hartnell climbed down. This was unusual. He was tense and uneasy and he decided to keep a very close watch on Francie.
Jake was manipulating a heavy lock on the double doors of the warehouse and after a few minutes they swung open, creaking.
"Right, inside, quick and let's get it out," Francie snapped. They moved into the warehouse and Francie's hand went into his pocket. Hartnell tensed, watching in the dim light from the corner of his eye.
With startling suddenness a powerful torchlight blazed around them.
"Stay where you are, all of you," a voice ordered.
Francie's hand came out of his pocket. There was a glint and then a gasp at the other end of the torch beam. Jake leapt forward, but the armed watchman who'd surprised them had already slumped to the floor with Francie's knife in his stomach on a level with where he'd been holding the torch.
Everything had happened so quickly that Hartnell hardly realized what had happened. The whole gang was shaken up a bit. And they dispersed into the shadows for fear of a night watchman's mate somewhere in the darkness.
Hartnell moved away, felt crates and kept back amongst them in the darkness. Now he realized what had happened. And the speed with which Francie had drawn and thrown the knife indicated that he'd already been feeling for it when he put his hand in his pocket. He shuddered. Had it been meant for him?
He put his hand in his pocket over the pistol. He was very thankful for it.
For several seconds - it seemed much longer - there was no sound. And then another torch flashed on and swept the crates. Hartnell ducked.
"All right boys," came Francie's voice. "There's nobody else. Let's get these things loaded quick."
Hartnell stood up. The gang had moved together and Francie was directing the torch at the crates. He moved out with them, still not sure where he stood, feeling he'd better play for time alone with them in this imprisoning building.
"Is 'e dead, Francie?" he heard Johnny ask.
"Never mind about that. Let's get out." Francie's voice was a rasp. His plans had gone awry. He'd have to deal with Hartnell outside.
They began to drag the crates to the door, Hartnell watching Francie all the time. Nobody bothered about the body on the ground beyond the pool of torchlight.
Suddenly Smiler held up his hand.
"What's that?" he hissed. His eyes were wide.
Francie snapped out the torchlight. There was the faint sound of a car engine back near the entrance.
With one accord they slipped, with an edge of panic, out of the warehouse and raced for the vehicles. It didn't matter who drove.
Francie leapt into the lorry, behind the wheel and as Hartnell sprang in beside him, the torches ripped through the night behind them and shots barked out.
"Narks, by Christ!" yelled Francie.
The lorry shot forward, careened round a corner. There were more torches. Francie bent low over the wheel and drew out his pistol.
"They're all around us." he snarled. "Somebody spilt."
Another corner with a screech of tires and the gates were there. The headlights outlined two uniformed men, directly in the path, waving their arms for the lorry to stop. Francie raced at them.
"You'll hit them," Hartnell shouted.
"You bet," Francie screamed.
The police held their ground; a searchlight swept from somewhere. There were more shots. Francie accelerated, the police jumped at the last minute, there was a thud, a cry and then the lorry was out in the road racing wildly through the streets.
"You hit one of them," Hartnell said. It was all too fantastic to be real.
"What did you expect?" Francie snarled. "Think I was going to stop and wait for them to move?"
Hartnell glanced through the window panel. Johnny, Smiler, Jake and Bill were in the back. The van was following their breakneck get away.
"We'll have to ditch the lorry. We'll never get back to the hideout with it. As soon as they've got that body out of the way they'll be after us."
"You may have killed that man," Hartnell said.
"So what," Francie rasped. "You got cold feet?"
They were swerving desperately through narrow streets split up by odd bombed sites with remains of houses and air raid shelters.
"Open the hatch," Francie said. "I want to say something to Jake."
Hartnell reached up and slid back the glass window.
Jake came to the opening at Francie's call.
"You got your rod handy?" Francie asked.
"Right here boss."
"Well just cover our friend here. I got an idea."
Hartnell felt the cold muzzle against his neck and cursed himself for unwittingly helping.
"What's all this?" he demanded.
"You know," Francie snapped. "Just remember that Gracie's still with us and if anything blows about us she'll get it."
"What . . .?" Hartnell began, but Francie's voice cut him short.
"Slug him, Jake."
He started to turn, his hand moving to his pocket, but then a splitting force smashed against his head and everything spun dizzily into darkness.
"Get ready to run for it, boys," Francie yelled back through the window. "I'm going to make a diversion."
The lorry careened madly on until the next bombed site loomed up. It was walled off. On the other side was a drop of a few feet and a crowd of ruins.
"Jump and run as soon as I slow," Francie yelled. "Lie low or get back to the hideout."
Abruptly he braked to a crawl, opened his door, and stepped down to the running board still guiding the wheel.
With one hand he pulled Hartnell over behind the wheel, his teeth gritting with strain, sweat on his forehead from the wild risk he was taking.
All in a second he twirled the wheel, slammed the door and jumped clear.
By the time the lorry had crashed up the pavement, pushed out a section of the low wall and rolled down into the site, Francie and the others were scrambling over the ruins to another road higher up. There was no sign of the much faster van. It had turned off somewhere.
By the time the police car screeched past, braked farther on and backed up to the site to discharge half a dozen armed officers, Francie and the rest were not in sight.
The upturned lorry was carefully surrounded.
A few minutes later a superintendent called out:
"The driver's here, unconscious. At least we've got the man who killed Johnson."
Chapter 12
Gracie had been left at Francie's flat under the charge of Charlie - a big bruiser that Francie sometimes employed, the way he did so many people, to do odd jobs for him.
They sat in the lounge. Charlie never took his eyes from her while he twiddled with the automatic in his hand.
Gracie's chest was so constricted that she felt it must burst. Her fingernails were digging deep weals into her hands. She was fighting not to break down.
They had been gone only a few minutes. There was still time if only she could get away. And she knew just what she was going to do. Even prison for Roger would mean eventual release. She was going to telephone the police and tell them of the dock raid. But first she had to get away and every second was so vital.
She stood up and walked to the mantelpiece. She took a cigarette from the package there and lit it, trying desperately to know what to do.
Charlie followed her with his eyes. She was wearing her tight-fitting woolen dress and she looked good in it. He wondered what relationship she was to Francie. Whether he could afford to take liberties, He wasn't very bright.
Gracie turned towards him. She was beautiful. It looked as if she'd been crying and that accentuated the hollows of her eyes, giving a slightly lost look. Her breasts were not large, but they rose nicely against the dress in a sharp outline. Charlie's tongue came out and passed over his lips.
"You Francie's girl?" he asked.
She shook her head from side to side.
"What's he want to keep you here for?".,,...
Gracie thought quickly. Anything to keep him talking, search for an opening.
"He wants me to earn money for him - with men."
Charlie grinned. "Maybe 'e'd let me have first go for this afternoon's work," he said.
Gracie looked at the clock. They'd been gone ten minutes now.
"Lift up yer skirt and let's see yer legs," Charlie said.
She felt herself grow hot. She was about to tell him what Francie would do to him if he interfered with her when it snapped in at her that if she could get him to make a pass it might provide some opportunity to do something.
Fighting against her disgust, she reached down to the hem of the dress and eased it up to mid thigh.
Charlie whistled.
"Very nice," he said. "But not 'igh enough."
She raised the skirt which clung to her hips up to the triangle of briefs which covered her genitals. Charlie's eyes were popping. I wonder, he was thinking. I might even lay her while 'e's away.
Gracie let the skirt drop and turned away from him, as if disinterested. She leaned on the mantelpiece, knowing that the position clamped the dress around her bottom, outlining the buttocks. She kept telling herself that Roger's life depended on this. Her glance took in the earthenware lampstead on the mantelpiece amongst the ornaments. If only . . .
Charlie stared at her behind. His eyes traced the oval contours of each buttock. He imagined his hand smoothing round those tight lines, imagined pulling up her dress, smoothing his hand over the bare flesh. His penis had grown heavy. He imagined opening her legs, imagined her vagina. It would be clean and soft. He tried to feel himself plunging up it. Could he take the chance? Francie had said a few hours. Maybe if the girl didn't object ...
He stood up and Gracie turned again. She noticed the bulge of his trousers and smoothed the dress over her hips with her hands.
Charlie saw her touch the dress. It tautened across her and he could see the light bulges of the thighs. He stared at the outlined triangle between them, long and obvious. Then he raised his bright, little eyes and looked at her.
"You're not bad, at all," he said. "In fact you got what it takes."
"You think so?"
She tried to make her voice sound encouraging.
"Sit on that chair," he ordered, indicating an armchair beside the mantelpiece.
"Pull that skirt up and open your legs," he said, when she'd obeyed.
Overcoming her intense reluctance she did as he ordered, pulling her legs up on the chair, opening them, pulling up the dress so that he had a bird's-eye view of the spot between her legs, covered, as it was, with the thin, frilling strip of her briefs.
Charlie's mouth was dry. He was fond of a little exhibitionism before the event.
"Take those pants off," he commanded.
Gracie hesitated. This was Francie all over again. Suppose she didn't succeed in doing anything. Suppose he just had intercourse with her. She shivered. And then she slipped her hands under her bottom, grasped the flimsy material and edged the garment off her hips, down her thighs, over her high-heeled shoes and let it drop to the floor.
Charlie licked his lips. This was an unexpected enjoyment.
"Now open wide."
Gracie spread her legs so that her knees touched the arms of the chair on either side. Her gaze wavered before his eyes which stared at her completely exposed vagina.
The pink flesh was there before Charlie's gaze. He'd gone far enough now to make going back too uncomfortable. His prick was atingle and there it was, an open target of soft flesh in a bush of blonde hair, with her thighs opening toward him like a broad tunnel and the rounds of her buttocks showing underneath.
The exhibitionist in him rose. He fumbled with his buttons and pulled out his penis. It was hot in his hand and as hard as the pistol he'd left on the table.
Gracie stared. Her lips moved in revulsion, her stomach turned over. She controlled herself with a great effort.
"It's a good one - eh?" Charlie said, hoarsely. "Go right up, it will. Make you bust at the seams."
As he came towards her she stood up. If he got her in the chair the lamp was out of reach and she'd have no chance. Her stomach was twisted with nervous fear. She put out her hand towards his penis as if she'd stood up because she couldn't wait to get hold of it.
Charlie felt a tremor run through him. She was more willing than he'd hoped. He reached her and felt the cool fingers close over his length of rigidity. He breathed hard and Gracie smelt his unpleasant breath on her face.
She began to rub her fingers gently along the staff and he seized her and kissed her on the lips. Holding her breath, eyes open, she pushed her tongue into his mouth. She felt his big hands pulling up the skirt at the back and then they closed over her bare bottom, pressing her against him. The lamp was beside her right hand. It had a long, narrow neck with a raffia shade on top and the base swelled out into a heavy-looking bowl.
His hands had clasped her buttocks, were feeling them all over as he kissed her neck again. For a second she wondered what would happen if the blow didn't knock him out, foresaw the fury, the rape, the beastliness - and then in one desperate movement she had grabbed the lamp round his shoulder and crashed it with all the force she could muster against the side of his head.
His eyes glazed, his grip relaxed. For a terrible moment he didn't fall and she thought he would be all right. She hit him again as he swayed back from her and this time he sank slowly to his knees and then crashed forward on his face.
She stared at him dumbly for a second or two and then a chill possessed her. Mechanically she seized her bag from the table, saw the gun and slipped it in. She kept her eyes on him all the time, decided against pulling on her briefs and then rushed from the house.
It was only in the street that she remembered there was a telephone in the house. She broke into a run; breath was sobbing and heaving deep inside her. She ran for several blocks, turning corners blindly. A late stroller paused to stare as she rushed past.
Then she saw it: the red telephone booth with its thin rectangle of light outside a little row of shops. Money! Had she change? Oh, of course - not necessary!
She rushed into the booth, seized the receiver and dialed 999.
For some time afterwards she walked quickly through the streets, not knowing what to do, until her mind began to function again.
It was late. There was nothing to do but wait. She didn't know where to go. She had to get off the street. In a renewed fit of fear, she hailed a passing taxi and gave him the only address she could think of - that of her own flat in Earl's Court.
Back in the flat she sank thankfully onto the bed and lay there trembling. She wished it were daylight, comforting daylight when nothing seemed so sinister and she could sit in a restaurant and wait for the newspaper to learn what had happened.
For a little she must have dozed off - perhaps it had been hours. She was awakened by a tapping on the door. She sat bolt upright, trembling and listened. The tapping persisted. "Who is it?" The words forced themselves out at last. "Roger."
The voice was muffled. She heard only the name. Her heart turned over. She sprang from the bed. With fingers that trembled feverishly she pulled open the door. And then she stepped back in terror.
The figure outside was a strange one. It wasn't Roger. A scream rose to her lips and then died out as the man stepped quickly into the room and closed the door quietly behind him.
"Didn't expect to see me again, did you?" She'd never heard such savagery before in Francie's voice.
Chapter 13
Superintendent Wilson looked sadly at the tired figure slumped in the chair on the opposite side of his desk. This was stranger and stranger the more he thought about it.
He was a man of some intuition with a long, brilliant history in the Yard - and the man before him didn't strike him as a criminal. There were many cold-blooded villains, of course, who didn't strike one that way.
It hadn't taken long to check on him. Good family. Parents killed in the war from Hitler's bombs; B.A. Cambridge, rugger and tennis blue; D.F.C. and generally fine record in the RAF during the war; seemed a good type.
Nothing more to be got from him now. He pressed a button. Two men came in.
"All right, son," he said. "We'll see if you have anything else to say later."
They took Hartnell out and locked him in a cell. He sat on the hard bench and put his head in his hand. His head still ached, his shoulder was strained and he had bruises all over. But that was just an irritant. He tried to think straight.
He'd protested throughout that he hadn't been driving the lorry, but they'd found him behind the wheel and things looked black for him. He'd insisted throughout that he could name the man who'd been the driver, had considered blowing the whistle on the gang and then remembered that that would automatically involve Gracie. He had seen newspaper headings referring to "Gangster's Moll" and it had dried him up utterly, even if he did have to face a murder rap. He'd explained to them how he got into the racket and the short length of time he'd been involved, but he doubted whether they believed him. It seemed they'd been trying to crack Francie's gang for a long time.
If only he could get hold of Francie and force him to admit he'd been the driver. But if he told the police how they might find Francie, probably Gracie would be there too. He felt an ache of longing and anxiety for Gracie. Something had happened to her, he was sure.
But he could hardly think beyond the moment. After a little while he fell asleep in spite of the discomfort.
"I don't know what to think, Stan," Superintendent Wilson was saying. "I'm very concerned about Johnson. But I have a feeling we've got the wrong man."
"Seems quite a decent type," Chief Inspector Baker replied. "Can't think why he won't tell us more if he's innocent."
"The only thing I can think is that there's someone he's trying to protect - most likely a woman," the Superintendent went on. "His type's usually got gallant ideas of an extreme nature where women are concerned."
"But then he may be lying altogether. Maybe he's really the leader of this gang. I'd say he had the brains."
"Rather unlikely, Stan. When he was pulled out of the cab the bruise on his head was the wrong side - fits in with his story of being slugged. Funny, too, that nobody else was hurt. Williams says shots were fired at him from the back of the lorry. Hartnell had a gun in his pocket but it hadn't been fired."
Chief Inspector Baker tapped a foot on the floor. For him, the matter was best cleared up by routine investigation on all possible leads in a Court of Law. But he recognized his chief's genius. It had kept him, not unhappily, in a subordinate position for years. He never knew what the Super was going to suggest next.
"I'd like to break this gang before I retire, Stan," Wilson went on. "When I think of all those drugs they must have distributed and the robberies they've got away with it makes my blood boil. I think we've only caught a sprat today."
Later, before he was formally charged, Superintendent Wilson had what he described as an off-the-record interview with Hartnell. Not even the Chief Inspector was present.
"Will you tell me why you won't give us a lead on this gang, son?" he asked. "They shopped you, according to your story. Why shield them?"
"I have my own reasons," Hartnell said.
"It makes your own position much worse. There's not much between you and a rope, you know."
Hartnell said nothing.
"Is it a woman?"
"Yes."
"I see. Why did they shop you, son?"
"If only I could get my hands on them I'd find out all about it - and I'd make the driver admit," Hartnell snapped bitterly.
"Why don't you let us do that for you?"
"I told you, I have my reasons."
The Superintendent sighed.
"Might save your girl," he said - a shot in the dark.
Hartnell's hands clenched, his eyes flickered.
The Superintendent's calm expression didn't alter a bit, but his interest quickened. He knew he'd scored a bull.
"Otherwise there's no saying what they might do to her."
Hartnell glared at him, his eyes ablaze.
"What do you know about it?" he snapped. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Look son, I'm only trying to help you. Why don't you tell me how your girl's involved in this and we'll do our best to get her out."
But Hartnell had regained his outward composure. He wasn't giving away any more. He shook his head.
"All right," said the Superintendent. "But you're just making things worse for yourself - and for her."
He waited a few seconds, but Hartnell had closed up like a clam. He looked tired. The Superintendent pressed the button.
"All right," he said, when they came in. "Take him away and charge him."
Chapter 14
In the morning Hartnell was taken to court for a matter of a few minutes and committed to the next Quarter Sessions. It was in the courtroom, before the public that he first began to feel the seriousness of his position.
Somebody had to take the blame for that officer's death and he was the only one in the running. And, for a policeman to be crushed to death under the wheels of a lorry in such circumstances was not an act likely to endear him to any jury with its inevitable predispositions.
He was becoming more and more worried, too, about Gracie - almost to the point of giving information and risking her ruination rather than her fate at the hands of the gang.
They took him back to the cells of the local police station. The Scotland Yard men had gone, he was told. He would be transferred to prison to await the Quarter Sessions later in the day.
He sat on the narrow, wooden bench filled with remorse and regrets. Regrets from the beginning. He should have stayed in the RAF. Regrets that he hadn't cleared out after the first operation when he'd found out what the gang was dealing in. Regrets that he and Gracie hadn't got away while there had still been time. Regrets finally that this last operation - it was, for him, to have been the last - had ended so disastrously.
He remembered Francie's words, yelled in the lorry - "Somebody's spilt." Who could have spilt? It was probably just as well for him that they had. Although a knife in his back or a bullet in his chest wouldn't be any worse than a rope around his neck. There were bits of the fantastic events of the last hours which left him bewildered.
Through the rest of the morning he sat on the bench thinking, wondering what he should do, assailed by doubts.
Once he got up to stretch his legs and he was still standing when the duty officer arrived at lunchtime with a plate of food and a cup of tea. Hartnell found himself wondering what these men thought about the criminal who had, apparently, killed one of their number. They all regarded him without expression. He could have been any one-day-in drunk.
The officer placed the tray on the bench, stood a moment as if he was trying to think of something and then went out as if he was still puzzling some problem. He closed the door behind him.
Hartnell looked at the tray. He didn't feel hungry. He waited for the turning of the key in the lock, heard the footsteps going away and up the stone steps.
He sat rigid, listening. After a few seconds he went to the door and pushed it gently. His heart beat fast; he held his breath. The man hadn't locked it.
Hartnell stood undecided. He could hardly believe in this incredibly elementary oversight. One of his first thoughts was that it was some kind of trick, but realizing immediately the absurdity of that, his mind began to race.
If he could get away he could find Gracie, no matter where she was, make sure she was all right. And then he'd get Francie. He didn't want a murder charge hanging over his head for the rest of his life - and Francie was the only one who could clear him.
He fought down his fear, his desire not to do anything, fought down his lethargy, his feeling that escape was ridiculous and impossible. The longer he waited the less chance he had.
He pushed the door. It creaked frighteningly as it opened.
Quietly he slipped out into the corridor and crept quickly round the first corner to the steps which led up. They mounted into a small office at the side of the building. From there he remembered, there was an exit leading out into the road.
He listened, almost certain that someone would come down the steps at any moment and catch him red-handed. That would be one more charge to his debit.
He began, stealthily, to climb the steps. The hair was prickling on the back of his neck.
Halfway up he heard a door close and stopped, petrified, unable even to turn and scramble down again. But there was no further sound and he resumed his climb.
At the top was a wooden parapet. He peered carefully over it. There was nobody in the office! Up to this point he'd hardly thought of escape as a real possibility, but now he began to feel he could do it. It sent a chill up his spine.
There was a door with a frosted glass top leading off from the office and he could hear voices inside. He had only seconds before someone would come back to the office.
Taking a deep breath he stepped out into the open, feeling crazily big and vulnerable and crossed the office. He reached the outer doorway - the door was latched back to the wall outside - and glanced out.
With another gulp of air he slipped into the passage at the side of the building. Inside he was a tangled jumble of raw nerve ends.
There was nobody there at all. He glanced quickly out into the street, aware in passing of the blue lamp outside the front and then he moved round the edge of the wall and began to walk hurriedly in the opposite direction, mingling with the lunchtime workers on their way home. His eyes glanced covertly from side to side. His back felt like an enormous target on which somebody was drawing a bead from the police station behind. He wanted to break into a run but was terrified of attracting attention. The people around him seemed unreal, so many cardboard figures. He still couldn't believe what had happened. But he knew that in a short time every policeman in the metropolis would be watching for him. He had to find Gracie quickly and then get Francie.
In an office on the first floor of the same police station a message buzzed up to Superintendent Wilson. He listened and then moved quickly to the window. Chief Inspector Baker was already there.
"He's just moved out," the Superintendent said.
They both stared discreetly out. From a doorway opposite a man in plain clothes moved sharply into the crowd and began to walk away. Farther up the road another detached himself from a shop window and began to amble along looking in others.
"There goes Jones - and there's Turner," the Superintendent said softly. "You've got the others ready?"
"Everything as you ordered, sir."
Superintendent Wilson gave a little prayer to the Almighty for this gamble which might cost him his career.
"The sprat is now being set to catch the mackerel," he murmured.
Chapter 15
For some minutes Francie just glared at Gracie. He'd had a hard time dodging through the streets. He'd intended picking the lock, but then the thought that she was about the only person who could have spilt gave him a fresh thought and he'd tapped on the door. It had been as he'd half suspected.
Her look of terror told him everything. He was out of breath and shaken. He sat down on a chair still glaring at her.
"You called the narks," he snarled after a few minutes.
"If you touch me, I shall scream the roof off," Gracie said. But when he came towards her the scream wouldn't come.
Francie clamped his hand over her mouth and pushed her down on the bed, leaning over on top of her.
"What did you do to get rid of Charlie?" he snapped.
He moved his hand down to her throat.
"I hit him with a lamp," she blurted, huskily.
"Where did you call 'em from?"
"A booth. I don't know where it was."
He squeezed her throat.
"You're lying. You called 'em from the flat."
"I called them from a booth," she croaked.
He relaxed his grip.
"Why did you call 'em, Gracie. That wasn't a nice thing to do. You got us all in trouble, but your boyfriend's in it the worst."
Gracie's eyes were hollows of fear, staring up at him like death.
"What happened?" she whispered.
He told her, reveling in the effect the details had on her.
"Thank God, he's alive," she whispered.
"Won't be for long," Francie gloated. "That copper must be dead or dying. I went smack into him with the lorry doing sixty. Hartnell's going to be the booby for that."
"You swine!" she said softly.
Francie chuckled fiendishly.
"The only trouble, Gracie, is to know what to do with you. You know too much and if I leave you 'ere you're going to tell the narks just to try and get your boyfriend in the clear. On the other 'and if I keep you with me where me and the boys are going to get away to for a while, I'll never be able to trust you. So what can I do, Gracie?"
She stared at him and her mind was saying "Swine, swine, filthy swine!"
"There's only one thing left, Gracie," he said. "I gotta get rid of you."
He chuckled evilly.
"It breaks me 'eart that our great romance 'as to end this way but there's nothing else for it. I'm sure you agree with me, Gracie."
Gracie's mind was in a whirl. She thought quickly of the gun in her bag, but Francie's weight was on her, the bag on the other side of the room.
"Still I gotta lie low at least until tomorrow," Francie was saying, "and I don't want to do the job here - somewhere in the country would be better. So what we're going to do, Gracie, is have a last night of pleasure, then I'm going to give you a little punishment and then when we get to the country with the boys, they can all see what it's like to fuck Slim Bailey's daughter before she goes to 'er Maker."
Gracie shuddered. She wished she'd never been born. Horror seemed to pile on horror. In the back of her mind she kept telling herself that somehow she had to help Roger.
"You'd better be nice to me now, Gracie," Francie sneered. "Cos I've had a hard time in the last few hours due to you. You'd better make up for it, hadn't you?"
She looked at him with eyes of contempt and he jerked up the skirt of her dress, rubbing his hands up her thighs. When he touched her between the legs she just lay still.
"Why aren't you wearin' pants?" he asked. And then he laughed nastily. "Getting ready for me, were you - or for him?"
He pulled the skirt right up to her waist and gazed down at her nakedness. He ran his hands gently over her hips and belly and then squeezed them with cruel force.
"Last time I'll be seeing these," he said. "But there'll be plenty more. Most women would be very happy to be nice to Francie."
He leaned down suddenly and bit hard into the roundness of her thigh. His teeth sank into softly-muscled flesh making her jerk and cry out. He laughed at her reaction, moved his lips up the thigh and bit into the flesh at the very portals of her cavity.
She pushed his head with her hands and, still laughing, he pushed her dress up over her waist, up over the swelling of her breasts and forced her to shake it off her shoulders over her head. He took off the brassiere and leaned back looking at her body. Its symmetry was quite beautiful. It reminded him, on a slightly smaller scale, of that of Lady Anne - of which he'd be seeing more when they hid out in the country for a time.
Gracie lay there, resigned as she'd so often been resigned, hardly there at all, thinking all the time of Roger and what she would have done had she not been trapped by Francie here.
Francie stood up and began to take off his clothes.
"I don't think anyone's going to find us here, Gracie, my sweet," he said. "So we can just relax and have a good time."
He stripped off and stood with his penis cleaving the air, rigid as a poker.
"Stand up," he said. "I want to have a look at you while you still look the way you do."
She got to her feet and stood by the bed while his eyes swept over avidly. He turned her round and his eyes gloated on the provocative lines of her waist and buttocks.
He caught hold of her and began to run his hands all over her, up and down her sides, over her breasts, over her buttocks and thighs. Suddenly he caught her hair and forced her down to her knees in front of him. He bobbed his bulge of manhood at her face, rubbing the moist head over her cheeks, grinning, with his: lips drawn back from his teeth. Gracie closed her eyes.
"Open your mouth," he commanded. And when she was slow he twisted her hair and her lips opened in a cry of pain.
He pushed his knob against the softness of her lips, brushed it along her mouth in a heat of self-tantalization. Then he prodded it into the opening.
"Suck it, you bitch," he snarled. "Go on - suck it."
He twisted her hair again, pulling her face forward, her mouth onto his prick.
Her lips began to move on it. He felt the suction, drawing his knob like a magnet, seeming to elongate his organ with every suck. He watched her cheeks hollowing around his flesh. He felt he'd like his sex to ram right down her throat and fill her gullet, choking her.
He jerked her hair again.
"Harder," he rasped. "Use your bloody tongue."
The tongue wrapped around the knob, soft and firm. Her mouth, tongue, lips were all soft, moist, warm.
Francie tightened his buttocks together, thrusting his prick at her mouth, jerking slightly against her.
"Lovely. That's lovely," he murmured, wheezing the words through his teeth.
He held the back of her head, now, running his hands over the silkiness of her hair, shuffling his loins at her as her mouth pulled at him.
"Just like that," he gritted. "Just like that."
Gracie sucked on his penis as if it were some wonderful lollipop. She could feel its hard, rubbery texture filling her mouth, hot under her tongue. She tried not to think about what she was doing. She cast her thought to Roger all the time, except when Francie pulled her hair, jerking her back into the present.
He kept pushing it further into her mouth so that it grated gently against her teeth and she could feel the movement of the sheath of outer skin on the hard core within. It was filling her mouth and as he held her head in a viselike grip she felt as if she would choke or be sick - the way she'd felt when he'd stuffed it into her back passage.
Her knees were beginning to ache and her jaw felt stiff as if she'd been chewing some thick, resistant pudding.
Francie's testicles kept swaying against her chin. There was an odor of sweat about his genitals and the mass of hair over his belly and around his organ suffocated her.
Feeling the movement, like a sea swell inside his hips, Francie held his legs together, rubbing his knees against each other, locking his wiry calves in an encouragement of the passionate juices somewhere this long sensitive tube of flesh began.
He was reaching the point where it would be too late to turn back where he would be carried along like driftwood in a rapids - and he wanted this sensation to last.
He arched his hips backward.
"All right. Get on the bed," he ordered. His breath was broken, uneven.
Gracie lay back on the bed.
"Open your legs wide," Francie said.
She flopped open her legs.
He reached for the pillow, dragged it from under her head and slid it under her hips, raising them three inches above the bed so that her body sloped slightly downwards from the uppermost point which was her abdomen down to the head of the bed.
Francie gloated over the hole he was about to excavate. He realized that he still wanted Gracie, still longed to force her to belong to him. His eyes gleamed with cruelty. At least he could hurt her, make her aware of him that way before she died.
He moved up between those widespread thighs. Pulled apart the nether lips like curtains, aimed his penis like a long pike - and lunged into her with all his weight.
"Ooooh!" Gracie uttered a long gasp of pain. Her body squirmed as if she were convulsing on an electric chair.
Francis's penis felt as if it had been scraped, as if her passage was trying to push it out as it tore in. He gasped too at the sudden delicious, clamping enclosure of this penis that felt so itchy it wanted to urinate.
"How's that, then Gracie," he snarled, his chin jutting forward with the strain. "I'm going to fill you with such a flood you'll drown."
Lying helpless, dominated under him, Gracie felt as if she must be bleeding inside with the roughness of his entry. She bit her lip and lolled her head sideways away from his face as it came down to hers.
She thought how wonderful it would have been to have lost her virginity to Roger, to have had nobody but him, wanted nobody. How she loved him, how different roughness would seem coming from him. She would cling to him and love him, feeling a well of passion fill her loins. Now she felt only the pain and the humiliation, as usual, of this man, unasked, slaking himself on her most intimate part, twitching his organ into her torn, aching passage.
Francie was loving her this time as if he would kill her. His penis was buffeting into her with savage, relentless strokes and his face, when she opened her eyes, was twisted into a mask of strain and sadism.
He leaned up from her breasts and pushed her thighs up towards her breasts. He grasped each breast and squeezed it, bruising the paps, wrenching as if he were trying to draw milk from the nipples.
His eyes, watching her face, as the waves of sensual intoxication enveloped his loins, grinned devilishly as he saw her pain.
Against his hips as he thundered deep into the moist clinging passage, he felt the soft, white mounds of her buttocks, meeting his flesh like firm buffers.
He ravished her savagely, twisting his hips this way and that, crashing his organ into her from different angles, feeling the knob tearing at the lining of her vagina, jerking gasps of excitement from him to the accompaniment of moans of pain from her.
Gracie's vagina felt like an inferno, boiling with the heat of lava. It felt as if it were being enlarged and burnt out at the same time.
Her mind flitted round the thought of the drubbing she would have from the other members of the gang and she decided she would die in the process - it would be too much to bear.
His hands were still on her breasts. He wasn't treating her as a human being. He was mauling the little hillocks of flesh, like a tiger over some dead animal. His nails dug into the sleek, white bulges. When he squeezed she felt suddenly bruised and her chest constricted with the pain. It was a never-ending nightmare which seemed to be only just beginning.
Francie was working feverishly to a climax. He saw her lips below, soft red lips and he swooped down to fasten on them, to bite them as his rod bit into those lower lips, ransacked that lower mouth.
He filled her with his tongue, forcing her mouth wide, intruding with the whole of his into that breathless cavern. Her lips were bleeding from his teeth and she tried to struggle her head away from him, but it was locked under his as her hips were locked under his.
As liquid prepared for the rush inside him, like urine trying, but unable, to escape, he moved up from her again, grunting and choking his breath above her.
"Gracie, Gracie!" He uttered her name savagely, his voice devoid of tenderness. He uttered the name as if he were destroying her and gloating over the destruction.
"Oh, oh, oh!" He was so overcome that he seemed at times to lose his rhythm and left his penis pushed to its utmost, inside her loins for seconds at a time as he ground his hips into hers.
Gracie's lips moved in quiet, almost semiconscious murmuring of pain, now. It seemed that the devil's venom was about to sweep into her.
Her passage contracted automatically around the thick stem of wildly probing flesh inside her and it seemed to Francie that the head of his penis was growing to an enormous size like a balloon expanding, nearing bursting point.
And, then the rush started. It raced through him, shaking his whole body in a sort of delirium. Her tight, reluctant channel was dragging the sperm out of him with an overwhelming suction. The rush grew in volume. He cried out, gnashing his teeth. He caught her breast again, crushing the firm bulbs and then his body shook in the convulsive tremor which accompanied the shattering of his fluid into the torn, painful depths of her vagina.
At frequent intervals during the night he experimented with her, forcing her into all sorts of contorted positions. Exhausted, at last, he lay beside her quivering body, gazing at the ceiling. He didn't dare go to sleep because of the gun in his jacket pocket. There could be nothing left in Gracie, now, but a great hatred towards him.
Chapter 16
Hartnell, lost in the lunchtime crowds, ventured at last to look round. There was no sign of a policeman, nobody who looked as if they might be coming after him. He breathed with relief, told himself that he was far from clear yet and hurried on.
The first place to make for was Gracie's. He wondered how long he would have before his escape was discovered. It was possible, of course, that it might be several hours before they went down to take him out for the journey to the prison.
Farther on he came across a taxi rank, felt in his pocket, found they'd left his wallet and got in the vehicle at the head of the line.
He gave an address near Gracie's place. He might as well take a few minor precautions instead of leading any pursuers straight to the spot.
The taxi began to work its way through the heavy London traffic. Hartnell fidgeted as he stared from the windows, and twisted round from time to time to look back along the way they'd come.
He was clear by now. They wouldn't know for at least some time which way he'd come. The only trouble was the immediate description of himself which would be circulated. That would make every policeman an enemy. He shrank down in the back of the taxi. The only pleasant thought in his mind was that of seeing Gracie.
While they purred through the streets and he fumed at every set of traffic lights against them, he decided he'd better be careful in his approach to her flat. Some of the gang might be there. There was no telling where they'd all ended up in their flight from the police. He remembered the little skylight that looked down into her kitchen. He thought there was a fire escape at the back of the building. If he could get onto the roof, and if the skylight was open as it usually was ... It was worth a try. It would be ridiculous to walk open-eyed into the gang's clutches.
Earl's Court was much quieter than many parts of London, particularly now that the lunchtime rush was subsiding.
He got out of the taxi and began to walk. He didn't see the taxi behind him which turned sharply into another street, and stopped.
He saw Gracie's block and felt a nervous excitement inside him as he picked out her window. He hoped with all his heart that she was there and that she was safe.
He walked round to the back of the building. There was a long, well-laid-out garden stretching its length - and there was the fire escape zigzagging up to the roof. He wished it wasn't the middle of the afternoon.
He glanced up and down the street and then slipped into the garden. He looked at the windows alongside the fire escape. Some of them he would have to pass. But it was a chance he had to take. There was nobody in the street, which was partially cut off from him by a screen of hedge and small trees. He hesitated. But he had no time to lose. Even now they might have discovered his absence.
Quickly, walking as if he had every right to be there, but with his chest a jangle of nerves, he crossed to the foot of the iron fire escape and began to mount.
He glanced into the first window he passed. It was a kitchen - and empty. That was good. Kitchens were not likely to be occupied in the middle of the afternoon.
He climbed up the back of the building, glancing down once to the street below. One or two people were passing but they did not look up.
At one of the windows he passed a woman who was pressing some clothes, but she had her back towards him and he crept past without being seen, congratulating himself on his luck.
He reached the roof and swung himself onto it. It sloped considerably for a few feet and he had some difficulty in clambering onto the flatter portion. Once there, however, he was hidden by a maze of chimneys, radio and television masts.
He tried to walk as softly as he could, but his feet thudded on the tiles and once he almost slipped as he reached the skylight. His hands were trembling slightly - Gracie was, perhaps, so near.
The skylight was closed. He cursed his luck. He could see nobody in the kitchen. He tried to raise up the frame but could make no impression. It was fastened from the inside.
He was still wondering what way to tackle the problem when there was a movement below. Somebody had entered the kitchen and was looking up. He peered through the dusty glass. Then he flung himself away from the skylight.
A gun had been raised towards the window above. Behind it he had recognized the snarling face of Francie, As he ducked, the glass shattered and splinters flew in all directions. There had been almost no report from the silenced pistol.
Superintendent Wilson was listening at the radio of the patrol car. Jones was calling on his pocket radio from a street in Earl's Court.
He told the driver to head in that direction as he listened to the message.
Hartnell was on the roof of a house, Jones was telling him, probably trying to break in through a skylight. He couldn't see him because the chimneys were acting as a screen, but he thought he'd heard the smash of broken glass.
Turner was around the front of the block, keeping watch, he reported.
"Right. Stay there, Jones, and keep up the track if he leaves. It may not be what we're looking for. So just hang on."
The superintendent sent out another message calling three more patrol cars. Ordering them to close in on the area.
Chapter 17
Francie had finally fallen asleep. When he had awakened with a start, Gracie had been still lying, naked, beside him.
He went into the bathroom and splashed water over his face, keeping the door open so that he could see her. Now he was going to have another bit of fun. He was determined to break Gracie physically and morally before he left with her. He wished now that he'd put her on drugs earlier. He'd always thought he'd keep any special girl of his off that poison. But now he realized it would have been the best way to have got her completely dependent on him in every way. He would have liked to have seen her on her knees begging him for another shot, promising him anything, looking up to him as to a god.
He came back into the room and looked out of the window into the street. He wondered how the police were getting on, how Hartnell was getting on and he chuckled. He was too smart, much too smart for them. He always had been and he always would be. It was a pity Gracie didn't realize that, didn't realize he was the one she should have tagged along with, not waited for that damned, gentlemanly fool, Hartnell, who didn't know the first thing about how to look after himself or her.
Hartnell wouldn't spill on the gang, he knew. That would involve Gracie and Hartnell knew they had her. Francie chuckled again. All he had to do was clear off into hiding, watch the papers to make sure there wasn't any unexpected turn of events, and wait until everything had blown over. It was all so simple.
He wondered if the rest of the boys had got away. He supposed they had. They were all pretty smart when it came to saving their guts. They'd probably all be waiting for him at the hideout when he took Gracie there later today.
Gracie stirred on the bed and opened her eyes. He turned towards her, watching her awaken to a world she didn't for the moment recognize. He grinned at the look of mingled fear and horror which flushed her face when she saw him, remembered where she was and what had been happening.
Watching her all the time, he began to dress slowly. He'd had so much of her during the night that he no longer felt any desire. He just wanted to see her squirm like a trussed rabbit.
With a final adjustment of his tie, he walked across the room and began to rummage in a drawer.
Gracie got out of bed and reached for a dressing gown.
"I wouldn't bother about that," Francie said without looking around. "I prefer you in the raw and I'll only have to undress you again."
Gracie sat on the edge of the bed. She found her fingers were trembling slightly and she felt as if she'd been on a several days' binge.
Francie straightened from the drawer. He had several items of clothing in his hand - all scarves, suspender belts, slight garments like that.
He came across to her.
"You'd better not struggle unless you want to be beaten up," he snarled. "I'm going to tie you up just to make things easier. Stand up and turn around.
Gracie glanced desperately at her bag with its hidden revolver. She wondered if Francie had slept, if she'd missed a chance to save herself. To struggle now would be hopeless. She had no idea what he was going to do to her. The thought of further rape left her almost indifferent. She turned her nude back towards him.
"Put your wrists together," he said.
He began to tie her arms, binding them tightly with a scarf. He pushed her face down on the bed and tied her ankles likewise. He rolled her over onto her back, stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and bound another scarf over it.
"That should keep you quiet," he murmured.
Gracie followed his movements with her eyes. She felt a tremor of new fear. More than ever now, he seemed to her to be touched with madness. The hard eyes flickered all the time between a glare and a grin, the long, blond hair fell slightly over one ear and the sensual mouth sagged open from time to time in the oblong face.
Francie went back to the drawer and began to empty the contents onto the floor. He didn't seem to find what he was looking for and his eyes searched around the room alighting, eventually, on a thin, plastic-covered cord to one of the lamps. He went over to it, jerked the cord from both wall and lamp with a couple of sharp tugs.
He glanced back at Gracie, whose eyes still watched him, showing the whites as they followed him around the room. He began to double the flex, winding it around his right hand - and doubling it again.
"This is going to be your punishment," he said, with a low chuckle. "Always pleasure and then punishment, Gracie."
Gracie tried to say something, but all she could manage was a muffled grunt through the gag.
"If you could make a sound," Francie went on, "you'd soon be screaming for mercy. But I'm afraid, my sweet, that you'll have to suffer in silence."
He swished the cord twice through the air and the sound made Gracie wince.
The next instant she gave a violent jerk and rolled over onto her face. The cord had slashed across her breasts, bringing out a thin red weal, multiplied several times, across the flesh.
She bit into the gag. Her bosom was burning with sharp pain. And then the lash smacked across her rump, making her jerk back onto her side with the sizzling fire of the pain.
Tears came to her eyes, forced out by the gnawing agony. Her buttocks clamped together, straining in an effort to rid her of the hot stinging across their whip-marked expanse.
Francie raised his hand and brought the cord down again, across her hips this time, with all his force. His face was contorted in what seemed a paroxysm of malignity, as if he were about to have an orgasm.
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he muttered insanely to himself as his arm rose and fell with increasing rapidity. All his hatred of the power which she in turn had exercised on him, came out in the violence in his face and in his movement.
Gracie squirmed on the bed uttering muffled sounds of anguish. She was like a fish hauled from the water and flung onto the bottom of a boat. Her body was becoming a mass of red weals. It was a prison of pain. She wanted to escape from her body. Between the slashes of the wire across her bare, tender skin she had wild, tear-filled thoughts - desire to have the power of a yogi impervious to physical pain; she tried to steel herself in a mental scream that this couldn't affect her spirit, that if she told herself it was nothing, she could conquer the torture of the flesh.
But it was useless. The body was all of her, reaching up with stabbing pain into her mind, filling her head with a buzzing of sound and torment so that, at last, each fresh lash was no more than a faint sting to a background of unbearable, killing anguish.
She remembered only that the stings were last in the region of her buttocks when the sound and the pain in her head merged into a complete, deafening consistency of sound and then she could feel no more.
Francie was almost reaching an orgasm. As he followed, with a physical awareness of sensation the biting of the cord into the flesh, his penis had risen sharply, pressing with a series of sharp twinges into his trousers. He felt the familiar excitement in chest and loins and it seemed to grow as he bent over her prostrate, humiliated body.
Greedily he watched the way the black cord sank deep into the white skin and then rose out, leaving the ridged flesh below squirming as if each part of her lived a separate, sensitive existence.
She had twisted and turned, writhing awkwardly on the bed. The lash had fallen indiscriminately across nearly every portion of her body, caressing thighs and hips, making crisscross patterns across her stomach and breasts, giving her back and bottom a blaze of furious color.
His arm was beginning to ache as he realized she was no longer moving. But it didn't stop him. He was almost coming and he needed to go on slashing her body, tearing it into ribbons of violent pink, until the climax came.
His hips began to jerk after each down movement was completed. His thighs tensed, thrusting his loins towards her as he straightened.
With his free hand he searched frantically for his mass of stiff flesh and drew it out from his trousers so that it shot out like a cannon towards her body.
He rocked on his heels and the balls of his feet as the blows followed fast and furiously on one another. His organ was a massive projection, flaming red - almost purple at its tip, needing no external titivation to rush on its way to the orgasm.
He fixed his eyes madly, glazedly on the lines the whip left on the flesh. Each line seemed like the contraction of some tight vagina around his penis. He was coming; he wielded the wire with a last ferocity - and then it flew from his hand as the sperm shot from the tip of his taut weapon, described a large arc and cascaded down her buttocks, a trail of almost opaque white fluid, showing clearly on the red weals, slightly on the rare patches of white flesh.
Francie swayed, his hips twitching after the last charge of liquid had shattered from him. He leaned forward and placed his hands on the edge of the bed, bending forward in momentary exhaustion.
He stayed like that for only a few seconds. Then he straightened up and looked at the body in front of him. Little beads of blood were breaking through like dots along the line of the weals. Gracie was unconscious, with streaks of tear paths from her eyes to the gag. His lips drew back from his teeth. That was what he should have done to her long ago.
He turned away and sank into a chair. Her body still seemed slim and beautiful in spite of the angry blaze of its wounds. But he'd soon be rid of it altogether. Once she was dead there would be no more torment, no more desire to win her body and soul.
He pulled a piece of underwear from the pile on the floor and wiped his deflated penis. He looked at his watch. It was getting late - already into the afternoon. He felt slightly weary and debated whether he should take a nap while waiting for her to recover and decided against it in case she recovered too quickly and even now turned the tables on him.
She was already stirring and her eyes opened in a new recognition of pain. He decided to leave her for a while to wallow in anguish until he untied her and led her out smarting with the long aftermath of the beating, to a taxi and the hideout.
He considered rubbing salt in the wounds and then found he hadn't the energy. He stood up and crossed to the window again. He felt quite pleased in the way things had turned out. It must be pretty safe now, out there.
It was while he was looking that he heard the noise on the roof. It sounded heavy for a cat, like someone dislodging a slate, like a footstep, in fact.
He listened intently, but for several seconds there was no further sound. Perhaps it was a cat - must have been.
Nonetheless he stayed quite still, holding his breath, waiting for the next sound, eyes raised toward the ceiling.
The sound came, suddenly, from the kitchen roof. He took out his gun. Someone was trying to break through the kitchen skylight.
Francie looked at Gracie, once. He crept towards the open kitchen door. The skylight was to the side over the sink and he couldn't see it without going into the room.
The light was shadowed from the skylight and the head and shoulders of a figure were visible through the dusty glass.
For some seconds Francie stared as the man above tried to raise up the frame of the locked window. A shock of surprise flooded over him as he realized the man was Hartnell. He thought of Gracie lying in her bleeding state in the next room and for once he felt a little afraid, a little jittery. This man on the roof loved her. How he came to be there Francie couldn't imagine, but he had obviously broken out of a police cell and that meant he might be armed.
The head and shoulders were a perfect target, his gun was fitted with a silencer.
But Hartnell looked through and saw him just as he raised the weapon. The bullet shattered the glass, but there was no thud of a body. Hartnell had disappeared. He had missed.
Francie retreated to the door, watching the skylight all the way. His mind was whirling. He couldn't risk a gunfight in this place. He hadn't time to untie Gracie and get her away. She would be so much ballast. His own skin came, finally, before everything else. He considered putting a bullet through Gracie, but found he hadn't the nerve to finish his dream - perhaps he never would have been able to kill her.
He glanced quickly at the skylight for the last time and then slipped from the kitchen, crossed the other room into the tiny vestibule, let himself out, slammed the door and raced down the stairs three at a time.
When he walked out into the street he was moving smartly but not noticeably fast. He turned the nearby corner, doubled his pace and hailed the first taxi he saw.
Chapter 18
Hartnell edged himself very carefully up to see over the skylight from a different angle. He took a risk of having his head blown off, but there was nothing else he could do except keep out, which he had no intention of doing.
The kitchen was empty when he peered over. The glass of one of the two panes were shattered and cracked in all directions.
He waited for nearly a minute and then he smashed the rest of the glass with his fist, ducking back out of sight at the same time.
He heard the glass clattering on the floor, nothing else, and he gradually eased himself up again to look over. The kitchen was still empty and he couldn't think what the setup was. Who was in there? And was Gracie there? Were they waiting to get him down there to have a better target - a sitting duck, virtually? If only he had a pistol - or even some sort of club. He stared along the roof but there was nothing.
Down in the kitchen he could see bottles, a heavy frying pan, heavy ladles. Yes, he would have to take the chance and get down there. The silence was ominous. But, maybe the lack of movement inside meant that whoever had been here had fled. Perhaps it was one of the gang hiding out for the time being. Gracie probably wasn't there at all. These considerations played small part in his action. Nothing would have stopped him getting into the flat. If Gracie was there, at least they'd make a fight of it and maybe go down together.
Gingerly, watching the kitchen door all the while, he reached through the shattered pane and undid the catch. With one hand he pushed it up and then inserted the other under the frame as it rose. He withdrew the first hand and pushed the window right up, latching the iron catch on the last notch. There was still no movement from within and he could hear nothing at all.
He waited a moment, sweating. He knew he was taking his life recklessly in his hands. He'd done it before in those years of daredevil hell amidst the flak and the enemy planes.
Gently he swung himself onto the edge of the skylight. It was a drop of ten feet. He dropped, landing on the balls of his feet shooting forward a pace and seizing a ladle from the wall in the same movement.
As he edged forward towards the open door he picked up a bottle to throw at the first sign of movement. But there wasn't any and as he reached the door and could see through the crack he was suddenly sure the room was empty. No. There was someone on the bed! The blood rushed to his head and he lunged into the room, his face wrinkled with horror. Gracie was lying there the way Francie had left her.
As soon as he'd got the gag off her she burst into hysterical tears, which seemed a mixture of the most utter anguish and the most complete joy.
Hartnell's eyes had filled with tears. He was speechless. He untied her bonds as quickly as his trembling hands would permit him and then clasped her gently in his arms. Neither had said a word.
They clung together for a long time, pressed tenderly together. It didn't matter to Gracie that his hands were on the weals on her back. That he was here was unbelievable and wonderful. It gave her some strange, new faith. It was surely an act of God that he should have arrived just at this moment before Francie took her off to new ravishment and death.
Hartnell's voice broke with a sob when at last he managed to speak.
"Who did this Gracie?"
Quietly, through her tears, wincing occasionally from a sudden twinge of pain, she told him how Francie had arrived, purporting to be him, how he had subjected her to this misery and intended taking her away to kill her.
Hartnell's voice shook with emotion. His eyes were like a hunted tiger's, haunted and savage at the same time.
"I'll kill him for this!" His voice was intense, bordering still on a sob. "I'll smash him to a pulp and then I'll hang for it. The bastard, the filthy bastard! I'll kill him!"
His voice had risen, become almost shrill with emotion, and it was Gracie who became the calming agent.
"Pass me a gown, darling. I don't want you to see me like this."
Hartnell sat on the bed, his head in his hands, working himself into a fury of hatred against Francie, thinking what he was going to do to him when he caught him. If it hadn't been for Gracie he would have rushed straight from the house in pursuit.
Gracie went into the kitchen and bathed the raw, stinging wounds as best she could, refusing help from Hartnell.
"Where will he have gone?" he grated, after a while.
"It doesn't matter, darling." Gracie came back into the room. He saw slight traces of bruises on her lovely face. "Don't chase him, darling. We must get away," she pleaded.
"Where will he have gone?" Hartnell repeated, almost harshly. "I'm going after him, Gracie. I should never be able to live with the knowledge of what he'd done to you."
"Oh Roger, Roger. Can't you see that the fact that we're together now and have a chance is the most important. Let what's passed, pass. Oh darling, please."
"No, Gracie. I have to get him first. And, by God, when I do he'll wish they'd got him the other night instead."
Gracie looked at him hopelessly. He was going to dash all their chances of getting quietly into a different world. Before it had been she who hadn't seen things clearly, now it was he. Her whole body was burning, but it seemed unimportant now that he was here with her. She longed to keep him with her, somehow, anyhow.
"Tell me what happened to you?" she asked. She had washed the tearstains from her face and her eyes in their tired, shadowy hollows were brighter than they'd been for some time. Quietly, indifferently, almost impatiently he told her. She listened intently, occasionally biting her lip with the twinge of pain from one or more of the weals which covered her body. When he'd finished she resumed her plea.
"Any more of this can only lead to tragedy, Roger - I feel it," she begged. "Let's try to get away while it's possible. I've heard of people taking fishing boats to France. Anything would be better than staying here."
Roger gazed compassionately at the bruise marks on her face. The picture of her beaten body he wanted to try and keep out of his mind. "No, dearest," he said. "When I escaped it was to find you and then get Francie to jail by hook or by crook. Now it's just my intention to get Francie by hook or by crook."
"But it won't clear you. What I want, Roger, is for you to be cleared. But that couldn't happen. You'd never get Francie - and even if you did he'd never admit he was driving the lorry."
"You're probably right, Gracie," Hartnell agreed. "But it doesn't make any difference. I've just got to get him. It'll make it easier if I know where he's likely to have gone - otherwise I'll simply head for the hideout to see if he's there."
Gracie felt the hopelessness of argument. Not even love for her or concern for his own life would thwart him in his determination to get even with Francie.
"That's almost certainly where he's going. He said something about meeting the others there. Darling, I'm coming with you if you're going. I don't want not to be with you when you're in such danger."
"I won't let you do that. You're in no state to do anything but stay here. Lock the door and don't open it to anyone. If anyone tries to come through the skylight run out to the nearest police station - even that would be better."
"But, darling . . ."
He cut her short.
"Gracie - you must do as I say. If you came with me it would only restrict me and make me nervous and afraid because you were there and might get hurt. Once I get Francie and have settled with him. I'll come back here and then we'll see."
Gracie picked up her handbag and felt inside.
"Take this," she said, holding the revolver - Charlie's revolver - towards him, "And may God be on your side, darling."
He took the weapon and she came into his arms. They kissed gently. Too much had happened and was going to happen for passion to have any place. There was only tenderness and desperate hatred of parting.
Gracie's lips moved as if in a prayer.
"I'll always love you, darling," she whispered.
He held her gently to him, hating not to be able to press her more tightly to him because of the wounds.
"We'll make a lift yet, Gracie," he said softly. "This is coming to an end - all this business."
"I hope so. God, I hope so."
Hartnell placed the gun in his right-hand pocket. He went out onto the landing and Gracie closed the door behind him. All the way down the stairs he fought down his wondering if he would ever see her again.
Sitting on a bench some way up the street, Detective Constable Jones saw Hartnell come out of the block. He buried himself in his newspaper and muttered the news into his pocket radio.
"Keep on him, Jones," the superintendent's voice came back. "We'll let Turner know. We're only round the corner but I don't want him to get scared. We'll be following you."
Hartnell walked right past Jones' seat with a rapid stride. After a few seconds the detective constable got up, looked in the opposite direction, stretched, looked after Hartnell as if getting his bearings and then crossed the road and followed him at some distance on the other side.
Five minutes later when Gracie, fully dressed and hardly showing the pain she felt as she walked, came out of the block, the superintendent's car had already passed and was giving directions to other patrol cars coming in from other directions.
Without fuss or flurry the whole drama passed away from Earl's Court towards the docks.
Hartnell walked for some distance before he took a taxi. He was a little afraid of police checks on all vehicles. He hadn't bought a newspaper, preferring to remain in ignorance of information which, he was sure, could only depress him. Francie was his sole objective.
He was burning like a volcano to get his hands on the gang leader's throat. First he would like to beat him the way he'd beaten Gracie but twice as hard and twice as long, and then he wanted to throttle him with his hands.
Sometimes he glanced over his shoulder and once he thought a man was following him on the opposite side of the road. But when he turned sharply down on a side street the fellow kept straight on.
He knew London fairly well, but it was some time before he found the hideout. The taxi had driven him to a street the name of which he remembered in the vicinity, but he still wandered for quite some time before he hit upon the narrow lane which led to the narrower one and the garage. The area was quiet. It was mid-afternoon. Many of the buildings in the lane were garages and storage houses: a couple of little, ragamuffin boys were playing marbles in the broader lane and a skinny woman passed Hartnell, carrying a shopping bag.
He waited, lingering on the corner a few seconds and then began to walk carefully towards the garage.
Above the garage was another floor - a loft which had been used for storage. In this had been cut a long slit and it was from this slim embrasure that Lucky, who had been posted on a guard duty in case anyone came while the gang were clearing up, saw Hartnell advancing cautiously along the lane.
Francie had half expected him and when Lucky flew breathlessly down the basement steps to warn of his approach, the gang stopped their clearing-up operations and began to get into position.
The majority - everyone had got back safely from the docks - were to remain in the basement room, taking cover behind beds and crates, guns trained on the door through which Hartnell would eventually come.
Francie was to join Lucky in the loft and they would shoot him down from behind. With their silencers the guns would not sound even as violently as a tire bursting or a cork popping out of a bottle.
"Right," Francie hissed before he and Lucky flew back up the stairs to the wooden ladder leading to the loft. "As soon as 'e comes in let him 'ave it. He's out for blood, believe me. So it's up to our little firin' squad to shoot first."
He took a last look at the positioning around the basement, his eyes signified his cruel satisfaction and then he raced after Lucky up into the loft.
Lucky watched Hartnell arrive, peering again through the slit in the woodwork. Francie was poised in the darkness at the top of the ladder below the trapdoor which led out onto the flat roof of the garage.
Detective Constable Jones, who had beer joined by his colleague Turner, watched Hartnell disappear into the narrow lane. Over their radios they heard Superintendent Wilson saying. "This looks like it, boys. Close in . . ."
Hartnell tiptoed into the unlocked garage. The van was there, he noticed, number-plate changed yet again. It looked as if everyone had got away. He took the gun from his pocket and slipped the safety catch. He had a look at the van first. He was not unaware that Francie might be expecting him, and in one sense it turned his blood cold at the thought that he might be walking smack into a trap. But at the same time there was no other way of getting Francie and he was going to do that whether it cost him his own life or not.
Satisfied that there was nobody in the van he made softly for the basement stairs. At the top he paused and contemplated the ladder to the loft. It was dark up there. He could see nothing. He hesitated, unsure which way to take first and then, as had been arranged, he heard voices coming from the basement room. He made his way cautiously down the steps, very slowly. He was, perhaps, halfway down when he heard the quick scuffle which seemed to come from the loft. He turned about, pointing the revolver towards the top of the basement steps. The creak of the trapdoor came to him, a grunt of exertion and then he was bounding up the steps two at a time.
Just in time to see a foot swinging up through the open trapdoor and disappearing into the square of light, he fired and scrambled up the steps.
Lucky, who had been watching Hartnell arrive had been slow to leave the chink for fear of making noise while he was directly underneath. It was thus he had seen the arrival of the police: several patrol cars crammed with them as far as he could make out had filled the entrance to the lane, blocking it completely.
He had crept frantically from the lookout spot, gesticulating through the darkness to Francie who had not noticed until Lucky reached him.
It had been a moment's reflection to decide on the uselessness of fighting their way through Hartnell to warn the rest of the gang. It was too bad, was Francie's thought, but there it was, each man for himself. It might be that the police would be so occupied with the rest that he and Lucky could make a clean getaway over the roofs. The police would certainly get a warm reception if they tried to get down to the basement - they'd have to use gas.
He had reckoned without Hartnell's keen sense of hearing - and his shot.
The shot, followed by silence, had brought the police to the garage at a run and had sent the gang swarming out from the basement.
There had been a more or less head-on collision. The gang had ranged themselves around the van and the top of the basement steps and started a furious gun battle with the police who drove a couple of patrol cars up outside the garage doors for protection. So severe was the police fire that it was virtually impossible for any of the gang to climb up the ladder to the loft.
Hartnell, meanwhile, had followed Lucky and Francie out onto the roof.
They had already made good time across the flat, concrete top of the garage and were disappearing along the furrow formed by the sloping roofs of two warehouses at a higher level farther on.
He dropped Lucky with his first shot, wishing he hadn't had to but knowing that Lucky would turn against him with Francie - odds that with only five shots remaining he wouldn't have been able to take.
He saw Francie turn, as if surprised they'd been followed so quickly, and shoot back along the furrow. He flung himself on his face and crawled to the ridge the two roofs made, peering round. Another shot shattered the slate as he pulled his head back and he broke out in a sweat, whistling through his teeth. He peeped again and Francie had run on and was jumping down to another level. He had two alternatives: to follow along the furrow as an open target, or to scramble along the broad but insecure-looking guttering on the outside of one of the two ridges of roof. He chose the latter course, threw caution to the winds and scrambled along at speed, nearly losing his footing once and regaining it with a cold chill in his stomach.
He could hear the shooting behind him and below and he wondered what the hell had happened, but dared not look back.
At the far end of the roof ridge he looked down onto the lower level - a flat roof sloping slightly away from him.
Another shot smashed the slates near his head and he saw Francie had climbed again on the other side and was retreating amidst a number of chimneys. He held his fire. Francie had used three shots to his two.
With a quick jump, he was down onto the low roof and darting across the space to the step up.
Francie swung round a chimney and Hartnell fired, knowing he was going to hit. He heard the cry of pain. He had caught Francie's ankle. He heard something crashing down the roof beyond him on the side he couldn't see, wondered if it was Francie's gun and decided it was a chance not to be missed.
He vaulted up onto the higher roof and advanced rapidly towards the chimney.
There was a quick slithering and Francie, dragging one ankle, his face creased with pain, threw himself from the sheltering chimney and fell behind another.
Hartnell could see the outside of the roof now, and a gun was lying in the guttering. Below, to his astonishment he saw a mob of policemen looking up, and farther along the lane a crowd of people had gathered.
He had no time for reflection. A roof slate skimmed past his shoulder. That was it; Francie had only the one gun and he'd lost it.
"All right Francie," he called, and his voice was grim with satisfaction. "When I get there you're going to wish you'd never been born."
He edged round the chimney, watching for the next slate. It came and he ducked, hearing it smash to pieces on the chimney stack behind him.
At the same time he saw Francie make a desperate plunge down the side of the roof towards the lost revolver.
He raised his arm, but an almost impossible descent and a broken ankle had already done the job for him. With one shrill scream, Francie slipped, clung, slipped again and crashed from the roof to the feet of the police below, taking a shower of debris with him.
Hartnell walked to the edge of the roof and looked over as far as he could. Half a dozen policemen had heavy revolvers trained on him. He heard Superintendent Wilson's voice coming up to him through a megaphone:
"All right, son. Come on down. You've done your bit."
He began to walk back across the roofs and police were already coming to meet him.
They took him down through the trapdoor and into the garage. It was bedlam. Crates had been shot to pieces by police Sten guns and the gang had capitulated to a man.
The superintendent walked over to him with his rather bewildered-looking inspector.
"That's the man who drove the lorry," Hartnell said, simply, indicating the crumpled heap which was Francie farther up the lane.
By the time they had reached him, Gracie had broken through the relaxing police cordon and was with him. The superintendent decided he understood Hartnell's reticence, even though, he observed, the young lady did look a tiny bit battered.
Francie had been turned onto his back. He was bleeding badly. He hadn't long to live - a few minutes perhaps.
Hartnell looked down at him and no longer felt anything.
"Who drove the lorry that killed the policeman, Francie?" he asked.
Francie stared at him from the blood and the dirt and there was still no break in the cruelty in his eyes. He spat on the ground.
"Tell him who was driving it, Francie."
Francie spat again and blood came from his mouth. His eyes said "I'll see you in hell" as they looked from Hartnell and rested on Gracie.
"He was driving," he said weakly to the small crowd of police officers around him. He groaned and weakly moved his hand to his face. More blood welled from his mouth. He raised his head feebly. It seemed that he tried to grin fiendishly at Hartnell and then Gracie. And then he collapsed backwards with his mouth and eyes open.
They allowed Hartnell a few minutes with Gracie. She was crying.
"Somebody in the gang's going to admit it was Francie sooner or later," Hartnell said. "But I'll have a long time to do. You must forget me, Gracie. You're free now."
"Oh, Roger, I'll wait - you know I'll wait." She clung to him, sobbing.
The superintendent came over.
"All right, boy," he said. He turned to Gracie. "Don't worry too much, Miss. With good conduct it'll be much shorter than you think."
Gracie stared at him with bright eyes through her tears, and Hartnell looked at him too and was about to ask a question when the superintendent said: "Better wait for the proper channels," and took him by the arm towards the waiting car.
He looked out from the car where he was handcuffed between two detectives. He watched Gracie's eyes shining through her tears and he could only tell her with his eyes that he hoped she'd be waiting.
Hers repeated what she'd said before and her slim, still figure seemed to go on repeating it until the car turned into the broader lane and she was out of sight.
