The head-lights of the car they were following were still just visible several turns ahead. For the next few miles the journey developed into a nightmare. The turns were innumerable.
‘God knows how we’re going to get back,’ grumbled Michael. ‘I don’t know which I prefer; your friend with the gun or an attempt to find our way back through these roads before morning.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Martin consolingly. ‘You may get both. Any idea where we are? Was that a church we passed just now?’
‘I thought I heard a cow,’ suggested Abbershaw helpfully.
‘Let’s catch ’em up,’ said Martin. ‘It’s time something definite happened.’
Abbershaw shook his head.
‘That’s no good, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see our position? We can’t stop a man in the middle of the night and accuse him of murder without more proof or more authority. We must find out where he is and that’s all.’
Martin was silent. He had no intention of allowing the adventure to end so tamely. They struggled on without speaking.
At length, after what had seemed to be an interminable drive, through narrow miry lanes with surfaces like ploughed fields, through forgotten villages, past ghostly churches dimly outlined against the sky, guided only by the glare ahead, the darkness began to grey and in the uncertain light of the dawn they found themselves on a track of short springy grass amid the most desolate surroundings any one of them had ever seen.
On all sides spread vast stretches of salting covered with clumps of rough, coarse grass with here and there a ragged river or a dyke-head.