CHAPTER SEVEN: SOMETHING THE TIDE BROUGHT IN…

A LOOSE shutter on one of the sideshow booths was banging in the wind as April Dancer slipped noiselessly from the small caravan and began to make her way across the field towards the souvenir kiosk which had been rented by Sheila Duncan.

Doors yammered, canvas flapped, ropes heaved and the hedge was tossing in the squalls which moaned in the wires stringing together the thrumming telegraph poles, and whining through every slit and gap in the circus. The girl zipped her windcheater closer to her neck and tucked her trouser legs deep into her boots. Just before she emerged from the dense shadow the twin lines of trailers cast, she paused and looked around her.

A three-quarter moon sailed occasionally into sight across rifts in the scurrying clouds, but most of the light flooding the Big Top and the carved faces of the booths came from the single street lamp positioned at the entrance to the field. The caravans themselves were all in darkness though there was no telling how many of the blank windows might hide a flattened nose or eagerly peering eye.

April listened for a moment to the drumroll of the waves clamouring to enter the harbour below, and then moved on, keeping to the shadows as far as possible. A few paces later, the street lamp whirled away and the wet grass flew up and hit her coldly on the cheek. She had tripped over a carelessly placed guy rope in the dark.

She rose to her feet and made some attempt to dust off the muddy knees of her trousers: then, without warning, a hand fell on her arm as she was about to cross the brighter space separating her from the dark line of the booths.

"Hold it a minute, lovely," Mark Slate's voice whispered urgently. "We have visitors and I have a feeling it may not be convenient to call."

"Mark! You startled me for a moment!... What are you doing here? I thought our date was at the booth."

"It was. This blasted wind pushed me up the hill faster than I had expected and I was here five minutes early — fortunately, perhaps. Because as I approached the place, having circumnavigated the bobby on duty at the gate, I noticed a momentary flash of light within. Before I could make up my mind what to do, I saw it again. Aha! thought I. 'It's burglars, is it? Very well, we shall wait until our numbers are swelled and then we shall act."

"Wait until what yelled?" April demanded over the blustering of the wind. In the sudden lull which followed her words, they heard the chimes of the town-hall clock, swaying and distorted in the turbulent air, telling the half hour.

"I said wait until our numbers are swelled," Mark said as loudly as he dared. "Wait until you showed up, in other words. Now perhaps we can try some kind of circling movement and take them from two sides at once. However hard you try, you simply can't do that all on your lonesome!"

"Of course not. You were right to wait, Mark... You didn't see anything in the brief flash of light, by any chance? I mean, it didn't last long enough for you to see inside and to catch a glimpse of what they were doing?"

"Afraid not. It was simply the suspicion of a gleam through the shutter. And then, once my interest was caught and I watched properly, I saw the same thing again — only this time it was fractionally longer and I was able to positively identify that it came from inside and wasn't some stray reflection."

"What do you make of it, then?"

"Seems to me that kind of light is made only by someone who knows the place backwards and just shows a glim to verify the position of something."

"Working practically by instinct, you mean," April said. "Yes, I agree that's what it sounds like. Come on... you know which booth it is; third from the left in the line at right angles to the children's roundabout. I'll take the door at the back; you stand by at the front in case whoever it is tries to exit over the counter and through the curtain."

They sped across the area lit by the street lamp and melted into the shadows behind the sideshows. While the girl tiptoed round to the door of the third kiosk, Slate stood guard a little to one side, at the front. A foot away from the door-handle, April paused. The wind was still whistling around the stays and guy ropes of the circus, flattening the grass which showed up in a bar of light piercing the dark through a passage separating two booths.

Before she moved, another source of light fleetingly revealed itself nearer at hand. As Mark had told her, there was someone inside with a flashlight: for the briefest of moments, she had seen the keyhole and the crack around the door etched against the night… then everything was dark again, by contrast even more so than before. She stretched out her hand and grasped the handle.

Afterwards, she was never able to decide exactly what it was that gave her away. Perhaps, unknown to herself, she had made some telltale noise which carried over the tumult of the wind; perhaps the intruder happened to be looking towards the door and the bulk of her body had cut off some faint illumination filtering through the keyhole; perhaps he had noticed Mark's previous arrival and had been lying in wait for them.

At all events, whatever the reason, she had scarcely touched the handle when it turned violently in her grip, the door was jerked open, and flame spat towards her three times from the muzzle of a heavy calibre revolver.

The ingrained training which had led her automatically to stand to one side as she prepared to throw open the door probably saved her life. Even so, she felt the wind of the slugs on her face as they sang past her. An instant later, almost in a reflex action, she had leaned down and inwards and — guided by the position of the flashes from the gun — had seized the burglar's wrist and pulled.

There was a flurry of movement, a grunt of surprise, and the intruder, speeded on his way by a perfect hip throw, sailed through the open doorway and crashed to the ground outside.

April whirled round and cast herself to the floor of the booth in a single movement as the gunman scrambled to his feet in the dark and loosed off two more shots into the doorway. She was herself unarmed in the conventional sense, and unless she could manoeuvre herself into a position where she would be at much closer range, there was little she could do to combat his fire power. If, as she thought, the gun was a revolver, there must presumably still be either one or three shots left in the cylinder, according to whether there were six or eight chambers. If, on the other hand, she was mistaken and it was a heavy automatic pistol, there could be as many as seven or even ten shots to come. She decided to gamble on it being the former and try to draw her adversary's fire.

There was a faint scraping sound transmitted through the flimsy structure of the booth as Mark Slate inched his way to her rescue, his back pressed in the shadows to the outside wall.

Reaching behind her, April groped on the floor and found something hard and cold and disc-shaped — probably a Serpentine lid from one of the small stud boxes, she thought. She flipped it to the side of the doorway farthest from the scraping noise.

The flash of the explosion, drowning the small clatter of the lid on the wooden floor, seemed to her to come only inches away from her head. The intruder must have been stealing towards the door and was now only just outside.

Before the ringing in her ears had died away, there was a confusion of sounds — feet pounding, a smothered cry, a heel jarring on wood — culminating in two further shots. Simultaneously Mark shouted something unintelligible and she heard panting sounds and the noise of a struggle. As she scrambled to her feet, her nostrils tingling to the acrid stench of cordite, something heavy slammed against the wooden wall of the hut with a force that shook the small building.