The Runaways by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online Page B

nice scented smell which he liked. If it had been his. Sister Ethel’s, he thought, no one would have been allowed in it without having a bath first. He poked about in it for a while and opened a mirror-fronted cabinet that hung on the wall. There were lots of bottles, tubes, toothbrushes, packets and sprays and pill boxes in the cabinet. When Smiler closed the cabinet his reflection confronted him in the mirror, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, freckles all over his face like the markings on a skylark’s egg, and his blond hair tousled all over his head. He took a comb from the shelf under the cabinet, wetted it under the cold tap, and tidied his hair.
    Then he went down to the sitting-room and looked at the books on the shelves. Smiler liked books. Although he preferred adventure stories, strip comics and do-it-yourself books, he would read anything even if he didn’t understand half of it. At Fishponds, if it were raining or he felt bored or he didn’t want for a while to be with the other lads, he would often go into the Public Library and sit over a book in the Reading Room. The woman who ran the place was a bit sniffy with him at first but she had got to know him and, providing his hands were clean, she let him stay as long as he liked.
    There were hundreds of books on the cottage shelves, a lot of them about fishing and hunting, rows of novels, a pile of Ordnance Survey maps at the end of one shelf, and on the bottom shelf a row of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Smiler knew all about the encyclopaedia. His father had once told him that you could find out about everything in it. And it was true, as Smiler had more than once proved in the Reading Room.
    For two hours Smiler sat on the floor enjoying himself. Although the curtains were drawn plenty of sunlight filtered through. Because of the central heating which had been on all night, it was not cold. He looked up all about cheetahs in the encyclopaedia. Not that there was much about them, just twenty lines or so. Smiler was interested to read that, for centuries in Persia and India, cheetahs had been used for hunting small game and antelopes. They were hooded, then taken out, and, when the hood was slipped, away they went after whatever it was. He remembered Yarra coming out of the barn. Yarra and Tarzan. Yarra and Samuel M.… He lay back on the floor, saw himself with a cheetah on the leash, the cheetah hooded, and the two of them moving along a great hillside then … Wheeeh! Off came the hood, the leash was slipped, and Yarra was away after a deer!
    He sat up and grinned to himself. Some hope, Samuel M., he thought. Anyway that cheetah was miles away by now if it had any sense. He pushed the book back on to the lower shelf. As he did so he saw that at the end of the shelf, wedged between the last volume and the wooden upright, was a large glass bottle. Smiler recognized it at once. His Dad liked his whisky at night and had had bottles like this. It was a nice old green bottle. In the top was a home-made cork with a slit cut in it that you could drop money through. The bottle was three-quarters full of fivepenny pieces. Smiler picked it up. It weighed like a bomb. He shook it, and then wondered how much there would be in it … Pounds and pounds. Ten at least.
    As he put the bottle back be suddenly heard a key scraping at the back door lock. Smiler was up and into the hall and out of the front door like a shot. He ran across the garden away from the road and bridge. He raced up the hillside and turned into a small clump of stunted yews. From here he could look down on the cottage and barn.
    Although he couldn’t see all the courtyard at the back, he could see the big white gate at the entrance. While he watched he was pleased to think that he had not left any tell-tale traces in the house. He was on the run and could not afford to give himself away. The whisky bottle was back in its place, and all the books. And he had tidied up the kitchen, wiping