The Runaways Read Online Free PDF

the back door. He took the key and opened it. The lock was a Yale. Smiler put the key back on the porch rafter and, once in the cottage, closed the door on the free catch. He could get out from the inside by turning the latch. He went through the hall to the front door and found that the lock there was a Yale too. That was fine, because if he heard anyone coming in the back he could slip out of the front unseen.
    In the kitchen he picked the mail from a wire basket that hung under the letter flap. There were two letters in white envelopes addressed to a Major H. B. Collingwood, Ford Cottage, Crockerton, Near Warminster, Wiltshire, and a picture postcard addressed to Mrs B. Bagnall at the cottage. The picture on the card was a view of Mont Blanc across the Lake of Geneva and the message on it cheered Smiler up a lot. It read:
Dear Mrs B.
    Mrs Collingwood and I send our regards and I am happy to say she is much improved in health though it will be a good month yet before the medico will be able – we hope – to give her a clean bill of health.
    When you next come in and find this will you please check the level of the central heating oil tanks as I don’t trust that oil fellow to call regularly to top it up.
    Kind regards to you, Mr B., and family.
    Sincerely, H. B. Collingwood
So, thought Smiler, the Major is away with his wife for quite a time and Mrs Bagnall, whoever she was, came in now and then to keep an eye on things. Well, all he had to do was to keep a weather-eye open for Mrs Bagnall. Considerably perked up, whistling gently to himself, he gave himself a good wash at the kitchen sink. He dried himself on a roller towel fixed to the back of a door next to the washing machine. Opening the door, he discovered that it held a small central heating plant. Now from Sister Ethel’s Albert – who was a plumber and electrical engineer – Smiler knew quite a lot about heating plants. Albert had often taken him on jobs and was, anyway, forever talking about his work. This plant was set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and the time clock was adjusted so that it came on at nine o’clock at night and went off at eight in the morning … enough, Smiler knew, to keep the cottage warm and damp free and to avoid any danger of pipes freezing up.
    Smiler put the letters and the postcard back in the mail basket and tidied up the sink from his washing. As a precaution he pulled the roller towel up so that no one could see that he had used it. He then made a quick tour of the cottage, promising himself a more detailed one later. This done, he slipped out of the back door and over to his barn, closing the door after him.
    He took with him – strictly on loan – a small portable transistor set which he had found in the Major’s study. The inside of his shirt was pouched with a can of corned beef, key attached for opening, a packet of Ryvita biscuits, and a bottle of orange juice. He ate and drank unhurriedly, although he was considerably sharp-set with hunger. While he ate he turned the radio on very softly.
    Some time before it got really dark Smiler gathered up his empty sardine tins and the corned-beef can and the now empty packet of salt biscuits and the cider bottle. Holding the rubbish clasped to his breast he went down the ladder frontwards, without the use of his hands, bumping his bottom from rung to rung to keep his balance. At the door he jerked up the catch with one shoulder and hooked the door open with his foot. The dusk was thickening. There was no one about. He slipped out. Because he was only going to go a few yards to the river to dump his rubbish he left the door open. To close it would have meant the nuisance of putting all the tins on the ground and using his hands.
    He went quickly round the corner of the barn and through the garden to the river which was still running high with the previous day’s rains. He threw his load into the flood water and then bent down to wash his hands