“I know what I’m doing,” said three. “There can’t be anything wrong or we’d have had a message. D’you want your share?”

“What share?” said the Stan voice. “Don’t forget we’ve got nothing in our hands but trouble.”

“That’s not our fault. We did our best. Anyway she may help us yet. Come on, now, bundle him in.”

“Why don’t you listen to me?” Stan expostulated. “I’ve been in it since I could spit. You want to leave this old bath-chair, no one’s going to find it here for days, weeks. I ask you—two cars, bonnet to bumper. Sticks out a mile to the rawest flat in the force.”

“Not at Christmas. Parties—”

“We ought to stick together, all in the fastest.”

“Too much load. And what could look more suspicious than a car bulging with men?”

“Not at Christmas,” retorted Stan sulkily.

“All right, that’ll do. I’m in charge. You can get in the back—of this one—with them, Duster driving. Tim, drive for me, will you? Get a move on, Stan, time’s short. Pick him up.”

“Here, give us a hand, then,” cried Stan, “as if he’s a fairy!”

From a slight distance came a rejoinder that Brett could not make out.

“Smug little cocky little tits!” muttered Stan with venom. “Public perishing school! Hey, Duster! Give us a hand.”

Someone, apparently new, approached. Together they took hold of Brett as nurses heave up paralysed patients. As he swung up, the snow jumped into a glare under two dazzling beams.

A noise like a waterfall broke the stillness. So much, thought Brett, for the rescue searchlights, the helicopter. He gathered from the third voice that there were two cars, although he couldn’t see a second set of headlights. As he pondered this problem, his shoulders fell from four hands to two. One of the men went to his feet. As he bent to pick them up, the lights lit his face.

Wacey, said Brett to himself, without surprise. That was the Stan, the old hand at the game. And Wacey, not the other, had held his head and had given him handkerchief, snow and brandy. Why such tenderness? He was no friend to Wacey. An explanation was trapped somewhere inside his brain, like a fly buzzing against a window pane. He thought it had to do with the tense of a verb. Dreamily he started to conjugate tollo, his childhood’s favourite. Tollere, sustuli, sublatum—he was indeed being raised, to the accompaniment of a good deal of grunting. His right side was bumped against some sort of frame.

“Shove up, zany, can’t you?” he heard a strange voice say roughly.

His shoulders were jerked, slipped, and fell. His head cracked against a wall. Through the dinning pain that seemed to fill his skull he heard a groan, the sort that greets a fumbled catch in a Test match.

“Mr. Nightingale!”

Someone at the far end of a speaking tube called his name.

“Hullo!” he answered.

“Shut up.”

“Dear fellow—”