Cruelty Read online

  Peter didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, let me tell you something,’ Raymond went on. ‘We don’t like anything you do either.’

  Peter’s arms were beginning to ache. He decided to take a risk. Slowly, he lowered them to his sides.

  ‘Up!’ yelled Ernie. ‘Get ’em up!’

  ‘What if I refuse?’

  ‘Blimey! You got a ruddy nerve, ain’t you?’ Ernie said. ‘I’m tellin’ you for the last time, if you don’t stick ’em up I’ll pull the trigger!’

  ‘That would be a criminal act,’ Peter said. ‘It would be a case for the police.’

  ‘And you’d be a case for the ’ospital!’ Ernie said.

  ‘Go ahead and shoot,’ Peter said. ‘Then they’ll send you to Borstal. That’s prison.’

  He saw Ernie hesitate.

  ‘You’re really askin’ for it, ain’t you?’ Raymond said.

  ‘I’m simply asking to be left alone,’ Peter said. ‘I haven’t done you any harm.’

  ‘You’re a stuck-up little squirt,’ Ernie said. ‘That’s exactly what you are, a stuck-up little squirt.’

  Raymond leaned over and whispered something in Ernie’s ear. Ernie listened intently. Then he slapped his thigh and said, ‘I like it! It’s a great idea!’

  Ernie placed his gun on the ground and advanced upon the small boy. He grabbed him and threw him to the ground. Raymond took the roll of string from his pocket and cut off a length of it. Together, they forced the boy’s arms in front of him and tied his wrists together tight.

  ‘Now the legs,’ Raymond said. Peter struggled and received a punch in the stomach. That winded him and he lay still. Next, they tied his ankles together with more string. He was now trussed up like a chicken and completely helpless.

  Ernie picked up his gun, and then, with his other hand, he grabbed one of Peter’s arms. Raymond grabbed the other arm and together they began to drag the boy over the grass towards the railway lines.

  Peter kept absolutely quiet. Whatever it was they were up to, talking to them wasn’t going to help matters.

  They dragged their victim down the embankment and on to the railway lines themselves. Then one took the arms and the other the feet and they lifted him up and laid him down again lengthwise right between two lines.

  ‘You’re mad!’ Peter said. ‘You can’t do this!’

  ‘ ’Oo says we can’t? This is just a little lesson we’re teachin’ you not to be cheeky.’

  ‘More string,’ Ernie said.

  Raymond produced the ball of string and the two larger boys now proceeded to tie the victim down in such a way that he couldn’t wriggle away from between the rails. They did this by looping string around each of his arms and then threading the string under the rails on either side. They did the same with his middle body and his ankles. When they had finished, Peter Watson was strung down helpless and virtually immobile between the rails. The only parts of his body he could move to any extent were his head and feet.

  Ernie and Raymond stepped back to survey their handiwork. ‘We done a nice job,’ Ernie said.

  ‘There’s trains every ’arf ’our on this line,’ Raymond said. ‘We ain’t gonna ’ave long to wait.’

  ‘This is murder!’ cried the small boy lying between the rails.

  ‘No it ain’t,’ Raymond told him. ‘It ain’t anything of the sort.’

  ‘Let me go! Please let me go! I’ll be killed if a train comes along!’

  ‘If you are killed, sonny boy,’ Ernie said, ‘it’ll be your own ruddy fault and I’ll tell you why. Because if you lift your ’ead up like you’re doin’ now, then you’ve ’ad it, chum! You keep down flat and you might just possibly get away with it. On the other ’and, you might not because I ain’t exactly sure ’ow much clearance them trains’ve got underneath. You ’appen to know, Raymond, ’ow much clearance them trains got underneath?’

  ‘Very little,’ Raymond said. ‘They’re built ever so close to the ground.’

  ‘Might be enough and it might not,’ Ernie said.

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Raymond said. ‘It’d probably just about be enough for an ordinary person like me or you, Ernie. But Mister Watson ’ere I’m not so sure about and I’ll tell you why.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Ernie said, egging him on.

  ‘Mister Watson ’ere’s got an extra big ’ead, that’s why. ’Ee’s so flippin’ big-’eaded I personally think the bottom bit of the train’s goin’ to scrape ’im whatever ’appens. I’m not saying it’s goin’ to take ’is ’ead off, mind you. In fact, I’m pretty sure it ain’t goin’ to do that. But it’s goin’ to give ’is face a good old scrapin’ over. You can be quite sure of that.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Ernie said.

  ‘It don’t do,’ Raymond said, ‘to ’ave a great big swollen ’ead full of brains if you’re lyin’ on the railway line with a train comin’ towards you. That’s right, ain’t it, Ernie?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ernie said.

  The two bigger boys climbed back up the embankment and sat on the grass behind some bushes. Ernie produced a pack of cigarettes and they both lit up.

  Peter Watson, lying helpless between the rails, realized now that they were not going to release him. These were dangerous, crazy boys. They lived for the moment and never considered the consequences. I must try to keep calm and think, Peter told himself. He lay there, quite still, weighing his chances. His chances were good. The highest part of his head was his nose. He estimated the end of his nose was sticking up about four inches above the rails. Was that too much? He wasn’t quite sure what clearance these modern diesels had above the ground. It certainly wasn’t very much. The back of his head was resting upon loose gravel in between two sleepers. He must try to burrow down a little into the gravel. So he began to wriggle his head from side to side, pushing the gravel away and gradually making for himself a small indentation, a hole in the gravel. In the end, he reckoned he had lowered his head an extra two inches. That would do for the head. But what about the feet? They were sticking up, too. He took care of that by swinging the two tied-together feet over to one side so they lay almost flat.

  He waited for the train to come.

  Would the driver see him? It was very unlikely, for this was the main line, London, Doncaster, York, Newcastle and Scotland, and they used huge long engines in which the driver sat in a cab way back and kept an eye open only for the signals. Along this stretch of the track trains travelled around eighty miles an hour. Peter knew that. He had sat on the bank many times watching them. When he was younger, he used to keep a record of their numbers in a little book, and sometimes the engines had names written on their sides in gold letters.

  Either way, he told himself, it was going to be a terrifying business. The noise would be deafening, and the swish of the eighty-mile-an-hour wind wouldn’t be much fun either. He wondered for a moment whether there would be any kind of vacuum created underneath the train as it rushed over him, sucking him upwards. There might well be. So whatever happened, he must concentrate everything upon pressing his entire body against the ground. Don’t go limp. Keep stiff and tense and press down into the ground.

  ‘How’re you doin’, rat-face!’ one of them called out to him from the bushes above. ‘What’s it like waitin’ for the execution?’

  He decided not to answer. He watched the blue sky above his head where a single cumulus cloud was drifting slowly from left to right. And to keep his mind off the thing that was going to happen soon, he played a game that his father had taught him long ago on a hot summer’s day when they were lying on their backs in the grass above the cliffs at Beachy Head. The game was to look for strange faces in the folds and shadows and billows of a cumulus cloud. If you looked hard enough, his father had said, you would always find a face of some sort up there. Peter let his eyes travel slowly over the cloud. In one place, he found a one-eyed man with a beard. In another, there was a long-chinned laughing witch. An aeroplane came across the cloud trav