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Breakaway

Short Story (2,010 words)

A convict breaks out of jail on the Isle of Wight, breaks into a house and forces a young woman to give him food. He takes the army uniform and pay book of her sergeant boy friend, and then takes the woman with him on the ferry so that she can't raise the alarm. Once on the mainland, he puts her on the return ferry, confident that she cannot raise the alarm for some time. However he gets a nasty surprise when he tries to buy a train ticket.

This is one of those plots, like Romeo and Juliet, which could not be modernised and set in the era of the mobile phone.

Escaping from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight features in two other Canning works, the short story It never pays off and the novel The Hidden Face.

Argosy, April 1962.

Included in Crime and Detection, ed. John Higgins.