Deadly Strangers

News which has yet to hit the media, but which has hit informal local gossip channels, is that a patient at Greenwood, an institution for the criminally insane, has escaped. That gossip does not largely include the fact of several murders that have occurred since, the perpetrator most certainly the escapee. Concurrently, a young woman named Belle Adams (Hayley Mills), travelling on her own, is trying to make her way from the Greenwood area to the south coast, specifically to Wickham where she has a compulsion to visit, and where she has not been since she lived there when she was a child. Following the deaths of her parents in a car accident, she became a ward of her uncle, that being the reason for moving from Wickham. Out of circumstance, she changes what was her original plan of taking the train to Wickham, to accepting vehicle rides from strangers, including Jim Nicholls (Ken Hutchison), a lecherous lorry driver, and Malcolm Robarts (Sterling Hayden), an eccentric older American expatriate who still retains a romantic sensibility. Who Belle ends up spending most of the time with on her trek is a young Birmingham-based travelling salesman named Stephen Slade (Simon Ward), who demonstrates that he has a bit of a temper and imbibes just a little too much, perhaps to calm his nerves which can spark his temper. Belle and Stephen's interactions with each other are colored by relationships from their past, Belle's with her uncle, and Stephen's with an ex-girlfriend. Their time together is also overshadowed by a potentially violent encounter they have with a couple of bikers. Still with no news of the escapee in the papers, Belle catches Stephen is what looks to be a couple of lies. Could these lies be hiding that he is the escapee and thus a murderer?