by M. M. Kaye
He frowned at the recollection of that interview, and for a moment his mouth twisted in a wry grimace of distaste.
Claire said: ‘Monica? What was she doing in Kyrenia?’
‘Nothing much. She thought she’d pay a call on Miss Derington, but of course there was no one in the house.’
‘On me?’ said Amanda, surprised. ‘I hope you explained that I was out on a picnic and that the house would be empty until after seven, what with Miss Moon and the servants both out. She won’t even get any tea! You ought to have brought her along with you.’
The frown in Glenn Barton’s eyes deepened. He said uncomfortably: ‘She wasn’t really in a picnicking mood. She’s feeling pretty upset, what with her brother’s death and____’ He broke off and after a short pause said heavily: ‘You’ll probably be seeing her later anyway. She may wait if she’s nothing else to do,’ and changed the subject.
They cleared away the tea things and repacked the picnic baskets, and Amanda seized the opportunity of drawing Mr Barton apart and telling him something of her abortive mission on the previous night.
‘I’m sorry it was so useless, Glenn,’ she finished, ‘but I’ll try and see her again when–when she’s feeling a bit better. At least you know that you were right and that she’s not a bit in love with Lumley Potter.’
‘Yes,’ said Glenn slowly. ‘I suppose that’s something; though I was always sure she couldn’t be. She’s too–too fastidious for such an untidy, messy sloppy sort of chap as Potter.’ He smiled at Amanda and added a little awkwardly: ‘Anyway it was more than kind of you to go, and I’m very grateful. I am really.’
He took her hand and held it for a brief moment in a hard grip, and Amanda’s fingers returned the pressure sympathetically. She smiled warmly at him, and in the next instant became suddenly aware that Steve Howard was watching them with an odd look in his eyes. A hard, bright, speculative look that held more than a hint of anger, and that for no reason at all caused Amanda’s heart to give a queer little lurch and brought the bright colour up into her cheeks.
Claire called out: ‘Glenn, come and give a hand with these baskets and things,’ and Mr Barton dropped Amanda’s hand and turned away. Presently he and George Norman carried the baskets and rugs down to the cars, Persis accompanying them.
The sun was low in the sky and the ruined walls threw long purple shadows on the grass and the wild thyme and the sheer rock faces that fell away almost vertically to the olive groves and the quiet blue sea far below.
The sea was as smooth and unwrinkled as polished steel, but high above it the breeze had strengthened with the approach of sundown and blew strongly about the castle, whistling shrilly through the stone arches and along the deserted battlements.
Claire and Toby had walked away together deep in conversation, and Amanda, leaning against a parapet of stone and looking downwards, saw Alastair Blaine standing in an embrasure of the battlements below, talking to Anita Barton. She wondered idly if Alastair too would shortly be the possessor of another Potter masterpiece in Prussian blue, and hoped that Glenn would not meet his wife on his return from the cars. He had looked tired and ill and quite incapable of coping with a situation that involved being faced with a runaway wife and her lover.
Amanda turned her attention to the tilting ground that lay far below, and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when banners and pennants had flown there, and knights in armour had jousted before Richard of England and Queen Berengaria on their wedding day in Cyprus almost eight hundred years ago …
‘What are you thinking of, Amarantha?’ inquired Steve Howard coming to lean against the wall beside her. She had not heard him approach because of the croon of the wind, and she turned quickly, considerably startled.
‘Penny for them,’ offered Steve. ‘Or are they worth more?’
‘If you really want to know, I was thinking that you and Toby and Glenn and the rest of them ought to be in armour, and Persis and Claire and I should be wearing wimples and “camises of fine white linen” and–and ermine lined pelicons—or do I mean surcotes?’
‘Anyone mad enough to wear armour in this climate would be toasted to a crisp inside ten minutes,’ observed Mr Howard prosaically. ‘And you are wrong about the wimple. You should by rights be leaning out of the nearest window letting your hair down—like Rapunzel. How long have you known this man Barton?’
The question took Amanda by surprise. ‘Glenn? I met him at Limassol. You know all about that. Why do you ask?’
‘“Glenn”,’ murmured Steve, and went on to observe with some asperity that considering the shortness of their acquaintance they appeared to be on remarkably intimate terms with each other.
‘Hardly that,’ said Amanda sweetly, ‘though he, like me, is probably worth anyone’s while for half an hour in the moonlight.’ She saw with satisfaction that she had made him angry, and added with deliberate provocation: ‘I must find out.’
‘Try it!’ said Steve, smiling unpleasantly.
Something clattered on the stone behind them and a mangled tube of Hooker’s Green fell at Amanda’s feet. Lumley Potter had joined them.
‘Damn!’ said Mr Potter fretfully.
He deposited a folding easel and a virgin canvas on the ground and stooped to retrieve half a dozen tubes of paint that had fallen from an insecurely fastened box under his arm.
‘Thought I’d make a quick study from here,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Hullo, Howard; you working on anything here?’
Amanda turned to look at Steve in some surprise. She had not realized that he had made Lumley Potter’s acquaintance.
‘No, alas. I find that it has nothing to say to me,’ said Steve with perfect gravity. ‘To the eye perhaps; but spiritually, no.’
‘Now that’s very interesting,’ said Mr Potter earnestly. ‘I, on the other hand____’
He plunged with enthusiasm into a pond of theory, and Amanda, who considered that Steve had asked for it, wandered away and left them to it.
She had already been up to the topmost part of the castle, but she thought that she would go again, and alone, to sit by the Queen’s window where Berengaria must so often have sat, and watch the sun go down. She climbed a long flight of ruined stone steps with a high curtain wall above her and a steep grassy slope falling away below, and passed under an arch of lichened stone and through small, walled enclosures, partially roofless, that had once been guardrooms, granaries, galleries and garderobes.
The Queen’s chamber was open to the wind and the evening sky, and a large part of the outer walls had fallen away, so that from the edge of the stone-paved floor one looked down on to tree tops and a yawning gulf where the rocky peak on which the castle of St Hilarion was built fell sheer away in a drop of well over two thousand feet.
Only one portion of the outer walls still remained, and from this the Queen’s window, a graceful double arch in stone, looked out across the dreamlike landscape spread far below.
The sky and the sea had lost the deep, intense blue of the earlier afternoon and were pale in the evening light, and along the far horizon lay a faint lilac shadow that was the mountains of Turkey.
Amanda turned from the window and wandered away to where the weather-worn stone gave on to nothingness.
The evening wind whistled shrilly past her, whipping back her thin frock and tugging at her hair so that the heavy coils were loosened and fell upon her shoulders, tumbling down her back. Amanda put up a hand to arrest them, and yet another hairpin slid out, bounced upon the stone and fell into the void.
The song of the wind drowned the sound of footsteps behind her. A hand thrust hard against her and she fell forward and plunged downward into that horrible gulf, her scream of terror whipped away on the wind.
* * *
It was her hair that saved Amanda. Those long, thick, golden-brown tresses. Her hair and an aged and twisted fir tree that grew outwards from a fissure in the rock-face below the castle wall.
The branches whipped her face an
d broke under her, but they caught her hair; tangled it and wrenched at it, but held it as Absalom’s had once been held. It checked her fall and gave her just time to clutch at a stronger bough.
Amanda hung there, blind and breathless with terror, her hands clinging frantically to the creaking bough, her long hair dragged taut above her and her feet swinging over emptiness.
She heard a shout above her, but she could not turn her head and she dared not move. The muscles in her arms hurt agonizingly, her clutching fingers were numb from her weight, and the wind sang through the pine needles and drowned out all other sounds.
She heard the bough crack, but it did not break, and she knew that she should move her hold and try to swing herself backwards on to the tree trunk; but she could not do so. If she attempted to relax her hold, she would fall.
The tree shuddered as though something heavy had struck it and a voice that she did not recognize shouted to her to hold on. It seemed to come from somewhere close behind her. But no one could climb down that rock-face below the wall—it would be suicide. Someone else was shouting now and a woman was screaming. Amanda felt the tree shake again and the bough to which she clung cracked ominously. And then hard fingers closed about one wrist and a voice said breathlessly:
‘Try and get your foot on to the branch behind you. Your left foot. Swing it straight back.’
She obeyed automatically, and could not afterwards remember how she had got from the tree trunk to a narrow ledge of rock that had been concealed from above. Once there, with an arm steadying her, it had not been too difficult to reach the level of the ruined battlements.
Someone above her leaned down and caught her hands, and a moment later her feet were on level ground and she had fainted for the first time in her life.
12
Amanda swam slowly up out of blackness into the warm golden glow of the evening sunlight.
Someone was pouring an unpleasant and fiery liquid down her throat and she choked and coughed; swallowed a considerable quantity of the stuff in the process, and choked again.
Steve Howard, very white about the mouth, was looking down at her with a grim anger that startled her. Amanda stared up at him, puzzled and shaken, and momentarily at a loss to know where she was or what she was doing, and why Steve should be in a rage.
She shut her eyes for a brief moment and opened them again. They were all still there, staring at her with pale excited faces. Claire and George Norman, Persis, Toby, Alastair and Glenn.
‘What happened?’ asked Amanda. ‘Did I____’
And then suddenly she remembered, and stopped on a harsh gasp.
‘You fell,’ said Steve grimly. ‘And I’d like to know what the hell you mean by wandering along parapets that a child of two would realize were unsafe! It’s not your fault that you are not unpleasantly dead at this moment.’
It is possible that Mr Howard had a sound knowledge of psychology, for sympathy at this juncture would undoubtedly have reduced Amanda to tears and a return of terror. His curtly callous observation had an entirely opposite effect.
Amanda sat up, her breath coming short, and opened her mouth with the intention of informing him furiously that she had not fallen, but had been pushed.
But she did not say it.
She sat quite still, realizing, with a sudden, appalled clarity, that except for the Cypriot caretaker, Lumley Potter, Anita Barton and herself, there had been no one else at Hilarion that evening but the seven people who faced her.
Then one of nine people—seven of whom stood looking down at her, so close to her that by merely reaching out her hand she could touch any one of them—had meant to murder her. Her—Amanda Derington! What was it that Steve had just said? ‘It’s not your fault that you are not unpleasantly dead at this moment.’ It was not someone else’s fault either, for one of these people had meant her to be dead. Had tried to kill her____
Amanda shrank back against the sun-warmed stones of the wall, her wide, terrified eyes going from face to face in that circle.
Claire—Alastair—Toby—Glenn—Persis—George—Steve____
No. Not Steve! He was the only one she could be sure of. The only one. Her frightened eyes turned to him and she reached up and clutched at his sleeve.
Steve leant down and jerked her ungently to her feet, and Amanda said breathlessly: ‘Please will you all go away. Please! I’m all right. I am really. I’m sorry I gave you all such a fright. I–I think I’d just like to sit here alone for a bit until I feel less peculiar. Please go!’
Her frantic fingers on Steve Howard’s arm said not you! not you!
Persis said: ‘Nonsense! Now see here honey____’
‘Persis honey,’ remarked Steve pleasantly, ‘Scram! I’ll see that she doesn’t trip over any more walls.’
He glanced at his wrist watch and turned to Toby Gates:
‘Would you mind giving Mrs Halliday a lift home, Gates? I’ll drive Miss Derington back when she’s feeling less scrambled.’
‘Of course,’ said Toby, looking uncertainly from Persis to Amanda and back again.
‘Good idea,’ said George Norman, his ruddy features resuming their normal hue. ‘Beastly shock for her. Might have been a nasty accident. They really should rail off these dangerous spots. It’s a scandal!’
They departed and Amanda was alone with the wind and Mr Howard.
She relaxed her grip on his arm, turned her back on him and said in a muffled voice: ‘Would you mind going to the other side of that wall.’
‘Why?’ inquired Steve. ‘Are you going to cry?’
‘No,’ said Amanda indistinctly. ‘I’m going to be sick.’ And was.
Mr Howard bore this unalluring spectacle with commendable fortitude, and having provided assistance in the form of a clean handkerchief, remarked that it was a waste of a good brandy and that he hoped for the sake of subsequent visitors that it would rain during the night.
‘Feeling better?’ he inquired presently.
‘Yes thank you. Could we go somewhere where there are four walls and no edge, do you think?’
‘Nothing easier.’ He drew her hand through his arm and walked her away, keeping her between him and the solid inner wall. They had gone less than half a dozen yards when he checked suddenly and bent down to pick up something that lay wedged between two slabs of stone. It was a small, twisted tube of oil paint from which the top was missing. He turned it over in his hand, looking at it thoughtfully, and then slipped it into his pocket without comment.
They walked back through the roofless rooms, and once again the steep flight of stone steps lay below them.
Amanda stopped and shut her eyes. She had never been in the least affected by heights, but now she knew that she would never be able to look down from any height again without being afraid. She knew that it was ridiculous and absurd; the ruined stairway was wide and safe and the slope that fell away along one side of it was covered with grass and shrubs, trees and fallen boulders. But the fear of falling was on her and she could not move.
Steve Howard picked her up without ceremony and carried her down the long, uneven flight to the quiet and shelter of a grass-grown level, where the solid walls of the Outer Bailey towered comfortingly above them and the last of the sun turned the dry grasses to bright gold.
‘All right here?’
‘Yes,’ said Amanda gratefully. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’ll get over it,’ said Steve, striking a match against the stones and lighting himself a cigarette.
Amanda sank down cross-legged on the warm grass and said in a voice that she tried to keep steady: ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for–for saving my life. That branch wouldn’t have held much longer.’
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ said Steve shortly. ‘Barton got you out of that.’
‘Glenn?’
‘Yes—Glenn.’
Steve’s mouth twisted a little wryly on the name. ‘He’s the one you have to thank. He thought he heard someone scream, and ran
out and saw you. I was on my way up, and he yelled out to me, and the next thing I knew he had lowered himself down over the edge and found some sort of a foothold and dropped down onto the trunk of that tree. He must have plenty of nerve. I wouldn’t have cared to do it myself.’
‘And I let him go without saying anything!’ said Amanda, distressed. ‘I thought it was you____’
‘Alas, no,’ said Steve satirically. ‘I was merely among those present. How did you happen to do it?’
‘I was pushed,’ said Amanda in a whisper.
‘Say that again!’
‘S–someone pushed me.’
Steve stood very still, looking down at her, his mouth a tight line and his eyes blazing.
Presently he said quite softly: ‘Who?’
‘I–I don’t know,’ said Amanda, a terrified break in her voice. ‘The wind was so loud—I didn’t hear any other sound. And then suddenly someone pushed me hard and–and I fell…’ Her voice died out in a whisper and she shuddered uncontrollably.
‘You are quite sure it wasn’t a sudden gust of wind?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said Amanda, retreating from the verge of tears. ‘It was a hand.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘I tell you I don’t know! I didn’t hear or see anyone.’
‘Come on, Amanda—think! Try and remember what it felt like. Was it a small hand or a large one? Hard? Thin? Warm? That dress you’re wearing is pretty flimsy, you must have some idea.’
‘But I haven’t! You see my hair had come down and it was all over my back.’
‘Hell!’ said Steve softly.
He dropped his cigarette on the grass, put his foot on it and sat down beside her with his hands clasped about his knees, and stared fixedly ahead of him at the massive walls of the Outer Bailey. Amanda, watching him, saw that there were harsh lines on his forehead and about his mouth that she did not remember having noticed before, and that his eyes were blank and unseeing.
After a time he said curtly and without turning his head: ‘What made you keep quiet up there?—about being pushed?’
