In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  He remembered that immediately after he had finished his own interview and moved away to a more shadowy part of the study, he had tried to evade his discomfort by persuading himself that he might perhaps have imagined the whole incident, that it might like some dream by daylight have accrued from the putting together of a whole series of unrelated trifles: his jealousy over Victoria’s talk with a stranger, the conversation they had shared about Blake’s tiger, the lonely motor-car ascending the steep of the dale and the sense of some third invisible personage attending them during the moment outside the cave.

  His confusion of mind had continued for several minutes; and it was only when Mrs Blount had been committed by the Sergeant’s questions to a description of Victoria in similar terms, that he had realised with the most acute relief that the unreality had no part in the person questioned, but was something to do with Sergeant Sanders himself; for he had noticed that the moment the Sergeant was told anything, it at once became wrong in some way; not fully accurate, not enough, scarcely true. Even the words, ‘Victoria Blount’, though they undoubtedly made up her name, sounded different after the Sergeant had repeated them, and it was perhaps for this very reason that his visit had temporarily cheered them all to such an extent that after his departure they had for a little time been able to talk normally and optimistically and had even managed to say good night quite cheerfully before making their way upstairs to bed.

  But, for John, the sense of a lightening in his thoughts had been very short-lived. Like the house itself, every part of his body was restless and ill-at-ease, seeming to be possessed of a separate interest and intention, refusing to remain subservient to the singleness of his being. He could feel very soon after he had switched off the the light the singularity of his heart, the creeping mobility of his muscles and the living pain in his injured shoulder. In the infinite darkness of his head, thoughts rolled and heaved like an ocean under the night sky; and soon pictures began to spring unbidden to his mind, causing him to mutter words aloud in the darkness. Insistently, again and again, as clearly as though he were experiencing it truly for the first time, he saw Victoria’s last sombre smile through the window of the car before she had been driven off into the village. The image was so real that he began to feel she was herself vitally in the room with him; even that she lay beside him in his bed trying to awaken him not from his sleep but to some dark nightmare of her own.

  The conviction of her presence was so intense that he uttered hoarse and strident words which resounded coldly and continuously in the blackness about him and wrung the fingers of his clasped hands as he reproached himself for not having realised what her smile had conveyed at the moment she had given it to him. He writhed beneath the cold sheets when he remembered that there had been a moment when he might have flung open the door of the car and seized her in his arms to pull her out on to the wet road. If it were true that thoughts were swifter even than lightning, there might have been an instant between the show of her self-confidence and her passing down the village road when in some way, at the very last, even as she was smiling through the closed window, she might have anticipated these present moments of the night: her own absence from the house, the flat emptiness of the bed in the next room, the comings and goings of the others on the landing, and the movements of unseen policemen on the moorlands surrounding the house.

  He longed for light, for the sounds of the morning. Nothing, he felt, could happen during the night; there could be no good news of any sort before dawn. But then, when dogs barked, when cocks crew, and the men came into the yard, there would be something healthful to do. They would find Victoria by daylight; it was the friend of them all and would not permit her to be hidden from them any longer.

  Wherever the man had taken her, whether to Scarborough, or to York as Sergeant Sanders had seemed to think, he would stand no chance of concealing her when the bright world awoke and the people moved out into the roads and streets with their eyes seeing and their ears hearing. Then, after they had brought her safely home, then would be the time to deal with the man for the terror he had caused her and the fear he had visited upon them.

  Sergeant Sanders had suggested that even the car might not have been his own, that in all likelihood it would have been one which he had stolen during the morning; and for that offence alone, the man could be sent to prison for many months. He had also said that the Police had a strong suspicion that he had a ‘record’ and that as soon as they were able to identify him they would be able to charge him with a number of other crimes, not so serious as the present one but quite serious enough to ensure that he would be grievously punished. The Sergeant had explained to George Harkess that criminals grew in crime and that it was the tragedy of detection that although the development of a particular tendency in one man might clearly have been foreseen, they were powerless to punish or prevent it until it was too late.

  ‘Too late,’ he thought aloud. Could it be true if Sergeant Sanders had been with Victoria in the cave and had heard everything the man had said as he, John, had heard it, that he would have known that at some further point in time he would suddenly decide to run away with her? How could the Sergeant have known something that the man had not appeared to know himself? At the very last minute when she had snatched the letter and decided to post it herself, the man had almost shouted at him ‘It’s too late, she has made up our minds for us’, or if he had not said ‘too late’ in those words, he had meant that it was too late. This, the very last thing he had said, suggested that until that moment he had taken no final decision about stealing Victoria. If that were so, if his decision to kidnap her had appeared to him to come from somewhere outside himself, although to the Sergeant knowing everything it might have seemed inevitable, then perhaps everything that had happened since, everything that was happening at this moment in the moonless hours of the night, might be combining to make the man commit some further unforeseen and yet inevitable act … To the Sergeant, knowing what he did know, it would seem that there was time to prevent this act, but to the man who would not know what he was about to do until he did it, it would seem that there was no time in which to change his mind. And therefore it was not altogether true to say that anything was too late.

  Too late, too late! The words rang in his mind as he lay there in the darkness, their meaning becoming ever more obscure and confused with each repetition of the formulated but unspoken syllables behind his eyes. Three Times, he thought; the Sergeant’s Time, measured by the watch he carried in his breast pocket, the man—Mr Noone’s—Time, measured by something other than the wrist-watch on the white strap, and John’s Time, recorded by the grandfather clock in the hall, moving somewhere between them both in the misery of the night. He wondered if there might not be a further ‘all-inclusive’ Time which took account of these separate slow and remorseless tickings, a Time which would have room in it for whatever Victoria was experiencing out there on the moors, and Mrs Blount in her bedroom. What sort of a Time, he asked himself, was God’s Time?

  He turned over on to his stomach, pulled the bedclothes above his head, and waited.

  Perhaps because he had ceased ever to expect it and perhaps because the pain in his shoulder had become so constant that it no longer emphasised even the passing of his own time, the morning came quite suddenly with a small wind which blew in through the window, cool and milky, seeming visibly to thin the darkness of the room. He saw the shape of his clothes on the chair by the wall, the hollow reality of the wardrobe, and the gleam of the jug and basin on the wash-stand. The room began to fill with the scents of the farm, thin and fresh, the delicate scents of the early morning: hay and the bitter smell of straw, early chimney smoke, and the scent of bruised bracken. These things were so familiar, so heart-warmingly comfortable that quite effortlessly at the height of his distress he fell immediately asleep and awoke only when Annie knocked on his door and called him down to a late breakfast.

  Dressing and washing quickly, he ran downstairs and found
Sergeant Sanders and George Harkess awaiting him in the hall. They followed him into the dining-room and George Harkess sat down at the table with him whilst the Sergeant stood facing him with his back to the window.

  George Harkess made the first remark. He gave him one of his large moustache-lifting smiles. “Well my boy, thought we’d let you sleep it out. How’s that shoulder of yours this morning?”

  “I can move my arm now thank you,” said John, “but I don’t think I want any breakfast—at least not much. Does it matter, sir?”

  “Of course not old chap; but I think you’d be in much better shape if you tried to stuff down a little toast and marmalade—don’t you agree Sergeant?”

  “I do indeed sir,” replied the Sergeant without moving. John looked up at him; his navy-blue blotted out nearly all of the light from the rather small window and he was discomfited by the fact that it was impossible to see his face beneath the shadows which underlay his peaked cap.

  “Do you always wear your hat in the house?” he asked suddenly.

  The Sergeant laughed. “Only when I’m on duty,” he replied. “Why, don’t you like it?”

  “No,” said John. “It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

  “Well that’s easily settled,” said the Sergeant. He took it off and tucked it under his left arm. “Is that better?”

  “Yes thank you.”

  “Anything we can do,” said George Harkess, “just let us know young man and we’ll do it. Have you any further complaints?”

  “No sir—well only one; I’d like to know when Mrs. Blount’s coming down.”

  “She’s in the study,” said George Harkess, “and you’ll be seeing her in a few minutes. But first of all, we wanted to ask you a few questions, didn’t we Sergeant?”

  “We did, sir.” Suddenly unblocking the light from the window the Sergeant moved over to the fireplace. “How do you feel about it, son?”

  “All right Sergeant. I’ll answer anything you ask me if I possibly can.”

  “Good! well here’s the first one: Mrs Blount mentioned that you had said you did not like this man you met in the cave yesterday?”

  “That’s right. I didn’t, I hated him.”

  “Why was that?”

  John put down his toast and looked up.

  “I don’t really know Sergeant—I just didn’t.”

  “Come! come!” The back of the Sergeant’s neck made a steep angle with his blue collar, “you must have some reason for a statement like that, mustn’t you?”

  “Yes I suppose I must.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s hard to think of it, that’s all. It’s hard to know why you don’t like a person you’ve just met.”

  “Well let’s see if we can help you.” He paused. “Now you like Mr Harkess here I’m sure, even though you’ve only known him the inside of a week; and if I were to ask you why you liked him, I imagine you’d very soon be able to give me a few reasons, wouldn’t you?”

  In the opposite chair George Harkess coughed; as a preliminary to something he was about to say, his moustache moved quickly upwards. John glanced brightly at the Sergeant.

  “No, that’s just it,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to give you the reasons, because you see I don’t like Mr Harkess very much, and it’s always so much easier to know why you like a person than why you don’t, isn’t it?”

  Neither of them moved. John did not look at them; he did not want to look at them; but their sudden stillness was as audible as any movement would have been. He felt he had been rude and said, “I mean, you do want me to tell the truth, don’t you Sergeant Sanders? It’s no good my telling you any lies is it?”

  The Sergeant said nothing for a moment; he looked as though his body were uncomfortable, as though his uniform were prickling him. In front of him, George Harkess leaned back in his chair and let out a bellow of laughter.

  “We’ve hooked a tartar, Sar’n’t!” he said. “Do you think it might be better if I joined Mrs Blount for a few minutes whilst you and the boy sort this out between you?”

  “I don’t think so sir.” Sergeant Sanders took his watch out of his breast pocket and glanced at it. “There’s little time for private interviews and we must keep to the subject in hand. Now look here son, what I’m getting at is this; was there any particular reason why you should have taken such a dislike to this fellow with the motor-car? Did he say anything you didn’t like, or do anything?”

  “Yes he did. He made a great fuss of Victoria and kissed her hand and said he’d been eavesdropping on us.”

  At this George Harkess’s heavy head swivelled round to the Sergeant, but the Sergeant ignored him; he looked only at John. “I see,” he said. “Did he say anything else?”

  “Yes, he made out that Victoria and I were hiding in the cave because we wanted to—”

  “Go on,” said the Sergeant.

  “He thought we were in there to make love.”

  The Sergeant stood as still as the Grandfather clock.

  “And were you?”

  “No. At least I might have kissed her later—I sometimes do feel like kissing her—if he hadn’t come; but I never really thought of it because he stayed and stayed; we couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “Couldn’t you have pretended that you were going to leave yourselves, anyway? that you had to be getting back home?”

  “That’s just what we did pretend. I said that we’d decided not to have tea there after all; but he said it was raining very hard and that we ought to wait until it was over.”

  “He was set on it, was he?”

  “Yes. We didn’t want to be rude to him. In a way he seemed lonely and to begin with I think we both felt a bit sorry for him.”

  “Good enough,” said the Sergeant. “Can you remember anything else now? Any other suggestions he made, or anything else that he did and which you didn’t like?”

  “There was one other thing,” said John; “it may not seem much to you, but even if I think of it now it annoys me although it was only a little thing.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He put on her mackintosh for her and I didn’t like the way he did it.”

  They said nothing. The Sergeant was very still again and George Harkess was just breathing heavily like an animal in a shed. John waited for them to say something, and because they said nothing he felt that their silence was a loud question which must be answered.

  “He did it as though he knew her awfully well,” he blurted out; “as though she was his—daughter or something.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the Sergeant.

  “Explain yourself,” said George Harkess.

  “I can’t; but if you’d seen him do it you’d know what I meant. It was the way he did up the buttons and patted her chest afterwards, like someone touching something they’d like to buy and have for themselves. Can’t you understand? It was just as I said the first time; it was as though he owned her.”

  This time they looked at each other and then away again rather quickly.

  “Yes son, I think we understand. You’ve made a very good point there and I think that’ll have to do. I think we know all we need to know for the present, and there’s not a lot of time left for any more questions at this stage.” His square fingers tapped on the mantelpiece and George Harkess stood up.

  “Mrs Blount?” he asked.

  “No,” said the Sergeant, his eyes brooding over John. “I don’t think so sir. Not yet anyway.”

  “Sergeant! May I ask you something,” said John.

  “You may.”

  “Have you found Victoria? Any sign of her, anything at all?”

  “No we haven’t found her, son; not yet; but we’ve found the motor-car all right—sixty miles away in York of all places and only a hundred yards away from the car-park from which it was stolen the day before yesterday.”

  John swallowed. “Is that a good sign?” he asked.

  “In some ways yes and in other ways no. B
etween midnight and one o’clock this morning there was heavy rain in York, but the roadway under the car was dry which means that by this time he has had nine hours’ start on the Police, and in a case of this sort the time-factor is really all that matters.”

  “Are they watching the stations?” asked John.

  “They are now and so far no two people answering the descriptions have been seen, though there were a number of single passengers on the milk train this morning whose movements and identities we’re checking.”

  “But no one with a girl like Victoria?”

  “No,” said the Sergeant, “and that’s why I’m here and why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” said John. It was strange that when people were lost they had to be sought for behind many questions and answers. It seemed to be a waste of time to be talking and making these noises in the throat, moving one’s lips and looking at another person whilst questions were asked about time and place. If a needle were lost in a haystack and it was really wanted, the only thing to do would be to take the haystack to pieces a little at a time and search every hollow stalk; but when a person was lost the place in which he might be found was hidden behind a haystack of words.

  “If he’s gone to London why are you bothering about Corby? Why don’t you make all the police in London look for him there?” He checked himself. “Oh of course—I’d forgotten. You said that she wasn’t with him.”

  “We feel he may have—gone on without her,” said the Sergeant very slowly. “We found a handkerchief in the van and a quantity of yellow clay. We have some dogs outside in the Police van, and in addition, some photographic equipment of my own. I managed to borrow two dogs from a keen sportsman”—he paused—“a poacher I should say in the village. We thought it might be as well to have a run round the Moors with them in the immediate neighbourhood of the house.”