by Mary Stewart
We stood looking over the sea-wall. A group of sailors, noisily talking and laughing, went past, then a man and a girl, absorbed. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to us, and once again I felt the beginnings of that strangely dreamlike feeling I had experienced before, only this time it was not brought about by weariness, but by something else I could not quite understand. It was as if Richard Byron and I were alone in a bubble of glass, enclosed in its silence, into which nothing could break, and out of which we might not go. People, like the dim denizens of some undersea-world in which our bubble was suspended, came and went, floating, soundlessly, amorphous, outside the glass, peering in perhaps, but having no power to intrude upon the silence that enmeshed us. To this day I still remember Marseilles, the noisiest city in the world, as a noiseless background to that meeting with Richard Byron, a silent film flickering on a screen in front of which we two moved and stood and talked, the only living people there.
I turned to face him.
‘You said there were two questions you were going to ask me, and you’ve only asked one. What was the other?’
He looked at me without speaking, and in that dim light his expression was unreadable, but I got the impression that he was oddly at a loss.
I said: ‘I think I know; in fact, I can hardly help knowing, can I? It should have come first, shouldn’t it? – it’s the more important.’
I saw the corner of his mouth lift in a smile.
‘Possibly.’
I said, deliberately: ‘David is at the Hôtel Tistet-Védène, Avignon.’
For a long moment he was motionless, then suddenly his body swung round to face me, and his hands shot out to grip my wrists. Again, as in Nîmes, his grip hurt me, but this time I made no attempt to get away. I could feel his heart beating in his hands.
‘Charity,’ he said roughly, ‘why did you tell me that? Why – suddenly? I haven’t told you the story yet – haven’t explained. I haven’t even told you I was lying when I said I’d murdered Tony. You’ve no reason on earth to think you can trust me – I’ve bullied you and hurt you and abused you and all but made you ill. Why the hell should you suddenly make me a present of this before I’ve even started to say my piece?’
It was as if his heart was an engine, and its pounding was driving mine as well. It started to race.
‘I – I don’t know,’ I said lamely, and tried to pull my hands away.
He shifted his grip, and his eyes fell on my bruised wrist. For a second or two he stood with his head bent, staring at the ugly dark mark, then his mouth suddenly twisted, and he pulled me into his arms and kissed me.
After a long while he let me go, and I leaned back against the low parapet, while he turned abruptly and gazed out to sea.
‘I suppose that was why,’ I said shakily.
‘The hell of it is,’ he said, ‘that I’ve wanted that ever since I walked into the Temple of Diana and saw you sitting there, with tears on your eyelashes. And all the time I thought you were a crooked little—’
‘Bitch.’
He grinned a little. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Yes, all that time, when I thought you were in with them, a cheap little crook mixed up in a particularly filthy game of murder – the sort of game that plays with a child’s life and sanity as if it were a – a plastic counter you could lose, and never miss it.’
He looked away from me suddenly.
‘Your refusing to tell me where to find David – was it because David wanted you to?’
‘Yes,’ I said gently.
‘And I thought you were helping them to keep him away from me. You looked so guilty, so guilty and scared, and of course I’d no idea that David himself—’ He broke off sharply.
‘I’m sorry, but that’s how it was. He wanted to – to avoid you, so I helped. I thought I was doing the right thing.’
He gave me a little smile. ‘Yes, I see that now. But you must see how all the evidence went against you, even while every instinct I’ve ever had rose up and screamed that the evidence was wrong … It was just one more thing, after all those that had happened, one more thing which could shake one’s values to smithereens, and make yet another safe road as shifty as sand. Another thing that couldn’t be, but was.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘How does it go—?
Sith there is yet a credence in my heart,
An esperance so obstinately strong,
That does invert the attest of eyes and ears;
As if those organs had deceptious functions,
Created only to calumniate …
Isn’t that what you mean?’
He smiled again, more naturally. ‘Yes, exactly, though I can’t say it puts it much more clearly. Poor Troilus – he says it better later on, you know—
If beauty have a soul, this is not she …
If there be rule in unity itself,
This is not she …
But I was luckier than Troilus, wasn’t I? For me, the rules did hold good – that no one who looks and moves and speaks as you do could be the bitch you seemed to be. But it was hell while it lasted, reason and instinct at war, and both violated.’ He turned his head. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Didn’t it happen to me too? I thought you were a beast and a murderer, I was scared of you, and yet – this happened.’
‘This happened,’ he repeated, ‘and reason goes out of court – for both of us.’
‘Yes.’
He said slowly, looking down at the dark opaque shifting of the water: ‘But you got the question wrong, Charity. You didn’t really think I was going to throw that one at you again, did you, before I’d explained why I still had the right to an answer?’
‘I got it wrong? You weren’t going to ask where David was?’
‘No.’
‘What were you going to ask, then?’
He stood, watching the water, leaning on his elbows on the low wall. He said, heavily, for the fourth time:
‘Who’s Johnny?’
15
Madam, will you walk—?
(Old song)
The dark water heaved below the wall, oily looking, webbed with a flotsam of straws and pieces of cork. It was strangely fascinating, as well as soothing, to watch the lift and fall and sway of the drifting fragments in the shallow gleam of the street-lamp.
I said: ‘Johnny was my husband.’
‘Was?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry.’
I turned, like him, to face the sea, leaned my elbows on the wall and concentrated on the moving water.
‘He and I were married in the war – he was in the R.A.F. We had two years, so I suppose we were lucky. Then he was killed over Pas de Calais.’
‘Bomber?’
‘No. Fighter escort.’ Away out over the sea the milky haze had begun to withdraw from the moon. The horizon swam up out of darkness to meet her faint light.
‘Some day,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you about Johnny. But not now.’
He glanced at me quickly.
‘Because of this – because of what’s happened?’
‘Because you kissed me, do you mean?’
‘Because I love you, Charity.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not because of that. What happens to me now doesn’t alter what happened to me before. What was between me and Johnny was a real thing that we built very carefully for ourselves, and, when we built it, it was perfect and satisfying. But because it was blasted to bits by a German shell, that doesn’t mean I’m never to try and build anything else among the ruins. Johnny isn’t a ghost, you know, tagging along at my elbow, reminding me to mourn.’
‘When I first saw you,’ he said softly, ‘you were crying.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And it’s true I was thinking about Johnny. But the memory of my life with him isn’t likely to get up and forbid me to live any more, or any differently … One ought to build even better the second time, and I can still build. And Johnny—’ I said, tu
rning to Richard Byron, ‘why, Johnny would have egged me on.’
He straightened up, and his arms went round me, this time very gently. He was smiling, and his eyes had a little steady flame deep in the grey. He held me a little away from him and looked at me, his lips curving.
‘I love you, Charity,’ he said again. ‘You’re so sweet and you’re so sane. My God, I think you could almost make the world seem a sweet, sane place again, the way it used to be … Am I to take it that you’re telling me to go ahead and kiss you again?’
‘Why, no, I—’
‘Because I’m planning to,’ said Richard Byron.
And did.
It seemed hours later, and the moon had laid her trail of silver out to sea, when we stood again, side by side, elbows on the wall again, and began to talk.
‘… Enough of this side-tracking,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve got to think, and you’re got to help me, so you’ve got a right to know the story. It’s a pretty filthy one to drag you into—’
‘It seems to me,’ I said mildly, ‘that I’m in fairly deep as it is, and entirely through my own efforts.’
He mused a little, and I could see the lines etch themselves again deeply round his mouth, those bitter little lines that made his face suddenly harsh and frightening.
He began to talk …
It was certainly not a pretty story, and as I listened, I could feel some of the anger that burned even now in Richard’s voice, licking along my own veins.
Briefly, it was this.
Richard Byron, who was reasonably well-to-do, lived at Deepings, in Surrey, and had acquired some reputation among those who knew, as a dealer in various kinds of antiques. ‘It started in a strictly amateurish sort of way,’ he said. ‘I bought things I liked, and occasionally sold again to people who saw them and wanted them; then bit by bit I came into it as a business, because I got interested. I didn’t have to make a living that way, but I gradually learned more about it, and began to travel after stuff, and in time became really keen on certain aspects of the business – old silver and jewellery particularly. I’m supposed to know quite a lot about it now.’
The war had put a stop to it, of course, and he had joined the Air Force – ‘Flying a ruddy great Lanc. over the Ruhr,’ said Richard. ‘That was where I got to know Tony, of course.’
‘Tony?’
‘Tony Baxter. The lad I’m supposed to have murdered.’
‘Oh.’
‘He was my navigator, and one of the nicest chaps you could ever know. The idea that he could ever have fallen for Loraine—’
‘You did, yourself,’ I reminded him. ‘After all, you married her.’
He shot me a look from under his brows. ‘Yes, I married her. David was twelve and Mary had been dead seven years, and I thought—’ he broke off. ‘Well, hell, you’ve seen her, and if you don’t know why I married her you ought to.’
I had a sudden vivid memory of Loraine Byron’s lovely face and blue eyes, of her long white throat and the full breasts outlined by the silk of her dress.
‘I can guess,’ I said.
He sent me another look. ‘I met her in Paris,’ he said. ‘I opened my Paris office in the spring of last year, and I was over there several times during the year. In September I went over to attend a big sale of silver, and I took Tony with me, with some idea of showing him the ropes and persuading him to come in and work for me. Loraine was at the sale – I didn’t see who with. Then I met her again soon afterwards at a party; she was there with a man I knew, Louis Meyer, the London representative of a big Paris dealer. He introduced me to Loraine. We met again, several times. I was at a horribly loose end, just then, and I—’ he paused. ‘Anyway, I married her about a month later, and took her back to Deepings at the end of October.’
His mouth twisted, and his voice took on the hard unpleasant undertone I had first heard in it.
‘It didn’t work,’ he said shortly. ‘Naturally. As soon as we were married I knew I’d been a fool. In the first place, she hadn’t wanted to go to England at all: she wanted me to settle in France, in the South. But there was Deepings – and David – and I insisted. Then of course there was trouble. And – again of course – it just didn’t work with David; she couldn’t be bothered with him, and he had no time for her. He’s a courteous little devil, and he said nothing to me, but I could see he was unhappy about it … We had a highly unpleasant few weeks, and then Tony came to stay for Christmas.’ His voice went flat and dead. He might have been reading out of the police report. ‘He was found dead in his bed at three o’clock on the morning of January 19th. He had been strangled. There was a thin cord knotted tightly round his neck. It was the cord from my window-blind, and my finger-prints were on the little acorn gadget that you pull the blind down with.’
‘Of course they were,’ I said. ‘I expect you’d pulled the blind down at some time or other, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes. That’s the sort of thing that saved my neck in the end. They could think what they liked, but there was an innocent reason as well as a guilty for most of the things they found. Then ten minutes after Loraine discovered the body—’
‘Loraine found him!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ he said, with the edge back on his voice. ‘She went to his room – at three o’clock in the morning. She was quite open about it, all in the cause of justice. The police were impressed. She admitted she’d been there before – often: it was a lovely motive for me to kill him, handed to the police on a plate. what do you think about that?’
‘I think that three o’clock on a January morning’s an awfully funny hour to be waking your lover up,’ I said.
He gave a hard little laugh. ‘You’re right at that, sweet Charity. It’s a hell of a funny hour. But she did, and then when she had fainted with the shock, and someone went to the bathroom to get some water, they found David there; my little David, unconscious and as cold as ice. When I got there, I thought for a minute that he was dead too.’
The hard voice stopped, and he stared at the sea. But I knew he was not seeing the white path the moon paced across the water, but a small body huddled on a cold tiled floor.
‘He couldn’t remember much about it,’ he said at length. ‘When he was fit to talk he told them that he’d woken with the tooth-ache, and gone along to the bathroom to fill a hot-bottle. He didn’t remember the time. But as he switched on the bathroom light somebody struck him from behind.’
‘He had no idea at all? He didn’t hear anything – a skirt swishing, or high heels? Nothing to tell him whether it was a man or a woman?’
He gave a wry smile. ‘Believe me, if there’d been the faintest scrap of evidence that could have pinned it on Loraine, I’d have pinned it,’ he said viciously. ‘Because she was in it, all right. You can’t live with a woman for half a year, even the way we lived, and not know when she’s lying in her teeth. She knew all about it. But she didn’t hit David. It was a man. David was facing the bathroom mirror – it hangs opposite the door, and he just saw the arm raised over him, for a fraction of an instant, before it happened. It was a man’s arm, in a navy sleeve.’
‘Not a dressing-gown?’
‘No, not a dressing-gown.’ He grinned a little, and his hand moved till it covered mine. ‘You’re very quick on the evidence in my defence, aren’t you? Yes, that was one small thing: I’d been wearing a grey suit that day, as well. And I don’t possess a navy one.’
‘Well, why—?’
‘They didn’t attach much importance to David’s testimony, you see. He’s only a child, he’d had a bad shock, the glimpse he’d had was too slight and might have been imagined, and besides, he might be expected to be a pretty partial witness, of course. He insisted from the very beginning that it couldn’t possibly have been me – not for any reason, except that it just couldn’t.’
‘And so you were arrested?’
‘After a bit, yes. Oh, the police were very thorough and really very decent over the whole thing. It was all
done by kindness. But one thing and another mounted up, and everything pointed the same way – so I was arrested.’
He regarded the water sombrely.
‘I’ll spare you the next part. Standing your trial for murder, even when you get off, isn’t a thing to go back to, even for a moment, in your mind. It’s like having a filthy and contaminating disease – degrading, exhausting, leaving pock-marks on your spirit that never smooth out. Again, everybody was very decent – surprisingly decent. And, though I got to hate the prosecuting Counsel more then anyone else on earth, it was a fair trial. The fact that I’m here proves that … oh, I’ve nothing against the police, even if she did lead them right up the garden path and back again. Other mugs had taken that walk before them.’
‘But, Richard, did she do it? The murder, I mean? And was there a man in a navy suit? Who was he?’
‘I wish I knew,’ he said heavily, ‘I wish I knew. They never traced him. But I think there was a man there with her, an accomplice, whom she let in to do the job. He may have come in through the bathroom window – it was open, by the way – and have hidden behind the door when he heard David coming. It was he who knocked David out, to prevent his seeing him. Then either he or Loraine killed Tony. I myself think that he, not she, did it – or why did she have him there at all?’
‘Her lover?’
‘Possibly. But even if he were spending the night with her – you’ll have gathered that she and I had stopped sharing a room – and even if Tony had found out, that’s hardly a motive for murder. No, she let him in to do the job.’
