Dead or Alive

by Patricia Wentworth

  The key might be anywhere. It might be in the old woman’s pocket. It might be in Henderson’s pocket, or Johnny’s pocket, or anybody’s pocket.…

  He stared about him, at his wits’ end, flicking the light to and fro. The kitchen table—no cloth—more dirty plates—a chair thrown down—another chair, with a soiled apron trailing over the seat, the pocket gaping, half ripped off.

  Something clicked in Bill’s mind. He picked the dirty rag up and shook it. There were two pockets, and only one of them was torn. Out of the other there cascaded and tumbled an incredibly filthy pack of cards, about half a packet of liquorice drops—and the key.

  Bill’s heart gave a bound of triumph as he picked it up. It was the key all right. There was no doubt about that. A most massive piece of ironmongery which would certainly not fit any lock in the lodge. He pocketed it, switched off his torch, and let himself out by the back door.

  The first thing he did after that was to unlock the gates. If he found Meg—no, when he found Meg—they might have to run for it, and it might be a near thing getting away. It would be a comfortable thought to feel that the gate was open. When he had opened it, he stood there frowning in the dark. It seemed to him that the key was now a useless white elephant. The only use it could be put to was to lock the gates again, and Bill had an extremely strong and definite conviction that those gates were better open.

  After some thought he went out to his car and put the key into the back of the cubby hole by the steering-wheel. If it was wanted, it could be got at here—by him. And if it wasn’t wanted, it would be quite safe.

  He went back into the grounds of Ledstow Place.

  XXX

  The splash of Meg’s fall was lost in the crash of the falling door. She went down into the waters of the lake and felt them close over her head. She had the illusion that it was these waters which were rushing upwards, and not she who was sinking through them. There was an ice-cold pressure at her eyes, her ears, her throat. The terror which had possessed her when she jumped from the bridge was frozen about her heart, which seemed to have stopped beating. The short time that it took her to sink and rise again appeared to her to be endlessly and dreadfully prolonged. Then, with a curious suddenness which was like the transition from a nightmare into waking consciousness, she found that her head was above water and that she was swimming. A good swimmer does certain things intuitively and without conscious volition. Meg had dived and swum since she was five years old, and even in an extremity of fear it was impossible for her to take the water awkwardly or to choke herself by getting it into her nose and throat. She had begun to strike out as she came up, from pure instinct.

  She drew a long breath, and felt the nightmare fade. Her heart was beating quite normally again. All that horrible feeling of fear was gone. Her mind was calm and empty, its only conscious thought a faint surprise that the lake should be so deep. She blinked the water from her eyes and swam with long, steady strokes. She began to consider where she should land. The bank was close on her left. Should she make for it, or would it be better to strike right across the lake and get into the wood? She could hear voices behind her now on the bridge. If someone jumped in after her, she would do better to land and trust to getting away on her feet. Perhaps she would do better to land anyhow. She could reach the wood much more quickly if she ran, and she would get a good start before they came after her, because they would have to come back across the bridge and down through the house. But it would have to be now, at once.

  A couple of strokes took her into her depth. She came up dripping on to mud and stones, and then with a scramble to the grass which bordered the drive. She looked over her shoulder and saw a light on the bridge and the beam of a torch darting to and fro across the dark water. She hadn’t come out a moment too soon, and she hadn’t a moment to waste. She picked up her wet feet and ran for it, keeping to the grass and wondering how much of a start she was going to get.

  She got quite a good one, thanks to the recriminations which had been going on upon the bridge, and by the time the pursuit had been organized and Miller despatched to the lodge on a bicycle to detail the Hendersons for their share in it Meg had reached the first of the trees. She saw the bicycle lamp without seeing the bicycle or its rider, and lay flat on the grass with her face hidden until it had gone by her. Then she got up and went on again, slowly now, because there were blackberry bushes and a tangle of willow and alder and hazel growing upon rough ground which dipped suddenly into patches of bog, and deep swampy holes.

  She had been lucky so far, luckier indeed than she knew, because Miller, craning out of the window she had broken, had cut his hand on a splinter of glass and let the electric torch he was holding drop, as she herself had dropped, into the lake, only unlike her it didn’t come up again. He had to go and find another torch, with the result that Meg got her start.

  Well, she had got it, and she had got so far. But where had she got to? A swamp in which her wet feet squelched, making noise enough to give her away the minute the pursuit drew near. Even on the grass, drenched stockings and drenched shoes had combined to produce the most horrible squeaking, squishing sound as she ran. For all she knew, the whole wood might be a bog—there might be acres of it—she had never explored in this direction. There was only one thing to be done, and she did it. The shoes and stockings must go.

  She stood on each leg in turn, and left the horrid wet things to lie where they fell. It was nice to be rid of them, but she hated the squdgy feel of the slime between her toes. She could move a great deal more quietly now, and that was something. But where was she moving to? She had no answer to that. There was a bog, and an inky blackness in which she had to feel her way. Her body had begun to shake with cold, her garments dripped and clung to her like bandages. And she had no plan, and no objective. She couldn’t even say, “I must go on, or they’ll get me,” because they were just as likely to get her if she did go on. At any moment she might hear Miller, or Henderson, or Johnny come crashing through the undergrowth. At any moment the ray of a torch might cut the darkness like a stab. Or—most horrid thought—she might at any moment, feeling before her in this black gloom, touch one of them unawares. An ice-cold finger seemed to stroke her spine at the thought of it. She tried to push the thought away. She must have a plan, or the fear which makes men run screaming would catch her and send her stumbling and crying into the bog, into the lake, into the very arms of her enemies.

  She began to make her plan, standing still and listening for a footstep or a voice. She must get to the wall—that was the only possible thing to do. The wood ran up to the wall and on beyond it again. She must hope for a bush that would bear her weight, if for no more than a moment, in a running scramble to reach the top of the wall, or for some tree with a limb extending far enough to give some chance of a jump. It would be a desperate, dangerous chance, but there wasn’t any chance in the world that Meg wouldn’t have taken now. If they caught her they would put her in the water. The words jingled and rhymed in her head. They would put her in the water—perhaps here—in the dark—in one of these bog-holes. She would drown in the mud and the slime. And she wouldn’t ever see Bill again. Oh no—no—not that—please not that! She would take any chance in the world rather than die like that in the dark. And just as her thought touched panic, she heard something move, a little to her left. The sound came to her through the fluttered beating of her heart—a splash, a muffled plop. It was the sound which her own shoes had made before she discarded them, and it pricked her with terror. It was a toss-up whether she ran or froze, but that wild beating of her heart settled it. She couldn’t run, because she couldn’t get her breath, and while she stood motionless, one hand to her throat, the other clutching an alder bough, she heard the sound again, farther off—and then again, farther still.

  The next thing she knew, her teeth had begun to chatter so violently that she had to thrust the knuckle of her forefinger between them to prevent their making a noise like castanets, and oddly,
vividly there rose before her the blue room in the days when it was her own room at Way’s End, and she knitting the very first jumper she had ever made, and Bill reading “Allan Quartermaine” aloud—the fight at the kraal, and Alphonse whose teeth kept chattering, and the bit of oily rag that Allan gave him to bite on so that he wouldn’t be heard and give the ambush away. She had even a sensation of an oily taste in her mouth, just as she had had it when Bill was reading. And then and there, looking back like that and seeing Bill, it came to her that she loved him with all her heart—just like that—all mixed up with Allan Quartermaine, and her first jumper, and Alphonse, and the oily rag. It wasn’t romantic and it was the most romantic thing in the world. It was everyday with the light that never was on sea or land shining through—bursting through. It was the End of the Rainbow, and the Crock of Gold, and the Golden Apple, and the Story without an End. And here she was, in a black bog, drenched and muddy, trying to stop her teeth from chattering lest the sound should betray her to a particularly unpleasant death. No, she wasn’t trying to stop them now—they had stopped.

  She moved forward again. There was a warm feeling instead of a cold one at her heart. It was just as if she had put out a hand to Bill in the dark and it had found him. She went forward, feeling her way. The ground rose a little and was drier. She trod on a bramble-trail and winched, pulled away from it, and found her ankle caught and flayed. When she was free again she went on. Roots—tussocks of coarse grass—a stump that grazed her shin—more brambles. And then suddenly, dreadfully, her hand reaching out before her touched flesh—the hard, firm flesh of a man’s cheek. She felt the bone beneath it, the angle of the cheek-bone and jaw, and the shaved hair harsh against her palm as it slipped. Her palm slipped because she was slipping. The world was falling away from under her feet. The darkness was full of fiery sparks.

  She pitched forward into Bill Coverdale’s arms.

  XXXI

  The arms closed round her, but she did not feel them. For a moment she felt nothing at all, and then waked with Bill’s cheek against her own—the cheek she had touched in such an agony of terror just before she fell. She was wet, she was lost, she was being hunted to her death; the bog had her by the feet, and the darkness shut them in; but that waking moment was the happiest she had ever known. To pass from the extremity of dread to the extremity of joy, to fear the worst and to find the best, to wake from lonely grief in her lover’s arms—what more poignant happiness could any woman know? The moment carried everything before it—shyness, hesitancy, doubt. She turned her lips to his and gave him kiss for kiss in an eager passion of joy.

  The moment passed. She did not know how long it had lasted. It was outside time. It passed. She became aware of her body again, a drenched, trembling thing, and of Bill’s lips, not on hers any longer, but at her ear with an almost soundless whisper.

  “Meg—what’s up?”

  She had to whisper too. A word might ruin them, might ruin Bill. She said,

  “They’re trying to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “The Cannock—she isn’t—I think Uncle Henry’s a prisoner—Bill!”

  His arms tightened about her.

  “You’re all wet—Meg!”

  “I had to swim.”

  “It’s all right—now. I’ve got my car. We’ve only got to get to the gate.”

  “Only!” Meg felt a shaky laugh rise in her throat. The gate would be watched, the gate would be locked. It wasn’t any good thinking about the gate. She began to say this with her face pressed against Bill’s shoulder, but all at once he stopped her. There was a sound away on their right—a splash, and a rip of cloth. There were more blackberry bushes than one, and more bog-holes.

  They began to move away from the sound without a word, pushing through the undergrowth and making for the gate—making, that is, for where they supposed it to be, or where Bill supposed it to be, for Meg had stopped having any ideas on the subject. The points of the compass, the direction of the village, the position of the gate, and her own whereabouts were all gone from her, dissolved in the confusion of this darkness which had drowned everything. She followed Bill because she would have followed him anywhere. Her bare feet and legs were terribly scratched. The way seemed endless.

  And then quite suddenly they were out of the wood. The wall rose up before them, solid and black, and between it and the bushes from which they had emerged there was a path. Bill took her by the arm and ran her along it. It was much less dark than it had been in the wood. If you looked up you could see the top of the wall against the sky, and the black massing of the trees. When they came to it they would be able to see the lodge, and when they came to the lodge they would be within one short dash of the gates. But they couldn’t get out. The gates were locked.

  The lodge loomed up. Bill’s hand checked her. She trembled under it and stopped. They both stopped, listening. There was no sound at all. They crept forward until they were level with the side of the lodge, the back door behind, the front door still ahead, the gate perhaps twenty yards away, when with a sudden flash the light of a powerful torch leapt towards them from the drive and was instantly followed by a shot. And no bad shot either. The bullet passed between them. Close as they were, an inch or two higher or an inch or two lower and it would have found no room. It whistled through the gap between head and shoulder—two heads, two shoulders, as close as might be, yet leaving just that gap—and it ripped the cloth of Bill’s sleeve as it went, just where armhole and shoulder-seam join. A shout followed the shot.

  Bill ducked, and jumped Meg sideways. The ray followed them, and another shot—wide this time. He ran her round the corner of the lodge and in at the back door, and there drove the bolts home.

  But he had broken the kitchen window. It wasn’t going to take the sportsman with the revolver more than about three split seconds to find that out. The place was a trap. Upstairs would give them the best chance. The stair was bound to be steep, and with any luck it might turn. He made for it, getting out his own torch as they went. And the luck was good. There wasn’t any turn, but there was something a great deal better. The stair was one of those enclosed ones common enough in old cottages. It went up between two walls and ended in a yard-square landing with a door on either side. Anyone who wanted to play rough would have to stand in that narrow space and open one of those doors, when it would be the pleasantest and easiest thing in the world to slog him over the head with a chair.

  He explained all this to Meg as soon as they had shut themselves into the left-hand room. It was a bedroom, very untidy and ill-kept. The torch showed a few inches of guttered candle in a tin candlestick on the narrow ledge above the fireplace. Bill lighted it. Since it was known that they were here, they might as well see what they were doing. The candle flame, very yellow after the blue white of the electric ray, showed a sloped ceiling, a muddle of bedclothes on a pallet bed, and a battered yellow chest of drawers standing under the window with a cracked mirror hanging half out of its frame.

  The opposite wall was pierced by a second door. It stood ajar. Bill took the candle and looked in. Another bedroom, overlooking the front door—the old woman’s room by token of a red flannel dressing-gown hanging from a peg. He found a second candle, lighted it from the one he was carrying, and left it on the rickety chest of drawers just inside the door. Then he came back with his long, quick stride to listen at the head of the stair. There was no sound from below, no sound at all anywhere. It might have been Robinson Crusoe’s house on a desert island. He looked over his shoulder at Meg.

  “Get along in there and find some dry clothes. You can’t stay like that!”

  Meg dripped on the dirty square of carpet. She had discarded her skirt before she jumped into the lake. Her pale silk knickers were horribly smothered with mud and a greenish slime, her bare legs were scratched and bleeding, her grey woollen jumper was a sodden sponge, but her eyes glinted obstinately at Bill.

  “If you think I’m going to put on any of that horr
ible old woman’s things—”

  Bill scowled ferociously.

  “Don’t be an absolute damned fool! You can’t stay like that! Get along in there and see what you can find! And step on it, because we’re going to have visitors, and you’ll be happier with some clothes on!”

  She stamped a bare foot and said, “I won’t!” and then suddenly ran from him into the other room and banged the door.

  Her flesh crawled at the thought of Mrs Henderson’s clothes. But yesterday—no, the day before yesterday—she had seen a string of washing hanging out behind the lodge, and if she could find something that had just been washed—

  She pulled out the drawers and looked. In the top one there was a most extraordinary collection of things—several pairs of old evening shoes; a tattered plush tablecloth which had once been blue; five or six fans—lace, silk, satin, and even paper; at least a dozen handbags; and two fur tippets in a noisome state of decay.

  Meg shut the drawer with a shudder, and tried the next one, with better luck. Here were some of the clothes she had seen on the line. A voluminous flannelette night-gown came first to her hand. It was of a horrid greyish colour, but it had certainly been washed and dried again. It was quite, quite dry. Bill was right, much as she hated to admit it. It was a mug’s game to stay in these sopping clothes. She peeled them off, took the next garment to rub herself dry, and pulled the night-gown over her head. If felt warm to her chilled skin.

  Well, that was that. What next?

  She did not feel equal to Mrs Henderson’s drawers, which were made of blue and white checked stuff with very long open legs. There was a pair of these, a roll of unmade calico, and some black woollen stockings. As these also seemed to have been newly washed, she put on a pair of them.

  Then she pulled out the bottom drawer. It was filled with the same heterogeneous jumble of things as the first drawer she had opened. There were boots, and table-knives, a woollen scarf, yards of frowsty black lace, a packet of candles, some gingerbread nuts, and a horribly draggled red velvet dress. But right on top of all this muddle there was an unopened brown paper parcel with the name of a Ledlington draper on the outside. Mrs Henderson had been shopping, or her so had been shopping for her, and when Meg had torn open the parcel she felt that they had shopped to some purpose, for neatly folded inside the paper was a pair of strong black stockinette knickers and a thick navy cardigan. It took her about half a minute to step into the knickers, blessedly new and clean from the shop, and to tuck the night-gown inside them. She had to double it up from the hem and wrap it about twice round her, but that made it all the warmer, and when it was done and she had put on the blue cardigan and buttoned it up she felt grateful to Bill, and a good deal revived. She bulged—or rather Mrs Henry’s night-gown bulged—but she was dry, and the feeling that she had forgotten what it was like to be warm and would probably never remember it again became less insistent.