‘Yes, sir,’ said Pike. But he stood a moment after the words had left his mouth. He looked down—a trick he had when thinking deeply—at the very polished toe-caps of his very shiny boots; but after a moment, with a visible jerk, pulled himself away from whatever thought had held him. He said:
‘Very good, sir. Thank you. I’ll say goodbye, sir.’ He turned to Anthony. ‘And goodbye to you, sir … And … and … good luck.’ The door closed, softly but crisply, behind him.
Lucas looked at it. He laughed a laugh which was half snort. ‘Good luck indeed!’ he said. ‘Pike’s got you and your marvels on the brain, Gethryn. Since the Lines-Bower show he’s damn near deified you.’
Anthony stood up, the bulky envelope held firm beneath one arm. He said:
‘Pike’s too good a man to do any deifying … So long, Lucas, and thank you.’ He tapped the envelope. ‘These’ll be safe. And don’t you worry. If I were you I should think I was mad, too. I do now.’
The door closed behind him. Lucas was left alone. He sat in his chair and stared at nothing and chewed an unlighted cigarette until the sting of wet, stringy tobacco on his tongue brought him to himself.
IV
The dark, shapely head of Lucia Gethryn looked round the edge of his study door at her husband. He sat astraddle upon a small chair and gazed down over its back and his folded arms at the carpet.
Lucia followed her head. ‘I thought,’ she said, going to him and laying a hand upon his arm, ‘that you weren’t ever going to stop using the telephone. And your coffee got cold. And you didn’t have any port. I’ve told White to bring …’
‘What I want to know,’ said Anthony, ‘is how in the name of the Seven-fingered Septuagesima an ex-bruiser got a woman like that woman …’
Lucia crossed to the writing table and upon it perched herself. She said:
‘I knew that would make you wonder. It did me. There’s a good story behind it, I should think. She adores him, you know …’
Anthony raised his head. ‘Make it “loves”. It means more, and it’s what she does … Know her beginnings?’
The dark head nodded. ‘Just a little. She’s told me one or two things. She’s a Dane. Her father was Captain of a sailing-ship. She was at sea with him from when she was a baby until he died. After his death she couldn’t get to sea any more. She said that at one time she thought she’d go mad with being on land. And then she met Dan. And she hasn’t worried about the sea any more.’
‘Curioser,’ said Anthony, ‘and curioser. One should meet Dan, I feel.’
‘Probably,’ said Lucia softly, ‘Dan isn’t Dan except to her.’
Anthony raised his chin from his hands. He lifted his head again and looked at his wife. He said:
‘Sentimental. But very probably true … I’ll tell you what D. Bronson, ex-pug, is though. I have, as you know, been telephoning. The receiver is still hot upon my ear. I have telephoned to old Lansmoor and to Betty Partridge and to two old friends of mine called Spiky Skinner and Flatty Wilson. And also to Myerbeer. And to Dick Dybar …’
‘Please!’ Lucia said. ‘Stop the roll-call. Except for Lord Lansmoor, I don’t know even the names … And who’s Betty Partridge?’
‘Betty,’ said Anthony, ‘is no bird, except for the name. Betty was once the best heavy-weight in this country. But he would try to train on beer. He’s now the hall-porter at the Senior Imperial. Spiky Skinner and Flatty Wilson are the best seconds in the country; they also happened to be in the first platoon I ever had. Myerbeer’s the man who runs the Olympic Sporting Club and Dybar’s that friend of Archie’s who’s lost more money promoting fights than his father made printing Bibles. Point of contact with A. R. Gethryn—Daniel Bronson. I knew they’d all know a lot about Bronson; but they were even more obliging—they all knew him. Even Dybar.’
‘But what …’ began Lucia; then, ‘sorry, darling.’
‘Granted,’ said Anthony, ‘no sooner than asked. I was checking the opinion of Mrs Bronson. You can say it didn’t need checking, and probably you’d be right. But check it I did. No dissentients.’ He put his chin again upon his folded arms.
Lucia looked down at the head of her husband. She waited, but he did not speak. She leaned forward then and between finger and thumb took as much of his hair as was convenient. She pulled, and the silence was sharply broken.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is for being a Master Mind. Explain. What were there no dissentients about; exactly?’
Anthony rubbed at his scalp. ‘What else, woman, than the character of D. Bronson in relation to the killing of Blackatter? That woman said to me this afternoon: ‘Dan might kill, but he wouldn’t kill like that!’ Blackatter was shot, you know, at close range, through the back of the head. The telephone has just said to me, in six voices and six different ways, that it seems incredible, not only that D. Bronson should kill like that, but that D. Bronson should kill at all.’
‘Oh!’ said Lucia. ‘But she would be right, you know. I mean, if she says he “might kill”, he might.’
‘Very true,’ said Anthony, ‘but nothing to do with the case. Several tra-las. What we have got—put in its lowest terms of value—is confirmation of the great unlikelihood of Bronson’s killing a man behind his back …’ He fell silent.
There came a knock at the door, and after it White bearing a tray upon which were a coffee-cup, two wine-glasses, and a decanter. Lucia moved from the writing-table. But Anthony sat motionless, his head upon his crossed arms, his half-closed eyes looking down, over the chair-back, at the carpet.
White went. To Anthony his wife brought coffee. He did not move until she touched his shoulder. Then, absently, he straightened his body, took the cup and drained it and, almost in one movement, gave it back to her. Back went his arms along the chair-rail, and down again upon those arms went his head.
Lucia poured port. One glass she picked up and held out towards her husband. His eyes cannot have been really closed, for his hand came up and his fingers closed about the glass’s stem and took it from her.
He drank. With a sudden movement he straightened his body and, reaching out a long arm, set down the half-empty glass, with a little smack upon the writing-table’s edge. He said, with an explosiveness most foreign to him:
‘It’s idiocy! It’s damned, fat-headed, raving foolishness! It’s worse than that, it’s waste of time! And it’s cruel to that woman!’ He got to his feet and began to walk up and down the long room. With anxious, wide eyes Lucia watched him. She waited for him to speak again, but he paced in fiery silence. She said at last:
‘What … what … d’you mean that …’
He interrupted her. He halted to face her. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He said:
‘I mean that it’s hopeless. I mean that I ought to be shot for not having said so from the beginning and gone on saying so. Read that!’ He flung out an arm, pointing. Lucia’s eyes followed the finger; brought their gaze to rest upon a bulging, rusty-orange-coloured folder which lay upon the writing-table.
‘In that,’ said Anthony, ‘is the case against Bronson. It’s a cast-iron case. And Bronson’s been tried; and Bronson’s appealed; and Bronson’s had a very strong petition for him put up. And he was found guilty, and his appeal didn’t work; and his petition’s been turned down. And he’s going to be hanged in a hundred or so hours from now …’
Lucia stood now, close to him, facing him, her lovely head thrown back a little so that her eyes could meet his. She put up a hand to her throat. She said, in a low voice which gave evidence of her difficulty in producing it:
‘You mean … you mean to say, after all you’ve said … you mean to say that you … Oh, Anthony!’
He looked down at her. His eyes softened. He said:
‘I mean that not even Gabriel could get the man off. See: there’s one way, and one way only, to get that man off. And that’s to produce, within four days from this minute, utterly conclusive proof that not he, but some definite other person, k
illed Blackatter. Understand? Look what you’re asking, you women! You’re asking that now, months after the thing was done, when even witnesses’ memories are getting hazy and any scent there might’ve been at the time’s vanished long ago—you’re asking that now, within less than a week, a man’s to dig up a murderer who in the first place covered himself so well that no one got even a hint of his existence. It’s Merlin you want, Unlimited …’
He broke off. For Lucia was smiling at him; smiling that particular one of her smiles which always had, and always would, make him catch his breath a little at its beauty. Smiling, she was! Yet, a moment ago, when she had jumped up to face him, she had been tense and white and her eyes had been dark pools of anxiety. She said softly:
‘All right, dear. All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. D’you know, I thought—just for a minute—I thought you were going to say that you wouldn’t even try. I am a fool sometimes.’
Anthony looked at her. ‘Sure you weren’t right the first time? Because, you know, you were.’
She shook her head, with a slow, decisive mockery. ‘Don’t tell me!’ she said. ‘You went off the deep end because you knew you were going to try but you were frightened—and are frightened—horribly frightened, that you mayn’t succeed. And that’s right, whatever you say! Isn’t it?’
Anthony kissed her. ‘If there’s anything,’ he said, ‘more annoying than a woman who knows she’s right, it’s a woman who is.’ He reached out and plucked from the table the orange-coloured dossier. ‘Here, you take this and go to bed and read it. I want to think.’
Lucia took the folder gingerly. ‘But think about what, dear? I mean’—her brow puckered—‘where are you to start thinking?’
‘That,’ said Anthony, ‘is what I’ve got to think about.’
V
The little cell was suddenly full. The Warden looked down at the man who sat upon the edge of the small and narrow bed. The two warders were at attention; the man who had come with the Warden hovered loosely in the background. The Warden said:
‘It’s late, Bronson. But I’d given you my word I’d let you know, so soon as I had official notice, about the Petition. I’m sorry, Bronson; the Home Secretary has notified the Petitioners that he cannot make any recommendation to the King.’
The Warden’s voice was soft, and deep and rounded. It seemed to roll murmurously round this room which was a box of stone.
The man who sat upon the bed’s edge looked up. He nodded apathetically. His great shoulders were drooped, and his head seemed sunken between them. He said:
‘Thank you, sir.’ His voice was low, lower even than the Warden’s, but it was rough. There seemed to be harsh, uneven edges to it.
The Warden looked down at the speaker. He seemed about to say something; checked himself; turned on his heel. The warders stiffened. The man in the background opened the cell door. Within its frame the Warden turned. He said:
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Bronson?’
The man on the bed did not look up. But his head, down between those great shoulders, moved slowly from side to side.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Good night, Bronson,’ said the Warden.
From the prisoner’s down-bent head came the beginnings of an answering ‘Good night’; but only the beginnings. It was as if, halfway through the familiar words, he realised, possibly for the first time in his life, their meaning.
‘Good …’ he began. ‘Ha!’
The one deep note of the little laugh seemed to break itself against the close walls so that discordant pieces of it went on jingling inside the listeners’ heads long after the sound had died.
CHAPTER II
THE MORNING OF FRIDAY
I
A BREEZE had risen in the night and the fog was no more. Pale-gold, seven-o’clock-in-the-morning November sunshine lighted a white-rimed London. In Stukeley Gardens the great square houses had roofs like pantomime palaces, and the shrubs and trees were fantastic white jewels enclosed not by sullen railings but a hedge of bravely glittering spears.
At three minutes to seven o’clock Anthony’s new car—an open, very low, very black and very wolfish car—purred away from Number 39. Anthony drove. By his side was Lucia, a fur bundle from which peered, every now and then, a delightful nose which the frosty air whipped to a most unusual pinkness. At the back, an ulster and a cap making of him a barely animate-seeming bundle, was White. He cowered back into his seat, and beneath the pulled-down peak of his cap his eyes were closed. The Guvner’s driving—as frequently White said to his cronies—was OT.
The big car devoured the almost empty London streets; tossed them throbbingly, contemptuously behind it. London began to fade; streets straggled; ceased, began again patchily; tailed off into fields. They tore up over Fordley Common, swung right by the new bridge over the Bale and came out on to the smooth dun-grey riband of the arterial road.
‘Ah!’ said Anthony; and his right foot went down.
‘Oh!’ muttered White. He pressed his body still further back into its corner.
Lucia was silent; from her nest of fur her eyes stared out at the speedometer-needle. They opened wide as they stared; then wider. They shifted at last from that needle and its story and cast one oblique glance at the grass-edging of the road. And then, like White’s, they closed.
And so they came at last, having turned off the arterial road at New Fordwich, first to the town of Greyne and then to the village of Farrow and The Horse and Hound Inn.
Before the porch of The Horse and Hound Anthony brought the black car to a smooth and silent standstill. He looked at his dashboard clock and was satisfied; afterwards, Lucia was heard to refer to the time taken for the journey as ‘sinful’; White’s only comment, at this time or any other, was a shake of the head and a rigid compression of the lips.
Stiffly, they got to ground. Up the steps of the porch Lucia ran and beat upon the door’s knocker. White began to unload luggage. Anthony looked at The Horse and Hound and was gratified. It is one of the few real Inns left to the land of Inns. It is a building of real half-timbering and white plaster, and leaded windows most pleasing to the eye. And beyond its western end is a stable-yard where still horses are stabled. And there is a garden. And beneath the very proper sign showing a Horse only a little less gaudy and unbelievable than its companion the Hound, is, among others, the word Bait.
Anthony, blowing upon stiff hands from which he had peeled the gloves, went up the porch-steps in the wake of his wife. The door stood open and Lucia was inside it. Upon the threshold he paused for an instant while he read, over the lintel, the words ‘FREE HOUSE—D. BRONSON—LICENSED TO SELL BEER, WINES, SPIRITS AND TOBACCO’.
He stepped across the threshold and stood in a low, black-beamed, white-walled, sweet-smelling hall-place. Upon each side were doors, four upon the right and three upon the left. Before the first upon the right, which stood open, was Lucia. She was talking with someone within the room. Anthony went forward. He stood behind his wife and over her fur-clad shoulder saw Daniel Bronson’s wife. He bowed; he found himself, most surprisingly, without words. In answer the fair head was bowed. She stood in full flood of the hard winter sunlight which streamed through a window behind her and to her right. He saw her as paler than he had thought, but perhaps that was fatigue. Yet there was nothing sickly about this whiteness of her; rather was there a vivid, vital sort of … of … he groped in his mind for a word and found transparency. And he saw her as even taller than the picture his mind had kept—but perhaps this was a matter of clothes, for today her garb was white and black—black from well-shod feet to admirable waist, white from waist to chin, beneath which was a bow of silken black which held together, gracefully and gratefully, the collar of silken white.
She said to him:
‘You are good. I have said to your wife how welcome you are. They gave me this morning your telegram which you telephoned. I have said to your wife that there is,now ready, breakfast for you. Af
ter, if you wish me, I could be at your service … perhaps I mean to answer your questions. Or to tell things which you might wish to know.’ She came closer, up to the doorway upon whose other side Anthony and Lucia stood. She pressed a bell upon the wall and there came within half-a-minute a neat maid. To this girl she said:
‘Show Colonel and Mrs Gethryn their room, Annie.’ And to Anthony: ‘You will not forget. If you wish me, at any time, I am here.’
Upstairs went Anthony and Lucia then, following the silk-clad and very shapely legs of the girl Annie, who presently opened a door without which their bags already lay and stood aside to let them enter. A most pleasing room, though of no great size. Its windows looked out over the garden and beyond the garden to a country wide and rolling where wintry browns were broken by the thin tracery of hedges, the black and red and silver of trees and the steely glitter of the river which twisted sharply down the Kare valley.
The maid hovered in the doorway. She murmured:
‘If there’s anything, ma’am …’
Lucia turned from the window and that view. ‘Nothing, I think, thank you.’ She looked at her husband.
Anthony shook his head. ‘Nothing for me.’ He smiled down at the girl. The girl smiled back; an odd smile, compound of shy and willing servitude, challenge to the male, and … something else. Anthony’s mind noted that smile, tucking it away in the back of his brain. He said, as she reached the door:
‘Many other people staying here?’
The girl turned. She was not smiling now. ‘Oh, no, sir!’ she said. ‘There’s … they … sometimes we’re full this time o’ year, sir, for the hunting … but now, sir, they …’ She stammered, grew red in the cheek, lost her tangled threads and ended with: ‘No, sir. Only one other gentleman. He came last night, sir, late. Don’t know how long for, sir, I’m sure. He seems a very quiet gentleman, sir.’
The Noose Page 3
