by Ellis Peters
She came dropping down the slope towards them with her soft, lithe stride, not hurrying, not delaying, one hand in her pocket, one holding up her collar to her chin. He saw her face pale and still, with great eyes enormously dilated. She was aware of him; she saw them both, converging upon her, and knew them very well, and yet it seemed to him that she was looking through them rather than at them, that her mind and her heart were somewhere infinitely distant and inaccessible. He could not put a name to the disquiet she roused in him, or the quality of the pale, charged brightness that vibrated about her moonlit movements. But he knew he was frightened, that he dreaded the unavoidable questions to which he didn’t want to know the answers. And all the time she was drawing nearer, her steps quickening a little; and there was no escaping the moment and the spark.
But when the spark flashed Beck was breathless, and Tom was dumb. It was Annet who looked wonderingly from face to face, and asked in a voice shaken between offence and uneasiness: ‘What are you doing here? is anything the matter?’
Was anything the matter! As though they had offended her by coming out to meet the last bus, as though they could not trust her to come home alone. The same erected head and faintly, gravely hostile face, unaware of having given more cause for anxiety than she did every day by being aloof and independent of them. Or was it quite the same? Her eyes were so wide and opaque and strange, as though she had only just awakened from sleep, and deep within the blankness a small, remote flame of disquiet kindled as he watched. But not fear; only disquiet, as though they were the unaccountable ones.
He said: ‘We came to look for you.’ What else could he say?
Still out of breath, her father said with feeble anger:
‘Where’ve you been? When you went out you said you’d be in to tea.’ Fantastic, the commonplaces that came most readily to the tongue; maybe wisely, for what could words do about it now?
‘I know,’ said Annet, her voice almost conciliatory, something like a smile playing over her face for the absurdity of all this. ‘I meant to. I know I’m horribly late, I went a long way, farther than I realised. I couldn’t believe it was so late, it seemed to drop dark all at once. But you didn’t have to send out a search party, surely? I thought you’d be home by now, Mr Kenyon. You didn’t stay because of me, did you?’
And then she did smile, vaguely and sweetly and penitently, softened and eased by the night and the silence and that something in herself that kept her lulled and still like a dreaming woman; and the smile died on her lips and left them parted on held breath as she saw their fixed and wondering faces. Their own wariness, incomprehension and quickening fear stared back at them from her dilated eyes.
‘What’s the matter? I’m sorry I’m late, but why should you be alarmed about a couple of hours? I really don’t see— I’m not even wet, it’s stopped raining. What is the matter?’
Carefully, in a breathy voice that hurt his throat, Beck asked: ‘And what about the five days in between?’
She looked from one face to the other, and the smile was as dead as the skeleton rocks bleaching in the moonlight below them. She moistened her lips and tightened her grip on the raised folds of her collar. In the great dark eyes the little flames of fear burned high and bright.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Annet in a thin whisper. ‘What five days?’
CHAPTER III
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He got up as soon as it was light, and dressed and went out. What was the point of staying in bed? He hadn’t slept more than ten minutes at a stretch all night. He couldn’t stop hearing her voice, patiently, desperately, wearily going over the recital time after time, unshakable in obstinacy.
‘I went out to post the letters, and met Mr Kenyon at the gate. He offered to take them for me, but I wanted some fresh air, so I walked. What else can I tell you? That’s what I did. I went for a long walk, right over the Hallowmount and along the brook. I meant to come back round by the bog, but it got dark so quickly I changed my mind and climbed back over the top. And then I met them, and that’s all. It’s Thursday. Whatever you say, it must be Thursday, it was Thursday I went out with the letters. What’s happened to you all?’
And the two of them at her, one on either side, frightened and angry but afraid to be too angry, afraid to drive her further from them; anxious, bitter, piteous, throwing the same questions at her over and over.
‘Where did you go? Where did you spend the nights? Who went with you? What’s come over you? Do you expect us to believe a fairy-tale like that?’
He had driven them home, and then torn himself away as inconspicuously as he could, but he hadn’t been able to help hearing the beginning of it. What right had he in that scene? Annet didn’t want or need him, and he didn’t want to hear them call her a liar. He got out of the house, and took the car and drove into Comerford. All the way along the quarter of a mile of solitary, moonlit road, under the flank of that naked slope, he was repeating to himself that at least she was alive and well, and that was everything. Wherever she had been, whatever was the truth about her lost five days, she was alive and well, and home. But by the ragged, chaotic pain that frayed him he knew that that was not quite everything. And he knew that she would win, that in the end, true or not, they would all be committed to the same uneasy silence and acceptance.
One thing he could do, and he did it. He parked the Mini in the drive of Bill Mallindine’s modern house by the riverside, and made returning a borrowed book the excuse for his unexpected call. Eve was out at some improbable feminine meeting, but Bill gave him a drink and a chair by the fire, and welcomed him gladly. And he hadn’t even had to ask any questions. At a table in one remote corner of the multiple living-room – heaven knew how they heated it so successfully, the crazy shape it was – Miles Mallindine and Dominic Felse were devotedly disentangling finished cassettes from cameras, and securing them in their little yellow bags ready for the post. Their heads together over the work, they gave him the polite minimum of attention. It was Bill who teased Miles to display some of his best pictures, and volunteered the information that the two had spent the half-term camping and climbing near Tryfan. The two pairs of boots, bristling with tripe hobs and clinkers, carelessly off-loaded in the hall, should have spoken for themselves.
So that, as far as it went, was that. Miles was home, with enough paraphernalia to provide him with an alibi, and with a reliable ally to bear witness for him into the bargain. And if they’d really planned anything together, Annet and he, wouldn’t they have taken care to cover her tracks as well as his?
And besides, there was the incredible conviction with which she had carried off her return, the dozen details that couldn’t be shrugged away. The mention of her surprise at seeing him, when he should have been well on his way home, the reassurance that she wasn’t even in danger of getting wet, because it had stopped raining, when it hadn’t rained for five days. And her charmed, distant face, and the suddenly engendered fear and wonder as the ground shook under her feet. Could she, could anyone, act like that? It was hard to believe.
Almost as hard as that the earth had opened and admitted her into secret, terrible places, and given her back at the end of five days with no memory of the time between, not a minute older than she went away. Late, late in a gloaming Kilmeny had come home, all right, but whether from some fairy underworld or a cheap hotel God-knew-where, that was more than he dared guess. Bonny Kilmeny! She was that, whatever else she might be. And Kilmeny, you’ll remember, he said to himself bitterly, driving home, was pure as pure could be. Who are you, to say Annet isn’t?
It wasn’t over when he got home. He had prayed that she’d be in bed, and her parents too exhausted to harrow the barren ground over again for him. But she was still there, and all that was changed was that the passion was clean gone out of her repeated affirmations, nothing left but the simple repetition of facts, or what she claimed were facts. She was indifferent now, she spoke without vehemence; if they believed her, well, if they
did not, she couldn’t help that. She was tired, but eased; and there was something still left in her face and body of a strange, rapt, content. The strongest argument for her, if she had but known it. They might plead, and argue, and lament; she had only to withdraw into her own heart, and she was secure from all troubling. He could feel the truth of that, at least. The source of warmth and joy and security was within her, some perfection remembered. Not remembered, perhaps, only experienced still. My God, but it couldn’t be true! Could it?
And when they all said good-night, like relatively civilised people, suddenly it was clear that they would speak no more of this. She could not be shaken. She could only be convinced by the production of a letter received in answer to one she had posted on Thursday, by the torn-off leaves of the calendar, and their collective certainty. Confronted with these, she shrank in bewilderment and fright, and from accusing they had to reassure her. Did any of them believe? Was it even possible to believe? Elsewhere he would not have credited it, but here on the borders the frontiers of experience grew generously wide and imaginative. They winced from pressing her too hard, probably they were grateful that they had not been able to catch her out in any particular. Wasn’t it better to let well alone, and pray a little? Dreading, nevertheless, what revelation might yet erupt to confound them all.
Nobody knew! That was sanctuary, that nobody knew but the four of them, and please God, nobody ever would. He was so tangled into their household now that he would never get clear. Maybe he had drawn too close to Annet, in everything but blood, ever again to be considered as more distant than a brother.
Perhaps that was why he couldn’t sleep, why he arose before dawn, and went like a sensible modern man to look over the ground by daylight. Painfully new daylight, but clear enough to show details the moon had silvered over. Because she must be lying. (Musn’t she?) And if she was lying, where had she been? Farther away than the other side of the Hallowmount. And what had she been doing? (And with whom? But that was the question he would not entertain, he pushed it out of sight as soon as it reared its head.) Even granted the simple possibility of amnesia, she must have been somewhere. And from that somewhere she had returned precisely to the Hallowmount, as if only through the medium of that incalculable place could she reach her home again. That made this as surely a translation back from fairyland as if the earth had truly opened and let her go.
Again he climbed the hill, this time in the grey first light of a dull morning. Once over the crest he looked down upon the shallower undulations of another moorland valley, open heath grazing on both sides of the narrow brook that threaded it. An unpopulated, bare, beautiful desolation in changing tints of heather and bracken and furze. Not a single house in sight. No one here but sheep to stare at him and wonder as he dropped in long strides down the hill. On a wet Thursday afternoon there’d be no picnickers, no hill-walkers, no one to watch Annet Beck disappear into the underworld. Not like venturing on to Comerbourne station with a suitcase in broad daylight, among hundreds of people who knew her. But if this was to be considered as an escape route to somewhere else instead of fairyland, then there had to be a means of leaving this bowl of waste land, and faster than on foot. Footpaths were here by the dozen, trailing haphazard across the country from nowhere to nowhere, apparently, skirting the patches of bog where the cotton grass fluttered ragged and frayed. With a pony you could cover the ground here at a good speed, but Annet wasn’t one of the local jodhpurs and ’ard ’at sorority, and with a pony she would in any case have been courting notice when she did encounter human beings. Could a car be got up here? He had been long enough in these parts now to realise that there were comparatively few places round these border uplands where the local people couldn’t get cars to go. They had to; they lived in every corner of the back of beyond.
The long, oval, tilted bowl of pasture rose to northward, towards Comerford, and dipped to southward, in the direction of Abbot’s Bale. Both were out of sight. In a tract of land without cover you could still be private here; all you needed was neutral colours and stillness, and you were invisible.
The easiest run out of the bowl would surely be towards Abbot’s Bale. And beyond the brook, in the broad bottom of the valley, there sprang to life irresolutely a tiny, trodden path, that broadened and paled as it followed the ambling brook downwards, until it showed bared stones through here and there, and had grown to the dimensions of a farm cart, with two deep wheel-ruts, and the well-trodden dip where the horse walked in the middle. Where it tunnelled through the long grass it dwindled again, but always to reappear. Where it passed close to the marshy hollows the bright emerald green of fine, lush turf invaded it. In the distance there was a gate across it, and beyond probably others. But gates can be opened. Most gates, anyhow. A motor-bike could be brought up here with ease, even a small car, if you didn’t mind a rough ride. And whoever had met Annet here and taken her away wouldn’t be noticing a few bumps, or even a few scratches threatening his paint.
To Abbot’s Bale, and from there wherever you liked, and no one in Comerford or Comerbourne any the wiser, for neither need be touched. Her everyday coat, a sensible rainscarf, no luggage: Annet had taken no chances this time. No one should suspect; no one should have any warning. Afterwards? Oh, afterwards the flood, the price, anything. What would it matter, afterwards?
He jumped the brook and made his way along the cart-track. Deep ruts on both sides of him, in places filled with the moist black mud of puddles that never dry up completely. Brown peat water deep between the tufted grasses, distant, solitary birds somewhere calling eerily. The hoof-track on which he walked had been laid with stones at some time, and stood up like a little causeway, only here and there encroached upon by the richer grass. There seemed to be no traces of a car having negotiated this road recently. Nor had he heard any sound of an engine break the silence last night, when she returned, but that great hog-back of rock had heaved solidly between, and might very well cut off all sound.
Five dry days, and a brisk wind blowing for three of them; the ground was hard and well-padded with thick, spongy turf. Only in the green places where the marsh came close would there be any traces to be found.
He came to the first of them, and the stony foundation of the track was broken there, and the ground had settled a little, subsiding into a softer green tongue of fine grass. Moisture welled up round the toe of his shoe, and he checked in mid-stride and drew his weight back carefully. The wheel-ruts still showed cushioned and smooth on both sides; no weight had crushed them last night, or for many days previously. But in the middle of the path a single indentation showed, the flattened stems silvery against the brilliant green. Too resilient to retain a pattern of the tread, the turf had not yet quite recovered from the pressure of somebody’s motor-bike tyres.
There was no doubt of it, once he had found it. He followed it along almost to the first gate, and found its tenuous line three times on the way, to reassure him that he was not imagining things. Nowhere was there a clear impression of the tread; for most of the way the path was firm and dry, and where the damp patches invaded it the thick grass swallowed all but that ribbon of paler green. But he knew now that he was not mistaken; someone had brought a motorcycle up here from the direction of Abbot’s Bale no longer ago than yesterday. A motorcycle or a scooter; he couldn’t be sure which.
The sun was well up, and he was going to be late for breakfast; they’d be wondering, next, what had happened to him! He turned back then, and scrambled up the slope towards the ring of trees.
Miles Mallindine had a Vespa. And however many young men had danced with and coveted Annet, there was no blinking the fact that Miles had already got himself firmly connected with her comings and goings once, and could hardly expect to evade notice when something similar happened for the second time. Others might be possibles, but he was an odds-on favourite.
But he’d been camping somewhere near Llyn Ogwen and climbing on Tryfan with Dominic Felse. Or had he? All the long week-end? Wit
h a Vespa he could cover that journey quite easily in a couple of hours. And would young Felse lie for him? Neither of them struck him as a probable liar, and yet he was fairly sure that for each other, where necessary, they would take the plunge without turning a hair.
If you want to know, he told himself with irritation, lunging down the westward side of the Hallowmount, there’s only one straightforward thing to do, and that’s ask. Not other nosy people who may have seen something, not his friend who’ll feel obliged to put up a front for him, but Miles himself. At least give him the chance to convince you, if there’s nothing in it, and to get it off his chest if there is.
As if that was going to be easy!
It took him all morning to make up his mind to it; but in his free period at the end of the morning school he sent for Miles Mallindine.
‘You wanted to see me, sir?’
The boy had come in, in response to his invitation, jauntily and easily, brows raised a little; unable to guess why he was wanted, you’d have said, but long past the days of instinctively supposing any summons to the staff-room to be a portent of trouble.
‘Yes, come in and close the door. I won’t keep you many minutes.’ They had the room to themselves for as long as they needed it, but the thing was to keep it brief and simple; and tell him nothing that wasn’t absolutely essential. ‘You own a Vespa, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Miles, agile brows jumping again.
‘Did you go up to Capel Curig on it this week-end?’
‘Yes. It’s a bit of a load, with two up and the tent and kit, but we’ve got it to numbers now.’ He was filling in the gaps, kindly and graciously, to avoid leaving the bald, enquiring: ‘Yes’ lonely upon the air between them. But he was wondering what all this was about, and testing out all possible connections in his all too lively mind.
