by Ellis Peters
Tom sprang wildly towards her; but it was George Felse who caught and lifted her in his arms as she fell.
CHAPTER V
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Call her doctor,’ said George, over the limp, light body. ‘I’d rather he was here.’
He put off Mrs Beck, who was clawing frantically at her darling and spilling unwonted and painful tears, with a lunge of one shoulder, and carried his burden to the couch. ‘Tom, you get him. Use my name, he’ll come all the quicker.’
Tom got as far as the telephone before he realised that he did not even know which doctor they favoured, and there being no emergency notes on the scratch-pad to enlighten him, he was forced to come and drag Beck away from the couch to supply the information he needed. Annet was lying motionless and pale by then, a pillow under her cheek, her body stretched carefully at ease, the narrow skirt drawn down over her knee, surely by George Felse. Tom dialled with an erratic finger, hating George more for his deftness and humanity even than for his official menace. What right had he? What right? To strike her down, and then to be the one who held her in his arms, and laid her down so gently among the cushions, and stroked back the tumbled hair from her eyes with such assured fingers.
‘Doctor Thorpe? I’m speaking for Mr Beck at Fairford. Can you come out here at once, please? Yes, it’s urgent. Miss Beck – Annet – she’s in a faint. Detective-Inspector Felse is here, he told me to ask you to hurry. I don’t know – a degree of shock, I suppose – he urges you to come as soon as possible. Good, thank you!’
He hung up, and his hand was shaking so that the receiver rattled in the rest. He went back to the living-room with Beck clinging close on his arm.
Mrs Beck had control of herself again; the traces of her few and angry tears mottled her cheeks, her ruled dark hair, dull from many tintings, was shaken out of its customary severity, but she was herself again, and would not be overwhelmed a second time. George had withdrawn and left Annet to her; not, it seemed, from any embarrassment or incompetence on his own part, rather to provide her with something urgent and practical to do, for he did not withdraw far, and he watched her ministrations with a close and sombre regard.
‘Is she subject to fainting fits?’
‘I’ve never known her faint before.’ She gave him a furious look over her daughter’s body. ‘You frightened her. You shocked her.’
‘She could have read most of the same details in tonight’s paper,’ said George, ‘but I doubt if they’d have had the same effect. She wouldn’t have realised then what she knows now – that it happened forty yards away from her, while she was waiting for her – friend. There are things she knows that I didn’t have to tell her. Such as where he was while she stood waiting for him. If he’d been round the other corner in the tobacconist’s, buying cigarettes, I think Annet would have stood the shock of an unknown old man’s death without collapsing.’
‘But, good God!’ protested Tom, twisting away from the thought, ‘you’re making out that she kept watch for him on the corner while he did it.’
‘That’s one possibility. There are others.’
He didn’t go into them. He stood looking down at the pale, motionless face on the cushions, pinched and blue at the corners of the closed lips, a strange, faint frown, austere and distant, clenched upon her black brows. The silken wings of her hair spread blue-black on either side, buoyed up on the resilient down of the pillow like a drowned girl’s hair afloat on water.
So slight, and so remote; and so incalculable. Was it possible to know her so well that she would some day be able to take down all the barriers and be relaxed and at peace with you? He’d never had much close contact with her. It might be only that unbelievably touching beauty of hers that made him feel her exile from her fellow-men to be something imposed from without, and not chosen. That, and her age. She could have been Dominic’s year-older sister. He would have liked a girl. So would Bunty, but there’d just never been one. Did she remain closed like an ivory box with a secret spring even when she was with X? Or open like a flower to the sun? The inescapable X. X who must be found, because he had almost certainly killed a solitary, eccentric, miserly old man for the contents of his till and the sweepings of three show-cases.
‘You haven’t proved she was even there,’ said Beck, stirred to the feeble man’s desperate bravery. ‘There must be many girls who fit the same description equally well. You see Annet’s ill. She never faints. She was wandering somewhere all the week-end, and she’s ill and frightened, and you have to use her so brutally.’
‘I’m sorry if you think I was brutal. I don’t think I was guilty single-handed of cutting the ground from under Annet’s feet. Someone else did that. When he hit the old man. No,’ he said, looking down bitterly at the slow, languid heave and fall of Annet’s breast, ‘I haven’t proved she was there. I haven’t proved she was the girl on the corner. I didn’t have to. Annet told us that, pretty plainly. The only thing she has told us yet.’
But it wasn’t; not quite. She had told him, however unwillingly, the depth and height and hopelessness and helplessness of the love that was eating her alive. If they hadn’t seen it, if they had no means of measuring or grasping it, that was their failure; and it looked as if that inadequacy in them might yet be the death of Annet. A little honest brutality might have cheered and warmed her, and brought her close enough to confide.
He looked up and caught Tom Kenyon’s eye upon him. There was one who wasn’t going to dispute his contention that Annet had betrayed herself. He’d wanted a reaction from her, and he’d got it at last, and it identified her only too surely.
‘But you realise, don’t you,’ said Tom with careful quietness, ‘that she’s absolved herself, too? Oh, I know! If it wasn’t Annet your witness saw, why should this be such a shock to her? But since it is such a shock, she can’t have known. Can she? She can’t have known anything about the murder, maybe not even about the robbery. She was there, yes, but quite innocently, waiting for him. She thought he was buying something, maybe a present for her. It was only because of their joint escapade that she wouldn’t admit where she’d been. To keep him out of trouble, yes, but not that trouble – because she knew nothing about that until you just told her. Why else should it drop her like a shot?’
George said: ‘You make a pretty good case. If this is genuine, of course.’
‘If it’s genuine! My God, man, look at the poor kid!’
No need to tell him that, he’d hardly taken his eyes off her. But he didn’t commit himself to any opinion about the nature of this collapse. He’d been in the world and his profession long enough to know that deception has many layers, and women know the deepest of them. No question of Annet’s unconsciousness now, no doubt of her anguish; but he had known self-induced illnesses and self-induced collapses before, as opportune as this, as disarming as this, sometimes even deceiving their victims and manipulators. When you can’t bear any more, when you want the questioning to stop, when you need time to think, you cut off the sources of reason and force and light, and drop like a dead bird off its roost in a frosty night. And as long as you stay darkened and silenced, no one can torment you.
Annet remained dark and silent a disquietingly long time. Cold water bathing her forehead brought no flicker to her pinched face.
‘We’d better get her to bed,’ her mother said. ‘Arthur, help me with her.’
‘I’ll carry her upstairs for you.’
George stooped and slid an arm under the girl’s shoulders, very gently easing her weight into balance against his breast. Her head rolled limply upon his shoulder, the black wing of glossy hair swung, and hid her face. Inside the loose collar of her yellow sweater a narrow thread of black velvet ribbon lay uncovered against the honeyed pallor of her neck. It moved with her weight, dipping between her little breasts.
He held her cradled against him, and ran his fingers round her neck beneath the fragrant drift of hair. There was a neat little bow tied there in the ribbon; he eased it ro
und until he could untie it, and she never stirred, not even when he laid the loosened ends together, and drew out the treasure she had concealed between her breasts.
He held it out for them all to see, dangling on its ribbon: a narrow circlet of gold, a brand-new wedding ring.
They were upstairs with her a long time, the mother and the doctor, but they came down at last. George, who had sat all the time looking down with a shadowed face and dangling the ring by its ribbon, rose to meet them. He could think of nothing in his life that had filled him with so deep a sense of shame as the act of filching that tiny thing from her while she lay senseless; the most private and precious thing she possessed, the symbol of everything she wanted, and he could not let her keep it. He weighed it in his hand, and it was heavier than it should have been with all the inescapable implications that clung to it.
The old man’s assistant, who had left him just preparing to lock up on Saturday night, had made an inventory of the stolen pieces, as far as his memory served him. There was no question as to whether he would be able to identify the ring; a tiny private mark was scratched beside the assay marks inside it, whoever had had it in his stock would know it.
‘Has she come round?’
‘How is she?’
Two of them asked together; Arthur Beck, suddenly piteously old and withered, only trembled and waited.
‘Yes, she’s come round.’ Doctor Thorpe closed his bag and looked from one to another of them with quick, speculative grey eyes. ‘But you won’t be able to question her any more tonight.’
The slight antagonism in his voice was human enough, in the circumstances, but George’s ear was becoming acutely tuned to every inflection that concerned Annet. Thirty-five, not bad-looking, in professional attendance on her for five years or so — on those rare occasions, at least, when she needed attention: yes, this might very well be another of her many mute, unnoticed victims.
‘I wasn’t thinking of trying. Is she going to be all right?’
‘Physically there’s not much the matter with her. It was a long faint, but she came out of it fairly well in the end. She seems to be in a state of deep and genuine shock, but physically she’s as strong as a horse, there’ll be no ill effects. Just leave her alone for tonight, that’s all.’
‘Will you come in and see her tomorrow morning? I’d like to have your all-clear before I talk to her again, and I’ll go very gently. But it’s urgent that it should be as soon as possible.’
‘Very well,’ said the doctor with tightening lips, ‘I’ll look in and see her before surgery. Call me about nine, and I’ll give you my report.’
‘When she’s slept on it she may be willing to talk to me freely. I think you must see it’s the best, the only thing she can do to help herself now. If you have any influence with her, try to get her to realise it.’ He included all of them in that request, and saw the doctor’s tight, reserved face ease a little. ‘I’ve got a job to do, but it isn’t to hurt Annet. A part of it is to save whatever can be saved for her.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said the doctor.
‘Do one thing more for me, will you? With your permission, Mr Beck, I want to put a constable on guard here in your grounds. I’d be obliged, doctor, if you’d stay here with Annet until he arrives.’
They stared eye to eye for a second, then the doctor said quietly: ‘Very well, I’ll go back to her.’
Beck turned and shuffled his way to the stairs after him, a wretched, wilted figure, babbling feeble daily platitudes, trying to pretend there was a grain of normality left in his life, where there was nothing but a waste of wreckage like a battlefield.
‘I’ll be off now,’ said George, glad, if anything, to be left confronting Mrs Beck, with whom, it was clear, he would have to deal if he wanted to get sense out of anyone. ‘I shall have to take this ring with me, you understand that?’
‘Yes, I understand.’ She looked down pallidly at the thin, bright circlet. ‘Do you think – is it possible that they—?’
‘I think it very unlikely. This is a symbol, that’s all. And a promise. It isn’t so easy to get married in a hurry without a fair amount of money, and you see they can’t have had much between them.’
She flinched at that, his sound reasons for thinking so were only too clear.
‘And in the circumstances,’ he said gently, ‘I think you should hope and pray that they didn’t manage it.’
She whispered: ‘Yes!’ hardly audibly.
‘Don’t let her go to work tomorrow, even if she wants to. I want you to keep a close guard on her, and hold her available only to us. Don’t take anyone into your confidence, not yet, at any rate. Better telephone Mrs Blacklock in the morning, and say Annet has a return of her cold.’
‘Yes,’ she said again, dully, ‘I expect that would be best.’
‘And I need, if you have one, a good recent picture of her.’
Photographs of Annet were so few in the house, now Tom came to think of it, that their rarity shed light on her absence of vanity. When had he even seen her peering at her make-up in a mirror with the devoted attention of most girls? Mrs Beck brought a postcard portrait, the latest she had, and George pocketed it after one thoughtful glance again at the lovely, troubling face.
‘Thank you. You shall have it back, I promise you.’ Would she get the original back as surely? He wished he knew the answer to that. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. And believe me, I’m sorry!’
‘I’ll see you out,’ said Tom, and followed him from the room and out through the dim hall, into the moist, mild night. The front door closed almost stealthily upon the tragedy within.
‘It can’t be true!’ said Tom, suddenly in total revolt. The rupture was too brutal and extreme between this immemorial border stability, the continuity that made nothing of wars and centuries and dissensions, and that abrupt and strident descent into the cheapest and shallowest of ephemeral crimes. A mean little incident, a quick raid and a random blow, merely for money, for the means to buy things for Annet, to take Annet about in style – everything Annet didn’t want. The offence against her, the debasing of her immoderate love, almost as capital a crime as the killing of the old man. She couldn’t have known. It was the death of everything she had wanted from love. No, she couldn’t possibly have known.
‘It can,’ said George grimly. ‘It happens all the time.’
Did he mean merely this sordid, characteristic latter-day killing for profit, or the unbelievable misunderstanding and profanation of love implied in it? There was no knowing; he was so much deeper than he seemed, you only saw the abyss when you were already falling.
‘We think we have sound relationships,’ said George, answering the doubt beyond doubt, ‘and suddenly there’s a word said or a thing done, so shatteringly out of key that you find yourself alone, and know you’ve never actually touched your partner at any point, or said a word in the same language. And it doesn’t always even absolve you from loving, when it happens. That’s the hell of it.’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Tom, ‘except tell you everything I know. There’s only one thing you haven’t heard already. They don’t know about it, I never told them, but I went over the Hallowmount yesterday morning, early, to see if there were any signs of a vehicle having been up there recently. I found tracks of a motorbike or a scooter, there’s no telling which.’ He described them, and traced them again to the first gate. ‘It seemed to me that someone must have brought her back that way, the night before. After the showers this afternoon the grass and moss will have sprung back and smoothed them out, most likely, but there may be a trace left here and there. And I can show you exactly where they were.’
‘Then you shall, early tomorrow. If you wouldn’t mind turning out about seven? The track up from the south – Abbot’s Bale and beyond. Yes, I see that,’ said George, musing darkly under the hollies by the gate. ‘But why the same route back? She left in broad daylight, without luggage, in her everyday clothes, and that imp
robable way. All very understandable. But in the dark he could surely have come round and dropped her quietly at the corner of the lane.’
‘But not without using up quite a bit more time over his return, because he’d have had to come right round the hill, one end or the other. And maybe it was urgent that he should get home. He may have watchful parents, too,’ said Tom with a hollow smile.
‘Probably has! They often turn out to belong to the most respectable citizens around,’ reflected George wryly, ‘and they’re always at a loss to understand what they’ve done to deserve it.’
‘But Annet—’ He looked up briefly and bitterly at the lighted window; no shadows moved across the pale curtains. ‘Do you have to put a police guard on her? Where could she run to, even if she tried to get out?’
‘I wasn’t thinking so much of Annet running,’ said George in a deceptively mild and deprecating voice. He caught the wondering glance that questioned his purpose, and said more abruptly, with no expression at all: ‘Hasn’t it dawned on you that this lover of hers has killed once already? And that only Annet knows who he is?’
He walked away into the dark. Shaken to the heart, Tom protested softly and wildly after him: ‘He wouldn’t hurt her? Damn it, he loves her!’
‘He did,’ came wafting back to him hollowly as the car door slammed. ‘Before he was frightened for himself.’
Mrs Beck was nowhere to be seen when Tom went back into the house; and Beck was sitting slumped in a chair, clutching a glass that shook in his hands and slopped shivering waves of whisky and soda on to his trousers. When he lifted it to his mouth it chattered against his false teeth, when he propped it steadyingly against his body it chattered against his waistcoat buttons. His glasses sagged sidelong down his nose, exposing one moist, hopeless eye, while the other was still seen monstrously magnified behind the lens. He must have downed one drink already, and spilled half of it. And he hadn’t forgotten to get out a second glass. Tom’s heart sank at sight of it, though he needed at least one shot, perhaps, to steady him. If this was going to be the way of escape, he wanted no part of it, he needed all his wits, he had thinking to do. And yet how could he go away and leave this wretched wreck to sweat and shiver alone? He wasn’t fit to be left.
