CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I took hold of her hands. She did not avoid mine, but she put them decisively away from her. Her own hands were very cold. I said, ‘Carol, Elizabeth’s dead now. You know that.’
She stood there looking up at me, and when she spoke, it was in the voice I first remembered. Stella had called her a minute white woman with a voice to match. She said, ‘Jake, what happened? I must know what happened.’
‘You know as well as I do. She went into the wood with her recording stuff. I was away in London, but she must have gone into the wood in the evening, because that was when she hoped to get what she wanted. Your husband must have turned the pigs into the wood earlier that day, didn’t he? I don’t think they were there when I left in the morning. I suppose Elizabeth didn’t know they were there. I got back very late. I’d ditched the car in the storm. I assumed Elizabeth was in bed. It was only in the morning I realised she hadn’t been in her room all night. But in any case it was probably all over long before I got home.’
She shook her head very slowly from side to side. It was so like Dennis Wainwright’s trick that it startled me, but that was silly. She had been married to him for long enough. ‘But why?’ she said. ‘Why did they go for her like that? There was nothing to make them, unless— Pigs don’t attack as a rule. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know anything about Tamworths. With ordinary pigs – no, I agree. They don’t attack unless there’s something to set them off.’
‘Blood,’ said Carol. It was quite unexpectedly horrible, hearing her say it in that little flat voice. I suppose I had still got blood on the brain a bit. ‘Blood,’ she said again. ‘If there’s blood about, they go for it. Tamworths are no different. All pigs do it. She must have been injured first, or they wouldn’t have done what they did.’
I said, ‘You know that, do you? No one else has said so. It’s true, of course. I’ve seen some terrible things with one of a herd accidentally injured. I didn’t expect you to know. Does your husband?’
‘Dennis? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he knows anything about pigs except what he’s just read up. Why should he? But you knew, didn’t you, Jake?’
We stood there looking at each other for quite a while after that. We had been, to my immediate knowledge, the breath of life to each other after years of slow suffocation. Now we stood looking at each other through a barrier as translucent and impermeable as plate glass. I did not say, ‘You can’t think I killed her,’ because it was obviously untrue. She could think so. Somehow or other I had to persuade her not to.
I said, ‘But your husband had it in for her over those trees. He must have. He must have known it was mostly her doing that he was stopped. They’d have told him. I’d even warned her to be careful of him. I thought he was dangerous. Whether or not he knew the pigs might attack her doesn’t matter. She could have been dead or dying before they touched her.’
‘But Dennis didn’t want Elizabeth out of the way. Why should he? You saw her as a barrier in your way – all right, Jake, in our way. But for Dennis she was a safeguard, for the same reason.’
‘Only if he knew about us.’
‘He did know about us. I told him.’
I stared at her. I felt something very like sheer physical nausea. I said, ‘But—’ Her face was quite expressionless. ‘But you said he mustn’t know. When did you tell him, Carol? I don’t understand.’
‘When I decided it was no use going on. It was the only way to stabilise things.’
A wave of the most appalling hopelessness rolled over me. I do not pretend to logic in the matter, but what I felt most clearly was a sense of betrayal. I said, ‘Do you mean he accepted it?’
‘I don’t know what he did. He hasn’t said or done anything.’
‘He has, in fact. He wrote to me through my solicitor. Did you know?’
‘No. How should I? When was this?’
‘The day before Elizabeth died. No, two days before. Don’t you see? He wrote to them and they rang up and asked me to go and see them. That was why I went to London that day. I couldn’t know I was going to run into trouble coming home – nobody could, for that matter – but as I say, the thing was done by then. Even if I’d got in at the expected time, Elizabeth would still have been dead by the time I got here. But it was his letter took me to London.’
‘Did it have to take you to London?’
‘It was a very odd letter. My solicitors would be very likely to want to discuss it with me, and in fact did.’
‘He couldn’t know you’d go up straight away like that.’
‘He knew in fact I had gone. He was in the garden when I left. I saw him.’
‘He couldn’t know you were going to London.’
‘At that time of the morning? Where else would I be going? Everyone gets the 7.40 from Burtonbridge.’
She gave me a look of such dreadful unhappiness that my whole heart melted towards her. She said, ‘But I can’t think he’d have done it. It’s not only a matter of character. That might cut both ways, I admit. But I still don’t see why he should.’
‘Where was he that evening?’
‘All right, I don’t know. Not in the house, but I don’t know where.’
I nodded. ‘Leave it for the moment,’ I said. ‘About me. You talked about character. Do you think it is in my character to have done it?’
She had drawn back away from me again. She spoke in her small, dispassionate voice, looking at me from what seemed a great distance. ‘I think you could, yes. Not by premeditation, probably. More in a moment of extreme frustration, even irritation. You wanted her dead, Jake. All right, so did I. Nothing else would do. But it’s no good if you killed her.’
I shook my head despairingly. ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Of course I wanted her dead. When you laid down the terms you did, I knew nothing else would do. Now that she is dead, and by no act of mine, I want you to leave your husband and marry me as soon as you decently can. But if you won’t until you are convinced I didn’t kill her, I shall have to try and find out what really happened. Will you at least suspend judgment and give me a chance to do that?’
She said, ‘If Dennis killed Elizabeth, I’ll do whatever you like. But I must know. Now let me go. You mustn’t come back along the beach with me, or even after me. You must turn inland and go home by the mere.’ She left me as abruptly as she always had, even when everything had been perfect between us. I did as she wanted. I walked up the beach and over the coarse grass of the narrow strip that was neither beach nor land. When I came to the first of the stone walls that bounded the fields, I turned right until I came to a gate. Then I crossed the field and went eastward again, looking for another gate. By the time I had made my distance eastwards, I had the cold flat water of the mere between me and the Holt House. Then I turned south and made for the road.
It was a dark, appallingly dreary afternoon. As I came down towards the gate, I saw Stella standing at the top of the path that led down to the beach. She was quite motionless, silhouetted against the grey sky that ran down to a grey invisible sea. For some reason or other the words Dido, with a willow in her hands, upon the wild sea banks came into my head. The setting could hardly have been less suitable. As I watched her she turned and came back up the path.
She said, ‘Oh hullo, there you are. I somehow didn’t think you’d gone inland.’
‘I’m a bit off the sea-side,’ I said.
‘Well, yes.’ We turned in at the gate together. ‘But there’s no need to stay here, is there? You won’t, will you, not after this?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’ ‘But Jake—’
I had gone into the hall first and switched on the lights. It was not dark yet, but the house needed light. There was a quality, almost of desperation, in her voice that brought me round to face her. She stood a step lower than I did, looking up at me with the light direct on her face. The eyes were dark with tiredness and the cheekbones sharply mod
elled.
‘It was Elizabeth wanted to stay here, not you,’ she said. I noticed that ever since Elizabeth’s death Stella had always spoken of her by her full name, never the shortened form. It had a curiously depersonalizing effect. Elizabeth was already less an active element in our lives than a historical figure, sterilized by time.
‘No, not entirely,’ I said. ‘I told you I was not unhappy here, not in the place as such, I mean. I may move now, of course. But I’m not desperate to get away.’
‘This thing with the wood is settled, isn’t it? There’s nothing else to keep you here, is there?’
There came clearly into my mind the picture of a small figure, made tiny by the huge stretch before and behind it, walking steadily eastwards along the beach in the grey afternoon and another figure, tall and quite motionless, up there on the wild sea banks, watching it go by. ‘I somehow didn’t think you’d gone inland,’ Stella had said when she turned from her waiting and came up the path. I had wondered why at the time. I said, ‘I don’t feel like making any decision at the moment, that’s the truth.’
‘But you haven’t got to make a decision. There’s no hurry about that. All you want to do is get away from this place, even temporarily. Go to London for a bit. You could stay at your club, couldn’t you?’ She came into the hall and went past me, head back, looking straight in front of her. She had never had Elizabeth’s rather calculated grace of movement. She moved either hesitantly or as if she was forcing her way through unseen obstructions. Now she shouldered her way through the empty air between me and the kitchen door as if she was an ice-breaker in heavy pack-ice. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. I said it to her back, and she nodded briefly and disappeared into the kitchen.
Tea was a silent meal, but then so, without embarrassment, were most of my meals with Stella. After tea a growing restlessness drove me out into the wood. It was the first time since Elizabeth’s death. The light was going. I took a torch and the alpenstock. I took the alpenstock with elaborate casualness, but Stella was nowhere about and nobody saw me go. I climbed the stile, taking care, this time, not to drum on it with my staff. The wind blew in off the sea, and I moved, as always, under a roof of faint continuous sound, but all round me the wood was silent. I felt very strongly that it was empty, and that Dennis Wainwright had herded his Tamworths into a stock lorry and sent them back to wherever they had come from. But I did not know, and my conscious mind argued caution. I turned towards the north side of the wood, going as quietly as possible.
It was already not easy to be certain of the place, even when I came to it. The men who had gone out there had done their work with a sort of gloomy and scandalised thoroughness. We had had two nights, at least, of rain, and, wherever they were now, the pigs had gone over the ground at intervals, trampling everything into neutrality. There was blood now in the composition of the soil, but were there ten yards of land anywhere in southern England where the blood had not, at one time or another, called from the ground for vengeance? I do not know what I expected to find. I thought that, knowing as I did what must have happened, I might be able to find some evidence of it. In particular, I wanted to recover the heavy stick I had myself pushed into the ground. I went about the place silently, head down, looking but not touching anything. It occurred to me that I should present to an observer an almost classic picture of the guilty creature returning to the scene of his crime. But there was no observer and there had been, officially at any rate, no crime. I went off, as nearly as I could, on the line I had followed that dank early morning after the storm, starting along the fence on the north side of the wood and then turning inwards towards the central path. I did this several times, advancing my turning point slightly each time, but keeping the same line of movement south-westwards. I knew I had driven the end of the stick fairly solidly into the earth. I thought that was probably the top of the stick, as it had grown on the tree. If I could only get within sight of it, it ought to have the conspicuousness of an unnatural object in the natural tangle of the wood. No dead branch falling from its tree would drive itself into the earth as far as that or at that particular angle: and no stick grows upside down.
The odd thing is that when I did come to it, I remembered the place first and found the stick because I particularly looked for it. As I had thought, there was no mistaking the artificiality of the angle once you had seen it. The stick itself was a natural waste product of the wood, but an oak stick, even a stick from a holm oak, is massive compared with the quicker growing hardwoods. It looked a handy enough weapon to pick up casually. It was not a cut cudgel. I put out my hand to pull it out of the soft earth, and almost at once heard movements from the direction of the central path, not ten yards away. The feeling I had had before of suppositious guilt came over me strongly. I took my hand back, straightened myself and turned cautiously in the direction of the sounds. I could see nothing, but there was someone there. The sounds were clearly human sounds. It is difficult to say why this was obvious, but there was never any doubt about it. I did in fact take a tighter hold on the alpenstock and get it balanced ready for action. But it was Dennis Wainwright I was afraid of, not the big boar.
The sounds had stopped again, and I decided to make a move myself. So long as I had not been seen on the prowl, there was no great harm in my being where I was, and I badly wanted to know who else it was in the wood with me. I moved cautiously towards the path. I found that so long as I went carefully enough, the noise of the wind in the tops of the trees provided a reasonable cover for any sound I made. I hoped that whoever it was on the path had not heard my rather hesitant movements a dozen yards to the north of him. He could not have been making much attempt to conceal his own.
When I came out on to the path, I could see no one in either direction, but I thought whoever it was had moved westwards, in the direction of the Holt House. Obviously to move after him down the pathway invited an ambush, but it also made it possible, in that breathing, rustling wood, to move almost completely inaudibly. I did not believe, in fact, that he knew I was there. There was no reason why he should turn aside and wait for me, and the jinks in the path ought to make it possible at some point to get a sight of him without being seen. Using the alpenstock as a walking stick and moving as quietly as seemed reasonably possible, I made off westwards along the path.
There was a disconcerting moment when I saw the stile, with the last of the daylight behind it, ahead of me, but no figure between me and it. He must have turned off the path one way or the other, and for all I knew I might have walked straight past him. I stopped and spun round, half expecting to find him on my tail, but there was nothing on the path behind me. I was getting tired of playing hide-and-seek. I decided to walk straight down the remainder of the path, where I had at least every legal right to be, get over the stile and go home. It was getting dark in the wood now, and even if I saw the enemy, I might not be able to recognise him. It was time to cut my losses and break off the engagement.
I walked to the stile, going steadily but fairly quietly, half turned to climb it and saw the figure of a man standing in the western edge of the wood a few yards to my left. He stood with one hand on a tree trunk and the other in his pocket, leaning slightly forward and staring intently at the front of the Holt House. The last of the daylight just touched his face. There was no mistaking the elegant figure and splendid, jutting profile. It was Mr Grainger of Seele.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He would in any case have seen me when I got over the stile and walked across to the house. Whether I should, if I could, have pretended not to see him I do not know. I was still in two minds when the alpenstock clattered sharply against the stile and he spun round as if he had been shot at from behind. He had only seen me once, of course, in the driving seat of the car with Mr Greenslade beside me, but the number of people he was likely to meet in the wood at that hour was strictly limited. He knew me at once, and made a very creditable effort to get on some sort of reasonable terms with me before either of
us started talking. I thought I was prepared to like Mr Grainger, even across the barrier of his physical graces.
I said, ‘Mr Grainger, isn’t it?’ I put my ridiculous staff against the stile behind me. I saw that he was empty handed, and the thing embarrassed me.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Mr Haddon, of course.’ He took his hand away from the tree and came a few steps towards me. Then he stopped. ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of any conceivable reason why I should be here that you’d be likely to believe. In any case – well, there it is. I was looking for your sister-in-law, Miss Lancaster.’ He stopped and looked at me in the dusk. Then he said, ‘It seems an odd place to exchange formalities, but may I say how sorry I was to hear of your wife’s death?’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I confess myself interested to know why you should think that is a formality.’
He smiled. He had, as had been apparent from the first moment I saw him, a good deal of cheerful insolence in him. It would not endear him to many of the people he dealt with locally, particularly the husbands and fathers whose peace of mind his mere appearance must chronically threaten. I did not see it could do me any harm. He said, ‘Put it down mostly to unfortunate phrasing. Apart from that – I have in fact only one source of information about you and your household.’
‘Stella?’ I said.
‘Stella, of course.’
‘And Stella’s view was that any commiseration with me on the score of my wife’s death was in the nature of a formality?’
‘I don’t think she ever said so in so many words. That was certainly the impression she conveyed. I don’t expect you need to be told that there wasn’t much love lost between them.’
‘I don’t, no. But Stella’s opinion of her sister is not necessarily the same as my own.’
The Holm Oaks Page 14
