‘So I gather,’ said Alice Riddick grimly. ‘Listen, my dear—will you be all right for to-night? Because I’ll get to you by lunch-time to-morrow, even if I have to steal one of the Radcliffe ambulances and a driver with it… Will that do?’
Helen’s heart sank. It wouldn’t do, of course; it wasn’t nearly soon enough. But she still had reserves of pride to draw on, and she drew on them now.
‘Yes, thank you, Alice, that’s marvellous. Bless you.’
‘And in the meantime, get yourself a lawyer, and don’t go making statements to the police, even if they happen to be true.’
Helen laughed tremulously. ‘It’s Sherlock Holmes I really need, not a lawyer so much. Alice, it’s all so—’
‘Sherlock Holmes? Now I wonder if— Oh no. He’s away.’
‘What were you going to say?’
‘I was going to say I might have brought Gervase along with me. It sounds as if it might be in his line. But I was trying to get in touch with him yesterday, and apparently he’s been out of Oxford since Friday, and no one seems to know, quite, where he is.’
‘Gervase?’
‘Gervase Fen. Didn’t you ever come across him when you were up?’
‘No, I don’t think I did. He’s Professor of English, isn’t he? I’ve heard of him, of course.’
‘Yes… Well, I shall just have to see what I can do on my own. Helen, it is—it is manslaughter, isn’t it? I mean, they just imagine you’ve been careless about a prescription, or some nonsense like that?’
‘No, Alice. It’s murder.’
There was a second pause—a longer one.
‘Oh… Well, you’re still not to worry, child. No certainly innocent person has been executed for murder in England or America for the past fifty or a hundred years, and I see no reason at all why they should abandon the precedent in your case.’
‘Then you don’t believe I’d—’
‘Tush, child! Of course I don’t. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus, and your extreme lack of turpitude when you were reading medicine here was one of the most depressing human phenomena I’ve ever come across. If you’ve murdered anyone, I’m a Dutchman. So what I should do now, if I were you, is lock all your doors and windows, drink a bottle of gin and go to bed soused. In the morning you’ll feel horrid, but benzedrine’ll cure that.’
This time Helen’s laughter was sincere. ‘Thank you, darling. I dare say I’m just being a nervy fool, and I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, but—well, if you only knew the things that have been happening to me…’
‘Tell me in the morning. I’ll be there. And if you want to ring me in the night, go ahead. I can’t sleep a wink with this bloody toe, anyway.’
‘Oh, Alice, I’m so sorry about that. However did it happen?’
‘An old fool of a don called Wilkes ran over it on his bicycle.’
‘Oh, Alice!’
‘Yes, child, I know it’s funny. That’s been borne in on me with increasing force every time I’ve mentioned it to anyone. But you just try it, that’s all I say.’
‘I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to giggle. I know it must be damnably painful.’
‘It belongs,’ said Miss Riddick philosophically, ‘to the same class of affliction as warts on the behind. One doesn’t expect sympathy; all one hopes is that people won’t actually make themselves sick with laughing…But that’s enough about me. Keep cheerful, child, and I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Well, Alice, if you’re sure…’
‘I’m sure. God bless.’
Helen rang off. And that was when a man’s voice, immediately behind her, said:
‘I’m so sorry, but—’
She swung round, her brief spell of reassurance dissolved on the instant in panic terror. ‘Who—’
‘Please.’ He put strong hands on her shoulders to steady her. ‘Your front door was open, and I heard your voice, so I came in. I’m sorry if I frightened you.’
Helen went limp. ‘Mr. Datchery,’ she said, and began to laugh. She laughed quietly, without hysteria, until the laughter turned to tears. With her head on Mr. Datchery’s shoulder she cried some of the wretchedness out of her; and when her sobs began to diminish he said briskly:
‘Without at all wishing to alarm you further, I think I ought to mention that the hall is flooded and we’re both of us about to go under for the third time.’
She broke away from him, flushed beneath her tears. ‘I—I don’t know what you’ll be thinking of me,’ she said with a doleful sniff. ‘I—I d-don’t always weep on the s-shoulders of strange men. And every time we’ve met so far—’
‘Every time we’ve met so far,’ he said gravely, ‘I’ve felt, I admit it, a little like a feast at a skeleton. But that’s hardly been your fault.’ He offered her a silk handkerchief. ‘You look awful,’ he added more cheerfully. ‘There, there, don’t drop it about. Wipe your face with it, and if you smear your lipstick like that it’ll look as if you’ve been drinking blood. Your collar’s undone. Your hair’s coming down. As soon as you’re ready you can offer me some beer, if there is any in the house.’
‘Oh, don’t bully me,’ said Helen. ‘I’ve been so miserable, and—’
‘No doubt you have. But just as it happens, there’s very little left for you to worry about now. What I’ve come to ask—’
‘Wait,’ Helen told him, and fled upstairs.
Five minutes later she returned, looking, except for the pallor, her normal self again, to find Mr. Datchery in the sitting-room, loudly singing a hymn to the accompaniment of her father’s harmonium. ‘Greenland’s icy mountains,’ he murmured, desisting from this performance as she came in. ‘And they’re not quite so irrelevant as you might at first think. That looks better, I must say. Will you take my word for it, please, that no one suspects you any longer of murdering dominies or writing anonymous letters? I’ve just come from talking to Colonel Babington and Inspector Casby about it, so I ought to know.’
Helen said: ‘Who are you?’
He chuckled. ‘I’m a friend of a friend of yours. But never you mind who I am. The point is, do you believe what I’ve just said?’
‘Yes!’ cried Helen. ‘Yes! But in that case, the steel I had—’
‘Ah. The steel. You’ve been fretting about that, have you? Quite right, too. Of course, it was in fact your steel which killed Rubi,’ he added dispassionately, as an afterthought.
‘But—’
‘But there’s still a loose end to be tied in, you were going to say. I quite agree. And that’s why I’m here. There’s only one question I need to ask, so you must answer it very carefully.’
Helen braced herself. ‘Yes?’
‘What sort of books’—Mr. Datchery’s pale-blue eyes were directed ruminatively towards the ceiling—‘what sort of books did Beatrice Keats-Madderly read?’
‘I—I beg your pardon?’
‘Who,’ Mr. Datchery elaborated with a gracious air, ‘were her favourite authors?’
Helen stared helplessly at him. ‘But you can’t be serious!’
‘Of course I can be serious. I often am. I am now.’ Mr. Datchery had by this time left the harmonium in order to lower his long, lean body into an armchair, where he sprawled gracelessly. ‘Do answer,’ he said waspishly after a moment.
‘Well, I—I suppose,’ said Helen in a daze, ‘that Emma Paton was her favourite novelist. She used to enthuse about her an awful lot, and—’
‘So!’ exclaimed Mr. Datchery in a guttural, Teutonic manner. ‘Also gut! That, you know,’ he said more mildly, ‘is just the answer I wanted.’
‘But what has it got to do with—’
‘With the Cotten Horror? A good deal. You’d be surprised. May I use your telephone?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s—oh well, you know where it is, don’t you?’
She sat bewildered for a while after he had gone out of the room, trying vainly to assemble her thoughts into a coherent pattern. But there was renewed hope for her now, a
nd she was content to struggle no longer, to let events carry her wherever they would… Mr. Datchery had left the sitting-room door open, and she realized presently that she could hear him talking on the telephone.
‘Look here, Emma, when I take the trouble to ring you up I don’t expect to be treated to a great diatribe about not writing for six years.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well, but we were both much younger in those days.’
‘I don’t regard it as an unchivalrous thing to say, at all.’
‘No, I haven’t read any of your books for decades. I’ve read some reviews of them.’
‘Do let me get to the point, or you’ll be running me into another one-and-ninepence. What I want to know is whether you’ve had a fan-letter recently from a woman named Beatrice Keats-Madderly, living in a place called Cotten Abbas.’
‘Nonsense, you don’t get as many fan-letters as all that.’
‘Well, go and look, then.’
A pause.
‘You have? Did you answer it?’
‘No, I know I don’t answer letters, but that’s not the point.’
‘Well, when?’
‘You think Thursday definitely. And it’d be posted that day?’
‘It would. Excellent. In your own hideous scrawl, I take it.’
‘Well, there’s no need to jump down my throat like that. Violet ink as usual?’
‘Yes, good. And of course, it wouldn’t be the sort of letter that’d invite or imply any further correspondence between you.’
‘My language is not pedantic.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘There are the pips.’
‘Well, if you want to go on talking we must reverse the charges.’
‘Quick, or it’ll be another three minutes.’
‘Of course not. Good-bye.’
‘I said, good-bye.’
An extremely long pause.
‘Oh, do listen, there are the pips again.’
Half a minute later Mr. Datchery returned to the sitting-room, counting out three-and-sixpence from his trousers pocket into the palm of his hand. This sum he deposited conscientiously on the mantelpiece. ‘Did you hear?’ he asked. ‘You were meant to.’
Helen nodded. ‘All except the very beginning. But’—she gestured helplessly—‘but what does it all mean?’
He might have explained it then, had there been opportunity; but as it turned out, there was not. Even as Helen spoke, a car, driven fast, pulled up outside the house with a squeal of brakes, and they heard its occupants hurrying up the path to knock violently at the front door. With Mr. Datchery at her heels, Helen ran to meet them. The thick, unshaven face of Harry Rolt loomed up in the dim light of the hall, and Constable Burns was behind him.
‘My girl,’ said Rolt succinctly. ‘Not here, is she?’
Helen shook her head. ‘But what—’
‘Not been home all day, not since she found that chap’s body. But Burns here, he says he saw her eavesdropping at the window when the Inspector and me were having our talk.’
Burns started to explain: ‘She ran off, though, when I called to her, and by the time I got round the side of the house—’ But Mr. Datchery interrupted him.
‘Your talk,’ he said sharply, ‘about what?’
Rolt eyed him with momentary hostility. ‘I don’t know who the hell you are to ask questions,’ he said unpleasantly, ‘but if you must know, we happened to be talking about me being the only one in the village as knew about Beatrice Keats-Madderly’s birth. And what I’m afraid of—’
He stopped, for once irresolute and unsure of himself.
Very distantly, on the main-line railway which skirted the village, they heard the whistle of a train.
Chapter Fifteen
‘A bridge,’ said Mr. Datchery. ‘A railway-bridge stuck in the middle of a field, somewhere out in the Brankham direction. I’m not sure that I could find my way back to it, but you’ll know where it is. And I suggest we get there quickly.’
There are some voices you do not think to question. Looking back on it afterwards, recreating in her mind’s eye the shadowy hall with the wind still rising in the darkness outside the open door, Helen realized that neither to herself nor to the other two, in that moment of crisis, did it occur to require of Mr. Datchery the why and wherefore of his unexplained assurance. The door had slammed behind them, and they were out in the night, before another word was spoken—and that word was addressed by Rolt not to Mr. Datchery but to Burns, by way of confirming the whereabouts of the place that had been described. Then, silent again, they were hurrying down the path to the gate, and with Rolt at the wheel—Burns beside him, Helen and Mr. Datchery in the back—the big, battered car leaped forward, twenty horses strong, to skid with a screech of stretched tyres round the angle of the church and accelerate fiercely along the main street.
Helen never kept any clear impression of that short and hectic ride. She could remember the smell of petrol and of stale cigar smoke; could remember that by a common trick of the retina it was the clouds which seemed to her to be fixed and the moon which seemed to be anchorless; could remember her finger’s finding and enlarging a hole in the leather upholstery of the seat on which she sat, her nail scratching at the soft, damp kapok inside. But these were isolated images; the sum of them she could never recall. And the silence which lay heavy on them was broken only once, when Mr. Datchery said abruptly:
‘Is there an express due?’
The dashboard light was in a hollow hood projecting above the instrument-panel. Burns leaned forward, twisted the hood to turn it on, glanced at his wrist-watch. The small glow-worm of light vanished again.
‘In five minutes,’ he said.
Then they were out of the village, among trees, meadows, hedges. All of them had known where they were going; all of them now knew why. The headlamps converged to a white splash on the empty road, and fitfully, whenever the clouds uncovered her, the moon blanched them with her own light, as a fire in a room will grow cold under the sun’s rays. The wind was blowing not uniformly but in violent, unpredictable gusts, like buffets from the ragged hem of an immense rough garment, and the trees seethed with it. Dust, piled up during the long, windless drought, whirled round them in clouds, eddying violently wherever the thrust of their progress conflicted with the direction of the wind. And all along the banks, the June wildflowers bent their thready stems as the car passed. ‘Easy, sir,’ said Burns, as the Humber approached a sharp bend without slackening speed. ‘Easy does it…’ Andthen Mr. Datchery grunted as Helen was flung against him, and the hedges wheeled in dizzying ellipse, and they were in the straight again… Helen lost all sense of time; at one moment it seemed to her that they had already covered many long miles, at another that the slam of the front door, as they left the house, was still vibrating in her ears. She found out afterwards that in sober fact the whole journey had taken them three minutes exactly.
Helen, Burns, and Mr. Datchery were out of the car before it stopped, and scrambling over the stile which gave access to the right-of-way across the field they sought. Gasping painfully from the unaccustomed effort, Rolt followed, and then they were all of them running, stumbling in the darkness on tussocks of uncropped grass at the path’s verge, in the direction in which they knew the old bridge to lie. Knew, and presently saw. For now the moon was unveiled again, and they could make out the flattened arcs of the stone parapet, and the geometrical belt of shadow, at the field’s crest, which marked the shallow cutting. For an instant they paused, straining their eyes for what more the moon might show. But they were still too far off for certainty, and so in another moment they were running again, running towards a shadow whose edge—as more cloud spread like a stain over the bright disc overhead—raced to meet them across the uneven slope. In six strides the darkness reclaimed them.
It was uphill the last part of the way. They struggled on, spaced out now according to their physical capacity: Burns ahead, then Mr. Datche
ry, then Helen, with Rolt a good way to the rear. The wind blew hard against their faces, thrusting their expired breath back into their mouths and overfilling their lungs when they sucked air in; where there were drops of sweat on their foreheads it struck chill. Helen tripped, and only recovered her balance by a convulsive movement which strained a muscle in her thigh. Then the ground became level again, and the wire fence which guarded the cuttings lip loomed up in front of her. In the black depths below, the metal of the rails gleamed very faintly, and far along to the right was the single eye of a green signal-light. She heard again the whistle of the approaching engine, and from behind her, as if released by the sound, Rolt’s voice spoke.
‘Pen!’ it called in agony. ‘Pen, girl! Pen!’
The clouds were like smoke, without depth or cohesion, spindrift-thin. Through a rent in one of them the moon looked out again. And Helen saw.
In the last stages of the ascent she had evidently strayed unawares from the path, so that the bridge was now a hundred yards to her left, with the blurred figures of Burns and Mr. Datchery between her and it. You could distinguish details—weeds sprouting from crevices in the crumbling stone, a flustered night-bird clapping his wings on the bare bough of a dying oak, the wind—whipped swaying of the tall brome-grass. But Helen had no attention to spare for any of these things; they somehow found lodgement in her mind, so that later she was able to recollect them, but the whole of her consciousness was fixed, in that moment of revelation, on the slender figure, ghostly in the moonlight, which stood at the centre of the bridge, gazing across the nearer of the two parapets in the direction from which the train would come. Its hair was tangled. Its eyes glittered like a cat’s as the head turned. And in the instant that Helen became aware of it, it moved, climbing swiftly on to the parapet to stand there balanced precariously against the wind. Burns started to run again, with Mr. Datchery after him. But they had not taken half a dozen steps before words from the poised figure, shaky yet shrill and clear, halted them.
‘Don’t come near!’ called Penelope Rolt. ‘Don’t come near or I’ll jump!’
The Long Divorce Page 16
