It was at this point that she heard the car.
She felt so much relief that for the moment she was quite herself again. It was the silence that had been so horrid. The familiar, comfortable sound of traffic on the King’s highway broke into this paralysing silence, and with it Hilary’s fear. Even the fog didn’t seem to be quite so dense, and she had the bright thought that the car would probably be running slow, and that she might be able to follow its tail-lights into Ledlington as a guide.
She pedalled along carefully, making up her mind that she had better jump off when the car was near so as to be sure of getting well out of the way. There would be plenty of time, because, as she could hear, the car wasn’t going at all fast. It couldn’t, of course. About ten miles an hour would be anyone’s limit, unless they wanted to run off the road at the first bend.
Afterwards Hilary could remember everything quite clearly down to this point. She particularly remembered thinking that she would be able to keep up with the car if it wasn’t doing more than ten miles an hour, but after that there was a confusion. There was light—and a noise. The car must have had its fog-light on or its headlights dipped. The noise was the car roaring down upon her, rushing into sudden speed—a big car. And she had jumped. If she hadn’t had the plan ready in her mind she wouldn’t have had time to jump clear, but because she had planned to jump off on to the grass as the car came near she did jump, and saved herself. Heat, and a grinding sound, and her head coming crash against something hard. Stars in the darkness—catherine wheels and golden rain—and then nothing at all. She had fallen heavily and knocked her head hard enough to be stunned for about a minute and a half. If it had been longer, there would have been no more Hilary Carew.
She came back to a pain in her head—to being lifted—to a voice that said, ‘Only stunned. Quick now, and we’ll make a job of it!’ She didn’t know the voice at all, and what it said had no meaning for her. Her mind was open, empty, and without power to grasp anything. The things that passed through it meant nothing to her at all. She knew that she had a pain in her head, nothing more. That was the whole world.
Something else came into this world. Grit—cold, wet grit against her mouth. Horrid. She moved, and touched something sharp, something that cut her hand. She wasn’t being lifted any more. She was lying on her face with grit in her mouth, her cheek on something wet, and hard, and cold. The road—she was lying in the road. She was lying on her face in the road. And she had cut her hand. It hurt. She had cut it on something sharp. She remembered the bicycle, and thought it was all smashed up, and how was she going to get into Ledlington now?
All these thoughts really took no time at all. Consciousness came back and they were there, waiting for the light to touch them. She became aware of two things simultaneously, and then a third. The car with its engine running, and its lights shining on her—those two things first. And then the slam of a door. Someone had slammed the door of the car.
The man at the wheel put the car into bottom gear and jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.
Hilary heard the sudden roar of the engine. It came to her as sound, as danger, as terror itself. The two men who had carried her from the grass verge had laid her on her face in the track of the car with the broken bicycle beside her. If you fall from a bicycle, you are most likely to fall on your face than on your back. The men had considered this, and they had laid Hilary on her face in the road. She would be found broken and dead in the morning, a casualty of the fog. If they had cared less for probabilities and had laid her on her back, the plan would have gone off without a hitch, but they had laid her on her face. A half-stunned girl on a wet and slippery road has just about twice as much chance of scrambling to her feet from this position.
At that roaring Hilary raised herself upon her hands, stared at the orange fog-light of the car, and saw it rush towards her. But as it rushed, she threw herself sideways—scrambling, slithering, thrusting herself up from the road. She got somehow to her feet and went blundering and stumbling across the grass verge until she was brought up short by a hedge. Blind terror has an instinct of its own. There were thorns which she did not feel, blackberry trails which came across her face, across her mouth, as she went down on her knees burrowing and groping to find a gap which would let her through. Her hair caught, her coat ripped, an interlacing tangle of twigs and branches held her back, but she pushed and struggled until she was through, and there on the other side of the hedge she crouched with her head on her knees and the stuff of her skirt clutched against her face to muffle the sound of her panting breaths. She was almost fainting, but not quite. Thought swung between oblivion and nightmare. Then steadied. They would come back. They would look for her. They mustn’t find her.
She got up and ran as fast as she could away across the field.
TWENTY
DOWN THE ROAD the car came to a standstill with a grinding of brakes. One of the men got out and ran back. There was a difference of opinion between him and the driver as to what had happened. The fog had made it impossible to see. The wheels had bumped over something. With any luck Miss Hilary Carew was a corpse.
He reached the spot. There was no corpse on the road. There was a good deal of smashed bicycle, scattered, fragmentary, and excessively dangerous. He trod on the rim of a wheel, and half a dozen broken spokes came flicking up at him, tearing his trouser leg and stabbing into the palm which he thrust out to fend them off. He swore, shouted, barked his shin on a pedal, and getting clear, ran back to the car.
All this took a minute or two. By the time explanations and recriminations had been bandied, and an electric lamp extracted from a crowded cubby-hole, Hilary had blundered into a second hedge. If she had not been so giddy she would have run straight down the deep field, and she would probably have been overtaken there, for the men soon found the place where she had forced her way through the first hedge. With the fog to help her she might have escaped, but there were two of them, able bodied and active, and they had a torch. They had also a great deal at stake. But then so had she, and if she was weak and shaken, her very weakness helped her and she had run anything but straight. Her head was swimming, and without knowing it she bore hard to the right. This took her across a corner of the field and brought her up short against a hedge which ran in from the road. She scrambled through it, being lucky enough to strike a gap, and then, finding her feet on a downhill slope, she followed them. They took her into a deep hollow place set about with bushes. When she got there she stopped, crouched down and trembling all over. The bushes closed her in and hid her, and the fog hid the bushes. Here, in this dreadful dark lonely place, like a hunted wild thing she had a sanctuary. The earth supported her shaking limbs. The darkness was a shelter. The stripped wintry bushes stood sentinel. If a foot moved against her, or a hand stretched out to do her harm, there would be an alarm, of snapping twig and creaking branch.
Gradually she relaxed. Her heart quieted. Her head cleared. She listened, and could hear no sound of pursuit.
After what seemed like a very long time a faint sound came to her, a sound of voices. Just that—just voices, just an indistinguishable murmur of sound a long way off. She strained in an agony, waiting for it to come nearer, to break upon her. Instead there was silence. Then, suddenly sharp and clear, the slam of a door, and upon that again an engine throbbing.
Hilary’s hands came together and held one another tight. They had got into the car, banged the door, and started the engine. They had given up looking for her, and they were going away. Oh, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful!
A cold drop trickled suddenly between her shoulder-blades. Suppose it was a trick. Suppose they were only pretending to go away. Suppose she climbed back into the road and found them waiting for her there. A hand at her throat—suddenly—in the dark. A voice behind the curtain of fog, whispering under its breath, ‘Quick, and we’ll make a job of it!’ They wouldn’t miss her a second time. The car would smash her as it had smashed the bicycle. She w
ouldn’t ever see Henry any more. That hurt so sharply that it did her good. She felt a fierce determination to see Henry again. She was going to. She didn’t care what they did, she was going to.
She became suddenly quiet and balanced. She was conscious of a new courage. It was not the young courage which says with a light heart, ‘Dreadful things happen—in the newspapers—to other people—but of course they couldn’t happen to me or to the people I love.’ They had happened to her, they had happened to Marion, they had happened to Geoffrey Grey. If she found courage now, it was the older, colder courage which says, ‘This thing has got to be faced, and it’s up to me to face it.’
She sat up, pushed back her hair from her face, winced as she touched a long deep scratch, and heard the car go down the road and away. It was heading for Ledlington. The sound of it faded out upon the foggy air. It didn’t stop suddenly, as it would have done if they had run on for a bit and then pulled up. It lessened gradually and died away in the distance.
And yet it might be a trick. There had been two men. One of them might have stayed behind to catch her when she came out upon the road again. They would surely count on her having to find her way back to the road. She thought of a still black figure, a featureless wickedness, standing there under the hedgerow, waiting. Her thought was quite steady and calm. It wouldn’t do to go out on the road. Neither could she risk trying to stop a passing car. It would probably be impossible in a fog like this anyhow.
She began to try and think what she had better do.
Fields belong to somebody. There might be a path somewhere near, or a cottage—some place which she could reach without going out upon the road again. She tried to remember the way she had come, and to make out where she was now. She thought about halfway to Ledlington, but she couldn’t remember any place like this hollow among the bushes, and she didn’t know how far off the road she was. Not far by the noise of the car, which had sounded startlingly close.
She was, had she only known it, at the bottom of the pond which had been offered to her as a landmark by the shock-headed boy when he was telling her how to find Humpy Dick’s cottage. He had omitted to tell her that it had gone dry in the drought, and she had omitted to notice it as she rode past. A glint of water was what she had been looking for, and, missing that, she missed the footpath, too.
She found it now. Climbing up out of the bottom and pushing through the bushes, she came upon it almost at once, a rutted path deeply scored by the passing of laden carts. Carts meant people, and people meant a house. She began to follow the ruts away from the road.
It wasn’t easy. Without that deep scoring of the ground she would have been lost, but the furrows kept her to the path. If she ceased to stumble and turn her ankles, she knew at once that she was bearing away from the track, and so felt her way back to it and stumbled on again. It was very weary work. Suppose there wasn’t any house. Suppose this wasn’t a real place at all. Suppose she had got into a nightmare where an endless path went on, and on, and on through an everlasting fog. That was a very stupid thought. If you had one single grain of sense you didn’t let yourself think that sort of thought when you were trying to find your way in a fog. Here Hilary’s imp cocked a snook at her and said rudely, ‘If you had a grain of sense you wouldn’t have come.’ He made a sort of jingle of it, and it went echoing round and round inside her head:
You’d have stayed at home, you wouldn’t have come.
You wouldn’t have come, you’d have stayed at home.
She went on feeling for the ruts with her feet, walking with one hand stretched out in front of her in case of a wall or another hedge.
It was a gate she touched. Her hand went over it, and it brought her up short with a bar at her waist and another across her knees. She felt for the latch, lifted it, and walked through. It wasn’t big enough to be a field gate, and there were no ruts inside it, just a hard path which might at some time have been laid down in gravel. It was quite hard to walk on—hard, and narrow. She bore too far to the right, and went in up to her ankle in the soft earth of a garden bed. And then, before she came to it, she was aware of the house. It was much too dark to see anything, and her outstretched hand touched only the empty air, yet some sense told her that the house was near. Two more cautious steps, and there it was—a wall covered with creepers—the wood of a window frame, cold glass. She was off the path and must get back to it again. Groping, she came to a step, and a wooden door with a heavy metal knocker. The enchanting vision of a lighted room—a fire, hot tea—rose gloriously upon the fog. Open, Sesame! She had only to knock on the door and someone would open, and the enchantment would come true. She had the knocker in her hand, and nothing so easy as to let it fall—nothing so easy, and nothing so hard.
She stood there, and with every passing second it was harder to move at all. Her hand cramped on the heavy metal ring. If someone had followed her in from the road, the sound of the falling knocker would give her away. Perhaps there was no one in the house. There was no light in any window, and no sound at all. She laid the knocker gently back against the wood and began to feel her way round the house.
It was only a cottage really, for almost at once she was at the corner and groping along a side wall. Another corner, and the back of the house. If there was anyone at home, this was where they would be. Life in a cottage centres round the kitchen, and the kitchen is always at the back of the house.
As she turned the corner, she saw a shining in the fog, a silver shining which disclosed its secret currents. The light came from a window on the ground floor, and the fog moved in it with a slow upward movement like the rising of some sluggish tide. To Hilary that dim shining was like the first created light—very good. It broke the yoke of the darkness from her mind, and the nightmare slipped away. She went up to the window and looked in.
There was no curtain, at least none that was drawn. There was a sink below the sill, and taps. There was no light in the room, which seemed to be a scullery and very small, but a door stood open into the kitchen, and a lamp on the kitchen table shone upon the window and upon the fog. It shone in Hilary’s eyes and dazzled her, so that at first she could see nothing except the lamp and the blue and white checked tablecloth which was spread between it and the table. In spite of being dazzled she kept her eyes wide and looked through the open door. Then she saw something else. She saw Mrs Mercer turn round from the range with a teapot in her hand. The range was beyond the table and the lamp, a big old-fashioned range with a glowing fire. Mrs Mercer turned round from it with the teapot. She set it down upon a tray beside the lamp—an old-fashioned tin tray with a gold pattern on it. Then she straightened herself up as if she had been carrying something heavy.
Hilary knocked on the window.
For a moment nothing happened. Then Mrs Mercer came round the table and through the scullery door. She unlatched the window above the sink, and pushed it open, and said in a weak, dragging voice, ‘Is that the milk? I didn’t expect you in all this fog.’
Hilary leaned well in over the sill. She wasn’t going to have any windows shut in her face. If it was humanly possible to have some of the tea in that fat brown teapot, she meant to have it. She hoped earnestly that the milk-jug she now saw on the tray was not empty, and it revived her a good deal to notice that there was only one cup. Alfred was evidently not expected home to tea. She let the light fall on her face, and she said, ‘Good evening, Mrs Mercer.’
Mrs Mercer caught at the edge of the sink and swayed. The lamp was behind her, and her face just a blur. After a minute she said weakly, ‘It’s Miss Carew?’
Hilary nodded.
‘Won’t you let me in? I’d like a cup of tea—you don’t know how much I’d like a cup of tea. I’ve just had a fall off my bicycle. I expect I look as if I’d been dragged through a hedge. May I come in and tidy up?’
Mrs Mercer still held on to the sink with one hand. The other was at her side. She said, ‘Oh, miss—you frightened me!’
‘I’m so sor
ry if I did.’
She stared at Hilary.
‘Perhaps you’ve got to catch a train,’ she said.
‘I can’t think how I’m going to get to the station—my bicycle’s all smashed up. Won’t you let me in and give me some tea?’
‘My husband don’t like visitors. I’m expecting him.’
‘There’s only one cup on the tray.’
Mrs Mercer began to shake.
‘Can’t I say who I want in my house and who I don’t? I didn’t ask you to come here, did I? If you’d got any sense in you you’d stay away. Haven’t you got anything to do at home that you must needs come trapesing and trailing after those what don’t want you? You be off quick! And the quicker the better, because if Mercer comes home—if Mercer comes home—’
Up to that first mention of the man’s name she had used an angry whisper, but now it failed. Her eyes were fixed with terror, not upon Hilary, but upon some picture called up by her own words, some picture of Alfred Mercer coming home and finding them here—together.
‘Mrs Mercer—’ Hilary’s voice was urgent, ‘I want to ask you something. I don’t want to stay—I’ve got to get back to town.’
Mrs Mercer’s pale tongue came out and moistened her lips.
‘Go!’ she said. ‘Go—go—go—while you can—’
Hilary nodded.
‘I want to go every bit as much as you want me to. I’ll go the very minute you’ve told me what I want to know. And if you don’t want Mercer to find me here we’d better get on with it. But I do wish you’d let me in.’
The pale tongue touched the pale lips again.
‘I darsn’t. He’d—cut my heart out.’
Hilary’s spine crept, not so much at the words as at the sick look of terror which went with them. It was no good going on like this. She leaned in as far as she could and dropped her hand on Mrs Mercer’s wrist. It was icy cold, and the fingers clenched on the stone edge of the sink.
Case Is Closed Page 14
