Death and the Joyful Woman

DEATH AND THE JOYFUL WOMAN

ELLIS PETERS

The Second Felse Novel

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST TIME Dominic Felse saw Kitty Norris she was dancing barefoot along the broad rail of the terrace at the Boat Club, in a cloud of iris-coloured nylon, a silver sandal dangling from either hand. It was the night following the Comberbourne Regatta, the night of the mid-season Club dance, when such acrobatic performances were not particularly surprising, though the demonstrators were usually male. It was also the eve of Leslie Armiger’s wedding day, though Dominic was not aware of that, and wouldn’t have understood its significance even if he had been.

He was on his way home from his music lesson, an inescapable boredom which beset him weekly; and because the night was fine and warm he had let the bus go without him and set out to walk the mile and a bit to Comerford by the riverside road. At the edge of the town it brought him close beneath the club-house terrace. The strains of the band floated out to meet him, and a babel of voices was blown across the wooden balustrade with the music; and there along the railing, ten feet or so above his head, floated Kitty in her extravagant dress, hands spread wide dangling the absurd contraptions of cobweb straps and three-inch spike heels she called shoes. Several voices, all male, were calling on her entreatingly to come down and be sensible; two young men were threading a hasty way between the tables on the terrace to intercept her, and one of them in his extreme concentration had just failed to see a waiter with a loaded tray. Shrieks of consternation and a flurry of dispersing flounces marked the area which was now awash with short drinks. Kitty danced on, unheeding; the table lights illuminated from below a face set in childlike concentration, the tip of her tongue protruding at the corner of parted lips. Dominic had never seen anyone so incandescent with gaiety.

His first thought had been a mildly contemptuous: “If they’re this high by a quarter to ten, what on earth will they be like by one o’clock in the morning?” But that was the automatic reaction of his youthful superiority, and tempered already by curiosity. He had experimented with tobacco so frequently during the last year and a half, unknown to his parents, that he had worn out its novelty without discovering its attractions; but now that he was beginning to contemplate alcohol hopefully from afar he did so with the same incorrigible conviction that it must be wonderful, since adults took such delight in it, and reserved it so jealously for their own use. These antics going on over his head were part of the rites; Dominic curled his lip at them, but stopped in the darkness beneath the terrace to take a longer look at the bacchanalia from which he was barred. And having seen Kitty he lost sight of everything else.

She was the centre of the din, but she herself was silent, and perhaps that contributed to the overwhelming impression of disembodied beauty. She was of no more than medium height, but so slender that she looked tall, and taller still because of being poised swaying above him against the dark-blue sky. She looked pale, too, white almost to transparency, though in fact she was sturdy and sun-tanned and as robust as a bull-terrier. Almost everything about her swam, like her body, in diaphanous clouds of illusion, but in the heart of the phantasm there was Kitty, a reality.

He stood gaping in his shadowy place below her, holding his breath for fear she would fall. One of the young men, a flash of magpie black and white lunging over the rail, made a grab for her, and she whirled round perilously and eluded him, her full skirts swirling about her. Dominic, staring upwards fascinated, caught a glimpse of long, slim legs, a smooth, pale golden thigh. He averted his eyes hastily, but made even more haste to raise them again. After all, who could see him? She wouldn’t know. Nobody was looking at him, nobody knew he was there.

“Kitty, you’ll fall! Don’t be a fool!” implored the terrified young man above, catching at her hand as she drew back from him. She uttered a sudden high squeak of protest, and dropped one of her sandals plump into Dominic’s startled hands; and there in microcosm was the solid reality that harboured within the iris-coloured cloud. A bit of silver nonsense it might be, but it was made for a healthy, modern, size six foot. Dominic stood holding it gingerly before him as though it might be charged with the incalculable properties of enchantment, so stupefied that it took him several seconds to realise what a quietness had fallen overhead. When at last he looked up it was to see three or four heads leaning over the wooden balustrade and staring down at him. Only one of them had any significance for him, he didn’t waste any time looking at the others.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Kitty. “I hope it didn’t hurt you? If I’d realised there was anyone there I wouldn’t have been behaving so badly.”

A clear, round voice she had, direct and disconcerting, and so polite that it confused him even more than her former extravagances had done. She wasn’t drunk, after all, she wasn’t even elevated. As soon as she was aware of him she spoke to him as a punctilious child speaks to a stranger. And where was the gaiety now? She looked down at him from the shadow of her long, smooth, light-brown hair with large, plaintive violet eyes, and her expression didn’t change when she had weighed up the person with whom she had to deal. Dominic was used to the look of indulgent condescension that visited so many faces when confronted with his want of years, but Kitty continued to gaze at him with the wondering, wary, courteous look of an equal and a contemporary.

He couldn’t find his tongue, there wasn’t anything for him to say that wouldn’t sound idiotic, and he didn’t know how to break out of the constricting moment. Disgusted with himself and crimson to the ears, he stood in a sweat of shame, wishing he’d gone straight home, wishing the night could be darker, wishing the morons up there with her would stop grinning, or better still, go away.

“You can throw it,” said Kitty simply. “It’s all right, really, I can catch.”

And she could and did. He measured the distance carefully, and tossed the sandal gently up into her outstretched hands, and she lifted it out of the air as lightly as thistledown, held it up for him to see, in something between a wave and a salute, and stooped to put it on. And that was the end of the incident. One of the young men put his arm round her, and she let herself be led away towards the dance-hall. There was just one instant when she looked back, a last glance of reluctance and regret, as though she knew she had disastrously disturbed the peace of a fellow-creature who was in no case to defend himself. The oval face with its clear, generous features had a honeyed glow in the shadow of the burnished hair; the violet eyes were wide and dark and full of a rueful wonder. He had never seen anyone look so sad. Then she was gone.

She stayed with him, however, all the way home, and upset his life and all his relationships for months. His term results suffered a downward lurch from first place to fifth, his coordination on the Rugby field that winter went to pieces and he didn’t get into his house fifteen. He couldn’t talk about Kitty to anyone; his best friends, without malice, would have made his life a misery, and his parents were out of the question, for his mother was after all a woman, and he instinctively knew better than to confide in her about another woman whose image was elbowing her out of sole possession of his heart, while his father was a man, and good-looking enough and young enough to be in some degree a rival. Even if he had wanted to unburden himself to them, Dominic wouldn’t have known what to say; he didn’t understand himself what was happening to him.

At fourteen love can be an overwhelming experience, all the more so for being totally incomprehensible. But Dominic was as normal as his own predicament; his appetite didn’t fail him, if anything it increased, he slept well, he enjoyed most of what happened to him, however disquieting, and he got over it. By the time he saw the girl again, more than a year later, he was back at the top of his class, mad about sports cars, and engaged in a campaign to induce his father to let him have a motorbike as soon as he was old enough. He had almost forgotten what Kitty looked like. He had never discovered who she was, indeed he had never tried, because any inquiries, in whatever quarter, would have involved a certain degree of self-betrayal. She was just Kitty, a recollection of absurd, melancholy beauty, already growing shadowy.

The occasion of their second meeting was the autumn visit of the mobile Blood Transfusion Unit to Comerbourne Grammar School in the last week of September. Dominic had stayed late for football practice, and after his shower had remembered something he wanted to look up for his history essay, and lingered an extra hour in the library. When he finally crossed the forecourt on his way to the side gate it was already dusk, and he saw the unit’s van drawn up close to the gymnasium block, and a nurse trotting across from the rear doors with an armful of documents and equipment. The session was a quarterly occurrence, and he had never paid the least attention to it before and would not have done so now but for the dark-red Karmann-Ghia which was just turning into park in the narrow space behind the van. The car brought him up standing, with a gasp of pleasure for its compact and subtle beauties, and when its door opened he could scarcely drag his eyes from that chaste thoroughbred shape even to satisfy his curiosity about its lucky owner. But the next moment even the car was in eclipse. A girl swung long, elegant legs out of it, and walked slowly across the concrete to the door of the block, as if she was a little dubious of her errand or her welcome when it came to the point. And the girl was Kitty.

Dusk or daylight or unrelieved midnight, Dominic would have known her. She had only to put in an appearance, even after fifteen months, and everything that had to do with her acquired a significance so intense as to blot out the rest of the world. The parked van, the lighted windows behind which the nurses moved busily, the whole apparatus of donating blood suddenly became a vital reality to Dominic, because Kitty was a donor. He knew he ought to go home and tackle his homework, but he couldn’t bring himself to move from the spot, and when finally he did compel his legs into action he found that they were carrying him towards the gymnasium block instead of towards the gate.

In any case he’d probably missed the bus he’d intended to take by now, and there was twenty-five minutes to wait for the next. If he went away now he might never have such an opportunity again. She wasn’t with a party this time, she wasn’t on a terrace ten feet above him; anybody could go in there and join her at the mere cost of a pint of blood. After all, it was a good cause, and even if they did have a list of regular donors they surely wouldn’t turn down another one. I really ought to think about these services more, he said to himself virtuously, especially with Dad being in the position he is, it’s up to me to do him credit, actually. It’s now or never, warned some more candid demon at the back of his mind, she’s on her own as yet because she drove herself here, but if you don’t make up your mind pretty smartly the official transport will be there, and you won’t have a dog’s chance of getting near her. And you’ll have tapped off a pint of blood for nothing, it added spitefully, demolishing the pretence that he was contemplating the sacrifice out of any impulse of public-spiritedness. But he was beyond noticing the intricacies of this argument within him, for he was already pushing open the swing-door and shouldering his way through into the hall.

She was sitting alone on one of the chairs ranged along the wall, looking a little perplexed and a little forlorn, as if she wondered what she was doing there at all. She wore a dark green jersey suit with a skirt fashionably short and tight, and the magnificent legs which had made his senses swim gleamed smoothly golden from knee to ankle, so perfectly tanned that he couldn’t tell whether she was wearing nylons or not. She looked up quickly as he came in, pleased not to be alone any longer. The heavy coil of honey-coloured hair swayed on her smooth cheek, the disconcerting eyes smiled at him hopefully.

“Hallo!” she said almost shyly, almost ingratiatingly.

She didn’t recognise him, he saw that at once, she was merely welcoming him as a fellow-victim. “Hallo!” he said with a hesitant smile. He stacked his books on a window-sill, and sat down several places away from her, afraid to make too sudden a claim upon her attention merely because she found his company preferable to being alone.

“We’re early,” said Kitty. “They’re not ready for us yet. I hate waiting for this sort of thing, don’t you? Is it your first time?”

“Yes,” said Dominic rather stiffly, because he thought for a moment that she was making an oblique reference to his youth.

“Mine, too,” she said, cheered, and he saw that he’d been misjudging her. “I felt I ought to do something about something. Every now and again it gets me like that. I’m not much use at anything much, but at least I’ve got blood. I hope! Was yours a case of conscience, too?”

She grinned at him. There was no other word for it, it was too wry and funny and conspiratorial to be called merely a smile. He felt his stiffness melting like ice in sunlight, and with it the marrow in his bones.

“Well, it was sort of on the spur of the moment,” he admitted, grinning back shyly, he who was seldom shy and frequently a good deal too cocky. “I just happened to be late leaving and I saw the van here, and I thought maybe I ought, well, you see, my father’s a policeman, , , “

“No, really?” said Kitty, impressed. The big eyes dilated; they weren’t really the colour of violets, he saw, but of purple-brown pansies.

“Well, a detective actually,” said Dominic punctiliously, and then blushed because it sounded dramatic, and in reality he knew that it was normally nothing of the kind. The very name of the profession carries such artificial overtones, you’d never dream how humdrum is the daily life of a member of the County C.I.D.

“Gosh!” said Kitty, eyes now enormous with pleased respect. “I see I must keep in with you. Who knows when I may need a friend? What with all these fifty limits around at weekends, and no parking allowed anywhere less than a mile from the middle of town, I could be run in almost any minute.” She caught his fixed and fascinated eye, and laughed. “I’m talking an awful lot, aren’t I? You know why? I’m nervous of this thing we’ve got coming along. I know it’s nothing, but somehow I don’t like the idea of being tapped like a barrel.”

“I’m scared of it, too,” said Dominic.

It wasn’t true, he hadn’t given the actual operation a single thought; but it was generously meant, and it never occurred to him how difficult he was making it for her to hit upon a reply which would be equally graceful to his self-esteem. But she managed it, some natural genius guiding her. She gave him a pleased look, and then a doubtful one, and then a wonderful smile.

“I don’t believe you,” she said confidently, “but it’s jolly nice of you to say it, anyhow. If I yell when they prick my ear for a sample, will you promise to yell, too, so I won’t feel alone in my cowardice!”

“I shall probably be the first to yell,” he said gallantly, hot with delight and embarrassment.

A door opened with a flourish upon their solitude, and a plump young nurse put her head out into the hall. “My, my!” she said, with that rallying brightness which is almost an occupational hazard in her profession. “Two of us here before time! We are eager to help, aren’t we?”

“Yes, aren’t we?” said Kitty like a meek echo, dragging her eyes away from Dominic’s before the giggles could overwhelm them both.

“If you’d like to get it over with, folks, you can come in now.”

They went in to the sacrifice together. A row of narrow campbeds and two attendant nymphs waited for them expectantly, and an older nurse shuffled documents upon a small table, and peered up at them over rimless glasses.

“Good evening!” she said briskly. “Names?” But she beamed at Kitty and didn’t wait for an answer. “Oh, yes, of course!” she said, ticking off one of the names in her list. “This is a very nice gesture you’re making, we do appreciate it, my dear. It does me good to see you young people setting an example.”

She was being very matey indeed, Dominic thought, evidently Kitty was really somebody; but then, a girl who drove a Karmann-Ghia was bound to be somebody. But if only the old battle-axe had let her give her name! He tried to read the list upside down, and was jerked out of his stride as the blue-grey eyes, bright and knowing, pin-pointed him and sharpened into close attention. “Name, please?”

He gave it. She looked down her list, but very rapidly, because she was only verifying what she already knew. “I haven’t got your name here, apparently we weren’t expecting you.” She looked him up and down, and the hard, experienced face broke into a broad and indulgent smile.

“No, I just came in, , , ” he was beginning, but she wagged an admonishing finger at him and rode over him in a loud, friendly, confident voice which stated positively: “You’re never eighteen, ducky! Don’t you know the regulations?”

“I’m sixteen,” he said, very much on his dignity, and hating her for being too perceptive, and still more for trumpeting her discoveries like a town-crier. She had made eighteen sound so juvenile that sixteen now sounded like admitting to drooling infancy, and his position was still further undermined by the unacknowledged fact that he had been sixteen for precisely one week. This formidable woman was perfectly capable of looking at him and deducing that detail to add to her score, “I thought it was from sixteen to sixty,” he said uncomfortably.

“It’s from eighteen to sixty-five, my dear, but bless you for a good try. We can’t take children, they need all their strength for growing. You run along home and come back in a couple of years’ time, and we’ll be glad to see you. But we shall still need your parents’ consent, mind.”

The younger nurse was giggling. Even Kitty must be smiling at him under cover of the gleaming curtain of her hair. Not unkindly, he had sense enough to know that, but that didn’t make the gall of his humiliation any less bitter. And he really had thought the minimum age was sixteen. He could have sworn it was.

“Are you sure? It used to be sixteen, didn’t it?”

She shook her head, smiling broadly. “I’m sorry, love! Always eighteen since I’ve been in the service. Never mind, being too young is something time will cure, you know.”

There was absolutely nothing he could do about it, except go. Kitty craned round the nurse’s shoulder from her campbed and saw him turn towards the door, crushed and silent. The old fool needn’t have bellowed at him like that. The poor kid was so mortified he wasn’t even going to say good-bye.

“Hey, don’t go!” said Kitty plaintively after his departing back. “Wait for me, and I’ll give you a lift.” She made it as near a child’s wail for company as she decently could, to restore him to a good conceit of himself, and threw in the bribe to take his mind off his injuries, and the sudden reviving gleam in his eyes as he looked round was full repayment. She put it down to the car, which was intelligent of her though inaccurate. “You could at least come and talk to me,” she said. “I was counting on you to take my mind off this beastly bottle.”

Nobody believed in her need to be amused and distracted, but girls like Kitty are allowed to pretend to as many whims as they please.

“Well, if you really want me to, , , ” he said, recovering a little of his confidence.

“That’s all right,” said the matron, beaming benevolently, “by all means wait, my dear, nobody wants to drive a willing lad away.” He gave her a look she was too complacent to understand; she couldn’t even pat a child on the head, he reflected bitterly, without breaking its neck, the kind of touch she had. But she was no longer so important, now Kitty had called him back.

“Here you are,” said the young nurse, planking a chair down beside Kitty’s campbed. “You sit down and talk to your friend, and I’ll bring you both a nice cup of tea afterwards.”

Dominic sat down. Kitty was looking at him, and studiously avoiding looking at the bottle that was gradually filling up with her blood; but not, he observed, because she felt any real repugnance for it. She was shaking with giggles, and when his slender bulk was interposed between her and the official eyes she said in a rapid, conspiratorial whisper: “These people kill me!”

That made everything wonderful by standing everything on its head. He made a fool of himself and she didn’t seem to notice; they behaved according to their kind, only slightly caricaturing themselves, and they killed her.

“I really did think it was all right at sixteen,” he said, still fretting at the sore place, though he couldn’t help grinning back at her.

“Sure,” said Kitty, “I know you did. I never thought about there being a limit at all, but it’s only sense. Am I done yet? You look, I don’t like to.”

He didn’t like to, either; the thought of her blood draining slowly out of the rounded golden arm gave him an almost physical experience of pain. “Nearly,” he said, and averted his eyes. “Look out, here comes our nice cup of tea.”

It wasn’t a nice cup of tea, of course, when it came; it was very strong and very sweet, and of that curious reddish-brown colour which indicates the presence of tinned milk. When they were left to themselves again to drink it Kitty sat up, flexing her newly-bandaged arm, took an experimental sip, and gave the cup a look of incredulous distaste.

“I know,” said Dominic apologetically. “I don’t like it with sugar, either, but you’re supposed to need it after this caper. It puts back the energy you’ve lost, or something.”

“I don’t feel as if I’ve lost any,” admitted Kitty with some surprise, and looked thoughtfully at her bandage. “I’m still not sure what they’ve got in that bottle,” she said darkly. “Wouldn’t you have thought it would be beer?” She caught his lost look, and made haste to explain, even more bafflingly: “Well, after all, that’s what I live on.”

He was staring at her helplessly, more at sea than ever. He hoped he was misunderstanding her, but how could he be sure? He knew nothing about her, except that she was the most charming and disturbing thing that had ever happened to him. And there was her performance that evening at the Boat Club dance.

“Oh, I don’t mean it’s actually my staple diet,” she said quickly. “I just meant it’s what I live on, it’s what pays the bills, you know. I ought to have told you, I’m Kitty Norris. If that means anything? No good reason why it should,” she hurried on reassuringly. “I’m just Norris’s Beers, that’s all I meant.” She said it in a resigned voice, as though she was explaining away some odd but not tragic native deformity to which she had long become accustomed, but which might disconcert a stranger.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Dominic, at once relieved and mortified. What must she think of him for almost taking her literally? And he ought to have known. Katherine Norris the beer heiress was in and out of the local news headlines regularly, he must surely have seen her photograph occasionally. It couldn’t have done her justice, though, or he wouldn’t have failed to recognise her. Her name was prominent on about a third of the pub signs in the county, all those, in fact, which weren’t the monopoly of Armiger’s Ales. And hadn’t she been going to marry old Armiger’s son at one time? Dominic groped in his memory, but local society engagements and weddings did not figure among the events he was in the habit of filing, and he couldn’t remember what was supposed to have happened to break off the merger. It was enough to be grateful for the fact, no need to account for it. “I should have realised,” he said. “My name’s Dominic Felse.”

“Cheers, Dominic!” She drank to him in the acrid, sugary tea. “Did you know this used to be a bottle of stout once? I mean they used to give the victims stout to restore them afterwards. Old man Shelley told me so. I’m being done, Dominic, that’s what.”

“Norris’s stout?” asked Dominic, venturing timidly on a joke. It had a generous success; she threw back her head and laughed.

“Too true! I’m being done two ways,” she said indignantly as she swung her feet to the floor and shook down her sleeve over the already slipping bandage.

It was nearly at an end, he thought as he followed her out.

The transport had arrived and was disgorging its load of volunteers on the forecourt; the evening had closed in as it does in late September, with swiftly falling darkness and sudden clear cold. She would get into the Karmann-Ghia and wave her hand at him warmly but thoughtlessly, and drive away, and he would walk alone to the bus stop and go home. And who knew if he would ever see her again?

“Where can I take you?” she said cheerfully, sliding across from the driving-seat to open the other door.

He hesitated for a moment, worrying whether he ought to accept, whether he wasn’t being a nuisance to her, and longing to accept even if he was. “Thanks awfully,” he said with a gulp, “but I’m only going to the bus station, it’s just a step.”

“Straight?” said Kitty, poker-faced. “That where you spend your nights?”

“I mean I’ve only got to catch a bus from there.”

“Come on, get in,” said Kitty, “and tell me where you live, or I shall think you don’t like my car. Ever driven in one of these?”

He was inside, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her, their sleeves brushing; the plastic hide upholstery might have been floating golden clouds under him, clouds of glory. The girl was bliss enough, the car was almost too much for him. Kitty started the engine and began to back towards the shrubberies to turn, for the transport had cramped her style a little. The bushes made a smoky dimness behind her, stirring against the gathering darkness. She switched on her reversing light to make sure how much room she had, and justified all Dominic’s heady pride and delight in her by bringing the car round in one, slithering expertly past the tail of the transport at an impetuous speed, and shooting the gateway like a racing ace. They passed everything along Howard Road, and slowed at the traffic lights.

“You still haven’t told me where I’m to take you,” said Kitty.

There was nothing left for him to do but capitulate and tell her where he lived, which he did in a daze of delight.

“Comerford, that’s hardly far enough to get going properly. Let’s go the long way round.” She signalled her intention of turning right, and positioned herself beautifully to let the following car pass her on the near side. The driver leaned out and shouted something as he passed, gesticulating towards the rear wheels of the Karmann-Ghia. Dominic, who hadn’t understood, bristled on Kitty’s behalf, but Kitty, who had, swore and grinned and waved a hand in hasty acknowledgment.

“Damn!” she said, switching off her reversing light. “I’m always doing that. Next time I’m going to get a self-cancelling one. Don’t you tell your father on me, will you? I do try to remember. It isn’t even that I’ve got such a bad memory, really, it’s just certain things about a car that trip me up every time. That damned reversing light, and then the petrol. I wouldn’t like to tell you how many times I’ve run out of petrol inside a year.”

“You haven’t got a petrol gauge, have you?” he asked, searching the dashboard for it in vain.

“No, it’s a reserve tank. I thought it would be better, because when you have to switch over you know you’ve got exactly a gallon, and that’s fair warning.”

“And is it better?” asked Dominic curiously.

“Yes and no. It works on long journeys, because then I don’t know how far it will be between filling stations, so I make a point of stopping at the very first one after the switchover, and filling up. But when I’m just driving round town, shopping or something, I kick her over and think, oh, I’ve still got a gallon, I needn’t worry, plenty of time, pumps all round me. And then I clean forget about it, and run dry in the middle of the High Street, or halfway up the lane to the golf links. I never learn,” said Kitty ruefully. “But when I had a petrol gauge on the old car I never remembered to look at it in time, so what’s the use? It’s just me. Dizzy, that’s what.”

“You drive awfully well,” said Dominic, reaching for the nearest handful of comfort he could offer her. That self-derisive note in her voice, at once comic and sad, had already begun to fit itself into a hitherto undiscovered place in his heart like a key into a secret door.

“No, do you mean that? Honestly?”

“Yes, of course. You must know you drive well.”

“Ah!” said Kitty. “I still like to hear it said. Like the car, too?”

It was one subject at least on which he could be eloquent, doubly so because it was Kitty’s car. They talked knowledgeably about sports models all the way to Comerford, and when she pulled up at his own door in the village the return to his ordinary world and the shadow of his familiar routine startled him like a sudden blow. Those few minutes of utter freedom and ease with her were the end of it as well as the beginning. He had to be thankful for a small miracle that wouldn’t drop in his lap a second time. He climbed out slowly, chilled by the fall back into time and place, and stood awkwardly by the door on her side of the car, struggling for something to say that shouldn’t shame him by letting down the whole experience into the trivial and commonplace.

“Thanks awfully for the lift home.”

“Pleasure!” said Kitty, smiling at him. “Thanks for the lift you gave me, too. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather shed my blood with.”

“Are you sure you feel all right?” was all he found to say.

An end of muslin was protruding from Kitty’s sleeve; she pulled it experimentally, and it came away in a twisted string, shedding a scrap of lint on the seat beside her. They both laughed immoderately.

“I feel fine,” said Kitty. “Maybe I had blood pressure before, and now I’m cured.”

An instant’s silence. The soft light from the net-curtained front window lay tenderly on the firm, full curves of her mouth, while her forehead and eyes were in shadow. How soft that mouth was, and yet how decided, with its closely folded lips and deep, resolute corners, how ribald and vulnerable and sad. The core of molten joy in Dominic’s heart burned into exquisite anguish, just watching the slow deepening of her valedictory smile.

“Well, thanks, and good-bye!”

“See you at the next blood-letting,” said Kitty cheerfully, and drove away with a flutter of her fingers to her brow, something between a wave and a salute, leaving him standing gazing after her and holding his breath until the blood pounded thunderously in his ears, and the pain in his middle was as sharp and radical as toothache.

But she saw him again earlier than she had foretold, and in very different circumstances; and the blood in question on that occasion, which was neither his blood nor hers, had already been let in considerable quantities.

CHAPTER II.

THE LATEST OF Alfred Armiger’s long chain of super-pubs, The Jolly Barmaid, opened its doors for business at the end of that September. It stood on a “B” road, half a mile from Comerford and perhaps a mile and a quarter from Comerbourne; not an advantageous position at first sight, but old Armiger knew what he was doing where making money was concerned, and few people seriously doubted that he would make the place pay. Those who knew the beer baron best were already wondering if he had any inside information about the long-discussed by-pass, and whether it wouldn’t, when it eventually materialised, turn out to be unrolling its profitable asphalt just outside the walls of the new hotel. It was seven months now since he’d bought the place and turned loose on it all the resources of his army of builders, designers and decorators, and everyone came along on the night of the gala opening to have a look at the results.

Detective-Sergeant George Felse of the County C.I.D. wandered in off-duty out of pure curiosity. He had often admired the decrepit stone-mullioned house and regretted its steady mouldering into a picturesque and uneconomic slum. Two old ladies had been living in it then, and like so many ancient sisters they had died within days of each other, leaving the place unoccupied for almost a year before their distant heir decided to sell and cut his losses. There was nothing else to be done with a place of such a size and in such a state; the only question had been whether he would ever find a buyer. But he had; he’d found Alfred Armiger, the smartest man on a bargain in three or four counties.

It still made no sense to George, even when he pushed open the new and resplendent Tudor door and walked into a hall all elaborate panelling and black oak beams, carved settles and copper-coloured glass witchballs. He estimated that ten thousand at least must have been sunk in the restoration, and he couldn’t see how Armiger was ever going to get it back, short of shifting the place bodily on to the main road, which was liable to tax even his formidable powers. Even if he could continue to fill it as he’d apparently filled it tonight, which was very doubtful, it would still cost him more to run, with the staff he’d need here, than he’d make out of it.

It was certainly lively enough tonight. In the crowded public bar on the left, lantern-lit and period down to the fire-dogs in the hearth, George recognised most of the Bohemian population of Comerbourne, more especially the young ones. Ragged beards and mohair sweaters gave the place the texture of goats and something of their pungent smell. In the two small lounge-bars on the right the eighteenth century had been allowed a toe-hold, and there were some nice brocade chairs and some comfortable couches, and a fair number of the more sober county posteriors were occupying them. The dining-room seemed to be doing a considerable trade, too, to judge by the numbers of white-coated waiters who were running backwards and forwards for drinks to the saloon bar. Most of them seemed to be strangers to the district, probably newly recruited for this house. He saw only one whom he knew, old Bennie from the White Horse in Comerbourne, no doubt transplanted here for his local knowledge. It would pay to have someone about the place who knew all the celebrities, and all the nuisances, too.

They were a mixed bag in the saloon bar, neither big shots nor Bohemians. The big room had been virtually rebuilt, and Tudorised with a monstrously heavy hand. The ceiling beams were too low and too obtrusive, and hung with far too motley an array of polished copper, much of it shamelessly new. Armiger always knew exactly what he wanted, and if he couldn’t get it in period he’d have it manufactured specially, even if it involved some surprising anachronisms. But at least the customers were genuine enough here, farmers, tradesmen, travellers, local cottagers and workmen, and scattered among them the occasional county elder who still preferred this kind of company.

George inched his way patiently to the bar and ordered a pint of mild, and a blonde with a topknot like the Prince of Wales’s feathers and long pink finger-nails set the pot in front of him and informed him with a condescending smile that tonight everything was on the house, with Mr. Armiger’s compliments. Hence the crowd, he thought, though the evening was yet youngish, and no doubt hundreds more would get wind of the party before closing-time. When drinks were free George stopped at one, indeed if he’d known he would probably have deferred satisfying his curiosity until another night, but he was here now. And the spectacle was undoubtedly interesting. More than half the members of the Borough Council were somewhere in the house, and a good sprinkling of the more widely scattered County Council, too. Armiger crooked his finger and people came running, but how many of them out of any love for him? You wouldn’t need the fingers of both hands to count ‘em, thought George, one would be enough.

He was carrying his pint pot to the most retired corner he could see when a heavy hand thumped him on the shoulder and a voice resonant and confident as brass, but tuned as truly as brass, too, bellowed in his ear: “Well, well, my boy, is this an honour or a warning?”

Speak of the devil, and his bat-wings rustle behind you.

“Don’t worry,” said George, turning to grin over his shoulder at the man who had bought him the beer. “I’m off duty. Thirst brought me in on you. Thanks for this, I wasn’t expecting it. Cheers!”

Armiger had a whiskey in his other hand; he hoisted it to George and downed it in one quick swig. Not a tall man, hardly medium height, but built like a bull, shoulder-heavy, neckless, with a large head perpetually lowered for the charge. He ran head-down at business, at life, at his enthusiasms, at his rivalries, at everyone who got in his way and everything that acquired a temporary or permanent significance for his pocket or his self-esteem. He was dark, with thinning hair brushed across his sun-tanned scalp, and the short black moustache that bristled from his upper lip quivered with charged energy like antennae. His bluish chin and brick-red cheeks gave him a gaudy brilliance no matter how conservatively he dressed. Maybe he’d consumed a fair quantity of his own wares, or maybe he was merely high on his pride and delight in his new toy, and his ebullient hopes for it. Come to think of it, it was very improbable that he ever got tight on liquor, he’d been in command of it and manipulated his fellow-men by means of it too long to be susceptible to it himself at this late stage. He glittered with excitement and self-satisfaction; the bright, shrewd eyes were dancing.

“Well, how do you like my little place? Have I made a good job of it?”

“Terrific,” said George reverently. “Do you think it’s really going to pay for transferring the licence out of the town? Looks to me a costly house to run.”

“You know me, boy, I never throw money away without being sure it’ll come back and bring its relations along. Don’t you worry, I’ll make it pay.”

He slapped George on the back again with a knowing grin, and was off through the crowd head-down, big shoulders swinging, distributing a word here and a handshake there, and radiating waves of energy that washed outward through the assembly and vibrated up the panelled walls to clang against the copper overhead. Self-made and made in a big way, Alfred Armiger; many a lesser mortal had been bowled over in that head-down charge to success. Some of the casualties were here tonight; more than one of the looks that followed his triumphal progress through his Tudor halls would have killed if it could.

“He’s in high fettle,” said a voice in George’s ear. “Always is when he’s been walking on other people’s faces.” Barney Wilson of the architect’s department slid into the settle beside him, and spread lean elbows on the table; a long, saturnine young man with a disillusioned eye. “Don’t take too much notice of me,” he said with a wry smile, catching George’s curious glance, “I’m prejudiced. I once had hopes of taking this place over myself, pulling down the rubbishy part of it and making the rest over into a house for my family. I still grudge it to him. What does he need with another hotel? He has more than he can keep count of already.”

“Biggish job for a private man, restoring this place, the state it was in,” suggested George, eyeing him thoughtfully.

“Biggish, yes, but I could have done the necessary minimum and moved Nell and the kids in, and taken my own time over the rest. And the way sales trends are running these days, a place this size and in that sort of state was the only kind of place I had a chance of getting. Everybody wants a modern, easy-to-run semi or bungalow, they fetch fantastic prices everywhere, but these bigger properties are going for next to nothing. You can’t run ‘em without servants, or so everyone supposes, and they cost the earth to maintain. But the maintenance would have just been my job to me, and Nell was raised on a Welsh farm, she knows all about managing a lot of house-room with a minimum of effort. Oh, we thought we were in. I’d even started drawing plans for my conversion, believe it or not, I was that confident. What a hope! The minute I clapped eyes on his man at the auction I knew we’d had it. If it hadn’t been for him we could have got the place for the reserve, nobody else wanted it.” He gazed glumly into his beer and sighed. “But no, he had to snatch it from under our noses and turn it into this monstrosity. You can expect anything of a man who’d turn The Joyful Woman into The Jolly Barmaid!”

“Is that what it used to be called?” asked George, surprised and impressed. “I never heard that.”

“I’m well up in the history of this house, believe me. I read it up from the archives when I thought we were going to live in it. It was a pub, for centuries before it was used as a private house, and that was the sign, The Joyful Woman. Lovely, isn’t it? Goes right back to about 1600. And before that it was a private house again, and before that, until the Dissolution, it was a grange of Charnock Priory. But now it’s The Jolly Barmaid, and that’s that.”

“Business is business, I suppose,” said George sententiously.

“Business be damned! He’s willing to run this place at a loss rather than let his son have any part of it, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“Was his son going to have some part of it?”

“He was coming in with me. We put together all we could raise between us to bid for it. We were going to convert the barn into a studio for him and Jean, and Nell and I and the kids were going to have the house. You know the barn? It’s right across the yard there, beyond where he’s laid out the carpark. It’s stone, built to last for ever. It would have made an ideal studio flat. But somehow his loving father got to know about it, and he thought a few thousands well spent to spite his son.”

The Armiger family quarrel was no news to George, or indeed to any native of the Comerbourne district. It was natural enough that Armiger, self-made, ambitious and bursting with energy as he was, should intend his only son to follow him in the business, and marry another beer heiress who would nearly double his empire. Natural enough also, perhaps, that the boy should react strongly against his father’s plans and his father’s personality, and decline to be a beer baron. The story was that Leslie wanted to paint, and most probably the rift would have been inevitable, even if he hadn’t clinched his fate by getting engaged to a humble clerk from the brewery offices instead of falling in with his father’s arrangements for him. Variations on the theme were many and fantastic from this point on; what was certain was that Leslie had been pitched out of the house without a penny, and the girl had either left or been sacked, and they had married at a registry office as soon as they could. Once married they had dropped out of sight, their news-value exhausted. What was news was that Armiger should still be pursuing them so malevolently that he grudged them even a home.

“There must have been a limit to what he was prepared to throw away in a cause like that,” suggested George mildly. “He likes his money, does Armiger.”

Wilson shook his head decidedly. “We went to our limit, and he was still as fresh as a daisy. Maybe he does love his money, but he’s got plenty of it, and he loves his own way even more.”

“Still, Leslie shouldn’t have any difficulty in getting credit, with his expectations, , , “

“He hasn’t any expectations. He hasn’t got a father. This is final. And believe me, the news went round fast. They know their Armiger. Nobody’s going to be willing to lend money to Leslie, don’t think it. He has the thousand or so he got from his mother, and what he can earn, that’s all. And can you think of anyone round these parts who’s going to ally himself willingly with somebody on whom Armiger’s declared total war?”

George couldn’t. It wasn’t just the money and power that would frighten them off, it was the sheer force of that ruthless personality. There are people only heroes would tackle, and heroes are few and far between. “What’s young Leslie doing?” asked George. Come to think of it, that made young Leslie a hero; and starting heavily handicapped, too.

“Working as packer and porter and general dog’s-body at Malden’s, for about eight pounds a week,” said Wilson bitterly. “He’s never been trained to earn his living, poor devil, and painting isn’t going to pay the milkman. And a baby on the way, too, so Jean will have to give up her job soon.”

Armiger had erupted into the saloon bar again, sweeping newcomers towards the free drinks, dispensing hospitality in the grand manner. They followed the compulsive passage of the cannon-ball head through the crowd, their eyes guardedly thoughtful. He seemed to have a party with him now, he was busy seating them in a far corner of the big room.

“Parents usually come round in the end, however awkward they may be,” said George without too much conviction.

“Parents, yes. Monoliths, no. Leslie never had but one parent, and she died nearly three years ago, or she might have ventured to stick up for him when the crash came. Not that she ever had much influence, of course, poor soul.”

Wilson was craning to see past undulating shoulders to the group in the far corner, and the passage of a waiter with a loaded tray had just opened a clear corridor to the spot. Others were equally interested in the spectacle. A woman’s voice said dispassionately: “Vulgar little monster!” and a man’s voice, less dispassionate, murmured: “So that was Kitty’s red bus I saw in the carpark. I thought there couldn’t be two like it round here.”

There were three people with Armiger. The man was everything that Armiger was not, and valuable to him for that very reason; George was familiar with the contrast and all its implications. Into houses where Armiger’s bouncing aggression would not have been welcomed Raymond Shelley’s tall grey elegance and gentle manners entered without comment; where negotiations required a delicacy of touch which Armiger would have disdained to possess, he employed Shelley’s graces to do his work for him. Nominally Shelley was his legal adviser, permanently retained by the firm; actually he was his other face, displayed or concealed according to circumstances. Middle-aged, quiet, kind, not particularly energetic or particularly effective in himself, but he supplied what Armiger needed, and in return Armiger supplied him with what he most needed, which was money. He was also Kitty Norris’s trustee, having been for years a close friend of her father. And there was Kitty by his side now, in a full-skirted black dress that made her look even younger than her twenty-two years, with an iridescent scarf round her shoulders and a half of bitter in her hand. So that, thought George, admiring the clear profile pale against the subdued rosy lights, is the girl who gave our Dom a lift home the other night. And all Dom could talk about was the car! How simple life is when you’re as young as that!

The third person was a handsome, resigned-looking, quiet, capable woman of forty-five, in a black suit, who was just fitting a cigarette into a short black holder. The movements of her long hands were graceful and strong, so was her body under the severely-tailored cloth. She let the men talk. Intelligent, illusionless eyes swept from face to face without noticeable emotion; only when she looked at Kitty she smiled briefly and meaningly, owning a contact with her which set the men at a slight distance. Women as efficient as Ruth Hamilton and as deeply in the business secrets of their employers frequently entertain a faint contempt for the temples they sustain on their shoulders and the gods they serve.

“His secretary,” said a man’s voice in an audible whisper somewhere behind them. “Has been for twenty years. They say she does more than type his letters.”

That was no new rumour, either, George had heard it bandied about for at least ten of the twenty years. The only surprising thing about it was to hear it mentioned at all; it had been taken for granted, whether believed or discounted, for so long that there was no point in trying to squeeze a drop of sensation out of it now. Nor was anyone ever likely to know for certain whether it was true or not. The legend had been more or less inevitable, in any case, for Miss Hamilton had virtually run Armiger’s household as well as his office ever since his wife’s long, dragging illness began, and that was a good many years ago.

Wilson emptied his pint and pushed the tankard away from him. “Jean is quite a girl. But sometimes I wonder how Leslie ever managed to see her in the first place, with Miss Norris around. Not that I think he made any mistake, mind you. Still, look at her!”

George had been thinking much the same thing, though he did not know Jean Armiger. Young men frequently reject even the most dazzling of girls, he reflected, when thrust at them too aggressively by their fathers, and if Armiger’s mind was once made up he would certainly tackle this enterprise as he did every other, head-down and bellowing. Still, look at her!

She was the last person at whom he did turn and look when he left the saloon bar at about ten o’clock. She hadn’t moved, she’d hardly spoken; she sat nursing the other half, but only playing with it, and though Armiger had vanished on one of his skirmishes and Miss Hamilton seemed to be gathering up her bag and gloves and preparing to leave, Kitty sat still; so still that the sparkles in the glittering scarf were motionless, crumbs of light arrested in mid-air. Then the swing-door closed gently on the grave oval of her face, and George settled the collar of his coat and strolled across the hall towards the chill of the September night.

Old Bennie Blocksidge, a lean, tough little gnome, was crossing the hall with an empty tray, all the copper witchballs repeating his bald pink dome as he passed beneath them. He stopped to exchange a word with George, jerking his head in the direction of the side door which led out to the courtyard.

“He’s in high feather tonight, Mr. Felse. No holding him.”

“He” could be no one but Armiger. “I noticed he’s vanished,” said George. “Why, what’s he got up his sleeve now? I should think he’d had triumph enough for one night.”

“He’s just gone off with a bottle of champagne under his arm, any road up, off to show off his new ballroom to some bloke or other. That’s the old barn what was, off across the yard there. Wanted to open it this week, he did, but they’ve only just finished the decorations. Sets great store by it, and so he ought, it’s cost him a packet.”

So that was what was to become of young Leslie’s studio. George stepped aside to allow free passage to two people who had just followed him out of the saloon bar, and watched Miss Hamilton and Raymond Shelley cross the hall together and go out through the swing-doors and the nail-studded outer portals which stood open on the night; and in a few moments he heard a car start up in the carpark, and roll out gently on to the road, and caught a glimpse of Shelley’s Austin as it swept round and headed for Comberbourne.

“Told us not to disturb him, neither,” said Bennie, sniffing. “Says he’ll be back when he’s good and ready. Ordered his car for ten, and here it is turned ten, and he says,’tell him he can damn’ well wait till I’m ready, if it’s midnight.’ Clayton’s sitting out there in the Bentley cursing like a trooper, but what’s the good? There’s never no doing anything with him. If you like your job you just go with him, nothing else you can do.”

“And you do like your job, Bennie?”

“Me?” said Bennie with a grin and a shrug. “I’m used to it, I go with the stream. There’s worse bosses than him, if you just go along with him and don’t worry. These youngsters, they fret too much.”

“Well, let’s hope he soon drinks his champagne and lets Clayton take him home.”

“It was a big ‘un, a magnum. He thinks in magnums.”

“He does indeed!” said George. “The Jolly Barmaid was a classic example of Armiger’s inflated habits of mind. “Good night, Bennie.”

“Good night, Mr. Felse.”

George walked home into Comerford, and gave his wife and son a brief account of his evening’s entertainment.

“Your girl-friend was there, Dom,” he said, glancing mischievously at Dominic, who was in his homework corner still bent over a book, though it was a late start rather than an exaggerated sense of duty that had kept him at it until this hour. He slapped the Anglepoise lamp away from him and quickly switched it off, to hide the fierce blush that surged up into his cheeks, and assuming his protective colouring with the dexterity of a cornered animal, said eagerly: “No, was she? Did you see the car? Isn’t it a beauty?”

“I wasn’t looking at the car.”

“Gosh, can you beat it! No soul!” said Dominic disgustedly, for once removing himself to bed without having to be driven. He had told his parents about coming home in the Karmann-Ghia because he was experienced enough to know that even if they had not witnessed his arrival themselves, someone among the neighbours was sure to have done so, and to retail the information over pegging out the washing or giving the lawn its last autumn mowing. Better and safer to give them an edited version himself, and the car made wonderful cover, but if his father was going to spring nasty little surprises like that sudden dig tonight, Dominic was going to have to stay in dark corners, or keep his back turned on his family.

Bunty Felse awoke just after midnight from her first light doze with a curious question on her mind, and stroked George into wakefulness with the gentle ruthlessness wives employ instead of open brutality.

“George,” she said as he grunted a sleepy protest into her red hair, “do you remember that singer girl at Weston-super-Mare last summer. The one who dragged Dom into her act, the way they do?”

“Mmm!” said George, dazed by this seeming irrelevance. “What about her, for goodness’ sake?”

“He noticed her all right, didn’t he?”

“Couldn’t very well miss her,” admitted George, “she was round his neck. How on earth did she get him up there? Some trick, I don’t remember. I know I blushed for him.”

“Yes, you did,” said Bunty significantly. “He didn’t. He bragged about it for days, the little ass. He said she was a dish.”

“That’s all those paperbacks he reads.”

“No, I think it’s pop records. The point is, apparently this Norris girl really is a dish. But he never said so. Why?”

“No accounting for tastes,” mumbled George. “Maybe he doesn’t think she is a dish.”

“Why shouldn’t he? Everybody else does. You do,” said Bunty, and was drifting off to sleep again, still worrying over the discrepancy, when the telephone beside their bed rang.

“Damn and blast!” said George, sitting up in bed wide awake and reaching for the instrument. “Now what’s up?”

The telephone bleated in a quavering voice which at first he hardly recognised for Bennie Blocksidge’s. “Mr. Felse?” it wailed. “Oh, Mr. Felse, I dunno if I’m doing right, but I’d sooner it was you, and you’re the nearest, and being as you were here tonight it’s you I called. We got bad trouble here, Mr. Felse. It’s the guv’nor, Mr. Armiger. He never come back. Past closing-time, and he never come, and eleven, and half past eleven, and the lights still on in there. And Mr. Calverley got worried, and one thing and another, even if he did say not to disturb him, they went to see was he all right, , , “

“Make it short,” said George, groping for his slippers. “What’s happened? I’m on my way, but what’s happened? Make it three words, not three hundred.”

“He’s dead,” said Bennie, making it two. “there in the barn, all by himself, stone dead and blood all over.”

CHAPTER III.

THE MOMENT OF truth had overtaken Armiger in the middle of an expanse of new flooring almost big enough for a bull-ring, and of a colour not so far from that of fine sand. He lay in the full glare of his brand-new lights, sprawled on his face with arms and legs tossed loosely about him, his right cheek flattened against the glossy parquet. If you stooped to look carefully the thick profile in its bold, bright colouring still showed clear and undamaged; but the exposed back of his head was crumpled and indented, welling dark blood that oozed up out of the splintered cavities and spilled sluggishly over into the puddle gathering on the floor, where the crimson of blood and the thin clarity of wine met and intermingled in long, feathery fronds of pink.

All round his head and shoulders blood and champagne had spattered to a distance of two or three feet, but not so lavishly as old Bennie had made out, you could easily approach him between the splashes, at least from the back, from which position, George thought, squatting over the body, this ferocious damage had been done. Any enemy of Alfred Armiger’s might well prefer not to face him when he hit out at him at last. The neck of the magnum lay in the pink ferns of the pool, close to the shattered head, and slivers of glass glittered on the bull shoulders; two yards away the rest of the bottle lay on its side, a thin dotted line of blood marking where it had rolled when it broke at last.

Well at least, thought George grimly, we’re spared the classic hesitation between accident, suicide and murder; the one most easily associated with Armiger was the one that overtook him, and nobody’s ever going to argue about it.

He had called his headquarters in Comerbourne before he left home, called them again after his first check-up on the scene, and turned everyone else out of the ballroom until the van should arrive. He had the place to himself for a quarter of an hour at the most. For Armiger he felt as yet nothing but a sense of shock and incredulity that so much demoniac energy could be so abruptly wiped out of existence. The blob of black in the acres of pallor looked like a squashed fly on a window-pane.

He stood back carefully, avoiding the splashes of blood, and looked round the room. No sense of reality informed this scene, it was a stage set, lavish and vulgar, the curtain rising on a run-of-the-mill thriller. The barn, pretty clearly, had once been the hall of the older house. Its proportions were noble, and its hammer-beam roof had been beautiful until Armiger got at it. His impact had been devastating; the hammer-beams and posts, the principals and curved braces and purlins had all been gilded, and the squares of common rafters between the gold had been painted a glaring glossy white, while from the centre beam depended four spidery modern electric chandeliers. The concentration of reflected light was merciless. All round the upper part of the walls he had built a gallery, with a dais for the band at one end, and a glass and chromium bar at the other, a double staircase curving up to it from the dancing floor with an incongruous Baroque swirl. Beneath the gallery the walls were lined with semi-circular alcoves fitted with seats, in every alcove an arched niche with a white plaster dancer; Empire, this part of it, if it could be said to have a style at all. Small tables nestled in the curves of the balustrade all the way round the gallery. The walls were white and gold and a glitter of mirrors. The palais crowd, thought George, dazed, will love it. Poor Leslie Armiger, he’d never see his beautiful bare, spacious studio home again. He’d never have been able to afford to heat it properly, in any case, it would have been Arctic in winter.

So much for the setting in general. Of notable disarrangements in this vacant and immaculate order there were only two, apart from the body itself. One of the plaster statuettes, from the alcove on the right of the door, lay smashed at the foot of the wall. There was no apparent reason for it, it was a good fifty feet from where Armiger lay, and apart from the broken shards there was no sign of any struggle, no trace even of a passing foot. The other detail struck a curiously ironical note. Someone, almost certainly Armiger himself, had fetched two champagne glasses from the bar and set them out on the small table nearest to the gilded dais at the top of the staircase. Evidently he had had no forewarning, he had still been in high feather, still bent on celebrating; but he had never got as far as opening the magnum.

George paced out thoughtfully the few yards between the sprawling feet in their hand-made shoes, and the foot of the staircase. No marks on the high gloss of the floor. He eyed the broken magnum; there was not much doubt it was the instrument which had killed Armiger. It was slimed with his blood right to the gold foil on the cork, and no artificial aids were necessary to see clearly the traces of his hair and skin round the rim of the base.

George cast one last look round the glaring white ballroom, and went out to the three men who waited nervously for him in the courtyard.

“Which of you actually found him?”

“Clayton and I went in together,” said Calverley.

There was a sort of generic resemblance in all the men Armiger chose as managers for his houses, and it struck George for the first time why; they were all like Armiger. He singled out people of his own physical and mental type, and what could be more logical? This Calverley was youngish, thick-set but athletic, like an ex-rugby-player run very slightly to flesh; moustached, self-confident, tough as fibre-glass. Not at his debonair best just now, understandably; the face made for beaming good-fellowship was strained and greyly pale, and the quick eyes alert for profit and trouble alike were trained on trouble now, and saw it as something more personal than he cared for. He’d even gone to meet trouble halfway, it seemed, by arming himself with a companion. People whose daily lives were spent in Armiger’s vicinity soon learned to be careful.

“What time would that be?” They’d know, to the minute; they’d been watching the clock for him over an hour, waiting to get him off the premises and call it a day.

“About four or five minutes after midnight,” said Calverley, licking his lips. It was not yet one o’clock. “We gave him until midnight, that’s how I know. We’d been waiting for him ever since closing-time, but he’d said he didn’t want to be disturbed, so, well, we waited. But from half past eleven we began to wonder if everything was all right, and we said we’d give him until twelve, and then go in. And we did. When it struck we left the snug at once, and came straight over here.”

“All the lights were on like that? You touched nothing? Was the door open or closed?”

“Closed.” Clayton fumbled a cigarette out of the pocket of his tight uniform jacket, and struck a match to light it. A lean, wiry, undatable man, probably about thirty-five, would look much the same at sixty; flat sandy hair brushed straight back from a narrow forehead, intelligent, hard eyes that fixed George unblinkingly and didn’t mind the light. And his hands were as steady as stone. “I was first in, I handled the door. Yes, the lights were on. We never touched a thing once we’d seen him. We only went near enough to see he was a goner. Then I run back to the house to tell Bennie to call the police, and Mr. Calverley waited by the door.”

“Had anyone seen Mr. Armiger since he came over here?” George looked at old Bennie, who was shivering in the background.

“Not that I know of, Mr. Felse. Nobody from the house has been across here. He never showed up after he took the champagne off the ice and walked off with it. I saw him go out of the side door. You know, Mr. Felse, you just come into the hall then yourself.”

“I know,” said George. “Any idea who this fellow was, the one to whom he wanted to show the ballroom? You didn’t see him?”

“No, he wasn’t with him when I saw him go out.”

“He made quite a point of not wanting to be disturbed?”

“Well, , , ” Bennie hesitated. “Mr. Armiger was in the habit of laying off very exact, if you know what I mean. I wa’n’t nothing out of the way this time.”

“Can you remember his exact words? Try. I’m interested in this appointment he had.”

“Well, I says to him, ‘Mr. Clayton’s ‘ere with the car.’ And he says: “Then he can damn’ well wait until I’m ready, if it’s midnight. I’m just going over to show a young pal of mine my ballroom, he’ll be right interested, he says, to see what you can do with a place like that, given the money and the enterprise, and I don’t want anybody butting in on us,’ he says, ‘I’ll be back when I’m good and ready, not before.’ .And then he goes.”

“But he didn’t sound upset or angry about it?” The words might have indicated otherwise in another man, but this was how Armiger habitually dealt with his troops.

“Oh, no, Mr. Felse, he was on top of the world. Well, like he was all evening, sir, you saw him yourself.”

“Odd he didn’t mention a name.”

“With that much money,” said Clayton in his flat, cool voice, “he could afford to be odd.”

“He was laughing like a drain,” said Bennie. “When he said that about showing off the ballroom he was fair hugging himself.”

“Somebody must have seen this other fellow,” said George. “We shall want to talk to all the rest of the staff, but I take it all those who don’t live on the premises have gone home long ago.” That would be the first job, once the body was handed over to the surgeon. “Any of the waiters living in, besides Ben?”

“Two,” said Calverley, “and two girls. They’re all up, I thought they might be needed, though I don’t suppose they know anything. My wife’s waiting up, too.”

“Good, we’ll let her get to bed as soon as we can.” He pricked his eras, catching the expected note of the cars turning in from the road. “That’s them. Go and switch the corner light on for them, Bennie, will you? And then I think you three might join the rest of the household inside.”

They withdrew thankfully; he felt the release of a quivering tension that made their first steps almost as nervous as leaps. Then the ambulance wagon came ponderously round into the yard, and Detective-Superintendent Duckett’s car impatiently shepherding it, and the machinery of the County C.I.D. flowed into the case of Alfred Armiger and took possession of it. It was a mark of the compulsive power of the deceased that the head of the C.I.D. had climbed out of his bed and come down in person at one o’clock in the morning. Only the murder of his own Chief Constable could have caused him greater consternation. He stood over the body, hunched in his greatcoat against the chill of the small hours and the hint of frost in the air, and scowled down at the deformed head which would never plan mergers or mischief again.

“This is a hell of a business, George. I tell you, my boy, when you came on the line and told me, I thought you’d gone daft or I had.”

“I felt much the same,” said George. “But there’s not much mistake about it, is there?”

Death, like its victim, had never been more positive. Superintendent Duckett viewed the setting, the body and the instrument, and said nothing until the doctor was kneeling over his subject, delicately handling the misshapen skull. Then he asked briefly, growling out of his collar: “How many blows?”

“Several. Can’t be sure yet, but six or seven at least. The last few possibly after he was already dead. Somebody meant business.” The doctor was youngish, ex-army, tough as teak, and loved his job. He handled Alfred Armiger with fascinated affection; nobody had cherished him like that while he was still alive.

“And I always thought it would be apoplexy,” said Duckett, “if it ever happened to him at all. How long’s he been dead?”

“Say half past eleven at the latest, might be earlier. Tell you better later on, but you won’t be far out if you consider, say, ten-fifteen to eleven-thirty as the operative period. And most of these blows were struck while he was lying right here, and I’d say lying still.”

“The first one put him out, in fact, and then whoever it was battered away at him like a lunatic to make sure he never came round again.”

“Not like a lunatic, no. Too concentrated and accurate. He was on target every time. But you could call them frenzied blows, they went on long after there was any need.”

“So it seems. Didn’t stop till the bottle broke. Marvel it didn’t break sooner, but glass plays queer tricks. George, on the details of this we sit, but firmly,” said Duckett heavily. “Dead, yes, of head injuries if we have to go that far, but keep the rest under wraps for the time being. I’ll issue a statement myself, refer the boys to me. And warn off those fellows who found him. We don’t want this released until I see my way ahead.”

“Very good,” said George. “I don’t think they’ll be wanting to talk about it, they’re too close to it for comfort. Can you make anything of that broken statuette?”

Duckett approached and stared at it, glumly frowning, then picked up its nearest neighbour, a couple locked in a tango death-grip. He grunted with surprise at its lightness, and turned it upside down to stare with disgust into its thin shell. “Sham as the rest of the set-up.” He put it back in its place and thumped the wall beneath it experimentally, but light as it was it sat sturdily on its broad base, and never even rocked. “Wouldn’t fall even if you crashed into the wall beside it, you’d have to knock the thing off bodily. No trace of anything else in the wreckage, nothing was thrown. No scratched paint. And anyhow, if it fell it would fall slightly outwards from the foot of the wall, this is right in the angle of the wall. May be dead irrelevant, may not. Get a record of it, Loder, while you’re about it. Not a hope of getting any prints off it, surface is too rough, but I suppose Johnson may as well try.” The photographer, circling Armiger’s body, murmured absorbed acquiescence, and went on shooting.

“And the champagne glasses,” said George.

“I saw them. You know whose prints will be on those, don’t you? Be a miracle if there are any others, unless it’s the maid’s who dried them and stacked them away here when they were unpacked. Still, we’ll see. Door, of course, Johnson, all the possible surfaces, baluster of that staircase. And that disgusting mess.” He indicated the magnum with a flick of his foot. “His own liquor turned traitor in the end.”

“Whoever was holding the neck of that,” said George, “must have been pretty well smeared. Blood all over it, right to the cork. His shoes and trousers may be spattered, too, though maybe not so obviously as to attract attention. I figure he was standing this side. He took care not to step in it. Not a trace between these marginal splashes and the door.”

“Well,” said Duckett, stirring discontentedly, “give me all you’ve got.”

George gave it, including his own accidental contact with Bennie during the evening.

“And those other two? What account have they given of their moves from ten o’clock on?”

“Clayton was sitting in the car out front when I left, which would be several minutes after ten. He says he moved the car into the yard about twenty past, as he saw no sign of Armiger coming back, and he was in the pub until closing-time, had one pint of mild, and that’s all. From half past ten until nearly eleven he hung around by the car. Still no boss. Then Calverley asked him to come into his own sitting-room, and he was there with Calverley and Mrs. Calverley all the time from then on. All three vouch for that. Bennie was clearing up in the bars with the other waiters, and keeping an eye open for Armiger returning, so that he could give Clayton the item. Around half past eleven Calverley and Clayton began to think they ought to investigate. They’re all used to doing what Armiger says and making no fuss about it, but they’d also be blamed if anything came unstuck and they didn’t deduce it by telepathy and come running, so whatever they did was pretty sure to be wrong, it was only a question of which was wronger, to butt in on him when he didn’t want them or to be missing when he did. I won’t say they were worried about him, but they were getting worried about their own positions with relation to him. Come midnight, they said to each other, better risk it. And they walked in solidly together and found him like this. The only period they don’t cover for each other is approximately half past ten to eleven, but I fancy you’ll find the indoor staff can account for Calverley for most of that time, too. Clayton could have moved around outside without being observed. I haven’t had time to see the others yet, but they’re waiting for me.”

“So many more months to shut,” said Duckett. “Those three will have spread the load by now.”

“You know, I doubt it. Don’t forget, this place only opened tonight, and all the staff except Bennie Blocksidge seem to have been brought into the district from all over. None of them knows the others yet. And when this drops on a bunch of strangers it’s just as likely to shut their mouths as open them. After all, somebody killed him, it might be the bloke sitting next to you.”

“Get on to ‘em, anyhow. When we finish here and take him away I’m leaving you holding it, George. Ring me early, and I’ll send you a relief.”

“I’ll stay with it all day,” said George firmly, “if it’s all the same to you.” He wanted to be sure of an undisturbed night rather than an uneasy and solitary sleep during the day. “Want me to contact Armiger’s solicitors, or will you do that?”

“Cui bono?” said Duckett absently. “I’ll get on to them myself. You make what you can of the bunch here, and I’ll send Grocott to help you with the day staff when they come in, and the list of people who were in the pub last night.”

George left them still busy with cameras and flashes, and went to interview the frightened maids and waiters and the pretty, bleached blonde who was Mrs. Calverley. He got as little from them as he had expected, but deduced from the frozen silence in which he found them that they had justified his forecast by withdrawing into themselves rather than sharing their fears. Laboriously he put together an account of Armiger’s movements during the last hour or two of his life. Shortly before ten, according to Mrs. Calverley, one of the waiters, a young man named Turner who lodged in Comerford, had come into the saloon bar and relayed some message to Mr. Armiger, who had excused himself to his friends and followed him out. A couple of minutes later he had returned, gone straight to his party and had a word with them, and then gone out again. It appeared that this must have been when the anonymous young pal arrived to see him, for what he did next was to bounce into the servery by the dining-room, help himself to a magnum of champagne, and make off in the direction of the side door, bumping into Bennie and giving him his orders with regard to Clayton and the car on the way. No one had again seen him alive.

By the time George had done with the last of them it was almost daylight, and the ambulance had long since taken the dead man away, though Johnson was still in possession of the ballroom, indefatigably combing every hospitable surface for prints. George took himself home for a bath and breakfast and a brief and troubled conference with Bunty, and then took himself off again before Dominic should come scurrying downstairs and begin to ask questions.

He called at the house where the waiter lodged, and found him sitting in his room poring over the day’s runners, half-dressed and not yet shaven. Turner was a Londoner, pale with the city pallor on which summer has no influence, thin and sharp-eyed and dubious of Comerford already. He wouldn’t last long, he’d be off back to town. Meantime he might well be detached about all the people involved in this case, since he knew none of them. He wasn’t worried about being visited by the police, only puzzled and intrigued.

Yes, he said, some time before ten, maybe five minutes or so, he couldn’t be exact, he’d been passing through the hall and a young man had walked in at the door and buttonholed him, and asked for Mr. Armiger. Didn’t give a name, just said ask Mr. Armiger if he can spare a few minutes, say it’s important and I won’t keep him long. And he’d delivered the message, and thought no more about it, and Mr. Armiger had gone out to his visitor, who had waited in the hall for him. That was the last Turner had seen of either of them, because he’d been back in the dining-room after that. Did he know the young man? He knew nobody here, he’d only just come. Could he describe him? Well, there was nothing special about him. Young fellow about twenty-five or twenty-six. Dark overcoat and a grey suit. No hat. Tallish but not tall, cleanshaven, brown hair, nothing particular to notice about him. But he’d know him again if he saw him. Or a photograph? Well, probably, but you can’t always tell with photographs. He could try. Why, anyhow? What did they want him for? What had happened?

George told him, in the shortest and most startling words he could find, watching the cigarette that dangled from a colourless lip. The ash didn’t even fall, but at least Turner’s eyes opened fully for the first time, staring at George with a curiosity and excitement in which he could see no trace of fear or even wariness. The unmistakable tint of pleasure was there. Nothing against the boss, you understand, but after all, he’d hardly clapped eyes on him a couple of times, and it isn’t every day you get up this close to a murder.

“Go on!” he said, gleaming. “Well, I’ll be damned!” And so he might, but not, thought George, for anything to do with Armiger’s death. “You reckon it was this fellow I saw who done it?”

“It’s merely one line of inquiry,” said George dryly. “What I’m trying to do is to fill in all the details of the evening, that’s all. What time did you leave the job last night?”

“About twenty to eleven.” The thought that he might have to account for himself had not shaken his confidence in the slightest. “I got back here before eleven, the old girl’ll tell you the same. What’s more, one of the other blokes walked back with me, name of Stokes, you’ll find him just up the street here, Mrs. Lewis’s.” He pushed the paper aside, not even the runners could win back his attention now. “Can you beat it!” he said, and whistled long and softly. “And they think they’ve got all the life down home!”

George went down the dingy stairs turning over in his mind the irony of this last comment, and betting himself, though without relish because he was on a virtual certainty, that Turner would be in for work before his time that day, if never again.

The news hadn’t got out yet, or at least it was not yet public property, for there was no crowd dawdling hopefully about The Jolly Barmaid when George returned to its bright new doors. He put in a call to Duckett, outlined his moves up to date, and the little information he had gleaned from them, and settled down to compile, with Bennie Blocksidge’s help, a list of people who had been present at the gala opening on the previous evening. There would be no opening hours to-day, that was out of the question with the emperor dead; and once half past ten arrived and the first customer was brought up short against a closed door and a laconic notice, the secret wouldn’t be a secret long.

By the time their list was as complete as their combined memories could make it, Grocott and Price were on the premises and waiting for orders. George unloaded the more promising of the routine calls on to them, and went to telephone Duckett again. By this time even solicitors should be working, and “Cui bono?” was still one of the leading questions. Had Armiger really cut off his son completely, or had he only threatened him and left him to stew a while in his own juice? Not in the hope of bringing him to heel, since marriage can’t be sloughed off as easily as all that even to satisfy an Armiger; but perhaps merely out of spleen, to punish him for his rebellion with a taste of poverty, before taking him back chastened and amenable.

And plus an ex-clerk wife who would be a constant reminder of a defeat to her unloving father-in-law? No, it wasn’t easy to imagine it, after all George turned a thumb down as he dialled Duckett’s number. About a hundred to one Leslie didn’t figure in the will, unless in some peculiarly hurtful and humiliating way. And Armiger’s wife was some years dead, and he had no other child. So somebody was due for a windfall. He wouldn’t disseminate his empire, living or dead. Nor was it really conceivable that he would have neglected to make a revised will, or even postponed it for a period of reflection. He had never reflected, but always charged, and this time would be no exception.

“I talked to old Hartley,” said Duckett. “The terms of the will won’t be much help to us at first glance, but they’re interesting, very interesting. Seems he had his old will destroyed and dictated the terms of a new one the very day he threw his son out. The boy isn’t so much as mentioned. Might as well be dead, apparently, to his father.”

“I’ve been betting myself,” said George, “that he wouldn’t let his pile be divided up. Right?”

“Right. He was a born amasser, he didn’t want things to disintegrate after he was gone, either. There’s a long list of minor legacies to staff, not one of ‘em interesting to us, you wouldn’t consider killing a mouse for the amounts he considered a due reward for service. Mind you, he paid good wages living, I don’t think it’s meanness, it’s just this empire-building tendency of his. But the residue of his property, after payment of these flea-bites, is left to, did I hear you make a guess?”

“You did not,” said George. “My mind’s a blank. He didn’t, by any chance, think of the possibility of grandchildren, and leave it in trust for them?”

“Not a hope. The whole dynasty is cancelled, he’s making a new and surprising start. The name is Katherine Morris, George. And what, if anything, do you make of that?”

CHAPTER IV.

AND WHAT DID George make of it? Just plain spite? A reaction towards Kitty Norris simply because Leslie had veered off from her and married someone else? A way of hitting Leslie as hard as possible by so pointedly deflecting his expectations into the lap of the girl he wouldn’t marry? Not a gesture of consolation to Kitty, Armiger wasn’t quite as clumsy as that, surely, even when he was angry. Or was there more to it than met the eye? Plainly this represented a move to amalgamate Armiger’s Ales and Norris’s Beers and vest the lot in Kitty after his death; but might it not be intended primarily as a move in a game which was to be played with Armiger very much alive and in shrewd command of his forces? Kitty would be welcome to the show after he was dead, provided he ran it while he was alive. His naming her as his heiress might well be an earnest of good faith designed to bring off a deal which had so far eluded him, and the deal could only be the acquisition of Norris’s to add to his own barony here and now. After all, with Leslie out of the picture Armiger was making no sacrifice in declaring his intention of leaving everything he had to Kitty, since he had no other close relatives, and he couldn’t take his fortune with him. He had to dispose of it somehow; how better than by buying a present gain with it, while he was here to enjoy it?

Supposing there existed a tentative proposition for a merger, thought George, and Miss Norris’s manager was holding off, as he understandably might, for once the two firms were joined there wasn’t much doubt who would turn out to be the boss, wouldn’t such a disposition for the future strengthen Armiger’s hand considerably? What had he to lose, in any case? If he failed to get what he wanted this will was as easily revoked as the previous one. It was at least worth a try. What Armiger wanted he usually got, hence the ferocity and finality of his reaction on the one occasion when he failed in his aims.

George got out his car and sat behind the wheel, and thought out his next move without haste. A rum set-up, when you came to think of it, old Norris making Armiger’s right-hand man trustee for his daughter, but the three men had been fairly close friends, and nobody had ever questioned Shelley’s integrity; it seemed to work well enough in practice. He didn’t know whether the trust was wound up now that the girl was of age, or not. There were a lot of relevant things he didn’t know, and on the face of it he had very little right so far to inquire into them. There was only one person he had a perfect right to see about Kitty Norris’s movements and affairs, and that was Kitty Norris. She had been at The Jolly Barmaid last night, she had been with Armiger, he had spoken to her, among others, just before he went off happily to display his latest garish toy; and sooner or later George would have to see her. It might as well be sooner, he decided, and started the car.

Kitty had a flat in Comerbourne, not far from the main shopping centre, but tucked away in a quiet street in the lee of the parish church, and therefore clear of the business traffic which made the town bedlam all through the day. Even there, however, parking was a problem, and George had to take his Morris a good way past the house in order to find a vacant space into which he could insert it. He was lucky, the red Karmann-Ghia was there at the kerb, so Kitty was in. It was nearly noon when she opened the door to him, in a sweater and skirt and a pair of flat, childish sandals, and gazed at him for a moment with nothing in her eyes but patient bewilderment, waiting for him to state his business.

“My name is Felse,” said George. “I’m a police officer, Miss Norris.” The bewilderment vanished so promptly, she stepped back from the doorway so instantly, that he knew she knew. “You’ve heard already about Mr. Armiger?”

“Mr. Shelley telephoned me,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Felse.”

She was looking at him, he noticed, with a certain grave curiosity which he thought was not all for his office but partly for himself, and he was human enough and male enough to be flattered and disarmed by her attention. Some people cannot look directly at you in conversation even when they have nothing to hide; Kitty, he thought, would look straight at you even if she had a guilty secret to hide, because it was the way she was made, and she wouldn’t be able to help it.

“I’m making investigations into Mr. Armiger’s death, and there are points on which I think you may be able to help me, if you will. I promise not to keep you very long.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said, leading him into a big, pastel-coloured room, lofty and unexpectedly sunlit, for she lived on the fourth floor, and the buildings opposite were lower, and showed her only their roofs. “Please sit down, Mr. Felse. May I get you a drink?” She turned and looked at him with a small, wry smile. “It sounds like a Raymond Chandler gambit, doesn’t it? But I was just going to have a sherry, actually. And after all, you’re not a private eye, are you?”

“More of a public one,” said George. It wasn’t going as he’d expected, but he was content to let it wander; it might arrive somewhere very interesting if he let well alone.

“I hope you like it dry,” said Kitty deprecatingly. “It’s all

I’ve got.” The hand that proffered the glass was not quite steady, he saw, but there was every excuse for that tremor.

“Thanks, I do. I’m afraid it must have been a great shock to you, Miss Norris, Mr. Armiger’s death.”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, and sat down directly in front of him and looked straight at him, just as he’d forseen she would have to do. “Mr. Shelley and Miss Hamilton both rang up to tell me,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it. You know what I mean. He was so alive. Whether you liked him or not, whether you approved of him or not, there he was, and you couldn’t imagine the world without him. And there were things about him that were admirable, you know. He was brave. He came up with nothing, and he took on the world to get where he got. And even when he had so much he wasn’t afraid. People often learn to be afraid when they have a lot to lose, but he was never afraid of anything. And he could be generous, too, sometimes. And good fun. If you were a child he wasn’t afraid or ashamed to play with you like a child, even though there was really nothing childish left in him. I suppose it was because children made good playthings for him, because we were satisfied with lots of action, and never made difficulties of principle for him like grown-ups do. It was very easy to get on with him then. And very hard afterwards.” She looked down into her glass, and for the first time George saw, as Dominic had seen, the essential sadness of her face, and like Dominic was dumbfounded and engaged by it, inextricably caught into the mystery of her loneliness and withdrawal.

She moved, he thought, as though her course was set, and her own volition had nothing to do with it, having aligned itself long ago with some other influence which was disposing of her. Not Armiger’s influence, or she could not have talked of him like that. Perhaps not any man’s, only a tide of events in which she felt herself to be caught, and which she had to trust because she had no alternative.

“We’re all imperfect,” said George, trying to speak as simply as she had done, and hoping he didn’t sound as sententious to her as he did to himself. “I think he’d like what you’ve just said of him.”

“There was a great deal that I had against him,” she said, choosing her words with scrupulous care. “That’s why I want to be fair to him. If there’s anything I can tell you, of course I will.”

“You were with him last night, at least for part of the evening. Towards ten o’clock, so I understand from one of the waiters, someone asked Mr. Armiger to spare him a few minutes, and Mr. Armiger went out to speak to him. He then came back and spoke to you and the other people at his table, before leaving again. Is that right?”

“I didn’t look at the time,” she said, “but I expect that’s accurate enough. Yes, he came back to us and said would we excuse him for a quarter of an hour or so, he had to see someone, but he’d be right back, and he hoped we’d wait for him.”

“That’s all he said? He didn’t mention a name, or anything like that?”

“No, that’s all he said. And he went, and then Ruth said she had to get back, because she was expecting a call from her sister in London about a quarter to eleven, she’d promised she’d be in at that time. That’s Miss Hamilton, you know, Mr. Armiger’s secretary. And as Mr. Shelley had brought her he had to leave, too, so I was on my own. I thought at first I would wait, and then I didn’t, after all. I was tired, I thought I’d have an early night. I think it must have been just after a quarter past ten when I left, but maybe someone else might know. The car gets quite a lot of attention,” said Kitty without a trace of irony in her voice or her face, “someone may have seen me drive off.”

Someone had; Clayton had, as he chafed and cursed in his boss’s Bentley in front of The Jolly Barmaid, five minutes or so before he resigned himself to a long wait and moved the car into the courtyard. He had watched her drive out from the carpark and pull out to the right on her way to Comerbourne; and devoted car-enthusiast though he was, it was doubtful if he had been looking at the Karmann-Ghia, “I see,” said George. “So you’d be home by soon after half past ten, I suppose.”

“Oh, before, I expect. It only takes me ten minutes, even counting putting the car away. Oh, God!” said Kitty, recollecting herself too late, as usual. “I shouldn’t be telling you that, should I?”

“I’m incapable of working it out without a pencil and paper,” George reassured her, smiling. But even when she made you laugh there was something about this girl that had you damn’ near crying, and for no good reason. She wasn’t heartbroken about Armiger, she’d stated her position with reference to him punctiliously; shocked she might well be, but that wasn’t what had got into even her smile, even the sweet, rueful clowning that came naturally to her.

“May I ask you some personal questions about your affairs, Miss Norris? They’ll seem to you quite irrelevant, but I think if you care to answer them you may be helping me.”

“Go ahead,” said Kitty. “But if it’s business it’s odds on I won’t even know the answers.”

“I understand that your father left his estate in trust for you, dying as he did when you were quite a child. Can you tell me if that trust terminated when you came of age?”

“I know the answer to that one,” she said, mildly astonished, “and it did. I can do whatever damn-fool thing I like with my money now, they can only advise me. Actually it all goes on just the same as before, but that’s the legal position.”

“So if a merger was proposed between Armiger’s and Norris’s it would be entirely up to you to decide whether you wanted to go through with it?”

“Yes,” she said, so quietly that he knew she had heard the further question he had not asked. “He did want that,” she said, “you’re quite right. He’s been working at it for some time. The people at our place weren’t very keen, but he was like the goat in that silly song, and I dare say he’d have busted the dam in the end. But nothing had happened yet, and now it doesn’t arise any more.”

“And what did you want to do?”

“I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted not to know about it, I wanted to be somewhere else, and not to have to think about it at all. I’d have been glad to give it to him and get rid of it, myself, but after all, people work there, a lot of people, and it means more to them than it does to me. One ought not to own something that matters more to other people. If I knew how to set about it, or could persuade Ray Shelley to understand what I wanted, I’d like to give it to them.”

George had a sense of having been drawn into a tide which was carrying him helplessly off course, and yet must inevitably sweep him, in its own erratic channel, towards the sea of truth. He certainly wasn’t navigating. Neither, perhaps, was she, but she swam as to the manner born with this whirling current, its overwhelming simplicity and directness her natural element. She meant every word she said now, there was no doubt of that, and she expected him to accept it as honestly; and confound the girl, that was exactly what he was doing.

Trying to get his feet on to solid earth again, he said: “This idea of uniting the two firms wasn’t a new one, was it? Forgive me if I’m entering on delicate ground, but the general impression is that Mr. Armiger had the same end in mind earlier, and meant to achieve it in a different way, by a direct link between the two families.”

“Yes, he wanted Leslie to marry me,” she said, so simply that he felt ashamed of his own verbosity. She looked up over her empty glass, and he saw deep into the wide-set eyes that were like the coppery purple velvet of butterfly wings. You looked down and down into them, and saw her clearly within the crystal tower of herself, but so far away from you that there was no hope of ever reaching her. “But it was his idea, not ours. You can’t make these things for other people. He ought to have known that. There never was any engagement between Leslie and me.”

A moment of silence, while she looked steadily at him and her cheeks paled a little. He had one more question to ask her, but he let it ride until he had risen to take his leave, and then, turning back as if something relatively unimportant had occurred to him, he asked mildly: “Do you happen to know the terms of Mr. Armiger’s will?”

“No,” she said quickly, and her head came up with a sudden wild movement, the velvet eyes enormous and eager upon his face. He saw hope flame up in her as though someone had lighted a lamp; a word, and something like joy would kindle in the crystal tower of her loneliness. What was it she wanted of him? Beyond the relatively modest needs of her car and her wardrobe and this almost cloistral flat of hers, money seemed to mean very little to her. He had to go through with it now, because he had to know if what he had to tell her was what she wanted to know.

“He’s left everything to you,” said George.

The light in her was quenched on the instant, but that was the least of it. She stood staring at him open-mouthed, and the colour drained slowly from her face. Her knees gave under her, she reached a hand back to grope for the arm of a chair, and sat down dazedly, her ringers clenched together in her lap.

“Oh, no!” said Kitty in a gasping sigh that seemed to contain disappointment and consternation and rage inextricably mingled, and something else, too, a kind of desperation for which no effort of his imagination could account. “Oh, God, no! I hoped he’d never really done what he threatened, or if he had done it I hoped he’d taken it back. I mean about Leslie! He always swore he hadn’t and wouldn’t, but then even if he had he wouldn’t have been able to admit it, you see. And now, Oh, damn him!” she said helplessly. “Why? There was no possible reason, the thing never arose. He knew I didn’t need it, he knew I shouldn’t want it. Why?”

“He had to leave it to someone,” said George reasonably, “and he had a free choice what he did with his own, like everyone else. There’s no need for you to feel responsible for someone else’s deprivation, you know, it was none of your doing.”

“No,” she said dully, and let the monosyllable hang on the air as though she had meant to add something, and then could find no suitable words for what she wanted to say. She got up again resignedly to see him out, punctilious in accompanying him to the door, but all the time with that lost look in her eyes. When the door had closed between them he made three purposeful paces away from it towards the stairs, and two long, silent ones back again. She hadn’t moved from the other side of the door, she was leaning against the wall there, trying to think, trying to get hold of herself. He heard her say aloud, helplessly: “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!” in childish reproach, as though she was appealing to an unreasonable deity to see her point of view.

What had he done to her? What was it he’d done? Granted she didn’t want the money, granted she thought it ought to have gone to Leslie, she needn’t have received the news as though it embodied some peculiarly insidious attack upon her. He couldn’t say he hadn’t provoked any interesting reasons, the trouble was he didn’t know how to make sense of them now he’d got them.

He went down the carpeted stairs displeased with himself, almost ashamed, not even trying to make the odd pieces of jigsaw puzzle fit together, since they were so few and so random that no two of them touched as yet; and there, leaning negligently on the Morris, when he reached it, was Dominic.

He was a little out of breath, having run all the way to the car while George was coming down the last flight of stairs; but George was too preoccupied with other things to notice that. The bright inquisitive smile looked all right, the “Hallo, Dad!” sounded all right, and George didn’t look closely.

“Hallo!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

It was the third time Dominic had skipped his school lunch and made do with a snack in the town, in order to have time to walk slowly up and down Church Lane in the hope of catching a glimpse of Kitty. The telephone directory had supplied her address, once she herself had told him her name. He hadn’t yet quite recovered from the shock of strolling past the open door of the block and seeing the unmistakable shape of his father slowly descending the last turn of the stairs; and if it hadn’t been for the sudden inspiration the sight of the car had given him, he would have been running still.

“I’ve been on an errand for Chuck,” he said, mastering his breathing with care. Chuck was the least offensive of the several names by which his house-master was known to the upper school.

“Here?” said George, divining an improbability even where he had no reason to feel suspicious.

“To the rector,” said Dominic firmly, jerking his head towards the corner of the churchyard wall. Blessedly the rector was a governor of the school and chaplain to its cadet corps. “I saw the car and hung around on the offchance. As it’s getting round to half past twelve I thought with a lot of luck you might buy me a lunch.”

On reflection George thought he might. Beer barons may die, but the rest of the world still has to eat. “Get in,” he said resignedly, and took his offspring to a restaurant not far from the school, so that there should be no risk of his being late in the afternoon. “What about Chuck? Can the answer wait?”

“No answer,” said Dominic. “That’s all right.” The odd thing was that he didn’t feel as if he was lying at all; it was quite simply unthinkable to let the truth be seen or known, or even guessed at, though there was nothing guilty or shameful about it. Privacy as an absolute need was new to him. Ever since starting school at five years old he’d lied occasionally in order to keep something exclusively for himself, like most children, but without ever reasoning about what he was doing, and only very rarely, because his parents, and particularly his mother, had always made it easy for him to confide in them without feeling outraged. This was something different, something so urgent and vital that he would have died rather than have it uncovered. And yet he had to do things which would expose him to the risk of discovery; he had to, because what was his father doing there in the block of flats where Kitty lived? What was he doing there, the morning after old Armiger was killed, the morning after Kitty’d been with him at The Jolly Barmaid? “Your girl-friend was there, , , ” And now this visit. They’d have to see everyone who’d been there, of course, but why Kitty, so soon?

“You’re on this murder case, aren’t you?” he said, trying to strike the right note of excited curiosity. “Mummy told me this morning old Armiger was dead. What a turn up! I never said anything to the fellows, naturally, but it leaked in around break, with the milk. It’s all over the town now, they’ve had half a dozen people third-degreed by this time, and one or two arrested.”

“They would,” said George tranquilly. “The number of people who can do this job better than I can, it’s a wonder I ever hold it down at all. Who’s the favourite?”

A sprat to catch a mackerel was fair enough. Dominic trailed his bait and hoped for a rise. “That chap Clayton. I bet you didn’t know he was under notice, did you?”

“The devil he is!” said George, wondering if Grocott had collected this bit of information yet, wondering, too, from which school theorist the item of news had come.

“Then you didn’t know! Old Armiger’s gardener’s son is in our form. There was a blazing row three days ago over hours, Clayton pitched right in and said he wouldn’t stand for being shoved around all hours of the day and night, and Armiger threw it up at him that he’d done time for larceny once and once for receiving a stolen car, and he was bloody lucky to have a job at all, , , “

“Language!” said George mechanically, drawing in to the kerb.

“Sorry; quoting. And then he fired him. Did you know he had a record?”

“Yes, we knew. A record ten years old. Not enough to hang him.”

“It isn’t capital murder,” said Dominic.

“I hope you’re not going to turn into a lawyer in the home,” said George. “I was using a figure of speech.”

He locked the car, and ushered his son before him into the dining-room of The Flying Horse. They found a table in a corner, and settled purposefully over the menu. Bad timing, thought Dominic, vexed. I shall have to come right out and ask.

“Are you on to anything yet?” The ardent face, the earnest eyes, these would pass muster with George; it was Dominic himself who suffered, making this enforced use of a travesty of something so real and so important to him. His father was wonderful, and he did feel a passionate partisan interest in any case his father was handling. But here he was putting on the appropriate face for his own ends, parodying his own adoration, and it caused him an almost physical pain when George grinned affectionately at him, and slapped him down only very gently.

“Just routine, Dom. We’ve hardly begun, there’s a long way to go yet.”

“Who was it you had to see in Church Lane? There aren’t any suspects there, are there?”

After a moment of consideration George said calmly: “I’d been to see Miss Norris. Just as I told you, pure routine. I’m working my way through a whole list of people who were on the premises last night, that’s all.”

“And no real leads yet? I don’t suppose she was able to tell you much, was she?”

“Practically nothing I didn’t know already. Get on with your lunch and stop trying to pump me.”

And that was all he was going to get, for all his careful manipulations. He tried once or twice more, but he knew it was no good. And maybe there was nothing more to extract, maybe this was literally all. But Dominic wasn’t happy. How could he be, with murder passing so close to Kitty that its shadow came between her and the sun?

CHAPTER V.

“Yes,” said Jean Armiger, “I’ve heard the news. It’s in the noon papers, you know. I’ve been expecting you.”

She was a slender dark girl, with short black hair clustering closely round a bold, shapely head. Her face was short, broad and passionate, and her spirit was high. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She stood squarely in the middle of her ugly, inconvenient furnished bed-sitting-room on the second floor of Mrs. Harkness’s seedy house in a back street on the edge of town, facing George and the full light from the window, and scared of neither. The slight thickening of her body beneath the loose blue smock had robbed her of her quick-silver lightness and precision of movement, but its unmistakable qualities were there in every motion she made with her hands and head. For some reason, perhaps because Kitty had a way of dimming everyone else around her, George hadn’t expected anyone as attractive as this, or as vivid. Jean, as Wilson had said, was quite a girl. It wasn’t so difficult, after all, to see how Leslie Armiger might contrive to notice her existence, even in Kitty’s presence. He had grown up on brotherly terms with Kitty.

“You’ll understand, I’m sure, that we have routine inquiries to make. Were you at home last night, Mrs. Armiger?”

She curled a lip at the phrase, and cast one flying glance round the room he had dignified by the name. True, there was a cramped make-shift kitchenette out on the landing to be added to the amenities, and a shed in the garden where Leslie was allowed to keep his easel and canvasses and colours. But, home?

“Yes,” she said, forbearing from elaborating on the glance, which had been eloquent enough. “All the evening.”

“And your husband?”

“Yes, Leslie was here, too, except for a little while, he went out about half past nine to post some letters and get a breath of air. He was in the stores packing orders all day yesterday, he needed some fresh air. But it was only for about half an hour.”

“So he was home by ten?”

“I think it was a little before. Certainly by ten.”

“And he didn’t go out again?”

“No. You can check that with him, of course,” she said disdainfully. At this very minute, if all had gone according to plan, Grocott would be asking Leslie Armiger the same questions, discreetly in the manager’s office, at Malden’s, so that the staff, no doubt already agog, shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he was due to be arrested any moment; but Jean didn’t know that, of course. George wasn’t even sure why he had taken the precaution of arranging these two interviews to take place simultaneously; he had no reason as yet to distrust this young couple rather than any other of the possible suspects, but he had learned to respect his hunches. And if they had no lies to tell he had done them no wrong.

“We shall do that, of course,” he said disingenuously. “Tell me, Mrs. Armiger, have you had any contact with your father in-law since your marriage? Ever seen him or spoken to him?”

“No, never,” she said firmly, with a snap which said plainly that that was the way she had wanted it.

“Nor your husband, either?”

“He hasn’t seen him. He did write to him once, only once, about a couple of months ago.”

“Trying to effect a reconciliation?”

“Asking for help,” said Jean, and bit off the consonant viciously and clenched her teeth on silence.

“With your consent?”

“No!”

She wasn’t going to much trouble to hide her feelings, but she hadn’t intended to spit that negative at him so bitterly. She turned her head away for a moment, biting her lip, but she wouldn’t take it back or try to soften it now it was out.

“With what result?”

“With no result. He sent a contemptuous answer and refused to do anything for us.” She had been grateful for that, it had salved the fierce pride Leslie had involuntarily injured by making the appeal.

“And there’s been no further approach?”

“None as far as I know. But I’m sure none.”

After some inward debate George told her the terms of Armiger’s will; it seemed a justifiable line of inquiry. “Does that come as a surprise to you, Mrs. Armiger?”

“No,” she said steadily. “Why should it? He had to leave his money to someone, and he had no relatives left that be hadn’t quarrelled with.”

“You didn’t know of this plan of his to make Miss Norris his heiress?”

“All we knew was that Leslie was written off for good, so it no longer concerned us. His father had made that very plain.”

She was turning the narrow wedding ring upon her finger, and George saw that it was loose. The cheek on which the dark hair curled so lustrously was thinner than it should have been, too, perhaps with too much fatigue and worry, carrying the child, running this oppressive, cramped apology for a home and working part-time to eke out the budget; or perhaps with some other strain that gnawed at her from within. Something terrifying and destroying had happened to her when Leslie caved in and wrote to his father, something he might never be able to undo. Thanks to that unrelenting old demon of a father of his, he had another chance to come up to her expectations, if he had it in him; but after that one slip he had to prove it, up to then probably she’d been serenely sure of him. And yet George could see Leslie’s point of view, too. He must love his wife very much, or he wouldn’t have burned his boats for her sake; and to see her fretting here, to think of his son spending the first months of his life here, was surely enough to bring him to heel, however reluctantly. You could even argue that his attitude was more responsible than hers. What was certain was that by that one well-meant gesture he’d come dangerously near to shaking his marriage to pieces.

“I won’t trouble you any longer, Mrs. Armiger. Thank you for your help.”

He rose, and she went with him to the door, silent, disdaining to add anything or ask anything. Or hide anything? No, she would do that, if she had to. Maybe he’d soon know whether she was already hiding something.

The stairs were dark and narrow, the house smelled of oilcloth, stale air and furniture polish. Mrs. Harkness’s frigid gentility would never stand many visits from the police, even in plain clothes. George had already observed that no telephone wires approached the house, and that there was a telephone box only fifty yards away at the corner of the road. He drove away in the opposite direction, but turning left at the next by-road came round the block and parked under the trees within sight of the bright red cage, and sat watching it for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, twenty-five; but Jean Armiger didn’t come.

That pleased him; he had liked her, and he wanted her on the level, and though he had suffered some reverses in the past he had never yet learned to be sufficiently wary of the optimism with which he viewed the motives and actions of those people who made an instant good impression upon him. However, he went through the motions of scepticism; he wouldn’t commit himself to believing absolutely in her until he’d called Grocott, who was back in the office by now waiting for the telephone to ring.

The call tended to confirm his view that Jean was honest, and her testimony reliable. Young Leslie, called discreetly into conference from his dusty warehouse behind the big shop in Duke Street, had told a story which tallied at all points with his wife’s. Instead of going straight back after posting his letters he’d gone for a walk round by the park. He hadn’t been away quite half an hour, because he was certain the church clock hadn’t struck ten when he let himself into the house again. All very simple and entirely probable, and there had certainly been no contact between husband and wife. Yet the result, perversely, was to make George turn and take another look at his dispositions; and there was still room for doubt. As Jean had so unwisely revealed that she knew, Duckett’s bald statement was in the noon papers. Armiger had been found dead last night on the premises of The Jolly Barmaid with severe head injuries; foul play was, by implication, taken for granted, though Duckett had avoided committing himself. That was enough to alert both the dispossessed son and his fiercely loyal wife; guilty or innocent, they would know they must shortly account for their movements on that evening, guilty or innocent they might find themselves without a surety except each other, and make haste to coordinate the details of their story before the questions were asked. There’d been time for a telephone call between the appearance of the early editions on the streets and George’s two-thirty deadline. Depressed, George searched for the vindicating detail which should justify him in throwing this doubt overboard, but he couldn’t find one. Given the intelligence Jean certainly did not lack, there could have been collusion.

“How did he look?”

“Not too bad. A bit shocked, naturally, but he didn’t pretend they’d been on good terms, or that he was terribly cut up. Even if he was, actually, he wouldn’t let you see it. A very reserved chap, and a bit on the defensive, too.”

“Scared?”

“I wouldn’t say scared. But he’s well aware that he’s in a spot to attract, shall we say, the unwelcome attentions of the nosy public as well as ours. He’s no fool, and he knows his affairs are common property. Knows his strongest card is that he had nothing to gain by killing his dad, too.”

“Did he take pains to call your attention to the fact?”

“You underestimate him,” said Grocott with a short laugh. “He’s giving us credit for seeing that much ourselves. He just seemed to me to be leaning back on it for reassurance every time the going looked a bit rough.”

“How does he get on with the drivers and warehouse men?” asked George curiously. Such little communities don’t always take kindly to young men of superior education and manners accidentally dropped among them, especially if the alien tends to keep himself to himself.

“Surprisingly well. They seem to like him, call him Les, and let him mull in with them or keep quiet according to how he feels. Main thing is, I think, that there’s nothing phoney about him. He doesn’t try to be hail-fellow-well-met or drop his accent and pick up theirs. They’d soon freeze him out if he did, but he’s a lot too sensible for that. Or too proud. Either way it’s worked out to his advantage.”

The picture that emerged, thought George as he walked back to his car, was an attractive one, but he had to beware of being disarmed by that into writing off Leslie Armiger as innocent. Money is not the only motive for killing. There on one side was the heiress, already so wealthy that the money motive was no motive at all, and on the other side this young couple, very poor indeed but with nothing whatever to gain by Armiger’s death. He was of some potential value to them still so long as he remained alive, since in time he might have relented and taken them into favour after all. Especially with a grandson or granddaughter on the way. On the other hand, those who knew him best had said that he was extremely unlikely to change his attitude, and anyone can let fly in a rage, even with nothing to gain by it but the satisfaction of an overwhelming impulse of hatred and a burning sense of injury.

And there were others who didn’t love him, besides his own son. Clayton, that quiet tough in uniform, had turned out to be under notice, and Armiger had apparently tossed his prison record in his teeth when they fell out, and told him he was “bloody lucky to have a job at all.” Had that been merely a shaft at random, or meant to suggest to him that Armiger could, if he chose, make it practically impossible for him to find alternative employment anywhere in the Midland counties? People have been killed for reasons a good deal less substantial than that. And there was Barney Wilson, who had been done out of the home on which he’d set his heart, merely to satisfy Armiger’s spite against his son. That way the injury might smart even more fiercely than if the blow had been aimed directly at him. And others, too, people who had done business with Armiger to their cost, people who had worked for him.

Sitting there in the car contemplating the width of the field wasn’t going to get him anywhere. George hoisted himself out of a momentary drowsiness and drove to the head office of Armiger’s Ales, which was housed in a modern concrete and chromium building on a terrace above the cutting of the river. The main brewery was down behind the railway yards, in the smoke and grime of old Comerbourne, but the headquarters staff had broad lawns and flowering trees spread out before their windows, and tennis courts, and a fine new carpark for their, on the whole, fine new cars. Miss Hamilton’s Riley was the only old one among them, but of such enormous dignity and lavish length that it added distinction to the whole collection.

She drove it well, too, George had often seen her at the wheel and admired her invariable calm and competence. As often as not there would be two or three callow teen-age boys in the car with her when she was seen about at weekends in summer, recruits from the downtown youth club she helped the probation officer to run. Maybe love of that beautifully-kept old Riley had been the saving of one or two potential delinquents within the past few years.

Raymond Shelley was just crossing the entrance hall when George appeared. He halted at once, obviously prepared to turn back.

“Do you want to see me? I was just on my way out, but if you want me, of course, , , ” He had his briefcase under his arm and his silver-grey hat in his hand; the long, clear-featured face looked tired and anxious, and there was a nervous twitch in his cheek, but his manners would never fall short of the immaculate, nor his expression fail of its usual aristocratic benevolence. “One of your men was in this morning, so I rather assumed you’d done with us for to-day. I was going out to see Miss Norris. But I can easily telephone and put it off for an hour or two.”

“Please don’t,” said George. “I’ll talk to Miss Hamilton, if she’s free. You go ahead with whatever you were planning to do.”

“You’re sure? Naturally if there’s anything further I can do to help I’ll be only too pleased. I’ll bring you to Ruth’s room, at least.” He reached a long, thin hand to the polished balustrade of the staircase and led the way. “We have already accounted for ourselves, of course,” he said with a wry smile.

“I happened to see you leave the premises with Miss Hamilton last night,” said George, returning the smile. “I was in the hall when you left.”

“Good, that puts us in a very strong position. I wish all the other problems were going to be as easily resolved,” said Shelley wretchedly. “This is a beastly business, Mr. Felse.”

“Murder usually is, Mr. Shelley.”

The word pulled him up motionless for a moment. “Is that absolutely certain, that it’s murder? The official statement leaves the issue open, and your man this morning was very discreet. Well, , , ” He had resumed his climb, and turned right in the broad panelled corridor on the first floor. “I won’t pretend I’m surprised, everything pointed that way. At the moment I can’t realise what’s happened. I can think and understand, but nothing registers yet. It’s going to take a long time to get used to his not being here.”

“I can appreciate that,” said George. “You’ve worked with him a good many years. Known him, perhaps, better than anyone, you and Miss Hamilton. You’re going to miss him.”

“Yes.” He let the monosyllable stand alone, making no claims for his affection; if anything, he himself sounded a little surprised at the nature of the gap Alfred Armiger had left in his life. He tapped on the secretary’s door, and put his head into the room. “A visitor for you, Ruth,” he said, and went away and left them together.

She rose from behind her desk, a tall, quiet woman in office black which had suddenly become mourning black, her smooth dark hair parted in the middle and coiled on the back of her neck. Twenty years she’d been in Armiger’s service. There wasn’t much she didn’t know about him and his family, and maybe to understand all is to forgive a good deal, at any rate. Her calm was as admirable as ever, but her face bore the marks of shock and strain. He saw her fine black brows contract at sight of him, in a reflex of distress and reluctance, but she made him welcome none the less, and sat down opposite him in front of her desk, instead of withdrawing behind it, to mark her abdication from her official status.

“I’ve come to you as the person who can best help me to understand the family set-up here,” said George directly. “Anything connected with Mr. Armiger’s circle and affairs may be of vital importance now, I know you realise that. As one who is in a position to be fair to both of them, will you tell me the facts about Mr. Armiger’s quarrel with his son?”

She set an open box of cigarettes and a heavy glass ashtray on the edge of the desk midway between them, and allowed herself a moment for thought before she answered. He had time to take in the character of the room, which from long association had taken on her strong, austere colouring. The small black wall-clock with its clear, business-like face and good design was of her choosing, so were the elegant desk fittings. And there were two large framed photographs on the wall, and one smaller one in a stand-up frame on the desk, all of groups of boys from the probation officer’s club. Two of the pictures she herself had probably taken at some summer camp; the third showed half a dozen boys grouped round her at a party on the club premises. She looked entirely at home among them, firm and commanding still, but flatteringly handsome and feminine, guaranteed to make any unstable sixteen-year-old feel six inches taller every time she allowed him to light her cigarette or embrace her in a foxtrot. Waste of an able woman, thought George, twenty years running nothing more personal than this office; she ought to have had a couple of promising boys of her own to worry about, instead of picking up the casualties after the kind of wastrel family that has a dozen and neglects the lot.

“There were faults on both sides,” she said at last, a little tritely after so much thought. She felt the inadequacy herself, and smiled. “But in reality Mr. Armiger himself was responsible for all of them. I’m sure I needn’t tell you that he was a most difficult man, whether as an employer or a parent. It wasn’t wilful, he simply could not see another person’s point of view. He was honestly convinced that everything and everybody ought to revolve about him and do what he expected of them. As a child Leslie was dreadfully spoiled. He could have anything he wanted provided it didn’t cross his father’s will, and while he was a child of course there wasn’t any real clash. Every accomplishment such as his painting, everything he shone at, every superior possession, only flattered his father. And he was never punished for anything unless it annoyed his father, you see. After Mrs. Armiger began to be an invalid and kept to her room they asked me to move into the house. Mr. Armiger used to spend more of his time at home then, and manage a good deal of his business from there, before this place was completed. I won’t say I didn’t do my best to straighten up the accounts, the few years I was there, but it was a bit late to take Leslie in hand by then, the damage was done. Well, as soon as Leslie began to grow up and need a life of his own the clashes began, as you can imagine. They fought spasmodically for four or five years before the break came, and all the earlier fights Mr. Armiger naturally won. All the effective weapons were on his side. But when the issues at stake became more and more important it didn’t work out that way any longer. Leslie paints very well, he wanted to go in for it seriously, but his father wouldn’t let him, he made him come into the offices here. Everybody had to fall in with his plans. Leslie was supposed to marry Kitty Norris and go into beer in an even bigger way than his father. And before they’d finished fighting out the battle about his painting, he’d met Jean and there was an even bigger row brewing up.”

“He got to know her right here, in the offices?”

“At first, yes, and then they began seeing each other casually, not even secretly, and Mr. Armiger was furious. There was a terrible scene, and he ordered Leslie not to see her again, and laid down the law flat about what his future was to be, toe the line or go. I don’t think he meant it then, he was only trying to bring Leslie to heel, but this was the real issue at last, and it broke all the rules. Leslie should have given in and promised to be a good boy. Instead, he went right out and took Jean dancing and got himself engaged to her on the spot.”

“Not the best possible prospect for a marriage,” suggested George, “if he walked into it simply as a way of rebelling against his father.”

“It wasn’t that,” she said, shaking her head decidedly. “All his father had done was make him realise what was at stake, how big it was and how very much he wanted it. And as soon as he recognised it he grabbed it, like a sensible boy, and hung on to it, too, though the repercussions were hair-raising. He walked right in here to his father’s office the next day, and stood in front of his desk, and just blurted out like a gunshot that he was engaged. Maybe that’s the only way he could get it out at all. Mr. Armiger really thought, you know, even then, that he could simply order him to break it off. When he found he couldn’t I expected a heart attack from pure shock. Leslie dug his heels in and said no, no, no, and went on saying no. He couldn’t believe it was happening to him. When he really grasped the idea, he threw them out, and that time he did mean it. All right, he said, if you want her, if she’s worth that to you, take her. Take her out of here now, this minute, and neither of you need ever come back. And Leslie said O.K., that suited him, and he went right downstairs and did just that, bundled Jean into her hat and coat and walked out with her. She stayed in her lodgings and he went to a hotel, and they spent the time while they waited to get married looking for somewhere to live. Leslie went to the house just once more, to collect his things, but as far as I know he never did see his father again. He couldn’t find anything better for them than furnished rooms, and when it came to getting a job, of course, he’d no qualifications and no training. The only thing he’d taken seriously at Oxford was his painting. He had to go to work more or less as a labourer. I’m afraid he’s collected all the arrears of discipline he missed in one dose,” she said ruefully. “If he comes through it intact you can say he’ll be able to cope with anything else life may throw at him.”

“Would he ever have relented?” asked George.

“Mr. Armiger? No, never. Crossing his will was an unforgivable blasphemy. I can imagine him as a senile old man in the nineties, perhaps, turning sentimental and wanting a reconciliation, but never while he had all his faculties.”

“Did anyone try to reason with him at the time?” She smiled at that, rightly interpreting it as meaning in effect: did you?

“Yes, Ray Shelley broke his head against it for weeks, and Kitty did her best, too. She was very upset, she felt almost responsible. As for me, I know a rock when I see one. I didn’t say a word. First because I knew it would be no good, and secondly because if by any chance he did have a sneaking wish to undo what he’d done, arguing with him would only have made him more mulish than ever.”

“Did you by any chance see the letter Leslie wrote to his father two months ago?” asked George.

The level dark eyes searched his face. “Did Leslie tell you about that?”

“No, his wife did. I haven’t yet seen Leslie.”

Quietly she said: “Yes, I saw it. It wasn’t at all an abject letter, in case you don’t know what was in it. Rather stiff-necked, if anything, though of course it was a kind of capitulation to write at all. They’d obviously only just settled for certain that Jean was going to have a baby, and the poor boy was feeling his responsibilities badly, and I suspect feeling very inadequate. He told his father the child was coming, and appealed to him to help them at least to a roof of their own, since he’d robbed them of the one they’d hoped to have. I don’t know if you know about that?”

“I know,” said George. “Go on.”

“Mr. Armiger made a very spiteful reply, acknowledging his son’s appeal like a business letter, and repeating that their relationship was at an end, and Leslie’s family responsibilities were now entirely his own affair. It was deliberately worded to leave no hope of a reconciliation, ever. He pretended he’d had no idea Leslie ever wanted the barn, but then he ended by saying that since he was interested in the place he was sending him a souvenir of its purchase, and it was the last present they need ever expect from him. As a would-be painter, he said, Leslie might find it an appropriate gift. It was the old sign, from the earlier days when the house used to be an inn.”

“The Joyful Woman,” said George.

“Was that its name? I didn’t know, but that accounts for it. I saw it when Mr. Armiger brought it in for the people downstairs to pack. It was a rather crude painting of a woman laughing, a half-length. They found it in the attics when the builders moved in on the house. It was on a thick wooden panel, very dirty and damaged, the usual kind of daub. One of the firm’s cars took it and dumped it at Leslie’s landlady’s house the day after the letter was written.”

Jean had said nothing about the gift, only about the curt and final letter. But there might be nothing particular in that omission, since the gift was merely meant to be insulting and to underline what the letter had to say. This is all you need expect from me, living or dead, and this is all you’ll ever own of The Joyful Woman. Make the best of it!

“Leslie didn’t write or telephone again?”

“Never again as far as I know. But I should know if he had.”

And all day, thought George, I’ve been writing off a certain possibility because I felt so sure that, firstly, if Leslie did go and ask for an interview Armiger wouldn’t grant it, and secondly, if by any chance he did choose to see him it certainly wouldn’t be to greet him with backslapping heartiness, champagne and a preview of his appalling ballroom. But maybe, after all, that was exactly the way he might receive him, rubbing salt into the wounds, goading him with the shoddy miracles money could perform. On a night when triumph and success were in the air maybe this was much more his mark, not direct anger but this oblique and barbaric cruelty. “He’ll be interested to see what can be done with a place like that, given plenty of money and enterprise, , , ” “He was fair hugging himself.”

“Miss Hamilton, have you got a reasonably recent photograph of Leslie?”

She gave him a long, thoughtful look, as though she was considering whether he could need such a thing for any good purpose, and whether, in any case, denial could serve to do anything but delay the inevitable. Then she got up without a word, and went behind the desk, and brought out from one of the drawers a half-plate portrait, which she held out to him with a slight, grim smile shadowing the corners of her mouth. It had at some time been framed, for George saw how the light had darkened the pale ground slightly, and left untouched a half-inch border round the edges. More recently it had been torn across into two ragged pieces, and then carefully mended again with gum and Sellotape. The torn edges had been matched as tenderly as possible, but the slash still made a savage scar across the young, alert, fastidious face.

George looked from the photograph to the woman behind the desk.

“Yes,” she said. “I fished it out of his wastepaper basket and mended it and kept it. I don’t quite know why. Leslie has never been particularly close to me, but I did see him grow up, and I didn’t like to see the last traces of him just wiped out, like that. That may help you to understand what had happened between them.” She added: “It’s two years old, but it’s the only one he happened to have here in the office. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be any use looking for any of those he had at home.”

George could imagine it. A much-photographed boy, too, most likely. He saw bonfires of cherubic babies, big-eyed toddlers, serious schoolboys, earnest athletes, self-conscious young men-about-town, Armiger’s furnace fed for hours, like a Moloch, on images of his son.

“Thank you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll see that you have it back,” was all he said.

The face was still before his eyes as he went out to his car. Leslie Armiger was not visibly his father’s son. Taller, with long, fine bones and not much flesh. Brown hair lighter than his father’s curled pleasantly above a large forehead, and the eyes were straight and bright, with that slight wary wildness of young and high-mettled creatures. The same wonder and insecurity was in the long curves of his mouth, not so much irresolute as hypersensitive. No match for his father, you’d say on sight, if it came to a head-on clash either of wills or heads. But in spite of the ceremonial destruction of his image, young Leslie was still alive; the bull had pawed the ground and charged for the last time.

It was just four o’clock, and Dominic was walking up Hill Street on his way to the bus stop. Since he had to pass the main police station it was his habit to call in, on days when he hadn’t biked to school, on the offchance that George might be there with the car, and ready to go off duty; and sometimes he was lucky. To-day George picked him up at the corner and took him to the office with him while he filed his latest report; then they drove home together.

“One little call to make,” said George, “and then we’ll head for our tea. You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? It won’t take long.”

“And then you’ve finished for the day?” Dominic’s anxious eyes were searching his face surreptitiously, and trying to read the mind behind it. He would have liked to ask right out if anything positive had turned up, if Kitty was safely and irrevocably out of the affair; but how could he? They had had a family code for years in connection with George’s work, governed by rules none the less sacred for being unformulated; and once already to-day he’d been warned off from infringing them. One did not ask. One was allowed to listen if information was volunteered, and to suggest if participation was invited, but never to ask; and a silence as inviolable as the confessional sealed in all that was said within the framework of a case. He contained the ache within him, and waited faithfully, but it hurt.

“Don’t know yet, Dom, it’ll depend on what I get here.” He was turning into the empty parking-ground of The Jolly Barmaid. “If my man’s here I shan’t be five minutes, whatever the outcome may be.”

But it did not take even five minutes, for Turner was sitting in the curtained public bar, cigarette on lolling lip, devouring the racing results, and it needed only one good look at Leslie Armiger’s photograph to satisfy him.

“That’s him. That’s the young bloke who come asking for Mr. Armiger. Stood on the doorstep to wait for him, but I saw him in a good light when he first come in. Different clothes, of course, but that’s him all right, I’d know him anywhere.”

“You’d swear to him?”

“Any time you like, mate. About five to ten he walked in, and Mr. Armiger come out to him, and that’s the last I saw of ‘em.”

“Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”

He pocketed the photograph and went back to the car thinking grimly: Home by ten, were you, my lad! So you’ve solved the problem I’ve always wanted to get straightened out, how to be in two places at once. Now I wonder if you’ll be willing to tell me how it’s done?

CHAPTER VI.

LESLIE ARMIGER WAS not a happy liar. There was almost as much relief as fright in his eyes as he looked from the photograph to George’s face and back again. Jean came to his side, and he put his arm round her for a moment, with a curiously tentative gesture of protection, as though he had wanted to clasp her warmly, and either because of George’s presence or his own predicament or her aloofness he could not.

“The best thing you can do now,” said George sternly, “is tell me everything. You see what happens when you don’t. You, too, Mrs. Armiger. Wouldn’t it have looked infinitely better if you’d told the truth in the first place, rather than leave it to come out this way?”

“Now wait a minute!” Leslie’s sensitive nostrils were quivering with nervous tension. “Jean had nothing to do with this. She hasn’t got a time sense, never did have. She merely made one of her vague but confident guesses, saying I was in by ten.”

“And picked on a time and a few details that matched your story word for word? That tale was compounded beforehand, Mr. Armiger, and you know it as well as I do.”

“No, that isn’t true. Jean simply made a mistake, , , “

“So you backed up her statement rather than embarrass her? Now, now, you can do better than that. Have you forgotten that your statement and hers were made at the very same moment, something like a mile apart? My boy, you’re positively inviting me to throw the book at you.”

“Oh, Christ!” said Leslie helplessly, dropping into a chair. “I’m no good at this!”

“None at all, I’m glad you realise it. Now suppose we just sit round the table like sensible people, and you tell me the truth.”

Jean had drawn back from them, hesitating for a moment. She said quietly: “I’ll make some coffee,” and slipped out to the congested kitchenette on the landing; but George noticed that she left the door open. Whatever her private dissatisfactions with her husband, she would be back at his side instantly if the law showed signs of getting tough with him.

“Now then, let’s have it straight this time. What time did you really come home?”

“It must have been about ten to eleven,” said Leslie sullenly. “I did go to that pub of his, and I did ask to see him, but I give you my word Jean didn’t know anything about it. All she did was get worried because of the times, because there was three-quarters of an hour or so unaccounted for. But I never told her where I’d been.”

George had no difficulty in believing that; it was implied in every glance they cast at each other, every hesitant movement they made towards each other, so wincingly gentle and constrained. It was clear that they knew how far apart they stood, and were frightened by the gap that had opened between them. That fiery girl now so silent and attentive outside the half-open door was suffering agonies of doubt of her bargain. Had he, after all, the guts to stand up to life? Was that disastrous appeal to his father only a momentary lapse, or was it a symptom of inherent weakness? George thought they had fought some bitter battles, and frightened and hurt each other badly; but now he was the enemy, and they stood together in a solid alliance against him. He might very well be doing them a favour just by being there.

“Then you’d better tell her now, hadn’t you?” he said firmly. “It’ll come better from you than from anyone else. And she may be a good deal happier about knowing than about not knowing.”

“I suppose so.” But he didn’t sound convinced yet, he was too puzzled and wretched to know which way to turn. He swallowed the humiliation of being lectured, and began to talk.

“All right, I went out to post my letters, and then I kept going, and went straight to the pub and asked for my father. I didn’t want to go in, I just stuck at the door until he came out to me. And I didn’t happen to see anybody I knew, the waiter was a stranger, that’s why, when this thing blew up this morning, I was fool enough to think I could just keep quiet about being there. But you mustn’t blame Jean for trying to help me out.”

“We won’t bring your wife into it. Why did you go and ask for this interview? To make another appeal to him?”

“No,” said Leslie grimly, “not again. I was through with asking him for anything. No, I went to get back from him something of mine that he’d taken, or if I couldn’t get it back, at least to tell him what I thought of him.” He was launched now, he would run. George sat back and listened without comment to the story of the first appeal, and the answer it had brought, the cruel and gloating gift of the old inn sign as a memento of Leslie’s defeat and his father’s victory. He gave no sign that he was hearing it for the second time that day.

“Well, then just two weeks ago something queer happened. He suddenly changed his mind. One evening after I got home old Ray Shelley turned up here positively shiny with good news. I knew he’d done his best for me at the time of the bust-up, he was always a kind soul, and he was as pleased as Punch with the message he had for me. He said my father’d thought better of what he’d done, come to the conclusion that though he’d still finished with me it had been a dirty low-down trick to needle me with that present of his. Said he now saw it was a mean-spirited joke, and he withdrew it. But being my father he couldn’t come and admit it himself, he’d given Shelley the job. He was to take back the sign, and he’d brought me five hundred pounds in cash in its place, as conscience money, not forgetting to repeat that this was positively the last sub. we could look for. He said he couldn’t leave me to starve or sink into debt for want of that much ready money, but from now on I’d have to fend for myself.”

Jean had brought in the coffee and dispensed it silently, and because her husband in his absorption let it stand untasted at his elbow she came behind him and touched him very lightly on the arm to call his attention to it. She could not have ventured contact with a complete stranger more gingerly. He started and quivered at the touch, and looked up at her with a flash of wary brown eyes, at once hopeful and wretched. The shocks that passed between them made the whole cluttered, badly lit room vibrate like a bow-string.

“Go on,” said George peremptorily. “What did you say to his offer?”

“I refused it.” He was taking heart now from the very impetus of his own feelings, remembering his injuries and recovering his anger. The guarded voice warmed; there was even a note of Armiger’s well-tuned brazen music in it when he was roused. “I’d had it, I was done with the whole affair, it could stay as it was. It’s a pity it was poor old Shelley who got the blast, after all he’d tried to do for me, but there it was. So the old boy went off very upset. He even tried to get me to accept a loan out of his own pocket, but even if I’d have taken it in any case, and I wouldn’t, I couldn’t from him. I know him, even with all he makes he lives right up to his income, sometimes over it. We tried to soothe him down as well as we could, because, damn it, it wasn’t his fault. He said he hoped we wouldn’t cut ourselves off from him completely, couldn’t he come down and see us sometimes, he’d like to be sure we were all right, and of course we said come any time, if he could bear the place we’d be glad to see him. And we gave him all the gen, because the old bag downstairs objects to having to answer the door for our visitors, though she never misses taking a good look at them, in case there’s anything fat in it to shoot over the garden fence to the other harpy next door. She leaves the front door on the latch while she’s in, so that anyone who comes to see us can walk right up. And we even told him where to find the key of our room, in case he ever called a bit too early and wanted to wait for us. I know,” said Leslie, catching George’s faintly puzzled and inquiring eye. “You’re wondering if all this detail is really relevant. It’s relevant, all right! The day before yesterday, while we were both out in the afternoon, somebody got into this room and pinched my father’s letter.”

“The letter! The one accompanying the gift of the sign? But why should anybody want to steal that?”

“If you can think of more than one explanation you’re a better man than I am. There is only one. Because my father really wanted that sign back. That was why he sent Shelley on his errand. He wanted it, and it was even worth five hundred pounds to him to get it. And when that attempt flopped his next move was to remove the only proof that he ever gave it to me. Without that, its ownership would be a matter of his word against mine, and where do you think I’d be then?”

“That’s not quite true, you know,” said George reasonably. “Miss Hamilton typed that letter, she knows exactly what was in it, and has already told me all the facts about that gift. There would also be the testimony of the people who packed and delivered it to you. So it wouldn’t have been a matter of your unsupported word.”

Leslie laughed, with some bitterness but even more honest amusement. “Really, you don’t know the kind of set-up he had with his staff, do you? Hammie may have been beautifully open with you now he’s dead, but if he’d been still alive she’d have done and said whatever he wanted, she always did, it’s the cardinal point in her terms of reference. She wouldn’t have remembered anything that could make things awkward for him, don’t you think it, and neither would the lads in the office, or the bloke who drove the van. Oh, no, that wouldn’t complicate things for him. The letter was the only evidence in black and white. My father wanted that thing back, he was prepared to give five hundred to get it, and when that failed he started to clear the ground so he could claim the thing anyhow, even though I hadn’t seen fit to part with it.”

“Are you suggesting that Mr. Shelley was a party to this trick?”

“No! At least, not consciously. God, I don’t know! I’ve never known how far he was aware of the uses Dad made of him. It went on all the time, whenever he needed a nice, benevolent front that would soften up the opposition. You must have seen them in action. Can you be totally unaware when you’re being used as a cover man? For years and years? Maybe he shuts his eyes to it and hopes for the best, maybe he really doesn’t see. Naturally he didn’t simply go back and say: Easy, old boy, you just walk in, the door’s on the latch, and they keep their key on top of the cupboard on the landing. Nothing like that. But he told him, all the same, consciously or unconsciously, because there’s no other way he could have known. And he came, he or somebody else for him. Somebody’d been here, and the letter was gone.”

“You didn’t ask Mrs. Harkness if she’d seen the caller? She must have been in, or the street door would have been fastened.”

“She was in, and I bet she knows who it was who called, but what’s the good of asking her? She’d simply deny any interest in my visitors, and get on her high horse and turn nasty, because she knows damn’ well I know she’s always got her kitchen door ajar snooping and listening. I couldn’t even begin to ask her.”

“Yes, I see it would be easier for us to do it. Though probably no more effective. And then another question arises. I notice you haven’t mentioned the sign itself. If he was removing the evidence of the gift, why not remove the gift at the same time?”

“He couldn’t, it wasn’t here. I got sort of interested in the thing. It’s been overpainted so many times you can’t tell what may not be underneath, and there’s something about the shapes and proportions of the painting itself that isn’t nineteenth century by a long chalk. It isn’t that I think it’s worth anything, not in money, but I should like to know something about its history, and see if there’s something more interesting underneath the top layers. So I talked to Barney Wilson about it. He said how about that dealer who has the gallery in Abbey Place, the other side of town, he thought he’d be willing to have a look at the thing for us. So I got him to take the sign over to him for an opinion, and it’s still with him now.”

“When did you send it to him? Before the letter was abstracted, obviously. Was it also before Mr. Shelley came to see you?”

Leslie visibly counted days; colour had come back into his cheeks and something like excitement into his eyes. “Yes, by God, it was! Shelley was here on Thursday evening. Barney took the sign away with him in the van on Monday morning, three days before.”

“Suggestive, you think?”

“Don’t you? I’d had the thing six weeks, and Dad had shown no further interest in it. Then it’s deposited with this dealer, and three days later Dad opens a campaign to recover it. Wouldn’t you say there’s a connection?”

“You think he got a direct tip from the dealer that it might be of value after all?”

“Well, I don’t know that it need mean that, actually. It might be enough if it got to my father’s ears that I’d asked for an opinion on it. If he thought he’d accidentally given me something valuable and turned the joke on himself it would just about kill him.” He shied at his own choice of words, the sharp realisation of his position coming back upon him with a painful jolt.

“All right, leave it at that,” said George equably. “The letter vanished. What then?”

“Well, then, last night, as I said, I suddenly set off to tackle him about it, without saying a word to Jean. I didn’t want to go home to see him, and last night I knew exactly where he’d be, and I suppose I was in the mood to pick a fight, too, smouldering mad. Not that mad, though,” he amended with a wry grin, meeting George’s measuring eye. “I never touched him. I suppose I got there a bit before ten, and asked this waiter of yours to ask him if he could spare a minute. I didn’t give a name because I thought if I did he wouldn’t come, but most likely he would have, anyhow, the way it turned out. He came out bouncing and laughing when he saw me, and banged me on the back as though I was the one thing wanted to make his evening complete. He said he’d just leave his friends a message and then he’d be with me, and then he shoved me out of the side door and said go on over and take a look at the barn now, see if you recognise the old dump. Walk in, he said, the door’s unlocked, I was going over there in any case a bit later on.

“And I went on over, just as he said. I could guess what he wanted with me over there, but I wanted privacy for what I’d got to say to him, so it suited me, too. You’ve seen the place, I take it, you know what he’s done to it. In a few minutes he came bounding in, bursting with high spirits, with a magnum of champagne under his arm. ‘Well, what’d you think of your ideal home now, boy,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t it shake you?’ But I hadn’t come to amuse him, and it was all rather water off a duck’s back. I let fly with what I had to say, told him what I thought of his dirty tricks, and accused him of stealing the letter. He just laughed in my face and denied everything. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said, ‘why should I want to steal my own letter?’ I suppose I hadn’t expected any sort of satisfaction except just in getting the load off my own chest, so I unloaded. I told him what sort of lying, cheating devil he was, and swore I’d fight him to the last ditch, over the sign, over my career, over everything.”

“And half an hour or so later he was dead,” said George deliberately.

“I know, but I didn’t touch him.”

Jean moved her hand silently upon the table until it touched Leslie’s hand; that was all, but the spark that passed between them quivered through every mass within the room.

“I didn’t touch him,” said Leslie again, with a softer and easier intonation. “He was running about the gallery there, getting out champagne glasses from the bar, and I said was he celebrating the final break, because this was it. And he said, ‘This isn’t for you, boy, I’m expecting better company.’ So I left. I walked out and left him there fit and well. It couldn’t have been half past ten, because only one or two cars had moved out, and there was no sign of turning-out time. I walked home, and I walked fast because I was still burning. By about ten to eleven I was home.”

“Did you see anyone around when you left? Or on the way? Just to confirm your times?”

“Not that I noticed,” said Leslie, paling. “I wasn’t thinking about needing confirmation, or I’d have done something about it. I was inclined to fume off by myself, rather, the mood I was in.”

“I can confirm the time when he got in,” said Jean firmly, and the hand that had moved to touch her husband’s now closed over it and gripped it tightly. “There’s a chiming clock at the church just along the road. I heard it strike the three-quarter hour just two or three minutes before Leslie came in.”

“Yes, well, there may be others who noticed him somewhere along the way, you know. We’ll try to find them.” Evens so, Armiger could just as well have been left behind in his ballroom dead as living. According to the surgeon he might have died as early as ten-fifteen. “Mrs. Harkness didn’t have to let you in, I suppose? You have your own key?”

“Yes. And she probably wouldn’t hear me come in. She goes to bed early, and she sleeps at the back of the house.” He was going to the opposite extreme now, producing all the possible unfavourable circumstances himself before they could be unearthed by others.

“Don’t labour it,” said George with a slight smile, getting up from his chair. “Others are having to account for themselves, too, you know. If you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve nothing to hide and nothing to worry about. And if you’ll let me advise you, hide nothing. And then stop worrying.” He buttoned his coat, stifling a yawn. The coffee had helped, but what he needed now was sleep. “Meantime, you’ll be here at our disposal, won’t you?”

“I’ll be here,” said Leslie, slightly huskily because his throat was dry with returning fright.

The last George saw of them, as he looked back from the top of the stairs, was the two pale, unwavering faces, side by side and almost on a level, with wide, wary eyes staring after him; and the two hands gripped together between their bodies, clinging to each other as though they defied the world to tear them apart.

CHAPTER VII.

“I’M INCLINED TO believe him,” said George, frowning over the litter of scribbled notes tucked under his coffee cup. “When his father told him to go across to the barn, he says the old man said: ‘Walk in, the door’s unlocked, I was going over there in any case a bit later on.’ And then about the champagne, which put me off in the first place: ‘This isn’t for you, boy, I’m expecting better company.’ That strikes me as sounding true, and fitting in with the facts. If the champagne had been all part of heaving his triumph in Leslie’s face he’d had time to open it. But it wasn’t opened. And the alternative seems much more probable. He was expecting someone, he was preparing a celebration, but it wasn’t for Leslie. Leslie was just a pleasant interlude of devilment thrown in by sheer luck, to pass the time until the other person arrived. The real business of Armiger’s evening was still to come. And if I’m right, then it was because of this other person, not because of Leslie, that he didn’t want to be disturbed. Why should he care who heard him tormenting his son? He’d have enjoyed it all the better with an audience.”

“Didn’t you say Miss Norris told you he said he’d be only a quarter of an hour or so?” asked Bunty. “That makes his time schedule rather tight, doesn’t it?”

“It does seem so. And as a matter of fact only she used that phrase. According to Miss Hamilton and Shelley he merely said he’d be back, and he hoped they’d be able to wait. Maybe her recollection isn’t quite accurate, maybe he was speaking rather loosely. And important meetings can take place in a quarter of an hour, of course.”

“Supposing Leslie did get back by ten to eleven, would he have had time to be the murderer? He has no car, there’s no bus just then, it must be true that he walked, and even walking fast it would take him fully twenty minutes. So he must have left by half past ten at latest.”

When she was admitted into conference in this way she used a level, quiet voice, careful to break no thread of George’s reasoning. Sometimes she put things into his head, sometimes she showed him things that were already there.

“Yes,” said George, “there was time, though certainly none to spare. The surgeon’s report confirms that death may have taken place any time between ten and eleven-thirty.”

“And it doesn’t take long, of course,” admitted Bunty, “to bash somebody over the head with a bottle and run for it.”

“Well, it’s not quite so simple as that. It wasn’t just one blow that killed him. Seems there were at least nine blows struck, all at the back and left side of the head. There are several fractures, and some splintering of the bone. Then there’s also a large abrasion on his right temple and cheek, apparently from his fall; when he was first struck. That wouldn’t have killed him, in any case, he’d have been stunned but nothing worse. But at least four of the other blows could have been fatal. It may not take long to batter a man’s head to pieces that way, but it takes longer than just hitting out once and running. It must have been quick work if Leslie did it.”

“Very messy work, too,” said Bunty.

“Yes, we’re not forgetting that. And Johnson’s report isn’t much help, except in establishing that somebody must have had some badly soiled gloves to dispose of after the event. No prints on bottle or glasses except Armiger’s own, nothing to be got from that broken statuette, and all the prints lying at random about the room turn out to be Armiger’s or else belonging to some of the decorators and electricians who were working on the place. Only one or two haven’t yet been matched up. Clayton’s prints are on the door handle, but nowhere else, and there are also some on the door we have to check up now with Leslie’s.” He shuffled the sheets of notes together, and reached for the toast. “Well, if the chief agrees I’m going to follow up this odd business of the inn sign. May as well see if there’s anything to it.”

Dominic was standing in the doorway of the room with his school-bag under his arm. He had been there for some time, waiting to be noticed, and unwilling to break into his father’s concentration until he could catch his eye. The morning was bright, and the normality of everything wonderfully reassuring, and they had said not a word that could tend to cast a shadow on Kitty. Not that other people were expendable, of course, but he couldn’t help being glad when Kitty slipped clean out of the discussion.

“Have I to bike to-day, Dad, or are you going in this morning?” he asked, seizing his opportunity.

“Yes, I’m going, I’ll take you. Give me five minutes and I’m ready.”

Dominic had hoped that he would be communicative on the ride, but he wasn’t, he remained preoccupied, and nothing was said between them until they parted at the corner by the police station. It was still an effort not to ask questions, but since the inquiries seemed to be veering well away from Kitty it did not hurt him quite so much to contain his curiosity.

“Can I ride back with you this afternoon? I shall be a bit late myself, because it’s rugger practice. Say quarter to five?”

“I hope to be free by then,” agreed George. “You can call in and see, anyhow. I shall be here.”

He watched his son shoulder his bag and stride away along the street. He was running to length these days, not so far off a man’s height now, but still very slender. He was getting control of his inches, too, and learning to manage his hands and feet and all the other uncoordinated parts of him. Give him a year, and he’d be downright elegant in movement. Odd how they do their growing-up by sudden leaps, so that however constantly and affectionately you watch them they still manage to transmute themselves while your back’s turned, and confront you every third month or so with another daunting stranger. Freckled and chestnut-haired and no beauty, apart, perhaps, from those eyes of his; but like his mother, whom he so engagingly resembled, he didn’t need beauty. George found them both formidable enough as they were.

He went in to his conference with Superintendent Duckett assembling in his mind the details of his evening interview with Jean and Leslie Armiger. Duckett found them no less interesting than George had done, and endorsed his proposition to follow up the curious affair of the inn sign. The dreary, dogged search for bloodstained clothing, the exhaustive interrogation of anyone and everyone who had been present at the opening night of The Jolly Barmaid, would go on all day and probably for a good many more days into the bargain; but if a promising side-track could shorten the journey, so much the better for them all.

George telephoned County Buildings before he set out, to check with Wilson.

“That’s right,” said Wilson amiably, “I offered to pick up the thing for Leslie and take it over to Cranmer’s for him. Oh, yes, I think the chap’s all right, knows his stuff, and all that. He’s had one or two good things in since I’ve known the place. I don’t know a thing about this panel of Leslie’s, no. I’ve seen it, of course, but there’s nothing exceptional about it on sight, except, perhaps, the quality and solidity of the panel it’s painted on. I’d like to see the worm who could get his teeth in that. No, I can’t say I know Cramner, except just from looking round his place occasionally, and buying one or two small things. He’s been there a few years now. Usual sort of antiquary, old and desiccated and hard as nails.”

The description fitted Mr. Cranmer very fairly, George thought, when he entered the small gallery in Abbey Place, and took stock of the person who hovered delicately in the background, refraining from intercepting him until he showed whether he wanted to gaze or do business. The neighbourhood was a part of the old town, mainly early Tudor, and the low black-beamed frontage of the shop was beautiful. English black-and-white, in contrast to some of its European kin, is so wonderfully disciplined, makes such a patterned harmony of a whole street, instead of a Gothic cadenza. The interior was also plain white beneath the enormous beams of the ceiling, and not cluttered. The man himself was of medium height, slightly stooped, grey of hair and complexion and clothing, and lean with an astringent leanness like that of roots and sinews and all that is most durable in nature. He wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look enormous and incredibly blue. To approach him from the inoffensive side-view and be suddenly transfixed by that vast blue glare was electrifying.

The voice that went with the grey shape was old, prosaic and discreet; so discreet that until George identified himself as a police officer it produced no information whatever, and without even appearing to be wilfully stalling; as without any apparent volte-face it then became loquacious. Yes, he had the painting in question in his workshop, he understood that it had been the sign of an inn called The Joyful Woman. Yes, it might possibly turn out to be of some value, though questionably of very much.

“Several times clumsily overpainted, you know, and exposed to a great deal of weathering when in use as a sign, and therefore frequently touched up and varnished over, like most of its kind. But I have an idea, mind you, it is just an idea, that it may be based on an eighteenth-century portrait by a local artist named Cotsworth. You won’t have heard of him, I dare say. Not important, but interesting, if it turns out to be his. Worth a few hundreds, perhaps, to a local collector.” He trotted away into his back room to bring forth a foot-square framed canvas, the head of some long-dead worthy. “This is a Cotsworth,” he said triumphantly. It seemed to George depressingly smug, clumsy and ugly, but he forebore from saying so.

“You’ve had the painting for about a fortnight, I understand. Are you making tests on it? Did young Mr. Armiger empower you to do that, or was he merely asking for an opinion first?”

“He asked for an opinion, but I should like, if he agrees, to try to uncover at least a corner of the older paint, and see if it confirms my guess. If it does, Mr. Felse, I may be prepared to offer Mr. Armiger as much as two hundred and fifty pounds for it myself.”

“Very handsome, Mr. Cranmer. Did you inform Mr. Armiger senior, or anyone in his employ, that you had the painting here, and that it might conceivably be valuable?”

The two hundred and fifty pounds had struck the first really phoney note; if he was ready to mention such a sum he was thinking in terms of a thousand and upwards. And once that false quantity had jarred on George’s senses this whole room began to seem as much a fa็ade as the magnified blueness of the eyes.

“Certainly not,” said the old man stiffly. “It came to me as the property of Mr. Armiger junior, through Mr. Wilson, and I wouldn’t dream of communicating with anyone else about it. Except, of course, the police when they require me to co-operate.” He made it a plaintive and dignified reproof, and George let him have it that way; but the fact remained that he had not been required to co-operate to the extent of naming a price, and there had been no need whatever for him to do so. Unless, of course, he wanted his offer to come back to the owner in this superlatively respectable fashion, relayed by the innocent police. It might not come off, but there was nothing lost in trying.

All very correct, thought George, halting for a moment outside to weigh up the three mediocre moderns in the low Henry VII windows; but then, he would be correct, and cautious too, now that Armiger’s dead. The last thing he’d want would be to be involved. All the same, George suspected that Mr. Cranmer had indeed flashed the urgent warning to Armiger: look out, you’re giving away something valuable. He probably didn’t know that Armiger had gone as high as five hundred pounds in his attempt to recover it, or he wouldn’t have stuck at two hundred and fifty himself, the discrepancy was too glaring to pass without comment. He hadn’t, of course, actually made an offer, only hinted that he might be prepared to do so, but the implications were there. He would have collected a plump commission, no question of it, if he’d helped Armiger to get the better of Leslie, and acquired the great man’s formidable patronage into the bargain. Now that that was knocked on the head, quite literally, he was going into the deal for himself. All that, thought George, strolling without haste back to his car, depends rather on whether Mr. Cramner was acquainted with the painting’s provenance; but since the thing came from young Armiger, and he evidently knows it to be the sign of The Joyful Woman, we may safely assume that he could guess Armiger had thrown it out as valueless, even if Wilson didn’t tell him. And he probably did, he’s a talkative soul, he confides easily.

The upshot, he decided, letting in the clutch, is that young Leslie ought to take back that picture very firmly, resisting all offers to buy it from him, and take it to some absolutely immaculate authority for an opinion. And so I’ll tell him, if he’s in a listening mood, and if no unforeseen explosion blows him into gaol in the meantime.

He spent the rest of the morning in his office doing some of his arrears of paper work on the case, and the early afternoon with Duckett on a visit to the Chief Constable, who was anxious for quick results, partly because the case involved a family so well known in the Midlands, but chiefly because he wanted to get away from town for some shooting at the weekend. The visit comforted nobody, since the Chief Constable still thought of everybody and treated everybody as a classifiable item in a military hierarchy, and Duckett on an important case always became more and more laconic, until his gruffness amounted almost to dumb insolence.

“Waste of time!” snorted Duckett as he drove back towards Comerbourne at the solid, law-abiding pace which was also a symptom of his less amenable moods. “Never let that boy of yours go into the police force, George.”

“He says he won’t, anyhow,” said George. “When it comes to the point he often seems to be on the side of the criminal.”

“All his generation are anti-social,” said Duckett disgustedly.

“No, it’s just a natural sympathy with the hunted, I think, when the odds turn against them. Maybe a feeling that this society of ours makes its own criminals, too, and therefore deserves ‘em.” He wondered if he was projecting his own occasional qualms on to Dominic’s shoulders; better not look too closely in case he was. The depression that sometimes followed a successful conviction was bad enough, without being inhibited by doubts in the thick of the hunt. “Never mind,” he said placatingly, “who knows if something won’t have broken while we’ve been away theorising?”

And when they turned the corner into Hill Street, and saw the concreted apron frontage of the station alive with staring, chattering people, it appeared that indeed something had. The station faced sidelong to the street on the outer side of a wide curve, with a small garden and two seats in front of its windows, and then the concreted forecourt lined out into parking space for four cars. One of the four spaces was now occupied by a flat two-wheeled cart bearing a tin trunk, a small pile of old iron bolts and oddments, a tumbled mound of old clothing and rags, and a top-dressing of three small, silent, staring children. A somewhat larger child in his father’s cut-down trousers and a steadily unravelling grey jersey held by the head a shaggy, fat brown pony. A uniformed constable, with the admirably detached, impervious solidity acquired only after innumerable public embarrassments, sauntered about between the door and the waiting family, gently shooing the shifting crowd along if it became too stagnant, and hypnotising it into pretending to an indifference as monumental as his own.

“God!” said Duckett, as he parked his car. The constable permitted himself a fleeting grin on the side of his face which was turned towards them and away from the public view. “Has Grocott gone off his head and started bringing in all the tickney lot?”

“No, sir, this one brought himself. Claims he has important information.”

“So he got a load aboard before the pubs closed, and brought half the town along as well,” Duckett diagnosed disgustedly, and eyed the composed and dignified children, who looked back at him calmly, as though they had no doubts at all as to who was the alien and the savage. They were not full-blooded gipsies, they had not the soft, mysterious Indian features, the melting eyes, the delicate bones, but something in a coarser grain, olive and wild and sinewy, with a bloom of dirt. “What are they?” said Duckett gruffly. “Lays?”

“No, sir, Creaveys.”

“What’s the difference? Nobody knows who’s married to whom or which kids belong to which parents, anyhow. If you’re a Creavey you are a Lay.”

He stalked into the station, and pounded up three flights of stairs to his own office, with George at his heels. Grocott was at the door before he had time to be called.

“All right,” said Duckett, “let’s have it. That’s Joe Creavey’s pony, isn’t it?”

Joe was the Creavey (or Lay) who was almost no trouble; an occasional blind when business in wool rags and old iron was booming, and just once, with ample provocation, a determined assault with an ash-plant on his wife, but no major sins were recorded against him. He fed his kids, minded his own business without unduly annoying other people about it, and was unmistakably a happy and well-adjusted man.

“Yes, sir. Joe’s below with Lockyer. He came in just over an hour ago, saying he’d got important evidence in the Armiger case.”

Joe was well known in the seedier outer districts of Comerbourne, where he made regular rounds with his pony-cart, collecting rags and scrap, and a good many residents automatically saved their cast-off clothes for him. It was worth making regular use of him, because he would take away for you all kinds of awkward and unmarketable rubbish on which the Cleansing Department tended to frown if it was put out for their attentions; though what he afterwards did with some of the items no one cared to inquire. On this particular morning he had been round the shabby-genteel corner of town which housed Mrs. Harkness, and in addition to collecting the contents of her rag-bag he had thoughtfully lifted the lid of her dustbin in case there should be anything salvageable there. People often put old shoes in dustbins, sometimes in a state which Joe regarded as merely part-worn. He didn’t find shoes this time, he found gloves, and the gloves were aged but expensive leather gauntlets, with woven tapes stitched inside, lettered L.A. He took them instinctively, and only afterwards did he examine them closely, when he was pulled in at one of the suburban pubs and had his first pint inside him. It was then he found that the palm and the fingers of the right glove were stained and stiffened with something dark and crusted, and the left carried a few similar dark-brown stains here and there in its frayed leather. Joe knew who lodged with Mrs. Harkness, she was one of his regular clients; he knew what the initials L.A. stood for; and he knew, or was convinced that he knew, what had saturated and ruined those gloves, and why they were stuffed into the dustbin. He knew his duty, too; the police must be told. But his route to the station had taken him through four more bars before it triumphantly delivered him, and if there was anyone left in Comerbourne who didn’t yet know that Leslie Armiger had murdered his father and Joe Creavey had the proof of it, he must have been going about for the last couple of hours with his ears plugged.

“Blabbed it all over town, and pretty well brought a procession with him. He isn’t exactly drunk, not by his standard, but well away. Do you want him?”

“No,” said Duckett, “let him stew for a bit. I want the gloves, and I think I want young Armiger, too. If there’s nothing in this, now’s the time to talk to him, before we’re sure there’s nothing in it. But let’s have a look at these first.”

The gloves were produced, they lay on the desk with palms upturned, displaying the reddish-black, encrusted smears that certainly looked uncommonly like blood.

“Well, what do you think it is, Gorge?”

“Creosote, for one thing,” said George promptly, sniffing at the stiffened fingers, “but that doesn’t say it’s all creosote.”

“No, traces of roofing paint, too. Johnson had better run them up to the lab., and we’ll see.”

“You’re not thinking of keeping Joe overnight, are you?” asked Grocott.

“Eh? Keep him overnight? What, and dump all that tribe of kids into the receiving home when there’s no need? The Children’s Officer would murder me! All right, George, you be off and fetch the boy along.”

George made the best of a job he never liked, approaching the manager’s office discreetly without getting anyone to announce him, and making the summons sound as much like a request as he could; all the same, Leslie, coming up in haste from the warehouse, paled and froze at the sight of him. Once he had grasped the idea it wasn’t so bad; colour came back into his face and a defiant hardness into his eyes, and he went out by George’s side with a composed countenance and an easy stride, as though an old friend had called him. They had to cross either the shop or the yard, and George hoped he was right in choosing the yard, where Leslie was better known and better understood.

Nobody was deceived, of course, they’d be muttering and wondering the rest of the day; but a van-driver caught Leslie’s eye and cocked up a thumb at him and grinned, and one of the packers walked deliberately across their path so that he could offer a crumpled cigarette packet in passing. The boy looked harassed rather than cheered, but he smiled all the same, and accepted the offering; and with the first deep drag the pinched lines round his mouth relaxed. He sat beside George in the car, drawing deep, steadying breaths, and trying too hard to prepare himself.

“Mr. Felse,” he said in a constrained voice, as George slowed at the traffic lights, “could you do something for me? I should be very grateful if you’d go and see my wife for me.”

“You’ll be seeing her yourself in an hour or so,” said George equably. “Won’t you?”

“Shall I?”

“That depends on what you’ve done, so only you know the answer.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Leslie fervently. “I suppose you can’t tell me what this is all about?”

“You suppose correctly. You’ll soon know, but I won’t anticipate. Now let me ask you the one question I somehow never asked you before. Did you kill him?”

“No,” said Leslie without over-emphasis, almost gently.

“Then you’ll be going home to your wife, and the worst that can happen is that you may be a little late. She’ll forgive you for that, long before she forgives us for scaring you.”

Leslie was so unreasonably soothed and calmed by this tone that he forgot to take offence at the assumption that he was scared. He walked into the police station briskly, wild to get to his fence and either fall or clear it; and suddenly finding himself without George, had to turn back and look for him. He had stopped to speak to a boy in a grammar school blazer who was standing in the hallway.

“My son,” he explained as he hurried to overtake his charge. “He’s still hoping, and so am I, that I’m going to be able to drive him home. I should be off duty by this time.”

“Oh, now, look,” said Leslie with a faint recovering gleam in his eye, “I should hate to keep you after hours, I can easily come some other time.”

“That’s the stuff!” George patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “You keep up that standard, and you’ll be all right. Always provided you’re telling us the truth, of course. Come on, three flights up, and I’m afraid the taxpayer doesn’t provide us with a lift.”

Dominic watched them climb to the first turn of the staircase and pass out of sight like that, his father’s hand on the young man’s shoulder. Was it possible that it was all over already? Leslie Armiger didn’t look like a murderer. But then, what murderer ever does? But he didn’t!

Dominic was convulsed by the secret, uneasy part of him that couldn’t help identifying itself with those in trouble, those trapped by circumstances and cornered, however deservedly, by the orderly ranks of the law-abiding. He felt the demon in his own nature, and trembled, knowing there was no end to his potentialities. He had to let part at least of his sympathy go out to the hunted, because the quarry could so easily be himself. Infinitely more terrible, it could be somebody who mattered to him so desperately as to make him forget himself. It could be Kitty! And yet he wanted not to be glad that it should be the young man in the worn, expensive suit, with the strained smile and the apprehensive eyes.

The surge of relief in his heart outraged him, and drove him out from under the desk-sergeant’s friendly but inquisitive eye into the impersonal pre-twilight of the September evening, to wait on one of the seats in the strip of garden.

So it was that he saw the red Karmann-Ghia swoop beautifully inward from the road to park beside the ragman’s cart, and Kitty swing her long, slender legs out from the driver’s door. His heart performed the terrifying manoeuvre with which he was becoming familiar, turning over bodily in his breast and swelling until he thought it would burst his ribs.

She closed the door of the car with unaccustomed slowness and quietness, and walked uncertainly across the concrete towards the door; and as she came her steps slowed, until within a few yards of the step she halted altogether, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, in an agony of indecision. She looked to right and left as though searching for the courage to go forward; and she saw Dominic, motionless and silent in the corner of the wooden seat, clutching his school-bag convulsively against his side.

He couldn’t believe, even when her eyes lit on him, that it would get him anything. He was just somebody she’d run into once, casually, and not expected to meet again. Probably she wouldn’t even remember. But her eyes kindled marvellously, a pale smile blazed over her face for a moment, though it served only to illuminate the desperate anxiety that instantly drove it away again. She turned and came to him. He jumped to his feet, so shaken by the beating of his heart that he scarcely heard the first words she said to him.

“Dominic! I’m so glad to find you here!” He came out of a cloud of fulfilment and ecstasy to find himself sitting beside her, his hands clasped in hers, her great eyes a drowning violet darkness close before his face. She was saying for the second time, urgently, desperately: “Is Leslie in there? They were saying in the shops the police fetched him from Malden’s. Is it true? Do you know if he’s in there?”

“Yes,” he said, stammering, “he came with my father. Only a few minutes ago.” He was back on the earth, and the bump had hurt a little, but not much, because of her remembering his name, because of her turning to him so gladly. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting even that. And in any case he couldn’t be bothered with such trivialities as his own disappointments, while she carried such terrible trouble in her face.

“Oh, God!” she said. “Is he under arrest?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, not yet, , , “

“Your father’s in there, too? I’d rather it be him than any of the others. I’ve got to talk to him, Dominic. Now I’ve got to.”

She released his hands with a vast sigh, and put back with a hopeless gesture the fall of smooth, pale hair that shadowed her forehead.

“I’ve got to tell him,” she said in a tired, tranquil voice, “because if I don’t they’ll only put it on to poor Leslie, and hasn’t enough happened to him already? I won’t let them touch him.” She lifted her head and looked into Dominic’s eyes with the practical simplicity of a child confiding its sins, relieved to exchange even for punishment a burden too great to bear a moment longer. “I killed his father, you see.”

CHAPTER VIII.

DOMINIC TRIED TO speak, and couldn’t find his voice for a moment, and even when he did it tended to shift key unexpectedly, in the alarming and humiliating way he’d thought he was finished with; but Kitty didn’t seem to notice.

“You mustn’t say such things. Even if, if something happened that makes you feel to blame, that can’t be true, and you shouldn’t say it.”

“But I did it, Dominic. I never meant to, but I did. He came to me, and he said: ‘I’m just going to kick Leslie out of here once for all, and boy, shall I enjoy it. And then I’ve got something to tell you. Not here, you come out to the barn, we can be quiet there. Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘to get rid of his lordship, and then come on over.’ And I wasn’t going to go, I’d made up my mind not to go. I got out the car and started to drive home, and then after all I didn’t, I went round by the lane to the road behind the barn, and parked the car along under the trees by that little wood, and went into the courtyard by the back way. I thought if I begged him just once more he might give in and take Leslie back, and start acting decently to them. After all, he was his son. I couldn’t get it into my head that it was really for keeps. People just don’t act like that. Leslie wasn’t there, only his father. He started telling me all his great plans for the future, all excited and pleased with himself, and he had a magnum of champagne and glasses set out on one of the tables. Oh, Dominic, if you knew how obscenely ridiculous it all was, , , “

His mouth ached with all the things he wanted to say to her and mustn’t; his heart filled his chest so tightly that he could hardly breathe. “Kitty, I wish there was some way I could help you,” he said huskily.

“You do help me, you are helping me, you’re lovely to me. You keep right on looking at me as if I was a friend of yours, and you haven’t moved away from me even an inch. But you will!”

“I won’t!” he said in a gasp of protest. “Never!”

“No, perhaps you wouldn’t ever, you’re not the kind. Let me go on telling you, it makes it easier, and my God, I need rehearsing, this is going to be lousy on the night whatever I do.”

He had her by the hands again, and this time the initiative had been his, and the warm, strong fingers clung to him gratefully, quivering a little.

“He’d had a brainwave,” said Kitty in a half-suffocated voice, laughing and raging. “If Leslie wouldn’t have me and join the businesses up, he would! He was going to marry me himself! That’s what the champagne and the excitement was all about. He didn’t even ask me, he told me. He didn’t even pretend to feel anything for me. When he put his arms round me and wanted to kiss me it wasn’t even sexually revolting, it was just like signing a merger. And I’d been trying to talk to him all the while about Leslie, and he hadn’t even heard me. I was so mad, it was so mean and ludicrous and horrible, I was out of my mind, I couldn’t think of anything except getting away. I just pushed him off like a demon. We were by the table at the top of the stairs, where he’d put the champagne and the glasses. I don’t know how it happened, he went if backwards, and stepped off the edge of the top stair, and went slipping and rolling and clawing all the way down and crashed on the floor. I ran down and past him to the door, I was terrified he’d get up and try to stop me. I wasn’t afraid of him, it wasn’t that, it was just that everything was so foul, I couldn’t have borne it if he’d tried to speak to me again. But he just lay there on his face, and never moved. I didn’t think anything about it, I didn’t stop to see how much he was hurt, I just ran back to the car and left him lying there. So you see, I killed him. And I’ve got to tell them. I never meant to, it never even occurred to me until I was in the car that he might be terribly hurt. But I did it. And I can’t let them go on thinking poor Leslie had anything to do with it.”

When she had finished she lifted her eyes and looked at him closely, already half sorry and half ashamed that she should be so weak as to unload this cruel and humiliating confidence upon a mere child, too old not to be damaged by it, and not yet old enough to be able to evaluate it justly. But it wasn’t a child who was looking steadily at her, it was a man, a very young man, maybe, but unquestionably her elder at that moment. He kept firm hold of her hands when she would have drawn them away, and his eyes held hers when she would have averted them.

“Oh, God!” she said weakly. “I’m a heel to drag you into this.”

“No, you did right, Kitty, really you did. I’ll show you. That was all that happened? You’re sure that was all? You pushed him and he fell down the stairs and knocked himself out. That was all?”

“Wasn’t it enough? He was dead when they found him.”

“Yes, he was dead. But you didn’t kill him.” He knew what he was about to do, and it was so terrible that it almost outweighed the sense of joy and completion that he felt at knowing her innocent, and being able to hold out the image of her in his two hands and show her how spotless it was. Never in his life before, not even as a small, nosy boy, had he betrayed a piece of information he possessed purely by virtue of being George’s son. If he did it he was destroying something which had been a mainspring of his life, and the future that opened before him without it was lonely and frightening, involved enormous readjustments in his most intimate relationships, and self-searchings from which he instinctively shrank. But already he was committed, and he would not have turned back even if he could.

“Listen to me, Kitty. All that was published about Mr. Armiger’s death was that he died from head injuries. But it wasn’t just falling down the stairs that did it. It’s only because of my father’s work that I know this, and you mustn’t tell anyone I told you. After he was lying unconscious somebody took the champagne bottle and battered his head in with it deliberately, hit him nine times, and only stopped hitting him when the bottle smashed. And that wasn’t you! Was it?”

She whispered between parted lips, staring at him in a stupor of horror and incredulity and relief: “No, no, I didn’t, I couldn’t, , , “

“I know you couldn’t, of course you couldn’t. But somebody did. So you see, Kitty, you didn’t kill him at all, you didn’t do anything except push him away from you and accidentally stun him. Somebody else came in afterwards and battered him to death. So you see, there’s no need for you to tell them anything. You won’t, will you? There’ll be nothing in this glove business, they won’t touch Leslie, you’ll see. At least wait until we know.”