Death and the Joyful Woman

She hadn’t heard the half of that, she was still groping after the release and freedom he was offering back to her. The warm flush of colour into her face and hope into her eyes overwhelmed him with a kind of proud humility he had never experienced before.

“You mean it? You wouldn’t just try to comfort me, would you? Not with fairy stories? But you wouldn’t! Oh, Dominic, am I really not a murderess? You don’t know what it’s been like since yesterday morning, since they told me he was dead.”

“Of course you’re not. It’s true what I’ve told you. So you won’t tell them anything, will you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I must. Oh, Dominic, what should I have done without you? Don’t you see, I don’t even mind now, as long as I’m not, what I thought I was. I don’t mind anything now. But I must tell them, because of Leslie. I can show them that he’d gone, and his father was still alive. I can prove he didn’t kill him.” She looked down at him, and was distressed by his consternation, but she knew what she had to do. “I’ve got this far and I’m not turning back now. I’ve had enough of concealing information. At least I can see that Leslie’s safely out of it.”

“But you can’t,” protested Dominic, catching at her wrist and dragging her down again beside him. “You can only prove he didn’t kill him in the short time you were there. They might still think he came back. Somebody came. And don’t you see, if you tell them what you’ve told me, they’ll think you’ve left out the end, they’ll think you stayed and finished him off.”

“I don’t see why you should say that,” said Kitty, wide-eyed. “You don’t think that, you believe me. Why shouldn’t they?”

“Well, because their business is not to believe, and how can you prove it?”

“I can’t,” she agreed, paling a little. “But I can’t turn back now, I couldn’t bear to. You don’t have to worry about me any more, the most wonderful thing anyone could have done for me is done already. You did it.”

If she hadn’t said that, if she hadn’t suddenly touched his hot cheek so lightly and fleetingly with her fingertips, he might have been able to protest yet once again, perhaps even to persuade her. But her touch snatched the breath from his throat and the articulation from his tongue, and he couldn’t say a word, he had to stand and watch, suffocating, mute and paralysed, as she turned to leave him; and when she looked back just once to say quickly: “Don’t worry, I won’t say a word about you,” he almost burst into tears of frustration and rage because he lacked the power to shout at her that it wasn’t about himself he was worrying, that he didn’t care about himself, that only she mattered, and she was making a terrible mistake, that he couldn’t bear it, that he loved her.

She was gone. The darkening doorway swallowed her, and it was in any case too late. He sat down again, huddled in the far corner of the seat, and wrestled with himself painfully until his mind cleared again, and presented to him the most appalling implication of the whole incident, producing it with cruel aplomb, like a magician palming an ace out of the pack. He had robbed her even of the defence of ignorance! He, and no one else. If she’d gone rushing in there as she’d wanted to, and poured out her story as she had to him, they’d have seen the glaring hole in it at once, just as surely as he had. They’d have questioned her about the weapon, about the injuries, and she wouldn’t have known what they were talking about, and her manner and her bewilderment would have rung true past any mistaking. And worse, she’d never tell them about his treachery, and explain how she got her information, because that would get him into trouble. One slip to warn them that she knew how that death had come about, and they’d be absolutely sure she was responsible for it. The details had never been published, only a handful of people knew them, and one other, the murderer. He’d as good as convicted her.

His manhood, so recently and intoxicatingly achieved, was crumpling badly, slipping out of his hold. He ought to get up and march in there after her and tell them honestly about his lapse, but he hadn’t the courage, the very thought of it made him feel sick. It wasn’t just for himself he was such a coward, it was his father’s job, his whole career. C.I.D. officers ought not to discuss their cases in front of their families. They’d been the exceptional family, proud of their solidarity, disdaining to doubt their absolute mutual loyalty, over-riding conventional restrictions because they were so sure of one another. All this had made perfect sense while that solidarity remained unbreached, but now he’d broken it, and how did it look now? His father was compromised. He would have to own up, it was the only way he could even try to repair the harm he’d done to Kitty; but he’d have to do it in private, to his father alone. Maybe there’d be some grain of evidence that would extricate Kitty, and make it unnecessary for confession to go any farther. Supposing George felt he had to resign, supposing, ,

He longed for George to come and take him home, so that he could get the first awful plunge over. But when at last a step rang on the flags of the hallway and he jerked round in hope and dread to see who emerged, it was only Leslie Armiger, stepping lightly, buoyant with relief. He walked like a new man, for the old gloves he’d discarded after painting the garden shed where he kept his materials had yielded a great many interesting substances, creosote, bituminous dressing, several kinds of paint and lacquer, but not a trace of blood. As soon as he’d seen them he’d laughed with relief; he could have kicked himself for the imaginative agonies of anticipation he’d inflicted on himself, all on account of these ancient and blameless relics. His position now was actually neither better nor worse than it had been before this tea-cup storm blew up, but there was no doubt that the recoil had raised his credit all round. Especially with himself; this feeling of liberation was more than worth the scare.

Detective-Sergeant Felse had been called away from the interrogation to interview someone in his own room, but Leslie didn’t know who it was, or whether the caller had anything to do with his father’s death. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He was on his way home to Jean, still free and almost vindicated, and never again would he scare as easily as that.

It was ten minutes more before George came out to speak to his son, and then it was only to say tersely that after all he wouldn’t be able to leave for some time yet, possibly several hours, and Dom had better get on home by bus. He wasn’t going to have an opportunity to unburden himself here, that was obvious; his father was gone again almost before he could open his stiff lips to get out a word.

Miserably he took his dismissal and went home; there was nothing else to be done. He countered Bunty’s queries with monosyllables, sat wretchedly over his tea without appetite, and refuged in his corner with textbooks he couldn’t even see for the anxiety that hung over his eyes as palpable as fog. Bunty suspected a cold coming on, but he repelled her attempts to take his temperature so ill-humouredly that she revised her diagnosis. Something on his mind, she reflected with certainty, and it isn’t me he wants, so it must be his father. Now what, I wonder, have those two been doing to each other?

It was twenty to ten before George came home. He looked tired and frayed and in no mood to be approached, but there was no help for it. Bunty fed him and allowed him to be quiet, though she knew by old signs that there was something on his mind, too, that would have to come out before long. It was without prompting that he leaned back wearily at last, and said in a voice entirely devoid of any pleasure or satisfaction: “Well, it’s all over bar the shouting. We’ve just made an arrest in the Armiger case. We’ve charged Kitty Morris.”

Bunty’s exclamation was drowned by the shriek of Dominic’s chair. He was on his feet, trembling.

“No!” he said faintly, and then, with the flat quietness of desperation: “Please, Dad, I’ve got to talk to you. It’s about that. It’s important.” He looked imploringly at his mother, and his lips were quivering. “Mummy, do you mind awfully, , , “

“That’s all right, darling,” said Bunty, loading her tray methodically as though nothing out of the way was happening. “I’m going to wash up. You go ahead.”

She made things sound so normal and calm, as she almost always did, that he longed to ask her to stay, but it couldn’t be done that way, he had to have it out with George. She cleared the table, flicked Dominic’s ear very lightly with the folded tablecloth as she went to put it away, and bore off the tray into the kitchen, closing the door firmly after her. They were left looking rather helplessly at each other, neither of them any longer able to doubt that this was a family crisis of the first magnitude. George flinched from it as much as Dominic did; he was tired and out of temper, and he knew it, and this luckless child was inviting trouble even their combined goodwill might not be able to avert.

What was the use of thinking how best to do it, when all that mattered was that it should be done?

“You know I was outside there this evening when Kitty Norris came to ask for you,” said Dominic in the drained tones of despair. “I talked to her before you did. She told me all that tale about pushing Armiger down the stairs because he, he insulted her. But she told me she killed him. She didn’t! You’ve got to believe me. All she did was go away and leave him there stunned. She said, , , “

“I don’t know why it should be necessary for us to discuss it at all,” said George, laboriously patient with him but desperately unwilling to go on hammering at an affair of which he’d already had about all he could take, “but if I’m supposed to humour you, I will. If she went away and left him there stunned, how did she know it was the champagne magnum that battered his head in? If she wasn’t the one who killed him, if she was gone from the scene and somebody else came in and finished him off, how did she know how it was done? All that was ever made public was that he died of head injuries. So you tell me how she knew, how she could know and still be innocent?”

So they had tricked it out of her, questioned and cross-questioned and slipped in catch remarks until she gave herself away. Dominic hated them all, even his father, but not so much as he hated himself for making such an appalling miscalculation. He should have known she’d still insist on going through with her confession, because Leslie must be safeguarded whatever happened to her, Leslie who wouldn’t many her, thank God, the stupid fool, Leslie with whom she was still so crazily, desolately in love that she couldn’t see anyone else for him. Dominic sat down slowly and carefully at the table, braced his sweating palms upon its glossy surface before him, and said loudly and hoarsely: “She knew because I told her.”

He was glad he’d sat down, however it diminished his dignity, he felt safer that way; his knees would never have held him up, standing. George had lurched forward in his chair and come heavily to his feet. He spread his hands upon the table and leaned over his son, and in spite of himself Dominic wilted. He wanted to close his eyes, but he wouldn’t, because whatever was coming to him, he’d asked for it, he couldn’t complain.

“You what?” said George.

“I told her. I told her because I thought then she wouldn’t have to tell you about being there at all. She was going to tell you she’d killed him, and yet she didn’t know anything about him being battered to death, she just thought he’d cracked his skull when he fell down the stairs. So I knew she hadn’t, and how could I let her go on thinking she had? I had to tell her. I couldn’t not tell her.” Resolute in his desperation, he said with an altogether inaccurate suggestion of defiance: “I’d do the same again.”

George said, after a blank and awful pause: “I’ve a good mind to tan the hide off you.”

With all his sore heart Dominic almost wished he would, but with all his lively senses he knew he wouldn’t. There was no getting out of things that way any more, the bolt-hole had been stopped at least two years now. Paying this debt was going to be a whole lot more complicated than that, a whole lot more long-drawn-out and painful. The compensations of being under juvenile discipline had never presented themselves to him before.

“I know,” he said drearily, “but I had to do it. There wasn’t anything else to do. And now I’ve made everything worse for her instead of better.”

“Whether you’ve done that or not, you’ve certainly made it impossible for us to judge how far she’s telling the truth. And you know what else you’ve done, don’t you?” said George remorselessly.

Yes, he knew. He’d undermined the foundations of the house, and shaken the pillars that held up the roof. He wouldn’t have believed himself that he could do such a thing; for a moment half of his heart was with George, astonished and reproachful, half of it with Kitty, injured and imprisoned. Between the two of them he wished he could die.

“I shall have to report this to the chief, of course,” said George. “I blame myself more than you. There’s nothing to be done but tell him that I’ve been consistently indiscreet. I’d no right to allow you such easy access to information in the first place, it was thoroughly unconstitutional behaviour, and I should have known better. It was unreasonable to expect that you could refrain for ever from shooting off your mouth, I suppose.” But he had expected it; he’d been so sure of it, in fact, that it had never occurred to him to question his discretion at all. Only now that he’d lost that absolute trust did Dominic know how to value it.

“I didn’t do it lightly,” he said, flinching. “I never have before.”

“Once is all it takes. I shall have to see Superintendent Duckett in the morning and take the responsibility for this myself. That’s putting it squarely where it belongs.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dominic abjectly. “Do you have to?”

“Yes, I have to, in fairness to you as well as to Kitty. If he asks for my resignation he’ll be within his rights.” That was cruel, because he was virtually sure that Duckett, things being as they were, the case as good as closed, and this particular item of evidence now so much less vital than Dominic supposed, would hardly even bother to listen to him, and quite certainly be unable to muster more than a token reprimand. “In future, of course,” he said, “I shall have to make sure I don’t talk about a case when you’re within earshot. I’ll take good care this doesn’t happen again. And you’ll give me your word here and now not to meddle in this affair any more. You’ve done damage enough.”

“I can’t! I won’t! I tell you Kitty didn’t know until I told her. You’ve got to believe me. Don’t you see there isn’t really any evidence against her apart from that? Dad, you’ve got to let her go now, don’t you see that? You’ve no right to hold her now that I’ve told you about it. She’s innocent, and if you won’t prove it, I’ll damn’ well do it myself.”

George had had more than enough. He opened his mouth to say something for which he would quite certainly have been sorry next moment, and which would have cost Bunty days of patient, cunning negotiations to put right again between them; and then the violent young voice that was shouting at him cracked ominously, and stopped him in his tracks, and he was saved. He looked again, and more closely, at the pale, raging face and the anguished eyes that didn’t avoid his searching stare, because the case was too desperate for considerations of dignity to have any further validity.

Understanding hit George like a steam hammer. Someone you’re used to thinking of as a child, someone who sounds like a hysterical boy, suddenly looks at you with the profound, solemn, staggering grief of a man, and knocks the breath out of you. It won’t last, of course, it isn’t a constant yet, he’ll be back and forth between maturity and childishness a hundred times before he loses the ability to commute. But it’s the first plain prophecy of things to come, and it’s hit him deadly hard. Oh, God, thought George, utterly dismayed, and I teased him about her! How dim can you get about your own kid?

Treading with wincing care, as though even a loud noise might start them both jangling again like shaken glasses George went and sat down at the table opposite his son. In a soft, reasonable voice he said: “All right, boy, you owed me that. I haven’t been fair to you. This is the first time you ever let me down, and that’s not a bad record, all things considered. I don’t really think you did it lightly, I don’t really under-value your reasons. I don’t blame you for not being willing to contract out. Probably in your place I should do exactly the same as you’ve done. And since I’m the person who’s to blame for breaking all the rules in the first place, and I’ve been doing it for years, I may just as well do it just once more, and tell you how the case really stands now. It won’t make you any happier,” he said ruefully, “but it may settle your mind. Since Kitty Norris told us her story tonight we’ve been working hard at the details. We’ve questioned all the tenants of the block of flats where she lives, and we’ve found a couple on the ground floor who heard and saw her come in that night, not at half past ten, as she said at first, nor at ten past eleven, as she says now, but just after midnight. She declines to account for that missing time.”

“They could be mistaken, , , ” began Dominic strenuously.

“I didn’t say she denied it, I said she wouldn’t account for it.” The voice was gender and gentler. “And that’s not all, Dom. We also brought in the clothes Kitty wore that night. I saw her, she had on a black silk dress with a full skirt, I didn’t have any trouble picking it out. She had an Indian scarf, too, a shot red and blue gauze affair with gold embroidery. To tell you the one thing that fits in nowhere, since I’m telling you the things that do fit, only too well, the end of the scarf has a corner torn off, and we haven’t been able to find a trace of it so far. The left side of the skirt of the dress has several smears along the hem, not easily visible because of the black colour, but enough to react to tests. They’re blood. The same group as Armiger’s. Her shoes I didn’t notice, but we found them, by one spot of brown on the toe of the left one. That’s blood, too, Dom. The same group. Armiger’s group, but not Kitty’s. We tested.”

Dominic shut his eyes, but he couldn’t stop seeing the silver sandals glittering in her hands at the Boat Club. They wouldn’t be the same shoes, but he couldn’t stop seeing them.

“I’m sorry, old man,” said George. He rose and drew away gingerly; the front view of Dominic was beginning to be too precarious, he moved considerately to the rear. The slender shoulders were braced and motionless. “It isn’t the end of the world, or of the case, either,” said George, “but it’s no good pretending that the outlook’s rosy, Dom. I had to tell you, in justice to you. Don’t take it too much to heart.”

He laid his hand for an instant on Dominic’s shoulder, and let his knuckles scrub gently at the rigid cheek.

Dominic got up abruptly and steered a blind course for the door, and blundering past Bunty fled for the stairs. Bunty looked after him, looked at George, and hesitated whether to follow. It was George who said warningly: “No!” and shook his head at her. It couldn’t be cured that way, either.

“Let him alone,” said George. “He’ll be all right, just let him alone.”

CHAPTER IX.

BY THE TIME he came down to breakfast next morning he had thought things out for himself, and arrived at a position from which he did not intend to be moved; that was implicit in the set of his jaw and the pallid resolution of his whole face, which seemed to have moved a long stage nearer to its mature form overnight. By his puffy eyelids and the blue hollows under his eyes thinking was what he’d been doing all through the hours of darkness when he should have been sleeping. He arrived at the breakfast table composed and quiet, greeted his parents punctiliously, to show there were no dangerous loose ends dangling, and made himself more mannishly attentive to Bunty than she had ever known him. Gravely she played up to him; having two men in the house was going to be interesting. She had no real complaints against George, but having a rival around wasn’t going to do him any harm, and she was going to enjoy herself. If only it hadn’t had to happen to him this way! She and George had spent the early hours of the morning in subdued and anxious colloquy over him, and it was difficult not to betray that they were watching him with equal anxiety now, intensely aware of every consciously restrained movement he made, even of the hesitations and selections that preceded every word he spoke.

“About last night, Dad,” he said, embarking at last with a shivering plunge which he did his best to make look normal. “I’ve been thinking what I ought to do. I’ve thought over everything you said, and, and thanks for telling me. But there’s one thing I know absolutely, and it’s evidence to me even if it isn’t to you, I mean you can’t possibly know it as I do. When she talked to me Kitty didn’t know how Mr. Armiger was killed. So she couldn’t possibly be the person who killed him. I don’t expect you to be sure of that, because you didn’t see her and hear her, but I did, and I am sure. So all the other things you’ve found out against her can’t really mean that she’s guilty, there has to be some other explanation for them.”

“We shall still be working on it,” said George, “trying to fill up all the gaps. I told you, the case isn’t closed yet.”

“No. But you’ll be trying to fill up the gaps with one idea in mind. The logical end of your gap-filling is a conviction, isn’t it?”

George, moved partly by genuine bitterness and partly by a blind, brilliant instinct for the thing to say that would make them equals, asked with asperity: “Damn it, do you think I like this solution any better than you do?” He didn’t even care, for the moment, whether Bunty caught the smarting note of personal resentment in that, provided it bolstered Dominic’s developing ego.

The blue-ringed eyes shot one rapid, startled glance into his face and were hastily lowered again. They would be stealing measuring looks in his direction with increasing frequency from now on.

“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Dominic cautiously. The tone suggested that he would have liked to linger inwardly over the implications, if there had not been something infinitely more urgent to be considered. “Only I start from what I know, and it makes the whole thing different for me. And so, well, maybe I might get somewhere different, and find out things that you wouldn’t. You can see that I’ve got to try, anyhow.”

“I can see you feel you have to,” agreed George.

“You don’t object?”

“Provided you don’t impede us in any way, how can I object? But if you do happen on anything relevant, don’t forget you have a duty to pass it on to the police.”

“But I suppose that doesn’t mean you have to tell me anything!”

The tone was so arrogant this time that George revised his ideas of the nursing this developing ego needed; it seemed, on the whole, to be doing very well for itself, and there was no sense in letting it get out of hand. “No,” he said firmly. “And after what happened yesterday that can hardly surprise you.”

“O.K.,” said Dominic, abashed and retreating several years. “Sorry!”

He rose from the table with a purposeful face, and marched out without saying a word about his intentions. It was Saturday, so at least he was saved from fretting barrenly over books he wouldn’t even be able to see, and lectures that would be double-Dutch to him. Bunty followed him out into the garden, where he was grimly pumping up the tyres of his bicycle. She didn’t ask any questions, she just said: “Good luck, lamb!” and kissed him; she thought she might justifiably go as far as that, it was what she’d always done and said when she was sending him out to face some dragonish ordeal like the eleven-plus examination or his first day at the grammar school. He recognised the rite, and dutifully raised his head from his labours to offer his mouth, as engagingly and as inattentively as at five years old; but instead of scrubbing off the kiss briskly with the back of his hand and leaning hard on the pump again, he straightened up and looked at her with the troubled eyes that didn’t know from minute to minute whether to be a boy’s or a man’s. The first three ages of man were batting him back and forth among them like a shuttlecock.

“Thanks, Mummy!” he said gruffly, preserving the ritual.

She tucked a ten-shilling note into his pocket. “An advance against your expense account,” she said.

For a moment he wasn’t sure that he was being taken seriously enough. “I’m not kidding,” he said sternly, scowling at her.

“I’m not kidding, either,” said Bunty. “I don’t know the girl, but you do, and if you say she didn’t do it that goes a long way with me. Anything on the level I can do to help, you ask me. Right?”

“Right! Gosh, thanks, Mummy!”

It wasn’t just for the ten shillings, which at first he’d suspected of being a bribe to him to cheer up, it wasn’t even for the offer of help and support, it was for everything she’d implied about his relationship with Kitty: that it was adult, that it was real, that it had importance and validity, and was to be treated with respect. He experienced one of those moments of delighted love for his mother, of startling new discoveries in his exploration of her, which are among the unexpected compensations of growing up. And Bunty, who knew when to vanish, sailed hastily back into the house feeling almost as young as her son.

Flashes of pleasure and warmth, however, did nothing to solve the problem of Kitty, and the shadow and weight closed on him again more oppressively than ever as he straddled his bicycle and rode out of Comerford by the farm road that would bring him out close to The Jolly Barmaid. In the grassy verge by the cross-roads he put one foot to the ground and sat gazing at the house, thinking hard. People had almost given up standing about staring at the place by this time, the centre of attention had shifted now to wherever Kitty was likely to be. The news was out, in morning papers and news bulletins and by the ever-present grapevine that twined across the back fences of the villages and burrowed its roots into the foundations of the town. Kitty Norris! Can you believe it?

The vulgar new sign in its convolutions of wrought-iron gleamed at the edge of the road. The doors would not be opened for business until after the funeral, for which permission had been given at yesterday’s adjourned inquest. How it would have annoyed Armiger to have to forgo a weekend’s takings just because someone was dead. The funeral, they said, would be on Monday, and Raymond Shelley was seeing to the arrangements, not Leslie Armiger. The conventionally-minded, with magnificent hypocrisy, were already beginning to censure Leslie for want of filial feeling, and were quite certain in advance that he wouldn’t go to the funeral. Why in the world, wondered Dominic, should he be expected to? He’d been expressly dismissed from his position as a son, and forbidden to feel filial; if he suffered any regrets for his ex, or late, father it constituted a gesture of generosity on his part, it wasn’t in any way due from him. And what did he feel now for Kitty, who had flown slap into the net to make sure he should not be snared? He must know by now. Everybody knew. Even when Dominic rode past the first farm cottages the air felt heavy and tremulous with the reverberations of the news, and two women with their heads together over the fence could only be retailing the rich imaginary details of Kitty’s fall.

Dominic began to follow the course Kitty had taken that night. Here she had halted before sweeping out in a right-hand turn and heading for Comerbourne; it had then been about a quarter past ten. Somewhere on her way she’d changed her mind and wished she’d stayed; somewhere before the next right-hand turn into the lane that wound its way to Wood’s End, and there brought her into the rear farm road, the ridge-road from the back of The Jolly Barmaid, that followed the old contour track between the upland fields and the low, moist river meadows. Probably she’d driven this stage slowly and cautiously; she was a fast driver by inclination but not a reckless one, and at night the frequent bends and high hedges of the lane contained and shrouded even the beams of headlights.

Natural enough, when she changed her mind, to go round like this instead of turning and driving back along the high road; natural enough, that is, if she only made up her mind when the cross-roads came in sight, and what could be more likely? A cross-roads is an invitation to pause, to think again and confirm your direction. So she turned down here, saying to herself: I will, I’ll have one more go at making him see reason.

A third of a mile or so, and the lane brought her to the next right-hand turn, under the signpost at Wood’s End. Hardly a village, just a few farm cottages, the long drive of the farm, one tiny shop, and a telephone box. And from here to the right again, into the old road, and maybe just over a quarter of a mile to go to the tall boundary wall of The Jolly Barmaid. She had parked “along there under the trees by that little wood.” When he reached the spot it was easy to see why, for the road broadened there into a wide stretch of trampled grass on the left, like an accidental lay-by under the hanging wood, and there she could get off the road. For by that time it must have been nearly, if not quite, half past ten, closing time at the pub, and though most of the customers would be using the main road, there was always the possibility that some of the countrymen would be leaving by this way.

Dominic dismounted, and pushed his bike slowly the last fifty yards or so from the place where she had parked to the rear exit from the courtyard. It was not a gate but a broad opening in the high wall, blocked with two iron posts so that no cars could drive out that way. The barn-ballroom was quite close, she had only to cross this remote corner of the yard to the doorway and walk in. And there Armiger had waited for her, full of his new plan, entertaining no doubts of her complacency.

How long had it taken, what happened in there? Not long, surely. She trying to get him to listen to her plea for Leslie, he riding over everything with his great schemes for the future, and convinced that she was with him; like two people trying to convey to each other two conflicting urgencies, without a word in common in any language. If she had reached this place about half past ten, or a little later, allowing for parking and locking the car and perhaps for some final hesitation, Dominic estimated that she must have taken flight well before eleven. Armiger would never let the exposition of his deal take him more than a quarter of an hour, he went straight at things. There was a pretty good indication of the times involved, too, in Kitty’s declaration that she had reached her flat by about ten past eleven; granted that was discredited by the evidence of her neighbours, yet it must be the time she had felt she ought to give, the correct time to round off the version of her movements which she wanted to have believed. Between ten and five minutes to eleven she came running out of the ballroom and left Armiger lying at the foot of the staircase, thought Dominic with certainty.

And then what? She would want only one thing, as she herself had said, and that was to get away. Would she drive on to the next turning and go right round The Jolly Barmaid again to the main road? Or turn there under the trees and drive back by the way she had come? She’d turn, he decided, after only a moment’s thought; this way was quieter and also shorter. There was plenty of room to turn under the trees. Almost certainly she headed back towards Wood’s End. And in fourteen or fifteen minutes she should have been home. Why wasn’t she?

He thought over and round it, and he was sure that was the only point on which she had lied. And why? There was an hour lost. Whatever she’d done with it, he was quite certain she hadn’t gone back and killed Alfred Armiger, so why wouldn’t she tell them what had happened during that missing time? Because there was someone else involved? Someone equally innocent, whom she refused to harm?

Her whole desire had been to get away. If she hadn’t done it it was because she couldn’t.

He had begun to push his bike back towards Wood’s End, trailing his toes in the fallen leaves under the trees. He chose to walk because his mind was grinding over the meagre facts so slowly that his feet had to keep the same pace. Here she turned and drove back, and yet she didn’t get home to Comerbourne until after midnight. She was going along here, probably fast, running away from her sense of outrage and frustration and shame; and somewhere along here fright fell on her, too, the dread that she ought to have waited to make sure how badly he was hurt; but by then it wouldn’t stop or turn her, it would only drive her on all the faster. So why didn’t she get home soon after eleven, as she should have done?

And then he knew why.

It was so simple and so silly that it had to be true. He heard the busy low note of the engine cough and fail, felt the power die away, and saw Kitty reach for the tap with one impatient toe, to kick it over on to the reserve, and then draw back furious and exasperated because it was on the reserve already, and yet once again she’d done her inimitable trick. Half the day she’d probably been saying to herself cheerfully: “Plenty of time, I’ve got a gallon, I’ll call at Lowe’s before I leave Comerbourne, I’ll look in at the filling station at Leah Green, , , ” making easy promises every time the necessity recurred to her, until it didn’t recur to her any more.

“I never learn. I run dry in the middle of the High Street, or halfway up the lane to the golf links.” He could hear her voice now, and remember every word she had said about her two blind spots. Nobody who didn’t know Kitty as he did, nobody who wasn’t in her confidence as he was, could ever have unearthed this simple explanation for her lost hour. She just ran out of petrol! She was always doing it; she’d told him so herself.

The next question was: Where did it happen? He thought that over and decided that it must have been somewhere close to The Jolly Barmaid and well away from Comerbourne. If she had been near the town when she ran dry she would simply have stopped a car on the main road and begged the driver either to let her have some juice or to call in at her garage and leave a message; to be immobilised on the main road near Comerbourne at around eleven o’clock would be innocent enough, just as good as being home by ten past eleven, and there wouldn’t have been any missing hour, or any need for lies. But Kitty had lied, it was one of the main points against her. No, somewhere along here, somewhere unpleasantly close to the inn, she found herself stranded. And here she didn’t want to stop a car and ask for help, she didn’t want to have her garage man come out with petrol for her; she didn’t want to call attention to her presence in any way, or let anyone know that she had been here.

Dominic was imagining her state of mind with so much passion that his own heart-beats quickened and his temples began to throb with panic. Every minute that passed must have driven her a little nearer to hysteria. Supposing Armiger was desperately hurt, and she’d run away and left him? Supposing, even, that he should die? Maybe she’d thought of going back to him, but she simply couldn’t face it. She hadn’t meant to do anything so dreadful, but it had happened and she was to blame. In that state of mind she would have only one instinctive idea, and that would be to hide the fact that she had ever been near the place after she left by the main road at a quarter past ten.

Supposing it happened somewhere here, he thought, walking slowly along the left-hand side of the old road, she’d be in a spot about getting the car as far as possible off the fairway, because it’s rather narrow and winding. If I keep my eyes open I may be able to spot the place, because she’d have to try and run it almost into the hedge, and I wonder if maybe her paint may not show some scratches, too?

He was almost within sight of the Wood’s End cottages when he found one place at least where some vehicle had certainly been run as far as possible on to the bumpy grass verge, its near-side wheel-marks hugging the base of the hedge. There was no mistaking it; the crushing of the thick growth on the ground, the breaking of the overgrown shoots of the hedge, these were slight signs already partially erased by showers and winds and the passing of time, but the breakages were there to be seen if you looked for them, and the wheel-track was still evident. It might be Kitty, it might not, there was no way of knowing unless she chose to tell them.

However, supposing for the sake of the theory that this was where she ran dry, what would she do next? She would have to call on someone for help, and the obvious thing to do was to go to the telephone box at Wood’s End, and from there ring up some private person, someone she could trust absolutely. And the someone came in response to her appeal, and brought her petrol enough to get her home. But what had determined Kitty’s silence was surely the fact that this simple act had now laid her benefactor open to a charge as an accessory after the fact in a murder case. If they convicted her they could charge her helper. Kitty wouldn’t allow that; no word of hers was ever going to involve the friend who had come to her rescue. That was the kind of girl she was.

This long communion with himself had brought Dominic to the telephone box. He stood and looked at it for a moment, and then, without any clear idea of what he hoped to find within, pulled open the door and looked round the dusty interior. Absolutely impersonal, a piece of the mundane machinery of modern living, with the usual graffiti. He was letting the door swing to when he caught an incongruous gleam of gold, and pulled it hastily open again. Clinging in the hinge of the door, shadowy as cobweb but for a few torn gilt threads, a scrap of gauze hung like a crushed butterfly.

He put out a hand to pull it loose, and then checked himself in the act, and did no more than smooth out the delicate scrap tenderly with his fingertips until he could distinguish the minute embroidered flowers of gold on the almost impalpable silk. A corner of an Indian scarf, shot dark blue and red, embroidered with gold thread; the scarf Kitty had worn on the night of Armiger’s death. The one detail for which the police had no satisfactory explanation, the bit that didn’t fit in; but for Dominic it fitted in miraculously.

He mustn’t move it; he must let his father see it just as it was. He shut himself into the box and dialled with a hand trembling with excitement.

“This is Dominic Felse here. Can I speak to my father, please? I know, but this is important, it’s something to do with the case.”

George was up to his neck in paper work, and impatient of interruptions, but too sore from his recent mistakes to take any new risks where Dominic was concerned. He listened without any real expectations, and heard, incredulously: “I’m at the telephone box at Wood’s End, Dad. I’ve found the corner you said was torn from Kitty’s scarf.”

“You’ve what?

Dominic repeated his statement patiently. “It’s caught on a rough place in the hinge of the door, she must have pulled it clear in a hurry and torn the corner clean off. I know, I haven’t moved it. I’m keeping an eye on it until you come.”

“How on earth did you come to walk straight to it?” asked George, humanly aggrieved.

“I used me natural genius. Come along and I’ll tell you.” He couldn’t help the cocky note, but he wasn’t really feeling elated; there was still too far to go, and too much at stake. He debated within himself, while he waited, how much he ought to tell his father, how much he was committed to telling. All that was really evidence was that scrap of silk, but it tended to consolidate his theories into something like facts, and perhaps he ought to confide everything. His accidental acquaintance with Kitty’s idiosyncrasies in connection with cars, for instance, was evidence, too, and so was the shaved place along the hedge. In the end he told George the whole process of thought which had brought him to the telephone box, and was listened to with flattering attention. He added his initials to George’s on the envelope in which George enclosed the shred of gauze, though he had a faint suspicion that that was a sop to his self-love.

“It all makes remarkable sense, as far as it goes,” agreed George, inspecting the hedge. “We can check the car and see if it shows any traces. This chap’s wings were well into the strong growth.”

“I suppose,” said Dominic, very carefully and quietly, “it wouldn’t be possible for me to see Kitty, would it?”

“I’m afraid not, Dom. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t consider it. You’d need a solid reason like being her legal adviser or a member of her family to get in to her, yet, at any rate.”

“Yes, I see. I didn’t think I could, really. But you could see her, couldn’t you? You could ask her all my questions for me, if you would, like where she ran out of petrol, and whom she telephoned. I don’t think she’ll tell you, of course, but she won’t be expecting you to know anything about it, and she may give something away without meaning to. She isn’t very good at telling lies, really,” said Dominic, suppressing the slight constriction in his throat. “She forgets and comes out with a bit of the truth, without thinking. Only if she’s lying for somebody else she’ll be twice as careful.” He scrubbed his toes along the deep grooves the wheels had left in the soft grass under the hedge, and scowled down at his feet. “I suppose you couldn’t give her a message from me, could you? Oh, nothing unconstitutional, I only meant just to give her my regards, and maybe tell her I’m doing what I can for her.”

“I’ll give her that message with pleasure,” said George gravely.

He didn’t tell him that Kitty’s car had yielded two faint, minute smears of blood from the edge of the driving-seat, obviously brushed there from the skirt of her dress, or that the fine scratches on the near-side front wing had already been preoccupying their minds for several hours. It seemed ungenerous to keep these things back from him, when he was making so notable a contribution, but there was no choice about it. They’d agreed on their terms of truce; Dominic wasn’t expecting concessions.

George went to see Kitty that afternoon. Raymond Shelley was just leaving her, his face worn and wretched, his bulging briefcase hugged to him defensively as he passed George in the corridor, as though he had Kitty’s life locked in it. It wasn’t easy for them even to talk to each other now, they had become representative of the two sides, and communication was an effort.

“You realise, of course,” said Shelley, “that her defence will be an absolute denial of the charge. Any competent doctor will be able to show that no woman could have been responsible for the attack, on physical grounds alone.”

George said nothing to that. He had tentatively raised the same point, and Duckett had given him a derisive glare, and said: “Are you kidding? What, with a sitting target all laid out for her against a brand-new floor about as hard as ebony? A fairly lusty ten-year-old could have done it.”

“I can’t realise it, even yet,” burst out Shelley, shaking his head helplessly. “Kitty! I’ve known her all her life, she couldn’t wilfully hurt even an insect. It just can’t be true, Felse, it simply can’t. I can’t forgive myself for leaving her alone that night. If I’d realised he had any such thing in his mind I could have stopped it.”

Could he, wondered George, looking after him with sympathy as he flung nervously away. How much influence had he with Armiger, if it came to the point? What was it Leslie had called him?, a cover man. He was the one who was used; he was in his master’s secrets only as far as Armiger chose to admit him for his own ends. No, Shelley would never have been effective in diverting the bull’s rush, but if he’d tried he might have made one more casualty.

Kitty had survived the first anguish, the agonised tears of helplessness and loneliness and shame that had scarified his heart yesterday. Dominic, thank God, knew nothing about that half-hour of collapse, and never would know. Whatever his imagination inflicted upon him, it would not be the reality George had seen and suffered. The first thing to-day’s Kitty did was to apologise for it, simply and directly, without embarrassment. It was past, it wouldn’t happen again.

“I’m sorry I gave you such a bad time. I hadn’t expected it myself, I was shocked. It just shows, you never know how you may react in a crisis. And I always thought I had an equable temperament.”

George said: “My son sent you his regards, and said I was to tell you that he’s doing what he can for you.”

She lifted her head and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew belonged by rights to Dominic. She looked pale and drained, but all her distress had done to her looks was to make her eyes look larger than ever, and the vulnerable curves of her mouth more plaintive and tender. She had on the same neutral-tinted sweater and skirt he had seen her in at her flat, and a book was turned down beside her; she looked like an over-earnest student surprised during the last week before a vital examination.

“Please thank him for me. He’s almost the only one who believes me when I say I didn’t do it. Out of the mouths of babes, , , ” She shut her hands suddenly on the air as if to snatch back the unforgivable indiscretion. “No, don’t tell him I said that. It isn’t even true, and it would hurt him. Just thank him for me, and give him my love.” At that she had taken a careful second look before she ever let her lips shape the single significant syllable, but she didn’t take it back. The soft bow of her mouth folded firmly, and let it stand.

“We found the place where you pulled the car into the hedge when you ran out of petrol,” said George in the same conversational tone. “Why didn’t you tell us about that? You might have known we were sure to find it.”

“He found it,” said Kitty, and smiled again to herself, and that smile, too, was for Dominic. “What a boy!” she said. “Fancy remembering that! But even he could be wrong, you know. Now I’m not talking about that any more, it isn’t a subject I like, and you can’t make me. Come to think of it, there’s absolutely nothing you people can do to me now. Except, perhaps, stop visiting me. I’d much rather see you than nobody. Poor old Ray looks so desperately sad he breaks my heart. And who else is likely to come near me?”

“You have hordes of friends, and you know it,” said George, consenting to follow her disconcerting leaps.

“I had. The most popular deb. of her year, that was Kitty. Do you know how many eligible young men have wanted to marry me, since they knew Leslie was out of the market? Seven actually got as far as asking, and about five more were hovering pretty near the brink. And do you know how many have been to try and see me to-day, to show how much they loved me? One. And that was Leslie, the one who never pretended to.” She laughed, and because Leslie had come it was a genuine, beautiful, even joyful laugh. Only then did George understand. Kitty had got something out of her disaster, after all.

“Did they let him in?”

“Oh, yes, he had a certain claim, you see, my victim’s son, and brought up almost like a brother to me. He was sweet,” said Kitty, looking down into her cupped hands and smiling with a brooding tenderness for which any man would have performed prodigies of love and loyalty. “And terribly upset.” She didn’t care who observed her personal sorrow or her personal rapture here; life had become so precarious as to be simple, there was no time for dissembling or being ashamed. “I believe he even feels responsible for me, simply because it was his father who got killed, as though he could help it. He feels almost as if it was he who got me into it. But I got myself into it, nobody else. You won’t mistake that for a confession, will you? It isn’t.”

“And kept somebody else out of it,” said George.

She turned her head and looked at him, not so abruptly that he could claim he had got a real reaction out of her, but at least so positively that he knew she was paying attention for once.

“The person you telephoned to come and help you out of your mess,” said George. “We know you did, you left a bit of your scarf caught in the door of the telephone box at Wood’s End. Did you think we shouldn’t get wise to that call? You may as well tell us all about that interlude, you know, it’s only a matter of time.”

“I’m in no hurry,” said Kitty, smiling, even teasing him, though the sadness that was in everything she did or said was in this perversity too.

“Who was it, Kitty? Better give us the name than have us give it to you.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Look, I’ve thought of something,” she said. “If I’m convicted, I can’t inherit from my victim, can I? So what happens to the money? I never thought to ask poor old Ray, I was so busy stroking his hand and saying: There, there! Do you know?”

“I’m not sure. But I should think it would automatically go to the next-of-kin, unless there’s some express veto on that in the will itself.” He didn’t know how much of this he could take, and still remember that he was a police officer, here on business. He wished he could think that she was doing it to him on purpose, to repay her own injuries, or out of bravado, to put them out of her mind, but he knew she wasn’t. She was evading being questioned, but she asked her own questions because she wanted to know the answers.

“Good!” she said with a sigh of satisfaction. “Then at any rate Leslie and Jean won’t have to worry any more, they’ll be loaded. I suppose I ought to make a will, too.”

George opened his mouth to answer her, and couldn’t get out a word. She looked up, her isolation penetrated for a moment by the quality of his shocked silence, and searching for the reason in her own words, came up with the wrong answer.

“It’s all right,” she said quickly and kindly. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know! Even if the worst comes to the worst, it isn’t capital murder.”

CHAPTER X.

“THERE SHE is,” said Leslie, stepping back from the table. “The Joyful Woman in person. I took your advice and fetched her back from Cranmer’s yesterday. What do you think of her?”

If George had told the simple truth in answer to that it would have had to be: Not much! Propped against the wall to catch the light from the window, what there was of it on this dull Sunday morning, the wooden panel looked singularly unimpressive, its flesh-tints a sallow fawn-colour, its richer shades weathered and dirtied into mere variations on tobacco-brown. Not very big for an inn sign, about twenty by eighteen inches, and even within that measure the figure was not so bold as it could have been. Against a flat ground that might once have been deep green or blue but was now grained with resinous brown varnishes coat after coat, the woman was shown almost to the waist. At the base of the panel her hands were crossed under little maidenly breasts, swathed in a badly-painted muslin fichu. Her shoulders beneath the folds of muslin were braced back, her neck was long, and in its present incarnation shapeless, and inclined forward like a leaning flower-stem to balance the backward tilt of the head. In half-face, looking to the right, she raised her large bland forehead to the light and laughed; and in spite of the crudity of the flat masses of which she was built, and the want of moulding in the face, there was no doubt that this was the laughter of delight and not of amusement; she wasn’t sharing it with an audience, it belonged to herself alone. Joyful was the just word for her.

“I know nothing about painting,” said George truthfully, and taking care not to sound complacent about it. “Frankly, it’s pretty ugly, isn’t it? And a queer mixture. That frill round her neck, and those mounds of hair like wings, and the corkscrew curls at the sides, all look like touches of early Victorian realism. But her pose isn’t Victorian, or realistic. More sort of hieratic, if I’m making any sense?”

“You’re making quite remarkable sense. Which is it you find ugly, the mass or the detail?”

“The detail, I suppose. The mass balances, I mean the shape of her on the panel. The masses of paint are clumsy, but I suppose that’s from years of overpainting by amateurs every time it got shabby.”

“You know,” said Leslie appreciatively, “you’d better be careful, or you’re going to turn into an art critic.” He had quite forgotten, in his excitement over this unimposing work of art, that his relationship with George had hitherto been one of mutual suspicion and potential antagonism. “That’s exactly what’s happened to her, and been happening for probably a couple of centuries. Every time she needed brightening up, some ham-fisted member of the family took a brush and some primary colours and simply filled in the various bits of her solidly, line to line, like a mosaic. And every now and again one of the artists got carried away and started putting in twiddly bits like the corkscrew curls, which, as you so justly remarked, don’t belong. I’m betting they don’t go below a couple of coats at all. But the shape, the way she fills the panel and stands poised, and leaves these rather beautiful forms round her, that’s there from the beginning, and that’s good. And I want her out of that coffin. I want to see what she was like once, before she went into the licensed trade, because I’m pretty sure there was a before. She hasn’t always been an inn sign.”

Jean, pausing for a moment on her way out to the landing kitchenette, stared intently at the laughing woman, and bit thoughtfully at the handle of the fork she was holding in her hand. “You know, she kind of reminds me of something, only I can never think what. Do you think she always laughed?”

“Yes, I think so, it’s in the tilt of the head. But with luck we shall see, some day. I’m taking her to the chap who runs the university gallery this afternoon,” explained Leslie contentedly. “I telephoned him yesterday, Brandon Lucas, I find I used to know his son at Oxford, so that broke the ice nicely, and he said yes, she sounded very interesting, and he’d like to have a look at her.”

“Did you have any trouble getting it back from Cranmer?” asked George.

“No, no trouble. He wasn’t very keen on parting, but I suppose he’d hardly be likely to commit himself to too urgent an interest, after your inquiries.”

“Did he make you an offer?”

“Yes,” said Leslie.

“How high did he go?”

Too late George felt the slight chill of constraint that had suddenly lowered the temperature in the room, and the tension that charged the air between husband and wife. He shouldn’t have asked; money was something that had shadowed the whole of their short married life, the want of it, the injustice of its withdrawal, the indignity of stooping to ask for it.

“Six hundred pounds,” said Jean, distinctly and bitterly, and made for the door.

Leslie’s ringers pinched out his cigarette, suddenly trembling. “You didn’t want to touch it when Dad offered five hundred,” he said indignantly. “You said I did right to turn that down. What’s so different about this offer?”

“It’s a hundred more,” she said flatly and coldly, “and it doesn’t come from your father. It’s straight money from a dealer, and it wouldn’t burn me, and the things I could buy with it wouldn’t be poisoned.”

So that was it. When the offer was pushed up to so tempting a figure she had wanted him to take it. Perfectly logical and understandable. She was a breeding tigress, she wanted to line a nest for her young; not at any price, but at any price that didn’t maim her pride. If her confidence in Leslie had been still unshaken she would have accepted his estimate of their best course, and gone along with him loyally, but that one disastrous move of his had ended the honeymoon once for all. Now he had to prove himself, he would never be taken on trust again, and his every act was to be scrutinised and judged mercilessly, not because she was greedy for herself, but because she was insatiable for her child. Looking round the shabby, congested room that was their home, George couldn’t blame her for preferring to clutch at certain benefits to-day rather than speculate on riches tomorrow.

“And if I’d taken it, and then the thing had turned out to be worth ten times as much, you’d never have let me forget that, either,” said Leslie, smarting. He flushed at the petulant tone of his own voice, and to break off the unseemly argument went forward and plucked the panel from its place, his pleasure in it spoiled. He was ashamed of having displayed their differences before George, and probably so was she, for she said from the doorway, without turning her head: “Well, it’s no use worrying now, in any case, it’s done. We may be lucky yet.”

“Believe me, Mrs. Armiger,” said George firmly, “if Cranmer offered six hundred for it he was absolutely certain of clearing a good deal more than that. He isn’t in business for fun. You hang on to it until you get a really disinterested opinion.”

He moved to Leslie’s shoulder to take another look at it. There was a queer ornament pinned between the childish breasts, something that looked like an enormous oval brooch with some embossed pattern on it. It rested upright above the crossed hands, long, curved, inarticulate hands pallid under the crazed vanish. “You’ve got some definite idea of your own about this, haven’t you?” he asked curiously.

“Well, I have, but I don’t dare believe it. It’s too staggering, I’d rather not talk about it until somebody else has pronounced on it, somebody who knows a lot more about these things than I do.” He wrapped the panel in an old dust-sheet and stacked it carefully in a corner. “I’m sorry, I’ve been so Ml of her I can’t think of much else, but I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about her. Is it something about Kitty?” His face was grave enough at the thought of her, the vexation and the pleasure of his own affairs both overshadowed.

“It is about her, as a matter of fact,” said George. “You paid her a visit yesterday morning, didn’t you?”

“Yes, as soon as I could get away from the shop. I didn’t even know she’d been arrested until I went to work. Why? It was all right, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, quite. I was simply wondering if she’d been any more forthcoming with you than she was with us. There’s an hour of her time, that night, from just after eleven until just after twelve, for which she refuses to account, and there’s a possibility that her reasons for keeping quiet are concerned with some other person. My impression is that the best thing that could happen for her is that everything to do with her movements that night should come out.”

“Guilty or innocent?”

“Guilty or innocent.”

“From you,” said Leslie after some thought, “I might accept that. But if you mean did she tell me anything yesterday morning that she wouldn’t tell you in the afternoon, no, she didn’t. Not a word about my father or that night. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk a lot about anything. She just said she didn’t do it, and I said I never thought she did. Which I suppose is a perfectly good reason for co-operating with you, now that I come to think of it.”

“It is, if that’s what you honestly believe. You were with her, how long? Half an hour or so? If you weren’t talking, what were you doing all that time?”

“Most of that time,” said Leslie, angry colour suddenly mantling over his shapely cheek-bones, “Kitty was crying, and I was trying to comfort her.” He glared for a moment, but the flash of partisan indignation passed as quickly as it had flared up. “Oh, nothing shattering, just she needed to, and with me she could. She didn’t tell me anything about your missing hour. And I suppose you know you’re not the only one who’s been asking me about it? Your boy came to see me yesterday.”

“I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised.” Dominic had volunteered no information resulting from his inquiries in this direction, it seemed likely that he had acquired none. “We have a working arrangement,” said George with a hollow smile. “Did he ask you this one? If Kitty was in a desperate hole and needed someone quickly, someone who wouldn’t hesitate to come out to her late at night and get her out of trouble, to whom would she turn?”

“No, he didn’t ask that exactly, but maybe we covered much the same ground another way. There was a time when I’d have said she’d come to me. We’ve been good friends, she was like my little sister most of the time we were growing up, but that ghastly scheme of my father’s broke it all down. What could you expect? Kitty’s odd, sweet and funny and candid, but very much alone, too. I’m very fond of her, and I think she was of me until Dad spoiled everything. I did say to her yesterday, why on earth didn’t she call on me if she was in a spot, but all she said was something daffy about my not being on the telephone any more, as though that was any reason for locking me out of her life. Did you say something?”

George shook his head. “No, go on. If she wouldn’t turn to you, then who would it be?”

“Well, of course she has fellows round her as thick as bees wherever she goes, and all that, but I can’t imagine her going to any of them. I think it would be someone older, if she really needed something. It would have been her aunt, the one who brought her up, of course, only she died a year or so ago. There’s her manager, he’s a nice old boy, and she’s known him all her life, or Ray Shelley, he’s her unofficial uncle, she always got on well with him, especially after he tried to stick up for me when the row burst. Someone like that. I’m not being much help?”

“You might be,” said George.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s Kitty I want to help, not you. No offence, you’re only doing your job, I know. But I’m not a policeman, I’m just a friend of Kitty’s.”

“All right,” said George, resigned to his exclusion from humankind, “that’s understood. I suppose, by the way, that Dom made it quite clear where he stands?” He saw by the fleeting gleam of a smile in Leslie’s eyes that indeed Dominic had, and that he had been welcomed accordingly.

He got as far as the door, and then turned back to say: “One more thing, you might like to know, we did find somebody who confirmed your timing that night. One of the colliers on late shift at the Warren happens to live at the bottom end of this road. He was coming off the miners’ bus at the corner just as you turned in on your way home. That fixes the time pretty accurately at around a quarter to eleven, give or take a couple of minutes. So that’s that. For what it’s worth now.”

“I see,” said Leslie slowly. “Well, thanks for telling me, anyhow. It would have been worth a lot a couple of days ago. As you say, it doesn’t seem to matter much now.”

“It was only last night we got round to the idea of checking the miners’ bus. If I’d known before I’d have told you. Well, good luck with your Joyful Woman this afternoon. How are you doing the trip? That’s an awkward thing to tote around by bus. I could offer you transport, if you’re in difficulties?”

“That’s awfully kind of you, but we’ve got the use of Barney Wilson’s van when he isn’t using it himself. He lets me keep his spare key, so that I can fetch it if I want it. He stables it at the Department’s depot just out on the main road, not having a garage at home, so it’s nice and handy.”

“Trusting chap,” said George from the top of the stairs. “Most people would rather loan you their wives.”

Well, he thought as he drove slowly and thoughtfully homeward, he hadn’t come out of that encounter quite empty-handed, even if there were some annoying loose ends that didn’t tie in anywhere. Chief among them was The Joyful Woman, that unpromising work of art, of such commonplace provenance and ungainly appearance, for which nonetheless a shrewd dealer was willing to pay six hundred pounds. Had she anything to do with Armiger’s death, or had she not? She didn’t fit in with the theory which had been devouring him ever since his visit to Kitty yesterday, but if she was going to turn out to be extremely valuable the possibility became worth considering.

Yet if money was the motive for this murder there was surely a greater prize to be considered than the few thousands which might be involved even in an important art find. Not the money Armiger had been playing for at the end of his life, but all the money he already had, the quarter of a million or so that young Leslie had always lightheartedly assumed would come to him. Had he really resigned himself to doing without it? And even if he had been on the point of coming to terms with his new poverty, for want of the means to change it, what would be his reaction if fate had suddenly presented him with a wonderful, a unique opportunity of regaining his fortune?

No doubt about it, Leslie had left The Jolly Barmaid that night with no intention of doing anything more reprehensible than walking home. That was what he had meant to do, and that was what he had done; the collier’s evidence proved that quite conclusively. There was no question of his having hung about outside and witnessed Kitty’s panic flight, and then returned to finish the job she had accidentally begun. He had been in Comerbourne at that moment, a mile and a quarter away from the scene. If he had killed he had gone back to kill, and the intent had been conceived as instantaneously as a flash of lightning, or, say, a cry for help. A cry from Kitty.

George had arrived at this point when it dawned upon him at last that he was thinking in terms which indicated that he no longer entertained the slightest doubt of Kitty’s innocence. Whether that was Kitty’s own doing or Dominic’s was something he couldn’t determine. But it didn’t surprise him; he was only belatedly recognising something which had been true for at least twenty-four hours.

Not Kitty. Someone else. Someone to whom she had telephoned from Wood’s End? Supposing, for the sake of the argument, that someone had found out from an agitated Kitty that Armiger was lying unconscious in the barn, and supposing that someone had, or abruptly discovered at that moment, an overwhelming reason for wanting the job finished. There was Kitty all set up ready to take the blame, and herself alerting the murderer to his unique opportunity. A chance like that comes only once in a lifetime.

It was Kitty herself who had put the idea into George’s head, without the slightest conception of the kind of seed she was sowing, merely clutching at a small satisfaction in her desolation of sadness: “If I’m convicted I can’t inherit from my victim, can I? So what becomes of the money?” And again, reassured and consoled: “Good! Then Leslie and Jean won’t have to worry any more, they’ll be loaded.”

The set-up, however accidental, was perfect. It didn’t even involve the killer in conniving at Kitty’s death, since, as she had said, this wasn’t capital murder; but the division of murder into capital and simple murder did not affect the law that a murderer cannot inherit from his victim. Kitty convicted could forfeit her inheritance and still come out of prison at the end of her term a rich and comparatively young woman. With a quarter of a million at stake he might even have been able to persuade himself that he wasn’t doing her such a terrible wrong. That much money can often drown out the voice of conscience only too effectively.

There had been, in fact, only two snags when George had set out to pay this unexpected Sunday morning visit. Leslie had no car he could have taken out that night to hurry back to the barn; and as he had so suggestively reported Kitty herself as reminding them, he wasn’t on the telephone any more. He could be reached only during working hours, at the warehouse. Insurmountable obstacles both; except that one of them had already been surmounted, for it seemed he had the use of Barney Wilson’s van whenever its owner didn’t need it. The spare key was in his charge and the van was close at hand in the yard of the depot. Now if the other obstacle should prove equally illusory?

The thing had been getting more complicated by the hour, and yet George had felt all along that in reality the truth must be one single thread that passed through the tangle as straight as a ruled line, and only by accident formed part of this proliferated web of motives and feelings. And here it was, the clear thread, the convincing motive, the irresistible temptation. A man who has a quarter of a million in his sights can afford to turn down a mere six hundred pounds.

But, Leslie wasn’t on the telephone.

CHAPTER XI.

DOMINIC SOUGHT our his father on Sunday evening with a face so determined that it was plain he was bent on a serious conference. Bunty had gone to church; George wouldn’t have minded having her sit in on their counsels, but in all probability Dominic would, considering that mothers should be shielded from too close consideration of such shocking things as murder. In his present mood of newly appreciated responsibility he probably blamed George for subjecting her to his confidences all these years.

“Dad, I’ve been thinking about this glove business,” he began, squaring his elbows purposefully on the table opposite George’s chair.

“Yes?” said George. It was not the precise opening he had expected, but it was apposite enough; there was no getting away from the gloves.

“You know what I mean. Those gloves of Leslie’s were O.K., but somebody must have had some pretty fouled-up gloves to dispose of after that night, mustn’t they? The bottle was plastered right to the cork. And I could tell, the way you all pounced on even the possibility of those old painting gloves being the ones, that that was what you were looking for and hoping for. I mean, anything else the murderer had on might be marked, but his gloves definitely would, and he definitely was wearing gloves. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. So?”

“Well, you never did say, but was Kitty wearing gloves that night?” He didn’t ask it with any sense that the answer was going to prove anything, he wasn’t as simple as that. But it was a necessary part of the development of his ideas.

“Not indoors,” said George at once. “But she could very well have had some in the car. When she was dressed up for the evening she’d probably wear them for driving.”

“Yes, but you’ve never found any stained gloves among her things.” He didn’t ask, he asserted, waiting with sharp eyes levelled for a reaction, and whatever he got satisfied him. “Well, bearing this glove question in mind, I’ve been thinking exactly what happened that evening. If I’ve got it right, she dashed out of the barn to run home, and in a few hundred yards she ran out of petrol. There she is in a panic, she thinks she’s done something dreadful, injured him badly, maybe even fatally, she’s got to get away, she daren’t call a garage or anything. She runs to the telephone box and calls up some friend she can trust, says where she is, says come and bring me some petrol, a can, or even a tube to siphon it, anything, just to get me home. Don’t say a word to anyone, she says, and come quickly. I’ve done something terrible. And she blurts out all about it; she’d be in such a state she wouldn’t be able to help it. Now suppose this person she calls has good reason to want Armiger dead. He might not ever have thought of doing anything about it until now, but now it suddenly strikes him, this is it, this is for me! There’s Armiger knocked cold in the barn, a sitting target if only he stays out until I can get round there, and there’s somebody else all lined up to take the blame. I don’t say he’s absolutely made up his mind to kill him, but it’s just too good to miss having a close look at the set-up. Obviously there are risks, he may only have been knocked out for a few minutes, he may be conscious by the time this fellow gets there, he may even have gone. But what is there lost if he is? If he’s gone, that’s it. If he’s up off the floor and hugging his headache all you need do is fake concern, help him to his car, and go off and reassure Kitty. And if Armiger’s still lying where Kitty left him, and still dead to the world, well, there you are, a chance in a million.

“So he goes all right, he goes like a shot off a shovel, not to Kitty but to the barn. And sure enough, there’s Armiger still out cold, and the chance in a million has come off.”

“Go on,” said George quietly, studying the intent face that stared back at him across the table. However hotly they both denied it, there must be something in this likeness Bunty was always finding between them, especially when they annoyed her. It was like having a mirror held up to his own mind. Often enough before, when the same interest had preoccupied them both, he had found Dominic hard on his heels at every check, like an echo; but now he was no longer sure who was the echo and who the initiator. “Go on, let’s see what you can do with the details.”

“I can fit them in,” said Dominic. “All of them. This fellow’s all keyed up for action, but he hasn’t really believed in it until then. No weapon, you see, no real preparations. That would be like tempting providence. He’s wearing gloves simply because he’s been driving on a coldish night. Now he takes the chance that’s really been offered to him at last. The minute he comes in at the door and sees Armiger still lying there, he grabs at the nearest weapon he sees, the plaster statuette from the alcove just on the right of the door. I heard you say what they were like, and how surprisingly light and hollow they turned out to be. He snatches it up to brain Armiger with that, but heaves it away again in disgust on the spot because it’s such a silly, light thing it couldn’t brain a mouse. It smashes against the wall, and he rashes up the stairs and grabs the bottle instead, and lets fly with that again and again until it smashes, too. And then he comes to his senses with Armiger pretty obviously dead, and he’s got to get rid of the traces. Especially the gloves. And quickly, that’s the point. Within a few hundred yards of where he is he’s got to jettison those gloves. Because, you see, he’s got to go on to Kitty and get her off the scene as he promised, otherwise whoever doesn’t connect him with it when the murder comes out, she will. The whole beauty of the set-up is that nobody shall know. He can afford to let the police find their own way to Kitty. He can’t afford to leave her or her car where they are, and have her picked up in circumstances so tight that she’ll have to come out with the whole story, and say: ‘I called so-and-so to come and help me, and he swore he would, but he never came.’ Because even if that didn’t give her ideas, it would certainly give them to you people, wouldn’t it?”

“We shouldn’t be likely to miss the implications,” agreed George.

“He may not actually have planned on forcing Kitty to take the blame. If the chips fell that way, there she was. But probably he hadn’t anything against her, and rather preferred that she should get away with it, too, as long as he was all right, of course. Anyhow, he had to go through with the rescue part of it as though he’d rushed straight to her. This part in the barn can’t have taken many minutes, he wasn’t long delayed. So he’d got to get rid of the gloves. He’d got to meet Kitty, talk to her, handle the petrol can. He couldn’t afford to leave blood about in the wrong places, or let Kitty see it and take alarm. He daren’t put the gloves in his pocket or anywhere in his own car, they’d be certain to leave marks. So you see, what it boils down to is that he’d got to jettison them or hide them somewhere before he met Kitty.”

“You have thought it out, haven’t you?” said George. “Go on, how does he get rid of them?”

“There’s not too much scope and not too much time, is there? He hadn’t time to go far from the road, he had to stay out of sight of Kitty. He lets himself out of the barn carefully, closing the door with his left hand, because that glove wouldn’t be so saturated, it might only be splashed here and there. I don’t think he’d leave the gloves anywhere inside, even if there was a hiding-place, because of the door handle. Better smears of blood on it than fingerprints. Then he peels off the gloves, letting them turn inside-out as he pulls them off, and probably rolling the right one inside the left, to get the cleanest outer surface he can. I’ve been over the ground, there’s a drain grid close to the back of the barn, that’s tempting, but too obvious, because unless there was a strong flow of water going down, and there wasn’t, gloves would lodge under the grid, and anyhow it’s the first place the police would look, , , “

“The first place they did look. After the barn itself, of course. Go on.”

“Then there’s just the road, the hedge-banks and ditches, and the hanging wood opposite. Seems obvious, but I should think it takes an awful lot of men an awful long time to search the whole of a wood that size, or even just the strip alongside the road, because he hadn’t time to go very far inside. And all the ground there is so covered with generations of leaf-mould, they could hunt and hunt, and still might miss what they were looking for. Anyhow, that’s what I should have done, rushed up into the wood and shoved them somewhere down among the mould. And then he goes on to Kitty’s rescue, arriving all steamed up and concerned for her, dumps the petrol in her tank for her, and tells her to go home and not worry, she’s making a fuss about nothing, the old fool’s sure to be all right. And Kitty, you said she was wearing a dress with a wide skirt, she’s so relieved to see him she keeps close to him all the time they’re there together, and her skirt brushes against his trouser legs, where the blood’s splashed, and a drop falls from his sleeve on her shoe. In the dark there neither of them would know. And that’s it, all your evidence. Have I missed anything out?”

George had to own that he had not; he had accounted for everything.

“You’re quite sure he must have killed Armiger before he sent Kitty home, and not after?”

“Well, of course! He wouldn’t stay unconscious for ever. If this chap had gone first to Kitty I doubt if he’d ever have had the impetus or the nerve left to go back and look if opportunity was still waiting for him.”

He had seemed utterly sure of himself until he came to the end, but when George sat thoughtfully silent he couldn’t stand the strain. He’d poured out all his hopes into that exposition, and he was trembling when it was done. His eyes, covertly hanging upon George’s face, pleaded for a sign of encouragement, and the brief silence unnerved him. If he’d only known it, George was still staring into a mirror.

“Well, say something!” burst out Dominic, his voice quaking with tension. “Damn you, you just sit there! You don’t care if they send Kitty to prison for life, as long as you get a conviction. You don’t care whether she did it or not, that doesn’t matter. You’re not doing anything!”

George, coming out of his abstraction with a start, took his son by the scruff of the neck and shook him, gently enough to permit them both to pretend that the gesture was a playful one, hard enough to indicate that it wasn’t. The flow stopped with a gasp; in any case the onslaught had shocked Dominic a good deal more than it had George.

“That’s enough of that. You hold your horses, my boy.”

“Well, I know, I’m sorry! But you do just sit there! Aren’t you going to give me anything back for all that?”

“Yes, a thick ear,” said George, “if you start needling me. If you’d been anywhere near that wood of yours since noon to-day you’d have found it about as full of policemen as it’ll hold, all looking for your gloves, as they’ve been doing in various places, more or less intensively, ever since we were sure there must have been gloves involved. Maybe we’re not as sure as you that they’ll be in a logical place, but we’re just as keen as you are to find them. We even have open minds, believe it or not, on such minor points as whether a few small smears of blood on the hem of a dress are really adequate, in the circumstances. You’re not the only one who can connect, my lad. We’d even like to know who it was she called that night. You be working on that one, and let me know when you’ve got the answer.”

He was aware, by the sharpness and intelligence of the silence that followed, that if he had not said too much he had been understood too well. Dominic resettled his collar with great dignity, studying his father intently from the ambush of a composed and inscrutable face.

So it’s like that, said the bright, assuaged eyes. I see!. They may be looking for the gloves to clinch their case, but you’re not, you’re looking for them to break it. You don’t believe she did it! What did I tell you? I knew you’d come round to my way of thinking in the end. He was understandably elated by the knowledge, comforted by not being alone any longer in his faith, but there was something else going on behind the carefully sustained calm of that freckled forehead, something less foreseeable and a good deal more disturbing. He was glad to have an ally, and yet he fixed upon him a look that was far from welcoming. He saw too much, recognised his own sickness with too sharp a sensitivity in someone else, and most penetratingly of all in his father. He’d longed for an ally, but he didn’t want a rival.

“I am working on it,” said Dominic deliberately. “What’s more, I think I’m on to the answer.” But he did not say that he was going to share it, with his father or anyone. Saint George had sighted another banner on the horizon. It was going to be a race for the dragon.

CHAPTER XII.

ON MONDAY MORNING, about an hour before Alfred Armiger was escorted to the grave, against all predictions, by a grim-faced and sombre son, Kitty Norris made a formal appearance of about two minutes in court, and was remanded in custody for a week.

She sat quietly through the brief proceedings, without a smile or a live glance for anyone, even Raymond Shelley who appeared for her. Docilely she moved, stood, sat when she was told, like a child crushed by the burden of a strange place and unknown, powerful, capricious people. Her eyes, hollowed by the crying and the sleeplessness which were both past now, had swallowed half her face. They looked from enemy to enemy all round her, not hoping for a gap in the ranks, but not actively afraid. She had surrendered herself to the current that was carrying her, and whatever blows it dealt her she accepted mutely, because there was no help for it. It was heartbreaking to look at her. At least, thought George, who had brought her to the court, Dominic was spared this.

In the few minutes she spent in court the news had gone round, and there was a crowd waiting to see her come out, and one lone cameraman who erupted in her face before George could shelter her. He ought to have known that Kitty Norris, whose clothes and cars and dates had always made news, couldn’t escape the headlines even on this first unheralded appearance in her new role. For the first time the lovely, hapless face came back to life. She shrank back into George’s arm, frightened and abashed, mistaking raw curiosity for purposeful malignance. He half lifted her into the car, but even then the eyes and the murmurs followed her, gaping alongside the windows as she was driven away.

“Why should they be like that?” asked Kitty, shivering. “What have I ever done to them?”

“They don’t mean any harm, dear,” said the matron comfortably, “they’re just nosy. You get used to it.”

There ought to be something better to say to her than that, thought George, suffering acutely from the brushing of her sleeve against his, and the agonising memory of her warmth on his heart; and yet this queer comfort did seem to calm her. She expected nothing from him, and it was not upon his shoulder that she let her head rest as she was taken back to prison.

“You’ll have to brace up, you know, Kitty,” he said as he helped her out of the car, himself unaware until he had said it that her name was there on his lips waiting to slip out so betrayingly.

“Why?” said Kitty simply, looking through him into a bleak distance.

“Because you owe it to yourself, and to your friends who believe in you.”

The cords of his throat tightened up, outraged that he could ask them to give passage to such unprofessional sentiments. And he told himself afterwards, nursing the smart of being misunderstood, that he deserved no better than he got. For Kitty smiled suddenly, affectionately, shortening her range so that for a moment she really seemed to see him. Then she said in a gentle voice: “Oh, yes, I mustn’t let Dominic down. You tell him I’m coming out fighting when the bell goes. With him in my corner, how can I lose?”

Well, thought George grimly as he drove back towards the centre of Comerbourne, that’s properly accounted for me. The invisible man, that’s all I am, an office, not a person, and an inimical office at that. And it hurt. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but that only made the smart worse. Jealousy is always humiliating; jealousy of your own young son is an indignity hardly to be borne.

The very soreness of his own nerves, and the small, nagging sense of guilt that frayed the edges of his consciousness, made him very affectionate and attentive to Bunty, and that in itself was dangerous, for Bunty had known him a long time, and was a highly intelligent woman in her artfully unpretentious way. But long familiarity had made George so unwary with her that even his occasional subtleties tended to be childishly innocent in their cunning. She loved him very much, and her security of tenure was unshakable.

After the long, fretting days with so little accomplished George would wake out of his first shallow, uneasy sleep to the ache of his own ineffectiveness, and reach for Bunty not as a consolation prize, but as the remedy for what ailed him; and she would open her arms and respond to him, half awake, even half awake knowing that she was called upon to be two women, and sure she could without extending herself be all the women George would ever want or need. It was mostly in the middle of the night that he confided with the greatest ease and benefit. It was in the early hours of Wednesday morning that he told her about his precariously based conviction that the person Kitty had called to her aid on the night of the crime was in all probability the murderer of Alfred Armiger.

“But wouldn’t she have suspected as much herself, afterwards?” asked Bunty. “She wouldn’t keep silent about it, surely, if she thought it over and came to that conclusion herself? No earthly reason why she should protect a murderer, even if he did bring her some petrol.”

“Of course not, but naturally she must have called on some person she knew intimately and could trust absolutely. In real life nobody treats a murder investigation like an impersonal puzzle in a book, and suspects everyone who had an opportunity or a motive; to some extent you’re bound to go by what you know of them. There are people it could be and people it couldn’t be. Your family, your friends, they’re immune. This man was immune. If you were in a hole, and you yelled to me for help and I came, and afterwards there was a body around to be accounted for, would it enter your head that I might be the killer?”

“Never in a million years,” said Bunty. “But there’s only one of you for me. I might look sideways at almost anyone else.”

“What, Dom, for instance? Or old Uncle Steve?”

She thought of her bumbling old sheep of a paternal uncle and giggled. “Darling, don’t be funny! That sweet old fool!”

“Or Chris Duckett, say?”

“No, I see what you mean. The only people you’d consider letting in on your scrape would be people you couldn’t possibly suspect of anything bad. But if someone actually put it into your head afterwards, mightn’t you just begin to wonder? Have you put it to Kitty that way?”

“I’ve put it every way I can think of.” The words that visited his lips when he thought of Kitty came spurting out of him in breathless bursts of indignation and anxiety, impossible to disguise however he muffled them by nuzzling in Bunty’s hair. He could never deceive Bunty worth a damn, anyhow, he gave up trying. “All along she’s simply ignored questions about that telephone call. She knows we know she did ring somebody. But still she, no, she doesn’t deny it, she just pretends not to understand, or else she doesn’t even pretend, she just sits there and shuts her mouth and isn’t with us any more. I’ve tried, and Duckett’s tried. Nobody can get anything out of her. Of course I’ve told her whoever she called may very well be the murderer. I’ve urged her, I’ve threatened her, I’ve bullied her, it’s only made it worse. She’s more determined than ever not to give him away.”

“Because she doesn’t believe he had anything to do with it,” said Bunty.

“No, she doesn’t believe it. There’s no talking to her.”

“So she thinks she’d only be shifting her own trouble on to someone else just as innocent.”

“And that we’d be just as dead set on getting a conviction against him as we must have seemed to be against her,” said George bitterly. Suddenly abjectly grateful for Bunty’s presence and her oneness with him, that sturdily refused to be changed by any outer pressures or even by the helpless convulsions of his overburdened heart, he turned and wound his arms about her, burying his face in the warm hollow of her neck. She shifted her position gently to make him more comfortable, hugging him to her heart.

“And Chris Duckett still thinks she did it?”

He mumbled assent, too tired to free his mouth. The slight movement was like the beginning of a kiss; he turned it into one.

“So between the chief hell-bent on getting a conviction against her, and you just as hell-bent on getting one against someone she’s certain is equally blameless, and who’d be equally helpless if she once dragged him into it, no wonder the poor girl’s just giving up the fight and refusing to say a word.”

George came out of ambush to protest indignantly that he wasn’t hell-bent on any such thing, that nobody was trying to convict for the sake of a conviction, that there was a logical case for investigating X’s movements very carefully. He outlined it, and in the quietness there in the small hours it sounded even more impressive than it had when Dominic had propounded it on Sunday evening, in terms that might have been conjured out of George’s own mind as a direct challenge to him.

“If it’s like that,” said Bunty at last, “and she won’t talk for you, why don’t you turn somebody loose on her for whom she will talk? I don’t know Kitty as you do, , , ” Her hand caressed George’s cheek; he hoped she wasn’t comforting him for the undignified pain of which she couldn’t possibly know anything, but he was dreadfully afraid she was.”, , , But I can’t help feeling that if you got Leslie Armiger to question her she might break down and tell everything. I may be wrong,” said Bunty kindly, well aware that she was not wrong, “but they almost grew up together, and I gather they’re fond of each other.”

“But that’s just what I can’t do,” said George.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s the one! Because in spite of one snag I can’t get round I’m almost sure it was Leslie.” He felt her stiffen in disbelief, her fingers stilling in his hair. “I know! He isn’t on the telephone! He remembered to remind me of that. I know, but look what he has to gain, he and nobody else.” He poured out the whole of it, physically half asleep on her shoulder, but mentally, agonisingly wide awake, sensitive to every breath she drew, almost to every implication she was reading into his words.

“Still, I don’t see how it could have been Leslie,” said Bunty firmly when he had done.

“I know, I told you, I don’t, either. No telephone, there’s no getting past it.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant I don’t see how it could have been Leslie, because even if she could have called him, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.” She told him why. When she ended he was asleep, his mouth against her cheek. She kissed him, and he didn’t wake up. “Poor old darling!” she said, and went to sleep embracing him.

But when he awoke before dawn he remembered everything she had told him, and sat up in bed abruptly. The whole thing to be re-thought from the beginning, a new cast to be made. He lay down very softly, to avoid disturbing Bunty, and began to go over the ground yet again in his mind, inch by painful inch.

He came home that night late and on edge after a day of furious but so far unproductive activity, and it was no pleasure, the mood he was in, to have Dominic spring out of the living-room at him before he could so much as drop his briefcase and hang up his hat. The mirror had just presented him with the image of his forty-one-year-old face, fretted and drawn with tiredness, with straight brown hair greying at the temples, and he was afraid receding a little too, when there erupted into the glass, beside it the sixteen-year-old copy, fresh as new milk, just-formed, with lashes like ferns and a thatch as thick as gorse, a face as yet so young and unused that all the anxiety and trouble in the world couldn’t take the springy freshness out of it. The contrast wasn’t comforting; neither was the look Dominic fixed on him, waiting with held breath for the news he’d almost given up expecting.

“Sorry, boy,” said George, “we haven’t found them yet.”

Dominic didn’t move. The anxious eyes followed every motion with a hopeless concentration as George hung up his coat and made for the stairs. In his own mind he had given them until this evening; if they hadn’t found the gloves by now it was no use relying on it that they ever would, no use waiting any longer for the turn of luck it didn’t seem as if they were going to get. Luck’s hand would have to be forced. When logs coming down a river jam, somebody has to set off a charge to release them and start them flowing again. Dominic did not particularly fancy himself as a charge of dynamite, but extreme measures were called for. And this time it was in any case impossible to confide in George, because the kind of shock tactics Dominic had in mind would not, and could not, be countenanced by the police. One word to George, and the whole thing would be knocked on the head. No, he had to do this alone, or if he had to ask for help it mustn’t be from his father. And before he ventured he had to make sure he hadn’t left any loopholes for want of sufficient briefing. There were still things he didn’t know; by the terms of their toleration agreement he couldn’t go to his father for them, but what he wanted to know Leslie Armiger could tell him.

“I’m going out, Mummy,” said Dominic, following Bunty into the kitchen. It was already well past eight o’clock, and she was surprised, but she didn’t ask him where or why, she merely said: “All right, darling, don’t be too late.” She was a nice mother, he was suddenly moved to engulf her in a bear’s hug before he fled, but she was holding a hot iron, so he didn’t do it. She hadn’t even said: “But you haven’t finished your homework!” though he hadn’t. Any other mother would have been all too liable to nag, the way he was skimping his work these days.

He got out his bike and rode into Comerbourne, and let himself into Mrs. Harkness’s front garden by the low iron gate. There was an outside bell for the Armigers, but they didn’t always hear it, you had to walk in at the front door and climb the stairs and tap on the door of their room.

Leslie was sitting over a pile of books at the table, in his shirt-sleeves and a cloud of cigarette smoke. Dominic might not be doing his homework, but Leslie was, with dedicated concentration. He’d come down from Oxford without a degree, having behaved there as his father had fully intended him to behave, tossing his liberal allowance about gaily, playing with zest, painting with passion, cutting an engaging figure socially and working only just enough to keep him out of trouble, and perhaps a little over to appease his tutor after every grieved lecture, purely out of liking for the old boy, and as a concession to his conservative ideas of what universities were for. That left him with a lot of leeway to make up now, when marriage and responsibility had put a sharp end to his prolonged adolescence.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dominic, dismayed. “I’d better not butt in on you if you’re working.”

“No, come in, it’s all right.” Leslie closed his book and pushed the whole pile aside, stretching his cramped shoulders. “I’m glad to have an excuse to stop. There’s nothing new, is there? About Kitty?”

Dominic shook his head. “You haven’t been to see her again, have you?”

“Not yet, it’s no use asking too often, you know, they wouldn’t let me. Is there something else I can help with?”

“Well, there is, as a matter of fact. You’ll probably think it a funny thing to ask, but it’s about this picture of yours. If you wouldn’t mind telling me all that stuff about how somebody tried to get it back, I think it might help me. Because I’ve got a sort of theory, but I don’t know enough about the details to know yet if it makes sense.”

“You think The Joyful Woman may be mixed up in the business?” asked Leslie, studying him curiously through the haze of smoke. The queer thing about the kid was that there was nothing queer about him; tallish, pleasant-looking, reasonably extrovert, healthily certain of himself, taking himself a bit seriously at this stage, but then he’d be odd if he didn’t. You could drop him among his kind in any public school, and he’d fall on his nice large feet and wriggle a place for himself on the spot. You could imagine him keeping well in the swim at whatever he touched, perhaps one notch ahead of average at games and two or three notches ahead at his books, with enough energy left over for a couple of reasonably intelligent hobbies, say climbing at one extreme and amateur theatricals at the other, and perhaps one amiable lunacy like an immoderate passion for fast motorbikes or a weakness for blonde bits on the side. Wonderfully ordinary, and yet here he was taking a proprietorial hold on a murder case, and bringing all his down-to-earth qualities to bear on a situation so unordinary that the result was pure fantasy. For a moment Leslie looked at him and couldn’t believe he had his focus right, the components tended so strongly to fall apart into different dimensions. I suppose, he thought, in this setting we all look a bit out of drawing; it’s only his being so young that makes it more marked in his case.

He sat down with him and told him the whole history of The Joyful Woman over again from the beginning, while Dominic followed with quick questions and hopeful eyes. Jean came in halfway through the story and brought him a mug of chocolate and some biscuits; she had grown up with three young brothers, and was used to feeding boys on principle at frequent intervals.

“So the idea is that this dealer, this Cranmer, had dropped the hint to your father that the thing was valuable.” Warmth and eagerness had come back into Dominic’s eyes, and a calculating gleam; it was working out as he’d thought it might. “But it was Mr. Shelley who came to see you.”

“On my father’s behalf, of course.”

“But why of course? You only know that because he told you so. Look, suppose it happened this way. Cranmer sees some definite possibility in the picture, he knows your father must have thrown it out as worthless, and he knows it may be worth a great deal. He decides it would pay him to keep in with your father, so he telephones the office to warn him. But just by chance he misses him. They put him on to Mr. Shelley, and he tells him what he thinks, that his boss should think again, he’s giving away a small fortune. But instead of passing on the message Mr. Shelley does a bit of quick thinking. He’s sure by then that you and your father are never likely to heal the breach, so you won’t be comparing notes. And he sees a better use to make of this stroke of luck. You sit on it and keep quiet, he says to Cranmer, and you and I can do a deal and share the proceeds between us, never mind Armiger. And he comes to you with that story about your father having thought better of his mean joke, and sent him to offer you the five hundred pounds instead of the picture. You said he had the money in cash. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Not particularly. My father would think nothing of shuffling that much about in cash. But I agree it makes your version possible. I agree it might have seemed quite an easy way of getting hold of the sign too. But surely if the old boy had been in it for himself he wouldn’t have dared to take it any farther after I turned him down? It was too risky.”

“But if the stake was big enough? You refuse him, so he comes back and steals your father’s letter, which is the only actual proof of ownership. He’s banking on it that you won’t touch your father in any way, having seen how you feel, not to take anything from him, not to see him, not to talk to him, but also surely not to make a public accusation against him over this business. He’s betting you’ll just write it off in disgust, and not do anything about it at all, because of course you’re not going to be told the picture has any value, Cranmer will see to that end of it. Just commonplace rubbish! So you were supposed to think, what’s the point, the joke will be on him, let him have it and much good may it do him! The silly old fool jumped to conclusions just because it leaked out to him that we’d consulted a dealer, and now he’s made himself just about as big an ass as he is a rogue, so let him hang the thing on the wall to remind him how he got too sharp and cut himself.”

Carried away by his own eloquence, Dominic had lapsed into language which he suddenly realised might by conventional standards be thought offensive in the circumstances. Even if you thought about the dead like that you weren’t supposed to say it, and even if Leslie had no reason whatever to love his late father he was supposed to observe certain rules and maintain certain attitudes. And you never know how conventional unconventional people may be just beneath the skin. He paled to the lips, and then flushed bright red to the hair. “I say, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth like this, it’s terrible cheek. I really am sorry! I should have remembered he was your father, and all that, , , “

“That’s all right,” said Leslie with a rueful grin. “I might very well have taken it just like that. I probably should have, if I hadn’t happened to reach my limit just about then. Don’t mind calling my dad names, that’s the last thing he’d have kicked about. One of the better things about him was that he didn’t snivel about his virtue while he pulled off his sharp deals, he just slapped them down gleefully and said in effect: Go on, beat that! Carry on, you’re doing all right.”

“You really didn’t mind? It was a hell of a cheek. But you see how important it could be if Shelley actually could have reasoned like that. There he is, sure you won’t bother to claim the picture once Cranmer says your father’s disputing its ownership, but just let the whole thing go, and put all the dirty work down to your father. So Shelley and Cranmer can quietly dispose of the goods and share the proceeds. And then suddenly out of the blue, when he’s home after getting back from the pub that night, Kitty rings him up.

“You said he was one person she might very well turn to in her trouble. She blurts out everything to him, and asks him to come and get her away. She doesn’t realise she’s telling him anything very terrible when she says that you’ve been there in the barn with your father, because you know he told her it was you he was going out to see, but just think what it would mean to Shelley! The very thing he was sure wouldn’t happen had happened. Instead of letting the whole thing drop you’d gone rushing off to your father, to pitch into him about the dirty trick he’d played you. Then of course he wouldn’t know what you were talking about, and he’d say so, and the whole business would come out. And finish for Shelley! He’d been with your father, how many years? Just think what it would mean to him to be kicked out now and have to start afresh with your father against him, maybe even to be disgraced publicly and have a charge laid against him. But there’s Kitty on the phone, babbling that she’s pushed your father down the stairs and he’s lying there in the barn unconscious. It’s now or never if Shelley wants to shut down on the scandal for good, and keep hold of his share in the picture deal. So he tells Kitty yes, don’t worry, just stay there, he’s on his way. And he gets out the car and drives like hell back to the barn. And kills your father.”

They were both gazing at him with wide and wary eyes, in wonder and doubt. Leslie said in a tight, quiet voice: “It could have happened, I suppose. It would certainly seem like the end of the world to him if Dad turned against him. And I’m not saying he wouldn’t have gone the limit against him in the circumstances. He didn’t mind a little sharp practice, he expected it and he could deal with it, but if there was a lot of money involved, , , And then, his vanity would be desperately hurt if he found out that for once he hadn’t been the smartest operator around.”

“And when you pitched into him about pinching his own letter, he did deny all knowledge of it, didn’t he?”

“He did,” agreed Leslie dubiously, “but he could just as well have been lying like a trooper, I took it he was. Still, I suppose it could have happened like that.”

Jean had sat silent and intent throughout this exchange, her eyes turning from one face to the other as they talked, her chin on her fists. She made a sudden movement of protest. “No, it couldn’t,” she said, “it didn’t. I’m sorry, boys, there’s just one thing wrong with it, but it makes it all wrong. Oh, I’m not saying it couldn’t be Mr. Shelley who did it, but if so, it didn’t happen like that.”

They had both turned to stare at her. “Why not?” they asked together.

With the gentle reasonableness and absolute authority of a kindergarten teacher instructing her brighter charges, Jean told them.

CHAPTER XIII.

OCTOBER CAME IN cold and gusty, with squally days and ground frosts at night; the grass in front of the main offices of Armiger’s Ales stopped growing and shrank into its winter sleep, and the leaves began suddenly to fall from the trees thicker than rain, until the pure, slender skeletons showed through the thinning, yellowing foliage against a blown and blustery sky. Inside, the full heating system was put into use for the first time that season. Ruth Hamilton, coming down the stairs at five o’clock on Thursday evening, listened to the moaning of the wind outside the long staircase window and hunched her shoulders. It was going to be a stormy night; the last fine spell had broken, and the last traces of summer had blown away in a day.

Old Charlcote, the pensioner who manned the janitor’s desk in the hall, had come out of his cage and had his coat on already. Miss Hamilton was usually the last of the staff to leave, he often had occasion to curse her inflexible sense of duty, though never above his breath, she being the force she was in the affairs of the firm. He was just pulling on his home-knitted navy-blue mittens, the tail of one eye on the clock, the other on the stairs, and only a very small part of his attention indeed on the person who was doing his best to engage it. What on earth did a boy from the grammar school want here at this hour, or, for the matter of that, at any hour?

“What is it, Charlcote?” asked Miss Hamilton, sailing authoritatively across the polished floor from the foot of the stairs. “Is anything the matter?”

Why couldn’t she have been just one minute later? The kid would have been safely off the premises, and they all could have gone home. Now that conscience of hers would probably insist on probing into the last recesses of whatever the little pest wanted, and he’d have to hang about for an hour or more before he’d be able to lock up and get out.

“Nothing we can do anything about, miss. This young fellow was asking for Mr. Shelley, but he’s left about ten minutes ago. I don’t suppose it’s anything very urgent.”

The boy, gripping his school-bag very tightly under his arm, said vehemently: “It is urgent. I did want awfully to talk to him tonight. But I suppose if he’s gone, , , ” The constrained voice faded out rather miserably. The eyes, large and anxious and very bright, dwelt questioningly upon Miss Hamilton’s face, and hoped for a sign of encouragement. She thought she saw his lips quiver. “It’s difficult,” he said. “I don’t know what I ought to do.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Shelley left a little early tonight. He has a lot of work on his hands just now.” She didn’t go into details; what could this child know about the case that was preoccupying Ray Shelley’s time and thought? “I’m afraid you won’t be able to contact him tonight, I know he has an appointment, and they’re liable to be at work most of the evening.” The appointment was with counsel, and would include an interview with Kitty. “Won’t tomorrow do? He’ll be in tomorrow.”

“I shan’t be able to skip school,” explained the boy with self-conscious dignity. “I should have been earlier, tonight, only I had to stay for rugger practice. I did hurry, I hoped I might be in time.” He had certainly hurried his shower, there were still traces of playing-fields mud beneath his left ear and just along the hairline beneath the thick chestnut thatch at his left temple. Miss Hamilton’s shrewd eyes had not missed them; she knew quite a lot about boys. There was something decidedly wrong with this one, behind that composed, strained front of his; it showed no less clearly than the tide-marks.

“Haven’t I see you before somewhere? I’m sure I ought to know you.”

A pale smile relaxed the fixed lines of his face for a moment. “We played your club a couple of times this summer, I expect you saw me at tea. I bowl a bit, spins, not awfully good. My name’s Dominic Felse.”

“Felse? Not the same Felse, isn’t that right, the detective-sergeant?”

“He’s my father,” said the boy, and clutched his bag even more tightly, with a sudden contortion of nervous muscles, as though he had shuddered. “It’s something about the case that I wanted to talk to Mr. Shelley about.”

“But your father surely wouldn’t, , , “

“He doesn’t know,” said Dominic with a gulp. “It’s just an idea of my own that I thought I ought to put to Mr. Shelley.”

There was no doubt about it, some intense agitation was shaking him, and if he received the slightest encouragement he would let go the tight hold he had on himself and pour out whatever was on his mind. She was used to receiving and respecting the confidences of boys, some of them a great deal tougher propositions than this well-brought-up child. She cast a glance at the clock. Charlcote was looking significantly at it too. His time was his time, he had no intention of seeing anything pathetic in this nuisance of a boy, and he had been careful to block his ears against every word of this unnecessary conversation.

“Will I do?” she asked gently, and catching the eloquent roll of Charlcote’s eyes heavenward in mute but profane appeal, suppressed a grim smile. “If I can help you, you’re welcome to come in and talk to me.”

The sharp jingle of the keys was like an expletive. “It’s all right, Charlcote,” she said, relenting. “You can just leave the outside door and go. I’ll lock up when we come out, you needn’t wait.”

The old man had his coat buttoned and his cap in his hand before he could finish saying smugly: “It’s my duty to lock up in person, miss, but of course if you care to give orders to the contrary, , , “

She wanted to say: “Get out, you silly old fool, before I call your bluff,” but she didn’t; he had ways of manipulating the heating system when he was aggrieved, or mismanaging the tea round, it was never worth while taking him on in a long-term engagement. “Consider it an order by all means,” she said briskly, “and run off home to Mrs. Charlcote at once. I’ll make sure we leave everything in order.” And she took Dominic firmly by the arm and marched him towards the stairs. “Now, come along up to my room, we may as well be comfortable.”

“May I really? You don’t mind?” He let himself be led away gratefully; she felt him trembling a little with relief and hope, though the trouble didn’t leave his face. It was something that couldn’t be so easily removed, but at least it could be investigated and possibly shared. She brought him to her own office and put him into the visitor’s chair, and pulled up a straight chair to the same side of the desk with him, where she could watch his face and he wouldn’t be able to evade her eyes. Not that he seemed to want to; he looked back at her earnestly and unhappily, and when she helped herself to a cigarette to give him time to assemble himself he leaped to take the matches from the stand and light it for her. Very mannish; except that his fingers were shaking so that she had to steady his hand with her own, and if the touch had been just a shadeless impersonal she thought he would have burst into tears there and then.

“Sit down, child,” she said firmly, “and tell me what’s the matter. What is all this about? What is it you want with Mr. Shelley?”

“Well, you see, he’s Miss Norris’s solicitor, and I thought the best thing I could do was come to him. Something’s happened,” said Dominic, the words beginning to tumble over one another on his tongue, “something awful. I’ve just got to tell somebody, I don’t know what to do. They’ve been looking everywhere, did you know?, for the gloves. The police, I mean. They’ve been looking for them ever since it happened. And now, , , “

“Gloves?” said Miss Hamilton blankly. “What gloves?”

“The murderer’s gloves. They say whoever killed Mr. Armiger was wearing gloves, and they must have been badly stained, and they think they must have been hidden or thrown away immediately after the murder. They’ve been looking all over for them, to clinch their case. And I’ve been looking for them, too, because,” he said, raising desperate eyes to her face, “I was absolutely sure they wouldn’t be Miss Norris’s at all, if only I could find them. I was sure she was innocent, I wanted to prove it. And I have found them,” he ended, his voice trailing away into a dry whisper.

“Then that’s all right, surely,” she said in carefully reasonable tones. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? I suppose you’ve turned them over to your father, and now everything will be all right. So what are you worrying about?”

He had put down his school-bag beside him on the floor. His hands, deprived of this anchor, gripped each other tightly on his knees. He looked down at the locked and rigid fingers, and his face worked.

“No, I haven’t turned them in. I haven’t said a word to a soul. I don’t want to, I can’t bear to, and I don’t know what to do. I was so sure they’d be a man’s gloves. But they’re not! They’re a woman’s, , , They’re Kitty’s!”

The knotted hands came apart with a frantic jerk, because he wanted them to hide his face, which was no longer under control. He lost his voice and his head, and began to cry, in shamed little gulps and hiccups he tried in vain to swallow. Miss Hamilton put down her cigarette carefully in the ashtray and took him by the shoulders, shaking him first gently and then peremptorily.

“Now, this is silly. Come along, tell me about it. Where did you find them? How did it happen that you found them, if the police couldn’t?”

“I shouldn’t tell you,” he got out between gulps, “I oughtn’t to tell anyone. It just happened. If I told you, you’d have to tell lies, too.”

“Oh, now, look, I’m trying to help you. If you don’t tell me everything how can I judge the importance of these gloves? You may be quite mistaken about them, they may not be the ones at all. You may be fretting quite needlessly.”

“They are the ones, I know they are. And they’ll say, they’ll say she, , , ” He was trying to master the hiccups that were convulsing him, and to all her patient questions he could make no better answers than a few grotesque, incoherent sounds. It was quite useless to persist, he was half hysterical already. She released him and went into the small cloakroom which adjoined her office, and came back with a glass of water. She presented it to his lips with an authority there was no gainsaying, and he drank docilely, scarlet and tearful, still heaving with convulsions of subsiding frequency and violence. “There’s blood on them,” he gasped between spasms. “What am I going to do?

She stood back and looked at him thoughtfully, while he knuckled angrily at his eyes and muffled his hiccups in a crumpled handkerchief.

“Is that what you were going to ask Mr. Shelley?”

He nodded miserably. “He’s her solicitor, and, and I thought maybe I, I could just give them to him. I thought maybe he’d take the responsibility, because I, I, , , “

“You could destroy them,” said Miss Hamilton deliberately, “if that’s how you feel. Destroy them and forget all about it.”

“No, I couldn’t!. How could I? Don’t you see how I’m placed? My father, , , I feel awful! He trusts me!” He struggled momentarily with an all too evident inclination to relapse into tears again. “But it’s Kitty!”

Sixteen-year-olds miserably in love are a pathetic sight, and his situation, she saw, was indeed pitiable. Whatever his resolution the issue was certain; he’d never be able to bear the burden for long, sooner or later out it would all come tumbling to his father. Meantime, someone had to lift the immediate load from him.

“Listen to me, Dominic,” she said firmly. “You’re quite sure in your own mind, aren’t you, that Kitty didn’t kill Mr. Armiger?”

Where, she was wondering, did Kitty manage to pick up this improbable adorer, and how on earth did they get on to Christian name terms? But Kitty had always been incalculable in her attachments.

“Then have the courage of your convictions. Don’t say a word to Mr. Shelley. He’s a legal man, it would be cruel to pass the buck to him of all people. You can give the gloves to me. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not afraid to back my own judgment.”

Dominic’s long lashes rolled back from large eyes gleaming with bewilderment and hope; he stared at her and was still.

“Law or no law,” she said with determination, “I’m not prepared to help to send Kitty to prison for life, even if she did kill an unscrupulous old man in self-defence. And like you, I’m very far from convinced that she did. I’ll take the responsibility. Let’s consider that it was I who found them.”

“Oh, would you?” he said eagerly. “If only you would, I should be so relieved.”

“You needn’t even know what I do with them. Give them to me and forget them. Forget you ever found them.”

“Oh, I’d be so grateful! I haven’t got them here, because I’ve just come straight from school, you see, and I couldn’t risk carrying them about with me all day. The fellows can be awfully nosy, without meaning any harm, you know, and suppose somebody got hold of those? But I’ve got to come into Comerbourne again for my music lesson tonight, may I bring them to you then?”

“Yes, of course. I have to go to the club for part of the evening, though. Where does your music teacher live?”

He told her, brightening every moment now, his voice steady and mannish again. It was in Hedington Grove, a little cul-de-sac off Brook Street, near the edge of town. “I leave there at nine. I usually catch the twenty past nine bus home to Comerford.”

“You needn’t worry about the bus tonight,” she said good-humouredly. “I shall be finished at the club by then, I’ll pick you up at the corner of your teacher’s road, on Brook Street, and drive you home. I’ll be there at nine. Is that all right?”

“Fine, of course, if it isn’t troubling you too much. You’ve been most awfully kind.” He scrubbed once more at his eyes, quickly and shamefacedly, and smoothed nervous fingers through his hair. “I’m awfully sorry I was such an ass. But honestly I didn’t know what to do.”

“Feel better now?”

“Much better. Thanks awfully!”

“Well, now suppose you trot in there and wash your face. And then run off home and try not to worry. But don’t say a word to anyone else,” she warned, “or we should both be in the soup.”

“I won’t breathe a word to a soul,” he promised fervently.

She shepherded him down the stairs again into the silent hallway, and out into the darkness, and switching off the last lights after them, locked the door. The boy was beginning to feel his feet again now, and to want to assert his precarious masculinity all the more because she had seen it so sadly shaken. He hurried ahead to open doors for her, and accompanied her punctiliously across the forecourt to the parking ground where the big old Riley waited.

“Can I drop you somewhere now? I could take you to the bus stop, if you’re going home?”

“Thanks a lot, it’s awfully kind of you, but I’ve got my bike here. I put it in the stand near the gate.”

All the same, he came right to the car with her, opened the door with a flourish and closed it upon her carefully when she had settled herself on the driving-seat; and he didn’t move away until she had fished her black kid gloves out of the dashboard compartment, pulled them on and started the car. Then he stepped back to give her room to turn, and lifted a hand to her with a self-conscious smile as she drove away.

When she was gone he awoke suddenly to the chill of the wind and ran like a greyhound for his bike. He rode back into the centre of the town as fast as he could go. Some of the shops were already closing, and the dapple of reflected lights in the wet surface of the pavements blurred into a long, hazy ribbon of orange-yellow, the colour of autumn.

CHAPTER XIV.

IT WAS ON Thursday evening that Professor Brandon Lucas, on his way to a weekend art school which did not particularly interest him but at which he had rashly consented to put in an appearance, made a sudden detour in his most capricious manner and called on Jean and Leslie Armiger. The visit could have been regarded as planned, since he had with him the notes and sketches relating to the sign of The Joyful Woman, but he had not admitted his intention even to himself until the miles between him and his boredom were shortening alarmingly, and his reluctance to arrive had become too marked to be ignored. Why get there in time for dinner? His previous experiences at Ellanswood College had led him to write off the food as both dull and insufficient, whereas there was a very decent little hotel in Comerbourne; and if the slight ground mist didn’t provide a plausible excuse for lateness his errand to the Armigers could be pleaded as important, and even turned into a topic of conversation which might save him the trouble of listening to fatuities about art from others.

Being too short-sighted without his glasses to read the lettering on Leslie’s bell, and too self-confident in any case to bother about such details, he startled the silent evening street with a tattoo on Mrs. Harkness’s knocker, and brought out the lady herself; but he was equal even to Mrs. Harkness, and made so profound an impression upon her that Leslie’s status with her went up several notches on the strength of the call.

The professor climbed the stairs unannounced, to find Leslie in his shirt-sleeves washing up at the little landing sink, and the smell of coffee bubbling merrily from the hot plate, and demonstrated his finesse by exclaiming in delight that he’d come just in time, that the cooking at The Flying Horse was splendid, but their coffee hadn’t come up to the rest. And having thus intimated that they need not attempt to feed him, he sat down comfortably and reassured them with equal dexterity that they were not expected to try to entertain him.

“I’m on my way to a weekend course, as a mater of fact. I mustn’t stay long, but I thought I’d look in on you with a progress report. That’s a very interesting job you’ve found me, my boy, very interesting indeed.”

Leslie came in rolling down his sleeves, and produced liqueur glasses and the carefully nursed end of the half-bottle of cognac Barney Wilson had brought back from his summer holiday in France. Jean had conjured up a glass dish he hadn’t known they possessed, and filled it with extravagant chocolate biscuits which Leslie felt certain would be the wrong thing to offer this unexpectedly Corinthian old buck of a professor, until he saw how deftly and frequently they were being palmed. She had also shed her old blue smock and appeared in a honey-yellow blouse that made her hair look blue-black and her skin as clear and cool as dew. Half an hour ago they had been talking to each other with the cautious forbearance of strangers in order not to quarrel, but whenever events demanded from her a gesture in support of her husband Jean would be there, ready and invincible.

“Is it going to turn out to be anything? I was afraid to touch it myself, but I could hardly keep my hands off it, all the same.”

“You had definite ideas about it?”

“Well, rather indefinite, but very suggestive. Such as its possible date, and the genre it belongs to.”

“Have you shown it to anyone else?”

“A dealer in the town here. He put forward some theory that it was originally a portrait by some local eighteenth-century painter called Cotsworth.”

“Preposterous!” croaked Lucas with a bark of laughter, pointing his imperial at the ceiling like a dart.

“Well, not so much preposterous as crafty, actually, I think. Because he’s offered as high as six hundred for it since.”

“Has he, now! And you turned him down. Good boy! So you must have had an idea you were on to something much more important than a dauber like Cotsworth. As indeed I’m pretty sure you are. Mind you, the actual market value may not be very great, I’m not sure how much commercial interest such a discovery might arouse just at this moment. Ultimately it’s likely to be considerable, when the full implications are realised.”

Leslie was startled to discover that his hands were trembling with pure excitement. He didn’t want to look at Jean, she would only think he was underlining the professor’s vindication of his judgment; she would expect him not to miss an opportunity like that, not out of any meanness of spirit but out of his fundamental insecurity. And yet he was longing to exchange glances with her, and see if she was quivering as he was. There ought to be a spark still ready to pass between them, when they were on the verge of promised discoveries fabulous enough to excite this Olympian old man.

“Its possible date,” said Lucas, harking back. “What did you conceive its possible date to be?”

If he wasn’t actually teasing them he was doing something very like it, offering them marvels and then making them play guessing games for the prize. Well, thought Leslie, if he had to be tested he’d better put a good face on it, and say what he had to say with authority.

“Before fourteen hundred.”

It sounded appallingly presumptuous when he’d said it, he would almost have liked to snatch it back, but now it was too late. He stuck out his chin and elaborated the audacity, refusing to hedge. “It seemed to me that the pose couldn’t be later, or the hands, that want of articulation, the long curved fingers without joints. And then the backward-braced shoulders and head, and even something about the way the blocks of colour are filled in to make the dress. If we get all those layers of repainting off successfully I shall expect to see a kind of folded drapery you don’t get as late as the fifteenth century.”

“And the genre! You said you had ideas about that, too.”

Leslie drew breath hard and risked a glance at Jean. Her eyes, wide and wondering, were on him; he didn’t know whether she was with him or only marvelling at his cheek and expecting to see him shot down the next moment.

“I think she’s local work,” he said in a small voice, “because I think she’s been kicking about here for centuries, never moving very far from where she was first put in position. And that wasn’t on any pub. The only thing out of tradition is the laugh, , , “

“Yes,” said Lucas, his eyes brightly thoughtful upon the young man’s face, “the laugh. Don’t let that worry you. The laugh is one of those things that happen to any tradition from time to time, the stroke of highly individual genius nobody had foreshadowed and nobody ventures to copy afterwards. And extraordinary experiences they can be, those inspired aberrations. Go on. Out of what traditions? You haven’t reached the point yet.”

Going softly for awe of his own imaginings, Leslie said: “That oval inset that looks like a brooch, that’s what first made me think of it. In its original form it was that odd convention, a sort of X-ray plate into the metaphysical world. Wasn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

“It was then. It was an image of the child she’s carrying. She’s a Madonna of the Annunciation or the Visitation, something before the birth, anyhow, , , “

“Of the Magnificat, as it happens. You seem to have done very well without an adviser at all, my boy.”

“I haven’t dared even to think seriously about it before,” owned Leslie with a shaky laugh. “You as good as hinted that I could go ahead with my wildest guesses and they wouldn’t be too fantastic, or I wouldn’t have ventured even now. Do you really mean that a piece of work like that has been lying about in attics and swinging in the wind in front of a pub ever since the fourteenth century?”

“More likely since about the latter half of the sixteenth. No doubt you know that the house from which the panel came was at one time a grange of Charnock Priory? And that the last prior retired there after the Dissolution?”

“Well, a friend of mine did dig out something of the kind from the archives, but until then I’m afraid I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“You didn’t? You cheer me. Neither did I, but it seems it was so. What struck me about this panel of yours was its likeness in proportion and kind to one of the fragments in Charnock parish church. I don’t know if you know the rector? A scholarly old fellow, quite knowledgeable about medieval art. Glass is his main line, but he knows the local illuminators and panel painters well, too, and he’s spent a good many years of his life hunting for bits of the works of art that were disseminated from Charnock at the Dissolution. What’s now the parish church is the truncated remains of the old priory church, of course, and such relics as he’s been able to trace he’s restored to their old places. This head of an angel with a scroll is all he has of what seems to have been a larger altar-piece, probably from the Lady Chapel.”

“And you think we’ve found the lady?” asked Leslie, not meaning to be flippant, simply too excited to bear the tension of being entirely serious. An elevated eyebrow signalled momentary disapproval, but the knowing eye beneath it saw through him, and there was no reproof.

“I think it is a strong possibility. I went to see the rector. He has records which indicate that parts of the furnishings must have gone into retirement with the last prior, and some very interesting sketches and notes of his own, collected from many scattered sources. He holds that the angel with the scroll is the angel of the Magnificat, he has contemporary and later references to the painting which enable one to form a fairly detailed picture, and I’m bound to say there’s every reason to feel hopeful that your panel is the Virgin from the same altar-piece. The master who painted it is not known by name, but various examples of his work have been identified, including some illuminations. One of them has an initial strongly resembling your Madonna.”

“Including the laugh?” asked Jean in a low voice.

“Including the laugh. Altogether the evidence is so strong that I don’t anticipate much difficulty in establishing the authenticity of your fragment. The rector has seen it. If I am cautiously prepared to pronounce it genuine, he is absolutely convinced. He had made a careful reconstruction from the various references of what the lost Madonna should be. It bore an unmistakable resemblance to your panel. He has since made another sketch from the panel in its present form and from his previous sources, to show what we should uncover.”

He slapped his briefcase open on the table, and drew out a wad of documents and papers, spreading them out before him with a satisfied smile.

“I’ve brought you his notes and drawings to examine over the weekend, if you’d like to. And here is his latest sketch. There she is. As she was, and as she will be.”

It was quite small, smaller than a quarto sheet of paper; they drew close together to look at it. The Joyful Woman had put off her muslin fichu and corkscrew curls and the Toby frills from round her wrists, and stood in all her early English simplicity and subtlety, draped in a blue mantle over a saffron robe, all her hair drawn back austerely under a white veil. She leaned back to balance the burden she carried, clasping her body with those hands feeble as lilies, and the symbolic image of the unborn son stood upright in her crossed palms. She looked up and laughed for joy. There was no one else in the picture with her, there was no one else in the world; she was complete and alone, herself a world.

Leslie felt Jean’s stillness as acutely as if she had never before been still. He moistened his lips, and asked what would inevitably sound the wrong question at this moment; but he had to know the answer. He had to know what he was doing, or there was no virtue in it.

“Have you any idea how much she’s likely to fetch if I sell her? Always supposing we’re right about her?”

“It’s a matter of chance. But the master’s work is known and respected, and there are few examples, possibly none to be compared with this. And there’s a local antiquarian interest to be reckoned with. I think, putting it at the lowest, even if you sell quickly, you should still realise probably between seven and eight thousand pounds.”

Desperately quiet now, their sleeves just touching, Jean and Leslie stood looking at the promise of fortune.

“And the rector, would he be in the market? He must want it terribly, if he’s so sure, , , “

“He’d give his eyes for it, of course. You’ve stopped him sleeping or eating since he’s seen this. But he’s already appealing for twenty thousand to keep his poor old rotting church together, there’s no possibility whatever of earmarking any funds for buying Madonnas.”

“Not even to bring them home,” said Leslie. He moved a little away from Jean because he wanted to see her face, buts he kept it averted, looking at the little drawing. He wondered if she knew that she’d folded her own hands under her breasts upon the immemorial wonder, in the same ceremonially possessive gesture.

“Not even to bring them home. But there’ll be other bidders. If you wait and collect enough publicity before you sell you may get double what I’ve suggested.” Professor Lucas closed his briefcase and pushed back his chair. The boy was obviously in need of money, small blame to him for relishing it in advance.

“I can’t afford to pay for all the work that will have to be done on the panel,” said Leslie, his voice slightly shaky with the intensity of his resolution. “Would your laboratory be prepared to stand that, if I give the thing back to Charnock?”

Lucas straightened up to look at him intently, and came to his feet slowly. “My dear boy, you realise what you’re saying?”

Yes, he realised, and he had to say it quickly and firmly and finally, so that there should be no possibility of withdrawing. Panic surged into his throat, trying to choke the words into incoherence. He was afraid to look at Jean now, he knew he’d done something she could never understand or forgive, but he’d had to do it, he couldn’t have lived with himself if he’d let the moment go by.

“It isn’t mine,” he said, “only by the last of a long series of ugly accidents, and I don’t like that. It ought to go back where it belongs. And it isn’t because it’s the church, either,” he said almost angrily, in case he should be misconstrued. “I should feel the same if it was a secular thing and as fine as that. It was made for a certain place and purpose, and I’d rather it went back. Only it would be a bit rough if I gave it back to the rector and then he couldn’t get the necessary work done on it for want of money.”

“If you mean what you’ve just said that point needn’t worry you. I would be prepared to undertake the work in our workshop, certainly. Indeed I should be very unwilling to let it go to anyone else. But you spend the weekend thinking it over, my boy,” said the professor cheerfully, pounding him on the shoulder, “before you make up your mind to part with it. I’ll leave all this stuff with you, better see how good our case is before you decide.”

“I have decided, but I should like to read all this, of course. It isn’t that I want to cut a figure,” he said carefully, “though I shall probably enjoy that, too. But supposing I just took the highest offer and she went to America, or into some private collection here that does no good to anybody? I should never stop feeling mean about it. I want her to go back into her proper place, and if they can’t pay for her they can’t, and anyhow I have a sort of feeling they ought not to have to. Where she’s going she’ll belong to everybody who likes to look at her, and they’ll see her the way they were meant to see her, or as near as we can get to it. Then I might really feel she’s mine. I don’t feel it now.”

“I’m not trying to dissuade you, my boy, you don’t have to out-argue me. I just don’t want you to rush matters and then regret it. You make up your own mind and then do what you really want to do. Call me in a few days’ time, will you, and we’ll meet again, probably at the gallery if you can make it. I shall have to go now.” He tucked his flattened briefcase under his arm. “Good night, Mrs. Armiger! Thank you for the coffee, it was excellent.”

Jean came out of her daze to add her thanks and farewells to those Leslie was already expressing. When Leslie came back from seeing his visitor out she was standing by the table, her face fixed in a grave, pale wonderment, staring at the rector’s sketch.

He closed the door gently behind him, waiting for her to speak, or at least to look up at him, and when she did neither he didn’t know how to resolve the silence without sounding abject or belligerent, either of which, in his experience, would be fatal. The tension which strained at his nerves she didn’t seem to feel, she was so lost in her own thoughts.

“I couldn’t do anything else,” he said helplessly, aware of the defensive note but unable to exorcise it.

She started, and raised to his face eyes in which he could read nothing, wide and dark and motionless, like those of a woman in shock.

“It was mine,” he said, despairingly abrupt, “I could do what I saw fit with it.”

“I know,” she said mildly, and somewhere deep within her uncommunicative eyes the faint, distant glimmer of a smile began.

“I suppose I’ve disappointed you, and I’m sorry about that. But I couldn’t have been happy about it if I’d, , , “

She moved towards him suddenly with a queer little gesture of protest, and, “Oh, do be quiet,” she said, “idiot, idiot! I could shake you!” She came at him with a rush, taking him by the shoulders as though she intended to put the threat into effect, and then, slipping her arms under his and winding them tightly about him, hugged him to her and hid her face in his chest. “I love you, I love you!” she said in muffled tones against his heart.

He didn’t understand, he was hopelessly at sea. He never would be able to make sense of it, he’d be just as mystified about what he’d suddenly done right as about all the things he’d been doing wrong. Maybe he’d even come to the conclusion that she was simply female, illogical and responsive to a firm touch, and strain his innocent powers to keep the whip hand of her. It didn’t matter, as long as he believed her. “I love you,” she said. His arms had gone round her automatically, he held her carefully and gingerly, as though she might break and cut his fingers, but with the warmth of her solid and sweet against him he had begun to tremble, astonished into hope.

“I’m sorry about the money, Jean,” he stammered, floundering in the bewildering tides of tenderness and fright and returning joy that tugged at him. “But we’ll manage without it between us. I know you think it was irresponsible, but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t feel it was mine. Oh, Jean, don’t cry!”

She lifted her head, and she wasn’t crying at all, she was laughing, not with amusement but with pure joy. She put up her face to him and laughed, and she looked like the woman in the drawing. “Oh, do shut up, darling,” she said, “you’re raving!” And she kissed him, partly to silence whatever further idiocies he was about to utter, partly for sheer pleasure in kissing him. It was quite useless to try to put into words for him the revelation she had experienced, the sudden realisation of how rich they were in every way that mattered, he and she and the child that was coming. With so much, how could she have fretted about the minor difficulties? How could she have felt anything but an enormous pity for old Alfred Armiger, who had so much and couldn’t afford to give any of it away? And how, above all, could she ever have feared dissatisfaction or disappointment with this husband of hers who had nothing and could yet afford to make so magnificent a gift?

“You mean you don’t mind?” he asked in a daze, still breathless. But he didn’t wait for an answer. What did it matter whether he understood how this sudden and absolute fusion had come about? It wouldn’t pay him to question how he had got her back; the wonderful thing was that he had. All the constraint was gone. They hugged each other and were silent, glowing with thankfulness.

It was the unexpected tap on the door that broke them apart, the prim double rap that invariably meant Mrs. Harkness, and usually with a complaint. Leslie took his arms from round his wife reluctantly, put them back again for one more quick hug, and then went to open the door.

Mrs. Harkness was looking unusually relaxed and conciliatory, for Professor Lucas’s influence still enveloped her as in a beneficent cloud.

“A boy brought this note for you a little while ago, Mr. Armiger. He said you were to have it at once, but as your visitor was still here I didn’t care to disturb you.”

“A boy? What boy?” asked Leslie, thinking first of Dominic, though he knew of no particular reason why Dominic should be delivering notes to him at this hour of the evening, nor why, supposing he had any such errand, he should not come up and discharge it in person.

“Mrs. Moore’s boy from just along the road. I thought it wouldn’t hurt for waiting a quarter of an hour or so.”

“I don’t suppose it would. Thank you, Mrs. Harkness.”

He closed the door, frowning at the envelope with an anxiety for which he knew no good reason. The Moore boy also attended the grammar school, and was much the same age as Dominic and probably in the same form; he might easily be a messenger for him at need. But what could be the need?

“What is it?” asked Jean, searching his face.

“I don’t know, let’s have a look.” He tore the envelope open, still lulled by her warmth close against his arm, and aware of her more intensely than of all the other urgencies in the world, until he began to read.

DEAR MR. ARMIGER,

I’ve asked Mick Moore to bring you this on the dot of half past eight, because I need help with something at nine o’clock, and it’s desperately important, but I daren’t let it out more than half an hour before the time. If my father knew about it too soon he’d knock the whole thing on the head, but if he only knows just in time to be on the spot as a witness I hope he’ll let me go through with it, I hope he won’t be able to stop me. I don’t want to telephone home myself because it might be Mummy, and I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want her to know anything about it until it’s all over. So I thought the best thing was to leave this message for you.

This is what I want you to do. Please get on to my father and tell him to have the police watching the corner of Hedington Grove and Brook Street at nine o’clock. There’ll be a car there waiting to pick me up and drive me back home to Comerford. Please make them follow it, be sure they do, it’s urgent. I’ve done something to make things happen, but they have to be there to see it, otherwise it will all be wasted, and no good to Kitty after all.

If anything comes unstuck for me, please try to help Kitty, I don’tmind as long as she comes out all right.

Thanks.

DOMINIC FELSE.

“What the hell!” said Leslie blankly. “Is he fooling, or what?”

“No, not about Kitty, he never would. He’s dead serious. Leslie,” said Jean, her fingers clenching on his arm, “he’s frightened! What is it he’s done?”

“God knows! Something crazy, stuck his neck out somehow, , , Oh, lord!” said Leslie in a gasp of dismay as his eye fell on his watch. He sprang for the door and went clattering down the stairs. It was eleven minutes to nine, eleven minutes to zero hour. There was no time now to do anything but take the affair seriously.

He heard Jean’s heels rapping down the stairs close behind him, and turned in the open doorway to shout to her to stay where she was, that he’d see to everything, that he’d be back. But she was still close at his elbow, tugging her way breathlessly into her coat, as he wrenched open the door of the telephone booth at the end of the street.

It seemed to take him an age to locate George Felse’s number, and a fantastic time to get an answer when he dialled it, and even then it was Bunty who answered. Dominic’s assumption that mothers were not to be frightened inhibited Leslie’s tongue no less surely. No, never mind, it could wait, if Mr. Felse wasn’t there. Never mind, he’d call him again. He slammed the receiver back and tried again.

“Police, Comerbourne? Listen, this is urgent. Please do what I ask at once, and then stand by for the explanation. It’s the Armiger case, and this is Leslie Armiger, and I’m not kidding. If Mr. Felse is there, get him. Never mind, then, you, listen, , , “

Jean whispered in his ear: “I’m going to fetch Barney’s van. I’ll be back.” She shoved open the door and ran, the staccato of her heels dwindling along the street.

“Corner of Brook Street and Hedington Grove, nine o’clock,” Leslie was repeating insistently. “We’ll be coming along from this end to meet ‘em, you see you’re there to follow ‘em.”

It was two minutes to nine when he cradled the receiver for the second time.

CHAPTER XV.

DOMINIC STRUCK THE hundredth wrong note of the evening, corrected it with a vicious lunge of both normally adroit hands, and said resignedly: “Damn! Sorry! I’m making a hell of a mess of this. Wouldn’t you rather I shut up?”

“I would,” said old Miss Cleghorn frankly, “but your parents are paying for an hour, my lad, and an hour you’re going to put in, even if you drive me up the wall in the process. I’m beginning to think I ought to revert to the old ebony ruler, though, and fetch you a crack over the knuckles every time you do that to my nerves.”

Dominic flicked a phrase of derisive laughter out of the piano and made a face at her. She was plump, sixty-odd and as lively as a terrier, and on the best of terms with her pupil, indeed from his point of view she was the one redeeming feature in these Thursday evening lessons. It was Bunty who had insisted that the ability to play at least one musical instrument was an invaluable part of any young man’s equipment, and kept his unwilling nose to the keyboard; a feat which wouldn’t have been nearly so easy if some part of his mind hadn’t come to the generous conclusion that she was probably right about the ultimate usefulness of the accomplishment.

“Ebony ruler my foot!” scoffed Dominic. “I don’t believe you’ve even got one, much less that you ever hit anybody with it.”

“You be careful! It isn’t too late to begin, and it doesn’t have to be ebony. Come on now, you’re not getting out of it by trying to side-track me. Try it again, and for goodness’ sake keep your mind on what you’re doing.”

He did his best, but the trouble was that his mind was very insistently and earnestly upon what he was doing, and it had almost nothing to do with this harmless regular Thursday evening entertainment, which had merely provided the occasion for it. He set his teeth and laboured doggedly through the study again, but his thoughts were ahead of the clock, trying to speculate on all the possible developments which might confront him, and to compile some means of dealing with all of them. What worried him most was that he had had to base his actions so extensively upon speculation, that there was so much room for miscalculation at every stage. But it was too late to allow himself to be frightened by all the possible mistakes he had made, because there was no drawing back now.

“One certain fact,” said Miss Cleghorn, nodding her bobbed head emphatically when he had fumbled his way to the last chord, “you haven’t touched a piano since last Thursday, have you? Own up!”

He hadn’t, and said so. He quite saw that from her point of view it was reprehensible, and the tone in which he made his excuses was deprecating. He thought it would be nice if he could believe that some day such things would again have importance for him, too. The weight of the real world was heavy on his shoulders; the little cosy, everyday world in which mealtimes and music lessons mattered had begun to look astonishingly charming and desirable to him, but he couldn’t get back to it. Like an unguided missile he was launched and he had to go forward.

“And how do you expect to learn to play well if you never practise? No, never mind soft-soaping me with fancy finger-work, you take your hands off that keyboard and listen when I’m talking to you.”

He removed them obediently and sat meekly with them folded in his lap while she scolded him. It couldn’t be said that he listened, though his eyes stared steadily at her round pink face with a rapt attention which amply covered the real absence of his mind. To look at her was comforting, she was so ordinary and wholesome and unsecret, knowing and knowable, no partner to the night outside the closed curtains, which had begun to be terrifying to him. He dwelt earnestly upon her invariable hand-knitted twin set and short tweed skirt, the Celluloid slide in her straight, square-cut grey hair, the mole on her chin that bobbed busily as she abused him. He smiled affectionately, cheered by the human conviction that nothing sinister or frightening could exist in the same dimension with her; but as soon as he looked away or closed his eyes he knew that it could, and that he had invoked it and could not escape it.

“It’s all very well,” she said severely, “for you to sit there and smile at me and think that makes everything all right. That’s your trouble, my boy, you think you can just turn on the charm and get away with murder.”

She could have made a happier choice of words, of course; but how could she know she was treading hard on the heels of truth?

“I know,” he said placatingly, “but this week I’ve had things on my mind, and honestly there hasn’t been time. Next week I’ll do better.” I will if I’m here, he thought, and his heart shrank and chilled in him. He grinned at her. “Cheer up, it’s nearly nine o’clock, your suffering’s almost over.”

“Yours will begin in a minute,” she said smartly, “if you don’t watch your step. You know what you’re asking for, don’t you?”

“Yes, please. With lots of sugar.” He knew there was cocoa in a jug on the stove in her kitchen, there always was on cold nights. She got up good-humouredly and went to fetch it. “All right, pack up, we’ll let you off for tonight.”

It was still a few minutes to nine, and he didn’t want to be even one minute early for his appointment. If Leslie had done his part the police should be watching the corner of the street. To arrive ahead of time was to risk appearing there in full view, and having an irate father descend on him on the spot with a demand that he should explain himself, and wreck everything he had gone to such pains to build up. Even reasonable fathers were queer about allowing you freedom of action in matters which infringed their authority and involved your own danger; and of the reality of the danger he had brought down upon himself Dominic was in no doubt whatever. That was the whole point. If he was not in any danger, then he was hopelessly off the track, and all his ingenuity would have proved nothing, and left Kitty as forsaken and encircled as ever. Moreover, this danger was something he must not ward off. He would have to watch it closing in, and sit still like a hypnotised rabbit to let it tighten on him. If he fought his own way out he might fail of proving what he had set out to prove. He mustn’t struggle, he must leave it to others to extricate him and hope they would be in time. He was voluntary bait now, nothing more.

“You are in a state tonight,” said Miss Cleghorn, shaking him by a fistful of chestnut hair. “You don’t even hear when I offer you biscuits. Why I bother, when all you deserve is bed without supper, I can’t imagine. What’s the matter with you? Things being tough at school, or what?”

School! That was all they thought about. If you were sixteen, whatever worries you had must be about school.

“No, I’m all right, honestly. Just one of those days, can’t concentrate on anything. I’ll catch up by next time.”

“You’d better! Here you are, get this down you, it’s freezing outside, you need something to keep you warm, waiting for that old bus. I always say that’s the bleakest spot in town, that bus station.”

He made his cocoa last until the dot of nine. Better give her an extra minute or two, in case she got held up at the club.

“I’ll tell Mummy you said I was making steady progress,” he said impudently as he pulled on his coat. “That all right?”

“You can tell her I said you should be spanked, she might oblige. Now watch how you go, I can see the frost sparkling on the road already. Only just October and hard frost, I ask you!”

“Good night!” he said, already at the front gate.

“Good night, Dominic!” She closed the door on him slowly, almost reluctantly. Now what can be the matter with that child, she wondered vexedly, he’s certainly got something on his mind. Ought I to speak to his mother, I wonder? But he’s at a funny age, probably it’s something he doesn’t want her to know about, and he’d never forgive me if I interfered. No, better let well alone. She switched on the television and put her feet up, and in a little while Dominic Felse passed out of her mind.

He walked to the end of the street with a slowing step, trying not to notice that it was slowing, not to let it slow. Normality, be with me! I’ve got a load off my mind, not on it. I’ve got to do it right, otherwise I’d have done better not to do it at all. Come on, you’re in it now, give it everything you’ve got. Remember Kitty! He thought of her, and the tension within him was eased as by a sudden warmth relaxing every nerve. What, after all, does danger matter? You’re making Kitty safe. What happens now can’t hurt her, it can only deliver her. He took heart; he was going to be all right. Even when it came, he was going to accept it and not chicken out.

There was always, of course, the thought that she might not come to the rendezvous, that in all honesty she might have thought better of it. There was the possibility that she might come, but acting in all good faith, in which case she would simply take what he gave her, and reassure him and drive him safely home; and the thousand deaths he died on the way would be no more than he deserved, and the abject amends he owed her would be something he could never hope to pay. There were so many pitfalls, so many ways of being wrong; and yet all the time he knew in his heart that he was not wrong.

And she was there. When he drew near to the corner of the silent, frosty road, under the tinkling darkness and sparkle of the trees, he saw the long, sleek shape of the old Riley sitting back relaxed and elegant alongside the knife-edged glitter of the kerb. She opened the near-side door for him, smiling. Never before had he noticed how silent, how deserted this quarter of the town could be at night. There was not another person in sight, and only one lone car passed along the middle of the broad road as he approached. When it had gone everything was so still that his light footsteps sounded loudly in the quietness, reverberating between the frostlight and the starlight with a terrible, solitary singleness.

“Hallo, Dominic,” said Miss Hamilton, scooping up an armful of things from the front passenger seat and dumping them at random into the rear seat, scarf and handbag and a bunch of duplicated papers that looked like club notices, and a large electric torch that rolled to the far hollow of the hide upholstery.

“Hallo, Miss Hamilton! This is most awfully kind of you. You’re sure I’m not being a nuisance? I could easily get the bus home.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said placidly. “Get in. It will only take me a quarter of an hour or so, I shall soon be home. And it’s much too cold to hang about waiting for buses.” She leaned across him and snapped home the catch on the handle of the door. “It’s getting rather worn, I shall have to have a new handle fixed. I have to lock it or it might come open, especially on a bend. And as I’m apt to be carrying rather lively passengers sometimes it could be dangerous,” she concluded with a smile.

“None aboard tonight,” he said, glancing at the back seat.

“I’ve just dropped two of them. The club’s still in session, but I don’t have time to stay all the evening.” She settled back in the driving-seat, and looked at him with the indulgent smile that took into account both his youth and its extreme sensitivity, his helpless tears of the afternoon and his desire that she should forget them.

“Well, did you bring them?” she asked gently. “Or have you thought better of it and turned them over to your father? Don’t worry, I shan’t blame you if you have, I shall quite understand. It was entirely up to you.”

“I’ve brought them,” he said.

“Then the best thing you can do is hand them over right now, and I’ll take them and put them away, and you can forget the whole thing. I’ll never remind you of it again, and no one else can. You’ve not told anyone else?”

“No, not a word.”

“Good, then don’t. From tonight on you’re to stop worrying, you understand? Kitty’ll come out of it all right if she didn’t do it, and we two are agreed that she didn’t. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.” He withdrew from his music-case a small, soft bundle rolled rather untidily in tissue-paper, so loosely that a corner of Polythene protruded, and in the reflected light from the sodium street lights there was just a glimpse of crumpled black kid through the plastic, soiled and discoloured. He put it into Miss Hamilton’s hand, his large eyes fixed trustingly upon her face, and heaved a great sigh as it passed, as though a load had been lifted from him.

Her eyes flickered just once from his face to the small package in her hand, and back again. She leaned across to open the dashboard compartment in front of him, and thrust the gloves into the deepest corner within. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, catching his anxious glance, “I shan’t forget about them. They’re quite safe with me. Do as I said, put them clean out of your mind. You need never see or think of them again. Not a word more about them, now or at any other time. This closes the affair. You understand?”

He nodded, and after a moment managed to say in a very low voice: “Thank you!”

She started the car. A motorbike whirred by them towards the town, its small, self-important noise soon lost. A solitary old gentleman on his way back from the pillar-box turned into a side road and vanished. They inhabited a depopulated world, a frosty night world full of waiting, ardent echoes that had no sound to reduplicate. He must not look round. His head kept wanting to turn, his eyes to search the street behind them, his ears were straining for another engine turning over reluctantly in the cold, but he must not look round or even seem to wish to look round. He was an innocent, a fool without suspicions, a simpleton who had not said a word to anyone about this meeting. What should he be concentrating on, now that she had relieved him of his burden? Naturally, the car. It was worth a little enthusiasm, and at sixteen adults don’t expect you to have any tenacity even in your anxieties, they take it for granted you can be easily seduced by things like cars.

“What year is it?” he asked, watching the competent movements of her hands as the car moved off, and capturing one genuine moment of pleasure in its smooth, quiet lunge forward. “Is it actually vintage!”

It wasn’t, but it missed it by only a few years. She smiled faintly as she answered his questions, the controlled, indulgent smile of a considerate adult allowing a child his preoccupations, even stooping to share them, but distantly envying him his ability to lose himself in them as a blessing long passed out of her own experience. Precisely the kind of smile to be expected from her in the circumstances, and it told him nothing. He could have done with a few pointers. There should have been something revealing in that one glance she had cast at his carefully assembled package, something to tell him if he was on target or if he had guessed wildly astray and utterly betrayed himself; but there had been nothing, no sudden gleam, no sharpening of the lines of her face. It was too late now to wonder.

“You do keep her beautifully,” he said without insincerity.

“Thank you,” she said gravely. “I try.”

The road had narrowed a little, the pavement trees ceased abruptly, the garden walls and fences began to be interspersed with the hedges of fields. He wished he could lean far enough to the right to get a glimpse in the rear-view mirror, but he knew he mustn’t. He wished he knew if they were following. It would be hell if he had to go through all this for nothing.

“We’ll take the riverside road,” said Miss Hamilton, “it’s shorter. I suppose you haven’t started learning to drive yet?”

“Well, it would be difficult, really. I can’t go on the road yet, and we haven’t got any drive to speak of, only a few yards to the garage. They did talk about starting lessons at school, there’s plenty of room in the grounds there, but nothing’s come of it yet.”

“It would be an excellent idea,” she said decidedly. “In school conditions you’d learn very easily, from sheer force of habit. And it’s certainly become an essential part of a complete education these days.”

“But I think they’re scared for their flower-beds, or something, they swank frightfully about their roses, you know.”

It was possible to talk about these remote things, he found with astonishment, even when his throat was dry with nervousness and his heart thumping. He cast one quick glance at her profile against the last of the street lighting, the clear, austere features, the slight smile, the sheen of the black hair and the smooth shape of the great burnished coil it made on her neck. Then they had turned into the dark road under the trees, and the headlights were plucking trunk after slender trunk out of the obscurity ahead, sharp as harp-strings, taut curves of light that swooped by and were lost again in the darkness behind. Somewhere there on their right, beyond the belt of trees, the shimmer of the river, bitterly cold under the frosty stars. In summer there would have been a few cars parked along the grass verges down here, with couples locked in a death-grip and lost to the world inside, and more couples strolling among the trees or lying in the grass along the river-bank; but not now. The back rows of cinemas were warmer, the smoky booths of the coffee-bars had as much privacy. No one would come here tonight. And without the lovers this was a lonely and silent road.

It will be here, he thought, somewhere in this half-mile stretch, before we leave the trees. And he gripped the piped edges of the bucket seat convulsively, and felt his palms grow wet, because he wasn’t sure if he could go through with it. It isn’t just being afraid, he thought. How do you manage it when you see a blow coming, or a shot, and you mustn’t duck, you mustn’t drop for cover, you must just let it take you? How do you do it? He flexed his fingers, startled to find them aching with the intensity of his grip on the leather. He was strong, he could very well defend himself, but until the witnesses appeared he mustn’t. They had to see for themselves what had been planned for him, his own word would never be enough. And if they weren’t following, if they didn’t arrive in time, then in the last resort what happened to him would have to be evidence enough to clear Kitty, Kitty who of all people in the world was safest from being blamed for whatever deaths might occur tonight.

Miss Hamilton put out her left hand and opened the glove compartment, rummaging busily among the tangle of things within until she brought out a packet of cigarettes. She had slowed down to a crawl while she drove one-handed, and she shook out a cigarette from the packet and put it between her lips with neat, economical movements which made it clear she had done the same thing a few thousand times before. She reached into the pocket again, groping for her lighter, and failed to find it.

“Oh, of course, it’s in my handbag,” she said, letting the car slide to a stop. “Can you reach it for me. Dominic?”

He looked over into the litter of things on the back seat; her bag had slid down into the hollow against the torch. The old car was spacious, with ample leg-room between front and rear seats, and he had to turn and kneel on the seat to lean over far enough to reach the corner. He did so in an agony of foreknowledge, living through the sequel a hundred times before it became reality. Terrified, in revolt, forcing himself to the quiescence against which his flesh struggled like an animal in a trap, he leaned over with arm outstretched, presenting to her meekly the back of his brown head. Oh, God, let her be quick! I can’t keep it up, I shall have to turn round, , , I can’t! Oh, Kitty! And maybe you won’t even know!

Something struck him with an impact that made the darkness explode in his face, and he was jerked violently forward over the back of the seat, the breath driven out of him with a second shock of pain and terror. Then the darkness, imploding again on a black recoil into the vacuum from which the burst of light had vanished, sucked him down with it into a shaft of emptiness and let him fall and fall and fall until even the falling stopped, and there was no more pain or fright or anger or fighting for breath, no more anxiety or agonised, impotent love, nothing.

CHAPTER XVI.

“I WISH WE knew what we were looking for,” said Jean, crouched forward into the windscreen of Barney Wilson’s Bedford van and peering with narrowed eyes to the limit of the headlight beams. “A car, it might be any car, we don’t know whose, it could be a taxi, or anything. We just don’t know.”

“It won’t be a taxi,” Leslie said with certainty. “He’s done something to make things happen.’ It sounds like a man-to-man business.”

“And we don’t even know that they’ll be coming by this road, it could be the main road.”

“If it comes to that, we don’t know they’ll be on either. Anyhow, the police are covering both. What more can we do? I can only take this thing one way at a time, and this is the quietest and loneliest. Headlights ahead there, keep your eyes open.”

The approaching lights were still two or three coils of the winding road distant from them, and perforated by the scattered trees, but they were coming fast. One dancing turn carried them into the intervening double bend, and a second brought them out of it and into full view on one of the brief short stretches. Leslie left his headlights undipped, checking a little and crowding the middle of the road, setting out deliberately to dazzle and slow the other driver. The approaching lights, already sensibly dipped as they turned into the straight, flashed at him angrily, and failing to get a response, stayed up to glare him into realisation of his iniquity. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus beyond the dazzle on the windscreen of the car. Only one face in view there, and not much hope of distinguishing whether man or woman. In a lighted road it might have been easier.

A horn blared at him indignantly. He said: “Oh, lord!” as he pulled aside just far enough to let the long car by. Driven well and peremptorily, and going fast, going with purpose.

“No boy,” said Jean, and instantly gasped and clutched at the dashboard as he braked hard. “Leslie! What are you doing?”

It was instantly clear what he was doing, and he didn’t bother to answer her in words. He was in close under the trees at the side of the road, hauling on the wheel to bring the van about.

“What is it? What did you see? He wasn’t there.”

“Not in sight,” said Leslie, and ran the van backwards with an aplomb he would never have achieved in ordinary circumstances. “Didn’t you recognise the car?” They came about in an accelerating arc that brushed the grass, and whirled away in pursuit of the vanishing rear lights. “Hammie’s! That couldn’t be a coincidence. Thank God I know that car so well it can’t even hoot at me in the dark without giving itself away. And she doesn’t know this van. She’s used to seeing me driving various missiles, but not this.”

Jean huddled against his arm, shivering, but not with cold. “Leslie, if it is her, suppose he isn’t with her any more? Suppose something’s happened already?” She didn’t say that it was unthinkable to suspect Miss Hamilton of crime and violence, because now nothing was unthinkable, every rule was already broken and every restraint unloosed. “Could she have left him somewhere back there on the road?”

He hadn’t thought of that, and it shook him badly. The Riley could be as lethal a weapon as any murderer would need. But he kept his eyes fixed on the receding rear-lights, and his foot down hard. “The police car will be coming along behind.”

“Yes, but the road’s so dark, that black surface, , , “

“She’s turning off,” he said abruptly and eagerly, and stamped the accelerator into the floor; for why, if she was alone and upon innocent business, should she turn off this road to the right? There was nothing there but the remotest of lovers’ lanes, a dead end going down to the river-bank. Not even a lane, really, just a cart-track through the belt of trees, once sealed by a five-barred gate, though it hadn’t been closed for a year or so now, and hung sagging in the grass from its upper hinge. Leslie knew the place well enough from summer picnics long ago. There was a wide stretch of open grass by the river there, where cars could drive right down to the water and find ample room to turn. But what could a woman alone want down there on a frosty October night?

He swung the van round into the mouth of the track, and pulled up. “You get out and wait here for the police car.”

“No,” she said in a gasp of protest, clutching at his arm, “I’m coming with you.”

“Get out! How will they know, if you don’t? They’re nowhere in sight. Oh, God, Jean, don’t waste time.”

She snatched her hand away and scrambled out. He saw her face staring after him all great wide-set eyes in an oval pallor, as he drove down into the darkness between the trees. She didn’t like letting him go without her. They were loose among murders and pursuits and all the things that didn’t normally happen, who could be sure there wouldn’t be guns, too? But what sort of a team were they going to be in the future if they pulled two ways now? She watched the van rock away down the rutted track, and then stood shivering, watching the road faithfully. Leslie’s ascendancy was established in that one decision, when he wasn’t even thinking about their partnership or their rivalry, and it couldn’t have been won in the face of a stiffer test. The hardest thing he could possibly have asked of her was to stand back and let him go into action alone, now, when she had newly discovered how much he meant to her.

The frozen ruts of the track gripped the wheels of the van and slewed it in a series of ricochets down into the rustling tunnel of trees. He couldn’t see the rear-lights of the Riley now, he couldn’t hear its engine; he had all he could do to hold the van and drive it forward fast towards the faint glimmer of starlight that flooded the open river-bank. The trees thinned. He slowed, killing his headlights altogether in the hope of remaining undetected until he got his bearings, and cruised to the edge of the copse.

She had driven the car right out on to the low terrace of rimy grass above the water, sweeping round in a circle to be ready to drive out again. Both doors hung open like beetle-wings spread for flight, and midway between the car and the edge of the bank she was dragging something laboriously along the ground, something limp and slender that hung a dead weight upon her arms. Beyond the two figures moving sidelong like a crippled animal the flat breadth of the river flowed pallid with lambent light, at once swift and motionless, a quivering band of silver.

All down the rough ride under the trees Leslie’s mind had been working coolly and lucidly, telling him exactly what to do. Don’t leave the escape route open. Broadside the van across the track, there’s no other way out. Make sure she shan’t get the car out again. But in the end he didn’t do any of the things his busy brain had been recommending to him, there was no time. She had such a little way to go to the water, and he knew the currents there and could guess at the cold. He didn’t stop to think or consider at all, he just let out a yell of which he was not even conscious, slashed his headlights full on and drove straight at her, his foot down hard. Let her get away, let her run, anything, as long as she dropped the kid in time.

The front wheels left the track and laboured like a floundering sea-beast on to the bumpy shore of the open turf. Rocking and plunging, he roared across the grass, and his headlights caught and held her in a blaze of black and white. She was hit by noise and light together, he saw her shrink and cringe, letting the boy fall for a moment. She wrenched her head up to stare wildly, and he saw a face carved in light, as hard and smooth and white as marble, with panting mouth and gaunt eyes glaring. The eyes had still an unmistakable intelligence and authority, he couldn’t get a finger-hold on the hope that she might be mad. Then she stooped and seized the boy beneath the armpits, wrenching him up from the ground with furious determination, and began to drag herself and him in a stumbling run towards the water’s edge. Heavy and inert, he slipped out of her hold and she clawed at him again, frantic to finish what she had begun.

Only at the last moment, as the van swerved and braked screaming to a stop a few yards short of her, did she give up. She flung the boy from her with a sudden angry cry, and ran like a greyhound for her car. Her hair had slipped out of its beautiful, austere coil, it streamed down over her shoulders as she ran, shrouding the whiteness of her face. Leslie, tumbling from the van before it was still, snatched vainly at her arm as she fled, and then, abandoning her for what was more urgent, plunged upon the boy who lay huddled where she had thrown him.

She had all but done what she had set out to do; a few seconds more and he would have been in the river. His head and one arm dangled over the downward slope of grass, the limp fingers swinging above the edge of the water. Leslie fell on his knees beside him and hauled him well ashore, turning him so that he lay face upwards in the grass. Under the tumbled chestnut thatch Dominic’s face was pinched and grey, the eyes closed. He was breathing with a heavy, short, painful rhythm through parted lips, but at least he was breathing. Leslie felt him all over with hasty hands, and began to hoist the dead weight into his arms. He was just clambering gingerly to his feet under his burden when he heard the Riley start up and soar into speed.

He’d forgotten that she had a lethal weapon still in her hands. She hadn’t finished with them yet. There was room between the water and the standing van for her to drive round and come upon them at speed, and what was there now to restrain her from killing two as readily as one? He was one man, apparently alone, there was room for him in the river with the boy.

The Riley’s headlights whirled round the bulk of the Bedford, straightened out parallel with the river’s edge, and lunged at him in a blinding glare. Caught off balance, staggering beneath the boy’s weight, he broke into a lurching run. He couldn’t hope to get into the trees, where she couldn’t reach them, but he jumped for the van and tried to put a corner of its bulk between him and the hurtling car. She wouldn’t crash the van, she wouldn’t do anything to wreck her own means of escape; she was sane, appallingly sane, and at least you can have some idea of what the sane will do. The blaze of light blinded him, he couldn’t see the van or the ground or the starlit shape of the night any more, he could only hurl himself straight across the car’s path into the dark on the other side.

He caught his foot in the tussocky grass and fell sprawling over his burden beneath the back wheels of the Bedford. The car missed his scrabbling feet by inches, he felt the frosty clumps of the turf crunch close to his heels. Then the light and the rushing bulk were past, and his cringing flesh relaxed with a sob of relief. He eased his weight from the boy and put his face down into his sleeve for a moment, and lay panting, sick with retrospective terror.

The roar of the car receded, swaying up the rutted track towards where Jean waited. Leslie struggled out of his weakness and came to his feet and began to run, but what was the use? A couple of minutes and the Riley would be out on the road. He cupped his mouth in his hands and bellowed in a voice that shook the frost from the trees: “Jean, look out! Stand clear!”

She surely wouldn’t try anything crazy? Would she? How could you be sure with Jean, who couldn’t bear to be beaten, and would die rather than give in?

Winding along the complex curves of the road from Comerbourne came the headlights of two cars, late but coming fast. Jean was standing in the middle of the road waving her arms peremptorily at the first of them when she heard the labouring sound of the Riley climbing back up the lane, and started and quivered to Leslie’s shout. She ran back to stare frantically into the tunnel of the trees. Not the van, the car. What had happened down there? Where was Leslie? What was he doing? The Hamilton woman shouldn’t get away now, she mustn’t, she shouldn’t, even if it made no difference in the end. Jean ran like a fury and wedged her shoulder under the top bar of the drunken old gate, and dragged it protesting out of its bleached bed of grass. She staggered across the track with it supported on her shoulder, and slammed it home against its solid gatepost on the other side. There was a great wooden latch that still dropped creakingly into place; she lodged it with a crash, and flung herself aside under the hedge as the Riley drove full at the barrier.

The impact burst the bars and sent the weaker gatepost sagging out of true. Wood and glass flew singing through the air, and splinters settled with a strange noise like metallic rain. The car had not the impetus to drive straight through the obstacle, it was brought up shuddering and plunging in the wreckage of the gate, the windscreen shivered, one lamp ripped away. The engine died. Jean crouched quivering in the midst of a sudden teeming activity that shuddered with movement and purpose, but made no more sound.

She opened her eyes and uncovered her ears and crawled shakily out of the hedge. Beyond the impaled Riley the van came rocking gently up the slope; she saw Leslie’s disordered hair and anxious face staring over the wheel, and in the passenger seat beside him Dominic’s unconscious head lolled above the fringe of Barney Wilson’s old utility rug. Both the cars from Comerbourne were drawn up along the edge of the road, and five men in plain clothes had boiled out of them and taken charge of everything. Two of them were closing in one on either side of the wrecked car. Two more were dismembering the ruins of the gate and hoisting them aside to clear the way. And the fifth, who was George Felse, had made for the Bedford and climbed in beside his son, easing the dangling head into the hollow of his shoulder and feeling with gentle fingers through the tangled hair.

Dominic came round upon a rising wave of fear and pain, to feel himself held in someone’s arms like a baby, and someone’s ringers tenderly smoothing out the frenzied ache that hammered at his head. Making the inevitable connection, he settled more closely and thankfully into the comforting shoulder, and feeling the rush of tears stinging his eyelids, hastened to cover himself.

“Mummy, my head hurts!” he muttered querulously. But it was his father’s voice that said gently in reply: “Yes, old lad, I know. You lie quiet, we’ll find you something to stop it.”

The discrepancy jolted him seriously, and he opened his eyes to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, but closed them again very quickly because the effort was very painful. However, he’d had time to see the face that was bending over him, and there was no doubt about it, it was his father. Well, if that was how he felt about things it didn’t look so bad, not so bad at all. Dominic had expected at the very best to find himself in the doghouse. Maybe if you’re really going to kick over the traces in a big way it pays to get yourself half killed in the process. Even if it does hurt.

Drifting a little below the surface of full consciousness, he remembered the one thing he had to get settled, the only thing in the world that really mattered.

“It wasn’t Kitty,” he said, not very distinctly but George understood. “You do know now, don’t you?”

“Yes, Dom, we know now. Everything’s all right, everything’s fine, you just rest.”

He was sinking unresisting into a stupor of weariness and relief, tears oozing between his closed eyelids into George’s shoulder, when a sudden appalling sound startled him into full consciousness again. Someone had laughed loudly and angrily, a discord harsh as a scream.

He opened his eyes wide, his wrung nerves vibrating, and beyond George’s head and Duckett’s solid shoulders, beyond Jean and Leslie clinging hand in hand, he saw a wild creature in a torn black suit, her cheek cut by flying glass, long black hair dangling in great heavy locks round her face, a bloodstained Maenad wrenching ineffectively at her pinioned wrists, her mouth contorted as she spat defiance.

“All right, yes, I killed him. I don’t care who knows it. Do you think you can frighten me with your charges and your cautions? All right, what if I did kill him? It isn’t capital murder, don’t think you’re going to kill me, that’s something you can’t do. I know the law, I’ve had to know it. Twenty years,” she shouted hoarsely, “twenty years of my life he had out of me! I could have married a dozen times over, but no, I had to fix my sights on him! Twenty years his bitch, being patient, waiting for that bag of a wife of his to die, , , “

Dominic began to shake in his father’s arms, and then to sob convulsively. He couldn’t help it, and when he’d begun he couldn’t stop. All that black and white dignity, all that composure and discipline, she ripped them to shreds and threw them in his face. He couldn’t bear it. He burrowed his throbbing head desperately into George’s shoulder, whimpering, but he couldn’t shut out the sound of her voice.

“, , , and then still waiting after she was dead, and still no reward. Bide my time, I’ve done nothing all my life but bide my time, and what did I ever get out of it but him! And then suddenly her on the telephone, that fool of a girl yelling for help to me, me!, and bleating that he was planning to marry her! And what was I to get, after I’d given him years of my life? Nothing, none of my rights, just the same old round, his letters to type in the daytime, and him in my bed when he felt like it, and her, her holding the reins! Yes, I killed him,” she panted, her breast heaving, “but it wasn’t enough. He ought to have been conscious. He ought to have felt it more, every blow! There ought to have been some way I could kill him ten times over for what he did to me!”

CHAPTER XVII.

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HE REMEMBERED NOTHING of the drive home in the van, with George nursing him anxiously in his arms, and Leslie driving as gingerly, so Jean said afterwards, as if he had an ambulance load of expectant mothers aboard instead of just one. He was conscious but totally astray. Very slight concussion, so the doctor said, and his recollections would sort themselves out coherently enough later on; but this part of the evening never came back. They put him to bed, and dosed him with something that gradually took the pain away but took the world away with it. “He’s all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll keep him under light sedation tomorrow, and by evening he’ll be right as rain.”

He woke once in the night, struggling and crying out fiercely, loosing in his dreams the resistance he had restrained by force a few hours earlier. Bunty brought him a drink, and he gulped it down greedily, asked her wonderingly what was the matter, and fell asleep again on her arm. Towards dawn he began sobbing violently in his sleep, but the fit subsided when she bathed his hot forehead and soothed him back into deeper slumber; and in the morning he awoke hungry, alert and loquacious, though still somewhat pale and tense, and wanted to talk to his father.

“This evening,” said Bunty firmly. “Right now he’s busy arranging about getting Miss Norris released. That’s what you were worrying about, isn’t it? You take it easy and stop fretting, everything’s under control.”

“Oh, Mummy!” he said reproachfully, almost offendedly, “you’re so darned calm.” He wouldn’t, she thought, have chosen that word if he could have seen her face when they brought him home. He took a rapid retrospective glance at the memories that were beginning to assemble themselves into some sort of shape, and asked coaxingly: “You’re not very mad with me, are you?”

“Well, you know,” said Bunty amiably, putting away the thermometer which confirmed that his temperature was normal, “maddish.”

“Only maddish? Well, look, Mummy, I overspent my expense account. Those gloves were twenty-three and eleven, I never knew they cost so much. Any good my putting in a claim?”

“We can’t let the detective lose on the job,” she said comfortably. He wasn’t feeling quite as tough and skittish as he pretended, but it was better not to notice that. “I’m surprised you didn’t just go to Haywards for them, and get them put down to my account.”

“Well, hell!” said Dominic, confounded. “I never thought of that.”

By evening he was pronounced fit to talk as much as he liked. Later it might be necessary to take an official statement from him, but for the moment what mattered was that he should get the whole thing off his chest to his father as soon as George came home.

“Is it all right?” asked Dominic eagerly, before George could even move up a chair to the side of the bed. “Kitty’s free?” He couldn’t altogether suppress the tremor in his voice when he uttered her name.

“Yes, it’s all right, Kitty’s free.” He didn’t say any more, it was for her to do that. Dominic knew what he’d done for her, nothing George might say could add anything to his glory, and he certainly wasn’t going to take anything away from it. “You needn’t worry any more, you did what you set out to do. How does your head feel now?”

“Sore, and I’ve got a stiff neck. But not so bad, really. What was it she hit me with?”

“You won’t want to believe it. A rubber cosh loaded with lead shot, the kind the Teds favour.”

“No!” said Dominic, his mouth falling open with astonishment. “Where would she get a thing like that?”

“Can’t you guess? From one of her club boys. She confiscated it from him a few weeks ago, with a severe lecture on the iniquity of carrying offensive weapons.” Alfred Armiger hadn’t survived to appreciate the irony, but by the grace of God Dominic had. “What was it that put you on to her in the first place?”

“It was Jean’s doing, really. I got to thinking how all the people involved had known Mr. Armiger for years, and wondering why one of them should suddenly pick on that night not to be able to stick him a moment longer. And I thought the real motive must be something that had happened that very evening, something that changed things altogether for that one person. So after we got to know about Kitty’s phone call, and it seemed likely that the person she called might be the one, this sudden motive thing sort of got narrowed down into something that was said in that phone call. I made a smashing case on those lines against Mr. Shelley, and tried it on Leslie and Jean. And straight away Jean said no, it couldn’t happen like that. She said Kitty wouldn’t run to a man, but to a woman. She said,” said Dominic, steeling his hesitant voice to use the adult words Jean had used, firmly and authoritatively as became a man, “that Kitty had just suffered a kind of sexual outrage, almost worse than the ordinary kind, with that beastly old man making a pass at her that wasn’t even a pass, but just a cold-blooded business deal. And you see, what made it much worse, “