Anna, Where Are You?

CHAPTER XXXIII

It was a little earlier than this that Frank Abbott switched out the overhead light in his room at the George in Ledlington and having adjusted the shade of a bedside lamp and arranged his pillows to his liking, took up the second-hand volume of Lord Tennyson’s poems which he had that day discovered at Bannerman’s in the Market Square and turned over the pages. Since Mr. John Robinson had made two quotations, one from the beginning, and the other from the end of a poem, and since Miss Silver considered this to have some significance as to which his own mind was a total blank, he felt that it was up to him to solve the riddle which, it seemed, she had been pleased to set him.

He began to go through the book, looking at the first lines of every poem until he arrived at “Enoch Arden”-masses and masses of Enoch, in Victorian blank verse. And here was the first quotation:

“Long lines of cliff, breaking, have left a chasm,

And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands.”

It had meant nothing to him at the time, and it meant nothing to him now.

He began to wade into the story of Enoch, faint but pursuing. In the absence of his Miss Silver, he dared to find him insufferably dull. Astonishing to think that these long narrative poems had ever had a vogue. And then quite suddenly there was a gleam. He began, metaphorically speaking, to sit up and take notice. So that was it, was it? Nothing really to do with the case of course. He could hardly reproach her with keeping back material evidence. But interesting-oh, very definitely interesting.

He followed Enoch to his death-bed, and to Mr. John Robinson’s second quotation:

“… and the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral-”

He closed the book, put it down beside the lamp, and was presently sliding in an agreeable manner down the smooth inclines of sleep.

Meanwhile Miss Silver was sitting up in her bedroom. She had undressed, performed her evening ablutions, read her usual chapter, and set the door ajar between her room and Jennifer’s. All this completed, she hesitated a little, and then put on her warm blue dressing-gown with its handmade crochet trimming and sat down by the electric fire. Mr. Craddock’s foresight in putting in so powerful a plant passed through her mind as a subject for commendation. So labour-saving, so clean, so comfortable a mitigation of the cold and damp of these winter months in the country. She gave the subject quite a little thought before passing to another topic.

The day had been not only very interesting, but very completely filled. Mrs. Craddock’s indisposition had persisted. She had not fainted again, but she had continued in a very weak and tearful condition, and had not attempted to leave the sofa, or to occupy herself in any way. When it was suggested that she would be better in bed she made no demur. Peveril Craddock’s reaction to all this was a mood of gloomy displeasure. No one who had spent even a few days in the house with him would have expected him to be helpful, but he showed so much resentment over his wife’s collapse that it really was the greatest relief when he announced that he would be working late and removed himself and a supper-tray to his study in the main block.

There were then the children to feed and get to bed, Emily Craddock to be tended, cheered, and induced to partake of the good milk soup which Miss Silver had prepared for her. After which there remained that general clearing-up which is perhaps the most thankless and least rewarding of all household tasks. It is therefore no wonder that this was Miss Silver’s first opportunity of reviewing the events of the last two days.

If there was a connection between these murderous bank robberies and the Colony of which Deepe House was the centre, there must at one time or another have been small clues as light and apparently aimless as those floating threads of gossamer which fill the air just after dawn on a summer morning. They are not to be seen, their origin is not to be traced, they are no more than an insubstantial touch just felt and gone again. But what has once been felt may be recalled. Without pushing the metaphor too far, it was Miss Silver’s purpose to empty her mind of speculation and recall certain episodes, conversations, pictures. In the past she had found that memory, unquestioned and left to produce its own images, would often provide some detail not consciously noted at the time. Sitting quite still with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap, she went back to her interview with Mr. Craddock in town, her arrival at Deepe House, the first contact with each member of the family, each member of the Colony. First impressions she had always found to be of a particular value. They had to be corrected by experience, but even then something could be gained from them.

She went over her first meeting with Emily Craddock, a simple and pathetic case of a woman dominated to the point of will and judgment being completely in abeyance. Or almost so. There were moments when the hypnotized creature stirred and half woke up to unimaginable misery and fear.

Jennifer was not hypnotized. She had adored Peveril Craddock. She now hated and feared him-a dumb hatred, and a dumb fear. Something had happened to cause these things, and to drive them down into the darkest and most secret places of her thought. Miss Silver had not handled children for twenty years without discovering that if a child is very badly frightened it will never speak of what has frightened it.

The Miss Tremletts, Miranda, Augustus Remington, Mr. John Robinson-there had been a first meeting with each one of them, and in every case a definite and distinct impression had been made. The pictures came into her mind and passed out of it again.

When she had done with them she made room for the one which she had reserved to the last, her brief passing contact with the bank murderer. She saw herself moving along the gangway of the bus and stepping down to the ground. Only two people went towards the station, elderly women with shopping-baskets. The other seven or eight passengers made off in the direction of the High Street. She had let them get away before making any move herself, since she had no desire that anyone should notice that she had come to meet a goodlooking young man with a car. She had occupied herself with opening her handbag and scrutinizing what might very well have passed for a shopping-list. It was not until the last of the passengers was clear of the station yard that she began to walk up the incline towards the entrance, and it was when she was about half way that the bandaged man had passed her. The scene came back distinctly- the limping step, the gloved hand upon the stick. There was a very small triangular tear between the index finger and the one next to it. She had not remembered it till now, but it was there in the picture. A few stitches of the seam had come undone, to leave a triangular gap. There were three loosened stitches to the left of it, and a little end of thread. It was the left hand which leaned upon the stick. The head had a caplike bandage covering all the hair and most of the right side of the face. The collar of the old loose raincoat was turned up. Since he passed to her left, it was only the right side of his face which presented itself. The right side of his face-a mass of bandages-the collar of the raincoat hiding the neck and the line of the chin-a loose sleeve, and a bandaged hand. The hand held a small suit-case. So much for the side that was turned towards her-the right-hand side. And on the left, folds of the bandage passing about the head and out of sight, the collar of the raincoat standing up about the neck, the sleeve hanging loose, and a gloved hand resting upon a stick. She had seen no more, she could recall no more. The picture was there in her mind, but it gave up no further detail.

She began to consider the stick. It was of the commonest type -a plain crook for the gloved hand to rest on-a plain dark stick. Only nowadays very few men carried a stick at all. But since the murderer was posing as an injured man, the stick went very well with his disguise. Yet for that stick to be available it must have been, and probably still was, in his possession. Because it was an old stick, worn and rubbed about the ferrule. It had not been bought for the occasion, it was a possession. Then he probably had it still. Anyone might have such a stick. It was of too common a type to be a danger. It was of too common a type to offer any certain means of identification. At the very most it could add some slight reinforcement to other and stronger evidence.

What evidence? She went on looking at the picture in her mind, and all at once there came to her an echo from no more than a couple of days ago-Maurice and Jennifer squabbling.

“He always wears gloves.”

“He’s afraid of spoiling his hands.”

And Benjy, “I’m not afraid of spoiling my hands.” With Maurice bursting into a loud rude laugh and a “You haven’t got anything to spoil!”

It was quite irrelevant. A fragment heard by chance and no name mentioned. Just someone who wore gloves. A man. The glove in her picture of the bandaged man, the glove upon the left hand which rested on the crook of the stick-an old wash-leather glove, worn and old like the stick itself-stretched with use until the stitches parted between the two first fingers. The thread which curled up from the small triangular tear was worn and dirty. The glove was an old, worn glove. If such a glove and such a stick were to be found in anyone’s possession-”

She had reached this point, when the picture and the silence broke together to the muffled sound of a shot.