Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER VIII

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PERHAPS,” suggested Lockyer blankly, after a long moment of silence, “they both went into the river.”

“You think so?” George switched off the torch, and the deepening dusk fell on them like a cloak. “And who drove Arundale’s car away? It was there, in the yard, with his overnight case and his books in it, at three. It was gone before four, and nobody else had gone missing. Oh, no, they didn’t both go the same way.’

“They didn’t both go down the river, anyhow,” said Dickie Meurice softly, and they heard and felt him stirring in the darkness, again with that curious suggestion of pleased malevolence. “Because just before Liri came to tell you she’d found this one, she was talking to the other one on the telephone.”

He had his sensation, and it was everything he had hoped it would be. Only Liri herself let the revelation pass without a sound. She had made one sharp movement, however, that did just as well. However stolidly she sat out questioning, after that, he’d know that he’d hit her where it hurt. She’d had her chance to have his goodwill, and done rather more than turn up her nose at the offer. Now she could try it the other way.

“How do you know that?” demanded George, “if you were here keeping an eye on the body?”

“I wasn’t. I had a hunch she was up to something, so I let her get a head start, and then followed her up. If she’d been on the level she’d have come straight in by the terrace, but she didn’t. She went off round the back of the house, to the passage from the yard. So I came in by the front and beat her to the back stairs, and I was there to see exactly what she did. She went straight to the telephone call box under the stairs, and asked for a London number.

“Dear Dickie,” said Liri quite gently, as if neither he nor anything he did could matter to her now, “always so true to form. Where were you? Hiding in the next box?”

“In the presence of the police,” he retorted maliciously, “I shouldn’t be too witty about eavesdropping, if I were you. They have other names for it in the way of duty. I can demonstrate that I heard all right, and I can repeat every word I heard, too. Including the number!”

“And including a name?” asked George dryly.

“No, I didn’t get a name. But the number was Valence 3581. You can check it easily enough, but I wouldn’t mind betting you’ll find it’s the number of Lucien’s London flat. That would be the first place she’d try, even if she didn’t know where he’d be – and maybe she did, at that!”

“And why didn’t you tell me about this at once, as soon as we arrived? Instead of behaving as if you’d been here all the time and had no information to offer?”

“Because I couldn’t make out just what it was all about, not until I realised whose body we’d found. And what mattered first was to get him out. She wasn’t going to run.”

“So in fact you didn’t actually know whose number it was, or to whom she was talking?”

“No, not then. I don’t know, for that matter, but listen to the text, and draw what conclusions you like. I didn’t hear everything, people were just coming chattering along the gallery to dinner. When someone answered her she said: ‘Never mind that, there’s no time.’ And the next I got was: ‘… just get out, fast. The body’s been found… ’ Then whoever was at the other end was doing the talking, until she cut him off. ‘Damn you,’ she said, ‘I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye!’ ”

“That was all?”

“Isn’t it enough? I didn’t know whose body she’d found, but she did. She was climbing out on the tree when I came on the scene, she’d had a good look at him. But maybe she’d known all along which of them went into the water. Maybe she even helped in the job, or at least helped Lucien to get away afterwards. Stay here, she says, and keep an eye on him, while I run and tell Mr. Felse! You have to hand it to our Liri, she’s quick on the draw. She couldn’t suppress the discovery, because I happened on her just at the wrong moment. But she could and did run like a hare to warn the murderer, before she gave the alarm. And she found me a job to do that would keep me quiet while she did it, or so she hoped. Only as luck would have it I’d already begun to smell a rat by then.”

He smiled, the well-known smile that charmed the televiewers regularly on Thursday nights, his fair head cocked towards Liri; and though the smile was now invisible, they felt its weighted sweetness probing her.

“But in any case, you don’t have to take my word for it. Ask her! Ask the operator who got her her London number.”

“All in good time,” said George impassively, “we’ll ask everything that needs to be asked, but not, I think, here. I should be grateful if you would all keep this to yourselves, just as you have done until now. Lockyer, stay with him, I must go and telephone. The rest of you, come on, let’s get back to the house.”

They made their way back in single file to the dry pathway and the glow-worm twilight that was left in the park, George lighting them until they were out of the trees. At the end of the line, Dominic and Tossa linked hands and drew close, shivering suddenly with the chill of the river, and the cold oppression of darkness, malice and death. She whispered in his ear, anxiously, that he must go straight up and change. The suggestion, mildly maternal, pointedly possessive, seemed to be left over from another world, but at least indicated the possibility of recovering that world, when all this was over. Dominic, the shivers warmed out of him by her solicitude, pressed her hand impulsively and wondered again at the terrifying diversity of man.

“Come up to the office with me,” George said to Liri as they climbed the steps to the terrace. “I must talk to you.”

“Of course,” said Liri. Her voice was curiously easy now, aloof and contained still, but something more than that. The word that suggested itself was “content.” George understand that. They had their body and their case, a pretty substantial case now, though still circumstantial; but she had done everything she could, and it was no longer up to her. “But it will be you talking,” she said gently. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

In the yellow drawing-room, as they passed through the gallery, Andrew Callum was singing, in a voice achingly muted and raw and sad:

“The judge looked over his left shoulder.

He said: ‘Fair maid, I’m sorry.’

He said: ‘Fair maid, you must be gone.

For I cannot pardon Geordie.’ ”

“So that’s the way it is,” said Duckett heavily. “Well, we can put out a general call immediately for the car, and turn on everything to find it. That’s no problem. About the boy I’m not so happy. We’ll get all the airports covered, and have a watch kept on his flat – though if the girl was lucky enough to catch him there, that’s one place he’ll have written off. We’ve nothing to lose by avoiding a public appeal. There still could be another answer.” But he sounded exceedingly dubious about it. “I suppose it’s practically certain he did take the car?”

“I’d say a hundred per cent certain,” said George. “He knew, as everyone here knew, that Arundale wouldn’t be expected back until to-night. He could give himself many hours grace by making off with that car.”

“Well, since she’s tipped him off about the body being found… you say she hasn’t admitted anything about that?”

“She won’t say anything at all. She’s done what she could for him, now she doesn’t care what happens to her.”

“You don’t think she actually was in it with Galt? After the fact, say?”

“I’m certain she wasn’t. If she had been, the last thing she’d have done was to go looking for the body. She’d just have sat back and prayed for us not to find it. But she did go looking for it. According to Meurice, she’s been hunting it at intervals all day. Oh, no, it wasn’t Arundale she expected to find, it was Lucien. That’s why she’s so calm now, almost happy. He may be in trouble, but at least he’s alive.”

“Then why won’t she talk about any part of it?”

“Two reasons, I think. First, because she knows nothing herself, and isn’t sure how much I know, so that even by opening her mouth on something that seems innocuous to her she may be handing me another little fact that makes damning sense to me. And second, by refusing to say anything at all, she may be able to leave us in some doubt about her, and divert a bit of our attention from him.”

“I thought she hated him?” said Duckett.

“She thought so, too. She knows better now, and so do we. One more point, he certainly has a valid passport, because in three weeks time he’s due to leave for a tour of Latin America. First destination Buenos Aires. And since she caught him successfully at his flat, he’s undoubtedly pocketed his passport. Most likely that’s what he went there for. And possibly to raise some quick cash.”

“You think he was heading out in any case?”

“I think so.”

“Right, airports, then. Ports, too, but less likely. For the car we’ll put out a general call immediately. Where d’you want the wagon to come? That drive’s too public by far.”

“We’re lucky there. Have them go on along the main road, past the lodge and over the river bridge beyond the edge of the estate. Just beyond the bridge there’s a gate, and a cart-track crosses two fields – it’s drivable, all right – and reaches Follymead ground at a third gate by the riverside. Lockyer’s down there on the spot, and I’m going back there now. No point in viewing the place where we got him out, it’s pure chance he got held up there. The doctor can have him right away.”

“Did he drown?”

“Unlikely. If so, the water won by a very short head. His skull isn’t the right shape. I didn’t do any close investigating, there were too many spectators, and the doctor will do it better. But something hit him.”

“It couldn’t have been a fall?”

“Could have. Pending closer examination, of course. But in that case, why run for it? It looks as if Arundale went hopelessly wild when the ground reeled under him. It looks as if he was the aggressor. And lost. They’ve been married twenty years, and never anything, not a shadow.”

“It happens,” said Duckett, and drew in breath gustily through the moustache that would have done credit to a Corsican maquisard.

“It does, I only wish it hadn’t.”

“You can say that again, George… they’re due out to-morrow evening, this folk-music party?”

“There’s a final concert after tea, five to half past six, then they disperse. We can hold it that long, if we have to. I’d prefer it, too.”

“Keep it wrapped, then, and I’ll manage this end. If the lid has to blow off, let it be when they’ve gone home. We may save something.” His hard breathing rattled in the receiver. “But… Arundale! My God, George, he was impregnable. Do you reckon Buckingham Palace is safe?”

“Think of me,” said George bitterly. “I’ve still got to break the news to the widow.”

The class came chattering and singing from the after-dinner session at a quarter to ten, and headed for the small drawing-room to continue their discussions over coffee. Every evening the noise had grown, and the gaiety, and the exhilaration. Professor Penrose must have surpassed himself, in spite of being deprived of the services of Liri Palmer and Dickie Meurice. It was extraordinary how the two dramatic productions being staged at Follymead had run parallel all the way, even in their crises and accelerations, apparently unconnected and without communication. Only Liri linked them now, or rather, moved from one to the other freely, and had a part in both. Meurice, thought George, reluctantly but clearly, was largely irrelevant. He stirred up a little mischief in passing, but he was of no importance. In a sense he never had been. His malice frayed the edges of events, but never determined or even deflected them. He was the mouse gnawing at the exposed root of an oak tree already split by lightning.

When Audrey Arundale passed along the gallery – and he noted that she had so arranged matters as to move as long as possible alone – George was waiting for her. He saw her pause for a moment outside the open door of the small drawing-room, and brace herself to enter and put on her hostess face.

“Mrs. Arundale.”

She turned and saw him, and her look was almost glad. Whatever business he had with her would be preferable to going in there and making pleasant talk. But she didn’t know, of course, what it was going to be.

“Can you spare me a few minutes? There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Of course. Shall we go into the office?”

There is no easy way to tell anything as heavy as bereavement, and the spiral approaches are worse than the straight. The victim has so long to imagine and fend off belief. George was only just back from seeing the body removed from the Follymead grounds by the police ambulance, and was very tired. Everything he could do tonight was done, every inquiry he could set in motion was already on the move. By this time all the airports were alerted to look out for Lucien Galt, and the number and description of the stolen Volkswagen were being circulated on all the police transmissions. They had reached a dead point where there was nothing for them to do but pause and draw breath. George and Audrey looked at each other across the hearth of Arundale’s office with a shared exhaustion, not enemies, not even opponents.

“Mrs. Arundale, I think you must know that ever since I was called in here we’ve been accepting it as a possibility that a death was involved, and in fact have been looking for a body. I’m afraid what I’ve got for you is not good news. This evening we’ve found it. We took him out of the river about an hour and a half ago.”

She set her hands to the arms of her chair, and rose. Her eyes, wide and fixed, held steady on his face. She said nothing at all, so plainly waiting that there was nothing to do but complete the half-arrested blow.

“It isn’t Lucien Galt, as we’d expected. It’s your husband. I’m very sorry.”

Her lips moved, saying automatically: “I understand,” but there was hardly a sound, only a faint rustling of her breath. She turned her head questingly this way and that, and put out her hand with that remembered gesture, feeling for Edward, her prop and mentor; but Edward wasn’t there, and would never again be there ready to her hand, and there was nobody now to tell her what to do. She was alone.

He saw the blood drain from her face, and her eyes roll upward in her head. As if she had indeed leaned on the arm that unaccountably failed to be there, her balance forsook her. She swayed, and then, like a shot bird, collapsed in broken, angular forms at his feet; and he lunged from his chair on one knee, and took her weight in his arms as she fell.

George drove home to Comerford through a sudden squall of rain, and his eyes were full of Audrey Arundale’s reviving face. When she came round she had apologised for her lapse, and resolutely refused to have anyone fetched to her, or to concede that she might be in need of help. “I’m quite all right now!” How often he’d heard it, hurried and insistent and forbidding, from people who were anything but all right, but dreaded above anything else being the centre of a fuss. If you over-rode them, you sometimes precipitated the total collapse you most wanted to avoid. And besides, he had detected in Audrey a kind of relief, a kind of relaxation, that meant she wouldn’t break. After you have been living with horrible uncertainties, even the definition and finality of death come as an almost welcome change.

Now at least she knew. And what was there he could do for her? Not bring the dead man back to life again, certainly; and not, in his present state, even attempt to assess her degree of guilt or innocence.

So George drove home, and Bunty fed him and asked him no questions. She never did, but he sometimes confided. It might not be exactly approved procedure, but given a discreet and intelligent wife and an appropriate case it would have seemed to him a waste, even a dereliction of duty, not to use all the means to hand.

She looked him over from head to feet with alert eyes the image of Dominic’s, noted the river-slime coating his feet and ankles, and probably got as much out of this instantaneous physical examination as ever he did on looking over a witness. But all she said was:

“Our two all right?”

“Very much so. I’m afraid they may even be enjoying themselves.” It was clear to her that George was not. Lesson One, do not become involved. But the effective text of Lesson Two, how not to become involved, no one has ever yet supplied. Perhaps as well. The best policemen are those who walk rather more in other people’s shoes than in their own, and never lose sight of the relevance of the grace of God. “That place is a Disneyland fantasy,” he said, looking back suddenly at the monstrous bulk of Follymead, and astonished at the impact it made when viewed from homelier fields.

“We ought to go and spend a week-end there, some time,” said Bunty, busy with whisky and water. In a single hazel glance she estimated the amount necessary, in his present state of tiredness, to knock him out for the nine hours of sleep he needed. “They’re having a course on Mozart’s wind music next month, it could be good.”

“We will, some time,” agreed George without conviction. If it’s still functioning, after this earthquake that’s brewing, he added in his own mind. The whisky was hot and strong and very welcome; buds of warmth and sleepiness opened in him like accelerated shots in some botanical film. “I’m going to bed, I’m bushed. Get me up early, won’t you?”

“With what?” said Bunty disrespectfully. “Dynamite?”

But she didn’t need dynamite; the telephone did it for her, rather too early, to her mind. George had awakened once with the first light, and stayed awake just long enough to enjoy the realisation that he need not move yet, his wife’s long, soft breathing beside him, and the sudden awareness that one thing of significance had certainly been said last night between them, though not by him.

“Our two all right?”, indeed!

Here had he been treading cautiously and watching the weather in the house, wondering what it would be like for Bunty to awake to the fact that her son had brought home a remarkably positive and permanent-looking girl friend; and all the time Bunty had it weighed up accurately and fairly, and was giving him the nudge, in case he had missed the significance of what was going on. “Our two” sounded large enough to set at rest more minds than his. He fell asleep again smiling. When he awoke again to the clamour of the telephone, it was half past seven, and Bunty was downstairs preparing breakfast. He reached for the instrument beside the bed, before she could pounce on the one downstairs and silence it.

“Sorry to wake you,” said Duckett, “but I wanted to make sure of getting you before you left. I’ve got an interim report from the doctor for you.”

“Already?” George sat up abruptly wide-awake. “That’s quick work.”

“He didn’t drown. No water in the lungs. He was dead before he ever went in.”

“The head wound?”

“Fractured skull. It turns out he had rather a thin one, but not one of those extreme cases. Somebody hit him a lot too hard, from almost behind him, slightly to his left. He’d be dead in minutes.”

“And the weapon? Has he got anything on that? Kind, shape, material? He must have been up all night,” said George with compunction.

“He was up all night. He wants to know why you can’t find ’em at a civilised hour. We can’t give you proper details yet, but I asked him for a long shot. And here it is. Traces of rust in the wound. Iron, he says, and narrow, say half an inch thick at the most. Width might be as much as two inches or so. Squared-off edges to it. It penetrated so deeply that it must have been swung at him pretty desperately, edge-on. Doc argues a fairish length, eighteen inches to two feet, maybe even more. Something like a flat iron bar, or a very large file. Does it make any sense?”

“It makes a lot of sense. Now I’ve got a request for you. Can you borrow me a frogman, and get him to Follymead during the morning? The sooner the better.”

“I can try. Where d’you want him?”

“Have him brought in the same way the ambulance came last night, and I’ll have Lockyer on the lookout for him at the boundary.”

“All right, you shall have him. And one more item of interest for you. Arundale’s Volkswagen has been found. Abandoned at a parking meter in Mayfair, locked, unrifled, everything intact. He took it to London, George. He went to his flat, the girl’s phone call proved that. But he can’t have been there long, there’s no word so far of anybody seeing him. In any case, he won’t go back there now he’s warned. Where d’you reckon he’ll turn up next?”

“Rio, probably,” said George, and reached for his dressing-gown. “I’ll call you from Follymead.”

“Oh, and George…”

“Hullo?”

“Those blood-samples you brought in earlier, from the ground there. Arundale was an AB, a universal recipient. Your specimens are A. They may be Galt’s, we don’t know his group yet. They’re certainly not Arundale’s.”

Duckett’s police frogman was a wiry Blackcountryman who had dived in these parts before. He barely made the minimum height requirement, and had a chronic cigarette-smoker’s cough, but he was tougher than leather, all the same, and had a lung capacity abstemious athletes might well have envied. He stood at the edge of the bank where Edward Arundale had almost certainly entered the water, and looked down into the black pool above the third weir. The surface water whipped across its stillness so impetuously and smoothly that it appeared still itself, to break in a seethe of white foam over the fall. Beneath the surface it would be mercilessly cold; he was going to need his second skin. The colour of the pool was perhaps more truly olive-green than black, and opaque as the moss-grown flags that floored the grotto.

“Soup!” he said disapprovingly, and trod out his cigarette into the soft ground. “How am I supposed to see through that?”

“That’s your problem. We’ve tried fishing for it with hooks, but it’s deep here, deeper than you’d think.”

“I should have thought anything going in here would be carried over the edge. You’ve got some force running there.”

“That’s what we thought, too, and why we looked for him well downstream. Too far downstream, as it turned out. But what we’re looking for now would go down like a stone, and stay down.”

“Yeah,” said the diver, dabbling a toe thoughtfully, “What is it I’m supposed to be looking for? I might as well know, I suppose.”

George told him. Shrewd, deep eyes set in nets of fine wrinkles in the sharp face visualised it, measured, weighed. “If that went in here, it’s still here, all right. Any idea what the bed’s like?”

“Mucky. Maintenance isn’t what it once was. But there doesn’t seem to be much weed.”

“All right, let’s go.”

It was about half past ten when he lowered himself into the pool, and submerged, plunging promptly beneath the rushing surface water. In the yellow drawing-room at the house the first session of the day was still in progress, and even when the students emerged for mid-morning coffee, at eleven, the interval wouldn’t be long enough to allow them to stray. The operators by the river had the grounds to themselves. Given a less absorbing subject and a less expert persuader, there would have been truants by this time. George had half-expected two truants, as it was, but it seemed that Dominic and Tossa were doing their duty.

So there were none but official witnesses when the diver rose for the third time, breaking the surface tension in a surge of unexpected silver in the day’s first watery gleam of sun. The Braide streamed down his black rubber head and shoulders, and pulled at him viciously. George had insisted on having a line on him, in case of accidents; small river though the Braide was, it could be dangerous even to an expert when it ran as high as this. But in the issue he had needed no help. He hoisted himself ashore, black and glistening, with a lizard’s agility, and pushed up his mask.

“Got it! Half sunk in the muck down there. I hit something else, too, that I’d like to have another go at, but this is your prize.”

He unhitched it from the cord at his belt, and held it up to be seen.

Felicity hadn’t been exaggerating, after all, it was a good three inches longer than the span of her forearm and stretched fingers. The laboratory guesses weren’t far out: half an inch thick, roughly two inches wide at the business end, which still retained traces of its last coat of paint, and possibly traces of haemoglobin, too, in spite of the river water; somewhat thicker and wider where it had rested in the wards, and this central part of it was a dead ancient-iron colour, since paint couldn’t reach it, and nobody had used oil on it for years. And at the other end, a huge, coiled handle to balance its weight, decorated with a flourish of leaves. An ideal handle for grasping to strike a blow edge-on. With a thing like that you could hit out and fell an ox. And there it had hung in the wards of the gate, where Felicity had been the last to drop it home when she walked away from Lucien on Saturday afternoon, and went to set light to the fuse and fire the charge that was to blow Follymead apart. Ready and waiting for the hand that would be next to raise it, the hand that drew it out of the wards to use as a weapon of vengeance. Trees were set round in a screen between the gate and the waterside, thirty yards away; the waiting victim would see nothing.

“That’s it,” said George, “just a gate-latch, right there on the spot, waiting to be used.” The weight of it was formidable, and yet not too great for even a scholar’s arm to be able to swing it effectively. “That fills the gap. Thanks!”

“I’m going down again. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’d like to make sure while we’re on the job.”

He slid down from the bank again, feet-first into the water, and dropped from view. They were left contemplating the length of wrought iron that lay on the slippery turf between them.

“It looks straightforward enough now,” said Lockyer. “Arundale came down here pretty well in a state of shock, without thinking what he was going to do. And when he bore down on the handle, he felt the latch loose in the socket. And took it on the spur of the moment. You could say it was this thing put murder in his mind.”

“And then what?” asked George dispassionately. “It was Arundale who got his head stove in and his body slung into the river.”

“He was up against a much younger and fitter man. There was a hand-to-hand struggle, and this thing changed hands in the fight, and the boy hit out at him with it, and found he’d killed him.”

“A case of self-defence. Could be. He might still panic, get rid of the body and run. People do do such things.”

“Especially as he might not get away with a manslaughter verdict, if his misconduct with Mrs. Arundale was taken into consideration.”

“In any case,” observed George, brooding, “even if you’re being attacked, there are limits to what you’re entitled to do. Getting your enemy’s weapon away from him is one thing, bashing his head in with it when you’ve disarmed him is another. Watch it, here he comes.”

A coil of wet roped surfaced like a languid snake, and Lockyer furled in the slack. The diver broke surface in a fountain of spray, and they eased him in to the bank and leaned to help him ashore. For this time he carried something in his hands. He uncovered his face and drew in air greedily, and held up his prize triumphantly.

“Look at that! Maybe it’s nothing to do with your affair, but don’t tell me it’s proper place is in the slime down there. Or that it’s been there long, either.”

A black walking-cane, with a chased metal knob for a handle; the shaft an appropriate length for a fairly tall man, perhaps rather thicker than pure elegance would have decreed, but tapering away to a fine metal ferrule. The diver balanced it in his hand curiously. “Not so heavy. I’d say if that was just tossed in and happened to fall flat, it would go downstream. It was speared deep into the mud, ferrule down. I kicked the knob, groping for the other thing. What’s the wood – ebony?”

“It looks like it.” George took the stick from him and turned it in his hands. He rubbed with an inquisitive thumb at the metal of the ferrule, and it brightened suggestively under the friction. “I believe this is silver. Looks as if it must have come from the house.”

He took out his handkerchief, and wrapped it about the knob, which was traced all over with coiling leaves. Not much possibility of getting any prints off the thing, after it had been at the bottom of the pool, but the action was automatic. He had the knob lightly enclosed in one hand, and the other hand holding the shaft of the stick, when he felt a slight play between them, as if the handle had worked loose. Gingerly he closed his fingers and tried to move it; it would not turn, but it did shift uneasily in his hand, drawn out a fraction of an inch from its socket.

“Wait a minute! Look… look at this!”

He drew stem and knob apart, and they gave with a slightly gritty resistance. Inch by inch the long, fine blade slid into view, until he drew it completely from its sheath and held it out before them. A blue runnel of light, edged with the dulled rainbow colours of tarnish, ran down the steel like captured lightning and into the ground.

“Good lord,” said Lockyer, fascinated, “what is it?”

“A sword-stick, I suppose they’d call it. Sort of city gimmick the members of the Hellfire Club would carry and use for kicks.”

“That’s me all over,” said the diver, staring admiringly, “always a whole-hogger. You ask me for one weapon, I find you two. All zeal, Mr. Easy!”

“Well, but,” blurted Lockyer, “if Arundale brought that with him…”

They looked at each other over the thin blade, that gleamed sullenly in the sun, and down the wind went one plausible theory. The man who had had the forethought to cancel his engagements had also taken care to provide himself with a weapon. And not even a would-be murderer needs a bludgeon in his left hand when he has a sword in his right.