Flight of a Witch

Chapter VII

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The evening paper wasn’t dropped into the Felse family’s letter-box until the last edition came in at about five o’clock. Bunty Felse was alone when it came, with the tea ready, and neither husband nor son present to eat it. Dominic was always late on rugger practice afternoons, but even so he should have been home before this time. And as for George, when he was on this kind of case who could tell when she would see him?

She sat down with the paper to wait for them patiently, and Annet Beck’s face looked out at her from the front page with great, mute, disconcerting eyes, beneath the query: ‘Have you seen this girl?’

‘Anyone who remembers noticing the girl pictured above,’ said the beginning of the text more precisely, ‘with a male companion in the central or southern districts of Birmingham during last week-end, should communicate with the police.’

Bunty read it through, and in fact it was as reticent as it could well be and still be exact in conveying its purpose and its urgency. She sank her head between her hands, threading her fingers into the bush of chestnut hair that was just one shade darker than Dominic’s, and contemplated Annet long and thoughtfully. ‘A male companion,’ ‘it is believed,’ ‘helping the police in their enquiries’ – such discreet, such clinical formulae, guaranteed non-actionable. But a real girl in the middle of it, and somewhere, still hidden, a real boy, maybe no older than Dominic.

They were pretty sure of their facts, that was clear. They knew when they laid hands on the partner of Annet’s truancy they would have Jacob Worrall’s murderer. What they didn’t know, what nobody knew but Annet, was who he was. And Annet wouldn’t tell. Bunty didn’t have to wonder or ask how things were going for George now, she knew.

No one could identify him but Annet. And she wouldn’t. Why, otherwise, should they be reduced to appealing to the public for information, and displaying Annet as bait? He might be anyone. He might be anywhere. You might go down to the grocer’s on the corner and ask him for a pound of cheese, and his hands might be trembling so he could hardly control the knife. You might bump into him at a corner and put your hand on his arm to steady yourself and him as you apologised, and feel him flinch, recoiling for an instant from the dread of a more official hand on his shoulder. He might get up and give you his seat in a bus, or blare past you on a noisy motor-bike at the crossing, and snarl at you to get out of his way. He might be the young clerk from the Education Department, just unfolding the paper in the bus on his way home. He’d killed a man, and he was on the run, but only one girl could give him a face or a name.

How well did he know his Annet? Do you ever know anyone well enough to stake your life on her? When all the claims of family and society and upbringing pull the other way? If he was absolutely sure of her loyalty, there was a hope that he wouldn’t try to approach her at all, that he’d just take his plunder and make a quiet getaway while he was anonymous, leaving Annet to carry the load alone. Could she love that kind of youth? Plenty of fine girls have, owned Bunty ruefully, why not Annet? It might be the best thing, because if he started running he would almost inevitably lose his nerve and run too fast, and just one slip would bring the hunt after him. Somewhere away from here, where he couldn’t double back to remove, in his last despair, the one really dangerous witness.

But if he couldn’t be sure of her, if he feared, as he well might, that under pressure she might break down at last and betray him, then from this moment on Annet’s life was in great danger. If you’re frightened to death, you stop loving, you stop thinking or feeling but in one desperate plane of reference, you fight for your life, and kill whatever threatens it. These, at least, thought Bunty, must be the reactions of an unstable young creature, not yet mature, the kind of boy who could have committed that brutal, opportunist crime in the shop in Bloome Street. The commonplace of today, the current misdemeanour, cosh the shopkeeper, clear the till, run; quick money to pay for this and future sprees, in three easy movements. It happens all the time. Preferably old men or old women in back-street shops, because they’re so often solitary. No, the boy who did that wouldn’t keep his love intact for long when it was his life or Annet’s.

Bunty got up suddenly and went to the telephone in the hall. It wasn’t so much that she was really anxious about her offspring; just a sudden unwillingness to be alone with this line of thought any longer, and a feeling that company would be helpful. It might even help her to think. How could she leave alone a problem that was tormenting George?

‘Eve? You haven’t got Dominic there, have you?’

‘I did have, sweetie, for about ten minutes, but that was half an hour ago. They blew in and went into a huddle in the corner, and then they up and made a phone call, and went off again. They brought the paper in with them. I did wonder,’ said Eve Mallindine, resigning the idea reluctantly, ‘if they’d come to you. They never said a word. And when I looked at the “News” – well, you’ll have seen it.’

‘Yes,’ said Bunty, and pondered, jutting a dubious lip. ‘Eve – they were where they said they were, surely? Over the week-end? They couldn’t, either of them—’

‘No,’ said Eve, firmly and serenely, ‘they couldn’t. Neither of them. Not in any circumstances.’

‘No, of course not! My God, I must be going round the bend. It’s such hell growing up, that’s all. And I’m afraid to think we’ve got angels instead of boys – such arrogance! And there was the first time, for Miles – don’t shoot me down in flames, but it did happen.’

‘Listen, honey,’ said Eve’s bright, confident voice, for once subdued into a wholly private and unmocking tenderness, ‘it didn’t happen. Not even that once. Don’t tell anyone else. I promised Miles I wouldn’t ask him anything, or tell anything, and I wouldn’t now if we weren’t all in a pretty sticky situation. Miles never tried to run away anywhere, with or without Annet Beck. So you can put that out of your mind.’

‘But they were picked up at the station,’ said Bunty blankly, ‘with two cases. And two tickets to London.’

‘So they were. Two cases. But both of them were Annet’s.’

‘Both of them? But Bill would have known! For goodness’ sake! He took Annet home with one case, and brought Miles back with the other. Do you mean to tell me he doesn’t know the family luggage?’

Eve said, with curiosity, wonder, and not a little envy: ‘You know, George must be a tidy-minded man, to inspire such confidence in husbands. Bill?’ A brief, affectionate hoot of laughter patted his name on the head and reduced him to size. ‘Bill doesn’t know his own shirts. Every time we dig the cases out of the attic to pack, he swears he’s never seen half of them before. “When did we buy this thing, darling?” “I don’t remember this – did we pinch it somewhere?” I could filch a tie out of his drawer and give it him for his birthday, and he wouldn’t know.’

‘But how, then? I mean—’

‘I don’t know, I never asked. When Bill dropped on them and jumped to conclusions, Miles arranged it that way, that’s all. And she let him. I got the case back to Annet afterwards. I took advantage of Regina Blacklock’s car to do it, but she never knew, and you knew Braidie, he was so correct he was stone-deaf to everything but what he was supposed to hear. It was very easy, I just telephoned to Annet at the hall, and asked her to get Braidie to call here when he took her home, some day when her parents would be out. So I know what I’m talking about, my love. I’d thought the poor lamb had bought it specially for the jaunt, you see, and I started to unpack it, out of pure kindness of heart and helpfulness. Thank God Bill wasn’t there! All Annet’s best frocks! You should have seen his face! After he’d covered up for her so nobly, and then to see me meddling. I tell you, I had the honour of all mothers in my hands.’

‘I’ll be cheering in a minute,’ said Bunty, swallowing a sound that indicated other possibilities. ‘All right, I’m grateful, you preserved our reputation most nobly. But if you expect me to live up to your record, and not ask questions—’

‘Wouldn’t be any good, darling, I don’t know any more answers.’

‘Not even who the second ticket was for?’

‘That least of all. Because Miles doesn’t know it, either.’

‘Then I give up! Why should he—’

But she stopped there, because there could be only one reason, and it made her stand back and look again at young Miles, with sympathy and respect, and a sudden flurry of consternation and dismay. If he was reaching after maturity at this rate, without any childish desire for acknowledgement or payment or praise, how far behind could Dominic be? She didn’t want them men too soon, she needed a little time yet to get used to it, even though the symptoms had begun already so long ago. She caught her breath in a rueful giggle, and said: ‘Eve, do you suppose there’s an evening class we could join – on growing old gracefully?’

She expected something profane and cheering from Eve in return, but there was blank silence, as though her friend had withdrawn altogether and cut off the connection. On Bunty, too, the abrupt chill of realisation descended, freezing her where she stood.

‘Bunty—’ said Eve’s voice, slowly and delicately.

‘Yes, I’m still here. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Eve. ‘Great minds!’

‘Could it be the same person? Since it wasn’t Miles, that time – could it be? Then anything Miles knows – anything! – may be vital. Anything she ever said to him then, a name or something short of a name. Anything he noticed about her. Anyone he saw her with. She relied on him, she let him help her, she may have trusted him with at least a clue.’

‘No,’ said Eve, her voice anxious and still. ‘Miles doesn’t know. He – whoever he may be – was always a secret, from Miles, from everybody, just like this time. Terribly like this time, now you come to mention it.’

‘But there might be something that he does know, without even realising it. Eve, he must talk to George.’

‘You took the words out of my mouth. Call me if he shows up there. And if he comes back here,’ said Eve with grim resolution, ‘I’ll see to it that he comes round to your place and gets the whole story off his chest like a sensible man – if I have to bring him along by the ear!’

No one, however, had to bring Miles along by the ear. About seven o’clock Bunty looked out as she drew the living-room curtains, and saw them striding briskly and purposefully up the garden path towards the front door, Dominic in the lead. Not merely two young, slender shapes, but three. Somewhere along the way, Bunty thought at first, they’d picked up a third sixth-former who had an uneasy conscience about something he knew and hadn’t confided; but when she ran to let them in, and they came into the light of the hall, she saw that the third was Tom Kenyon.

Of all people in the world she would least have expected them to run to him for advice. He was too perilously near to them, and yet set apart by the invisible barrier that segregates teacher from pupils; too old to be accepted as a contemporary, and too young to have any of the menace or reassurance of a father-figure. They liked him well enough, with reservations, these hard-to-please, deflationary young gentlemen, even if they had christened him Brash ’Arry, jumping to conclusions about the middle initial H on his brief-case; but to go to him in their anxieties was quite another matter.

‘Hallo!’ said Bunty, from long habit reducing even the abnormal to normality. ‘Come in! You’re in time for coffee, if you’d like some.’

‘I’m sorry if we look like an invasion,’ said Tom, with a brief and shadowed smile, ‘but this may be urgent. Is George home yet? We’ve got to see him.’

‘Yes, come along in.’ She threw the door wide and passed them through. Her son went by with a single preoccupied glance of apology for his lateness. Miles, always meticulous, said a dutiful: ‘Good evening, Mrs Felse!’ Tom marshalled them before him with an air of dominant responsibility that made Bunty smile, until she remembered the occasion that had almost certainly brought them here. ‘Visitors for you, darling!’ she said, and closed the door on them and went to reassure Eve.

George had his slippered feet on the low mantelpiece, and his coffee-cup in the hearth by his chair. He looked up at their entrance with tired eyes, not yet past surprise at this procession.

‘Hallo, Kenyon, what is this? Are you having trouble with these two?’

Two reproving frowns deplored this tone. Tom Kenyon didn’t even notice.

‘They came to me after they’d seen the paper tonight. It seems they’d been comparing notes and putting two and two together, and they came to the conclusion they had some information and a theory that they ought to confide to somebody in authority. Your boy naturally wanted to come straight to you, but Miles preferred to try it out on me first, before bothering you.’

That was one way of putting it. He knew very well why, of course. At first startled and disarmed by their telephone call, he had been tempted to believe that he had done even better than he had supposed during this first term, and established himself as the natural confessor to whom his seniors would turn in trouble. But he had too much good sense to let his vanity run away with him for long. A careful glance at the circumstances, and he knew a better reason. Neither of them would have dreamed of coming to him, if he had not betrayed himself so completely to Miles in that one brief interview. If there was one thing of which Miles was quite certain, after that, it was that Brash ’Arry would be guided in this crisis not by pious thoughts of the good of society or his moral duty, but by one simple consideration: what he felt to be in Annet Beck’s best interests. If he listened to their arguments, and then gave it as his opinion that they must go to the police, to the police they would go, satisfied that they were doing the best thing for Annet.

And he needn’t think he had the advantage of them as a result of this consultation, either; what it meant, he told himself ruefully but honestly, was that they had discovered in him weaknesses which could be exploited. And boys can be ruthless; he knew, it wasn’t so long since he’d been one. They might, on the other hand, be capable of astonishing magnanimity, too. There was stuff in Miles that kept surprising him; his address in this crisis, the direct way he approached his confession, without hesitation or emphasis, the way the ‘sir’ vanished from his tongue, and the greater, not less, respect and assurance that replaced it. Maybe there were things this boy wouldn’t use even against a schoolmaster, distresses he wouldn’t exploit, even to ease his own.

‘I didn’t wait to hear all they have to say, but I’ve heard enough. I said we ought to come straight to you, and tell at once. So here we are.’

Had his own motives, after all, been quite as single and disinterested as they had calculated? Anything that might uncover the identity of Annet’s lover he would naturally bring to George at a run, because it might remove the danger that threatened Annet’s life. And remove with it, prodded the demon at the back of his mind, the unseen rival, the tenant of that tenacious heart of hers, leaving the way free for another incumbent. He was afraid to look too closely at this dark reverse of his motive, for fear it should prove to be the main impulse that moved him. My God, but it was complicated!

‘Sit down!’ said George, getting up to pour coffee. ‘All right, Miles, we’re listening. What’s on your mind?’

‘I’ve been taking it for granted, of course,’ said Miles directly, ‘that I’m on the list of suspects, until you check up on our week-end. Because of the last time. I haven’t asked Mr Kenyon if he knows about that—’

‘I do,’ said Tom.

‘—but I know you do, of course. And this is going to sound as if I’m just trying to slide out from under, I realise that, but I can’t help it.’

‘Don’t let that worry you,’ said George. ‘We’ve already checked, you are out from under. We know where you were on Saturday evening, and what you were doing. Just go ahead.’

‘Oh, good, that makes it easier. You see,’ said Miles, raising sombre brown eyes to George’s face in a straight, unwavering stare, ‘I never did plan to go away anywhere, that last time, it wasn’t what it looked like at all. I’ve never said anything before, and I wouldn’t now, except that somebody did plan to go away with her then, and it might – I don’t know, but it might – be the same person who took her away this time. There’s been one murder,’ said Miles with shattering simplicity, ‘and there may well be another. Of Annet herself. If we don’t find him.’

The ‘we’ was significant. He watched George’s face, unblinking. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘That’s right. Go on.’

‘So we have to find him. And the devil of it is that I didn’t try to find out anything about him when I had the chance. I never asked any questions. She asked me to help her to get away. She wanted to go to London. I knew she wasn’t happy. I knew they didn’t want her to go, and it was wrong, in a way, to help her to leave them high and dry. But she asked me, and I did it. She said her parents would be out when she was supposed to go for her piano lesson in the village that Friday afternoon, and she’d have her cases packed, and would I fetch her and take her to the station at Comerbourne. And I said yes. I’d only just passed my test about three weeks before, I wasn’t supposed to touch the car yet unless Dad was with me. But I said yes, anyhow. And I asked her, did she want me to get her ticket for her, so that she could slip in without being noticed at the booking office. And she said it was two tickets she wanted, not one. Singles.’

He had paled perceptibly, and for once he lowered his eyes, frowning down at his own hands clenched tightly in his lap. But only for a moment, while he re-mustered his forces. ‘And I booked them for her,’ he said, ‘the day before she planned to leave.’

‘It sounds,’ said George, carefully avoiding all emphasis, ‘as though she made fairly shameless use of you.’

‘No! No, you don’t know! It wasn’t like that at all. She was perfectly honest with me. I could have said no. I did what I wanted to do. I helped her, and I didn’t ask her anything. If she needed to go, as badly as that, I was for her. She didn’t owe me anything. And it was for me to choose what I’d do, and I did choose. I booked the tickets for her, and the next day I skipped my last period, and went down to where Dad leaves the car, just round the corner from his office, in the yard at the back. You can’t see it from his window, I knew that, and I had the spare key. I fetched Annet and her two cases from Fairford. Her parents were due home in half an hour, but they wouldn’t expect her back from her class until six, so she had a couple of hours’ grace. I took her to the station. We were a good twenty minutes early, but the train backs in well ahead of time. She said he would get on the train independently, with only a platform ticket, and then join her on board. So we went in together when there was a slack moment, and I took a platform ticket from the machine to get out again. We wanted both London tickets punched normally, you see, no queries, nothing to wonder about at all.’

‘And you never asked her outright who he was? Or even looked around to see if anyone was casing the pair of you? Anyone who might be the boy she was going to meet?’

‘No,’ said Miles, and flamed and paled again in an instant, remembering stresses within himself that had cost him more than his dignity was prepared to admit.

‘All right! This isn’t a matter of betrayal now,’ said George practically, ‘it’s Annet’s safety. I believe you didn’t ask, I believe you didn’t look for him. Leave it at that for now. Go on.’

‘Well, you know how it ended. Or rather you don’t, quite. I meant to have the car back in the yard before Dad ever missed it, and ninety-nine days out of a hundred I could have done it, but that was the hundredth. He had a call from a client who was breaking a train journey for one night at the Station Hotel, and had some bit of business he wanted to clear up quickly. And of course there was no car. He thought it had been stolen – there were several taken around that time, if you remember, locked and everything – some gang going round with a pocketful of keys. Anyhow, he reported it to the police, so after that there wasn’t going to be any hushing up the affair, naturally. And then he took a taxi across to the station, and the first thing he saw was his own car parked down the station approach. Well, of course he tipped off the constable from the corner to keep an eye on it, and he came down to the booking-office and the ticket gate to ask if anyone had seen it driven up and parked there. They know him – everybody does. And of course—’

Miles hunched his shoulders under the remembered load.

‘That was it! There we were on the platform, with two suitcases, and I had the two tickets in my hand. And he was furious already about the car. I didn’t blame him. Actually he was damn’ decent, considering. But after a bit of publicity like that it was all up with Annet’s plans, anyhow. We just let it ride, let him think what he was thinking. We didn’t have to consult about it, there wasn’t anything else to do. There’d be fuss enough about me, why drag the other fellow into it? All Annet could save out of it was her own secret. Dad said, back to the car, please, and back to the car we went like lambs. He drove out to Fairford, and handed Annet out of the car, and then he looked at the two cases, and neither of them meant a thing to him, but then he never remembers the colour of his own from one year to another. Mummy buys them for him, for presents, when the old ones are getting too battered. He wouldn’t notice. So I handed him one of them, it didn’t matter which, and gave Annet the item with one eye, and she caught on at once. Mummy got the other back to her, afterwards.’

‘You mean your mother knew?’ said Tom, startled, his respect for Eve’s unwomanly discretion soaring.

‘Oh, yes! I don’t think it would have taken her long to get the hang of it, anyhow, because Mummy does notice things. But she opened the case that same night, meaning to put my things away, so the cat was well and truly out of the bag.’

‘And she never said a word! Not even to your father?’ asked George.

‘No, she never did. She could have got me out of some of the muck, of course, but then we’d have had to leave Annet deeper in it, you see, and that was the last thing I wanted. I was all right, in any case, my parents never really panic. And at least nobody was pestering Annet about who, or how, or why, the way things were, because they thought they knew. If somebody’d crossed me out they’d have begun on her in earnest. Mummy let me play it my way, and that way there weren’t any questions. But you see,’ said Miles, contemplating his involuntary guilt with set jaw and dour eyes, ‘that that makes what’s happened since partly my doing. I stood in for him, and he stayed a secret. She still had him, they could try again. This time she didn’t ask anyone for help, they didn’t risk trains or places where there were people who might know them. And this time they pulled it off, if only for a week-end. A trial run for the real flight, maybe. Only this time,’ he said with the flat finality of certainty, ‘he ran out of funds and killed a man.’

‘It doesn’t necessarily follow,’ said George cautiously, ‘though I admit it’s a strong probability.’

‘I think it does follow. I think if there’d been any doubt, Annet would have spoken. As soon as she knew about the murder, she seems to have known whose life was at stake. Why else should she close up like this?’

‘Even Annet could be wrong,’ said George. ‘She never gave you any clue? You never noticed anything? Saw her with anyone special?’

Miles shook his head decidedly. ‘Maybe I was trying not to, I don’t know. I’ve tried all this evening to dredge up something that might be useful. But what I have is only deduction. He was from somewhere round here. That’s certain, because of the tickets. She wasn’t lying to me about that, I’m sure, he was going to board the train in Comerbourne. That time they were bound for London, this time it was Birmingham. That all ties in. She’s never been away from Comerford for long, it’s far more likely she’d get involved with someone here, someone she saw often, someone close at home. And someone hopelessly unsuitable,’ he said, watching George’s face steadily. ‘Even more unsuitable than I am now. I wasn’t warned off until after that fiasco. This one, whoever he is, would never have been allowed near her at all. That’s plain. There was a young fellow who drives long-distance lorries. Good-looking chap who danced—’

‘We know about him,’ said George.

‘Not that I know anything against him, mind you, only that they wouldn’t even have considered him for her. Or there’s a clerk from Langfords’ drawing-office, who used to make trips to London for the firm sometimes. He took her out once or twice, but there are tales about him, and her mother didn’t like him, and soon put a stop to it. Someone like that fits the picture. Someone who travels a fair amount and knows his way around. Because she doesn’t really. With all her assurance, and everything, she’s a milk-white innocent.’

The urgent, practical, purposeful level of his voice never changed, but suddenly it was sharp with an unbearable concentration of beauty and longing, as though he had charmed Annet into the middle of their close circle. There passed from one to another of them the electric tension of awareness, and every face was taut and still, charged with private anguish. Tom stared sightlessly before him with eyes that had reversed their vision, and were struggling with the uncontrollable apparitions within him. Dominic watched Miles protectively and jealously, and kept his lips closed very firmly upon his personal preoccupations. George saw them momentarily isolated hopelessly one from another. Loneliness is the human condition; we grasp at alleviations where we can find them, but most of the time we have to get by with tenuous illusions of communion. Only families, the lucky ones, and friends, the rare and gifted ones, sometimes grow together and inhabit shared worlds too securely for dispossession.

‘And then,’ pursued Miles, too intent upon his hunt to be aware of any checks and dismays, even his own, ‘there’s the matter of her reappearance. Nobody seems to have realised how odd that is, and how suggestive.’

‘And what do you know about her reappearance? There was nothing in the paper about that.’

‘I know, but Mr Kenyon began asking us some pretty significant questions the day after half-term, about where we’d been – about where I’d been,’ amended Miles more precisely, ‘over the week-end, and about the cart-road at the back of the Hallowmount. And Mrs Beck had been on the telephone to my mother, fishing about my whereabouts, too. So we knew there was something wrong at Fairford that I should naturally be blamed for unless I had an alibi, and that the track behind the Hallowmount had something to do with it. It had to be Annet, or why get after me? But Mr Kenyon said, when I asked him, that Annet was safe at home. So why all this about the road at the back of the hill, unless they knew she’d gone or come back that way? But that’s not all. The grave-vine’s got it now, with trimmings. Putting all the bits together, and adding what they fancy, as usual. They’re saying Annet was found wandering on the Hallowmount at night, and swore she hadn’t been anywhere, that she’d only been for a walk and was on her way home. They say she’d been lost to the world for five days under the Hallowmount, like those village girls in the eighteenth century, and remembered nothing about it. They say it in an ambiguous sort of way, if you know what I mean, half believing it really happened, half-sniggering over it as a tall tale invented to cover what she was really up to all that time. Round here they’re expert in having it both ways.’ He looked from George to Tom, and back to George again. ‘Is it true?’

‘Substantially, yes. Mr Kenyon saw her climb over the Hallowmount on Thursday, and he and her father went up there on Tuesday night, and met her just coming over the crest.’

‘And she did tell that tale? Pretending she knew nothing about the five days in between?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom.

‘Then she did it for a pretty urgent and immediate reason. Dom and I have been thinking about this. Nobody knows better than I do,’ said Miles with authority, ‘how Annet behaves in a jam like that. I’ve been through it with her once. She never told a single lie. She walked in at home again with a ruthless sort of dignity, told what she pleased of the truth, and wouldn’t say another word. She didn’t let me out of it, because I’d shown her I didn’t want that. But she never admitted to anything against me, either. She’d have done the same again. That was what she meant to do, I’m certain. If you’re thinking she cooked up that tall story as an alibi for the week-end, and turned up on the Hallowmount to give colour to it, you’re way off target. No, the boot’s on the other foot. She told it because she was caught there.’

‘What you’re saying, then,’ said George intently, ‘is that Annet was there on the hill for some private and sound reason of her own, and was taken completely by surprise when she came over the crest, intending to go straight home, and ran full tilt into her father and Kenyon.’

‘Exactly. And she did the best she could with it on the spur of the moment. She’d have done better if she’d had time to think, but she didn’t, she had to act instantly. So she fell back on the old tales, not to cover her lost weekend, but to distract attention from what she was doing there, at that moment.’

‘Go on,’ said George, after an instant of startling silence that set them all quivering like awakening sleepers. ‘What do you think, in that case, she was doing there?’

‘She could,’ said Dominic, out of the long stillness and quietness he had preserved in his corner, ‘have been hiding something, for instance. Something neither of them wanted to risk taking home with them.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as two thousand pounds worth of small jewellery, and what was left of the money after they’d paid their bills.’

‘No!’ protested Tom Kenyon loudly, rigid in his chair. ‘That’s as good as saying she was a party to the crime. I don’t believe it. It’s impossible.’

‘No, sir, I didn’t mean that. She needn’t have known at all. Suppose he gave her a box, or a small case, or something, and said, here, you keep this safe, it’s all I’ve managed to save, it’s our capital. Suppose he told her: Put it somewhere where we can get at it easily when we’ve made our plans, and are ready to get out of here together. He’d know what was really in it, and how completely it could give him away if it was found, but she wouldn’t, she’d only think he was afraid of his family prying, and getting nosey about his savings, maybe even pinching from them if it happens to be that sort of family. And it easily could. He may be in lodgings, he may have a father who keeps a close watch on him, or scrounging brothers, there could be a dozen reasons why it would be safer to trust to a hiding-place in the footways of the old lead mines, or in one of the hollow trees up there, than to risk prying eyes at home. She wouldn’t know how urgent it really was, but it would make sense even to her. And you see the one solid advantage of putting it somewhere outside rather than having it at either home – if by bad luck it was found, there’d be nothing to connect it directly with him. She wouldn’t question. She’d do as he asked, and think no wrong until you sprang the murder on her, two days later. Then she’d understand.’

‘In that case, why didn’t he persuade her to run at once – permanently – instead of coming home at all? He had the girl, he had the money. Why not make off with them both while he had the chance?’

‘Because he was comfortably sure there was nothing in the world to connect him with the murder, and to run without reason just at that time would have been the quickest way of inviting suspicion. Wouldn’t it?’ challenged Dominic earnestly, brilliant eyes clinging to his father’s face.

‘You’re forgetting,’ said Tom, ‘the roaming Romeo who tried to pick her up.’ He caught himself up too late, and met George’s eye in embarrassed dismay. ‘I’m sorry, probably I shouldn’t have mentioned that. It hasn’t been published, has it?’

‘It hadn’t, but since we seem to have embarked on a full-scale review, it may as well be.’ He recounted the episode briefly. “There’s certainly a point there. When he heard of that incident he’d know there was a possible witness who’d be able to tie in Annet, at least, to the scene and time of the murder. It isn’t difficult to give a recognisable description of Annet. It would be impossible not to recognise any decent photograph of her, once you’d seen her at close quarters.’

‘But she wouldn’t know there was any urgent reason to warn him that a witness existed, because she knew of no crime. And without an urgent reason,’ said Miles with absolute and haughty certainty, ‘she wouldn’t say a word to him about a thing like that.’

‘Not tell him, when she’d been accosted by a street-corner lout?’

The very assumption of intimate knowledge of her, even at this extremity of her distress and need, could prick both these unguarded lovers into irritation and jealousy. Kenyon had allowed himself to slip into the indulgent schoolmaster voice that brought Miles’s hackles up, Miles was staring back at him with the aloof and supercilious face that covers the modern sixth-former’s wilder agonies. The minute action and reaction of pain quivered between them, and made them contemporaries, whether they liked it or not. Dominic’s very acute and intelligent eyes studied them both from beneath lowered lashes, and what he felt he kept to himself. But the air was charged with sympathy and antagonism in inseparable conflict, and for a moment they all flinched from the too strident discord of the clash.

‘No,’ said Miles, more gently but no less positively. ‘It was a thing she wouldn’t confide. Especially not to him.’

‘Well, if you’re right about that, he’d have no idea that there was going to be anyone to give a description of either of them. He knew he’d left no traces, he thought he was quite clear. Every reason why he should hope to lie low for a reasonable time, and let the robbery in Birmingham blow over. Yes, that makes sense,’ agreed George. ‘It seems possible that he may not even have known, at first, that the old man was dead. Most probably he hit and grabbed and ran, and left him, as he thought, merely knocked out.’

‘And even when he knew it was murder, there was nothing, as far as he knew, to connect him with it. The obvious thing to do was come inconspicuously home again, and go back to work, and act normally. Hide the money and the jewellery,’ pursued Dominic, returning to his trail tenaciously, ‘or get Annet to hide them, somewhere where naturally he hoped they’d stay safely hidden, but where at any rate they couldn’t incriminate him any more than anyone else if they were discovered. But now it’s gone past that. There was a witness he didn’t know about, and Annet has been identified. The case is tied firmly to Annet and the man who spent the week-end with her. And only Annet’s resistance stands between him and a murder charge. That’s the situation he finds himself in now.’

‘There’s another point.’ Miles frowned down at the hands that had tightened almost imperceptibly on each other at every repetition of her name, and carefully, painfully disengaged them. ‘Supposing this is a good guess of ours, and she was entrusted with the business of hiding the money, then of course they may have agreed on the place beforehand. It may even be a place they’ve used for other things before now. But it may not. Supposing nobody but Annet knows where the stolen jewellery and money is now? He knows his life depends on her keeping silent. If he gets to the point of being terrified into running for it, he can’t even get his loot and run without contacting Annet. And if he does—’

‘He can’t,’ George said reassuringly. ‘We’ve got a constant guard on her, inside the house and out. The degree of her danger hasn’t escaped us. And we don’t intend to take our eyes off her. You can rely on that.’

‘Yes—’ And he was grateful, a pale smile pierced the preoccupied stillness of his face for a moment. ‘But he’s got nothing to lose now unless he can get the means to make his break. And if he can find a way to her somehow, he’s liable to remember that she— that nobody else can identify him—’

Miles carefully moistened lips suddenly too dry to finish the sentence.

‘Yes, I realise all that. But I’ve got a man outside the house, Miles, and a policewoman inside with her. And however desperate he may be, we’re dealing with only one man. The essence of his situation is that he’s alone.’

‘Not quite alone,’ said Miles almost inaudibly. ‘He’s got one person who might help him to get to her, if ever you so much as turn your back for a minute.’

George stood off and looked down at him heavily, and said never a word in reply to that. It was Tom Kenyon, still fretting against the arrogance of the boy’s certainty, who demanded: ‘Who’s that?’

‘Annet,’ said Miles.

They had talked themselves into dead silence. The two boys sat with the width of the room between them, braced and still, their eyes following with unwavering attention every quiver of George’s brooding face, while he told over again within his mind the points they had made, and owned their substance. They had good need to be afraid for Annet, and very good reason to look again and again at the looming, significant shape of that long hog-back of rock and rough pasture that linked her with and divided her from her lover. Was it necessarily true that Annet had had a particular purpose in being on the Hallowmount that night of her return? Wasn’t it simply her road back? Wasn’t it natural enough that they should use the same route returning as departing? She wouldn’t be afraid of the Hallowmount in the dark. But in that case, according to Miles, she wouldn’t have troubled to cover herself and her movements with that fantastic story, even when she was taken by surprise on top of the hill. She drew her veil of deception because she had something positive and precise to hide. Who should know better than Miles?

But even if she had indeed been entrusted with the hiding of the plunder on her way home, was it likely that she had put it somewhere unknown to her partner? Possible, at a stretch, but certainly not likely. What appeared to George every moment more probable was that they had some hiding-place already established between them, and frequently used, their letter-box, their private means of communication, accessible from both sides of the mountain without difficulty and without making oneself conspicuous. Given such a cache, tested and found reliable from long use, it would not even occur to them to hide their treasure anywhere else. And it would be the most natural thing in the world for Annet to undertake the job of depositing it, if the spot was directly on her way home. The boy had his motor-bike to manage, and his own family to manipulate at home; and by consent, so it seemed, they made use of the Hallowmount as the watershed of their lives, and the act of crossing it alone had become a rite. It was the barrier between their real and their ideal worlds, between the secret life they shared and the everyday life in which their paths never touched, or never as lovers. It was the hollow way into the timeless dream-place, as surely as if the earth had opened and drawn them within.

What was certain was that they had between them a treasure to hide. What was likely was that they had a place proved safe by long usage, in which to hide it. What was left to question was whether it was still there. Up to the appearance of the evening paper, probably he had no reason to see any urgency in its recovery, and every reason to avoid going near it. But now?

For some hours now he had known how closely he was hunted. Frightened, inexperienced, unable to confide in or rely on anyone but himself, how long would it take him to make up his mind? Or how long to panic? He might well have retrieved the money already. But he might not. And whether they were justified in all these deductions or not, there was nothing to be lost by keeping a watch on the Hallowmount, in case he did betray himself by making for his hoard. Heaven knew they had no other leads to him, except the mute girl in Fairford.

Price wouldn’t thank him for a chilly, solitary night patrolling the border hills, but anything was worth trying. George excused himself, and went to the telephone. When he came back into the room none of them had moved. They all looked up at him expectantly.

‘I’m putting a man on watch overnight,’ said George, ‘in case he goes to recover it during the dark hours. You may very well be right about it being hidden there, somewhere on the hill. Night’s the most likely time for him to go and fetch it, if by any chance he does know where to look, but covering the ground by daylight won’t be so easy. The last thing I want to do is put him off, and the sight of a plainclothes man parading the top of the Hallowmount would hardly be very reassuring. And man-power,’ he owned, dubiously gnawing a knuckle, ‘isn’t our long suit.’

‘We could provide you with boy-power,’ said Tom Kenyon unexpectedly. ‘Plenty of it, and it might be a pretty good substitute. Miss Darrill’s taking out the school Geographical Association on one of their occasional free-for-alls tomorrow. They were having a field-day on Cleave, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t just as well be switched to the Hallowmount. It’s geologically interesting, it would carry conviction, all right. And if we deploy about forty boys all over the hill it will make dead certain nobody can hunt for anything there without being spotted. As well as giving us three a chance to do some hunting on our own. If you gentlemen,’ said Tom, looking his two sixth-formers in the eye with respectful gravity, ‘wouldn’t mind joining in for the occasion?’

They had stiffened and brightened, and looked back at him as at a contemporary, measuring and eager, only a little wary.

‘If it would be any help?’ said Miles, casting a questioning glance at George. ‘And if you think we should involve Miss Darrill? We should have to tell her why.’

‘It would give me a day,’ said George, ‘the most important day, the day he’s likely to break. He knows now how he stands. Of course Miss Darrill must know what’s in the wind, but nobody else, mind. And if she does consent, she’s to do nothing whatever except what she was going out to do, take her members on a field expedition and keep them occupied in a perfectly normal way. All I need is that you should be there, and prevent him from getting near any possible hiding-place on the hill. If he’s collected his loot already, it can’t be helped. But if he hasn’t, that’s our only working lead to him.’

‘Jane will do it,’ said Tom positively. ‘And what if we should find the stuff ourselves? What do we do?’

‘You leave it where it is, but don’t let the spot out of your sight. I’m going to have to be in Birmingham part of the day, but before the daylight goes I’ll be ready to relieve you. Can you hold the fort until then?’

‘Yes, until you come, whenever that is.’ It was the only way he had of helping Annet. She might not be grateful, she might hate him for it, but there was no other way.

‘Good! I’ll try to be back in the station by four-thirty. Will you call me there then? If anything breaks earlier, I’ll get word to you as soon as I usefully can.’

‘I’ll do that. And may I call Jane Darrill now? Better give her what warning we can, if we’re upsetting her bus arrangements.’

He called her, and the light, assured, faintly amused voice that answered him manifested no surprise. Curious that he should be able to hear in it, over the telephone, wry overtones of reserve and doubt he had never noticed in it in their daily encounters.

‘That means switching tea to somewhere in Comerford,’ she said, sighing. ‘There won’t be time to take them out to the Border. And what do you suppose the Elliots will do with the provisions laid in for forty hungry boys?’

‘I didn’t think about that,’ he said, dismayed. ‘Well, if you can’t do it, of course—’

‘Who said I couldn’t do it? Twenty-four hours notice is required only for the impossible. Don’t worry, I live here, I can fix tea, all right. By the way, who’s asking me to do this, you or the police?’

‘Me,’ he said simply, without even the affectation of correctness.

‘Just as long as we know,’ said Jane, a shade dryly. ‘All right, it’s on.’

She hung up the receiver, and left him troubled by tensions newly discovered in himself, when he had thought that Annet had exhausted all his resources of feeling and experience. He wondered, too, as he went back to report to George in the living-room, why he should feel ashamed, but he had no leisure to indulge his desire to examine the more obscure recesses of his own mind. There had been, throughout, only one person who really mattered, and for the first time in his life it was not himself.

‘That’s that,’ he said. ‘It’s arranged. I think we’d better call it a day now, if we’re going to be on patrol between us all day tomorrow. Come on, Miles, I’ll run you home.’

In the hall he hung back and let the boys go out into the chill of the night ahead of him. There was still something he had to ask George. He could not remember ever feeling so responsible for any boy in his charge as he did now for Miles; the act of confiding had drawn them closer than he found quite comfortable, and probably the boy was chafing, too.

‘It’s definite, isn’t it?’ he asked in a low voice, as they emerged on the doorstep. ‘What you said about young Mallindine? They were up there in Snowdonia the whole time?’

‘Quite definite. We’ve already checked on their weekend.’ George remembered the mental clip over the ear that was in store for Dominic when the time was ripe, and smiled faintly in the dark. The two boys were talking in low tones, out there beside the Mini, small, taut, tired voices studiously avoiding any show of concern with the things that really filled their minds. ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re in the clear.’

‘I shouldn’t think you’ve ever been so glad to cross off your prime suspect,’ said Tom, feeling his own heart lift perceptibly, even in its passionate preoccupation with that other hapless young creature for whom there was no such relief.

‘Well, he wasn’t that, exactly, he was rather down the list, as a matter of fact. Though as it turns out,’ said George with soft deliberation, ‘we’ve lost Number One as well.’

‘You have? Who—?’ But perhaps he wasn’t allowed to ask; it was all too easy to assume that goodwill entitled you to the confidence of the authorities. ‘Sorry, I take that back. Naturally you can’t very well talk about it.’

‘Oh, in this case I think I could.’ George cast one brief glance at him along his shoulder, and saw the young, good-looking, self-confident face paler and more thoughtful than usual, but unshakable in innocence and secure as a rock. ‘Number One was an obvious case for investigation. In close contact with her daily, then clean away from here for the week-end just as she vanished. Involved closely in her reappearance, too, as if he knew where to look for her, and was interested in creating the atmosphere for her return. Anxious to be around when I began to ask questions, very anxious to know the odds. And falling over himself to point out to me indications that someone else had been on the scene.’

Tom was staring back at him blankly, searching his mind in all the wrong directions, and still quite unable to see this eligible lover anywhere in the case.

‘But there wasn’t anyone. The trouble from the beginning was that there was no one in close contact with her like that—’

‘No one?’ said George with a hollow smile. ‘Yes, there was this one fellow. Right age, right type, and rubbing shoulders with her every day. You mean to say you never noticed him? But we’ve checked up on his movements all the week-end, too, and he’s well and truly out of it. He went home like a lamb, just as he said he was going too, and he was in a theatre with another girl when Jacob Worrall was killed. For God’s sake!’ said George between irritation and respect, ‘do you want me to tell you what they saw?’

Then it came, the full realisation, like a weight falling upon Tom and flattening the breath out of him. He froze in incredulous shock, heels braced into the gravel, staring great-eyed through the dark and struggling for words, confounded by this plain possibility which had never once occurred to him. What sort of complacent fool had he been? He stood off now and looked at himself from arm’s-length, with another man’s eyes; and that, too, was a new experience to him.

‘You mean to say you never realised? Why do you suppose I asked Doctor Thorpe to stay with Annet, that night, until my man came to keep watch on her? Who else knew at that time that we were on to her? Who else could have known that she was a threat to him? Did you think I was protecting her from her father? You weren’t a very likely murderer in yourself,’ said George gently, propelling the stricken young man along the path towards the waiting boys, ‘and you could hardly have been her partner in that first attempt at flight, six months ago, that’s true. But even now it isn’t by any means certain that the man we’re looking for is the same person, it’s merely a fair probability. And on circumstantial evidence alone, until Miss MacLeod put you clean out of the reckoning today, you were undoubtedly Number One.’