Seeing is Believing

Twelve

The clock ticked loudly.

"I wonder," Courtney said aloud.

Guesses, all without shape or reason, drifted in his mind. The atmosphere of the kitchen was warm and damp, with a prevalent ghost of lamb stew.

"You'll excuse us, I know," he told Mrs. Propper, shutting away his thoughts. "Miss Browning wants to get home."

"And so she should, if she'll take my advice," declared the cook, flinging open the back door. "It's little enough sleep any of the rest of us will be getting in this house tonight. Good night to you, Miss Ann. Good night to you, sir."

"Good night, Mrs. Propper."

As they went down two steps, and the door closed behind them, they were momentarily blinded by the contrast between the moonlight and the light from the unshaded kitchen windows.

They found themselves on a concrete walk which ran along the back of the house, parallel with it, to a garage at the other end. A gravel path at right angles to the concrete one led straight out into the rose-garden. Passing a garden shed, they had gone a little way down the gravel path when Ann spoke.

"Why did H.M. ask about that?"

It was as though he could feel the alert, searching intelligence working beside him. The scent of the rose-garden, without color yet with its suggestion of hot color, closed in around them.

"Is there something in grapefruit," she said, "that would be bad for — well, for lockjaw poisoning?"

"I don't know. Grapefruit's an acid. Or is it an alkaloid? Anyway, it's strong stuff."

Beyond the garden lay a stretch of open lawn with a few apple and plum trees. A gate in the high stone wall led out into the lane of grass. As he opened the gate, Ann turned round.

"Please. It's awfully kind of you to offer to go home with me. But I'd rather you didn't."

— He felt a rush of disappointment.

"It's not that I don't want you to," she told him quickly. "I'd love you to. It's just that there's something I've got to think out. Now. Something I can't talk about, even to you. And then maybe I shall be better company. You don't mind?"

"Of course not."

"Then good night." She extended her hand.

He took the hand. "Good night, and try not to worry too much. You're sure you'll be all right?"

"All right?" She half laughed at him, her eyes widening. "Why on earth shouldn't I be all right?"

"Nothing. Probably just a psychic fit like one of Frank Sharpless's. Pay no attention to it. But I'd hate anything to happen to you."

"You're nice," said Ann, after a pause, and pressed his hand.

Then she left him.

Courtney latched the iron gate, leaned over it, and glanced to his left up the lane. Its soft, unkempt grass deadened footsteps. On one side it was closed in by stone walls like one continuous wall, with the heads of fruit trees drooping above. On the other side, a line of elms closed it in as well, with a screen of bushes and stinging-nettles underneath. An apple had fallen here and there, to rot. It was a narrow little lane, in daytime haunted by wasps and at night full of an eerie oppressiveness.

Courtney watched her print frock move away from him and disappear.

He moved back from the gate, and felt in his pocket after his pipe. Hot tonight. Uncomfortably hot. He hadn't noticed this before.

Far away to his left, Leckhampton Hill rose against the moonlit sky, with the clay face of the quarry along its upper ridges. It was the beginning of the Cotswolds, and from it you could see Cheltenham like a gray toy town in the valley. Through Courtney's mind, incongruously, ran lines of verse her remembered having read in an anthology long ago…

Well, it wasn't November now. No; it was hot. Infernally hot, and the little grass-carpeted lane lay like a tunnel under the over-ripe fruit along the walls.

Phil Courtney filled and lighted his pipe. The little core of light from the match startled him, like a pigmy explosion, when he struck it. He turned back towards the house, realizing that when a match flame made you jump there must be something wrong with your nerves.

Subdued activity seemed to be pulsing in the house. He could tell that, even at this distance away.

He thought of Vicky Fane, pretty, healthy Vicky, with her jaw-muscles rigid as though in a cast, the skin drawn back in the agony of the risus sardonicus, lying on a bed which must not be disturbed or even creak in case it brought on the convulsions.

And he had taken a few more steps when he stopped. He heard, distantly, a sound which carried clearly on the still air in these still streets. It might have been a symbol. It was the hurrying clang of an ambulance-bell.

Simultaneously, from somewhere far up the grass lane, a woman began to scream.

Sparks and fire from his pipe spilled to the ground. He tried to knock it out, but thrust it into his pocket without thinking further of it. Subconscious fear returned. The screams, shrill and terrified, were choked off as though by a hand. Then silence, and one more scream.

His fingers were so clumsy that it seemed minutes before he could get the gate open. But he did not hesitate about the direction in which to go. He ran towards the left, his foot sending flying a spongy apple as he ran.

"Ann!" he called. "Ann!"

No reply.

"Ann!"

Somewhere ahead of him, he thought he heard a movement; then a pause of what can only be called awareness, and a tearing sound as though of bushes or stinging-nettles.

Only patches of moonlight penetrated the dank, spongy-soft tunnel. He was some hundred yards or more along the lane when he saw her, or at least a huddle in a print frock, leaning on hands and knees near the stone wall to the left. As she seemed to hear his footfalls swish in the grass, she scrambled up and began to run as though blindly in the other direction.

"Ann! It's me! Phil Courtney!"

The figure hesitated, stumbled, tottered, and then stood still. She was standing with her back to him, hardly recognizable in the splintered moonlight, when he reached her.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. N-nothing!"

He could hear her thin, harsh breathing, shaking the words and stumbling on them with the accents of terror. He struck a match and held it up.

At first she refused to turn round and face him. When she did so, after the first match had burnt down and another was struck, she was smiling — but not very convincingly.

Her thin frock had been ripped down partly from the left shoulder, exposing the white silk slip and outlining the breast. A bruise was beginning to show on her neck under the left ear. Her thick hair, which she wore bound round her head, was slightly loosened; hairpins showed in it. There were grass-stains on her dress at the knees, and on the rumpled tan silk stockings underneath. She was bedraggled, grimy, obviously frightened — but trying to carry it off as though nothing had happened.

"Don't make a noise!" she urged. "I'm p-perfectly all right. Do put out that match. No, don't. Light another."

"But what—"

"It was someone. A man."

"What man?"

"I d-don't know." She passed the back of her hand across her forehead. "He caught me from behind and put his hand over my mouth. He — anyway, I fought loose and yelled. He got his hand on my mouth again. I think I bit his hand, but I'm not sure. When he heard you coming, he must have…"

"Where did he go?"

"A-across there, most likely. Towards the fields. It's open fields. No, don't! Don't! Come back!"

The darkness was dense, the stinging-nettles a formidable brush. Striking still another match, he held it above his head. There was nothing else here except the unkempt grass and a decayed plum or two.

"Would you recognize him again?"

"No. I never even saw him. Please! Don't make a row! Take me home."

She was trembling badly now.

Holding her arm in his, he took her along the lane for some three hundred yards, to where faint white street-lamps glimmered in the Old Bath Road.

"I shall he all right now," she assured him. "No, don't come any farther. I don't want my father or mother to see you; and I don't want them to see me either; or heaven knows what they'd think. Good night. And thanks."

She was gone, running lightly and holding up the shoulder of her torn frock, before he had time to protest. He saw her turn in at a gate near by, with a quick look up and down the road. Then, more violently disturbed than ever before in his life, Phil Courtney retraced his steps.

Psychic fits, it seemed, had their uses after all. The episode had been so brief and rapid that he wondered whether he might have dreamed it. Stopping again at the place where he had found Ann, which he had' marked by a wooden back gate with a white enameled sign reading, "No hawkers or circulars," he struck matches to see whether any traces might have been left."

No footprints. No convenient cuff-link dropped, or similar clue. Only the trampled grass, the evil lane, the close-pressing elms.

"I'll be a—'' he began aloud.

His last match burnt his fingers, and he dropped it. He returned to the Fanes' house and opened the gate, where a shadow rose up in front of him.

But it was only Frank Sharpless.

"Who's there?" demanded Sharpless's voice out of the gloom. "Me."

"Oh. What time is it?"

"I don't know. Must be past eleven. Frank, have you seen anybody hanging about here?"

It took some little while to make Sharpless understand this question. He seemed dazed, and so completely in anguish that Courtney's concern for Ann was almost lost in pity. He remembered that Vicky Fane was dying of lockjaw up there in an airless room.

"Attacked Ann?" Sharpless kept repeating stupidly. "Where? When? Why" Though he was trying to focus on this, he could not do so. "Was she hurt?"

"No. Only a bruise and a torn dress."

"But was the fellow trying to…?"

"I don't know. Trying to kill her too, more probably."

"What do you mean, trying to 'kill her too?’" asked Sharpless, after a pause as though for confused thought.

"Nothing. Just a slip of speech."

Sharpless's powerful fingers fastened on his arm. "You don't think anybody tried to kill Vicky? Not deliberately?"

"No, no, no!"

"I hear you've fallen for Ann." "Yes. I have."

"Good luck, old boy. I'd be more congratulatory, only at a time like this…" In the dimness he swept his arm towards the house. He stiffened. His tone altered, and his voice deepened. All his heart was in it. "Don't let her die," he said. "Dear God, don't let her die!"

"Steady."

"But what are they doing up there, anyway? Something's up. I know it. More people came from the hospital or somewhere. But they won't even let me in. Wait! I forgot to ask you. What time is it?" "You did ask me. I said—"

Distantly, the church clock answered them by beginning to strike.

"Only twelve?" demanded Sharpless in an incredulous voice. He had whirled round after counting the first three. "Only midnight? Cripes, it can't be. There's something wrong with that clock. It's two o'clock in the morning, or more. It must be."

"Frank, you've got to get hold of yourself."

"I tell you, there's something wrong with that clock!"

But there was nothing wrong with the clock.

They discovered this long before its clang had struck the quarter, the half-hour, the three-quarter, and the hour again.

In Sharpless's present frame of mind, Courtney thought it best to keep him away from the house, in case he made a scene. He sat Sharpless down on a stone bench under the trees. He got him to smoking cigarettes. The lights of the house burned more brightly as those of the town died; and still no word came from the sick-room upstairs.

The clang of the church clock got into their thoughts. They heard it when it did not strike, and were startled by it when it did.

While the hours dragged on, Sharpless talked. He talked monotonously, quickly, in a low voice which rarely varied in key. He talked of himself and Vicky Fane. Of what they were going to do when she was well. Of what he was going to do at Staff College. He said he might be sent out to India, and gave a long description of life in India. He quoted his father and his uncles and his grandfather for this.

Dawn, Courtney thought, could not be far off. It would come white and ghostly among the fruit trees.

The church clock struck two-thirty.

Ten minutes later, while Sharpless was recalling an interminable childhood and a game called Little Wars, the back door of the house opened.

"Captain Sharpless!" called Mrs. Propper's voice. It poured with acid. "Captain Sharpless!"

With Courtney following him, Sharpless ran.

"They think you'd better go in," said Mrs. Propper gravely.

"Steady, Frank!"

"I can't face it," said Sharpless. "I can't!"

"You've got to. Damn it, don't turn into a weak sister now! Go on."

Sharpless walked slowly through the kitchen, past a blubbering Daisy. He stumbled over a chair in the dining room, and only found his way out when Courtney switched on the lights.

In the downstairs hall, a little group was stumping down the stairs: with many pauses, as though nobody could drag himself away from the room above. First came little Dr. Nithsdale, then Sir Henry Merrivale, and then a man in a white coat. But what struck Courtney like a blow across the skull was the expressions on their faces.

The man in the white coat, though his forehead looked damp with perspiration, was smiling. H.M. had a heavy, sour glare of relief. Even Dr. Nithsdale, though a fierce-looking little man with a bedside manner which would have alarmed Methuselah, appeared less assertive than usual.

His voice was low but penetrating and shrill.

"Mind," he said, "I'll no' say it wasna a bonny guess! Ye've Sco'ish blood in ye're veins, I hae nae doot. Hoots, dinna trouble tae deny it! But I'll no' say, either, mind you, that the leddy's oot o' danger or owt like it, until—"

He paused. His eye fell on Sharpless, who was standing by the newel-post.

"Hoots!" said Dr. Nithsdale, stopping short. "Here's. a lad could du wi' a dose o' physic! Losh, mon, hauld tight! Ye're-"

"Is she dead?"

"Hoots!" said Dr. Nithsdale, with rich scorn.

It was H.M. who answered. He steadied Sharpless as the latter put both hands on the rail of the staircase.

"It's all right, son," H.M. said gently. "Take it easy. She'll live."