The Case Is Closed

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hilary’s mind went perfectly cold and stiff, but her hand shut the door. She stood on the other side of it and waited without thought or movement. She did not know how long she waited.

She began to think again. Was he coming in here? No, he wasn’t. The footsteps went past. She lost them. What was Alfred Mercer doing here? She didn’t know. She wanted to know, but there wasn’t any way of finding out. Had he followed her? She must find out. She went to the fire-place and rang the bell.

It seemed a long time before anyone answered it. Then the girl who had brought the tea came in and said there was eighteenpence to pay. Hilary took out two shillings and a sixpence, put one shilling and a sixpenny bit into the girl’s hand, and held the other shilling between finger and thumb.

‘I wonder if you could tell me the name of the man who came in just now?’

The girl was plump and good-tempered – a heavily built young thing with a high colour. She looked at the shilling and said,

‘Oh, no, miss, I couldn’t.’

‘You don’t know his name?’

‘Oh, no, miss, I don’t.’

‘You’ve seen him before – he’s been here before?’

‘Oh, no, miss, he hasn’t.’

‘You mean he’s a stranger?’

‘Oh, no, miss.’

Hilary could have stamped with rage. Did the girl know anything, or didn’t she? She seemed impenetrably stupid, but you never could tell. And she couldn’t afford to stay here and perhaps be caught asking awkward questions. Whether the girl knew Alfred Mercer or not, it was very certain that Alfred Mercer would know Hilary Carew, and that blighted girl had left the door open when she came in. Hilary Carew had got to make herself scarce, and she’d got to look slippy about it.

She looked slippy, but she didn’t look slippy enough, for just as she got to the end of the passage and had her hand on the outer door, Alfred Mercer came walking briskly back by the way he had gone. Hilary looked sideways and saw him, and with the same movement she pulled the door towards her and slipped out.

There was a recessed porch and some steps. Her bicycle was leaning against the steps, but someone had knocked it down and she had to pick it up. She was very, very quick about it. One moment she was groping for the bicycle, and the next she was wobbling out on to the road and leaning forward to reach the electric lamp and switch it on. Nothing seemed to happen when she did this. It wasn’t as dark as it was going to be later on, but it was quite dark enough, and there was quite a lot of fog. It was her own fault for stopping to have tea, but there comes a point when you care more about having your tea than about doing what you ought to do, and Hilary had reached that point. She now used some bitter expressions about the shock-headed young man who had sent her out on a foggy afternoon with a lamp which had probably died last winter.

When she had gone a few hundred yards and had nearly run into a ditch because the road turned off sharp to the right and the bicycle kept straight on, she got off and had a look at the lamp. Not a glimmer. She shook it, poked it, opened it, and closed it again with an exasperated bang. A beautiful bright beam of light instantly disclosed the fact that she had somehow got into a field. She got back on to the road, mounted, and began to ride as fast as the fog would let her in the direction of Ledlington, hoping passionately that Alfred Mercer hadn’t got a bicycle, too. She felt tolerably sure that he wouldn’t have a car, but he might have a bicycle. And then the voice of common sense, speaking in a very faint and unconvincing manner, enquired why on earth Alfred Mercer should want to follow her. He had already told her about two hundred times that his wife was out of her mind Common sense was of the opinion that this should suffice him. Something that wasn’t common sense kept urging in a low and horrid whisper, ‘Ride, Hilary – ride for your life! He’s coming after you – he’s coming now!’

As a matter of fact Mr. Mercer was drinking beer in the bar. He had recognised Hilary when she turned her head, and he had seen her through the half open door, but he had followed her no farther than the bottom step. The bicycle which he had stumbled into and knocked over was gone. That meant that Miss Carew had taken it. He wasn’t running down any dashed road after any dashed bicycle; not much he wasn’t. He went into the bar, ordered a pint of beer, laced it – deplorably – with gin, and awaited the arrival of his principal, who was late on account of the fog. His principal would arrive by car. If Miss Carew was to be followed, they could follow her comfortably in the car. He expended some profanity on the weather, and addressed a good deal more to Miss Hilary Carew.

About ten minutes later a car drew up in front of the inn, and after no more than five minutes went on again with a passenger. It took the Ledlington road.

The fog was deepening steadily. When she struck a bad patch Hilary had to get off and walk. It was better to walk than to run into a ditch or a tree. The prospect of getting hurt and lying out on a clammy road all night was too repellent. There began to be more and more bad patches, and she began to wish more and more fervently that she had never come on this wild goose chase. Her imp produced an appropriate rhyme:

‘If you want to chase a goose

That’s flying loose,

You really should take care

The goose is there.’

She rode a little way, and then had to get off again. It was funny how much safer she felt when she was riding the bicycle. As a matter of actual fact she was probably safer on her feet, but every time she dismounted the feeling that she was stepping down into danger came over her. It was exactly as if there was another mist upon the Ledlington road, a steadily rising mist of fear. When she was on the bicycle she was a little above it, but each time she got off, it was deeper and colder about her.

She found herself listening, straining her ears for any sound that would break the silence which the fog had brought. If she stood still she could hear her own breathing, but nothing else -not a bird’s wing, not a twitter, not a breaking twig or a leaf brushed aside by any moving wild thing. Nothing was abroad, nothing moved except Hilary Carew, who wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t an obstinate little fool who thought she knew better than anyone else. Anyone else meant Henry. She had actually come to the point where she felt that Henry had been right when he told her to leave the Everton case alone – in case of something worse happening. To whom? To Hilary Carew, on a dark foggy road where nobody passed, and where no one would know – for a long, long time.

‘Idiot!’ said Hilary to herself. ‘What’s the good of thinking of that sort of thing now? Stop it, do you hear – stop it at once! And you’re not to think about Henry either! It’s undermining. He isn’t here, and if he was he’d probably be hating you like poison.’

‘But he wouldn’t let me be murdered in the dark.’

This was another Hilary who was so afraid that she had no proper pride and would have flung herself with passionate relief into the arms of Henry Cunningham even if he was hating her.

It was at this point that she heard the car.

She felt so much relief that for the moment she was quite herself again. It was the silence that had been so horrid. The familiar, comfortable sound of traffic on the King’s highway broke into this paralysing silence, and with it Hilary’s fear. Even the fog didn’t seem to be quite so dense, and she had the bright thought that the car would probably be running slow, and that she might be able to follow its tail-light into Ledlington as a guide.

She pedalled along carefully, making up her mind that she had better jump off when the car was near so as to be sure of getting well out of the way. There would be plenty of time, because, as she could hear, the car wasn’t going at all fast. It couldn’t, of course. About ten miles an hour would be anyone’s limit, unless they wanted to run off the road at the first bend.

Afterwards Hilary could remember everything quite clearly down to this point. She particularly remembered thinking that she would be able to keep up with the car if it wasn’t doing more than ten miles an hour, but after that there was a confusion. There was light -and a noise. The car must have had its fog-light on or its headlights dipped. The noise was the car roaring down upon her, rushing into sudden speed – a big car. And she had jumped. If she hadn’t had the plan ready in her mind she wouldn’t have had time to jump clear, but because she had planned to jump off on to the grass as the car came near she did jump, and saved herself. Heat, and a grinding sound, and her head coming crash against something hard. Stars in the darkness – Catherine wheels and golden rain -and then nothing at all. She had fallen heavily and knocked her head hard enough to be stunned for about a minute and a half. If it had been longer, there would have been no more Hilary Carew.

She came back to a pain in her head -to being lifted – to a voice that said, ‘Only stunned. Quick now, and we’ll make a job of it!’ She didn’t know the voice at all, and what it said had no meaning for her. Her mind was open, empty, and without power to grasp anything. The things that passed through it meant nothing to her at all. She knew that she had a pain in her head, nothing more. That was the whole world.

Something else came into this world. Grit – cold, wet grit against her mouth. Horrid. She moved, and touched something sharp, something that cut her hand. She wasn’t being lifted any more. She was lying on her face with grit in her mouth, her cheek on something wet, and hard, and cold. The road – she was lying in the road. She was lying on her face in the road. And she had cut her hand. It hurt. She had cut it on something sharp. She remembered the bicycle, and thought it was all smashed up, and how was she going to get into Ledlington now? ’

All these thoughts really took no time at all. Consciousness came back and they were there, waiting for the light to touch them. She became aware of two things simultaneously, and then a third. The car with its engine running, and its lights shining on her – those two things first. And then the slam of a door. Someone had slammed the door of the car.

The man at the wheel put the car into bottom gear and jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.

Hilary heard the sudden roar of the engine. It came to her as sound, as danger, as terror itself. The two men who had carried her from the grass verge had laid her on her face in the track of the car with the broken bicycle beside her. If you fall from a bicycle, you are more likely to fall on your face than on your back. The men had considered this, and they had laid Hilary on her face in the road. She would be found broken and dead in the morning, a casualty of the fog. If they had cared less for probabilities and had laid her on her back, the plan would have gone off without a hitch, but they had laid her on her face. A half stunned girl on a wet and slippery road has just about twice as much chance of scrambling to her feet from this position.

At that roaring sound Hilary raised herself upon her hands, stared at the orange foglight of the car, and saw it rush towards her. But as it rushed, she threw herself sideways – scrambling, slithering, thrusting herself up from the road. She got somehow to her feet and went blundering and stumbling across the grass verge until she was brought up short by a hedge. Blind terror has an instinct of its own. There were thorns which she did not feel, blackberry trails which came across her face, across her mouth, as she went down on her knees burrowing and groping to find a gap which would let her through. Her hair caught, her coat ripped, an interlacing tangle of twigs and branches held her back, but she pushed and struggled until she was through, and there on the other side of the hedge she crouched with her head on her knees and the stuff of her skirt clutched hard against her face to muffle the sound of her panting breaths. She was almost fainting, but not quite. Thought swung between oblivion and nightmare. Then steadied. They would come back. They would look for her. They mustn’t find her.

She got up and ran as fast as she could away across the field.