The Case Is Closed

CHAPTER TWENTY

Down the road the car came to a standstill with a grinding of brakes. One of the men got out and ran back. There was a difference of opinion between him and the driver as to what had happened. The fog had made it impossible to see. The wheels had bumped over something. With any luck Miss Hilary Carew was a corpse.

He reached the spot. There was no corpse on the road. There was a good deal of smashed bicycle, scattered, fragmentary, and excessively dangerous. He trod on the rim of a wheel, and half a dozen broken spokes came flicking up at him, tearing his trouser leg and stabbing into the palm which he thrust out to fend them off. He swore, shouted, barked his shin on a pedal, and getting clear, ran back to the car.

All this took a minute or two. By the time explanations and recriminations had been bandied, and an electric lamp extracted from a crowded cubby-hole, Hilary had blundered into a second hedge. If she had not been so giddy she would have run straight down the deep field, and she would probably have been overtaken there, for the men soon found the place where she had forced her way through the first hedge. With the fog to help her she might have escaped, but there were two of them, able-bodied and active, and they had a torch. They had also a great deal at stake. But then so had she, and if she was weak and shaken, her very weakness helped her and she had run anything but straight. Her head was swimming, and without knowing it she bore hard to the right. This took her across a corner of the field and brought her up short against a hedge which ran in from the road. She scrambled through it, being lucky enough to strike a gap, and then, finding her feet on a downhill slope, she followed them. They took her into a deep hollow place set about with bushes. When she got there she stopped, crouched down and trembling all over. The bushes closed her in and hid her, and the fog hid the bushes. Here, in this dreadful dark lonely place, like a hunted wild thing she had a sanctuary. The earth supported her shaking limbs. The darkness was a shelter. The stripped wintry bushes stood sentinel. If a foot moved against her, or a hand stretched out to do her harm, there would be an alarum of snapping twig and creaking branch.

Gradually she relaxed. Her heart quieted. Her head cleared. She listened, and could hear no sound of pursuit.

After what seemed like a very long time a faint sound came to her, a sound of voices. Just that – just voices, just an indistinguishable murmur of sound a longway off. She strained in an agony, waiting for it to come nearer, to break upon her. Instead there was silence. Then, suddenly sharp and clear, the slam of a door, and upon that again an engine throbbing.

Hilary’s hands came together and held one another tight. They had got into the car, banged the door, and started the engine. They had given up looking for her, and they were going away. Oh, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful!

A cold drop trickled suddenly between her shoulder-blades. Suppose it was a trick. Suppose they were only pretending to go away. Suppose she climbed back into the road and found them waiting for her there. A hand at her throat – suddenly – in the dark. A voice behind the curtain of fog, whispering under its breath, ‘Quick, and we’ll make a job of it!’ They wouldn’t miss her a second time. The car would smash her as it had smashed the bicycle. She wouldn’t ever see Henry any more. That hurt so sharply that it did her good. She felt a fierce determination to see Henry again. She was going to. She didn’t care what they did, she was going to.

She became suddenly quiet and balanced. She was conscious of a new courage. It was not the young courage which says with a light heart, ‘Dreadful things happen – in the newspapers – to other people – but of course they couldn’t happen to me or to the people I love.’ They had happened to her, they had happened to Marion, they had happened to Geoffrey Grey. If she found courage now, it was the older, colder courage which says, “This thing has got to be faced, and it’s up to me to face it.’

She sat up, pushed back her hair from her face, winced as she touched a long deep scratch, and heard the car go down the road and away. It was heading for Ledlington. The sound of it faded out upon the foggy air. It didn’t stop suddenly, as it would have done if they had run on for a bit and then pulled up. It lessened gradually and died away in the distance.

And yet it might be a trick. There had been two men. One of them might have stayed behind to catch her when she came out upon the road again. They would surely count on her having to find her way back to the road. She thought of a still black figure, a featureless wickedness, standing there under the hedgerow, waiting. Her thought was quite steady and calm. It wouldn’t do to go out on the road. Neither could she risk trying to stop a passing car. It would probably be impossible in a fog like this anyhow.

She began to try and think what she had better do.

Fields belong to somebody. There might be a path somewhere near, or a cottage -some place which she could reach without going out upon the road again. She tried to remember the way she had come, and to make out where she was now. She thought about half way to Ledlington, but she couldn’t remember any place like this hollow among the bushes, and she didn’t know how far off the road she was. Not far by the noise of the car, which had sounded startlingly close.

She was, had she only known it, at the bottom of the pond which had been offered to her as a landmark by the shock-headed boy when he was telling her how to find Humpy Dick’s cottage. He had omitted to tell her that it had gone dry in the drought, and she had omitted to notice it as she rode past. A glint of water was what she had been looking for, and, missing that, she missed the footpath, too.

She found it now. Climbing up out of the bottom and pushing through the bushes, she came upon it almost at once, a rutted path deeply scored by the passing of laden carts. Carts meant people, and people meant a house. She began to follow the ruts away from the road.

It wasn’t easy. Without that deep scoring of the ground she would have been lost, but the furrows kept her to the path. If she ceased to stumble and turn her ankles, she knew at once that she was bearing away from the track, and so felt her way back to it and stumbled on again. It was very weary work. Suppose there wasn’t any house. Suppose this wasn’t a real place at all. Suppose she had got into a nightmare where an endless path went on, and on, and on through an everlasting fog. That was a very stupid thought. If you had one single grain of sense you didn’t let yourself think that sort of thought when you were trying to find your way in a fog. Here Hilary’s imp cocked a snook at her and said rudely: If you had a grain of sense you wouldn’t have come.’ He made a sort of jingle of it, and it went echoing round and round inside her head:

‘You’d have stayed at home, you wouldn’t have come.

You wouldn’t have come, you’d have stayed at home.’

She went on feeling for the ruts with her feet, walking with one hand stretched out in front of her in case of a wall or another hedge.

It was a gate she touched. Her hand went over it, and it brought her up short with a bar at her waist and another across her knees. She felt for the latch, lifted it, and walked through. It wasn’t big enough to be a field gate, and there were no ruts inside it, just a hard path which might at some time have been laid down in gravel. It was quite hard to walk on – hard, and narrow. She bore too far to the right, and went in up to her ankle in the soft earth of a garden bed. And then, before she came to it, she was aware of the house. It was much too dark to see anything, and her outstretched hand touched only the empty air, yet some sense told her that the house was near. Two more cautious steps, and there it was -a wall covered with creepers – the wood of a window frame, cold glass. She was off the path and must get back to it again. Groping, she came to a step, and a wooden door with a heavy metal knocker. The enchanting vision of a lighted room – a fire, hot tea – rose gloriously upon the fog. Open, Sesame! She had only to knock on the door and someone would open, and the enchantment would come true. She had the knocker in her hand, and nothing so easy as to let it fall – nothing so easy, and nothing so hard.

She stood there, and with every passing second it was harder to move at all. Her hand cramped on the heavy metal ring. If someone had followed her in from the road, the sound of the falling knocker would give her away. Perhaps there was no one in the house. There was no light in any window, and no sound at all. She laid the knocker gently back against the wood and began to feel her way round the house.

It was only a cottage really, for almost at once she was at the corner and groping along a side wall. Another corner, and the back of the house. If there was anyone at home, this was where they would be. Life in a cottage centres round the kitchen, and the kitchen is always at the back of the house.

As she turned the corner, she saw a shining in the fog, a silver shining which disclosed its secret currents. The light came from a window on the ground floor, and the fog moved in it with a slow upward movement like the rising of some sluggish tide. To Hilary that dim shining was like the first created light – very good. It broke the yoke of the darkness from her mind, and the nightmare slipped away. She went up to the window and looked in.

There was no curtain, at least none that was drawn. There was a sink below the sill, and taps. There was no light in the room, which seemed to be a scullery and very small, but a door stood open into the kitchen, and a lamp on the kitchen table shone upon the window and upon the fog. It shone in Hilary’s eyes and dazzled her, so that at first she could see nothing except the lamp and the blue and white checked tablecloth which was spread between it and the table. In spite of being dazzled she kept her eyes wide and looked through the open door. Then she saw something else. She saw Mrs. Mercer turn round from the range with a teapot in her hand. The range was beyond the table and the lamp, a big old-fashioned range with a glowing fire. Mrs. Mercer turned round from it with the teapot. She set it down upon a tray beside the lamp – an old-fashioned tin tray with a gold pattern on it. Then she straightened herself up as if she had been carrying something heavy.

Hilary knocked on the window.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Mrs. Mercer came round the table and through the scullery door. She unlatched the window above the sink, and pushed it open, and said in a weak, dragging voice,

‘Is that the milk? I didn’t expect you in all this fog.’

Hilary leaned well in over the sill. She wasn’t going to have any windows shut in her face. If it was humanly possible to have some of the tea in that fat brown teapot, she meant to have it. She hoped earnestly that the milk-jug she now saw on the tray was not empty, and it revived her a good deal to notice that there was only one cup. Alfred was evidently not expected home to tea. She let the light fall on her face, and she said,

‘Good evening, Mrs. Mercer.’

Mrs. Mercer caught at the edge of the sink and swayed. The lamp was behind her, and her face just a blur. After a minute she said weakly,

‘It’s Miss Carew?’

Hilary nodded.

‘Won’t you let me in? I’d like a cup of tea – you don’t know how much I’d like a cup of tea. I’ve just had a fall off my bicycle. I expect I look as if I’d been dragged through a hedge. May I come in and tidy up?’

Mrs. Mercer still held on to the sink with one hand. The other was at her side. She said,

‘Oh, miss – you frightened me!’

‘I’m so sorry if I did.’

She stared at Hilary.

‘Perhaps you’ve got to catch a train,’ she said.

‘I can’t think how I’m going to get to the station – my bicycle’s all smashed up. Won’t you let me in and give me some tea?’

‘My husband don’t like visitors. I’m expecting him.’

There’s only one cup on the tray.’

Mrs. Mercer began to shake.

‘Can’t I say who I want in my house and who I don’t? I didn’t ask you to come here, did I? If you’d got any sense in you you’d stay away. Haven’t you got anything to do at home that you must needs come trapesing and trailing after those what don’t want you? You be off quick! And the quicker the better, because if Mercer comes home – if Mercer comes home – ’

Up to that first mention of the man’s name she had used an angry whisper, but now it failed. Her eyes were fixed with terror, not upon Hilary, but upon some picture called up by her own words, some picture of Alfred Mercer coming home and finding them here – together.

‘Mrs. Mercer – ’ Hilary’s voice was urgent – ‘I want to ask you something. I don’t want to stay – I’ve got to get back to town.’

Mrs. Mercer’s pale tongue came out and moistened her lips.

‘Go!’ she said. ‘Go – go – go – while you can – ’

Hilary nodded.

‘I want to go every bit as much as you want me to. I’ll go the very minute you’ve told me what I want to know. And if you don’t want Mercer to find me here we’d better get on with it. But I do wish you’d let me in.’

The pale tongue touched the pale lips again.

‘I darsn’t. He’d – cut my heart out.’

Hilary’s spine crept, not so much at the words as at the sick look of terror which went with them. It was no good going on like this. She leaned in as far as she could and dropped her hand on Mrs. Mercer’s wrist. It was icy cold, and the fingers clenched on the stone edge of the sink.

‘Look here,’ she said, ‘I want to know what you meant when you said you tried to see Mrs. Grey while the trial was on.’

Mrs. Mercer strained away from the sink and from Hilary.

‘I did go – I did try – nobody can’t say I didn’t try. I thought he’d have killed me then.’

‘You tried to see her, and she was resting. Why did you try? What did you want to say to her?’

She felt the crazy leap of the pulse that was under her hand. Her grasp tightened. Her head swam with all the unhappiness that had been since then. It wasn’t battle, murder, and sudden death that were the most dreadful things – it was having to go on after they had scorched your life to the bone. She thought of Marion as she had been, Marion as she was now. She said in a breaking voice,

‘You asked me about Marion. She’s so changed. If you could see her you wouldn’t be able to bear it -you wouldn’t really. Won’t you tell me why you went to see her, and what you were going to say? You said if she had seen you – you said it in the train. If she had seen you – what were you going to tell her if she had seen you?’

Mrs. Mercer stopped pulling away. The hand at her side dropped limply. She said in a faint, exhausted tone,

‘It’s too late.’

‘Tell me,’ said Hilary.

Mrs. Mercer shook her head, not with any energy, but as if, being weak, she could not keep it from shaking.

‘Let me go!’ she said.

Hilary held the cold wrist.

‘What were you going to tell her?’

Mrs. Mercer began to cry. Her nose twitched and the tears ran down beside it into her mouth.

‘It’s no use,’ she said with a gasping sob. ‘I was brought up religious, and I know what I done. I darsn’t read my Bible, and I darsn’t say my prayers, and I darsn’t go back on what I promised Mercer. If I had told her then, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but what’s said now won’t mend what’s gone, nor it won’t save me from what I done. Only if Mercer was to know he’d kill me, and then I’d be in hell.’ She had stopped gasping. The words came out with hardly any breath behind them, her voice failing but never quite gone.

Hilary shook the wrist she was holding.

‘Hell’s now,’ she said – ‘when you’re doing something wicked. No wonder you’re unhappy. Tell me what you were going to say to Marion. Please tell me. I won’t go till you do. Do you want Mercer to come back and find me here? I don’t. But I can’t go till you’ve told me.’

Mrs. Mercer leaned towards her across the sink.

‘He’ll kill you,’ she said in a whispering voice – with the bread-knife or something – and say I did it as like as not – and say I’m mad. He tells everyone I’m mad, and when he’s killed you that’s what he’ll say – “My wife done it.” And they’ll take me away and lock me up – because he’ll say I’m mad.’

Hilary’s heart banged against her side. Was it true? Was it? Was it? She said, very slow, and afraid, and like a child,

‘Are you mad, Mrs. Mercer?’

The woman broke into a flood of tears.

‘I’m not, I’m not! Not without he sends me mad with all his wickedness! Oh, miss, I wish I was dead – I wish I was dead!’

Hilary stopped feeling afraid. She managed to pat the heaving shoulder, and felt it pitifully sharp and thin.

‘Mrs. Mercer, do stop crying. If you said what wasn’t true at the trial – and I think you did, because I know Geoff never killed anyone, I really know it – if you did a wicked thing like that, don’t you see your only chance is to tell the truth now and put it right? I don’t wonder you feel like that about hell, with Geoff in prison and Marion so unhappy. But just think how awful it would have been for you if he’d been hanged and there wasn’t anything you could do that would bring him back and put things right again. Doesn’t that make you feel a bit better? Because you can put it right now. You don’t want to go on being miserable like this – do you?’

Mrs. Mercer wrenched sharply away.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she said. “You get along out of here, or something’ll happen!’

The tears stung Hilary’s eyes. She had thought – she had been sure -the wildest hopes had dazzled her – and then suddenly everything was gone.

Mrs. Mercer had retreated into the doorway. She stood there leaning against the jamb. There was a wretched triumph in her voice.

‘You go back on to the road and turn to the left, and you’ll get to Ledlington! Where’s your bicycle?’

Hilary straightened herself. She was stiff from leaning over the sill.

‘Smashed.’ And then, ‘They tried to kill me.’

Mrs. Mercer put up a hand, touched her lips, and let it fall again. The lips parted and said,

‘Who?’

‘Don’t you know?’ said Hilary with a little scorn in her voice.

Mrs. Mercer backed away from her into the kitchen. When she was clear of the door she thrust at it with her hands and with her knee. The door fell to with a clap. Hilary was alone in the foggy dark.

She felt her way back round the house and out at the gate. Then she followed the ruts again.