The Key

CHAPTER SIX

AT HALF-PAST SIX next morning Garth yawned, stretched, and jumped out of bed. There seemed to have been no interval at all. He had remembered about Conrad and Medora, he had looked at his watch and found the time to be half an hour after midnight, and then he had gone to sleep and slept without a break and without a dream. Funny, because sometimes he dreamed like mad.

Well, now he thought he would get up. The maids had no vice of early rising. Mabel had been house-parlourmaid in Aunt Sophy’s mother’s time, and goodness knew how long ago that was. Florence had cooked the Rectory meals for thirty years. Miss Sophy would get her early morning tea at eight, but very little else would be done before breakfast. He thought he would rather like to walk out into the garden before anyone was up. He felt some curiosity about Miss Brown’s nocturnal excursion, and some inclination to prospect.

He emerged from his room upon a well blacked-out passage and switched on the light at the head of the stairs. He had no mind to rouse the household and provide Bourne with another inquest by taking a header into the stone-flagged hall. The light came on, imparting a raffish air to its respectable surroundings. After the early morning sunlight this synthetic product was all wrong, all out of key. It gave the sedate Rectory stair a horrid up-all-night appearance.

He was nearly at the bottom, when something sparkled at him from the heavily patterned carpet. He bent, and pricked his finger on a sliver of glass. As he dropped it into the wastepaper basket in the study he wondered vaguely who had been breaking what. Then he let himself out by the glass door, and was pleased to observe that his hand had lost neither its cunning nor its steadiness. There was no creak of the hinge for him. He stepped on to the dew-drenched lawn and looked down the garden, as he had looked from his bedroom window in the night. It was the same scene, but whereas then everything had been dreaming under the moon, now it was all enchantingly awake, the border jewel bright, the old wall behind it warm and mossy in the early sunshine. Away to the left the shadows lay across the grass, but now it was the sun that laid them there, and the trees themselves were full of colour and light – the cedar with its cones like a flock of little owls sitting all in rows on the great layered branches, the thorn almost as red with berries as in its blooming time. That was where he had first caught sight of Miss Brown last night – not as Miss Brown, but as something that moved in the shadow of the thorn.

He crossed the garden until he came to the place, and stood there frowning. Perhaps Miss Brown had been unable to sleep – perhaps she had come out to take the air. The answer to that was that he didn’t think so. They had gone to their rooms at ten o’clock. If Miss Brown had made any effort to sleep, she would not still have been wearing a black lace dinner-dress at half-past twelve.

Two or three yards beyond the thorn tree the grey wall at the foot of the garden broke into an arch filled by a door of weathered oak. He lifted the latch, swung the door inwards, and walked out into the narrow Cut which ran at the back of all these houses facing on to the green. It had on one side of it a long, continuous wall which joined one wall of the churchyard at right angles about twenty feet farther on, and on the other a tall mixed hedge. Between wall and hedge there was just room for two people to walk abreast, or for a boy to ride a bicycle. It was in fact chiefly used by errand boys, who found it a short cut. On the right it skirted the churchyard and came out in the middle of the village. On the left it followed the wall until it ended, and then wandered out to join the road which bordered the Green. Five houses shared the wall. Each had a door which gave upon the Cut.

Perhaps Miss Brown had gone out of one door and in at another. Perhaps she had been to call upon one of her neighbours. Thanks to Miss Sophy’s flow of conversation he could name them all – Mr Everton, the retired businessman and poultry expert, in Meadowcroft; the new rector, in The Lilacs instead of Miss Jones; the Miss Doncasters next door in Pennycott; Mrs Mottram in The Haven; and Dr Edwards and his wife at Oak Cottage. Not at all a probable lot, with the exception of Mr Everton, who might for all he knew be in the habit of sitting up till midnight and making assignations with gloomy ladies in evening dress. Hang it all, you couldn’t have much of an assignation inside of ten minutes, which was really all you could give it, allowing for crossing the garden twice. There certainly wasn’t more than a quarter of an hour between the creak that had woken him up and the creak that had signalled Miss Brown’s return.

He moved a step or two, and for the second time his eye was caught by something glinting under the light. This time he had no need to prick his finger. The sun slanted across the hedge and dazzled upon broken glass – quite a lot of it. Nothing in the least mysterious about how it came there. Quite obviously the milk boy had been careless and let a bottle fall. The base had rolled under the hedge and was still sticky with milk.

Garth looked at the splinters on the ground, and thought about the splinter on the Rectory stair. He thought Miss Brown had picked it up on the hem of her black lace skirt and dropped it again as the lace dipped and brushed the carpet on her way upstairs.

Well, it wasn’t really his business – or wouldn’t have been if it were not for Aunt Sophy. As it was, it gave him a feeling of insecurity. He didn’t like the way in which the old dear had come by Miss Medora Brown. Coffee grounds and cards are not really a substitute for first-class references. He wondered to what extent Aunt Sophy had been carried away, and whether she had considered the question of references at all.

He walked slowly past the back door into Meadowcroft, and wondered whether Miss Brown had passed through it last night. When he reached the boundary wall of The Lilacs he turned back again. He was within a couple of yards of the open Rectory door, and had paused for another look at the litter of glass, when without any warning a voice went off in his ear.

‘Coo! That’s a smash!’ it said. ‘Not ’arf!’ Swinging round, he found himself looking down at a leggy boy of twelve, his grey flannel shorts half way up his thighs, and his sleeves half way up to the elbow. He might have been stretched, or the clothes might have shrunk. How much longer they would hold together was conjectural. ‘Hello!’ said Garth. ‘Who are you?’

‘Cyril Bond. I’m a ’vacuee. That’s my billet.’ He jerked an elbow in the direction of Meadowcroft, and added, ‘Got hens in there, we have. They don’t ’arf lay. I get a negg for my breakfast twice a week, I do.’

‘And you made this horrible mess?’

‘Naow!’ The shrill tone was scornful. ‘That’s a milk bottle, that is. I don’t tike the milk round. That’s Tommy Pincott’s doing, that is. He done it yesterdye. He’s fourteen and left school. He works for his uncle, and I reckon he’ll cop it from him.’ Garth stepped over the glass and went in through the Rectory door. The shrill voice followed him.

‘You’re stying in there? Your nyme’s Albany? Come last night, didn’t you?’

‘You seem to know all about it.’

‘Course I do!’

The boy’s face brightened. He had fair hair, grey eyes, a fresh colour, and a deceptive appearance of cleanliness. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the church.

‘There was a man shot in there a coupler days ago – right in the church. There’s going to be a ninquest todye and none of us boys won’t be let go to it. Coo – I’d like to go to a ninquest!’

‘Why?’

The boy scuffed with his feet among the broken bits of glass.

‘I dunno. Miss Marsden, our teacher, she said any boy that went on talking about this gentleman that was shot, she’d keep him in. That’s what comes of having wimmen brought in to teach you. My dad doesn’t hold with it. He says they’ll all be too big for their boots after the war. D’you reckon that’s right?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Garth, laughing.

He prepared to shut the door, but the boy came edging over the threshold.

‘Do you reckon the gentleman shot himself?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I reckon it’s a funny place to shoot yourself, don’t you – right in a church?’

Garth nodded.

Cyril kicked at a stone with the toe of a disintegrating shoe. His voice was shriller than ever. ‘Fancy going right into a dark church to shoot yourself, when you might do it comfortable at ’ome! It don’t seem likely – that’s wot I sye.’

‘Does anyone else say it?’

Cyril kicked again. The stone went into the ditch.

‘I dunno. What do you reckon about it, mister?’

‘It’s out of my reckoning,’ said Garth in rather an odd tone of voice. Then he said, ‘Cut along now!’ and shut the door.