Ellis Peters - George Felse 03 - Flight Of A Witch (17 page)

‘There’ll be a neighbour with a flattened nose somewhere around. The girls who sold Annet the dress and the nightdress didn’t add much, either.’

‘She shopped alone. Every time. And in city shops and a supermarket, never in the small local places. If he was with her, he waited outside. Most men do. So that’s it. That’s the lot. But at least we’ve moved, and now we can keep moving.’

‘That’s the lot. And I’ve got to be on my way,’ said George, pushing away his empty cup. ‘Mrs Brookes promised me to try and dredge up every word they said to each other, or anything she can remember about the girl. If she does come through with anything, call me, will you? I’ll give you a ring as soon as I get in at the office, and give you anything new we’ve got at that end. Not that I expect anything,’ he said honestly, turning up the collar of his coat in the doorway against the thin wind that had sprung up with dusk. ‘Yet,’ he said further, and went round to the parking ground to pick up the car.

He was later than he’d said he’d be, getting back to the office in Comerbourne. Tom Kenyon had telephoned once already, with nothing to report but a blameless day of chaotic activity among the geographers, and a continuing watch on the Hallowmount, which would be faithfully maintained until he and his helpers were either called off or relieved. He had promised to ring again in half an hour, which meant he might be on the line again at any moment.

But when the telephone rang again, and George leaned across to pick it up, the voice that boomed in his ear belonged to the Superintendent in Birmingham.

‘Thought you’d be making it about now,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Two bits of news for you, for what they’re worth. First, we’ve found a small boy who lives three doors away from Mrs Brookes’s back premises, and plays football in the street there. They will do it. He kicked the ball over the wall into Miss Clarkson’s yard on Friday morning, and knowing she was away, opened the door and let himself in to fetch it. He says there was a motor-bike propped on its stand inside there. A BSA three-fifty. That fits?’

‘It fits,’ said George, aware of a sudden lurch forward, as though he had been astride just such a mount, and accelerating along a closed alley between blank walls. ‘He didn’t, by any chance, collect registrations?’

‘No luck, he didn’t. Bright as a button about what interests him, he’s completely dim about the number. But if it was there, somebody else must have seen it, if we look hard enough. Somebody will have seen the rider, too. It’s only a matter of slogging, now we know where to look. And the second thing. Mrs Brookes has had an afterthought. Don’t ask me what it means, or even if it means anything. Myself, I’d be inclined to suppose she made it up to bolster her own picture of the visiting angel, if she didn’t in other ways strike me as being scrupulously honest in her observations, if not exactly acute. She says there
was
mention of a man. It didn’t occur to her when she was talking to you, because it was so obvious that you were enquiring about someone very different. But she remembered it afterwards, and thought she ought to correct her statement, however irrelevant this information may be.’

‘I recognise,’ said George, ‘the style.’

‘Good, now make sense of the matter. So far, I can’t. She says when Annet Beck fetched the key on Thursday, she told her that she would probably be having a visitor during the week-end. Said he had to be in Birmingham, so he’d be looking in to see her—’

‘He?’ said George, ears pricked, suddenly aware that this was going to be the place where the cul-de-sac ended, and he must brake now, and hard, if he wanted to keep his head unbroken.

‘He. The man for whose presence she was apparently preparing Mrs Brookes, just in case he should be seen. The only man in the case. And know who she said he’d be? This’ll shake you!
Her father
!’

Promptly at five-thirty Tom Kenyon telephoned again.

‘Nothng new here. It was a good day out, but nothing whatever happened. I suppose that was exactly what we could expect, with forty-two of us clambering about all over the rocks. If there is anything here to be found, you can stake your life nobody came for it to-day. But we didn’t find it, either.’

‘Were you able to do any looking?’ It wouldn’t be easy, with a handful of sharp-eyed juniors on the watch for every eccentricity in their elders.

‘Some. Not to attract attention, though, and that means we could only look very superficially at the outcrop areas where the kids were swarming. We had a go at the ring of trees, and the old footways down below, until the boys came down to hunt over the tips for crystals among the calcite. But all we collected was pockets full of Jane’s rock specimens. She always loads them on to the nearest human pack-mules to carry home for her. Women know what they’re doing, having no pockets.’

‘They’ve all come down by this time, I suppose?’ said George.

‘Ostentatiously. I thought it might be a good idea to leave with as much noise as possible, in case someone somewhere was waiting his turn. But Mallindine and your boy are still up there,’ he said reassuringly, ‘keeping an eye on things from cover until I go back. I’m on my way now, I’m going to send them down to get tea here at the pub.’

‘The others have gone?’

‘Yes, into Comerford with their coach, for tea. Jane arranged it. And then home to Comerbourne and disperse. Dead quiet up there now.’

He could feel the quietness of the Hallowmount moving, growing, pouring through the dusk towards the village, flowing round and over Fairford and Wastfield, drowning this isolated telephone box on the edge of the wilds. Down the darkening flanks the streams of silence ran softly and slowly, curling round the scattered buildings of the farm, sweeping greenly over the roof of the Sparrowhawk’s Nest. All day waiting like a great beast asleep, the long ridge stretched and stirred now in the first chill of twilight, and the little, quivering, treacherous ground-wind awoke and began curling its tremulous pathways up through the long grass.

‘Can you hold on there until I come out to meet you?’

‘Yes, I’ll be somewhere on top. I’ve had tea. I’ll send the boys down and wait for you.’

‘Good! I’ll be along as soon as I’ve talked to the Superintendent. And had a look in at Fairford, perhaps, if you don’t mind hanging on another half-hour or so?’

‘I don’t mind. Whenever you can make it, I’ll be here. Don’t pass up anything you should do first.’ He hesitated, unsure how much right he had to ask questions but aching with the effort to contain them. “Did you turn up anything useful at your end?’

‘Maybe. Difficult to tell as yet. We’ve found where they stayed. Not a hotel – they borrowed a flat rented by a friend of Annet’s. The motor-bike appears again. No one saw the man. But according to the old lady round the corner, the owner of the house, Annet told her she was expecting a visitor. Annet described him to her as her father.’

The indrawn breath at the other end of the line hissed agonisingly, as though the listener had flinched from a stab-wound. ‘Her
father
?’

‘Does that suggest anything?’

It suggested far too much, things Tom had never wanted to hear, and did not want to remember, possibilities he could not bear to contemplate. He choked on exclamations that would unload a share of the burden on to George’s shoulders, bit them back and swallowed them unuttered. They lay in his middle like lead.

‘It sounds as if we have to revise our ideas, doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ said Tom, his throat constrained.

‘Why say that, unless it was to prepare the way in case she was seen with this man? A man obviously, in that case, respectable enough to pass for her father.
And old enough
.’

‘Not a teenager run wild,’ said Tom.

‘Not even a youngster in his twenties. A father-figure. If only just. One could pass for Annet’s father at around forty, maybe, but hardly earlier. Any ideas?’

The distant voice said hoarsely, aware how little conviction it must be carrying: ‘No ideas.’

‘You be thinking about it,’ said George, and rang off without more words.

And what did that mean, on top of all the confusions that had bludgeoned him since noon? What was it young Tom Kenyon knew that George didn’t know, concerning some man who might be, but was not, Annet’s father? And why, feeling as he felt about Annet, and longing as he must long for an end to this uncertainty that held a potential death for her, why had he gulped back his knowledge from the tip of his tongue in panic, and resisted his solid citizen instinct to plump it into the arms of the police and get rid of the responsibility?

George turned out the lights in the cold office, locked the door after him, and went to make his report in person to Superintendent Duckett. But Annet’s father, and Annet’s fictional father, and Annet’s father’s lodger, and the accidental intimacies and involuntary reactions of proximity mingled and danced in his mind all the way.

It was nearly half past six when he reached Fairford. He didn’t know why he felt so strongly that he must go there, he had no reason to suppose that anything new had happened there, least of all that Annet would have unsealed her lips and repented of her silence. Nor was he going to try to prise words out of her by revealing any part of what he had found out. That he knew from ample trial to be useless. It was rather that he felt the need to reassure himself that there was still an Annet, a living intelligence, an identity surely not dependent on any other creature for its single and unique life, a girl who could still be saved. Because if she was past saving, the main object of this pursuit was already lost. The old dead man had his rights to justice, but the young living girl
was
the more urgent charge now upon George’s heart.

He turned in at the overgrown gate, into the darkness of the untrimmed, autumnal trees, the soft rot of leaves like wet sponge under his wheels. He came out of the tunnel of shadow, and sudden lances of light struck at his eyes. The front door stood wide open, all the lights in the bouse were blazing, the curtains undrawn. In the shrubberies down towards the brook someone was threshing about violently. In the garden, somewhere behind the house, someone was bleating frantically like a bereaved ewe, and until George had stopped the engine and scrambled out of the car he could not distinguish either the voice or the words. Then it sprang at him clearly, and he turned and ran for the house.

‘Annet! Annet!’ bellowed Beck despairingly, crashing through the bushes.

George bounded up the steps and into the hall, and Policewoman Lilian Crowther leaned out of the living-room doorway with the telephone receiver at her ear, and dropped it at sight of him, and gasped: “Thank God! I was trying to get through to you. She’s gone!’

‘When?’ He caught at the swinging telephone and slammed it back on its rest, seized the girl by the arm and drew her with him into the room. ‘Quick! When? How long ago?’

‘Not more than five minutes. We found out a few minutes ago. Lockyer’s out there looking for her – and her father. She can’t be far.’

‘You shouldn’t have left her.’

‘She collapsed! Like that other time. She was lying with her head nearly in the hearth, and I couldn’t lift her alone. I ran for her mother to help me—’

The window was wide open, the curtains swinging in the rising wind of the evening. Mrs Beck blundered past through the shaft of light, running with aimless urgency, turning again to run the other way, her face contorted into a grimace of weeping, but without tears or sound. As though death was all round the house, just outside the area of light, and everyone had known and recognised it except Annet; as though she was lost utterly as soon as she broke free from the circle and ran after her desire, and none of them would ever see her again. As though, plunging out of the window, she had plunged out of the world.

George vaulted the sill and landed on the edge of the unkempt grass. Mrs Beck turned and stared at him with dazed eyes, and caught at his arm.

‘She’s gone! I couldn’t help it, no one could stop her if she was so set to go. It isn’t anyone’s fault. What could we do?’

‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said, and put her off, and ran through the trees to the boundary fence, leaving her stumbling after him. No moon, but even in the starlight of half a sky the emptiness about Fairford showed sterile and motionless. He had met no girl on the road. She would keep to the trees as long as she could. He circled the grounds hurriedly, halting now and again to freeze and listen. He heard Beck baying at the remotest edge of the garden, and met Lockyer methodically threading the shrubberies.

‘No sign of her?’

‘No sign, sir. I heard your car. Crowther’ll have told you—’

‘Keep looking,’ said George, and turned back at a run towards the house. He overtook Mrs Beck on the way, and drew her in with him.

‘Here, sit down by the fire and be quiet. Lilian, close the window and get her a drink.’ He shut the door with a slam, and leaned his back against it. ‘Now, what happened?’

‘I told you, she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire. How could I know it was a fake? I ran for Mrs Beck – she was upstairs, she didn’t hear me call. When we came back Annet was gone.’

‘She climbed out of the window,’ said Mrs Beck, hugging her writhing hands together in her lap to keep them still. ‘Without even a coat – in her thin house-shoes!’

‘Yes, yes, I know all that.’ And Lockyer, patrolling dutifully outside, couldn’t be on every side of the house at once. Annet could move like a cat, she hadn’t found it difficult to elude him on her own ground. ‘But before! Something happened, something gave her the word. Why tonight? Why now? She chose her time, she had a reason. Has she had any letters? Telephone messages?’

‘No,’ said Lilian Crowther positively. ‘I’ve been with her all the time until she dropped like that. And Mrs Beck reads her letters – but anyhow there haven’t been any today.’

‘And no visitors,’ said George, fretting at his own helplessness, and caught the rapid flicker of a glance that passed uneasily between them. ‘No visitors? Someone
has
been here?’

‘I asked him to come,’ said Mrs Beck loudly. ‘I asked him to talk to her and do what he could. What else is he for, if not to help people in trouble? I thought he might get something out of her. It was last night being choir practice that made me think of it. I telephoned him, and asked him to come in today. There couldn’t be any harm in that. If she couldn’t see her own vicar – even criminals are allowed that.’

‘All right,’ said George, frantically groping forward along this unforseen path, ‘so the vicar came. No one else?’

‘No one else. You must admit I had the right—’

‘All right, you had the right! Was he left alone with her?’

‘No,’ said Lilian, defensively and eagerly, ‘I was with her all the time. Mrs Beck left them together, but I stayed in the room.’

‘Thank God for that! Annet didn’t object?’

‘She didn’t seem to care one way or the other.’ And yet she had bided her time, and torn herself resolutely out of their hold. Something had passed, something significant. Why otherwise should she have chosen this particular hour, after waiting so long and so stoically? ‘Well, what did they have to say to each other? Everything you can remember.’

She dredged up a number of embarrassed, agonising platitudes through which the adolescent rawness of pity showed like flesh through torn clothing. The vicar was back in the room with them, convulsed with sympathy and hideously unable to contain it, or spill it, or wring his inadequate if kindly heart open and give it to her frankly; an ageing boy with only a boy’s heaven to offer anyone, and stunted angels with undeveloped wings like his own.

‘He said he was to tell her the choir had missed her at practice, and sent her their prayers. He said they took comfort in the thought that they would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit, he said. And that was about all,’ she concluded lamely, scouring her memory in vain for more vital matter. ‘It doesn’t seem anything to set her off like this.’

And yet she had received, somehow, the summons that sent her out into the dusk. He could not be mistaken. If it was not here, in this trite comfort, then there must be something else, something they had missed.

‘Nothing else happened? He didn’t give her a note from someone else?’

‘No, honestly. He never went near enought to hand her anything. You’d have thought he was afraid of her – I suppose he was, in a way,’ said Policewoman Crowther, with more perception than George would have given her credit for.

‘She didn’t see the paper?’ He hadn’t seen it himself, he didn’t know if there was anything in it to speak to her, but somewhere the lost thread dangled, and must be found again.

‘No, she never tried to. She never showed any interest.’

Perhaps, thought George, because she knew they wouldn’t let her have the papers even if she wanted them. Perhaps because she had waited with such fatal confidence for the only message she needed, and knew it would not come that way.

But then there was nothing left but those few, bald sentences, brought from the outside world by the vicar; and if the clue was nowhere else, it must be there. The choir had missed her – Mrs Beck must have telephoned him just before he went over to the church for practice, and he had unburdened his heart to her colleagues to spread the load. And nobly they had responded. Or had they? The tone of the message was surely his, or a careful parody. It sounded as though he had dictated, and they had said: Amen. They sent her their prayers. They would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit. Six-thirty was the hour of evensong, that was plain enough. Yes, but it belonged to tomorrow, not today. Why did it send her out tonight. George sweated through it word by word, and darkness, rather than light, fell on him in the moment of discovery, stunning him.

Six-thirty at the altar. Six-thirty at the Altar! All the difference in the world.