Ellis Peters - George Felse 03 - Flight Of A Witch (20 page)

His going uncovered the two figures clasped indissolubly together in the grass. Annet had not moved. Withdrawn into herself in the sealed silence of bereavement, she crouched in the classic shape of mourning. Tom strained to keep his eyes upon her, and his own pain was only an irritation that fretted at his bitter concentration without bringing him ease, a threat that filmed his vision over with faintness when most he desired to continue seeing. He moaned when they eased the coat away from his wound, but he shook the encroaching dark from him, and fastened on Annet still like a famishing man.

George had dropped to his knees beside those motionless, fused lovers, and was putting back gently the curtain of black hair that shrouded their faces, to look closely at the wound that had brought them down together. But even when he had satisfied himself, what was there he could have to say to Annet? She knew Peter Blacklock was dead; there was no need for anyone to break that news to her. There was no need for words at all; there was no aspect of this death and this survival she had not already understood. And George had nothing to say. But without fuss, as one doing what was there to be done, he took her chin in his hand and lifted her head erect, gently loosened her fingers from their rigid clasp, and unwound her arms from about her dead. He lifted the limp body out of her embrace and laid it down in the grass, and taking Annet by the hands, drew her to her feet.

And she turned to him, not away from him! She turned to him voluntarily, leaning forward into his shoulder with a broken sigh. He held her for a while, gently and impersonally; and when she raised her head and stood back from him he took away his arms gently and gradually and let her stand alone.

‘Miles!’

He had not said one word or made one movement until then, only stood motionless and apart in the darkness by the rocks, biding his time. Tom had forgotten him until he heard the measured and muted voice say: ‘I’m here.’

‘Take Annet down to my car, and drive her home. She’ll go with you now.’

He came up out of a well-shaft of weakness and slight fever, tossed into half-consciousness, aware of faces bending over him, and of a bright, bare whiteness which was a small room at the Cottage Hospital, though he did not know that until later. He said aloud the most urgent thing he had drawn up with him out of his uneasy dreams, not realising how often he had said it before.

‘Annet didn’t know. She had no part in it. She knew nothing about murder – or robbery.’

The faces showed no surprise. They soothed him quickly: ‘It’s all right. We know. Nobody blames Annet.’

‘She only wanted to go to him to persuade him to come back with her and give himself up.’

‘Yes, don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. We know.’

‘She said – it had no virtue unless he chose it himself. She refused to go away with him. She wanted—’

‘Yes, you told us. It’s all right, we know everything.’

She wanted him to kill her, he had tried to say, but it stuck in his throat and filled him with such a leaden burden of pain that he sank again into the drowning depths of his isolation. None of them had heard what he had heard, or suffered what he had suffered. They could look her in the face again, live within touch and sound and sight of her and find it bearable. But he never could. He didn’t even ask after her. It was no use, there was nothing there for him. His only right in her was to proclaim her immaculate; and that he did as often as he drifted back into consciousness, purging his overburdened soul and bleeding his frustrated love out of him in anxious witness to her innocence.

‘Don’t let them blame Annet. She didn’t do anything—’

‘No, no, don’t worry. Annet will be all right.’

Later, when he was convalescent, propped up in pillows with his shoulder swathed, they all came to see him, bringing with them fragments which were not now so much pieces of a puzzle as handfuls of stones to pile on a cairn, marking the place memorable for a disaster or a death. Or maybe an achievement. Or a discovery. Such as his own limitations, or the child’s discovery, uncomfortable but salutary, that fire burns, or if you get out of your depth you may drown.

It was George Felse who brought him the few pieces that actually were gaps in the puzzle: the inquisitive small boy who had reported the motor-cycle in Mrs Brooke’s backyard, the message the vicar had brought, and the precise reason behind Annet’s flight from Fairford.

‘The bike seemed to point to Stockwood, who had the loan of one of the estate BSAs for the week-end. He couldn’t have been the first fellow, six months ago, but that didn’t let him out altogether, there was no certainty they were the same. And he’d let himself in for suspicion, anyhow, first by lying about his whereabouts, and then by saying he’d spent the time with a woman, but refusing to name the woman.’

He said nothing about his own barely tenable theory that the woman might, just might, have been Regina Blacklock; a theory they’d never had to investigate, after all, thank God!

‘Moreover, he had a prison record. He did a year for his part in a hold-up job, through getting mixed up with some girl, and his wife got a decree nisi against him into the bargain. He was an obvious possibility. But when Mrs Brookes came up with the item of evidence about Annet’s
father
, that let Stockwood out. He wasn’t old enough by years. When I spoke to you on the ’phone I had a kind of idea that
you
knew something you weren’t exactly rushing to tell, something that seemed to fit.’

‘I did,’ said Tom, remembering that, too, as something infinitely distant and unreal. ‘I thought I did. But it doesn’t matter now. It was wrong, anyhow. So you didn’t have to find out who Stockwood’s woman was.’

‘No, we didn’t have to, but as it turned out, we did. The Superintendent let his name drift into the hand-out to the evening paper on Saturday, and she came forward in a hurry, all flags flying, to say he’d been with her. She was his wife, you see. She is his wife,’ he corrected himself with a broad smile. ‘Talk about good out of evil, the Bloome Street case put paid to that divorce, once and for all. I doubt if he could lose her again even if he tried.’

Side-tracked out of the too-deeply-worn cutting of his own obsessive grief, Tom followed this strange by-product of murder with awakening wonder. ‘But if it was his wife, why wouldn’t he say so?’

‘Because it had taken him months to get her even to talk to him again, and he wanted her back, and had just brought her to the point of surrender. It was a triumph that she’d let him work his way in and stay those few days. But he knew he was still on probation, and he was terrified that if he gave it away that he’d lived with her again she’d think he was trying to fix her, force her hand by preventing the divorce from going through. He knew her well enough to know she has a temper, and she was badly hurt the first time. She might very well have turned on him and told him to go to hell if she’d thought he was framing her. But when she heard the police were interested in his movements, she came like a fury to protect him. That’s one happy ending, at least, even if we only reached it by accident.’

‘I’m glad somebody got some good out of it,’ said Tom.

‘So we were left with a motor-bike that could be one of the three they keep at Cwm, but didn’t have to be, and this idea of the man who could pass for Annet’s father. When it turned out that the vicar had brought the message that sent Annet out that night, that seemed to make him a possibility, at first sight. But obviously he spent the whole of Sunday at Comerford – he had Communion and two services, and he always puts in an appearance at Sunday School, too – and in any case there were immediately other inferences to be drawn. The message he brought was from the choir, so he said, but in practice that meant from the choir-master. Peter Blacklock – well, who had such privileged access to Annet as he did? He could and did ride one of the estate three-fifties up and down to the plantations when it suited him – nobody in his senses would use an E-type Jag for a job like that, where he wanted to be inconspicuous – and he could very well pass for Annet’s father. And it was only a startling thought at first sight,‘ said George, looking back at it sombrely from the light of knowledge, ’and then not for long.’

‘But he was at church, too. And at choir practice on the Friday night. He rang up afterwards and asked why Annet hadn’t come – whether she was ill.’

‘That was part of the campaign. He had to know whether they’d done anything decisive, like going to the police. Annet was sure they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t happy, he wanted to know. He divided his time very delicately. On Thursday he took Annet to Birmingham. On Friday at dusk he left her there and came back to choir practice, and went through that little performance of enquiring after Annet, offering to go round and see her if she was fit to have visitors. And then he went back to her, and stayed with her until Sunday morning. What happened on Saturday night you know. It wasn’t planned, of that I’m certain. It happened out of desperation and chance opportunity. He never intended murder, but he needed money. He needed it badly, and it was there winking at him, and only this old man in the way. He gave Annet the wedding ring, and neither she nor we will ever know exactly why. It may have been just cover for what he’d done. Or it may be the real reason why he went into the shop, to buy the thing for her, the symbol of the permanence of their love and the secret dream-marriage that was all they would ever have, and the other thing may have happened on a disastrous impulse, because the time and the circumstances offered, and he was fuller of longing for her than he could bear. I don’t know. In some ways I underestimated him, maybe I’d better not even try to guess.

‘Well, that was Saturday. And on Sunday he came to morning service in Comerford, to be seen, to be fortified by other people’s assumption of his normality until he almost believed himself that everything was normal. He didn’t know until he went back that the old man was dead. He’d asked his deputy to play on Sunday evening. That happened sometimes, no one thought anything about it. And he didn’t come back until he brought Annet home on Tuesday evening, and parted from her behind the Hallowmount.’

‘And it was Annet who hid the briefcase?’

‘Yes, that was Annet. She hid it in their old place, and walked over the crest and came face to face with you.’

With difficulty, his face turned away, Tom asked: ‘She told you about it?’

‘She told us. No reason why she shouldn’t now.’

‘But she didn’t know what it was. He can’t have told her.’

‘All she knew was that it was their savings, the only funds they had, and they wanted it ready to hand, because soon – very soon, they were determined on that now – they were going away together for good.’

Tom turned from that because it cut too near, and he could not bear to look at it yet. ‘I should have thought it might have been awkward with the servants. I know there was no reason to go closely into his movements, but if you had, they’d have told you he was absent most of the relevant time.’

‘What servants?’ said George simply, and smiled. ‘The days of resident staffs are over, even in houses like Cwm. Hadn’t you realised? Well, why should you, come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a revolution that hit you, any more than it did me. Nobody has servants, these days. You have dailies who come in to clean, mornings, and maybe one who cooks if you’re lucky, but only during the day, at that, and not week-ends. Week-ends Madam does her own cooking now, and if she’s away, her husband eats out. Stockwood had been sent off to his wife, and delighted with the opportunity, Mrs Bell had said she had her daughter and the baby coming over the week-end, so she couldn’t oblige, and Blacklock had said that was all right, he could manage. Their regular early girl, who came first thing in the morning to clean, had a key, and most often she never saw him, anyhow. No, there was no difficulty there. One appearance at choir practice and one at church, and everyone had a normal picture of his week-end, and was convinced he’d spent it here.’

‘I suppose,’ said Tom, staring fixedly at the stiff hem of the sheet, ‘it must have been going on for some time – between him and Annet?’

‘That depends what you mean. I think he must have loved her almost from the moment she began to work for his wife. Certainly very soon afterwards.’

Very soon afterwards! How could he help it, married to that busy public figure whose capacities for private warmth he must have exhausted long ago, and brought into daily contact with that glowing, ardent, conserved potential of beauty and passion, whose very extravagance would be like drink to him in a desert?

‘I don’t know when he made the fatal mistake of betraying it. Probably not long before they planned that first abortive flight together. I think it must have been a new discovery then. She couldn’t, I think, fail to respond as soon as she knew. And once she loved him,’ said George, weighing the words and dropping them on to the cairn one by one, ‘he was done for. Between the two of them he didn’t have much chance.’

‘
She
didn’t make him a murderer,’ said Tom, taking fire. ‘I don’t see how anyone could blame Annet.’

'I'll go with you on that. So would most people. Everyone probably,’ said George ruefully, ‘except Annet.
She
knew. When it was too late, she knew what she’d done. If she’d failed to respond he would have made himself content with what he had, glimpses of her, proximity, company, the pleasure of working together, until time and his glands eased up on him, and turned the whole thing into a nice, gentle, father-and-daughter affection. She made the mistake of taking him at his word. It was only a very little step from that to loving him. And once she began,
she
was the dominant. She’d dragged him unwittingly into a situation that wasn’t beyond her scope, but was more than he could bear. To her love was for loving, not a passive thing, and once she’d accepted him he couldn’t go on fondly dreaming it, he was forced to turn it into action. The first try was a failure, but the second – more cautious this time, just a rehearsal – came off. When they wandered past Worrall’s shop that Saturday evening they’d had just two nights together, and the world was on fire. Once he’d tasted that, how could he let it go? They had to get away together, for good this time. Nothing else would do. But for that he had to have money, a fair sum of money, not the twenty pounds or so for petrol and day-to-day spending he kept in his pockets by Regina’s grace, but enough to break free and start again somewhere else. And money in that quantity was what he hadn’t got – almost the only thing he hadn’t got.’

‘I know,’ said Tom, low-voiced. ‘It takes a bit of realising. The cars, and the clothes – and everything.’

‘He was a pretty good solicitor once in his own right, but when he married her the administration of her estates took up all his time. It never occurred to her that she ought to pay him for it, everything she had was his. He only had to admire something, only to like it, much less want and ask for it, and she’d buy it and give it to him. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t give him – except the solid salary his work was worth to her. She wasn’t possessive about her money, she just didn’t think about it, and it never occurred to her that he could feel cramped and humiliated by having to ask her for what she never grudged. Maybe he didn’t miss it himself until he wanted something he couldn’t ask her to buy for him. So like any adolescent kid pushed to desperation, he took the twentieth-century short cut – a quick attack and a clean sweep of the most expensive-looking cases in the shop. But like any adolescent kid frightened out of his wits by his own first act of violence, he hit too hard, and there was more than a headache and the insurance money to pay for it. No, between those two he didn’t have much chance. But Annet had the honesty and the courage to look squarely at her own part in it, and take rather more than her share of blame on her shoulders. She was quite prepared to give her own life away to save him from making bad worse, to try to make some sort of restitution to him and to the world. Regina is and will always be injured and blameless.’

‘And yet she thought the world of him,’ said Tom, honestly baffled. ‘And she
is
a good woman.’