Ellis Peters - George Felse 03 - Flight Of A Witch (8 page)

‘Amnesia,’ said Mrs Beck, too strenuously, and recoiled from the theatrical impact of the word, and said no more.

Why were they arguing like this, what was it they were trying to ward off? What did the police care about a truant week-end, provided no laws had been broken?’

‘It was a fine, dry week-end,’ said George reasonably, ‘About ten per cent of the Black Country must have been roaming the border hills on Saturday and Sunday, and the odds are pretty good that a fair porportion of them were on the Hallowmount. They couldn’t all miss a wandering, distressed girl. If any locals had seen her they’d have spoken to her. Everyone knows her. And did she reappear tired, hungry, anxious or grimy? Apparently not. She came down to you completely self-possessed, neat, tidy and fresh, asking pertinent questions. From fairyland, yes, perhaps. From amnesia one’s return would, I fancy, be less coherent and coordinated.’

He hitched his chair a little nearer to Annet, he reached and took her hands, compelling her attention.

‘I don’t doubt the happiness, Annet,’ he said gently. ‘In a way I think you’ve told me a kind of truth, a partial truth. Now tell me the rest while you can. You were no nearer the underworld than, say – Birmingham. Were you?’

Hard on the heels of the brief, blank silence Beck said, in a high, hysterical voice: ‘But what does it mean? What if she actually was in Birmingham? That’s not a crime, however wrong it may be to lie to one’s family. What are all these questions
about
? I think you should tell us.’

‘Perhaps I should. Unless Annet wants to alter her story first?’

‘I can’t,’ said Annet. Braced and intent, she watched him, and whether it was incomprehension he saw in her face or the impenetrable resolution to cover and contain what she understood all too well, he still could not determine.

‘Very well. You want to know what the questions are about. Last Saturday night, around shop-closing time,’ said George, ‘a young girl was seen, by two witnesses independently, standing on the corner of a minor – and at that hour an almost deserted – street in Birmingham. She was idling about as though waiting for someone, about forty yards from a small jeweller’s shop. The first witness, an old woman who lives in the street, gave a fair description of a girl who answers very well to Annet’s general appearance. The second one, a young man, gave a much more detailed account. He spoke to her, you see, wasted five minutes or so trying to pick her up. He described her minutely. Girls like Annet can’t, I suppose, hope to escape the notice of young men.’

‘But however good a description you had,’ protested Tom, ‘why a girl from Comerford, of all places, when this was in Birmingham?’

‘A good question, I’m coming to that.’

‘I suppose your son told you Annet was missing during the week-end,’ said Tom, bitterly and unwisely.

George gave him a long, thoughtful glance from under raised brows.

‘No, Dominic’s told me nothing – but thanks for the tip. No, the Birmingham police came to us because this girl, according to her unwelcome cavalier, was filling in the time while she waited, as one does, by fishing the forgotten bits out of her pockets. Everyone has an end of pencil, or a loose lucky farthing, or a hair-grip, or something, lost in the fluff at the seam. This girl had a bus ticket. She was playing with it when he accosted her, and she was nervous. That amused him. He paid particular attention to the way she was folding it up into a tiny fan — you know? — narrow folds across in alternate directions, then fold the whole thing in the middle. When he was too pressing – though of course he doesn’t admit that – she drew back from him hastily, twisted the fan in her fingers and threw it down. He says he left her alone then. If she didn’t want him, he could do without her. But when they took him back to the corner next day he knew where the ticket had lodged, close under the wall, in a cranny of the paving stones. And sure enough, they found it there, and he identified it positively.

‘It turned out,’ said George flatly, ‘to be a one-and-fourpenny by Egertons’ service between Comerbourne and Comerford. With that and the description it wasn’t so hard to settle upon Annet, once they came to us. Unfortunately no one saw the person for whom she was waiting. She told the youngster who accosted her she was waiting for her boyfriend, and he was an amateur boxer. So he didn’t hang around to put it to the test.’

‘But what of it?’ persisted Beck feverishly. ‘Why are they hunting for this girl – whoever she may be?’

‘Because, around midnight that night, when a policeman on the beat came along, he saw that the steel mesh gate over the jeweller’s doorway wasn’t quite closed. All the lights in the shop were off, the gate was drawn into position, but when he tried it he found it wasn’t secured. And naturally he investigated. He found the till cleared of cash, and several glass cases emptied, too, apparently of small jewellery. The loss is estimated at about two thousand pounds, mostly in good rings.

‘And the proprietor – he was an old, solitary man, who lived over his shop – he was in his own workroom at the back. His head had been battered in with a heavy silver candlestick,’ said George, his voice suddenly hard, deliberate and cold. ‘He was dead.’

The gasp of realisation and horror that stiffened them all jerked Annet for the first time out of her changeling calm, and out of her chair. She was torn erect, rigid, her face convulsed, her hands clutching at the empty air before her. The great eyes dilated, fixed and blank with shock. The contorted mouth screamed: ‘No – no, –
no
!’ and her voice shattered on a suffocating breath.

Tom sprang wildly towards her; but it was George Felse who caught and lifted her in his arms as she fell.

Call her doctor,’ said George, over the limp, light body. ‘I’d rather he was here.’

He put off Mrs Beck, who was clawing frantically at her darling and spilling unwonted and painful tears, with a lunge of one shoulder, and carried his burden to the couch. ‘Tom, you get him. Use my name, he’ll come all the quicker.’

Tom got as far as the telephone before he realised that he did not even know which doctor they favoured, and there being no emergency notes on the scratch-pad to enlighten him, he was forced to come and drag Beck away from the couch to supply the information he needed. Annet was lying motionless and pale by then, a pillow under her cheek, her body stretched carefully at ease, the narrow skirt drawn down over her knee, surely by George Felse. Tom dialled with an erratic finger, hating George more for his deftness and humanity even than for his official menace. What right had he? What right? To strike her down, and then to be the one who held her in his arms, and laid her down so gently among the cushions, and stroked back the tumbled hair from her eyes with such assured fingers.

‘Doctor Thorpe? I’m speaking for Mr Beck at Fairford. Can you come out here at once, please? Yes, it’s urgent. Miss Beck – Annet – she’s in a faint. Detective-Inspector Felse is here, he told me to ask you to hurry. I don’t know – a degree of shock, I suppose – he urges you to come as soon as possible. Good, thank you!’

He hung up, and his hand was shaking so that the receiver rattled in the rest. He went back to the living-room with Beck clinging close on his arm.

Mrs Beck had control of herself again; the traces of her few and angry tears mottled her cheeks, her ruled dark hair, dull from many tintings, was shaken out of its customary severity, but she was herself again, and would not be overwhelmed a second time. George had withdrawn and left Annet to her; not, it seemed, from any embarrassment or incompetence on his own part, rather to provide her with something urgent and practical to do, for he did not withdraw far, and he watched her ministrations with a close and sombre regard.

‘Is she subject to fainting fits?’

‘I’ve never known her faint before.’ She gave him a furious look over her daughter’s body. ‘You frightened her. You shocked her.’

‘She could have read most of the same details in tonight’s paper,’ said George, ‘but I doubt if they’d have had the same effect. She wouldn’t have realised then what she knows now – that it happened forty yards away from her, while she was waiting for her – friend. There are things she knows that I didn’t have to tell her. Such as where he was while she stood waiting for him. If he’d been round the other corner in the tobacconist’s, buying cigarettes, I think Annet would have stood the shock of an unknown old man’s death without collapsing.’

‘But, good God!’ protested Tom, twisting away from the thought, ‘you’re making out that she kept watch for him on the corner while he did it.’

‘That’s one possibility. There are others.’

He didn’t go into them. He stood looking down at the pale, motionless face on the cushions, pinched and blue at the corners of the closed lips, a strange, faint frown, austere and distant, clenched upon her black brows. The silken wings of her hair spread blue-black on either side, buoyed up on the resilient down of the pillow like a drowned girl’s hair afloat on water.

So slight, and so remote; and so incalculable. Was it possible to know her so well that she would some day be able to take down all the barriers and be relaxed and at peace with you? He’d never had much close contact with her. It might be only that unbelievably touching beauty of hers that made him feel her exile from her fellow-men to be something imposed from without, and not chosen. That, and her age. She could have been Dominic’s year-older sister. He would have liked a girl. So would Bunty, but there’d just never been one. Did she remain closed like an ivory box with a secret spring even when she was with X? Or open like a flower to the sun? The inescapable X. X who must be found, because he had almost certainly killed a solitary, eccentric, miserly old man for the contents of his till and the sweepings of three show-cases.

‘You haven’t proved she was even there,’ said Beck, stirred to the feeble man’s desperate bravery. ‘There must be many girls who fit the same description equally well. You see Annet’s ill. She never faints. She was wandering somewhere all the week-end, and she’s ill and frightened, and you have to use her so brutally.’

‘I’m sorry if you think I was brutal. I don’t think I was guilty single-handed of cutting the ground from under Annet’s feet. Someone else did that. When he hit the old man. No,’ he said, looking down bitterly at the slow, languid heave and fall of Annet’s breast, ‘I haven’t proved she was there. I haven’t proved she was the girl on the corner. I didn’t have to. Annet told us that, pretty plainly. The only thing she has told us yet.’

But it wasn’t; not quite. She had told him, however unwillingly, the depth and height and hopelessness and helplessness of the love that was eating her alive. If they hadn’t seen it, if they had no means of measuring or grasping it, that was their failure; and it looked as if that inadequacy in them might yet be the death of Annet. A little honest brutality might have cheered and warmed her, and brought her close enough to confide.

He looked up and caught Tom Kenyon’s eye upon him. There was one who wasn’t going to dispute his contention that Annet had betrayed herself. He’d wanted a reaction from her, and he’d got it at last, and it identified her only too surely.

‘But you realise, don’t you,’ said Tom with careful quietness, ‘that she’s absolved herself, too? Oh, I know! If it wasn’t Annet your witness saw, why should this be such a shock to her? But since it
is
such a shock, she
can’t have known
. Can she? She can’t have known anything about the murder, maybe not even about the robbery. She was there, yes, but quite innocently, waiting for him. She thought he was buying something, maybe a present for her. It was only because of their joint escapade that she wouldn’t admit where she’d been. To keep him out of trouble, yes, but not
that
trouble – because she knew nothing about that until you just told her. Why else should it drop her like a shot?’

George said: ‘You make a pretty good case. If this is genuine, of course.’

‘
If
it’s genuine! My God, man, look at the poor kid!’

No need to tell him that, he’d hardly taken his eyes off her. But he didn’t commit himself to any opinion about the nature of this collapse. He’d been in the world and his profession long enough to know that deception has many layers, and women know the deepest of them. No question of Annet’s unconsciousness now, no doubt of her anguish; but he had known self-induced illnesses and self-induced collapses before, as opportune as this, as disarming as this, sometimes even deceiving their victims and manipulators. When you can’t bear any more, when you want the questioning to stop, when you need time to think, you cut off the sources of reason and force and light, and drop like a dead bird off its roost in a frosty night. And as long as you stay darkened and silenced, no one can torment you.

Annet remained dark and silent a disquietingly long time. Cold water bathing her forehead brought no flicker to her pinched face.

‘We’d better get her to bed,’ her mother said. ‘Arthur, help me with her.’

‘I’ll carry her upstairs for you.’

George stooped and slid an arm under the girl’s shoulders, very gently easing her weight into balance against his breast. Her head rolled limply upon his shoulder, the black wing of glossy hair swung, and hid her face. Inside the loose collar of her yellow sweater a narrow thread of black velvet ribbon lay uncovered against the honeyed pallor of her neck. It moved with her weight, dipping between her little breasts.

He held her cradled against him, and ran his fingers round her neck beneath the fragrant drift of hair. There was a neat little bow tied there in the ribbon; he eased it round until he could untie it, and she never stirred, not even when he laid the loosened ends together, and drew out the treasure she had concealed between her breasts.

He held it out for them all to see, dangling on its ribbon: a narrow circlet of gold, a brand-new wedding ring.

They were upstairs with her a long time, the mother and the doctor, but they came down at last. George, who had sat all the time looking down with a shadowed face and dangling the ring by its ribbon, rose to meet them. He could think of nothing in his life that had filled him with so deep a sense of shame as the act of filching that tiny thing from her while she lay senseless; the most private and precious thing she possessed, the symbol of everything she wanted, and he could not let her keep it. He weighed it in his hand, and it was heavier than it should have been with all the inescapable implications that clung to it.

The old man’s assistant, who had left him just preparing to lock up on Saturday night, had made an inventory of the stolen pieces, as far as his memory served him. There was no question as to whether he would be able to identify the ring; a tiny private mark was scratched beside the assay marks inside it, whoever had had it in his stock would know it.

‘Has she come round?’

‘How is she?’

Two of them asked together; Arthur Beck, suddenly piteously old and withered, only trembled and waited.

‘Yes, she’s come round.’ Doctor Thorpe closed his bag and looked from one to another of them with quick, speculative grey eyes. ‘But you won’t be able to question her any more tonight.’

The slight antagonism in his voice was human enough, in the circumstances, but George’s ear was becoming acutely tuned to every inflection that concerned Annet. Thirty-five, not bad-looking, in professional attendance on her for five years or so — on those rare occasions, at least, when she needed attention: yes, this might very well be another of her many mute, unnoticed victims.

‘I wasn’t thinking of trying. Is she going to be all right?’

‘Physically there’s not much the matter with her. It was a long faint, but she came out of it fairly well in the end. She seems to be in a state of deep and genuine shock, but physically she’s as strong as a horse, there’ll be no ill effects. Just leave her alone for tonight, that’s all.’

‘Will you come in and see her tomorrow morning? I’d like to have your all-clear before I talk to her again, and I’ll go very gently. But it’s urgent that it should be as soon as possible.’

‘Very well,’ said the doctor with tightening lips, ‘I’ll look in and see her before surgery. Call me about nine, and I’ll give you my report.’

‘When she’s slept on it she may be willing to talk to me freely. I think you must see it’s the best, the only thing she can do to help herself now. If you have any influence with her, try to get her to realise it.’ He included all of them in that request, and saw the doctor’s tight, reserved face ease a little. ‘I’ve got a job to do, but it isn’t to hurt Annet. A part of it is to save whatever can be saved for her.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said the doctor.

‘Do one thing more for me, will you? With your permission, Mr Beck, I want to put a constable on guard here in your grounds. I’d be obliged, doctor, if you’d stay here with Annet until he arrives.’

They stared eye to eye for a second, then the doctor said quietly: ‘Very well, I’ll go back to her.’

Beck turned and shuffled his way to the stairs after him, a wretched, wilted figure, babbling feeble daily platitudes, trying to pretend there was a grain of normality left in his life, where there was nothing but a waste of wreckage like a battlefield.

‘I’ll be off now,’ said George, glad, if anything, to be left confronting Mrs Beck, with whom, it was clear, he would have to deal if he wanted to get sense out of anyone. ‘I shall have to take this ring with me, you understand that?’

‘Yes, I understand.’ She looked down pallidly at the thin, bright circlet. ‘Do you think – is it possible that they—?’

‘I think it very unlikely. This is a symbol, that’s all. And a promise. It isn’t so easy to get married in a hurry without a fair amount of money, and you see they can’t have had much between them.’

She flinched at that, his sound reasons for thinking so were only too clear.

‘And in the circumstances,’ he said gently, ‘I think you should hope and pray that they didn’t manage it.’

She whispered: ‘Yes!’ hardly audibly.

‘Don’t let her go to work tomorrow, even if she wants to. I want you to keep a close guard on her, and hold her available only to us. Don’t take anyone into your confidence, not yet, at any rate. Better telephone Mrs Blacklock in the morning, and say Annet has a return of her cold.’

‘Yes,’ she said again, dully, ‘I expect that would be best.’

‘And I need, if you have one, a good recent picture of her.’

Photographs of Annet were so few in the house, now Tom came to think of it, that their rarity shed light on her absence of vanity. When had he even seen her peering at her make-up in a mirror with the devoted attention of most girls? Mrs Beck brought a postcard portrait, the latest she had, and George pocketed it after one thoughtful glance again at the lovely, troubling face.

‘Thank you. You shall have it back, I promise you.’ Would she get the original back as surely? He wished he knew the answer to that. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. And believe me, I’m sorry!’

‘I’ll see you out,’ said Tom, and followed him from the room and out through the dim hall, into the moist, mild night. The front door closed almost stealthily upon the tragedy within.

‘It can’t be true!’ said Tom, suddenly in total revolt. The rupture was too brutal and extreme between this immemorial border stability, the continuity that made nothing of wars and centuries and dissensions, and that abrupt and strident descent into the cheapest and shallowest of ephemeral crimes. A mean little incident, a quick raid and a random blow, merely for money, for the means to buy things for Annet, to take Annet about in style – everything Annet didn’t want. The offence against her, the debasing of her immoderate love, almost as capital a crime as the killing of the old man. She couldn’t have known. It was the death of everything she had wanted from love. No, she couldn’t possibly have known.