No Way Of Telling (18 page)

She opened the side-kitchen door and Mick, glad to be home, rushed inside.

“Is that you, Amy?” called Mrs Bowen.

“Yes, Granny.”

“I’ll make the tea then.”

But Amy had still another task to do before she took off her wellingtons and her coat. The door through to the front-kitchen was shut. Mr Nabb was certainly on the other side of it, but where? Close to it?—just about to open it? Or over by the fire? She had to know. She looked in and there he was, humped up again on the chest at the far side of the room, tying knots in his piece of string. He never even looked at her. Mrs Bowen was lighting the lamp.

“I shan’t be long, Granny. I’ve done the ewes but I haven’t shut the chickens in yet. Have you got enough sticks for morning?”

“You might as well fetch in a few more when you come.”

Amy closed the door quickly and a second later was lifting the heavy jar of pickles off the shelf and standing it on the floor. It was essential to hide the letter in another place, for once she had gone to bed the side-kitchen was going to be inaccessible to her.

When she raised the sheet of newspaper and found the letter lying where she had hidden it the day before, she felt a curious thrill of discovery, even though she had known it must still be there. She pushed it into the front of her coat. The question that had occupied her thoughts a good deal that morning was in what new place to conceal the letter until she was ready to start out on her journey. It had to be somewhere from which she could retrieve it easily, yet somewhere absolutely safe. Even for those few hours she dared not keep it in her bedroom, not with Mr Nabb forever on the prowl, nosing into everything. Then she had had what had seemed at the time to be a flash of inspiration: she would hide the letter in a nesting-box in the hen-house. No one would think of looking there!

But she had reckoned without the dislike of all hens for being disturbed. They were accustomed to Amy’s regular visit at nightfall to push across the slide of their own small entry and turn the catch on it; but they were not accustomed, once they had roosted, to having the main door of the hen-house swing wide open, and when it happened now it had a most unsettling effect upon them.

They began to cluck and ruffle their feathers in the dim light. One hen fluttered down from the left-hand perch and stepped jerkily out on to the gang-plank. Amy shooed her back. The hen tried to dodge her way out again and when Amy again prevented her the general agitation and clucking increased. Feeling about a little desperately for the nearest nesting-box Amy put her hand directly on to a sitting hen. There was a loud squawk and then pandemonium as the rest of the hens began to flap and squawk as well, and to topple each other off the perches. With deep dismay Amy realised that hiding the letter in the hen-house was another one of her bad ideas. It would never do. If they made only half as much noise as this when she came to fetch the letter she would be utterly betrayed.

“Oh, you are such stupid creatures,” she muttered. “Why can’t you have some sense?”

“I hope they’ve provided plenty of eggs for my breakfast,” said a voice behind her pleasantly.

Amy let go of the letter, dropping it on to a bunch of indignant feathers, and whirled round. There he was—Vigers, the tiger-man, Inspector Catcher, Mr Brilliant—leaning his skis up against the wall beside the side-kitchen door, smiling at her. She caught the gleam of his teeth in the dusk.

“I never heard you come,” she stammered.

“I’m not surprised, with all that hullabaloo going on. What happened?—why are they so upset?”

She shook her head, dumbly.

“Perhaps there’s a fox about,” he suggested. “One should never under-estimate the instinct for danger that birds and animals have. The Romans put it to good use—they guarded their citadel with flocks of geese. If anyone came creeping up to the walls at night the geese would start cackling, and then of course the alarm was raised. I’ve always thought that was a very ingenious idea. What—weren’t there any eggs at all?” he added, seeing her empty hands.

“Oh, yes—I fetched them in before. It was just this one old hen—she was still sitting—I thought she might have laid by now. She hasn’t though,” said Amy, shutting the door with such a thump the hens protested again. “Did you—did you find—anything?”

“Not today,” said Inspector Catcher, and he held open the side-kitchen door for Amy to precede him.

“I’ve some sticks to get yet,” she mumbled. “You go on in—Granny made the tea a while back. I shan’t be many minutes, tell her.”

The very moment he was out of sight she snatched open the hen-house door and her hand was actually on the letter when she heard an appalling rumpus break out in the side-kitchen—Mick’s frantic barking, some kind of a crash, and angry shouting.

Mick! She had forgotten that Mick was in the side-kitchen!

With the speed of despair Amy slammed the hen-house door shut and, stooping, managed to tilt the great chopping-block just enough off the ground to be able to push the letter underneath. In such a hurry it was the best she could think of doing. Then she sprang for the side-kitchen door, and as she wrenched it open the surprised and questioning faces of Mrs Bowen and Mr Nabb appeared in the doorway opposite.

Inspector Catcher held Mick suspended at arm’s length. Mick had stopped barking. He had almost stopped breathing as well, so tight were the fingers that gripped him by the scruff of the neck. His jaws were gaping stiffly, his eyes bulged, his hind-quarters wriggled spasmodically.

“Mick!” screamed Amy.

Inspector Catcher tossed the dog towards her like a rag. Mick tried to double back at once, but Amy grabbed and held him.

“However did those pickles come to be on the floor?” cried Mrs Bowen, her eyes on the broken jar and spreading mess.

“I put them there,” said Amy, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks. “For tea, Granny—I thought we could have them for tea. I forgot to bring them in, though—it was my fault —I forgot.”

Mrs Bowen knelt down on the stone flags and embraced both dog and child together.

“There now, Amy—it’s all right. Mick’s fine—see! He’s not been harmed.”

“If that dog ever comes near me again,” said Inspector Catcher, wiping his hands fastidiously on a silk handkerchief, “I shall kill him. So if you want to preserve your pet you’d better make sure he keeps away from me.”

Some hours later Amy sat on her grandmother’s bed, the ironing-blanket round her shoulders, and watched while the old woman combed and plaited her grey hair. Mrs Bowen’s candlestick stood on the chest-of-drawers and was reflected in the small square swing mirror. Her face was reflected mistily beside it. Amy, wriggling her toes to keep off the cold, regarded this familiar and peaceful picture with a yearning she was not able to express to her grandmother. They had been discussing the day’s events, Amy with some evasion here and there.

“It can’t go on for ever, Amy—that’s the way I look at it,” said Mrs Bowen. She reached for a piece of white tape, twisted it deftly round the end of a pigtail and tied it in a bow. “There’s bound to come a thaw, sooner or later—or they’ll tire of being here—or we’ll run out of food, even. I wouldn’t mind to go hungry if it only got rid of them.”

“There may not come a thaw for days and days—it’s freezing tonight as hard as ever, and look what the forecast said—getting worse.”

The flurry of snow at tea-time had turned out to be no more than a passing shower. When Amy had let Mick out for his last run the stars were glitteringly bright in a vast unclouded black sky, and the air was so icy it hurt her to breathe it and she had had to cover her mouth and nose with a gloved hand. But at that rigorous moment all the doubts that had nagged at her courage since early afternoon suddenly vanished. She was staring at the Inspector’s skis, propped up against the wall. Here was Bartolomeo’s warning! Better than snowmen; better indeed, more explicit, than anything she could have planned, and provided by the Inspector himself. Her spirits had lifted then on the wings of a wild conviction: luck must be on her side, and no matter what mistakes she made, what miscalculations, luck would see her through.

Would it, she wondered now, do more than see just her through? How about those she left behind? Were they going to need luck as well, or would care be enough?

“Granny—you’ll watch out for Mick, won’t you? He meant what he said, that man, I’m sure he did. He’d
like
to kill him.”

Mrs Bowen, holding her second pigtail in both hands, leant forward to peer in the glass at Amy and not getting a clear enough sight of her there, turned round to stare across the shadowy candlelit room.

“What do you mean by that, Amy—
me
watch out for Mick? Of course I do, when he’s by me—but he’s mostly with you, not me.”

“I know he is—only sometimes perhaps—well, I might be outside, mightn’t I?—and Mick might be inside. What I mean is—you won’t forget to watch out for him, will you? I think he’d better stop in my bedroom.”

“Why, yes—maybe that might be best,” said Mrs Bowen uncertainly. She turned back to the chest-of-drawers, rapidly tied the remaining pigtail, and then came and sat down on the bed beside Amy. “You’ve had something on your mind all day—I’ve known it well enough. That nonsense you were talking of—going downstream to the village—you can’t surely be thinking of that still? You must know as well as I do, Amy, it would be madness for you to try, even.”

“I don’t mean to try, Granny—don’t worry. I only said it for —for something to say.” Amy’s voice faltered a little and she crossed her fingers under the ironing-blanket. She wanted to get her grandmother away from this unsafe subject and so she hurried on: “Do you know what I’ve been thinking, Granny? I think they’re both of them cruel. One of them’s clever and cruel, and the other one’s stupid and cruel, and I don’t know which sort of cruel is the worst, do you?”

“Ah! It’s a poor job either way,” said Mrs Bowen. “What should make people want to hurt others, let alone to kill them—that’s a mystery I’ve never been able to fathom. But it’s my belief it’s catching, Amy, same as the measles. It could be they had those who were cruel to them once and they merely took the infection. If the truth were known, we might even find it in our hearts to feel sorry for them.”

Amy considered this.

“Maybe a bit for Mr Nabb,” she said at last, remembering the rage in his voice when he had declared that children were devils, always trying to make a monkey out of you. Supposing it were true that years and years ago, in school perhaps, he had been made miserable, tormented, jeered at—why then she might find it in her heart to understand, at least a little, why hate had lodged in his, and to pity him for it.

“But I’d never feel sorry for that other one,” she said. “I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. Did you see his face when he had Mick by the neck? He was smiling, Granny. He’s terrible!”

Amy had intended to stay awake. She waited until she judged that her grandmother would have fallen asleep and then she dressed herself again and sat on the floor with an arm round Mick and her back against the iron framework at the foot of the bed.

Her legs were encased in the sleeves of her spare brown jersey which she had put on upside-down and fastened tight round her waist with a safety-pin; her usual leggings, being scarlet, were out of the question. She had thought at first that her legs would have to do without any extra covering—it was better to be cold than to be seen; but then she thought that if her legs got too cold they might not be able to move as fast, so she improvised trousers out of the brown jersey. Her scarlet scarf had been traded earlier on for her grandmother’s scarf, the colouring of which was more subdued. Amy had considered every detail in advance; or so she hoped and believed. And every eventuality that it was possible to prepare for, she had prepared for. All she could do now was to get her escape-line ready, and then wait until the right time came for her to go. Three o’clock in the morning was the right time, she had decided. People were always asleep then, and yet it was not so very much before dawn; the worst of the night would be over.

It was seven days past full moon, a piece of information supplied by the calendar in the front-kitchen which she had discreetly consulted. Amy felt this to be propitious: a waning moon, rising late, would suit her very well. Although even starlight without a moon would really be bright enough, she told herself optimistically; the only real essentials were that the snow should hold off and the sky remain clear, and for these conditions Amy had no guarantee.

There were other uncertainties too. For instance, she was not positive how much time it would take her to lay a false trail. She planned to go right down to the frozen stream and back again, treading in her own footsteps on the return journey and trusting her pursuers would be in enough of a hurry to skim past the single set of prints without inspecting them very closely. A proper false trail would have necessitated walking backwards on the return journey, and the distance was too great for this, and time was too short. The whole manoeuvre, allowing for limited visibility, was going to take about three-quarters of an hour, she had reckoned. Secretly Amy was worried by a lurking suspicion that it might take her much longer, and might also exhaust her before she had even started on the real journey over the top.

Her most serious handicap was to have no easy means of knowing the time. She had racked her brains to think of a plausible excuse for borrowing her grandmother’s bedside clock, but without success. Mrs Bowen would have stared at Amy, her eyes as sharp as needles: “Borrow my clock?” Regretfully Amy had come to the conclusion that she might just as well tell her grandmother everything as ask to borrow her clock. Her only alternative was the grandfather-clock in the front-kitchen whose soft but resonant strike she could hear when she was lying flat on the floor with her ear against the boards and concentrating. But it was too soon for listening yet. They were still talking down below.

She had brought a bunch of hairy binder-twine upstairs with her when she came to bed, having failed in an attempt to make off with the new clothes-line. Mrs Bowen had seen her.