The Long Shadow (18 page)

“I’ve taken my cat back,” it ran, “and tomorrow I’ll come for my grandsons.”

No signature, nothing. And as Imogen stood there it slowly dawned on her that “tomorrow”, in a letter arriving by post, means “today”.

“G
ONE
? W
HAT DO
you mean, they’re gone?” Dot was
staring
at Imogen blankly. “But they
can’t
be gone. I said goodnight to them only …”

And then, at last, it sank in. The rushing, and the uproar, and the panic began.

“Hiding …? But how …?”

“
Out
?
Oh, but they’d never …”

“Oh no …! How
could
they….”

*

Police? Apparently (so someone seemed to have been informed) in nine cases out of ten the police find the child perfectly safe somewhere in its own home.

The attics, then?

Of
course
I’ve looked in the attics.

The cellar?

Under the stairs?

Of
course
we’ve looked there. Looked there. Looked there. Looked there.

The cat. That wretched cat. They’ve been going on about it all day. They wouldn’t, surely …?

No, of course they wouldn’t.

Oh, aren’t they naughty …!

“The police are on their way,” someone said, striding in from the hall; and at this Dot gave a little scream, and collapsed into a chair.

“Oh no. Oh no. I can’t … I can’t …” she kept sobbing, until someone seized her by the shoulders and yanked her to her feet.

“Shut up! Stop it!” ordered Herbert, giving his wife a
peremptory
little shake—and Imogen, watching, momentarily forget her desperate anxiety in sheer amazement—“Now, come along, Dot,
pull yourself together. We’re going to Twickenham. Yes,
now.
The police will handle this end. What …? Oh, don’t be silly. I don’t care a damn whether she’s there or not, it’s the kids that matter. Don’t you realise, they’re
in
danger
?
So shut up! And come
on
!”

And Dot, meek and dazed, and totally willing, followed her husband out of the room and out of the house, without even looking for her handbag.

Nonplussed though she was by this unprecedented performance on Herbert’s part, Imogen couldn’t help feeling that his notion of seeking the boys in Twickenham was a bit far-fetched, to say the least. It was true that they’d been squabbling, desultorily, about whether a cat could, or couldn’t, find its way back to its old home over long distances: but a comfortable, theoretical squabble by your grandmother’s fireside is one thing, a real-life journey, on a bitter winter night, by train, and bus, and tube, when you are only seven and eight years old, is surely another? The dark, nearly deserted roads; the vast, cavernous main-line station…. Not to mention the money for the fares….

No. They couldn’t have.

Or could they? Did Herbert, perhaps, know his own sons best?

And if, at seven and eight years old, they would dare the night journey to Twickenham, then what else might they not dare?

*

The boat-house. The locked boat-house. With Minos in it, of course, sitting expectantly on the most comfortable bit of board, his yellow, censorious eyes fixed on the door whence rescue would come.

And with the rats in it, too, the exciting, delectable rats.

Not so delectable, though, on an icy winter’s night, with no grown-up anywhere, and the deserted boat-house looming black and silent against the vast, unheeding sky.

It would be lonely, down there by the river, at this hour of the evening. Too cold for strollers, too late for stray commuters returning from work. The little boys would be quite, quite alone.

If they had gone out at all, they would surely have explored first the safer, more familiar areas, close to home?

*

It was just like the search for Minos all over again, only this time the suburban gardens were wells of impenetrable blackness, and the roads, white and hard in the moonlight, were completely deserted. The wind had dropped now, and the threat of snow no longer hovered in the air; but it was colder than ever—a harsh, biting cold, laced with dampness. Above the housetops hung the perfect disk of the moon, exactly at the full, but haloed, now, with a thin mist, and therefore casting no shadows. Everywhere was a level, changeless pallor, through which Imogen hurried as in a dream.

Hurried; but there was no point in hurrying, as she did not know where she was going. Every step she took could just as easily be taking her farther and farther from the children: but then again it might be taking her nearer. Walking was just as useless as standing still, but not particularly more so.

“Timmie! Vernon!” she called inanely, just as they had called “Minos!” a few hours back. “Timmee … Ver-non …!” She knew, of course, that they wouldn’t answer because they weren’t there, just as Minos hadn’t been there, and so then she moved on, round the next corner, along the next road.

Twice—three times—helpful householders popped their heads round their front doors and asked could they do anything, but of course they couldn’t. Have you seen two little boys, seven and eight years old? No, they were afraid not. Not two little
boys.
Not two
little
boys. No. Oh no. I’m sorry….

Once, an old lady raised a brief, wild hope by explaining how she’d seen
one
little boy, carrying a basket of summun’ … but the spurious moment of excitement was short-lived.

“Ah, don’t be daft, Gran, that was Ron with the fish’n chips, dontcher remember? Besides, it was hours ago, tea-time …” and Imogen, thanking them, wandered on.

“Ver-non! Tim-mee!”

*

The boat-house, when she reached it, was exactly as she had pictured it—black, silent, and utterly deserted. Locked, too, of course, just as it had been this afternoon. The padlock was beaded now with half-frozen moisture, stinging to the touch. She shook it, senselessly, as a sort of ritual. Look, God, I’m doing
something.

“Ver-non! Tim-mee!”

It took courage to shout in this deserted place, where your voice creaked like bats’ wings among the empty wooden buildings, but she forced herself to do it.

“Ver-non! Tim-mee!”

*

“They went
that
-a-way, lady,” volunteered the sly-looking
fifteen-year-
old who ought to have been at home this winter night, not prowling around the deserted out-houses on the water-front. “Yeh, thassit. Along
that
way—” he gestured vaguely towards the beginnings of the tow-path. “They was running,” he added, with a certain relish, and stood watching Imogen with interest as she pounded away into the night. He’d never seen a woman run like that; as old as Ma she musta bin, or older.

A few hundred yards farther on she slowed her pace. How did she know, after all, if the boy was speaking the truth? He might have been making it all up for fun. Or maybe he was just being obliging, people love to say Yes rather than No when you ask them something, and anyone could tell that Imogen had
wanted
him to have seen the children.

Not to have seen them
running,
though. Running, perhaps in terror, alongside the black menacing water, deeper and wider than ever it seemed by day. What could they have seen, or imagined they had seen, that they should run thus blindly in a direction away from the town, away from human habitation, into the hollow, moonlit night?

“Tim-mee! Ver-non!”

Her voice was ridiculous under the vast sky, it reached nowhere, the syllables skimming feebly over the black water to be lost, sucked down, in the dark currents about half way over, never even reaching the opposite shore.

On she went, sometimes running, sometimes walking, into the bland, shadowless spaces of the night stretching palely as far as she could see.

“Tim-mee! Ver-non!”

The sounds drained away across the flat, dim water-meadows; tangled and lost themselves among the black clusters of reeds at the water’s edge; and not so much as an echo of her own voice came back to her under the moon.

“I
S IT STILL
following us?” asked Timmie tremulously. “
I
s
it, Vernie?”

It was years since Timmie had called his brother “Vernie”—or, indeed, had turned to him for an opinion about anything whatever. Vernon, although terribly frightened, felt a little glow of pride.

“No—no, I don’t think so,” he answered, looking back along the moonlit tow-path. “I don’t think it can be, Timmie,” he added, more confidently. “I mean, if it
was
a
ghost—and of course it can’t be, there’s no such things as ghosts—but if it
was
a ghost, then it would have caught us up by now, it could go much faster than we can.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The image it conjured up of the thing gaining on them with huge, effortless strides along the pale, glimmering tow-path, was too much for Timmie. He began to sob. “Oh no … Oh no….”

“But
of
course
it isn’t a ghost,” Vernon assured him, squeezing his hand—it must have been years, too, since the little boys had condescended to walk hand-in-hand—“there’s no such things as ghosts, Timmie, really there isn’t. And it didn’t
look
like a ghost, did it?”

*

Not to start with, it didn’t. It hadn’t talked like a ghost, either, at the beginning. It had talked quite sensibly. In fact, the whole thing had started so easily, so innocuously: it had never occurred to the little boys as they tiptoed, guilty and excited, out of the front door, that they were embarking on an adventure on this sort of scale. They’d known, of course, that they were being naughty, that they were supposed to be in bed: but then they’d been promised that it would only take a minute or two; and that
it was urgent, because Minos might run away if they didn’t hurry; he was only just up the road, but no one could catch him, he wouldn’t come to people he didn’t know….

It wasn’t as if it was a stranger who’d persuaded them. If it had been, then naturally they wouldn’t have gone. They both knew very well that one doesn’t go off with strangers in
any
circumstances, no matter how good the pretext.

But surely someone who has been to the house, who has stood on the steps talking to Mummy and Daddy, who has brought bars of chocolate, isn’t a
stranger
?
And so when Minos turned out not to be just up the road after all, they felt no great qualms about going a little farther, as far as the Gardens. Lots of cats gathered there (so their informant assured them) alongside the railings, at just this time in the evening, because old ladies came to feed them. Minos, no doubt, would be among the rest.

But he wasn’t; and so one thing led to another, and presently they were down by the boat-house—uneasy by now, but too shy to protest. If Imogen had arrived there just one hour earlier, she would have seen them.

“It was the picnic that made me start to run,” confided Timmie to his brother as they plodded hand in hand through the
moonlight
. “All that about the picnic…. No
real
person goes for a picnic in the middle of the night.”

“No.” Vernon weighed the point up anxiously. “Still, Timmie, it doesn’t
prove
it was a ghost. I mean, I don’t suppose even ghosts …”

“And all that about Grandpa expecting us,” continued Timmie apprehensively. “I didn’t like it. I mean, Grandpa’s dead, he
can’t
be expecting us….”

“Of course he can’t … it was just … silly,” affirmed Vernon, as confidently as he was able. He was still feeling very frightened. Because, if it wasn’t a ghost, then why did it go on like that about Grandpa waiting for them in the meadows by the river? “No
real
person would go for a picnic in the middle of the night,” Timmie had said, and of course he was right. No real
person would. A river-picnic, too … would Grandpa, too, be a ghost when he came to join them, rowing silently, moth-white, across the dark water, the ghost-oars making no sound as they dipped and rose …?

*

“I think perhaps we’d better run some more,” he said to Timmie, in a tight little voice, “just to keep ourselves warm”—and
hand-in
-hand they jogged onwards once more, towards nothing and nowhere, under the light of the moon. By the time Imogen passed the same spot, nearly an hour later, there was no tiniest trace of the small footsteps on the rutted, frozen path; no faintest echo of the timid, childish voices lingered any longer on the still night air.

*

Imogen had long since given up calling the children. It seemed terribly dangerous, somehow, to be thus broadcasting their names at random into the infinite spaces of the night. Now and again she glanced furtively at the black, faintly stirring water out there beyond the reeds, imagining, sometimes, that among the small silvery ripples she could detect a brighter swirl of disturbance, a turmoil of ghastly happening. But of course it was never anything; a small fish rising, perhaps; or a floating twig, revolving slowly into silver light. And other times, peering off towards the left instead of to the right, her eyes would scour the grey
water-meadows
for two black dots trudging away into the white
moonscape
; and always she saw them, not two merely, but dozens of them, hundreds, dancing, merging, vanishing in front of her eyes. They were there, they weren’t there, bobbing about and re-
appearing
, drowning in the moonlight as in an infinite sea….

*

Suddenly, there was a woman walking briskly towards her along the tow-path. An elderly—yes, an old woman—wearing a
head-scarf
…. Imogen stopped dead, for a moment, in utter
amazement
. Then, clearing her throat, she hurried forward.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, coming to a halt as Imogen drew near. “Have you seen two little boys, seven and eight years old? I seem to have lost them.”