Anna, Where Are You? (19 page)

He moved across the courtyard, his hands out before him. There was a door—he remembered that there was a door with some kind of canopy over it. Yes, that was it, a canopy with pillars. His hand touched one of them and felt a cold slime upon it. There were two steps, smooth and shallow, and beyond the steps a heavy door. He remembered seeing it in the daylight, with a scar on it where the knocker had been wrenched away, he supposed for salvage. His left hand found the place and felt it now. Quite a deep hole where a nail had been driven in. The nail, the scar, just touched his thought and was flung off it by the sudden realization that the surface he was touching was a slanting one. It should have been flat, and it wasn’t flat. It should have been steady, and it wasn’t steady. It slanted and it moved. The door was ajar.

Whilst Peter Brandon stood looking up at her window Thomasina was following the footpath across the park. Like Peter, she had a torch but she didn’t want to use it. She could manage, because all you had to do was to get away from the trees and then there was enough diffused light from a hidden moon to show the direction of the big house and to help you to follow the path. All the same, she was not half way across the open park before the thought of the lighted room she had left behind her was tugging at her. She had to keep on thinking about Anna, and how infuriating Peter had been, and that only the most despicable kind of coward started out to do something and then turned back because he was afraid.

With these useful thoughts to spur her she got as far as the courtyard. Her feet came upon the slippery winter moss which furred the stones. You could walk without making any noise at all, but where you bruised it in the dark a faint smell of decay came up and hung in the air.

Insensibly she kept a little to the right, because behind the curtains of that right-hand wing there were people—six of them —Mr. and Mrs. Craddock—the three children—Miss Silver. The rooms would have had fires in them, and lights, even if they were dark now and growing cold. If she called out, someone would hear.

Why on earth should she call out? And why, if you please, had she come here at all? Not to stand in the dark and wonder if Miss Silver would hear her if she screamed. She had come to see whether she could get into the deserted part of the house and stop the horrid, growing thought that it might be hiding some dreadful secret about Anna Ball. This possibility, which had seemed quite strong and vigorous an hour ago, now dwindled to the merest wraith. The house was an empty ruin. The damp deserted smell of it came seeping through the rickety boards which blinded its shattered windows. It came to her that if she stood there for another single moment she wouldn’t be able to make herself go on, and that if she didn’t go on she would never stop despising herself.

She turned her back upon the inhabited wing and had taken a single step forward, when something moved, away to the left. She couldn’t have said that she saw even so much as a shadow, or that she heard anything at all. Only something had moved. She stood where she was. The movement came from outside the courtyard. She had a sense of its continuance. She thought someone or something was coming in from outside. She couldn’t see, and she couldn’t hear, but she thought that something went by in the dark.

And the next moment she was sure. A foot slipped on one of the shallow steps which went up to the door, a torch flickered, the door moved, and someone went in. She couldn’t see at all who it was, but she meant to find out. That thread of light from the torch had just touched the edge of the door and gone out. But it had taken with it nine-tenths of Thomasina’s fear. Silence, and darkness, and decay—these are the things which sap courage at the very roots of the race. Man has always been afraid of the enemy whom he can neither see nor fight. Thomasina certainly wasn’t going to let herself be afraid of an ordinary everyday object like an electric torch. That single flicker of light brought the whole thing down to a common human level. Somebody with an electric torch had just gone into the house, and she was going to make it her business to find out who that someone was. Ordinary visitors come up to a door and knock or ring. If they have got a torch they put it on. The person who had just gone into the house didn’t want to be seen or heard any more than she did herself.

She came quite silently up to the door and tried it. Since she had heard no click of the latch, no sound of a key being turned or a bolt slid home, she was sure enough that it would move under her hand. But when it did so she had a faint stirring of fear—it opened upon so total a darkness and released so damp and mouldy a smell.

It takes too long to tell. Thought is so much quicker. It really was only a moment since she had seen the flicker of the torch and the door slide back from it to let a shadowy somebody into the house. As she came in herself she was aware of a footstep going away and a single brief lightening of the darkness as the torch flashed on and off again in some passage which ran out of the hall. It served to show her where she was—on the threshold of a lobby leading into the black cavern of the hall. No detail, just a black cave running back into the house and the impression of a stairway—all very vague and formless, and then in an instant swallowed up again by the dark.

She began to walk in the direction from which the light had seemed to come, hands stretched out in front of her and feet that felt their way. There was no second flash of light. By the time she had taken about twenty of those slow steps she was no longer sure of the direction from which the light had come. As she stood at the entrance, it had been somewhere away to the right, but she did not know whether she had kept a straight line as she walked towards it. It is a very hard thing to do in the dark. Some people pull to the left, and some to the right. It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a straight course.

She ought to have left the door wide behind her. It would not have let in any light, but looking back, there would have been just enough difference between the outdoor darkness and the enclosed gloom of the house to show her where she was. But she had left the door as she had found it, no more than an inch or two ajar—it had seemed safer somehow. The person she was following might have turned and looked back, or someone else might have come, and then that open door would have given her away.

She stood where she was, looking back and listening. There was a sound—or was there—she wasn’t sure. An old empty house has sounds of its own. This sound wasn’t in the house. It came from the the other side of the door which she had left ajar. Or she thought it did—she couldn’t be sure. But if anyone was coming in, she mustn’t stand there and be caught. She must get away.

She had put out her foot to take the next step, when, with a blinding shock, imagination passed into actual happening. She had come farther than she knew and she had veered to the right. If her foot had taken that next step, her hand would have touched the panel of a door. But before there was time for the step to be taken the door was wrenched inward and the beam of a powerful electric lamp struck her full in the face.

It was a little earlier than this that Frank Abbott switched out the overhead light in his room at the George in Ledlington and having adjusted the shade of a bedside lamp and arranged his pillows to his liking, took up the second-hand volume of Lord Tennyson’s poems which he had that day discovered at Bannerman’s in the Market Square and turned over the pages. Since Mr. John Robinson had made two quotations, one from the beginning, and the other from the end of a poem, and since Miss Silver considered this to have some significance as to which his own mind was a total blank, he felt that it was up to him to solve the riddle which, it seemed, she had been pleased to set him.

He began to go through the book, looking at the first lines of every poem until he arrived at “Enoch Arden”—masses and masses of Enoch, in Victorian blank verse. And here was the first quotation:

“Long lines of cliff, breaking, have left a chasm,

And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands.”

It had meant nothing to him at the time, and it meant nothing to him now.

He began to wade into the story of Enoch, faint but pursuing. In the absence of his Miss Silver, he dared to find him insufferably dull. Astonishing to think that these long narrative poems had ever had a vogue. And then quite suddenly there was a gleam. He began, metaphorically speaking, to sit up and take notice. So that was it, was it? Nothing really to do with the case of course. He could hardly reproach her with keeping back material evidence. But interesting—oh, very definitely interesting.

He followed Enoch to his death-bed, and to Mr. John Robinson’s second quotation:

“……… and the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral—”

He closed the book, put it down beside the lamp, and was presently sliding in an agreeable manner down the smooth inclines of sleep.

Meanwhile Miss Silver was sitting up in her bedroom. She had undressed, performed her evening ablutions, read her usual chapter, and set the door ajar between her room and Jennifer’s. All this completed, she hesitated a little, and then put on her warm blue dressing-gown with its handmade crochet trimming and sat down by the electric fire. Mr. Craddock’s foresight in putting in so powerful a plant passed through her mind as a subject for commendation. So labour-saving, so clean, so comfortable a mitigation of the cold and damp of these winter months in the country. She gave the subject quite a little thought before passing to another topic.

The day had been not only very interesting, but very completely filled. Mrs. Craddock’s indisposition had persisted. She had not fainted again, but she had continued in a very weak and tearful condition, and had not attempted to leave the sofa, or to occupy herself in any way. When it was suggested that she would be better in bed she made no demur. Peveril Craddock’s reaction to all this was a mood of gloomy displeasure. No one who had spent even a few days in the house with him would have expected him to be helpful, but he showed so much resentment over his wife’s collapse that it really was the greatest relief when he announced that he would be working late and removed himself and a supper-tray to his study in the main block.

There were then the children to feed and get to bed, Emily Craddock to be tended, cheered, and induced to partake of the good milk soup which Miss Silver had prepared for her. After which there remained that general clearing-up which is perhaps the most thankless and least rewarding of all household tasks. It is therefore no wonder that this was Miss Silver’s first opportunity of reviewing the events of the last two days.

If there was a connection between these murderous bank robberies and the Colony of which Deepe House was the centre, there must at one time or another have been small clues as light and apparently aimless as those floating threads of gossamer which fill the air just after dawn on a summer morning. They are not to be seen, their origin is not to be traced, they are no more than an insubstantial touch just felt and gone again. But what has once been felt may be recalled. Without pushing the metaphor too far, it was Miss Silver’s purpose to empty her mind of speculation and recall certain episodes, conversations, pictures. In the past she had found that memory, unquestioned and left to produce its own images, would often provide some detail not consciously noted at the time. Sitting quite still with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap, she went back to her interview with Mr. Craddock in town, her arrival at Deepe House, the first contact with each member of the family, each member of the Colony. First impressions she had always found to be of a particular value. They had to be corrected by experience, but even then something could be gained from them.

She went over her first meeting with Emily Craddock, a simple and pathetic case of a woman dominated to the point of will and judgment being completely in abeyance. Or almost so. There were moments when the hypnotized creature stirred and half woke up to unimaginable misery and fear.

Jennifer was not hypnotized. She had adored Peveril Craddock. She now hated and feared him—a dumb hatred, and a dumb fear. Something had happened to cause these things, and to drive them down into the darkest and most secret places of her thought. Miss Silver had not handled children for twenty years without discovering that if a child is very badly frightened it will never speak of what has frightened it.

The Miss Tremletts, Miranda, Augustus Remington, Mr. John Robinson—there had been a first meeting with each one of them, and in every case a definite and distinct impression had been made. The pictures came into her mind and passed out of it again.

When she had done with them she made room for the one which she had reserved to the last, her brief passing contact with the bank murderer. She saw herself moving along the gangway of the bus and stepping down to the ground. Only two people went towards the station, elderly women with shopping-baskets. The other seven or eight passengers made off in the direction of the High Street. She had let them get away before making any move herself, since she had no desire that anyone should notice that she had come to meet a goodlooking young man with a car. She had occupied herself with opening her handbag and scrutinizing what might very well have passed for a shopping-list. It was not until the last of the passengers was clear of the station yard that she began to walk up the incline towards the entrance, and it was when she was about half way that the bandaged man had passed her. The scene came back distinctly— the limping step, the gloved hand upon the stick. There was a very small triangular tear between the index finger and the one next to it. She had not remembered it till now, but it was there in the picture. A few stitches of the seam had come undone, to leave a triangular gap. There were three loosened stitches to the left of it, and a little end of thread. It was the left hand which leaned upon the stick. The head had a caplike bandage covering all the hair and most of the right side of the face. The collar of the old loose raincoat was turned up. Since he passed to her left, it was only the right side of his face which presented itself. The right side of his face—a mass of bandages—the collar of the raincoat hiding the neck and the line of the chin—a loose sleeve, and a bandaged hand. The hand held a small suit-case. So much for the side that was turned towards her—the right-hand side. And on the left, folds of the bandage passing about the head and out of sight, the collar of the raincoat standing up about the neck, the sleeve hanging loose, and a gloved hand resting upon a stick. She had seen no more, she could recall no more. The picture was there in her mind, but it gave up no further detail.

She began to consider the stick. It was of the commonest type —a plain crook for the gloved hand to rest on—a plain dark stick. Only nowadays very few men carried a stick at all. But since the murderer was posing as an injured man, the stick went very well with his disguise. Yet for that stick to be available it must have been, and probably still was, in his possession. Because it was an old stick, worn and rubbed about the ferrule. It had not been bought for the occasion, it was a possession. Then he probably had it still. Anyone might have such a stick. It was of too common a type to be a danger. It was of too common a type to offer any certain means of identification. At the very most it could add some slight reinforcement to other and stronger evidence.

What evidence? She went on looking at the picture in her mind, and all at once there came to her an echo from no more than a couple of days ago—Maurice and Jennifer squabbling.

“He always wears gloves.”

“He’s afraid of spoiling his hands.”

And Benjy, “I’m not afraid of spoiling my hands.” With Maurice bursting into a loud rude laugh and a “You haven’t got anything to spoil!”

It was quite irrelevant. A fragment heard by chance and no name mentioned. Just someone who wore gloves. A man. The glove in her picture of the bandaged man, the glove upon the left hand which rested on the crook of the stick—an old wash-leather glove, worn and old like the stick itself—stretched with use until the stitches parted between the two first fingers. The thread which curled up from the small triangular tear was worn and dirty. The glove was an old, worn glove. If such a glove and such a stick were to be found in anyone’s possession—”

She had reached this point, when the picture and the silence broke together to the muffled sound of a shot.