Eternity Ring (19 page)

Miss Silver said, “Yes.”

Frank Abbott watched the tail-light of the car dwindle to a spark and go out. He went back to the morning-room and said,

“Well, I’ve got a précis to make for the Chief, only I shall have to find an English word for it, or he’ll go through the roof. He’s had to put up with Ferrand being French, but he won’t be taking any of it from me. By the way, what is the English for précis?”

Miss Silver obliged with the word “summary,” and was thanked.

“All right then, I’m off to the study. You can tell Monica about Cis.”

Miss Silver smiled and said, “I think she will be pleased.”

He stopped on his way to the door.

“She would have been—I don’t know about it now. It’s—a bit tricky, isn’t it? Well, it’s no good worrying. I couldn’t have stopped her.”

He went out.

Miss Silver sat there knitting with the room settling into stillness round her. Bramble and Cicely seemed to have left the house very quiet. The old spaniel must have taken himself off to the kitchen, where scraps were strictly forbidden but the rule was perhaps not always as strictly kept.

It must have been well after half past ten when there were sounds from the hall—the clap of the front door, a man’s voice saying, “Don’t bother—I’ll just go in,” and upon that the dramatic entrance of Mark Harlow with wind-swept hair and an appearance of distraction. Somewhere behind him the house-parlourmaid Ruth murmured and withdrew to inform her sister and Mrs. Mayhew that he had just walked past her, and she didn’t think it was right.

Mark Harlow shut the door behind him, stared, and said,

“Where’s Cis?”

In the ordinary way Miss Silver would have reproved the informality by one of those changes of manner which, though slight, leave no doubt that an offence has been committed. On this occasion, any displeasure she may have felt was not permitted to appear. Instead she smiled slightly and said,

“Come and sit down, Mr. Harlow.”

He came a step or two nearer and repeated his question.

“Where’s Cis? I want to speak to her.”

Miss Silver lifted her eyes to his face. The artistic temperament alluded to by Frank Abbott was apparently still very much in the ascendant. She said in a calm and cheerful voice,

“Mrs. Hathaway has gone home.”

“What!”

“She has returned to Deepside.”

The news seemed to deprive him of the last vestige of manners. He said “What!” again, only much more loudly and rudely than before. And then,

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Mr. Harlow—”

Something in her look and manner halted him. It even produced a kind of impatient apology.

“Oh, I’m sorry! But there must be some mistake—she wouldn’t go to Deepside if it was the last place on earth—especially now!”

Miss Silver coughed.

“Why do you say that, Mr. Harlow?”

He flung himself into the chair in which Frank had been sitting.

“What’s the good of that fellow Abbott? Why didn’t he stop her going? Don’t you know that Grant Hathaway is in this business up to the neck? Frank Abbott knows it well enough. She had no business to go back! He ought to have stopped her!”

Miss Silver continued to knit. From her tightly netted fringe to her beaded slippers, she presented a perfect picture of the elderly English spinster whose means, like her ideas, are strictly limited, and her position in the social scale such that she may quite safely be ignored or taken for granted. To Mark Harlow she was merely someone to whom he could let off his nervous irritation. She said, “Dear me!” in a tone of mild protest, and he burst out with,

“She ought never to have been allowed to go! Suppose he is arrested while she is there!”

Miss Silver’s expression became tinged with surprise.

“Is there any reason to suppose that he will be arrested?”

He went on angrily,

“I should think there was every reason!”

She gazed at him in what he took to be incredulity. He let himself go.

“I should think he was liable to be arrested at any moment! What are her parents thinking about?”

Miss Silver continued to gaze.

“They are dining out. They have not yet returned.”

He made an inarticulate sound of anger.

“And that useless fellow Abbott—he must know what they’ve got against Hathaway if no one else does!”

Miss Silver said, “Oh—” It was the merest breath. And then, “What have they got against him, Mr. Harlow?”

The coffee-tray still stood beside the chair. Almost as if he did not know what he was doing, Mark Harlow filled the cup. Now he gulped down what must have been a nauseous lukewarm brew, milkless and sugarless, and set the cup back rattling on its saucer.

“Plenty, I should say. Not that I want to say anything—but Cis going back to him like this, it makes me mad. Did she tell you I rang up? I wanted to come round and see her then, but she said no, and like a fool I let it go at that. I oughtn’t to have taken any notice of what she said. I ought to have come round— I had the strongest feeling—But I didn’t want to offend her.” He stared blankly at Miss Silver. “I’m in love with her, you know. That doesn’t matter—I’m not thinking about that. It’s Cis that matters-—and that damned fellow Grant.”

Miss Silver knitted. After a moment she said,

“What makes you think that Mr. Hathaway may be responsible for these two murders?”

He went on staring gloomily.

“It’s not what I think—it’s the police. All I care about is Cis getting involved.”

“And what do the police think?”

He jerked a shoulder.

“They don’t tell me, but it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? It’s the most damnable luck my having run into him at the Bull. I couldn’t do less than offer him a lift, and look what it’s dragged me into! I’ve had to tell the police that I left him in the bar, and that we had to wait for him. He turned up late, and he was putting something in his pocket. I haven’t the slightest doubt that it was the lighter which this Rogers woman said she saw him looking for in the yard. On the top of that she comes down here after him. Well, I ask you!”

“She came down here after him?”

“It looks like that, doesn’t it? I suppose Caddie and I ought to be thankful it was his name and address that she got hold of and not mine, or the police might be trying to stick it on to one of us. We were both in France along with about a million other people, and we were both at the Bull that night. But it was Grant Hathaway she came down here to see—and that lets us out.”

“How exceedingly shocking!”

Miss Silver did indeed look as if she had received a shock. For the moment she had even ceased to knit. Her hands were motionless upon the cloud of pale pink wool.

“So you can understand why I’m worried about Cis.”

Even in the midst of the distressing thoughts which were crowding in upon her, Miss Silver was able to feel distaste for this continued use of the diminutive. That young people nowadays rushed straight into Christian names was a mere commonplace of fashion, but that intimate “Cis” could still offend her. Even Monica Abbott did not use it as freely as that. She said,

“Oh dear ! Do you really think that Mr. Hathaway—”

“It isn’t my business to think about Grant. I’m worried to death about Cis.”

“Do you think Mr. Hathaway saw her when she came down— this Mrs. Rogers?”

He looked at her without troubling to conceal his contempt.

“Well, he must have done. He couldn’t very well have murdered her if he hadn’t.”

“But you don’t know that he saw her?”

He gave an angry laugh.

“There’s such a thing as guessing! I can make a very intelligent guess!”

Cicely drove up the dark Lane. She drove slowly, because now that she was clear of Abbottsleigh she was not quite ready to arrive at Deepside. She had wanted to get away before the parents came home, she didn’t want to meet them. But she didn’t know how she was going to meet Grant—and, as a stupid anticlimax, Mrs. Barton. However much you would like to conduct your private affairs in a vacuum, the domestic hearth is full of eyes, the spot you live in is full of ears, especially if it is a village. Relations and friends expect to have things explained to them, and if you have a housekeeper you have at least to tell her where you are going to sleep.

Cicely crawled up the Lane, fortifying herself. Her own thoughts left no room for what otherwise might have been the macabre suggestion that here or hereabouts Louise Rogers had been violently done to death, and not so far away to the left her body had lain under a pile of leaves between a Friday and a Saturday evening.

Any attention which she had to spare was taken up by Bramble, who stood on his hind legs and leaned out of the window giving short yelps and moans of excitement. At intervals she said, “No, Bramble!” and he turned round to lick the air rapidly in the direction of her shoulder before resuming what amounted to a running commentary upon their return. There was certainly no need to tell him that they were going home. His sleeping-box, complete with its paper mattress and its blankets, reposed upon the back seat. He hadn’t the slightest doubt as to where they were going, and his quivering anticipation knew no bounds.

The back gate stood open as it always did. She drove slowly up to the side of the house and stopped there. She would have to get the key of the garage. She put the window up and slipped out on her own side, shutting the door quickly on Bramble, who did his best to slip out too and very nearly brought it off. She said “No!” several times very firmly, and left him there moaning with his nose pressed tightly up against the glass. Just for the moment she didn’t want him at her heels, or bounding joyously on ahead to bark and hurl himself at the nearest door. It had just occurred to her that she didn’t know how late it was, and that Mrs. Barton would probably have gone to bed. Suppose she was asleep, and Grant was asleep. It would be the most humiliating flop if she had to turn round and go back to Abbottsleigh. Of course she needn’t because she still had her latch-key safe in the flap of her crocodile purse, only if Grant had shot the bolt, the latch-key wouldn’t help her to get in.

She crossed the front of the house, passed the main door with its pillared porch and the three steps going up to it, and came round the corner to the opposite side from where she had left the car. If Grant was up he would be in the study, and if he was in the study she would be able to see the light through the curtains. She might even be able to see into the room, because those curtains were devils. Someone had economized over the stuff when they were made, and they weren’t really full enough. If you got them to meet in the middle, it was ten to one they left a gap at the side, and if that snake Agnes had gone blinding off to Lenton, it was pretty certain no one would have had time to bother very much about them tonight.

She drew a quick breath of relief. The study was lighted. Both windows showed a glow, and the left-hand one, which was a door, a long gold streak. Her heart began to beat rather hard as she came up to it and looked in. There was all the strangeness of a dream about standing outside her own house and looking in. Just for a moment it made her feel like a ghost. Then something warm rushed over her and she was Cicely Hathaway and very much alive.

Grant was there. He could only just have come in, because he was wearing his old raincoat. What she had just seen was a bit of the sleeve moving as he crossed the room. The gap in the curtain showed her no more than a handsbreadth of the opposite wall and what lay between that wall and the window. She could see the width of the old dark wallpaper, the edge of a heavy gold picture-frame, the jut of the black marble mantelshelf, and, right in the middle of the space, the blue Chinese bowl which she had filled with pot-pourri. She remembered gathering the roses and drying them—all the same kind, Hugh Dickson, because he kept his scent better than any of the others. She had filled two bowls and put them one on either side of the mantelpiece because it wanted cheering up, with that dark paper, and the quite forbidding portrait of old Mr. Hathaway’s grandfather glooming down on the room. She couldn’t see the portrait, only the edge of the frame and the bowl of pot-pourri. And then she couldn’t see the bowl, because a shoulder and arm and a lot of raincoat came between. The shoulder moved, the arm moved, the raincoat moved. There was a patch on the outside of the sleeve just above the elbow—quite a new patch, showing dark against the weather-bleached stuff. She wondered about the patch, and about what Grant was doing over there by the mantelpiece. His arm had lifted, as if he were doing something to the bowl of pot-pourri. But she couldn’t see what he was doing, she couldn’t see his hand.

And then all at once she had a horrid cold feeling. She didn’t want to stand there looking in any more. She didn’t want Grant to know that she had stood there looking in. She stepped back softly and ran for the corner. There was a flower-bed next to the house. She kept on the grass verge and made no sound, but she was shaking when she turned the corner and felt in her purse for the key. Mrs. Barton was almost sure to have gone to bed, but the door wouldn’t be bolted, because Grant always did that the last thing. She stood just inside the porch and groped for the key. Her fingers shook. She groped for the key, and it wasn’t there.

She felt a blank astonishment, because it had always been there, in the outer flap which wasn’t used for anything else. She couldn’t remember when she had actually seen it last, but it had always been there. It ought to be there now, but it wasn’t. She had the feeling you get when you miss a step in the dark. It isn’t a nice feeling. And on the top of that the feeling of being a ghost came back—a ghost locked out.

Well, there were two things she could do. If Mrs. Barton wasn’t in bed, there would be a light somewhere at the back of the house. It might be in her bedroom, or in the sitting-room, or in the kitchen. If there was a light downstairs, she would hear the front door bell. If the light was upstairs, or if there wasn’t a light at all, Cicely would just have to go back and knock on the study window, and she didn’t want to. Quite inexplicably and unreasonably she didn’t want to. She didn’t even want to go back past the study window, but she made herself do it, because if she went round the other way she would have to pass the car, and Bramble would probably start screaming. She went as she had come, keeping to the grass.

Just as she was level with the study window, the light went out. She ran the rest of the way. Idiotic to be startled by a light going out in your own house, but she ran until she had to stop and grope her way under an arch heavy with ivy which gave upon the herb garden at the back of the house. There was a straggling ivy hedge, and a rickety gate under the arch. She had to stop and grope for the latch. Then when she was through, there were some evergreen shrubs to clear before she could get a good view of the windows. The kitchen was dark, but beyond it there was a chink of light at the edge of the sitting-room window. The sight was comfortable beyond all belief. In a revulsion of feeling she told herself just what an idiot she was and went briskly on round the house to collect her suit-case and Bramble.

After he had pounced and tried to lick her face he rushed joyously ahead, giving short excited screams and occasionally coming back to bite her ankles. The whole business of being shut out and feeling like a ghost now seemed too silly for words. Bramble certainly hadn’t the slightest doubt about the joyfulness of the occasion. At the sound of footsteps approaching on the other side of the door he hurled himself against it, barking at the top of his voice.

Mrs. Barton hesitated for no more than a moment. Alone in the house she might be, and with two murders in the neighbourhood you did stop to think before you opened your door as late as this. But if it wasn’t that Bramble dog pouncing and barking fit to burst his way in, then she’d lost the use of her lawful senses, which was a thing they’d never had in their family, thank God. She opened the door, and was overwhelmed, partly by a flurry of black dachshund nipping her ankles, pulling at her skirts, and making as much noise as half a dozen, and partly by the astonishing sight of the suit-case and Mrs. Grant Hathaway. She saw them in that order, and was bereft of speech.

It was Cicely who said very clearly and with a kind of young dignity,

“How are you, Mrs. Barton? I’m afraid it’s rather late to arrive, but I have only just heard about Agnes and I thought I had better come home.”

Mrs. Barton again thanked God, and was never certain whether she had done it aloud or not. She did not know when she had ever felt so much fervent relief. There was nothing that would put such a stop to people talking as for Mrs. Grant to come back to where she belonged—and a very proper answer to that Agnes and her mad goings on. There wasn’t anyone could believe what there wasn’t any call for them to believe—not with Mrs. Grant showing them like this.

Before she could assemble seemly words of welcome Cicely was saying,

“Mr. Grant will bring in Bramble’s box and put the car away. I’ll just go and tell him we’re here.”

Mrs. Barton looked distressed.

“But he isn’t in. There’s one of those Jersey calves not too good. He said he’d be late. That’s why I’m up myself. I didn’t fancy going to bed and the house not locked up properly.”

Cicely stared.

“But, Mrs. Barton, there was a light in the study just now. I came round that way.”

She walked past her into the hall and set the suit-case down. Then quite suddenly she ran round the corner and down the passage leading to the study. She ran, because if she stopped to think, it wasn’t going to be easy to tell Grant that she had come back. She didn’t stop to think. She ran down the passage and opened the door on a dark and empty room.