His hand steadied me. ‘We’ll look presently. Now sit down again. Have some more brandy.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Come on; do as you’re told.’
I obeyed him. ‘You seem to spend a lot of time forcing spirits down my throat, Richard.’
He corked the flask and put it down beside me. ‘You seem a lot more worried about this dog than you do about friend Paul.’
‘It’s David’s dog. Besides, Paul Véry ran over a rabbit,’ I added, as if that explained everything.
‘What—’ began Richard, then checked himself and spoke rapidly: ‘Now listen. Only Kramer and Loraine are coming in my car?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘How far behind you?’
‘I don’t know. He had to go to your garage first to get the car.’
‘I see … well, that wasn’t very far. You came fast, I take it?’
‘Pretty fast, yes. We did stop once on the road; that wasted about five minutes, I’d say.’
‘Did you indeed? What for?’
‘A spot of love-making,’ I said levelly.
‘I – see.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Of course. That was when you changed places, I suppose?’
‘Yes. But Richard, tell me what’s happened? This man Marsden—’
‘Later. Listen; as things have turned out, we’ve every chance of winning. They’ll stop when they see the van and the Mercedes, and we’re two men armed, with surprise on our side. It’ll be all right in a very short time, you’ll see.’
‘What are you going to do?’
He gave a little laugh. ‘I’ve no idea. No doubt inspiration will come in the moment of crisis.’
‘Where’s Mr. Marsden?’
‘Gone to take a look at our friend Paul … listen, is that a car?’
We froze, straining our ears through the myriad noises of the night’s silence. I became conscious of the whispering of the sea; not the breathing, bell-tolling, ebbing-and-flowing sorrow of the northern tides I knew, but the long, murmurous hush-hush of the land-bound waters. And above us sang the pines.
‘No,’ I said presently in a low voice. ‘I can’t hear a car.’
He stayed for a while with his head cocked to listen, then he relaxed, and I saw the faint gleam of a gun as he turned it over in his hand.
‘There was a gun in the car,’ I said quickly. ‘I had it on my knee when we skidded. If we can find it that makes three of us—’
‘No.’ His voice was flat. ‘Indeed it doesn’t. You’ll stay behind the lines, lady – in the trenches, in fact.’ I saw his arm lift, and point inland. ‘About forty yards back of these trees there’s a rocky bank, with a dry gully beyond it. David’s there. You’ll wait with him, please.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but at that moment Marsden interrupted us, looming suddenly out of the darkness.
‘He’s still unconscious,’ he said in a rapid undertone, ‘but nothing seems to be broken. We’ll bring him over here, to be on the safe side, and tie him up in the van. We don’t want to take the risk that they’ll see him lying there, and be warned before they stop that there’s something wrong. Is there any rope left?’
‘I doubt it.’ Richard was on his feet, and the two of them were moving about the van. ‘I think we used all there was.’
I felt an absurd desire to laugh. ‘On André?’
‘Mmm?’ Marsden’s voice was muffled. He seemed to be investigating a tool-box. ‘André? Who’s he?’
‘The driver of the van.’
‘Oh. Yes. He’s tied up in there. He’s all right.’
Richard spoke softly from inside the van: ‘Nothing here. Charity, is there a belt on your coat?’
‘No.’
‘Oh hell.’ He landed beside me, soft-footed on the pine-needles. ‘This is beginning to have all the elements of farce, isn’t it? Too many villains, and nothing to tie them up with. And for the life of me I daren’t give you my trouser-belt.’
‘I doubt if he’ll give much trouble,’ said Marsden, ‘but I’d rather be sure. There may be a rope in the boot of the car. Coming, Byron? We’ll go and get him.’
‘O.K.,’ said Richard. ‘Charity, if you hear a car, get back to that gully and stay with David till we come for you.’
‘Yes, Richard,’ I said meekly.
But Marsden was made of sterner stuff. ‘I found a gun in the Mercedes. Perhaps she—’
‘No,’ said Richard once more, finally. ‘Both you and I have had a pot at her tonight, and Kramer might be luckier.’
‘Beautifully put,’ I said, and Marsden laughed.
‘Let’s go.’
They had barely taken two paces when I was on my feet, backed against my tree, all my brittle self-confidence in fragments.
‘There it is!’ I said hoarsely. ‘Listen!’
Through the ghostly song of the pines, through the secret breathing of the sea, we heard it, faint but unmistakable; the throb of an engine.
‘Blast!’ said Marsden softly.
‘And coming at a wicked pace,’ said Richard, and listened a moment longer. My heart was beating to suffocation. ‘That’s my car all right, damn him … Charity, please.’
‘I’m going.’ My voice, like my body, was shaking. I had to push myself away from the solid comfort of the pine-tree’s bole. I was vaguely aware of the two men, moving like shadows in the cover of the van. I ran away from the road, through the trees. The Bentley’s engine cut through the silence in a rising drone, urgent, crescendo. I was free of the pines, and dodging through head-high scrub. In front loomed a dark mass that might be the rocky bank. The Bentley was coming fast, her engine snarling on a wasp-note of anger … I reached the foot of the rocky bank, and stopped. I could not go on. I suppose it was delayed shock, or something, but I know that I was stuck there, shaking and sweating and cold as ice, staring back through the leaves and the pine-trunks, towards the road.
I saw the glare of the Bentley’s lights, cutting along the darkness of the cliff-top. The sound of her engine swelled suddenly as she rounded the curve half a mile away. The parasol pines soared again like great thunderhead clouds in the moving light.
The headlamps went out, and the Bentley swooped towards us in the little glow of her side-lights, confident, menacing – the tiger coming in to kill. He had seen the parasol pines; I heard his brakes grip momentarily as he swept into the last stretch of road. Any minute now he would see the van, and stop. The Bentley’s snarl deepened. She was on us, moving fast. She was swinging right-handed into the track.
Then the night was ripped, unbelievably, by the roar of another engine. The Mercedes.
I don’t remember moving at all, but I must have run towards the road like a mad thing. I only knew that Paul Véry had come round; had somehow got into the Mercedes, and was giving his warning.
I saw the Bentley veer into the track on the cliff-top, I heard the shriek of her brakes. I saw the Mercedes, roaring like a bomber, leap forward, then lurch on to her burst front tyre, and plunge broadside on across the road.
The Bentley never had a chance.
There was a yell, a dreadful scream, and then the cars met in a sickening crash of rending metal and shrieking tyres. Some hideous freak of chance knocked the Bentley’s switch as she struck, so that, for one everlasting moment, as the two cars locked in a rearing tower of metal, her headlights shot skywards like great jets of flame. The cars hung there, black against the black sky, locked on the very brink of that awful cliff, then the beam swung over in a great flashing arc, and the locked cars dropped like a plummet down the shaft of lift, straight into the sea.
And after that last appalling impact, silence, broken hideously by echo after echo of the sound, as the disturbed sea washed and broke, washed and broke, against the cliff below. For an age, it seemed, the agitated waves beat their terrible reiteration on the rock, till, spent at last, they sank and smoothed themselves to their old whispering.
The last clouds shifted, parted,
broke under the wind, and the moonlight fell, infinitely pure, infinitely gentle, to whiten the moving water.
27
O most delicate fiend!
Who is’t can read a woman?
(Shakespeare)
David was still asleep. I had gone to find him, leaving the two men looking for a way down the cliff. They had driven the van across the road on to the track, switched on its lights, and turned it to face the sea. There was not a chance in a million, Marsden said, that any of the three in the cars was still alive, but we could hardly leave the place without attempting to find out.
With a shudder, I left them to it, and made my way back through the trees to look for David. As I emerged at the top of the rocky bank, I found that I could see my way plainly in the moonlight. Below me, in sharply shadowed monochrome, lay the gully; under a jut of rock and leafage, a darker shadow stirred. I scrambled down hurriedly, to be met by a shapeless shade that whined a little and wriggled with a somewhat subdued delight.
‘Rommel!’ I went down on my knees in the dust, and hugged him. ‘Oh Rommel! Did I nearly kill you, poor boy?’
Rommel lavished me with generous but damp forgiveness, and then ran, with a yelp of excitement, into the shelter of the rock. I followed.
David lay curled up, wrapped in a coat. He looked very young and touching, and the sweep of his dark lashes over his cheek was so like Richard’s that I felt a sudden rush of some emotion stronger than any I had ever felt before. I knelt down again, beside him, and felt his hands; they were cold. I put a hand to his cheek, and was horrified to feel it wet to the touch, as if with sweat, but immediately Rommel, feverishly licking the other cheek, provided the clue. I pushed him off.
‘It was very clever of you to find him,’ I told him, ‘but wait a minute, will you?’
I gathered David up close to me, and began to rub the cold hands. Rommel, pressing close with quivering body, watched eagerly.
And presently the dark lashes stirred, and lifted. He stared at me blankly, and his hands moved a little under mine.
‘Hullo, David,’ I said.
The wide gaze flickered. ‘Mrs. – Selborne?’
‘Yes. How d’you feel?’
‘Pretty foul.’ He moved his head gingerly, and blinked up at the moonlit bank with the great pines billowing beyond. ‘Where am I?’
‘Some way east of Marseilles. But don’t worry. Everything’s all right now.’
His eyes were on me again, with a look in them I couldn’t quite fathom. I felt him move away from me a little. ‘I remember now … Marseilles. How did you get here?’
I understood then. I reached out a hand and took hold of his. ‘David, I tell you it’s all right. I’m not one of them; you can trust me. I followed you out here – Rommel and I did, that is—’
‘Rommel?’
He turned at that, and his eye fell for the first time on the dog, who, belly to earth, shivering with delight in every hair, was waiting to be noticed.
‘He found you all by himself,’ I said. ‘Tracked you down.’
‘Oh, Rommel!’ said the boy, and burst into tears, with his head buried deep in the dog’s fur, and his arms round its neck. I let him cry out his fright and loneliness and distrust, while Rommel administered comfort, but presently the sobs changed to hiccups, and a voice said uncompromisingly from Rommel’s neck: ‘I feel beastly sick.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. ‘It’ll do you good. Don’t mind me. …’
Some short time later, after a nasty little interlude, he came back and sat down beside me. I put my coat round him, and held him close. I was wondering how on earth to begin telling him about Richard.
‘You’d better have a drop of this.’
‘What is it?’
It was Richard’s flask. ‘Brandy.’
‘Oh!’ He was palpably pleased. ‘Real brandy? … ugh, it’s horrible!’
‘I know, but it’s fine when it gets a bit further down. Have some more.’
‘No, thanks. I feel all right, only hungry.’
‘Great heavens!’
‘What are we doing here anyway?’ he demanded. ‘What happened? I want to know. Are we—?’
‘One thing at a time. We’re waiting here for – for transport back to Marseilles.’
He spoke quickly, apprehensively: ‘Marseilles? That shop? I don’t want—’
‘Not to the shop,’ I said reassuringly. ‘That’s all over. The owner of that place has been dealt with. Will you tell me what happened there, or don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘I hardly remember. I took the bracelet in, and he looked at it, and then asked me where I got it. He looked so queerly at me that I thought he guessed I’d pinched it, and so I made up a few lies. He seemed all right then, and asked me into the office. He went to a drawer; I thought he was getting the money. But he turned round with a towel or something in his hand. I – I don’t really remember what happened then.’
‘Chloroform, I think.’ The smell was still there very faintly, sweet and horrible. Kramer must have recognized him at once, I thought. Probably Loraine had rung up as soon as he was missing, and told her employer about the bracelet. My arm tightened round him. ‘What on earth made you choose that shop, of all the shops in France?’
‘Well, I had no money,’ said David, ‘and that beastly bracelet was all I could find. I thought Marseilles was the only place hereabouts where I could sell a thing like that and no questions asked, so I hitch-hiked here. It took ages. I took the bracelet into two or three places, but they wouldn’t buy it. In the end one chap told me to go to that shop. He said the man was a dealer in silver and he’d probably take it.’ He gave a little shudder, and burrowed his head against my shoulder.
‘What were you planning to do after you’d got the money?’
‘Eat.’ The answer was prompt and emphatic.
I looked down at him. ‘You poor wretch! D’you mean to tell me you’ve had nothing all day?’
‘I had lunch with some lorry-drivers, but nothing since then.’
‘Oh dear! And I had some chocolate in my bag, but I lost it. The only consolation is that you’d have been a lot sicker if you’d been chloroformed on top of a good meal. I dare say it won’t be very long before you’ll get something.’ I lifted my head to listen, but there was no sound except the sighing of the pines. ‘And after you’d eaten, David, what were you going to do then?’
‘I was going back to Nîmes to look for Daddy.’
I was startled, and showed it. ‘To look for your father?’
He gave me a slightly shamefaced look. ‘Yes. It was really because you went away from the hotel that I decided to go.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘That day in Nîmes – you remember? – when we ran away from my father, and I told you I was afraid of him … Well, it wasn’t true.’
I began to sort out my ideas all over again. ‘You never really thought he was mad? You weren’t ever really afraid of him at all?’
David said, with scorn: ‘Of course not. Afraid of him? I’d never be afraid of him as long as I lived!’
I said, helplessly: ‘Then for heaven’s sake explain! I can’t get this straight. You said you didn’t want to meet him; you said it was a matter of life and death, and you said he was mad. And you did look afraid; you looked scared stiff. Now, what’s it all about?’
‘I was afraid,’ he said sombrely, ‘terribly afraid, but for him, not of him. I’ll try and tell you … Shall I just begin at the beginning?’
‘Please.’
He began to talk, in a clear little voice completely empty of emotion. It was a queer experience to hear the same beastly story of the night of murder and treachery, so soon retold in the voice of a child. It differed from Richard’s in nothing but point of view.
‘… And when I heard he’d been acquitted, I knew he would come down to Deepings straight away. But he didn’t. I waited and waited, and then the police telephoned Mrs. Hutchings – that’s th
e housekeeper – that Daddy’d had an accident, and was badly hurt. He’d been taken to hospital, they said. Of course I wanted to go and see him, but they said he was still unconscious, and I must wait. Then, quite late, she came.’
The pitch of his voice never changed, but suddenly, shockingly, I was aware of the cold hatred underneath it. Then, as he went on, I began to realize that David’s story was more terrible, even, than Richard’s.
‘She came to my room. I wasn’t asleep, of course. She told me she’d been to the hospital. She broke it ever so gently, you know, but – she told me Daddy had died. What did you say?’
‘Nothing. Go on. She told you your father was dead?’
‘She did. She also told me it was no use going to the hospital; she said I’d not be able to see him, because he’d been too badly burned. Of course,’ said David, his mouth half buried somewhere near Rommel’s right ear, ‘I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, you know. I didn’t really want to go away with her, but I couldn’t stick Deepings just then, and anyway, what could I do? Daddy was dead, and she was my step-mother, and I more or less thought I had to do as she said. There’s not much you can do if you’re only a boy, and besides, I’d not had much practice in thinking things out for myself, then. I have now.’
‘I know that,’ I said bitterly.
David went on: ‘She’d taken a flat up near the Bois, and we lived there. She was quite decent to me, as I thought, and I was so dashed unhappy anyway that I didn’t care what happened. I suppose I just moped around the place. I found Rommel one day in the Bois, with a can tied to his tail. After that it was better.’
I said, a little grimly: ‘What happened next?’
‘About three weeks ago, she told me Daddy was still alive.’
‘How on earth did she explain away her lie about his death?’
‘She told me she’d done it for my sake.’ The grey eyes lifted to mine for a moment: they were quite expressionless. ‘She said that, according to the reports she’d had from the doctors and the police, Daddy had tried to commit suicide.’
‘David!’
‘Yes. She implied, of course, that he had done that awful murder, and that it had been preying on his mind. Oh,’ said David, with a large gesture, ‘she spared me all she could. She said that he’d been going queerer and queerer for some time, and that he must have killed Uncle Tony – and knocked me down – in a sort of blackout. She prescribed it to – is that the word?’