But Raven had expected that. He ducked his head and was safely through in the kitchen doorway with his gun out.' Stay put,' he said. 'This gun doesn't make any noise. I'll plug you where you'll feel it if you move.' The old woman was where he had expected her to be, between the dresser and the door squeezed in a corner. She moaned, 'Oh, Acky, you ought to 'ave 'it 'im.'
Acky began to swear. The obscenity trickled out of his mouth effortlessly like dribble, but the tone, the accent never changed; it was still the good school, the theological college. There were a lot of Latin words Raven didn't understand. He said impatiently, 'Now where's the girl?' But Acky simply didn't hear; he stood there in a kind of nervous seizure with his pupils rolled up almost under the lids; he might have been praying; for all Raven knew some of the Latin words might be prayers: 'Saccus stercoris', 'fauces'. He said again: 'Where's the girl?'
'Leave 'im alone,' the old woman said. "E can't 'ear you. Acky,' she moaned from her corner by the dresser, 'it's all right, love, you're at 'ome.' She said fiercely to Raven, 'The things they did to 'im.'
Suddenly the obscenity stopped. He moved and blocked the kitchen door. The hand with the knuckle-duster grasped the lapel of his coat. Acky said softly, 'After all, my Lord Bishop, you too, I am sure—in your day—among the haycocks,' and tittered.
Raven said, 'Tell him to move. I'm going to search this house.' He kept his eye on both of them. The little stuffy house wore on his nerves, madness and wickedness moved in the kitchen. The old woman watched him with hatred from her corner. Raven said, 'My God, if you've killed her...' He said, 'Do you know what it feels like to have a bullet in your belly? You'll just lie there and bleed...' It seemed to him that it would be like shooting a spider. He suddenly shouted to her husband, 'Get out of my way.'
Acky said, 'Even St Augustine...' watching him with glazed eyes, barring the door. Raven struck him in the face, then backed out of reach of the nailing arm. He raised his pistol and the woman screamed at him, 'Stop! I'll get 'im out.' She said, 'Don't you dare to touch Acky. They've treated 'im bad enough in 'is day.' She took her husband's arm; she only came half-way to his shoulder, grey and soiled and miserably tender. 'Acky, dear,' she said, 'come into the parlour.' She rubbed her old wicked wrinkled face against his sleeve. 'Acky, there's a letter from the bishop.'
His pupils moved down again like those of a doll. He was almost himself again. He said, 'Tut-tut! I gave way, I think, to a little temper.' He looked at Raven with half-recognition. 'That fellow's still here, Tiny.'
'Come into the parlour, Acky dear. I've got to talk to you.' He let her pull him away into the hall and Raven followed them and mounted the stairs. All the way up he heard them talking. They were planning something between them; as like as not when he was out of sight and round the corner they'd slip out and call the police. If the girl was really not here or if they had disposed of her, they had little to fear from the police. On the first-floor landing there was a tall cracked mirror; he came up the stairs into its reflection, unshaven chin, hare-lip and ugliness. His heart beat against his ribs; if he had been called on to fire now, quickly, in self-defence, his hand and eye would have failed him. He thought hopelessly: this is ruin. I'm losing grip, a skirt's got me down. He opened the first door to hand and came into what was obviously the best bedroom, a wide double-bed with a flowery eiderdown, veneered walnut furniture, a little embroidered bag for hair combings, a tumbler of Lysol on the washstand for someone's false teeth. He opened the big wardrobe door and a musty smell of old clothes and camphor balls came out at him. He went to the closed window and looked out at Khyber Avenue, and all the while he looked he could hear the whispers from the parlour: Acky and Tiny plotting together. His eye for a moment noted a large rather clumsy-looking man in a soft hat chatting to a woman at the house opposite; another man came up the road and they strolled together out of sight. He recognized the police at once. They mightn't, of course, have seen him there, they might be engaged on a purely routine inquiry. He went quickly out on to the landing and listened: Acky and Tiny were quite silent now. He thought at first they might have left the house, but when he listened carefully he could hear the faint whistling of the old woman's breath somewhere near the foot of the stairs.
There was another door on the landing. He tried the handle. It was locked. He wasn't going to waste any more time with the old people downstairs. He shot through the lock and crashed the door open. But there was no one there. The room was empty. It was a tiny room almost filled by its double-bed, its dead fireplace hidden by a smoked brass trap. He looked out of the window and saw nothing but a small stone yard, a dustbin, a high sooty wall keeping out neighbours, the grey waning afternoon light. On the washstand was a wireless set, and the wardrobe was empty. He had no doubt what this room was used for.
But something made him stay: some sense uneasily remaining in the room of someone's terror. He couldn't leave it, and there was the locked door to be accounted for. Why should they have locked up an empty room unless it held some clue, some danger to themselves? He turned over the pillows of the bed and wondered, his hand loose on the pistol, his brain stirring with another's agony. Oh, to know, to know. He felt the painful weakness of a man who had depended always on his gun. I'm educated, aren't I, the phrase came mockingly into his mind, but he knew that one of the police out there could discover in this room more than he. He knelt down and looked under the bed. Nothing there. The very tidiness of the room seemed unnatural, as if it had been tidied after a crime. Even the mats looked as if they had been shaken.
He asked himself whether he had been imagining things. Perhaps the girl had really given the old woman her bag? But he couldn't forget that they had lied about the night she'd stayed with them, had picked the initial off the bag. And they had locked this door. But people did lock doors—against burglars, but in that case surely they left the key on the outside. Oh, there was an explanation, he was only too aware of that, for everything; why should you leave another person's initials on a bag? When you had many lodgers, naturally you forgot which night … There were explanations, but he couldn't get over the impression that something had happened here, that something had been tidied away, and it came over him with a sense of great desolation that only he could not call in the police to find this girl. Because he was an outlaw she had to be an outlaw too. Ah, Christ! that it were possible. The rain beating on the Weevil, the plaster child, the afternoon light draining from the little stone yard, the image of his own ugliness fading in the mirror, and from below stairs Tiny's whistling breath. For one short hour to see … He went back on to the landing, but something all the time pulled him back as if he were leaving a place which had been dear to him. It dragged on him as he went upstairs to the second floor and into every room in turn. There was nothing in any of them but beds and wardrobes and the stale smell of scent and toilet things and in one cupboard a broken cane. They were all of them more dusty, less tidy, more used than the room he'd left. He stood up there among the empty rooms listening; there wasn't a sound to be heard now; Tiny and her Acky were quite silent below him waiting for him to come down. He wondered again if he had made a fool of himself and risked everything. But if they had nothing to hide, why hadn't they tried to call the police? He had left them alone, they had nothing to fear while he was upstairs, but something kept them to the house just as something kept him tied to the room on the first floor.