After one stunned instant, for which she could hardly blame him, he reacted with admirable promptitude. The door opened wider than ever. ‘Come inside!’ he said. ‘I’ll call my colleague, and we’ll get the poor chap indoors at once.’
‘I could help you carry him in,’ she said. ‘We ought not to lose any time.’
‘Don’t worry, Lawrence is only a couple of minutes away. He has a scooter, he’ll be here in no time. You sit down by the fire, you’re wet and cold. I’ll be back directly.’ And he thrust her briskly into a small, book-lined room, and himself went on along a passage to the hall and the telephone, leaving the door open between them. She heard him dial, and speak briefly and drily, almost as though similar rescue operations landed on his doorstep every night. It might not be the first occurrence, she realised. People who live beside flood rivers are liable to be recruited from time to time. Certainly he wasted no time in calling up his reserves. After the click of the hand-set as the connection was cut, she heard him dial and speak once more.
When he came back into the doorway of the room where she waited, he had a duffle coat over his arm, and was carrying a folding garden-bed with a rigid aluminium frame and a patterned canvas cover printed with brilliant sunflowers. Incongruously festive for a stretcher, but she saw that it would serve the purpose very well.
‘If you wouldn’t mind coming along to light us on the way back? I’ve got a coach-lantern here in the garden room. I called the police, as well,’ he explained. ‘You may not know, but we had an officer here looking for a missing boy, earlier this evening. I hope you may have found him for them.’
‘No,’ said Charlotte quickly, ‘this isn’t the boy. I do know about that, but this is someone else, a man I know slightly. He’s staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, like me.’
‘Oh… I see! A pity… I called the number the chief inspector gave me, I felt sure… Well, never mind, here’s Lawrence! Let’s get this one in, at any rate.’
The busy sputter of a Vespa came rocking round the bulk of the house, and the young man of the custodian’s box put his head in at the open door, gave Charlotte a brief, blank glance, and asked briskly: ‘Where is he?’
‘By the path, just upstream. Here, take this! I’ll lead. And mind how you go,’ he said, heading rapidly out through the garden, the lantern held out beside him to light the steps for Charlotte. ‘That path’s in a very dangerous state until it dries out properly. What was he doing taking a night walk there? A stupid thing to do!’
His voice was detached and impersonal, but she heard very clearly the implication: And what were you doing taking a night walk there? ‘Lucky for him you came along,’ he said, almost as if he had recognised the implication, too, and was making a token apology for it.
‘Listen!’ said the young man named Lawrence suddenly, and checked to strain his ears for the small, recurrent sound that had reached him. ‘Someone else out late, too. This place is getting like Brighton beach.’
They had reached the gate in the box hedge, and froze in the grass for an instant to listen. Slow, irregular footsteps, audible only by reason of the slight sucking of soft mud at the heels of someone’s shoes as he approached along the path.
‘I called the chief inspector,’ said the curator, advancing again to meet the sound. ‘I thought it likely this might be the young fellow he was looking for. But he couldn’t be here yet.’
‘He wouldn’t be coming along here, anyhow. He’ll be driving. Mrs Paviour surely wouldn’t walk this way in the dark, would she?’
‘Lesley’s home, twenty minutes ago, and gone to bed. I hope she’s sleeping through this disturbance.’
They walked towards the unsteady steps, and a figure took shape out of the darkness, weaving as it came and blinking dazedly as the lantern was lifted to illuminate its face. Wet and muddy, but moving doggedly under his own steam, Gus Hambro lurched into the circle of his would-be rescuers, braced his rubbery legs well apart, and stood dazzled, holding his head together with both hands.
‘It’s him!’ said Charlotte, humanly indifferent to grammar at this crisis. ‘He’s walking… he’s all right!’
The young man named Lawrence put her aside kindly but firmly, and took over in her place, drawing Gus’s left arm about his shoulders. ‘Man!’ he said admiringly. ‘Are you the tough one! Here, girl, cop hold of this thing, we don’t need a stretcher for types like this.’
The curator moved to the other side, encircled Gus competently but aloofly, and handed over the lantern. It was Charlotte who led the way back slowly and carefully through the garden. Mounting steps was what Gus found most bewildering at this stage; his feet made manful efforts, but tended to trail, and he was half-carried the last few yards to the door. And yet he had come to himself unaided, clambered to his feet without even the support of a fence to lean on, and made his way some two hundred yards towards the single light of the curator’s open door. A tough one, as Lawrence had observed. Or else his handicap had been rather less than she had reckoned. She was tired by this time, and unsure of her judgement: of stresses, of odds, even of personalities.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gus, quite distinctly but as if from a great distance. ‘I seem to be causing a lot of trouble.’
‘Not to worry, chum!’ said the Lawrence youth benignly, puffing a little on the steps but indestructibly cool and amiable. ‘See that nice, bright hole in the wall? Aim for that, and you’re home and dry!’
The nice, bright hole in the wall stood wide, as they had left it, gleaming with the reflections of white paint within. They bore steadily down upon it. And suddenly the oblong of light was inhabited. A shadowy silhouette materialised, rather than stepped, into the frame, and stood leaning forward slightly, peering understandably into the dimness outside, and curious about the massed group of figures converging upon the doorway. There was an outside light which no one, so far, had thought to switch on. The girl in the conservatory reached out a hand and flicked the switch, lighting them the last few yards, and floodlighting herself at the same time. Appearing magically out of shadow, suddenly she shone there before them, the focus of light and warmth and refuge. She had not the least idea what was going on, and she was smiling into the night in enquiry and wonder, her brows arched halfway to laughter, her lips parted in a whimsical welcome to whatever might be pending.
There was one brief moment while she stood illuminated thus theatrically, and still not at all comprehending that the group which confronted her had had a close brush with tragedy. She had a heart-shaped face, of striking, creamy smoothness, and broader than its length from brow to chin, like the bright, intelligent countenance of a young cat, innocent, assured and inquisitive. Her eyes were so wide-set and widely-opened that they consumed half her face in a dazzling pool of greenish-blue radiance. Her nose was neat, small and short, and her mouth full-lipped and firmly formed above a tapered but resolute chin. She had a cloud of short hair curving in clinging waves about her head, the colour of barley silk, and under the feathery fringe her forehead bulged childishly, with room in it for a notable brain, the one thing about her that was not suavely curved and ivory-smooth.
The details sounded like a collection of attractive oddities. The sum total was a quite arresting beauty. And the most jolting fact about her emerged only by implication. In a nylon jersey house-gown of peacock pattern and iridescent colouring, which clung like a silk glove, she could not possibly be anyone but Mrs Paviour, that same Lesley who walked when the fit took her, last thing at night, and had been home twenty minutes when Charlotte rang the door-bell. Ergo, the wife of this elderly Don Quixote, Great-Uncle Alan’s colleague and contemporary, who must be well into his sixties at the very least, and slightly arid and passé even at that. How old was the girl in the doorway? Not a day over twenty-five, Charlotte reckoned—hardly two years senior to herself. Perhaps even less. What an extraordinary mis-match! And not just because of the tale of years involved. The old man was a cracked leather bottle trying to contain quicksilver. She could not feel anything for him! It made no sense. And yet she had not the look of a woman cramped or dissatisfied. She glowed with ease and wellbeing.