He nodded, and after a moment managed to say in a very low voice: “Thank you!”
She started the car. A motorbike whirred by them towards the town, its small, self-important noise soon lost. A solitary old gentleman on his way back from the pillar-box turned into a side road and vanished. They inhabited a depopulated world, a frosty night world full of waiting, ardent echoes that had no sound to reduplicate. He must not look round. His head kept wanting to turn, his eyes to search the street behind them, his ears were straining for another engine turning over reluctantly in the cold, but he must not look round or even seem to wish to look round. He was an innocent, a fool without suspicions, a simpleton who had not said a word to anyone about this meeting. What should he be concentrating on, now that she had relieved him of his burden? Naturally, the car. It was worth a little enthusiasm, and at sixteen adults don’t expect you to have any tenacity even in your anxieties, they take it for granted you can be easily seduced by things like cars.
“What year is it?” he asked, watching the competent movements of her hands as the car moved off, and capturing one genuine moment of pleasure in its smooth, quiet lunge forward. “Is it actually vintage!”
It wasn’t, but it missed it by only a few years. She smiled faintly as she answered his questions, the controlled, indulgent smile of a considerate adult allowing a child his preoccupations, even stooping to share them, but distantly envying him his ability to lose himself in them as a blessing long passed out of her own experience. Precisely the kind of smile to be expected from her in the circumstances, and it told him nothing. He could have done with a few pointers. There should have been something revealing in that one glance she had cast at his carefully assembled package, something to tell him if he was on target or if he had guessed wildly astray and utterly betrayed himself; but there had been nothing, no sudden gleam, no sharpening of the lines of her face. It was too late now to wonder.
“You do keep her beautifully,” he said without insincerity.
“Thank you,” she said gravely. “I try.”
The road had narrowed a little, the pavement trees ceased abruptly, the garden walls and fences began to be interspersed with the hedges of fields. He wished he could lean far enough to the right to get a glimpse in the rear-view mirror, but he knew he mustn’t. He wished he knew if they were following. It would be hell if he had to go through all this for nothing.
“We’ll take the riverside road,” said Miss Hamilton, “it’s shorter. I suppose you haven’t started learning to drive yet?”
“Well, it would be difficult, really. I can’t go on the road yet, and we haven’t got any drive to speak of, only a few yards to the garage. They did talk about starting lessons at school, there’s plenty of room in the grounds there, but nothing’s come of it yet.”
“It would be an excellent idea,” she said decidedly. “In school conditions you’d learn very easily, from sheer force of habit. And it’s certainly become an essential part of a complete education these days.”
“But I think they’re scared for their flower-beds, or something, they swank frightfully about their roses, you know.”
It was possible to talk about these remote things, he found with astonishment, even when his throat was dry with nervousness and his heart thumping. He cast one quick glance at her profile against the last of the street lighting, the clear, austere features, the slight smile, the sheen of the black hair and the smooth shape of the great burnished coil it made on her neck. Then they had turned into the dark road under the trees, and the headlights were plucking trunk after slender trunk out of the obscurity ahead, sharp as harp-strings, taut curves of light that swooped by and were lost again in the darkness behind. Somewhere there on their right, beyond the belt of trees, the shimmer of the river, bitterly cold under the frosty stars. In summer there would have been a few cars parked along the grass verges down here, with couples locked in a death-grip and lost to the world inside, and more couples strolling among the trees or lying in the grass along the river-bank; but not now. The back rows of cinemas were warmer, the smoky booths of the coffee-bars had as much privacy. No one would come here tonight. And without the lovers this was a lonely and silent road.
It will be here, he thought, somewhere in this half-mile stretch, before we leave the trees. And he gripped the piped edges of the bucket seat convulsively, and felt his palms grow wet, because he wasn’t sure if he could go through with it. It isn’t just being afraid, he thought. How do you manage it when you see a blow coming, or a shot, and you mustn’t duck, you mustn’t drop for cover, you must just let it take you? How do you do it? He flexed his fingers, startled to find them aching with the intensity of his grip on the leather. He was strong, he could very well defend himself, but until the witnesses appeared he mustn’t. They had to see for themselves what had been planned for him, his own word would never be enough. And if they weren’t following, if they didn’t arrive in time, then in the last resort what happened to him would have to be evidence enough to clear Kitty, Kitty who of all people in the world was safest from being blamed for whatever deaths might occur tonight.
Miss Hamilton put out her left hand and opened the glove compartment, rummaging busily among the tangle of things within until she brought out a packet of cigarettes. She had slowed down to a crawl while she drove one-handed, and she shook out a cigarette from the packet and put it between her lips with neat, economical movements which made it clear she had done the same thing a few thousand times before. She reached into the pocket again, groping for her lighter, and failed to find it.
“Oh, of course, it’s in my handbag,” she said, letting the car slide to a stop. “Can you reach it for me. Dominic?”
He looked over into the litter of things on the back seat; her bag had slid down into the hollow against the torch. The old car was spacious, with ample leg-room between front and rear seats, and he had to turn and kneel on the seat to lean over far enough to reach the corner. He did so in an agony of foreknowledge, living through the sequel a hundred times before it became reality. Terrified, in revolt, forcing himself to the quiescence against which his flesh struggled like an animal in a trap, he leaned over with arm outstretched, presenting to her meekly the back of his brown head. Oh, God, let her be quick! I can’t keep it up, I shall have to turn round, , , I can’t! Oh, Kitty! And maybe you won’t even know!
Something struck him with an impact that made the darkness explode in his face, and he was jerked violently forward over the back of the seat, the breath driven out of him with a second shock of pain and terror. Then the darkness, imploding again on a black recoil into the vacuum from which the burst of light had vanished, sucked him down with it into a shaft of emptiness and let him fall and fall and fall until even the falling stopped, and there was no more pain or fright or anger or fighting for breath, no more anxiety or agonised, impotent love, nothing.
CHAPTER XVI.
“I WISH WE knew what we were looking for,” said Jean, crouched forward into the windscreen of Barney Wilson’s Bedford van and peering with narrowed eyes to the limit of the headlight beams. “A car, it might be any car, we don’t know whose, it could be a taxi, or anything. We just don’t know.”
“It won’t be a taxi,” Leslie said with certainty. “He’s done something to make things happen.’ It sounds like a man-to-man business.”
“And we don’t even know that they’ll be coming by this road, it could be the main road.”