‘No, Dominic’s told me nothing – but thanks for the tip. No, the Birmingham police came to us because this girl, according to her unwelcome cavalier, was filling in the time while she waited, as one does, by fishing the forgotten bits out of her pockets. Everyone has an end of pencil, or a loose lucky farthing, or a hair-grip, or something, lost in the fluff at the seam. This girl had a bus ticket. She was playing with it when he accosted her, and she was nervous. That amused him. He paid particular attention to the way she was folding it up into a tiny fan — you know? — narrow folds across in alternate directions, then fold the whole thing in the middle. When he was too pressing – though of course he doesn’t admit that – she drew back from him hastily, twisted the fan in her fingers and threw it down. He says he left her alone then. If she didn’t want him, he could do without her. But when they took him back to the corner next day he knew where the ticket had lodged, close under the wall, in a cranny of the paving stones. And sure enough, they found it there, and he identified it positively.
‘It turned out,’ said George flatly, ‘to be a one-and-fourpenny by Egertons’ service between Comerbourne and Comerford. With that and the description it wasn’t so hard to settle upon Annet, once they came to us. Unfortunately no one saw the person for whom she was waiting. She told the youngster who accosted her she was waiting for her boyfriend, and he was an amateur boxer. So he didn’t hang around to put it to the test.’
‘But what of it?’ persisted Beck feverishly. ‘Why are they hunting for this girl – whoever she may be?’
‘Because, around midnight that night, when a policeman on the beat came along, he saw that the steel mesh gate over the jeweller’s doorway wasn’t quite closed. All the lights in the shop were off, the gate was drawn into position, but when he tried it he found it wasn’t secured. And naturally he investigated. He found the till cleared of cash, and several glass cases emptied, too, apparently of small jewellery. The loss is estimated at about two thousand pounds, mostly in good rings.
‘And the proprietor – he was an old, solitary man, who lived over his shop – he was in his own workroom at the back. His head had been battered in with a heavy silver candlestick,’ said George, his voice suddenly hard, deliberate and cold. ‘He was dead.’
The gasp of realisation and horror that stiffened them all jerked Annet for the first time out of her changeling calm, and out of her chair. She was torn erect, rigid, her face convulsed, her hands clutching at the empty air before her. The great eyes dilated, fixed and blank with shock. The contorted mouth screamed: ‘No – no, – no!’ and her voice shattered on a suffocating breath.
Tom sprang wildly towards her; but it was George Felse who caught and lifted her in his arms as she fell.
CHAPTER V
« ^ »
Call her doctor,’ said George, over the limp, light body. ‘I’d rather he was here.’
He put off Mrs Beck, who was clawing frantically at her darling and spilling unwonted and painful tears, with a lunge of one shoulder, and carried his burden to the couch. ‘Tom, you get him. Use my name, he’ll come all the quicker.’
Tom got as far as the telephone before he realised that he did not even know which doctor they favoured, and there being no emergency notes on the scratch-pad to enlighten him, he was forced to come and drag Beck away from the couch to supply the information he needed. Annet was lying motionless and pale by then, a pillow under her cheek, her body stretched carefully at ease, the narrow skirt drawn down over her knee, surely by George Felse. Tom dialled with an erratic finger, hating George more for his deftness and humanity even than for his official menace. What right had he? What right? To strike her down, and then to be the one who held her in his arms, and laid her down so gently among the cushions, and stroked back the tumbled hair from her eyes with such assured fingers.
‘Doctor Thorpe? I’m speaking for Mr Beck at Fairford. Can you come out here at once, please? Yes, it’s urgent. Miss Beck – Annet – she’s in a faint. Detective-Inspector Felse is here, he told me to ask you to hurry. I don’t know – a degree of shock, I suppose – he urges you to come as soon as possible. Good, thank you!’
He hung up, and his hand was shaking so that the receiver rattled in the rest. He went back to the living-room with Beck clinging close on his arm.
Mrs Beck had control of herself again; the traces of her few and angry tears mottled her cheeks, her ruled dark hair, dull from many tintings, was shaken out of its customary severity, but she was herself again, and would not be overwhelmed a second time. George had withdrawn and left Annet to her; not, it seemed, from any embarrassment or incompetence on his own part, rather to provide her with something urgent and practical to do, for he did not withdraw far, and he watched her ministrations with a close and sombre regard.
‘Is she subject to fainting fits?’
‘I’ve never known her faint before.’ She gave him a furious look over her daughter’s body. ‘You frightened her. You shocked her.’
‘She could have read most of the same details in tonight’s paper,’ said George, ‘but I doubt if they’d have had the same effect. She wouldn’t have realised then what she knows now – that it happened forty yards away from her, while she was waiting for her – friend. There are things she knows that I didn’t have to tell her. Such as where he was while she stood waiting for him. If he’d been round the other corner in the tobacconist’s, buying cigarettes, I think Annet would have stood the shock of an unknown old man’s death without collapsing.’
‘But, good God!’ protested Tom, twisting away from the thought, ‘you’re making out that she kept watch for him on the corner while he did it.’
‘That’s one possibility. There are others.’
He didn’t go into them. He stood looking down at the pale, motionless face on the cushions, pinched and blue at the corners of the closed lips, a strange, faint frown, austere and distant, clenched upon her black brows. The silken wings of her hair spread blue-black on either side, buoyed up on the resilient down of the pillow like a drowned girl’s hair afloat on water.
So slight, and so remote; and so incalculable. Was it possible to know her so well that she would some day be able to take down all the barriers and be relaxed and at peace with you? He’d never had much close contact with her. It might be only that unbelievably touching beauty of hers that made him feel her exile from her fellow-men to be something imposed from without, and not chosen. That, and her age. She could have been Dominic’s year-older sister. He would have liked a girl. So would Bunty, but there’d just never been one. Did she remain closed like an ivory box with a secret spring even when she was with X? Or open like a flower to the sun? The inescapable X. X who must be found, because he had almost certainly killed a solitary, eccentric, miserly old man for the contents of his till and the sweepings of three show-cases.
‘You haven’t proved she was even there,’ said Beck, stirred to the feeble man’s desperate bravery. ‘There must be many girls who fit the same description equally well. You see Annet’s ill. She never faints. She was wandering somewhere all the week-end, and she’s ill and frightened, and you have to use her so brutally.’
‘I’m sorry if you think I was brutal. I don’t think I was guilty single-handed of cutting the ground from under Annet’s feet. Someone else did that. When he hit the old man. No,’ he said, looking down bitterly at the slow, languid heave and fall of Annet’s breast, ‘I haven’t proved she was there. I haven’t proved she was the girl on the corner. I didn’t have to. Annet told us that, pretty plainly. The only thing she has told us yet.’
But it wasn’t; not quite. She had told him, however unwillingly, the depth and height and hopelessness and helplessness of the love that was eating her alive. If they hadn’t seen it, if they had no means of measuring or grasping it, that was their failure; and it looked as if that inadequacy in them might yet be the death of Annet. A little honest brutality might have cheered and warmed her, and brought her close enough to confide.