He looked up and caught Tom Kenyon’s eye upon him. There was one who wasn’t going to dispute his contention that Annet had betrayed herself. He’d wanted a reaction from her, and he’d got it at last, and it identified her only too surely.
‘But you realise, don’t you,’ said Tom with careful quietness, ‘that she’s absolved herself, too? Oh, I know! If it wasn’t Annet your witness saw, why should this be such a shock to her? But since it is such a shock, she can’t have known. Can she? She can’t have known anything about the murder, maybe not even about the robbery. She was there, yes, but quite innocently, waiting for him. She thought he was buying something, maybe a present for her. It was only because of their joint escapade that she wouldn’t admit where she’d been. To keep him out of trouble, yes, but not that trouble – because she knew nothing about that until you just told her. Why else should it drop her like a shot?’
George said: ‘You make a pretty good case. If this is genuine, of course.’
‘If it’s genuine! My God, man, look at the poor kid!’
No need to tell him that, he’d hardly taken his eyes off her. But he didn’t commit himself to any opinion about the nature of this collapse. He’d been in the world and his profession long enough to know that deception has many layers, and women know the deepest of them. No question of Annet’s unconsciousness now, no doubt of her anguish; but he had known self-induced illnesses and self-induced collapses before, as opportune as this, as disarming as this, sometimes even deceiving their victims and manipulators. When you can’t bear any more, when you want the questioning to stop, when you need time to think, you cut off the sources of reason and force and light, and drop like a dead bird off its roost in a frosty night. And as long as you stay darkened and silenced, no one can torment you.
Annet remained dark and silent a disquietingly long time. Cold water bathing her forehead brought no flicker to her pinched face.
‘We’d better get her to bed,’ her mother said. ‘Arthur, help me with her.’
‘I’ll carry her upstairs for you.’
George stooped and slid an arm under the girl’s shoulders, very gently easing her weight into balance against his breast. Her head rolled limply upon his shoulder, the black wing of glossy hair swung, and hid her face. Inside the loose collar of her yellow sweater a narrow thread of black velvet ribbon lay uncovered against the honeyed pallor of her neck. It moved with her weight, dipping between her little breasts.
He held her cradled against him, and ran his fingers round her neck beneath the fragrant drift of hair. There was a neat little bow tied there in the ribbon; he eased it round until he could untie it, and she never stirred, not even when he laid the loosened ends together, and drew out the treasure she had concealed between her breasts.
He held it out for them all to see, dangling on its ribbon: a narrow circlet of gold, a brand-new wedding ring.
They were upstairs with her a long time, the mother and the doctor, but they came down at last. George, who had sat all the time looking down with a shadowed face and dangling the ring by its ribbon, rose to meet them. He could think of nothing in his life that had filled him with so deep a sense of shame as the act of filching that tiny thing from her while she lay senseless; the most private and precious thing she possessed, the symbol of everything she wanted, and he could not let her keep it. He weighed it in his hand, and it was heavier than it should have been with all the inescapable implications that clung to it.
The old man’s assistant, who had left him just preparing to lock up on Saturday night, had made an inventory of the stolen pieces, as far as his memory served him. There was no question as to whether he would be able to identify the ring; a tiny private mark was scratched beside the assay marks inside it, whoever had had it in his stock would know it.
‘Has she come round?’
‘How is she?’
Two of them asked together; Arthur Beck, suddenly piteously old and withered, only trembled and waited.
‘Yes, she’s come round.’ Doctor Thorpe closed his bag and looked from one to another of them with quick, speculative grey eyes. ‘But you won’t be able to question her any more tonight.’
The slight antagonism in his voice was human enough, in the circumstances, but George’s ear was becoming acutely tuned to every inflection that concerned Annet. Thirty-five, not bad-looking, in professional attendance on her for five years or so — on those rare occasions, at least, when she needed attention: yes, this might very well be another of her many mute, unnoticed victims.
‘I wasn’t thinking of trying. Is she going to be all right?’
‘Physically there’s not much the matter with her. It was a long faint, but she came out of it fairly well in the end. She seems to be in a state of deep and genuine shock, but physically she’s as strong as a horse, there’ll be no ill effects. Just leave her alone for tonight, that’s all.’
‘Will you come in and see her tomorrow morning? I’d like to have your all-clear before I talk to her again, and I’ll go very gently. But it’s urgent that it should be as soon as possible.’
‘Very well,’ said the doctor with tightening lips, ‘I’ll look in and see her before surgery. Call me about nine, and I’ll give you my report.’
‘When she’s slept on it she may be willing to talk to me freely. I think you must see it’s the best, the only thing she can do to help herself now. If you have any influence with her, try to get her to realise it.’ He included all of them in that request, and saw the doctor’s tight, reserved face ease a little. ‘I’ve got a job to do, but it isn’t to hurt Annet. A part of it is to save whatever can be saved for her.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said the doctor.
‘Do one thing more for me, will you? With your permission, Mr Beck, I want to put a constable on guard here in your grounds. I’d be obliged, doctor, if you’d stay here with Annet until he arrives.’
They stared eye to eye for a second, then the doctor said quietly: ‘Very well, I’ll go back to her.’
Beck turned and shuffled his way to the stairs after him, a wretched, wilted figure, babbling feeble daily platitudes, trying to pretend there was a grain of normality left in his life, where there was nothing but a waste of wreckage like a battlefield.
‘I’ll be off now,’ said George, glad, if anything, to be left confronting Mrs Beck, with whom, it was clear, he would have to deal if he wanted to get sense out of anyone. ‘I shall have to take this ring with me, you understand that?’
‘Yes, I understand.’ She looked down pallidly at the thin, bright circlet. ‘Do you think – is it possible that they—?’
‘I think it very unlikely. This is a symbol, that’s all. And a promise. It isn’t so easy to get married in a hurry without a fair amount of money, and you see they can’t have had much between them.’
She flinched at that, his sound reasons for thinking so were only too clear.
‘And in the circumstances,’ he said gently, ‘I think you should hope and pray that they didn’t manage it.’
She whispered: ‘Yes!’ hardly audibly.
‘Don’t let her go to work tomorrow, even if she wants to. I want you to keep a close guard on her, and hold her available only to us. Don’t take anyone into your confidence, not yet, at any rate. Better telephone Mrs Blacklock in the morning, and say Annet has a return of her cold.’