‘Yes,’ she said again, dully, ‘I expect that would be best.’
‘And I need, if you have one, a good recent picture of her.’
Photographs of Annet were so few in the house, now Tom came to think of it, that their rarity shed light on her absence of vanity. When had he even seen her peering at her make-up in a mirror with the devoted attention of most girls? Mrs Beck brought a postcard portrait, the latest she had, and George pocketed it after one thoughtful glance again at the lovely, troubling face.
‘Thank you. You shall have it back, I promise you.’ Would she get the original back as surely? He wished he knew the answer to that. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. And believe me, I’m sorry!’
‘I’ll see you out,’ said Tom, and followed him from the room and out through the dim hall, into the moist, mild night. The front door closed almost stealthily upon the tragedy within.
‘It can’t be true!’ said Tom, suddenly in total revolt. The rupture was too brutal and extreme between this immemorial border stability, the continuity that made nothing of wars and centuries and dissensions, and that abrupt and strident descent into the cheapest and shallowest of ephemeral crimes. A mean little incident, a quick raid and a random blow, merely for money, for the means to buy things for Annet, to take Annet about in style – everything Annet didn’t want. The offence against her, the debasing of her immoderate love, almost as capital a crime as the killing of the old man. She couldn’t have known. It was the death of everything she had wanted from love. No, she couldn’t possibly have known.
‘It can,’ said George grimly. ‘It happens all the time.’
Did he mean merely this sordid, characteristic latter-day killing for profit, or the unbelievable misunderstanding and profanation of love implied in it? There was no knowing; he was so much deeper than he seemed, you only saw the abyss when you were already falling.
‘We think we have sound relationships,’ said George, answering the doubt beyond doubt, ‘and suddenly there’s a word said or a thing done, so shatteringly out of key that you find yourself alone, and know you’ve never actually touched your partner at any point, or said a word in the same language. And it doesn’t always even absolve you from loving, when it happens. That’s the hell of it.’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Tom, ‘except tell you everything I know. There’s only one thing you haven’t heard already. They don’t know about it, I never told them, but I went over the Hallowmount yesterday morning, early, to see if there were any signs of a vehicle having been up there recently. I found tracks of a motorbike or a scooter, there’s no telling which.’ He described them, and traced them again to the first gate. ‘It seemed to me that someone must have brought her back that way, the night before. After the showers this afternoon the grass and moss will have sprung back and smoothed them out, most likely, but there may be a trace left here and there. And I can show you exactly where they were.’
‘Then you shall, early tomorrow. If you wouldn’t mind turning out about seven? The track up from the south – Abbot’s Bale and beyond. Yes, I see that,’ said George, musing darkly under the hollies by the gate. ‘But why the same route back? She left in broad daylight, without luggage, in her everyday clothes, and that improbable way. All very understandable. But in the dark he could surely have come round and dropped her quietly at the corner of the lane.’
‘But not without using up quite a bit more time over his return, because he’d have had to come right round the hill, one end or the other. And maybe it was urgent that he should get home. He may have watchful parents, too,’ said Tom with a hollow smile.
‘Probably has! They often turn out to belong to the most respectable citizens around,’ reflected George wryly, ‘and they’re always at a loss to understand what they’ve done to deserve it.’
‘But Annet—’ He looked up briefly and bitterly at the lighted window; no shadows moved across the pale curtains. ‘Do you have to put a police guard on her? Where could she run to, even if she tried to get out?’
‘I wasn’t thinking so much of Annet running,’ said George in a deceptively mild and deprecating voice. He caught the wondering glance that questioned his purpose, and said more abruptly, with no expression at alclass="underline" ‘Hasn’t it dawned on you that this lover of hers has killed once already? And that only Annet knows who he is?’
He walked away into the dark. Shaken to the heart, Tom protested softly and wildly after him: ‘He wouldn’t hurt her? Damn it, he loves her!’
‘He did,’ came wafting back to him hollowly as the car door slammed. ‘Before he was frightened for himself.’
Mrs Beck was nowhere to be seen when Tom went back into the house; and Beck was sitting slumped in a chair, clutching a glass that shook in his hands and slopped shivering waves of whisky and soda on to his trousers. When he lifted it to his mouth it chattered against his false teeth, when he propped it steadyingly against his body it chattered against his waistcoat buttons. His glasses sagged sidelong down his nose, exposing one moist, hopeless eye, while the other was still seen monstrously magnified behind the lens. He must have downed one drink already, and spilled half of it. And he hadn’t forgotten to get out a second glass. Tom’s heart sank at sight of it, though he needed at least one shot, perhaps, to steady him. If this was going to be the way of escape, he wanted no part of it, he needed all his wits, he had thinking to do. And yet how could he go away and leave this wretched wreck to sweat and shiver alone? He wasn’t fit to be left.
‘He’s gone, is he? Come and have a drink, Kenyon. I don’t usually indulge, but I felt I needed something to steady my nerves.’ He cast a hunted look towards the ceiling. ‘My wife’s with Annet. I don’t know! You don’t think it could be all a mistake?’ he pleaded pathetically, and shrank from the direct encounter of their eyes. ‘No, I suppose not. If the man’s dead— But it’s some mistake about Annet. She couldn’t have picked up that sort of young man. Bad as it is with her, I’m sure that can’t be true. She wouldn’t encourage the wrong type of boy. She’s hard to please, our Annet. She never liked the flashy type. These Teddy boys, they used to ask her to dance, and she’d dance with them, and be polite, but they never got anywhere with her. Myra always tells us what kind of evening they have.’
Myra always tell us! Not Annet. And Annet knew, none better, that Myra always told them, that her very function was always to tell them. The closer you watch, thought Tom, the more you do not see. You didn’t trust her – I wonder why, in the first place? There must have been a time when she was to be trusted absolutely – you didn’t trust her, and you wouldn’t let her have her soul to herself, but she got it in spite of you, and shut you out from it. And it’s late now to complain of what she did with it, unaided and unadvised.
‘But you haven’t got a drink, my dear boy, do help yourself to a drink. I’m sure you need – we all need a little reinforcement. Please! Let me!’
He struggled to rise and reach the bottle, and there was nothing to be done but forestall him. Tom made his glass pale with soda, and hid its insipid colour with a careful hand.
‘And then, in Birmingham, is that feasible! I ask you! No, no, there’s some mistake, it was another girl. How could Annet know a young man in Birmingham? She’s hardly ever been there even overnight, only once or twice with Mrs Blacklock to educational conferences or extra-mural classes, you know. And now and then shopping, of course, with her mother, or with Myra, but only for the day. It’s absurd! With so little opportunity, how could she possibly have formed an intimate association with a young fellow in the city? It’s a mistake, isn’t it? It must be a mistake.’