‘It sounds as if we have to revise our ideas, doesn’t it?’
‘It does,’ said Tom, his throat constrained.
‘Why say that, unless it was to prepare the way in case she was seen with this man? A man obviously, in that case, respectable enough to pass for her father. And old enough.’
‘Not a teenager run wild,’ said Tom.
‘Not even a youngster in his twenties. A father-figure. If only just. One could pass for Annet’s father at around forty, maybe, but hardly earlier. Any ideas?’
The distant voice said hoarsely, aware how little conviction it must be carrying: ‘No ideas.’
‘You be thinking about it,’ said George, and rang off without more words.
And what did that mean, on top of all the confusions that had bludgeoned him since noon? What was it young Tom Kenyon knew that George didn’t know, concerning some man who might be, but was not, Annet’s father? And why, feeling as he felt about Annet, and longing as he must long for an end to this uncertainty that held a potential death for her, why had he gulped back his knowledge from the tip of his tongue in panic, and resisted his solid citizen instinct to plump it into the arms of the police and get rid of the responsibility?
George turned out the lights in the cold office, locked the door after him, and went to make his report in person to Superintendent Duckett. But Annet’s father, and Annet’s fictional father, and Annet’s father’s lodger, and the accidental intimacies and involuntary reactions of proximity mingled and danced in his mind all the way.
It was nearly half past six when he reached Fairford. He didn’t know why he felt so strongly that he must go there, he had no reason to suppose that anything new had happened there, least of all that Annet would have unsealed her lips and repented of her silence. Nor was he going to try to prise words out of her by revealing any part of what he had found out. That he knew from ample trial to be useless. It was rather that he felt the need to reassure himself that there was still an Annet, a living intelligence, an identity surely not dependent on any other creature for its single and unique life, a girl who could still be saved. Because if she was past saving, the main object of this pursuit was already lost. The old dead man had his rights to justice, but the young living girl was the more urgent charge now upon George’s heart.
He turned in at the overgrown gate, into the darkness of the untrimmed, autumnal trees, the soft rot of leaves like wet sponge under his wheels. He came out of the tunnel of shadow, and sudden lances of light struck at his eyes. The front door stood wide open, all the lights in the bouse were blazing, the curtains undrawn. In the shrubberies down towards the brook someone was threshing about violently. In the garden, somewhere behind the house, someone was bleating frantically like a bereaved ewe, and until George had stopped the engine and scrambled out of the car he could not distinguish either the voice or the words. Then it sprang at him clearly, and he turned and ran for the house.
‘Annet! Annet!’ bellowed Beck despairingly, crashing through the bushes.
George bounded up the steps and into the hall, and Policewoman Lilian Crowther leaned out of the living-room doorway with the telephone receiver at her ear, and dropped it at sight of him, and gasped: “Thank God! I was trying to get through to you. She’s gone!’
‘When?’ He caught at the swinging telephone and slammed it back on its rest, seized the girl by the arm and drew her with him into the room. ‘Quick! When? How long ago?’
‘Not more than five minutes. We found out a few minutes ago. Lockyer’s out there looking for her – and her father. She can’t be far.’
‘You shouldn’t have left her.’
‘She collapsed! Like that other time. She was lying with her head nearly in the hearth, and I couldn’t lift her alone. I ran for her mother to help me—’
The window was wide open, the curtains swinging in the rising wind of the evening. Mrs Beck blundered past through the shaft of light, running with aimless urgency, turning again to run the other way, her face contorted into a grimace of weeping, but without tears or sound. As though death was all round the house, just outside the area of light, and everyone had known and recognised it except Annet; as though she was lost utterly as soon as she broke free from the circle and ran after her desire, and none of them would ever see her again. As though, plunging out of the window, she had plunged out of the world.
George vaulted the sill and landed on the edge of the unkempt grass. Mrs Beck turned and stared at him with dazed eyes, and caught at his arm.
‘She’s gone! I couldn’t help it, no one could stop her if she was so set to go. It isn’t anyone’s fault. What could we do?’
‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said, and put her off, and ran through the trees to the boundary fence, leaving her stumbling after him. No moon, but even in the starlight of half a sky the emptiness about Fairford showed sterile and motionless. He had met no girl on the road. She would keep to the trees as long as she could. He circled the grounds hurriedly, halting now and again to freeze and listen. He heard Beck baying at the remotest edge of the garden, and met Lockyer methodically threading the shrubberies.
‘No sign of her?’
‘No sign, sir. I heard your car. Crowther’ll have told you—’
‘Keep looking,’ said George, and turned back at a run towards the house. He overtook Mrs Beck on the way, and drew her in with him.
‘Here, sit down by the fire and be quiet. Lilian, close the window and get her a drink.’ He shut the door with a slam, and leaned his back against it. ‘Now, what happened?’
‘I told you, she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire. How could I know it was a fake? I ran for Mrs Beck – she was upstairs, she didn’t hear me call. When we came back Annet was gone.’
‘She climbed out of the window,’ said Mrs Beck, hugging her writhing hands together in her lap to keep them still. ‘Without even a coat – in her thin house-shoes!’
‘Yes, yes, I know all that.’ And Lockyer, patrolling dutifully outside, couldn’t be on every side of the house at once. Annet could move like a cat, she hadn’t found it difficult to elude him on her own ground. ‘But before! Something happened, something gave her the word. Why tonight? Why now? She chose her time, she had a reason. Has she had any letters? Telephone messages?’
‘No,’ said Lilian Crowther positively. ‘I’ve been with her all the time until she dropped like that. And Mrs Beck reads her letters – but anyhow there haven’t been any today.’
‘And no visitors,’ said George, fretting at his own helplessness, and caught the rapid flicker of a glance that passed uneasily between them. ‘No visitors? Someone has been here?’
‘I asked him to come,’ said Mrs Beck loudly. ‘I asked him to talk to her and do what he could. What else is he for, if not to help people in trouble? I thought he might get something out of her. It was last night being choir practice that made me think of it. I telephoned him, and asked him to come in today. There couldn’t be any harm in that. If she couldn’t see her own vicar – even criminals are allowed that.’
‘All right,’ said George, frantically groping forward along this unforseen path, ‘so the vicar came. No one else?’
‘No one else. You must admit I had the right—’
‘All right, you had the right! Was he left alone with her?’
‘No,’ said Lilian, defensively and eagerly, ‘I was with her all the time. Mrs Beck left them together, but I stayed in the room.’
‘Thank God for that! Annet didn’t object?’
‘She didn’t seem to care one way or the other.’ And yet she had bided her time, and torn herself resolutely out of their hold. Something had passed, something significant. Why otherwise should she have chosen this particular hour, after waiting so long and so stoically? ‘Well, what did they have to say to each other? Everything you can remember.’