She dredged up a number of embarrassed, agonising platitudes through which the adolescent rawness of pity showed like flesh through torn clothing. The vicar was back in the room with them, convulsed with sympathy and hideously unable to contain it, or spill it, or wring his inadequate if kindly heart open and give it to her frankly; an ageing boy with only a boy’s heaven to offer anyone, and stunted angels with undeveloped wings like his own.
‘He said he was to tell her the choir had missed her at practice, and sent her their prayers. He said they took comfort in the thought that they would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit, he said. And that was about all,’ she concluded lamely, scouring her memory in vain for more vital matter. ‘It doesn’t seem anything to set her off like this.’
And yet she had received, somehow, the summons that sent her out into the dusk. He could not be mistaken. If it was not here, in this trite comfort, then there must be something else, something they had missed.
‘Nothing else happened? He didn’t give her a note from someone else?’
‘No, honestly. He never went near enought to hand her anything. You’d have thought he was afraid of her – I suppose he was, in a way,’ said Policewoman Crowther, with more perception than George would have given her credit for.
‘She didn’t see the paper?’ He hadn’t seen it himself, he didn’t know if there was anything in it to speak to her, but somewhere the lost thread dangled, and must be found again.
‘No, she never tried to. She never showed any interest.’
Perhaps, thought George, because she knew they wouldn’t let her have the papers even if she wanted them. Perhaps because she had waited with such fatal confidence for the only message she needed, and knew it would not come that way.
But then there was nothing left but those few, bald sentences, brought from the outside world by the vicar; and if the clue was nowhere else, it must be there. The choir had missed her – Mrs Beck must have telephoned him just before he went over to the church for practice, and he had unburdened his heart to her colleagues to spread the load. And nobly they had responded. Or had they? The tone of the message was surely his, or a careful parody. It sounded as though he had dictated, and they had said: Amen. They sent her their prayers. They would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit. Six-thirty was the hour of evensong, that was plain enough. Yes, but it belonged to tomorrow, not today. Why did it send her out tonight. George sweated through it word by word, and darkness, rather than light, fell on him in the moment of discovery, stunning him.
Six-thirty at the altar. Six-thirty at the Altar! All the difference in the world.
Six-thirty!
Twenty to seven by his watch, and she was somewhere out there in the dark, with a quarter of an hour’s start of him at least, bursting her heart on the steep climb to her lover.
He tore the door open and was out of it and down the steps in a couple of raking strides, before they realised that he had found what he was looking for. Racing towards his car, he shouted peremptorily for Lockyer, and by the time he had the MG turned recklessly in the confined space and pointing down the drive, the bushes threshed before the constable’s galloping body, and Lockyer was running beside him. George slowed, and shoved open the door.
‘Get in, quick! Never mind searching, you’re not needed here. I know now where to look.’
Lockyer fell lurching into the seat beside him, and slammed the door. They rocked out through the gate and swung left into the narrow road.
‘Where are we going?’ Lockyer clung to the dashboard, and hefted his big body to speed the turn, panting after his run.
‘Top of the Hallowmount.’
‘For God’s sake, what’s she doing rushing up there?’
‘Meeting her lover. He sent for her.’
Her lover, if he still was that, after being hunted for days, and nursing for days the knowledge that the case against him depended entirely upon her. More likely by now it was her murderer she was going to meet. One can run faster and live more cheaply than two, hide more easily, remain anonymous more surely. And besides, the bulk of the evidence would die with Annet. Even when he made up his mind to run, he couldn’t, he daren’t, run until he had silenced her. God alone knew what she thought they were going to do. Run away together, maybe, to the ends of the earth, ditch the BSA somewhere, hitch lifts, reach the sea and the chance of a passage over to France.
Maybe! Or maybe she had something else in mind, something passionate and individual and her own, not to be guessed at too confidently by anyone in the world; because no one in the world knew Annet well enough to be sure what she would do, but George Felse by this time knew her at least well enough to wait with humility, and wonder, and acknowledge that she was a mystery.
Past the Wastfield gate, bounding and wallowing over the cart-ruts, and on between the rought pastures, fence-posts blurring into a continuous flickering wall of pallor alongside. Half the sky dark over them, but glimmerings of starlight still. Pale objects shone lambent out of the darkness, a tall gate-post where the plantation began, the wall of a barn in the field opposite. Before them the Hallowmount loomed, cutting off the dapplings of the sky, its great bulk languid but aware.
‘But how did he get word to her? Or was it all arranged between them before?’
All arranged, maybe, though they’d expected to make their bid for freedom in other circumstances than these. All arranged but the time and the place, perhaps even the place accepted, established by old usage. And the time he had appointed, and she was keeping her appointment. Without even a coat. In her thin house-shoes.
‘Her visitor brought the message this afternoon.’
‘Her visitor? But there wasn’t anybody, except—’
Members of the clergy, like doctors and postmen, tend to be invisible, but that big, comely, well-meaning figure sprang into sharp focus now, became male, personable and possible in Lockyer’s eyes. He swallowed, appalled. ‘What, the vicar?’ He swallowed again, swallowed voice and all, and sat stunned.
Her father! Well, he was old enough to fill the bill, if only just old enough, he made sense of the description; and nobody had enquired into his movements. Why should they? Certainly he was at choir practice, that night when Annet missed it, certainly he was at church and fulfilling his usual duties on the Sunday. But a man can be in Comerford church at half past seven, and in Birmingham by nine-o’clock, or shortly after. One man had.
‘But – the vicar?’ persisted Lockyer, gulping dismay and disbelief.
George said nothing to that, he was busy holding the car steady over the worst patch of road without slackening speed. He knew now. This time he couldn’t be wrong, and he wasn’t in any cul-de-sac, with a blank wall at the end of it waiting for him to crash at speed.
He saw the rough grasses of the slope put on form behind the wire fence, the couching bulk of the hill withdraw into its true dimension. He brought the car round into the arc of short grass by the second plantation gate, and scrambled out of the driver’s door and through the wires of the fence with Lockyer pounding at his back. Head-down, lungs pumping, he breasted the first slope, got his rhythm, and began to climb the Hallowmount faster than he had ever climbed a hill in his life.
Tom Kenyon sat in a niche of the rocks on the highest point of the Altar, and stared along the ridge. It was the first time he had ever been up here alone, and the strangest thing to him was that it did not feel like the first time. The silence that had flowed down into the valleys with the dropping twilight was absolute now, it lay like a cloak over the whole great, wakeful shape of rock and pasture, smoothed and moulded to the stretched body. Sometimes he felt a rhythm stirring under him, like deep and easy breathing, and found himself tuning his own breath to the same measure. Sometimes he fell, without realising it, into such a stillness that the faintly-seen shapes of his own circling arms and clasped knees seemed to have acquired the texture and solidity of rock, as though he had grown into the quartzite of the Altar. He had no sense of undergoing a new experience; this was rather a recollection, drawn from so deep within him that he felt no desire to explore its origins, for that would have been dissecting his own identity, or to question its validity, for that would have been to doubt his own. He felt the tension of long ages of human habitation drawing him into the ground, absorbing him, making him part of the same continuity.