The kneeling man heard it, and wrenched round frantically to face it, plucking the gun from the discarded briefcase and bracing it before his body. His lunging shoulder swept the handkerchief aside and dislodged the torch after it; it fell and rolled sparkling along the ground, and he leaned after it with a hoarse gasp and snapped it off into darkness. But for an instant it had illuminated his tense and frightened face as it fell.
Tom clung shaking in his niche, the blurred oval of light and fear still dancing on the darkness before his eyes. Not Beck! No! Not any of the young bloods who gathered on the corner of the square in Comerbourne to compare the noisy and ill-ridden mounts that were their pathetic status symbols. Not young Stockwood. Not some mercifully expendable stranger. But Peter Blacklock, estate manager and husband to the wealthiest woman in West Midshire, secretary of half a dozen worthy bodies that operated under her shadow, choirmaster, organist, general factotum of the village, the prince-consort of Cwm Hall.
With the face everything fell into proportion, coherence and certainty, instantly, before the whorls of light had ceased to float in front of him in the darkness, and long before he relaxed the half-hysterical grip of his abraded finger-tips on the rocks.
Her father! Yes, he would do for that, she could have produced him before Mrs Brookes without a qualm. Forty-four or so, pleasant and charmingly-spoken, mild, easy-humoured, with a twist of rueful fun in him, and an uncle to her in her parents’ eyes – who could have filled the bill better? And he made sense of so much more than that, by the qualities he had not, by the voids he offered for her to fill. He was as inevitable as he was impossible.
Who else had been in such close contact with her? Thrown together by the hour, casually and practically, in Regina’s house, forced together by Regina’s pitiless committee work, those two, being what they were, might easily fall together into the abyss of love, and drown, and die. It wasn’t as if you were offered a choice. The time might well come when they could not bear it any longer, when they had to escape, had to be together somewhere out of her shadow. And once tasted, how could they let that desperate ecstasy go? Even the opportunist robbery, which at first seemed so improbable in one who had everything, fell implacably into place. Because he was penniless!
It was staggering, but it was true. What did he have of his own? From the time he’d married Regina her estates had taken up all his time. And what did he want with a profession when she would gladly buy him or give him anything he wanted? Except, of course, the one thing he had wanted to death, and couldn’t ask her for. For that he’d had to provide himself.
Poor devil!
All this passed through Tom’s mind by fitful glimpses, like light from a guttering candle, in the few seconds while he listened to the fervent footsteps his heart recognised now only too well. He wanted to call out to her to go back, while there was time, but he’d hesitated too long, and it was too late. Annet was there against the sky, her hair streaming.
Blacklock had lowered the gun; he knew her now, and sprang with open arms to meet her. But the true impetus that flung them together, strained breast to breast in a ravenous embrace, was hers, and had always been hers. She wasn’t his victim; he was hers. She had destroyed him by loving him. If she’d never even noticed him, except as a middle-aged man, a father figure, he’d have mastered his feelings for her. But she’d opened to him, she’d loved him, he’d been forced to turn longing and dream into action. No, Annet was nobody’s victim, she had done what she had chosen to do, taken him because he was the weakest, the most helpless, the least effective, the unhappiest of all the men it might have been. All good reasons, and there was no going back on them now.
Blacklock said: ‘Annet!’ as a man dying of thirst might have said: ‘Water!’ He had his arms locked round her, the gun, still in his hand, pressed against her back. And then there was a silence that tore at Tom’s senses, while they kissed and he burned.
‘I thought you weren’t coming. I was afraid!’
‘I came as soon as I could. You knew I’d come.’ And again the silence, aching and hurried and brief. ‘Darling! Darling!’ Her deep voice throaty and charged with agonising tenderness, the implications in its tones of stroking hands, and the deliberate, assuaging pressure of her body, reassuring, caressing, protecting.
‘Yes, I knew! If you could, I knew you’d come. But I was afraid. We’ve got to hurry,’ he said urgently. ‘The bike’s down below. If we can get an hour’s start we can shake them. They won’t look for us westwards. And from Ireland—’
He broke off there to take her in more exactly. ‘You haven’t even got a coat! We must buy you one somewhere tomorrow. You can wear my windjacket for tonight.’ He stooped to snatch up the briefcase from the ground, and caught Annet by the wrist. ‘Come on, hurry, they’ll be after us soon.’
They would go, he would tow her down the hill in his wake and drag her into his crime, she who had done nothing criminal yet. It was more than Tom could bear. She must not do it. She must not make herself an accessory after the fact, an outlaw and a felon, not even for love’s sake. To hold her back from that was something worth dying for.
He didn’t know what he was going to do until he had done it. Scrambling, shouting, he broke out of the shadow of the rocks and flung himself between them and the edge of the slope.
‘Annet, don’t! Don’t listen to him! Don’t go with him! Don’t make yourself a murderess! Don’t—’
Blacklock uttered a soft, terrified cry of panic and despair, and loosed Annet’s arm. Hugging the briefcase to him, he fired blindly at the half-seen figure that distorted the darkness, fired rather at the shouting and the threat than at any corporeal opponent. The impact of the bullet sent Tom staggering backwards, and swung him partially round before he dropped.
He groped along the ground, astonished, lucid and without pain for an instant, dazed by the whirling of stars over him, and the chill and shock of the ground under him. Then the pain came, knifing at his shoulder a full second after the impact, and he cried out in bitter indignation, one brief, angry shout of agony. The earth and the sky stilled, he knew himself lying at Annet’s feet, and felt the stillness of horror holding her paralysed over him. Fumbling at his left shoulder, he felt the hot stickiness of blood; and when he tried to lift himself on one elbow, he fell back ignominiously into the grass.
Darkness lurched at him, withdrew, stooped again. He fought it off, straining upwards obstinately towards Annet’s unseen face and frozen stillness.
‘Don’t go! Don’t let him make you.’ His own voice sounded grotesquely faint and far, and faded like a weak radio signal. He thought he had uttered more words than he heard, and some had been lost, but he went on trying. It was all he could do for her now. ‘You didn’t kill anyone – you didn’t steal— Don’t let him make you what he is.’
There was no way to silence him but one. Shaking, sweating and half-blinded, Blacklock passed his forearm across his eyes to clear them, and reached the hand that clutched the briefcase to push Annet out of the way.
‘Annet, go on ahead!’
He pointed the gun carefully at the patch of muted darkness heaving on the ground. His finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. The voice had to stop. It was like a barrier between them and freedom, there was no escape until it was silenced.