It was at that moment that the black dolphin knocker on the front door banged peremptorily three times on its curling cast-iron wave.
CHAPTER V
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The man huddled on the settee lay utterly still, the tremors suppressed by force, his breath held. He did not raise his head; he wanted never to raise it again. It was Bunty who dragged herself up out of her chair and went into action. She could move, she was in command of herself. And she knew what she was doing, now. Hurriedly she stooped for her handbag, and ran a comb through her hair. Would there be marks on her throat? Not yet, probably, but she shook out her chiffon scarf and tucked it in around her neck to make certain of being unremarkable. There was blood on her fingers; she dipped her handkerchief into the nearest liquid, which was the spilled tea on the table, and wiped the stains away.
“Give me the key!”
Speech hardly hurt at all. She had time to realise, even in that moment, how little she was damaged. He must have snatched his hands away from her as soon as he felt her pain.
He lifted his head at the sharp sound of her voice, and turned upon her a blind, mute face.
“The key, quickly! Give it to me!”
He sat up and felt through his pockets for it numbly, and held it out to her without a word. From his last safe place at the end of despair, where there is nothing left to lose or gain, he watched her walk out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. He heard the bolts of the front door drawn back, heard the key turned in the lock.
In those few yards Bunty lived through a total reassessment of everything that had happened to her. Her senses were abnormally acute, her mind moved with rapidity and certainty. She remembered things observed at the time without comprehension, and made sense of them. Her legs might be shaky under her, but mentally she was on her feet again.
She opened the door of the cottage with the accurately measured reserve of a woman alone, knocked up at an unusually early hour on a Sunday morning. Not too wide at first, ready to close it and slip the bolt again quickly if she didn’t like the look of her visitor; then surprised and relieved, setting it wide and coming confidently into the doorway.
The two uniformed policemen on the step of the porch gazed back at her in silence for a moment, more surprised to see her than she was to see them.
“Good morning!” said Bunty, and waited with the polite, questioning curiosity of the innocent to hear what they wanted of her.
“Good morning, ma’am!” The elder of the two shoved up his flat cap civilly on the furze-bush of his pepper-and-salt hair, and eyed her with circumspection, plainly finding her of a reassuring respectability. “Sorry if we startled you, but we saw a light in one of the windows here a while since, from up the coast road a piece, and knowing that the lady and gentleman who summer here have left, we wondered… You never know, just as well to check up, when a house is empty.”
“Oh, I see! Yes, of course, and how very good of you! Reggie and Louise will be so grateful,” said Bunty warmly, “to know that you keep such a good watch on their place. I’m a friend of the Alports, they’ve lent me their cottage for a long week-end. I drove up last night.”
“Ah, that accounts for the light, then.” He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and why shouldn’t he, when she produced the owners’ names so readily? An Englishwoman of forty, dressed in a smart and rather expensive grey jersey suit, must seem probable enough as an acquaintance of the Alports; indeed, it was unlikely that such a person would ever find her way to this spot unless directed by the owners. “And you found everything in order here, ma’am? No signs of anyone prowling around in the night? No trouble at all?”
The younger policeman, tall and raw-boned, and surely a local boy, had drawn back out of the porch, and was using his eyes to good purpose without seeming to probe. The front window, through which he had already taken a sharp look, would show him only a room where everything must be as the Alports had left it. He was eyeing the hard gravel, too, but all it would tell him was that a car had arrived here, stood a little while before the door, and then been put sensibly away in the garage, which is exactly what one would expect the English lady to do with her car on arrival. Now he was turning his blue and innocent regard upon Bunty, and taking her in from head to foot, without apparent question of her genuineness, rather with a degree of critical pleasure on his own account.
“Trouble?” said Bunty, wide-eyed. Her smile faded into faint anxiety, nicely tempered with curiosity. “No, nobody’s been here. Everything was all right when I arrived. Why, is something wrong?”
“Och, nothing for you to worry about, ma’am,” said the sergeant comfortably. “You’re no’ likely to be troubled here. Most like he’s gone on northwards.”
“He?” she echoed. “You mean there’s somebody you’re looking for? A criminal?”
“We’ve had warning to look out for a car, ma’am, a large old car, black, thought to be a Rover, registration NAQ 788. It’s known to have driven north out of England during the night. Constable at Muirdrum believes he saw the same car go past about three hours ago, heading for Arbroath, but he’s no’ sure of the number. We’re checking up and down all these roads, just in case. But there’s no call for you to worry, ma’am, you’ll be fine here.”
So no one, it seemed, was looking for her just yet. No one had mentioned that there’d been a woman aboard, most likely no one knew. Obviously they knew it hadn’t been a woman driving.
“NAQ 788,” she repeated thoughtfully. “A black Rover. I could get in touch with you if I do see anything of it, of course.”
“Ay, you could do that, ma’am. But I don’t think you’re likely to catch sight of him, I doubt he’s as far north as he can get by now.”
“What do you want him for?” Bunty asked inquisitively. A woman without curiosity would be suspect anywhere. “Has he run somebody down, or something?”
“Well, no’ just that!” She hadn’t expected a direct answer, and clearly she wasn’t going to get one, but his business-like, unalarmed attitude told her most of what she needed to know. “Constable somewhere down south had a narrow squeak, though,” he vouchsafed, after due consideration. And that was all she was going to get out of him; but it seemed that he had given a second thought to getting something out of her in exchange.
“We’ll be on our way then. Sorry if we disturbed you. And by the way, maybe I should have your name and home address, ma’am, just for information.”
She hadn’t been expecting that, but she was equal to it. Startled by her own readiness, she responded without hesitation: “I’m Rosamund Chartley—that’s Mrs. Chartley, of course…” The young one, if not the other, had long since assimilated the significance of her ring. “And I live at 17 Hampton Close, Hereford.” She couldn’t be sure how much he would know in advance about the Alports, but her use of their name had registered immediately, she might as well play for safety and assume that he knew their home town, too. She watched him write down her instant fiction, and smiled at him as he put his note-book away; not too encouragingly, on the contrary, with a slight intimation that if that was all she could do for him she would like to go back to her interrupted breakfast.
“Thank you, ma’am, we won’t keep you any longer now. And I’m sure ye needna be at all uneasy. Good morning, Mrs. Chartley!”
He re-adjusted his cap on the grizzled heather he wore for hair, summoned his subordinate with a flick of a finger, and they departed. She closed the door, and leaned back against it for a moment, listening. They had a car, they must have turned it on the gravel and withdrawn it into the shelter of the trees before knocking at the door. She heard it start up and wind away into the convolutions of the lane. Only then did she re-bolt and lock the door, and go back into the living-room.