“Later, when the nurse is here. I’ve called Doctor Braby again,” he said, and looked long and sombrely at the figure in the bed, withdrawn and immune. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t rally. I think he should see her again.”
“But really I don’t need anything,” Dinah began gently. But Hugh’s brows were signalling her urgently to accept, to come away out of here where they could talk; and Hugh’s hand was persuasive at her elbow, drawing her toward the door. They needed time to consider what it really was they had discovered, to come to terms with what they knew, before anyone else need know it. Yes, she thought, he’s right. Why put it off? It won’t go away, and it can’t be kept secret. We’ve got to talk. Why not now? She yielded to the coaxing hand that urged her away. “Oh, very well—it’s kind of you, Robert, I’ll be back very soon.”
Hugh closed the bedroom door very softly and cautiously after them. The house crowded in upon them, heavy, ancient and cold, as they crept down the stairs in silence. Dinah had glanced back just once as the door closed, and seen Robert seated again beside his mother’s bed, indestructibly patient, lonely and durable; the man who made coffee, filled hot-water bottles, put fresh, aired sheets on the bed for the nurse, brought up books for her to read, thought of everything and did everything that was needed in this house. There might have been a whole generation instead of six years between him and Hugh. Then he was shut in and they were shut out, and the vast treads of the stairs creaked softly under their feet; and she realised that they were hurrying, that they were frantic to reach some enclosed place, with at least one more solid door between themselves and the pair upstairs, where they could turn and look at each other without concealment at last, and say everything they had to say.
Robert had laid a tray as meticulously as for a full-dress party, and placed it on a low round table of Benares brass in the drawing-room, and even plugged in a little electric fire on the vast empty hearth, a spark in a cold cavern. One standard lamp was switched on beside the table; the rest of the room receded into darkness. Hugh closed the door behind them, and leaned back against it with a huge sigh of wonder and dismay.
“My God, Dinah, what are we going to do?”
She didn’t answer. She had walked on into the room as soon as he released her arm, moving automatically towards the circle of light in which the table stood, though she had no more thought of coffee at that moment than he had. She even touched the arched handle of the porcelain pot, vaguely, as if she wondered what she was doing here, and could only associate her presence with these small evidences of Robert’s scrupulous attention to his guest. Her hand dropped. She looked up at Hugh, still pressed against the door with his arms spread and his head turning tormentedly from side to side.
“It can’t be true, can it? Can it? That coat—and this cold of hers—the next day she was worse, suddenly much worse… You remember how it rained when you drove me over here that night?”
Yes, she remembered. She noted, too, realising it for the first time, that when he spoke of the Abbey he never said “home”. Home was the flat over the workshop. Grooms should live above the stables.
“Then she knew everything about it—all the time she knew,” he said in a drained whisper. “Not Robert…”
Dinah gazed back at him large-eyed across the table. “No, not Robert. I should have known.”
Hugh heaved himself away from the door, and began to pace helplessly about the room, grinding his heels into the frayed carpet: a few steps away from her, a few steps back again.
“Not Robert—Mother! The poor old girl, she must have been mad! Dinah, she must have been mad, mustn’t she? Why should she want to slug a poor harmless crank for hanging round that damned door, unless she knew what was wrong with it? And if she knew that, then she knew why… She must have been the one who… There isn’t any other possibility left, is there? But why? Why? Who was this fellow they found, anyhow?”
“I don’t know that,” said Dinah. Her voice sounded to her curiously distinct and pitched a little high, as though she stood a long way off, and had to make it reach not only Hugh, but herself. “All I know is who killed him. Not why.”
“Yes… there’s no escaping that now, is there?”
“And it wasn’t Robert,” she said, with the same distant, hypnotic authority.
“No, not Robert. So what, for God’s sake, are we going to do now?”
In the moment of silence she heard the ticking of the clock, and would have liked to know how its hands stood, but it was shrouded in darkness in a corner of the room, and in any case she could not turn her eyes away because of the intensity with which Hugh’s eyes held them.
“And it wasn’t your mother,” she said.
For a moment he thought he had not heard her correctly, though she had incised the words upon the stillness between them with all the clarity of an engraving; then he knew that he had, and that she had meant what she said, and after all his restless and agonised writhings he was suddenly quite still, intent and silent while he studied her.
“But that’s crazy!” he said. “You saw her coat, still green and damp from being rolled away like that on Saturday night, all soaked with rain. And stuck with yew needles— what more could we possibly need than that? Damn it, Dinah, it was you who found it!”
“Yes, I found it. Does that prove who wore it? Somebody wore it to steal out to the churchyard, I give you that. How can we be so sure it was your mother?”
“But, hell, Dinah, you just found it hidden in her room…”
“Yes… the one place in the house, you tell me, that hasn’t been searched. The best place to hide something. I wonder,” said Dinah, “if the gun’s there, too? She wouldn’t know, would she? For two days now she’s been either asleep or more or less in a coma. Anybody could have hidden the coat there.”
A gust of incredulous laughter shook him. “Anybody, the girl says! For God’s sake, how many people were there in the house?”
“There was one extra last Saturday night,” said Dinah. “There was you!”
He took two or three hasty steps towards her, as though he wanted to use his hands, the brusque persuasion of his body, to recall her to herself and put an end to this grotesque nightmare of distrust and misunderstanding. She did not move to meet him, nor to recoil from him, but kept her place, the brass table solidly between them.
“Dinah, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t mean this!”
“I know what I’m saying. You slept in this house on Saturday night. I drove you over here, as you just reminded me. Who else belonging to this house knew there was going to be a watcher prying round the church porch all night? Had your mother been in the bar listening? Had Robert? But you had! You knew! ‘If the monks don’t get you, the devil will,’ you said. And you had a fine monk’s robe all waiting for you here by the garden door. You’d be surprised, Hugh,” she said, “how many details a girl notices when she’s paying her first visit to people who may be going to be her in-laws. I saw the worn rugs in the hall, the old coats in the lobby. The kind of old coats most houses keep, pensioned off, just for running out in the rain when you’ve forgotten to shut the garage door—or popping out to feed the chickens, if you keep chickens. I remember that old camel coat very well. It could make a fine monk out of anyone in the dark, man or woman, and it wasn’t in your mother’s wardrobe then.”
“But, by God, all you’re saying is that any of us could have put it on. Because I told them all about that fool of a ghost-hunter, when I came in, that night—they may not have been there to hear it for themselves, but they knew, all right. How could I know she’d get up in the small hours and go blundering out there to catch her death?”