It seemed odd to Rowe, returning like this. The big house was silent -- and the fountain was silent too. Somebody must have turned off the switch which regulated the flow. There were lights on in only two of the rooms. This was the place where for months he had lain happily in an extraordinary peace; this scene had been grafted by the odd operation of a bomb on to his childhood. Half his remembered life lay here. Now that he came back like an enemy, he felt a sense of shame. He said, "If you don't mind, I'd rather not see Dr Forester. . ."
The policeman with the torch said, "You needn't be afraid, sir, he's quite tidy."
Mr Prentice had not been listening. "That car," he said, "who does it belong to?"
A Ford V8 stood in the drive -- that wasn't the one he meant, but an old tattered car with cracked and stained windscreen -- one of those cars that stand with a hundred others in lonely spoilt fields along the highway -- yours for five pounds if you can get it to move away.
"That, sir -- that's the reverend's."
Mr Prentice said sharply, "Are you holding a party?"
"Oh no, sir. But as one of them was still alive, we thought it only right to let the vicar know."
"Things seem to have happened," Mr Prentice said gloomily. It had been raining and the constable tried to guide them with his torch between the puddles in the churned-up gravel and up the stone steps to the hall door.
In the lounge where the illustrated papers had lain in glossy stacks, where Davis had been accustomed to weep in a corner and the two nervous men had fumed over the chess pieces, Johns sat in an arm-chair with his head in his hands. Rowe went to him; he said, "Johns", and Johns looked up. He said, "He was such a great man. . . such a great man. . ."
"Was?"
"I killed him."
3
It had been a massacre on an Elizabethan scale. Rowe was the only untroubled man there -- until he saw Stone. The bodies lay where they had been discovered: Stone bound in his strait-waistcoat with the sponge of anaesthetic on the floor beside him and the body twisted in a hopeless attempt to use his hands. "He hadn't a chance," Rowe said. This was the passage he had crept up excited like a boy breaking a school rule; in the same passage, looking in through the open door, he grew up -- learned that adventure didn't follow the literary pattern, that there weren't always happy endings, felt the awful stirring of pity that told him something had got to be done, that you couldn't let things stay as they were, with the innocent struggling in fear for breath and dying pointlessly. He said slowly, "I'd like. . . how I'd like. . ." and felt cruelty waking beside pity, its old and tried companion.
"We must be thankful," an unfamiliar voice said, "that he felt no pain." The stupid complacent and inaccurate phrase stroked at their raw nerves.
Mr Prentice said, "Who the hell are you?" He apologized reluctantly, "I'm sorry. I suppose you are the vicar."
"Yes. My name's Sinclair."
"You've got no business here."
"I had business," Mr Sinclair corrected him. "Dr Forester was still alive when they called me. He was one of my parishioners." He added in a tone of gentle remonstrance, "You know -- we are allowed on a battlefield."
"Yes, yes, I daresay. But there are no inquests on those bodies. Is that your car at the door?"
"Yes."
"Well, if you wouldn't mind going back to the vicarage and staying there till we are through with this. . ."
"Certainly. I wouldn't want to be in the way."
Rowe watched him: the cylindrical black figure, the round collar glinting under the electric light, the hearty intellectual face. Mr Sinclair said to him slowly, "Haven't we met. . .?" confronting him with an odd bold stare.
"No," Rowe said.
"Perhaps you were one of the patients here?"
"I was."
Mr Sinclair said with nervous enthusiasm, "There. That must be it. I felt sure that somewhere. . . On one of the doctor's social evenings, I dare say. Good night."
Rowe turned away and considered again the man who had felt no pain. He remembered him stepping into the mud, desperately anxious, then fleeing like a scared child towards the vegetable garden. He had always believed in treachery. He hadn't been so mad after all.
They had had to step over Dr Forester's body; it lay at the bottom of the stairs. A sixth snare had entangled the doctor: not love of country but love of one's fellow-man, a love which had astonishingly flamed into action in the heart of respectable, hero-worshipping Johns. The doctor had been too sure of Johns: be had not realized that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police. When Johns shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the revolver which had once been confiscated from Davis and had lain locked away for months in a drawer, he was not ruining the man he respected -- he was saving him from the interminable proceedings of the law courts, from the crudities of prosecuting counsel, the unfathomable ignorances of the judge, and the indignity of depending on the shallow opinion of twelve men picked at random. If love of his fellow-man refused to allow him to be a sleeping partner in the elimination of Stone, love also dictated the form of his refusal.
Dr Forester had shown himself disturbed from the moment of Rowe's escape. He had been inexplicably reluctant to call in the police, and he seemed worried about the fate of Stone. There were consultations with Poole from which Johns was excluded, and during the afternoon there was a trunk call to London. . . Johns took a letter to the post and couldn't help noticing the watcher outside the gate. In the village he saw a police car from the country town. He began to wonder. . .
He met Poole on the way back. Poole, too, must have seen. All the fancies and resentments of the last few days came back to Johns. Sitting in a passion of remorse in the lounge, he couldn't explain how all these indications had crystallized into the belief that the doctor was planning Stone's death. He remembered theoretical conversations he had often had with the doctor on the subject of euthanasia: arguments with the doctor, who was quite unmoved by the story of the Nazi elimination of old people and incurables. The doctor had once said, "It's what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State's right to economize -- when necessary. . ." He intruded on a colloquy between Poole and Forester, which was abruptly broken off, he became more and more restless and uneasy, it was as if the house were infected by the future: fear was already present in the passages. At tea Dr Forester made some remark about "poor Stone".
"Why poor Stone?" Johns asked sharply and accusingly.
"He's in great pain," Dr Forester said. "A tumour. . . Death is the greatest mercy we can ask for him."
He went restlessly out into the garden in the dusk; in the moonlight the sundial was like a small sheeted figure of someone already dead at the entrance to the rose garden. Suddenly he heard Stone crying out. . . His account became more confused than ever. Apparently he ran straight to his room and got out the gun. It was just like Johns, that he had mislaid the key and found it at last in his pocket. He heard Stone cry out again. He ran through the lounge, into the other wing, made for the stairs -- the sickly confected smell of chloroform was in the passage, and Dr Forester stood on guard at the foot of the stairs. He said crossly and nervously, "What do you want, Johns?" and Johns, who still believed in the misguided purity of the doctor's fanaticism, saw only one solution: he shot the doctor. Poole, with his twisted shoulder and his malign conceited face, backed away from the top of the stairs -- and he shot him, too, in a rage because he guessed he was too late.