The fresh sea breeze dispelled his nausea, and he walked aimlessly down the narrow, shaded lanes, trying to lose his abhorrent individuality in the vivid smells and colors of the flowers.
He put his hands into the pockets of his coat, and he felt something which, after a moment’s puzzlement, he was able to identify as the Biddenden cake Josephine had failed to break at the wedding the night before. He took it out of the pocket. There was a raised pattern on the crumbly surface and, looking closely, he saw that it was a representation of two women physically joined at the hip. Crawford had read of twins who’d been born so, though he didn’t know why the town of Biddenden should celebrate one such pair on their biscuits. He crumbled the thing up in his hands and scattered it over the path for the birds.
After a while he began to walk back toward where the rear wall of the inn rose above the greenery, but he halted when he heard voices behind a hedge ahead of him, for he didn’t want to have to talk to anyone.
“What do you mean, ‘should have restrained him'?” came a man’s voice angrily. “I’m not a member of the Watch—and anyway, nobody would have guessed that he could walk away. We carried him down the stairs to the kitchen.” “Murderers are generally good actors,” said another voice.
Crawford was suddenly dizzy with rage, and actually reeled back a step; he took a deep breath, but before he could shout he heard another voice say, “Did you hear how his first wife died?"—and he sagged and let the breath out.
CHAPTER 3
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se’nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet he shall be tempest-tost.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth
“First wife? No. How did you?”
“The father and sister of the dead woman upstairs got here a few minutes ago—they’re in the dining room. They say his first wife ran off with a Navy man who got her with child, and Crawford found out about it and burned down the house she was living in. Her Navy man tried to get into the burning house to save her, but Crawford fought him, on the street out front, long enough to make it impossible for anyone to get inside.”
Crawford’s eyes and jaws and fists were all clenched tight, and he had to crouch to keep from falling over. He could hear the blood pressure singing in his head.
“Jesus,” said the first man. “And did you see what he did to the Carmody girl upstairs? Like a mill wheel rolled over her. And then he went back to sleep! The doctor says, judging from her temperature and the way the blood’s dried, that she was killed around midnight. So old Crawford was sleeping there next to that thing for something like seven hours!”
“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not searching this damn garden without a pistol in my hand.”
“That’s a point. Yeah, let’s …”
The voices drifted away then. Crawford sat down in the grass and held his head in his hands. These people were so wrong, about so many things, that he despaired of ever getting it all straightened out … but the worst of it was that Mr. Carmody apparently believed that old story about Caroline’s death.
It had been about six years ago—Caroline had left him, but though he had known which house she was living in in London, he hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to go and confront her; it was too much like making a perilous leap from one high rooftop to another—an error would be fatal. He might simply fall, simply ruin any possibility that she would come back to him … for there would be only one chance, she wouldn’t feel that she owed him more than one conversation.
And so for ten days he had ignored his medical practice to sit all day in a pub across the street from the house she was in, trying to judge the perfect moment to see her and ask her to return.
And before he did, the place had caught fire. Crawford thought now that the Navy man might have set it intentionally when he’d learned—when he had got the impression—that she was pregnant.
When smoke had begun gouting out of the upstairs windows, Crawford had dropped his beer and sprinted out of the pub and across the street, and he’d been slamming his shoulder against the front door when the sailor had opened it from inside, to come lurching and coughing out in a cloud of acrid smoke. Crawford had bulled past him, shouting “Caroline!"—but the sailor had caught him by the collar and whirled him back outside.
“Hopeless,” the man had wheezed at him. “Only be killin’ yourself.”
But Crawford had heard a scream from inside. “That’s my wife,” he gasped, tearing away from the sailor.
He had taken only one running step back toward the house when a hard punch to the kidney brought him to his knees; but when the Navy man grabbed him under the arms to haul him out onto the street, Crawford drove an elbow, with as much force as he could muster, back into the man’s crotch.
The sailor collapsed forward, and Crawford caught his arm and spun him out into the street, where he fell and rolled moaning in the dust. Crawford turned back toward the open door, but at that moment the upper floor gave way and crashed down into the ground floor, exploding out through the doorway such a burst of sparks and heat that Crawford was lifted off his feet and tossed right over the hunched sailor.
His eyebrows and a lot of his hair were gone, and his clothing would have been aflame in moments if someone had not flung on him the contents of a pail of water that had been brought to douse the wall of one of the surrounding houses.
The fire was officially declared an accident, but rumors—and even a couple of street ballads—hinted that Crawford had set it in revenge, and then prevented the Navy man from getting inside to rescue Caroline. Crawford thought the sailor himself might have started the rumors, for a couple of the onlookers at the fire had remarked acidly on his hasty solo escape.
And this thing now was far, far worse. Of course people will take it for granted that I killed Julia, he thought. They won’t listen to me. And already errors have begun to creep into the story—such as the doctor’s statement that she died at around midnight. I know she was still alive at dawn. I remember drowsily making love to her while the curtains were just beginning to lighten; she was straddling me, sitting on top of me, and while I don’t know if I ever did wake up fully, I know I didn’t dream it.
I can either stay, and be arrested, and almost certainly hang … or I can run, leave the country. Of course, if I run, everybody will conclude that I did kill her, but I don’t think my voluntary submission to arrest and trial would make them think any differently.
All I can do, he thought, is run.
He felt better after deciding; at least now he had a clear goal, and something to think about besides Julia’s intolerably sundered body.
He stood up cautiously—and instantly there was a shout and the stunning bam of a gunshot, and a tree branch beside his head exploded in stinging splinters.
And then Crawford was running, back through the lanes of the garden, toward the back wall. Another shot boomed behind him and his left hand was whiplashed upward, spraying blood across his eyes, but he leaped, caught the wall with his right hand, and contorted his body up and outward through empty air; a moment later he hit rocky dirt hard on his side, but as soon as he had stopped sliding he made himself roll back up onto his feet and hobble down a slope to a rutted, building-shaded alley.