I picked up the lamp again. Alice had come right next to me now and together we stared into the gloom. Clare was crying. I could hear her, somewhere in the darkness ahead of me. I handed Alice the lamp.
‘Here! Hold it — up high — and follow me.’
I took the automatic from her and walked forward. We saw the African then as we both moved to the end of the room. With his back to the wall he was holding Clare, like a shield, high up, right in front of his chest, so that she covered almost all his torso. I couldn’t use the gun. I noticed how near he was to the end of the great oak linen press, the half-ton wooden coffin filled with stone, which faced his thighs and midriff, while he held Clare at a level above it. He obviously had no idea what the machine was for, or how its great weight could be made to slide towards him. Yet I couldn’t use it against him in this manner unless I was sure that, while I did so, he would keep Clare out of the way.
He answered the problem for me. Since Alice and I were now to one side of him and thus only the press blocked his escape towards the door, he let Clare go and stepped up onto it, before starting to walk over the top of the machine.
I had my chance then. I rushed for the handle as he towered above us. Grasping it with both hands I turned it viciously, so that the great box began to move, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing momentum.
The African, feeling the machine slide beneath him, lost balance, stumbled, righted himself — and then as the rollers began to spin faster, he found himself walking a treadmill, a journey he couldn’t sustain, being pushed back inexorably on the great box towards the wall. He panicked then, jumping off the moving press as it sped towards the wall, springing off the end of it, as from a diving board.
But the great weighted box was running like a battering-ram now, the handle at the side spinning round unaided. The African, landing on the flagstones, was immediately caught in the gap between the end of the press and the wall. And when the vice closed on him, it went on closing, without resistance, ramming into his back, first gathering all his bones together in a fierce grip, before squeezing them brutally like a car in a metal-compacter, driving the breath out of him. In the end he had no wind left to scream and all we heard were his ribs cracking, the vertebrae in his neck breaking, so that his head, now the only part of his body above the level of the butt end of the press, nodded first and then keeled over suddenly, unanchored now, like a dark fruit released from its branch.
I stood there horrified for several seconds. The man seemed to have been dispatched by some elemental force, a fly crushed on a windowpane. Yet I, in fact, had dispatched him — and I was horrified at the result: this death’s-head now caught in the flaring oil light, lying on its side at the end of the press, as after some violent beheading.
Nor was this the only madness of the evening. There was Arthur lying behind me. Arthur: husband or father? And it suddenly seemed to me more than likely, given his age and that touch of the old mid-West in his voice, that this man was her father, the rough tycoon and Chicago meat-baron, Arthur Troy, creator of the family fortunes. And I saw then how Alice had gained no sanity with me at all in the past months. She had come to tell the truth perhaps, here and there. But she had lied all the time about the real things. She had never been married to any New York attorney, never had a son by a previous marriage. There had never been the ‘real thing’ for Alice, and all this reality she had told me about was sheer invention, fictional replacements for life, dreams of living.
Long ago, something must have led her to think of this man, whom latterly she had come to despise, as her husband. Long ago, for some agonising reason, she had turned her father into a husband: and so, before this present hatred, she must have loved him once. Loved him to distraction? Perhaps. It was certainly madness. Anyway, father or father-figure — it hardly mattered any more. She had destroyed them both.
Clare was quite unhurt when I picked her up, while the trumpets from the great hall, with the attendant hum of excited talk and laughter, had obviously prevented anyone in the house from hearing our battles down in the old laundry. The yard was still empty when we looked outside.
Alice had regained most of her icy control, at least, if not her sanity. She took her little automatic back, then locked the door on the two corpses with nerveless competence, hiding the key.
‘That’s that,’ she said easily, as though completing some tiresome shopping expedition. ‘They won’t find them in there for quite a while.’
I was angry suddenly at what I felt to be her sheer callousness in the matter.
‘My God, Alice, you just told me he was your father. You can’t leave him in there like that. Is he your father?’
‘We’ve not the time,’ she called back tartly over her shoulder. ‘And yes, he is.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She didn’t reply. I was carrying Clare in my arms, as we threaded our way between the parked cars towards the kitchen entrance to the house.
‘No time?’ I whispered back angrily. ‘No time? For your father?’
‘Later. Afterwards!’ She dismissed her father as curtly in death as she had in life. ‘We need Mrs Pringle now,’ she went on.
Suddenly, longing to be away from all this mayhem, I said, ‘She must have told the police already. Why don’t Clare and I just try and make a run for it now — in your car?’
Alice stopped in her tracks. ‘No. I’ll come, too.’
‘Why? You’ve done nothing. Let us go alone. We can get to Tewkesbury and wait there.’
Alice was looking at me closely. I could see her face quite clearly in the light from the big windows above us. And now, just beneath the veneer of calm and control in her expression, I saw a great fear, fear for what we had just done, perhaps, of what we had both witnessed. I’m not sure. But I knew I couldn’t leave her then. She needed my help now as badly as I had needed hers, months back, when she had first surprised me naked in the valley. I couldn’t leave her then, someone I loved — and so I was perfectly willing to give ourselves up to the police. I was ashamed at my idea of leaving her.
I said, ‘We’ll stay. Of course we’ll stay. And wait for the police. Mrs Pringle is bound to have called them.’ It seemed an end at last.
But Alice, her faith renewed by my change of heart, now had other ideas. ‘She may not have told them,’ she said brightly, suddenly decisive again. ‘Let’s find out.’
We surprised Mrs Pringle a few moments later in the old kitchen as we came through. She was sitting at the long pine table, her back towards us, a huge tin of fancy biscuits open in front of her, nibbling at them furiously, nervously, like a great mouse. Her husband, Arthur’s chauffeur, a small ferret-like creature whom I’d not met before, was with her. They had a bottle of Ruby Port between them — unopened, though. Obviously, knowing my real identity now as a wife-killer, and that I was roaming about somewhere in the house at that very moment, the party mood had not blossomed in either of them. Recognising me, even in my guise as a fierce Albanian, Mr Pringle stood up in some alarm. His wife turned then, a chocolate biscuit stalled halfway into her great jaws.