A Shilling for Candles (13 page)

“Neither have I. Funny, isn’t it. I suppose, roaming from place to place
it’s easy to miss pictures.”

“I’m afraid I don’t go to the cinema often. It’s a long way to a good one
from our place. Have some more tongue.”

“She meant to do me such a good turn—Chris. Irony, isn’t it? That
her gift should be practically my death warrant.”

“I suppose you have no idea who could have done it?”

“No. I didn’t know any of her friends, you know. She just picked me up one
night.” He considered the schoolgirlish figure before him. “I suppose that
sounds dreadful to you?”

“Oh, no. Not if you liked the look of each other. I judge a lot on
looks.”

“I can’t help feeling that the police may be making a mistake—I
mean, that it was just an accident. If you’d seen the country that morning.
Utterly deserted. No one going to be awake for at least another hour. It’s
almost incredible that someone should have been out for murder at that time
and in that place. That button
might
be an accident, after all.”

“If your coat turned up with the buttons on it, would that prove you had
nothing to do with it?”

“Yes, I think so. That seemed to be all the evidence the police had.” He
smiled a little. “But you know more about it than I do.

“Where were you when you lost it—the coat, I mean?”

“We’d gone over to Dymchurch one day: Tuesday, it was. And we left the car
to walk along the seawall for about half an hour. Our coats were always left
lying in the back. I didn’t miss mine till we stopped for petrol about
halfway home, and I turned around to get the bag Chris had flung there when
she got in.” His face suddenly flamed scarlet, and Erica watched him in
surprise and then in embarrassment. It was moments later before it occurred
to her that the tacit admission that the woman was paying was more
humiliating to him than any murder accusation. “The coat wasn’t there then,”
he went on hurriedly, “so it could only have gone while we were walking.”

“Gypsies?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any. A casual passerby, more likely.”

“Is there anything to tell that the coat is yours? You’d have to prove it
to the police, you know.”

“My name is on the lining—one of those tailor’s tags, you know.”

“But if it was stolen that would be the first thing they’d take off.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose so. There’s another thing, though. There’s a small
burn on the right-hand side below the pocket, where someone held a cigarette
against it.”

“That’s better, isn’t it! That would settle it very nicely.”

“
If
the coat were found!”

“Well, no one who stole a coat is likely to bring it to the police station
just because the police want it. And the police are not looking for coats
on
people. They’re looking for discarded ones. So far no one has done
anything about getting
your
coat. On your behalf, I mean. To be
evidence for you.”

“Well, what can I do?”

“Give yourself up.”

“What!”

“Give yourself up. Then they’ll give you a lawyer and things. And it will
be his business to look for the coat.”

“I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t, What’s-Your-Name.”

“Erica.”

“Erica. The thought of having a key turned on me gives me the
jitters.”

“Claustrophobia?”

“Yes. I don’t really mind closed spaces as long as I know that I can get
out. Caves and things. But to have a key turned on me, and then to have
nothing to do but sit and think of—I just couldn’t do it.”

“No, I suppose you couldn’t, if you feel like that about it. It’s a pity.
It’s much the most sensible way. What are you going to do now?”

“Sleep out again, I suppose. There’s no rain coming.”

“Haven’t you any friends who’d look after you?”

“With a murder charge against me? No! You overrate human friendship.” He
paused a moment, and added, in a surprised voice: “No. No, perhaps you don’t,
at that. I’ve just not met the right kind before.”

“Then we had better decide on a place where I can meet you tomorrow and
bring you some more food. Here, if you like.”

“No!”

“Where then?”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean that you’re not meeting me anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d be committing a felony, or whatever it is. I don’t know
what the penalty is, but you’d be a criminal. It can’t be done.”

“Well, you can’t stop me dropping food out of the car, can you? There is
no law against that, that I know of. It will just happen that a cheese and a
loaf and some chocolates will fall out of the car into these bushes tomorrow
morning. I must go now. The landscape looks deserted, but if you leave a car
standing long enough someone always pops up to make inquiries.”

She swept the refuse of the food into the car, and got in herself.

He made a movement to get to his feet. “Don’t be foolish,” she said
sharply. “Keep down.”

He swiveled around on his knees. “All right. You can’t object to this
position. And it expresses my feelings much better.”

She shut the car door, and leaned over it.

“Nut or plain?”

“What?”

“The chocolate.”

“Oh! The kind with raisins in it, please. Some day, Erica Burgoyne, I
shall crown you with rubies and make you to walk on carpets rich
as—”

But the sentence was lost in the roar of Tinny’s departure.

“KINDNESS,” said Erica, to her father’s head groom, “have
you anything laid by?”

Kindness paused in his checking the corn account, shot her a pale glance
from a wrinkled old eye, and went on with his adding.

“Tuppence!” he said at length, in the tone one uses instead of a spit.

This referred to the account, and Erica waited. Kindness hated
accounts.

“Enough to bury me decent,” he said, having reached the top of the column
again.

“You don’t want to be buried yet a while. Could you lend me ten pounds, do
you think?”

The old man paused in licking his stub of pencil, so that the lead made a
purple stain on the exposed tip of his tongue.

“So that’s the way it is!” he said. “What have you been doing now?”

“I haven’t
been
doing anything. But there are some things I might
want to do. And petrol is a dreadful price.”

The mention of petrol was a bad break.

“Oh, the car is it?” he said jealously.

Kindness hated Tinny. “If it’s the car you want it for, why don’t you ask
Hart?”

“Oh, I
couldn’t
.” Erica was almost shocked. “Hart is quite new.”
Hart being a newcomer with only eleven years’ service.

Kindness looked mollified.

“It isn’t anything shady,” she assured him. “I would have got it from
Father at dinner tonight; the money, I mean; but he has gone to Uncle
William’s for the night. And women are so inquisitive,” she added after a
pause.

This, which could only refer to Nannie, made up the ground she had lost
over the petrol. Kindness hated Nannie.

“Ten pounds is a big bit out of my coffin,” he said with a sideways jerk
of the head.

“You won’t need it before Saturday. I have eight pounds in the bank, but I
don’t want to waste time tomorrow morning going into Westover for it. Time is
awfully precious just now. If anything happens to me, you’re sure of eight
pounds anyhow. And Father is good for the other two.”

“And what made you come to Kindness?”

There was complacence in the tone, and anyone but Erica would have said:
because you are my oldest friend, because you have always helped me out of
difficulties since I was three years old and first put my legs astride a
pony, because you can keep my counsel and yours, because in spite of your
cantankerousness you are an old darling.

But Erica said, “I just thought how much handier tea caddies were than
banks.”

“
That’s that!
.

“Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. Your wife told me about that, one
day I was having tea with her. It wasn’t her fault, really. I saw the notes
peering through the tea. A bit germy, I thought. For the tea, I mean. But an
awfully good idea.” As Kindness was still speechless. “Boiling water kills
most things, anyhow. Besides,” she said, bringing up as support what she
should have used for attack, “who else could I go to?”

She reached over and took the stub of pencil from him, turned over a
handbill of the local gymkhana which was lying on the saddle-room table, and
wrote in schoolgirl characters on the back:

I owe Bartholomew Kindness ten pounds. Erica Meir Burgoyne.

“That will do until Saturday,” she said. “My checkbook is finished,
anyhow.”

“I don’t like you frittering away my brass handles all over Kent,”
Kindness grumbled.

“I think brass handles are very showy,” Erica said. “You’d do much better
to have wrought iron.”

As they went through the gardens together towards his cottage and the tea
caddy, Erica said:

“About how many pawnbrokers are there in Kent?”

“‘Bout two thousand.”

“Oh, dear!” said Erica. And let the conversation lapse.

But the two thousand pawnbrokers slept with her that night, and leaped
awake before her waking eyes.

Two thousand! My hat!

But of course Kindness was just guessing. He probably had never pawned
anything in his life. How could he know in the very least how many
pawnbrokers there were in a county? Still, there was bound to be quite a
number. Even in a well-to-do county like Kent. She had never noticed even
one. But she supposed you wouldn’t notice one unless you happened to be
looking for it. Like mushrooms.

It was half-past six of a hot, still morning as she backed Tinny out of
the garage, and no one was awake in the bland white house that smiled at her
as she went. Tinny made a noise at any time, but the noise she made in the
before-breakfast silence of a summer morning was obscene. And for the first
time Erica was guilty of disloyalty in her feeling for Tinny. Exasperated she
had been often; yes, furious; but it had always been the fury of possession,
the anger one feels for someone so loved as to be part of oneself. Never in
her indignation, never in the moments of her friends’ laughter, had she ever
been tempted to disown Tinny. Still less to give her up.

But now she thought quite calmly, I shall really have to get a new
car.

Erica was growing up.

Tinny expostulated her way through the quiet shining lanes, chuffing,
snorting, and shaking, while Erica sat upright in the old-fashioned seat and
ceased to think about her. Beside her was a box containing half a spring
chicken, bread and butter, tomatoes, shortbread, and a bottle of milk.
This—“Miss Erica’s lunch”—was the Steynes housekeeper’s unwitting
contribution to the confounding of the Law. Beyond it, in a brown paper
parcel, was Erica’s own subscription—a less delicate but more filling
one than the housekeeper’s—purchased at Mr.-Deeds-in-the-village.
(“Eastindiaman and provision Merchant. All the Best in Season.”) Mr. Deeds
had provided pink and shining slices of jellied veal (“Do you really want it
as thick as that, Miss Erica?”) but he had not been able to supply a brand of
chocolates with raisins in it. No demand for that, there wasn’t.

It had not even crossed Erica’s mind that she was tired, that there
remained less than an hour before closing time, and that a starving man might
just as well have good solid lumps of plain chocolate as be indulged in his
light preference for raisins. No; Erica—although she could not have
told you about it—knew all about the importance of little things.
Especially the importance of little things when one was unhappy. In the hot
and dusty evening she had toured the neighboring villages with a
determination that grew with her lack of success. So that now, in the torn
and gaping pocket of Tinny’s near door, lay four half-pound slabs of
chocolate with raisins in it, the whole stock of Mrs.-Higgs-at-Leytham, who
at a quarter past seven had been persuaded to leave her high tea (“only for
you I’d do it, Miss Burgoyne, not for another soul”) and turn the enormous
key in her small blistered door.

It was after seven before she had clamored her way through sleeping
Mallingford and entered the hot, shadeless country beyond. As she turned into
the long straight of the chalky lane where her quick country-trained eyes had
noticed that boot yesterday, she wished that Tisdall might have better cover
than those gorse bushes. Not cover from the Law, but cover from the sky there
was going to be at midday. A blazing day, it was going to be. Tisdall would
need all of that bottle of milk and those tomatoes. She debated whether or
not it would be a good move to transport the fugitive to other climes. Over
to Charing, for instance. There were woods enough there to house an army in
safety from sun and law. But Erica had never much liked woods, and had never
felt particularly safe in one. It was better to be hot in gorse bushes and be
able to see a long way away, than have strangers stumbling over you in the
cool of thick trees. Besides, the Tisdall man might refuse the offer of a
lift.

There is no doubt as to what the Tisdall man’s answer would have been, but
the proposition was never put to him. Either he was so dead asleep that not
even the uproar of Tinny’s advent could rouse him, or he was no longer in
that piece of country. Erica went to the end of the mile-long straight, Tinny
full out and making a noise like an express train, and came back to the spot
where she had stopped yesterday. As she shut off the engine, the silence fell
about her, absolute. Not even a lark sang, not a shadow stirred.

She waited there, quietly, not looking about her, her arms propped on the
wheel in the attitude of one considering her future movements. There must be
no expectancy in her appearance to arouse suspicion in the mind of stray
countrymen. For twenty minutes she sat, relaxed and incurious. Then she
stretched herself, made sure during the stretch that the lane was still
unoccupied, and got out. If Tisdall had wanted to speak to her, he would have
reached her before now. She took the two parcels and the chocolate and cached
them where Tisdall had been lying yesterday. To these she added a packet of
cigarettes produced from her own sagging pocket. Erica did not smoke
herself—she had tried it, of course, had not much liked it, and with
the logic that was her ruling characteristic had not persisted—and she
did not know that Tisdall smoked. These, and the matches, were just “in
case.” Erica never did a job that was not thorough.