Down Under (13 page)

He had been so sure of her. He would have pledged himself to the uttermost for her loyalty and her love, and she had not had so much of either as to come to him and say, “I've made a mistake. Let me go.” He had loved an imagination of his own heart. There was no Rose Anne.

Half way down the hill he walked into blinding rain—very cold rain, driven before a stinging wind. He was wet through by the time he reached Malling. He had only a small suit-case with him, but there was a larger one in the car, and the car was in the garage of the Rose and Crown. He had no notion what he was going to do next, but it seemed a good idea to put on dry clothes.

When he looked back on this time, he thought his mind had quite stopped feeling anything at all. His body was cold and wet. It had a most extraordinary sensation of fatigue. It wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep for a very long time.

He came into the Rose and Crown, and asked for a room, and a fire, and his suit-case, and a hot drink. After that he was not very clear about anything, but he must have peeled off his wet things and got into bed, because when he awoke, there he was, the clothes hanging on a chair and an empty tumbler on the small table at his side. He did not know how long he had been asleep, but he thought it must have been a long time, because the light had changed a good deal. He sat up, and found that he was in his dressing-gown. His watch told him that it was three o'clock. After all, he had only slept five hours. It must have been about ten o'clock when he reached Malling.

He got out of bed, and found the fire burning brightly. Someone must have been in to make it up. All the King's horses and all the King's men might have clattered through the room without rousing him, so deeply had he been drowned in sleep. He stood by the fire now and remembered what lay on the other side of that sleep. Everything seemed a long way off and a long time ago. It was in another life that he had been going to marry Rose Anne. Her letter was an old story.

The letter—where was it? He had put it in his pocket. He ought to have burnt it at once. He frowned at his own carelessness, because his wet clothes might very easily have been taken down to be dried. Odd that he couldn't remember undressing. He wondered if the drink they had given him had been double strength, and he wondered whether he had hung his clothes to the fire himself, or whether someone had picked them up from where he had dropped them in a sodden heap. He reached for the coat, felt in the nearest pocket, and found the letter safe. The pocket was still clammy, the letter in its envelope quite damp. He took it out, because before he burned it he must read it again. It was the only one of Rose Anne's letters he would ever read again. They must all be burned, but he would not read them first—only this one he must read before it went into the fire. He still felt nothing. He could say her name and handle her letter without any feeling at all. It was rather like having a limb that had gone to sleep. Better get through with the business before it woke up and began to hurt like the devil.

The sheet stuck when he would have unfolded it, and he leaned down to hold it in the warmth over the flame. Paper dries very quickly. The letter gave off a little cloud of moisture and crackled stiffly as he opened it.

His first thought was that the paper had smudged with the wet. There were brown marks between the lines of writing. And then he saw that the brown marks were writing too. His heart beat hard against his side as he held the paper close to the fire again and watched the brown deepen as the heat caught it. The black writing said, “You must please try and forgive me.” The brown writing stumbled beneath it, and said,

“My darling, I love you—I do love you. Don't believe this letter. There will never be anyone but you.”

Between all the lines the brown writing went, trembling and uneven—Rose Anne's writing, shaken with the haste and fear which were shaking her as she wrote. It went as far as the blot and broke off there. He held the page to the fire again. There must be more. There must be something to tell him where she was and how he could reach her. The paper scorched his hand. He drew it back and scanned it eagerly, but there was no more brown writing after the blot, only the black writing with its lie that Rose Anne loved someone else. He went on trying, as if an intensity of effort could compel unwritten words from the paper, but it was no use, the words were not there. All the numb places in him had come awake and were crying out in anguish for those unwritten words—for any one of them which would give the slightest clue as to how he could reach and help Rose Anne.

There was a time when the sense of her helplessness and his impotence broke him down. What had they done to her to make her write that lying letter? He had a picture of her, gentle and lovely, moving amongst the flowers in her father's garden, and the sun on her hair. It broke him down.

CHAPTER XV

Someone came knocking at the door. He went to it, shot the bolt, and spoke through the panel.

“What is it?”

A girl's hesitating voice murmured something about the fire and faded out.

Oliver switched on the light, went over to the window, and drew the curtains. He occupied himself in putting his things together. He took particular pains over folding the clothes which had been wet, and whilst he moved about these tasks he was getting a grip on himself again. When he had shut the suit-case down he was ready to think. He was to decide what he would do next, and it seemed to him that it must be one of three things.

He must take Rose Anne's letter to the police,

or

He must take it on to Mr Smith,

or

He must follow the broken threads which he already held in the hope that one of them would bring him to Rose Anne.

He sat down on the side of the bed and weighed these courses one against the other.

If he took the letter to the police, the search for Rose Anne would be transferred to the other side of the Channel. It occurred to him with a good deal of force that the letter might very well have been written—no, dictated—with this very object. He did not believe Rose Anne was in Paris. He did not believe she had been taken out of England. He did not believe a word of the lying letter. He tried to imagine what the police would make of it, and he thought that it would be quite possible for them to read it as the effusion of a girl who, having eloped, was now in two minds about it and inclined to regret what she had done. He thought they would be very likely to read it that way.

He decided that he could not spare the time to go and see Mr Smith. He could not incur the danger of being too late. With those piteous, straggling words calling him, he must attempt whatever could be attempted—now, without any delay at all.

It was the third course. Well, where was it going to take him? His first impulse was to return to Hillick St Agnes and force a search of the Angel. These old inns had cellars. Why had they not been searched already? The Garstnets must co-operate, or plead guilty. This impulse spent itself. This crime was not the work of some boggling amateur. Mr Smith's words recurred again: “You will place an unscrupulous and powerful organization on its guard.” He was admitting now that he believed in such an organization. Rose Anne was not the first to disappear, and of the others not one had ever come back. It was not a mere matter of Matthew Garstnet and his wife, and the cellars at the Angel. There were dark depths—His thoughts broke off in horror.

What then?

There came into his mind Oakham—small, remote Oakham, with its one big house lying deserted behind stone walls, and Matthew Garstnet's sister-in-law keeping a solitary guard there—Matthew Garstnet's sister-in-law who might be Amos Rennard's sister-in-law too. Sparks went to and fro in his mind. Florrie had been sent there to be out of the way. What if Rose Anne had been sent there too? It was only ten miles by road.

The sparks flashed. A plan began to form. Hillick St Agnes must be assured that the letter had done its work. If anyone was watching for his reactions, they had better be given something to keep them quiet.

He went down to the telephone-box and rang up James Carew. He actually got Elfreda and as she would do equally well, he informed her that he was returning to London, and that his club would find him there till further notice. The Angel got the same message, and here it was Mrs Garstnet who answered. She went away in the middle and fetched pencil and paper to write down the address, although she had had it when he was away before. He thought he heard a muffled whispering—somewhere. Was she asking Matthew what she should say? He wondered. And then there she was, rather curiously out of breath.

“Oh, yes, Captain Loddon—I'm quite ready now.”

He dictated the address, and when she had written it down she said,

“Then you won't be coming back again?”

“I don't think so. There isn't anything to come back for—now.”

He heard her catch her breath. There was a sound as if the receiver had knocked against something.

“I'm sure I can't say, sir, how very sorry we are.” Her voice broke. “Miss Elfreda—tells me—there was—a letter.”

Oliver said, “Yes.” He paused, then added, “She's in France. She's going to marry someone else. Good-bye, Mrs Garstnet.”

He came out of the box with a sense of satisfaction. He thought he had done that well. By closing-time tonight every man, woman, child, cat, dog, and mouse in Hillick St Agnes would know that Miss Rose Anne had run away to France to be married, and that Captain Oliver Loddon was taking himself and his disappointment to London and wouldn't be coming this way again.

He wondered in his own mind whether he had really said good-bye to it all, and then winced away from the thought, because if he found Rose Anne—if he found Rose Anne—they would come this way not once but many times. An old song began to ring in his head:

“Bring back, bring back,

Bring back my bonnie to me, to me.

Bring back, bring back,

Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.”

As he paid his bill and had his cases brought down, the tune was still there, and when he drove away it fitted itself to the purr of the engine. What was he going to do next? Drive to Oakham. Well then, what was he going to do with his car when he got there? There are times when a car can be a nuisance. To leave it in Malling was to inform all and sundry that he was expecting to return. To put it up in Oakham was to advertise his arrival there. He would very much have preferred to come hiking over the hill. In the end he decided to drive to Oakham and leave the car somewhere off the road whilst he had a look at The Place. It would be late enough by the time he got there, and dark within another half hour.

He drove on through the grey weather, and wondered if it would turn to fog. It was cold enough and still enough. No rain now, but trees and hedgerows black and dripping, and the light failing momentarily. In his mind the pretty, plaintive old tune took words again:

“Last night as I lay on my pillow,

Last night as I lay on my bed,

Last night as I lay on my pillow,

I dreamed that my bonnie was dead.

Bring back, bring back,

Bring back my bonnie to me, to me.

Bring back, bring back,

Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.”

CHAPTER XVI

He ran the car up under one of the oak trees which stretched out their branches over the wall. They were still in leaf and made a perfect screen. He was twenty yards off the road, and it would be dark in less than no time.

He made easy work of getting over the wall, with the car to give him a leg up and a convenient bough to take hold of, but once he was over he was not so sure what he was going to do next. Something very unpleasant about skulking round someone else's house in the dark. It really was quite dark in here under the trees. He began to move along on the inside of the wall in the direction of the gates. He had a torch in his pocket, but it must be kept for emergencies. Meanwhile he thought his best plan would be to follow the drive.

It was very neglected. Bushes crowded in upon it, and trees hung low overhead. What had once been gravel was now moss, and very slippery. It seemed to be a long drive. And then all at once he was out of it, with some light still coming from the sky. There was enough anyhow to mark the difference between sky and house. The Place stood right in his way, a great square block, all black, with no light showing anywhere. He supposed that Mrs Edwards kept to the kitchen premises, and he had a not unattractive picture of a glowing fire and a teapot on the hob. This homely image increased his discomfort. He was probably the world's champion fool, wandering round spying on a caretaker and a child. Anyhow, fool or not, he was going to have a stab at it.

He crossed the front of the house, grateful for the moss, which deadened the sound of his feet, and came to steps which led up on to a terrace. The terrace ran round two sides. There was not a gleam of light anywhere. The ground must have risen, for it took only a couple of steps to bring him down from the terrace at its far end. He came to a wall with an arch in it, and a wooden door which swung in when he pushed it. There were flagstones under foot, and the feeling of being in an enclosed place. He made out that he was in some kind of court or yard. All right, in about half a minute he would probably run into a water-butt, tread on a rake, or take a header over a chopping-block. Back yards were always littered with booby traps, especially old back yards like this. The place fairly reeked of neglect and decay. The flagstones were slimy, and there was a smell of fungus and rotting wood.

Well, what on earth was he going to do now? His idea that Rose Anne might be here seemed fantastic in the extreme, but even the most fantastic imagination boggled at the suggestion that this back yard held any clue to her whereabouts. No, if there was any such clue, it would be within the house itself. He picked his way back to the arch and regained the terrace. If he was going to do any breaking and entering, he had better get as far away from the kitchen as possible.