Run! (3 page)

“I was. Why?”

“Oh, because—” said Aspidistra Aspinall. “I just wondered. Quite a lot of people do go to school there. I didn't of course. I think Co-education might be rather fun—don't you? I had governesses, and after they buried the third they sent me to a fierce games-playing school where they broke my spirit with lacrosse and net-ball.”

“I want to know why you've got a key to this house,” said James.

She said, “Oh, Mr Elliot!” in a shocked voice. And then, “All my relations would think it most improper for me to tell a total stranger a thing like that—in the pitch dark too!”

“I think I'll be getting back to my car,” said James.

“You can't. You agreed to give it half an hour—you know you did. Scotchmen always keep their words—at least high-minded Scotchmen. Your voice sounds devastatingly high-minded.”

“I do wish you wouldn't talk such frightful nonsense!” said James, but he stayed where he was.

He heard a funny little sigh with a catch in it.

“Would you rather I burst into tears? On your shoulder? I can quite easily—if you want me to. If I stop talking nonsense for more than half a second, I probably shall whether you want me to or not.”

“I certainly don't want you to.”

“Well, there you are.
You have been warned.
I'd better go on. Before my Aunt Clementa died she said I was to have her diamond necklace. She kept on saying so, and every time the nurse went out of the room she clutched my wrist and said—”

“Who clutched your wrist?”

“You're not listening. My Aunt Clementa did.”

“It might have been the nurse.”

“Well, it wasn't—it was my Aunt Clementa.”

“Why?”

“There isn't any why about it. She just clutched me, and she said, ‘It's worth a lot of money. You'll find it when I'm gone. It's somewhere in this room. Don't let them get their hands on it.'”

“Who is
them
?”

The hay rustled vaguely.

“Oh, just Ruthless Relations—the assorted kind. So when I got the chance I thought I'd come along and do a little quiet treasure-hunting. There isn't an awful lot you can do in a fog like this, so I put on my crocodiles to give me courage, and I pinched somebody's torch and the housemaid's bicycle and happened along.”

“Yes?” said James in a nasty unbelieving tone of voice.

“Well, it didn't come off. Things don't. You plan them beautifully, and they walk out on you in the middle of the plan. There was someone else with a torch there first, all very hush-hush, so I ran away, and then the shooting began. And I've simply got to go back, because the person the torch belongs to will have my blood if I've lost it, and it may be anywhere by now, but I dropped it about a yard from the door of Aunt Clementa's room, and I'm simply bound to collect it if it's still there. And I cannot desert my crocodiles.”

III

They waited the full half hour by James's watch. It seemed longer. At least it seemed longer to him. He had no means of knowing what the girl felt about it. After letting off what he firmly believed to be the cock-and-bull story about her Aunt Clementa's diamond necklace, she had bombarded him with questions until it was less trouble to answer them than to sit there in the hay and say nothing—“How old are you?” “Have you got any people?” “Is your father alive?” “What does he do?” “What do you do?”

To this questionnaire James replied in due order, “Twenty-five.” “Yes.” “Very much so.” “Commands a regiment, and his family.” “I demonstrate cars. I hope I've just sold one.”

He heard her laugh. He thought she tried not to, but it got away.

“Why didn't you go into the Army? If your father's that sort, he wanted you to, didn't he?”

James remembered the Great War, not the paltry European
fracas
of 1914–18, but the long, stubbornly contested struggle over the question of whether he went to Sandhurst or not. If Colonel Elliot had put his foot down a little less firmly, or had occasionally stopped bellowing when the subject came up, James might conceivably have wanted to go into the Army, but every time his father roared at him he reacted vigorously in the direction of civil life. James made much less noise, but he was more really obstinate, and in the end he got his way and a mechanical training which he hankered after. His mother, the sweetest of women, maintained a surprising calm. She had a talent for tête-a-têtes, and whether she was talking to an infuriated husband or to an exasperated son, her response hardly ever varied from a simple but effective “Oh, yes, darling—I do see what you mean.”

James did not, naturally, explain all this to a total stranger in a hay loft. He said moderately, yes, his father had wanted him to go into the Army, and no, he, James, hadn't wanted to. He had had a small legacy from a great aunt, and had used it for a premium. It was very important to get into a good firm. He was with Atwells. They were very good people.

He looked at his watch and said abruptly,

“We'd better be getting along. Anyone who was going to clear off must have done it by now. If there is still anyone there, we shall probably get shot at again. A nice crew you keep in these parts, I must say! What we ought to do is to go straight to the police.”

“You said that before. I'm not going to.”

“That's because you know who the fellow is.”

She must have got up, because he heard her stamp her foot in the hay. He heard her stamp, and he heard her wince. Then he heard her catch her breath.

“I say, have you got a handkerchief?” she said.

“It's got petrol on it. What do you want it for?”

“My foot's cut. If I go dripping blood all over everything, it'll be a give-away.”

“How did you cut it?”

“How on earth do I know? That blighted bicycle, I shouldn't wonder. You don't mind if I tear the rag, do you? Because I must hitch it on to my ankle somehow.”

She hitched it, and they came down the ladder and back to the house. The bicycle lay sprawling where it had fallen. The door was shut and fastened. The fog brooded over all. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall produced a key, opened the front door, and was gone. It was exactly like a disappearing trick on the stage. One minute she was there with her shoulder practically touching his, making little clinking sounds with a key-ring, and keys, and the lock which one of the keys was supposed to fit, and the next there was neither sound nor feel of her.

He listened, and got nothing at all from the silence. He called to her under his breath, using a slightly conventionalized variant of the “Hi, you there!” type of address, and still he got nothing. He raked out his torch and switched it on. She said she had left her shoes just to one side of the stair foot. Well, she might have been telling the truth, or she mightn't, but it was a bed-rock cert that there were no shoes there now.

He slid the beam to and fro and looked most carefully. He found a little smudged space on the dusty floor behind the right-hand newel-post. The shoes might have stood there, but they certainly weren't standing there now.

He went to the top of the stair and flicked about with his torch. The main flight divided half way up, and led on either side to dark, empty-feeling corridors which ran away to the right and to the left.

James called into the empty-feeling space, “Are you there?” but nobody answered him. He began to experience symptoms of the parental temper. If this dashed girl thought he was going to search this dashed house for her, she could just start thinking again. It probably had twenty bedrooms, to say nothing of garrets, and cellars, and what house-agents call offices. He was prepared to let her collect her shoes and then give her a lift to wherever she might be staying, but he was hanged if he was going to play hide-and-seek with her in this mouldy house.

He scowled at the left-hand passage. And then, from the hall below, he heard a sound. He leaned over the gallery, and an uprush of cold air came to him. He had left the hall door shut, but it was certainly open now. The sound he had heard was the sound of shod feet treading lightly. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall was evidently no longer shoe-less. The crocodiles had been recovered. Her voice came up to him in a faint, floating “Coo-ee!” He stared down, and could see nothing. The smell of the fog came drifting up. The girl's voice came with it.

“Good-night, James Elliot.”

IV

It took James one solid hour to feel and grope his way as far as Staling. He got there in the end more by luck than good management, having first crawled down the drive into what proved to be a widish lane, and then continued along the lane at a snail's pace until it brought him out upon the road. The road ultimately brought him to Staling, and just as he came to the first house of the village, he ran out of the worst of the fog.

He knew where he was now, and the road was drivable. The local pub would certainly not have any accommodation for a Rolls. He decided to go on, and in half an hour was clear of the fog and making up for lost time on the long straight stretch over Wilder's Heath.

His mind was now free to consider the whole adventure. The Aspidistra girl was certainly a most unblushing liar. Only impudence of the first water would have produced a name like that. It was, of course, arguable that it could hardly have been intended to deceive, but this only added to his just annoyance, to be offered a completely unbelievable lie being a gross insult to one's intelligence.

He wondered a good deal about the shooting. There was something very odd about it. The shot might have been a random one intended to scare an intruder off the premises, but not meant to hit. This theory would have made everything much easier. James felt obliged to reject it. The shot had passed too close to him at a moment when his torch was affording a mark. It would have been perfectly easy for the person unknown to fire wide, and he hadn't fired wide, he had had a jolly good shot at either James or the girl. The torch had spilled a little pool of light between them. It must have been quite obvious that there were two people in the hall. James had an unpleasant conviction that the person unknown had aimed at one of them. He couldn't possibly have wanted to kill James, who was a total stranger. Then he must have been aiming at the girl.

One fact emerged quite plainly from the confusion, and that was that the girl could make a pretty good guess at who had fired the shot. She had rushed out with “He's not a homicidal maniac,” and how could she possibly say that if she didn't know who he was? No, she knew—she knew jolly well.

But she wouldn't go to the police. Why wouldn't she?

Two reasons suggested themselves. She might be mixed up in whatever it was that he had butted into, in which case she wasn't in a position to denounce a fellow-criminal. Or—she might be afraid—

James thought about this.

He gave her marks for courage. Most girls would have screamed if they had been shot at in the dark, and most girls would have cried in the hayloft. Girls could be extraordinarily brave, but they nearly always cried afterwards. This girl hadn't—at least not as far as he knew. And she had cut her foot pretty badly too. He found himself admiring the presence of mind with which she had grabbed him and said “Run!”

He only just stopped himself on the edge of reflecting that she had a very pretty voice. On the other hand, she was the most infernal little liar. And that bunk about her Aunt Clementa and a diamond necklace—whoever heard of a name like Clementa? The girl just couldn't speak the truth. She couldn't even produce a reasonable, plausible lie. If the aunt had had any of the names which aunts do have, he might—no, not he, but some more gullible man might have believed her. James was not gullible. His fourteen cousins had taught him a lot about the general untruthfulness of girls. His cousin Daphne, with whom he had once been in love, had considerably undermined his faith in women by getting engaged to three separate men during three successive dances at her coming-out ball. James was one of the three, and though he now regarded Daphne as a Lucky Escape, the incident had added considerably to his native caution. His native caution told him not to believe a single word the girl had said. It added with no uncertain voice that he had better put the whole thing out of his mind and keep it out.

He had a good quick run back to town, with only one more belt of fog, and that not very thick. He bought a paper in the Fullham Road whilst he was held up in a traffic block. He thought the names of the Scottish Rugger team might be out. He hoped they were going to play Lind. Just as he was going to look and see, the block broke and a woman in a baby Austin behind him hooted in the most annoying manner. After that there wouldn't be any chance of opening the paper until he got back to his rooms. He put away the Rolls, and was glad to have a walk to stretch his legs.

He was, for the moment, occupying his cousin Gertrude Lushington's studio in Simpson's Mews, Gertrude being on a walking tour somewhere in Eastern Europe. She might turn up at any time, preferably in the middle of the night, or she might stay away for a year, strolling in in a casual manner just when the family had decided that she had definitely got herself murdered this time and they had better see about going into mourning. She refused to take any rent, but James determined to contest this point when she returned. Meanwhile he cooked his own breakfast and supper on her gas stove, and paid the rates when the demands came in. As Gertrude was considerably in arrears, he did not feel under too much of an obligation.

There were two rooms, and a place which had been a loose-box and now contained a gas stove, a sink, and a bath. The bath was served by a geyser. James turned it on, and went up a steep stair into the studio, where he switched on an overhead light and took a look at the football news. The names weren't out yet.

The geyser took twenty minutes to produce a decent bath. He stood there skimming through the paper. Mussolini had made a speech. Monsieur Laval had made a speech. Mr. Eden had made a speech. James thanked heaven that he did not have to make speeches. He supposed some people liked doing it. There was no accounting for tastes.