The Case Is Closed (11 page)

Marion Grey went back to work after five days of Hilary’s nursing. It was about this time that Jacques Dupré wrote to his sister in Provence:

I saw Marion in the street today. It breaks one’s heart — she looks like a shadow carved in stone…

But then Jacques was a poet, and he had loved her vainly for years — one of those endless, hopeless loves.

Hilary urged a longer rest, but was silent when Marion said,

‘Don’t stop me, Hilary. If I stop I shall die. And if I die, Geoff won’t have anyone.’

It was this speech more than anything else which took Hilary down to Ledlington again just a week after her last fruitless visit. She wasn’t going to be caught in the dark this time, se she took the 9.30, and found her way out of the station yard and into Market Street with a good fat slice of the morning still before her, to say nothing of the afternoon — only she hoped she would have found Mrs. Mercer long before it came to that. She had duly pawned Aunt Arabella’s ring, and was comfortably conscious of being a capitalist with four pounds ten and sixpence in her purse. She had brought it all with her, because you never know, and bicycle shops have a way of asking for a deposit before they will hire a machine to a stranger. Even a deposit does not always incline them to what they regard as a chancy transaction.

Hilary tried three bicycle shops before she encountered a very pleasant and impressionable young man who not only produced a bicycle but gave her floods of information about all the cottages between Ledlington and Ledstow. He had a most surprising crop of fair hair which stood up a sheer four inches from his freckled forehead, and he was one of the most friendly creatures Hilary had ever met. He hadn’t heard of any strangers taking any cottages —‘But then you never know, miss — I’ll just pump that back tyre up a bit. It might be Mr. Greenhow’s cottage, best part of a mile and a half along the Ledstow road and turn to the left down the the lane — there isn’t more than one thereabouts. I did hear he’d gone to stay with his married daughter in London, but Fred Barker told me he’d come back again. Or it might be the new house Mr. Carter was building for his daughter, only she never got married at all and it was up to be let. I don’t know that you’d hardly call it a cottage, but you might try there. And there’s the Miss Soameses. They always let in the summer, but you wouldn’t hardly call it summer now, and they’re a good half-mile off the main road.’

‘I shouldn’t think that would be it.’

The young man stopped pumping and stood up.

‘There’s Humpy Dick’s place,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Nasty old tumble-down shack though. I shouldn’t think anyone ’ud take it, though you never can tell — can you?’

It didn’t sound attractive, but Hilary wasn’t looking for attractions. A broken-down woman might very well be hidden away in a broken-down shack.

She said, ‘How do I get to it?’ and was rewarded with another flood of information.

‘Third bridge you come to there’s a lane going off to the right — well, ’tisn’t hardly a lane, but you might call it one. Well, you don’t take any notice of that, you go straight on, and then there’s a bit of a wood, and then there’s a pond, but you don’t go as far as the pond. There’s a footpath all along by the side of the wood, and you keep right on till you come to Humpy Dick’s. Only I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone there, because it’s stood empty ever since Humpy fell over the quarry in the dark last January and his brother fetched him away. I did hear a London gentleman had bought it — some kind of an artist — but he wouldn’t hardly move in this time of year, I shouldn’t think. Anyhow, it was empty a fortnight ago, because I was up that way myself and seen it.’ He went on telling her about cottages, until she received a comforting impression that the Ledstow road had fallen a prey to ribbon building, and that cottages fairly jostled one another over the whole seven miles.

She thanked the young man, left a deposit of two pounds, and tore herself away. She would much rather have continued to listen to his friendly discourse than go the round of the house-agents and then start looking for Mrs. Mercer.

The house-agents were a complete wash-out. They were neither chatty nor helpful. The name, of Mercer evoked no response. They knew nothing of any cottage being taken. The Miss Soames never left in winter. Mr. Greenhow’s cottage had not been in their hands. Mr. Carter was going to live in his new house himself. The late Mr. Humphrey Richard’s cottage had been sold about a month ago. They were not at liberty to give any information about the purchaser. Thus three agents with admirable discretion. But at the fourth a very young clerk told Hilary that the place had been bought for a song by a Mr. Williams, a gentleman from London, who wanted it for a weekend cottage in summer.

By this time Hilary was hungry, and today she wasn’t lunching on a bun and a glass of milk. You didn’t pawn Aunt Arabella’s ruby ring every day of the week, and when you did you didn’t lunch on buns —you splashed, and had a two-course lunch, and cream in your coffee.

It was about half past one when she rode out of Ledlington past rows of little new houses, some finished and lived in, some only half-grown, and some just marked out, mere sketches on the ground. Hilary rode past them on the hired bicycle, bumping a little where the road had been cut up, and thinking that the shock-headed young man had been too zealous with his pumping. However, hired bicycles had a tendency to leak, so perhaps it was all for the best.

Once clear of the houses, she had an expanse of perfectly flat green fields on either side under the lowering grey arch of the sky. The morning had been fine, and the weather forecast one of those which thoughtfully provides for every contingency. Hilary, having picked out the pleasant words ‘bright intervals’, hadn’t really bothered about the rest of it, but as she looked at that low grey sky, lost fragments emerged uneasily from the corners of her mind. There was something about ‘colder’, and it was certainly turning colder. That didn’t matter, but there was also a piece about ‘rapid deterioration later’, and she had a gloomy feeling that the word fog came into it somewhere. She ought to have read it more carefully, but the honest truth was that she hadn’t wanted to. She had wanted to get on with this business and get it over, and really, in November, if you allowed yourself to be put off by what the weather forecast said, you might just as well throw in your hand and hibernate. All the same she did hope there wasn’t going to be a fog.

The fog came on at about four o’clock. Hilary had been to fifteen cottages and six small houses. They all said that they didn’t let, though some of them varied the answer by admitting that they wouldn’t mind taking in a quiet lady or gentleman in the summer. One of them went so far as to say that she was used to actresses and didn’t mind their ways. They all seemed to regard Hilary as desirous of forcing herself upon them at an unsuitable time of year when people expected to be left to themselves after the labours of the holiday season. She must have overshot the footpath to Humpy Dick’s cottage, because though there were several patches of woodland she never identified the young man’s pond. This was not very surprising, as he had quite forgotten to tell her that it had dried out in the drought of 1933 and had never had any water in it since. She arrived at Ledstow feeling that she never wanted to hear of a cottage again.

At Ledstow she had tea. She had it in a sort of parlour in the village pub. It was very cold, and stuffy with the stuffiness of a room whose windows have not been opened for months. Everything that could be cleaned was very clean, and everything that could be polished was very highly polished. The red and green linoleum shone like a mirror, and a smell of soap, varnish, turpentine, bacon, onions, and old stuffed furniture thickened the air. There was a sofa and three padded chairs upholstered in an archaic tapestry whose original colour or colours had merged into an even drab. There were paper shavings in the fire-place and, on the mantelshelf above, a bright blue vase with a bunch of pansies painted on it, a copper lustre sugar-bowl with a wreath of lumpy pink and blue fruits below the rim, a horrid little ornament displaying the arms of Colchester (why Colchester?), a brass bedroom candlestick, shining like gold, and a pet of a zebra, all stripy, feeding out of a little girl’s hand. The little girl had a sprigged dress with a yellow petticoat, and the zebra carried a pair of panniers, one heaped up with fruit and the other with flowers. Hilary loved him passionately at sight, and by dint of dwelling fondly upon his stripes contrived to forget that the tea was bitter and the butter rancid, and that she was no nearer finding the Mercers than when she had set out.

It was perhaps as well that the room afforded neither warmth nor comfort, because even its cold stuffiness was hard to leave. If there had been a fire and a comfortable chair, Hilary might have found it almost impossible to wrench herself away and go out into the dark. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but it was going to be, long before the lights of Ledlington came into view. And there was certainly going to be a fog. No, there was a fog already, and it looked like getting worse. Well, it was no good staying here, she had better be going. She would just have to give up any idea of finding the Mercers today. She opened the parlour door, and saw Alfred Mercer coming down the passage.

Hilary’s mind went perfectly cold and stiff, but her hand shut the door. She stood on the other side of it and waited without thought or movement. She did not know how long she waited.

She began to think again. Was he coming in here? No, he wasn’t. The footsteps went past. She lost them. What was Alfred Mercer doing here? She didn’t know. She wanted to know, but there wasn’t any way of finding out. Had he followed her? She must find out. She went to the fire-place and rang the bell.

It seemed a long time before anyone answered it. Then the girl who had brought the tea came in and said there was eighteenpence to pay. Hilary took out two shillings and a sixpence, put one shilling and a sixpenny bit into the girl’s hand, and held the other shilling between finger and thumb.

‘I wonder if you could tell me the name of the man who came in just now?’

The girl was plump and good-tempered — a heavily built young thing with a high colour. She looked at the shilling and said,

‘Oh, no, miss, I couldn’t.’

‘You don’t know his name?’

‘Oh, no, miss, I don’t.’

‘You’ve seen him before — he’s been here before?’

‘Oh, no, miss, he hasn’t.’

‘You mean he’s a stranger?’

‘Oh, no, miss.’

Hilary could have stamped with rage. Did the girl know anything, or didn’t she? She seemed impenetrably stupid, but you never could tell. And she couldn’t afford to stay here and perhaps be caught asking awkward questions. Whether the girl knew Alfred Mercer or not, it was very certain that Alfred Mercer would know Hilary Carew, and that blighted girl had left the door open when she came in. Hilary Carew had got to make herself scarce, and she’d got to look slippy about it.

She looked slippy, but she didn’t look slippy enough, for just as she got to the end of the passage and had her hand on the outer door, Alfred Mercer came walking briskly back by the way he had gone. Hilary looked sideways and saw him, and with the same movement she pulled the door towards her and slipped out.

There was a recessed porch and some steps. Her bicycle was leaning against the steps, but someone had knocked it down and she had to pick it up. She was very, very quick about it. One moment she was groping for the bicycle, and the next she was wobbling out on to the road and leaning forward to reach the electric lamp and switch it on. Nothing seemed to happen when she did this. It wasn’t as dark as it was going to be later on, but it was quite dark enough, and there was quite a lot of fog. It was her own fault for stopping to have tea, but there comes a point when you care more about having your tea than about doing what you ought to do, and Hilary had reached that point. She now used some bitter expressions about the shock-headed young man who had sent her out on a foggy afternoon with a lamp which had probably died last winter.

When she had gone a few hundred yards and had nearly run into a ditch because the road turned off sharp to the right and the bicycle kept straight on, she got off and had a look at the lamp. Not a glimmer. She shook it, poked it, opened it, and closed it again with an exasperated bang. A beautiful bright beam of light instantly disclosed the fact that she had somehow got into a field. She got back on to the road, mounted, and began to ride as fast as the fog would let her in the direction of Ledlington, hoping passionately that Alfred Mercer hadn’t got a bicycle, too. She felt tolerably sure that he wouldn’t have a car, but he might have a bicycle. And then the voice of common sense, speaking in a very faint and unconvincing manner, enquired why on earth Alfred Mercer should want to follow her. He had already told her about two hundred times that his wife was out of her mind Common sense was of the opinion that this should suffice him. Something that wasn’t common sense kept urging in a low and horrid whisper, ‘Ride, Hilary — ride for your life! He’s coming after you — he’s coming now!’

As a matter of fact Mr. Mercer was drinking beer in the bar. He had recognised Hilary when she turned her head, and he had seen her through the half open door, but he had followed her no farther than the bottom step. The bicycle which he had stumbled into and knocked over was gone. That meant that Miss Carew had taken it. He wasn’t running down any dashed road after any dashed bicycle; not much he wasn’t. He went into the bar, ordered a pint of beer, laced it — deplorably — with gin, and awaited the arrival of his principal, who was late on account of the fog. His principal would arrive by car. If Miss Carew was to be followed, they could follow her comfortably in the car. He expended some profanity on the weather, and addressed a good deal more to Miss Hilary Carew.

About ten minutes later a car drew up in front of the inn, and after no more than five minutes went on again with a passenger. It took the Ledlington road.

The fog was deepening steadily. When she struck a bad patch Hilary had to get off and walk. It was better to walk than to run into a ditch or a tree. The prospect of getting hurt and lying out on a clammy road all night was too repellent. There began to be more and more bad patches, and she began to wish more and more fervently that she had never come on this wild goose chase. Her imp produced an appropriate rhyme:

‘If you want to chase a goose

That’s flying loose,

You really should take care

The goose is there.’

She rode a little way, and then had to get off again. It was funny how much safer she felt when she was riding the bicycle. As a matter of actual fact she was probably safer on her feet, but every time she dismounted the feeling that she was stepping down into danger came over her. It was exactly as if there was another mist upon the Ledlington road, a steadily rising mist of fear. When she was on the bicycle she was a little above it, but each time she got off, it was deeper and colder about her.

She found herself listening, straining her ears for any sound that would break the silence which the fog had brought. If she stood still she could hear her own breathing, but nothing else —not a bird’s wing, not a twitter, not a breaking twig or a leaf brushed aside by any moving wild thing. Nothing was abroad, nothing moved except Hilary Carew, who wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t an obstinate little fool who thought she knew better than anyone else. Anyone else meant Henry. She had actually come to the point where she felt that Henry had been right when he told her to leave the Everton case alone — in case of something worse happening. To whom? To Hilary Carew, on a dark foggy road where nobody passed, and where no one would know — for a long, long time.

‘Idiot!’ said Hilary to herself. ‘What’s the good of thinking of that sort of thing now? Stop it, do you hear — stop it at once! And you’re not to think about Henry either! It’s undermining. He isn’t here, and if he was he’d probably be hating you like poison.’

‘But he wouldn’t let me be murdered in the dark.’

This was another Hilary who was so afraid that she had no proper pride and would have flung herself with passionate relief into the arms of Henry Cunningham even if he was hating her.

It was at this point that she heard the car.

She felt so much relief that for the moment she was quite herself again. It was the silence that had been so horrid. The familiar, comfortable sound of traffic on the King’s highway broke into this paralysing silence, and with it Hilary’s fear. Even the fog didn’t seem to be quite so dense, and she had the bright thought that the car would probably be running slow, and that she might be able to follow its tail-light into Ledlington as a guide.

She pedalled along carefully, making up her mind that she had better jump off when the car was near so as to be sure of getting well out of the way. There would be plenty of time, because, as she could hear, the car wasn’t going at all fast. It couldn’t, of course. About ten miles an hour would be anyone’s limit, unless they wanted to run off the road at the first bend.

Afterwards Hilary could remember everything quite clearly down to this point. She particularly remembered thinking that she would be able to keep up with the car if it wasn’t doing more than ten miles an hour, but after that there was a confusion. There was light —and a noise. The car must have had its fog-light on or its headlights dipped. The noise was the car roaring down upon her, rushing into sudden speed — a big car. And she had jumped. If she hadn’t had the plan ready in her mind she wouldn’t have had time to jump clear, but because she had planned to jump off on to the grass as the car came near she did jump, and saved herself. Heat, and a grinding sound, and her head coming crash against something hard. Stars in the darkness — Catherine wheels and golden rain —and then nothing at all. She had fallen heavily and knocked her head hard enough to be stunned for about a minute and a half. If it had been longer, there would have been no more Hilary Carew.

She came back to a pain in her head —to being lifted — to a voice that said, ‘Only stunned. Quick now, and we’ll make a job of it!’ She didn’t know the voice at all, and what it said had no meaning for her. Her mind was open, empty, and without power to grasp anything. The things that passed through it meant nothing to her at all. She knew that she had a pain in her head, nothing more. That was the whole world.

Something else came into this world. Grit — cold, wet grit against her mouth. Horrid. She moved, and touched something sharp, something that cut her hand. She wasn’t being lifted any more. She was lying on her face with grit in her mouth, her cheek on something wet, and hard, and cold. The road — she was lying in the road. She was lying on her face in the road. And she had cut her hand. It hurt. She had cut it on something sharp. She remembered the bicycle, and thought it was all smashed up, and how was she going to get into Ledlington now? ’

All these thoughts really took no time at all. Consciousness came back and they were there, waiting for the light to touch them. She became aware of two things simultaneously, and then a third. The car with its engine running, and its lights shining on her — those two things first. And then the slam of a door. Someone had slammed the door of the car.

The man at the wheel put the car into bottom gear and jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.

Hilary heard the sudden roar of the engine. It came to her as sound, as danger, as terror itself. The two men who had carried her from the grass verge had laid her on her face in the track of the car with the broken bicycle beside her. If you fall from a bicycle, you are more likely to fall on your face than on your back. The men had considered this, and they had laid Hilary on her face in the road. She would be found broken and dead in the morning, a casualty of the fog. If they had cared less for probabilities and had laid her on her back, the plan would have gone off without a hitch, but they had laid her on her face. A half stunned girl on a wet and slippery road has just about twice as much chance of scrambling to her feet from this position.

At that roaring sound Hilary raised herself upon her hands, stared at the orange foglight of the car, and saw it rush towards her. But as it rushed, she threw herself sideways — scrambling, slithering, thrusting herself up from the road. She got somehow to her feet and went blundering and stumbling across the grass verge until she was brought up short by a hedge. Blind terror has an instinct of its own. There were thorns which she did not feel, blackberry trails which came across her face, across her mouth, as she went down on her knees burrowing and groping to find a gap which would let her through. Her hair caught, her coat ripped, an interlacing tangle of twigs and branches held her back, but she pushed and struggled until she was through, and there on the other side of the hedge she crouched with her head on her knees and the stuff of her skirt clutched hard against her face to muffle the sound of her panting breaths. She was almost fainting, but not quite. Thought swung between oblivion and nightmare. Then steadied. They would come back. They would look for her. They mustn’t find her.

She got up and ran as fast as she could away across the field.