The House Above the River (21 page)

“I was so worried. I felt I could not bear any more.”

“I understand that, madame. But you were not worried about your husband. It was on your own account, wasn't it?”

She whispered, “Yes,” all the calm self-possession gone.

“Now as to the special drug, we have additional information. You said you took and hid the prescription to prevent your husband taking too much. This obliged him to write for further supplies, so preventing him from taking any for a time. But we have proof that you, yourself, wrote for fresh supplies. The quantity found in your room is not a quarter of the amount you, personally, obtained. How do you explain this, madame?”

Miriam began to shake all over; her hands, her feet, her head quivered and shook. She tried twice to stand up, but sank back each time, helpless. At last she managed to say, “He must have forged my writing! He must have hidden it in my room and taken it, on purpose. Suicide! I know it was suicide!”

“This is a new idea. Why should he conceal his supplies in your room? Why not in his own?”

“To put the blame on me. To make it seem my fault.”

“You had a simple remedy, madame. To destroy all of the drug, instead of keeping it. At any rate, I take it you locked the drawer where it was?”

“Yes. No. I don't—remember.”

Inspector Renaud got up.

“Perhaps you will show me, madame. You suggest that your husband came into your room, when you were asleep, perhaps, and took out the drug he had concealed there on purpose. We will go to your room, and you will show me where exactly you hid these extra supplies, and where you think
he
could have hidden them. I admit that I find your theory very confusing.”

Helped by the inspector, Miriam tottered to her feet, and half supported, half propelled, was got upstairs to her room.

Here Renaud let her sit down again, and with her usual extraordinary resilience she began to recover, and even to boast of her ingenuity in hiding the medicine.

“I kept the communicating door locked on my side,” she said. “Always, except of course when he asked to come to my room. He could not get in that way, unless I was here.”

“But he could get in, surely, from the passage, at any time?”

“I think he would not dare unless he knew I was asleep.”

“And I think that is nonsense,” Renaud told her, rudely. “Also it destroys your own idea that he hid the drug himself in your room. You cannot have it both ways, you know.”

“You confuse me,” she wailed. “I don't know what I am saying.”

“You know the truth,” said the inspector. “That is all we want to hear. Monsieur Davenport's symptoms before he disappeared point to the fact that he was poisoned by that drug. Did you administer the poison?”

“No! NO!”

“Do you still hold that he has committed suicide?”

“He must have done. I think he must have done. He would not have taken so much by accident.”

“How do
you
know, madame, how much he took?”

“I don't. You are making me say things. I know nothing!”

“Then we will ask Monsieur Davenport, himself, madame. Perhaps
he
will tell us the truth.”

Miriam leaped to her feet. As Henry came slowly into the room she screamed once, the high, panic-stricken scream of a rabbit in a snare. Then she had gone, plunging out of the room and down the stairs before any of the men could reach her. She rushed across the hall and into her sitting-room, banging the door behind her and locking it on the inside.

Susan heard the noise and came out on to the landing. Francine and the two maids ran from the kitchen. Inspector Renaud and his sergeant bounded down the stairs.

“In her room,” cried Francine. “I heard the key turn in the lock.”

The combined efforts of the men burst in the door. But the room was empty. The open window showed them which way she had gone.

Giles, not having caught a single fish worth keeping in two hours of that lazy sunny afternoon, was winding up his line before rowing back to
Shuna
when he heard Miriam calling to him from the bank above the landing-stage.

Or rather, calling
for
him. Looking round over his shoulder he saw her standing there, gazing wildly about her, vainly searching the river for the yacht she expected to see quite close, and which was not there. She did not notice, or did not recognise, the solitary fisherman in his little boat. She called and called, in urgent need, in terrified despair.

For a moment Giles hesitated. Clearly she did not see him; with the sun in her eyes, perhaps he was hidden. So much the better. He had had enough—more than enough—of her. It would do no good to either of them to meet again. There was no way any more to help her; nothing whatever he could do.

That moment of hesitation on his part, of blindness on hers, sealed her fate. If he had responded when she first called out she might have stayed where she was, waiting for him. But she caught sight of him just as he was picking up his oars to row away.

“Giles!” she screamed. “Don't go! Don't leave me, Giles! Take me with you!
You must take me with you
!”

Moving with desperate haste she flung herself forward, turned, seized the head of the top ladder and trod swiftly down the first rungs. There was a tearing, rending sound, and the whole ladder came away from the stage, with Miriam clinging to it.

To Giles, frozen with surprise and horror, the whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion. The ladder moved inexorably outwards and began to fall. Miriam's feet fell away from it, leaving her hanging by her hands alone. As her grip weakened she began to scream, her hands slipped from the rungs and she fell ten feet to the stage below. With the final jerk she gave it, the ladder's lower supports, long spikes dug into the mud, swivelled up out of it, and the whole heavy iron structure fell on her sprawled body. Her shrieks were cut off suddenly, her legs jerked convulsively twice, and were still.

Giles reached the end stage in a couple of minutes. It was the only one of the three afloat. As he clambered up the first ladder he heard her moaning, and knew that she was alive. But he had seen the great iron bar of the ladder strike her back, and he knew what he would find.

He came to her, and stooped, and with a great effort, straddling her body, lifted the thing away from her. Then he knelt, very gently moving her head to turn her bruised face a little, so that she could breathe more easily. She was quite conscious, still mad with fear. Her mouth opened to scream again, but no sound came. She clutched at him with a frenzied hand.

“Don't move. Lie still,” he urged.

“I can't move,” she whispered. “I can't move my legs.”

“Don't try. Just lie still. I must get help.”

“No one can help me now,” she said, and closed her eyes. Weak tears flowed from them down her pale cheeks.

The police and Susan, the gardener and Francine, all appeared at the top of the bank while Giles was wondering if it was safe to leave her.

Renaud grasped the situation very quickly. He was not a Breton for nothing. A boat must bring her off, he saw at once. A stretcher, a boat, an ambulance at the hard. None of them at the top of the bank could reach the stage where she lay from the landward side until the tide was up again. They all hurried away to begin the rescue operations, and Giles sat down beside Miriam.

He took her hand and stroked it, praying for immediate death to forestall her further agony. The sun beat down on them. He had gone fishing without shirt or sweater. He had nothing to shield her with, or even to put under her head.

But she did not complain. Reality had been forced upon her at last, in a most terrible form; not only her body had been shattered, but her belief in her own supremacy. She was dazed, and her wandering thoughts were not any longer on her present predicament.

“Henry,” she murmured, presently. “Henry is alive.”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Did you know?”

He could not bring himself to acknowledge this. “Hush,” he said. “Don't talk. It'll tire you.”

“Henry has won,” she whispered. “He has killed me. I knew that he wanted to kill me.”

“Hush,” he said, again, but for the first time he was ready to believe her. The ladder ought to have been mended. In any case the rope he had put on it should have held with only Miriam's weight. It could not have been mended, and where was the rope? Glancing over his shoulder he saw no sign of it on the fallen ladder, or the stage. So perhaps she was right; had been right all the time. She had been engaged in a grim duel, which she had lost.

Her hand stirred under his. She did not open her eyes, but began to speak again, in the new weak voice that hurt him more even than her terrible screams.

“I had to defend myself. It was not wicked to defend myself.”

He had to answer this. “There were other ways. You could have left him. But you must not think of it all now. I understand.”

“Do you? I wonder if you do.” She opened her eyes, to fix his attention upon her. “I have always loved you, Giles. No, don't stop me. I have no strength to fight you now. I never loved Henry. But I was greedy. You were so poor, in those days. I was afraid of it. Henry seemed to be rich. There was the château. It sounded so wonderful. If only I had waited.”

He was sickened by the meaning behind her cheap words. Again she had forgotten George, his own immediate successor; also the procession of later poor dupes that Henry had watched. The old Miriam was still alive, and even now, reviving. The moment of honesty was over.

“No,” he said. “No. This isn't the time. You mustn't say such things. Not now. Not after …”

“I have always loved you, Giles,” she insisted, in the same weak, compelling whisper. “When I am better …”

“No,” he said again, immeasurably shocked. “No. No.”

He had to stop her lying tongue, because he knew she was finished, there was no possible recovery, and he could not endure that she should so profane her death.

It took two hours to get Miriam away from the landing-stage and back to her room at the château.

Giles stayed with her. He did what he could to comfort the slow minutes of waiting, and then, when a motor boat came off from the hard, bringing a stretcher and blankets, he showed the scared fishermen on board how to move her on to it, without bending or jarring her injured spine. By the time they got her to Penguerrec, an ambulance had arrived to take her on to a hospital, but she refused absolutely to go there. Giles argued with her, the ambulance men protested and explained, but all to no purpose.

“I will die in my own room,” she kept repeating.

“But you may not die at all. You may be completely cured.”

“My legs are paralysed. I shall never walk again.”

Giles saw that reality had thrust upon her once more. His role was reversed. It was now he who pretended. But it was no good, in the end they had to give in to her. They had to, because she began to lift herself on her arms, threatening to drag herself from the stretcher and make an end there and then. So they drove her to the château, and carried her into the hall.

Inspector Renaud and the rest came crowding round her; Henry, Susan, Francine—even Marie and Lucette, peeping white-faced from the door leading to the kitchens.

Renaud was furious. Miriam had baulked him again. She had not made the expected confession, so he was no further with the case than before. This accident would undoubtedly rouse public sympathy on her behalf, perhaps with censure for himself. He tried to stamp out the difficulty.

“This woman is under arrest,” he cried. “She is under my orders!”

Giles was shocked at such a callous claim, and doubted the truth of it. He was about to protest when Henry forestalled him.

“You cannot arrest her,” he said. “She has committed no crime.”

Renaud turned on him.

“She tried to murder you! You yourself have charged her with this crime.”

“I charge her with no crime,” said Henry, steadily. “I deny it, and shall deny it in any court you take it to.”

“And if you die, monsieur, as you still may, as a result of the poisoning?”

“If I die, I shall no longer be concerned with the case.”

Miriam, staring up from the stretcher, met her husband's eyes, and they exchanged a long, strange look, in which there was no hatred and no fear, only a sort of brooding speculation.

“If I die first,” she asked, “will my murder come home to you, Henry?”

No one answered her. At a sign from the inspector the ambulance men stooped to lift her.

Giles said, “Has anyone sent for a doctor? She ought not to be moved off the stretcher until a doctor has seen her.”

“I have telephoned for a specialist,” Henry answered. “He will be here any time now. He was bringing a portable X-ray apparatus with him.”

“Did you know, then, she would refuse to go to hospital?”

“Yes,” he said, without bothering to explain his certainty.

Susan slipped her cold hand into Giles's. They moved back a little from the group round the stretcher.

“He wouldn't have let her go if she'd wanted to,” she whispered. “It was the first thing he said.”

“When?”

“Inspector Renaud told him she'd had an accident and he was sending her to hospital. Henry said he wouldn't let her go. Just like that.”

“How very odd.”

“I know. Horrible. It's all horrible, isn't it? Not just the accident. Them.”

He pressed her hand and let it go. Horrible was indeed the word for this tangling of a slippery web of malice and greed and revenge and hatred. They were like two snakes engaged in a slow battle to the death, each with jaws fixed in the other's flesh, holding and waiting.

The ambulance men were discussing the situation with Inspector Renaud. They had lowered the stretcher again to the floor.