The March Hare Murders (5 page)

As she nodded acknowledgement, he went out, walking along quickly until it occurred to him that he might be following behind Verinder and might catch up with him.

Stopping, he stood looking vacantly into a tool-shop window. Saws, chisels and hammers were spread out before him. He liked the look of them. He liked their hard efficiency. He would have liked to have had a reason for buying one. But of all the crazy things to do, he thought, to dash out of that shop without having paid for the book so that he had to go back and walk right into Verinder. One might almost have thought that he had wanted to meet Verinder. One might almost have said that he had done it on purpose. And was that the truth? Had he done it on purpose? And for a purpose?

•   •   •   •   •

David did not go that evening to have coffee with the Verinders, and for once Ferdie and Stella did not press him to go. Stella spoke very little at dinner. She seemed irritable, and when Ferdie said he wished they had not got to go out, she accused him sharply of never wanting to go anywhere, of being almost as bad as David. Then she said she was sorry and looked as if she might cry. Ferdie, plainly, could make no sense of it. David left them and walked quickly up the road to the Three Huntsmen.

He spent the rest of the evening there. When, after the pub had closed, he walked back to the house the sky was full of stars and the hedges on either side of the road were jagged walls of shadow. But the white road seemed to have a light of its own, the stones on its surface and the faint ruts at the edges showing up clearly, spilling their own small shadows on to the ground. The windows of Bell Cottage were full of light, the Pratts’ house was all darkness.

Standing still, David looked at Bell Cottage. He wondered why it was that, since for the last few years he had not cared that Verinder still existed, the man’s mere presence, the sight of his thick neck and bulging pullover and his cold, kind eyes should stir up this burning in the pit of the stomach? What was an imagination for if it spared one this?

When Ferdie and Stella came back from Bell Cottage it was nearly midnight. David, lying on his bed in the darkness, yet still dressed, heard them come in and for some time longer lay there looking at the ceiling, tired of the ache of his hatred and yet engrossed by it. At last he got up and slowly stripped off his clothes. The night was black against the windows, and the lights in Bell Cottage had all gone out.

David seldom went to sleep at once, and to-night, when he got into bed, a mere dullness of the mind descended upon him, a heavy, listless torpor that was far from sleep. His eyes would not stay closed for more than a few minutes, yet when they were open they saw nothing and looked for nothing. When he got into this condition he never had any sense of time. The passing of the hours was only a meaningless strain, gradually increasing till it became almost unbearable. Thus he had no idea how much later it was that he noticed the change outside the windows. From a deep grey-blackness, it seemed to him that the night had taken on a rusty shine, as if the sky were stretched above some great town lit by the small diffused lights of thousands of lamps, instead of over the dark, empty countryside. But that lasted only for a moment. Almost at once, the glow brightened intensely and began to flicker. Red reflections quivered wildly on the ceiling. David jumped out of bed, knowing that something was on fire.

He expected to see Bell Cottage alight. But it was only the summer-house that was burning. Already the fire enclosed it in a swirling skirt of flame. In the midst of the blaze, the body of the little building looked shrunken and black and unsteady. Above it the darkness was spangled with leaping, sequin-like sparks. A loud noise came from it, a roaring and cracking.

Ever since his accident, David had had a terror of fire. But he pulled on trousers and shoes and ran down the stairs, shouting to Ferdie as he went. As he reached the gate of the house opposite, he saw a figure appear round the corner of the low white building and come towards him. It was a woman, dressed in a yellow silk dressing-gown, with her dark hair loose on her shoulders. In the light of the fire she seemed all gold and bronze.

Seeing David standing there, she came to his side, speaking to him at once in the intimate tone of intense excitement.

“Oh, look,” she said, “look, what a fire!” Her eyes were dark and brilliant. “We can’t do anything, can we? We can’t possibly do anything.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” David said, “There can’t be much left of the shack now.”

“No, we can’t do anything at all,” she said, and her hand clutched David’s arm as if to prevent his going for possible buckets of water. “We couldn’t put it out. The fire’s got much too much of a hold, hasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” David said.

She was standing close to him. He could see the excited tremor of her mouth and sense the tension of her body.

“It’s a gorgeous fire,” she said. “I love a fire.” She tore her eyes away from it to look at David. “Don’t you? Don’t you love a fire?”

She seemed to David very much more beautiful than she had seemed the last time he had seen her, standing at her garden gate with the dahlias in her hands.

“No,” David said, “I don’t, as it happens.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I’m afraid of them.”

“I’m not,” she said, with a childish sort of satisfaction. “I love them. I’m glad we can’t put it out.”

“I’m glad we haven’t got to try to put it out,” David said.

She laughed again, shaking her hair back. “But who’d have thought it would make a blaze like that?”

“What?” David asked.

“The summer-house. Such a small thing to burn like that.”

“You don’t seem to mind losing it,” he said.

“Why should I?”

“I suppose, if I had a summer-house, I should mind losing it.”

“Would you?” She let go of his arm and took a couple of steps towards the fire. Some sparks, shooting towards her, singed the grass just in front of her feet. “I woke up and saw a red light in the sky, and I thought the house was on fire.” She sounded as if she were sorry that she had been wrong, because the house would have made an even finer blaze. “Then, when I saw what it was, for a moment I felt terrified because of Mark.”

“Why because of him?”

“Because of his sleeping out here.”

An insane thought came into David’s mind that she was standing there gloatingly watching her husband’s funeral pyre. Then his mind steadied itself. “Oh,” he said, “so he didn’t sleep here to-night?”

“No, not to-night,” she said.

“Lucky thing.”

“But I wonder how it caught fire,” she said. “How could a place catch fire in the middle of the night?”

“Hey!” a voice shouted behind him. “Hey—what are you two standing there for? Why don’t you do something? Get the garden hose!” Mark Verinder, with a purple dressing-gown flapping open, showing striped pyjamas, came running across the grass towards them.

At the same time Ferdie appeared, followed, a moment later, by Stella.

Both Ferdie and Mark Verinder thought that something ought to be done about the fire. They said that it might spread to the trees or even the house. Ferdie was practical and energetic. He soon had a coil of garden hose writhing across the lawn and a fine spray of water spitting ineffectively at the flames. He enjoyed doing it. Ingrid Verinder remained staring at the fire with absorbed, shining eyes.

Stella went into the house and came out carrying two buckets, so full that the water kept slopping over on to the cuffs of her slacks. Putting the buckets down, she stood there as if she were wondering why she had brought them. Then she began fidgeting about, picking up a long stick and looking as if she were considering trying to beat out the fire.

Verinder came up to David.

“Good of you to come,” he said. “Good of you all to come.”

“It won’t last long now,” David said, watching the golden, statuesque figure of Ingrid Verinder.

“No, the whole thing’s wood, and dry as matchboard in this weather.” Verinder brought a pipe out of his dressing-gown pocket. “You didn’t see it start, by any chance?”

“No.”

“I wonder how it did start.”

“Cigarette end, possibly.”

“At this time of night?”

David shrugged his shoulders. “Someone may have passed and thrown one in from the path.”

“Just possible, I suppose—just possible,” Verinder said.

“Well,” David said, “how else could it have started?”

“I don’t know.” David heard the click of Verinder’s teeth on the stem of his pipe. “Lucky I wasn’t sleeping there to-night, wasn’t it?”

“Very lucky.”

“I’ve slept there nearly all the summer.”

“Then why not to-night?”

“I’ve not felt very well for a few days. Chill on the stomach, I think. So I was sleeping indoors for a change.”

“Very lucky,” David repeated.

“But look here,” Verinder said, turning to him with a look of concern, “you oughtn’t to be standing around like this; you ought to be back in bed. Everything’s under control now—you get back to bed, my dear chap.”

David moved a few inches away. “I’m all right, thanks.”

“You ought to get back to bed and get some sleep,” Verinder said.

“I’ll wait for the others,” David said. “Was there anything in the summer-house you mind losing?”

“A few books, that’s all. I hate losing books. And a typewriter—valuable property these days. But it can’t be helped, so I don’t intend to worry overmuch. But I tell you what; I’ve had an idea—I’ll make some coffee. I should think every one would like some coffee.”

“I say—” A new voice broke in on them. Verinder paused. A young man whom David had not seen before came up to them, carrying something in his hand. “Look, Mark, what I found in the hedge,” he said.

The young man was so like Ingrid Verinder in appearance that David immediately took for granted that he was her brother. He was perhaps two years younger than she, about the same height, dark, and with the same rather blunt, almost heavy features. There was something very like her, too, in his expression, something David had not yet been able to name, though at first he had thought of it as a sort of simplicity. But as soon as he saw the young man, he became quite certain that it was not simplicity and that, whatever it was, it was complicated by some kind of sharp intelligence.

Verinder looked at what the young man was holding. “That’s a petrol-can,” he said. “Oh, by the way, Obeney, this is Giles Clay. Ingrid’s brother. And my secretary, sort of.”

“A petrol-can?” David said.

“In the hedge,” Giles Clay replied. “I found it in the hedge.”

“It’s new,” David said.

“Quite new.”

They looked at one another. Then Verinder gave a slight giggle.

“Looks as if someone had something against me, if they deliberately set fire to my property.” In an odd way, he looked pleased. “Well, I think that was a good idea of mine to go and make some coffee. Tell the others about it, will you, when they’re ready? And give me that.” He took the petrol-can from the young man and walked off into the cottage.

With a crash, one side and most of the roof of the summer-house fell in. Immediately, as if they had found something new to consume, the flames surged fiercely upward but soon sank again. The spray from Ferdie’s hose-pipe danced delicately about them.

Giles Clay gave a laugh. “He doesn’t seem much worried, does he?”

“By the fire?”

“By the petrol-can.”

“Then you really think the place was deliberately set on fire?”

“Wouldn’t you say so?”

“But who’d do a thing like that?”

Clay gazed into the blaze. “Oh, it might be any one, mightn’t it?”

“Not quite any one.”

Clay narrowed his eyes, as if against the glare. “Naturally I didn’t mean that literally. I meant, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I should think it was probably an accident,” David said.

Yet he did not think it had been an accident. He was quite certain that the shed had been purposely set on fire. But that thought gave him such a feeling of dismay that he wanted to dissociate himself from it immediately, and unthinkingly, he started to walk away.

“Queer thing, arson,” Clay remarked, following him. “I had an attack of it myself when I was a child. I kept setting fire to things, just for the sake of the excitement. Nothing big, you know, nothing that mattered, and I didn’t see anything wrong in it. Then one day there was nearly a nasty accident. One of our maids got her hair on fire trying to put it out. God, I’ll never forget it. Luckily for me my parents managed to hush it up, and more luckily still, perhaps, the shock cured me. But it’s a wonderful excitement all the same, you know, starting a fire. … Oh, just a minute. Ingrid!”

Turning, Ingrid Verinder looked at them questioningly, then, as if reluctant to move, came towards them.

As she did so, her brother murmured to David, “Don’t say anything about the petrol-can.” To her he said, “Mark’s gone in to make some coffee.”

“Yes,” she said, “I saw him go.”

“Don’t you think you might take Obeney in?” Clay said. “I’ll keep an eye on things with Ferdie. We don’t need every one around.”

She nodded. “Will you come in, Mr. Obeney? It’s all practically over here, isn’t it?” She said it sadly.

David started to refuse the offer of coffee, then he found himself agreeing and going with her to the house.

She walked with long steps, as long as his, the yellow silk outlining her thighs as she moved. She said nothing until they reached an open door that led into a sitting-room. Then, as they stepped inside, she stood still and faced him abruptly. “Why have you been avoiding us, Mr. Obeney?” She searched his face with an odd, sullen intentness.

David thought of denying that he had been avoiding them, but her directness made that seem stupid.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t been seeing anybody,” he said. “One gets those times, you know.”

“It isn’t because you don’t like Mark?” she said. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“Don’t like him?” David said.

“You don’t. I saw you together. I can always tell when people don’t like Mark. He can’t; he always expects people to like him, but I can tell.”