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Like his portrait on the wall, the Colonel’s older son was unsmiling. Below I heard a mutter from a more aged person who was passing from the stairwell into the passage and onwards towards the kitchen. Outside, beyond the newly opened front door, a man was dragging cases out of the back of a shabby cab and stacking them on the drive.
The Captain’s steady climb reached me and I stepped aside to allow him to retain his grip on the banister. I remembered the sense of pity that had met my examination of his portrait and was disorientated by it. It stole my capacity to speak sensibly. I said in a shaken rush, ‘You’re limping. For a moment I thought—’
Later I would be forever grateful that intelligence briefly put in an appearance and checked the end of that sentence. I had been about to say that for a moment I’d thought he was his brother.
Instead, I found that he was surveying me with the sort of calm scrutiny that scorched. I imagine he saw a silly young woman in a summer frock with a pale face and standing on the stairs in a house where she had no right to be. I saw that he was a good few years older than the young man in his photograph. He didn’t tower over a person as his brother must have done, but was tall enough to have seemed nicely built had it not been for the debilitating distraction of the cane, and I had the slightly embarrassing thought that the voice on the telephone had been an indication of the presence of the real man after all. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. His ordinary single-breasted suit over shirt and tie would have done for any reasonably wealthy man of the day.
So much I grasped as he turned his attention to my question. I heard him say with creditable mildness, ‘I sprained something tangling with an idiot who was running for the same train. It’ll ease off soon enough. What are you doing up here?’
Then, sharper, ‘There’s blood on your ear.’
I put a hand up. My fingertips came away stained with a thin film, like grease. I had been bashed about the head by my case after all. The memory went through me like a bolt. Followed by the memory that I had been on my way to telephone for the police. I found that my eyes must have drifted past him onwards down the stairs at the thought because his head half turned to follow my gaze as if unsure that I wasn’t acknowledging a presence beyond him. There wasn’t anyone there, of course. His gaze slowly returned to me, watching me more closely. I imagine he was wondering if my sudden desire to move onwards was driven by the shame of snooping. I had an overwhelming urge to show him my empty hands, palms uppermost.
Instead I scrubbed away the blood on my fingers and gabbled anxiously, ‘There was a man. In this house. I was preparing your father’s lunch and he was in here. He stole my case. I’d only left it here while I went to the shop. I came through into the stairwell and he ran past me into a car – he’d been looking about the house, I think. He’d been into your library and the study. I came up to see what he’d been doing upstairs. I don’t know who he was. After what happened to Mr Winstone last night I thought, well … I don’t know. He bashed me as he took off and, as I said, he took my case.’ A hesitation before I added nonsensically, ‘It had all my clothes in.’
I had to suddenly reach past him for the banister. Not because I was in any way unequal to the distress but because my words were coming out so quickly that I ran out of breath. I found that his hand had flashed to my elbow to steady me. It was done with the same instinctive reflex that would have formerly intercepted my flight. It meant to save me from tipping head first down the stairs but it hurt too because his walking stick was trapped beneath his hand and my flesh.
Now I really was breathless. He steadied me for a moment and then said, ‘All right now?’
‘Yes. Yes, fine now, thank you.’
He let me go. I stayed propped against that vital solidity of the banister. Then he said in a tone of some doubt, ‘Did you say someone came in here to steal your bag?’
‘My suitcase, actually. It was only left in the kitchen while I went to the shop.’
‘Very well, your case,’ he amended calmly. ‘But why?’
I was calm again myself now. I turned my back against the banister and said plainly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. He’d been in the library. And that office to the right.’ A waft of my hand. ‘I was about to go in there myself to telephone the police when you arrived.’
I saw something snap in his expression. An indefinable shift in his attention. ‘Show me,’ he said. And suddenly, uniform or no, I really was face to face with a career soldier.
The cane was dropped against the banister and the long coat that had been draped over his arm was hung there above it. There was no sign of the limp now as he went with me down to the white and black chequerboard tiles on the ground floor.
He hesitated when he reached the threshold into the room that housed the telephone. For a moment I thought he was anticipating something that waited for him in the room beyond.
I was seeing the room for the first time as he must; as a person familiar with it must, I mean. There was the same warm sunlit glow and today it cast into relief the pretty feminine décor of a woman’s drawing room that was only superficially supplanted by its later incarnation as a man’s study. This had been his mother’s room and her personal choice of paintings still hung on the wall; two landscapes in unattractive brown. My father would have loved them both. I was more conscious of the masculine touches that overlaid the woman’s tastes. They belonged to the young Master John as Mrs Abbey had called him, and they also belonged to the dread that had flooded Freddy’s face as he had approached this very same threshold last night.
It was the same memory that this was the brother’s domain that checked the man beside me now. But the Captain had better mastery of his feelings than the boy had, where calmness might manage the job better. He only asked me unnecessarily, ‘In here, you say?’
And stepped into the room.
I watched him as he surveyed the untouched surfaces and shelves of this space. I found myself recalling the photographs on the gallery wall and realising that I’d misread him there too. The idea I’d had that he was a cold, bland man beside the insatiable, charming energy of his brother was a lie. I’d read that grey portrait as calm but it was only calm if the manner of the control itself served to prove the energy of the thoughts beneath. I don’t mean to say that he displayed an unhealthy tendency for concealment. In fact, I believe it was the opposite. This was a man who had the intelligence to feel but also to take responsibility for his manners and to govern them, particularly at times like the present when a young woman had surprised him in his house.
Of course the contrast to this was the intimidating idea that instinct might be the force that unchained responsibility for him. It made me wonder if the physical part of his life in soldiering was the moment that measured reason twisted into the freedom of pure reflex. In short, I found myself wondering if he enjoyed the liberation of violence.
It was a bad moment for the Captain to turn and spy me waiting awkwardly on the threshold, fingers toying blindly with the grooved wood that framed the doorway. My mouth began to frame the tentative suggestion that perhaps he should undertake the act that had motivated my flight from the gallery upstairs and it was time to call the police. It would have marked a conclusion to my part here for both of us. Then he caught as I did the crescendo of speech in the passage behind me and beyond the stairwell. The sharp rattle of raised voices in there was accompanied by the unexpected yip as a dog barked.
In a moment he was past me, a hand lightly brushing my sleeve in encouragement to follow, and perhaps reassurance. He met the commotion in the claustrophobic gloom of the passage. I was behind him. We weren’t witnesses to another assault though. At least not one by a human. Danny Hannis was there with a captive white blur wriggling away under his arm. He must have just snatched his dog up after it had been discovered attempting to worry the old man’s ankles. The Colonel was there now beyond him, a bullish head on a short neck, who must have once stood taller than his son. He was the sort of man who in his youth must have strutted about grim-jawed with all the might of his military training, but now he was reduced to being all torso and frail limbs. He seemed to develop a list as he marched along the passage towards us to the point that his shoulder veered helplessly into a line of gin traps. He was brandishing a fist like a prize fighter. I wasn’t quite sure who he was preparing to beat: the dog or the farmhand.
The Captain curbed it all by saying quite cheerfully, ‘Hello, Hannis,’ before adding, ‘Father, do you have to announce your return by battering an estate worker?’
‘Particularly when the estate worker in question only came in to see what Miss Sutton was up to.’ Danny was not, it must be said, particularly cowed by the Colonel’s anger. Perhaps it was a common enough mood that no one here thought to take it seriously.
‘What was she up to?’ I felt the Captain’s gaze switch curiously to my face.
Danny abandoned retreat to tell him quite coolly in a tone that was rather unpleasantly man-to-man, ‘I saw her go nosing into the tithe barn and then here, and then that car dashed off.’
There was something there that uncomfortably gave the suggestion of suspicion. I tried to hide my irritation. The Captain, on the other hand, really did conceal nothing. I felt the readjustment quite plainly as he reconsidered my flight from the gallery upstairs. It made my cheeks flush quickly and hotly since, on the subject of behaving oddly, Danny was rather more guilty than I, given the fact he must have been hiding in the machine barn while his dog had escorted me on my way.
I told Danny, ‘In which case you’ll be interested to know I thought I was looking for Mrs Cooke. Only I found a goat instead. And since we’re talking cars, did you have to nearly run me down in the lane with that beast of a machine?’
I felt my mouth work into silence in a peculiar way as it dawned on me just as soon as I spoke that of course it hadn’t been Danny who had roared along the lane at me. It had almost certainly been the bald-headed imposter arriving to begin his search. I risked a glance at the Captain. He’d guessed it from the change in my expression. That control was in evidence again on his face. This time from the cool turn of his gaze towards me his manner appeared to wish to project itself onto me. Well, as it was, I could appreciate the impulse that might drive a son to shield his ageing father from the shock of learning that his home had been invaded, particularly coming as it did in the wake of a belated return to the site of recent bereavement and the added distress of Mr Winstone’s attack.
I did my best to help. I stood there mutely and let the Captain tell me briskly, ‘Hannis isn’t allowed to drive the car. Something about the nature of his cornering has put my father off. I can’t imagine why.’
The remark made Danny’s grin return briefly in the dark. There was concealment somewhere in there of a different sort that seemed like a conspiracy to avert a different stress for the old man. I thought Danny knew I’d noticed. He added with perfect blandness, as if pre-empting another accusation, ‘And before you ask, it can’t have been Pops behind the wheel just now because the doctor took one look last night and prescribed bed and quiet. So with that in mind, he’s gone into town with Mum on the bus.’
There was no grin this time, but beneath the rough hair, his eyes gleamed. We attempted a general movement towards the light of the stairwell. Only unfortunately, for all the old man’s air of increasing infirmity, the Colonel was still as sharp as a tack.
As he stepped out into the better light of the space beneath the stairs from the peculiar tomb of violent implements that seemed in some way a physical representation of his grief, I saw his face clearly for the first time. In other ranked soldiers I had met, even when dressed in ordinary clothes, their profession had always been distinguishable by the peculiar suppleness around their mouths when they spoke; something like an exaggeration of the movement of the jaw that belonged to men who spent a lot of time in the officer’s mess and got a lot of practice at guffawing. I couldn’t imagine this old soldier had ever guffawed in his life.
His son didn’t look like he belonged to that class either. He certainly wasn’t smiling when his father queried coldly, ‘You saw this man?’
Because I was stupid, I asked blankly, ‘Which man?’
‘Father, this is the young woman who made me run for the train. Miss Sutton.’ Just beyond my right shoulder the Captain’s voice was low and mildly persuasive, as though his father was in danger of bullying me like he did Danny Hannis. For a moment I thought the son was saving me, but when I turned my head I found that although his eyes were a considerably less dramatic shade of hazel compared to his father’s grey, at that moment they shared rather too much of the family intensity for my comfort. There was something odd there; a kind of dismissive impatience when he added, ‘I think, Emily, you said you were about to prepare my father’s lunch?’
Flushing, I said lamely, ‘Why yes, I—’
‘This man who nearly ran you down.’ The Colonel’s interruption was decisive. ‘He was here? At this house? Was it the same fellow who …?’
He meant to ask, of course, if this were the same fellow I had encountered on Mr Winstone’s garden path. Standing by the table with the lamp on it, the old man’s gaze was unwavering. I couldn’t help answering now. I risked a glance at the Captain as I said awkwardly, ‘He wasn’t the same man.’
I caught the moment the son raised his eyes to heaven.
The Colonel was waiting. I could see that he was used to having his orders obeyed. I could also see that his hand was trembling a little where it hung by the polished lip of the table. I said unwillingly, ‘He looked like a city man who had taken a wrong turn off the main road.’ I couldn’t help the stray of my eyes towards the Captain’s own city attire. There was a twitch of enquiry in response to the unintended insult. I added hastily, ‘I mean his suit was grey and he wasn’t terribly tall and he was balding.’
‘Age?’ This was from Danny.
‘About fifty, I think. He had a pappy complexion.’
‘Pappy?’ The Colonel frowned at the term.
‘You know, fleshy but soft, like a shrivelled potato.’
‘You have excellent powers of observation.’ I believe the Captain was mocking me. Little did he know how much I had been privately congratulating myself for learning the lessons of yesterday and managing to commit this man’s features to memory. The Captain asked, ‘And what did he take, do you know?’
He’d asked me this once before. He knew what I would say. ‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said, ‘except my case, of course. He took my suitcase.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Captain agreed impatiently, ‘and with it, all your clothes. So that when we next see you, I presume you’ll be clad in your aged aunt’s wardrobe, which last saw the light of day in the era of bustles or something like that. Have pity for me while you do it. I wasn’t planning a trip to the country when I dropped Father at the station yesterday and my change of mind came up on me, shall we say, rather abruptly and without leaving time to pack.’
‘You needn’t have come at all,’ remarked the old man tersely while revealing for the first time the first glimmer of the parent beneath. He was fond of his son. That weakness in his hand wasn’t fading though. It suddenly struck me that it was perhaps deliberate that the Captain was keeping us loitering in the lee of the staircase. A few steps more would confront the old man with the open door into the younger son’s study and I thought I knew by now what effect it had. To lay it before the old man like this just as soon as he’d arrived would be an awful welcome.
‘Hold on a minute, Emily.’ I must have moved impulsively to shut it because the Captain put his hand out. I think he thought I was running away. His gesture held me there while he said to his father, ‘Do you want your cane? I’ve taken it upstairs already. Emily? Perhaps you might …?’
Perhaps he’d understood me after all. And perhaps he knew his father well enough to know that it wouldn’t help to let the old man know why we were, in effect, managing his entrance to his own home. I nodded my agreement and turned to slide through the gap between the Captain and the painted triangle that screened the space under the rising stairs. Then the Colonel’s voice addressed me so that I turned again and found myself briefly faced with the panel of glass beneath the stairs that proved to be a historic gun cabinet. Sporting guns from the ages were locked inside, gleaming with oil, and an awful lot of rotten old shooting sticks with deer’s feet for handles.
I was turning again to face the Colonel as he asked, ‘Do I understand correctly that you saw both these men? This fellow today and the man who struck Bertie? Has your stepfather remembered anything useful, by the way?’ This last question was barked at Danny.
Danny shifted the weight of the little dog in his arms – who was now hanging like a deadweight in protest – and said blandly, ‘Not really. To be honest, now the excitement’s worn off and people have stopped fussing over him, the only thing Pop can really remember with any clarity is the sight of Miss Sutton’s face looming over him on the path.’
‘Poor man,’ I sympathised automatically, before I’d thought. But really I was wondering why Danny had said it like that. Why he’d felt compelled to add this little mention of my part in Mr Winstone’s collapse in the manner of an amusing aside and yet I could tell in an instant that it meant something to the Captain. I couldn’t read Danny’s face because his eyes were downcast as he ran his free hand over the dog’s head in an easy caress, but I could read the Captain’s. He was staring at me as though he’d just discovered a lie while he said clearly, for his father’s sake, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem anything important was taken today. Do you want to step outside with Hannis, Father, and give your orders about where to take your many bags?’
And then the impasse was broken by a flurry of movement which bore the old man to the door and outside and the Captain to the study door. He shut it decisively. A hand gripped the handle firmly while his eyes followed the departure of his father and then as soon as he was sure the Colonel was out of earshot, his attention rounded onto me. I was hoping for an easing of tension; a recognition at the very least of our mutual charade. I wasn’t prepared to meet suspicion. And I wasn’t remotely happy to perceive the tone in his voice when he said, ‘What are you doing here, truly? I mean who are you? What is your profession?’
I gaped. The lie he thought he’d discovered was very specifically mine. It made me bluster, ‘I beg your pardon? What have I been doing? I’ve been here talking to you on the telephone, I should think, and running errands, that’s what.’ His head tilted. He expected an answer to each of his questions. I added a shade tartly, ‘I haven’t got a profession. Formerly I was a chemist’s assistant. In Knightsbridge.’
‘And your father? What does he do?’
The rapidity of his hard questions was strangely shocking. It was the unfriendliness of them. I understood that he didn’t know me and might wish to understand better who had been letting herself into his father’s home, but I didn’t know what this particular course of his suspicion meant. I told him, ‘He’s a supplier of antiques to the nobility. Or, at least, he was. He’s trying to retire.’
‘So he’s also a person with a former profession. I see. And this cousin of yours?’
‘Cartographer.’ Surprisingly, this was given by Danny Hannis. We’d both thought – the Captain and I – that Danny was already outside, but there he was, bending on one knee before the front door, dragging a string from his pocket to act as an improvised lead for the dog. Without lifting his head he added, ‘At least, that’s what she is when she’s not being a strange solitary soul living in the shadow of her dead mother.’ Now the head lifted. ‘You know her. She’s the daughter of old Steward Jones. He clipped our ears for poaching fish from his pond and when he died old Mrs Jones retired to the cottage in the valley. That was about the time you last spent a long spell at home … I mean, it was about ten years ago.’
I expected the Captain to soften a little at this laying out of my credentials. But he didn’t. He listened impassively while Danny told me cheerfully, ‘I meant to say. Your cousin’s bicycle was left in my workshop after her accident and she asked me to give it to you. Said it might be useful. It’s outside the kitchen door, leaning against the far wall. She’s set to be let out tomorrow so you can tell her that you got my note and managed to get eggs and milk as directed.’
Then his mouth twitched in a manner that implied either sympathy, solidarity or ridicule before he swiftly escaped outside to receive his orders from the Colonel, leaving me to fight a battle with the Captain that I couldn’t even imagine a need to begin.
I tried to establish a little more clarity as the Captain moved to ease the front door closed. I said reasonably, ‘Don’t you think it’s time we called the police?’ Then I added haplessly in the face of his stare, ‘Isn’t that what one normarily does at a time like this? When one isn’t being whatever it is you suspect me of?’
I actually expected him to smile at that, particularly given the way my brows furrowed in the wake of spotting my own little peculiarity of speech. But it turned out the illusion I’d been suffering that I understood his idea of calm was made of very brittle stuff. I didn’t know this man at all. And didn’t want to. I thought I preferred the sort of soldier who smirked and guffawed.
This man manufactured a stare that made it seem he thought I had run mad. It was a very strange defence. I was helpless as he said, ‘No police.’
I said quickly, ‘I appreciate that you want to protect your father but why are you—?’
I meant to ask why he was systematically belittling the pretty fundamental loss of all my clothes, let alone the seriousness of my account of an invasion into his house, but he interrupted with a very bland question of, ‘Do you understand?’ Then I had to stand there feebly while he pursued his own course. ‘I expect you think I’m overstepping my authority here but, really, you foisted that role upon me when you decided to embroil any passerby who happened to be in the vicinity in the rescue of my father’s driver.’
We were back to unhappy mentions of Matthew Croft again. I whispered his name.
The sunlight through the glass beside the doorframe touched one side of the Captain’s face. It should have softened his features but it didn’t. ‘Spot on,’ he said. ‘Since you got there so swiftly, I imagine you must have already digested every sordid detail of my family’s history with that man, so you cannot be at a loss now to understand why at this moment I’m here when I ought to be in London and why I couldn’t possibly allow you to wreak further havoc in this house. Haven’t you done enough?’
‘I haven’t actually.’
‘What?’
‘Heard the full sordid details.’ That startled him. He’d thought I was finally admitting darker intentions. It seemed he was absolutely failing to understand me too. It was unexpected. This was not a common experience for me. I told him with a greater sense of sympathy for the feeling that was driving him here, ‘Barely anyone has said a word. And besides, I haven’t asked. I have no interest in knowing what happened in that room or what Mr Langton did. And I don’t want to hear any unpleasant insinuations about Mr Croft either.’ I lifted my chin rebelliously, just in case he meant to defy me there. ‘Based solely on my own brief dealings with that man, I have to tell you that I actually quite like him.’
That, suddenly, made the Captain smile. In the midst of his worries about his father, I’d made him laugh. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better not ask what opinion you’ve been forming about the rest of us.’
It was a concession of sorts. Then he gave a little sigh and tension fled too. A hand lifted to run through dark hair. He said with considerably more gentleness, ‘Look, please try to see what’s happened here from my point of view. I don’t really mean to accuse you of anything. I believe you really have acted in good faith. It’s just that I’ve come here at great inconvenience because of something that was said by a young woman I’ve never met and now she’s announced that we have to add an intruder to the list. If you knew how the past few months have been for my father you’d know just how horribly convenient that sounds.’
A strange chill went through me as his head lifted and he told me frankly, ‘Now, I can’t stop you from reporting the loss of your case to the police, and I certainly will be encouraging Mr Winstone to report his assault. In fact, he’s probably already done it, so I hope you’re ready to give a full and thorough witness statement when our local constable comes knocking. But,’ he added, becoming severe again, ‘be aware that you never had access to this house. Tell them you were robbed outside, tell them it took place anywhere – on the moon if you like. But do not mention this house.’
He continued by making a rough list. ‘Don’t mention your food in the kitchen, the telephone conversation with me in my brother’s study or any of it. Please. I really cannot have the police calling on my father. It’s bad enough that Bertie’s attack loosely connects my father to Matthew Croft. I can’t have it made worse by having this house in an official report. You have no idea of the distress it will cause when it gets out. Which it will inevitably do. Please?’
Now he’d surprised me. I’d expected him to claim my silence with threats. Instead he’d dared to trust that the high significance he placed upon his father’s needs would rank as sufficient justification for overriding mine. In a last show of defiance, I muttered to my shoes, ‘I’ll send you the bill for replacement clothes, shall I? Since I won’t be depending on the law to return them.’
I looked up in time to see a different kind of concentration flicker behind those eyes, followed by perhaps the first instinctive feeling I’d seen him reveal that day and it wasn’t violent at all. There was the smallest glimmer of warmth. I’d obviously just revealed some part of me too. ‘Do that. And Emily?’
‘What?’
‘Did you really say ‘normarily’? You do know it isn’t a word, don’t you?’
‘It’s an accidental contraction of normally and ordinarily,’ I said bravely. This was something that happened whenever I got myself into a position of trying to speak my mind and only ended in entangling myself instead. It irritated me that I’d slipped into doing it now. ‘I can’t help it. You’ve already scored your victory. Do you have to make me feel like a child too?’
I’d like to pretend I managed make a grand exit then and left him staring dumbfounded at my magnificent wake from his place in the stairwell. But instead I glanced back briefly as I reached the passage towards the dining room and, to be honest, there was something awfully humbling about seeing this man wreathed in all that sunshine while his father and a man and a dog bickered cheerfully about luggage behind the glass outside, turning alone to face whatever fresh battle awaited him within the bright, pretty setting of that study.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_9c6cfc8b-f5c8-5152-b807-b5040e59f9d6)
I have often wondered if I am the sort of person who tends to make things unnecessarily dramatic with the force of my own emotions. But lately I have tended to believe it is more complicated than that. I think that sometimes it is my better feelings that keep me from making bigger mistakes. I didn’t march back to the bus stop to idle away three hours until the second and final bus of the day came. I didn’t feed the resentment from my ejection from the Manor or use it as an excuse to relieve all the other stresses of the morning either. I’m already a woman who is haunted by the grander wrongs I have encountered in life – there are plenty of real opportunities to feel wretchedly at fault if one only looks for them after all – and I certainly didn’t need to add to the burden by participating in the more immediate idea of tit-for-tat that grows all too often from smaller trespasses upon basic civility.
I suppose the simple truth was that I was haunted enough by things that I couldn’t control, so I certainly didn’t wish to add to the list by including things I could. So instead I shed the lot by feeding a few scraps to the goat as I’d promised, then I wheeled the bicycle gingerly down the hill back to my cousin’s cottage and took the water jug from the cool of the kitchen to find the spot in the stream above the ford where the sheep didn’t spoil the banks.
The hour that followed began with an introduction to yet another man. This one wasn’t balding and wasn’t attacking anyone either. He was robust and friendly and he was interrupted in the act of propping his motorcycle against the verge outside my cousin’s gate as I returned with a brimming jug.
Constable Rathbone accompanied me inside. He was flushed after his race down the track from the other direction – the route that rose from the cottage through dark green trees and a gate onto a lane – and his hair had been swept into chestnut curls around the base of his helmet by the wind. He was here, as the Captain had foreseen, because Mr Winstone had reported his assault early this morning and this proved that it was a good job I’d put off racing for that bus because it really would have been suspicious if the main witness had taken off before she’d even left a name and forwarding address.
The constable sipped my tea and took notes while I recounted a simple statement of what I had found on Mr Winstone’s garden path. The kitchen was an inferno because I’d had to light the stove to boil the kettle and the room was only made bearable by the breeze that was wafting in through the open front door. Through the course of the policeman’s questions I learned that he was a true upholder of the law and by that I mean he gave the impression he might be very efficient at setting-to with whistle and truncheon if he were called to suppress a civil disturbance. I had a suspicion, however – and it was borne out by the fact that he had not yet visited the supposed site of the attack – that when it came to the investigation of a crime, his training only went as far as recording the bare facts of the case ready to hand over the lot to a detective from the county force. I supposed PC Rathbone might prove to be capable of rising to the task of arresting his man if the brute were to be caught in the act of doing something irrefutably guilty. But quite honestly the good Constable Rathbone didn’t give the impression that he had any idea of actually going in hunt of him.
In a way it was fortunate Constable Rathbone wasn’t much of a detective. He had finished his tea and was folding away his notebook and reaching to collect his helmet from the kitchen table when we heard a car roll to a halt on the trackway outside. There was a creak as its springs met a hollow and silence as the engine died. Naturally, I went to look. I was half hopeful that this was a cab bearing my cousin home from the hospital. It wasn’t. The chrome bumper of a black bonnet peeped at me from beyond the screen of the garden gate while I hovered near the mass of coats hanging in the hall. Aunt Edna didn’t seem to be stalking me from amongst them today.
But a real living person was hunting me. The sound of a car door swinging on its hinges travelled through the open front door. It was followed naturally enough by the thump as the car door was shut again, only, instead of hearing next the crush of dry stone underfoot, there was a cough as the engine kicked urgently back into life. The driver had climbed back in again. He made his car perform a quite extraordinary turn in about thirty rapid shuffles back and forth before dashing away again around the bend towards the lane where the gate had been left swinging. It was the black Ford and the swift about-turn had occurred when its bald-headed driver had stepped around the front of his car and found himself being presented with a close view of a policeman’s motorcycle.
I stood there too stunned to really register shock. Quite honestly, it had never occurred to me to think that I was the common theme in this run of oddness rather than the Manor. Only here I was gripping the coarse folds of one of many aged coats, merging with them, really. And thinking that I’d met bombs and war, and wasted years dreading that all the human nastiness that ran like a vein through the whole lot might persist into peacetime, and yet at the same time I’d still happily been convinced that none of it had ever been specifically directed at me. Now, though, this man had apparently taken to calling on my doorstep just as soon as I’d left myself with no real chance of catching any bus anywhere and I was feeling as though this one thing were about to prove that my attempt to find a little perspective here was set to be horribly skewed the wrong way. Where I had meant to assert once and for all that nastiness had no place in my daily life at all, these people appeared determined to prove that it very specifically did.
‘Changed his mind, did he?’ PC Rathbone joined me in the hall, small eyes in a sunburnt face wrinkling comfortably at the now vacant trackway. ‘Oh, no, here he is back again.’
The policeman was oblivious to the fact that this was an entirely different car. I couldn’t quite see its nose well enough to say what make of vehicle it was, but this time the gate was carefully pushed shut and the black bonnet that drew to a halt at the end of my garden contained the unmistakeable might of a very powerful engine. It seemed that I had been partially right to think the Manor owned its share of this strangeness because here was its representative arriving in person at my garden gate. It must be said that the news didn’t exactly come as a relief.
Willpower made me shake off the clawing grasp of musty coats and the proximity of the amiable policeman and step out onto the path. My hands met and gripped the weathered wood of the gate and I waited there while the car creaked and Captain Langton climbed out. I saw him hesitate fractionally as he saw me there, but then he turned to press the car door shut. Unlike the other man, this man didn’t even quiver when he stepped around the nose of his car and his eyes fell upon the policeman’s motorcycle.
His eyebrows lifted a fraction though when I didn’t open the gate for him. Instead I leaned across it with my weight on my hands to tell him in an unfriendly whisper, ‘PC Rathbone is here asking about Mr Winstone’s injury. And did you see the other car?’ I could tell from the brief drift of his attention towards the empty lane that he hadn’t. ‘It was the man from the Manor but PC Rathbone thinks you’re him. He didn’t notice that the other car drove away and you’ve arrived in a different car. Are you sure you want to see him now?’
I stopped myself from turning this round into a plea to stay with a fierce jerk of determination. I was, I think, expecting the Captain to make his excuses to leave. I suppose I was encouraging it. I couldn’t see a way for him to come in without having to either lie or make me explain that he was not the same man that the other driver had been. And despite his repeated requests for discretion, I didn’t quite think lying was his usual habit. At the same time it was suddenly hitting me with the kind of tension that makes every part of the mind ache that I ought to really be wondering why that other man had called here, and how that man had known where to find me at all and what I would do if the burglar was only waiting for these people to go before coming back again.
To stop myself from seeing this second man as my salvation, I made myself wonder what he wanted from me now.
