She scribbled a note under the small circle of light her bedside lamp gave. The sealed envelope was addressed to Frau Agathe Klostermann, but on the half-sheet of paper inside it said only, in English: ‘Klostermann is here, and on the case. He got through late this evening.’
McHugh would know the hand; he’d studied the written statements too curiously to fail to recognise it; but what did that matter? She let herself out on to the balcony, and slipped down the wooden stairs into the street, hugging the shadow of the wall, where the broad eaves leaned over her. She did not want to carry the note herself; how could she tell how soon they would send to wake her? But if she must, she must. But as she ran stooping below the dining-room windows the gate of the yard opened, and a man’s shambling figure came out. She recognised Fritzi, the elderly innocent who worked for Herr Kerner, the undertaker. Fritzi was never sent away without a cup of coffee and an almond cake from Liesl’s tin in the kitchen. Of course, this was the evening on which they were to deliver Richard’s coffin; he must be lying in it now, there in his room at the far end of the balcony. Poor Richard, who had suffered the injustice of becoming only a contention and a threat to those who had outlived him.
‘Fritzi!’ she said softly, and held out to him her letter and a crumpled ten-schilling note. ‘For Frau Klostermann – Frau Agathe. Verstehen Sie?’
He understood very well; his simple-mindedness did not extend to money. He took the errand in hand with alacrity, nodding his head repeatedly and favouring her with a flood of reassurances which did not even sound like German to her. Delivering the letter would hardly take him out of his own way home, and he was probably entirely reliable.
‘Quickly!’ she urged, and watched him lope away along the glassy ice of the roadway. The sky was overcast, sagging like lead over the roofs of the houses, and there was a whining, shifting wind. Something too thin and fine-spun to be snow stung her lips. She turned, shivering, and hurried back into the house by the way she had come, and crouched on the staircase again, listening to the voices from below.
How far had they got while she was away? It seemed that Neil was still closeted in the office with Klostermann, for the three voices she heard were those of Trevor, Miranda, and the doctor. Miranda spoke only now and again, fretfully, complaining of her son’s usage in tones which indicated that she felt it as an affront to herself rather than an injury to him. Did she really love him at all? Could she love? Supposing she had killed Richard almost on impulse, carried away by an indignation she would feel to be fully justified, and people and events between them had turned the spotlight of suspicion on Laurence, would she let him take the blame for it to save herself? Herself and sixty thousand pounds? Would she even try to clinch the matter by poisoning him, if the need arose? If she were asked that question she would indignantly declare her love for her son, and her willingness rather to suffer for him than to let him suffer for her, and she would mean and believe every word of it. But she wasn’t a woman who knew herself very well.
‘Motive?’ Trevor was saying impatiently. ‘Of course Antonia’s money and Antonia’s will provided the motive. It’s all very well saying keep an open mind, what other motive could there be? Nothing but that damned will, that wasn’t even like her. Robbery’s out. His money wasn’t touched. We looked through his things, nothing seemed to be missing.’
‘No,’ agreed the doctor, sighing. ‘Everything was just as we might have expected to find it – nothing missing.’
There were so few of them left now. Five legatees, on equal terms, all with strong reasons for wishing Richard to die before he signed that hasty will of his; but she herself hadn’t killed him, and neither had Laurence, and that left just three people, those three down there in the dining room.
Miranda? Was it even possible?
‘Come to think of it,’ said Trevor, in a voice suddenly sharpened by a note of surprise, ‘shouldn’t there have been something unexpected among Richard’s things?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Whatever it was Antonia gave him, at the end. Something for Richard to remember her by! Have you forgotten? The last words of the great should always be written down at once. Whatever it was she gave him “to remember her by”, he wouldn’t wilingly have been parted from it.’
‘Oh, that!’ said the doctor with a sniff. ‘We found that, surely. In his briefcase, that ivory miniature of her.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Trevor. ‘Oh, dear, no! He’s had that for years. Didn’t you notice how worn it is? That’s been round the world with him a couple of times.’
‘Then what was it? And where was it? He’d never let it out of his care.’
Not an easy man to know, Trevor Mason. What was and what was not within his scope? He seemed to contain within himself curious contradictions. No one could be more considerate at times, no one could angle more viciously for his own ends when roused. Would he go as far as murder? How could you tell? Murderers were human creatures, too. And the doctor? He had fought like a demon to save Laurence, but did that necessarily prove that he hadn’t also fried to kill him? Wouldn’t it be the best possible way of covering himself, once he was called to the case? But on the other hand, if he’d wanted to finish his patient off wouldn’t he have been able to do it very easily with the syringe, even before her eyes?
‘But no, what’s the good!’ said the doctor vexedly. ‘There’s no getting away from that will and its provisions, it’s nonsense to talk about robbery, and grub round for other motives. Such a motive for murder as that will couldn’t exist by accident alongside a totally different motive. It’s against the law of averages.’
The voices came and went in Susan’s ears like a chorus to her thoughts, and some phrases she caught vividly, and some passed by her. This crashed abruptly large in her mind, like an entry of brass. Couldn’t exist by accident, she repeated to herself, alongside a totally different—No, not by accident. But it could by design! To cover completely another motive and another murderer. Not by accident, by design. Except Antonia had made the will, and Antonia was dead, and could never have shaped her testament to bring about this monstrous mischief, living or dead. Besides, everything here was impromptu. Only the freakish weather had dropped them here, as vicious a piece of improvisation as – as a will composed to screen murder.
She stood up slowly, holding by the wall. She felt cold, but not with the cold of the night, from the heart outwards.
‘No getting away from it,’ said the doctor, still gnawing at his trouble. ‘You can’t ignore the evidence of your own eyes.’
‘Ears,’ said Trevor. ‘Let’s be accurate, at all costs.’
‘Eh? What was that?’
‘I said, ears. I didn’t precisely see the provisions of the will, I heard them. Our friend Klostermann would call that hearsay evidence, I’m sure.’
He didn’t know what he was saying, or that lightly ironic tone would have been frozen clean out of his voice. But she knew. The seed was late in dropping, but it rooted and grew and flowered like one of those speeded-up film sequences that produce monstrous prodigies of nature within the span of one minute. Everything was clear; truth was there to be seen. How little faith we really have even in the people we love, she thought, marvelling. Everyone said: ‘It wasn’t like her!’ but no one ever said: ‘—therefore she never did it.’ No, they turned round and said: ‘She wasn’t the person we thought her.’ Even Richard. Even poor Richard.
She turned, and silently climbed the stairs, walking stiffly, with curious care, as though she trod unfamiliar ground that might shiver and gape under her feet.
Neil’s door was not even locked. Neither was his briefcase, when she found it in the wardrobe. It was as simple as that. She looked for the long envelope, and there it was, as soon as she snapped open the case. She drew out the thick folded form with its linen grain, and unfolded it under the bedside lamp, kneeling on the rug to read. It took her a long time, not only because of the legal phraseology, but also because she read wi
th hypnotised slowness, taking every word into her consciousness with a deliberate effort, greedy for it and yet distrusting it. There was no hurry now. She had everything she needed, Laurence was safe. And Antonia was with her in the room. This was the very accent. This was the kind of person she was. No one would ever read this and say: ‘But it wasn’t like her.’
She had finished, and was folding the will again, when she heard the hand at the door, and felt the stirring of the air that went before the movements of a man’s body. She whirled on her knees, clutching the papers to her breast, and stared with dilated eyes as Neil came in slowly, and slowly closed the door behind him.
He was looking at her without anger, with a terrible weary intelligence, as though he had been expecting her for a long time. She saw death in his face, and a bewildered, unassuageable sorrow; and in his hand, the last thing on earth she would ever have expected to see there, a small, shiny black gun.
CHAPTER XIV
As the hours that go, as the winds that blow,
So we twain will pass away.
Act 3
She gathered herself slowly, bracing her feet under her. She opened her mouth to scream, and knew that she could not; her throat was too dry, and the sheer effort was beyond her. It isn’t easy to scream at will, when you have lived a life in which such antics never had a place.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Neil in a flat, tired voice. ‘Because if you do I shall kill you. I shall have to, now that you know. You do see that, don’t you?’ He looked down for an instant at the hand that held the gun, and it seemed to astonish him as much as it astonished her. ‘You’d never guess,’ he said with a note of hopeless bewilderment in his voice, ‘whose gun that was. I never handled one in my life until I took this from Richard’s suitcase.’
‘Along with the diamonds,’ said Susan. The level tone she achieved was a surprise to her, it argued a sort of invulnerable continuity in her being, and she was encouraged; for a moment it had seemed to her that she had stopped existing, and could never resume on the old terms.
‘No, those were in his briefcase. That’s how I first found out about them, when I fetched his case from the plane. I thought you’d have known that, since you know so much. Queer, isn’t it, the things people do! I should have said Richard was the last man in the world to own a gun, but there it was. It seemed a kind of protection, so I took it. But I didn’t really believe I should ever be using it.’
‘You don’t have to use it,’ she said, her eyes still fixed unwaveringly on his face. ‘I’m quiet. What are you going to do?’
‘Run,’ said the flat, sad voice. ‘What else can I do now? And you’re coming with me. I can’t leave you here to start the hunt after me. I need time.’ He passed a hand over his forehead, and something in the movement let her into the secret of the headache he was trying in vain to smooth away. ‘Don’t make any noise,’ he said, ‘or I shall kill you. I have to, you see, now that you know. Why did you have to find out? Everything was going so well, but you had to be the one who couldn’t let me rest.’
Would he really fire? Was the gun even loaded? The hell of it is you can’t tell by looking at it. But yes, he wouldn’t neglect a thing like that. Even if he’d never touched one before, he’d make sure he knew how to use it. He’d been in extremity forty-eight hours now, he’d studied hard how to survive. She saw him brace his big shoulders and straighten his athletic back, and guessed at the weight he seemed to himself to be carrying; the world was not much more burdensome. Yes, he would fire if she made it necessary.
‘Always you,’ he said, ‘always you between me and the light. Why? What did I ever do to you? I liked you! Get up, and put that will back in the briefcase. No, stay facing me, I want to see your hands.’
They were trembling, but not as much as she had feared. Her nerves, unlike her mind, did not yet believe that she was within touch of death. She put the will back into the envelope, and into the briefcase, and closed the case upon it.
‘Fasten your coat. Have you gloves? Take those woollen ones of mine.’ Such care for the details of her comfort in the cold of the night, but the gun never wavered in his hand.
He reached behind him, and she heard the key turn in the lock; he was late with that precaution, but he was taking no chances now, the key went into his pocket before he moved side wise to the wardrobe, and lifted out his coat. ‘Don’t!’ he said, reading her mind. ‘Don’t make me. If you force me, I shall fire.’
It was a lame and humiliating business climbing so awkwardly into his coat, keeping his eyes on her, and the little black eye of the gun on her, too, except for snatched seconds while he slid either arm into its sleeve. But the touch of the ludicrous in his performance fell away before the hopeless, relentless grief in his face; and she remained very still, because she wanted to live. Laurence was safe, the shadow was slipping away from over him, whatever followed; with this knowledge in her, how detemined she was to live!
‘Open the window!’ Like hers, it opened on the balcony. Setting it wide, feeling the touch of the gun boring into her back, she thought, we shall have to pass the dining-room windows, someone will sense the movement and look out, we shall surely be seen. She dared not look round, but she knew he was close at her shoulder as she stepped through into the bitter wind and the thin, sudden snow. He had the briefcase under his arm, and he changed the gun to his left hand while he drew the long window closed after them; but she could not see his movements, and she walked before him with desperate care not to alarm or disconcert him. One involuntary convulsion of that tensed finger, and she would never tell anyone how true to form Antonia had run at the end of her life.
They went down the staircase, stepping cautiously on the frosty treads, she one pace ahead of him. They crossed the lighted windows, and the rising wind, howling desolately now, covered the sound of their steps, and the thin, driving snow beating diagonally across the glass made them only a vaguely moving shadow in the darkness. No one came to the window to peer after them, no one called out.
‘Go on,’ said Neil. She felt his breath gusty against her temple. ‘Through the village to the track. Go faster.’
She tried; she was afraid not to try, and yet she was afraid of the thin coating of new snow on the hard ice of the road, afraid of trying to hurry where she could not even see the ground properly for the slashing fall and the shifting darkness. Glass would have been safe walking by comparison. The small, frozen flakes stung her cheeks and lips and melted in her lashes, blinding her. She hugged the edge of the beaten track, where she could hope to wedge her feet into untrodden places, but through two days other people had been making use of the same meagre rims, and there was hardly a square inch left that was not polished ice. Slipping and recovering, balancing as best she could, she was thrust forward into the wind.
‘You won’t get through,’ she cried, straining her voice against the whining storm. ‘It’s getting worse.’
‘I shall,’ he said.
‘They’ll be looking for you.’
‘Oh, no, not yet. He’s finished with me. Randall will keep him happy for a long time, and then there are the others.’
‘But in the end they’ll go to wake me.’
‘Not for some time yet. Long enough.’
She was horribly afraid he might be right. The village was so small, the way through it so short, already they were half-way to that distant rim where the houses fell behind, and the ground slipped away into a gully among the rocks, easily blocked by heavy snows. And people went to bed at a respectable hour, no one was stirring in all that whitened darkness. Even Fritzi was sleeping long ago after his errand.
Then she remembered McHugh, and hope sprang up in her like a sudden recovering flame in a fire which had seemed quite dead. One man at least was awake in this extinguished village. Somewhere between here and that left turning between the houses they must surely meet him. He must have had her message long ago, now he could repay her for the warning. But why hadn’t he made his appearance al
ready? The distance was not so great, and he must surely have taken the hint at once.
Thinly between the wails of the strengthening wind she heard what seemed for a moment like a human voice crying; but the wind on a squally night plays queer tricks. The fist in her back jabbed home the gun warningly; Neil had heard it, too. It came from somewhere ahead of them, if they could have drawn aside the whirling snow like a veil to see a few yards before their faces. Something dark lay in the snow by the side of the tracks, and heaved and moved awkwardly towards them. Two outstretched arms flattened laborious hands along the ice and heaved again. They were quite near the narrow turning to Frau Agathe’s house now, it must be only a few yards beyond that smudge in the snow. Susan cleared her eyes with her hand, and peered forward, and knew she was looking at McHugh.
She thought first, with a rush of concern for him: ‘He’s hurt!’ and then for herself, even more bitterly: ‘He’s disabled!’ The last waking man, and he had to turn careless in his haste, and bring himself down on the ice with broken bones, like a brittle old lady going out to post a letter on a frosty night. He, who was so confident of his body, and so cocksure in his superb control of it, he had to be brought down from his high horse on this night of all nights, when his fall could do the maximum damage to everyone round him.
‘Go on!’ said Neil hoarsely in her ear, and the gun ground into her back. ‘Don’t stop. Don’t speak.’
To be silent will be to speak, she thought, if he’s conscious. ‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘Let me stay and help him. You’ll go faster without me.’
‘Go on, damn you, and shut up. Pass him.’ The weight of despair in the voice was such that she thought it should have been he who was broken to the ground under it. From between the outstretched arms already filmed with new flakes McHugh lifted his head, and the pallor of his face was turned to them with a great moaning sigh of relief. In a moment she would be able to bend and touch him; only, of course, she could not. Suddenly that hurt even more than her own fear. Tears contorted the vague images before her into a dazzle of black and white.