“Well, like what I imagine you were at his age. Sensitive, a bit priggish, socially awkward, plenty of charm smoldering under the surface. Just the ticket for a woman with a strong maternal instinct.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Ned. The idea was so repugnant to him, and its implications so disquieting, that he shied away from it, saying brusquely:
“Do they think he did it, then?”
“They can’t be sure, till he’s fit to interview. But I’d say not.”
“Not?” Ned realized he had been holding his breath.
“No. There’s a major snag, you see. They thought at first that young Holmes might have received his injury while struggling with your wife—look here, old son, isn’t all this too harrowing for you just yet?”
“No. Carry on.”
“Well. Medical opinion now is that the blow he got was so violent it must have knocked him cold instantly—he couldn’t have gone on suffocating your poor wife. On the other hand, if he had nearly finished her by then, she wouldn’t have had the strength to give him such a blow. And anyway, there was no sign of anything in the room having been used as a weapon.”
Ned Stowe buried his face in his hands. It was like a sentence of death. If Brian Holmes could not have done it, Stuart Hammer must have done it. And that left Herbert Beverley to him.
Three hours later, as he sat in his empty house trying to read, the telephone bell rang.
“Ned Stowe here.”
“Ned, it’s me.”
“Laura!”
“I’ve just seen about it in the paper. Darling—”
“I started a letter to you, but—”
“Yes. Are you all right?”
He could sense the anxiety behind the detached voice she always used on the telephone.
“It’s been terrible. I was in Bristol when it happened. It’s all a complete mystery.”
“Can you speak?”
It was the old formula—her way of asking if there were others in the room with him. Were the police tapping his telephone line? It seemed most unlikely, but—
“Well, yes and no,” he replied. “Everyone is being very kind. I shall have to stay here for a week more, I think.”
“And then?” Her whisper felt like an intimate caress.
“Then I’ll be coming to London. Permanently, I hope.”
“Yes, Ned. I shall be here.”
That was all the conversation they had, but the memory of it carried him through the ordeal of the next few days—the inquest, the grief of Helena’s parents, the funeral, the interviews with solicitors and house agents, the friendly, nerve-racking talks with Inspector Bartley. Ned knew he was under no suspicion: his alibi at Bristol had been carefully checked, and he was able to answer the police questions without prevarication. He learned from Colonel Gracely that they were checking the alibis of everyone in the village for the night when Helena was murdered, and had widened their search for a weapon with which Brian Holmes had been attacked; but they could do little more until the young man, now critically ill with pneumonia, was fit to be questioned. Ned had received a touching letter of condolence from Mrs. Holmes, and had written back inquiring after her son’s health.
As far as Helena was concerned, he had nothing to worry about. But each hour that passed thickened the ice of fear over his heart. Time had never moved so slowly for him, but it did not move half slowly enough. He had nothing in the world now except Laura, and Laura was the whole world to him; and to reach Laura he must go through an ordeal from which his soul shrank.
On a brief visit to London, he found a letter awaiting him at his club. It contained a car key wrapped in a blank sheet of paper. There was to be no reprieve. Three days later, the code message appeared in the Personal column of The Times.
And now, on the Saturday evening, Ned found himself sitting in the train to Norringham-—he had decided not to take his car—committed to murder, feverishly rehearsing in his mind for the hundredth time all the instructions Stuart Hammer had given him twenty-four days ago. It couldn’t go wrong, it couldn’t go wrong, it couldn’t go wrong, the wheels of the train tapped out. And Herbert Beverley—that domineering, hard-faced, brutal man who had ruined so many lives—what loss would he be to the world?
Ned had chosen a compartment where five people were already sitting, for he wished to avoid any conversation by which he might be remembered. But it was typical of his present state of mind that he had taken few other precautions. The police, he was sure, were not keeping him under observation. He had told Mrs. Marle that he would be staying the weekend at his club, and he had indeed booked a room there. But he made no attempt to conceal the destination of his present journey. Taking a taxi to St. Pancras, a return ticket to Norringham—this was merely giving hostages to fortune. By the time the train reached Norringham, Ned had arrived at that state of trancelike, insentient being, deeper than recklessness or panic, which marks the total surrender to necessity.
The train was punctual, the carefully memorized route to the suburb where Herbert Beverley lived took him only twenty minutes’ walking, so he was half an hour early for the appointment. He turned into the cul-de-sac, noted the registration number on the Humber there, walked out into Forest Road again, heard a radio playing a Brandenburg concerto as he passed the gate of Herbert Beverley’s house. It was misty out here, the street lamps making aureoles of light in the gloom. Suppose it gets really foggy? suppose the car won’t start? suppose the old man decides it’s too cold to walk his dog?
Ned forced these thoughts out of his mind, concentrating on the image of a small old man, focused in headlamp beams like a target in the sights of a rifle. He walked briskly on, shivering and sweating in his overcoat, responding to the “good night” of a few hurrying pedestrians. Time and Forest Road seemed to stretch on forever into the blind night. A line of verse repeated itself in his head—Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end—and his blood crawled with dull horror. Turning, he retraced his steps and was back in the cul-de-sac by 10:30. Still quarter of an hour to go. In quarter of an hour I shall have killed a man. 0 lente, lente currite.
He took out the car key, opened the door, quickly bundled himself in. The door closed with a gentle click that sounded like an explosion. The car was facing toward Forest Road. Ned had driven Humbers; he familiarized himself again with pedals and switches, moving the gear lever gently in the dark with his gloved hand.
He had set his watch by the G.P.O. clock on the way from the station. Ten minutes to go. Five. If the engine starts at the first touch of the self-starter, everything will be all right. The engine did start at the first touch. Ned let it run for a minute, then switched on the sidelights and drove cautiously out of the cul-de-sac into Forest Road away from Beverley’s house. A hundred yards down the road he turned it, drove halfway back, and stopped in a gap of darkness between lampposts, switching off his lights but not the engine.
It all depended now on Herbert Beverley. Was he such a man of habit that he always took the dog out sharp at 10:45 P.M., always crossed the road at the same place, always walked in the same direction? It was fantastic to rely on that. The whole thing was mad melodrama. Lighted windows glimmered stagily through the mist, between the laurels and monkey puzzles which veiled the houses of Norringham’s affluent citizens. A figure materialized on the pavement ahead—a man with a white dog on a lead—outside Herbert Beverley’s house.
Ned had the car moving in second gear along the crown of the road as man and dog started crossing it, thirty yards ahead of him now. He switched on the headlights, accelerating violently. The man, blinded by the sudden blaze of light, stopped in the middle of the road, then made as if to move back to the pavement, but the dog was pulling in the opposite direction.
It was all over in a few seconds. Ned hurled the car at the little figure, which stood there stock-still, one hand raised now as if to ward it off. The headlights revealed his face; and whether Ned’s nerve broke at the last possible instant, or whether somethi
ng in that gentle, scholarly face deflected him—a face so utterly at odds with the character of Herbert Beverley as Stuart Hammer had painted it for him—Ned wrenched the wheel over to the left, swinging the heavy car away from his objective.
He felt no bump. He was sure he had not hit the white-faced little man in the black hat and overcoat. But he drove on as fast as if the ghost of a victim were pursuing him, not daring to look round, too terrified to know whether he was unspeakably relieved or unspeakably humiliated by his failure.
A couple of hundred yards down the road he got a grip on his panic and slowed the car to a crawl. And the next thing he knew was a white object throwing itself against the offside window, a furious snarling—Herbert Beverley’s bull terrier, the lead still attached to its collar, jumping up at the car, rousing all Forest Road with its hysterical barking, and set to pursue him, if necessary, the length and breadth of Norringham.
9 The Other Woman
Ned Drove on as fast as he dared—it would be disastrous to be caught speeding in this car by the police. At the end of Forest Road he was held up by a traffic light, and the dog overtook him. Turning left, he was horrified to find himself in a shopping street, well lighted, with quite a number of people on the pavements staring curiously at the black Humber pursued by the white dog. The street, unless he had lost his bearings altogether, led into the center of Norringham, so he turned left into a wide, boulevardlike road and put on speed, only to be checked by another traffic light and overtaken by the apparently tireless dog, which again started battering itself on the window.
Ned Stowe had never been afraid of dogs. Perhaps this one was playing a familiar game its master had taught it. If so, he could get it into the car and leave it shut up inside; his original plan had been to abandon the car somewhere near Herbert Beverley’s house and walk back to the station. It would be worth trying. Pulling into the side of the road, he opened the driver’s window, held out his hand to the bull terrier and made friendly noises. The dog leaped again. Its forepaws scrabbled on the top of the door and its teeth fastened in Ned’s gloved fingers, biting to the bone.
With the whole weight of the dog hanging from his fingers, the pain was excruciating. He could not extricate his hand, and to pull the dog up into the car would be madness—its intentions were quite clearly not playful. Jammed behind the steering wheel, he had little freedom of movement. He tried opening the door catch with his left hand and bashing the door against the dog hanging outside; but his cramped position prevented him from doing this hard enough to dislodge the brute. Shutting the door again, he put his head out of the window, and struck the dog repeatedly on the nose with his free hand, but his constricted blows had no force in them. He got hold of the dog’s lead and pulled upward. This at least took the agonizing strain off his right hand. The animal’s body was now held in air more by its collar than by Ned’s fingers, and the strain began to choke it, so that presently its jaws relaxed momentarily, allowing Ned to drag his hand out of their grip. He let go of the lead and wound up the window before the dog could recover from its fall and leap through.
The intense pain from his crushed fingers seemed to clear his head. He drove away at a steady pace, thankful that, as far as he knew, no one had witnessed the recent struggle. Looking round from time to time, he saw the bull terrier racing behind him through pools of misty lamplight, bounding along the boulevard like a white fury attached to the car by an invisible bond. His head clearing, Ned realized that he would never shake off the dog as long as he was in a built-up area, with traffic lights and a speed limit. An A.A. sign, picked up by his headlights, indicated that at the next crossroads he could turn left onto the London road. He glanced at the petrol gauge: the tank was full. The rest of the plan had gone wrong, so there was no point in his abandoning the car here. Why not abandon it in London?
He turned left, and soon was accelerating away from the built-up area. Norringham was twenty miles distant before it occurred to him that Herbert Beverley might have recognized the car which had so nearly run him down and reported its loss to the police. But by this time Ned’s mind had settled into a mood of desperate recklessness. There was only one thought in it—to get to Laura. His nerve had failed over the attempt on Herbert Beverley: it would not fail again. Everything he had done had been done for Laura, and he was not going to lose the prize now. No doubt, finding his uncle alive tomorrow, Stuart Hammer would post the letter to Laura which Ned had written on the Avocet. Stuart was in London tonight, at a reunion dinner of the Coastal Forces: he would presumably return to Norringham tomorrow—Monday at the latest. The letter would reach Laura’s flat on Monday or Tuesday. Ned must be there to intercept it.
But what about the duplicate letter? Sooner or later, Stuart Hammer would discover that Ned was living with Laura, and, realizing that the first letter had been intercepted, post the duplicate one. Ned could not spend his life watching Laura’s mail. As he drove on through the night, Ned worried at this problem. He could tell Laura that, under the stress of Helena’s death, he had written a letter breaking it off with her, and ask her to destroy it unread when it arrived. No, that wouldn’t do; the time factor made it senseless. Stuart Hammer had him by the scruff.
And wasn’t it much more likely that Stuart would use that damnable letter as a threat rather than a retribution, to force Ned to make a second attempt upon Herbert Beverley? During their talks on the Avocet, the two men had worked out a code message to appear in The Times should anything go badly wrong—a message fixing a rendezvous (it had been Ned’s idea) at the aquarium of the London Zoo. This meeting should only take place in the last resort, if plans failed or some extreme danger threatened. Ned felt there was nothing in the world he feared more than a second meeting with Stuart Hammer: it would be like meeting a figure out of some recurrent dream and finding it was real; or like a man being confronted by the other half of his own split personality.
He had reached the outskirts of London before he realized there was a more immediate problem facing him. How was he to account to Laura for arriving out of the blue, at two-thirty in the morning, with a wounded hand and no luggage? She might be away for the weekend. She might, for that matter, be entertaining another man: why shouldn’t she, after all? He had not even written to her during the last ten days and except for one telephone call there had been no contact between them since they parted in Norfolk.
But Ned was at that stage of physical and emotional exhaustion which compels a man to concentrate entirely on the next step and makes everything beyond it seem remote and unimportant. The next step was to leave the car without being observed—somewhere near an all-night taxi rank and as far as possible from Laura’s flat in Chelsea. King’s Cross Station. There would surely be taxis there. Ned drove down the Euston Road, and turned right, into one of the Blooms-bury streets. It was still and empty. He got out and walked quickly away, leaving the ignition key in place, the doors unlocked.
He was halfway to King’s Cross when his dulled mind at last perceived the danger of what he was doing. A stolen car discovered within quarter of a mile of King’s Cross might well cause the police to make inquiries at the terminus; and the driver of a taxi picked up there at 2:30 A.M. would tell them where he had deposited his fare. Congratulating himself on his astuteness, Ned turned away and began walking westward. He was almost dropping with fatigue when—a lifetime later, it seemed—he rang Laura’s bell, feeling like a fugitive who has walked a hundred miles to find sanctuary.
After he had rung the bell several times, a window was thrown up and Laura’s head appeared. It was typical of her, Ned gratefully thought, that she wasted no time in questions or exclamations of surprise. The moment she recognized who it was in the street below, she withdrew her head; a light went on in the hall, and the front door opened. Ned almost fell into her arms. He had come home.
In the little sitting room, Laura helped him off with his overcoat, poured him a stiff whisky, sat on the arm of his chair while he drank it. Her body was wa
rm and moist from sleep, the coppery hair tumbling over her dressing gown in wild disorder. Ned’s grinding fatigue had suddenly changed into a vague, passive, drugged bliss. He and Laura kept smiling incredulously at each other, touching each other, as if to assure themselves that this miraculous event had really happened and they were together again.
“Are you hungry? Can’t I make you an omelet, darling?”
“It’s all right, love, I had dinner on the train.” The moment he had said it, Ned saw his mistake: Laura must never know he had traveled to Norringham. Yet he did not care, he wanted her to know—to know this and everything. If Laura had asked “What train?” he would have told her the whole story of Stuart Hammer, Herbert Beverley and Helena. It was dammed up inside him, clamoring for release. But that strange trait of Laura’s which he had always found both sympathetic and provoking—her deep incuriosity—prevented her from asking questions now. She accepted his arrival, unannounced, at this extraordinary hour, with her usual fatalism. Neither of them was to know at this moment how differently events might have turned out if she had said “What train?” and given Ned the cue to unburden his mind.
Laura did not even notice that he was holding his whisky in his left hand. She too was blind with emotion. But presently, when she raised his right hand and kissed it, she saw the wounds, the dried blood.
“Oh, Ned! What have you done to your hand?”
“A dog bit me,” he replied light-headedly.
Laura became practical at once, washing the hand, putting on iodine and a bandage.
“Is that better? Does it hurt badly?”
“Nothing hurts now.” The quaver he heard in his own voice released a gush of warm self-pity. “Oh, Laura, I’ve had such an awful time,” he said brokenly, and burst into tears.
She held his head close against her, saying nothing, stroking his hair with little, tentative movements, as though he still were almost a stranger. She was not conscious that this shyness, tentativeness of hers was a legacy from the time when she had been afraid to commit herself absolutely with Ned—afraid lest, if she did so and lost him, she would lose her own self irrevocably.
A Penknife in My Heart Page 11