“I see.” And she did see. She was beginning to feel sick and dizzy again.
“Marijohn is illegitimate,” he said, as if in attempt to explain the situation flatly. “We have the same father. Her mother died soon after she was born and my father—in spite of my mother’s protests and disgust—brought her to live with us. After the divorce, he naturally took her away—he had to. My mother only had her there on sufferance anyway.”
The silence fell again, deepening as the seconds passed.
“Jon,” said Sarah at last. “Jon, did you—”
He knew what she wanted to ask, and she sensed that he had wanted her to ask the question which was foremost on her mind.
“No," he said. “I didn’t kill Sophia. You must believe that, because I swear it’s the truth. And if you ask why I lied to you, why I always told you Sophia’s death was an accident, I’ll tell you. I thought Marijohn had killed her. Everything I did which may have seemed like an admission of guilt on my part was in order to protect Marijohn—but although I didn’t know it at the time, Marijohn thought I’d killed her. In spite of all our mutual understanding, we’ve both been suffering under a delusion about each other for ten years. Ironic, isn’t it?”
She stared at him, not answering. After a moment he moved towards her, leaving Marijohn by the door.
“The scene with Sophia came after supper on the night she died,” he said. “Michael was there too. After it was over, I went out into the garden to escape and sat on the swing-seat in the darkness for a long while trying to think what I should do. Finally I went back into the house to discuss the situation with Marijohn but she wasn’t there. I went upstairs, but she wasn’t there either and when I came downstairs again I met Eve in the hall. She told me Sophia had gone out to the Flat Rocks to meet Max, and suddenly I wondered if Marijohn had gone after Sophia to try and reason with her. I dashed out of the house and tore up the cliff path. I heard Sophia shout ‘Let me go!’ and then she screamed when I was about a hundred yards from the steps leading down to the Flat Rocks, and on running forward I found Marijohn at the cliff’s edge staring down the steps. She was panting as if she’d been running—or struggling. She said that she’d been for a walk along the cliffs towards Sennen and was on her way back home when she’d heard the scream. We went down the steps and found Max bending over Sophia’s body. He’d been waiting for her on the Flat Rocks below.” He paused. “Or so he said.”
There was a pause. Sarah turned to Marijohn. “What a coincidence,” she said, “that you should be so near the steps at the time. What made you turn back at that particular moment during your walk along the cliffs and arrive at the steps just after Sophia was killed?”
“Sarah—” Jon was white with anger, but Marijohn interrupted him.
“I could feel Jon wanted me,” she said simply. “I knew he was looking for me so I turned back.”
Sarah scarcely recognized her voice when she next spoke. It was the voice of a stranger, brittle, hard and cold. “How very interesting,” she said. “I’ve never really believed in telepathy.”
“What are you suggesting?” said Jon harshly. “That I’m lying? That Marijohn’s lying? That we’re both lying?”
Sarah moved past him, opening the door clumsily in her desire to escape from their presence.
“One of you must be lying,” she said. “That’s obvious. Sophia before she fell called out ‘Let me go’ which means she was struggling with someone who pushed her to her death. Somebody killed her, and either of you—as you tell me yourself—had an ideal motive.”
“Sarah—”
“Let her go, Jon. Let her be.”
Sarah was in the corridor now, taking great gulps of air as if she had been imprisoned for a long time in a stifling cell. She went downstairs and out into the drive. The night air was deliciously cool, and as she wandered further from the house the freedom was all around her, a vast relief after the confined tension in that upstairs room.
He was waiting for her by the gate. She was so absorbed in her own emotions and her desire to escape that she never even noticed, as she took the cliff path, that she was being followed.
8
“It’s a funny thing,” said the mechanic when Justin reached the car again. “But I can’t make her go. T’aint the carburetor. Can’t understand it.”
Justin thought quickly. He could get a lift to St. Just and a lift out to the airport, but he would have to walk the mile and a half from the airport down into the valley to Clougy. But anything was better than waiting fruitlessly by the roadside at Zennor. He could try another phone call from the square at St. Just.
“All right,” he said to the mechanic. “I’ll have to try and get a lift home. Can you fix up for someone from your garage to tow away my car tomorrow and find out what’s wrong?”
“Do it right now, if you like. It only means—”
“No, I can’t wait now. I’ll have to go on ahead.” He found a suitable tip and gave it to the man who looked a little astonished by this impatience. “Thank you very much for all your trouble. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight to you,” said the mechanic agreeably enough, pocketing the tip, and climbed into his shooting brake to drive back along the road towards St. Ives.
9
Sarah first saw the dark figure behind her when she was half a mile from the house. The cliff path had turned round the hillside so that the lighted windows were hidden from her, and she was just pausing in the darkness to listen to the sea far below and regain her breath after the uphill climb when she glanced over her shoulder and saw the man.
Every bone in her body suddenly locked itself into a tight white fear.
You’ve been assigned Sophia’s role...
The terror was suffocating, wave after wave of hot dizziness that went on and on even after she began to stumble forward along the cliff path. She never paused to ask herself why anyone should want her dead. She only knew in that blind, sickening flash that she was in danger and she had to escape.
But there was no cover on the stark hillside, nowhere to shelter.
It was then that she thought of the rocks below. In the jumbled confusion of boulders at the foot of the cliffs there were a thousand hiding places, and perhaps also another route by the sea’s edge back to the cove and the house. If she could somehow find the way down the cliff to the Flat Rocks...
The path forked slightly and remembering her exploring earlier that day, she took the downward path and found the steps cut in the cliff which led to the rocks below.
Her limbs were suddenly awkward; the sea was a roar that receded and pounded in her ears, drowning even the noise of her gasps for breath.
She looked back.
The man was running.
In a panic, not even trying to find the alternative route down the cliff, she scrambled down the steps, clinging to the jutting rocks in the sandy face and sliding the last few feet to the rock below. She started to run forward, slipped, fell. The breath was knocked out of her body and as she pulled herself to her feet she looked up and saw him at the head of the steps above her.
She flattened herself against the large rock nearby, not moving, not breathing, praying he hadn’t seen her.
“Sarah?” he called.
He sounded anxious, concerned.
She didn’t answer.
He cautiously began to descend the steps.
Let him fall, said the single voice in her mind drowning even the noise of the sea. Let him slip and fall. She couldn’t move. If she moved he would see her and she would have less chance of escape.
He didn’t like the steps at all. She heard him curse under his breath, and a shower of sand and pebbles scattered from the cliff face as he fumbled his way down uncertainly.
He reached the rock below at last and stood still six feet away from her. She could hear his quick breathing as he straightened his frame and stared around, his eyes straining to pierce the darkness.
“Sarah?” he called again, and added
as an afterthought: “It’s all right, it’s only me.”
She was pressing back so hard against the rock that her shoulder-blades hurt. Her whole body ached with the strain of complete immobility.
He took a step forward and another and stood listening again.
Close at hand the surf broke on the reefs and ledges of the Flat Rocks and was sucked back into the sea again with the undertow.
He saw her.
He didn’t move at all at first, and then he came towards her and she started to scream.
Six
1
Justin was running, the breath choking his lungs. He was running past the farm down the track to Clougy, not knowing why he was afraid, knowing only that his mother’s murderer was at the house and that no one knew the truth except Justin himself and the killer. He didn’t even know why his mother had been killed. The apparent motivelessness of the crime nagged his mind as he ran, but he had no doubts about the murderer’s correct identity. According to Eve it would only be one person...
He could hear the stream now, could see the hulk of the disused water-wheel on one side of the track, and suddenly he was at Clougy at last and stumbling through the open front door into the lighted hall.
“Daddy!” he shouted, and the word which had lain silent in the back of his vocabulary for ten years was then the first word which sprang to the tip of his tongue. “Where are you? Marijohn!”
He burst into the drawing-room but they weren’t there. They weren’t in the music room either.
“Sarah!” he shouted. “Sarah!”
But Sarah didn’t answer.
He had a sudden premonition of disaster, a white warning flash across his brain which was gone in less than a second. Tearing up the stairs, he raced down the corridor and flung open the door to his father’s bedroom.
They were there. They were sitting on the window seat together, and he was vaguely conscious that his father looked drawn and unhappy while Marijohn’s calm, still face was streaked with tears.
“Justin! What in God’s name—”
“Where’s Sarah?” was all he could say, each syllable coming unevenly as he gasped for breath. “Where is she?”
There were footsteps in the corridor unexpectedly, a shadow in the doorway.
“She’s gone for a walk with Michael,” said Max Alexander.
2
“It’s all right,” Michael Rivers’ voice was saying soothingly from far away. “It’s all right, Sarah. It’s only me... Look, let’s find a better place to sit down. It’s too dark here.”
She was still shuddering, her head swimming with the shock, but she let him lead her further down towards the sea until they were standing on the Flat Rocks by the water’s edge.
“Why did you follow me?” she managed to say as they sat down on a long low rock.
“I saw you leave and couldn’t think where on Earth you were going or what you wanted to do. I believe I thought you might even be thinking of committing suicide.”
“Suicide?” She stared at him. “Why?” And in the midst of her confusion she was conscious of thinking that in spite of all that had happened, the thought of suicide to escape from her unhappiness and shock had never crossed her mind.
“You’ve been married—how long? Two weeks? Three? And you discover suddenly that your husband has a rather ‘unique’ relationship with another woman—”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she interrupted. “Marijohn told me. Jon’s decided to leave and never see her again.”
“He decided that ten years ago. I’m afraid I wouldn’t rely too much on statements like that, if I were you. And what do you suppose your marriage is going to be like after this? He’ll never fully belong to you now, do you realize that? Part of him will always be with Marijohn. Good God, I of all people should know what I’m talking about! I tried to live with Marijohn after Jon had first disrupted our marriage, but it was utterly impossible. Everything was over and done with, and there was no going back.”
“Stop it!” said Sarah with sudden violence. “Stop it!”
“So in the light of the fact that you know your three-week old marriage is finished, I don’t see why you shouldn’t think of committing suicide. You’re young and unbalanced by grief and shock. You come out here to the Flat Rocks to the sea, and the tide is going out and the currents are particularly dangerous—”
She tried to move but he wouldn’t let her go.
“I thought of suicide that weekend at Clougy,” he said. “Did you guess that? I went fishing that afternoon by the sea and thought and thought about what I could do. I was out of my mind ... And then the child came and talked to me and afterwards I went back to the house. Marijohn was in our bedroom. I knew then how much I loved her, and I knew that I could never share her with any man, even if the relationship she had with him was irreproachable and completely above suspicion. I foresaw that I would be forced to have a scene with Jon in an attempt to tell him that I could stand it no longer and that I was taking Marijohn away ... So after dinner we had the final scene. And I was winning ... It was going to be all right. Jon was shaken—I can see his expression now ... And then, oh Christ, Sophia had to come in, threatening divorce proceedings, threatening exposure to anyone who would listen—God, she would have destroyed everything! And Marijohn’s name smeared all across the Sunday papers and all my friends and colleagues in town saying, ‘Poor old Michael—ghastly business. Who would have thought...’ and so on and so on... All the gossip and publicity, the destruction of Marijohn, of everything I wanted... Sophia was going to destroy my entire world.”
“So you killed her.”
He looked at her then, his face oddly distant. “Yes,” he said. “I killed her. And Jon went away, saying he would never have any further communication with Marijohn, and I thought that at last I was going to have Marijohn back again and that at last I was going to be happy.”
His expression changed. He grimaced for a moment, his expression contorted, and when he next spoke she heard the grief in his voice.
“But she wouldn’t come back to me,” he said. “I went through all that and committed murder to safeguard her and preserve her from destruction, and all she could do was say how sorry she was but she could never live with me again.”
The surf broke over the rocks at their feet; white foam flew for a moment in the darkness and disintegrated.
“Sophia knew they were brother and sister,” he said. “Not that it mattered. She would have made trouble anyway. But if she had never known they were brother and sister, the scope of her threats would have been narrower and less frightening in its implications ... But she knew. Very few people did. The relationship had always been kept secret from the beginning in order to spare Jon’s mother embarrassment. Old Towers made out that Marijohn was the child of a deceased younger brother of his. And when they were older they kept it secret to avoid underlining Marijohn’s illegitimacy. I always did think it would have been best if Sophia had never known the secret, but Jon told her soon after they were married, so she knew about it from the beginning.”
There was another pause. Sarah tried to imagine what would happen if she attempted to break away. Could she reach the cover of the nearby rocks in time? Probably not. Perhaps if she doubled back ... She turned her head slightly to look behind her, and as she moved, Rivers said,
“And now there’s you. You’ll divorce Jon eventually. Even if your marriage survives this crisis there’ll be others, and then it’ll all come out, the relationship with Marijohn, your very natural jealousy—everything. Marijohn’s name will be dragged across the petition because like Sophia, you know the truth, and when the time comes for you to want a divorce you’ll be embittered enough to use any weapon at your disposal in an attempt to hit back at both of them. And that’ll mean danger to Marijohn. Whatever happens I want to avoid that, because of course I still love her and sometimes I can still hope that one day she’ll come back ... Perhaps she will. I don’t know. But whether she comes
back or not I still love her just the same. I know that better than anything else in the world.”
There was no hope of escape by running behind them across the rock. The way was too jagged and Sarah guessed it would be too easy in the dark to stumble into one of the pools and lagoons beyond the reefs.
“It would be so convenient if you committed suicide,” he said. “Perhaps I could even shift the blame on to Jon if murder were suspected. I tried to last time. I planned the death to look like an accident, but I wore a red sweater of Jon’s just in case anyone happened to see me go up the cliff path and murder was suspected afterwards. I knew Sophia was meeting Max on the Flat Rocks. I heard Sophia remind him of their rendezvous after supper, and saw Max leave the house later. Then after the scene in the drawingroom when we all went our separate ways, I didn’t go up to my bedroom as I told you earlier this evening. Jon went into the garden, Marijohn went to the drawing-room, Sophia went upstairs to change her high-heeled shoes for a pair of canvas beach shoes, and I took Jon’s sweater off the chest in the hall and went out ahead of her to the cliffs. I didn’t have to wait long before she came out from the house to follow me...
“But they never suspected murder, the slow Cornish police. They talked of accident and suicide, but murder was never mentioned. Nobody knew, you see, of any possible motives. They were all hidden, secret, protected from the outside world...”
“Michael.”
He turned to look at her and she was close enough to him to see in the darkness that his eyes were clouded as if he were seeing only scenes of long ago.
“If I said that I wasn’t going to divorce Jon and that the secret was safe with me—”
“You’d be wasting your breath, I’m afraid, my dear. I’ve confessed to you now that I’m a murderer and that’s one secret I could never trust you to keep.”
She swung round suddenly to face the cliffs. “What’s that?”
He swung round too, swiveling his body instinctively, and even as he moved she was on her feet and running away from him in among the rocks to escape.
The Dark Shore Page 17