Fen did not attempt pursuit. He groped for the gun, picked it up, retrieved the torch and returned to Brenda, who had sunk to the ground. She was numb, speechless.
‘That’s settled him,’ Fen said quietly. ‘He won’t have another gun or another torch with him, so he’ll go away and leave us in peace. It’s all over, my dear.’
A single tear trickled down her face. For a minute or two they heard Mr Merrythought’s far-off baying. Then it ceased, and quietness came home again to Melton Chart.
But beneath a distant tree Mr Merrythought blinked, because his eyes were darkening, and thrust his hot muzzle into a clump of wet grass. The varied, delightful scents of beast and bird were fading in his nostrils as the lifeblood ebbed out of him. He had fought like a gladiator, but now he could do no more. He did not whimper, he growled softly to himself. And in this fashion, irate, suspicious and undaunted to the last, he waited for death.
Half an hour later there were many lights in the wood. Stagge and Elspeth were accompanied by the bearded doctor and by two stretcher-bearers. Fen thought that he had never seen so blessed and enchanting a sight.
14
Exit, Pursued by a Bear
The doctor emerged from Brenda’s bedroom with an air of professional complacency. He rubbed his hands at Fen and Stagge, who were waiting in the narrow, green-carpeted passage outside.
‘You can talk to her now,’ he said. ‘What she’s been through would have killed most people, but she doesn’t seem to be much the worse for it, to judge from the amount she’s eating. I’m going home, anyway.’
‘The knee’s all right?’ Fen asked. His hair was tousled, he lacked both jacket and tie, and he looked like one of the unemployable.
‘Perfectly. Throat’ll be sore for a time, of course, and if she wasn’t so damn hungry she wouldn’t enjoy swallowing very much. Subconjunctival ecchymoses. But they’ll clear up in a week or two. It was an amateurish attempt.’
‘Fortunately,’ Fen murmured. The doctor swung his bag at them in farewell and departed. They entered the bedroom.
It was small, and decorated in pastel shades. A fire burned in the diminutive grate, and the pale blue curtains were drawn across the windows, shutting out sight though not sound of the downpour in the darkness outside. A pyjama case shaped like a panda peered at them myopically from the mantelpiece. The dressing table, which Fen, startled, recognized as genuine Louis-Seize, bore more fards and unguents than were desirable for a girl of Brenda’s age. The Poetical Works of Shelley, Horses and Horsemanship, and a tattered copy of a work by Mr Peter Cheyney, brightly jacketed, were held together by a decrepit wooden duck – distinctly a sentimental remnant of nursery days – and a thing which looked like a model of Cleopatra’s Needle. The air was faintly scented with chypre – on perceiving which Stagge, whom a puritan upbringing had led to associate olfactory delights of a non-culinary order with ungodliness, frowned slightly. A white-clad nurse fussed about, tidying. Elspeth was there, Brenda’s parents were there. And Brenda herself was propped up against pillows in a flimsy black nightdress and a yellow satin bed-jacket, consuming chops and peas, from a plate on a bed-table, with the greatest possible gusto.
Fen was relieved to note that the embarrassing emotional excitements of their homecoming had somewhat subsided. Brenda had wept, Brenda’s mother had wept, Elspeth had wept, the servants had wept, and Brenda’s father had shaken hands repeatedly with everyone. Fen had been offered dressing gowns, fires, airing cupboards and brandy; all except the last he had refused with a stern and spartan air. But now the crisis had passed, and a calm cheerfulness prevailed.
‘M’m,’ Brenda said through a mouthful as she saw Fen. ‘Do come and sit down, Professor Fen. Are you hungry?’
‘Not a bit.’ Fen spoke with truth, although he had had no dinner. And as he looked at Brenda he marvelled at the resilience of youth. He himself was still shaken. There is something peculiarly unnerving about resigning yourself to death and then finding yourself alive and well; and a subsidiary but important effect is to make you feel vaguely ridiculous, as though you had sat down on a chair which was not there. Brenda, however, seemed completely unperturbed. The colour had returned to her cheeks, and she was even disposed to be mildly flirtatious.
Mr Boyce, a small, glossy, prosperous-looking, middle-aged man, shook Fen’s hand for about the ninth time.
‘I’m eternally in your debt, sir,’ he said. ‘Brenda has told us everything that happened.’
‘You must thank Mr Merrythought,’ said Fen, ‘and so must I. But for him, neither of us would be here. Well, Brenda, you seem to be completely recovered.’
‘Swallowing’s bloody,’ said Brenda incautiously, at which her parents made simultaneous noises of protest and dismay, and she blushed fierily. ‘But otherwise,’ she went on hastily, ‘I flourish like the green bay tree.’ Fen saw what Miss Parry had meant about Brenda’s prose style. ‘Thanks awfully for everything, Professor Fen. Mummy, have you got his tie?’
‘Yes, dear. Here it is, Professor Fen. It has been pressed. But I’m afraid your jacket’s still very damp. I’ll have it cleaned and send it on to you.’
‘Please don’t trouble,’ said Fen as he crossed to a mirror and adjusted the tie round his neck. ‘I can take it away with me as it is.’
They engaged in polite altercation on this topic, during which Stagge – as was not surprising – became a trifle restive. He cleared his throat and addressed Mr Boyce.
‘If you’ve no objection, sir, there are one or two questions I should like to ask your daughter.’
‘Of course.’ Mr Boyce was hurriedly apologetic. ‘Yes, of course. My dear, we must leave these gentlemen for the moment.’ He hesitated. ‘As regards the immediate future—’
‘I shall be leaving a reliable man on guard here for tonight, sir,’ said Stagge, ‘though I believe that now your daughter’s had a chance to tell us what she knows, there’ll be no further danger.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Mr Boyce mopped his brow, which was damp with emotion. ‘But until this fellow’s caught—’
‘Until then, sir – and’ – Stagge eyed Fen eloquently – ‘we hope it won’t be long – I’ll make myself responsible for her safety.’
‘Good.’ Mr Boyce turned to his wife. ‘Come along, my dear. And you’d better be getting home, Elspeth, or your people will be wondering what’s become of you. We’ll be back later, Brenda. And I hope you gentlemen will join me in a drink before you leave.’
Fen smiled at Elspeth and extended his hand; at which – to everyone’s surprise and Brenda’s secret annoyance – she flung her arms round his neck, kissed him passionately, burst into tears and fled from the room. Mr and Mrs Boyce, after a mute interchange of grimaces over this phenomenon, followed her.
Fen, Stagge and the nurse were left alone with Brenda. The nurse merged discreetly into the background, where she rattled medicine bottles to give an impression of activity. The two men settled down in chairs beside the bed. Fen lit a cigarette.
‘Now,’ said Stagge.
Brenda, having finished the chops and peas, had set to work on a large peach melba. At Stagge’s monosyllabic injunction she grinned suddenly.
‘I think,’ she said, looking mischievously at Fen, ‘that the maestro ought to give a demonstration of his powers.’
‘In what way, miss?’ Stagge asked.
‘Tell us in advance everything I’m going to say.’
Fen smiled back at her. ‘Far be it from me to steal the limelight,’ he remarked mendaciously, ‘but of course, if you insist.’
He produced a pencil and pocket diary – which proceeding Stagge contemplated with evident disfavour – tore a sheet from the latter, and scribbled busily for a few minutes. Then he handed Brenda his notes. Her eyes widened as she read.
‘I was only joking,’ she said, ‘but you do know. And yet I don’t see how anyone but me can know, and I haven’t told you.’ Then her face fell. ‘Oh, but I suppose he’s confessed.�
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‘Not a bit. That,’ said Fen rather grandly, ‘is pure deduction.’
Brenda saluted solemnly. ‘Sorry, maestro…Oh, but there’s one thing you’ve got wrong.’
‘Is there?’ Fen was not greatly dismayed. ‘Sorry to let you down.’
Stagge scraped his feet along the floor. ‘If you please, miss,’ he begged.
Brenda finished the peach melba with unheard-of rapidity, was approached by the nurse with some nauseous potion, swallowed it unblinking, demanded a cigarette, was given one by Fen in spite of the nurse’s half-hearted protests, and leaned back against the pillows, smoking with the uneasy elaboration of a novice.
‘It all began,’ she said, ‘the evening before last, when we were rehearsing Henry V. I was playing Katherine, you see, and I suppose now they’ve given Sheila Wotherspoon the part, and she’s got a stupendous bust and can’t act for nuts…Well, anyway, I arranged to meet Jeremy Williams in the science building afterwards. It was all quite innocent, you know,’ Brenda said, wriggling slightly beneath the sheets and eyeing the nurse in an attempt to assess her potentialities as an informer. ‘We were both interested in – in – well, in flowers, you see. And anyway, Freud says—’
Stagge coughed discreetly.
‘All right, then, I’ll spare you Freud,’ Brenda agreed. ‘Well, I left the rehearsal before Jeremy did, and went straight to the science building and upstairs to the biology lab, where we usually – I mean, where we’d said we’d meet. And I waited there – in the darkness, of course, because I didn’t dare switch on a light – for such a long time that I began to get nervous. Jeremy didn’t show up, and I couldn’t imagine what was keeping him, and I don’t really like labs, and it was creepy.’
Fen could visualize the scene easily enough – the gleam of jars and bottles and pipettes in the weak starlight, an articulated skeleton perhaps, its scrubbed bones luminous, the macabre wallcharts of the lymphatic system, and the musty, pungent smell of frogs spreadeagled in pickle. A rather sordid setting, he reflected, for the naive ecstasies of calf love.
‘Then about a quarter past ten,’ Brenda was saying, ‘I decided I’d better give up and go home, because I knew Jeremy had to be back at his house at ten. I thought he’d stood me up, and I can tell you I was pretty wild about it.’
‘One doesn’t like,’ Fen murmured, ‘to miss a cosy chat about flowers.’
Brenda looked blank for a moment. Then she gurgled pleasurably. ‘Touché,’ she said. ‘One up to you, maestro…Where was I? Oh, yes. Well, I was just going to get the hell out of it when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. And my God, was I scared. I knew it couldn’t be Jeremy at that time, you see, and it struck me that I was either going to be found by that prig Wells, who’d be sure to report it to the headmaster, who’d be sure to report it to Miss Parry – or else, if I managed to hide somewhere, be locked in for the night. The second prospect wasn’t so bad, of course, because I could easily open a downstairs window and climb out. It was the thought of being found that shook me, because I couldn’t think of any plausible tale to account for being there, and some people’ – she assumed an expression of mock gravity – ‘simply won’t believe you when you say you’re interested in flowers.
‘Well, the point is this, you see, that the chemistry lab and the biology lab are side by side and connected. In fact you can only get to the biology lab through the chemistry lab. So I hid myself behind the connecting door and looked through the crack into the chemistry lab. And a man came in, carrying a torch.
‘That struck me as queer to start with, because if he’d had any business there he’d surely have switched on the lights. He was walking pretty quietly, too, and at the time I couldn’t make out who he was. I just waited and watched and prayed he wouldn’t come into the biology lab. And actually, he didn’t. He stood still and listened for a moment and then went up to one of the cupboards in the chemistry lab and shone his torch on it. The cupboards have glass fronts, you know, so that you can see what’s inside. Obviously he didn’t find what he wanted in the first cupboard, so he went on to another – did quite a round of them, in fact, before he got the right one. Then he hauled out a heavy screwdriver and jammed it between the doors and forced the cupboard open. And when the torch shone on his hands I could see he was wearing gloves.’
Involuntarily Brenda put a hand to her throat to touch the bruises there.
‘He took a small glass bottle out of his pocket,’ she went on after a moment, ‘and got a jar out of the cupboard, and poured something from it into the bottle – not a great deal, I should say. He poured it very carefully, and there was a kind of steam rising from it, and even then I had a suspicion of what it was, and that scared me even more. Well, he corked the bottle tightly and put it in his pocket, and put the jar back and closed the cupboard. You can imagine I was pretty much on edge, but I had the sense to watch where he put the jar so that I could make sure what it was he’d taken.
‘And then it happened.’ Brenda made a despairing gesture. ‘The corny old farce situation one’s seen hundreds of times. In brief – I sneezed. I felt it coming and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Stifled it a bit, of course, but it was still a God-awful noise.’
‘You should have pinched the bridge of your nose,’ Fen told her.
‘Should I? I never knew that. Anyway, I didn’t. And you can imagine how I felt. I’d have given my soul for it to have been Miss Parry, instead of a criminal with a bottle of that stuff in his pocket.
‘Still, there was nothing I could do about it. He’d heard. And for a moment I thought he was almost as frightened as I was. He didn’t move at once – just stood there as if he was uncertain what to do. Then he said, “Who’s that?” in rather a shaky voice. That cheered me up a bit, so I kept still and said nothing. But – but in the end he found me.
‘I think he was relieved to see who it was. Anyway, he said, “What the devil are you doing here?” very sharply, but still in a whisper. And I whispered back – God knows why I should have whispered – “Anyway, I’m not committing a burglary.” That was pretty damn foolish of me, and the way he looked at me then made me go cold all over. He said, “You’ve seen more than’s good for you, young woman. Do you know what it was I took?” I nodded. He said, “If you say a word about this to anyone, you’ll get that full in your pretty face, and it won’t be pleasant. And if by any chance you should think of trying to put yourself under police protection, just remember that I’m not working alone. If I go to prison, I have friends who’ll wait any number of years to get even with you. As it is, you’re lucky I don’t kill you here and now. Now get out of here, and keep your mouth shut.”’
All this Brenda narrated in a manner which was a strange mixture of remembered fear and histrionic effect. She was enjoying herself – being, as Mathieson had said, a very good actress and well able to get her effects across; but she was still half frightened, and by a curious irony this fact blurred rather than emphasized the verisimilitude of what she was saying.
‘He grabbed me by the arm and led me out of the building,’ she went on, ‘but on the way I managed to get a look at that cupboard and make sure what he’d stolen.’ Brenda glanced at Fen. ‘And this is where you went wrong. It was sulphuric acid.’
‘Vitriol,’ Fen explained, ‘is only another name for sulphuric acid.’
‘Oh,’ said Brenda. ‘Humblest apologies, maestro…Anyway, when we got outside he sloped off into the darkness – and there I was.’
Stagge was unable to restrain himself any longer. ‘But who was it?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you must have seen who it was?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Brenda. ‘It was Somers. Michael Somers.’
Stagge put a hand dazedly to his eyes, and rubbed at them as if to assure himself that he was not dreaming. Evidently this was not what he had expected.
‘Somers?’ he echoed. ‘You’re certain, miss?’
‘Of course.’ Brenda’s tone was slightly contemptuous. ‘I’d never spoken to
him, but I knew him perfectly well by sight. We used to pass one another on our bikes when he was going into town and I was on my way home from school.’
The superintendent made a gesture of resignation. ‘Very well, miss. Go on, please.’
‘Well, of course I was horribly upset,’ Brenda resumed. ‘I’d seen The Phantom of the Opera, and all that sort of thing, and nobody wants half a pint of sulphuric acid chucked at their face. I went off home, hoping to God Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t notice how upset I was. But they did, and they tried to question me – poor pets, they knew I was holding out on them, but what the hell could I do? – and next morning, yesterday morning that is, they rang up Miss Parry, and she questioned me, and seemed to imagine I’d been raped or something, and I was afraid she’d tell Mummy and Daddy that was what had happened and they’d believe her, and one way and another, what with being scared as well, yesterday was about the most bloody miserable day I’ve ever spent.’
Brenda paused for breath, wiped a suspicion of tears quickly from her eyes, and stubbed out her cigarette on a plate.
‘Of course, I knew I ought to have gone at once to the police and damned the consequences, and in the end I would have, only he’d said he had friends who’d settle with me if anything happened to him, and though I knew he was probably lying it might have been true, and I couldn’t have a police guard for the rest of my life, and so…’ Brenda left the sentence unfinished. ‘I don’t really believe in long-delayed revenges – Valley of Fear and so forth – but I s’pose they must happen sometimes.’
‘It’s very understandable, Miss Boyce,’ said Stagge sympathetically. ‘You would have done better to come to us, but if I’d been in your shoes, I’m not at all sure that I’d have had the nerve to do it.’
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