It was bitterly cold.
Up above, in the black sky, the stars looked down frostily, and by watching them swing he knew that the river was taking a wide loop, first through one quadrant, then, slowly, back through another.
He forced himself to think.
The treasure which he had to preserve was his bodily strength. The knife wound and the shock and the cold were draining it away. He must keep a reserve sufficient to get him out of the river. He would have to hoard it up, like a miser. He would have to use his head to save his body.
He thought about the ways of rivers, about rivers which curved, about the River Loire in particular. At the outer point of the arc the current would under-eat the edge and the banks would be steep and difficult to climb. When the current swung away again, it ought to leave a shelf, by which a tired man might perhaps crawl out.
Nap continued to watch the stars. He had swung right round once. Now he was beginning to swing again. He counted up to ten, and then started to kick, with his legs, against the current.
The pain in his side became acute.
He turned on to his front and tried to use his arms. It was almost as bad, but the movement, slight as it was, seemed to be gaining ground. The main channel was behind him. He persevered in these tired, froglike movements, until suddenly his knees struck against something which felt like sand.
There was very little current. He crawled, on all fours, into a bank of rushes and got very slowly to his feet. He put his hands gently to his stomach and felt, across the water-sodden shirt front, a patch of something stickier than water. It was blood, but it did not seem to be coming very quickly which was encouraging.
He took a handkerchief from his coat pocket, squeezed it dry, folded it into a pad and slipped it in underneath where the front of his shirt ran into the top of his trousers. When he had tightened his belt on top of it things felt a bit firmer. It was the best he could do for the moment. He started to walk forward. It wasn’t easy. First the rushes, then loose shingle, and finally a thicket of dwarf alders. The alders were particularly trying for a tiring man. Every branch had to be pushed aside by hand and the roots were alive in their venomous intricacy. He was just thinking that it could not go on forever when the ground started to fall away; the rushes reappeared and he found himself looking at the river.
He had been walking across an island.
For a moment the mere prospect of lowering his hurt and shivering body again into that cold, unfriendly blackness unnerved him. It was only the hard realisation that a night in the open in his condition would kill him more surely than the gentlemen on the north bank that prodded him forward.
The swim, this time, was mercifully short. He employed the same technique as before, letting the current carry him along the circumference of its sweep and then, at the last moment, striking out against it.
A few minutes later he was on his face in a blessed piece of meadowland. More, ahead of him, about a hundred yards, but easily discernible now that his eyes had had time to get used to the night, was the bulk of a building.
He rested for a minute, then climbed to his feet and plodded forward toward it. He seemed to have got into a farm track: the one, no doubt, which ran between the building and the river down which the cattle went to drink. He followed it, and found that it circled the building, keeping outside a low wall.
When he got round to the front he saw that this was something more than the ordinary farm. It was a house of some size. It also seemed to be quite dark, deserted or sleeping.
Nap stood on the drive, turning the matter wearily over in his mind. He was well aware of the difficulty of waking a French house once it has put itself to bed. Then he saw that he was mistaken. There was a light in one of the lower windows: a gleam, through shutters.
He walked across and knocked on the door.
Nothing happened.
In a sudden fury he raised the heavy iron knocker and thundered it down on the woodwork. Very slow footsteps, a crack of light and a voice which said, “Who is that?”
It was neither hostile nor friendly.
“An English tourist,” said Nap. “I have had an accident with my motor bicycle, and been thrown into the water. I fear I am hurt.”
“I am not a doctor,” said the voice doubtfully. “But come in.”
Nap followed into the hall, then into a long room, partly kitchen but mostly dining room. There was a big fireplace with one of those everlasting wood fires, which never seem to blaze very fiercely yet never quite die. The man was throwing sticks on to the bed of white ash.
“I fear that the water—” said Nap. There was already a pool round his feet.
“They are bricks,” said the man. “Water will not hurt them. I must fetch you a blanket.”
He did not seem unduly surprised. Nap thought that possibly the Frenchmen in those parts had gone through so much during the war that nothing would now have power to surprise them further.
“For your wound, too,” said the man. “I have a box.”
By the time he came back Nap had got his shirt off. His hands seemed to be functioning clumsily. The movement had started the blood again. Now that his shirt was off he could see the damage: a long wound across the top of his stomach. The flesh, blanched by water and drawn away from the lips of the cut, made it look worse than it probably was. It did not seem very deep.
The Frenchman had come back and was looking at the wound critically. “A curious accident,” he said, at last. “Here is the box.”
Nap, to his surprise, saw that the man was holding out an olive green, japanned steel case. He recognised it at once. It was the excellent first-aid kit of a Sherman tank. Nap knew it well. The contents seemed untouched. He opened a packet of sulphanilamide, poured the whole contents on to a new gauze pad, and started to fasten it over the wound. It was whilst he was doing so that he found he had lost control of his hands.
“Let me,” said the Frenchman. He finished the strapping of the wound deftly. Then he removed what was left of Nap’s clothes and started to dry him, firmly but not unkindly with a very rough towel.
Ten minutes later Nap was feeling a lot better. He was sitting in a chair by the fire, drinking, very slowly, a tumbler of apple brandy. He was wearing a long, grey nightgown, buttoned round the neck. His drying hair was beginning to stand on end. Round his legs, kiltlike, he wore an American army blanket.
He was even beginning to review the events of the evening with a dangerous complacency, when he received the next shock.
The room, as he had noticed, was a long one. It ran the full breadth of the house and the windows at the back overlooked the river. The Frenchman had opened the shutters, said something which Nap did not catch. Then he repeated it. “Much activity.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Nap. “I didn’t—”
“I say, possibly it is your friends who look for you. There is much activity. I can see lights. They are at the bridge over the river.”
Nap thought hard. The man looked dependable. In any event he was clearly entirely in his power.
“Not my friends,” he said.
“So,” said the man. “Then possibly it would be better to close the shutters again.” He did so and came back into the room.
“I think they are the people who—” Nap indicated the wound in his side.
“The people who caused your motorcycle accident,” said the man quickly.
“Well—” said Nap. “I’m afraid—”
“There is not the least necessity for explanations. Things happen. One does what one can to help. It is preferable to know as little as possible.”
“Have you got a telephone?”
“There is one in the closet. Follow me, please.”
Nap gave the operator Madame Delboise’s number. The bell rang once and then he heard her voice. Rapidly he explained what had happened. He described the house he was in.
“A house with a long drive and a low white wall round it, just south of the bridge – yes.
You are in good hands,” said Madame Delboise. “I will be with you in ten minutes.”
“It’s no laughing matter,” said Nap.
“Your appearance,” said Madame Delboise. “You look – I find it difficult to do you justice. You look like a choirboy peeping out of the top of a bell tent.”
“I feel like a corpse looking out of its winding sheet,” said Nap sourly. “Is anything else likely to happen tonight. Did you have any trouble getting here?”
“Not actual trouble. We passed on the bridge. We did not assault each other. We law-abiding members of the Resistance – the old Trades Union – rarely come to blows with our more extreme brothers, any more than your politicians of the Right actually fight with those of the Left.”
“I see,” said Nap. Despite Madame Delboise’s assurance he felt glad of the three men who had come in with her and were now sitting sipping their host’s apple brandy and talking quietly to him. They all looked capable.
Headlights flared on the road outside as a car swung round into the drive.
“I left a message,” said Madame Delboise. “This may be—”
“On the other hand,” said one of the men, “it may not.”
The three men took up their positions quietly, one each where he could command a window and one out of the line of sight behind the door. Nap thought they probably needed no orders for this sort of thing.
A car stopped outside. Footsteps crunched on the gravel; there was a pause, followed by a very gentle knock on the door.
The owner of the house went out and they heard his footsteps clattering along the passage and the sound of the front door being opened. There was a mutter of voices and the man came back. He was followed by a thick, middle-aged man who came into the room as if he owned it.
“Monsieur Bren,” said Madame and Nap simultaneously.
“It seems to me,” said Monsieur Bren, “that this is a time for explanations.”
The trouble was that Nap was finding it increasingly difficult to keep awake. The cold of the river and the heat of the fire, the apple brandy, the alternation of suspense and relief, and the ultimate feeling of deep security engendered by the presence of his old friend Monsieur Bren of the Paris Sûreté, all were combining to send him to sleep.
He had fought off this lassitude long enough to give a fairly coherent account of the matter which had brought him to Angers. After that things had become blurred.
He was aware that Madame Delboise was speaking. She was explaining something to Monsieur Bren. It was something that she or her colleagues had discovered. Nap had no difficulty in recognising what it was. From out of the mists of talk, the miasma of weariness, the jumble of names and places, it stood out hard and clear. Like a spotlight in the dark, it focused on one place, picking it out in sharpest black and white, leaving its surroundings in greater gloom.
It was the Ferme du Grand Puits, as he had seen it last. Enclave, secret, set apart on its hilltop, among the woods.
He found, without surprise, that he was looking down on it from above. He could see the woods and the clearing, and the farm buildings. He could see someone moving, antlike, across the clearing. Someone who carried something in his arms. He came down closer to look. He was about to overtake him when suddenly the man turned, and he saw it was Major Thoseby who was smiling.
When he woke the sun was high in the sky. He was in a box bed, in an upstairs room. He had no recollection of coming there. His head was clear, and the wound in his side was hurting him, but in a healthy sort of way. It was stinging, not throbbing.
There was a cup of coffee on the chest beside the bed. It was cold, but he drank it and then slowly got dressed. His clothes were dry, and they had been brushed, but they felt oddly stiff after their soaking.
In the hall downstairs he found a gendarme. The gendarme intimated – it was barely a suggestion, certainly not an order – that Monsieur Bren had said that he thought it might be better if Nap did not go outside the house until Monsieur Bren returned.
Besides, the rest would do Monsieur’s wound good.
“When will he be back?” asked Nap.
“This afternoon,” said the gendarme. He added that Monsieur Bren was making inquiries. His friends were making inquiries, everyone was making inquiries.
All very fine, thought Nap to himself, as he sat in the sunlight, in the parlor, re-dressing the hole in his side. It was puffy, but clean. Even his inexpert eye could see that there was nothing dangerous about it. All very fine, he repeated, but here am I, sitting in an unknown house, in a district of France about which I know only that it lies somewhere to the west of Angers, on the Loire, whilst an uncertain number of people are making some vaguely comprehended inquiries. At the Old Bailey in London, the trial will be in its third day. For all the information I have succeeded in obtaining I might just as well have remained in London.
Nevertheless, although he rehearsed this argument to himself several times as the day wore on, yet he found it difficult to be dissatisfied. He had a feeling – a feeling which he shared, oddly enough, with Macrea, who was to give voice to it, that same night, to Mr. Rumbold. He felt that enough had been done to start things going. The train had been truly laid and fired and sooner or later would come the explosion and the truth would erupt from the darkness in which it had been hidden so long, into the light of day.
It was six o’clock before anyone arrived, and then it was not Monsieur Bren, but one of his assistants, a young lieutenant of police.
“Would a car ride trouble you?” he asked.
“I’m quite fit,” said Nap. “Rather a fraud, really.”
“Some of the going will be rough.”
“To the Ferme du Grand Puits?”
The man looked surprised, then nodded his head.
Nap took leave of his host whose name he still had not discovered and they got into the police car, the lieutenant, the two gendarmes, Nap and a police driver. It was an open car, and Nap was soon glad of the leather coat which someone had lent him. They crossed the river and kept to the north bank, through Saumur and Bourgeuil, and it did not seem long before they were turning off at Pont Boutard. Nap glimpsed the corn chandler’s shop in the headlights as they swung left, up on to the heath. Then a right fork, and they were bumping up the track and his time was fully occupied holding himself off the side of the car as it lurched and slid.
At the last moment, as they reached the point where the track ran out of the woods and he knew they would be coming in sight of the farm, he saw something which puzzled him. It was just over the brow of the hill, a steady glow, like the full moon coming up. As they topped the last rise, he saw that the light did not come from the farm buildings at all: it was lower down the hill. It looked like a small searchlight or an arc lamp, and it was slung on a derrick beside the superstructure of the well.
There were a lot of men there and they were doing something with ropes, which ran to a second derrick and a pulley.
The car drew up, and everyone got out. Their arrival caused a little stir among the group at the well head. The lieutenant had a word with a grey-haired man, who seemed to be directing operations, and whom Nap understood to be the prefect of the district.
“Would you care to descend?” said the lieutenant.
“Descend?” said Nap.
“It is perfectly safe.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Nap weakly.
The next thing he knew was that he was sitting in a sort of bosun’s chair. When he looked up the night sky was a pale oval over his head: an oval with one unnaturally bright star in it. Far below him a glowworm of light came and went. The descent was jerky but controlled, and Nap, like Alice in similar circumstances, found that he had plenty of time to wonder what was going to happen next.
What did happen was that the descent ceased and a hand came out of the darkness and grabbed his boot heel. The electric torch came on again, its beams focused now on to a shallow cavity at a point where the wall of the old dry well met the
floor.
The light illuminated the cavity – and what lay in it.
The little heap, the scraps of cloth, the leather belt, green with mildew, the thin, white bones.
“Allow me to present you,” said the voice of Monsieur Bren in his ear, “a gentleman for whom many people have been looking. Lieutenant Julian Wells.”
“Hullo Angers,” said the voice, impersonally. “I have no answer from your London number.”
“Curse it,” said Nap. “What’s the time?”
“Eleven o’clock,” said Madame Delboise. “Your father must be making a night of it.”
“He’s more likely to be in bed and asleep,” said Nap. “I’ll try to get Macrea at his chambers. It’s an off-chance. He might be working late.”
Here he missed both Macrea and Mr. Rumbold by a few minutes. Half an hour later, in desperation, he rang his own home again. His father had just got back.
Then Nap really started talking.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The morning of Thursday, the fourth day of the trial, opened with a drenching downpour of rain. Nothing would now damp the general interest. The queue for the gallery was longer than it had been on the first day. The trial had grown, in the mysterious way that a murder trial can, and had possessed the minds of the public. “Rex v. Lamartine” was news.
Possibly the most worried man in the court was Macrea.
The whole case now lay in his hands. Truth had come up from the bottom of a well and he knew everything. He was now able to answer all of the questions which Mr. Rumbold had asked him the night before – and a few more. What had been dark was plain. Yet his next move was far from clear to him.
The procedure of a criminal trial was, he considered, singularly ill-adapted for the bringing out of the truth about any crime, It was shaped and constituted to one end alone: to show whether or not a particular person was guilty. This end it achieved admirably. But it could not be pushed beyond its function.
Death Has Deep Roots Page 21