"And I will never desert Mr Micawber," murmured Justin under his breath as he excused himself and went back home. It was well past ten o'clock and 'The Laurels' had settled down for the night, with only a glimmer of gaslight from the drawing-room, where two mantles had been left burning. But the fire was still in behind its screen, and on the round table reposed a decanter of madeira which Flo accepted as a 'gentlemanly' wine on the strength of an old partiality of their father's at Christmas time.
He ate the sandwiches and poured himself a glass, nearly asleep from the warmth of the room after the bitter cold of the night outside. A fearsome draught was whistling in the hall as he lit the candle and glanced around to make sure that he had carried out the various duties Flo expected of him in order to preserve the house from fire and rapine. All gas jets were out and the front door bolted. There was something unexpected in his line of sight, however: something that looked like a square of paper lying on the linoleum under the letter-box which had no cage. He picked it up, shading the flame which was guttering madly, and read what was written in two lines of spindly script:
Be at the griffin bridge at eight tomorrow night keep N beyond the lamp.
When had it come? He opened the door and peered out, but the snow which had begun to fall in earnest had already covered his own tracks, laying a smooth carpet across the path and garden to the gate into the road. There was nothing to be learnt there and nothing helpful in the message itself, which was unsigned and writ-
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ten on a sheet of ruled paper that might have been torn from a child's exercise book. A very cautious person, apparently, this informant, who preferred to say things and not write them, but that was the hallmark of a class which distrusted the written word and the whole machinery of communication as a kind of witchcraft. That the man (he supposed it was a man) had written at all was remarkable. He must have something worth while to say and feel a pressing need of saying it—unless there were some other reason behind this suggestion of a rendezvous in the darkness, some less agreeable reason.
"Was it a quiet evening? Did anyone call?" he asked his sisters next morning over the breakfast marmalade. While Flo was there he did not press the matter beyond their rather surprised assurance that of course it had been a quiet evening and of course no one had called, for she was an excessively nervous person who had never quite recovered from the news of a burglary that had occurred some years earlier in a neighbouring street, but getting Mamie to himself for a moment, he asked her straight out whether she had heard any suspicious sounds.
"Heard anyone? Where? Inside the house? Do you mean a burglar? How too simply perfect!" Mamie cried. Not for a long time had he engaged her sympathies so deeply, and the disillusionment when it came was proportionately great—"You mean no one broke in! Not even an attempt! I could have sworn I heard someone outside in the snow while we were having supper."
He seized on that. "What time?"
"About eight."
"Did you hear footsteps?"
"It was someone prowling. Flo heard him too; she was quite alarmed. She has heard it other nights, she says—like someone who wants to come in but won't."
It was a phrase that kept recurring to him, for on two recent occasions he himself had heard someone walking up and down in the lane by the front gate and had wondered what brought a man out strolling in such bitter weather. He might know very soon; the directions in the message were clear enough: eight o'clock on the north side of the Griffin Bridge, beyond range of the gas lamp, which was the last outrider of the municipal lighting on that side.
At ten minutes to the hour he approached the rendezvous from the Warbury Road, seeing ahead of him the lights in the market-
THE QUEST: 1899
place and to his left the bulk of the castle towering up dimly above the haughs and the griffin on his plinth half-way along the parapet. The night was overcast, with an east wind tearing at the trees and bringing to him, sharp and distinct, the clatter of the southbound express as it raced along the embankment above the estuary, its whistle screaming as it approached the bend by Warbury Halt. Five to eight. One could set one's watch even in winter by that train, whose lighted carriages shone like a glow-worm in the darkness towards the sea.
As the sound of it died away into a distant muttering he stepped off the road into the shelter of the trees and moved down towards the bridge, where a feeble gleam of gaslight illumined the stones against which the snow had drifted. He had reached his chosen point of vantage, about thirty yards from the lamp and close against the hedgerow that followed the highway on its eastern side, when the belfry of the parish church began to strike the hour, followed by the altogether more worldly chimes of the castle clock from directly across the stream. Almost at once he heard a noise in the wood behind him and swung round. Something was there, perhaps a fox or some other wild creature disturbed by his coming, moving very lightly in the undergrowth on a carpet of dead leaves, but he could see nothing in the gloom beyond the dim line of the hedge and after a while it ceased, leaving him in a silence broken only by the moaning of the wind in the trees.
Minutes passed. It was bitterly cold, with a raw dampness that seemed to strike to the marrow of his bones. Even his curiosity had atrophied in the cold, to be replaced by a feeling of unease as the minutes ticked by, and the lights in the castle across the water went out, and that faint rustling began again in the depths of the wood, only nearer to him than before. Suddenly, when all his attention had become centred on the dark terrain to his left, he heard footsteps on the highway to the south.
He drew back further and stooped down, so that there might be no chance of being seen in silhouette before he had made out who his visitor might be. All was quiet now in the wood behind him: and on the bridge the footsteps paced along like laggards behind the beating of his heart. At the far edge of the lamplight a dark shape appeared, then seemed to dissolve in two—two shadows moving as one in the faint aureole of light. He saw their bulk, the tall conical helmets of the Police, then recognised the men themselves: Constables Pogh and Moffat, who had been among the witnesses at the Moot Hall and Blair's particular henchmen.
He remained crouching in the hedge as they went past and along the Warbury Road, walking as one: two police officers on their beat. He thought that now they had gone his mysterious informant might materialise. But though he waited until nine had struck, no one came.
VII
"Whoever he may be, he will have plenty more opportunities of seeing me," reasoned Justin philosophically next day. He could detect a number of reasons, apart from the intrusion of Pogh and Moffat, to keep a timid man from a rendezvous on such a night, and he had no intention of being cast down by one failure of communication. If this "informant", as he called him in his mind, had failed, the only thing to do was to turn to other sources, and that meant Sugden first in spite of everything.
When he approached Mr. Lumley, however, with a suggestion that they should return together to Bewley Street he was met with a coolness so marked that in another man he might have suspected some ulterior motive, even jealousy. The Vicar did not seem to want to talk about it. He avoided questions. It was only gradually to be got from him that Sugden had taken to his bed where he lay silent and unmoving, refusing to be roused by gifts of food or medicine or the comfort of words. It was something inside the man, the Vicar said when he was led at last to express himself about these things. "Some failure of the will. I know very little about it, but I've read somewhere that missionaries in Africa have found the black fellows often die quite unaccountably--from discouragement, it seems, or fear. We could add remorse, and perhaps that's what ails George Sugden."
"Even a dying declaration would be something," mused Justin, "provided it was made in 'settled and hopeless expectation of death' as the jargon has it, and was taken down in writing and signed."
"My dear fellow, isn't that rather callous?" cried Mr Lumley, revolted by the suggestion. "I c
ouldn't think of helping in such a plan ... unless the man himself desired it. Which, it seems, he wont."
Justin was left with what he had begun to dub in his own mind 'the reserves'. Their form was not encouraging. From young Merrick, by the mouth of Mr Verney, he had received one suggestive piece of information, but of the others, Miss Binns had failed him, the roadman Green refused to see him, and Miss Kelly, for all her fierce devotion to her brother, had been of no practical help.
Then he remembered Kelly's fiancee, Amy Dodds.
"I want young Spinks to take this letter down to Pelegate to Miss Kelly," he instructed Harris on his way out to lunch. "He's to wait for an answer. You might tell him to jolly his ideas along a bit."
He had only asked for Amy's address, and it was a surprise to find on his return a somewhat sheepish Spinks with Miss Kelly herself in tow—a rampant, bridling Miss Kelly hard put to it to contain herself. "I thought fine that you'd be after Geordie Sugden, sir," she burst out the moment they were alone on the private side of the baize door.
"So I have been 'after' him. But the fellow's sick."
"Shamming, sir, more likely, he's that artful. Don't you be took in, sir."
Justin replied that he would do his best not to be taken in. He was amused and at the same time touched by this combative spirit that gave no rest to itself or to anyone else. "Now try and look at it sensibly," he urged. "Sick, shamming, afraid or all three at once, what does it matter? He's dug in his heels for the time being. If it's any comfort to you I believe he was at Massingham."
"Of course he was, sir," she snapped back at him indignantly. She was far too intelligent a woman to be satisfied by empty words.
"Very well, I understand your point of view. Now try and see mine. Presumably you want me to help you?" He saw in her eyes the sudden start of fear that perhaps he was going to throw up the case, and hurried on: "And I will help you if you'll give me a chance. But Sugden's only one side of the problem and there are others we shouldn't ignore. That's why I want to see Miss Dodds."
"Just as you say, sir."
"Have you her address?"
"Five Clay Yard. I telled the lad."
"Have you seen her lately?"
"Seen her about, sir. Now and then like."
Justin asked no more questions. Clearly a coldness had developed between the two women, but it was about the last thing to surprise him and in any case it was none of his business. He did not want
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to be involved in jealousies that had probably been present from the day Kelly had brought his clever, domineering sister and pliant mistress together under the same roof. Even in the witness-box at the Moot Hall when their interests had been identical the difference between them had been striking—Miss Kelly all fire and independence; poor Amy a calamity. He wondered what had become of her. 'On the game', most probably, which would account for the distaste her name seemed to arouse in his formidable and Puritanically minded client.
Yet if Number 5 Clay Yard was a 'gay' house, he thought, then words had lost their meaning. A derelict shack in an alley off Pele-gate, it stood between a barn and a stretch of waste land through which meandered a stream choked with rubbish. In the gathering twilight he could see stone steps drunkenly askew, the blank face of a window with drawn blinds, a door with a brass knocker green with age.
Just then he saw movement behind the blinds in the upper room and guessed that someone had heard him and was having a peep. Was the correct response to knock? To take off one's hat? The thought that Mr Lumley would surely have known rebuked him. But after a while he heard sounds upstairs, then footsteps coming down, and the door opened.
His first thought was that she had not changed at all. The same pinched face with big frightened eyes was staring at him from the shadows of the passage, giving him the same oddly pleasurable shock of recognition that he had known when old Verney had gone into die pulpit at Massingham.
Once inside in the parlour in the lamplight he could see that in some ways there had been changes. She had put on weight, which became her, as did the quieter clothes she wore, and her hail was glossier and no longer crimped and curled into a mop. Even the pathetic sticks of furniture had had care lavished on them, though the effect seemed inexpressibly forlorn against the damp patches on the walls and the flaking plaster from the ceiling where the slats showed through. There was a rug whose pattern had all but vanished, a table covered with a cloth on which stood a vase of dried flowers, two devotional pictures, a horsehair sofa with cushions woven in rainbow coloured wools. It was more, he reflected, than 5 Clay Yard deserved; more than the whole community (himself included) deserved that allowed such things to happen.
Very gently, doing his best not to alarm her, he began to explain why he had come, keeping his own expectations of her at a minimum. The most he could look for was that she might have some piece of knowledge, small in itself, which would enlarge the pattern he had been building up or give him a lead to some other witness, perhaps even to the elusive friend who had made the rendezvous at the Griffin Bridge. But there he drew a complete blank. He saw at once that she had no knowledge of any such person. And when he went on to sound her about Sugden's guilt and the identity of the other man who had been at Massingham he sensed in her an immediate distrust, something defensive and resentful, as though after years of waiting she had ceased to hope and didn't want to be bothered any more.
The moment he spotted this he changed tack. Since the future had not drawn her, he would try the past. It made him feel a confidence trickster to be exploiting grief, but he told himself as people do on such occasions that it was for her good. And once they were back beyond the Moot Hall trial into the shadowy world of Piggott's house, with the evening of the crime before them, the sheer fascination of the thing took hold of him and he became engrossed by the tale that only she could tell him—of how Kelly had looked, and what he had said, and how he had gone out to Milligan on the first stage of his journey into darkness.
First, his clothes.
Breeches, boots, a 'newish grey tweed jacket'—his only one. Every detail was in place and vividly recalled. It had been some time after ten when Kelly had gone out with his snares in his pocket saying he was going 'to the Moor', his favourite hunting-ground, clear of the keepers who infested the estates in the plain below. The last she had seen of him that night was at the corner of the street, where Milligan had joined him, and they had turned off into Gilesgate, going north, with Matt the terrier trotting at their heels.
While she had been speaking something had stirred in the back of Justin's mind, just out of reach. It was infuriating being unable to catch hold of it. But he did not like to stop her on the brink of the hour when Kelly had come home for the last time in the grey morning light. "I got 'im into bed, sir. But then these Poliss come, sir, and pulled 'im out, not savin' what they was wantin' or what 'e done. They got 'is shoes, sir, and the breeches, which was damp but they
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telt 'im to get into 'em. Then they spots this old coat of 'is, sir-and so I give it 'em."
"But wasn't it a 'newish' coat that he'd been wearing?" said Justin softly, and the wayward thought had clicked into place in his mind. 'A newish grey tweed jacket'-weren't those your words?"
"Was they, sir?"
"How did a newish grey tweed coat manage to turn into that greasy old horror the Police swore to as being Mick Kelly's at the trial?"
She was staring at him wide-eyed. "Don't understand, sir."
"I think you do. Why did you say old coat' just now?"
"It were just a word, sir. Just slipped out like."
"Were the Police lying when they produced that hideous old coat as the one you handed them?"
No answer.
"Which coat did you hand them, Amy?"
There was a long silence and then she said: "The old-un. It were one o' Piggott's. I'd burnt the ither."
The intoxi
cating feeling that he had broken through at last swept over him like a wave. If she had told the truth and the jacket which he had seen in court and in which the compromising scrap of paper had been found by Dr Higson had not been the one Kelly had been wearing on the night of the burglary, then it followed that either the half-blind Piggott had been wearing it at Massingham (which was absurd), or some third party had borrowed it, or else the Police had deliberately torn the large sheet of paper found in the Rectory and planted a piece of it for Higson to find in the lining of what they had believed was Kelly's coat. This last scarifying notion did not alarm him as much as it would have done in Rees's day: he was more hardened to human frailties and thought it was probably the truth. But he could see one great objection to it. Neither Amy nor Miss Kelly had said a word about it at the trial when they had had every reason for speaking out and saying whose coat it was. Could there be an explanation of such silence?
A moment later and he had hit on it himself. They had not spoken because if they had no one would have believed them, even if Piggott had been sane enough to be called or Kelly himself had had the legal right to go into the box. They had no other coat to produce. Amy had burnt it.
The wind had got up and for some time the house had been full of those oddly furtive sounds so suggestive of visitors on a winter's night whom one may not wish to see. It was the same at 'The Laurels', where there was a cupboard on the landing with a varied repertoire of groans and loud ejaculations that had scared him out of his wits as a boy and still woke him sometimes with uneasy memories. But this time it sounded different—softer and more purposeful, as though someone had come in through the back door and might be moving in the passageway beyond. He glanced across at Amy, but she seemed to have noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
"Why did you burn the coat?" he said, deciding that he had imagined things. "You can tell me, you know, I'm on your side. You won't remember me, but I was always on your side. I was with Mr Rees the solicitor at the trial."
"I know that," she remarked surprisingly.
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