by Lorna Gray
I said quickly, ‘I appreciate that you want to protect your father but why are you—?’
I meant to ask why he was systematically belittling the pretty fundamental loss of all my clothes, let alone the seriousness of my account of an invasion into his house, but he interrupted with a very bland question of, ‘Do you understand?’ Then I had to stand there feebly while he pursued his own course. ‘I expect you think I’m overstepping my authority here but, really, you foisted that role upon me when you decided to embroil any passerby who happened to be in the vicinity in the rescue of my father’s driver.’
We were back to unhappy mentions of Matthew Croft again. I whispered his name.
The sunlight through the glass beside the doorframe touched one side of the Captain’s face. It should have softened his features but it didn’t. ‘Spot on,’ he said. ‘Since you got there so swiftly, I imagine you must have already digested every sordid detail of my family’s history with that man, so you cannot be at a loss now to understand why at this moment I’m here when I ought to be in London and why I couldn’t possibly allow you to wreak further havoc in this house. Haven’t you done enough?’
‘I haven’t actually.’
‘What?’
‘Heard the full sordid details.’ That startled him. He’d thought I was finally admitting darker intentions. It seemed he was absolutely failing to understand me too. It was unexpected. This was not a common experience for me. I told him with a greater sense of sympathy for the feeling that was driving him here, ‘Barely anyone has said a word. And besides, I haven’t asked. I have no interest in knowing what happened in that room or what Mr Langton did. And I don’t want to hear any unpleasant insinuations about Mr Croft either.’ I lifted my chin rebelliously, just in case he meant to defy me there. ‘Based solely on my own brief dealings with that man, I have to tell you that I actually quite like him.’
That, suddenly, made the Captain smile. In the midst of his worries about his father, I’d made him laugh. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better not ask what opinion you’ve been forming about the rest of us.’
It was a concession of sorts. Then he gave a little sigh and tension fled too. A hand lifted to run through dark hair. He said with considerably more gentleness, ‘Look, please try to see what’s happened here from my point of view. I don’t really mean to accuse you of anything. I believe you really have acted in good faith. It’s just that I’ve come here at great inconvenience because of something that was said by a young woman I’ve never met and now she’s announced that we have to add an intruder to the list. If you knew how the past few months have been for my father you’d know just how horribly convenient that sounds.’
A strange chill went through me as his head lifted and he told me frankly, ‘Now, I can’t stop you from reporting the loss of your case to the police, and I certainly will be encouraging Mr Winstone to report his assault. In fact, he’s probably already done it, so I hope you’re ready to give a full and thorough witness statement when our local constable comes knocking. But,’ he added, becoming severe again, ‘be aware that you never had access to this house. Tell them you were robbed outside, tell them it took place anywhere – on the moon if you like. But do not mention this house.’
He continued by making a rough list. ‘Don’t mention your food in the kitchen, the telephone conversation with me in my brother’s study or any of it. Please. I really cannot have the police calling on my father. It’s bad enough that Bertie’s attack loosely connects my father to Matthew Croft. I can’t have it made worse by having this house in an official report. You have no idea of the distress it will cause when it gets out. Which it will inevitably do. Please?’
Now he’d surprised me. I’d expected him to claim my silence with threats. Instead he’d dared to trust that the high significance he placed upon his father’s needs would rank as sufficient justification for overriding mine. In a last show of defiance, I muttered to my shoes, ‘I’ll send you the bill for replacement clothes, shall I? Since I won’t be depending on the law to return them.’
I looked up in time to see a different kind of concentration flicker behind those eyes, followed by perhaps the first instinctive feeling I’d seen him reveal that day and it wasn’t violent at all. There was the smallest glimmer of warmth. I’d obviously just revealed some part of me too. ‘Do that. And Emily?’
‘What?’
‘Did you really say ‘normarily’? You do know it isn’t a word, don’t you?’
‘It’s an accidental contraction of normally and ordinarily,’ I said bravely. This was something that happened whenever I got myself into a position of trying to speak my mind and only ended in entangling myself instead. It irritated me that I’d slipped into doing it now. ‘I can’t help it. You’ve already scored your victory. Do you have to make me feel like a child too?’
I’d like to pretend I managed make a grand exit then and left him staring dumbfounded at my magnificent wake from his place in the stairwell. But instead I glanced back briefly as I reached the passage towards the dining room and, to be honest, there was something awfully humbling about seeing this man wreathed in all that sunshine while his father and a man and a dog bickered cheerfully about luggage behind the glass outside, turning alone to face whatever fresh battle awaited him within the bright, pretty setting of that study.
Chapter 8
I have often wondered if I am the sort of person who tends to make things unnecessarily dramatic with the force of my own emotions. But lately I have tended to believe it is more complicated than that. I think that sometimes it is my better feelings that keep me from making bigger mistakes. I didn’t march back to the bus stop to idle away three hours until the second and final bus of the day came. I didn’t feed the resentment from my ejection from the Manor or use it as an excuse to relieve all the other stresses of the morning either. I’m already a woman who is haunted by the grander wrongs I have encountered in life – there are plenty of real opportunities to feel wretchedly at fault if one only looks for them after all – and I certainly didn’t need to add to the burden by participating in the more immediate idea of tit-for-tat that grows all too often from smaller trespasses upon basic civility.
I suppose the simple truth was that I was haunted enough by things that I couldn’t control, so I certainly didn’t wish to add to the list by including things I could. So instead I shed the lot by feeding a few scraps to the goat as I’d promised, then I wheeled the bicycle gingerly down the hill back to my cousin’s cottage and took the water jug from the cool of the kitchen to find the spot in the stream above the ford where the sheep didn’t spoil the banks.
The hour that followed began with an introduction to yet another man. This one wasn’t balding and wasn’t attacking anyone either. He was robust and friendly and he was interrupted in the act of propping his motorcycle against the verge outside my cousin’s gate as I returned with a brimming jug.
Constable Rathbone accompanied me inside. He was flushed after his race down the track from the other direction – the route that rose from the cottage through dark green trees and a gate onto a lane – and his hair had been swept into chestnut curls around the base of his helmet by the wind. He was here, as the Captain had foreseen, because Mr Winstone had reported his assault early this morning and this proved that it was a good job I’d put off racing for that bus because it really would have been suspicious if the main witness had taken off before she’d even left a name and forwarding address.
The constable sipped my tea and took notes while I recounted a simple statement of what I had found on Mr Winstone’s garden path. The kitchen was an inferno because I’d had to light the stove to boil the kettle and the room was only made bearable by the breeze that was wafting in through the open front door. Through the course of the policeman’s questions I learned that he was a true upholder of the law and by that I mean he gave the impression he might be very efficient at setting-to with whistle and truncheon if he were called to
suppress a civil disturbance. I had a suspicion, however – and it was borne out by the fact that he had not yet visited the supposed site of the attack – that when it came to the investigation of a crime, his training only went as far as recording the bare facts of the case ready to hand over the lot to a detective from the county force. I supposed PC Rathbone might prove to be capable of rising to the task of arresting his man if the brute were to be caught in the act of doing something irrefutably guilty. But quite honestly the good Constable Rathbone didn’t give the impression that he had any idea of actually going in hunt of him.
In a way it was fortunate Constable Rathbone wasn’t much of a detective. He had finished his tea and was folding away his notebook and reaching to collect his helmet from the kitchen table when we heard a car roll to a halt on the trackway outside. There was a creak as its springs met a hollow and silence as the engine died. Naturally, I went to look. I was half hopeful that this was a cab bearing my cousin home from the hospital. It wasn’t. The chrome bumper of a black bonnet peeped at me from beyond the screen of the garden gate while I hovered near the mass of coats hanging in the hall. Aunt Edna didn’t seem to be stalking me from amongst them today.
But a real living person was hunting me. The sound of a car door swinging on its hinges travelled through the open front door. It was followed naturally enough by the thump as the car door was shut again, only, instead of hearing next the crush of dry stone underfoot, there was a cough as the engine kicked urgently back into life. The driver had climbed back in again. He made his car perform a quite extraordinary turn in about thirty rapid shuffles back and forth before dashing away again around the bend towards the lane where the gate had been left swinging. It was the black Ford and the swift about-turn had occurred when its bald-headed driver had stepped around the front of his car and found himself being presented with a close view of a policeman’s motorcycle.
I stood there too stunned to really register shock. Quite honestly, it had never occurred to me to think that I was the common theme in this run of oddness rather than the Manor. Only here I was gripping the coarse folds of one of many aged coats, merging with them, really. And thinking that I’d met bombs and war, and wasted years dreading that all the human nastiness that ran like a vein through the whole lot might persist into peacetime, and yet at the same time I’d still happily been convinced that none of it had ever been specifically directed at me. Now, though, this man had apparently taken to calling on my doorstep just as soon as I’d left myself with no real chance of catching any bus anywhere and I was feeling as though this one thing were about to prove that my attempt to find a little perspective here was set to be horribly skewed the wrong way. Where I had meant to assert once and for all that nastiness had no place in my daily life at all, these people appeared determined to prove that it very specifically did.
‘Changed his mind, did he?’ PC Rathbone joined me in the hall, small eyes in a sunburnt face wrinkling comfortably at the now vacant trackway. ‘Oh, no, here he is back again.’
The policeman was oblivious to the fact that this was an entirely different car. I couldn’t quite see its nose well enough to say what make of vehicle it was, but this time the gate was carefully pushed shut and the black bonnet that drew to a halt at the end of my garden contained the unmistakeable might of a very powerful engine. It seemed that I had been partially right to think the Manor owned its share of this strangeness because here was its representative arriving in person at my garden gate. It must be said that the news didn’t exactly come as a relief.
Willpower made me shake off the clawing grasp of musty coats and the proximity of the amiable policeman and step out onto the path. My hands met and gripped the weathered wood of the gate and I waited there while the car creaked and Captain Langton climbed out. I saw him hesitate fractionally as he saw me there, but then he turned to press the car door shut. Unlike the other man, this man didn’t even quiver when he stepped around the nose of his car and his eyes fell upon the policeman’s motorcycle.
His eyebrows lifted a fraction though when I didn’t open the gate for him. Instead I leaned across it with my weight on my hands to tell him in an unfriendly whisper, ‘PC Rathbone is here asking about Mr Winstone’s injury. And did you see the other car?’ I could tell from the brief drift of his attention towards the empty lane that he hadn’t. ‘It was the man from the Manor but PC Rathbone thinks you’re him. He didn’t notice that the other car drove away and you’ve arrived in a different car. Are you sure you want to see him now?’
I stopped myself from turning this round into a plea to stay with a fierce jerk of determination. I was, I think, expecting the Captain to make his excuses to leave. I suppose I was encouraging it. I couldn’t see a way for him to come in without having to either lie or make me explain that he was not the same man that the other driver had been. And despite his repeated requests for discretion, I didn’t quite think lying was his usual habit. At the same time it was suddenly hitting me with the kind of tension that makes every part of the mind ache that I ought to really be wondering why that other man had called here, and how that man had known where to find me at all and what I would do if the burglar was only waiting for these people to go before coming back again.
To stop myself from seeing this second man as my salvation, I made myself wonder what he wanted from me now.
It was a fair question. The Captain was scrutinising my unsmiling face; trying to trace that hostility to its source. He hadn’t come here expecting this. I suppose he’d presumed the manner of my exit from his house hadn’t quite paved the way for plain unfriendliness.
I thought for a moment he might be imagining that I was trying to send him away without talking to the policeman because I was afraid of betraying that I was actually a party to the bald man’s actions. The Captain’s own features were carrying a question. But when his mouth finally moulded itself into speech, it wasn’t to announce his departure or add fuel to my increasing sense of isolation. It merely asked, ‘Are you going to let me in?’
I let him in. I stepped sideways with my hands still gripping that gate so that it swung on its hinges. Then, with one final guarded glance at my face, the Captain stepped past me onto the awkwardly narrow space of the path and on into the hallway of my cousin’s house. With no steps to climb, there was no sign of the faint unevenness in his stride now. I eased the gate shut and followed. I was in time to hear his opening greeting to the policeman. It was astounding after all he had made me swear not to say.
The Captain said coolly, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. Captain Richard Langton. Has Miss Sutton told you about her encounter with an unusual car today? No? You should know that there is a man in this neighbourhood who has taken to driving about at speed and indulging in near-misses with pedestrians.’
I thought his manner was designed to carry meaning for me, I don’t know why. Well, actually, I did know why; I just didn’t like it. It struck me that this steady release of information was the Captain’s way of exerting control over me and this scene, and the idea was deeply, unreasonably offensive. I didn’t want to be cast in a passive role here. Not even when the act itself might have been intended to assure me that he believed that my nervousness belonged to something more complicated than the guilt of being caught red-handed meeting his burglar. The Captain might have been exposing our secret to the policeman purely to reduce the threat I might pose if he should prove to have been wrong about me. But it was more likely that the Captain thought the threat to me was unmanageable enough that I needed to be sheltered by someone like him; someone like an experienced soldier who would choose for me which decisive action to take. Any minute now and he’d be telling me not to worry again.
I approached as the policeman asked him seriously, ‘Really?’ PC Rathbone drew out his notebook again and licked the tip of his pencil. ‘Can you describe the car?’
The Captain had heard my tread on the step and was gracious enough to step aside slightly to allow me to join them in
the gloom of Aunt Edna’s coat-rack. There seemed to be some expectation that I would answer. Both the men fixed their gazes upon me. But when I drew a hesitant breath, the Captain recounted crisply, ‘Black paintwork. A Ford perhaps, but I shouldn’t think it was locally owned since there aren’t many cars of any sort round here and the driver is dressed like a neat little businessman. Aged about forty, sorry, fifty.’ A nod to me. ‘He called at the Manor earlier. Apparently he picked up one of Miss Sutton’s bags and gave her a fright and now he’s just turned up here.’
He was, I noticed, continuing the theme of making light of the loss of my things and I didn’t like that either.
But I didn’t do anything about it. I stood there, hugging myself and mute, in my cousin’s hallway while PC Rathbone swelled complacently. ‘Perhaps this little chap called here to make his apologies and saw my machine outside and took fright himself?’
The policeman’s lower lip was puckering in an enquiring sort of way. I felt compelled to say in a voice made tight and rapid by something that came close to temper, ‘Perhaps. But you should know that the man wasn’t all that little and he really had no reason to take my case.’
It was then that I saw the expression behind the Captain’s eyes quite suddenly. He’d been hiding it before behind his calm assertion of command over these proceedings. I knew now this had simply been his own natural urge to establish order here while he calculated how far my ongoing hostility implied my efforts towards secrecy were indicative of a separate, deeper complication. And his urge to take charge was contradicted by his appreciation for my protection of his father. I added nothing more and watched him read the faint slackening of my lips.
There was the barest flicker of recognition in that hazel gaze. Then the Captain waited as the policeman jotted down a few notes. As the last line was written and the notebook snapped shut, the man from the Manor added, ‘You’ll naturally be adding this house to your round later, won’t you, Constable?’