by Lorna Gray
The girl bridled at being mentioned in that order of diminishing status as a human – men, policemen and womenfolk. I was also terribly aware of the shift towards obedience in Abbey’s manner as he sidled across the room. Anticipation stalked with him as he let the other man snatch the paper from his hand and returned with him as he reclaimed his place by the dresser, and it was frightening because I began to see that some of Abbey’s attempts to stem my words hadn’t been from dismay that I was exposing him. The mark on my cheek burned like a memory. He’d begged me to help him, but from the first he’d been in danger of steering this scene into a harder depth of tension. With his little lurches across the room, he might have frightened me into calling out for a second time. But not necessarily, I thought, for the sake of calling Richard.
Certainly, he’d given the impression that the risks of antagonising Duckett had been working as powerfully upon his own nerves as they had upon mine. Once his initial excitement from plucking me off the stairs had passed, I had grown deeply conscious of the caution that had kept him back from me just far enough to let me feel some of my own determination. I thought his restraint might have grown from a very ugly instinct that he didn’t want to be near me when Duckett reacted to my next cry for help. But the true weight of his actions was more sinister than that.
I understood now that, above it all, he’d tried to turn every little drift in concentration back to me, by word or by deed. He’d been frustrated when Duckett had persisted in remaining so calm. But now he thought that Duckett was beginning to notice me.
Chapter 30
It was the brief stray of Abbey’s eyes across the room that gave me the clue about the rest. His glance wasn’t for me. It was for the person who had been standing, unmoving and unnoticed, in the space where the broom cupboard met the wall bearing the kitchen door.
Mrs Abbey drew my head round so quickly to the distant corner beyond the policeman that it hurt my neck. Or, at least, reminded me of an ache that had been put there by one of my many falls today. She was still wearing that neatly tailored skirt and jacket in navy of the sort that gave a woman like her a formidable kind of style. She didn’t look like a prisoner but she didn’t exactly look free, either.
Mrs Abbey didn’t notice my shocked dismay. She was staring at her husband. She was exchanging a silent question with him of the sort that only ever occurs between two people who understand each other perfectly. His answer was the faintest of shrugs. I was remembering the way she’d screamed her command to hurry to Richard’s side because he was deranged and he’d kill and I knew then that it had been Richard’s violence she had desperately tried to prevent at the pump house. She’d been afraid that the living Langton would hurt her helpless, defenceless man. And I thought it answered too a little of the question of what she really felt for Richard’s younger brother John. For all her protestations of a deep and abiding friendship with the young master of this estate, she must have had no real faith in the blood that had coursed through John’s veins if she could have instinctively believed the surviving brother capable of acting with that same want of reason today.
Now she was noticing her husband’s desire to draw sound from me, and digesting it. Whatever he was doing here hadn’t formerly been part of any plan of hers.
I thought she was conveying disapproval when she allowed her eyes to drift to me. She told me as if I’d even thought to ask the question, ‘I came in a few minutes before you did. I was looking for you. Or that Captain of yours.’
My lips were dry. It was hard to ask, ‘You were looking for me?’
‘Yes. No one could tell me that Paul was unharmed and still free. I hadn’t any choice. I was going to have to ask you to tell me plainly what had happened. My only other option was to just go home to wait endlessly in that desolate, empty house and it was hardly fair when I did warn you to be quick, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed very cautiously. ‘Yes, yes you did.’
Her lipstick was a garish smudge in a pinched but elegant face as I floundered in the effort of trying to calculate how thoroughly she was meaning to imply she had given up her hope of harnessing the Langton nature. I was also trying to comprehend that she’d just admitted before Duckett that she’d cared to hear about her husband’s condition and, after all the fear and secrecy that Mrs Abbey had worked upon my sympathies, in truth Duckett was entirely indifferent to the lie.
He wasn’t really listening anyway. In fact, at present, he was mesmerised by the letter. All of a sudden he wasn’t quite so calm after all, because those few paragraphs were making his brows pucker. It was like the time under the hospital arches, only this time his anger at his ignorance was amplified because the letter meant nothing to him when he thought it should.
‘May I see?’ This was from the policeman.
Surprised, Duckett complied. I noted that he kept the Webley ready just in case the policeman was intending to rush him, but he wasn’t. Detective Fleece seemed merely curious. We all watched spellbound as he read the letter through.
Duckett’s voice was tight. ‘It’s nothing to do with me?’
‘Nothing,’ confirmed the policeman. Then he folded the letter in half and, apparently for the sake of tidiness because the tabletop was so cluttered, slipped it into the pocket of his coat.
I thought Duckett should have demanded it back. Instead he was staring at the policeman, briefly repulsed. I was silent too. I didn’t quite dare to mention that Abbey had left the letter for me to find. It seemed impossible that Abbey had foreseen this moment, but every note of caution was remembering the way his wife had spoken about the Langton family and that nothing they had left had been designed to do anyone any good. Now I was noticing the way Abbey’s head had turned as Duckett had betrayed his nervousness. And now Duckett seemed to suddenly be focusing on me without anyone needing to steer him into it. He was reaching a hand into a coat pocket to draw out another piece of folded paper. This one was a small square of brown. He handed it to the policeman.
‘Read this,’ Duckett commanded with the beginnings of a smirk. ‘That man has a habit of writing meaningless rubbish about women.’
There was a momentary caution in the detective’s movement as he reached out his hand. There was an intensity of curiosity in Mrs Abbey’s. I believe she and the detective had both misunderstood. They both thought that Duckett was offering another note by John Langton. There was a glimmer of anticipation in the way the policeman unfolded the paper. Then that brief spark of interest abruptly dimmed once again and instead of pocketing this one too, Detective Fleece surprised me by reaching across the table to me. He told me, ‘This one is meant for you, I think.’
I felt the twist in Mrs Abbey’s interest; the disappointment as she learned that this note was only written by John Langton’s other brother. The feeling in her turned to daring that nearly made her step across the room with a demand to see it too. I don’t know what I would have done if she had. As it was, she seemed to change her mind halfway through the act and instead moved past the table into the space of the kitchen counter behind me.
It left me free to meet the detective’s hand with leaden fingers. The paper was the brown wrapping that had contained Richard’s sandwiches yesterday. This note was very short and the disappointment for the detective was that it was by Richard’s hand and not John’s. The joke for Duckett was that this was the second time that Richard had revealed some of his feelings. This note began:
Sir. We haven’t been formally introduced but I saw your encounter with my friend Miss Sutton just now at the docks. I am, as you may have gathered, a captain in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. My home is London and I’m here for a matter of days at the most. It is as long as my commanding officers can spare me from my duties, which are of an independent nature.
It was, to all intents and purposes, a bland reassertion of his credentials. No threats, no warnings, beyond the statement that he wasn’t exactly an untrained weakling. Just a reference to the fact he’d been a wi
tness to Duckett’s unpleasantness on the waterside outside his office and perhaps a hint that Richard understood the delusion Duckett was under about my relationship with Abbey. Richard’s own cool assertion that he was my friend was his answer to the mistake. The paragraph that came next was the part he must have added as an afterthought at the very end of the discussion we’d shared under the shade of that hospital porch.
In fact, given what you and I have just heard, and the hint it bears about Miss Sutton’s criminally overlooked capabilities, I think I should ask her if she would like to come along on my next job. The work doesn’t prohibit contact with members of the public and I think she’ll enjoy the challenge of travelling as I do, if she doesn’t think it all too soon. Don’t you agree?
Yours, Captain R Langton.
He meant Greece. He meant his trip to Athens. This was what had prompted him yesterday to comment on the change in the way I’d spoken about my former hope of joining my cousin’s next foreign holiday. I’d slipped into setting the plan firmly in my past; presumably while telling myself very earnestly that I’d learned in the midst of one of those intriguingly bewildering debates with Richard that my idea of searching for liberty abroad was instead drifting vaguely into the new-found and mildly hesitant thought that freedom might dwell wherever my life chose to put it.
This principle was a falsehood, of course. I must have known all the while that the change was really motivated by the rather less worthy but significantly more emboldening consideration that if I wanted to see more of Richard, I might enjoy the chance of it if I stayed in London.
But in writing this note, Richard knew this was different. This wasn’t some dream of mine of little outings to coffee houses or the pictures and trusting that life might be allowed to take its course without testing my confidence, for once. He cannot have expected me to have the chance to read this note, but still, it was as though it had been penned for me all the same.
Because if I were to go with him on a job, we would have to be married first. And how long did you have to wait before you could marry these days, thanks to the anxious habits of couples who had met during the war? Barely longer than it took to get the licence.
I was dragged out of the brief forgetfulness of a furtive smile by the chill of being reminded that the man’s forbidding, fragile old father was right by my side. The movement of that old, stern hand on the back of my chair was what had roused me, but he wasn’t staring at the note in my hand any more, or my face, if he couldn’t read Richard’s handwriting at that range. If those severe grey eyes had been reading the change in my expression at all, now the Colonel was suddenly reacting to the way that Abbey had stopped hovering in an impotent kind of way by that dresser.
The taller man wasn’t particularly threatening me now. He seemed to have developed a maddening compulsion to pick things up and put them down again. Presumably it had been his nervous hands that had moved the Colonel’s pots and pans onto the table. Now he was picking up a jug and setting it down again. Then he picked up a plate and then a teacup. I was fascinated for a moment. His fingerprints would be everywhere. Then I turned my head once more to the man leaning hard upon the hand that gripped my chair and I saw the old man’s face.
It was as if the Colonel were receiving a physical assault. It was shattering him to perceive this deliberate contamination of the one room in this great sad house that had lately, through the ministrations of his son and perhaps me too, taken on some semblance of being his home. It made me straighten like a bolt in my seat and forget the injunction against action long enough to cry out, ‘Stop it. Stop it! Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?’
‘That’s enough.’
Duckett’s voice came coolly across the room. It was a command for Abbey and he jumped as if he’d been shot. Duckett seemed to have succumbed to the same urge to touch as well because he had taken up both the spare oil lamps from the window ledge near the door, only he was still wearing his gloves.
Duckett was hugging the two lamps to his chest. They were the sort that had bulbous bases to contain the oil and frosted glass globes to spread the light. Briskly he told Abbey, ‘I think you’ve left enough proof that you were here, Paul. Let’s get this done.’ Abbey turned like a puppet towards the table where I was sitting perched in my chair, only to freeze when Duckett’s voice flung itself impatiently across the room to address the woman messing about at the kitchen counter behind me. ‘What are you doing, Florence?’
Mrs Abbey appeared to have spent the past minutes moving about, quietly opening drawers and cupboards in the space where the oven stood. She made a show of discovering that all the glassware had been moved to the table. She selected one and bore it to the sink to run a tap into it. ‘Getting a drink of water.’
She wasn’t pouring the water for herself. She stepped around the Colonel and reached to slide the glass across the table at me, on a course that didn’t upset the stacks of crockery her husband had set there. She stayed there, leaning across the table, expecting me to take the glass from her. I stayed clasping the seat of my chair with whitening hands and didn’t move.
‘See?’ remarked Duckett tersely. ‘She doesn’t want it.’ Then he straightened briskly with his lamps rattling in his arms. ‘Paul? Bring her. And you two gentlemen can walk before me.’
Florence Abbey could presumably make her own choice about where to walk.
Then Duckett hesitated. Rather clumsily, he had worked the pair of lamps into the crook of one elbow and now he was staring at the weapon in his hand, as though it were a faintly unsettling discovery. He asked the policeman in a way that gave a brief kick of hope, ‘What did you say about this gun?’
The question came as Abbey twisted across the room and reached past his wife for me. I thought he would stop again; keep himself clear from the line of fire as he had every time before. He didn’t. Something had changed. This wasn’t controlled. My skin was crawling away. This was because the touch of Abbey’s hand through the thin sleeve of my frock felt like he was leaving his prints on me as he had with the plates and the jug. He wasn’t remotely acting any more like a man who thought Richard must appear at any moment to save him. This wasn’t about making me call Richard. Even his own shout might do that. Or his wife’s. She was standing there only a yard or more behind him.
Abbey had allowed himself to be brought here. He’d obeyed Duckett’s command to leave a nice array of marks for the fingerprinting dust to find. He was obeying more orders now and it was because clearly for Abbey escape depended solely upon the fact that he’d given Duckett that gun. Only, judging by the way he was beginning to panic, equally clearly Duckett’s interest in those lamps represented his failure.
I was still resisting his efforts to prise me from the chair. But his weren’t the only hands dragging at me because the old man was huffing and snatching at me too. The Colonel’s grip upon my arms was as excruciating as the way Abbey’s fists were forcibly working my fingers free from the seat of my chair. Practically standing above me, the Colonel was trying to use his shoulder to barge Abbey aside. Futilely, as it turned out, and it was evident that the Colonel hadn’t been remotely worrying about his pots and pans just now; he’d been conscious of their irrelevance when it came to the danger here for me. And that made it awful because this was the protectiveness of an old soldier whose last shreds of dignity belonged to the sense of honour where even old men had to defend women and children.
Before I even knew it, I was stopping fighting and was out of the chair and standing in Abbey’s grip and saying on an urgent undertone to no one in particular, ‘The warehouse fire.’
And then, while the Colonel was muttering a breathless, ‘Eh?’ I was turning my head to Duckett and saying incredulously, ‘Abbey’s terrified of fire. You know what the warehouse smoke did to his lungs and you’re torturing him with the threat of more. So he gave you the Webley because it was a stolen gun and he did it because it was the only thing he had left that might save him once you’d caug
ht him, even though he knew full well he’d already personally left his mark with his own idiotic attack on Richard down by the pump house.’ I had to take a breath. Abbey’s grip was hurting and he seemed to be trying to get a hand over my mouth, only it was easy enough to twist away. Then I was flinching away properly within the restraint of his grip because he was abandoning silence for the sake of attempting instead to strike me. This time it wasn’t for any calmly conceived strategy. He didn’t like the way I was talking about fire. It was hard to fend him off without fighting.
But as I twisted, I saw the flicker that passed across Mrs Abbey’s face even if Duckett didn’t. She hadn’t known before this moment the depth of their failure at the pump house. She could see that I had fixed my nerve upon unseating her husband’s plan and I didn’t care that it angered him or that she might feel it endangered her. Because I absolutely was not going to wrestle with Abbey to the extent that Duckett would be forced to restore order.
Abbey had lost control now and instead of trying to subdue me, he was roaring at me. He was bellowing, ‘I didn’t give him the blasted thing. He caught me as I was running home to my wife. He’d been nosing about your cottage. It was the cottage that gave me the idea of bringing Brian here. He might have planned to use my wife’s home to prove I was the one who’d been running around burning things. So I distracted him by telling him that I’ve been staying at the tithe barn since the housekeeper left, because the alternative was Eddington and my children are there—’
‘Don’t mention them.’ The caution from his wife was spoken urgently.
‘The hayloft in the tithe barn has been your haunt for several weeks?’ The policeman’s voice masked her plea. His question was given clearly with the practical calm that made it seem as though he were merely continuing his interrupted interview. ‘How were you never seen?’