by Lorna Gray
Then a smaller crowd went past with the Abbeys and I was free at last to turn quite blindly to the corner to retrieve Detective Fleece’s discarded coat. Bloody or not, I took the wretched thing and used it to beat out every raw feeling on the growing flames of that neglected fire.
Fighting the fire made the hayloft darker, mainly because I could see very little else but the bright flares of smouldering strands of hay. We were lucky because the spreading blaze had to work its way along each blade of dried grass in turn and the ancient oak floorboards beneath were tougher than they looked. The worst of the job was keeping the disturbed wisps from taking root in one of the stacks. Or drifting down through the boards into the stables below. I didn’t dare step past the crowd to go and look because if I’d found everything as it ought to be down there, it would have left me with nothing to do except find the Colonel.
Instead, through the messy smog I created I must still have perceived some of the movement in the crowd around Duckett. I knew Detective Fleece was standing on the far side of the partition, pressing a fresh bundle of cloth to his upper arm. He was a sagging shape in the smutty air. He tried to hand his handcuffs to someone who was passing by – someone in ordinary clothes with lighter hair, who was Danny, perhaps – but they ignored him because they were coming to help me with the fire. Anyway, PC Rathbone was already there and he was the only man on the scene whose face wasn’t set into savage lines. This was his first arrest and he was loving it.
And then someone was able to relieve the exhausted detective from the job of standing guard over that gun and he, in his turn, could move to place a hand on Richard’s shoulder. I saw Richard turn and look up at the detective. I watched them exchange a few grim words. There was a glance at me. Finally Richard rose to his feet and let the detective take his turn at bending low over the unharmed but frightened man.
Then Richard dusted off his hands and came to me.
I hadn’t noticed that the person who had added a more practical hand to my efforts with the fire had left me alone again. And that the light was almost entirely absent here now because the air was unhealthily thick, the fire was out and the distant hatch in the end wall was open but obscured by busy policemen. Richard was putting out his hand to lightly dissuade mine from beating any longer at the floorboards and saying with a definite roughness in his voice, ‘For someone who hates grand gestures, you certainly seem dead set on performing as many as you can of your own for the sake of saving my home and my people, wouldn’t you say? Father told me what you did.’
The shock of finally finding time for calmer thought in this dead space of darkness and heat pierced the other shock that was embedded deep into my heart. He had found his father alive. I felt I should be worrying and instead I was asking in a voice so level it sounded wrong, ‘What … what did your father tell you?’
I think Richard must have felt my pulse through my hand; it was the contradiction to my voice. His own voice was so steady now that there was almost a lick of humour in it when he told me, ‘Father was very proud of his play-acting while he built up an image of a heart attack in the kitchen. He told me how you ensured he was left behind, as if we hadn’t already heard it for ourselves. But he was also, I’m afraid, the reason why we missed every fresh chance to get to you. Until the last one.’
The sudden deepening into apology made me uneasy. My hand stirred restlessly within his. I felt his fingers soothe mine as I asked, ‘You were there?’
‘Of course.’
That oddly level voice of mine was back again. ‘Did Detective Fleece know?’
‘I think he hoped.’
After a moment, Richard told me, ‘We had a small team in the dining room, but I was outside at first. Beneath the kitchen window with PC Rathbone and a few others. We were there when you came out. Did you notice how Duckett came out in the midst of you as you passed from house to barn? I imagine he thought it was an effective way of preventing anyone from taking a pot shot at him as he came out, which it was.’
It was helping me that he was speaking so unemotionally. We might just as easily been talking about a strategy for catching a bus. It allowed me to pretend that I could speak as plainly as he did. I asked, ‘How much did you hear of what was said?’
‘Enough. That is, enough that my father’s actions were entirely unnecessary. Noble, but unnecessary. We’d certainly heard Detective Fleece’s loud instructions to prepare for Duckett’s retreat into the barn and if we hadn’t, we would have learned where you’d gone pretty swiftly. The alarm was raised by the fellow who’d been called out of the interview to hear the warning that Duckett’s car had been found. He saw Abbey’s dive into the kitchen when he was coming to relay the news to me at the watershed. They all knew I’d want to get back to the house if Duckett was loose in the vicinity. Unfortunately, my father didn’t know any of this and didn’t wait long enough for anyone to tell him. He crashed about through the house and finally located me just as we were moving on Detective Fleece’s instructions and trying to find a way through that hatch into the hayloft. Meeting my father was why our usefulness was limited to hanging onto the hatch for grim death when Mrs Abbey tried it, I’m sorry to say. Father insisted I had to know what you’d said about the warehouse. I suppose he felt I should know precisely who we were facing. He also had the housekeeper’s keys, as if we needed them, because Abbey had lied there too, as it turned out – presumably to reduce Duckett’s ideas of escape. The whole contraption was tied up with a piece of string and a stick.’
It had been an act. The Colonel’s gasping had been an act, at least in the main. And the policeman must have been aware of it as well to have known to keep me away and to distract Duckett from testing the old man’s pulse.
Richard’s voice deepened. He added rather less easily, ‘By the time Father had finished running about, he really had worked himself to the point of collapse and it took us a while to get to the gist of the message that he felt was so important to convey. He wasn’t exactly … coherent. But he did talk about you.’
Richard was watching my face. He let me understand the seriousness of the Colonel’s present condition, and then he added grimly, ‘I think … I think he did it for me. Because he knew that you mattered.’
There was a shuffle beyond the partition as Duckett was hauled to his feet and taken away. I watched him go for a moment and then I said gently, ‘I’m sorry, Richard.’
It was hard for him that this costly and unnecessary act was his father’s plea for redemption. This had been the desperate self-sacrifice of an old warrior run along far more ancient lines than any recent model of war. The Colonel had been fighting to retrieve some lost honour and leaving behind a frantic wish that the gift would be judged and accepted. It was a relief for me, really, that Richard would never know how his father’s plans had failed to communicate themselves to me. Because while Richard was once again being forced to temper his reaction for the sake of shielding the old man’s dignity, this time there was also a sense that for both of them this was the moment they laid John’s memory to rest.
It was easier then to ask in a stronger voice, ‘Where is the Colonel now?’
‘In hospital, I should hope. I should say he isn’t very well and although it would have been the norm to put the man to bed and call the doctor, since all they do is prescribe aspirin and rest when it’s a problem with the heart, we knew he’d never stay put. So Hannis and your cousin took charge of purloining Matthew Croft’s car for the trip to Gloucester. They’ll get him to the hospital there and I trust them to care for him until I can get down in person later … Emily?’
Duckett had creaked his way out of the hatch to a waiting car. I risked a glance at Richard’s face. And had the disconcerting suspicion that Richard knew full well that I’d been oblivious to the lie. That he was observing the resolve in me as I claimed the right of guarding this secret. The sense of it shook away my stupor and this strange reserve at last. I was free. It was very much time to find some fresher ai
r.
I eased my hand out of his grip. I led the way down the stairs, not out of that low hatch into the space above the church where that police car was bearing Duckett away, but on and down, retracing my steps past the goat stable, which was empty now. Presumably the poor creature had been taken outside by some kind-hearted person who had thought to act in case the whole loft should have gone up with the spilled oil from that lamp.
Then I was taking that first step outside and it came as a shock, somehow, after all that gloom, to remember that the world outside was busy and it must now be no later than mid-afternoon on a glorious summer’s day. I’d been meaning, I think, to go into the Manor, but the kitchen was overrun with policemen who were recording every small detail of the scene. The telephone was ringing and answered in the house. So I stalled there on the threshold of the tithe barn, in the brief island of stillness where the sunshine met the weathered stone wall. This was the place where a day or so before my bicycle had rested. I found I was hugging myself, drawing life from the sun and the sudden release of seeing the busy effort of all these people working to restore order.
I said inconsequentially, ‘We destroyed your car, I’m sorry.’
‘Pretty thoroughly, yes,’ Richard agreed. The air out here was scented by the ruins of that proud Lagonda. As I had hoped, it had rolled safely away from the house, but unfortunately it had come to a stop against the machine barn. Unlike our little pool of oil in the hayloft, the fire had fought a longer battle out here. A chain of men were bucketing water over the blackened skeleton of metalwork while the high timbers of the barn doors showed where flames had begun crawling their way upwards to the roof.
Richard’s dry humour as he remarked on it made me give my tension a little shake, all of a sudden, until something easier appeared in its place. It came with a little sideways glance that carried some of the warmth of the stones at my back. He was still with me. He was beside me, already propping a shoulder against the stone corner that framed the small tithe barn door. I claimed the support of the wall and leaned back. He was much taller than me when we stood like this. And reassuringly companionable too while a rush of men and a few women scurried past us uphill, muttering about setting a hose to the tanks in the watershed.
Richard tipped his head at the departing backs. ‘I feel as though I ought to go and help, but somehow I think it’s good for him to be given the chance to wreak his own idea of order at long last upon the Langton estate, with full benefit of law and necessity.’
He was referring to the man who had marched past at the head of the group. This was the man who had been at the scene of Duckett’s arrest and had helped me with the fire. And the man who had, now I came to think about it, only really left me when Richard had climbed to his feet.
I caught Richard watching me. I asked him, ‘Who is that? I thought it was Danny.’
‘Matthew Croft.’ A corner of his mouth twitched. His arms were folded too as he leaned against the stonework, but unlike me he was relaxed. The bandage about his hand and wrist was grey now. His suit jacket was dusted and unbuttoned and the recent exertion had darkened his hair just a little. The stone doorway framed him perfectly, dark behind and glorious sunlight on his face. He was the man who had written that easy little note about his trip to Athens.
My eyes took it all in, every vivid little detail of his presence cast in high relief as, oblivious, his gaze ran downhill again and he told me, ‘Mr Croft came steaming down here in his car about a minute after the first gunshots. On any normal day the crack of a gun wouldn’t have raised so much as a murmur, since we’re in the depths of the countryside, but after the chaos he’d already witnessed today he was hardly going to presume it was a gamekeeper bagging pigeons.’
I could see Detective Fleece and he was looking like a man who was about to come and ask us some questions. And at the same time the determined rhythm of the work at the machine barn showed just what fire meant to these people at harvest time.
Richard waited for me to turn my head. Then he shared some of his grimmer thoughts for the first time. ‘Do you know,’ he remarked slowly, ‘I think he actually meant to give the thing to me.’
He meant Duckett. He was exposing the memory of those things I wished could be forgotten; the devastating shadow of what Duckett might have done, or Richard might, which my mind still half believed had happened and that my beautiful freedom in this space outside was a dreaming denial of it.
As I shivered, Richard added, ‘I think Duckett knew he wasn’t going to get away and he was making one last great effort to shake off the evidence against him. I think he must have paid enough attention to the accusations you’d been levelling at Abbey to imagine that I might be relieved to have the chance to hide the thing. He believed I’d conceal it for him for the sake of my father.’
The chill grew worse when Richard’s disbelief and his sheer grateful relief for the narrowness of his escape made me recall vividly just how precisely this man knew already what it felt like to be struck by a bullet. It cast a rather different slant on the horror of that brief struggle with the long barrel of the revolver against his stomach. It released a fearsome restless energy in me that became an ache in every limb as I confessed in a lurch, ‘I couldn’t do it. Mrs Abbey gave me the tools to stop him and I couldn’t do it. I could have stopped him. But I didn’t. I wasn’t fierce enough. I don’t think I could quite believe it was necessary. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary. Because clearly, beneath all the madness and revenge, Duckett never was actually a murderer.’
I checked. The contradiction was like a scar on my memory, because the intent had been there. Beside me, Richard was quick to feel my distress. His voice was suddenly utterly firm. ‘Didn’t you hear what the detective was saying to you just before he gave us the command to come in?’
I gave a hasty shake of my head.
‘Detective Fleece was shouting at you to hold your nerve for a while longer. He just wanted you to give him the time to close the distance between himself and Duckett. It was a matter of yards, at most. He just wanted a few seconds.’
I was biting my lip. And blinking fiercely. This reassurance was the wrong thing for him to say. It was proving that this idea I had that the sunlight was all I needed to be able to shrug off every tension – after all, what had happened to me really? – was a sham. This strange alienation I was feeling was all too real. I couldn’t quite get my behaviour right. I was standing against my wall and feeling suddenly the clumsiness of smiling, or not, as was very much the case at this moment, without ever truly knowing if either was the correct expression to be wearing.
Beside me, Richard gave me a moment to absorb his point about the policeman’s motivation, which I singularly failed to do, and then he told me very plainly, ‘The policeman’s just like you and me and every other person who possesses a halfway decent hope of rebuilding some normality after the war. Today, in that kitchen and then the hayloft, he was trying to establish a way of arresting those people for the crimes they’d already committed. He wasn’t waiting for them to goad each other into committing something even more depraved. And I can tell you that he was absolutely, uncompromisingly certain that the first real violence wasn’t going to be forced out of you. If you’d struck with that knife, they’d have succeeded in making you the only killer in that little piece of hell.’
That final word rang on for a moment, before he added grimly, ‘I can hardly even bring myself to contemplate the destruction you’d have wreaked upon your peace of mind if you’d been left facing that. And the same rule applies to the cost of my own actions. So, while I’ll admit that you were taking a terrible risk by trying a path of disarmament, and another time you might have been proved devastatingly wrong, you weren’t mistaken this time. And you weren’t even making that choice alone. Because although you didn’t plan for it, I was there.’
There ought to have been peace in those forceful words. But I still couldn’t quite break free of those last minutes in that hayloft. And n
ow I abruptly had the discomfort of knowing that although I didn’t want it to, my awkwardness was abruptly persisting in ringing on and on upon the principle of Richard’s presence in that place too. I had the sudden guilt of knowing that if I didn’t get my manner quite right this time and shrug off this growing distress, he might begin to think I was blaming him for intervening, when he knew full well I had resolved to bear no more sacrifices.
Only I wasn’t. How could I, when I’d already accepted his father’s idea of heroism and every muscle of mine still ached with the memory of grasping Duckett’s deep bitter lesson that some things went beyond right and wrong and the simple mechanics of the thing had meant that I’d let Richard step between us? And the truth was that after all my deep protestations about the wrongfulness of that kind of burden, I’d been utterly, criminally glad of it because otherwise I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
It was at that moment that Detective Fleece sidled a little nearer. My entire mind shied from having to explain all this to him too and while it was doing that, I heard Richard say abruptly and quite carelessly, ‘I love you.’
The statement was at complete odds with the bitter thoughts that were racing through my mind. After a day of manipulations and couched demands for things that ought to have been left well alone, it was a contradiction that hurt every nerve. It dragged my head round sharply. I peered at him through a confusion that was a kind of headache and said blankly, ‘What?’
He stood there beside me, still propped against the bright stone wall, and told me calmly, ‘I love you.’ The statement probably shouldn’t have needed an explanation, but it did. It came on an almost conciliatory note. ‘I’m just cancelling out the venom they’ve been working on you.’
I was supposed to feel my liberation. I was supposed to smile. I blinked numbly instead. ‘Oh.’
It was an idiotically useless thing to say. Suddenly he had eased himself away from the wall. He was stepping round before me. It wasn’t for the sake of enfolding me in his arms, though my befuddled heart wished he would. One hand was by his side and the other was perhaps drifting nearer me and he seemed braced, all of a sudden. Businesslike. As though this marked the end of a conference. And the policeman wasn’t here for me. He’d merely left the crowd by the smouldering car because he hadn’t yet found time to have his wound dressed and he was craving a moment of peace in order to test whether the flow of blood had stopped. It had, but the blood had dried in vivid lines down his wrist.