“I hope you’re right,” said Leslie fervently. “I suppose you can’t tell me what this is all about?”
“You suppose correctly. You’ll soon know, but I won’t anticipate. Now let me ask you the one question I somehow never asked you before. Did you kill him?”
“No,” said Leslie without over-emphasis, almost gently.
“Then you’ll be going home to your wife, and the worst that can happen is that you may be a little late. She’ll forgive you for that, long before she forgives us for scaring you.”
Leslie was so unreasonably soothed and calmed by this tone that he forgot to take offence at the assumption that he was scared. He walked into the police station briskly, wild to get to his fence and either fall or clear it; and suddenly finding himself without George, had to turn back and look for him. He had stopped to speak to a boy in a grammar school blazer who was standing in the hallway.
“My son,” he explained as he hurried to overtake his charge. “He’s still hoping, and so am I, that I’m going to be able to drive him home. I should be off duty by this time.”
“Oh, now, look,” said Leslie with a faint recovering gleam in his eye, “I should hate to keep you after hours, I can easily come some other time.”
“That’s the stuff!” George patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “You keep up that standard, and you’ll be all right. Always provided you’re telling us the truth, of course. Come on, three flights up, and I’m afraid the taxpayer doesn’t provide us with a lift.”
Dominic watched them climb to the first turn of the staircase and pass out of sight like that, his father’s hand on the young man’s shoulder. Was it possible that it was all over already? Leslie Armiger didn’t look like a murderer. But then, what murderer ever does? But he didn’t!
Dominic was convulsed by the secret, uneasy part of him that couldn’t help identifying itself with those in trouble, those trapped by circumstances and cornered, however deservedly, by the orderly ranks of the law-abiding. He felt the demon in his own nature, and trembled, knowing there was no end to his potentialities. He had to let part at least of his sympathy go out to the hunted, because the quarry could so easily be himself. Infinitely more terrible, it could be somebody who mattered to him so desperately as to make him forget himself. It could be Kitty! And yet he wanted not to be glad that it should be the young man in the worn, expensive suit, with the strained smile and the apprehensive eyes.
The surge of relief in his heart outraged him, and drove him out from under the desk-sergeant’s friendly but inquisitive eye into the impersonal pre-twilight of the September evening, to wait on one of the seats in the strip of garden.
So it was that he saw the red Karmann-Ghia swoop beautifully inward from the road to park beside the ragman’s cart, and Kitty swing her long, slender legs out from the driver’s door. His heart performed the terrifying manoeuvre with which he was becoming familiar, turning over bodily in his breast and swelling until he thought it would burst his ribs.
She closed the door of the car with unaccustomed slowness and quietness, and walked uncertainly across the concrete towards the door; and as she came her steps slowed, until within a few yards of the step she halted altogether, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, in an agony of indecision. She looked to right and left as though searching for the courage to go forward; and she saw Dominic, motionless and silent in the corner of the wooden seat, clutching his school-bag convulsively against his side.
He couldn’t believe, even when her eyes lit on him, that it would get him anything. He was just somebody she’d run into once, casually, and not expected to meet again. Probably she wouldn’t even remember. But her eyes kindled marvellously, a pale smile blazed over her face for a moment, though it served only to illuminate the desperate anxiety that instantly drove it away again. She turned and came to him. He jumped to his feet, so shaken by the beating of his heart that he scarcely heard the first words she said to him.
“Dominic! I’m so glad to find you here!” He came out of a cloud of fulfilment and ecstasy to find himself sitting beside her, his hands clasped in hers, her great eyes a drowning violet darkness close before his face. She was saying for the second time, urgently, desperately: “Is Leslie in there? They were saying in the shops the police fetched him from Malden’s. Is it true? Do you know if he’s in there?”
“Yes,” he said, stammering, “he came with my father. Only a few minutes ago.” He was back on the earth, and the bump had hurt a little, but not much, because of her remembering his name, because of her turning to him so gladly. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting even that. And in any case he couldn’t be bothered with such trivialities as his own disappointments, while she carried such terrible trouble in her face.
“Oh, God!” she said. “Is he under arrest?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, not yet, , , “
“Your father’s in there, too? I’d rather it be him than any of the others. I’ve got to talk to him, Dominic. Now I’ve got to.”
She released his hands with a vast sigh, and put back with a hopeless gesture the fall of smooth, pale hair that shadowed her forehead.
“I’ve got to tell him,” she said in a tired, tranquil voice, “because if I don’t they’ll only put it on to poor Leslie, and hasn’t enough happened to him already? I won’t let them touch him.” She lifted her head and looked into Dominic’s eyes with the practical simplicity of a child confiding its sins, relieved to exchange even for punishment a burden too great to bear a moment longer. “I killed his father, you see.”
CHAPTER VIII.
DOMINIC TRIED TO speak, and couldn’t find his voice for a moment, and even when he did it tended to shift key unexpectedly, in the alarming and humiliating way he’d thought he was finished with; but Kitty didn’t seem to notice.
“You mustn’t say such things. Even if, if something happened that makes you feel to blame, that can’t be true, and you shouldn’t say it.”
“But I did it, Dominic. I never meant to, but I did. He came to me, and he said: ‘I’m just going to kick Leslie out of here once for all, and boy, shall I enjoy it. And then I’ve got something to tell you. Not here, you come out to the barn, we can be quiet there. Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘to get rid of his lordship, and then come on over.’ And I wasn’t going to go, I’d made up my mind not to go. I got out the car and started to drive home, and then after all I didn’t, I went round by the lane to the road behind the barn, and parked the car along under the trees by that little wood, and went into the courtyard by the back way. I thought if I begged him just once more he might give in and take Leslie back, and start acting decently to them. After all, he was his son. I couldn’t get it into my head that it was really for keeps. People just don’t act like that. Leslie wasn’t there, only his father. He started telling me all his great plans for the future, all excited and pleased with himself, and he had a magnum of champagne and glasses set out on one of the tables. Oh, Dominic, if you knew how obscenely ridiculous it all was, ,
