, “
His mouth ached with all the things he wanted to say to her and mustn’t; his heart filled his chest so tightly that he could hardly breathe. “Kitty, I wish there was some way I could help you,” he said huskily.
“You do help me, you are helping me, you’re lovely to me. You keep right on looking at me as if I was a friend of yours, and you haven’t moved away from me even an inch. But you will!”
“I won’t!” he said in a gasp of protest. “Never!”
“No, perhaps you wouldn’t ever, you’re not the kind. Let me go on telling you, it makes it easier, and my God, I need rehearsing, this is going to be lousy on the night whatever I do.”
He had her by the hands again, and this time the initiative had been his, and the warm, strong fingers clung to him gratefully, quivering a little.
“He’d had a brainwave,” said Kitty in a half-suffocated voice, laughing and raging. “If Leslie wouldn’t have me and join the businesses up, he would! He was going to marry me himself! That’s what the champagne and the excitement was all about. He didn’t even ask me, he told me. He didn’t even pretend to feel anything for me. When he put his arms round me and wanted to kiss me it wasn’t even sexually revolting, it was just like signing a merger. And I’d been trying to talk to him all the while about Leslie, and he hadn’t even heard me. I was so mad, it was so mean and ludicrous and horrible, I was out of my mind, I couldn’t think of anything except getting away. I just pushed him off like a demon. We were by the table at the top of the stairs, where he’d put the champagne and the glasses. I don’t know how it happened, he went if backwards, and stepped off the edge of the top stair, and went slipping and rolling and clawing all the way down and crashed on the floor. I ran down and past him to the door, I was terrified he’d get up and try to stop me. I wasn’t afraid of him, it wasn’t that, it was just that everything was so foul, I couldn’t have borne it if he’d tried to speak to me again. But he just lay there on his face, and never moved. I didn’t think anything about it, I didn’t stop to see how much he was hurt, I just ran back to the car and left him lying there. So you see, I killed him. And I’ve got to tell them. I never meant to, it never even occurred to me until I was in the car that he might be terribly hurt. But I did it. And I can’t let them go on thinking poor Leslie had anything to do with it.”
When she had finished she lifted her eyes and looked at him closely, already half sorry and half ashamed that she should be so weak as to unload this cruel and humiliating confidence upon a mere child, too old not to be damaged by it, and not yet old enough to be able to evaluate it justly. But it wasn’t a child who was looking steadily at her, it was a man, a very young man, maybe, but unquestionably her elder at that moment. He kept firm hold of her hands when she would have drawn them away, and his eyes held hers when she would have averted them.
“Oh, God!” she said weakly. “I’m a heel to drag you into this.”
“No, you did right, Kitty, really you did. I’ll show you. That was all that happened? You’re sure that was all? You pushed him and he fell down the stairs and knocked himself out. That was all?”
“Wasn’t it enough? He was dead when they found him.”
“Yes, he was dead. But you didn’t kill him.” He knew what he was about to do, and it was so terrible that it almost outweighed the sense of joy and completion that he felt at knowing her innocent, and being able to hold out the image of her in his two hands and show her how spotless it was. Never in his life before, not even as a small, nosy boy, had he betrayed a piece of information he possessed purely by virtue of being George’s son. If he did it he was destroying something which had been a mainspring of his life, and the future that opened before him without it was lonely and frightening, involved enormous readjustments in his most intimate relationships, and self-searchings from which he instinctively shrank. But already he was committed, and he would not have turned back even if he could.
“Listen to me, Kitty. All that was published about Mr. Armiger’s death was that he died from head injuries. But it wasn’t just falling down the stairs that did it. It’s only because of my father’s work that I know this, and you mustn’t tell anyone I told you. After he was lying unconscious somebody took the champagne bottle and battered his head in with it deliberately, hit him nine times, and only stopped hitting him when the bottle smashed. And that wasn’t you! Was it?”
She whispered between parted lips, staring at him in a stupor of horror and incredulity and relief: “No, no, I didn’t, I couldn’t, , , “
“I know you couldn’t, of course you couldn’t. But somebody did. So you see, Kitty, you didn’t kill him at all, you didn’t do anything except push him away from you and accidentally stun him. Somebody else came in afterwards and battered him to death. So you see, there’s no need for you to tell them anything. You won’t, will you? There’ll be nothing in this glove business, they won’t touch Leslie, you’ll see. At least wait until we know.”
She hadn’t heard the half of that, she was still groping after the release and freedom he was offering back to her. The warm flush of colour into her face and hope into her eyes overwhelmed him with a kind of proud humility he had never experienced before.
“You mean it? You wouldn’t just try to comfort me, would you? Not with fairy stories? But you wouldn’t! Oh, Dominic, am I really not a murderess? You don’t know what it’s been like since yesterday morning, since they told me he was dead.”
“Of course you’re not. It’s true what I’ve told you. So you won’t tell them anything, will you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I must. Oh, Dominic, what should I have done without you? Don’t you see, I don’t even mind now, as long as I’m not, what I thought I was. I don’t mind anything now. But I must tell them, because of Leslie. I can show them that he’d gone, and his father was still alive. I can prove he didn’t kill him.” She looked down at him, and was distressed by his consternation, but she knew what she had to do. “I’ve got this far and I’m not turning back now. I’ve had enough of concealing information. At least I can see that Leslie’s safely out of it.”
“But you can’t,” protested Dominic, catching at her wrist and dragging her down again beside him. “You can only prove he didn’t kill him in the short time you were there. They might still think he came back. Somebody came. And don’t you see, if you tell them what you’ve told me, they’ll think you’ve left out the end, they’ll think you stayed and finished him off.”
“I don’t see why you should say that,” said Kitty, wide-eyed. “You don’t think that, you believe me. Why shouldn’t they?”
“Well, because their business is not to believe, and how can you prove it?”
“I can’t,” she agreed, paling a little. “But I can’t turn back now, I couldn’t bear to. You don’t have to worry about me any more, the most wonderful thing anyone could have done for me is done already. You did it.”
