We tested.”
Dominic shut his eyes, but he couldn’t stop seeing the silver sandals glittering in her hands at the Boat Club. They wouldn’t be the same shoes, but he couldn’t stop seeing them.
“I’m sorry, old man,” said George. He rose and drew away gingerly; the front view of Dominic was beginning to be too precarious, he moved considerately to the rear. The slender shoulders were braced and motionless. “It isn’t the end of the world, or of the case, either,” said George, “but it’s no good pretending that the outlook’s rosy, Dom. I had to tell you, in justice to you. Don’t take it too much to heart.”
He laid his hand for an instant on Dominic’s shoulder, and let his knuckles scrub gently at the rigid cheek.
Dominic got up abruptly and steered a blind course for the door, and blundering past Bunty fled for the stairs. Bunty looked after him, looked at George, and hesitated whether to follow. It was George who said warningly: “No!” and shook his head at her. It couldn’t be cured that way, either.
“Let him alone,” said George. “He’ll be all right, just let him alone.”
CHAPTER IX.
BY THE TIME he came down to breakfast next morning he had thought things out for himself, and arrived at a position from which he did not intend to be moved; that was implicit in the set of his jaw and the pallid resolution of his whole face, which seemed to have moved a long stage nearer to its mature form overnight. By his puffy eyelids and the blue hollows under his eyes thinking was what he’d been doing all through the hours of darkness when he should have been sleeping. He arrived at the breakfast table composed and quiet, greeted his parents punctiliously, to show there were no dangerous loose ends dangling, and made himself more mannishly attentive to Bunty than she had ever known him. Gravely she played up to him; having two men in the house was going to be interesting. She had no real complaints against George, but having a rival around wasn’t going to do him any harm, and she was going to enjoy herself. If only it hadn’t had to happen to him this way! She and George had spent the early hours of the morning in subdued and anxious colloquy over him, and it was difficult not to betray that they were watching him with equal anxiety now, intensely aware of every consciously restrained movement he made, even of the hesitations and selections that preceded every word he spoke.
“About last night, Dad,” he said, embarking at last with a shivering plunge which he did his best to make look normal. “I’ve been thinking what I ought to do. I’ve thought over everything you said, and, and thanks for telling me. But there’s one thing I know absolutely, and it’s evidence to me even if it isn’t to you, I mean you can’t possibly know it as I do. When she talked to me Kitty didn’t know how Mr. Armiger was killed. So she couldn’t possibly be the person who killed him. I don’t expect you to be sure of that, because you didn’t see her and hear her, but I did, and I am sure. So all the other things you’ve found out against her can’t really mean that she’s guilty, there has to be some other explanation for them.”
“We shall still be working on it,” said George, “trying to fill up all the gaps. I told you, the case isn’t closed yet.”
“No. But you’ll be trying to fill up the gaps with one idea in mind. The logical end of your gap-filling is a conviction, isn’t it?”
George, moved partly by genuine bitterness and partly by a blind, brilliant instinct for the thing to say that would make them equals, asked with asperity: “Damn it, do you think I like this solution any better than you do?” He didn’t even care, for the moment, whether Bunty caught the smarting note of personal resentment in that, provided it bolstered Dominic’s developing ego.
The blue-ringed eyes shot one rapid, startled glance into his face and were hastily lowered again. They would be stealing measuring looks in his direction with increasing frequency from now on.
“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Dominic cautiously. The tone suggested that he would have liked to linger inwardly over the implications, if there had not been something infinitely more urgent to be considered. “Only I start from what I know, and it makes the whole thing different for me. And so, well, maybe I might get somewhere different, and find out things that you wouldn’t. You can see that I’ve got to try, anyhow.”
“I can see you feel you have to,” agreed George.
“You don’t object?”
“Provided you don’t impede us in any way, how can I object? But if you do happen on anything relevant, don’t forget you have a duty to pass it on to the police.”
“But I suppose that doesn’t mean you have to tell me anything!”
The tone was so arrogant this time that George revised his ideas of the nursing this developing ego needed; it seemed, on the whole, to be doing very well for itself, and there was no sense in letting it get out of hand. “No,” he said firmly. “And after what happened yesterday that can hardly surprise you.”
“O.K.,” said Dominic, abashed and retreating several years. “Sorry!”
He rose from the table with a purposeful face, and marched out without saying a word about his intentions. It was Saturday, so at least he was saved from fretting barrenly over books he wouldn’t even be able to see, and lectures that would be double-Dutch to him. Bunty followed him out into the garden, where he was grimly pumping up the tyres of his bicycle. She didn’t ask any questions, she just said: “Good luck, lamb!” and kissed him; she thought she might justifiably go as far as that, it was what she’d always done and said when she was sending him out to face some dragonish ordeal like the eleven-plus examination or his first day at the grammar school. He recognised the rite, and dutifully raised his head from his labours to offer his mouth, as engagingly and as inattentively as at five years old; but instead of scrubbing off the kiss briskly with the back of his hand and leaning hard on the pump again, he straightened up and looked at her with the troubled eyes that didn’t know from minute to minute whether to be a boy’s or a man’s. The first three ages of man were batting him back and forth among them like a shuttlecock.
“Thanks, Mummy!” he said gruffly, preserving the ritual.
She tucked a ten-shilling note into his pocket. “An advance against your expense account,” she said.
For a moment he wasn’t sure that he was being taken seriously enough. “I’m not kidding,” he said sternly, scowling at her.
“I’m not kidding, either,” said Bunty. “I don’t know the girl, but you do, and if you say she didn’t do it that goes a long way with me. Anything on the level I can do to help, you ask me. Right?”
“Right! Gosh, thanks, Mummy!”
It wasn’t just for the ten shillings, which at first he’d suspected of being a bribe to him to cheer up, it wasn’t even for the offer of help and support, it was for everything she’d implied about his relationship with Kitty: that it was adult, that it was real, that it had importance and validity, and was to be treated with respect. He experienced
