of a dress are really adequate, in the circumstances. You’re not the only one who can connect, my lad. We’d even like to know who it was she called that night. You be working on that one, and let me know when you’ve got the answer.”
He was aware, by the sharpness and intelligence of the silence that followed, that if he had not said too much he had been understood too well. Dominic resettled his collar with great dignity, studying his father intently from the ambush of a composed and inscrutable face.
So it’s like that, said the bright, assuaged eyes. I see!. They may be looking for the gloves to clinch their case, but you’re not, you’re looking for them to break it. You don’t believe she did it! What did I tell you? I knew you’d come round to my way of thinking in the end. He was understandably elated by the knowledge, comforted by not being alone any longer in his faith, but there was something else going on behind the carefully sustained calm of that freckled forehead, something less foreseeable and a good deal more disturbing. He was glad to have an ally, and yet he fixed upon him a look that was far from welcoming. He saw too much, recognised his own sickness with too sharp a sensitivity in someone else, and most penetratingly of all in his father. He’d longed for an ally, but he didn’t want a rival.
“I am working on it,” said Dominic deliberately. “What’s more, I think I’m on to the answer.” But he did not say that he was going to share it, with his father or anyone. Saint George had sighted another banner on the horizon. It was going to be a race for the dragon.
CHAPTER XII.
ON MONDAY MORNING, about an hour before Alfred Armiger was escorted to the grave, against all predictions, by a grim-faced and sombre son, Kitty Norris made a formal appearance of about two minutes in court, and was remanded in custody for a week.
She sat quietly through the brief proceedings, without a smile or a live glance for anyone, even Raymond Shelley who appeared for her. Docilely she moved, stood, sat when she was told, like a child crushed by the burden of a strange place and unknown, powerful, capricious people. Her eyes, hollowed by the crying and the sleeplessness which were both past now, had swallowed half her face. They looked from enemy to enemy all round her, not hoping for a gap in the ranks, but not actively afraid. She had surrendered herself to the current that was carrying her, and whatever blows it dealt her she accepted mutely, because there was no help for it. It was heartbreaking to look at her. At least, thought George, who had brought her to the court, Dominic was spared this.
In the few minutes she spent in court the news had gone round, and there was a crowd waiting to see her come out, and one lone cameraman who erupted in her face before George could shelter her. He ought to have known that Kitty Norris, whose clothes and cars and dates had always made news, couldn’t escape the headlines even on this first unheralded appearance in her new role. For the first time the lovely, hapless face came back to life. She shrank back into George’s arm, frightened and abashed, mistaking raw curiosity for purposeful malignance. He half lifted her into the car, but even then the eyes and the murmurs followed her, gaping alongside the windows as she was driven away.
“Why should they be like that?” asked Kitty, shivering. “What have I ever done to them?”
“They don’t mean any harm, dear,” said the matron comfortably, “they’re just nosy. You get used to it.”
There ought to be something better to say to her than that, thought George, suffering acutely from the brushing of her sleeve against his, and the agonising memory of her warmth on his heart; and yet this queer comfort did seem to calm her. She expected nothing from him, and it was not upon his shoulder that she let her head rest as she was taken back to prison.
“You’ll have to brace up, you know, Kitty,” he said as he helped her out of the car, himself unaware until he had said it that her name was there on his lips waiting to slip out so betrayingly.
“Why?” said Kitty simply, looking through him into a bleak distance.
“Because you owe it to yourself, and to your friends who believe in you.”
The cords of his throat tightened up, outraged that he could ask them to give passage to such unprofessional sentiments. And he told himself afterwards, nursing the smart of being misunderstood, that he deserved no better than he got. For Kitty smiled suddenly, affectionately, shortening her range so that for a moment she really seemed to see him. Then she said in a gentle voice: “Oh, yes, I mustn’t let Dominic down. You tell him I’m coming out fighting when the bell goes. With him in my corner, how can I lose?”
Well, thought George grimly as he drove back towards the centre of Comerbourne, that’s properly accounted for me. The invisible man, that’s all I am, an office, not a person, and an inimical office at that. And it hurt. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but that only made the smart worse. Jealousy is always humiliating; jealousy of your own young son is an indignity hardly to be borne.
The very soreness of his own nerves, and the small, nagging sense of guilt that frayed the edges of his consciousness, made him very affectionate and attentive to Bunty, and that in itself was dangerous, for Bunty had known him a long time, and was a highly intelligent woman in her artfully unpretentious way. But long familiarity had made George so unwary with her that even his occasional subtleties tended to be childishly innocent in their cunning. She loved him very much, and her security of tenure was unshakable.
After the long, fretting days with so little accomplished George would wake out of his first shallow, uneasy sleep to the ache of his own ineffectiveness, and reach for Bunty not as a consolation prize, but as the remedy for what ailed him; and she would open her arms and respond to him, half awake, even half awake knowing that she was called upon to be two women, and sure she could without extending herself be all the women George would ever want or need. It was mostly in the middle of the night that he confided with the greatest ease and benefit. It was in the early hours of Wednesday morning that he told her about his precariously based conviction that the person Kitty had called to her aid on the night of the crime was in all probability the murderer of Alfred Armiger.
“But wouldn’t she have suspected as much herself, afterwards?” asked Bunty. “She wouldn’t keep silent about it, surely, if she thought it over and came to that conclusion herself? No earthly reason why she should protect a murderer, even if he did bring her some petrol.”
“Of course not, but naturally she must have called on some person she knew intimately and could trust absolutely. In real life nobody treats a murder investigation like an impersonal puzzle in a book, and suspects everyone who had an opportunity or a motive; to some extent you’re bound to go by what you know of them. There are people it could be and people it couldn’t be. Your family, your friends, they’re immune. This man was immune. If you were in a hole, and you yelled to me for help and I came, and afterwards there was a body around to be accounted for, would it enter your head that I might be the killer?”
“Never in a million years,” said Bunty. “But there’s only one of you for me. I might look sideways at almost anyone else.”
“What, Dom, for instance? Or old Uncle Steve?”
