She thought of her bumbling old sheep of a paternal uncle and giggled. “Darling, don’t be funny! That sweet old fool!”
“Or Chris Duckett, say?”
“No, I see what you mean. The only people you’d consider letting in on your scrape would be people you couldn’t possibly suspect of anything bad. But if someone actually put it into your head afterwards, mightn’t you just begin to wonder? Have you put it to Kitty that way?”
“I’ve put it every way I can think of.” The words that visited his lips when he thought of Kitty came spurting out of him in breathless bursts of indignation and anxiety, impossible to disguise however he muffled them by nuzzling in Bunty’s hair. He could never deceive Bunty worth a damn, anyhow, he gave up trying. “All along she’s simply ignored questions about that telephone call. She knows we know she did ring somebody. But still she, no, she doesn’t deny it, she just pretends not to understand, or else she doesn’t even pretend, she just sits there and shuts her mouth and isn’t with us any more. I’ve tried, and Duckett’s tried. Nobody can get anything out of her. Of course I’ve told her whoever she called may very well be the murderer. I’ve urged her, I’ve threatened her, I’ve bullied her, it’s only made it worse. She’s more determined than ever not to give him away.”
“Because she doesn’t believe he had anything to do with it,” said Bunty.
“No, she doesn’t believe it. There’s no talking to her.”
“So she thinks she’d only be shifting her own trouble on to someone else just as innocent.”
“And that we’d be just as dead set on getting a conviction against him as we must have seemed to be against her,” said George bitterly. Suddenly abjectly grateful for Bunty’s presence and her oneness with him, that sturdily refused to be changed by any outer pressures or even by the helpless convulsions of his overburdened heart, he turned and wound his arms about her, burying his face in the warm hollow of her neck. She shifted her position gently to make him more comfortable, hugging him to her heart.
“And Chris Duckett still thinks she did it?”
He mumbled assent, too tired to free his mouth. The slight movement was like the beginning of a kiss; he turned it into one.
“So between the chief hell-bent on getting a conviction against her, and you just as hell-bent on getting one against someone she’s certain is equally blameless, and who’d be equally helpless if she once dragged him into it, no wonder the poor girl’s just giving up the fight and refusing to say a word.”
George came out of ambush to protest indignantly that he wasn’t hell-bent on any such thing, that nobody was trying to convict for the sake of a conviction, that there was a logical case for investigating X’s movements very carefully. He outlined it, and in the quietness there in the small hours it sounded even more impressive than it had when Dominic had propounded it on Sunday evening, in terms that might have been conjured out of George’s own mind as a direct challenge to him.
“If it’s like that,” said Bunty at last, “and she won’t talk for you, why don’t you turn somebody loose on her for whom she will talk? I don’t know Kitty as you do, , , ” Her hand caressed George’s cheek; he hoped she wasn’t comforting him for the undignified pain of which she couldn’t possibly know anything, but he was dreadfully afraid she was.”, , , But I can’t help feeling that if you got Leslie Armiger to question her she might break down and tell everything. I may be wrong,” said Bunty kindly, well aware that she was not wrong, “but they almost grew up together, and I gather they’re fond of each other.”
“But that’s just what I can’t do,” said George.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s the one! Because in spite of one snag I can’t get round I’m almost sure it was Leslie.” He felt her stiffen in disbelief, her fingers stilling in his hair. “I know! He isn’t on the telephone! He remembered to remind me of that. I know, but look what he has to gain, he and nobody else.” He poured out the whole of it, physically half asleep on her shoulder, but mentally, agonisingly wide awake, sensitive to every breath she drew, almost to every implication she was reading into his words.
“Still, I don’t see how it could have been Leslie,” said Bunty firmly when he had done.
“I know, I told you, I don’t, either. No telephone, there’s no getting past it.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant I don’t see how it could have been Leslie, because even if she could have called him, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.” She told him why. When she ended he was asleep, his mouth against her cheek. She kissed him, and he didn’t wake up. “Poor old darling!” she said, and went to sleep embracing him.
But when he awoke before dawn he remembered everything she had told him, and sat up in bed abruptly. The whole thing to be re-thought from the beginning, a new cast to be made. He lay down very softly, to avoid disturbing Bunty, and began to go over the ground yet again in his mind, inch by painful inch.
He came home that night late and on edge after a day of furious but so far unproductive activity, and it was no pleasure, the mood he was in, to have Dominic spring out of the living-room at him before he could so much as drop his briefcase and hang up his hat. The mirror had just presented him with the image of his forty-one-year-old face, fretted and drawn with tiredness, with straight brown hair greying at the temples, and he was afraid receding a little too, when there erupted into the glass, beside it the sixteen-year-old copy, fresh as new milk, just-formed, with lashes like ferns and a thatch as thick as gorse, a face as yet so young and unused that all the anxiety and trouble in the world couldn’t take the springy freshness out of it. The contrast wasn’t comforting; neither was the look Dominic fixed on him, waiting with held breath for the news he’d almost given up expecting.
“Sorry, boy,” said George, “we haven’t found them yet.”
Dominic didn’t move. The anxious eyes followed every motion with a hopeless concentration as George hung up his coat and made for the stairs. In his own mind he had given them until this evening; if they hadn’t found the gloves by now it was no use relying on it that they ever would, no use waiting any longer for the turn of luck it didn’t seem as if they were going to get. Luck’s hand would have to be forced. When logs coming down a river jam, somebody has to set off a charge to release them and start them flowing again. Dominic did not particularly fancy himself as a charge of dynamite, but extreme measures were called for. And this time it was in any case impossible to confide in George, because the kind of shock tactics Dominic had in mind would not, and could not, be countenanced by the police. One word to George, and the whole thing would be knocked on the head. No, he had to do this alone, or if he had to ask for help it mustn’t be from his father. And before he ventured he had to make sure he hadn’t left any loopholes for want of sufficient briefing. There were still things he didn’t know; by the terms of their toleration agreement he couldn’t go to his father for them, but what he wanted to know Leslie Armiger could tell him.
“I’m going out, Mummy,” said Dominic, following Bunty into the kitchen. It was already well past eight o’clock,
