glass, long black hair dangling in great heavy locks round her face, a bloodstained Maenad wrenching ineffectively at her pinioned wrists, her mouth contorted as she spat defiance.
“All right, yes, I killed him. I don’t care who knows it. Do you think you can frighten me with your charges and your cautions? All right, what if I did kill him? It isn’t capital murder, don’t think you’re going to kill me, that’s something you can’t do. I know the law, I’ve had to know it. Twenty years,” she shouted hoarsely, “twenty years of my life he had out of me! I could have married a dozen times over, but no, I had to fix my sights on him! Twenty years his bitch, being patient, waiting for that bag of a wife of his to die, , , “
Dominic began to shake in his father’s arms, and then to sob convulsively. He couldn’t help it, and when he’d begun he couldn’t stop. All that black and white dignity, all that composure and discipline, she ripped them to shreds and threw them in his face. He couldn’t bear it. He burrowed his throbbing head desperately into George’s shoulder, whimpering, but he couldn’t shut out the sound of her voice.
“, , , and then still waiting after she was dead, and still no reward. Bide my time, I’ve done nothing all my life but bide my time, and what did I ever get out of it but him! And then suddenly her on the telephone, that fool of a girl yelling for help to me, me!, and bleating that he was planning to marry her! And what was I to get, after I’d given him years of my life? Nothing, none of my rights, just the same old round, his letters to type in the daytime, and him in my bed when he felt like it, and her, her holding the reins! Yes, I killed him,” she panted, her breast heaving, “but it wasn’t enough. He ought to have been conscious. He ought to have felt it more, every blow! There ought to have been some way I could kill him ten times over for what he did to me!”
CHAPTER XVII.
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HE REMEMBERED NOTHING of the drive home in the van, with George nursing him anxiously in his arms, and Leslie driving as gingerly, so Jean said afterwards, as if he had an ambulance load of expectant mothers aboard instead of just one. He was conscious but totally astray. Very slight concussion, so the doctor said, and his recollections would sort themselves out coherently enough later on; but this part of the evening never came back. They put him to bed, and dosed him with something that gradually took the pain away but took the world away with it. “He’s all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll keep him under light sedation tomorrow, and by evening he’ll be right as rain.”
He woke once in the night, struggling and crying out fiercely, loosing in his dreams the resistance he had restrained by force a few hours earlier. Bunty brought him a drink, and he gulped it down greedily, asked her wonderingly what was the matter, and fell asleep again on her arm. Towards dawn he began sobbing violently in his sleep, but the fit subsided when she bathed his hot forehead and soothed him back into deeper slumber; and in the morning he awoke hungry, alert and loquacious, though still somewhat pale and tense, and wanted to talk to his father.
“This evening,” said Bunty firmly. “Right now he’s busy arranging about getting Miss Norris released. That’s what you were worrying about, isn’t it? You take it easy and stop fretting, everything’s under control.”
“Oh, Mummy!” he said reproachfully, almost offendedly, “you’re so darned calm.” He wouldn’t, she thought, have chosen that word if he could have seen her face when they brought him home. He took a rapid retrospective glance at the memories that were beginning to assemble themselves into some sort of shape, and asked coaxingly: “You’re not very mad with me, are you?”
“Well, you know,” said Bunty amiably, putting away the thermometer which confirmed that his temperature was normal, “maddish.”
“Only maddish? Well, look, Mummy, I overspent my expense account. Those gloves were twenty-three and eleven, I never knew they cost so much. Any good my putting in a claim?”
“We can’t let the detective lose on the job,” she said comfortably. He wasn’t feeling quite as tough and skittish as he pretended, but it was better not to notice that. “I’m surprised you didn’t just go to Haywards for them, and get them put down to my account.”
“Well, hell!” said Dominic, confounded. “I never thought of that.”
By evening he was pronounced fit to talk as much as he liked. Later it might be necessary to take an official statement from him, but for the moment what mattered was that he should get the whole thing off his chest to his father as soon as George came home.
“Is it all right?” asked Dominic eagerly, before George could even move up a chair to the side of the bed. “Kitty’s free?” He couldn’t altogether suppress the tremor in his voice when he uttered her name.
“Yes, it’s all right, Kitty’s free.” He didn’t say any more, it was for her to do that. Dominic knew what he’d done for her, nothing George might say could add anything to his glory, and he certainly wasn’t going to take anything away from it. “You needn’t worry any more, you did what you set out to do. How does your head feel now?”
“Sore, and I’ve got a stiff neck. But not so bad, really. What was it she hit me with?”
“You won’t want to believe it. A rubber cosh loaded with lead shot, the kind the Teds favour.”
“No!” said Dominic, his mouth falling open with astonishment. “Where would she get a thing like that?”
“Can’t you guess? From one of her club boys. She confiscated it from him a few weeks ago, with a severe lecture on the iniquity of carrying offensive weapons.” Alfred Armiger hadn’t survived to appreciate the irony, but by the grace of God Dominic had. “What was it that put you on to her in the first place?”
“It was Jean’s doing, really. I got to thinking how all the people involved had known Mr. Armiger for years, and wondering why one of them should suddenly pick on that night not to be able to stick him a moment longer. And I thought the real motive must be something that had happened that very evening, something that changed things altogether for that one person. So after we got to know about Kitty’s phone call, and it seemed likely that the person she called might be the one, this sudden motive thing sort of got narrowed down into something that was said in that phone call. I made a smashing case on those lines against Mr. Shelley, and tried it on Leslie and Jean. And straight away Jean said no, it couldn’t happen like that. She said Kitty wouldn’t run to a man, but to a woman. She said,” said Dominic, steeling his hesitant voice to use the adult words Jean had used, firmly and authoritatively as became a man, “that Kitty had just suffered a kind of sexual outrage, almost worse than the ordinary kind, with that beastly old man making a pass at her that wasn’t even a pass, but just a cold-blooded business deal. And you see, what made it much worse, “
He turned his head on the pillow and stared steadily at the wall. He couldn’t say it, even now. What made it much worse was that she was still in love with Leslie, and his father’s complacent proposal must have seemed to her horribly shocking. “Jean said in those circumstances she’d go to a woman if she had to have help,” he said, controlling the level of his voice with determination. He wasn’t quite himself yet, he cried easily if he wasn’t on his guard.
