Flight of a Witch

Tom sprang wildly towards her; but it was George Felse who caught and lifted her in his arms as she fell.

CHAPTER V

« ^ »

Call her doctor,’ said George, over the limp, light body. ‘I’d rather he was here.’

He put off Mrs Beck, who was clawing frantically at her darling and spilling unwonted and painful tears, with a lunge of one shoulder, and carried his burden to the couch. ‘Tom, you get him. Use my name, he’ll come all the quicker.’

Tom got as far as the telephone before he realised that he did not even know which doctor they favoured, and there being no emergency notes on the scratch-pad to enlighten him, he was forced to come and drag Beck away from the couch to supply the information he needed. Annet was lying motionless and pale by then, a pillow under her cheek, her body stretched carefully at ease, the narrow skirt drawn down over her knee, surely by George Felse. Tom dialled with an erratic finger, hating George more for his deftness and humanity even than for his official menace. What right had he? What right? To strike her down, and then to be the one who held her in his arms, and laid her down so gently among the cushions, and stroked back the tumbled hair from her eyes with such assured fingers.

‘Doctor Thorpe? I’m speaking for Mr Beck at Fairford. Can you come out here at once, please? Yes, it’s urgent. Miss Beck – Annet – she’s in a faint. Detective-Inspector Felse is here, he told me to ask you to hurry. I don’t know – a degree of shock, I suppose – he urges you to come as soon as possible. Good, thank you!’

He hung up, and his hand was shaking so that the receiver rattled in the rest. He went back to the living-room with Beck clinging close on his arm.

Mrs Beck had control of herself again; the traces of her few and angry tears mottled her cheeks, her ruled dark hair, dull from many tintings, was shaken out of its customary severity, but she was herself again, and would not be overwhelmed a second time. George had withdrawn and left Annet to her; not, it seemed, from any embarrassment or incompetence on his own part, rather to provide her with something urgent and practical to do, for he did not withdraw far, and he watched her ministrations with a close and sombre regard.

‘Is she subject to fainting fits?’

‘I’ve never known her faint before.’ She gave him a furious look over her daughter’s body. ‘You frightened her. You shocked her.’

‘She could have read most of the same details in tonight’s paper,’ said George, ‘but I doubt if they’d have had the same effect. She wouldn’t have realised then what she knows now – that it happened forty yards away from her, while she was waiting for her – friend. There are things she knows that I didn’t have to tell her. Such as where he was while she stood waiting for him. If he’d been round the other corner in the tobacconist’s, buying cigarettes, I think Annet would have stood the shock of an unknown old man’s death without collapsing.’

‘But, good God!’ protested Tom, twisting away from the thought, ‘you’re making out that she kept watch for him on the corner while he did it.’

‘That’s one possibility. There are others.’

He didn’t go into them. He stood looking down at the pale, motionless face on the cushions, pinched and blue at the corners of the closed lips, a strange, faint frown, austere and distant, clenched upon her black brows. The silken wings of her hair spread blue-black on either side, buoyed up on the resilient down of the pillow like a drowned girl’s hair afloat on water.

So slight, and so remote; and so incalculable. Was it possible to know her so well that she would some day be able to take down all the barriers and be relaxed and at peace with you? He’d never had much close contact with her. It might be only that unbelievably touching beauty of hers that made him feel her exile from her fellow-men to be something imposed from without, and not chosen. That, and her age. She could have been Dominic’s year-older sister. He would have liked a girl. So would Bunty, but there’d just never been one. Did she remain closed like an ivory box with a secret spring even when she was with X? Or open like a flower to the sun? The inescapable X. X who must be found, because he had almost certainly killed a solitary, eccentric, miserly old man for the contents of his till and the sweepings of three show-cases.

‘You haven’t proved she was even there,’ said Beck, stirred to the feeble man’s desperate bravery. ‘There must be many girls who fit the same description equally well. You see Annet’s ill. She never faints. She was wandering somewhere all the week-end, and she’s ill and frightened, and you have to use her so brutally.’

‘I’m sorry if you think I was brutal. I don’t think I was guilty single-handed of cutting the ground from under Annet’s feet. Someone else did that. When he hit the old man. No,’ he said, looking down bitterly at the slow, languid heave and fall of Annet’s breast, ‘I haven’t proved she was there. I haven’t proved she was the girl on the corner. I didn’t have to. Annet told us that, pretty plainly. The only thing she has told us yet.’

But it wasn’t; not quite. She had told him, however unwillingly, the depth and height and hopelessness and helplessness of the love that was eating her alive. If they hadn’t seen it, if they had no means of measuring or grasping it, that was their failure; and it looked as if that inadequacy in them might yet be the death of Annet. A little honest brutality might have cheered and warmed her, and brought her close enough to confide.

He looked up and caught Tom Kenyon’s eye upon him. There was one who wasn’t going to dispute his contention that Annet had betrayed herself. He’d wanted a reaction from her, and he’d got it at last, and it identified her only too surely.

‘But you realise, don’t you,’ said Tom with careful quietness, ‘that she’s absolved herself, too? Oh, I know! If it wasn’t Annet your witness saw, why should this be such a shock to her? But since it is such a shock, she can’t have known. Can she? She can’t have known anything about the murder, maybe not even about the robbery. She was there, yes, but quite innocently, waiting for him. She thought he was buying something, maybe a present for her. It was only because of their joint escapade that she wouldn’t admit where she’d been. To keep him out of trouble, yes, but not that trouble – because she knew nothing about that until you just told her. Why else should it drop her like a shot?’

George said: ‘You make a pretty good case. If this is genuine, of course.’

‘If it’s genuine! My God, man, look at the poor kid!’

No need to tell him that, he’d hardly taken his eyes off her. But he didn’t commit himself to any opinion about the nature of this collapse. He’d been in the world and his profession long enough to know that deception has many layers, and women know the deepest of them. No question of Annet’s unconsciousness now, no doubt of her anguish; but he had known self-induced illnesses and self-induced collapses before, as opportune as this, as disarming as this, sometimes even deceiving their victims and manipulators. When you can’t bear any more, when you want the questioning to stop, when you need time to think, you cut off the sources of reason and force and