Flight of a Witch

forecourt at this hour. A powerful, bowed, cross-grained little elderly man with an obstinate, surly face that never took anyone in for long. It was one of the very few places where George and the probation officer had ever been able to place their most perilous problem-boys with goodwill and confidence. If they failed there, you were on your way to despairing of them. Some did fail; there was more than enough to despair about in human nature, twentieth-century style. Some, against all the odds, stuck it out and got a stout foothold on life again; there was plenty of ground for hope, too.

George asked after the latest of them, as Hopton flicked his leather squeaking across the windscreen. Hopton opined that the latest was an idle, cheeky layabout with a chip on his shoulder as big as a Yule log; he reckoned he’d shape up about average. Rightly interpreting this as a considerably more encouraging report than it sounded, George turned to the matter that was nearer his heart.

‘Ever see young Geoff Westcott these days? He’s still driving for Lowthers, isn’t he?’

‘Hear him more than I see him. Comes clattering in to fill up sometimes, week-ends. Oh, ay, he’s still there. Good driver, too, on a lorry. Pity he leaves his manners in the cab when he knocks off. He’s hell on that three-fifty of his.’

‘Fill up last week-end?’ asked George.

‘Didn’t see him. Why? You got something on him?’ The shrewd old eyes narrowed on George’s face expectantly. ‘Didn’t see him since Thursday, come to think of it.’

‘He’s clean, as far as I know,’ said George amiably. ‘When on Thursday? Just a little job involving a motor-bike, nothing special on him, just eliminating the barely-possibles.’

‘He was in in the middle of the afternoon. I remember young Sid asked him what he was doing romping around in working hours, and he said he had three extra days saved up from the summer holidays, and was taking ’em before the weather broke altogether.’

George digested this with a prickle of satisfaction stirring his scalp. He fished out from his wallet one of the barely-dry copies the police photographer had made him from Annet’s photograph.

‘What poor girl’s he standing up for what other poor girl, these days?’

‘Mate,’ said Hopton, very dryly indeed, ‘you got it wrong. These days the girls ain’t surplus round here like they used to be. It’s the men who get stood up, even the ones with three-fifties. And if they don’t like it, they know what they can do. They’re relieved if they can get a girl to go steady, they lay off the tricks unless they want to be left high and dry.’

‘You’re not telling me young Geoff’s got a steady?’

‘Hasn’t he, though! Wouldn’t dare call Martha Blount anything but steady, would you?’

‘No,’ owned George freely, ‘I wouldn’t!’ If Martha Blount meant marriage, the odds were that she wasn’t wasting her time. There were still Blounts round the Hallowmount, nearly three centuries after Tabby blundered in and out of fairyland. ‘How long’s this been going on?’

‘Few weeks now, but it’s got a permanent look about it.’

‘Ever seen him with this one? Before or since.’ George showed the grave and daunting face, the straight, wide eyes that made it seem a desecration to mention her in such light and current terms.

‘Oh, I know her. That’s the old schoolmaster’s girl, from up the other valley. Used to teach my nephew, he did, they nearly drove him up the wall before he got out of it and moved to Fairford. She’s a beauty, that one,’ he said fondly, tilting his head appreciatively over Annet’s picture. ‘No, I’ve never seen her with Geoff Westcott. Wouldn’t expect to, neither.’

No, and of course they’d know that, whether they ever acknowledged it or not, and take care not to affront the village’s notions of what was to be accepted as normal and what was not. Still, one asked.

‘Now if you’d said him,’ said Hopton unexpectedly, and nodded across the street.

Outside the single hardware shop a young man in a leather jacket of working rather than display cut had just propped a heavy motor-cycle at the pavement’s edge, and was striding towards the shop doorway. A tall, dark young man, perhaps twenty-five, scarcely older, possibly younger; uncovered brown hair very neatly trimmed, a vigorous, confident walk, none of the signs of convulsed adolescence about him. And a striking face, dark and reticent as a gipsy, with a proud, curled, sensitive mouth. He was in the shop only a minute, evidently collecting something which had been ordered and was ready for him, tools of some kind; a gleam of colour and of steel as he stowed the half-swathed bundle in his saddle-bag, straddled the machine with a long, leisurely movement of his whole body from head to toes, kicked it into life, and roared away from the pavement and along the single street. In a few moments he was out of sight.

‘Seen her with him times enough,’ said Hopton, as if that was perfectly to be expected.

‘Have you, indeed! And who is he? I don’t even know him.’

‘Name of Stockwood. He’s another of ’em. See him behind the wheel of the Bentley, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Put him astride one of them there BSAs they keep for running up and down to the plantations and the farms, and he sprouts horns. He does look after them, though, I will say that. They come in now and again to be serviced – some rough rides they get, the estate being what it is – and you can tell a machine that’s cared for.’

‘Are you telling me,’ asked George intently, light dawning, ‘that that’s Mrs Blacklock’s chauffeur? Since when? There used to be a thin, grey-haired fellow named Braidie.’

‘Retired about three months ago, and this chap came. Name of Stockwood. I’ve seen him driving the Beck lass home often enough.’

George stood looking thoughtfully after the faint plume of dust that lingered where the rider had vanished. So that was the reliable human machine that guarded Annet from undesirable encounters by regularly driving her home. Pure luck that he should be seen for the first time not with the car, but with one of the estate utilities, and consequently out of strict uniform. Chauffeurs are anonymous, automatic, invisible; but there went a live, feeling and very personable young man. Was it quite impossible that Annet, startled and disarmed by the change from Braidie’s elderly, familiar person, should steal glances along her shoulder in the Bentley, on all those journeys home, and see the man instead of the chauffeur?