without reason just at that time would have been the quickest way of inviting suspicion. Wouldn’t it?’ challenged Dominic earnestly, brilliant eyes clinging to his father’s face.
‘You’re forgetting,’ said Tom, ‘the roaming Romeo who tried to pick her up.’ He caught himself up too late, and met George’s eye in embarrassed dismay. ‘I’m sorry, probably I shouldn’t have mentioned that. It hasn’t been published, has it?’
‘It hadn’t, but since we seem to have embarked on a full-scale review, it may as well be.’ He recounted the episode briefly. “There’s certainly a point there. When he heard of that incident he’d know there was a possible witness who’d be able to tie in Annet, at least, to the scene and time of the murder. It isn’t difficult to give a recognisable description of Annet. It would be impossible not to recognise any decent photograph of her, once you’d seen her at close quarters.’
‘But she wouldn’t know there was any urgent reason to warn him that a witness existed, because she knew of no crime. And without an urgent reason,’ said Miles with absolute and haughty certainty, ‘she wouldn’t say a word to him about a thing like that.’
‘Not tell him, when she’d been accosted by a street-corner lout?’
The very assumption of intimate knowledge of her, even at this extremity of her distress and need, could prick both these unguarded lovers into irritation and jealousy. Kenyon had allowed himself to slip into the indulgent schoolmaster voice that brought Miles’s hackles up, Miles was staring back at him with the aloof and supercilious face that covers the modern sixth-former’s wilder agonies. The minute action and reaction of pain quivered between them, and made them contemporaries, whether they liked it or not. Dominic’s very acute and intelligent eyes studied them both from beneath lowered lashes, and what he felt he kept to himself. But the air was charged with sympathy and antagonism in inseparable conflict, and for a moment they all flinched from the too strident discord of the clash.
‘No,’ said Miles, more gently but no less positively. ‘It was a thing she wouldn’t confide. Especially not to him.’
‘Well, if you’re right about that, he’d have no idea that there was going to be anyone to give a description of either of them. He knew he’d left no traces, he thought he was quite clear. Every reason why he should hope to lie low for a reasonable time, and let the robbery in Birmingham blow over. Yes, that makes sense,’ agreed George. ‘It seems possible that he may not even have known, at first, that the old man was dead. Most probably he hit and grabbed and ran, and left him, as he thought, merely knocked out.’
‘And even when he knew it was murder, there was nothing, as far as he knew, to connect him with it. The obvious thing to do was come inconspicuously home again, and go back to work, and act normally. Hide the money and the jewellery,’ pursued Dominic, returning to his trail tenaciously, ‘or get Annet to hide them, somewhere where naturally he hoped they’d stay safely hidden, but where at any rate they couldn’t incriminate him any more than anyone else if they were discovered. But now it’s gone past that. There
‘There’s another point.’ Miles frowned down at the hands that had tightened almost imperceptibly on each other at every repetition of her name, and carefully, painfully disengaged them. ‘Supposing this is a good guess of ours, and she was entrusted with the business of hiding the money, then of course they may have agreed on the place beforehand. It may even be a place they’ve used for other things before now. But it may not. Supposing nobody but Annet knows where the stolen jewellery and money is now? He knows his life depends on her keeping silent. If he gets to the point of being terrified into running for it, he can’t even get his loot and run without contacting Annet. And if he does—’
‘He can’t,’ George said reassuringly. ‘We’ve got a constant guard on her, inside the house and out. The degree of her danger hasn’t escaped us. And we don’t intend to take our eyes off her. You can rely on that.’
‘Yes—’ And he was grateful, a pale smile pierced the preoccupied stillness of his face for a moment. ‘But he’s got nothing to lose now unless he can get the means to make his break. And if he can find a way to her somehow, he’s liable to remember that she— that nobody else can identify him—’
Miles carefully moistened lips suddenly too dry to finish the sentence.
‘Yes, I realise all that. But I’ve got a man outside the house, Miles, and a policewoman inside with her. And however desperate he may be, we’re dealing with only one man. The essence of his situation is that he’s alone.’
‘Not quite alone,’ said Miles almost inaudibly. ‘He’s got one person who might help him to get to her, if ever you so much as turn your back for a minute.’
George stood off and looked down at him heavily, and said never a word in reply to that. It was Tom Kenyon, still fretting against the arrogance of the boy’s certainty, who demanded: ‘Who’s that?’
‘Annet,’ said Miles.
They had talked themselves into dead silence. The two boys sat with the width of the room between them, braced and still, their eyes following with unwavering attention every quiver of George’s brooding face, while he told over again within his mind the points they had made, and owned their substance. They had good need to be afraid for Annet, and very good reason to look again and again at the looming, significant shape of that long hog-back of rock and rough pasture that linked her with and divided her from her lover. Was it necessarily true that Annet had had a particular purpose in being on the Hallowmount that night of her return? Wasn’t it simply her road back? Wasn’t it natural enough that they should use the same route returning as departing? She wouldn’t be afraid of the Hallowmount in the dark. But in that case, according to Miles, she wouldn’t have troubled to cover herself and her movements with that fantastic story, even when she was taken by surprise on top of the hill. She drew her veil of deception because she had something positive and precise to hide. Who should know better than Miles?
But even if she had indeed been entrusted with the hiding of the plunder on her way home, was it likely that she had put it somewhere unknown to her partner? Possible, at a stretch, but certainly not likely. What appeared to George every moment more probable was that they had some hiding-place already established between them, and frequently used, their letter-box, their private means of communication, accessible from both sides of the mountain without difficulty and without making oneself conspicuous. Given such a cache, tested and found reliable from long use, it would not even occur to them to hide their treasure anywhere else. And it would be the most natural thing in the world for Annet to undertake the job of depositing it, if the spot was directly on her way home. The boy had his motor-bike to manage, and his own family to manipulate at home; and by consent, so it seemed, they made use of the Hallowmount as the watershed of their lives, and the act of crossing it alone had become a rite. It was the barrier between their real and their ideal worlds, between the secret life they shared and the everyday life in which their paths never touched, or never as lovers. It was the hollow way into the timeless dream-place, as surely as if the earth had opened and drawn them within.
