Flight of a Witch

‘Maybe. Difficult to tell as yet. We’ve found where they stayed. Not a hotel – they borrowed a flat rented by a friend of Annet’s. The motor-bike appears again. No one saw the man. But according to the old lady round the corner, the owner of the house, Annet told her she was expecting a visitor. Annet described him to her as her father.’

The indrawn breath at the other end of the line hissed agonisingly, as though the listener had flinched from a stab-wound. ‘Her father?’

‘Does that suggest anything?’

It suggested far too much, things Tom had never wanted to hear, and did not want to remember, possibilities he could not bear to contemplate. He choked on exclamations that would unload a share of the burden on to George’s shoulders, bit them back and swallowed them unuttered. They lay in his middle like lead.

‘It sounds as if we have to revise our ideas, doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ said Tom, his throat constrained.

‘Why say that, unless it was to prepare the way in case she was seen with this man? A man obviously, in that case, respectable enough to pass for her father. And old enough.’

‘Not a teenager run wild,’ said Tom.

‘Not even a youngster in his twenties. A father-figure. If only just. One could pass for Annet’s father at around forty, maybe, but hardly earlier. Any ideas?’

The distant voice said hoarsely, aware how little conviction it must be carrying: ‘No ideas.’

‘You be thinking about it,’ said George, and rang off without more words.

And what did that mean, on top of all the confusions that had bludgeoned him since noon? What was it young Tom Kenyon knew that George didn’t know, concerning some man who might be, but was not, Annet’s father? And why, feeling as he felt about Annet, and longing as he must long for an end to this uncertainty that held a potential death for her, why had he gulped back his knowledge from the tip of his tongue in panic, and resisted his solid citizen instinct to plump it into the arms of the police and get rid of the responsibility?

George turned out the lights in the cold office, locked the door after him, and went to make his report in person to Superintendent Duckett. But Annet’s father, and Annet’s fictional father, and Annet’s father’s lodger, and the accidental intimacies and involuntary reactions of proximity mingled and danced in his mind all the way.

It was nearly half past six when he reached Fairford. He didn’t know why he felt so strongly that he must go there, he had no reason to suppose that anything new had happened there, least of all that Annet would have unsealed her lips and repented of her silence. Nor was he going to try to prise words out of her by revealing any part of what he had found out. That he knew from ample trial to be useless. It was rather that he felt the need to reassure himself that there was still an Annet, a living intelligence, an identity surely not dependent on any other creature for its single and unique life, a girl who could still be saved. Because if she was past saving, the main object of this pursuit was already lost. The old dead man had his rights to justice, but the young living girl was the more urgent charge now upon George’s heart.

He turned in at the overgrown gate, into the darkness of the untrimmed, autumnal trees, the soft rot of leaves like wet sponge under his wheels. He came out of the tunnel of shadow, and sudden lances of light struck at his eyes. The front door stood wide open, all the lights in the bouse were blazing, the curtains undrawn. In the shrubberies down towards the brook someone was threshing about violently. In the garden, somewhere behind the house, someone was bleating frantically like a bereaved ewe, and until George had stopped the engine and scrambled out of the car he could not distinguish either the voice or the words. Then it sprang at him clearly, and he turned and ran for the house.

‘Annet! Annet!’ bellowed Beck despairingly, crashing through the bushes.

George bounded up the steps and into the hall, and Policewoman Lilian Crowther leaned out of the living-room doorway with the telephone receiver at her ear, and dropped it at sight of him, and gasped: “Thank God! I was trying to get through to you. She’s gone!’

‘When?’ He caught at the swinging telephone and slammed it back on its rest, seized the girl by the arm and drew her with him into the room. ‘Quick! When? How long ago?’

‘Not more than five minutes. We found out a few minutes ago. Lockyer’s out there looking for her – and her father. She can’t be far.’

‘You shouldn’t have left her.’

‘She collapsed! Like that other time. She was lying with her head nearly in the hearth, and I couldn’t lift her alone. I ran for her mother to help me—’

The window was wide open, the curtains swinging in the rising wind of the evening. Mrs Beck blundered past through the shaft of light, running with aimless urgency, turning again to run the other way, her face contorted into a grimace of weeping, but without tears or sound. As though death was all round the house, just outside the area of light, and everyone had known and recognised it except Annet; as though she was lost utterly as soon as she broke free from the circle and ran after her desire, and none of them would ever see her again. As though, plunging out of the window, she had plunged out of the world.

George vaulted the sill and landed on the edge of the unkempt grass. Mrs Beck turned and stared at him with dazed eyes, and caught at his arm.

‘She’s gone! I couldn’t help it, no one could stop her if she was so set to go. It isn’t anyone’s fault. What could we do?’

‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said, and put her off, and ran through the trees to the boundary fence, leaving her stumbling after him. No moon, but even in the starlight of half a sky the emptiness about Fairford showed sterile and motionless. He had met no girl on the road. She would keep to the trees as long as she could. He circled the grounds hurriedly, halting now and again to freeze and listen. He heard Beck baying at the remotest edge of the garden, and met Lockyer methodically threading the shrubberies.

‘No sign of her?’

‘No sign, sir. I heard your car. Crowther’ll have told you—’

‘Keep looking,’ said George, and turned back at a run towards the house. He overtook Mrs Beck on the way,