Flight of a Witch

and drew her in with him.

‘Here, sit down by the fire and be quiet. Lilian, close the window and get her a drink.’ He shut the door with a slam, and leaned his back against it. ‘Now, what happened?’

‘I told you, she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire. How could I know it was a fake? I ran for Mrs Beck – she was upstairs, she didn’t hear me call. When we came back Annet was gone.’

‘She climbed out of the window,’ said Mrs Beck, hugging her writhing hands together in her lap to keep them still. ‘Without even a coat – in her thin house-shoes!’

‘Yes, yes, I know all that.’ And Lockyer, patrolling dutifully outside, couldn’t be on every side of the house at once. Annet could move like a cat, she hadn’t found it difficult to elude him on her own ground. ‘But before! Something happened, something gave her the word. Why tonight? Why now? She chose her time, she had a reason. Has she had any letters? Telephone messages?’

‘No,’ said Lilian Crowther positively. ‘I’ve been with her all the time until she dropped like that. And Mrs Beck reads her letters – but anyhow there haven’t been any today.’

‘And no visitors,’ said George, fretting at his own helplessness, and caught the rapid flicker of a glance that passed uneasily between them. ‘No visitors? Someone has been here?’

‘I asked him to come,’ said Mrs Beck loudly. ‘I asked him to talk to her and do what he could. What else is he for, if not to help people in trouble? I thought he might get something out of her. It was last night being choir practice that made me think of it. I telephoned him, and asked him to come in today. There couldn’t be any harm in that. If she couldn’t see her own vicar – even criminals are allowed that.’

‘All right,’ said George, frantically groping forward along this unforseen path, ‘so the vicar came. No one else?’

‘No one else. You must admit I had the right—’

‘All right, you had the right! Was he left alone with her?’

‘No,’ said Lilian, defensively and eagerly, ‘I was with her all the time. Mrs Beck left them together, but I stayed in the room.’

‘Thank God for that! Annet didn’t object?’

‘She didn’t seem to care one way or the other.’ And yet she had bided her time, and torn herself resolutely out of their hold. Something had passed, something significant. Why otherwise should she have chosen this particular hour, after waiting so long and so stoically? ‘Well, what did they have to say to each other? Everything you can remember.’

She dredged up a number of embarrassed, agonising platitudes through which the adolescent rawness of pity showed like flesh through torn clothing. The vicar was back in the room with them, convulsed with sympathy and hideously unable to contain it, or spill it, or wring his inadequate if kindly heart open and give it to her frankly; an ageing boy with only a boy’s heaven to offer anyone, and stunted angels with undeveloped wings like his own.

‘He said he was to tell her the choir had missed her at practice, and sent her their prayers. He said they took comfort in the thought that they would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit, he said. And that was about all,’ she concluded lamely, scouring her memory in vain for more vital matter. ‘It doesn’t seem anything to set her off like this.’

And yet she had received, somehow, the summons that sent her out into the dusk. He could not be mistaken. If it was not here, in this trite comfort, then there must be something else, something they had missed.

‘Nothing else happened? He didn’t give her a note from someone else?’

‘No, honestly. He never went near enought to hand her anything. You’d have thought he was afraid of her – I suppose he was, in a way,’ said Policewoman Crowther, with more perception than George would have given her credit for.

‘She didn’t see the paper?’ He hadn’t seen it himself, he didn’t know if there was anything in it to speak to her, but somewhere the lost thread dangled, and must be found again.

‘No, she never tried to. She never showed any interest.’

Perhaps, thought George, because she knew they wouldn’t let her have the papers even if she wanted them. Perhaps because she had waited with such fatal confidence for the only message she needed, and knew it would not come that way.

But then there was nothing left but those few, bald sentences, brought from the outside world by the vicar; and if the clue was nowhere else, it must be there. The choir had missed her – Mrs Beck must have telephoned him just before he went over to the church for practice, and he had unburdened his heart to her colleagues to spread the load. And nobly they had responded. Or had they? The tone of the message was surely his, or a careful parody. It sounded as though he had dictated, and they had said: Amen. They sent her their prayers. They would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit. Six-thirty was the hour of evensong, that was plain enough. Yes, but it belonged to tomorrow, not today. Why did it send her out tonight. George sweated through it word by word, and darkness, rather than light, fell on him in the moment of discovery, stunning him.

Six-thirty at the altar. Six-thirty at the Altar! All the difference in the world.

Six-thirty!

Twenty to seven by his watch, and she was somewhere out there in the dark, with a quarter of an hour’s start of him at least, bursting her heart on the steep climb to her lover.

He tore the door open and was out of it and down the steps in a couple of raking strides, before they realised that he had found what he was looking for. Racing towards his car, he shouted peremptorily for Lockyer, and by the time he had the MG turned recklessly in the confined space and pointing down the drive, the bushes threshed before the constable’s galloping body, and Lockyer was running beside him. George slowed, and shoved open the door.

‘Get in, quick! Never mind searching, you’re not needed here. I know now where to look.’

Lockyer fell lurching into the seat beside him, and slammed the door. They rocked out through the gate and swung left into the narrow road.