CHAPTER XI
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He came up out of a well- shaft of weakness and slight fever, tossed into half-consciousness, aware of faces bending over him, and of a bright, bare whiteness which was a small room at the Cottage Hospital, though he did not know that until later. He said aloud the most urgent thing he had drawn up with him out of his uneasy dreams, not realising how often he had said it before.
‘Annet didn’t know. She had no part in it. She knew nothing about murder – or robbery.’
The faces showed no surprise. They soothed him quickly: ‘It’s all right. We know. Nobody blames Annet.’
‘She only wanted to go to him to persuade him to come back with her and give himself up.’
‘Yes, don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. We know.’
‘She said – it had no virtue unless he chose it himself. She refused to go away with him. She wanted—’
‘Yes, you told us. It’s all right, we know everything.’
She wanted him to kill her, he had tried to say, but it stuck in his throat and filled him with such a leaden burden of pain that he sank again into the drowning depths of his isolation. None of them had heard what he had heard, or suffered what he had suffered. They could look her in the face again, live within touch and sound and sight of her and find it bearable. But he never could. He didn’t even ask after her. It was no use, there was nothing there for him. His only right in her was to proclaim her immaculate; and that he did as often as he drifted back into consciousness, purging his overburdened soul and bleeding his frustrated love out of him in anxious witness to her innocence.
‘Don’t let them blame Annet. She didn’t do anything—’
‘No, no, don’t worry. Annet will be all right.’
Later, when he was convalescent, propped up in pillows with his shoulder swathed, they all came to see him, bringing with them fragments which were not now so much pieces of a puzzle as handfuls of stones to pile on a cairn, marking the place memorable for a disaster or a death. Or maybe an achievement. Or a discovery. Such as his own limitations, or the child’s discovery, uncomfortable but salutary, that fire burns, or if you get out of your depth you may drown.
It was George Felse who brought him the few pieces that actually were gaps in the puzzle: the inquisitive small boy who had reported the motor-cycle in Mrs Brooke’s backyard, the message the vicar had brought, and the precise reason behind Annet’s flight from Fairford.
‘The bike seemed to point to Stockwood, who had the loan of one of the estate BSAs for the week-end. He couldn’t have been the first fellow, six months ago, but that didn’t let him out altogether, there was no certainty they were the same. And he’d let himself in for suspicion, anyhow, first by lying about his whereabouts, and then by saying he’d spent the time with a woman, but refusing to name the woman.’
He said nothing about his own barely tenable theory that the woman might, just might, have been Regina Blacklock; a theory they’d never had to investigate, after all, thank God!
‘Moreover, he had a prison record. He did a year for his part in a hold-up job, through getting mixed up with some girl, and his wife got a decree nisi against him into the bargain. He was an obvious possibility. But when Mrs Brookes came up with the item of evidence about Annet’s
‘I did,’ said Tom, remembering that, too, as something infinitely distant and unreal. ‘I thought I did. But it doesn’t matter now. It was wrong, anyhow. So you didn’t have to find out who Stockwood’s woman was.’
‘No, we didn’t have to, but as it turned out, we did. The Superintendent let his name drift into the hand-out to the evening paper on Saturday, and she came forward in a hurry, all flags flying, to say he’d been with her. She was his wife, you see. She is his wife,’ he corrected himself with a broad smile. ‘Talk about good out of evil, the Bloome Street case put paid to that divorce, once and for all. I doubt if he could lose her again even if he tried.’
Side-tracked out of the too-deeply-worn cutting of his own obsessive grief, Tom followed this strange by- product of murder with awakening wonder. ‘But if it was his wife, why wouldn’t he say so?’
‘Because it had taken him months to get her even to talk to him again, and he wanted her back, and had just brought her to the point of surrender. It was a triumph that she’d let him work his way in and stay those few days. But he knew he was still on probation, and he was terrified that if he gave it away that he’d lived with her again she’d think he was trying to fix her, force her hand by preventing the divorce from going through. He knew her well enough to know she has a temper, and she was badly hurt the first time. She might very well have turned on him and told him to go to hell if she’d thought he was framing her. But when she heard the police were interested in his movements, she came like a fury to protect him. That’s one happy ending, at least, even if we only reached it by accident.’
‘I’m glad somebody got some good out of it,’ said Tom.
‘So we were left with a motor-bike that could be one of the three they keep at Cwm, but didn’t have to be, and this idea of the man who could pass for Annet’s father. When it turned out that the vicar had brought the message that sent Annet out that night, that seemed to make him a possibility, at first sight. But obviously he spent the whole of Sunday at Comerford – he had Communion and two services, and he always puts in an appearance at Sunday School, too – and in any case there were immediately other inferences to be drawn. The message he brought was from the choir, so he said, but in practice that meant from the choir-master. Peter Blacklock – well, who had such privileged access to Annet as he did? He could and did ride one of the estate three-fifties up and down to the plantations when it suited him – nobody in his senses would use an E-type Jag for a job like that, where he wanted to be inconspicuous – and he could very well pass for Annet’s father. And it was only a startling thought at first sight,‘ said George, looking back at it sombrely from the light of knowledge, ’and then not for long.’
‘But he was at church, too. And at choir practice on the Friday night. He rang up afterwards and asked why Annet hadn’t come – whether she was ill.’
‘That was part of the campaign. He had to know whether they’d done anything decisive, like going to the police. Annet was sure they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t happy, he wanted to know. He divided his time very delicately. On Thursday he took Annet to Birmingham. On Friday at dusk he left her there and came back to choir practice, and went through that little performance of enquiring after Annet, offering to go round and see her if she was fit to have
