Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

“We ran into Liri at the top of the stairs,” said Dominic, “and she told us. I hope that’s all right. You’re going to need somebody, if only to run the errands.”

“That’s all right. Anybody keeping an eye on him now?”

“Dickie Meurice,” said Liri, her voice suddenly shaken out of its calm by the surrender of her responsibility, as her legs shook beneath her for a moment. “He wasn’t with me… he just showed up. I told him to stand by.”

“Good! Tossa, you run across by the footbridge, will you, and find Lockyer, and tell him to meet us downstream. Tell him to bring some ropes down with him. And an axe or a hatchet, something we can use on the tree.”

“Right!” said Tossa, dry-mouthed with excitement, and whirled and ran.

“Come on, then,” said George. “Lead the way, Liri.” And they followed her out across the terrace, and down the slope of turf towards the distant stone bridge.

It took them half an hour to get him ashore, and not a word was said in all that time but for the brief exchanges that were necessary to the job in hand. If they had tried to hack away the driftwood that held him before they had a line on him, he would have escaped them again, for once dislodged, the flood would have taken him headlong downstream out of their hands. It was Dominic, as the lightest weight among the men present, who clambered out barefoot on the swaying barrier of branches, and secured a rope round the shoulder that just broke surface, cased in sodden tweed that was now of no colour at all but the river’s mud-brown. The driftwood under him dipped where he ventured too far; the ice-cold darkness rushed over his feet and tore at his balance. He thought of nothing as he worked; his mind had shrunk into his numbed hands.

“All right, come ashore.”

George reached a hand to retrieve his saturated son. Lockyer carefully took in the slack of the rope, and tested it with a gradual pull downstream; the arm that was all they could see of the dead man rose languidly along the surface, like the arm of a man turning in his sleep, but the body did not float free.

George looked along the tangled arms of the tree, and found the one that pinned the body in its clenched fist, half out of the water. “All right, we’ll bring him in branch and all, it’ll make a useful brake. Meurice, give me that hatchet.”

Dickie Meurice handed it eagerly. He would not for anything have forfeited his place here. He was only guessing, of course, but if his guess was right the pay-off would be worth a little discomfort.

“And the other rope.”

There was still a cloudy daylight out on the open sward, but here among the trees they had to peer to see even one another. The girls stood well back on drier ground, their faces two pale, still ovals in a green monochrome. Nobody had tried to send them away. What was the use of banishing Liri, who had been the one to find this pathetic thing they were trying to bring ashore? In any case, she would not have gone. She stood silent and intent, and her composure was impenetrable.

George climbed out himself this time. There was no need to go so far that his weight would be a handicap. He made the coil of rope fast round a fork in the branch, and passed the ends back to Dominic’s waiting grasp.

“Give him a hand, Meurice. Everything may come loose with a rush when this gives.”

He hacked at the branch, below the fork where the rope was secured. The wood was still green and young, clinging to life; it took him a few minutes to chop his way through it.

“Dig your heels in, it’s going.”

They had heard the first ominous cracking, and were braced and ready. The whole branch suddenly heaved and turned like a live thing, tossing the body momentarily out of the water, and dropping it again in a flurry of dirty foam; then the tangle of wood broke loose from its moorings, and would have surged out into midstream at once, but the two ropes, drawn in gradually hand over hand, coaxed it sidelong into the bank. Torn foam seethed through the lattice of sodden leaves. George scrambled back to the muddy ground, and helped them to draw him in, and disentangle him from the tree. Ankle-deep in cold spill-water, they hoisted the dead weight clear, and laid him on the higher ground padded with last year’s leaves and starred with this year’s late anemones.

The sagging, shapeless shadow that had been a man lay flattened to the moist earth by his mud-heavy clothes. Lank hair of the universal river-colour plastered the pallor that was his forehead. George said in a voice suddenly sharp and intent. “Give me the torch.”

The cone of light sprang out of the dimness and brought shapes to life again in this twilit world that had no shape. The long body sprawled awkwardly, so weighted down with water that it seemed to be dissolving away from them into the ground. A massive, large-featured face, smooth and austere and once impressive enough, gaped up at them through soiled trails of river-water.

The single muted whimper of a cry came from Tossa. Liri Palmer made never a sound. Dickie Meurice drew in breath with a long-drawn hiss that might have been pure horror and excitement, but sounded horribly like glee.

“But that isn’t…” blurted Lockyer, amazed, and let the sentence trail away helplessly into silence. He had a teenage daughter; in her vicinity there was no possibility of avoiding acquaintance with the features of the current pop and folk idols.

“No,” agreed George grimly, staring into the pool of light at his feet, “no, it isn’t Lucien Galt. It looks as if we’ve got to hunt farther afield for him. No… this is Edward Arundale.”

CHAPTER VIII

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PERHAPS,” suggested Lockyer blankly, after a long moment of silence, “they both went into the river.”

“You think so?” George switched off the torch, and the deepening dusk fell on them like a cloak. “And who drove Arundale’s car away? It was there, in the yard, with his overnight case and his books in it, at three. It was gone before four, and nobody else had gone missing. Oh, no, they didn’t both go the same way.’

“They didn’t both go down the river, anyhow,” said Dickie Meurice softly, and they heard and felt him stirring in the darkness, again with that curious suggestion of pleased malevolence. “Because just before Liri came to tell you she’d found this one, she was talking to the other one on the telephone.”

He had his sensation, and it was everything he had hoped it would be. Only Liri herself let the revelation pass without a sound. She had made one sharp movement, however, that did just as well. However stolidly she sat out