Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

questioning, after that, he’d know that he’d hit her where it hurt. She’d had her chance to have his goodwill, and done rather more than turn up her nose at the offer. Now she could try it the other way.

“How do you know that?” demanded George, “if you were here keeping an eye on the body?”

“I wasn’t. I had a hunch she was up to something, so I let her get a head start, and then followed her up. If she’d been on the level she’d have come straight in by the terrace, but she didn’t. She went off round the back of the house, to the passage from the yard. So I came in by the front and beat her to the back stairs, and I was there to see exactly what she did. She went straight to the telephone call box under the stairs, and asked for a London number.

“Dear Dickie,” said Liri quite gently, as if neither he nor anything he did could matter to her now, “always so true to form. Where were you? Hiding in the next box?”

“In the presence of the police,” he retorted maliciously, “I shouldn’t be too witty about eavesdropping, if I were you. They have other names for it in the way of duty. I can demonstrate that I heard all right, and I can repeat every word I heard, too. Including the number!”

“And including a name?” asked George dryly.

“No, I didn’t get a name. But the number was Valence 3581. You can check it easily enough, but I wouldn’t mind betting you’ll find it’s the number of Lucien’s London flat. That would be the first place she’d try, even if she didn’t know where he’d be – and maybe she did, at that!”

“And why didn’t you tell me about this at once, as soon as we arrived? Instead of behaving as if you’d been here all the time and had no information to offer?”

“Because I couldn’t make out just what it was all about, not until I realised whose body we’d found. And what mattered first was to get him out. She wasn’t going to run.”

“So in fact you didn’t actually know whose number it was, or to whom she was talking?”

“No, not then. I don’t know, for that matter, but listen to the text, and draw what conclusions you like. I didn’t hear everything, people were just coming chattering along the gallery to dinner. When someone answered her she said: ‘Never mind that, there’s no time.’ And the next I got was: ‘… just get out, fast. The body’s been found… ’ Then whoever was at the other end was doing the talking, until she cut him off. ‘Damn you,’ she said, ‘I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye!’ ”

“That was all?”

“Isn’t it enough? I didn’t know whose body she’d found, but she did. She was climbing out on the tree when I came on the scene, she’d had a good look at him. But maybe she’d known all along which of them went into the water. Maybe she even helped in the job, or at least helped Lucien to get away afterwards. Stay here, she says, and keep an eye on him, while I run and tell Mr. Felse! You have to hand it to our Liri, she’s quick on the draw. She couldn’t suppress the discovery, because I happened on her just at the wrong moment. But she could and did run like a hare to warn the murderer, before she gave the alarm. And she found me a job to do that would keep me quiet while she did it, or so she hoped. Only as luck would have it I’d already begun to smell a rat by then.”

He smiled, the well-known smile that charmed the televiewers regularly on Thursday nights, his fair head cocked towards Liri; and though the smile was now invisible, they felt its weighted sweetness probing her.

“But in any case, you don’t have to take my word for it. Ask her! Ask the operator who got her her London number.”

“All in good time,” said George impassively, “we’ll ask everything that needs to be asked, but not, I think, here. I should be grateful if you would all keep this to yourselves, just as you have done until now. Lockyer, stay with him, I must go and telephone. The rest of you, come on, let’s get back to the house.”

They made their way back in single file to the dry pathway and the glow-worm twilight that was left in the park, George lighting them until they were out of the trees. At the end of the line, Dominic and Tossa linked hands and drew close, shivering suddenly with the chill of the river, and the cold oppression of darkness, malice and death. She whispered in his ear, anxiously, that he must go straight up and change. The suggestion, mildly maternal, pointedly possessive, seemed to be left over from another world, but at least indicated the possibility of recovering that world, when all this was over. Dominic, the shivers warmed out of him by her solicitude, pressed her hand impulsively and wondered again at the terrifying diversity of man.

“Come up to the office with me,” George said to Liri as they climbed the steps to the terrace. “I must talk to you.”

“Of course,” said Liri. Her voice was curiously easy now, aloof and contained still, but something more than that. The word that suggested itself was “content.” George understand that. They had their body and their case, a pretty substantial case now, though still circumstantial; but she had done everything she could, and it was no longer up to her. “But it will be you talking,” she said gently. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

In the yellow drawing-room, as they passed through the gallery, Andrew Callum was singing, in a voice achingly muted and raw and sad:

“The judge looked over his left shoulder.

He said: ‘Fair maid, I’m sorry.’

He said: ‘Fair maid, you must be gone.

For I cannot pardon Geordie.’ ”

“So that’s the way it is,” said Duckett heavily. “Well, we can put out a general call immediately for the car, and turn on everything to find it. That’s no problem. About the boy I’m not so happy. We’ll get all the airports covered, and have a watch kept on his flat – though if the girl was lucky enough to catch him there, that’s one place he’ll have written off. We’ve nothing to lose by avoiding a public appeal. There still could be another answer.” But he sounded exceedingly dubious about it. “I suppose it’s practically certain he did take the car?”

“I’d say a hundred per cent certain,” said George. “He knew, as everyone here knew, that Arundale wouldn’t be expected back until to-night. He could give himself many hours grace by making off with that car.”

“Well, since she’s tipped him off about the body being found… you say she hasn’t admitted anything about that?”