Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

good news. This evening we’ve found it. We took him out of the river about an hour and a half ago.”

She set her hands to the arms of her chair, and rose. Her eyes, wide and fixed, held steady on his face. She said nothing at all, so plainly waiting that there was nothing to do but complete the half-arrested blow.

“It isn’t Lucien Galt, as we’d expected. It’s your husband. I’m very sorry.”

Her lips moved, saying automatically: “I understand,” but there was hardly a sound, only a faint rustling of her breath. She turned her head questingly this way and that, and put out her hand with that remembered gesture, feeling for Edward, her prop and mentor; but Edward wasn’t there, and would never again be there ready to her hand, and there was nobody now to tell her what to do. She was alone.

He saw the blood drain from her face, and her eyes roll upward in her head. As if she had indeed leaned on the arm that unaccountably failed to be there, her balance forsook her. She swayed, and then, like a shot bird, collapsed in broken, angular forms at his feet; and he lunged from his chair on one knee, and took her weight in his arms as she fell.

George drove home to Comerford through a sudden squall of rain, and his eyes were full of Audrey Arundale’s reviving face. When she came round she had apologised for her lapse, and resolutely refused to have anyone fetched to her, or to concede that she might be in need of help. “I’m quite all right now!” How often he’d heard it, hurried and insistent and forbidding, from people who were anything but all right, but dreaded above anything else being the centre of a fuss. If you over-rode them, you sometimes precipitated the total collapse you most wanted to avoid. And besides, he had detected in Audrey a kind of relief, a kind of relaxation, that meant she wouldn’t break. After you have been living with horrible uncertainties, even the definition and finality of death come as an almost welcome change.

Now at least she knew. And what was there he could do for her? Not bring the dead man back to life again, certainly; and not, in his present state, even attempt to assess her degree of guilt or innocence.

So George drove home, and Bunty fed him and asked him no questions. She never did, but he sometimes confided. It might not be exactly approved procedure, but given a discreet and intelligent wife and an appropriate case it would have seemed to him a waste, even a dereliction of duty, not to use all the means to hand.

She looked him over from head to feet with alert eyes the image of Dominic’s, noted the river-slime coating his feet and ankles, and probably got as much out of this instantaneous physical examination as ever he did on looking over a witness. But all she said was:

“Our two all right?”

“Very much so. I’m afraid they may even be enjoying themselves.” It was clear to her that George was not. Lesson One, do not become involved. But the effective text of Lesson Two, how not to become involved, no one has ever yet supplied. Perhaps as well. The best policemen are those who walk rather more in other people’s shoes than in their own, and never lose sight of the relevance of the grace of God. “That place is a Disneyland fantasy,” he said, looking back suddenly at the monstrous bulk of Follymead, and astonished at the impact it made when viewed from homelier fields.

“We ought to go and spend a week-end there, some time,” said Bunty, busy with whisky and water. In a single hazel glance she estimated the amount necessary, in his present state of tiredness, to knock him out for the nine hours of sleep he needed. “They’re having a course on Mozart’s wind music next month, it could be good.”

“We will, some time,” agreed George without conviction. If it’s still functioning, after this earthquake that’s brewing, he added in his own mind. The whisky was hot and strong and very welcome; buds of warmth and sleepiness opened in him like accelerated shots in some botanical film. “I’m going to bed, I’m bushed. Get me up early, won’t you?”

“With what?” said Bunty disrespectfully. “Dynamite?”

But she didn’t need dynamite; the telephone did it for her, rather too early, to her mind. George had awakened once with the first light, and stayed awake just long enough to enjoy the realisation that he need not move yet, his wife’s long, soft breathing beside him, and the sudden awareness that one thing of significance had certainly been said last night between them, though not by him.

“Our two all right?”, indeed!

Here had he been treading cautiously and watching the weather in the house, wondering what it would be like for Bunty to awake to the fact that her son had brought home a remarkably positive and permanent-looking girl friend; and all the time Bunty had it weighed up accurately and fairly, and was giving him the nudge, in case he had missed the significance of what was going on. “Our two” sounded large enough to set at rest more minds than his. He fell asleep again smiling. When he awoke again to the clamour of the telephone, it was half past seven, and Bunty was downstairs preparing breakfast. He reached for the instrument beside the bed, before she could pounce on the one downstairs and silence it.

“Sorry to wake you,” said Duckett, “but I wanted to make sure of getting you before you left. I’ve got an interim report from the doctor for you.”

“Already?” George sat up abruptly wide-awake. “That’s quick work.”

“He didn’t drown. No water in the lungs. He was dead before he ever went in.”

“The head wound?”

“Fractured skull. It turns out he had rather a thin one, but not one of those extreme cases. Somebody hit him a lot too hard, from almost behind him, slightly to his left. He’d be dead in minutes.”

“And the weapon? Has he got anything on that? Kind, shape, material? He must have been up all night,” said George with compunction.

“He was up all night. He wants to know why you can’t find ’em at a civilised hour. We can’t give you proper details yet, but I asked him for a long shot. And here it is. Traces of rust in the wound. Iron, he says, and narrow, say half an inch thick at the most. Width might be as much as two inches or so. Squared-off edges to it. It penetrated so deeply that it must have been swung at him pretty desperately, edge-on. Doc argues a fairish length, eighteen inches to two feet, maybe even more. Something like a flat iron bar, or a very large file. Does it make any sense?”

“It makes a lot of sense. Now I’ve got a request for you. Can you borrow me a frogman, and get him to Follymead during the morning? The sooner the better.”

“I can try. Where d’you want him?”