Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

“Did you follow up the Stewarts? They must have retired somewhere around London. Londoners don’t go far away.”

“I did. They’ve got a little house in Esher, all very nice and accessible. But they’ve got time on their hands, too, for the first time in years, and they’ve gone off to Italy for an early holiday. Can’t say I blame ’em. They’ll be back next week, but next week doesn’t help us now. Well, that took a fair amount of time without much result, I grant you. So I took off for that garage and service station where the kid started work. Purley and Sons, Highbury. Quite a nice chap, Purley, old-fashioned paternal style. Good little business, and still personal. Garages can be, even in London.”

“And they remember him?”

“They remember him. Give him quite a good name as a worker. Didn’t mind how mucky he got, and loved cars nearly as much as guitars. And you know he was only a kid when he started with them? Well, this is the one pearl I’ve got for you with all this diving, George. Purley took a real interest in the kids he employed, and was a stickler for the regulations. And you know the birth certificate juveniles have to produce when they start work?”

“Of course, what about it?”

“Just that in his case it wasn’t a birth certificate. It was an adoption certificate.”

So he had known, of course, he had known all along. It is, in any case, the modern policy to ensure that they know, and so avoid future shocks. He had always known; and this was the one fact he had always refrained from mentioning, if not suppressed. He talked freely to interviewers about his upbringing in public care, he went back to his old home regularly as a visitor. No sore places there.

But never, never did he tell anyone, even Liri Palmer, that John James and Esther Galt were only his adoptive parents. That was a spot he was careful never to touch.

For fear of pain?

A quarter of an hour later the telephone rang for the third time, and this time it really was Stirling. By that time the inquiries he had to make there seemed almost unnecessary, but he set them in motion, all the same. It would take a little time to get hold of details from so far back, names, dates of death, and so on, but the services kept everlasting records. He would get what he wanted, though perhaps not in time to affect or simplify the issue.

And now there was nothing left to be done, except sit back and wait for Lucien Galt to come back to Follymead under escort.

In the back of the police car, purling steadily along the Ml at seventy, Lucien Galt sat closed into himself like a locked house, but like a locked house with someone peering through the curtains, and possibly a gun braced across the sill of a just-open window. He had said hardly anything since the large, civil men closed in on him at the airport, and wafted him smoothly aside into a private room. If he had seen the slightest hope of giving them the slip, then or afterwards, he would have risked it, but they didn’t take any chances, and they didn’t give him any. No use looking back now and cursing the mistakes he had made. He had a situation to deal with here. Nothing else mattered now.

He was horribly tired, that was the worst thing about it. He needed to think clearly and carefully, and he was in no condition to do it, but he had to try. This perfectly decent and pleasant person beside him, and the other one, driving, they were human, they had treated him throughout with slightly constrained civility and consideration. It was an extraordinary feeling, being wound about with chains of forbearance and watchfulness, like a mental case, like a psychopath under observation. But it did mean that they would listen to him and report on him with all the detachment of which they were capable.

“I’d like to tell you how it happened,” he said abruptly, breaking the silence which had been largely of his own making. At first he hadn’t known what to do, or how to conduct himself, and though he had despised the normal bluster and pretence with which the guilty cover up their guilt, it had seemed to him that a profession of non- understanding was the only course left to him, and after that, silence, and such dignity as he could find a way of keeping. I know nothing, I understand nothing, I am a citizen of substance and some importance, (am I?) but I am certainly not going to make a fuss in this public place. Since you apparently have a duty to do, by all means let’s go back and sort out this misunderstanding in private. All very well, but it made this blunt and exhausted opening now seem very crude. He shrank from the sound of it, and yet he was aware that it made a credible beginning. The guilty first protest (at least he had done that only once, and briefly), then sit back and think, and begin to worry, and break into a sweat of anxiety, and finally come to the conclusion that a half-admission may get them something. What he had said must have that ring to this solid, quiet person beside him, who looked like a merchant skipper on leave, brown-faced and far-sighted, and at ease anywhere.

The eyes had shortened their focus upon him, along a broad tweed shoulder. The good-natured teak face gave nothing away. “How you drove the car away, you mean?” asked Detective-Sergeant Rapier placidly.

“All right, I did drive the car away, if you want me to say so.”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t want to say. We’re not asking you for any statements.”

“I know that. I’m offering you one. If you want to take it down, you can. But even if you don’t want to, you can listen. I’m tired of running, anyhow, I want it straightened out.”

“If you want to talk,” said Rapier philosophically, “who’s to stop you? But I feel I ought to remind you that there are two witnesses present, whether there’s a record or not, and that anything you say may be used in evidence. Maybe you should take another long, quiet think – about as long as from here to Comerbourne. There’ll be time there to do all the talking you’ll need to do.”

“I have thought,” said Lucien bleakly. “I should have done better to think before I ran. What has it got me? I don’t suppose I ever had much chance of getting out, but what chance I had I seem to have muffed. Talking can’t make things worse now. It might even make them a shade better. Because I never meant to kill him, of course. If I hadn’t had the most hellish luck he’d be alive now.”

In the small, pregnant silence, shatteringly apparent even while Price continued to direct the car calmly at the same smooth speed, Lucien observed his two escorts exchanging in the mirror a speaking glance that was yet very careful not to say too much.

“I didn’t know,” said Rapier mildly, “that anybody’d mentioned a death.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lucien in a spurt of nervous fury that left him trembling, “let’s pack in this pretence that you’re after me for running off with a car. People don’t try to skip out to South America for that, and you fellows don’t have the airports alerted to stop them. That’s not what all this is about. You know as well as I do that Mr. Arundale’s dead, and if you weren’t as good as certain I killed him, you wouldn’t be here taking me back with you to Comerbourne. So why put on this act with me!”