House of Green Turf

the stones I can find. At first I took it for granted it was Tom, you see… that I’d killed him when I crashed the car. But they told me at once that he was safe. Then I thought that there might have been somebody else involved in the accident, but there wasn’t. It isn’t as simple as that, and it isn’t as recent. The knowledge seemed to come from very deep, as if an earthquake had split the ground and thrown up something from miles down. There are no levels any more, everything’s torn up and thrown about, and everything has to settle all over again afterwards, and make a new surface to walk on. The first steps are liable to be pretty shaky. And buried things may break out and meet you in the way.’

He saw the quickened breathing heaving her breast, and the hectic flush of exertion flicking her cheekbones. ‘I’m tiring you,’ he said.

‘No, don’t go! No, you’re helping me. After I’d dredged up every recollection I could, right back to school, I did try, you see, to put it out of my mind. I told myself it was one of those freaks, the shock and the fright and the pain choosing to hit me after the event in this way. Nothing behind it. But I couldn’t satisfy myself, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to satisfy me, either. I’m not running a temperature, I’m not in shock, I haven’t any worries, my career will wait for me the short time it has to wait, and all I have to do is lie around and enjoy myself while I get well. There simply is no reason at all—is there?—why this terrible conviction of guilt should stay with me still. Only one possible reason. That it’s true, that it’s justified.’

‘But if there existed any real source for it, you would have found it.’ It did not convince him, and he knew as soon as it was out that it would not convince her.

‘No, because I’m the wrong person to do the searching. Oh, I believe I want to find it, but how can I be sure? Isn’t it possible that there’s at least as much of me trying to stamp it back into the ground, quickly, before I ever get a good look at it? Isn’t that the most likely reason why I always see it out of the corner of my eye?’

‘But did you never stop to consider that you have relatives, associates, friends, people who have been intimately involved in your life for years, and none of them accuses you of anything? Do you really believe you’ve committed some mortal fault against another person, without a single one of your acquaintances knowing anything about it? Is there an empty place anywhere in your life where you even could have done this hypothetical thing, in absolute isolation from any witness? That would rule out anything but the cruder possibilities, like flat, planned murder, that has to be kept secret. And that would involve more complications, like skills I very much doubt if you possess.’ He span out his theme to its ultimate absurdity. ‘And a body. And there never was a body featuring in your affairs, I take it?’

‘No… no body.’ She shivered, and passed the heel of her hand over her eyelids. ‘It wouldn’t be like that. There are more oblique ways of killing. Even without meaning to. But you see, it’s just because I’ve been dead in a way myself that I must know. After coming back to life again as I have, I’ve got to make this a new beginning, otherwise it will be unbearable. If I have something shameful buried somewhere in my past, then I want to know what it is. I want to settle the account, if it can be settled. I want to be out of debt.’

‘And you’ve said nothing of all this to anyone else? To your agent, or your family?’

The look she gave him, beginning with blank incomprehension and burning up into horrified recoil, more than answered that question. Clearly it would have been unthinkable to confide in any one of those circling satellites. She had dealt openly with him only because of his reassuring distance from her, and because he was a professional with a legitimate and impersonal interest in her recovery. And only a moment ago he had come very close to touching her hand, by way of establishing a closer contact! If he had done it he would have lost her irrecoverably.

‘Well, supposing now,’ he said carefully, ‘that someone else, someone completely detached, took over this search for you?’

He grudged her to the psychiatrists, but they might well be the obvious answer, if she could be persuaded to co-operate. And Harlingford was a good man, and old enough to see her with a disenchanted eye. If, he hedged wryly, any man still living is old enough for that. To love her would be to be powerless to help her, that was clear, for at the first touch, no more than the meeting of eyes, she would draw back out of reach, retreat into the castle and bar the doors. Now I wonder, he thought, I really wonder why?

‘Supposing someone else, someone who makes a job of that kind of thing, took over the stone-turning for you? If he found some lost detail—most probably perfectly innocent—to account for the setting up of this cancer in your mind, would that satisfy you? You would have to have faith in your man, of course. But there are people, you know, who are trained in these techniques, highly skilled professionals who take this sort of thing as their special field.’

If he had only known it, he had gone about this oblique approach all too gently; they were on different wavelengths, and communication as he understood it had ceased, though to her mind he had just begun to make sharp and practical sense. She sat up alertly. The word professional had a reassuring sound in her ears. Why not? He was right, what she needed was someone who knew how to set about unearthing lost incidents, someone who put his talents on the market at a fair price, and could be hired to do a specific job on a business footing. In a relationship like that, mutually agreed, there would be no violation of privacy.

‘Would you like me to put your case in the hands of somebody like that, and leave it to him to do your searching for you? And if the expert fails to turn up anything discreditable, then will you be satisfied?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘oh, yes! That’s what I need, somebody completely objective. But I shouldn’t know where to look for the right person, and I don’t want to ask anyone else to… to be an intermediary for me. Find me a good private detective, and I’ll turn the whole nightmare over to him, and abide by whatever he finds.’

CHAPTER TWO

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His name was Francis Killian, and he was forty-one years old. Strictly speaking, he was not what is usually thought of as a private detective at all, and he never called himself one. The small plate on his office door above the book-shop in Market Street, Comerbourne, said only: ‘Confidential Enquiries,’ and that was precisely what he dealt in. He didn’t touch divorce business or commercial spying; sometimes he wondered why, since he had no very inflated opinion of his own holiness, and there was more money in these lines than in the cold, retired researches he did undertake. An eventful life, which had begun its adulthood with national service in Korea, could hardly leave him many illusions; and even after that unspeakably horrible trap had opened and released him, scarred for life, he had half-chosen and half-drifted into situations and callings which were not for the squeamish. Trying, perhaps, to rediscover disgust as the clean feel it, a luxury out of reach of those already soiled.

So he couldn’t congratulate himself that it was any particular moral purity that had won him a recommendation from one of Comerbourne’s most respectable solicitors to one of Comerbourne’s most eminent surgeons, improbably in quest of a private enquiry agent ‘for a friend,’ of course! All that had kept Francis acceptable to such clients was a fastidious sense of cleanliness, a cold dislike of the feel of dirt. If he still had moral scruples it was from old habit, and they were by no means clearly defined.