person.
‘And the timing?’
‘We left Barbara’s place just after nine, say five or ten past. I reckon it would be about five minutes later when we heard the car shoot off like that.’
It fitted. And possibly the simple theory that a courting couple had been making use of the Lyons’ drive, and taken to the road again without due care, was the correct one. But there were things about the affair that pricked in George’s mind like burrs.
‘Then this car, apparently, was parked well up that sloping lane absolutely without lights?’
They looked at each other, and confirmed with an assured exchange of glances that this was so.
‘No mistake about it. If they’d even had sidelights on I believe the faint radiation would have shown. When the lights came on, the car was out on the road.’
So what would even a courting couple have been doing, drawn in on the grass in absolute darkness, to their own peril? What were the odds against any such car sailing carelessly out and knocking down probably the only pedestrian in all the miles of that road at that time, just by chance? Chance is very, very methodical in its distribution of probabilities, and uses sheer coincidences only very sparingly.
‘Or, of course,’ pointed out Barbara obligingly, ‘you may take the view that this is simply our concocted story, and we first knocked the child down and then picked him up again.’
‘And drove the other car away by remote control? Of course, you were the one who went to telephone, and then set off with the ambulance. You haven’t actually inspected the place where somebody certainly was parked, backed up into the side of the lane ready to drive out on to the road. Maybe Willie did see it before he left. The other car was there, all right, he brought some fragments of grass and fresh hawthorn leaves out with him. By the way, where did you leave the Land-Rover?’
‘On the gravel in front of the house,’ said Willie, surprised. It took him a second or two to get the drift. He grinned. ‘True, that would leave me without transport, wouldn’t it, if we were working our way round to come to my lodge from Wales. Unless, of course, I was coming all the way back to Abbot’s Bale with Barbara. By which time it would be rather late to set off back up the valley with the Land-Rover. Nice guessing, and only slightly wrong. Actually, we were planning on spending the night at my place, not hers, and driving down in the morning.’
That fitted, too. If they had driven away from Abbot’s Bale House openly in the Aston Martin, and left the Land-Rover standing on the forecourt for anyone to see who cared, plainly they had opted for a policy of complete openness. Which, George recollected, had hardly been Barbara’s attitude two days ago, so it must be Willie who had made the decision, and convinced her of its rightness.
‘Am I allowed to ask you again, Mrs Rainbow,’ said George equably, ‘whether you want to alter your amended account of Thursday night? In the light of all this, I feel I’m being invited to show an interest.’
‘On Thursday night,’ said Willie firmly, ‘Barbara left as soon as her husband was off to choir practice, and drove up to my place. Not for the first time. We were there together from about half past eight until half past eleven, when she left for home. By which time, I gather, her husband was dead. Barbara told you a tall story because she didn’t want to bring me into the affair at all. Which was nice of her, but pointless, since I
‘Idiot,’ said Barbara, affectionately and serenely, ‘don’t you see that leaves us both in it up to the neck? Obviously, each of us would be ready to give the other an alibi any time of the day or night, but what makes you think George has to accept that?’
‘Idiot,’ said Willie, just as buoyantly, ‘do you think that makes us any different from all the rest of Middlehope? There isn’t a native up there who wouldn’t give every other native an alibi, as against the aliens. George knows it. Even if he didn’t – but he does! – Jack Moon would have told him. That puts us just alongside all the rest. Even if we happen to be telling the truth! In any case, where else would we want to be?’
It was a point of view which George could appreciate, but one, plainly, which had never fully dawned on Barbara until this moment. She laid down her knife, and gazed wide-eyed at Willie across the table, and her slow, astonished smile of acceptance was something to see. That Willie the Twig should include her without question in that ‘we’, as though she had been born and bred in the secret world of Middlehope, as he had, charmed and flattered her. That he could do it without in the least considering that she should feel charmed and flattered was even more staggering. Love was one thing, love you couldn’t help, it went out to alien creatures if it so chose, and there was nothing you could do about it. But this patient, assured instruction that she belonged, and ought to have the sense to stop behaving as if she did not, this was quite another matter. There were startled tears, as well as irresistible laughter, in Barbara’s eyes as she agreed almost meekly:
‘That’s right! So we’re still in the running, along with all the rest of the valley.’
‘Neck and neck,’ said Willie the Twig heartily, and speared the largest remaining pickled onion.
Bossie awoke when the light of a fine Sunday morning reached his face, and lay blinking at all the whiteness that surrounded him, and wondering where he was. They had put him in a single room so minute that there was no room in it for much beyond the bed, the inevitable bedside locker, and a tiny wash-basin. There was, however, a large and eastward-facing window, which let in the sun into his eyes. Not home, that was definite. So there had to be a reason, and that started his memory working overtime at picking up clues out of what began as a nightmare agglomeration of disconnected impressions. Darkness, and car noises and car lights, and rolling face-down on spiky boulders like a fakir on a bed of nails. And something crazy, a face of extreme beauty leaning down over him, and a voice like a velvet paw stroking his senses – Bossie knew about voices, and this was a show-stopper.
He moved, and a lot of things hurt, but not acutely, just protestingly, to remind him they were there. Especially his left hip and side, on which he was lying. He turned over, which also hurt, and then he found the pillow rasping his right cheek. The safest position seemed to be flat on his back. Like a sensible person he adopted it, and heaved himself up slightly on the pillow, and settled down to think things out.
If his muscles were stiff and sore, there was nothing the matter with his mind, once it came awake enough to function. He remembered walking along the dark road from the bus stop, as he had done dozens of times before, and then the terrifying rush of air and metal and bulk bearing down on him from the lane on the right, in total darkness until the headlights suddenly sprang up to pin him. He remembered the jolting pain hoisting him by the left hip and slamming him down on the road, grazed and stunned, and the indignity of struggling to move, and not being able to shift his weight by an inch. Just like the kind of nightmare where you fall down in front of a steam-roller, and watch it approaching, dead slow, and find your own movements even slower, absolutely helpless to remove you from its path.
