“And you like it?”
“I do, Miles. I’ve discovered a dormant hunger for books that I believe will swell eventually to a passion. I get pleasure just from handling them. I begin to find a room empty and spiritless if books don’t form part of the furnishing. I’ve even begun to buy books of my own. Look here!” She showed him a volume she had been carrying under her arm. It was a gift edition of Chaucer’s Tales.
“Where did you pick this up? It’s not very easy to come by this edition nowadays.”
“This is my lucky day. Everything in the garden’s beautiful. I was actually given some primroses by my employer this morning. She had a hamper up from the country. And now this. And meeting you. Are you buying that for the children?” She nodded towards the Hans Andersen.
“I’m striving against temptation.”
“The temptation of buying it? Oh, Miles, give in at once. Nothing is so heavenly as an un-birthday present.”
She was so glowing, so persuasive, so confident in her hope, that he yielded with a laugh. “And I don’t mind taking that book off you at cost price,” he added, laying a finger on the Chaucer.
“I couldn’t, Miles. I couldn’t really. When I think of the time I’ve spent, all this week, quieting my Nonconformist conscience, the agony of indecision in which this very afternoon I walked from Oxford Street—no, I couldn’t. I’ve been waiting a whole week for enough money to buy it, and I was paid last night. I was terrified lest it should be snapped up.”
“Why has conscience been so active in the matter? Is it against your principle to buy books?”
“It’s a question of £ s. d. Conscience insisted that if I didn’t spend the money on handkerchiefs, I should be reduced to the sort of painting-rags that Brand pulls out of his pocket in company. Poor Brand!” Her expression sobered. “He’s had a horrible life with that woman, you know. You don’t realise how she’s kept his house all these years—it’s filthy and full of the most contemptible rubbish, everything shoddy and broken and worthless. Those handkerchiefs were typical. Though, as a matter of fact”—she smiled again—“he’d unearthed a silk one from somewhere that last night. I teased him about it.”
Miles’s heart gave a sickening jolt. While they waited for the Hans Andersen to be wrapped up, he asked her casually which night, and, without arousing her suspicion, learned that she referred to Christmas Eve. It was clear that she had no notion whither his enquiries tended; she was too happy for the shadow of that tragedy to touch her to-day. Miles envied her; she spoke lightly of so many trivialities that pleased her, and caught him with a detaining hand when he would have gone away without his change.
“Day-dreaming?” she accused him, laughing.
He pulled himself together, made her some appropriate reply, and walked with her to Trafalgar Square.
“Have some tea,” he offered her, with a sudden effort, realising that it was now five o’clock.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back. Any time you want your library catalogued, Miles, ring me up, and I’ll give you special terms.”
5
Miles walked blindly under the Admiralty Arch into St. James’s Park. Destiny, it seemed, was determined that he should be heavily implicated in this affair. He wondered whether it would later occur to Isobel what she had said, what far-reaching results might spring from those lightly uttered words. For if Brand had a silk handkerchief on Christmas Eve, that, surely, must be the handkerchief found in Adrian Gray’s fireplace some hours later. If it hadn’t been burnt, it must have been discovered by the police among his belongings, for they had examined every pocket, drawer, and soiled-linen basket for handkerchiefs made of silk and had found none, except in Eustace’s luggage.
“It must have been his,” argued Miles desperately. “It’s no good fighting against facts. There are too many fools doing it all the time, as it is. Brand must have killed his father. He killed him, in the heat of passion, with the paper-weight, that he afterwards rubbed clean with a handkerchief, that he later burned in the grate. Presumably there was blood on it—must have been, when you remember the state of Gray’s face. And now we’re back at the old question—Why?”
Round and round, like a dormouse endlessly turning its wheel, he drove his familiar arguments. Presently, like an infuriated dormouse, seeing no way out, he was striding through the London streets, repeating the same facts and phrases again and again, as though their constant repetition would give them a fresh meaning.
There is a game played in childhood, particularly among the Boy Scouts of the last generation, that consists in changing a word, a letter at a time, into a totally dissimilar one. Thus
CAT
COT
COG
DOG
though the examples are never so simple as that, and the words never of fewer than five letters. But some such game Miles was playing to himself now. He began with the position as it was known to the public, and strove to change it, a fact at a time, into a proven case against Brand.
“Of course, Eustace’s cheque is the problem,” he told himself. “If we could put Eustace out of the affair, things would be a lot easier. Brand gets his cheque, quarrels with his father, murders him, no doubt accidentally, and slips off to bed, presumably removing any clues there may be against himself.”
But this version seemed to him woefully unsatisfactory. He was by no means intimate with Brand; nevertheless, he was convinced that, having obtained his money, nothing Adrian Gray said, no matter how bitter or insulting, would arouse in his son any appreciable feeling, certainly not to the extent of murder.
“There’s something else,” he decided, turning into a Tube station, and holding out his season-ticket for the benefit of the man at the barrier, “something he destroyed or something he’s hidden. The
