“There is,” Torrant told her grimly, and looked at his watch, j He wondered in what crevice of the night Simeon would be caught up with, to answer first a charge of assault—because j he would be caught up with: Chauncy was not a town in „ which a man could board a train on the spur of the moment |] or, failing that, melt unnoticed. He wondered too what Simeon . had told Mrs. Watts to produce that stoniness, what threat the inventive mind had produced for this particular emergency. I Whatever it was, it would dissolve with Simeon safely in custody.
Louise said, still with that small wry smile, “I couldn’t leave without telling you, Maria. I didn’t know I’d nearly get you killed. I was careful, and I don’t know how Simeon knew—”
“I do,” said Torrant briefly, and explained, cursing himself i all over again. He had left Mrs. Judd to find a safe temporary 1 shelter for Maria, and who knew what dire phrases she might have used on the telephone? ‘Life or death’, ‘Mrs. Mallow’s young cousin’—enough, anyway, to make Simeon, overhearing, decide that the evacuation of Maria from the garage apartment called for action. He might have intended to warn Anna-belle, perhaps, or threaten Maria into silence with her cousin’s safety held over her head—but he hadn’t taken his car, he had left that for a badge of occupancy at Mrs. Judd’s while he ran up the side roads and across the fields.
To hear Maria say to Louise Mallow that she knew; to see this effortless money going up in smoke.
Not a parrot after all, Torrant thought, holding the beaked and thrusting face in his mind; a bird of prey. Simeon had bargained with Louise over the Mallow estate; how much of the proceeds from Martin’s murder had Annabelle Blair turned over to him? Annabelle, who had been dead for three weeks when he knocked at the door of the house on Bolton Road . . .
Maria left the loveseat with a held-in suddenness and crossed the room and took her cousin’s hands. Louise looked up at her, the gray gaze quiet and clear. “I’m sorry about everything, Maria.”
“Sorry!” Maria said, and it was plainly not the soreness from Simeon’s hands at her throat that made her voice blurred and shaken. “If I’d come when you wrote me—”
But Louise had steeled herself beyond that point. She was holding herself very still, and her glance slipped past Maria’s and met Torrant’s, acknowledging a sound over the sleet, a faint hum that was coming closer. She took her hands gently from Maria s and stood up.
“Shock,” Torrant told her rapidly; he had already begun to think about this. “The doctor will certainly go along with that under the circumstances. All you have to tell the police—”
“But I don’t care,” Louise said. Her mouth twisted a little in a smile. Relaxed, free of fear, it was a pleasant mouth. ‘1 thought once that I couldn’t bear to have people know the truth, even strangers—but I didn’t know then what Annabelle Blair was really like. It’s so nice, not being Annabelle any more.”
The hum grew louder and then slowed; headlights slid along the windows as a car stopped before the Mallow house, a black car with a bubble of red on top. Louise said steadily to Torrant, “Would you let them in? I think I’d better go upstairs and get a few things.”
So that there were only speeding seconds alone with Maria, whose glance and voice and walk had seemed to belong in his personal history from the first; Maria whom he had found and almost lost. Now wasn’t the time to tell her; she looked white and ruffled and bemused. She looked at Torrant as though she didn’t see him, and said in a wondering voice, “She called Gerald by his first name once, and that proved she thought of him that way. And then, tonight, she called me Maria, and I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t afraid of her any more.”
Torrant watched her. He said gravely, “And what do I have to call you?”
The knocker fell then with a crisp official sound, and after a long moment he went to answer it.
