deadened footsteps. On one side it was closed in by stone walls like one continuous wall, with the heads of fruit trees drooping above. On the other side, a line of elms closed it in as well, with a screen of bushes and stinging- nettles underneath. An apple had fallen here and there, to rot. It was a narrow little lane, in daytime haunted by wasps and at night full of an eerie oppressiveness.
Courtney watched her print frock move away from him and disappear.
He moved back from the gate, and felt in his pocket after his pipe. Hot tonight. Uncomfortably hot. He hadn't noticed this before.
Far away to his left, Leckhampton Hill rose against the moonlit sky, with the clay face of the quarry along its upper ridges. It was the beginning of the Cotswolds, and from it you could see Cheltenham like a gray toy town in the valley. Through Courtney's mind, incongruously, ran lines of verse her remembered having read in an anthology long ago…
Well, it wasn't November now. No; it was hot. Infernally hot, and the little grass-carpeted lane lay like a tunnel under the over-ripe fruit along the walls.
Phil Courtney filled and lighted his pipe. The little core of light from the match startled him, like a pigmy explosion, when he struck it. He turned back towards the house, realizing that when a match flame made you jump there must be something wrong with your nerves.
Subdued activity seemed to be pulsing in the house. He could tell that, even at this distance away.
He thought of Vicky Fane, pretty, healthy Vicky, with her jaw-muscles rigid as though in a cast, the skin drawn back in the agony of the
And he had taken a few more steps when he stopped. He heard, distantly, a sound which carried clearly on the still air in these still streets. It might have been a symbol. It was the hurrying clang of an ambulance-bell.
Simultaneously, from somewhere far up the grass lane, a woman began to scream.
Sparks and fire from his pipe spilled to the ground. He tried to knock it out, but thrust it into his pocket without thinking further of it. Subconscious fear returned. The screams, shrill and terrified, were choked off as though by a hand. Then silence, and one more scream.
His fingers were so clumsy that it seemed minutes before he could get the gate open. But he did not hesitate about the direction in which to go. He ran towards the left, his foot sending flying a spongy apple as he ran.
'Ann!' he called.
No reply.
Somewhere ahead of him, he thought he heard a movement; then a pause of what can only be called awareness, and a tearing sound as though of bushes or stinging-nettles.
Only patches of moonlight penetrated the dank, spongy-soft tunnel. He was some hundred yards or more along the lane when he saw her, or at least a huddle in a print frock, leaning on hands and knees near the stone wall to the left. As she seemed to hear his footfalls swish in the grass, she scrambled up and began to run as though blindly in the other direction.
'Ann! It's me! Phil Courtney!'
The figure hesitated, stumbled, tottered, and then stood still. She was standing with her back to him, hardly recognizable in the splintered moonlight, when he reached her.
'What's wrong?'
'Nothing. N-nothing!'
He could hear her thin, harsh breathing, shaking the words and stumbling on them with the accents of terror. He struck a match and held it up.
At first she refused to turn round and face him. When she did so, after the first match had burnt down and another was struck, she was smiling — but not very convincingly.
Her thin frock had been ripped down partly from the left shoulder, exposing the white silk slip and outlining the breast. A bruise was beginning to show on her neck under the left ear. Her thick hair, which she wore bound round her head, was slightly loosened; hairpins showed in it. There were grass-stains on her dress at the knees, and on the rumpled tan silk stockings underneath. She was bedraggled, grimy, obviously frightened — but trying to carry it off as though nothing had happened.
'Don't make a noise!' she urged. 'I'm p-perfectly all right. Do put out that match. No, don't. Light another.'
'But what—'
'It was someone. A man.'
'What man?'
'I d-don't know.' She passed the back of her hand across her forehead. 'He caught me from behind and put his hand over my mouth. He — anyway, I fought loose and yelled. He got his hand on my mouth again. I think I bit his hand, but I'm not sure. When he heard you coming, he must have…'
'Where did he go?'
'A-across there, most likely. Towards the fields. It's open fields. No, don't! Don't! Come back!'
The darkness was dense, the stinging-nettles a formidable brush. Striking still another match, he held it above his head. There was nothing else here except the unkempt grass and a decayed plum or two.
'Would you recognize him again?'
'No. I never even saw him. Please! Don't make a row! Take me home.'
She was trembling badly now.
Holding her arm in his, he took her along the lane for some three hundred yards, to where faint white street- lamps glimmered in the Old Bath Road.
'I shall he all right now,' she assured him. 'No, don't come any farther. I don't want my father or mother to see you; and I don't want them to see me either; or heaven knows what they'd think. Good night. And thanks.'
She was gone, running lightly and holding up the shoulder of her torn frock, before he had time to protest. He saw her turn in at a gate near by, with a quick look up and down the road. Then, more violently disturbed than ever before in his life, Phil Courtney retraced his steps.
Psychic fits, it seemed, had their uses after all. The episode had been so brief and rapid that he wondered whether he might have dreamed it. Stopping again at the place where he had found Ann, which he had' marked by a wooden back gate with a white enameled sign reading, 'No hawkers or circulars,' he struck matches to see whether any traces might have been left.'
No footprints. No convenient cuff-link dropped, or similar clue. Only the trampled grass, the evil lane, the close-pressing elms.
'I'll be a—'' he began aloud.
His last match burnt his fingers, and he dropped it. He returned to the Fanes' house and opened the gate, where a shadow rose up in front of him.
But it was only Frank Sharpless.
'Who's there?' demanded Sharpless's voice out of the gloom. 'Me.'
'Oh. What time is it?'
'I don't know. Must be past eleven. Frank, have you seen anybody hanging about here?'
It took some little while to make Sharpless understand this question. He seemed dazed, and so completely in anguish that Courtney's concern for Ann was almost lost in pity. He remembered that Vicky Fane was dying of lockjaw up there in an airless room.
'Attacked Ann?' Sharpless kept repeating stupidly. 'Where? When? Why' Though he was trying to focus on this, he could not do so. 'Was she hurt?'
