Authors: Emma Smith
“And where do you suppose we shall be off
to,
Mrs Bowen?” asked Inspector Catcher.
“Why, how should I know?” she answered him, astonished. “It’s no affair of mine where you’re going after.”
“Oh, but it is your affair, Mrs Bowen, because we’re not going anywhere.”
“Not going anywhere?” she cried, aghast. “You surely don’t mean to tell me you’re thinking of stopping the night here?”
“Well, of course we’re going to stay here for the night,” said he, with a touch of impatience. “You don’t seriously imagine we shall be setting out at this hour, in the middle of this wilderness, in the teeth of a blizzard, to look for some other accommodation? Come, come, Mrs Bowen—be reasonable! How good that bacon does smell, after all. It’s not burning, is it?”
“But I can’t have you,” said Mrs Bowen bluntly. “I’m sorry—I can’t, and that’s final. I haven’t the facilities. There’s only the two beds for a start—I’m not going to turn Amy out of hers, and I’ve no intention of turning out of mine, not for you or for anyone else.”
“Mrs Bowen—please! There’s no need for you to work yourself up into such a state of excitement. We can manage perfectly well without beds, and really I don’t believe that even you can grudge us a seat in front of your fire. Didn’t I tell you a few minutes ago you’d be getting police protection in return for food and lodging? Considering the circumstances I should have thought you’d be only too glad to have us under your roof for the night.”
“We’ve done well enough up to now without protection, police or otherwise. We’re not used to company, me and Amy—to be quite plain with you, we don’t enjoy it. And I can’t understand why ever in the world you didn’t stop on in Melin-y-Groes, seeing you were down there making enquiries. There’s Mrs Rhys—she does Bed and Breakfast. Or come to that, why couldn’t Victor Pugh have put you up? He’s got a spare bedroom, that I do know.”
“And what makes it more likely for Victor Pugh to have put us up than for anyone else to do it? Is he the only person in your village with a spare bedroom?”
“No, he’s not,” said Mrs Bowen sharply, “but he’s the only policeman.”
“Oh, so that’s what his name was—Pugh! Perhaps I ought to explain to you now, Mrs Bowen, that we’ve come to an arrangement with Constable Pugh. He’s going to keep an eye on the village down below while we have our headquarters up here in the hills with you. That’s because in a manhunt the best strategy is always to spread out as much as possible. You never can tell at which point the man you’re hunting may try to escape from the net, you see.”
“Amy! Hold these plates for me.”
Mrs Bowen scooped up the bacon and broke four eggs into the frying-pan.
“Headquarters, did I hear you say just now? How long were you thinking of staying for, then?”
“For as long as it takes us to find our man—that might be tomorrow, or it might be the day after. Of course, if it goes on snowing as hard as this it may take us even longer—who knows?”
“But I can’t feed four mouths, day after day, till goodness knows when—there’s not enough food,” said Mrs Bowen.
“Oh, nonsense!” he replied, easily. “I can tell you’re a very provident housekeeper simply by looking at you, Mrs Bowen. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stores tucked away. You’ll manage to feed us all right.”
Mrs Bowen made no reply. She was stooping over the frying-pan and so it was Amy who saw Mr Nabb pull open the drawer of the table.
“What’s this?” he asked.
The medallion was dangling from his fingers.
“Granny!” said Amy, urgently attracting Mrs Bowen’s attention. Mrs Bowen turned round.
“That?” she said. “It’s what they call a holy medal, I believe. Amy—come on over here. These eggs are about done and I need you to hold the plates for me again. Did you butter the bread like I told you to? That holy medal,” she said, raising her voice, “was given to my son before he went off to Australia, the purpose of it being, as I remember, to keep him safe on the journey. I don’t recall now who gave it—that’s going back a good few years, that is. But as he wasn’t one for medals and such things himself he passed it on to me, and it’s been in the drawer there ever since. Amy—you’ve forgotten the cheese—whatever next? Don’t just stand there staring—fetch it out of the cupboard this instant. Didn’t you hear the Inspector say he was hungry?”
Amy had listened to her grandmother in growing stupefaction. All her life she had known her for someone incapable of telling a lie, yet now she related this piece of fiction with such composure and such fluency that Amy could visualise the scene as clearly as though she had actually witnessed it herself. In Amy’s imagination her father wore a navy-blue duffle-coat with the collar turned up.
“Put that back where you found it and pull in your chairs,”
said Mrs Bowen commandingly. There was a certain sparkle about her, as though she had just enjoyed an invigorating experience. “You might as well eat your food now, while it’s hot, as I’ve been to all the trouble of cooking it for you.”
They did as she told them. But because Mr Nabb’s eyes were never still he had no sooner picked up his knife and fork than he laid them down again and bending sideways groped along the floor. When he straightened himself there was a small piece of crumpled paper in his hand. Amy’s heart gave a horrible thump of warning. She shrank back, away from Mr Nabb. Without saying a word he smoothed the paper out flat on the table, and there were Amy’s two little matchstick men with skis on their feet and a row of dots and a row of arrows pointing towards the cottage door.
To Amy it seemed that now everything was revealed, that this drawing of hers was a piece of evidence so incriminating that only to look at it was enough for the whole guilty truth to be known immediately. But Mrs Bowen remarked in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice:
“That wasn’t such a bad drawing of yours after all, Amy. It was a pity for you to have thrown it away—your father would have liked to have seen it. But never mind, you can make another picture for him easily enough—and now the Inspector’s here, and Mr Nabb, you can study better how to do it right.”
Amy took Mick upstairs with her when she went to bed and arranged his old coat on the floor and told him to lie down and stay there. But he was restless. She kept her candle alight and watched him. He turned round and round on the coat and pushed it with his nose and scraped it with his paw.
“Mick—lie down!”
He flopped at once in obedience, but his ears were still pricked. He tilted his head, first to one side, then to the other. A murmur of voices reached them through the floor-boards and various bumps and scrapes that could have been the sound of chairs pulled up to the fire. Amy found herself listening as well, trying to match every noise to a possible movement. Mick growled. Then he sprang up and wandered round the room, sniffing and hanging his head close against the cracks, trembling as though he could hear rats on the move.
“It’s no good, Mick—they’re going to be there all night, and I’ll never get any sleep if you don’t settle down.”
But in the end she was obliged to climb out of her bed and tie Mick to one leg of it with an improvised rope made by knotting a pair of stockings together. She crouched on the floor, stroking him, and the murmur of voices below went on.
“I wonder what they’re saying—I wish I could hear.”
It was cold. She took the old ironing-blanket off her bed and wrapped it round her shoulders. Then she picked up her candle and tiptoed through the doorway into her grandmother’s room. Queenie was curled up at the foot of Mrs Bowen’s feather quilt.
“Amy?”
“I can’t sleep, Granny. I wish they’d stop talking—it keeps me awake.”
“There’s nothing in this world could keep me awake tonight, I don’t believe—I’m tired to the bones of me. It must be telling that pack of lies has worn me out.”
“You were a wonder, Granny. I’d no idea you could make things up like that,” whispered Amy admiringly.
“Nor I didn’t myself, and I don’t know that I feel so very comfortable about it, neither. Fancy, to find out at my age I’m a liar born—an old woman like me, and never suspected it all these years. It came so easy, Amy—a natural gift, you might say. I ought to be ashamed. Well, so I am, in a way.”
“I do wish that little one, that Mr Nabb—I wish he wasn’t so nosey,” said Amy.
“Nosey!—that’s the very word for him,” agreed Mrs Bowen. “And even supposing it is his job to be, I don’t like him any the more for it. He’s disrespectful. But it’s the tall one I can’t abide—I can’t abide him, Amy. Whatever he says it seems like he’s laughing at me. Why should he laugh at me all of the time? He may think he’s a whole lot cleverer—and I’m not denying he is—but that’s no reason. A person doesn’t show his cleverness by laughing at people—he just shows he’s got no manners at all—none!”
“How long do you think they’re going to stop here?”
“Till they find him—that’s what they said, didn’t they?”
“Yes, that’s what they said. Oh, Granny, I just can’t bear for them to catch him. Are they sure to?”
“Now Amy, have sense. Right or wrong, we’ve done all we can for that poor man, and very likely we did more than we should have done. They say that he killed someone—maybe he never meant to—we can’t judge, we don’t know. But he must take the consequences now, and for you to stand there in your nightdress with your teeth chattering won’t help him one little bit. So you be a good girl, Amy, and get into your bed and go to sleep. That’s what I mean to do.”
And Mrs Bowen turned her back and pulled the bedclothes round her ears, leaving Amy to feel as much alone as if her grandmother had suddenly vanished out of the room. She stood forlorn by the high pillow, shivering, and the candlestick in her hand shivered with her. She was not sleepy. The voices in the front-kitchen mumbled on. Whatever were they saying? Talk, talk; and then a pause; and then talk, talk, talk again.
Very quietly Amy crossed to the head of the staircase and leaned into the short matchboarded tunnel, listening. But the door at the bottom was shut and not a single word came clearly through it. She knew that the deeper, harsher voice was Mr Nabb’s and the other, softer and slower, belonged to Inspector Catcher. Amy put her candlestick on the floor so that its gentle flicker illuminated the stairway, and then with infinite caution lowered herself two steps. They had stopped talking. She waited. As soon as Mr Nabb began to speak she lowered herself again, but when she reached the third step from the bottom she dared not press the latch for fear that even the faintest rattle would give her away.
So there she huddled, the ironing-blanket clutched around her shoulders, her feet as cold as ice. The conversation had lapsed again. Perhaps they had heard her creeping down the stairs; perhaps at this very moment they were staring across the room in her direction. Then there was a thud, a clink, a clatter; someone swore, someone laughed, and under cover of the noise Amy pressed the latch and pushed: the door stood open a crack, not more than an inch, but enough. Their voices reached her as distinctly as though she were sitting beside them.
“For heaven’s sake, Harris—leave that fire alone, can’t you!
You’ll wake the old woman up with all the racket you’re making.”
“Serve her right—give her a taste of her own medicine. She hasn’t shown very friendly to us, I must say. What’s the matter with her? Don’t they trust the police round here?”
The Inspector laughed again. Something about his laugh struck Amy as peculiar. She felt as though the laugh were a clue, if she could only understand it, to some bigger puzzle, something that had been worrying her all the time at the back of her mind. Her heart began to beat faster, louder, with a sense of painful anticipation. Why had the Inspector just called Mr Nabb by another name?
There was the chink of a glass, the sound of someone shifting in his chair—
her
chair. It was strange to be able to hear but not to see them; not to see the expression on their faces, whether they frowned or smiled, or how they sat, leaning back or bending forward.
“What makes you so sure he’s alive, anyway?” said Mr Nabb. “You’re always so sure you’re right, Vigers. I think we’re wasting our time here.”
There was a pause and then the smooth, soft voice replied:
“He’s alive all right—I know it. You’re in too much of a hurry to get back to civilization, Harris. That’s why you think he’s dead in a snowdrift—you want him to be, so as to have it all over and done with. It’s a pity you’re not enjoying yourself. I am.”
“Enjoy! I don’t see how anyone—except for a nut-case—could enjoy himself spending the night in a barn with the temperature below freezing-point.”
“But that was last night, Harris. Tonight you’ve no reason to complain—I’ve provided you with a warm fire and a comfortable chair.”
“A chair! Why can’t we get lodgings in the village and sleep decently in beds? It’s safe enough—they won’t have got wind of us—not likely! They’re cut off by the snow down there, same as here.”
“What you’re saying is sheer nonsense, Harris. That village isn’t cut off, the same as here. It’s got a policeman and it’s got a telephone line—it’s in direct communication with the world. And if we’re one jump ahead of the Embassy people now—which we are—it’s only because they don’t know we’re ahead of them; they don’t know we’re here. Can’t you understand that once we attract attention to ourselves we lose our whole advantage, quite apart from any other consequences. I don’t count the woman in the Post Office. She’s not a risk. She swallowed your story, obviously, and your appearance, Harris, if you’ll forgive my saying so, is sufficiently nondescript not to excite interest. But I am not nondescript, and if I’d gone into the village with you attention would undoubtedly have been attracted, and we should have been remembered, and in due course we could have been described. We don’t want that to happen, do we? So let’s have no more of this absurd talk about lodgings in the village.”
“Well, I still think he’s dead,” said the voice of Mr Nabb, sulkily. “How can he be alive? Didn’t Oscar say he’d all but cut his arm clean off him? That was three days ago. Three days without a bite to eat, and an arm half gone, and then this snow on top to finish him off—of course he’s dead! Or as near as makes no difference.”