Authors: Emma Smith
Resolved on staying calm and showing no trace of alarm, she went inside and set about lighting the fire in the front-kitchen, noting to herself as she did so that they must have kept a blaze going half the night through, for the logs were still smouldering and the ashes red-hot.
“Where’s that granddaughter of yours, Mrs Bowen?” said Inspector Catcher affably, pausing on his way into the side-kitchen. Round his neck hung the towel he had asked for and been grudgingly given the night before, and from the ends of his long fingers dangled a neat little bag of washing and shaving equipment. “She should have been the first up, not the last—she ought to be cooking our breakfast by now. Isn’t that what girls are for—looking after their elders and betters? I’m afraid you must spoil her, Mrs Bowen. Children ought to be disciplined, not indulged—aren’t I right, Nabb?”
Mr Nabb, scratching himself by the window, merely grunted.
“There’s no call to rouse Amy yet awhile,” said Mrs Bowen evenly. She was down on her knees, her back turned, sweeping up the hearth. “I was only just then thinking—it’ll do her good to lie on a bit. Not quite herself she wasn’t, yesterday, it seemed to me—”
“No, she wasn’t,” said Mr Nabb, interrupting sharply. “I had my eye on that girl and I noticed the way she was carrying on. And I’ll tell you this much—it was very peculiar. As a matter of fact I mentioned it to her.”
“You did?”
Still on her knees Mrs Bowen slewed round towards him, brush and shovel raised in either hand. What had he said to Amy, what warning or threat uttered, that might have made her decide any risk, however fearful, was worth taking?
“Yes, I did,” he replied in a surly voice.
“It could be she’s sickening,” said Mrs Bowen breathlessly. “They’ve got the measles at school. Have you two gentlemen had the measles? Better to part her from you, I daresay, just in case.”
Oh, Amy! she wanted to cry—where are you? If only it were the measles! If only Amy were tucked up safe in bed, how thankful she would be—never mind the spots!
Abandoning all pretence of keeping an easy conversation going, Mrs Bowen cooked them their breakfast in silence; and three times while they were eating it she went outside to gaze up the hill in a state of growing agitation. She did not know what to do for the best, for the greater safety of her child. If she could only be certain of where Amy was she would at least then be able to weigh one peril against another. Surely it was true that she had gone down to Tyler’s Place? And if she had, and if she were even now toiling homewards, Mrs Bowen had no wish, for the sake of easing her own distress, to give her away to those bad men. But just supposing—? Mrs Bowen was afraid to suppose it. She would wait another five minutes; another five. And perhaps she might have continued in this way to postpone her worst fears, interval by interval, were it not that when for the third time she went out into the shed it was snowing.
The low dark sky had begun to loosen its load in hurried flurries. The wind was rising. Something strange in the sound of it frightened her. She listened and heard it again—a sort of whistling, except that it was too low-pitched for whistling, and yet too shrill to be the usual moaning noise of wind. Wonderingly, Mrs Bowen stepped out from beneath the cover of the sloping roof into a ferment of conflicting currents of air. Her apron was torn almost off her. She fought her way to the corner of the cottage and there she crouched, not daring to set foot or even, for a few moments, to look beyond, one hand pressed to the stones of the solid wall for support, the other attempting to hold clear of her eyes the strands of grey hair whipping wildly across her face. But when she did peer round the side of the cottage all she could see was a huge shapeless moving mass filling the valley, travelling fast, an inky cloud blotting out the world, and at the sight of it her heart seemed to burst wide open with terror. Such a blizzard was not just a storm of wind and snow—it was more. It was a destroyer, out of whose path any frail or living thing must flee or perish.
The Inspector and Mr Nabb heard her in the side-kitchen calling aloud like a madwoman:
“I’m coming, my darling! I’m coming—I’m coming!”
When they reached her she was scarcely recognizable. Shaken by terrible sobs, her face screwed up, her mouth open, tears pouring down her cheeks, she was trying blindly to cram on boots and coat at the same time. They took hold of her arms but she fought to get free.
“Gone clean off her rocker,” said Mr Nabb. “What happened? Do you think that dog went and bit her?”
And still she pushed at them feebly, striving to reach the door.
“Stand away from me—don’t hinder me! I’m bound to go after her! Let me get by!”
“After her?”
From the frantic babble of words Inspector Catcher plucked these two as a hawk plucks a mouse from the heather, and repeated them. “Was that what you said—
after her?
Harris—take a look upstairs.”
Mr Nabb was up the stairs and down again in a matter of seconds.
“Nobody there—she’s gone.”
For one instant Inspector Catcher’s face flamed at the other man a glance of total rage, as though it were Nabb himself who had conjured Amy away like a knot from a piece of string, and then it closed again over all betrayal of expression.
“Mrs Bowen,” he said clearly, “where’s that girl of yours? Where’s Amy? Where’s she gone?”
Passive in the grip of his fingers, Mrs Bowen stood looking down blankly at the floor. She had stopped crying. She had stopped struggling to get away. Her outburst over, she had become very quiet; only when she pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her cardigan, the handkerchief shook in her hand. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“How long has she been gone? When did she go?”
“I don’t know,” she said once more, in the same low flat voice. “I don’t know where she is. I don’t know when she went. But she’s out there somewhere and I’m bound to go after her. She’s been in my keeping ever since the night she was born. I can’t leave her now, my Amy. I’m bound to go after her.”
Inspector Catcher opened the side-kitchen door. Sheets of snow drove past up the hillside with a hissing noise. Mick, shivering at the end of his string, yelped.
“Why, you couldn’t even stand up in that, Mrs Bowen, much less set off to look for someone. You’d better come inside and tell me whatever it is you haven’t told me yet—everything.”
“Didn’t I say it?” declared Mr Nabb in a tone of spiteful triumph. “Didn’t I say right from the start they knew a lot more than they were letting on to know? You didn’t believe me, did you?”
“Be quiet, Harris! I haven’t the slightest interest in what you may have said. Mrs Bowen, you can surely understand what you see with your own eyes? The weather’s against you. So come away from that door—I want to talk to you.”
But Mrs Bowen stared out at the fury of the storm, unheedingly. There was nothing she could do for Amy—nothing. Nothing! And the only prayer her dry mind managed to form was an agonised command: find her, Lord, as I would if I could; and shelter her as I would—as I would!
“Mrs Bowen—”
“Wait now,” she answered dully. “I must bring the dog inside. I’ll put him in the child’s room. She told me to take good care of him.”
“She told you that? So you knew she was going?”
Before replying Mrs Bowen took Mick upstairs and shut him into Amy’s bedroom. Then she came and sat by the fire obediently. She sat quite still except for the continuous fidgeting of her hands clasped together in her lap.
“I didn’t understand her meaning. I said it was for her to look after him—Mick being her pet, like.”
“You didn’t know she was planning to run off—she hadn’t discussed it with you?”
“Of course she had,” said Mr Nabb.
Mrs Bowen shook her head.
“Then why were you lying to us? Why did you pretend she was still in bed when you must have known perfectly well she wasn’t? What was your reason for pretending, Mrs Bowen?”
“I thought she’d maybe only gone to the top of the hill—I thought she’d be back any minute.”
“But she’d been up and down to the top of the hill all day yesterday. Why was it suddenly such a secret? Come along, Mrs Bowen—I want an answer. I want to know what it is you’re hiding from me!”
Mrs Bowen was silent. His voice went on and on. She wished it would stop, if only just for long enough to let her listen to her own unhappy mind and hear what counsel it gave her; but all she could hear was this insidious voice of his asking her on and on, question after question, and it seemed to Mrs Bowen like the silver thread a spider weaves, imprisoning its victim, binding it helpless.
“You’re wasting your time,” broke in Mr Nabb, roughly. “That’s not the way. You leave her to me. I can soon get her to tell us what they’ve been up to.”
Mrs Bowen looked at the scowling face on one side of her and then at the fair smooth smiling face on the other and she remembered Amy’s whisper: “They’re both of them cruel.” Her hands ceased their restless fiddling and locked together tightly on her knees.
“Amy was afraid of you,” she burst out in a passionate undertone. “That’s why she went—you frightened the very wits out of her almost.”
“But why should Amy be afraid of the police, Mrs Bowen?” Inspector Catcher asked her softly. “Unless of course she’d done something wrong herself—had she?”
The confusion of truth and falsehood, of real danger and danger that might after all be imaginary, was too much for Mrs Bowen and she sat like someone stupefied, unable to answer. Yet an answer she was bound to give: he was waiting for it. After a long pause she said bleakly:
“You’re not our sort.”
“I see. And so because we’re
not your sort
Amy was frightened and ran off without telling you in the middle of the night?”
Mrs Bowen nodded. She had fixed her attention on the fire; if she could only manage to keep her gaze steadily on a certain flame the right answers would come to her.
“And where do you suppose she has run to?”
Again there was a long pause.
“Most likely she’d go for Mr Protheroe, Dintirion.”
“Protheroe—that’s who she was on about yesterday,” said Mr Nabb. “I remember the name. They were his sheep, she said, and he ought to be told—and she was saying how the stream was as good as a path, frozen—”
“Thank you, Harris—I heard as well, you know,” said Inspector Catcher, standing up. “I too have ears, it may surprise you to learn. You’d better stay here. It shouldn’t need both of us to deal with this.”
Mrs Bowen raised her head. “You’re meaning to go after her, then? But didn’t you tell me just now no one could so much as stand up in such weather?”
“I said that
you
couldn’t stand up in it,” he corrected her calmly.
“And that’s true enough,” she muttered. “I don’t have the strength. But it’s different for a man. And then with those things on your feet, you can go fast, can’t you? And no one could harm a child, not on purpose—I don’t believe it. Not a
child
—”
Half to herself and half to him, she rambled on. Inspector Catcher watched her and listened as he did up his jacket. He was smiling. She seemed to amuse him very much.
“Why should I want to harm your granddaughter, Mrs Bowen? What a curious idea. I’m going to bring her back here, so that we can all be together again. Harris,” he said, “I may be some time—that river winds about like the devil.”
“Amy’s not gone down the stream,” said Mrs Bowen.
In an instant the smile had vanished from his face. He turned on her.
“How do you know?”
“She told me herself she’d no intention of trying the stream—better a lot if she had. Better a lot the stream than over the top.”
“Over the top?” he asked her, bending down. “What’s this—over the top?”
“Over the hills, up behind. The short way over—that’s what we call it, and that’s what it is, in fine weather—over the top to the Protheroe place, Dintirion.”
“It’s the first I’ve heard of a short way over the top to anywhere,” said he savagely. “Why didn’t you tell us about it before?”
“Why? Because there’s no such way, that’s why—not now, not once the snow’s come—no way fit for a sheep to venture on, let alone a child. Madness indeed it would be for her to try to find that path today,” said Mrs Bowen, beginning to rock herself to and fro. “And supposing it was dark still—worse than madness. Worse! And yet I can’t get it out of my head it’s where she’s gone.”
“You really think that girl’s got so little sense she’d have taken a path that wasn’t even fit for a sheep?”
“I might be wrong. There’s a chance yet she could be down at Tyler’s Place. But I know how it is with children—if they’ve set their hearts on never mind what, they believe they can do what can’t
be
done, not by human endeavour. They don’t understand there’s some things are plain
impossible.
And Amy had her heart set on Dintirion. I know she had. I knew it all the time, deep down inside of me. She was wanting to get there bad enough to believe she’d manage to find her way over the top to it somehow—find her way home, you might say—she was born at Dintirion all those years ago. Only I know better—terrible that path is at night, in winter, with cliffs to go by and the side of Cader Ddu steep as a mountain. I know she can’t ever reach Dintirion, not in the snow—never! My poor child,” said Mrs Bowen, her eyes stretched wide as though she were actually seeing the horrors of which she spoke.
“Well, that’s all right then—what are we worrying about?” said Mr Nabb, harshly.
But Inspector Catcher had caught hold of Mrs Bowen’s wrist.
“Where’s this Tyler’s Place?” he said.
She was startled. “Tyler’s Place?”
“You mentioned it just now. You said that Amy might be down at Tyler’s Place. Where is it?”
Still for a moment she hesitated and in the pause heard, louder than the tick of the clock and the whirr of the flames in the grate, the ravening noise of the storm outside battering doors and windows as it swept over the cottage and on. She said:
“It’s down the other side of the hill, below the haystack, down right at the bottom. Nobody’s lived there for years—it’s nothing more than just an old ruin. But she’d be back here by now if that’s where she’d gone. No, indeed—it’s not to Tyler’s Place she went. I know in my heart it was over the top.”