Run! (22 page)

Sally clutched him with sudden violence.

“James—they went past—when I was waiting—when you were down looking at the lorry!”

“Then you saw them. That's a bit of luck. What were they like?”

“I
didn't
see them. Maddening, isn't it? I just heard a motor-bike, and I didn't take the slightest interest in it or anything. I just heard it go past, and I think there were two men, but I couldn't swear that there were. I just wasn't taking any interest.”

“Well, that's how it was done,” said James in a satisfied tone. “They took a chance, and they very nearly brought it off. And now I expect they're having some light refreshment and thinking out the next stunt. Very persevering people.”

“I wonder if one of them was Hildegarde,” said Sally.

James said nothing for quite a long time. He was thinking of the lorry rushing down on them, and the Rolls all new and beautiful, and Sally's face—and Sally's face. He had seen her cover it with her hands, and he had known why.

Sally looked at him once or twice out of the tail of her eye and thought, “That's how he looks when he's angry,” and thought, “I shouldn't like it if he looked like that at me,” and thought, “He probably will—often. We shall quarrel like mad.” And then something in her gave a little jig and said, “What fun!” She saw James's face relax. He looked round at her and said,

“It's a cursed nuisance when the criminals you ought to report to the police are all your nearest relations and friends—isn't it?”

Sally bit the corner of her lip.

“That's what I've been telling you all along.”

James pursued the subject—earnestly.

“Because of course we really ought to go to the police, but there's next to no evidence, and it would be very awkward for you.”

“
Very
awkward,” said Sally, who would have jumped off Pedlar's Hill after the lorry before she would have followed James into a police-station to give evidence against Ambrose Sylvester.

“So we'll give to the police a miss,” said James with sincere regret.

XXIX

James dropped Sally at Rere Place at one o'clock. Seen in the daylight, the house was quite unlike what he had imagined it to be in the dark and the fog. It wasn't nearly so old for one thing. An eighteenth-century Rere had built a square Georgian front on to the old Tudor house and run a pretentious flight of stone steps up to the hall door. It was down these steps that he and Sally had plunged, and it was at the bottom that they had stumbled over Gladys's bicycle and Sally had cut her foot.

“It looks different—doesn't it?” said Sally.

“I didn't really see it at all.”

“And it felt horrid—didn't it? It does, you know—or it did. Perhaps it won't now. I used to feel the horridness coming up all dank like a fog the minute I got inside the door, and that afternoon the house was full of it.”

“Don't stay here,” said James, frowning. “I wish you wouldn't, Sally. Old Pomeroy will be most awfully pleased if I take you along and say we're engaged.”

“Oh, no, you mustn't,” said Sally quickly. “You mustn't tell anyone. And we're not—not really, not yet.”

“Previous engagement?” said James.

“No—no. Oh, James, that's not fair.”

“Well, you can't have it both ways—not with me. We're engaged, and don't you forget it. And I'm not going away till I've seen J.J., because for all you know he's a hundred miles away doing something else. It's ten to one he was pulling your leg when he said he was coming here.”

Sally shook her head and jumped out. He saw her run up the steps, but before she reached the top the hall door was thrown open and Jock West appeared. James, following Sally, received what he hadn't in the least expected, a delighted welcome.

“Hullo, 'ullo, 'ullo! Family reunion! The young squire returns! House-warming and free ale for the tenantry! Speeches, toasts, and a full-dress gala ball at which I shall lead out the cook!” He took Sally by the waist and kissed her. “And you, dear James, will dance a
pas seul,
unless you can rake up one of the family ghosts to join in the revels.”

Standing a couple of steps below them, James frowned and spoke his mind.

“Look here, J.J., I don't like Sally staying here. I've told her so. I've got to deliver this car to Colonel Pomeroy at Fieldover, but as soon as I can get away I'll come back. Sally, you'd better tell him exactly what you've been telling me. I'll get away as soon as I can. I expect I'll be taking the Rolls back, because she's had a bit of a shake-up and she ought to be looked over. I mustn't stop now, because I'm late. I'll just get Sally's case.”

As he drove away, Jock West's red eyebrows went up. His eyes, nearly as green as Sally's, sparkled interrogatively.

“Pretty sure of himself our James—what?”

Sally said nothing. Her colour was bright.

“Pretty sure of you?” pursued Jocko.

Sally made up her mind suddenly.

“Quite, quite sure of me.”

“Oh, he is, is he? And what about you? Are you quite, quite sure of him?”

Sally permitted herself a modest smile.

“Oh, I think so.”

“Are you giving it out—telling the world—telling our kind guardian, and his kind wife, and our dear Henri?
Hein,
Sally?” He mimicked Henri Niemeyer's voice and accent very successfully.

Sally lost all her bright colour.

“No, Jocko—no, no,
no
! Oh, Jocko, no—you mustn't say a word!”

Jocko whistled, looked critically at Sally for a moment, clapped her on the shoulder, and remarked that he was all for letting sleeping dogs lie.

“And what about broaching a tin of bully beef and having a spot of lunch?”

XXX

James did not get back till five o'clock. As he turned in at the gate and drove up between the neglected overhanging trees, he remembered the first time he had come that way. There was no fog now, but it was as dark as the wrong side of the moon. Here or hereabouts he had run off on to the turf at the edge of the drive. Here or hereabouts he had turned out on to the wide sweep in front of the house and drew up by the steps against which Sally had leaned her borrowed bicycle.

He got out, and saw the whole front of the house like a black cliff with no light showing. The Georgian front ran to windows—rows of them—but there wasn't a lighted one among the lot.

As he went up the steps, his heart went down. It went as heavy as lead inside him and sank with every step he mounted. He found himself in front of the door with a horrid feeling that he might knock upon it for a twelvemonth and get no answer. Which was nonsense, because, naturally, Sally and J.J. would be looking out for him. A cold, faint whisper stirred the recesses of his mind. It said, “A deep hole … one of the cellars … never heard of again.…”

James's nature made him justly impatient of this kind of hole-and-corner whispering. He said something short and sharp and tugged at the iron bell-pull, after which he applied himself to the knocker.

Nothing happened. He stopped knocking to listen, and a most oppressive silence came seeping out of the house like the damp out of rotting wood. James had never felt drawn to Rere Place, but he now conceived a healthy and thoroughgoing dislike for it and its bricks and mortar, its timbering and its stucco, its attics, stairways, desolate uninhabited rooms, dark unfriendly windows—and its cellars. Above all, and most emphatically, its cellars.

He banged on the door, and all of a sudden Jock West opened it. He held up a guttering candle.

“In a bit of a hurry, aren't you?” he said.

“Yes,” said James.

“Thought the wicked guardian had spirited us away or bricked us up in one of the cellars? I believe you did. Well, well—what it is to be in love! Sally's been in the same sort of flap about you.”

“I haven't!” said Sally, coming up out of the black depths of the hall with a candle of her own. Its yellow light made very little impression on the gloomy panelling and the dark stair with its huge newel-posts and heavy carved balustrades.

The eighteenth century ended as you came into the hall. It ran up two storeys high, and its panels were patterned with the Tudor rose and the Rere bats. Over the enormous fireplace a coat of arms showed black and silver in the candlelight—three bats sable on a field argent, and the motto, “I kepe the rere.”

Sally held up her candle to show it better.

“The motto dates from some little battle in the French wars. Gilbert Rere kept a bridge with his sword until his men could take up the position he wanted on a hill above the river. Those medieval people did love puns.”

James put his arm round her. He couldn't help it. His imagination didn't often play tricks with him, but the moment when it had whispered about the cellar had been a bad one.

Jock West shut the hall door and came over to them.

“Council of war,” he said. “As all the rooms this side are about forty feet long, I suggest the butler's pantry. It's cosier, and the candles will really light it. If you're staying, you shall have our best haunted room—the one Giles Rere slept in the night he shot his brother. There's another one with a Headless Lady, but she's a bit played out. It's about a hundred years since anyone has seen her, but Giles has been giving quite good performances lately, so I'm told. By the way, are you staying?”

“I can,” said James. “But I think we had better all clear out and go to a pub. I don't quite see what good we're going to do here. I don't want to be rude, J.J., but I can't see any point in staying here without light, or food, or fires, or beds.”

“Lashins of beds,” said Jocko.

“Wringing wet!” said Sally.

Jock took each of them by an arm.

“Eschew the fleshpots, my children. Life is real, life is earnest. Candles were good enough for Gilbert, and Giles, and the Headless Lady, and they've got to be good enough for the likes of us.
And
in my butler's pantry you will find a nice little Beatrice stove. It's smelling to heaven because I spilt oil all over it, but it's getting up a very pleasing fug there. Just you come along and see!”

They proceeded through a swing door at the back of the hall. The smell of warm oil surged to meet them.

“I couldn't get away before,” said James. “Colonel Pomeroy knows my people, and he wanted to talk. He couldn't make up his mind whether to send the car back to be gone over or not. In the end he let me take her. It took time to persuade him.”

“Here we are,” said Jocko, holding up his candle. “Here's my pantry.”

It was a good-sized room, the walls lined with shelves and presses, the floor flagged with stone. The Beatrice stove contended valiantly with the surrounding cold. The whole place was very cold. The closing of the door set a chill draught moving.

Sally shivered.

“I don't know what you call cosy, Jocko.”

“It's all comparative. You wait till Beatrice has really got going. I brought her down with me, but I think I rather overdid the oil.”

“Is there anything to sit on?” said Sally.

“That chair has only three legs. You can have it, my child—you're the lightest. The Windsor chair for James, and ye olde oake table for me.”

Sally rejected the three-legged chair and swung herself on to the table beside him.

“Well?” said James.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘Well?'” said Jock West. “Sally's been telling me a steepish sort of yarn. If it's true, we ought to go to the police, and if it isn't, we're making fools of ourselves. We shall probably do that in any case.”

“It's true,” said Sally in a quiet voice. “It's true, but nothing on earth will make me go to the police, so we needn't waste time over that.”

Jock patted her shoulder.

“All right, all right—I'm not keen on it myself. If we're going to play the fool, I'm all for keeping it in the family—a little decent privacy for the dirty linen.”

“What has Sally told you?”

Jock put up a long, bony hand and ticked off the items finger by finger.

“One—she says you were fired at in this house a fortnight ago. Says there were at least two people here. Thinks the one who fired was Henri. Not a shred of evidence, but the female mind works that way. Sally's mind very female—Woman, don't pinch me!” He put up a second finger. “Two—says kind guardian and kind guardian's wife tried to bump me off at Holbrunn last year. Evidence very slight. I was there. They were there. I fell over the cliff. Therefore they pushed me.” Another finger went up. “Three—someone asks a Mr. Jackson of Atwells whether he was the driver who had taken a nice Rolls-Royce car down into Sussex on the twenty-second of January or some such date. Mr. Jackson incautiously says he was because he is led to believe that there is a lady in the case. After which Mr. Jackson goes to swell the weekly list of casualties on the road. Again no evidence, but the female mind opines that the unfortunate Jackson was lured away and run over because it was thought that the driver of the Rolls might have seen something which he wasn't meant to see.”

“The people behind all this don't leave much evidence lying about,” said James.

Jock nodded and put up another finger.

“Four—someone tips bricks off a roof on to our James. Five—someone runs an empty lorry down a steep hill at our James. It does look a bit as if someone was annoyed with him, doesn't it? But there ain't no evidence.”

“There never will be any evidence,” said Sally in a desperate voice.

“Well, that's where you're wrong,” said Jocko. “Female mind a bit mixed.
Because,
my child, according to your own story there is evidence hidden in this house, and it's such damning evidence that they're ready to go round risking their necks doing murder on the bare chance that our James got a smell of it the day he was here. Looks as if poor old Clementa had stumbled on something fairly fierce—doesn't it? The question is, ‘What?'”