The Tiger in the Well (12 page)

The dybbuk, thought Bill, and a cold thrill of fear suffused him, body and soul.

The shape was half human, half devil; it had hands, it had a tail, it radiated malevolence. It was the sort of shape that would spring and prance through hell, mocking the damned. Bill watched it for the few moments it took the servants to push the chair up the ramp and into the house, and then he realized that he hadn't been able to breathe for fear.

He let his breath out in a silent shuddering sigh.

Oh, ridiculous. It was the schnapps. It was the mist; he wasn't seeing properly. Certainly the surface of the little mirror kept fogging over with moisture. But the evil in that little dark shape, and the way it had crawled out of his head—or had it been sitting on his shoulder.''

Then the dripping silence was broken. There was a moan from the carriage. A girl's voice, he thought—and in pain—

His hand trembling, he put up the mirror again. The driver still sat on the box with his back to Bill's alley, the horses were standing motionless at the other end, the steam from their flanks blending with the mist. The door of the carriage lay open.

And then that little fiend thing shot out of the house and sprang in a single leap off the pavement and into the carriage, and the girl screamed.

Before Bill could think, Goldberg had covered half the distance between his tree and the carriage. But before he got any farther, the girl herself appeared on the iron platform—

a dark cloak, a cascade of dark hair, mouth and eyes wide with panic—and then she fell full-length on the pavement.

She was up in a moment. She was seeing nothing: she was in some realm beyond fear, beyond thought. As if Goldberg wasn't there, she sped around him, her face fixed, and made straight for the bank and plunged into the water. She sank in a moment.

Bill leaped out of the alley and joined Goldberg on the edge. The water was black, and the mist was so thick over it that they couldn't see halfway across; they couldn't even see where the surface was. There were ripples spreading, but no sign of the girl.

A voice behind them, and Goldberg turned and replied in the same language. It was the driver. He looked back anxiously at the house, where light from the golden doorway soaked out into the mist. A servant appeared, and the driver beckoned.

"We're just passing by," Goldberg whispered to Bill.

Then he said something in Dutch to the driver—something about police, Bill thought. The servant heard, and nodded, and ran back to the house. Bill crouched down low over the edge, but he could see nothing. She'd vanished.

During the next few minutes three more servants came out of the house with lanterns, and one ran off over the little bridge nearby; and then two policemen arrived, with a net and a boat hook; and shortly after that a steam launch with electric lights came chugging under the bridge and tied up to the bank.

The policemen looked competent and unruffled. Bill supposed there was a routine procedure for finding and hauling out bodies. In normal circumstances the presence of policemen was uncomfortable for Bill, but after what he'd seen earlier, he could hardly get close enough to them. They were real, they were human, they weren't made of nightmares.

After a few more minutes, when they'd launched a dinghy and begun to trail their boat hooks through the water, Goldberg nudged Bill and spoke quietly.

"We're getting some funny looks from the servants. I think it's time we slipped away. They're not going to find her now, and I've seen enough."

He said something vague and general to the men on the bank, wished them good night or good luck, and began to trudge away. Bill followed. He cast a last glance back at the house, but there was no sign of the man in the chair or of his dybbuk.

The Knife Man

The day after her encounter with Bill, Sally re-ceived a letter with a Norwich postmark. She tore it open at once.

Dear Miss Lockhart,

I regret to inform you that the Reverend Mr. Beech is no longer resident at this address, and that his present whereabouts are unknown to me.

I am therefore returning your letter, and I hope that you will excuse my opening it in order to ascertain your address.

I am.

Yours very sincerely, T. D. Gunston, M.B., F.R.G.P., Director, St. Anselm's.

Her letter was enclosed. At first she didn't know what to think: a wave of disappointment passed over her. She'd thought, naturally, that St. Anselm's was a parish; but if it was something that had a director, and if that director was a medical man, the whole thing was confused again. A nursing home.'' A mission.?

She left the breakfast table, took her cup of tea to the bureau, and wrote to Dr. Gunston at once.

Dear Dr. Gunston, Thank you for returning my letter to Mr. Beech. I am most anxious to speak to him on a matter of the most

extreme importance. Time is short, and the only clue I had to his whereabouts was the name of St. Anselm's, which I took to be a parish of which he was the priest. You say he is no longer resident there; may I ask what St. Anselm's is, and how long he stayed with you.'* Anything you can tell me will help me.

She signed it, stamped it, and put it in the post on her way to the City.

She had taken to sitting for minutes on end at her desk, saying nothing, toying at first with a pen, but then falling completely still. It was like sleep—like real sleep, unlike the broken state of wakefulness she suffered in bed. It was a time when responsibility receded, and when she existed as little as possible.

It worried Margaret Haddow, and it worried Cicely Corrigan, their clerk. Cicely would bring Sally letters to sign or ask irrelevant questions just in order to wake her out of this unhappy trance, and on the day she wrote back to St. Anselm's, Margaret decided to take her out to lunch and talk to her.

They went to a chophouse in Watling Street where they had gone before. Women were so rarely seen in the City, where you could stand at a busy junction at the busiest part of the day and see nothing but men for ten minutes at a time, that Sally and Margaret still felt a little like strangers; and there were some eating places where, having been once, they never went again. But this little place was friendly, the booths they sat in were comfortable, and the food was good.

Margaret ordered for both of them: grilled lamb chops and vegetables, and when the food came she made Sally eat it.

"What's the matter with you.'"' Margaret said. "I know what you're worried about, but there's nothing the matter with you, is there.'* You're healthy and clever and you've got a bit of money and an extremely talented partner and all things considered you're not badly off at all. Eat that chop. And this cauliflower is excellent. Everyone cooks cauliflower for

far tcx) long; they know when to take it out of the water in this place. Gravy?"

Sally smiled.

"Fm sorry," she said. "I've let it depress me too much. I find it hard to think of anything else. ..."

"Well, think of this, then. We've got that fusspot Mrs. Carpenter coming this afternoon. She's going to say that her dear husband would have insisted on gold, gold never fails, put all your money in gold mines, my dear. She's got about six thousand pounds, and she wants some life insurance too. . . . What shall we tell her to invest in.^*"

Sally sipped some water.

"I like the look of those Bolivian railway shares," she said. "Hickson's promoting them, and he's done very well."

"Now I read something about Hickson recently—or did I hear it from Mr. Battle.?" Mr. Battle was their downstairs neighbor in the office building—^a joumalist of sorts. Margaret tapped the table, trying to remember. "Oh, yes. Mr. Battle showed me an article in some paper, I can't remember what, attacking Hickson violently. It was only just this side of libel, said Mr. Battle, and he should know. It implied that Hickson owned a number of sweatshops under different names. I don't know how true it was; it felt like an attempt to discredit him without actually having any evidence. I'll have to ask Mr. Battle if he's still got it."

"Why did he show it to you.''"

"We were talking about socialism. It was a socialist paper."

"Oh," said Sally. "What do you feel about Hickson, then.?"

Margaret made a face. "Difficult," she said. "I know one ought to disregard that son of thing, but ..."

"You think there's something in it.? Well, perhaps Hickson's not right for Mrs. Carpenter. What about chemicals.? The Germans are doing extraordinary things. ..."

They discussed Mrs. Carpenter's investments, and then the state of the market in general, and the effect the government's economic measures were having. It was the sort of

talk that Sally usually enjoyed, and little by little her eyes became more animated and the color returned to her cheeks. Margaret's treatment worked so well that Sally had some bread-and-butter pudding to follow the chop, and then they looked at the time and hurried back to Bengal Court for fear of missing Mrs. Carpenter.

That weekend Sally decided to go to Oxford. Rosa had left an open invitation, and Sally felt sure it would do both her and Harriet good. Surely the child must be feeling something of Sally's anxiety.? It didn't show, Harriet's nature being sturdy and cheerful and not especially reflective; but she too had begun to wake in the night, and had wet her bed twice in the past week, something they'd thought she'd grown out of.

So on Saturday morning they packed their bags and went with Sarah-Jane to Paddington Station to catch the train to Oxford. It was a brisk autumn day, and Sally thought back to the day nine years before when she and Frederick had come to Oxford to bring news of his brother to the same man she was going to see now. That business had ended in Matthew Bedwell's death at the hands of the man Sally had later shot; something as densely clustered with lawyers as her present situation couldn't involve that kind of violence, surely, and yet here she was, rolling along the beautiful High Street as the autumn sun touched the golden buildings, and she had a revolver in her bag with five bullets in it. . . .

They reached the rectory in time for lunch, and Harriet's cousins May and Matthew, six and four respectively, greeted her with glee. Rosa was deep in preparations for a village pageant; it was the closest she could come to the theater these days, except as a member of the audience.

Reverend Nicholas Bedwell, a powerfully built man whose cheerful face still bore a scar or two around the eyes from his boxing days, greeted her warmly.

"What a lot of nonsense," he said. "Rosa's told me all

about it. The fellow's clearly a scoundrel. Come and have some lunch, and we'll go for a walk in the afternoon. See if we can find some chestnuts."

The dining table was crowded, and the children were noisy, but they were indulged for once, since their father could see how happy it was making Sally.

In the woods that aftemoon, as the Bedwells' spaniel frisked through the leaves and the children raced here and there hunting for chestnuts, Sally told Rosa and her husband about the injunction and the letter from St. Anselm's.

"I've heard of the place," Nicholas Bedwell said. "I don't know why it didn't come to mind earlier. It's a nursing home of some kind; it's run by one of those charities that look after clergymen in reduced circumstances—^you know the kind of thing—usually they specify aged and infirm or something like that. You've written to the director.?"

"Yes, at once. But I don't suppose he'll be able to tell me anything; he was quite clear about not knowing where Mr. Beech was now."

"I looked Beech up in Crockford's. The clerical directory. He's in his fifties, apparently—not aged yet, though he might be infirm, of course. Worked abroad as a missionary; perhaps he caught malaria or something of the sort."

"Where did he work.?"

"China. But he was much younger. I suppose there are recurring diseases that catch up with you. . . . His last address is given as that place in Portsmouth, but my Crockford's is out of date. They running out of chestnuts.? I'd better scatter some more."

Knowing that there wouldn't be many chestnuts, he'd brought along a pocketful of them to drop quietly in places where the children were about to look. Harriet had found three, to her great satisfaction.

They walked on, talking about autumn, and how the children were all growing, and where May and Matthew would go to school, and about Rosa's pageant; and when the chil-

dren were beginning to tire, they turned back to the rectory. Mist was gathering, and someone somewhere was burning leaves.

They roasted the chestnuts on the nursery fire, and then Nicholas told them all a story. Harriet sat on Sally's lap, leaning in close, her thumb in her mouth; the other two sat beside Rosa on the sofa, each wide-eyed and intent on the story, each becoming the princess and the poor woodcutter's son, and each learning what it was to be brave, and fearful, and loved, and triumphant, and responsible. Nicholas was as good a storyteller as Jim, though his stories were very different.

Harriet didn't hear the story. She was tired, and the comforting voice and Mama's lap and breast and warm arms were enough to make her content. When it was time for bed, Sally carried her up and undressed her very gently.

"We won't wake her up just to wash her," she whispered to Sarah-Jane. "I'd sooner she slept. Morning'll do."

She kissed Harriet's cheek, brushed the strong fair curls away from her forehead, and laid her on the little bed next to Sally's own.

Next morning they went to church. Sally wasn't sure what she felt about that, though she always went when she stayed with the Bedwells, out of politeness. It would be good to believe in something like that, but it was too easy; the world wasn't that simple. She looked around the old church, following the lines of the pulpit, reading the inscriptions on the wall, trying to make out what the figures in the stained glass were doing, and listening to Nicholas preach. More stories; no one went to sleep when Nicholas preached, but the trouble was that he couldn't repeat his sermons from year to year. People forget a plain, straightforward argument, but they don't forget stories, and they'd soon remind him if they'd heard one before.