Weekend with Death (10 page)

When Joanna had been collected and they were slipping through the grey streets, Sarah found herself wondering about Wickham's ambitions. It had occurred to her once or twice that they might have come down in the dust. Something in the way he had looked when the duty mask had slipped. Something Joanna had said—but then Joanna was always so vague.

She slid her hand into the pocket of her fur coat and felt the edge of the letter she had written to Henry Templar. All that really mattered about Wickham at this moment was that she must get him to post Henry's letter.

The car was a Vauxhall limousine, and she was sitting in the comfortable back seat between Wilson and Joanna. She turned a little and said in her sweetest voice,

“Oh, Mr. Cattermole, would it be a trouble—might we stop at a pillar-box? There's a letter I would like to have posted.”

Wilson beamed.

“But of course, Miss Sarah.” He bent to the speaking tube. “The next pillar-box, Wickham.”

When they drew up Sarah handed over her letter. They had stopped some ten yards short of the box. She watched Wickham go towards it, and thought, “He's not hurrying himself.” All at once a seething impatience rose up in her. Here she was, tied down between Wilson and Joanna with a rug across her legs, when she might have been running to push her letter through the slit and hear it fall on the top of all the other safe, posted letters.

At this moment Wilson gave a smothered exclamation.

“Dear me—I had quite forgotten I have a letter too! How very stupid!”

With surprising energy he flung open the door, jumped out, and ran after Wickham, calling him back. Sarah watched them meet and talk for a moment. Wilson's hand went out. Then he turned and came back to the car, whilst the chauffeur went on to the letter-box. Still with that odd impatience, Sarah saw him pass round to the farther side. Now his hand went up, and now it fell again.

She sat back with a sigh of relief. Her letter to Henry was in the post, and she had nothing to do but wait and hunt ghosts until he came.

CHAPTER XII

“It is getting colder every moment,” said Joanna Cattermole in a complaining voice. “I think it would have been better if we had gone down by train. Wick-ham looks very pale. Do you think he is really fit to drive? Influenza is such a horrid thing.”

“He assures me that he is. I can do no more than ask him.” Wilson's tone was rather dry. “I hope I am not such a barbarous employer that he would imagine himself bound to prevaricate. And as to his being pale, he never has very much colour. After all, two years in prison would remove the tan from his skin, and as he was only released in September he has not had much opportunity of regaining it.”

Sarah had not meant to speak, but a painful stab of incredulity and pity brought words to her lips.

“
In prison? Wickham?
”

Wilson shook his head with an effect of self-reproach.

“Dear me—now I shouldn't have said that, should I? But I am sure, Miss Sarah, that it will be safe with you. I really had forgotten that I was not alone with my sister. Very wrong of me. Yes, the poor fellow was sent to me by one of those excellent societies which undertake the after care of discharged prisoners. But of course I did not intend that anyone except my sister and myself should be aware of his unfortunate past. He was involved in a bank robbery with violence. I believe he might consider himself lucky to have escaped with so light a sentence. It was either three years or two—I am not really sure which. I fear that he was led away by his unfortunate political opinions. He was, I regret to say, a member of a very extreme group of Communists, but, as I said to the secretary of the society at the time that I engaged him, ‘Every man has a right to his opinions as long as they do not lead him into conflict with the law, and every man has a right to a second chance. I am sure that after his late unhappy experience he will do his best to avail himself of the chance I am prepared to offer him.'”

Sarah sat there wedged in, and had to listen. There was a great deal more, and she had to listen to all of it—Wilson's views on the Penal System, on Prison Reform, on Communism, on the Rights of Man—“As you know, I myself am a liberal”—with excursions into Free Trade, Raw Materials, and the Colonial Problem.

Joanna had fallen asleep, but tedious as Wilson might be, Sarah had never been more wide awake. The glass screen might be soundproof—she hoped with all her heart it was—but she felt a blatant indecency in the discussion of a man on the other side of it. She could see him in profile, the line of brow, cheek and chin. Suppose he could hear what was being said—suppose he had heard. The face should have been a sensitive one—it had a frozen look. She had seen him frown, but she had never seen him smile. Did two—or had it been three—years of prison blunt you so much that you didn't care, or did they drive thought and feeling inwards to rage and fester there?

Wilson came back to the point from which he had started.

“He was, I believe, at quite a well known public school. His father, I think, was in the army. A natural reaction from militarism, which I would be the last to condemn, may have been the beginning of his downfall. I myself, as you are doubtless aware, have been a lifelong pacifist—I was a conscientious objector during the last war.…” He continued to talk.

It was about half an hour later that the car showed the first signs of trouble. After a mile or two of lumpy running, Wickham pulled up by the side of the road and opened the bonnet. Presently he came round to the window and announced that he would like to get the car to a garage.

“There'll be one at Hedgeley.”

“Dear me—how very unfortunate! And how far is it to Hedgeley?”

“A couple of miles.”

“Is there an hotel there?”

“Of sorts,” said Wickham laconically.

“I said we ought to have come by train,” said Joanna. “And it is going to snow—I feel quite sure that it is going to snow.”

They were detained at Hedgeley long enough to reduce I Miss Cattermole to a state of nervous depression, and her brother to the limit of his self-control. The hotel was of the cheap commercial kind. The food was definitely bad. The fire in the coffee-room smoked and kept on going out. There was nothing to read. When Sarah suggested going out to get a paper, there seemed to be a number of reasons why she should not do so. The nearest paper shop was half a mile down the street. The car might be ready at any moment. The morning papers would be sold out and the evening papers not yet in. And finally, “I must really ask you not to leave my sister—she is in a sadly nervous state.”

Sarah, whose inclination had been of the slightest, gave way, and was rewarded by a mild half promise that Wilson would look out for a paper-boy.

If he looked, it was in vain. No paper was forthcoming. Sarah, who was divided between boredom, curiosity, and a quite strong reluctance to read any more about Emily Case, began to wonder why there had been no papers at breakfast. As a rule there were three, but this morning none except yesterday's
Times
. She wondered whether Morgan had taken them. She wondered whether they contained too faithful a description of Sarah Marlowe.

The day grew steadily colder. At intervals of half an hour Wilson crossed the street to the garage and came back with discouraging reports.

“They can't find out what is wrong”… “Wick-ham says it may be the coil” … “No, my dear, they cannot say how long they will be. We must just possess our souls in patience.” …

It was not until five o'clock that Wickham came across to say that the car was in running order. It was quite dark as they took the road, running on through the town and out upon a tree-bordered highway.

Presently they turned right-handed, and then turned again. Two right-hand turns take you back in the direction from which you have come, and a third brings you to the road you have just left. Prolonged boredom makes you either very dull or very observant. It had the latter effect upon Sarah. She said in a tone of surprise,

“Why, we are back on the Hedgeley road!”

“We might be on any road in this dreadful darkness,” said Joanna in her most complaining voice. “I am sure I cannot think how Wickham manages to drive with those wretched black-out lights.”

“Wickham is an extremely good driver,” said Wilson complacently. “You need not be in the least nervous, my dear.”

“But why are we going back?” said Sarah.

“What makes you think we are going back, Miss Sarah?”

She turned a puzzled face upon him.

“We are coming into Hedgeley again.”

In the darkness she wondered whether Wilson was smiling. His voice sounded as if he were.

“One place looks exactly like another in the blackout, and I am sure you can trust Wickham not to lose his way.”

Sarah said no more. She leaned back and stared out into the darkness. They were driving back, right through Hedgeley, between the garage and the hotel, past the church with the pointed spire. She could not see these things, but she knew that they were there. She knew that they drove right through the town and out at the other side.

Presently they took a turning which brought them by an uphill road to open ground. There were no trees or hedgerows any more, only a black moor in the darkness under a freezing sky.

CHAPTER XIII

About a quarter of an hour after Mr. Cattermole's Vauxhall had driven away from his front door Henry Templar walked up the steps and rang the bell. It was an unconventional hour, and Henry had been bred to a regard for the social conventions. If Sarah had been in her own home, it would still have been a little marked, but since she was Mr. Cattermole's employee, to walk in at half past nine in the morning and demand an interview was an uncomfortably conspicuous act, and one to which only a sense of extreme urgency could have compelled him.

His conversation with Sarah on the telephone the previous evening had exasperated and alarmed him. He had not known her for seven years without being aware of the lengths to which her warm heart, her generosity, and her obstinacy were capable of taking her. If she thought getting involved with the police was going to throw her out of a job and interfere with her supporting Miss Tinkler, then she was liable to compromise herself to almost any extent in a pig-headed attempt to dodge the law. When you came down to brass tacks, the thing that made women so difficult to deal with was that fundamentally they had no respect for the law. He supposed it was because they had only recently had any voice in the law-making business, and before that for generations of women the man-made and man-wielded law was a thing to be borne, suffered under, dodged, flouted, or broken.

During the watches of the night Henry considered very seriously the consequences which Sarah would be inviting if she persisted in withholding vital information from the police. He composed speeches and marshalled arguments, but he had extremely little hope that they would cause Sarah to see the error of her ways. In the whole time that he had known her he could not remember an occasion on which he had induced her to change her mind. Not when it had really mattered. And her answer when pressed had always amounted to this—“What's the good of arguing, when that's how I feel?”

There it was—if you were a woman you didn't reason; you felt. The irrational nature of the female sex really came home to him for the first time. Along with his serious consideration of the consequences which Sarah might be bringing upon herself, he began to be almost as deeply concerned about those in which he might himself be involved if he were to allow his feelings to precipitate him into matrimony. Because there was no disguising the fact that Sarah was a dangerously impulsive person. It was part of her charm. But—

During those sleepless hours Sarah's charm presented itself to Henry under the time-honoured guise of flowers decking the edge of a precipice. And Henry had no natural bent towards precipices.

At 7.0 a.m. he dialled Mr. Cattermole's number, and received no reply. At 7.15, at 7.30, and 7.45 he repeated the performance, with the same result. At eight o'clock he was informed that the line was out of order. He then rose, shaved, dressed, and breakfasted. By this time it was nine o'clock. He decided that by walking to Bank Street he would get some fresh air and exercise and catch Sarah before she started her morning's work. He could allow himself a quarter of an hour.

Thompson answered the bell, and the minute she opened the door Henry had a premonition. Something was going to go wrong with his neat timetable. Something had in fact already gone wrong. Thompson, prim and tidy in lilac print and an apron which crackled with starch, shook her head reprovingly. She too prized the conventions, and to come asking for a young lady when it wasn't hardly breakfast-time wasn't at all the thing—not in the class of house she was accustomed to.

“Oh, no, sir—they've just left.”

“
Left?”
said Henry in a stupefied tone.

“Gone away for the week-end,” said Thompson, as one explaining things to a dull-witted child.

“And there he stood,” she told Mrs. Perkins afterwards in the kitchen. “Looked as if he couldn't hardly believe it, and frowned something shocking. And then he said, ‘Are you sure?' and I said, ‘Yes, sir.' And he said, ‘Where have they gone? I suppose you can give me the address?' and I said, ‘Indeed I can't!'”

Mrs. Perkins heaved a sigh.

“Sounds as if he'd got it bad,” she said—“doesn't it?”

“I don't know about that.” Thompson's voice was sharp.

Mrs. Perkins shook her head.

“Ah, no—you wouldn't. You mark my words, Lizzie, they've had a tiff—that's what it is. You mark my words!”

“That was him on the 'phone last night. I heard her say ‘Henry' as I come past with my tray—‘Henry, I can't', she said. And I thought to myself, ‘You just go on saying that and it'll be a bit of all right.' And what it was he was wanting her to do, well, it isn't for me to say, but from what I've come across, they're all alike, men are, and all any of them want is to have things their own way, so I just hope she goes on saying can't to him.”