The police, of course, must also be looking for Lucien, but she had seen no sign of them in these reaches. Let them search in their way, with all the aids their specialist knowledge gave them; she would search in hers, with no aids at all but her ignorance, which would not allow her to miss a single yard of undercut bank or a single clump of sallows.

  Here, so close to the boundary, the artificiality of Follymead relaxed into something like a natural woodland. Where the view from the windows ended nature was allowed in again, still somewhat subdued, and the river surged away from the planed curves of its man-made vistas in an unkempt flood. Here for a while it rolled through open meadow and in a straight, uncluttered bed; she looked at the brown, smooth water, quiet and fast, saw the shallow, whirling eddies swoop past her, and felt sure that nothing would ground here. Ahead of her trees and bushes closed in again, leaning together over the water. These tangles of willow and undergrowth must have gone untended for a long time. She left the path and clung to the bank, and clambering through bushes, shouldering her way through sliding, whistling, orange-coloured sallows, she found herself suddenly marooned on a soft and yielding headland, with water before her and water on either hand. On her right the main flow coursed along sullenly, little checked by the lush growth; but the flood-water had spilled over among the trees and drowned the low-lying ground as far as she could see ahead through the twilight of the woodland. Before her and on her left it swirled in frustrated pools, and lay still, dappled with grasses. When she moved a foot, the water which had gathered slowly about her shoe eased away again into the spongy turf. She could go no farther, as close to the river as this. She would have to turn back and skirt the sodden ground at a greater distance.

  But before she retreated she made a careful survey of the flooded area as far as she could see. Lodged in the stream on her right, ripping the water into a dozen angry spurts of sound and fury, a fallen tree, or perhaps only a branch from a larger tree, lay anchored with its tattered trunk wedged fast in the soft ground, and its splayed branches clutching and clawing ineffectively at the fast current that slipped hissing through its fingers. She peered into the seething fistful of water, half dirty brownish foam, and among the hundred fleeting, shifting pallors she thought she saw one pallor that remained constant, only nodding and swaying a little while the Braide boiled past it and swirled away downstream.

  She had thought she had seen something so often by then that she felt nothing, except the compulsion to know. She set foot testingly on the torn bole, and shoved hard, and it remained immovable, deep sunk in the mud and wedged into place with all the driftwood it had arrested. She straddled a stubborn cross-branch, and felt her way out on the rough bark, holding by the alder wands that sprang through the wreckage and held it secure. Two, three yards gained, and the support under her grew slender, and gave a little beneath her weight, but still held fast. The water was rushing under her feet now, she looked down into it with fascination, finding something in it of music, in the melting of eddy into eddy, and current into current, the flow endlessly unfolding, able to plait into itself every thread that came drifting down the stream. Only the small, lax pallor hung idle and unchanging in the heart of change, and shook the pattern of unity to pieces round it.

  Another yard, and she would be nearly over it. The branch bowed under her, the water touched her shoes, arched icily over one toe in a hiss of protest, and poured back into the flood. She dared not go any farther. But this was far enough. She stooped carefully, holding by the thin, swaying extremity of a branch, and looked steadily and long at the trapped thing in the water.

  She must have heard, though in her preoccupation she had not identified, the small sounds that did not belong to the rhythm of the river. Nevertheless, she was startled when she turned to draw back from her precarious outpost, and found herself staring at Dickie Meurice.

  He was a yard out on the tree-trunk after her, clinging and reluctant, but grinning, too, pleased at having crept up on her so closely without being detected. He must have been following her right from the house. He must have frozen into stillness, somewhere there in the arch of the courtyard, when she had paused to look back from the rim of the trees. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered. Let him come, let him see something, at least, if not all, enough to assure him he hadn’t come out for nothing.

  “Oh, you!” she said, her voice flat and neutral. “I might have known.”

  “You might have known! Who else would be so considerate? I thought you might need help… if you found anything.”

  “You’re so right,” she said, moving back upon him without haste, knowing he could not pass her, sure even that if she abandoned him here he wouldn’t dare to venture out where she had been. For one thing, he was heavier than she was, he’d be ankle-deep in the Braide. For another, he was more careful of himself than she was, not having her stake at risk. “I do need help. I need somebody to stay here with it, while I go and raise the alarm.”

  He didn’t believe it for a moment; he hung still, clutching precariously at the still green but dilapidated branches of the wrecked tree, and staring at her narrowly and doubtfully. She laughed on a hard, high note, moving steadily nearer, breast to breast with him, forcing him backwards. He looked over her shoulder, and he saw the floating, languid whiteness, articulated, apparently alive, drifting at the end of its dark sleeve. He uttered a small, strangled sound, and gave back before her gingerly, clawing his way towards the soggy, yielding ground under the trees.

  “Yes,” she said hardly, “that’s a hand you’re looking at. With fingers.” Saturated grass sagged under her foot as she stepped from the tree. Water seeped into her shoe, and she never even noticed, beyond shifting her stance brusquely to safer ground. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you understand? Are you afraid of a dead man? He’s there. I have found him.”

  Between the thrusting alders and the penning branches of the derelict tree, the pale, flaccid hand gestured and beckoned on a sudden surge of water, and flicked its fingers at them derisively, demonstrating beyond doubt its quenched but unquestionable humanity.

  “Stay here with him,” she said peremporarily, and thrust past towards the drier ground, fending off alders with a wide sweep of her arm. He saw her face closely as she passed him, intent and fierce, incandescent with excitement. “I’m going up to the house to tell Inspector Felse.”

  He caught at her arm, but half-heartedly, almost confused into obeying her without protest. “Stay here, nothing! I’m coming with you.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Liri spat at him over her shoulder, tearing her sleeve out of his hand. “Stay here and keep an eye open, and mark the place for us. We don’t want to have to hunt for him again, there’s a quarter of a mile of this wild part. And suppose the river dislodges him? At least you can tell us. And if anyone else comes near, get them away from here. I won’t be long.”

  She was away before he could stop her, weaving like a greyhound between the clinging sallows, stooping under branches, running like an athletic boy. And so positive and compelling was her authority that for some minutes he stayed where she had stationed him, his gaze fixed uneasily on that small, idling whiteness in the surge of brown. He could not forget the burning blue of her eyes, so intense as to sear out all expression, and the taut lines of her face, drawn so fine that the bones showed through in fiery pallor. He had never understood her, and he never would. Something unsuspected within him, something almost old-maidish in its respect for the proper forms, was scandalised by her composure. Hadn’t she just found her black-haired true-love drowned in the Braide? Wasn’t that his hand playing horribly with the dimpled currents there, snared in the branches of the tree? Only an hour ago she had been singing, with shattering effect, about another lost love slain by the braes of another river:

  “O, Yarrow braes, may never, never rain

  Nor dew thy tender blossoms cover.

  For there was basely slain my love.

  My love, as he had not been a lover.”

  Suddenly he wanted to understand her, he wanted to know, his normal inquisitiveness came to life again and shook off her influence. He always had to probe into everything that came his way, in case there might be something in it for Dickie. He cast one rather reluctant but still avid glance at the elusive thing he was supposed to be watching. It idled on the current like a skater, swayed in a slight, rhythmic movement. He wasn’t going anywhere. Fixed as the Rock of Gibraltar.

  Dickie Meurice could move very rapidly indeed when he chose. He made better time than Liri herself over the obstacle-strewn course to the stone bridge. By the time he reached it, and paused on the edge of the open parkland on the other side, Liri was well up the slope towards the house, and running strongly. He kept to the edge of the trees instead of following her by the direct route, until she came to the steps that led up to the south terrace. She didn’t climb the steps. He saw that, and hugged himself. She was up to something, or she would have taken the direct and open way in. Instead, she was circling the wing of the house to enter by the courtyard, as she had left it. Dickie let her slip from sight, and then abandoned his shadowy shelter, and set off at his fastest run across the open ground, and in at the front doors. By the time she had threaded the passage into the house from the rear, he would be hanging over the rail of the back stairs, ready for her.

  The gong for dinner had not yet sounded, but everyone was gathering into the public rooms in readiness for it; he could hear the babel of voices from the gallery and the libraries, high and merry, as he slid through the quiet corridors and leaned over the well of the back stairs. Any sounds from below would come up to him clearly here; he would know when she arrived, and whatever her intentions, she would have to cross that quiet lobby below him.

  The staircase was old, solid and tightly wound, and made a wonderful funnel for rising sounds, especially as the lower corridor was of stone. He made his way down perhaps a third of the flight, to a point where he would still be well out of sight of anyone approaching from below, and have time to make his escape into the labyrinth of public rooms before she reached this upper landing. Follymead might have been designed for monstrous games of hide-and-seek. He leaned cautiously over the oak rail, and peered down the coiled, enclosed space, as into the whorls of a shell.

  He could see beneath him the stone flags of what had once been the central lobby of the service floor and was now a cool, indoor spot for summer days with a fantasy of plant-stands, tapestry-draped walls, a few white-painted wrought-iron seats, and two pay-telephones discreetly tucked into the corner under the stairs, and walled round, but not roofed, with reeded wood shells just six feet high, painted ivory-white. They provided adequate insulation on their own level, and an excellent sounding-board to carry conversation up the well of the staircase. No one involved in the re-designing of Follymead as a college had thought of that; none of them had envisaged a future clientèle, addicted to listening in on other people’s telephone conversations. Their mistake, thought Dickie Meurice, speculating pleasurably on one possibility.

  The crisp, chill sound of Liri’s footsteps, walking briskly, came along the stone passage ahead of her, and rang hollowly up the stairs. Low heels, but narrow and sharp, tipped with metal. Kitten heels, they called them; appropriate enough for that young tigress. Their rhythm didn’t slacken or turn aside towards the staircase. He saw her foreshortened figure cross below him, the dark brown head so erect and beautifully balanced, the impetuous outline of brow and nose, the great braid of hair lashing like a tail for the tigress. Straight towards the telephones! He heard the soft clash of the swing door closing, reed to reed, snug as the seam of a dress.

  He dropped one turn lower, sliding down the rail of the stairs eagerly. Almost above her head now, and though she was out of his sight he could hear and time every turn of the dial. Two revolutions, one long, one short. For the operator, so what she wanted was not a local call; but he had never supposed that it would be. And blessedly, that meant she must ask for her number. Things could not have been going more smoothly his way.

  “I’d like to call a London number, please. Valence 3581. This is Belwardine 640.”

  Every word clear and unmistakable so far. Coins rattled into the slot, below him. They waited for what seemed a longer time than the two minutes it actually was, and in the interval the gong sounded for dinner. That was the signal for the whole hungry party to come milling along the gallery from the small drawing-room, from the terraces, from all the corners in which they were disporting themselves, and converge on the dining-hall. It was on the same main floor, situated above the special level of the great drawing-room, and those once-menial regions where the telephones had been installed. Meurice could maintain his place on the stairs brazenly, and nobody would bother him. But the cavalcade of joyous voices drowned out Liri’s first words when the distant party, whoever he might be, answered her, and blotted into meaningless murmurs half of what passed afterwards. It is hard enough making sense of one half of a telephone conversation; trying to make something of half of that one half is a job for the cypher experts.

  “Never mind that,” he heard her say clearly, her voice low and guarded, but sharp with impatience and strain, “there’s no time…” And again, after a maddening moment when nothing was audible but the Rossignol twins marching along the gallery to the loud, gay strains of “Auprès de ma blonde”: “… just get out, fast. The body’s been found… ”

  There was more, a hard silence on her part, the distant voice inaudibly pouring words at her, never a name to identify him. Why must they sing even when they weren’t getting paid for it? There went Andrew Callum, leading half a dozen disciples in “The Boy from Killane,” and away went a burst of words from Liri, down the wind with the heroic lament for Douglas Kelly:

  “Tell me, who is the giant with gold, curling hair.

  He who rides at the head of your band?

  Seven feet is his height, with some inches to spare.

  And he looks like a king in command…”

  And on the diminishing echo, clearly: “Damn you, I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye.”

  The receiver clashed in the rest, and the door swung before her thrust, she was out, and at the foot of the staircase.

  He turned and took the rest of the stairs three at a time, in long leaps. By the time Liri came out on the main landing, he was away along the gallery and out through the great front doors, and bounding down the steps from the terrace towards the dimming slopes that led to the Braide. He ran like a hare, in exuberant leaps, back to the duty Liri had laid on him. The vacant, wandering hand was still languid and easy on the thrusting current. Meurice found himself a dry place to stand, and waited; it was certain he wouldn’t have long to wait.

  “I wish I hadn’t done it now,” said Felicity, as many another has said before her with as little effect, and many another will certainly say in the future. “If I’d known…” She stopped there, jutted a dubious lip at what it had been in her mind to say, and rejected it ruthlessly. Whatever she lacked, she was beginning to discover in herself a rare and ferocious honesty. “I should, though,” she said, “the way I felt, even if I’d known how it would turn out.”

  “None of us knows that yet,” George reminded her crisply. He had placed a chair considerately for her, so that no too acute light should touch her face, and no too direct glance put her off her stride. Oh, there was stuff in Felicity of which she knew nothing yet, even if she was finding out some things about herself the hard way, and too rapidly.

  “No,” she conceded, “but we know the probabilities. I did know them, even then, or I could have if I’d been willing.”

  “I doubt,” said George, doing her the justice of showing a like honesty, “if you anticipated that much success.”

  She looked up quickly at that, a little startled, and considered it gingerly. The faintest and briefest glint of a smile showed in her eyes, and as feebly withdrew. “You’re not trying to make me think I haven’t done something dreadful, are you?” You, of all people! her tone implied.

  “No, I wouldn’t do that. But I am telling you that something like that happens in most lives. Most of us, when it does happen, are lucky enough, clumsy enough, or scared enough to make a mess of our opportunity for malice. You were the unlucky one. You had the perfect explosive put into your hand, and the perfect fuse for it into your mouth. Even then, for some of us, it would have failed to go off. But we shouldn’t have been less guilty. Having something to regret leaves you anything but unique or particular in this world, Felicity, rather confirms you one of the crowd.” He saw her braced to think that out, and resolute to kick the argument to pieces, and saw fit to divert the event. “Look; suppose I ask you my questions first, and then we can talk.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “But I’ve told you everything I can think of now.”

  “Yes, this is a matter of something you did tell me. You said you left Lucien there by the river, and came away, ‘and latched the gate after me.’ Did you mean that literally? Not just pulled the gate to after you, but latched it?”

  She was staring at him now alertly and brightly, momentarily deflected from her own problems. “Yes, latched it. Of course! Why, is that important?”

  “It’s a detail. They all help. The latch was still in position then?”

  She nodded emphatically. “You couldn’t very well miss it, it’s nearly as long as my arm.” An exaggeration of course, what she was really indicating with a small flourish was her forearm, from elbow to fingertips. “It hasn’t had any rivets, or whatever they are, holding it for a long time, it just hangs there in the slots, you can pull it out if you want to.”

  “Yes, I see. And Lucien didn’t think better of it, and come after you? Try to stop you?”