“No,” she said sombrely, “why should he? He didn’t know what I was going to do. He didn’t care about me one way or the other. I suppose there wasn’t really any reason why he should. He never even looked round. He was sitting in the grotto, glad I was gone. I realise now that he must have been at the end of his patience, to do what he did to me.”

  “I suspect,” said George, “that his patience was always on the short side.”

  “Maybe. I didn’t really know much about him, did I?” she said bleakly. “And neither did he about me.” She looked up earnestly into George’s face, and asked simply: “What am I going to do?”

  Outside, the gong for dinner was bawling merrily, but they didn’t notice it, or hear the noisy parade to the hall.

  “Live with it,” said George with equal simplicity, “and make the best of it. I can’t absolve you, and you wouldn’t be grateful to me if I tried. I can’t charge you with anything, and there isn’t any penance to be found anywhere, if that’s what you’re looking for. No, you’ll just have to hump the memory along with you and go on carrying it, like the rest of us, and learn to live with yourself and your mistakes. It’s the one way you find out how to avoid more and greater failures.”

  “But if I’ve killed him?” she said in a whisper, her eyes frantic but trusting.

  “Whatever happens, you won’t have killed him. Not unless you’d been responsible for living their two lives as well as your own, for all the qualities in them and all the things they’d ever done or thought that eventually made it impossible for yesterday to end without a tragedy – only then would you have killed the one and made the other a murderer. Your contribution was bitter enough to you, but only the spark that set off a fire already laid. Don’t claim more than your share, Felicity, you’ll find your fair share quite enough to carry.”

  After a brief, deep silence she said in a low voice: “Thank you! At least you haven’t treated me like a child.”

  “You’re not a child. Let’s face it, you’re not grown-up yet, either, not quite. But I’ll tell you this, you’re a great deal nearer to being a woman than you were yesterday, when I first met you.”

  Her lips tightened in a wry and painful smile that was very close indeed to being adult, and she said something no child could have said. “That doesn’t seem much for Lucien to die for,” said Felicity, and finding her own utterance more horrifying than she had expected, rose abruptly to leave him. “There isn’t anything… useful… I can be doing?”

  “Living,” said George, “and perhaps for the moment just living, without any thinking. And don’t think that isn’t useful. For a start you can go in to dinner with the rest of them, and help to tide Follymead over to-night.”

  Faintly she said, the child creeping back into her voice and eyes uninvited: “Do I have to? I’m not hungry.”

  “You will be. The least useful think you can do is make yourself ill. And you’re needed, don’t forget you’re part of the household, a bigger part than ever before.”

  “All right,” she said grimly, and took a step or two towards the door. The weight of the house came down on her appallingly for a moment. She looked back at him in sudden piteous appeal, she didn’t know for what.

  “Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said in a muted wail, “if only I wasn’t so damned dull and plain …”

  “Plain!” George echoed incredulously. “Plain!” he repeated in a growl of exasperation. “Child, did you never look at yourself in a mirror? Plain! Come here!” He took her by the shoulders and turned her about, and trotted her sharply across the room to the high mantel and the Venetian mirror above it. It hung so high that at close range only her head came into view, with George’s impatient face above. He cupped a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to the glass. “My dear little idiot, for goodness sake look at yourself. What do you want, in heaven’s name? Do you have to be coloured like a peony to be worth looking at? What if you haven’t got your aunt’s milk-whiteness and roses, and a pile of fair hair? This… this pale-brown, baby-fine stuff you have got was made to go with this face. You find me a more delicately-drawn hair-line than this, or a better-shaped head. And as for your face, I’d like to know who put you off it in the first place. Look at the form of these eye-sockets, look at this line, this curve along your chin and neck. Plain! You haven’t finished growing yet, and the peak’s still to come, but if you can’t see it coming you must be blind, my girl. Don’t you realise you’ve got bones that are going to keep you beautiful until you’re eighty? The prettiest colouring in the world won’t stand by you like these will.”

  Felicity stood transfixed with pure astonishment, her hands raised to touch the cheek-bones his fingers had just quitted. Her eyes, huge with wonder, stared unrecognisingly at the face in the glass. Her lips moved very faintly, shaping distantly and incredulously the word “beautiful.”

  The sudden rush of feet outside the door, the rap of knuckles on the wood, never penetrated her stunned senses. Even when the door opened upon Liri Palmer’s roused face and glittering eyes, with Dominic close to her shoulder, Felicity only turned like a creature in a dream, still lost to every shock but one.

  “Can you come?” Liri’s blue stare fixed urgently upon George. “There’s something I want to show you.” She had bitten back, at sight of Felicity, the blunt announcement she would otherwise have made. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you, but it’s important.”

  Her voice was mild, but her eyes were imperious. Liri’s maturity extended to sparing the children; or perhaps she was merely concerned with keeping them from under her feet.

  “Felicity was just on her way to dinner,” said George, and started her towards the door with a gentle push between the shoulder-blades. She went where he urged her, obediently, like a sleep-walker. They moved aside from the doorway to let her pass, and she looked back for a moment with eyes still blind to everything but the distant vision of her own beauty, incredible and yet constant. She trusted George. There had been very few adults in her young life whom she had been able to trust.

  “Thank you! I’ll try… I’ll do what you said.”

  “Good night!” said George.

  “Good night!” said Felicity remotely, and wandered away with a fingertip drawing and re-drawing the line of her cheek-bone and jaw, which George had found beautiful. Beautiful! She followed the beckoning word towards the dining-hall and her duty. She was enlarged, she contained and accepted even her guilt, even her inability to erase it. She had something to live for, so unexpected that it loomed almost as large as the death she had precipitated.

  As soon as she was gone they all three came into the room and closed the door carefully after them. He should have known that where Dominic was, Tossa also would be.

  “Well?”

  “I’ve found the body,” said Liri, point-blank.

  It couldn’t have been anything else, of course; he had seen it in her braced and motionless excitement. So there wasn’t going to be any blessed anticlimax, any apologetic reappearance. They had a body, they had a crime. And Follymead had the prospect of ruin. George looked at the dusk leaning in at the window, at the clock that showed five minutes past the dinner hour, and reached into the desk drawer for his torch.

  “Where is he?”

  “Caught in a fallen tree in the river. Below the stone bridge, in the wild part. I’ll take you there.”

  “We ran into Liri at the top of the stairs,” said Dominic, “and she told us. I hope that’s all right. You’re going to need somebody, if only to run the errands.”

  “That’s all right. Anybody keeping an eye on him now?”

  “Dickie Meurice,” said Liri, her voice suddenly shaken out of its calm by the surrender of her responsibility, as her legs shook beneath her for a moment. “He wasn’t with me… he just showed up. I told him to stand by.”

  “Good! Tossa, you run across by the footbridge, will you, and find Lockyer, and tell him to meet us downstream. Tell him to bring some ropes down with him. And an axe or a hatchet, something we can use on the tree.”

  “Right!” said Tossa, dry-mouthed with excitement, and whirled and ran.

  “Come on, then,” said George. “Lead the way, Liri.” And they followed her out across the terrace, and down the slope of turf towards the distant stone bridge.

  It took them half an hour to get him ashore, and not a word was said in all that time but for the brief exchanges that were necessary to the job in hand. If they had tried to hack away the driftwood that held him before they had a line on him, he would have escaped them again, for once dislodged, the flood would have taken him headlong downstream out of their hands. It was Dominic, as the lightest weight among the men present, who clambered out barefoot on the swaying barrier of branches, and secured a rope round the shoulder that just broke surface, cased in sodden tweed that was now of no colour at all but the river’s mud-brown. The driftwood under him dipped where he ventured too far; the ice-cold darkness rushed over his feet and tore at his balance. He thought of nothing as he worked; his mind had shrunk into his numbed hands.

  “All right, come ashore.”

  George reached a hand to retrieve his saturated son. Lockyer carefully took in the slack of the rope, and tested it with a gradual pull downstream; the arm that was all they could see of the dead man rose languidly along the surface, like the arm of a man turning in his sleep, but the body did not float free.

  George looked along the tangled arms of the tree, and found the one that pinned the body in its clenched fist, half out of the water. “All right, we’ll bring him in branch and all, it’ll make a useful brake. Meurice, give me that hatchet.”

  Dickie Meurice handed it eagerly. He would not for anything have forfeited his place here. He was only guessing, of course, but if his guess was right the pay-off would be worth a little discomfort.

  “And the other rope.”

  There was still a cloudy daylight out on the open sward, but here among the trees they had to peer to see even one another. The girls stood well back on drier ground, their faces two pale, still ovals in a green monochrome. Nobody had tried to send them away. What was the use of banishing Liri, who had been the one to find this pathetic thing they were trying to bring ashore? In any case, she would not have gone. She stood silent and intent, and her composure was impenetrable.

  George climbed out himself this time. There was no need to go so far that his weight would be a handicap. He made the coil of rope fast round a fork in the branch, and passed the ends back to Dominic’s waiting grasp.

  “Give him a hand, Meurice. Everything may come loose with a rush when this gives.”

  He hacked at the branch, below the fork where the rope was secured. The wood was still green and young, clinging to life; it took him a few minutes to chop his way through it.

  “Dig your heels in, it’s going.”

  They had heard the first ominous cracking, and were braced and ready. The whole branch suddenly heaved and turned like a live thing, tossing the body momentarily out of the water, and dropping it again in a flurry of dirty foam; then the tangle of wood broke loose from its moorings, and would have surged out into midstream at once, but the two ropes, drawn in gradually hand over hand, coaxed it sidelong into the bank. Torn foam seethed through the lattice of sodden leaves. George scrambled back to the muddy ground, and helped them to draw him in, and disentangle him from the tree. Ankle-deep in cold spill-water, they hoisted the dead weight clear, and laid him on the higher ground padded with last year’s leaves and starred with this year’s late anemones.

  The sagging, shapeless shadow that had been a man lay flattened to the moist earth by his mud-heavy clothes. Lank hair of the universal river-colour plastered the pallor that was his forehead. George said in a voice suddenly sharp and intent. “Give me the torch.”

  The cone of light sprang out of the dimness and brought shapes to life again in this twilit world that had no shape. The long body sprawled awkwardly, so weighted down with water that it seemed to be dissolving away from them into the ground. A massive, large-featured face, smooth and austere and once impressive enough, gaped up at them through soiled trails of river-water.

  The single muted whimper of a cry came from Tossa. Liri Palmer made never a sound. Dickie Meurice drew in breath with a long-drawn hiss that might have been pure horror and excitement, but sounded horribly like glee.

  “But that isn’t…” blurted Lockyer, amazed, and let the sentence trail away helplessly into silence. He had a teenage daughter; in her vicinity there was no possibility of avoiding acquaintance with the features of the current pop and folk idols.

  “No,” agreed George grimly, staring into the pool of light at his feet, “no, it isn’t Lucien Galt. It looks as if we’ve got to hunt farther afield for him. No… this is Edward Arundale.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  « ^ »

  PERHAPS,” suggested Lockyer blankly, after a long moment of silence, “they both went into the river.”

  “You think so?” George switched off the torch, and the deepening dusk fell on them like a cloak. “And who drove Arundale’s car away? It was there, in the yard, with his overnight case and his books in it, at three. It was gone before four, and nobody else had gone missing. Oh, no, they didn’t both go the same way.’

  “They didn’t both go down the river, anyhow,” said Dickie Meurice softly, and they heard and felt him stirring in the darkness, again with that curious suggestion of pleased malevolence. “Because just before Liri came to tell you she’d found this one, she was talking to the other one on the telephone.”

  He had his sensation, and it was everything he had hoped it would be. Only Liri herself let the revelation pass without a sound. She had made one sharp movement, however, that did just as well. However stolidly she sat out questioning, after that, he’d know that he’d hit her where it hurt. She’d had her chance to have his goodwill, and done rather more than turn up her nose at the offer. Now she could try it the other way.

  “How do you know that?” demanded George, “if you were here keeping an eye on the body?”

  “I wasn’t. I had a hunch she was up to something, so I let her get a head start, and then followed her up. If she’d been on the level she’d have come straight in by the terrace, but she didn’t. She went off round the back of the house, to the passage from the yard. So I came in by the front and beat her to the back stairs, and I was there to see exactly what she did. She went straight to the telephone call box under the stairs, and asked for a London number.

  “Dear Dickie,” said Liri quite gently, as if neither he nor anything he did could matter to her now, “always so true to form. Where were you? Hiding in the next box?”

  “In the presence of the police,” he retorted maliciously, “I shouldn’t be too witty about eavesdropping, if I were you. They have other names for it in the way of duty. I can demonstrate that I heard all right, and I can repeat every word I heard, too. Including the number!”

  “And including a name?” asked George dryly.

  “No, I didn’t get a name. But the number was Valence 3581. You can check it easily enough, but I wouldn’t mind betting you’ll find it’s the number of Lucien’s London flat. That would be the first place she’d try, even if she didn’t know where he’d be – and maybe she did, at that!”

  “And why didn’t you tell me about this at once, as soon as we arrived? Instead of behaving as if you’d been here all the time and had no information to offer?”

  “Because I couldn’t make out just what it was all about, not until I realised whose body we’d found. And what mattered first was to get him out. She wasn’t going to run.”

  “So in fact you didn’t actually know whose number it was, or to whom she was talking?”

  “No, not then. I don’t know, for that matter, but listen to the text, and draw what conclusions you like. I didn’t hear everything, people were just coming chattering along the gallery to dinner. When someone answered her she said: ‘Never mind that, there’s no time.’ And the next I got was: ‘… just get out, fast. The body’s been found… ’ Then whoever was at the other end was doing the talking, until she cut him off. ‘Damn you,’ she said, ‘I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye!’ ”

  “That was all?”

  “Isn’t it enough? I didn’t know whose body she’d found, but she did. She was climbing out on the tree when I came on the scene, she’d had a good look at him. But maybe she’d known all along which of them went into the water. Maybe she even helped in the job, or at least helped Lucien to get away afterwards. Stay here, she says, and keep an eye on him, while I run and tell Mr. Felse! You have to hand it to our Liri, she’s quick on the draw. She couldn’t suppress the discovery, because I happened on her just at the wrong moment. But she could and did run like a hare to warn the murderer, before she gave the alarm. And she found me a job to do that would keep me quiet while she did it, or so she hoped. Only as luck would have it I’d already begun to smell a rat by then.”

  He smiled, the well-known smile that charmed the televiewers regularly on Thursday nights, his fair head cocked towards Liri; and though the smile was now invisible, they felt its weighted sweetness probing her.

  “But in any case, you don’t have to take my word for it. Ask her! Ask the operator who got her her London number.”

  “All in good time,” said George impassively, “we’ll ask everything that needs to be asked, but not, I think, here. I should be grateful if you would all keep this to yourselves, just as you have done until now. Lockyer, stay with him, I must go and telephone. The rest of you, come on, let’s get back to the house.”

  They made their way back in single file to the dry pathway and the glow-worm twilight that was left in the park, George lighting them until they were out of the trees. At the end of the line, Dominic and Tossa linked hands and drew close, shivering suddenly with the chill of the river, and the cold oppression of darkness, malice and death. She whispered in his ear, anxiously, that he must go straight up and change. The suggestion, mildly maternal, pointedly possessive, seemed to be left over from another world, but at least indicated the possibility of recovering that world, when all this was over. Dominic, the shivers warmed out of him by her solicitude, pressed her hand impulsively and wondered again at the terrifying diversity of man.