“I’m sorry,” said the operator, after a few minutes of waiting, “there’ll be a slight delay, but I’ll get you through as soon as I can. Can I call you back?”

  “Please do. I’ll be right on hand.”

  He heard the students emerge from their session, and the gong pealed for lunch. Marshall had taken to sending him in a tray as soon as the party were all accounted for and busy. Not long to go now; this evening they would disperse, he hoped with only pleasant memories of this extraordinary week-end at Follymead, and then the survivors could look round without secrecy, and see what could be salvaged.

  George propped up before him the photograph of Audrey in her party-dress, and sat waiting, eye to eye with all that youth and innocence and happiness. He wondered if she’d ever looked like that for Edward Arundale.

  Ten minutes later the telephone shrilled, and he reached for it eagerly, expecting his Scottish connection. But the voice that grated amiably in his ears was that of Superintendent Duckett, in high feather.

  “George? We made it in time, after all. You can relax. They picked up Lucien Galt at London Airport half an hour ago.”

  “Nothing to it,” Duckett was elaborating happily a minute later. “Came in by taxi and checked in as if nothing had happened. Best thing he could do, of course, only he didn’t do it quickly enough. Yesterday morning he could have flown out like a V. I. P. and no questions asked.”

  “Why in the world didn’t he?” George wondered. “Inexperience?”

  “Money. It takes a little time to knock together about three thousand pounds in notes.”

  “That’s what he had on him?”

  “In his case. As much as he could turn into cash in the time, obviously. He had a ticket for Buenos Aires. They’re holding him at the airport for us, and I’ve started Price and Rapier off to fetch him back. On the car charge, of course – taking away without owner’s permission. And even for a holding charge that must be the understatement of the year.”

  “How did he react when they invited him to step aside and talk things over?” asked George. He’d seen that moment walk up behind so many men and tap them on the shoulder, and he had a pretty clear picture of this young man he’d never yet seen, proud to arrogance, impetuous, used to respect and adulation, even if he thought he despised it.

  “Quietly. From what I hear, he looked round smartly for a way out, and might have tried to make a break for it if he could, but he sized things up at once, and went along without any fuss. He hadn’t a chance, and I fancy he’d hate to make an unsuccessful scene. Now the question is, how do we handle him. It’s your case, George, you know the people and the set-up there, you’re up with all the new developments, if there are any since you fished up that queer affair the boys are working on. You suggest, I’ll consider.”

  So now it was up to George, and he had to make up his mind a shade too early, before he really had anything but a hunch to go on. It was a gamble, and he was no gambler, and yet all his instincts told him to trust the conviction in his blood.

  “All right, I’ll tell you what I’d like done. Have him brought straight back here to me, to Follymead. I’ll be waiting for him, and I’ll be responsible for him.”

  Duckett digested that in hard silence for a moment, and then said: “Right, I’ll do that.” Duckett was an admirable chief even in his acts, George found himself thinking, but better still in his abstentions. Not everybody could leave a subordinate alone to do a thing his own way. “How do you want the boys to handle him meantime? Press him, let him alone, what?”

  “Don’t discourage him, don’t press him. Just let him stew, and if he wants to talk, caution him, but then let him talk. It might be very interesting.”

  “You think he will talk, don’t you?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Just a minute, George… hang on, here’s Phillips in from the lab…”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a positive reaction on the blade of that sword-stick affair. It seems to be A, the same as your specimens from the ground.”

  “Good, thanks! No prints, of course?”

  “Not a ghost of one. What did you expect, after being in the water all that time? In any case that knob’s so finely chased it breaks up all the lines,” said Duckett philosophically, “and nobody’s going to hold a sword by the blade… not while he’s using it.”

  The second time the telephone rang George pounced on it like a hunting leopard, assured that it must be Stirling this time. But it was Scott, reporting from London at last.

  “Well, about time,” said George, round a mouthful of chicken sandwich. “What’s been keeping you?”

  “Mobile people, mostly,” said Scott crisply, the light tenor voice buoyant and detached. “I struck unlucky at that children’s home of yours. The old house-parents – Stewart and his wife – they retired just about a month ago. There’s a couple named Smith in possession now, brand new. Naturally they know some of the past kids as names, but no other way. The only people about the place who know young Galt know him only from his visits since he left. Nobody there knows a thing about this medal of his.”

  “Did you follow up the Stewarts? They must have retired somewhere around London. Londoners don’t go far away.”

  “I did. They’ve got a little house in Esher, all very nice and accessible. But they’ve got time on their hands, too, for the first time in years, and they’ve gone off to Italy for an early holiday. Can’t say I blame ’em. They’ll be back next week, but next week doesn’t help us now. Well, that took a fair amount of time without much result, I grant you. So I took off for that garage and service station where the kid started work. Purley and Sons, Highbury. Quite a nice chap, Purley, old-fashioned paternal style. Good little business, and still personal. Garages can be, even in London.”

  “And they remember him?”

  “They remember him. Give him quite a good name as a worker. Didn’t mind how mucky he got, and loved cars nearly as much as guitars. And you know he was only a kid when he started with them? Well, this is the one pearl I’ve got for you with all this diving, George. Purley took a real interest in the kids he employed, and was a stickler for the regulations. And you know the birth certificate juveniles have to produce when they start work?”

  “Of course, what about it?”

  “Just that in his case it wasn’t a birth certificate. It was an adoption certificate.”

  So he had known, of course, he had known all along. It is, in any case, the modern policy to ensure that they know, and so avoid future shocks. He had always known; and this was the one fact he had always refrained from mentioning, if not suppressed. He talked freely to interviewers about his upbringing in public care, he went back to his old home regularly as a visitor. No sore places there.

  But never, never did he tell anyone, even Liri Palmer, that John James and Esther Galt were only his adoptive parents. That was a spot he was careful never to touch.

  For fear of pain?

  A quarter of an hour later the telephone rang for the third time, and this time it really was Stirling. By that time the inquiries he had to make there seemed almost unnecessary, but he set them in motion, all the same. It would take a little time to get hold of details from so far back, names, dates of death, and so on, but the services kept everlasting records. He would get what he wanted, though perhaps not in time to affect or simplify the issue.

  And now there was nothing left to be done, except sit back and wait for Lucien Galt to come back to Follymead under escort.

  In the back of the police car, purling steadily along the Ml at seventy, Lucien Galt sat closed into himself like a locked house, but like a locked house with someone peering through the curtains, and possibly a gun braced across the sill of a just-open window. He had said hardly anything since the large, civil men closed in on him at the airport, and wafted him smoothly aside into a private room. If he had seen the slightest hope of giving them the slip, then or afterwards, he would have risked it, but they didn’t take any chances, and they didn’t give him any. No use looking back now and cursing the mistakes he had made. He had a situation to deal with here. Nothing else mattered now.

  He was horribly tired, that was the worst thing about it. He needed to think clearly and carefully, and he was in no condition to do it, but he had to try. This perfectly decent and pleasant person beside him, and the other one, driving, they were human, they had treated him throughout with slightly constrained civility and consideration. It was an extraordinary feeling, being wound about with chains of forbearance and watchfulness, like a mental case, like a psychopath under observation. But it did mean that they would listen to him and report on him with all the detachment of which they were capable.

  “I’d like to tell you how it happened,” he said abruptly, breaking the silence which had been largely of his own making. At first he hadn’t known what to do, or how to conduct himself, and though he had despised the normal bluster and pretence with which the guilty cover up their guilt, it had seemed to him that a profession of non-understanding was the only course left to him, and after that, silence, and such dignity as he could find a way of keeping. I know nothing, I understand nothing, I am a citizen of substance and some importance, (am I?) but I am certainly not going to make a fuss in this public place. Since you apparently have a duty to do, by all means let’s go back and sort out this misunderstanding in private. All very well, but it made this blunt and exhausted opening now seem very crude. He shrank from the sound of it, and yet he was aware that it made a credible beginning. The guilty first protest (at least he had done that only once, and briefly), then sit back and think, and begin to worry, and break into a sweat of anxiety, and finally come to the conclusion that a half-admission may get them something. What he had said must have that ring to this solid, quiet person beside him, who looked like a merchant skipper on leave, brown-faced and far-sighted, and at ease anywhere.

  The eyes had shortened their focus upon him, along a broad tweed shoulder. The good-natured teak face gave nothing away. “How you drove the car away, you mean?” asked Detective-Sergeant Rapier placidly.

  “All right, I did drive the car away, if you want me to say so.”

  “I don’t want you to say anything you don’t want to say. We’re not asking you for any statements.”

  “I know that. I’m offering you one. If you want to take it down, you can. But even if you don’t want to, you can listen. I’m tired of running, anyhow, I want it straightened out.”

  “If you want to talk,” said Rapier philosophically, “who’s to stop you? But I feel I ought to remind you that there are two witnesses present, whether there’s a record or not, and that anything you say may be used in evidence. Maybe you should take another long, quiet think – about as long as from here to Comerbourne. There’ll be time there to do all the talking you’ll need to do.”

  “I have thought,” said Lucien bleakly. “I should have done better to think before I ran. What has it got me? I don’t suppose I ever had much chance of getting out, but what chance I had I seem to have muffed. Talking can’t make things worse now. It might even make them a shade better. Because I never meant to kill him, of course. If I hadn’t had the most hellish luck he’d be alive now.”

  In the small, pregnant silence, shatteringly apparent even while Price continued to direct the car calmly at the same smooth speed, Lucien observed his two escorts exchanging in the mirror a speaking glance that was yet very careful not to say too much.

  “I didn’t know,” said Rapier mildly, “that anybody’d mentioned a death.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lucien in a spurt of nervous fury that left him trembling, “let’s pack in this pretence that you’re after me for running off with a car. People don’t try to skip out to South America for that, and you fellows don’t have the airports alerted to stop them. That’s not what all this is about. You know as well as I do that Mr. Arundale’s dead, and if you weren’t as good as certain I killed him, you wouldn’t be here taking me back with you to Comerbourne. So why put on this act with me!”

  “Have we asked you any questions about Mr. Arundale’s death, sir? I don’t recollect that we have.”

  “You don’t have to ask me, I’m telling you. I want to tell you. I’m sick of being the only one who knows.”

  “It’s a free country,” allowed Rapier considerately. “But no charge has been made against you formally yet on any count. I shouldn’t be in any hurry to make statements, if I were you.”

  “But if I do, you’ll keep a record of it? Not that I care, except that I’d rather get it over in one. I’m so damned tired.”

  “Very well, sir, if that’s what you want. But you will bear in mind that I’ve cautioned you.” And with the minimum of movement and fuss, suddenly the sergeant had his notebook on his knee, and his ball-pen in his hand. Probably wise to the fact that I’m one of those contra-suggestible types, thought Lucien bitterly. If they seem to be heading in the direction you want them to go, push like the devil the other way, and they’ll persist. If you give them a hand, they’ll turn back.

  “Oh, I give you full credit for that. But it’s all right, I want it finished now. It never should have begun. It was all unnecessary.”

  He moistened his lips nervously. How much did they know? Better assume they knew most of it. How could Felicity keep her mouth shut for long, once she realised what she’d unleashed. And even if they hadn’t yet recovered everything the river was supposed to conceal, they soon would when the level went down. No, better leave out nothing that was there to be found.

  “I was down by the river,” he said, and shivered as if he’d plunged into its coldness, “and the kid had followed me there, the warden’s niece, the Cope girl. She’d been round my neck ever since I’d got to Follymead, I couldn’t shake her. And I was in a miserable way because I’d quarrelled with my own girl, and she was around, too, and things were pretty bad with me. I wanted to get somewhere by myself, and think, and there was this silly little thing bleating about love, when she didn’t know she was born yet. I stood it a long time, and then I blew up. All I wanted was to get rid of her, and I wasn’t particular how I did it. I’m not proud of it now. I suppose it was about the cruellest thing I’ve ever done. I gave her a message to take to her aunt… to Mrs. Arundale… as if there was something between us. There wasn’t, of course, I only met the lady a couple of times before. It was just that Felicity was already mad jealous of her aunt, that’s why I made it her. It cut deeper. And it worked, too. She took offence and walked off and left me there, and that was all I wanted. I never thought she’d go and deliver the damned message, right out in front of both of them… or just to him, I don’t know… to him, anyhow, because he came. I’d said to tell Mrs. Arundale I was waiting for her there. But it was her husband who came.”

  The sergeant’s hand seemed to do no more than idle over the paper, spraying shorthand symbols like rain. But he wasn’t missing anything. And he could still spare one eye, occasionally, for a quick glance at his prisoner’s face.

  “Must have been a bit of a shock, when you expected Mrs. Arundale,” he said sympathetically.

  “I didn’t expect anyone. I told you, all I meant to do was shoo the Cope girl away. I never thought she’d have the devilment – I don’t know, though, I asked for it! – or the guts, either.” Lucien shivered, a nervous compulsion that ran through his bones in a sharp contraction of cold. “He was there before I knew. I wasn’t paying any attention to anything. I was just glad to be alone, and then there he was coming out of the trees, with this thing in his hand…” A compulsive yawn followed the chill; he smothered it in his hands, and shook himself violently. He wasn’t through the wood yet, he had to keep his mind clear.

  “This thing…?” said Rapier, patiently nudging.

  “Maybe you don’t know it. It hangs in the gallery there, among a lot of other exotic junk, Victorian, maybe older. The Cope kid showed it to us when we went round the house, the first evening. It’s a black walking-stick with a silver handle, but really it’s a sword inside an ebony sheath. I knew it as soon as I saw it, but I never thought… He just drew it out and came at me. Never said a word, simply ran at me with the blade. I tried to talk to him, but there was no time at all, and anyhow I doubt if he could even hear. He looked quite mad… stone-cold mad. I couldn’t believe in it, I nearly let him get me because I couldn’t take it in. But then I knew he meant killing, and I just put the rocks between us in time, and ducked aside into the trees, hoping to beat him to the gate and get away. But he saw what I was about, and cut back there as fast as I did. I got my hand to the latch, and then he was on top of me, and I jumped round and put up my other arm to fend him off, and the tip of the blade ripped my fingers…” He flexed them painfully, and there indeed was the sliced cut, imperfectly healed, crossing all four fingers diagonally between second joints and knuckles. “And the latch had pulled half out of its place, so I knew it was free, and I pulled it out.”

  He shut his face tightly between his palms, trying to suppress the sick yawns that were tearing at him now like bouts of pain. Queer the way you reacted when the time came, mentally calm but physically disrupted, a rash of nervous symptoms with a tensed and wary mind. This pause he prolonged in the hope of eliciting a question, anything that would make things easier for him, and give him a signpost, but Rapier waited politely with his ballpoint suggestively poised, and said not a word.

  “But I had to spring away from the gate to get out of range. And then he was between me and it, and even if I had a weapon I couldn’t match his reach. He drove me down towards the water again, and all I could do was try to parry his strokes. But then it was no good backing any more, I should have been in the river, so I had to try and jump him. I’m no more good at that than he was, and I was in a state by men, and… I don’t even know exactly what happened. We were struggling together there, and I hit him… He went down. I didn’t know I’d hurt him badly, the only thing I thought about was to grab the sword, while he was stunned. But after a few minutes, when he still didn’t move, I got scared, and took a closer look at him. His head was like a ploughed field, and yet there was next to no blood. He wasn’t breathing, and with a head that shape he wasn’t going to breathe again. I knew I’d killed him. And all for nothing. I never wanted to, I hardly knew him… What was I supposed to do, with that on my hands?” he appealed passionately.