'Not more than five minutes. We found out a few minutes ago. Lockyer's out there looking for her and her father. She can't be far.'

'You shouldn't have left her.'

'She collapsed! Like that other time. She was lying with her head nearly in the hearth, and I couldn't lift her alone. I ran for her mother to help me-'

The window was wide open, the curtains swinging in the rising wind of the evening. Mrs Beck blundered past through the shaft of light, running with aimless urgency, turning again to run the other way, her face contorted into a grimace of weeping, but without tears or sound. As though death was all round the house, just outside the area of light, and everyone had known and recognised it except Annet; as though she was lost utterly as soon as she broke free from the circle and ran after her desire, and none of them would ever see her again. As though, plunging out of the window, she had plunged out of the world.

George vaulted the sill and landed on the edge of the unkempt gra.s.s. Mrs Beck turned and stared at him with dazed eyes, and caught at his arm.

'She's gone! I couldn't help it, no one could stop her if she was so set to go. It isn't anyone's fault. What could we do?'

'I'm not blaming you,' he said, and put her off, and ran through the trees to the boundary fence, leaving her stumbling after him. No moon, but even in the starlight of half a sky the emptiness about Fairford showed sterile and motionless. He had met no girl on the road. She would keep to the trees as long as she could. He circled the grounds hurriedly, halting now and again to freeze and listen. He heard Beck baying at the remotest edge of the garden, and met Lockyer methodically threading the shrubberies.

'No sign of her?'

'No sign, sir. I heard your car. Crowther'll have told you-'

'Keep looking,' said George, and turned back at a run towards the house. He overtook Mrs Beck on the way, and drew her in with him.

'Here, sit down by the fire and be quiet. Lilian, close the window and get her a drink.' He shut the door with a slam, and leaned his back against it. 'Now, what happened?'

'I told you, she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire. How could I know it was a fake? I ran for Mrs Beck she was upstairs, she didn't hear me call. When we came back Annet was gone.'

'She climbed out of the window,' said Mrs Beck, hugging her writhing hands together in her lap to keep them still. 'Without even a coat in her thin house-shoes!'

'Yes, yes, I know all that.' And Lockyer, patrolling dutifully outside, couldn't be on every side of the house at once. Annet could move like a cat, she hadn't found it difficult to elude him on her own ground. 'But before! Something happened, something gave her the word. Why tonight? Why now? She chose her time, she had a reason. Has she had any letters? Telephone messages?'

'No,' said Lilian Crowther positively. 'I've been with her all the time until she dropped like that. And Mrs Beck reads her letters but anyhow there haven't been any today.'

'And no visitors,' said George, fretting at his own helplessness, and caught the rapid flicker of a glance that pa.s.sed uneasily between them. 'No visitors? Someone has has been here?' been here?'

'I asked him to come,' said Mrs Beck loudly. 'I asked him to talk to her and do what he could. What else is he for, if not to help people in trouble? I thought he might get something out of her. It was last night being choir practice that made me think of it. I telephoned him, and asked him to come in today. There couldn't be any harm in that. If she couldn't see her own vicar even criminals are allowed that.'

'All right,' said George, frantically groping forward along this unforseen path, 'so the vicar came. No one else?'

'No one else. You must admit I had the right-'

'All right, you had the right! Was he left alone with her?'

'No,' said Lilian, defensively and eagerly, 'I was with her all the time. Mrs Beck left them together, but I stayed in the room.'

'Thank G.o.d for that! Annet didn't object?'

'She didn't seem to care one way or the other.' And yet she had bided her time, and torn herself resolutely out of their hold. Something had pa.s.sed, something significant. Why otherwise should she have chosen this particular hour, after waiting so long and so stoically? 'Well, what did they have to say to each other? Everything you can remember.'

She dredged up a number of embarra.s.sed, agonising plat.i.tudes through which the adolescent rawness of pity showed like flesh through torn clothing. The vicar was back in the room with them, convulsed with sympathy and hideously unable to contain it, or spill it, or wring his inadequate if kindly heart open and give it to her frankly; an ageing boy with only a boy's heaven to offer anyone, and stunted angels with undeveloped wings like his own.

'He said he was to tell her the choir had missed her at practice, and sent her their prayers. He said they took comfort in the thought that they would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit, he said. And that was about all,' she concluded lamely, scouring her memory in vain for more vital matter. 'It doesn't seem anything to set her off like this.'

And yet she had received, somehow, the summons that sent her out into the dusk. He could not be mistaken. If it was not here, in this trite comfort, then there must be something else, something they had missed.

'Nothing else happened? He didn't give her a note from someone else?'

'No, honestly. He never went near enought to hand her anything. You'd have thought he was afraid of her I suppose he was, in a way,' said Policewoman Crowther, with more perception than George would have given her credit for.

'She didn't see the paper?' He hadn't seen it himself, he didn't know if there was anything in it to speak to her, but somewhere the lost thread dangled, and must be found again.

'No, she never tried to. She never showed any interest.'

Perhaps, thought George, because she knew they wouldn't let her have the papers even if she wanted them. Perhaps because she had waited with such fatal confidence for the only message she needed, and knew it would not come that way.

But then there was nothing left but those few, bald sentences, brought from the outside world by the vicar; and if the clue was nowhere else, it must be there. The choir had missed her Mrs Beck must have telephoned him just before he went over to the church for practice, and he had unburdened his heart to her colleagues to spread the load. And n.o.bly they had responded. Or had they? The tone of the message was surely his, or a careful parody. It sounded as though he had dictated, and they had said: Amen. They sent her their prayers. They would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit. Six-thirty was the hour of evensong, that was plain enough. Yes, but it belonged to tomorrow, not today. Why did it send her out tonight. George sweated through it word by word, and darkness, rather than light, fell on him in the moment of discovery, stunning him.

Six-thirty at the altar. Six-thirty at the Altar! All the difference in the world.

Six-thirty!

Twenty to seven by his watch, and she was somewhere out there in the dark, with a quarter of an hour's start of him at least, bursting her heart on the steep climb to her lover.

He tore the door open and was out of it and down the steps in a couple of raking strides, before they realised that he had found what he was looking for. Racing towards his car, he shouted peremptorily for Lockyer, and by the time he had the MG turned recklessly in the confined s.p.a.ce and pointing down the drive, the bushes threshed before the constable's galloping body, and Lockyer was running beside him. George slowed, and shoved open the door.

'Get in, quick! Never mind searching, you're not needed here. I know now where to look.'

Lockyer fell lurching into the seat beside him, and slammed the door. They rocked out through the gate and swung left into the narrow road.

'Where are we going?' Lockyer clung to the dashboard, and hefted his big body to speed the turn, panting after his run.

'Top of the Hallowmount.'

'For G.o.d's sake, what's she doing rushing up there?'

'Meeting her lover. He sent for her.'

Her lover, if he still was that, after being hunted for days, and nursing for days the knowledge that the case against him depended entirely upon her. More likely by now it was her murderer she was going to meet. One can run faster and live more cheaply than two, hide more easily, remain anonymous more surely. And besides, the bulk of the evidence would die with Annet. Even when he made up his mind to run, he couldn't, he daren't, run until he had silenced her. G.o.d alone knew what she thought they were going to do. Run away together, maybe, to the ends of the earth, ditch the BSA somewhere, hitch lifts, reach the sea and the chance of a pa.s.sage over to France.

Maybe! Or maybe she had something else in mind, something pa.s.sionate and individual and her own, not to be guessed at too confidently by anyone in the world; because no one in the world knew Annet well enough to be sure what she would do, but George Felse by this time knew her at least well enough to wait with humility, and wonder, and acknowledge that she was a mystery.

Past the Wastfield gate, bounding and wallowing over the cart-ruts, and on between the rought pastures, fence-posts blurring into a continuous flickering wall of pallor alongside. Half the sky dark over them, but glimmerings of starlight still. Pale objects shone lambent out of the darkness, a tall gate-post where the plantation began, the wall of a barn in the field opposite. Before them the Hallowmount loomed, cutting off the dapplings of the sky, its great bulk languid but aware.

'But how how did he get word to her? Or was it all arranged between them before?' did he get word to her? Or was it all arranged between them before?'

All arranged, maybe, though they'd expected to make their bid for freedom in other circ.u.mstances than these. All arranged but the time and the place, perhaps even the place accepted, established by old usage. And the time he had appointed, and she was keeping her appointment. Without even a coat. In her thin house-shoes.

'Her visitor brought the message this afternoon.'

'Her visitor? But there wasn't anybody, except-'

Members of the clergy, like doctors and postmen, tend to be invisible, but that big, comely, well-meaning figure sprang into sharp focus now, became male, personable and possible in Lockyer's eyes. He swallowed, appalled. 'What, the vicar vicar?' He swallowed again, swallowed voice and all, and sat stunned.

Her father! Well, he was old enough to fill the bill, if only just old enough, he made sense of the description; and n.o.body had enquired into his movements. Why should they? Certainly he was at choir practice, that night when Annet missed it, certainly he was at church and fulfilling his usual duties on the Sunday. But a man can be in Comerford church at half past seven, and in Birmingham by nine-o'clock, or shortly after. One man had.

'But the vicar vicar?' persisted Lockyer, gulping dismay and disbelief.

George said nothing to that, he was busy holding the car steady over the worst patch of road without slackening speed. He knew now. This time he couldn't be wrong, and he wasn't in any cul-de-sac, with a blank wall at the end of it waiting for him to crash at speed.

He saw the rough gra.s.ses of the slope put on form behind the wire fence, the couching bulk of the hill withdraw into its true dimension. He brought the car round into the arc of short gra.s.s by the second plantation gate, and scrambled out of the driver's door and through the wires of the fence with Lockyer pounding at his back. Head-down, lungs pumping, he breasted the first slope, got his rhythm, and began to climb the Hallowmount faster than he had ever climbed a hill in his life.

Tom Kenyon sat in a niche of the rocks on the highest point of the Altar, and stared along the ridge. It was the first time he had ever been up here alone, and the strangest thing to him was that it did not feel like the first time. The silence that had flowed down into the valleys with the dropping twilight was absolute now, it lay like a cloak over the whole great, wakeful shape of rock and pasture, smoothed and moulded to the stretched body. Sometimes he felt a rhythm stirring under him, like deep and easy breathing, and found himself tuning his own breath to the same measure. Sometimes he fell, without realising it, into such a stillness that the faintly-seen shapes of his own circling arms and clasped knees seemed to have acquired the texture and solidity of rock, as though he had grown into the quartzite of the Altar. He had no sense of undergoing a new experience; this was rather a recollection, drawn from so deep within him that he felt no desire to explore its origins, for that would have been dissecting his own ident.i.ty, or to question its validity, for that would have been to doubt his own. He felt the tension of long ages of human habitation drawing him into the ground, absorbing him, making him part of the same continuity.

Miles had been right, fear was inappropriate and irrelevant. Awe remained with him, and grew, but not fear. And if Miles had been right about that, too, then belonging was all. It could happen to you without any motion on your part. Suddenly it was, and you were in it. You belonged, you respected, you partook, you contributed, this earth and all its layers of ancestral bones accepted you; a better and safer, a more impregnable security than belonging to a tribe or conforming to a society could give you.

How strange that you should have to clamber alone into some remote, wild place like this, into this articulate silence and this teeming solitude, to discover where you came from and where you were going, and in what company. I belong, therefore I am.

The ground-wind had dropped, the gra.s.ses were motionless. The cold, clear air hung still. He heard, with some detached sense that did not suffer his deeper silence to be broken, light, distant sounds from the edges of Comerford, the faint, far hum of cars on country roads, a motor-cycle climbing steadily, small synthetic echoes from other worlds.

And all this time, side by side with this unbelievable serenity of mind, the horror possessed him that had fallen upon him when George Felse had said: 'Annet described him as her father.'

There was nothing new to be thought or felt about it now, but he could not let it rest, his mind trod round and round the same path endlessly, agonised and finding no rea.s.surance.

George had taken it to mean merely that she was preparing the way for some man respectable enough and old enough to pa.s.s for her father, in case they should be seen together. But supposing she had been using the term more precisely than that? Supposing she really meant the man everyone thought of as her father?

He had tried to get the idea out of his mind, but it would not leave him. All the details that might have presented discrepancies, and delivered him from the nightmare, came treacherously and fell into place. Beck had been home all the week-end? Oh, no, by his own account and his wife's, he hadn't. He'd tramped the lanes and the streets of Comerford most of Thursday night, but after that he'd gone off by bus to his sister's place at Ledbury and his cousin's small-holding in the Teme valley, in case Annet had turned up there. He'd come home only on Monday night. n.o.body had checked his statements, why should they? Not even his wife. n.o.body knew that he wasn't really Annet's father, n.o.body except Mrs Beck and Tom Kenyon.

Unless Annet knew. That was the whole point. Did Did Annet know? And if so, how long had she known? He pondered that painfully, and he could not avoid the fear that she did know it, and had known it for a long time. It accounted all too reasonably for her inaccessibility, her estrangement from them both. From Beck as father, that is. But Beck as a man? Annet know? And if so, how long had she known? He pondered that painfully, and he could not avoid the fear that she did know it, and had known it for a long time. It accounted all too reasonably for her inaccessibility, her estrangement from them both. From Beck as father, that is. But Beck as a man?

Was it too far-fetched? It would be an appalling tragedy, but it could happen. There was an even worse thought peering at him relentlessly from the back of his mind: that Beck had told her the truth himself, because he could not feel towards her as his daughter, knowing she was not, and his sick conscience would not let him rest until he had made confession. He was a stickler for truth and duty in his ineffective way, he might even have meant it for the best.

And she how could you ever be sure about Annet? She might have reacted with warmth and indignation and tenderness, from which the slippery path to love is not so far. And granted that as a possibility, into what a desperate and piteous situation they had trapped each other. Flight, robbery, murder might well come to look like legitimate ways out of it, if no other offered.

He wished now that he had told George, he even made strenuous resolutions to tell him as soon as he came; but in his heart he knew that he never would. He could not repeat what he had heard from an overwrought and drunken man; he had no right to break that lamentable confidence.

As often as he reached the end of this reappraisal, and turned to look at the whole idea with a more critical eye, he was convinced that he was mad, that it was impossible, that he had a warped mind; but as soon as he began a feverish examination of the details, in the hope of throwing it out altogether, he knew that it could happen, that such things had happened, that there was no immunity from the abnormal even in a world of careful normality, and no place to hide from love if it came for you. Look at his own case! Had he ever wanted to love her? Does anybody ever want to walk into the fire?

Half past six by his watch. The small, luminous pinpoints of the figures were the only brightness in this calm, immemorial, secret dark. He stirred, finding his limbs cramped by the gathering chill, and slid down from his perch into the gra.s.s. George would surely be here soon. And almost inevitably the two boys, though told to go home after their tea, would use their own obstinate judgement, and come back to share what was left of his vigil. More than likely even Jane, having packed her coach-load off to Comerbourne in charge of a couple of prefects, would return to see how he had fared. It couldn't be long now.

He would be sorry, almost, to have his solitude shared by the living. For all the innumerable generations of the dead, dwindling far into time past, before the Romans came mining for lead, before the Iron Age fort on Cleave was dug, before the chipped flints of Middlehope were made, he had no need of speech in order to communicate, no need to exert himself in explanations or response. He was at one with them without effort of any kind, without rites, without ritual.

Regina was surely right. There were not, there never had been, any witches on the Hallowmount. They would have been inappropriate, derisory, redundant, alien, false. Incantations were for outsiders.

He thought, I'm going queer from being alone, getting fanciful; there's a twentieth century somewhere around, and we're in trouble in the middle of it, and no way out that I can see.

And it was then that the small sound that had been hammering for some minutes at his senses, unnoticed, achieved actual presence, and made itself known to him.

Time came back with it, and stress, and the inescapable memory of Annet, mute in the heart of her pathetic dream of happiness, with wreckage all round her. He moved out of the enclosing ring of the rocks, to hear more clearly.

Busy, regular, persistent, the hum of an engine climbing steadily, not on the Fairford side of the hill, but down there in the highest reaches of Middlehope. From the western flanks of the Hallowmount the sound would be cut off completely; here on the crest he heard it plainly. And when he moved out to the edge of the slope, looking down over the shallow bowl of the valley head, he saw the small glow-worm of a headlight weaving its way up by the sheep-path from Abbot's Bale. Light and sound drew steadily nearer, crossing the boggy patches with a.s.surance, mounting into the dry pasture where the path vanished like a smoke-trail on a pale sky. Close beneath the Altar, in the throat of Middlehope, the motor-cycle halted, and in a moment the engine stopped.

Like a cloud of birds disturbed, the silence wheeled, circled, and settled again. The tiny light went out. A small, dark figure detached itself from its mount, and began to climb the slope.

CHAPTER X.

He drew back hurriedly into the circle of rocks about the Altar, the beat of his heart suddenly violent against his ribs, the tatters of time past shuddering away from him. The grating of stones under his own feet sounded like an avalanche to him. He felt with stretched toes for the silent patches of short turf, groped his way round bony elbows of rock into a deep niche of darkness, braced his feet firmly in gra.s.s, and took hold on the harsh faces of spar with cautious fingers. With his head drawn back into cover, his cheek against the stone, he could watch the faint, lambent s.p.a.ces of sky between the outcrops, overhanging the descent into Middlehope. If he failed to see where the intruder emerged, he would surely hear him come.

A motor-bike, and a solitary rider climbing purposefully towards this unlikely place in the night! They had not been so far out in their guesses, they had not wasted their day. And here was he alone, not empowered or equipped to do more than observe and identify. Above all identify. That he must do, at whatever cost. Because this could not be coincidence, it could not be innocent. The man climbing the hill was Jacob Worrell's murderer.

How many minutes to mount from the last faint smear of the path above the brook? The head of the valley was shallow and bare, it could not take long. He waited with breath held, but the thudding of blood in his own ears deafened him to more distant sounds, or else there was no rising current of air to lift to this place sounds from too close below. Minutes dripped by like the slow drops of sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades, and still nothing. He began to think the newcomer must have swung away from the Altar to traverse towards the trees.

Then he caught the sudden rattle of a stone rolling under a foot, and the grunt of a sharply-drawn breath, both startlingly close. He shrank and froze in his cranny, cheek turned painfully against the rock, eyes on the paler levels where sky and earth met.

A head and shoulders, stooped into the effort of climbing, and all but shapeless in consequence, heaved from the dead black of the earth and hunched into the dim blue-black of sky. In lunging strides the shadow lengthened, came over the rim panting with exertion, and straightened and stretched with a sigh of relief as it stepped on to level ground. Against the sky he was a long silhouette, against the rocks, as he came forward, he was shapeless movement, almost invisible, and rapid movement at that. He knew exactly where he was going, and felt no doubt of his solitude.

Tom heard the slur of his steps along the short gra.s.s, the deep, whistling breaths he drew, still panting with the exertion of his climb. He was moving diagonally across the s.p.a.ce within the rocks, somewhat away from where Tom lay in hiding. Sounds rather than vision traced his pa.s.sage, and it was straight as an arrow to the furrowed faces of spar at the base of the Altar.

Craning out of his hiding-place, straining vision and bearing after ident.i.ty, Tom gathered every detail only to doubt it the next moment, where so much was guessed at blindly. Now the shadow shrank, dropped together. He heard the effortful subdued movements that did not belong, surely, to the very young. And that fitted, now that the woman in Birmingham had given them the clue. The man was on his knees, close against the piled boulders of the outcrop, the b.u.t.tresses of the Altar. Huddled, headless, the dull shadow hunched forward, reaching with both arms into a crevice of the rock face. The laboured breathing steadied cautiously, the faint sob at the end of every inhalation swung like a pendulum.

The sound of cautious groping, and a whispered curse, and then a strong and certain sound, the grating of stone against stone, as though a heavy stopper was being withdrawn carefully from the unglazed neck of a stoneware bottle. The stooping shoulders heaved back, the bent head reappeared. Something was laid aside on the gra.s.s with a soft thud, and he leaned and groped forward again, and again drew back with full hands. A deep sigh of thankfulness. He turned on his knees to face away from the rock, and held his prize before him on the gra.s.s.

Tom's heart repeated vehemently and certainly: Not Beck! Not because of the motor-bike. Beck had never openly owned such a thing, true, but motor-bikes can be hired, or if necessary bought and kept secretly. And however grotesque it might seem to a.s.sociate Beck's narrow, unworldly nature and mild scholarship with such things, the fact remained that many even odder and more unlikely characters rode them. Not Beck, when it came down to it, only because he so desperately desired that it should not be Beck. But he clung to his certainty, and would not be dislodged from it.

A glow-worm of light sprang up abruptly between the arched body and the circling rocks, trained upon the gra.s.s. By the tiny pool of pallor it made, it could be only one of those thin pencil-torches that clip in a breast pocket, and even so the kneeling man held it shrouded in his hand, for his fingers were dimly outlined with the rose-coloured radiance of his blood. He could not risk showing a light openly on top of the Hallowmount, but neither could he handle his prize, it seemed, without using the torch for a moment or two.

Sharp in the gleam sprang the black outline of a small leather briefcase. He held it flat and steady with a knee, the torch cupped over it closely, while with his free hand he turned a key in the lock, tipped the case upright, peered and fumbled within. He had to satisfy himself that his treasure was intact, it represented his funds, his hope of escape, the only future he had. He wanted two hands to manipulate it, and leaned aside for an instant to wedge his torch in a crevice low in the rocks, turned carefully on the briefcase and shaded by his draped handkerchief. Now if only he would turn his head. If only the wind would rise and whisk the handkerchief away, so that the shrouded thread of light could expand and reach his face. But the air hung still, charged with indifference and silence.

Turning back feverishly to the examination of the contents of the case, he set his knee astray on the sharp edge of the flat plug of stone he had drawn from the crevice, and winced and gasped, but neither the hissing indrawn breath nor the painful exhalation had any voice to identify him. That cavity within the rocks must have been known to them for a long time, served them as letter-box and safe-deposit on more than one occasion, but it had surely never had to guard two thousand pounds-worth of small jewellery before. Could so small a case hold all that value in jewellery? Tom supposed it could. Most of it had been in good rings, and diamonds and sapphires and a few gold watches will lie in a very little s.p.a.ce.

And it seemed there had been room left in the case for something else, besides the stolen jewellery. The motion of the hurrying hands brought it halfway out into the light, the right hand gripped it momentarily with a convulsive clasp, the shape of the hold defining it clearly, even before Tom's straining eyes caught the short black thrust of the barrel.

A tiny thing, a compact handful. Some small calibre pistol. He knew nothing about guns, he had never handled one. Some time, somewhere, this man had; the hand knew the motions, though it performed them as in a momentary and terrifying absence of mind. Men of an age to pa.s.s for Annet's father had almost all of them been in uniform during the last war, and the trained hands don't forget. And plenty of them had brought home guns at the end of it, and never bothered to hand them in, even after police appeals.

He was satisfied now, he sat back on his heels with a sigh, and thrust the gun down again into the case. His hand was swallowed to the wrist when the sudden sound came, lifted over the crest between them on a random current of air from the west, from the Fairford side of the ridge. Somewhere below there it might have been fretting at the edges of their consciousness for a minute or more, and they had been too intent to notice it; for now it was startlingly near and clear and resolute, for all its quietness, the soft slurring of light feet in the gra.s.s, running, stumbling, slipping, recovering, hurrying uphill to the Altar.

The kneeling man heard it, and wrenched round frantically to face it, plucking the gun from the discarded briefcase and bracing it before his body. His lunging shoulder swept the handkerchief aside and dislodged the torch after it; it fell and rolled sparkling along the ground, and he leaned after it with a hoa.r.s.e gasp and snapped it off into darkness. But for an instant it had illuminated his tense and frightened face as it fell.

Tom clung shaking in his niche, the blurred oval of light and fear still dancing on the darkness before his eyes. Not Beck! No! Not any of the young bloods who gathered on the corner of the square in Comerbourne to compare the noisy and ill-ridden mounts that were their pathetic status symbols. Not young Stockwood. Not some mercifully expendable stranger. But Peter Blacklock, estate manager and husband to the wealthiest woman in West Midshire, secretary of half a dozen worthy bodies that operated under her shadow, choirmaster, organist, general factotum of the village, the prince-consort of Cwm Hall.