With the face everything fell into proportion, coherence and certainty, instantly, before the whorls of light had ceased to float in front of him in the darkness, and long before he relaxed the half-hysterical grip of his abraded finger-tips on the rocks.

Her father! Yes, he would do for that, she could have produced him before Mrs Brookes without a qualm. Forty-four or so, pleasant and charmingly-spoken, mild, easy-humoured, with a twist of rueful fun in him, and an uncle to her in her parents' eyes who could have filled the bill better? And he made sense of so much more than that, by the qualities he had not, by the voids he offered for her to fill. He was as inevitable as he was impossible.

Who else had been in such close contact with her? Thrown together by the hour, casually and practically, in Regina's house, forced together by Regina's pitiless committee work, those two, being what they were, might easily fall together into the abyss of love, and drown, and die. It wasn't as if you were offered a choice. The time might well come when they could not bear it any longer, when they had to escape, had to be together somewhere out of her shadow. And once tasted, how could they let that desperate ecstasy go? Even the opportunist robbery, which at first seemed so improbable in one who had everything, fell implacably into place. Because he was penniless Because he was penniless!

It was staggering, but it was true. What did he have of his own? From the time he'd married Regina her estates had taken up all his time. And what did he want with a profession when she would gladly buy him or give him anything he wanted? Except, of course, the one thing he had wanted to death, and couldn't ask her for. For that he'd had to provide himself.

Poor devil!

All this pa.s.sed through Tom's mind by fitful glimpses, like light from a guttering candle, in the few seconds while he listened to the fervent footsteps his heart recognised now only too well. He wanted to call out to her to go back, while there was time, but he'd hesitated too long, and it was too late. Annet was there against the sky, her hair streaming.

Blacklock had lowered the gun; he knew her now, and sprang with open arms to meet her. But the true impetus that flung them together, strained breast to breast in a ravenous embrace, was hers, and had always been hers. She wasn't his victim; he was hers. She had destroyed him by loving him. If she'd never even noticed him, except as a middle-aged man, a father figure, he'd have mastered his feelings for her. But she'd opened to him, she'd loved him, he'd been forced to turn longing and dream into action. No, Annet was n.o.body's victim, she had done what she had chosen to do, taken him because he was the weakest, the most helpless, the least effective, the unhappiest of all the men it might have been. All good reasons, and there was no going back on them now.

Blacklock said: 'Annet!' as a man dying of thirst might have said: 'Water!' He had his arms locked round her, the gun, still in his hand, pressed against her back. And then there was a silence that tore at Tom's senses, while they kissed and he burned.

'I thought you weren't coming. I was afraid!'

'I came as soon as I could. You knew I'd come.' And again the silence, aching and hurried and brief. 'Darling! Darling!' Her deep voice throaty and charged with agonising tenderness, the implications in its tones of stroking hands, and the deliberate, a.s.suaging pressure of her body, rea.s.suring, caressing, protecting.

'Yes, I knew! If you could, I knew you'd come. But I was afraid. We've got to hurry,' he said urgently. 'The bike's down below. If we can get an hour's start we can shake them. They won't look for us westwards. And from Ireland-'

He broke off there to take her in more exactly. 'You haven't even got a coat! We must buy you one somewhere tomorrow. You can wear my windjacket for tonight.' He stooped to s.n.a.t.c.h up the briefcase from the ground, and caught Annet by the wrist. 'Come on, hurry, they'll be after us soon.'

They would go, he would tow her down the hill in his wake and drag her into his crime, she who had done nothing criminal yet. It was more than Tom could bear. She must not do it. She must not make herself an accessory after the fact, an outlaw and a felon, not even for love's sake. To hold her back from that was something worth dying for.

He didn't know what he was going to do until he had done it. Scrambling, shouting, he broke out of the shadow of the rocks and flung himself between them and the edge of the slope.

'Annet, don't! Don't listen to him! Don't go with him! Don't make yourself a murderess! Don't-'

Blacklock uttered a soft, terrified cry of panic and despair, and loosed Annet's arm. Hugging the briefcase to him, he fired blindly at the half-seen figure that distorted the darkness, fired rather at the shouting and the threat than at any corporeal opponent. The impact of the bullet sent Tom staggering backwards, and swung him partially round before he dropped.

He groped along the ground, astonished, lucid and without pain for an instant, dazed by the whirling of stars over him, and the chill and shock of the ground under him. Then the pain came, knifing at his shoulder a full second after the impact, and he cried out in bitter indignation, one brief, angry shout of agony. The earth and the sky stilled, he knew himself lying at Annet's feet, and felt the stillness of horror holding her paralysed over him. Fumbling at his left shoulder, he felt the hot stickiness of blood; and when he tried to lift himself on one elbow, he fell back ignominiously into the gra.s.s.

Darkness lurched at him, withdrew, stooped again. He fought it off, straining upwards obstinately towards Annet's unseen face and frozen stillness.

'Don't go! Don't let him make you.' His own voice sounded grotesquely faint and far, and faded like a weak radio signal. He thought he had uttered more words than he heard, and some had been lost, but he went on trying. It was all he could do for her now. 'You didn't kill anyone you didn't steal- Don't let him make you what he is.'

There was no way to silence him but one. Shaking, sweating and half-blinded, Blacklock pa.s.sed his forearm across his eyes to clear them, and reached the hand that clutched the briefcase to push Annet out of the way.

'Annet, go on ahead!'

He pointed the gun carefully at the patch of muted darkness heaving on the ground. His finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. The voice had had to stop. It was like a barrier between them and freedom, there was no escape until it was silenced. to stop. It was like a barrier between them and freedom, there was no escape until it was silenced.

She woke to realisation and awareness, starting out of her daze of horror.

'No, don't!' She flung herself between them with arms spread.

'Annet, please!' He dropped the briefcase then to grasp her by the arm and pluck her out of the way, his voice a wail of despair.

Annet tore herself out of his grip and dropped like a bird, stretching her body upon Tom's on the ground, winding her arms about him fiercely. Her cheek was pressed against his, her hair spread silken and cool over his forehead and eyes. Breast to breast, her chin upon his shoulder, she clung to him tenaciously with all her slight, warm, dear weight, covering him from harm.

'Annet!'

'No, you shan't, I won't let you!'

And she felt nothing for him, nothing at all! That was worse than the drain of blood out of his burning shoulder, worse than the terror of death. She felt nothing for him, all her agony and resolution was to save her darling from d.a.m.ning himself beneath a still greater load of guilt, a second and more deliberate murder.

Faint and sick, Tom lay quaking with his new knowledge of her. She had never needed him to show her her duty. He should have known it. She had run up here to her meeting without even a coat, without so much as a handkerchief by way of luggage. She never meant to go She never meant to go! It was for something quite different she came. And all he had done, with his interference and his disastrous want of understanding, was at best to subject himself to her humiliating pity, and at worst to destroy himself. Live or die, this was the only way he would ever have her arms round him.

He braced his one good hand feebly against her shoulder and tried to push her away from him, outraged by this admission to her mercy while he was excluded from her heart. Light as she was, she clung and would not be dislodged. He was too weak to lift her weight from him. He could not even break her hold. He felt the tears burst from his closed eyelids and dew her cheek, but she did not seem to be aware of them, and he could not even turn his head aside and spare her his humiliation and distress. There was no help for it; he had to submit, he had to hear them fight out their last conflict over his body.

'Get up, Annet! There's no time-' Blacklock was all but weeping.

'No! You shan't touch him, I won't let you. Not again!'

'Let him live, then, I don't care! Anything, whatever you want, only come, quickly! Get up I won't hurt him, I won't touch him. Only come on, we've only got a few hours at the most.'

She unwound her arms from Tom very gently and carefully, and rose from the ground. She kept her body between the wounded man and the gun still, her hands spread on the air, ready to turn and cover him again at the first false word or gesture. Slowly she drew herself upright, and faced her lover.

Low and clearly: 'No,' she said, 'I'm not coming.'

He could not believe it. He stared, the gun drooping and trembling in his hand. 'Annet!'

'Peter, don't go! Come back with me, it's the only way. Come back and face them. Oh, why did did you? you? Why did you Why did you? There wasn't anything I wanted, except you. Surely you knew that? And now there's nothing we can do except go back together. Can't you see that?'

He repeated: 'Annet!' whimpering, unable to understand but already transfixed with terror.

'I'll stay with you, don't be afraid.' She went towards him, her hands out to touch him, and he gave back before her as though she had been an advancing fire. 'As long as they let me, I'll stay with you. I won't forsake you. Only don't run, and hide, and kill again. You'd have to, once you began running. Stop now! That poor old man That poor old man!' she said, and her voice was a soft, dreadful cry of pain. 'Come back with me and give yourself up. Darling, darling, trust me and come! I can't bear the other way for you, it's too horrible.'

He couldn't believe it. He drew breath, sobbing, fumbling towards her and starting away again. 'You must come! You said you'd come! Oh, G.o.d! Oh, G.o.d! Annet, you can't abandon me!' No louder than the stirring of the breeze that came so late, his voice wept and raged, and Tom could not stop hearing it.

'I'm not abandoning you, I'm here with you. As long as they let me I shall be with you. Always, everywhere. But I won't go away with you. What we've done we've done, we have to stand to it now. Come back with me!'

Helpless under their feet, the blood draining steadily out of him into the ground, Tom shut eyes and ears and willed his senses to withdraw from them and leave him darkened and out of reach. But there was no escape. He tried to turn on his face, clawing at the ground with his one good hand, struggling to drag himself away by the fistfuls of long gra.s.s that brushed cold along his cheek; but he could move only by inches, and there was no place to hide.

Where was his conception of love now, beside this tormented pa.s.sion? They had forgotten him. For each of them no one existed but the other; he pleading with her to escape with him, refusing to go without her, refusing as desperately to turn and go back with her; she absolute and inflexible to save him from further evil, begging him, willing him to turn and walk of his own volition towards his expiation and salvation.

'You want me taken! You want them to hang me!'

'You know I don't. I want you intact, I want you free. There isn't any virtue unless you choose it freely.'

How could he choose it? He was too feeble and too afraid.

'You don't love me,' he moaned, helpless to go or stay.

'It's because because I love you!' I love you!'

'Then you've got to come with me. You shall shall come with me,' he said in a broken howl of despair, 'or I'll kill you. I'd rather that than leave you behind.' come with me,' he said in a broken howl of despair, 'or I'll kill you. I'd rather that than leave you behind.'

'Yes!' Incredibly she seized on that as the answer to her deepest anxiety. Her voice lifted into joy, her broken movements towards her lover took fire in a sudden blaze of confidence and eagerness. 'Yes, kill me! That would be best. Kill me! I want you to.'

She had taken two soft, rapid paces towards him, she had him by the hand that held the gun, and was raising it softly, softly, towards her breast, with infinite care not to startle or frighten him. Her long fingers gentled his wrist, encircling and caressing him.

'Yes, kill me, Peter. I mean it. Then I'll be there waiting for you, and you won't be alone or afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. I won't forsake you. I love you! Kill me!'

Pa.s.sionate, persuasive and sincere, the voice insisted. Dominant and a.s.sured, the hand lifted and guided his hand. Oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d, she really did mean it! There was nothing she would not do for him, dying was not even the ultimate gift she was offering him, she had the hereafter in the other hand, patient companionship through purgatory, half his guilt on her shoulders, and no deliverance for her until he was delivered.

Tom rolled over on his face, and braced his good arm under him to prise himself up from the ground. He had to get to them, there was n.o.body else. He shouted, or thought he shouted, but they seemed to hear nothing. Red-hot tongs gripped his left shoulder, and his dangling arm fouled the balance of his body and swung grotesquely in the way of the knee he was laboriously hoisting under him. When he got foot to ground, the ground rolled away and brought him down again on his face, sobbing with pain and desperation; but he touched rock with his outflung hand, and groping his way up it inch by inch, got a firm hold, and dragged himself up again to his knees, to his feet. Swaying, lurching, holding frantically by the rock, he struggled round to face the two who did not even know he was there.

He gripped his bleeding shoulder in his right hand, and thrust himself off from the rocks, blundering towards them in a top-heavy run; and then the crushing darkness swirled round him again in strangling folds and brought him down, and for a moment vision and hearing deserted him, and nothing was left but the agonised sensitivity of his finger-tips, flayed and quivering from the very touch of the withered gra.s.s.

So he never saw Annet draw the muzzle of the gun to her breast and settle it, smiling though the darkness would have hidden the lovely and terrible quality of the smile against her heart.

Hearing came back to him with a crash, swollen sounds battering his flinching ears like bomb-bursts. Then as suddenly they dwindled and separated, congealing into recognisable order, though for some seconds they made no sense, because he had no strength to turn his head. He thought there was a voice urging something, and that must have been Annet, and another voice that recoiled and refused, in helpless horror, and yet with so little strength or conviction that it was plain it could not long go on refusing. And then a clipped impact, a sharp, faint cry, and something falling.

Two things falling. One of them flew and rolled, ricocheting from the rocks, and at the end of its course along the gra.s.s stung his outstretched hand. He closed his fingers on it, and it was hard and heavy, and fitted snugly into his palm. A flung stone. Not just any stone, he knew it by its weight and texture. One of Jane's specimens of galena. One of the boys must have had it in his pocket. It didn't belong on top here, it came from below, by the old lead workings.

One of the boys! That shook him into full consciousness again, and drove him to his knees, heavy head thrust erect by main force, clouded eyes straining. The mated shadows under the Altar had been torn apart, something small and metallic had whined against stone in falling. The gun, struck clean out of Blacklock's hand, lay three yards away in the gra.s.s, a pencil-beam of light from his little torch searched for it frantically and found it. On either side shadows came running, a ring of footsteps circled him like a chain, as he flung himself after the gun and s.n.a.t.c.hed it from the ground.

He was straightening up with it in his hand when another light found him, pinned him, held him transfixed and dazzled. Someone had come scrambling round the slabs of the Altar, running with the rest, and there halted suddenly to launch and steady the beam of a strong torch upon him. For a long moment he crouched blinded in the glare, his head thrown back, his eyes dilated and blank as gla.s.s in a contorted face of desperation and anguish, quite motionless.

He could have fired into the light, he could have taken one at least of these encroaching shadows with him out of the world, but he did not. They were all round him, they knew him, there was no escape. He knew it was all over. It stared plain in the tragic mask of his face that he knew, and had accepted his end. He looked full into the light, and suddenly lifted the gun to his own temple and squeezed the trigger.

The shot and Annet's brief, heart-rending shriek of grief and loss exclaimed and recoiled together from rock to rock, eddying away into infinite distance. The beam of light quivered in a shaking hand, and dropped after the collapsing body into the gra.s.s.

When George Felse reached the spot half a minute later, with Lockyer hard on his heels, when Jane Darrill came forward on unsteady legs, the torch dangling in her hand and the two boys silent and shaken beside her, Dominic still clutching a fragment of barytes in his hand, Annet was couched in the trampled gra.s.s with her lover's body cradled in her arms, her cheek pressed against his head, the small, powder-rimmed hole in his temple hidden by the fall of her black hair. Body, arms, head, she was folded about him with all her force, as though she would never again unclasp and separate herself from him. She did not move when they came to her, or speak, or show in any way that she was aware of them.

Faintness like a smothering velvet curtain swung between Tom's eyes and the figures that closed in from either side. s.n.a.t.c.hes of voices reached him. He heard George telling somebody to 'see what you can do for Tom,' and then there were hands carefully taking hold of him, turning him on his back, detaching his rigid fingers from the tuft of long gra.s.s by which he had been trying to drag himself along. Someone raised him a little against a knee. Through his own personal darkness he was spasmodically aware of light turned upon him. The hands that were busy at his blood-soaked shoulder were a man's, but the light touch that supported his head was surely a woman's. He opened his eyes and looked up into Jane's face, softly lit from below, drawn, subdued, great-eyed with shock.

The pendulum of consciousness reached its steadiest, and the light its brightest. He lifted his head with an effort, craning round Jane's supporting arm. Someone stood between him and Annet, a young, tall silhouette, frozen still for awe of death.

'Dom, go down and 'phone from the box,' said George's voice. 'Call the station and tell them it's an ambulance job, urgent. Then call Superintendent Duckett, and tell him what's happened. And then go home. You hear?'

Low-voiced, Dominic said: 'Yes,' and offered no argument. He uncrooked his aching finger from about the piece of bartytes he wouldn't, after all, have to throw, and let it fall dully into the ground; then, remembering that Jane had wanted it, groped for it again and returned it to his pocket. He felt beneath the dangling plummet of specimens for coppers, and his hand, numbed from long tension, fumbled clumsily with pennies it could not feel except as coldness. He dragged his gaze from Annet and went as he was bidden, walking to the edge of the westward slope with the abnormal firmness and matter-of-factness of one still in shock; but once over the edge he came to himself, and set off running and leaping down the traverse of gra.s.s like a hare.

His going uncovered the two figures clasped indissolubly together in the gra.s.s. Annet had not moved. Withdrawn into herself in the sealed silence of bereavement, she crouched in the cla.s.sic shape of mourning. Tom strained to keep his eyes upon her, and his own pain was only an irritation that fretted at his bitter concentration without bringing him ease, a threat that filmed his vision over with faintness when most he desired to continue seeing. He moaned when they eased the coat away from his wound, but he shook the encroaching dark from him, and fastened on Annet still like a famishing man.

George had dropped to his knees beside those motionless, fused lovers, and was putting back gently the curtain of black hair that shrouded their faces, to look closely at the wound that had brought them down together. But even when he had satisfied himself, what was there he could have to say to Annet? She knew Peter Blacklock was dead; there was no need for anyone to break that news to her. There was no need for words at all; there was no aspect of this death and this survival she had not already understood. And George had nothing to say. But without fuss, as one doing what was there to be done, he took her chin in his hand and lifted her head erect, gently loosened her fingers from their rigid clasp, and unwound her arms from about her dead. He lifted the limp body out of her embrace and laid it down in the gra.s.s, and taking Annet by the hands, drew her to her feet.

And she turned to him, not away from him! She turned to him voluntarily, leaning forward into his shoulder with a broken sigh. He held her for a while, gently and impersonally; and when she raised her head and stood back from him he took away his arms gently and gradually and let her stand alone.

'Miles!'

He had not said one word or made one movement until then, only stood motionless and apart in the darkness by the rocks, biding his time. Tom had forgotten him until he heard the measured and muted voice say: 'I'm here.'

'Take Annet down to my car, and drive her home. She'll go with you now.'

CHAPTER XI.

He came up out of a well-shaft of weakness and slight fever, tossed into half-consciousness, aware of faces bending over him, and of a bright, bare whiteness which was a small room at the Cottage Hospital, though he did not know that until later. He said aloud the most urgent thing he had drawn up with him out of his uneasy dreams, not realising how often he had said it before.

'Annet didn't know. She had no part in it. She knew nothing about murder or robbery.'

The faces showed no surprise. They soothed him quickly: 'It's all right. We know. n.o.body blames Annet.'

'She only wanted to go to him to persuade him to come back with her and give himself up.'

'Yes, don't worry. Don't worry about anything. We know.'

'She said it had no virtue unless he chose it himself. She refused to go away with him. She wanted-'

'Yes, you told us. It's all right, we know everything.'

She wanted him to kill her, he had tried to say, but it stuck in his throat and filled him with such a leaden burden of pain that he sank again into the drowning depths of his isolation. None of them had heard what he had heard, or suffered what he had suffered. They could look her in the face again, live within touch and sound and sight of her and find it bearable. But he never could. He didn't even ask after her. It was no use, there was nothing there for him. His only right in her was to proclaim her immaculate; and that he did as often as he drifted back into consciousness, purging his overburdened soul and bleeding his frustrated love out of him in anxious witness to her innocence.

'Don't let them blame Annet. She didn't do anything-'

'No, no, don't worry. Annet will be all right.'

Later, when he was convalescent, propped up in pillows with his shoulder swathed, they all came to see him, bringing with them fragments which were not now so much pieces of a puzzle as handfuls of stones to pile on a cairn, marking the place memorable for a disaster or a death. Or maybe an achievement. Or a discovery. Such as his own limitations, or the child's discovery, uncomfortable but salutary, that fire burns, or if you get out of your depth you may drown.

It was George Felse who brought him the few pieces that actually were gaps in the puzzle: the inquisitive small boy who had reported the motor-cycle in Mrs Brooke's backyard, the message the vicar had brought, and the precise reason behind Annet's flight from Fairford.

'The bike seemed to point to Stockwood, who had the loan of one of the estate BSAs for the week-end. He couldn't have been the first fellow, six months ago, but that didn't let him out altogether, there was no certainty they were the same. And he'd let himself in for suspicion, anyhow, first by lying about his whereabouts, and then by saying he'd spent the time with a woman, but refusing to name the woman.'

He said nothing about his own barely tenable theory that the woman might, just might, have been Regina Blacklock; a theory they'd never had to investigate, after all, thank G.o.d!

'Moreover, he had a prison record. He did a year for his part in a hold-up job, through getting mixed up with some girl, and his wife got a decree nisi against him into the bargain. He was an obvious possibility. But when Mrs Brookes came up with the item of evidence about Annet's father father, that let Stockwood out. He wasn't old enough by years. When I spoke to you on the 'phone I had a kind of idea that you you knew something you weren't exactly rushing to tell, something that seemed to fit.' knew something you weren't exactly rushing to tell, something that seemed to fit.'

'I did,' said Tom, remembering that, too, as something infinitely distant and unreal. 'I thought I did. But it doesn't matter now. It was wrong, anyhow. So you didn't have to find out who Stockwood's woman was.'

'No, we didn't have to, but as it turned out, we did. The Superintendent let his name drift into the hand-out to the evening paper on Sat.u.r.day, and she came forward in a hurry, all flags flying, to say he'd been with her. She was his wife, you see. She is his wife,' he corrected himself with a broad smile. 'Talk about good out of evil, the Bloome Street case put paid to that divorce, once and for all. I doubt if he could lose her again even if he tried.'

Side-tracked out of the too-deeply-worn cutting of his own obsessive grief, Tom followed this strange by-product of murder with awakening wonder. 'But if it was his wife, why wouldn't he say so?'