He’s quite deranged. Those few devastating minutes after that frantic discussion with Mrs Abbey were summarised in a few hateful words.
I left the lane for a track that led into the woodland from the spot where Richard had parked his car. I crossed the footpath that Danny had promised would lead to the shop and rattled down many twists and turns before engaging in a brief battle with a hawthorn, where the smothering trees gave way to grass. I was at the foot of a long field occupied by a couple of horses and three goats and marked out at one end for the villagers to use as potato plots. The rest was meadow. I rolled through long grasses that clutched at my pedals onto a sunlit bank and found myself on a short rise above the pump house. But this is the simplified version of that frantic bicycle ride.
In truth, this dry description of trees and trackways belongs to the run of events that I assembled later, once logic could place everything that came after my interview with Mrs Abbey in their correct order. In the interests of accuracy it seems honest and fair to record what happened after I left that woman in the manner in which I truly remember it.
My first memory is that I knew quite clearly that I was confused. Touch was present and so was sight, in a particularly restricted form where the peripheries might not have existed for all the attention my senses were paying them.
I knew I had lately been travelling rapidly. Now I wasn’t. I appeared to have exchanged the heat of a sweating tarmacadam road in a village for this violent brightness of open sky and the crisp tang of fresh grass. I had swapped the sensation of racing downhill on a bicycle for an unyielding mat that pressed hard against my side. It felt upside down for a moment, like it was pressing on me from above. Then gravity swirled itself back into its correct alignment and my head hurt and I could hear the faint ticking as a bicycle wheel span slowly towards a halt near by.
I lifted my face from the hard-baked ground. Blades of grass stuck to my skin. It appeared that the weighty bicycle had succeeded in unseating another female rider. I was sprawling any old how on the side of a gentle slope. Every limb hurt. It was as if the force of gravity were stronger than normal, making the pressure of lying here agony. I wasn’t alone, either. There was a shuffle about two yards behind and a rustle of footsteps drawing close. There was the faint glint of something small and metallic being lifted from the grass not far from where my right hand was helping me to ease myself upwards, followed by further footfalls beating an uneven retreat to silence. My head was sounding a final verse of that old refrain. He’s deranged.
I knew who he was. And I knew why I thought the object he had lifted had been metal. It was because I had seen the blade flash from his hand only moments before, to miss me by a cat’s whisker as I plunged recklessly down the slope on a collision course. It had been one of those insane split-second choices. Injury from a weapon or to act for self-preservation. The choice had been immediate.
I turned my head and found the other one. The man who had inspired this mad dash. Richard was a few yards away, suit jacket unbuttoned and closer to getting up than I was. He said something to me, but I didn’t catch it. I concentrated on beginning to push myself up into something closer to a sitting position and regretted it. Everything hurt, or at least I knew there was pain without quite being able to decipher the feeling. This, I told myself quite sternly, was all a matter of choice. One had, quite simply, only to decide to set it aside and everything would relax and ease back into its normal balance. I sat up a little straighter. No, I had to concede, it really did hurt. And not surprising, either, given the pace of my descent on that final slope to collide deliberately with Paul Abbey and drag him and his knife away from Richard. That had been my choice between injury and self-preservation; Richard’s injury or my comfort. The bicycle lay on its side about a yard away, one wheel still spinning because only seconds had passed since I had last noted it.
Something moved. It was close by. Abbey hadn’t gone. I turned my head, leadenly it seemed to me. Then Richard was moving. Perhaps it was him who had caught my eye in the first place. He was saying something to me, and then again more strongly, and he was up on one knee and his mouth was twisting as he shouted at me violently, and I was recoiling, disbelieving, cringing as he lunged across the grass as if to strike. He was on me with a thump before I could do more than cower away and this time there was absolutely no doubt whether my mind was capable of deciphering pain.
He had hold of me. My cry meant nothing. He was dragging me round, using his body to lever me against him into an excruciating curve so that my view was no longer the pump house and a pretty little streambed but uphill, through long grasses to where thistles stood high on the skyline. His hands had turned me face down beneath him, yanked me there, really. For a moment he only had one hand clamped about me. The other was reaching up behind him against the sky, palm uppermost and open as if in the act of fending something off, or in supplication. Only there was nothing there and I couldn’t see very much anyway because of the sun. I could feel the way his arm was flung wide through the twist of his upper body as he shouted, and I felt that because of the way his lungs moved. I still couldn’t hear a thing. Or at least I could, but I couldn’t register it long enough to remember it.
It occurred to me then to wonder if perhaps Abbey really hadn’t gone. I only had the briefest, cringing fraction of a second to consider this and to anticipate fresh pain before the upraised hand changed its mind about its plea and dropped down beside me. Then his head dropped as well and his weight crushed me and smothered me until the only part of me that wasn’t covered by him was the part that was being pressed into the cruel, unyielding ground.
There was a single jolt. It ran through every one of his muscles and into mine. Just as I was beginning to believe I might never have the chance to breathe again, I felt the pressure ease slightly and the twist as his torso turned once more to trace again that run of the stream bed downhill. Then my ribs ground against a stone as he turned to look the other way. I could feel his chest moving in short, hurried snatches for air, but the renewed pressure of his weight on mine was almost suffocating. His right hand was the only bit of him I could see. It had landed palm down against the rough, dry stalks beside me. It had shifted slightly as he’d twisted to look the other away. There was blood on it. A raw graze like a burn that was running red just beside my face.
Abruptly the weight lifted. The hand helped to thrust him to his feet. I was barely stirring beside his dust-stained shoes when his other hand reached across his body to tug me to my feet in my turn. I was standing very close against his left side. I couldn’t help it since his left arm firmly clamped me there. He had turned again to look downhill. I followed the line of his eyes that were narrowed against the glare and I could see the shocking contrast between the dark green foliage of a redwood that rivalled the one near my cousin’s cottage and the lichens that coated the corrugated roof of the pump house. If that was the way Abbey had left, he was long gone.
Richard’s gaze moved back again, deliberately passing just above mine, and then swiftly travelled onwards to the rise with all the thistles. I watched him as he watched the landscape. His expression was that of a mind performing endless, very rapid calculations. I could feel the tremor where his hand had tightly closed upon my upper arm, pinning me against him. The other hand was flexing into a fist and then releasing again; trying to ease the pain, I thought. He twisted back towards the pump house. And was finally ready to intercept my gaze on the return.
He was like himself, but not quite. His mouth moved. I could hear after all. He remarked, ‘That entrance of yours was a touch dramatic, don’t you think? You could have just said hello. Or rung your bicycle bell.’
‘He had a knife.’ My mouth was dry. And something was wrong with that statement, only I couldn’t think what. I couldn’t understand why Richard should be looking like he was torn between reading a threat in every blade of grass and frantic about it, and trying not to laugh.
His eyes moved on again. That hazel gaze resumed its search once more, only this time the pattern changed and his attention finally settled upon his wounded hand. He was staring at it, serious now, turning his hand this way and that as though he were expecting the blood, and yet surprised to find it there.
I found myself staring too and shrinking slightly as I said blankly, ‘He was moving in. You hadn’t seen it and he was going to – I don’t know what. But I had to do something.’
‘So you ran him down with your bicycle.’ There was something rather dry in the way he said that and his arm was wrapped like iron about me, but I didn’t believe he’d even noticed. His attention was fixed on something high on the hillside now, as though preoccupied and his mouth was only going through the motions of speaking to me.
Suddenly, though, his mind sharpened. His voice broke into the roughness of a reprimand and he told me with some force, ‘You should have stayed back. What the hell is the point of me being as I am if someone like you ends up being called on to do it too?’
The abruptness of the change stung. Jolted me back into life, really. I’d thought we were making light of it. That was what one did, wasn’t it, whenever something had happened that was starkly frightening, only it was easier to pretend that it had all been a bit of a close shave? None of this was quite what I’d thought. Every nerve ending was suddenly fully alert and I felt it when his head turned to check behind through the twist in the grip that was clamped hard around me. As his gaze turned back, that all too brutal honesty added sternly, ‘You should have trusted … you should have left me to do what needed to be done.’
Then I felt the sharpening of his concentration on the hillside beyond me as a fresh tightening of muscle that ran all the way through my veins to my heart. It came at the moment that I found my hands were bracing in a probably futile attempt to ease myself out of the curve of his arm and he said with a quick concession into ordinary reassurance, ‘Hush now. I know.’
And any idea I had that I had returned to full awareness of my surroundings was first corrected by the bloodied right hand that moved across to touch mine – for a brief moment I’d been able to forget it, but not now – and then I realised someone was coming downhill at speed when Richard raised his voice to speak clearly over my head. It was done with a considerably brighter tone than the one he had lately used on me. ‘Good morning. A timely arrival, I think.’
Despite his tone, I felt the impulse to put himself between me and this new threat course through the iron grip of his arm, and then the sharp suppression as he checked the feeling as absurd. I soon knew why. Because it wasn’t Abbey who had arrived slithering at the end of a descent from that thistle-topped ridge. It was Matthew Croft, with Freddy just behind. This was their land and Richard must have been watching their approach all the time we’d been talking. It came to me abruptly that this was the first time these two men had met in a very long while.
And Richard, at least, had been expecting Danny to be part of this new arrival and come ready to perform the introductions. I thought Matthew Croft had noticed it and was determined to get through this meeting on his own good manners because he explained mildly, ‘Danny couldn’t stay. He came up to the house to tell us that you’d found signs of occupation in our pump house and to ask Eleanor to telephone PC Rathbone, and then he thought it best to get on to the Manor to see that things were as they ought to be there. He sent us down here not a moment too soon, it seems. That fellow’s gone now, I think. Was this man actually living at the pump house? Danny wasn’t clear. And did he attack you? I mean, I assume you didn’t initiate that?’
‘I didn’t initiate that,’ Richard confirmed. Something tugged at his voice as he sidestepped the presumably unintentional implication that, as far as history was concerned, people mightn’t always be too sure who was the aggressor when talking about disputes involving a Langton. Richard tipped his head towards the pump house. ‘Abbey emerged from beneath a shrub shortly after Hannis disappeared on his errand to your farmhouse. He was brandishing a log at me and, from the way he hefted it, I suspect the same kind of impulsive, panicked idea of ambush must have come to that man’s mind once before as he cowered by a different brick hut.’
He meant when the passerby had been poor Bertie Winstone. I silently added to the list the name of Abbey’s wife on her quest to reclaim the Colonel’s keys.
Matthew Croft’s eyes were performing the same intense survey of the silent landscape that had occupied Richard a few minutes before. Richard’s grip on me eased at last as he turned to look as well. I thought Richard might have been concerned that the other man would have something to say about his own trespass here, rather than merely Abbey’s, but Matthew was determinedly ignoring it. I took the opportunity to step away and retrieve my fallen bicycle.
Richard intercepted me just as I was dragging it off the ground – everything really did hurt. His voice had the faintest trace of his old self in it when he asked in genuine surprise, ‘Where on earth do you think you’re off to?’
I gave a guilty start when his hand met the saddle to ease its journey into being upright and in the process restrained it. And I must have nearly dropped the impossibly heavy bicycle because his other hand – the injured one – had reached for the handlebars. Suddenly I was recoiling; this was too much. I intended to take the bicycle to that neat little gate cut into a hedge on the far side of the pump house and go away because I was wise enough to recognise that real incidents like this were hard, brutal things that required room to breathe and I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t even be here. Richard had remarked himself that I didn’t want to be called on to test just how far I would go for someone I cared about. And Duckett himself had observed that taking a life changed a person. I hadn’t quite taken it that far, of course, but I certainly hadn’t played the part of bystander just now. I’d acted whether I believed I’d been right to do it or not, and, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t do it again.
And something had changed in a way that felt like a continuation of the wretched bewilderment I’d experienced as Richard had plunged towards me. Richard had told me once that it was impossible to be prepared for nastiness, but I couldn’t even put a term to the kind of blind incomprehension I’d felt as he’d shouted at me. In truth, it had felt like an echo of my terrible urge to stop Abbey; a kind of justified retribution, as if my own actions had thrown Richard’s out of all normal balance and I was the enemy here. I think I’d felt, for a terrible moment, that the violence that must truly dwell within my world had finally been unmasked. Now I was calm enough to see that the fear had been the irrational dread of panic, but the memory of that momentary sense of finding everything utterly altered by my own actions was inescapable. It was a match for the present disquiet of knowing that shock was fading, but still something felt terribly awry.
So I wanted to leave this place, all of these disorientating contradictions of what I believed and how the danger to Richard had required me to act, only all the while he was holding the bicycle and that hand was near mine and I couldn’t change that without surrendering the bicycle, which I had a peculiar idea was a symbol of control. The feeling was compounded by the way all my groceries were scattered on the ground around my feet in a giddying arc.
That hand moved, just once. It made me flinch and I managed to say through a snarl with my head turned very firmly now towards that gap in the hedge, ‘I’m leaving now. You don’t need me here. And anyway, I’ve got to get home—’ I stumbled over that telling word, because it was the Manor that had fixed itself in my mind as home. ‘I mean, I’ve got to get back because your father wants his shopping and don’t think I don’t know what you were saying back there. You’re just the same as everyone else. All along everyone’s been making me feel small and cowardly for refusing to intervene. Only I’ve done it now. I saved you and still you’re ready to explain all the reasons why I’ve got it wrong. But you know that this time it’s you who’s wrong because, actually, I didn’t get involved for your sake just now. You’re the man who makes a career out of violence. I was trying to save Paul Abbey from you.’
I didn’t quite know where that had come from. Nastiness was the only alternative I had to crying. In a way I was impressed that no imaginary words had slipped in. Because all of it was made up. All the same, for a moment triumph reigned in a burning throat. Then Richard stirred. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even sound annoyed. He didn’t touch me, either. He adjusted the nature of the stillness that possessed him as he stood there holding the bicycle so that it couldn’t topple and take me with it, and I felt the rise of his protectiveness once more as he said on a note of realisation, ‘That’s all fine. But you should know you’re trying to run off in the wrong direction. Emily, did you hit your head?’
The truth dragged my head round. ‘Yes, but—’
Beyond Richard’s shoulder, Matthew Croft took a small step forwards. He remarked idly for the benefit of no one in particular, ‘The first time I met Miss Sutton, she was standing in a crowd like this and Bertie Winstone had just bled all over her arm. I took care to spend a not inconsiderable length of time talking about nothing very much before inventing a few usefully distracting errands into the kitchen.’
That grisly hand retreated out of sight.
Then I lurched away from the idiotic blundering of shock. I forgot all about the bicycle, so it was a good job Richard had a hand on it still because I was running shaking hands over my face and through my hair as if to wipe away the shadow of bewilderment and exclaiming, aghast, ‘Richard!’
This was because my eyes had regained their sense of scale and distance and I remembered now the real mistake I’d made.
Now my mind was lurching back into working properly again, I could make out the distant point far to the left where I had emerged from the woodland beside a vicious hawthorn. It was quite a different part of the field from the small gap in the hedge I had lately been rushing for. This field stood at the end of the well-trodden deer track that led from the gateway where Richard had parked his car. Slightly nearer was the rise where I had first made sense of the disturbance that was distracting the horses. And there, at that point beyond the scattered debris of my shopping, where anthills crowned a little knoll, was the spot where I had set my bicycle at the slope and careered down the last few yards into the middle of a fight in which I should have had no part.
There had been no hesitation in Abbey as far as I could recall. They’d broken apart and Abbey had stepped back and was in the process of stepping in again. At the time I think my plan may well have been to reach out a hand at speed in the hope of dragging danger away from Richard. Now I could see that I’d made the error of not quite allowing for the fact that in the three seconds it took me to close in, it was quite enough time for Abbey to not be quite where he’d been when I’d started. In fact, he’d been in quite a different place, such as directly beneath my front wheel. And Richard had stepped blind into me to take his share of the collision when we all went crashing down. No wonder he thought I’d overstepped the mark.
Particularly when the weapon Abbey had retrieved as he had clambered to his feet had not been a knife. It had been a gun. And Richard’s wound had come as he had enfolded me within the safety of his body and Abbey had opened fire.
Freddy was taking the bicycle from Richard and I hadn’t remembered quite as much as I’d thought. I was asking rapidly, ‘What sort of gun was it? I mean, I realise now I saw it was a handgun. I just forgot.’
My manner of speaking made a brief glimmer of that old warmth appear on Richard’s mouth but his reply came without any humour at all. ‘A Webley, perhaps.’
Freddy was wheeling the bicycle into the shade of a great beech tree and we were following him and the boy was saying on a note of marvel, ‘It was a bit close, wasn’t it? What I don’t understand is why he hesitated like that. It was like he was trying to make up his mind.’ Freddy looked young today. At first, he’d been keen to hang nervously behind Matthew’s heels. Now he looked delighted as he abandoned the bicycle and hurried about retrieving my fallen groceries.
‘Freddy.’ This was a caution from Matthew. The youth turned to look and got a quick suppressive shake of the head.
‘Oh,’ the boy said with a sheepish glance at Richard and then at me. ‘Yes. Sorry.’
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t worrying about what Freddy had said. I still couldn’t really absorb words unless I concentrated hard. I was thinking that I knew why Richard’s reply had been brief. It had been for me. I knew he’d guessed I would know what a Webley was. It was a revolver and the sort of beast from the Great War that always turned up in some old veteran’s effects and made my father curse because members of the public shouldn’t have them at all. Richard meant me to know that this was something more – something to be discussed in a quieter moment when Freddy wasn’t forgetting Matthew’s caution all over again and telling me with an eager kind of horror, ‘He wasn’t aiming at Captain Langton anyway, Miss. I saw him as we were finding a way down from the hilltop. He was standing over you with that gun hanging from his hand. It felt like he was there for ages.’
Freddy was thrusting food items back into their wrappings as he told me all the rest of the ugly details. ‘It was like he was weighing options in his head; as if he wanted to have revenge on you for knocking him over with the bicycle but knew it was mad to do it. He looked hungry enough, anyway. Only then he was there – Captain Langton, I mean – and we thought he was enough to persuade that man to think again. We saw the man dither between letting you go and taking aim. His hand dipped. But then he just shrugged, raised his hand again and pulled the trigger. When he saw us yelling from the top of the ridge, he ran. I think Captain Langton was really brave, don’t you?’
It was clear that whatever forbidding weight the Langton name had carried for this boy, it had all been supplanted now. Whereas I barely knew what I thought; only that I was cold, even in the sunlight, and I really had tipped this thing into violence and I knew Richard would be noticing the way the line of my lips grew taut again with Freddy’s heroic summary. It wasn’t enough that I’d forced Richard into the path of injury for the sake of saving me. I knew now that Richard’s roughness before had been from the shock of nearly losing me.
He was beside me now and taking the clean handkerchief from my fingers that I hadn’t even noticed I’d drawn out of the depths of my handbag for him. He pressed it over his hand before telling me in a hard, serious voice, ‘I should say thank you. As it was, Abbey wasn’t going to shoot me. He didn’t mean to get me at all. I believe he’d pulled out the gun as a kind of display of bravado before his strategic exit rather than with any intention of using it. And even if he wasn’t, I probably could have managed him. But then you appeared and …’ He stopped. Some second thought prevented him from adding anything more. He was as conscious as I was of the others here. But it wasn’t that he cared whether it might seem to them that this was rather too close to apportioning the blame that was due. I thought he had probably been about to attempt to reassure me. It was what he always did. Only something checked him and I didn’t want reassurance anyway. Like him I was feeling grim and hard and braced, and everything still felt strange here and it wasn’t the blood any more or the brief effects of a light concussion or even the sense that Abbey had taken my intervention badly because I was fine, really, and it was impossible to explain this restless energy I was feeling.
It wasn’t even the strain of knowing that in one simple act I’d abandoned all my ideas of standing firm in that way that had always been half hope and half dread for me – I’d always been capable of acting, just like most people given the right threat of loss. And as I’ve said before, I’ve seen war. I’ve known what it is for a very long time and I was still myself then. But all the same, there was suddenly some increasing sense that something had irretrievably changed here – it wasn’t exactly the culmination of that fear I’d confessed this morning to my cousin of being alienated in the end from Richard by everyone’s cruel interferences, because we were still very much united, but now everything was altered, colder. Perhaps the difference was in Richard’s blunt manner of dealing out his honesty to me; but more probably the change was inside me. And it was almost certainly owing to the sense that Richard had put himself in the way of harm for me.
This was never going to be an easy thing to discuss. So I helped Richard to put off the awful conversation for a moment when I might be able to muster some better self-control than this grimly restrained revulsion, and then we all went down to look at the pump house. There wasn’t much to see behind the greasy pump machinery except a small mess of fresh rubbish belonging to a brief period of daytime occupation and a truly disgusting aroma of urine. There wasn’t much room, either, so I stepped back outside to hug myself in the sunshine without going so far that anyone needed to worry that I was giving way to that old urge to flee the things that frighten me. I went no further than the corner of the pump house where the windows were.
I found that Freddy had come with me anyway. I knew he’d heard the way Richard had addressed his friend as ‘Mr Croft’ as we’d stepped out of the door rather than merely Croft, as perhaps Richard’s status as the squire’s son might have traditionally required him to do. There was a furtive keenness in the boy’s face that did not sit well there. Hero worship was fading and the old distrust was lurking, waiting to be revived.
I said gently, ‘It’ll be all right, you know. They’re both decent people.’
‘I thought,’ remarked the boy, replacing watchfulness with a grin, ‘that I was supposed to be looking after you?’ Then one of the horses, a great dark bay beast, loomed beside my bicycle and he moved to fend it off while a woman joined us.
She was a slight woman with a shy smile who wore slacks and a shirt like this landscape was where true happiness lay, and she was presumably Eleanor Croft. She also had that over-dressed journalist in tow, only he wasn’t a journalist; he was a man by the name of Detective Constable James Fleece and he’d charted his own course here after overhearing the last of my conversation with Mrs Abbey. He already knew both Mr and Mrs Croft quite well. He had a wry quip for Matthew as he caught a greeting from where that man and Richard were now examining the shaded places beside stone troughs that marked the springhead. Richard was tied there by seriousness and the necessity of nodding his agreement to whatever was said to him, but when I moved once, I saw his head lift. Richard was leaving me room in which to breathe, but it seemed to me that he’d let down his guard only so much.
The policeman was speaking to me. He didn’t seem to mind that I’d been particularly rude to him before. Now he heard my description of what had happened here and then he left me too so that he and Mrs Croft could take their own turn at muttering over the mess inside the pump house. Then, finally, Richard was able to return to me.
I saw his brief exchange with Mrs Croft as they passed. I distracted myself from seeming to watch too closely by noticing that her horse was grazing again now and the goats were there as well. I found myself recalling someone’s remarks that Mrs Croft would normally be seen out riding, but this intimidating animal looked thoroughly on holiday and I thought there was probably a correlation between that and the few months since her marriage, if only the happy gossip in me was alert enough to see it.
Richard approached me. His presence made me ready to unfold my arms and muster a smile when he came to a halt by me. He was standing by my side. I hadn’t realised how tightly my arms had still been clasped protectively about me before. And I made a corner of his mouth quirk when I tipped my head at the space between the pump house and the springhead and said, ‘Do you think Freddy believes he’s looking for John’s treasure?’
Freddy was doing what no one else had. The boy was lifting the manhole cover on the vast underground cistern that was buried beside the pump house and was peering inside.
The sense of cold that had accompanied my full understanding of the way that Richard had shielded me had eased a little now and become a little more reasonable. He was looking fit enough but tired. The fall had hurt him too. He had removed his jacket and folded it over his arm. It was the arm with the bloodied hand. He was close beside me and I was conscious of his stealthy examination of my face as I watched the policeman join the boy. Richard had noticed that calm good sense was fully in charge of me now and it seemed he approved. At least, I thought he did.
Then, while Richard was nodding in reply to my comment and likewise watching the unnecessary inspection of the underground cistern and drawing breath to begin what really needed to be said and what would presumably become that very bruising discussion about my actions and his, my self-control slipped a bit. This was because I was still myself, really, and not terribly practised at speaking what I felt.
The slip didn’t take me into pride. I wasn’t distancing myself here. I was turning my eyes suddenly to meet his and lurching headlong into saying rather too desperately, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said back there. I don’t know what came over me to make me speak to you like that. It was reaction, I suppose. And I’m sorry because now you’re hiding your hand from me as if I’ve got a real phobia, but I haven’t. It isn’t anything like it. It’s not really the sight of blood that affects me. I can’t really explain. I’m sorry.’
I stopped. This much-needed apology was too naked and too close to concealment as well, because I realised I could explain how the sight of blood affected me, I just really didn’t think I should. He probably knew anyway. I’d told him enough about my feelings to make him capable of guessing that the difficulty arose as much from my mind’s deep, instinctive aversion to the evidence of a person’s cruel intent as it did from any real fear of the blood itself. But if I repeated that claim now, he might grow to believe I really had been shying away from him as though he and his profession were tied up in the core of my fears. Only they weren’t, and to say something like that would only cause pain when the instinct didn’t obey any conscious rules anyway.
I shook it away and began to say something else that was better but equally earnest, only to stop when I realised that I needn’t have been worrying about what he thought at all because I wasn’t actually sure Richard was listening. He was watching Matthew Croft as that man cheerfully debated something with Freddy and the policeman. The boy was probably being teased about his disappointed search. Then Richard’s eyes slid left to catch me watching him. He caught me as I was biting my lip a shade doubtfully and I quickly released it for the sake of a brief uncertain smile, expecting to draw a smile in return. It would have been a simple way of dismissing anxiety and, with it, establish relief in that usual pattern where I borrowed a little bit of his assurance.
Instead, Richard’s brows lowered. I heard his breathing check. Then his left hand – the unbloodied one – reached to gently take hold of mine. Even that simple act surprised me with its suddenness, but he seemed to pause a while to weigh it in his palm, as if considering the details. We were very near. It was instinctive to watch the way my hand lay in his as closely as he did. Then his fingers tightened and he turned my wrist as he had once before, so that my hand was held between the warmth of his grip and the soft texture of his clothing. Only this time, instead of completing the act by closing my fingers over a neatly folded note, he briefly raised the back of my hand to his lips.
His gaze lifted to meet mine across the grip he had upon my hand. It was like being touched with a bolt of pure energy. Every nerve focused on the intensity of the few inches of space between us, on the glimpse of the mind behind those eyes. He was grave, as though he’d been abruptly startled yet again with a mark of my care, only I knew I hadn’t done anything of the sort at all. The bewildering stillness was released a moment later by a brush of his thumb across the back of my hand, which left its own trail of sensation.
Then a noise from those other people beyond his shoulder drew his head round. They were about to rejoin us. Richard let his hand fall into the space between us, but he didn’t let me go. His grip was firm. I still didn’t know what he thought I’d done. He didn’t wish to explain here. I might have believed this brief expression of his need for me had been a swift means of settling my unease without openly acknowledging the disturbing truth that something really had been altered by my arrival in this place. But this wasn’t about me, at least not in that way. This was something strong and immediate that was contained within his own feelings. This was disconcertingly like an impulsive gesture of respect.
It was the steadiness of his attention on the people by the pump house that gave me the clue that something might have happened in the space of those minutes alone with Matthew Croft. I had the peculiar moment of thinking that this feeling might relate to the simple fact that I was here and by his side, amongst all these people who might have every reason to distrust him.
‘Richard, I—’
I’d been about to gravely break that other rule of mine – the one about not claiming a little bit more of his strength by adding to his list of responsibilities. I’d been about to admit just how much I needed him to be on my side too. But it was a raw thing to confess in this hurry of speaking before we were swept up in the bustle of meeting the others. I’d only have said it wrong. Then the policeman appeared before us and it was too late anyway.
Detective Fleece gave stern instructions about going to the doctor and getting Richard’s wound properly recorded. Then he hurried us through the woods in a crowd to the Lagonda with the bag of groceries but without the bicycle. They all stood there to watch us get in. Then they watched us get out again when it became clear that Richard couldn’t comfortably handle the car.
Now I was turning the great machine – I really could drive, it hadn’t been a reckless boast in the midst of an argument – and I was setting it sedately at the climb out of the woodland, and Richard was finally asking in the peace of being alone together, ‘Emily? What are you thinking?’
He surprised me into speaking the truth and for once it wasn’t any worry about Abbey or powerlessness or the weight of realising just how much every ounce of me ached for this man beside me.
In this instance, amazingly, I was able to observe, ‘That horse was John’s, wasn’t it?’
We were passing the first of the rough cottages into the village and I’d surprised him. My comment drew a laugh. He remarked, ‘Dark thoughts indeed. What has led you to conclude that it was John’s?’
‘Freddy was trying to lead it away before you could notice, but had to give it up as a bad job.’
‘Ah.’
There was a pause while Richard gave every appearance of being one who was watching for the brass sign that marked the doctor’s house. But then he confided to the window beside him, ‘If the horse was John’s, it’s probably valuable and probably still ours, officially. I believe Mrs Croft offered to buy the beast when John died, but since my father couldn’t exactly engage in business with her or her husband without risking accusations of trying to influence the witness, I imagine he just denied the horse was ever ours. It was a solution of sorts, I suppose. And yet,’ he added after a slight hesitation, ‘the truth is, I still can’t help thinking that this discreet way of settling an exchange was rather too similar to a gesture of thanks.’
‘You think your father was grateful to them?’ I didn’t understand.
He told me, ‘The whole world delights in dissecting the horrors of what my brother did and the lies he spread and yet they’ve never quite turned upon my father. The way the Crofts tell it, my father did nothing more serious than believe my brother’s tomfoolery and allow himself to be led into attempting the arrest of the wrong man for various crimes at a very wrong time.’
I steered the enormous car to a halt outside the shop. I knew Richard had always been clear about his family’s past, but this ran deeper than any necessary honesty. It felt like the sort of thing that should never be voiced. It was for Richard’s sake and his alone that I asked quietly, ‘You think there’s more to it?’
Richard waited while I silenced the engine before he turned his head. ‘The way Father is now? I just don’t know. But knowing the aversion he has to hearing Matthew Croft’s name and the sentence my uncle is serving these days, I think it must take a harsh toll upon the spirit of a man like my father, who for all his faults has a strong sense of honour, if he even partially owes his freedom to the generosity of a man he once tried to have hanged for murder.’
This was the lie the Colonel had given me a glimpse of on his first wretched day home. Now Richard let me absorb the full scale of its hold on the old man and the hard trust Richard had in my fitness to share his secrets. And then we went into the doctor’s surgery.