Marie drank her tea quickly. Where was Charles by this time, she wondered? Searching Asshe Woods with the wind whining through the trees and the grass wet with early dew. She shivered suddenly. The heat and cosiness of the white-painted panelled room suddenly stifled her. She stood up abruptly, her cup rattling in its saucer.
‘I’m going to look for Charles,’ she said and while they were all staring after her, she hurried out.
Marie Hafferty stood in the hall, a tensed figure, pretty in a plump way. In the light from the small chandelier the white walls crowded with photographs and framed posters glinted. All photos or cinema-posters of Tod Hafferty in the different films in which he had starred, long ago and far away.
Her expression seemed to become curiously tired as her gaze travelled round. From every side his face looked out at her, or he showed his once-wonderful profile; the straight nose, the rounded, cleft chin.
She got a raincoat out of the little cloakroom and went along the passage past the kitchen. She heard Bess Pinner moving about on the other side of the door. A radio was playing. She pulled the side-door open and the February evening, darkening, seemed to flood in. She stepped out into the garden.
She waited until her eyes grew accustomed to the night. Soon she was able to distinguish the details of the garden, the brick path to the small orchard beyond.
This was the way her father-in-law had gone.
On the other side of the orchard a gate opened on to the rough path to Asshe Woods. That was the way Tod Hafferty took whenever he set out for his walk. Along the rough track and through another gate in the wire-fencing where the woods began. Then on through Asshe Woods to the road, which inclined high enough to look clear across the River Stour towards the old, deserted port of Richborough. Then the road dipped again until it joined the road to Asshe House, Tod Hafferty’s home the past seventeen years, since he had brought Helen and his family to live here away from London, during the war.
Three o’clock until around four-thirty, that was the time Tod Rafferty went walking.
Only this afternoon he had not come home.
Marie Rafferty searched the darkness for the gleam of a torchlight that would be Charles returning. She saw it, a will-o’-the-wisp, behind which moved the solid figure of her husband, approaching through the orchard. He had not gone on through Asshe Woods to the road, she thought, and returned by the road, the way Tod Hafferty did. He had not completed the full circle.
She could hear the swish-swish of his shoes through the dew-sodden grass as he drew nearer, and she called out to him.
There was no reply, and a tingle of apprehension ran down her spine. She called again. The moving torchlight halted, and then the end of its powerful beam searched for and found her. She blinked in the glare, and put her hand over her face in an ill-tempered movement.
‘That you, Marie?’ Charles’ voice came to her, with its typical unnecessary question.
‘Where is he?’
There was no answer as he stood before her, his face eerie in the reflection from the torch. She could not see the expression in his deep-set eyes, which were black shadows thrown by the torchlight. It was as if he was wearing a pair of dark glasses, she thought, and again that flutter of fear caught at her.
His hidden eyes seemed to be boring into her; she could not see them, but she could feel them. ‘Do put the light out,’ she said irritably, ‘you’re wasting the battery.’
He obeyed her instantly, and now she could make out his face as the darkness closed round them. It was a pale oval, blurred beneath the shadow of his hat-brim, and his eyes took on some life, glinting at her.
‘Do you think something’s happened to him?’ she said.
He didn’t answer her, and she moved closer to him. His face seemed to take on a tautness, almost as if it was changing shape. His mouth moved, as if he found it an effort to form the words.
‘I—I don’t know,’ he said.
But once more she experienced that tingling presentiment, and she felt sure he was lying to her.
CHAPTER TWO
Charles Hafferty had left Asshe House, picking up his hat from the hall and pulling his overcoat on hurriedly, struggling with it as he went through the orchard, and keeping his electric torch moving around from side to side all the time.
His mind was still back in the sitting-room with his wife and his mother, while he felt a vague resentment that Bill Parker had made no effort to accompany him; his brother-in-law was a lazy devil, physically, however alert he might be mentally, he thought. And, he reflected inconsequentially, he didn’t like the way he mauled Olivia about in public.
His thoughts turned to his own wife, and the mess their marriage seemed to have become. Lately, he had felt that all Marie was waiting for was something to activate her and she would make some drastic move; walk out on him? He wondered if she would have done it before, if she had been in any position to do so. She had nowhere else to go. She had no money of her own. She was utterly dependent upon him. And things were not all that wonderful with him, his line of commercial art was not paying off so well lately.
It flashed through his mind that perhaps he ought to sell Woodview, the house his father had given him three years before as a wedding-present. It was near Asshe House, and Tod Hafferty had bought it cheaply several years earlier to let to a series of tenants. Wouldn’t he do better, Charles Hafferty thought, to sell it and get a flat in London?
Perhaps he would find work easier to get, and certainly Marie would enjoy living in London more than this part of the world. It occurred to him that it was his father who up till now blocked any idea that he might have to get rid of the house. Tod Hafferty would never forgive him for selling his wedding-present.
Charles Hafferty’s thoughts fastened on Tod Hafferty and the purpose of this jaunt he was making through Asshe Woods in the darkness, and his jaw set in harsh lines, as he paused and directed the beam of light around him. The trees and undergrowth met his shifting gaze. He had come about fifty yards along the path through the woods, and to his right beyond the edge of the trees was the old chalk pit.
He turned aside from the path and made his way between the trees until he was clear of them. The chalk pit was some twenty strides ahead. The ground was rough, and already his shoes were wet through. He glanced a little uneasily at his torch, he fancied it had given an ominous flicker. He hoped the battery wasn’t due to pack up, or the bulb. He didn’t relish finding his way back to Asshe House in the darkness. But the light now seemed as strong as ever. It was only a momentary anxiety.
He made out the void of the chalk pit a few feet ahead and proceeded cautiously. Now he reached the edge and flashed his torch downwards into the darkness.
It was as if some magnet drew the torch-beam at once. It fastened on what lay in the centre of the circle of light, as Charles Hafferty stared down, then with a quick movement, he turned, made his way along the edge a couple of yards and found a way down the side of the pit.
A few minutes later, he scrambled back to the chalk pit edge, where he stood for a few moments getting his breath again. Then without a further glance down behind him, he directed the torch-beam ahead and made his way through the woods again.
He went through the gate in the wire fence, then, walking more quickly now, along the rough path until he reached the gate to the orchard. He went through it, and it was then that he thought he saw a figure in the darkness ahead.
He thought it was a woman’s figure and decided it must be Olivia who had come out after him. When he heard Marie call out to him he experienced a twinge of surprise. His mouth felt dry, so that he couldn’t answer her. He moved more quickly and heard himself mumble her name, then she was there in the light of his torch.
There were her questions, then she was telling him to save using up the torch-battery, and he was answering her he didn’t know what