‘It came from somewhere close at hand,’ he insisted.
She was looking at him suspiciously now.
‘What did it say?’ she asked.
‘Murder – help! Murder!’
‘Murder – help! Murder,’ repeated the girl. ‘Somebody has played a trick on you, Monsieur. Who could be murdered here?’
Jack looked about him with a confused idea of discovering a dead body upon a garden path. Yet he was still perfectly sure that the cry he had heard was real and not a product of his imagination. He looked up at the cottage windows. Everything seemed perfectly still and peaceful.
‘Do you want to search our house?’ asked the girl drily.
She was so clearly sceptical that Jack’s confusion grew deeper than ever. He turned away.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have come from higher up in the woods.’
He raised his cap and retreated. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw that the girl had calmly resumed her weeding.
For some time he hunted through the woods, but could find no sign of anything unusual having occurred. Yet he was as positive as ever that he had really heard the cry. In the end, he gave up the search and hurried home to bolt his breakfast and catch the 8.46 by the usual narrow margin of a second or so. His conscience pricked him a little as he sat in the train. Ought he not to have immediately reported what he had heard to the police? That he had not done so was solely owing to the pansy girl’s incredulity. She had clearly suspected him of romancing – possibly the police might do the same. Was he absolutely certain that he had heard the cry?
By now he was not nearly so positive as he had been – the natural result of trying to recapture a lost sensation. Was it some bird’s cry in the distance that he had twisted into the semblance of a woman’s voice?
But he rejected the suggestion angrily. It was a woman’s voice, and he had heard it. He remembered looking at his watch just before the cry had come. As nearly as possible it must have been five and twenty minutes past seven when he had heard the call. That might be a fact useful to the police if – if anything should be discovered.
Going home that evening, he scanned the evening papers anxiously to see if there were any mention of a crime having been committed. But there was nothing, and he hardly knew whether to be relieved or disappointed.
The following morning was wet – so wet that even the most ardent golfer might have his enthusiasm damped. Jack rose at the last possible moment, gulped his breakfast, ran for the train and again eagerly scanned the papers. Still no mention of any gruesome discovery having been made. The evening papers told the same tale.
‘Queer,’ said Jack to himself, ‘but there it is. Probably some blinking little boys having a game together up in the woods.’
He was out early the following morning. As he passed the cottage, he noted out of the tail of his eye that the girl was out in the garden again weeding. Evidently a habit of hers. He did a particularly good approach shot, and hoped that she had noticed it. As he teed up on the next tee, he glanced at his watch.
‘Just five and twenty past seven,’ he murmured. ‘I wonder –’
The words were frozen on his lips. From behind him came the same cry which had so startled him before. A woman’s voice, in dire distress.
‘Murder – help! Murder!’
Jack raced back. The pansy girl was standing by the gate. She looked startled, and Jack ran up to her triumphantly, crying out:
‘You heard it this time, anyway.’
Her eyes were wide with some emotion he could not fathom but he noticed that she shrank back from him as he approached, and even glanced back at the house, as though she meditated running to it for shelter.
She shook her head, staring at him.
‘I heard nothing at all,’ she said wonderingly.
It was as though she had struck him a blow between the eyes. Her sincerity was so evident that he could not disbelieve her. Yet he couldn’t have imagined it – he couldn’t – he couldn’t –
He heard her voice speaking gently – almost with sympathy.
‘You have had the shellshock, yes?’
In a flash he understood her look of fear, her glance back at the house. She thought that he suffered from delusions …
And then, like a douche of cold water, came the horrible thought, was she right? Did he suffer from delusions? Obsessed by the horror of the thought, he turned and stumbled away without vouchsafing a word. The girl watched him go, sighed, shook her head, and bent down to her weeding again.
Jack endeavoured to reason matters out with himself. ‘If I hear the damned thing again at twenty-five minutes past seven,’ he said to himself, ‘it’s clear that I’ve got hold of a hallucination of some sort. But I won’t hear it.’
He was nervous all that day, and went to bed early determined to put the matter to the proof the following morning.
As was perhaps natural in such a case, he remained awake half the night, and finally overslept himself. It was twenty past seven by the time he was clear of the hotel and running towards the links. He realized that he would not be able to get to the fatal spot by twenty-five past, but surely, if the voice was a hallucination pure and simple, he would hear it anywhere. He ran on, his eyes fixed on the hands of his watch.
Twenty-five past. From far off came the echo of a woman’s voice, calling. The words could not be distinguished, but he was convinced that it was the same cry he had heard before, and that it came from the same spot, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the cottage.
Strangely enough, that fact reassured him. It might, after all, be a hoax. Unlikely as it seemed, the girl herself might be playing a trick on him. He set his shoulders resolutely, and took out a club from his golf bag. He would play the few holes up to the cottage.
The girl was in the garden as usual. She looked up this morning, and when he raised his cap to her, said good morning rather shyly … She looked, he thought, lovelier than ever.
‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Jack called out cheerily, cursing the unavoidable banality of the observation.
‘Yes, indeed, it is lovely.’
‘Good for the garden, I expect?’
The girl smiled a little, disclosing a fascinating dimple.
‘Alas, no! For my flowers the rain is needed. See, they are all dried up.’
Jack accepted the invitation of her gesture, and came up to the low hedge dividing the garden from the course, looking over it into the garden.
‘They seem all right,’ he remarked awkwardly, conscious as he spoke of the girl’s slightly pitying glance running over him.
‘The sun is good, is it not?’ she said. ‘For the flowers one can always water them. But the sun gives strength and repairs the health. Monsieur is much better today, I can see.’
Her encouraging tone annoyed Jack intensely.
‘Curse it all,’ he said to himself. ‘I believe she’s trying to cure me by suggestion.’
‘I’m perfectly well,’ he said.
‘That is good then,’ returned the girl quickly and soothingly.
Jack had the irritating feeling that she didn’t believe him.
He played a few more holes and hurried back to breakfast. As he ate it, he was conscious, not for the first time, of the close scrutiny of a man who sat at the table next to him. He was a man of middle age, with