The front door of the cottage had an old-fashioned bell pull that set up a tuneless jangling somewhere inside. Nothing happened for so long that Lucy had almost made to ring again when the door was flung open to reveal Colonel Procope.
The declining sun clearly illuminated a look of eager welcome on his face which very soon gave place to puzzlement, consternation, anger if not more. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
She had her back to the light; she was far from his mind; her hair was hidden; he had never done more than glance at her. These points occurred to her later; for the moment she was aware only that he had not recognized her. It seemed to her suddenly important to remain unrecognized. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, trying to look as well as sound rustic and gawky, ‘but I wondered if my horse could have a drink of water.’
‘Certainly not! Get out!’ He was shouting and glaring, his fierce eyes doubly strange under the brown thatch of hair. ‘If you don’t, if you’re not gone by the time I finish talking’ — his voice rose to something like a scream and a fleck of saliva hit her cheek — ‘I promise you I’ll set my dogs on you and I won’t be calling them off!’
There was no need on Lucy’s part for any mimicry of someone badly disconcerted and frightened. She was back in the saddle, and had cantered a hundred yards towards the village, before she had time to reflect that any available dogs of the sort implied would assuredly have made a tremendous noise at the first sound of an unexpected visitor. Later still it occurred to her that no horse needed to be taken in search of water with a whole river a bare hundred yards away, but that was not going to matter now.
She arrived back at the post office in time to get some change and was soon on the telephone to Edward’s college, to the porter there who advised her to ring the old mill house, then to Edward himself who listened to her account of events without asking any questions, except where he would find her on his arrival in something under the hour. Lucy went to the saloon bar of the designated pub on the far side of the village green, which was nice enough but not as nice as Mr Littlejohn’s, and very slowly drank a half-pint of shandy (heavy on the lemonade).
Bit by bit her excitement ebbed away and with it all pretence of certainty, all her former sense of having happened to catch Colonel Procope on the point of committing some fearful atrocity. He had responded with surely disproportionate anger to a stranger’s innocent intrusion, for such it had been to his knowledge, and had perhaps shown something of the same earlier to young Tommy. There were a dozen possible explanations for that. He was secretive about his shed, inside which he had dug a trench, and that trench might to a fevered fancy like her own — she admitted it now to herself — have been a grave. And it might have been an unknown number of other things besides. He, the colonel, had fabricated eight lines in the general style of a two-hundred-year-old poem to send a message to a friend who quite likely had been a spy. What had Edward called the basis for that notion? Surmise, perhaps leaving a ruder word unspoken. What he would call her more recent notions Lucy dreaded to think.
Her heart sank further when at last he arrived. She knew immediately from the way he looked round the bar, spotted her, came over, greeted her with a touch of solicitude, that he had not taken her tale seriously. He had turned up for merely avuncular reasons, to give her moral support and to calm her down. His manner was studiedly non-committal when she acted on his request to go over things again.
‘So according to you,’ said Edward after listening to her, ‘you surprised the colonel just as his friend Green, having received and acted on his message, was about to walk in, be killed and be buried in the garden shed. Well now, why would the colonel want to kill his old mate after so elaborately persuading him to come all this way?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, adding stoutly, ‘but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a reason.’
‘True, as far as it goes. How, do you think, would the colonel have known so exactly when Green was due after his long and difficult journey? And how might he have induced Green to call on him?’
‘He’s on the telephone.’
‘True again. If Green was indeed going to appear, he might do so at almost any hour of any day out of, let’s say a hundred.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you happened to come along and poke your nose in at the precise time he was expected.’
Lucy said forcefully, ‘That’s right, perhaps I did, and it’s no argument against the manifestation of an unlikely coincidence to notice that such a manifestation, though perfectly possible, is unlikely.’
‘True a third time. I think. Now I’m going to have a large glass of whisky. What about you? Would you like something of the sort yourself?’
‘No, thank you.’ She was slightly astonished. ‘What, what for?’
‘To strengthen you against a coming ordeal, or what may very well turn out to be one. We’re off back to the colonel’s place to see what we can catch him at.’
‘Oh, are we? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait till dark?’
‘He’ll be on his guard then, and I want to see the ground in the light. The sooner we’re there the better.’
When Edward had returned from the counter with his whisky, she said, ‘Have you told, you know, your friends in the company about any of this?’
He hesitated briefly. ‘No.’
‘Because you don’t want to look ridiculous. As ridiculous as you think my story is.’
Dropping all lightness from his manner, and focusing his attention on her in a way he had never done before, he took her hands in a loose but strong grip. ‘I think it only just conceivable that your story has any substance in it at all. And that’s how you feel yourself, isn’t it? But I’d be a fool if I didn’t follow it up. And I’d be worse than a fool if I didn’t do something to repay the trust you showed in me when you asked me to help you.’
She was not sure she understood all the meaning behind his words, but she caught his tone immediately and responded to it. ‘I’m ready whenever you say.’
He gave a wide grin with his eyes fixed on hers, another new expression, and squeezed her hands for a moment. ‘Good. Now where’s that horse of yours?’
‘I suppose you mean Boris. He’s on the green outside here, or he was when I last looked.’
‘Yes, I thought I saw him,’ he said without much conviction, half got up, remembered his whisky and drained it. ‘Right. Order of march. You lead on Boris. I follow in my trusty shooting-brake, which I should like to pull up and put somewhere out of the way a couple of hundred yards short of the objective. Is that possible?’
‘We’ll pass a bridge over the river on our right. After that I’ll dismount at a point where you should be able to drive off the road.’
He nodded and they left without further ado. Outside they parted in silence, Edward to his car, Lucy to Boris, who showed no resentment at having had to put up with a pretty dull hour, though he was obviously dying to be off somewhere. Before she put her foot in the stirrup she said to him,
‘Now this is probably going to be nothing at all, but on the other hand you may find yourself having to do something pretty serious and grown-up, and I’ll be relying on you. Are you ready for that?’
He tossed his head in a twisty, sporty way that showed he was ready for anything.
‘Okay. Walk march.’
Behind her, she heard Edward start his engine but did not look back. Down the slight hill they went, left into the lane, up to the bridge. The light was still strong, but anyone would have known that evening was not far off. Colonel Procope’s cottage came into sight. Soon afterwards, Lucy dismounted as arranged and led Boris to a point in somebody’s field where he would not be disturbed and could not be seen from the road. Here she tied him to a fencing post by a rope long enough to let him graze without getting tangled, gave him some bread she had been saving and stroked his forehead and down to his nose. She told him to stay quiet and not to worry, because she would be back for him. Her heart was beating fast again, this time from fear, not of the colonel or whatever he might do but of his doing nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, of his turning out to be up to nothing worth all this fuss.