She nodded. In spite of his prohibition, he longed for her to approach him again, just touch him. It was an impossible hunger that made him breathless. She made a little helpless gesture as if she too were in the grip of an overpowering emotion. Then she turned, her face held awkwardly away from him, ran down the hall and let herself out of the front door.
After she had gone it occurred to him that she had asked no questions as to his reasons for coming to the house. She had said little and he everything that mattered. He thought that he must be going mad, for he could not understand that twenty years of discipline could fall away like a lesson imparted to a bored child.
The house was as it had been described in the transcript of the trial. He noticed its layout without emotion or empathy, the long passage that ran from the front door to the door at the back where Painter's coat had hung, the kitchen, the narrow, wall-confined stairs. A kind of cerebral paralysis descended on him and he moved towards that back door, withdrawing the bolts numbly.
The garden was very still, overgrown, basking under a brazen sky. The light and the heat made him dizzy. At first he could not see the coach house at all. Then he realised he had been looking at it ever since he stepped into the garden, but what he had taken for a great quivering bush was in fact solid bricks and mortar hidden under a blanket of Virginia creeper. He walked towards it, not interested, not in the least curious. He walked because it was something to do and because this house of a million faintly trembling leaves was at least a kind of goal.
The doors were fastened with a padlock. Archery was relieved. It deprived him of the need for any action. He leant against the wall and the leaves were cold and damp against his face. Presently he went down the drive and through the gateless entrance. Of course, the silver car would not be there. It wasn't. A bus came almost immediately. He had quite forgotten that he had omitted to lock the back door of Victor's Piece.
Archery returned the keys to the estate agent and lingered for a while looking at the photograph of the house he had just come from. It was like looking at the portrait of a girl you had known only as an old woman, and he wondered if it had perhaps been taken thirty years before when Mrs. Primero had bought the house. Then he turned and walked slowly back to the hotel.
Half-past four was usually a dead time at the Olive and Dove. But this was a Saturday and a glorious Saturday at that. The dining room was full of trippers, the lounge decorously crowded with old residents and new arrivals, taking their tea from silver trays. Archery's heart began to beat fast as he saw his son in conversation with a man and a woman. Their backs were towards him and he saw only that the woman had long fair hair and that the man's head was dark.
He made his way between the armchairs, growing hot with trepidation and weaving among beringed fingers holding teapots, little asthmatic dogs, pots of cress and pyramids of sandwiches. When the woman turned he should have felt relief. Instead bitter disappointment ran through him like a long thin knife. He put out his hand and clasped the warm fingers ol Tess Kershaw.
Now he saw how stupid his first wild assumption had been. Kershaw was shaking hands with him now and the man's lively face, seamed all over with the wrinkles of animation, bore no resemblance at all to Roger Primero's waxen pallor. His hair was not really dark but thin and sprinkled with grey.
"Charles called in on us on his way back from town," Tess said. She was perhaps the worst dressed woman in the room in her white cotton blouse and navy serge skirt. As if explaining this, she said quickly, "When we heard his news we dropped everything and came back with him." She got up, threaded her way to the window and looked out into the bright hot afternoon. When she came back she said, "It feels so strange. I must have walked past here lots of times when I was little, but I can't remember it at all."
Hand in hand with Painter perhaps. And while they walked, the murderer and his child, had Painter watched the traffic go by and thought of the way he could become part of that traffic? Archery tried not to see in the fine pointed face opposite his own, the coarse crude features of the man Alice Flower had called Beast. But then they were here to prove it had not been that way at all.
"News?" he said to Charles and he heard the note of distaste creep into his voice.
Charles told him. "And then we all went to Victor's Piece," he said. "We didn't think we'd be able to get in, but someone had left the back door unlocked. We went all over the house and we saw that Primero could easily have hidden himself."
Archery turned away slightly. The name was now invested with many associations, mostly agonising.
"He said good-bye to Alice, opened and closed the front door without actually going out of it, then he slipped into the dining room—nobody used the dining room and it was dark. Alice went out and..." Charles hesitated, searching for a form of words to spare Tess. And, after the coal was brought in, he came out, put on the raincoat that was left hanging on the back door and—well, did the deed."
"It's only a theory, Charlie," said Kershaw, "but it fits the facts."
"I don't know..." Archery began.
"Look, Father, don't you want Tess's father cleared?"
Not, thought Archery, if it means incriminating her husband. Not that. I may already have done her an injury, but I can't do her that injury.
"This motive you mentioned," he said dully.
Tess broke in excitedly, "It's a marvellous motive, a real motive." He knew exactly what she meant. Ten thousand pounds was real, solid, a true temptation, while two hundred pounds ... Her eyes shone, then saddened. Was she thinking that to hang a man wrongfully was as bad as killing an old woman for a bag of notes? And would that too remain with her all her life? No matter which way things fell out, could she ever escape?
"Primero was working in a solicitor's office," Charles was saying excitedly. "He would have known the law, he had all the facilities for checking. Mrs. Primero might not have known about it, not if she didn't read the papers. Who knows about all the various Acts of Parliament that are going to be passed anyway? Primero's boss probably had a query about it from a client, sent him to look it up, and there you are. Primero would have known that if his grandmother died intestate before October 1950 all the money would come to him. But if she died after the Act his sisters would get two-thirds of it. I've been looking it all up. This is known as the Great Adoption Act, the law that gave adopted children almost equal rights with natural ones. Of course Primero knew."
"What are you going to do?"
"I've been on to the police but Wexford can't see me before two on Monday. He's away for the weekend. I'll bet the police never checked Primero's movements. Knowing them, I'd say it's likely that as soon as they got hold of Painter they didn't trouble with anyone else." He looked at Tess and took her hand. "You can say what you like about this being a free country," he said hotly, "but you know as well as I do that everyone has a subconscious feeling that 'working class' and 'criminal class' are more or less synonymous. Why bother with the respectable, well-connected solicitor's clerk when you've already got your hands on the chauffeur?"
Archery shrugged. From long experience he knew it was useless to argue with Charles when he was airing his quasi-communist ideals.
"Thank you for your enthusiastic reception," Charles said sarcastically. "What is there to look so miserable about?"