There had been a moment of awful fear, just there on the edge of thought. Now it was gone. There was space over her. She was not closed in. She wasn’t – buried. When she stretched her arm above her head there was nothing there. Only darkness, only air. Nothing to prevent her from getting to her feet.
She wasn’t quite ready for that. She stayed leaning on her hand. Presently she sat right up and tried to think. The last thing she remembered was drinking the glass of milk which Anna had put beside her bed. After that nothing – just nothing at all. She put up a hand to her throat and let it slide down again, touching, feeling. She had been wearing her black dress, but she wasn’t wearing it now. But she hadn’t undressed. What she was touching wasn’t a nightgown. There was a silk shirt, and the lapel of a coat. Someone had taken off her dress and put her into these clothes – her grey coat and skirt and the outdoor coat that went with them. She was even wearing her little grey felt hat.
She sat and thought about this. She was in her outdoor things, but she wasn’t out of doors. Why? It didn’t seem to make sense. She had on her outdoor shoes. Why had she put them on? The answer came with astonishing certainty, ‘I didn’t.’ Then, after a long strange pause, ‘Someone did.’
There really was no getting away from it. Someone had drugged the milk, and changed her clothes, and brought her here. But why? The answer forced its way – ‘To get rid of me.’
She put her head in her hands and tried to think. To have sight and to have no use for it – to batter against this wall of darkness and to feel it just flow back again like air, like water, like fear itself! She pressed her hands down close upon her eyelids and held them there. If you did that, even in a lighted room you would not expect to see.
She got herself steady again and began gradually and methodically to feel about her. She might be in a cellar, or in one of the passages. The air was heavy and the floor damp. She had got to find out where she was, and she had got to be careful. There might be some hole or some pit into which she could fall, as poor Aunt Cara had done. Quick and clear there came up the picture of Anna brushing away the dust from Miss Cara’s slippers, the cobweb from the tassel of her dressing-gown. If it was in such a place as this that she had come by the cobweb and the dust, then it was in such a place as this that she had come by her death. But how had she come to such a place at all? Of her own free will, or drugged as Candida had been drugged?
She began to move cautiously on her hands and knees, feeling before her. Almost at once she touched something smooth – first leather, and then a metal clasp. Her handbag – her own handbag.
Of course if she was to disappear, her handbag must go with her. She couldn’t be supposed to have run away in a thin black dress and indoor shoes. She must be dressed for a journey, and she must wear a hat and have a handbag with her. Was it poor sobbing Anna who had thought of all these things? She couldn’t believe it. Yet Anna had acted a part before now. She might have been pushed, threatened… She had no need to think who might have threatened her. A voice in her own mind said quick and clear, ‘She would never have hurt Aunt Cara.’ And like an echo another answered it, ‘How do you know what anyone will do?’
People have just so much resistance and no more. Not everyone can endure to the end. Anna had been conditioned by forty years of service – forty years of bondage during which she had been driven by another will than her own, a very hard and ruthless will.
These things did not come to Candida as logical, consecutive thoughts. They were there, as the pictures are there on the walls of a room into which you have strayed. You did not bring them into the room, but they are there, and if you look that way they are most plainly to be seen. The one she could see most plainly of all was the dark picture of Olivia Benevent’s hatred.
She had stopped moving, her hand on the bag. Now she sat back and opened it. The first things that she felt were a purse, a handkerchief. Her hand went beyond them. It touched something cold. There, at the bottom of the bag, fallen down by its own weight, was an electric torch.
Chapter Thirty-four
Inspector rock sat looking at Miss Silver. As he was to remark to the Chief Constable later, everything did seem to be piling up. The post-mortem had proved that the injury which had caused Miss Cara Benevent’s death was the result of a blow from a piece of rusty iron. The rust had scaled off and there were unmistakable traces of it in the wound. There could be no question at all but that it was murder. A couple of men were going through the house room by room in search of anything which could have been used as the weapon. The Superintendent would have been here if he had not gone down with a sudden attack of influenza. He himself was to report direct to the Chief Constable, and meanwhile he was to exercise all possible vigilance, resource, and tact. A short interview with Miss Olivia Benevent had left him with no illusions as to the difficulty of combining these qualities. Old ladies were tricky at the best of times, and single old ladies who hadn’t had anyone to cross them for donkey’s years were the trickiest of the lot. In his own family there had been a cousin of his mother’s, old Miss Emily Wick, who was a caution. Said to have money in the bank, and a proper Hitler in petticoats with all the relations saying, ‘Yes, Cousin Emily’ when she said yes, and ‘No, Cousin Emily,’ when she said no. A trial, that’s what she was, and a bee in her bonnet about the woman who looked after her wanting to poison her for her money – ‘But she won’t get a penny.’ And as it turned out, nobody did, because she was living on an annuity and there wasn’t even enough of it left to bury her. When Miss Olivia Benevent sat there and went on about her niece having murdered Miss Cara she put him strongly in mind of old Cousin Emily Wick. And now here was Miss Candida Sayle gone off into the blue, and everyone saying they hadn’t a notion how, or why, or where. All except Miss Olivia, who stood there as if she had swallowed the poker and stuck to it that the girl had run away because her conscience wouldn’t let her stay. He sat and looked at Miss Silver, who up to now had been just an elderly lady in the background. He gathered that she was a relative of Miss Arnold’s, and that she had come over on the previous evening to keep Candida Sayle company at Mr. Stephen Eversley’s request. Miss Arnold was the daughter of old Canon Arnold, and as such beyond social criticism. In fact the whole set-up was not only respectable but in the highest degree select. His experienced glance found in Miss Silver a type with which life in a cathedral town had made him familiar – elderly ladies who sat on committees, took stalls in church bazaars, and engaged in a hundred and one ecclesiastical activities. She was, it is true, of a slightly earlier pattern, her manner more formal and her dress more out of date.
Their interview, however, had not proceeded very far before he became aware of a welcome difference. Where most of these ladies were apt to be diffuse and flustered in making anything that resembled a statement, Miss Maud Silver was both cool and succinct. She presented him with the clearest possible picture of the previous evening and what had passed between herself and Miss Sayle. He had left her to the last, and what she said tallied perfectly with the statements made by Derek Burdon, Stephen Eversley, and the maid Anna. When she had finished speaking he regarded her with respect. She had stuck to the point, she had avoided personal comment, and she had given him a strong impression of verbal and factual accuracy. He found himself asking for what had been withheld.