‘Yes.’ Was it conceivable that the police hadn’t visited her, that she didn’t know who I was, a wife-killer on the run: that she thought I was just some lone eccentric camper poaching on her preserves? But that rifle? She had come prepared.
All the same, I decided to pretend for a moment. ‘Yes,’ I went on innocently, ‘I was just having a swim.’ I spoke casually, naturally. But of course I couldn’t see myself — my wild hair and half-beard, the scar on my brow, the savage I must have appeared to her.
Her eyes smiled first, then her lips, as she considered my innocent response. Like her naked back, that I’d seen a week before, her mouth was unusually long; long, well-bowed lips beneath a straight nose and above a chin that ran out very firmly from sharply cornered jawbones, ending in an equally firm point. Though her body was muscular and compact, her face was thin, finely chiselled, every bone, each line carefully angled and distinct, like an anatomical drawing. Below her neck she was an athlete; above it there was a contrary, quite unexpected refinement, a questing distinction of some sort; the face of someone who has thought about life more than they needed to, who had hounded the conventions.
‘Just having a swim!’ she said rather mockingly. ‘With that bow on the ground there. And looking like Robinson Crusoe. You’re something of a shot, aren’t you?’ she went on, looking at the recurve bow on the ground next the well. ‘You killed that German Shepherd with it, didn’t you? — the dog I saw you tipping down that hole.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘Curious,’ she said, appraising me carefully once more. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re the teacher, aren’t you? That boys’ school near here: the one who killed his wife ten days ago.’
‘Yes. I’m Peter Marlow. But I didn’t kill her.’
‘Of course not.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘They all say that, don’t they?’
‘It’s true,’ I said wearily.
‘Well, maybe it is,’ the woman replied after another long pause. ‘That’s what’s curious you see. That’s what makes it really very interesting,’ she went on with sudden enthusiasm. ‘Why you should choose to lie up in the woods here for ten days and how you managed it. You must be an educated man, after all.’ She said this with a touch of admiration or mockery in her voice, I couldn’t decide which. ‘Books and chalk,’ she went on. ‘Grades and all that. I wonder you managed to survive at all out here in the wilds.’
‘I haven’t survived so well. Not really.’
‘What have you been doing? To eat I mean. Shooting the pigeons or the duck? You must really be a fine shot —’
‘Look,’ I interrupted. ‘What does it matter? We’re not here to talk about survival or the wild life, are we?’ I started to move. ‘Why don’t you just call the police. I’m tired of standing here like an ass. I’m cold. Let me get some clothes.’ I moved again. But she raised the rifle.
‘Not so quickly, please,’ she said. She had a genuinely polite, concerned tone in her voice now.
‘Look, you think I killed my wife,’ I said. ‘Well, call the police then. You’d better not take any risks.’
‘I’m not taking any risks.’ She lifted the rifle, holding it up in one hand now, finger still on the trigger, cowboy fashion. ‘I can use this as well as you seem to be able to use that bow.’
I relaxed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m sure you can. And you can track people just as well, I’ve noticed. Without a sound. I never heard you come up behind me here. Like an Indian scout.’ I stopped, thinking then of her own strange behaviour the past week. ‘You know,’ I went on, taking the offensive now, ‘You’re an even more curious mixture than you think I am. I’ve been watching you recently. You don’t add up somehow. Oh, I’ve seen you without your knowing it, I’ve become something of a scout myself: those strange lights on all round you in the conservatory in the middle of the night. And bringing that bunch of roses out to the tombs on the island. And those war-whoops you let out the other day, when you came down to swim here, that afternoon when it was hot, when the midges were about. I thought you were a Red Indian, I really did: so bronzed, that long brown back, all that dark hair.’ I looked at her now, straight in the eye, then up and down, moving over her body, appraising her minutely as she had me, undressing her with my eyes, taking visual revenge on her as she stood in the pool of sunlight by the corner of the old pumping-shed.
Her face changed, a whole new expression, forceful, amused. She smiled at me intently, just as she had that afternoon coming back from the lake: a huge smile, almost too radiant, so that I wondered again if there was, after all, a touch of madness in her.
‘So you saw all that did you?’ she asked, a hint of excitement in her voice.
‘Yes. And heard it, too: those war-whoops. I liked that. In fact,’ I went on, filled with sudden enthusiasm myself now, ‘The way you behaved … it made me feel … I was going to ask you to help me.’
‘You were? About what?’ she said with interest.
‘About my daughter, my getting out of here. I’m not that good at living rough, I’ve found.’
‘Funny. It’s the opposite with me. I’m not that good at being civilised,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’re in luck: we could change places maybe.’
‘No, I meant — I thought if I explained things you might understand how I didn’t kill my wife. It was the people I once worked for. I used to be … with British Intelligence.’
She nodded her head as I spoke, too readily, as though agreeing wordlessly with a child’s preposterous story, as I told her a few brief details of my recent history, my present predicament. But I stopped quite soon.
‘Why should you believe it?’ I said. ‘It sounds nonsense enough just in the telling.’
‘Maybe I do believe it. You’d hardly have spent ten days lying up in the woods here if it wasn’t true, would you?’
‘Why not?’
‘A real wifeslayer,’ she said with some relish. ‘Well, you’d have kept on running or given yourself up at once. They nearly always do.’
‘Are you a detective?’
‘Only of myself. That’s what I’d have done. One or the other. I wouldn’t have hung about if — ’
‘If you’d killed your husband?’ I said to her pointedly. ‘I saw you both the other night. I was watching when you were in the conservatory together, very late. You were eating a chicken leg. I saw the way he looked at you.’
She didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Was yours a good marriage?’ she asked finally.
‘Yes. Very.’
She pondered this. Then she said suddenly. ‘I’ll listen to you then. You’d better tell me all about it, properly. Though all the same …’ She thought about something, undecided. Then out of the blue she threw the old Winchester across at me, so that it came at me very quickly out of the air, slap into my hand. I only just caught it.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s this for?’ I held the rifle, completely at a loss.
‘Just to see,’ she said. ‘Well? Go on!’
‘To see what?’
‘If you’re really being honest.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you’d shoot me now, if you weren’t telling me the truth, wouldn’t you? Or at least, you’d run away. No?’
I stood there, doing nothing.
‘You see? You’re telling the truth,’ she said with satisfaction. I handed the rifle back to her.
‘Yes, but what if I hadn’t been?’
‘I’d be dead. Or you’d be gone. That’s all.’
‘But why take the risk?’