The Hunter and the Trapped (8 page)

“What does all this mean?” Diana asked, as lightly as she could. She was there to establish facts first: admonitions could be left until later.

“Well, I couldn't very well stay at home.”

“Why not?”

Penelope looked at her and Diana's heart sank. The girl was already more mature, more self-confident. Diana shrank from the obvious answer.

“Actually, Carol asked me ages ago to share with her. She finds this place too expensive on her own. I didn't like to leave Daddy before, but now that he'd rather not have me at home …”

“Did he say that?”

“Well, naturally he was very upset. I don't blame him, really. It was all a mistake. Nobody's fault, I suppose.”

“Nobody's fault!”

Again Penelope gave her that quiet, experienced look. Diana was exasperated.

“You behave as you did, in that absolutely scandalous manner and then say
nobody
was to blame?”

“I wouldn't expect you to understand,” Penelope told her. “I'm sorry for you in a way. But you must have known it wouldn't last.”

Simon had told her! Diana stared, her face whitening, all her worst fears justified. But she was damned if the girl should enjoy her triumph.

“Simon rather likes to boast, doesn't he? Rather an endearing little-boy habit. He didn't seem to me any different when I saw him – yesterday.”

“You can't have seen him yesterday,” said Penelope, calmly. “We were on the north downs near Dorking.”

She walked away into the tiny kitchen to deposit the drying-up cloth that was still in her hand. When she came back she said, “I'm afraid I've got to go out, now. I'm doing a temporary job in a shop, collecting some money for my holiday.”

“Where are you going?” Diana asked, struggling to keep herself from slapping the little bitch's face.

“The Arles festival. It's a combined party from the college.”

“How d'you mean – combined?”

“Students and dons. Simon's coming …” She smiled, not maliciously, but in pure pleasure. “That's really why I'm going, of course.”

“How
can
you? Your poor father …”

“Oh please!”

Penelope was losing her self-confidence at last. She burst out, “You've no right to come here! You of all people! It's – it's indecent! Of course I hate upsetting Daddy, but it's my life, not his! I've got to do what I think I must, haven't I? It's nobody's business except mine!”

“Not Richard's?”

There were tears in Penelope's eyes now.

“I've explained to him. He knew all along, really. He knows I'm sorry I let myself be carried away …”

“Simon has a lot to answer for!”

“Oh, don't be so stupid! Carried away by Richard, I meant.”

Diana felt she would suffocate if she stayed any longer in that room. Suffocate or scream or strangle Penelope. She got up, her mouth set in a hard line.

“I think you must be out of your mind,” she said, in a small tight voice. “I know Simon far better than you ever will. There is no happiness before you now. That I can promise you.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Penelope, under her breath. She was not afraid and she hoped that Diana understood this fact.

That evening Diana told William about her visit to the girl. At first he said nothing, but when she described Penelope's coming holiday in France, he looked up quickly.

“So that was what Hubert meant,” he said.

“Hubert?”

“I had lunch with him today. I've seen him several times in the last week or two. He's taken this business of Penny very badly. Wanted to throw her over completely at first, in the bad old Victorian manner. ‘Never darken my doors again' sort of thing. I got him out of that. Made him continue her allowance. He's been giving her a personal allowance, clothes and so on, besides the housekeeping money. She's quite comfortable with the Feathers girl, isn't she?”

“If you think sleeping on a divan in the sitting room of a minute two-roomed flat made out of one large room of an old house is comfort, I suppose she is. They have a sort of glorified cupboard of a kitchen and share a bathroom with two other so-called flats in the same house.”

“Lots of girls live like that.”

“But haven't had Penny's earlier surroundings. Perhaps she'll get tired of it.”

“And perhaps she won't. She has some sort of job, Hubert says.”

“In a shop. To collect money for the holiday with Simon. Or is it the honeymoon?”

“You're very bitter.”

“Am I? You don't seem to care at all. I thought Hubert was your friend.”

“He is. But I've never approved of the way he's treated Penny since her mother died. Expected too much of her and neglected her at the same time. She was bound to break out. Times have changed.”

“You sound as if you
approved
of her present behaviour.”

“I don't altogether disapprove.”

He looked at her so fixedly that she was forced to meet his gaze and felt her cheeks redden. Once again they were on the brink of a show down, William thought, wondering if he dared push it to a conclusion. But now it was Diana who recoiled, breaking off the conversation altogether and hurrying from the room upon an invented errand. William sighed. He could see no end to the recurring embarrassment, unless, for some reason, Simon were forced to take himself somewhere else.

But that would mean a genuine loss to the college. Did he really set this higher than the loss of his wife, he wondered ruefully. And then he asked himself if he had ever really held her since the first few years of their marriage. And asked himself, too, how much he now felt her loss: when he was able to put her totally from his mind for the whole of his happy working day.

At the next opportunity of speaking alone to his mother, William asked her if Diana had given her the recent news of Penelope.

“No,” Mrs. Allingham answered. “But then Diana doesn't often confide in me.”

“This isn't exactly a confidence, merely a report.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“I do indeed and I'm sorry for it. I hoped you two were getting to know each other better.”

“We get on with each other very well,” she told him, “which is perhaps a better thing on the whole.”

He was silent at that and Mrs. Allingham went on, quietly, “Tell me the news about Penny.”

He did so, relating both what Hubert had told him and what Diana had learned during her visit to the girl. Mrs. Allingham took it quietly, sighing a little.

Then she asked, “Was Diana very upset?”

“I'm afraid so. She has a good deal of social sense. She is more conventional than I am, I think.”

“Hubert is more conventional than either of you. He must have had a horrible time at the Carringtons.”

“He did. At first they waited for Penny. Then Richard began to panic about a possible accident and insisted on ringing up Hubert's house and then the police and the hospitals. Then the Carringtons said they had better dine while they waited for news. Hubert thinks they had already begun to suspect the truth. They had a miserable meal and then Richard was called to the phone. It was Penny, to say she wasn't coming and would write and was going to stay at Caroline's and please apologise to everyone, including her father.”

“Insolence!” said Mrs. Allingham, profoundly shocked.

“Guts!” said William. “It can't have been easy to say, knowing how Penny hates hurting anyone's feelings. She could have let it go and left them all to guess.”

“That would have been abominable.”

William turned on her.

“What about you, Mother?” he asked. “You knew where she'd gone, didn't you?”

“No.”

“You knew that John knew, then?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you make him say? You were in league together to keep it from Hubert, weren't you?”

She did not answer.

“Why? Won't you tell me why? D'you think I don't know why?”

“If you know, is there any point in our discussing it?”

He knew that there was none. His mother had acted for his sake, John for his own.

“I must tell John where she is,” he said.

Mrs. Allingham answered, calmly, “I expect Penny has already told him. She always writes to him about everything that happens to her.”

“She didn't write to him about her engagement. Is she likely to write about this … ?”

Mrs. Allingham sighed.

“I don't know. I feel I know very little about
this
– as you call it. Except that it will end, perhaps very soon, and then Penny will be really free at last.”

“Why should it end? Are we sure it has even begun, except as a dream in Penny's mind?”

“The man is evil – an evil embodiment of self-love and pride – with a total disregard of all law, moral or spiritual, perhaps worldly, too. Evil always destroys itself and so comes to an end.”

“That's a pretty sweeping over-simplification and takes no account of how much damage it does on the way. I can't think in terms of good and evil. Too sensational. Too vague. I have to look for detailed deficiency or some other kind of aberration. After all, Simon has done nothing, as far as we know, that is not common behaviour in these immoral days. I don't see that he can be attacked publicly on any grounds whatever. He is most discreet. This holiday, for instance. They are going in a party of at least twenty. I know he will see to it that any hint of scandal will appear as slander and be suppressed as such.”

“He is evil,” repeated Mrs. Allingham. “You will be forced to acknowledge it in time.”

Hubert Dane, who visited her shortly after she had had this conversation with her son, needed no persuading to agree with her fully.

“William won't have it,” she told him, sadly. “But doctors have no sense of sin, do they? Very little real moral sense at all. I don't mean that William …”

“Of course you don't. I know exactly what you mean. He probably thinks Fawcett's endocrine mechanisms are wrong or diseased, which comes to the same thing, doesn't it? Trust a specialist to find his own subject even against common sense. And in any case what difference does it make to the
effects
, whether the cause is illness or deliberate wickedness? Those who suffer from people like Fawcett don't suffer less because a doctor says it's due to disease.”

Mrs. Allingham nodded.

“In any case there is nothing we can do,” she said. “Only pray that Penny's real goodness and – balance – will win in the end.”

Hubert's face darkened.

“I'm not prepared to take that risk,” he said. “I've been making a few quiet inquiries about the man and the picture that emerges is very much darker than anything William led me to suspect.”

“How d'you mean?”

“Other students at the college. And women, – certainly one woman, outside it. I've known for some time about one dreadful case. A suicide, on his account, from a liner.”

Mrs. Allingham's face contracted in pain.

“Couldn't it have been an accident?”

“Unfortunately it could, except for one piece of evidence that can't be released. There'd been a party on board and several passengers had seen – the victim, rather drunk, leaning on the rail. The cabin portholes were closed. No one saw it happen. Just vanished.”

“Wasn't there an inquiry?”

“Of course. The shipping line was all for the accident theory. But the ship's doctor said the poor creature was neurotic and suffering from insomnia. He knows more but won't give it away.”

“Have you actually seen this ship's doctor?”

“Oh, yes. I told you I mean to collect all the positive evidence I can.”

Mrs. Allingham began to understand the formidable enmity that possessed her son's friend.

“Hubert, revenge is not for us,” she began, but he stopped her with a passionate gesture.

“I mean to have it,” he said, in a low voice. “I mean to break him.”

“What good will that do?” In her alarm Mrs. Allingham got up and moved across the room to lay her hand on Hubert's shoulder. “An open scandal would do infinitely more harm than good to Penny. Mr. Fawcett may have caused the rupture with the Carringtons, but would Penny have been happy, really happy, with Richard? Wasn't it better she should realise in time how little she cared for him?”

Hubert got up, shaking off the old woman's restraining hand.

“She could have broken it off later and I'd have said nothing and done nothing. But this was an insult to us all, including Penny herself. Such arrogance is unforgivable and dangerous. I mean to break him. I shall stop at nothing. The man's a killer. That poor drowned – person was murdered, as surely as if Fawcett himself dropped his victim over the rail. Killers deserve to die.”

“You are wrong,” Mrs. Allingham said, rallying. “You cannot speak of revenge as if it were justice. I do implore you, for all our sakes, to give up this dreadful hunt. You will hurt yourself, your own reputation and position, as much as his. He is very clever, you know, and very careful. Give it up, Hubert. The very thought of what you're doing and what it may mean for William and Diana and Penny
terrifies
me!”

“You speak as if he were supernatural,” said Hubert, with an unpleasant sneer on his face. “I don't agree. Criminal types are all the same, as I am in a position to know. They may have a certain low cunning but on the whole they are less intelligent and less efficient than the rest of us. In the end, tackled properly, they always give themselves away and then they can be caught. And broken.”

Mrs. Allingham said no more and presently Hubert left her. But her disquiet persisted. So much so that she reported the conversation in full to William the same evening while Diana was in the kitchen. Later, when John came up from Portsmouth for the day, she repeated it to him. If she could not check Hubert's unchristian purpose, she felt, she could at least warn everyone concerned. Penny, she thought, would hear of it from John. Perhaps, soon, she might suggest that they had the girl to dinner. To encourage her to keep her former friends. As for Mr. Fawcett, himself, it did not occur to her to get in touch with
him
. She was still convinced that by God's ordinance evil destroys itself. She devoutly hoped for this consummation and naturally was not prepared to interfere with cosmic laws, or dispute the higher power.