But yet—he was as deep in it as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she had been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I’d only been going a couple of weeks with the girl.’
‘That’s what you say,’ he said.
‘But all the village—’
‘All the village knew there were goings-on; nobody knew just where they went on, or when. You must, all three, have been remarkably careful.’
I tried another tack. ‘But if she wasn’t pregnant—why should I have killed her?’
‘You’ve just told me yourself that you thought she was,’ he said.
‘Because he told me—my brother told me. Now, look, Inspector,’ I said, trying to think it out as I went along, trying to ram it home to him, ‘you say she wasn’t having a baby? So why should I have thought she was? She wouldn’t have told me, if she hadn’t been: why should she? It was he who told me: it was my brother. But you say yourself, he knew it wasn’t true. So why should he have told me?’
He looked at me, cold as ice. He said: ‘That’s easy. He wanted you to kill her for him.’
He wanted me to kill her! I could have laughed. The thing was getting fantastic, getting out of hand; and yet at the same time I had the feeling that the fantasy was a hard, gripping, grim fantasy that, once it had its hold on me, would never shake loose. I stammered out: ‘Why should he have wanted her killed?’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was threatening to tell that it was he who ran the child down, and left it to die.’ And he said, cold and bitter: ‘I have no wish to trap you. We know that it was your brother who killed the child: we have proof of it. And we know it was you who killed the girl. We have proof of that too: there’s her blood on your cuff.’
On my cuff. Where he had put his hand that night: taking my wrist in his grasp, giving me a brotherly little shake ‘to steady me’. I remembered how I’d thought, even then, that it wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative.
Putting his hand on my wrist—fresh from the blood-smeared plastic. Making such a point, later on, about there being no chance of our soiled shirts getting confused, one with the other’s…
So there it is. I wonder if we’ll be doing our time in the same prison?—sharing the same cell, maybe?—we two blood brothers…
Because he’ll be doing time all right, as well as me. While I’m doing my time for his killing of the girl—he’ll be doing his, for my killing of the child.
Well—that’s all right with me. He’ll be first out, I dare say, (is it murder to leave a kid to die, in case, when he gets better, he tells? I suppose not: the actual knocking-down would be accidental, after all.) So Fred’ll be out, first: and Black Will will be there to meet him when he comes. By the time I get out, I dare say Will will be ‘in’ for what he done to Fred; may even have got over it all by then—it looks like being a very long time away.
But can you beat it?—working it out so far ahead, leading up to it so patiently, so softly, so craftily? Planting the blood on my cuff: and then leading up to it so softly, so craftily… And all for revenge: revenge on his own twin brother!
After all, what I did, was done in self-preservation: there was no venom in it, I wished him no harm. That night after the accident, I mean: when, clutching his arm, begging him to help me—just to be on the safe side, I rubbed his sleeve with the juice of a blackberry.
The Hornets’ Nest
‘WE’VE GOT HORNETS NESTING AGAIN in that old elm,’ said Mr. Caxton, gulping down his last oyster, wiping thick fingers on his table napkin. ‘Interesting things, hornets.’ He interrupted himself, producing a large white handkerchief and violently blowing his nose. ‘Damn these colds of mine!’
‘I saw you were treating them,’ said Inspector Cockrill; referring, however, to the hornets. ‘There’s a tin of that WASP-WAS stuff on your hall table.’
Cyrus Caxton ignored him. ‘Interesting things, I was saying. I’ve been reading up about them.’ Baleful and truculent, he looked round at the guests assembled for his wedding feast. ‘At certain times of the year,’ he quoted, ‘there are numerous males, the drones, which have very large eyes and whose only activity is to eat—’ he glared round at them again, with special reference to the gentlemen present’—and to participate in the mass flight after the virgin queen.’ He cast upon his bride a speculative eye. ‘You are well named Elizabeth, my dear,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.’ And added with ugly significance, ‘I hope.’