‘We could pretend we were all going along the path,’ said Primmy, ‘and saw the note and went into the cave and found her.’
‘Who’ll believe us?’ insisted Abel.
Christo was coming out of his state of shock, out of the claustrophobic horrors that had driven him from the cave. ‘I can’t leave her there and that’s the end of it. All night and perhaps the next and the next… I’ll go to the police. I’ll simply say that she’d asked me to meet her and I found her there.’
‘At least, at least, say that you saw the note?’
‘Well, all right, I’ll say that I saw the note. Actually, I thought I heard someone moving and as she wasn’t in the glade, I went through to the river.’
‘Christo! It could have been the murderer!’
‘Well, then I’ll tell them—No, I can’t if I’m going to say the note was there.’ He looked shocked and horrified, nevertheless.
‘We’ll all go down now,’ said Abel. ‘We’ll—we’ll get her out of the water. We’ll go to the police and tell them about it, say that you rushed back and told us. Only you’ve got to swear that you’ll say you saw the note.’
Evaine stayed with the babies. The rest went down to the woods, hurrying, lest anyone should observe them, as though on an anxious errand. Through the fields, skirting the growing crops, over a gate tied as usual intricately with string which a farmer must each day patiently unknot: why not a simple noose or even a metal catch they never could understand—but that was farming in dear Welsh Wales. Into the cool of the woods and so, crossing the path, to the green glade, the late sunshine thrusting its bright slanting rays down through the branches, like the golden rays from old pictures of God the Father in heaven.
No one had passed that way. The dampened paper still hung, pierced through by a thorn, blue-grey against the whiteness of the starry blossom. Christo picked a sprig of it, wrenching it off from the tough parent bough, and carried it with him, creeping after them, tense again with the suffocating horror of the dark cave, close about him. ‘Is she still there?’
She was still there: still in both senses, a lump, a thing, lying on the low bank, two humped shoulders where the head disappeared hanging down into the water; one arm trailing, the other bent behind her. Christo, half fainting, turned aside as they lifted her out and laid her on the bank. Her face was terrible, turned up to the afternoon sunshine, lank hair spread across it like dark weed. He knelt down beside her and looked with juddering self-control into the blank blue eyes; and placed in the drowned hand his little sprig of May. ‘Someone must stay with her,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave her alone again.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Rohan at once. ‘Mellie and I will stay. You three go down to the village and tell the police.’
They toiled along the narrow path to the tiny police station; saw, unastonished, the freezing of the constable’s face as they filed wretchedly in. They had done no harm, never been brought to his attention, but—the Hippies! Christo said steadily: ‘We came to tell you that we’ve found a girl dead, down by the river. She’s been drowned.’
‘It’s Megan the Post,’ said Melisande, in the Welsh idiom.
‘Megan Thomas? Drowned? Duw, duw!’ said the man. He looked at them for a moment suspiciously but accepted the obvious way out. ‘Drowned herself, is it? Lost her health, poor thing, everyone knew it. Not too surprising after all.’
‘She left a note,’ said Abel. He handed it over. ‘It seems to have got wet.’
The constable peered down at it: looked up sharply, suspicious again. ‘Funny she wouldn’t write it in Welsh?’
Primmy went ashen. Stupid, stupid mistake—of course a girl like that would write in her familiar tongue! But Abel said coolly: ‘We think it was meant for—him—so that’s why it would be in English.’ He told the little story, quietly, reassuringly. The man accepted it readily enough. To his somewhat simple mind, the likelihood of a mad girl’s drowning herself seemed pretty logical. ‘Duw, duw! Well, well—poor girl!’ And when they brought him to the Corot-green evening gloom of the bank by the water, he knelt over her and, seeing how they had laid her out, reverently, with the sprig of blossom in her hand, said again: ‘Poor girl—there’s pitiful!’
But he wore a very different look when next afternoon he came with the sergeant from Llangwyn, to the cottage. He had known the dead girl from her childhood and now was black with anger. He summoned them all into the single big room which they had constructed from all the little downstairs parlours and larders and kitchen, now thrown into one; and said to the three men, viciously, not waiting for his superior: ‘Well—which one of you, then?’