They watched him, terrified: watched Idris, watched the shifty lout with his cocky face, safe in the circle of his convenient alibis, a pack of kids under his thumb. ‘You!’ said Abel, breaking out at him, violently. ‘Everyone knows the sort you are! You got her into trouble; and—knowing she was meeting him, perhaps—you got to the cave first and murdered her.’
The sergeant stood with a light hand on Christo’s wrist. He said coolly: ‘So why did she leave a suicide note?’
‘A note?’ said Idris, in a curious voice. ‘She left a note?’
The note!—which they themselves had written and placed there. ‘Perhaps… Perhaps,’ suggested Abel, ‘she intended to kill herself so she wrote the note. But she couldn’t do it and he found her there and held her head down in the water.’
‘The same could go for him,’ said Idris with a jerk of the chin towards Christo; and now he spoke confidently, subtly jeering.
‘Or the murderer wrote the note himself?’ suggested the sergeant, smoothly. That reaction of Idris’ hadn’t escaped his notice.
‘He’d have had to,’ said Idris, triumphantly. ‘She couldn’t write.’
Couldn’t write? She couldn’t write? Rohan hung on to his swinging senses. ‘All the more reason to say that you did it. You killed her, you wrote the note—’ But his voice trailed away in despair.
‘What, me? Knowing that everyone would know she couldn’t write?’ said Idris; and the sergeant unconsciously tightened his grip on Christo’s arm. Throughout all the valley, the Hippies must have been the only people unaware that Mad Megan couldn’t read or write.
So… The girl, pretty and alluring enough, ignorant and foolish….Conceives a passion for one of these free-living young men and conceives indeed. Terrified of her father’s vengeance if she gives away her lover’s name, he takes her down to the cave and there pushes her head under water; fastens up the false note and—with or without the collusion of his friends—arranges to ‘find’ her and duly informs the police. ‘We’ll go along to the station,’ said the sergeant to the constable over Christo’s bent head; and added civilly: ‘You’ll come with us?’
‘He’ll come,’ said the constable, not civilly at all.
Christo made no answer: went with them, dumb.
And dumbly, helplessly, they watched him. The big farm gate swung-to, its post dragging through the dry earth, kicking up a little cloud of dust. Outside, the small, dark police car waited. That alone would be torment, the closed windows and doors.
Along the way, the hedges were milky white; but Corinna would go no more a-Maying down the country lanes. He sat in the rear seat, the sergeant’s hand now light again, on his wrist. He said: ‘Will you have to lock me up?’
‘And do it with pleasure,’ said the constable, not waiting for his sergeant to reply.
‘Now? When we get there? And all through the night?’ He struggled to explain. ‘I get claustrophobia. I can’t bear to be closed in.’
‘You didn’t mind being closed in, in that cave, did you?’ said the constable, only half his attention on the dangerous windings of the narrow country road. ‘You didn’t mind being in there, holding her down, drowning her? You were closed in there; and you’ll be closed in now. Now and for the rest of your life. And God damn you!’
‘Now, now,’ said the sergeant. ‘That’ll be enough!’
‘You didn’t know the girl,’ said the constable, savagely. ‘I knew her from a child. Helpless, she was…’
‘Well, well—he isn’t convicted yet….’
Christo did not hear them: already was beyond hearing. Now, tonight, for the rest of his life. But the rest of his life need not matter. He would know little about it by the end of this one coming night, this endless night.
Endless night… Endless night…‘What’s that you’re mumbling now?’ said the constable, forgetting the road altogether, to turn and look back over his shoulder. ‘What’s that about drowning?’
From Herrick. From ‘Corinna’. He mumbled it a little louder. ‘All love, all liking, all delight, Lies drowned with us in endless night.’
And he repeated it, ‘Endless night!’ and put his white face into his hands and abandoned himself to the engulfing dark: to his only defence against it—to witlessness.
Gwennie and Boyo had dashed across the field to catch the last possible glimpse of the car. It was their Hippy, the one they’d seen calling to Megan when she was already dead, lying there by the river, dead and drownded.