Читать книгу Dr. Morelle and the Doll - Ernest Dudley - Страница 9

CHAPTER FIVE

Charles Hafferty and P.C. Jarrett pushed on silently, each peering out to the perimeter of his pool of light. The grass was soaking, it had been a heavy dew all right, as soon as darkness fell. It was rough going up to Asshe Woods; once Jarrett nearly twisted his ankle. The rubber boots were a size too big.

As they came up to the rough track, the wind sighed through the tangle of bushes and trees, and Jarrett saw the white outlines of the gate which the man beside him was indicating. ‘That’s the way my father goes,’ he said.

He unhitched the gate and they went through. A cheerless spot on a wintry evening like this, Jarrett decided, with a shiver. To their left a tangle of blackberry and thorn bushes and beyond it the black leafless trees. Where they stood was a small clearing, then the woods and further along, P.C. Jarrett remembered, was the chalk pit, an unsavoury place full of rusted tin cans and rubbish.

‘Straight through the woods,’ Charles Hafferty was saying, ‘and out the other side. But that’s not to say he did the same today.’ Jarrett didn’t say anything. ‘I mean,’ the other went on, ‘he didn’t get home, so something must have been different, somewhere.’

‘Shall we look at the chalk pit?’

‘He didn’t usually go that way.’

‘You just said he must have done something different today,’ Jarrett said. Charles Hafferty caught the faintly triumphant grin beneath the shadow of the helmet, and he nodded.

‘You’ve got a point there, too,’ he said.

Jarrett led the way; he crashed forward through the tangled bushes, blackberry thorns ripping at his coat, his torch-beam casting wavering shadows. They reached the chalk pit at a place where there had once been a wire fence, but it was now a tangle of rusty, broken wire strands.

A wicked place, Jarrett thought, standing as close to the edge as he cared to. Ought to be properly fenced off. A danger to children. The pit fell steeply down, its sides a jungle of bushes and debris; it had become the cemetery of rusted petrol or diesel oil cans.

The two torch-beams flickered over a holed bucket, an ancient iron bedstead, a battered pram, a twisted mess of chicken-wire.

Charles Hafferty said abruptly: ‘He’s not here. Better get on. It’s quite a way if we’re going all round.’

They turned away and started along the track that led through Asshe Woods.

Whippy branches caught at them, patches of leaves that concealed dips in the path caused them to stumble. Charles Hafferty keeping his gaze to the right, the other to his left, they pushed on. The leafless trees creaked in the wind, the surroundings assumed the quality of a dream.

P.C. Jarrett fell into a reverie, Marie Hafferty’s image jumping up disconcertingly in his mind.

A dangerous, discontented woman, he thought. Not the kind of wife he’d care to take on. How did Charles Hafferty cope with her? His thoughts switched to the task before him; it was beginning to look a little serious, Tod Hafferty’s failure to return home for his tea.

When they emerged from Asshe Woods at the other side, the wind hit them in a sudden squall, so that Charles Hafferty gasped and shivered.

‘If he is hurt, and stuck out on a night like this, it will give him pneumonia, at least.’

Jarrett murmured sympathetically. From where they stood he could see the lights of the Kellys’ house. Inviting lights on a chilly night. Only one light upstairs, Frank Jarrett noticed. Somebody sitting in their bedroom. Fay Kelly, he wondered romantically, alone and lonely?

He and his companion, who seemed to have become withdrawn and kept nervously glancing behind him, as if he had forgotten something, gained the road. They proceeded along it for a hundred yards, the road inclining slightly all the way. They paused. From this point, as they stared out towards Sandwich Flats, the darkness opened out across flat, marshy terrain, cut twice by the River Stour doubling back on itself. The wind was fresh in their faces, tasting of the sea. Behind them and to their right lay fields and wasteland, and Asshe Woods, through which they had come.

Jarrett realized, with a hopeless shrug to himself, that he and Charles Hafferty had kept to rough track and path all the time; Tod Hafferty could have strayed anywhere on the route he habitually took, beyond the searching light of their torches. He might have pushed on in the direction of the derelict harbour at Richborough, or a score of other points. Or he might merely have turned off the road along which they were now heading, back towards the handful of houses known as Asshe.

It wasn’t much of a search they were making of it, but it was the best they could do. Jarrett hoped fervently the old chap would be back at Asshe House when they returned. He and his companion went on; he sensed that Charles Hafferty felt equally that they were wasting their time.

Soon they were proceeding slightly downhill to reach the wider road at the foot of the decline, which ran between Asshe and Eastmarsh, the way P.C. Jarrett had biked earlier that night.

When at last they were back at Asshe House, they stood looking at each other in the darkness, their faces pale in the glow from their torches.

‘At least we know he isn’t lying up there with a broken ankle,’ Jarrett said.

The other said nothing, and led the way to the house. He pushed the kitchen-door open and Jarrett followed him into the warmth. The radio was still playing. Bess was sitting by the table. A local newspaper was spread in front of her, but she was not reading. Her convex lenses came up to them.

‘You didn’t find him?’

‘We’ve been all round,’ Charles Hafferty said, ‘and he’s not there.’

Bess shook the white hair combed flat and pulled into a knot in the back of her neck. Jarrett and Charles Hafferty pulled off their rubber boots and put on their shoes.

‘We’d better break it to Mother,’ Charles Hafferty said.

Jarrett followed him to the hall, and then into the sitting-room, with the fire blazing comfortingly in the wide fireplace. Olivia and Bill Parker were not there; no doubt they’d thought it unnecessary to call in again about the lost man. Marie Hafferty looked up from the book she was reading, and Helen Hafferty jerked her head and her eyes fastened on her son. She had been sitting staring into the fire.

‘We’ve been all round,’ Charles Hafferty told her, ‘and he’s nowhere to be found. Not to worry, it must mean he’s gone off somewhere and he’s bound to phone, or else turn up here.’

His mother looked from him to Jarrett, who nodded reassuringly. ‘I’m sure he’s nowhere outside, Mrs. Hafferty,’ he said. ‘We’d be certain to have seen him.’

‘Would you?’ Marie said. ‘On a night as black as this?’

Her husband swung round on her; Marie’s eyes gleamed, then he turned back to P.C. Jarrett. ‘What happens now?’

‘Nothing more I can do at the moment. Mr. Hafferty might still turn up any time. I’ll go off now, and I’ll give you a ring later on.’

Charles Hafferty glanced again at his wife. ‘Looks as though it’ll be best if I wait here.’ She didn’t answer him. He turned to Jarrett. ‘What time will you ring up?’

Jarrett eyed his watch. It was nearly eight p.m. ‘I’ll give him till 10:30. Then if he still hasn’t come home we’d better try again.’