Lorna Gray - The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

In a way it was fortunate Constable Rathbone wasn’t much of a detective. He had finished his tea and was folding away his notebook and reaching to collect his helmet from the kitchen table when we heard a car roll to a halt on the trackway outside. There was a creak as its springs met a hollow and silence as the engine died. Naturally, I went to look. I was half hopeful that this was a cab bearing my cousin home from the hospital. It wasn’t. The chrome bumper of a black bonnet peeped at me from beyond the screen of the garden gate while I hovered near the mass of coats hanging in the hall. Aunt Edna didn’t seem to be stalking me from amongst them today.

But a real living person was hunting me. The sound of a car door swinging on its hinges travelled through the open front door. It was followed naturally enough by the thump as the car door was shut again, only, instead of hearing next the crush of dry stone underfoot, there was a cough as the engine kicked urgently back into life. The driver had climbed back in again. He made his car perform a quite extraordinary turn in about thirty rapid shuffles back and forth before dashing away again around the bend towards the lane where the gate had been left swinging. It was the black Ford and the swift about-turn had occurred when its bald-headed driver had stepped around the front of his car and found himself being presented with a close view of a policeman’s motorcycle.

I stood there too stunned to really register shock. Quite honestly, it had never occurred to me to think that I was the common theme in this run of oddness rather than the Manor. Only here I was gripping the coarse folds of one of many aged coats, merging with them, really. And thinking that I’d met bombs and war, and wasted years dreading that all the human nastiness that ran like a vein through the whole lot might persist into peacetime, and yet at the same time I’d still happily been convinced that none of it had ever been specifically directed at me. Now, though, this man had apparently taken to calling on my doorstep just as soon as I’d left myself with no real chance of catching any bus anywhere and I was feeling as though this one thing were about to prove that my attempt to find a little perspective here was set to be horribly skewed the wrong way. Where I had meant to assert once and for all that nastiness had no place in my daily life at all, these people appeared determined to prove that it very specifically did.

‘Changed his mind, did he?’ PC Rathbone joined me in the hall, small eyes in a sunburnt face wrinkling comfortably at the now vacant trackway. ‘Oh, no, here he is back again.’

The policeman was oblivious to the fact that this was an entirely different car. I couldn’t quite see its nose well enough to say what make of vehicle it was, but this time the gate was carefully pushed shut and the black bonnet that drew to a halt at the end of my garden contained the unmistakeable might of a very powerful engine. It seemed that I had been partially right to think the Manor owned its share of this strangeness because here was its representative arriving in person at my garden gate. It must be said that the news didn’t exactly come as a relief.

Willpower made me shake off the clawing grasp of musty coats and the proximity of the amiable policeman and step out onto the path. My hands met and gripped the weathered wood of the gate and I waited there while the car creaked and Captain Langton climbed out. I saw him hesitate fractionally as he saw me there, but then he turned to press the car door shut. Unlike the other man, this man didn’t even quiver when he stepped around the nose of his car and his eyes fell upon the policeman’s motorcycle.

His eyebrows lifted a fraction though when I didn’t open the gate for him. Instead I leaned across it with my weight on my hands to tell him in an unfriendly whisper, ‘PC Rathbone is here asking about Mr Winstone’s injury. And did you see the other car?’ I could tell from the brief drift of his attention towards the empty lane that he hadn’t. ‘It was the man from the Manor but PC Rathbone thinks you’re him. He didn’t notice that the other car drove away and you’ve arrived in a different car. Are you sure you want to see him now?’

I stopped myself from turning this round into a plea to stay with a fierce jerk of determination. I was, I think, expecting the Captain to make his excuses to leave. I suppose I was encouraging it. I couldn’t see a way for him to come in without having to either lie or make me explain that he was not the same man that the other driver had been. And despite his repeated requests for discretion, I didn’t quite think lying was his usual habit. At the same time it was suddenly hitting me with the kind of tension that makes every part of the mind ache that I ought to really be wondering why that other man had called here, and how that man had known where to find me at all and what I would do if the burglar was only waiting for these people to go before coming back again.

To stop myself from seeing this second man as my salvation, I made myself wonder what he wanted from me now.

It was a fair question. The Captain was scrutinising my unsmiling face; trying to trace that hostility to its source. He hadn’t come here expecting this. I suppose he’d presumed the manner of my exit from his house hadn’t quite paved the way for plain unfriendliness.

I thought for a moment he might be imagining that I was trying to send him away without talking to the policeman because I was afraid of betraying that I was actually a party to the bald man’s actions. The Captain’s own features were carrying a question. But when his mouth finally moulded itself into speech, it wasn’t to announce his departure or add fuel to my increasing sense of isolation. It merely asked, ‘Are you going to let me in?’

I let him in. I stepped sideways with my hands still gripping that gate so that it swung on its hinges. Then, with one final guarded glance at my face, the Captain stepped past me onto the awkwardly narrow space of the path and on into the hallway of my cousin’s house. With no steps to climb, there was no sign of the faint unevenness in his stride now. I eased the gate shut and followed. I was in time to hear his opening greeting to the policeman. It was astounding after all he had made me swear not to say.

The Captain said coolly, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. Captain Richard Langton. Has Miss Sutton told you about her encounter with an unusual car today? No? You should know that there is a man in this neighbourhood who has taken to driving about at speed and indulging in near-misses with pedestrians.’

I thought his manner was designed to carry meaning for me, I don’t know why. Well, actually, I did know why; I just didn’t like it. It struck me that this steady release of information was the Captain’s way of exerting control over me and this scene, and the idea was deeply, unreasonably offensive. I didn’t want to be cast in a passive role here. Not even when the act itself might have been intended to assure me that he believed that my nervousness belonged to something more complicated than the guilt of being caught red-handed meeting his burglar. The Captain might have been exposing our secret to the policeman purely to reduce the threat I might pose if he should prove to have been wrong about me. But it was more likely that the Captain thought the threat to me was unmanageable enough that I needed to be sheltered by someone like him; someone like an experienced soldier who would choose for me which decisive action to take. Any minute now and he’d be telling me not to worry again.

I approached as the policeman asked him seriously, ‘Really?’ PC Rathbone drew out his notebook again and licked the tip of his pencil. ‘Can you describe the car?’