Pat returned to the house not long before the dinner bell, in a flurry of cold air and red cheeks. Curtis had no opportunity to speak to her before she went up to change. It was unavoidable that they both had to be present at dinner. He only hoped that Daniel was in a state to watch over himself for a few hours, and was relieved to see James Armstrong at the dinner table too. He resolved to keep an eye on that young man throughout the evening.
“Where’s Mr. Holt?” commented Pat, in a pause of the conversation. “Has he left us as well?”
“We’re not quite sure,” said Lady Armstrong. “He went out this morning for a bicycle ride, I understand, and he hasn’t come back.”
“Perhaps he got a puncture. The roads are awfully stony. I say, I wonder if it was him I saw.”
“You saw him?” James’s voice was sharp.
“I don’t know if I saw him,” Pat said patiently. “I saw a fellow who might have been him, on a bicycle, at about lunchtime, I suppose. I was having a bite to eat up that stony outcrop perhaps seven miles northeast of here.”
“Oh, Pat, you are exhausting.” Fen gave her an affectionate look. “So desperately healthy.”
“But could it have been Holt?” James demanded.
“Miss Merton said, she doesn’t know.” Lady Armstrong’s tone held a hint of command. “We’ve men out on the roads. There’s nothing more to be done for now.”
“It’s almost certainly a puncture.” Pat spoke with conviction. “I shouldn’t bicycle here, I must say, one would be forever changing tires.”
“Oh, you’re a lady cyclist?” Mrs. Lambdon asked with some disapproval, and the conversation turned, to Curtis’s relief, away from the man he had killed.
He managed a word with Pat before bed when the two women engineered the evening card tables so that the three of them were engaged in a game of Reunion. By this point Curtis had developed a respect for their organisational powers that verged on awe.
“He’s not ill,” Pat murmured. “He’s got my revolver, and the door’s locked. Bring water.”
“Is he all right?” Curtis asked, as quietly as he could.
Pat gave him a look that struck him as a little too sympathetic. “Highly strung. He’ll do.”
Fen took a trick with great glee at that point, and Curtis returned his attention to the game as best he could, which was to say that he was thoroughly trounced.
He waited with almost unbearable impatience for the party to break up that night. It was taking on a nightmarish aspect now he knew the masks these people wore. Sir Hubert’s jovial manner seemed a parody of itself. James Armstrong and Lambdon struck him as not bluff but brutish, and Lady Armstrong’s fluttering, affectionate ways were repulsive in their glaring falseness. He made himself smile and chat and play, and went to his room with fervent gratitude at the earliest opportunity.
Chapter Twelve
He waited till past midnight before slipping from the house, armed with a flask of water, a hip flask of whisky, a cold chicken pie pilfered from the kitchen, and a revolver. He took even more care than before, treading as lightly as he could to get over the gravel around the house, and keeping to the shadows of the trees, away from the drifts of autumn leaves, rain-sodden though they were. He was aware that the Armstrongs’ men might still be out looking for Holt, and wished he had Daniel’s stealth, but he encountered nobody on his cautious way up to the folly.
The door was locked. He knocked, softly, and then stood back, feeling very exposed, so that he was visible from the window. He hoped Daniel wasn’t asleep.
There was the scrape of a heavy wooden bar, and the door opened.
Daniel stood in the doorway, rumpled, unshaven and disreputable in the baggy stolen garments, and Curtis’s heart twisted at the sight. He hurried into the folly. Daniel barred the door behind him and turned.
Curtis had meant to ask at once whether Daniel had seen anything to suggest he’d been found, but the words had vanished from his mind. He was paralysed with the desire to take the man in his arms again, just to hold him close and feel his warmth.
“Curtis.”
“Christ, I’m glad to see you,” Curtis said with unthinking honesty.
“I’m glad to see you too. Not as glad as I was last time we met. But then, I never want to be quite so pathetically grateful to see anyone again.” Daniel’s voice sounded strong enough, but there was a twist of something nastily mocking in there.
Curtis tried to read his face in the darkness. “Are you all right?”
“Thanks to you. And the remarkable Miss Merton, of course. If James Armstrong had come along, I’m positive she’d have shot him on sight.”