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This handsome admission, accompanied as it was by the smile of a fond parent, not unnaturally made Janet blink. As White moved towards the
window of his study, and leaned in to reach the wooden cigarette-box that stood on his desk, Mr Jones said wisely that his guess was that Janet was one of the Marthas of this world.
Not even the most domesticated girl could be expected to relish this reading of her character, and Janet had just opened her mouth to deny it, when a diversion occurred which changed the words on her tongue to a small shriek of dismay.
From somewhere in the dense rhododendron thickets a shot had sounded, and Wally Carter, who had unlatched the gate on the farther side of the stream, and stepped on to the bridge, sagged suddenly at the knees, and crumpled up into an inanimate heap on the rough planks.
‘Why – what– Good God, what’s happened?’ gasped Mr Jones, his eyes starting out of his head.
White, who had turned quickly at the sound of Janet’s shriek, was not in a position to obtain a view of the bridge over the stream, and demanded testily to know the meaning of his daughter’s scream.
‘Mr Carter – the shot—!’ whimpered Janet.
White strode up to her, and looked in the direction of her shaking finger. The sight of Wally’s still form made him give an exclamation under his breath, but instead of joining Janet and Mr Jones in their stupefied immobility, he threw the cigarette-box into a chair, spilling its contents haphazard, and snapped out: ‘Don’t stand there like a stuck pig! Come on!’
His words jerked the other two out of their trance. Mr Jones heaved himself out of his chair, and set off down the slope in White’s wake at a lumbering trot, while Janet followed, sobbing, ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ in an ineffectual manner that would certainly have infuriated White had he lingered to hear it.
By the time she and Samuel Jones reached the bridge, White had raised Wally in his arms, and was feeling for his heart. He was looking rather pale, and when he drew his hand away it was reddened with blood.
‘Oh, is he dead? Oh, whatever shall we do?’ cried Janet distractedly.
‘Stop that screeching, and get something to stanch the blood!’ snapped White. ‘Here, Sam, see what you can do! I don’t know how far gone he is. I’ll get hold of Chester at once. Thank God it’s a Sunday, and he won’t be out!’
Mr Jones, whose cheeks had assumed a yellow pallor, knelt clumsily down beside Wally’s body, and told Janet in an unsteady voice to tear a piece off her petticoat, or something.
Janet, however, had had her father’s handkerchief thrust into her hand, and with trembling fingers was unbuttoning Wally’s shirt to lay bare a neat, red hole in his chest. The sight of blood made her feel sick, but after the first few moments of startled horror she had managed to pull herself together and even had the presence of mind to call after her father, who was running back to the house, that it was of no use for him to ring up Dr Chester.
‘He’s out!’ she shouted. ‘I saw his car pass the house from my bedroom window just before I came down! Going towards Palings!’
‘Damn!’ said White, checking for an instant. ‘All right, I’ll get his partner!’
He vanished from their sight round a clump of azaleas, and Janet, swallowing hard, turned back to Wally’s body.
Samuel Jones had struggled out of his coat, and rolled it into a pillow for Wally’s head. His gaily striped shirt seemed out of keeping with his blanched, horror-stricken countenance. He said in a hushed voice: ‘It’s no use, Miss Janet. He’s gone.’
‘Oh no, don’t say that! He can’t have!’ quavered Janet, holding White’s handkerchief pressed to the wound in Wally’s chest. ‘Oh, what an awful thing! Oughtn’t we to try to give him brandy? Only, it says in my First-aid book that one should never—’
‘He’s gone,’ repeated Jones, laying Wally’s slack hand, which he had been holding by the wrist, down on the planks. ‘You can’t feel a pulse. Not a flicker. Clean through the heart, if you ask me. My God, if I’d known this was going to happen I’d never have come!’
Janet was too busy fussing over Wally’s body to pay much heed to this somewhat egoistic remark. Under her sharp directions, Jones reluctantly undid Wally’s collar and tie; but when neither this nor the chafing of his hands produced in him the smallest sign of life, Janet realised that he must indeed be dead, and broke into gulping sobs of nervous shock. Mr Jones, who was himself feeling, as he afterwards expressed it, a bit jumpy, with difficulty restrained himself from swearing at her, and tried, instead, to offer such comfort as lay in repeated assurances that it was not her fault, and she had done all that she could.
It seemed hours before White reappeared, and was, in actual fact, some seven minutes later. Neither Janet nor Mr Jones, though both now convinced that Wally was dead, had moved from the bridge, each feeling vaguely that to leave Wally’s body would be a callous action; but when White came hurrying into sight, Jones rose with a good deal of puffing and groaning to his feet, and stepped forward to meet him.
‘No use, old man. He’s gone,’ he said, for the third time that afternoon.
‘God, what a ghastly thing!’ muttered White, staring down at Wally. ‘I was afraid it was all up with him. But how the devil— Oh, shut up, Janet! Stop that bloody row!’
Janet tried, ineffectively, to muffle her sobs in her handkerchief. Mr Jones laid a hand on White’s arm, saying in a deep voice: ‘Steady on, old man! We stand in the presence of death, you know.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t give me any of that cant!’ retorted White. ‘As though it wasn’t damnable enough for a thing like this to happen without your adding to it with the sort of talk that’s enough to make a man sick!’
Mr Jones looked very much shocked by this explosion of temper, but excused it on the grounds that his host was naturally a little upset.
Janet struggled up from her knees, and leaned for support on the rustic rail of the bridge. ‘Did you manage to get hold of Dr Hinchcliffe?’ she asked, between sniffs. ‘You were such ages!’
‘Yes, of course I got hold of him, and the police, too,’ said White savagely. ‘They’ll all be here before we know where we are, so don’t try and move the body!’
Janet emerged from her handkerchief to show a startled face. ‘The police?’ she stammered. ‘The police, father?’
