The Hunter and the Trapped Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/josephinebell

  Contents

  Josephine Bell

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Josephine Bell

  The Hunter and the Trapped

  Josephine Bell

  Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and 1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College, Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she was granted M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1922, and a M.B. B.S. in 1924.

  Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.

  Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in 1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped found the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and served as chair during 1959–60.

  PART ONE

  A Trap is Set

  Chapter One

  The forecourt of the college was filled with students, some moving purposefully towards a door at the side of the quadrangle, others loitering to enjoy the spring sunshine, finding in it a nourishment far superior to that of the tepid meats offered in their dining room. Some again, ignoring altogether the main purpose of the midday break, sat basking on the wide sweep of steps that led up to the pompous, Victorian, pillared entrance.

  Simon Fawcett came quietly from the darkness of the college entrance hall into the sunshine at the top of the steps. He paused there, looking down at the multitude and though he had made no sound in arriving and since then had not moved or spoken, a hundred eyes turned to look at him and many remained fixed, watching for a sign of recognition, hoping for acknowledgment or simply enjoying the grace and beauty of the figure set above them between the pillars.

  For Simon had a singular beauty of face, a dark perfection that went well with his spare body, not over tall but well knit and reasonably strong. In repose, as now, he had an air of sadness, that might have conveyed an unbearable poignancy if it had not been so impersonal.

  The crowd below him still watched expectantly. The physics lecturer, crossing the quadrangle with a senior mathematics tutor, gave a little exasperated laugh.

  “Fawcett at public worship again,” he remarked, acidly.

  The mathematician was more open-minded.

  “I don’t think he does it deliberately. It isn’t his fault he happens to have a face like that.”

  “Of course he does it deliberately. He adores the effect he makes.”

  “Sheer vanity? I don’t agree.”

  “You never will.”

  They reached the door leading to the dining rooms and disappeared. Penelope Dane, lingering there, hoping against hope that Simon Fawcett would pass close by, on his own way to lunch, heard the tail of their remarks, reddened in anger and dragged her eyes back to the open book in her hand to continue her pretence until all hope was gone.

  Simon, the ritual of worship complete, the homage graciously accepted, caught sight of two of his senior history students lounging against the ornamental urns at the foot of the steps and giggling at their own wit. His face changed quite suddenly, breaking up into an eager, laughing, wholly boyish series of expressions as he ran lightly down the steps to join them. He thrust an arm through a crooked elbow of each and marched them off, bursting into their conversation as if he knew what had gone before and capping their sallies with a bite and bawdiness far beyond their range.

  The professor of English literature and the President of the college, whose subject was philosophy, walked sedately down the steps. The sun had brought them out for the first time that spring. They had watched Simon’s performance with a mixture of pleasure and faint disgust.

  “Fawcett has been here for six years,” the President said, “and I still can’t make up my mind about him. A good brain, an adult mind and yet I find myself, as I did just then, when he ran down the steps, saying to myself, ‘Who is this little mountebank?’ Unfair?”

  “Definitely. He’s a first-class teacher of his subject. He even makes those two lads he’s with now, work. They’ve both got excellent brains and they’re as idle as hell. But Fawcett knows exactly how to handle them. Plays the fool with them, like this, but clamps down hard at the right time. They eat out of his hand and he’ll drive them through a first-class honours degree, both of them.”

  “Oh, they’re his slaves all right. So are a good many more. I suppose there’s no harm in it – with him.”

  They exchanged knowing glances and the professor laughed.

  “You don’t imagine Fawcett is emotionally involved with any of this crowd, or ever has been, do you? He treats them all alike; he’s kind, he likes them, he talks to them on their own level and keeps it all on the surface. Admirable.”

  The President nodded but he remained unconvinced. After a few turns in the sun he went indoors again, to enjoy a solitary lunch in his own room. The professor had a date with a friend at the Athenaeum. Walking down to the main road he took a bus. His salary did not run to taxis, except very occasionally.

  Near the door of the students’ canteen Penelope Dane lingered, her eyes on the open page of her book, her ears alert for the sound of the beloved voice. When Simon, still linked to the two students, came within earshot she looked up, trying to pretend surprise, but so clumsily that she blushed at her own ineptitude. The young men were too preoccupied to notice her. Simon glanced in her direction, gave her a mechanically polite nod and swept past. Penelope, shutting her book with a violent gesture of anger, but suffering in her heart a sickening despair, moved away to sit on the steps and stare blindly at nothing.

  Nothing was the key to her life at present, which for her meant Simon and only Simon. Every time, as now, she suffered some marked rebuff from him she thought of their first meeting and was once more most painfully confused. Before this year the boys and men she had met at her home, or at the Allinghams, or as fellow students, had without exception behaved in one of two ways. Either they were friendly, easy to get on with, eager to develop the acquaintance, or else they were awkward, totally uninterested. Simon fitted neither of these categories. At the Allinghams, where she and her father were dining, Simon had made a fifth. He had sat next to her: he had monopolised her, flattered her, amused her, touched her, wholly captivated her. She did not discover until the next day that he was on the
staff at the college, because the term had only just begun and it was her first term there. She did not understand how deep and total was her infatuation until, after taking her once to the theatre and once to the ballet, his interest seemed to have faded as suddenly as it had appeared.

  So this was the older man, she thought bitterly, sitting on the steps, drowning in her grief, but not willingly, rather thrashing about for some foothold in the depths. She might have guessed that a bachelor in his mid-thirties would be difficult. At the very least, different. She tried to be honest. What exactly did the whole thing amount to? She was in love, completely besotted, as Caroline, her friend, continually reminded her. And Simon? When she was with him he was kind, even tender: he was amusing, exciting, a well-informed man of the world. He caressed her with his eyes but he had never kissed her. He had never come into her home, nor had she ever visited his. A theatre, a ballet, a few dinners at cheap restaurants. And now, when she had managed to get tickets for …

  “Have you had your lunch or are you giving it a miss?”

  He stood over her, looking down into the face she instantly lifted to his. She had neither seen nor heard his approach. She felt her cheeks grow hot again and even the pricking of tears in her eyes. She was furious.

  “I’m on my way now,” she said, only too well aware of the absurdity of this statement. She got to her feet. It was unbearable to be so near him and held at such a distance. She added, trying to smile, “I got those tickets.”

  “Tickets?”

  “For the Festival Hall. Next Tuesday. You said …”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I?”

  He was not looking pleased. It was quite obvious that he did not want to prolong this meeting. His eyes flicked away from her and back as if he were calculating how much curiosity was growing in the minds of those about them.

  Penelope wanted to move, but her limbs, being held by her heart, would not obey her mind. In extreme exasperation she said, “Of course if you don’t want to go …”

  “Why should you think that?”

  It was said gently but it struck deep.

  “Because … just now. Oh, what does it matter? What does anything matter?”

  Simon drew in his breath and let it out slowly. She heard it as a sigh, a sign of boredom.

  “I’ll get Carol to go instead,” she said, briskly.

  “No.” Simon held out a hand. “Give me the tickets. Meet me outside the Hall. Quarter of an hour before it starts. We’ll feed afterwards.”

  Without a word she got the tickets from her handbag and gave them to him. His fingers touched hers as he took them, touched her wrist as he lifted his hand away. Penelope stood for a full minute after he left her and then walked slowly towards the canteen. She floated along in a golden mist of pleasure, her doubts destroyed, her reason snuffed out, her heart filled with a vague pity for her friends, who did not feel a lover’s touch lingering on their hands.

  She arrived five minutes early at the Festival Hall, Simon five minutes late. He was absorbed into the music for which he had a great love and real understanding, while Penelope sat entranced by his nearness, finding the whole performance magical, transformed and illuminated by her love. At dinner, afterwards, she suffered unexpected, total disillusion.

  Simon had been thoroughly satisfied by the concert. It was indeed a splendid occasion, for the two Oistrakhs, father and son, were playing and in their hands the music sang and soared and glittered with a brilliance that was rare and intoxicating. They both left the Festival Hall excited, bemused, above themselves.

  At the first road crossing Penelope stepped off the kerb into the oncoming traffic and Simon, recalled by the instant turmoil of shrieking brakes and horns, seized her hand and dragged her back. So uplifted were they that they only laughed and went on their way, a little more cautiously, but still with hands linked, across Waterloo Bridge and into the Strand and behind the Charing Cross hospital into St. Martins Lane and beyond, until Simon found the small restaurant he was looking for and they parted to take seats opposite one another.

  Penelope then saw, from the way he looked at the menu and from his vague glance at herself that his thoughts, unlike hers, were far away, so far that he was scarcely aware of her presence. With a sudden chill at her heart she understood that his extreme pleasure had nothing whatever to do with herself except that he was grateful to her for providing the tickets for the concert. Indeed, after ordering for them both, a thing he had always done since their first meal alone together, he gave her his tender friendly smile and said, “You couldn’t have chosen a better programme, could you?”

  She laughed, but heard it hollow.

  “I didn’t, of course. I chose it for celebrity and they certainly lived up to it. They were marvellous, weren’t they?”

  He did not bother to answer this, which made her feel her remark was too trivial and banal to merit a reply. Simon was looking at the wall behind her head. His eyes were sad now but a ghost of his smile still lingered. He looked both very young and very vulnerable.

  “I heard Oistrakh the first time he came to England,” he said. “The same total revelation of the music, the same extraordinary beauty. I was completely carried away, as I was today. In spite of the fact that my companion on that occasion was …” he paused long enough to gather Penelope’s unwilling, shrinking gaze, “… was someone I was, and indeed am, very fond of.” He repeated on a lingering note, “Very, very fond of.”

  The waiter came with steaming soup. Penelope put a scalding spoonful into her mouth, welcoming the pain because it was less than the sudden agony of her stricken heart. The shock had been severe, as Simon meant it to be.

  But Penelope was not without spirit. The older man again, her inner protest struggled to inform her, flaunting his experience. O.K. She’d play up to that.

  She said, rather too loudly, summoning all her courage, “You mean a woman you were in love with?”

  A shade passed over Simon’s face, a hint of anger that passed immediately. The usual charming smile, the light amused voice, came back.

  “We were very deeply attached.” He looked away from her, glanced here and there round the restaurant, noted with satisfaction that his appearance had not been overlooked and returned his gaze to Penelope. He leaned forward towards her.

  “We still are,” he said softly.

  This time Penelope felt nothing. The news had already frozen her. The hurt was too great and too unexpected. For weeks she had observed him, had listened to discussions of him, noted that everyone found him sexually unapproachable. His name carried no scandal, unless a hint of essential impotence counted as such. Plainly his private life was a mystery to the students at the college. They were unwilling to believe it did not exist but they had no evidence whatever to the contrary.

  Watching him now, as he waited for her reaction, Penelope was roused to a kind of protest.

  “Why don’t you marry, then?” she asked, bluntly.

  Simon’s smile grew even more compassionate, more all-embracing.

  “She has children. I could not ask her to leave them,” he said.

  “So she’s married already?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  “Otherwise I would have married her.”

  His arrogance struck her sharply.

  “Would her husband have divorced her?”

  Again she saw a flash of anger darken Simon’s face, but again it passed as quickly as before.

  He spoke softly, his eyes again on the wall behind her, his vision turned inwards.

  “He, too,” he said, “worships the ground she walks on.”

  The waiter changed their plates, brought them generous fillet steaks, poured their wine. Penelope wondered if she could still swallow, but was determined to force the food down. She could not feel sicker than she did already.

  Simon fell upon his meal with relish. His enjoyment of the concert had given him a good appetite. He was pleased to see that Penel
ope was eating well, too. It was not his fault that a string of mortally wounded figures strewed the trail behind him. Cheerful survivors always pleased him. He began to talk to Penelope about her college friends, particularly Caroline Feathers.

  “You don’t share a flat with her, do you?”

  “No. I live at home with Daddy. I must.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I keep house for him. Since Mother died.”

  He was surprised to find that he knew so little of her background. Usually he was, and knew himself to be, very curious about his companions.

  “She died four years ago,” Penelope said, beginning to feel more normal. She had always found him easy to talk to until she began to fall in love with him. Now that the love had been struck down with such a savage blow she felt strangely released and able to meet his questions in the old friendly easy way.

  “Daddy isn’t at home much,” she said. “I mean except at weekends. But I don’t think it ever occurred to him to give up the house, even though it’s much too big for us. I was still at school when she died. We have a sort of cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Byrnes. A dear. She manages everything, really. I just have to be hostess when people come.”

  “Your father is a barrister, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause while Simon considered the end of the meal. He persuaded Penelope to have fruit while he ate cheese and ordered coffee to follow.

  “Do you never go away on your own, then?” he asked at length.

  “Not often. We haven’t got many relations. I used to go to the Allinghams’ cottage. They asked me after Mother died. Daddy is a great friend of Bill Allingham. But you know all that, don’t you? I met you at the Allinghams.”

  She wondered a little that he had asked her for her father’s profession.

  “Yes,” said Simon. “You were telling me about their cottage.”

  “Richard, that’s their boy, was only ten then and Susan two years younger, about. But Bill’s nephew turned up at times. He’s in the Navy. Daddy used to have him to crew for him.”