commenced dragging her towards the pool. 'Swimming!' he said, the word bursting from his lips like a bubble of slime. 'You're going swimming, Carol. You're going to like it, I know. And so am I. Especially afterwards!'
For the last week or so, David Prescott had also taken to getting up early. Alice didn't complain or ask why, because he was always so quiet and considerate and invariably brought her a cup of coffee. It must be the summer, the light mornings, the old 'early bird' syndrome. But in fact it was the mail.
Out this way the mail deliveries were always early, the very crack of dawn, and David was expecting a letter. From the orphanage. Not that it would contain anything of any significance - he was sure it wouldn't - but still he'd like to get to it before Alice. If she saw it first... well, she'd only say he was paranoid. About Johnny. And certainly it would look as though he was, else why would he write to the orphanage about him?
The thing was, David was desperate that things should work out all right; he really did want to love the poor kid. But at the same time he'd always been more receptive of mood than Alice - more aware of the aura of people, especially kids - and he knew that Johnny's aura just wasn't right. If it was something out of his past (but what past? He was just a child), something the orphanage would know about, then David believed that he and his wife should be told. For he suspected Alice was right to complain about the attitude of the orphanage; they had seemed too eager to wash their hands of Johnny, or rather: 'To place him in the care of a normal, loving family, where he can grow into a healthy person. Healthy in mind, as well as in body...'
That's what the orphanage director had said the day they went to pick up their new son, and the words had always stuck in David's memory: 'Healthy in mind, as well as in body.'
Something wrong with Johnny's mind? Something a little sick? Or a lot sick? For that was the nature of the aura which David sometimes felt washing out from the boy: a sick one, and clammy as an old man on his deathbed. Johnny felt sick as death. But not his death.
And this morning, sure enough, the letter was there. David tore it open and read it, and for a little while the words made no sense. Budgerigars in the kids' rooms, and Johnny stealing, killing and collecting them? A collection of dead things: mice, beetles, the budgies, even a kitten?
A dead kitten under his bed, crawling with maggots, and Johnny twisting its legs until they came off in his hands? That was how the orphanage people had found out about it, when the other kids came screaming.
But a kitten?
Moggit...?
Screaming?
And David could hear the horrified screams of those kids from here. Except it wasn't those kids but one of his own - no, his own - Carol, from the bottom of the garden!
What...?
And Alice's sleepy, mumbling voice from upstairs, calling down, 'Where's the coffee? The kids are up early.'
And another scream from the garden, cut off gurglingly at its zenith.
David had ever been the one to leap to conclusions, often incorrectly. He did so now, and this time was right.
Down the garden path with his dressing-gown flapping, yelling for Carol, hoarsely, like crazy. But no answer. And a small blurred figure inside the polythene dome, kneeling at the side of the pool. David burst in; it was Johnny kneeling there; he looked as if he were trying to drag Carol out of the water. And she was floating there, face-down, arms limply outstretched, crucified on the blue, gently lapping water.
Johnny had been playing in the fields; he'd heard Carol's screams and seen a man - dirty, bearded, dressed in rags - climbing the wall out of the garden. The man ran away across the fields and Johnny went to see what he'd been doing. Carol was in the pool and he'd tried to drag her out.
He told the story to David, to Alice, the police, anyone who wanted to hear it. And most of them believed him; even David half-believed him, though he didn't want him near any more. And Alice probably believed him, though that would be hard to say for she wasn't much good for anything from that time forward.
The police