The Flood by John Creasey Page B

excuse for coming; that he was trespassing.
    Eve began to talk, of trifles. The weather, the summer in general, things which interested her no more than they did him. Underlying it all was tension and. . . fear?
    She switched the subject abruptly: “Is it true that the Robertsons’ farm has gone?”
    “Yes,” Woburn answered, and immediately felt better; they had stopped pretending. “It’s just disappeared.”
    “Will it ever stop?” Eve Davos asked, and raised a clenched hand helplessly. Could she be acting? Could she talk like this if she knew the secret? Could she go on with such passion: “Acres and acres have just been swallowed up. What is being done to stop it? Anything at all?”
    “The military are trench-digging,” Woburn said. “The worst trouble is that they don’t know what they’re up against.”
    “You mean, those. . . things?”
    “Yes.” If she knew about them would she speak with such horror? “They’ve a name for them,” Woburn told her.
    “Octi.”
    “Octi,” she repeated, and added as if to herself: “Of course, because they’ve eight legs. It’s as good as any name.” She moistened her lips. “Don’t the authorities know what they are?”
    Did she?
    Could she fool him so easily?
    “I just don’t know,” confessed Woburn helplessly. “I was questioned for an hour or more last night, in two spells, and I should say they just haven’t the slightest idea of what’s behind it. These octi seem to burrow beneath the ground, and then burst. It—” he broke off.
    “Did a man named Palfrey question you?”
    He was surprised, but managed to hide it. “Yes, Why?”
    “He came here last night,” Eve explained. “Questions, questions, questions! As if he needed to ask me – if I’d known anything to help, I would have told him at once. My own sister—”
    She broke off.
    Woburn thought desperately: “Is she telling me the truth, or is she lying?”
    The maid came in, with the coffee in a silver pot: milk, cream, biscuits. She put this all down on a small table by the window, and went out without a word. Eve sat down, to pour out, asking the usual formal question – that was the worst of this, the odd formality. A kind of stiffness was coming back, too, Woburn was aware of the early feeling; that he was intruding on private grief, and should never have come.
    He asked abruptly: “How is your father?”
    She didn’t answer.
    He thought perversely: “I just go from bad to worse. I’ve got to get out of here.” With the thought came recollection that the bridge was up and the portcullis down. He couldn’t see the entrance from this spot but Eve could; she was sitting and looking out of the window.
    “My father is very ill,” she said, at last. She turned to face him. “The shock of Naomi’s death—” she broke off.
    “For some reason, he blames himself. You see, he— he sent her into the village.”
    As Bill Robertson had sent Reggie.
    “He’s sent her time after time, day after day,” Eve went on. “I tried to tell him he can’t possibly blame himself, that there wasn’t the slightest known danger, but – he seemed to go mad.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and he knew now what had been the trouble with her; she carried the memory of her father’s grief as well as the hardness of her own. “I can see him now. He just walked round and round the room, this room, he kept crying out Naomi’s name, he kept calling upon God to strike him down, he—”
    She couldn’t go on; but she had not tried to hide the fact that she had told her father about him and the octi. So if Palfrey was right and the attack had been to stop him from describing the creatures, then Davos had known and could have sent the would-be killers.
    Woburn spoke into the silence.
    “Where is your father now?”
    “In his room.”
    “Has he seen a doctor?”
    “There is a resident doctor here,” she said, “a friend of my father. He says there is nothing to be done, it is a