Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (8 page)

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, rising. “You’ve probably got to be, to eat this concoction I’ve knocked up. It was the best I could do. If you don’t mind, I’ll dish it up in the kitchen and bring it in on the plates.”

“Bunty, I’ve been…” His eyes took in the order she had restored to the room, the laid table, the signs of activity in the kitchen; he was side-tracked by sheer amazement, and then abashed by a devastating sense of his own uselessness by comparison. “Good lord, you can’t have slept at
all
!”

“Oh, yes, I did,” she called back from the kitchen. “This is one of those five-minute meals. The only thing that isn’t instant, I’m glad to say, is the coffee.” She appeared in the kitchen doorway with the piled plates in her hands, and closed the door behind her with one foot. “Look out, these are hot!”

She had found Louise Alport’s hostess apron, gaily printed crash linen with pockets shaped like tulips, and her nursery towelling oven gloves. The cottage had a fantasy quality, unreal, inexhaustible, and in such dreamlike experiences you take anything you can get, to balance the everything you have lost, your normal world. Also, perhaps, for a better reason, to dazzle your companion, and keep the machinery of his life ticking over until the normal world is recovered.

If, of course, it ever is recovered.

“Bunty, I’ve been thinking…”

“Good!” she said heartily. “Maybe you can infect me. After lunch we’ve got a lot of hard thinking to do.”

“Not we,” he said gently. “
I
.”

She looked up sharply at that, eyeing him doubtfully across the table. He had regained his balance, at least; whether he yet believed seriously in his own innocence or not, he wasn’t going to be shaken into induced behaviour again. No more doing his worst to act like a killer because he believed that he had reduced himself to that role, and had no right to any other.

“Bunty, I’m more grateful to you than I can ever tell you. But now I’ve got to go on with this by myself. It’s my problem, not yours. I’ve
let
you do too much for me, and without you I should never have come to my senses. But now I
am
in my right mind, and I want you out of this mess, clean out of it. I want you home, untouched, as if you’d never known anything about me and my sordid affairs. After lunch I’m going to drive you into Forfar, and put you on a train for Edinburgh, on the way home. I’d make it all the way to Edinburgh, and see you safe on the express, only I doubt if I could get the car that far without being picked up.”

“I doubt,” said Bunty, laying down her fork with careful quietness, “whether you’ll get it as far as Forfar, either.”

“I think I shall. I know these roads. And you know what they said… they’re looking for a car that jumped a red light and scared a policeman out of a year’s growth, but not for a murderer. So they’ll be hunting me, all right, but they won’t have turned out the whole force after me. I’ll make it safely to Forfar with you. And I shall feel a little less guilty if I know you’re clear away. I can’t let you go on carrying my load for me.”

“Aren’t you forgetting,” she said dryly, “that they know I’m here? That I gave them a false name and address, which they may very well be checking up on at this moment? You think that young constable won’t know me again?”

His eyes, devouring her with an unwavering stare of anxiety, compunction and reverence, said clearly that any man who had talked with her even for a moment would know her again among thousands. His voice, quietly reasonable, said only: “What does that matter? He’s never going to see you again. All they’ve got is a false name. They may find out that your Rosamund doesn’t exist, but that still won’t help them to find Bunty. By tomorrow you’ll be home again, and nobody’ll know where you’ve been, and nobody here will know who the woman was who answered the door to the police this morning.”

“It’s impossible,” said Bunty firmly. “In any case, I’ve got no money, not a penny.”

“
We
have,” he said, and smiled at her.

What surprised her most was the violence of the temptation that tugged at her mind and heart, to accept the offer and escape now, back into her old prosaic life, to close this secret interlude and lock the door on it for ever. She thought with an astonishing surge of joy and longing of her unexciting household in Comerford, and the half of her life that was over seemed to her in retrospect, and from this pinnacle of strangeness, full, satisfying and utterly desirable. Luke was not talking of impossibilities at all. By morning she could be home. No one would ever know where she’d been in the interval. Probably no one need ever know she had been away at all.
Not even George
!

The very mention, the very thought of George turned her in her tracks, and brought everything into focus for her. Of course she couldn’t consider it. She had never seriously believed that she could.

“And what,” she asked deliberately, “are
you
proposing to do?”

“As soon as I’ve seen you safely out of here I’m going to tidy up this place and leave it as nearly as possible the way we found it. Maybe I shan’t succeed, but at least I can try to keep the Alports out of the deal. And then I’m going to take the car and everything that’s in it, and somehow get myself to a police station without being picked up on the way. I can manage that much, if I put my mind to it. And I’ll tell them everything I know about how Pippa got killed. Everything,” he said, his grey gaze wide and steady on her face, “except about you. And then it will be up to them.”

And I will remember you for ever, the grey eyes said, but not for her to hear; whether I ever see you again or not, and whatever becomes of me.

The moment of silence between them was brief and hypnotic; she couldn’t let it go on, there were those urgent realities all the while drumming in her brain, and she knew, and it was time he knew, too, that she had no intention of going anywhere.

“Eat your lunch,” she said practically, “it’ll be even more revolting cold. You’re wasting your time, in any case. I won’t leave you. We’re in this together, and we stand or fall together. I’m not going home to Comerbourne until I can take you with me, a free man.”

In a sudden harsh gasp he burst out: “I meant to kill you!” and shuddered at the memory.

“I know you did. I know you meant to, but you couldn’t. There was never any possibility that you’d be able to do it, when it came to the point. And neither can I go away and leave you now. Maybe I
meant to
, for a moment, but I can’t. We mean to do things, out of some misconception of what we are, but what we really are always goes its own way when it comes to the point.”

“I owe you everything I’ve got in the world now,” he said carefully, “and everything I am, for whatever it’s worth. You don’t owe me anything, except a great deal of fear and pain.” But he didn’t say that he wanted her to go; it wouldn’t have been true.

“That isn’t how I see it. You chose me for a companion in your extremity. But it happened to be my extremity, too, and I chose to accept your companionship for my own salvation. That’s a bond, and I’m not going back on it. You didn’t make it alone, I helped to make it.
We
made it,” she said, “and now
we
’ve got to resolve it.” And abruptly she rose from the table, and marched away into the kitchen for the coffee.

When she came back, he was staring out of the window with his chin on his fist, his face turned away from her; and she would never know whether he abandoned argument because he knew it would not be effective, or because he was only too afraid that it might, and he didn’t want to lose her. For what he said, after a long pause, was only :

“Then I’d better bring in her things from the car, and see if there’s anything there that means anything, to begin with.”

“We should have a look at the gun, too,” Bunty agreed, relieved.

“I suppose,” he said, “I ought to bring
her
in, too.” Bunty, watching his profile narrowly, noting its determined calm, and impersonality brittle as glass, saw sweat break in beads on his lip. “In any case I shall have to, to get at her suitcase.”

She almost offered to help him, and realised in time that she must not. Where death was concerned she was stronger and better rehearsed than he was—hadn’t she, in a sense, passed clean through a death of her own to this uncanny understanding of him? But there were now almost more ways of hurting and affronting him than there were of helping him, and most of them had to do with his wish to protect and spare her. She knew him now as well as she knew her own son, she was sensitive to everything that happened within him. It wouldn’t cost her much to humour him. So she refrained from offering him the obvious comfort that would have shocked him deeply; for she had been on the point of reassuring him that by this time rigor mortis would most probably be passing, and he wouldn’t have to struggle with a twisted marble girl.

He laid her down carefully on the bed, and turned back the folds of the blanket from her. She was limp and pliant in his hands. He settled her head on the pillow, and straightened her legs and arms, trying to remember whether there had been any expression of fear in her face, where now there was nothing but indifference, and sadly conscious that he would have been unable to see it for the fear in himself. The dead never look as if they are alive and sleeping, whatever people may say. They always look dead. There is an absolute quality about death.

So there she was, young and slender and lovely, the sum of three years of his life, and the focal point of everything he knew about suffering. And maybe he had killed her, but in his heart he felt an increasing conviction that he had not. If he could have been quite sure of his innocence he might have felt the last convulsion of love for her at this moment; but because he was not quite sure, all he dared feel was a terrible, aching pity at such cruel waste. He smoothed her long, fair hair on either side of her face, trying to make something orderly out of disorder.

Then he locked the door, and went down to bring in her suitcase and handbag from the car.

The gun lay between them on the table, a tiny, compact shape of bluish steel, hardly more than four inches long, to the outward view of so simple and innocent a construction that it looked more like a theatrical property or a toy than a machine for killing. It had a tiny cameo head engraved on the side of the grip, and the lettering along the barrel clearly announced its name and status :

LILIPUT KAL. 6.35

Modell 1925.

“I suppose there’s no point in handling it carefully,” said Bunty, eyeing it dubiously. “We’ve already plastered the outside of it with our prints, and in any case we can be certain they haven’t left any others there to be found.”

Nevertheless, neither of them was in any hurry to touch it again. This trifle, hardly too big to have fallen out of a child’s lucky-bag, had bound them together and held them rigidly apart the whole night long, but it had no place in their relationship now. For a moment Bunty had an impulse to ask him why, when he had dragged himself to the very brink of murder against his nature, he had not, after all, used the gun. But that was only one of the many things she could never ask him, and in any case he would not have known the answer. On reflection, she felt that she might be better able to explain it to him. The Luke who had approached that moment in such sickness and despair had believed himself—no, had
known
himself—to be a murderer; but his own blood and sinews had felt no conviction of any such identity, and had done everything possible to avoid making it true. The gun might have made success only too certain, and his hands had shirked it at the last moment, and come to the decision naked, and still fighting hard against what he was trying to make them do. So she was alive, and he…

He picked up the Liliput suddenly, and thumbed over the small, grooved catch at the left side of the grip. “It’s all right,” he said, holding it out to her with a faint smile, “I’ve only put it on safety. That won’t foul up any evidence there may be, and if we’re going to handle it we may as well take no chances.” He caught the sudden kindling flare of her eyes, and made haste to answer before she asked. “No, really, it hasn’t been like that all the time. I put the safety on after I came round, as soon as I made up my mind I had to get out and take everything with me. I don’t even know why. I suppose I was afraid to handle it without, not being used to such things. Pippa was no good with it, either,” he said wryly, “she had to shove it over with her free hand instead of just using her thumb. She always had to wrestle with anything manual, even bottle-openers.”

Bunty turned the little thing incredulously in her hand. It couldn’t have weighed much more than half a pound. “You mean it was on safety all that time…” She let it go there, sparing a brief smile for the memory of her night’s ordeal. His subconscious rebellion against death had certainly been doing its best for him and for her.

“I think so. I
hope
so! I don’t actually know which way is which, and I haven’t fired it, to find out. But you can’t help picking up the general principles if you see enough telly serials. And she certainly wasn’t in any mood to be switching it on to safety when she started waving it at me. And it wasn’t muzzled when it killed her, either, that’s for sure. I only pushed the catch off again,” he said, paling, “when the police… when you went to the door…”

She knew exactly when he must have given this little snake its teeth back, and for what purpose, and the less he thought about that now, the better. “I suppose we can take it for granted,” she said briskly, “that this
is
the gun that killed her? It’s the only way it makes sense. They wouldn’t leave you there holding a different one, what would be the use? As soon as the police had recovered the bullet you’d have been in the clear. We could at least have a look how many shots have been fired from it, couldn’t we? How do you open this thing, do you know?”

He took it from her. “Most of them seem to have a little catch at the bottom of the butt, and the magazine slots in there. This must be it…” His finger was on the little clip when she suddenly caught him by the wrist, her eyes flaring.

“No, wait… don’t! I’ve just thought of something! What’s it like, this magazine thing?”

“A sort of little oblong steel box with one side open. You slot the bullets in, and a spring moves them up singly into the chamber. I
think
! But we can have a look,” he said reasonably.

“No, don’t open it! If there are good hard surfaces, like that, it would hold prints, wouldn’t it? Whoever loaded it would have to handle it… and I know we’ve completely wrecked any chances there might have been of getting anything off the outside, and in any case there wouldn’t be any traces there but ours. But we haven’t touched the inside! And I bet nobody thought of wiping that part off before they planted it on you.”

“But it isn’t going to tell us anything, is it?” he objected ruefully. “Whoever shot Pippa didn’t have to touch the magazine.
She
was the one who loaded it…”

“Ah, but
was
she? How do we know that? She got that gun from somebody else, probably somebody shady. And you said yourself, she was hopeless with her hands, she had to wrestle with things. If she got somebody to give her a gun,
wouldn’t she get him to load it for her, too
?”

“You could be right, at that!” he agreed, reflecting the cautious glow of her excitement back to her; and he took his finger from the clip in haste. “You don’t think, do you, that the chap who gave it to her may be the same as the chap who killed her?”

“Why not? Pippa got into something that was too deep for her, if you ask me, and where the guns are the motives for murder often are, too. But even if we only find out who gave it to her, that’ll be something. You know,” said Bunty intently,“what really puzzles me about Pippa? Not so much why she dropped you—most likely that was when she picked up with this other man—but why she picked you up again. Not out of any affection, you soon found that out. She wasn’t changing back, not on the level. No, she came running after you and made herself charming again because she wanted something out of you.”

“It would make sense,” he agreed painfully, remembering Pippa alive, ambitious and energetic. “Only she never actually asked me for much, did she? A trip to London in my company. Oh, yes, and the loan of the car on Thursday, because she was going shopping for clothes. It’s a bind, getting on buses with dress-boxes. She brought it back in the evening, and we went to a cinema. But that’s all she asked from me. And what is there in that?”

“But that drive to London with you she wanted very, very badly. She showed you that when you held out on her. What could possibly have been so urgent about it? I mean, she could as easily have got herself there by train, if she wanted to go as badly as all that. But that wouldn’t do.
It had to be with you
.”

“But why? Why should it matter to her how she ran out, even if for some reason she had to run?”

“I don’t know. But Pippa knew. She knew of a very strong reason indeed, or why should she still go on persisting, even when she found out that you knew about her visitor, and weren’t going to be taken in any more? When she couldn’t get her own way by charm, she was even desperate enough to use the gun. And now I’ve thought of something else about this gun. You were meant to be found right there on the spot, a sitting duck, ready to be charged. Either still out, or half-dizzy and half-drunk, dithering over the body and not knowing which way to run. Caught red-handed with a murder you couldn’t even begin to deny… even believing yourself guilty…”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s the way it would have been.”

“Then,” she said, closing her eyes tightly in concentration, “whoever planted you would have to take steps to ensure that you
should
be found like that. He
couldn’t
leave it to chance. I’d stake my life that the police got an anonymous telephone call to go to your house, just as soon as the other fellow had made sure he was out of range. From a public call box. Not too near. He’d have liked to keep a watch and make sure everything went according to plan, but he wouldn’t risk it. Professionals don’t take chances, he’d get well away. And you said you were only out about twenty-five minutes… Whoever he was, he was relying on having much longer than that.”

She opened her eyes, wide, brilliant, greenish-hazel, and stared at him. “You know what? I reckon you slid from under simply by having a good hard head, and coming round more quickly than anyone could have expected. Your part was to be discovered groggy and helpless with drink, if not still out, with the girl dead on the floor and the gun still in your hand, caught in the very act. Instead, you came round too early and scared sober, cleaned up the place, ran for the car, and got out with all the evidence. And you know, I begin to think it may have been the best thing you could do.”

“Maybe I had one more small stroke of luck,” he said, taking fire almost reluctantly from her sparks. “I’m sure about one thing, we were wrestling for the gun, and somehow we lost our balance and started to fall. Supposing someone coming in behind me had just let loose with a cosh—just
supposing
it’s true:—then if I was already falling with the blow I should partially ride it. And he might not even know.”

“And that
is
how you were placed? I was right? You had your back to the door?”

“More or less, yes. If you’d known Pippa… She owned whatever she made part of her outfit, like me. She owned whatever was mine. When she walked in, she walked right in. You always ended up with your back to the door.”

“So if either of you saw a third person enter, it would be Pippa. Did her face change? Did she cry out?”

“Oh, God, do I know?” he said, groaning with the effort to remember clearly. “We were so tangled, neither of us knew about anyone else but the two of us. I don’t know… I don’t remember… She was yelling at me all the time, what would one yell more mean?”

“No, I see that. No, don’t worry, it wouldn’t prove anything, anyhow. Let it go.”

“Bunty,” he said suddenly, reaching across the table to touch her hand, “I don’t want you to hope too much, and find yourself badly let down in the end. God knows you’ve made me begin to believe I couldn’t have done it, but everything we’ve got is only conjecture. There isn’t one blind bit of evidence to show that there was ever anyone else there but the two of us. Not one! Not that I’m giving up so easily, I don’t mean that… I don’t
want
to believe I’m a killer. But if it should turn out… I don’t want
you
hurt!” he concluded with abrupt passion, and plucked his hand away.

There could hardly, Bunty thought, be a better demonstration of her contention that he had nothing of the killer about him, and not even his own despairing conviction had been able to instil the makings into his nature. Here was he struggling to extend himself to accept the possibility of his guilt, and his chief worry was to save her from becoming so involved that she might be seriously damaged by the disillusionment.

“Give me time,” she said, wisely sticking to the practical point he had raised, “and I’ll find the sign you want. I’ll
prove
there was someone else there. There wasn’t, for instance, anything missing from the body? Or from the house?”

He shook his head with a wry smile. “That’s just what I was thinking of, as a matter of fact. Pippa’s still wearing her engagement ring! It isn’t such a valuable job, I know, but surely if some sort of crook acquaintance had followed her to my place and killed her, he’d have gone to the trouble to take a solitaire diamond from her finger before he left? It wouldn’t delay him long.”

She thought that over rapidly, her lip caught in her teeth. “That could also mean something that seems to me much more likely. After all, you don’t just kill over a slight difference of opinion, or a few shillings in crooked money. The mere fact that it was worth murder suggests to me that whoever it was wasn’t interested in one ring, not even on the side. What was at stake was bigger than that. The ring was worth more to him right there on Pippa’s finger when the police came, to make them say just what you’re saying: If there’d been an intruder here, he’d have made off with this. Everything
had
to be left intact, or there was a hole in the case against you.”

“Then how,” he asked with a perverse smile, “are you ever going to produce that sign for me?”

“You want to bet?” said Bunty. “Don’t side-track me, and we’ll get there yet. Where were we? Yes… with you set up as the fall guy, and the murderer telephoning the police from a suitably distant call box. Now you can take it as read that the police would
have
to check on such a call, whether they took it seriously or not, simply because it always
might
be true. In this case they found only an empty house, locked and innocent, no body, no criminal, no gun, nothing—just a bachelor cottage with the two tenants gone off for their half-term breaks, as probably some neighbour would confirm. Or the school caretaker, if there isn’t a neighbour who occasionally swops gossip with you. All in order. So what would they do next? Shrug it off as a false alarm? They
do
happen, all too often, out of spite, or boredom, or just a perverted sense of humour. Or would they put in the squad and go over the place thoroughly? In their present state, shorthanded and overworked, and taking into account the surface improbability of two respectable young men like you getting involved in murder, I’d say they wouldn’t spare the time. On the other hand, they’d still be a little bit curious, just as to what was behind that call.”

“Do you think the caller would mention names?” Luke asked alertly.

“A good point! No, I don’t think he would. The more anonymous your anonymous call is, so to speak, the less likely ever to tie up with you. No, he wouldn’t mention Pippa’s name, certainly not if he had some traceable connection with her himself. He’d just say, you boys want to get along to such-and-such an address, fast, there’s a girl been killed in there.”

“Then when the police drew a blank at my place, they’d have no way of following up by checking on Pippa’s flat and movements. So what more
could
they do?”

“I’ll tell you. They could pass out to the papers a little news item about the police being called to an apparently false alarm of the murder of a girl at a Comerbourne address. And then they’d sit back and wait to see if somebody comes forward with word of a daughter, or a sister, or a friend, going missing. No details, of coursé, just the general bait.”