Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (10 page)

‘Then this car, apparently, was parked well up that sloping lane absolutely without lights?’

They looked at each other, and confirmed with an assured exchange of glances that this was so.

‘No mistake about it. If they’d even had sidelights on I believe the faint radiation would have shown. When the lights came on, the car was out on the road.’

So what would even a courting couple have been doing, drawn in on the grass in absolute darkness, to their own peril? What were the odds against any such car sailing carelessly out and knocking down probably the only pedestrian in all the miles of that road at that time, just by chance? Chance is very, very methodical in its distribution of probabilities, and uses sheer coincidences only very sparingly.

‘Or, of course,’ pointed out Barbara obligingly, ‘you may take the view that this is simply our concocted story, and we first knocked the child down and then picked him up again.’

‘And drove the other car away by remote control? Of course, you were the one who went to telephone, and then set off with the ambulance. You haven’t actually inspected the place where somebody certainly was parked, backed up into the side of the lane ready to drive out on to the road. Maybe Willie did see it before he left. The other car was there, all right, he brought some fragments of grass and fresh hawthorn leaves out with him. By the way, where did you leave the Land-Rover?’

‘On the gravel in front of the house,’ said Willie, surprised. It took him a second or two to get the drift. He grinned. ‘True, that would leave me without transport, wouldn’t it, if we were working our way round to come to my lodge from Wales. Unless, of course, I was coming all the way back to Abbot’s Bale with Barbara. By which time it would be rather late to set off back up the valley with the Land-Rover. Nice guessing, and only slightly wrong. Actually, we were planning on spending the night at my place, not hers, and driving down in the morning.’

That fitted, too. If they had driven away from Abbot’s Bale House openly in the Aston Martin, and left the Land-Rover standing on the forecourt for anyone to see who cared, plainly they had opted for a policy of complete openness. Which, George recollected, had hardly been Barbara’s attitude two days ago, so it must be Willie who had made the decision, and convinced her of its rightness.

‘Am I allowed to ask you again, Mrs Rainbow,’ said George equably, ‘whether you want to alter your amended account of Thursday night? In the light of all this, I feel I’m being invited to show an interest.’

‘On Thursday night,’ said Willie firmly, ‘Barbara left as soon as her husband was off to choir practice, and drove up to my place. Not for the first time. We were there together from about half past eight until half past eleven, when she left for home. By which time, I gather, her husband was dead. Barbara told you a tall story because she didn’t want to bring me into the affair at all. Which was nice of her, but pointless, since I
am
in it, and in any case it means that I can vouch for her absolutely. When somebody killed Rainbow, Barbara was up in the forest with me.’

‘Idiot,’ said Barbara, affectionately and serenely, ‘don’t you see that leaves us both in it up to the neck? Obviously, each of us would be ready to give the other an alibi any time of the day or night, but what makes you think George has to accept that?’

‘Idiot,’ said Willie, just as buoyantly, ‘do you think that makes us any different from all the rest of Middlehope? There isn’t a native up there who wouldn’t give every other native an alibi, as against the aliens. George knows it. Even if he didn’t – but he does! – Jack Moon would have told him. That puts us just alongside all the rest. Even if we happen to be telling the truth! In any case, where else would we want to be?’

It was a point of view which George could appreciate, but one, plainly, which had never fully dawned on Barbara until this moment. She laid down her knife, and gazed wide-eyed at Willie across the table, and her slow, astonished smile of acceptance was something to see. That Willie the Twig should include her without question in that ‘we’, as though she had been born and bred in the secret world of Middlehope, as he had, charmed and flattered her. That he could do it without in the least considering that she should feel charmed and flattered was even more staggering. Love was one thing, love you couldn’t help, it went out to alien creatures if it so chose, and there was nothing you could do about it. But this patient, assured instruction that she belonged, and ought to have the sense to stop behaving as if she did not, this was quite another matter. There were startled tears, as well as irresistible laughter, in Barbara’s eyes as she agreed almost meekly:

‘That’s right! So we’re still in the running, along with all the rest of the valley.’

‘Neck and neck,’ said Willie the Twig heartily, and speared the largest remaining pickled onion.

Bossie awoke when the light of a fine Sunday morning reached his face, and lay blinking at all the whiteness that surrounded him, and wondering where he was. They had put him in a single room so minute that there was no room in it for much beyond the bed, the inevitable bedside locker, and a tiny wash-basin. There was, however, a large and eastward-facing window, which let in the sun into his eyes. Not home, that was definite. So there had to be a reason, and that started his memory working overtime at picking up clues out of what began as a nightmare agglomeration of disconnected impressions. Darkness, and car noises and car lights, and rolling face-down on spiky boulders like a fakir on a bed of nails. And something crazy, a face of extreme beauty leaning down over him, and a voice like a velvet paw stroking his senses – Bossie knew about voices, and this was a show-stopper.

He moved, and a lot of things hurt, but not acutely, just protestingly, to remind him they were there. Especially his left hip and side, on which he was lying. He turned over, which also hurt, and then he found the pillow rasping his right cheek. The safest position seemed to be flat on his back. Like a sensible person he adopted it, and heaved himself up slightly on the pillow, and settled down to think things out.

If his muscles were stiff and sore, there was nothing the matter with his mind, once it came awake enough to function. He remembered walking along the dark road from the bus stop, as he had done dozens of times before, and then the terrifying rush of air and metal and bulk bearing down on him from the lane on the right, in total darkness until the headlights suddenly sprang up to pin him. He remembered the jolting pain hoisting him by the left hip and slamming him down on the road, grazed and stunned, and the indignity of struggling to move, and not being able to shift his weight by an inch. Just like the kind of nightmare where you fall down in front of a steam-roller, and watch it approaching, dead slow, and find your own movements even slower, absolutely helpless to remove you from its path.

He lay thinking with his usual concentrated ferocity, and the longer he thought, the clearer all the details became, things he had never consciously noticed at all. And the clearer the details became, the clearer still did it become that Bossie was in need of help. He could no more tell the whole truth now than a couple of days ago, when he had carefully refrained from telling any of it; but the hour had clearly come to pick his way gingerly through the minefield, and unload at least a part of the burden on somebody official. While he could!

A skittish nurse came to take his temperature, asked archly how we were feeling this morning, and generally behaved as to a juvenile of doubtful intelligence, which was all the more offensive because she was barely six years older than he was. Bossie refrained from blasting her until she had brought him his breakfast, a sensible precaution, and then demanded to know how long he was going to be kept here.

‘Once the doctor’s seen you,’ she said goodhumouredly, ‘they’ll probably throw you out. Your folks are coming in later to take you home.’

‘Then before they come,’ ordered Bossie firmly, ‘I want to talk to the police. Somebody sensible. Sergeant Moon would do.’ For what had happened to him had happened in Sergeant Moon’s territory, and he would certainly have been informed of it.

‘Now isn’t that convenient,’ said the nurse smugly, ‘seeing the police are here to talk to you, and the doctor says they can? It isn’t Sergeant Moon, though, it’s Detective-Superintendent Felse. You must have been up in the top reaches of crime to have the C.I.D. after you.’

He didn’t resent that; it was, after all, badinage of a kind rather flattering to his ego. He was busy arranging within his mind what he could and could not tell, and stepping delicately round the places where they overlapped, and by the time George came in, closed the door, and sat down beside the bed, Bossie was ready for him.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked George. ‘Fit to talk about it?’

‘Yes.’ He had made up his mind to that, but there was still a certain tentative look about him, as though a degree of editing was going on behind his corrective lenses. His right cheek was grazed and swollen, but the damage was not great, and beauty had never been Bessie’s long suit. ‘I was walking home from the bus,’ he began briskly, for this was only the preface to the real story, ‘and I was just past the end of the lane from the farm, when all of a sudden this car came rolling down the slope and out on to the road, and turned after me. There hadn’t been a sound until then. He never switched on his engine or his lights until he was out, and then he came straight at me. I jumped for the hedge, but the wing hit me and knocked me down, and I was sort of stunned.’

‘And he stopped when he was past you?’ prompted George.

‘Yes, a few yards past. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move, and I could see his rear lights right in front of me.’

‘So it looks, doesn’t it, as if he meant to do the right thing, and stop and salvage you, and report the accident, if he hadn’t lost his nerve when he heard another car coming? You know, don’t you, that Mrs Rainbow’s car came along, and she called the ambulance and the police, and came down here with you?’

‘No, really? Was that who it was?’ Momentarily sidetracked into the recollection of all that indignant beauty bending sympathetically over him, Bossie gaped and dreamed. ‘You know, I don’t remember ever seeing her close to, before, only going past in the car. She didn’t come to church, only once or twice.’ Not surprising, thought George; Rainbow’s preoccupation was her respite. ‘But it wasn’t like that,’ said Bossie returning to the matter in hand. ‘It wasn’t an accident. And he didn’t stop because he’d hit me – he stopped because he’d missed me. He stopped to have another go.’

After a moment of silence, though not of complete disbelief, George said reasonably: ‘You’ll have to justify that, you know. Go into detail. There must be certain things that have given you that impression. Now you tell me. You were lying half-stunned, but you say you could see his rear-lights only a few feet away. Then you must also have been able to see his number-plate, though you may not be able to recall it now.’

‘No,’ said Bossie, with a hint of satisfaction, ‘I not only don’t remember, I never saw his number. There was only a blank between the rear lights. Dull, like sacking. I think he’d got his number-plates covered.’

‘He’d get picked up if he was seen on populated roads like that.’ But he was on a road practically deserted at night, and it wouldn’t take many minutes to swathe a number-plate, or many minutes to uncover it again, once safely away from the spot. ‘Go on, you’ve got something more to say, haven’t you?’

‘He started backing the car,’ said Bossie.

George forbore from pointing out the grisly reasons why no sane assassin, having failed in a forward hit, would then back over his victim, but Bossie’s next delivery was unnerving evidence that he had thought of them for himself.

‘Oh, not straight towards me, over to my left. He started backing past me. His front wheels were about by my shoulder when he suddenly changed his mind and shot off at speed and left me there, and I only realised then that there was another car coming along from the village, and he’d heard it and run for it. Before they could come on the scene and get a look at him. If they hadn’t come,’ stated Bossie positively, ‘he was going to straighten out again behind me – nothing would have shown on the road – and run me over. It would have passed for a hit-and-run, and if he got away all right he’d have plenty of time to clean up the car.’

‘So what you’re asking me to believe,’ said George neutrally, ‘is that somebody was actually lying in wait for you there. Expressly for you. Well, before we go into that, can you give us anything on the car? Registration, obviously not, but anything about it? Description, colour, size?’

Bossie showed embarrassment for the first time; of all the things this noticing child failed to notice, mechanical objects held the least interest for him, even in broad daylight, and this had happened in the dark. ‘Middling-sized,’ he hazarded dubiously, ‘and dark, but I never really saw what it was like. But it had a good sort of sound when it took off – you know, quiet and fierce…’

‘Hmmm, pity, but let it go. Now, if this was a deliberate attempt on
you
– you are saying that, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Bossie with finality.

‘Then how would the person concerned know you’d be passing there at that time?’

‘I think,’ said Bossie carefully, ‘he followed the bus up from Comerford, or maybe from somewhere in between. There was a car went past just as I was getting off the bus. I did have a sort of feeling I heard the same sound again, ahead, when I was walking home. I’m better at sounds, you see, I notice them more. If that was him, he’d have had time to get into position before I got near the place.’

‘In which case he’d have to know in advance who you are, where you live, which way you’d be walking.’

‘I think he does. Even which night I go to music-lesson. It isn’t often I’m out in the dark on my own, he’d need to do his homework on that, wouldn’t he?’

The surprising child was actually becoming involved in this puzzle, even enthusiastic about it. From the safety of a bed in hospital the terrifying aspects were gratifyingly distant and vague. Sitting snugly here under police protection, he was beginning to feel like the hunter instead of the hunted.