Make Death Love Me (10 page)

By this time the red Vauxhall had passed through Childon on its way to Stantwich. Its driver was a young man called Peter Johns who was taking his mother to visit her sister in Stantwich General Hospital. They met a police car with its blue lamp on and its siren blaring, indeed they came closer to colliding with it than they had done with the mini-van, and these two near-misses afforded them a subject for conversation all the way to the hospital.

At ten to three the police called on Mrs Elizabeth Culver to tell her the bank had been robbed and her daughter was missing. Mrs Culver said it was kind of them to come and tell her so promptly, and they said they would fetch her husband who was a factory foreman on the Stantwich industrial estate. She went upstairs and put back into her wardrobe the dress she had been going to wear that evening, and then she phoned the Toll House Hotel to tell them to cancel the arrangements for the silver wedding party. She meant to phone her sisters too and her brother and the woman who, twenty-five years before, had been her bridesmaid, but she found she was unable to do this. Her husband came in half an hour later and found her sitting on the bed, staring silently at the wardrobe, tears streaming down her face.

Pamela Groombridge was ironing Alan's shirts and intermittently discussing with her father why the phone hadn't been answered when she rang the bank at twenty to two and two o'clock and again at three. In between discussing this she was thinking about an article she had read telling you how to put coloured transfers on ceramic tiles.

Wilfred Summitt was drinking tea. He said that he expected Alan had been out for his dinner.

‘He never goes out,' said Pam. ‘You know that, you were sitting here when I was cutting his sandwiches. Anyway, that girl would be there, that Joyce.'

‘The phone's gone phut,' said Pop. ‘That's what it is, the phone's out of order. It's on account of the lines being overloaded. If I had my way, only responsible ratepayers over thirty'd be allowed to have phones.'

‘I don't know. I think it's funny. I'll wait till half-past and then I'll try it again.'

Pop said to mark his words, the phone was out of order, gone phut, kaput, which wouldn't happen if the army took over, and what was wanted was Winston Churchill to come back to life and Field Marshal Montgomery to help him, good old Monty, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty. Or it just could be the rain, coming down cats and dogs it was, coming down like stair-rods. Pam didn't answer him. She was wondering if the colour on those transfers would be permanent or if it would come off when you washed them. She would like to try them in her own bathroom, but not if the colour came off, no thanks, that would look worse than plain white.

The doorbell rang.

‘I hope that's not Linda Kitson,' said Pam. ‘I don't want to have to stop and get nattering to her.'

She went to the door, and the policeman and the police-woman told her the bank had been robbed and it seemed that the robbers had taken her husband and Joyce Culver with them.

‘Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,' said Pam, and she went on saying it and sometimes screaming it while the policeman fetched Wendy Heysham and the policewoman made tea. Pam knocked over the tea and took the duty-free Bristol Cream out of the sideboard and poured a whole tumblerful and drank it at a gulp.

They fetched Christopher from the estate agent's and when he came in Pam was half-drunk and banging her fists on her knees and shouting, ‘Oh, God, oh, God.' Neither the police-woman nor Wendy Heysham could do anything with her. Christopher gave her another tumblerful of sherry in the hope it would shut her up, while Wilfred Summitt marched up and down, declaiming that hanging was too good for them, pole-axing was too good for them. After the electric chair, the pole-axe was his favourite lethal instrument. He would pole-axe them without a trial, he would.

Pam drank the second glass of sherry and passed out.

Wiser than those who had made his escape possible, Alan avoided the narrow lanes. He met few cars, overtook a tractor and a bus. The rain was falling too heavily for him to see the faces of people in other vehicles, so he supposed they would not be able to see his. There wasn't much petrol in the tank, only about enough to get him down into north Essex, and of course it wouldn't do to stop at a petrol station.

His body was still doing all the work, and that level of consciousness which deals only with practical matters. He couldn't yet think of what he had done, it was too enormous, and he didn't want to. He concentrated on the road and the heavy rain. At the Hadleigh turn he came out on to the A12 and headed for Colchester. The petrol gauge showed that his fuel was getting dangerously low, but in ten minutes he was on the Colchester bypass. He turned left at the North Hill roundabout and drove up North Hill. There was a car park off to the left here behind St Runwald's Street. He put the car in the car park which was unattended, took out his sandwiches, locked the car and dropped the sandwiches in a litter bin. Now what? Once they had found his car, they would ask at the station and the booking office clerk would remember him and remember that he had passed through alone. So he made for the bus station instead where he caught a bus to Marks Tey. There he boarded a stopping train to London. His coat, which was of the kind that is known as showerproof and anyway was very old, had let the rain right through to his suit. The money had got damp. As soon as he had got to wherever he was going, he would spread the notes out and dry them.

There were only a few other people in the long carriage, a woman with two small boys, a young man. The young man looked much the same as any other dark-haired boy of twenty with a beard, but as soon as Alan saw him he remembered where he had heard that ugly Suffolk-cockney accent before. Indeed, so great was the resemblance that he found himself glancing at the boy's hands which lay slackly on his knees. But of course the hands were whole, there was no mutilation of the right forefinger, no distortion of the nail.

The first time he had heard that voice it had asked him for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound note. He had pushed the coins across the counter, looked at the young bearded face, thought, Am I being offhand, discourteous, because he's
young
? So he had put the coins into a bag and for a brief instant, but long enough to register, seen the deformed finger close over it and scoop it into the palm of the hand.

Suppose he had remembered sooner, this clue the police would seize on, would it have stopped him? He thought not. And now? Now he was in it as much as the man with the beard, the strange voice, the walnut fingernail.

Some sort of meeting was in progress in the village hall at Capel St Paul, and among the cars parked in puddles on the village green were two Ford Escorts, a yellow and a silver-blue. The fifth key that Marty tried from his bunch unlocked the yellow one, but when he switched on the ignition he found there was only about a gallon of petrol in the tank. He gave that up and tried the silver-blue one. The tenth key fitted. The pointer on the gauge showed the tank nearly full. The tank of a Ford Escort holds about six gallons, so that would be all right. He drove off quickly, correctly guessing – wasn't he a country lad himself? – that the meeting had begun at two and would go on till four.

The van he had parked fifty yards up the road. They made Joyce get out at gunpoint and get into the Ford, and Marty drove the van down a lane and left it under some bushes at the side of a wood. There was about as much chance of anyone seeing them on a wet March afternoon in Capel St Paul as there would have been on the moon. Marty felt rather pleased with himself, his nervousness for a while allayed.

‘We can't leave her tied up when we get on the A12,' he said. ‘There's windows in the back of this motor. Right?'

‘I do have eyes,' said Nigel, and he climbed over the seat and undid Joyce's hands and took the gags off her mouth and her eyes. Her face was stiff and marked with weals where the stockings had bitten into her flesh, but she swore at Nigel and she actually spat at him, something she had never in her life done to anyone before. He stuck the gun against her ribs and wiped the spittle off his cheek.

‘You wouldn't shoot me,' said Joyce. ‘You wouldn't dare.'

‘You ever heard the saying that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb? If we get caught we go inside for life anyway on account of we've killed Groombridge. That's murder.'

‘Get it, do you?' said Marty. ‘They couldn't do any more to us if we'd killed a hundred people, so we're not going to jib at you, are we?'

Joyce said nothing.

‘What's your name?' said Nigel.

Joyce said nothing.

‘OK, Miss J. M. Culver, be like that, Jane, Jenny or whatever. I can't introduce us,' Nigel said loudly to make sure Marty got the message, ‘for obvious reasons.'

‘Mr Groombridge's got a wife and two children,' said Joyce.

‘Tough tit,' said Nigel. ‘We'd have picked a bachelor if we'd known. If you gob at me again I'll give you a bash round the face you won't forget.'

They turned on to the A12 at twenty-five past two, following the same route Alan Groombridge had taken twenty minutes before. There was little traffic, the rain was torrential, and Marty drove circumspectly, neither too fast nor too slowly, entering the fast lane only to overtake. By the time the police had set up one of their checkpoints on the Colchester bypass, stopping all cars and heavier vehicles, the Ford Escort was passing Witham, heading for Chelmsford.

Joyce said, ‘If you put me out at Chelmsford I promise I won't say a thing. I'll hang about in Chelmsford and get something to eat, you can give me five pounds of what you've got there, and I won't go to the police till the evening. I'll tell them I lost my memory.'

‘You've only got one shoe,' said Marty.

‘You can put me down outside a shoe shop. I'll tell the police you had masks on and you blindfolded me. I'll tell them . . .' the greatest disguise Joyce could think of ‘. . .  you were old!'

‘Forget it,' said Nigel. ‘You say you would but you wouldn't. They'd get it out of you. Make up your mind to it, you come with us.'

The first of the rush hour traffic was leaving London as they came into it. This time Marty got on to the North Circular Road at Woodford, and they weren't much held up till they came to Finchley. From there on it was crawling all the way, and Marty, who had stood up to the ordeal better than Nigel, now felt his nerves getting the better of him. Part of the trouble was that in the driving mirror he kept his eye as much on those two in the back of the car as on the traffic behind. Of course it was all a load of rubbish about Nigel killing that bank manager, he couldn't have done that, and he wouldn't do anything to the girl either if she did anything to attract the attention of other drivers. It was only a question of whether the girl knew it. She didn't seem to. Most of the time she was hunched in the corner behind him, her head hanging. Maybe she thought other people would be indifferent, pass by on the other side like that bit they taught you in Sunday School, but Marty knew that wasn't so from the time when a woman had grabbed him and he'd only just escaped the store detective.

He began to do silly things like cutting in and making other drivers hoot, and once he actually touched the rear bumper of the car in front with the front bumper of the Escort. Luckily for them, the car he touched had bumpers of rubber composition and its driver was easy-going, doing no more than call out of his window that there was no harm done. But it creased Marty up all the same, and by the time they got to Brent Cross his hands were jerking up and down on the steering wheel and he had stalled out twice because he couldn't control his clutch foot properly.

Still, now they were nearly home. At Staples Corner he turned down the Edgware Road, and by ten to five they were outside the house in Cricklewood, the Escort parked among the hundred or so other cars that lined the street on both sides.

Nigel didn't feel sympathy, but he could see Marty was spent, washed up. So he took the gun and pushed it into Joyce's back and made her walk in front of him with Marty by her side, his arm trailing over her shoulder like a lover's. On the stairs they met Bridey, the Irish girl who had the room next to Marty's, on her way to work as barmaid in the Rose of Killarney, but she took no notice of them beyond saying an off-hand hallo. She had often seen Nigel there before and she was used to Marty bringing girls in. If he had brought a girl's corpse in, carrying it in his arms, she might have wondered about it for a few minutes, but she wouldn't have done anything, she wouldn't have gone to the police. Two of her brothers had fringe connections with the IRA and she had helped overturn a car when they had carried the hunger strike martyr's body down from the Crown to the Sacred Heart. She and her whole family avoided the police.

Marty's front door had a Yale lock on it and another, older, lock with a big iron key. They pushed Joyce into the room and Nigel turned the iron key. Marty fell on the mattress, face-downwards, but Joyce just stood, looking about her at the dirt and disorder, and bringing her hands together to clasp them over her chest.

‘Next we get shot of the vehicle,' said Nigel.

Marty didn't say anything, Nigel kicked at the mattress and lit the wick of the oil heater – it was very cold – and then he said it again. ‘We have to get shot of the car.'

Marty groaned. ‘Who's going to find it down there?'

‘The fuzz. You have to get yourself together and drive it some place and dump it. Right?'

‘I'm knackered.' Marty heaved himself up and pushed a pile of dirty clothes on to the floor. ‘I got to have a drink.'