The Unkindest Cut (20 page)

When a sort of calm had been restored and Jane had managed to get the small group seated in the kitchen with mugs of tea, Bright reviewed his report which, stripped of irrelevancies, boiled down to this: ‘God alone knows where that young madwoman's got to. I've had every man and woman I could raise scouring the woods and empty buildings and there's no sign of her, none at all.'

‘Did you tell them to keep looking up?' Jane asked. ‘She's a climber, remember. I told Ian Fellowes. It's human instinct to flee upwards but searchers hardly ever look up.'

‘Was I in the room when you told Mr Fellowes? But never mind it for now. The leaves are still on the trees so it would be easy enough to hide yourself among the branches of a big hardwood, and now the light's gone. From what she was saying, it's you she blames for her downfall and I'm damn sure it's you she's coming after. Short-handed as we are, we could never cover the whole area and we'll have to use a few men to cover the railway and the bus stops in case she makes a run for it. Do you think she'd know how to steal a car?'

‘For a while,' Jane said, ‘about two years ago, she was very much in love with Duggie Gough.' Young Gough had been a prominent local car thief, now believed to be in Canada but still pursuing the same profession.

‘And now she's been going around with another mechanically-minded young yob,' Bright said gloomily. ‘The question is, does her hatred of you outshine her wish to escape; and on the whole, going by the look I saw on her face, I would say probably yes. Anyway, I can't take any chances. Is there anywhere you can go, anyone the pair of you could possibly go and stay with a long way from here, where you'd be safe for the night? Obviously you must tend your patients tomorrow.'

Jane might have shrugged off the threat from Helen Maple, but Bright, usually the most stolid man in the tradition of British policemen, was obviously nervous and he communicated his nerves to Jane, who began to feel a fluttering of her insides as she explained that Roland's parents were in New Zealand and that her own were dead.

‘Then all I can do,' said Bright, ‘is guard you as well as circumstances allow. I've phoned Edinburgh and Honeypot promised that she'll send every man who can be spared … in the morning. Same story all round. Scraping the bottom of the barrel and working the men in shifts, I reckon I can keep watch on the main road and the car parks and put a warning out to the bus company. That'll leave me four men in or near this house during the night. That's one man near each door plus one outside this room. And that includes me. Not a lot to fend off a madwoman, especially one who's a skilled climber and a bit of an athlete, by all accounts. Tomorrow, if we haven't caught her, we'll see about finding a safe house for you. Maybe your sister in Dublin …'

Jane made a face. She had largely overcome her dislike of her sister but their childhood hatred still waited in the background, ready to erupt at the first careless word, and her acceptance was not reciprocated.

Neither Mr nor Mrs Fox felt like doing any useful work during what was left of the evening. Bright would have been seriously hampered in making and maintaining his dispositions if the householders had been pottering about the place. An early night seemed to be called for. Happily, each was immersed in a lengthy book at the time – Jane in a new treatise on veterinary practice and Roland proofreading Simon Parbitter's latest crime novel. Thus occupied, they found that the time passed swiftly.

Jane, whose habit it was to sleep in the nude, rose once before turning out the light and wrapped herself in a towelling bathrobe with a dressing gown over the top in order to make tea and to dispense biscuits to the officers on guard duty as well as to Roland and herself. The night had become hot and stuffy, so that to have attempted to sleep in those unaccustomed gowns would have been wasted effort but Jane, remembering the likelihood of there being a man on the landing, hung them carefully behind the door. She often had to rise in the night.

The night was also very still. When the lights were out and they were trying to settle, Jane said, ‘Roley, are you afraid?'

Roland was fairly sure that any reply suggesting that Helen was
only a girl
might be taken amiss. ‘I'd be nervous,' he said, ‘except that it's not my job to be nervous. It's Sergeant Bright's job to keep her well away from you and me and I don't see what I can do to help.'

‘I can't think of anything very practical,' said Jane. ‘In a way, that's what scares me. Whenever I'm doing something useful that contributes to our safety, I'm never scared; but waiting for somebody else to protect me, that's terrifying. We don't know how good Sergeant Bright will be at the job.'

‘I can understand that, I think. Would it help if I got out your shotgun and had it ready?'

Her whisper came out of the darkness. ‘That would be waiting for somebody else to act. And you're not used to it. Nor are you licensed to handle it. If you fired a shot with policemen all around there might be hell to pay. But if you gave it to me with a couple of shells, that might help. The law would allow me to fire a shot if I had good reason to believe that my safety or my possessions were being threatened.'

Roland sighed, not so much at the thought of getting out of the warm bed but more at having to detach himself from a warm and naked Jane. He switched on his bedside lamp and quitted the bed. Jane's shotgun was one of her several bequests from her great-grandfather. It was an old gun but of very high quality by a top maker.

With only one gun in the house, the police had accepted that a solid oak built-in wardrobe reinforced by a digital lock would be acceptable security. In addition, the wardrobe was, as usual, so full of clothes that the gun was not immediately obvious. Jane had some idea of the value of a top class hammer gun from the 1870s by Westley Richards and had had to stop Roland airing his damp laundry on the barrel. He found and extracted the gun and took it to Jane, handing her a brace of orange cartridges separately.

Jane loaded the barrels and laid the gun beside her right leg. She knew full well that a hammer gun, not having a safety catch, should not be cocked until the moment before firing; but that moment can be an eternity when danger threatens. She cocked both hammers. Then, comforted by the familiar feel of the comb, the action and the trigger guard under her hand, she pulled the single sheet up and fell immediately asleep.

J
ane was jerked awake an hour later by a hubbub on the landing. The second that it took for consciousness to dawn allowed the confrontation to develop. Jane's eyes opened on an appalling scene. A gibbering madwoman was arriving at the foot of the bed. Her hair, threaded with leaves, was flying wildly and she was screeching threats beyond comprehension. A subsequent enquiry tracked her route through the downstairs lavatory window and up what had once been the shaft for a dumb waiter to the upstairs landing before her presence had been detected, but Jane knew nothing of that. Of Roland, who had gone to answer a call of nature, there was no sign.

Helen was still brandishing the knife clotted with dried blood, completing a spectacle that was awe-inspiring enough to cause the few officers present to hesitate for what might have been a fatal second. To Jane, in those first fraught seconds, they seemed a crowd but not a useful crowd. In an instant of panic she clutched the shotgun, lifting the muzzles and pulling both triggers.

The consequences followed a predestined path. The hammers came down on the strikers which in turn struck the percussion caps. The styphnate in the percussion caps fired small spurts of flame into the nitro powder. About fifty grains of nitro powder sent just over two ounces of lead shot on its way. The shot passed close over Helen's head and blew a hole in the wall just below the ceiling. Her head was below the line of the shot but it was in the path of the sound and shock wave.

Stunned by the blast, she nearly poked her own eye out as she brought up her hands in a defensive gesture. Instead, she jabbed herself in the forehead. Any lingering clarity of thought went by the way. In a monumental explosion of fury she hurled down the knife, pinning her own left foot to the floor by the web between the first and second toes.

Now that she was no longer holding the knife, the four policemen who had been hampering each other by crowding with Roland through the bedroom door were encouraged to grab her by the wrists. Before taking any further action, however, they were frozen to the floor by the final outcome of the two shots. The amount of gas generated by those two shots was not great. Cold, it would have been of no great significance. Propulsive powders when fired expand, cold, by a factor of at least six thousand, but they leave the muzzles at a very high temperature. Thus the volume was very much increased, quite enough to fill the space beneath the sheet. The single sheet was wafted well on its way towards the ceiling where it hovered, much like a giant stingray in a sub-ocean film.

Jane rolled over on to her face and, not for the first time, prayed for the gift of invisibility. She could only give thanks that, this time, there were no cameras clicking and flashing as they recorded her shame for posterity.

A
few months later, around the time of Helen Maple's court case, Jane and Roland welcomed a little baby girl into Whinmount after a particularly long and arduous labour. The run-up to the trial and the necessary rehashing of witness statements and evidence had been rather eclipsed by this happy event, but on the day when Jane was expected to give her evidence in person, she was there, with special permission to leave the courtroom every three hours during her testimony – should it last that long – and go and feed her ravenous daughter. Roland had come into his own since the birth of Gilda and taken over the general day-to-day caring for her during the trial. There were even discussions between Jane and Roland that he would become the full-time carer and stay-at-home father …

The trial over, Helen found guilty of murder and several counts of aggravated burglary and in prison for the next ten years at least (surely her anger wouldn't allow her to be released early for good behaviour) life could try and get back to some semblance of normality once again. Jane's veterinary practice was flourishing, Roland's novel was on hold whilst he spent most of his time looking after his daughter and taking on other roles to do with the running of their household – all very much to everyone's surprise, including his own!

Ian Fellowes got over his injury fairly swiftly and sent everyone at the station on a self-defence course in case they should be faced with a mad knife-wielding woman ever again. And poor Alistair Ledbetter continued to pursue and refine his gambling habit and never did learn his lesson in either the women he chose as partners nor how to live within his means.