Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (11 page)

The report was sharp and loud between the rocks, and followed closely by a gasping grunt and a curious, waspish whine. The dark shape before him buckled suddenly sideways, clutching at its knee, and went down in a toppling fall on to the stones, sliding downhill a yard with scrambling feet before it found a stable resting-place. What astonished Luke most was that the other gun didn’t go off, but he had no time to speculate on the reason. Without a word he launched himself forward down the path, swung Bunty before him past the grovelling, groaning, cursing man on the ground, and charged after her.

The threshing shape heaved suddenly, as if the rock had risen under him; an arm came up and reached for him. He hurdled the body blindly, felt the fingers claw at his ankle and miss their hold. Then he came down by ill luck on shifting stones that rolled away from under his foot and flung him on his back, knocking the breath out of him, and half the sense with it. The hand that had missed his ankle scrabbled after him hungrily, and found a grip on his hair. A solid weight rolled over on top of him, holding him down; the hand shifted to his mouth. Not to his throat, his mouth! That was it, that was why no shot, either, he realised, struggling to free his arms from the weight that pinned them. They wanted no sound carrying for miles up-coast and down over the sounding-board of this placid sea. This back-gate guard had been told to threaten, not to fire. In that case Luke had good reason to be glad of his own single shot; someone, somewhere, might have heard. Bunty, he thought desperately, wrenching one arm clear and jabbing upwards viciously under a thick jaw, scream,
now
, while you’ve got the chance, and keep on screaming. They might cut and run yet. But what was the use, she wasn’t a screamer. Not a sound from her!

An arm swung at his head, and he rolled aside from the blow and felt something hard graze his temple and clang like metal on the rock. Whalebone fingers ground deep into his cheeks, clamping his lips against his teeth. He fought for breath, and heard his opponent pumping in sobbing gasps of air and spending them in incoherent, monotonous curses, hissing with pain between the words that were hardly words. When the weight on top of him shifted for another attempt at clubbing him with the gun, he heaved up one knee and tried to throw his incubus from him, but it was too heavy to be lifted or unbalanced so easily. And from somewhere above, a crazy accompaniment to this disordered scene, came the busy, absorbed sound of feet descending endlessly towards them, like the Goons padding along some impossibly long radio corridor to open the door to one more visitor to Bedlam.

It was Bunty, however, who reached them first, Bunty with a sizable stone in her two hands, and some furious atavism stirring in her that made fear of secondary importance. It was not a particularly well-chosen stone, but she had had to grope for it in the dark. Nor was she very deft at using it; perhaps she was right, and they both of them had some built-in prohibition against killing that handicapped them badly in a situation like this. But she did her best. The stone thudded against the back of a classically Alpine skull, low towards where the neck should have been if there had been any neck, and rolled down hunched shoulders to bounce away down the slope. The throttling hand slackened, the weight slumped with a grunt over Luke’s threshing body. Bunty, taking what she could find, reached over the wide shoulders to seize the lapels of the man’s raincoat, and drag it back with all her strength to pinion his upper arms. Luke heaved himself clear with a convulsion that sent them all three slipping and staggering downhill; and Bunty caught at his hand and helped to pull him to his feet.

They were at the edge of the jetty, hand in hand, the injured man dragging himself along after them half-stunned and moaning, when the three men from above overtook and fell upon them. Luke, swinging to fight them off a shade too late, went down heavily beneath two of them, and stayed down. Bunty, turning at the edge of the water, watched the small, murderous black eye of a revolver advance at leisure until it touched her breast.

“All righ’t, sweetheart,” said the small, murderous, black-avised man behind the gun, in just the mild, metallic, indifferent voice the gun might have used, “upstairs again, and see and be a lady on the way. Your boy-friend here can’t afford no slips on your part. He’s got enough troubles as it is. Walk!”

Bunty walked, at an even and sedate pace, leading that procession up the cliff-path and back to the house, with the gun not a yard from her back, and a torch pricking her consciousness occasionally to remind her that every step was watched. She walked with the same erect stride she always had, stretching her long legs to the steeper steps without slackening speed. There was nothing she could do, except make it clear that she had no tricks to play. Luke was only a few yards behind her, and the enemy, though reduced to three against two, had now four guns at their disposal, and none ranged against them. There was no sense in provoking death.

Far behind them among the rocks, the wounded man hoisted himself painfully from stair to stair, dragging one leg and leaving a long smear of blood behind him. When the prisoners were safely in the house and under guard, perhaps one of his fellows would help him to finish the journey. Now it seemed that he was of no importance. His thin, quiet cursing followed them up to the terrace, and behind it like a backcloth rolled the soft, absorbed night-singing of a calm sea.

How queer, thought Bunty involuntarily, I still don’t know where we are. Somewhere on the east coast of Scotland. North of Muirdrum, I remember the policeman there thought he’d recognised Luke’s car passing through. Luke mentioned going into Forfar. Her mind sketched in, with lightheaded clarity, a map of the Angus coastline. Somewhere between Arbroath and Montrose? Up the coast there must be Lunan Bay, and farther north are the Bullars of Buchan, where Doctor Johnson insisted on sailing into the rock cauldron in a small boat. You can only do it when it’s calm.
Calm
! Like to-night. You could do it to-night.

Luke came up the path after her between two guns. The key of the boat-house had been taken from him along with the gun from the same pocket. All their evidence lost. He was bruised, sore and sick with chagrin; but most of all he raged that he had not sent Bunty home or taken her to the safety of the nearest police station in the morning, while there’d been time, time they’d frittered away in supposing that they had only the police to contend with. Now they knew better, and now was too late.

But at every step he felt that there was something wrong, that something about Bunty was not as he had expected it to be, and his battered and confused mind could not run the discrepancy to earth. Not until they were hustled and prodded through the back door into the kitchen, and there penned in a corner until someone found the fuse-box. The wounded man, out in the darkness, laboriously groaned and fumbled his way up towards the terrace, and no one seemed to care. If you’re incapacitated, you’re finished with. Throw the broken one away and get a new one. The modern trend even with human beings, it seemed. Luke shivered, but even in the middle of this horror there was a grain of comfort that glowed securely, so clear was the division between himself and these people with whom, for a while, he had been confusing himself.

It was worth finding out, even if it was the last thing he did.

“Draw the curtains,” ordered the irresponsibly cheerful voice from inside the broom-cupboard. “Don’t want to embarrass the visitors, do we? Neighbours are nosy enough without encouraging ’em.” A curious, high-pitched giggle echoed brassily out of the enclosed space.

“They’re drawn,” said the small, dark, deadly one. “Get on with it.”

“All right, the current’s on.”

The third man flipped down the light-switch, the round fluorescent fixture blinked its daylight eye once, and then glowed steadily. And there they were, all five of them, two prisoners and three captors. No, six altogether, the lame man was just fumbling his way through the doorway, holding by the latch with all his weight. They hauled him inside not out of any concern for him, but so that they could close the door and keep the light within.

It was then that Luke realised at last what had been wrong with Bunty. How could she have used both hands to heave up that rock and crack this wretch on the head with it? She’d been carrying something when they set out. She wasn’t carrying anything now, except the handbag that swung from her wrist. She had both hands in the pockets of her light grey coat, and was looking round at them all measuringly and warily, her face stonily calm. She met even his eyes, and her expression didn’t change, was significantly careful not to change.

Somewhere, at some moment which he could not locate in his frantic recapitulation, Bunty had disposed of the better part of fifteen thousand pounds. The package of banknotes and Pippa Gallier’s passport and air ticket had vanished without trace.

Nothing else on either of ’em,” reported the giggler, shoving Luke back into the corner of the wicker settee with a careless vigour that made the white frame creak indignantly. “Never thought there would be. I told you these babes are sharper than he reckoned.”

So there was another he, not so far present. They had been gradually coming to some such conclusion. Why should all hands have kept off them so indifferently, otherwise? The one who called the tune wasn’t here yet. These four were merely waiting, and filling in time with the necessary preliminaries while they waited.

Bunty and Luke sat side by side in the two-seater settee, pushed well back into the window embrasure, as far as possible from the door of the living-room. It was easy for one man to control them there. The third man, the youngest, the dimmest, but perhaps the most vicious, too, sat on a chair placed carefully before them, far enough away to be out of their reach, close enough to have them both infallibly covered. He held his gun as though he loved it, as a call-girl might hold diamonds, and his eyes above it were like chips of bluish stone, flat and impervious, a little mad, the cunningly inlaid eyes of a stone scribe from later Egypt, built up with slivers of lapis lazuli and onyx and mother-of-pearl to give a lifelike semblance of humanity. He was dressed in what his kind and generation would certainly classify as sharpish gear, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. Bunty, watching him, sat very still indeed. The little dark man would kill for what seemed to him sufficient reason, and without any qualms except for his own safety afterwards. The other two would probably kill if they were ordered to. But this young one was the kind that might go off without warning, like a faulty grenade, and kill to ease his tension, or relieve his boredom, or simply because it occurred to him momentarily as something it would be fun to do, and no consideration of his own safety would keep him back, because thought had nothing to do with his processes.

The giggler could have passed for normal any time he liked. He was big and rosy, and looked like a country butcher, well-fleshed but not yet run to fat. There was nothing at all suspect about him, except the slightly hysterical pitch of his laughter.

And the other man, the one who had been posted well down the rock path to intercept them, sat hunched in one of the big chairs now, with his left trouser-leg rolled up above the knee, painfully sponging at his calf, where Luke’s shot had torn its way straight through to ricochet from the rock behind. He had bled a lot, the water in the bowl at his feet was red. He pawed self-pityingly at the thick white flesh, and took no notice of what the others were doing. The giggler had fetched down gauze and wool and a bandage for him from the bathroom cupboard, and the victim was totally absorbed in nursing his wound. And indeed, thought Bunty, eyeing the damage, he must have been in a good deal of pain. When he had finished his bandaging, and got up gingerly to try his weight on the injured leg, all he could manage was a slow hobble, clinging to the furniture for support.

He was the biggest of them, and the oldest, a massive, muscular person with a white, sad, fleshy face. His hair was receding, and his expression was anxious and defensive. The small dark one had called him Quilley. There was something odd in the attitude of the younger ones to him, the way they left him out of their calculations, or included him only as an afterthought. Or perhaps it was not so odd, in such a world as theirs, that a man’s stock should crash when he’s disabled, or has got the worst of an encounter. He was a doubtful asset now, and a potential liability. Some wild animals, the kind that hunt in packs, kill off their injured or infirm members, as some sort of measure of social hygiene.

“It’s here, though,” said the small dark man with certainty. “It’s here somewhere. Either we find it, or he tells us where. The place ain’t that big. You sure about the car, then, Skinner?”

“I’m sure,” said the giggler cheerfully, spinning the garage key round his finger with absent-minded dexterity. “Clean as a whistle.”

“You didn’t miss out on anywhere? Under the back seat? Down the upholstery?”

“I didn’t miss out on anything. There’s nothing there.”

“What you wasting time for?” the boy with the levelled gun demanded querulously, without removing his unwinking stone gaze from his charges. “I could get it out of him easy. Or
her
!” The flick of excitement on the last word indicated that he would rather prefer that alternative. Bunty supposed that in its obscene fashion it was a compliment, but if so, it was one she could well have done without. She could feel Luke’s muscles stiffening beside her, his whole body rigid with anxiety. She cast one glance at him, and found his fixed profile almost too still. The cheek nearer to her was bruised and soiled. His mouth was drawn and stiff with fear for her.

“Yeah, I know!” said the dark man sardonically. “And all at once we got no clues and no witness. If anybody shuts
this
one’s mouth for good, it ain’t going to be while
I
’m in charge. Think the boss’d wear that from anybody but himself? Sooner you than me, mate! But till he gets here, you take orders from me, and my orders are,
lay off
. OK?”

“Well, OK, Blackie, it’s all one to me. I’m only saying…”

“You always are. Quit saying, and just keep your eye on ’em, that’s all, while we take this room apart.” He cast a long look round the airy living-room, and ended eye-to-eye with Luke. He wasn’t expecting anything to come easily, but he went through the motions of asking. “You could make it easy on yourself and us, kid. In the end you may have to, you know that? What
did
you do with the money?”

“What money?” said Luke.

Skinner, dismantling the drawers of the writing-desk one by one, giggled on his unnerving high note. “Get that! He knows nothing about any money.
What money
!”

“All right,” said Blackie, sighing. “You want it the hard way, you can have it. We’ve got time. But don’t say I didn’t ask you nicely. If you think better of it, just say, any time. We’re going to find it in the end.”

And they set to work to find it, emptying books from the shelves, letters from the bureau, rolling back the rugs for loose blocks in the parquet, but discovering none. They took the living-room to pieces and put it together again, neatly and rapidly but without haste, with the thoroughness of long practice. But they found nothing of interest. And Bunty and Luke, so close to each other that their arms brushed at every slight movement, sat and watched the search with narrow attention, and kept silent. They had nothing to say in these circumstances, even to each other. They hardly ventured to look at each other, for fear even that exchange should give something away. Yet something had passed between them, tacitly and finally. Neither of them would dream of giving in, unless or until the case was beyond hope. Perhaps not even then; they were both stubborn people. He didn’t know what Bunty had done with the parcel of notes, but if she’d had the presence of mind to hide it even out there in the dark, pursued and ambushed as they’d been, then she certainly wasn’t going to give away its whereabouts now without the toughest of struggles. And Luke couldn’t because he didn’t know.

“Clean as wax-polish in here,” concluded Blackie, looking round the room. “Let’s have a go at the kitchen.”

The kitchen, compact though it was, was full of fitments that would keep them busy for quite a while. Blackie sized up the job in one frowning stare, and jerked his head at the youth guarding the prisoners.

“Hey, you, Con… hand over to Quilley and come and give us a hand here.”

“What, and leave nobody but him between this lot and the front door?” Con said disrespectfully. “With the lock broke? Or did you forget?”

With impassive faces and strained senses Bunty and Luke filed away for reference one more scrap of information that might, just might, with a lot of luck, be relevant and useful. They’d had to break the lock to get in. The bolts hadn’t been shot, so there might still be those to contend with, supposing a chance ever offered; but on the whole it was unlikely that they would have bothered to shoot them home now. They were expecting the boss; and the boss sounded the sort of man who would expect all doors to open before him without delay.

“Watch it!” said Blackie, without personal animosity. “You’re nearly too fly to live with, these days, you are. So if he can’t sprint, he’ll still have a gun, won’t he?”

“Yes, and instructions not to do any real damage with it!”

Con talked too much for his own good. That little weakness might have been there to be discovered in any case, but there’d been no need to spell it out and underline it. For the sake of the information they—or one of them— held, Bunty and Luke must at all costs be preserved alive until they had confided it. Once the secret had been prised out of them, of course, they were expendable enough.

“What if they jump him? So he plugs one of ’em in the leg, and the other’s out of the room and out the front door, and us all back there in the kitchen. And that’ll sound good when you make your report, Blackie, me old Crowe.”

“All right, then, we’ll make dead sure. Bring ’em in here with you, and lock ’em in the store. There’s no window in there, and only one door, and that’s into the kitchen. That’ll make four of us between them and any way out. Satisfied?”

“Whatever you say.” Con rose, unfolding his long legs and arms with the stiffly articulated movements of a grasshopper. He made a brisk upward gesture with the gun. “Come on, then, let’s have the pair of you. You heard the gentleman. You want showing the way to the store? Hey, Blackie, there’s nothing useful in there, is there? Garden shears or sécateurs, or like that?”

“Nah, nothing, we done in there. Bring ’em along!”

“After
you
, lady!” said Con with a whinnying laugh, and ground the barrel of his revolver hard into Luke’s ribs out of sheer exuberance. From his chair Quilley watched them go with harassed, apathetic eyes, as if he had resigned perforce from the whole business, and was waiting with apprehension for someone to decide what was to be done with him now.

All Mrs. Alport’s primrose-coloured kitchen fitments stood open, and the giggler was grubbing among the taps under the sink. The store measured only three feet by two, and some of that was taken up by shallow shelves at the back, where Reggie Alport kept his electrical spares, bulbs, fuse-wire, plugs and adaptor. Luke had to stoop to enter it; even Bunty’s hair brushed the roof.

Con watched them fold themselves uncomfortably and closely together in this upright coffin, and shrilled with horse-laughter as he closed and locked the door on them.

“Nice and cosy for two… I call that just the job. Hey, Blackie, I hope you know what you’re doing. I can’t see ’em wanting to come out o’ there.” He thumped the locked door just once with the flat of his hand. “Have fun!” he called, and went off to sack Louise Alport’s cupboards.

In the darkness, smelling of timber and fine dust, Luke shifted gently to make more room for her, and drew her closely into his arms; there was no other way of finding adequate space. Her head fitted into the hollow of his shoulder and neck; she felt his cheek pressed against her hair, and his lips close to her ear.

“Bunty…” The finest ardent thread of a whisper. “Did you understand? They can’t lock the front door, they had to break the lock. Bunty, I’m going to try to start something… the first chance I get, when they fetch us out of here…”

“No,” she breathed into his ear as softly and us urgently, “you mustn’t. They’ll shoot you…”

“Not until they’ve found out what they want. They don’t want to go to extremes until
he
gets here. You heard them. They as good as said
he
’s already rubbed out one person too soon, before he got his questions answered. Bunty, I’m going to try it. What else is there for us? I’ll try to give you the item, but when I cut loose,
you run
.. . .”

“No!” she said, an almost soundless protest.

“
Yes
. I’ll cover you… somehow I will. You go straight for the front door and out. And, Bunty… don’t stay on the road,
get into the trees
… This lot are car men, cross-country you can leave them standing…”

“I’m not going,” she said.

“
Yes
.
.
. you’ve
got
to go. You can go to the police, then, you can tell them. I’ll stick it out here till they come.”

“In what sort of shape?” she whispered bitterly.

“Alive… and not a murderer. Better shape than I was in this time last night.”

“But Luke, listen… the police have had time by now to check up on that name and address I gave them. Suppose they do? Suppose they find out your friends have never heard of me, and the address I gave doesn’t exist? They’ll be back to find out what I’m up to, what’s going on here. This is the one place they’ll make for—
they’ll
come to
us
. They could be back any moment,” she said, and her breath was warm on his cheek, turning his heart faint and crazed with love.

“Yes, they could,” he said, and his whispering voice trembled with the effort it put into being convincing; but she knew he didn’t believe in it.

Neither did she, altogether, but it was at least a possibility. Especially if, by any remote chance, someone had brought in that purse with Bunty Felse’s name on it, and tried to return it, and so set the Midshire police hunting for a missing woman, whose description would fit the totally unexpected woman in the Alports’ cottage here in Angus. Such a long and complicated “if ”; but no one is more likely to fit diverse pieces of a puzzle patiently together than the police, whose job it is. And no one has better communications.

“But I want you out,” he said, “before it comes to shooting. Even if they do come, it might be touch and go. I’d rather get you away. If I can make that chance, promise to try… promise me, Bunty…”

She lifted a hand and touched his cheek gently, let her palm lie there for a long moment holding him, partly in apology, partly as a distraction, because she had no intention of making any promises. When the time came she would play it as seemed best, weighing the chances for him as well as she could in the split second she would have for consideration. But she could not conceive of any combination of circumstances that was likely to induce her to leave him now.