Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (6 page)

He took the last yard in one fast, light step, and reached for her with long hands crooked; and she stooped under his grasp instead of leaning back from him, and slashed upwards at his throat with all her weight, uncoiling towards him like a spring. She felt the impact, and sudden heat licked her fingers, but in the same instant he had her by the wrist, and had wrenched hand and weapon away from his grazed neck, forcing her arm back until her grip relaxed. Distantly, through the roaring in her ears, she heard the nail-file tinkle on the wood blocks of the floor, a light, derisory sound. Then his groping hands found their hold on her throat, and chaotic eruption of light and darkness blinded her eyes.

She put up her hands and clawed at her murderer’s face, until the pressure on her throat grew to an irresistible terror, and then an agony, and she could only fight feebly to drag his hands away. Her eyes burned, quite darkened now, there was nothing left in existence but a panic struggle for breath. A sound like sobbing thudded in her ears, the great breaths she could no longer drag into her lungs seemed to pulse through her failing flesh from some other source. Someone else was dying with her, she heard him in extremity, moaning and whining with pain, and long after she had no voice left to complain with, that lamentable sound followed her down into darkness and silence.

Consciousness began again in an explosion of fiery pain; the red-hot band of steel round her neck expanded, burst, disintegrated. She was dead, she must be dead. Or why the delirious cool rush of air into her body again at will, the abrupt withdrawal of pressure and fear, the sudden wild awareness of relief and ease? Nothing was holding her any more, nothing confined her, her own limp hands wandered freely to touch her bruised throat. Her knees gave way under her slowly, she slid down against the arm of the wicker chair, and collapsed into the cushions like a disjointed doll, and lay gulping in air greedily, tasting it as never before, experiencing it as a sensuous delight. The darkness lifted slowly. She opened her eyes, and colours and shapes danced dazzlingly before them. She saw sunlight reflected on the ceiling, and a shimmer that was the refractions of broken light from the motion of the sea.

Her eyes and her mind cleared together, into an unbelievable, unprecedented clarity. She lay still for a long moment, seeing the outlines of things round her with a brilliant intensity that was painful to her eyes after the darkness. The same room, the same signs of struggle, the fallen handbag on the floor, the broken tea-pot, the tablecloth dragged into disorderly folds. She was alive, she was intact. Not because of any miraculous intervention, but for solid reasons, in pursuit of which her mind stalked in silence within her recovering body. The clarity within there was as blinding and sharp as the clarity without.

She sat up slowly, clinging to the edge of the table, and looked round for her murderer.

Head-down in a dark huddle on the wicker settee, he lay clutching the orange-coloured cushions to his face with frantic energy, fingers, wrists, forearms corded with strain, as if he willed never to show himself to the light again. He had withdrawn from her the full width of the room when he snatched his hands away. Shuddering convulsions shook through him from head to foot; a touch, and he would fly apart and bleed to death. He was bleeding now, she saw the oblique graze on his neck oozing crimson, and staining the orange silk. Who had come nearer to killing?

It was at that moment that the black dolphin knocker on the front door banged peremptorily three times on its curling cast-iron wave.

The man huddled on the settee lay utterly still, the tremors suppressed by force, his breath held. He did not raise his head; he wanted never to raise it again. It was Bunty who dragged herself up out of her chair and went into action. She could move, she was in command of herself. And she knew what she was doing, now. Hurriedly she stooped for her handbag, and ran a comb through her hair. Would there be marks on her throat? Not yet, probably, but she shook out her chiffon scarf and tucked it in around her neck to make certain of being unremarkable. There was blood on her fingers; she dipped her handkerchief into the nearest liquid, which was the spilled tea on the table, and wiped the stains away.

“Give me the key!”

Speech hardly hurt at all. She had time to realise, even in that moment, how little she was damaged. He must have snatched his hands away from her as soon as he felt her pain.

He lifted his head at the sharp sound of her voice, and turned upon her a blind, mute face.

“The key, quickly! Give it to me!”

He sat up and felt through his pockets for it numbly, and held it out to her without a word. From his last safe place at the end of despair, where there is nothing left to lose or gain, he watched her walk out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. He heard the bolts of the front door drawn back, heard the key turned in the lock.

In those few yards Bunty lived through a total reassessment of everything that had happened to her. Her senses were abnormally acute, her mind moved with rapidity and certainty. She remembered things observed at the time without comprehension, and made sense of them. Her legs might be shaky under her, but mentally she was on her feet again.

She opened the door of the cottage with the accurately measured reserve of a woman alone, knocked up at an unusually early hour on a Sunday morning. Not too wide at first, ready to close it and slip the bolt again quickly if she didn’t like the look of her visitor; then surprised and relieved, setting it wide and coming confidently into the doorway.

The two uniformed policemen on the step of the porch gazed back at her in silence for a moment, more surprised to see her than she was to see them.

“Good morning!” said Bunty, and waited with the polite, questioning curiosity of the innocent to hear what they wanted of her.

“Good morning, ma’am!” The elder of the two shoved up his flat cap civilly on the furze-bush of his pepper-and-salt hair, and eyed her with circumspection, plainly finding her of a reassuring respectability. “Sorry if we startled you, but we saw a light in one of the windows here a while since, from up the coast road a piece, and knowing that the lady and gentleman who summer here have left, we wondered… You never know, just as well to check up, when a house is empty.”

“Oh, I
see
! Yes, of course, and how very good of you! Reggie and Louise will be so grateful,” said Bunty warmly, “to know that you keep such a good watch on their place. I’m a friend of the Alports, they’ve lent me their cottage for a long week-end. I drove up last night.”

“Ah, that accounts for the light, then.” He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and why shouldn’t he, when she produced the owners’ names so readily? An Englishwoman of forty, dressed in a smart and rather expensive grey jersey suit, must seem probable enough as an acquaintance of the Alports; indeed, it was unlikely that such a person would ever find her way to this spot unless directed by the owners. “And you found everything in order here, ma’am? No signs of anyone prowling around in the night? No trouble at all?”

The younger policeman, tall and raw-boned, and surely a local boy, had drawn back out of the porch, and was using his eyes to good purpose without seeming to probe. The front window, through which he had already taken a sharp look, would show him only a room where everything must be as the Alports had left it. He was eyeing the hard gravel, too, but all it would tell him was that a car had arrived here, stood a little while before the door, and then been put sensibly away in the garage, which is exactly what one would expect the English lady to do with her car on arrival. Now he was turning his blue and innocent regard upon Bunty, and taking her in from head to foot, without apparent question of her genuineness, rather with a degree of critical pleasure on his own account.

“Trouble?” said Bunty, wide-eyed. Her smile faded into faint anxiety, nicely tempered with curiosity. “No, nobody’s been here. Everything was all right when I arrived. Why, is something wrong?”

“Och, nothing for you to worry about, ma’am,” said the sergeant comfortably. “You’re no’ likely to be troubled here. Most like he’s gone on northwards.”

“
He
?” she echoed. “You mean there’s somebody you’re looking for? A
criminal
?”

“We’ve had warning to look out for a car, ma’am, a large old car, black, thought to be a Rover, registration NAQ 788. It’s known to have driven north out of England during the night. Constable at Muirdrum believes he saw the same car go past about three hours ago, heading for Arbroath, but he’s no’ sure of the number. We’re checking up and down all these roads, just in case. But there’s no call for you to worry, ma’am, you’ll be fine here.”

So no one, it seemed, was looking for her just yet. No one had mentioned that there’d been a woman aboard, most likely no one knew. Obviously they knew it hadn’t been a woman driving.

“NAQ 788,” she repeated thoughtfully. “A black Rover. I could get in touch with you if I do see anything of it, of course.”

“Ay, you could do that, ma’am. But I don’t think you’re likely to catch sight of him, I doubt he’s as far north as he can get by now.”

“What do you want him for?” Bunty asked inquisitively. A woman without curiosity would be suspect anywhere. “Has he run somebody down, or something?”

“Well, no’ just that!” She hadn’t expected a direct answer, and clearly she wasn’t going to get one, but his business-like, unalarmed attitude told her most of what she needed to know. “Constable somewhere down south had a narrow squeak, though,” he vouchsafed, after due consideration. And that was all she was going to get out of him; but it seemed that he had given a second thought to getting something out of her in exchange.

“We’ll be on our way then. Sorry if we disturbed you. And by the way, maybe I should have your name and home address, ma’am, just for information.”

She hadn’t been expecting that, but she was equal to it. Startled by her own readiness, she responded without hesitation: “I’m Rosamund Chartley—that’s
Mrs
. Chartley, of course…” The young one, if not the other, had long since assimilated the significance of her ring. “And I live at 17 Hampton Close, Hereford.” She couldn’t be sure how much he would know in advance about the Alports, but her use of their name had registered immediately, she might as well play for safety and assume that he knew their home town, too. She watched him write down her instant fiction, and smiled at him as he put his note-book away; not too encouragingly, on the contrary, with a slight intimation that if that was all she could do for him she would like to go back to her interrupted breakfast.

“Thank you, ma’am, we won’t keep you any longer now. And I’m sure ye needna be at all uneasy. Good morning, Mrs. Chartley!”

He re-adjusted his cap on the grizzled heather he wore for hair, summoned his subordinate with a flick of a finger, and they departed. She closed the door, and leaned back against it for a moment, listening. They had a car, they must have turned it on the gravel and withdrawn it into the shelter of the trees before knocking at the door. She heard it start up and wind away into the convolutions of the lane. Only then did she re-bolt and lock the door, and go back into the living-room.

The young man was sitting bolt upright on the settee, dark against the brilliance and shimmer of the sea, every nerve at stretch, his eyes fixed wildly on the empty doorway, waiting for her to reappear there. The gun was in the clenched right hand that lay on his knee, and his finger was crooked on the trigger.

She saw it instantly, and instantly understood. He must have lowered his hand in sheer stupefaction when the meaning of that astonishing performance of hers penetrated his mind, with his death only the tightening of a nerve away.

Oh, God, she thought, suppose he hadn’t waited to hear? Why didn’t I take it from him before I went to the door? But there’d been no time to consider everything. And thank God, he
had
waited, and confusion and bewilderment had kept him from dying. Or curiosity, perhaps, curiosity can be a valid reason for going on living, when no other is left.

So the first thing she had to do, without delay but without any hasty gesture that could startle him back into despair, was to cross the room to him, and gently take the thing out of his hand. He didn’t resist; his cramped fingers opened at her touch, and gave it up without protest. Enormous eyes, cloudy with wonder, devoured her face and had no attention for anything else.

“
Why
?” he asked, in a rustling whisper.

“You won’t need it now,” she said. But she knew that was not what he meant.

“Why didn’t you bring them in and give me up?
Why didn’t you tell them I tried to kill you
?”

Without a word in answer, she opened a drawer of the little writing-desk on the other side of the room, and thrust the gun far back out of sight. Then she came back to the settee and sat down beside him.

“Look,” she said urgently, “you and I have got to talk. We’ve got a little time now, and the car’s safest where it is. They won’t come looking for it here now—not yet!”

“But
why did you send them away
?”

“Never mind that. There are things I’ve got to know, and we may not have all that long. That girl in the car—
who is she
?”

“Her name’s Pippa Gallier,” he said, with the docility of despair, shock and hopeless bewilderment, but with some positive motion of faith, too, as though she had surprised him into drawing back the first of the bolts that sealed his terrible solitude from the world. “We were going to be married. I
thought
we were…”

“She’s a Comerbourne girl? That
is
where you teach, isn’t it? What was she? What did she do?”

“She worked at the big fashion shop, Pope Halsey’s, and did a bit of modelling for them when they had dress shows. She was an assistant buyer. She wasn’t a Comerbourne girl, though, her family belong to Birmingham. She had a little flat over one of the shops in Queen Street. Why?” he asked dully, but at least there was a grain of life in his voice now, and in his eyes, that never wavered from searching her face. He had some kind of stunned trust in her now that told him she must have a reason for probing these irremediable things. Nothing she did was wanton; it didn’t follow that she could change anything.

“And how did she come to die?”

“I shot her,” he said, staring through her and seeing the girl’s dead face.

“All right, you shot her! But that’s not what I want. I want to know how it happened, every detail, everything you remember. Tell me about it.”

He drew breath as if the effort cost him infinite labour, and told her, fumbling out the sequence of events with many pauses. He was terribly tired, and completely lost, but he was still coherent.

“I wanted to marry her. We were running about together steadily, until about a couple of months ago, and we were as good as engaged. And then she got very off-hand with me, for some reason, and started pulling away. She turned down dates, or she rang up to make excuses, and if I objected she flared up and walked out. They’d always tried to tell me she had other men on a string, too… I never believed it. I was daft about her…”

“They?” said Bunty, pouncing on this lack of definition. “Who were
they
?”

“The chap who shares—shared—my cottage, Bill Reynolds, he teaches at the same school. Other friends of ours, too.”

“And some of them knew her well? Could they have been on her string themselves?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They knew her, but not that well. I never believed it. And then just over a week ago it seemed as if we’d got past the bad patch. You know how it can be, everything straightens out and starts running on wheels. She was the sweetest I’ve ever known her, and things were back as they used to be. I bought her a ring. She’d never let me get that far before. I was
happy
! You know what I mean? I’d never believed there was anything wrong about her, but I’d never felt sure of her before, and now I did, she’d promised, and we were engaged. And then she suggested that we should go to London together this half-term…”

“To London?” said Bunty sharply. “
Not
up here, then?”

“No, to London. She had a few days of her holiday left to use, she suggested we should drive down on Friday evening. So when it came to Friday evening I was ready well ahead of the time we’d fixed, and I ran the car round into town, to her flat, to pick her up. It was a good half-hour earlier than she’d be expecting me. And I was just parking the car, a bit away from the house—you know what it’s like trying to find anywhere to park in Comerbourne—when I saw her come out of the private door of her flat. Not alone, with a fellow I’d never seen before. And she was hanging on his arm and chattering away to him and looking up into his face, like… like a cut-price call-girl! You can’t mistake it when you do see it.”

“Did they see you?” asked Bunty intently.

“No, I told you, I could only find a place farther along the street. No, they didn’t see me…”

“And you didn’t go after them? You didn’t challenge them?”

“I never had time. I’d just got out of the car when they came out, and they turned the other way. He had a car parked there just in front of the shop, and they got into it and drove off in the other direction. By the time I was across the road they were turning the corner out of Queen Street.”

“What sort of car was it? Would you know it again?”

“I didn’t get the number, I never thought of it, but it was a light-grey Jag. Does it matter?”

“It matters,” she said sharply. “Every detail matters. What about the man?”