Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (9 page)

‘Now, look here, God,’ raged Bessie’s submerged Christian innocence, somewhere deep inside him, ‘this isn’t fair, you can’t just stand there! It isn’t bloody good enough!’ He was accustomed to pray as candidly and robustly as he argued with his father, and in a comparable emergency he would probably have sworn at his father, too. It was now or never, wasn’t it?

The lights of an approaching car swept an arc above him, rounding a curve still some hundred yards back, darkened momentarily, and returned in a steady glow, though still with the bulk of a hedge between. Seconds, and they would be here, and the car by Bessie’s side had not yet cleared his body, and had no time now to straighten out behind him. The engine throbbed, the forward leap at speed tore the long twigs of the hedge swishing after it, and the long grass surged and strained forward to follow. The rear lights reappeared large and bright, and soared away, diminishing, until they vanished in red pin-points round the next corner, accelerating all the way.

Bossie let his breath spill out of him like blood, rested his grazed cheek in his arm, and waited trustingly to be salvaged. He was barely half-conscious when the approaching car, travelling with the timeless benignity of the happy and well-disposed, braked sharply and drew up well short of the spot where he lay, and two people came tumbling out, concerned and competent, to pick up the pieces.

The telephone rang just as George was clearing up for the evening, with every intention of putting his feet up for the few hours remaining, and renewing his perspective on the case by seeing it at greater distance and through Bunty’s eyes. He should have known better than to expect anything so pleasurable.

‘Glad you’re still there, sir.’ It was Barnes on the line. ‘I thought I might catch the sergeant, at any rate. We’ve got a rather rum thing here, hit-and-run, up in the southerly road, where the Lyons drive comes in. People in a following car picked up the victim, and the lady’s gone in with the kid to the hospital, called the ambulance and all. Reason I thought it just might be something for you, the lad who got knocked down is one of the choirboys, and it was Mrs Rainbow who came along in the Aston Martin and salvaged him. Maybe I’m reaching rather far, but unless coincidence is working overtime, there ought to be some connection. Anyhow, I thought you should know, right away. It’s Sam Jarvis’s lad. Not to worry too much, from all I gather he just got knocked sideways and shocked and grazed, no serious injuries, he’ll be all right.’

‘Thank God for that!’ said George. ‘Have his people been notified? Where have they taken him? Comerbourne General?’

‘That’s right. Mrs Rainbow said she’d call them from the hospital as soon as they got there.’

‘Good, but I’ll have a word with Sam, too. Who was it travelling with Mrs Rainbow? People, you said. ’

‘That’s right. Mr Swayne was with her. He stood by and took care of the boy while she went to call the ambulance. Now the lads are on the spot he’s taken the Aston Martin and followed on down to the hospital to collect her.’

Well, well! Not Colin Barron, not John Stubbs, none of her old circle, but our own Willie the Twig, thought George. Heading out, not homeward, with Barbara, after nine o’clock at night. That little flame of interest at the house-warming didn’t just flicker out when they were apart. Two people worse-suited, on the face of it, it would be hard to find. Willie the impervious and self-sufficient recluse, married to a forest and never likely to want a divorce, and Barbara the sophisticate and hostess, out of her world when out of the city. On the face of it!

‘Right, we’ll be out there and have a look.’ George hung up, and reached for his coat. ‘Come on, Jack, we seem to have what may or may not be a further development.’

He told him about it in the car, on the way to the quiet stretch of road where the farm drive swept down into the highway. It was considerably less dark now, with a policeman standing by to flag down any stray traffic, and lights surrounding the area where the approximate position of Bessie’s form had been chalked out on the tarmac. After fine, dry weather the surface showed nothing of wheel-tracks.

‘But the hedges in the lane want brushing back,’ said the uniformed sergeant in charge, turning his lights on the thick greenery. ‘There’s been a car backed in there on to the edge of the grass, see, backed in just far enough to be out of sight, the tracks go no further. Courting couple, most likely, finding a nice private place and reckoning there isn’t going to be much farm traffic this late. It looks as if that was the car that came out and hit him, luckily the knock just threw him clear. There might be traces on the wing, if ever we find the right car, but they could be very slight, nothing to attract attention.’ There were ends of grasses and a few small twigs brushed out from the hedge where the car had stood, and scattered a yard or two after its progress, obviously freshly severed.

‘Won’t get any tyre-marks out of that lot,’ said Sergeant Moon thoughtfully. ‘In the grass it’s just a furrow, and as soon as it touches the lane surface it vanishes. Too hard and too dry.’

‘And the other car? Mrs Rainbow’s? I hear she went with the boy in the ambulance.’ That was nice of her, and for some reason not at all surprising.

‘Yes, sir. That one was standing back here ten yards short of where the boy was lying, when we got here, heading away from Abbot’s Bale, over the ridge. Mr Swayne stayed to give us a statement, and then followed down to the hospital. Everything bears out their account. They heard a car start up, fast, before they came into this stretch. By the time they did, all they saw were the rear-lights just vanishing at the end of this longish straight. They were driving quite slowly themselves, and have first-rate headlights, or they might have driven over the boy, he was in dark school clothes, and this surface eats light.’

‘Thanks,’ said George, ‘we’ll get to them as soon as we’ve checked how Bessie’s doing.’

‘Accident?’ wondered Moon, as they drove down the valley towards Comerford.

‘Apparently. Even probably. But there’s always the odd possibility…’

‘She’ll have contacted his parents,’ said Moon comfortably, ‘the minute she had something officially reassuring to say. And ten to one she’ll stay around until the docs have been over him and voted him sound as a bell.’

His view of the alien female was illuminating, as though some false outlines in the portrait of Barbara were beginning to melt and run, and reassemble into a different pattern. ‘And if she’s still there,’ he went on positively, ‘you’ll find Willie the Twig sitting waiting for her, with all the patience in the world.’

Barbara’s Aston Martin was standing alone in the public car park attached to one flank of the Comerbourne General Hospital, when they reached it just before ten o’clock, and Willie the Twig, in his normal leather-elbowed, thorny tweeds and creaseless, comfortable slacks, was sitting on one of the synthetic hide benches in the reception area, one long leg crossed over the other, and a very old
Country Life
in his lap, exchanging occasional sallies with the nurse at the reception desk and the aide on the switchboard, but for the most part turning the pages of his magazine with imperturbable patience and a certain startled interest, perhaps viewing the prices of houses at five years’ remove, and wondering at the way they had ballooned since. His spiky fair hair was on end in all directions, which was normality itself, and the elongated, fleshless image he projected, from natural-Shetland, polo-collared throat to narrow classical brogues, was, if one stood back and took a fresh look at the whole, elegant in the extreme. Elegance of body and mind might well count with Barbara. Money could not match it, as money could not provide it.

He looked up when George entered, with Sergeant Moon at his elbow. His thick, reddish-blond brows shot up, and his bright grey eyes radiated mild surprise and pleasure.

‘Well, hullo, have they dragged you in on this, too? I call that excess of zeal, you know. The kid’s going to be as right as rain, all he’s got is a grazed cheek, a bunch of bruises on one hip, and a bad case of precautionary sedation. I’d have given him a shot of brandy and put him to bed for about twenty hours, and he’d have come out fighting.’

‘From all we know of him,’ agreed George drily, ‘he probably will. Is Mrs Rainbow still in there with them?’

‘Try and get her out until she knows the score. His folks are on the way, did they tell you? We called them, they know he’s OK. The chap who hit him took off like a rocket when he heard us coming. We wondered what had bitten somebody up there ahead of us. I reckon he was going to have a look what damage he’d done, but when he heard us coming he didn’t want to be there to answer for it.’

‘Lucky you were driving so circumspectly,’ said George, with only the mildest irony, for Willie’s volcanic but expert driving was notorious.

‘I wasn’t driving, George. And we were in no hurry.’ Willie the Twig had a gentle line in irony, too.

The nurse on reception, who was young, and not a local girl, hovered suggestively, primly waiting for the newcomer to state his business and credentials, but she was forestalled by the appearance of an elderly sister who knew Superintendent Felse very well from many and varied contacts. Sailing before her, in a burst of brightness that cried aloud gloriously against all the hospital white, came Barbara Rainbow. She wore a long, narrow skirt slit to the knee, in a deep petunia colour, and an embroidered mandarin coat of thin, padded silk, and her hair was knotted in a bunch of curls on top of her head, and fastened with a tall jet comb. Anything further removed from widow’s weeds it would have been impossible to imagine; maybe that was the reason for the get-up. And here sat Willie the Twig in his usual country suiting, as perfectly content with her brilliance as she was with his casualness. She saw George, and smiled radiantly. She looked fulfilled and roused and happy, whether for private reasons of her own and Willie’s, or simply because she had risen to an unexpected occasion with decision and success, and felt all the better for it.

‘You don’t want to see the patient tonight, do you?’ said the sister promptly. ‘It wouldn’t do you a bit of good, he’s sedated, and in any case the doctor won’t let anybody try to question him yet.’

‘I did come with that intention,’ George admitted, ‘but I’d already gathered it wouldn’t be allowed. As long as he’s all right I don’t suppose leaving it until tomorrow morning will make much difference. You are keeping him overnight?’

‘Doctor thought it wise, in case of delayed shock, but if you ask me he’s pretty tough. Dazed, but there doesn’t seem to be any concussion. But we’re keeping him in to be on the safe side.’

‘And there’s nothing really damaged? Nothing to worry about?’

She detailed Bessie’s few abrasions and bruises placidly, and guaranteed his generally sound condition.

‘Did he have anything to say when you got him in? He usually has plenty, if he was conscious I can’t imagine him being silent.’

She thought about that seriously, as if something unusual had just been brought to her notice. ‘Now you come to mention it, we hardly got a cheep out of him, except answers to, “does that hurt?” and that sort of thing. Oh, and he did say he’d lost his music-case, and Mrs Rainbow assured him Mr Swayne had picked it up and it was quite safe. After that he really did go mute. I suppose it was catching up with him by then.’

Perhaps. But for some reason it failed to sound like Bossie.

‘Any use my putting a man in with him, in case he wakes up and wants to get it off his chest in the night?’

‘Wouldn’t get you a thing,’ she assured him. ‘He’s as good as out now, and he’ll sleep right through until tomorrow. You can make it fairly early, though, and see if he’s awake about seven.’

So that was that, and the arrival of Sam and Jenny, roused and anxious but calm, brought the number of people attendant upon Bossie to an inconvenient crowd.

‘Come on,’ said Willie the Twig practically, ‘they’re not closed yet, and I’m hungry. And I rather think the Superintendent would like the first-hand story from us, at any rate, since he can’t get it yet from the kid. Let’s all go and get a pint and a snack at the “Fleece”, and George can ask us whatever he wants to know.’

They left both cars where they were, safe in the hospital grounds, and walked the few hundred yards to the “Fleece”, an old, half-timbered pub, with mediaeval tiles still paving its short passage to the public bar. There were deep settles in which small groups could be as private as in separate rooms, and if the bread, though pleasantly crusty, was slightly past its best at this time on Saturday night, the cheese was good, the ham even better, and the pickles home-made.

‘It was going to be a slap-up dinner over at the “Radnorshire Arms”,’ said Barbara, buttering bread with ardour. ‘But that went for a Burton. Tomorrow, maybe?’ She looked across the table at Willie the Twig, and her eyes were large and eloquent.

‘If we’re still out of jug,’ said Willie imperturbably.

‘Maybe George could arrange for a double cell,’ she said serenely. ‘That would be nice.’

‘If you’re trying to tell me something,’ said George tolerantly, ‘I’d rather you did it right-way-round. But first of all, about tonight. Let’s have your version.’

‘We were going out to dinner,’ said Barbara, ‘as we’ve mentioned, and then we were going to have a long night drive round through Wales and come back over the border to the forest lodge. Time was no object, and I was driving, and I’m wary of those dark, winding, narrow farm roads, in any case, so we were only doing about thirty, probably less. We hadn’t seen another car since we turned into that road, and you know how it winds. One thing I’ll swear to, there weren’t any car lights on, anywhere ahead of us. Even with those hedges cutting off direct vision, in that darkness there’d have been a gleam, enough to see. Agreed, Willie?’

‘Absolutely. And then suddenly there were lights, just switched on, obviously, some way ahead and round a couple of bends, but you see the aura clearly enough.’

‘And it stayed like that maybe half a minute,’ confirmed Barbara, ‘by which time we were getting nearer, and then suddenly whoever it was opened the throttle and put his foot down hard, and the light patch shot off like a bullet. By the time we turned into that longer straight, just past the end of the lane, the rear lights were pin-points at the far end, and then vanished. Then Willie spotted the little boy, lying in the road. And we stopped, and went to see how badly he was hurt, but it wasn’t so bad after all. And Willie stayed with him and went over him for breaks and so on, and wrapped his coat round him, while I dashed off back to telephone. And that’s about all.’

‘I lifted him to the side,’ said Willie. ‘I thought I’d better, and there was nothing busted, it was safe to move him. But I marked the way he’d been lying.’

No particular surprise that Willie the Twig should have a stick of chalk somewhere in his pockets. He was the sort of man who habitually had string, nails, screwdrivers, and half a dozen other useful things distributed about his person.

‘And the timing?’

‘We left Barbara’s place just after nine, say five or ten past. I reckon it would be about five minutes later when we heard the car shoot off like that.’

It fitted. And possibly the simple theory that a courting couple had been making use of the Lyons’ drive, and taken to the road again without due care, was the correct one. But there were things about the affair that pricked in George’s mind like burrs.