by Lorna Gray
Chapter 35
I hadn’t realised the distant echo had been the shattering of my office windows as the policemen broke in. I learned later that they had been smashed from the inside with the plant stand that had been Gregory’s stool. Clarke must have had the foresight to take the key from the lock when he had secured the door.
The attic darkroom abruptly contained a heaving mass of policemen. After so many desperate seconds of desertion the gallery seemed full to bursting, with Clarke buried beneath the majority of them. I didn’t recognise any of these plain-clothed policemen except for PC Downe who had led the charge. He’d taken one look at me and turned tail almost instantly to race back down the stairs again carrying the news that I was fine and on the same breath calling for Jim. Someone gave me a clean handkerchief to press over my bloodied wrist and ushered me towards the darkroom door. This was a scene of an arrest and rapid interrogation and judged no place for bystanders, particularly female ones with a vacuous stare.
None of them knew who I was. They hadn’t been here, they hadn’t even seen Jim. None of them had time to think why I should have been near Clarke at all. The inspector was here now and a new team was in charge. I slid drunkenly step by step down into the gloom of the stairs. I missed the comfort Adam would have brought. Somehow I’d expected him to arrive with them. I had to use my elbow as a brake against the banister rail because my right hand was clamped over the wound on my left. Someone marched up the stairs past me. Two more of them. Orders were being discussed, a confusion between detectives about whether Jim’s men were handling Reed’s interrogation or the inspector’s were. They slid past with barely a glance for a lone woman on the stairs.
It was then that I learned someone had come with me after all. I thought they hadn’t but a hand was on my elbow and it steered me left across the vacant landing on the first floor into the kitchen. He was gone before I turned. I think he had spoken to me but my ears were full of the tramp of many feet on the bare floorboards above and the cacophony up there of male voices all talking together.
Quite automatically I drew out a drawer and assembled all the bits and pieces I needed to patch myself up. Luckily Christi’s method of packing hadn’t valued any possessions of mine and since it was still my kitchen, I knew where everything was: scissors, dressing and a fine roll of bandage.
The landing outside my door was empty. It had only just dawned on me what that meant. He was there, in the bedroom opposite me. The relief of it almost finished me off. Through the angle of the two doorways, I could just make out one half of Adam where he was sitting on the foot of the bed. Someone who rated themselves as a bit of a doctor was trying to do something along the lines of a clean-up of his temple. Adam couldn’t see me. He was thoroughly crowded by two of the newly arrived policemen who seemed oblivious to the fact that he might be finding it rather hard to concentrate on their questions with fingers poking at his head.
My wrist was barely bleeding. I managed to brave a quick examination to ensure that there was no glass in the cut. There wasn’t but it was hard to look.
Several more policemen raced up the stairs and dived briefly into Adam’s room while another paused on the threshold of mine with their hand on the brass knob of the open door. They asked me how I was. I think they were looking for someone. This newly arrived inspector perhaps. Whoever it was, it wasn’t me in my tiny space of the little narrow kitchen. In the next blink, the stairwell was empty again and all I could see was Adam through the crowd of his policemen. They had moved aside a little so that I could see Adam’s face. His eyes were downcast, gaze resting on the carpet while they spoke to him. I saw the dark line of his eyelashes flicker as he gave a faint nod.
Then Gregory’s voice close by murmured, “Looks like he’s well surrounded, doesn’t he? Is he under arrest?”
I could understand why he should think that. Then the kitchen door was pushed shut and cut Adam off from view.
Gregory had been hiding behind the door. He’d kept his hand on the handle to form a dark little triangular hiding place against the wall. He had his hand on it now, barring any attempt of mine to drag it open again and escape. After my first attempt to dive through the closing door had been rebuffed and flung back against the countertop, I didn’t try again. The stifled cry had been involuntary but I didn’t scream. I didn’t think it was wise. It would push him into immediate action. He and I stood there in an impasse of rapid breathing which finally he broke.
“Don’t try to pretend that you haven’t guessed.” It was a low murmur, daring me to lie.
He looked, odd to say it, almost charming. His steel wire hair was ruffled from his play-acting downstairs. His face was the sort that was rectangular – broad brow and jaw grained with grey – but made robust rather than fat through a lifetime of enjoying exercise. Now his lips were curving through concentration and a certain delicious anticipation of what must come next.
I don’t think it had struck me before that this was a man who knew me, and in knowing me had sent violence after me.
“I can’t get out, Kate,” he told me ruefully.
There seemed to be an awful lot of noise going on in the office beneath our feet. The men who had been searching the house for Gregory had trooped back downstairs again and now they seemed to be moving furniture about. Perhaps they were working to open the bolted courtyard door.
Gregory said, “There’s an injured policeman down there.”
“Ah,” I agreed conversationally, as if I understood.
He told me, “The first one got past me but I got the second. I think he tore a vein.”
Gregory reached a hand past my left hip for the roll of bandage from the counter top. A few inches unravelled as he lifted it and I watched his fingers absently smooth the finely textured band of fabric.
“I was about to give the other a little accident too but that man of yours lurched drunkenly into him off the bottom step and then the pair of them set about making a way in for the rest. Your man had to break the office window since Clarke had pocketed the key. I think Hitchen found it quite therapeutic crashing about with that wooden seat. It woke him up enough that he thought to notice me.”
A few more delicate inches were rolled free. In the close confines of this kitchen I was standing propped against the hard edge of the counter top with my stinging wrist still cradled in my other hand. The window in this room was small and damp and stained with mould and the dim light caught the sweat standing out on Gregory’s brow. There was a thin film there that was threatening to form a bead. His eyebrows still retained some chestnut amongst the grey and they were damp as well. The eyes that glared beneath were deep-set with weathered creases at the edges, and his pupils were strange.
They flicked up to briefly to touch upon mine. “He noticed when that constable left to lead the swarm that had come in through the front door and took them racing up the stairs. No one knew me. No one else would have noticed if I’d joined their stampede to your side. No one else cared about me.” His hands moved, miming out the actions that must have inevitably followed if he’d found me upstairs I think. He gave a rueful shrug at the thought, an unfocussed stare that hardened. “Unfortunately, he was determined to stick to me like glue. I could see it in his eyes from across the room when he moved to keep pace with me. It was at the same moment that you screamed for the ineffectual sergeant who was bashing the last of the glass from the vacant window.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to respond, so I said slightly hoarsely, “You saw that?”
“Yes. He wasn’t stupid enough to close the distance between us.”
It was said briskly, regretfully. After a moment of contemplation, Gregory recollected the bandage. He had twisted a length around two fingers from his left hand. I saw him give the thin band a little tug to test its tension. He seemed to think it would do. I watched as he eased the loop from his fingers and uncoiled a little more from the roll.
Outside the door the house was briefly quiet. Like an in
take of breath. For a moment I considered screaming and attacking before he unravelled any more but I didn’t think it would do any good. Even in the time it took for someone to cross the landing he could have conclusively silenced me. The scissors were just there and there were drawers full of knives and tools and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if I got to them first. Quite simply, I didn’t dare to depend on anyone being able to save me from this tiny cage of a room if I tipped him into panic.
Gregory was calmly telling me, “I was running up the stairs and Hitchen was there too. He meant me to know I wasn’t going to get up to you without him. Then I was stopped at the foot of the next flight by the sound of that constable coming clattering back down again. I knew it would be a mistake to be seen there. Luckily a second wave of policemen came crowding past and they collided with the rush from the courtyard and then someone started bellowing orders about and jostling everyone further and I dived in here and Hitchen lost me. I think he thought I’d bolted back down the stairs again. In hindsight, that might have been better.” He gave a staged sigh. “But your man didn’t find me behind the door. He didn’t get a chance to because some of those new fellows spotted him in the crush and dragged him out and started trying to organise him down the stairs. They told him you were safe. They told him they had questions. I’m not quite sure they were as ready to believe his account of things as you are. Only with uncanny timing he suddenly felt the effects of the wound to his head and needed to sit down so they had to take him into the bedroom.”
Gregory leaned in to confide on a very intimate note, “I think he did it deliberately.”
There was a glimmer of a smirk. “Perhaps he thinks he’s mounting a guard. Perhaps he thinks I can’t sneak past with him watching from there. Shame no one else will believe him.”
And I thought suddenly, he really didn’t know that Jim had been playing out Rhys’s game all along. He didn’t know that those men who had run up and down the stairs a moment after I’d walked in here were looking for him. I kept my unsteady lips pressed tightly together as if the realisation might escape.
Gregory was concentrating on his bandage. He had it trailing to a length of about a yard. He cut it off with the scissors and then set about twisting it around his fist and then rolling the other end about his other hand. Over and under his wrists turned to leave some slack between them of about a foot or a little more.
Gregory was fascinated by his own creation. He told it, “I thought I was trapped. Until you walked in, I was beginning to think I was going to have to attempt an exit through that window.” My eyes followed the point of his bandage-wrapped hand. He was making a small joke. The kitchen window was tiny. I’d have struggled to fit and I was barely more than half his size. It was a good job too because otherwise I believe he’d have tried to tip me out with a view to slipping away while they all ran to pick me up off the courtyard floor. It would have been a long drop. The descent by the metal ladder from that hotel window in Aberystwyth would have had nothing on this.
Gregory moved towards me a little. His breathing rate had increased. “Of course,” he confided, “until you walked in to the gallery today, I didn’t have any exit at all. For weeks now I’ve been trying to retrieve what Black took. You have no idea what it’s been like living under a threat like that. I thought he’d handed it on but I guessed after a few days that you didn’t have it either. But then I realised that I didn’t need to retrieve this thing. I knew it had to be something vaguely connected to my work at the gallery. But there’s nothing here from my other business. I’ve been very sure about that. No one knows the people I’ve worked with all these years. These policemen can make guesses about the bonds and ambitions that rule the life of a sportsman. They can read my patronage of Rhys’s career and judge me on my talent for forging connections. But no one could dream of the scale of ambition that was working away inside this body, quietly, discreetly until war conveniently opened up the field again. There are races that don’t involve the glory of leading a rowing crew to the finish like I did before. And other ways of winning.”
There was something desperately bitter about the way he said the word winning. It hinted that, for all the ambition, the bond that ruled him now was torturous. His lips were curling into a leer. “None of that matters. I knew that all Black could have found was a hint of the role I’ve had in this gallery over the past two years. I knew that without him, there really would be nothing to set me apart from all the other people who’ve had the opportunity to exploit the contacts of this place. Which means that in reality almost any of your clients might do for a suspect now. And that in turn means that all I have to do to put myself firmly out of the running in the eyes of the police is cast myself as an innocent bystander. And discourage the only real witness from betraying me if I can.” A dry hint of mirth. Then an automatic step to close the distance between us when he noticed I’d slid backwards, carefully moving away from him along the counter edge. I didn’t dare tell him that the last time I’d seen the surviving part of Black’s evidence, it had been plummeting towards an old gentleman on the street outside who must surely have been a policeman.
“As soon as your name was mentioned I knew you would use the same foolishness that made you attempt to dissuade Rhys from letting me share his office two years ago as the excuse to betray me again now. I was going to engineer a little accident when Clarke came in. All I needed to make it work was for you to come and take the air by the courtyard door …”
A tense moistening of his lips with his tongue confirmed the thwarted plan. We both froze as a clump of regulation footwear went past the door. It sounded like they were bringing Clarke down. For all of Gregory’s confidence that Adam was still their main man, he didn’t think to retract the tip of his tongue or close his mouth until the sounds had reached the ground floor.
In a whisper, Gregory added, “I let you think I brought you here today to find this thing for me. But you’re here because I knew you’d bring along a suitably respectable audience for the attack when Clarke burst in supposedly with the intention of destroying the evidence. They were watching when he conveniently bungled it and turned on me instead. You’ve made me the next innocent victim here.”
His hands were testing the tension of his little garrotte. The bandage stretched a little but it wouldn’t break. I think he was using the suspense of telling me this to convince himself he was capable of using it. I could almost feel the rhythm of his heartbeat in the air. It matched mine. I think he could see my pulse beating in my throat. I found myself wishing that my frock had a high collar because then my neck wouldn’t be feeling quite so exposed. He was staring at my heartbeat, hypnotised.
I put up my hand to my throat. He blinked like a man coming out of a dream.
Then those peculiarly flecked irises flicked up to meet mine. I don’t think he knew he’d stopped speaking. He continued, “The funny thing about today is that it never occurred to me to paint someone else as the suspect. I’d got Reed primed to clear the path for Clarke’s entrance on my command; my part here was going to be firmly fixed; and I’d got you, of course … But then my very good friend gifted me Hitchen when he decided he’d found himself a clue and I thought I could use it too.”
He was dreaming of that soiled crowbar; of the opportunity Adam had represented. Of the misfortune of timing that had left Clarke trapped upstairs and Gregory with the choice of either attempting guilty flight or ensuring that he had at least silenced the worst witness by coming after me.
A floorboard creaked somewhere outside, harmlessly enough I think but frustration coloured Gregory’s face. He had me now and yet he was being forced to worry about the possibilities of what else might still go wrong. He was worrying about the closed door and about how it was both a shelter and fuel to paranoia. He couldn’t be sure now that hordes of policemen weren’t silently assembling outside the door waiting for my cue.
I saw it in his face. He didn’t dare make me scream. While I was safe and well,
logic dictated that they – whoever and however many they were – had to wait out there in the hope of a peaceful resolution. Like all of us, they too couldn’t risk moving prematurely in case their own action caused him to tip into that extreme of desperation.
I felt Gregory’s concentration sharpen upon my face. He seemed to be seeing me anew. It was like he’d barely considered me as a real presence in here before. For a moment I stood there before him in vivid, glorious living colour.
Then he told himself softly, “And I still can use him, you know. I still can.”
Breath stilled. The hands lifted. Slowly. His thumbs were braced upon the taut strip of cloth, ensuring its tension. They were strong hands, weathered from years on the water.
Gregory whispered rather wistfully, “He is only in the next room. They’d think he found the chance to slip across …”
I think he wanted me to give him my permission. To tell him I agreed and to promise to go quietly. Very slowly, I put out my hands, the clean and the bloodied, to softly meet his.
Very gently I intercepted the steady approach of those tangled fists towards my throat. “Don’t you think,” I said very carefully indeed, “that you should use me to get away?”
For a moment I didn’t think he’d heard. The lips were slightly slack. His hands were warm beneath mine. Trembling. Then I saw a spasm twitch across his mouth. I think his initial emotion was overwhelmingly disappointment.
I said very gently, “You’re trapped in this room. You said so yourself. But you can use me to get away. These new policemen don’t know you. They don’t know your face. We can walk out while they’re still talking to Adam. Look at my wrist.” He looked. “You can tell anyone who asks that you’re a doctor and you’re taking me to your car where you have your bag so that I can be patched up properly.”
