The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  The hands hovered beneath mine. The bandage was a tight band. It was making the skin pucker on his fingertips where it cut into the flesh. I could see he was running the argument through his mind, but still inclining towards action. I’m not sure how he thought he’d escape if he strangled me now. At this moment I wasn’t sure he had much capacity for thought left at all.

  I guessed he was still fixated on managing the one unplanned element in his day. He was thinking about Adam.

  I said softly, dismissively, “What’s Adam going to do? He won’t dare say anything if I’m with you.”

  It was the mention of Adam that made Gregory blink. His posture changed. Instead of braced and ready for a physical struggle with me that, while it would be difficult, he must surely win, his head lifted. His hands drew back from mine, though I kept mine there just in case.

  With a grim sort of resignation, he abruptly set about unravelling the bandage onto the countertop before using it anew to bind that dressing onto my wrist.

  ---

  After all his worries, when we cautiously opened the kitchen door it was onto a silent and deserted floor. The bedroom was empty. Someone was pacing about upstairs and there was a reassuringly insubstantial murmur of voices from the space downstairs but, essentially, our way was clear.

  Gregory’s efforts to bind my wrist had been extraordinarily thorough. He’d even taken the time to test that the bandage hadn’t constricted the flow of blood by giving a little pinch to my thumb. Now he had his hand on my elbow, keeping me close and steering me slightly ahead of him as we hurried down the stairs.

  I went easily, willingly. This was my escape from the terrifying claustrophobia of the kitchen too. There was blood on Gregory’s sleeve that wasn’t mine. Clarke’s blow with the crowbar had not been kind. There was a tear on the blazer at the point where the sleeve met his shoulder and a smear of blood streaked the shirt beneath. I suppose it had seemed important that Clarke’s attack was convincing.

  He was rushing me along. The office was a mess. My client books were everywhere and so was the furniture. Rhys’s client chair was in my path. I put out a hand to ease it aside. The windows were busy rectangles of daylight and so was the door. There were people out there. There were people in the exhibition room too when Gregory swept me through the door. Three of them were new, unidentifiable plain-clothes policemen. They were only casually interested in us. They’d been tasked with cataloguing the contents of the boxes in this room. I drew breath to tell them about Gregory. He thought I was going to tell them he was a doctor. His hand was still on my arm.

  And it was then that there was a brief telltale flicker of shade behind as several people moved all at once.

  Unfortunately Gregory’s reactions were quicker.

  A mass of people had been standing with their backs pressed against the wall that ajoined the office. Their plunge for me came at the same moment that my companion gave a startled little gasp of realisation and lashed out instinctively to catch my hand as it thrust against his chest. I was suddenly fighting, and I think I surprised him how much. For a brief moment my free hand flailed and unexpectedly met his face. His cheek smudged beneath my palm. I heard him grunt. I was almost dragged clear by reaching hands. Painfully. But then the disorganised boxes tangled amongst our legs and now I felt the pitch followed by the contraction as many fingers scraped my arm, the one with the dressing, and the sharp crush as they bore me down. A faint cry was forced out by the impact. It was joined by a confusion of other voices that huffed and snarled above me and for a few short seconds I was trapped beneath them; and pinned by all of them amongst the boxes in a writhing tussle that must surely end in only one way. Then, through it all, I heard Gregory’s shout.

  “I’ll do it, you know. I will.”

  They let him up. He was panting. Everyone was. He took me with him with a grip that wrenched a sob from me. He had my arm, my injured wrist turned cruelly behind me in a twist that he tethered to my waist by hooking a finger through the belt to my dress. It was agony. The grip was too much. I couldn’t draw breath. I hadn’t anticipated anything like this. It wasn’t the sharp pain of violence. It was a slow breaking of my wrist and it was an agonising kind of restraint that got worse with each raging second. And there was a fresh shock too. The explanation of why the policemen hadn’t pressed home their attack. There was a needlepoint of metal against the softer flesh beneath my ribs.

  It made every muscle shiver in a spasm of revulsion. Through it all, I heard Gregory’s desperate command.

  “Stay back! Get back I say!”

  I could see it now. He’d had the screwdriver in his pocket all this time. Now he had the handle firmly gripped in his palm. Its tip was engaged with my side. It was an odd sort of threat because in some way I wondered just how fatal its two inches of blunted metal could really be. Obviously dangerous enough. I remembered his confession that the injured policeman had torn a vein. Presumably this was how.

  PC Downe picked himself up from a sprawl against the boxes that had brought him face to face with me and stepped back, breathing hard. I’d thought Adam was there but he wasn’t. There was a vacuum in this room as if hope and help had both suddenly left very abruptly by the back door. PC Downe’s frightened eyes scanned the few faces in the room and found himself cast as the spokesperson. It was fear that made him say in a high shrill voice as we made for the front door, “Did you really imagine she wouldn’t tell us? That the first words she spoke after realising what Black had found within those photographs wouldn’t be your name? She told me upstairs just as soon as she laid out the remaining prints.”

  Gregory was shaking violently. The shock of the near miss had him twisting jerkily about to check where the next danger was coming from. There was none outside. The policemen out there were retreating in a respectful arc. For me, this was a repeat of the terrors that had haunted me since that doorway in Lancaster; the one where I was made to accept the utter inferiority of my strength when set against another’s sheer physical will. But Gregory always did like to give the illusion of choice; so now I had to choose between going with him and the indescribable agony of the hold he had on my arm.

  PC Downe was saying, “I hope you noticed that Sergeant Fleece let you incriminate yourself with your telephone call? Because I’m sure when the telephone records are checked, we’ll find that you didn’t telephone your doctor at all, won’t we?”

  I didn’t know that it was a police policy to enrage a violent man. Perhaps it wasn’t. At long last PC Downe seemed to dredge up some old memories of negotiation training. He was now saying something worthy about mistakes and not hurting anyone and how none of this was necessary. It might have sounded more persuasive had Gregory been prepared to listen.

  Gregory was snarling at me, “You shouldn’t have done this. You should have helped me get away. Your husband would have known to keep quiet. He did know. He was only too delighted to lay out Hitchen as a quarry but when he guessed his mistake he swallowed it because he knew that doing this to an old friend would mean corrupting himself and the beauty of everything we’d done together.”

  His urgent steps turned me in the doorway to the street outside. The move tangled my feet. The stumble made Gregory drag painfully on my wrist to snatch me onto a different path. I was gasping fiercely, “It wasn’t friendship. It was fear because he knew you well enough to know what you were capable of. And he couldn’t quite comprehend that you’d really do it.”

  Gregory wasn’t listening. By my ear he was already adding, “I suppose I should have known you were only pretending in the kitchen. You never were very,” a pause, “loyal.”

  The venom in that single word was matched by the cruelty of his drag upon my wrist. It made me cry out. He always had made me feel at fault if I disagreed with his point of view. But this one was just for now. It was absurd, I thought, but Gregory really did blame me for the inconvenience of wishing to preserve my own life.

  The realisation finally put an end to the
odd battle I’d been fighting lately between retaining a sense of who I thought I was and reinventing myself as someone who was – how had Christi put it? – a little less insipid. Gregory’s behaviour now proved the truth. I’d always spoken my mind; it was just that my husband had never seen much reason to listen. But Gregory had. He knew better than anyone that no claim of friendship had ever shaken my resolve before where I knew I was right. He called it disloyalty. And now I understood precisely why I was so dangerous to him.

  There was black nearby. The police cars were still waiting beside the kerb. Beyond there was the hum and rattle of traffic by the church. Gathering close were Wednesday shoppers on the far side of the street milling in a horde around the widening fan of policemen. They were staring at me. But I still couldn’t find Adam.

  I’d been sure he would be out here. I’d guessed easily enough that it was his eyes that had been wrenched up to catch my movement beyond the closing door. It was his mouth that had quietly raised the alarm. But all I had was PC Downe bearing a distant promise of intervention with the bitter truth etched upon his face, and Gregory huffing in my ear.

  Gregory was gasping from the exertion of fighting me for the screwdriver and dragging me onwards. I’d managed to fix my free hand over the fist that gripped his weapon. My arm was aching from resisting his but he wasn’t athletic after all. Beneath his smart blazer he was overweight and unfit. Which only made it very frighteningly clear just how easy it was for even an ageing man to bring a woman who was fighting every inch of the way into the heart of the road.

  Because he meant to take me with him. Of course he did. This was his way of ensuring his control, of demonstrating his power, of exacting his revenge on me for daring to know the truth about him. This was murder; to him I was already dead, he just had to get me in through the passenger door of the waiting police car.

  That step might take only a few more seconds. The unimaginable dread of how much longer after that it would take me to accept my end made me use the only weapon I had left. My voice. I gasped out, “Ask him about Detective Black. Ask him to explain how he killed him.”

  It wasn’t easy to speak. I was a spectacle laid on for the endless fascination of the gawping mass of people. The crowd was shoppers and policemen. I’d expected the policemen to pounce. Adam had called me brave enough for anything, but he must know I couldn’t do this on my own. He must know. But they all seemed to abruptly give Gregory room; the policemen, everyone.

  We were near the waiting car. I could smell Gregory’s sweat. Beyond us the watchful public had abruptly stopped retreating. Something had changed and it wasn’t my question. My attempt to goad him into betraying that one last secret was irrelevant. Ludicrously, the weight of not knowing what this fresh strain meant very nearly made me trip into taking that last step to the side of the car. Only I knew I mustn’t. If I did I knew I would scream. Purely from this nightmare of frustration of fighting him every inch of the way and still finding myself at last brought up against the handle of this blasted car door. I could feel the scream growing. It waited, bubbling in the depths of my soul like a madness, ready to consume me.

  “I didn’t kill Black.” By my ear, Gregory was spitting the words. Somehow the injustice of the accusation enraged him. “I didn’t start all this. It’s his fault it’s escalated. He acted like a petty thief. If only he’d surrendered what he’d found when I stepped in off the street to meet him dashing out, or even told me he was a policeman, none of this would have happened. Instead he demanded to know the scale of my involvement in Rhys’s projects. He knew I’d have to act. He deliberately made this into something big.”

  Gregory was trying to work out how to hold me and the screwdriver and reach for the car door all at the same time. But then I saw Adam. We both saw him.

  He’d stepped in a hasty stumble out of the ugly warped door of the shop next door, only to slow abruptly as soon as he fixed his eyes on us. He was moving through the wavering policemen and onto the road. He was a matter of yards away, that was all. He was breathing hard. I thought he’d been running. I couldn’t quite read his face but he had a hand out, like Clarke had done only placating and without the concealed block of wood, ready to make a play for that wavering screwdriver. Relief was like a wash of cold water. Debilitating. His approach bewildered Gregory.

  Behind Gregory, another voice pierced the chaos. This was why they had fallen back. This was what they had been waiting for. This was why Adam had held our attention for these last few precious seconds. Jim had been stepping through from a different doorway. His voice wasn’t breathless. It interrupted with sickening calm. “I’ve just been enjoying a little chat with one of your erstwhile assistants, Mr Scott. Apparently Reed isn’t a professional criminal at all. Apparently he’s a private eye with a weakness for gambling and you sold him a part in the race to retrieve Black’s photographs on the principle that you were the innocent party. And now it seems your attempt to complete the lie has proved singularly ill advised too. A word to the wise if I may; if you’re truly determined to close this deal by abducting my friend, you really should have checked first whether the keys to that car had been left in the ignition.”

  There was a sudden stinging rush of blood to my arm. I kicked back hard with a foot. A zing went by as the screwdriver was flung at Adam’s head, forcing him to flinch aside. I felt the thump of liberation as Gregory Scott swung round, roaring for Jim, to land a punch. He twisted, ducking and ready for a fight and in doing so flung me away, spinning. Right into the path of the approaching bus.

  Chapter 36

  I crawled back to life to find my face pressed into the wool of his shoulder and an arm flung tightly about his neck. His own arms were holding me close. One hand was warm against my hair and the other was a safe curve about my body. Although for a time there had only been the precipice of the deep abyss and absolute silence, now suddenly I could hear myself repeating over and over again in a pale shadow of hysteria, “The bus, the bus, the bus …”

  There was the faintest whisper of amusement. I felt of the warmth of his jaw against my temple. I heard him say with a fierce kind of relief, “It wasn’t a bus, sweetheart, it was a car. It was a car being driven by a very gentle old man at about three miles an hour and I think you terrified him even more than he did you. He wobbled to a halt, you screamed at him loudly enough to rattle all the windows in the street and took off.”

  A small movement of his fingers where they tangled in my hair. “It was all I could do to catch you and get you to sit down here.”

  Here. Wherever here was, it felt hard and cold where it met the skin of my calf and it was probably wood. I didn’t think I had been crying. I couldn’t remember anything between the moment when wild reasoning had abruptly vanished and this slow dawning of thought however many minutes later. Even in a blind panic I must have known who he was and permitted him to guide me. Now I could feel the persistent throbbing of my poor bandaged hand as a steady metronome to my heartbeat. My pulse was more regular than it had been for a long while. The bandaged hand was sandwiched awkwardly between us. We were both twisted towards each other; his right to my left. Hips, thighs and knees pressed close as a sort of barrier to comfort. He was probably deeply uncomfortable. I was too. Like a switch had been thrown I could suddenly hear the noise of traffic very close by and people talking.

  I began to sit up. He loosened his hold to allow me to draw away enough to blink at him and begin to look about but he didn’t let me go. He kept me in the curve of his arm and his free hand met mine as it drifted down from its stranglehold to rest upon the neckline of his jumper. We were sitting on one of the crude wartime benches in front of the war memorial with its wreaths and tokens left to commemorate the recent Armistice Day. The parish church towered over us all and Royal Wedding bunting was everywhere. It was cold and we were both without our coats.

  Adam briefly extended his hand to point out a little old man in an equally tiny Austin 7 who was shakily taking the turn out of C
ricklade Street. He said gently, “There he goes. He got quite a ticking off from PC Downe for his part in it as well, because he bowled in straight through the police line without even looking.”

  “Serves him right,” I said darkly. “Silly old fool.” Then I gulped and said unsteadily, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I don’t think I like people very much at the moment. But—”

  Adam supplied lightly, “— But you do like me?”

  I don’t think I grasped that his humour was a mask for his own worry. I sat up a little straighter and turned and looked at him. Beneath the marks of strain, that familiar faint curve was touching one corner of his mouth. It made me blink at him as though he were being particularly stupid.

  I told him, “I love you. I thought you knew.”

  Then, because he only stared at me utterly, heartshakingly blankly – he really hadn’t known – I lifted my hand to his cheek and leaned in and kissed him. His skin was warm beneath my palm where I drew his head round to mine. His mouth felt perfect, just like the rest of him. As I had suspected it would be. This was a man who had been firmly on my side from the very beginning, even when all my actions were incomprehensible. It felt like I must have loved him for a very long time. For a moment this felt like the natural expression of it.

  And then I realised what I’d done at a time like this.

  I drew away enough to put a shaking hand to my mouth. The tumult of emotions rushed back in and I was too tired to work out what any of them meant. Rejection, hope, guilt, shame and elation. “Oh God,” I said desperately. And shuddered into disintegration again.

  I say ‘again’ but actually it was pretty clear to me then that I really hadn’t been weeping into the curve of his neck before. I’d been too shocked for any normal release. No wonder he’d been relieved when I’d spoken. Now I felt his relief again because he drew me into the safety of his arms once more and held my grief so fiercely tight that he might drive it all away. And then his voice murmured by my ear, “Now what on earth is there to cry about in that little statement?”