Death and the Joyful Woman gfaf-2

by Ellis Peters

  “Thank you,” she said gravely. “I try.”

  The road had narrowed a little, the pavement trees ceased abruptly, the garden walls and fences began to be interspersed with the hedges of fields. He wished he could lean far enough to the right to get a glimpse in the rear-view mirror, but he knew he mustn’t. He wished he knew if they were following. It would be hell if he had to go through all this for nothing.

  “We’ll take the riverside road,” said Miss Hamilton, “it’s shorter. I suppose you haven’t started learning to drive yet?”

  “Well, it would be difficult, really. I can’t go on the road yet, and we haven’t got any drive to speak of, only a few yards to the garage. They did talk about starting lessons at school, there’s plenty of room in the grounds there, but nothing’s come of it yet.”

  “It would be an excellent idea,” she said decidedly. “In school conditions you’d learn very easily, from sheer force of habit. And it’s certainly become an essential part of a complete education these days.”

  “But I think they’re scared for their flower-beds, or something, they swank frightfully about their roses, you know.”

  It was possible to talk about these remote things, he found with astonishment, even when his throat was dry with nervousness and his heart thumping. He cast one quick glance at her profile against the last of the street lighting, the clear, austere features, the slight smile, the sheen of the black hair and the smooth shape of the great burnished coil it made on her neck. Then they had turned into the dark road under the trees, and the headlights were plucking trunk after slender trunk out of the obscurity ahead, sharp as harp-strings, taut curves of light that swooped by and were lost again in the darkness behind. Somewhere there on their right, beyond the belt of trees, the shimmer of the river, bitterly cold under the frosty stars. In summer there would have been a few cars parked along the grass verges down here, with couples locked in a death-grip and lost to the world inside, and more couples strolling among the trees or lying in the grass along the river-bank; but not now. The back rows of cinemas were warmer, the smoky booths of the coffee-bars had as much privacy. No one would come here tonight. And without the lovers this was a lonely and silent road.

  It will be here, he thought, somewhere in this half-mile stretch, before we leave the trees. And he gripped the piped edges of the bucket seat convulsively, and felt his palms grow wet, because he wasn’t sure if he could go through with it. It isn’t just being afraid, he thought. How do you manage it when you see a blow coming, or a shot, and you mustn’t duck, you mustn’t drop for cover, you must just let it take you? How do you do it? He flexed his fingers, startled to find them aching with the intensity of his grip on the leather. He was strong, he could very well defend himself, but until the witnesses appeared he mustn’t. They had to see for themselves what had been planned for him, his own word would never be enough. And if they weren’t following, if they didn’t arrive in time, then in the last resort what happened to him would have to be evidence enough to clear Kitty, Kitty who of all people in the world was safest from being blamed for whatever deaths might occur tonight.

  Miss Hamilton put out her left hand and opened the glove compartment, rummaging busily among the tangle of things within until she brought out a packet of cigarettes. She had slowed down to a crawl while she drove one-handed, and she shook out a cigarette from the packet and put it between her lips with neat, economical movements which made it clear she had done the same thing a few thousand times before. She reached into the pocket again, groping for her lighter, and failed to find it.

  “Oh, of course, it’s in my handbag,” she said, letting the car slide to a stop. “Can you reach it for me. Dominic?”

  He looked over into the litter of things on the back seat; her bag had slid down into the hollow against the torch. The old car was spacious, with ample leg-room between front and rear seats, and he had to turn and kneel on the seat to lean over far enough to reach the corner. He did so in an agony of foreknowledge, living through the sequel a hundred times before it became reality. Terrified, in revolt, forcing himself to the quiescence against which his flesh struggled like an animal in a trap, he leaned over with arm outstretched, presenting to her meekly the back of his brown head. Oh, God, let her be quick! I can’t keep it up, I shall have to turn round, , , I can’t! Oh, Kitty! And maybe you won’t even know!

  Something struck him with an impact that made the darkness explode in his face, and he was jerked violently forward over the back of the seat, the breath driven out of him with a second shock of pain and terror. Then the darkness, imploding again on a black recoil into the vacuum from which the burst of light had vanished, sucked him down with it into a shaft of emptiness and let him fall and fall and fall until even the falling stopped, and there was no more pain or fright or anger or fighting for breath, no more anxiety or agonised, impotent love, nothing.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  “I WISH WE knew what we were looking for,” said Jean, crouched forward into the windscreen of Barney Wilson’s Bedford van and peering with narrowed eyes to the limit of the headlight beams. “A car, it might be any car, we don’t know whose, it could be a taxi, or anything. We just don’t know.”

  “It won’t be a taxi,” Leslie said with certainty. “He’s done something to make things happen.’ It sounds like a man-to-man business.”

  “And we don’t even know that they’ll be coming by this road, it could be the main road.”

  “If it comes to that, we don’t know they’ll be on either. Anyhow, the police are covering both. What more can we do? I can only take this thing one way at a time, and this is the quietest and loneliest. Headlights ahead there, keep your eyes open.”

  The approaching lights were still two or three coils of the winding road distant from them, and perforated by the scattered trees, but they were coming fast. One dancing turn carried them into the intervening double bend, and a second brought them out of it and into full view on one of the brief short stretches. Leslie left his headlights undipped, checking a little and crowding the middle of the road, setting out deliberately to dazzle and slow the other driver. The approaching lights, already sensibly dipped as they turned into the straight, flashed at him angrily, and failing to get a response, stayed up to glare him into realisation of his iniquity. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus beyond the dazzle on the windscreen of the car. Only one face in view there, and not much hope of distinguishing whether man or woman. In a lighted road it might have been easier.

  A horn blared at him indignantly. He said: “Oh, lord!” as he pulled aside just far enough to let the long car by. Driven well and peremptorily, and going fast, going with purpose.

  “No boy,” said Jean, and instantly gasped and clutched at the dashboard as he braked hard. “Leslie! What are you doing?”

  It was instantly clear what he was doing, and he didn’t bother to answer her in words. He was in close under the trees at the side of the road, hauling on the wheel to bring the van about.

  “What is it? What did you see? He wasn’t there.”

  “Not in sight,” said Leslie, and ran the van backwards with an aplomb he would never have achieved in ordinary circumstances. “Didn’t you recognise the car?” They came about in an accelerating arc that brushed the grass, and whirled away in pursuit of the vanishing rear lights. “Hammie’s! That couldn’t be a coincidence. Thank God I know that car so well it can’t even hoot at me in the dark without giving itself away. And she doesn’t know this van. She’s used to seeing me driving various missiles, but not this.”

  Jean huddled against his arm, shivering, but not with cold. “Leslie, if it is her, suppose he isn’t with her any more? Suppose something’s happened already?” She didn’t say that it was unthinkable to suspect Miss Hamilton of crime and violence, because now nothing was unthinkable, every rule was already broken and every restraint unloosed. “Could she have left him somewhere back there on the road?”

  He hadn’t thought of that, an
d it shook him badly. The Riley could be as lethal a weapon as any murderer would need. But he kept his eyes fixed on the receding rear-lights, and his foot down hard. “The police car will be coming along behind.”

  “Yes, but the road’s so dark, that black surface, , , “

  “She’s turning off,” he said abruptly and eagerly, and stamped the accelerator into the floor; for why, if she was alone and upon innocent business, should she turn off this road to the right? There was nothing there but the remotest of lovers’ lanes, a dead end going down to the river-bank. Not even a lane, really, just a cart-track through the belt of trees, once sealed by a five-barred gate, though it hadn’t been closed for a year or so now, and hung sagging in the grass from its upper hinge. Leslie knew the place well enough from summer picnics long ago. There was a wide stretch of open grass by the river there, where cars could drive right down to the water and find ample room to turn. But what could a woman alone want down there on a frosty October night?

  He swung the van round into the mouth of the track, and pulled up. “You get out and wait here for the police car.”

  “No,” she said in a gasp of protest, clutching at his arm, “I’m coming with you.”

  “Get out! How will they know, if you don’t? They’re nowhere in sight. Oh, God, Jean, don’t waste time.”

  She snatched her hand away and scrambled out. He saw her face staring after him all great wide-set eyes in an oval pallor, as he drove down into the darkness between the trees. She didn’t like letting him go without her. They were loose among murders and pursuits and all the things that didn’t normally happen, who could be sure there wouldn’t be guns, too? But what sort of a team were they going to be in the future if they pulled two ways now? She watched the van rock away down the rutted track, and then stood shivering, watching the road faithfully. Leslie’s ascendancy was established in that one decision, when he wasn’t even thinking about their partnership or their rivalry, and it couldn’t have been won in the face of a stiffer test. The hardest thing he could possibly have asked of her was to stand back and let him go into action alone, now, when she had newly discovered how much he meant to her.

  The frozen ruts of the track gripped the wheels of the van and slewed it in a series of ricochets down into the rustling tunnel of trees. He couldn’t see the rear-lights of the Riley now, he couldn’t hear its engine; he had all he could do to hold the van and drive it forward fast towards the faint glimmer of starlight that flooded the open river-bank. The trees thinned. He slowed, killing his headlights altogether in the hope of remaining undetected until he got his bearings, and cruised to the edge of the copse.

  She had driven the car right out on to the low terrace of rimy grass above the water, sweeping round in a circle to be ready to drive out again. Both doors hung open like beetle-wings spread for flight, and midway between the car and the edge of the bank she was dragging something laboriously along the ground, something limp and slender that hung a dead weight upon her arms. Beyond the two figures moving sidelong like a crippled animal the flat breadth of the river flowed pallid with lambent light, at once swift and motionless, a quivering band of silver.

  All down the rough ride under the trees Leslie’s mind had been working coolly and lucidly, telling him exactly what to do. Don’t leave the escape route open. Broadside the van across the track, there’s no other way out. Make sure she shan’t get the car out again. But in the end he didn’t do any of the things his busy brain had been recommending to him, there was no time. She had such a little way to go to the water, and he knew the currents there and could guess at the cold. He didn’t stop to think or consider at all, he just let out a yell of which he was not even conscious, slashed his headlights full on and drove straight at her, his foot down hard. Let her get away, let her run, anything, as long as she dropped the kid in time.

  The front wheels left the track and laboured like a floundering sea-beast on to the bumpy shore of the open turf. Rocking and plunging, he roared across the grass, and his headlights caught and held her in a blaze of black and white. She was hit by noise and light together, he saw her shrink and cringe, letting the boy fall for a moment. She wrenched her head up to stare wildly, and he saw a face carved in light, as hard and smooth and white as marble, with panting mouth and gaunt eyes glaring. The eyes had still an unmistakable intelligence and authority, he couldn’t get a finger-hold on the hope that she might be mad. Then she stooped and seized the boy beneath the armpits, wrenching him up from the ground with furious determination, and began to drag herself and him in a stumbling run towards the water’s edge. Heavy and inert, he slipped out of her hold and she clawed at him again, frantic to finish what she had begun.

  Only at the last moment, as the van swerved and braked screaming to a stop a few yards short of her, did she give up. She flung the boy from her with a sudden angry cry, and ran like a greyhound for her car. Her hair had slipped out of its beautiful, austere coil, it streamed down over her shoulders as she ran, shrouding the whiteness of her face. Leslie, tumbling from the van before it was still, snatched vainly at her arm as she fled, and then, abandoning her for what was more urgent, plunged upon the boy who lay huddled where she had thrown him.

  She had all but done what she had set out to do; a few seconds more and he would have been in the river. His head and one arm dangled over the downward slope of grass, the limp fingers swinging above the edge of the water. Leslie fell on his knees beside him and hauled him well ashore, turning him so that he lay face upwards in the grass. Under the tumbled chestnut thatch Dominic’s face was pinched and grey, the eyes closed. He was breathing with a heavy, short, painful rhythm through parted lips, but at least he was breathing. Leslie felt him all over with hasty hands, and began to hoist the dead weight into his arms. He was just clambering gingerly to his feet under his burden when he heard the Riley start up and soar into speed.

  He’d forgotten that she had a lethal weapon still in her hands. She hadn’t finished with them yet. There was room between the water and the standing van for her to drive round and come upon them at speed, and what was there now to restrain her from killing two as readily as one? He was one man, apparently alone, there was room for him in the river with the boy.

  The Riley’s headlights whirled round the bulk of the Bedford, straightened out parallel with the river’s edge, and lunged at him in a blinding glare. Caught off balance, staggering beneath the boy’s weight, he broke into a lurching run. He couldn’t hope to get into the trees, where she couldn’t reach them, but he jumped for the van and tried to put a corner of its bulk between him and the hurtling car. She wouldn’t crash the van, she wouldn’t do anything to wreck her own means of escape; she was sane, appallingly sane, and at least you can have some idea of what the sane will do. The blaze of light blinded him, he couldn’t see the van or the ground or the starlit shape of the night any more, he could only hurl himself straight across the car’s path into the dark on the other side.

  He caught his foot in the tussocky grass and fell sprawling over his burden beneath the back wheels of the Bedford. The car missed his scrabbling feet by inches, he felt the frosty clumps of the turf crunch close to his heels. Then the light and the rushing bulk were past, and his cringing flesh relaxed with a sob of relief. He eased his weight from the boy and put his face down into his sleeve for a moment, and lay panting, sick with retrospective terror.

  The roar of the car receded, swaying up the rutted track towards where Jean waited. Leslie struggled out of his weakness and came to his feet and began to run, but what was the use? A couple of minutes and the Riley would be out on the road. He cupped his mouth in his hands and bellowed in a voice that shook the frost from the trees: “Jean, look out! Stand clear!”

  She surely wouldn’t try anything crazy? Would she? How could you be sure with Jean, who couldn’t bear to be beaten, and would die rather than give in?

  Winding along the complex curves of the road from Comerbourne came the headlights of two cars, late b
ut coming fast. Jean was standing in the middle of the road waving her arms peremptorily at the first of them when she heard the labouring sound of the Riley climbing back up the lane, and started and quivered to Leslie’s shout. She ran back to stare frantically into the tunnel of the trees. Not the van, the car. What had happened down there? Where was Leslie? What was he doing? The Hamilton woman shouldn’t get away now, she mustn’t, she shouldn’t, even if it made no difference in the end. Jean ran like a fury and wedged her shoulder under the top bar of the drunken old gate, and dragged it protesting out of its bleached bed of grass. She staggered across the track with it supported on her shoulder, and slammed it home against its solid gatepost on the other side. There was a great wooden latch that still dropped creakingly into place; she lodged it with a crash, and flung herself aside under the hedge as the Riley drove full at the barrier.

  The impact burst the bars and sent the weaker gatepost sagging out of true. Wood and glass flew singing through the air, and splinters settled with a strange noise like metallic rain. The car had not the impetus to drive straight through the obstacle, it was brought up shuddering and plunging in the wreckage of the gate, the windscreen shivered, one lamp ripped away. The engine died. Jean crouched quivering in the midst of a sudden teeming activity that shuddered with movement and purpose, but made no more sound.

  She opened her eyes and uncovered her ears and crawled shakily out of the hedge. Beyond the impaled Riley the van came rocking gently up the slope; she saw Leslie’s disordered hair and anxious face staring over the wheel, and in the passenger seat beside him Dominic’s unconscious head lolled above the fringe of Barney Wilson’s old utility rug. Both the cars from Comerbourne were drawn up along the edge of the road, and five men in plain clothes had boiled out of them and taken charge of everything. Two of them were closing in one on either side of the wrecked car. Two more were dismembering the ruins of the gate and hoisting them aside to clear the way. And the fifth, who was George Felse, had made for the Bedford and climbed in beside his son, easing the dangling head into the hollow of his shoulder and feeling with gentle fingers through the tangled hair.