“How long?” asked Bianca.
“He’s doing it now.”
Ruth shrieked. Robert slapped her. I could feel tears run down my own cheeks, as I turned on Charles.
“Do something — stop him, somehow! I didn’t think you’d let him go through with it, even if he does prosecute over the cheques...”
“How can I stop him?” Charles asked, but he didn’t look at me. He was concentrating on Julian.
We stood there, listening. There was no sound from the den.
“I can’t bear it,” I said. “We must get a doctor for him.” I started for the phone, only to have Robert thrust himself in front of me.
“You can’t...”
“Stop her!”
Ruth screamed again. I panicked, side-stepped Robert and ran for the phone. Ruth, still screaming, tripped me and as I fell, she fell on top of me. Then Bianca was hissing something at Julian, who was arguing with Charles. I could hear Robert wheezing above me, as I fought with Ruth.
“We can’t let him die...”
“...get hold of her by that arm...”
“He’s your father! For God’s sake, Julian!”
“Bitch!”
Then something hit me on the head and the room went into a spiral around me. When it straightened out, I was sitting in the place recently occupied by J.B., and Ruth was cutting the telephone cord. The door of the den was now open. Julian came out, closely followed by Charles.
“Charles!” He looked across at me, concerned, but didn’t rush to my side. He was one step behind Julian, crossing the hall to the door, urging him to do, or not do something. I heard the words... “Doctor said...” and “Maybe hours...” Julian was pressing the back of his hand to his upper lip. He looked tortured.
“Shut up, you!” said Robert, glowering over me.
“No!” cried Charles, catching Julian by the shoulder and forcing him to stand still. “I won’t stand for murder. I didn’t really think you’d go through with it. I know you can’t. Look — I’ll take the blame for the cheques if you like, but... all you’ve got to do is phone for a doctor, get J.B. round, say there was some mistake... he’ll never guess that you meant him any harm and then in due course you’ll inherit...”
“I agree with Bianca that it’s too late,” said Robert. “J.B.’s too sharp a bird not to guess that that last injection was out of the ordinary. And even if we do switch bottles...”
“We’ve no choice,” said Ruth, her voice jerking. “If we get a doctor and J.B. comes round, he’ll prosecute Charles and Charles will be able to prove that he didn’t put the money through his own account. No one will be able to prove that he did. But if the bank is asked to hand over those cheques to J.B., he’ll see at once that they were made payable to us. The only way we can cover up the fraud is to allow J.B. to die.”
“Oh, Charles is in it up to his neck,” said Bianca. She was the only one in the room who didn’t appear to be feeling the strain. “The only way we could have got those cheques is through Charles, and even if he didn’t benefit from them directly, he still committed a crime by obtaining them for us, and so he’ll go to prison.”
“Prison or no,” said Charles, “I’ll not let him die. Now do you go for the doctor, Julian — or do I?”
The two men stood toe to toe, glaring at each other. I willed Julian to give in, He did waver.
“You always had a special feeling for him, didn’t you?” Charles didn’t reply. “Well... I suppose... but the phone — you can see we can’t phone.”
“We can take my car, and phone from down the road.”
Bianca slid her arm through her husband’s, pressing herself against him as she whispered in his ear. Julian’s face stilled. His back stiffened, and I knew we’d lost.
“Go if you like,” he said indifferently. “I suppose it may help your case with the police if you call the doctor yourself. If you do succeed in reviving my father, and he raises the matter of who received the money from the cheques, then we shall say that you gave it to us so that we could repay the people who had suffered from your father’s fraud.”
It sounded thin. I didn’t like it, and I could see that Charles didn’t either. There was something about the cocky set of Julian’s head which hinted at knowledge undisclosed.
“All right,” said Charles. He looked and sounded defeated. He came over to me, and I stumbled to my feet.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, and then had to steady myself so as not to fall. I’d been hit on the head once too often.
“Let her stay,” said Ruth unexpectedly. “She’s not fit to go tearing around.”
“Why — so she shall,” said Bianca. She put an arm round my shoulders, pulling me off balance and away from Charles. There was something about her ready agreement which puzzled me, but my head was aching too badly for me to be able to work it out.
“Well...” said Charles, looking unsure of himself for once. “I’ll only be five minutes, Sue, and it’s true you don’t look too good.” He glanced at his watch. “Say ten minutes at the outside.”
We didn’t even kiss or touch hands. He let himself out. We heard his car start up. I didn’t even go to the window to wave goodbye.
“Let him get to the road,” said Ruth.
“Yes,” agreed Bianca. “She was busy with something in the armoire. “We don’t want him blocking our drive.” She brought a complicated bit of electrical wiring out of the cupboard and set it on the coffee table. “Sue — come and look at this, will you?”
I felt evil in the air, but couldn’t work out where it came from.
She smiled up at me. I think it was the very first time I’d seen her look really pleased about something. “Do you remember that we installed a radio set in Charles’ car after he had his little spell in hospital? Well, that was no ordinary radio. It contained sufficient explosive to blow the car to fragments, and Charles with it. It has a radio-controlled detonator, and this...” She gestured to the box of tricks before her. “Is it!” She grabbed my hand and selected a finger. “Here press the switch and send your lover to Kingdom Come!”
“No!” I screamed. “Charles!”
“No good calling for him,” laughed Bianca, pulling on my finger. I clawed at her with my free hand, and Julian hastened to help his wife. He wound his long arms round me, forcing me towards the wicked instrument. I kicked and heard him yelp. I screamed. Ruth flung herself on my other arm; she was crying again. Robert danced around us, yelling ineffectively.
“Now!” screamed Ruth.
“Now!” smiled Bianca, and with one last effort she placed my finger into position and bore down on my hand with all her weight. The impact bruising my finger and grazed the skin. Julian and Bianca held me there, holding the key down — my hand pressing down the key to blow Charles to pieces — until we heard a muffled explosion. Then Julian pulled himself off me, and Bianca released my hand. She looked exultant.
“It had to be,” said Robert. “He would have betrayed us, otherwise.”
“We can blame him for everything now,” nodded Bianca. “No need to switch the bottles back... if there is any doubt raised about the old man’s death, we can say that he’d found out that Charles was fiddling the books, and had threatened to expose him. That would have given Charles sufficient motive to kill J.B. It ought to finish Oliver Ashton off, too, to hear that one of his sons is a murderer! And Mary Ashton! When I see her face...!” I thought she was going to have hysterics, but she managed to control herself.
I was looking at Robert; he shrunk away from me. “You must see we had to safeguard ourselves,” he explained.
“That’s right,” said Ruth, mopping herself up. “We couldn’t trust Charles because he couldn’t be bought with money, or subdued by violence. We could control him more or less while he thought you were in danger, but once the old man was dead and we had to release you, we couldn’t be sure what he’d do.”
I took deep breaths, one after the other. Soon I would begin to feel, and t
o suffer. Now I could only think how unfair it had been that Charles should have had to die. I didn’t recognise my voice when I started to speak.
“You killed him because he was loyal and couldn’t be bought; because he was true to those he loved. You killed him out of envy, because he was everything that you are not. He brought you face to face with the dark corners of your souls, and you couldn’t bear it. He showed you that an easy conscience is of more lasting value than all the money you’ve stolen. You fought him with all the weapons you had, and although he was hurt he wasn’t beaten because he could still laugh and make love and be loved in his turn.” I had their full attention. “Can any of you say that you truly love anyone else, or that you can laugh at a good joke, or even that you are loved? At night, when you go to bed, do you sleep peacefully or do you dream of the harm you’ve done? Do you dream of a harmless, kindly old man locked away in a cold cell, cut off from his family, just because he tried to help Julian, here? Will you, Robert, ever be free from asthma? Your trouble is psychosomatic, isn’t it? It’s brought on by worry, and worry will never leave you now, not till the end of your days. And you, Ruth... can you look at the man you’ve married and not envy other women their loving husbands and children? Does Robert love you? No, of course not. He hates you because every time he looks at you he’s reminded of what he’s done. And you hate him because he cares nothing for you. And what about you, Julian? Can you face the long hours of the night alone in your bed without wondering if with another woman you might have been able to enjoy a normal relationship, if you might even have been loved for your own sake and not for your prospects of inheriting a fortune? Will you ever be able to sleep, without thinking of the harm you did your benefactor, Oliver Ashton, and how you’ve killed the only man who understood your faults and was able to love you in spite of them? How does it feel to have killed your father? And Bianca...”
“Yes?” she said, slit-eyed.
“I think I understand you now. You married Julian thinking he would be your passport to an easy life. Perhaps you even loved him for himself once, but that was all over a long time ago. Perhaps you stopped loving him when the money started to run out, perhaps when you met the Ashtons and saw what it might mean to be loved by the genuine article. You fell in love with Charles. He was the same age as the man you’d married and he had many of the same physical characteristics, but Charles was a true Golden Boy, and once you’d seen him you knew Julian for what he was — a smudged carbon copy. Only Charles wasn’t interested in you and let you see it...” How well I remembered Charles telling me that women of Rita’s type bored him, and how closely Bianca approximated to that type! “You never understood what Charles wanted in a woman. He never did try to make you; that was a lie you made up to save your face after he rejected you. So what you couldn’t have, you set out to destroy, by involving him in the frame of the fraud case, by traducing him to J.B., by blackmail, and by torture. And the only result of your efforts was to throw me in Charles’ way. Did you know that he shared my bed from the night he left hospital? Perhaps you guessed he was lost to you for good when you visited me in my flat? Perhaps that was when you decided that Charles had to die. He died because you couldn’t bear to see him loved and be loved by anyone but yourself.”
The smile set rigid on her face, faded, and returned. Whatever I said, she would not allow her mouth to reflect the bitterness I saw in her eyes. I opened the front door. The sun had come out, but there was a cold wind blowing.
“Where are you going?” Ruth pulled on my arm.
“To Charles of course. He always felt the cold so much. I must go to him, and cover him over with something warm. I’ll sit with him until the police come.”
“Don’t be stupid!” said Ruth. “Why do you think we stopped you from going with him in the first place? There’s no need for you to get involved. He’s dead and discredited. Let’s leave it at that; no one else need get hurt.” She pushed between me and the doorway, speaking to the others over my shoulder. “She’s shocked. Get her a cup of tea, or a drink; something to make her see sense.”
“Let me go to him,” I said, pleading with her. She was so much stronger than she looked, and I was hardly able to keep on my feet. “It can’t matter now what I do.”
“You don’t understand,” said Ruth. “You can’t allow yourself to be associated with him anymore, for your own sake. He’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do to help him now. You’ve got to think of yourself. Life must go on. You must pack up and get out of here before we call the doctor for J.B. Don’t think about Charles; someone will find him, passing along the road, and inform the police in due course. You must go back to your own flat and forget what’s happened. Behave yourself, and everything will be all right, but we don’t want you weeping and wailing over Charles’ body in your present state. Why, if the police were to get at you now...”
“She’ll betray us, too!” hissed Robert. “You should have let her go with Charles.”
“She’ll be all right, if she only pulls herself together.”
“You can see she won’t. She doesn’t care about anything...”
“That’s right,” I said. “I don’t care about anything anymore. I just want to be with Charles, that’s all.”
A long, thin arm caught me round the waist and hauled me away from the door. Julian, breathing hard.
“There’s a car coming up the drive — can’t you hear it?”
Robert was peering through the window, his face reflecting shocked disbelief. “The man from the Fraud Squad? What... I don’t understand!”
In a flurry of movement, I was pushed and pulled to the centre of the room.
“The Old Man — he’s dead?”
“...must be. Leave him where he is... we can say we tried to phone...”
“Put her in the freezer!” That was Bianca’s voice lifting clear of the others. “I checked — there’s plenty of room for her. We can put something heavy on top so that she can’t get out. We can deal with her later, when the police have gone. No one will hear her if she screams, it’s so well insulated...”
“She might die!”
“So? We stage a little accident in her flat later on...”
“No!” I tried to scream and had a cushion held over my face. I fought, but hands grabbed me from every angle, and I was bundled through the kitchen and into the utility room as the doorbell rang.
“Up-sa-daisy!” said Bianca. I was swung up and then down, hitting the frozen packets of food with such a thump that all the breath was knocked out of me. As I tried to struggle to my knees, the heavy lid of the freezer thudded down. I tried to heave it up, hunching myself against it, but it would not move. The chilly atmosphere bit at my hands, face and legs. The packets of frozen food were frosted with ice, which grated and stuck to my skin. I screamed and heard the sound return to me, shockingly muted.
“Charles!”
Tears came then. I shook and shivered. The cold began to grip through my clothes. I roused myself to attack the lid again, but it was no good. I collapsed wearily. I couldn’t fight any more. I didn’t particularly want to, now that Charles was dead. Soon I would be dead too, and that would be the end of that.
Six
I was only half conscious when the lid was wrenched upwards and someone hauled me out of the freezer with the minimum of ceremony. Hard, cruelly hard hands brushed down my arms and legs and forced me to stand; I clutched at soft, supple leather and moaned, was picked up and hurtled through the air...
I gagged on the spirit poured down my throat.
“More!” said a voice I seemed to have known, a long time ago. The rim of a flask grated against my teeth. Whoever was holding the flask was quite determined that I should get more whisky down me. I drank, and felt fire burn my gullet, and chase down into my ribs, competing with the chill that was convulsing my body in rhythmic shivers. My hands and legs flamed as someone chafed them. My cheek burned. Someone pulled my hair up and wrapped me round in a cocoon of soft l
eather that smelt new. My nose was pressed into soft, warm wool.
Cautiously I opened my eyes. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but I knew that sweater. It was one of Charles’ favourites. I was sitting on Charles’ knee in the kitchen, and J.B. was peering into my face from a distance of six inches as he chafed my hands. He looked perfectly fit and very anxious.
“It’s all right!” said Charles, in a voice which informed me that everything was very far from all right with him. I discovered that he was trembling, too. I pulled my hands away from J.B. and started to feel Charles all over.
“You’re dead!” I said absurdly. “You must be damaged, at least. Perhaps... are your legs all right?” I had a vision of Charles with his legs blown off, lying in a wrecked car. The memory of the unfortunate victim of the industrial accident, who had been in the same ward at the hospital as Charles, floated through my mind.
“Of course not!” he said angrily. “Don’t be stupid, Sue! You didn’t expect me to take a gift of a radio from them without wondering what was behind it? I had it to pieces the first day I took possession of the car, discovered the explosive device, and wrote to David for instructions as to how to deal with it. Then I bought an identical radio set to install in my car, and put the original, lethal set in that old tool shed at the bottom of the garden here. It made a fine noise when it went up, didn’t it?” He captured both my hands and held them so tightly that I almost screamed with pain. In fact, he was holding me so tightly I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to do so. I was only thankful it wasn’t necessary. I began to weep into his sweater.
J.B. chirruped something about giving me more whisky, and Charles told him not to be more of a fool than he could help. I had not been mistaken about one thing, anyway; Charles was in a right royal rage about something. I soon found out what.
Someone thrust my spectacles at me. It was Ronald, looking as calm as if he were about to attend a boardroom meeting, complete with briefcase.
Sue for Mercy Page 11
