by Ellis Peters
The dull voice behind her said, dragging with weariness:
“What difference does it make?”
“I was looking for a rug,” she said, “to put over you.”
There was one instant of absolute silence, then the door closed as abruptly as a cry, and she heard the key turned hastily, clumsily in the lock. For a long minute she caught the deep, harsh, strained accent of his breathing, close there against the door, so that almost she could see his damp forehead pressed against the cold white panelling, and the veined eyelids heavy as marble over the burned-out grey eyes. Only slowly and with infinite effort did he drag himself away; she heard his steps slur along the carpeted landing, and stumble down the stairs.
CHAPTER IV
« ^ »
The first thing she did was to cross to the window and hoist the sash, to have a second look at the lie of the land seawards. The bedroom looked out, like the bathroom, to the rear of the house, but not directly towards the water. To the left lay the outline of the coast above the cliffs, undulating between tree-lined hollows and blanched grassy brows, but beneath the walls of the cottage the land crumbled away towards the sea. By craning out to extend her view to the right she could see the cliffs broken by a small, tight inlet, where the tide came in to a tiny jetty and a boat-house. Many a small house like this must have been snapped up by boating enthusiasts as desirable weekend accommodation, all round the Scottish coast. Did it belong to this man’s family? Surely to someone who knew him well, or he wouldn’t have been admitted to all its secrets. There seemed to be a rocky path leading down from the house to the inlet, but only here and there could she glimpse a level, slated spot that formed a part of it.
The drop from the window she abandoned as impossible. Even if she had had sheets enough to knot into a rope, and confidence enough in the finished article to trust herself to it—after all, what had she to lose?—she didn’t believe she could climb round the corner of the house to level ground. Forget that, and consider the contents of the room.
She was closing the window again when she heard the car below start up, and gently roll the few yards into the garage, and in a moment the double doors closed hollowly over it. Naturally he wouldn’t risk leaving that where it could be seen, and draw attention to itself and him.
Well, if she couldn’t get out of here, could she keep him from getting in? The trouble with modernised holiday cottages is that everything tends to be either light-weight or built-in. Wardrobe and dressing-table here were neatly contrived with white-wood shelving built on to the wall, there was nothing of any solidity that was movable, not even the bed. A child could have shoved that across the floor on its admirable and infuriating ball castors. There were no bolts inside the door to supplement the lock, and she couldn’t barricade herself in.
There remained only the lock itself, new and presumably efficient, but surely also a light-weight, a token seal on privacy. She emptied the contents of her handbag on the bed, and fingered them over for anything that might provide a tool or a weapon. The obvious lock-picker was her nail-file, a giant from the lavish manicure case George had once given her, long and strong and with a formidable point. She had another use for that, however. It was the only thing she had that even suggested a weapon, all it lacked was a comfortable handle that would give her more control and force in using it, and she supplied that by embedding the unpointed end firmly in the cake of soap she had stolen from the bathroom. It wasn’t much as defence against a gun, but if she got a chance she intended to forestall that direct confrontation. If she had had this in her hand half an hour ago, when he had sat there in broken exhaustion on the stairs, with his back turned to her…
So this, she thought, pushing back the tangled hair from her forehead, this is how killers are made. No, I can’t! Not unless… not until… All the same, she fingered the point of the file, and remembering that there were bricks outside the window, went and flung up the sash again, and began carefully whetting the improvised dagger, first one end, then the other, watching the scored surfaces grow bright.
The light was growing brighter, too. She was facing to the right, towards the sea, and the layer of mist that floated above the water thinned before her face into diaphanous wisps, and dissolved in light. She looked down towards the inlet, her eyes drawn by a tiny point of colour and movement. Out of the boat-house a graceful blond shape slipped demurely, all pale, smooth woodwork and gleaming brass and bright blue paint, stealing along like a cat to rub itself delicately against the jetty. Of course, how lucky for him that he knew somebody with a secluded cottage on the coast, and a boat that could make it, in the right hands, over to the Low Countries. Somewhere at any rate, on the way to a much more distant place where a man could vanish.
He was there in the boat, she saw the thin dark figure step ashore and make the boat fast. He was bringing something in his arms from the foot of the path. What it was she could not see at first, though she saw him stoop to hoist it, and could easily recognise that it was heavy, and filled his arms. Only when he stowed it aft, and went to drag up a tarpaulin cover over it, did she realise how simple and significant a thing it was. A large, jagged stone. That was all.
She stood at the window, the file arrested in her hand. Of course, that was one of the simpler essentials. He would need a weight.
No, she corrected herself, two weights. And here he came with the second one, placing it carefully, to avoid disturbing the trim of the boat. There would be two bodies, a double burial at sea. No use hiding the first without at the same time disposing of the second, and rendering it silent for ever.
She was looking on at the final preparations for her own death and burial.
She was probing desperately at the lock with a straightened hair-grip, two of her nails broken and a fingertip bleeding and raw, when she heard her enemy enter the house and begin to climb the stairs. The key turned in the lock; the door opened.
“Come down, when you’re ready.”
His voice was level and dull. His eyes, though they did not avoid her, hardly seemed to see her, but she had no doubt that they would give him notice sharply enough if she made a false move. Nor could she see the gun, but it must be ready in his pocket in case of need. The dimness on the landing sheltered him a little, turned him into a mere lay figure, a cardboard cut-out in shades of grey. She picked up her handbag from the bed, walked steadily past him to the bathroom, and bolted the door; and after a moment she heard him go slowly down the stairs, step by heavy step like a lame man.
All the time that she was in there, making up her face with almost superstitious care to get everything right, and with a flat, dream-like sense of saying good-bye, she could feel his eyes down below, never swerving from the staircase, penning her in. When she had done her extended best for her appearance she would have to go down and face him. You can’t just crouch in a corner and close your eyes, and wait for a miracle. She made sure that her make-shift dagger was disposed at the right angle at the top of the jumbled possessions in her bag, with a fold of her handkerchief covering it. If you have to go down, you go down fighting.
Sunday morning breakfast she thought numbly, on a brief week-end jaunt before the winter sets in! Where was I yesterday? Safe at home in all that autumnal oppression, with nothing to do but wait for everything to be all right again. If it had been a clear, sunny morning like this, nothing need ever have happened, all those cobwebs would have melted from me like mist. She counted the years now, and they were nothing, a triviality, dropped petals, with illimitable wealth still to fall. She took her sights from the past resolutely, and set them on the shrunken future.
With a step as slow and drugged as his, she went down the stairs; and he was there, as she had known he would be, waiting for her. He held open the second white door in the hall. The living-room of this spectacular little house would obviously be designed to overlook the sea. A remnant of curiosity remained to her. She looked round the room with remote, unreal interest. There was a picture window, wit
h the dawn sun framed in it in impossible beauty, for they were looking almost due east. There was a narrow white door beside it, no doubt leading into a tiny, built-in kitchenette. Everything was white wicker and orange corded silk, bright, inexpensive and gay, cushioned chairs, a light settee, a small dining-table with an orange-coloured cloth.
Her sense of unreality grew extreme. There must be a store of non-perishable and tinned foods left in the cottage. He had made tea, and produced tinned ham, cheese and crispbread. For himself, no doubt, and he must have needed it, but he had laid two places. Either he was gone beyond the boundary of reason, or the cottage exerted on him the compulsions to which he was accustomed within its walls, and the first of them was hospitality, even to his victim.
She lost touch with her own destiny then, the unreality of that room was too much for her. She knew the facts, she knew what they predicted, but she could no longer behave in accordance with what she knew. Beyond a certain point you abandon carefulness, because it is so patently of no more use, and silence, because it makes no difference any more, and because caprice may by some freakish chance hit the jackpot you’ll never get by taking aim. She began to range the room, paying no attention to him, examining everything that bore witness to the absent owners. And there on the small white bookcase, stocked with Penguins and other paperbacks for their guests, was their double photograph, a studio portrait of man and wife in their comfortable fifties, he in white open-necked shirt and silk scarf, with a round, amiable face and receding hair, she in the ageless Paisley silk shift, with a modish new shingle and a good-humoured middle-aged smile.
“Your parents?” she asked with deliberate malice; for she was quite sure that they were not his parents.
“Friends,” said the heavy voice behind her. “Louise is my godmother,” he added, with shattering calm.
“Ah, so that’s why you’re so at home here,” she said. “What’s their name?”
“Alport. Reggie and Louise Alport.” Why care enough now to make secrets of these details? He answered her because it would have taken more energy and effort to keep silence than to speak. “If you want some tea,” he said remotely, “help yourself.”
She turned to look at him then, and even came to the table and sat down, suddenly aware how desperately she wanted some tea. The suggestion of the laid table was too strong to be resisted, even though all this was a pointless interlude on the way to something else, something final.
“Do they live in Comerbourne, too?”
“No, in Hereford.” A dreary and desperate wonder sat upon him; and now that she saw him in the full light from the eastern window he was pale and insubstantial as paper, perished paper, so brittle that it might crumble to dust at any moment. “That’s where my family come from.”
“Then you work in Comerbourne.” She could not have explained why it was so important to keep talking, to keep drinking tea, and swallowing mouthfuls of sawdust food that stuck in her throat; to maintain, not a pretence, but a hypnotic suggestion, that everything here was normal, and had to be preserved, so that scoring through its normality with an act of violence should be increasingly difficult. Nor could she have said why a grain of information added to her knowledge of him should seem to add to her meagre resources. The nail-file was surely a better bet. Yet she persisted. Of course, who else enjoys even one October week-end lasting until Wednesday morning? It was the half-term break; she ought to have known. “You teach,” she said, feeling her way, “at one of the schools in Comerbourne.”
“I did,” he said distantly.
“What did you teach?”
“Art… if it matters now.”
I wonder, she thought, feeling the shuddering undertones beneath these exchanges, whether he knows what I’m thinking as clearly as I know what’s going on inside him? Kill me here and now, and he’ll have the trouble of carrying or dragging me down to the boat, and the risk of being seen at it. Make me walk there to be killed on board, and he takes the chance that I may try breaking away, even at the last moment. Why not, with nothing to lose? The whole thing could go wrong then, even if it’s an outside chance. I might survive to talk. No, he’ll want to make sure. It will be here!
He’s just made up his mind!
“How odd,” she said, her eyes holding his across the table, her right hand in the open handbag on her lap, “to think that I don’t even know your name.”
“Why should you?” he said. And suddenly he set both hands against the edge of the table, and pushed back his chair. His face was more dead than alive, blue-stained at lips and eyes, cemetery clay, but he moved with method and certainty, like a machine.
“Yes, what are you waiting for?” she blazed abruptly, on her feet with the nail-file in her hand. Her handbag went one way, her handkerchief another. “Do you think I don’t know you’ve got everything ready? Even the stone for my feet?”
He got up slowly and started round the corner of the table after her, hooking a hand under the edge to hoist it aside from between them. She caught the brief reflection of light from eyes opaque and dead as grey glass.
“I’m sorry!” said the distant voice, from somewhere far beyond sorrow. “What can I do? You shouldn’t have looked in there. What choice have you left me? I liked you,” he said, wrenching at his own unavailing pain, “you were kind to me! But what can I do about it now?”
“You could let me walk to my grave,” she said, backing from him inch by inch, “and save yourself trouble.” Anything to spin out five more minutes, three, even one, to give time one more chance. And still, at this extremity, she had a corner of her mind free to wonder where the gun was, why it wasn’t in his hand. He couldn’t be afraid of the shot being heard, not here, there was no other dwelling in sight. If he’d had the sense to use the gun he needn’t even have come within her reach, she would have had no chance at all.
His hand swung the table round, shedding the tea-pot from its tilted edge, and drove it hard against the wicker arm-chair beside the wall. She dared not turn her head to look, but her hip rammed hard into the arm of the chair, and she could retreat no farther.
“Not you,” she heard his voice saying hopelessly, “you’d run, you’d swim for it, I know you. Why did it have to be you?”
Bracing her fingers round the hilt of her dagger, she had just time to feel one angry stab of amusement, involuntary and painful, at his appropriation of what should surely have been her question. And then the moment and he were on her together.
He took the last yard in one fast, light step, and reached for her with long hands crooked; and she stooped under his grasp instead of leaning back from him, and slashed upwards at his throat with all her weight, uncoiling towards him like a spring. She felt the impact, and sudden heat licked her fingers, but in the same instant he had her by the wrist, and had wrenched hand and weapon away from his grazed neck, forcing her arm back until her grip relaxed. Distantly, through the roaring in her ears, she heard the nail-file tinkle on the wood blocks of the floor, a light, derisory sound. Then his groping hands found their hold on her throat, and chaotic eruption of light and darkness blinded her eyes.
She put up her hands and clawed at her murderer’s face, until the pressure on her throat grew to an irresistible terror, and then an agony, and she could only fight feebly to drag his hands away. Her eyes burned, quite darkened now, there was nothing left in existence but a panic struggle for breath. A sound like sobbing thudded in her ears, the great breaths she could no longer drag into her lungs seemed to pulse through her failing flesh from some other source. Someone else was dying with her, she heard him in extremity, moaning and whining with pain, and long after she had no voice left to complain with, that lamentable sound followed her down into darkness and silence.
Consciousness began again in an explosion of fiery pain; the red-hot band of steel round her neck expanded, burst, disintegrated. She was dead, she must be dead. Or why the delirious cool rush of air into her body again at will, the abrupt withdrawal of pressure and f
ear, the sudden wild awareness of relief and ease? Nothing was holding her any more, nothing confined her, her own limp hands wandered freely to touch her bruised throat. Her knees gave way under her slowly, she slid down against the arm of the wicker chair, and collapsed into the cushions like a disjointed doll, and lay gulping in air greedily, tasting it as never before, experiencing it as a sensuous delight. The darkness lifted slowly. She opened her eyes, and colours and shapes danced dazzlingly before them. She saw sunlight reflected on the ceiling, and a shimmer that was the refractions of broken light from the motion of the sea.
Her eyes and her mind cleared together, into an unbelievable, unprecedented clarity. She lay still for a long moment, seeing the outlines of things round her with a brilliant intensity that was painful to her eyes after the darkness. The same room, the same signs of struggle, the fallen handbag on the floor, the broken tea-pot, the tablecloth dragged into disorderly folds. She was alive, she was intact. Not because of any miraculous intervention, but for solid reasons, in pursuit of which her mind stalked in silence within her recovering body. The clarity within there was as blinding and sharp as the clarity without.
She sat up slowly, clinging to the edge of the table, and looked round for her murderer.
Head-down in a dark huddle on the wicker settee, he lay clutching the orange-coloured cushions to his face with frantic energy, fingers, wrists, forearms corded with strain, as if he willed never to show himself to the light again. He had withdrawn from her the full width of the room when he snatched his hands away. Shuddering convulsions shook through him from head to foot; a touch, and he would fly apart and bleed to death. He was bleeding now, she saw the oblique graze on his neck oozing crimson, and staining the orange silk. Who had come nearer to killing?
It was at that moment that the black dolphin knocker on the front door banged peremptorily three times on its curling cast-iron wave.
