by Ellis Peters
“We!” she repeated with emphasis. “And the very first thing you do is get a few hours’ sleep… and a bath, if it’ll help. You’ve had no sleep for two nights, and I haven’t had much, and we’re going to need our wits about us. I’ll tidy up this mess, and then I’ll snatch a sleep, too.”
“A bath!” His face brightened childishly. “I never thought I should be looking forward to anything again!”
“Go and get it, then. You’ll be more use when you’ve had a rest, and can think straight again.”
He rose and made for the door like a bidden child, dropping with sleep, but in the doorway he turned once again to look at her long and earnestly. His eyes had cleared into a pure, tired greyness, young and vulnerable and still heavy with trouble, but hesitant now on the edge of hope.
“Bunty…”
She was already gathering up the scattered dishes from the tea-stained cloth, and piling them on the tray. She looked up at him inquiringly across the table.
“… what’s the Bunty short for?”
She smiled. “Bernarda. But I don’t tell everybody that. They took to calling me Bunny, and I wasn’t having that, cuddly was the last thing I intended to be. So I twisted it into Bunty myself. At least that’s got one sharp angle to it. What can I call you?”
“Luke. My name’s Luke Tennant. All sharp angles. Bunty… Bernarda…” His voice touched the names with timid delicacy, like stepping-stones to what he wanted to say. “I’m sorry!” he blurted painfully. “Did I… hurt you very much…?”
“No!” she said quickly. “Hardly at all. It’s all right!” She had scarcely noticed the stiffness and soreness of her throat, and touched the bruises now with surprise.
“I’m sorry! How could I? I must have been clean out of my mind…”
“Think nothing of it!” Bunty was beginning to experience a lightheadedness that could all too easily be mistaken for lightness of heart. She looked ruefully at the long scratch on his neck, on which a few beads of dried blood stood darkly. “I’m sorry I tried to kill you, too, for that matter. Neither of us was much good at it. Let’s just say we both failed our practical, and call it quits!”
The turmoil of hope had finally overwhelmed and wrecked him. He rolled himself in the quilt on the Alports’ bed, and drowned in the vast sea of sleep that had been waiting for his first unguarded moment. And Bunty, having restored order in the living-room, lay down on the cushions of the settee and tried to think. It was the first time she had had a moment for thinking since this fantastic affair began, and it was the last such moment she would have until this affair ended. At least she was sure now of herself and him. But who could be sure of the ending?
She had meant to go carefully over his story, to try to extract from his halting account some significant point which had meant nothing to him. But as soon as she closed her eyes George’s thin, middle-aged, scrupulous face was there within her eyelids, and she could see nothing else. If she had wanted something of her own to do, as proof that she had been in the world in her own right, she had it now, and for her soul’s sake she must succeed in it; and George was far away and knew nothing about it, and could not help her. Be careful what you pray for, she thought wryly, you may get it. And to the beloved face within her closed eyes she said: You concentrate on your own case, chum, this one’s mine—whether I like it or not. I got myself into it, and now I’ve got to get two of us out of it. You know how it is, there’s no other way home. So go away, like a good boy, and let me think.
But he wouldn’t go away; and in a few moments she let go of her anxieties and embraced the thought of him instead, with a still and grateful passion, and the instant she let her mind lie at rest in him she fell asleep.
It was nearly noon when she awoke, the sun was high, the light harder, more than half the room now out of the direct sunlight. She got up stiffly, sticky with sleep, and the sense of time pressing fell upon her like fear. She washed and made up her face, and then went to explore the contents of the kitchen cupboard. A canned Sunday luncheon was something of which her family would have disapproved, but it was better than nothing. There were no potatoes, of course, but there was rice, and ham, and some exotic canned vegetables. And blessedly, there was coffee. The kitchen was tiny, built out to the extremity of the level ground, with a broom-cupboard and a store under the same roof. She opened the back door, and the shimmering reflected light from the sea flooded in; and beyond a tiny, flagged terrace, the slatey stairs began to plunge downhill towards the inlet and the jetty, and the moored boat below.
She knew then, busy in the sunlit kitchen with can-opener and pans, that the silence and the brightness were an illusion, and nothing was going to be easily salvaged, neither Luke Tennant’s liberty nor her own peace of mind.
He came down the stairs with a brisk, self-conscious tread that told her plainly he meant to resume responsibility for his own fate. He was a new if slightly battered man, polished, shaven, combed into aggressive neatness; he was the lucky one in one respect, at least, he had his luggage with him on this trip. He had even changed his clothes, perhaps as a symbolical gesture of hope and renewal. The sleep he had had, too short and too drunkenly deep, had left him a little sick and unsteady, but very determined. His face was still pale, but the terrible tension was eased once and for all. He could even smile properly. He smiled when he opened the door of the living-room, and looked for Bunty, and found her. It was as if his eyes had been waiting with the smile in readiness, and she was the spark that set light to it.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, rising. “You’ve probably got to be, to eat this concoction I’ve knocked up. It was the best I could do. If you don’t mind, I’ll dish it up in the kitchen and bring it in on the plates.”
“Bunty, I’ve been…” His eyes took in the order she had restored to the room, the laid table, the signs of activity in the kitchen; he was side-tracked by sheer amazement, and then abashed by a devastating sense of his own uselessness by comparison. “Good lord, you can’t have slept at all!”
“Oh, yes, I did,” she called back from the kitchen. “This is one of those five-minute meals. The only thing that isn’t instant, I’m glad to say, is the coffee.” She appeared in the kitchen doorway with the piled plates in her hands, and closed the door behind her with one foot. “Look out, these are hot!”
She had found Louise Alport’s hostess apron, gaily printed crash linen with pockets shaped like tulips, and her nursery towelling oven gloves. The cottage had a fantasy quality, unreal, inexhaustible, and in such dreamlike experiences you take anything you can get, to balance the everything you have lost, your normal world. Also, perhaps, for a better reason, to dazzle your companion, and keep the machinery of his life ticking over until the normal world is recovered.
If, of course, it ever is recovered.
“Bunty, I’ve been thinking…”
“Good!” she said heartily. “Maybe you can infect me. After lunch we’ve got a lot of hard thinking to do.”
“Not we,” he said gently. “I.”
She looked up sharply at that, eyeing him doubtfully across the table. He had regained his balance, at least; whether he yet believed seriously in his own innocence or not, he wasn’t going to be shaken into induced behaviour again. No more doing his worst to act like a killer because he believed that he had reduced himself to that role, and had no right to any other.
“Bunty, I’m more grateful to you than I can ever tell you. But now I’ve got to go on with this by myself. It’s my problem, not yours. I’ve let you do too much for me, and without you I should never have come to my senses. But now I am in my right mind, and I want you out of this mess, clean out of it. I want you home, untouched, as if you’d never known anything about me and my sordid affairs. After lunch I’m going to drive you into Forfar, and put you on a train for Edinburgh, on the way home. I’d make it all the way to Edinburgh, and see you safe on the express, only I doubt if I could get the car that far without being picked up.”
“I think I shall. I know these roads. And you know what they said… they’re looking for a car that jumped a red light and scared a policeman out of a year’s growth, but not for a murderer. So they’ll be hunting me, all right, but they won’t have turned out the whole force after me. I’ll make it safely to Forfar with you. And I shall feel a little less guilty if I know you’re clear away. I can’t let you go on carrying my load for me.”
“Aren’t you forgetting,” she said dryly, “that they know I’m here? That I gave them a false name and address, which they may very well be checking up on at this moment? You think that young constable won’t know me again?”
His eyes, devouring her with an unwavering stare of anxiety, compunction and reverence, said clearly that any man who had talked with her even for a moment would know her again among thousands. His voice, quietly reasonable, said only: “What does that matter? He’s never going to see you again. All they’ve got is a false name. They may find out that your Rosamund doesn’t exist, but that still won’t help them to find Bunty. By tomorrow you’ll be home again, and nobody’ll know where you’ve been, and nobody here will know who the woman was who answered the door to the police this morning.”
“It’s impossible,” said Bunty firmly. “In any case, I’ve got no money, not a penny.”
“We have,” he said, and smiled at her.
What surprised her most was the violence of the temptation that tugged at her mind and heart, to accept the offer and escape now, back into her old prosaic life, to close this secret interlude and lock the door on it for ever. She thought with an astonishing surge of joy and longing of her unexciting household in Comerford, and the half of her life that was over seemed to her in retrospect, and from this pinnacle of strangeness, full, satisfying and utterly desirable. Luke was not talking of impossibilities at all. By morning she could be home. No one would ever know where she’d been in the interval. Probably no one need ever know she had been away at all. Not even George!
The very mention, the very thought of George turned her in her tracks, and brought everything into focus for her. Of course she couldn’t consider it. She had never seriously believed that she could.
“And what,” she asked deliberately, “are you proposing to do?”
“As soon as I’ve seen you safely out of here I’m going to tidy up this place and leave it as nearly as possible the way we found it. Maybe I shan’t succeed, but at least I can try to keep the Alports out of the deal. And then I’m going to take the car and everything that’s in it, and somehow get myself to a police station without being picked up on the way. I can manage that much, if I put my mind to it. And I’ll tell them everything I know about how Pippa got killed. Everything,” he said, his grey gaze wide and steady on her face, “except about you. And then it will be up to them.”
And I will remember you for ever, the grey eyes said, but not for her to hear; whether I ever see you again or not, and whatever becomes of me.
The moment of silence between them was brief and hypnotic; she couldn’t let it go on, there were those urgent realities all the while drumming in her brain, and she knew, and it was time he knew, too, that she had no intention of going anywhere.
“Eat your lunch,” she said practically, “it’ll be even more revolting cold. You’re wasting your time, in any case. I won’t leave you. We’re in this together, and we stand or fall together. I’m not going home to Comerbourne until I can take you with me, a free man.”
In a sudden harsh gasp he burst out: “I meant to kill you!” and shuddered at the memory.
“I know you did. I know you meant to, but you couldn’t. There was never any possibility that you’d be able to do it, when it came to the point. And neither can I go away and leave you now. Maybe I meant to, for a moment, but I can’t. We mean to do things, out of some misconception of what we are, but what we really are always goes its own way when it comes to the point.”
“I owe you everything I’ve got in the world now,” he said carefully, “and everything I am, for whatever it’s worth. You don’t owe me anything, except a great deal of fear and pain.” But he didn’t say that he wanted her to go; it wouldn’t have been true.
“That isn’t how I see it. You chose me for a companion in your extremity. But it happened to be my extremity, too, and I chose to accept your companionship for my own salvation. That’s a bond, and I’m not going back on it. You didn’t make it alone, I helped to make it. We made it,” she said, “and now we’ve got to resolve it.” And abruptly she rose from the table, and marched away into the kitchen for the coffee.
When she came back, he was staring out of the window with his chin on his fist, his face turned away from her; and she would never know whether he abandoned argument because he knew it would not be effective, or because he was only too afraid that it might, and he didn’t want to lose her. For what he said, after a long pause, was only :
“Then I’d better bring in her things from the car, and see if there’s anything there that means anything, to begin with.”
“We should have a look at the gun, too,” Bunty agreed, relieved.
“I suppose,” he said, “I ought to bring her in, too.” Bunty, watching his profile narrowly, noting its determined calm, and impersonality brittle as glass, saw sweat break in beads on his lip. “In any case I shall have to, to get at her suitcase.”
She almost offered to help him, and realised in time that she must not. Where death was concerned she was stronger and better rehearsed than he was—hadn’t she, in a sense, passed clean through a death of her own to this uncanny understanding of him? But there were now almost more ways of hurting and affronting him than there were of helping him, and most of them had to do with his wish to protect and spare her. She knew him now as well as she knew her own son, she was sensitive to everything that happened within him. It wouldn’t cost her much to humour him. So she refrained from offering him the obvious comfort that would have shocked him deeply; for she had been on the point of reassuring him that by this time rigor mortis would most probably be passing, and he wouldn’t have to struggle with a twisted marble girl.
He laid her down carefully on the bed, and turned back the folds of the blanket from her. She was limp and pliant in his hands. He settled her head on the pillow, and straightened her legs and arms, trying to remember whether there had been any expression of fear in her face, where now there was nothing but indifference, and sadly conscious that he would have been unable to see it for the fear in himself. The dead never look as if they are alive and sleeping, whatever people may say. They always look dead. There is an absolute quality about death.
So there she was, young and slender and lovely, the sum of three years of his life, and the focal point of everything he knew about suffering. And maybe he had killed her, but in his heart he felt an increasing conviction that he had not. If he could have been quite sure of his innocence he might have felt the last convulsion of love for her at this moment; but because he was not quite sure, all he dared feel was a terrible, aching pity at such cruel waste. He smoothed her long, fair hair on either side of her face, trying to make something orderly out of disorder.
Then he locked the door, and went down to bring in her suitcase and handbag from the car.
CHAPTER VII
« ^ »
The gun lay between them on the table, a tiny, compact shape of bluish steel, hardly more than four inches long, to the outward view of so simple and innocent a construction that it looked more like a theatrical property or a toy than a machine for killing. It had a tiny cameo head engraved on the side of the grip, and the lettering along the barrel clearly announced its name and status :
LILIPUT KAL. 6.35
Modell 1925.
“I suppose there’s no point in handling it carefully,” said Bunty, eyeing it dubiously. “We’ve already plastered the
outside of it with our prints, and in any case we can be certain they haven’t left any others there to be found.”
Nevertheless, neither of them was in any hurry to touch it again. This trifle, hardly too big to have fallen out of a child’s lucky-bag, had bound them together and held them rigidly apart the whole night long, but it had no place in their relationship now. For a moment Bunty had an impulse to ask him why, when he had dragged himself to the very brink of murder against his nature, he had not, after all, used the gun. But that was only one of the many things she could never ask him, and in any case he would not have known the answer. On reflection, she felt that she might be better able to explain it to him. The Luke who had approached that moment in such sickness and despair had believed himself—no, had known himself—to be a murderer; but his own blood and sinews had felt no conviction of any such identity, and had done everything possible to avoid making it true. The gun might have made success only too certain, and his hands had shirked it at the last moment, and come to the decision naked, and still fighting hard against what he was trying to make them do. So she was alive, and he…
He picked up the Liliput suddenly, and thumbed over the small, grooved catch at the left side of the grip. “It’s all right,” he said, holding it out to her with a faint smile, “I’ve only put it on safety. That won’t foul up any evidence there may be, and if we’re going to handle it we may as well take no chances.” He caught the sudden kindling flare of her eyes, and made haste to answer before she asked. “No, really, it hasn’t been like that all the time. I put the safety on after I came round, as soon as I made up my mind I had to get out and take everything with me. I don’t even know why. I suppose I was afraid to handle it without, not being used to such things. Pippa was no good with it, either,” he said wryly, “she had to shove it over with her free hand instead of just using her thumb. She always had to wrestle with anything manual, even bottle-openers.”
