The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  “Yes, her keys. Didn’t you think of them? Her suitcase wasn’t locked, was it? Would Pippa go anywhere with her suitcase unlocked? Of course she locked it! Of course she had her keys with her, here, in this handbag. She was locking up her flat, wasn’t she? She was locking her luggage. He—whoever he was—he took her keys to look through her case, and he didn’t find what he was looking for, so he kept the keys. Why? To look for it in her flat… don’t you think so?”

  She led him in her arm to the nearest of the white wicker chairs and persuaded him into it, and sat on the arm and held him against her shoulder, talking to him in a soft, reasonable, detached voice, coaxing and reassuring without directly doing either.

  “He wanted something she had, or something he believed she had. He thought it would be in her case, but it wasn’t. So he went to her flat to hunt for it there. Now you know,” she said, and had no need, and felt none, to explain what it was that he knew.

  “There was someone there,” he said, suddenly laughing, shaking with laughter like a lunatic. “I didn’t…” And he put his head down in her lap and laughed and wept, with relief, with rapture, because he wasn’t a murderer.

  “She always carried them,” he said, clearly, almost gaily, staring out over a sea now deep-blue and shadow-green in the late afternoon light. His face was warm, human, mobile, with fluctuating colour and live, ardent eyes. His age, which went up and down on the yo-yo of circumstances, had steadied at twenty-seven, and now he was well able to hold it there. “She was a person who took care to lock things. She had a little leather case shaped like a climbing boot, she’d bought it somewhere in the Tyrol, one holiday. A little kid climbing boot with a keyring. You fitted your keys on the ring, and it went inside the boot, and the boot zipped up. She wouldn’t go away without that! And it isn’t here. And I didn’t take it. So somebody else did. So I believe—I believe now!—that I didn’t kill her. Someone did come in on us. I was set up purposely to take the blame. Can you credit it?” he said, lost in wonder. “Now I don’t even care so much if they convict me. Just so I know I didn’t do it.”

  “They’re not going to convict you,” said Bunty quietly. She had taken her arm from him, even withdrawn herself from the arm of the chair and left him unsupported, as soon as he reared himself up intact and joyful, with that fresh, live face she had never seen before, but which she liked on first sight. “They can reason, too. And they’ll listen, I’ll see to that. And there’s her flat in Comerbourne, that ought to furnish some evidence, too. The gun… her suitcase searched… her keys missing… We’ve got something to offer, now.”

  He looked at the light, and he looked at the poor little relics disposed about the table. Then he looked again over the sea, and calculated chances, and wondered.

  “Maybe we ought to wait a little, just until it’s dusk? I should hate to be picked up now. I want to drive up to the police station and report in without any question of compulsion.”

  “We could wait a little longer,” said Bunty. “Why don’t you put the boat away, while we’re waiting?”

  He had forgotten about the boat, riding gently beside the jetty, nuzzling its fenders like a kitten as the water rocked under it. It must be nearly full tide now, the deck swaying high, and the inlet full to its limit. It seemed a lifetime since he had hoisted those two stones aboard, and covered them guiltily from sight. He could hardly believe, now, in the person he had been during those morning hours, so short a time ago. Bunty had peeled that incubus off from his flesh and spirit, and brought him to this intoxicating freedom, which was proof against any charge others might bring.

  He looked at her across the white and orange room, and tried to assess the quality she had for him, and the physical aspects of her that expressed, so inadequately, her essence. So beautiful, with that chestnut hair like a ripe brown cap moving suavely round her head, and those few grey strands so alive and silvery that they set light to every movement she made, like attendant spirits embracing and guarding her. Powdered freckles golden over the bridge of a straight nose. And those eyes for which his experience had no measure, so blazingly honest and gallant and clear, at once green and golden and brown, the eyes that had first drawn him to her. They were looking at him now with a direct, contented regard in which he found undoubted affection, but did not dare find more.

  But I love you, he thought, I shall love you for ever and ever and ever, as long as I live, and with everything there is left of me that knows how to love, even after I’m dead. I had no conception that there could be a kind of love like this, or a kind of person like you. Utterly without deceit, or meanness, or the very shadow of anything second-rate. I thought one always had to compromise, to make allowances, to be ready to come to terms with love. Nobody ever told me you were possible, or I would never have settled for anything less.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, fumbling after ordinary words through the golden haze of a revelation for which no expression was possible, “I’d better get Reggie’s treasure under cover.”

  And he took off his coat and slung it on the back of a chair, putting on instead an old duffle jacket that Reggie Alport left permanently hanging in the hall cupboard, as working gear for when the east coast proved blustery and unkind. In a few moments Bunty, putting away crockery and tools in the kitchen, heard his footsteps, unbelievably light and young now, leaping down the slatey stairs towards the water.

  CHAPTER VIII

  « ^ »

  By the time Bunty had washed out the stained table-cloth and hung it to dry, and sat down to wait for Luke’s return, she was no longer entirely easy in her mind about those keys. Supposing she had read too much into their absence, and built him up on insufficient evidence to another shattering fall? What if they were upstairs all the time, for instance, in Pippa’s coat pocket? No, that was hard to believe. Someone who loved clothes so much wouldn’t spoil the set of them by carrying things of any bulk or weight in the pockets. Which is why the handbags of to-day have grown bigger than shopping bags.

  I don’t know, though, thought Bunty on reflection. This year’s coats have at least got flared skirts again, not straight, so that even a loose threepenny-bit shows through in a duodecagonal bump. Why not slip up and make sure, now, while Luke’s out of the house?

  He would have locked the bedroom, of course, she quite understood that. She was to be protected from touching or seeing again the sad wreckage of his first love. But there was his coat on the back of the chair by the desk, and there was a good chance that the key was in his pocket. He need never know that she had circumvented his concern for her feelings, if she made her search at once.

  The bedroom key was there, she found it in the left-hand outside pocket. She ran up the stairs, and let herself into the pastel-coloured room; and there on the bed lay the youth and beauty for whose passing she had been startled into grieving only two days ago. Wasted and spoiled, and withdrawn now into supreme indifference, Pippa was never going to look into her mirror at forty-one, and wonder if everything had been well done, and whether this was all. Just being alive again would have been prize enough for Pippa. Bunty stood beside the bed and looked down at her with wonder and pity. Touching her started no other feelings, no repugnance at all; Bunty had seen death before.

  The charcoal-coloured coat had fine silver threads running through the weave, a flared skirt, and two large slant pockets. There was nothing in them, but the trouble was that they were cut so wide and shallow that they might easily shed their contents when the wearer was recumbent. Better look in the boot of the car, too, and make quite sure. The matching skirt had no pockets. Slenderly cut for an almost hipless figure, it could not possibly have accommodated one. There was nowhere else to look. Bunty passed her hands all down the still, chill body, avoiding the encrusted brown hole in the fine cream sweater. No, Pippa had no keys. And no more use for keys.

  The large, delicate eyelids, blue-veined like pale harebells, were imperfectly closed. A faint gleam of reflected light from the hooded
eyes followed Bunty to the door. She looked back once, and the stillness of the slight figure had the quality of tomb sculpture, monumental not so much in the absence of movement as in the total renunciation of movement. The infection of silence and stealth that possesses the living in the presence of death is not awe but sympathetic magic, used as a protection. Do your best not to seem alien and alive here, and death won’t recognise another victim and turn on you.

  Bunty tiptoed out of the room, and closed and locked the door. She was still moving soundlessly when she slipped the bedroom key back into Luke’s pocket. Poor girl! How old could she have been? Twenty-three or twenty-four? She didn’t look so much, but apparently she was senior enough to be a deputy buyer at a first-class store like Pope Halsey’s. Probably very good at her job; a pity, a thousand pities, she hadn’t been content to stick to it, but had meddled with something out of her scope.

  The garage key was hanging on its own proper hook in the kitchen; Luke had made no attempt to hide it, once he had brought Pippa and her belongings into the house. Bunty took it, let herself out by the front door, and crossed the gravel to the creosoted timber building, large enough for two cars. She unlocked the door and went in. There was the big old Rover, a hulking black shape in the light from the dusty window, unfashionable, powerful and solid, built when cars were meant to last, and to run remorselessly until every part dropped dead together. At the last moment she wondered if Luke would have locked the boot again, and whether she would have to go back and hunt for more keys; but the huge lid gave easily to her hand, and bounced open to its fullest. There was nothing to hide in there now.

  Pippa had travelled a great many miles in this dark coffin, and there had been some pretty rough riding on the way. The Tyrolean climbing boot could very easily have rolled out of those shallow pockets and into a dark corner here, and escaped notice. But no, there was nothing to be found but a gallon can for petrol, the spare wheel braced to one side, and a wooden tool-box and a jack shoved well to the back. Bunty moved those items which were movable, and felt all round the dusty floor until she was satisfied. Nothing. And the thing could hardly have found its way into the petrol can or the tool box.

  Nevertheless, for no good reason, she opened the lid of the box. A roughish affair, but solid, maybe as old as the car. There was a top tray full of small tools and a good deal of accumulated rubbish, of the kind one keeps because it may come in useful some day, and finally throws out in a grand clearance about two days before the occasion for its usefulness does arise. She lifted the tray. It sat upon two stout wooden supports, and below was a larger compartment.

  The clean, new, flat package that lay there, almost as large as the inside dimensions of the box, and wrapped neatly in decorative bookshop paper, startled her by its sheer incongruity. It was about fifteen inches by ten, and could easily have been one of the lavish gift-books currently fashionable for leaving negligently around on coffee-tables. Only it wasn’t. She prodded it, and it had no bound hardness, but a thick, yielding, heavy, papery quality. It might have been unremarkable enough almost anywhere else; but here it arrested her attention like the eruption of a Roman candle.

  She lifted it out, and on impulse pulled at the end of the pink tape that tied it, and unwrapped it at one end. It felt like paper, and it was paper. Neat bundles of thin, limp oblongs printed in sepia browns and muted greens on white, and held together in regular order by girdles of narrow brown gumstrip. Six bundles in one layer, four of them ranged side by side, and two lengthways alongside them; and several layers.

  She riffled the ends through her fingers unbelievingly, and stared, and stared again. She had never seen so many ten-pound notes in her life. At a lightning estimate, she was holding in her hands something over twelve thousand pounds.

  For just one moment her mind recoiled with horror and revulsion, suddenly seeing a Luke who had been lying to her throughout, who had been in some shady deal with the girl, and killed her over the proceeds. Here was this bundle hidden in his tool box, in his car, and here was he on the coast, ready and equipped with a boat for his escape, and funds to keep him afloat wherever he went.

  It shook her to the heart, but it was gone as suddenly as it had come. It blew through her mind like a gust of wind, and died into invulnerable calm. No, she had the best possible reason to know better than that. If he had killed Pippa, then Bunty Felse, too, would have been dead by now, there would have been no recoil from the act. He wasn’t a killer, and he would be the least effective of partners in anything criminal. Moreover, her instinct told her that he could not possibly have been acting all this time. For what purpose, even if he had the ability? No, she had not really been shaken. She knew she was right about him. She would stake her life on it. She was staking her life on it.

  Not Luke. Pippa.

  Hadn’t he mentioned twice that she had borrowed his car to carry home her shopping on Thursday?

  So that was why she had been frantic when Luke had told her in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going anywhere, when she had found him disillusioned, and the car still in the garage, and out of her reach for ever. She couldn’t tell him about the money, and she couldn’t get access to her hiding-place to recover it. She had put it clean out of her own reach. No wonder she raved, no wonder she committed the final folly and threatened him with the gun.

  Yes, someone had been involved in crooked business, but it wasn’t Luke. Pippa was running out in a hurry with hot money, but it wasn’t from Luke she was running. On the contrary, she had run back to him and ingratiated herself with him afresh in order to make use of him for her get away. That was what she had wanted of him. That was what she had had in mind when she came back and couldn’t have been sweeter. And his engagement ring? Well, a little bonus like that is always welcome. Why say no? He was more likely to do what she wanted if she accepted him. And a solitaire diamond, even a little one, is not to be sneezed at.

  There were more and more implications crowding in beyond these. Bunty was dizzy with the flashing of chaotic particles falling into place, as though a jigsaw puzzle had abruptly decided to solve itself.

  Any minute now Luke would be coming up from the sea. Let him find this parcel as she had found it, let him demonstrate to himself as well as to her what the find meant in terms of his own integrity. And let him destroy for ever, in the finding, whatever grain of doubt had remained to suggest to her, even for an instant, what she had just found herself momentarily believing. He had a right to know that she had doubted, provided he understood that the doubt was the last.

  She smoothed the end of the package hastily back into order, re-tied it exactly as before, and replaced it in the tool box. She closed the boot, locked the garage and went back to put the key in its place.

  Presently Luke came up from the inlet, with the salt smell of the coast eddying from the shoulders of Reggie Alport’s jacket. She let him hang it up in the hall cupboard, and put on his own coat again, before she leaned out from the kitchen and said: “You don’t think she could have had her keys in her pocket, after all, do you?”

  He shook his head emphatically. He had had that slight figure in his arms, and composed it into order on the bed, he knew there was nothing in her pockets. She wasn’t a pocket girl, anyhow, she was an outsize-handbag girl.

  “And they couldn’t have slipped out while she was in the boot? I only want,” she said, “to make certain that someone took them.”

  “I don’t think so for a moment,” said Luke, “but it won’t take a minute to have a look.” And he reached for the key of the garage, and led the way blithely.

  He found it. She didn’t even have to prompt him. He groped all round with buoyant thoroughness in the huge boot, shoved the petrol can aside, scooped a hand round the spare wheel, and hoisted the lid of the tool box. “Nothing,” he said; and then, arrested by a capricious meimory: “Do you know, this is the only thing I ever made in woodwork class at school? Not much finesse, but you must admit the zeal.”

  H
e was happy, he hoped for grace, and believed in justice, and he knew, knew he was not a murderer. She wondered how there could have remained to her even one scruple of insecurity. After all, few people in the world could know him as well as she now knew him; not even his mother, if he still had a mother, knew him better.

  “A tour-de-force,” she said. “What do you keep underneath, Black and Decker’s total output? It’s nearly big enough.”

  “Junk, mostly,” he said. “I’m a jackdaw.” And he hoisted the tray in one hand, himself fleetingly curious.

  “Hey!” he said sharply, his voice losing its reminiscent ease. “What’s this? I’ve never… Father Christmas has been!” But there was no recapturing the note of innocence. Wary, mystified and calm, he lifted out the book that was no book, and studied the gay wrapping paper, dotted with variegated bookworms of all ages, with their noses appropriately buried. “I don’t understand. I didn’t put this in here.”

  “What is it?” asked Bunty at his shoulder. “Open it!”

  And he opened it, on the lid of the boot, sweeping the folds of paper aside with a large vigour which it seemed belonged to him when he was in possession of himself. She watched the sudden rigidity of his face, the dropped jaw, the bewildered eyes, the wonderfully quick apprehension. All genuine. What she was less prepared for was the instant understanding, the blazing intelligence with which he turned his face upon her.

  “You knew, didn’t you? You’d already found it?”

  No bitterness, no accusation, only that quick, alert, brittle tone of someone who feels ice cracking under him. She had every right in the world to put him to the test; the ache in him was only the longing to be found intact after the test was over.

  “Yes,” she said, “I found it while you were down at the boat.”