The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  He was the biggest of them, and the oldest, a massive, muscular person with a white, sad, fleshy face. His hair was receding, and his expression was anxious and defensive. The small dark one had called him Quilley. There was something odd in the attitude of the younger ones to him, the way they left him out of their calculations, or included him only as an afterthought. Or perhaps it was not so odd, in such a world as theirs, that a man’s stock should crash when he’s disabled, or has got the worst of an encounter. He was a doubtful asset now, and a potential liability. Some wild animals, the kind that hunt in packs, kill off their injured or infirm members, as some sort of measure of social hygiene.

  “It’s here, though,” said the small dark man with certainty. “It’s here somewhere. Either we find it, or he tells us where. The place ain’t that big. You sure about the car, then, Skinner?”

  “I’m sure,” said the giggler cheerfully, spinning the garage key round his finger with absent-minded dexterity. “Clean as a whistle.”

  “You didn’t miss out on anywhere? Under the back seat? Down the upholstery?”

  “I didn’t miss out on anything. There’s nothing there.”

  “What you wasting time for?” the boy with the levelled gun demanded querulously, without removing his unwinking stone gaze from his charges. “I could get it out of him easy. Or her!” The flick of excitement on the last word indicated that he would rather prefer that alternative. Bunty supposed that in its obscene fashion it was a compliment, but if so, it was one she could well have done without. She could feel Luke’s muscles stiffening beside her, his whole body rigid with anxiety. She cast one glance at him, and found his fixed profile almost too still. The cheek nearer to her was bruised and soiled. His mouth was drawn and stiff with fear for her.

  “Yeah, I know!” said the dark man sardonically. “And all at once we got no clues and no witness. If anybody shuts this one’s mouth for good, it ain’t going to be while I’m in charge. Think the boss’d wear that from anybody but himself? Sooner you than me, mate! But till he gets here, you take orders from me, and my orders are, lay off. OK?”

  “Well, OK, Blackie, it’s all one to me. I’m only saying…”

  “You always are. Quit saying, and just keep your eye on ’em, that’s all, while we take this room apart.” He cast a long look round the airy living-room, and ended eye-to-eye with Luke. He wasn’t expecting anything to come easily, but he went through the motions of asking. “You could make it easy on yourself and us, kid. In the end you may have to, you know that? What did you do with the money?”

  “What money?” said Luke.

  Skinner, dismantling the drawers of the writing-desk one by one, giggled on his unnerving high note. “Get that! He knows nothing about any money. What money!”

  “All right,” said Blackie, sighing. “You want it the hard way, you can have it. We’ve got time. But don’t say I didn’t ask you nicely. If you think better of it, just say, any time. We’re going to find it in the end.”

  And they set to work to find it, emptying books from the shelves, letters from the bureau, rolling back the rugs for loose blocks in the parquet, but discovering none. They took the living-room to pieces and put it together again, neatly and rapidly but without haste, with the thoroughness of long practice. But they found nothing of interest. And Bunty and Luke, so close to each other that their arms brushed at every slight movement, sat and watched the search with narrow attention, and kept silent. They had nothing to say in these circumstances, even to each other. They hardly ventured to look at each other, for fear even that exchange should give something away. Yet something had passed between them, tacitly and finally. Neither of them would dream of giving in, unless or until the case was beyond hope. Perhaps not even then; they were both stubborn people. He didn’t know what Bunty had done with the parcel of notes, but if she’d had the presence of mind to hide it even out there in the dark, pursued and ambushed as they’d been, then she certainly wasn’t going to give away its whereabouts now without the toughest of struggles. And Luke couldn’t because he didn’t know.

  “Clean as wax-polish in here,” concluded Blackie, looking round the room. “Let’s have a go at the kitchen.”

  The kitchen, compact though it was, was full of fitments that would keep them busy for quite a while. Blackie sized up the job in one frowning stare, and jerked his head at the youth guarding the prisoners.

  “Hey, you, Con… hand over to Quilley and come and give us a hand here.”

  “What, and leave nobody but him between this lot and the front door?” Con said disrespectfully. “With the lock broke? Or did you forget?”

  With impassive faces and strained senses Bunty and Luke filed away for reference one more scrap of information that might, just might, with a lot of luck, be relevant and useful. They’d had to break the lock to get in. The bolts hadn’t been shot, so there might still be those to contend with, supposing a chance ever offered; but on the whole it was unlikely that they would have bothered to shoot them home now. They were expecting the boss; and the boss sounded the sort of man who would expect all doors to open before him without delay.

  “Watch it!” said Blackie, without personal animosity. “You’re nearly too fly to live with, these days, you are. So if he can’t sprint, he’ll still have a gun, won’t he?”

  “Yes, and instructions not to do any real damage with it!”

  Con talked too much for his own good. That little weakness might have been there to be discovered in any case, but there’d been no need to spell it out and underline it. For the sake of the information they—or one of them— held, Bunty and Luke must at all costs be preserved alive until they had confided it. Once the secret had been prised out of them, of course, they were expendable enough.

  “What if they jump him? So he plugs one of ’em in the leg, and the other’s out of the room and out the front door, and us all back there in the kitchen. And that’ll sound good when you make your report, Blackie, me old Crowe.”

  “All right, then, we’ll make dead sure. Bring ’em in here with you, and lock ’em in the store. There’s no window in there, and only one door, and that’s into the kitchen. That’ll make four of us between them and any way out. Satisfied?”

  “Whatever you say.” Con rose, unfolding his long legs and arms with the stiffly articulated movements of a grasshopper. He made a brisk upward gesture with the gun. “Come on, then, let’s have the pair of you. You heard the gentleman. You want showing the way to the store? Hey, Blackie, there’s nothing useful in there, is there? Garden shears or sécateurs, or like that?”

  “Nah, nothing, we done in there. Bring ’em along!”

  “After you, lady!” said Con with a whinnying laugh, and ground the barrel of his revolver hard into Luke’s ribs out of sheer exuberance. From his chair Quilley watched them go with harassed, apathetic eyes, as if he had resigned perforce from the whole business, and was waiting with apprehension for someone to decide what was to be done with him now.

  All Mrs. Alport’s primrose-coloured kitchen fitments stood open, and the giggler was grubbing among the taps under the sink. The store measured only three feet by two, and some of that was taken up by shallow shelves at the back, where Reggie Alport kept his electrical spares, bulbs, fuse-wire, plugs and adaptor. Luke had to stoop to enter it; even Bunty’s hair brushed the roof.

  Con watched them fold themselves uncomfortably and closely together in this upright coffin, and shrilled with horse-laughter as he closed and locked the door on them.

  “Nice and cosy for two… I call that just the job. Hey, Blackie, I hope you know what you’re doing. I can’t see ’em wanting to come out o’ there.” He thumped the locked door just once with the flat of his hand. “Have fun!” he called, and went off to sack Louise Alport’s cupboards.

  In the darkness, smelling of timber and fine dust, Luke shifted gently to make more room for her, and drew her closely into his arms; there was no other way of finding adequate space. Her head fit
ted into the hollow of his shoulder and neck; she felt his cheek pressed against her hair, and his lips close to her ear.

  “Bunty…” The finest ardent thread of a whisper. “Did you understand? They can’t lock the front door, they had to break the lock. Bunty, I’m going to try to start something… the first chance I get, when they fetch us out of here…”

  “No,” she breathed into his ear as softly and us urgently, “you mustn’t. They’ll shoot you…”

  “Not until they’ve found out what they want. They don’t want to go to extremes until he gets here. You heard them. They as good as said he’s already rubbed out one person too soon, before he got his questions answered. Bunty, I’m going to try it. What else is there for us? I’ll try to give you the item, but when I cut loose, you run.. . .”

  “No!” she said, an almost soundless protest.

  “Yes. I’ll cover you… somehow I will. You go straight for the front door and out. And, Bunty… don’t stay on the road, get into the trees… This lot are car men, cross-country you can leave them standing…”

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  “Yes . . . you’ve got to go. You can go to the police, then, you can tell them. I’ll stick it out here till they come.”

  “In what sort of shape?” she whispered bitterly.

  “Alive… and not a murderer. Better shape than I was in this time last night.”

  “But Luke, listen… the police have had time by now to check up on that name and address I gave them. Suppose they do? Suppose they find out your friends have never heard of me, and the address I gave doesn’t exist? They’ll be back to find out what I’m up to, what’s going on here. This is the one place they’ll make for—they’ll come to us. They could be back any moment,” she said, and her breath was warm on his cheek, turning his heart faint and crazed with love.

  “Yes, they could,” he said, and his whispering voice trembled with the effort it put into being convincing; but she knew he didn’t believe in it.

  Neither did she, altogether, but it was at least a possibility. Especially if, by any remote chance, someone had brought in that purse with Bunty Felse’s name on it, and tried to return it, and so set the Midshire police hunting for a missing woman, whose description would fit the totally unexpected woman in the Alports’ cottage here in Angus. Such a long and complicated “if ”; but no one is more likely to fit diverse pieces of a puzzle patiently together than the police, whose job it is. And no one has better communications.

  “But I want you out,” he said, “before it comes to shooting. Even if they do come, it might be touch and go. I’d rather get you away. If I can make that chance, promise to try… promise me, Bunty…”

  She lifted a hand and touched his cheek gently, let her palm lie there for a long moment holding him, partly in apology, partly as a distraction, because she had no intention of making any promises. When the time came she would play it as seemed best, weighing the chances for him as well as she could in the split second she would have for consideration. But she could not conceive of any combination of circumstances that was likely to induce her to leave him now.

  He wanted to turn his head the few necessary inches, and press his lips into her palm, but he didn’t do it, because he had no rights in her at all but those she had given him freely, and they were not that kind of rights. Until they were out of here—if they ever got out of here alive—there was nothing he could say to her, though his heart might be bursting. Afterwards, if they could clear up this affair with all its debts and start afresh, things might go very differently. But the darkness in which they stood seemed to him a symbolic as well as an actual darkness, and he couldn’t see anything ahead. And there might not be any more time for talking, to-night or ever.

  “Bunty, I’m sorry!” he breathed, and that seemed to be it. He had never been so short of words, and in any case, what good were they?

  “For what? For getting into a mess through no real fault of your own?”

  “For everything I’ve done to you. For involving you. I wish I could undo it,” he said. “Forgive me!”

  “There’s nothing to forgive. You couldn’t have involved me if I hadn’t involved myself. No debts either way. Simply, it happened.”

  “No… I began as your… murderer…” The word was almost inaudible, lost in the tangle of her hair. “Don’t let me end like that now. I’ll make the chance and you must go. That’s why you must … I can bear it if you get back safely… I’ll be satisfied then.”

  And he meant it. If she had come out like a pilgrim, looking for something uniquely her own, some justification of her whole life to show to the gate-keepers and the gods when her time came, she had it. For every journey, even the last one, you need a ticket.

  The dulled accompaniment of voices and movements from the kitchen had halted, recommenced, changed, and the two of them in their narrow prison had never noticed. Nor could they hear the approach of the car through so many layers of insulation. The first they knew of the boss’s arrival was when the door of the store-cupboard was suddenly flung open, and Skinner beckoned them out into the light. They came, dazzled for a while after such a darkness, eyes wide and dazed from staring into a different kind of light. Luke kept his arm about Bunty as they were herded through the kitchen and into the living-room.

  And the living-room was full of a large, restless, top-heavy man in a light overcoat and a deeper grey suit, standing astride the orange-coloured rug. It was a still night, but he seemed somewhere to have found a reserve of tempestuous wind, and brought it into the house in the folds of his well-tailored but untamed clothes, so that the room seemed suddenly gusty and tremulous, convulsed with the excess of his energy. He was nearly half a head taller than Luke, and twice as wide, massive shoulders and barrel chest tapering away to long, narrow flanks. For all that bulk, he moved with a violent elegance that was half exuberant health and half almost psychotic self-confidence and self-love. He straddled the floor and looked them all over with the eye of a proprietor, viewing a new acquisition which didn’t look like much now, but of which he could make something in double-quick time, and something profitable, too.

  His head was big, to match his shoulders, and startlingly rough-hewn after the disguise of his immaculate clothes ended at the collar; a head of crude, bold lines, and a face in which the bone strained glossy beneath the tanned skin, not because there was so little flesh there, but because there was so much bone. He had a forehead ornamented with knobbly projections like incipient horns, and above it bright auburn hair grew low to a widow’s peak. An upright cleft marked his massy chin. The deepset eyes—boxers should have eyes like that, invulnerable, lids and all, in cages of concrete skull, cased with hide like polished horn—twinkled with restless, reddish lights, good-humoured without being in the least reassuring.

  … auburn hair growing low, cleft chin, eyes buried in a lot of bone ...

  Luke’s fingers closed meaningly on Bunty’s arm. He couldn’t say anything to her, but there was no need, he had described this man to her so well that even she knew him on sight. This was the man on whose arm Pippa Callier had leaned devotedly as they left her flat together on Friday night, the man whose car had stood all night in the mews round the corner, waiting to take a mythical mother and her mythical cousin home again to Birmingham. How strange that she should have thought she could get away with such a pretence, even for a moment. And how innocent and unpractised it suddenly made her in Bunty’s sight. This was nobody’s cousin, and one could almost believe, nobody’s son. He could have burst out of a rock somewhere of his own elemental force, self-generated and dangerous.

  She pressed her elbow into Luke’s side in acknowledgment. But there was no way of telling him that she suddenly found herself better informed even than he was, that she, too, had seen this man before, just once and briefly, too distantly to have known all those details of his appearance, but clearly enough to know his movements again wherever she saw them, the long, arching stride of a man
with vigour to spare, the appraising tilt of the big head, the swinging use of the high shoulders. On Friday evening, when he had meant nothing to her, before he changed into the dinner jacket that Luke had found so conspicuous in Queen Street.

  Luke knew the boss’s face again, as he had said he would. But Bunty knew more, his trade, his provenance, even his name, that last magic that every elemental being should guard as he guards his life, for in a sense it is his life.

  This one hadn’t guarded his. He had had it printed on windscreen stickers, blazoned on fluorescent posters, strung along thirty-seven be-flagged frontages in neon lights for all the world to see and memorise.

  His name was Fleet.

  CHAPTER XI

  « ^ »

  The huge newcomer revolved on the heel of a hand-made shoe, taking in all the inhabitants of this minor kingdom of his, and dealing in turn with them all.

  “Hah! ” he said, a bark of satisfaction and amusement, as he surveyed Luke from head to foot with one flash of his coarse-cut-marmalade eyes. “I see you got the right party, anyhow. That’s something!”

  The snapping gaze swept over Bunty with interest, sized her up with casual appreciation, and flicked another glance at Luke. “Well, get that! He finds new ones fast. Who’d have thought it!”

  He tossed the key he was swinging across to Skinner. “Turn the Jag round, will you, and wheel it up to the gate ready for off. You never know, we might have to leave on the hop.”

  The skirt of his pearl-grey Terylene overcoat whirled, and another spin brought him to Quilley. “What’s the matter with you?” There was no sympathy in the inquiry, rather a note of outrage, even of immediate reserve. His employees had no business to get hurt on duty.

  “I stopped one, boss. He had a gun.”

  “Couldn’t you bet on him having a gun?” Bunty had the impression for one instant that he had almost said “The gun”, and thought better of it in time. “What’s up, then? How bad is it?” The top span, and he confronted Blackie. “If he’s a write-off for anything active, we can use him upstairs. Why haven’t you got someone up there keeping a watch out? I tell you, half the constabulary could be walking in on us, and you sitting here playing hide and seek.”