The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  “Boss, they’re over the other side, too… among the trees, five or six of ’em…”

  There had been no sound of a car, no glimpse of headlights. They had drawn in as silently as the night itself; so they knew what kind of hunt this was, and what to expect when they sprang the trap. Could this be all on account of Rosamund Chartley and her mythical address in Hereford?

  There was a hoarse, muted shout overhead, a rush for the stairs. Skinner came bounding down in three stumbling leaps, fending himself off from walls and furniture with flailing arms.

  “Boss, it’s the police! We better get out of here fast… they’re all round us…”

  A sudden pale eye of light stroked its way down the wall, dimmed and diffused by the drawn curtains, probing at the window and passing in absolute silence. In a moment they saw it through the open door of the living-room, spilled in a lace of pallor on the floor of the hall, patterned by the frosted glass in the front door. When it passed from there, there would be darkness across the stretch of gravel to where the Jaguar stood in the shelter of the trees, turned and ready to run.

  “That’s it, then,” Fleet said in a clipped whisper, meant for no ears but his own, though Bunty heard it with the exaggerated clarity of voices in dreams. He knew the game was up. He knew when to throw in his hand.

  The light passed on from the hall, and left the front door in darkness again.

  “Now!” hissed Fleet. “Out! Run for the Jag!”

  And out they went, tumbling, jostling, thrusting, all in something so like silence that their flight became more dreamlike than their lingering. Fleet was first out of the door, fast and light on his feet, a man well named; and after him Blackie, hurtling like a terrier, Con, outlined for a moment in the doorway all arms and legs, Skinner pounding along heavily in the rear and rolling like a half-filled barrel. All the darkling crew streamed out across the open court before the cottage, night-birds startled from their carrion. Bunty sat dazed with all the accumulated weariness of a night and a day, and listened to their flight.

  There was a postscript. Leaning heavily on the bannisters, Quilley came stumbling and groaning after, down the stairs and through the hall.

  “Boss, wait for me… don’t go without me…!”

  She heard the moaning complaint ebb along the wall, and reach the front door. And then the two of them were alone. Stiffly she got up from the floor, laying Luke gently down out of her arms, and went out into the porch.

  The sound of all those running feet on the gravel had roused the whole garden. It was like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. Pencils of light sprang up from three points, two among the trees on one side of the gate, one from the rough grass on the other, and converged upon the racing figures; and suddenly the copse began to spawn men, they came swarming out on the run, and streamed from all directions towards the Jaguar. They were already between the fugitives and the Riley. A little spurt of flame stabbed the darkness, a shot fired at the tyres, not at the men. Fleet didn’t retaliate, didn’t swerve or halt or hesitate, he charged straight for the grey car, darted round in its shelter to the driving seat, and in a moment the engine soared into life, and the car began to move, gathering speed like a greyhound out of a trap. With three of its four doors wide open and vibrating like wings, it surged across the gravel towards the open gate, while the rest of the crew scrambled and clawed their way aboard. He kept it idling for them a matter of seconds only. The nearest policeman was not ten yards away.

  Quilley, last of the queue, came hobbling agonisingly after, appealing aloud in a high wail of outrage :

  “Boss, wait for me… wait for me… you can’t…”

  He was hopping frantically alongside as they gathered speed; he got a grip on the front passenger door and clung in desperation.

  “Give me a hand… Con, give me a hand…”

  But it was Fleet who gave him a hand. They were four aboard, and wanted all the speed they could make, and no overloading. Fleet leaned across Con to the open door, spread his large palm against Quilley’s chest and shoved him off, neatly catching the door as it swung loosely back, and slamming it shut. The car leaped clear of the pursuers by a matter of feet, and Quilley, hurled from his hold, fell sprawling under it.

  The rear wheel heaved and lurched over his foot, the Jaguar slewed round insecurely for an instant, and then shot away through the gate and roared round the curve of the drive. Quilley’s scream and the exultant tiger-purr of the acceleration died away together, diminuendo along the calm air of the night. A cluster of dark figures surrounded the rumpled heap on the ground. The light-grey Jaguar was gone along the sunken lane, hell-bent for the main road.

  Suddenly it waa abnormally quiet, and everything was over.

  CHAPTER XIII

  « ^ »

  Luke came round with a skull full of hammers and a mouth full of old cobwebs, springing into instant, jangling awareness of Bunty’s arm under his head and Bunty’s palm cupping his cheek, and a bolt of hurtful light probing over them both out of the darkness. The edge of the falling beam showed him the end of a man’s dark sleeve, and a hand holding a gun.

  There was no end to it, and no escape. He set a palm to the floor in frantic haste and levered himself up groggily to his knees, leaning between Bunty and the threat, trying to put her behind him, though the sudden movement set his head ringing like a cracked bell, and the torch burned a hole through his eyes and into his brain. And Bunty drew him back gently into her arms and held him there, her cheek pressed against his forehead.

  “It’s all right, my dear, it’s all right! The police are here… It’s all over, we’re safe…”

  “Safe…?” he repeated dazedly. He lifted a shaky hand and touched her cheek. “They didn’t hurt you…? Where are they?”

  “They got away in the Jaguar… all but the lame one…”

  “They’ll no’ get far.” The darkness spoke in the voice of the sergeant with the pepper-and-salt hair, in tones of ripe satisfaction. The gun vanished into a jacket pocket. The torch settled briefly upon Bunty’s pale, soiled face, and considerately turned its beam aside. “We’ve got a road-block up in the cutting. They’ll no’ get through that. You’re all right, ma’am?”

  She nodded: now that the tension was broken she was almost too tired to speak.

  “And your right name, now,” he asked cautiously. “It wouldn’t be Felse, would it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m Bunty Felse.”

  “Thank God for that!” said the sergeant with profound satisfaction, and in all innocence kicked away the newly-recovered world from under Luke’s feet. “Your husband’s been going daft, worrying about you.”

  How strange, how very strange, that it had never even occurred to him to think that she might belong to someone else! As if such a woman as she was could ever have come so far through life without being recognised, desired, loved. She had seemed to belong so surely to him, to be a miracle created specially for his salvation, without any existence previous to their meeting. But of course she was flesh and blood, like ordinary women. For him she had no age, no class, no kin, there had been nothing before he found her. But of course she had known all those years of her life without him, before ever he existed for her. She had known a marriage, and a husband who was going daft, worrying about her.

  Luke lay very still, overwhelmed with the magnitude of his desolation and loss. And what confounded him most was the paradox of being in her arms, linked with her in an alliance such as surely she had never in her life experienced with any man before, or ever would with any man after. He both possessed and had lost her.

  Three men came in from the seaward side, and one more from the landward, and this last was an inspector, no less. They found candles in one of the kitchen cupboards, and the young constable of the morning, taciturn as ever, rummaged among Reggie Alport’s electrical spares and did some minor miracles with fuse-wire. Soon he had the current working in the kitchen, at least, so that they could do a little preliminary fir
st-aid on Quilley before the ambulance came. The door stood open between the kitchen and the living-room, to share the benefit of the light.

  “No,” admitted the inspector ruefully, “I’m afraid we didn’t check up on your fictional Mrs. Chartley at first. I only wish we had, we should have been here earlier. But you seemed all above-board to McCabe, and we had no reason then to be looking out for a woman. No, what put us on to you was further information from your home county. You can thank your son for it, indirectly. It seems he came home without notice late on Saturday evening, and found nobody there to welcome him. When nobody came back by eleven he called your husband’s chief, and found that Mr. Felse had gone down south on a job, so he naturally took it for granted you might have decided to travel with him for the ride. It wasn’t until some child turned up next morning, saying she’d found your purse, that he began to wonder.”

  All the threads were beginning to tie in neatly into the pattern, even some of which the police would never know anything. So that was why there’d been no letter from Dominic, because he intended to rush home in person for her birthday, and surprise her. And if he’d been a couple of hours earlier, perhaps she would never have gone out walking to shake off her demon, never entered “The Constellation Orion,” never met Luke Tennant. And perhaps, when he was at the end of his tether, Luke Tennant would have given up thinking of Norway, and pointed that little gun at his temple and pulled the trigger, as he had so nearly done when the police came knocking at the door.

  “So he told your C.I.D. chief, and they got in touch with your husband, and nobody knew where you were, or why you should be missing. Then they really began hunting. And it seems there’s an old chap who saw you late on Saturday night with a young man he didn’t know, and was sufficiently nosy to take note of the car and its number.”

  “Old Lennie,” she said, and smiled. “We bought some coffee at his stall. Thank God for nosy people! I see! So then they added my description to the information about NAQ 788, and circulated it. And Mrs. Chartley filled the bill well enough to be worth investigating. And you found the Alports had never heard of her, and her address didn’t exist.”

  “That’s about it. So we thought it best to move in on you here pretty cautiously. We felt you must have been under duress this morning when you answered the door. A loaded gun a yard or so from your back can turn anybody into a first-class dissembler. It was the only way we could account for your behaviour.”

  “I know,” she admitted, “my behaviour throughout has been far from what you’d expect of a policeman’s wife. But there’s more to this than a couple of traffic offences. They haven’t said anything to you about a murder?”

  They hadn’t. Nor, it seemed, about the snatching of Armitage Pressings’ weekly pay-roll. Apparently nobody had missed Pippa Gallier yet, and no one suspected the connection between these events scattered through two months of time and three hundred miles or so of country. Bunty and Luke had still quite a lot to account for. The dead girl upstairs was going to come as a shock. And the money…

  Bunty had almost forgotten about the money, but it was high time to retrieve it now. It was, after all, the chief evidence they had to offer for their own integrity, and the stake for which they had defied Fleet and all his private army.

  “Before we start,” she said, “could you send one of your men down to the jetty to fetch something? Something I hid there. A flat parcel in gift-wrapping paper.” She turned her head and looked at Luke, sitting drained and pale and sad beside her. “It’s under one of the slabs of slate that form the steps, only about three yards up from the jetty,” she said, for Luke rather than for anyone else. “I pushed it under there when I slipped and fell. If you hadn’t been solidly between Quilley and me I could never have got away with it, even in the dark.”

  The inspector looked at the raw-boned young constable who was good with fuses, and the constable, whose ears, like his eyes, missed nothing, took one of the torches without a word, and went off through the kitchen to the cliff path.

  “And exactly what,” asked the inspector curiously, “is in this gift parcel? What has it got to do with this business?”

  “Everything,” she said simply. “It’s what those men were after, it’s what they killed the girl for—the girl upstairs—not to speak of the man who was driving the van when they snatched it in the first place. It’s a week’s pay-roll from a big firm outside Comerbourne. Getting on for fifteen thousand pounds in notes.”

  “I think,” said the inspector carefully, after a pause to regain his breath, “you’d better tell me the whole story.”

  Between the two of them they told him. By the time they were half-way through, the recital was punctuated by Quilley’s first half-conscious moans from the kitchen, and the inspector was unrolling the parcel of notes on the table before him. The sound of police cars halting before the door of the cottage put in the final full-stop. Fleet and his lieutenants were back under guard.

  A hefty red-headed sergeant came in first from the night, his arms full of guns and his face one broad, freckled beam of fulfilment.

  “Regular arsenal, sir… four of ’em!” He laid them out proudly on the table before his chief, and for an instant his jaw dropped at sight of the treasure already deployed there. “Two revolvers, nice brand-new Colt Agent and a German Pickert .32. A Webley and Scott .25 automatic… and this little squib… that’s another German job, a Menz Liliput. Wouldn’t think that could do any damage, would you?”

  The inspector viewed them without noticeable enthusiasm. Guns had never figured in the crimes that came within his ordinary range, and to him, as to George in Comerbourne, they were an omen of times changing for the worse. He looked up at Luke over the array of armaments.

  “Which one?”

  “The one you’re holding.” The Webley was almost as tiny, but he would have known that Liliput again among thousands, by the associations that clung to it, by Bunty’s confiding presence at his side, by the memory of that ride in which he could hardly believe now, when this little ugly shape had bound her into stillness and submission, who now sat beside him as an ally of her own will, held by nothing but her own generosity and loyalty. At every mention of her husband and son, those two who had genuine rights in her, the pain in his heart had tightened and intensified by one more turn. But still, every now and again, she spoke for both of them, and said “we,” and all that tension was released each time she said it, and he knew that she was not lost to him, that she was indeed, in some measure, his, and his for life.

  “You realise, of course,” said the inspector gently, for he was a man of intuition as well as intelligence, and had already placed his own stake, “that he’s sure to have alibis for everything?”

  “Yes, I know. I don’t care now. If you want to hold me, that’s all right. I’m satisfied now.”

  “What happened?” asked the inspector, folding the gay paper over the indecent display of wealth, and looking up at the sergeant.

  “They tried to crash the barrier. Bent that nice grey paint job badly, stove her nose right in. They poured out in all directions when she stalled, but we got ’em all fielded in quick time. They didn’t fire. Soon as we laid hands on ’em they started acting legal. They hadn’t done anything, they were on their lawful occasions. Only the big chap talks.”

  “Yes,” said the inspector resignedly, “only he would. Still, better bring ’em in until the wagon arrives.”

  Fleet came in with rock-like assurance, his hands in his pockets, his henchmen mute and stolid behind him. And of course they would all have a dozen witnesses to testify that they had been somewhere miles away when the Armitage pay-roll was snatched, and at least outside the house when Pippa Gallier was shot; and of course they would even have licences for all those guns, except Pippa’s, of which they would deny all knowledge prior to yesterday. And of course, regarding the money and their presence here, and their flight when the police came, Fleet would tell the same old story of being robbed by Pippa,
of actually breaking in on Luke’s house to find Pippa dead and Luke drunk and unconscious, of pursuing Luke here into Scotland after the money—with some mildly illegal origin for the money, something almost innocuous, but enough to account for a certain shyness of the police…

  Yes, it was all implicit in his bearing as he came in.

  “Keys?” said Fleet, smiling, always smiling, with deep-sunk marmalade eyes mildly indignant, but no more, with salient bones grown bland with tolerance under the tanned and gleaming skin, a benevolent, misjudged man. “What should I know about her keys? I expect he threw ’em away. I never saw any such little leather boot. You can search me.” Which of course they could, and any residence of his into the bargain; he wasn’t such a fool as to keep a thing so easily identifiable.

  “Look, I’ve told you that money was ours, and it’s got nothing to do with any pay-roll, it’s racing winnings. We had a syndicate. And a system. You fellows wouldn’t approve, but you’d have a job to pick us up on it, all the same, I’m telling you that. Naturally we came after it. What would you have done, written it off? More fool me, for ever letting that little bitch hold the kitty, but she had a way with her… Ask him, he knows! She double-crossed him, too, and he paid her her dues, and good luck to him. But don’t look at me! I can prove where I was all the early part of Saturday evening. By the time I got there it was all over.

  “And that’s all I am saying,” said Fleet, still beneficently smiling. “I want to see my lawyer before I say another word.”

  “And you’ve got licences for all these cannon, I suppose?” said the inspector, mildly shuffling Pippa’s passport and air ticket in his hands. The bone-cased eyes lingered on them hungrily, but gave nothing away. There was something else there, too, sandwiched between the two documents, something Bunty and Luke hadn’t discovered because it was slim enough and small enough to hide among the notes: a sealed white envelope, stamped, ready for the post.