by Simon Brett
‘I’ve just remembered something he said to me in Taunton.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘He said that one should always sort out a bolt-hole for oneself.’
‘Well, what does that mean?’
‘I thought you might know.’
‘No idea.’
‘What I mean is. . when you were in Taunton, you were fairly discreet about your affair. . I wondered where. .’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘You said something last week about “gambolling in the countryside”. Was there somewhere. .’
‘There was, but. .’
‘Where?’
‘Do you think. .?’
‘It’s a possibility. I think it’s worth investigating.’
‘You?’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. It just seems vindictive. The idea of bringing him to justice. Still, I suppose you could just tell the police and — ’
‘I wasn’t thinking of bringing him to justice. I was thinking of finding out from him what actually did happen.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Tell me where it is.’
She told him. ‘But I’ve a nasty feeling,’ she concluded dismally, ‘that if you do find anything there, it’ll just be Alex’s body.’
He put the phone down and turned round to see the whole family looking at him, open-mouthed. Juliet stood half-way down the stairs, familiarly pale. Charles’s mind was working well, making connections fast. He felt confident.
‘Frances,’ he asked, ‘do you fancy a little trip?’
‘Where to?’
‘Somerset.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
Miles’s face contorted. ‘Oh really, Pop! It’s a hell of a long way. You can’t just do things like that, on a whim.’
‘Why not?’ Charles looked at Frances. ‘It’s your half-term, isn’t it? Be good to see some real countryside. We could stay in a nice hotel.’
‘But,’ objected Juliet, whose every holiday was planned at least six months in advance, ‘you haven’t booked anywhere!’
‘What do you say, Frances?’
‘All right.’
Good old Frances. She wasn’t where Juliet got it from either.
It was a nice hotel. On the edge of Exmoor. There was no problem booking. Indeed, after another bad summer for British tourism, they were welcomed with open arms.
They had a drink before dinner sitting in a bay window, watching dusk creep up on Dunkery Beacon. They talked a lot during dinner and then after a couple of brandies, went up to the bedroom.
It was a family room, with one double bed and one single. They sat down on the double one. Charles’s hand stroked the so-familiar contours of his wife’s shoulders.
‘This is another of your detective things, isn’t it, Charles?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Tomorrow will, I hope, be a significant day.’
‘Dangerous?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose it might be. I hadn’t thought. Or it might just be nothing. Me barking up yet another wrong tree.’
Frances took his hand. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do it, Charles. I do worry about you, you know.’
He felt closer to her than he had for years, as he tried to explain. ‘It’s strange. When something like a murder happens, I just feel I have to sort out what really happened. I feel. .’ he struggled for the right word, ‘. . responsible.’
Frances laughed wryly. ‘Responsible for anonymous corpses, but when it comes to those close to you. .’
He felt suitably chastened. ‘I’m sorry, Frances.’ He looked out of the window at the clear night over Exmoor. ‘I was thinking about that today over lunch. About you and me, about. . you know, responsibility.’
‘Oh yes?’ It wasn’t quite cynical, but nearly.
‘And whether responsibility and truth are compatible. I’ve always found truth a problem. That’s really why I left you.’
‘I thought you left me for other women.’
‘In a way. But it was because I needed other women, and I needed to be truthful about it. I hated all the subterfuges, I hated lying to you. At the time it seemed more truthful to make a break; then at least the position was defined. If I had left you, then I wasn’t expected to be. .’
‘Responsible?’ Frances supplied.
‘I suppose so’
After London, the quiet of the country was almost tangible. ‘You know, Frances, I often wonder if we could get back together.’
‘So do I, Charles.’ She sighed. ‘But if it did happen, there are certain things I would demand.’
‘You could have truth. I’ve always tried to be truthful to you, Frances.’
‘And what about that other recurrent word. . responsible?’
‘Hmm.’
‘There’s still the matter of other women.’
‘Oh, there aren’t many of those now. Never have really been many who counted.’
‘No?’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Hasn’t been anyone for months, really, Frances. I don’t seem to feel the same urge to wander that I used to.’
‘All right, Charles,’ asked Frances softly, ‘when was the last one?’
Oh dear. He had genuinely forgotten about Dottie Banks until that moment. And he had promised Frances that he would always be truthful. ‘Well, last night, actually. But she didn’t mean anything.’
Charles spent the night in the single bed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It must have taken a while from Taunton, Charles thought, as Frances drove them in the yellow Renault S along the route Lesley-Jane had described. How they ever found time to get there during Peter Hickton’s intensive rehearsals, he could not imagine.
But then he remembered that Lesley-Jane and Alex had both been in the company before work on The Hooded Owl began. Perhaps they had discovered and used their secret love-nest during the lazier days of the summer.
He glanced sideways at Frances. He thought it might be some time before he was looking for a love-nest again with her. His wife’s face was rigidly set, not with anger, which would have been easier to manage, but with hurt, which was almost impossible.
Damn Dottie Banks. And damn all the other Dottie Bankses in his life — all the quick irrelevant lays, who had a nasty habit of suddenly becoming relevant when he was with Frances.
Still, Dottie Banks had given him more than most of the others. She had sent him on the way to solving the mystery of her husband’s murder.
‘Not far along here,’ he said. ‘The North Molton road out of Withypool.’
‘What are you expecting to find, Charles?’
‘I don’t know. I just hope it isn’t another corpse.’
They drew up beside the stone-pillared farm gate which Lesley-Jane had described. Charles got out of the car. It was very muddy underfoot. Damn, he didn’t have any boots. Hardly surprising. He hadn’t expected a trip down to his daughter’s for lunch to end up in the middle of Exmoor.
‘Do I come too?’ asked Frances. She looked a little less resentful than earlier, and — dare he hope it? — even slightly anxious for him.
‘No, love. Stay in the car, if you don’t mind.’
‘All right. I have a book.’
‘What are you reading?’
‘Rereading Anna Karenina.’
‘Oh well, that should keep you going for a little while.’
‘You bet.’
‘Funny, I find I’m rereading more books now. Going through my old favourites. Must be entering the last lap.’
‘Don’t be morbid, Charles.’
‘No.’ He outlined a tussock with the toe of his shoe. Now he was so close to a possible solution, he felt the urge to linger. It wasn’t exactly that he was afraid; he just didn’t want to leave Frances.
‘Off you go then.’
‘Yes. Yes. .’ He turned away and started trudging through the wet grass in the direction Lesley-Jane had specified.
The landscape was
very empty. Charles could see why it had appealed to Alex Household. Humankind and human structures seemed a long way away. The hills rolled and folded into each other, hiding little patches of dead ground. The tall, tough grass that covered them ruffled and flattened with the wind, like a cat’s fur being stroked. Disgruntled sheep with strange dye markings cropped away at the grass, glowering at Charles as he passed. Anyone who wanted to feel at one with the earth, to shed the twentieth century and all its trappings, might think that here he had achieved his ambition.
No doubt in the summer, the area would be spotted with ardently rucksacked walkers, but it was now early November, and the recent rain and cold would have deterred all but the most perverse. Given shelter, someone might pass undetected in this landscape for some time.
But he’d need a lot of shelter to survive. The cold wind scoured Charles’s face and whipped his sodden trousers against his legs. He wished he had brought his overcoat.
He looked round, but the undulations seemed to have shifted, rolled into a new formation. He could not see the distinctive yellow of Frances’s car. Still, there was a little stream just beyond the mound to his left. That would give him his bearings again.
He reached the top of the mound and looked down. The stream, like the hills, had moved. He now had no idea where he was.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-twenty. He had to be at the Variety Theatre in Macklin Street at seven-thirty that night for another performance of The Hooded Owl. If he wasn’t there, he rather feared Paul Lexington might have come to the end of his understudies.
The sky was dull, with a foreboding of rain. He set off briskly in what might be the right direction, but found it difficult to get up any speed over the snagging grass.
He changed his mind, and set off in another right direction, but this offered only more hills. Over each new brow, more hills.
He tried another way, now slightly sweating from anxiety. He didn’t care what he found, the car, the stream, or the hut that was the purpose of his visit. Anything that would give him his bearings again. He listened out for the trickle of water, but the wind offered nothing but rustling grass, now very loud in his ears.
Another hill-top gave on to more hills. He turned randomly at right angles, and set off at a lolloping run. His foot caught in the grass, and he sprawled headlong.
He picked himself up and breasted another mound.
Thank God. In the crease of the hills beneath him, in a channel of rushes dark like body-hair against the brightness of the grass, was the stream.
And at the bottom of the dip stood a small stone hut with a broken-backed roof.
He followed the stream down towards it. Presumably once the building had been a shepherd’s hut, even his home perhaps, but it was long derelict. The thatch of what remained of the subsided roof was streaked with the dark green of lichen.
It was a dank and unwholesome spot.
And yet he could see how different it must have looked in the summer, how it would have appealed to Alex at the beginning of his supposed new start, and to Lesley-Jane in the throes of her first grown-up affair. It had what all lovers seek, secrecy, privacy, exclusivity. Charles could picture the smugness with which Alex Household would have sat in such a sanctuary and discussed the frenetic activities of the Taunton company. It was a place that offered a kind of peace.
Along the stream pale grey rocks stood exposed. Charles picked his way between them, sometimes having to clamber up, sometimes jumping from one to the other across the water.
As he drew close to the hut, a sense of dread took hold of him. Down in this hollow the sky seemed darker, the wind colder. A fine rain was now dashing against his face.
He felt he was about to find something.
And he feared it would be his friend’s body.
‘Alex! Alex!’ he cried out, not knowing what reply he expected.
He certainly did not expect the shock of a gunshot, cutting through the sounds of the grass.
Nor the sharp impact of the bullet that shattered into the rock a yard in front of him.
Nor the fierce pain in the shin that took his leg from under him and sent him sprawling to the ground.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Charles felt the blood trickling down his leg into his wet sock and, still keeping low behind a rock, rolled round to look at the wound.
It was a deep graze, but nothing more. He had been hit, not by the bullet, but by a sliver of quartzy rock. He would undoubtedly survive.
He lay there and thought. If Paul Lexington were describing the situation, he would undoubtedly have said that he had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that Charles’s conjecture must have been correct: Alex must be in the hut. The bad news was that Alex had a gun and was shooting at him.
Charles raised his head above the line of the rock and looked down towards the hut. Immediately another shot cracked from the doorway and ricochetted off a rock a couple of yards to his right.
He ducked back.
But after a moment’s thought he popped his head up again. It was immediately answered by another shot, which hit a rock behind him.
He lay back down and squinted round. There weren’t that many rocks. Certainly not enough to afford shelter for him to get nearer the hut.
But he read another significance into their scarcity. Alex had fired three shots at him from about twenty yards. Each one had missed by at least a yard. But each one had actually hit one of the few rocks scattered around.
Surely that wasn’t just bad shooting. A bad shot would have sprayed bullets all over the place, hitting rocks or earth at random. Only someone who was after the maximum deterrent effect would have ensured that each shot hit a rock and caused that terrible screech of ricochet.
In other words, Alex was not shooting to hit him.
Well, it was a theory.
And Charles didn’t have many others. From where he was lying, he could neither go forwards nor backwards without exposing himself as a target. So. unless he planned to lie there until nightfall, which would rule out any possibility of his getting up to town to give his evening’s performance, he had to make a move.
Besides, his whole thesis, the whole reason why he was there was that he didn’t believe Alex Household capable of actually shooting anyone.
He stood up.
A bullet hit a rock three yards in front of him. Confirming his theory.
‘Alex, I’m coming down.’ He stepped forward.
It seemed a long, long walk.
But only one more bullet was fired.
It screamed away from a rock behind him.
When he finally reached the doorway of the hut, he could see Alex Household slumped against it, the arm holding the gun limp at his side.
Had he not known who to expect, he would not have recognised his friend. Through its beard and filth, the face was sunken and ghastly. The eyes flickered feverishly like guttering candles. From the hut came the nauseating stench of human excrement.
‘Alex.’
‘Charles, you shouldn’t have come.’ Alex Household shivered and the words tumbled out unevenly.
‘I’m your friend.’
‘J-j-j-judas was a friend,’ the filthy skeleton managed to say. ‘Why not just let me take my chance? If the police find me, that’s one thing. But for you to make the trip just to turn me in. .’
‘I haven’t come to turn you in.’
‘Of course you have. Don’t pretend. You all think I’m a murderer.’ The old light of paranoia showed in the feverish eyes.
‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I know that you didn’t shoot Michael Banks.’
‘What?’ Alex Household’s body suddenly sagged. He slipped down the door-post to the ground. When Charles knelt to support him, he saw tears in the sick man’s eyes.
‘You’re ill, Alex.’
The shaggy head nodded, and then was shaken by a burst of vomiting.
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I’d left some stuff h
ere. From the summer. Tins and. . With the gun, too. This place was always my last line of defence, when they — when they came to get me. .’ Again the paranoia gleamed. ‘But I finished all the food. . I don’t know, two days ago, three. Of course, I still had water from the stream, and then. . the earth’s plenty. .’ He gestured feebly around at the hillside.
‘You mean grass and. .’
Alex nodded. ‘Yes, but it. .’ He made a noise that might have been a giggle in happier circumstances ‘. . made me ill. Ill.’ He retched again.
‘I must get you to a doctor. Quickly.’
Alex shook his head. ‘No, Charles, please. Just let me die here. It’s easier.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t spend my life in some prison. If I’m alive, I need to be free.’
‘But you will be.’
‘No, Charles. Everyone thinks I killed Micky Banks. Go on, be truthful. They do, don’t they?’
He couldn’t help admitting it. ‘But I know you didn’t, Alex.’
‘Clever old you.’ This was accompanied by the weakest of smiles. ‘What do you think happened then?’
‘I’ll tell you. Stop me when I’m wrong.’
‘Oh, I will, Charles. I will.’
‘This is what I think happened that night. I’ll grant you were in a bad state, which was hardly surprising after all the business with losing your part and then Lesley-Jane going off with Micky — incidentally, there was less in that than you thought, but that’s by the way. O.K., so you had all the motives, you even had the gun, but you didn’t do it.
‘The gun stayed in the pocket of your jacket in the Green Room until well into the second act. It was taken from there by the murderer, while you were still in the wings, in your shirt-sleeves, feeding Micky his lines through the deaf-aid. The murderer came into the wings with the gun and with the firm intention of shooting someone.
‘But this is the bit that took me longest to work out. It’s been screaming at me for days, but I just couldn’t see it.
‘The murderer had no intention of shooting Micky Banks. You were the target.’
‘When you saw the gun pointing at you, you realised the murderer’s intention and begged for mercy. You said, ‘Oh Lord! No. No, put it down. You mustn’t do that to me. You daren’t. Please. Please. .’ I should have realised that from the fact that Micky said “Oh Lord” — an expression incidentally, that wasn’t in the script of the play and that he had never used in his life — before he turned round from the Hooded Owl and looked into the wings. So it wasn’t a reaction from him. He was merely relaying what he heard over his deaf-aid.
