by Ellis Peters
Silence again, absolute silence. No querulous baritone and no reedy, wavering treble to be heard now inside the long room, not the least sound of movement or even breathing. Outside the door George leaned with an ear against the wood, straining to hear if any indication of struggle or distress stirred within, but there was nothing. Behind him Sam and Toby stood painfully still.
Presently George began to talk, clearly, reasonably, deliberately, without haste.
‘We know you’re in there now. We know the boy is with you. We know there’s no one else in there. Whatever happens to him will be your doing, no one else’s. Your responsibility. Think about it! What a fool you’d be to harm him now! You can’t get away. Touch him, and you destroy yourself. Only the desperate do that, and why should your case be desperate? You’re a reasoning man, you can see what’s in your own best interests. It’s only a matter of time, why prolong it? You may as well open the door now, it will make no difference in the end, and spare you and us a great deal of trouble. Mitigating circumstances always count.’
Between sentences he waited, but still silence, never a word in reply. A slightly less intense silence and stillness in there, perhaps, the faint suggestion of slight movements, of people breathing, even the stealthy suggestion of furious thought. But no words.
‘If you harm that boy, you’re done for, you understand that, don’t you? Up to now you’re not in any desperate case, are you? But there’d be no shadow of doubt about that, and you’d pay for it to the limit. Why not see reason? To start with, prove you haven’t harmed him already. That will be something in your favour. Let him speak! Just enough to say: Yes, I’m here, yes, I’m all right. Bossie, are you listening?’
If there was the kind of response a gagged mouth can make, it was barely loud enough to reach the listeners straining their ears outside the door, but there was something else, a sudden sharp crack, as though a foot had back-heeled stone, and then a suppressed gasp and the brief flutter of a very unequal struggle, instantly suppressed. Then silence again.
‘Get Grainger,’ said George in a whisper, and one of the constables slipped away. ‘Jack, take a look at those windows – though I think they’re too high and too small to be any use. And, Sam, could you bear to go back to Jenny, and try to keep her there, out of this? Leave us to do what can be done, you know we’ll stick at nothing to get him out. You look after Jenny.’
‘Yes, I’ll go.’ There was nothing Sam had been able to do so far but stand and listen and suffer. And if nobody told Jenny anything pretty soon, she’d be coming to find out. He felt his way quietly along the wall to the archway, and departed.
‘He is there,’ Toby whispered. ‘I think he’s still OK. He couldn’t use his tongue, but he used his feet. That’s Bossie! He won’t hurt him now, surely! What good would it do him?’
None, true enough. But these cases who get themselves into a state of siege, with hostages, sometimes take their revenge on the world that way. It made no sense, no. Bossie might be more than half the case against Rainbow’s murderer, if it came to a charge, but where that left the killer at least a chance of acquittal and freedom after trial, killing Bossie now would leave him no chance at all. But that was an argument of reason, not of spite, and spite can argue, too. All they could do was go on talking to him in reasonable terms, urging his best interests on him, talking him into exhaustion, if need be, but never into frenzy.
‘All right, we can afford to wait. You can’t get away. But what are you gaining? You may as well come out now, and spare yourself some uncomfortable hours. We’re patient people, we shan’t tire and go away.’
Sergeant Grainger came, placidly muting his skeleton keys, a big man stepping as lightly as a cat. And hard on his heels came Barbara and Willie the Twig, asking no questions, already apprised of what was happening. That was an idea! Perhaps Barbara’s voice, coming unexpectedly, might jolt the young man within out of another fragment of confidence and resolution, make him more amenable to reason, if not to resignation. George drew her aside to let Grainger come to the lock.
‘Barbara, we’re going in, and I want to keep the operation covered and his attention distracted while we deal with the lock. You try talking to him, he’s not expecting you.’ Getting in might be a ticklish moment, but they would have to play it as cautiously as possible, no rushing their quarry into panic.
She asked in a whisper: ‘Is it John Stubbs?’
‘Seems so. He’s nowhere else to be found. Try it! Keep talking gently till we get through.’
Her voice was one of her particular beauties, deep, clear, slightly husky, an admirer could never mistake it for any other. She stood pressed against the hinged side of the door while Grainger worked, handling his tools gently, without a sound, until metal edged metal inside the lock.
‘John, is that really you in there? This is Barbara. John, that’s a friend of mine you’ve got in there with you, and I want him safe, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt him, would you? I’ve got a present for him that he hasn’t even seen yet. I don’t know how you got into this mess, John, I thought I knew you, at least a little. I still think so, and this isn’t your style at all.’ She would have liked to pause and listen to the quality of the continued but subtle silence within, for it seemed to be passing through as many changes as the inflections of speech, but she could not break the thread, because of the tiny sounds of metal on metal, engaging and slipping, and gripping again. ‘Don’t go on with this, what’s the point of hurting people more? What good can that do you or anyone? Open the door and come out to us now. Send Bossie out to me. And then you come. I’ll be here waiting for you, I promise.’
The sergeant made a fine, satisfied sound, and she heard the lock surrender and the handle turn, easing wood softly a fraction of an inch from wood. A hair-fine line of light showed. George put her gently aside, and thrust the door wide open.
At the far end of the long room, just short of the corner where the hand-cart and its attendant fragments lay, two figures clamped tightly together stood backed against the stone wall. In front Bossie, with his own handkerchief thrust between his teeth and knotted tightly behind his head, his glasses askew, and a coil of rough baling twine spiralling tightly from his waist to his shoulders, pinioning his arms. The last length of the cord was looped round his neck, tightly enough to score the skin, and behind him, gripping the end of the loop and glaring fury and desperation, stood, not John Stubbs but Colin Barron.
CHAPTER TEN
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The voice that came jerking out of him, after so long of obstinate silence, was loud, harsh and too high-pitched. ‘Take one step in here and I kill him! One step, that’s enough!’
Nobody moved. Frozen in the doorway, they measured the odds, and found them impossible. The room was long. By the time even the fleetest of them reached him, he could kill, and by the look of his face, that sharp, easy, knowing, business face hardly recognisable now in its pale ferocity, he would kill. Even the convulsive tension of his fingers was tightening the cord as they watched. One false move, and it would be over. The sweat running on his forehead was clearly visible in the flooding light.
‘Don’t touch that light switch! Don’t put a hand near it! If you do, he’s dead for a start. I shan’t need light to finish him off.’
Carefully unmoving, George said in a flat, neutral voice: ‘Why go on? Turn him loose and come with us, you’ll be sparing yourself worse things. At least talk. And listen.’
‘I’ll talk to you through the door, if I talk at all. Get back out of here, leave the light, and close the door. Or I’ll kill him. If you try anything, I’ll make sure he goes first.’
With aching care, inch by inch, hands in full view to show nothing was contemplated against him, they withdrew. They left the light on, they closed the door.
Back to square one! Not John Stubbs, but Colin Barron, the smart young dealer who thought it well worth while poking his nose in wherever Rainbow turned his attention, the one who had followed him
up into Middlehope, found some profitable business with the sale of the Macsen-Martel effects, but never quite discovered Rainbow’s real incentive, and was constantly, inquisitively on the prowl after it. And had he ever really coveted Barbara, or merely made use of her, or tried to, as she had been employed to make use of him and his kind? Not a pleasant world! No wonder she had recoiled from it to the remotest extremes of Middlehope Forest.
Barbara stood in monumental, frowning calm, fronting the closed door. Possibly the same thoughts were in her mind. She raised her voice to carry clearly within.
‘Colin? Are you listening? I’m sorry I called you John. You dropped him in the muck, you see, hauling off like this. I don’t say I was ever sure about you, Colin, but I may have thought you all sorts of things, but never a coward. Men don’t fight behind children, Colin. Only apologies for men. Now prove which you are. Give us Bossie, and I’ll get back my respect for you. What are you gaining by threatening him, anyhow? If we can’t get in, you can’t get out. Never, not on your terms. You’d better start considering ours. Just tell me, as a matter of academic interest, did you ever really think anything of me? It would be interesting to know.’
She was never going to know, of course, because what could she or anyone make of that sudden, strangling, sobbing outburst of sexual profanity that bubbled behind the door. One might gather that she was a married whore, and he a winnowing wind blowing both her and her proprietor-husband where he listed, but the mixture of abuse and longing no one was ever going to disentangle. Happily only she, rather than Bossie, seemed to be threatened by this storm. Barbara was drawing some very dangerous fire. The vibrations from within sounded enfeebled rather than intensified.
‘I tell you what,’ called Barbara, irrepressible in inspiration, ‘sell us Bossie for me! You do realise you can trade him, don’t you? If you feel that way about me, here I am, put your contemptible noose about my neck instead. I shall be a volunteer, and I’m over twenty-one, Colin. Think how much better that will make you feel!’
It was more than enough. Willie the Twig took her by the arm and drew her away into the open, chilly, clean centre of the courtyard, and she understood and accepted his suggestion that she had pushed things to the safe limit, and made her point that Bossie, alive, was a valuable bargaining counter. She went where Willie led her, quivering. She wound her arms about his neck and pressed her lips into his throat, and it was a motion of exultation rather than a gesture of need or appeal.
‘It’s all right,’ said Willie into her ear, ‘it’s all right! He isn’t crazy, his mind’s working, you got to him, all right.’
All the same, it was back to stalemate. Back to: ‘We’re still here, Barron. We shan’t go away, you know that. And you can’t, not without us. There’s no way on this earth you can get out of there except in our arms. So why prolong it? Mrs Rainbow is right. The boy is quite irrelevant. We can’t get in, but you can’t get out. And we, in the long run, don’t have to get in, but you, in the end, do have to get out. Walking or carried, alive or dead, there’s only this one way out for you, and we’re not quitting. Think it over, Barron! Make it as easy on yourself as possible. Come out now!’
It went on and on, monotonously, Moon taking a turn, George returning to the attack, a barrage of voices kept up relentlessly to leave him no time to relax, no time to think or despair, in case despair should take its worst course. But somehow he had made time to think, all the same. Now that he’d begun to talk, and knew his identity was known, he used his voice with increasing aggression. Not confidence, perhaps, a kind of last-ditch bravado.
‘You want this kid, Felse? Intact? I’ve got the goods, I put the price on them, understand?’ Barbara had reached him, sure enough.
‘No harm in naming your price,’ agreed George. ‘The customer doesn’t have to buy. Not when he has a foreclosure on you in the end, in any case. But go on talking, we’re listening.’
‘Don’t forget the seller can chuck the goods in the dustbin if he doesn’t get his price. You’d better listen. If I don’t get the return I want, I can still wipe him out.’
‘That would settle your own hash, and you know it. I don’t think you’re crazy enough to want that.’
‘I might be, Felse, I might be, if there’s nothing else left. There’s no hanging now. And there’s a lot better remission than you lot like, and even parole— What should I be, by comparison with some of the real killers? Just one kid, and almost cleanly!’
It was curious that the more ghastly his arguments became, the more secure seemed Bossie’s future. He was very seriously beginning to consider his captive as a barterable commodity, not to be squandered. George had visions of having to rouse the Chief Constable in the middle of the night.
‘Go on, I’m interested. What do you want, a jet plane to fly you to Libya?’
‘I’ll get myself out of the country, there are ways. Nothing as ambitious as that. I want all your men called off for twelve hours, and a car brought here for me – and my little nephew, of course!’
‘A dark green SAAB?’ asked George. ‘The one you used to try and run him down? You’ll have to prove he’s still as good as new, first, you realise that? Nobody buys a pig in a poke.’
‘A nice, well-maintained police car, with everything legitimate, and twelve hours guarantee of a clean bill, in case of any hitch. And he’s OK as of now, and I’ll prove it if I have to, but he won’t be, if you bitch me up short of noon tomorrow.’
‘On the other hand,’ pointed out George, tirelessly mild, ‘you are still stuck in there, the one who needs clemency. Unless you convince us we have to, we are not disposed to let you out, except into our custody. You’d better be a lot more convincing.’
A sudden, prolonged, tired but vicious outburst of profanity. No detectable movement, no struggle at all, things getting bedded down into a status quo. No, he wouldn’t slaughter his bargaining counter. Given time, he might even fall asleep from exhaustion. But he was a tough proposition, far tougher than John Stubbs, with any amount of stamina.
It was no comfort at all when the constable from the switchboard made his way in just after eleven, to announce in a triumphant whisper: ‘We’ve found him! Stubbs! He’s in Birmingham, at this Lavery woman’s flat, seems they had a dinner date on the town, and he jumped at it when this chap Barron offered to do his evening rounds for him. Some of the students wanted to stay on late and finish charting the bit of infirmary they were working on, and Barron said he’d see them off the premises and lock up. We called the flat several times before, but they were still out. They’re only just back. He’s on his way back here now.’
Poor harmless, glum, undecided John Stubbs, good enough to run a job like this caretaking one at Mottisham, but not good enough to get much higher on his own achievements, jealous and resentful of smarter acquaintances such as Colin Barron, but willing to lean on them, too. And torn between two grotesquely different women, and the mixed fortunes they offered, salvation to the undistinguished. So all the time he was taking the more profitable legatee out to dinner! In crass innocence!
‘You still there, Felse?’ demanded the hoarse, vindictive voice from within.
‘I’m still here. I’m listening.’
‘Better make up your mind quickly, if you want this kid, I’m getting tired of waiting. Give me the break I want, and he’s yours.’
‘If you turn him loose to us here on the spot, that might be worth considering. But it doesn’t rest with me, and there are no short cuts to an answer.’
‘Not a chance! I don’t take my halter off him until I’m clear. Then I’ll dump him safely, somewhere he can look after himself.’
‘And we should trust you? But you’d never make it, you know, I guarantee that. You’d much better come out, and get it over.’
‘If I don’t make it, he doesn’t make it, either. I’ll see to that! So get to your damned Chief Constable, and get things moving. And I want more time, since you’re wasting so much. I want a full day!’
If he was tiring, it didn’t show in his voice. All those listening tried to find some sign of weakening, of wandering resolution, and couldn’t. And nothing had changed; there was just this one way out and in, and parley with him was in fact only an exercise in wearing him down, and none too effective so far. It was going to be a long night.
Toby couldn’t stand still and listen to it any longer. He turned his back and groped away along the wall, out of the stable-yard, and round to the left, to circle the whole block and look once more for some other means of approach, anything that would turn the scale. Though he knew that Moon and the constables had already done the same thing, and found nothing of any use. It was better than standing outside the door thinking helplessly of Bossie inside there, roped into helplessness and with a noose round his neck, and of Jenny, with superhuman forbearance, keeping her distance as requested, and dying every minute.
A few broken, embedded stones of a wall jutted for some yards from the corner of the stable-block. He stumbled over them, and came round to the rear of the north walk of the old cloister, into the nave of the church. All along there on his left ran the thick, decrepit stone wall that once had severed the church from the cloister. And to his right the gardens fell away, and gave place to a large, cleared space, receding into darkness between distant walls, where some trick of latent and reflected light, owing to its white encrustations, showed him dimly the shape of a concrete mixer. The sky was a little paler than it had been, against it he could see the tracery of scaffolding encasing one wall, though it vanished again into a single darkness below the skyline. The workmen had much of their plant and stores here, it seemed. Toby moved along the wall, his left hand extended to touch the rough and crumbling surface, and groped his way round a short, buttress-like projection, surely added long after the church itself was gone and the cloister had become stables. Sign enough that this wall, though immense, had been showing traces of disintegration even in the eighteenth century, and needed propping at this point. As he rounded it and felt for the wall again, a small figure erupted under his feet with a muted squeak of alarm, and instantly shushed imperiously at him, as if he had been the offender. Startled, Toby looked down into a round face just visible as a pallor in the night, and clutched at a coat-collar, and was himself as promptly and eagerly clutched by the arm, and towed away into the scaffolded and plant-stacked shelter of the distant buildings, away from the critical zone.
