by John Gardner
As he turned to go back inside ‘River Walk’, he hesitated for a second, thinking that he’d caught something out of the corner of his eye, a figure, perhaps; a shape detaching itself from the shadows at the side of the house, moving swiftly. But when he looked again it was gone. Imagination, he thought. Somewhere distant behind the house a car engine sprang to life, and Tommy stayed where he was for a few moments, breathing in the dusk air and waiting for Laura to return.
Back in the hall, Laura joining them, he spoke again, rapidly as though his mind wasn’t wholly on the job in hand. ‘We’ve found nothing, okay?’ addressing the whole team crushed into the hall space, the front door still half open. ‘Maybe we’ll nip back later, dawn raid, see if someone else has come calling. The lads okay, Laura?’
‘All set, Chief.’
‘Off you go then. Molly and Suzie with me.’ They followed him into the drawing room.
‘Miss Palmer is thinking about moving away from King’s Lynn,’ Shirley greeted them from the settee. ‘Thinking about moving to Ireland.’
‘Your people’ve been round the house?’ Paula craned up at him, still looking worried, Thetis sitting silently fiddling with her skirt, running her fingers through her hair.
‘Nobody lurking in this house,’ Tommy too jovial, bouncy. ‘We’ll leave a couple of our blokes to watch out for you, but I think things’ll be fine.’
‘But Pip,’ Paula frantic. ‘What about Pip?’
‘What about him?’
‘You said he was around. Possibly putting us in danger…’
‘That’s why we’re leaving a couple of our people here, outside. Probably be back tomorrow after we’ve made more enquiries. You’ll be perfectly safe. Don’t worry.’
When they were outside, the sky just beginning to darken, Suzie turned to him. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ certainly angry.
Tommy said nothing, simply took her by the elbow and propelled her over the flagstone path towards the cars. When they reached the vehicles he said, in his softest voice, the one he used for small children. ‘We’ll do no good at all sitting in that house with two obviously terrified women. We’ve found a nicely constructed secret room. Did you look at the pictures? They were child’s pictures, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, on one wall, a nice little painting of a scene from Treasure Island on the other. That’s a child’s secret bedroom, but of course it could be used for other people. I’ve got the germ of an idea about John Goodman and I’m going to follow that up when we get back. Maybe, I don’t know and I don’t believe they’ve got a clue about Pip Ascoli. Let’s leave them in peace and get the hell out. I’ve got a feeling, not based in any way on any scientific principle, that we’re being watched, so I want to make this look real. Now, Molly.’
‘Yes, Chief.’
‘Will you please take WDS Mountford back to Long Taddmarten in the spare car.’
‘Of course, Chief.’
‘And come straight to my room when you’re back. Brian…?’
‘Yes, Chief.’
‘Home Brian, and don’t spare the horses.’ In his funny Music Hall turn accent.
The Wolseley took off like a rocket, followed by the Railton.
Molly leisurely started the spare car, put it in gear, and drew away with Suzie sitting beside her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Golly was bored, had the attention span of a gnat. They still hadn’t come — the lady policeman and her boss — and he’d spent most of the day poking around, waiting: took some books off the shelves in the little study round the back of the house, leafed through them but they had no pictures so he left them on the floor.
When it got to dusk he went back up to the attic room, lay on his bed and dozed, thought about going out again in the darkness, nicking a bit more food because he was hungry: hungry in every way.
Then he heard it.
Someone in the house. Came in through the back door. Footsteps in the hall, then into the body of the building.
The lady policeman? No. Steps were heavy. A man? The honourable copper? Maybe.
He reached into his pocket, running his fingers round the wire, pulling it out, testing the tightly fitted insulating tape wound on to each end, the wire turned over in a hook right at the ends to keep it tight, stuck into the thick coils of tape. He had washed off and cleaned the wire when he first came into the house, cleaned it and dried it on a towel found in the bathroom, blood and bits coming off on the towel from that nice big girl he’d used it on up the road: the one who’d been doing it with the Yank in the hut.
He slid off the bed, glad of his plimsolls: he’d practised creeping about the house, able to do it without a sound now. Went to the door and realized something was funny, odd. Whoever had come in hadn’t turned the lights on. He didn’t understand that because the lights were working — he’d tried them and they’d worked but he couldn’t leave them on. Couldn’t put them on again either. He knew that if anyone saw the lights on in the house they might investigate and where would he be then?
He came out of his room, peered down, over the banister rail running along the landing, saw right down past the second floor and into the dark that was the hall. There was a flicker of light somewhere. A torch. That was it. The other person in the house was using a torch. Golly, standing on the landing, tried to work out what that meant and finally decided that whoever it was didn’t want to be seen either.
He heard a cough, knew it was a man in the house now and took another pace towards the foot of the stairs, craning his neck forward, trying to get a glimpse of the intruder, one end of the wire tight in his hand.
Then the other noise, the car drawing up outside, doors slamming, footsteps, people running.
Golly shrank back towards the door to the attic room, his room.
*
Molly drove most carefully, wasn’t really worried about how long it took. If anything she dawdled, talking away the journey between King’s Lynn and Taddmarten.
‘You know what he’s up to?’ she asked Suzie.
‘Being the bumbling detective, heart.’ Suzie had Tommy’s intonation off to a t, the pauses and everything.
Molly said she was wicked and Suzie said, ‘I don’t know what all that was about. I think it was really for the benefit of Paula and her scrumptious daughter. She’s going to have problems with that girl before she gets much older.’
Molly laughed, ‘If she gets much older. There’s something very strange there, something irrational. I mean their reaction to Pip Ascoli.’
‘Pip must be a scary kind of man. But what Tommy was doing’s a different matter. He was playing the bumbling detective. Tommy has that clarity of mind which he cloaks by doing his imitations, and he does the bumbling detective by a choice of words, and his delivery. What he says is usually the complete antithesis of what’s going on in his head.’
‘The real question to ask,’ Molly said, impressed by Suzie’s comprehension, and then thinking that of course she knew Tommy’s ways: they were lovers and it would be strange if she didn’t have an insight. ‘The real question to ask is why he was doing all that double talk? There’s a reason for everything the Chief does, and what do you make of this sudden latching on to the agent — John Goodman is it?’
Suzie nodded in the darkness, and Molly continued. ‘Apart from one mention a few days ago, we’ve heard nothing about Goodman. Don’t even know what he looks like.’
‘There’ll be a reason.’
As they were coming into the outskirts of Taddmarten, Molly said she was going round past Knights Cottage. ‘Just take a quick butcher’s.’
‘Yes, make sure it’s still standing, Molly.’
They turned left, up Knights Close, and as they drove towards the cottage, Molly stiffened in the driving seat. ‘See that?’
‘What?’
‘Look. There again. Someone’s in the bloody house.’
And Suzie caught a fast flash of light downstairs.
‘That’s someone with a torch.’
Molly brought the car to an almost screaming standstill abreast of the five-bar white gate and was out of the car, her hand going back to draw the Smith & Wesson .38 from behind her hip. ‘You take the back, Sue. I’ll go in the front,’ her other hand reaching for her keys — Molly had charge of one entire set but kept the front door key permanently on her chain.
Suzie wondered how she was expected to get in, thought maybe she wasn’t; perhaps Molly would flush the interloper out through the back, making it her job to trap him. But when she got to the rear door it was open: wide and fully ajar. She pushed on in and heard Molly shout from the hall, ‘I am an armed police officer, come out or I’ll shoot!’
Suzie didn’t even see the person who charged her as she was feeling her way into the kitchen, heard only the sudden rattle of feet, heard the rasp of breathing and was knocked to one side by someone running full tilt, heading for the back door.
He had shoulder-barged her, sending her spinning against the wall, bumping against it hard, knocking the wind out of her as she rolled along, then fell, recovered, took a deep breath and began to run after him, shouting as she went.
In the darkness outside she could just make out the running figure, hurtling up the garden, going through the gate in the wall like magic, and on towards the meadow on the other side of the trees and fencing. She heard a loud grunt as her quarry hit the door in the wall, cracking it open, heard the thud of his footsteps going up the rising ground. She would never catch him now, and she knew it as the query came into her head, asking herself what had happened to Molly? She should have been out here by now.
Suzie turned and began to walk back, hurrying and aware of a car engine she could hear up past the far trees, in the distance, starting up on the other side of Bob Raines’s field.
The lights were on deep within the house, in the hall she reckoned as she hurried through, coming into the glare and being dazzled by it going from dark to the light so suddenly.
And not believing what she now saw, in the middle of the hall, on the flagstones where Max Ascoli’s body had been.
She felt a terrible surge of nausea, tasted the bile in her mouth. Molly was standing in the centre of the hall, her feet dragging on the ground and behind her, Suzie’s nightmare tugged at her: Golly Goldfinch with his wire around Molly’s neck, his dreadful skewed face and the mouth slanting in a panting grin, making a deep grunting noise as he dragged Molly towards death.
She had her head back, the wire pulling at her neck, eyes bulging and her mouth an unnatural oval, tongue beginning to loll out over her bottom lip, the crushed face pleading for help, and as Suzie stopped, then recoiled from the sight, Molly dropped her pistol, fingers going slack and the gun hitting the stone, skittering towards Suzie.
In a blink of time questions slid through Suzie Mountford’s head: this couldn’t be real; couldn’t be happening, not to Molly because Molly knew all the moves, Molly was the expert, knew exactly how to duck and dive and give the lethal punch and knock out a six-foot man with the flick of her wrist. It couldn’t be happening to Molly, not to Molly.
But it was, and Molly was starting to sag on the wire cutting deeply into her neck, Golly giving her the coup de grâce.
And as Suzie was thinking these things, streaming through her mind, she made a dive for the revolver, still moving on the flagstones.
She scooped it up, turned, spread her feet just as Golly laughed and dropped Molly’s body free of the wire.
‘Lady policeman,’ Golly said in his slow, breathy speech. ‘Lady policeman.’ Joy in the words.
Suzie, arms extended, squeezed the trigger twice, heard in her head Tommy say, ‘No, heart, keep the bloody thing still, you’re waving it about like it’s got balls attached! Not like that, heart!’
She was deafened by the report as she fired, then again, the double boom of the two shots and, looking over the muzzle with her eyes wide open she watched, disbelieving as Golly Goldfinch’s face exploded in blood, bone, flesh and gristle.
He made no noise from what was left of his mouth, but she watched as he was lifted from his feet, body levitating for a second, arching backwards towards the front door, hitting it sideways on and dropping in an uncoordinated jumble of arms, legs and the rest of him, thudding down on to the stone.
Once she had done it, actually shot the beast dead, Suzie heaved twice, then shook her head and leaped towards Molly, who lay rasping, breath coming in laboured moments of exertion and her head cricked unnaturally on the floor.
*
Later, Suzie couldn’t remember using the telephone, summoning an ambulance and getting Tommy, who brought almost the whole team with him. Eventually she recalled desperately trying to telephone the number of the instrument in Tommy’s room, but he was constantly engaged. She had already rung for an ambulance, identified herself, but was still trying Tommy when the medics arrived.
She closed the line again and again asking for the number and finally had to get the operator to break in on the conversation: Tommy yelling at her, ‘Where the hell have you got to?’ She must have told him because he arrived, cradled her in his arms, in spite of the others being there. She saw Laura almost in tears, and Ron looking exceptionally grim.
Then Laura was left with her while the others piled into the cars and drove away, using the signal bells to move any other traffic.
One of the medics had come over and suggested to Laura that Suzie was in shock, ‘Should get her into the warm, if I were you, miss.’
She walked, with Laura hanging on to her, staggered really, right to the Falcon and up to her room, with young Laura fending off both of the Staleways, getting Suzie on to her bed, everything a bit of a blur.
‘How’s Molly?’ she finally asked, and Laura looked away, bit her lip, and said they didn’t know yet. ‘Touch and go.’
She pulled herself together after a while, couldn’t stop shaking, then began to cry for quite a long time, asked Laura to get her a brandy, ‘A double.’ Laura fluttered off, bringing her a glass of what looked more like a quadruple, her hand shaking so much she could hardly hold it.
All the time she kept seeing Golly’s face exploding in front of her, feeling the jerk of the revolver in her hands and the deafening roar punching at her ears. She knew it was the shock that made her so unsteady but after an hour or so she felt ashamed of her reaction. Bloody softy, she called herself, and cursed that she wasn’t there for what she was certain must be the end of the Ascoli business.
It wasn’t until very late that night that she learned what had happened. Tommy banished everyone else from her room and talked to her gently, sitting beside the bed while she kept apologizing and telling him it was the shock.
‘I know, sweet. Take it all back,’ he told her. ‘You can shoot properly and you did. Wonderful, heart. Absobloodylutely wonderful.’
Before anything else she asked about Molly, and Tommy gave her a long, sad look. ‘I’m sorry, heart. Molly died. They could do nothing for her. She was dead before she hit the ground. You saw her die, couldn’t have done anything for her.’
Suzie let out a long, shuddering wail, trying to stifle it with a hand over her mouth, sure that Molly had still been breathing when she got to her, on the flagstones. ‘How?’ she asked again.
‘How, Tommy? How? Molly knew it all. All the moves.’
‘Taken by surprise, Suzie. Only answer, taken by surprise. Can happen to any of us.’ He put his arms around her, to hold and comfort her. ‘Molly always carried a weapon, in spite of everything she was vulnerable because of the weapon and her skills, so she always knew the risks, and she accepted them.’
‘But, Tommy, it’s so unfair.’ She thought that if Molly hadn’t decided to take a look at Knights Cottage, she’d still be alive now, and thought of her, the confidence, single-mindedness, everything about her. When they had first met, she remembered that she hadn’t really liked Molly. It was only with the passing of time that she came to understand and respect her. Molly had taught her so much.
> ‘I’m going to miss her, Tommy.’
‘We’re all going to miss her,’ he said. ‘I never had to worry about my personal safety when Molly was around. Going to miss her a hundred times over. Can’t really believe she’s gone.’
He was silent for a good minute, then said if she wanted to blame anybody she should blame Max Ascoli. ‘Oh, yes, heart he’s still alive.’
It was Max who had come into the house, driven over in Paula’s car, came back to get those letters Molly had already found in his little safe. They’d found the safe open tonight after he’d gone.
As the evening wore on, he told her what else had happened after he’d received her telephone call.
Dennis Free and Peter Prime were left in position at the observation points looking out, and down, on the house called ‘River Walk’. About nine o’clock Dennis tried to get in touch with Tommy who had left Shirley manning his telephone at the Falcon. Dennis, who had been watching from the corner of the playground, had seen a car drive in, thought it was the garage returning Paula’s car at first.
A man got out, went to the door of ‘River Walk’. Dennis, watching through Laura’s night glasses, saw him take a key from a pocket and let himself into the house. That caused alarm. Before going any further he rang from the telephone box, tried to get Tommy but spoke to Shirley who said he should proceed with caution — good old police terminology — take Peter with him, go in and check on the stranger who had just walked into the house.
He signalled for Peter to join him and the two of them went up the flagstone walk to the front door, where they heard raised voices. They rang and knocked loudly and were eventually let in by Thetis, whom they described as being in a highly emotional state. She was shouting and crying, ‘Stop them! Please stop them!’
Later Dennis said, the words looked a bit simple when written down, but in reality the girl had been in a dramatic and excited, highly charged condition.
Loud, melodramatic shouting was coming from the drawing room. Afterwards both men said they were unprepared for what they found, couldn’t believe their eyes seeing a dead man in the middle of an outrageous slanging match, Paula screaming at Max Ascoli, accusing him of manipulating her and of being a cold-hearted murderer, guilty of fratricide, while their daughter sobbed in the doorway.
