I had let myself out very quietly from instinct, not intention. I had intended charging straight over to my garage, but instinct and the silence kept me pressed against the door for several moments. The silence was unnerving; it made the sea sound uncannily close and made me for once grateful for the homely croaks of a handful of insomniac frogs. I could see my garage door was just ajar, but I couldn’t hear one sound coming from inside. Then a figure that wasn’t David’s glided from the door and swiftly made for the bridge end of the building and disappeared round the corner. He had gone so fast against the wall that I couldn’t have stopped him even had I been an expert shot with the Luger and there been no law to restrain me. I wondered why he had gone that way and not back to the inn but was far too concerned for David to dwell on any other matter. I ran over to the garage and heard his blasphemous mutters before I pulled open the door and switched on the light. He sounded hurt.
He was hurt. He was trying to haul himself from the floor by the locked handle of the driver’s door. There was blood streaming down the side of his face from a gash over his left eyebrow and his hair and shoulders glinted with glass splinters. The remains of his glasses were on the floor at his feet. ‘Oh, my poor darling ‒’ I rushed to him.
‘Poor bloody moron ‒ let him see me first ‒’ he mumbled in a daze and went on fighting the locked handle. ‘Got to get this out ‒ my car ‒’ He swayed violently and crumpled on to the floor.
I opened my mouth to yell for Harry, then closed it with a snap. I had realized what David meant. Fewer people around till the car was clear the better. One set of my car keys were in my room but I kept the spare set in the bottom of the box of tissues in the dashboard shelf. Car thieves were less of a problem on the marsh than the miles between one’s home and the nearest garage, and repairing a window cost less than a lock. I looked around quickly, found an old rag lying in one corner of the floor, wound it round my hand and wrist, turned my back to protect David and myself, and broke the driver’s window with the butt of the Luger so easily that had I not been so frightened and angry I’d have been very pleased with myself. A couple of seconds later I backed out as if from a pit at Brands Hatch. I saw David raising himself on an elbow and that the floor beneath the car was clear. As David said, a smart operator ‒ who must now be convinced luck loved him, and David’s unexpected appearance had proved the cherry on top … Rose, my dear treasured friend, you don’t know how I hate to say this, but wasn’t I right? His own was the dress rehearsal ‒ you’ll remember he wasn’t hurt at all. He crept down in the night to set up yours to get you. Not the first man to try to kill the girl he loved rather than let anyone else get her … thank God he slipped up.
I swung the car back hard left to drive out forward and passed the hall door as Harry charged out slapping on a cap and zipping up a shooting-jacket. He shouted something I couldn’t catch. I didn’t know if he’d recognized me in the darkened interior, or thought I was stealing my car. I daren’t risk any time on explanations until I had the car up on the marsh road well clear of the buildings. I had to slow on the cinder road before crossing the bridge and taking the sharp turn that was necessary either left or right. I wasn’t absolutely certain my car was a danger; I was one hundred per cent certain of the dangers of the lining dykes.
I made a calculated guess before I was off the bridge. If the car was safe it wouldn’t matter which way I turned. If Francis had fixed up something with a long enough fuse to let him get clear ‒ and he was a mining engineer ‒ I guessed his main object must be to create a diversion that would, forseeably, empty the inn. The nearest fire station was eighteen miles away. Unless every available pair of amateur hands got on the job at once, the garages and flat, being half-timbered, could be a bonfire before the professional firemen arrived. That would leave Francis free to nip quietly back into the inn for whatever it was he wanted to find or do. And if I was right over all this, then the obvious place for him to hide and wait was on the stretch of sea road hidden from the inn windows by the opposite building. No one would hang around the flat windows that side with a garage below on fire, and on that bit of road he’d have a nice wide dyke between him and the blaze.
Directly I swung the car towards the sea, the headlights picked up his crouching figure, huddled between dyke rushes and the road edge on the far left. He didn’t look up at the car. He seemed to be studying something in one hand. The thought flashed into my mind; the bastard’s doing a countdown on a stop-watch. That was my last coherent thought for quite a long time.
I stood on the brake and clutch. The car slithered to a stop about ten yards from where I had first seen him. He hadn’t waited. Once he realized I was stopping by him, he reacted like an Olympic sprinter to the starter’s pistol and raced down the road as if his gold were at stake. There was no need to guess why. I switched off the engine, but left on the headlights and leapt out. I ran faster than I knew I could and was over the bridge when my car exploded. I heard later that, unlike David’s, there had been no visible smoke from the bonnet and the first sheet of flame seemed to come from the boot.
Suddenly I was surrounded by heavily breathing men wearing shooting-jackets and boots over pyjamas, demanding in East Anglian, Canadian and marsh voices what the hell was going on. The only man I properly noticed wore an old duffle coat over a dressing-gown and a sling hanging round his neck and wasn’t asking anything. Johnny Evans-Williams stood at the edge of the cinder track staring not at the blaze across the dyke but down towards the sea. In the light of the other men’s torches the expression on Johnnie’s face was the expression of a man looking straight into hell. Then David’s powerful shoulders blocked out the others as he pushed his way through, half-blind without his glasses. He steadied himself with one hand on my shoulder and mopped the blood from his left eye with the other. ‘I was not kidding, love, when I said you’re making an old man of me. You all right?’
I nodded breathlessly. ‘But the bastard’s got away ‒’
‘Only pro tem. All the blokes saw him running in your heads and ‒’ He never finished the sentence. The sound that silenced him deafened us all. It was the sound of an explosion further off down the marsh that, in comparison, reduced the sound of my car exploding to the popping of a paper bag.
Harry recognized it first. ‘Wall’s give! Sea’s coming! In and up all! In and up all!’
Other men shouted and somewhere a woman screamed. I thought I just heard Johnnie’s agonized ‘The boy ‒’ before all human voices were drowned by the gigantic roaring of the sea battering through the wall, tearing away concrete blocks as if they were pebbles, and hurtling back into the stranded harbour with the terrifying, unmeasurable elemental power of millions of tons of suddenly unleashed water.
Though the inn was on the natural mound of one old arm and we had only yards to run to the hall door, before we reached it the sea had spilled over the arms and was surging and boiling ankle-deep over the flags. It was nearly over the eighteen-inch flood-sill of the hall door, when Harry slammed and bolted it, and slammed down the flood-board fixed to the inside. The farmers, being fenmen, had already organized themselves into anti-flood squad with the speed born of experience, and disappeared to ensure every ground-floor window and door was securely locked, every flood-board down, and every available cushion and movable chair seat piled against the bottoms of the windows.
‘I guess I best take a look at your face, Dave ‒’
‘You take him up for that, doctor,’ barked Harry. ‘I’ll not say she’ll come in below and I’ll not say she’ll not. Inn’ll hold. Done it afore. Get on up all as isn’t wanted down here to watch.’ He rounded on Trevor who had now appeared white-faced in a hastily pulled on T-shirt and jeans. ‘Fetch out candles smart, lad. Lights’ll go soon as she gets the pylons and she’ll get ours. Mayn’t be wetting many feet in Harbour but she’ll fetch out the electricity.’ He looked at Johnnie who was now sitting on a stool in the empty bar with his arms propped on the counter and his head in his hand
s. He seemed oblivious to the roaring that was still going on outside, and what was happening inside and to his inn. His wife, in a fur coat over nightclothes, stood by him with one arm round his sagging shoulders. I hadn’t noticed her in the yard or known she was up, until I saw her watching Johnnie with a strange mixture of distress and relief on her thin, pinched, greyish face. ‘Best to get the guv’nor upstairs, madam,’ said Harry in a gentler tone. ‘Best get him up.’
‘Yes, Harry. Thank you.’ She leant closer to Johnnie and whispered something. He didn’t seem to hear.
Nick had gone up ahead. I said quietly, ‘Can you manage the stairs alone, David? I think Johnnie needs more help.’
‘Yep. He will.’ He removed his arm from my shoulders and brushed his mouth against my ear to add, ‘His son, I’ll bet.’
I stared at his blood-caked face and painfully bloodshot eyes. ‘What ‒?’ But as I mouthed the demand I remembered how Johnnie’s smile had reminded me of something I couldn’t place and how my caricature of Francis had so unaccountably ‒ then ‒ turned into one of Johnnie. And I remembered that first terrible triumphant roar of the returning sea and Johnnie’s cry of anguish. I nodded and went into the bar. ‘Can I help you get your husband upstairs, Mrs Evans-Williams?’
She said calmly, gratefully. ‘Thank you, my dear. He’s so shocked ‒ Renny’s death ‒ you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and our eyes met, but whether she knew how much or how little I understood, I couldn’t tell.
We took him along to my room as Nick, with Linda’s help, was dealing with David’s face in there. We had Johnnie on the spare bed when all the lights failed. Linda drew me aside. ‘Thank God Angie’s still flat out. I’ve just had another look at her. Hasn’t stirred since Nick sent me back after we heard your car ‒’ She had to break off as Nick needed her to hold one of the candles Trevor had brought in earlier.
‘You’ll be just fine after a good rest, Johnnie. You have had a real traumatic time ‒ just take it real easy.’ Nick turned back to David and took another thorough look by torchlight in both eyes. ‘No glass. I guess you were in real luck. None has gotten in that I can trace.’
‘That was his one slip-up.’ David spoke very softly. ‘He blinded me with the torchlight before he used the other end on my glasses. Then finished the job with a neat chop on the back of the neck. But for that light, he might’ve done the job for good.’
‘Land sakes, Dave, why would the guy want ‒’ Nick’s voice stopped abruptly. There wasn’t enough light for me to see how David had silenced him, but I saw Johnnie raise his head momentarily then flop back and close his eyes.
‘Thanks, Nick.’ David got out of the armchair. ‘I’ll get my spare glasses.’
‘I’ll get them. In one of your suitcases?’
‘Small one, love. Two pairs. Either’ll do.’
I took one of the candles with me, stood the pewter holder on the chest in David’s room, found his glasses, and before returning with them took the candle into the bathroom. I was examining the few traces of sand and mohair at the bottom of the bath when David joined me. I handed him his glasses, he put them on and bent over the bath. ‘Can’t have done his blood-pressure much good when he switched on his torch in here. He’s bound to have done that not to knock into anything. And then he had to come back.’
‘And create a diversion to clear this joint.’
‘Sure did.’
Without saying more we moved to his room window and leant out. The sea had quietened. It had regained its lost entry and was satisfied to lick round the inn and ripple gently over the drowned marsh, dykes and road. It was not much more than a couple of feet deep round the inn, but the marsh we were overlooking was fifteen feet below sea-level and twenty feet below the inn. From the inn to the sea wall there was nothing to see but the water growing blacker as the sky was imperceptibly growing lighter, and the gap that looked to have been bitten out of the wall by giant teeth.
David said, ‘I thought you said the Endels had finished off all the dragons.’
‘We must’ve slipped up.’
‘Even Homer sometimes nods,’ he allowed wearily, ‘and you weren’t around then. You didn’t slip over that rug. Still under Johnnie?’
‘No. Harry ‒ oh God ‒ better check.’
We found Harry dealing with the flooded telephone alcove. ‘Nah. Not come from outside. Come up from the cellars. She got in the lot and the cold store. Not done the birds no good I shouldn’t wonder but Mr le Vere, he’ll not be bothered. Rug? It’s safe. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Bunged it in the guv’nor safe. Waterproof it is, I got the keys.’ He thumped his middle. ‘On me belt. Wanting it now?’
David and I looked at each other in the candlelight. He said, ‘If it’s not too much of a bother now, Harry?’
‘Nah. She’s going down. Be out soon. Soon dry off. Up here, mind. Harbour’ll stay a harbour till they mends the wall and that’ll take a day or two I shouldn’t wonder.’ He put down his bucket and squelched ahead of us to the office. He didn’t ask why we wanted the rug or another question about it. No one else asked any more questions during what remained of that night. Consequently, it was not until the morning that Nick McCabe discovered why Angie had slept so soundly through it all and Linda was unable to wake her.
Chapter Eleven
‘Brisbane.’ David took another sip of the Chief Constable’s whisky. ‘Only time I was there was the day I flew out and wrote and posted that card to Rose while waiting for my flight. Yet that morning by the nethouse when, as we did, he must’ve spotted the faint fuzz on the fodder, he seemed to know I’d been there. Could have been just coincidence ‒ just the first place in Australia that came into his head ‒ but as the other coincidences we’ve described seemed to be piling up, I started wondering if he had some reason for wanting Rose out of Endel and at Harbour.’
The Chief Constable took another look at the two-day-old strapping over David’s left eyebrow and reached for his tobacco jar. ‘Understandably.’
We were alone with him in his study. Yesterday, we had spent a couple of hours alone with two senior CID men in Astead’s main police station, and last evening an hour alone with Mrs Evans-Williams in her flat. The Chief Constable had just told us that, around the time we were in the flat, an Astead police car had driven Gordon back to his lodgings in Cliffhill. The CID men yesterday had told us Gordon’s full name was Gordon Alan Robertson and that since the previous evening he had been helping with their enquiries. Shortly after we left them, the coastguards had found Francis’s body trapped between displaced concrete blocks, and an hour or so later they had fished out the Audi that had been flattened like a stamped-on sardine tin.
‘Car’s in a shocking mess,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘but the forensic chaps have managed to find what they expected in the boot. Yes. He had her body there wrapped in the rug. Those stains were made by her blood and I’m informed she was wrapped in it immediately after death. The chaps are very pleased with themselves and you for that rug. It was precisely what they told us to look for after they found the few strands of mohair in the hair, on the clothes, and then in the boot of the Allegro. Could’ve given us no small problem had he used a plastic groundsheet, but obviously he decided wool would be warmer. Had to keep the body warm as long as possible. New rug, my chaps say. We know he didn’t buy it locally, and as you’ve said you’ve never seen it in his car, Rose, presumably he brought it elsewhere and kept it in the boot for this purpose.’
‘Christ,’ muttered David, and I grimaced.
‘Yes. Unpleasant thought.’ He filled his pipe, carefully. ‘That fatal blow worried the police surgeon too. He drove out to look at the ash and decided the damage couldn’t have been made by a human skull without its being smashed like an eggshell. He thought it had been caused by some heavy implement wrapped in something similar to her leather hat held in the hand of an outstretched arm swung right back before swinging forward and hitting the tree with great force. Most p
robably a man, he said, though a strong woman could’ve done it. Suggested we started looking for an implement and the rug. We didn’t expect to find either in the woods as we were pretty sure both were in dykes, but had to look.’ He lit his pipe with one match. ‘You’re right. She was killed nearly two hours earlier than was first assumed. We now put the time somewhere between ten a.m., when we know she left the hairdresser, and ten-thirty a.m., when young Billy Adams spotted her apparently empty car in the clearing. The boy’s quite definite about the time. He’s just had a new watch for his birthday a few days back and consults it every couple of minutes. We think Denver had already killed her and put her body in the boot when he heard the child, and hid in the trees until Billy wandered back down the track. It’s a mile down that track to the main road. Billy says he had only gone a short way when the Allegro went slowly by driven by “a lady wearing a floppy browny hat, browny coat and dark glasses” and disappeared round the next bend. That track’s all bends. Denver, of course.’
I said mechanically, ‘Sue was always borrowing his shirts and sweaters as they were the same height and build. And she always kept dark glasses in her dashboard shelf. With the hat pulled down and glasses, with his pale skin he could easily have looked like a woman from a few yards off.’
David said, ‘The kid must’ve seemed a bonus. Further proof that Sue was still alive, and to cover his alibi she had to seem that until around noon. I imagine once well down the track he took a side path to where he’d hidden his Audi. Have any tyre tracks been found?’
The Chief Constable nodded. ‘The ground’s always damp and thick with old leaves in those woods and, as the trees are still so heavy with leaves, one could conceal a tank a few feet from the paths with very little effort. He’d chosen a nice snug corner. Quite nice sets of tyre marks, I’m informed, but, of course, he wasn’t a countryman. Small boys in cities don’t have much opportunity for tracking Red Indians. And as those odd little corners so accessible to the road are alive with courting couples’ cars in the holiday season, he may well have thought a few more tyre marks would go unnoticed. As it would have done, had we no reason to believe foul play was involved.’
Marsh Blood (The Endel Mysteries Book 2) Page 16
