Death Of A Hollow Man (27 page)

The click sounded very loud. And rather final. Having shut the door, Kitty didn’t move away but leaned back against it in what seemed to Rosa a rather threatening maimer. And then she smiled. It was a terrible smile. Her narrow top lip with its exaggerated lascivious arch did not spread sideways. It lifted in the manner of an unfriendly animal, revealing pointed, sharp incisors. The light glinted on them. They looked dangerously sharp and bright. Then she stopped smiling, and that was worse. Because Rosa, distracted briefly by the sight of those alarming pale fangs, made the mistake of looking into Kitty’s eyes. Brilliant azure ice. Inhuman. Suddenly the air in the room was thick and fearful. And Rosa knew. She knew that all the joshings and suppositions and half-serious theories bandied about in the clubroom were no more than simple facts. And that Kitty had truly got rid of her husband for his money and her freedom. And that she, Rosa, was now alone with a murderess.

Rosa realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out now with great care, as if the gentle purling might snatch Kitty’s attention and activate some quiescent impulse to destroy. Rosa tried to think, but all her cerebral processes seemed to have ground to a halt. She tried to move as well, and found to her horror that far from simply standing on the floor as she had supposed, she seemed to be rooted in it like a tree. Her heart thudded, and the drop of water splashed and spread. And it seemed to Rosa that the long long space between one splash of water and the next and one thud of her heart and the next was alive with the pulsating obscene hum of evil.

What could she do? First look away. Look away from those guileless, cruel eyes. Then have a go at tautening up her sagging mental faculties. If only she had told someone—anyone—that she was going to White Wings. But then, thought Rosa sluggishly, ticking over again at last, Kitty didn’t know that. Bluff! That was the thing. She would bluff her way out. She would say that she had told Earnest where she was going, and that he was driving over to pick her up any minute now. Quaveringly she got the information across.

“But Rosa—how can he be? The car’s out there in the drive.”

Oh, but she was cunning! All that was in her voice was simple puzzlement. Rosa joined Barnaby in wondering how the hell they had all come to believe that Kitty couldn’t act. Well, that was water down the drain. What next? Kitty moved away from the door, and Rosa’s brain, now miraculously freed from its former coagulate state, leaped into protective action, feeding dozens of combative images across the screen of her mind.

She floored Kitty with a kung-fu kick or a straight uppercut. She pressed her to the ground and held a knife to her throat. With one immaculate Frisbee spin of a plate, she stunned her into insensibility. As the last of these comforting pictures faded, she realized that Kitty was slowly walking toward her.

“Oh, God,” prayed Rosa. “Help me …
please. ”

She felt huge and stifled, hippo-sluggish in the heat. Runnels of sweat ran over her scalp and down between her breasts, yet her upper lip and forehead prickled with chill, and her blood felt thick and unmoving. She stared at Kitty, young, Amazonian, slim as a whip with strong, sinewy arms and legs and thought again, What chance will I have?

Kitty was smiling as she came on. Not her genuine weasely smile, but a false one, painted on her lips. A simulacrum of concern. So might she have smiled at Esslyn, thought Rosa, as she wished him well on the first night, before unsheathing the means of his destruction. And then, recalling her first husband, she had a sudden, vivid impression of Earnest arriving home as he would be just now and wanting his lunch. At the thought of never seeing his dear face again, Rosa felt her blood stir and start to flow. Anger chased out fear. She went up on the balls of her feet (now miraculously unstuck) and felt her calf muscles tense. She would not go down without a fight.

Kitty was barely a foot away. It was now or never. Rosa hooded her eyes in what she hoped was a menacing fashion. And sprang.

Colin Smy sat alone in his workshop. He was cold but could not be bothered to light the heater. He held a smooth blond piece of maple in his hands, but the beauty and grain of the wood, once a certain stimulus to feelings of the deepest contentment and an amulet against despair, this morning had lost the power to move. Next to him was a cedarwood cradle. Only two days ago he had been delicately chiseling a border of leaves and flowers around the name Ben. He pushed the cradle with his finger, and it rocked on its bed of fragrant rust-colored shavings. He got up then and moved a little stiffly around the room, touching and stroking various artifacts, pressing the outlines hungrily and devouring the detail of line and marking as a man might who was on the point of going blind.

Colin picked up his chisel. The varnish on the handle had long since worn away, and it fitted the palm of his hand to such perfection that the word “familiar” was totally inadequate to describe the sensation. Colin always felt vaguely ill at ease away from his workshop and the beloved tools of his trade. Now, believing that it might be months or even years before he saw or touched any of them again, he felt a great gaping, prescient sense of loss.

He stilled the cradle and stood looking round for a moment more. Although his emotions were chaotic, his thoughts were crystal clear. Paramount was the vow he had made to Glenda when she lay dying. “Promise me,” she had cried, over and over again, “that you will look after David.” And he had reassured her, over and over again. Almost her last words (before “such a short while” and “good-bye, my darling”) were, “You won’t let any harm come to him?”

Colin had kept his promise. Since her death, David had been his world. He had given up everything and gladly for the boy. His welding job had been the first to go. So that he could take David to and from school and be available at the weekends and holidays, Colin had taken up freelance woodwork and carpentry, at first with scant success. In material terms they’d had very little, but they had each other, and Colin had been overwhelmed with pride when his son had shown a talent far surpassing his own for carving. Two of David’s sculptures stood now on his workbench. A grave old man, a sower of seed, a shallow basket in the crook of his arm and a kneeling heifer, a present for Ben, most tenderly carved, its head bowed, the horns tipped at such an eloquent angle.

After Glenda had left them, Colin put thoughts of remarriage aside. At first, grieving for his wife, this had not been difficult. Later, when occasionally meeting women he might normally have been tempted to pursue, the thought that they might not love David as he deserved or, worse, come to resent him had stopped the chase before it started. But now David was grown up and had even brought one or two girls of his own home, but the affairs had petered out, and Colin had been glad at the time. The girls had seemed a touch overconfident (one of them was almost domineering) for David. Now, of course, Colin wished to God his son had married one of them. But even then, he had to admit, if David had continued helping out at the Latimer, he would still have met Kitty.

Colin sat down again and held his aching head in his hands. When he had first heard the rumor about David and Esslyn’s wife, he had been unalarmed if a little disappointed in his son. But Kitty was an attractive young woman and, like everyone else in the company, Colin was not averse to the idea of Esslyn’s eye being put out. But to think it could lead to this… .

Last night, sick at heart, he had tried to talk to David, but when it came to the sticking point, he had lacked the courage to put his feelings of dread into plain words. Instead, he had mumbled, “Now she’s free … I suppose … well … you’ll be …”

“Yes, Dad.’’ David had spoken calmly. “She’s free. Although I wouldn’t have wanted it to happen like this, of course.”

Colin had listened, struggling with feelings of amazed disbelief. That David could speak in such a manner. In such a detached,
heartless
manner. David, who had never harmed a living thing. Who would carry spiders carefully out into the garden rather than kill them. Who, when he was ten and his hamster died, had wept for three days. When he added, “I shall have to go very carefully at first,” Colin, not trusting himself to reply, had left the house and spent the ensuing hours walking round and round Causton trying desperately to come to some decision. Knowing what the right thing to do was, realizing simultaneously that he could never do it, and struggling to alight on an alternative course of action.

Because he must do something. He had experienced great alarm during his interview with Tom at the station on Tuesday morning. More alarm than David apparently, who, when asked at one o’clock how it had all gone, had just said “fine” and continued with his dinner. Although Colin’s time at the station had been short, it had also been deeply disturbing. He had never thought of old Tom as being especially clever, but the sharp, piercing quality of the chief inspector’s gaze—quite absent from their cozy sessions in the scene dock—had caused him to think again. Now, having got a glimpse of the measure of the man, Colin realized that Barnaby was a hunter. He would pursue; questioning, checking, rechecking, perceiving, concluding, closing in. And how well would David be able to stand up to that sort of treatment?

Before going back to work, he had told his father that he had simply denied any knowledge of razor tampering and this had been accepted, but already Colin was seeing this supposed acceptance as a clever ploy. David was so guileless. He would not see that Barnaby was only pretending to believe him. That, even now, they were probably questioning Kitty. Making her admit complicity. And she would, too. She would tell them everything to get herself off the hook.

Colin snatched up his raincoat. One of the sleeves had got tangled, and he almost growled with impatience as he tried to force his arm in. What the hell was he doing sitting here brooding, going round and round the situation while perhaps any minute …

He ran out, not even stopping to lock his shed, skidding on the icy pavement. He cursed his previous indecision. He had known hours ago; had known when he was walking the streets at 3:00 a.m., that there was only one course of action that he could possibly take. Because of what he had sworn to Glenda all those years ago. (“You won’t let any harm come to him? Promise me?”) Oh, why had he waited? Now, Colin became convinced as he slid and skittered toward the police station, that he was already too late, that sometime during the afternoon the police had fetched David from his place of work and were even now working on him, trying to break him down.

At last he hauled himself up the station steps, searing his hands on the freezing metal rail, and asked at the desk to see Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby. A pretty darkhaired police-woman told him that the inspector was out and showed him to a small room, acrid with stale cigarette smoke, where he could wait. Noticing his white face and trembling hands, she asked if he would like to talk to anyone else. Then if he would like some tea. But Colin declined both these offers, and was then left in peace studying an antitheft poster and waiting to confess to the murder of Esslyn Carmichael.

“How the Other half lives, eh, chief?” muttered Troy snidely as he drove up the graceful curve of the drive leading to White Wings and swaggered into a semi-circular preparking spin, throwing up several pounds of gravel in the process. Troy drove fast, skillfully, and with care, but could not resist the flourish of a zigzag or curlicue when coming to a halt. Occasionally Barnaby felt it sensible to restrain this flamboyant behavior, and then Troy, with a piqued, almost disconsolate air, would park with such funereal exactitude that it was all his superior could do to keep a straight face. This usually lasted a few days, then exuberance gradually snuck back in. Troy regarded this pizazz as part of his style. He was very hot on style, and despised those dullards who didn’t know a Cordobian reversal from an uphill start. Right now, feeling a lecture coming on, he snapped his belt and started to climb out before the chief could really get into the swing of it.

As he did so, a piercing yell came from the house. Then a series of screams. Troy raced to the baronial front door, tried it, found it locked, and pounded on it with his fists, shouting, “Open up! This is the police!” Barnaby had just joined him when a key was turned and the door swung inward. Kitty stood in the opening in a pretty blue housecoat with the most extraordinary expression on her face. She looked in a state. A bit fearful, a bit angry, but shiftingly so, as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She stood in the center of the hall patting her curls and pulling a mock-horrified face.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Barnaby. “Who was that screaming?”

“Me, actually …”

“Why?” An icy wind was blowing into the house. Troy shut the front door, but the blast continued. Barnaby strode into the kitchen. The back door was wide open. “Who else is here?”

“No one.” She tiptoed across to the garden door and closed it. “Brrr.”

“Whose car is that outside?”

“I’m going to make some coffee to calm my nerves. D’you want some?”

“Kitty.” Barnaby stopped her. “What the devil’s going on?”

“Well … you won’t believe this, Tom, but I think I’ve found your murderer.”

“Perhaps I can make some coffee, Mrs. Carmichael?” said Troy, with his most winning smile. “You sound as if you could do with some.”

“Oh, how sweet.” Kitty’s unpainted lips returned the smile. Troy noticed with an uprush of excitement that beneath the lusciously lipsticked Cupid’s bow he had so admired the other evening was a real one. Just as luscious and twice as sexy. “But I’d better do it,” she continued. “It’s all Eyetalian, the equipment… it might blow up in inexperienced hands.” Although her voice barely changed, it managed to imply that she was sure Sergeant Troy’s hands were anything but inexperienced, and, given the opportunity, would be more than prepared to put her theory to the test. “Shan’t be a mo.”

“You can talk, I assume, Kitty, while you’re getting to grips with that contraption.”

“ ’Course I can,” replied Kitty, juggling water, coffee, twists of chrome and a couple of retorts. “To put it in a nutshell, Rosa just came round here and
attacked
me.”