Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (13 page)

“What are you getting at?” he asked cautiously.

“What I say, if you like to take the lady and light out for Holland, or wherever, what’s that to me? I’m saying nothing.
Just so you don’t take my money with you
! You can have your freedom and welcome, but my dough you can’t have. You tell us where you’ve put it, and as soon as I’ve got it in my hands we’ll all clear out of here, and leave you to put out to sea as fast as you like.” He leaned a little nearer, with a wolfish smile on his lips, which were thrust out aggressively by the massive teeth within. “But if you don’t act like a sensible lad, and hand over, I
will
turn you in. Better freedom without the lolly than neither a one of ’em. You think it over!”

“How do I know,” demanded Luke with growing confidence, but still with some reserve, “that you’ll keep your bargain? How do I know you won’t take the money and then call the police on us?”

“Why should I? What have I got to gain? I came for the money, and that’s all I want. And I don’t need to tell you, I’m sure, that I’m not anxious to call attention to myself among the cops unless I have to. I’ve got to be feeling very mean to take that risk. Once I’ve got my money back, what have I got to feel mean about? But make no mistake, you cross me now and I can be mean as all get-out.”

He got up suddenly, airily, light on his feet like so many bulky men, swung his chair back to the table, and strolled away across the room.

“Take your pick, kiddo. It’s up to you.”

In the momentary silence Skinner came down the stairs again, his researches completed. He spread empty hands and raised his shoulders. “Nothing up there. I left Quilley on look-out, but it’s as quiet as the grave, and black as your hat on the land side. What cooks here?”

He looked from Fleet to Blackie, who was frowning in frantic thought, many coils behind in following his boss’s complex proceedings; and from Blackie to Con, who had shut off what mind he had and given up the struggle some minutes ago, and was now no more than a machine for pointing a gun to order. They were all of them confounded that the hard questioning had not begun long ago. There must be a reason.

There
must
be a reason, and the reason was not any squeamishness or compunction on Fleet’s part. It was just barely possible that he really meant to withdraw once he got his hands on the money, exactly as he had said, and that he found it preferable and less messy to trade on Luke’s conviction of his own guilt rather than to beat the required information out of him. But still Bunty couldn’t believe it. He was more devious than that, he enjoyed being devious. There was something buried deeper, beneath this apparent reasonableness. Did he, for some obscure purpose of his own, want a Luke completely unmarked by violence?
And for what
?

“Hush!” said Fleet. “Our young friend’s making up his mind. To be sensible, I hope.”

“I haven’t got a lot of choice, have I?” said Luke loudly; and his manner became, in some way Bunty could recognise but not define, a direct response to Fleet’s, a nice balance of nervousness, doubt, and growing assurance. He had not looked at her throughout, and she understood that he dared not, that if he did his eyes would betray him, and the enemy would no longer believe in this guilt-ridden, squirming fugitive.

“It’s an alternative,” said Fleet, smiling at him with the first careless glint of contempt. “You can hand over and go free, or rot in gaol for fourteen years or so thinking about the money you can’t get at. For a million it might be worth it—not for this little lot, not by my measure. You please yourself.”

“It isn’t worth it by my measure, either.” He licked his dry lips and swallowed hard, reluctant but driven. “All right! ” he said in a gulping breath. “You can have the damned money!”

“That’s better,” said Fleet warmly. “I knew you’d see sense. Where is it?”

Bunty had not the least idea what Luke was going to say. She was lost, like Fleet’s henchmen, she could only wait, and be ready to follow whatever lead events and Luke offered her.

“You ought to have known, if you’d given any thought to it,” said Luke, with the feeble spleen of a defeated man scrabbling for what crumbs of dignity he can salvage. “You think we were going without it, or something, when we lit out of here down to the sea? We had the stuff down there already, of course, waiting till it was dark and we could slip away without being seen.”

“Aaaah!” breathed Fleet, and pondered in silence for a moment, his eyes narrowed upon Luke’s face. It was apt, it was reasonable, it would certainly have to be tested. “Go on, tell us more. Why didn’t you take off as soon as you got here?”

“Because it was nearly daylight. Anybody round here would know the boat. Even if they didn’t start investigating us, they might very well take it for granted the Alports were up here, and the local shop might send in, even on a Sunday, to see if they wanted supplies. There’s no telephone here, people
come
. The Alports are good customers, and well known. We didn’t want anyone poking around here and finding us instead, and that car in the garage. It seemed better to risk lying low to-day, and setting out after dark.”

“But you put the cash aboard in advance! Then why not your luggage, too?” demanded Fleet shrewdly.

“We wanted it. Damn it, we’d been up all night, we needed a bath… I had to shave… We weren’t
expecting
any trouble. I’ve been here before with the owners, I could account for being here if I
had
to—for everything except Pippa and the money.” He wiped his forehead feverishly; there was no need to act, sweat stood on him in globules, bitter as gall on his lips. “Pippa—it was too light to risk being seen carrying her down to the boat, and anyhow, there was no way of hiding her there any better than here. No use trying to sink her here, inshore. She
had
to wait for dark. But the money, just a flat parcel, that was only a minute’s job, so we made sure of it.”

“It occurs to me,” said Fleet thoughtfully, “that with all this talk of ‘ our ’ luggage your lady friend here doesn’t seem to have any belongings, beyond a handbag—I take it that grey one belongs to her? That was going to be a bit awkward, wasn’t it, girl? Are you always so improvident?”

“I’ve got nothing but a handbag,” Bunty said with hard deliberation, “because I walked out with nothing but a handbag. Why, is my business.
He
doesn’t know the reason, and you’re not interested, either. He told you, he picked me up in a pub. What’s the odds? If you know anything about that kid upstairs, you know that king-size case of hers is full of brand-new stuff. I carry a few extra pounds, but we’re much the same size. I could get by.”

Amazed, she watched the image she was projecting emerge and parade before him, no predictable bar-fly, but a woman on the dangerous verge of middle-age, a woman who had suddenly rebelled, looked over her shoulder and cut her losses. And how far from the truth was that picture? There had been a time, only twenty-four hours ago, when it would have seemed to her as close as a mirror-image. Now it was clear that she and this imaginary creature were at opposite poles, and never could, by any miracle, have touched fingertips. Fleet’s eyes went over her with mild curiosity, and looked away again. To him it was a reasonably convincing portrait she had drawn, or perhaps he didn’t care enough to probe any further.

“So you hid the money ready,” he said, eyeing Luke, “in the boat.”

“I didn’t say it was in the boat.” That would have been too easy, one man could go over the whole craft in ten minutes, and Luke wanted at least two of them out of the way. “It was getting light, we couldn’t hang around to unlock the boat-house. We had the stuff all proofed up for sea, in oiled silk and plastic, we just fastened a nylon line on the parcel and let it down over the edge of the jetty, into the water. There’s an old mooring ring down there, right at the seaward end, well down the stone facing, it’ll be under water now. But you can reach it, all right, if you lie on your stomach and reach over. The end of the line’s made fast to that.”

Blackie Crowe had paled with shock at the thought of fifteen thousand pounds bubbling about beneath the tide on the end of a nylon line. Even Fleet’s thick eyebrows arched as high as the Neanderthal bone-structure within would let them.

“I hope for your sake you
did
make it fast,” he said grimly. “How come, is it weighted, then?”

Luke nodded. “Enough to keep it down out of sight.” He came to his feet, slowly and cautiously, in order not to provoke Con’s jumpy trigger-finger, but readily enough to show his willingness to oblige. “I’ll go down with your man and show him,” he said, in a soft voice that did its best not to seem too eager.

“Ah, now, just a minute, not too fast.” Fleet waved him down again, but Luke, though he stayed where he was, remained standing. “How do I know you’re not in Channel class in the water? You might make a break for it with a nice clean dive while one of the boys was fishing off the end of the jetty. You might even stick a toe under him and help
him
into the water. And we might still be whistling for that money. Oh, no, laddie, you won’t do any showing, only on paper. We might never see you again.”

Luke jerked his head at Bunty. “You’d have her, wouldn’t you?” he said, aggrieved; but the very faint, opportunist glint in his eye was not quite concealed. “Think I’d do a thing like that to her?”

“Since you ask me, yes, I think you would. I’m not so sure you put the right value on the lady. No, you’ll stay here.”

“One man alone won’t have an easy job finding it,” Luke urged earnestly. “It’s pitch dark down there now, he’ll need somebody to give him a light, and hang on to him while he leans over. The ring must be eighteen inches under by now, and there’s a tidy drag below those rocks. You could lose him and the money.”

Fleet hesitated. “Know what, kid? I think you’re trying to pull something. You didn’t have much trouble putting it there, seemingly.”

“I didn’t have
any
! It was nearly daylight, and low tide, and I know the place. It’s a different cup of tea now, for somebody who doesn’t. Better let me go. I’ll do the fishing, if that’ll satisfy you.”

He made the offer with a tight, strained urgency and fevered eyes, sure now that it would be refused, and sure that he could get two of the enemy out of the house on this fools’ errand. He ventured one brief flicker of his eyes in Bunty’s direction; she knew, she was on his heels now, close and eager.

Fleet made up his mind. It might be true, and it would take no more than a quarter of an hour or so to put it to the test.

“Here, come to the desk. Draw me a map, and make it good. Direction and distance from the foot of this path you talk about—the lot.” He watched Luke stoop to rummage in the top drawer of the desk for pen and writing-pad, tear off the top sheet of the pad, and without hesitation begin to sketch in the jetty and the approach angle of the cliff path. Satisfied, Fleet turned to Skinner, who was lounging against the wall by the door, one shoulder hunched as a prop. “You go down and fish up this parcel. Take Con with you. And give me that Colt, just in case.”

For one moment his back was turned squarely on Luke, and his bulk partly hid the desk from the eyes of the others. For once Luke could move a hand in the shelter of his own body, and not be observed. The large, smooth granite pebble, veined and beautiful, that his friends used as a paperweight, lay close to his right sleeve. He closed his hand over it and drew it towards him, sliding it quickly into the pocket of his coat. By the time Fleet swung round on him again he was scribbling measurements on his sketch-map, and turned to show his hands otherwise empty and innocent as he handed it over.

“There you are. X marks the spot where the treasure’s buried.”

He stayed where he was as they examined it, his back to the desk. It was a good place, if they’d let him keep it. It meant that when the moment came he could draw the two remaining armed men to this side of the room to deal with him, and leave Bunty a clear run to the doorway. The lame man upstairs, edging anxiously and audibly from front window to rear window and back again, would never get down the stairs in time to intercept her.

“Seems straightforward enough,” said Skinner, memorising the lay-out. “Better get that big torch out of the Riley, Con, this one here’s giving out.”

Without a gun in them, Con’s hands were discontented and at a loss what to do with themselves. Only the weight and solidity of the Colt had held them still. They had the twitches now. Maybe Con was already hooked on one of the hard drugs, maybe he was only half-way there on LSD. Fleet himself was watching him, as the boy left the room, with a considering coldness, a practical speculation. Con might not last very long in Fleet’s employ; but he hadn’t become a liability yet.

Luke strained his ears for the sound of the front door opening and closing on Con’s exit, opening and closing again as he came back with a large, rubber-cased torch. The latch clicked into place lightly on his return, and he came on without any delay into the living-room. The bolts were not shot, the lock no longer functioned; the way out was open.

“And who,” Fleet asked suddenly, settling back in his chair, “has got the other gun—
his
gun?”

Skinner turned in the kitchen doorway. “I have. Want it?”

“Yes, hand it over.” Fleet laid down the Colt close beside him on the edge of the table, and took Pippa’s Liliput in his hands. No doubt he had supplied it in the first place, while he still half-trusted her. “That’s all. Go on, get on with it.”

Then there were four of them left in the room. They heard the receding footsteps cross the kitchen, heard the outer door open and close, and for a moment or two faint sounds still reached them, dropping away down the first steps of the path. Bunty sat erect and rigid, her eyes fixed on Fleet. Luke quietly turned the chair round from the desk and sat down there; and no one ordered him back to join Bunty in the window embrasure. So much gained. Two ways to aim and shoot now, instead of one.

Fleet had pulled a handful of paper tissues from his pocket, and was polishing idly at the Liliput, his hands at work almost absent-mindedly, filling in time by getting on with the next job while he waited. His eyes studied Luke thoughtfully across the room, with the detached assurance of a practised mathematician solving a routine problem.