Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (3 page)

“Have you got transport? Then may I give you a lift home?”

“It’s out of your way,” she said equably. “I live in Comerford, and I imagine you’re heading for the M.6.”

“It won’t add more than three miles to the distance. And there’s nobody waiting for me,” he said tightly. She was growing used to that tone, but it still puzzled her, because for all its muted desperation it was strangely innocent of self-pity.

“Then if you don’t mind going round that way, I should be glad to ride with you.” Why not? All he wanted was to warm his hands at this tiny fire for a few minutes longer. And she could take care of herself. She was a mature woman, self-reliant and well-balanced, she was not afraid to venture nearer to another person, not afraid that she would not be able to control the relationship, even extricate herself from it if the need arose. She was old enough to be able to offer him the companionship he needed, and not have it mistaken for something else.

His hand touched her arm punctiliously as they walked across to the car, but he kept the touch light and tentative, as if mortally afraid of damaging the grain of comfort he had got out of her. The broad space of tarmac was emptying fast, the last few cars peeling off in turn between the white posts of the exit. Soon they would have the night to themselves on the dark country road into Comerford.

“Here we are!”

He leaned to open the door for her, and closed it upon her as soon as she was settled. She was incorrigibly ignorant about cars, and worse, in the view of her family, she was completely incurious. Cars were a convenient means of getting from here to there, and sometimes they were beautiful in themselves, but they made no other impression upon her. This one was large but not new, and by no means showy, short on chrome but long on power under the bonnet, and he handled it as though he knew what to do with all the power he could get, and probably considerably more than he could afford. Bunty might have no mechanical sense at all, but she had an instinctive appreciation of competence.

“Have you very far to go?” she asked, watching the drawn profile beside her appearing and disappearing fitfully as they passed the last lights of the frontage and took the Comerford road.

“About three hundred miles. It won’t take me long. It’s a quicker run by night.”

“Maybe… but all the same I wish you’d go home to bed. I don’t feel happy about you setting off on a run like that, in the state you’re in.”

“There’s nothing the matter with my state. I’m not drunk,” he said defensively.

“I know you’re not. I didn’t mean that. But in any case, it isn’t going to be a very long week-end, is it, to be worth such a journey? It’s nearly Sunday already. And you did say there was no one waiting for you.” The silence beside her ached, but was not inimical. “Am I trespassing?” she asked simply.

“
No
!” It was the first time she had heard warmth in his voice. “You’re very kind. But I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here now. It won’t be such a short stay as all that, you see, I’m not due back till Wednesday. Don’t worry about me, I shall be all right.”

Abruptly she asked: “When did you last eat?” Astonished, he peered back into the recesses of his memory, and admitted blankly: “I don’t even know! Yes, wait… I did have a lunch… of sorts, anyhow. Opened a tin… one of those repulsive dinky grills.”

“Nothing since then?”

“No…I suppose not! I haven’t wanted anything.”

“No wonder you look sick,” she said practically. “You’d be wanting something before you got to the end of your journey, believe me. And those two whiskys will settle better with some food inside you. If Lennie hasn’t closed up his stall we’ll stop there and pick up some sandwiches or hot dogs for you, and a coffee.”

“I suppose,” he admitted, “it might be an idea.” The lights of Comerford winked ahead of them, orange stars against a moist black sky. Old Lennie’s coffee-stall always spent Saturday evening on the narrow forecourt before the old market cross, handy for the late crowds emerging from the Bingo hall and the billiard club. All the new estates and the commercial development lay at the other end of the town, and this approach across the little river might still have been leading them into the old, sprawling village the place had once been. A foursquare Baptist chapel, built a hundred years ago of pale grey brick, looked out across the water between pollarded trees. Once over the slight hump of the bridge, they could see the white van of the coffee-stall gilded by the street lamp above it, and with its own interior light still burning. The small, lame proprietor, hurt in a pit accident twenty-five years ago, was just clearing his counter.

“Pull in for a minute and drop me,” ordered Bunty, “and I’ll see what he’s got left. We can’t park here, but we can turn down by the riverside and find a place there for you to eat in peace.”

She was back in a minute or two with two paper bags and a waxed carton of coffee.

“It’s a good thing Lennie knows me so well, he wouldn’t have opened up again for everybody, not after he’s cashed up.”

The old man had come limping out from his stall to close the shutter, and stood looking after his customer now with candid curiosity, watching her tuck her long legs into a strange car, beside a strange young man. He stood stolidly gazing, with no pretence at other preoccupations, as the car took the right-hand turn that would bring it down towards the park and the riverside gardens.

“This is all right, anywhere here. This is only a loop road, it brings us back to the main one just before the lights. We shan’t be in anyone’s way here, there won’t be much traffic at this time of night.”

There were no houses along here, and hence no homeless cars parked overnight outside them, an inevitable phenomenon in every urbanisation. He halted the car with its hub-caps brushing the overgrown grass under the trees. A narrow path and a box hedge separated them from the park on this near side, and across the road, beyond fifty yards of ornamental shrubbery and trees, the Comer gleamed faintly. After he had stopped the engine it was very quiet, and unaccountably still, as if every necessity for measuring time had stopped. Nobody was waiting for either of them at the end of their journey.

Suddenly she felt him shaking beside her, the only shaken thing in all that stillness. It happened as soon as he took his hands from the wheel and let his concentration relax, and for a full minute of struggle he could not suppress the shudders that pulsed through him. Bunty tore open the waxed carton of coffee and put it into his hand, closing her own fingers over his to guide the cup to his lips. He drank submissively, and presently drew a long, cautious breath, and let it out again in a great, relaxing sigh, and she felt his tensed flesh soften again into ease.

“I’m sorry… I’m all right, just more tired than I realised.”

“At least get some food inside you and rest for a bit.” She dumped the paper bags of sausage rolls and ham sandwiches on his knees, and watched him eat, at first with weary obedience and little interest, then with sudden astonished greed, as though he had just discovered food. “You see, you were hungry.” She sat nursing the half-empty coffee carton, studying the shadowy form beside her with a frown.

“Look, you simply can’t go on with this, it would be crazy.”

“Maybe I am crazy,” he said perversely. “Did you ever think of that? You were right about the food, though. Look, I owe you for all this, you must let me…”

“My round,” said Bunty. “A return for the other half.”

He didn’t argue. He stretched himself with a huge sigh that racked and then released him from head to foot, and lay back in the driving seat, turning his forehead to rest against the glass. A large hand crumpled the empty paper bags and held them loosely on his knee.

“Better?”

“Much better!”

“Then listen! You shouldn’t go on to-night. It isn’t fair to other road-users to drive when you’re as exhausted as this. You might pass out on the motorway, what then?”

“I shan’t pass out on the motorway,” he said through a shivering yawn, “I can’t afford to.” The note of grim certainty sank into a mumble; he yawned again. “No choice,” he said distantly, “no choice at all…”

She sat silent for a while, though she had had much more to urge upon him; for after all, she told herself, he was not hers. And the moment that thought was formulated she knew that he was, that he had been hers since the moment she had accepted him. Now she didn’t know what to do about him. People to whom you have once opened your doors can’t afterwards be thrown out, but neither can they be kept against their will. If he would go on, he would, and she had no right to prevent him even if she could. Only then did it occur to her how completely, during this last hour and a half, she had forgotten about herself.

What drew her out of her brooding speculation was the rhythm of his breathing, long and easy and regular, misting the glass against his cheek. He was asleep. The hand that lay open on his knee still cradled the crumpled paper-bags; she lifted them delicately out of his hold and dropped them into the empty carton, and he never moved.

So it seemed that she had nothing left to do here, after all. She didn’t even consider waking him; sleep was probably the thing he most needed, and perhaps if he had his rest out he would wake up ready to see sense and go home. And you, she told herself, might just as well do the same. It was no distance from here, she could walk it in ten minutes. A pity, in a way, to slip away without a good-bye, but these encounters are sometimes better ended without ceremony, and the partners in them don’t need any formulae in order to understand and remember them.

She waited a little while, but he was deeply asleep, she could easily depart without disturbing him. The sky had cleared overhead, there were stars, and the moisture in the air would be rime by morning. Not a good night to be sleeping out in a car. Maybe he had a rug tucked away somewhere, old cars without modern heaters often carry them as a matter of course. She looked round on the back seat, but there was nothing there but his suitcase. If there was a rug that lived permanently in the car, it might be in the boot; and there were his keys, dangling in the ignition close to her hand. Would he regard it as a breach of their delicate, unformulated agreement if she made use of them to look for something to cover him?

She hesitated for a few moments over that question, but when it came to the point she knew she could not leave him to wake up half-frozen in a rimy dawn. She raised her hand to the keys, and carefully drew them out, and her companion slept on peacefully. Quietly she opened the door, and quietly closed it after her.

The black butt-end of the car was as broad as a cab. There was enough light for her to find the lock easily, and the key was the second she tried. The large lid of the boot gave with a faint creak, and lifted readily. Faint starlight spilled over the rim into the dark interior, but called into being only vague shapes under the shadow of the lid. She felt forward into the dimness, and her hand found something woolly and soft, but with a hard stiffness inside it that rocked gently to her touch. She felt her way along it, and her fingers slipped from its edge and grasped something cold, articulated and rigid.

For one instant she was still, not recognising what she held; then she snatched back her hand with a hissing intake of breath, so sharply that the chill thing she touched was plucked momentarily towards her. With minute, terrible sounds the folded shapes within the boot shifted and rocked, leaning towards the open air as if they would rise and climb out to confront her. The marble hand she had grasped hung poised at the end of its sleeve. Something pale and silken and fine swung forward and flowed over Bunty’s hand, encircling her frozen fingers in the curled ends of long, straight blonde hair.

The girl coiled up between the tool-box and the spare wheel was dead and stiffening. Until that blind touch disturbed her, she must have been lying like a child asleep. Her dark coat was unbuttoned over a cream-coloured sweater, and in the breast of the sweater, even by this curious, lambent half-light, a small round dot of darkness could be seen, crusted and rough-edged like a seal, the only indication of the manner in which she had died.

Bunty crouched, staring, her hands at her mouth, numbed and cold with shock.

So this was why that girl of his was never going to have the chance to let him down again, this was why he had to get out of here to-night at all costs. This was how their quarrel had ended.

A hand reached past her shoulder and slammed the boot shut. And if there had ever been a moment when she could have turned and run, with a hope of eluding pursuit in the trees, it was already over, had passed unrecognised while she stood there incapable of utterance or movement, all her senses stunned with horror.

She had heard nothing, had seen nothing but the slight, contorted body before her; but something had roused him, the cold air as the car door opened, the cautious sound of the latch closing again, maybe even some subconscious instinct of self-preservation that needed no help from the physical senses. For there he was at her back, recoiling now to evade her touch, in case shock gave her the reckless courage to attempt any move against him, edging silently along the side of the car to show to her, and hide from anyone else who might choose this of all moments to come by, the small black gun levelled at her heart. His hand was still steady. And the evidence was there between them, hidden now but unforgettably present, that the gun was loaded, and that he knew how to use it.

“Keep quiet,” he said, in a thread of a voice that had the tension of hysteria. “If you make a sound or a move, I shall kill you.”

She was deathly quiet, and frenziedly still. Numbness clogged all her senses, but somewhere within her burned a core of intelligence frantically alert to all the possibilities, and quick to guard itself from any mistakes.

“My God, my God,” he said in a howling whisper, to himself rather than to her, “why did you?…
why did you
?”

Yes, why, she thought, her mind lost in this drugged body, groping like a sleepwalker, why did I? Because I felt responsible for you! See what it gets you, feeling responsible! This is involvement gone too far. But there wasn’t any turning back; none for him, and none for her. She said nothing. As yet she had no voice, she couldn’t have screamed for help even if the round black muzzle of the gun hadn’t been trained on her with its one hypnotic eye. Screaming is, in any case, harder than you might suppose. It takes an experience of this kind to teach you how tough a resistance your sensible flesh, mind and spirit put up to believing in danger and death. Such things happen at a dream-distance, to others; never to you. When they do crop up in your way, like some skeleton apparition in a medieval legend, you don’t believe in them. Not until you’ve had time to acclimatise. By which time it is too late to take avoiding action.

But this was reality. She wasn’t at home in bed, dreaming it. There he was, in the soft, diffused light, rigid and quivering, but a hundred per cent awake and alert and dangerous, staring at her with bruised eyes now wide-open and impersonal as fate in a shadowless, porcelain face, over the gun which had become a third—no, a fourth—character in this impossible scene.

She looked down at the closed lid of the boot, and there was a tress of pale hair glimmering over the rim.

“Lock it,” he said. And when she stooped mechanically to turn the key: “No… that hair… push it out of sight, all of it…” The voice was thin, harsh and piercing, like broken glass.

She fumbled at the silvery tendrils, which seemed still to have such innocent, sparkling life in them. She tucked the last strand out of sight, and her fingertips touched the cold, ice-cold face. The chill passed out of the dead flesh into the living without revulsion; all she felt was a dreadful, quickening pity over so much waste. She let down the lid gently, like the lid of a coffin, and turned the key upon the body. Slowly she straightened up and looked round blindly at the man with the gun, the bunch of keys outstretched in her hand.

“Put them on the wing between us,” he said, and drew back a step out of her reach, with infinite care to be silent and restrained even in this movement. He didn’t want to startle her into some panicky reaction that would make the shot necessary.

She laid down the keys where he indicated, releasing them softly, with the same exaggerated caution against any sound. And he reached out his free hand without taking his eyes from her, and gathered them up and pocketed them.

“Let’s have it clear.” His voice was more assured now, and deader, if there are degrees in death. “If you make a single false move, even by mistake, I’ll kill you. What choice have you left me? You see I’ve nothing to lose now.”

Her mind was beginning to work, clearly enough, but like the logical threading of a dream. She saw, and acted in accordance with what she saw. He had indeed nothing to lose. His back was against a wall, and he was proof against fears and scruples; and she was not going to make any false move. She looked back at him, motionless and attentive, and said nothing.

“Get back in the car. I shall be close behind you.”

She turned stiffly, obeying the motion of the hand that held the gun, and slowly circled the back of the car and walked to the passenger door. Slowly, in case he suspected her of an attempt at escape. She might, indeed, have risked it if the car had been drawn up on the other side of the road, but here there was only the narrow path and then the thick hedge, nowhere at all for her to take cover. He followed her step for step, she could feel the muzzle of the gun not six inches from her back. The transit of those four or five yards seemed to last a lifetime; at least it gave her a sudden dazzlingly clear distant view of her own situation. Only a few hours ago she had been laboriously extending her powers to cope with the realisation that half her life had slipped away almost unnoticed, and now she saw the other half bridged in one monstrous leap, and death within touch of her hand.

No car came along. No one walked home by this way. No belated lovers dawdled in the dark. In summer there might have been a hope, there was none now. She was on her own, and there was nothing she could possibly do except obey him. Except, perhaps, leave some sign here to be found?

Her handbag was on her wrist, and there was no chance of opening it without being detected. But her purse was in her left-hand coat pocket, and it contained a perspex window in the flap, with her name and address in it. Good-bye to seven pounds and some loose change, but what did she need with money now? At least it would show where she had been. She drew it out carefully but quickly, the swinging handbag hiding the movements of her hand, and tossed it slightly aside into the overgrown autumnal grass that separated the footpath from the road. It fell with very little sound, but she risked letting her foot slip from the edge of the kerb in a noisy stumble to cover the moment, and spread her right hand against the car to steady herself. The man behind her drew in his breath with a hiss of warning, alarm and pain, and the muzzle of the gun prodded her back and sent an icy chill down the marrow of her spine.

“
Be careful
!”

But he meant the stumble, not the purse she had thrown away. All his attention was focused on her, he didn’t look aside into the grass. And now it was up to fate. If an honest person found what she had left behind, he would try to return it, and failing to find her at the address given, take it to the police, who would most surely wonder at her absence. If a dishonest person—or even a humanly fallible one—found it… well, so much the worse.

He stepped past her at the appropriate moment, and held the door open for her. As soon as she was inside he slammed the door upon her and darted round to the driver’s door; and as soon as he took his hand from her own door, she reached for it again, wrenched at the handle and flung her weight against it in a sudden passion of realisation that it was now or never. Leap out and run for it, back towards the cross… The car’s bulk would cover her for the first few moments, he would have to take aim afresh and in a hurry, she might get clean away.

The door held fast, the handle moved only part-way, and the thrust of her body was spent vainly. There was a safety catch with which she wasn’t familiar, and she hadn’t seen him set it before he slammed the door. By the time she had found it and was clawing at it frantically, he was in the driving seat beside her, and the car was in motion.

The door catch gave, the safety catch held. He reached a long arm across her and slammed the door to again, and she had lost her only chance, if it had ever been a chance. The impetus of their take-off flung her back in the seat, hard against his shoulder. The trees hissed by on either side at speed. To attempt to jump out now would be as good a way as any of committing suicide.

She sat with her hands clenched together in her lap, confronting the truth fully for the first time, and so closely that she saw nothing else. What difference could it possibly make who found her purse, or whether it was ever found at all, or how many police they turned out to look for her to-morrow? Nobody could get to her in time to be of any use; she was absolutely on her own, and her time must be short.

What could this man do now, except get rid of the witness?

He took the turn into the main street fast and expertly, and at such an angle that her mind, working with frosty clarity somewhere within the shell of shock, registered the certainty that he knew this town very well. Then she remembered the traffic lights. There was no way of evading that crossing in the middle of Comerford; and she knew, if he did not, that on Saturday nights there was usually a police constable keeping an eye unobtrusively on affairs there, at least until all the Espresso bar and motorbike brigade had gone home to bed, which they seldom did until after midnight. Now if the lights should be against them there…

There were still several groups of young people conducting their leisurely and noisy farewells along the pavement when the car drew near to the crossroads. The dance at the Regal wasn’t over yet, and there was P.C. Peter Hillard standing by the window of the jeweller’s shop looking at nothing and watching everything, with his hands linked behind him, and the usual deceptive expression of benign idiocy on his face. Now if the lights were at red, surely she dared… He wouldn’t shoot here, he’d run. Remember the safety gadget on the door this time…

The amber changed to red before them. A convulsion of hope ran through her, she sat forward very slightly, bracing herself, as the car slowed and rolled up to the lights. And suddenly there was the stab in her side, the blunt black barrel reminding her, and the blue-ringed eyes more chilling than the gun.

“
Don’t
!” he said, his right hand still gently manipulating the wheel. “You might do for me, but I should do for you first.”

He had known exactly what was in her mind. Either he had foreseen it all the time, or else the slight tension of joy had communicated itself to him as clearly as if she had declared her intent aloud. And all she had out of it was one more odd fact about him: he was ambidextrous, he could shoot her as readily with the left hand as the right. Now she had the option of inviting her own death at once, or waiting for a better chance, without much conviction that there would ever be one.

What she actually did emerged not as the consequence of thought at all, but blindly, on an impulse she had no time to assess. The car was still very slowly in motion, about to brake to a halt, and Hillard was looking their way, though from across the street he had no chance of seeing and recognising her. He could, however, read off a registration number without difficulty from there, if there should be a blatant offence…

She turned her head and peered back through the rear window, and in a sharp cry of vengeful delight she crowed: “There’s a police car pulling up behind us!
He’s getting out
…!”

She might have killed herself one way, but she had as nearly risked doing it in another. The driver’s foot went down on the accelerator so violently that she was jerked back stunningly in her seat, wrenching her neck and setting fireworks scintillating before her eyes. Light and darkness flickered wildly past her, as the car shot across the intersection at high speed. A large Austin, crossing sedately with the lights in its favour, braked hard, a van’s tyres smoked and squealed on the tarmac dry with frost. But they were through, untouched, and boring along the modestly-lit tunnel of Hawkworth Road at an illegal sixty-five. Bunty clung to the edge of the seat, gasping for the breath that had been knocked out of her, and recovered it only to break into weak, involuntary laughter, rather from relief at finding herself still alive than from any sense of achievement.

No more of that sort of thing! If she had stopped to think she would never have taken such a chance. The wonder was that the gun had not gone off in his hand when she sprang the trap; the violence of his reaction showed her how near she had come to that ending. Hair-trigger nerves might be expected in a murderer on the run. And if only he’d kept his head and looked in his mirror, instead of tramping on the accelerator the instant she had sounded the alarm, he might have got through Comerford and away without question.

“Damn you!” moaned the bitter voice beside her, shaky with fury. “
Damn you
! There wasn’t any damned police car!”

“There soon will be,” she said, “now.”

If Hillard had missed getting their number, someone in the Austin or the van would surely have noted it. Was that anything gained? It might be, if Hillard was quick to act on it. If the fugitive was heading for the M.6 he could hardly avoid going through Hawkworth, and there would be time to alert the police there by telephone, and even to set up a road-block. There was a strong campaign on against dangerous driving, and their exit from Comerford had certainly been spectacular.

If she could work out all that, so could he. He knew the odds now, he was concentrating on getting past Hawkworth in the least possible time, but if her luck held he wouldn’t be quick enough, even at this lawless speed.

At this moment she would have been certain of her own imminent death, if he had dared take a hand from the wheel or divert a thought from his driving to kill her. That was her only security, after what she had just done to him: nothing could happen to her while he was driving at this intensity. Better pray that the police would stop him at Hawkworth. If they did not, only one encouraging consideration remained, that he would surely prefer to remove her as far as possible from home before killing and disposing of her, in order to gain more time to make his own escape. Given a few hours’ grace you can hide a body, even two bodies, competently enough to delay inquiries for weeks, by which time he undoubtedly meant to be far away.