What Dread Hand? (8 page)

‘Even your fancy girl?’ he said. ‘It appears it was she who wrote the letter.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, ‘by my fancy girl.’

‘Well, everybody else does,’ he said. ‘All the village knows she was playing you off, one against the other. And grinning behind their hands, waiting for her husband’s home-coming.’

‘But all the village can’t tell us two apart,’ I said. ‘I was out poaching.’

‘That’s a damn lie,’ says Fred, playing it the way we’d agreed upon. ‘That was me, poaching.’

‘One of you was poaching?’ says Inspector Cockrill, very smooth. ‘And one of you was with the lady? And even the lady couldn’t have said which was which?’

He said it sort of—suggestive. ‘I dare say she might,’ I said, ‘later on in the proceedings. But there couldn’t have been any proceedings that night, there wouldn’t have been time: because the accident happened.’

‘Why should she say so positively that it was you, then?’

‘I dare say she thought it was,’ I says. ‘I dare say he told her so. She’d finished with him: it would be the only way he could get her.’

‘I see,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘How very ingenious!’ I didn’t know whether he meant how ingenious of Fred to have thought of it then, or of me to think of it now.

‘Don’t you listen to him, sir,’ says Fred. ‘He’s a bloody liar. I wasn’t with the girl that night. I tell you—I was poaching.’

‘All right, you were poaching,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘Any witnesses?’

‘Of course not. You don’t go poaching with witnesses. I used to go with him,’ says Fred, bitterly, gesturing with his head towards me, ‘but not since he pinched my girl, the bloody so-and-so.’

‘And last night?’ says the Inspector softly. ‘When the girl was murdered?’

‘Last night too, the same,’ said Fred. ‘I was in the woods, poaching.’

‘You
call
me
a liar!’ I said. ‘It was me in the woods. The Vicar saw me going there.’

‘It was me the Vicar saw,’ said Fred. ‘I told him, Good evening, and he laughed and said, “Going poaching?”’

‘There!’ said Inspector Cockrill to me, like a teacher patiently getting the truth from a difficult child. ‘How could he know
that?
Because the Vicar will surely confirm it?’

‘He knows it because I told him,’ I said. ‘I told him I’d been poaching and I hoped the Vicar hadn’t really realised where I was going.’

‘Very ingenious,’ said Inspector Cockrill again. ‘Ve-ry ingenious.’ It seemed like he couldn’t get over it all, sitting there, shaking his head at the wonder of it. But I knew he was playing for time, I knew that we’d foxed him. And Fred knew too. He suggested, reasonably: ‘Why should you be so sure, sir, that the girl was murdered? Why not just a second hit-and-run?’

‘A bit of a coincidence?’ said Inspector Cockrill, mildly. ‘Same thing, in the same place and so very soon after? And when on top of it, we find that the girl was threatening a certain person with exposure, about the
first
hit-and-run…’ He left it in the air. He said to his sergeant: ‘Have you collected their clobber?’

‘Yessir,’ said the sergeant. ‘Two pairs of shoes—’ and he gave the Inspector a sort of nod, as if to say, Yes, they look as if they’ll match very nicely—‘and all the week’s laundry.’

‘Including Monday’s?’ says Cockrill.

‘Including Monday evening’s, sir. The old woman washes of a Monday morning. Anything they’ve worn after that—which includes two shirts to each, sir—is in two laundry baskets, one in each bedroom.’

‘Two baskets?’ he says, looking more bright-eyed than ever. ‘That’s a bit of luck. Their laundry’s kept separate, is it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ says Fred, though I don’t know what call he had to butt in. ‘His in his room, mine in mine.’

‘And no chance of its getting mixed up?’ said Inspector Cockrill. He fixed Fred with that beady eye of his. ‘This could be important.’

Fred, of course, was maintaining the mutual-accusation arrangement we’d agreed upon. ‘Not a chance, sir,’ he said a bit too eagerly.

I wasn’t going to be left out. I said: ‘Not the slightest.’

‘That’s right, sir,’ says the sergeant. ‘The old lady confirms it.’

‘Good,’ said Cockrill. He gave a few orders and the sergeant went away. People were still buzzing about, up in our bedrooms. ‘I’m coming,’ called up the Inspector, to someone at the head of the stairs. He turned back to us. ‘All right, Cain and Abel,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to stew in it. But in a day or two, as the song says, “I’ll be seeing you.” And when I do, it’ll be at short notice. So stick around, won’t you?’

‘And if we don’t?’ I said. ‘You’ve got nothing against us, you can’t charge us; you’ve got no call to be giving us orders.’

‘Who’s giving orders?’ he said. ‘Just a little advice. But before you ignore the advice—take a good, hard, look at yourselves. You won’t need any mirrors. And ask yourselves,’ he said, giving us a good, hard, long look on his own account, from the soles of our feet to the tops of our flaming red heads, ‘just how far you’d get…’

So that was that; and for the next two days, we ‘stewed in it’: David and Jonathan, Cain and Abel—like he’d said, blood brothers.

On the third day, he sent for us, to Heronsford police station. They shoved Fred into one little room and me in another. He talked to Fred first, and I waited. All very chummy, fags and cups of tea and offers of bread and butter: but it was the waiting…

Long after I knew I couldn’t stand one more minute of it, he came. I suppose they muttered some formalities, but I don’t remember: Fred and I might hate one another, and by this time we did, well and truly, there’s no denying it—but it was worse, a thousand times worse, without him there. My head felt as though it were filled with grey cotton-wool, little stuffy, warm clouds of it. He sat down in front of me. He said: ‘Well—have you come to your senses? Of course you killed her?’

‘If anyone killed her,’ I said, clinging to our patter, ‘it must have been him.’

‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘But why should your brother have killed her?’

‘Well,’ I says, ‘if the girl was having a baby—’

‘A baby?’ he says, surprised; and his eyes got that bright, glittering look in them. He said after a minute of steady thinking: ‘But she wasn’t.’

‘She wasn’t?’ I said. ‘She
wasn’t?
But she’d told him—’

Or hadn’t she told him? Something, like an icicle of light, ice-cold, piercing, brilliant, thrust itself into the dark places of my cotton-wool mind. I said: The bloody, two-timing, double-crossing bastard…!’

‘He
didn’t seem,’ said the Inspector, softly, ‘to expect her to have been found pregnant.’

So that was it! So
that
was it! So as to get me to agree to the killing, to get me to assist with it… I ought to have been more fly—why should Fred, of all people, be so much afraid of Black Will as to go in for murder? Will’s a dangerous man, but Fred’s not exactly a softie… The icicle turned in my mind and twisted, probing with its light-rays into the cotton-woolliness. Revenge! Cold, sullen, implacable revenge upon the two of us—because Lydia had come to me: because I had taken her. Death for her: and I to be the accomplice in her undoing—in my own undoing. And for me… I knew now who had sent the anonymous note about the hit-and-run accident: so easily to be ‘traced’ (after she was dead) to Lydia.

But yet—he was as deep in it, as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she
had
been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I’d only been going a couple of weeks with the girl.’

‘That’s what you say,’ he said.

‘But all the village—’

‘All the village knew there were goings-on; nobody knew just where they went on, or when. You must, all three, have been remarkably careful.’

I tried another tack. ‘But if she wasn’t pregnant—why should I have killed her?’

‘You’ve just told me yourself that you thought she was,’ he said.

‘Because he told me—my brother told me. Now, look, Inspector,’ I said, trying to think it out as I went along, trying to ram it home to him, ‘you say she wasn’t having a baby? So why should I have thought she was?
She
wouldn’t have told me, if she hadn’t been: why should she? It was he who told me: it was my brother. But you say yourself, he knew it wasn’t true. So why should he have told me?’

He looked at me, cold as ice. He said: ‘That’s easy. He wanted you to kill her for him.’

He
wanted
me
to kill her! I could have laughed. The thing was getting fantastic, getting out of hand; and yet at the same time I had the feeling that the fantasy was a hard, gripping, grim fantasy, that, once it had its hold on me, would never shake loose. I stammered out: “Why should he have wanted her killed?’

‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was threatening to tell that it was he who ran the child down, and left it to die.’ And he said, cold and bitter: ‘I have no wish to trap you. We know that it was your brother who killed the child: we have proof of it. And we know it was you who killed the girl. We have proof of that too: there’s her blood on your cuff.’

On my cuff. Where he had put his hand that night: taking my wrist in his grasp, giving me a brotherly little shake ‘to steady me’. I remembered how I’d thought, even then, that it wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative.

Putting his hand on my wrist—fresh from the blood-smeared plastic. Making such a point, later on, about there being no chance of our soiled shirts getting confused, one with the other’s…

So there it is. I wonder if we’ll be doing our time in the same prison?—sharing the same cell, maybe?—we two blood brothers…

Because he’ll be doing time all right, as well as me. While I’m doing my time for
his
killing of the girl—he’ll be doing his, for my killing of the child.

Well—that’s all right with me. He’ll be first out, I dare say, (is it murder to leave a kid to die, in case, when he gets better, he tells? I suppose not: the actual knocking-down would be accidental, after all.) So Fred’ll be out, first: and Black Will will be there to meet him when he comes. By the time I get out, I dare say Will will be ‘in’ for what he done to Fred; may even have got over it all by then—it looks like being a very long time away.

But can you beat it?—working it out so far ahead, leading up to it so patiently, so softly, so craftily? Planting the blood on my cuff: and then leading up to it so softly, so craftily… And all for revenge: revenge on his own twin brother!

After all, what
I
did, was done in self-preservation: there was no venom in it, I wished him no harm. That night after the accident, I mean: when, clutching his arm, begging him to help me—just to be on the safe side, I rubbed his sleeve with the juice of a blackberry.

D
EAR MR. EDITOR,

I’m so sorry but your letter asking me to write something for your proposed anthology, was delivered to the wrong address—as you’ll see from the enclosed; and I’ve only just found out about it, too late to send you a story, I’m afraid. I thought, however, that you personally might be interested in this document (though I hope you won’t blame yourself—you can see that the poor creature was quite mad.) It is only a copy, of course. The original, which the dead woman was clutching, is in handwriting, very illegible and blotchy and what the trick.cycs. call ‘disturbed’. The police have it now. This has been very much tidied up and made readable—as it stood it really was hardly sense.

Don’t bother to return it.

Yours sincerely,

Enclosure:

Dear Mr. Editor,

I am writing this in the kitchen while I wait for the kettle to boil and also of course because of the gas in the sitting-room. And anyway, Helen’s in the sitting-room and making dreadful noises, sort of snoring. She’s lying all hunched up and queer and her face is scarlet. Last time she was as white as a fish but drowning’s different: not that she
was
drowned because they interfered and got her out. Now I’ve got to kill her all over again, this time with the gas, because of the story.

This time it’s because of you, writing and asking me to do a short story for this anthology of yours. I found the letter on the table in the hall this morning, half out of the envelope—I don’t know what’s become of the envelope. There was another bit of paper there too, I didn’t notice what that was about, a small slip of green paper. Was it something to do with the story? The letter starts ‘Dear Girl’ so it couldn’t be for Helen, she’s nearly forty although she’s still quite pretty. (I see now that you say it’s a sort of joke, starting the story ‘Dear Girl’—all the people writing in the book are to be women; so perhaps it was for Helen, but it’s too late now.) Anyway, you say you want a nice creepy sort of story full of colour and horror and all the rest. I don’t know why you should ask me to write a story or Helen either, if it was meant for Helen; unless of course you know about that other time, about the drowning? Naturally
I
immediately thought of the drowning, because that was creepy and horrible enough, Helen and me alone out there in the mist on the edge of the canal; and Helen’s face when she saw the little gun in my hand. But on the other hand, I thought it might not do for the story because she was saved, so it wasn’t a proper murder.