‘Think about it. You’re the man, he’d expect you to be the more dangerous. If he hit you first, I might have let the dog run and jumped the other way. But if we believed him and waited while he killed Salmon, he could take you next and then me. Anyway, that’s how I had it figured in the heat of the moment. Not that it makes any difference. Around here, if some Bubba or a Mex points a gun at you, you try like hell to get your shot off first.
‘Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll leave here at first light and I’ll drop you off at the airstrip. You’ll have a wait for Jim, but that can’t be helped. I’ll drive straight from there to the sheriff’s office.’ She made a face. ‘It’s a darned shame. I was going to fade away in the next day or two. I’ve already sold the place to Jim’s dad – he bought most of the land some years back and now he wants the house for Jim’s sister who’s marrying in the fall.’
‘You might be better to skip out now,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘The last thing I want is a hue and cry. That way, if they ever caught up with me, flight would be evidence of guilt. I’ll have to stay and see it through and hope like hell that nobody makes the connection between me and the late Dave until after I’m gone.’
‘They’ll charge you,’ I said. ‘Manslaughter at the least.’
She looked amazed that I should even think such a thing. ‘No chance. Not if you get the hell out of here and keep your mouth shut. See how I trust you? Can you give me a week to ride it out?’
It was all wrong and yet . . . ‘I promise. But will a week be enough?’
‘I knew you were a right guy. A week’ll be plenty. We’re west of the Pecos now. Times have moved on, but the law is still on the rough and ready side. Look at it this way. My family has lived around here forever. We’ve been good neighbours and helped to build this country. Our name’s worth something hereabouts. I went to school with the sheriff. I’m a woman living alone while my husband’s away on business. I came home to find this Bubba threatening me with a gun. It’ll turn out that he had a bad reputation, or why would he have taken on a job like this? I can bet you that this ol’ boy has been around town, showing his ass and acting smart and there’s already been word to the sheriff that this sucker was in town.
‘He said that he wanted money but he had rape in his mind. So I shot him. Any other girl would have done the same. He’d pulled down the phone-wires – I’ll do that before we leave. So I stayed in the house until daylight, just in case he had some friends with him. It’ll hardly make the papers, even.’
If she was confident, it was not for me to make objections. I wanted nothing more than a quick exit from the scene. ‘What will you do afterwards?’ I asked her.
She poured us some more coffee while she thought about it. ‘I don’t think I’ll tell you too much about that,’ she said at last. ‘I trust you, but I want a complete break and nobody in the know. I’ll just tell you this much. I have an old friend. He wanted me to marry him, before even I met Dave. I guess now’s his chance. We used to hunt together. That’s how I came to meet Dave, we all came together on a trip to shoot quail. So I guess Salmon here won’t be short of a job.’ She lit another cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘Why in hell is somebody so interested in this one dog. Does she know where the treasure’s buried or something?’
‘We’ve wondered the same.’
‘I’ll keep her near me and a gun near my fist until I can make my move,’ she said.
My part in these plans seemed to be very much that of a rat leaving a sinking ship. On the other hand, I could see that my presence might provoke questions which she would very much prefer not to be asked.
‘Say, I could use a shower,’ she said, ‘but I can’t go to the sheriff smelling sweet and fresh. Wrong image for a woman who’s been sweating all night. How about you? No reason why you shouldn’t take a shower.’
If I took my clothes off I would never be able to don them again unaided; and the thought of being nursemaided by this tough, competent Amazon terrified me. I decided that I should gather some information while we were in this state of trust. Besides, I was curious. ‘I don’t even know your real name,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘You could find it out easy enough if you tried. So why not? I’m Jessica Wendell Holbright. Born Wendell, married Holbright. You can call me Jess – most people do. I guess that was what put all those falconry names into Dave’s mind – jesses, hawks, you know?’
‘I know,’ I said. A jess is the strap on a falcon’s leg.
‘Dave always did go for the great outdoors. Camping, hunting . . . And he saw himself as a hawk and all the others as doves. He certainly made a grab at me.’
‘Tell me about him.’
She looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Can’t do any harm, I guess,’ she said at last.
‘I had some money, you see, after my folks died. Not a whole lot, by Texan standards, but some. When Dave and I married, he thought that he’d get his hooks into my little pile, but no way! And I wouldn’t sell the place either. I made him a good allowance.’ I saw her breasts rise and fall in a sigh. ‘Well, maybe that was a mistake, it hurt his pride. He wanted to be the breadwinner and the man of property – and he always had this streak of ruthlessness. He pulled one or two shady deals and then took off for California, telling me that he was on to a good thing.’
She sighed again, more deeply. ‘And he could have been. He was a clever man but stupid, you know what I mean?’
‘A clever fool?’ I said. ‘I know what you mean. Universities are full of them.’
‘Yeah. Well, Dave went and set up this Savings and Loan thing and lit out with the money. He’d have been better to stay with it and remain legit, because there’s no bigger fool than a con artist when he gets out of his league and he got taken for a ride in a deal over some Mex gold and lost the lot. And meanwhile one of the parcels of land which he’d bought cheap, as window dressing for the Savings and Loan, turned out to be the one place for a new freight terminal. Wouldn’t you know it? The receiver who’d been put in was a bright young whizz-kid. He sold it for a packet and parlayed the money up until he could pay off all the investors. Most of them left the money to ride, I hear. So I guess they haven’t been looking for him too hard over this side.
‘While this was happening, Dave had skipped out of the country to let the dust settle and was set to recoup his losses by another con over your side of the water. That’s why I went over, to try and convince him that he wasn’t at the top of the hit-list over here and that nobody knew him from a rat’s ass anyway. I said that I’d split my roll with him if he’d only come home, for God’s sake, and settle down. But he was in too deep, by then. He promised me . . . But what the hell? Promises come cheap and somebody killed him before he could make good.’ She looked past my shoulder into the distance, blinking. ‘He was a louse, but he was good to me when he thought about it,’ she finished.
‘Tell me about your visit to Scotland,’ I said.
She looked at me with her head on one side and then decided that a little more revelation could not matter. I think that she was glad to talk, to keep her mind off what might have been. ‘I flew to Gatwick,’ she said, ‘and he met me off the shuttle at Edinburgh.’ She pronounced Edinburgh exactly as it is spelled. ‘We spent the most of a week wrangling about when he’d come back. But there were good times too. I’ll have them to remember. He took me to shoot your red grouse once. It cost an arm and a leg but it was worth it.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘I paid for it out of my own bankroll, so you needn’t think I was living it up on hot money. The moor was real pretty, the heather almost scarlet and all, and those grouse come like bullets. I never saw birds fly like that.
‘And Salmon was great, weren’t you, my darling?’ Anon gave a little whimper of acknowledgment. ‘They let me walk with the beaters as a flank gun in the afternoon and she worked her little ass off in that long heather.’
‘He had a shooting friend,’ I said. ‘Somebody who hasn’t come forward, so
it’s a reasonable guess that he was your husband’s associate in the fraud. And the money hasn’t shown up, so another guess, unless you know better, would be that that’s who killed your husband and why.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it that way,’ she said, ‘but I suppose it’s so. Will they get the bastard? Dave wasn’t much, but far’s I know he drew the line at murder.’
‘From what I hear, they’re stuck at the moment. It seems that both men were cagey about their association. You never met the other man?’
‘Never. And Dave was as close as an oyster about him. Cagey, like you said. From what little he did say, they went after geese a few times in the early mornings and Dave would go back for breakfast and to get warmed up at the other man’s place, but I don’t know where that was. Dave did say once what a help the other man had been.’
‘You’re sure?’ I asked quickly. ‘You’re sure that he was saying that his shooting companion had also helped him in the big fraud? They couldn’t have been two different men?’
‘That’s how it came over to me. It seemed to me that Dave had sought out this cookie as being just the guy he needed. Something he said made me think he knew the guy’s name before ever he went across.’
‘He’d need an introduction to somebody,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t just turn up in Scotland and start asking people, “How would you like to help me with a fraud?” Somebody must have given him either the right name or the name of somebody else who could fix him up with the right introduction.’
‘I bet you’re right. Then, I guess, when they found that they were both sold on hunting, they got together now and again, but being very careful not to be seen around together. I think I set eyes on him once, though.’
She said the last few words so casually that it took me some seconds to recognise what might be the Open Sesame for which the police had been waiting. ‘Could you describe him?’ I asked.
‘It was only a glimpse. And I couldn’t appear as a witness,’ she said, ‘or some shitass would want to haul me up as an accessory or something. But if there’s a chance that he killed Dave or set him up, I’ll tell you what I know.
‘It was the evening before we went to the moor together. Dave didn’t have a spare gun for me and I like a faster-handling gun than a twelve-gauge. He said that his pal had a sixteen-gauge or else that he knew where to borrow one for me, I forget. He made a phone-call and a little later he went downstairs to meet his buddy and get the gun.’
‘How much later?’ I asked.
‘Maybe an hour, I wasn’t watching the clock. If you’re hoping to make a guess at the distance,’ she said shrewdly, ‘he maybe didn’t set off straight away. I was upstairs, looking out what I was going to wear next day. I didn’t want some bum thinking that Texans can’t dress right. I looked out of our bedroom window – not being curious, you understand, but just wanting to be sure that Dave was getting me a gun, because I didn’t want to miss the chance of trying my hand at red grouse. They were just getting the gun and some shells out of the trunk of his car.
‘I was looking down from above, so I never saw his face. The impression I got was that he had a round head. And he was very deep-chested. It was like looking down on a beach ball on top of a barrel. He had dark brown hair, parted on the left, no bald spot. And sticking-out ears. That’s all I saw.’
It might not be much but it might eliminate a hundred suspects. ‘What about his car?’ I asked.
‘Just one of your compacts. Not big or small. Colour . . . grey, I think. It was a saloon with a trunk, not a station wagon. Hell, I didn’t give it more than a glance.’
‘The gun, then,’ I said. She was a woman but she was Texan. She would know about shotguns. ‘You must have given that more than a glance. You had it in your hands for most of a day.’
I was right, she did know about guns. Most British women, even Beth, would have become vague; but Americans take the gun seriously. ‘It shot like a dream,’ she said. ‘I wanted Dave to try and buy it for me before I came back, but he said no dice. A side-by-side bored skeet and improved. Sidelock. Short barrels, twenty-five inch I’d guess. Not new but a good gun, an Italian copy of a Best English. I was getting better than three for five shots, which I’m told is good.’ She stopped and laughed to herself. ‘Some of the menfolk were looking at me kind of glassy-eyed, as if a woman was only there on sufferance and I’d no business being able to shoot better than some of them, but there was one of your lords there, Crail was his name, he was running the show, he was real friendly – not the way you think a lord would be – and he said that if I’d been over for longer he’d’ve given me an invite to see what I could do with driven pheasants.’
What she had told me could be a help to the police but, although sixteen-bores are out of fashion in Britain, there were plenty of guns around which answered that description, superficially at least. I could not see the police solemnly measuring the choke boring of bankers’ guns. I asked whether there had been anything distinctive about the engraving, but it had been the usual rose and scroll.
‘You told me that he brought cartridges,’ I said. ‘Was there a gunshop name on the box?’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘Gamebore and Eley, mixed up in a cartridge bag. All sevens,’ she said.
I racked my brain but tiredness had caught up with me again as the adrenalin wore off. I was trying to think through a quilt of exhaustion. ‘All this could help the police,’ I said. ‘Not to find him, but to identify him once he’s been found. Do you mind if I pass it on, after a few days?’
Her face had softened while she spoke about the good times but now her jaw looked firm again. ‘Go right ahead. I’d like to think that I’d helped finger the bastard for what he did to Dave and maybe stopped him doing it to somebody else. Let me know through Mr Rodgers if they get him – I’ll send him a Glad You’re In There card once a year. And now, we’ll have to get ready to move. Time for one more cup of coffee to see you on the road.’
We had one last cup of coffee and then she washed up carefully. ‘What about the dog?’ I said. ‘Won’t that suggest another visitor?’
‘I’ve been talking for weeks about the cute little spaniel Dave bought in Scotland. So he shipped her over and Jim fetched her from Houston. Big deal!’
Jess took a careful look around to ensure that I had left no traces of my presence. Then we went outside. In the first light of dawn the body was lying on its back, the shotgun beside one outflung arm, the very picture of an aggressor cut down in the act. The lights of the pick-up had dimmed to a red glow in the barn.
Anon went on to the back seat of the car. Jess was about to drive off when I called, almost shouted, to stop.
‘Now what?’ she said.
‘I threw some coins against the wall to distract Bubba’s attention.’
‘You worried about the money?’
‘British coins,’ I said. ‘They might make even the most friendly sheriff think.’
She slapped her forehead. ‘You’re right.’
The tenderness in my shoulder seemed to have invaded my whole body. Jess got out of the car and gathered the coins. She drove halfway to the road and then stopped to use a tow-rope from the car to pull down the telephone wires, refusing my half-hearted offer of help. We set off again. The sun topped the horizon. The country looked dead and burnt but she said that it would be green in a few more weeks. After that she drove in silence until we had turned off on to the track which led to the airstrip.
‘I’ll send you a message,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’ll be – oh – “Spring has come at last”. When you get those words, you’ll know that I’m free and clear and you can tell the cops all you know. Until then . . .’
‘Until then, I won’t say a word.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
She pulled up on the edge of the airstrip. ‘You’re a good scout,’ she said. ‘Your wife’s a lucky girl.’ She turned in her seat and kissed me warmly on the lips. It went
on and on. There was no passion in it. I could not have told why the experience was pleasant, but I shall remember that kiss when I am very old. I was in no hurry to break away.
‘I must go and act the terrified little woman,’ she said at last. ‘Jim will be here before too long. Tell him from me that he brought Salmon to me from Houston, the day before yesterday. Now go.’
I twisted round, despite my shoulder, and gave Anon a scratch behind the ear. I knew that I would never see her again and I had developed an affection for the little bitch. Then I collected my bag and got out of the car. Jess drove in a circle and waved once before dragging a trail of dust along the track. I sat on a rock and watched a small herd of antelope graze across the burnt-out landscape in the middle distance. There was heat in the sun, but before it could get uncomfortable there came a droning in the sky and Jim arrived, early, setting the plane down as gently as if it had been crystal and taxiing to within a few yards of me.
He flew me to Houston and I went home by Detroit, Boston and back to Prestwick through another night. I slept, on and off, for much of the way, but in my waking moments I thought about Jess Holbright, wondering whether the sheriff had accepted her story. If not, her easiest escape might be to put the blame on me. Only when the long-haul jumbo had dragged itself into the air from Boston airport did I realise that I had been sitting with my fists clenched, half expecting men in dark suits and raincoats to arrive and take me off the plane.
Jess would have had the busiest day of her life and yet she had not forgotten about me. She must have made a surreptitious phone-call. The same car was waiting at Prestwick to take me home.
Chapter Seven
After the brown of Texas the green of Scotland was blinding. The shrubs in the garden must have been in bloom when I left but I had not noticed them until homecoming blessed me with fresh vision. Beth, beautiful Beth, still looking ten years less than her real age, came flying out to greet me. I turned half away in case she should throw herself at me. Her face showed distress at my apparent coldness but her first questions were still of Anon. Was she all right? Would she be happy and loved where she was? I assured Beth that Anon would be worked, pampered and adored.
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