‘So that’s the reason you didn’t tell me. If I’d known they wasn’t married, I wouldn’t have needed to find out who killed her.’
‘And I wouldn’t have been able to persuade you to help me,’ she said, leading him on and dreading his response.
‘Don’t know about that.’ He eyed her up and down with stolid approval. ‘I always like to help a lady.’
‘Could be dangerous,’ she warned him, but her heart was racing.
‘I’ll break an arm and a leg.’ But he was talking about Vic Fletcher again.
She took his arm, jerking it for his attention, restraining him because he seemed intent on reaching Fletcher as soon as possible.
‘You see,’ she explained, looking sideways up at him, with such mischief in her eyes that he persuaded himself he could now see she was Angela’s sister, ‘Harry, you’re not out of danger, simply because Fletcher’s got no claim. There’s me, you see. And with or without your help I’m going on with this…’
‘With my help.’
‘And if, in the end, we prove that you killed Angela, then it’s not Fletcher who’s going to kill you. It’s me.’
She was laughing up into his face. His eyes glowed back at her.
‘You and who else?’
She wriggled her shoulders, swinging on his arm to his stride. ‘Just me, Harry, just me.’
Then Harry was serious, because he’d seen beyond her laugh and into her eyes, and he’d realized that she meant it.
‘Let’s go and see Cynth,’ he said.
‘She of the stiletto heels,’ she agreed, and the moment was gone so completely that Harry thought he’d imagined it.
They walked side by side down the hill and back to the lay-by. Not touching now, not speaking. She had been surprised by his perception, and by his ability to penetrate so quickly to an understanding of their new relationship. But she felt that something had gone from it. His enthusiasm, spurred by Fletcher, had led him to accept her assistance when he’d needed it. Now it was she who needed the assistance, and she was uncertain whether she’d used the correct approach with him. Making a joke of her intention to kill him, if she proved his guilt, had been intended to tell him how certain she now was of his innocence. But Harry was basically a serious man. He had understood something of the determination in her intention, but had turned away from it.
As they came in sight of her car, she saw that Vic Fletcher was sitting in it, behind the wheel.
Harry stopped in mid-limp, making a soft growling sound in his throat. Her fingers clutched his arm. ‘No, Harry.’
‘Let me break him apart…’
‘Where’s the challenge you spoke about?’ she said softly. ‘He’s no stronger than a woman.’
He began to move forward again, and she noticed how he had changed. The bulky pace, now with the limp barely perceptible, had become a lithe movement that poised him on the balls of his feet, his shoulders were loose, his chin ducked low, his hands grappling into something between a clutch and a bludgeon.
‘He got me into this,’ he said thickly. ‘He shoulda let it die.’
She made no move to follow him. ‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Harry…no.’
He stopped, and turned. Every bump on his face seemed to have hardened. ‘Say it.’
‘Not like this,’ she said quietly. Not with violence. If you scare him off altogether, we’ll never know why he was after the truth. Think, Harry. Let him go. Frighten him…but no violence.’
His expression did not change, but a muscle eased here and a tension softened there. His eyes gleamed, then he tossed his head. ‘If I touch him, it’ll be violent.’
‘Let me do it.’
For a moment he seemed unresponsive, then he moved aside. ‘It’s your car.’
She walked past him. Fletcher was sitting back with a hesitant grin on his face. She took a second to register him in her mind. A weak, secretive man, she decided, who would preserve his secrets. They moved surreptitiously behind his weak eyes, but their substance remained hidden. The pale grin hid a fear of Harry that was deeply seated, so it must have been important to him to make this gesture of defiance. Sitting there, he was telling her that he wasn’t going to be shaken off, that he’d be there at the end. What the end might mean to him was his secret.
‘Get out of my car,’ she said, her voice thin, its edge honed.
‘Nice bit of machinery,’ he said, but he was already opening the door.
‘We’d prefer not to see you again,’ she told him.
‘So what’s in it for you, lady?’ His sneer was paltry, his lips being unable to handle it. He stood beside the car, watching warily as Harry approached with ambling intent.
‘Can you walk back to the phone?’ he asked her quietly.
‘If necessary.’
‘Then call an ambulance, but don’t give your name. This character won’t be able to speak for a long time.’
‘Going,’ said Fletcher, raising his palm in protest. ‘Just going.’
Which he did, so rapidly that Virginia had to raise her voice, for it to reach him. ‘You wouldn’t, Harry, would you?’
‘Just watch me.’
The Metro fired up, and Fletcher managed to force it into a wriggle and a squeal of tyres as he took off and passed them in a cloud of dust. Only when he was out of sight did they allow themselves to laugh, she with her hand on his forearm, he with his head thrown back.
At that moment, Fletcher was no more than a laughable irrelevance. It was perhaps a mistake for them to take that attitude, but it drew them a little closer.
Chapter Five
‘Show me the back way,’ she said, settling into the passenger’s seat and offering him the chance to drive.
He slid behind the wheel, notching the seat back. ‘If I’m going to dirty your seats, we might as well make ’em match.’
At the crossing he drove straight on, though the lane ahead was not signposted.
‘It doesn’t really go anywhere,’ he explained, ‘only to the old brickworks. Something to do with clay, somebody said, but it ran out. Whatever…the place closed, so it’s quiet up here.’
The tar and gravel soon gave way to a rough, broken surface, through which shone the red and gold of broken, fired bricks. The brickworks had supplied the surface for its own approach road. She found herself wondering which had come first, the works or its road. Harry was taking it quietly, his eyes darting around as the hedges fell away and the surroundings revealed themselves as barren. The exploitation of the available terrain had been ruthless.
‘What’re you looking for?’ she asked.
‘Habit.’ He turned his head briefly, grimacing. ‘I used to bring the cars up here, an’ I didn’t want to be spotted. But it was a choice spot for courting couples.’
‘Not very romantic, is it?’
‘They didn’t come for romance,’ he said lightly. ‘They came for nothing more’n sex.’
She looked at him with raised eyebrows, smiling in amused surprise.
‘They used to have their own sidings,’ he went on, ‘with points and things, but Beeching finished all that, and they had to carry on with lorries. That’s the actual works, though you can’t see the kilns, and there’s a big quarry the other side, half full of water now.’
The buildings were no longer a firm conglomerate, gaps in their continuity breaking the pattern. Two chimneys still stood, one at an impossible angle, and she did, in fact, catch glimpses of beehive shapes that could have been kilns. He was steering around its left side, where the levelled loading area was still channelled with sunken steel rails, clogged with brick dust. He ran the wheels along one set, then swung right to the level, grey line of hardcore. The steel rails came to an end, and they were driving along the bed of the abandoned twin-track railway. Long ago the rails and sleepers had been salvaged. The surface was rough, but firm.
Harry dropped back to twenty. ‘Hell on the suspension,’ he said.
She could see that this would indeed
provide a secret approach. At times they ran along cuttings, and even on the level stretches the hedges were so rampant that the car was well hidden.
‘Why’re we going to see Cynth?’ he asked, his tone casual. ‘And don’t tell me it’s because she used to wear them spike things.’
She eased back in the seat. The suspension was thrumming away, the Merc showing off by smoothing it out. ‘They were all the go, four years back. Going out, now, though. No, it’s not that. Cynthia’s husband disappeared, and Angela died the same day. Two robberies, which must have been connected. It’s too many coincidences, Harry.’
‘You’re not tellin’ me Angela was mixed up in the robberies. She was there, and I jumped into her car, that’s all it was.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘If she was your sister, you’d know what she was like.’
She gave an easy laugh, but there was enough wrong with it to attract his attention. ‘She was capable of anything, that’s all I can say. The world had gone wrong, and she was searching round for something she could do that would show she was rejecting it. Why not a bank robbery? To her, it might have seemed that all their money was obtained at the expense of the proletariat.’
‘Who?’
‘Those who don’t have any.’
‘That’s the reason banks get robbed,’ he told her. ‘People who haven’t got any want some, and that’s where it’s kept, in banks. None of your fancy words and ideas. Just ’cause they want it.’
‘To Angela it would’ve seemed a romantic and exciting gesture…’
‘What I should’ve done,’ he said, glaring ahead, ‘was to give her that good spanking I spoke about, and sent her home to daddy.’
‘You think that would’ve worked?’
‘Amateurs!’ he said with scorn. ‘They’re ruining the whole scene.’ He glanced at her. ‘Anyway, how could she have been involved?’
‘I take it you know how far we’ve got.’ She prodded him in the ribs. ‘You’re not concentrating.’
‘Looking for the gap,’ he assured her.
The trouble was that there were no significant bends and no grades to guide him. It all looked the same, a disappearing perspective of grey hardcore, and the gap in the right-hand hedge, which Charlie had kept reasonably clear, had had four years to realize it should not be there. It had welcomed nettles and docks, and a flush of rosebay willowherb was standing naked, now that its fluffy clothing had been blown away.
‘That’s it,’ said Harry. ‘I think.’ He stopped the car and got out, trampling some of it down. ‘Yes, that’s the bungalow. Don’t reckon we can get the car through, though.’
Virginia didn’t reckon he could persuade her to get through, either, not with all those nettles. She climbed out to have a look, lifting herself onto her toes.
They had passed the village of Harley Green, Charlie having had the good sense to select a reasonably isolated building for his re-spraying business. She was looking down on the property, the railway line having been run along an embankment just there. The track Harry had used to bring in and take out the cars was still visible as two depressions through humps of miserable grass, running directly down to the shed.
It had been a smallholding at one time, the shed possibly having housed chickens. A sagging wire-netting fence ran along both boundaries of the property, flanked by a farmer’s pasture on one side and a sluggish stream on the other. The bungalow itself was small, possibly two-bedroomed, red brick with a shallow roof of slate. The shed, Virginia saw, was larger than the bungalow. It would have accommodated three cars, she guessed. The end facing the railway line had double wooden doors, one sagging badly, so much so that it would no longer close properly.
‘I can’t get through this, Harry, and I’m not risking the car.’
‘No sweat.’
Before she realized his intention he had her up in his arms, and was plunging through the undergrowth. She was on her feet again before she could protest. The effort had not even affected his breath.
‘Let’s walk down quietly and have a look in his workshop,’ he said, a hint of anticipation in his voice, and now, on what was almost home territory to him, he led the way with confidence.
‘Harry,’ she said, trotting to catch up. ‘I never knew…did you live here?’
‘With Cynth and Charlie? Lord, no. I was in digs in the village. A Mrs Thomas. I useta do her garden for her. We had some smashin’ roses. I think we can squeeze through the gap in the doors.’ She had been keeping an eye on the bungalow, checking whether they were observed. But there was no movement. The bungalow, judging by the general dilapidated appearance of it, could have been deserted, but there were curtains at the windows, and beyond its corner she could just see the green rear of a small hatchback.
Harry thrust his shoulder through the gap in the doors, pausing to put a hand to the sagging one. It groaned open a further reluctant foot. She followed him inside. He was standing with his hands on his hips, looking round. The light was poor, there being no windows or skylights. He was waiting for his eyes to adapt.
It was not the same as he recalled it. Gone was the pear-drop choking tang of the paint, the light from the bank of floods in the roof, the concentrated beam from Charlie’s working spot, the hiss of the spray-gun, the phut of his compressor, the scattered strips of masking tape, the crumples of masking newspaper Charlie had used. There was no life in the building, no purpose to it.
Harry realized that he’d been eager to get inside. Part of his life had circulated inside this building, for three years. He’d assumed he might recapture something special, because…yes…there had been a sense of adventure to it, a whiff of danger, and with every car a feeling of relief and triumph that once again he’d pulled it off. Now there was nothing. It was a vacant shell, its corrugated iron roof ringing with nothing more than empty memory. There was a sad desolation to it, a musty and stale deadness in the air.
The workbench still ran along one side — hadn’t it been bigger? — the abandoned spray-gun lying on it with dead paint clogging its nozzle, beside it two empty cans with four-inch brushes in them, the thinners long since evaporated. Beneath the bench more cans, probably still full of acrylic car paint in every available colour. Scattered on the floor were empty cans. Morosely, he kicked at them, rebounding them from the walls. One rolled to Virginia’s feet.
She stared down at it. Water-based wash, it said on the side. Dilute only with water. Cardinal Red. ‘Harry,’ she said, but she got no further.
A narrow side door was kicked open, intruding a shaft of brilliant daylight. The figure was a silhouette, but could be detected as a woman, short but sturdy. Also obvious was the silhouette of a shotgun.
‘Didn’t I tell you!’ she screamed. ‘Keep away from me, you bloody witch.’
It was Virginia she was facing, and directly at Virginia that the shotgun was pointed.
‘Cynth!’ bellowed Harry, to distract attention, then he had flung himself at her, one arm raised to deflect the gun.
As he hit her the gun fired, the charge thundering into the iron roof, lifting a portion of it for a second before it flapped back. The gun skidded across the dirt floor as the two locked bodies sprawled together after it. Cynthia was a fighting, biting tigress, snarling and spitting and screaming as Harry tried to subdue her. ‘It’s me, Cynth,’ he choked, trying to prise her fingers from his throat. ‘It’s Harry, Cynth!’ as he tried to tangle her flying feet and knees in his legs. He caught her wrists, spreadeagling her. ‘For Chrissake, Cynth, it’s me.’
Then they were struggling again, rolling in the dust, her arms round his neck, her face buried in his, both their legs flailing as each tried to stabilize their situation. Cynthia raised her head. ‘Oh Harry, Harry love!’ she cried out, and the struggling went on.
Virginia, having rescued the shotgun and expertly ejected the cartridges, watched them, and realized that Harry had come back to a big welcome.
Eventually they scrambled to their feet, sti
ll laughing, she with tears streaming in channels through the dust on her cheeks.
‘Harry!’ she choked.
Then he lifted her with his right arm round her waist, and her left one was round his neck. Her feet were six inches from the ground.
‘Cynth,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet Virginia Brent. Virginia, this is Cynthia.’
It was done with immense formality. Virginia wondered how he’d look in a dinner jacket and black bow tie. Magnificent, she decided. But her attention was concentrated on Cynthia.
She saw a woman of about her own age, which was thirty, but slimmer, shorter, barely five feet three inches, the waist and hips emphasized by the tight fit of her jeans. A slim blonde, was Cynthia, the bleached blondness that grows out. It had not been corrected for some time. In spite of the fact that she was still laughing at the joy of their reunion, when Harry put her back on her feet Cynthia slumped. The weariness was implanted. The greyness in her complexion was not entirely from the dust the welcome had stirred. Her eyes, too, lacked any sparkle, and eye-shadow served only to emphasize their depth, and did nothing to hide a despair that had lodged there a long while. Virginia thought there could also be fear, in the line of the lips and the quivering at one corner of Cynthia’s mouth.
There was certainly suspicion. Cynthia made no move to shake hands. Her head was tilted when Virginia offered the shotgun, then the two shells, one fired, one not.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, looking past Virginia’s shoulder and not sounding sorry at all.
‘You get intruders?’
‘You’d be surprised.’ She turned back to Harry. ‘When’d you get out, Harry?’
‘Two or three months.’
‘And you didn’t come to see me!’
‘I thought Charlie was here.’ He flexed his fingers and stared at the result. ‘Didn’t know he wasn’t around.’
She squeezed his arm. ‘That’s no excuse. If he had been…’
‘It would’ve been embarrassin’, Cynth, you know that.’
The Second Jeopardy Page 5