The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  “I might, though,” said Bunty. “All right, get to it your own way. She came breezing in, expecting to be taken to London. And you told her that she’d had it, that it was over, and she might as well go home.”

  “What I told her was meaner than that, but let it go, it added up to much the same. I asked if her mother had slept well, and whether I could have the name of her tailor. She was always quick on the uptake, Pippa, not as clever as she thought she was, perhaps, but pretty sharp, all the same. She got it in a moment that I’d seen them, and she came up with a good story faster than you’d ever credit. That was her mother’s cousin, that man with the Jaguar, it was because he’d turned up for a visit that her mother’d been able to make the trip, and that’s why she had no warning. And she was all set to put me in the wrong and herself in the right, as usual, and I was the one who was supposed to apologise. Only this time it didn’t work. Damn it, I’d seen them! I asked her whether they’d locked Mother in the flat while they went out to dinner, because I’d seen her just slipping her keys in her bag. You’re a liar, I told her, and a cheat, and what else you are you know best, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve done with you, you can go to London, or the devil, or wherever you please, but not with me. She couldn’t believe it. I’d been so easy up to then, it took a little while to sink in. But as soon as she did manage to get it into her head that I meant it, things got even crazier than they already were. She started persuading, threatening, even fawning… you’ve no idea how fantastic a performance that was, from Pippa. You’d have thought getting to London that night was a matter of life and death to her. She’d expected the car to be waiting in the road for her, and instead, it was locked in the garage Bill and I rent —rented—down at Floods’, at the end of the street. When she realised nothing was going to get her her own way any more, she suddenly dived her hand into her bag and pulled out a gun. That gun.” He glanced across at the drawer where Bunty had hidden it, and then at her attentive face, and said wryly: “I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

  She gave him no reassurances, and made him no promises. Not yet. “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, I still can’t believe in it myself. These things don’t happen, not in connection with people like Pippa. Where would she get a gun? Why should she want one? And why, for God’s sake, should she care enough about going to London with me to grab it out of her bag and point it at me, and tell me I’d better keep my promise to drive her down, or else! Why? It mattered to her just getting her own way, I know, but surely not that much? And she meant it, I know she did, now. But then…”

  “Then,” said Bunty, “you were too furious to be cautious.”

  “Too drunk,” he said hardly. “She waved this thing at me, and threatened, and as far as I was concerned that was the last straw. I wanted to kill her… or, at least, I was ready to. Oh, I know that, all right! When it happens to you, you know it. I just went for her. No holds barred. I got her by the wrist and we had a wild, untidy sort of struggle for the gun. About the rest I’m not sure. But I know I ripped it out of her hand. I know that. I know I was holding it when we both fell over together, and went down with a crash. I’m not sure what I hit. The edge of the table, I think. I hit something, all right, I’ve still got the hell of a headache and a bump like a hen’s egg to prove it. All I know for certain is that I went out cold for a time. I don’t know how long, exactly, but not long, not more than twenty or twenty-five minutes, I’d say. When I came round, I was lying over Pippa on the floor. And I still had the gun in my hand. And Pippa… she was dead. It took me a few minutes to understand that. I was shaking her, talking to her, telling her playing the fool wouldn’t get her anything… Oh, my God! You wouldn’t believe how little different she looked… not different at all. There was no blood, nothing to show for it, only that small hole in her sweater. She looked just as if she was pretending, to frighten me. And that would have been like her, too. But she didn’t move, and she didn’t breathe… and there was that hole, and just the ooze of blood round it, that her sweater absorbed. And in the end I knew she was dead, really dead, and I’d killed her. You,” he said abruptly, turning the full devastating stare of his haggard eyes on Bunty, “you change things. But not even you can change that.”

  She leaned forward and laid her hand possessively on his arm, holding him eye to eye with her. “The shot… There’s just one bullet-hole. Did you hear the shot?”

  He thought that over with agonised care. “Not that I can remember. I’d expect the moment when we fell to be the moment when the gun went off. When I fired it,” he corrected himself grimly. “I told you, I meant murder. But I don’t actually remember hearing the shot. All I know beyond doubt is that I came round, and she was dead.

  “And I panicked. I can’t blame the drink for that. I wasn’t in very good shape when I came round, but I tell you, I was stone cold sober. I tidied up the room, and locked the house, and ran for the car. You can get it round to the back gate, and it’s quite private there. I packed up girl and luggage and all in the boot, and picked up the spent cartridge case—it was there on the floor right beside her—and locked the place up again, as if we’d set off according to plan, and got out of there. It didn’t take long, there was no mess, no blood… She was lying on her back, you see, and I reckon the bullet must be still in her, I couldn’t find any exit wound. I threw the spent case in a field as soon as I was out of town. All I thought of was getting away. At first I didn’t know where, I was driving round and round on the country roads in a state of shock, trying to think, and I had to have a drink to help me. I had to. And that was when I met you.”

  He looked up, and for a moment studied her with wonder and care, forgetting himself. “It’s funny, how you’ve changed. You had the black dog on you then, too. It was because you were sad that I wanted to talk to you. I wish I’d left you alone. I’m sorry!”

  “What were you going to do?” asked Bunty.

  “I thought of this place. I’ve been here several times with Reggie and Louise, and they gave me an open invitation to use it even after they’d packed it in for the year and gone home. They’re like that, they probably invited other people, too. That’s why they leave a key. And I thought of Reggie’s boat.”

  “You were going to drop her overboard,” said Bunty, “and head for Denmark, or somewhere…”

  “Norway, actually. It must be possible to land unobserved somewhere on all that tremendous coastline, and I know my way around there a little. I’ve even got friends there… though I don’t suppose,‘’ he owned drearily, ” that I could have dragged them into this mess.”

  “And I,” she said practically, almost cheerfully, “was to go overboard, too, in mid-passage.”

  He stared back at her mutely, out of the extremes of exhaustion, unable any longer to be ashamed or afraid. Even the tension which had held him upright was broken now, after the slow blood-letting of this confession. He was close to total collapse.

  “Why didn’t you take your chance when it came?” he asked in a thread of a voice. “Why did you send the police away?”

  She got up slowly, and moved away from him to pick up the shards of the tea-pot. “I’d better get this mess cleaned up,” she said, momentarily side-tracked, and lost that thread again on the instant. The housewife was there, somewhere inside, but fighting against the odds. She straightened up with the fragments in her hands, and stood frowning down at them thoughtfully.

  “I didn’t need them,” she said, and turned to face the boy on the settee, whose eyes had never ceased their faithful study of her through the cloud of their guilt and sorrow and resignation.

  “I’d only just realised it,” she said deliberately, “but I knew I didn’t need them. In the night I wasn’t thinking or noticing very clearly, or I might have known before. Things are distorted as soon as you’re afraid. Maybe I did know, subconsciously. I think I may have done. I had all the evidence, if I’d been able to recognise it. When you drove at that constable in Hawkworth�
� did he jump back first, or did you swerve first? I didn’t work it out then, I know now. And what a lot of trouble you went to, to avoid running down a hare, even when you were on the run. No wonder you couldn’t go through with it when it came to my turn.”

  Half of that, she realised, was lost upon him. He was in no condition to follow her through such a maze; but he clung to his own question, and it bore a slightly different inflection now, tinted with the living wonder of genuine curiosity, and—was it possible?—hope!

  “Why did you send them away? Why didn’t you hand me over to them, and be safe?”

  “Because,” said Bunty, now with something very like certainty, “I was safe. Because I don’t believe you are a murderer. I don’t believe you ever killed anyone, not even Pippa!”

  CHAPTER VI

  « ^ »

  For a long moment he stared up at her in absolute stupefaction, hardly able to grasp what she had said, and even when his battered mind had got hold of the words, the sense was too slippery and elusive to be mastered without a struggle. She saw his lips moving automatically over the incredible syllables, and understanding came in a late, disruptive agony, and set him shaking again.

  “My God, I wish that was even possible,” he said, panting, “but it’s crazy. Look, there were only two characters in all this lousy scene, Pippa and me. Nobody else! Don’t you start kidding me along at this stage. It’s nice of you even to pretend to believe I might be human, after all I’ve done to you, but…”

  “I’m not pretending,” she said strongly. “That’s what I do believe. Time’s short, I can’t spare any for kidding you along, and you can’t spare any for having doubts about me, if we’re going to make anything of this mess.”

  “Make anything of it?” he echoed incredulously. “For God’s sake, what is there left to make, except restitution?”

  “We could begin by making sense of what we know. Know, not assume.”

  He clutched helplessly at his head, squeezed his thin grey cheeks hard between his hands, and shook himself till the lank dark hair flopped on his forehead; but when he opened his eyes again and stared up at her dizzily until her image cleared, she was still confronting him with the same fixed and resolute face.

  “Don’t!” he said piteously. “Not unless you mean it! I was just coming to terms with what I am. If you start me hoping now it only means I’ve got to go through this hell twice over. I couldn’t stand it! What we know! I know I was lying on top of her, and she was dead with a bullet in her, and I was clutching the gun. I know I got it out of her hand, I know I was holding it when we fell. I know I wanted to kill her…”

  “You wanted to kill me,” said Bunty bluntly. “What does that prove?”

  “No,” he said passionately, “I never wanted to kill you. I meant to…”

  “Meant to or wanted to, I’m still here.”

  “But there was no one else there, only the two of us…”

  “How do you know that? You were out for twenty minutes.”

  “You do mean it,” he said, staring, and quaked with his sudden devouring hope and fear. He dared not believe that there was anything in this intuition of hers, but it was an impossibility to doubt the genuineness of her conviction. He began to want his innocence with an agonising intensity.

  “But if I didn’t kill her, who did? Who else had my motive? Who else had a motive at all?”

  “How can we know that, when we know next to nothing about her? If she was betraying you she could have been betraying others as well. And if it was a sound motive for you, so it was for them.”

  “But how could any of them even know where she was? She came in a taxi. I was there, motive and all. The most I could squeeze out of it,” he said wretchedly, “was that it might have been almost an accident, when it came to the point… that the gun might have gone off when we fell. Even that I couldn’t make myself believe. So if that’s what you’re trying to prove…”

  “No,” she said at once, “not that. Because I think murder was done that evening. But not by you.”

  “I wish to God,” he said, trembling, “you could convince me.”

  “Give me a chance to try. Let me look at that bump of yours, where you hit the table—if you did hit the table.”

  He sat charmed into obedient stillness as she took his head in her hands and turned him a little to get the full light from the window on the place. She felt his lean cheeks, cold with his long weariness, flush into warmth and grow taut with awareness of her touch. His eyes, which he had closed at her approach, as a measure of his devoted docility, opened suddenly and looked up at her, moved and dazzled. For the first time she realised how young he was, surely three or four years short of thirty. She was looking at an over-wrought boy, who had delivered himself into her hands, now absolutely defenceless. And she had promised him a miracle! Miracles are not easy to deliver; she trembled with him as she thought of her responsibility.

  “It’s crazy,” he said, shivering. “After all this, I don’t even know what to call you.”

  “Most people call me Bunty. Bend your head forward… that’s it.”

  The mark of the blow he had taken was there to be found without difficulty, a swollen, tender pear-shape, above and if anything slightly behind his right ear. The forward end of it was higher, and only there was the skin slightly broken in one spot. She parted the thick dark hair to examine the mark carefully.

  “I’m not a doctor, or even a nurse. But unless you’ve got a table with padded edges, it certainly wasn’t the table that did this. If you’d hit any sharp edge you’d have had a considerable cut.”

  “There’s an old wooden-framed chair with leather upholstery,” he said indistinctly from under the fall of tangled hair. “It was close by the table, on my right. Not the overstuffed kind, you’d feel the wood underneath, all right, if you fell on it. It could have been the back of that.”

  “It could… but you’d have had to fall sideways… or else to turn your head sharply as you fell. You’ve got a diagonal welt, like this…” She drew her fingers along it, and their course ended decidedly behind his ear. “It looks to me much more the kind of mark you’d have if someone had come up behind you and hit you one nice, scientific tap to put you out for the count. And somebody who knew how to go about it, and had the right sort of tool for the job.” She smoothed back his hair over the tender place, and came round the arm of the couch to face him. “Maybe a piece of lead piping inside a sock,” she said. She was smiling, faintly but positively. “Or more likely the simplest thing of all, a rubber cosh.”

  He fingered his bruise and gaped at her dazedly. “But it’s mad! If you’re thinking of a common burglary, there wasn’t a thing in the place worth a man’s while. Nobody’d be bothered burgling a cottage belonging to the likes of Bill and me, why should they? They always seem to know where the right stuff is. And if you mean something less accidental… if you’re thinking I might have some sort of connection with crooks… I swear I haven’t. I’ve never had anything to do with anybody like that. Not out of virtue, or anything, they just never came my way.”

  “You’ve got something there,” she agreed. “The people who carry coshes are much the same sort of people who carry guns.” She added pointedly: “Pippa had a gun. You hadn’t any acquaintance among the pros., but how do you know she hadn’t?”

  After a long moment of hurried calculation, swinging hurtfully between his anxiety to grasp at this life-line and his terror of finding it gossamer, he asked very quietly, his eyes clinging desperately to her face: “Bunty… do you really believe what you’re saying? You wouldn’t try to… soothe me, would you? Just out of kindness?”

  “No,” she said sturdily, “I wouldn’t. I’m only saying what I mean.”

  “Then… what do you think happened?”

  “I think someone else walked into that room—and I’ll back my judgment by betting you what you like that you had your back to the door and Pippa was facing it— laid you out economically with a kn
ock on the head, and then dealt with Pippa. For some reason of his own, which we don’t know. As evidence for her having got involved in something in which she was out of her depth, there’s the gun. As you say, what would such a girl as Pippa want with a gun? Where would she get one? It’s the pros, and the would-be pros, who carry them. So there was Pippa dead, and you beautifully set up to take the blame. So beautifully that you yourself believed you’d killed her. That’s the lines on which I’m thinking at this moment. But as yet we’ve hardly begun.”

  “Then in any case it looks as if I’ve cut my own throat, doesn’t it?” he said with a lopsided grin. “I’ve run out and pointed the finger at myself. What do I do now? Who’s ever going to believe I can possibly be innocent?”

  “They might,” said Bunty. “I believe it.”

  “Ah, you!”

  She saw it in his eyes then, though she was too intent on the matter in hand to pay much attention, that for him she had become a creature immeasurably marvellous and unforeseen. But he didn’t expect to find more than one of her.

  “Bunty, what am I to do now? Go to the police and give myself up?”

  “No,” said the law-abiding police wife without hesitation. “Not yet! I’ve burned my boats, too, remember? I bought a few hours for consideration by lying to the police and sending them away. I gave a false name. To them I’m an accessory after the fact. What we do now is make use of the short time we’ve got in hand. Before we go to the police, let’s see exactly what we have got, and have a go at making sense of it. The more evidence we can hand to them, the better prospects we’ve got.”

  “We?” he said softly, and one black eyebrow went up unexpectedly in sympathy with the corner of his mouth. A slightly wry, slightly careworn smile, but nevertheless a smile, the first she had seen on this haggard face.