The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  “One of ’em’s nothing to do with me, ask him about that. For mine I have. All but the Pickert, maybe. I picked that up during the war. It’s damned hard to keep within the law all the time,” said Fleet tolerantly.

  “But you deny playing any part in Pippa Gallier’s death? Or in the wage-snatch from Armitage Pressings?” The inspector slipped the point of his ball-pen almost absent-mindedly inside the flap of the envelope, and began to slide it along. It was noticeable that he did not touch the envelope itself, but held it between passport and ticket; and the address had appeared for a moment to engage more of his attention than he was actually giving to Fleet.

  “That I don’t mind repeating. I followed her to this chap’s place, I got kind of restless waiting for her to come out, and I went in to find out what was happening. She was on the floor, dead, and this young fellow was out cold on the top of her, with the gun in his hand. And if he didn’t shoot her, then get on with finding out who did, because you won’t get anywhere looking at me. Two of my lads were with me, they know she was dead when we went in. That’s it! ” said Fleet, with a snap of his formidable jaws like a shark bisecting an unlucky bather. “I’ve finished talking.”

  “But I haven’t!” snarled a sudden ferocious voice from the kitchen. “I’m just set to begin.”

  As one man they swung to face the doorway. The voice was one they had none of them heard before, though several of them had heard the same man speak. Fleet knew this voice muted, anxious and willing to please, Luke knew it injured, whining and doomed, aware of its narrowing destiny. The police had heard it only in one wild scream as the car went over its protests, and flattened them into the gravel.

  Propped on a policeman’s arm, Quilley leaned from the kitchen rug, his left leg stripped from the knee down, his foot crushed and leaning disjointedly sidewise from the ankle. By straining to the limit of his strength he could just get his eyes upon Fleet, and they aimed there like gun-barrels, as deadly and as fixed. He was not afraid now, he had nothing to lose, he could close the doors on the man who had tyrannised over him, and if he closed them on himself, too, that would still be liberation. Fleet had tossed him to the police like a bone to hounds, to delay the pursuit. There was a price for that.

  “Here’s one,” said Quilley stridently, “who wants to talk, and he’s got plenty to tell, too. Of course that’s the Armitage money, and I was there when we snatched it, and what you want to know about that I can tell you, even who fired the shot. But it wasn’t him, not that time. He hasn’t got the guts to go out and do a job, he just directs from a safe place. It was the girl he killed… with his own hands… and I was there to see it…”

  For one moment it seemed that Fleet would hurl himself, out of his chair, clean through all opposition, and clamp his hands round Quilley’s throat. But he did not. He sat back by a cautious inch or two in his seat, to demonstrate how little this attack meant to him; and his face with all its death’s-head boniness continued to smile.

  “It was after she asked for the gun,” Quilley pursued loudly and firmly, “that he got uneasy. She was getting above herself, and his women don’t do that. But he still fancied her, then, so he gave her a gun of sorts to keep her happy—that rubbishing little thing you’ve got there, the one he’s trying to kid you is nothing to do with him…”

  “That?” said Fleet blankly, wide-eyed in innocence. “I never saw the thing in my life until yesterday.”

  “Like hell he never saw it! He gave it to her. He was never too sure about her after that, but when he slept with her Friday night he took a peep at the case with the money in it, and it looked all right. But still his thumbs pricked about her, so he had us watch her, see what she’d do. And Saturday night, after she thought he’d gone back to town, she came bustling out with a suitcase, and locked her flat, and went off in a taxi, so we had to notify him. Con and Blackie followed her in the Riley, while I waited for him, and he let us into her flat to make sure about the money. He didn’t need her keys for that, he’d had one made for himself long ago, but she didn’t know that. You think he’d leave any money of his behind a door he couldn’t get through when he liked? And what do you know? She’d filled the case up with bundles of newspaper cuttings, only the top note in each clip was real. So then he knew she was off with the dough. They had orders to pick her up and bring her back if she tried to run out by train, or anything, but she never, she went to this little house, and walked right in, so they called him at her flat, and we went over there fast. The door wasn’t locked, it was easy. We walked in, and there she was waving this gun at this kid, and raving how he’d got to keep his promise to her, and he went for her as if he thought it was a pop-gun, he was so tight, and there they were fighting for it, and him in the doorway weighing it all up, like he always does everything, what’s in it for Fleet! And I,”said Quilley vengefully, “I was the one who was right there beside him. I saw him club this kid cold. Nobody knows how to do it better. I saw him take the gun out of his hand. And she, she was all over him suddenly, she says, darling, she says, thank heaven you came, she says, he’d have killed me! And there she is hanging round Fleet’s neck, hoping he’s only just busted in, and he puts that gun to her chest and shoots her dead. Just like that!”

  “Poor devil!” said Fleet, with hardly a pretence at sincerity. “Hysterical. He’s got it in for me, I always knew he hated my guts. He’ll say anything.”

  “Not anything, just the facts, Fleet. Nobody needs more. I tell you, he shot her. And then he wiped the gun and put it back in the kid’s hand, and arranged the two of ’em there, all ready to be found, so the kid could take the rap. We called the cops from a call box to come and get him, only he must have come round too soon and cleared out. And there’s one thing I can tell you, too. She’d been getting ready to put the finger on the lot of us, and especially Fleet. In her flat we found some trial runs for a letter she was putting together for the police, all cut out of newspapers, half a dozen different types. She was headed out, and she was going to make good and sure we wouldn’t be at large to hunt for her. Oh, yes, we went back to her flat… just as soon as we found there was no money in her suitcase and nothing in her bag, no left-luggage ticket, or anything like that. We took her keys and went back to turn the whole place out, but all we found was these bits of paper, where she’d been experimenting with this letter. About the Armitage job, and about Pope Halsey’s furs, too. She knew all about that, she was the one who tipped us off about the shipment. We had a proper hunt, but we never found anything else, and he burned those bits of paper. Anything you want to know,” said Quilley, incandescent with vengeance, “you ask me. I was there every time, there’s nothing I can’t tell you.”

  “Nothing,” said Fleet, crossing one grey-worsted leg negligently over the other, and grinned towards the kitchen doorway, round which the frantic eyes glared and gloated on him. “And nothing he won’t, either, true or false. You can see he’d do anything to knife me in the back. But I’ve got witnesses will prove the opposite… witnesses with nothing to gain.”

  “Except money!” said Quilley. “Alibis he gets wholesale.”

  “You see?” said Fleet, sighing. “Poor chap! Psychopathic, really!”

  “Then you didn’t go back to her flat?” asked the inspector mildly.

  “Who said we didn’t? She’d run out with my money… our money… we didn’t know what she’d done with it…”

  “And he couldn’t ask her,” said Quilley viciously. “He was too sure it would be there in her suitcase, he’d fired first and looked afterwards.”

  “Of course we went back to look in her flat, where else was it likely to be? But we didn’t find any trial shots at synthetic letters to the police… that cheap little judy didn’t know anything about any crimes except running out with our winnings, you can bet on that.”

  “He’s making the whole thing up, then?”

  “Of course he is. I came after my money, yes, that’s fair enough, and I wasn’t particular how I
went about recovering it, either, if it comes to that. But he’ll have a hell of a job connecting me with that girl’s death, or that gun he’s raving about.”

  “Will I?” shrilled the vengeful voice from the kitchen, whinnying with triumph and whimpering with pain. “You think you’re in the clear because you wiped off the grip nicely? Who loaded it in the first place, mate, think about that! Wait until they get their little insufflators on that magazine before you crow too loud.”

  Bunty closed her fingers excitedly on Luke’s arm. And Fleet laughed. A little too loudly, perhaps; there seemed suddenly to be a bleak, small hollow inside the laughter, that echoed like a bare cell.

  “Come off it, man! You know as well as I do I opened the thing up here to-night, here in this room, to see how many rounds were in it. You watched me do it! Like all the rest of the boys, and they’ll all swear to it.”

  “You think so? This time you don’t own all the witnesses, Fleet. At the best it’ll be a draw, three-three. And by the time they’ve got it through their thick heads that you’re going down for twenty years, you think you’ll even be owning three of ’em? They won’t be able to shift over to our side fast enough.”

  “You talk too much to be feeling sure of yourself,” Fleet said tolerantly, and beamed at the inspector with a face of brass. But was there a very faint flare of uneasiness far down in the wells of his eyes? “You won’t get far on his uncorroborated word,” he said virtuously, “he’s got a record as long as your arm. I don’t know why I ever risked taking him on, but somebody has to give the lags a chance.”

  “A bit of corroboration would certainly be helpful,” agreed the inspector reasonably. “Even on one specific point… say these trial letters she was supposed to be compiling, now. But of course, you deny there ever were any, and he says you burned them. In either case, nobody else is going to be able to give us any fresh information now.” He was gently unfolding the sheet of thick white paper he had withdrawn from the envelope. He took his time about it, and its texture, or some quality he found in it, seemed to be affording him a certain obscure amusement. They observed that he handled it only by the edges, with considerable care. “Of course, if we could have called the girl herself as a witness…”

  He looked up, smiling. “Now isn’t that a coincidence! She had it among her papers, all ready stamped and addressed for posting, I suppose she was going to slip it into the box at London Airport at the last moment. No point in taking risks until she was actually on her way out. It’s a good surface, it should hold prints well.”

  He turned it for them to see the sliced-out words and phrases of print from which it had been compiled.

  “You want to know how the text reads? It’s addressed to Superintendent Duckett, Chief of the Midshire C.I.D. It runs :

  ‘The man you want for the Armitage hold-up is Jerome Fleet, who has the chain of garages that just opened a branch in Comerford. He uses his business for cover and transport. He has a man named Blackie Crowe working for him, also one called Skinner, and Sam Quilley, and a young one they call Con. They were all in the wage-snatch, and they did the fur job, too. I am not sure about his new manager, but think all his men except the locals are crooks. But Fleet is the boss.’

  “Underlined, that last bit. And she signed herself, not too originally: ‘A Well-Wisher ’.”

  He looked up across the paper as he refolded it, and smiled into the amber eyes of a caged tiger. “Isn’t it lucky, Mr. Fleet, that the fair copy survived?”

  The moment of flat silence was broken abruptly by an outburst of loud, rattling, jarring sound from the kitchen, fed by gulping indrawn breaths of pain. It took them a few shocked seconds to realise that it was only Quilley, laughing.

  CHAPTER XIV

  « ^

  In the back of the police car, speeding south down the A.73 south of Cumbernauld New Town, Bunty and Luke sat all but silent, shoulder to shoulder as on the white wicker settee in Louise Alport’s devastated living-room.

  “How am I ever going to face the Alports?” Luke had said, looking round his battle-field despairingly from the weary vantage-point of victory. “Louise will kill me!” So soon do words resume their normal easy and unthinking meaning. And Bunty had consoled him. “They’ll forgive you! On this story they can dine out for life!”

  “Your husband’s on the line, Mrs. Felse,” said the driver. “He’s through Kendal now, it won’t be long. We’ll run off and rendezvous with him at Lockerbie.” And to the radio he said cheerfully: “You know the King’s Arms, in High Street? They’ve got no parking space, but at this hour there’ll be room in the street.”

  “He’ll find it,” said Bunty.

  “You want to speak to him, Mrs. Felse?”

  “Just give him my love,” she said.

  “Your boy’s coming on now, ma’am. He says you cost him twenty-two bob for flowers, and they’ll be dead before you see them.”

  “Tell him half a bottle of Cognac would have kept better.”

  “He says no Cognac, but there’s a bottle of Riccadonna Bianca, though you don’t deserve it.”

  She laughed, and her eyes gushed tears suddenly and briefly. Luke had never seen her in tears. There was always a new snare, a fresh, impossible attraction. Of course, they were crazy for her, those two men of hers rushing north to meet her because waiting was impossible. There would never be anyone like her, never, never, never. And now there wasn’t much time left for him, he could feel the minutes slipping through his fingers like sand, and there was so much to say, so much that he wanted to say properly before he lost her for ever, so much he knew would never be said. There was the police driver, sitting there in front of them impersonal and incurious, but human. And nothing must ever be said of love, however love crowded his thoughts and made his heart faint.

  It was enough, in a way, that she had invited him to go south with her. Naturally she was free to go, and naturally she wanted to reach her family as soon as possible, and return home with them; but he had still certain charges hanging over him, and he could have been held, had not she expressly asked to have him with her, and even punctiliously invited him to go with her, as if he could deny her anything, as if he would willingly have parted with her a moment sooner than he needed. It was enough because it meant that what had happened between them had a validity of its own, present and eternal, for her as well as for him. And in the car, between their few exchanges, she had slept confidingly against his shoulder, even nestled into the shelter of his diffident arm, and settled her cheek against his breast. The journey north, with death on his back and a gun in his hand ready for her, was only twenty-four hours past.

  “I could stay,” he said haltingly. “In Lockerbie, I mean. There’d surely be a room for me, this time of year. I mean, you’ll want… your family… they’ll want you to themselves…”

  “Don’t be silly!” said Bunty warmly. “You’re coming with us. Didn’t I say I wasn’t going home till I could take you with me?”

  “I’m not much of a trophy,” he said, and could not keep all the bitterness out of his tone.

  “You’re not a trophy. You’re my co-victor. Without you there’s no triumph, and I need a triumph. My family are very critical.”

  “I can imagine,” he said, racked with unwilling laughter. And in a moment, very seriously indeed: “You know there are still several counts against me.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s going to be interested in throwing the book at you now,” she said, yawning into his sleeve like a sleepy child. “Not after what we’re bringing them.” It still turned his heart over in a transport of joy and humility when she said “we.”

  “I don’t mind. I shan’t complain. Bunty,” he said shyly, “you’re happy, you’ve got everything. Why were you sad? When you came into the ‘Orion’, why were you so sad?”

  She looked back at that moment with some astonishment, it seemed now so alien and so far away.

  “Sometimes being happy doesn’t seem enough. I was alone,
and I’d stopped being young, and suddenly I didn’t know where I was going or what I was for. It was you,” she said, without calculation, “who cured me.”

  “I did? But I… I don’t see,” he said, trembling, “how I can have been much comfort or reassurance to you!”

  “I didn’t want to be comforted or reassured! I wanted to be used! You had a use for me. Me! Not my husband’s wife or my son’s mother. Me, Bunty!”

  She felt his helpless adoration in the devoted stillness of his body and the agonised tenderness of the arm that held her, and she thought: Poor Luke! No, lucky Luke! Everything rounded off firmly and finally for him, no letdowns afterwards, no waking up gradually to the fact that I’m nearly old enough to be his mother, and it’s beginning to show more grossly every year. No rejections, and no disillusionments. Here he has me for ever. And for ever—no, not young, perhaps, but never more than forty-one! And brave and loyal and good, everything he wants to believe me. When I need that reference to forward to the gods, I shall know where to apply.

  “All my life,” she said, inspired, “I shall remember you and be grateful to you.”

  And he, who had all this time been crying in his heart how he would remember her always, and with eternal gratitude and love, was so disarmed and so perfectly fulfilled by her taking the words out of his heart that he never missed the word she had omitted. So that it did not matter, in the end, that she should wonder whether she had done well to avoid the mention of love. It was not the only word in the language; and as one of the most misused, it was thankful, now and again, for reticence and silence.

  She was asleep in his arm when the car ran off the dual carriage-way and wound its way into the small, handsome town, half asleep at the end of Sunday. The car from the south was there before them, Luke saw the two men standing beside it, heads up, eyes alertly roving, waiting for them to arrive. In the beam of headlights the two faces burned out of the darkness eager, intent, impatient, as was only proper when they were waiting for Bunty; and as the car that brought her to them slipped smartly into a vacant parking spot beside the kerb, Luke saw them both smooth away the residue of wild anxiety out of their eyes, and the tension of longing out of their faces. There is a certain duty to take old love easily, even when it scalds.