by Gil North
Margaret saw the car go past. She said into the telephone, “But I’ve just been to her home in Balaclava Street. She hasn’t been back since she left the shop.”
Margaret listened.
Margaret went on, “She’d something to tell you. The Inspector came to the shop this afternoon, looking for you. She’d been to the police-station. You weren’t there.”
Margaret replaced the receiver. She came out of the kiosk and the man outside brushed past her and shut himself in. Margaret stayed on the pavement, in the light, close to the kiosk, making quite certain that the road was empty. She lived in Sevastopol Road, only a few doors away.
Chapter X
Greensleeve’s foot pressed hard on the accelerator. He roared up the High Street, past the church. He couldn’t think of any other way to take.
His speed increased, his own garden on one side of him, the house where he lived, in which his wife was always waiting for him. He wasn’t thinking of his house or of his wife. He had no intention of stopping.
A figure leapt into the road, from the entrance to his drive, waving its arms, long skirt flapping round its calves, a shawl slipping from its shoulders, muffled and wrapped like a mummy. He recognized it just in time.
The car lurched. Its tail swung, grazing the stone wall, metal screeching. The face at the window by his side grimaced. He mumbled, weak with shock. He could hear a spate of words, making no sense. After a while he recovered sufficiently to say, “I nearly killed you—”
She didn’t listen to him. The violence of the explanation he hadn’t taken in set her coughing. A paroxysm of coughing convulsed her. She held to the car, bent double, fighting to regain her breath.
She gasped, choking, “Cluff was here. I’ve been trying to get you at the shop. Cluff was asking about you. Cluff wanted to know where you were on the night of the murder.”
He opened his mouth to protest, refusing to believe her.
“She lied,” the old woman managed. “She lied deliberately. I’ve been waiting here in the rain. I’m not fit to be out. I’ve caught my death.”
“Lied?” he said, mystified.
“It wasn’t after ten,” the woman said. “It wasn’t much after nine. I heard you. I heard the car.”
He stiffened, rigid, sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“Cluff believed it. Cluff wouldn’t listen to me,” the old woman sobbed. “What are they trying to do to you?”
The car rocked, its rear bumper caught in a crevice in the wall. The offside back wheel, where the car was on the wrong side of the road, spun in the cavity of a drain, polishing the bars of its grating. Another car drew up behind him. Greensleeve thought a voice asked, “Are you in trouble?”
He let the car take charge. Metal protested shrilly. Metal buckled and rent. The tyres gripped. He leapt forward with a jolt, trying to control his sudden freedom. Lights coming down the hill dazzled him. He flung an arm across his eyes. Somebody screamed.
Up the hill, racing, on to the level road at the top, down the incline to the hollow. No houses now. No lights except the dancing twin beams of his headlights. Cluff sneaking into the shop. Cluff sneaking into his house. Cluff badgering his assistants. Cluff putting lies into his wife’s mouth. Cluff’s spies everywhere. Cluff weaving a shroud to fold him in. Cluff a spider in the middle of his web, watchful, inexorably patient, calm, waiting for Jean. Why? Why? Why?
Wind whistled past Greensleeve’s ears. Rain drenched him through the window he had neglected to close.
The girl ran like a rabbit in his headlights, frantic, from this side of the road to that. She gained the grass verge. She jumped the ditch awkwardly. She was too big for the hedge. The hedge was too thick for her to break through.
He was running himself, the door of his car swinging in the wind, the lights of the car blazing, the car in the middle of the road behind him. He knew he was shouting. She’d abandoned her attempt to penetrate the hedge. She stumbled in the shadow of the hedge, head down, shoulders bent, arms pressed close to her sides. If his pleas carried to her above the noise of the night, the thumping of her blood in her ears, she paid no attention to his pleas. His heart swelled to bursting. He realized too late that he should never have left the car, that he should have driven past her and come back down the hill to meet her. Too late for that. Too late now. He could make out, as she could, a gap in the hedge, the vague outline of a gate into the pasture behind the hedge. The night was dark, no moon or stars. Once out of the range of his headlights, in the blackness of the fields, he’d lose her. He couldn’t keep this up. The distance between them was increasing already. If her fear equalled his, fear lending wings to them both, she had the advantage of him in years.
The edge of the ditch crumbled. She staggered, clutching the empty air. He called on his last resources, his panting mingling with hers. She toppled forward on to her face, evading in her fall his outstretched hands. He had a dim impression of her squirming and twisting and he was collapsing too, on top of her, into her warm softness.
He lay there. He couldn’t get up. Someone was talking, begging. Someone was screaming. The words might have been his, the screams hers. He couldn’t tell.
The words went on. The screams stopped. She quietened beneath him. His hands caressed rounded, smooth flesh. He could feel a pulse beating in her throat. They lay there eternally, time relative, all silence now, each moment a lifetime, bodies pressed together, throbbing, all other motion stopped, each of them waiting.
He moved first, rolling away. He struggled to his hands and knees, his chest heaving, his head lolling. He didn’t know where the sounds were coming from. He’d no breath left. She wasn’t making these noises.
The road cut a line across the sky, at the top of the hill, blacker below, less black above. Black shapes breasted the crest, outlined, shrinking from the feet up. Weary beyond measure he hauled himself upright. He stared down at the inert girl, sorry for her, sorry for himself. He could hear a dog barking.
He ran again. He had to run, in the shelter of the hedge as she had run, but downhill, in the direction of his car, trying to keep out of the track of its lights. The dog at his heels spurred him on. The skin of his back crawled in anticipation of the dog’s teeth. He could hear, “Clive! Clive!”
A wave of dark engulfed him, past the car. He’d no time to jump for the car, no time to start its engine, no time to avoid with the help of the car the shouting men pounding after him. He swerved, with the inspiration of despair, behind the car, across the road. By a miracle the hedge on that side thinned. A short stretch of fencing blocked his way. He could make out the rails of the fence broken, sagging from its posts. He flung himself into the muddy grass, worming under the rails.
Barker, blinded by the sudden transition from light to dark, chased on down the road. The dog had passed as well, too excited to note how his quarry had doubled.
Greensleeve, hidden, silent in the fields, went on drunkenly. He splashed through a stream. The legs of his trousers clung to his calves. Water squelched in his shoes at each tottering step he took. Sometimes he slowed almost to a stop. Sometimes he trotted a few stumbling paces before his palpitating, aching limbs forced him to slow again. His head seemed about to explode. He couldn’t see the ground. He pushed through hedges that barred his way or climbed clumsily over walls, barking his shins, skinning his hands, bringing top-stones down in his wake. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know what he’d done. He couldn’t think of anything except Jean underneath him, Jean still, and his fingers tensing.
Cluff, on one knee, lifted her in his arms. Barker’s feet rattled on the road against the background of Clive’s barks.
His hands touched her gently, groping for signs of life. Her head rolled and he pressed her closer in his arms to steady her. She stirred briefly. He propped her against his thigh and struggled out of his Burberry, wrapping her in it. He stayed very
still, not moving.
He heard feet ringing again on the metalled road, slowly, with a heavy, hopeless tread. He looked up. He felt the nudging of Clive’s muzzle. Barker, conquered, appeared in the light from the car.
Barker said, “I lost him. I went as far as the first houses. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen.”
Rain slanted in the beams of the headlights. Rain fountained on the shiny, black road.
“It’s Greensleeve’s car,” Barker said.
She moved a second time. Her eyes stared up into his face, the lids fluttering over them. Her lips compressed and parted. He bent his head closer to her, his ear near her mouth, striving to hear her whispers. She fought against him, her strength returning, and he restrained her, quietening her fear little by little.
“He’s gone,” Cluff said. “You’re safe now.”
Her writhing stopped. She lay back, letting her body sag. He gained his feet without letting her go and supported her to the car.
“How—?” she began.
“Margaret,” Cluff said.
“I was coming to you. I couldn’t find you in the town. I waited and waited—”
“I’ll take you home.”
“I didn’t dare go home till I’d found you. My parents—I walked out of the shop.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She straightened in the seat by the driving-wheel. She put out a hand and got hold of Cluff’s sleeve, where he was standing in the road by the open door. “I saw them,” she said.
“Greensleeve and Jane Trundle?”
“One evening when I went back. I’d forgotten—my compact, a glove, I can’t remember—in the cloakroom behind the dispensary. I knew he was still there, that she was with him. I didn’t think. I knocked at the dispensary door. The shop was dark, only a line of light under the door into the dispensary. It didn’t occur to me. I opened the door—” She covered her face with her hands.
Barker’s feet scraped on the road.
“What will happen to him?” the girl asked, and Cluff sighed.
“I couldn’t believe that he’d killed her,” Jean said.
Neither Barker nor Cluff contradicted her.
“I wasn’t sure,” Jean added. “I thought sometimes I must have dreamed it.”
“It was real,” Cluff said.
“He never mentioned it. I told no one except Margaret.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Jean asked in a low voice, not looking at the Sergeant, “She was his mistress?” She read the answer in Cluff’s face. She said, “I tried to think it hadn’t anything to do with her murder. I couldn’t decide. If it hadn’t and I’d told—If people in Gunnarshaw got to know.”
“He was more afraid of that than of anything.”
Cluff nodded to Barker. Barker walked round the car to the driving-seat.
Jean murmured, “He began to talk about Jack Carter. Everyone was talking about Carter. Margaret said—I had to tell you then.”
Cluff got into the back of the car. He called Clive in after him. Barker turned the car in the gateway Jean had never been able to reach in her flight from Greensleeve. They drove back along the road towards Gunnarshaw.
“Stop!” Cluff ordered.
He stood beside the car, halted up the hill a couple of hundred yards from Greensleeve’s drive. Barker switched off the engine. Cluff shook his head. He said, “Take Jean home.”
Barker started to object.
“She’s had enough for one night,” Cluff said.
“You’ll wait for me to come back?” Barker pressed him anxiously.
“He might not be in there.”
“Where else?”
Cluff was already moving down the road in front of the car. Barker reached back for the rear door Cluff had shut behind him. He opened the door and let Clive out.
When the car drove past Cluff, picking up speed, man and dog were walking together.
Chapter XI
He came from the fields, into the garden on the side of the house away from the road. The old woman at the table in the kitchen, her arms on the table, her head lying on her arms, roused herself and looked up. He saw the horror in her face as she gazed at him. She pulled herself to her feet, holding to the table, her mouth gaping, her eyes wide.
He ignored the old woman, aware of her and yet not aware of her, as familiar to him as a piece of furniture. He crossed the kitchen, making for the door in its opposite wall. He was surprised to find the old woman in front of him, her arms outstretched. This additional obstacle irritated him, goading him beyond endurance.
Her lips moved. He could see her toothless gums. Her thin grey hair hung in wisps over her eyes. She wouldn’t get out of his way. “No,” the old woman said. “No.”
Greensleeve couldn’t follow. He wrenched at her arms. He tore her arms away. “Go to Cluff,” the old woman was begging. “Tell Cluff everything. It’s your only chance.”
She clung to him, fighting him. “Cluff,” she breathed. “Cluff! Don’t you see yet?”
He disentangled himself again from her grip. She wouldn’t leave him alone. She wouldn’t understand. As often as he pushed her away she returned to the attack, hindering him, wasting his precious time, her words more incoherent, less and less intelligible. He thought he heard, “That devil!” but he wasn’t paying attention, his mind elsewhere. “That devil! That devil!” she repeated, her voice seeming to come from very far away.
He didn’t think. He brushed her aside. She tottered, off balance, and clutched at a chair. He clenched his fist and hit her as hard as he could, his blow falling on her neck. He continued to the door from which she had separated him, relieved to be rid of her. He didn’t notice that her fingers let go of the chair, that she slid to the floor and lay still.
His wife, her hands in her lap, sat quietly in the sitting-room. She stared into space with an expression half vacant, half cunning, her mind planning, mapping the progress of her plot, the room dark, unlit, no fire burning in the grate. Little by little she grew conscious of the disturbance in the kitchen. She smiled to herself. She moved slowly, into a wide hall, feeling for a light-switch. She depressed the switch. A low-powered bulb came on, lighting the hall dimly.
Stairs mounted to the upper storey, broad, like the hall thickly carpeted. By the side of the stairs, between them and the wall, a passage led back to the kitchen.
She strolled nonchalantly, over the floor of the hall to where the passage began. She put a hand on the newel post, standing at the bottom of the stairs, leaning comfortably, perfectly at ease. Her husband swayed at the end of the passage, framed in the kitchen doorway.
She watched him, calmly, making no effort to go to him. Her eyes glinted but her face gave away nothing of the exultation she felt boiling inside her.
He bore no resemblance to the neat, well-brushed, well-groomed Greensleeve who had left that morning, as every morning, without a word of farewell. His hand on the wall smeared the wallpaper with a brown patch. He had lost his hat and the rain had plastered his hair to his skull, matting it down on his forehead, revealing more clearly the expanding baldness on his crown he so carefully trained his hair to conceal. His coat, disreputable and earth-stained, hung open, one of its buttons and the cloth where the button had been sewn torn off. A second button dangled from a thread, swinging to the motion of his body. His trousers were caked with mud. Mud covered his sodden, disintegrating shoes. Rents split his clothing where rusty nails in the fences he had climbed had snatched at it. His face was smudged. His hands were bleeding. He was filthy, daubed with dirt from head to feet. He looked at her with an expression she had never seen before, admitting his defeat, surrendering to her.
She prayed for his legs to fail him. She wanted fiercely to see him crawling to her on his hands and knees, reaching for her legs, bending his head to kiss her feet. She read her n
ame in the silent movement of his lips, his plea for help.
He let go of the wall. He drove himself forward, stumbling, hardly able to keep himself up. She let him come. His eyes fixed on her, unwinking, drawing from her strength to continue. She had only to put out a hand and she could have touched him.
She stared back at him. Intentionally, spurning him, she half-turned. She started to go up the stairs. He grabbed at the newel post to save himself. He rotated round it and lay stretched on the bottom steps of the flight of stairs. “I didn’t kill her,” he was muttering.
She walked, giving him time to follow, along the landing, past the doors on either side of her, to the door of her own room at the far end of the landing. She opened the door and turned to face him. “No,” she said, “You killed me.”
She went to him. She dragged and pulled him into the bedroom. Inside she thrust him suddenly away. He fell backwards against the open door, his weight pushing it closed. He went with it, leaning against it, breathing heavily, resting, waiting until he recovered something of his strength.
She eyed him from the middle of the room, by her bed. “I knew,” she told him, with a scorn that crushed him. “Did you imagine you could keep it from Cluff?” Only the door at his back kept him on his feet.
“Forgive me,” he managed at last.
She laughed: “Will Gunnarshaw forgive you? Will Gunnarshaw forget?”
He sobbed, “I couldn’t bear it—”
“Everything gone,” she taunted. “For her! Your fine importance. Your cherished position. Your dignity. Your reputation. The respect they had for you.”
“Is it too late?”
“The idol overturned. The mighty fallen—”
He said, wonderingly, “But I didn’t kill her,” repeating his denial.
“Who will believe you?”
“It’s true,” he insisted.