by Gil North
“Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
“I’ve tried,” he said. “To keep Gunnarshaw from knowing. It’s all I’m guilty of.”
“Did you think at first you were free? Did you believe you were safe at last when you heard of her death?”
He couldn’t argue with her.
“I’m glad,” she said.
“I paid,” he replied. “I’d have gone on paying—”
She said, “It’s better than I’d hoped for. You’ve played into my hands, into Cluff’s hands. You’ve put the seal on your own destruction.”
He didn’t know what she was talking about. It meant nothing to him that, for some unknown reason, she was opening the door of a wardrobe. The clothes and the shoes she hurled across the room to fall at his feet mystified him. The stick she took from the wardrobe after them puzzled him beyond measure. She held the thick, tapering ebony near the ferrule. “Those,” she accused, glancing at the suit and the shoes on the carpet, “yours. This—yours.” She thrust at him with the intricately carved, rounded ivory head of the stick, his father’s stick, a family heirloom, known in Gunnarshaw. He gazed at the stains in the crevices of the carving. “It’s enough,” she said. “They’re clever these days. Nobody’s even attempted to clean it.”
She savoured her triumph. He lived through a thousand lifetimes.
“These,” she added. “And what else I can tell them. The blackmail you can’t deny. The ruin that faced you if Gunnarshaw found out. The time I told Cluff you came in that night—”
“You can’t know when she was killed!”
“The money in her handbag, the money you’d given her—”
“Who told you?”
She laughed again: “Your letter—”
“I never wrote to her.”
“Wasn’t it yours? Never mind.”
He whispered, not to her but to himself, thinking of Jean on the road, a little while ago, his flight from Cluff and Barker, “There’s no way out now.”
“None,” she said. “There never was.”
“Tell them it isn’t true.”
“You ask that? From me? After our life together?”
Chapter XII
The trunks of the pine trees soared black into the black night. The bulk of the house rose threatening. Cluff walked as if the gravel was eggs. Clive whimpered once, the whimper hardly audible.
“Stay, boy! Stay!” Cluff said, pointing to a spot under the trees.
He rounded the gable end of the house. The drive expanded into a wider area, flagged. He made no more noise on the flags than he had done on the gravel.
He listened. The wind soughed in the trees. Rain dripped from the branches. The wind and the rain silenced the more distant sounds of Gunnarshaw. Only a lessening of the dark over the roof, the reflection of its lights on low cloud, denoted the presence nearby of a town.
He groped for the handle of the kitchen door. He turned the handle and pushed. The door swung inward at his touch. The red eye of a dying fire winked at him from the grate. He looked at her legs, protruding from behind the table, regretting a little the time he had had to spend with Jean on the road, those other minutes he had wasted, purposely, in the drive after Barker in the car had disappeared down the hill on his way to Balaclava Street with Jean.
He knelt by the old woman. She wasn’t dead. He thought Greensleeve, coming by the fields, couldn’t have been much ahead of him.
He went into the passage, his ears cocked, making no sound. He stood in the hall, looking about, through an open door into a dark room, at other doors closed, with no hint of light in the cracks between them and their frames.
The stairs turned back on themselves halfway up. He stepped on the inner edges of the treads, testing each one before he put his full weight on it to make sure it didn’t creak and betray him. He stopped briefly at the head of the stairs, warned by a murmur of voices. He redoubled his caution, tiptoeing along the landing.
He had the knob in his grip. Words came to him in snatches. He released the knob and put his ear to the white-painted panel. He stayed where he was, listening.
Greensleeve sat on his wife’s bed. She seemed to tower above him. She still had the stick in her hand. She pointed with the stick at the suit and the shoes.
She said, “I wore them.”
His head drooped lower. His fingers scratched at the eiderdown. He didn’t remember crossing from the door to the bed.
Her voice trembled with the intensity of the hate she had for him. “I followed you that night,” she went on. “I’ve often followed you. I knew what you were going to do.”
He said, “It was Carter I was afraid of when I saw her with him. I thought she must have told Carter what there was between her and me.”
She demanded, “How long is it since we slept together? When have I been up at night waiting for you to come in? When did you ever come to my room before you went to yours?”
“You were out,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him, “when I got back. I didn’t know.”
“I had to wait,” she told him, “until I was sure you and the old woman were asleep. In the garden. It was cold.”
“And Jean,” he mused. “Not you,” he said to his wife. “Never you.”
“I was always the last one you thought of.”
He asked quietly, “Did you kill her?”
She flung at him, “You killed her. It’s all proved, up to the hilt. Even a man like Cluff must see it.”
“Cluff made up his mind from the start.”
“I saw you,” she said, “going into the Town Hall. I saw her. I watched her in your car till you came. I saw you drive away with her.”
“She made me go. She said Carter would marry her if I made it worth their while.”
“I knew where you’d drop her,” his wife said. “Which way she had to come to get back to Rupert Street. What else did you promise her to make her do that on such a night? How much more did she want so that you wouldn’t have to risk being seen driving her through the centre of the town?”
He said, “It was something else every day.”
“I saw the money,” she said. “I hadn’t time to read the letter. I heard somebody coming.”
“Would you really have gone through with it?”
“In your clothes,” she taunted him. “After she’d been with you in the car. With your stick.”
“If it had been anyone else but you—”
“My word against yours. They’ll never believe you, not when they know about you and her.”
“You’ve been clever.”
“It was you I wanted to get rid of.”
He asked, “Where are you going?”
“To telephone.”
“Don’t!”
“You’re a fool. It’s either you or me.”
“Please!”
“You’re not poor. I deserve something in life after you’re gone—”
She looked back at him, triumphant. He was on his feet. She opened her mouth and lifted the stick, suddenly afraid, regretting that she hadn’t been able to resist gloating over him, that she couldn’t have prevented herself from making it clear beyond doubt, while she could, who he had to thank for what would happen to him. She couldn’t believe, he had been so crushed and broken, that he was reaching for her.
He grabbed at the stick. She fought for the stick and he tore it from her hand, simply, with an incredible, effortless strength. He lifted the stick to strike her.
She stared into his eyes. She began to scream.
Her screams mingled with the sound of a car engine in the drive outside. Barker, switching off the engine, heard the screams as he jumped out of the car. He glimpsed Cluff’s dog, sitting on its haunches on the grass border, waiting for a word of release. He didn’t stop to speak to the dog.
; He didn’t stop either in the kitchen, where the old woman was beginning to stir on the floor. He ran along the passage, up the stairs, on to the landing, tracking the screams to their origin, concerned for Cluff.
Cluff stood by the closed door of a bedroom. He had his hand on the knob of the door but he wasn’t making any effort to open the door.
Barker said breathlessly, “Is it locked? Let me try to break it in.”
Cluff looked round at him.
The screams ended abruptly.
Cluff shook himself. “I should have gone in,” Cluff said.
“What—?” Barker started.
Cluff said, “I couldn’t have told a tale like that in a court of law. She’d still have had him. There’s Jean and the old woman. In any case, he’d have had nothing to live for once his affair with Jane Trundle came out.”
He took his hand away from the door knob.
He added, “What other way was there? She’d never have admitted it. How could they have convicted her?” He said, “Who am I to interfere? The guilt was his just as much as hers.”
“Sergeant,” Barker pleaded, hurrying after Cluff.
“He won’t run away again,” Cluff said.
Barker heard the bedroom door opening. He looked back, past Greensleeve in the doorway, holding a stick, its head bloody, at Greensleeve’s wife crumpled on the bed, her skull broken.
Cluff went down the stairs. Barker stood helplessly between the departing Cluff and the advancing Greensleeve. Greensleeve held the stick out. Greensleeve said, “You’ll want it as evidence.”
Barker took the stick. He stepped out of Greensleeve’s way. “She’s dead,” Greensleeve said dispassionately. “It doesn’t matter about Jane Trundle. They’ll only try me once. This murder’s the simplest.”
Barker said, “Wait—”
“In the sitting-room,” Greensleeve said. “I can’t stay up here with her.”
“Sergeant! Sergeant!” Barker was shouting again, torn between Greensleeve in a room off the hall, Cluff in the kitchen at the end of the passage.
Cluff was lifting the old woman. “You’ll be all right,” he was saying. “They’ll send for a doctor.” He put her in a chair.
“Sergeant!”
“There’s a phone in the hall,” Cluff replied. “Ring for Mole.”
“If he escapes?”
“He’s a chemist. It’s up to him.”
“But—”
Cluff shrugged: “I’ll stay till they come then.”
Uniformed constables followed Mole out of the police car. Cluff, in the drive, said, “In there. Barker’s with him.”
“You’ve done it again,” Mole exclaimed. “How did you get on to it, Caleb?”
Cluff said, “His wife’s upstairs. Look after the old woman.”
He whistled to Clive. He set off along the drive. Someone was running after him. Barker called out, “The Inspector’s in charge.”
Cluff turned into the road, up the hill. He murmured, “I’ll let Patterson know.”
He didn’t invite Barker to accompany him. Barker watched him in the light of the lamps in the road. Clive kept close to the Sergeant’s heels. Barker could see the broad back and the shapeless trousers under the ancient Burberry, the heavy boots and the old tweed hat. The white patches on the dog’s fur stood out in the night.
Barker stepped aside to let the car pass. The car stopped at the turn out of the drive. “I’m taking him to the station,” the driver shouted, out of his window. Two men, a burly constable and Greensleeve, sat in the back.
The driver said, “Mole’s still there. You’ll be staying with the Sergeant until they get her away?”
Barker kept quiet.
The driver let the clutch in and moved forward. He added, before he was too far away for Barker to hear, “Where’s the Sergeant got to, anyway?”
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