The Tiger In the Smoke
Page 29
He found he could only just see her. She looked tall and quiet and the power in her was greater than his power because he was so tired.
‘You’ve broken your knife, too,’ she was saying, not realizing how it sounded. ‘Anyway, let me square up with you for that.’
He still stood before her, unaware that he was not terrible. He could see her bag and guessed that it contained at most a few thousand francs. There was her coat, of course, which looked all right if he only had somewhere handy to flog it. Her hands were so covered with the plaster that he could not see if her ring, and she only wore one, was any good or imitation.
He shook his head and motioned to her to move. He did not want to have to touch her, because he needed all the strength he possessed and time was short. All the same he thought he would smash the doll. There might be something in it and it would be a satisfaction anyhow. The girl was still sitting there like a fool, and he let her have it.
‘Get up!’
She seemed to be much farther from him than he had thought, for the blow missed her entirely and all but overbalanced him. Her sudden laughter was the most terrible sound he had ever heard, for he knew what she was going to say a fraction of a second before he heard the words.
‘You look like the little boy next door, Johnny Cash, who took my toy theatre and tore it up to get the glitter out of it, and got nothing, poor darling, but old bits of paper and an awful row. Do lie down. Then you’ll feel better.’
Old bits of paper, yellow and red and thick tinny gold, lying on the coalshed floor. A cardboard horse on which the colours were running. His best shirt covered with dye. And outside the locked door, Nemesis thundering on the boards. It was not even a new mistake. He had made it before.
He turned from her blindly, shambled across the floor, and staggered out into the airless garden, yellow and overgrown and reeking with its strange bitter smell.
Now the whole hillside was alive with noise, and from down on the rocks hoarse exclamations floated up as men, whose very tongue sounds excited to Anglo-Saxon ears, fished for a pallid body in shallow water.
The man who fled lurched against the door into the courtyard. It did not give becaus it opened the other way, and that was lucky for him. He heard a footstep on the stones within and had just time to drop down behind a dark bush beside the post before the door swung inwards and Luke, followed by his opposite number from the Sûreté, came charging through on his way to the ice-house.
At the same moment the Talbot and a police car raced each other into the yard.
Havoc edged a step backwards, missing his footing, and rolled over into a ditch which had been completely hidden by the long grasses. His luck was persisting. It had never failed him since he had found its key. Where he directed, so it led him safely.
It was soft and cool in the ditch and he could have slept where he lay, but he resisted the temptation and crawled on a foot or so to find that an old conduit pipe, quite large enough to take his emaciated body, passed under the wall and out on to the open hilltop.
As he emerged, lifting his head wearily amid the weeds, he discovered that the cover continued. He was in a disused waterway, a deep narrow fold in the open plain with the house to his left. He could stand in it, even, without his head showing above the dry grass on its edges.
Behind him the noise and commotion, the shouting and the signals from cliff to beach, were all receding, and as he stumbled painfully on they grew fainter.
He could not tell where he was going and the curve in the hollow was so gradual that he was never aware of it. He moved blindly and emptily, asking no questions, going nowhere save away.
The ditch wound round towards the cliff edge where the coast was deeply indented, as if the sea had one day taken a single bite out of the rocky wall. The tiny bay thus made was now almost three parts of a circle, and, long before, falling water draining off the land had worn deep sides to a pool two hundred feet below.
Havoc paused. The great beam which had been let into the bank on either side to save any unfortunate animal swept away by the rains supported him at breast height, and he hung there for some minutes looking down.
Beyond the bay the sea was restless, scarred by long shadows and pitted with bright flecks where the last of the winter sun had caught it. But the pool was quiet and very still.
It looked dark. A man could creep in there and sleep soft and long.
It seemed to him that he had no decision to make and, now that he knew himself to be fallible, no one to question. Presently he let his feet slide gently forward. The body was never found.
THE END
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Copyright © Margery Allingham Limited, a Chorion company, 1952
Introduction copyright © Susan Hill, 2015
Margery Allingham has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage in 2015
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