Play to the End

by Robert Goddard

  It made no sense. And yet it had to. Colborn was calm and confident. He knew exactly what he was doing. He’d thought of everything. He had a plan. And I was central to it.

  The next words I spoke were, “Is this where your mother came?” We were in a lay-by on a sharp curve in the road along Beachy Head. Beyond a low bank, the ground sloped up ahead of us for less than a hundred yards to the cliff top. It was cold and grey and drizzly, cloud drifting like gunsmoke across the hummocked turf and wind-sculpted patches of gorse, the disused lighthouse on the bluff to the east blurred by the misting fret. There wasn’t another car—another human—in sight.

  “Yes,” said Colborn, in laggardly answer to my question. “Witnesses reported that she sat here in the Jag, engine running, for several minutes, then drove straight up the slope—and over.”

  “If you’re planning some kind of double suicide…”

  “No. Turn the engine off if it’ll reassure you.”

  It did, though not a lot. Silence wrapped itself around us, broken by the mournful wail of the foghorn on the new lighthouse out of our sight at the foot of the cliff.

  “There was no bank round the lay-by when Mother killed herself,” Colborn resumed. “But then it’s only really intended to prevent accidents. You could get over easily enough with a few runs at it. Then it’s a straight drive to a sheer drop of more than five hundred feet. Death guaranteed. It’s a popular spot for suicide. Twenty or so every year. And the number’s climbing. It draws them. The closeness to the road. The certainty. The symbolism. End of land. End of life.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “For you to make a choice, Toby. For you to decide what happens to us—you, me and Jenny.”

  “What choice do I really have? You’re holding the gun.”

  “It’ll be another half an hour at least before Jenny arrives. We have some time. Just enough, in fact.” He stretched forward, opened the glove compartment, took out a pair of thin leather driving gloves and tossed them into my lap. “Put those on.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it. Then I’ll explain.”

  “All right.” I pulled them on. “Now, why?”

  “Because there has to be some way to account for your fingerprints not being on the gun. If it’s ever recovered.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It may have struck you that if Jenny phones Delia—as she well might—she’ll realize I’ve lied to her.”

  “It’s struck me.”

  “Not actually a problem, however, because if Jenny does phone Delia, she won’t be able to speak to her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Delia’s dead, Toby. That’s why not.”

  I looked round at him. “You…” The horror of what he was saying burst into my mind. “You…killed her…when you went back…into the house?”

  “I had to. She knew what I’d done. I mean, she probably knew a long time ago. But this morning she knew without a shadow of a doubt. And with you as an ally, she wouldn’t have let it lie. Believe me. I had no choice. It was her or me. I asked her for the phone number of the Spa Hotel. She’d written it on a Post-it note stuck to a cupboard door in the kitchen. I shot her through the back of the head as she reached up for it. There was a lot of blood. More than I’d expected.” He took something out of his pocket—a small, crumpled piece of bright-red paper—and stuck it to the dashboard: it was the Post-it note; as it curled up, I saw that the back was still the original yellow. “Lucky I was standing out in the hall. I didn’t get a speck on me.”

  “My God.”

  “I left the car engine running so you wouldn’t hear the shot.”

  “You’re mad. You must be. To…murder your aunt.”

  “I don’t feel mad. And it was you who reminded me that she wasn’t really my aunt at all. Besides, I didn’t do it. You did, Toby. You went back in and shot her, then forced me to drive here at gunpoint, phoning Jenny on the way.”

  “No-one will believe that.”

  “I think they will. You intended to kill us both and have Jenny arrive to be confronted by the tragic consequences of rejecting you. But the enormity of what you’d done to Delia got the better of you. You decided at the last moment to spare my life. You let me get out of the car. Then you drove it off the cliff.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “I can’t force you to. But if you don’t, when Jenny arrives…I’ll kill you both.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t let you have her, Toby. There’s no way in this world I’ll allow that. If you try to drag me down, I’ll take us all down.”

  “You said…you love her.”

  “I do. More than life itself.”

  “You are mad.”

  “That’s your opinion. And this is your choice. Prove you love her. By sacrificing yourself to save her. I’ll look after her. I’ll help her get over it. I’ll make her happy. Happier than you ever could. I’ll even keep the tape in a safe and secure place so that one day, after my death, the truth will be uncovered. You’ll be a hero. A posthumous one, it’s true. But a hero none the less.”

  I stared at him, sick with the certainty that he wasn’t bluffing. He’d already killed once. Twice, if you counted his father. He had nothing to lose. If I didn’t take the blame for what he’d done, he’d destroy us all. The offer to salvage my reputation one day was so unlikely it might even be genuine. But we’d both be dead by then, in my case long dead, though probably not forgotten. Abandoning Jenny to a man I knew to be a murderer was a strange way to prove my love for her. Yet the alternative was worse. Only one question mattered. Would he do it? Would he kill her if I refused to co-operate? Would he?

  “What’s it to be, Toby? Death and glory? Or just death?”

  “You said I had a choice.”

  “So you do.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “Should I take that as a yes to death and glory?”

  “Maybe.” It was a yes to something. But to neither of the options he’d presented. I could see only one way out. And it was by no means certain.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said. “Hand over the tape.”

  “I’ll swap it for the gun.”

  “Nice try, Toby. But the gun stays with me. You might reckon killing me is a smarter choice than suicide. Or you might bottle out at the last moment and try to drive away. I can’t risk that.”

  “The police won’t buy your story unless the gun’s found on me.”

  “I’ll drop it over the cliff after you. They’ll conclude it was thrown out on impact.”

  My escape was barred. It had been a frail hope that in truth was no hope at all. “Don’t do this, Roger. Please.”

  “Too late for appeals to my better nature, Toby. Far too late. My mind’s made up. Is yours?”

  “Hold on. Let’s—”

  “No. Let’s nothing. You give me your answer. Now.”

  “All right. I…” His gaze was fixed and unblinking. I took a deep breath. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good. I knew you’d see it my way.”

  “You mean you knew I’d have to.”

  “Exactly. Stop recording now and give me the tape.” He held out his left hand. “The rest…will be silence.”

  Flood, Toby (1953–2002)

  Bland English character actor. Started on the stage, then broke into TV as Hereward the Wake. A few film appearances, but Hollywood did not take to him. He returned to the stage, without his former success. Committed suicide at Beachy Head after murdering a woman in Brighton, where he was performing in a play.

  Some such form of words, from a future edition of Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies, recited itself in my head as I sat at the wheel of Roger Colborn’s Porsche and he climbed slowly out of the passenger seat, closing the door behind him with perfectly judged force. I saw him move away, then stop and look back at me.

  I felt sick. My hand trembled as I reached for the ignition key. My breathing was sh
allow, my pulse racing. My palms were moist with sweat. I cursed Colborn and fate and my own stupidity for finding myself seemingly only a few minutes away from the death he’d arranged for me. I was going to end my life on Colborn’s terms. I had to. Because every alternative was worse. That, apparently, was to be Toby Flood’s quietus.

  I started the engine, clunked the gearstick into reverse and edged back from the bank bounding the lay-by. Tears were fogging my vision now, tears of anger and fear and utter despair. I blinked them away and looked up the slope to the broken, dipping edge of the cliff. Beyond it, I knew, was thin air and the sea far below—a plummet to certain death. “Dear Christ,” I murmured. “What a bloody awful way to go.” I slipped the gearstick into neutral.

  Then I saw movement ahead of me. A figure had emerged from behind one of the clumps of gorse and thorn dotting the slope and was hurrying towards me across the grass. It was a mop-haired man, dressed in duffel-coat, jeans and desert boots. It was Derek Oswin.

  I glanced at Colborn and realized he hadn’t yet seen the approaching figure. I couldn’t even guess what would happen when he did. And I had only a few seconds in which to forestall him. I yanked on the brake and jumped out.

  “What the hell are you doing?” shouted Colborn. “Get back in the car.”

  “We have company, Roger,” I responded as I rounded the bonnet. “You’d better put the gun out of sight.”

  Colborn glanced round and saw at once what I meant. He drew his right arm in close to his side, shielding the gun from Derek’s view. A spasm of cold fury crossed his face and he shot me a glare that implied I was somehow responsible for this apparition.

  “Mr. Flood,” Derek called. “And…Mr. Colborn.” He reached the top of the bank and stood there, looking down at us. He was breathing hard, his cheeks flushed from exertion. “I th-th-thought…I’d f-find you here.”

  “Where have you been these past few days, Derek?” I asked. “I’ve missed you.”

  “A…guesthouse in Bognor Regis. Very…r-reasonably p-priced…at this time of the year. I’m…sorry if I…caused you any…anxiety.”

  “You trashed your house yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I…m-messed it up a little, it’s…true.”

  “Stole my tapes.”

  “B-borrowed them…Mr. Flood.”

  “And stole the manuscript from my agent.”

  “R-reclaimed.”

  “I told you,” said Colborn, in a steely undertone.

  “Why?” I asked softly, the anger I should have felt at being manipulated by Derek Oswin supplanted by a steadily growing hope that his intervention might somehow save the day.

  “To…see what would happen.”

  “‘See what would happen’?”

  “But I…think I went too far.”

  “That, Derek, is the understatement of the century.”

  “It’s a b-bit early to say, d-don’t you think…Mr. Flood? W-with…ninety-eight years st-still to go…I mean.”

  “How did you know we’d be here?”

  “I d-didn’t. Not for certain. It was just…a hunch. I’ve been ch-checking the house each day…to see if you’d discovered the t-tape in the globe. I must…have just missed you this morning. When I found the tape was gone, I knew you were on the last lap. Thanks for pinning Captain Haddock back on my coat, Mr. Flood.” He was talking more confidently now, the stutters and hesitations fading. “I went to see Uncle Ray, to find out if you’d spoken to him…about Dad…and Mrs. Colborn.” Slowly, as Derek continued, Roger Colborn turned to look at him, crooking his arm behind his back to obscure the gun. “He told me you’d gone to see Mrs. Sheringham, so I got him to drive me round there. P-Powis Villas was cordoned off by the police. There’d been a m-murder. Of Mrs. Sheringham…one of the neighbours said. She’d seen Mr. Sheringham, looking…very upset. And a P-Porsche had been spotted…driving away. Well, I knew what that meant. I g-guessed…Mr. Colborn…would bring you here…b-because of his mother. I left Uncle Ray…in the car park…at the Visitor Centre.” He nodded in the direction of the building whose roof I could just make out through the murk on the eastern skyline. “I…suppose, logically, I shouldn’t have come. I mean, you could argue my plan’s…worked out b-better than I could ever have hoped.”

  “Go on, then,” said Roger. “Argue that.”

  “Well, you’re…finished, aren’t you…Mr. Colborn?” For the first time, Derek was addressing his half-brother directly. “I’ve b-brought you down.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked if you’d stayed away, Derek,” I said, edging closer to Colborn. “He’d devised a way to pin the murder on me. After I’d conveniently driven off the cliff.”

  Derek blinked at me in surprise. And then at Colborn. “R-really?”

  “Yes,” said Roger. “Really.”

  “That’s t-terrible. I’d…” Derek looked back at me. “I’d n-never…have let him…get away with that…Mr. Flood.”

  “No,” said Roger. “I don’t suppose you would. Which makes your arrival here…quite fortuitous.”

  I saw the decision taking shape in the sudden tensing of Colborn’s face. He could still pull it off, by blaming a second murder on me, one that only increased his chances of laying the first at my door as well. He swivelled to face Derek, swinging the gun out from behind him and taking his eyes off me as he did so.

  I slammed into his midriff in a stooping charge, capitalizing on the only advantage I had: weight. I caught him off balance and he fell. The gun went off with a deafening crack close to my left ear. We hit the tarmac hard. For the moment, I could hear even less than I could see. I looked up in desperate search of Derek. And there he was in front of me, hopping down the bank and bending to grab the gun which had slipped from Colborn’s grasp as we fell.

  “Run,” I shouted. And Derek did run, back up the bank and away across the grass towards the cliff, the gun clutched by the barrel in his right hand.

  Then Colborn’s elbow struck me hard under the chin, hurling me sideways with my tongue viced agonizingly between my teeth. I rolled onto my back, then struggled up to see Colborn already over the bank, racing in pursuit of Derek. I scrambled to my feet and headed after them.

  They were about ten yards apart and stayed that way, fear offsetting for Derek any edge Colborn’s greater athleticism should have given him. They were running hard across the wet turf, following a beeline to the edge of the cliff. My lungs strained as I followed them, my chest tightening, my left ear ringing. I could hear nothing except my own panting breaths, could see nothing but the two figures ahead of me, one in black, one in brown, moving like fleet ghosts in the thickening fret.

  Derek came to a stumbling halt a few feet short of the edge and tossed the gun over. Then he turned to face Colborn, who’d stopped in the same instant, those vital ten yards behind. But I kept running.

  Derek was smiling. He opened his mouth and spoke, but I couldn’t catch the words. Whether Roger said anything in reply I had no way of telling. He glanced back over his shoulder at me, judging my distance, measuring his moment. Then he turned and ran straight at Derek.

  Derek’s only chance was to run away from the edge, towards Roger. But he shrank back, if anything, closer to the edge. Maybe he hadn’t realized what Roger’s final way out of all his problems was to be. Or maybe he had realized. Maybe that was why he didn’t try to evade his brother’s embrace.

  They went over together, Roger’s arms wrapped round Derek’s waist, the momentum of his charge carrying them out a yard or so into the grey void before they began to fall.

  They were still together when I reached the edge. I dropped, gasping, to my knees and watched the few remaining seconds of their descent.

  They struck the foot of the cliff and rolled apart down the beach. The sea lapped in around them. And retreated, foaming red.

  That was then. This is now. Late. Very late. Too late, for Derek Oswin and Delia Sheringham. And for Roger Colborn too. Three deaths. And every one of them could have be
en mine.

  Late, like I said. But still too early to impose a strict order on the events that followed that double fall from the cliff. I remember the lighthouse offshore, banded the colours of blood and chalk; the cliff face, pale as bleached bone; the seagulls, muted by my deafness, gliding wraithlike in and out of the mist; and Derek’s strange, triumphant smile. I remember all those things. Their clarity seems to grow, indeed, as much else fades.

  I flagged down a car and the driver called the police on his mobile. He ferried me the short distance to the Visitor Centre, where I found Ray Braddock waiting patiently for his godson to return. I can’t recall how I broke the news to him, nor how he reacted. He was sitting in his car, hunched at the wheel, staring straight ahead, when I walked away.

  I returned to the lay-by and waited by the Porsche for Jenny. Maybe it was just as well, in the circumstances, that the police arrived before she did.

  Initially, it was just one patrol car. The two policemen in it got the message in the end that this was no routine suicide and contacted Brighton CID. A coastguard crew followed and surveyed the scene down on the beach from the cliff top. They started to set up some sort of derrick preparatory to winching down with stretchers to recover the bodies.

  Then Jenny did arrive. Exactly what the police told her I couldn’t catch. Whatever it was, she clearly couldn’t take it all in at first. The officers tried to keep us apart. I remember the look on her face as she stared at me between their broad shoulders across the lay-by. She probably still thought Roger had been telling the truth when he phoned her from the car. She probably thought I was mad. She started shouting. “What have you done?” And crying. “What have you done?”

  Two more police cars arrived. I was bundled into one of them and driven to Eastbourne General Hospital. On the way, I noticed that my ear had been bleeding. I was fast-tracked through Casualty and into a cubicle, a burly policeman in attendance. A young doctor looked me over. He pronounced the eardrum intact and said my hearing would slowly recover over the next twenty-four hours. It already was recovering, in fact, though shock prevented the improvement doing much for my coherence.