Ruthless in All

by Jessica Steele

  'But you're going away tomorrow!'

  Arden went to bed that night inwardly seething with impotent fury. As J. Stephens Esquire hadn't been slow to point out, from tomorrow onwards it would be just her and him!

  Typically, her aunt had again said that she would delay going to Matlock. But she couldn't allow that. Aside from the Colonel's arrangements still standing, and her not wanting her aunt to miss the chance of a lift, the harping Brownings would complain loud and long if Louise altered the arrangements at this late stage. One thing for sure, though—once that week was over, that smooth-talking rattlesnake in the green room was out, if she had to put him out herself!

  Colonel Meredith, looking pleased with life, was there on hand the following morning to stow her aunt's luggage with military precision into the boot of his car. And having everything plotted, it was with that same precision that he handed Arden the key to his cottage, the key all neatly labelled with a full address in case she couldn't remember the place it was near with its multitude of double 'L's'.

  'That's everything, Louise, I think,' he said, giving her a smiling look as he attentively tucked a car rug around her knees, then closed the passenger door and went round to the driver's side of his car.

  'I've given Mr Stephens his breakfast,' repeated Louise to her niece through the open window. The last meal in Arden's view he was getting delivered—if he wanted to eat, he could jolly well come down to the dining room!

  'Have a lovely time,' she said, seeing that the Colonel was ready to start up.

  From her aunt's bleak look, Arden could see that she had little hope of the month in front of her being lovely, but Louise forced a smile, and as though looking for something brighter to pin her thoughts on, she squeezed Arden's hand through the open window as Colonel Meredith put the car into gear, her thoughts far away from Matlock, as she said:

  'We'll set about redecorating every room when we both get back.'

  Arden kept her smile in place as she waved until the car was out of sight. Aunt Louise would need something to cheer her up when she returned—just how was she going to put it to her that what little money there was, was spoken for? That, even if they could do the redecorating themselves, there just wasn't any money to spare to buy wallpaper?

  Lunch time came and went without any sign of the man upstairs. Let him rot up there, she thought, growing cross with herself to feel a twinge of conscience that, from the evidence of her eyes, he didn't look well and probably needed his appetite coaxing.

  Why should she bother about him? she counter-argued. He knew full well where the kitchen was, where the dining room was. And unwell though he looked, he'd had use of his legs to bring his tray down yesterday, and to prowl around the grounds every morning.

  Plagued by a nagging conscience that was at odds with her determination to let the devil starve, Arden was called away from her self-imposed task of cupboard tidying in the kitchen, when the telephone called her to the reception area.

  Simon Berry, ringing to ask her out to the theatre next week, and asking should he get tickets, gave her a small respite from her nagging thoughts.

  She looked up as the front door opened and a stranger approached the desk as she was in the middle of telling Simon that she was going away on holiday and that Hills View was closing. But in trying to appear businesslike in front of the stranger, his arrival putting her off her stroke, instead of saying she was going away next week and would be unable to go to the theatre, Arden told Simon that Aunt Louise had already left for her holiday, too late realising that she had given him, and the stranger, the impression that as soon as she had put the phone down she too would be on her way.

  'Going to the Med?' queried Simon, having not the slightest idea of their financial position, somehow thinking that all guest houses raked the money in.

  Arden eyed the stranger, hoping that he didn't think the closing of Hills View was imminent and that what he had overheard hadn't put him off wanting a bed for the night—any revenue was welcome—except revenue from that man in the green room.

  Her thoughts happier to think there might be three under the roof of the guest house that night, she had no idea as she put down the phone what she had answered to Simon. Except, not wanting him to think she could not afford a Mediterranean holiday, she knew she hadn't told him that she was heading for an isolated cottage in a place called Brynmoel.

  She smiled a welcome at the stocky warmly clad visitor, as she bade him, 'Good afternoon.'

  'Good afternoon,' he replied. 'My luck's out, then, if you're closing down.'

  Her smile still in place, Arden was just about to tell him she was sure that they could accommodate him for a night or two when he took from his pocket his press card.

  'You're a newspaperman?' she enquired, wondering what had brought him to Chalmers Hollow where very little happened, and certainly nothing she would have thought the nationals would be interested in. Perhaps he was in transit on his way to a story, was her next thought, though it was an odd time of day to be stopping, in her view.

  'For my sins,' he replied, but she could see that for all its locations, he would not want to do anything else, as he went on to ask, 'Had any visitors you weren't expecting recently?'

  Had they ever! Arden's mind went instantly to the man in the green room, while oddly, for no reason, she let her arm casually rest on the closed registrations book.

  'There was an arsonist on the loose at New Year,' she found herself hedging, 'but he gave himself up the very next day. Is that why you're in the area?' she asked guilelessly, instinct strong in her, not her fertile imagination, she was sure; that instinct telling her that this newshound was on the trail of none other than Mr J. Stephens.

  In the next ten minutes, as the newsman opened up, Arden was learning—with something akin to shock— that there was nothing wrong with her imagination. Nothing wrong with her eyesight either. For she had seen Mr Stephens before, though that was not his real name. His real name was Blane Hunter, a wealthy industrialist everyone had heard of. Not that she had ever met him personally, but his picture, minus that scar, had been in the papers a time or two, newsprint blurring the features that were now well known to her.

  Pretending she needed a tissue, Arden bent beneath the counter to hide the fact that she was staggered, delicately touching it to her nose, hiding her face as she listened and heard how Blane Hunter's wife had been killed in a car accident, and how he had ended up in hospital with shock, abrasions and bruises.

  'But he's out of hospital now?' she asked, feeling remorse at her attitude to the man upstairs who, recently a widower, had wanted nothing more than to be left alone to come to terms with his grief.

  Well, left alone from prying pressmen he would be if she had anything to do with it, she thought, compunction having her forgetting what a brute he had been to her. That compunction at that moment had her wanting to do anything to make up for the fact that she had been ready to starve him out.

  'Did a bunk on New Year's Eve,' said the reporter. 'He wasn't anywhere fit enough to leave hospital, so they said. But from what I can gather he was last heard damning all of the press for not leaving him alone.'

  'The press got to him while he was in hospital?' she asked naively.

  'There are ways,' he replied, without much interest.

  'But why would the press want to hound him?' she asked. 'I mean, surely you're all human enough to realise his suffering—having just lost his wife. Having…'

  'Ex-wife,' he put in.

  'He was divorced?'

  'Had been for the last ten years,' she was informed. 'She was a tramp of the first water. Slept around like she didn't have a bed of her own,' he went on. 'But that doesn't stop my nose from twitching at the first smell of something fishy.'

  'Fishy?' she exclaimed, startled.

  'Wouldn't you think it fishy if you'd discovered someone had overheard them having one hell of a row in his office? That someone overhearing the dear Delcine screaming that if he wouldn't
settle her debts, she would kill herself, and him telling her "Good—I should have broken your neck years ago", then the next thing we know is that he'd driven her to her death?'

  Arden's eyes went round. Her voice choked, as she gasped, 'You think he—killed her!'

  'Wouldn't put it past him. He's a clever, ruthless bastard in business.'

  'But—murder…' Arden choked. Then, quickly getting herself together, before her imagination could take flight, 'But if he was driving the car, driving his ex-wife to her death, wouldn't he stand the risk of killing himself too?'

  'Like I said, he's a clever bastard. He didn't stay around for the inquest, did he?'

  'There's been an inquest?'

  'Not yet. They're still examining what's left of the written-off car he was driving—it was burnt out.'

  'He isn't…' Arden bit her lip that she'd nearly slipped up. 'Is he badly burned?' she rephrased it to a question rather than the statement it had nearly been.

  'Not a singed hair on his head,' was the cynical reply. 'From what we've been able to glean, he was still conscious when the car hit a brick wall, and was able to get out and pull Delcine clear before the car went up.'

  'But Delcine was already dead?'

  'So he says.'

  'But you don't believe it?'

  'He had a tailor-made opportunity then to break the neck he thought he should have broken years ago, didn't he?'

  Numbed by what she had been told, Arden was then having to come away from her astonishment as she heard the newshound, by the sound of it having told her all he was going to, repeat his question, had she had any strangers booking in since New Year's Eve.

  She shook her head, and found her voice to tell him, 'We're not open for business until the spring,' and watched him go, trying to keep a lid on her imagination that asked the question—had she been foolish? Had she foolishly kept quiet and left herself alone with a murderer under her roof?

  Of course he wasn't a murderer, she was telling herself much later. And putting all her logic to use, she was then squashing her fears. Delcine Hunter's death was an accident—how could it be otherwise? As she had said to the reporter, Blane Hunter would have stood every chance of killing himself too if he had deliberately crashed that car—and from what she remembered of him, far from being on peak form as he was, only picking at his food as he was, there was too much aggression in the man for him to have a death wish.

  And aside from all that, what man, in shock as the reporter had said, would have the presence of mind, when pulling someone from a car that looked likely to burst into flames at any moment, to then turn round and break his ex-wife's neck? It didn't tie up. Besides which, had he wanted her to die, why pull her from the wreckage anyway, why not let her burn with the car?

  Satisfying herself that the man she now knew to be Blane Hunter could not have deliberately killed his ex-wife, Arden turned her back on her imagination that would have gone up the avenue of his deliberately setting fire to that wreckage to hide all traces of whatever it was forensic scientists were able to find out from such remains. She was then on to thinking about the phoney name he had given, suspecting that the address he had given in Scotland was just another red herring too. For, racking her brains as she had ever since the reporter had left, she went on, now that she had Mr J. Stephens' real name, to recalling what she could remember reading about Blane Hunter and his ex-wife in newspapers left around by guests at the end of the day.

  The reporter had called Delcine Hunter a tramp, and struggling to recall reading matter that hadn't been important at the time, Arden was conjuring back a foggy picture of some petite pretty blonde who was said to never be lacking for an escort. Though that was about all she could recall.

  The compunction she had felt, that Blane Hunter must be hiding himself away to keep his grief private, had disappeared by the time Arden had got round to dwelling on him being divorced for ten years. Which must mean, she thought, that unless he was still in love with Delcine, then beyond the regret which was probably normal at one's ex-wife departing this life, he wasn't heartbroken at all.

  But, having decided that morning that if he wanted to eat he knew where the dining room lay, later that evening she was laying up a tray for the guest in the green room.

  She was not, she was sure, bothered one way or another whether he still loved the dead Delcine or not. But, in remembering how uncommunicative she herself had been for weeks after her parents had died, she could not deny a pull on her sympathies.

  That her sympathy was not required was clear. One look at his belligerent expression as he eyed the tray she took in to him told her that. And her sensitivities were on a merry-go-round, on the swings, swinging first this way and then that—for him, then hotly against him. It was the latter that erupted and had her wanting to slap him when, churlishly, he bluntly told her:

  'I don't want that.'

  Any fellow feeling for him went streaking. 'Then go without!' she flared. It annoyed her particularly, because for herself she would not have bothered cooking a three-course meal, but would have been content with something on toast.

  'My prerogative, I believe,' he told her tersely, which did nothing to sweeten her. This was the first time she had seen him since he had charmed his way round her aunt—she wanted it to be the last.

  'You can starve as far as I'm concerned,' she told him in no uncertain tone, memory of what the newshound had told her pushed back into her subconscious; she had no intention of referring to it. 'But while we're at it,' she added, flaring again as he appeared to look through her rather than at her, 'I want my holiday. Perhaps you'll be good enough, Mr High-and-Mighty-Hunter, to tell me when you're…'

  Aghast that the name had slipped through her subconscious, Arden was left to hurriedly put down the tray as aggression roared to the surface of the man she had just called Hunter, and who strode quickly across the room to take her fiercely by the arms.

  'You know who I am?' he thundered, his hold on her arms biting. 'How long have you known?'

  'I…' Her voice faded as she read the violence in his expression. 'I thought I recognised you from—from somewhere,' she made herself go on, the pressure being applied to her arms crippling, fear taking her at the murderous gleam in his eyes. 'But—but I've only—only known who you are f-for a few hours. A—a reporter came looking for you.'

  'You told him I was here?' All the ruthlessness he had been accused of was there in his face.

  'No—No,' Arden said quickly. And, 'You're hurting me!' she cried.

  'What did you tell him?' he insisted, as ruthless with her as ever he was in business, she saw, as he ignored the fact that he was causing her pain, hellbent as he was on learning everything she had told the newshound.

  'I didn't tell him anything,' she cried. 'Somehow or other he'd sniffed out that you were here, but—but he'd overheard me talking to Simon—a f-friend—on the phone. I was telling Simon that I was closing Hills View down. I let him—the reporter—think we hadn't got any visitors.'

  Suspicious wasn't the name for the way Blane Hunter looked at her. With narrowed eyes, he dissected every inch of her face as though to ascertain if she was telling the truth.

  'I didn't tell him you were here. Honestly I didn't,' she said urgently. 'Even when he intimated that you might have killed your ex-wife on purpose in that car cr…'

  'Killed her on purpose!'

  The stunned look on his face, the way the blood began circulating in her hands again to tell her he had let go of her numbed arms, had Arden knowing that the suggestion that he had murdered his ex-wife had rocked him.

  'Good God,' he muttered, his face pale as he walked from her and towards the window. But almost immediately he was recovering himself, aggression back as he snarled, 'If anyone gets away with murder, it's the press!'

  That his aggression was no longer out in full force against her, but against someone else, had Arden's courage returning. But with it came sorrow—sorrow for the man, sorrow for the condition he was
in.

  'That's why you left hospital against advice, isn't it,' she asked quietly, 'to get away from being hounded by the press?'

  'I need—to find peace.'

  The admission had come from him as if against his will. But it was an admission. And at the admitted disquiet in' his head, Arden's soft heartstrings were further tugged at. That was, until Blane Hunter happened to look across and witness for himself that her eyes were showing that she was daring to feel sorry for him. Abruptly, he sent any sympathy in her flying as he barked:

  'How much did he offer you?'

  'Money—do you mean?'

  'What the hell else?' he rapped savagely. And, firing her temper, 'You women will do anything for money!'

  Rattlesnake was too good a name for him, Arden thought, furious in a moment as it came to her that her aunt too must be included in that statement. Which must mean that when Louise, out of the goodness of her heart, had promised him he could stay, that too was being flung back as being only so that she could lay her hands on his lodging fee.

  'As a matter of fact,' she retorted freezingly, 'he offered me nothing.'

  'He'll be back,' he said, as if he knew it as gospel. 'And others with him.' His eyes then flicked round the badly faded wallpaper of his room, he stated cynically, 'And you can do with the money, can't you, Miss Kirkham?'

  What a swine he was! Arden sorely wished she had left him to go hungry. 'Hard up we might be, Mr Blane Hunter from London, not Mr J. Stephens from Scotland,' she threw at him indignantly, 'but there's a lot you have to learn about simple country folk—about me. I would never betray a guest here, or hang him before he had been tried, no matter how much was offered!'

  Blazing at his disdainful look of disbelief, Arden had the terrible feeling that if she stayed in the same room with him for another second she would surely set about him. It took all she had to look at him down her nose, and to sweep out—only just did she refrain from slamming the door behind her.

  My God, she thought, to think that for even one second she had been sorry for him! Cynical, disbelieving serpent that he was! Nightmares or no nightmares over the death of his ex-wife, still suffering from shock or not over what had happened, Blane Hunter was worth not a moment's pity from anyone!