Rainbow's End gfaf-13

by Ellis Peters

  ‘Thanks,’ said George, ‘we’ll get to them as soon as we’ve checked how Bessie’s doing.’

  ‘Accident?’ wondered Moon, as they drove down the valley towards Comerford.

  ‘Apparently. Even probably. But there’s always the odd possibility…’

  ‘She’ll have contacted his parents,’ said Moon comfortably, ‘the minute she had something officially reassuring to say. And ten to one she’ll stay around until the docs have been over him and voted him sound as a bell.’

  His view of the alien female was illuminating, as though some false outlines in the portrait of Barbara were beginning to melt and run, and reassemble into a different pattern. ‘And if she’s still there,’ he went on positively, ‘you’ll find Willie the Twig sitting waiting for her, with all the patience in the world.’

  Barbara’s Aston Martin was standing alone in the public car park attached to one flank of the Comerbourne General Hospital, when they reached it just before ten o’clock, and Willie the Twig, in his normal leather-elbowed, thorny tweeds and creaseless, comfortable slacks, was sitting on one of the synthetic hide benches in the reception area, one long leg crossed over the other, and a very old Country Life in his lap, exchanging occasional sallies with the nurse at the reception desk and the aide on the switchboard, but for the most part turning the pages of his magazine with imperturbable patience and a certain startled interest, perhaps viewing the prices of houses at five years’ remove, and wondering at the way they had ballooned since. His spiky fair hair was on end in all directions, which was normality itself, and the elongated, fleshless image he projected, from natural-Shetland, polo-collared throat to narrow classical brogues, was, if one stood back and took a fresh look at the whole, elegant in the extreme. Elegance of body and mind might well count with Barbara. Money could not match it, as money could not provide it.

  He looked up when George entered, with Sergeant Moon at his elbow. His thick, reddish-blond brows shot up, and his bright grey eyes radiated mild surprise and pleasure.

  ‘Well, hullo, have they dragged you in on this, too? I call that excess of zeal, you know. The kid’s going to be as right as rain, all he’s got is a grazed cheek, a bunch of bruises on one hip, and a bad case of precautionary sedation. I’d have given him a shot of brandy and put him to bed for about twenty hours, and he’d have come out fighting.’

  ‘From all we know of him,’ agreed George drily, ‘he probably will. Is Mrs Rainbow still in there with them?’

  ‘Try and get her out until she knows the score. His folks are on the way, did they tell you? We called them, they know he’s OK. The chap who hit him took off like a rocket when he heard us coming. We wondered what had bitten somebody up there ahead of us. I reckon he was going to have a look what damage he’d done, but when he heard us coming he didn’t want to be there to answer for it.’

  ‘Lucky you were driving so circumspectly,’ said George, with only the mildest irony, for Willie’s volcanic but expert driving was notorious.

  ‘I wasn’t driving, George. And we were in no hurry.’ Willie the Twig had a gentle line in irony, too.

  The nurse on reception, who was young, and not a local girl, hovered suggestively, primly waiting for the newcomer to state his business and credentials, but she was forestalled by the appearance of an elderly sister who knew Superintendent Felse very well from many and varied contacts. Sailing before her, in a burst of brightness that cried aloud gloriously against all the hospital white, came Barbara Rainbow. She wore a long, narrow skirt slit to the knee, in a deep petunia colour, and an embroidered mandarin coat of thin, padded silk, and her hair was knotted in a bunch of curls on top of her head, and fastened with a tall jet comb. Anything further removed from widow’s weeds it would have been impossible to imagine; maybe that was the reason for the get-up. And here sat Willie the Twig in his usual country suiting, as perfectly content with her brilliance as she was with his casualness. She saw George, and smiled radiantly. She looked fulfilled and roused and happy, whether for private reasons of her own and Willie’s, or simply because she had risen to an unexpected occasion with decision and success, and felt all the better for it.

  ‘You don’t want to see the patient tonight, do you?’ said the sister promptly. ‘It wouldn’t do you a bit of good, he’s sedated, and in any case the doctor won’t let anybody try to question him yet.’

  ‘I did come with that intention,’ George admitted, ‘but I’d already gathered it wouldn’t be allowed. As long as he’s all right I don’t suppose leaving it until tomorrow morning will make much difference. You are keeping him overnight?’

  ‘Doctor thought it wise, in case of delayed shock, but if you ask me he’s pretty tough. Dazed, but there doesn’t seem to be any concussion. But we’re keeping him in to be on the safe side.’

  ‘And there’s nothing really damaged? Nothing to worry about?’

  She detailed Bessie’s few abrasions and bruises placidly, and guaranteed his generally sound condition.

  ‘Did he have anything to say when you got him in? He usually has plenty, if he was conscious I can’t imagine him being silent.’

  She thought about that seriously, as if something unusual had just been brought to her notice. ‘Now you come to mention it, we hardly got a cheep out of him, except answers to, “does that hurt?” and that sort of thing. Oh, and he did say he’d lost his music-case, and Mrs Rainbow assured him Mr Swayne had picked it up and it was quite safe. After that he really did go mute. I suppose it was catching up with him by then.’

  Perhaps. But for some reason it failed to sound like Bossie.

  ‘Any use my putting a man in with him, in case he wakes up and wants to get it off his chest in the night?’

  ‘Wouldn’t get you a thing,’ she assured him. ‘He’s as good as out now, and he’ll sleep right through until tomorrow. You can make it fairly early, though, and see if he’s awake about seven.’

  So that was that, and the arrival of Sam and Jenny, roused and anxious but calm, brought the number of people attendant upon Bossie to an inconvenient crowd.

  ‘Come on,’ said Willie the Twig practically, ‘they’re not closed yet, and I’m hungry. And I rather think the Superintendent would like the first-hand story from us, at any rate, since he can’t get it yet from the kid. Let’s all go and get a pint and a snack at the “Fleece”, and George can ask us whatever he wants to know.’

  They left both cars where they were, safe in the hospital grounds, and walked the few hundred yards to the “Fleece”, an old, half-timbered pub, with mediaeval tiles still paving its short passage to the public bar. There were deep settles in which small groups could be as private as in separate rooms, and if the bread, though pleasantly crusty, was slightly past its best at this time on Saturday night, the cheese was good, the ham even better, and the pickles home-made.

  ‘It was going to be a slap-up dinner over at the “Radnorshire Arms”,’ said Barbara, buttering bread with ardour. ‘But that went for a Burton. Tomorrow, maybe?’ She looked across the table at Willie the Twig, and her eyes were large and eloquent.

  ‘If we’re still out of jug,’ said Willie imperturbably.

  ‘Maybe George could arrange for a double cell,’ she said serenely. ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘If you’re trying to tell me something,’ said George tolerantly, ‘I’d rather you did it right-way-round. But first of all, about tonight. Let’s have your version.’

  ‘We were going out to dinner,’ said Barbara, ‘as we’ve mentioned, and then we were going to have a long night drive round through Wales and come back over the border to the forest lodge. Time was no object, and I was driving, and I’m wary of those dark, winding, narrow farm roads, in any case, so we were only doing about thirty, probably less. We hadn’t seen another car since we turned into that road, and you know how it winds. One thing I’ll swear to, there weren’t any car lights on, anywhere ahead of us. Even with those hedges cutting off direct vision, in that darkness there’d have
been a gleam, enough to see. Agreed, Willie?’

  ‘Absolutely. And then suddenly there were lights, just switched on, obviously, some way ahead and round a couple of bends, but you see the aura clearly enough.’

  ‘And it stayed like that maybe half a minute,’ confirmed Barbara, ‘by which time we were getting nearer, and then suddenly whoever it was opened the throttle and put his foot down hard, and the light patch shot off like a bullet. By the time we turned into that longer straight, just past the end of the lane, the rear lights were pin-points at the far end, and then vanished. Then Willie spotted the little boy, lying in the road. And we stopped, and went to see how badly he was hurt, but it wasn’t so bad after all. And Willie stayed with him and went over him for breaks and so on, and wrapped his coat round him, while I dashed off back to telephone. And that’s about all.’

  ‘I lifted him to the side,’ said Willie. ‘I thought I’d better, and there was nothing busted, it was safe to move him. But I marked the way he’d been lying.’

  No particular surprise that Willie the Twig should have a stick of chalk somewhere in his pockets. He was the sort of man who habitually had string, nails, screwdrivers, and half a dozen other useful things distributed about his person.

  ‘And the timing?’

  ‘We left Barbara’s place just after nine, say five or ten past. I reckon it would be about five minutes later when we heard the car shoot off like that.’

  It fitted. And possibly the simple theory that a courting couple had been making use of the Lyons’ drive, and taken to the road again without due care, was the correct one. But there were things about the affair that pricked in George’s mind like burrs.

  ‘Then this car, apparently, was parked well up that sloping lane absolutely without lights?’

  They looked at each other, and confirmed with an assured exchange of glances that this was so.

  ‘No mistake about it. If they’d even had sidelights on I believe the faint radiation would have shown. When the lights came on, the car was out on the road.’

  So what would even a courting couple have been doing, drawn in on the grass in absolute darkness, to their own peril? What were the odds against any such car sailing carelessly out and knocking down probably the only pedestrian in all the miles of that road at that time, just by chance? Chance is very, very methodical in its distribution of probabilities, and uses sheer coincidences only very sparingly.

  ‘Or, of course,’ pointed out Barbara obligingly, ‘you may take the view that this is simply our concocted story, and we first knocked the child down and then picked him up again.’

  ‘And drove the other car away by remote control? Of course, you were the one who went to telephone, and then set off with the ambulance. You haven’t actually inspected the place where somebody certainly was parked, backed up into the side of the lane ready to drive out on to the road. Maybe Willie did see it before he left. The other car was there, all right, he brought some fragments of grass and fresh hawthorn leaves out with him. By the way, where did you leave the Land-Rover?’

  ‘On the gravel in front of the house,’ said Willie, surprised. It took him a second or two to get the drift. He grinned. ‘True, that would leave me without transport, wouldn’t it, if we were working our way round to come to my lodge from Wales. Unless, of course, I was coming all the way back to Abbot’s Bale with Barbara. By which time it would be rather late to set off back up the valley with the Land-Rover. Nice guessing, and only slightly wrong. Actually, we were planning on spending the night at my place, not hers, and driving down in the morning.’

  That fitted, too. If they had driven away from Abbot’s Bale House openly in the Aston Martin, and left the Land-Rover standing on the forecourt for anyone to see who cared, plainly they had opted for a policy of complete openness. Which, George recollected, had hardly been Barbara’s attitude two days ago, so it must be Willie who had made the decision, and convinced her of its rightness.

  ‘Am I allowed to ask you again, Mrs Rainbow,’ said George equably, ‘whether you want to alter your amended account of Thursday night? In the light of all this, I feel I’m being invited to show an interest.’

  ‘On Thursday night,’ said Willie firmly, ‘Barbara left as soon as her husband was off to choir practice, and drove up to my place. Not for the first time. We were there together from about half past eight until half past eleven, when she left for home. By which time, I gather, her husband was dead. Barbara told you a tall story because she didn’t want to bring me into the affair at all. Which was nice of her, but pointless, since I am in it, and in any case it means that I can vouch for her absolutely. When somebody killed Rainbow, Barbara was up in the forest with me.’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Barbara, affectionately and serenely, ‘don’t you see that leaves us both in it up to the neck? Obviously, each of us would be ready to give the other an alibi any time of the day or night, but what makes you think George has to accept that?’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Willie, just as buoyantly, ‘do you think that makes us any different from all the rest of Middlehope? There isn’t a native up there who wouldn’t give every other native an alibi, as against the aliens. George knows it. Even if he didn’t – but he does! – Jack Moon would have told him. That puts us just alongside all the rest. Even if we happen to be telling the truth! In any case, where else would we want to be?’

  It was a point of view which George could appreciate, but one, plainly, which had never fully dawned on Barbara until this moment. She laid down her knife, and gazed wide-eyed at Willie across the table, and her slow, astonished smile of acceptance was something to see. That Willie the Twig should include her without question in that ‘we’, as though she had been born and bred in the secret world of Middlehope, as he had, charmed and flattered her. That he could do it without in the least considering that she should feel charmed and flattered was even more staggering. Love was one thing, love you couldn’t help, it went out to alien creatures if it so chose, and there was nothing you could do about it. But this patient, assured instruction that she belonged, and ought to have the sense to stop behaving as if she did not, this was quite another matter. There were startled tears, as well as irresistible laughter, in Barbara’s eyes as she agreed almost meekly:

  ‘That’s right! So we’re still in the running, along with all the rest of the valley.’

  ‘Neck and neck,’ said Willie the Twig heartily, and speared the largest remaining pickled onion.

  Bossie awoke when the light of a fine Sunday morning reached his face, and lay blinking at all the whiteness that surrounded him, and wondering where he was. They had put him in a single room so minute that there was no room in it for much beyond the bed, the inevitable bedside locker, and a tiny wash-basin. There was, however, a large and eastward-facing window, which let in the sun into his eyes. Not home, that was definite. So there had to be a reason, and that started his memory working overtime at picking up clues out of what began as a nightmare agglomeration of disconnected impressions. Darkness, and car noises and car lights, and rolling face-down on spiky boulders like a fakir on a bed of nails. And something crazy, a face of extreme beauty leaning down over him, and a voice like a velvet paw stroking his senses – Bossie knew about voices, and this was a show-stopper.

  He moved, and a lot of things hurt, but not acutely, just protestingly, to remind him they were there. Especially his left hip and side, on which he was lying. He turned over, which also hurt, and then he found the pillow rasping his right cheek. The safest position seemed to be flat on his back. Like a sensible person he adopted it, and heaved himself up slightly on the pillow, and settled down to think things out.

  If his muscles were stiff and sore, there was nothing the matter with his mind, once it came awake enough to function. He remembered walking along the dark road from the bus stop, as he had done dozens of times before, and then the terrifying rush of air and metal and bulk bearing down on him from the lane on the right, in total darkness until the headlights
suddenly sprang up to pin him. He remembered the jolting pain hoisting him by the left hip and slamming him down on the road, grazed and stunned, and the indignity of struggling to move, and not being able to shift his weight by an inch. Just like the kind of nightmare where you fall down in front of a steam-roller, and watch it approaching, dead slow, and find your own movements even slower, absolutely helpless to remove you from its path.

  He lay thinking with his usual concentrated ferocity, and the longer he thought, the clearer all the details became, things he had never consciously noticed at all. And the clearer the details became, the clearer still did it become that Bossie was in need of help. He could no more tell the whole truth now than a couple of days ago, when he had carefully refrained from telling any of it; but the hour had clearly come to pick his way gingerly through the minefield, and unload at least a part of the burden on somebody official. While he could!

  A skittish nurse came to take his temperature, asked archly how we were feeling this morning, and generally behaved as to a juvenile of doubtful intelligence, which was all the more offensive because she was barely six years older than he was. Bossie refrained from blasting her until she had brought him his breakfast, a sensible precaution, and then demanded to know how long he was going to be kept here.

  ‘Once the doctor’s seen you,’ she said goodhumouredly, ‘they’ll probably throw you out. Your folks are coming in later to take you home.’

  ‘Then before they come,’ ordered Bossie firmly, ‘I want to talk to the police. Somebody sensible. Sergeant Moon would do.’ For what had happened to him had happened in Sergeant Moon’s territory, and he would certainly have been informed of it.

  ‘Now isn’t that convenient,’ said the nurse smugly, ‘seeing the police are here to talk to you, and the doctor says they can? It isn’t Sergeant Moon, though, it’s Detective-Superintendent Felse. You must have been up in the top reaches of crime to have the C.I.D. after you.’