Dishonour Among Thieves

by James Pattinson

  He walked to the door and pushed it open. He walked out of the barn, and he could see the marksmen with their rifles trained on him. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and took aim. He heard Jean screaming at him.

  ‘No, Tom, no!’

  He heard the patter of her feet and caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye as she ran towards him. And then the rifles made a crackle of sound and he went down just as the woman reached him and fell on top of him with a bullet in the heart.

  16

  Poor Devil

  The two crop-headed young men read about it in a paper they had bought for that specific purpose. They wanted to gloat.

  ‘So the coppers did their job all right,’ Sid remarked, with a smack of the lips as though he were tasting something good.

  ‘You mean they did our job all right,’ Lennie said; and he laughed. ‘Who’d have thought they’d kill the both of ’em, the man and the woman?’

  ‘Two birds with one stone.’

  ‘No; one bird and one bastard.’

  ‘That was a bright idea of yours, Lennie.’

  ‘I’m full of bright ideas, Sid.’

  They read the report through again. They were not fast readers and their lips moved as they read, mouthing the words. It was even better the second time round.

  Jackie Fulton heard about it in prison. Her first reaction was one of regret. She had not meant Tom to be killed; she had never imagined that that would happen. She felt guilty about it because it was she who had helped to run him down by giving the information about him.

  But then she told herself that even without her help they would have caught up with him in the end, so really she was not to blame. And it was good to know that that bitch had been killed with him; she deserved all she had got. Mrs Mace! So that was her name! A married woman who had somehow got her claws into Tom. It was good riddance to bad rubbish in her case.

  Nevertheless, all in all, Miss Fulton did feel rather unhappy about the way things had turned out. It should never have come to this.

  Eddie Sangster was sorry. Tom Benton had been a good pal and he had liked him right from those early days in the army. Maybe they should have stayed in uniform; none of this would have happened then. Though, of course, in Tom’s case it had not been a matter of choice; he had been slung out because of that business with the tank. And perhaps everything was fated to happen as it did and you could do nothing to alter the course of events however you might try; you just had to accept what came along.

  Well, he knew what was coming to him; a long term in jail; years and years of soul-destroying existence behind high walls and barred windows. Perhaps Tom had had the best of it after all.

  Houlder and Dobie were unmoved by the news of what had happened to Benton. Houlder knew that he had set the wheels in motion which had eventually led to the killings at Pear Tree Farm. But what was another killing to him? Or even two or three. He already had three to his credit and he was not letting them weigh heavily on his conscience. He had no idea what a conscience was. So Tom Benton was gone. So what!

  Dobie took things as they came, with stoic equanimity. He was resigned to a long prison sentence, but he would serve it, and when he came out he would find some way of making a living. There were always ways.

  Pity about Tom Benton, but there it was. No sense in shedding tears about him; that wouldn’t bring him back.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Garner said, ‘is how a man like Benton could have forgotten to reload the shotgun. To come out of that barn with two dead cartridges in the breech seems hardly believable.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t forget,’ Peters suggested. ‘Maybe he meant to do it that way.’

  ‘You think he may have intended getting himself killed? Is that what you’re implying?’

  ‘Why not, sir? Some people have a death wish. And what did he have to look forward to after we’d got him?’

  ‘Do you think the woman had a death wish too?’

  ‘It’s possible. Or she may just have been trying to save him and got herself caught in the crossfire.’

  Garner frowned. ‘Unfortunate, that. It’s the kind of thing that gets the police a bad name. The papers seize on it and start calling us trigger-happy.’

  ‘The scum who write for the papers should try doing our job themselves; then they’d see just how easy it is.’

  ‘They never will, though,’ Garner said. ‘They’re happy where they are; the pay’s higher. We shall have to get in touch with the husband, of course. Seems he’s over in Canada staying with relatives. Fred Mace, the name is. Shouldn’t be too hard to trace.’

  ‘Be a nasty shock for him when he hears what happened.’

  ‘We all have to face shocks at some time in our lives.’

  ‘So now with Mrs Mace and Mr Benton dead, it only leaves the dummy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Garner said, ‘it only leaves him. He’s on his own now, poor devil.’

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