by Ellis Peters
He hoisted himself up groggily from the slimy tarmac, and got his feet under him, stunned eyes wide open but blind, just in time to mouth a throatful of incoherent sounds and collapse into Johnny’s arms. But he had stood, he was alive, death had discarded him.
Johnny took the weight neatly, dropping to put a shoulder under Musgrave’s hips. He hoisted him carefully to the grass under the trees at the roadside, propping his head with the scarf he stripped from round his own neck. Musgrave was breathing, hoarsely but regularly, and Johnny could find no obvious signs of injury.
‘My God, but some folks are lucky! If that door hadn’t burst open …’
Musgrave’s glasses had flown off when he was flung out of the open door; they lay broken in the gutter, their splintered lenses refracting gleams of faint, sourceless light.
Behind Johnny’s back Gisela said,’ Johnny …’
Her voice was low and muted; it took him a moment to realise why it made his hair rise in the nape of his neck. That hushed sickness of horror brought his face round to her wary and still.
‘Johnny, there’s somebody else in the car.’
There couldn’t be. It was absurd. Musgrave had clambered into his car alone, and certainly stopped nowhere on the way. Yet Johnny laid the unconscious man’s head hurriedly back on the folded scarf, and came to his feet in frantic haste.
‘In the back seat. Somebody—’
She was half in at the hanging door, kneeling in the frost of broken glass that whitened the driving seat, squeezing her shoulders against the unbelievably crumpled junk of metal that sagged into the rear of the car. A hand and an arm lolled over the back of the driving seat. She was feeling her way with shivering, tentative fingers up the sleeve towards a shoulder trapped and flattened cruelly under the weight of the standard and the roof as it was driven in. Shallow and hard, moaning breaths gushed out of the tangle of wreckage from a face close to hers. There was blood on her hand.
Johnny took her round the waist and drew her back, and she turned suddenly with a cry of understanding and love and pity, and wound her arms about him.
‘Johnny, it’s Codger!’
He didn’t say anything, he just froze in her arms, for one instant absolutely stiff and still; then he had put her aside and was in the car, thrusting, heaving, tearing hands and wrists on jagged edges as he fought to lift away the weight that held the crushed body prisoned. His hand touched a feebly moving jaw, stroked its way up a cheek sticky with blood.
‘Codger, old lad, I’m here, Johnny’s here. Hold on, boy, I’ll get you out. It’s me, Codger … it’s Johnny …’
A faint sound, between moan and speech, answered him out of the tangle, and something in the very tone of it told him he was known. Whether his voice had penetrated the darkened and lonely mind, or whether his very presence spoke its own languag to some inner sense, Codger was aware of him. Johnny worked his left hand painfully under Codger’s armpit, gripping hard in the stuff of his coat.
‘Gisela—’
‘Yes,’ she said, quivering at his shoulder.
‘See if the rear door will open.’ He rested while she tried, keeping his hold, spreading his back against the sagging roof. ‘It’s buckled.’ She had a foot braced against the running-board, her weight thrown back, pulling with both hands.
‘I know – but I think the catch has burst, it might give. Careful, don’t hurt yourself.’
The top of the door gaped, started out of place. With a hideous grating of metal the lower part gave to her pull, and the door was open. She leaned into the car, stretching an arm to support Codger about the body. Her sleeve tore against jagged edges of metal, but she gripped and held.
‘Good girl! If I can shift this an inch or two, try to ease him clear.’
Crouching, he got a foot on the seat, and thrust upward with braced shoulders, panting, setting his teeth. He had felt the slight lurch above him of a weight settling afresh; it was not so much a matter of lifting it as of disturbing it. The lamp standard had crashed on the left side of the car and crushed it. Johnny’s contortions shook the lopsided shell, and the weight slid farther to the left. The buckled metal, relieved of the oppression from above, lifted slightly with the force of its own tensions, and Johnny felt it give, and heaved with all his force.
Codger slid backwards out of the vice, and Johnny, scrambling after, helped to lower him with aching care and anxiety into Gisela’s arms.
‘Let me take him.’
He came round to lean into the car behind her, and she let his arm replace her own, and edged past him to stand clear, waiting until she could lift Codger’s trailing legs and help to carry him to the grass.
Johnny held the distorted, crushed body in his arms, stooping over it, his forehead running with sweat as he wiped blood away from the battered face.
The large, blank eyes opened wide, staring unfocused into the night. A convulsion of doubt and loneliness and fear quaked through him. A core of solitary terror, deep within and tenacious to the end, beat frantically about its prison for company and comfort.
‘I’m here,’ said Johnny, close to his ear. ‘I’ve got you, it’s all right.’ Nobody had ever heard Johnny’s voice sound like that, except Hero, perhaps, when she was three years old, and he had suddenly to be two parents instead of one.
Codger’s mouth moved, fought for a moment with the old constrictions, and then forgot them utterly. A thread of a voice, heart-rendingly apologetic for failure, said faintly but coherently: ‘Sorry, Johnny! I done it all wrong – botched it … Sorry!’
‘You did fine,’ protested Johnny staunchly, not even understanding then what he meant, not even realising that his poor mute had expressed himself plainly at last; and he kept on saying it, steadily and soothingly, until it penetrated his senses that Codger had stopped listening.
Chapter Seven
Johnny laid his burden back in the grass, and got stiffly to his feet.
‘I’m going to take the car and go back to the first house there, and call the police. See what you can do for Musgrave.’ He took a couple of steps, and looked back for an instant. ‘You don’t mind being left?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
Almost inevitably some car or other would be along and stop at the scene any moment; the marvel was that they had had the night to themselves so long, though it had been no more than ten minutes in all, he found, when he thought to look at his watch. Better wipe his face and hands, and not burst in on some suburban housewife looking like a murderer fresh from his crimc. He used a handkerchief as best he could on his scratched cheek and stained palms, and whirled the car round in the width of the road. There was a house only a hundred yards or so back, the last of its kind for half a mile, and certain to be on the telephone. Better call the ambulance, too, while he was about it. It wouldn’t be any use to Codger, but Musgrave might need it.
He drove like an automaton, and said and did what was needful. He felt nothing yet, only a stunned coldness that was probably shock. He didn’t think, he didn’t reason, the functions of his own personal mind had stopped; social man, civic man, did what was required of him.
When he got back to them Musgrave was sitting up in Gisela’s arm under the hedge, and there was a dark Morris drawn in close to the wreck. The newcomer had provided brandy, apparently, for Gisela had a flask in her hand. Better still, the kind donor was by no means anxious to linger if he could be of no further help; no doubt he had a wife at home waiting for him, and by the look of him probably a family, too. If the police and the ambulance were already summoned, and there was nothing more he could do, he thought he’d better be on his way.
Johnny thought so, too. He wasn’t anxious to have any unofficial observers present during what was to come.
‘Then I’ll leave you my card, in case I should be needed.’
He was still addressing himself to Johnny, but with a respectful eye on Musgrave, too, an accurate measure of the inspector’s rapid and dogged recovery.
&
nbsp; ‘Thanks,’ said Johnny, ‘but I don’t suppose they’ll have to bother you. We’ll stick it out. We have to, anyhow, but that’s enough.’
‘Terrible thing,’ said the relieved Samaritan, gratefully withdrawing. ‘So sorry about your wife – dreadful for her. Wonderfully brave!’
He drove away uncorrected. Maybe there really was something about them that made them look married, or maybe it was the done thing to assume that two respectable-looking middle-aged people driving about together late at night should have the benefit of the doubt.
The words stayed in Johnny’s bludgeoned mind when the speaker was gone, like a spark in bracken, smouldering unseen in the roots of his thoughts. My wife. A long time since he’d even run the phrase over his tongue. It had a bitter-sweet taste, stimulating and evocative.
He took a rug out of the car, retrieved Gisela’s coat, and gently covered Codger’s body. It seemed already to have contracted, to be strangely low and at home in the grass, as though it were already returning to earth. Johnny closed the large, puzzled, patient eyelids over the fixed eyes, and turned abruptly to those who were still alive.
‘Here, girl, better put this on. I’m sorry we’ve managed to ruin it for you.’ He turned her about like a child, and fastened the single great button under her chin. ‘Sit in the car, love, and try not to feel too much of anything. As soon as I can I’ll take you home.’
He wasn’t too surprised when she didn’t do it. Women had always liked Johnny, but they’d never obeyed him; and that was odd, considering how little trouble men had ever given him in that way. She was close beside him as he lunged forward quickly to lend Musgrave an arm to lean on, for the inspector was climbing unsteadily to his feet.
‘Now, take it easy, man, your fellows will be here soon. I’ve called them, and the ambulance, too, and you’d better stay a patient for tonight, I should think.’
‘I’m all right,’ said Musgrave obstinately. ‘This is my case, as long as I’m on my feet. I’m quite capable of carrying on now. You got him out, didn’t you? Miss Salberg told me. Where is he?’
He kept hold of Johnny’s arm to hold himself upright, for the world swung when he turned his head; but the dry authority had come back into his voice as soon as he was master of his senses.
Johnny nodded silently towards the place where the car rug was spread over Codger’s body. He still found it hard to grasp that that was all, that one of his friends, dependants, children, was gone; troublesome, no doubt, in his way, but does that make you feel any differently towards your children?
Musgrave went down on his knees gingerly, and turned back the rug. The dead face ignored him, already sunken into its own inscrutable fantasy, where he had no rôle at all, either as friend or enemy.
‘He tried to kill me,’ said Musgrave quietly, his voice suddenly fully alert and aware. ‘Or did you know that already?’
‘He did what?’ said Johnny faintly, hearing his own words echo to him out of an infinite distance, and unconscious even of Gisela’s hand closing warmly on his arm.
‘Tried to kill me.’ Musgrave repeated it no less quietly, looking up at him over the silent body. ‘You didn’t know, then? What did you imagine he was doing here?’
‘Codger?’ He clutched his head, holding his disintegrating mind together. ‘He was the gentlest soul who ever breathed, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Oh, yes, I think he would – if he thought you were being threatened, Mr Truscott. You, or anyone belonging to you. Was he the gentlest soul who ever breathed when he graduated through that special training course of yours during the war? And what do you think this was for?’
He had pushed back the rug from the right arm, and lifted the large hand that curled indifferently at Codger’s side. He drew up the cuff and showed a thin cord dangling from the clenched brown fingers. Not long, no more than eighteen inches, tethered to a waisted toggle at either end. Black cord, close-textured, probably waxed.
‘And how do you think I got this?’
Musgrave pulled down the collar of his shirt and strained his chin upward, to show a thin groove scored across the right side of his neck, strung here and there with beads of blood.
‘And this?’
He held out his left hand before Johnny’s eyes, and a similar groove marked its back, and broke the skin below the base of the little finger
‘He was in the back of the car. Quiet as a cat. All I saw was a change in the degree of light in the mirror, suddenly, as though something had cast a shadow. I didn’t hear a thing. I don’t know why I put up my hand, but that’s the only reason I’m alive now. Just a reaction against a feeling of movement behind me. The cord went round hand and all, and he couldn’t tighten it. I half blacked out, and lost control. But I’m alive.’
Death had kicked open the driver’s door and ejected him. The dog it was that died.
‘Ever seen a thing like that before?’
Musgrave laid down the hand in the grass, and clambered weakly to his feet again. Johnny was standing staring down at the trailing cord with dilated eyes, his face motionless and numb.
Yes, he had seen similar cords many times. Just one of the many ways of killing silently. Men who were to survive and continue useful in Johnny’s wartime trade had had to know as many of them as possible; no man can master them all. Codger’s unco-ordinated mind had never excised those skills, his hands had never forgotten them. There’d been no spastic tremor when he flicked the cord round Musgrave’s throat and drew it tight; only the blind instinct of fear and the upflung hand had saved him.
Johnny stiffened knees that threatened to buckle under him, and suddenly the fingers closed tightly upon his arm seemed to be all that held him upright, or kept him from covering his face and howling his anguish to the night.
He knew now what it was Codger had botched. ‘I done it all wrong … Sorry, Johnny! Sorry!’ Only now did he understand what he had heard.
‘Oh, my God!’ he said helplessly. ‘My God, my God!’
The hum of cars coming rapidly, not yet shut between the trees; the distant alarm of an ambulance bell at the last crossroads.
‘That won’t be needed,’ said Musgrave, and went down on his knees again to feel his way through the dead man’s pockets, without any great hope of revelations; what could such as Codger Bayliss be carrying about with him? The garrotte was an atavism, a mechanical memory, violence re-enacted in innocence; there wouldn’t be two such prodigies.
‘I don’t know or care,’ said Johnny, in a voice that creaked with effort, ‘whether you’ll take my word for this, but for my own peace I want to say it. I didn’t send him. I had no idea what he meant to do.’
‘He knows,’ said Gisela in a whisper.
Musgrave looked up, his bruised eyes flashing from her face to Johnny’s. ‘Strange as it may seem,’ he said, ‘I don’t doubt you. I can imagine you doing murder, Truscott, but not getting somebody else to do it for you. Not even a man in his right wits. If it came to it, I’m pretty sure you’d do your own killing.’
‘Thank you. I suppose I should be grateful for that. And yet you understand, don’t you, that he wasn’t to blame, that he couldn’t be held responsible for what he did. I took on the responsibility for him, and this is how I’ve carried it.’
I done it all wrong – botched it.… Sorry, Codger! Sorry!
‘Your conscience doesn’t come within my province,’ said Musgrave dryly. ‘You must sort that out yourself.’
‘Blast you, I wasn’t offering it to you, or asking your advice about it, either. I’m telling you we’ve somehow managed to kill off an innocent between us, no matter what you choose to call him.’
‘I’m concerned only with facts. Facts like a length of cord round my neck, Mr Truscott. Or …’
His hand came out of Codger’s left-hand jacket pocket holding something that looked at first like a rolled-up handkerchief. It uncoiled on his hand like a living thing, bursting into a glow of colours under the headlights as a sleepy fir
e bursts suddenly into flames.
‘Or this,’ said Musgrave, his voice sharp and quivering with eagerness, vented in a great sigh of achievement; and he stretched out in his two hands before Johnny’s eyes eight inches of embroidered silk ribbon bright with poppies and cornflowers and ripe golden wheat, the torn end of Hero’s baldric, slashed with Mare Chatrier’s blood.
‘I’ll go, then,’ said Johnny, halting just inside the door. ‘If you’re sure you’ll be all right?’
‘You won’t come in? I think you need a drink, Johnny.’
‘Not now. We’d better get some sleep.’
It was nearly three o’clock. The world seemed to have completed an entire revolution in those three hours of the night.
She watched his face with hollow dark eyes, hazed with weariness, and felt him withdrawing from her moment by moment into a private place where he kept his deepest griefs, and where, it seemed, even after all these years she was not allowed to enter.
‘Johnny, are you all right?’ Ridiculous phrase, but one used it for every degree of well-being from the merest subsistence to bliss; and he would understand.
‘I’m all right,’ he said.
‘Do you know you never said one word all the way home?’
‘What was there to say?’ he said drearily. ‘He’s dead. He tried to kill Musgrave, and Musgrave is about to prove that he killed Chatrier. And I made a fine mess of taking care of him, if I couldn’t keep him from getting involved in this job. But it’s too late to say anything. It’s done.’
‘I wish you could have been spared this,’ she said in an aching whisper, meaning the bereavement and self-reproach and the pure pain of Codger’s death.
‘I wish I could,’ said Johnny, meaning the knowledge he would have given his right hand not to possess, but of which he could ncver now be rid. He hadn’t said a word, he’d let the thing happen as she’d willed it, because he wasn’t supposed to know, and what good could it do Codger now to turn and betray Gisela? Hadn’t he been thrashing his mind for a way in which she could get rid of the baldric safely, without even admitting him to the secret, since it seemed she’d die before she’d do that? Well, she’d found a way.