by Lorna Gray
Her recent words rang true. There was nothing she could do to stop Duckett. Paul Abbey was always going to come to her when he got out. And I alone had been trusted from the first moments with at least some partial truths because I was a woman, but I hadn’t quite shown enough sympathy for her plight to prove myself capable of trying to help.
I couldn’t help stammering then, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Her reply was to take a last step and claim my hand. Her fingers closed over me as I gripped the wooden partition. I felt her drag my hand free. I let her do it. It was a terrible mistake. It was what she had wanted from me all along.
She drew on my hand to bring me against the partition. Unlike her husband, though, she wasn’t visiting violence upon me. She was expressing a more decisive version of what I was feeling – that the only power we had as Duckett’s future victims was the power to decide whether or not to do nothing. The proof of how she personally had settled that debate lay in my presence in this hayloft. It lay in this disguise of conversation when I ought to have been noticing how she was acting. There were no lies in what she’d said and yet none of it had actually been the truth. Mrs Abbey had long since abandoned her scheme to make Richard save us here. She didn’t need Richard at all because now they had me.
A moment later, Duckett was lurching in. I was already flinching back, but her move hadn’t been the cue for Duckett to finish me. He stepped straight past my partition and swung his fist to fling Mrs Abbey hard away from me. He must really have liked her because if he hadn’t, I swear instinct would have made him blast away her life with that gun. As it was, he merely sent her back to her husband with such force that she crashed off him and the only thing that saved her from flying onwards to the floor was her husband’s wild snatch for her arm. She had a hand up to her face where Duckett must have caught her. There was a trace of blood at the corner of her mouth and yet, in that desolate place beyond Duckett’s idea of restraint for the sake of friendship, I thought she must be considering herself very clever.
Because concealed in my hand was a small vegetable knife.
Chapter 34
Mrs Abbey must have decided to select a knife from the kitchen drawers while her husband had been declaring his intention to use me as a sacrificial victim. She’d made a great fuss about pouring a glass of water, but she’d never meant to give me a drink. She’d been working all this time to arm the victim for her defence.
It was a good job too because Duckett was coming back for me.
We’d tipped him out of his stupor. Unnoticed by Duckett, the policeman was suddenly taller against his wall. His warning was a repetition of my name. It was a caution again. A determined negative. But Duckett was coming for me. I had a hand gripping the partition as I turned to meet him. That hard boundary of wood was all that stopped me from stepping backwards into the useless corner, where the hard angle of the roof met the hay.
Duckett rounded the turn. The spread of light from the lamp on its post was casting one half of his body into golden relief. The other was black and only his beady eye shone out from the void. His mouth was slack, like his collar, where the ugly tie had been loosened at his neck.
From her place on the floor Mrs Abbey was bleating out shrilly, ‘You asked about John’s treasure, Emily? The only treasure I have is with Mrs Winstone.’ She had no hope in these men. Her words were for me and desperately well played. ‘Not John’s pictures or wealth, but mine and truly precious.’
She meant her children, waiting painfully near to hand if Duckett should ever get away from here.
‘Miss Sutton, don’t!’
The harsh injunction from the policeman’s mouth came just at the moment I put out my hand. Detective Fleece had seen Mrs Abbey take up the weapon in the Manor kitchen. All along he’d been trying to convey to me how she meant to use it. Now the blade was lying hard and sharp behind the screen of my hand and I was pointing at Duckett’s chest. Heart beating, maddened by my own nerve, I startled a terrified man by waggling my hand to indicate the shadows beyond him.
‘Look!’ I cried. ‘They were hiding there.’
Duckett twisted obediently. Richard wasn’t stepping out of the lee of the great frame that supported the roof. This was my own lie. Duckett turned and turned again. Mrs Abbey was screaming. Shouting at me. And Detective Fleece was using the wall as a brace to climb swiftly to his feet. Duckett didn’t see. He was frantically glancing back at me for confirmation and crowding me, with the gun held ready, because he would have let loose a shot had Richard been in the darkness beyond the opposite partition as I’d said. Duckett’s flank made a perfect unguarded triangle as that arm lifted clear.
All I had to do was use enough force to break the skin. He might not even die. And when I’d struck him there, I would have to slash a second time at his hand as he wrenched instinctively round to face me. I imagined that even if he were gravely hurt, he’d still spasm into bringing that gun to bear. I had to be ready to make him drop it. I could see how. They’d planned for a trained man to do this, but I was here instead. The policeman was injured; no one would blame me, not the coroner, not even me in my nightmares.
Mrs Abbey was screaming again. In the blink of a second she had drawn breath and begun again. I knew why. Duckett was twisting again towards the policeman. He’d seen the policeman move. The detective was lurching forwards and shouting my name with his own instruction because Duckett was still turning towards him and then it might be too late.
I put out my hand again.
Not to strike Duckett. It’s terrible to say it, but at the moment of decision, almost the strongest influence against it was the knowledge that Mrs Abbey thought it right that I should. Instead the knife ran from my hand and skittered shining silver through the lamplight across the wooden boards, to be lost in the distant haystack.
The knife did what my shout hadn’t. The shock of movement jerked Duckett’s instinct into letting off two shots uselessly into the dark. They punched past the haystack to drive two holes through the roof tiles. Sharp needles of daylight fired back. And then I was stepping forwards and laying hold of his gun hand with a commitment I didn’t know I had. This was my plan. Mine, forged when the policeman had made the point that Duckett’s only power lay in the bullets of that gun. It had been held waiting until the policeman had been fit to help. It was a small kind of arrogance, I suppose, to wait for this and believe I had found another way, where these people had decided that escape came with savage corruption. But there were only six bullets to account for. Or there had been. Now there were four.
Duckett was writhing. Twisting. One contorting thrust of his free hand across my throat and shoulders nearly forced me away. I was saved, if that was the appropriate term for the experience, by the painful discovery that my ribs were crushed between him and the partition. It stopped me when I might otherwise have fallen.
‘Up. Get his hand up.’ A scuff of feet and the policeman’s hands passed across the post where the lamp had stood to join mine.
His command was a snarl. A strain of effort. It was vital we managed it. It was so we didn’t accidentally shoot anyone. I could feel the detective’s grim determination as he shifted his weight around the limit of the wooden barrier. It helped me prise myself free of the agonising crush of the partition. I was reasonably sure this wasn’t what the policeman had been nudging me towards all this time with his little cautions because I’d surprised him as well as everyone else, but this was our chance. Only Detective Fleece’s hands were slipping. His left was almost useless, so then there was only his stronger right while his injured arm thrust limply against Duckett’s shoulder. And Duckett was flailing again.
‘See to that fire and get her out!’ The policeman’s next desperate bellow deafened me, but this time it wasn’t an order for me.
It was a roar that carried the full length of the barn and it was because all my fears about Abbey were proving groundless. Abbey wasn’t seizing his chance to attack me. He wasn’t helping us either
. He was screaming and hurling himself and his wife back into the corner because that crushing collision with the wooden barrier had knocked the lamp from its post and the oil was burning a slick film across the loose hay.
The fire was smoking where the hay was rotten. It was a poisonous curl of fumes. I remembered this about fire. I’d seen it often enough in the Blitz. The smoke was as dangerous as the flames and all it needed to do to fully mimic the horror of those wartime days was to carry the scent of something terrible cooking in the ashes. This fire was only small – blue-tinged fingers standing up from the mat of oiled hay – and yet the space seemed abruptly brighter. Blinding, really, after the sudden darkness when the lamp had dropped. I remember the faint surprise that such a delicate spread of flames should have made such a difference.
Blood and sweat on the policeman’s palm was making his fingers slip on mine and then tighten savagely as he forced his grip to hold. We worked the writhing man’s fist up into the space above our heads. Duckett had partly carried it there himself, in that instinctive way people have of reaching upwards in an effort to shake us off. His free hand was clawing at mine. He was marginally taller than I was, or at least longer in the arms. And by virtue of build and gender, considerably stronger. It was against all odds that I managed, teetering and using the policeman’s one-armed strength as my anchor, even as Duckett wrenched at my wrist, to curl my fingers over the fingers that gripped that gun.
There was sudden tug. A blast so loud it drew a cry from me and closed my eyes, and a second blow that made me call out again because I had to duck my head low against the shelter of my upraised arm to protect my face as fragments of stone tile and ancient dust came clattering down on us.
It wasn’t me who was screaming though. We were terrifying Duckett because he couldn’t shake us off. He knew what we were doing. All we had to do was get the bullets from that gun. He wasn’t stupid enough to release the trigger this fourth time. He was still screaming. He had his fingers clamped tight and his other fist was brutally enfolding my wrist and I was smaller than him and tiring and I couldn’t get him to release his finger from the trigger enough to allow the revolver mechanism to engage the next bullet. I was straining, both for breath and to reach as my hands slid a little. I felt the crush as the policeman’s grip over my fingers changed. It crushed me. It tore at my skin. The next grip wasn’t his or Duckett’s. It was steadier. New hands were joining mine. Familiar and secure. And I didn’t know how Richard could do it, but he had eased me aside so that I surrendered the fight to him, gasping, very briefly without even understanding that I’d let him stand before me. It was worse, somehow, because a moment ago I’d been mentally preparing for the instant that my grip failed and Duckett had mastery of my wrist enough to tether me for those last few seconds while he took aim. Now it was a different expression of sheer terror that gripped me because Richard was here too.
It was in the space between one heartbeat and the next, while my body staggered free to the partition – and hung there to rest a moment in the harsh beam of light cast from the newly opened hatch before gathering itself for the effort of redressing the balance – that Duckett stopped screaming, as though panic ran on a switch. That frightened face shone and hard black eyes settled shockingly upon Richard’s face.
‘You.’
The rough purpose contained within that single word from Duckett made me realise what I’d done. It took barely a moment for him to speak, but my innocence took an age to die. The change in him came like a footnote to his humiliation outside the hospital.
Suddenly Duckett wasn’t fighting to lift that weapon clear. He was allowing Richard’s stern grip to draw his hand downwards. Duckett allowed that weapon to slide smoothly into the gap between them. It was almost like a surrender, only there was a snarl in that slanting light. They were face to face. The gun was against Richard’s stomach, and against his own too, with Richard’s hand folding over the hard black line of the barrel. The policeman was scrabbling uselessly to part them. Now I did scream. A desperate plea to avert the unimaginable.
It was swallowed instantly in the numbing misery of realising the idiocy of my intentions and the sluggishness of my limbs compared to their rapid movement. It was smothered by a last cry from Mrs Abbey as she struggled beneath her husband’s panicked urge to shield her from the encroaching fire. She begged him in bewildered desperation, ‘Why couldn’t she just end this?’
She was right. There had been no moral superiority in my actions. I hadn’t chosen a course that preserved all of us, even the criminals, from harm. As I thrust myself uselessly forwards in this airless cavern, panting from a reckless tussle that had absolutely failed, I finally understood. I’d left London because I’d felt a desperate need to find freedom after the stifling life of a war-torn town; and I’d discovered it within a few hours of arriving here through the decisive act of choosing to answer a telephone. But just as the man I’d encountered on the other end had, in fact, been dwelling all that time in the city I’d only recently left, the idea that any decision of mine had any greater influence was fantasy. The world didn’t change and I was unshakeably me. The Colonel had described to me once how, in the course of war, you see the opportunity to finish your enemy and then you don’t need any other cause at all.
I thought it was a dismal rule for living when this wasn’t war but the responsibilities were just the same. There was a choice between acting and passing the burden along the line. She’d armed me when the toll upon my soul for my self-defence would barely have counted. Others had borne the sacrifice long before me. Duckett was staring up at Richard’s face like they were lovers. And when those hands moved – his and Richard’s on the weapon that pressed between them – I knew at last that nothing I ever did could change the fact that my refusal to play my part in the face of the awful truth made me as culpable here as a murderer.
Chapter 35
There was no sound. Everything in me was blinding anticipation, with every nerve straining for confirmation of what I had seen in the final fullness of a gunshot.
Only it never came. After a day when no one had done any of the things they had been accused of and only did something else that was worse, there was a different bang. It was the crash as Richard changed his grip – he wasn’t trapped there in a struggle for control over that gun. He was twisting behind its muzzle and keeping close and fixing his other hand over the back of Duckett’s neck. Detective Fleece was there too and suddenly a man was on the ground and the light was poor again because of the rush of bodies all pounding into our space between the haystacks.
They jostled me. The fire was our meagre light now. It was low, still behind the partition, but it was feeding and casting a crimson hue upon the stone roof tiles overhead as it crept, finger by finger, towards the stacked hay. It smoked greedily and it smothered the sharp scent of spent ammunition. I was reaching to help Richard. I was reaching for Duckett’s outstretched hand – it was being pressed into the floorboards by my feet, but the man’s fist was still armed. Duckett had cried out as Richard had put him face down upon the floor. Now he was still. Richard had his knee in Duckett’s back. It looked painful because Richard was leaning across him to get that hand with the revolver in it firmly pinioned. I could see that Richard’s other hand was hindered by its duty of keeping the man’s shoulders down. It was like bending through a racing current when I dropped into a crouch before Richard and placed my own hands to help secure that fist.
Duckett wasn’t struggling. He was limp, passive, and then it was my own foot that moved the Webley harmlessly away. Someone, a uniformed policeman with more decision than me, was kicking the Webley fully clear. That gun, that evil thing, finished by skittering, rattling to a stop against the base of the partition that had quietly been my support for what felt like so long.
I was in the way. A crowd wanted my space. Richard’s heart was racing, I could tell. He was rapidly surveying the disarmed man’s prone form like he always did when he was reassuring
himself that the threat was being managed and no new danger had been overlooked. Then I felt the jolt as his gaze lifted to fix on me. We were inches apart. In this dark space his eyes were betraying an intensity of thought that wasn’t like his at all. His hard stare had purpose and it belonged to the brutal run of alternatives that had threatened just before. Each one a terror that went beyond danger, beyond anger, and yet, like all the rest, hadn’t happened at all.
It was disturbing to see my feelings reflected there. I stood. I stepped sharply back. I’d expected to find I’d been wrong. For a brief moment in the stillness of helping to restrain Duckett there had been a disorienting sense that it had been my own confused interpretation of everyone’s intentions that had made the danger here. I understood nothing and nothing I had dreaded had come to pass.
But that was a lie too. The dark shadow of the Colonel and what those people had each tried to do to me was as certain as the way Duckett was being crushed into the ground by my feet. I was told to move, gruffly, by a policeman who wanted to do his work. I retreated a few steps more because about half a dozen more wanted to crowd in. I had a grip on the wooden post. I put the back of a hand to my forehead to sweep some grime away. It was a gesture made on the edge of distress, or disbelief, or something. I couldn’t tell. But I knew the clarity of standing by my post as Richard exchanged rapid words with his neighbours was crueller than the madness of the past minutes because I felt again the stain of fearing the unimaginable ugliness of seeing Richard shot. And from there I unavoidably slid into the real criminal awfulness of acknowledging that I had very nearly been just as afraid that Richard’s hand would send a bullet the other way into Duckett.