Rainbow's End

CHAPTER TEN

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The voice that came jerking out of him, after so long of obstinate silence, was loud, harsh and too high-pitched. ‘Take one step in here and I kill him! One step, that’s enough!’

Nobody moved. Frozen in the doorway, they measured the odds, and found them impossible. The room was long. By the time even the fleetest of them reached him, he could kill, and by the look of his face, that sharp, easy, knowing, business face hardly recognisable now in its pale ferocity, he would kill. Even the convulsive tension of his fingers was tightening the cord as they watched. One false move, and it would be over. The sweat running on his forehead was clearly visible in the flooding light.

‘Don’t touch that light switch! Don’t put a hand near it! If you do, he’s dead for a start. I shan’t need light to finish him off.’

Carefully unmoving, George said in a flat, neutral voice: ‘Why go on? Turn him loose and come with us, you’ll be sparing yourself worse things. At least talk. And listen.’

‘I’ll talk to you through the door, if I talk at all. Get back out of here, leave the light, and close the door. Or I’ll kill him. If you try anything, I’ll make sure he goes first.’

With aching care, inch by inch, hands in full view to show nothing was contemplated against him, they withdrew. They left the light on, they closed the door.

Back to square one! Not John Stubbs, but Colin Barron, the smart young dealer who thought it well worth while poking his nose in wherever Rainbow turned his attention, the one who had followed him up into Middlehope, found some profitable business with the sale of the Macsen-Martel effects, but never quite discovered Rainbow’s real incentive, and was constantly, inquisitively on the prowl after it. And had he ever really coveted Barbara, or merely made use of her, or tried to, as she had been employed to make use of him and his kind? Not a pleasant world! No wonder she had recoiled from it to the remotest extremes of Middlehope Forest.

Barbara stood in monumental, frowning calm, fronting the closed door. Possibly the same thoughts were in her mind. She raised her voice to carry clearly within.

‘Colin? Are you listening? I’m sorry I called you John. You dropped him in the muck, you see, hauling off like this. I don’t say I was ever sure about you, Colin, but I may have thought you all sorts of things, but never a coward. Men don’t fight behind children, Colin. Only apologies for men. Now prove which you are. Give us Bossie, and I’ll get back my respect for you. What are you gaining by threatening him, anyhow? If we can’t get in, you can’t get out. Never, not on your terms. You’d better start considering ours. Just tell me, as a matter of academic interest, did you ever really think anything of me? It would be interesting to know.’

She was never going to know, of course, because what could she or anyone make of that sudden, strangling, sobbing outburst of sexual profanity that bubbled behind the door. One might gather that she was a married whore, and he a winnowing wind blowing both her and her proprietor-husband where he listed, but the mixture of abuse and longing no one was ever going to disentangle. Happily only she, rather than Bossie, seemed to be threatened by this storm. Barbara was drawing some very dangerous fire. The vibrations from within sounded enfeebled rather than intensified.

‘I tell you what,’ called Barbara, irrepressible in inspiration, ‘sell us Bossie for me! You do realise you can trade him, don’t you? If you feel that way about me, here I am, put your contemptible noose about my neck instead. I shall be a volunteer, and I’m over twenty-one, Colin. Think how much better that will make you feel!’

It was more than enough. Willie the Twig took her by the arm and drew her away into the open, chilly, clean centre of the courtyard, and she understood and accepted his suggestion that she had pushed things to the safe limit, and made her point that Bossie, alive, was a valuable bargaining counter. She went where Willie led her, quivering. She wound her arms about his neck and pressed her lips into his throat, and it was a motion of exultation rather than a gesture of need or appeal.

‘It’s all right,’ said Willie into her ear, ‘it’s all right! He isn’t crazy, his mind’s working, you got to him, all right.’

All the same, it was back to stalemate. Back to: ‘We’re still here, Barron. We shan’t go away, you know that. And you can’t, not without us. There’s no way on this earth you can get out of there except in our arms. So why prolong it? Mrs Rainbow is right. The boy is quite irrelevant. We can’t get in, but you can’t get out. And we, in the long run, don’t have to get in, but you, in the end, do have to get out. Walking or carried, alive or dead, there’s only this one way out for you, and we’re not quitting. Think it over, Barron! Make it as easy on yourself as possible. Come out now!’

It went on and on, monotonously, Moon taking a turn, George returning to the attack, a barrage of voices kept up relentlessly to leave him no time to relax, no time to think or despair, in case despair should take its worst course. But somehow he had made time to think, all the same. Now that he’d begun to talk, and knew his identity was known, he used his voice with increasing aggression. Not confidence, perhaps, a kind of last-ditch bravado.

‘You want this kid, Felse? Intact? I’ve got the goods, I put the price on them, understand?’ Barbara had reached him, sure enough.

‘No harm in naming your price,’ agreed George. ‘The customer doesn’t have to buy. Not when he has a foreclosure on you in the end, in any case. But go on talking, we’re listening.’

‘Don’t forget the seller can chuck the goods in the dustbin if he doesn’t get his price. You’d better listen. If I don’t get the return I want, I can still wipe him out.’

‘That would settle your own hash, and you know it. I don’t think you’re crazy enough to want that.’

‘I might be, Felse, I might be, if there’s nothing else left. There’s no hanging now. And there’s a lot better remission than you lot like, and even parole— What should I be, by comparison with some of the real killers? Just one kid, and almost cleanly!’

It was curious that the more ghastly his arguments became, the more secure seemed Bossie’s future. He was very seriously beginning to consider his captive as a barterable commodity, not to be squandered. George had visions of having to rouse the Chief Constable in the middle of the night.

‘Go on, I’m interested. What do you want, a jet plane to fly you to Libya?’

‘I’ll get myself out of the country, there are ways. Nothing as ambitious as that. I want all your men called off for twelve hours, and a car brought here for me – and my little nephew, of course!’

‘A dark green SAAB?’ asked George. ‘The one you used to try and run him down? You’ll have to prove he’s still as good as new, first, you realise that? Nobody buys a pig in a poke.’

‘A nice, well-maintained police car, with everything legitimate, and twelve hours guarantee of a clean bill, in case of any hitch. And he’s OK as of now, and I’ll prove it if I have to, but he won’t be, if you bitch me up short of noon tomorrow.’

‘On the other hand,’ pointed out George, tirelessly mild, ‘you are still stuck in there, the one who needs clemency. Unless you convince us we have to, we are not disposed to let you out, except into our custody. You’d better be a lot more convincing.’

A sudden, prolonged, tired but vicious outburst of profanity. No detectable movement, no struggle at all, things getting bedded down into a status quo. No, he wouldn’t slaughter his bargaining counter. Given time, he might even fall asleep from exhaustion. But he was a tough proposition, far tougher than John Stubbs, with any amount of stamina.

It was no comfort at all when the constable from the switchboard made his way in just after eleven, to announce in a triumphant whisper: ‘We’ve found him! Stubbs! He’s in Birmingham, at this Lavery woman’s flat, seems they had a dinner date on the town, and he jumped at it when this chap Barron offered to do his evening rounds for him. Some of the students wanted to stay on late and finish charting the bit of infirmary they were working on, and Barron said he’d see them off the premises and lock up. We called the flat several times before, but they were still out. They’re only just back. He’s on his way back here now.’

Poor harmless, glum, undecided John Stubbs, good enough to run a job like this caretaking one at Mottisham, but not good enough to get much higher on his own achievements, jealous and resentful of smarter acquaintances such as Colin Barron, but willing to lean on them, too. And torn between two grotesquely different women, and the mixed fortunes they offered, salvation to the undistinguished. So all the time he was taking the more profitable legatee out to dinner! In crass innocence!

‘You still there, Felse?’ demanded the hoarse, vindictive voice from within.

‘I’m still here. I’m listening.’

‘Better make up your mind quickly, if you want this kid, I’m getting tired of waiting. Give me the break I want, and he’s yours.’

‘If you turn him loose to us here on the spot, that might be worth considering. But it doesn’t rest with me, and there are no short cuts to an answer.’

‘Not a chance! I don’t take my halter off him until I’m clear. Then I’ll dump him safely, somewhere he can look after himself.’

‘And we should trust you? But you’d never make it, you know, I guarantee that. You’d much better come out, and get it over.’

‘If I don’t make it, he doesn’t make it, either. I’ll see to that! So get to your damned Chief Constable, and get things moving. And I want more time, since you’re wasting so much. I want a full day!’

If he was tiring, it didn’t show in his voice. All those listening tried to find some sign of weakening, of wandering resolution, and couldn’t. And nothing had changed; there was just this one way out and in, and parley with him was in fact only an exercise in wearing him down, and none too effective so far. It was going to be a long night.

Toby couldn’t stand still and listen to it any longer. He turned his back and groped away along the wall, out of the stable-yard, and round to the left, to circle the whole block and look once more for some other means of approach, anything that would turn the scale. Though he knew that Moon and the constables had already done the same thing, and found nothing of any use. It was better than standing outside the door thinking helplessly of Bossie inside there, roped into helplessness and with a noose round his neck, and of Jenny, with superhuman forbearance, keeping her distance as requested, and dying every minute.

A few broken, embedded stones of a wall jutted for some yards from the corner of the stable-block. He stumbled over them, and came round to the rear of the north walk of the old cloister, into the nave of the church. All along there on his left ran the thick, decrepit stone wall that once had severed the church from the cloister. And to his right the gardens fell away, and gave place to a large, cleared space, receding into darkness between distant walls, where some trick of latent and reflected light, owing to its white encrustations, showed him dimly the shape of a concrete mixer. The sky was a little paler than it had been, against it he could see the tracery of scaffolding encasing one wall, though it vanished again into a single darkness below the skyline. The workmen had much of their plant and stores here, it seemed. Toby moved along the wall, his left hand extended to touch the rough and crumbling surface, and groped his way round a short, buttress-like projection, surely added long after the church itself was gone and the cloister had become stables. Sign enough that this wall, though immense, had been showing traces of disintegration even in the eighteenth century, and needed propping at this point. As he rounded it and felt for the wall again, a small figure erupted under his feet with a muted squeak of alarm, and instantly shushed imperiously at him, as if he had been the offender. Startled, Toby looked down into a round face just visible as a pallor in the night, and clutched at a coat-collar, and was himself as promptly and eagerly clutched by the arm, and towed away into the scaffolded and plant-stacked shelter of the distant buildings, away from the critical zone.

He went willingly, as soon as he had divined the reason; and the moment they were well away from the wall an intent voice round the region of his upper arm hissed at him: ‘Mister, I couldn’t talk there, you can hear right through. That’s Bossie he’s got in there! We’ve got to get him out!’

‘I know!’ agreed Toby in the same urgent undertone. ‘We’re trying to. It’s full of police round there, but we can’t get in. He’s threatening to hurt Bossie if we do. Hey, you’re Bossie’s stand-in, aren’t you? Spuggy?’

‘Yes, we’re all here, four of us. We had to come back. He told us not to, but we had to, we couldn’t leave him on his own.’

‘Took long enough, didn’t you?’ complained Toby ungratefully, going blindly where he was urged, by a guide so close to the ground that he trod it as knowingly as a mouse.

‘I know, we waited outside for a bit, and then we had to get into cover because the coppers came round there. They’re watching the place now, they’d never have let us come in. We had to go a long way round, and we got a bit lost in the dark. But we’ve been here ages now, only we didn’t know then what to do.’

But now they did know? Marvellously, the small, fierce voice sounded sure of itself. Somebody had thought of something that could be done, and this mite was both spy to report the latest state of battle inside the north walk, and now recruiting sergeant for the cause. If a police constable had wandered round the corner he might have hesitated; any civilian was as good as in uniform. He hauled his prize in among the stacked timbers and scaffolding poles under the wing of the house, and three more shadows popped up to receive them. The tallest stood slightly higher than Toby’s shoulder.

‘There’s a bloke here got a bit more weight,’ announced Spuggy tersely. ‘I think he’s game.’

The tallest of the nocturnal waifs eyed the larger shape dimly outlined, and said at once: ‘Eh, you’re the chap who visits at Bossie’s place, aren’t you? Look, we’ve got to have some help. Where do we need the top-weight on this thing, fore or aft? For a ram?’

Toby peered at the ground, dropping to his knees to be sure of what was being offered him. A large, folding ladder, three-fold, and long at that, left here among the plant. Surely more than aluminium by its weight, some sort of stout alloy. By the size of it, it was meant to be strong, and its ends jutted formidably.

‘For God’s sake!’ said Toby, awed. ‘That wall’s heaven knows how thick.’

‘I know, but part of it’s rotten as rubble,’ said Ginger, whose father had taught him about building. ‘We saw it inside, this afternoon, you could see daylight through. Look, you can see light through it now.’

It was true. From this modest distance, and square to the affected area, Colin Barron’s protective light shone through very clearly in several starry points, the weak joint in his armour.

‘We were inside this afternoon. That part, it’s just left of where they’re standing. The wall bulges. I reckon it’s ready to go if we hit it right.’

‘We might kill them,’ doubted Toby fearfully.

‘There isn’t any other way. We’ve got to try.’

From the darkness under the house wall a hearty whisper blew into their colloquy like a gale-force wind. ‘You have positively got something there,’ owned Willie the Twig, coming round the concrete-mixer, ‘that I wish I’d thought of.’

They knew him, and were not disconcerted; everybody knew Will Swayne could move among the wild things in the forest and never be detected unless he wished. And he was an ally after their own hearts. Where Willie was, Barbara would not be far away. Her scent was on the air, shadowy there at Willie’s shoulder.

‘Weight forward of amidships, I’d say, either side now we’re two matched. You lot will have to gallop. And Barbie, make yourself useful, go back and tip off the police, they’ll have to rush him the instant they hear us hit. In case!’

Barbara, glittering, whispered: ‘Yes!’ as roused and resolute as the children, and turned and whisked away into the dark. ‘Give her two minutes,’ said Willie, ‘enough to pass the word, not enough for them to interfere.’ He lifted his side of the ladder, shifting back far enough to give it a prow calculated to do maximum damage before its crew reached the point of risk. Six of them now to man it, and the forward two could hoist most of its weight and balance it, while the lightest weights, Spuggy Price and Jimmy Grocott, manfully matched their small persons but immense pugnacity next in the line, and Toffee Bill and Ginger, the architect of the whole enterprise, brought up the rear with no spare length going to waste, and all their force behind the ram. It was all crazy and improvised and amateur, but at least it was action and thought, the sort of desperate sortie men might have mounted in the centuries when this place was first built.

The steady pattern of terrestial stars in the stone wall made their target perfectly clear. An area not more than five feet across, and a little below the middle of the height of the wall. That, Ginger said with certainty, was where the bulge was. And if anything was going to shatter Colin Barron, short of a thunderbolt from heaven, it was the whole wall at his left shoulder exploding on top of him.

‘Is it time?’ whispered Ginger, still captain of this venture, but without a watch.

‘Now!’ said Willie the Twig softly, and they all braced their arms firmly in the frame of the ladder, and leaned forward for the word.

‘Charge!’ croaked Ginger, and the whole half-dozen, eyes fixed unrelentingly on the area of stars, launched themselves forward in a vehement, unsteady trot, instinctively feeling for a rhythm, lurched into the double, gathered breath and accelerated into full, triumphant gallop many yards from the target.

It was something out of another world, mad and marvellous and exhilarating in its desperation, something that happens only once in a lifetime. Toby thought of all those short legs twinkling behind him, and all those enlarged hearts pumping adrenalin like crazy, enough to flood the old fish-ponds and overflow into the river.

The twin poles of the ladder hit the target dead-centre, with six translated personalities for motor. The check was merely momentary, no more than a slight jolt, before the points sheered on with only slightly retarded momentum, exploding into the light beyond in an avalanche of flying stones. Through a quivering, quaking gap three yards wide the victorious team with their battering-ram burst into Bossie’s prison. From the doorway George Felse, Sergeant Moon and two or three constables, closely followed by Barbara Rainbow, exultant, with streaming hair, surged in to meet them.

Through a stifling acrid dust-storm, thick as old-fashioned fog, George dived headlong for Colin Barron’s half-buried body, and fell on his knees to dig like a terrier at the litter of stones and rubble that covered him. Praise God, at the instant of total, deafening shock he had done the instinctive thing, dropped his captive to throw up both arms to cover his head. Not too successfully; there was blood as well as dirt in the thick fair hair, and he was stunned, but the damage looked relatively trivial. Concussion, probably, but no fractures. Like so many of the mediaeval walls that look so irreproachably solid, this one had been rubble-filled within the stone shell. But the point of impact had been barely six feet from his left ear, and the heavier ammunition had sprayed at that level, and effectively knocked him out. Bossie, held closely in front of him and shielded by his body, was somewhere there underneath, and with any luck no worse than winded.

George on one side and Moon on the other were still scooping away debris and lifting Barron’s weight aside, as Willie the Twig and Toby Malcolm came clambering in recklessly through the gap they had made, four dusty choirboys-errant hard on their heels, and all in a state of awe and exaltation at the wreckage they had produced, and total euphoria at its successful result. Minor avalanches still slid and muttered along the wall, where a tattered area of sky appeared, its shape changed every few seconds by the belated fall of one more precariously balanced stone. Coughing and spitting out gritty particles, they plunged enthusiastically into the work of rescue.

Thankfully they extracted Bossie, temporarily winded but without much more than a scratch on him, unwound him from rope and gag, retrieved his glasses unbroken, cleaned them, and stood him on his feet, as good as new. Doubtless he should have been in a state of nervous collapse, but there were no signs of it. As soon as he had any breath, he was as voluble as ever.

‘Aren’t you going to put handcuffs on him?’ he demanded, surveying his prostrate enemy. ‘It is him! He’s the one I saw the night Mr Rainbow was killed. When he locked the door I saw the light flash off that flat stone in his ring, and I remembered it. And I bet he’s got my parchment on him, too.’

Reaction might come later, but Bossie was Bossie yet, and not to be swept away immediately into Jenny’s arms, not before his vindication was complete. It was, in any case, an idea that was worth considering. With so great a cloud of witnesses, less than half of them police, just as well to lift the evidence on the spot, if it really was there, before any question of its provenance could arise.

The contents of Colin Barron’s pockets were without special interest, until they came to a deep breast-pocket inside his jacket, and drew forth something rolled up like an oversize stick of cinnamon inside a narrow suede bag.

‘That was Arthur’s,’ said Barbara immediately. ‘He had a set of those made once, when he’d got hold of some very special Georgian silver cutlery, and wanted to carry samples to show. I doubt if there’d be others exactly like them.’

Out of the case slid a rolled, brownish tube faintly marked with traces of faded ink. Unrolled, it also displayed clearly enough the fresh characters of Bossie’s effort, far too positive to be convincing for long.

‘Yes,’ said Bossie triumphantly. ‘That’s it!’ Who should know his own handiwork better?

‘That’s the thing I pinched,’ agreed Toby. ‘Plus my friend’s improvements, of course.’

Several pairs of eyes peered at the unprepossessing relic, between puzzlement and awe, willing to be impressed but unable to see any sane reason why they should be.

‘You mean,’ enquired Spuggy wonderingly, ‘that’s what it was all about? Just that bit of old stuff? Is it that precious?’

‘Two people evidently thought so,’ said George soberly.

‘Well, how about this, then?’ And Spuggy fished in the depths of his own overcrowded pockets, and produced a longish, flat wad of what looked like disintegrating plaster, and on the surface, indeed, was nothing else. ‘It’s that piece I poked out when we went round this afternoon,’ he explained simply. ‘It seemed to make that chap so mad, I’d thought I’d better not leave it lying around, so I slipped it in my pocket. But all the plaster bits started flaking off, and I found this other stuff folded up inside. Look!’

No need to exhort them, they were all looking, with disbelieving eyes, as he thumbed apart the edges of not one, but apparently three or four leaves of something that might very well be vellum. Stiff, inclined to crumble, but very slowly unfolding now to show remarkably clear edges of inner surface, preserved by being pressed together. There were certainly the marks of written characters there, the opening letters of line below even line. Gritty particles of mortar drifted from it as Spuggy held it up to view. ‘It looks like some of the same. And Bossie said it was where the other bit was found. Is this any good?’

For a moment nobody had breath to answer him.

‘Because if it is,’ continued Spuggy practically, ‘there’s some more of it down here among all this muck. I reckon it came down with the wall.’

As one they turned to stare, and then scattered to peer and rake and dig all along the broken area of wall, among the ruin of the north walk, where once the carrels and aumbries of Mottisham Abbey had been ranged, and the monks had both read and written. And first one excited voice, and then another, hailed fresh discoveries. Wherever the wall had weathered and fallen into holes, it seemed, the leaves of parchment had been rolled or folded and wedged into the cracks as filling, to be plastered over and seal the gaps. In the days of penury and decline, when repairs were impossible, something had to stop the holes to keep the wind away! The treasure for which Rainbow had died and Colin Barron had killed lay scattered in dust and rubble at their feet.