The Grass Widow's Tale

CHAPTER V

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The man huddled on the settee lay utterly still, the tremors suppressed by force, his breath held. He did not raise his head; he wanted never to raise it again. It was Bunty who dragged herself up out of her chair and went into action. She could move, she was in command of herself. And she knew what she was doing, now. Hurriedly she stooped for her handbag, and ran a comb through her hair. Would there be marks on her throat? Not yet, probably, but she shook out her chiffon scarf and tucked it in around her neck to make certain of being unremarkable. There was blood on her fingers; she dipped her handkerchief into the nearest liquid, which was the spilled tea on the table, and wiped the stains away.

“Give me the key!”

Speech hardly hurt at all. She had time to realise, even in that moment, how little she was damaged. He must have snatched his hands away from her as soon as he felt her pain.

He lifted his head at the sharp sound of her voice, and turned upon her a blind, mute face.

“The key, quickly! Give it to me!”

He sat up and felt through his pockets for it numbly, and held it out to her without a word. From his last safe place at the end of despair, where there is nothing left to lose or gain, he watched her walk out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. He heard the bolts of the front door drawn back, heard the key turned in the lock.

In those few yards Bunty lived through a total reassessment of everything that had happened to her. Her senses were abnormally acute, her mind moved with rapidity and certainty. She remembered things observed at the time without comprehension, and made sense of them. Her legs might be shaky under her, but mentally she was on her feet again.

She opened the door of the cottage with the accurately measured reserve of a woman alone, knocked up at an unusually early hour on a Sunday morning. Not too wide at first, ready to close it and slip the bolt again quickly if she didn’t like the look of her visitor; then surprised and relieved, setting it wide and coming confidently into the doorway.

The two uniformed policemen on the step of the porch gazed back at her in silence for a moment, more surprised to see her than she was to see them.

“Good morning!” said Bunty, and waited with the polite, questioning curiosity of the innocent to hear what they wanted of her.

“Good morning, ma’am!” The elder of the two shoved up his flat cap civilly on the furze-bush of his pepper-and-salt hair, and eyed her with circumspection, plainly finding her of a reassuring respectability. “Sorry if we startled you, but we saw a light in one of the windows here a while since, from up the coast road a piece, and knowing that the lady and gentleman who summer here have left, we wondered… You never know, just as well to check up, when a house is empty.”

“Oh, I see! Yes, of course, and how very good of you! Reggie and Louise will be so grateful,” said Bunty warmly, “to know that you keep such a good watch on their place. I’m a friend of the Alports, they’ve lent me their cottage for a long week-end. I drove up last night.”

“Ah, that accounts for the light, then.” He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and why shouldn’t he, when she produced the owners’ names so readily? An Englishwoman of forty, dressed in a smart and rather expensive grey jersey suit, must seem probable enough as an acquaintance of the Alports; indeed, it was unlikely that such a person would ever find her way to this spot unless directed by the owners. “And you found everything in order here, ma’am? No signs of anyone prowling around in the night? No trouble at all?”

The younger policeman, tall and raw-boned, and surely a local boy, had drawn back out of the porch, and was using his eyes to good purpose without seeming to probe. The front window, through which he had already taken a sharp look, would show him only a room where everything must be as the Alports had left it. He was eyeing the hard gravel, too, but all it would tell him was that a car had arrived here, stood a little while before the door, and then been put sensibly away in the garage, which is exactly what one would expect the English lady to do with her car on arrival. Now he was turning his blue and innocent regard upon Bunty, and taking her in from head to foot, without apparent question of her genuineness, rather with a degree of critical pleasure on his own account.

“Trouble?” said Bunty, wide-eyed. Her smile faded into faint anxiety, nicely tempered with curiosity. “No, nobody’s been here. Everything was all right when I arrived. Why, is something wrong?”

“Och, nothing for you to worry about, ma’am,” said the sergeant comfortably. “You’re no’ likely to be troubled here. Most like he’s gone on northwards.”

“He?” she echoed. “You mean there’s somebody you’re looking for? A criminal?”

“We’ve had warning to look out for a car, ma’am, a large old car, black, thought to be a Rover, registration NAQ 788. It’s known to have driven north out of England during the night. Constable at Muirdrum believes he saw the same car go past about three hours ago, heading for Arbroath, but he’s no’ sure of the number. We’re checking up and down all these roads, just in case. But there’s no call for you to worry, ma’am, you’ll be fine here.”

So no one, it seemed, was looking for her just yet. No one had mentioned that there’d been a woman aboard, most likely no one knew. Obviously they knew it hadn’t been a woman driving.

“NAQ 788,” she repeated thoughtfully. “A black Rover. I could get in touch with you if I do see anything of it, of course.”

“Ay, you could do that, ma’am. But I don’t think you’re likely to catch sight of him, I doubt he’s as far north as he can get by now.”

“What do you want him for?” Bunty asked inquisitively. A woman without curiosity would be suspect anywhere. “Has he run somebody down, or something?”

“Well, no’ just that!” She hadn’t expected a direct answer, and clearly she wasn’t going to get one, but his business-like, unalarmed attitude told her most of what she needed to know. “Constable somewhere down south had a narrow squeak, though,” he vouchsafed, after due consideration. And that was all she was going to get out of him; but it seemed that he had given a second thought to getting something out of her in exchange.

“We’ll be on our way then. Sorry if we disturbed you. And by the way, maybe I should have your name and home address, ma’am, just for information.”

She hadn’t been expecting that, but she was equal to it. Startled by her own readiness, she responded without hesitation: “I’m Rosamund Chartley—that’s Mrs. Chartley, of course…” The young one, if not the other, had long since assimilated the significance of her ring. “And I live at 17 Hampton Close, Hereford.” She couldn’t be sure how much he would know in advance about the Alports, but her use of their name had registered immediately, she might as well play for safety and assume that he knew their home town, too. She watched him write down her instant fiction, and smiled at him as he put his note-book away; not too encouragingly, on the contrary, with a slight intimation that if that was all she could do for him she would like to go back to her interrupted breakfast.

“Thank you, ma’am, we won’t keep you any longer now. And I’m sure ye needna be at all uneasy. Good morning, Mrs. Chartley!”

He re-adjusted his cap on the grizzled heather he wore for hair, summoned his subordinate with a flick of a finger, and they departed. She closed the door, and leaned back against it for a moment, listening. They had a car, they must have turned it on the gravel and withdrawn it into the shelter of the trees before knocking at the door. She heard it start up and wind away into the convolutions of the lane. Only then did she re-bolt and lock the door, and go back into the living-room.

The young man was sitting bolt upright on the settee, dark against the brilliance and shimmer of the sea, every nerve at stretch, his eyes fixed wildly on the empty doorway, waiting for her to reappear there. The gun was in the clenched right hand that lay on his knee, and his finger was crooked on the trigger.

She saw it instantly, and instantly understood. He must have lowered his hand in sheer stupefaction when the meaning of that astonishing performance of hers penetrated his mind, with his death only the tightening of a nerve away.

Oh, God, she thought, suppose he hadn’t waited to hear? Why didn’t I take it from him before I went to the door? But there’d been no time to consider everything. And thank God, he had waited, and confusion and bewilderment had kept him from dying. Or curiosity, perhaps, curiosity can be a valid reason for going on living, when no other is left.

So the first thing she had to do, without delay but without any hasty gesture that could startle him back into despair, was to cross the room to him, and gently take the thing out of his hand. He didn’t resist; his cramped fingers opened at her touch, and gave it up without protest. Enormous eyes, cloudy with wonder, devoured her face and had no attention for anything else.

“Why?” he asked, in a rustling whisper.

“You won’t need it now,” she said. But she knew that was not what he meant.

“Why didn’t you bring them in and give me up? Why didn’t you tell them I tried to kill you?”

Without a word in answer, she opened a drawer of the little writing-desk on the other side of the room, and thrust the gun far back out of sight. Then she came back to the settee and sat down beside him.

“Look,” she said urgently, “you and I have got to talk. We’ve got a little time now, and the car’s safest where it is. They won’t come looking for it here now—not yet!”

“But why did you send them away?”

“Never mind that. There are things I’ve got to know, and we may not have all that long. That girl in the car— who is she?”

“Her name’s Pippa Gallier,” he said, with the docility of despair, shock and hopeless bewilderment, but with some positive motion of faith, too, as though she had surprised him into drawing back the first of the bolts that sealed his terrible solitude from the world. “We were going to be married. I thought we were…”

“She’s a Comerbourne girl? That is where you teach, isn’t it? What was she? What did she do?”

“She worked at the big fashion shop, Pope Halsey’s, and did a bit of modelling for them when they had dress shows. She was an assistant buyer. She wasn’t a Comerbourne girl, though, her family belong to Birmingham. She had a little flat over one of the shops in Queen Street. Why?” he asked dully, but at least there was a grain of life in his voice now, and in his eyes, that never wavered from searching her face. He had some kind of stunned trust in her now that told him she must have a reason for probing these irremediable things. Nothing she did was wanton; it didn’t follow that she could change anything.

“And how did she come to die?”

“I shot her,” he said, staring through her and seeing the girl’s dead face.

“All right, you shot her! But that’s not what I want. I want to know how it happened, every detail, everything you remember. Tell me about it.”

He drew breath as if the effort cost him infinite labour, and told her, fumbling out the sequence of events with many pauses. He was terribly tired, and completely lost, but he was still coherent.

“I wanted to marry her. We were running about together steadily, until about a couple of months ago, and we were as good as engaged. And then she got very off-hand with me, for some reason, and started pulling away. She turned down dates, or she rang up to make excuses, and if I objected she flared up and walked out. They’d always tried to tell me she had other men on a string, too… I never believed it. I was daft about her…”

“They?” said Bunty, pouncing on this lack of definition. “Who were they?”

“The chap who shares—shared—my cottage, Bill Reynolds, he teaches at the same school. Other friends of ours, too.”

“And some of them knew her well? Could they have been on her string themselves?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They knew her, but not that well. I never believed it. And then just over a week ago it seemed as if we’d got past the bad patch. You know how it can be, everything straightens out and starts running on wheels. She was the sweetest I’ve ever known her, and things were back as they used to be. I bought her a ring. She’d never let me get that far before. I was happy! You know what I mean? I’d never believed there was anything wrong about her, but I’d never felt sure of her before, and now I did, she’d promised, and we were engaged. And then she suggested that we should go to London together this half-term…”

“To London?” said Bunty sharply. “Not up here, then?”

“No, to London. She had a few days of her holiday left to use, she suggested we should drive down on Friday evening. So when it came to Friday evening I was ready well ahead of the time we’d fixed, and I ran the car round into town, to her flat, to pick her up. It was a good half-hour earlier than she’d be expecting me. And I was just parking the car, a bit away from the house—you know what it’s like trying to find anywhere to park in Comerbourne—when I saw her come out of the private door of her flat. Not alone, with a fellow I’d never seen before. And she was hanging on his arm and chattering away to him and looking up into his face, like… like a cut-price call-girl! You can’t mistake it when you do see it.”

“Did they see you?” asked Bunty intently.

“No, I told you, I could only find a place farther along the street. No, they didn’t see me…”

“And you didn’t go after them? You didn’t challenge them?”

“I never had time. I’d just got out of the car when they came out, and they turned the other way. He had a car parked there just in front of the shop, and they got into it and drove off in the other direction. By the time I was across the road they were turning the corner out of Queen Street.”

“What sort of car was it? Would you know it again?”

“I didn’t get the number, I never thought of it, but it was a light-grey Jag. Does it matter?”

“It matters,” she said sharply. “Every detail matters. What about the man?”

“I’d know him again,” he said bitterly. “A big chap, well-dressed, over-dressed for Comerbourne, you don’t see many dinner jackets around in Queen Street. But he made everything he had on look like slightly sporty wear, this type. You could imagine him rally-driving in a special one-off, instead of rolling round in a Jag. He had this he-man touch, and yet everything about him was smooth, his clothes, his movements… everything except his face. That had some pretty crude, craggy lines, a knubby forehead, auburn hair growing low, cleft chin, eyes buried in a lot of bone. Yes, I’d know him again!”

“And she went with him willingly? You’re sure?”

“Willingly? Gladly! You should have seen her!”

“And what did you do?”

“What could I do? They were gone, and I didn’t know where. But it was pretty safe betting she wasn’t going to be hurrying back within the next half-hour to meet me. I went back home, trying to kid myself there must be another answer, persuading myself there’d be a message for me. And there was! Bill was just rushing off for his own half-term, to his parents’ place in Essex, when I got back. He told me there’d been a phone call for me from Pippa, he’d left me a note. She was terribly sorry, but she’d have to put off leaving for our jaunt until to-morrow evening. Her mother’d turned up unexpectedly, meaning to stay overnight, and she hadn’t the heart to run out on her, and couldn’t even tell her she’d had a trip planned, because Mother would be so upset at having spoiled it for her! So would I mind keeping away until to-morrow evening, and she’d come along and join me as soon as she’d seen her visitor off home! And it could all have been true,” he said bleakly, staring into the past with the sick fascination of one contemplating disasters about which nothing can now be done, “if I hadn’t known beforehand that her visitor wore a dinner jacket and stood about six feet three in his shoes. Because we’d only just got engaged, and her mother knew nothing about me yet, and we wouldn’t have wanted to spring it on her in circumstances like that, without any preparation. It could all have been true, only I knew now that there wasn’t a word of truth in it.

“So I went out and got horribly drunk. Black, vicious, murderous drunk. I don’t usually drink much, but I seem to have an abnormally high tolerance, it takes a lot to fill me up. But I wasn’t too tight to walk round by her flat after the pubs closed, and I wasn’t too far gone to know what I was seeing, either. The grey Jaguar was parked discreetly round the corner in the mews. Mother stayed the night, all right!”

“And this was Friday? But if she’d ditched you, and if you’d written her off as a dead loss, how did you come to tangle with her again on Saturday?” demanded Bunty.

“You forget, she didn’t know I’d written her off. She thought she only had to drop me a message, and I’d swallow it whole and sit back until she wanted me again.”

“Of course,” she said, enlightened, “she turned up on Saturday evening according to programme!”

“According to her programme. And if you’ll believe me, that possibility had simply never occurred to me. I was so full up with what had happened, the thing was so completely finished for me, that I’d clean forgotten she didn’t know I knew! She thought everything was serene, and she only had to stroll in at my place and say: Darling, here I am, all ready! and I’d run to fetch the car, and we could start. So that’s what she did, around seven o’clock on Saturday evening, came rolling up in a taxi with her biggest suitcase, and started on another apology for Friday’s hold-up as soon as she came in at the door. And I’d been howling like a dog all morning with the hangover of a lifetime, and topping it up again in self-defence most of the afternoon, and I was fit for murder.”

“You do realise,” said Bunty, frowning with concentration, “that so far you haven’t so much as mentioned that you owned a gun? Legally or illegally!”

“I didn’t own a gun. Legally or illegally. I’d never had one in my hands, as far as I can remember. I know damn-all about the things. When I do mention it you’re not going to believe me. I wouldn’t believe myself.”

“I might, though,” said Bunty. “All right, get to it your own way. She came breezing in, expecting to be taken to London. And you told her that she’d had it, that it was over, and she might as well go home.”

“What I told her was meaner than that, but let it go, it added up to much the same. I asked if her mother had slept well, and whether I could have the name of her tailor. She was always quick on the uptake, Pippa, not as clever as she thought she was, perhaps, but pretty sharp, all the same. She got it in a moment that I’d seen them, and she came up with a good story faster than you’d ever credit. That was her mother’s cousin, that man with the Jaguar, it was because he’d turned up for a visit that her mother’d been able to make the trip, and that’s why she had no warning. And she was all set to put me in the wrong and herself in the right, as usual, and I was the one who was supposed to apologise. Only this time it didn’t work. Damn it, I’d seen them! I asked her whether they’d locked Mother in the flat while they went out to dinner, because I’d seen her just slipping her keys in her bag. You’re a liar, I told her, and a cheat, and what else you are you know best, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve done with you, you can go to London, or the devil, or wherever you please, but not with me. She couldn’t believe it. I’d been so easy up to then, it took a little while to sink in. But as soon as she did manage to get it into her head that I meant it, things got even crazier than they already were. She started persuading, threatening, even fawning… you’ve no idea how fantastic a performance that was, from Pippa. You’d have thought getting to London that night was a matter of life and death to her. She’d expected the car to be waiting in the road for her, and instead, it was locked in the garage Bill and I rent —rented—down at Floods’, at the end of the street. When she realised nothing was going to get her her own way any more, she suddenly dived her hand into her bag and pulled out a gun. That gun.” He glanced across at the drawer where Bunty had hidden it, and then at her attentive face, and said wryly: “I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

She gave him no reassurances, and made him no promises. Not yet. “Go on,” she said.

“Well, I still can’t believe in it myself. These things don’t happen, not in connection with people like Pippa. Where would she get a gun? Why should she want one? And why, for God’s sake, should she care enough about going to London with me to grab it out of her bag and point it at me, and tell me I’d better keep my promise to drive her down, or else! Why? It mattered to her just getting her own way, I know, but surely not that much? And she meant it, I know she did, now. But then…”

“Then,” said Bunty, “you were too furious to be cautious.”

“Too drunk,” he said hardly. “She waved this thing at me, and threatened, and as far as I was concerned that was the last straw. I wanted to kill her… or, at least, I was ready to. Oh, I know that, all right! When it happens to you, you know it. I just went for her. No holds barred. I got her by the wrist and we had a wild, untidy sort of struggle for the gun. About the rest I’m not sure. But I know I ripped it out of her hand. I know that. I know I was holding it when we both fell over together, and went down with a crash. I’m not sure what I hit. The edge of the table, I think. I hit something, all right, I’ve still got the hell of a headache and a bump like a hen’s egg to prove it. All I know for certain is that I went out cold for a time. I don’t know how long, exactly, but not long, not more than twenty or twenty-five minutes, I’d say. When I came round, I was lying over Pippa on the floor. And I still had the gun in my hand. And Pippa… she was dead. It took me a few minutes to understand that. I was shaking her, talking to her, telling her playing the fool wouldn’t get her anything… Oh, my God! You wouldn’t believe how little different she looked… not different at all. There was no blood, nothing to show for it, only that small hole in her sweater. She looked just as if she was pretending, to frighten me. And that would have been like her, too. But she didn’t move, and she didn’t breathe… and there was that hole, and just the ooze of blood round it, that her sweater absorbed. And in the end I knew she was dead, really dead, and I’d killed her. You,” he said abruptly, turning the full devastating stare of his haggard eyes on Bunty, “you change things. But not even you can change that.”

She leaned forward and laid her hand possessively on his arm, holding him eye to eye with her. “The shot… There’s just one bullet-hole. Did you hear the shot?”

He thought that over with agonised care. “Not that I can remember. I’d expect the moment when we fell to be the moment when the gun went off. When I fired it,” he corrected himself grimly. “I told you, I meant murder. But I don’t actually remember hearing the shot. All I know beyond doubt is that I came round, and she was dead.

“And I panicked. I can’t blame the drink for that. I wasn’t in very good shape when I came round, but I tell you, I was stone cold sober. I tidied up the room, and locked the house, and ran for the car. You can get it round to the back gate, and it’s quite private there. I packed up girl and luggage and all in the boot, and picked up the spent cartridge case—it was there on the floor right beside her—and locked the place up again, as if we’d set off according to plan, and got out of there. It didn’t take long, there was no mess, no blood… She was lying on her back, you see, and I reckon the bullet must be still in her, I couldn’t find any exit wound. I threw the spent case in a field as soon as I was out of town. All I thought of was getting away. At first I didn’t know where, I was driving round and round on the country roads in a state of shock, trying to think, and I had to have a drink to help me. I had to. And that was when I met you.”

He looked up, and for a moment studied her with wonder and care, forgetting himself. “It’s funny, how you’ve changed. You had the black dog on you then, too. It was because you were sad that I wanted to talk to you. I wish I’d left you alone. I’m sorry!”

“What were you going to do?” asked Bunty.

“I thought of this place. I’ve been here several times with Reggie and Louise, and they gave me an open invitation to use it even after they’d packed it in for the year and gone home. They’re like that, they probably invited other people, too. That’s why they leave a key. And I thought of Reggie’s boat.”

“You were going to drop her overboard,” said Bunty, “and head for Denmark, or somewhere…”

“Norway, actually. It must be possible to land unobserved somewhere on all that tremendous coastline, and I know my way around there a little. I’ve even got friends there… though I don’t suppose,‘’ he owned drearily, ” that I could have dragged them into this mess.”

“And I,” she said practically, almost cheerfully, “was to go overboard, too, in mid-passage.”

He stared back at her mutely, out of the extremes of exhaustion, unable any longer to be ashamed or afraid. Even the tension which had held him upright was broken now, after the slow blood-letting of this confession. He was close to total collapse.

“Why didn’t you take your chance when it came?” he asked in a thread of a voice. “Why did you send the police away?”

She got up slowly, and moved away from him to pick up the shards of the tea-pot. “I’d better get this mess cleaned up,” she said, momentarily side-tracked, and lost that thread again on the instant. The housewife was there, somewhere inside, but fighting against the odds. She straightened up with the fragments in her hands, and stood frowning down at them thoughtfully.

“I didn’t need them,” she said, and turned to face the boy on the settee, whose eyes had never ceased their faithful study of her through the cloud of their guilt and sorrow and resignation.

“I’d only just realised it,” she said deliberately, “but I knew I didn’t need them. In the night I wasn’t thinking or noticing very clearly, or I might have known before. Things are distorted as soon as you’re afraid. Maybe I did know, subconsciously. I think I may have done. I had all the evidence, if I’d been able to recognise it. When you drove at that constable in Hawkworth… did he jump back first, or did you swerve first? I didn’t work it out then, I know now. And what a lot of trouble you went to, to avoid running down a hare, even when you were on the run. No wonder you couldn’t go through with it when it came to my turn.”

Half of that, she realised, was lost upon him. He was in no condition to follow her through such a maze; but he clung to his own question, and it bore a slightly different inflection now, tinted with the living wonder of genuine curiosity, and—was it possible?—hope!

“Why did you send them away? Why didn’t you hand me over to them, and be safe?”

“Because,” said Bunty, now with something very like certainty, “I was safe. Because I don’t believe you are a murderer. I don’t believe you ever killed anyone, not even Pippa!”