The Grass Widow's Tale

CHAPTER VIII

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By the time Bunty had washed out the stained table-cloth and hung it to dry, and sat down to wait for Luke’s return, she was no longer entirely easy in her mind about those keys. Supposing she had read too much into their absence, and built him up on insufficient evidence to another shattering fall? What if they were upstairs all the time, for instance, in Pippa’s coat pocket? No, that was hard to believe. Someone who loved clothes so much wouldn’t spoil the set of them by carrying things of any bulk or weight in the pockets. Which is why the handbags of to-day have grown bigger than shopping bags.

I don’t know, though, thought Bunty on reflection. This year’s coats have at least got flared skirts again, not straight, so that even a loose threepenny-bit shows through in a duodecagonal bump. Why not slip up and make sure, now, while Luke’s out of the house?

He would have locked the bedroom, of course, she quite understood that. She was to be protected from touching or seeing again the sad wreckage of his first love. But there was his coat on the back of the chair by the desk, and there was a good chance that the key was in his pocket. He need never know that she had circumvented his concern for her feelings, if she made her search at once.

The bedroom key was there, she found it in the left-hand outside pocket. She ran up the stairs, and let herself into the pastel-coloured room; and there on the bed lay the youth and beauty for whose passing she had been startled into grieving only two days ago. Wasted and spoiled, and withdrawn now into supreme indifference, Pippa was never going to look into her mirror at forty-one, and wonder if everything had been well done, and whether this was all. Just being alive again would have been prize enough for Pippa. Bunty stood beside the bed and looked down at her with wonder and pity. Touching her started no other feelings, no repugnance at all; Bunty had seen death before.

The charcoal-coloured coat had fine silver threads running through the weave, a flared skirt, and two large slant pockets. There was nothing in them, but the trouble was that they were cut so wide and shallow that they might easily shed their contents when the wearer was recumbent. Better look in the boot of the car, too, and make quite sure. The matching skirt had no pockets. Slenderly cut for an almost hipless figure, it could not possibly have accommodated one. There was nowhere else to look. Bunty passed her hands all down the still, chill body, avoiding the encrusted brown hole in the fine cream sweater. No, Pippa had no keys. And no more use for keys.

The large, delicate eyelids, blue-veined like pale harebells, were imperfectly closed. A faint gleam of reflected light from the hooded eyes followed Bunty to the door. She looked back once, and the stillness of the slight figure had the quality of tomb sculpture, monumental not so much in the absence of movement as in the total renunciation of movement. The infection of silence and stealth that possesses the living in the presence of death is not awe but sympathetic magic, used as a protection. Do your best not to seem alien and alive here, and death won’t recognise another victim and turn on you.

Bunty tiptoed out of the room, and closed and locked the door. She was still moving soundlessly when she slipped the bedroom key back into Luke’s pocket. Poor girl! How old could she have been? Twenty-three or twenty-four? She didn’t look so much, but apparently she was senior enough to be a deputy buyer at a first-class store like Pope Halsey’s. Probably very good at her job; a pity, a thousand pities, she hadn’t been content to stick to it, but had meddled with something out of her scope.

The garage key was hanging on its own proper hook in the kitchen; Luke had made no attempt to hide it, once he had brought Pippa and her belongings into the house. Bunty took it, let herself out by the front door, and crossed the gravel to the creosoted timber building, large enough for two cars. She unlocked the door and went in. There was the big old Rover, a hulking black shape in the light from the dusty window, unfashionable, powerful and solid, built when cars were meant to last, and to run remorselessly until every part dropped dead together. At the last moment she wondered if Luke would have locked the boot again, and whether she would have to go back and hunt for more keys; but the huge lid gave easily to her hand, and bounced open to its fullest. There was nothing to hide in there now.

Pippa had travelled a great many miles in this dark coffin, and there had been some pretty rough riding on the way. The Tyrolean climbing boot could very easily have rolled out of those shallow pockets and into a dark corner here, and escaped notice. But no, there was nothing to be found but a gallon can for petrol, the spare wheel braced to one side, and a wooden tool-box and a jack shoved well to the back. Bunty moved those items which were movable, and felt all round the dusty floor until she was satisfied. Nothing. And the thing could hardly have found its way into the petrol can or the tool box.

Nevertheless, for no good reason, she opened the lid of the box. A roughish affair, but solid, maybe as old as the car. There was a top tray full of small tools and a good deal of accumulated rubbish, of the kind one keeps because it may come in useful some day, and finally throws out in a grand clearance about two days before the occasion for its usefulness does arise. She lifted the tray. It sat upon two stout wooden supports, and below was a larger compartment.

The clean, new, flat package that lay there, almost as large as the inside dimensions of the box, and wrapped neatly in decorative bookshop paper, startled her by its sheer incongruity. It was about fifteen inches by ten, and could easily have been one of the lavish gift-books currently fashionable for leaving negligently around on coffee-tables. Only it wasn’t. She prodded it, and it had no bound hardness, but a thick, yielding, heavy, papery quality. It might have been unremarkable enough almost anywhere else; but here it arrested her attention like the eruption of a Roman candle.

She lifted it out, and on impulse pulled at the end of the pink tape that tied it, and unwrapped it at one end. It felt like paper, and it was paper. Neat bundles of thin, limp oblongs printed in sepia browns and muted greens on white, and held together in regular order by girdles of narrow brown gumstrip. Six bundles in one layer, four of them ranged side by side, and two lengthways alongside them; and several layers.

She riffled the ends through her fingers unbelievingly, and stared, and stared again. She had never seen so many ten-pound notes in her life. At a lightning estimate, she was holding in her hands something over twelve thousand pounds.

For just one moment her mind recoiled with horror and revulsion, suddenly seeing a Luke who had been lying to her throughout, who had been in some shady deal with the girl, and killed her over the proceeds. Here was this bundle hidden in his tool box, in his car, and here was he on the coast, ready and equipped with a boat for his escape, and funds to keep him afloat wherever he went.

It shook her to the heart, but it was gone as suddenly as it had come. It blew through her mind like a gust of wind, and died into invulnerable calm. No, she had the best possible reason to know better than that. If he had killed Pippa, then Bunty Felse, too, would have been dead by now, there would have been no recoil from the act. He wasn’t a killer, and he would be the least effective of partners in anything criminal. Moreover, her instinct told her that he could not possibly have been acting all this time. For what purpose, even if he had the ability? No, she had not really been shaken. She knew she was right about him. She would stake her life on it. She was staking her life on it.

Not Luke. Pippa.

Hadn’t he mentioned twice that she had borrowed his car to carry home her shopping on Thursday?

So that was why she had been frantic when Luke had told her in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going anywhere, when she had found him disillusioned, and the car still in the garage, and out of her reach for ever. She couldn’t tell him about the money, and she couldn’t get access to her hiding-place to recover it. She had put it clean out of her own reach. No wonder she raved, no wonder she committed the final folly and threatened him with the gun.

Yes, someone had been involved in crooked business, but it wasn’t Luke. Pippa was running out in a hurry with hot money, but it wasn’t from Luke she was running. On the contrary, she had run back to him and ingratiated herself with him afresh in order to make use of him for her get away. That was what she had wanted of him. That was what she had had in mind when she came back and couldn’t have been sweeter. And his engagement ring? Well, a little bonus like that is always welcome. Why say no? He was more likely to do what she wanted if she accepted him. And a solitaire diamond, even a little one, is not to be sneezed at.

There were more and more implications crowding in beyond these. Bunty was dizzy with the flashing of chaotic particles falling into place, as though a jigsaw puzzle had abruptly decided to solve itself.

Any minute now Luke would be coming up from the sea. Let him find this parcel as she had found it, let him demonstrate to himself as well as to her what the find meant in terms of his own integrity. And let him destroy for ever, in the finding, whatever grain of doubt had remained to suggest to her, even for an instant, what she had just found herself momentarily believing. He had a right to know that she had doubted, provided he understood that the doubt was the last.

She smoothed the end of the package hastily back into order, re-tied it exactly as before, and replaced it in the tool box. She closed the boot, locked the garage and went back to put the key in its place.

Presently Luke came up from the inlet, with the salt smell of the coast eddying from the shoulders of Reggie Alport’s jacket. She let him hang it up in the hall cupboard, and put on his own coat again, before she leaned out from the kitchen and said: “You don’t think she could have had her keys in her pocket, after all, do you?”

He shook his head emphatically. He had had that slight figure in his arms, and composed it into order on the bed, he knew there was nothing in her pockets. She wasn’t a pocket girl, anyhow, she was an outsize-handbag girl.

“And they couldn’t have slipped out while she was in the boot? I only want,” she said, “to make certain that someone took them.”

“I don’t think so for a moment,” said Luke, “but it won’t take a minute to have a look.” And he reached for the key of the garage, and led the way blithely.

He found it. She didn’t even have to prompt him. He groped all round with buoyant thoroughness in the huge boot, shoved the petrol can aside, scooped a hand round the spare wheel, and hoisted the lid of the tool box. “Nothing,” he said; and then, arrested by a capricious meimory: “Do you know, this is the only thing I ever made in woodwork class at school? Not much finesse, but you must admit the zeal.”

He was happy, he hoped for grace, and believed in justice, and he knew, knew he was not a murderer. She wondered how there could have remained to her even one scruple of insecurity. After all, few people in the world could know him as well as she now knew him; not even his mother, if he still had a mother, knew him better.

“A tour-de-force,” she said. “What do you keep underneath, Black and Decker’s total output? It’s nearly big enough.”

“Junk, mostly,” he said. “I’m a jackdaw.” And he hoisted the tray in one hand, himself fleetingly curious.

“Hey!” he said sharply, his voice losing its reminiscent ease. “What’s this? I’ve never… Father Christmas has been!” But there was no recapturing the note of innocence. Wary, mystified and calm, he lifted out the book that was no book, and studied the gay wrapping paper, dotted with variegated bookworms of all ages, with their noses appropriately buried. “I don’t understand. I didn’t put this in here.”

“What is it?” asked Bunty at his shoulder. “Open it!”

And he opened it, on the lid of the boot, sweeping the folds of paper aside with a large vigour which it seemed belonged to him when he was in possession of himself. She watched the sudden rigidity of his face, the dropped jaw, the bewildered eyes, the wonderfully quick apprehension. All genuine. What she was less prepared for was the instant understanding, the blazing intelligence with which he turned his face upon her.

“You knew, didn’t you? You’d already found it?”

No bitterness, no accusation, only that quick, alert, brittle tone of someone who feels ice cracking under him. She had every right in the world to put him to the test; the ache in him was only the longing to be found intact after the test was over.

“Yes,” she said, “I found it while you were down at the boat.”

“I give you my word, I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t. I wondered for about five seconds,” she said steadily, “but that was all. No, Pippa put it there, of course. It was why she had to go to London with you. No other car would do. And it was why she died.”

He had paled afresh at the revelation of how difficult and new and vulnerable was his relationship with her. You had to work at this as hard as at a marriage. What was more surprising was the clarity with which they both suddenly saw that there would never be any need for a second such assay. From that moment they knew each other through and through.

They locked the garage again, and took their find into the house and there opened it upon the living-room table. All that money, they couldn’t believe in it. Neither of them had ever seen so much.

“So that’s why she was in such a state when I told her to get out,” said Luke, looking down at it with a shadowed face, almost afraid to touch. “And that’s what he was looking for. He searched her case, and then took the keys away to search her flat, and all the time it was where she’d hidden it, in my car. Where do you suppose she got it?”

“It’s stolen money. What other possibility is there? I can’t believe she was up to anything on her own. Somebody deposited this with her until it cooled enough to be distributed or moved out of the area. And before the heat was off she’d had it in her possession so long she’d come to think of it as hers—so much in clothes and clubs and parties and travel and fun. Everything she wanted. She’d begun to question whether it ever need be distributed at all. Who could make better use of it than she could?”

“You really think it may be that? I know she was extravagant and spoiled… But she’d never… Oh, I don’t know!” he said helplessly, winding the pink tape nervously round his fingers.

“What else could it be? How could she come by this much money in cash, otherwise? And if she had, honestly, why keep it in cash and have it hanging around? And why did she acquire a gun, unless it was because she had something to protect, and somebody willing and able to find her a gun to protect it with? Who carries this kind of money in a parcel? Not honest people.” Bunty sat down and stared at the uncovered notes, brooding with her head in her hands. “How long has Pippa worked in Comerbourne?”

“Nearly three years. I met her soon after I started work there.”

“Then this comes from some local coup,” she said with authority, and closed her eyes the better to think back over recent history. The sight of all those miniature queens, so demure and complacent in whatever hands, was distracting. “You said she started getting off-hand with you about two months ago. That was probably when she first picked up with these people. And just over a week ago she came back and began to make up to you. And she worked at Pope Halsey’s, as an assistant buyer…”

Her voice snapped off abruptly. She opened her eyes wide, bright-green in this slanting pre-evening light, dazzled eyes. “Oh, no! That must be it! Tell me again, Luke, what department did she work in?”

“I don’t think I did tell you. But it was furs,” he said, puzzled, forgetting the money in her intensity. “Why?”

“And she was assistant to the buyer?”

“Yes… she used to model furs for their advertisements. She looked marvellous… I’ve seen the stills…” He caught Bunty’s bright stare, fixed as a fortune-teller’s crystal-hypnotised gaze, and trembled with a premonition of final truth. “Why?”

“There was a big van-load of furs,” she said like a clairvoyant, “coming from London for Pope Halsey, just about six weeks ago. It was hi-jacked soon after it left the M.1, flagged down near a lay-by, by somebody pretending there’d been an accident. The driver was picked up with bad concussion next day, the van was ditched on a minor road. The furs were gone, clean trade. Probably turned into cash that very night. Somebody had advance notice of that consignment. How if Pippa gave them the tip-off?”

“Oh, no! ” he said, with the last anguish on her account, and drew back his hands from the banknotes on the table. “You think this could be that money? After all this time?”

“No,” said Bunty positively, “not that money. The last place they’d be likely to unload the goods and pick up the cash would be Comerbourne, where the stuff was consigned. No, not that. But supposing she’d been the contact for that. And supposing the same gang needed a safe deposit in Comerbourne on a later job, and thought they had a reliable little girl there—respectable, above suspicion, and already implicated in one affair. Because there was another gang job in Comerbourne, just three weeks ago. Didn’t you hear about it? The pay-roll of Armitage Pressings was snatched on its way from the bank. The gang vanished, and so did the money. There were road-blocks up almost at once, but the money vanished, all the same. I reckon it vanished inside Comerbourne. Don’t you? They found the van in a scrap-yard afterwards, right there in the town. The money had to lie somewhere until the heat was off. Deposited with some confederate inside the town, somebody they could trust. Somebody they thought they could trust. Armitage’s pay-roll per week is around fifteen thousand. How much do you make this lot?”

He had been counting the number of notes in one bundle, and the number of bundles, but he couldn’t believe the answer. “I figure it as something over fourteen thousand, anyhow. There’d be change, too, of course, if it was wages money, but that wouldn’t be so portable, maybe she ditched that. Even the notes… but banks don’t keep the numbers of the used notes they hand out, do they?”

The timing was right and the amount was right, and where else would a shop assistant get fifteen thousand pounds in notes? Bunty watched him fingering through the neat, banded bundles, still dazed. She saw his hand halt upon one of them, and his face grew sharply intent as he turned its edges towards him.

Black, rigid card—or was it a blue so dark as to be nearly black?—jutted on either side of the banknotes by a fraction of an inch. Luke had felt the alien stiffness even before he had seen the slivers of darkness. He thrust his thumb under the brown paper band and ripped it open, tumbling out upon the table a small black book, its cover printed in gilt lettering and heraldry between two white windows.

“A passport!”

Fire-new, virgin, its stiff cover opened a little as soon as the constriction was removed.

“Pippa’s. Of course!” said Luke in a low voice, and opened it where the blue-tinted pages yielded of their own tension. Something folded double inside began to unfold in sympathy. “Aaaah!” he said in a long sigh. “Now I see!”

It was a B.E.A. ticket. He unfolded it and studied the details with a closed and unrevealing face.

“Dated for to-day. A single from Heath Row to Le Bourget. The eight o’clock Trident flight. So that’s why she needed the Kwells! She’d have had to be at West London Air Terminal by seven o’clock. I don’t suppose I should even have been awake by the time she took off for Paris. There wouldn’t have been any difficulty. We… hadn’t planned on sharing… The only trick would have been getting this out of the tool-box while I wasn’t around to see, and that wouldn’t have bothered her. She’d only have to say she’d left something in the car, some time when I was shaving, or something, and couldn’t run her errand myself. She could do harder things than that by far. And I don’t suppose I was much of a problem to manage.”

“No,” agreed Bunty, “I don’t suppose you were. But things didn’t work out so easily. They came back for their money, just when she had everything planned for her run-out. What else could it be? They followed her to your house. Maybe they had someone watching her moves all along, those people don’t trust anyone far. They saw her leaving with a suitcase, and followed her, and it would be simple enough getting into your place, even if the door was locked, but I don’t suppose it was…”

“It almost never was,” he owned, fingering the air-line ticket sombrely on the table. “Sometimes not even when we went to bed. We hadn’t anything worth stealing, we didn’t think in terms of locking things up.”

“So they just walked in. Just like Pippa. And they heard part—I’d say not very much—of what passed between you, and saw the struggle for the gun. How very easy, to knock you on the head, and then they could get rid of a liability and leave you to take the blame. When even you were convinced of your own guilt, why should the police look any farther? But you see where they went wrong. They were sure the money would be in Pippa’s case. But it wasn’t! And now it was too late to try and make her tell what she’d done with it. They’d killed her! She wasn’t going to answer any questions any more. Probably they searched your cottage, but they can’t have known about the car, waiting in the garage a whole street away, with this money packed inside it. They couldn’t begin to guess where the loot really was. No! But they took her keys with them, and went back to make a thorough search of her flat. My guess is they’d take it for granted she’d moved the actual money, but they’d be looking for a left-luggage ticket, or a safe-deposit key, something that would show them where she’d hidden it.”

He looked up at her, and his face warmed into a faint smile. “That’s quite a lot of supposing.”

“I know it is, but it adds up. And in that case we can be certain of one thing, the anonymous caller who alerted the police to come and fetch you didn’t identify the corpse. They’d want the police busy round your place with everything they had. They wouldn’t want any premature clue to send the investigation over to Pippa’s flat, because they had a longish job of searching to do there themselves. And did you notice, none of these things in her bag has her name on it—not even in the purse, now I come to think of it.”

“And now I come to think of it,” he said, suddenly rearing his head like a hound pricking his ears at the distant sounds of the hunt, “they’d be expecting sensational news by this morning, a broadcast item about the murder at the least, police activity all round our quarter. And there wouldn’t be any! They’d know it had gone wrong. They’d know I’d somehow managed to dispose of the body and get clean away.”

Bunty made a soft, smothered sound of dismay. She got up quickly, beginning to thrust the bundles of notes together and fold the paper round them. “Yes… Luke, I hadn’t thought… I didn’t realise…”

“And as they wouldn’t find anything at Pippa’s place,” he said, “not even a left-luggage ticket, the next thought that would occur to them would be that I must have got away not only with Pippa and all the evidence, but also with their fifteen thousand pounds.”