The Grass Widow's Tale

CHAPTER XIII

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Luke came round with a skull full of hammers and a mouth full of old cobwebs, springing into instant, jangling awareness of Bunty’s arm under his head and Bunty’s palm cupping his cheek, and a bolt of hurtful light probing over them both out of the darkness. The edge of the falling beam showed him the end of a man’s dark sleeve, and a hand holding a gun.

There was no end to it, and no escape. He set a palm to the floor in frantic haste and levered himself up groggily to his knees, leaning between Bunty and the threat, trying to put her behind him, though the sudden movement set his head ringing like a cracked bell, and the torch burned a hole through his eyes and into his brain. And Bunty drew him back gently into her arms and held him there, her cheek pressed against his forehead.

“It’s all right, my dear, it’s all right! The police are here… It’s all over, we’re safe…”

“Safe…?” he repeated dazedly. He lifted a shaky hand and touched her cheek. “They didn’t hurt you…? Where are they?”

“They got away in the Jaguar… all but the lame one…”

“They’ll no’ get far.” The darkness spoke in the voice of the sergeant with the pepper-and-salt hair, in tones of ripe satisfaction. The gun vanished into a jacket pocket. The torch settled briefly upon Bunty’s pale, soiled face, and considerately turned its beam aside. “We’ve got a road-block up in the cutting. They’ll no’ get through that. You’re all right, ma’am?”

She nodded: now that the tension was broken she was almost too tired to speak.

“And your right name, now,” he asked cautiously. “It wouldn’t be Felse, would it?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m Bunty Felse.”

“Thank God for that!” said the sergeant with profound satisfaction, and in all innocence kicked away the newly-recovered world from under Luke’s feet. “Your husband’s been going daft, worrying about you.”

How strange, how very strange, that it had never even occurred to him to think that she might belong to someone else! As if such a woman as she was could ever have come so far through life without being recognised, desired, loved. She had seemed to belong so surely to him, to be a miracle created specially for his salvation, without any existence previous to their meeting. But of course she was flesh and blood, like ordinary women. For him she had no age, no class, no kin, there had been nothing before he found her. But of course she had known all those years of her life without him, before ever he existed for her. She had known a marriage, and a husband who was going daft, worrying about her.

Luke lay very still, overwhelmed with the magnitude of his desolation and loss. And what confounded him most was the paradox of being in her arms, linked with her in an alliance such as surely she had never in her life experienced with any man before, or ever would with any man after. He both possessed and had lost her.

Three men came in from the seaward side, and one more from the landward, and this last was an inspector, no less. They found candles in one of the kitchen cupboards, and the young constable of the morning, taciturn as ever, rummaged among Reggie Alport’s electrical spares and did some minor miracles with fuse-wire. Soon he had the current working in the kitchen, at least, so that they could do a little preliminary first-aid on Quilley before the ambulance came. The door stood open between the kitchen and the living-room, to share the benefit of the light.

“No,” admitted the inspector ruefully, “I’m afraid we didn’t check up on your fictional Mrs. Chartley at first. I only wish we had, we should have been here earlier. But you seemed all above-board to McCabe, and we had no reason then to be looking out for a woman. No, what put us on to you was further information from your home county. You can thank your son for it, indirectly. It seems he came home without notice late on Saturday evening, and found nobody there to welcome him. When nobody came back by eleven he called your husband’s chief, and found that Mr. Felse had gone down south on a job, so he naturally took it for granted you might have decided to travel with him for the ride. It wasn’t until some child turned up next morning, saying she’d found your purse, that he began to wonder.”

All the threads were beginning to tie in neatly into the pattern, even some of which the police would never know anything. So that was why there’d been no letter from Dominic, because he intended to rush home in person for her birthday, and surprise her. And if he’d been a couple of hours earlier, perhaps she would never have gone out walking to shake off her demon, never entered “The Constellation Orion,” never met Luke Tennant. And perhaps, when he was at the end of his tether, Luke Tennant would have given up thinking of Norway, and pointed that little gun at his temple and pulled the trigger, as he had so nearly done when the police came knocking at the door.

“So he told your C.I.D. chief, and they got in touch with your husband, and nobody knew where you were, or why you should be missing. Then they really began hunting. And it seems there’s an old chap who saw you late on Saturday night with a young man he didn’t know, and was sufficiently nosy to take note of the car and its number.”

“Old Lennie,” she said, and smiled. “We bought some coffee at his stall. Thank God for nosy people! I see! So then they added my description to the information about NAQ 788, and circulated it. And Mrs. Chartley filled the bill well enough to be worth investigating. And you found the Alports had never heard of her, and her address didn’t exist.”

“That’s about it. So we thought it best to move in on you here pretty cautiously. We felt you must have been under duress this morning when you answered the door. A loaded gun a yard or so from your back can turn anybody into a first-class dissembler. It was the only way we could account for your behaviour.”

“I know,” she admitted, “my behaviour throughout has been far from what you’d expect of a policeman’s wife. But there’s more to this than a couple of traffic offences. They haven’t said anything to you about a murder?”

They hadn’t. Nor, it seemed, about the snatching of Armitage Pressings’ weekly pay-roll. Apparently nobody had missed Pippa Gallier yet, and no one suspected the connection between these events scattered through two months of time and three hundred miles or so of country. Bunty and Luke had still quite a lot to account for. The dead girl upstairs was going to come as a shock. And the money…

Bunty had almost forgotten about the money, but it was high time to retrieve it now. It was, after all, the chief evidence they had to offer for their own integrity, and the stake for which they had defied Fleet and all his private army.

“Before we start,” she said, “could you send one of your men down to the jetty to fetch something? Something I hid there. A flat parcel in gift-wrapping paper.” She turned her head and looked at Luke, sitting drained and pale and sad beside her. “It’s under one of the slabs of slate that form the steps, only about three yards up from the jetty,” she said, for Luke rather than for anyone else. “I pushed it under there when I slipped and fell. If you hadn’t been solidly between Quilley and me I could never have got away with it, even in the dark.”

The inspector looked at the raw-boned young constable who was good with fuses, and the constable, whose ears, like his eyes, missed nothing, took one of the torches without a word, and went off through the kitchen to the cliff path.

“And exactly what,” asked the inspector curiously, “is in this gift parcel? What has it got to do with this business?”

“Everything,” she said simply. “It’s what those men were after, it’s what they killed the girl for—the girl upstairs—not to speak of the man who was driving the van when they snatched it in the first place. It’s a week’s pay-roll from a big firm outside Comerbourne. Getting on for fifteen thousand pounds in notes.”

“I think,” said the inspector carefully, after a pause to regain his breath, “you’d better tell me the whole story.”

Between the two of them they told him. By the time they were half-way through, the recital was punctuated by Quilley’s first half-conscious moans from the kitchen, and the inspector was unrolling the parcel of notes on the table before him. The sound of police cars halting before the door of the cottage put in the final full-stop. Fleet and his lieutenants were back under guard.

A hefty red-headed sergeant came in first from the night, his arms full of guns and his face one broad, freckled beam of fulfilment.

“Regular arsenal, sir… four of ’em!” He laid them out proudly on the table before his chief, and for an instant his jaw dropped at sight of the treasure already deployed there. “Two revolvers, nice brand-new Colt Agent and a German Pickert .32. A Webley and Scott .25 automatic… and this little squib… that’s another German job, a Menz Liliput. Wouldn’t think that could do any damage, would you?”

The inspector viewed them without noticeable enthusiasm. Guns had never figured in the crimes that came within his ordinary range, and to him, as to George in Comerbourne, they were an omen of times changing for the worse. He looked up at Luke over the array of armaments.

“Which one?”

“The one you’re holding.” The Webley was almost as tiny, but he would have known that Liliput again among thousands, by the associations that clung to it, by Bunty’s confiding presence at his side, by the memory of that ride in which he could hardly believe now, when this little ugly shape had bound her into stillness and submission, who now sat beside him as an ally of her own will, held by nothing but her own generosity and loyalty. At every mention of her husband and son, those two who had genuine rights in her, the pain in his heart had tightened and intensified by one more turn. But still, every now and again, she spoke for both of them, and said “we,” and all that tension was released each time she said it, and he knew that she was not lost to him, that she was indeed, in some measure, his, and his for life.

“You realise, of course,” said the inspector gently, for he was a man of intuition as well as intelligence, and had already placed his own stake, “that he’s sure to have alibis for everything?”

“Yes, I know. I don’t care now. If you want to hold me, that’s all right. I’m satisfied now.”

“What happened?” asked the inspector, folding the gay paper over the indecent display of wealth, and looking up at the sergeant.

“They tried to crash the barrier. Bent that nice grey paint job badly, stove her nose right in. They poured out in all directions when she stalled, but we got ’em all fielded in quick time. They didn’t fire. Soon as we laid hands on ’em they started acting legal. They hadn’t done anything, they were on their lawful occasions. Only the big chap talks.”

“Yes,” said the inspector resignedly, “only he would. Still, better bring ’em in until the wagon arrives.”

Fleet came in with rock-like assurance, his hands in his pockets, his henchmen mute and stolid behind him. And of course they would all have a dozen witnesses to testify that they had been somewhere miles away when the Armitage pay-roll was snatched, and at least outside the house when Pippa Gallier was shot; and of course they would even have licences for all those guns, except Pippa’s, of which they would deny all knowledge prior to yesterday. And of course, regarding the money and their presence here, and their flight when the police came, Fleet would tell the same old story of being robbed by Pippa, of actually breaking in on Luke’s house to find Pippa dead and Luke drunk and unconscious, of pursuing Luke here into Scotland after the money—with some mildly illegal origin for the money, something almost innocuous, but enough to account for a certain shyness of the police…

Yes, it was all implicit in his bearing as he came in.

“Keys?” said Fleet, smiling, always smiling, with deep-sunk marmalade eyes mildly indignant, but no more, with salient bones grown bland with tolerance under the tanned and gleaming skin, a benevolent, misjudged man. “What should I know about her keys? I expect he threw ’em away. I never saw any such little leather boot. You can search me.” Which of course they could, and any residence of his into the bargain; he wasn’t such a fool as to keep a thing so easily identifiable.

“Look, I’ve told you that money was ours, and it’s got nothing to do with any pay-roll, it’s racing winnings. We had a syndicate. And a system. You fellows wouldn’t approve, but you’d have a job to pick us up on it, all the same, I’m telling you that. Naturally we came after it. What would you have done, written it off? More fool me, for ever letting that little bitch hold the kitty, but she had a way with her… Ask him, he knows! She double-crossed him, too, and he paid her her dues, and good luck to him. But don’t look at me! I can prove where I was all the early part of Saturday evening. By the time I got there it was all over.

“And that’s all I am saying,” said Fleet, still beneficently smiling. “I want to see my lawyer before I say another word.”

“And you’ve got licences for all these cannon, I suppose?” said the inspector, mildly shuffling Pippa’s passport and air ticket in his hands. The bone-cased eyes lingered on them hungrily, but gave nothing away. There was something else there, too, sandwiched between the two documents, something Bunty and Luke hadn’t discovered because it was slim enough and small enough to hide among the notes: a sealed white envelope, stamped, ready for the post.

“One of ’em’s nothing to do with me, ask him about that. For mine I have. All but the Pickert, maybe. I picked that up during the war. It’s damned hard to keep within the law all the time,” said Fleet tolerantly.

“But you deny playing any part in Pippa Gallier’s death? Or in the wage-snatch from Armitage Pressings?” The inspector slipped the point of his ball-pen almost absent-mindedly inside the flap of the envelope, and began to slide it along. It was noticeable that he did not touch the envelope itself, but held it between passport and ticket; and the address had appeared for a moment to engage more of his attention than he was actually giving to Fleet.

“That I don’t mind repeating. I followed her to this chap’s place, I got kind of restless waiting for her to come out, and I went in to find out what was happening. She was on the floor, dead, and this young fellow was out cold on the top of her, with the gun in his hand. And if he didn’t shoot her, then get on with finding out who did, because you won’t get anywhere looking at me. Two of my lads were with me, they know she was dead when we went in. That’s it! ” said Fleet, with a snap of his formidable jaws like a shark bisecting an unlucky bather. “I’ve finished talking.”

“But I haven’t!” snarled a sudden ferocious voice from the kitchen. “I’m just set to begin.”

As one man they swung to face the doorway. The voice was one they had none of them heard before, though several of them had heard the same man speak. Fleet knew this voice muted, anxious and willing to please, Luke knew it injured, whining and doomed, aware of its narrowing destiny. The police had heard it only in one wild scream as the car went over its protests, and flattened them into the gravel.

Propped on a policeman’s arm, Quilley leaned from the kitchen rug, his left leg stripped from the knee down, his foot crushed and leaning disjointedly sidewise from the ankle. By straining to the limit of his strength he could just get his eyes upon Fleet, and they aimed there like gun-barrels, as deadly and as fixed. He was not afraid now, he had nothing to lose, he could close the doors on the man who had tyrannised over him, and if he closed them on himself, too, that would still be liberation. Fleet had tossed him to the police like a bone to hounds, to delay the pursuit. There was a price for that.

“Here’s one,” said Quilley stridently, “who wants to talk, and he’s got plenty to tell, too. Of course that’s the Armitage money, and I was there when we snatched it, and what you want to know about that I can tell you, even who fired the shot. But it wasn’t him, not that time. He hasn’t got the guts to go out and do a job, he just directs from a safe place. It was the girl he killed… with his own hands… and I was there to see it…”

For one moment it seemed that Fleet would hurl himself, out of his chair, clean through all opposition, and clamp his hands round Quilley’s throat. But he did not. He sat back by a cautious inch or two in his seat, to demonstrate how little this attack meant to him; and his face with all its death’s-head boniness continued to smile.

“It was after she asked for the gun,” Quilley pursued loudly and firmly, “that he got uneasy. She was getting above herself, and his women don’t do that. But he still fancied her, then, so he gave her a gun of sorts to keep her happy—that rubbishing little thing you’ve got there, the one he’s trying to kid you is nothing to do with him…”

“That?” said Fleet blankly, wide-eyed in innocence. “I never saw the thing in my life until yesterday.”

“Like hell he never saw it! He gave it to her. He was never too sure about her after that, but when he slept with her Friday night he took a peep at the case with the money in it, and it looked all right. But still his thumbs pricked about her, so he had us watch her, see what she’d do. And Saturday night, after she thought he’d gone back to town, she came bustling out with a suitcase, and locked her flat, and went off in a taxi, so we had to notify him. Con and Blackie followed her in the Riley, while I waited for him, and he let us into her flat to make sure about the money. He didn’t need her keys for that, he’d had one made for himself long ago, but she didn’t know that. You think he’d leave any money of his behind a door he couldn’t get through when he liked? And what do you know? She’d filled the case up with bundles of newspaper cuttings, only the top note in each clip was real. So then he knew she was off with the dough. They had orders to pick her up and bring her back if she tried to run out by train, or anything, but she never, she went to this little house, and walked right in, so they called him at her flat, and we went over there fast. The door wasn’t locked, it was easy. We walked in, and there she was waving this gun at this kid, and raving how he’d got to keep his promise to her, and he went for her as if he thought it was a pop-gun, he was so tight, and there they were fighting for it, and him in the doorway weighing it all up, like he always does everything, what’s in it for Fleet! And I,”said Quilley vengefully, “I was the one who was right there beside him. I saw him club this kid cold. Nobody knows how to do it better. I saw him take the gun out of his hand. And she, she was all over him suddenly, she says, darling, she says, thank heaven you came, she says, he’d have killed me! And there she is hanging round Fleet’s neck, hoping he’s only just busted in, and he puts that gun to her chest and shoots her dead. Just like that!”

“Poor devil!” said Fleet, with hardly a pretence at sincerity. “Hysterical. He’s got it in for me, I always knew he hated my guts. He’ll say anything.”

“Not anything, just the facts, Fleet. Nobody needs more. I tell you, he shot her. And then he wiped the gun and put it back in the kid’s hand, and arranged the two of ’em there, all ready to be found, so the kid could take the rap. We called the cops from a call box to come and get him, only he must have come round too soon and cleared out. And there’s one thing I can tell you, too. She’d been getting ready to put the finger on the lot of us, and especially Fleet. In her flat we found some trial runs for a letter she was putting together for the police, all cut out of newspapers, half a dozen different types. She was headed out, and she was going to make good and sure we wouldn’t be at large to hunt for her. Oh, yes, we went back to her flat… just as soon as we found there was no money in her suitcase and nothing in her bag, no left-luggage ticket, or anything like that. We took her keys and went back to turn the whole place out, but all we found was these bits of paper, where she’d been experimenting with this letter. About the Armitage job, and about Pope Halsey’s furs, too. She knew all about that, she was the one who tipped us off about the shipment. We had a proper hunt, but we never found anything else, and he burned those bits of paper. Anything you want to know,” said Quilley, incandescent with vengeance, “you ask me. I was there every time, there’s nothing I can’t tell you.”

“Nothing,” said Fleet, crossing one grey-worsted leg negligently over the other, and grinned towards the kitchen doorway, round which the frantic eyes glared and gloated on him. “And nothing he won’t, either, true or false. You can see he’d do anything to knife me in the back. But I’ve got witnesses will prove the opposite… witnesses with nothing to gain.”

“Except money!” said Quilley. “Alibis he gets wholesale.”

“You see?” said Fleet, sighing. “Poor chap! Psychopathic, really!”

“Then you didn’t go back to her flat?” asked the inspector mildly.

“Who said we didn’t? She’d run out with my money… our money… we didn’t know what she’d done with it…”

“And he couldn’t ask her,” said Quilley viciously. “He was too sure it would be there in her suitcase, he’d fired first and looked afterwards.”

“Of course we went back to look in her flat, where else was it likely to be? But we didn’t find any trial shots at synthetic letters to the police… that cheap little judy didn’t know anything about any crimes except running out with our winnings, you can bet on that.”

“He’s making the whole thing up, then?”

“Of course he is. I came after my money, yes, that’s fair enough, and I wasn’t particular how I went about recovering it, either, if it comes to that. But he’ll have a hell of a job connecting me with that girl’s death, or that gun he’s raving about.”

“Will I?” shrilled the vengeful voice from the kitchen, whinnying with triumph and whimpering with pain. “You think you’re in the clear because you wiped off the grip nicely? Who loaded it in the first place, mate, think about that! Wait until they get their little insufflators on that magazine before you crow too loud.”

Bunty closed her fingers excitedly on Luke’s arm. And Fleet laughed. A little too loudly, perhaps; there seemed suddenly to be a bleak, small hollow inside the laughter, that echoed like a bare cell.

“Come off it, man! You know as well as I do I opened the thing up here to-night, here in this room, to see how many rounds were in it. You watched me do it! Like all the rest of the boys, and they’ll all swear to it.”

“You think so? This time you don’t own all the witnesses, Fleet. At the best it’ll be a draw, three-three. And by the time they’ve got it through their thick heads that you’re going down for twenty years, you think you’ll even be owning three of ’em? They won’t be able to shift over to our side fast enough.”

“You talk too much to be feeling sure of yourself,” Fleet said tolerantly, and beamed at the inspector with a face of brass. But was there a very faint flare of uneasiness far down in the wells of his eyes? “You won’t get far on his uncorroborated word,” he said virtuously, “he’s got a record as long as your arm. I don’t know why I ever risked taking him on, but somebody has to give the lags a chance.”

“A bit of corroboration would certainly be helpful,” agreed the inspector reasonably. “Even on one specific point… say these trial letters she was supposed to be compiling, now. But of course, you deny there ever were any, and he says you burned them. In either case, nobody else is going to be able to give us any fresh information now.” He was gently unfolding the sheet of thick white paper he had withdrawn from the envelope. He took his time about it, and its texture, or some quality he found in it, seemed to be affording him a certain obscure amusement. They observed that he handled it only by the edges, with considerable care. “Of course, if we could have called the girl herself as a witness…”

He looked up, smiling. “Now isn’t that a coincidence! She had it among her papers, all ready stamped and addressed for posting, I suppose she was going to slip it into the box at London Airport at the last moment. No point in taking risks until she was actually on her way out. It’s a good surface, it should hold prints well.”

He turned it for them to see the sliced-out words and phrases of print from which it had been compiled.

“You want to know how the text reads? It’s addressed to Superintendent Duckett, Chief of the Midshire C.I.D. It runs :

‘The man you want for the Armitage hold-up is Jerome Fleet, who has the chain of garages that just opened a branch in Comerford. He uses his business for cover and transport. He has a man named Blackie Crowe working for him, also one called Skinner, and Sam Quilley, and a young one they call Con. They were all in the wage-snatch, and they did the fur job, too. I am not sure about his new manager, but think all his men except the locals are crooks. But Fleet is the boss.’

“Underlined, that last bit. And she signed herself, not too originally: ‘A Well-Wisher ’.”

He looked up across the paper as he refolded it, and smiled into the amber eyes of a caged tiger. “Isn’t it lucky, Mr. Fleet, that the fair copy survived?”

The moment of flat silence was broken abruptly by an outburst of loud, rattling, jarring sound from the kitchen, fed by gulping indrawn breaths of pain. It took them a few shocked seconds to realise that it was only Quilley, laughing.