The house he wanted was at the end of the terrace, on a corner. There were black wrought-iron gates into a small garden, where one late rose was still in bloom. What must I look like, he thought, standing here? Like those chaps on the dole who go round selling dusters at the door. What will she think?
He rang the bell and a dog barked. A woman opened the door to him. She was tall and slender, with a nervous, worried face. He knew immediately that he had come to the right place.
‘Mrs Carpenter?’ he said. ‘ I wonder if I could speak to you. It’s about your son.’ She stood aside to let him in.
On the way home the bus stopped at York and he phoned Ramsay. He was tired by then and the noise all around him prevented him from thinking or speaking clearly. It took a long time to get put through to him. He realized he must sound confused and elated to the policeman, but no longer cared. Soon he would share the responsibility of knowledge and it would all be over. When he returned to the bus it was full and noisy and he had no chance to sleep. It was late afternoon when they arrived at Newcastle. He was relieved to be almost home. He thought he would catch a bus to Heppleburn – he had spent too much already on this escapade and a taxi would be an extravagance – but when he got out at the Haymarket Miss Hunt was there in her red Metro.
‘Mr Robson,’ she said. ‘What a coincidence! Come in and I’ll give you a lift.’
He hesitated for a moment, but he was tired and not thinking clearly. Besides, it was one way of finding out if he were right. In his mood of exhilaration he thought he was invincible. It was only when he had lifted his suitcase on to the back seat and had sat comfortably on the passenger seat that he realized a shotgun was resting on her knee, the barrel pointing towards him. It was partly hidden by her long black cape.
‘I knew when to meet you,’ she said. ‘I received a telephone call at the school this morning. It was from my daughter.’ The mask of politeness slipped and her voice changed. ‘ The policeman was in the office when I took the phone call. I found that rather amusing.’ She began to laugh.
She drove out of the city and took the road north, so he knew she was taking him to her bungalow, not to Heppleburn. In his absence the fog had thickened and the police had lit burning braziers to mark the roundabouts. The cars crawled from one cat’s eye to the next and he had no idea where he was.
‘Where did you get the gun?’ he asked. The question had been troubling him during the drive through Newcastle. Her silence was unnerving him too and he wanted to get her to speak to him.
‘From my elderly neighbour,’ Irene Hunt said. ‘She keeps it to protect herself from imagined intruders. She’s so confused that she won’t notice that it’s gone. I took the Heminevrin from her too.
The doctor prescribed it for her months ago, but she’d forgotten all about it and there was nearly a bottle left.’
He realized that they must be in Nellington. The illuminated sign of the pub lurched crazily out of the fog above them. She turned off the main road towards the sea, though he did not see the junction or the signpost. It was so black that he did not know how she kept to the road.
‘When did you find out that Matthew was your grandson?’ he asked.
She smiled fondly but her voice was firm. ‘No more questions,’ she said. ‘Not until we get home. I don’t want to put the car in the ditch. You might run away. But don’t be anxious. I’ll satisfy your curiosity before I kill you.’
She had left the light on in the bungalow porch, so he knew they had arrived. There was no light in the farmhouse, though somewhere in the darkness he could hear the dogs howling as if they had been chained for the night.
‘It’s no good shouting,’ Irene Hunt said. ‘The old lady’s deaf and even if she were to hear you she’d take no notice.’ She got out of the car and locked the door meticulously behind her. ‘Come on,’ she said, suddenly irritated like a child denied a treat. ‘Come inside. I want to tell you all about it.’
Jack followed her. He left his suitcase inside the car and thought it unlikely that he would need it now. Inside, she drew all the curtains and put a light to the fire. It caught immediately and the flames were reflected on the walls of the room and her eager face.
‘Sit down,’ she said, as if he were some friend who had called in without invitation. ‘You must be tired.’
‘It never occurred to me,’ he said, ‘that Mrs Carpenter might phone you.’
‘We’re very close,’ she said proudly.
‘Yet she never told Matthew about you.’
‘That was her husband’s fault,’ she said. ‘When the children were young they were close to her adoptive parents. He’d never let her tell them the truth. He said it would confuse them. When he left her she didn’t want to admit that she’d lied. She did persuade Matthew to apply for the job at Heppleburn. That was kind. As it turned out it was just as well Matthew never knew I was his grandmother. It was difficult enough for him at Heppleburn without Medburn knowing he was a relative of mine.’
Jack sat in a large, comfortable armchair. He felt as if he were slipping into sleep. Miss Hunt held the gun lightly across her lap and he was almost too tired to care if she used it or not. But he did want to know what had happened and it occurred to him that the longer he could persuade her to keep talking, the more chance there was that he would survive.
‘Why did you kill Medburn?’ he asked.
‘Because of Matthew, of course,’ she said fiercely. ‘The headmaster had been tormenting me for years, but that was different. I love Matthew. He’s the only relative I’ve had to care for. He had to be protected.’
Her voice was high-pitched and wild and he wondered why none of them had realized before how desperate she was. He supposed they were so used to her that they took her for granted. They did not look behind the formal, authoritarian exterior. And she was convinced that her action was justified. She had no cause to show fear or remorse.
‘You killed Medburn because he was going to sack Matthew?’
She nodded.
‘He told me on the day of the Harvest Festival,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? It was the day of the Parents’Association committee meeting when your daughter suggested that we had the Hallowe’en party. I thought: if only I were a witch. I’d shape a spell and make him disappear for ever. Then I decided I’d kill him anyway. It wasn’t as if he was worth anything. He had no intrinsic value. He was an ugly little man. I couldn’t see anything wrong in it.’
She was rambling and Jack looked at the gun, wondering whether she might forget it and allow it to slip from her knee to the floor.
‘I enjoyed getting the details right,’ she said. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that I had ambitions to be a theatre designer until my parents sent me north in disgrace? I designed it like a stage act. Anne’s father was an actor…’ She stopped, lost in thought, then continued. ‘It took me longer than I expected to carry Medburn to the small playground. He was heavier than he looked.’ She seemed lost in memory and the gun began to slide between her knees towards the floor, but she caught it and held it firmly. She leaned forward and talked earnestly. ‘I had to plan it all,’ she said, ‘in every detail. It wasn’t easy, you know.’
She looked up at him as if she expected approval.
‘I knew about the Heminevrin,’ she went on, ‘ because the old lady’s daughter complained to me once that she couldn’t get her to take it. “ The doctor says it’ll stop her wandering around at night,” she said, “but she just spits it out because it tastes so bad. You’d think they could put something in it to make it taste better.” I didn’t think that would matter with Medburn because everyone knew he had no sense of taste, but even he noticed it. “This coffee isn’t up to your normal standard, Miss Hunt,” he said, being as pompous as ever, but he drank it all the same.’