She shook her head. ‘Sorry, honey. No can do. Nothing personal.’
Mitch slumped back in the chair. ‘At least tell me one more thing. The gun. I still don’t understand how it came to be the one that killed your husband.’
She laughed, showing the sharp, white teeth. ‘Pure coincidence. It was beautiful. Jake happens to be…
… a burglar by profession, and a very good one. He has worked all over the States and Canada, and he’s never been caught. We thought that if I told him about the security system at the house, he could get around it cleverly and… Of course, he couldn’t bring his own gun here from Mexico, not by air, so he had to get one. He said that’s not too difficult when you move in the circles he does. The kind of bars where you can buy guns and other stolen goods are much the same anywhere, in much the same sort of neighbourhoods. And he’s done jobs up here before.
‘As luck would have it, he bought an old Luger off two inexperienced muggers. For a hundred bucks. I just couldn’t believe it when you came around with your story. There couldn’t be two old Lugers kicking around the neighbourhood at the same time, could there? I had to turn away from you and hold my sides, I was laughing so much. It made my eyes water. What unbelievable luck!’
‘I’m so glad you think so,’ said Mitch.
‘Anyway, when I told Jake, he agreed it was too good an opportunity to miss, so he came back up here, dug the gun up from where he had buried it, safe in its wrapping, and planted it in your garage. He hadn’t handled it without gloves on, and he thought the two young punks he bought it from had been too scared to touch it, so the odds were, after you told me your story, that your fingerprints would still be on it. As I said, even if they aren’t… It’s still perfect.’
Only tape hiss followed, and Detective Greg Hollins switched off the machine. ‘That it?’ he asked.
Mitch nodded. ‘I left. I thought I’d got enough.’
‘You did a good job. Jesus, you got more than enough. I was hoping she’d let something slip, but I didn’t expect a full confession and her accomplice’s name in the bargain.’
‘Thanks. I didn’t have a lot of choice, did I?’
The last two times Mitch had been to see Laura, he had been wearing a tiny but powerful voice-activated tape recorder sewn into the lining of his suit jacket. It had lain on the chair beside the bed when they made love, and he had tried to get her to admit she had a boyfriend, as Hollins had suspected. He had also been wearing it the night she told him the police were about to find the Luger in his garage.
The recorder was part of the deal. Why he got off with only a warning for not reporting the theft of an unregistered firearm.
‘What’ll happen to her now?’ he asked Hollins.
‘With any luck, both she and her boyfriend will do life,’ said Hollins. ‘But what do you care? After the way she treated you. She’s a user. She chewed you up and spat you out.’
Mitch sighed. ‘Yeah, I know…’ he said. ‘But it could have been worse, couldn’t it?’
‘How?’
‘I could’ve ended up married to her.’
Hollins stared at him for a moment, then he burst out laughing. ‘I’m glad you’ve got a sense of humour, Mitchell. You’ll need it, what’s coming your way next.’
Mitch shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Hey, just a minute! We made a deal. You assured me there’d be no charges over the gun.’
Hollins nodded. ‘That’s right. We did make a deal. And I never go back on my word.’
Mitch shook his head. ‘Then I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’
‘Well, there’s this lady from the Law Society waiting outside, Mitchell. And she’d really like to talk to you.’
THE TWO LADIES OF ROSE COTTAGE
In our village, they were always known as the ‘Two Ladies of Rose Cottage’: Miss Eunice with the white hair, and Miss Teresa with the grey. Nobody really knew where they came from, or exactly how old they were, but the consensus held that they had met in India, America or South Africa and decided to return to the homeland to live out their days together. And in 1939 they were generally believed to be in or approaching their nineties.
Imagine our surprise, then, one fine day in September, when the police car pulled up outside Rose Cottage, and when, in a matter of hours, rumours began to spread throughout the village: rumours of human bones dug up in a distant garden; rumours of mutilation and dismemberment; rumours of murder.
Lyndgarth is the name of our village. It is situated in one of the most remote Yorkshire Dales, about twenty miles from Eastvale, the nearest large town. The village is no more than a group of limestone houses with slate roofs clustered around a bumpy, slanted green that always reminded me of a handkerchief flapping in the breeze. We have the usual amenities – grocer’s shop, butcher’s, newsagent’s, post office, school, a church, a chapel, three public houses – and proximity to some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.
I was fifteen in 1939, and Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa had been living in the village for twenty years, yet still they remained strangers to us. It is often said that you have to ‘winter out’ at least two years before being accepted into village life, and in the case of a remote place like Lyndgarth, in those days, it was more like ten.
As far as the locals were concerned, then, the two ladies had served their apprenticeship and were more than fit to be accepted as fully paid up members of the community, yet there was about them a certain detached quality that kept them ever at arm’s length.
They did all their shopping in the village and were always polite to people they met in the street; they regularly attended church services at St Oswald’s and helped with charity events; and they never set foot in any of the public houses. But still there was that sense of distance, of not quite being – or not wanting to be – a part of things.
The summer of 1939 had been unusually beautiful despite the political tensions. Or am I indulging in nostalgia for childhood? Our dale can be one of the most grim and desolate landscapes on the face of the earth, even in August, but I remember the summers of my youth as days of dazzling sunshine and blue skies. In 1939 every day was a new symphony of colour – golden buttercups, pink clover, mauve cranesbill – ever changing and recombining in fresh palettes. While the tense negotiations went on in Europe, while Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, and while there was talk of conscription and rationing at home, very little changed in Lyndgarth.
Summer in the dale was always a season for odd jobs – peat-cutting, wall-mending, sheep-clipping – and for entertainments, such as the dialect plays, the circus, fairs and brass bands. Even after war was declared on 3 September, we still found ourselves rather guiltily having fun, scratching our heads, shifting from foot to foot, and wondering when something really warlike was going to happen.
Of course, we had our gas masks in their cardboard boxes, which we had to carry everywhere; street lighting was banned, and motor cars were not allowed to use their headlights. This latter rule was the cause of numerous accidents in the dale, usually involving wandering sheep on the unfenced roads.
Some evacuees also arrived from the cities. Uncouth urchins for the most part, often verminous and ill-equipped for country life, they seemed like an alien race to us. Most of them didn’t seem to have any warm clothing or Wellington boots, as if they had never seen mud in the city. Looking back, I realize they were far from home, separated from their parents, and they must have been scared to death. I am ashamed to admit, though, that at the time I didn’t go out of my way to give them a warm welcome.