Shit! He slammed his fist against the steering-wheel.
“Why did you want me to come with you?” he demanded into the silence.
“You’re a free agent,” she pointed out caustically.
“You didn’t have to come.”
It started to rain as they reached Wareham, slanting stair-rods that drove in through the open windows.
“Oh, great!” announced Roz, clutching her jacket about her throat.
“The perfect end to a perfect day. I’ll be soaked. I should have come on my own in my own car. I could hardly have had less fun, could I?”
“Why didn’t you then? Why drag me out on a wild-goose chase?”
“Believe it or not,” she said icily, “I was trying to do you a favour.
I thought it would be good for you to escape for a couple of hours. I was wrong. You’re even more touchy away from the place than you are in it.” He took a corner too fast and threw her against the door, grazing her leather jacket against the buckled chromium window strip.
“For God’s sake,” she snapped crossly.
“This jacket cost me a fortune.”
He pulled into the kerb with a screech of rubber.
“OK,” he snarled, ‘let’s see what we can do to protect it.” He reached across her to take a book of road maps out of the dashboard pocket.
“What good will that do?”
“It will tell me where the nearest station is.” He thumbed through the pages.
“There’s one in Wareham and the line goes to Southampton. You can take a taxi back to your car at the other end.” He fished out his wallet.
“That should be enough to pay your way.” He dropped a twenty-pound note into her lap then swung the car on to the road again.
“It’s off to the right at the next roundabout.”
“You’re a real sweetheart, Hawksley. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners along with her little aphorisms about women and life?”
“Don’t push your luck,” he growled.
“I’m on a very short fuse at the moment and it doesn’t take much to rile me. I spent five years of marriage being criticised for every damn thing I did.
I’m not about to repeat the experience.” He drew up in front of the station.
“Go home,” he told her, wiping a weary hand across his damp face.
“I’m doing you a favour.”
She put the twenty-pound note on the dashboard and reached for her handbag.
“Yes,” she agreed mildly, “I think you probably are. If your wife stuck it out for five years, she must have been a saint.” She pushed the door open on its screaming hinges and eased round it, then bent down to look through the window, thrusting her middle finger into the air.
“Go screw yourself, Sergeant. Presumably it’s the only thing that gives you any pleasure. Let’s face it, no one else could ever be good enough.”
“Got it in one, Miss Leigh.” He nodded a curt farewell, then spun the wheel in a U-turn. As he drove away the twenty pound note whipped like a bitter recrimination from the window and fell with the rain into the gutter.
Hal was cold and wet by the time he reached Dawlington, and his already evil temper was not improved to find her car still parked at the end of the alleyway where she had left it. He glanced past it, between the buildings, and saw that the back door of the Poacher stood ajar, the wood in splinters where a crowbar had been used to wrench it free of its frame. OH, Jesus! She had set him up. He knew a moment of total desolation he was not as immune as he thought himself -before the need to act took over.
He was too angry for common sense, too angry to take even elementary precautions. He ran on light feet, thrust the door wide and weighed in with flailing fists, punching, kicking, gouging, oblivious to the blows that landed on his arms and shoulders, intent only on causing maximum damage to the bastards who were destroying him.
Roz, arriving thirty minutes later with Hal’s sodden twenty pound note clutched in one hand and a blistering letter of denunciation in the other, stared in disbelief at what she saw.
The kitchen looked like a scene from Beirut in the aftermath of war.
Deserted and destroyed. The table, upended, leant drunkenly against the oven, two of its legs wrenched free.
Chairs, in pieces, lay amongst shards of broken crockery and jagged glass. And the fudge, tilted forward and balanced precariously on its open door, had poured its contents across the quarry tiling in streams of milk and congealed stock. She held a trembling hand to her lips.
Here and there, splashes of bright red blood had tinged the spreading milk pink.
She looked wildly up the alleyway, but there was no one in sight. What to do?
“Hal!” she called, but her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Hal!” This time it rose out of control and, in the silence that followed, she thought she heard a sound from the other side of the swing doors into the restaurant. She stuffed the letter and the money into her pockets and reached inside the door for one of the table legs.
“I’ve called the police,” she shouted, croaky with fear.
“They’re on their way.”
The door swung open and Hal emerged with a bottle of wine.
He nodded at the table leg.
“What are you planning to do with that?”
She let her arm fall.
“Have you gone mad? Did you do all this?”
“Am I likely to have done it?”
“Olive did.” She stared about her.
“This is just what Olive did. Lost her temper and destroyed her room.
She had all her privileges taken away.”
“You’re babbling.” He found a couple of glasses in an intact wall cupboard and filled them from the bottle.
“Here.” His dark eyes watched her closely.
“Have you called the police?”
“No.” Her teeth chattered against the wine glass.
“I thought if you were a burglar you’d run away. Your hand’s bleeding.”
“I know.” He took the table leg away from her and put it on top of the oven, then pulled forward the only intact chair from behind the back door and pressed her into it.
“What were you going to do if the burglar ran out this way?”
“Hit him, I suppose.” Her fear was beginning to subside.
“Is this what you thought I’d set you up for?”
“Yes.”
“God!” She didn’t know what else to say. She watched while he found a broom and started to sweep the mess towards one corner.
“Shouldn’t you leave that?”
“What for?”
“The police.”
He eyed her curiously.
“You said you hadn’t called them.”
She digested this in silence for several seconds, then put her glass on the floor beside her.
“This is all a bit heavy for me.”
She took the twenty-pound note from her pocket, but left the letter where it was.
“I only came back to give you this.” She held it out as she stood up.
“I’m sorry,” she said with an apologetic smile.
“What for?”
“Making you angry. I seem to have a knack for making people angry at the moment.” He moved towards her to take the money, but stopped abruptly at her look of alarm.
“Goddamnit, woman, do you think I did this?”
But he was speaking to thin air. Roz had taken to her heels down the alleyway and the twenty-pound note, once again, fluttered to the ground.
THIRTEEN
Roz’s sleep that night was intermittent, fitful dozing between turbulent dreams. Olive with an axe, hacking chen tables to pieces.
I didn’t think you would… it’s not as easy as it looks on the ……… Hal’s fingers on her wrist, but his face the gleeful face of her brother as he gave her Chinese burns as a child.
Goddamnit, woman, do you think I did this… Olive hanging from the gallows, her face the slimy grey of wet day. Have you no qualms about releasing someone like her back into society… A priest with the eyes of Sister Bridget. It’s a pity you’re not a Catholic… You could go to confession and feel better immediately… You keep offering me money…