The young man was sitting bolt upright on the settee, dark against the brilliance and shimmer of the sea, every nerve at stretch, his eyes fixed wildly on the empty doorway, waiting for her to reappear there. The gun was in the clenched right hand that lay on his knee, and his finger was crooked on the trigger.
She saw it instantly, and instantly understood. He must have lowered his hand in sheer stupefaction when the meaning of that astonishing performance of hers penetrated his mind, with his death only the tightening of a nerve away.
Oh, God, she thought, suppose he hadn’t waited to hear? Why didn’t I take it from him before I went to the door? But there’d been no time to consider everything. And thank God, he had waited, and confusion and bewilderment had kept him from dying. Or curiosity, perhaps, curiosity can be a valid reason for going on living, when no other is left.
So the first thing she had to do, without delay but without any hasty gesture that could startle him back into despair, was to cross the room to him, and gently take the thing out of his hand. He didn’t resist; his cramped fingers opened at her touch, and gave it up without protest. Enormous eyes, cloudy with wonder, devoured her face and had no attention for anything else.
“Why?” he asked, in a rustling whisper.
“You won’t need it now,” she said. But she knew that was not what he meant.
“Why didn’t you bring them in and give me up? Why didn’t you tell them I tried to kill you?”
Without a word in answer, she opened a drawer of the little writing-desk on the other side of the room, and thrust the gun far back out of sight. Then she came back to the settee and sat down beside him.
“Look,” she said urgently, “you and I have got to talk. We’ve got a little time now, and the car’s safest where it is. They won’t come looking for it here now—not yet!”
“But why did you send them away?”
“Never mind that. There are things I’ve got to know, and we may not have all that long. That girl in the car— who is she?”
“Her name’s Pippa Gallier,” he said, with the docility of despair, shock and hopeless bewilderment, but with some positive motion of faith, too, as though she had surprised him into drawing back the first of the bolts that sealed his terrible solitude from the world. “We were going to be married. I thought we were…”
“She’s a Comerbourne girl? That is where you teach, isn’t it? What was she? What did she do?”
“She worked at the big fashion shop, Pope Halsey’s, and did a bit of modelling for them when they had dress shows. She was an assistant buyer. She wasn’t a Comerbourne girl, though, her family belong to Birmingham. She had a little flat over one of the shops in Queen Street. Why?” he asked dully, but at least there was a grain of life in his voice now, and in his eyes, that never wavered from searching her face. He had some kind of stunned trust in her now that told him she must have a reason for probing these irremediable things. Nothing she did was wanton; it didn’t follow that she could change anything.
“And how did she come to die?”
“I shot her,” he said, staring through her and seeing the girl’s dead face.
“All right, you shot her! But that’s not what I want. I want to know how it happened, every detail, everything you remember. Tell me about it.”
He drew breath as if the effort cost him infinite labour, and told her, fumbling out the sequence of events with many pauses. He was terribly tired, and completely lost, but he was still coherent.
“I wanted to marry her. We were running about together steadily, until about a couple of months ago, and we were as good as engaged. And then she got very off-hand with me, for some reason, and started pulling away. She turned down dates, or she rang up to make excuses, and if I objected she flared up and walked out. They’d always tried to tell me she had other men on a string, too… I never believed it. I was daft about her…”
“They?” said Bunty, pouncing on this lack of definition. “Who were they?”
“The chap who shares—shared—my cottage, Bill Reynolds, he teaches at the same school. Other friends of ours, too.”
“And some of them knew her well? Could they have been on her string themselves?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They knew her, but not that well. I never believed it. And then just over a week ago it seemed as if we’d got past the bad patch. You know how it can be, everything straightens out and starts running on wheels. She was the sweetest I’ve ever known her, and things were back as they used to be. I bought her a ring. She’d never let me get that far before. I was happy! You know what I mean? I’d never believed there was anything wrong about her, but I’d never felt sure of her before, and now I did, she’d promised, and we were engaged. And then she suggested that we should go to London together this half-term…”
“To London?” said Bunty sharply. “Not up here, then?”
“No, to London. She had a few days of her holiday left to use, she suggested we should drive down on Friday evening. So when it came to Friday evening I was ready well ahead of the time we’d fixed, and I ran the car round into town, to her flat, to pick her up. It was a good half-hour earlier than she’d be expecting me. And I was just parking the car, a bit away from the house—you know what it’s like trying to find anywhere to park in Comerbourne—when I saw her come out of the private door of her flat. Not alone, with a fellow I’d never seen before. And she was hanging on his arm and chattering away to him and looking up into his face, like… like a cut-price call-girl! You can’t mistake it when you do see it.”
“Did they see you?” asked Bunty intently.
“No, I told you, I could only find a place farther along the street. No, they didn’t see me…”
“And you didn’t go after them? You didn’t challenge them?”
“I never had time. I’d just got out of the car when they came out, and they turned the other way. He had a car parked there just in front of the shop, and they got into it and drove off in the other direction. By the time I was across the road they were turning the corner out of Queen Street.”
“What sort of car was it? Would you know it again?”
“I didn’t get the number, I never thought of it, but it was a light-grey Jag. Does it matter?”
“It matters,” she said sharply. “Every detail matters. What about the man?”
“I’d know him again,” he said bitterly. “A big chap, well-dressed, over-dressed for Comerbourne, you don’t see many dinner jackets around in Queen Street. But he made everything he had on look like slightly sporty wear, this type. You could imagine him rally-driving in a special one-off, instead of rolling round in a Jag. He had this he-man touch, and yet everything about him was smooth, his clothes, his movements… everything except his face. That had some pretty crude, craggy lines, a knubby forehead, auburn hair growing low, cleft chin, eyes buried in a lot of bone. Yes, I’d know him again!”
“And she went with him willingly? You’re sure?”
“Willingly? Gladly! You should have seen her!”
“And what did you do?”
“What could I do? They were gone, and I didn’t know where. But it was pretty safe betting she wasn’t going to be hurrying back within the next half-hour to meet me. I went back home, trying to kid myself there must be another answer, persuading myself there’d be a message for me. And there was! Bill was just rushing off for his own half-term, to his parents’ place in Essex, when I got back. He told me there’d been a phone call for me from Pippa, he’d left me a note. She was terribly sorry, but she’d have to put off leaving for our jaunt until to-morrow evening. Her mother’d turned up unexpectedly, meaning to stay overnight, and she hadn’t the heart to run out on her, and couldn’t even tell her she’d had a trip planned, because Mother would be so upset at having spoiled it for her! So would I mind keeping away until to-morrow evening, and she’d come along and join me as soon as she’d seen her visitor off home! And it could all have been true,” he said bleakly, staring into the past with the sick fascination of one contemplating disasters about which nothing can now be done, “if I hadn’t known beforehand that her visitor wore a dinner jacket and stood about six feet three in his shoes. Because we’d only just got engaged, and her mother knew nothing about me yet, and we wouldn’t have wanted to spring it on her in circumstances like that, without any preparation. It could all have been true, only I knew now that there wasn’t a word of truth in it.