“So I went out and got horribly drunk. Black, vicious, murderous drunk. I don’t usually drink much, but I seem to have an abnormally high tolerance, it takes a lot to fill me up. But I wasn’t too tight to walk round by her flat after the pubs closed, and I wasn’t too far gone to know what I was seeing, either. The grey Jaguar was parked discreetly round the corner in the mews. Mother stayed the night, all right!”
“And this was Friday? But if she’d ditched you, and if you’d written her off as a dead loss, how did you come to tangle with her again on Saturday?” demanded Bunty.
“You forget, she didn’t know I’d written her off. She thought she only had to drop me a message, and I’d swallow it whole and sit back until she wanted me again.”
“Of course,” she said, enlightened, “she turned up on Saturday evening according to programme!”
“According to her programme. And if you’ll believe me, that possibility had simply never occurred to me. I was so full up with what had happened, the thing was so completely finished for me, that I’d clean forgotten she didn’t know I knew! She thought everything was serene, and she only had to stroll in at my place and say: Darling, here I am, all ready! and I’d run to fetch the car, and we could start. So that’s what she did, around seven o’clock on Saturday evening, came rolling up in a taxi with her biggest suitcase, and started on another apology for Friday’s hold-up as soon as she came in at the door. And I’d been howling like a dog all morning with the hangover of a lifetime, and topping it up again in self-defence most of the afternoon, and I was fit for murder.”
“You do realise,” said Bunty, frowning with concentration, “that so far you haven’t so much as mentioned that you owned a gun? Legally or illegally!”
“I didn’t own a gun. Legally or illegally. I’d never had one in my hands, as far as I can remember. I know damn-all about the things. When I do mention it you’re not going to believe me. I wouldn’t believe myself.”
“I might, though,” said Bunty. “All right, get to it your own way. She came breezing in, expecting to be taken to London. And you told her that she’d had it, that it was over, and she might as well go home.”
“What I told her was meaner than that, but let it go, it added up to much the same. I asked if her mother had slept well, and whether I could have the name of her tailor. She was always quick on the uptake, Pippa, not as clever as she thought she was, perhaps, but pretty sharp, all the same. She got it in a moment that I’d seen them, and she came up with a good story faster than you’d ever credit. That was her mother’s cousin, that man with the Jaguar, it was because he’d turned up for a visit that her mother’d been able to make the trip, and that’s why she had no warning. And she was all set to put me in the wrong and herself in the right, as usual, and I was the one who was supposed to apologise. Only this time it didn’t work. Damn it, I’d seen them! I asked her whether they’d locked Mother in the flat while they went out to dinner, because I’d seen her just slipping her keys in her bag. You’re a liar, I told her, and a cheat, and what else you are you know best, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve done with you, you can go to London, or the devil, or wherever you please, but not with me. She couldn’t believe it. I’d been so easy up to then, it took a little while to sink in. But as soon as she did manage to get it into her head that I meant it, things got even crazier than they already were. She started persuading, threatening, even fawning… you’ve no idea how fantastic a performance that was, from Pippa. You’d have thought getting to London that night was a matter of life and death to her. She’d expected the car to be waiting in the road for her, and instead, it was locked in the garage Bill and I rent —rented—down at Floods’, at the end of the street. When she realised nothing was going to get her her own way any more, she suddenly dived her hand into her bag and pulled out a gun. That gun.” He glanced across at the drawer where Bunty had hidden it, and then at her attentive face, and said wryly: “I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”
She gave him no reassurances, and made him no promises. Not yet. “Go on,” she said.
“Well, I still can’t believe in it myself. These things don’t happen, not in connection with people like Pippa. Where would she get a gun? Why should she want one? And why, for God’s sake, should she care enough about going to London with me to grab it out of her bag and point it at me, and tell me I’d better keep my promise to drive her down, or else! Why? It mattered to her just getting her own way, I know, but surely not that much? And she meant it, I know she did, now. But then…”
“Then,” said Bunty, “you were too furious to be cautious.”
“Too drunk,” he said hardly. “She waved this thing at me, and threatened, and as far as I was concerned that was the last straw. I wanted to kill her… or, at least, I was ready to. Oh, I know that, all right! When it happens to you, you know it. I just went for her. No holds barred. I got her by the wrist and we had a wild, untidy sort of struggle for the gun. About the rest I’m not sure. But I know I ripped it out of her hand. I know that. I know I was holding it when we both fell over together, and went down with a crash. I’m not sure what I hit. The edge of the table, I think. I hit something, all right, I’ve still got the hell of a headache and a bump like a hen’s egg to prove it. All I know for certain is that I went out cold for a time. I don’t know how long, exactly, but not long, not more than twenty or twenty-five minutes, I’d say. When I came round, I was lying over Pippa on the floor. And I still had the gun in my hand. And Pippa… she was dead. It took me a few minutes to understand that. I was shaking her, talking to her, telling her playing the fool wouldn’t get her anything… Oh, my God! You wouldn’t believe how little different she looked… not different at all. There was no blood, nothing to show for it, only that small hole in her sweater. She looked just as if she was pretending, to frighten me. And that would have been like her, too. But she didn’t move, and she didn’t breathe… and there was that hole, and just the ooze of blood round it, that her sweater absorbed. And in the end I knew she was dead, really dead, and I’d killed her. You,” he said abruptly, turning the full devastating stare of his haggard eyes on Bunty, “you change things. But not even you can change that.”
She leaned forward and laid her hand possessively on his arm, holding him eye to eye with her. “The shot… There’s just one bullet-hole. Did you hear the shot?”