He thought that over with agonised care. “Not that I can remember. I’d expect the moment when we fell to be the moment when the gun went off. When I fired it,” he corrected himself grimly. “I told you, I meant murder. But I don’t actually remember hearing the shot. All I know beyond doubt is that I came round, and she was dead.
“And I panicked. I can’t blame the drink for that. I wasn’t in very good shape when I came round, but I tell you, I was stone cold sober. I tidied up the room, and locked the house, and ran for the car. You can get it round to the back gate, and it’s quite private there. I packed up girl and luggage and all in the boot, and picked up the spent cartridge case—it was there on the floor right beside her—and locked the place up again, as if we’d set off according to plan, and got out of there. It didn’t take long, there was no mess, no blood… She was lying on her back, you see, and I reckon the bullet must be still in her, I couldn’t find any exit wound. I threw the spent case in a field as soon as I was out of town. All I thought of was getting away. At first I didn’t know where, I was driving round and round on the country roads in a state of shock, trying to think, and I had to have a drink to help me. I had to. And that was when I met you.”
He looked up, and for a moment studied her with wonder and care, forgetting himself. “It’s funny, how you’ve changed. You had the black dog on you then, too. It was because you were sad that I wanted to talk to you. I wish I’d left you alone. I’m sorry!”
“What were you going to do?” asked Bunty.
“I thought of this place. I’ve been here several times with Reggie and Louise, and they gave me an open invitation to use it even after they’d packed it in for the year and gone home. They’re like that, they probably invited other people, too. That’s why they leave a key. And I thought of Reggie’s boat.”
“You were going to drop her overboard,” said Bunty, “and head for Denmark, or somewhere…”
“Norway, actually. It must be possible to land unobserved somewhere on all that tremendous coastline, and I know my way around there a little. I’ve even got friends there… though I don’t suppose,‘’ he owned drearily, ” that I could have dragged them into this mess.”
“And I,” she said practically, almost cheerfully, “was to go overboard, too, in mid-passage.”
He stared back at her mutely, out of the extremes of exhaustion, unable any longer to be ashamed or afraid. Even the tension which had held him upright was broken now, after the slow blood-letting of this confession. He was close to total collapse.
“Why didn’t you take your chance when it came?” he asked in a thread of a voice. “Why did you send the police away?”
She got up slowly, and moved away from him to pick up the shards of the tea-pot. “I’d better get this mess cleaned up,” she said, momentarily side-tracked, and lost that thread again on the instant. The housewife was there, somewhere inside, but fighting against the odds. She straightened up with the fragments in her hands, and stood frowning down at them thoughtfully.
“I didn’t need them,” she said, and turned to face the boy on the settee, whose eyes had never ceased their faithful study of her through the cloud of their guilt and sorrow and resignation.
“I’d only just realised it,” she said deliberately, “but I knew I didn’t need them. In the night I wasn’t thinking or noticing very clearly, or I might have known before. Things are distorted as soon as you’re afraid. Maybe I did know, subconsciously. I think I may have done. I had all the evidence, if I’d been able to recognise it. When you drove at that constable in Hawkworth… did he jump back first, or did you swerve first? I didn’t work it out then, I know now. And what a lot of trouble you went to, to avoid running down a hare, even when you were on the run. No wonder you couldn’t go through with it when it came to my turn.”
Half of that, she realised, was lost upon him. He was in no condition to follow her through such a maze; but he clung to his own question, and it bore a slightly different inflection now, tinted with the living wonder of genuine curiosity, and—was it possible?—hope!
“Why did you send them away? Why didn’t you hand me over to them, and be safe?”
“Because,” said Bunty, now with something very like certainty, “I was safe. Because I don’t believe you are a murderer. I don’t believe you ever killed anyone, not even Pippa!”
CHAPTER VI
« ^ »
For a long moment he stared up at her in absolute stupefaction, hardly able to grasp what she had said, and even when his battered mind had got hold of the words, the sense was too slippery and elusive to be mastered without a struggle. She saw his lips moving automatically over the incredible syllables, and understanding came in a late, disruptive agony, and set him shaking again.
“My God, I wish that was even possible,” he said, panting, “but it’s crazy. Look, there were only two characters in all this lousy scene, Pippa and me. Nobody else! Don’t you start kidding me along at this stage. It’s nice of you even to pretend to believe I might be human, after all I’ve done to you, but…”
“I’m not pretending,” she said strongly. “That’s what I do believe. Time’s short, I can’t spare any for kidding you along, and you can’t spare any for having doubts about me, if we’re going to make anything of this mess.”
“Make anything of it?” he echoed incredulously. “For God’s sake, what is there left to make, except restitution?”
“We could begin by making sense of what we know. Know, not assume.”
He clutched helplessly at his head, squeezed his thin grey cheeks hard between his hands, and shook himself till the lank dark hair flopped on his forehead; but when he opened his eyes again and stared up at her dizzily until her image cleared, she was still confronting him with the same fixed and resolute face.
“Don’t!” he said piteously. “Not unless you mean it! I was just coming to terms with what I am. If you start me hoping now it only means I’ve got to go through this hell twice over. I couldn’t stand it! What we know! I know I was lying on top of her, and she was dead with a bullet in her, and I was clutching the gun. I know I got it out of her hand, I know I was holding it when we fell. I know I wanted to kill her…”
“You wanted to kill me,” said Bunty bluntly. “What does that prove?”
“No,” he said passionately, “I never wanted to kill you. I meant to…”
“Meant to or wanted to, I’m still here.”
“But there was no one else there, only the two of us…”
“How do you know that? You were out for twenty minutes.”
“You do mean it,” he said, staring, and quaked with his sudden devouring hope and fear. He dared not believe that there was anything in this intuition of hers, but it was an impossibility to doubt the genuineness of her conviction. He began to want his innocence with an agonising intensity.
“But if I didn’t kill her, who did? Who else had my motive? Who else had a motive at all?”
“How can we know that, when we know next to nothing about her? If she was betraying you she could have been betraying others as well. And if it was a sound motive for you, so it was for them.”
“But how could any of them even know where she was? She came in a taxi. I was there, motive and all. The most I could squeeze out of it,” he said wretchedly, “was that it might have been almost an accident, when it came to the point… that the gun might have gone off when we fell. Even that I couldn’t make myself believe. So if that’s what you’re trying to prove…”