“So that’s why she was in such a state when I told her to get out,” said Luke, looking down at it with a shadowed face, almost afraid to touch. “And that’s what he was looking for. He searched her case, and then took the keys away to search her flat, and all the time it was where she’d hidden it, in my car. Where do you suppose she got it?”
“It’s stolen money. What other possibility is there? I can’t believe she was up to anything on her own. Somebody deposited this with her until it cooled enough to be distributed or moved out of the area. And before the heat was off she’d had it in her possession so long she’d come to think of it as hers—so much in clothes and clubs and parties and travel and fun. Everything she wanted. She’d begun to question whether it ever need be distributed at all. Who could make better use of it than she could?”
“You really think it may be that? I know she was extravagant and spoiled… But she’d never… Oh, I don’t know!” he said helplessly, winding the pink tape nervously round his fingers.
“What else could it be? How could she come by this much money in cash, otherwise? And if she had, honestly, why keep it in cash and have it hanging around? And why did she acquire a gun, unless it was because she had something to protect, and somebody willing and able to find her a gun to protect it with? Who carries this kind of money in a parcel? Not honest people.” Bunty sat down and stared at the uncovered notes, brooding with her head in her hands. “How long has Pippa worked in Comerbourne?”
“Nearly three years. I met her soon after I started work there.”
“Then this comes from some local coup,” she said with authority, and closed her eyes the better to think back over recent history. The sight of all those miniature queens, so demure and complacent in whatever hands, was distracting. “You said she started getting off-hand with you about two months ago. That was probably when she first picked up with these people. And just over a week ago she came back and began to make up to you. And she worked at Pope Halsey’s, as an assistant buyer…”
Her voice snapped off abruptly. She opened her eyes wide, bright-green in this slanting pre-evening light, dazzled eyes. “Oh, no! That must be it! Tell me again, Luke, what department did she work in?”
“I don’t think I did tell you. But it was furs,” he said, puzzled, forgetting the money in her intensity. “Why?”
“And she was assistant to the buyer?”
“Yes… she used to model furs for their advertisements. She looked marvellous… I’ve seen the stills…” He caught Bunty’s bright stare, fixed as a fortune-teller’s crystal-hypnotised gaze, and trembled with a premonition of final truth. “Why?”
“There was a big van-load of furs,” she said like a clairvoyant, “coming from London for Pope Halsey, just about six weeks ago. It was hi-jacked soon after it left the M.1, flagged down near a lay-by, by somebody pretending there’d been an accident. The driver was picked up with bad concussion next day, the van was ditched on a minor road. The furs were gone, clean trade. Probably turned into cash that very night. Somebody had advance notice of that consignment. How if Pippa gave them the tip-off?”
“Oh, no! ” he said, with the last anguish on her account, and drew back his hands from the banknotes on the table. “You think this could be that money? After all this time?”
“No,” said Bunty positively, “not that money. The last place they’d be likely to unload the goods and pick up the cash would be Comerbourne, where the stuff was consigned. No, not that. But supposing she’d been the contact for that. And supposing the same gang needed a safe deposit in Comerbourne on a later job, and thought they had a reliable little girl there—respectable, above suspicion, and already implicated in one affair. Because there was another gang job in Comerbourne, just three weeks ago. Didn’t you hear about it? The pay-roll of Armitage Pressings was snatched on its way from the bank. The gang vanished, and so did the money. There were road-blocks up almost at once, but the money vanished, all the same. I reckon it vanished inside Comerbourne. Don’t you? They found the van in a scrap-yard afterwards, right there in the town. The money had to lie somewhere until the heat was off. Deposited with some confederate inside the town, somebody they could trust. Somebody they thought they could trust. Armitage’s pay-roll per week is around fifteen thousand. How much do you make this lot?”
He had been counting the number of notes in one bundle, and the number of bundles, but he couldn’t believe the answer. “I figure it as something over fourteen thousand, anyhow. There’d be change, too, of course, if it was wages money, but that wouldn’t be so portable, maybe she ditched that. Even the notes… but banks don’t keep the numbers of the used notes they hand out, do they?”
The timing was right and the amount was right, and where else would a shop assistant get fifteen thousand pounds in notes? Bunty watched him fingering through the neat, banded bundles, still dazed. She saw his hand halt upon one of them, and his face grew sharply intent as he turned its edges towards him.
Black, rigid card—or was it a blue so dark as to be nearly black?—jutted on either side of the banknotes by a fraction of an inch. Luke had felt the alien stiffness even before he had seen the slivers of darkness. He thrust his thumb under the brown paper band and ripped it open, tumbling out upon the table a small black book, its cover printed in gilt lettering and heraldry between two white windows.
“A passport!”
Fire-new, virgin, its stiff cover opened a little as soon as the constriction was removed.
“Pippa’s. Of course!” said Luke in a low voice, and opened it where the blue-tinted pages yielded of their own tension. Something folded double inside began to unfold in sympathy. “Aaaah!” he said in a long sigh. “Now I see!”
It was a B.E.A. ticket. He unfolded it and studied the details with a closed and unrevealing face.
“Dated for to-day. A single from Heath Row to Le Bourget. The eight o’clock Trident flight. So that’s why she needed the Kwells! She’d have had to be at West London Air Terminal by seven o’clock. I don’t suppose I should even have been awake by the time she took off for Paris. There wouldn’t have been any difficulty. We… hadn’t planned on sharing… The only trick would have been getting this out of the tool-box while I wasn’t around to see, and that wouldn’t have bothered her. She’d only have to say she’d left something in the car, some time when I was shaving, or something, and couldn’t run her errand myself. She could do harder things than that by far. And I don’t suppose I was much of a problem to manage.”
“No,” agreed Bunty, “I don’t suppose you were. But things didn’t work out so easily. They came back for their money, just when she had everything planned for her run-out. What else could it be? They followed her to your house. Maybe they had someone watching her moves all along, those people don’t trust anyone far. They saw her leaving with a suitcase, and followed her, and it would be simple enough getting into your place, even if the door was locked, but I don’t suppose it was…”
“It almost never was,” he owned, fingering the air-line ticket sombrely on the table. “Sometimes not even when we went to bed. We hadn’t anything worth stealing, we didn’t think in terms of locking things up.”
“So they just walked in. Just like Pippa. And they heard part—I’d say not very much—of what passed between you, and saw the struggle for the gun. How very easy, to knock you on the head, and then they could get rid of a liability and leave you to take the blame. When even you were convinced of your own guilt, why should the police look any farther? But you see where they went wrong. They were sure the money would be in Pippa’s case. But it wasn’t! And now it was too late to try and make her tell what she’d done with it. They’d killed her! She wasn’t going to answer any questions any more. Probably they searched your cottage, but they can’t have known about the car, waiting in the garage a whole street away, with this money packed inside it. They couldn’t begin to guess where the loot really was. No! But they took her keys with them, and went back to make a thorough search of her flat. My guess is they’d take it for granted she’d moved the actual money, but they’d be looking for a left-luggage ticket, or a safe-deposit key, something that would show them where she’d hidden it.”