“But I want you out,” he said, “before it comes to shooting. Even if they do come, it might be touch and go. I’d rather get you away. If I can make that chance, promise to try… promise me, Bunty…”
She lifted a hand and touched his cheek gently, let her palm lie there for a long moment holding him, partly in apology, partly as a distraction, because she had no intention of making any promises. When the time came she would play it as seemed best, weighing the chances for him as well as she could in the split second she would have for consideration. But she could not conceive of any combination of circumstances that was likely to induce her to leave him now.
He wanted to turn his head the few necessary inches, and press his lips into her palm, but he didn’t do it, because he had no rights in her at all but those she had given him freely, and they were not that kind of rights. Until they were out of here—if they ever got out of here alive—there was nothing he could say to her, though his heart might be bursting. Afterwards, if they could clear up this affair with all its debts and start afresh, things might go very differently. But the darkness in which they stood seemed to him a symbolic as well as an actual darkness, and he couldn’t see anything ahead. And there might not be any more time for talking, to-night or ever.
“Bunty, I’m sorry!” he breathed, and that seemed to be it. He had never been so short of words, and in any case, what good were they?
“For what? For getting into a mess through no real fault of your own?”
“For everything I’ve done to you. For involving you. I wish I could undo it,” he said. “Forgive me!”
“There’s nothing to forgive. You couldn’t have involved me if I hadn’t involved myself. No debts either way. Simply, it happened.”
“No… I began as your… murderer…” The word was almost inaudible, lost in the tangle of her hair. “Don’t let me end like that now. I’ll make the chance and you must go. That’s why you must … I can bear it if you get back safely… I’ll be satisfied then.”
And he meant it. If she had come out like a pilgrim, looking for something uniquely her own, some justification of her whole life to show to the gate-keepers and the gods when her time came, she had it. For every journey, even the last one, you need a ticket.
The dulled accompaniment of voices and movements from the kitchen had halted, recommenced, changed, and the two of them in their narrow prison had never noticed. Nor could they hear the approach of the car through so many layers of insulation. The first they knew of the boss’s arrival was when the door of the store-cupboard was suddenly flung open, and Skinner beckoned them out into the light. They came, dazzled for a while after such a darkness, eyes wide and dazed from staring into a different kind of light. Luke kept his arm about Bunty as they were herded through the kitchen and into the living-room.
And the living-room was full of a large, restless, top-heavy man in a light overcoat and a deeper grey suit, standing astride the orange-coloured rug. It was a still night, but he seemed somewhere to have found a reserve of tempestuous wind, and brought it into the house in the folds of his well-tailored but untamed clothes, so that the room seemed suddenly gusty and tremulous, convulsed with the excess of his energy. He was nearly half a head taller than Luke, and twice as wide, massive shoulders and barrel chest tapering away to long, narrow flanks. For all that bulk, he moved with a violent elegance that was half exuberant health and half almost psychotic self-confidence and self-love. He straddled the floor and looked them all over with the eye of a proprietor, viewing a new acquisition which didn’t look like much now, but of which he could make something in double-quick time, and something profitable, too.
His head was big, to match his shoulders, and startlingly rough-hewn after the disguise of his immaculate clothes ended at the collar; a head of crude, bold lines, and a face in which the bone strained glossy beneath the tanned skin, not because there was so little flesh there, but because there was so much bone. He had a forehead ornamented with knobbly projections like incipient horns, and above it bright auburn hair grew low to a widow’s peak. An upright cleft marked his massy chin. The deepset eyes—boxers should have eyes like that, invulnerable, lids and all, in cages of concrete skull, cased with hide like polished horn—twinkled with restless, reddish lights, good-humoured without being in the least reassuring.
… auburn hair growing low, cleft chin, eyes buried in a lot of bone ...
Luke’s fingers closed meaningly on Bunty’s arm. He couldn’t say anything to her, but there was no need, he had described this man to her so well that even she knew him on sight. This was the man on whose arm Pippa Callier had leaned devotedly as they left her flat together on Friday night, the man whose car had stood all night in the mews round the corner, waiting to take a mythical mother and her mythical cousin home again to Birmingham. How strange that she should have thought she could get away with such a pretence, even for a moment. And how innocent and unpractised it suddenly made her in Bunty’s sight. This was nobody’s cousin, and one could almost believe, nobody’s son. He could have burst out of a rock somewhere of his own elemental force, self-generated and dangerous.
She pressed her elbow into Luke’s side in acknowledgment. But there was no way of telling him that she suddenly found herself better informed even than he was, that she, too, had seen this man before, just once and briefly, too distantly to have known all those details of his appearance, but clearly enough to know his movements again wherever she saw them, the long, arching stride of a man with vigour to spare, the appraising tilt of the big head, the swinging use of the high shoulders. On Friday evening, when he had meant nothing to her, before he changed into the dinner jacket that Luke had found so conspicuous in Queen Street.
Luke knew the boss’s face again, as he had said he would. But Bunty knew more, his trade, his provenance, even his name, that last magic that every elemental being should guard as he guards his life, for in a sense it is his life.
This one hadn’t guarded his. He had had it printed on windscreen stickers, blazoned on fluorescent posters, strung along thirty-seven be-flagged frontages in neon lights for all the world to see and memorise.
His name was Fleet.
CHAPTER XI
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The huge newcomer revolved on the heel of a hand-made shoe, taking in all the inhabitants of this minor kingdom of his, and dealing in turn with them all.
“Hah! ” he said, a bark of satisfaction and amusement, as he surveyed Luke from head to foot with one flash of his coarse-cut-marmalade eyes. “I see you got the right party, anyhow. That’s something!”
The snapping gaze swept over Bunty with interest, sized her up with casual appreciation, and flicked another glance at Luke. “Well, get that! He finds new ones fast. Who’d have thought it!”
He tossed the key he was swinging across to Skinner. “Turn the Jag round, will you, and wheel it up to the gate ready for off. You never know, we might have to leave on the hop.”
The skirt of his pearl-grey Terylene overcoat whirled, and another spin brought him to Quilley. “What’s the matter with you?” There was no sympathy in the inquiry, rather a note of outrage, even of immediate reserve. His employees had no business to get hurt on duty.