The husband didn’t mention a visitor.”
“Maybe he wasn’t told.”
This prompted Voss to clap his hand to the back of his neck. “A secret visitor. Someone she didn’t mention to her husband. Who? A lover?” He sounded encouraged, then pressed his hand to his forehead. “But why should the lover want to kill her?”
I listened in a bored way and took a look at my watch.
“This opens it up,” said Voss. “By Jesus, it opens it up!”
I cleared my throat. “Have you finished with me?”
Voss looked at me abstractedly. “Finished? For the present, yes. Have we got your address?”
“I gave it to the sergeant at the desk.”
“Fair enough.” He made a dismissive gesture.
I didn’t say good-bye as I went out.
TWENTY
Pressure. I’d tried ignoring it, turning my back on it, meeting it halfway, laughing in its face, arguing with it, defying it, but still it closed in, unstoppable. Now it had got to me.
I needed the gun.
From Bath I drove fast along the Wiltshire roads, main beam probing the evening mist, wipers working intermittently. I kept checking the mirror, because I had a suspicion that I was being tailed. One set of headlamps stayed consistently fifty yards behind me whatever speed I was doing, and at times I was going flat out.
The victim of my own imagination?
No. The threat of pursuit was real. I was suspected of murder. Doubly suspected. First Alice had pointed the finger at me. Now Inspector Voss.
You may think I was overreacting to Alice’s charge of shooting Cliff Morton in 1943, that it was too absurd to take seriously. But I’d learned enough about that young woman in the last five days to regard her as dangerous. She kept nothing to herself. It was a sure bet that she’d mouthed her suspicions to Digby Watmore by now. With the press on to me, as well as the police, what chance would I have?
Two murders down to me. Put them together and
Each time I drove through a stretch lit by street lamps I slowed and tried to identify the car trailing me. Difficult, because he kept his distance, and the mist lingered right into Berkshire, but by degrees I reached a few conclusions. A large black limousine with a wide axis and low lines, possibly a Jaguar, driven by a man, no passengers.
At Thatcham I stopped for petrol. While the girl was unfastening the cap I stepped quickly into the road to see what my faithful follower would do. Nowhere in sight. Yet two minutes after I got on the road again, I checked the mirror, and he was back with me.
On familiar territory, where the A34O forks left to Pangbourne, I slipped the leash by turning sharp left a short way up the road towards Englefield Park, then left again by the lake and back to the A4. I believe he overshot at the first turn.
I switched my thoughts to more useful activity. I’d arranged with Danny Leftwich to pick up the Colt.45 at the range on Wednesday morning, only I couldn’t wait that long. He should have finished cleaning it by now. So I drove past Reading on the A4 almost as far as Sonning and then branched right to seek out Danny’s sixteenth-century cottage by the golf course. I’d played bridge there several times the previous winter.
My lights first picked out the hump of his Volkswagen above a low stone wall, then the squat structure of the thatched cottage. Smoke, coiling into the night sky from one of the two chimneys, encouraged me; the unlit interior didn’t. I stopped by the wall, followed the winding route between soggy lavender bushes to the front door, touched the bellpush, heard it chime two notes, and waited hopefully. A dog barked. Nothing else.
No point in trying the bell again. Between the chimes and the barking, most of Sonning must have heard that Danny Leftwich had a visitor. I should have guessed that a man of Danny’s energy didn’t spend his nights indoors in front of the TV. Looking around, I spotted a brick-built garage or workshop at the end of the garden.
One thing was clear: He didn’t expend much of that energy in the garden. It was a job finding the crazy paving in the long grass. Worth it, though. When I rapped the door, Danny’s voice piped up at once, “Who is it?”
I told him.
He called, “Hold on, Theo. I’ll be right with you.”
I waited over a minute, then the door opened and I got a whiff of the chemicals and understood why the delay had been necessary. The building was a photographic darkroom. I had to bend my head to avoid touching a set of still wet prints pegged to plastic lines.
“Not bad, hm?” he said as I glanced at them.
They were nude shots. One shot, to be accurate, a blowup in black and white, printed ten times over. So- called glamour photography. A girl bending slightly forward, head turned to look over her shoulder at the camera, as if in a relay race, except that her bottom was too plump for a runner, and her pouting expression suggested it wasn’t a baton she was looking out for.
“Something new in cottage industries,” I commented.
“My spinning wheel’s got woodworm,” said Danny.
“I suppose you’ve got an outlet for these?”
There was a glint of mischief from Danny as he said, “Rikky Patel.”
I winced in disbelief. Rikky was another of our bridge team, an unfailingly solemn senior technician in the biology department.
“Rikky goes in for this?”
He enjoyed the idea for a moment and then explained, “Rikky’s uncle is a publisher. The Indian subcontinent is a fabulous market for soft porn.” He poured the contents of a developing tray into a beaker. “Come for your gun? I thought we said Wednesday.”
“Is it ready? You’re a pal.”
Danny wiped his hands and led me out and through the lavender to the cottage. The Colt was lying on a cloth on the kitchen table among a collection of bristle brushes, screwdrivers, jags, alien keys, cocktail sticks, and tins of gun oil. He picked it up and operated the slide. “I haven’t adjusted the sights. I was hoping to test-fire it.”
“I know,” I told him. “Something has come up. Did you by any chance get hold of some…”
“New cartridges? Sure. They’ll cost you a bit.”
I paid him generously, and nothing was said about the use I expected to make of them. “As a matter of interest,” I asked him, “the Colt is a pretty heavy weapon, isn’t it? I mean, the recoil is something to reckon with.”
“It has that reputation,” he agreed.
“Do you reckon a boy of nine could handle it with any accuracy?”
He frowned.
“I know it’s against the law,” I said, “but just supposing it happened.”
He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Theo, you already told me you fired the thing two-handed when you were a boy.”
Stupid, I thought. Of course I mentioned it last time. Too much on my mind.
I told him, “That was just messing about in a field, shooting at a tin can.”
He gave a shrug and we left it at that.
Although it was spotting with rain, he insisted on coming out to the car with me. Before I switched on, he made it obvious that there was something he wanted to mention. He bent his head confidentially to the window.
To be frank, I was slightly annoyed. I thought I’d made it plain that I wouldn’t land him in trouble with the law. He’d done me a favor, I’d paid him handsomely, and the matter was closed. So before he got a word out, I said
