on the stairs below, and had the gun ready in his hand still. No chances were going to be offered to her, no chances of any kind.
The back view of him was strangely desolate, the head drooping with its lank black hair dishevelled, the shoulders sagging. If she was sick with weariness, what must his exhaustion be? In the end there might be the chance he could not deny her; even he must succumb to sleep sooner or later.
She shot the bolt of the bathroom door after her, and groped for the cord of the light-switch, but nothing happened. Of course, the main switch was off, somewhere down there in the back premises, and there’d be no lights until he turned it on. The window was small, and the light from outside seemed to have dwindled almost into night again, now that she saw it from withindoors. It was barely half past five, after all that nightmare journey.
The cold water was bracing and welcome, and simply to be alone there, with a door and a bolt dividing her from him, was in itself a new lease of life. Evidently this place was used frequently and always kept ready for occupation, for there was soap on the wash-basin, and towels in the small white cupboard. Neat, small guest tablets of soap that fitted admirably into the palm. She considered for a moment, and then rolled the one she had used in her handkerchief, and slipped it into her handbag. There was nothing else she could see that might be useful to her; she took her time, as he had suggested, about looking round for a weapon to use against him. She had hoped there might be a razor, at least of the safety variety, in the cabinet, and therefore blades; but of course, the owner used an electric, there was the socket for it beside the mirror. Nothing there for her. The bolt on the door was a fragile thing, if she refused to come out it wouldn’t preserve her for long. There remained that window, discouragingly small and high though it was.
She carried the stool over to it, climbed up, snapped back the latch and hoisted the sash. Empty air surged away before her face. Craning over the sill to look down, she saw that on the rear side of the house the ground fell away sharply in a tumble of stones, almost a cliff, and instead of being one modest story from safe ground, she found herself peering down fifty feet of broken rock. No hope of climbing out from there.
So in the end she would have to open the door again, and go back to him. She did it very softly and cautiously, easing back the bolt without a sound, for she had left him sitting on the stairs a long time, and sleep might have (NB: typo in printed book (...instead of being one modest story from safe ground,...) she set foot on the landing he was on his feet, too, and turning to mount the remaining steps of the flight.
“Into the next room, please.” He reached past her to open the middle door of the three. “Yes,” he said, following the rapid glance she gave to the curving latch and the key-hole below it, “there’s a lock. I can’t afford any slips now, can I? You didn’t leave me much choice.”
Just over the threshold of the little bedroom, primrose and white, a charming place to house a guest, Bunty halted. With her back turned to him she said softly and deliberately :
“Do you know why I opened the boot?”
She didn’t look round, but she felt, almost she scented, the effusion of his desolation, bewilderment and despair, and the ache of his amputation from the harmless creature he must once have been.
The dull voice behind her said, dragging with weariness:
“What difference does it make?”
“I was looking for a rug,” she said, “to put over you.”
There was one instant of absolute silence, then the door closed as abruptly as a cry, and she heard the key turned hastily, clumsily in the lock. For a long minute she caught the deep, harsh, strained accent of his breathing, close there against the door, so that almost she could see his damp forehead pressed against the cold white panelling, and the veined eyelids heavy as marble over the burned-out grey eyes. Only slowly and with infinite effort did he drag himself away; she heard his steps slur along the carpeted landing, and stumble down the stairs.
CHAPTER IV
« ^ »
The first thing she did was to cross to the window and hoist the sash, to have a second look at the lie of the land seawards. The bedroom looked out, like the bathroom, to the rear of the house, but not directly towards the water. To the left lay the outline of the coast above the cliffs, undulating between tree-lined hollows and blanched grassy brows, but beneath the walls of the cottage the land crumbled away towards the sea. By craning out to extend her view to the right she could see the cliffs broken by a small, tight inlet, where the tide came in to a tiny jetty and a boat-house. Many a small house like this must have been snapped up by boating enthusiasts as desirable weekend accommodation, all round the Scottish coast. Did it belong to this man’s family? Surely to someone who knew him well, or he wouldn’t have been admitted to all its secrets. There seemed to be a rocky path leading down from the house to the inlet, but only here and there could she glimpse a level, slated spot that formed a part of it.
The drop from the window she abandoned as impossible. Even if she had had sheets enough to knot into a rope, and confidence enough in the finished article to trust herself to it—after all, what had she to lose?—she didn’t believe she could climb round the corner of the house to level ground. Forget that, and consider the contents of the room.
She was closing the window again when she heard the car below start up, and gently roll the few yards into the garage, and in a moment the double doors closed hollowly over it. Naturally he wouldn’t risk leaving that where it could be seen, and draw attention to itself and him.
Well, if she couldn’t get out of here, could she keep him from getting in? The trouble with modernised holiday cottages is that everything tends to be either light-weight or built-in. Wardrobe and dressing-table here were neatly contrived with white-wood shelving built on to the wall, there was nothing of any solidity that was movable, not even the bed. A child could have shoved that across the floor on its admirable and infuriating ball castors. There were no bolts inside the door to supplement the lock, and she couldn’t barricade herself in.
There remained only the lock itself, new and presumably efficient, but surely also a light-weight, a token seal on privacy. She emptied the contents of her handbag on the bed, and fingered them over for anything that might provide a tool or a weapon. The obvious lock-picker was her nail-file, a giant from the lavish manicure case George had once given her, long and strong and with a formidable point. She had another use for that, however. It was the only thing she had that even suggested a weapon, all it lacked was a comfortable handle that would give her more control and force in using it, and she supplied that by embedding the unpointed end firmly in the cake of soap she had stolen from the bathroom. It wasn’t much as defence against a gun, but if she got a chance she intended to forestall that direct confrontation. If she had had this in her hand half an hour ago, when he had sat there in broken exhaustion on the stairs, with his back turned to her…
So this, she thought, pushing back the tangled hair from her forehead, this is how killers are made. No, I can’t! Not unless… not until… All the same, she fingered the point of the file, and remembering that there were bricks outside the window, went and flung up the sash again, and began carefully whetting the improvised dagger, first
