Member of BPCC Ltd.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Peters, Ellis
The Grass Widow’s Tale.
Rn: Edith Pargeter
I. Title
823.912 [F]
ISBN 0-356-19580-5
Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd
Orbit House
1 New Fetter Lane
London EC4A 1AR
A member of Maxwell Macmillan Pergamon Publishing Corporation
The Grass Widow’s Tale
CHAPTER I
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The day before her birthday turned out to be a dead loss right from the start. It dawned reluctantly in murk, like a decrepit old man with a hangover half-opening one gummy eye, to glare sickly at the world and recoil into misanthropy. Morose commuters groped their way through a gloom that did not lift. Slimy black mud picked up by the setback heels of the new season’s shoes spattered mini-skirted legs to the thigh with miniature cow-pats, which dried greenish-grey and clung like glue. Desultory moisture in the air, balanced irritatingly between rain and mist, caused half of the hurrying morning tide to open their umbrellas, while leaving the other half unconvinced, and to walk the length of the street was to witness the formation of two inimical factions. There was no letter from Dominic in the post, nothing but a dismal circular for a furniture sale and a quarterly gas bill, first delayed and then wantonly inflated by a perverse computer. It was impossible to do the housework without switching on lights, and the spectral world outside the misted windows instantly sank deeper into the all-defiling ooze of dirt and darkness. There was no real daylight all that day.
When October turns traitor it can sometimes outdo the worst of the winter in nastiness. By the time George came home, late in the afternoon, it was raining with a restrained malice that wet people through before they realised it, and yet did nothing to rinse the spattered shop-windows and greasy pavements. All the lights were hazed with condensation and clinging filth; the day was a write-off, and the night already settling malevolently over Comerford.
Bunty heard the car slurp dejectedly along the kerb and slow to turn in at the gate; and her heart rose so violently that only then did she realise with a shock how low it had sunk. George was home, there would be a letter from Dominic in the morning. She examined with astonishment, and rejected with disdain, the feeling that she had been for some hours utterly alone.
And George came in, tall and tired, stained with the greyness of the day, and said, so abruptly that she knew he was hardly with her at all: “ Pitch a few things in a case for me, will you? I’ve got to go down to London.” Some sense of guilt touched him vaguely through the cloud of his abstraction. “I’m sorry!” he said. “Something’s come up.”
Bunty had been a detective’s wife for just over twenty years. Her responses were as nearly automatic as made no matter. You do not send your husband out on a job with a divided mind; least of all do you claim any part of his concentration for yourself when he needs it all intact for his own purposes. She closed her magazine briskly, crossed to him and kissed him with the brevity of old custom.
“Got time for tea? Ready in five minutes. What difference can that make?”
“You don’t mind?” he said, tightening his arm round her for a moment. His voice was weary; so were his eyes. The Midshire C.I.D. were having no easy time this autumn, and there wasn’t much Bunty didn’t know, directly or indirectly, about their preoccupations.
“I mind like hell!” Since when had they dealt in polite, accommodating lies? “But there it is. You get something good out of it, and I’ll be satisfied. Anything promising?”
“Hard to say. It might be a break-through, it might just drop dead. You know how it is.”
She knew just how it was; usually it dropped dead. But they had to pursue it just the same, as long as there was breath in it. “It’s time you had a break. Is it the wage-snatch? Has something broken there?”
“No, the fur job. If we’re lucky it might turn out to be something. They’ve picked up a small floating operator on another charge, one of the possibles we had listed. Specialises in driving jobs, anything on wheels, especially get- away cars. He answers to one of the two descriptions we got out of the driver of that van, but not any better than a dozen other professionals do. The thing is, he produced an alibi for the time of our job, but as soon as they probed it, it fell down. There may be nothing in it. Maybe his own gang want him shopped, for some reason of their own. Anyhow, they don’t want to know about him, and he’s left wide open. It may be the moment to get something out of him, or there may be nothing to get. But we’ve got to try it.”
“Of course! I hope it turns out right, I hope he’s your man. You sit down,” she said, steering him backwards into his own chair by the fire, “and I’ll put the kettle on. By the time I’ve packed it’ll be boiling. How long will you have to be away?”
“I don’t know, maybe two or three days. If I do get a lead, it’ll be down there I shall have to follow it up. I told Duckett, this is some metropolitan gang moving out. I’m sure of it. Distances have shrunk since we got the motorways, and town’s getting too congested and too hot. The pickings are better out here. And we’re beginners,” he said grimly. “They know where the pastures are green, all right! And the police greener!”
“They think!” said Bunty from the kitchen. The gas hissed under the kettle, and the busy, contented purr of water heating began almost at once. “You’re taking the car?” she asked.
