The Grass Widow's Tale

Pippa!”

CHAPTER VI

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For a long moment he stared up at her in absolute stupefaction, hardly able to grasp what she had said, and even when his battered mind had got hold of the words, the sense was too slippery and elusive to be mastered without a struggle. She saw his lips moving automatically over the incredible syllables, and understanding came in a late, disruptive agony, and set him shaking again.

“My God, I wish that was even possible,” he said, panting, “but it’s crazy. Look, there were only two characters in all this lousy scene, Pippa and me. Nobody else! Don’t you start kidding me along at this stage. It’s nice of you even to pretend to believe I might be human, after all I’ve done to you, but…”

“I’m not pretending,” she said strongly. “That’s what I do believe. Time’s short, I can’t spare any for kidding you along, and you can’t spare any for having doubts about me, if we’re going to make anything of this mess.”

“Make anything of it?” he echoed incredulously. “For God’s sake, what is there left to make, except restitution?”

“We could begin by making sense of what we know. Know, not assume.”

He clutched helplessly at his head, squeezed his thin grey cheeks hard between his hands, and shook himself till the lank dark hair flopped on his forehead; but when he opened his eyes again and stared up at her dizzily until her image cleared, she was still confronting him with the same fixed and resolute face.

“Don’t!” he said piteously. “Not unless you mean it! I was just coming to terms with what I am. If you start me hoping now it only means I’ve got to go through this hell twice over. I couldn’t stand it! What we know! I know I was lying on top of her, and she was dead with a bullet in her, and I was clutching the gun. I know I got it out of her hand, I know I was holding it when we fell. I know I wanted to kill her…”

“You wanted to kill me,” said Bunty bluntly. “What does that prove?”

“No,” he said passionately, “I never wanted to kill you. I meant to…”

“Meant to or wanted to, I’m still here.”

“But there was no one else there, only the two of us…”

“How do you know that? You were out for twenty minutes.”

“You do mean it,” he said, staring, and quaked with his sudden devouring hope and fear. He dared not believe that there was anything in this intuition of hers, but it was an impossibility to doubt the genuineness of her conviction. He began to want his innocence with an agonising intensity.

“But if I didn’t kill her, who did? Who else had my motive? Who else had a motive at all?”

“How can we know that, when we know next to nothing about her? If she was betraying you she could have been betraying others as well. And if it was a sound motive for you, so it was for them.”

“But how could any of them even know where she was? She came in a taxi. I was there, motive and all. The most I could squeeze out of it,” he said wretchedly, “was that it might have been almost an accident, when it came to the point… that the gun might have gone off when we fell. Even that I couldn’t make myself believe. So if that’s what you’re trying to prove…”

“No,” she said at once, “not that. Because I think murder was done that evening. But not by you.”

“I wish to God,” he said, trembling, “you could convince me.”

“Give me a chance to try. Let me look at that bump of yours, where you hit the table—if you did hit the table.”

He sat charmed into obedient stillness as she took his head in her hands and turned him a little to get the full light from the window on the place. She felt his lean cheeks, cold with his long weariness, flush into warmth and grow taut with awareness of her touch. His eyes, which he had closed at her approach, as a measure of his devoted docility, opened suddenly and looked up at her, moved and dazzled. For the first time she realised how young he was, surely three or four years short of thirty. She was looking at an over-wrought boy, who had delivered himself into her hands, now absolutely defenceless. And she had promised him a miracle! Miracles are not easy to deliver; she trembled with him as she thought of her responsibility.

“It’s crazy,” he said, shivering. “After all this, I don’t even know what to call you.”

“Most people call me Bunty. Bend your head forward… that’s it.”

The mark of the blow he had taken was there to be found without difficulty, a swollen, tender pear-shape, above and if anything slightly behind his right ear. The forward end of it was higher, and only there was the skin slightly broken in one spot. She parted the thick dark hair to examine the mark carefully.

“I’m not a doctor, or even a nurse. But unless you’ve got a table with padded edges, it certainly wasn’t the table that did this. If you’d hit any sharp edge you’d have had a considerable cut.”

“There’s an old wooden-framed chair with leather upholstery,” he said indistinctly from under the fall of tangled hair. “It was close by the table, on my right. Not the overstuffed kind, you’d feel the wood underneath, all right, if you fell on it. It could have been the back of that.”

“It could… but you’d have had to fall sideways… or else to turn your head sharply as you fell. You’ve got a diagonal welt, like this…” She drew her fingers along it, and their course ended decidedly behind his ear. “It looks to me much more the kind of mark you’d have if someone had come up behind you and hit you one nice, scientific tap to put you out for the count. And somebody who knew how to go about it, and had the right sort of tool for the job.” She smoothed back his hair over the tender place, and came round the arm of the couch to face him. “Maybe a piece of lead piping inside a sock,” she said. She was smiling, faintly but positively. “Or more likely the simplest thing of all, a rubber cosh.”

He fingered his bruise and gaped at her dazedly. “But it’s mad! If you’re thinking of a common burglary, there wasn’t a thing in the place worth a man’s while. Nobody’d be bothered burgling a cottage belonging to the likes of Bill and me, why should they? They always seem to know where the right stuff is. And if you mean something less