“It’s quicker, and I need to be mobile. I shall have to fill up on the way out. Thank the lord, at least it isn’t foggy.”
“I’d better reckon on three days or so, then? Keep an eye on this kettle, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
She had had plenty of practice, there had been a great many abrupt departures during those twenty years. She packed the small black suitcase with brisk movements, and by the time she brought it down George had the tea made, and was shuffling papers together in his briefcase and locking his desk.
“Has the van driver seen a photograph of your man?” she asked, pouring tea.
“Yes, but he can’t be too clear about anything but the general build and movements of the two he saw. It was night, and they had a powerful torch trained on him the moment he pulled up. We might get an identification when we can show him the man himself. But between you and me, I doubt it.”
Bunty doubted it, too. The van-load of furs bound from the London dealer to Comerbourne’s leading dress-shop had been hi-jacked shortly after leaving the motorway, on a night in early September, nearly six weeks past, and the driver was still in hospital. The wonder was that he had been able to tell them anything at all. A quiet stretch of road, a red triangle conspicuously displayed, a car askew, half off the road, a man running along the verge and waving a torch towards the cab of the big van—add up the details, and who wouldn’t have deduced an accident, and stopped to help? The driver had seen a second man dart out of the shadow of the car, and he had an eye for the characteristics of movement, and insisted he would know this one again if he could ever see him in motion. But no sooner had he pulled in to the side of the road and jumped down from his cab than he was hit on the head from behind, by someone he never saw at all, and that was the last thing he knew about it. Hit three times, as it turned out, to make sure of him. He had a tough constitution and a hard skull, and he survived, and even remembered. But for him they would never have known where the attack took place, for the empty van was picked up later on a road-house parking-ground twenty miles off its route, and the driver was found in the morning dumped in the remotest corner of a lay-by on a country road in the opposite direction. Every part of the van that might have carried prints had been polished as clean as bone. A thoroughly professional job. And nobody had seen hide or hair of the load of furs since then. Probably they had been delivered to an already waiting customer that same night.
If Midshire had had any doubts, after that, that crime on a big-business scale was moving in on its territory, the wage-snatch three weeks later would have settled the matter. But the driver who regularly conveyed Armitage Pressings’ weekly pay-roll to the factory on Thursdays had not provided any information for the police, because he had been unconscious when the ambulance-men lifted him on to the stretcher, and dead before they got him to hospital. As for the van, someone had ditched it among the skeletons in a local scrap-yard within an hour of the crime.
And this time the weapon they had used on him had not been a cosh, but a gun. Guns had seldom featured in Midshire crime before, and then usually in the haphazard and amateur kind. This was professionalism on a highly organised scale. The planners were extending their territory, and it looked as if the march of progress had reached Comerbourne.
“I’d better get off,” said George, sighing, and rose to pick up his case
“I’ll come in with you.” Bunty got up very quickly, and whisked out into the hall for her coat. “You can drop me off at the Betterbuy, and I’ll get a bus back. I want to pick up a few things there.”
There was nothing she needed, but with his preoccupations he couldn’t hope to read that in her face, which was bright, tranquil and sensible as always. The truth was that she had suddenly felt her very bones ache at the thought of seeing him go, and being alone in the house with the autumnal chill and silence after he was gone. Even a few minutes was worth buying; even the struggle on to a crowded bus on the way back might break the spell of her isolation, and restore her to the company of her neighbours. Tiresome, troublous and abrasive as one’s fellow- men can be, only the friction of human contact keeps one man-alive.
“I thought you hated the supermarket,” said George obtusely, frowning over his own anxieties, and smiling through them abstractedly at his wife. He had loved her ever since he was twenty-two and she eighteen, and so whole-heartedly and firmly that talking to her was something as secret as confiding in his own conscience; which was why she seldom questioned him, and he never hesitated to tell her what troubled him. No betrayal was involved; it was a conversation with himself. Only occasionally, as now, did he stiffen suddenly to the devastating doubt whether she in return opened her own agonies to him, or whether there was something there denied to him for reasons which diminished him, and removed her to a distance he could not bear. The moments of doubt were appalling, pin-points of dismay, but unbelievably brief, vanished always before he could pursue them, and forgotten before they could undermine his certainty. But he never knew whether this was because they were delusions, inspired by some private devil, or whether she diagnosed them and herself plucked them out of his consciousness before they could sting. She was, after all, the antidote to all evils. How could he know whether the exorcism worked as efficiently the other way?
“I do hate the place,” said Bunty warmly, “but what choice have I got? Haven’t you noticed that all our four groceries in Comerford have switched over to self-service?”
“I thought it was supposed to make shopping quicker and easier,” he said vaguely. What he was thinking was how beautiful she was, his forty-year-old wife, how much more beautiful now with her few silvery hairs among the thick chestnut waves, and the deep lines of character and laughter and rueful affection in her face, than the unblemished ivory girl of twenty years ago. Those smooth, eager, glowing young things are so touching, when you know only too well what’s waiting for them. They don’t all weather and mature into such splendour as this.
“Hah! You try it! Getting round is all right, once you know where everything is, but getting out is the devil. Give me the old corner gossip-shop every time. You could hang around if you weren’t holding anyone else up, and get out fast if you were. And no damned stamps!” said Bunty feelingly. “But that’s progress for you— all part of the same process. We’ve all got to get mechanised, like the criminals.”
They went out to the car together, the house darkened and locked behind them. Once in the car shoulder to shoulder, with the doors fast closed against the dull rain and the muddy remnant of the light, they recovered a certain security. The demons clawed at the glass impotently, tracing greasy runnels of water through devious channels down the panes, splitting the street lights into a dozen flat, refracted slivers of sulphur-yellow, smoky playing-cards shuffled in an invisible hand. The raw new bungalows on the other side of their own residential road perforated the darkness with eruptions of pink, featureless brick.
“Change and decay!” said Bunty bitterly. She hadn’t meant to say it, it was all too plain. The population explosion must settle somewhere, but homes ought to have a certain reticence, as well as a degree of assurance, and these were hesitant, at once aggressive and apologetic, meant for units, not families.
“I know! You wouldn’t think this was just a village when we settled here, would you? With about three service shops, and farms right on the through road, and a pet river like a tortoise-shell kitten chasing leaves all down the back-gardens.”
