The Grass Widow's Tale

He had been counting the number of notes in one bundle, and the number of bundles, but he couldn’t believe the answer. “I figure it as something over fourteen thousand, anyhow. There’d be change, too, of course, if it was wages money, but that wouldn’t be so portable, maybe she ditched that. Even the notes… but banks don’t keep the numbers of the used notes they hand out, do they?”

The timing was right and the amount was right, and where else would a shop assistant get fifteen thousand pounds in notes? Bunty watched him fingering through the neat, banded bundles, still dazed. She saw his hand halt upon one of them, and his face grew sharply intent as he turned its edges towards him.

Black, rigid card—or was it a blue so dark as to be nearly black?—jutted on either side of the banknotes by a fraction of an inch. Luke had felt the alien stiffness even before he had seen the slivers of darkness. He thrust his thumb under the brown paper band and ripped it open, tumbling out upon the table a small black book, its cover printed in gilt lettering and heraldry between two white windows.

“A passport!”

Fire-new, virgin, its stiff cover opened a little as soon as the constriction was removed.

“Pippa’s. Of course!” said Luke in a low voice, and opened it where the blue-tinted pages yielded of their own tension. Something folded double inside began to unfold in sympathy. “Aaaah!” he said in a long sigh. “Now I see!”

It was a B.E.A. ticket. He unfolded it and studied the details with a closed and unrevealing face.

“Dated for to-day. A single from Heath Row to Le Bourget. The eight o’clock Trident flight. So that’s why she needed the Kwells! She’d have had to be at West London Air Terminal by seven o’clock. I don’t suppose I should even have been awake by the time she took off for Paris. There wouldn’t have been any difficulty. We… hadn’t planned on sharing… The only trick would have been getting this out of the tool-box while I wasn’t around to see, and that wouldn’t have bothered her. She’d only have to say she’d left something in the car, some time when I was shaving, or something, and couldn’t run her errand myself. She could do harder things than that by far. And I don’t suppose I was much of a problem to manage.”

“No,” agreed Bunty, “I don’t suppose you were. But things didn’t work out so easily. They came back for their money, just when she had everything planned for her run-out. What else could it be? They followed her to your house. Maybe they had someone watching her moves all along, those people don’t trust anyone far. They saw her leaving with a suitcase, and followed her, and it would be simple enough getting into your place, even if the door was locked, but I don’t suppose it was…”

“It almost never was,” he owned, fingering the air-line ticket sombrely on the table. “Sometimes not even when we went to bed. We hadn’t anything worth stealing, we didn’t think in terms of locking things up.”

“So they just walked in. Just like Pippa. And they heard part—I’d say not very much—of what passed between you, and saw the struggle for the gun. How very easy, to knock you on the head, and then they could get rid of a liability and leave you to take the blame. When even you were convinced of your own guilt, why should the police look any farther? But you see where they went wrong. They were sure the money would be in Pippa’s case. But it wasn’t! And now it was too late to try and make her tell what she’d done with it. They’d killed her! She wasn’t going to answer any questions any more. Probably they searched your cottage, but they can’t have known about the car, waiting in the garage a whole street away, with this money packed inside it. They couldn’t begin to guess where the loot really was. No! But they took her keys with them, and went back to make a thorough search of her flat. My guess is they’d take it for granted she’d moved the actual money, but they’d be looking for a left-luggage ticket, or a safe-deposit key, something that would show them where she’d hidden it.”

He looked up at her, and his face warmed into a faint smile. “That’s quite a lot of supposing.”

“I know it is, but it adds up. And in that case we can be certain of one thing, the anonymous caller who alerted the police to come and fetch you didn’t identify the corpse. They’d want the police busy round your place with everything they had. They wouldn’t want any premature clue to send the investigation over to Pippa’s flat, because they had a longish job of searching to do there themselves. And did you notice, none of these things in her bag has her name on it—not even in the purse, now I come to think of it.”

“And now I come to think of it,” he said, suddenly rearing his head like a hound pricking his ears at the distant sounds of the hunt, “they’d be expecting sensational news by this morning, a broadcast item about the murder at the least, police activity all round our quarter. And there wouldn’t be any! They’d know it had gone wrong. They’d know I’d somehow managed to dispose of the body and get clean away.”

Bunty made a soft, smothered sound of dismay. She got up quickly, beginning to thrust the bundles of notes together and fold the paper round them. “Yes… Luke, I hadn’t thought… I didn’t realise…”

“And as they wouldn’t find anything at Pippa’s place,” he said, “not even a left-luggage ticket, the next thought that would occur to them would be that I must have got away not only with Pippa and all the evidence, but also with their fifteen thousand pounds.”

CHAPTER IX

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They stared at each other across the table, across those absurd trivialities for which murder had been done, and the small, vicious personal treasons that make love unlovely; and each of them was furiously reckoning the risk to the other, and beginning to erect barricades.

“They’d be on the alert to-day,” said Bunty, “for any police news from yesterday. There’ll be nothing about murder, but they won’t miss the significance of a car that went through a red light, and then nearly ran down a constable, because it was in such a guilty hurry to get away from Comerbourne.”

“No,” he agreed grimly, “they surely won’t. The police up here were alerted, so there’ll be something to give them the tip down there, even if it isn’t exactly public yet. They’ll know which way the police hunt has come. Within limits, they’ll know where to look for me…”

“For us,” she said instantly.

“For me! Oh, Bunty… Oh, God, I ought to have sent you home!”

“You did try. Don’t think of it, it isn’t your fault that I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t go even now,” she said stubbornly.

“Then let’s take all this stuff and get out of here, while the going’s good. I want to get you to the police. I’ve never wanted the police so much,” he said, and laughed rather breathlessly, tying the pink tape hurriedly round the