The Grass Widow's Tale

“There’s nothing to forgive. You couldn’t have involved me if I hadn’t involved myself. No debts either way. Simply, it happened.”

“No… I began as your… murderer…” The word was almost inaudible, lost in the tangle of her hair. “Don’t let me end like that now. I’ll make the chance and you must go. That’s why you must … I can bear it if you get back safely… I’ll be satisfied then.”

And he meant it. If she had come out like a pilgrim, looking for something uniquely her own, some justification of her whole life to show to the gate-keepers and the gods when her time came, she had it. For every journey, even the last one, you need a ticket.

The dulled accompaniment of voices and movements from the kitchen had halted, recommenced, changed, and the two of them in their narrow prison had never noticed. Nor could they hear the approach of the car through so many layers of insulation. The first they knew of the boss’s arrival was when the door of the store-cupboard was suddenly flung open, and Skinner beckoned them out into the light. They came, dazzled for a while after such a darkness, eyes wide and dazed from staring into a different kind of light. Luke kept his arm about Bunty as they were herded through the kitchen and into the living-room.

And the living-room was full of a large, restless, top-heavy man in a light overcoat and a deeper grey suit, standing astride the orange-coloured rug. It was a still night, but he seemed somewhere to have found a reserve of tempestuous wind, and brought it into the house in the folds of his well-tailored but untamed clothes, so that the room seemed suddenly gusty and tremulous, convulsed with the excess of his energy. He was nearly half a head taller than Luke, and twice as wide, massive shoulders and barrel chest tapering away to long, narrow flanks. For all that bulk, he moved with a violent elegance that was half exuberant health and half almost psychotic self- confidence and self-love. He straddled the floor and looked them all over with the eye of a proprietor, viewing a new acquisition which didn’t look like much now, but of which he could make something in double-quick time, and something profitable, too.

His head was big, to match his shoulders, and startlingly rough-hewn after the disguise of his immaculate clothes ended at the collar; a head of crude, bold lines, and a face in which the bone strained glossy beneath the tanned skin, not because there was so little flesh there, but because there was so much bone. He had a forehead ornamented with knobbly projections like incipient horns, and above it bright auburn hair grew low to a widow’s peak. An upright cleft marked his massy chin. The deepset eyes—boxers should have eyes like that, invulnerable, lids and all, in cages of concrete skull, cased with hide like polished horn—twinkled with restless, reddish lights, good-humoured without being in the least reassuring.

… auburn hair growing low, cleft chin, eyes buried in a lot of bone ...

Luke’s fingers closed meaningly on Bunty’s arm. He couldn’t say anything to her, but there was no need, he had described this man to her so well that even she knew him on sight. This was the man on whose arm Pippa Callier had leaned devotedly as they left her flat together on Friday night, the man whose car had stood all night in the mews round the corner, waiting to take a mythical mother and her mythical cousin home again to Birmingham. How strange that she should have thought she could get away with such a pretence, even for a moment. And how innocent and unpractised it suddenly made her in Bunty’s sight. This was nobody’s cousin, and one could almost believe, nobody’s son. He could have burst out of a rock somewhere of his own elemental force, self-generated and dangerous.

She pressed her elbow into Luke’s side in acknowledgment. But there was no way of telling him that she suddenly found herself better informed even than he was, that she, too, had seen this man before, just once and briefly, too distantly to have known all those details of his appearance, but clearly enough to know his movements again wherever she saw them, the long, arching stride of a man with vigour to spare, the appraising tilt of the big head, the swinging use of the high shoulders. On Friday evening, when he had meant nothing to her, before he changed into the dinner jacket that Luke had found so conspicuous in Queen Street.

Luke knew the boss’s face again, as he had said he would. But Bunty knew more, his trade, his provenance, even his name, that last magic that every elemental being should guard as he guards his life, for in a sense it is his life.

This one hadn’t guarded his. He had had it printed on windscreen stickers, blazoned on fluorescent posters, strung along thirty-seven be-flagged frontages in neon lights for all the world to see and memorise.

His name was Fleet.

CHAPTER XI

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The huge newcomer revolved on the heel of a hand-made shoe, taking in all the inhabitants of this minor kingdom of his, and dealing in turn with them all.

“Hah! ” he said, a bark of satisfaction and amusement, as he surveyed Luke from head to foot with one flash of his coarse-cut-marmalade eyes. “I see you got the right party, anyhow. That’s something!”

The snapping gaze swept over Bunty with interest, sized her up with casual appreciation, and flicked another glance at Luke. “Well, get that! He finds new ones fast. Who’d have thought it!”

He tossed the key he was swinging across to Skinner. “Turn the Jag round, will you, and wheel it up to the gate ready for off. You never know, we might have to leave on the hop.”

The skirt of his pearl-grey Terylene overcoat whirled, and another spin brought him to Quilley. “What’s the matter with you?” There was no sympathy in the inquiry, rather a note of outrage, even of immediate reserve. His employees had no business to get hurt on duty.

“I stopped one, boss. He had a gun.”

“Couldn’t you bet on him having a gun?” Bunty had the impression for one instant that he had almost said “The gun”, and thought better of it in time. “What’s up, then? How bad is it?” The top span, and he confronted Blackie. “If he’s a write-off for anything active, we can use him upstairs. Why haven’t you got someone up there keeping a watch out? I tell you, half the constabulary could be walking in on us, and you sitting here playing hide and seek.”

“Somebody’d have been up there any minute now,” said Blackie, without noticeable chagrin; and indeed, the big man’s voice, vibrant, full and pleasantly pitched, had no displeasure in it, he flashed and fulminated from excess of energy, and took delight in it as a kind of self-expression.

“Yeah, I know, because you cleaned up down here! All right, then, Quilley, get up there and keep a watch out front and back both. You can take it easy up there, just so you don’t miss any movements around this place.”

“He can start looking around inside, too,” said Blackie. “Because it ain’t in here, it ain’t in the kitchen or back