found that Mr. Felse had gone down south on a job, so he naturally took it for granted you might have decided to travel with him for the ride. It wasn’t until some child turned up next morning, saying she’d found your purse, that he began to wonder.”
All the threads were beginning to tie in neatly into the pattern, even some of which the police would never know anything. So that was why there’d been no letter from Dominic, because he intended to rush home in person for her birthday, and surprise her. And if he’d been a couple of hours earlier, perhaps she would never have gone out walking to shake off her demon, never entered “The Constellation Orion,” never met Luke Tennant. And perhaps, when he was at the end of his tether, Luke Tennant would have given up thinking of Norway, and pointed that little gun at his temple and pulled the trigger, as he had so nearly done when the police came knocking at the door.
“So he told your C.I.D. chief, and they got in touch with your husband, and nobody knew where you were, or why you should be missing. Then they really began hunting. And it seems there’s an old chap who saw you late on Saturday night with a young man he didn’t know, and was sufficiently nosy to take note of the car and its number.”
“Old Lennie,” she said, and smiled. “We bought some coffee at his stall. Thank God for nosy people! I see! So then they added my description to the information about NAQ 788, and circulated it. And Mrs. Chartley filled the bill well enough to be worth investigating. And you found the Alports had never heard of her, and her address didn’t exist.”
“That’s about it. So we thought it best to move in on you here pretty cautiously. We felt you must have been under duress this morning when you answered the door. A loaded gun a yard or so from your back can turn anybody into a first-class dissembler. It was the only way we could account for your behaviour.”
“I know,” she admitted, “my behaviour throughout has been far from what you’d expect of a policeman’s wife. But there’s more to this than a couple of traffic offences. They haven’t said anything to you about a murder?”
They hadn’t. Nor, it seemed, about the snatching of Armitage Pressings’ weekly pay-roll. Apparently nobody had missed Pippa Gallier yet, and no one suspected the connection between these events scattered through two months of time and three hundred miles or so of country. Bunty and Luke had still quite a lot to account for. The dead girl upstairs was going to come as a shock. And the money…
Bunty had almost forgotten about the money, but it was high time to retrieve it now. It was, after all, the chief evidence they had to offer for their own integrity, and the stake for which they had defied Fleet and all his private army.
“Before we start,” she said, “could you send one of your men down to the jetty to fetch something? Something I hid there. A flat parcel in gift-wrapping paper.” She turned her head and looked at Luke, sitting drained and pale and sad beside her. “It’s under one of the slabs of slate that form the steps, only about three yards up from the jetty,” she said, for Luke rather than for anyone else. “I pushed it under there when I slipped and fell. If you hadn’t been solidly between Quilley and me I could never have got away with it, even in the dark.”
The inspector looked at the raw-boned young constable who was good with fuses, and the constable, whose ears, like his eyes, missed nothing, took one of the torches without a word, and went off through the kitchen to the cliff path.
“And exactly what,” asked the inspector curiously, “is in this gift parcel? What has it got to do with this business?”
“Everything,” she said simply. “It’s what those men were after, it’s what they killed the girl for—the girl upstairs—not to speak of the man who was driving the van when they snatched it in the first place. It’s a week’s pay-roll from a big firm outside Comerbourne. Getting on for fifteen thousand pounds in notes.”
“I think,” said the inspector carefully, after a pause to regain his breath, “you’d better tell me the whole story.”
Between the two of them they told him. By the time they were half-way through, the recital was punctuated by Quilley’s first half-conscious moans from the kitchen, and the inspector was unrolling the parcel of notes on the table before him. The sound of police cars halting before the door of the cottage put in the final full-stop. Fleet and his lieutenants were back under guard.
A hefty red-headed sergeant came in first from the night, his arms full of guns and his face one broad, freckled beam of fulfilment.
“Regular arsenal, sir… four of ’em!” He laid them out proudly on the table before his chief, and for an instant his jaw dropped at sight of the treasure already deployed there. “Two revolvers, nice brand-new Colt Agent and a German Pickert .32. A Webley and Scott .25 automatic… and this little squib… that’s another German job, a Menz Liliput. Wouldn’t think that could do any damage, would you?”
The inspector viewed them without noticeable enthusiasm. Guns had never figured in the crimes that came within his ordinary range, and to him, as to George in Comerbourne, they were an omen of times changing for the worse. He looked up at Luke over the array of armaments.
“Which one?”
“The one you’re holding.” The Webley was almost as tiny, but he would have known that Liliput again among thousands, by the associations that clung to it, by Bunty’s confiding presence at his side, by the memory of that ride in which he could hardly believe now, when this little ugly shape had bound her into stillness and submission, who now sat beside him as an ally of her own will, held by nothing but her own generosity and loyalty. At every mention of her husband and son, those two who had genuine rights in her, the pain in his heart had tightened and intensified by one more turn. But still, every now and again, she spoke for both of them, and said “we,” and all that tension was released each time she said it, and he knew that she was not lost to him, that she was indeed, in some measure, his, and his for life.
“You realise, of course,” said the inspector gently, for he was a man of intuition as well as intelligence, and had already placed his own stake, “that he’s sure to have alibis for everything?”
“Yes, I know. I don’t care now. If you want to hold me, that’s all right. I’m satisfied now.”
“What happened?” asked the inspector, folding the gay paper over the indecent display of wealth, and looking up at the sergeant.
“They tried to crash the barrier. Bent that nice grey paint job badly, stove her nose right in. They poured out in all directions when she stalled, but we got ’em all fielded in quick time. They didn’t fire. Soon as we laid hands on ’em they started acting legal. They hadn’t done anything, they were on their lawful occasions. Only the big chap talks.”
