The Grass Widow's Tale

“Yes,” said the inspector resignedly, “only he would. Still, better bring ’em in until the wagon arrives.”

Fleet came in with rock-like assurance, his hands in his pockets, his henchmen mute and stolid behind him. And of course they would all have a dozen witnesses to testify that they had been somewhere miles away when the Armitage pay-roll was snatched, and at least outside the house when Pippa Gallier was shot; and of course they would even have licences for all those guns, except Pippa’s, of which they would deny all knowledge prior to yesterday. And of course, regarding the money and their presence here, and their flight when the police came, Fleet would tell the same old story of being robbed by Pippa, of actually breaking in on Luke’s house to find Pippa dead and Luke drunk and unconscious, of pursuing Luke here into Scotland after the money—with some mildly illegal origin for the money, something almost innocuous, but enough to account for a certain shyness of the police…

Yes, it was all implicit in his bearing as he came in.

“Keys?” said Fleet, smiling, always smiling, with deep-sunk marmalade eyes mildly indignant, but no more, with salient bones grown bland with tolerance under the tanned and gleaming skin, a benevolent, misjudged man. “What should I know about her keys? I expect he threw ’em away. I never saw any such little leather boot. You can search me.” Which of course they could, and any residence of his into the bargain; he wasn’t such a fool as to keep a thing so easily identifiable.

“Look, I’ve told you that money was ours, and it’s got nothing to do with any pay-roll, it’s racing winnings. We had a syndicate. And a system. You fellows wouldn’t approve, but you’d have a job to pick us up on it, all the same, I’m telling you that. Naturally we came after it. What would you have done, written it off? More fool me, for ever letting that little bitch hold the kitty, but she had a way with her… Ask him, he knows! She double-crossed him, too, and he paid her her dues, and good luck to him. But don’t look at me! I can prove where I was all the early part of Saturday evening. By the time I got there it was all over.

“And that’s all I am saying,” said Fleet, still beneficently smiling. “I want to see my lawyer before I say another word.”

“And you’ve got licences for all these cannon, I suppose?” said the inspector, mildly shuffling Pippa’s passport and air ticket in his hands. The bone-cased eyes lingered on them hungrily, but gave nothing away. There was something else there, too, sandwiched between the two documents, something Bunty and Luke hadn’t discovered because it was slim enough and small enough to hide among the notes: a sealed white envelope, stamped, ready for the post.

“One of ’em’s nothing to do with me, ask him about that. For mine I have. All but the Pickert, maybe. I picked that up during the war. It’s damned hard to keep within the law all the time,” said Fleet tolerantly.

“But you deny playing any part in Pippa Gallier’s death? Or in the wage-snatch from Armitage Pressings?” The inspector slipped the point of his ball-pen almost absent-mindedly inside the flap of the envelope, and began to slide it along. It was noticeable that he did not touch the envelope itself, but held it between passport and ticket; and the address had appeared for a moment to engage more of his attention than he was actually giving to Fleet.

“That I don’t mind repeating. I followed her to this chap’s place, I got kind of restless waiting for her to come out, and I went in to find out what was happening. She was on the floor, dead, and this young fellow was out cold on the top of her, with the gun in his hand. And if he didn’t shoot her, then get on with finding out who did, because you won’t get anywhere looking at me. Two of my lads were with me, they know she was dead when we went in. That’s it! ” said Fleet, with a snap of his formidable jaws like a shark bisecting an unlucky bather. “I’ve finished talking.”

“But I haven’t!” snarled a sudden ferocious voice from the kitchen. “I’m just set to begin.”

As one man they swung to face the doorway. The voice was one they had none of them heard before, though several of them had heard the same man speak. Fleet knew this voice muted, anxious and willing to please, Luke knew it injured, whining and doomed, aware of its narrowing destiny. The police had heard it only in one wild scream as the car went over its protests, and flattened them into the gravel.

Propped on a policeman’s arm, Quilley leaned from the kitchen rug, his left leg stripped from the knee down, his foot crushed and leaning disjointedly sidewise from the ankle. By straining to the limit of his strength he could just get his eyes upon Fleet, and they aimed there like gun-barrels, as deadly and as fixed. He was not afraid now, he had nothing to lose, he could close the doors on the man who had tyrannised over him, and if he closed them on himself, too, that would still be liberation. Fleet had tossed him to the police like a bone to hounds, to delay the pursuit. There was a price for that.

“Here’s one,” said Quilley stridently, “who wants to talk, and he’s got plenty to tell, too. Of course that’s the Armitage money, and I was there when we snatched it, and what you want to know about that I can tell you, even who fired the shot. But it wasn’t him, not that time. He hasn’t got the guts to go out and do a job, he just directs from a safe place. It was the girl he killed… with his own hands… and I was there to see it…”

For one moment it seemed that Fleet would hurl himself, out of his chair, clean through all opposition, and clamp his hands round Quilley’s throat. But he did not. He sat back by a cautious inch or two in his seat, to demonstrate how little this attack meant to him; and his face with all its death’s-head boniness continued to smile.

“It was after she asked for the gun,” Quilley pursued loudly and firmly, “that he got uneasy. She was getting above herself, and his women don’t do that. But he still fancied her, then, so he gave her a gun of sorts to keep her happy—that rubbishing little thing you’ve got there, the one he’s trying to kid you is nothing to do with him…”

“That?” said Fleet blankly, wide-eyed in innocence. “I never saw the thing in my life until yesterday.”

“Like hell he never saw it! He gave it to her. He was never too sure about her after that, but when he slept with her Friday night he took a peep at the case with the money in it, and it looked all right. But still his thumbs pricked about her, so he had us watch her, see what she’d do. And Saturday night, after she thought he’d gone back to town, she came bustling out with a suitcase, and locked her flat, and went off in a taxi, so we had to notify him. Con and Blackie followed her in the Riley, while I waited for him, and he let us into her flat to make sure about the money. He didn’t need her keys for that, he’d had one made for himself long ago, but she didn’t know that. You think he’d leave any money of his behind a door he couldn’t get through when he liked? And what do you know? She’d filled the case up with bundles of newspaper cuttings, only the top note in each clip was real. So then he knew she was off with the dough. They had orders to pick her up and bring her back if she tried to run out by train, or anything, but she never, she went to this little house, and walked right in, so they called him at her flat, and we went over there fast. The door wasn’t locked, it was easy. We walked in, and there she was waving this gun at this kid, and raving how he’d got to keep his promise to her, and he went for her as if he thought it was a pop-gun, he was so tight, and there they were fighting for it, and him in the doorway weighing it all up, like he always does everything, what’s in it for Fleet! And I,”said Quilley vengefully, “I was the one who was right there beside him. I saw him club this kid cold. Nobody knows how to do it better. I saw him take the gun out of his hand.