And she, she was all over him suddenly, she says, darling, she says, thank heaven you came, she says, he’d have killed me! And there she is hanging round Fleet’s neck, hoping he’s only just busted in, and he puts that gun to her chest and shoots her dead. Just like that!”
“Poor devil!” said Fleet, with hardly a pretence at sincerity. “Hysterical. He’s got it in for me, I always knew he hated my guts. He’ll say anything.”
“Not anything, just the facts, Fleet. Nobody needs more. I tell you, he shot her. And then he wiped the gun and put it back in the kid’s hand, and arranged the two of ’em there, all ready to be found, so the kid could take the rap. We called the cops from a call box to come and get him, only he must have come round too soon and cleared out. And there’s one thing I can tell you, too. She’d been getting ready to put the finger on the lot of us, and especially Fleet. In her flat we found some trial runs for a letter she was putting together for the police, all cut out of newspapers, half a dozen different types. She was headed out, and she was going to make good and sure we wouldn’t be at large to hunt for her. Oh, yes, we went back to her flat… just as soon as we found there was no money in her suitcase and nothing in her bag, no left-luggage ticket, or anything like that. We took her keys and went back to turn the whole place out, but all we found was these bits of paper, where she’d been experimenting with this letter. About the Armitage job, and about Pope Halsey’s furs, too. She knew all about that, she was the one who tipped us off about the shipment. We had a proper hunt, but we never found anything else, and he burned those bits of paper. Anything you want to know,” said Quilley, incandescent with vengeance, “you ask me. I was there every time, there’s nothing I can’t tell you.”
“Nothing,” said Fleet, crossing one grey-worsted leg negligently over the other, and grinned towards the kitchen doorway, round which the frantic eyes glared and gloated on him. “And nothing he won’t, either, true or false. You can see he’d do anything to knife me in the back. But I’ve got witnesses will prove the opposite… witnesses with nothing to gain.”
“
“You see?” said Fleet, sighing. “Poor chap! Psychopathic, really!”
“Then you didn’t go back to her flat?” asked the inspector mildly.
“Who said we didn’t? She’d run out with my money…
“And he couldn’t ask her,” said Quilley viciously. “He was too sure it would be there in her suitcase, he’d fired first and looked afterwards.”
“Of course we went back to look in her flat, where else was it likely to be? But we didn’t find any trial shots at synthetic letters to the police… that cheap little judy didn’t know anything about any crimes except running out with our winnings, you can bet on that.”
“He’s making the whole thing up, then?”
“Of course he is. I came after my money, yes, that’s fair enough, and I wasn’t particular how I went about recovering it, either, if it comes to that. But he’ll have a hell of a job connecting me with that girl’s death, or that gun he’s raving about.”
“Will I?” shrilled the vengeful voice from the kitchen, whinnying with triumph and whimpering with pain. “You think you’re in the clear because you wiped off the grip nicely? Who loaded it in the first place, mate, think about that! Wait until they get their little insufflators on that magazine before you crow too loud.”
Bunty closed her fingers excitedly on Luke’s arm. And Fleet laughed. A little too loudly, perhaps; there seemed suddenly to be a bleak, small hollow inside the laughter, that echoed like a bare cell.
“Come off it, man! You know as well as I do I opened the thing up here to-night, here in this room, to see how many rounds were in it. You watched me do it! Like all the rest of the boys, and they’ll all swear to it.”
“You think so? This time you don’t own all the witnesses, Fleet. At the best it’ll be a draw, three-three. And by the time they’ve got it through their thick heads that you’re going down for twenty years, you think you’ll even be owning three of ’em? They won’t be able to shift over to our side fast enough.”
“You talk too much to be feeling sure of yourself,” Fleet said tolerantly, and beamed at the inspector with a face of brass. But was there a very faint flare of uneasiness far down in the wells of his eyes? “You won’t get far on his uncorroborated word,” he said virtuously, “he’s got a record as long as your arm. I don’t know why I ever risked taking him on, but somebody has to give the lags a chance.”
“A bit of corroboration would certainly be helpful,” agreed the inspector reasonably. “Even on one specific point… say these trial letters she was supposed to be compiling, now. But of course, you deny there ever were any, and he says you burned them. In either case, nobody else is going to be able to give us any fresh information now.” He was gently unfolding the sheet of thick white paper he had withdrawn from the envelope. He took his time about it, and its texture, or some quality he found in it, seemed to be affording him a certain obscure amusement. They observed that he handled it only by the edges, with considerable care. “Of course, if we could have called the girl herself as a witness…”
He looked up, smiling. “Now isn’t that a coincidence! She had it among her papers, all ready stamped and addressed for posting, I suppose she was going to slip it into the box at London Airport at the last moment. No point in taking risks until she was actually on her way out. It’s a good surface, it should hold prints well.”
He turned it for them to see the sliced-out words and phrases of print from which it had been compiled.
“You want to know how the text reads? It’s addressed to Superintendent Duckett, Chief of the Midshire C.I.D. It runs :
‘The man you want for the Armitage hold-up is Jerome Fleet, who has the chain of garages that just opened a branch in Comerford. He uses his business for cover and transport. He has a man named Blackie Crowe working for him, also one called Skinner, and Sam Quilley, and a young one they call Con. They were all in the wage-snatch, and they did the fur job, too. I am not sure about his new manager, but think all his men except the locals are crooks.
“Underlined, that last bit. And she signed herself, not too originally: ‘A Well-Wisher ’.”
He looked up across the paper as he refolded it, and smiled into the amber eyes of a caged tiger. “Isn’t it lucky, Mr. Fleet, that the fair copy survived?”
The moment of flat silence was broken abruptly by an outburst of loud, rattling, jarring sound from the kitchen, fed by gulping indrawn breaths of pain. It took them a few shocked seconds to realise that it was only Quilley, laughing.
