He lay thinking with his usual concentrated ferocity, and the longer he thought, the clearer all the details became, things he had never consciously noticed at all. And the clearer the details became, the clearer still did it become that Bossie was in need of help. He could no more tell the whole truth now than a couple of days ago, when he had carefully refrained from telling any of it; but the hour had clearly come to pick his way gingerly through the minefield, and unload at least a part of the burden on somebody official. While he could!
A skittish nurse came to take his temperature, asked archly how we were feeling this morning, and generally behaved as to a juvenile of doubtful intelligence, which was all the more offensive because she was barely six years older than he was. Bossie refrained from blasting her until she had brought him his breakfast, a sensible precaution, and then demanded to know how long he was going to be kept here.
‘Once the doctor’s seen you,’ she said goodhumouredly, ‘they’ll probably throw you out. Your folks are coming in later to take you home.’
‘Then before they come,’ ordered Bossie firmly, ‘I want to talk to the police. Somebody sensible. Sergeant Moon would do.’ For what had happened to him had happened in Sergeant Moon’s territory, and he would certainly have been informed of it.
‘Now isn’t that convenient,’ said the nurse smugly, ‘seeing the police are here to talk to you, and the doctor says they can? It isn’t Sergeant Moon, though, it’s Detective-Superintendent Felse. You must have been up in the top reaches of crime to have the C.I.D. after you.’
He didn’t resent that; it was, after all, badinage of a kind rather flattering to his ego. He was busy arranging within his mind what he could and could not tell, and stepping delicately round the places where they overlapped, and by the time George came in, closed the door, and sat down beside the bed, Bossie was ready for him.
‘How are you feeling?’ asked George. ‘Fit to talk about it?’
‘Yes.’ He had made up his mind to that, but there was still a certain tentative look about him, as though a degree of editing was going on behind his corrective lenses. His right cheek was grazed and swollen, but the damage was not great, and beauty had never been Bessie’s long suit. ‘I was walking home from the bus,’ he began briskly, for this was only the preface to the real story, ‘and I was just past the end of the lane from the farm, when all of a sudden this car came rolling down the slope and out on to the road, and turned after me. There hadn’t been a sound until then. He never switched on his engine or his lights until he was out, and then he came straight at me. I jumped for the hedge, but the wing hit me and knocked me down, and I was sort of stunned.’
‘And he stopped when he was past you?’ prompted George.
‘Yes, a few yards past. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move, and I could see his rear lights right in front of me.’
‘So it looks, doesn’t it, as if he meant to do the right thing, and stop and salvage you, and report the accident, if he hadn’t lost his nerve when he heard another car coming? You know, don’t you, that Mrs Rainbow’s car came along, and she called the ambulance and the police, and came down here with you?’
‘No, really? Was that who it was?’ Momentarily sidetracked into the recollection of all that indignant beauty bending sympathetically over him, Bossie gaped and dreamed. ‘You know, I don’t remember ever seeing her close to, before, only going past in the car. She didn’t come to church, only once or twice.’ Not surprising, thought George; Rainbow’s preoccupation was her respite. ‘But it wasn’t like that,’ said Bossie returning to the matter in hand. ‘It wasn’t an accident. And he didn’t stop because he’d hit me – he stopped because he’d missed me. He stopped to have another go.’
After a moment of silence, though not of complete disbelief, George said reasonably: ‘You’ll have to justify that, you know. Go into detail. There must be certain things that have given you that impression. Now you tell me. You were lying half-stunned, but you say you could see his rear-lights only a few feet away. Then you must also have been able to see his number-plate, though you may not be able to recall it now.’
‘No,’ said Bossie, with a hint of satisfaction, ‘I not only don’t remember, I never saw his number. There was only a blank between the rear lights. Dull, like sacking. I think he’d got his number-plates covered.’
‘He’d get picked up if he was seen on populated roads like that.’ But he was on a road practically deserted at night, and it wouldn’t take many minutes to swathe a number-plate, or many minutes to uncover it again, once safely away from the spot. ‘Go on, you’ve got something more to say, haven’t you?’
‘He started backing the car,’ said Bossie.
George forbore from pointing out the grisly reasons why no sane assassin, having failed in a forward hit, would then back over his victim, but Bossie’s next delivery was unnerving evidence that he had thought of them for himself.
‘Oh, not straight towards me, over to my left. He started backing past me. His front wheels were about by my shoulder when he suddenly changed his mind and shot off at speed and left me there, and I only realised then that there was another car coming along from the village, and he’d heard it and run for it. Before they could come on the scene and get a look at him. If they hadn’t come,’ stated Bossie positively, ‘he was going to straighten out again behind me – nothing would have shown on the road – and run me over. It would have passed for a hit-and-run, and if he got away all right he’d have plenty of time to clean up the car.’
‘So what you’re asking me to believe,’ said George neutrally, ‘is that somebody was actually lying in wait for you there. Expressly for you. Well, before we go into that, can you give us anything on the car? Registration, obviously not, but anything about it? Description, colour, size?’
Bossie showed embarrassment for the first time; of all the things this noticing child failed to notice, mechanical objects held the least interest for him, even in broad daylight, and this had happened in the dark. ‘Middling-sized,’ he hazarded dubiously, ‘and dark, but I never really saw what it was like. But it had a good sort of sound when it took off – you know, quiet and fierce…’
‘Hmmm, pity, but let it go. Now, if this was a deliberate attempt on
‘Yes,’ said Bossie with finality.
‘Then how would the person concerned know you’d be passing there at that time?’
‘I think,’ said Bossie carefully, ‘he followed the bus up from Comerford, or maybe from somewhere in between. There was a car went past just as I was getting off the bus. I did have a sort of feeling I heard the same sound again, ahead, when I was walking home. I’m better at sounds, you see, I notice them more. If that was him, he’d have had time to get into position before I got near the place.’
‘In which case he’d have to know in advance who you are, where you live, which way you’d be walking.’
