with this, what’s the point of hurting people more? What good can that do you or anyone? Open the door and come out to us now. Send Bossie out to me. And then you come. I’ll be here waiting for you, I promise.’
The sergeant made a fine, satisfied sound, and she heard the lock surrender and the handle turn, easing wood softly a fraction of an inch from wood. A hair-fine line of light showed. George put her gently aside, and thrust the door wide open.
At the far end of the long room, just short of the corner where the hand-cart and its attendant fragments lay, two figures clamped tightly together stood backed against the stone wall. In front Bossie, with his own handkerchief thrust between his teeth and knotted tightly behind his head, his glasses askew, and a coil of rough baling twine spiralling tightly from his waist to his shoulders, pinioning his arms. The last length of the cord was looped round his neck, tightly enough to score the skin, and behind him, gripping the end of the loop and glaring fury and desperation, stood, not John Stubbs but Colin Barron.
CHAPTER TEN
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The voice that came jerking out of him, after so long of obstinate silence, was loud, harsh and too high-pitched. ‘Take one step in here and I kill him! One step, that’s enough!’
Nobody moved. Frozen in the doorway, they measured the odds, and found them impossible. The room was long. By the time even the fleetest of them reached him, he could kill, and by the look of his face, that sharp, easy, knowing, business face hardly recognisable now in its pale ferocity, he would kill. Even the convulsive tension of his fingers was tightening the cord as they watched. One false move, and it would be over. The sweat running on his forehead was clearly visible in the flooding light.
‘Don’t touch that light switch! Don’t put a hand near it! If you do, he’s dead for a start. I shan’t need light to finish him off.’
Carefully unmoving, George said in a flat, neutral voice: ‘Why go on? Turn him loose and come with us, you’ll be sparing yourself worse things. At least talk. And listen.’
‘I’ll talk to you through the door, if I talk at all. Get back out of here, leave the light, and close the door. Or I’ll kill him. If you try anything, I’ll make sure he goes first.’
With aching care, inch by inch, hands in full view to show nothing was contemplated against him, they withdrew. They left the light on, they closed the door.
Back to square one! Not John Stubbs, but Colin Barron, the smart young dealer who thought it well worth while poking his nose in wherever Rainbow turned his attention, the one who had followed him up into Middlehope, found some profitable business with the sale of the Macsen-Martel effects, but never quite discovered Rainbow’s real incentive, and was constantly, inquisitively on the prowl after it. And had he ever really coveted Barbara, or merely made use of her, or tried to, as she had been employed to make use of him and his kind? Not a pleasant world! No wonder she had recoiled from it to the remotest extremes of Middlehope Forest.
Barbara stood in monumental, frowning calm, fronting the closed door. Possibly the same thoughts were in her mind. She raised her voice to carry clearly within.
‘Colin? Are you listening? I’m sorry I called you John. You dropped him in the muck, you see, hauling off like this. I don’t say I was ever sure about you, Colin, but I may have thought you all sorts of things, but never a coward. Men don’t fight behind children, Colin. Only apologies for men. Now prove which you are. Give us Bossie, and I’ll get back my respect for you. What are you gaining by threatening him, anyhow? If we can’t get in, you can’t get out. Never, not on your terms. You’d better start considering ours. Just tell me, as a matter of academic interest, did you ever really think anything of me? It would be interesting to know.’
She was never going to know, of course, because what could she or anyone make of that sudden, strangling, sobbing outburst of sexual profanity that bubbled behind the door. One might gather that she was a married whore, and he a winnowing wind blowing both her and her proprietor-husband where he listed, but the mixture of abuse and longing no one was ever going to disentangle. Happily only she, rather than Bossie, seemed to be threatened by this storm. Barbara was drawing some very dangerous fire. The vibrations from within sounded enfeebled rather than intensified.
‘I tell you what,’ called Barbara, irrepressible in inspiration, ‘sell us Bossie for me! You do realise you can trade him, don’t you? If you feel that way about me, here I am, put your contemptible noose about my neck instead. I shall be a volunteer, and I’m over twenty-one, Colin. Think how much better that will make you feel!’
It was more than enough. Willie the Twig took her by the arm and drew her away into the open, chilly, clean centre of the courtyard, and she understood and accepted his suggestion that she had pushed things to the safe limit, and made her point that Bossie, alive, was a valuable bargaining counter. She went where Willie led her, quivering. She wound her arms about his neck and pressed her lips into his throat, and it was a motion of exultation rather than a gesture of need or appeal.
‘It’s all right,’ said Willie into her ear, ‘it’s all right! He isn’t crazy, his mind’s working, you got to him, all right.’
All the same, it was back to stalemate. Back to: ‘We’re still here, Barron. We shan’t go away, you know that. And you can’t, not without us. There’s no way on this earth you can get out of there except in our arms. So why prolong it? Mrs Rainbow is right. The boy is quite irrelevant. We can’t get in, but you can’t get out. And we, in the long run, don’t have to get in, but you, in the end, do have to get out. Walking or carried, alive or dead, there’s only this one way out for you, and we’re not quitting. Think it over, Barron! Make it as easy on yourself as possible. Come out now!’
It went on and on, monotonously, Moon taking a turn, George returning to the attack, a barrage of voices kept up relentlessly to leave him no time to relax, no time to think or despair, in case despair should take its worst course. But somehow he had made time to think, all the same. Now that he’d begun to talk, and knew his identity was known, he used his voice with increasing aggression. Not confidence, perhaps, a kind of last-ditch bravado.
‘You want this kid, Felse? Intact? I’ve got the goods, I put the price on them, understand?’ Barbara had reached him, sure enough.
‘No harm in naming your price,’ agreed George. ‘The customer doesn’t have to buy. Not when he has a foreclosure on you in the end, in any case. But go on talking, we’re listening.’
‘Don’t forget the seller can chuck the goods in the dustbin if he doesn’t get his price. You’d better listen. If I don’t get the return I want, I can still wipe him out.’
‘That would settle your own hash, and you know it. I don’t think you’re crazy enough to want that.’
