Nina lowered everything but her head under the water and in Aldershot Molly heard strange noises on the line before it went dead. She was to spend the next twenty minutes trying to get reconnected.
Meanwhile Nina said to the man, “I’ll call the police.” Considering that the phone was now under a foot of water, this was no threat. She should have said, “I’ve just called the police.”
The man’s brown eyes locked with Nina’s. He wasn’t in his teens or his twenties as most rapists are said to be. She estimated that he was around forty. He had dark, frightening eyes and a gaunt face. But he hadn’t stepped fully into the room. He said, “You’d better get out of there.”
Nina thought, like hell I will.
There was a bathrobe made of toweling hanging on the door. He unhooked it and slung it over the taps. “Put that around you. I don’t have much time. I’m John Mountjoy and I want some help.”
“Mountjoy-the man who escaped?”
“From Albany.”
Nina gave a gasp.
He said, “Now you know why I’m here.”
She said in a whisper, “Danny?” Her thoughts turned back ten years to the evening she had last seen Danny Boon, the night before they picked him up for shooting the postmaster. For almost a year she and Danny had held up sub-post offices in the West Country. They had become famous in the press as Bristol Bonnie and Clifton Clyde. Her nerves had been steel-hard in those days and she’d carried her own gun and would have used it, though probably not to kill. Together they’d netted a big sum and she’d bought this house from part of her share. It was Danny who had shot the Warminster postmaster who decided to “have a go.” He hadn’t meant to kill-but how do you explain that to a court of law? Someone had seen enough of Danny to provide the police with a good photofit and they found him in their records. With his name in all the papers and on TV, he had fixed a last meeting with Nina on a cold, damp February night at Sham Castle. He had promised her he’d say nothing to the police about her and he’d kept his word. She’d kept her promise to Danny to stop when she was ahead. Not once had she visited him in prison. Their collaboration was a closed book.
Ever since that evening Nina had been an exemplary citizen, even in that long, cold winter when neither she nor Frank had been in work. She’d married Frank on the rebound, out of grief for Danny, and, it has to be said, to confuse the police, who continued to hunt for her. Frank wouldn’t know an automatic from a banana, but he’d happened to step into her life at the critical time. She’d told him nothing of her past.
Mountjoy said, “Danny’s a good man.”
“You know him?” Nina whispered.
“A bit. We went to art classes. Inside, I mean. Listen, you’re going to have to help me. I need food, clothes, blankets, money. And I’m going to borrow your car. I’ll tell you where to find it later. Now would you get out of the bath and help me?”
Deeply shocked and disbelieving, she said, “Danny didn’t send you. He wouldn’t do that. Not Danny.”
He took a step into the room. “No. He told nobody. But I’m here. I worked it out.”
“What?”
He leaned over the bath and twisted the handle that released the plug. The water started flowing away. He picked up the bathrobe and handed it to her.
Nina drew it around her shoulders for protection and managed to stand up with what she hoped was decorum, if not dignity. Stepping out, she made an effort to sound in control. “What kind of clothes?”
“For a woman.”
“A woman?”
“A complete change. Warm stuff. Trousers, sweaters, underclothes.”
“Is someone with you?”
“Fetch them now. Fast.”
“She may not be my size.”
“We’ll make do.”
Tying the belt of the bathrobe tightly across her middle, she went through to the small bedroom she shared with Frank. She opened a fitted wardrobe. “You’d better take the stretch jeans and the double-knit sweater on the top shelf.” She opened a dressing-table drawer and picked out some knickers and a packet of tights she hadn’t opened yet. “If she’s on the run with you, she must be suffering. You can take whatever you need.”
She tried to sound cooperative. She would willingly give him all the clothes she possessed to buy his goodwill. The physical threat had receded a little, but a petrifying fear gripped her. The man knew of her involvement with Danny. He had it in his power to shop her to the police, to have her put away for murder. With the zeal of a charity worker, she delved into the wardrobe for a holdall and started stuffing things in. Anything to humor him.
“Will this be enough? I could fill another case if you like.”
He took the two spare blankets she kept in the chest under the window. “The man who went out just now- where was he going?”
“The pub.” She thought of adding the reassurance that Frank wouldn’t be home until well after closing time, after a slow, unsteady plod up Broad Street, but she checked herself. She wanted Mountjoy out of here as quickly as possible.
He was looking out of the window. “Where do you keep your car?”
Parking wasn’t permitted in Morford Street. “The garages at the back. It should be open.”
“What is it?”
“An old Renault Eight. Green.”
“Keys?”
“Downstairs. Shall I fetch them?”
“Pick up the bag. Don’t try anything. I’ll be right behind you.”
As she came downstairs she saw the broken windowpane in the back door and the glass splinters on the doormat. He’d simply reached through and let himself in. How many times had she told Frank they were insecure?
“Car keys,” he prompted her.
She went into the back room and found her handbag.
“Now some food.”
In the kitchen they filled two carriers, emptying her fridge of everything that could be eaten fresh and then taking cans from the cupboards, and biscuits and bread.
“The man who went to the pub,” he said. “Is he your husband, or what?”
She answered, “Yes.”
“Husband?”
“Yes.” She added the reassurance, “I won’t tell him about you. He knows nothing about my past.”
“And I suppose Danny knows nothing about him,” Mountjoy commented with an accusing glare, and Nina, the proof of the cynical expectation of prisoners that their women will abandon them, wished she had not spoken.
Mountjoy told her, “You’ll have to explain the car being gone.”
“He won’t even notice.” When she had helped him put the carriers beside the front door with the holdall and the blankets, she said, “How is Danny coping?”
“He’s all right. He’s strong.”
“You said just now that he didn’t tell you about me.”
Mountjoy said, “It was in the papers, wasn’t it? I lived here when you were in the news. You’re the one they called Bristol Bonnie.”
“But nobody knows my name.”
“Nor do I. I know where you live, that’s all.”
“How-if Danny didn’t tell you?”
He took time over answering, as if uncertain whether to tell, whether he felt she deserved to know. “They lay on classes. Education. I did art and so did he. The only picture he ever finished was an acrylic. He worked at it for months on end. It was a street scene, viewed straight on, with no perspective to mess him up. Some Georgian terraced houses on a steep slope. They had railings outside and you could just see the basement windows. The detail was pretty good. Two of the houses had a set of Venetian windows, the central one arched, with rectangular casements on each side, with small square panes. Pretty striking. There was a woman’s face looking out of one of
