after the Hutchmeyer money. And Baby had stolen a quarter of a million dollars from the safe in Hutchmeyer's study. Piper shook his head hopelessly and looked up to find her watching him with interest.
'No way, baby,' she said evidently reading his mind. 'It's dual destiny for us now. You try anything and I'll turn myself in and say you forced me.'
But Piper was past trying anything. 'What are we going to do now?' he asked. 'I mean we can't just sit here in someone else's house for ever.'
'Two days, maybe three,' said Baby, 'then we'll move on.'
'How? Just how are we going to move on?'
'Simple,' said Baby, 'I'll call for a cab and we'll take a flight from Bangor. No problems. They won't be looking for us on dry land...'
She was interrupted by a crunch on the drive. Piper went to the shutters and looked down. A police car had stopped outside.
'The cops,' Piper whispered. 'You said they wouldn't be looking for us.'
Baby joined him at the window. A bell chimed eerily two floors below. 'They're merely checking the Van der Hoogens to ask if they heard anything suspicious last night,' she said, 'they'll go away again.' Piper stared down at the two policemen. All he had to do now was to call out and...but Baby's fingers tightened on his arm and Piper made no sound. Presently after wandering round outside the house the two cops got back into their car and drove away.
'What did I tell you?' said Baby, 'no problems. I'll go down the kitchen and get us something to eat.'
Left to himself Piper paced the dim room and wondered why he hadn't called out to those two policemen. The simple, obvious reasons no longer sufficed. If he had called out it would have been some proof that he'd had nothing to do with the fire...at least an indication of innocence. But he had made no move. Why not? He had had a chance to escape from this mess and he hadn't taken it. Not through fear only but more alarmingly out of a willingness, almost a desire, to remain alone in this empty house with an extraordinary woman. What sort of terrible complicity was it that had prevented him? Baby was mad. He had no doubt in his mind about that and yet she exercised a weird fascination for him. He had never met anyone in his life before like her. She was oblivious of the ordinary conventions that ordered other people's lives and she could look calmly down at the police and say 'They will go away again' as if they were simply neighbours paying a social call. And they had. And he had done what she had expected and would go on doing it, even to the point of being anyone he wanted in this circumscribed freedom she had created round him by her actions. Anyone he wanted? He could only think of other authors but none had been in his predicament, and without a model to guide him Piper was thrown back on his own limited resources. And on Baby's. He would become what she wanted. That was the truth of the matter. Piper glimpsed the attraction she held for him. She knew what he was. She had said so last night before everything had started to go wrong. She had said he was a literary genius and she had meant it. For the first time he had met someone who knew what he really was and having found her he couldn't let her go. Exhausted by this frightening realization Piper lay down on the bed and closed his eyes and when Baby came upstairs with a tray she found him fast asleep. She looked at him fondly and then putting the tray down, took a sheet from a chair and covered him with it. Under the shroud Piper slept on.
In the police station Hutchmeyer would have done the same if they had let him. Instead, still naked beneath the blanket, he was subjected to interminable questions about his relations with his wife and with Miss Futtle and what Piper meant to Mrs Hutchmeyer and finally why he had chosen a particularly stormy night to go sailing in the bay.
'You usually go sailing without checking the weather?'
'Look I told you we just went out for a sail. We weren't figuring on going places, we just got up...'
