A Cry from the Dark (22 page)

Bettina signed to the waiter for another pot of coffee. She had needed most of the first pot to get through their talk, and now she needed still more. She was glad she had kept a clear head, but reflected that it had not helped her to make a cold, hard decision. That was something she had seldom shirked, except on this.

There was every reason for making one: poor battered Katie calling for revenge (as the doughty old woman would have done, if she had ever regained her voice), justice, the proper fitness of things. And above all her firm conviction that she herself had been the intended victim. The theft or destruction of the tapes of her new book only made sense if she was incapacitated from making a new tape later. The tool which made the botched attempt to suggest a break-in was really meant for that darker purpose and it had been used for it, but on the wrong woman. If Katie had not heard a noise and got up she would have been attacked in bed—Bettina's bed. And the only one of her close friends who had not been told of her trip to Edinburgh was Hughie.

And all for vanity—all to protect his silly public persona as a latter-day aesthete, a man with a funny accent who lived for Art, from a charge concerning something that happened over sixty years ago.

It all cried out for a different decision, for a strong, determined one that said enough is enough. She knew why, in all those years since Venice, the thing had never been brought out into the open. She knew it because she understood how the decision had been made that Hughie was her burden. It had been made when his strong, farm boy's arm was around her neck and she had smelled—not beer, as she had told Inspector Blackstone—but the insidious scent of Parma Violet soap. Then she had known she was being raped because it was what Hughie needed, and because he knew she was the only one who would never betray him. Or perhaps she had made the decision farther back than that: when she had seen that solitary figure trudging its way to school in short trousers that were not Australian short trousers, somehow giving off to her alert sense a feeling of helplessness, of being adrift, but at the same time of being excitingly different, instinct with the possibilities that Bundaroo had never till then had. She had never till now seriously questioned that decision. Now she realized it had given him a sense of invulnerability, of being unlike other men, of being one of those who lived by their own rules, made their own moral codes.

And Katie was the one who had suffered. And it was she, Bettina, his protectress, who had been his intended target. Hughie, shuffling off hurriedly, pleading for mercy from her, had been pathetic. But the inner Hughie, the one she had helped to make, was monstrous.

She finished off her coffee and slowly, reluctantly, made her way back to the flat to phone Inspector Murchison. The burden had been borne long enough, God knows. Borne long enough.

Robert Barnard's most recent novel is
The Mistress of Alderley.
Among his many other books are
The Bones in the Attic, A Murder in Mayfair, The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, No Place of Safety, The Bad Samaritan, The Masters of the House, A Scandal in Belgravia,
and
Out of the Blackout.
Scribner released a classic edition of
Death of a Mystery Writer
in 2002. Winner of the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award as well as Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards, the eight-time Edgar nominee is a member of Britain's prestigious Detection Club. In 2003, he was honored with the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. He lives with his wife, Louise, and with pets Jingle and Durdles, in Leeds, England.