Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (19 page)

They were working frantically now. He was sure this man knew the name James Jarvis, and his address, from the Locke anthem he had lost in the churchyard, but did he know what James Jarvis looked like? At least he’d gone to the trouble to find out Bossie’s routine, enough to hunt him down on his way home from the music lesson. But there might still be room for confusion. To some people all kids of about the same age looked alike. Who else of comparable age lived up that same road?

‘Would you really take me home?’ he bleated hopefully. ‘I’m Adrian Bowen, my dad lives at the Moor Farm in Abbot’s Bale. I don’t care if I do get into trouble, I want to go home!’ If a miracle happened, and he was believed and duly delivered there, the Bowens would at any rate haul him into the house, if only to demand explanations, and it would be too late then to drag him out again by force. But he didn’t believe in it! He worked at it, but he knew he was up against a stone wall. Solider than the one now flanking them!

The man leaning back against the door never moved, never took his eyes from Bossie, and as yet said no word. His smile had vanished, he peered from beneath brows drawn and morose, almost irritable, and jutted a thoughtful lower lip as he wrestled with this problem. But the false name did not make the slightest impression on his fierce concentration.

‘And for a while there you almost had me fooled,’ he mused at last, as much to himself as to Bossie. ‘Why the hell did you have to go and get mixed up in this business? Why did you meddle? You’re the one who’s made this necessary, you know that?’ Downright accusingly, as if Bossie owed him an abject apology for forcing his hand like this to a repugnant act. ‘What am I going to do with you now?’ he demanded, in tones decidedly aggrieved.

‘You could drive me home, like you offered,’ sniffed Bossie, determinedly obtuse. But the disguise was thinning; what was the use of it, if it was ineffective?

‘Knowing as much as you know, James Boswell Jarvis?’ said his enemy, and heaved his broad shoulders with an effort away from the door, and took a long stride forward into the north walk. ‘Not bloody likely!’

‘Your show, Toby,’ said George, marshalling his handful of men within the barrier, and casting a glance aside at the ticket-office, where a uniformed constable had taken over the-switchboard and re-established contact with the system, and was at this moment engaged in the first of a series of calls designed to run to earth the truant warden of Mottisham Abbey, who apparently had all available keys with him, since they had found none in the office. ‘Lead on, you know where Bossie’s liable to have holed up.’

In the complex of buildings, gardens, excavations and reserves of plant and scaffolding, Toby moved with cautious speed. Things had changed since last he gate-crashed this enclosure.

‘The stable-block’s this way.’ He went ahead steadily, and brought them face to face with the long line of the eighteenth-century wall. The night remained dark, and George had thought it best to work as far as possible without lights, using torches only fleetingly where necessary. He had given no voice to his misgivings, but Toby had grasped that the absence of John Stubbs was a matter for anxiety. He was one of the names against which a question-mark reared, he was here conveniently installed on the spot, and he was not where, by the terms of his appointment, he should have been. Moreover, he had been absent now for a length of time which should have allowed him to make the round of his charge, and be back at his post, but there was still no sign of him.

The gate that guarded the archway was closed, but yielded to a touch. The key was not in the lock. Toby pushed the gate open and slid through, with George and Sergeant Moon at his heels, and turned right, to make for the door in the north-east corner of the yard. And there he halted at the first step. The range of small, high windows in the inner wall of the north range glowed hollowly with a steady but muted light, reflected from below and patterned with shadows from the network of roof rafters.

‘There’s somebody—’ began Toby, low-voiced, and bit off the rest as George laid a warning hand on his arm. For there was indeed somebody within there, and though it might be Bossie, was it likely that a boy playing the secret investigator by night would run the risk of betraying his presence by switching on a whole array of lights, in a place where he had no right to be? Not a boy as bright as Bossie!

George went forward alone, moving silently along the wall to the door, beneath which a very thin line of light showed. He grasped the handle, and very gingerly turned it, but it did not yield to pressure. Locked! And locked with someone inside, and the lights on.

Correction, with two people inside. For hollowly from within he heard voices.

‘What the hell can you expect, now you’ve put me in this position?’ The once-amiable and encouraging guide looked a very different person now, coming forward slow step by step, glaring annoyance and genuine resentment from under brows tight and creased as though in pain. ‘It’s your own damned silly fault, you should have let well alone. You don’t think I
like
having to do this, do you?’

‘You don’t have to.’ Bossie was backing cautiously away along the rope, feeling his way. Not that it was going to do him much good even if he could dodge round to the other side and make a dash for the door, because he had watched his enemy withdraw and pocket the keys. ‘Nobody’s making you do anything. And if you know what’s good for you you won’t try, because my friends who were here with me this afternoon are coming back for me. They’ll be here any minute, you won’t have time to get away.’

‘What a hope!’ said his enemy with a tired and petulant smile. ‘You’ve made it clear enough that nobody knows where you are, and nobody’s going to know where you disappear from. I’ve got plenty of time.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. There are five of them who know exactly where I am, and if I don’t show up again they’re going to tell…’

He wasn’t believed, of course. There was no way of making that story convincing now. And he had reached the place where the piled junk and the hand-cart narrowed the way, and was feeling his way blindly past the obstructions when his foot slipped over the edge of the excavated section, and slight though the drop was, it threw him off balance. He fell against the rope, and rolled under it, and then a large hand had him by the back of his blazer, hauled him upright, and slammed him against the stone wall, and its fellow was clamped over his mouth just too late to suppress a single yell of indignation, rage and terror.

As if that one shout had set off a chain reaction of unnerving assaults upon the silence of the night, there was a sudden thunderous salvo of knocks on the locked door, a violent rattling of the handle, and a peremptory voice ordering: ‘Open up in there! This is the police! We’re here in force, you can’t get away. Unlock this door!’

Silence again, absolute silence. No querulous baritone and no reedy, wavering treble to be heard now inside the long room, not the least sound of movement or even breathing. Outside the door George leaned with an ear against the wood, straining to hear if any indication of struggle or distress stirred within, but there was nothing. Behind him Sam and Toby stood painfully still.

Presently George began to talk, clearly, reasonably, deliberately, without haste.

‘We know you’re in there now. We know the boy is with you. We know there’s no one else in there. Whatever happens to him will be your doing, no one else’s. Your responsibility. Think about it! What a fool you’d be to harm him now! You can’t get away. Touch him, and you destroy yourself. Only the desperate do that, and why should your case be desperate? You’re a reasoning man, you can see what’s in your own best interests. It’s only a matter of time, why prolong it? You may as well open the door now, it will make no difference in the end, and spare you and us a great deal of trouble. Mitigating circumstances always count.’

Between sentences he waited, but still silence, never a word in reply. A slightly less intense silence and stillness in there, perhaps, the faint suggestion of slight movements, of people breathing, even the stealthy suggestion of furious thought. But no words.

‘If you harm that boy, you’re done for, you understand that, don’t you? Up to now you’re not in any desperate case, are you? But there’d be no shadow of doubt about that, and you’d pay for it to the limit. Why not see reason? To start with, prove you haven’t harmed him already. That will be something in your favour. Let him speak! Just enough to say: Yes, I’m here, yes, I’m all right. Bossie, are you listening?’

If there was the kind of response a gagged mouth can make, it was barely loud enough to reach the listeners straining their ears outside the door, but there was something else, a sudden sharp crack, as though a foot had back-heeled stone, and then a suppressed gasp and the brief flutter of a very unequal struggle, instantly suppressed. Then silence again.

‘Get Grainger,’ said George in a whisper, and one of the constables slipped away. ‘Jack, take a look at those windows – though I think they’re too high and too small to be any use. And, Sam, could you bear to go back to Jenny, and try to keep her there, out of this? Leave us to do what can be done, you know we’ll stick at nothing to get him out. You look after Jenny.’

‘Yes, I’ll go.’ There was nothing Sam had been able to do so far but stand and listen and suffer. And if nobody told Jenny anything pretty soon, she’d be coming to find out. He felt his way quietly along the wall to the archway, and departed.

‘He is there,’ Toby whispered. ‘I think he’s still OK. He couldn’t use his tongue, but he used his feet. That’s Bossie! He won’t hurt him now, surely! What good would it do him?’

None, true enough. But these cases who get themselves into a state of siege, with hostages, sometimes take their revenge on the world that way. It made no sense, no. Bossie might be more than half the case against Rainbow’s murderer, if it came to a charge, but where that left the killer at least a chance of acquittal and freedom after trial, killing Bossie now would leave him no chance at all. But that was an argument of reason, not of spite, and spite can argue, too. All they could do was go on talking to him in reasonable terms, urging his best interests on him, talking him into exhaustion, if need be, but never into frenzy.

‘All right, we can afford to wait. You can’t get away. But what are you gaining? You may as well come out now, and spare yourself some uncomfortable hours. We’re patient people, we shan’t tire and go away.’

Sergeant Grainger came, placidly muting his skeleton keys, a big man stepping as lightly as a cat. And hard on his heels came Barbara and Willie the Twig, asking no questions, already apprised of what was happening. That was an idea! Perhaps Barbara’s voice, coming unexpectedly, might jolt the young man within out of another fragment of confidence and resolution, make him more amenable to reason, if not to resignation. George drew her aside to let Grainger come to the lock.

‘Barbara, we’re going in, and I want to keep the operation covered and his attention distracted while we deal with the lock. You try talking to him, he’s not expecting you.’ Getting in might be a ticklish moment, but they would have to play it as cautiously as possible, no rushing their quarry into panic.

She asked in a whisper: ‘Is it John Stubbs?’

‘Seems so. He’s nowhere else to be found. Try it! Keep talking gently till we get through.’

Her voice was one of her particular beauties, deep, clear, slightly husky, an admirer could never mistake it for any other. She stood pressed against the hinged side of the door while Grainger worked, handling his tools gently, without a sound, until metal edged metal inside the lock.

‘John, is that really you in there? This is Barbara. John, that’s a friend of mine you’ve got in there with you, and I want him safe, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt him, would you? I’ve got a present for him that he hasn’t even seen yet. I don’t know how you got into this mess, John, I thought I knew you, at least a little. I still think so, and this isn’t your style at all.’ She would have liked to pause and listen to the quality of the continued but subtle silence within, for it seemed to be passing through as many changes as the inflections of speech, but she could not break the thread, because of the tiny sounds of metal on metal, engaging and slipping, and gripping again. ‘Don’t go on 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.

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.’

‘I might be, Felse, I might be, if there’s nothing else left. There’s no hanging now. And there’s a lot better remission than you lot like, and even parole— What should I be, by comparison with some of the real killers? Just one kid, and almost cleanly!’

It was curious that the more ghastly his arguments became, the more secure seemed Bossie’s future. He was very seriously beginning to consider his captive as a barterable commodity, not to be squandered. George had visions of having to rouse the Chief Constable in the middle of the night.

‘Go on, I’m interested. What do you want, a jet plane to fly you to Libya?’

‘I’ll get myself out of the country, there are ways. Nothing as ambitious as that. I want all your men called off for twelve hours, and a car brought here for me – and my little nephew, of course!’

‘A dark green SAAB?’ asked George. ‘The one you used to try and run him down? You’ll have to prove he’s still as good as new, first, you realise that? Nobody buys a pig in a poke.’

‘A nice, well-maintained police car, with everything legitimate, and twelve hours guarantee of a clean bill, in case of any hitch. And he’s OK as of now, and I’ll prove it if I have to, but he won’t be, if you bitch me up short of noon tomorrow.’

‘On the other hand,’ pointed out George, tirelessly mild, ‘you are still stuck in there, the one who needs clemency. Unless you convince us we have to, we are not disposed to let you out, except into our custody. You’d better be a lot more convincing.’

A sudden, prolonged, tired but vicious outburst of profanity. No detectable movement, no struggle at all, things getting bedded down into a status quo. No, he wouldn’t slaughter his bargaining counter. Given time, he might even fall asleep from exhaustion. But he was a tough proposition, far tougher than John Stubbs, with any amount of stamina.

It was no comfort at all when the constable from the switchboard made his way in just after eleven, to announce in a triumphant whisper: ‘We’ve found him! Stubbs! He’s in Birmingham, at this Lavery woman’s flat, seems they had a dinner date on the town, and he jumped at it when this chap Barron offered to do his evening rounds for him. Some of the students wanted to stay on late and finish charting the bit of infirmary they were working on, and Barron said he’d see them off the premises and lock up. We called the flat several times before, but they were still out. They’re only just back. He’s on his way back here now.’

Poor harmless, glum, undecided John Stubbs, good enough to run a job like this caretaking one at Mottisham, but not good enough to get much higher on his own achievements, jealous and resentful of smarter acquaintances such as Colin Barron, but willing to lean on them, too. And torn between two grotesquely different women, and the mixed fortunes they offered, salvation to the undistinguished. So all the time he was taking the more profitable legatee out to dinner! In crass innocence!

‘You still there, Felse?’ demanded the hoarse, vindictive voice from within.

‘I’m still here. I’m listening.’

‘Better make up your mind quickly, if you want this kid, I’m getting tired of waiting. Give me the break I want, and he’s yours.’

‘If you turn him loose to us here on the spot, that might be worth considering. But it doesn’t rest with me, and there are no short cuts to an answer.’

‘Not a chance! I don’t take my halter off him until I’m clear. Then I’ll dump him safely, somewhere he can look after himself.’

‘And we should trust you? But you’d never make it, you know, I guarantee that. You’d much better come out, and get it over.’

‘If I don’t make it, he doesn’t make it, either. I’ll see to that! So get to your damned Chief Constable, and get things moving. And I want more time, since you’re wasting so much. I want a full day!’

If he was tiring, it didn’t show in his voice. All those listening tried to find some sign of weakening, of wandering resolution, and couldn’t. And nothing had changed; there was just this one way out and in, and parley with him was in fact only an exercise in wearing him down, and none too effective so far. It was going to be a long night.

Toby couldn’t stand still and listen to it any longer. He turned his back and groped away along the wall, out of the stable-yard, and round to the left, to circle the whole block and look once more for some other means of approach, anything that would turn the scale. Though he knew that Moon and the constables had already done the same thing, and found nothing of any use. It was better than standing outside the door thinking helplessly of Bossie inside there, roped into helplessness and with a noose round his neck, and of Jenny, with superhuman forbearance, keeping her distance as requested, and dying every minute.

A few broken, embedded stones of a wall jutted for some yards from the corner of the stable-block. He stumbled over them, and came round to the rear of the north walk of the old cloister, into the nave of the church. All along there on his left ran the thick, decrepit stone wall that once had severed the church from the cloister. And to his right the gardens fell away, and gave place to a large, cleared space, receding into darkness between distant walls, where some trick of latent and reflected light, owing to its white encrustations, showed him dimly the shape of a concrete mixer. The sky was a little paler than it had been, against it he could see the tracery of scaffolding encasing one wall, though it vanished again into a single darkness below the skyline. The workmen had much of their plant and stores here, it seemed. Toby moved along the wall, his left hand extended to touch the rough and crumbling surface, and groped his way round a short, buttress-like projection, surely added long after the church itself was gone and the cloister had become stables. Sign enough that this wall, though immense, had been showing traces of disintegration even in the eighteenth century, and needed propping at this point. As he rounded it and felt for the wall again, a small figure erupted under his feet with a muted squeak of alarm, and instantly shushed imperiously at him, as if he had been the offender. Startled, Toby looked down into a round face just visible as a pallor in the night, and clutched at a coat-collar, and was himself as promptly and eagerly clutched by the arm, and towed away into the scaffolded and plant-stacked shelter of the distant buildings, away from the critical zone.

He went willingly, as soon as he had divined the reason; and the moment they were well away from the wall an intent voice round the region of his upper arm hissed at him: ‘Mister, I couldn’t talk there, you can hear right through. That’s Bossie he’s got in there! We’ve got to get him out!’

‘I know!’ agreed Toby in the same urgent undertone. ‘We’re trying to. It’s full of police round there, but we can’t get in. He’s threatening to hurt Bossie if we do. Hey, you’re Bossie’s stand-in, aren’t you? Spuggy?’

‘Yes, we’re all here, four of us. We had to come back. He told us not to, but we had to, we couldn’t leave him on his own.’

‘Took long enough, didn’t you?’ complained Toby ungratefully, going blindly where he was urged, by a guide so close to the ground that he trod it as knowingly as a mouse.

‘I know, we waited outside for a bit, and then we had to get into cover because the coppers came round there. They’re watching the place now, they’d never have let us come in. We had to go a long way round, and we got a bit lost in the dark. But we’ve been here ages now, only we didn’t know then what to do.’

But now they did know? Marvellously, the small, fierce voice sounded sure of itself. Somebody had thought of something that could be done, and this mite was both spy to report the latest state of battle inside the north walk, and now recruiting sergeant for the cause. If a police constable had wandered round the corner he might have hesitated; any civilian was as good as in uniform. He hauled his prize in among the stacked timbers and scaffolding poles under the wing of the house, and three more shadows popped up to receive them. The tallest stood slightly higher than Toby’s shoulder.

‘There’s a bloke here got a bit more weight,’ announced Spuggy tersely. ‘I think he’s game.’

The tallest of the nocturnal waifs eyed the larger shape dimly outlined, and said at once: ‘Eh, you’re the chap who visits at Bossie’s place, aren’t you? Look, we’ve got to have some help. Where do we need the top-weight on this thing, fore or aft? For a ram?’

Toby peered at the ground, dropping to his knees to be sure of what was being offered him. A large, folding ladder, three-fold, and long at that, left here among the plant. Surely more than aluminium by its weight, some sort of stout alloy. By the size of it, it was meant to be strong, and its ends jutted formidably.