Make Death Love Me (26 page)

‘I heard from Stewart. By the second post.'

She gave him the letter. It was happy and affectionate. Stewart said he had had a call from his father all about her and her new man, and why didn't she and her Paul go and live in the cottage on Dartmoor?

‘Could we, please, Paul?'

‘I don't know . . .'

‘We could just go and see if you liked it. I could write to the woman in the village who looks after it and get her to air it and warm it, and we could be there by the weekend. Ambrose'll be home on Saturday but I'd leave the house
immaculate
for him. He won't mind my not being here, he'll be glad to be rid of me at last. Paul, can we?'

‘I'll do whatever you want,' he said. ‘You know that.'

He began to drink the tea she had made him. She sat opposite him at the table, her elbows on it, her chin in her hands, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. He smiled back at her and his smile was full of tenderness, yet much as he loved being with her, much as he wanted to share his whole life with her, he wished then that he could briefly be alone. It was impossible. There would be a cruelty in broaching it, he thought, after he had supposedly been all those hours with his wife. But he longed very much for solitude in which to think about what course of action next to take.

Una began talking to him about Dartmoor and the cottage itself. It would be a good place to hide in, he thought, after he had phoned the police and they had rescued Joyce and Joyce had told them the truth about him. They would never look for him in a private house in so remote a place. But before he could phone and certainly before he could leave, he must have more information. He must know for sure that Joyce's kidnapper, the boy whose walnut-nailed finger had scooped up the change and Marty Foster were one and the same.

‘Shall we go on Friday?' said Una.

He nodded. It gave him three days.

As their eyes met across the table, his troubled, hers excited, anxious, hopeful, some twenty miles to the south of them John Purford's aircraft was touching down at Gatwick.

Nigel and Marty had never thought of counting the notes they had stolen. They would only have done so if the question of dividing it had come up. Soon after he awoke on the morning of Tuesday, 26 March, after he had drunk some warm water, Nigel took the money out, spread it on the kitchen table and counted it. He didn't know how much they had spent but there was over four thousand left – four thousand and fifteen pounds, to be precise. The amount they had taken, therefore, had been somewhat in excess of what he had supposed. He divided it into two equal sums and tied up each of the resultant wads with a black stocking. Then he put them back into the bag with the bunch of Ford Escort keys.

He and Joyce had eaten nothing since the chicken soup at midday on Saturday, and not much for two days before that. Nigel was no longer hungry. Nor did he feel particularly weak or tired, only light-headed. The visions of a future in which he dominated Joyce had been replaced by even more highly coloured ones in which he had Marty at his mercy in some medieval torture chamber. He saw himself in a black cloak and hood, tearing out Marty's fingernails with red-hot pincers. Once he was out of there he was going to get Marty, hunt him if necessary to the ends of the earth, and then he was going to come back and finish Joyce. He didn't know whom he hated most, Joyce or Marty, but he hated them more than he hated his parents. The former had succeeded the latter as responsible for all his troubles.

Since Sunday Joyce had spent most of the time lying on the sofa. She hadn't washed or combed her hair or cleaned her teeth. Dust lay everywhere once more and the bed linen smelt sour. Once she had understood that Marty wasn't coming back, that she was alone with Nigel, that there wasn't going to be anything to eat, she had retreated into a zombie-like apathy, a kind of fugue, from which she was briefly aroused only by the ringing of the doorbell on Monday afternoon. She had wanted to know who it was and had tried to get to the window, but Nigel had caught her and thrown her back, his hand over her mouth. And then they had both faintly heard a bell ringing in the next room and Bridey going downstairs, and she had known to her despair what Nigel had known to his relief, that it had only been some salesman or canvasser at the door.

On the following morning it was nearly twelve before she dragged herself to the kitchen and, having drunk a cup of water, leant back against the sink, her face going white. When she drank water she could always feel the shock of it, teasingly trickling down, trace its whole passage through her intestines. She hadn't looked directly at Nigel, much less spoken to him, since Monday morning, for whenever she allowed her eyes to meet his it only brought on a spasm of hysterical crying. Twice a day perhaps she would go limply towards the door, and Nigel would take this as a signal to escort her to the lavatory. She was weak and broken, a butt for Nigel's occasional violence. She believed that everything had been destroyed in her, for she no longer thought with longing or anguish of Stephen or her parents, or of escape or of keeping herself decent and nice. Aeons seemed to have passed since she had been defiant and bold. She was starving to death, as Nigel had told her to, and she supposed – for this was all she thought of now – that she would grow weaker and weaker and less and less conscious of herself and her surroundings until finally she did die. She walked to the door and waited there until Nigel slouched over to take her outside.

When they were both back in the room, Nigel spoke to her. He spoke her name. She made no answer. He didn't use her name again, it was almost painful to him to bring it out, but said:

‘We can't stay here. You said once, you said if we let you go you wouldn't talk to the police.'

Stress and starvation had taken from Nigel's speech that disc jockey drawl and those eclectic idioms, and tones of public school and university re-asserted themselves. Joyce wondered vaguely at the voice which was beautiful and like someone in a serious play on the television, but she hardly took in the sense of the words. Nigel repeated them and went on:

‘If you meant that, straight up, we can get out of here.' He looked at her hard, his eyes glittering. ‘I'll give you two thousand,' he said, ‘to get out of here and go and stop in a hotel for two weeks. Give me two weeks to get out of the country, get clear away. Then you can go home and squeal all you want.'

Joyce absorbed what he had said. She sat in silence, nervously fingering her chin where a patch of acne had developed. After a while she said, ‘What about him? What about Marty?'

‘Who's Marty?' shouted Nigel.

It was hard for Joyce to speak. When she spoke her mouth filled with saliva and she felt sick, but she did her best.

‘What's the good of two thousand to me? I couldn't spend it. I couldn't tell my fiancé. It'd be like Monopoly money, it'd be just paper.'

‘You can save it up, can't you? Buy shares with it.' Memories of his father's advice, often derided in the commune, came back to Nigel. ‘Buy goddamned bloody National Savings.'

Joyce began to cry. The tears trickled slowly down her face. ‘It's not just that. I couldn't take the bank's money. How could I?' She wept, hanging her head. ‘I'd be as bad as you.'

With a gasp of rage, Nigel came at her, slapping her face hard, and Joyce fell down on the mattress, shaking with sobs. He turned away from her and went into the kitchen where the money was in the carrier bag. The bunch of car keys was there too, but Nigel had forgotten all about the silver-blue Ford Escort he had hidden in Dr Bolton's garage twenty-two days before.

While still in Crete, Dr and Mrs Bolton had received a telegram announcing that Dr Bolton's mother had died. Old Mrs Bolton had been ninety-two and bedridden, but nevertheless when one's mother dies, whatever the circumstances, one can hardly remain abroad enjoying oneself. Dr Bolton found the Ford Escort before he had even taken the suitcases out of his own car. He unpacked one of these in order to retrieve, from where it was wrapped round his sandals, the relevant copy of the
Daily Telegraph.
Having checked that his memory wasn't tricking him, he phoned the police.

They were with him in half an hour. Dr and Mrs Bolton were asked to make a list of all the people who knew they had no lock on their garage and also knew they were to be away on holiday.

‘Our friends,' said Dr Bolton, ‘are not the kind of people who rob banks.'

‘I don't doubt that,' said the detective inspector, ‘but your friends may know people who know people who are less respectable than they are, or have children who have friends who are not respectable at all.'

Dr Bolton was obliged to agree that this was possible. The list was a very long one and the Thaxbys were only added by Mrs Bolton as an afterthought and not until the Thursday morning. She couldn't remember whether or not she had told Mrs Thaxby. In this case, said the detective inspector, it wasn't a matter of when in doubt leave out, but when in doubt be on the safe side. Mrs Bolton said it was laughable, the Thaxbys of all people. Maybe they had children? said the inspector. Well, one boy, a very nice intelligent responsible sort of young man who was at present a student at the University of Kent.

Which went to show that Nigel's mother had not been strictly honest when recounting her son's activities to her friends.

A few hours after Mrs Bolton had given this vital piece of information to the police, John Purford at last got in touch with them. It wasn't that he was afraid or stalling, but simply that he didn't know the Childon bank robbery had ever taken place. The event had almost slipped his mother's mind. After all, it had been more than three weeks ago, the manager and the girl were sure to be dead, it was a tragedy, God knows, but life has to go on. This was what she said in defence when John saw a little paragraph in the paper about the car being found. He told his partner the whole thing, including the business in the back of the car with Jillian Groombridge. He said it must all be in his head, mustn't it? He had been at school with Marty Foster.

‘That's no argument,' said the partner. ‘There were folks must have been at school with Hitler, come to that.'

‘You think I ought to tell the police?'

‘Sure you ought. What have you got to lose? I'll come with you if you want. They won't eat you. They'll be all over you, nice as pie.'

In fact, the police were not particularly nice to John Purford. They thanked him for coming to them, they appreciated that he was able precisely to point out on a street plan the café where he had met Marty Foster and Nigel Something, but they scolded him soundly for giving away information of that kind and asked him, to his horror, if he knew the age of Jillian Groombridge.

They seized upon the fairly unusual christian name of Nigel. A couple on Dr Bolton's list had a son called Nigel. The police went to Elstree. Dr and Mrs Thaxby said their son was in Newcastle. They gave the police the address of the Kensington commune, and there Samantha's mother was interviewed. She also said Nigel was in Newcastle. Marty Foster's father didn't know where his son was, hadn't set eyes on him for two years and didn't want to. The police found Mrs Foster who was living with her lover and her lover's three children in a council house in Hemel Hempstead. She hadn't seen Marty for several months, but when she had last seen him he had been on the dole. Immediately the police set about tracing Marty Foster's address through the files of the Ministry of Social Security.

Nigel got his passport out of the rucksack and read it. Mr N. L. Thaxby; born 15.1.58; Occupation: student; Height: six feet; Eyes: blue. The passport had only been used twice, Nigel not being one of those enterprising and adventurous young people who hitch-hike across Europe or drive vans to India. He thought he'd take a flight to Bolivia or Paraguay or somewhere they couldn't extradite you. He'd have about fifteen hundred pounds left, and once he was there he'd contact some newspaper, the
News of the World
or the
Sunday People,
and sell them his story – for what? Five grand? Ten?

Twice more he had asked Joyce to take two thousand as the price of silence, and twice more she had refused. This time he went up to her with the gun levelled and watched her flinch and begin to put up her hands to her face. He wondered vaguely if she felt like he did as the result of their long fast, drugged as if with one of those substances that don't stupefy but make the head light and dizzy and change the vision and bend the mind. Certainly, she looked at him as if he were a ghost or a monster. He thought of shooting her there and then and keeping all the money for himself, but it was broad daylight and he could hear Bridey in the next room and, beyond the other wall, old Green's whistling kettle.

‘What did you say it for if you didn't mean it? Why did you say you wouldn't talk?' Nigel pushed one of the bundles of money into her face. He rubbed it against her tears. ‘That's more than you could earn in a year. Would you rather lie here bleeding to death than have two grand for yourself? Would you?'

She pushed the money away and covered her face, but she didn't speak. Nigel sat down. Standing made him feel a bit faint. He was acutely aware that he was doing it all wrong. He shouldn't be pleading for favours but compelling by force, yet he began to plead and to cajole.

‘Look, it doesn't have to be for two weeks, just long enough to let me get out of the country. You can go to a big hotel in the West End. And they'll never find out you've had the money because you can spend it. Don't you realize you can go to a jeweller's and spend the whole lot on a watch or a ring?'

Joyce got up and went to the door. She stood at the door, waiting wordlessly, until Nigel came over and listened and unlocked it. Joyce went into the lavatory. Behind her door Bridey was playing a transistor. Nigel waited tensely, wondering what was the point of a deaf man having a whistling kettle. It was whistling again now. Nigel heard it stop and thought about Mr Green until a clear plan began to form in his mind, and he wondered why he had never considered Mr Green from this aspect before. Nobody ever spoke to him because they couldn't make themselves understood, no matter how loud they shouted, and he hardly ever spoke because he knew the answers he might receive would be meaningless to him. Of course the plan was only a temporary measure and it might not, in any case, work. But it was the only one he could think of in which, if it didn't work, there would be no harm done.