Make Death Love Me (29 page)

have liked to do.

Her going out solved the problem of how to get out himself. It was almost three. He wrote a note:
Una, Something has come up which I must see to. Meet you at Paddington at 5. Love, Paul
. This he left on the hall table with the house keys Una had given him three weeks before.

Joyce had given him the answer he wanted, but now he had it Nigel couldn't believe it. He couldn't trust her. He saw himself at the airport going through the place where they checked you for bombs, reaching the gate itself that led you to the aircraft – and a man stepping out in front of him, another laying a hand on his shoulder. If Joyce was merely going to surrender the money to the bank, there would be no compulsion for her to respect her promise to him. She would break it, he thought, as soon as he was out of sight.

He would kill her when the house was empty.

Nigel didn't know who lived on the ground floor, certainly people who were out all day. The red-haired girl and her ‘fella' were out a lot. Bridey didn't work every day, but she always went out for some part of the day. Nigel thought it possible that Joyce's body might lie there undiscovered for weeks, but there was a good chance the police would arrive that weekend and break the door down. By then he would be far away, it hardly mattered, and it was good to think of Marty getting the blame and taking the rap, if not for the killing, then for a great deal else.

He listened for Bridey who hadn't gone to work for the eleven o'clock opening. At three she was still moving about in her room, playing a transistor. Nigel packed his clothes into Samantha's mother's rucksack. He put on his cleanest jeans, the pair Marty had taken to the launderette, and his jacket into the pocket of which went his passport. In the kitchen, over the sink, he removed with Marty's blunt razor the half inch of fuzzy yellow down which had sprouted on his chin and upper lip. Shaved and with his hair combed, he looked quite respectable, the doctor's son, a nice responsible young man, down from his university for the Easter holiday.

Joyce too had dressed herself for going out in as many warm clothes as she could muster, two tee shirts and a blouse and skirt and pullover. She had put the two thousand pounds along with her knitting into the bag in which Marty had bought the wool for that knitting. She said to Nigel, in a voice and a manner nearer her old voice and manner than he had heard from her for weeks, that she didn't know what a hotel would think of her, arriving without a coat and with rubber flip-flops on her feet. Nigel didn't bother to reply. He knew she wasn't going to get near any hotel. He just wished Bridey would go out.

At three-thirty she did. Nigel heard her go downstairs, and from the window he watched her walk away towards Chichele Road. What about the red-haired girl? He was wondering if he dared take the risk without knowing for sure if the red-haired girl was out of the house, when the phone began to ring. Nigel hated to hear the phone ringing. He always thought it would be the police or his father or Marty to say he was coming home, by ambulance and borne up the stairs on a stretcher by two men.

The phone rang for a long time. No one came up from downstairs to answer it. Nigel felt relieved and free and private. The last peal of the phone bell died away, and as he listened, gratified, to the silence, it was broken by the ringing of the front doorbell.

At Marble Arch Alan had bought a briefcase into which he put the money, having deposited his suitcase in a left-luggage locker at Paddington Station. In the shop window glass he looked with a certain amusement at his own reflection. He had put on his suit because it was easier to wear it than carry it, and his raincoat because it had begun to rain. With the briefcase in his hand, he looked exactly like a bank manager. For a second he felt apprehensive. It would be a fine thing to be recognized now at the eleventh hour. But he knew no one would recognize him. He looked so much younger, happier, more confident. I could be bounded in a nutshell, he quoted to himself, and think myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams . . .

He was a little late getting to Cricklewood, and it was ten past four when he walked up to the house and rang the bell. He rang Marty Foster's bell first because there was a chance he might answer and he didn't want to bother the Flynn girl unnecessarily. However, there was no answer. He tried again and again and then he rang the Flynn girl's bell. Somehow it hadn't crossed his mind there might be no reply to that either, that she could have forgotten her promise or simply be indifferent to her promise and go out. She hadn't exactly promised, he thought with a sinking of the heart.

Of course a taxi could get him from here to Paddington in a quarter of an hour, there was nothing to worry about from that point of view. He stepped back and down and looked up at the windows which looked back at him like so many wall eyes. Maybe the bells weren't working. He couldn't hear any sound of ringing from outside. But the Flynn bell had been working on Monday . . .

Along the street the old deaf man was coming, a string bag in his hand containing some cans and a packet of tea. Alan nodded to him and smiled, and the old man nodded and smiled back in a way that was suspicious and ingratiating at the same time. Slowly he fumbled through layers of clothing to retrieve a key from a waistcoat pocket. He put the string bag down on the step and unlocked the front door.

Knowing it was useless to speak to him but feeling he must say something to excuse his behaviour, Alan muttered vaguely about people who didn't answer bells. He edged past the old man into the passage and, leaving him on the doorstep wiping his feet, began to climb the stairs.

Immediately he heard the bell, the first time it rang, Nigel pointed the gun at Joyce and made her go into the kitchen. She understood this was because there was someone at the door he feared might be the police, but she didn't reason that therefore he wouldn't dare shoot her. There was something in his face, an animal panic, but the animal was a tiger rather than a rabbit, which made her think he would shoot her before he did anything else. He had taken off the safety catch.

He forced her into a chair and got behind her. Joyce slumped forward, the gun pressing against the nape of her neck. With his left hand Nigel felt about all over the draining board and the top of the bookcase and the drawer under the draining board for the rope. He found it in the drawer and wound it round Joyce as best he could, tying her arms to the back of the chair. When he had got the black stocking off his own bundle of notes, he put the gun down and managed to gag her. By then the doorbell had rung again and was now ringing in Bridey's room. Nigel shut the kitchen door on Joyce and went back into the living room to listen. From downstairs he heard the sound of the front door being softly closed. No more ringing, silence.

Then footsteps sounded on the stairs. Nigel told himself they must belong to old Green. He told himself that for about two seconds because after that he knew that they weren't the footsteps of a stout seventy-five-year-old but of a man in the prime of life. They came on, on, up to the bathroom landing and then up the last flight to the top. There they flagged and seemed to hesitate. Nigel went very softly to the door and put his ear against it, listening to the silence outside and wondering why the man didn't knock at his door.

Alan hadn't knocked because he didn't know which was the right door. There were three to choose from. He knocked first at the door to the room on the side of the house, the detached side. Then he tried the door that faced it because the remaining door must be the one to the front room which was evidently occupied by Green. The old man was coming slowly and heavily up the stairs. Alan stepped aside and attempted some sort of dumb show to indicate whom he wanted, but how do you indicate Foster in sign language? The old man shook his head and unlocked the door at which Alan had last knocked and went inside, closing the door behind him. Alan tried the door to the front room. He waited, sure that he could hear on the other side of it the sound of someone breathing very close by.

Nigel put the gun in its holster underneath his jacket, and then he unlocked the mortice with the big iron key. There was only one man out there. Very probably he knew the room was occupied, so it might be less dangerous to let him in than keep him out. Nigel opened the door.

The man outside was in a suit and raincoat and carrying a briefcase, which Nigel somehow hadn't expected. The face was vaguely familiar, but he immediately dismissed the idea that this might be the man he had seen watching the house. This was – he was convinced of it even before the brown envelope was produced – some canvasser or market researcher.

Alan said: ‘I'm looking for a Mr Foster.'

‘He's not here.'

‘You mean he lives here? In there?'

A nod answered him. ‘I understood he was ill . . .' Alan was almost deterred by the look on the handsome young face. It expressed amazement initially, then a growing suspiciousness. But he went on firmly. ‘I understand he was at home with the flu.'

At that the face cleared and the shoulders shrugged. Alan felt sure Marty Foster was somewhere in there. He hadn't come so far to give up now, on the threshold of Foster's home. The door was moving slowly, it was about to be shut in his face. Daring, amazed at himself, he set his foot in it like an importunate salesman, said, ‘I'd like to come in a minute, if you don't mind,' and entered the room, pushing the other aside, though he was taller and younger than he.

The door closed after him. They looked at each other, Alan Groombridge and Nigel Thaxby, without recognition. Nigel thought, he's not a canvasser, he's not from the hospital – who is he? Alan looked round the room at the tumbled mattress, the scattering of breadcrumbs on the seat of a chair, a plastic bag with knitting needles sticking out of it. Foster might be in whatever room was on the other side of that door.

‘I have to see him,' he said. ‘It's very important.'

‘He's in hospital.'

From behind the door there came a thumping sound, then a whole series of such sounds as of the legs of a chair or table bumping the floor. Alan looked at the door, said coldly:

‘Which hospital?'

‘I don't know, I can't tell you any more.' Joyce was working herself free of the rope which tied her to the chair, as Nigel had guessed she would. He put himself between Alan and the kitchen door, his hand feeling the holster round the gun. ‘You'd better go now. I can't help you.'

It was twenty minutes to five. He was meeting Una at five, he was leaving London – hadn't he done enough? ‘I'm going,' Alan said. ‘Who's behind that door, then? Your girl friend?'

‘That's right.'

Alan shrugged. He began to walk back to the door by which he had entered as Nigel, striding to open it, called back over his shoulder:

‘OK, doll, one moment and you can come out.'

Alan froze. He had been pursuing one voice and had found the other – ‘Let's see what's in the tills, doll . . .' He turned round slowly, the blood pounding in his head. Nigel was opening the door to the landing. Alan was a yard away from that door, perhaps only a hundred yards away from a phone box. He stopped thinking, speculating, wondering. He took half a dozen paces across that room and flung open the other door.

Joyce had got her arms free and was taking the gag off her mouth. He would hardly have known her, she was so thin and haggard and hollow-eyed. But she knew him. She had recognized the voice of the man she had supposed dead from the moment he first spoke to Nigel. She threw the black stocking on to the floor and came up to him, not speaking, her face all silent supplication.

‘Where's the other one, Joyce?' said Alan.

She whispered, ‘He went away,' and laid her hands on his arms, her head on his chest.

‘Let's go,' he said, and put his arm round her, holding her close, and walked her out the way he had come. Nigel was waiting for them at the door with the gun in his hand.

‘Leave go of her,' he said. ‘Let go of her and get out, she's nothing to do with you.'

It was the way he said it and, more than that, the words he used that made Alan laugh. Nothing to do with him, Joyce whom his conscience had brought into a bond with him closer than he had ever had with Pam, closer than he had with Una . . . He gave a little dry laugh, looking incredulously at Nigel. Then he took a step forward, pulling Joyce even more tightly against him, sheltering her in the crook of his right arm, and as he heard the roar and her cry out, he flung up his left arm to shield her face and threw her to the ground.

The second bullet and the third struck him high up in the body with no more pain than from two blows of a fist.

Nigel grabbed the bundle of notes he had given to Joyce and stuffed it into the carrier with the other one. He had a last swift look round the room and saw the briefcase lying on the floor a little way from Joyce's right foot. He unzipped it a few inches, saw the wads of notes and put the briefcase into his rucksack. Then he opened the door and stepped out.

The noise of the shooting had been tremendous, so loud as to fetch forth Mr Green. Bridey, coming in when she thought the coast would be clear, heard it as she mounted the second flight. Neither of them made any attempt to hinder Nigel who slammed the door behind him and swung down the stairs. In his progress through the vertical tunnel of the house, he passed the red-haired girl who cried out to him:

‘What's going on? What's happening?'

He didn't answer her. He ran down the last dozen steps, along the passage and out into the street where, though only five, it was already growing dark from massed rain clouds.

The red-haired girl went upstairs. Bridey and Mr Green looked at her without speaking.