The Long Kill Read online

  Behind the old woman’s shoulder, Anya made a mockingly wry face at Jaysmith. He scratched his nose and looked at the ground, then went and kicked one of the posts holding up the porch, and pressed his ear to the woodwork. His reward was a wide rejuvenating grin from Anya.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘All right, what?’ demanded Miss Wilson.

  ‘I’m ready to complete. The money should be available today. When can you be out?’

  For a moment she sucked in her cheeks and glared at him frostily, then gradually relaxed and smiled.

  ‘You’re a bit of a joker, aren’t you, Mr Hutton? I’d not have thought it when we first met. I could be out a week on Friday but I won’t be, because if you move on a Friday and things go wrong, which they always do, there’s no hope of getting hold of a tradesman over the weekend. So it’ll be a fortnight today if that suits.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jaysmith, offering his hand.

  They shook and the old woman said to Anya, ‘I’m glad that’s definite. I had that brother of mine on the phone last night and I nearly told him, but I wanted to be definite.’

  ‘You think he won’t be pleased?’ said Anya.

  ‘He will not but he’ll just have to lump it. Hadn’t you better be off? Here, I put a jar of rum butter out for your father.’

  She stepped into the hallway and returned a moment later with a large jar topped with a round of greaseproof paper held on with an elastic band.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Anya. ‘He’ll enjoy that.’

  ‘Tell him to keep it hid from those nurses,’ she said severely. ‘I’ll be down myself to see him when he gets home. I’ll not go to a hospital again, not till they carry me.’

  ‘No, auntie,’ said Anya, kissing her cheek.

  ‘And you’ll set things in motion, young man,’ said Miss Wilson to Jaysmith as he got into the car.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just off to see my solicitor.’

  Chapter 13

  As they approached the hospital Jimmy, who had been chattering excitedly for most of the journey, fell silent, answering his mother’s cheerful questions with monosyllables. Getting out of the car, he grasped Anya’s hand tightly and when Jaysmith said that he would wait for a while before joining them at Bryant’s bedside, the boy looked up at him with the accusing eyes of the betrayed.

  A nurse came down the corridor which led to the ward, accompanied by two uniformed policemen.

  She recognized Anya and stopped, saying to the policemen, ‘This is Mr Bryant’s daughter.’

  ‘Is he all right? What’s happened?’ asked Anya anxiously while Jimmy clung tightly to her leg as well as her hand.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said the nurse reassuringly. ‘And in excellent voice. He’s been insisting on seeing the police ever since he woke up this morning.’

  ‘We’d have wanted a statement in any case,’ said one of the men, a big, raw-boned youngster with an engaging smile. ‘But your dad seems to reckon he was run off the road by some idiot overtaking him down the Struggle. He seems to think we should have road-blocks out, and Scotland Yard in, looking for him.’

  ‘I daresay you’d be a little upset if you’d been put in a hospital bed by some maniac’s carelessness,’ snapped Anya. ‘Come on, Jimmy.’

  She walked away. The young constable looked after her admiringly.

  ‘Could it be true?’ asked Jaysmith.

  ‘Could be, but it’d really need a maniac to overtake on that road in those conditions. Excuse me, but who are you, sir?’

  ‘Just a friend of the family,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Who was it who found Mr Bryant, by the way? I know his daughter wants to thank him.’

  The officer checked his notebook.

  ‘It was a Mr Blackett, of Nab Farm, Ambleside. It was lucky he came along. The car was upside down with Mr Bryant hanging in his seat belt unconscious.’

  ‘Did Mr Blackett say anything about another car?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Now if you’ll excuse us, sir. Come on, Bob. Time we were off.’

  Jaysmith waited another ten minutes, then went into the ward. Bryant was sitting up in bed. With his head bandaged, his face flecked with small dressings and his arm in plaster, he looked almost a caricature of a hospital patient. But his eyes were alert and he greeted the newcomer with a pleasing energy.

  ‘Mr Hutton, I’ve been hearing about your kindness. Thank you. Good of you to come.’

  Anya was sitting by his side, holding his hand, and Jaysmith was pleased to see Jimmy wandering around the ward, looking with wide-eyed curiosity at the many strange and wonderful sights it contained.

  ‘It’s good to see you like this,’ said Jaysmith. ‘I gather it was a close call.’

  ‘Very close. You’d think I’d know after all my years in the legal game just how obtuse the police can be, but I can’t get them to show any interest at all in the lunatic who did this!’

  ‘Lunatic?’

  ‘Yes. I was crawling along, hardly able to see more than a couple of yards …’

  Anya interrupted him with the tartness of relief at finding him in such a lively state.

  ‘Crawling? You’ve never crawled in that car of yours in your life! And you must’ve been moving pretty fast to smash through a five-barred gate!’

  Bryant replied grimly, ‘Lucky it was there. The alternative was a five-foot wall. Oh all right, I had got up a bit of speed, but that was this idiot’s fault. He’d been following behind me for half a mile at a steady pace, then suddenly he started crowding me. Last thing you want in those conditions is someone up your exhaust, so naturally I speeded up a bit. I’d just begun to realize how fast he’d got me going when suddenly he was overtaking and cutting back inside on a bend. That’s when I went through the gate and flipped over. Madman!’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Jaysmith. ‘Car? Van? Truck?’

  ‘Car, I think,’ said Bryant slowly. ‘It’s all a bit mixed up still. But I’ll get it all sorted once I’m out of this place and can get a bit of peace.’

  ‘You’ll stay here till you’re fit to move!’ commanded Anya. ‘Jimmy!’

  She rose and went down the ward to where Jimmy had got into conversation with a man bandaged like a mummy, whose grapes he was eating with gusto.

  ‘She was wise to bring the boy,’ said Bryant. ‘He’d developed a real phobia of these places. I don’t much care for them myself.’

  Jaysmith reached into his pocket and produced a small labelless bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

  ‘I gather you’re not damaged internally,’ he said. ‘This might help you survive your stay.’

  Bryant opened the bottle, sniffed and said, ‘Hutton, you can visit me as often as you like.’

  ‘Don’t be too grateful. It’s your own Scotch. I filled it from your decanter this morning.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bryant. ‘Anya was saying you’d stayed the night.’

  ‘It seemed best. In the circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, it probably was. In the circumstances. I suggested you might be persuaded to stay a few more nights till I came home. She did not seem enthusiastic.’

  Jaysmith was taken aback as much by the suggestion as by Anya’s response. Bryant was observing him closely and it came to him that the solicitor was once again probing. The suggestion had been made to Anya to test her response, and the information passed to him so that his reaction could be noted and analysed also.

  He smiled and said, ‘Last night was an emergency. Help’s welcome from any source in an emergency, even from a stranger.’

  ‘I don’t think of you as a stranger, Hutton,’ said Bryant. ‘Somehow I feel I’ve known you better and longer than just a couple of meetings. That’s odd, isn’t it?’

  The return of Anya and Jimmy ended this line of conversation, much to his relief, and for the rest of the visit talk centred on Bryant’s and his daughter’s widely differing estimates of his discharge date. An elderly doctor trailing crowds of nurses arrived with the end-of-visiting bell a
nd smiled benevolently when invited to umpire.

  ‘Don’t want to miss the next fell-race, do we?’ he said. ‘Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. Let’s have a look at you now.’

  They took their leave. Jimmy kissed his grandfather and went running off to say goodbye to his mummy-wrapped friend who clearly fascinated him. Anya went in pursuit. As Jaysmith waited, he glanced back at Bryant’s bed. A curtain had been pulled, but not all the way round. The sheet was drawn back to his knees and his pyjama jacket was opened so that the doctor could examine the considerable bruising on his chest, but it was not this that caught Jaysmith’s eye. It was an extensive area of scar tissue down his left side. There was a matching area down the other side which presumably joined up with the left round his back, and in this were four little hollows, as though a child had pushed its fingers into plasticine.

  At some point in his life, Bryant had been badly beaten up and shot, though not necessarily in that order.

  Anya was ushering Jimmy out of the door. Jaysmith stored this new information up in his mind and went after them.

  The visit had clearly done both mother and boy a lot of good. From fear the boy had moved to proprietorial curiosity and it required a firm hand to keep him from peering through every door they passed. Anya smiled at Jaysmith, sharing her double relief, but at the exit she stopped and said, ‘Damn! I wanted to find out about the man who found him. I wonder who I should ask.’

  ‘How about me?’ said Jaysmith. ‘Mr Blackett. Nab Farm. Ambleside.’

  She looked so amazed he laughed out loud.

  ‘I asked that policeman you were rude to. I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘You’re a pretty clever fellow, aren’t you?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You don’t miss much.’

  ‘A lot,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve missed a lot.’

  In the car she said, ‘Would you mind if we stopped off in Ambleside? I’d like to thank Mr Blackett personally.’

  ‘Surely. Do you know where the farm is?’

  ‘We can ask. Or it’ll be marked on the Ordnance Survey map, probably.’

  ‘In there,’ he said, indicating the glove compartment.

  She opened it and pulled out the selection of maps it contained.

  ‘My,’ she said after a while. ‘You are thorough, aren’t you?’

  He glanced across to see what she meant and saw with a shock that she was holding the OS sheet NY 32 which Jacob had sent him. Naddle Foot was ringed in red and five black lines radiated from it, his possible lines of fire. Retirement had quickly made him careless.

  He said, ‘I’m one of nature’s doodlers.’

  ‘You surprise me. But it’s a very orderly kind of doodle and that fits, I suppose.’

  She refolded the sheet and rummaged around till she found the map with ‘Ambleside and district’ on it.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Nab Farm. Follow my directions.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said.

  Blackett turned out to be a burly, blunt and busy farmer. His reply to Anya’s thanks was, ‘I weren’t going to leave him, were I?’

  Jaysmith said, ‘Mr Bryant seems to think he was forced off the road by another vehicle overtaking him.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You didn’t see another vehicle?’

  ‘I could hardly see a thing,’ he said. ‘It was that bad. I got to that bend and saw the gate was broke and there was some lights in the field, so I stopped to have a look.’

  ‘How long after the accident was this, do you reckon?’

  He thought then said, ‘Not long. Engine were still hot.’

  ‘And you didn’t see another car? Or hear anything?’

  There was another pause for thought, then he said, ‘There might’ve been something. Another engine somewhere when I stopped mine and got out. But sound travels funny in them conditions. Now, I’m glad your dad’s all right, missus, but I’ve got to get back to work.’

  He turned and stumped away.

  ‘One of nature’s charmers,’ said Jaysmith as they got back into the car.

  ‘He’ll get my vote whenever he wants it,’ said Anya fiercely. ‘What do I care about charm? He saved pappy’s life, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. I think he probably did.’

  ‘You seem very interested in pappy’s story about this other car,’ said Anya.

  ‘I thought it worth checking.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Because your father was so certain, perhaps. If there were another car, the driver needs to be brought to book, don’t you think?’

  ‘You’re into retribution now, are you?’ she said.

  ‘I suppose I am. You’re not?’

  ‘I’ll stick with gratitude,’ she said. ‘For the time being. In any case, I don’t see how it can be quite like pappy said. Concussion can do queer things.’

  ‘True. But what makes you think your father’s got it wrong?’

  ‘Well, if there was a road hog belting down the Struggle, how come he didn’t overtake Mr Blackett first? I mean, if he was travelling so fast, while pappy and Blackett were crawling along, well, it’s a narrow twisting road with no turn-offs, so he can’t have been between them, can he? It doesn’t make sense.’

  She had a sharp mind, he acknowledged again. She marshalled the facts as efficiently and neatly as he himself did. The difference lay in the conditioning of their two minds. Her conclusion was that if the third car had not sped past Blackett also, it didn’t exist. His conclusion was very different.

  If the third car had not passed Blackett, it was because it too was crawling along, a little way behind Bryant, content to keep at the safe snail’s pace till the right moment came. Then the sudden acceleration, the near contact, the violent change of direction, the crash.

  But at that speed, even dropping off the road like that and turning over, Bryant was likely to survive. So the third car would stop, its driver get out to make sure. And distantly he would hear Blackett’s vehicle grinding along, see his lights approaching.

  There was no guarantee that his conclusion was sounder than Anya’s, but he did not need guarantees. He had seen last night what the threat of her father’s death had done to her and he now acknowledged formally what he had recognized then.

  It didn’t matter what Bryant was, or had been, or what he deserved. For Anya’s sake, Jaysmith could not allow him to be killed.

  Chapter 14

  At the hotel car park Anya refused his invitation to have a drink and got straight into her Fiat.

  ‘This young man’s got to have his lunch, then get to school,’ she said.

  ‘Do I have to go, mum?’ the boy demanded. ‘Couldn’t I go back tomorrow instead? Mr Hutton hasn’t shown me his magic trick yet.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jaysmith. He took a fifty pence piece out of his pocket and rolled it round his knuckles. The boy watched in fascination.

  ‘My father wanted you to stay at the house a bit longer,’ said Anya.

  ‘He said so.’

  ‘I told him no.’

  He didn’t say anything and his silence seemed to provoke her.

  ‘Look, I stay by myself when he goes away; there’s never been any of this helpless little woman stuff before.’

  ‘Does he go away often?’

  ‘Yes, quite often,’ she said firmly, then corrected herself as though feeling she was overreacting. ‘Not quite so often as he used to, not since I came back to live with him. But I made it clear that I didn’t expect him to alter his life just to fit me back in.’

  ‘Does he ever go back to Poland?’ he asked idly.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she said sharply.

  ‘Just making conversation, to extend the pleasure of your company,’ he said, smiling. ‘I remember he said he went back at the end of the war and I wondered if he’d ever made any other visits, that’s all. It’s not important.’

  She frowned. When she looked serious, she made a perfect third for the photograp
h of Jimmy and his grandfather that she had in her bedroom.

  ‘You must have misunderstood,’ she said. ‘He didn’t go back at the end of the war. He was there already when the war ended.’

  ‘Good Lord. You mean he was an agent?’

  ‘Something like that. He doesn’t talk about it; if you mention it, he’ll only joke that it didn’t last long enough for the glue on his false moustache to dry. His version is that he got shot when they arrested him and he spent the rest of the war in hospital, recovering just in time for the peace.’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  ‘I believe he doesn’t want to distress me, Jay,’ she said. ‘But I’m neither illiterate nor stupid. Wherever he was, it was a million miles away from the crisp comfort of Windermere Hospital. Look, we must dash. Jimmy, into the car, now! I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Their gazes locked and he nodded. Last night and this morning had eased them closer together, fractionally but discernibly. The fox was at the edge of the trees almost ready to step into the moonlit glade.

  ‘Jimmy! I won’t tell you again.’

  It was the still-moving coin which was petrifying the boy.

  ‘Hop-lah!’ cried Jaysmith flicking it high into the air, catching it in his right hand, showing the empty palm to the wide-eyed boy, then with his left plucking it out of the youngster’s ear and presenting it to him with a flourish.

  ‘Thanks a million,’ said Jimmy, running round the car and climbing into the passenger seat.

  ‘You can’t afford to keep this up,’ said Anya, switching on the engine.

  ‘I can’t afford not to,’ said Jaysmith.

  That afternoon he drove into Carlisle, forty miles away. It was the nearest town of any size, and he wanted a reference library with a Polish dictionary in it, and also the chance to use it with minimum risk of being observed by any of the Grasmere vigilantes. The library was situated in a pleasant old sandstone building between the attractively small cathedral and the sullenly squat castle. This was, he realized, the furthest north he’d ever been in the UK.