‘I didn’t ask him,’ she said. ‘I don’t ask him any questions.’
‘Have you got a key? Give it me and I’ll go in first.’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t know what he’d do.’ Her voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it. ‘It’s better if he knows I’m here – so it’s all right.’
She had opened the door before I thought of the obvious. I caught her by the arm.
‘Has he another gun? One of his own, I mean.’
I felt her trembling.
‘I don’t know.’
But she pulled away from me and I followed her inside. There wasn’t enough light from the street to see anything. We stopped and she called, ‘Peter! Peter? It’s only me. Peter?’
In the silence I could hear the sighing beat of my blood, the sound of her breathing, a faint thrum of traffic from the main road we had left.
‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘He’s unconscious.’
When I tried to follow her, I blundered into the edge of a counter. It caught me on the left side under the ribs with the force of a punch. I couldn’t find another door. I had a touch of panic I’d felt as a child sleeping in a cupboard bed. I would waken and feel around in the dark until I was sure there was no opening but only walls on all four sides.
A light came on in the back shop.
‘He’s not here.’
Her voice was drained of life.
I pushed past her into the room: a desk, filing cabinet, a battered table supporting a typewriter and a pile of clip folders.
‘Shut the door of the shop,’ I told her. ‘Or we’ll have somebody wandering in off the street.’
She went through obediently. I heard the door bump shut and then her locking it. Beyond the back shop there was a smaller room with an electric cooker and sink. There was a bed against the wall. I lifted back the soiled grey blanket that covered it. On the sheet there were rusty smears like the marks on the cloth that had wrapped the gun.
I was sitting on the bed when she came back.
‘What will we do?’ she asked.
‘Are you sure he’s gone?’
‘I’d left him in the bed. He was too ill to move.’
I didn’t like the idea but I knew I would have to check the rest of the place. He might be lying somewhere too weak to move or call. Or crouching delirious, waiting for a head to appear round a corner so that he could blow it off.
‘We’ll have to make sure,’ I said.
A practical streak I hadn’t expected led her back out to the desk from which she produced a heavy-duty torch cased in rubber.
‘The only other place,’ she said, ‘would be the yard.’
A side door took us out into a paved court. It felt cold like a place the sun never reached. In reaction I looked up and felt a silly relief at seeing a patch of stars above the tenement walls. The torch beam ran about the court into corners, across dark stains of oil and a litter of wind-blown trash. She settled it on an unpainted door that was heavily padlocked.
‘He couldn’t have got in there,’ I said.
‘There’s nowhere else.’
To show her how silly that was, I walked over and shook the door. The heavy shiny padlock fell open and hung gaping from the catch.
‘It’s not locked,’ she said.
‘I think it’s more than that.’
I heard myself whispering as if someone just outside the reach of our light might be listening. I lifted the padlock off and there were marks scored into the top.
‘It’s been broken,’ I said and added as she put her hand out to the door, ‘but whoever did it hung it back on the door. He can’t be in there now.’
She gave a push and the door swung open.
‘I can’t find the switch for the light,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know where it is.’
We stood in the doorway and let the torch play over dim bulks of sacks and ladders lengthy on the wall. I took the torch from her and put the light round again myself. Neither of us moved.
‘He wouldn’t be here.’
‘No,’ she said.
We came out and I hung the impressive padlock in place again.
Back in the room, she crouched on the edge of the bed. She looked pale and defeated and beautiful.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He was too ill to move.’
‘Maybe it’s not your problem any more,’ I said. ‘Will I take you home?’
‘Yes,’ and she added in a lost way, ‘nobody’ll be there.’
‘Not Kilpatrick anyway. Not if he was as anxious to get away as you say.’
As I spoke, I opened the cupboard over the sink and rummaged inside.
‘There’s coffee and sugar. No milk . . . And here’s a tin. It’s chocolate biscuits. Looks like supper.’
She sat watching me while I filled a pan with water and sat it on to boil. I found two cups, surprisingly of china, each with a matching saucer. I even found a jar with milk powder. ‘Just like home.’
She took the cup and I sat beside her on the bed.
‘Sweet drink and a biscuit. Take a biscuit. My prescription for shock,’ I said.
She wouldn’t take one but as she sipped the coffee the colour came back into her cheeks. I had put three rings of the cooker to high and left them on. As we sat, the little room grew warm. I remembered eating breakfast in Margaret’s house.
‘You’ll have to knock when you get back or your visitors will think they’re being burgled.’
‘Visitors?’
It occurred to me that I hadn’t told her about spending the night in her bed.
‘Your father’s cousin and his wife.’ My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember his name. ‘From Ireland. Your parents are over there just now.’
‘Uncle Liam?’
She stared in disbelief.
‘That’s right. His wife and him. They’re going on to London – but they’re at your house tonight.’
‘But what time is it?’
I looked at my watch. It was nearly one in the morning.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ she said. ‘How can I go home now? What would Aunt Rose tell my mother? She never liked me.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’s just that they find you being perfect a bit hard to take.’
‘What are you talking about?’ At least she didn’t look defeated any more. She had come alive. ‘Are you telling the truth?’
‘How else would I know about your Uncle Liam? I went to your house this morning—’
‘And they saw you? Oh, what did you have to do that for? She’ll tell my father for sure – she’ll make a real story of it. My life won’t be worth living.’
‘Your Aunt didn’t see me.’
‘It doesn’t matter. He tells her everything.’
‘Oh.’
He had more to tell her than Margaret realised.
‘I can’t go home at this time of night,’ she said. ‘Not with her there.’
I took another biscuit. They were good although they must have been there since before the holiday fortnight. The sellotape round the rim must have kept them fresh.
‘Sleep here,’ I said casually.
A spray of crumbs spoiled the effect. She brushed them mistrustfully out of her lap.
‘There’s the bed,’ I said defensively.
‘What about you?’
‘No problem. I can walk till I get to an all-night bus stop – or until I get home.’
‘And leave me here on my own?’
It would be an eerie place to be alone. The old building settling in the dark; the bulky shadows in the store across the yard.
‘I don’t mind staying.’
‘You’re not sleeping in this bed.’
‘I’ll sleep in the chair.’
That idea seemed to ring a bell for her. She must have seen somebody doing it in a movie. In the films, though, the chair wasn’t an upright, wooden-seat cane-back tucked under a desk.
‘You’ll sleep through there,’ she said.
‘It’s cold through there.’
Before she could argue, I went through and cleared the typewriter and folders off the table. I lifted it into the small room and went back for the chair. I set them both by the wall as far from the bed as they would go. She didn’t really have a great deal of choice. There was no way she was going home or that she would spend a night alone here without protection.