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.
CHAPTER TEN
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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.’