Ever since that evening Nina had been an exemplary citizen, even in that long, cold winter when neither she nor Frank had been in work. She’d married Frank on the rebound, out of grief for Danny, and, it has to be said, to confuse the police, who continued to hunt for her. Frank wouldn’t know an automatic from a banana, but he’d happened to step into her life at the critical time. She’d told him nothing of her past.
Mountjoy said, “Danny’s a good man.”
“You know him?” Nina whispered.
“A bit. We went to art classes. Inside, I mean. Listen, you’re going to have to help me. I need food, clothes, blankets, money. And I’m going to borrow your car. I’ll tell you where to find it later. Now would you get out of the bath and help me?”
Deeply shocked and disbelieving, she said, “Danny didn’t send you. He wouldn’t do that. Not Danny.”
He took a step into the room. “No. He told nobody. But I’m here. I worked it out.”
“What?”
He leaned over the bath and twisted the handle that released the plug. The water started flowing away. He picked up the bathrobe and handed it to her.
Nina drew it around her shoulders for protection and managed to stand up with what she hoped was decorum, if not dignity. Stepping out, she made an effort to sound in control. “What kind of clothes?”
“For a woman.”
“A woman?”
“A complete change. Warm stuff. Trousers, sweaters, underclothes.”
“Is someone with you?”
“Fetch them now. Fast.”
“She may not be my size.”
“We’ll make do.”
Tying the belt of the bathrobe tightly across her middle, she went through to the small bedroom she shared with Frank. She opened a fitted wardrobe. “You’d better take the stretch jeans and the double-knit sweater on the top shelf.” She opened a dressing-table drawer and picked out some knickers and a packet of tights she hadn’t opened yet. “If she’s on the run with you, she must be suffering. You can take whatever you need.”
She tried to sound cooperative. She would willingly give him all the clothes she possessed to buy his goodwill. The physical threat had receded a little, but a petrifying fear gripped her. The man knew of her involvement with Danny. He had it in his power to shop her to the police, to have her put away for murder. With the zeal of a charity worker, she delved into the wardrobe for a holdall and started stuffing things in. Anything to humor him.
“Will this be enough? I could fill another case if you like.”
He took the two spare blankets she kept in the chest under the window. “The man who went out just now-where was he going?”
“The pub.” She thought of adding the reassurance that Frank wouldn’t be home until well after closing time, after a slow, unsteady plod up Broad Street, but she checked herself. She wanted Mountjoy out of here as quickly as possible.
He was looking out of the window. “Where do you keep your car?”
Parking wasn’t permitted in Morford Street. “The garages at the back. It should be open.”
“What is it?”
“An old Renault Eight. Green.”
“Keys?”
“Downstairs. Shall I fetch them?”
“Pick up the bag. Don’t try anything. I’ll be right behind you.”
As she came downstairs she saw the broken windowpane in the back door and the glass splinters on the doormat. He’d simply reached through and let himself in. How many times had she told Frank they were insecure?
“Car keys,” he prompted her.
She went into the back room and found her handbag.
“Now some food.”
In the kitchen they filled two carriers, emptying her fridge of everything that could be eaten fresh and then taking cans from the cupboards, and biscuits and bread.
“The man who went to the pub,” he said. “Is he your husband, or what?”
She answered, “Yes.”
“Husband?”
“Yes.” She added the reassurance, “I won’t tell him about you. He knows nothing about my past.”
“And I suppose Danny knows nothing about him,” Mountjoy commented with an accusing glare, and Nina, the proof of the cynical expectation of prisoners that their women will abandon them, wished she had not spoken.
Mountjoy told her, “You’ll have to explain the car being gone.”
“He won’t even notice.” When she had helped him put the carriers beside the front door with the holdall and the blankets, she said, “How is Danny coping?”
“He’s all right. He’s strong.”
“You said just now that he didn’t tell you about me.”
Mountjoy said, “It was in the papers, wasn’t it? I lived here when you were in the news. You’re the one they called Bristol Bonnie.”
“But nobody knows my name.”
“Nor do I. I know where you live, that’s all.”
“How-if Danny didn’t tell you?”
He took time over answering, as if uncertain whether to tell, whether he felt she deserved to know. “They lay on classes. Education. I did art and so did he. The only picture he ever finished was an acrylic. He worked at it for months on end. It was a street scene, viewed straight on, with no perspective to mess him up. Some Georgian terraced houses on a steep slope. They had railings outside and you could just see the basement windows. The detail was pretty good. Two of the houses had a set of Venetian windows, the central one arched, with rectangular casements on each side, with small square panes. Pretty striking. There was a woman’s face looking out of one of them. Sad eyes. But Danny isn’t much good at painting people.”
“Me?” She sucked in her cheeks and clamped her teeth on them. With emotion heaped on to all the stress, she was afraid she might cry.
He said, “It had to be you, didn’t it? I knew you and Danny used to operate somewhere in these parts and I know the streets of Bath. The way he painted it was what they would term naive in the art world, but he took no end of trouble to get it right, the steep slope and those windows and the railings in front of the basements and the wrought-iron stands for window boxes on the house next door that didn’t have the Venetian windows. He must have a photographic memory. Of course, it could have been one of a dozen streets except for one thing: the doors. He painted them without doorknobs, or locks, or letterboxes. And to my knowledge there’s only one street with front doors that never open and that’s the lower half of Morford Street. You have access from the back, through the arch halfway along the terrace.”
She didn’t compliment him on his powers of observation. He didn’t seem to need humoring.
He said, “I thought you would want to help me.”
She nodded, wishing with all her might that he would leave.
He rattled the keys. “I’ll leave the car in the station car park. You can pick it up in the morning. There’s one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Those post office jobs you did with Danny. You both carried guns. What happened to yours?”
“I got rid of it.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t think so. You’ll have hidden it, but you won’t have got rid of it.”
“Truly.”
“Lying bitch. I had a wife who lied to me. Want to know what I did to her?”
She shook her head.
He was right. She had it in the house, under the loose floorboard in the front room, covered by a carpet and a table with a bronze flowerpot. She’d judged that it was safer to keep the gun all these years than risk it being found somewhere and traced back to her by forensic scientists. Up to this minute she had been right. Nina said, “I threw it into the river.”