Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale by Ellis Peters

felt through his pockets for it numbly, and held it out to her without a word. From his last safe place at the end of despair, where there is nothing left to lose or gain, he watched her walk out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. He heard the bolts of the front door drawn back, heard the key turned in the lock.
    In those few yards Bunty lived through a total reassessment of everything that had happened to her. Her senses were abnormally acute, her mind moved with rapidity and certainty. She remembered things observed at the time without comprehension, and made sense of them. Her legs might be shaky under her, but mentally she was on her feet again.
    She opened the door of the cottage with the accurately measured reserve of a woman alone, knocked up at an unusually early hour on a Sunday morning. Not too wide at first, ready to close it and slip the bolt again quickly if she didn’t like the look of her visitor; then surprised and relieved, setting it wide and coming confidently into the doorway.
    The two uniformed policemen on the step of the porch gazed back at her in silence for a moment, more surprised to see her than she was to see them.
    “Good morning!” said Bunty, and waited with the polite, questioning curiosity of the innocent to hear what they wanted of her.
    “Good morning, ma’am!” The elder of the two shoved up his flat cap civilly on the furze-bush of his pepper-and-salt hair, and eyed her with circumspection, plainly finding her of a reassuring respectability. “Sorry if we startled you, but we saw a light in one of the windows here a while since, from up the coast road a piece, and knowing that the lady and gentleman who summer here have left, we wondered… You never know, just as well to check up, when a house is empty.”
    “Oh, I
see
! Yes, of course, and how very good of you! Reggie and Louise will be so grateful,” said Bunty warmly, “to know that you keep such a good watch on their place. I’m a friend of the Alports, they’ve lent me their cottage for a long week-end. I drove up last night.”
    “Ah, that accounts for the light, then.” He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and why shouldn’t he, when she produced the owners’ names so readily? An Englishwoman of forty, dressed in a smart and rather expensive grey jersey suit, must seem probable enough as an acquaintance of the Alports; indeed, it was unlikely that such a person would ever find her way to this spot unless directed by the owners. “And you found everything in order here, ma’am? No signs of anyone prowling around in the night? No trouble at all?”
    The younger policeman, tall and raw-boned, and surely a local boy, had drawn back out of the porch, and was using his eyes to good purpose without seeming to probe. The front window, through which he had already taken a sharp look, would show him only a room where everything must be as the Alports had left it. He was eyeing the hard gravel, too, but all it would tell him was that a car had arrived here, stood a little while before the door, and then been put sensibly away in the garage, which is exactly what one would expect the English lady to do with her car on arrival. Now he was turning his blue and innocent regard upon Bunty, and taking her in from head to foot, without apparent question of her genuineness, rather with a degree of critical pleasure on his own account.
    “Trouble?” said Bunty, wide-eyed. Her smile faded into faint anxiety, nicely tempered with curiosity. “No, nobody’s been here. Everything was all right when I arrived. Why, is something wrong?”
    “Och, nothing for you to worry about, ma’am,” said the sergeant comfortably. “You’re no’ likely to be troubled here. Most like he’s gone on northwards.”
    “
He
?” she echoed. “You mean there’s somebody you’re looking for? A
criminal
?”
    “We’ve had warning to look out for a car, ma’am, a large old car, black, thought to be a Rover, registration NAQ 788.