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

him back into despair, was to cross the room to him, and gently take the thing out of his hand. He didn’t resist; his cramped fingers opened at her touch, and gave it up without protest. Enormous eyes, cloudy with wonder, devoured her face and had no attention for anything else.
    “
Why
?” he asked, in a rustling whisper.
    “You won’t need it now,” she said. But she knew that was not what he meant.
    “Why didn’t you bring them in and give me up?
Why didn’t you tell them I tried to kill you
?”
     
    Without a word in answer, she opened a drawer of the little writing-desk on the other side of the room, and thrust the gun far back out of sight. Then she came back to the settee and sat down beside him.
    “Look,” she said urgently, “you and I have got to talk. We’ve got a little time now, and the car’s safest where it is. They won’t come looking for it here now—not yet!”
    “But
why did you send them away
?”
    “Never mind that. There are things I’ve got to know, and we may not have all that long. That girl in the car—
who is she
?”
    “Her name’s Pippa Gallier,” he said, with the docility of despair, shock and hopeless bewilderment, but with some positive motion of faith, too, as though she had surprised him into drawing back the first of the bolts that sealed his terrible solitude from the world. “We were going to be married. I
thought
we were…”
    “She’s a Comerbourne girl? That
is
where you teach, isn’t it? What was she? What did she do?”
    “She worked at the big fashion shop, Pope Halsey’s, and did a bit of modelling for them when they had dress shows. She was an assistant buyer. She wasn’t a Comerbourne girl, though, her family belong to Birmingham. She had a little flat over one of the shops in Queen Street. Why?” he asked dully, but at least there was a grain of life in his voice now, and in his eyes, that never wavered from searching her face. He had some kind of stunned trust in her now that told him she must have a reason for probing these irremediable things. Nothing she did was wanton; it didn’t follow that she could change anything.
    “And how did she come to die?”
    “I shot her,” he said, staring through her and seeing the girl’s dead face.
    “All right, you shot her! But that’s not what I want. I want to know how it happened, every detail, everything you remember. Tell me about it.”
    He drew breath as if the effort cost him infinite labour, and told her, fumbling out the sequence of events with many pauses. He was terribly tired, and completely lost, but he was still coherent.
    “I wanted to marry her. We were running about together steadily, until about a couple of months ago, and we were as good as engaged. And then she got very off-hand with me, for some reason, and started pulling away. She turned down dates, or she rang up to make excuses, and if I objected she flared up and walked out. They’d always tried to tell me she had other men on a string, too… I never believed it. I was daft about her…”
    “They?” said Bunty, pouncing on this lack of definition. “Who were
they
?”
    “The chap who shares—shared—my cottage, Bill Reynolds, he teaches at the same school. Other friends of ours, too.”
    “And some of them knew her well? Could they have been on her string themselves?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They knew her, but not that well. I never believed it. And then just over a week ago it seemed as if we’d got past the bad patch. You know how it can be, everything straightens out and starts running on wheels. She was the sweetest I’ve ever known her, and things were back as they used to be. I bought her a ring. She’d never let me get that far before. I was
happy
! You know what I mean? I’d never believed there was anything wrong about her, but I’d never felt sure of her before, and now I did, she’d promised, and we were engaged. And then she suggested that we should go to London together this