Full Fury (19 page)

He
tossed the gun, caught it in his palm, made a stiff, ironic bow, and began to move aside.

I
went forward towards the door. ‘Carter!’ Myra screamed, and she started to run towards him. She wanted that gun. I brought my left arm up as hard as I could, and met his face on the way down with its bow.

I
don’t know what it was like from his end, but I’ll never forget what it did to me. Pain shot up my arm like a sword thrust and came out of the top of my head. I’d intended to dive for his gun. So much for intentions! For two seconds there was a blinding whirl in front of my eyes, and when it cleared all I could see was a big round hole a foot from my face. Myra’s expression behind it held little hope of my survival.

I
was sitting on the floor. Beside me, also sitting, was Carter Finn. The only satisfaction in it was that he was worse than me. They’d never build a nose out of that mess, and his lips were a nasty opening. But Myra needed him now. She needed his help, if I was to be removed, as a dead body.

‘
Carter, get up,’ she said.

He
couldn’t get up. She turned on him and lashed at him with a bit of expert language, but he only groaned and covered his face. She didn’t know what to do.

My
head was clearing, though there was nothing but horrible pain below my left elbow.

‘
He knew,’ I said. ‘He must have known all along. Else why’d he hate Karen so much? Because Karen had killed Paul, that’s why, and all to save her mother from getting pitched back into the Neville Gaines’s mess.’

Myra
’s face softened. ‘There was no need,’ she whispered. Then she backed off, feeling behind her for the edge of a chair. I got myself twisted round, reached my right hand under me, and levered myself up. Gently, oh so gently, because that hammer was cocked and it’d need only a nervous twitch to blow my head off. I moved sideways.

‘
No need,’ I agreed. ‘You’re right there. It’s achieved nothing, because it’s all going to come out.’ I slid on to a chair beside the telephone. Finn was crawling across the floor. ‘Crowshaw is going to reveal all. It’ll stink from here to… to Pentonville.’

She
flinched. ‘I don’t want to hear.’

But
she was going to, if it was the last thing I did. ‘How Neville Gaines was railroaded to the scaffold,’ I went on, relishing the words. ‘You’d like to hear that.’

The
gun was now resting in her lap. Myra had had about enough. I gave her some more.

‘
For instance, the two guns. Let’s just think about those. There were two guns mentioned at the trial, the one Neville got from Lovejoy, and the one that turned up on the second search.’

Myra
muttered: ‘I remember.’ Karen said nothing. Her eyes were nearly closed. Finn was levering himself into a chair. The front of his shirt wasn’t pretty.

‘
You can forget the gun the second search threw up,’ I said. ‘It was planted. That’s where Crowshaw came in. But it did give the idea, at the time, that Neville had gone out and bought himself two guns.’ I glanced at Karen. ‘But I now know he’d owned a gun of his own for years.’

Myra
fluttered her eyelashes.

‘
The interesting point,’ I went on, ‘is that Neville should have gone out and bought himself a second gun, when he already owned one. It wasn’t the matter of the number of shots he’d have available. He knew well enough how to re-load. No, there had to be another reason. That was where Karen stepped in, and produced another reason for me to look at. Lovejoy had been talking with Karen, and people who get talked to by Karen have a habit of saying things.’ I smiled at her, but got nothing back. ‘They say things they shouldn’t. And Karen found out there was a direct contact back from Lovejoy to Drover, and then to Andy Paterson.’

Myra
was moving her head backwards and forwards in stubborn rejection. But I wasn’t going to leave it alone.

‘
The inference was obvious. It was that Neville wanted the warning to get back to Paterson. Paterson was the one huge stumbling block that’d got to be climbed over.’

Myra
spoke softly. ‘That’s hardly a true picture.’

‘
Oh, come on,’ I scoffed. ‘You’d been having it off with this Paterson gigolo…’

She
gasped. My tone had been exactly right. ‘How dare you!’

‘
Well, what else?’ I demanded. ‘Neville had been watching things. He saw that this great oaf of a farmer with his neighing laugh and his slapping of shoulders had got something special for you. He’d seen what you did when Paterson got near you, went all soft and flabby…’

‘
You’re lying,’ she snapped.

‘
It’s how it seems to me.’

‘
Then you haven’t looked very far.’

‘
I can only go by evidence.’

‘
Andy was a friend.’

I
turned my head away in disgust.

‘
A friend,’ she shouted. ‘You know that very well. He was attentive, he gave me things that Neville never considered I… Are you listening?’

I
tossed it at her. ‘I’m listening.’

‘
He gave me courtesy and deference and… and attention. He was a gentleman.’

‘
He was a heathen.’ I might as well have slapped her with the word—Neville’s word.

‘
You’re not to say that,’ she whispered.

‘B
ut I do, because he was. Andy Paterson was a heathen, and you know it, and you’d got no feelings for him at all.’

She
made an angry movement. Karen’s voice came over the back of the settee. ‘Mother, please!’ Karen was trying.

I
said quickly: ‘You’re a woman of sensibilities, Myra. You’re emotional and you’re intense. You and Andy Paterson! You told Crowshaw you loved him. Nonsense.’

I
was Neville again, not believing and not accepting. ‘Neville,’ I said, ‘would never have believed it.’

‘B
ut he did,’ she claimed, almost pleading.

‘
Never. You could have thrown Paterson at him till Doomsday, and Neville would simply have ignored it.’

‘
He believed. Oh yes, he did. In the end.’

‘
You got him round to it, did you?’

There
was a hint of a smile of triumph on her lips. ‘Well… he did go to Mr Lovejoy and buy that gun.’

‘
Ah yes, Lovejoy’s gun. Neville’s gesture. Here was Neville Gaines, the artist, the poor lost soul in the wilderness, who couldn’t stand up to anything… here he was, having to consider an unimaginative and boorish clod like Paterson. And he went out and made a gesture! A gesture? Ask yourself. What could he have expected from that? Nothing but one of Paterson’s neighing laughs. Don’t give me that rubbish. Neville wasn’t making gestures to Paterson. Now, was he?’

Finn
leaned forward and made a croaking sound.

‘
It’s gone far enough,’ said Karen hopelessly.

‘
No!’ I shouted. ‘Let’s hear from Myra. Myra Gaines and her unmovable husband. What about it, Myra?’

She
raised her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t making gestures to Andy. It was for me.’

‘
Now we’re coming to it. It was for you, Myra, he was making gestures. What was it supposed to prove, assuming the news got back to you by way of Paterson?’

Somewhere
beneath the surface I’d stirred up a surge of memory, of contempt. ‘That he wasn’t a coward.’

‘
Did he have to prove it?’

‘
He had to,’ she said. ‘He had to prove something. I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, sitting around and letting everything flow past him, not noticing…’ She faltered.

‘
Not noticing you?’ I asked.

‘
Not noticing.’ The anger held her. She had quite forgotten the gun on her lap. ‘I never loved Andy. You’re right about that. How could I? But it had to be somebody like that, somebody rough and overbearing. Neville was locked away inside his own shell. I couldn’t live with a man like that. Just couldn’t. You understand? He’d got to come alive, do something, show me…’ She tossed her head. ‘I told him about Andy, but he wouldn’t listen. I showed him Andy, and he pretended he couldn’t see. In the end I think he saw, but he was afraid. Neville was a coward. He couldn’t face Andy. Not to go up to him and say look here I’ve had enough of this, or whatever men say. He was afraid.’

With
her hands flying in over-emphasis, she angrily demanded my acceptance. I looked at her with the stony disbelief I thought Neville would have used. It worked. Her eyes were wild.

‘
I’d shout it in his face. “Neville, you’re a coward.” And he wouldn’t blink. You could slap him, and he’d turn away. A rank coward. He’d just got to do something. I couldn’t have gone on unless he’d done something. I think he saw that in the end. It was making me ill—the scenes.’

She
stopped. She looked around. I’m not sure she knew where she was.

‘
Scenes?’ I prompted.

‘
At the end, that was. He was stubborn, sullen. He’d sit for hours: not speaking, looking at me, and you could scream in his face: coward, coward. And it was like shouting at a wall. He had to do something. You
must
see that. Something for me. Not for Andy. That gesture was for me!’

Somehow
Finn managed to force words between those lips. ‘For you, Myra.’ I looked at him. He’d have liked his fingers at my throat.

‘
Mother,’ pleaded Karen feebly. ‘You mustn’t get upset.’

‘
I don’t believe her,’ I said angrily. ‘Go on, Myra. Wave that silly gun. I don’t believe you. Myra and her dramatics! Everything had to be for you. I can see you, shouting in his face: you’re a coward. Feeble Neville, the useless nothing. So he went to all the trouble of finding Lovejoy in Birmingham, buying a gun, making clever conversation so that it got back to Myra! No, I don’t believe it.’

Myra
flashed at me: ‘It was for me.’

‘
He’d got another gun, ‘I reminded her. ‘It was his own. He’d had it for years. So if he wanted to make gestures to you, Myra, why didn’t he dig it out and wave it under your nose? Why didn’t he do something like that?’

Th
e triumph came out as a twisted, condescending smile. ‘Because I’d got it hidden away.’

It
had been a tiresome business getting to it, but now it was in the open. ‘You’d hidden it away.’ I sighed.

There
was silence in the room. She raised her head. ‘I wasn’t going to make it too easy for him. Oh no. He’d got to go out and do something. Show me. Anybody can wave a gun. He’d got to
do
something.’

‘
But he searched?’ I asked wearily, thinking of this great house we were at the moment sitting in.

Her
laugh was so brittle that the hair on my neck tingled. ‘The poor idiot. All over the house. Not letting me notice. Still pretending he wasn’t caring. But I knew. It was the first sign I was getting through to him. Fumbling through drawers, upstairs and downstairs. It really was idiotic. You’d have laughed.’

So
all right, I’d have laughed. The dull throb she gave in illustration had all the humour of a falling guillotine.

‘
It was for you,’ I agreed. ‘And that was what Karen tried so hard to hide. Sometime I was going to wonder why he’d go for another gun when he already had one. She didn’t want me to think too deeply, so she gave me an answer she hoped would rest my mind—a gesture for Andy Paterson.’

Karen
’s face had sunken into hollows of despair.

‘
But of course,’ I said, ‘once he’d gone out and done something—bought himself another gun—there’d be no reason to go on hiding the first one. Let him have a real go at it. There were two guns used up at that farm. Ten shots were fired. The one he bought from Lovejoy was found in the yard, empty, and his own in the cow byre with three fired. But which was used first? That’s the point. The three-shot gun hadn’t jammed, so you’d think he emptied Lovejoy’s first, then carried on with his own, fired three from that, and threw it down. But where did he throw it. Into the cow byre? He could have tossed it in through the doorway. But from his own statement he emptied Lovejoy’s gun into Paterson, there outside the doorway, threw it down, and then ran off. It was found there.’

Finn
croaked something. I ignored it.

‘
And it sounds so real. It’s just what he would do. He went on squeezing the trigger after the gun was empty. That sounds very true. So what does that leave us? That he’d been using his own gun earlier, and discarded it after three shots? But why? It hadn’t jammed. And anyway, it was found in the cow byre, and the chase didn’t go that way—it finished there. So we’ve got to come to the conclusion that Lovejoy’s gun was emptied first, and Neville’s own gun was fired afterwards.’