A Shot at Nothing Read online

  At this infuriating thought I whirled on him, angry words jostling for position, to be hurled in his face. But casually he was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets, staring out over the terrace at the recently mown lawn.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be splendid,’ he said to the glass, ‘if you could prove her innocence for her? How grateful she’d be.’

  ‘You must be insane.’

  ‘You’ve been successful two or three times in sorting out other people’s problems. A true daughter of Chief Superintendent Lowe. Philipa Lowe, the lady sleuth. Apply your brains to this one, my pet, why don’t you.’

  It was not a question, not even a request—a challenge to something. To my understanding and tolerance? He was being remarkably cutting with his tone, a surprisingly new Oliver Simpson. Was he angry with himself for not having been able to save her? But, to apply for me for assistance, that was grotesque.

  ‘You’re making yourself decidedly unpleasant, Oliver,’ I said to his back, a certain amount of coolness entering my voice. ‘You’ve never used that cold and sarcastic attitude with me before. Damn you, if you want to get her free, do it yourself.’

  I was reaching back for the door handle, intending to march out of there and back to the car and drive off and leave him, if my fury hadn’t eased a little before then. But he turned, and there were lines of pain in his face, such as I had not seen since the incident that had almost lost him his arm, and misery in the line of his mouth, distress in his eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t being sarcastic, Phil. I was asking for your help.’

  ‘My help…’ I whispered. ‘For her?’

  ‘I tried.’ He raised his shoulders, then allowed them to slump back. ‘I couldn’t find the truth. There was something I couldn’t quite get a hold of, and I couldn’t make sense of anything.’ He wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. ‘All I’d got to back up my instincts was what I knew of her. Oh, I’m not arguing…the evidence of a deliberate killing was all there. But I was certain she couldn’t have killed him. She’d already severely disabled him—no, don’t interrupt, Phil, I’ll explain in a minute. She’d come out on top, you could say. So there was no reason, even in the state he’d brought her to, for her to deliberately kill him. I knew her, Phil. She would not have fired that second barrel at him, not face to face, and when he was completely helpless.’

  I couldn’t understand what he was trying to impress on me, nor why he was laying it out in such detail—this sympathy he had for her. To appeal to me…

  ‘After all this time,’ I stalled, ‘what could you expect me to do about it? Talk sense, Oliver. And why should I? Why should I try to get this woman released, when she’d return straight to you? You must be out of your mind. Even to ask it! Damn it, that’s bloody well insulting, Oliver, now that I come to think about it. No. Don’t say another word. Let me finish. If you think I’m here just to be used as a stop-gap, to sleep in your bed until the time comes when I can restore her to it…pre-warmed…that’s so insulting that I could kill you myself, before—’

  ‘There!’ he cut in. ‘You see? You could kill. You just said it. So you could probably be the one to understand how she could’ve killed. Or not. Phil…Phil, in court, when she was sentenced, she turned and looked directly at me. Into my eyes. With sorrow and disillusionment. I’d let her down, and hadn’t been able to help her. I’ve never got over that. Do that for me and…and Phil, I’d marry you. There.’

  ‘What!’

  Didn’t he realise what he was saying? He made it sound as though he would sacrifice himself in marriage to me, if I’d assist the woman he really loved! It was disgusting. And oh—how he was suffering at having to say it!

  ‘You can just go to hell!’ I shouted, and I turned to the door.

  He was beside me in a second, had caught my shoulder and twisted me back to face him, and this with his right hand. It must, I thought, have hurt him terribly.

  ‘Phil, Phil, I’m sorry. I said it all wrong. I don’t love her now. Never from the moment I met you…’

  I had a flash memory of him raising his tweed hat. Of his later comment, ‘Never trust a man wearing a tweed hat, that was why I raised it.’ The image almost choked me. He wasn’t wearing his hat now, but could I trust him?

  ‘You’re hurting my shoulder,’ I whispered.

  He released me at once, as though my flesh was suddenly red-hot. ‘Silly Phil,’ he said softly. ‘When you know it’s you I love. But I feel I let her down—and I can’t forget it.’

  ‘You hated that?’ I was trying my own brand of sarcasm.

  ‘It’s like promises. You make a promise—you keep it. I felt I’d made her a promise—though nothing was said—and I’ve broken it.’

  ‘They mean that much?’

  ‘Promises? Yes, they do.’

  ‘Then promise to marry me.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Phil. That’s blackmail. A forced promise is automatically self-cancelling.’

  ‘But you did say you would promise—’

  ‘And you spoiled it by telling me to go to hell. That’s where I am right now. So that promise is null and void.’

  ‘You’, I said, ‘ought to have been a barrister. You’d have twisted the Lord Chief Justice round your little finger.’

  ‘Then do it as a cold and unemotional mental exercise, like Sherlock Holmes. Or Philip Marlowe, without the mister. But do it for me, and get her released, and then we’ll talk about marriage.’

  ‘The “we” in that statement meaning you and this Clare woman?’

  ‘No. You and I.’

  ‘But Oliver, if I managed to get her released she’d no longer wish to sell this house. And I want it. I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.’

  ‘You never know…she might be so grateful that she’d give it to you.

  ‘Hah!’ I said in disbelief.

  ‘She’d still have her guns, you see. A fortune in guns.’

  I nodded knowingly, and tried a small smile. ‘And if I married you, Oliver, it’d be me she’d be gunning for next. With all forty-two of them.’

  Then at last he broke the fine thread that remained of the tension, by grinning at me. ‘No, she wouldn’t. If she did that, she’d need you again, to save her a second time.’

  It’s very difficult, I found, to kiss satisfactorily when you’re both laughing.

  Then at last he said, with quiet sincerity, ‘May I tell you what happened?’

  I fluffed up my hair, as much as it will fluff, as it’s more like copper wire than hair. ‘If you must.’

  He pouted at me. ‘It does seem that I’ll have to.’ And he did.

  It had been in early September, almost six years before. Harris Steadman had been out shooting and returned in a foul temper, as Oliver had said, and Clare had found herself facing his anger and his wild accusations. Harris was more than a little drunk, having taken a large brandy flask with him to keep out the damp. It had begun to rain even before he left the house. He’d put on one of those waxed green Barbour waterproof jackets, with plenty of pockets. This jacket he left lying on the old black hallstand, when he got home later, with no respect for its venerable polish.

  At that stage there were two twelve-bore cartridges in one of the pockets.

  Clare was in the sitting-room, the one immediately across the corridor from the gunroom, though the doors weren’t opposite each other. It was in there that Harris faced her, and provoked a bitter quarrel. She heard for the first time, she said, how deeply he was in debt, even to the extent of having fiddled money from the company in which he had a small shareholding. He’d already convinced himself that it was all Clare’s fault, when she could easily have covered his debts.

  ‘Fiddling?’ I cut in. ‘You mentioned the business—what kind of business?’

  ‘They made lampshades. Still do, I suppose, without him.’

  ‘Lampshades!’ It seemed perhaps a rather ladylike pursuit for a man who was rapidly sounding more and more like a rip-roaring macho thug.
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  He smiled at my expression. ‘I think Clare must have fed in a little capital afterwards, because it’s still going strong, under its original founder. A cousin of Clare’s, I think. She does all the designing herself. Josie Knight, her name is. Anyway…Harris wanted Clare to help him out. Apparently he thought she might sell some of her father’s collection of guns. The very idea would’ve infuriated her.’

  ‘If she’d got money…I began, but then I saw that it would have been irrelevant. The guns would have been symbolic—her guns. Harris had clearly been needling her purposely.

  ‘They shouted at each other,’ Oliver continued, when he saw that I wasn’t going on with it. ‘Clare threw a glass ashtray at him, and he, completely beyond control, stormed out of the room, shouting something about her guns sitting there doing nothing, so they might just as well be where he was—out in the cold.’

  ‘Hmm!’ I said, nodding. So far I was on her side.

  ‘It was only when Clare heard the gunroom door slam,’ Oliver went on, ‘and the lock being thrown over, that she even began to guess what he intended to do, but at the very worst she thought he might be intending to grab three or four of her guns—as many as he could carry—and run off with them. So she went after him into the corridor, and started hammering at the gunroom door, and then she realised it could well be worse than she’d imagined, because Harris wasn’t even taking the trouble to get the keys from the drawer in order to open the showcases. She could hear him smashing the glass fronts, and bellowing at the top of his voice.’

  Oliver was narrating this in the unemotional voice he would have used in court, but I had to bear in mind that he would have encountered many domestic disputes, and become hardened to the bitter furies these always created.

  ‘She must have been terrified,’ I ventured.

  ‘Yes.’ He paused, clearly thinking about the extent of Clare’s terror. ‘But she wasn’t what you could call petrified with fear. Not Clare. We found the remains of a small occasional table outside this door. She’d pounded it to pieces, trying to get in at him, with Harris laughing like a maniac because it was locked, with the key inside, and Clare’s father had known what he was doing when it came to buying locks, and if you’ll take a look, Phillie, you’ll see the doors are solid oak.’

  I didn’t trouble. Now I was paying more attention to the room and its layout, wandering around as Oliver talked. The door was not central in the long wall behind me, and the French windows were not opposite the door, but off-set. For French windows they seemed huge, and there were no curtains to them. Almost central in the room was a long table, its surface battered and scarred. I had to assume that this had normally been used for stripping and cleaning the guns, or whatever had to be done to them. There was a tall chest of drawers against the wall facing me, beside the French windows. The drawers held boxes of cartridges, I discovered, in different bore sizes; that information was on the box lids. There were also cleaning materials. Next to it was a tall cupboard. It wasn’t locked, but when I glanced inside I saw that it held nothing but various items of clothing thought essential to the practical shooter. There were only two chairs, one at each end of the table, utility chairs and not designed with any consideration of comfort in mind.

  ‘Then,’ Oliver was saying, ‘after the glass-smashing bit, Clare heard a clattering sound, which would’ve been Harris flinging her guns on to the table. And he shouted something about how much they’d be worth after a dose of rain. She said later that it was only then that she realised what he intended to do. Which was to throw her guns out on to the lawn. The storm was at its height at that time. As I told you, it delayed me, and also the local squad car, which was on its way almost as soon as I was. But I had to back out of three flooded lanes and do circuits.’

  ‘And how long, would you say, did it take you to reach here?’

  ‘Oh…’ He wagged a hand vaguely. ‘Ten minutes or so. Fifteen at the outside.’

  ‘So the important episode you’re coming to took place in those few minutes?’

  ‘It was over when I got here, but a lot can happen in a few minutes.’

  ‘Yes. I take it that her first action would’ve been to run through the house and out at the front.’

  ‘That’s as she told it. She reached the entrance hall, and then, when she threw open the front door, she realised how bad the storm was. But Harris’s green jacket was there, where he’d thrown it on the hallstand. She put that on—and in that way armed herself with two twelve-bore cartridges. It’s uncertain whether the opening of the front door or the French windows came first, but it hardly matters. One of them triggered off the burglar alarm.’

  I could visualise it all, up to that point, and very clearly, she having to run through the house—what shoes had she been wearing?—then all round to the back and to the lawn. Was the grass long, or mown short at that time? And she would have found the French windows flung wide open on to the terrace…and Harris? What was he doing, with the storm cracking all round them and the rain streaming down?

  ‘Do you know exactly what happened, Oliver?’ I asked.

  ‘Only from what she said to me, and to the super later. But it all sounded very real and true.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘Harris had begun to throw the guns out on to the lawn,’ Oliver provided. ‘He was a big, strong man. A shotgun in one hand wasn’t a great weight to him. He threw them as far as he could—bellowing in anger and throwing filthy language at her. And Clare…sobbing and screaming and scuttling about, with no more than the spilled light from the French windows and the flashes of lightning to guide her, finding the guns, running to the terrace with them one at a time to throw them back to safety inside…

  I could tell by his tone, and the way the words streamed from him, the extent of his sympathy with her in this. Harris had been throwing them out and down. Easy for him. Clare would be weaker, and couldn’t possibly match him. More would go out than could be thrown back, and those would be thrown out again at her at once. Quite frankly, with a storm raging round me I would not have liked to stand out on that soaked lawn in a vertical stream of rain, waving a metal lightning conductor in my hands.

  But would she have cared about that? Would she have heard one crash of thunder, seen one fork of lightning? I thought not. It could simply have continued until she collapsed from exhaustion, with the whole collection strewn around her on the sodden grass.

  At what stage, then, had she realised that she had two cartridges in her jacket pocket, and the choice out of possibly forty-two guns into which she could load them? Yet Oliver had mentioned that Harris’s death could well have been an accident. A provoked accident? But what, in that event, had she been protecting? Her guns? Not herself, certainly. So murder it would have been.

  Yet my mind had galloped ahead of Oliver’s story, so that by that time I was right behind her, whatever she had done. She had won herself a champion, though she couldn’t have known it, with her guts and her persistence.

  ‘And how did it all end?’ I asked quietly. I could imagine no termination to it other than her collapse or Harris’s death, as he’d held the stronger hand.

  Oliver laughed shortly—a brief expression of disgust. ‘It was Harris himself. A queer cuss, he was. Unpredictable. His furies were enormous, and his sense of humour on the banana skin level. There he was, just inside this room, dry and warm—and what would Clare have looked like, out there on the lawn, bedraggled, wet through, her hair plastered round her face and her clothes clinging to her, weeping and swearing at the same time, and almost on her knees from exhaustion? It struck Harris as funny. He stood there and roared with laughter, and simply stopped throwing them out at her. She knew him. She ought to have understood him through and through. In effect, he’d abdicated. If she’d simply called him a dirty name and asked him to come out and help her, he’d probably have done it. But no. Not Clare. She called him a dirty name, right enough, and told him he’d had it, and he could just start packing and could sod o
ff out of her life with any one of his women. And while she was telling him, she was still tossing the guns back inside. By that time she’d barely got the strength to do any tossing, and she was piling them—the guns she could locate in the dark—on the terrace. He just watched her for a minute or two, then he got fed up with it—and simply closed the French windows, and locked them.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said emptily, trying to decide what I would have done in her place. But my sense of humour’s a bit warped. I find I can laugh at myself from time to time. Not Clare, apparently. She’d been way beyond laughter. ‘What did she do?’ I asked.

  ‘Well—it seems—the first thing she tried was to smash the glass. She threw a couple of the guns at it, but they just bounced back.’

  ‘By this time,’ I suggested quietly, ‘having forgotten how precious they were?’

  ‘Seemingly. But you know about double-glazing. It’s difficult to smash, with that air-cushion between the two layers. People have died in fires, unable to break their way out. And these windows, being so large, are of plate glass. I suppose you might drill a hole through, and then possibly smash them. Or chip a way through with an ice-pick. I don’t know. What she did, anyway, worked. She found she had cartridges in her pockets. She loaded both barrels —she was clear on that—and let the window have a blast. But she fired only one barrel, she insisted later. What she aimed at was the central frame itself, where the lock was. What she hit—and heaven knows she was exhausted and could barely see what she was doing—was the glass to the left of the lock. It was just on the edge of the blast that she got the lock itself.’