Bitter End Part 34

He introduced himself, and inquired if, perchance, he was addressing Mrs Armstrong.

'Yes,' husked the vision, sticking her hands in her pockets, a movement which drew back her shoulders and made two very prominent nipples appear under the thin wool of her mini sweater.

'I... I, er, hadn't expected to find you at home today, Mrs Armstrong,' Buchanan told her. 'I understood that both you and Mr Armstrong were out at work.'

'Yes,' she said again, leaving it at that, without embarra.s.sment, as though she felt that the monosyllable was all she need proffer to keep up her end of the conversation.

'I should have called on you earlier to ascertain whether you could help me with the inquiries I'm making into Mrs Gra.s.sick's death. I believe you already spoke to Mr Cambridge, the insurance investigator?'

'Yes.' 211. 'Yes, well . . .' Buchanan found himself contemplating her navel and ripped his eyes away. 'I don't want to go over the same ground as Mr Cambridge, but I wondered if I might arrange a time when it would be convenient for you to answer a few of my own questions.'

'Like what?' asked Mrs Armstrong, waxing loquacious.

'Ah . . . well, for instance ... I would like to know when you last saw either of the Gra.s.sicks.'

She leaned a hip against the door jamb and thought about that. 'Mr Gra.s.sick was staying down here the weekend before the accident.'

'Just Mr Gra.s.sick? His wife wasn't with him?'

'No. She doesn't come down much this time of year.'

She straightened suddenly and pushed open the door behind her. 'You'd better come in.'

Buchanan hesitated for less than a millisecond. The postman would be there again on Monday, after all.

Mrs Armstrong took him into the sun room at the side of the house and, unfortunately, he was unable to signal to Fizz from there. However, he didn't plan to be more than two or three minutes so that didn't bother him unduly. He sat down on the end of a cane chaise-longue and carried on from where he had left off. And neither of the Gra.s.sicks ever came down midweek, I presume.'

'Now and then,' she said, perching opposite him and wriggling her way backwards into the bosomy cus.h.i.+ons as hedonistically as a cat. 'But, because our house faces the other way, I didn't always notice they were there. Sometimes I'd see them drive by when I was in Chirnside and think, oh they must be at the cottage today.' She lit a cigarette, making it a performance that wouldn't have got an under-fifteen certificate. 'Like the day of the accident.'

'You saw one of them in Chirnside on the day of the accident?' Buchanan slid to the edge of his seat, knocking a pile of magazines off the cus.h.i.+ons beside him.

'No,' she said. 'I told you, I hadn't seen either of them since the weekend before, but I saw the car that day, so one 212. of them must have been at Brora Lodge -or was on the way there.'

'Which way was it headed?' Buchanan asked.

'It wasn't going anywhere,' said Mrs Armstrong, extending the tip of a red tongue to moisten her lower lip. 'I got away from work early, like I did today, because business is so slack at this time of year. I'm a hairdresser, and the boss says it looks bad to have three of us sitting around the salon filing our nails. Anyway, I was driving home along the back road and I saw the car parked in the entrance to a field, up the road there.'

'What time was that?'

'About one o'clock. Maybe a little before that. Twelve-thirty, probably.'

'You didn't mention this to Mr Cambridge?'

'No.' She raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows. 'Should I have?'

Buchanan could scarcely believe it. 'You're quite sure it was Lawrence Gra.s.sick's car?'

'Oh, no,' she said blithely, tapping the ash from her cigarette. 'It wasn't his car. It was Vanessa's.' Fizz had started her a.n.a.lysis of the fallout secure in the

expectation that it would prove worthwhile. The certainty

that the police and the fire brigade had removed everything

of interest -a fact that was central to Buchanan's

opposition -really didn't count for a great deal. She might

find something the original searchers -who had had a

different objective -had ignored. It would be great if she

did but she was also hoping for something that would be

of a.s.sistance on a more subliminal level. The largely

mindless task concentrated her thoughts -or rather, it

disengaged them like transcendental meditation while, at

the same time, keeping them focused on Vanessa Gra.s.sick.

It wasn't the sort of thing you could explain to a man certainly not a man like Buchanan who was a Martian to

his toenails. 213. She could have done with a lot longer than fifteen minutes, of course. Five minutes into her search she was still thinking of other things while she rifled the shrubbery, raked under bushes, read sc.r.a.ps of paper, hunted down anything that might give her a name or a lead, however tenuous, to follow.

Buchanan had disappeared from her consciousness as though he had never been, leaving only the ghost of an expectation that he would tell her when it was time to go.

That was probably why, when the sound of a car engine penetrated her engrossment, she filed it under 'Buchanan'

instead of 'run for it'.

She was still making the most of the last few seconds of scrutiny remaining to her when a pair of very s.h.i.+ny black shoes appeared at the corner of her vision. This was totally in keeping with her expectations so she sat back, clawed her hair out of her eyes and looked up, with a horrible jolt, at Lawrence Gra.s.sick.

At the debate, where she had been enthralled by his rationalism, she had found him almost handsome but there was nothing appealing in the face that glared furiously down at her, nor did there remain a trace of his persuasive reasoning in the voice that barked, 'What are you looking for?'

Fizz was struck dumb with shock, her mind scrolling fast through a list of possible answers to his question: a contact lens, a four-leafed clover, frog sp.a.w.n, mushrooms, fossils, flatworms, badger tracks. . .

Feeling at a serious disadvantage, she stood up but even then he seemed to tower over her, blotting out the light.

His eyes narrowed on her face.

'I've seen you before,' he said. 'That's right. You were in the audience last week when I was speaking ... I saw you jumping up and down in your seat as if you were about to start throwing something at the panel, but you never opened your mouth.'

'Yes, that was me,' Fizz exclaimed, light-headed with 214. relief, and started gabbling nineteen to the dozen, steering him off down this unexpected avenue of escape. 'What a wonderful debate. I really really enjoyed it. And you spoke so compellingly that you totally changed my mind about the issue. In fact, I've decided I really must get more actively involved in social issues like that. If more people--'

He was only half listening to her and, as she twittered on, his eyes did a quick recce of the street. Luckily Buchanan's Saab was out of sight in the turning bay beyond the Armstrong house.

'Ah, yes,' he interrupted, in a swift return to the harsh voice he had used for his first remark. 'You're Tam Buchanan's little girl, the one Niall Menzies mentioned.

Helping your boss snuffle around in my private affairs, are you? Rooting for something to get his face in the papers again, eh? What d'you call that -work experience?'

'I'm not Tam Buchanan's little girl,' Fizz said, with a rush of blood to the head. She could see nothing of Buchanan and concluded that he was keeping a low profile. Lower than the nearest garden hedge, probably, and d.a.m.n right too. 'I'm n.o.body's "little girl". I'm--'

'Right,' Gra.s.sick snarled, supremely uninterested in who she claimed to be. Then I'll tell you what I told Buchanan: mind your own business! If I see you snooping around my property again I'll call the police and have you charged.'