The Sculptress Part 34

He was curious.

"Will my opinion make a difference?"

"Probably."

"Why?"

"Because common sense tells me it would be a mad thing to do. It's miles from everyone I know, and it's expensive for what it is, a pokey little two up, two down. There must be better ways of investing my money." She studied his set face and wondered why her earlier offer to help had made him so hostile. He was a strange man, she thought. So very approachable as long as she steered clear of talking about the Poacher.

He looked past her towards the cliff-top where Mr. Richards was just visible, sitting on a rock and having a quiet smoke.

"Buy it," he said.

"You can afford it." His dark face broke into a smile.

"Live dangerously. Do what you've always wanted to do.

How did John Masefleld put it?

"I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied." So, live on your cliff by the sea and go beach combing with your dog. As I said, it sounds like paradise."

She smiled back, her dark eyes full of humour.

"But the trouble with paradise was that it was boring, which is why, when the one-eyed trouser-snake appeared, Eve was so d.a.m.n keen to bite into the apple of knowledge." He was a different man when he laughed.

She caught a glimpse of the Hal Hawksley, hail-fellow-well-met, boon companion, who could, were his tables ever full, preside with confident conviviality among them. She threw caution to the winds.

"I wish you'd let me help you. I'd be lonely here. And where's the sense in paying a fortune to be lonely on a cliff?"

His eyes veiled abruptly.

"You really are free with your money, aren't you? Exactly what are you suggesting? A buy-out?

A partners.h.i.+p? What?"

G.o.d, he was p.r.i.c.kly! And he had accused her of it once.

"Does it matter? I'm offering to bail you out of whatever mess you're in."

His eyes narrowed.

"The only certain thing you know about me, Roz, is that my restaurant is failing. Why would an intelligent woman want to throw good money after bad?"

Why indeed? She would never be able to explain it to her accountant whose idea of sensible living was minimum risk taking clean balance sheets, and tax advantageous pension plans. How would she even begin?

"There's this man, Charles, who reduces me to jelly every time I see him. But he's a d.a.m.n good cook and he loves his restaurant and there's no logical reason why it should be going down the pan. I keep trying to lend him money but he throws it back in my face every time."

Charles would have her certified. She swung her bag on to her shoulder.

"Forget I mentioned it," she said.

"It's obviously a sore nerve, though I can't imagine why."

She started to get up but he caught her wrist in a grip of iron and held her in her seat.

"Is this another set-up, Roz?"

She stared at him.

"You're hurting me." He released her abruptly.

"What are you talking about?" she asked, ma.s.saging her wrist.

"You came back." He rubbed his face vigorously with both hands as if he were in pain.

"Why the h.e.l.l do you keep coming back?"

She was incensed.

"Because you phoned," she said.

"I wouldn't have come if you hadn't phoned. G.o.d, you're arrogant. They come two a penny like you in London, you know."

His eyes narrowed dangerously.

"Then offer your money to them," he said, *and stop patronising me."

Tight-lipped, they took their leave of Mr. Richards with false promises of phoning the next day, and drove off up the narrow coast road towards Wareham. Hal, all too conscious of the darkening clouds and the reduction in speed that wet tarmac would enforce on him, concentrated on his driving. Roz, crushed by his hostility which, like a tropical storm, had blown out of nowhere, withdrew into hurt silence.

Hal had been gratuitously cruel, and knew it, but he was gripped by his own certainty that this trip had been engineered to get him out of the Poacher. And G.o.d was Roz good. She had every d.a.m.n thing: looks, humour, intellect, and just enough vulnerability to appeal to his stupid chivalry. But he had phoned her. Fool, Hawksley! She would have come back, anyway. Someone had to offer him the stinking money.

s.h.i.+t! He slammed his fist against the steering-wheel.

"Why did you want me to come with you?" he demanded into the silence.

"You're a free agent," she pointed out caustically.

"You didn't have to come."

It started to rain as they reached Wareham, slanting stair-rods that drove in through the open windows.

"Oh, great!" announced Roz, clutching her jacket about her throat.

"The perfect end to a perfect day. I'll be soaked. I should have come on my own in my own car. I could hardly have had less fun, could I?"

"Why didn't you then? Why drag me out on a wild-goose chase?"

"Believe it or not," she said icily, "I was trying to do you a favour.

I thought it would be good for you to escape for a couple of hours. I was wrong. You're even more touchy away from the place than you are in it." He took a corner too fast and threw her against the door, grazing her leather jacket against the buckled chromium window strip.

"For G.o.d's sake," she snapped crossly.

"This jacket cost me a fortune."

He pulled into the kerb with a screech of rubber.

"OK," he snarled, *let's see what we can do to protect it." He reached across her to take a book of road maps out of the dashboard pocket.

"What good will that do?"

"It will tell me where the nearest station is." He thumbed through the pages.

"There's one in Wareham and the line goes to Southampton. You can take a taxi back to your car at the other end." He fished out his wallet.

"That should be enough to pay your way." He dropped a twenty-pound note into her lap then swung the car on to the road again.

"It's off to the right at the next roundabout."

"You're a real sweetheart, Hawksley. Didn't your mother teach you any manners along with her little aphorisms about women and life?"

"Don't push your luck," he growled.

"I'm on a very short fuse at the moment and it doesn't take much to rile me. I spent five years of marriage being criticised for every d.a.m.n thing I did.

I'm not about to repeat the experience." He drew up in front of the station.

"Go home," he told her, wiping a weary hand across his damp face.

"I'm doing you a favour."

She put the twenty-pound note on the dashboard and reached for her handbag.

"Yes," she agreed mildly, "I think you probably are. If your wife stuck it out for five years, she must have been a saint." She pushed the door open on its screaming hinges and eased round it, then bent down to look through the window, thrusting her middle finger into the air.

"Go screw yourself, Sergeant. Presumably it's the only thing that gives you any pleasure. Let's face it, no one else could ever be good enough."

"Got it in one, Miss Leigh." He nodded a curt farewell, then spun the wheel in a U-turn. As he drove away the twenty pound note whipped like a bitter recrimination from the window and fell with the rain into the gutter.

Hal was cold and wet by the time he reached Dawlington, and his already evil temper was not improved to find her car still parked at the end of the alleyway where she had left it. He glanced past it, between the buildings, and saw that the back door of the Poacher stood ajar, the wood in splinters where a crowbar had been used to wrench it free of its frame. OH, Jesus! She had set him up. He knew a moment of total desolation he was not as immune as he thought himself -before the need to act took over.

He was too angry for common sense, too angry to take even elementary precautions. He ran on light feet, thrust the door wide and weighed in with flailing fists, punching, kicking, gouging, oblivious to the blows that landed on his arms and shoulders, intent only on causing maximum damage to the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who were destroying him.

Roz, arriving thirty minutes later with Hal's sodden twenty pound note clutched in one hand and a blistering letter of denunciation in the other, stared in disbelief at what she saw.

The kitchen looked like a scene from Beirut in the aftermath of war.

Deserted and destroyed. The table, upended, leant drunkenly against the oven, two of its legs wrenched free.

Chairs, in pieces, lay amongst shards of broken crockery and jagged gla.s.s. And the fudge, tilted forward and balanced precariously on its open door, had poured its contents across the quarry tiling in streams of milk and congealed stock. She held a trembling hand to her lips.

Here and there, splashes of bright red blood had tinged the spreading milk pink.

She looked wildly up the alleyway, but there was no one in sight. What to do?

"Hal!" she called, but her voice was little more than a whisper.

"Hal!" This time it rose out of control and, in the silence that followed, she thought she heard a sound from the other side of the swing doors into the restaurant. She stuffed the letter and the money into her pockets and reached inside the door for one of the table legs.

"I've called the police," she shouted, croaky with fear.

"They're on their way."

The door swung open and Hal emerged with a bottle of wine.

He nodded at the table leg.

"What are you planning to do with that?"

She let her arm fall.

"Have you gone mad? Did you do all this?"

"Am I likely to have done it?"

"Olive did." She stared about her.

"This is just what Olive did. Lost her temper and destroyed her room.

She had all her privileges taken away."

"You're babbling." He found a couple of gla.s.ses in an intact wall cupboard and filled them from the bottle.

"Here." His dark eyes watched her closely.

"Have you called the police?"

"No." Her teeth chattered against the wine gla.s.s.

"I thought if you were a burglar you'd run away. Your hand's bleeding."

"I know." He took the table leg away from her and put it on top of the oven, then pulled forward the only intact chair from behind the back door and pressed her into it.

"What were you going to do if the burglar ran out this way?"

"Hit him, I suppose." Her fear was beginning to subside.

"Is this what you thought I'd set you up for?"