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

ear. The forward end of it was higher, and only there was the skin slightly broken in one spot. She parted the thick dark hair to examine the mark carefully.
    “I’m not a doctor, or even a nurse. But unless you’ve got a table with padded edges, it certainly wasn’t the table that did this. If you’d hit any sharp edge you’d have had a considerable cut.”
    “There’s an old wooden-framed chair with leather upholstery,” he said indistinctly from under the fall of tangled hair. “It was close by the table, on my right. Not the overstuffed kind, you’d feel the wood underneath, all right, if you fell on it. It could have been the back of that.”
    “It could… but you’d have had to fall sideways… or else to turn your head sharply as you fell. You’ve got a diagonal welt, like this…” She drew her fingers along it, and their course ended decidedly behind his ear. “It looks to me much more the kind of mark you’d have if someone had come up behind you and hit you one nice, scientific tap to put you out for the count. And somebody who knew how to go about it, and had the right sort of tool for the job.” She smoothed back his hair over the tender place, and came round the arm of the couch to face him. “Maybe a piece of lead piping inside a sock,” she said. She was smiling, faintly but positively. “Or more likely the simplest thing of all, a rubber cosh.”
    He fingered his bruise and gaped at her dazedly. “But it’s mad! If you’re thinking of a common burglary, there wasn’t a thing in the place worth a man’s while. Nobody’d be bothered burgling a cottage belonging to the likes of Bill and me, why should they? They always seem to know where the right stuff is. And if you mean something less accidental… if you’re thinking I might have some sort of connection with crooks… I swear I haven’t. I’ve never had anything to do with anybody like that. Not out of virtue, or anything, they just never came my way.”
    “You’ve got something there,” she agreed. “The people who carry coshes are much the same sort of people who carry guns.” She added pointedly: “Pippa had a gun.
You
hadn’t any acquaintance among the pros., but how do you know
she
hadn’t?”
    After a long moment of hurried calculation, swinging hurtfully between his anxiety to grasp at this life-line and his terror of finding it gossamer, he asked very quietly, his eyes clinging desperately to her face: “Bunty… do you really believe what you’re saying? You wouldn’t try to… soothe me, would you? Just out of kindness?”
    “No,” she said sturdily, “I wouldn’t. I’m only saying what I mean.”
    “Then… what
do
you think happened?”
    “I think someone else walked into that room—and I’ll back my judgment by betting you what you like that you had your back to the door and Pippa was facing it— laid you out economically with a knock on the head, and then dealt with Pippa. For some reason of his own, which we don’t know. As evidence for her having got involved in something in which she was out of her depth, there’s the gun. As you say, what would such a girl as Pippa want with a gun? Where would she get one? It’s the pros, and the would-be pros, who carry them. So there was Pippa dead, and you beautifully set up to take the blame. So beautifully that you yourself believed you’d killed her. That’s the lines on which I’m thinking at this moment. But as yet we’ve hardly begun.”
    “Then in any case it looks as if I’ve cut my own throat, doesn’t it?” he said with a lopsided grin. “I’ve run out and pointed the finger at myself. What do I do now? Who’s ever going to believe I can possibly be innocent?”
    “They might,” said Bunty. “
I
believe it.”
    “Ah,
you
!”
    She saw it in his eyes then, though she was too intent on the matter in hand to pay much attention, that for him she had become a creature immeasurably marvellous and unforeseen. But he didn’t expect