Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

‘and me too when Will comes home. When he knows about the baby, he’ll beat the rest out of her; and then God help you and me too.’
    ‘The baby could be Jimmy Green’s,’ I said. ‘Or Bill Bray’s. She’s been out with them, too.’
    ‘That’s her tales,’ he said, ‘to make you jealous. They’re a sight too scared of Will to let Lydia make up to them. And so ought you and I to have been too, if we’d had any sense.’ Only where Lydia was concerned, there never seemed to be time to have sense; and six months ago, Fred said, Black Will’s return had seemed like an aeon away. ‘So what are you going to do?’ I said.
    ‘What are you going to do?’ he said. ‘A hit-and-run driver—you can get a long stretch for that. The kid wasn’t dead yet, when they found him.’
    Good old brotherly love!—Fred worrying about me, when after all I had pinched his girl. And him in such trouble himself.
    We went out in the car, where no one could hear us: our old landlady’s pretty deaf and takes no interest at all in our comings and goings, but Fred wasn’t taking no chances…
    Because it was all Fred’s idea: that I will say, and stick to it—it was Fred’s idea. Dead men tell no tales, said Fred; nor dead girls, neither. ‘If they find she’s in the family way—it’s like you said, she was spreading it around she’d been going with half the village. Once she was past talking, Will couldn’t pin it on us two: not to be certain.’
    ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.
    ‘She’d be past talking about the hit-and-run, too,’ he said. ‘You say she’s sore about that. She won’t tell now, because it means admitting she was joy-riding with you; but once Black Will gets it out of her that she was—and he will—then she’ll tell about the accident too; it’ll make her feel easier.’
    ‘So what do you suggest?’ I said. ‘ I’m not killing the girl, I can tell you that, flat.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that. You’ve done one killing,’ he said, not too pleasantly, I thought, ‘that’ll do for you. All I want from you now is an alibi.’
    ‘What, me alibi you?’ I said. ‘No one’d believe it for a minute. One twin speaking up for another—the whole village would testify how “close” we are.’ (The whole village not knowing anything about us and Lydia.)
    But Fred had thought of all that too. If a straight alibi failed, he said, there were other ways of playing it. He had it all worked out—suspiciously well worked out, I ought to have thought; but he gave me no time for thinking. ‘It won’t come to any alibi, our names probably won’t even come into it—as you say, the baby could be fathered on half the male population of Birdswell. But if it does—well, you alibi for me, I alibi for you; they’ll know it was one of us, but they’ll never know which of us; and if they don’t know which of us, they’ll have to let both of us go.’
    ‘And Black Will?’ I said. ‘When we’ve not only seduced his wife, but murdered her—which one of us will he let go?’
    ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we’d have to clear out anyway, if it got as far as that: start again somewhere else. But the chances are a hundred to one it’ll never come to it. After all, no one suspected you of the hit-and-run affair.’
    He kept coming back to that: and sort of—nastily. I didn’t forget that I’d done him wrong, pinching his girl. But that was his lever, really: while he kept reminding me, he could pretty well force me to go in with him—he was in trouble, but I was in trouble deeper.
    So we worked it out: we worked out everything, to the last detail. This was Tuesday, we’d do it Thursday night. I’d see nothing more of the girl; but he’d get her to go driving with him on pretence of talking over the baby business. And he’d lead round to the accident, advising her, maybe, to confess to the police it was me; and drive past where it happened. And get her to get out of the car and show him