Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

Mrs Burroughs had come into the bank with a cheque drawn on the account of a firm of solicitors for twelve thousand pounds. She didn’t explain its source but her manner was more high-handed than usual. Alan supposed it was a legacy and advised her not to put it in her deposit account but to open a new account under the Anglian-Victoria Treasure Trove scheme which gave a higher rate of interest. Mrs Burroughs said offendedly that she couldn’t possibly do that without consulting her husband. She would phone him at his office and come back at two.
    The idea of Mrs Burroughs, who lived in a huge house outside Childon and had a Scimitar car and a mink coat, acquiring still more wealth, depressed him so much that he broke his new rule and took the three thousand out of the safe while Joyce was busy talking about the price of beef with Mr Wolford. Strange to think, as he often did, that it was only paper, only pictures of the Queen and a dead Prime Minister and a sort of super-nurse, but that it could do so much, buy so much, buy happiness and freedom and peace and silence. He tore one of the portraits of Florence Nightingale in half just to see what it felt like to do that, and then he had to mend it with Sellotape.
    He heard Mr Wolford go. There was no one else in the bank now and it was nearly ten to one. Joyce might easily come into his office, so he put the money into a drawer and went out to the lavatory where there was a washbasin to wash the money dirt off his hands. It looked like more rain was coming, but he’d go out just the same, maybe up to Childon Fen where the first primroses would be coming out and the windflowers.
    Joyce was tidying up her till.
    â€˜Mr Groombridge, is this all right? Mr Wolford filled in the counterfoil and did the carbon for the bank copy. I don’t know why I never saw it. Shall I give him a ring?’
    Alan looked at the slip from the paying-in book. ‘No, that’s OK. So long as it’s come out clear and it has. I’m off to lunch now, Joyce.’
    â€˜Don’t get wet,’ said Joyce. ‘It’s going to pour. It’s come over ever so black.’
    He wondered if she speculated as to where he went. She couldn’t suppose he took the car just to the Childon Arms. But perhaps she didn’t notice whether he took the car or not. He walked out to it now, the back door locking automatically behind him, and got into the driving seat – and remembered that the three thousand pounds was still in his desk drawer.
    She wouldn’t open the drawer. But the thought of it there and not in the safe where it should have been, would spoil for him all the peace and seclusion of Childon Fen. After all, she knew his combination, if she still remembered it, just as he knew hers. Better put it away. He went back and into his office, pushed to but didn’t quite close the door into the bank, and softly opened the drawer.
    While he was doing so, at precisely one o’clock, Joyce came out from behind the metal grille, crossed the floor of the bank and came face to face with Marty Foster and Nigel Thaxby. They were between the open oak door and the closed glass door and each was trying to pull a black nylon stocking over his head. They hadn’t dared do this before they got into the porch, they had never rehearsed the procedure, and the stockings were wet because the threatening rain had come in a violent cascade during their progress from the van to the bank.
    Joyce didn’t scream. She let out a sort of hoarse shout and leapt for the glass door and the key that would lock it.
    Nigel would have turned and run then, for the stocking was only pulled grotesquely over his head like a cap, but Marty dropped his stocking and charged at the door, bursting it open so that Joyce stumbled back. He seized her and put his hand over her mouth and jammed the gun into her side and told her to shut up or she was dead.
    Nigel followed him in quite slowly. Already