Free Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell

because he’s young ? So he had put the coins into a bag and for a brief instant, but long enough to register, seen the deformed finger close over it and scoop it into the palm of the hand.
    Suppose he had remembered sooner, this clue the police would seize on, would it have stopped him? He thought not. And now? Now he was in it as much as the man with the beard, the strange voice, the walnut fingernail.
    Some sort of meeting was in progress in the village hall at Capel St Paul, and among the cars parked in puddles on the village green were two Ford Escorts, a yellow and a silver-blue. The fifth key that Marty tried from his bunch unlocked the yellow one, but when he switched on the ignition he found there was only about a gallon of petrol in the tank. He gave that up and tried the silver-blue one. The tenth key fitted. The pointer on the gauge showed the tank nearly full. The tank of a Ford Escort holds about six gallons, so that would be all right. He drove off quickly, correctly guessing – wasn’t he a country lad himself? – that the meeting had begun at two and would go on till four.
    The van he had parked fifty yards up the road. They made Joyce get out at gunpoint and get into the Ford, and Marty drove the van down a lane and left it under some bushes at the side of a wood. There was about as much chance of anyone seeing them on a wet March afternoon in Capel St Paul as there would have been on the moon. Marty felt rather pleased with himself, his nervousness for a while allayed.
    â€˜We can’t leave her tied up when we get on the A12,’ he said. ‘There’s windows in the back of this motor. Right?’
    â€˜I do have eyes,’ said Nigel, and he climbed over the seat and undid Joyce’s hands and took the gags off her mouth and her eyes. Her face was stiff and marked with weals where the stockings had bitten into her flesh, but she swore at Nigel and she actually spat at him, something she had never in her life done to anyone before. He stuck the gun against her ribs and wiped the spittle off his cheek.
    â€˜You wouldn’t shoot me,’ said Joyce. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
    â€˜You ever heard the saying that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb? If we get caught we go inside for life anyway on account of we’ve killed Groombridge. That’s murder.’
    â€˜Get it, do you?’ said Marty. ‘They couldn’t do any more to us if we’d killed a hundred people, so we’re not going to jib at you, are we?’
    Joyce said nothing.
    â€˜What’s your name?’ said Nigel.
    Joyce said nothing.
    â€˜OK, Miss J. M. Culver, be like that, Jane, Jenny or whatever. I can’t introduce us,’ Nigel said loudly to make sure Marty got the message, ‘for obvious reasons.’
    â€˜Mr Groombridge’s got a wife and two children,’ said Joyce.
    â€˜Tough tit,’ said Nigel. ‘We’d have picked a bachelor if we’d known. If you gob at me again I’ll give you a bash round the face you won’t forget.’
    They turned on to the A12 at twenty-five past two, following the same route Alan Groombridge had taken twenty minutes before. There was little traffic, the rain was torrential, and Marty drove circumspectly, neither too fast nor too slowly, entering the fast lane only to overtake. By the time the police had set up one of their checkpoints on the Colchester bypass, stopping all cars and heavier vehicles, the Ford Escort was passing Witham, heading for Chelmsford.
    Joyce said, ‘If you put me out at Chelmsford I promise I won’t say a thing. I’ll hang about in Chelmsford and get something to eat, you can give me five pounds of what you’ve got there, and I won’t go to the police till the evening. I’ll tell them I lost my memory.’
    â€˜You’ve only got one shoe,’ said Marty.
    â€˜You can put me down outside a shoe shop. I’ll tell the