So Close and No Closer

‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Rue told her, struggling to sit up. ‘What I need is the telephone so I can report Neil to the police. When I heard those shots this morning…’ She drew a ragged breath while Hannah gave her a concerned and disquieted look.

‘I’d better go down and let the doctor in.’ At the door she hesitated. ‘Rue…I think you should talk to Neil. He can’t have shot Horatio.’ She broke off as the front door bell clanged.

‘You can believe what you like, Hannah,’ Rue told her aggressively, ‘but you won’t convince me…’

The doorbell clanged again, and with another concerned look at her friend Hannah hurried downstairs.

It was quite some time before she came back with the doctor, and Rue looked at them both suspiciously, wondering what she had told him. Probably that

she was off her head, she thought bitterly. It was plain that Hannah was never going to believe that Neil Saxton was responsible for Horatio’s wound.

It wasn’t Dr Kendrick, whom Rue had known since she was a child, but one of his partners, a brusque Scot with sandy hair and sharp pale blue eyes, and firm fingers that registered her racing pulse and overwrought state while he listened to Hannah’s brief explanation of how she and Neil had discovered Rue staggering back to the house carrying Horatio.

‘Neil…Mr Saxton has taken the dog to the vet. He said he thought it was just a flesh wound, and that Horatio would be all right,’ she added for Rue’s benefit.

A fit of trembling seized Rue and, for no reason she could think of, tears suddenly started to pour down her face.

‘Shock,’ she heard the doctor pronounce, his voice fading as he added quietly, ‘I think she’s going to faint again.’

This time, when she came round, two pairs of eyes were watching her, Hannah’s anxious, and the doctor’s assessing. She had no right to be lying here like this, Rue thought fretfully; she ought to be on the telephone to the police, reporting Neil’s crime.

She heard the doctor say something about ‘exhaustion’ and opened her mouth to deny it, but a horrid weakness seemed to have invaded her, and when he asked Hannah to fetch a glass of water and handed Rue a tablet, she found that somehow or other she was swallowing it. A very short time after that, or so it seemed, she was floating weightlessly into a warm void where her aches and pains vanished completely.

CHAPTER SEVEN

RUE woke up abruptly to find her room in pitch darkness and the door closed. She normally left it open and the lights on in the hall downstairs, a habit she had fallen into when she first started living alone.

She half stumbled and half fell out of bed, her body a mass of aches, especially her arms. Her mouth felt dry—a legacy of the drug the doctor had given her.

As she went towards the light-switch she heard a familiar whimper, and her eyes, accustoming themselves to the dark now, picked out the shape of Horatio’s basket.

Shakily she switched on the light and then crouched down on the floor beside the dog. The wound had been attended to and cleaned, the bare patch of flesh gleaming pinkly against his dark fur. His tail thumped ecstatically on the floor. Rue put her arms round the dog and hugged him, whispering his name.

The bedroom door opened and she froze, hugging the dog protectively towards her as she saw Neil standing there.

From where she was kneeling on the floor, he seemed to tower over her; the dark robe he was wearing revealed a long and very muscular length of leg, instinct telling her that beneath the robe he was naked. She, in contrast, was wearing her underwear, with a nightshirt over the top, and she had a vague memory of Hannah helping her into it, so vague and clouded that she wasn’t sure whether it had been reality or a dream.

‘I heard you moving about,’ Neil told her, as calmly as though there was nothing untoward in him appearing in her bedroom without invitation looking as though he had just got out of bed, his dark hair tousled and untidy. ‘I thought I’d better come and reassure you about Horatio. The vet checked him over very thoroughly. Whoever shot him wasn’t very accurate. Apart from a flesh wound and shock, he was all right.’

Rue could hardly believe what she was hearing.

‘Did you tell the vet that you were the one who shot him?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Because I certainly intend to…and the police.’ She started to shake. ‘Get out of here! Get out of my house.’ Her hand tightened on Horatio’s collar and he whined softly sensing her tension.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Neil interrupted her curtly. ‘For goodness’ sake, you don’t really believe I shot him, do you?’

He broke off as he saw her face. Rue stared back at him resolutely and demanded shakily, ‘Didn’t you?’

‘No, I damn well did not.’ He was angry now, almost as angry as she was herself, she recognised, and a tiny sliver of doubt touched her like a cold dart of ice. What if she was wrong? But she couldn’t be.

‘Hannah said you heard shots. What time, can you remember?’ he pressed her.

He was trying to trap her, Rue thought. ‘It was about nine o’clock. The news was on.’

‘For your information, at nine o’clock this morning I had a meeting with my accountants in Cambridge. A fact which I am sure they will be delighted to confirm for you.’

Rue didn’t want to believe him. She wanted to protest that a man as rich and powerful as he was could force his accountants to lie to her, but she knew that it wasn’t true, just as she knew from the way he was looking at her that she had been wrong.

A horrible hollow feeling inside her chest seemed to cause her heart literally to drop.