Desperate Acts

Chapter Eight

EIGHT

As Gillian Budge had forewarned, Tobias Budge was in a very ornery mood. Which suited Cobb just fine.

"What about it? Can't a tavern-keeper spend fifteen minutes in his own wine-cellar?" Budge snarled across the bar at the constable who had so rudely interrupted his preparations for opening-time.

"It's the par-tick-ulars that interest me," Cobb said, his nostrils flaring eagerly as Budge carried on with bleeding a fresh keg of ale from Enoch Turner's brewery. "Yer good wife tells me she saw you go down there just as she was takin' a tray of drinks to the gents upstairs - a little before nine-thirty."

"She did, did she?"

"I got no reason not to believe her."

Budge scowled, bending his thick black brows into a pair of fearsome vees and repositioning the various platelets of his face. "Some ponce of a sea-captain come in here shortly before that an' demanded half a dozen bottles of chateau something or other for his crew, who'd trailed in behind him. I told him we didn't have any, but herself has to go an' give the game away."

"She ordered you to go down there and dig out a case?" Cobb prompted with some delight.

Budge's hairy-knuckled hands gripped the edge of the bar as if they were itching to rip it away and use it as a club on Cobb's noggin. "So I went downstairs an' she went up, leavin' that dolt Peck in charge of the bar."

"Because Etta was off sick again."

"Etta ain't got nothin' to do with this!"

"So you must've been in a hurry?"

"It's dark down there at the best of times. I rummaged about with a lantern, but couldn't find the French booze anywheres. By now the commotion above me's gettin' wild, so I pop my head out the taproom door, settle everybody down, an' holler at Peck. I hear Mrs. Budge comin' back from upstairs, so I figure she'll take over the bar an' keep Nestor from gettin' injured."

"Mrs. Budge reckons she come back down about a quarter to ten."

"Sounds about right. Anyways, I'm back lookin' for the wine an' cursin' that captain, when I happen to glance out the little window at the back."

Cobb tensed. "The one that looks out onto the alley?"

"Yeah. And I see two pair of trousers with legs attached - you c'n see nothin' above the waist from where I was - an' from the way they were scufflin' together, I figured I was seein' a couple of drunks pushin' an' shovin' each other."

"You must've heard somethin', bein' that close."

"Loud voices, mad as hell - but that's the way drunks are, ain't they?"

"You didn't think to try an' stop them?"

"Never crossed my mind. We get a dozen dust-ups around here every week."

"So you went back upstairs?"

"No. I knew the missus'd be livid - she's forever tellin' me to get all the stuff down there put in some order - so I went over to the other side an' kept lookin'."

"That would account fer the fact that yer missus thought you didn't come up till almost ten o'clock."

"She has too damn many thoughts, that woman."

"An' you found the wine?"

"No. I was gettin' set to come up empty-handed when I glance over at the window again - curious, I guess, about the drunks. I damn near dropped the lantern."