A Guilty Thing Surprised

13

KATJE was nowhere to be seen and it was Quentin Nightingale himself who this time admitted Wex ford to the Manor. But Wexford sensed her recent presence in the austere study. He felt that she had been standing here with Quentin, in his arms, kissing him, then running away when the bell rang.

Quentin himself had an abstracted air the look of a lover dreaming of the past, impatient for ;he near future. Wexford’s news jolted him into unwelcome reality.

‘Every piece of jewellery Elizabeth had I bought for her,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got the receipts for most of it, if you’d care to see them.’

‘Later. First I should like to see the stones themselves again.’

Quentin removed the Stubbs, opened the safe. Then he lifted the jewels from their boxes in handfuls, letting them fall through his fingers, as a child on its first visit to the seaside sifts shells and stones, its pleasure mixed with astonishment at the unknown.

He picked out from the heap his dead wife’s engagement ring and took it to the window, but the growing dusk defeated him and, returning, he switched on the desk lamp.

‘My glasses,’ he said. ‘Just by your elbow. Would you mind?’

Wexford handed them to him.

‘This is a fake.’ There was a small quiver in Quentin’s voice. ‘This isn’t the ring I gave Elizabeth on our engagement.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Not because I’m an expert on precious stones. I shall have to find an expert to tell us for sure about the rest. Are there any to be found around here or should I get someone down from London?’

‘We can find someone here. You haven’t told me how you know that ring is false.’

Quentin said bitterly, ‘When I bought it for her I had some words engraved inside it.’ Taking the ring from him, Wexford knew he wasn’t going to be told what those words had been. ‘There’s nothing inside this one.’

‘No.’

Quentin sat down. With a rapid, almost reflex gesture, he pushed the sparkling heap away from him, knocking a rivière of diamonds—-diamonds or paste?-on to the carpet. It lay like a glittering snake at Wexford’s feet.

‘I suppose,’ Quentin said, ‘that they’re all copies. Perfect copies too, aren’t they? All but one. Exquisite facsimiles of the real thing- except one. She had the stone copied and the platinum copied but she didn’t bother to have the words copied because they meant nothing to her. How utterly indifferent she must have been to me ....'

Was it this indifference, finally and irrevocably brought home to him, that made Quentin’s mind up for him? Was it this knowledge that led him to take his new and perhaps reckless step? Much later, after the cast was over, Wexford often asked himself these questions. But on the following morning, returning to the Manor from the jeweller’s, he hadn’t given them a moment’s thought and the news came to him as a complete surprise.

Katje showed him into the drawing room and he was already unwrapping the brown paper from the jewel boxes as he followed her when he saw that Quentin wasn’t alone. Denys Villiers was with him, standing by the french windows and holding both Quentin’s hands in his. Wexford heard the tail end of what sounded like a speech.

‘... Anyway, my best congratulations, Quen. I couldn’t be more glad for you.’ Then Villiers saw Wexford. He dropped his brother-in-law’s hands and his face set arrogantly.

‘May I know what ground there is for congratulation, sir?’

Villiers shrugged and turned his back, but Quentin, flushing, put out a hand to Katje and the girl ran to him.

‘Perhaps I’m indiscreet to tell you, Chief Inspector. You might read so much into this.’ Villiers made a faint derisive sound. ‘I’d like it kept secret for the time being,’ Quentin said. ‘Katje and I are going to be married.’

Wexford put down his parcel. ‘Indeed?’ he said. They looked like father and daughter standing there. There was even a slight resemblance between them, the family likeness apparent between any two people belonging to the classic north European type. ‘Then let me congratulate you also,’ he said, and again he apologised silently to Burden, whose ideas had perhaps been not so oldfashioned after all.

‘Naturally, we shall wait six months. A year might be more ...’

‘But I am not waiting a whole year, Kventin. Half a year perhaps. It is not fair if you are making me wait a whole year for my flat in London and my new fast sports car and my going all round the world for my honeymoon.’

So she was a gold-digger, after all. Wexford thought sadly. He had been wrong. These days it seemed that he was always wrong.

‘Now I should like to see you alone, sir,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course.’

Abruptly Villiers threw open the french windows and walked out of the room. Casting a dazzling smile over her shoulder, Katje followed him to pause on the lawn and survey everything around her with frank concupiscence.

‘She’ll go home to her parents until the wedding,’ Quentin said, and earnestly, ‘I want everything to be right. I want-what is it Antony says?

“Read not my blemishes in the world’s report. I have not kept my square.”

‘ ‘‘But that to come,” ‘ Wexford capped it, ‘ “shall all be done by the rule.” ‘ I daresay, he thought, I daresay. But what of ‘that to come’ for her? Such a long future, so much money, such idleness for temptations to gain ground in. She was the last for him and he perhaps only one of the first for her. Would they dine at the Olive sometimes and be served by a waiter who had once romped with this lady of the Manor in the coverts of Cheriton Forest? Poor Kventin, Wexford thought, aping her accent. He was no longer to be envied. It was a nice game he was playing, a game which had once seemed enticing to Wexford. But not any more, not on those terms, for it wasn’t worth the exorbitant price of the candle.

‘The jewellery,’ he said laconically, ‘is all fake. I took it to an old jeweller in Queen Street. He’s helped me in the past and he’s absolutely reliable. If he says it’s fake, it’s fake. She must have sold what you bought her and had exact copies made.’

‘But why, Chief Inspector? I gave her all the money she could possibly have needed. If she wanted more she had only to ask. She knew that.’

‘Would you have given her thirty thousand pounds?’ ‘I’m not a millionaire, Mr Wexford.’ Quentin sighed, bit his lip. ‘The jewellery was hers to do as she liked with. She chose to sell it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter why.’ He met Wexford’s eyes pleadingly. ‘I’d like to forget the whole thing.’

‘It isn’t as simple as that.’ Wexford sat down, rather imperiously motioning his host to sit down too. ‘Your wife sold her jewellery because she needed money. Now it’s my turn to ask why. Why did she need money, Mr Nightingale, and what did she do with it? We know she spent it. Her bank account was overdrawn. Where did the money go?’

Quentin shrugged unhappily. ‘She was generous. Perhaps she gave it to charity.’

‘Thirty thousand pounds? And why keep it dark from you? No, Mr Nightingale, I think your wife was blackmailed.’

Quentin leaned forward, frowning his bewilderment. ‘But that’s impossible! People are only blackmailed when they’ve done something against the law. My wife was ...’

He waved a helpless hand, encompassing the room. Wexford understood what he was trying to put into words, that the woman who had reigned here had been entirely cushioned by her position and her wealth from the squalor of criminal temptation. We aren’t of that class, his eyes said, of that seamy underworld. Haven’t you realised yet that we are only a little lower than the angels?

‘It need not necessarily have been some offence against the law,’ said Wexford quietly, ‘but against morality.’

Puzzled, Quentin seemed to consider. Then his brow cleared. ‘You mean she might have been unfaithful to me and someone found it out?’

‘Something of that kind, sir.’

‘No, Mr Wexford, you’re on the wrong track. I wasn’t that kind of husband either. Whatever my wife had done I would have forgiven her, and she knew it. We discussed the subject soon after we were married, as young couples do. Elizabeth asked me for my views. It was an academic question, you understand, a matter of seeking to know me better. We were-we were very much in love in those days.’

‘And what was your answer?’

‘That if she ever came to me and told me she hadthat there had been someone else, I would never blame her, certainly not divorce her. Not as long as she came to me and confided in me. I told her that I believed forgiveness to be a part of love, and that in such circumstances, when she was unhappy, she would need me most. And I would expect her to do the same by me if the need arose. I would never have divorced her. She was my wife, and even when we grew so terribly apart I still believed that marriage was for ever.’

A nice man, Wexford thought, his usual cynicism for a moment in abeyance, a kind and eminently civilised person. Cynicism returned. An ideal husband, or a man fate had designed for women to take for a ride? It was, he reflected, a good thing Quentin Nightingale had formed such admirable principles during his first marriage as he would certainly have to put them into practice during his second.

‘There are some things,’ he said, ‘which cannot be forgiven.’

Illustrations came into his mind, examples from his long experience of wrongdoers. There was the woman who had taken her husband back a dozen times after his terms of imprisonment for theft, but had refused ever to see him again when he had been convicted for indecent exposure. Or the man who had borne his wife’s infidelity for twenty years but when she was caught shoplifting had repudiated her.

‘You’re an intelligent broad-minded man,’ he said at last, ‘but you’re very conventional. I wonder if you really know yourself. You know what pleases you, but do you know what would disgust you?’

‘Nothing Elizabeth could have done,’ Quentin said obstinately.

‘Perhaps not, but she believed it would have disgusted you, believed it so firmly that she was prepared to pay thirty thousand pounds to keep it from you.’

‘If you say so,’ Quentin said helplessly. ‘Who could she ever have known that would extort money from her?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me that. A servant?’

‘Mrs Cantrip who has been devoted to us for sixteen years? Old Will who is respect itself? Sean who worshipped the very ground she walked on? You see yourself how absurd this is. Why should it be a servant, anyway?’

‘It’s more unlikely that it was one of her friends, isn’t it, sir? A servant who lived in this house would have access to private papers, might have been an eye witness, might have discovered photographs.’

‘Evidence of infidelity? I tell you, she knew I’d have understood. I’d have overlooked it, however much it hurt.’

Wexford stared at him, hardly able to contain his impatience. The man didn’t know what life was. He spoke of infidelity as if it was always a straightforward and temporary preference for someone else, a matter of temptation, of love and of subsequent guilt. He was innocent. But Wexford wasn’t. He had seen the letters even the most elevated and cultured lovers write to each other, the photographs elegant and fastidious women revel in posing for. Thirty thousand pounds might not be too great a price to pay to keep them from a husband’s eye.

‘You had a series of au pair girls, you told me.’

‘Ordinary young girls,’ Quentin said. ‘Quite straightforward and happy to be here. They adored Elizabeth.’

Just like Katje did?

‘Before the girls came,’ said Wexford, ‘you had a married couple. What was the name again?’

‘Twohey,’ said Quentin Nightingale.

The small white cottage was being scoured from top to bottom. When Wexford arrived, Mrs Cantrip abandoned the cleaning that had necessarily to be done on a Saturday, and sat down with the ginger cat in her lap.

The room smelt strongly of polish and mothballs.

‘Twohey, sir?’ she said. ‘Mr Nightingale dismissed him for insolence. He never showed a proper respect, not from the start, and he never did a fair day’s work, as far as I could see. Always hanging about where he wasn’t supposed to be, snooping and listening, if you know what I mean.’

‘And that was why he was sacked?’

The cat slithered to the floor and began sharpening its claws against a table leg. ‘Stop that, Ginger,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘Well, things came to a head, sir, and that’s a fact. A couple of weeks before he was sacked he got so disrespectful to Madam it was past bearing, and Madam always so gentle and never standing up for herself.’ She picked up the cat and dropped it out of the window among the zinnias and dahlias. ‘She caught him helping himself to Mr Nightingale’s whisky, and when she spoke to him about it, he said, “There’s plenty more where that came from,” if you’ve ever heard the like.’

‘And his wife?’

‘She wasn’t so bad. Under his thumb, if èhe truth were known. She took quite a fancy to me. Sent me a Christmas card two years running.’

‘You know their address, then?’ Wexford asked urgently.

‘I never wrote back, sir,’ said Mrs Cantrip, bristling a little with indignation. ‘They weren’t the kind of folks I’d care to associate with. I did notice the first one had a Newcastle postmark.’

‘Did they continue in service?’

‘That I wouldn’t know, sir. Twohey was always bragging and boasting, and he did say he was sick of the life. Going to set himself up in a hardware business, he said, but Mrs Twohey said to me, out of his hearing like, that it was all castles in the air. Where would they get the capital, sir? They hadn’t a penny to bless themselves and that’s a fact.’

Having left Sergeant Martin to begin the search for Twohey, Wexford drove down Tabard Road and parked in front of a bungalow whose pink front door matched the geraniums in its garden. Two children sat on a groundsheet on the lawn, but at opposite ends of it, as if they had put as much space between them as was consistent with their mother’s rule about not sitting on damp grass. The boy was cleaning paint brushes, the girl transferring caterpillars from a glass jar into a collection of matchboxes.

Wexford greeted them cheerfully, then strolled up to their father who was painting his garage doors. He noted with an inward chuckle that Burden looked anything but pleased to see him.

‘Carry on painting,’ said Wexford. ‘I like watching other people work. You needn’t look so worried. I only want you to lend an ear while I talk.’ And he told Burden about the jewellery and about Twohey.

Behind them the children, who had been silent since Wexford’s arrival, began a soft though fierce bickering.

‘I was wondering if what this Twohey found out was the secret of Villiers’ and Mrs Nightingale’s intense dislike of each other. There’s no doubt Nightingale is very attached to Villiers, and if he found out his wife had once done her brother some dreadful injury ...’

‘But what dreadful injury, sir?’ Burden dipped his brush into the paint, scraping the bottom of the tin. ‘Look at my two,’ he said bitterly. ‘They really seem to hate each other and there’s no cause for it, as far as I can see. They’ve been like cat and dog ever since John was a toddler and Pat in her pram.’

‘It’ll be different when they’re grown up.’

‘But will it? Why shouldn’t the Villiers-Nightingale case be a parallel?

Apparently you get these cases of brothers and sisters who are absolutely incompatible.’

‘They were separated,’ Wexford said. ‘They never had a chance to adjust to each other in the late teens and early twenties. If you separated Pat and John, then they might turn out like Villiers and Elizabeth, because one or other of them might let an old grievance smoulder. Your two will grow more tolerant from daily contact.’

'I don’t know,’ said Burden. ‘Sometimes I think of sending one of them away to boarding school.’

‘But you can see that separation doesn’t work, Mike.’ Wexford sat down on the short stepladder. ‘I wonder if it’s possible that Twohey killed her himself? If it was he she met in the forest and he killed her when she told him her source of supply had come to an end?’

‘Then how,’ Burden objected, ‘did he get hold of the torch? He was the last person to have access to the garden room at the Manor.’

‘True. Now, let’s see. Our case against Georgina falls to the ground because now we know Georgina had no motive. Villiers remains a possibility. He could have killed her because, her money having come to an end, she told him she would reveal everything to Nightingale. That bloody secret, whatever it was. Sean could have killed her because he saw her with another man.’

‘No, sir. We know it was premeditated. The killer took the torch with him.’

Burden placed his brush on his paint rag and turned the now empty tin upside down. ‘John!’ he called, then, ‘John!’ more loudly to make his voice heard above the quarrelling. ‘Go into the shed, will you, and fetch me another tin of pink?’

‘I can’t. It’s pitch dark in there and the bulb’s gone.’

‘Well, take a torch, then. Don’t be so feeble, and leave your sister’s things alone.’

‘Encouraging garden pests,’ said John scathingly. He got up with a sigh, trailed into the open garage and reached up for a torch which stood on a high shelf.

Wexford watched him, saying slowly, ‘Of course. Why didn’t I think of it before? We realised almost from the first that when you’re going into a place that you know will be dark you take a torch with you. But you take your own torch, don’t you? Everyone owns a torch. John knew exactly where his torch was and he fetched it as a matter of course. We’ve been daft, Mike. We thought of someone going to the Manor and taking the Nightingales’ torch. But why should they? What possible purpose could there be in going out of your way in securing a weapon that was the property of the woman you intended to kill? Why not bring your own?’

‘But the murderer didn’t bring his own,’ Burden objected. He struck his forehead with the flat of his hand, leaving a broad pink smear. ‘No, I’m being stupid. You mean that, if we exclude Nightingale himself, the only possible person to have taken that torch into the wood was Elizabeth herself?’

‘That’s what I mean. And you know what else it means? No one would choose a torch as a murder weapon if there was anything else to hand. Therefore, no one planned this murder. The killer premeditated nothing. He (or she) was overcome by an impulse of the moment and struck Elizabeth Nightingale with the torch she herself had brought with her.’

Burden nodded gravely. ‘She brought it,’ he agreed, ‘but someone else put it back.’

And, Wexford asked himself, how did Villiers know the jewels were fakes?