A Guilty Thing Surprised

14

WEXFORD walked to church with his wife and left her at the gate. Without any religious feeling himself, he sometimes went to morning service to please her. Today his office called him as peremptorily as the church bells had called her, but with a silent beckoning finger.

Burden was already there, busy at the phone, setting in motion the search for Twohey.

‘Born in Dublin about fifty years ago,’ Wexford heard him say. ‘Dark, Irish-looking, small eyes, cyst at the left corner of his mouth unless he’s had it removed. One conviction, fraudulent conversion while he was a hotel manager in Manchester in 1954. That’s right, could be in your Newcastle or Newcastle under Lyme. Keep in touch.’ He put the receiver down and grinned wryly at his superior.

‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ Wexford said when Burden handed him a photograph of the man he had described. ‘I thought I told you to take last evening off and finish your painting?’

‘I have finished it. Anyway, I didn’t do my homework last night, but I was up bright and early this morning. I’ve been having a conference with Mrs Cantrip.’

‘Has she any idea how the money was paid over to Twohey?’

Burden closed the window. He didn’t care for the sound of the bells. ‘It was all news to her. I don’t think she really took it in. Her Mrs Nightingale being blackmailed!’

‘She’d never heard of such a thing,’ said Wexford with a grin, ‘and that’s a fact?’

‘Something like that. She’s sure Twohey isn’t in the neighbourhood because if he was his wife would have come to see her.’

Wexford shrugged. Burden had planted himself in the solidly built swivel chair, so there was no help for it but to settle for one of the flimsier seats. He glared at the inspector and said coldly, ‘Why should he be in the neighbourhood?’

‘Because maybe it was him,’ Burden said ungrammatically, ‘that Mrs Nightingale met in the forest.’

‘It’s blackmailers that get killed, not their victims.’

‘Suppose she told him her source had dried up? He might have killed her in a rage. We know it wasn’t premeditated, don’t we? Thank goodness those bells have stopped.’ He opened the window again, raising the blind so that the sun streamed into Wexford’s eyes. Wexford shifted his chair irritably.

‘Or Sean Lovell might have seen them together and mistaken the reason for their meeting and ...’

‘So you’re coming round to young Lovell yourself now, are you?’

‘I’ve felt differently about him since he told me he took a knife to his mother when he was a young lad and saw her with one of her men. Besides, there’s the money he gets. I bet she told him she was leaving him all her money and she might not have said how much. He’d have thought it was a hell of a lot more than it was.’

‘Come off it, Mike. He either killed her from jealousy or he killed her for gain. The two don’t go together.’ Wexford got up. ‘Well, I’m off to stand Lionel Marriott a drink in the Olive.’

Burden picked up the phone once more. ‘Very nice,’ he said distantly. ‘I’m sorry I’m too busy to join you.’

‘Wait till you’re asked,’ Wexford snapped. Then he chuckled. ‘ “Blessed is he,” Mike, “that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful.” ‘

‘Well, it’s your seat, sir,’ said Burden blandly.

It was funny the way Burden seemed to have taken over everything these days, Wexford thought as he hung over the Kingsbrook Bridge, waiting for the Olive and Dove to open and for Marriott to come. When he looked back on the past week’s investigations it seemed to him that Burden had done most of the enquiries while he had sat listening to Marriott’s stories. Perhaps he was exaggerating. But Burden was certainly proving to be right in his theories. About the lack of premeditation, for instance, and Katje wanting to marry Nightingale and Georgina Villiers being just a nice ordinary woman. Soon, no doubt, he would have a theory as to the secret and another to account for Sean’s non-existent alibi. He dropped a chipping from the bridge parapet into the water. Our young men shall see visions, he thought, and our old men shall dream dreams ....

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Marriott, tapping him on the shoulder.

‘I was thinking I’m getting old, Lionel.’

‘But you’re the same age as I am!’

‘A little younger, I think,’ said Wexford gently. ‘It’s just struck me, this case is full of people who are too old for other people. It reminds me that I’m older than the lot of them.’ He looked up at the serene Sussex sky, cloudless and brilliant. ‘An old man in a dry month,’ he said. ‘An old man on a dry case ...’

‘The Olive won’t be dry,’ said Marriott. ‘Come on, Gerontius, let’s have that drink.’

On sunny days the patrons of the Olive could have their drinks at tables in the garden. It was a dusty little garden, rather arid, but Wexford and Marriott, like most Englishmen, felt it almost a duty to sit outside when the sun shone, for fine weather came so seldom and lasted so short a time.

‘But I’ve told you the whole story, Reg,’ Marriott said. ‘There isn’t any more.’

‘That from you?’

‘I’m afraid so, unless you want me to embroider it with my own ideas.’

Wexford picked a leaf out of his drink and looked irritably up into the tree from which it had fallen. He said sharply, ‘Do you think it possible that Villiers is homosexual?’

‘Oh, my dear, I shouldn’t think so.’

‘And yet you say he had no women friends between his marriages.’

‘He didn’t have any men friends either.’

‘No? What about Quentin Nightingale?’

‘Quentin certainly isn’t. I’ve a shrewd suspicion he’s chasing that little Dutch girl. Gone overboard for her, if you ask me. I grant you Denys’s feelings for his wives have only been lukewarm, but Quen was in love with Elizabeth when he met her and now he’s in love again.’

Wexford wasn’t going to betray Nightingale’s confidence even by a nod of agreement. ‘I wondered,’ he said, ‘if Elizabeth knew her brother was homosexual and hated him for it but was prepared to go to considerable lengths to keep it dark.’

‘I don’t see why she’d get murdered for that.’

Finishing his drink, Wexford decided not to breathe a word to Marriott about the blackmail payments. ‘No, it’s more likely she was seen in the forest with a man and the person who saw her killed her.’

He added thoughtfully, ‘ “My little songbird, the only true Nightingale in Myfleet.” ‘

In an eager helpful voice, Marriott said, ‘Perhaps he’s Quen’s natural child. Will Palmer’s always going about saying “he never had no father”.

How about that?’

‘What have you been reading?’ Wexford snapped. ‘Mrs Henry Wood? The Marriage of Figaro?’

‘Sorry. It was just an idea.’

‘And a very poor one. You may be a good teacher of English, Lionel, but you’re a rotten detective.’ Wexford smiled ruefully. ‘Even worse than me,’he said, and he got up, wondering what Burden had found out in his absence.

Marriott remained sitting at the table for a moment but he caught Wexford up just as the chief inspector was crossing the bridge.

‘I’ve remembered something,’ he said, out of breath. ‘Elizabeth used to send a hell of a lot of parcels. Smallish brown-paper parcels. Often, when I’ve been up there in the daytime, I’ve seen a parcel on the hall table, but there was always a letter or two waiting for the post on top of it. Any use to you?’

‘I don’t know, but thanks all the sarne.’

‘You’re welcome, my dear,’ said Marriott, turning to leave him. He looked back over his shoulder and added rather wistfully, ‘Don’t drop me, Reg, now you’ve squeezed me dry.’

‘Even a copper needs friends,’ said Wexford, and then he walked back up the High Street to the police station.

Burden was sitting at the rosewood desk eating a sandwich lunch.

‘Clear out of it,’ said Wexford crossly. ‘You’re making crumbs on my blotter.’

‘You always make crumbs.’

‘Maybe, but it’s my blotter and, incidentally, my office.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Burden virtuously. ‘I thought you’d gone on a pub crawl.’

Wexford gave an ill-tempered snort. He blew away the crumbs and sat down with dignity. ‘Any news?’

‘Not yet. No dice from either of the Newcastles. I’ve been on to Dublin.’

‘You’re wrong about one thing, Mike. Twohey didn’t meet Mrs Nightingale in any forest. She sent his money to him in parcels. I don’t know to what address but we could try asking Katje.’

Burden compressed his lips into a thin line.

‘You’ve had your lunch,’ said Wexford, ‘so I suggest you get over there now.’

Burden groaned. ‘Do I have to?’ he said in an almost schoolboy voice, in the voice of his son.

‘Are you joking?’ Wexford roared. ‘Are you out of your mind? She won’t eat you.’

‘It’s not being eaten that I’m scared of,’ said Burden. He screwed up his lunch paper, dropped it in the basket and went out, giving Wexford a glance of mock dismay.

There was nothing more for him to do now, Wexford reflected, but wait. He sent Bryant to the canteen to fetch him some lunch and after he had eaten it a great weariness overcame him. He decided to read to keep himself awake and, since the only reading matter he had to hand apart from a heap of reports he knew by heart was the book Denys Villiers had given him, he read that. Or, to put it more accurately, he read the first three paragraphs, only to nod off and nearly jump out of his skin when the phone bell shrilled.

‘Try hardware shops,’ he told his caller tiredly. ‘Especially those which have changed hands in the past four years. He may have changed his name.’

With a spark of inspiration, he added, ‘I’d be interested in any iron—

monger’s shop called Nightingale’s or, say, the Manor Stores.’

He returned to page one of Wordsworth in Love, flicked on to a family tree.

There, in strong black type, was the name, George Gordon Wordsworth. He had been, Wexford noted, the poet’s own grandson. And this piece of information, already recorded in his newly published book, was what Villiers had led him to believe he had sought from the school library. The man had a weakness, then, the weakness of underrating his opponent.

It was nearly six before Burden got back.

‘My God, you’ve been long enough.’

‘She and Nightingale were out. Picnicking, I gather. I waited till they got back.’

‘Could she remember the address on the parcels?’

‘She says she only posted parcels of stuff Mrs Nightingale sent to Holland, except for last Tuesday, the day Mrs N. got killed. Then she posted two, one to her mother in Holland and another one. She never even looked at the address.’

Wexford shrugged. ‘Well, it was worth a try, Mike. Sorry about your Sunday afternoon. I don’t suppose you met with a fate worse than death, though, did you?’

‘Nightingale was there all the time.’

‘You make him sound,’ said Wexford, ‘like a nurse in a doctor’s consulting room. Well, I’m going to Myfleet myself now just for another scout round that forest and maybe a talk with Mrs Cantrip. I’d advise you to go home.

They can put through any calls that come in.’

It might take days, it might take weeks, but eventually Twohey would be found. And then, Wexford thought as he drove past the King’s School, he would talk. He would sit in Wexford’s office, staring at the expanse of pale blue sky through the picture window as hundreds of unscrupulous villains had sat and stared before him, but, unlike most of them, he would have no reason to hold his tongue. A long term of imprisonment awaited him whether he spoke or kept silent. Probably he would be glad to talk to revenge himself on the dead woman and all her family, for no more money would come his way from that source.

And what would he say? That Villiers’ love for his brother-in-law was of a kind that their narrow society couldn’t condone? That Elizabeth had had a series of lovers young enough to be her own children? Or that, long ago, Villiers and Elizabeth had been concerned together in a criminal conspiracy?

Suddenly Wexford remembered the bombed house in which their parents had died. They were only children then, but children had been known to commit murder ... Two people buried under rubble but still alive, parents who were perhaps a stumbling block in the way of their children’s ambition.

Certainly Villiers had benefited greatly from their deaths. His sister hadn’t. Did the clue lie there?

Twohey would know. It was terribly frustrating to Wexford to think that perhaps Twohey was’the only person now alive who did know and that he was hidden away comfortably with his secret. And it might be days, it might be weeks ....

On to Myfleet. The church bells of Clusterwell were ringing for Evensong and, as soon as their chimes died away behind him, he heard those of Myfleet ahead, eight bells ringing great brazen changes through the evening air.

There was a note pinned to Mrs Cantrip’s front door: Gone to church. Back 7.30.

An invitation to burglars, Wexford thought, only he couldn’t remember any burglary taking place in Myfleet for ten years. Its trees shrouded crimes of greater moment. He turned away, and the ginger cat, locked out among the flowers, rubbed itself against his legs.

Breathing in the scent of the pines that all day had been bathed in sunshine. Wexford entered the forest. The path he took was the path Elizabeth Nightingale had taken that night, and he followed it until he came to the clearing where Burden believed she had met Twohey and he believed-what?

Perhaps Burden was right again, after all. Those parcels might never have been posted but delivered by hand. She would hardly have carried such large sums of money loose in her handbag. Anyway, she hadn’t had a handbag, only a coat and a torch ... He stared at the lichened log where she had sat. The scrape marks of four shoes were still apparent on the dry sandy ground and in the whorls of pine needles four shifting feet had made.

If her companion was Twohey—observed perhaps by Sean who misunderstood the purpose of their meetinghow had Twohey come? Over the black wooded hill from Pomfret? Or by the path that skirted the Myfleet cottage gardens and came out eventually-where? Wexford decided to explore it.

The church bells had stopped and the place was utterly silent. He walked between the straight narrow pine trunks, looking up sometimes at the patches of pale silvery sky, and sometimes from side to side of him into the forest itself which was so dark and, up to head height, so sterile, that no birds sang there and the only visible life was that of the midges which danced in swarms.

It was on account of the midges that he was glad when the trees to the left of him petered out and he found himself walking against the cottage fences. Presently, ahead of him, he heard a whisper of music. It was a sentimental treacly melody that he soon defined as belonging to the pop or dance-music order, and it reminded Wexford of those soft and faintly erotic tunes which had floated down to him from Katje Doorn’s transistor.

just as he was thinking how pleasant and undemanding it sounded on this peaceful summer evening, it ceased and was succeeded by an appalling cacophony, the furious result of several saxophones, organs, drums and electric guitars all being played at once.

Wexford put his head over the fence and stared into the square plot of land, part wilderness and part rubbish dump, which was the Lovells’back garden. From the open kitchen window some fifty feet of electric lead stretched to the shed from which the noise emanated. Wexford backed a little, covering his assaulted ears.

Then he took his hands down.

Inside the shed someone was speaking. The tone and timbre of the voice were unmistakable, its accent deliberately cultivated. Mid-Atlantic, Wexford decided.

With mounting curiosity, he listened.

Addressing his unseen, indeed non-existent, audience as guys and dolls’, Scan Lovell, with smooth professional patter, made a short dismissive comment on the last piece of music and then, more enthusiastically, announced his next record. This time it was the effusion of a big band and it was even more discordant than the composition which had made Wexford cover his ears.

It stopped, Sean spoke again and, as he took in the full implication of his words, a shaft of intense pity pierced Wexford. Perhaps, he thought, there are few things so sad as eavesdropping on a man alone with his daydreams, a man indulging his solitary, private and ridiculous vice.

‘And now,’ said the disembodied voice, ‘what you’ve all been waiting for. You’ve come a long way tonight and I can promise you you’re not going to be disappointed. Here he is, boys and girls. Let’s have a big hand for your own Scan Lovell!’

Unaccompanied, he began to sing. Wexford walked away, very delicately and softly for such a big man, his feet scarcely causing a crackle on the needled forest floor.

He knew now what Sean had been doing that night, what he did every night and would perhaps do for years until some girl caught him and showed him how daydreams die and that life is digging a rich man’s garden.