A Guilty Thing Surprised

8

THE torch had been scrubbed, probably immersed in water. Wexford held it gingerly in his handkerchief and unscrewed its base. The batteries had been removed but the glass and the bulb inside were unbroken. He noted that a few drops of water still clung to the interior of the tube that formed its handle.

Very slowly, he said, ‘Only you, Mr Nightingale, knew that I came to this house this morning in search of a torch. Did you speak of it to any of your servants or to Mrs Villiers or Mr Marriott?’

White-faced, Quentin Nightingale shook his head.

‘I believe,’ Wexford said, ‘that this torch was used to kill your wife.

It wasn’t here when I first visited the garden room; it is here now.

Someone replaced it in the past half-hour. Come, let us go back to your study.’

The widower seemed unable to speak at all. He sank heavily into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

‘Did you replace that torch, Mr Nightingale? Come, I want an answer. I shall sit here until I get one.’ There was a tap at the door and Wexford opened it to admit Burden. A quick glance passed between them, Burden raised his eyebrows at the silent slumped figure, and then moved without speaking towards the wall shelves as if fascinated by the books they held. ‘Pull yourself together, Mr Nightingale,’ Wexford said. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’ Ile would have liked to shake the man, stir him into some sort of response. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Since I don’t believe in wasting time and Inspector Burden looks as if he might appreciate a little entertainment, I’ll tell you a story. You may find some parallels in it with your own conduct over the past days. Who knows?

‘There was a country gentleman,’ he began, who lived with his beautiful wife in a manor house. They were happy together, even if their marriage might have been said to have grown a little rusty and dull with the years.’ Quentin moved a fraction at that, pushing his fingers hard into his white hair. ‘One day,’ Wexford said in the same pleasant conversational tone, ‘he discovered that his wife was being unfaithful to him, meeting another man in the woods at night. So, consumed with jealousy, he followed her, taking a torch with him, for the moon had gone and the night was dark. He saw her with this man, kissing each other, and heard them making plans and giving promises. Perhaps they even abused him. When the man had left her and she was alone, the husband confronted her, she defied him, and he struck out at her with the torch, struck again and again in his jealous frenzy until he had beaten her to death.

Did you say something, Mr Nightingale?’

Quentin’s lips moved. He moistened them, struggled forward in his chair and managed a strangled, ‘However ... however it happened, it wasn’t ... it wasn’t that way.’

‘No? The husband didn’t burn his bloodstained sweater on the still-smouldering bonfire? He didn’t pace the garden for hours in his anguish, finally locking himself in his own bathroom to spend more hours cleansing every trace of his wife’s blood from his person? Strange. We know he took a bath and that at what some would call n ungodly hour ...’

‘Stop!’ Quentin cried, clutching the arms of his chair. ‘None of this is true. It’s a monstrous fabrication.’ He swallowed, then cleared his throat.

‘I didn’t take a bath.’

‘You told me you did,’ retorted Wexford.

‘Twice,’ said Burden, the word dropping like a bead of cold water.

‘I know. It was a lie.’ A fiery blush coloured Quentin’s face and he closed his eyes. ‘Would you get me a drink, please? Whisky. It’s in there.’

Burden looked at Wexford and Wexford nodded. The whisky was in a small cabinet under the window. Burden poured about an inch into a glass and put it into the shaking hand, closing the fingers around it. Quentin drank, the glass chattering against his teeth.

‘I’ll tell you where I was,’ he said. Wexford noticed that he was at last making a determined effort to steady his voice. ‘But you alone. I should like it if the inspector could leave us.’

And if he was about to confess to murder ...? Wexford didn’t like it much.

But he had to know. He made a quick decision. ‘Will you wait outside, please, Inspector Burden?’

Obediently Burden went, without a backward glance. Quentin gave a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said. ‘I could just tell you baldly, but I need to justify myself. God, if you knew the remorse, the shame ... I’m sorry. I am trying to get a grip on myself. Well, I ... I must start somewhere.’ He finished the last of his drink, putting off, Wexford thought, the evil moment as long as he could. Then he said: ‘I want you to know that it was quite correct what you said about my wife and me, being happy together, I mean, but with our marriage grown dull with the years. That was true. I accepted it. I thought it inevitable with people who had been married as long as we had, and who had no children. We never quarrelled. I think I should tell you now that if my wife had fallen in love with someone else I shouldn’t have been angry. I shouldn’t even have objected. I expect I would have been jealous, but I wouldn’t have shown my jealousy by violence, God forbid!—or in any other way. I want to make that clear now.’

Wexford nodded noncommittally. The man’s words were simple and frank, carrying, he thought, an unmistakablc ring of truth.

‘You said,’ Quentin went on, ‘that nobody involved in a murder case has any right to a private life. I’ll have to tell you about my private life to make you understand why I did what I did.’ He got up suddenly and walked swiftly to the bookshelves, pressing his hands flat against morocco and gilt bindings. Staring at the titles of the books but perhaps unseeing, he said, ‘I used to go to her room once a fortnight, always on a Saturday night. She would push back the bedcovers and say, always the same, “This is nice, darling,” and afterwards, when I left her to go back to my room, she’d say, “That was lovely, darling.” She never called me by my name. Sometimes I think she forgot what it was.’

He stopped. Wexford wasn’t the sort of policeman who says impatiently, ‘Is all this really relevant, sir?’ He said nothing, listening with a grave face.

‘I was so bored,’ Quentin said to the books. ‘I was lonely. Sometimes I used to feel that I was married to a kind of beautiful animated statue, a doll that smiled and wore pretty clothes and even had a vocabulary of a certain limited kind.’

‘And yet you were happy?’ Wexford ventured quietly.

‘Did I say that? Perhaps because everyone else said I was, I grew used to telling myself I must be.’

He moved away from the bookcase and began to pace the room. It seemed for a moment that he had changed the subject when he said, ‘We used to keep servants, a proper staff, but Elizabeth gave them notice. Then we had a succession of au pair girls, two French and one German. I think Elizabeth made a point of choosing plain girls.’ He swung round, faced Wexford and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Perhaps she thought Katje was plain.

Fat and coarse was the way she once described her. I suppose—I suppose I was attracted to Katje from the start, but I never did anything about it. She was a young girl and I was-well, in loco parentis. I told myself I thought of her as a daughter. How we delude ourselves!’ He turned away his face. ‘It’s almost impossible for me to find the words to tell you. I ...’

‘You slept with her?’ Wexford said expressionlessly.

Quentin nodded.

‘The night before last?’

‘That wasn’t the first time. Chief Inspector, in all the sixteen years we’d been married, I’d never been unfaithful to my wife. I’d had my opportunities. What man hasn’t? I loved my wife. All those years I hoped for a sign of warmth, just one spontaneous sign that she recognised me as a human being. I never gave up hoping until Katje came. Then for the first time I saw a woman who was close to me, a woman living under my roof, behaving like a woman. Perhaps not as a woman should behave. She had boy friends all over the place and she used to tell me about them.

Sometimes in the evenings Elizabeth would be out, walking in the grounds or gone early to bed, and Katje would come in from some date and she’d tell me about it, giggling and laughing, talking as if the best thing in the world was to take and give pleasure.

‘One night, after one of these talks, I was lying in bed, waiting for Elizabeth to come in. I said I’d given up hope but that isn’t true. I always hoped. I never remember feeling such a depth of loneliness as I felt that night. I thought I’d give everything I possessed, this house, the fortune I’ve amassed, if she would just come into my room and sit on the bed and talk to me.’

Again he covered his face. When he took away his hands Wexford expected to see tears on his cheeks, for he had spoken that last sentence on a sob, but he was quite calm, even relieved, it appeared, at having so nearly got it all off his chest.

‘Presently I heard her come upstairs,’ he said. ‘I willed her to come in. I exercised all the power of my will. God knows how I stopped myself crying out to her. Her bedroom door closed and I heard her begin to run a bath. In that moment I forgot who I was, my age, my position, my duty to my wife. I put on my dressing gown and went upstairs. I knew what I was going to say to Katje, that I smelt gas and thought it was coming from her room. Of course I couldn’t smell gas. All that was coming from her room was the faint sound of music from her radio.

‘I knocked and she called to me to come in. She was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine. I didn’t have to say anything about gas. It sounds incredible but I didn’t speak a word. She smiled at me and put out her arms...’

Abruptly he stopped speaking. Like an old-fashioned novel, Wexford thought.

If it were written down, asterisks would come at this point. Quentin Nightingale’s asterisks were a sudden burning flush that threw into sharpness the whiteness of his hair and his moustache, ageing him. Fumbling for words and getting no help from the chief inspector, he said:

‘There were-well, other times. Not many. There was the night before last. I went up to Katje at about a quarter past eleven.

I didn’t know whether Elizabeth had come in. I wasn’t thinking about Elizabeth. Katje and Iwell, I stayed with her all night. It was Palmer walking about on the floor below that awakened me. I sensed something was wrong, so I got up and dressed and found him on the terrace.’

‘A pity you didn’t tell us all this before,’ Wexford said, frowning.

‘Put yourself in my place. Would you have?’

Wexford shrugged. ‘That’s beside the point.’ He was at a loss to account for his feelings. An alibi had been destroyed and a more convincing one had replaced it. Normally, when this occurred, he felt anger at the wasted time, relief at progress made. His present unease wasn’t normal and briefly he questioned himself. Then he knew. He was allowing himself something indefensible, personal involvement. What he felt for Quentin Nightingale was envy. Stiffly he got up.

‘This will have to be corroborated, Mr Nightingale,’ he said in a cold hard voice.

Pale again, Quentin said, ‘I realised you would want to ask Katje. It won’t embarrass her. She’s strange, unique. She’s ... Oh, I’m wasting your time. I’m sorry.’

Wexford went upstairs. When he reached the first floor he paused for a second outside the door of Quentin Nightingale’s bedroom and then, as he turned towards the top flight and began to mount, he heard music coming from above. It gave substance, near-reality to the unpermitted dream his envy of Nightingale had evoked. A soft, throaty voice was singing the number one song in the pop charts, singing of love. A passionate longing, bitter and savage, to recapture for one hour the youth he had lost engulfed Wexford. And suddenly growing old seemed the only tragedy of life, the pain beside which every other pain dwindled into insignificance. Mature, wise, usually philosophical, he wanted to cry aloud, ‘It isn’t fair!’

He came to the door and rapped on it sharply. The music should have stopped. Instead the voice welled and trembled on a vibrant note and she came to the door and let him in.

Her pink dress had white frills like a nightgown, and like a nightgown it was cut low to show milk-white halfmoons and shoulders where even the bones looked soft. She smiled at him, her sea-blue eyes full of laughter.

Quentin Nightingale had had all this, easily, without argument. So had the waiter at the Olive and Dove. So had how many others?

For the first time in his career he understood what impelled those men he questioned and brought to court, the men who forgot for a while chivalry and social taboo and sexual restraint, the rapists, the violators. But here there would perhaps be no need for violence, need only for a smile and an outstretched hand. Ca me donne tant de plaisir et vous si peu de peine. Oh, how much pleasure!

He followed her into the room, and out of the dressing table mirror their reflections marched towards them.

A young girl with her father. No, her grandfather. She was one of those people who make other people look unfinished and ill-made. In a bitter flash of illumination, Wexford saw himself as a battered bundle of old clothes. Not even middle-aged. Elderly, a grandfather.

‘Please sit down, Miss Doorn,’ he said, surprised that his voice was steady and sane. ‘And would you turn that radio off?’

She complied, still smiling.

He felt just the same about her. The longing-perhaps only a longing for rejuvenation?-was still there, but as he had turned away from the mirror he had experienced that sensation which divides the sane man from the mad. Between fantasy and reality a great gulf is fixed.

And that which seems possible, reasonable, felicitous, when conjured in the mind, dissolves like smoke in a fresh wind when its object is present in words and solid flesh. He had seen her for a brief moment as a lovely thing, but a thing only, without the power of discrimination, without rights, without intelligence. Now he saw her as a young girl who saw him as he was, an old man. Inwardly his whole body seemed to laugh harshly at itself.

‘I have some questions to ask you,’ he said. He wished the laughter would stop so that he could control himself and mould himself into the image he desired, something between God and a robot, tempered with avuncular geniality, ‘About your relations with Mr Nightingale.’ Pity they had to talk about sex. But if they hadn’t, perhaps the fantasy would never have grown. ‘What terms are you on with him?’

‘Terms?’

‘You know very well what I mean’ ‘ he growled at her.

She shrugged at that, threw out her hands. ‘I work for him and I live here in his house.’ She pulled at a strand of hair, considered it and then poked it into her mouth. ‘He is very nice and kind. I like him much.’

‘He’s your lover, isn’t he?’

She said cautiously, not embarrassed and not at all frightened, ‘He has said this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, poor Kventin! He does not want anyone to know at all, must be kept very secret thing. And now you have found it out.’

‘I’m afraid I must ask you to tell me about it.’

Stubbornly she stuck out her lower lip and shook her head.

‘Come now. He’s told me himself. You wouldn’t want him to go to prison, would you?’

She opened her mouth wide. ‘This is true? In England you can go to prison because you are making love?’

‘Of course notV Wexford almost shouted. ‘Now listen. Mr Nightingale will not go to prison if you tell me the truth. just tell me everything that happened between you ... No, no, not everything.’ An incredulous smile had widened her eyes. ‘Simply how it began and so on.’

‘All right.’ She giggled with pure pleasure. ‘This is always nice, I think, to talk about love. I like to talk of this more than anything.’

Wexford could feel his angry frown, artificially assumed, pushing all his features forward. ‘It is four, five weeks ago. I am in my bed and there is a knock and it is Kventin. Perhaps he is going to say the radio is too loud or I put the car away wrong, but he is saying nothing because at once I know he is coming to make love. I can see this in his face. Always I can see it in faces.’

God Almighty! thought Wexford, his soul cringing.

‘So I am thinking, Why not? I am thinking how he is kind with nice manners and thin straight body and I am forgetting he is older than my father in Holland. And also I know he is lonely man married to a frigid cold woman. So we are making love very soon and all is different, for when he is in my bed he is not old any more.’

She said this triumphantly, pointing to the bed. Her favourite subject had driven away her laughter and she spoke earnestly, with concentration.

‘Much much better than my friend the waiter,’ she said. ‘For Kventin has much experience and is knowing exactly how . . .’

‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ Wexford cut in. He drew a deep breath. ‘Miss Doorn, please spare me the lecture on sexual technique. Let us have the facts. There were other occasions...' Grinding his teeth, Wexford said, ‘Mr Nightingale made love to you at other times?’

‘Of course. He is liking me as much as I am liking him. The next week and the next week and then the night before last.’

‘Go on.’

‘But I have told you. I go out with my friend and the unkind man will not let us go into the hotel. My friend want us to go in the car, but this I will not do. This is not nice. Kventin would not do this. I am coming back home and I ani thinking perhaps Kventin come up and make love with me. And I am wishing and wishing when he knocks at the door and then I am happy. We are both very very happy.’

‘How long did he stay with you?’

‘All the night,’ said Katje airily. ‘I tell him that just before I come in I see Mrs Nightingale go into the wood and he is saying very very sadly, She does not want me, she has never wanted me. But I say, I want you, Kventin, and so he stay all the night. But he is going away very early in the morning because he is hearing the old gardener man walk about. So I lie in my bed alone, thinking perhaps I shall not see my friend the waiter any more, but go only with Kventin, and then I too am getting up to see why the old gardener man is in the house. There, now I have told it all!’

Wexford was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘At what time did you see Mrs Nightingale cross the road?’

‘Two minutes after eleven,’ said Katje promptly.

‘And at what time did Mr Nightingale pay you this nocturnal visit?, She looked at him, her blue eyes naive and enquiring. ‘I mean, come to your room?’

‘Fifteen minutes after eleven. I come in, I go straight to bed.’

‘How can you be so sure of the time?’

‘I am wearing my new watch and always I am looking at it.’ She waved her left wrist at him. The watch had a dial two inches in diameter fastened to a wide strap of pink and purple patent leather. ‘This my friend is giving me for my birthday and all the time I look at it.’ She glanced up at him under long dark gold lashes. ‘You are angry with me?’

‘No, no, I’m not angry, Miss Doorn.’

‘I am wishing that you will call me Katje, please.’

‘All right, Katje,’ said Wexford, far from displeased.

Suddenly correct and very Continental, she held out her hand to him. Her fingers were soft and warm. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you resemble my old uncle in Friesland who is sometimes kind and sometimes cross like you.’ She wagged a forefinger at him.

God, he thought, still smarting from that last thrust, how pretty that mannerism is now and how dreadful it will be when she’s forty. And will she still chew her hair? In such reflections a little comfort lies.

‘Now,’ she said, her head on one side, ‘I think I will go down and dust Kventin’s study.’