A Guilty Thing Surprised

9

BURDEN listened with disdain and incredulity to Wexford’s condensed and to some extent expurgated account of his two interviews. It aroused in him a cold angry disgust. Anyone who knew the chief inspector less well than he might imagine Wexford to be quite smitten by the charms-invisible to Burden-of that immoral Dutch girl.

‘I cannot see,’ he said, standing by the window in Wexford’s office and disentangling a knot in the string of the venetian blind, ‘why you suppose this story of theirs lets them out at all.’ He straightened the string and wound it round its hooks in a figure of eight. Burden liked everything to be neat and shipshape even in someone else’s domain. ‘On the contrary, they could have been in it together. You’ve only got that girl’s word that he-er, joined her at eleven-fifteen. It could have been later. Of course she’d back him up.’

‘Oh? Why would she? just what would she get out of being an accessory to the murder of her employer’s wife?’

Burden stared at him. Really, the old man was almost simple at times.

‘Get out of it? Marriage with Nightingale, of course.’

‘Don’t keep saying “of course”. It’s far from of course. And leave that blind alone. Sometimes I think you’ve got a compulsion complex, always tidying everything up. Listen to me, Mike. You’ve got to bring your ideas up to date a bit. You may be only thirty-six but you’re so dead old-fashioned it isn’t true. First of all I want you to know that I believe Nightingale. I believe his story because some instinct in me recognises the truth when I hear it. I don’t believe he’s capable of violence. If he thought his wife had a lover-if he cared, which is more to the point—he’d divorce her. Secondly, Katje Doorn isn’t a kind of Lady Macbeth. She’s a very contemporary young woman who is enjoying life enormously and not the least of what she enjoys is plenty of anxiety-free sex.’

Burden went pink at that and blinked his eyes. He tried to put on a sophisticated expression and failed.

‘What reason have we to suppose she wants to marry Nightingale?’ Wexford went on. ‘He’s an old man to her,’ he said urbanely. ‘She said as much. And for all her immorality, as you’d put it, she’s a nice normal girl who’d recoil in horror from the thought of taking into her bed a man fresh from murdering his wife. Mike, we’ve got to change our whole pattern of thinking in these domestic murder cases. Times have changed. Young women don’t look on marriage as the be-all and end-all of existence any more. Girls like Katje won’t help kill a man’s wife just so that he can make honest women of them. They don’t think they’re dishonest women just because they’re not virgins. And as for Katje wanting him for his money, I don’t think she’s given much thought to money yet. That may come later. At present she’s out for a good time without any worry.’

‘I sometimes wonder,’ said Burden like an old man, ‘what the world is coming to.’

‘Let the world look after itself. We’ll concentrate on our own small corner of it. We made a pattern, Mike, and now we’ve destroyed it. What next?

There are two lines to pursue, it seems to me. Who was Mrs Nightingale’s lover? Who had access to that torch?’

‘You’ve had a lab report on it?’

Wexford nodded. ‘There were traces of blood in the threads of the base screw and the lamp screw, and under the switch. The blood was of the same group as Mrs Nightingale’s and it’s a rare group, AB Negative. There’s no doubt the torch was the weapon.’

‘Well, who did have access to it? Who could have replaced it this morning?’

Wexford counted them off on his fingers. ‘Nightingale, Katje, Mrs Cantrip, Will Palmer, Sean Lovell, Georgina Villiers-oh, and Lionel Marriott. Quite a list. We might also include Villiers, as Georgina could have replaced it for him. Now what about Sean? He’s confessed to an admiration for Mrs Nightingale. He’s young and hotheaded, therefore jealous. It may not have been he she went to meet but he could have seen her with that person. His alibi is hopeless. He had access to the torch; his garden gives directly on to the forest.’

‘She was old enough to be his mother,’ said Burden.

Wexford laughed, a raucous bray. ‘My God, Mike, you don’t know what life’s about, do you? It’s because he was twenty and she forty that he would have an affair with her. Like ...’ He paused, then went on with apparent detachment, ‘Like middle-aged men and young girls. It happens all the time. Didn’t you ever fancy any of your mother’s friends?’

‘Certainly noW said Burden, outraged. ‘My mother’s friends were like aunts to me. I called them all auntie. Still do, come to that. What’s so funny?’

‘You,’ said Wexford, ‘and if I didn’t laugh I’d go round the twist.’

Burden was used to this but still he was very offended.

It seemed unfair to him, a sad sign of the times, that a man should be laughed at because he had high principles and a decent concept of what life should be. He gave a thin dry cough and said:

‘I shall go and have another talk with your favourite suspect, young Lovell.’

‘You do that.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘I have a date at four.’ He grinned. ‘A date with someone who is going to enlighten me further as to certain past histories.’

Wexford parked a hundred yards up the road from the school gates, well behind the cars of parents waiting for eleven-year-olds. A crocodile of cricketers in green-stained white came across from the playing fields as the clock on the school tower struck four. If they were punctual in nothing else, King’s pupils were punctual in getting out of school. As the last chime died away, they poured through the gates, laughing, shoving each other, paying no attention to the kerb drill with which Wexford had used to believe they were thoroughly indoctrinated by the road safety officer. Only the supercilious sixth-formers walked sedately, lighting cigarettes when they reached the shadow of the overhanging trees.

Denys Villiers came out in his dark blue Anglia. ‘He sounded his horn repetitively to clear boys out of the road, then, putting his head out of the window, shouted something Wexford couldn’t catch. The tone of his voice was enough. Wexford had the notion that if the man had had a whip he would have used it. He turned his head and saw Marriott trotting out of the main gate. When the little man had passed the car he wound down the window and hissed:

‘ “A frightful fiend doth close behind you tread!”

Marriott jumped, collected himself and smiled.

‘A very overrated poem, I’ve always thought,’ he said. ‘I daresay. I didn’t come here to discuss poetry. You were going to give me the slip, weren’t you?’

Marriott came round the bonnet and got into the car.

‘I must admit I was. I thought you’d give me a lecture for going up to the Manor this morning. Now please don’t, there’s a dear. I’ve had a most exhausting afternoon introducing Paradise Lost to the Lower Fifth and I really can’t stand any more.’

“The mind,” ‘ quoted Wexford, ‘ “is in its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ‘

‘Yes, very clever. I’m different. Mine makes a hell of hell. Do let’s rush, ducky, and get oursOves huge drinks. I suppose you’ll want me to go on with the next instalment on the way.’

'I can’t wait,’ said Wexford, starting the car and moving out into the stream.

‘Where had I got to?’

‘Villiers’first wife.’

‘June,’ said Marriott. ‘She didn’t like me. Oh dear, no. She said I’d be more use teaching in a Borstal institution. The first time she went to the Manor d’you know what she said to Quentin? “I call it scandalous,”

she said, “two people living by themselves in this barrack. It ought to be converted into a mental hospital.” Poor Quen didn’t like that at all.

His beloved house! But that was little June all over. She had a sociology degree and she’d been some kind of probation officer.

‘She and Denys had a dreadful flat over the pet foods shop in Queen Street. You know the place I mean. I only went there once and that was enough. The stink of putrefying horseflesh, my dear, and June’s funny friends all over the place. Crowds of them there every evening, all very earnest and wanting to put the world right. Banning the Bomb was the thing in those days, you know, and June used to hold meetings about it in their flat, that and famine relief before famine relief was even fashionable. She was the original demonstrator, was June. Whenever there’s a rumpus in Grosvenor Square I look very closely at the pictures, I can tell you, because I’m positive I’m going to see her face there one of these days.’

‘She’s not dead, then?’ Wexford said as they emerged into the High Street.

‘Good God, no. Denys divorced her or she divorced him. I forget which. Heaven knows why they got married in the first place. They had nothing in common. She didn’t like Quen and Elizabeth and she took a very dim view of Denys going up to the Manor so much. Associating with reactionary elements, she called it.’

‘If he didn’t care for his sister why did he go so much?’

‘Well, you see, he and Quen got on together like a house on fire from the word go,’ said Marriott as Wexford pulled into the centre of the road to take the right-hand turn. ‘Quen was thrilled to bits finding he’d got an upand-coming writer for a brother-in-law and I suppose he saw himself in the light of Denys’s patron.’ The car moved slowly down the alley and Wexford pulled up in front of the white flower-decked house. ‘Anyway, Denys must have complained to him about how impossible it was to work in his home atmosphere, and Quen offered him the Old House to write in. Don’t let’s sit out here, Reg, I’m dying of thirst.’

The rooms where the party had been held still smelt strongly of cigar smoke. Someone had tidied up and washed all the dishes. Hypatia, probably, Wexford thought, as Marriott flung open all the windows.

‘Now then, Reg, the cocktail hour, as they say. A little early perhaps, but everything’s early in the country, don’t you find?

What’s it to be? Whisky? Gin?’

‘I’d rather have a cup of tea,’ said Wexford.

‘Would you? How odd. All right, I’ll put the kettle on. I must say, Hypatia has left everything very nice. I must remember to say a word when next I see her.’

Wexford followed him into the kitchen. ‘She doesn’t live here, then?’

‘Oh, no. I shouldn’t care for that at all.’ Marriott wrinkled his nose distastefully. ‘Once have them permanently in and you can’t call your soul your own.’ He gave Wexford a sidelong very sly look. ‘Besides, there’s safety in numbers.’

Wexford laughed. ‘Quite a devil with the ladies, aren’t you, Lionel?’

‘I have my successes,’ said Marriott modestly. He put three spoonfuls of Earl Grey into the teapot and poured the boiling water on daintily. ‘Shall I go on with the story?'

‘Please.’

‘Well, as I said, June didn’t at all care for Denys work ing at the Manor. He was up there most evenings natter ing with Quen, you see, and every day in the holidays to work. She thought he ought to be out with her, waving banners and writing things on walls. So finally she walked out on him.’

‘Leaving him to his menage a trois?’

‘What a funny way of putting it. Still, no doubt, there was a triangular element there, but not an isosceles triangle. Poor Elizabeth was definitely the unequal angle. It always used to fascinate me when I went up there to see Denys and Quen utterly immersed in each other, books, books, books, my dear, and a positively ringing exchange of Wordsworth quotes, the two of them groaning that they had thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears. And all the time poor Elizabeth sat there reading Vogue and not a word to say for herself.’

‘I daresay you found something to chat to her about,’ said Wexford, drinking his tea. ‘I never met anyone who knew so much about-what shall I say?-current trivia?’

‘Really, Reg, you are unkind. I’ll have you know, Elizabeth wasn’t at all an empty-headed woman. just as intelligent as Denys in her way.’

‘That’s not what he says, but let it pass.’

‘Why are we sitting out here, anyway? I never could abide kitchens and I’m pining for my gin. Good, the cigar smoke’s cleared.’

Marriott fetched his drink and pulled two chairs up to the open french windows. His small walled garden was full of butterflies, drinking from the buddleia flQwcrs and sunning themselves with spread wings on the stones. Wexford sat where he could feel the warmth of the precious September sun that would soon be gone. It made him feel lazy and he told himself sternly to keep his mind alert.

‘So Villiers spent a good deal of his time at the Manor, did he?' he said.

‘Believe me, you couldn’t set foot in the place without finding him there. And as if that wasn’t enough to make him and Quen heartily sick of each other, he used to go away on holiday with them too.’

‘That must have been hard on Mrs Nightingale, especially as they excluded her from their conversations. just what were her interests, Lionel?’

Marriott bit his lip and seemed to cogitate. ‘Let me see,’ he said with the air of someone dredging in the depths. ‘Well, she took an active part in county life, you know, organising things and sitting on committees. And she spent hours every day making herself look lovely. She did the flowers and a bit of gardening ...’

‘Is that so?’ Wexford interrupted. ‘In the hothouse maybe with young Scan Lovell?’

‘What can you mean, dear old boy?’

‘As one of Wordsworth’s contemporaries put it:

“What men call gallantry and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.”‘

Marriott smiled, opening his eyes wide. ‘So that’s the way the wind’s blowing, is it?’

‘Well, she wasn’t having secret meetings in the forest with old Sir George Larkin-Smith, was she? Or the rector of Myfleet or Will Palmer?

Unless it was you, Lionel.’

‘I wondered when you were going to ask me that.’ Marriott stretched languorously in the sunshine and laughed. ‘But no, it wasn’t. And if you’re serious about this, Reg, Hypatia will tell you where I was. Mind you, I’m not saying I didn’t wish I’d had the opportunity ..

‘Maybe you even tried your chances?’

‘Maybe I did.’

This time it was Wexford’s turn to laugh. ‘So we come back to Sean Lovell, don’t we?’

‘She was fond of Sean,’ said Marriott. ‘I met her once coming out of the record shop here in the High Street. She’d been buying the number one pop single in the charts. “I must keep up with my little song-bird,” she said. “Really, he’s the only true Nightingale in-Vyfleet.” Quite witty, I thought. Elizabeth was notfool.’

‘An extraordinary remark to mpke,’ said Wexford.

‘Oh, I don’t know. You read too much into things, my dear. All you policemen are terribly salacious. Sean used to stand under Elizabeth’s windows and serenade her. I suppose she was flattered and it made her feel young. It was a case of heroine worship on one side and a sort of flattered acceptance on the other.’

‘Let’s get back to Villiers,’ said Wexford. ‘But first how about another cup of tea for a poor old salacious policeman?’

Myfleet was a pretty village even on a winter’s day. Now, bathed in mellow sunshine, it lay in its hollow beneath the forest like a sleeping beauty.

This afternoon it seemed unpeopled; only the flowers in cottage gardens stood out in the open enjoying the sun.

Burden drove to the Kingsmarkham end of the village and decided to walk the rest of the way. It was a day made for strolling, for appreciating the scent of ripening fruit and admiring the great multi-petalled dahlias, raised for a flower show or a harvest festival.

But he had been wrong in thinking the village totally deserted. Now, as he approached the Manor, he noticed Mrs Lovell leaning over the gate of her disreputable cottage, talking to a swarthy man in a cap who carried two dead and bleeding rabbits over his arm. The shifty looks he was giving the Manor -though probably the natural accompaniment to his conversation, concerned as it must be with the only topic currently of interest in my fleet- gave him the air of a poacher. Mrs Lovell encouraged him with peals of uninhibited ringing laughter.

He found Scan in the Old House, unloading apples from a basket on to one of the racks. They were pale red and gold, Beauty of Bath, their skins striped and shiny like old silk. The boy was whistling but he stopped abruptly when Burden came in.

‘Come here often, do you?’ Burden asked softly. ‘Is this where you used to meet Mrs Nightingale?’

‘Me?’ He gave Burden a sullen glare, sat down on a stack of silver-birch logs and began to roll a cigarette. ‘It’d be a help,’ he said, ‘if I knew what you was getting at. No, I don’t come here often. Fact is I never set foot in here since April.’ He cocked a thumb at the tunnel staircase. ‘On account of him being up there.’ Scowling, he lit his cigarette. ‘Me and old Palmer, we’ve got strict orders not to come in here disturbing him, see?’

‘You go into the garden room, though, don’t you? You go to sweep it out.

Ever borrowed a torch, Lovell, to light your way when you went to Mrs Nightingale in the forest?’

‘Me?’ Sean said again. ‘Are you off your nut?’ His cigarette had gone out.

He re-lit it, blinking when the flame caught the ragged paper and flared.

Perhaps it provided a flash of mental as well as physical illumination, for he said, ‘You trying to make out I was carrying on with Mrs Nightingale?

You are a nut and a dirty-minded nut at that.’

‘All right, that’ll do,’ said Burden, mortally offended. The supreme injustice of the accusation wounded him more than the insolence. ‘Come now,’ he said, keeping his temper, ‘you were on very friendly terms with her.’

Took,’ said Sean, ‘if you must know, she was interested in helping me with my career.’

‘Helping you do the gardening?’

The boy’s face flushed deeply. Unknowingly, Burden had returned thrust for thrust. ‘Gardening’s not my career,’ Sean said bitterly. ‘Tbat’s just a stop-gap, just to fill in time till I get on with my real work.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘Music,’ said Sean. ‘The Scene. Up there in London.’ Again he cocked a thumb, this time northwards. His face had grown rapt and, like Dick Whittington, he seemed to see a vision, a city paved with gold. ‘I’ve got to get there.’ His voice shook. ‘I know it all, see, like it was recorded in my head. I could tell you the way all the charts were, right back for years. I could pass exams.’

He clenched his hands and there shone in his eyes the fanaticism of the religious mystic. ‘There’s not one of them D.J.s knows half of what I do.’

Suddenly he shouted at Burden, ‘Take that grin off your face! You’re just ignorant like the rest of them, like my old lady with her men and her booze.

Mrs Nightingale was the only one as understood and she’s dead.’ He drew a dirty sleeve across his eyes, the artist rnanqu6 that the world persists in treating as an artisan.

Gentler this time, Burden said, ‘What was Mrs Nightingale going to do for you?’

‘There was this bloke in London she knew,’ Sean said, muttering now. ‘He was with the B.B.C. and she promised faithful she’d mention my name. Maybe for singing, maybe for a D.J. In a small way for a start.’ he added humbly.

‘You got to start in a small way.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know what’ll happen to me now.’

‘Best stick to your gardening, grow up a bit and get rid of some of these fancy ideas,’ Burden said. Sean’s glance of pure hatred riled him. ‘Let’s forget your ambitions for a moment, shall we? Why did you tell the chief inspector you were watching a television programme when that programme wasn’t even shown?’

Sean looked peevish rather than frightened at being caught out in his lie.

‘I had been watching the telly,’ he said, ‘but I got fed up. My old lady had got her bloke in for the evening, that Alf Tawney. Grinning at me, they was, and mocking me on account of me watching Pop Panel.’ Sean clenched his fingers over an apple until his knuckles whitened. ‘One fellow after another my mum’s had ever since I was a kid and all they’ve ever wanted is to get me out of the way. I tell you, when I was about ten I saw my mum with one of them men of hers, kissing and pawing each other and I picked up the carving knife and went for her. I’d have killed her, I would, only the bloke got the knife away and hit me. I’d have killed her,’ he said fiercely, and then something he saw in Burden’s eyes silenced him. Awkwardly he said, ‘I don’t care any more, not about her, only I get- I get fed up.’ His fingers relaxed and he dropped the apple into the rack. Burden saw that his nails had pierced the rosy skin, leaving deep juicy wounds.

He said smoothly, ‘It seems to me you let your emotions get the better of you.’

‘I said I was ten, didn’t I? I’m not like that now. I wouldn’t lay a finger on her whatever she did.’

'I take it,’ said Burden, as Sean wiped his sticky hand on his jeans, ‘I

take it you’re referring to your mother?’

‘Who else’d I be referring to?’

Burden shrugged lightly. ‘So you got “fed up” with your mother and Alf Tawney. Where did you go?’

‘Down to my shed,’ said Sean. ‘I sat there all alone, thinking.’ He sighed heavily, got up and, turning his back on Burden, resumed his unloading of the apples. ‘Just thinking and-and listening.’ The bright fruit, bruised by his hands, rolled into the rack. Very softly he began whistling again. His face had coloured as vivid a red as the apples. Getting up to leave, Burden wondered why.

‘Denys always went on holiday with them,’ said Marriott. ‘With both of them, I mean. But two years ago he had to go with Elizabeth alone. Quen caught the measles, poor thing. So humiliating. Elizabeth told me she absolutely dreaded being stuck with Denys in Dubrovnik, but Quen said he’d never forgive them if they stayed at home on his account, so they had to put up with it.

‘Well, they must have rowed the whole time because they both looked rotten when they got back and there was a distinct coldness between Denys and Quen all the following winter and Denys stopped going up to the Manor. Then, one day, in the June of the summer before last, I was up at the Manor when in walked Denys. “You are a stranger,” Quen said, but I could tell he was overjoyed. “I only came,” said Denys, “to tell you I can’t go to Rome with you next month. I’ve promised the Head I’ll be one of the escorts to the school party.”

‘ “You?” I almost screamed. “You must be out of your mind.” I mean, it’s a joke at school, the lengths the staff go to get out of it. “You’d pass up lovely Rome,” I said, “for the lousy old Costa Brava?” “I’m going,” he said, “it’s all fixed.” You should have seen poor Quen’s face. He did his best to work on Denys but it was no use. He was adamant.’

‘What about this year, Lionel?’

‘He was married by then, wasn’t he? He met Georgina on the Costa Brava, but I’ll come to that later. No, this year they went off to Bermuda by themselves, and I think that secretly they were only too glad to have got rid of old misery face. Elizabeth said as much to me when I went up there to witness her will and ...’

‘Her what?’ said Wexford slowly. ‘Did you say her will?’