Kissing the Gunner's Daughter

by Ruth Rendell

  The illuminated house showed through the trees, was swallowed in darkness, reappeared as Donaldson drove up the drive and across a wide empty plain. He hesitated at the gap in the low wall, then accelerated and went ahead, swinging on to the forecourt. A statue that probably represented the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo was reflected in the dark waters of a shallow pool. Donaldson drove to the left of it and in among the cars.

  The front door stood open. He saw that someone had broken one of the panes in a bow window on the left-hand or west wing of the house. Inside the front door, from an orangery full of lilies, a pillared screen at each end of it in what he thought was called the Adam style, an arch opened on to the big hall where there was blood on the floor and the rugs. Blood made a map of islands on the pale oak. As Barry Vine came out to him, he saw the man’s body at the foot of the staircase.

  Wexford approached the body and looked at it. It was a man of about sixty, tall, slim, with a handsome face, the features finely cut and of the kind usually called sensitive. His face was now waxen and yellowish. The mouth hung open. The blue eyes were open and staring. Blood had dyed scarlet his white shirt and stained blacker his dark jacket. He had been formally dressed in a suit and tie, had been shot twice from the front at close range, in the chest and in the head. His head was a mess of blood, a brownish stickiness matting the thick white hair.

  ‘Do you know who this is?’

  Vine shook his head. ‘Should I, sir? Presumably the guy who owned the place.’

  ‘It’s Harvey Copeland, former MP for the Southern Boroughs and husband of Davina Flory. Of course you haven’t been here long, but you’ll have heard of Davina Flory?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

  You could never tell with Vine, whether he had or not. That deadpan face, that unruffled manner, stolid calm.

  He went into the dining room, preparing himself, but just the same what he saw made him catch his breath. No one, ever, becomes entirely hardened. He would never reach a stage of looking at such scenes with indifference.

  Burden was in the room with the photographer. Archbold as Scene-of-Crimes officer was measuring, making notes, and two technicians had arrived from forensics. Archbold stood up when Wexford came in and Wexford motioned to him to carry on.

  When he had allowed his gaze to rest for a few moments on the bodies of the two women, he said to Burden, ‘The girl, tell me everything she said.’

  ‘That there were two of them. It was about eight. They came in a car.’

  ‘How else would you get up here?’

  ‘There were sounds from upstairs. The man who’s dead on the stairs went to investigate.’

  Wexford walked round the table and stood beside the dead woman whose head and streaming hair hung over the back of her chair. From there he was able to get a different view of the woman opposite. He looked at the remains of a face, laid left cheek downwards in a blood-filled dinner plate, on the red cloth.

  ‘That’s Davina Flory.’

  ‘I guessed it must be,’ Burden said quietly. ‘And no doubt the man on the stairs is her husband.’

  Wexford nodded. He felt something unusual for him, a kind of awe. ‘Who’s this? Wasn’t there a daughter?’

  The other woman might have been about forty-five. Her eyes and hair were dark. Her skin, white and drained in death, had probably been very pale in life. She was thin, dressed in gypsyish clothes, trailing patterned cottons with beads and chains. The colours had been predominantly red, but not so red as they now were.

  ‘It would have made a hell of a din, all this.’

  ‘Someone may have heard,’ Wexford said. ‘There must be other people on the estate. Someone looked after Davina Flory and her husband and daughter. I’m sure I’ve heard there’s a housekeeper and maybe a gardener live in houses up here, tied cottages on the estate.’

  ‘I’ve seen to that. Karen and Gerry have gone out to try and locate them. You’ll have noticed we didn’t pass a house on the way in.’

  Wexford moved round the table, hesitated, came closer than he had hitherto been to the body of Davina Flory. Her copious dark hair, threaded with white, escaping from a loose knot on the back of her head, lay spread in blood-dabbled tendrils. The shoulder of her dress, a red silk which clung closely to her thin shape, bore a huge blackish stain. Her hands lay on the blood-dyed tablecloth in the position of someone at a seance. They were the kind of preternaturally long thin hands such as are seldom seen except on oriental women. Age had done little to damage them, or else death had already shrunk the veins. The hands were unadorned but for a plain gold wedding ring on the left one. The other had half-closed in death as the fingers contracted to clutch a handful of bloody damask.

  His sense of awe increasing, Wexford had stepped back to take in more fully this scene of horror and destruction, when the door crashed open and in walked the pathologist. Some moments before Wexford had heard a car draw up outside but had assumed it was only the return of Gerry Hinde and Karen Malahyde. It had in fact brought Dr Basil Sumner-Quist, a man who was anathema to Wexford. He would have much preferred Sir Hilary Tremlett.

  ‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Sumner-Quist, ‘how are the mighty fallen!’

  Bad taste, no, worse than that, outrageous, revolting lack of any taste at all, characterised the pathologist. He had once referred to a garrotting as ‘a tasty little titbit’.

  ‘I suppose that’s her?’ He prodded at the bloodstained red silk back. The prohibition on touching dead bodies applied to all but himself. ‘We think so,’ Wexford said, keeping the note of disapproval in his tone to a minimum. He had no doubt shown enough disapproval for one night. ‘This is most probably Davina Flory, the man on the stairs is her husband Harvey Copeland and we guess that’s her daughter. I don’t know what she’s called.’

  ‘You finished?’ Sumner-Quist said to Archbold.

  ‘I can come back, sir.’

  The photographer took one last shot and followed Archbold and the forensics men from the room. Sumner-Quist did not delay. He lifted up the head by grasping the mass of grey-threaded dark hair. The pathologist’s body hid the ruined half of this face and a noble profile was revealed, majestically high forehead, straight nose, a wide curved mouth, the whole scored with a thousand fine lines and deeper indentations.

  ‘Cradle-snatching when she picked him, wasn’t she? She must have been at least fifteen years older.’

  Wexford dipped his head.

  ‘I’ve just been reading her book, Part One of the autobiography. A life packed with incident, you might say. Part Two must remain for ever unwritten. Still, there are too many books in the world, in my humble opinion.’ Sumner-Quist let out his shrill braying laugh. ‘I’ve heard it said that all women when they get old turn into goats or monkeys. She was a monkey, I’d say, wouldn’t you? Not a sagging muscle to be seen.’

  Wexford walked out of the room. He was aware that Burden was following him but he didn’t look round. The anger which had been brewing in the restaurant, fermenting now from another cause, threatened to explode.

  He said in a cold dull voice, ‘When I kill him, at least it’ll be old Tremlett doing the post-mortem.’

  ‘Jenny’s a great admirer of her books,’ said Burden, ‘the anthropology ones or whatever you call it. Well, I suppose they’re political too. A remarkable woman, she was. I gave Jenny the autobiography for her birthday last week.’

  Karen Malahyde came into the hall. She said, ‘I wasn’t certain what to do, sir. I knew you’d want to talk to the Harrisons and Gabbitas before it got too late, so I told them the bare facts. It seems to have come as a complete shock.’

  ‘You did quite right,’ said Wexford.

  ‘I said it was likely you’d be along within the half-hour, sir. The houses, they’re a pair, semi-detached, are about two minutes away down the lane that runs from the back garden.’

  ‘Show me.’

  She led him to the side of the west wing, past the broken bow window, and pointed to where the r
oad skirted the garden and disappeared into the dark.

  ‘Two minutes in a car or two minutes on foot?’

  ‘I’d say ten minutes on foot, but I’ll tell Donaldson where they are, shall I?’

  ‘You can tell me, I’ll walk.’

  * * * *

  Donaldson was to follow with Barry Vine. Wexford set out along the lane that was separated from the garden by a high hedge. On the other side of it the forest encroached. There was very little mist here and the moon had risen. Out of the reach of the arc lamps, the moonlight washed the path ahead with a greenish phosphorescence on which conifers laid smooth or feathery black shadows. Also black against the clear shining sky were the silhouettes of marvellous trees, specimen trees planted decades before, and even by night discernible as fantastic or strange by their immense height or curious leaf formations or contorted branches. The shadows they cast were like letters in Hebrew on an old stained parchment.

  He thought of death and of contrast. He thought of the ugliest of all things happening in this most beautiful place. Of ‘right perfection wrongfully disgraced’. The memory of that blood splashing the room and the table like spilt paint made him shudder.

  Here, so near by, was another world. The path had a magical quality. The wood was an enchanted place, not real, a backdrop perhaps to The Magic Flute or a setting for a fairy tale, an illustration, not living landscape. It was totally silent. Underfoot he trod on pine needles and his shoes made no sound. On and on, as the path wound, opened new moonlit vistas of leafless larches, araucarias with monkey puzzle branches like anchored reptiles, cypresses pointing spires into the sky, Scots pines whose crowns were concertinas, macrocarpas dense as tapestries, junipers slender and frondy, firs with last year’s cones knobbing their tufted boughs. Moonlight, gaining strength, flooded the pinetum, glimmered through its alleys, was here and there excluded by a dense barrier of needled branches or trunks like twisted hanks of rope.

  Nature, which should have risen up and howled, sent a gale roaring through these woods, driven the wild things to protest, the branches of trees to toss and lament, was quiet and sweet and placid. The stillness was almost unnatural. Not a twig moved. Wexford rounded a bend in the path, saw it peter out, the woods thin before him and a clearing emerge. A narrower path opened out of it, penetrating a screen of the more common sort of conifers.

  The lights of houses showed gleaming at the end of the path.

  * * * *

  Barry Vine and Karen Malahyde had been upstairs to the first and second floors to check that there were no more bodies. Curious to know what might be up there, Burden was nevertheless chary of passing Harvey Copeland until Archbold had logged the body’s position, it had been photographed from all angles and the pathologist had given it his preliminary examination. To pass it he would have had to step over the dead man’s outflung right arm and hand. Vine and Karen had done so, but an inhibition, squeamishness and a sense of what was fitting, stopped Burden. He made his way instead across the hall and looked into what turned out to be the drawing room.

  Beautifully furnished, exquisitely tidy, a museum of pretty things and objects d’art. Somehow, he would not have imagined Davina Flory living like this, but in a more slapdash or Bohemian fashion. He would have pictured her, robed or trousered, seated with like-minded spirits at some ancient and battered refectory table in a big warm untidy place, drinking wine and talking long into the night. A kind of banqueting hall it was that his imagination had conjured up. Davina Flory inhabited it, dressed like a matriarch in a Greek tragedy. He smiled to himself shamefacedly, looked again at the festooned windows, portraits in gilded frames, the jardinière of kalanchoe and ferns, the spindle-legged eighteenth-century furniture, and closed the door on it.

  At the back of this east wing and behind the hall were two rooms that seemed to be his and her studies, another that opened into a large glazed room full of plants. One or more of the dead had been an enthusiastic gardener. The place was sweet-scented from bulb plants in bloom, narcissi and hyacinths, and with that damp green feel, humid and mild, peculiar to conservatories.

  He found a library behind the dining room. All these rooms were as orderly, as sleek and tended as the first one he had looked into. They might have been in some National Trust mansion where certain rooms are open to the public. In the library all the books were contained behind screen doors of trelliswork, dark-red wood, fine gleaming glass. A single book only lay open on a lectern. From where he stood Burden could see that the print was old and he guessed at long S’s. A passage led away to kitchen regions.

  The kitchen was big but in no way cavernous. It had been newly fitted in the pseudo-farm dairy style, but he thought the cabinet doors were oak not pine. Here was the refectory table he had been imagining, glowingly polished and with fruit on a polished wooden platter in the centre of it.

  A cough behind him make him look round. Archbold had come in with Chepstow, the fingerprint man.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Prints.’

  Burden held up his right hand to show the glove on it. Chepstow nodded, got to work on the door handle on the kitchen side. The house was too grand to have that kitchen exit known as the ‘back door’. Burden gingerly approached the open doors, one which led to a laundry room with washing machine, dryer and ironing things, the other to a kind of lobby with shelves, cupboards and a rack where coats hung. Yet another room had to be passed through before an exit to the outside was reached.

  He looked round as Archbold came through. Archbold gave a half-nod. The door had bolts but they were not secured. A key was in the lock. Burden wouldn’t touch the doorknob, glove or no glove.

  ‘You’re thinking they came in this way?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it, sir? How else? All the other outside doors are locked.’

  ‘Unless they were admitted. Unless they came to the front door and someone opened it and invited them in.’

  Chepstow came through and did his test on the doorknob, the fingerplate, the jamb. A cotton glove on his right hand, he carefully turned the knob. It gave and the door came open. Outside was cool greenish darkness with a remote wash of moonlight. Burden could make out a high hedge, enclosing a paved court.

  ‘Someone left the door unlocked. The housekeeper when she went home, maybe. Maybe she always left it unlocked and they only locked it before they went to bed.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Burden.

  ‘Terrible thing to have to lock yourselves in when you’re in an isolated place like this.’

  ‘They evidently didn’t,’ Burden said, irritated.

  He made his way through the laundry room which led, by a doorway where the door stood open, into a kind of back hall lined with cupboards. An enclosed staircase, much narrower than the principal one, mounted between walls. These then were the ‘back stairs’, a feature of big old houses Burden had often heard of but seldom if ever seen. He went up, found himself in a passage with open doors on both sides.

  The bedrooms seemed innumerable. If you lived in a house this size you might lose count of how many bedrooms you had. He turned lights on and then off as he proceeded. The passage turned to the left and he knew he must be in the west wing, above the dining room. The only door here was closed. He opened it, pressed the switch his fingers felt on the left-hand wall.

  Light flooded on to the sort of disorder he had imagined Davina Flory living in. It took him an instant only to realise that this was where the gunman or gunmen had been. The disturbance had been caused by them. What was it Karen Malahyde had said?

  ‘They took her bedroom apart, looking for something.’

  The bed had not been stripped but the covers thrown back and the pillows tossed aside. The drawers in the two bedside tables were pulled out and so were two of those in the dressing table. One of the wardrobe doors was open and a shoe from inside lay on the carpet. The lid of the ottoman at the foot of the bed had been raised and a length of silken fabric, a rose and gold floral pattern, trailed over the side of i
t.

  It was odd, this feeling Burden had. His image of the kind of life he had expected Davina Flory to lead, the kind of person he would have thought she was, kept returning to him. This was how he would have envisaged her bedroom, beautifully appointed, cleaned and tidied daily, but subjected by its owner to a continuous untidying process. Not through wanton disregard of a servant’s labours but because she simply did not know or notice, was indifferent to the neatness of her surroundings. It had not been so. An intruder had done this.

  Why then did he find something incongruous about it? The jewel box, a red leather case, empty and upturned on the carpet, expressed the truth plainly enough.

  Burden shook his head ruefully, for he would not have expected Davina Flory to have possessed jewels or a case to put them in.

  * * * *

  Five people in the Harrisons’ small front room turned it into a crowded place. John Gabbitas, the woodsman, had been fetched from next door. There were not enough chairs and an extra had to be brought from upstairs. Brenda Harrison had insisted on making tea, which no one had seemed to want, but of which, Wexford thought now, they all needed the relief and comfort.

  She was cool about it. She had had, of course, some half-hour in which to adjust to the shock before he got there. Nevertheless, he found her briskness disconcerting. It might have been some minor disaster befalling her employers that Vine and Malahyde had told her about, a bit of the roof blowing off, for instance, or water through a ceiling. She bustled about with the teacups and a tin of biscuits while her husband sat stunned, his head occasionally moving from side to side as if in disbelief, his eyes staring.