by Ruth Rendell
Before running outside to boil a kettle and lay a tray – she seemed a hyperactive restless woman – she had confirmed his own identification. The dead man on the stairs was Harvey Copeland, the elder of the dead women at the table Davina Flory. The other woman she identified as certainly Davina Flory’s daughter Naomi. In spite of the exalted status, in anyone’s estimation, of her employers, it appeared that they were all on Christian-name terms here, Davina and Harvey and Naomi and Brenda. She even had to think for a moment before recalling Naomi’s surname. Oh, yes, Jones, she was Mrs Jones, but the girl called herself Flory.
‘The girl?’
‘Daisy was Naomi’s daughter and Davina’s granddaughter. Her name was Davina too, she was sort of Davina Flory the younger, if you see what I mean, but they called her Daisy.’
‘Not “was”,’ said Wexford. ‘She’s not dead.’
She lifted her shoulders a little. Her tone seemed to him indignant, perhaps only because she had been proved wrong. ‘Oh. I thought the policewoman said they all were.’
It was after this that she made the tea.
He could already tell that of the three she was to be his principal informant. Her apparent callousness, an indifference that was almost repulsive, was of no particular account. Because of it, she might make the best witness. In any case, John Gabbitas, a man in his twenties, though living in one of the Tancred Wood houses and managing the woodland, worked for himself as well, as a woodsman and tree expert, and said he had only returned an hour before from a job on the other side of the county. Ken Harrison had scarcely uttered a word since Wexford and Vine arrived.
‘When did you last see them?’ Wexford asked.
She answered quickly. She was not the kind of woman to take thoughts. ‘Seven thirty. I always did, regular as clockwork. Unless she had a dinner party. When it was just them, the four of them, I’d cook whatever it was and dish it up and put in on the heated trolley and wheel it into the dining room. Naomi always served it, or so I presume. I was never there to see. Davina liked to be at the table by seven forty-five sharp, same every night when she was home. It was always the same.’
‘And it was the same tonight?’
‘It was always the same. I wheeled the trolley in at seven thirty. It was soup and sole and apricots with yoghurt. I put my head round the sare door, they were all there . . .’
‘Round the what?’
‘The sare. That’s the name they had for it. The conservatory. I said I was off and I went out the back way like I always do.’
‘Did you lock the back door?’
‘No, of course I didn’t. I never do that. Besides, Bib was still there.’
‘Bib?’
‘She helps out. Comes up on her bike. She’s got a morning job some mornings so she mostly comes here in the afternoons. I left her here, finishing off the freezer, and she said she’d be off in five minutes.’ A thought suddenly struck her. Her colour changed – for the first time. ‘The cat,’ she said, ‘is the cat all right? Oh, they didn’t kill the cat!’
‘Not so far as I know,’ Wexford said. ‘Well, no, certainly not.’
Before he could add, as he had begun to, suppressing a tone of irony, ‘Only the people’, she exclaimed, ‘Thank God for that!’
Wexford gave her a moment. ‘Around eight, did you hear anything? A car? Shots?’
He knew the shots would not have been heard from here. Not shots fired inside the house. She shook her head.
‘A car wouldn’t go past here. The road ends here. There’s only the main road in and the by-road.’
‘The by-road?’
She answered him impatiently. She was one of those people who expect everyone to know, as well as they themselves do, the workings and rules and geography of their little private world. ‘It’s the one comes up from Pomfret Monachorum, isn’t it?’
Gabbitas said, ‘That’s the way I came home.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Twenty past eight, half past. I didn’t see anyone, if that’s what you’re asking. I didn’t meet a car or pass one or anything like that.’
Wexford thought that came out rather too pat. Then Ken Harrison spoke. The words came slowly, as if he had suffered an injury to his throat and was still learning how to project his voice. ‘We didn’t hear a thing. There wasn’t a sound.’ He added, wonderingly – and incomprehensibly – ‘There never was.’ He explained. ‘You can never hear anything at the house from here.’
The others seemed long to have registered and accepted what had happened. Mrs Harrison had adjusted to it almost at once. Her world had altered but she would contend with it. Her husband reacted as if the news had just that moment been broken to him, ‘All dead? Did you say they were all dead?’
It sounded to Wexford like something out of Macbeth, though he wasn’t sure it was. A lot of tonight was like something out of Macbeth.
‘The young girl, Miss Flory, Daisy, she’s alive.’
But, he thought, is she? Is she still alive? Then Harrison shocked him. He thought that was impossible but Harrison did it.
‘Funny they didn’t finish her off, wasn’t it?’
Barry Vine coughed.
‘Have another cup of tea, will you?’ said Brenda Harrison.
‘No, thank you. It’s getting late and we’ll be off. You’ll want to get to bed.’
‘You’ve finished with us, then, have you?’
Perhaps it was a favourite word with him. Ken Harrison was looking with a kind of glazed wistfulness at Wexford.
‘Finished? No, by no means. We shall want to talk to you all again. Perhaps you’ll let me have Bib’s address. What’s her other name?’
No one seemed to know. They had the address but no surname. She was just Bib.
‘Thanks for the tea,’ said Vine.
Wexford went back to the house by car. Sumner-Quist had gone. Archbold and Milsom were working away upstairs. Burden said to him, ‘I forgot to mention it but I had road blocks put on all the roads out of here when the message came through.’
‘What, before you knew what it was about?’
‘Well, I knew it was in the nature of a – a massacre. She said, “They’re all dead,” when she made her 999 call. You think I over-reacted, do you?’
‘No,’ said Wexford slowly, ‘no, not at all. I think you were right, insofar as it’s possible to block all roads. I mean, there must be dozens of ways out.’
‘Not really. What they call the by-road .goes to Pomfret Monachorum and Cheriton. The main drive goes directly to the B 2428 into town and there happened to be a squad car on that about half a mile along. In the other direction the road goes to Cambery Ashes, as you know. It was a piece of luck for us, or it looked that way. The pair in the squad car knew about it within three minutes of her call. But they didn’t go that way, they must have gone by the by-road, and then there wasn’t much of a chance. No description, no index number or approximation to it, no idea what to look for. We haven’t now. I couldn’t have asked her anything more, could I, Reg? I reckoned she was dying.’
‘Of course you couldn’t. Of course not.’
‘I hope to God she doesn’t die.’
‘So do I,’ said Wexford. ‘She’s only seventeen.’
‘Well, naturally one hopes for her sake she’ll live, but I was thinking of what she can tell us. Pretty well everything, don’t you think?’
Wexford just looked at him.
Chapter Five
The girl could tell them everything. Davina Jones called Daisy Flory could tell them when the men came and how they came, what they looked like, even perhaps what they wanted and took. She had seen them and perhaps spoken to them. She might have seen their car. Wexford thought it likely she was intelligent and hoped she was observant. He hoped very much she would live.
Entering his own house at midnight, he thought of phoning the hospital to check on her. What good would it do, his knowing whether she lived or died?
If they told him she wa
s dead he wouldn’t sleep, because she had been young and with all of her life before her. And for Burden’s reason too, he had better be honest. Because if she was dead the case would be all that much harder. But if they told him she was all right, she was doing well, he would be too hyped up at the prospect of talking to her to sleep.
Anyway, they wouldn’t tell him that, but either that she was dead or ‘holding her own’ or ‘comfortable’. In any case WPC Rosemary Mountjoy was with her, would sit outside the ward door till morning and be relieved at eight by WPC Anne Lennox.
He went quietly upstairs to see if Dora was still awake. The light from the open door fell, not on her face, but in a wide band across the arm that lay outside the covers, the sleeve of her nightdress, the rather small neat hand with round pink fingernails. Deep sleep held her and her breathing was steady and slow. She could sleep easily then, in spite of what had happened earlier that evening, in spite of Sheila and the fourth member of their party he was already calling ‘that wretched man’. He felt unreasonably exasperated by her. Retreating he pulled the door to behind him, went down again and in the living room hunted through the paper rack for the Independent on Sunday of two days before.
The review section was still there, pushed between the Radio Times and some freebie magazine. It was the Win Carver interview he was looking for and the big portrait photograph he remembered as a double-page spread. Page eleven. He sat down in an armchair, found the page. The face was before him, the face he had seen an hour before in death when Sumner-Quist had lifted it from the table by a handful of hair like an executioner holding aloft a severed head.
The text began as a single column on the left-hand side. Wexford looked at the picture. The portrait was of a kind a woman would only tolerate seeing of herself if she had succeeded overwhelmingly in fields distant from the triumph of youth and beauty. These were not lines on the face but the deep scoring of time and the pleating of old age. From a bird’s nest of wrinkles the nose stood out beak-like and the lips curved in a half-smile that was both ironic and kindly. The eyes were still young, dark, burning irises and clear unveined whites in the tangle of gathered folds.
The caption read: Davina Flory, the first volume of whose autobiography The Youngest Wren of Nine is published by St Giles Press at £16.00. He turned the page and there she was when young: a little girl in a velvet dress with lace collar, ten years later a grown-up girl with a swan neck, mysterious smile, shingled hair and one of those dresses with no waist and a belt round the hips.
The print swam before his eyes. Wexford gave a huge yawn. He was too tired to read the piece tonight and leaving the paper open on the table, he went back upstairs. The evening past seemed immensely long, a corridor of events with at the opening of the tunnel, distant but very much there, Sheila and that wretched man.
* * * *
While the reader had recourse to a magazine, the non-reader went to a book for help.
Burden let himself into his house to the sound of his son yelling. By the time he was upstairs the noise had stopped and Mark was being comforted in his mother’s arms. Burden could hear her telling him, in that rather didactic confident way of hers which was immediately reassuring, that diplodocus the two-ridged reptile had not walked the earth for two million years and in any case had never been known to inhabit toy cupboards.
By the time she came into their bedroom Burden was in bed, sitting up with her birthday copy of The Youngest Wren of Nine resting against his knees.
She kissed him, went into a detailed description of Mark’s dream, which for a little while distracted him from the biographical note he had been reading on the back flap of the book jacket. In that moment he decided to say nothing to her of what had happened. Not till the morning. She had deeply admired the dead woman, followed her travels and collected her works. Their pillow talk of the previous night had been about this book, Davina Flory’s childhood and the early influences which helped to form the character of this distinguished anthropologist and ‘geo-sociologist’.
‘You can’t have my book till I’ve finished it,’ she said sleepily, turning over and burying her head in the pillows. ‘Anyway, can’t we have the light out?’
‘Two minutes. Just to let me unwind. Good night, love.’
Unlike many writers past a certain age, Davina Flory had had no reservations about her birth date appearing in print. She had been seventy-eight, born in Oxford, the youngest of the nine children of a professor of Greek. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, with later a Ph.D. from London, she had married in 1935 a fellow undergraduate at Oxford, Desmond Cathcart Flory. Together they had set about the redemption of the gardens of his home, Tancred House, Kingsmarkham, and had begun the planting of the famous woods.
Burden read the rest, put the light out, lay looking into the dark, thinking of what he had read. Desmond Flory had been killed in France in 1944, eight months before his daughter Naomi was born. Two years later Davina Flory began her travels in Europe and the Middle East, re-marrying in 1951. He had forgotten the rest of it, the new husband’s name, the titles of all the works.
None of this would matter. That Davina Flory had been who she was would turn out to be no more important than if she had been what Burden called ‘an ordinary person’. It was possible that the men who had killed her had no idea of her identity. A good many of the kind of people Burden came across in his work were, in any case, unable to read. To the gunman or gunmen at Tancred House she had been only a woman who possessed jewellery and lived in an isolated place. She and her husband and daughter and granddaughter were vulnerable and unprotected and that was enough for them.
* * * *
The first thing Wexford saw when he woke up was the phone. Usually the first thing he saw was the little black Marks and Spencer alarm clock, the arch-shaped clock that was either braying away or about to go off. He couldn’t remember the phone number of Stowerton Royal Infirmary. WPC Mountjoy would have phoned if anything had happened.
In the post, on the doormat, was a card from Sheila. It had been posted in Venice four days before, while she was there with that man. The picture was of a gloomy baroque interior, a pulpit and drapery over it, marble probably but cunningly contrived to look like cloth. Sheila had written, ‘We have just been to see the Gesuiti, which is Gus’s favourite joke-church in all the world and not to be confused, he says, with the Gesuati. Stone Wilton is a bit cold on the feet and it is freezing here. Much love, S.’
He would make her as pretentious as himself. Wexford wondered what on earth the card meant. What was a joke-church, and come to that what was Stone Wilton? It sounded like a village in the Cotswolds.
The Independent on Sunday review section in his pocket, he drove himself to work. The removal of furnishings and equipment had already begun for the setting up of an incident room at Tancred House. The investigation would be conducted from there. DC Hinde told him as he came in that a Kingsmarkham systems manufacturer on the industrial estate was offering them, free of charge as a gesture of good will, computers, word processors with laser printers, printer ancillaries, workstations, software and faxes.
‘The managing director’s chairman of the local Tories,’ Hinde said. ‘Chap called Pagett, Graham Pagett. He’s been on the blower. He says this is his way of implementing the Government’s policy that fighting crime is up to the private individual.’
Wexford grunted.
‘We can do with that kind of support, sir.’
Yes, it’s very good of him, ’ Wexford said absently. He wouldn’t go up there yet but waste no time, take Barry Vine with him and find the woman called Bib.
It had to be straightforward, this business. It had to be murder for robbery or murder in the course of robbery. Two villains in a stolen car after Davina Flory’s jewellery. Maybe they’d been reading the Independent on Sunday, except that this newspaper hadn’t mentioned jewellery other than Win Carver’s comment that Davina wore a wedding ring, and they’d be more likely anyway to read the People. If the
y could read. Two villains certainly, but not strangers to the place. One who knew all about it, one who didn’t, his mate, his pal, met perhaps in prison . . .
Someone connected with those servants, the Harrisons? With this Bib? She lived at Pomfret Monachorum, which probably meant she had gone home by the by-road. Wexford fancied the by-road as an exit for the gunman and his companion. That was their most likely way out, especially as one of them must have known the place. He could almost hear one saying to the other that this was the way to avoid the Plod coming in.
* * * *
The forest separated Pomfret Monachorum from Tancred and Kingsmarkham and almost from the rest of the world. Behind it the road ran to Cheriton and to Pomfret. The ruined walls of an abbey still stood, the church was pretty outside, wrecked inside by Henry VIII and later Cromwell, and the rest of the place consisted of the vicarage, a cluster of cottages and a small council estate. Out on the Pomfret road was a row of three shingle-and-slate cottages.
It was in one of these that Bib lived, though neither Wexford nor Vine knew which one. All the Harrisons and Gabbitas knew was that it was in the row called Edith Cottages.
A plaque bearing this name and the date 1882 was embedded in the shingles above the upper windows of the middle one. All the cottages needed painting, none looked prosperous. Each one had a television aerial on its roof and the one on the left a dish sticking out from the side of a bedroom window. A bicycle leant up against the wall by the front door of the cottage on the right and a Ford Transit van was parked half on the grass verge outside its gate. A wheelie-bin stood in the garden of the middle cottage, on a piece of concrete with a manhole cover in it. There were daffodils in bloom in this garden but no flowers in either of the others, and the one with the bicycle was overgrown with weeds.
Because Brenda Harrison had told him Bib rode a bicycle, Wexford decided to try the house on the right. A young man came to the door. He was rather tall but very slight, dressed in blue jeans and an American college sweatshirt so worn and washed and faded that only the U of University and a capital S and T were discernible on the greyish background. His was a girlish face, the face of a pretty tomboy. The youths who played heroines in sixteenth-century drama must have looked like him.
