Kissing the Gunner's Daughter

by Ruth Rendell

  They had driven through the pinetum and reached the cottage where he lived. Gabbitas’s manner, when ushering Wexford in, had become slightly more gracious. Wexford asked him where he had been on the previous day.

  ‘Coppicing a wood near Midhurst. Why?’

  It was a bachelor’s house, tidy, functional, a little shabby. The living room into which he took Wexford was dominated by objects which turned it into an office, a desk with laptop computer, grey metal filing cabinet, stacks of box files. Bookcases full of encyclopaedias half filled a wall. Gabbitas cleared a chair for him by lifting off its seat an armful of folders and exercise books.

  Wexford persisted. ‘And you came home along the by-road?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Mr Gabbitas,’ said Wexford rather crossly, ‘you must have seen enough television, if you know it from no other source, to understand that a policeman’s purpose in asking you the same thing twice is, frankly, to catch you out.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Gabbitas. ‘OK, I do know that. It’s just that a – well, a law-abiding person, doesn’t much like to have it thought he’s done anything to be caught out about. I suppose I expect to be believed.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay. That’s rather idealistic in the world we live in. I wonder if you’ve been thinking about this business much today. While you’ve been in your woodland solitude near Midhurst, for instance? It would be natural to give it some thought.’

  Gabbitas said shortly, ‘I’ve been thinking of it, yes. Who could help thinking of it?’

  ‘About the car these people who perpetrated this – this massacre, arrived in, for instance. Where was it parked while they were in the house? Where was it when you came home? Not making its escape by the by-road or you would have passed it. Daisy Flory made her 999 call at twenty-two minutes past eight, within a few minutes of their leaving. She made it as fast as she could crawl because she was afraid she might bleed to death.’ Wexford watched the man’s face while he said this. It remained impassive but the lips tightened a little. ‘So the car can’t have gone by the by-road or you would have seen it.’

  ‘Obviously it went by the main road.’

  ‘There happens to have been a squad car on the B 2428 at this time and it was alerted to block the road and note all vehicles from eight twenty-five. According to the officers in that car no vehicle of any kind passed until eight forty-eight when our own convoy with the ambulance came. A roadblock was also set up on the B 2428 in the Cambery Ashes direction. Perhaps our block was put on too late. There’s something you can perhaps tell me: is there any other way out?’

  ‘Through the woods, d’you mean? A jeep could perhaps get out if the driver knew the woods. If he knew them like the back of his hand.’ Gabbitas sounded extremely dubious. ‘I’m not sure I could do it.’

  ‘But you haven’t been here all that long, have you?’

  As if he thought explanation rather than an answer required, Gabbitas said, ‘I teach one day a week at Sewingbury Agricultural College. I take private work. I’m a tree surgeon among other things.’

  ‘When did you first come here?’

  ‘Last May.’ Gabbitas put his hand up to his mouth, rubbed his lips. ‘How is Daisy?’

  ‘She’s well,’ Wexford said. ‘She’s going to be very well – physically. Her psychological state, that’s another thing. Who lived here before you came?’

  ‘Some people called Griffin.’ Gabbitas spelt it. ‘A couple and their son.’

  ‘Was their work confined to the estate or did they have outside jobs like you?’

  ‘The son was grown-up. He had a job, I don’t know what. In Pomfret or Kingsmarkham, I should think. Griffin, I think his first name was Gerry or maybe Terry, yes, Terry, he managed the woodland. She was just his wife. I think she sometimes worked up at the house.’

  ‘Why did they leave? It wasn’t just a job to leave, it was a house too.’

  ‘He was getting on. Not sixty-five but getting on. I think the work got too much for him, he took early retirement. They had a house to go to, a place they’d bought. That’s just about all I know about the Griffins. I met them just the once, when I got this job and I was shown the house.’

  ‘The Harrisons will know more, I imagine.’

  For the first time, Gabbitas really smiled. His face was attractive and friendly when he smiled and his teeth were spectacular. ‘They weren’t on speaking terms.’

  ‘What, the Harrisons and the Griffins?’

  ‘Brenda Harrison told me they hadn’t spoken since Griffin insulted her months before. I don’t know what he said or did, that’s all she told me.’

  ‘Was that the real reason for their leaving?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Do you know where this house they moved to is? Did they leave an address?’

  ‘Not with me. I think they said Myringham way. Not all that far. I have a distinct memory of Myringham. Would you like a coffee? Or tea or something?’

  Wexford refused. He also refused Gabbitas’s offer of a lift back to where his car was parked outside the incident room.

  ‘It’s dark. You’d better take a torch.’ He called after Wexford, ‘That was her place, Daisy’s. Those stables, they were her private sort of sanctuary. Her grandmother had them done up for her.’ He had a kind of genius for minor bombshells, small revelations. ‘She spent hours in there on her own. Doing her own thing, whatever that was.’

  They had taken her sanctuary over without asking permission. Or, if permission had been asked and obtained, it was not from the stables’ owner. Wexford walked along the winding path through the pinetum, aided by the torch Gabbitas had lent him. It occurred to him as the now dark bulk, the unlit rear, of Tancred House came into sight, that all this now probably belonged to Daisy Flory. Unless there were other heirs, but if there were, newspaper articles and obituaries had made no mention of them.

  She had come into all this narrowly. If the bullet had been an inch lower, death would have robbed her of her inheritance. Wexford wondered why he was so sure that her inheritance would be a liability to her, that when she knew of what some would call her good fortune, she would recoil from it.

  * * * *

  Hinde had checked the items listed by Brenda Harrison with Davina Flory’s insurance company. A string of jet beads, a rope of pearls that, whatever Brenda might insist, were probably not real, a couple of silver rings, a silver bracelet, a silver and onyx brooch, she had not bothered to insure.

  On both lists were a gold bracelet valued at three thousand five hundred pounds, a ruby ring with diamond shoulders valued at five thousand pounds, another set with pearls and sapphires at two thousand, and a ring described as a diamond cluster, a formidable piece of jewellery this, valued at nineteen thousand pounds.

  The whole seemed to be worth rather more than thirty thousand. They had taken the less valuable pieces as well, of course, not knowing. Perhaps they had been even more ignorant and had supposed their loot worth far more than it was.

  Wexford poked at the grey furry cactus with his forefinger. Its colour and texture reminded him of Queenie the cat. No doubt she too had thorns concealed by silky fluff. He locked the door and went to his car.

  Chapter Eight

  Five cartridges had been used in the Tancred murders.

  The cartridges, according to the ballistics expert who had examined them, had come from a Colt Magnum .38 revolver. The barrel of every pistol is scored inside by distinct lines and grooves which in turn leave their mark on the bullet as it leaves the gun. The interior of each barrel contains unique marks, as individual as a fingerprint. The marks on the .38 cartridges found at Tancred House – all had passed through the bodies of Davina Flory, Naomi Jones and Harvey Copeland – matched and could therefore be concluded to have come from the same gun.

  Wexford said, ‘At least we know that only one gun was used. We know it was a Colt Magnum .38. The man Daisy saw did all the shooting. They didn’t share it out, he did all the shooting hims
elf. Is that odd?’

  ‘They only had one gun,’ said Burden. ‘Or only one real gun. Do you know, I read somewhere the other day about a town in the United States where a serial killer was on the loose, that all the students on the university campus were permitted to go out and buy guns for their own protection. Kids of nineteen and twenty they must have been. Think of that. Handguns are still hard to come by in this country, thank God.’

  ‘We said that when poor Martin was shot, remember?’

  ‘That was a Colt .38 or .357 too.’

  ‘I’d noticed,’ Wexford said sharply. ‘But the cartridges used in the two cases, Martin’s killing and this one, don’t match anyway.’

  ‘Unfortunately. If they did we’d really be getting somewhere. One cartridge used and five left to go? Michelle Weaver’s story wouldn’t look quite so fantastic.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you it was odd using a handgun at all?

  ‘Occurred to me? It struck me at once. Most of them use a sawn-off shotgun.’

  ‘Yes. The great British answer to Dan Wesson. I’ll tell you something else that’s odd, Mike. Let’s say there were six cartridges in the cylinder, it was full to capacity. Four people were in the house but the gunman didn’t fire four times, he fired five times. Harvey Copeland was the first to be shot, yet, knowing he had only six cartridges he fired twice at Copeland. Why? Perhaps he didn’t know there were three more people in the dining room, perhaps he panicked. He goes into the dining room and shoots Davina Flory, then Naomi Jones, one cartridge each, then Daisy. One cartridge remains in the cylinder but he doesn’t shoot Daisy twice to “finish her off”, as Ken Harrison might put it. Why doesn’t he?’

  ‘Hearing the cat upstairs surprised him. He heard the noise and ran?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. Or there weren’t six cartridges in the cylinder, there were only five. One had already been used before he came to Tancred.’

  ‘Not on poor old Martin, though,’ Burden said briskly. ‘Anything come in from Sumner-Quist yet?’

  Wexford shook his head. ‘I suppose we must expect delays. I’ve put Barry on to checking where John Gabbitas was on Tuesday, what time he left and so on. And then I’d like you to take him with you and find some people called Griffin, a Terry Griffin and his wife living in the Myringham area. They were Gabbitas’s predecessors on the Tancred estate. We’re looking for someone who knew this place and the people who lived here. Possibly for someone with a grudge against them.’

  ‘A former employee then?’

  ‘Perhaps. One who knew all about them and what they possessed, their habits and so on. One who’s an unknown quantity.’

  After Burden had gone, Wexford sat looking at the scene-of-crime photographs. Stills from a snuff movie, he thought, the kind of pictures no one but himself would ever see, the results of real violence, real crime. Those great dark splashes and stains were real blood. Was he privileged to see them, or unfortunate? Would the day ever come when newspapers displayed such photographs? It might. After all, it was not so long ago that no publication ever showed a picture of the dead.

  He made the mental adjustment that shifted him from being a sensitive man with a man’s feelings to a briskly functioning machine, an analysing eye, a printer-out of question marks. In this avatar, he looked at the photographs. Tragic, appalling, monstrous as the scene in the dining room might be, there was nothing incongruous about it. This was how the women would have fallen if one of them had been sitting at the table facing the door, the other, opposite her, standing up and staring past her. The blood on the floor in the empty corner near the foot of the table was Daisy’s blood.

  He saw what he had seen that night. The bloody napkin on the floor and the blood-dappled napkin in Davina Flory’s hand, clutched by her dying, contracting fingers. Her face lying dipped in a plate of blood, and the dreadful ruined head. Naomi lay back in her chair as if in a swoon, her long hair trailed over the barred back of it and dipping nearly to touch the floor. Spangles of blood on the lampshades, the walls, black blotches on the carpet, dark spray spots on the bread in the basket, and the tablecloth dark where the blood had seeped in a dense smooth tide.

  For the second time in this case – and he was later to experience it again and again – he had a perception of a prevailing order destroyed, of beauty outraged, of chaos come again. With no evidence for believing it, he thought he detected in this perpetrator a gleeful passion for destruction. But there was nothing incongruous in these photographs. Given the dreadful events, it was what he would expect. On the other hand, the pictures of Harvey Copeland, showing him spreadeagled on his back at the foot of the staircase, his feet towards the front hall and door, presented a problem. One perhaps which Daisy’s testimony would solve.

  If the men had come downstairs and met him coming up to look for them, why had he, when the gunman shot him, not fallen backwards down those stairs?

  * * * *

  Four was the hour he had in mind, it was at four that he had been to see her yesterday, though today he had named no definite time. The traffic was light and he reached the hospital rather early. It was ten to four when he stepped out of the lift and walked along the corridor towards MacAlister Ward.

  This time there was no Dr Leigh waiting to meet him. He had called Anne Lennox off her watch. There seemed to be no one about. Perhaps the staff were all having a quick breather (or choker) in the charge nurse’s room. He came quietly to Daisy’s room. Through the frosted-glass panels he could see she had someone with her, a man in a chair on the left side of the bed.

  A visitor. At least it wasn’t Jason Sebright.

  The pane of glass in the door clarified this man’s image for him. He was young, about twenty-six, biggish and thickset, and such was his appearance that Wexford could immediately place him, or make a good guess at doing so. Daisy’s visitor belonged to the upper middle class, had been to a distinguished public school but probably not to a university, was ‘something in the city’ where he worked all his days with a computer and a phone. For this job he would be – as Ken Harrison might have said – finished before he was thirty, so he was coining in the maximum before that date. The clothes he wore were suitable for a man twice his age; navy blazer, dark-grey flannels, a white shirt and old school tie. The one concession he made to vague ideas of fashion and suitability was the wearing of his hair rather longer than that shirt and blazer required. It was fair curly hair and from the way it was combed and the way it curled round his ear lobes Wexford guessed he was vain about it.

  As for Daisy, she sat up in bed, her eyes on her visitor, her expression inscrutable. She was not smiling, nor did she look particularly sad. It was impossible for him to tell if she had begun to recover from the shock she had received. The young man had brought flowers, a dozen red roses in bud, and these lay on the bedcover between him and her. Her right hand, the good hand, rested on their stems and on the pink and gold patterned paper in which they were wrapped.

  Wexford waited for a few seconds, then tapped on the door, opened it and walked in.

  The young man turned round, bestowing on Wexford precisely the stare he had expected. At certain schools, he had often thought, they teach them to look at you like that, with confidence, contempt, a degree of indignation, just as they teach them to talk with a plum in their mouths.

  Daisy didn’t smile. She managed to be polite and cordial without smiling, a rare feat. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ Her voice today was subdued but measured, the edge of hysteria gone. ‘Nicholas, this is Inspector – no, Chief Inspector Wexford. Mr Wexford, this is Nicholas Virson, a friend of my family.’

  She said it calmly, without a flicker of hesitation, though she had no family left.

  The two men nodded to each other. Wexford said, ‘Good afternoon.’ Virson only gave a second nod. In his idea of a hierarchy, his great Chain of Being, policemen had their low place.

  ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’

  Daisy looked down. ‘I’m OK.’

 
; ‘Do you feel well enough for us to have a talk? To go into things rather more deeply?’

  ‘I must,’ she said. She stretched her neck, lifted her chin. ‘You said it all yesterday when you said we had to, we didn’t have a choice.’

  He saw her close her fingers round the paper that wrapped the roses, saw her clutch the stems tightly, and had the strange notion she was doing it to make her hand bleed. But perhaps they were thornless.

  ‘You’ll have to go, Nicholas.’ Men with this Christian name are almost always called by one of its diminutives, Nick or Nicky, but she called him Nicholas. ‘It was sweet of you to come. I adore the flowers,’ she said, squeezing their stems without looking at them.

  Wexford had known Virson would say it or something like it, it was only a matter of time. ‘I say, I hope you aren’t going to put Daisy through any sort of interrogation. I mean, at the end of the day what can she in fact tell you? What can she remember? She’s a very confused lady, aren’t you, lovey?’

  ‘I’m not confused.’ She spoke in a calm low monotone, giving each word equal weight. ‘I’m not at all confused.’

  ‘Now she tells me.’ Virson managed a hearty laugh. He got up, stood there, suddenly seeming not quite sure of himself. Over his shoulder he threw at Wexford, ‘She may manage a description of the villain she did see, but she never even caught a glimpse of the vehicle.’

  Now why had he said that? Was it simply that he needed something to say to fill up the time while he considered attempting a kiss? Daisy lifted her face to him, something Wexford hadn’t expected, and Virson, bending down quickly, put his lips to her cheek. The kiss stimulated him to use an endearment.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you, darling?’

  ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘On your way out could you find a vase and put these flowers in it?’

  This, evidently, was not at all what Virson had meant. He had no option but to agree.

  ‘You’ll find one in a place they call the sluice. I don’t know where it is, down to the left somewhere. The poor nurses are always so busy.’