Kissing the Gunner's Daughter

by Ruth Rendell

  Virson went off, carrying out the roses he had carried in.

  Today Daisy had a hospital gown on that fastened with tapes down the back. It covered and enclosed her left arm with the bandages and the sling. The IV line was still there. She followed his eyes.

  ‘It’s easier for putting drugs into you. That’s why they keep it there. It’s coming off today. I’m not ill any more.’

  ‘And you’re not confused?’ He was quoting her.

  ‘Not in the least.’ She spoke for a moment like someone much older. ‘I have been thinking about it,’ she said. ‘People tell me not to think of it but I have to. What else is there? I knew I’d have to tell you everything as best I could so I’ve been thinking about it to get things straight. Didn’t some writer say violent death wonderfully concentrates the mind?’

  He was surprised but he didn’t show it. ‘Samuel Johnson, but it was knowing one was going to be hanged on the morrow.’

  She smiled a little, a very little, narrowly. ‘You’re not much like my idea of a policeman.’

  ‘I daresay you haven’t met many.’ He thought suddenly, she looks like Sheila. She looks like my own daughter. Oh, she was dark and Sheila was fair but it wasn’t those things, whatever people said, that made one person look like another. It was similarity of feature, facial shape. It made him a bit cross when they said Sheila was like him because they had the same hair. Or had, before his went grey and half of it fell out. Sheila was beautiful. Daisy was beautiful and her features were like Sheila’s. She was looking at him with a sadness close to despair. ‘You said you’d been thinking about it, Daisy. Tell me what you thought.’

  She nodded, her expression unchanging. She reached for the glass of something on the bedside cabinet – lemon squash, barley water – and drank a little. ‘I’ll tell you what happened, everything I remember. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, please.’

  ‘You must interrupt me if something isn’t clear. You’ll do that, won’t you?’

  Her tone, suddenly, was that of someone used to telling servants, and not only servants, what she wanted, and having them obey. She was habituated, he thought, to telling one to come and he cometh, another to go and he goeth and a third, do this and he doeth it. Wexford suppressed a smile. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s hard to know how far back to begin. Davina used to say that when she was writing a book. How far back to begin? You could start at what you thought was the beginning and then you’d realise it began long, long before that. But here, in this case – shall I start with the afternoon?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’d been to school. I’m a day student at Crelands. As a matter of fact, I’d love to have boarded but Davina wouldn’t let me.’ She seemed to recollect something, perhaps only that her grandmother was dead. De mortuis . . . ‘Well, it would have been silly really. Crelands is only the other side of Myfleet, as I expect you know.’

  He knew. This was also the alma mater of Sebright, apparently. A minor public school, it nevertheless belonged in the Headmasters’ Conference, as Eton and Harrow did. The fees were similar to theirs. Exclusively a boys’ school from its founding by Albert the Good in 1856, it had opened its doors to girls some seven or eight years ago.

  ‘Afternoon school stops at four. I got home at four thirty.’

  ‘Someone fetched you by car?’

  She gave him a glance, genuinely puzzled. ‘I drove myself.’

  The great British car revolution had not passed him by, but he could still recall very clearly the days when a three or four-car family was something he thought of as an American anomaly, when a great many women couldn’t drive, when few people possessed a car until they were married. His own mother would have stared in astonishment, suspected mockery, if asked if she could drive. His mild surprise wasn’t lost on Daisy.

  ‘Davina gave me my car for my birthday when I was seventeen. I passed my test next day. It was a great relief, I can tell you, not having to depend on one of them or be driven by Ken. Well, as I was saying, I got home by four thirty and went to my place. You’ve probably seen my place. That’s what I call it. It used to be stables. I garage my car there and there’s this room that’s mine, that’s private.’

  ‘Daisy, I’ve a confession to make. We’re using your place as an incident room. It seemed the most convenient. We do have to be there. Someone should have asked you and I’m very sorry we overlooked it.’

  ‘You mean there are lots of policemen and computers and desks and a – a blackboard?’ She must have seen something like it on television. ‘You’re sort of investigating the case from there?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be afraid. I don’t mind. Why should I mind? Be my guest. I don’t mind anything any more.’ She looked away, wrinkled up her face a little, said in the same cool tone, ‘Why would I care about a little thing like that when I’ve nothing to live for?’

  ‘Daisy . . .’ he began.

  ‘No, don’t say it, please. Don’t say I’m young and I’ve all my life before me and this will pass. Don’t tell me time is a great healer and this time next year I’ll have put it all in the past. Don’t.’

  Someone had been saying those things to her. A doctor? Some psychologist on the hospital staff? Nicholas Virson?

  ‘All right. I won’t. Tell me what happened after you got home.’

  She waited a little, drew in her breath. ‘I’ve got my own phone, I expect you’ve noticed. I expect you’re using it. Brenda phoned to ask if I’d like tea and then she brought it. Tea and biscuits. I was reading, I get a lot of prep. A levels for me in May – or it was to have been.’

  He didn’t comment.

  ‘I’m no intellectual. Davina thought I was because I’m – well, quite bright. She couldn’t bear to think I might take after my mother. Sorry, you won’t want to hear about that. It doesn’t matter any more, anyway.

  ‘Davina expected us to change for dinner. Not dress exactly but change. My – my mother came home in her car. She works in a crafts gallery – well, she’s a partner in a crafts gallery – with a woman called Joanne Garland. The gallery’s called Garlands. I expect you think that’s yucky but it’s the woman’s name so I suppose it’s OK. She came home in her car. I think Davina and Harvey were home all afternoon but I don’t know. Brenda would know.

  ‘I went to my room and put a dress on. Davina used to say jeans were a uniform and should be used as such, for work. The others were all in the serre having drinks.’

  ‘In the what?’

  ‘The serre. It’s French for “greenhouse”, it’s what we always called it. It sounds better than “conservatory”, don’t you think?’

  Wexford thought it sounded pretentious but he said nothing.

  ‘We always had drinks in there or in the drawing room. Just sherry, you know, or orange juice or fizzy water. I always had fizzy water and so did my mother. Davina was talking about going to Glyndebourne; she is – was – a member or a friend or whatever and she always went three times a year. Everything like that she went to, Aldeburgh, the Edinburgh Festival, Salzburg. Anyway, her tickets had come. She was asking Harvey about what she should order for dinner. You have to order your dinner months in advance if you don’t want to picnic. We never did picnic, it would be so awful if it rained.

  ‘They were still talking about that when Brenda put her head round the door and said dinner was in the dining room and she was off. I started talking to Davina about going to France in a fortnight’s time, she was going to Paris to be in some television book programme and she wanted me to go with her and Harvey. It would have been Easter holidays for me but I didn’t much want to go and I was telling her I didn’t and – but you won’t want to hear all this.’

  Daisy put her hand up to her lips. She was looking at him, looking through him. He said, ‘It is very hard to realise, I know that, even though you were there, even though you saw. It will take you time to accept what has happened.’
<
br />   ‘No,’ she said remotely, ‘it’s not hard to accept. I’m not in any doubt. When I woke up this morning I didn’t even have a moment before I remembered. You know –’ she shrugged at him ‘– how there’s always that moment, and then everything comes back. It’s not like that. Everything’s there all the time. It’ll always be there. What Nicholas said, about me being confused, that’s absolutely not so. OK, never mind, I’ll go on, I’m digressing too much.

  ‘My mother usually served dinner. Brenda left it all there for us on the trolley. We didn’t have wine except at the weekends. There was a bottle of Badoit and a jug of apple juice. We had – let me see – soup, it was potato and leek, sort of vichyssoise, but it was hot. We had that and bread, of course, and then my mother cleared away the plates and served the main course. It was fish, sole something or other. Is it called sole bonne femme when it’s in a sauce with creamed potatoes round?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wexford said, amused in spite of everything. ‘It doesn’t matter. I get the picture.’

  ‘Well, it was that with carrots and French beans. She’d served us all and sat down and we’d started eating. My mother hadn’t even started. She said, ‘What’s that? It sounds like someone upstairs.’

  ‘And you hadn’t heard a car? No one had heard a car?’

  ‘They’d have said. You see, we were expecting a car. Well, not then, not till a quarter past eight, only she’s always early. She’s one of those people who are as bad as the unpunctual ones, always at least five minutes early.’

  ‘Who is? Who are you talking about, Daisy?’

  ‘Joanne Garland. She was coming to see Mum. It was Tuesday, and Joanne and Mum always did the gallery books on a Tuesday. Joanne couldn’t do them on her own, she’s hopeless at arithmetic even with a calculator. She always brought the books and she and Mum worked on them, the VAT and all that.’

  ‘All right. I see. Go on, will you?’

  ‘Mum said she heard a noise upstairs and Davina said it must be the cat. Then there was quite a lot of noise, more than Queenie usually makes. It was like something crashing on to the floor. I’ve thought about it since and I’ve thought maybe it was a drawer being pulled out of Davina’s dressing table. Harvey got up and said he’d go and look.

  ‘We just went on eating. We weren’t worried – not then. I remember my mother looked at the clock and said something about how she wished Joanne would make it half an hour later on Tuesdays because she had to eat her meal too fast. Then we heard the shot and then another, a second one. It made this terrible noise.

  ‘We jumped up. My mother and I, Davina went on sitting where she was. My mother sort of cried out, screamed. Davina didn’t say anything or move – well, her hands sort of closed round her napkin. She clutched her napkin. Mum stood staring at the door and I pushed my chair away and started going to the door – or I think I did, I meant to – maybe I was just standing there. Mum said, “No, no” or “No, don’t” or something. I stopped, I was just standing there, I was sort of frozen to the spot. Davina turned her head towards the door. And then he came in.

  ‘Harvey had left the door half-open – well, a little bit open. The man kicked it open and came in. I’ve tried to remember if anyone screamed but I can’t remember, I don’t know. We must have. He – he shot Davina in the head. He held the gun in both hands, like they do. I mean like they do on telly. Then he shot Mum.

  ‘I haven’t a clear memory of what happened next. I’ve tried hard to remember but something blocks it off, I expect it’s normal when you’ve had a thing like that happen, but I wish I could remember.

  ‘I’ve a sort of idea I got on to the floor. I crouched on the floor. I know I heard a car start up. That one, the other one, had been upstairs, I think, he was the one we heard. The one who shot me, he was downstairs all the time, and when he shot us the other one got out fast and started the car. That’s just what I think.’

  ‘The one who shot you, can you describe him?’

  He was holding his breath, expecting her to say, fearing she would say, that she couldn’t remember, that this too had been absorbed and destroyed by shock. Her face had been contorted, almost distorted, with the effort of concentration, the recollection of almost intolerably painful events. It seemed to clear as if a little rest had come to her. Alleviation soothed her, like a sigh of relief.

  ‘I can describe him. I can do that. I’ve willed myself to that. What I could see of him. He was – well, not too tall but thickset, heavily built, very fair. I mean his hair was fair. I couldn’t see his face, he had a mask over his face.’

  ‘A mask? D’you mean a hood? A stocking over his head?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ve been trying to remember because I knew you’d ask but I don’t know. I could see his hair. I know he had fair hair, shortish, and thick, quite thick fair hair. But I wouldn’t have been able to see his hair if he’d had a hood over it, would I? D’you know what’s the impression I keep getting?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That it was a mask like the sort people wear in smog, in pollution, whatever you call it. Or even one of those masks the woodsmen wear when they’re using a chain saw. I could see his hair and his chin. I could see his ears – but they were just ordinary ears, not big or sticking out or anything. And his chin was ordinary – well, it might have had a cleft in it, a sort of shallow cleft.’

  ‘Daisy, you’ve done very well. You’ve done supremely well to take all this in before he shot you.’

  At those words she shut her eyes and screwed up her face. The shooting, the attack on herself, he saw was still too much for her to discuss. He understood the terror it must evoke, that she too could so easily have died there in that death room.

  A nurse put her head round the door.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Daisy said. ‘I’m not tired, I’m not overdoing it. Really.’

  The head retreated. Daisy took another drink from the bedside glass. ‘We’re going to have a picture made of him, based on what you’ve been able to tell me,’ Wexford said. ‘And when you’re better and out of here, I’m going to ask you if you will say this all over again in the form of a statement. Also, with your permission, a tape will be made of it. I know it will be hard for you but don’t say no now, think about it.’

  ‘I don’t have to think,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a statement, of course I will.’

  ‘In the meantime, I should like to come back and talk to you again tomorrow. But first, I’d like you to tell me one more thing. Did Joanne Garland in fact come?’

  She seemed to be pondering. She was very still. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, I didn’t hear her ring the bell or anything. But all sorts of things might have happened after – after he shot me, and I didn’t hear them. I was bleeding, I was thinking of getting to the phone, I was concentrating on crawling to the phone and getting you, the police, an ambulance, before I bled to death, I really thought I’d bleed to death.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’

  ‘She could have come after they, the men, after they left. I don’t know, it’s no use asking me, I just don’t know.’ She hesitated, said very quietly, ‘Mr Wexford?’

  ‘Yes?’

  For a moment she said nothing. She hung her head and the copious dark-brown hair fell forward, covering face and neck and shoulders with its veil. Her right hand went up, that slim white long-fingered hand, and raked her hair, took a handful of it and threw it back. She looked up and looked at him, the expression taut, intense, her upper lip curled back in pain or incredulity.

  ‘What’s going to become of me?’ she asked him. ‘Where will I go? What will I do? I’ve lost everything, everything’s gone, everything that matters.’

  Now was not the time to remind her she would be rich, that not everything had gone. That which for many makes life worthwhile remained to her in abundance. He had never been a man to believe blindly in the adage which told him that money doesn’t bring happiness. But he remai
ned silent.

  ‘I should have died. It would have been better for me if I’d died. I was terrified of dying. I thought I was dying when the blood was pumping out of me and I was terrified – oh, I was so frightened. The funny thing was, it didn’t hurt. It hurts more now than it did then. You’d think something going into your flesh would hurt so terribly but there wasn’t any pain. But it would have been best if I’d died, I know that now.’

  He said, ‘I know I risk your thinking of me as one of those who hand out the old placebos. But you won’t continue to feel like this. It will pass.’

  She stared at him, said rather imperiously, ‘I shall see you tomorrow then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She held out her hand to him and he shook it. The fingers were cold and very dry.

  Chapter Nine

  Wexford went home early. His feeling was that this might be the last time he got home by six for a long while.

  Dora was in the hall, replacing the phone receiver, as he let himself in. She said, ‘That was Sheila. If you’d been a second sooner you could have talked to her.’

  A sardonic retort rose to his lips and he suppressed it. There was no reason for being unpleasant to his wife. None of it was her fault. Indeed, at that dinner on Tuesday, she had done her best to make things easier, to dull the edge of spitefulness and soften sarcasm.

  ‘They are coming,’ Dora said, her tone neutral.

  ‘Who’s coming where?’

  ‘Sheila and – and Gus. For the weekend. You know Sheila said they might on Tuesday.’

  ‘A lot of things have happened since Tuesday.’

  At any rate, he probably wouldn’t be home much during the weekend. But tomorrow was the weekend, tomorrow was Friday, and they would arrive in the evening. He poured himself a beer, an Adnam’s which a local wine shop had begun to stock, and a dry sherry for Dora. She laid her hand on his arm, moved it to enclose the back of his hand. It reminded him of Daisy’s icy touch. But Dora’s was warm.