Kissing the Gunner's Daughter

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford quoted, ‘“An event has happened on which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent.”’ He got a suspicious look in return. ‘Did the Telecom man come?’

  ‘Yes, he did at last. I was going spare, what with her toddling to the front door every five minutes to look up and down the road for him. By the way, Andy Griffin wasn’t there, he came in later. His mother said he was out jogging.’

  They were interrupted by Davidson, coming round the screens with a waxed paper carrier containing tandoori chicken, pilaf rice and mango chutney for Wexford.

  ‘I wish I’d had that,’ said Burden.

  ‘Too late now. No swaps, I hate pizza. Did you find out what they quarrelled about with the Harrisons?’

  Burden looked surprised. ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘No, but if they’re so paranoid they might have volunteered the information.’

  ‘They didn’t mention the Harrisons. Maybe that’s significant. Margaret Griffin went on about the immaculate state she’d left the cottage in and how the one time they met Gabbitas he’d had tar on his boots and it came off on their carpet. He’d soon turn the place into a tip, she could tell that.

  ‘Andy Griffin came in. I suppose he might have been jogging. He’s overweight, not to say fat. He was wearing a tracksuit but not everyone who wears them goes on tracks. He looks as if he couldn’t run for a bus that was going at five mile an hour. He’s shortish and fair but there’s no way you could stretch Daisy Flory’s description to fit him.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have to describe him. She’d know him,’ said Wexford. ‘She’d know him even behind a mask.’

  ‘True. He was out on Tuesday night, he says with mates, and his parents confirm he went out at around six. I’m checking it out with the mates. They’re supposed to have gone the round of pubs in Myringham and for a Chinese in a place called the Panda Cottage.’

  ‘Those names! Sounds like a haunt for gay endangered species. He’s on the dole?’

  ‘Like I say, one of those benefits. They’re always changing the names. There’s something funny about him, Reg, though I can’t tell you what. I know that’s not helpful but what I’m really saying is, we have to keep our eye on Andrew Griffin. His parents give the impression of disliking everyone and they’ve got a lot of resentment built up for some reason – or no reason – against Harvey Copeland and Davina Flory, but Andy, he hates them. His whole manner and voice change when he talks about them. He even said he was glad they were dead – “scum” and “shit” are the words he uses about them.’

  ‘Prince Charming.’

  ‘We’ll know a bit more when we find out if he really was out round the pubs and this Panda Cottage on Tuesday.’

  Wexford glanced at his watch. ‘Time for me to get off over to the Infirmary. D’you feel like coming? You could put a few Griffin queries to Daisy yourself.’

  The moment the words were out of his mouth he regretted them. Daisy was accustomed to him by now, she would almost certainly not want another policeman arriving with him and arriving unannounced. But he need not have worried. Burden had no intention of coming. Burden had an appointment for another interview with Brenda Harrison.

  ‘She’ll keep,’ he said of Daisy. ‘She’ll feel easier about talking when she’s out of there. By the way, where’s she going when she is out of there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wexford said slowly. ‘I really don’t know. It hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘Well, she can’t go home, can she? If it’s her home, I suppose it is. She can’t go straight back where it happened. Maybe one day but hardly now.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ said Wexford, as he went, ‘in time to see what the television networks do for us. I’ll be back in time for the ITN news at five forty.’

  Once again, at the hospital, he did not declare himself but entered unobtrusively, almost secretly. No Dr Leigh was about and no nurses. He knocked on the door of Daisy’s room, unable to see much through the frosted glass, the shape of the bed only, enough to tell him no visitor sat at the bedside.

  No one said to come in. Of course, he was rather earlier than he had been on previous occasions. Alone, unescorted, he did not like to open the door. He knocked again, now certain, without evidence for his certainty, that the room was empty. They must have a day room and she might be in it. He turned away and came face to face with a man in a short white jacket. The charge nurse?

  ‘I’m looking for Miss Flory.’

  ‘Daisy went home today.’

  ‘She went home?’

  ‘Are you Chief Inspector Wexford? She left a message that she’d phone you. Her friends came for her. I can give you the name, I’ve got it somewhere.’

  Daisy had gone to Nicholas Virson and his mother in Myfleet. That, then, was the answer to Burden’s question. She had gone home to her friends, perhaps her closest friends. He wondered why she hadn’t told him of this on the previous day, but perhaps she hadn’t known. No doubt, they had been in touch with her, had invited her and she had agreed in order to escape. Almost every patient longs to escape from hospital.

  ‘We’ll be keeping an eye on her,’ the charge nurse said. ‘She has an appointment here for an examination on Monday.’

  Back at the stables, he watched television, one news broadcast after another. The artist’s impression of what the Tancred gunman looked like came on to the screen. Seeing it like that, enlarged, somehow more convincing than a drawing on paper could be, Wexford knew who it reminded him of.

  Nicholas Virson.

  The face on the screen was exactly as he remembered Virson’s face at Daisy’s bedside. Coincidence, chance and something fortuitous on the artist’s part? Or some unconscious displacement on Daisy’s? Did that make the picture, which had now vanished from the screen to be succeeded by some pop star’s wedding, worthless? The mask the gunman had worn had served its purpose if the result of wearing it had been to make himself look like the witness’s boyfriend!

  Wexford sat in front of the television, unseeing. It was getting on for half past six, the time Sheila and Augustine Casey might be expected to arrive. He felt no compulsion to go home.

  He went back to his own desk where a dozen messages awaited him. The top one told him what he already knew, that Daisy Flory could be found care of Mrs Joyce Virson at The Thatched House, Castle Lane, Myfleet. It also gave him something he didn’t know, a phone number. Wexford took his own phone out of his pocket and punched the digits.

  A woman’s voice answered, superior, sweeping, imperious. ‘Hallo?’

  Wexford said who he was and that he would like to talk to Miss Flory on the following day, in the afternoon at about four.

  ‘But it’s Saturday!’

  He agreed. There was no denying it.

  ‘Well, I suppose so. If you must. Can you find this cottage? How do you intend to get here? The bus service isn’t at all reliable . . .’

  He said he would be there at four and pressed the cut-off button. There was much to be said for this new phone. The door opened, a strong draught of cold evening air swept in and Barry Vine appeared.

  ‘Where have you sprung from?’ Wexford said rather sourly.

  ‘It sounds ridiculous, but she’s disappeared. Mrs Garland. Joanne Garland. She’s missing.’

  ‘What d’you mean, missing? You mean she’s not there? That’s hardly the same thing.’

  ‘She’s missing. She told no one she was going away, she left no messages or instructions for anyone. No one knows where she’s gone. She hasn’t been seen since Tuesday evening.’

  Chapter Ten

  The old people were watching television. Their last meal of the day was over, it had been served at five, and this was evening for them, with bedtime scheduled for eight thirty not too far off.

  Armchairs and wheelchairs were arranged in a semicircle in front of the set. The elderly viewers were confronted by a brutish face, the Identikit-picture maker’s idea of the Tancred gunman. It was the kind of face that once
, long ago, was defined by the phrase ‘a blond beast’. And this was the expression one of them used to describe him, uttering it in a loud stage whisper to the man next to her:

  ‘Look at him, a real blond beast!’

  She seemed one of the livelier inmates of the Caenbrook Retirement Home and Burden felt relief when it was to her chair that the thin worried-looking girl who had received them ushered him and Sergeant Vine. She looked round, smiled, surprise rapidly giving place to a very real delight when she understood that the visitors, whoever they might be, were for her.

  ‘Edie, there’s someone to see you. They’re policemen.’

  The smile remained. It widened.

  ‘Hey, Edie,’ said the old man she had whispered to, ‘what have you been up to then?’

  ‘Me? Chance’d be a fine thing.’

  ‘Mrs Chowney, my name is Inspector Burden and this is Detective Sergeant Vine. I wonder if we could have a word with you. We’re anxious to find the whereabouts of your daughter.’

  ‘Which one? I’ve got six.’

  As Burden told Wexford later, that almost stunned him. It certainly silenced him, if briefly. Edie Chowney compounded matters by announcing proudly – to an audience, who had evidently heard it many times before – that she also had five sons. All alive, all doing well for themselves, all in this country. It struck Burden then as dreadful, as something which in many other societies would be incomprehensible, that out of those eleven children none had taken their mother to live in their home, under their wing. Indeed, to avoid this, they had preferred to raise the money, among them all most likely, which would keep her in this doubtless expensive end-of-the-road for the discarded old.

  As they went along the corridor to Mrs Chowney’s room, a plan put forward by the thin warden, which drew forth more ribaldry from the old man, Burden reflected that one of those ten siblings of Joanne Garland might have been a better source for the information he was seeking. But there he was wrong, for Edie Chowney, walking to her room without asistance, ushering them in and complaining to the warden that the heating was less than adequate, showed herself as much in command of her mind and her speech as someone thirty years younger.

  She looked to be in her late seventies, a small sprightly woman, thin but broad and rather bandy. It was a strong body that had borne many children. Her wispy hair was dyed dark-brown. Only her hands, tree-root-like and with knobbed knuckles, revealed it must have been arthritis that betrayed her and committed her to Caenbrook.

  The room had its basic furnishings and it had Edie Chowney’s own things. Mostly framed photographs. They crowded on to the window sill and the table tops, the bedside cabinet and the little bookcase, these pictured people with their own posterity, their spouses, their dogs, their homes in the background, all of them aged between forty and fifty-five. One was very likely Joanne Garland but there was no knowing which.

  ‘I’ve got twenty-one grandchildren,’ said Mrs Chowney when she saw him looking. ‘I’ve got four great-grandchildren and with any luck, if Maureen’s eldest gets on with it, I’ll have a great-great-grandchild one of these fine days. What d’you want to know about Joanne?’

  ‘Where she’s gone, Mrs Chowney,’ said Barry Vine. ‘We’d like the address of where she is. Her neighbours don’t know.’

  ‘Joanne never had kids. Married twice but no kids. Women aren’t barren in our family so I reckon it was from choice. Didn’t have much choice in my day but times change. Joanne’d be too selfish, wouldn’t put up with their noise and the mess. You get a lot of mess one way and another with kids. I should know, I’ve had eleven. Mind you, she was the eldest of the girls, so she knew.’

  ‘She’s gone away, Mrs Chowney. Can you tell us where?’

  ‘Her first husband was a hard worker but he never made good. She divorced him, I didn’t like that, I said, you’re the first person in our family ever to go through the divorce court, Joanne. Pam got divorced later and so did Trev but at the time Joanne was the first. Anyway, she met this wealthy man. Do you know what he used to say? He used to say, I’m only a poor millionaire, Edie. Oh, they lived it up, I can tell you, spend, spend, spend, but it all came to grief like the first time round. He had to pay up – ooh, she made him pay through the nose. That’s how she’s got that house and started that business she’s got and bought that big car and all. It’s her keeps me in here, you know. It costs as much to be in here as a posh hotel in London, which is a mystery when you look round you. But she pays, the others couldn’t run to it.’

  Burden had to stem the tide. Edie Chowney had only paused to draw breath. He had heard of lonely people’s verbosity when at last in company but this (as he told himself) was ridiculous.

  ‘Mrs Chowney . . .’

  She said, more sharply, ‘All right. I’ve done. I know I talk too much. It’s not my age, it’s my nature, I’ve always been a chatterbox, my husband used to go on at me. What was it you wanted to know about Joanne?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘At home, of course, or at business. Where else would she be?’

  ‘When did you last see her, Mrs Chowney?’

  She did a curious thing. It was as if she were reminding herself about which particular child they were enquiring. She viewed the photograph collection by the bed, paused for calculation, then selected a coloured one in a silver frame and looked at it, nodding.

  ‘It would have been Tuesday evening. That’s right, Tuesday, because it was the day the chiropodist comes and she always comes on a Tuesday. Joanne came in while we were having our teas. Five-ish. Maybe a quarter past five. I said, you’re early, what about the shop? and she said, gallery, Mother, you always say that, the gallery’s OK, Naomi’s there till half past. You know who she meant by Naomi? Naomi’s one of them that got murdered – no, massacred like they say on the telly, massacred at Tancred House. Wasn’t that a terrible thing? I suppose you’ve heard about it – well, you would, being policemen.’

  ‘While your daughter was with you, did she say anything about going to Tancred House that evening?’

  Mrs Chowney handed Burden the photograph. ‘She always went up there on Tuesday evening. Her and that poor Naomi, the one that was massacred, they did the shop accounts. That’s her, that’s Joanne, it was taken five years back but she hasn’t changed much.’

  The woman looked overdressed in a bright pink suit with gilt buttons. A great deal of gold costume jewellery huddled round her neck and swung from her ears. She was tall with a good figure. Her blonde hair was rather rigidly and elaborately dressed and she seemed heavily made-up, though this was hard to tell.

  ‘She didn’t tell you she was going away on holiday?’

  ‘She wasn’t,’ Edie Chowney said sharply. ‘She wasn’t going anywhere. She’d have told me. What makes you think she’s gone away?’

  That was something Burden hardly liked to answer. ‘When would you expect her to visit you again?’

  Bitterness entered her voice. ‘Three weeks. A good three weeks. It wouldn’t be sooner. Joanne never comes more than once every three weeks and sometimes it’s a month. She pays up and she thinks she’s done her duty. Comes once in three weeks and stops ten minutes and thinks she’s the good daughter.’

  ‘And your other children?’ It was Vine who asked. Burden had resolved not to.

  ‘Pam comes. I mean, she only lives two streets away, so coming every day wouldn’t kill her. Not that she does come every day. Pauline’s in Bristol, so you can’t expect it, and Trev’s on one of them oil rigs. Doug’s in Telford, wherever that may be. Shirley’s got four kids and that’s her excuse, though God knows they’re all in their teens. John drops in when it suits him, which isn’t often, and the rest of them crop up around Christmas. Oh, they all turn up together at Christmas, a whole troop of them. What’s the use of that to me? I said that to them last Christmas, what’s the good of you all coming at once? Seven of them on Christmas Eve in one go, Trev and Doug and Janet and Audrey and . . .’

  ‘Mrs
Chowney,’ said Burden, ‘can you give me the addresses of . . .’ he hesitated, hardly knowing how to put it ‘. . . one or two of your children who live nearest? Who live around here and might know where your daughter Joanne has gone?’

  * * * *

  It was eight before Wexford finally left for home. When the car reached the main gates and Donaldson got out to open them, he noticed something tied to each gatepost. It was too dark under the crowding trees to make out more than shapeless bundles.

  He switched on the headlamp beam, left the car and went to look. More bouquets, more tributes to the dead. Two this time, one on each gatepost. They were simple bouquets but exquisitely arranged, one a Victorian posy of violets and primroses, the other a sheaf of snow-white narcissi and dark green ivy. Wexford read on one card: In grief for the great tragedy of 11 March. The other said: These violent deaths have violent ends and in their triumph die. He returned to the car and Donaldson drove out through the gateway. The message on the first bunch of flowers left on the gatepost had seemed innocuous, a rather apt quotation from Antony and Cleopatra – well, apt if you had extravagantly admired Davina Flory. This later one had a faintly sinister ring. It too was probably Shakespeare but he couldn’t place it.