by Ruth Rendell
But was she an adequate bodyguard for Daisy on her own? Were Anne or Rosemary adequate? He must persuade Daisy to leave the house. Not exactly to go into hiding but certainly to go some distance and hole up with friends. Still, he confessed to himself and later to Burden that this was a development he hadn’t expected. He had supplied a ‘minder’ for Daisy but only to be on the safe side. That one of those men, the gunman necessarily if the other, the unseen, had been Andy Griffin, should in fact come back to ‘get her’ was the stuff of dreams, of fiction, of wild imaginings. It did not happen.
‘It did,’ said Burden. ‘She’s not safe here and she ought to go. I don’t see how it’s going to make much difference if we move the Harbisons and Gabbitas into the house. There were four people in the house that first time, remember? That didn’t deter him.’
The white tablecloth with the glass on it and the silver. The food on the heated trolley. The curtains cosily drawn against the March night. The first course finished, the soup, Naomi Jones serving the fish, the sole bonne femme, and when everyone has a plate, as everyone begins to eat, the sounds from overhead, the noises Davina Flory says are made by the cat Queenie on the rampage.
But Harvey Copeland goes to look, handsome Harvey who looked like Paul Newman and had been a ‘wow on campus’, that his elderly wife had married for love and sex. Silence outside, no car, no footsteps, only a distant commotion overhead.
Harvey has gone upstairs and come down again or has never reached upstairs, but turned at the foot as the gunman comes out of the passage . . .
How long had all this taken? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? And in those two minutes what was going on in the dining room? They were calmly eating their fish in Harvey’s absence? Or simply waiting for him, talking about the cat, the way the cat ran up the back stairs and down the front every night. Then the shot and Naomi getting to her feet, Daisy getting to her feet, starting for the door. Davina remained where she was, seated at the table. Why? Why would she do that? Fear? Simple fear holding her fast to the spot?
The door flies open and the gunman enters and the shots are fired and the tablecloth is no longer white but scarlet, dyed by a dense stain that was to spread across nearly the whole of it . . .
‘I’ll talk to her in a minute,’ Wexford said. ‘Of course I can’t force her to leave if she doesn’t want to. Come with me, will you? We’ll both have a go.’
‘She may be very anxious to go by now. Morning makes all the difference.’
Yes, but it doesn’t make that kind of difference, thought Wexford. The light of day makes you less afraid, not more. Sunshine and the morning make you dismiss last night’s terrors as exaggerated. Light is practical and dark is occult.
They went outside, crossed the yard and came slowly round the side of the house, the west wing. He had not used those words to himself metaphorically. The sun shone with a hard strong light where the moon had shed a pale glow. The sky was a deep blue without cloud. It might have been June, for the air felt mild as if the chill had been lifted for an assured stretch of months.
‘He came round the back here, then,’ Burden said. ‘What was he trying to do, find a way in? An open window downstairs? It wasn’t a cold night.’
‘There were no open windows downstairs. All the doors were locked. Unlike that previous time.’
‘It was a bit funny, wasn’t it, pattering round the house so that two people inside could plainly hear you? With all the windows closed, they could still hear? You disguise yourself in a hood but you don’t mind making a hell of a racket while you’re looking for a way in.’
Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder if the truth is he didn’t mind if he was heard or seen? If he believed Daisy was alone and he meant to kill her, so what if she did see him?’
‘In that case, why wear a mask?’
‘True.’
An unfamiliar car was parked a few yards from the front door. That door opened as they approached the car and Joyce Virson came out with Daisy behind her. Mrs Virson was in a fur coat, the kind of garment neither favoured nor fashionable, that the Oxfam shop baulked at and the church sales couldn’t sell, unmistakably made from the pelts of many foxes.
Never had Wexford seen Daisy so punkish. There was something defiant about her gear, the black tights and lace-up boots, black sweatshirt with something white printed on it, the scuffed black leather motorbike jacket. Her face was a mask of misery but her hair, heavily gelled, stuck out in spikes all over her head like a forest of burnt tree stumps. She seemed to be making a statement – perhaps only that this was Daisy contra mundum.
She looked at him, she looked at Burden, in silence. It took Joyce Virson a moment or two to recall who this was. A big toothy smile transfigured her as she came up to Wexford with both hands outstretched.
‘Oh, Mr Wexford, how are you? I’m so pleased to see you. You’re just the man to persuade this child to come back with me. I mean, she can’t stay here on her own, can she? I was so utterly horrified when I heard what happened here last night, I came straight over. She should never have been allowed to leave us.’
Wexford wondered how she had heard. Not through Daisy, he was sure.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the way things are allowed to be these days. When I was eighteen I wouldn’t have been permitted to stay anywhere on my own, let alone in a great lonely house like this one. You can’t tell me things have changed for the better. I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned the old days were the best.’
Stony-faced, Daisy watched her through half this speech, then turned aside to fix her eyes on the cat which, perhaps seldom permitted to escape from the front of the house, was sitting on the stone coping of the pool, watching the white and red fish. The fish swam in concentric circles and the cat watched.
‘Do say something to her, Mr Wexford. Persuade her. Use your authority. You can’t tell me there’s no way of bringing pressure to bear on a child.’ Mrs Virson was rapidly forgetting that persuasion necessarily must include elements of niceness and perhaps flattery if it is to succeed. Her voice rose. ‘It’s so stupid and downright foolhardy! What does she think she’s playing at?’
The cat dipped a paw into the pool, found an element different from what it expected and shook water drops from its pads. Daisy bent down and lifted it up in her arms. She said, ‘Goodbye, Joyce,’ and with an edge of irony, not lost on Wexford, ‘Thank you so much for coming.’ She stalked into the house with her fluffy armful, but left the door open.
Burden followed her in. With no idea what to say, Wexford muttered something about having it all in hand, the police had it under control. Joyce Virson gave him a scathing glare, as well she might.
‘I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. I’m going to have to see what my son says about that.’
From her it sounded like a threat. He watched her making heavy weather of turning the little car round and positioning it without – just without – scraping its nearside wing on the gateway post as she drove off. Daisy was in the hall with Burden, sitting in a high-backed, velvet-cushioned chair with Queenie on her lap.
‘Why do I care so much if he does kill me?’ she was saying. ‘I don’t understand myself. After all, I want to die. I’ve nothing to live for. Why did I scream and make all that fuss last night? I should have walked out there and gone up to him and said, Kill me, go on, kill me. Finish me off, like that horrible Ken says.’
Wexford shrugged. He said with some taciturnity, ‘Don’t mind me, will you? If you get done in I’ll have to resign.’
She didn’t smile but made sort of grimace. ‘Talking of resigning, what d’you think? It was that Brenda phoned her, Joyce, I mean. She phoned her up first thing this morning and told her I’d given them the sack and to make me keep them on. How about that? As if I was a child or a psychiatric case. That’s how Joyce knew about last night. There’s no way I’d have told her, interfering old bat.’
‘You must have other friends, Daisy. Isn’t there someone
else you could stay with for a little while? For a couple of weeks?’
‘You’ll have caught him in two weeks?’
‘It’s more than probable,’ Burden said stoutly.
‘It makes no difference to me, anyway. I’m staying here. Karen or Anne can come if they like. Well, it’s if you like, I suppose. But it’s a waste of time, they needn’t bother. I shan’t be afraid any more. I want him to kill me. That’ll be the best way out, to die.’
She hung her head forward and buried her face in the cat’s fur.
Tracing Andy Griffin’s movements from the time he left his parents’ house proved impossible. His usual drinking companions from the Slug and Lettuce knew nothing of any other address he might have, though Tony Smith spoke of a girlfriend ‘up north’. That empty expression always came up in conversation concerning Andy. Now there was a girlfriend in that vague region, that never-never land.
‘Kylie, she was called,’ said Tony.
‘I reckon he made her up,’ Leslie Sedlar said with a sly grin. ‘He got her off the telly.’
Until losing his job just over a year before, Andy had been a long-distance lorry driver for a company of brewers. His usual route had taken him from Myringham to various London outlets and to Carlisle and Whitehaven.
The brewers had few good words to say of Andy. They had in the past two or three years been enlightened as to the reality of sexual harassment. Andy spent little time in the office but on the few occasions he had been there he had made offensive remarks to a woman marketing executive and had once taken hold of her secretary from behind in an arm lock round her neck. Status did little to deter Andy Griffin, it was apparently enough that his quarry should be female.
The girlfriend seemed a myth. There was no evidence of her and the Griffins denied her existence. Terry Griffin gave reluctant permission for a search of Andy’s bedroom in Myringham. He and his wife were stunned by the death of their son and both looked as if they’d aged by ten years. They sought the remedy of television as others in their situation might look to sedatives or alcohol. Colours and movement, faces and violent action, flowed across the screen to provide a solace that needed only to be there, not to be absorbed or even comprehended.
The whitewashing of her son’s reputation was now Margaret Griffin’s only aim. It might have been said that this was the last best thing she could do for him. Accordingly, still watching the flowing images, she denied all knowledge of any girl. There had never been a girl in Andy’s life. Taking hold of her husband’s hand and gripping it tightly, she repeated this last phrase. She managed, in the way she repudiated Burden’s suggestion, to make a girlfriend sound like a venereal disease, in a mother’s eyes as disgraceful, as irresponsibly acquired and as potentially damaging.
‘And you last saw him on Sunday morning, Mr Griffin?’
‘Early morning. Andy was always up with the lark. About eight, it was. He made me a cup of tea.’ The man was dead and he had been a thug, a sexual menace, idle and stupid, but his father would continue pathetically to do for him this splendid public relations job. Even post mortem his mother would advertise the purity of his conduct and his father eulogise over his punctual habits, his thoughtfulness and his altruism. ‘He said he was off up north,’ Terry Griffin said.
Burden sighed, and suppressed his sigh.
‘On that bike,’ said the dead man’s mother. ‘I always hated that bike and I was right. Look what’s happened.’
From some curious emotional need, she was beginning the metamorphosis of her son’s murder into death in a road accident.
‘He said he’d give us a ring. He always said that, we didn’t have to ask.’
‘We never had to ask,’ his wife said wearily.
Burden put in gently, ‘But he didn’t in fact phone, did he?’
‘No, he never did. And that worried me, knowing he was on that bike.’
Margaret Griffin held on to her husband’s hand, drawing it into her lap. Burden went down the passage to the bedroom where Davidson and Rosemary Mountjoy were searching. The stack of pornography an exploration of Andy’s clothes cupboard had revealed didn’t surprise him. Andy would have known that his mother’s discretion where he was concerned would have kept herself and her vacuum cleaner honourably away from the inside of that cupboard.
Andy Griffin had not been a correspondent, nor had he been attracted by the printed word. The magazines relied on photographs solely for effect and the briefest of crudely titillating captions. His girlfriend, if she had existed, had never written to him and if she had given him a photograph of herself he had not kept it.
The only discovery they made of real interest was in a paper bag in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. This was ninety-six American dollar bills in various denominations, tens, fives and singles.
The Griffins insisted they knew nothing about this money. Margaret Griffin looked at the notes as if they were phenomenal, currency from some remote culture perhaps, a find from an archaeological dig. She turned them over, peering, her grief temporarily forgotten.
It was Terry who put the question she perhaps thought asking would make her look foolish. ‘Is it money? Could you use it to buy things?’
‘You could in the United States,’ Burden said. He corrected himself. ‘You could use it almost anywhere, I daresay. Here in this country and in Europe. Shops would take it. Anyway, you could take it to a bank and change it into sterling.’ He put it more simply. ‘Into – well, pounds.’
‘Why didn’t Andy spend it then?’
Burden balked at the idea of asking them about the rope but he had to ask. In the event, to his relief, neither of them seemed to make the awful connection. They knew the means by which their son had died but the word ‘rope’ did not immediately conjure for them the notion of hanging. No, they possessed no rope and they were sure Andy had not. Terry Griffin harked back to the money, the haul of dollars. Once the idea of it was planted in his mind, it seemed to take precedence over everything.
‘Those notes you said could be changed into pounds, they belonged to Andy?’
‘They were in his room.’
‘Then they’ll be ours, won’t they? It’ll be like compensation.’
‘Oh, Terry,’ said his wife.
He ignored her. ‘How much d’you reckon they’re worth?’
‘Forty to fifty pounds.’
Terry Griffin considered. ‘When can we have them?’ he said.
Chapter Eighteen
He answered the phone himself.
‘Gunner Jones.’
Or that was what Burden thought he said. He might have said ‘Gunnar Jones’. Gunnar was a Swedish name but such as might possibly be held by an Englishman if, say, his mother had been a Swede. Burden had been at school with someone called Lars who had seemed as English as himself, so why not Gunnar? Or else he had said ‘Gunner’ and it was a nickname he’d got through having been in the Royal Artillery.
‘I’d like to come and see you, Mr Jones. Would later on today be convenient? Say six?’
‘You can come when you like. I’ll be here.’
He didn’t ask why or mention Tancred or his daughter. It was slightly disconcerting. Burden didn’t want a wasted journey.
‘You are Miss Davina Jones’s father?’
‘So her mother told me. We have to believe the ladies in these matters, don’t we?’
Burden wasn’t getting himself involved with that one. He said he’d see G.G. Jones at six. ‘Gunner’ – on an impulse he looked it up in the dictionary from which Wexford was never parted for long and found it could also be another name for a gunsmith. A gunsmith?
Wexford’s phone call was to Edinburgh.
Macsamphire was such an odd name, though unmistakably Scots, that he had counted on the single one in the Edinburgh telephone directory being Davina Flory’s friend, and he was right.
‘Kingsmarkham Police? What help can I possibly be to you?’
‘Mrs Macsamphire, I believe Miss Flory an
d Mr Copeland with Mrs Jones and Daisy all stayed with you last August when they came up for the Edinburgh Festival?’
‘Oh, no, whatever can have given you that idea? Davina very much disliked staying in private houses. They all stayed in a hotel, and then when Naomi was taken ill, she had a really severe flu, I suggested she be moved here. So dreadful being ill in an hotel, don’t you think, even a grand one like the Caledonian? But Naomi wouldn’t, afraid of giving it to me, I expect. Davina and Harvey were in and out, of course, and we all went to a good many of the shows together. I don’t think I saw poor Naomi at all.’
‘Miss Flory was taking part in the Book Fair herself, I believe?’
‘That’s so. She gave a talk on the difficulties which arise in the writing of autobiography and she also took part in a writer’s panel. The subject was something about the practicalities of writers being versatile – that is, writing fiction as well as travel and essays and so on. I attended the lecture and the panel and both were really most interesting . . .’
Wexford managed to cut her short. ‘Daisy was with you as well?’
Her laugh was musical and rather girlish. ‘Oh, I don’t think Daisy was much interested in all that. As a matter of fact, she’d promised her grandmother she’d come to the lecture but I don’t believe she turned up. She’s such a sweet unaffected girl, though, you’d forgive her anything.’
This was the kind of thing Wexford wanted to hear from her – or he could persuade himself he wanted to hear it.
‘Of course, she had this young man of hers there with her. I only saw him once and that was on their last day, the Saturday. I waved to them across the street.’
