by Ruth Rendell
‘Nicholas Virson,’ said Wexford.
‘That’s right. Davina did mentioned the name Nicholas.’
‘He was at the funeral.’
‘Oh, was he? I was rather upset at the funeral. I don’t remember. Was that all you wanted to ask me?’
‘I haven’t begun to ask you what I really want, Mrs Macsamphire. It’s to do me a favour.’ Was it? Or to exact from him a great sacrifice? ‘Daisy should be away from here for various reasons I needn’t go into. I want to ask if you’d invite her to stay with you. Just for a week –’ He hesitated ‘– or two. Would you ask her?’
‘Oh, but she wouldn’t come!’
‘Why not? I’m sure she likes you. I’m sure she would like to be with someone she could talk to about her grandmother. Edinburgh is a beautiful and interesting city. Now, what’s the weather like?’
Again that pretty giggle. ‘I’m afraid it’s pouring . . . But of course I’ll ask Daisy; I’d love to have her, it’s just that I never thought of asking her myself.’
The drawbacks of the system sometimes seemed to outweigh the points in favour of setting up an incident room on site. Among the advantages were that you could see with your own eyes who came calling. Not a Virson vehicle this morning, drawn up between the pond and the front door, not one of the Tancred cars, but a small Fiat Wexford couldn’t immediately place. He had seen it before but whose was it?
This time he was to be granted no timely opening of the door and egress of the visitor. There was nothing of course to stop him pulling the sugarstick bellpull, gaining admittance and making a third at whatever tête-à-tête was in progress. He disliked the idea. He mustn’t take over her life, rob her of all privacy, her right to be solitary and free.
Queenie, the Persian, sat on the coping of the pool, looking into the mirror-like surface of the water. A lifted paw briefly distracted its attention. The cat contemplated the underside of fat grey pads, as if deciding on the paw’s fitness as a fishing implement, then tucked both paws under its chest, folded itself into the sphinx position and resumed its staring at the water and the circling fish.
Wexford walked back past the stables, round the house and on to the terrace. He had a vague feeling of trespassing, but she knew they were there, she wanted them there. While he was here she was protected, she was safe. He looked up at the back of the house and saw for the first time that the Georgianisation had not reached so far. This was much the way it had been in the seventeeth century, the half-timbering exposed, the top windows mullioned.
Had Davina built the conservatory? Before Listed Building consent was needed? He thought he disapproved, without knowing enough about architecture to have a firm opinion. Daisy was in there. He caught sight of her get up from where she had been sitting. Her back was to him and he quickly left the terrace before she had seen him. Her companion was invisible.
It was chance that allowed Wexford an encounter with him an hour later. He was coming out in his own car and he told Donaldson to wait when he saw someone getting into the Fiat.
‘Mr Sebright.’
Jason gave him a broad smile. ‘Did you read my piece on the mourners? The sub cut it to bits and changed the title. They called it “A Farewell to Greatness”. What I don’t like about local journalism is the way you have to be nice about everybody. You can’t be acerbic. For instance, the Courier has a gossip column but there’s never a snide line in it. I mean, the sort of thing you want is speculation about who’s screwing the Mayoress and how the Chief Constable wangled his holiday in Tobago. But that’s anathema on a local paper.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Wexford. ‘I doubt if you’ll be there long.’
‘That sounds a bit double-edged. I’ve had an amazing interview with Daisy. “The Masked Intruder”.’
‘She told you about that?’
‘Everything. The works.’ He gave Wexford a sidelong look, a little smile twitching. ‘I couldn’t help thinking, anyone could do that, couldn’t they? Come up here in a mask and frighten the ladies?’
‘Appeals to you, does it?’
‘Only as a story,’ said Jason. ‘Well, I’ll be off home.’
‘And where’s home?’
‘Cheriton. I’ll tell you a story. I only read it the other day, I think it’s wonderful. Lord Halifax said to John Wilkes, “Upon my word, sir, I do not know if you will first perish on the gallows or of the pox,” and Wilkes said back, quick as a flash, “That depends, my lord, on whether I first embrace your Lordship’s principles or your Lordship’s mistress.”’
‘Yes, I’ve heard it before. Is it apt?’
‘It sort of reminds me of me,’ said Jason Sebright. He waved to Wexford, got into his car and drove off rather too fast down the by-road.
Gunther, or Gunnar, appears in the saga of the Nibelungen. Gunnar is the Norse form, Gunther the German or Burgundian. Gunther resolved to ride through the flames which encircled Brünnhilde’s castle and thus win her for his wife. He failed and it was Siegfried who succeeded in Gunther’s shape, remaining with Brünnhilde for three nights, lying beside her but with a sword between. Wagner had composed operas about it.
This account was given Burden by his wife before he set off for London. Burden sometimes thought his wife knew everything – well, everything of that sort. Far from resenting this, it met with his unqualified admiration and it was very useful. She was better than Wexford’s dictionary and, he told her, much nicer-looking.
‘How did they do that, d’you think? The sword, I mean. It wouldn’t have been much of a hindrance if they laid it down flat. You could just have pulled the sheet up and over it and you’d hardly have known it was there.’
‘I think,’ said Jenny gravely, ‘they must have laid it sharp side upwards, the hilt resting on the bedhead, if you can imagine. Only I expect they only wrote about it, never actually did it.’
Barry Vine drove. He was one of those who enjoyed driving, whose wives are never allowed to drive, who will drive distances of enormous and terrible lengths and still appear to enjoy themselves. Barry had once told Burden how he had driven all the way home from the West of Ireland single-handed and without a break except for the bit on the ferry to Fishguard. This time he only had to drive fifty miles.
‘You know that expression, sir, “kissing the gunner’s daughter”?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Burden was beginning to feel an ignoramus. Was DS Vine about to tell him the further adventures of all these Wagnerian people, who seemed to find their way from Norse sagas into German operas and back?
‘It’s a phrase that means something completely different, only I can’t remember what.’
‘Does it come in an opera?’
‘Not so far as I know,’ said Barry.
Daisy’s father’s house was near Arsenal football ground, a small grey-brick Victorian house in a street of terraces. There was no restriction on parking and Vine could leave the car by the kerb in Nineveh Road.
‘Be light this time tomorrow,’ Barry said, feeling for the latch on the gate. ‘Clocks go on tonight.’
‘They go on, do they? I can never remember when they go on and when they go back.’
‘Spring forward, fall back,’ said Barry.
Burden, tiring of always being the one at the receiving end of instruction, was about to protest that you might as well say, fall forward, spring back, when a brilliant flood of light from the front door suddenly washed over them and made them blink.
A man came out on to the step. He held out his hand to each of them as if they were invited guests or even old friends.
‘You found your way all right then?’
It was one of those remarks which must have received a prefatory affirmative in order to be made at all, but people go on making them. G.G. Jones even made another.
‘Put your car somewhere, have you?’
His tone was jolly. He was a younger man than Burden had expected, or he looked younger. Inside, with the light on him rather than behind him, he was rev
ealed as not much more than forty. Burden had also expected a resemblance to Daisy but there was none, or none that an early cursory study showed. Jones was fair, his face ruddy. The look of youth was partly due to that face being round and babyish, snub-nosed, wide at the cheekbones. Daisy was no more like him than she was like Naomi. She was her grandmother’s child.
He was also overweight, too much overweight for his big frame to carry it well. The beginnings of a formidable belly swelled out his sweater in a barrel shape. He seemed perfectly at ease, with nothing to hide, and the impression of their being invited, even honoured guests, was enhanced by his producing a bottle of whisky, three cans of beer and three tumblers.
Both policemen refused. They had been shown into a living room that was comfortable enough but lacked what Burden would have called ‘a woman’s touch’. He was aware that this was (mysteriously to him, since he could only see it as flattering women) a sexist theory. His wife would have told him off for holding it. But secretly he adhered to it, it was fact. Here, for example, was a comfortable, decently furnished room with pictures on the walls and a calendar hanging up, a clock on the mantelpiece over the Victorian fireplace, even a rubber plant struggling to survive in a dim corner. But there was nothing of care or taste, nothing of interest in what a place looked like, no symmetry, no arrangement, no home-making. No woman lived in this house.
He was aware that he had been silent too long, even though Jones had filled the interval with fetching the diet coke he had pressed Barry into accepting and with pouring his own beer. Burden cleared his throat.
‘D’you mind telling us your name, Mr Jones? What do the initials stand for?’
‘My first name’s George but I’m always called Gunner.’
‘E,r or a,r?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Gunner or Gunnar?’
‘Gunner. On account of I used to play for Arsenal. Didn’t you know?’
No, they didn’t know. Barry’s lips twitched. He took a swig of his diet coke. So Jones had once, maybe twenty years ago, played for Arsenal, the Gunners, and Naomi the ‘soccer groupie’ had hero-worshipped from the stand . . .
‘George Godwin Jones, that’s my full name.’ Gunner Jones’s face wore a pleased look. ‘I’ve been married since Naomi,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘but that one wasn’t a roaring success either. She packed her bags five years ago and I’m not thinking of taking the plunge again. Not when it’s like the song says and you can have it all and not get hooked.’
‘What do you do for a living, Mr Jones?’ Barry asked.
‘Sell sports equipment. I’ve got a shop in the Holloway Road, and don’t talk to me about recessions. As far as I’m concerned, business is booming, never better.’ He wiped the broad, self-satisfied smile from his face as if with some swift inner switch. ‘That was a bad business at Tancred,’ he said, his voice dropping an octave. ‘That’s what you’re here about, yes? Or, let’s say you wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t happened?’
‘I don’t believe you’ve had much contact with your daughter?’
‘I haven’t had any, my friend. I haven’t had sight nor sound of her for a good seventeen years. How old is she now? Eighteen? I haven’t seen her since she was six months old. And the answer to your next question is, no, not a lot. No, I don’t care. It doesn’t worry me one way or the other. Men may get to like their kids when they’re older, fair enough, but babies? Don’t mean a thing, do they? I washed my hands of the lot of them and I’ve never had a moment’s regret.’
It was startling how fast his bonhomie could become belligerence. His voice rose and fell as the subject matter changed, a crescendo when he spoke of things personal to himself, a low purr when paying lip service to society’s requirements.
Barry Vine said, ‘You didn’t think of getting in touch when you heard your daughter had been injured?’
‘No, sport, I didn’t.’ Only a momentary hesitation preceded Gunner Jones’s opening of a second can. ‘No, I didn’t think about it and I didn’t do it. Get in touch, I mean. Since you ask, I was away when it happened. I went fishing, a not unusual pastime with me, in fact it’s what I’d call my hobby if anyone was interested in knowing what my hobby is. It was the West Country this time, I was staying in a cottage on the River Dart, nice little place I often go to for a few days at this time of the year.’ He spoke with a self-confident aggressiveness. Or perhaps this amount of pugnacity was never really confident? ‘I’m there to get away from it all, so the last thing I do is watch the news on TV. The first I knew of it was on the fifteenth when I got back.’ His tone altered a little. ‘Mind you, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have felt a pang if the kid’d gone the same way as the rest of them, but you’d feel like that about any kid, doesn’t have to be your own.
‘I don’t mind telling you something else. Maybe you think I’m incriminating myself but I’m saying it just the same. Naomi was nothing, nothing. I’m telling you, there wasn’t anything there. There was quite a pretty face and what you might call an affectionate nature. A hand-holder and a cuddler. Only the cuddling strictly stopped at bedtime. As for empty-headed, well, I’m not educated and I don’t reckon I’ve read more than say six books in all my life, but I was a bloody genius compared to that one. I was the personality of the year . . .’
‘Mr Jones . . .’
‘Yes, sport, you can have your say in a minute. Don’t cut me short in my own house. I haven’t said what I started to say yet. Naomi was nothing and I never had the pleasure of Mr Copeland MP’s acquaintance, but I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you what I’m working up to, any bloke who’d take on Davina Flory, any bloke, he’d have to be a soldier, a fighting soldier, gentlemen. He’d have to be brave as a lion and strong as a horse and with a skin as thick as a bleeding hippo. Because that lady was some queen-sized bitch and she never got tired. You couldn’t tire her, she only needed about four hours’ sleep and then she was raring to go – or raring to attack, I should say.
‘I had to live there. Well, they called it “staying there while we found somewhere”, but it was plain Davina’d never let go, especially after the baby came along.’ He barked at Burden, ‘D’you know what a Goth is?’
Something like Gunnar and those Nibelungen, Burden thought. ‘You tell me.’
‘I looked it up.’ Gunner Jones had evidently, long ago, learnt the definition by heart. ‘“One who behaves like a barbarian, a rude, uncivilised or ignorant person.” That’s what she used to call me, “the Goth” or just “Goth”. She’d use it like a Christian name. I mean, I had those initials, didn’t I? G. G. She wasn’t common, oh dear, no, or she’d have called me Horse. “What’s Goth going to sack and pillage today?” she’d say, and “Have you been battering at the gates of the city again, Goth?”
‘She set out to break up the marriage, she once actually told me how she saw me, as someone who’d give Naomi a child, and once that was done my usefulness was over. Just an animal at stud, that’s me. A champion Goth. I had the face to complain once, said I was sick of living there, we wanted a place of our own, and all she said was, “Why not go off and find somewhere, Goth? You can come back in twenty years and tell us how you’ve got on.”
‘So I went but I never came back. I used to read the ads in the papers for her books, the things they said, “Wise and witty, compassion combined with a statesmanlike grasp, humanity and a deep empathy for the humble and the oppressed . . .” Christ, but that made me laugh. I wanted to write to that paper and say, you don’t know her, you’ve got it all wrong. Well. I’ve got that off my chest and maybe I’ve given you some idea of why wild horses wouldn’t have driven me to make contact with Davina Flory’s daughter and Davina Flory’s grandchild.’
Burden felt slightly winded by it all. It was as if a juggernaut of hatred and bitter resentment had rolled through the little room, leaving him and Barry Vine to recover gradually from the flattening they had had. Gunner Jones had the look of a man who has been through a catharsis, liberated a
nd pleased with himself.
‘Have another of those diet cokes?’
Vine shook his head.
‘Time for a chaser.’ Jones poured himself a generous two fingers of whisky into the third glass. He was writing something down on the back of an envelope he had taken from behind the mantelpiece clock. ‘There you are. The address of the place I was in on the Dart and the name of the people at the pub next door, the Rainbow Trout.’ He had suddenly grown enormously good-humoured. ‘They’ll give me an alibi. You check up all you want, be my guest.
‘I don’t mind freely admitting something, gentlemen. I would gladly have killed Davina Flory if I’d thought I could do it and get away with it. But that’s when you come to the crunch, isn’t it? Getting away with it? And I’m speaking of eighteen years ago. Time heals all, or so they say, and I’m not the crazy young madcap, I’m not the Goth I was in the days when I thought once or twice I’d wring Davina’s neck and to hell with the fifteen years inside.’
You could have fooled me, thought Burden, but he said nothing. He wondered if Gunner Jones was the stupid man Davina Flory had believed him to be, or very, very clever. He wondered if he was acting or all this was real, and he couldn’t tell. What would Daisy have made of this man if she had ever met him?
‘As a matter of fact, I may be called Gunner but I can’t handle a gun. Never so much as fired an airgun. I ask myself if I could even find my way to that place, that Tancred House, these days and I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. I reckon there’ll have been some trees grown up and others fallen down. There were some folk there – Davina called them the “help”, I reckon she thought that a fraction more democratic than “servants” – lived in a cottage, name of Triffid, Griffith, something of that sort. They had a kid, some kind of retard, poor little sod. What became of them? The place’ll go to my daughter, I suppose. Lucky little lass, eh? I don’t reckon she’ll have been crying her eyes out, whatever she may say. Does she look like me?’
