by Ruth Rendell
‘Not a bit,’ said Burden, though by this time he had seen Daisy in the turn of Gunner Jones’s head, a certain lift to the corner of his mouth, the slant of his eyes.
‘So much the better for her, eh, my friend? Don’t think I can’t tell what’s going on behind that blank look of yours. If you’ve done, seeing it’s Saturday night, I’ll bid you a fond farewell and be off to my local watering-hole.’ He opened the front door and ushered them out. ‘If you’re thinking of lying low for a bit, keeping an eye on me, I’ll be leaving my vehicle where it’s parked right outside there and taking what the old folks call shanks’s pony.’ As if they were traffic police. ‘I’d hate to give you the satisfaction of finding me over the limit, as by now I surely am.’
‘D’you want me to drive?’ said Burden when they were in the car, knowing his offer would be refused.
‘No, thanks, sir, I enjoy driving.’
Vine started the ignition.
‘Is there a map-reader’s light in this car, Barry?’
‘Under the dashboard shelf. It pulls out on a flexible what-d’you-call-it.’
It was impossible to turn here. Barry took the car a hundred yards down the street, swung round in the entrance to a side street and returned the way they had come. The place was too much of an unknown, a mystery, for him to attempt the experiment of getting back to the crossroads by a sortie round the block.
Gunner Jones went across a pedestrian crossing in front of them. There was no one else on foot and they were the only car. Jones put up his hand in an imperious gesture to halt them but he didn’t look into the car or give any other sign that he knew who the driver and passenger were.
‘A strange man,’ Barry said.
‘This is a very odd thing, Barry.’ Burden had the map-reader’s light trained on the envelope Gunner Jones had given him and on which he had written the address. But it was the other side, the previously used side with the stamp, that he was looking at. ‘I noticed it when he first took it off the mantelpiece. It’s addressed to him, here at Nineveh Road, to Mr G.G. Jones, nothing peculiar about that. But the handwriting, it’s a very distinctive handwriting, I last saw it in a desk diary, I’d know it anywhere. It’s Joanne Garland’s writing.’
Chapter Nineteen
It was broad daylight now at six. Nothing could have made it feel more like spring, the late sunsets, the lengthening evenings. Less pleasing, according to the Deputy Chief Constable, Sir James Freeborn, was the length of time Wexford’s team had been quartered at Tancred House without results. And the bills they were running up! The cost! A day and night guard on Miss Davina Jones? What was it going to cost? The girl shouldn’t be there. He had never heard of such a thing, an eighteen-year-old imperiously insisting on staying alone in that barrack of a place.
Wexford came out from the stables just before six. The sun was still shining and the evening air untouched by chill. He heard a sound ahead that might have been made by heavy rain, but rain couldn’t be falling out of that unclouded sky. As soon as he came to the front of the house he saw that the fountain was playing.
Until now he had scarcely know it was a fountain. The water spouted from a pipe that came up somewhere between Apollo’s legs and the tree trunk. It cascaded through slanting sunbeams to make rainbows. In the little waves the fish cavorted. The fountain in full play transformed the place so that the house no longer looked austere, nor the courtyard bare, nor the pool stagnant. The sometimes oppressive silence had given place to a delicate musical splashing.
He tugged at the sugarstick bellpull. Whose car was that on the drive behind him? A sports car, an uncomfortable-looking, by no means new MG. Daisy came to let him in. Her appearance had undergone another alteration and she was feminine again. In black, of course, but clinging, flattering black with a skirt and not trousers, shoes and not boots, the back of her hair hanging loose, the sides looped up, like an Edwardian girl’s.
And there was something else different about her. He was unable at first to say what this was. But it was in all of her, her step, her demeanour, the lift of her head, her eyes. A light shone out of her. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes . . . What are you when the moon doth rise?
‘You answered the door,’ he said reproachfully, ‘when you didn’t know who it was. Or did you see me from the window?’
‘No, we’re in the serre. I turned on the fountain.’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t it lovely? Look at the rainbows it makes. With the water washing down you can’t see that nasty leer on Apollo’s face. You can believe he loves her, you can see he only wants to kiss her . . . Oh, please don’t look like that. I knew it would be all right, I sensed it. I sensed it was someone nice.’
With less faith in her intuition than she had herself, he followed her through the hall, wondering who the other half of ‘we’ was. The entrance to the dining room was still sealed up, door taped to architrave. She walked ahead of him with springy step, a different girl, a changed girl.
‘You remember Nicholas,’ she said to him, pausing on the threshold of the conservatory, and to the man inside, ‘This is Chief Inspector Wexford, Nicholas, that you met in the hospital.’
Nicholas Virson was sitting in one of the deep wicker armchairs and he didn’t get up. Why should he? He didn’t extend a hand, but nodded, said, ‘Ah, good evening,’ like a man twice his age.
Wexford looked about him. He looked at the prettinesses of the place, the green plants, an early azalea in flower in a tub, the lemon trees in their blue and white china, a pink cyclamen, burdened with blossoms in a bowl on the glass table. At Daisy, who was back in the seat she must have vacated a moment before, close to Virson’s chair. Their two drinks, gin or vodka or plain spring-water, were side by side, no more that two inches apart, beside the cyclamen flowers. He knew quite suddenly what had caused the change in her, brought pink into her cheeks and removed the pain from her anxious eyes. If it hadn’t been impossible in these circumstances, after what had happened and she had gone through, he would have said she was happy.
‘Can I offer you a drink?’ she said.
‘Better not. If that’s mineral water I’ll accept and have a glass.’
‘Let me do it.’
Virson spoke as if the request Wexford had made implied some gargantuan task, for the water to be fetched from a well, for instance, or brought up a dangerous ladder out of the cellar. Daisy must be saved from an exertion Wexford had no right to ask of her. A reproachful glance accompanied his handing over of the half-full glass.
‘Thank you. Daisy, I’ve come to ask you if you won’t reconsider your decision to stay here.’
‘How funny. So has Nicholas. I mean, come here to ask me that.’ She turned on the young man a smile of great candlepower. She took his hand and held it. ‘Nicholas is so good to me. Well, you all are. Everyone’s so kind. But Nicholas would do anything for me, wouldn’t you, Nicholas?’
It was a strange thing to say. Was she serious? Surely the irony was in his imagination?
Virson seemed a little taken aback, as well he might be. An uncertain smile trembled on his mouth. ‘Anything in my power, darling,’ he said. He seemed reluctant to have more to do with Wexford than he could help, but now he forgot prejudices and what was perhaps snobbism and said almost impulsively, ‘I want Daisy to come back to Myfleet with me. She should never have left us. But she’s so absurdly stubborn – can’t you do something to make her see she’s in danger here? I worry about her night and day, I don’t mind telling you. I can’t sleep. I’d stay here myself only I suppose it wouldn’t be quite the thing.’
That made Daisy laugh. Wexford didn’t think he had ever heard her laugh before. Nor did he believe he had ever heard a young man make such a remark, not even in the old days when he was young himself and people still found something improper in unmarried persons of opposite sexes sleeping under the same roof.
‘It wouldn’t be at all the thing for you, Nicholas,’ she said. ‘All your things
are at home. And it takes yonks to get to the station from here, you’ve no idea till you try it.’ She spoke fondly, she still held his hand. Momentarily, her face blazed with happiness when she looked at him. ‘Besides, you’re not a policeman.’ She spoke teasingly. ‘Do you think you could defend me?’
‘I’m a bloody good shot,’ said Virson like an old colonel.
Wexford said drily, ‘I don’t think we want any more guns here, Mr Virson.’
That made Daisy shiver. Her face went dull, like a shadow crossing the sun. ‘An old friend of my grandmother’s rang up at the weekend and asked me to go and stay with her in Edinburgh. Ishbel Macsamphire. You remember my pointing her out to you, Nicholas? She said she’d invite her granddaughter as well and that was supposed to be an attraction! I shuddered. Of course I said no. Maybe later in the year, but not now.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Wexford said, ‘very sorry.’
‘She’s not the only one. Preston Littlebury invited me to his house in Forby. “Stay as long as you like, my dear. Be my guest.” I don’t think he knows “be my guest” is a sort of joke thing to say. Two girls from school have asked me. I’m really popular, I suppose I’m a kind of celebrity.’
‘You’ve turned all these people down?’
‘Mr Wexford, I’m going to stay on here in my own house. I know I’m going to be safe. Don’t you see that if I ran away now I might never come back?’
‘We shall catch these men,’ he said stoutly. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’
‘An extremely long time.’ Virson drank his water or whatever it was in slow sips. ‘It’s getting on for a month.’
‘Just three weeks, Mr Virson. Another idea that occurred to me, Daisy, was that when you go back to school whenever it is the Crelands term starts – two or three weeks’ time – you might think of boarding for your final term.’
She answered him as if she saw the suggestion as extremely odd, almost improper. The gap of temperament and taste he had always sensed between her and Virson quickly closed. They suddenly became highly compatible young people with the same values and reared in an identical culture. ‘Oh, I’m not going back to school! Why would I ever do that? After everything that’s happened? A levels aren’t something I’m likely to need in my future life.’
‘Haven’t you got a university place consequent on how well you do in your A levels?’
Virson gave Wexford a look implying that it was impertiment of him to believe anything of the sort. ‘University places,’ said Daisy, ‘don’t have to be taken up.’ She spoke strangely. ‘I only tried for it to please Davina and now – now there’s no pleasing her any more.’
‘Daisy has left school,’ said Virson. ‘All that’s over.’
Wexford was suddenly sure some revelation was to be offered or announcement made. Daisy has just promised to be my wife – or something old-fashioned and pompous but nevertheless a bombshell. No revelatory statement was made. Virson sipped his water. He said, ‘I think I’ll stay on a while, darling, if you’ll let me. Could you give me a spot of dinner or shall we go out?’
‘Oh, the place is groaning with food,’ she said lightly. ‘It always is. Brenda was cooking all morning, she doesn’t know what to do with herself now – now there’s only me.’
‘You’re feeling better,’ was all Wexford said to her as she saw him to the door.
‘I’m getting over it, yes.’ But she looked as if things had gone further than that. He had the impression that from time to time she tried to revert to her old misery, for form’s sake, for decency. But to be miserable was no longer natural. Naturally, she was happy. Yet she said, as if feelings of guilt had caught up with her. ‘In a way I’ll never get over it, I’ll never forget.’
‘Not for a while, anyway.’
‘It would be worse somewhere else.’
‘I wish you’d reconsider. Both about going away from here and about university. Of course, university – that’s no business of mine.’
She did something astonishing. They were on the doorstep, the door was open and he was about to leave. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. The kisses landed, warm and firm, on both his cheeks. He felt against the length of him a body seething with delight, with joy.
Firmly, he disengaged himself. ‘Please me,’ he said as he had sometimes said to his daughters, long ago and usually to no avail, ‘please me by doing what I ask.’
The water continued to splash steadily into the pool and the fish leapt in the little waves.
‘Are we saying,’ said Burden, ‘that the vehicle they used left, and perhaps arrived, through the woods themselves? It was a jeep or a Land-Rover or something built for use on rough ground and the driver knew those woods like the back of his hand.’
‘Andy Griffin certainly knew them,’ said Wexford, ‘and his father does, perhaps better than anyone else. Gabbitas knows them and so, to a lesser extent, does Ken Harrison. No doubt the three dead people knew them and, for all we know, Joanne Garland may have done, members of her family may do.’
‘Gunner Jones says he doesn’t think he could find his way through them now. Why say that to me if he wasn’t pretty confident he could? I didn’t ask him. It was simply a piece of gratuitous information. And we’re talking about someone driving through the woods, not running through on foot, which provided you followed your nose or a compass would be bound to bring you out on a road sooner or later. This guy would have to be prepared to drive a cumbersome four-wheel-drive vehicle through woods in the dark and the only lights he’d dare to have on would be sidelights and maybe not even those.’
The other one walked in front of him with a lantern,’ Wexford said drily, ‘like in the early days of motoring.’
‘Well, perhaps he did. I find it all hard to picture, Reg, but what alternative is there? There’s no way they wouldn’t have passed Bib Mew or Gabbitas wouldn’t have met them if they were on the Pomfret Monachorum road – unless Gabbitas was one of them, unless he was the other one.’
‘How d’you like the idea of a motorbike? Suppose they made their way through the woods in the dark on Andy Griffin’s motorbike?’
‘Wouldn’t Daisy distinguish between the sound of a motorbike starting up and the sound of a car? I can’t somehow see Gabbitas riding pillion on Andy’s bike. Gabbitas, I don’t need to remind you, has no alibi for the afternoon and early evening of 11 March.’
‘You know, Mike, something rather strange has happened to alibis in recent years. It’s getting progressively more difficult to establish hard-and-fast ones. That works against villains, of course, but it also works for them. It’s got something to do with people leading more isolated lives. There are more people than ever before but individual lives are more lonely.’
The glazed look appeared on Burden’s face which often settled there when Wexford began to talk what he categorised as ‘philosophy’. Wexford was becoming ultra-sensitive to this change of expression and, since he had nothing more to say of value in the present case, he cut short his remarks and bade Burden good-night. But his thoughts on alibis remained with him as he drove home, how suspects were able to call on less and less corroboration in support of their claims.
Men, in times of recession and high unemployment, went to the pub less frequently than they had used. Cinemas were empty as television lured away their audiences. The Kingsmarkham cinema had closed five years before and been converted into a DIY emporium. More people lived singly than ever before. Fewer grown-up children lived at home. In the evenings and by night the streets of Kingsmarkham, of Stowerton, of Pomfret, were empty, not a car parked, not a pedestrian, only freight traffic rolling through, each truck with a lone driver. At home, in single rooms, or tiny flats, a lone man or lone woman sat watching television.
This accounted, in some measure, for the problems in establishing the certain whereabouts of almost all these people on that date in March. Who was there to support the claims of John Gabbitas and Gunner Jones, or come to that, Bib Me
w? Who could corroborate where Ken Harrison had been, or John Chowney or Terry Griffin, but in the case of two of them their wives, whose testimony was useless? They had all been at home, or on their way home, alone or with their wives.
To say that Gunner Jones had disappeared would be putting it too strongly. A call to the sports equipment shop in the Holloway Road ascertained that Gunner had gone on a few days’ holiday, he hadn’t said where, he often went away. Wexford would hardly help seeing the coincidence here, if coincidence it was. Joanne Garland kept a shop and had gone away. Gunner Jones, who knew her, who corresponded with her, kept a shop and ‘often went away’. Another thing, which Wexford was prepared to admit might be seen as way-out, had struck him. Gunner Jones sold sports equipment, Joanne Garland had converted a room in her house to a gym and filled it with sports equipment.
Were they together and if so, why?
The proprietors of the Rainbow Trout Inn at Pluxam on the Dart were most willing to tell DS Vine everything they knew about Mr G.G. Jones. He was a regular customer when in the neighbourhood. They let a few rooms to visitors and he had once stayed there, but only once. Since then he had always rented the cottage next door. It was not exactly next door, in Vine’s eyes, but a good fifty yards down the lane which led to the river bank.
The eleventh of March? The licensee of the Rainbow Trout knew exactly what Vine was talking about and needed no explanation. His eyes sparkled with the excitement of it. Mr Jones had certainly been there from the tenth to the fifteenth. He knew because Mr Jones never paid for his drinks till he left and there was a record of his expenditure for those days. To Vine it seemed an incredibly large sum for one man. As to the eleventh, the licensee couldn’t say, he had no record of Mr Jones coming in that evening, he didn’t write the dates on his ‘slate’.
Since then he hadn’t seen Gunner Jones and hadn’t expected to. There was no one in the cottage at present. The landlord told Vine he had no further bookings for Gunner Jones in the current year. He had rented the cottage four times and had always been alone. That is, he had never moved into it with someone else. The landlord had once seen him having a drink in the Rainbow Trout with a woman. Just a woman. No, he couldn’t describe her beyond saying she hadn’t impressed him as being too young for Gunner or, come to that, too old. The probability was that Gunner Jones was at present off fishing in some other part of the country.
