by Ruth Rendell
Gabbitas appeared as Burden returned to the front of the house. He seemed not to have come along the path through the pinetum but from among the trees themselves, from that area of woodland that lay to the south of the gardens. Instead of working boots, he was wearing trainers and instead of protective clothing or even his Barbour, jeans and a sweater. If there was a shirt under it this was not apparent.
‘May I know where you’ve been, Mr Gabbitas?’
‘A walk,’ Gabbitas said. It was short and sharp. He looked affronted.
‘A fine morning for a walk,’ Burden said mildly. ‘I want to ask you about rope. Do you use rope in your business?’
‘Sometimes.’ Gabbitas looked suspicious, he looked as if he was going to ask why, but he must have thought better of it – or remembered how Andy Griffin had died. ‘I haven’t used any lately but I’ve always got it to hand.’ As Burden had expected, he was in the habit of roping himself to a tree if the work he had to do was above a certain height or otherwise dangerous.
‘It’ll be in the machinery shed,’ he said. ‘I know exactly where. I could put my hand on it in the dark.’
But he couldn’t. Not in the dark or broad daylight. The rope had gone.
* * * *
Wexford, who had wondered where those features of Daisy’s appearance came from that were not direct hand-downs from Davina Flory, saw them uncannily present in the man before him. But no, not perhaps uncannily. Gunner Jones was her father, a fact manifest to all except those who saw likenesses only in physical size and in colour of hair and eye. He had her – or, rather Daisy had his – way of looking sideways with a tilt to eye and mouth, the curve of the nostrils, the short upper lip, the straight eyebrows that described a curve only at the temples.
His weight obscured other, possible, resemblances. He was a big heavy man with a truculent look. When he was brought to the interview room where Wexford was, he behaved as if on a social visit or even fact-finding mission. Eyeing the window (which gave on to a back yard and repository for wheelie-bins), he remarked breezily that the old place had changed out of all conscience since he was last here.
There was an insolent defiance in the way he spoke, Wexford thought. He ignored the hand that was extended to him with a false cordiality, and pretended to be studying a folder of papers on the table between them.
‘Sit down, please, Mr Jones.’
It was a cut above the usual interview room, that is the walls were not whitewashed roughcast, the window had a blind and no metal grille, the floor was not concrete but tiled and the chairs in which the two men sat had padded backs and seats. But there was nothing to raise it to ‘office’ standard and over by the door sat a uniformed policeman, PC Waterman, trying to look insouciant and as if sitting in the corner of a bleak chamber in the police station was the way he preferred to spend his Saturday mornings.
Wexford added a note to the notes in front of him, read what he had written, looked up and began to speak about Joanne Garland. He fancied Jones was surprised, perhaps even disconcerted. This was not what he had expected.
‘We were friends once, yes,’ he said. ‘She was married to my pal Brian. We used to go about a bit together, the two couples, I mean. Me and Naomi, Brian and her. As a matter of fact, I was working for Brian while I lived here, I had a job with his company as a sales rep. I did my leg in, as you may know, and the world of sport was closed to me at the tender age of twenty-three. Hard cheese, wouldn’t you reckon?’
Treating the question as rhetorical, Wexford said, ‘When did you last see Mrs Garland?’
Jones’s laughter was a honking sound. ‘See her? I haven’t seen her for whatever it is, seventeen, eighteen years? When me and Naomi split up she took Naomi’s side, which I daresay you could call being loyal. Brian took her side too and that was the end of my job. What you’d call that, my friend, I don’t know but I’d call it treachery. Nothing was bad enough for those two to say about me – and what had I done? Not a lot, to be honest with you. Had I beaten her up? Did I go with other women? Did I drink? No way, there was none of that. All I’d done was get driven round the bend by that old bitch till I couldn’t stand another bloody day of it.’
‘You haven’t seen Mrs Garland since then?’
‘I told you. I haven’t seen her and I haven’t spoken to her. Why would I? What was Joanne to me? I never fancied her, for a start. As you may by now have gathered, bossy meddling women don’t exactly turn me on, besides her being a good ten years older than me. I haven’t seen Joanne and I haven’t been near this place from that day to this.’
‘You may not have seen or spoken to her but you’ve communicated,’ Wexford said. ‘You recently had a letter from her.’
‘Did she tell you that?’
He should have known better than to ask. Wexford wouldn’t have described his blustering manner and quick protests as good acting. But perhaps they were not acting at all.
‘Joanne Garland is missing, Mr Jones. Her whereabouts are unknown.’
His expression was the extreme of incredulity, the look of a character in a horror comic confronted by disaster.
‘Oh, come on.’
‘She’s been missing since the night of the murders at Tancred House.’
Gunner Jones pushed out his lips. He lifted his shoulders in a massive shrug. He no longer looked surprised. He looked guilty, though Wexford knew this meant nothing. It was merely the air of a person who is not habitually honest and straightforward. His eyes fixed themselves on Wexford’s but the gaze soon faltered and fell.
‘I was in Devon,’ he said. ‘Maybe you haven’t heard that. I was fishing at a place called Pluxam on the Dart.’
‘We’ve found nobody to support your story that you were there during March the eleventh and twelfth. I’d like you to come up with the name of someone who might corroborate that. You told us you had never handled a gun, yet you’re a member of the North London Gun Club and hold firearms certificates in respect of two weapons.’
‘It was a joke,’ said Gunner Jones. ‘I mean, come on, surely you can see that? It’s funny, isn’t it, being called Gunner and never had a gun in my hand?’
‘I think I must have a different sort of sense of humour from yours, Mr Jones. Tell me about the letter you had from Mrs Garland.’
‘Which one?’ said Gunner Jones. He went on as if he hadn’t asked the question. ‘It doesn’t matter because they were both about the same thing. She wrote me three years ago – it was when I got divorced from my second wife – and said Naomi and me should get back together. I don’t know how she knew about the divorce, someone must have told her, we still knew some of the same people. She wrote to say now I was “free”, her word, there was nothing to stop me and Naomi ‘remaking our marriage’. I’ll tell you something, I reckon these days folk only write letters when they’re scared to talk on the phone. She knew what I’d say to her if she phoned me.’
‘Did you reply?’
‘No, sport, I didn’t. I consigned her letter to the bin.’ A look of ineffable shiftiness took command of Jones’s face. It was pantomimic. It was also, probably, unconscious. He had no idea how sly he looked when he lied. ‘I had another one like it around a month ago, maybe a bit more. That went the same way as the first.’
Wexford began questioning him about his fishing holiday and his prowess with guns. He took Gunner Jones over the same ground as when he had first asked him about the letter, and got similar evasive answers. For a long time Jones refused to say where he had been staying in York but he yielded at last and admitted sulkily that he had a girlfriend there. He provided a name and an address.
‘However, I shan’t be taking the plunge again.’
‘Until today you haven’t been to Kingsmarkham for getting on for eighteen years?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Not on Monday, 13 May of last year, for instance?’
‘Not on that day, for instance, or any other instance.’
It was the middle of the
afternoon and two hours since a sandwich lunch had been provided from the canteen, when Wexford asked Jones to make a statement and reluctantly and inwardly decided he must let him go. He had no hard evidence on which to hold him. Jones was already talking about ‘getting a lawyer down here’, which seemed to tell Wexford that he knew more about crime from American television imports than from actual experience, but again he could be acting.
‘Now I’m here I might think about taking a cab up to meet my daughter. How about that?’
Wexford said neutrally that this, of course, would be up to him. The idea was not pleasant but he had no doubt Daisy would be perfectly safe. The place was swarming with police officers, the stables still fully staffed. In advance of his own arrival, he put through a call to Vine, alerting him to Jones’s intention.
In the event, Gunner Jones, who had come by train, returned to London at once by the same means, putting up no resistance to the offer of police transport to Kingsmarkham British Rail Station. Wexford found himself uncertain as to whether Jones was really quite clever or deeply stupid. He concluded that he was one of those people to whom lies are as reasonable an option as the truth. What is chosen is that which makes life easier.
It was growing late and it was Saturday but he had himself driven back to Tancred just the same. Another floral offering had been hung on the right-hand post of the main gate. He wondered who might be the donor of these flowers, this time a heart composed of dark-red rosebuds, if it was a series of people or always the same person, and he got out of the car to look while Donaldson opened the gate. But on the card was written only the message, ‘Good night, sweet lady’, and there was no name or signature.
Halfway up the woodland road a fox ran across in front of them but far enough away for Donaldson not to have to brake. It disappeared into the thick greening underbrush. On the banks, among the grass and new April growth, primroses were opening. The car window was open and Wexford could smell the fresh mild air, scented with spring. He was thinking of Daisy, as the fear of her father’s surprise visit had led him to do. But thinking of her – he realised with careful self-analysis – with no excessive anxiety, no passionate fear, no absolute love, to speak truly.
He felt slightly shaken. He had no great desire to see Daisy, no need to be with her, place her in that daughter’s position, be her father and have that role acknowledged by her. His eyes were opened. Perhaps by the fact that he had not been horrified or angered by Gunner Jones’s declared intention of coming up here. He had been no more than annoyed and on his guard. For he was fond of Daisy but he did not love her.
It was self-revelation that the experience brought him. He had been taught the difference, the huge division, between love and being fond of someone. Daisy had been there when, for the first time in her life, Sheila defected. No doubt any amicable pretty young woman who was nice to him would have served the purpose.
He had been given his allotment of love, for wife, children and grandchildren, and that was it, there would be no more. He wanted no more. What he felt for Daisy was a tender regard and a hope that all would go well with her.
This final reflection was forming itself in his mind when he caught sight, from the car window, of a running figure in the distance among the trees. The day was fair and shafts of sunlight penetrated the woods everywhere in slanting misty rays, in places almost opaque. These hindered his view rather than helping him to see whose the figure might be. It ran, apparently joyously and with abandon, through the clear spaces and into the dense bars of light, then between them again. Impossible to tell whether the flying figure was a man or a woman, young or middle-aged. Wexford could only be confident that the runner was not old. It disappeared in the vague direction of the hanging tree.
* * * *
When the phone rang Gerry Hinde was talking to Burden, asking him if he had seen the flowers on the gate. You never saw flowers like that in a flower shop. When you wanted to buy some for your wife, for instance, you got them all bunched together, not looking very attractive, and she had to arrange them. His wife said that she didn’t really like people bringing her flowers because the first thing she had to do, whatever else she might be doing, was put them in water. And that might take ages when the chances were she was cooking a meal or getting one of the kids to bed.
‘It would be a useful thing to know. I mean, where whoever he is got those flowers from. Done like that.’
Burden didn’t like to say they would very likely be beyond DC Hinde’s means. He picked up the phone.
The puritan ethic still played an important role among the forces that ruled his thinking. It told him not to use a car if you could walk the distance, and that phoning the people next door was almost a sin. Therefore, when Gabbitas said he was at home in his cottage, Burden was on the point of asking sharply why he couldn’t have come over if he had something to say. A note of gravity and perhaps of shock in the woodsman’s voice stopped him.
‘Could you come here, please? Could you come and bring someone with you?’
Burden didn’t say what he might have, that Gabbitas had seemed far from keen on his company that morning. ‘Give me some idea of what this is about, would you?’
‘I’d rather wait until you’re here. It’s nothing to do with the rope.’ The voice wavered a little. It said awkwardly, ‘I haven’t found a body or anything.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Burden to himself as he put the receiver back.
He emerged on to the courtyard and walked round the front of the house. Nicholas Virson’s car was parked on the flagstones. The sunshine was still very bright but the sun by now quite low in the sky. Its oblique rays turned the car approaching along the main road out of the woods to a dazzling globe of white fire. Burden was unable to look at it, so that it had drawn up not far from him and Wexford was getting out before he saw who this was.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘He said to bring someone with me. I thought it a bit of a nerve.’
They took the narrow road through the pinetum. On either side the placid sunshine of early evening showed the varying colours of the conifers, smooth spires, serrated cones, Christmas tree spruces and sweeping cedars, green, blue, silver, gold and almost black. The sunlight stood in pillars and hung in bands between the symmetrical shapes. There was a strong aromatic, tarry scent.
Underfoot it was dry and rather slippery, for brown needles covered the road surface as well as the interstices of the wood. The sky was a great blue-white dazzlement above them. How lucky they were to live here, Wexford thought, those Harrisons and John Gabbitas, and how much they must fear the loss of it. Uneasily, he remembered his homeward journey of the previous evening and the woodsman and Daisy standing side by side in the sunlit aisle. A girl might lay her hand on a man’s arm and look up into his face in that confiding way and it all meant nothing. They had been a long way distant from him. Daisy was a ‘toucher’, she tended to touch you as she talked, to lay a finger on your wrist, pass her hand lightly across your arm in a gesture near a caress . . .
John Gabbitas was out in his front garden, waiting for them, his right hand beating time with a frenzied impatience as if he found this delay intolerable.
Once again Wexford was struck by his looks, a spectacular handsomeness which, if it had belonged to a woman, would have led you to call it a waste, buried in such a place. The same sort of comment simply never applied to a man. He was reminded suddenly of Dr Perkins’s remarks about Harvey Cope land and his appearance, and then Gabbitas was ushering them into the little house, into the living room and pointing with the same quivering finger that had beat time, at something which lay on a woven-raffia-topped stool in the middle of the room.
‘What is this, Mr Gabbitas?’ Burden asked him. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I found it. I found that.’
‘Where? Where it is now?’
‘In a drawer. In the chest of drawers.’
It was a large handgun, a revolver, of a dark leaden c
olour, the metal of the barrel of a slighty paler and browner shade. They looked at it, in a moment of silence.
Wexford said, ‘You took it out and put it there?’
Gabbitas nodded.
‘You know, of course, that you shouldn’t have touched it?’
‘OK, I know now. It was a shock. I opened the drawer, I keep paper and envelopes in there, and it was the first thing I saw. It was lying on top of a packet of paper for printing out. I know I shouldn’t have touched it, but it was instinctive.’
‘May we sit down, Mr Gabbitas?’
Gabbitas cast up his eyes, then nodded furiously. These were the gestures of a man wondering at the triviality of the request at such a time. ‘It’s the gun they were all killed with, isn’t it?’
‘It may be,’ said Burden. ‘It may not. That remains to be established.’
‘I phoned you as soon as I found it.’
‘As soon as you’d removed it from where you found it, yes. That would have been at five fifty. When was the last time you looked in that drawer, prior to five fifty?’
‘Yesterday,’ Gabbitas said after a small hesitation. ‘Yesterday evening. About nine. I was going to write a letter. To my parents in Norfolk.’
‘And the gun wasn’t there then?’
‘Of course it wasn’t!’ Gabbitas’s voice was suddenly ragged with exasperation. ‘I’d have got in touch with you then if it had been. There was nothing in the drawer but what’s always in it, paper, notepaper, envelopes, cards, that sort of thing. The point is the gun wasn’t there. Can’t you understand? I’ve never seen it before.’
‘All right, Mr Gabbitas. I should try to keep calm if I were you. Did you in fact write to your parents?’
Gabbitas said impatiently, ‘I posted the letter in Pomfret this morning. I spent the day felling a dead sycamore in the centre of Pomfret and I had two kids doing community service to help me. We finished at four thirty and I was back here by five.’
‘And fifty minutes later you opened the drawer because you meant to write another letter? You seem to be an enthusiastic correspondent.’
