by Ruth Rendell
It was with a scarcely restrained fury that Gabbitas turned on Burden. ‘Look, I didn’t have to tell you about this. I could have chucked it out with the rubbish and no one the wiser. It’s nothing to do with me, I simply found it, I found it in that drawer where someone else must have put it. I opened the drawer, if you must know, for a piece of paper on which to write an invoice for the job I did today. To the borough council’s environment department. That’s the way I work. I have to. I can’t hang about for weeks and weeks. I need the money.’
‘All right, Mr Gabbitas,’ Wexford said. ‘But it was unfortunate you handled this weapon. I suppose it was with bare hands? Yes. I’m going to put through a call to DC Archbold to come over here and take care of it. It’ll be wiser for no other unauthorised person to touch it.’
Gabbitas was sitting down, leaning forward, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, his expression truculent and peevish. It was the look of someone who has been baulked of his desire to have authority thank him for his services. Wexford considered that there were two possible views to take. One was that Gabbitas was guilty, perhaps only of possessing this gun, but guilty of that and now afraid to hang on to it. The other was that he simply did not realise the gravity of the matter or understand what this meant, if the revolver on the stool was indeed the murder weapon.
He made his call, said to Gabbitas, ‘You were out all day?’
‘I told you. And I can give you the names of dozens of witnesses to prove it.’
‘It’s a pity you can’t give us the name of one to corroborate where you were on 11 March.’ Wexford sighed. ‘All right. I suppose there are no signs of a break-in? Who else has a key to this house?’
‘Nobody, so far as I know.’ Gabbitas hesitated, and quickly emended what he had said. ‘I mean, the lock wasn’t changed when I moved in. The Griffins might still have a key. It’s not my house, it doesn’t belong to me. I suppose Miss Flory or Mr Copeland had a key.’ More and more names seemed to come to mind. ‘The Harrisons had a key between the Griffins going and me coming. I don’t know what happened to it. I never go out and leave the house unlocked, I’m careful about that.’
‘You might as well not bother, Mr Gabbitas,’ said Burden drily. ‘It doesn’t seem to make much difference.’
* * * *
You lost a rope and found a gun, Wexford reflected when he was alone with Gabbitas. Aloud he said, ‘I suppose much the same applies to the keys to the machinery shed. A lot of people have keys?’
‘There’s no lock on the door.’
‘That settles that, then. You came here last May, Mr Gabbitas?’
‘At the beginning of May, yes.’
‘No doubt you have a bank account?’
Gabbitas told him where, told him without hesitation.
‘And when you came here you immediately transferred your account to the Kingsmarkham branch? Yes. Was this before or after the murder of the police officer? Can you remember that? If it was before or after DS Martin was murdered in that bank branch?’
‘It was before.’
Wexford fancied Gabbitas sounded uneasy, but he was used to his imagination telling him things like that. ‘The gun you found just now was almost certainly the weapon used in that murder.’ He watched Gabbitas’s face, saw nothing there but a kind of blank receptiveness. ‘Of the public who were in the bank that morning, 13 May, not all came forward to make statements to the police. Some left before the police came. One took that gun with him.’
‘I know nothing about any of this. I wasn’t in the bank that day.’
‘But you had already come to Tancred?’
‘I came on May the fourth,’ Gabbitas said sullenly.
Wexford paused, then said in a conversational way, ‘Do you like Miss Davina Jones, Mr Gabbitas? Daisy Jones?’
The change of subject caught Gabbitas off guard. He burst out, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘You’re young and apparently unattached. She’s young too and good-looking. She’s very charming. As a result of what has happened she’s in possession of a considerable property.’
‘She’s just someone I work for. All right, she’s attractive, any man would find her attractive. But she’s just someone I work for, so far as I’m concerned. And may not be working for much longer.’
‘You’re leaving this job?’
‘It’s not a matter of leaving the job. I’m not employed here, remember? I did tell you. I’m self-employed. Is there anything else you want to know? I’ll tell you one thing. Next time I find a gun I won’t tell the police, I’ll chuck it in the river.’
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr Gabbitas,’ Wexford said mildly.
* * * *
In the Sunday Times review section was an article by a distinguished literary critic on material he had collected for a biography of Davina Flory. Most of this was correspondence. Wexford glanced at it, then began to read with mounting interest.
Many of the letters had been in the possession of the niece in Mentone, now dead. They were from Davina to her sister, the niece’s mother, and indicated that Davina’s first marriage, to Desmond Cathcart Flory, had never been consummated. Long passages were quoted, instances of unhappiness and bitter disappointment, all written in Davina’s unmistakable style that alternated between the plain and the baroque. The author of the article speculated, basing his argument on evidence in later letters, as to who might have been Naomi Flory’s father.
This accounted for something Wexford had wondered about. Though Desmond and Davina had married in 1935, Davina’s only child had not been born until ten years later. He called to mind, painfully, that horrible scene at the Cheriton Forest Hotel when Casey had loudly averred that Davina had still been a virgin for eight years after her marriage. With a sigh, he finished the piece and turned over to the double-page spread on the newspaper’s Literary Banquet held at Grosvenor House on the previous Monday. Wexford looked at it only in the hope of seeing a photograph of Amyas Ireland, who had been at the banquet the previous year and might be again.
The first face he saw, that leapt at him from a page of photographs, was Augustine Casey’s. Casey was sitting at a table with four other people. At any rate, there were four other people in the picture. Wexford wondered if he had spat in his wineglass, and then he read the caption.
From left to right: Dan Kavanagh, Penelope Casey, Augustine Casey, Frances Hegarty, Jane Somers.
All were smiling pleasantly except Casey, whose face wore a sardonic smirk. The women were in formal evening gowns.
Wexford looked at the picture and reread the caption, looked at the other pictures on the two pages, returned to the first one. He sensed Dora’s silent presence at his left shoulder. She was waiting for him to ask but he hesitated, not knowing how to frame what he wanted to say. The question came carefully.
‘Who is the woman in the shiny dress?’
‘Penelope Casey.’
‘Yes, I know. I can see that. What is she to him?’
‘She’s his wife, Reg. It looks as if he’s gone back to his wife or she’s come back to him.’
‘You knew this?’
‘No, darling, I didn’t know. I didn’t know he had a wife until the day before yesterday. Sheila didn’t phone this week so I phoned her. She sounded very upset, but all she told me was that Gus’s wife had come back to their flat and he’d gone back there “to talk it through”.’
That expression again . . . He put his hand up to his eyes, perhaps to hide the picture from sight. ‘How unhappy she must be,’ he said, and then, ‘Oh, the poor child . . .’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘I can’t tell you if this is the same weapon as was used in the bank killing last May,’ the expert witness said to Wexford. ‘It certainly is the weapon that was used at Tancred House on 11 March.’
‘Then why can’t you say if it was the same gun?’
‘It probably is. Evidence in favour of that theory is that the chamber accommodates six
cartridges – it’s a classic “six-gun” – and one of these was used at the bank killing, while five were used at Tancred House. Very likely the remaining five in the chamber. In a society where handguns appear constantly as murder weapons one would hardly care to hazard that. But I think it’s an intelligent guess here.’
‘But you still can’t be sure it’s the same gun?’
‘As I’ve said, I can’t be sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘The barrel’s been changed,’ the expert said laconically. ‘It’s not such an amazing task to undertake, you know. The Dan Wesson line of revolvers, for instance, with their variety of barrel lengths, are all capable of being changed at home by any amateur. The Colt Magnum might be more difficult. Whoever embarked on that would have to have the tools. Well, he must have had because this is definitely not the barrel this gun started life with.’
‘Would a gunsmith have them?’
‘Depends on what kind of gunsmith, I should say. Most specialise in shotguns.’
‘And that’s what makes the marks on the five cartridges fired at Tancred House different from the one that killed Martin? A change of barrel?’
‘Right. That’s why I can only say this and that is probable, not that it definitely happened. This is Kingsmarkham, after all, not the Bronx. There aren’t going to be unlimited caches of firearms about. It’s the numbers really that point to it, the one for that poor fellow who was one of you, and the five for Tancred. And the calibre, of course. And his intent to deceive. How about that? He wasn’t changing gun barrels for fun, it wasn’t his hobby.’
* * * *
He was angry. The relief he might have felt that Sheila had been divided from that man, that she would no longer go to Nevada, was subsumed in anger. For Casey she had turned down Miss Julie, for Casey she had changed her life and, it seemed to him, her very personality. And Casey had gone back to his wife.
Wexford hadn’t spoken to her. Only the answer answering machine replied when he dialled her number and there were no more cheerful messages, only the clipped name and request for a message to be left. He left a message, asking her to phone. Then, when she didn’t, he left another, one that said he was sorry – for her, for what had happened, and for all the things he had said.
He called into the bank on the way to work. It was the branch where Martin had been killed, not his bank, but the nearest to the route Donaldson took and it had its own small car park at the back. Wexford had his Transcend card that enabled him to draw cash at all banks and all branches in the United Kingdom. The name made him grind his teeth at the misuse of words, but it was a useful card.
Sharon Fraser was still there. Ram Gopal had obtained a transfer to another branch. The second cashier this morning was a very young and pretty Eurasian woman. Wexford, who had resolved not to do this, could not keep his eyes from turning to the place where Martin had stood and had died. There should be some mark, some lasting memorial. He half-expected to see Martin’s blood still there, some ‘vestige of it, while castigating himself for such nonsensical ideas.
Four people were in the queue ahead of him. He thought of Dane Bishop, ill and frightened, perhaps not even of sound mind by that time, shooting Martin from about this spot, running out and throwing down his gun as he went. The frightened people, the screams, those men who had not remained but had quietly slipped away. One of them, standing perhaps where he was standing now, had, according to Sharon Fraser, been holding a bunch of green banknotes in his hand.
Wexford looked round to see the length of the queue behind him and saw Jason Sebright. Sebright was trying to write a cheque where he stood instead of using one of the bank’s tables and chained-up ballpoint. The woman in front of him turned round and Wexford heard him say, ‘Do you mind if I rest my chequebook on your back, madam?’
This aroused uneasy giggles. Sharon Fraser’s light came on and Wexford went up to her with his Transcend card. He recognised the look in her eyes. It was apprehensive, unwelcoming, the look of someone who would rather attend to anybody except you because, by your profession and your searching questions, you endanger her privacy and her peace and perhaps her very existence.
When Martin died people had come into the bank and laid flowers on the spot where he fell, donors as anonymous as whoever had brought these bouquets to hang on the Tancred gates. The latest offerings were dead. Night frosts had blackened them until they looked like a nest made by some untidy bird. Wexford told Pemberton to remove them and throw them on Ken Harrison’s rubbish heap. No doubt they would soon be replaced by others. Perhaps it was because his mind was dwelling abnormally on love and pain and the perils of love that he had begun speculating who the donor of these flowers might be. A fan? A silent – and rich – admirer? Or more than that? The sight of the withered roses made him think of those early letters of Davina’s and her loveless years until Desmond Flory went away to war.
As he approached the house, he saw a workman at the west-wing window, replacing the pane of eight-ounce glass. It was a dull still day, the kind of weather the meteorologists had taken to calling ‘quiet’. The mist that hung in the air showed itself only in the distance where the horizon was blurred and the woods turned to a smoky blue.
Wexford looked through the dining-room window. The door to the hall was open. The seals had been taken off and the room opened up. On the ceiling and walls the blood splash marks still showed but the carpet was gone.
‘We’ll be making a start in there tomorrow, governor,’ the workman said.
So Daisy was beginning to come to terms with her loss, with the horror of that room. Restoration had begun. He walked across the flagstones, past the front of the house, towards the east wing and the stables behind. Then he saw something he hadn’t noticed when he first arrived. Thanny Hogarth’s bicycle was leaning up against the wall to the left of the front door. A fast worker, Wexford thought, and he felt better, he felt more cheerful. He even felt like speculating as to what might happen when Nicholas Virson arrived – or was Daisy too good a manager in these matters to let that happen?
‘I think Andy Griffin spent those two nights here,’ Burden said to him as he walked into the stables.
‘What?’
‘In one of the outbuildings. We searched them, of course, when we did the general search of the house after it happened, but we never went near them again.’
‘Which outbuilding are you talking about, Mike?’
He followed Burden along the sandy path behind the high hedge. A short row or terrace of cottages, not dilapidated but not well-maintained either, stood parallel to this hedge, the roadway a sandy track. You might be quartered here for a month, as they had been, without ever knowing the cottages were there.
‘Karen came out here last night,’ Burden said. ‘She was doing her rounds. Daisy said she heard something. There was no one in fact about but Karen came this way and looked through that window.’
‘She shone a torch, d’you mean?’
‘I suppose so. There’s no electricity to these cottages, no running water, no amenities at all. According to Brenda Harrison they’ve not had anyone living in them for fifty years – well, since before the war. Karen saw something which made her go back this morning.’
‘What d’you mean “saw something”? You’re not in court, Mike. This is me, remember?’
Burden made an impatient gesture. ‘Yes, sure. Sorry. Rags, a blanket, remains of food. We’ll go in. It’s still there.’
The cottage door opened on a latch. The most powerful of a variety of smells that greeted them was the ammoniac one of stale urine. There was a floor of bricks on which a makeshift bed had been contrived from a pile of dirty cushions, two old coats, unidentifiable rags, a good, thick and fairly clean blanket. Two empty Coke cans stood in the grate in front of the fireplace. An iron fire-basket contained grey ash and on top of the ash, thrown there perhaps after the cinders had cooled, was a wad of greasy screwed-up paper that had wrapped fish and chips. The smell of this
was marginally more unpleasant than that of the urine.
‘You think Andy slept here?’
‘We can try the Coke cans for prints,’ Burden said. ‘He could have been here. He would have known about it. And if he was here on those two nights, 17 and 18 March, no one else was.’
‘OK. How did he get here?’
Burden beckoned him through the unsavoury room. He had to duck his head, the lintels were so low. Beyond the hole of a scullery and the back door, bolted top and bottom but not locked, was a wired-in plot of overgrown garden and a small walled area that might have been a coal-hole or a pig sty. Inside, half-covered by a waterproof sheet, was a motorbike.
‘No one would have heard him come,’ Wexford said. ‘The Harrisons and Gabittas were too far away. Daisy hadn’t come back home. She didn’t come until several days later. He had the place to himself. But, Mike, why did he want the place to himself?’
They strolled along the path that bordered the wood. In the distance, to the south of the by-road, the whine of Gabbitas’s chain saw could be heard. Wexford’s thoughts reverted to the gun, to the extraordinary thing that had been done to the gun. Would Gabbitas have had the means and the knowledge to change the barrel on a revolver? Would he have the tools? On the other hand, would anyone else?
‘Why would Andy Griffin want to sleep up here, Mike?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder if this place had some sort of particular fascination for him.’
‘He wasn’t our second man, was he? He wasn’t the one Daisy heard but didn’t see?’
‘I don’t see him in that role. That would have been too big for him. Beyond his class. Blackmail was his line, small petty blackmail.’
Wexford nodded. ‘That’s why he was killed. I think he started in a small way and it was all for cash. We know that from his Post Office Savings account. He may have operated from here quite a bit while he and his parents still lived here. I don’t suppose he began on Brenda Harrison. He may well have tried it successfully on other women. All he had to do was pick an older woman and threaten to tell her husband or her friends or some relative that she’d made advances to him. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t.’
