by Ruth Rendell
While consuming salmon mayonnaise, he talked to two of Sylvia’s colleagues, then to a couple of old school-friends. There was something in what Burden said about doing one’s bit as a guest. Dora he could see involved in an amiable argument with Neil’s father. He kept half an eye on Burden all the while and edged in his direction when the school-friends went off for more chicken salad.
Burden took up their discussion at the precise point they had left it. ‘There must have been some sort of vehicle.’
‘Well, you know what Holmes said. When everything else is impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be so.’
‘How did they get there without transport? It’s miles from anywhere.’
‘Through the woods. On foot. It’s the only way, Mike. Think about it. The roads were positively clogged with traffic. Joanne Garland going up and down the main way in. First Bib, then Gabbitas on the by-road. But that doesn’t bother them because they’re making their way out in perfect safety – on foot. Why not? What had they to carry? A gun and some bits of jewellery.’
‘Daisy heard a car start up.’
‘Of course she did. She heard Joanne Garland’s car start up. Later than she says, but she can hardly be expected to be precise about the time. She heard the car start up after both gunmen had gone and she was crawling to the phone.’
‘I believe you’re right. And those two could have got away without anyone seeing them?’
‘I didn’t say that. Someone saw them. Andy Griffin. He was up there that night, bedding down in his hidey-hole, and he saw them. Close enough, I imagine, to know them again. The result of his attempt to blackmail them, or one of them, was that they strung him up.’
* * * *
After Burden and Jenny’s departure, Wexford began to think about leaving himself. They had left it late, their sitter would be obliged to stay on for a further quarter-hour. It was almost eleven.
Dora had gone with a crowd of other women, under Sylvia’s leadership, to be shown over the house. They were supposed to keep very quiet, so as not to wake the little boys. Wexford didn’t want to ask Sylvia if she had heard from her sister because such a question might provoke a scene of jealousy and resentment. If Sylvia was feeling good about her new house and her present style of life, she would answer his enquiry like a rational person. But if she wasn’t – and he couldn’t tell what her state of mind was this evening – she would round on him with those old accusations of a preference for her younger sister. He managed to make his way over to Neil and ask him.
Of course Neil had no idea whether Sylvia had recently spoken to Sheila, only vaguely knew that Sheila had been having a relationship with a novelist he had never previously heard of, and was unaware this relationship was over. Without this intention, he made Wexford feel foolish. He said he knew everything would be all right and excused himself to fetch a tray of coffee.
Dora came back, said that if he would like a real drink now she would drive home. No, thanks, Wexford said, he’d found that once you’d had two of these mineral waters, you didn’t really fancy alcohol. Shall we go then?
They had both become so delicately careful with this difficult child, bending over backwards not to offend her. But other people were leaving. Only a hard core of nocturnals would linger after midnight. They waited patiently for other people’s coats to be brought, for those last-minute pleasantries to be exchanged with departing guests that stand upon their going.
At last Wexford was kissing his daughter and saying good-night, thank you, lovely party. She kissed him back, gave him a nice, warm, unresentful hug. He thought Dora was going a bit far saying, ‘Happy house’ – what an expression! – but anything that helped along the aim to please.
There were various ways home. Through Myfleet itself or a slight detour north to by-pass Myfleet, or south the long way via Pomfret Monachorum. He took the by-passing route, though that made it sound like a well-lit twin-track highway instead of what it really was, a cat’s cradle of lanes in which you had to know how to pick up the right threads.
It was very dark. There was no moon and the stars were hidden by a thick overcast. In these villages the residents had campaigned against street lighting, so that at this hour they appeared uninhabited, every house in darkness but for the occasional square of drawn-curtain gleam, behind which some nightbird stayed up.
Dora heard the wail of sirens a fraction before he did. She said, ‘Do your lot have to? At past midnight?’
They were on one of the long stretches of tree-bordered lane between habitations. The banks on either side reared up like defensive walls. In this dark canyon his car lights made a greenish radiance.
‘That’s not us,’ he said. ‘That’s the fire service.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘A different kind of howl.’
The volume of sound increased and for a moment he thought the engine was coming this way, would meet them head-on. He had already begun to brake and was edging as close as he could to the nearside, when the wail died again and he knew the engine – appliances, they called them – was on some other road ahead.
The car gathered speed and came up out of the trough of rampart-like banks and dense bushes and sheltering trees, out of the well of darkness. The banks fell away, the road widened and a plain, a spread of downland, opened before them. The sky ahead was red. On the horizon and seeping across the massed clouds was a smoky redness as it might be above some city. But there was no city.
A new wailing began. Dora said, ‘It’s not in Myfleet. It’s this side of Myfleet. Is it a house on fire?’
‘We shall soon see.’
He knew before they got there. It was the only thatched house in the neighbourhood. The redness intensified. From a dull smoky rust it grew richer until the glow in the sky was like a fire of coals, like the bright spaces between burning coal. Then they could hear it. A crackling, licking, rhythmic roar.
Already the road was cordoned off. On the other side of the barrier the two appliances were parked. The firemen were hosing with what looked like water but very likely wasn’t. The noise the burning house made was like waves of the sea crashing on shingle in a storm, like the rushing tug-back of the tide. It deafened, it made speech impossible, commentary on the blaze, the urgent, streaming flames, silenced by it.
Wexford got out of the car. He went over to the barrier. A fire officer started telling him to get back, to take the Myfleet road, and then he recognised who this was. Wexford shook his head. He wasn’t going to attempt shouting above this noise. The heat from the fire reached out here, robbing the air of cold, of damp, blazing like some vast domestic hearth in an abode of giants.
Wexford gazed. He was near enough to imagine it seared his face. In spite of the recent rain, rain that had come too sparsely, the thatch had gone up like paper and kindling. Where it had been, where vestiges of it still were, the blackened roofbeams could be seen through the fierce roaring flames. The house had become a torch but the fire was more alive than a torch flame, animal-like in its greed and determination, its passion to burn and destroy. Sparks spiralled up into the sky, dipping and dancing. A great burning ember, a lump of seething thatch, suddenly blew out of the roof and eddied towards them like a rocket. Wexford ducked and backed away.
When the burning thing was smouldering at their feet, he said to the fire officer, ‘Was there anyone in there?’
The arrival of the ambulance saved the man from answering. Wexford saw Dora reversing the car to make room. The fire officer moved the barrier and the ambulance came in.
‘It was hopeless attempting anything,’ the fireman said.
A car followed. It was Nicholas Virson’s MG. The car slowed and stopped, but not as if under control, not as if the driver had braked and gone into neutral and put the handbrake on. It shuddered to a stop and stalled with a jump. Virson got out and stood looking at the fire. He put his hands over his face.
Wexford went back to Dora. ‘You can go on home if you like.
Someone will bring me.’
‘Reg, what’s happened?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine it started by chance.’
‘I’ll wait for you.’
The ambulancemen were bringing someone out on a stretcher. He had expected a woman but it was a man, the fire officer who had made a hopeless attempt. Nicholas Virson turned a stricken face to Wexford. Tears were running out of his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The house was in part very old and had been strongly built in that distant past on a timber frame. Two of the main posts survived. They were of oak and nearly indestructible, standing up among the ashes like burnt trees. There had been no foundations and, like trees, these great uprights had been planted deep in the ground.
The blackened site looked more like the leavings of a forest fire than a burnt house. Wexford, surveying the ruins from his car, remembered how he had thought the Virsons’ home pretty the first time he had seen it. A chocolate-box cottage with roses round the door and a garden fit for a calendar. The man who did this took pleasure in the destruction of beauty, enjoyed defacement for its own sake. For by now Wexford had no doubt this was a deliberate act of arson.
To wreak death might have been the primary motive, but the lust for spoliation was there as well. It gilded the lily, it iced the cake.
* * * *
The garage at The Thatched House had contained twenty two-gallon cans of petrol and about half that number of gallon cans of paraffin. These cans had been lined up against the sides of the garage, most of them against the common wall with the house. The thatched roof extended across the garage as well as the house itself.
Nicholas Virson had an explanation. Trouble in the Middle East had prompted his mother to lay in a store. Which particular trouble he couldn’t remember but the oil had been there for years, against a ‘rainy day’.
The days, Wexford thought, hadn’t been rainy enough. A long severe drought had preceded the drizzle of the past few days. Investigators had found little evidence in that garage, there was very little left. Something had ignited those cans, a simple fuse. The discovery of the stub of an ordinary household candle, near-miraculously rolled away and out under the doors, led them to believe this was a vital item in the arson. What the investigator had in mind wouldn’t always work but in this case it had worked. Soak a piece of string not in petrol, but in paraffin, and insert one end in a can of paraffin. The single can of paraffin would be surrounded by cans of petrol. Tie the other end of the string round a candle halfway down, light the candle and two, three, four hours later . . .
The fire officer was badly burned but would recover. Joyce Virson was dead. Wexford had told the press they were treating it as murder. This was arson and murder.
‘Who knew about that petrol, Mr Virson?’
‘Our cleaner. The chap who comes to do the garden. I expect my mother told people, friends. I may have told people. I mean, for one thing, I remember a very good friend of mine who’d come over and was very low on juice. I put enough in his tank to get him home. Then there were the chaps who came to patch up the thatch, they went in there, used to have their sandwiches in there at lunchtime . . .’
And a smoke, thought Wexford. ‘You’d better let us have some names.’
While Anne Lennox was taking the names down Wexford thought about the interview he had just had with James Freeborn, the Deputy Chief Constable. How many more murders were they to expect before a perpetrator was found? Five people had died so far. It was more than a massacre, it was a hecatomb. Wexford knew better than to correct the Chief Constable, to say something sarcastic, for instance, about hoping there wouldn’t be another ninety-five deaths. Instead, he asked for the incident room at Tancred to be maintained just till the end of the week and permission was reluctantly granted.
But no more guards on the girl. Wexford had to assure him that there had been none that week.
‘Something like that could go on for years.’
‘I hope not, sir.’
Nicholas Virson asked if they were finished with him, if he might go.
‘Not yet, Mr Virson.’
‘I asked you yesterday, before we had much idea of the cause of this fire, where you were on Tuesday night. You were very distressed and I didn’t press the question. I’m asking you again now. Where were you?’
Virson hesitated. At last he made that answer that is never true but nevertheless often given in these circumstances. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, I was just driving around.’
Two of those phrases in conjunction. Do people ever ‘just drive around’? Alone, by night, in early April? In their home countryside where there is nothing new to see and no beauty spots to discover and go back to see in daylight? On a holiday trip, perhaps, but in their own neighbourhood?
‘Where did you drive?’ he asked patiently.
Virson was no good at this. ‘I don’t remember. Just around the lanes.’ He said hopefully, ‘It was a fine night.’
‘All right, Mr Virson, what time did you leave your mother and start out?’
‘I can tell you that. Nine thirty. On the dot.’ He added, ‘I’m telling the truth.’
‘Where was your car?’
‘Outside on the gravel, and my – my mother’s beside it. We never put them in the garage.’
No, you couldn’t get them in. There wasn’t room. The garage was full of cans of fuel oil, waiting to go up when a flame reached them, running along a piece of string.
‘And where did you go?’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t know, I just drove around. You know when I got back . . .’
Three hours later. It looked nicely timed. ‘You drove around the countryside for three hours? In that time you could have got to Heathrow and back.’
An attempt at a sad smile. ‘I didn’t go to Heathrow.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you did.’ If the man wouldn’t tell him he would have to guess. He looked at the sheet of paper on which Anne had written the names and addresses of those people who knew about the petrol cache: Joyce Virson’s close personal friends, Nicholas Virson’s friend who ran out of ‘juice’, their gardener, their cleaner . . . ‘I think you’ve made a mistake here, Mr Virson. Mrs Mew works at Tancred House.’
‘Oh, yes. She works for us – er, me, as well. Two mornings a week.’ He seemed relieved at the change of enquiry. ‘That’s how she came to help out at Tancred. My mother recommended her.’
‘I see.’
‘I swear by my life and all I hold sacred,’ Virson said passionately, ‘I had nothing to do with any of this.’
‘I don’t know what you hold sacred, Mr Virson,’ Wexford said mildly, ‘but I doubt if it’s relevant in this case.’ He had heard the like of this often before, respectable men as well as villains swearing on their children’s heads and as they hoped for heaven in a life to come. ‘Let me know where I can find you, won’t you?’
Burden came up to him after Nicholas Virson had gone. ‘I went home that way too, you know, Reg. The place was in total darkness at eleven fifteen.’
‘No candle flame glimmering through the chinks in the garage door?’
‘The aim wasn’t to kill Mrs Virson, was it? I mean, our perpetrator’s quite ruthless, he wouldn’t care if he killed her or not, but she was incidental, she wasn’t his primary quarry?’
‘No, I don’t think she was.’
‘I’m going to get lunch. D’you want some? Today it’s Thai or steak and kidney pie.’
‘You sound like the lowest form of TV commercial.’
Wexford went outside with him and joined the short queue. From here only the end of the house was visible, the high wall and windows of the east wing. The shape of Brenda Harrison could be dimly seen behind one of these, rubbing at the glass with a duster. Wexford held out his plate for a wedge of pie with mashed potatoes and stir-fry. When he looked up again Brenda had disappeared from the window and Daisy had taken her place.
Daisy was not, of course, po
lishing the glass, but standing with her hands hanging by her sides. She seemed to be gazing into the distance, into woods and forest and far blue horizon, and to him her expression, as far as he could see, was ineffably sad. She was a figure of loneliness, standing there, and it brought him no surprise to see her put up her hands and cover her face before she turned away.
His head lifted, Burden too had seen. For a moment he said nothing but took his plate of the rather brightly coloured scented food and a can of Coke with the glass upturned over it.
Back in the stables, Burden said laconically, ‘He was after her, wasn’t he?’
‘Daisy?’
‘He’s always been after her from the first. When he rigged that fire it was Daisy he was after, not Joyce Virson. He thought Daisy would be there. You told me the Virsons had been here to persuade her to come to them on Tuesday night, dinner and stay the night.’
‘Yes, but she refused. She was adamant.’
‘I know. And we know she didn’t go there. But our perpetrator didn’t. He knew the Virsons had tried to persuade her and knew too that they went back in the afternoon to renew their attempt. Something must have happened to make him certain Daisy would be spending the night at The Thatched House.’
‘Not Virson then? He knew she wouldn’t be there. You keep saying, “he”, Mike. Must it be a “he”?’
‘It’s something one takes for granted. Perhaps one shouldn’t.’
‘Perhaps one should take nothing for granted.’
‘Bib Mew worked for the Virsons as well as up here. She knew about the petrol in the garage.’
‘She listens outside doors,’ said Wexford, ‘and perhaps hears only imperfectly what is said on the other side of them. She was here on the evening of 11 March. A lot of the – shall we say manoeuvres? – of that night depend on her evidence. She’s not very bright but she’s sharp enough to live alone and hold down two jobs.’
‘She looks like a man. Sharon Fraser said the people who left the bank were all men, but if one of them had been Bib Mew, would she know this wasn’t a man?’
