by Ruth Rendell
‘So her unhappiness was real – no wonder she kept saying she wanted to die and what would become of her – until one night, when she was here alone with Karen, he came back. He didn’t know about Karen and he came at the first opportunity to tell her he loved her, he had only wounded her to make it look real, to put her in the clear. He had always meant to do that and he knew it would be all right, he was a crack shot, he never missed. It was in the shoulder he shot her taking the smallest risk. But he couldn’t have warned her, could he? He couldn’t have told her in advance, he couldn’t have said, “I’m going to shoot you too, but trust me.”
‘But he had to take risks, didn’t he? For the Tancred estate and the money and the royalties, all to be theirs and no one else’s. He couldn’t phone her, he didn’t dare. The first chance he got, assuming she’d be alone, he came to the house to see her. Karen heard him but she didn’t see him. Daisy did. He wasn’t masked, that was Daisy’s own invention. She saw him and no doubt, remembering how he had betrayed her, how he had shot her too, she thought he had come back to kill her.’
Burden objected, ‘Shooting her at all was a hell of a risk. She could have taken against him and told us everything.’
‘He calculated that she was too deep in it herself for that. Give us a clue as to who he was, arrest him and he would tell us of her part in it. And he counted on her being too much in love with him to betray him. He was right, wasn’t he?
‘The day after he had come to the house in the dark he came back when she really was alone. He told her why he had shot her, that he loved her, and of course she forgave him. After all, he was all she had. And after that she was a changed girl, she was happy. I’ve never seen such a transformation. In spite of everything, she was happy, she had her lover back, all would be well. I’m a fool, I thought it was for Virson. Of course it wasn’t. She turned on the fountain. The fountain played to celebrate her happiness.
‘For a day or two the euphoria persisted – until the memory of that night began coming back.’ The red tablecloth and Davina’s face in a plate of blood and her harmless silly mother dead and poor old Harvey spread out on the stairs – and that crawl to the phone.
‘It wasn’t, you see, what she had meant at all. She hadn’t known it would be like that. It was a kind of game in the planning and the rehearsing. But the reality, the blood, the pain, the dead bodies, this she hadn’t meant at all.
‘I’m making no excuses for her. There are no excuses. She may not have known what she was doing but she knew three people would be murdered. And it was a case of folie à deux. She couldn’t have done it without him but he wouldn’t have done it without her. They egged each other on. Kissing the gunner’s daughter is a dangerous business.’
‘That expression,’ Burden said. ‘What does it mean? Someone said it to me the other day, I can’t think who it was . . .’
‘It was me,’ said Vine.
‘What does it mean? It means being flogged. When they were going to flog a man in the Royal Navy they first tied him to a cannon on deck. Kissing the gunner’s daughter was therefore a dangerous enterprise.
‘I don’t think she knew Andy Griffin would have to be killed. Or, rather, would be killed because this lover of hers saw killing as the way out of difficulties. Someone annoys you? Then kill him. Someone happens to look at your girlfriend? Kill him.
‘It wasn’t Daisy he was after when he rigged up that candle and string contraption among the petrol cans at The Thatched House. It was Nicholas Virson. Nicholas Virson dared to look at Daisy, dared in fact to think Daisy might actually marry him. Who would have supposed that Virson, who had asked Daisy to stay with him and his mother, wouldn’t in fact be home that night but keeping tabs on Daisy up at Tancred?’
‘She’s more like her grandmother than she knows. Did you notice how few friends she has? Not a single young woman has been to the house all this while – apart from the young women we put there. There was just one young woman at the funeral, a grand-daughter of Mrs Macsamphire.
‘Davina had a few friends from the distant past but their friends were Harvey Copeland’s. Naomi had friends. Daisy hasn’t one young woman to confide in, to be a companion to her now. But men? She’s very good with men.’ Wexford said it ruefully. He thought for a moment how very good she had been with him. ‘Men quickly become her slaves. An interesting point is how short-sighted Davina Flory must have been in believing she would have to provide a lover for Daisy, as if Daisy wasn’t ably equipped to provide her own. But they were self-absorbed, both these women, grandmother and granddaughter, and therefore unable to see further than their own noses.
‘Daisy met her lover in Edinburgh, at the Festival. We shall find out how eventually. Perhaps at fringe theatre or a pop concert. Her mother was ill and no doubt she escaped from her grandmother whenever she could. She was very sore at the time. Davina’s suggestion about Harvey was rankling. Not, I think, because she was shocked or even disgusted, but because she was coming more and more to hate all this interference in her life, this manipulation. Was it going to go on, this arranging her life for her? It wasn’t getting better, it was worse.
‘But here was a young man who had no regard for her family, no reverence for any of them, someone she must have seen as a free spirit, independent, dashing, bold. Someone like herself, or like she could be if she too was free.
‘Whose idea was it? His or hers? His, I think. But perhaps it would never have got off the ground if he hadn’t kissed the gunner’s daughter. And afterwards he said, All that could be ours. The house, the acres, the money.
‘It was a simple enough plan and would be simple enough to do. Provided he was a good shot and he was, he was a very good shot. He hadn’t a gun and that was a stumbling block. For him, being without a gun was always a stumbling block. It was as if his right arm wasn’t complete without a gun in the hand on the end of it. Did they perhaps discuss the possibility of there being a shotgun or a rifle at Tancred? Had old Harvey ever shot birds on the land? Would Davina have allowed that?’
Burden waited a while. Then, when Wexford looked up, ‘What happened when they got back here?’
‘I don’t think they did get back here. Daisy did, with her family. She went back to school and perhaps it seemed to her like a dream, a wicked daydream that now would never become real. But one day he turned up. He got in touch with her and they arranged to meet, here, in the stables, where she had her own place. No one saw him, no one came here but Daisy. How about it then? When were they going to do it?
‘I don’t think Daisy knew whether her grandmother had made a will or not. If there was a will and Naomi and Harvey were dead, she would certainly be the sole beneficiary. If there wasn’t a will Davina’s niece Louise Merritt might get some of it. Louise Merritt died in February and I don’t think it was a coincidence that they waited until after she was dead to carry out their plan.
‘Before that, some months before probably, in the autumn, he encountered Andy Griffin in the wood. How it came about I don’t know, how many meetings they had before the proposition was put, but Andy offered to sell him a gun and the offer was accepted.
‘He changed the barrel, he knew all about that. He’d brought the tools with him.’ Wexford explained how he had found the advertisement in the Heights town guide. ‘The gunsmith’s name was Coram Clark. I knew I’d come across that name somewhere before but I couldn’t remember where. All I knew was that it was someone’s name and someone connected with the case. It came back to me at last. Right at the start of things, the day after the murders, when the press were up here.
‘There was a reporter on the local paper asked a question at the press conference. He hung about outside waiting for me afterwards. He was very cocky, very self-assured, a very ungman, no more than a boy, dark, good-looking. He’d been at school with Daisy, he volunteered that information, and then he told me his name. He was talking about what he intended to call himself professionally, he hadn’t made up his mind.
&nbs
p; ‘He has now. I saw it on a by-line in the Courier. He’s calling himself Jason Coram, but his full name is Jason Sherwin Coram Sebright.’
* * * *
‘Sebright had also told me, apropos of nothing in particular, that his mother was American, that he visited his mother in the United States. It was still a long shot.
‘He told me that at the funeral. He sat next to me. Later on, he went about interviewing mourners, in a manner which he proudly told me was his US TV technique. He came here to get an exclusive interview out of Daisy the day after the prowler came round the house. I met him coming out and he told me all about it. He was going to call his piece “The Masked Intruder” and perhaps he has, for all I know.
‘A handsome dark young man Ishbel Macsamphire had seen her with in Edinburgh. That description might equally have fitted John Gabbitas but Gabbitas is an Englishman with parents in Norfolk.
‘Jason Sebright had just left school. He was eighteen, soon to be nineteen. In September he entered the journalism training scheme with a job on the Courier. He might easily have gone to Edinburgh at the same time as Daisy was there. I waited until it was ten a.m. in Nevada and put through calls to Coram Clark the gunsmith’s in the city of Heights. Coram Clark himself, called Coram Clark Junior, wasn’t there but to be found, they told me, at their store in downtown Carson City. Eventually, I spoke to him. He was keen to help. American enthusiasm I find very refreshing. You don’t get so much of that “might have been” stuff over there. Had he a young relative called Jason Sebright in this country?
‘He told me that he was familiar with the technique of changing the barrel of a gun. He told me that the tools for performing such a task would not be bulky and could easily be brought into this country. The Customs wouldn’t know what they were for. But he had no young relative called Jason in the United Kingdom or anywhere else for that matter. His daughters, née Clark, were married. He has no sons. He was an only child and has no nephews. He had never heard of Jason Sherwin Coram Sebright.’
* * * *
‘I’m not surprised,’ Burden said, not very pleasantly. ‘It was about as far-fetched as you could get.’
‘Yes. Still, it paid off. Coram Clark had no young relatives in this country or anywhere else. But he gave me a lot of useful information. He said he ran a class in marksmanship at a local shooting range. He also sometimes had students from Heights University working for him, driving, working in the store, even in some cases doing gun repair jobs. Students at American universities do quite frequently work their way through college.
‘After I put the phone down I remembered something. An American university sweatshirt with letters on it that had nearly faded or been washed out. But I was sure there had been a capital ST as well as a capital U.
‘My friend Stephen Perkins of Myringham University was able to tell me what those letters stood for by the simple expedient of examining the CVs in the applications of prospective creative-writing students. Stylus University, California. They call everything a city over there and Stylus is pretty small for a city but it has a police force and a police chief, Chief Peacock. It also has eight gunsmiths. Chief Peacock came back to me, he was even more helpful than Coram Clark, and he told me firstly that Stylus University had a Military History course on its syllabus and secondly that one of the gunsmiths frequently employed university students to help out in the store on evenings and weekends. I phoned the gunsmiths, one after another. The fourth one I phoned remembered Thanny Hogarth very well. He had worked for him up to the end of his final semester last year. Not because he needed the money. His father was wealthy and making him a big allowance. He loved guns, he was fascinated by guns.
‘Chief Peacock told me something else. Two years ago two students at Stylus were shot on campus, both men and with one thing in common. They had, successively, “dated” the same girl. Their killer was never found.’
* * * *
The bicycle was resting up against the house wall.
‘Interior Creators’ were inside the house, restoring the dining room. Their van was parked close up against the window Pemberton had broken. Today the fountain was not playing. In the limpid dark water the surviving red-headed fish swam round and round.
The three policemen stood by the pool. ‘The second time I went to his house,’ Wexford said, ‘I saw the tools among a lot of other stuff on a table. I didn’t know what they were. I think I even saw a gun barrel, but who knows what a gun barrel is when it’s not in a gun?’
Burden said suddenly, ‘Why didn’t he marry her?’
‘What?’
‘Before the shootings, I mean. If she’d changed her mind about him he’d have got nothing. She’d only to say she didn’t want him any more after what he’d done and he’d be out in the cold.’
‘She was under eighteen,’ Wexford said. ‘She’d have needed parental consent. Can you imagine Davina allowing Naomi to consent? Apart from that, you’re an anachronism, Mike, you’re out of your time. They’re children of today and I daresay marriage didn’t occur to them. Marriage? That was for the old people and the Virsons of this world.
‘Besides, it sets you apart, this kind of thing, a massacre. Maybe they understood something, that they were marked, that no one else would do for them, they had only each other.’
He went up to the house and was about to pull the sugarstick rod when he saw that the door was slightly ajar, left that way no doubt by ‘Interior Creators’. He hesitated, then walked in, Burden and Vine behind him.
They were in the serre, the two of them, so intent upon what they were doing that for a second they heard nothing. The two dark heads were close together. On the glass table were a pearl necklace, a gold bracelet and a couple of rings, one a ruby with diamond shoulders, the other set with pearls and sapphires.
Daisy was looking at her own finger, the third finger of her left hand on which Thanny Hogarth had perhaps just placed his engagement ring, a great cluster of diamonds, nineteen thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds.
She turned round. She stood up when she saw who it was and, with an involuntary gesture of the diamonded hand, swept all the jewellery on to the floor.
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