A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Just down this passage, sir, and mind the step. I’m sure you’ll say it was wrong of me to listen but I couldn’t help hearing what you said to that Mr Marriott. just what he needs, I thought, always up here snooping. And as for that Mrs Villiers ...

  Did you hear her say she’d brought her own lunch? A nasty packet of sandwiches, I daresay. As if I wouldn’t have given her a nice lunch. She’d only got to ask like a lady.’

  ‘Is this the place, Mrs Cantrip? It’s very dark down here.’

  ‘You can’t tell me, sir. I’m always telling Mr Nightingale to have a light fixed up. There was quite a nasty accident five or six years back when that Twohey fell down the step and thought his leg was broken but it was only a sprained ankle. He’d been too free helping himself from Mr Nightingale’s whisky bottle and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Who was Twohey?’ asked Wexford, stepping back for Mrs Cantrip to open the door. ‘A friend of the family?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, just a servant. Him and his wife used to work here, if you can call it work. It didn’t lighten my load, I can tell you. I was never so relieved in all my life as when Mr Nightingale sacked them. This is the garden room, sir, and there’s a bit more light, you’ll be glad to see.’

  The light came from a glazed door leading into the garden. His face impassive, Wexford looked slowly round the small uncarpetcd room. Its walls were whitewashed and on one of them hung a couple of shotguns, while beneath golf clubs and walking sticks lay in a long rack. There were two tennis rackets in presses, a string bag of tennis balls and a chip basket and scissors for cutting flowers. His glance went up to a shelf above the rack on which stood an array of torches: a lantern with a red cone on its top of the kind that is used to warn motorists of the presence of a broken-down car, a bigger storm lantern, a pencil torch and a bicycle lamp.

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘There should be another one, a great big silver-coloured one.’ Suddenly she had become rather pale. ‘A torch with a big head,’ she said, ‘a big head and a sort of long thick tube thing to hold it with. I reckon it’d be nine or ten inches long.’

  ‘And it should be up there with the others?’ Mrs Cantrip nodded, biting her lip. ‘When did you last see it there V

  ‘Oh, it’d be two or three weeks back. You don’t kind of clean a room like this, if you take my meaning, sir. There’s like no dusting or polishing, you see. Young Sean gives it a sweep out every so often.’

  ‘He does, does he?’ Wexford pulled out from under the rack a short set of steps, mounted them and looked at the ,surface of the shelf. A thickish patina of dust lay on the unpainted wood. In the front, between the bicycle lamp and the storm lantern, was a dust-frce circle some four inches in diameter.

  He licked his finger and just touched the centre of this clean circle. Then he said, looking at his fingertip, ‘That torch was taken down yesterday or the day before.’ He wiped his finger on his handkerchief, observing that the linen was unmarked. His inspired guess had.turned out to be well founded.

  It was such a big house, he thought, as he emerged from the passage and stood once more in the hall, a big country house tull of cupboards and hidey-holes. His men had been instructed to look for a weapon without being told what they should look for. Suppose they had seen the missing torch in Nightingale’s bedroom, sticking out perhaps from the pocket of a raincoat, would any one of them have had the intelligence, the faculty of putting two and two together to make more than four, to note it and draw it to the attention of his superiors? Wexford doubted it. They would have to begin again, this time with a specific missing object in view.

  He tapped on the morning-room door, then opened it. There was no one inside. Only a cigarette end still smouldering in a blue pottery ashtray showed that Marriott had been there, then had obeyed Wexford and gone.

  Giving himself carte blanche to explore the house all he pleased, Wexford looked into the drawing room and the dining room, and found both empty.

  He mounted the stairs to the first landing, treading shed rose petals under foot, and peered out between the crimson velvet curtains. Georgina Villiers was standing on the lawn, munching sandwiches and talking to Will Palmer. There was no sign of Quentin Nightingale. Wexford went down again, entered the empty study and telephoned Burden, asking him to come up to the Manor with Loring and Bryant and Gates and anyone else he could get hold of. He put the receiver down and listened to the silence.

  At first it seemed absolute. Then, from far above him, he made out faintly thin reedy music from a transistor, Katje’s perhaps; the tiny muted clink of plates as Mrs Cantrip prepared lunch; then footsteps coming from he couldn’t tell where but which brought Quentin Nightingale into the room.

  ‘A torch is missing from the garden room,’ Wexford said in a cool level voice. ‘A big torch, shaped like this.’ Using both hands, he drew it in the air. ‘Have you seen it about lately?’

  ‘It was there on Sunday. I went in to get my golf clubs and I noticed it was there.’

  ‘It isn’t there now. That torch killed your wife, Mr Nightingale.’

  Quentin leaned against a bookcase and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t honestly think,’ he whispered, ‘that I can take any more. Yesterday was the most ghastly day of my life.’

  ‘I can understand that. I’m afraid I can’t promise you today or tomorrow will be improvements.’

  But Quentin seemed not to have heard him. ‘I think I’m going mad,’ he said. ‘I must have been mad to do what I did. I’d give everything I’ve got to go back to Tuesday evening and start again.’

  ‘Are you making me some sort of confession?’ Wexford asked him sternly, getting up. ‘Because, if so ...’

  ‘Not that sort of confession,’ Quentin almost shouted. ‘Something private, something ...’ He clenched his hands, threw up his head. ‘Show me,’ he said hoarsely, ‘show me where you think this torch ought to be.

  I might be able ... just show me.’

  ‘All right. I’ll show you and then we’ll have another little talk. But let me tell you one thing first. Nobody involved in a murder case has any private life. Please remember that.’

  Quentin Nightingale made no reply, but he hunched his shoulders and again put that trembling hand to his forehead. Puzzled, Wexford speculated as to the nature of this acute anxiety that was turning the other man into a nervous wreck. Had he killed his wife? Or was this distress the result

  6f some other act, something necessarily more venial, yet as productive of agonising guilt?

  They walked down the dark passage, Wexford going first. Ahead of them a vertical slit of light showed the garden-room door slightly ajar.

  ‘I closed that door,’Wexford said sharply and pushed it wide. On the high shelf where, half an hour before, there had been only a clean circular patch in the dust, stood a large chrome torch, up-ended.

  8

  THE torch had been scrubbed, probably immersed in water. Wexford held it gingerly in his handkerchief and unscrewed its base. The batteries had been removed but the glass and the bulb inside were unbroken. He noted that a few drops of water still clung to the interior of the tube that formed its handle.

  Very slowly, he said, ‘Only you, Mr Nightingale, knew that I came to this house this morning in search of a torch. Did you speak of it to any of your servants or to Mrs Villiers or Mr Marriott?’

  White-faced, Quentin Nightingale shook his head.

  ‘I believe,’ Wexford said, ‘that this torch was used to kill your wife.

  It wasn’t here when I first visited the garden room; it is here now.

  Someone replaced it in the past half-hour. Come, let us go back to your study.’

  The widower seemed unable to speak at all. He sank heavily into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Did you replace that torch, Mr Nightingale? Come, I want an answer. I shall sit here until I get one.’ There was a tap at the door and Wexford opened it to admit Burden. A quick glance passed between them, Burden
raised his eyebrows at the silent slumped figure, and then moved without speaking towards the wall shelves as if fascinated by the books they held. ‘Pull yourself together, Mr Nightingale,’ Wexford said. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’ Ile would have liked to shake the man, stir him into some sort of response. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Since I don’t believe in wasting time and Inspector Burden looks as if he might appreciate a little entertainment, I’ll tell you a story. You may find some parallels in it with your own conduct over the past days. Who knows?

  ‘There was a country gentleman,’ he began, who lived with his beautiful wife in a manor house. They were happy together, even if their marriage might have been said to have grown a little rusty and dull with the years.’ Quentin moved a fraction at that, pushing his fingers hard into his white hair. ‘One day,’ Wexford said in the same pleasant conversational tone, ‘he discovered that his wife was being unfaithful to him, meeting another man in the woods at night. So, consumed with jealousy, he followed her, taking a torch with him, for the moon had gone and the night was dark. He saw her with this man, kissing each other, and heard them making plans and giving promises. Perhaps they even abused him. When the man had left her and she was alone, the husband confronted her, she defied him, and he struck out at her with the torch, struck again and again in his jealous frenzy until he had beaten her to death.

  Did you say something, Mr Nightingale?’

  Quentin’s lips moved. He moistened them, struggled forward in his chair and managed a strangled, ‘However ... however it happened, it wasn’t ...

  it wasn’t that way.’

  ‘No? The husband didn’t burn his bloodstained sweater on the still-smouldering bonfire? He didn’t pace the garden for hours in his anguish, finally locking himself in his own bathroom to spend more hours cleansing every trace of his wife’s blood from his person? Strange. We know he took a bath and that at what some would call n ungodly hour ..

  .’

  ‘Stop!’ Quentin cried, clutching the arms of his chair. ‘None of this is true. It’s a monstrous fabrication.’ He swallowed, then cleared his throat.

  ‘I didn’t take a bath.’

  ‘You told me you did,’ retorted Wexford.

  ‘Twice,’ said Burden, the word dropping like a bead of cold water.

  ‘I know. It was a lie.’ A fiery blush coloured Quentin’s face and he closed his eyes. ‘Would you get me a drink, please? Whisky. It’s in there.’

  Burden looked at Wexford and Wexford nodded. The whisky was in a small cabinet under the window. Burden poured about an inch into a glass and put it into the shaking hand, closing the fingers around it. Quentin drank, the glass chattering against his teeth.

  ‘I’ll tell you where I was,’ he said. Wexford noticed that he was at last making a determined effort to steady his voice. ‘But you alone. I should like it if the inspector could leave us.’

  And if he was about to confess to murder ...? Wexford didn’t like it much.

  But he had to know. He made a quick decision. ‘Will you wait outside, please, Inspector Burden?’

  Obediently Burden went, without a backward glance. Quentin gave a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said. ‘I could just tell you baldly, but I need to justify myself. God, if you knew the remorse, the shame ... I’m sorry. I am trying to get a grip on myself. Well, I ... I must start somewhere.’ He finished the last of his drink, putting off, Wexford thought, the evil moment as long as he could. Then he said: ‘I want you to know that it was quite correct what you said about my wife and me, being happy together, I mean, but with our marriage grown dull with the years. That was true. I accepted it. I thought it inevitable with people who had been married as long as we had, and who had no children. We never quarrelled. I think I should tell you now that if my wife had fallen in love with someone else I shouldn’t have been angry. I shouldn’t even have objected. I expect I would have been jealous, but I wouldn’t have shown my jealousy by violence, God forbid!—or in any other way. I want to make that clear now.’

  Wexford nodded noncommittally. The man’s words were simple and frank, carrying, he thought, an unmistakablc ring of truth.

  ‘You said,’ Quentin went on, ‘that nobody involved in a murder case has any right to a private life. I’ll have to tell you about my private life to make you understand why I did what I did.’ He got up suddenly and walked swiftly to the bookshelves, pressing his hands flat against morocco and gilt bindings. Staring at the titles of the books but perhaps unseeing, he said, ‘I used to go to her room once a fortnight, always on a Saturday night. She would push back the bedcovers and say, always the same, “This is nice, darling,” and afterwards, when I left her to go back to my room, she’d say, “That was lovely, darling.” She never called me by my name.

  Sometimes I think she forgot what it was.’

  He stopped. Wexford wasn’t the sort of policeman who says impatiently, ‘Is all this really relevant, sir?’ He said nothing, listening with a grave face.

  ‘I was so bored,’ Quentin said to the books. ‘I was lonely. Sometimes I used to feel that I was married to a kind of beautiful animated statue, a doll that smiled and wore pretty clothes and even had a vocabulary of a certain limited kind.’

  ‘And yet you were happy?’ Wexford ventured quietly.

  ‘Did I say that? Perhaps because everyone else said I was, I grew used to telling myself I must be.’

  He moved away from the bookcase and began to pace the room. It seemed for a moment that he had changed the subject when he said, ‘We used to keep servants, a proper staff, but Elizabeth gave them notice. Then we had a succession of au pair girls, two French and one German. I think Elizabeth made a point of choosing plain girls.’ He swung round, faced Wexford and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Perhaps she thought Katje was plain.

  Fat and coarse was the way she once described her. I suppose—I suppose I was attracted to Katje from the start, but I never did anything about it. She was a young girl and I was-well, in loco parentis. I told myself I thought of her as a daughter. How we delude ourselves!’ He turned away his face. ‘It’s almost impossible for me to find the words totell you.

  I ...’

  ‘You slept with her?’ Wexford said expressionlessly.

  Quentin nodded.

  ‘The night before last?’

  ‘That wasn’t the first time. Chief Inspector, in all the sixteen years we’d been married, I’d never been unfaithful to my wife. I’d had my opportunities. What man hasn’t? I loved my wife. All those years I hoped for a sign of warmth, just one spontaneous sign that she recognised me as a human being. I never gave up hoping until Katje came. Then for the first time I saw a woman who was close to me, a woman living under my roof, behaving like a woman. Perhaps not as a woman should behave. She had boy friends all over the place and she used to tell me about them.

  Sometimes in the evenings Elizabeth would be out, walking in the grounds or gone early to bed, and Katje would come in from some date and she’d tell me about it, giggling and laughing, talking as if the best thing in the world was to take and give pleasure.

  ‘One night, after one of these talks, I was lying in bed, waiting for Elizabeth to come in. I said I’d given up hope but that isn’t true. I always hoped. I never remember feeling such a depth of loneliness as I felt that night. I thought I’d give everything I possessed, this house, the fortune I’ve amassed, if she would just come into my room and sit on the bed and talk to me.’

  Again he covered his face. When he took away his hands Wexford expected to see tears on his cheeks, for he had spoken that last sentence on a sob, but he was quite calm, even relieved, it appeared, at having so nearly got it all off his chest.

  ‘Presently I heard her come upstairs,’ he said. ‘I willed her to come in.

  I exercised all the power of my will. God knows how I stopped myself crying out to her. Her bedroom door closed and I heard her begin to run a bath. In that moment I forgot who I was, my age, my
position, my duty to my wife. I put on my dressing gown and went upstairs. I knew what I was going to say to Katje, that I smelt gas and thought it was coming from her room. Of course I couldn’t smell gas. All that was coming from her room was the faint sound of music from her radio.

  ‘I knocked and she called to me to come in. She was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine. I didn’t have to say anything about gas. It sounds incredible but I didn’t speak a word. She smiled at me and put out her arms

  ...’

  Abruptly he stopped speaking. Like an old-fashioned novel, Wexford thought.

  If it were written down, asterisks would come at this point. Quentin Nightingale’s asterisks were a sudden burning flush that threw into sharpness the whiteness of his hair and his moustache, ageing him. Fumbling for words and getting no help from the chief inspector, he said:

  ‘There were-well, other times. Not many. There was the night before last. I went up to Katje at about a quarter past eleven.

  I didn’t know whether Elizabeth had come in. I wasn’t thinking about Elizabeth. Katje and Iwell, I stayed with her all night. It was Palmer walking about on the floor below that awakened me. I sensed something was wrong, so I got up and dressed and found him on the terrace.’

  ‘A pity you didn’t tell us all this before,’ Wexford said, frowning.

  ‘Put yourself in my place. Would you have?’

  Wexford shrugged. ‘That’s beside the point.’ He was at a loss to account for his feelings. An alibi had been destroyed and a more convincing one had replaced it. Normally, when this occurred, he felt anger at the wasted time, relief at progress made. His present unease wasn’t normal and briefly he questioned himself. Then he knew. He was allowing himself something indefensible, personal involvement. What he felt for Quentin Nightingale was envy. Stiffly he got up.