by Ruth Rendell
‘This will have to be corroborated, Mr Nightingale,’ he said in a cold hard voice.
Pale again, Quentin said, ‘I realised you would want to ask Katje. It won’t embarrass her. She’s strange, unique. She’s ... Oh, I’m wasting your time. I’m sorry.’
Wexford went upstairs. When he reached the first floor he paused for a second outside the door of Quentin Nightingale’s bedroom and then, as he turned towards the top flight and began to mount, he heard music coming from above. It gave substance, near-reality to the unpermitted dream his envy of Nightingale had evoked. A soft, throaty voice was singing the number one song in the pop charts, singing of love. A passionate longing, bitter and savage, to recapture for one hour the youth he had lost engulfed Wexford. And suddenly growing old seemed the only tragedy of life, the pain beside which every other pain dwindled into insignificance. Mature, wise, usually philosophical, he wanted to cry aloud, ‘It isn’t fair!’
He came to the door and rapped on it sharply. The music should have stopped. Instead the voice welled and trembled on a vibrant note and she came to the door and let him in.
Her pink dress had white frills like a nightgown, and like a nightgown it was cut low to show milk-white halfmoons and shoulders where even the bones looked soft. She smiled at him, her sea-blue eyes full of laughter.
Quentin Nightingale had had all this, easily, without argument. So had the waiter at the Olive and Dove. So had how many others?
For the first time in his career he understood what impelled those men he questioned and brough ‘ t to court, the men who forgot for a while chivalry and social taboo and sexual restraint, the rapists, the violators. But here there would perhaps be no need for violence, need only for a smile and an outstretched hand. Ca me donne tant de plaisir et vous si peu de peine. Oh, how much pleasure!
He followed her into the room, and out of the dressing table mirror their reflections marched towards them.
A young girl with her father. No, her grandfather. She was one of those people who make other people look unfinished and ill-made. In a bitter flash of illumination, Wexford saw himself as a battered bundle of old clothes. Not even middle-aged. Elderly, a grandfather.
‘Please sit down, Miss Doorn,’ he said, surprised that his voice was steady and sane. ‘And would you turn that radio off?’
She complied, still smiling.
He felt just the same about her. The longing-perhaps only a longing for rejuvenation?-was still there, but as he had turned away from the mirror he had experienced that sensation which divides the sane man from the mad. Between fantasy and reality a great gulf is fixed.
And that which seems possible, reasonable, felicitous, when conjured in the mind, dissolves like smoke in a fresh wind when its object is present in words and solid flesh. He had seen her for a brief moment as a lovely thing, but a thing only, without the power of discrimination, without rights, without intelligence. Now he saw her as a young girl who saw him as he was, an old man. Inwardly his whole body seemed to laugh harshly at itself.
‘I have some questions to ask you,’ he said. He wished the laughter would stop so that he could control himself and mould himself into the image he desired, something between God and a robot, tempered with avuncular geniality, ‘About your relations with Mr Nightingale.’ Pity they had to talk about sex. But if they hadn’t, perhaps the fantasy would never have grown. ‘What terms are you on with him?’
‘Terms?’
‘You know very well what I mean’ ‘ he growled at her.
She shrugged at that, threw out her hands. ‘I work for him and I live here in his house.’ She pulled at a strand of hair, considered it and then poked it into her mouth. ‘He is very nice and kind. I like him much.’
‘He’s your lover, isn’t he?’
She said cautiously, not embarrassed and not at all frightened, ‘He has said this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, poor Kventin! He does not want anyone to know at all, must be kept very secret thing. And now you have found it out.’
‘I’m afraid I must ask you to tell me about it.’
Stubbornly she stuck out her lower lip and shook her head.
‘Come now. He’s told me himself. You wouldn’t want him to go to prison, would you?’
She opened her mouth wide. ‘This is true? In England you can go to prison because you are making love?’
‘Of course notV Wexford almost shouted. ‘Now listen. Mr Nightingale will not go to prison if you tell me the truth. just tell me everything that happened between you ... No, no, not everything.’ An incredulous smile had widened her eyes. ‘Simply how it began and so on.’
‘All right.’ She giggled with pure pleasure. ‘This is always nice, I think, to talk about love. I like to talk of this more than anything.’
Wexford could feel his angry frown, artificially assumed, pushing all his features forward. ‘It is four, five weeks ago. I am in my bed and there is a knock and it is Kventin. Perhaps he is going to say the radio is too loud or I put the car away wrong, but he is saying nothing because at once I know he is coming to make love. I can see this in his face. Always I can see it in faces.’
God Almighty! thought Wexford, his soul cringing.
‘So I am thinking, Why not? I am thinking how he is kind with nice manners and thin straight body and I am forgetting he is older than my father in Holland. And also I know he is lonely man married to a frigid cold woman. So we are making love very soon and all is different, for when he is in my bed he is not old any more.’
She said this triumphantly, pointing to the bed. Her favourite subject had driven away her laughter and she spoke earnestly, with concentration.
‘Much much better than my friend the waiter,’ she said. ‘For Kventin has much experience and is knowing exactly how . , .’
‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ Wexford cut in. He drew a deep breath. ‘Miss Doorn, please spare me the lecture on sexual technique.
Let us have the facts. There were other occasions
‘Please Grinding his teeth, Wexford said, ‘Mr Nightingale r, made love to you at other times?’
‘Of course. He is liking me as much as I am liking him. The next week and the next week and then the night before last.’
‘Go on.’
‘But I have told you. I go out with my friend and the unkind man will not let us go into the hotel. My friend want us to go in the car, but this I will not do. This is not nice. Kventin would not do this. I am coming back home and I ani thinking perhaps Kventin come up and make love with me. And I am wishing and wishing when he knocks at the door and then I am happy. We are both very very happy.’
‘How long did he stay with you?’
‘All the night,’ said Katje airily. ‘I tell him that just before I come in I see Mrs Nightingale go into the wood and he is saying very very sadly, She does not want me, she has never wanted me. But I say, I want you, Kventin, and so he stay all the night. But he is going away very early in the morning because he is hearing the old gardener man walk about. So I lie in my bed alone, thinking perhaps I shall not see my friend the waiter any more, but go only with Kventin, and then I too am getting up to see why the old gardener man is in the house. There, now I have told it all!’
Wexford was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘At what time did you see Mrs Nightingale cross the road?’
‘Two minutes after eleven,’ said Katje promptly.
‘And at what time did Mr Nightingale pay you this nocturnal visit?, She looked at him, her blue eyes naive and enquiring. ‘I
mean, come to your room?’
‘Fifteen minutes after eleven. I come in, I go straight to bed.’
‘How can you be so sure of the time?’
‘I am wearing my new watch and always I am looking at it.’ She waved her left wrist at him. The watch had a dial two inches in diameter fastened to a wide strap of pink and purple patent leather. ‘This my friend is giving me for my birthday and all the time I look at it.’ She glanced up at him unde
r long dark gold lashes. ‘You are angry with me?’
‘No, no, I’m not angry, Miss Doorn.’
‘I am wishing that you will call me Katje, please.’
‘All right, Katje,’ said Wexford, far from displeased.
Suddenly correct and very Continental, she held out her hand to him. Her fingers were soft and warm. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you resemble my old uncle in Friesland who is sometimes kind and sometimes cross like you.’ She wagged a forefinger at him.
God, he thought, still smarting from that last thrust, how pretty that mannerism is now and how dreadful it will be when she’s forty. And will she still chew her hair? In such reflections a little comfort lies.
‘Now,’ she said, her head on one side, ‘I think I will go down and dust Kventin’s study.’
9
BU R D E N listened with disdain and incredulity to Wexford’s condensed and to some extent expurgated account of his two interviews. It aroused in him a cold angry disgust. Anyone who knew the chief inspector less well than he might imagine Wexford to be quite smitten by the charms-invisible to Burden-of that immoral Dutch girl.
‘I cannot see,’ he said, standing by the window in Wexford’s office and disentangling a knot in the string of the venetian blind, ‘why you suppose this story of theirs lets them out at all.’ He straightened the string and wound it round its hooks in a figure of eight. Burden liked everything to be neat and shipshape even in someone else’s domain. ‘On the contrary, they could have been in it together. You’ve only got that girl’s word that he-er, joined her at eleven-fifteen. It could have been later. Of course she’d back him up.’
‘Oh? Why would she? just what would she get out of being an accessory to the murder of her employer’s wife?’
Burden stared at him. Really, the old man was almost simple at times.
‘Get out of it? Marriage with Nightingale, of course.’
‘Don’t keep saying “of course”. It’s far from of course. And leave that blind alone. Sometimes I think you’ve got a compulsion complex, always tidying everything up. Listen to me, Mike. You’ve got to bring your ideas up to date a bit. You may be only thirty-six but you’re so dead old-fashioned it isn’t true. First of all I want you to know that I believe Nightingale. I believe his story because some instinct in me recognises the truth when I hear it. I don’t believe he’s capable of violence. If he thought his wife had a lover-if he cared, which is more to the point—he’d divorce her.
Secondly, Katje Doorn isn’t a kind of Lady Macbeth. She’s a very contemporary young woman who is enjoying life enormously and not the least of what she enjoys is plenty of anxiety-free sex.’
Burden went pink at that and blinked his eyes. He tried to put on a sophisticated expression and failed.
‘What reason have we to suppose she wants to marry Nightingale?’ Wexford went on. ‘He’s an old man to her,’ he said urbanely. ‘She said as much. And for all her immorality, as you’d put it, she’s a nice normal girl who’d recoil in horror from the thought of taking into her bed a man fresh from murdering his wife. Mike, we’ve got to change our whole pattern of thinking in these domestic murder cases. Times have changed. Young women don’t look on marriage as the be-all and end-all of existence any more. Girls like Katje won’t help kill a man’s wife just so that he can make honest women of them. They don’t think they’re dishonest women just because they’re not virgins. And as for Katje wanting him for his money, I don’t think she’s given much thought to money yet. That may come later. At present she’s out for a good time without any worry.’
‘I sometimes wonder,’ said Burden like an old man, ‘what the world is coming to.’
‘Let the world look after itself. We’ll concentrate on our own small corner of it. We made a pattern, Mike, and now we’ve destroyed it. What next?
There are two lines to pursue, it seems to me. Who was Mrs Nightingale’s lover? Who had access to that torch?’
‘You’ve had a lab report on it?’
Wexford nodded. ‘There were traces of blood in the threads of the base screw and the lamp screw, and under the switch. The blood was of the same group as Mrs Nightingale’s and it’s a rare group, AB Negative. There’s no doubt the torch was the weapon.’
‘Well, who did have access to it? Who could have replaced it this morning?’
Wexford counted them off on his fingers. ‘Nightingale, Katje, Mrs Cantrip, Will Palmer, Sean Lovell, Georgina Villiers-oh, and Lionel Marriott. Quite a list. We might also include Villiers, as Georgina could have replaced it for him. Now what about Sean? He’s confessed to an admiration for Mrs Nightingale. He’s young and hotheaded, therefore jealous. It may not have been he she went to meet but he could have seen her with that person. His alibi is hopeless. He had access to the torch; his garden gives directly on to the forest.’
‘She was old enough to be his mother,’ said Burden.
Wexford laughed, a raucous bray. ‘My God, Mike, you don’t know what life’s about, do you? It’s because he was twenty and she forty that he would have an affair with her. Like ...’ He paused, then went on with apparent detachment, ‘Like middle-aged men and young girls. It happens all the time. Didn’t you ever fancy any of your mother’s friends?’
‘Certainly noW said Burden, outraged. ‘My mother’s friends were like aunts to me. I called them all auntie. Still do, come to that. What’s so funny?’
‘You,’said Wexford, ‘and if I didn’t laugh I’d go round the twist.’
Burden was used to this but still he was very offended.
It seemed unfair to him, a sad sign of the times, that a man should be laughed at because he had high principles and a decent concept of what life should be. He gave a thin dry cough and said:
‘I shall go and have another talk with your favourite suspect, young Lovell.’
‘You do that.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘I have a date at four.’ He grinned. ‘A date with someone who is going to enlighten me further as to certain past histories.’
Wexford parked a hundred yards up the road from the school gates, well behind the cars of parents waiting for eleven-year-olds. A crocodile of cricketers in green-stained white came across from the playing fields as the clock on the school tower struck four. If they were punctual in nothing else, King’s pupils were punctual in getting out of school. As the last chime died away, they poured through the gates, laughing, shoving each other, paying no attention to the kerb drill with which Wexford had used to believe they were thoroughly indoctrinated by the road safety officer. Only the supercilious sixth-formers walked sedately, lighting cigarettes when they reached the shadow of the overhanging trees.
Denys Villiers came out in his dark blue Anglia. ‘He sounded his horn repetitively to clear boys out of the road, then, putting his head out of the window, shouted something Wexford couldn’t catch. The tone of his voice was enough. Wexford had the notion that if the man had had a whip he would have used it. He turned his head and saw Marriott trotting out of the main gate. When the little man had passed the—ar he wound down the window and hissed:
‘ “A frightful fiend doth close behind you tread!”
Marriott jumped, collected himself and smiled.
‘A very overrated poem, I’ve always thought,’ he said. ‘I daresay. I didn’t come here to discuss poetry. You were going to give me the slip, weren’t you?’
Marriott came round the bonnet and got into the car.
‘I must admit I was. I thought you’d give me a lecture for going up to the Manor this morning. Now please don’t, there’s a dear. I’ve had a most exhausting afternoon introducing Paradise Lost to the Lower Fifth and I really can’t stand any more.’
I “The mind,” ‘ quoted Wexford, ‘ “is in its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ‘
‘Yes, very clever. I’m different. Mine makes a hell of hell. Do let’s rush, ducky, and get oursOves huge drinks. I suppose you’ll want me to go on with the next inst
alment on the way.’
11 can’t wait,’ said Wexford, starting the car and moving out into the stream.
‘Where had I got to?’
‘Villiers’first wife.’
‘June,’ said Marriott. ‘She didn’t like me. Oh dear, no. She said I’d be more use teaching in a Borstal institution. The first time she went to the Manor d’you know what she said to Quentin? “I call it scandalous,”
she said, “two people living by themselves in this barrack. It ought to be converted into a mental hospital.” Poor Quen didn’t like that at all.
His beloved house! But that was little June all over. She had a sociology degree and she’d been some kind of probation officer.
‘She and Denys had a dreadful flat over the pet foods shop in Queen Street. You know the place I mean. I only went there once and that was enough. The stink of putrefying horseflesh, my dear, and June’s funny friends all over the place. Crowds of them there every evening, all very earnest and wanting to put the world right. Ban—
ning the Bomb was the thing in those days, you know, and June used to hold meetings about it in their flat, that and famine relief before famine relief was even fashionable. She was the original demonstrator, was June. Whenever there’s a rumpus in Grosvenor Square I look very closely at the pictures, I can tell you, because I’m positive I’m going to see her face there one of these days.’
‘She’s not dead, then?’ Wexford said as they emerged into the High Street.
‘Good God, no. Denys divorced her or she divorced him. I forget which.
Heaven knows why they got married in the first place. They had nothing in common. She didn’t like Quen and Elizabeth and she took a very dim view of Denys going up to the Manor so much. Associating with reactionary elements, she called it.’
‘If he didn’t care for his sister why did he go so much?’
‘Well, you see, he and Quen got on together like a house on fire from the word go,’ said Marriott as Wexford pulled into the centre of the road to take the right-hand turn. ‘Quen was thrilled to bits finding he’d got an upand-coming writer for a brother-in-law and I suppose he saw himself in the light of Denys’s patron.’ The car moved slowly down the alley and Wexford pulled up in front of the white flower-decked house. ‘Anyway, Denys must have complained to him about how impossible it was to work in his home atmosphere, and Quen offered him the Old House to write in. Don’t let’s sit out here, Reg, I’m dying of thirst.’
