A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘May we share the joke, sir?’ asked Wexford blandly.

  Villiers stopped laughing as people can when their laughter doesn’t stem from amusement but from some irony they have observed with admiration.

  He shrugged and then, his face going blank, opened his book once more and began to read where he had left off.

  ‘Mrs Villiers,’ said Wexford, ‘I want to talk to you again about the events of Tuesday night.’

  ‘But, why?’ Her voice was barely under control. ‘I thought it was all over. I was just beginning to stop thinking about it and now .—. Oh God, what shall I do?’ She stood for a moment, staring wildly at them and then ran from the room.

  Villiers smiled a little, apparently at something in his own book. Aware as he was of the huge vanity of writers, Wexford was nevertheless unable to understand how one of them could actually laugh at something he had written himself.

  ‘I can see I shall have to read this book of yours.’

  Villiers lifted his eyes and, again closing his book, kept his fingers inside it to mark the place. He took a copy of Wordsworth in Love from a stack on the window-sill and handed it to the chief inspector. ‘You can have this if it interests you.’ The weary grey eyes met Wexford’s and held them.

  ‘Thank you. It will interest me. I’m always willing to be enlightened.

  For one thing, I’m curious to discover why you’ve made yourself an authority on Wordsworth.’

  ‘A matter of taste, Mr Wexford.’

  ‘But there is always something to account for taste.’

  Villiers shrugged impatiently. ‘Well, you’ve brought us the news and we’ve had our little bit of literary chit-chat. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Certainly there is. I am investigating a murder, Mr Villiers.’

  ‘But not very fruitfully, if I may say so.’ Villiers sat down astride a dining chair, his chest against its bars and his arms folded on the top of its back. The ashen face with its tracery of lines again gave Wexford the impression that this man was sick, was dying. ‘And what’s the point, anyway?’ he said. ‘Elizabeth is dead and cannot be resurrected, You find who killed her and put him in prison for twenty or thirty years. Who benefits? Who’s the happier for it?’

  ‘You’re in favour of capital punishment perhaps? I’m surprised your first wife didn’t convert you from that view.’

  If Villiers was astonished that Wexford knew of his previous marriage he gave no sign of it. ‘Capital punishment?’ he said. ‘No, I’m not in favour of it. I don’t care much. I don’t care about people being kept in prison either except that my tax pays for their board.’

  ‘It seems to me, sir, that you don’t care much for anything.’

  ‘That’s so. So-called current affairs don’t interest me and nor does current opinion. I don’t like people and people don’t like me. They’re mostly fools,’ said the misanthropist with a kind of bitter relish. ‘I

  don’t suffer fools gladly. Progress bores me and so does noise.’ He added very quietly, ‘I want to be left in peace to live in the past.’

  ‘Then let’s discuss the past,’ said Wexford. ‘The recent past. Tuesday night, for instance.’

  Sitting opposite Burden in the living room, Georgina said fretfully, ‘I

  told you about Tuesday night last time you were here. If you’ve got a bad memory you ought to have written it down.’

  ‘Never mind my memory, Mrs Villiers. You just tell me again. You left the Manor at ten-thirty in your husband’s car. Who was driving?’

  ‘My husband was driving. He always drives when we’re out together. I think the man should always drive, don’t you?’ She set her mouth stubbornly. ‘The man should always be the dominant partner in a marriage so that his wife can look up to him. We,’ she said in a loud defiant voice, ‘are very happily married.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Burden. ‘What time did you reach home?’

  ‘I told you. About twenty to eleven. We went in and we went straight to bed. And that’s all.’

  ‘No, it isn’t all. No one comes home from an evening out and goes straight to bed. One of you must have put the car away. One of you must have locked up.’

  Oh, well, if that’s what you want. My husband just left the car on the drive. Mine was in the garage.’

  ‘Did you both go into the house together?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Side by side? Squeezing through the door at the same time?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Georgina petulantly. ‘I went in first and then my husband followed about a minute later. He locked the car because it was going to be left on the drive all night. He always does that.’

  ‘Very prudent. Since you’re evidently so careful, you wouldn’t have put the milk bottles out before you went to the Manor. Who did that when you got home? Who checked that all the windows were closed and the back door locked?’

  She hesitated, looking at him sullenly. Her fingers played nervously with her beads. ‘My husband always does that,’she said.’l went to bed first.’

  ‘How long did it take you to get to bed, Mrs Villiers? Ten minutes? A

  quarter of an hour? You didn’t go to bed unwashed and in all your clothes.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I put the bedroom light on and undressed and went to the bathroom and then I went to bed. My husband came to bed. He always reads for about half an hour before we go to sleep.’

  ‘Double bed, Mrs Villiers?’

  ‘No, we have twin beds. But you needn’t read anything into that. We’re a very happy couple.’

  ‘Yes, you told me before. Now, tell me, what time did you go to the Manor?’

  ‘We got there at about half past eight.’

  ‘I believe,’ said Burden disarmingly, ‘that you often went there to play bridge. How long did you usually stay there?’

  ‘Sometimes till midnight in the holidays.’

  ‘Tuesday night was still in the holidays, wasn’t it? Why did you leave so early?’

  ‘My—husband,’ said Georgina, putting as she always did a self-conscious pride of ownership into the word, ‘my husband had some research to do down at the school and ...’ She clapped her hand over her mouth but too late to stifle a little sharp cry. ‘When we got home,’ she stammered, ‘he changed his mind and ... Oh, why won’t you leave us alone? We could be happy if everyone would leave us alone!’

  Burden’s stare was hard and penetrating. He looked at her without blinking as she began to cry.

  ‘I left the car on the drive,’ said Villiers to Wexford. ‘No, I didn’t check the back door or the windows. That’s my wife’s province. I went straight to bed and straight to sleep.’

  Burden came in. ‘May I, sir?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Wexford.

  ‘What about this research you were going to do down at the school, sir? The essential research that took you away from the Manor at ten-thirty?’

  Villiers lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t you ever make excuses to get away from a boring host and hostess, Inspector?’ he asked imperturbably. ‘Don’t you ever say you’re expecting a phone call or you must get back to that boy of yours?’

  Burden scowled at him, furious that John had been brought into this interrogation. It was humiliating to find that Villiers, who ostentatiously ignored him as a private person, should all the time have recognised him as a parent.

  ‘So this was an empty excuse,’ he said angrily. ‘A deliberate lie.’

  ‘Sometimes I do tell lies,’ said Villiers, smoking with a kind of frivolous delicacy.’I’m a good liar.’

  ‘Strange for a man who declares himself indifferent to the opinions of others,’ Wexford commented, and suddenly, meeting Villiers’ arrogant eyes, a couplet came into his head. He quoted it, not only because it was apt but because he felt a pressing unquenchable need to show Villiers that he wasn’t a moron, that he wasn’t the flatfooted unlettered country policeman the writer thought him.

  “So much hc soared beyond or
sunk beneath The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe.”

  The effect was astonishing, not at all what he had expected. Villiers didn’t move but his face became feverishly pale. Statue-still, he seemed to be waiting, and not, Wexford thought, for more words, but for action, for some decisive crucial move. And then, perhaps because no one moved but both policemen stood in bewilderment, Villiers laughed.

  That laughter electrified Burden into rage.

  ‘What do you want, Mr Villiers?’ he almost shouted. ‘What are you trying to prove? Why do you try to set yourself so much above everyone else?’

  ‘Or beneath them, Mr Burden.’ Villiers hadn’t shifted his eyes from Wexford’s face and now they were very wide and very opaque. ‘Or sunk beneath them, remember. As to what I want, that’s simple.’ He got up, turned his back. ‘I want to die,’he said.

  ‘And what the hell,’said Wexford thoughtfully as they got back into the car, ‘came over him when I quoted those lines?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Burden, the Philistine. He made an effort. ‘Er-where do they come from? Wordsworth?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know where they come from. They were just sort of floating about in my head.’ Burden nodded indifferently. He was used to hearing lines that floated about in his superior’s head. Tedious bookishness, that’s what it was, and it rather embarrassed him. ‘But I’d like to know,’ said Wexford. ‘It’d be a job tracing them, our England being a nest of singing birds.’

  ‘We’ve got more important things to worry about,’ Burden said impatiently. ‘What’s more to the point is, are we going to be able to find a witness to corroborate that he didn’t go out again after he got home?’

  ‘Or that she didn’t.’

  ‘Pity the place is so isolated.’

  ‘Yes. We need to find someone who passed the place in a car. That can wait till the morning. You get that scarf sent over to the lab and then you can get off home to your painting. Manual work often helps the brain, Mike, and you can have a good think while you’re wielding the brush.’

  With a sigh of relief, Burden started the car. ‘Which of those two have you in mind, anyway?’

  ‘Mike, you’ll say I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’m as near as dammit certain she did it. She’s a strong healthy young woman, physically capable of felling another woman with a torch. It is she and not her husband who inherits. She was at the Manor when the torch was replaced.

  She knew the layout of the Manor grounds and she could have noticed the bonfire earlier in the evening. If she got blood on her clothes, she knew she could have burnt her outer clothes-say a sweater-on the fire.’

  ‘All this,’ said Burden, ‘argues premeditation, that she deliberately chose a torch of all things for her weapon.’

  ‘Think about it. Try and see what you can make of it all. I’m going to pick up Lionel Marriott and take him to the Olive for a drink.’

  12

  THE new cocktail bar at the Olive and Dove was almost deserted, for by now most of its patrons had deserted it for the dining room, while the serious drinkers were in the public or the saloon. Wexford shepherded Marriott into a secluded corner and placed a large whisky in front of him. The bar communicated with the dining room by means of double glass doors, but Wexford had made sure the diners were out of Marriott’s line of vision. He wanted their talk to be uninterrupted and Marriott removed from the temptation of waving to friends or sending smiling dumb-show messages to pretty women.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want to hear about this holiday on the Costa Brava.’

  ‘Holiday!’ said Marriott, momentarily closing his eyes. ‘Really, I’d rather spend a fortnight in a labour camp. The spotty devils are bad enough when you have to cart them up to London to the V. and A., but imagine two weeks cooped up with them in some torrid slum. They go mad, you know. None of the local girls is safe. They’re all in an advanced state of satyriasis at the best of times, and once get them in the sun ... ! And as for appalling infringement of the exchange regulations, you wouldn’t believe the diabolical ingenuity of some of them. Every one an accomplished smuggler and his mother’s milk scarce out of him.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Wexford, laughing. ‘What about Villiers?’

  ‘God knows how he found the time to go courting. You’d have thought every minute would have been taken up, what with having to be a Customs officer and a male nurse and a watch committee all rolled into one. Anyway, he met Georgina.’

  ‘She was holidaying there too?’

  ‘Only in the same sense that he was,’ said Marriott, waving enthusiastically as a satin-gowned brunette swept past their table.

  Wistfully, he watched her disappear into the dining room. ‘Georgina had gone with her own school party,’he said, ‘a bunch of teenage nymphomaniacs, from what I heard. Denys and she encountered each other on one of their nightly rounds of the local taverns, picking their charges up off the floor, you know.’

  ‘It really can’t have been as bad as that, Lionel.’

  ‘Perhaps I exaggerate a little,’ said Marriott airily. ‘Not that I heard any of this from Denys. He didn’t even bother to send me a card. No, the first hint I got was on the day before he was due back. Elizabeth and Quen dropped in one evening. “We’ve got some good news for you,” said Quen.

  “Denys has met a girl and they’re going to be married.” “Fast worker,” I said, and then of course I had to say I was pleased, although I was thinking she must be out of her mind, poor thing. Let me get you another drink, Reg.’

  ‘Tonight,’ said Wexford firmly, ‘I’m the host.’ Once let Marriott get to the bar and he would be within range of the allurements of his friends. He asked for two more whiskies and, while he waited for them, he cast his eyes speculatively over the waiters in the dining room, wondering which of them was Quentin Nightingale’s rival.

  The tall one with acne? The thin youth with slicked-back black hair?

  ‘They were married,’ Marriott went on, ‘from Georgina’s home in Dorset.

  Quen went down for the wedding but Elizabeth couldn’t. She had a migraine, Of course, even Denys couldn’t very well bring a second bride home to a horsemeat shop, so Elizabeth asked them to stay at the Manor while they were looking for a house.’

  ‘The Nightingales gave a dinner party for the bride. Everybody who was anybody was there. Old Priscilla and Sir George, the Rogerses; from Pomfret, the Primeros from Forby and, of course, your humble servant.’

  Looking anything but humble, Marriott lowered his voice to a suspenseful whisper. ‘Georgina was staying in the house but she was the last to arrive. Ah ha! I thought, making an entrance, the clever little thing.

  None of us had seen her, so naturally we sat with bated breath. All the women were got up to the nines. Elizabeth looked wonderful. White velvet, you know. It always does something foi a woman. Believe it or not, I even saw Denys looking at her with a sort of grudging admiration.

  ‘Then, just when we can contain our impatience no longer, in comes Georgina in Woolworth’s pearls and awell, we used to call them tub frocks, and this one had been in the tub a good many times, I can tell you. Did those women stare! Georgina wasn’t a bit shy. In fact, she dominated the conversation at the table. We heard all about her little housewifely plans and how she was going to make a real home for Denys and how they were going to have six children. And possessive! My dear, she actually grumbled to Elizabeth because she hadn’t been placed next to him.

  ‘I must say Elizabeth was charming to her. She even complimented her on her dress and really tried to keep her the centre of attention. She was bubbling over with gaiety and she didn’t look a day over twenty-five.’

  ‘Georgina,’ said Wexford, ‘did she seem envious?’

  ‘Of the mise en scene? If denigrating everything around one and trying to assume an ascendancy on the grounds of one’s middle-class ideas is only a mask for envy, yes, I suppose she was envious. Of course, Fve seen her dozens of times since th
en and all she can talk about is what a marvellous marriage she and Denys have and how they’re all in all to each other.’

  ‘And are they?’

  ‘He’s everything she wants,’ said Marriott, ‘although we see no sign of these six children, do we? As for him I think he’s as bored with his second marriage as he was with his first, but there’s only one thing that interests Denys Villiers and that’s his work. Once he and Georgina were settled in their bungalow, he was buzzing round the Manor again just likethe old days.’

  Wexford said slyly, ‘You must have been buzzing too to have seen him there.’

  For a moment Marriott looked a little foolish. Then he jumped up smartly.

  ‘You’ll excuse me one second while I pop into the dining room and have a word with ...’

  Wexford laughed. ‘I’ll excuse you altogether,’ he said, ‘for tonight.’

  ‘You’ve been thinking,’ said Dr Crocker on the following morning, ‘that she was wearing that scarf when the deed was done. Well, she wasn’t. It would have been saturated with blood if she had.’

  ‘Perhaps it was round her neck or she was holding it in her hand.’

  The doctor gave a derisive snort. ‘And after she was dead she took it off and wiped her head with it? That’s what it looks as if it was used for, to wipe blood off someone or something.’

  Wexford folded the report and put it down on his blotter. ‘You said you were out delivering a baby on Tuesday night,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose your route took you through Myfleet via Clusterwell

  ‘Sure it did. Why?’

  ‘You know Villiers’ bungalow?’

  ‘Of course I do. He’s a patient of mine. I passed it at about eleven.’

  ‘Did you notice the bungalow at all?’ Wexford said more urgently. ‘Were any lights on? Were the cars on the drive?’

  The doctor’s face fell. ‘I didn’t look. I was thinking about my patient and the possibility of the child being a breech presentation. Now, if I’d known

  ...’

  ‘That,’ said Wexford irritably, ‘is what they all say. Here’s Mike now.’

  Burden came in wearily. ‘Three of us have done a house-to-house in Myfleet,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon any of them go out in the evenings. The whole place shuts up about nine and those that aren’t in bed are in the pub. Nobody passed that way bar Katje Doorn. I’ve talked to her again and all she did was simper and tell me about a disgusting Swedish film. Though I did have the feeling she didn’t want to discuss her drive.’