A Guilty Thing Surprised Part 10

'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. Banning 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 fas.h.i.+onable. 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 G.o.d, 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. a.s.sociating 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.'

The rooms where the party had been held still smelt strongly of cigar smoke. Someone had tidied up and washed all the dishes. Hypatia, probably, Wexford thought, as Marriott flung open all the windows.

'Now then, Reg, the c.o.c.ktail hour, as they say. A little early perhaps, but everything's early in the country, don't you find?

What's it to be? Whisky? Gin?'

'I'd rather have a cup of tea,' said Wexford.

'Would you? How odd. All right, I'll put the kettle on. I must say, Hypatia has left everything very nice. I must remember to say a word when next I see her.'

Wexford followed him into the kitchen. 'She doesn't live here, then?'

'Oh, no. I shouldn't care for that at all.' Marriott wrinkled his nose distastefully. 'Once have them permanently in and you can't call your soul your own.' He gave Wexford a sidelong very sly look. 'Besides, there's safety in numbers.'

Wexford laughed. 'Quite a devil with the ladies, aren't you, Lionel?'

'I have my successes,' said Marriott modestly. He put three spoonfuls of Earl Grey into the teapot and poured the boiling water on daintily. 'Shall I go on with the story?'

'Please.'

'Well, as I said, June didn't at all care for Denys work ing at the Manor. He was up there most evenings natter ing with Quen, you see, and every day in the holidays to work. She thought he ought to be out with her, waving banners and writing things on walls. So finally she walked out on him.'

'Leaving him to his menage a trois?'

'What a funny way of putting it. Still, no doubt, there was a triangular element there, but not an isosceles triangle. Poor Elizabeth was definitely the unequal angle. It always used to fascinate me when I went up there to see Denys and Quen utterly immersed in each other, books, books, books, my dear, and a positively ringing exchange of Wordsworth quotes, the two of them groaning that they had thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears. And all the time poor Elizabeth sat there reading Vogue and not a word to say for herself.'

'I daresay you found something to chat to her about,' said Wexford, drinking his tea. 'I never met anyone who knew so much about-what shall I say?-current trivia?'

'Really, Reg, you are unkind. I'll have you know, Elizabeth wasn't at all an empty-headed woman. just as intelligent as Denys in her way.'

'That's not what he says, but let it pa.s.s.'

'Why are we sitting out here, anyway? I never could abide kitchens and I'm pining for my gin. Good, the cigar smoke's cleared.'

Marriott fetched his drink and pulled two chairs up to the open french windows. His small walled garden was full of b.u.t.terflies, drinking from the buddleia flQwcrs and sunning themselves with spread wings on the stones. Wexford sat where he could feel the warmth of the precious September sun that would soon be gone. It made him feel lazy and he told himself sternly to keep his mind alert.

'So Villiers spent a good deal of his time at the Manor, did he?' he said.

'Believe me, you couldn't set foot in the place without finding him there. And as if that wasn't enough to make him and Quen heartily sick of each other, he used to go away on holiday with them too.'

'That must have been hard on Mrs Nightingale, especially as they excluded her from their conversations. just what were her interests, Lionel?'

Marriott bit his lip and seemed to cogitate. 'Let me see,' he said with the air of someone dredging in the depths. 'Well, she took an active part in county life, you know, organising things and sitting on committees. And she spent hours every day making herself look lovely. She did the flowers and a bit of gardening ...'

'Is that so?' Wexford interrupted. 'In the hothouse maybe with young Scan Lovell?'

'What can you mean, dear old boy?'

'As one of Wordsworth's contemporaries put it: "What men call gallantry and G.o.ds adultery, Is much more common where the climate's sultry."'

Marriott smiled, opening his eyes wide. 'So that's the way the wind's blowing, is it?'

'Well, she wasn't having secret meetings in the forest with old Sir George Larkin-Smith, was she? Or the rector of Myfleet or Will Palmer?

Unless it was you, Lionel.'

'I wondered when you were going to ask me that.' Marriott stretched languorously in the suns.h.i.+ne and laughed. 'But no, it wasn't. And if you're serious about this, Reg, Hypatia will tell you where I was. Mind you, I'm not saying I didn't wish I'd had the opportunity ..

'Maybe you even tried your chances?'

'Maybe I did.'

This time it was Wexford's turn to laugh. 'So we come back to Sean Lovell, don't we?'

'She was fond of Sean,' said Marriott. 'I met her once coming out of the record shop here in the High Street. She'd been buying the number one pop single in the charts. "I must keep up with my little song-bird," she said. "Really, he's the only true Nightingale in-Vyfleet." Quite witty, I thought. Elizabeth was notfool.'

'An extraordinary remark to mpke,' said Wexford.

'Oh, I don't know. You read too much into things, my dear. All you policemen are terribly salacious. Sean used to stand under Elizabeth's windows and serenade her. I suppose she was flattered and it made her feel young. It was a case of heroine wors.h.i.+p on one side and a sort of flattered acceptance on the other.'

'Let's get back to Villiers,' said Wexford. 'But first how about another cup of tea for a poor old salacious policeman?'

Myfleet was a pretty village even on a winter's day. Now, bathed in mellow suns.h.i.+ne, it lay in its hollow beneath the forest like a sleeping beauty.

This afternoon it seemed unpeopled; only the flowers in cottage gardens stood out in the open enjoying the sun.

Burden drove to the Kingsmarkham end of the village and decided to walk the rest of the way. It was a day made for strolling, for appreciating the scent of ripening fruit and admiring the great multi-petalled dahlias, raised for a flower show or a harvest festival.

But he had been wrong in thinking the village totally deserted. Now, as he approached the Manor, he noticed Mrs Lovell leaning over the gate of her disreputable cottage, talking to a swarthy man in a cap who carried two dead and bleeding rabbits over his arm. The s.h.i.+fty looks he was giving the Manor -though probably the natural accompaniment to his conversation, concerned as it must be with the only topic currently of interest in my fleet- gave him the air of a poacher. Mrs Lovell encouraged him with peals of uninhibited ringing laughter.

He found Scan in the Old House, unloading apples from a basket on to one of the racks. They were pale red and gold, Beauty of Bath, their skins striped and s.h.i.+ny like old silk. The boy was whistling but he stopped abruptly when Burden came in.

'Come here often, do you?' Burden asked softly. 'Is this where you used to meet Mrs Nightingale?'

'Me?' He gave Burden a sullen glare, sat down on a stack of silver-birch logs and began to roll a cigarette. 'It'd be a help,' he said, 'if I knew what you was getting at. No, I don't come here often. Fact is I never set foot in here since April.' He c.o.c.ked a thumb at the tunnel staircase. 'On account of him being up there.' Scowling, he lit his cigarette. 'Me and old Palmer, we've got strict orders not to come in here disturbing him, see?'

'You go into the garden room, though, don't you? You go to sweep it out.

Ever borrowed a torch, Lovell, to light your way when you went to Mrs Nightingale in the forest?'

'Me?' Sean said again. 'Are you off your nut?' His cigarette had gone out.

He re-lit it, blinking when the flame caught the ragged paper and flared.

Perhaps it provided a flash of mental as well as physical illumination, for he said, 'You trying to make out I was carrying on with Mrs Nightingale?

You are a nut and a dirty-minded nut at that.'

'All right, that'll do,' said Burden, mortally offended. The supreme injustice of the accusation wounded him more than the insolence. 'Come now,' he said, keeping his temper, 'you were on very friendly terms with her.'

Took,' said Sean, 'if you must know, she was interested in helping me with my career.'

'Helping you do the gardening?'

The boy's face flushed deeply. Unknowingly, Burden had returned thrust for thrust. 'Gardening's not my career,' Sean said bitterly. 'Tbat's just a stop-gap, just to fill in time till I get on with my real work.'

'And what might that be?'

'Music,' said Sean. 'The Scene. Up there in London.' Again he c.o.c.ked a thumb, this time northwards. His face had grown rapt and, like d.i.c.k Whittington, he seemed to see a vision, a city paved with gold. 'I've got to get there.' His voice shook. 'I know it all, see, like it was recorded in my head. I could tell you the way all the charts were, right back for years. I could pa.s.s exams.'

He clenched his hands and there shone in his eyes the fanaticism of the religious mystic. 'There's not one of them D.J.s knows half of what I do.'

Suddenly he shouted at Burden, 'Take that grin off your face! You're just ignorant like the rest of them, like my old lady with her men and her booze.

Mrs Nightingale was the only one as understood and she's dead.' He drew a dirty sleeve across his eyes, the artist rnanqu6 that the world persists in treating as an artisan.

Gentler this time, Burden said, 'What was Mrs Nightingale going to do for you?'

'There was this bloke in London she knew,' Sean said, muttering now. 'He was with the B.B.C. and she promised faithful she'd mention my name. Maybe for singing, maybe for a D.J. In a small way for a start.' he added humbly.

'You got to start in a small way.' He sighed. 'I don't know what'll happen to me now.'

'Best stick to your gardening, grow up a bit and get rid of some of these fancy ideas,' Burden said. Sean's glance of pure hatred riled him. 'Let's forget your ambitions for a moment, shall we? Why did you tell the chief inspector you were watching a television programme when that programme wasn't even shown?'

Sean looked peevish rather than frightened at being caught out in his lie.

'I had been watching the telly,' he said, 'but I got fed up. My old lady had got her bloke in for the evening, that Alf Tawney. Grinning at me, they was, and mocking me on account of me watching Pop Panel.' Sean clenched his fingers over an apple until his knuckles whitened. 'One fellow after another my mum's had ever since I was a kid and all they've ever wanted is to get me out of the way. I tell you, when I was about ten I saw my mum with one of them men of hers, kissing and pawing each other and I picked up the carving knife and went for her. I'd have killed her, I would, only the bloke got the knife away and hit me. I'd have killed her,' he said fiercely, and then something he saw in Burden's eyes silenced him. Awkwardly he said, 'I don't care any more, not about her, only I get- I get fed up.' His fingers relaxed and he dropped the apple into the rack. Burden saw that his nails had pierced the rosy skin, leaving deep juicy wounds.

He said smoothly, 'It seems to me you let your emotions get the better of you.'

'I said I was ten, didn't I? I'm not like that now. I wouldn't lay a finger on her whatever she did.'

'I take it,' said Burden, as Sean wiped his sticky hand on his jeans, 'I

take it you're referring to your mother?'

'Who else'd I be referring to?'

Burden shrugged lightly. 'So you got "fed up" with your mother and Alf Tawney. Where did you go?'

'Down to my shed,' said Sean. 'I sat there all alone, thinking.' He sighed heavily, got up and, turning his back on Burden, resumed his unloading of the apples. 'Just thinking and-and listening.' The bright fruit, bruised by his hands, rolled into the rack. Very softly he began whistling again. His face had coloured as vivid a red as the apples. Getting up to leave, Burden wondered why.

'Denys always went on holiday with them,' said Marriott. 'With both of them, I mean. But two years ago he had to go with Elizabeth alone. Quen caught the measles, poor thing. So humiliating. Elizabeth told me she absolutely dreaded being stuck with Denys in Dubrovnik, but Quen said he'd never forgive them if they stayed at home on his account, so they had to put up with it.

'Well, they must have rowed the whole time because they both looked rotten when they got back and there was a distinct coldness between Denys and Quen all the following winter and Denys stopped going up to the Manor. Then, one day, in the June of the summer before last, I was up at the Manor when in walked Denys. "You are a stranger," Quen said, but I could tell he was overjoyed. "I only came," said Denys, "to tell you I can't go to Rome with you next month. I've promised the Head I'll be one of the escorts to the school party."

' "You?" I almost screamed. "You must be out of your mind." I mean, it's a joke at school, the lengths the staff go to get out of it. "You'd pa.s.s up lovely Rome," I said, "for the lousy old Costa Brava?" "I'm going," he said, "it's all fixed." You should have seen poor Quen's face. He did his best to work on Denys but it was no use. He was adamant.'

'What about this year, Lionel?'

'He was married by then, wasn't he? He met Georgina on the Costa Brava, but I'll come to that later. No, this year they went off to Bermuda by themselves, and I think that secretly they were only too glad to have got rid of old misery face. Elizabeth said as much to me when I went up there to witness her will and ...'

'Her what?' said Wexford slowly. 'Did you say her will?'