‘Well, what did you want to ask me?’ Her voice had a brusque barking note, as if she were used to command but not always to having her commands obeyed. Hundreds of dark brown freckles peppered her skin, the white vulnerable skin of the auburn-haired. She seemed in her late twenties, a woman wèo didn’t know how to make herself pretty but who tried. The edelweiss brooch on her blouse collar, the slide in her hair, showed that she tried. ‘My husband-you really should talk to my husband. He won’t be long.’ She eyed the clock rather wildly. ‘Quen—my brother-in-law, that is-wouldn’t keep him long. Anyway, what did you want to ask me?’
‘First of all, Mrs Villiers,’ said Burden, ‘did you and your husband come straight back here after your visit to the Manor last night?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘What did you do when you got home?’
‘We went to bed. We both went straight to bed.’
‘You had been driving the car I saw outside?’ Wexford put in.
Georgina Villers shook her head so violently that her hair flew out, disclosing unsuitable pendant car-rings. ‘We went in Denys’s car. We’ve got two cars. When we got married last year I had a car and he had a car.
Only old cars, but we kept them both. They aren’t worth much, you see.’She managed a feverish, very bright smile. ‘He’s out in his car now.’
‘And yours, I see,’ said Wexford in a pleasant fatherly voice, ‘has just been cleaned, Always clean your car on a Wednesday, do you, Mrs Villiers?
I expect you’re like my wife, a special time of the week for every little chore, eh? That way nothing gets left.’
‘No, I’m afraid not. I’m not methodical.’ She blinked at him, puzzled by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I ought to be, I know. Denys would like it if ... Why do you ask?'
,I’ll tell you, Mrs Villiers. If you were very methodical and always worked to a routine you’d be conditionedto it, and then I could understand that even the violent death of your sister-in-law might not make you deviate from that routine. But since you aren’t methodical and only, I assume, clean your car when you feel like it or when it needs it, why did you choose today of all days?’
She blushed deeply. A fear that was almost anguish showed in her eyes and she blinked again, bringing her hands together and then clasping them. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t distress yourself. Perhaps you cleaned the car because you were upset. Was that it?’ She was very slow on the uptake, Wexford thought, too frightened or too obtuse to see the loophole he was offering her. He offered it more explicitly. ‘I suppose you took the very sensible attitude that when one is unhappy or worried, work is the best thing to take one’s mind off one’s troubles?’
Relieved at last, she nodded. ‘Yes, that was it.’ Immediately she undid the small good her agreement had done her. ‘I wasn’t very upset, not really. I mean, she wasn’t my sister.’
‘That’s true,’ said Wexford. He drew his chair closer towards her and their eyes met, hers held by his like the eyes of a rabbit mesmerised by headlights. Suddenly Burden was excluded and the two of them were alone.
‘She was your husband’s sister, of course, just a sister-inlaw.’ Her face sharpened and hardened. ‘They didn’t like each other much, did they?’
‘No, they didn’t.’ She hesitated very briefly, sliding as if involuntarily from the arm to the seat of the chair, but not taking her eyes from Wexford’s face. ‘They didn’t get on at all,’ she said. ‘If you must know, Denys couldn’t stand her.’
‘Strange, Mrs Nightingale seemed to get on with everyone else.’
‘Did she? Oh, with the county people, you mean.’ She gave a deep quiet sigh and then spoke in a level rapid voice, ‘Elizabeth didn’t have any real friends. My husband, he thinks she was killed by a maniac, one of those men who attack women. I expect that’s what it was. She must have been mad, going into the forest at night. Really she was asking for it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Wexford said. He smiled genially to help the atmosphere relax.
Georgina Villiers was calmer now. She unclasped her hands and looked down at them, breathing shallowly. ‘Do you know why your husband didn’t get on with his sister?’
‘Well, they hadn’t anything in common.’
And what, Wexford asked himself, docs a woman like you, dull and characterless and conventional, have in common with an intellectual like Villiers, a teacher of classics, an authority on Wordsworth?
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘he thought her rather silly and extravagant.’
‘And was she, Mrs Villiers?’
‘Well, she had a lot of money, didn’t she? He hadn’t any other reason for not liking her, if that’s what you mean. She and Quen were very ordinary people really. Not the sort of people I’ve been used to, of course. I never associated with people like that before I was married.’
‘You got on well with them?’
‘Quen was always kind.’ Georgina Villiers twisted her wedding ring, moving it up and down hey finger. ‘He liked me for my husband’s sake, you see. He and my husband are great friends.’ She looked down, nervously biting her lip. ‘But I think he got to like me for myself. Anyway,’ she said, suddenly shrill and cross, ‘why should I care? A man’s wife ought to come first. He ought to think more of her than of outsiders, not go and do his work in somebody else’s house.’
‘You felt that My Nightingale had too great an influence over your husband?’
‘I don’t care,’ said Georgina, ‘for any outside interference.’ She pulled at the ear-rings, slightly releasing the screw of one of them. ‘I was a teacher of physical education,’ she said proudly, ‘before I was married, but I’ve given it up for good. Don’t you think a woman ought to stay at home and look after her husband? That’s best for people like us, have a real home and family without too much outside interest.’
Frowning at Burden who was nodding his head approvingly, Wexford said,
‘Would you object if we searched this house?’
Georgina hesitated, then shook her head.
The bungalow had another reception room and two bedrooms, the smaller of which was unfurnished and uncarpeted.
‘I wonder what he does with his money?’ Wexford whispered. ‘He’s got a good job and he writes those books.’
Burden shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s extravagant like his sister,’ he said. ‘He’ll be different now. He’s got a good wife.’
‘Oh, my God!’
Searching the sparsely filled cupboards, Burden said stiffly, ‘Well, I think it makes a nice change, talking to an ordinary decent woman.’
‘Perhaps she is ordinary and decent. She’s dull enough, God knows. There’s nothing here, no blood, nothing that could conceivably have been used as a weapon.’ They moved on into the kitchen where Wexford lifted the lid of the old-fashioned coke boiler. ‘Blazing away merrily,’ he said. ‘They could have burnt practically anything on here and she’s had hours to do it in.’
Georgina was waiting for them in the living room, sitting apathetically, staring at the wall.
‘I can’t think why my husband’s so long. You’d think that today he’d want to be here with me. You’d.think ...’ Suddenly she froze, listening intently. ‘Here he is now.’
She leapt from her chair and rushed into the hall, slamming the door behind her. Listening with half an ear to the whispered conversation between husband and wife, Burden said, ‘She’s certainly a mass of nerves.
It’s almost as if she expected us to find something. I wonder if ..
‘Sssh!’said Wexford sharply.
Denys Villiers walked into the room, talking over his shoulder to his wife. ‘I can’t be in two places at once, Georgina. Quen’s in a bad way.