‘One moment.’ said Wexford, putting out an arm to prevent Marriott from following them. The morningroom door closed. ‘What the hell are you doing here, anyway?’ the chief inspector said wrathfully. ‘I thought you were supposed to be at school?’
‘I had a free period, my dear, and how use it better than by popping up here to console poor Quen?’
‘Perhaps you can tell me how someone without a car “pops”, as you put it, up to Myfleet from Kingsmarkham and back again in forty minutes?’
‘Georgina,’ said Marriott, unable to restrain a grin of triumph, ‘gave me a lift. I was standing at the school gates lost in thought, wondering in fact how I was going to accomplish my popping, the Myfleet bus having just gone, when along she came, Manor-bound. Such a relief! We had a nice little chat, planning the things we were going to say to cheer Quen up.’
‘Then you’d better go in and say thern,’ said Wexford, giving the little man a small shove. ‘Say them and go. I’m just about to start another massive search of this place and I don’t want a lot of cheerful nosy people interfering with my men. And don’t forget,’ he added, ‘that we have a date at four o’clock.’ He sighed, shaking his head. ‘Now, Mrs Cantrip, for the garden room.’
‘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?'
‘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.’