Quentin Nightingale made no reply, but he hunched his shoulders and again put that trembling hand to his forehead. Puzzled, Wexford speculated as to the nature of this acute anxiety that was turning the other man into a nervous wreck. Had he killed his wife? Or was this distress the result of some other act, something necessarily more venial, yet as productive of agonising guilt?
They walked down the dark passage, Wexford going first. Ahead of them a vertical slit of light showed the garden-room door slightly ajar.
‘I closed that door,’ Wexford said sharply and pushed it wide. On the high shelf where, half an hour before, there had been only a clean circular patch in the dust, stood a large chrome torch, up-ended.
8
THE torch had been scrubbed, probably immersed in water. Wexford held it gingerly in his handkerchief and unscrewed its base. The batteries had been removed but the glass and the bulb inside were unbroken. He noted that a few drops of water still clung to the interior of the tube that formed its handle.
Very slowly, he said, ‘Only you, Mr Nightingale, knew that I came to this house this morning in search of a torch. Did you speak of it to any of your servants or to Mrs Villiers or Mr Marriott?’
White-faced, Quentin Nightingale shook his head.
‘I believe,’ Wexford said, ‘that this torch was used to kill your wife.
It wasn’t here when I first visited the garden room; it is here now.
Someone replaced it in the past half-hour. Come, let us go back to your study.’
The widower seemed unable to speak at all. He sank heavily into a chair and covered his face with his hands.
‘Did you replace that torch, Mr Nightingale? Come, I want an answer. I shall sit here until I get one.’ There was a tap at the door and Wexford opened it to admit Burden. A quick glance passed between them, Burden raised his eyebrows at the silent slumped figure, and then moved without speaking towards the wall shelves as if fascinated by the books they held. ‘Pull yourself together, Mr Nightingale,’ Wexford said. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’ Ile would have liked to shake the man, stir him into some sort of response. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Since I don’t believe in wasting time and Inspector Burden looks as if he might appreciate a little entertainment, I’ll tell you a story. You may find some parallels in it with your own conduct over the past days. Who knows?
‘There was a country gentleman,’ he began, who lived with his beautiful wife in a manor house. They were happy together, even if their marriage might have been said to have grown a little rusty and dull with the years.’ Quentin moved a fraction at that, pushing his fingers hard into his white hair. ‘One day,’ Wexford said in the same pleasant conversational tone, ‘he discovered that his wife was being unfaithful to him, meeting another man in the woods at night. So, consumed with jealousy, he followed her, taking a torch with him, for the moon had gone and the night was dark. He saw her with this man, kissing each other, and heard them making plans and giving promises. Perhaps they even abused him. When the man had left her and she was alone, the husband confronted her, she defied him, and he struck out at her with the torch, struck again and again in his jealous frenzy until he had beaten her to death.
Did you say something, Mr Nightingale?’
Quentin’s lips moved. He moistened them, struggled forward in his chair and managed a strangled, ‘However ... however it happened, it wasn’t ... it wasn’t that way.’
‘No? The husband didn’t burn his bloodstained sweater on the still-smouldering bonfire? He didn’t pace the garden for hours in his anguish, finally locking himself in his own bathroom to spend more hours cleansing every trace of his wife’s blood from his person? Strange. We know he took a bath and that at what some would call n ungodly hour ...’
‘Stop!’ Quentin cried, clutching the arms of his chair. ‘None of this is true. It’s a monstrous fabrication.’ He swallowed, then cleared his throat.
‘I didn’t take a bath.’
‘You told me you did,’ retorted Wexford.
‘Twice,’ said Burden, the word dropping like a bead of cold water.
‘I know. It was a lie.’ A fiery blush coloured Quentin’s face and he closed his eyes. ‘Would you get me a drink, please? Whisky. It’s in there.’
Burden looked at Wexford and Wexford nodded. The whisky was in a small cabinet under the window. Burden poured about an inch into a glass and put it into the shaking hand, closing the fingers around it. Quentin drank, the glass chattering against his teeth.
‘I’ll tell you where I was,’ he said. Wexford noticed that he was at last making a determined effort to steady his voice. ‘But you alone. I should like it if the inspector could leave us.’
And if he was about to confess to murder ...? Wexford didn’t like it much.
But he had to know. He made a quick decision. ‘Will you wait outside, please, Inspector Burden?’
Obediently Burden went, without a backward glance. Quentin gave a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said. ‘I could just tell you baldly, but I need to justify myself. God, if you knew the remorse, the shame ... I’m sorry. I am trying to get a grip on myself. Well, I ... I must start somewhere.’ He finished the last of his drink, putting off, Wexford thought, the evil moment as long as he could. Then he said: ‘I want you to know that it was quite correct what you said about my wife and me, being happy together, I mean, but with our marriage grown dull with the years. That was true. I accepted it. I thought it inevitable with people who had been married as long as we had, and who had no children. We never quarrelled. I think I should tell you now that if my wife had fallen in love with someone else I shouldn’t have been angry. I shouldn’t even have objected. I expect I would have been jealous, but I wouldn’t have shown my jealousy by violence, God forbid!—or in any other way. I want to make that clear now.’
Wexford nodded noncommittally. The man’s words were simple and frank, carrying, he thought, an unmistakablc ring of truth.
‘You said,’ Quentin went on, ‘that nobody involved in a murder case has any right to a private life. I’ll have to tell you about my private life to make you understand why I did what I did.’ He got up suddenly and walked swiftly to the bookshelves, pressing his hands flat against morocco and gilt bindings. Staring at the titles of the books but perhaps unseeing, he said, ‘I used to go to her room once a fortnight, always on a Saturday night. She would push back the bedcovers and say, always the same, “This is nice, darling,” and afterwards, when I left her to go back to my room, she’d say, “That was lovely, darling.” She never called me by my name. Sometimes I think she forgot what it was.’
He stopped. Wexford wasn’t the sort of policeman who says impatiently, ‘Is all this really relevant, sir?’ He said nothing, listening with a grave face.
‘I was so bored,’ Quentin said to the books. ‘I was lonely. Sometimes I used to feel that I was married to a kind of beautiful animated statue, a doll that smiled and wore pretty clothes and even had a vocabulary of a certain limited kind.’
‘And yet you were happy?’ Wexford ventured quietly.
‘Did I say that? Perhaps because everyone else said I was, I grew used to telling myself I must be.’
He moved away from the bookcase and began to pace the room. It seemed for a moment that he had changed the subject when he said, ‘We used to keep servants, a proper staff, but Elizabeth gave them notice. Then we had a succession of au pair girls, two French and one German. I think Elizabeth made a point of choosing plain girls.’ He swung round, faced Wexford and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Perhaps she thought Katje was plain.