‘He’s your lover, isn’t he?’
She said cautiously, not embarrassed and not at all frightened, ‘He has said this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, poor Kventin! He does not want anyone to know at all, must be kept very secret thing. And now you have found it out.’
‘I’m afraid I must ask you to tell me about it.’
Stubbornly she stuck out her lower lip and shook her head.
‘Come now. He’s told me himself. You wouldn’t want him to go to prison, would you?’
She opened her mouth wide. ‘This is true? In England you can go to prison because you are making love?’
‘Of course notV Wexford almost shouted. ‘Now listen. Mr Nightingale will not go to prison if you tell me the truth. just tell me everything that happened between you ... No, no, not everything.’ An incredulous smile had widened her eyes. ‘Simply how it began and so on.’
‘All right.’ She giggled with pure pleasure. ‘This is always nice, I think, to talk about love. I like to talk of this more than anything.’
Wexford could feel his angry frown, artificially assumed, pushing all his features forward. ‘It is four, five weeks ago. I am in my bed and there is a knock and it is Kventin. Perhaps he is going to say the radio is too loud or I put the car away wrong, but he is saying nothing because at once I know he is coming to make love. I can see this in his face. Always I can see it in faces.’
God Almighty! thought Wexford, his soul cringing.
‘So I am thinking, Why not? I am thinking how he is kind with nice manners and thin straight body and I am forgetting he is older than my father in Holland. And also I know he is lonely man married to a frigid cold woman. So we are making love very soon and all is different, for when he is in my bed he is not old any more.’
She said this triumphantly, pointing to the bed. Her favourite subject had driven away her laughter and she spoke earnestly, with concentration.
‘Much much better than my friend the waiter,’ she said. ‘For Kventin has much experience and is knowing exactly how . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ Wexford cut in. He drew a deep breath. ‘Miss Doorn, please spare me the lecture on sexual technique. Let us have the facts. There were other occasions...' Grinding his teeth, Wexford said, ‘Mr Nightingale made love to you at other times?’
‘Of course. He is liking me as much as I am liking him. The next week and the next week and then the night before last.’
‘Go on.’
‘But I have told you. I go out with my friend and the unkind man will not let us go into the hotel. My friend want us to go in the car, but this I will not do. This is not nice. Kventin would not do this. I am coming back home and I ani thinking perhaps Kventin come up and make love with me. And I am wishing and wishing when he knocks at the door and then I am happy. We are both very very happy.’
‘How long did he stay with you?’
‘All the night,’ said Katje airily. ‘I tell him that just before I come in I see Mrs Nightingale go into the wood and he is saying very very sadly, She does not want me, she has never wanted me. But I say, I want you, Kventin, and so he stay all the night. But he is going away very early in the morning because he is hearing the old gardener man walk about. So I lie in my bed alone, thinking perhaps I shall not see my friend the waiter any more, but go only with Kventin, and then I too am getting up to see why the old gardener man is in the house. There, now I have told it all!’
Wexford was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘At what time did you see Mrs Nightingale cross the road?’
‘Two minutes after eleven,’ said Katje promptly.
‘And at what time did Mr Nightingale pay you this nocturnal visit?, She looked at him, her blue eyes naive and enquiring. ‘I mean, come to your room?’
‘Fifteen minutes after eleven. I come in, I go straight to bed.’
‘How can you be so sure of the time?’
‘I am wearing my new watch and always I am looking at it.’ She waved her left wrist at him. The watch had a dial two inches in diameter fastened to a wide strap of pink and purple patent leather. ‘This my friend is giving me for my birthday and all the time I look at it.’ She glanced up at him under long dark gold lashes. ‘You are angry with me?’
‘No, no, I’m not angry, Miss Doorn.’
‘I am wishing that you will call me Katje, please.’
‘All right, Katje,’ said Wexford, far from displeased.
Suddenly correct and very Continental, she held out her hand to him. Her fingers were soft and warm. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you resemble my old uncle in Friesland who is sometimes kind and sometimes cross like you.’ She wagged a forefinger at him.
God, he thought, still smarting from that last thrust, how pretty that mannerism is now and how dreadful it will be when she’s forty. And will she still chew her hair? In such reflections a little comfort lies.
‘Now,’ she said, her head on one side, ‘I think I will go down and dust Kventin’s study.’
9
BURDEN listened with disdain and incredulity to Wexford’s condensed and to some extent expurgated account of his two interviews. It aroused in him a cold angry disgust. Anyone who knew the chief inspector less well than he might imagine Wexford to be quite smitten by the charms-invisible to Burden-of that immoral Dutch girl.
‘I cannot see,’ he said, standing by the window in Wexford’s office and disentangling a knot in the string of the venetian blind, ‘why you suppose this story of theirs lets them out at all.’ He straightened the string and wound it round its hooks in a figure of eight. Burden liked everything to be neat and shipshape even in someone else’s domain. ‘On the contrary, they could have been in it together. You’ve only got that girl’s word that he-er, joined her at eleven-fifteen. It could have been later. Of course she’d back him up.’
‘Oh? Why would she? just what would she get out of being an accessory to the murder of her employer’s wife?’
Burden stared at him. Really, the old man was almost simple at times.
‘Get out of it? Marriage with Nightingale, of course.’
‘Don’t keep saying “of course”. It’s far from of course. And leave that blind alone. Sometimes I think you’ve got a compulsion complex, always tidying everything up. Listen to me, Mike. You’ve got to bring your ideas up to date a bit. You may be only thirty-six but you’re so dead old-fashioned it isn’t true. First of all I want you to know that I believe Nightingale. I believe his story because some instinct in me recognises the truth when I hear it. I don’t believe he’s capable of violence. If he thought his wife had a lover-if he cared, which is more to the point—he’d divorce her. Secondly, Katje Doorn isn’t a kind of Lady Macbeth. She’s a very contemporary young woman who is enjoying life enormously and not the least of what she enjoys is plenty of anxiety-free sex.’
Burden went pink at that and blinked his eyes. He tried to put on a sophisticated expression and failed.
‘What reason have we to suppose she wants to marry Nightingale?’ Wexford went on. ‘He’s an old man to her,’ he said urbanely. ‘She said as much. And for all her immorality, as you’d put it, she’s a nice normal girl who’d recoil in horror from the thought of taking into her bed a man fresh from murdering his wife. Mike, we’ve got to change our whole pattern of thinking in these domestic murder cases. Times have changed. Young women don’t look on marriage as the be-all and end-all of existence any more. Girls like Katje won’t help kill a man’s wife just so that he can make honest women of them. They don’t think they’re dishonest women just because they’re not virgins. And as for Katje wanting him for his money, I don’t think she’s given much thought to money yet. That may come later. At present she’s out for a good time without any worry.’