‘I sometimes wonder,’ said Burden like an old man, ‘what the world is coming to.’
‘Let the world look after itself. We’ll concentrate on our own small corner of it. We made a pattern, Mike, and now we’ve destroyed it. What next?
There are two lines to pursue, it seems to me. Who was Mrs Nightingale’s lover? Who had access to that torch?’
‘You’ve had a lab report on it?’
Wexford nodded. ‘There were traces of blood in the threads of the base screw and the lamp screw, and under the switch. The blood was of the same group as Mrs Nightingale’s and it’s a rare group, AB Negative. There’s no doubt the torch was the weapon.’
‘Well, who did have access to it? Who could have replaced it this morning?’
Wexford counted them off on his fingers. ‘Nightingale, Katje, Mrs Cantrip, Will Palmer, Sean Lovell, Georgina Villiers-oh, and Lionel Marriott. Quite a list. We might also include Villiers, as Georgina could have replaced it for him. Now what about Sean? He’s confessed to an admiration for Mrs Nightingale. He’s young and hotheaded, therefore jealous. It may not have been he she went to meet but he could have seen her with that person. His alibi is hopeless. He had access to the torch; his garden gives directly on to the forest.’
‘She was old enough to be his mother,’ said Burden.
Wexford laughed, a raucous bray. ‘My God, Mike, you don’t know what life’s about, do you? It’s because he was twenty and she forty that he would have an affair with her. Like ...’ He paused, then went on with apparent detachment, ‘Like middle-aged men and young girls. It happens all the time. Didn’t you ever fancy any of your mother’s friends?’
‘Certainly noW said Burden, outraged. ‘My mother’s friends were like aunts to me. I called them all auntie. Still do, come to that. What’s so funny?’
‘You,’ said Wexford, ‘and if I didn’t laugh I’d go round the twist.’
Burden was used to this but still he was very offended.
It seemed unfair to him, a sad sign of the times, that a man should be laughed at because he had high principles and a decent concept of what life should be. He gave a thin dry cough and said:
‘I shall go and have another talk with your favourite suspect, young Lovell.’
‘You do that.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘I have a date at four.’ He grinned. ‘A date with someone who is going to enlighten me further as to certain past histories.’
Wexford parked a hundred yards up the road from the school gates, well behind the cars of parents waiting for eleven-year-olds. A crocodile of cricketers in green-stained white came across from the playing fields as the clock on the school tower struck four. If they were punctual in nothing else, King’s pupils were punctual in getting out of school. As the last chime died away, they poured through the gates, laughing, shoving each other, paying no attention to the kerb drill with which Wexford had used to believe they were thoroughly indoctrinated by the road safety officer. Only the supercilious sixth-formers walked sedately, lighting cigarettes when they reached the shadow of the overhanging trees.
Denys Villiers came out in his dark blue Anglia. ‘He sounded his horn repetitively to clear boys out of the road, then, putting his head out of the window, shouted something Wexford couldn’t catch. The tone of his voice was enough. Wexford had the notion that if the man had had a whip he would have used it. He turned his head and saw Marriott trotting out of the main gate. When the little man had passed the car he wound down the window and hissed:
‘ “A frightful fiend doth close behind you tread!”
Marriott jumped, collected himself and smiled.
‘A very overrated poem, I’ve always thought,’ he said. ‘I daresay. I didn’t come here to discuss poetry. You were going to give me the slip, weren’t you?’
Marriott came round the bonnet and got into the car.
‘I must admit I was. I thought you’d give me a lecture for going up to the Manor this morning. Now please don’t, there’s a dear. I’ve had a most exhausting afternoon introducing Paradise Lost to the Lower Fifth and I really can’t stand any more.’
“The mind,” ‘ quoted Wexford, ‘ “is in its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ‘
‘Yes, very clever. I’m different. Mine makes a hell of hell. Do let’s rush, ducky, and get oursOves huge drinks. I suppose you’ll want me to go on with the next instalment on the way.’
'I can’t wait,’ said Wexford, starting the car and moving out into the stream.
‘Where had I got to?’
‘Villiers’first wife.’
‘June,’ said Marriott. ‘She didn’t like me. Oh dear, no. She said I’d be more use teaching in a Borstal institution. The first time she went to the Manor d’you know what she said to Quentin? “I call it scandalous,”
she said, “two people living by themselves in this barrack. It ought to be converted into a mental hospital.” Poor Quen didn’t like that at all.
His beloved house! But that was little June all over. She had a sociology degree and she’d been some kind of probation officer.
‘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 fashionable. 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 God, 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. Associating 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 cocktail 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?’