‘Oh, no. I shouldn’t care for that at all.’ Marriott wrinkled his nose distastefully. ‘Once have them permanently in and you can’t call your soul your own.’ He gave Wexford a sidelong very sly look. ‘Besides, there’s safety in numbers.’
Wexford laughed. ‘Quite a devil with the ladies, aren’t you, Lionel?’
‘I have my successes,’ said Marriott modestly. He put three spoonfuls of Earl Grey into the teapot and poured the boiling water on daintily. ‘Shall I go on with the story?'
‘Please.’
‘Well, as I said, June didn’t at all care for Denys work ing at the Manor. He was up there most evenings natter ing with Quen, you see, and every day in the holidays to work. She thought he ought to be out with her, waving banners and writing things on walls. So finally she walked out on him.’
‘Leaving him to his menage a trois?’
‘What a funny way of putting it. Still, no doubt, there was a triangular element there, but not an isosceles triangle. Poor Elizabeth was definitely the unequal angle. It always used to fascinate me when I went up there to see Denys and Quen utterly immersed in each other, books, books, books, my dear, and a positively ringing exchange of Wordsworth quotes, the two of them groaning that they had thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears. And all the time poor Elizabeth sat there reading Vogue and not a word to say for herself.’
‘I daresay you found something to chat to her about,’ said Wexford, drinking his tea. ‘I never met anyone who knew so much about-what shall I say?-current trivia?’
‘Really, Reg, you are unkind. I’ll have you know, Elizabeth wasn’t at all an empty-headed woman. just as intelligent as Denys in her way.’
‘That’s not what he says, but let it pass.’
‘Why are we sitting out here, anyway? I never could abide kitchens and I’m pining for my gin. Good, the cigar smoke’s cleared.’
Marriott fetched his drink and pulled two chairs up to the open french windows. His small walled garden was full of butterflies, drinking from the buddleia flQwcrs and sunning themselves with spread wings on the stones. Wexford sat where he could feel the warmth of the precious September sun that would soon be gone. It made him feel lazy and he told himself sternly to keep his mind alert.
‘So Villiers spent a good deal of his time at the Manor, did he?' he said.
‘Believe me, you couldn’t set foot in the place without finding him there. And as if that wasn’t enough to make him and Quen heartily sick of each other, he used to go away on holiday with them too.’
‘That must have been hard on Mrs Nightingale, especially as they excluded her from their conversations. just what were her interests, Lionel?’
Marriott bit his lip and seemed to cogitate. ‘Let me see,’ he said with the air of someone dredging in the depths. ‘Well, she took an active part in county life, you know, organising things and sitting on committees. And she spent hours every day making herself look lovely. She did the flowers and a bit of gardening ...’
‘Is that so?’ Wexford interrupted. ‘In the hothouse maybe with young Scan Lovell?’
‘What can you mean, dear old boy?’
‘As one of Wordsworth’s contemporaries put it:
“What men call gallantry and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.”‘
Marriott smiled, opening his eyes wide. ‘So that’s the way the wind’s blowing, is it?’
‘Well, she wasn’t having secret meetings in the forest with old Sir George Larkin-Smith, was she? Or the rector of Myfleet or Will Palmer?
Unless it was you, Lionel.’
‘I wondered when you were going to ask me that.’ Marriott stretched languorously in the sunshine and laughed. ‘But no, it wasn’t. And if you’re serious about this, Reg, Hypatia will tell you where I was. Mind you, I’m not saying I didn’t wish I’d had the opportunity ..
‘Maybe you even tried your chances?’
‘Maybe I did.’
This time it was Wexford’s turn to laugh. ‘So we come back to Sean Lovell, don’t we?’
‘She was fond of Sean,’ said Marriott. ‘I met her once coming out of the record shop here in the High Street. She’d been buying the number one pop single in the charts. “I must keep up with my little song-bird,” she said. “Really, he’s the only true Nightingale in-Vyfleet.” Quite witty, I thought. Elizabeth was notfool.’
‘An extraordinary remark to mpke,’ said Wexford.
‘Oh, I don’t know. You read too much into things, my dear. All you policemen are terribly salacious. Sean used to stand under Elizabeth’s windows and serenade her. I suppose she was flattered and it made her feel young. It was a case of heroine worship on one side and a sort of flattered acceptance on the other.’
‘Let’s get back to Villiers,’ said Wexford. ‘But first how about another cup of tea for a poor old salacious policeman?’
Myfleet was a pretty village even on a winter’s day. Now, bathed in mellow sunshine, it lay in its hollow beneath the forest like a sleeping beauty.
This afternoon it seemed unpeopled; only the flowers in cottage gardens stood out in the open enjoying the sun.
Burden drove to the Kingsmarkham end of the village and decided to walk the rest of the way. It was a day made for strolling, for appreciating the scent of ripening fruit and admiring the great multi-petalled dahlias, raised for a flower show or a harvest festival.
But he had been wrong in thinking the village totally deserted. Now, as he approached the Manor, he noticed Mrs Lovell leaning over the gate of her disreputable cottage, talking to a swarthy man in a cap who carried two dead and bleeding rabbits over his arm. The shifty looks he was giving the Manor -though probably the natural accompaniment to his conversation, concerned as it must be with the only topic currently of interest in my fleet- gave him the air of a poacher. Mrs Lovell encouraged him with peals of uninhibited ringing laughter.
He found Scan in the Old House, unloading apples from a basket on to one of the racks. They were pale red and gold, Beauty of Bath, their skins striped and shiny like old silk. The boy was whistling but he stopped abruptly when Burden came in.
‘Come here often, do you?’ Burden asked softly. ‘Is this where you used to meet Mrs Nightingale?’
‘Me?’ He gave Burden a sullen glare, sat down on a stack of silver-birch logs and began to roll a cigarette. ‘It’d be a help,’ he said, ‘if I knew what you was getting at. No, I don’t come here often. Fact is I never set foot in here since April.’ He cocked a thumb at the tunnel staircase. ‘On account of him being up there.’ Scowling, he lit his cigarette. ‘Me and old Palmer, we’ve got strict orders not to come in here disturbing him, see?’
‘You go into the garden room, though, don’t you? You go to sweep it out.
Ever borrowed a torch, Lovell, to light your way when you went to Mrs Nightingale in the forest?’
‘Me?’ Sean said again. ‘Are you off your nut?’ His cigarette had gone out.
He re-lit it, blinking when the flame caught the ragged paper and flared.
Perhaps it provided a flash of mental as well as physical illumination, for he said, ‘You trying to make out I was carrying on with Mrs Nightingale?
You are a nut and a dirty-minded nut at that.’
‘All right, that’ll do,’ said Burden, mortally offended. The supreme injustice of the accusation wounded him more than the insolence. ‘Come now,’ he said, keeping his temper, ‘you were on very friendly terms with her.’
Took,’ said Sean, ‘if you must know, she was interested in helping me with my career.’
‘Helping you do the gardening?’
The boy’s face flushed deeply. Unknowingly, Burden had returned thrust for thrust. ‘Gardening’s not my career,’ Sean said bitterly. ‘Tbat’s just a stop-gap, just to fill in time till I get on with my real work.’