‘I knew she took a maternal interest in him. We had no children of our own. She asked me to get a friend of mine at the B.B.C. to hear him sing and I wasn’t too keen, but I will now. It’s the least thing-and the last thingI can do for her.’
‘Forgive me-you never suspected the interest might be more than maternal?’
Quentin screwed up his face in distaste, shaking his head violently. ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘there can’t have been, but if there was ... I’ve no right to sit in judgment, not while I and Katje ... Mr Wexford, I don’t understand all these undercurrents. I don’t understand any of it.’
‘Nor do l,’said Wexford grimly.
Meanwhile Burden was making discoveries of his own. Emerging from the Old House and from the gate to the courtyard which surrounded it, he encountered Mrs Cantrip coming from the kitchen garden with a bunch of parsley in her hand.
‘Oh, you startled me, sir,’ she said. ‘You walk so soft. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Getting a bit late for that, isn’t it?’ said Burden looking at his watch and seeing that it was half past five. ‘When do you knock off, anyway?’
‘Supposed to be at four and that’s a fact, but we’re all at sixes and sevens these days, don’t know where we are. Come on, sir, do. It’ll do you good and there’s Will waiting to have a word with you.’
‘What does he want me for?’ Burden walked towards the house with her.
‘He wouldn’t say, sir. Something about a scarf, I reckon.’
In the kitchen Will Palmer sat at the table next to the man Burden had observed earlier talking over her gate to Mrs Lovell. They were drinking tea from cups of dark glazed earthenware. The other man’s presence in the kitchen was explained by the two rabbits, four wood pigeons and a basket of eggs that filled a checkered counter top.
As soon as he saw Burden, Palmer got to his feet.
‘Got something to show you, governor.’
‘Well?’ Burden took his teacup from Mrs Cantrip, removing it as far as possible from the dead game.
‘This is it.’ With an air of triumph, Palmer produced from under the table a wet polythene bag, its neck fastened with garden twine. Burden undid the string and pulled out a piece of material. It was dampish but not wet and it was still plainly recognisable as a silk scarf.
The design on it was art nouveau, a stylised exquisite pattern of gold leaves on a primrose ground. Across the centre of the scarf was a long brown stain. Burden frowned. I Where did you find this?’
‘In a hole in the oak way down Cleever’s Vale.’
‘And where might Cleever’s Vale be?’
Palmer’s face registered a stunned astonishment. It was evidently inconceivable to him that anyone, especially a policeman, should be ignorant of something that to Myfleet was as much a part of the scene as the forest itself.
Mrs Cantrip said impatiently, ‘It’s part of the estate, sir, part of the park, the bit you come to first when you’re coming this way from Kingsmarkham.’
‘I was by way of clearing that old fungus from the oak,’ Palmer said, recovering from his astonishment. ‘Then I come on this hole, see? Likely an owl made it ...’
‘Squirrel,’ said the other man laconically, wiping his mouth. His face was very dark with a good day’s growth of beard.
‘Or a squirrel, as I was going to say, Alf,’ said Palmer, ruffled. ‘An owl or a squirrel, it being over-large for a woodpecker.’
‘Spare me the natural history.’
‘All right, governor, no need to get sarky.’ Palmer’s expression gained a new importance as the door to the garden opened and Sean came in to take his place at the table. ‘This hole would be about six feet up, I reckon,’ Palmer continued. ‘Level with the top of my head, it was.’
‘Rot,’said the swarthy man.
Palmer glared at him, but, apparently deciding that the interjection referred to the cause of the hole rather than to the nonsensical content of his remarks, went on, ‘This old fungus were all round the hole. What we call the Oyster Mushroom, sir, on account of his cap looks like an oyster, see? The Poor Man’s Oyster we calls him in these parts and mighty good fried he is, I can tell you.’
‘Stewed.’
‘Or stewed, Alf,’ said Palmer more graciously. ‘To cut a long story short, I stuck me hand in this hole and that’s what I found, what’s in that bag.’
‘In the bag? Or did you put it in?’
‘It wasn’t in no bag, governor. just rolled up and stuffed down the hole.’
‘Have you ever seen it before?'
‘Of course he has,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘It belonged to poor Mrs Nightingale. She used to wear it for a headscarf like when she went out walking.’ She bent over the scarf and recoiled sharply. ‘Would that be her blood, sir?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Sean Lovell jerked to his feet.
‘Going to be sick!’ he shouted. Moving faster than Burden would have believed possible in a woman of her age, Mrs Cantrip flung open the garden door.
‘Not in my kitchen, you’re noff With the unmoved scowl of the English rustic, the old gardener and the purveyor of game watched him stagger out, then listened with a quickened though still apathetic interest to the sounds of retching. Alf, hitherto monosyllabic, made what was for him a long speech.
‘Old stomach complaint,’ he said. ‘No guts.’ He laughed. ‘Wants to be a bleeding pop singer. Mental, I reckon he is.’
Mrs Cantrip took his cup and saucer and put them in the dishwasher. When the man made no move to go, she said briskly, ‘I’ll say good night, then, Alf. And we don’t want no more eggs till Monday.’
Leaving the Manor by the front and back doors respectively, Wexford and Burden encountered each other in the village street. There they exchanged news and were about to embark on one of their acrimonious but valuable discussions when Mrs Cantrip, puffed with running, caughtthem up.
‘Oh, sir,’ she said to Burden, ‘I am glad I caught you. I want to apologise, like, for the way those two went on, old Will and that Alf.
Will’s that talkative and as for Alf Tawney ... He’s not got the manners he was born with. Would I be in your way if I was to walk along with you a bit?’
‘Not at all, Mrs Cantrip,’ said Wexford graciously. He stopped by the official car and told Bryant to drive it back to the station.’Who’s Alf Tawney?’
‘Just a fellow we get our veg and chickens and such from, sir. He lives in a caravan on his ground at Clusterwell.’ Mrs Cantrip’s face closed into a kind of prudish blankness, just as Burden’s own sometimes did when a subject he would have described as ‘suggestive’ was about to be discussed. ‘You wouldn’t be interested in Alf,’ she said primly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Wexford. ‘Anyone associated with Mrs Nightingale interests us, even if he only supplied her with vegetables.’
‘Mrs Nightingale never associated with him, sir,’ said Mrs Cantrip, shocked. ‘If she’d ever heard of him it was only through that Sean.’ She sighed, as if coming to a painful decision. ‘Well, you may as well know, seeing as it’s common gossip and the scandal of the village. Alf’s carrying on with Sean’s mother.’
‘Dear me,’said Wexford.’That’s bad.’
‘There’s some as don’t blame Alf, him being a widow man since his boy was twelve and what with no one to cook his meals and see to his things. It’s her I blame. For, like the Bible says, sir, woman is a temptation to man and no two ways about it:
‘True,’said Wexford with feeling.
‘Mind you, I don’t care for that Scan myself, but there’s none as ‘d deny Mrs Lovell’s neglected him shameful. You might say he’s never had no proper mother.’
‘And Mrs Nightingale never had a son.’