‘That’s nice,’ said Burden. ‘What time did you reach home?’
‘I told you. About twenty to eleven. We went in and we went straight to bed. And that’s all.’
‘No, it isn’t all. No one comes home from an evening out and goes straight to bed. One of you must have put the car away. One of you must have locked up.’
Oh, well, if that’s what you want. My husband just left the car on the drive. Mine was in the garage.’
‘Did you both go into the house together?’
‘Of course.’
‘Side by side? Squeezing through the door at the same time?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Georgina petulantly. ‘I went in first and then my husband followed about a minute later. He locked the car because it was going to be left on the drive all night. He always does that.’
‘Very prudent. Since you’re evidently so careful, you wouldn’t have put the milk bottles out before you went to the Manor. Who did that when you got home? Who checked that all the windows were closed and the back door locked?’
She hesitated, looking at him sullenly. Her fingers played nervously with her beads. ‘My husband always does that,’she said.’l went to bed first.’
‘How long did it take you to get to bed, Mrs Villiers? Ten minutes? A
quarter of an hour? You didn’t go to bed unwashed and in all your clothes.’
‘Of course I didn’t. I put the bedroom light on and undressed and went to the bathroom and then I went to bed. My husband came to bed. He always reads for about half an hour before we go to sleep.’
‘Double bed, Mrs Villiers?’
‘No, we have twin beds. But you needn’t read anything into that. We’re a very happy couple.’
‘Yes, you told me before. Now, tell me, what time did you go to the Manor?’
‘We got there at about half past eight.’
‘I believe,’ said Burden disarmingly, ‘that you often went there to play bridge. How long did you usually stay there?’
‘Sometimes till midnight in the holidays.’
‘Tuesday night was still in the holidays, wasn’t it? Why did you leave so early?’
‘My—husband,’ said Georgina, putting as she always did a self-conscious pride of ownership into the word, ‘my husband had some research to do down at the school and ...’ She clapped her hand over her mouth but too late to stifle a little sharp cry. ‘When we got home,’ she stammered, ‘he changed his mind and ... Oh, why won’t you leave us alone? We could be happy if everyone would leave us alone!’
Burden’s stare was hard and penetrating. He looked at her without blinking as she began to cry.
‘I left the car on the drive,’ said Villiers to Wexford. ‘No, I didn’t check the back door or the windows. That’s my wife’s province. I went straight to bed and straight to sleep.’
Burden came in. ‘May I, sir?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Wexford.
‘What about this research you were going to do down at the school, sir? The essential research that took you away from the Manor at ten-thirty?’
Villiers lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t you ever make excuses to get away from a boring host and hostess, Inspector?’ he asked imperturbably. ‘Don’t you ever say you’re expecting a phone call or you must get back to that boy of yours?’
Burden scowled at him, furious that John had been brought into this interrogation. It was humiliating to find that Villiers, who ostentatiously ignored him as a private person, should all the time have recognised him as a parent.
‘So this was an empty excuse,’ he said angrily. ‘A deliberate lie.’
‘Sometimes I do tell lies,’ said Villiers, smoking with a kind of frivolous delicacy.’I’m a good liar.’
‘Strange for a man who declares himself indifferent to the opinions of others,’ Wexford commented, and suddenly, meeting Villiers’ arrogant eyes, a couplet came into his head. He quoted it, not only because it was apt but because he felt a pressing unquenchable need to show Villiers that he wasn’t a moron, that he wasn’t the flatfooted unlettered country policeman the writer thought him.
“So much he soared beyond or sunk beneath The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe.”
The effect was astonishing, not at all what he had expected. Villiers didn’t move but his face became feverishly pale. Statue-still, he seemed to be waiting, and not, Wexford thought, for more words, but for action, for some decisive crucial move. And then, perhaps because no one moved but both policemen stood in bewilderment, Villiers laughed.
That laughter electrified Burden into rage.
‘What do you want, Mr Villiers?’ he almost shouted. ‘What are you trying to prove? Why do you try to set yourself so much above everyone else?’
‘Or beneath them, Mr Burden.’ Villiers hadn’t shifted his eyes from Wexford’s face and now they were very wide and very opaque. ‘Or sunk beneath them, remember. As to what I want, that’s simple.’ He got up, turned his back. ‘I want to die,’ he said.
‘And what the hell,’said Wexford thoughtfully as they got back into the car, ‘came over him when I quoted those lines?’
‘Search me,’ said Burden, the Philistine. He made an effort. ‘Er-where do they come from? Wordsworth?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t know where they come from. They were just sort of floating about in my head.’ Burden nodded indifferently. He was used to hearing lines that floated about in his superior’s head. Tedious bookishness, that’s what it was, and it rather embarrassed him. ‘But I’d like to know,’ said Wexford. ‘It’d be a job tracing them, our England being a nest of singing birds.’
‘We’ve got more important things to worry about,’ Burden said impatiently. ‘What’s more to the point is, are we going to be able to find a witness to corroborate that he didn’t go out again after he got home?’
‘Or that she didn’t.’
‘Pity the place is so isolated.’
‘Yes. We need to find someone who passed the place in a car. That can wait till the morning. You get that scarf sent over to the lab and then you can get off home to your painting. Manual work often helps the brain, Mike, and you can have a good think while you’re wielding the brush.’
With a sigh of relief, Burden started the car. ‘Which of those two have you in mind, anyway?’
‘Mike, you’ll say I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’m as near as dammit certain she did it. She’s a strong healthy young woman, physically capable of felling another woman with a torch. It is she and not her husband who inherits. She was at the Manor when the torch was replaced.
She knew the layout of the Manor grounds and she could have noticed the bonfire earlier in the evening. If she got blood on her clothes, she knew she could have burnt her outer clothes-say a sweater-on the fire.’
‘All this,’ said Burden, ‘argues premeditation, that she deliberately chose a torch of all things for her weapon.’
‘Think about it. Try and see what you can make of it all. I’m going to pick up Lionel Marriott and take him to the Olive for a drink.’
12
THE new cocktail bar at the Olive and Dove was almost deserted, for by now most of its patrons had deserted it for the dining room, while the serious drinkers were in the public or the saloon. Wexford shepherded Marriott into a secluded corner and placed a large whisky in front of him. The bar communicated with the dining room by means of double glass doors, but Wexford had made sure the diners were out of Marriott’s line of vision. He wanted their talk to be uninterrupted and Marriott removed from the temptation of waving to friends or sending smiling dumb-show messages to pretty women.