‘I forgot,’said Villiers calmly.
‘You forgot? When I asked you most pointedly?’
‘Nevertheless, I forgot.’ Villiers’ cold face showed neither fear nor embarrassment. The man had a curious strength, an iron self-control; he seemed unbreakable. Why then have this strange sensation that he had been irrevocably broken long ago and that his strength had never been quite strong enough?
‘Come now, sir. You forgot you went out. Very well. Have you also forgotten where you went?’
‘I went,’ said Villiers, ‘where I said I was going, to the school library to look up a reference.’
‘What reference?’
With cool contempt, Villiers said, ‘Would it mean anything to you if I told you?’ He shrugged. ‘All right. I was looking up the precise relationship of George Gordon Wordsworth to William Wordsworth.’
Somewhat to his own humiliation, Wexford found that it did indeed mean nothing. He swung round on Georgina who crouched in her deckchair, gooseflesh on her arms and tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip. For once she wore no jewellery. Did the cheap gaudy stuff no longer please her now that she would be able to adorn herself with real gems? Or had she ferreted out of Nightingale the scornful words in which her sister-in-law’s bequest was couched?
‘Did you accompany your husband to the school, Mrs Villiers?’ He noted the faint shake of her head. ‘Had you done so you would hardly have gone in two separate cars. But you went out. Where?’
Her voice came in a shrill squeak. ‘I drove-I drove around the lanes.’
‘May I ask why?’
Villiers answered for her. ‘My wife,’ he said silkily, ‘was annoyed with me for going out. She did what she often does on such occasions, took her own car and went for a country drive.’ He gave a waspish smile. ‘To cool her temper,’ he said.
‘I’m not convinced of any of this,’ said Wexford slowly. He glanced around the bare garden. ‘I think we could all talk more frankly down at the police station.’
Georgina gave a wild cry and threw herself into her husband’s arms.
Wexford expected him to repudiate her but instead he held her with almost a lover’s tenderness. Standing up now, he stroked her dry rough hair. ‘As you like,’he said indifferently.
‘No, no, no,’ she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘You must tell him. You tell him.’
He was going to lie again. Wexford was sure of it.
‘What my wife wants me to tell you,’ said Villiers, ‘is that you’ve been a complete bloody fooP He patted Georgina as one pats a dog and then he pushed her away. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Chief Inspector.
Next time you suspect anyone of murder for gain, you had better check up on the value of what they’re gaining. I’m a good liar,’he said urbanely, ‘but I’m not lying now. My sister’s pieces of jewellery are all fakes.
I’d be surprised if the whole lot would fetch more than fifty pounds. You had better look elsewhere, Mr Wexford. You know as well as I do that your absurd trumped-up case against my wife has nothing but motive to make it stand up, and where is your motive now?’
Gone with the sun, thought Wexford, watching it sink behind the misty fields. He was suddenly quite sure that this time Villiers hadn’t been lying.
13
KATJE was nowhere to be seen and it was Quentin Nightingale himself who this time admitted Wex ford to the Manor. But Wexford sensed her recent presence in the austere study. He felt that she had been standing here with Quentin, in his arms, kissing him, then running away when the bell rang.
Quentin himself had an abstracted air the look of a lover dreaming of the past, impatient for ;he near future. Wexford’s news jolted him into unwelcome reality.
‘Every piece of jewellery Elizabeth had I bought for her,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got the receipts for most of it, if you’d care to see them.’
‘Later. First I should like to see the stones themselves again.’
Quentin removed the Stubbs, opened the safe. Then he lifted the jewels from their boxes in handfuls, letting them fall through his fingers, as a child on its first visit to the seaside sifts shells and stones, its pleasure mixed with astonishment at the unknown.
He picked out from the heap his dead wife’s engagement ring and took it to the window, but the growing dusk defeated him and, returning, he switched on the desk lamp.
‘My glasses,’ he said. ‘Just by your elbow. Would you mind?’
Wexford handed them to him.
‘This is a fake.’ There was a small quiver in Quentin’s voice. ‘This isn’t the ring I gave Elizabeth on our engagement.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Not because I’m an expert on precious stones. I shall have to find an expert to tell us for sure about the rest. Are there any to be found around here or should I get someone down from London?’
‘We can find someone here. You haven’t told me how you know that ring is false.’
Quentin said bitterly, ‘When I bought it for her I had some words engraved inside it.’ Taking the ring from him, Wexford knew he wasn’t going to be told what those words had been. ‘There’s nothing inside this one.’
‘No.’
Quentin sat down. With a rapid, almost reflex gesture, he pushed the sparkling heap away from him, knocking a rivière of diamonds—-diamonds or paste?-on to the carpet. It lay like a glittering snake at Wexford’s feet.
‘I suppose,’ Quentin said, ‘that they’re all copies. Perfect copies too, aren’t they? All but one. Exquisite facsimiles of the real thing- except one. She had the stone copied and the platinum copied but she didn’t bother to have the words copied because they meant nothing to her. How utterly indifferent she must have been to me ....'
Was it this indifference, finally and irrevocably brought home to him, that made Quentin’s mind up for him? Was it this knowledge that led him to take his new and perhaps reckless step? Much later, after the cast was over, Wexford often asked himself these questions. But on the following morning, returning to the Manor from the jeweller’s, he hadn’t given them a moment’s thought and the news came to him as a complete surprise.
Katje showed him into the drawing room and he was already unwrapping the brown paper from the jewel boxes as he followed her when he saw that Quentin wasn’t alone. Denys Villiers was with him, standing by the french windows and holding both Quentin’s hands in his. Wexford heard the tail end of what sounded like a speech.
‘... Anyway, my best congratulations, Quen. I couldn’t be more glad for you.’ Then Villiers saw Wexford. He dropped his brother-in-law’s hands and his face set arrogantly.
‘May I know what ground there is for congratulation, sir?’
Villiers shrugged and turned his back, but Quentin, flushing, put out a hand to Katje and the girl ran to him.
‘Perhaps I’m indiscreet to tell you, Chief Inspector. You might read so much into this.’ Villiers made a faint derisive sound. ‘I’d like it kept secret for the time being,’ Quentin said. ‘Katje and I are going to be married.’
Wexford put down his parcel. ‘Indeed?’ he said. They looked like father and daughter standing there. There was even a slight resemblance between them, the family likeness apparent between any two people belonging to the classic north European type. ‘Then let me congratulate you also,’ he said, and again he apologised silently to Burden, whose ideas had perhaps been not so oldfashioned after all.