‘Naturally, we shall wait six months. A year might be more ...’
‘But I am not waiting a whole year, Kventin. Half a year perhaps. It is not fair if you are making me wait a whole year for my flat in London and my new fast sports car and my going all round the world for my honeymoon.’
So she was a gold-digger, after all. Wexford thought sadly. He had been wrong. These days it seemed that he was always wrong.
‘Now I should like to see you alone, sir,’ he said.
‘Yes, of course.’
Abruptly Villiers threw open the french windows and walked out of the room. Casting a dazzling smile over her shoulder, Katje followed him to pause on the lawn and survey everything around her with frank concupiscence.
‘She’ll go home to her parents until the wedding,’ Quentin said, and earnestly, ‘I want everything to be right. I want-what is it Antony says?
“Read not my blemishes in the world’s report. I have not kept my square.”
‘ ‘‘But that to come,” ‘ Wexford capped it, ‘ “shall all be done by the rule.” ‘ I daresay, he thought, I daresay. But what of ‘that to come’ for her? Such a long future, so much money, such idleness for temptations to gain ground in. She was the last for him and he perhaps only one of the first for her. Would they dine at the Olive sometimes and be served by a waiter who had once romped with this lady of the Manor in the coverts of Cheriton Forest? Poor Kventin, Wexford thought, aping her accent. He was no longer to be envied. It was a nice game he was playing, a game which had once seemed enticing to Wexford. But not any more, not on those terms, for it wasn’t worth the exorbitant price of the candle.
‘The jewellery,’ he said laconically, ‘is all fake. I took it to an old jeweller in Queen Street. He’s helped me in the past and he’s absolutely reliable. If he says it’s fake, it’s fake. She must have sold what you bought her and had exact copies made.’
‘But why, Chief Inspector? I gave her all the money she could possibly have needed. If she wanted more she had only to ask. She knew that.’
‘Would you have given her thirty thousand pounds?’ ‘I’m not a millionaire, Mr Wexford.’ Quentin sighed, bit his lip. ‘The jewellery was hers to do as she liked with. She chose to sell it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter why.’ He met Wexford’s eyes pleadingly. ‘I’d like to forget the whole thing.’
‘It isn’t as simple as that.’ Wexford sat down, rather imperiously motioning his host to sit down too. ‘Your wife sold her jewellery because she needed money. Now it’s my turn to ask why. Why did she need money, Mr Nightingale, and what did she do with it? We know she spent it. Her bank account was overdrawn. Where did the money go?’
Quentin shrugged unhappily. ‘She was generous. Perhaps she gave it to charity.’
‘Thirty thousand pounds? And why keep it dark from you? No, Mr Nightingale, I think your wife was blackmailed.’
Quentin leaned forward, frowning his bewilderment. ‘But that’s impossible! People are only blackmailed when they’ve done something against the law. My wife was ...’
He waved a helpless hand, encompassing the room. Wexford understood what he was trying to put into words, that the woman who had reigned here had been entirely cushioned by her position and her wealth from the squalor of criminal temptation. We aren’t of that class, his eyes said, of that seamy underworld. Haven’t you realised yet that we are only a little lower than the angels?
‘It need not necessarily have been some offence against the law,’ said Wexford quietly, ‘but against morality.’
Puzzled, Quentin seemed to consider. Then his brow cleared. ‘You mean she might have been unfaithful to me and someone found it out?’
‘Something of that kind, sir.’
‘No, Mr Wexford, you’re on the wrong track. I wasn’t that kind of husband either. Whatever my wife had done I would have forgiven her, and she knew it. We discussed the subject soon after we were married, as young couples do. Elizabeth asked me for my views. It was an academic question, you understand, a matter of seeking to know me better. We were-we were very much in love in those days.’
‘And what was your answer?’
‘That if she ever came to me and told me she hadthat there had been someone else, I would never blame her, certainly not divorce her. Not as long as she came to me and confided in me. I told her that I believed forgiveness to be a part of love, and that in such circumstances, when she was unhappy, she would need me most. And I would expect her to do the same by me if the need arose. I would never have divorced her. She was my wife, and even when we grew so terribly apart I still believed that marriage was for ever.’
A nice man, Wexford thought, his usual cynicism for a moment in abeyance, a kind and eminently civilised person. Cynicism returned. An ideal husband, or a man fate had designed for women to take for a ride? It was, he reflected, a good thing Quentin Nightingale had formed such admirable principles during his first marriage as he would certainly have to put them into practice during his second.
‘There are some things,’ he said, ‘which cannot be forgiven.’
Illustrations came into his mind, examples from his long experience of wrongdoers. There was the woman who had taken her husband back a dozen times after his terms of imprisonment for theft, but had refused ever to see him again when he had been convicted for indecent exposure. Or the man who had borne his wife’s infidelity for twenty years but when she was caught shoplifting had repudiated her.
‘You’re an intelligent broad-minded man,’ he said at last, ‘but you’re very conventional. I wonder if you really know yourself. You know what pleases you, but do you know what would disgust you?’
‘Nothing Elizabeth could have done,’ Quentin said obstinately.
‘Perhaps not, but she believed it would have disgusted you, believed it so firmly that she was prepared to pay thirty thousand pounds to keep it from you.’
‘If you say so,’ Quentin said helplessly. ‘Who could she ever have known that would extort money from her?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me that. A servant?’
‘Mrs Cantrip who has been devoted to us for sixteen years? Old Will who is respect itself? Sean who worshipped the very ground she walked on? You see yourself how absurd this is. Why should it be a servant, anyway?’
‘It’s more unlikely that it was one of her friends, isn’t it, sir? A servant who lived in this house would have access to private papers, might have been an eye witness, might have discovered photographs.’
‘Evidence of infidelity? I tell you, she knew I’d have understood. I’d have overlooked it, however much it hurt.’
Wexford stared at him, hardly able to contain his impatience. The man didn’t know what life was. He spoke of infidelity as if it was always a straightforward and temporary preference for someone else, a matter of temptation, of love and of subsequent guilt. He was innocent. But Wexford wasn’t. He had seen the letters even the most elevated and cultured lovers write to each other, the photographs elegant and fastidious women revel in posing for. Thirty thousand pounds might not be too great a price to pay to keep them from a husband’s eye.
‘You had a series of au pair girls, you told me.’
‘Ordinary young girls,’ Quentin said. ‘Quite straightforward and happy to be here. They adored Elizabeth.’
Just like Katje did?
‘Before the girls came,’ said Wexford, ‘you had a married couple. What was the name again?’
‘Twohey,’ said Quentin Nightingale.
The small white cottage was being scoured from top to bottom. When Wexford arrived, Mrs Cantrip abandoned the cleaning that had necessarily to be done on a Saturday, and sat down with the ginger cat in her lap.