The room smelt strongly of polish and mothballs.
‘Twohey, sir?’ she said. ‘Mr Nightingale dismissed him for insolence. He never showed a proper respect, not from the start, and he never did a fair day’s work, as far as I could see. Always hanging about where he wasn’t supposed to be, snooping and listening, if you know what I mean.’
‘And that was why he was sacked?’
The cat slithered to the floor and began sharpening its claws against a table leg. ‘Stop that, Ginger,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘Well, things came to a head, sir, and that’s a fact. A couple of weeks before he was sacked he got so disrespectful to Madam it was past bearing, and Madam always so gentle and never standing up for herself.’ She picked up the cat and dropped it out of the window among the zinnias and dahlias. ‘She caught him helping himself to Mr Nightingale’s whisky, and when she spoke to him about it, he said, “There’s plenty more where that came from,” if you’ve ever heard the like.’
‘And his wife?’
‘She wasn’t so bad. Under his thumb, if èhe truth were known. She took quite a fancy to me. Sent me a Christmas card two years running.’
‘You know their address, then?’ Wexford asked urgently.
‘I never wrote back, sir,’ said Mrs Cantrip, bristling a little with indignation. ‘They weren’t the kind of folks I’d care to associate with. I did notice the first one had a Newcastle postmark.’
‘Did they continue in service?’
‘That I wouldn’t know, sir. Twohey was always bragging and boasting, and he did say he was sick of the life. Going to set himself up in a hardware business, he said, but Mrs Twohey said to me, out of his hearing like, that it was all castles in the air. Where would they get the capital, sir? They hadn’t a penny to bless themselves and that’s a fact.’
Having left Sergeant Martin to begin the search for Twohey, Wexford drove down Tabard Road and parked in front of a bungalow whose pink front door matched the geraniums in its garden. Two children sat on a groundsheet on the lawn, but at opposite ends of it, as if they had put as much space between them as was consistent with their mother’s rule about not sitting on damp grass. The boy was cleaning paint brushes, the girl transferring caterpillars from a glass jar into a collection of matchboxes.
Wexford greeted them cheerfully, then strolled up to their father who was painting his garage doors. He noted with an inward chuckle that Burden looked anything but pleased to see him.
‘Carry on painting,’ said Wexford. ‘I like watching other people work. You needn’t look so worried. I only want you to lend an ear while I talk.’ And he told Burden about the jewellery and about Twohey.
Behind them the children, who had been silent since Wexford’s arrival, began a soft though fierce bickering.
‘I was wondering if what this Twohey found out was the secret of Villiers’ and Mrs Nightingale’s intense dislike of each other. There’s no doubt Nightingale is very attached to Villiers, and if he found out his wife had once done her brother some dreadful injury ...’
‘But what dreadful injury, sir?’ Burden dipped his brush into the paint, scraping the bottom of the tin. ‘Look at my two,’ he said bitterly. ‘They really seem to hate each other and there’s no cause for it, as far as I can see. They’ve been like cat and dog ever since John was a toddler and Pat in her pram.’
‘It’ll be different when they’re grown up.’
‘But will it? Why shouldn’t the Villiers-Nightingale case be a parallel?
Apparently you get these cases of brothers and sisters who are absolutely incompatible.’
‘They were separated,’ Wexford said. ‘They never had a chance to adjust to each other in the late teens and early twenties. If you separated Pat and John, then they might turn out like Villiers and Elizabeth, because one or other of them might let an old grievance smoulder. Your two will grow more tolerant from daily contact.’
'I don’t know,’ said Burden. ‘Sometimes I think of sending one of them away to boarding school.’
‘But you can see that separation doesn’t work, Mike.’ Wexford sat down on the short stepladder. ‘I wonder if it’s possible that Twohey killed her himself? If it was he she met in the forest and he killed her when she told him her source of supply had come to an end?’
‘Then how,’ Burden objected, ‘did he get hold of the torch? He was the last person to have access to the garden room at the Manor.’
‘True. Now, let’s see. Our case against Georgina falls to the ground because now we know Georgina had no motive. Villiers remains a possibility. He could have killed her because, her money having come to an end, she told him she would reveal everything to Nightingale. That bloody secret, whatever it was. Sean could have killed her because he saw her with another man.’
‘No, sir. We know it was premeditated. The killer took the torch with him.’
Burden placed his brush on his paint rag and turned the now empty tin upside down. ‘John!’ he called, then, ‘John!’ more loudly to make his voice heard above the quarrelling. ‘Go into the shed, will you, and fetch me another tin of pink?’
‘I can’t. It’s pitch dark in there and the bulb’s gone.’
‘Well, take a torch, then. Don’t be so feeble, and leave your sister’s things alone.’
‘Encouraging garden pests,’ said John scathingly. He got up with a sigh, trailed into the open garage and reached up for a torch which stood on a high shelf.
Wexford watched him, saying slowly, ‘Of course. Why didn’t I think of it before? We realised almost from the first that when you’re going into a place that you know will be dark you take a torch with you. But you take your own torch, don’t you? Everyone owns a torch. John knew exactly where his torch was and he fetched it as a matter of course. We’ve been daft, Mike. We thought of someone going to the Manor and taking the Nightingales’ torch. But why should they? What possible purpose could there be in going out of your way in securing a weapon that was the property of the woman you intended to kill? Why not bring your own?’
‘But the murderer didn’t bring his own,’ Burden objected. He struck his forehead with the flat of his hand, leaving a broad pink smear. ‘No, I’m being stupid. You mean that, if we exclude Nightingale himself, the only possible person to have taken that torch into the wood was Elizabeth herself?’
‘That’s what I mean. And you know what else it means? No one would choose a torch as a murder weapon if there was anything else to hand. Therefore, no one planned this murder. The killer premeditated nothing. He (or she) was overcome by an impulse of the moment and struck Elizabeth Nightingale with the torch she herself had brought with her.’
Burden nodded gravely. ‘She brought it,’ he agreed, ‘but someone else put it back.’
And, Wexford asked himself, how did Villiers know the jewels were fakes?
14
WEXFORD walked to church with his wife and left her at the gate. Without any religious feeling himself, he sometimes went to morning service to please her. Today his office called him as peremptorily as the church bells had called her, but with a silent beckoning finger.
Burden was already there, busy at the phone, setting in motion the search for Twohey.
‘Born in Dublin about fifty years ago,’ Wexford heard him say. ‘Dark, Irish-looking, small eyes, cyst at the left corner of his mouth unless he’s had it removed. One conviction, fraudulent conversion while he was a hotel manager in Manchester in 1954. That’s right, could be in your Newcastle or Newcastle under Lyme. Keep in touch.’ He put the receiver down and grinned wryly at his superior.
‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ Wexford said when Burden handed him a photograph of the man he had described. ‘I thought I told you to take last evening off and finish your painting?’