Burden compressed his lips into a thin line.
‘You’ve had your lunch,’ said Wexford, ‘so I suggest you get over there now.’
Burden groaned. ‘Do I have to?’ he said in an almost schoolboy voice, in the voice of his son.
‘Are you joking?’ Wexford roared. ‘Are you out of your mind? She won’t eat you.’
‘It’s not being eaten that I’m scared of,’ said Burden. He screwed up his lunch paper, dropped it in the basket and went out, giving Wexford a glance of mock dismay.
There was nothing more for him to do now, Wexford reflected, but wait. He sent Bryant to the canteen to fetch him some lunch and after he had eaten it a great weariness overcame him. He decided to read to keep himself awake and, since the only reading matter he had to hand apart from a heap of reports he knew by heart was the book Denys Villiers had given him, he read that. Or, to put it more accurately, he read the first three paragraphs, only to nod off and nearly jump out of his skin when the phone bell shrilled.
‘Try hardware shops,’ he told his caller tiredly. ‘Especially those which have changed hands in the past four years. He may have changed his name.’
With a spark of inspiration, he added, ‘I’d be interested in any iron—
monger’s shop called Nightingale’s or, say, the Manor Stores.’
He returned to page one of Wordsworth in Love, flicked on to a family tree.
There, in strong black type, was the name, George Gordon Wordsworth. He had been, Wexford noted, the poet’s own grandson. And this piece of information, already recorded in his newly published book, was what Villiers had led him to believe he had sought from the school library. The man had a weakness, then, the weakness of underrating his opponent.
It was nearly six before Burden got back.
‘My God, you’ve been long enough.’
‘She and Nightingale were out. Picnicking, I gather. I waited till they got back.’
‘Could she remember the address on the parcels?’
‘She says she only posted parcels of stuff Mrs Nightingale sent to Holland, except for last Tuesday, the day Mrs N. got killed. Then she posted two, one to her mother in Holland and another one. She never even looked at the address.’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Well, it was worth a try, Mike. Sorry about your Sunday afternoon. I don’t suppose you met with a fate worse than death, though, did you?’
‘Nightingale was there all the time.’
‘You make him sound,’ said Wexford, ‘like a nurse in a doctor’s consulting room. Well, I’m going to Myfleet myself now just for another scout round that forest and maybe a talk with Mrs Cantrip. I’d advise you to go home.
They can put through any calls that come in.’
It might take days, it might take weeks, but eventually Twohey would be found. And then, Wexford thought as he drove past the King’s School, he would talk. He would sit in Wexford’s office, staring at the expanse of pale blue sky through the picture window as hundreds of unscrupulous villains had sat and stared before him, but, unlike most of them, he would have no reason to hold his tongue. A long term of imprisonment awaited him whether he spoke or kept silent. Probably he would be glad to talk to revenge himself on the dead woman and all her family, for no more money would come his way from that source.
And what would he say? That Villiers’ love for his brother-in-law was of a kind that their narrow society couldn’t condone? That Elizabeth had had a series of lovers young enough to be her own children? Or that, long ago, Villiers and Elizabeth had been concerned together in a criminal conspiracy?
Suddenly Wexford remembered the bombed house in which their parents had died. They were only children then, but children had been known to commit murder ... Two people buried under rubble but still alive, parents who were perhaps a stumbling block in the way of their children’s ambition.
Certainly Villiers had benefited greatly from their deaths. His sister hadn’t. Did the clue lie there?
Twohey would know. It was terribly frustrating to Wexford to think that perhaps Twohey was’the only person now alive who did know and that he was hidden away comfortably with his secret. And it might be days, it might be weeks ....
On to Myfleet. The church bells of Clusterwell were ringing for Evensong and, as soon as their chimes died away behind him, he heard those of Myfleet ahead, eight bells ringing great brazen changes through the evening air.
There was a note pinned to Mrs Cantrip’s front door: Gone to church. Back 7.30.
An invitation to burglars, Wexford thought, only he couldn’t remember any burglary taking place in Myfleet for ten years. Its trees shrouded crimes of greater moment. He turned away, and the ginger cat, locked out among the flowers, rubbed itself against his legs.
Breathing in the scent of the pines that all day had been bathed in sunshine. Wexford entered the forest. The path he took was the path Elizabeth Nightingale had taken that night, and he followed it until he came to the clearing where Burden believed she had met Twohey and he believed-what?
Perhaps Burden was right again, after all. Those parcels might never have been posted but delivered by hand. She would hardly have carried such large sums of money loose in her handbag. Anyway, she hadn’t had a handbag, only a coat and a torch ... He stared at the lichened log where she had sat. The scrape marks of four shoes were still apparent on the dry sandy ground and in the whorls of pine needles four shifting feet had made.
If her companion was Twohey—observed perhaps by Sean who misunderstood the purpose of their meetinghow had Twohey come? Over the black wooded hill from Pomfret? Or by the path that skirted the Myfleet cottage gardens and came out eventually-where? Wexford decided to explore it.
The church bells had stopped and the place was utterly silent. He walked between the straight narrow pine trunks, looking up sometimes at the patches of pale silvery sky, and sometimes from side to side of him into the forest itself which was so dark and, up to head height, so sterile, that no birds sang there and the only visible life was that of the midges which danced in swarms.
It was on account of the midges that he was glad when the trees to the left of him petered out and he found himself walking against the cottage fences. Presently, ahead of him, he heard a whisper of music. It was a sentimental treacly melody that he soon defined as belonging to the pop or dance-music order, and it reminded Wexford of those soft and faintly erotic tunes which had floated down to him from Katje Doorn’s transistor.
just as he was thinking how pleasant and undemanding it sounded on this peaceful summer evening, it ceased and was succeeded by an appalling cacophony, the furious result of several saxophones, organs, drums and electric guitars all being played at once.
Wexford put his head over the fence and stared into the square plot of land, part wilderness and part rubbish dump, which was the Lovells’back garden. From the open kitchen window some fifty feet of electric lead stretched to the shed from which the noise emanated. Wexford backed a little, covering his assaulted ears.
Then he took his hands down.
Inside the shed someone was speaking. The tone and timbre of the voice were unmistakable, its accent deliberately cultivated. Mid-Atlantic, Wexford decided.
With mounting curiosity, he listened.
Addressing his unseen, indeed non-existent, audience as guys and dolls’, Scan Lovell, with smooth professional patter, made a short dismissive comment on the last piece of music and then, more enthusiastically, announced his next record. This time it was the effusion of a big band and it was even more discordant than the composition which had made Wexford cover his ears.