He did not allow himself to dwell on the notion that such changes as he envisaged would destroy her personality and dull all the strangeness that had first attracted him, but it touched the edges of his mind. He pushed it away almost angrily. Why make difficulties where none existed? Why seek always to find flaws in perfect happiness?
Gemma and he would have love, a nightly orgy for two, an endless honeymoon. He turned towards her, pressing his lips against the mass of hair of which he planned to deprive her. Within minutes he was asleep and dreaming that he had found her child, restoring him to her and seeing her, by that gift, transformed into everything he wanted her to be.
“Kingsmarkham?” said Mrs. Scott, smiling comfortably at Wexford. “Oh, yes, we know Kingsmarkham, don’t we, dear?” Expressionless, her husband gave a tiny nod. “We’ve got a niece lives in ever such a nice little house near Kingsmarkham, built back in the seventeen hundreds, it was, and we used to go there regularly for our holidays right up till this year. But now . . .”
Wexford, who while she was speaking had been taking stock of the room and looking particularly at the framed photographs of those older Scott children who had survived, middle-aged now and with teenage children of their own, followed her gaze towards their progenitor.
No need to ask why they wouldn’t go back to Kingsmarkham or to question the implication that they would take no more holidays. Scott was a little old man, nearing eighty, whose face was badly twisted, especially about the mouth. Two sticks hung from the wings of his chair. Wexford supposed that he was unable to walk without their aid and, from his silence, was beginning to suppose that Ralph Scott had also lost the power of speech. It was something of a shock when the distorted mouth opened and a harsh voice said:
“What about a cup of tea Ena?”
“I’ll have it ready in a jiffy, dear.”
Mrs. Scott jumped up and mouthed something to Wexford, indicating that he should join her in the kitchen. This was a sterile-looking place full of gad gets, and it was modern enough to gladden the heart of any house-proud woman, but Mrs. Scott seemed to think it needed apology.
“Mr. Scott had a stroke back in the winter,” she said as she plugged in an electric kettle, “and it’s really aged him. He’s not at all the man he was. That’s why we moved out here from Colchester. But if he was himself I’d have had everything automatic here, he’d have done the lot himself, not left it to those builders. I wish you could have seen my house in Colchester. The central heating was too hot. You had, to have the windows open night and day. Mr. Scott did all that himself. Of course, him being in the trade all his life, there’s nothing he doesn’t how about heating and pipes and all that.” She stopped, stared at the kettle which was making whining noises, and said in a voice that seemed to be suppressing something explosive, “We saw in the papers about that man Swan and you digging all that up again about his little girl. It made Mr. Scott ill, just seeing his name,”
“The child died back in the winter.”
"Mr. Scott never saw the papers then. He was too ill. We never knew Swan lived near our niece. We wouldn’t have gone if we had. Well, he was living there the last time we went but we didn’t know.” She sat down on a plastic-upholstered contemporary version of a settle and sighed. “It’s preyed on Mr. Scott’s mind all these years, poor little Bridget. I reckon it would have killed him to have come face to face with that Swan.”
“Mrs. Scott, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but in your opinion, is it possible he let your daughter drown? I mean, is it possible he knew she was drowning and let it happen?”
She was silent. Wexford saw an old grief cross her face, travel into her eyes and pass away. The kettle boiled with a blast and switched itself off.
Mrs. Scott got up and began making the tea. She was quite collected, sorrowful but with an old dry sadness. The fingers on the kettle handle, the hand on the teapot, were quite steady. A great grief had come to her, the only grief, Aristotle says, which is insupportable, but she had borne it, had gone on making tea, gone on exulting in central heating. So would it be one day for Mrs. Lawrence, Wexford mused. Aristotle didn’t know everything, didn’t know perhaps that time heals all pain, grinds all things to dust and leaves only a little occasional melancholy.
“Mr Scott loved her best,” Bridget’s mother said at last. “It’s been different for me. I had my sons. You know how it is for a man and his little girl, his youngest.”
Wexford nodded, thinking of his Sheila, his ewe lamb, the apple of his eye.
"I never took on about it like he did. Women are stronger, I always say. They get to accept things. But I was in a bad way at the time. She was my only girl, you see, and I had her late in life. In fact, we never would have had another one, only Mr. Scott was mad on getting a girl.” She looked as if she were trying to remember, not the facts, but the emotions, of the time, trying and failing. “It was a mistake going to that hotel,” she said. “Boarding houses were more in our line. But Mr. Scott was doing so well and it wasn’t for me to argue when he said he was as good as the next man and why not a hotel when we could afford it? It made me feel uncomfortable, I can tell you, when I saw the class of people we had to mix with, Oxford boys and a barrister and a Sir. Of course, Bridget didn’t know any different, they were just people to her and she took a fancy to that Swan. If I’ve wished it once I’ve wished it a thousand times that she’d never set eyes on him.”
“Once we were in the lounge and she was hanging about him - I couldn’t stop her. I did try - and he gave her such a push, not saying anything, you know, not talking to her, that she fell over and hurt her arm. Mr. Scott went right over and had a go at him, told him he was a snob and Bridget was as good as him any day. I’ll never forget what he said. ‘I don’t care whose daughter she is,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if her father’s a duke or a dustman. I don’t want her around. She gets in my way.’ But that didn’t stop Bridget. She wouldn’t leave him alone. I’ve often thought since then that Bridget swam out to that boat so as she could be alone with him and no one else there.”
Mrs. Scott picked up her tray, but made no other move to return to the sitting room. She seemed to be listening and then she said:
“She couldn’t swim very far. We’d told her over and over again not to go out too far. Swan knew, he’d heard us. He let her drown because he just didn’t care, and if that’s killing, he killed her. She was only a child. Of course he killed her.”
“A strong accusation to make, Mrs. Scott.”
“It’s no more than the coroner said. When I saw in the paper about his own little girl I didn’t feel sorry for him, I didn’t think he’d got his desserts. He’s done the same to her, I thought.”
“The circumstances were hardly the same,” said Wexford. “Stella Rivers died from suffocation.”
“I know. I read about it. I’m not saying he did it deliberately any more than I’m saying he actually pushed Bridget under the water. It’s my belief she got in his way too - stands to reason she would, a step daughter and him newly married - and maybe she said something he didn’t like or got too fond of him like Bridget, so he got hold of her, squeezed her neck or something and - and she died. We’d better to go back to Mr. Scott now.”
He was sitting as they had left him, his almost sightless eyes still staring. His wife put a teacup into his hands and stirred the tea for him.
“There you are, dear. Sorry I was so long. Would you like a bit of cake if I cut it up small?”