She laughed. “Why?”
“You know, police practical jokes.”
“Did it work?”
“It was like his car farted all down the street.”
“Fab!” She laughed.
She lifted the bottle of lemonade and took a swig from it, then held it out to him. He looked at her backwash of breadcrumbs floating in the clear liquid and said, “You finish it.”
“You sure?” she said. “Thanks.”
By two in the afternoon they were at Honiton, where an overturned horsebox had blocked the road, and they sat in traffic for twenty minutes before turning off down a small lane. Breen tried to follow the small yellow lines on the map but he was soon lost.
“This road isn’t even on the map,” he said. The lanes were deep and dark, cut into the hilly landscape, huge hedges rising on either side so he couldn’t see the lie of the land. They became like tunnels, burrowing underground, roofed by branches of oak and hawthorn. After what seemed like hours of driving around they found a signpost to Exeter and followed it back to the main road.
It was past four by the time they reached Exeter. “What shall we do? It’ll be another hour at least before we get to Liskeard,” said Tozer.
Breen felt exhausted from the long journey and his stomach rumbled with hunger, but he said, “Let’s go on. We’ll find a motel somewhere afterwards.”
“I told you already, I’m not that kind of girl, sir.”
“What?”
“You said let’s go and find a room and I said I’m not that kind of girl.”
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
“I know. That was a joke. Sir.”
“Right.” He nodded. She was teasing him, at least.
The countryside turned wilder after Exeter. They crawled up onto the moor in the gray evening light. Tozer drove determinedly, peering over the steering wheel into the darkening landscape. She seemed to know her way around these roads, navigating confidently over the narrow bridges and ever-curving bends, slowing to avoid the occasional sheep. Now the hills were covered in dark brown bracken, turning black in the evening light, and stunted trees, silhouettes, bent into the shape of the wind. Gray stone walls climbed high up steep slopes around them.
It had been dark for over an hour by the time they reached Liskeard. It was a market town, the buildings low and small. There was a hard, worn look about the place. Tozer stopped by a large corner pub, where two old boys in threadbare tweed jackets and woolen caps stood by an alleyway.
Tozer got out. “Can you tell me where Fonthill House is?”
“Fonthill House?”
One took off his cap and scratched at his scalp. “That up Shute Hill?”
“Mebbe,” said the other.
“It’s a Major and Mrs. Sullivan,” said Breen from the open car window.
Another man emerged from the gloom. “Here, these two want to find a place called Fonthill House. A Major and Mrs.…”
“Sullivan,” said Breen.
“Aye, I know them,” said the third man. “He’s that one on the Bodmin Road. Blow-ins. I did some grass mowing for him Michaelmas gone. Wouldn’t make that mistake again.”
“Why not?”
“Skinflint said I’d not done it proper.”
“Never.”
“Cheeky bugger.”
“Where’s that?” said Tozer. For the first time Tozer’s accent sounded almost cosmopolitan.
The gents all offered various directions up the lanes, pointing out of town.
Fifteen
It was a huge gray-rendered Victorian house, a squat toad of a building that lurked behind a high granite wall. They drove in through the rusted gate down a narrow driveway choked with leggy rhododendron and laurels.
In the headlights, the garden wore a tired look. Leaves piled where the breeze had taken them. Grand cedars and Corsican pines had struggled against the wind for a century. In front of the house, in the center of a circular driveway, stood a large iron fountain. The pond around it was thick with overgrowth.
Gabled windows looked out from a slated roof. Attached to one chimney, a long scaffolding pole, on which a television aerial waved gently in the wind. On the ground floor, huge sash windows looked out over lawns that dipped away from the house. A soaked wicker chair sat alone, facing away from the house, looking out across the valley behind.
They pulled up alongside a brand-new maroon Jaguar, tires crunching on gravel. Next to the new car, the house looked ramshackle and unkempt. It felt absurd to be here, to be a detective announcing a death at a country house. It was something out of a slim paperback. There was a single light on the ground floor. Breen thought he saw a shape peering out at them as they parked. Almost as soon as he tugged on the wire pull of the bell at the wooden porch, another light came on in the hallway and the large front door opened.
The woman was in her early forties, fair-haired, slim and beautiful. She was dressed in slacks, a black polo neck and a wide-lapelled flowery jacket that looked like it must have been bought at Biba or some other trendy London boutique. There was a large bronze bangle on her left wrist. “Yes?” she said, frowning.
“My name is Detective Sergeant Breen. This is Constable Tozer.”
“And?”
“Are you Mrs. Julia Sullivan? Married to Major Mallory Sullivan?”
“Why?”
An elderly golden retriever limped to the door, barked once hoarsely, then seemed to lose interest, wandering away.
“Could we come in? We have something important we wish to discuss.” He knew how pompous he must be sounding. But it was easier to begin that way.
“Mal?” she called. “We have visitors.” There was wine on her breath.
A man appeared in a doorway, frowning. “What kind of time is this?”
Breen saw the likeness immediately. The dead girl’s round face, her thick eyebrows, her solidity. She had none of her mother’s lean beauty.
“Behave, Mal,” she said, quietly.
“Well?”
“It’s about your daughter.”
“Yes? What’s she done now?” said the major. Breen could now imagine the girl’s dead face as something not dead. Her face was his face. His angry scowl could have been hers.
“Mal, for God’s sake,” said Mrs. Sullivan, still quietly.
“Shoplifting or-”
“I’m afraid we think she’s dead,” interrupted Breen.
Gravity seemed to swell. The woman said, “God,” but so quietly Breen could barely hear her.
By her side, the major stood stiffly, a puzzled look on his face.
“I’m afraid she was murdered.”
Major Sullivan reached for his wife’s hand but she slapped it away, wrapping her arms around herself. “Come in,” she said.
They walked into the living room. A room with a fire dying in the grate. She walked straight to the sideboard, took a glass and poured herself a large whisky.
Breen assumed she was going to gulp it down to steady her nerves. Instead she turned and jerked the whole glass into her husband’s face. “Idiot,” she said.
He stood there, stunned, blinking against the pain in his eyes.
“This is all your fault.”
Whisky dripped from his face onto his shirt.
“That’s hardly fair,” he said, like a schoolboy complaining about a detention.
“None of it’s bloody fair,” she said, and she went to the sideboard and poured herself another glass without asking if anyone else wanted one.
“Tea would be an idea, perhaps,” Tozer said. “Where is the kitchen? Come and sit down, Mrs. Sullivan.”
“Tea?” said the major, still blinking. “Yes.” And Breen followed him across the hallway, through the dining room and into a kitchen at the back of the house where the washing-up was still stacked in a wooden drainer and where four empty beer bottles stood on the pine table.
He watched the major fill the kettle from a tap with a bit of pink rubber fastened to it to stop it splashing, and place it on the range. “It’s an awful shock, you know,” he said.
“Of course.”
“What did she mean, it’s all your fault?”