"You mean she was frightened of him?"
"In a way. She hated him and resented his being there. I wonder if I've still got that cutting." Wexford opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the one where he kept personal, semi-official things, grotesqueries that had interested him. He hadn't much hope of finding what he sought. At the time of Mrs. Primero's murder Kingsmarkham police had been housed in an old yellow brick building in the centre of the town. That had been pulled down four or five years ago and replaced by this block of startling modernity on the outskirts. The cutting had very probably got lost in the move from the high pitch pine desk to this one of lacquered rosewood. He leafed through notes, letters, odd little souvenirs, finally surfacing with a grin of triumph.
"There you are, the 'unperson' himself. Good-looking if you like the type. Herbert Arthur Painter, late of the Fourteenth Army in Burma. Twenty-five years old, engaged by Mrs. Primero as chauffeur, gardener and odd-job man."
The cutting was from the Sunday Planet, several columns of type surrounding a double-column block. It was a clear photograph and Painter's eyes were staring straight at the camera.
"Funny, that," said Wexford. "He always looked you straight in the eye. Supposed to denote honesty, if you've ever heard such a load of rubbish."
Burden must have seen the picture before, but he had entirely forgotten it. It was a large well-made face with a straight though fleshy nose, spread at the nostrils. Painter had the thick curved lips that on a man are a coarse parody of a woman's mouth, a flat high brow and short tightly waving hair. The waves were so tightly crimped that they looked as if they must have pulled the skin and pained the scalp.
"He was tall and well-built," Wexford went on. "Face like a handsome overgrown pug, don't you think? He'd been in the Far East during the war, but if the heat and the privation had taken it out of him it didn't show by then. He had a sort of glistening good health about him like a shire horse. Sorry to use all these animal metaphors, but Painter was like an animal."
"How did Mrs. Primero come to take him on?"
Wexford took the cutting from him, looked at it for a moment and folded it up.
"From the time the doctor died," he said, "until 1947 Mrs. Primero and Alice Flower struggled to keep the place going, pulling up a few weeds here and there, getting a man in when they wanted a shelf fixed. You can imagine the kind of thing. They had a succession of women up from Kingsmarkham to help with the housework but sooner or later they all left to go into the factories. The place started going to rack and ruin. Not surprising when you think that by the end of the war Mrs. Primero was in her middle eighties and Alice nearly seventy. Besides, leaving her age out of it, Mrs. Primero never touched the place as far as housework went. She hadn't been brought up to it and she wouldn't have known a duster from an antimacassar."
"Bit of a tartar, was she?"
"She was what God and her background had made her," Wexford said gravely but with the faintest suspicion of irony in his voice. "I never saw her till she was dead. She was stubborn, a bit mean, what nowadays is called 'reactionary', inclined to be an autocrat and very much monarch of all she surveyed. I'll give you a couple of examples. When her son died he left his wife and kids very badly off. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but Mrs. Primero was quite willing to help financially provided it was on her terms. The family was to come and live with her and so on. Still, I daresay she couldn't afford to keep up two establishments. The other thing was that she'd been a very keen churchwoman. When she got too old to go she insisted on Alice going in her place. Like a sort of whipping boy. But she had her affections. She adored the grandson, Roger, and she had one close friend. We'll come to that later.
"As you know, there was an acute housing shortage after the war and a hell of a servant problem too. Mrs. Primero was an intelligent old woman and she got to thinking how she could use one to solve the other. In the grounds of Victor's Piece was a coach house with a sort of loft over the top of it. The place for the coach was used to house the aforesaid Daimler, No one had driven it since the doctor died—Mrs. Primero couldn't drive and, needless to say, Alice couldn't either. There was precious little petrol about but you could get your ration, enough to do the shopping and take a couple of old dears for a weekly jaunt around the lanes."
"So Alice was that much of a friend?" Burden put in.
Wexford said solemnly, "A lady can be accompanied by her maid when she goes driving. Anyway, Mrs. Primero put an advert in the Kingsmarkham Chronicle for a young able-bodied man, willing to do the garden, perform odd jobs, maintain and drive the car in exchange for a flat and three pounds a week."
"Three pounds?" Burden was a non-smoker and no lover of extravagant living, but he knew from doing his wife's weekend shopping what a little way three pounds went.
"Well, it was worth a good bit more in those days, Mike," Wexford said almost apologetically. "Mrs. Primero had the loft painted up, divided into three rooms and piped for water. It wasn't Dolphin Square but, God, people were glad of one room back in 1947! She got a lot of answers but for some reason—God knows what reason—she picked Painter. At the trial Alice said she thought the fact that he had a wife and a baby daughter would keep him steady. Depends what you mean steady, doesn't it?"
Burden shifted his chair out of the sun. "Was the wife employed by Mrs. Primero too?"
"No, just Painter. She's got this little kid, you see. She was only about two when they came. If she'd worked up at the house she'd have had to bring the child with her. Mrs. Primero would never have stood for that. As far as she was concerned between her and the Painters there was a great gulf fixed. I gathered she'd hardly exchanged more than a couple of words with Mrs. Painter all the time Painter was there and as for the little girl—her name was Theresa, I think—she barely knew of her existence."
"She doesn't sound a very nice sort of woman," Burden said doubtfully.
"She was typical of her age and class," Wexford said tolerantly. "Don't forget she was a daughter of the lord of the manor when lords of the manor still counted for something. To her Mrs. Painter was comparable to a tenant's wife. I've no doubt that if Mrs. Painter had been ill she'd have sent old Alice over with a bowl of soup and some blankets. Besides, Mrs. Painter kept herself to herself. She was very pretty, very quiet and with a sort of deadly respectability about her. She was a bit scared of Painter which wasn't hard to understand, she being so small and Painter such a great hulking brute. When I talked to her after the murder I noticed she'd got bruises on her arm, too many bruises for her just to have got them through the usual kitchen accidents, and I wouldn't mind betting her husband used to knock her about."
"So, in fact," Burden said, "they were two completely separate units. Mrs. Primero and her maid living alone at Victor's Piece, the Painter family in their own home at the bottom of the garden."