"I don't know about 'bottom of the garden'. The coach house was about a hundred feet from the back door of the big house. Painter only went up there to carry in the coal and receive his instructions."
"Ah," said Burden, "there was some complicated business about coal, I seem to remember. Wasn't it more or less the crux of the whole thing?"
"Painter was supposed to chop wood and carry coal," Wexford continued. "Alice was past carrying coal and Painter was supposed to bring a scuttleful at midday—they never lit a fire before that—and another one at six-thirty. Now, he never objected to the gardening or the car maintenance, but for some reason he drew the line at the coal. He did it—apart from frequent lapses—but he was always grumbling about it. The midday duty cut across his dinner time, he said, and he didn't like turning out on winter evenings. Couldn't he bring two scuttles at eleven? But Mrs. Primero wouldn't have that. She said she wasn't going to have her drawing room turned into a railway yard."
Burden smiled. His tiredness had almost worn off. Given breakfast, a shave and a shower down, he would be a new man. He glanced at his watch, then across the High Street to where the blinds were going up on the Carousel Cafe.
"I could do with a cup of coffee," he said.
"Two minds with but a single thought. Root someone out and send them over."
Wexford stood up and stretched, tightened his tie and smoothed back the hair that was too sparse to become untidy. The coffee arrived in wax cups with plastic spoons and little cubes of wrapped sugar.
"That's better," said Wexford. "D'you want me to go on?" Burden nodded.
"By September 1950 Painter had been working for Mrs. Primero for three years. The arrangement appeared to work pretty well apart from the difficulties Painter made about the coal. He never brought it in without complaining and he was always asking for a rise."
"I suppose he thought she was rolling in money?"
"Of course, he couldn't have known what she'd got in the bank or in shares or whatever it was. On the other hand it was an open secret she kept money in the house."
"In a safe, d'you mean?"
"Not on your life. You know these old girls. Some of it was in drawers stuffed into paper bags, some of it in old handbags."
With a feat of memory Burden said suddenly, "And one of those handbags contained the two hundred pounds?"
"It did," Wexford said grimly. "Whatever she might have been able to afford, Mrs. Primero refused to raise Painter's wages. If he didn't like the set-up he could go, but that would mean giving up the flat.
"Being a very old woman, Mrs. Primero felt the cold and she liked to start fires in September. Painter thought this unnecessary and he made the usual fuss about it..."
He stopped as the telephone rang and he took the receiver himself. Burden had no idea from Wexford's reiterated, "Yes, yes ... all right," who it could be. He finished his coffee with some distaste. The rim of the wax cup had become soggy. Wexford dropped the phone.
"My wife," he said. "Am I dead? Have I forgotten I've got a home of my own? She's run out of housekeeping and she can't find the cheque book." He chuckled, felt in his pocket and produced it. "No wonder. I'll have to nip back." He added with sudden kindness, "Go home and have a bit of shut-eye, why don't you?"
"I don't like being left in the air," Burden grumbled. "Now I know how my kids feel when I break off in the middle of a bedtime story."
Wexford began bundling things into his briefcase.
"Leaving out all the circumstantial stuff," he said, "there isn't much more. I told you it was straightforward. It was the evening of September 24th it happened, a cold wet Sunday. Mrs. Primero had sent Alice off to church. She went at about a quarter past six, Painter being due to bring the coal at half past. He bought it all right and departed two hundred pounds to the good."
"I'd like to hear the circumstantial stuff," Burden said.
Wexford was at the door now.
"To be continued in our next," he grinned. "You can't say I'm leaving you in suspense." The grin faded and his face hardened. "Mrs. Primero was found at seven. She was in the drawing room lying on the floor by the fireplace in a great pool of blood. There was blood on the walls and on her armchair, and in the heart was a bloodstained wood chopper."
2
When sentence is given upon him let him be condemned ... let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
The nap Wexford had prescribed for him would have been attractive on a dull day, but not this morning when the sky was blue and cloudless and the sun promised tropical heat by midday. Moreover, Burden remembered that he had not made his bed for three days. Better have that shower and that shave instead.
After a canteen breakfast of two eggs and a couple of rashers of the greenback he liked, he had made up his mind what he was going to do. An hour could easily be spared. He drove northwards along the High Street with all the car windows down, past the shops, over the Kingsbrook Bridge, past the Olive and Dove and out on to the Stowerton road. Apart from a new house here and there, a supermarket on the site of the old police station, and aggressive road signs all over the place, things had not changed much in sixteen years. The meadows, the tall trees burdened with the heavy foliage of July, the little weatherboard cottages were much the same as when Alice Flower had seen them on her shopping trips in the Daimler. There would have been less traffic, then, he thought. He braked, pulled in and raised his eyebrows at the youth on a motorbike who, overtaking the oncoming stream, had missed him by inches.
The lane where Victor's Piece was must be somewhere about here. Those circumstantial details Wexford had been so tantalising about were coming back to him from his own memory. Surely he had read about a bus stop and a telephone box at the end of the lane? Would these be the meadows he remembered reading that Painter had crossed, desperate to conceal a bundle of bloodstained clothing?
Here was the phone box now. He indicated left and turned slowly into the lane. For a short way its surface was metalled, then it petered out into a track ending in a gate. There were only three houses: a white-plastered semi-detached pair and opposite them the late Victorian pile he had described as "a hideous dump".
He had never been as near to it as this before, but he saw noting to make him change his opinion. The roof of grey slates had been constructed—tortured almost—into a number of steep gables. Two of these dominated the front of the house, but there was a third on the right hand side and out of it grew another smaller one that apparently overlooked the back. Each gable was criss-crossed with timbering, some of it inexpertly carved into chevrons and all painted a dull bottle green. In places the plaster between the wood had fallen away, exposing rough pinkish brickwork. Ivy, of the same shade of green, spread its flat leaves and its rope-like grey tendrils from the foot of the downstairs windows to the highest gable where a lattice flapped open. There it had crept and burrowed into the mealy wall, prising the window frame away from the bricks.
Burden observed the garden with a countryman's eye. Never had he seen such a fine selection of weeds. The fertile black soil, cultivated and tended for many years, now nourished docks with leaves as thick and glossy as rubber plants, puce-headed thistles, nettles four feet tall. The gravel paths were choked with grass and mildewed groundsel. Only the clarity of the air and the soft brilliance of sunlight prevented the place from being actually sinister.