She had the same attitude to the police as others might have to bugs or mice. When they came upstairs she alternated her replies to their questions with reiterated remarks that it was a disgrace to have them in the house. She had the blankest, most obtuse blue eyes he had ever seen on anyone. At no time, even when they were about to take Painter away, did she show the least pity or the least horror, only this fixated dread of what people would think if they found the police had been questioning her husband.
Perhaps she had not been so stupid as he had thought. Somewhere in that pretty respectable mouse and that great hunk of sub-humanity, her husband, must have been the spring from which their daughter drew her intelligence. "Quite an intelligent girl," Archery had said casually. Good God, thought Wexford, remembering how he had boasted when his own daughter got eight O Level passes. Good God! What were Modern Greats, anyway? Were they the same as Mods and did that mean Modern Languages? He had a vague idea that this might be the esoteric and deliberately deceptive name given to Philosophy and Political Economy. He wouldn't show his ignorance to Archery. Philosophy! He almost whistled. Painter's daughter reading—yes, that was the term, reading—philosophy! It made you think all right. Why, it made you doubt...
"Mr Archery," he said, "you're quite sure this is Herbert Arthur Painter's girl?"
"Of course I'm sure, Chief Inspector. She told me." He looked almost defiantly at Wexford. Perhaps he thought the policeman would laugh at his next words. "She is as good as she is beautiful," he said. Wexford's expression remained unaltered. "She came to stay with us at Whitsun. It was the first time we'd seen her, though naturally our son had written to us and told us about her. We took to her at once.
"Chief Inspector, times have changed since I was at college. I had to face the possibility that my son would meet some girl at Oxford, perhaps want to marry her at an age when I'd thought of myself as still a boy and when Orders were a lifetime away. I'd see my friends' children marry at twenty-one and I was prepared to try and manage something for him, give him something to start life on. All I hoped was that the girl would be someone we could like and understand.
"Miss Kershaw—I'll use that name if you don't mind—is just what I would have chosen for him myself, beautiful, graceful, well-mannered, easy to talk to. Oh, she does her best to hide her looks in the uniform they all wear nowadays, long shaggy hair, trousers, great black duffel coat—you know the kind of thing, But they all dress like that. The point is she can't hide them.
"My wife is a little impulsive. She was hinting about the wedding before Theresa had been with us for twenty-four hours. I found it hard to understand why the young people were so diffident about it. Charles's letters had been paeans of praise and I could see they were deeply in love. Then she told us. She came out with it quite baldly. She said—I remember the very words—'I think you ought to know something about me, Mrs. Archery. My father's name was Painter and he was hanged for killing an old woman.'
"At first my wife didn't believe it. She thought it was some sort of a game. Charles said, 'It's true. It doesn't matter. People are what they are, not what their parents did.' Then Theresa—we call her Tess—said, 'It would matter if he had done it, only he didn't. I told you why he was hanged. I didn't mean he'd done it.' Then she began to cry."
"Why does she call herself Kershaw?"
"It's her stepfather's name. He must be a very remarkable man, Chief Inspector. He's an electrical engineer, but..." You needn't come that rude mechanicals stuff with me, thought Wexford crossly. "...but he must be a most intelligent, perceptive and kind person. The Kershaws have two children of their own, but as far as I can gather, Mr. Kershaw has treated Tess with no less affection than his own son and daughter. She says it was his love that helped her to bear—well, what I can only call the stigma of her father's crime when she learnt about it at the age of twelve. He followed her progress at school, encouraged her in every way and fostered her wish to get a County Major Scholarship."
"You mentioned 'the stigma of her father's crime.' I thought you said she thinks he didn't do it?"
"My dear Chief Inspector, she knows he didn't do it."
Wexford said slowly, "Mr. Archery, I'm sure I don't have to tell a man like yourself that when we talk of somebody knowing something we mean that what they know is a fact, something that's true beyond a reasonable doubt. We mean that the majority of other people know it too. In other words, it's history, it's written down in books, it's common knowledge." He paused. "Now I and the Law Lords and the official records and what your son means when he talks about the Establishment, know beyond any reasonable doubt, that Painter did kill Mrs. Rose Primero."
"Her mother told her so," said Archery. "She told her that she had absolute irrefutable personal knowledge that Tess's father did not kill Mrs Primero."
Wexford shrugged and smiled. "People believe what they want to believe. The mother thought it was the best thing for her daughter. If I'd been in her shoes I daresay I'd have said the same."
"I don't think it was like that," Archery said stubbornly. Tess says her mother is a very unemotional woman. She never talks about Painter, never discusses him at all. She just says quite calmly, 'Your father never killed anybody' and beyond that she won't say any more."
"Because she can't say any more. Look, sir, I think you're taking a rather romantic view of this. You're visualising the Painters as a devoted couple, kind of merry peasants, love in a cottage and all that. It wasn't like that. Believe me, Painter was no loss to her. I'm certain in my own mind he was in the habit of striking her just when the fancy took him. As far as he was concerned, she was just his woman, someone to cook his meals, wash his clothes and—well," he added brutally, "someone to go to bed with."
Archery said stiffly, "I don't see that any of that's material."
"Don't you? You're picturing some sort of declaration of innocence plus incontrovertible proof made to the one person he loved and whom he knew would believe in him. Forgive me, but that's a load of rubbish. Apart from the few minutes when he came back to the coach house to wash his hands—and incidentally hide the money—he was never alone with her. And he couldn't have told her then. He wasn't supposed to know about it. D'you understand me? He could have told her he had done it, he couldn't have told her he had not.
"Then we came. We found blood flecks in the sink and faint blood marks on the kitchen wall where he'd stripped off that pullover. As soon as he came back he took the bandage off his hand to show us the cut and he handed the bandage to his wife. But he didn't speak to her, didn't even appeal to her for support. He made just one reference to her..."
"Yes?"
"We found the handbag with the money in it under the mattress in their double bed. Why hadn't Painter told his wife if he'd been given that money in the morning? Here it is, find it in your transcript. 'I knew the wife would want to get her hooks on it. She was always nagging me to buy things for the flat.' That's all he said and he didn't even look at her. We charged him and he said, 'O.K., but you're making a big mistake. It was a tramp done it.' He came straight down the stairs with us. He didn't kiss his wife and he didn't ask to go in and see his child."