Apprehension sluiced the passion from his loins, leaving him cold as ice. He seized her arms, glaring at her in the light from the ivory figurine. How could he not have guessed the reason for her neglect and distant behaviour? ‘You’ve been with someone else!’
‘Oh Pookums!’ she cried, and covered her face with her hands. ‘How could you even think such a thing of your poor Barbie?’
Relief repaired some of the sexual damage. Down in the forest something stirred. ‘Well . . . what can it be, then? Can’t be too dwedful. Whisper it in Pookie’s ear.’
The lace expanded again in heartfelt preparation. ‘Well . . . when I got my mink coat out of store for the Traces’ wedding the other day I left it on the back seat of the car . . . just while I went shopping and . . . Oh sweetheart . . . someone stole it . . .’ She burst into a flood of tears, then, as he did not speak, peeped coyly out between her fingers. This action, which he had once thought charming, now struck him as suitable only for a child of three. A nauseatingly winsome child at that.
‘What the hell do you want to wear a mink coat for in July?’
‘I wanted you to be proud of me.’
‘Have you been to the police?’
‘No . . . I was in such a state . . . I just drove around worrying . . . and then I came home.’
‘You must do that tomorrow. Give them all the details. Fortunately it’s insured.’
‘Yes, darling . . . I don’t suppose?’ - a serpentine arm twisted over his shoulder and around his neck - ‘Pookie will ever buy his naughty Barbie anovver one?’
Pookie’s stare gave nothing away. He was trying to recall Krystal’s remark; little Krystal who was always so pleased to see him; whose welcome was never anything but warm and friendly. What was it she had said? ‘I’d have to do it five hundred times to get a coat like that.’ He smiled calmly, almost forgivingly, at his wife and patted her smooth brown shoulder.
‘We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?’
Chapter Three
Barnaby sat in the incident room. He was in his shirt sleeves before an open window. The soft thud of tennis balls and an occasional reproachful cry floated in from the nearby recreation ground. He twirled his rotating cards for the hundredth time and called for some coffee.
‘And not in that mug with the blasted frog squatting in it.’
‘Oh. I thought he was rather sweet,’ said Policewoman Brierley, her lips twitching.
‘Well I didn’t.’
‘No, sir.’
Barnaby spun one more time, realizing that he knew all the information by heart, hoping that a fresh reading might show a piece of the puzzle in a different light, juxtapose seemingly disparate facts, reveal with a whisk of the conjuror’s cloth something which had hitherto been darkly concealed. At least with poor old Loveless/Lovejoy/Lessiter accounted for all afternoon there was one suspect fewer.
Barnaby toyed with the idea that the murderer might be fancy free, killing to protect the reputation of his or her partner. It sounded a bit far fetched but if the partner’s legal spouse held the purse strings it might be a possibility. Money had been behind many a killing. Money and sex. Interlocked. An eternal ampersand. And a motive for murder since murder began.
Two days had passed since the funeral and Barnaby had spent one of them discussing the death of Mrs Trace with all the members of the shooting party with the exception of the farm boy and neighbouring landowners whom he had left to Troy. The only new bit of information to arise from this was that, at the time of the shooting, Phyllis Cadell was on her way back to Tye House, having got bored by the whole proceedings. Henry had expressed surprise that she had decided to accompany them in the first place. Phyllis in her turn had assured Barnaby that Bella had been urging her for some time to come out with them. Phyllis had done a certain amount of shooting when she was younger and knew how to handle a gun but had simply lost the taste for it. ‘I regretted joining them almost as soon as things really got going. I stayed for a bit then decided to give up. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself so I just slipped back to the house.’
Another example of unusual behaviour. Barnaby’s mind turned back to his cards and Miss Simpson. On the day of her death she too had behaved ‘out of character’. Were the two deaths connected? There was no sensible logical reason for believing this. Yet he still couldn’t leave the idea alone. Barnaby read the photostat of the inquest report again although by now he knew it backwards. He remembered his first quick conviction that there was something odd, some fact buried in there that didn’t make sense, but by now the whole piece was so stale he wondered where that original impulse had sprung from. Certainly repeated readings had done nothing to support or elucidate this instinctive belief.
On the morning of the second day he had interviewed Norah Whiteley in the tactfully vacated office of the headmaster at the school where she worked. She was a thin woman with a bitter mouth, mistakenly wearing very youthful clothes. What she had to tell him was disturbing.
‘I left David because I was afraid. I could just about cope with his women. At least that meant he left me alone. But he was very violent. You never knew what would start him off. The dinner wasn’t right, the car wouldn’t start. I could put up with it for myself but when he started on Jamie . . . I told him to go and when he wouldn’t I packed all his stuff, put it outside and had the locks changed. But even then I had to get a court order to stop him molesting us.’
‘Does he have access to the boy?’
‘No.’ There was a hard, unhappy, yet satisfied set to her lips. ‘He applied but I blocked it. I fought. I wouldn’t trust him to keep his fists to himself.’
‘And do you know if he has a . . . liaison with someone at the moment?’
‘Bound to. David’s never without a woman for long. He’s sex mad.’
As she said this Barnaby had a vivid recollection of his first sight of the man sitting close to Katherine Lacey in the kitchen of Tye House. He had mistrusted his own quick assumption at that time. Shades of D.H. Lawrence. And those wonderful torrid grainy films of his childhood: Double Indemnity. The Postman always Rings Twice. It was all there: the beautiful bride, the inadequate husband, the lusty stud. So obvious, such a cliché. And yet, and yet . . . How often the obvious turned out to be the truth.
But Barnaby saw no point in pretending that he had recognized any signs of guilt as the couple had become aware of his presence and broken apart. Whiteley had looked depressed and irritable, Katherine merely interested and concerned. And there was something so cool about the girl: an almost asexual purity in her beauty. He could imagine her body being offered up to its legal possessor when all the knots were properly tied, not without love necessarily, but perhaps with a moderate degree of fond attachment. It was harder to imagine her being swept away by a passion so strong it was worth risking a gilded future for.
David Whiteley was something else: amoral, self-interested and now known to be violent. Barnaby did not find it too difficult to visualize him in the role of murderer. But the death of Miss Simpson had been curiously nonviolent, almost subtle. Barnaby could not see the farm manager annotating Julius Caesar and he could never, with those brawny arms and legs, have climbed through the larder window. Nor could Barnaby see him committing murder to save any neck but his own.
Mechanically he gave the wheel another spin. He could not escape the comparison with Russian roulette. Five spins got you nowhere. The sixth could blow your mind. He drained the coffee, pleased to see nothing nearer to animate life in the bottom of the mug than a sweet dark primeval sludge. And then the phone rang.
Policewoman Brierley said, ‘I’ve got a Mrs Sweeney on the line, sir. She asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the inquiry about Miss Simpson.’
‘Put her on.’
‘It’s Mrs Sweeney here of the Black Boy. To whom am I speaking?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby.’
‘Are you the gentleman what came in for a half and a ploughman’s
the other day?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well I think you ought to come over. There’s something funny happening at the Rainbirds’.’
‘What sort of thing?’ The voice, which he recalled as flatly lugubrious, now positively rippled with excitement.
‘I don’t rightly know . . . it’s almost like someone singing only it’s not like any singing I ever heard . . . more like wailing, really. It’s been going on for ages.’
Afterwards Barnaby remembered that moment very clearly. As he replaced the receiver he had the strongest sense that the machinery of the case, which had seemingly ground almost to a halt with alibis, unproven and unprovable statements and, on the part of at least two people, the deliberate wish to deceive, was now moving again. Although he could not know with what speed the machinery would gather force or that a hand, as yet unknown to him, would hurl a spanner into the works with such terrible repercussions.
There must have been fifty people standing at the gate of Tranquillada. As soon as Troy cut the engine he and Barnaby could hear the sounds. A terrible keening. Mrs Sweeney left the gathering and hurried to meet them.
‘Since I talked to you I rung the bell but nobody came. I felt I had to do something.’
The two men walked up the path. No one attempted to follow. That in itself underlined the feeling of dread that permeated the hot still air. Normally, reflected Barnaby, you had to hold them back. He and Troy stood on the step. The threnody continued. Barnaby wondered how anything so apparently emotionless could produce such an effect on the heart of the listener. It stopped and started with inhuman regularity, like a needle stuck on a record. After using the knocker with no result Barnaby crouched down and shouted through the letter box: ‘Mr Rainbird . . . open this door.’
The lament escalated a notch or two, became almost a screech, then suddenly stopped. Immediately the crowd fell silent. Barnaby rapped the knocker hard again. The sounds were like pistol shots in the quiet street.
‘Shall I have a go at the door, sir?’ Troy was excited. He kept looking at the people by the gate, at Barnaby and at the house, underlining the importance of his position.
‘Window’s quicker. Try to find one open first.’ As Troy ran down the side of the house Barnaby looked again at the group. Instinctively they had drawn closer together. Their shadows fell, short and squat, on the warm pavement. One woman had a toddler in her arms. As Barnaby watched she turned the child’s face away from the bungalow and into her breast. The ceramic stork stared indifferently at them all.
Barnaby turned back and noticed, for the first time, a neat pile of mushrooms on the step. What the hell was keeping Troy? He’d been gone long enough to climb in and out of half a dozen windows. Barnaby was about to raise his fist again when he heard the click of the latch and the door swung open. Troy stared blankly at the chief inspector. He didn’t speak, just stood aside for Barnaby to enter. As the older man did so he felt his skin prickle as if someone had laid a frost-covered web against his face.
He walked through the hall past a red telephone dangling on its flex, past the scarlet-stippled wall and doors, glancing into each room as he went, finding them empty. He looked for the source of a silence more terrible than the sounds had ever been and found it in the lounge.
He stood for a moment on the threshold sick with horror. There was blood everywhere. On the floor, on the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains. But most of all on Dennis Rainbird. He looked as if he had been bathed in blood. His face, like that of a warrior brave, glistened with fingers of red. Red matted his hair and gloved his hands. He wore a red soaking wet tie and a red-flowered shirt. His knees and his shoes were red. Red tears rolled down his cheeks.
Barnaby turned back into the hall. ‘Don’t just prop the wall up. Get on the phone and get things moving.’ Then as Troy moved somnambulistically across the hall, ‘Don’t touch that, you bloody fool! Use the set in the car. And don’t open that door again without something on your hands. Anyone’d think you’d been in the force five minutes instead of five years.’
‘I’m sorry . . .’ Troy produced a handkerchief.
Barnaby returned to the lounge. He made his way towards the two figures in the centre of the room, placing his feet carefully on whatever unstained patches of carpet he could find.
How could one person have shed so much blood? Wasn’t there something vaguely theatrical about the scene? Surely an over-enthusiastic stage manager had been at work hurling buckets of the stuff about, preparing for a performance of Grand Guignol. And the strange thing was that over and above the sweep of disbelief and horror Barnaby felt his memory give a powerful kick. Déjà vu. But how could that be? Surely if he had experienced anything even faintly like this spectacularly nightmarish scene in the past he could hardly have forgotten?
‘Mr Rainbird . . . ?’ He bent down and saw, with a fresh wave of nausea, that it was only Dennis Rainbird’s encircling arm that was keeping his mother’s head on her shoulders. Her throat had been cut so deeply that Barnaby could see the bluish white gristle of the slashed windpipe. There were cuts all over her face and neck and arms and her dress was slashed open.
The room was in a hell of a mess. Photographs and pictures were thrown about, there were cushions and ornaments on the floor, two tables were overturned, the television set was smashed. Grey shards of glass were ground into the carpet.
Barnaby said, ‘Mr Rainbird’ again and touched him gently. As if this movement activated some hidden mechanism the man started to croon gently. He was smiling; a radiant wide mad smile. The cruel simulacrum of bliss seen on the faces of earthquake survivors or parents outside a burning house. A rictus of grief and despair.
Almost twenty minutes passed, then: ‘Good God . . .’ Barnaby got up. George Bullard stood in the doorway. He carried a small black case and looked around him, aghast. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘Careful where you step.’
The doctor stared at the two figures for a moment, his expression a mixture of pity and disgust, then picked his way gingerly across the floor. He knelt down and opened his bag. Barnaby watched as he cut into the stiff crimson cuff of Dennis Rainbird’s shirt and held his delicate wrist.
‘How long has he been like this?’
‘We got here around half an hour ago. I should think for at least half an hour prior to that. Did you sort out an ambulance before you came?’
‘Mm.’ The doctor shone a light into Dennis’ pupils. He didn’t even blink. ‘Should be here in a minute.’
‘It’s vital I talk to him—’
‘For heaven’s sake, Tom, use your sense. The man’s catatonic.’
‘I can see that. Can’t you give him something?’
‘No.’ George Bullard rose to his feet. ‘He’s made a good job of this and no mistake.’
‘How long do these states last?’
‘A day. A month. Six months. There’s no way of knowing.’
‘That’s all I need.’
‘Sorry.’
Through the net curtains Barnaby saw the ambulance drive up followed almost immediately by three police cars. There was a murmur of excitement from the crowd. The ambulance attendants, perhaps inured to scenes of carnage by years of scraping people off the motorway, seemed much less shocked by what had happened in the lounge at Tranquillada than either Barnaby or Doctor Bullard. Whilst one of them talked to the doctor the other attempted to separate Dennis from his mother. He tugged gently at Dennis’ wrist but the fingers were clamped on to her right shoulder and left upper arm as tightly as if he were hanging for his very life on a cliff edge. Patiently the man prised the fingers away one at a time and unhooked the thumb. Mrs Rainbird’s head rolled back, attached to the neck only by a thin flap of skin. The torso tipped over and slid on to the carpet. Dennis’ crooning ran down, then stopped.
‘Can he walk d’you think?’
‘Let’s try him. Up you come, my lovely.’
Dennis rose to his feet, rubber limbed
, still smiling. His face, always pale, was now almost albino-ish in its lack of colour.
‘Shall we clean him up a bit?’
‘Sorry,’ interjected Barnaby, ‘nothing must be touched.’
‘Right. On our way then.’ The three of them left the room, Dennis clinging trustingly like a child. Barnaby followed them out. The crowd, their wildest expectations more than fulfilled, played their part to the hilt, gasping aloud and crying out. One woman said, ‘And to think I nearly stopped in to watch the six o’clock news.’
‘Can you get everything he’s wearing bagged up?’ asked Barnaby. ‘I’ll send someone to collect it.’
‘Will do.’
Barnaby re-entered the lounge to find the doctor pulling down the corpse’s dress and shaking a thermometer.
‘What d’you think?’
‘Ohh . . . I’d say an hour . . . hour and a half at the most.’ He drew the slashed opening of her dress together. ‘He must’ve had some sort of brainstorm.’
‘I have to get a man over to the hospital. I don’t want Dennis Rainbird left alone.’
‘Well, Tom, you know your own business best. But I can assure you he won’t be going anywhere. Or doing himself a mischief.’
‘I’m not worried about him doing himself a mischief.’ He could hear the scene-of-crime men entering the hall. ‘But he might say something that could help us. He may even have seen something. He must have got home pretty soon after this happened.’
‘You mean . . . ? Oh. I seem to have been jumping to the wrong conclusions. Anyway - Dennis or no Dennis - whoever did this must have been clean off his rocker.’
‘His?’
‘Well,’ the doctor frowned, ‘it always is, isn’t it? An attack like this.’
‘Don’t you think a woman would be physically capable?’
‘Physically yes . . . I suppose so . . . if the rage is there. Psychologically and emotionally . . . that’s something else. It’d be a very peculiar sort of woman who could do something like this.’
The Killings at Badger's Drift Page 16