‘How many would it take?’ asked Quinn.
‘To do the job properly, sir, at least five men round the house, one motor-cyclist, and two wireless cars, on duty twenty-four hours a day. And that’s presuming that every future attempt will have as its starting point the house.’
‘Not a hope,’ said Quinn. ‘We’re under strength as it is. We can’t tie up that number of men in a case that’s covered by a question mark.’
CHAPTER 8
It was dusk merging into dark and the countryside was about to close down for the night.
Rusk leaned against the bonnet of the car as he stared caterwise across the field at the dimming outline of Frithton Look. In the twilight, the house gained age. The castellated tower was tall and forbidding and he saw men in armour riding forward on heavy chargers as they prepared to storm the castle that was defended with arrows, stones, and boiling oil.
He heard a car approach and then saw two sidelights. Almost immediately, the headlights were switched on as the driver realised that there was another car ahead. Sardonically, Rusk, harshly outlined, wondered if he looked a very suspicious character.
The oncoming car came to a halt and he recognised the Rover. Anne Kremayne lowered the front near-side window. I’m sorry I wasn’t in.’
Rusk didn’t bother to explain that he hadn’t been up to the house.
‘I’ve been over to Haywards Heath all day, seeing my latest godchild … Will you come into the house now?’
‘May I?’
He climbed into his car and followed the Rover into the drive and the tunnel of black formed by the poplar trees. The Rover turned into the garage, half-way along on the left-hand side of the drive, and once the garage had been locked up the two of them continued to the house in the police car.
Anne Kremayne switched on the hall lights. ‘You’ll have a drink?’
‘I very rarely say no if the hour’s right.’
‘Not even when you’re on duty?’
‘Officially, I’m off.’
She looked quickly at him, then away. ‘We keep the current drinks — as Jonathan always calls them — in the cabinet which has been wheeled through to the diningroom. Would you come through and give me a hand to collect what’s wanted?’
He helped her out of the plastic raincoat she had been wearing. She folded it over the banisters. She smiled. ‘A habit my mother spent years trying to break me of, but never succeeded. I also like spring onions, which makes me the complete outsider.’
‘You’ll find me outside, waiting. I could eat them until I look like one.’
‘Come on through. What would you like? Gin, whisky, sherry, or will you stick to Cinzano?’
‘Cinzano, please.’
They walked along the hall and through the doorway into the dining-room. Anne Kremayne switched on the wall-lights. ‘This room always looks rather lovely at night-time because everything mellows into the next.’ She crossed to the cocktail cabinet and opened the top which brought up the shelf with the bottles. ‘It’s a difficult house to furnish and try as I have, I’ve never managed to get it as I want it … Plenty of light and sensible colour, some really beautiful furniture to look at and admire, and some practical furniture on which visiting children can play cowboys and indians without my having heart-attacks — we’ve most of that here, but it isn’t right. Probably, it’s because the house itself isn’t one thing or the other, not that I dare say that in front of Jonathan who reckons this place was made in Heaven.’ She picked up a bottle of Cinzano and placed it on a tray, together with two bubble-stem sherry glasses.
Rusk took the tray from her and used his right hand to help her to her feet. She pulled herself up, released her hand. ‘Ten years ago, I’d have leapt up like a high-jumper: now I take my time and end up puffing like a grampus … Incidentally, what is a grampus?’
Rusk thought how warm and soft her hand had been and how her body had curved as she knelt. ‘It’s a mammal from the whale tribe, but beyond that I haven’t a clue.’
She smiled. ‘And to think that from Jonathan’s description I believed the Brains Trust rang you up every time they got stuck!’
They walked through the lounge to the library. ‘Where is Jonathan?’ asked Rusk.
She stopped, obviously surprised. ‘In France. Surely you knew that?’
‘Never a notion.’
‘What’s up with police intelligence? … I took it for granted you knew he’d gone across this morning. Second black mark against Blayne Rusk. I’ll whisper something: I’m just beginning to lose my awe of you.’
‘I refuse to believe you’re in awe of anyone, if the truth’s told.’
She asked him to pour out the drinks and he did so. She sat on one of the armchairs and removed her shoes and tucked her feet under herself. ‘This is black mark number three. No nice girl ever sits like this. But once you forget you’re nice, you discover this is so much more comfortable. I can never resist it when I’m en famille.’
He sipped the Cinzano. The house was a restful one, even if it would never figure in the Ideal Home. Anne Kremayne was responsible for that: if the Jerk had been given his head, the place would have twanged to the harsh notes of disharmony. ‘Whereabouts has Jonathan gone?’
‘I’m not certain exactly where, but he’s trying to find out all he can about Charolais cattle and what will happen if they’re used in crosses. Jonathan reckons the effects of the Common Market on farming will be disastrous and that everyone’s going to have to do some radical re-thinking because in the end the only things it’ll pay to produce will be milk, beef, or lamb. Sheep drive him round the bend because he swears they deliberately do the opposite to what he wants them to do, so he’s left with milk and beef. No one quite knows how the Charolais cross with Fresians will settle, but if it works it could be the answer. Plenty of milk and the very lean meat the housewives have mistakenly learned to want.’
‘He’s a really keen farmer.’
‘It’s a passion with him.’ She looked directly at him and spoke slowly. ‘You know him so well I don’t have to explain, but he so often gives people the wrong impression. He almost boasts about having been expelled from school, going bankrupt, and so on, and people who don’t know the truth sum him up as one of the world’s shirkers. He knows his words have that effect and yet he goes right on saying them. Can you explain it?’
‘Call it a defence mechanism, or say he likes to laugh at people.’
‘It … it can be a little embarrassing.’ That was for sure. Anyone not embarrassed by Kremayne in his louder moments would have qualified immediately as a rhinoceros. Anne Kremayne, with her sensitive and slightly withdrawn character, must suffer practically every time he opened his mouth in public.
She tugged her skirt down more fully over her knees. ‘I was going to ask you to come out and see me, so your unexpected call has saved you the effort.’ She looked up and watched him with her large brown eyes.
The light was coming across her face and leaving the far side of it in shadow.
She played with the stem of her glass, twisting it round and round. ‘The police think Jonathan can help them with this murder, don’t they, because of something that happened in the past?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was that something?’
He finished the Cinzano in the glass. ‘That’s Jonathan’s answer to make.’
She shook her head. ‘Can’t you see, Blayne, I’ve got to know and it’s better for me if I do.’
It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name.
‘You’re an old friend of his … you knew him at school,’ she said.
Sarcastically, he silently commented on the fact that she’d changed her words at the right moment to show she knew the true relationship between the Jerk and himself — not that it needed words. Anyone with half her intelligence would have picked up the right wavelength pretty smartly. ‘It’s something, Anne, that’s very much better done by him.’
‘Brenda Ellery was r
aped. Has Jonathan been charged with rape in the past?’
‘No.’
‘But he’s known to the police because of something that’s happened previously?’
‘Yes.’
‘A sexual offence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Serious?’
‘Nothing serious happened.’
‘It’s time you gave me chapter and verse, Blayne. I know enough now to make some pretty narrow guesses.’
‘He was tried and convicted of indecent assault on a girl. His plea was not guilty and he still maintains that the girl said she was stung and he’d stopped the car and was looking for the sting.’
‘And just because of that you think he could have raped and murdered the Ellery girl?’
‘Because of that case he became one of a large number of people we interviewed.’
‘And are all this number still under suspicion?’
‘No.’
‘Then why’s Jonathan?’
‘Certain of the clues get close to him.’
‘They can’t be very strong, or you’d have arrested him.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You think he’s guilty, don’t you?’
‘Does it matter? I’m a very minor cog in the police force.’
‘I tell you, he’s not guilty.’
‘I hope not.’
‘Do you? Do you really hope that?’
He made no answer.
‘Why won’t you listen to me? — I told you at the beginning he was at home throughout the night the girl was killed.’
‘Do you sleep in the same bedroom as he does?’
‘That’s nothing to do with it, and even if it were, I wouldn’t answer. What business of anyone else is it how we sleep? I’m not going to talk to anyone about the intimate details of my marriage.’
Rusk put down his glass on the small walnut pie-crust table. ‘Two people’s lives are threatened. Yours. And the next girl’s.’
‘I … I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve spoken to the psychiatrist, Anne. The killer is going on to kill again if he isn’t caught because the need to kill is greater than any other emotion within him. So there’s another girl somewhere, marked down for death. The killer doesn’t know her, isn’t aware of her existence, but one night he’ll be roaming the streets and the lanes, and he’ll find her, take her for a drive, rape and kill her. There’s a second woman in danger. You … The killer is both sane and mad. It could be his turn to be mad when he’s with you.’
‘I’m nothing to do with it.’
‘You are his wife.’
‘Stop being so certain. Just now you said you hoped he wasn’t guilty … You’ve come here, had a meal with him, drunk with him.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re prepared to like him when he’s offering you something, but behind his back you’re trying to break him?’
‘That’s not fair. I’ve a job to do …’
She broke the words. ‘I’m sorry, Blayne, but these days I sometimes hardly know what I’m saying. You’ve a job to do, and because you don’t really know Jonathan you think that job has to be done here. Because I do know him …’
‘There’s such a thing as blind loyalty, Anne.’
‘If I knew Jonathan was a murderer, I’d help the police. But I don’t know he is, and I’m not going to start to doubt him because you want to make him the murderer. He’s my husband, and that means I trust him.’
‘Can’t you see that …’
‘I can see part of what you’d like me to see. But I’m not looking your way.’
‘If your loyalty’s misplaced, it could be expensive for you.’
‘It’s not going to be.’
Did she believe that, he wondered, or was she fighting to stay in a world she knew? She was far too intelligent not to know that because the winds of suspicion blew strongly round her husband there must be a great deal of evidence against him.
‘Did you sleep in the same bedroom as he did on the night of the murder?’ he persisted.
She carefully brushed ash from the end of the cigarette into the ash-tray on the arm of the chair.
‘If you’ve faith he’s innocent, Anne, you can afford to tell the truth.’
‘And anything I say will be taken down in evidence and used against him,’ she said bitterly.
He shook his head. ‘A wife or husband is neither competent nor compellable as a witness for the prosecution.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘In this case, no one can force you to give evidence at the trial for the prosecution, no matter what you’ve seen or heard. If you saw him stab a girl, you couldn’t give such evidence, and if there were nothing else to bring the guilt home to him, he’d go free. Nothing you can say, Anne …’
‘I’m not going to say anything.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I’ve got a headache.’
‘Congratulations on the timing.’
About to reply furiously, she checked her words. ‘I knew I’d get angry and tried so hard not to. I was hoping to show you that what you thought was impossible, but … but it’s rather terrible.’
It was all too easy to see the suffering her mind was bringing her and he wished there was something he could do, but there was nothing.
‘Let’s have another drink, Blayne.’
He refilled their glasses.
‘You’ve never told me whether you enjoyed the Bar,’ she said.
He accepted the change of conversation. ‘Very much. After all, it’s the only gentleman’s profession left. The church has become commercial, respectable doctors disappeared with the birth of the National Health Service, and the army and navy are ready to accept anyone as officer-material provided only he can read and write.’
‘How cynically snobby.’
‘It’s amusing to be snobby when you obviously have no grounds on which to be.’
She shifted herself until she was sitting on the other side of her legs. ‘Did you have any cases of your own when you were in the law?’
‘Indeed yes.’
‘Successful ones?’
‘It’s my proud and honest boast that at one stage of my legal career I was the highest paid counsel in the British Isles … I had a County Court case at Wandsworth with a brief marked at three guineas. I met my opponent before we were called into court and after a brief discussion, if you’ll allow me that hoary old chestnut, we reached agreement on a settlement. We marched into court, my opponent and I, and he gave the terms of the settlement after which the judge looked at me and in his irascible voice asked if I agreed. My reply was in the form of the deathless prose, ‘Yes, your Honour.’ Three words, three guineas, a guinea a word. Not even Norman Birkett in his flush ever had it so good.’
She smiled. ‘Would you have stayed on if things had been different?’
‘Every time. Although I’d never have made the top flight …’
‘How can you say?’ she cut in.
‘I’ve come to know myself pretty well and to be honest enough, or lazy enough, to admit the size of what I know.’
‘What really prevented your continuing?’
‘Money. It stops a lot of things in this world.’
She looked down at the small diamond-ringed watch on her wrist. ‘I’m hungry, Blayne — could you manage bacon and eggs?’
‘I most certainly could.’
‘Then bring that bottle along and we’ll have another drink while I prepare everything … D’you think you could forget you’re a cynical snob and eat like the family in the kitchen?’
‘If necessary, I’ll take it straight on the floor.’
‘There should be no need to become that family-minded.’
They went through to the kitchen. While she cooked the meal on the oil-fired stove, he poured out two more drinks and then, on her suggestion, went down to the cellars and chose a bottle of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.
A quarter of an hour later, Anne
Kremayne put
two plates of eggs, bacon, tomatoes, and fried bread on the table. ‘There you are, sir. Compliments of the chef, complaints to the dustbin.’
The last time a woman had given him supper had been the day before Ruth left. As he remembered her on that day, and memory was becoming very distant-hazy, she’d covered her face with some strange new beauty compound that looked like mud and would have been more acceptable had it smelled like mud, and wore this throughout the meal.
He opened the bottle of wine with great care.
CHAPTER 9
The DI sat behind his desk and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife. The sound of the scraping sent a wave of revulsion through Rusk’s mind and made him feel as though he had caught one of his own nails on a piece of wool.
‘You’re usually a ruddy suppository of information,’ boomed the DI. ‘Let’s hear whether Kremayne is back yet from his holiday?’
‘He’s back, sir.’
‘All tanned and polished, I’ll bet. If I had his sort of money, I’d lie in the hot sun all day watching the girls in bikinis. Do something to a man, they do, especially when they’ve got string down the side instead of costume. Know what I mean?’
‘Regarding the something or the string?’ The DI snapped the pen-knife shut and looked up. ‘The string, you bloody fool.’ He picked up a sheet of paper, read it, and put it down. ‘Tell me one thing, when you’re at home, what do you do?’
‘Read, mostly.’
‘What? Long-haired novels that take five hundred pages to get from Monday morning to Monday afternoon with a stop in the middle for lunch?’ He reached up with his right hand and smoothed down his sleek black hair, rubbing the lobe of his right ear. ‘Bet you go for poetry, too? Poetry makes me want to spew. When I was at school they made me learn it by the ton. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Who the hell ever saw a lonely cloud? The sky’s always thick tight with ’em.’
‘Poetic licence.’
‘I’d make that a licence too damned expensive for anyone to take out.’ The DI flicked his lips with his fingers. ‘We’re getting a flood of idiots confessing to the murder.’
‘It’s funny how it always happens. Can you ever see yourself making a false confession?’
Exhibit No. Thirteen Page 8