by Ruth Rendell
‘Do you need me, sir?’
‘No, thanks, Anne. You stay where you are.’
A nurse came out of the room and held the door open. Dr Leigh said she would be waiting for him when he had finished and repeated her injunction about a time limit. Wexford went in and the door was closed behind him.
Chapter Seven
She was sitting up in a high white bed, propped by a mass of pillows. Her left arm was in a sling and her left shoulder thickly bandaged. It was so warm in the ward that instead of an enveloping hospital gown, she wore a little white sleeveless shift that exposed her right shoulder and upper arm. An intravenous line was attached to her bare right arm.
The photograph from the Independent on Sunday came to mind. This was Davina Flory all over again, this was Davina Flory as she had been at seventeen.
Instead of shingled hair, Daisy wore hers long. It was copious straight hair of a very fine, very dark brown, which fell down to and half-covered the wounded shoulder and the bare, whole shoulder. Her forehead was high like her grandmother’s, her eyes large and deep-set, not brown but a bright clear hazel with a black ring round the pupils. The skin was white for such a dark woman and the rather thin lips very pale. A prettier nose than her grandmother’s eagle’s beak tilted a little at the tip. Wexford recalled Davina Flory’s dead hands, narrow and long-fingered, and saw that Daisy’s were the same but with the skin still soft and childish. She wore no rings. On the pale pink lobes of her ears the pierce-marks showed as tiny pink wounds.
When she saw him she did not speak but began to cry. The tears rolled silently down her face.
He pulled out a handful of tissues from the box on her bedside cabinet and handed them to her. She wiped her face, then dropped her head, screwing up her eyes. Her body heaved with suppressed sobs.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
She nodded, clutching the damp tissues in her left hand. It was something he hadn’t given much thought to, that she had lost her mother in the violence of the previous night. She had lost a grandmother too, who might have been as much beloved, and a man who had been like a grandfather since she was five years old.
‘Miss Flory . . .’
Her voice came out muffled as she held the tissues up against her face. ‘Call me Daisy.’ He could tell she was making an effort as she swallowed hard and lifted her head. ‘Call me Daisy, please. I can’t be doing with “Miss Flory”, I’m called Jones really anyway. Oh, I must stop crying!’
Wexford waited a moment or two, though mindful of how few moments he had. He saw she was trying to expel pictures from her mind, to wipe them away, expunge the videotape, come to the here and now. She drew a long breath.
He waited a while but he couldn’t afford to wait too long. A minute only for her to breathe steadily in, smooth the tears away with her fingers. ‘Daisy,’ he began, ‘you know who I am, don’t you? I’m a policeman, Chief Inspector Wexford.’
She was nodding quickly.
‘They’re only allowing me ten minutes with you today but I’m going to come back tomorrow if you’ll let me. I want you to answer one or two questions now and I’ll try not to make them painful questions. Will that be all right?’
A slow nod and another gasp.
‘We have to go back to last night. I’m not going to ask you exactly what happened, not yet, just when you first heard them in the house and where.’
The hesitation was so long he couldn’t help looking down at his watch.
‘If you could just tell me what time you heard them and where it was . . .’
She spoke suddenly and in a rush. ‘They were upstairs. We were eating our dinner, we’d got to the main course. My mother heard them first. She said, “What’s that? It sounds like someone upstairs.”’
‘Yes. What next?’
‘Davina, my grandmother, said it was the cat.’
‘The cat?’
‘She’s a big cat called Queenie, a Blue Persian. Sometimes, in the evenings, she sort of rampages about the house. It’s amazing what a racket she can make.’
Daisy Flory smiled. It was a wonderful wide smile, a young girl’s smile, and she held it steady for a moment before it trembled on her lips. Wexford would have liked to take her hand but of course he couldn’t do that.
‘Did you hear a car?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t hear anything but the noise upstairs. A bumping noise and footsteps. Harvey, that’s my grandmother’s husband, he went out of the room. We heard the shot and then another. It was a terrible noise, it was really terrible. My mother screamed. We all jumped up. No, I jumped up and my mother did and I – I sort of started to go out and my mother shouted, “No, don’t,” and then he came in. He came into the room.’
‘He? There was only one?’
‘I only saw one. I heard the other one, I didn’t see him.’
The recollection of it silenced her again. He saw the tears come back into her eyes. She rubbed her eyes with her right hand.
‘I only saw one,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘He had a gun, he came in.’
‘Take it easy,’ Wexford said. ‘I have to ask you. It’ll soon be over. Think of it like that, it’s something that must be. All right?’
‘All right. He came in . . .’ Her voice went dead, automatic machine tones. ‘Davina was still sitting there. She never got up, she just sat there but with her head turned towards the door. He shot her in the head, I think. He shot my mother. I don’t know what I did. It was so terrible, it was like nothing you could imagine, madness, horror, it wasn’t real, only it was – oh, I don’t know . . . I tried to get on to the floor. I heard the other one getting a car started outside. The one in there, the one with the gun, he shot me and I don’t know, I don’t remember . . .’
‘Daisy, you’re doing very well. Very well indeed. I don’t suppose you can remember what happened after you were shot. But can you remember what he looked like? Can you describe him?’
She shook her head, put her right hand up to her face. He had the impression it wasn’t that she couldn’t describe the man with the gun but was unable for the present to bring herself to do so. She murmured, ‘I didn’t hear him speak, he didn’t speak.’ Though he hadn’t asked, she whispered, ‘It was just after eight when we heard them and ten past when they went. Ten minutes, that was all . . .’
The door opened and a nurse came in. ‘Your ten minutes is up. I’m afraid that’s all for today.’
Wexford got up. Even if they had not been interrupted he would hardly have ventured to go on. The girl’s ability to answer him was almost exhausted.
In a voice just above a whisper, she said, ‘I don’t mind you coming back tomorrow. I know I have to talk about it. I’ll talk some more tomorrow.’
She took her eyes from his and stared hard at the window, slowly lifting her shoulders, the one that was wounded and the one that was whole, and brought her right hand up to cover her mouth.
* * * *
The piece in the Independent on Sunday was imbued with a kind of clever bitchiness. Wherever it was possible to be snide, Win Carver was snide. No opportunity for a sneer was neglected. Yet it was a good essay. Such was human nature, Wexford confessed to himself, that it was better for its ironic and slightly malicious tone than a blander article would have been.
A journalist on the Kingsmarkham Courier would have adopted a sycophantic style when describing Davina Flory’s reafforestation, her dendrology studies, her gardening and her collecting of rare specimen trees. Ms Carver treated the whole subject as if were slightly funny and an instance of mild hypocrisy. ‘Planting’ a wood, she implied, was a not quite accurate way of referring to an exercise others did for you while all you forked out was the money. Gardening might be a very pleasant way of passing the time if you were only obliged to do it when at a loose end and on fine days. Strong young men did the digging.
Davina Flory, she went on to say in much the same vein, had been a stupendously successful and accla
imed woman, but she hadn’t exactly had to struggle, had she? Going to Oxford had been an obvious step, given her intelligence and with her father a professor and there being no shortage of money. A great landscape gardener she might be, but the acreage and the wherewithal fell into her lap when she married Desmond Flory. Being widowed in the last stages of the war had been sad but surely mitigated by inheriting on her first husband’s death an enormous country house and a huge fortune.
She was a little scathing too about the short-lived second marriage. However, when she came to the travels and the books, the uniqueness of Davina Flory’s penetration of eastern Europe and her political and sociological investigations of it, this at the most difficult and dangerous of times, Win Carver had nothing but praise to offer. She wrote of the ‘anthropological’ books to which these travels had given rise. She harked back with a charming adulatory nostalgia to her own student days some twenty years before, and to her reading of Davina Flory’s only two novels, The Hosts of Midian and A Private Man in Athens. Her appreciation she compared to Keats’s feeling for Chapman’s Homer, she even said she had been silenced ‘upon a peak in Darien’.
Finally, but not briefly, she came to the first volume of the autobiography: The Youngest Wren of Nine. Wexford, who had supposed this title a quotation from Twelfth Night, was pleased to have his guess confirmed. A résumé of Davina Flory’s childhood and youth, as described in these memoirs, came next, a passing reference to her meeting with Harvey Copeland, and Ms Carver ended with a few words – a very few – about Miss Flory’s daughter Naomi Jones who had a part-share in a Kingsmarkham craft gallery, and Miss Flory’s granddaughter and namesake.
In the last lines of the article Win Carver speculated as to the chances of a DBE in a future honours’ list and judged them pretty high. A year or two only must pass, she implied, before Miss Flory became Dame Davina. Mostly (wrote Ms Carver) ‘they wait till you’ve passed you eightieth birthday so that you won’t live too long.’
Davina Flory’s life had not been sufficiently protracted. Death had come unnaturally to her and with the maximum violence. Wexford, who was still in the incident room, laid the newspapers aside and studied the print-out Gerry Hinde had produced for him of the missing items of jewellery. There were not many, but what there were sounded valuable. Then he walked across the courtyard to the house.
* * * *
The hall had been cleaned. It reeked of the kind of disinfectant that smells like a combination of lysol and lime juice. Brenda Harrison was rearranging ornaments which had been put back in the wrong places. Her prematurely lined face wore an expression of intense concentration, the cause no doubt of the lines. On the staircase, three stairs up, where the carpet, perhaps ineradicably stained, was covered in a sheet of canvas, sat the Blue Persian called Queenie.
‘You’ll be glad to hear Daisy is making a good recovery,’ Wexford said.
She already knew. ‘One of the policemen told me,’ she said without enthusiasm.
‘How long had you and your husband worked here, Mrs Harrison?’
‘Getting on for ten years.’
He was surprised. Ten years is a long time. He would have expected more emotional involvement with the family after so long an association, more feeling.
‘Mr and Mrs Copeland were good employers then?’
She shrugged. She was dusting a red and blue Crown Derby owl and she replaced it on the polished surface before she spoke. Then she said in a thoughtful way, as if considerable cogitation had been going on before she came up with it, ‘There was no side to them.’ She hesitated, then added proudly, ‘Not with us at any rate.’
The cat got up, stretched itself and walked slowly in Wexford’s direction. It stopped in front of him, bristled up, glowered and quite suddenly fled up the stairs. After a moment or two the noises began. Sounds like a miniature horse galloping along the passage, bumps, crashes, reverberations.
Brenda Harrison switched a light on, then another. ‘Queenie always carries on like that about this time,’ she said.
‘Does she do any damage?’
A small smile moved her features, spread her cheeks an inch or so. It told him she was one of those who find their amusement in the antics of animals. Their sense of humour is confined almost exclusively to tea-partying chimpanzees, anthropomorphic dogs, kittens in bonnets. They are the sort that keep circuses going.
‘You could go up in half an hour,’ she said, ‘and you wouldn’t know she’d been there.’
‘And it’s always at this time?’ He looked at his watch: ten to six.
‘Give or take a bit, yes.’ She gave him a sidelong glance, grinning a very little. ‘She’s as bright as a button but she can’t tell the time, can she?’
‘I want to ask you just one more thing, Mrs Harrison. Have you seen any strangers about in the past days or even weeks? Unfamiliar people? Anyone you wouldn’t expect to see near the house or on the estate?’
She thought. She shook her head. ‘You want to ask Johnny. Johnny Gabbitas, that is. He gets about the woods, he’s always outside.’
‘How long has he been here?’
Her answer slightly surprised him. ‘Maybe a year. Not more. Wait a minute, I reckon it’ll be a year in May.’
‘If you think of anything, anything odd or unusual that may have happened, you’ll be sure to tell us, won’t you?’
By now it was growing dark. As he walked round the side of the west wing, the lights in the lee of the wall came on, controlled by a time switch. He paused and looked back towards the woods and the road which led out of them. Last night the two men must have come that way or else along the by-road; there was no other possible route.
Why had none of the four people in the house heard a car? Perhaps they had. Three of them were no longer alive to tell him. Daisy had not, that was all he could know or would know. But if one of them had heard a car he or she had not remarked on it in Daisy’s hearing. Of course he would hear much more from Daisy tomorrow.
The two men in the car would have seen the lighted house ahead of them. By eight the wall lights had been on for two hours and lights indoors for much longer. The road ran up to the courtyard, passed between the stone-pillared opening in the wall. But suppose the car had not come up to the house but turned to the left before the wall was reached. Turned left and right on to the road where he now was, the road that led past the west wing, twenty yards from it, curved past the kitchen regions and the back door, skirted the garden and its high hedge, and penetrated the pinetum, which led to the Harrisons’ house and that of John Gabbitas.
Taking this route would presuppose knowledge of Tancred House and its grounds. It might presuppose knowledge that the back door was not locked during the evenings. If the car in which they came was driven that way and parked near the kitchen door, it was possible, even likely, that no one in the dining room would have heard it.
But Daisy had heard the man she had not seen start a car she had not seen after the man she had seen had shot her and her family.
Probably he had left the house by the back door and brought the car round to the front. He had escaped when he heard noises overhead. The man who shot Daisy also heard noises overhead, which was why he had not fired another shot, the shot that would have killed her. The noises were, of course, made by the cat Queenie, but the two men were not to know that. Very likely, neither of them had been to the top floor, but they knew there was a top floor. They knew someone else might be up there.
This was an entirely satisfying explanation in all respects but one. Wexford was standing by the side of the road, looking behind him, pondering on this single exception, when car lights came up out of the wood on the main road. They turned off to the left just before the wall was reached and in the light from the house Wexford saw that it was Gabbitas’s Land-Rover.
Gabbitas stopped when he saw who it was. He wound down the window. ‘Were you looking for me?’
‘I’d like a word, Mr Gabbitas. Can you spare me half an hou
r?’
For answer, Gabbitas leaned across and opened the passenger door. Wexford hauled himself in. ‘Would you come over to the stables, please?’
‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’
‘Late for what, Mr Gabbitas? Pursuing a murder enquiry? There are three people dead here and one seriously injured. But on second thoughts I think your house might be the better venue.’
‘Oh, very well. If you insist.’
This little exchange had served to inform Wexford of things he had not noticed at their first meeting. From his accent and his manner, the woodsman showed himself a considerable cut above the Harrisons. He was also extremely good-looking. He was the type of a Cold Comfort Farm hero. He had the looks of an actor some casting director might pick to play the male lead in a Hardy or Lawrence adaptation. Byronic but rustic too. His hair was black, his eyes very dark. The hands on the wheel were brown with black hairs on the backs of them and on the long fingers. The half-grin he had given Wexford when asked to drive down the by-road had shown a set of very white, even teeth. He was a swashbuckler and of the type that is supposed more than any other to be attractive to women.
Wexford climbed into the passenger seat. ‘What time was it you told me you came home last night?’
‘Eight twenty, eight twenty-five, that’s the nearest I can make it. I didn’t think I’d have any reason to be precise about the time.’ There was an edge of impatience to his tone. ‘I know I was back in my house when my clock struck the half-hour.’
‘Do you know Mrs Bib Mew who works at the house?’
Gabbitas seemed amused. ‘I know who you mean. I didn’t know she was called that.’
‘Mrs Mew left here on her bicycle at ten to eight last night and reached home in Pomfret Monachorum at about ten past. If you reached home at twenty past it’s likely you might have met her on your way. She too used the by-road.’
‘I didn’t meet her,’ Gabbitas said shortly. ‘I’ve told you, I met no one, I passed no one.’