They went into the kitchen, and it was there that Stott came to them, as Kenworthy was in the act of examining the chain on the inside of the back door. The paint on the metalwork was chipped and worn.
‘She had both doors on the chain that Friday night?’ Kenworthy asked.
‘That’s one of the things that’s preying on her mind,’ Stott said. ‘She was too drunk to know what she was doing, but of course that’s neither excuse nor consolation. She insists that it was the last thing she remembers doing – in a fit of hopeless rage.’
‘Was Davina often locked out?’
‘It had happened before, I’m afraid. Davina had her own key, but the chain had to defeat her.’
‘So where did she usually go when that happened?’
Stott simply looked disconsolate.
‘My God – if only I’d stayed –’
‘Do you think you could really have prevented a tragedy? It had to come sooner or later.’
‘At least I’d have tried. Mr Kenworthy: you must know what we are asking ourselves. Where did we go wrong?’
‘You didn’t go wrong, Mr Stott. It was not you who made Davina as she was. That was God’s work.’
‘If only we’d managed her differently.’
‘I wouldn’t have fancied my chances,’ Kenworthy said.
He and Christine were silent until they were almost back in the village.
‘At least they’ll try,’ Kenworthy said. ‘They’re all set for another attempt. I wouldn’t put my hopes any higher than that.’
Christine found nothing to say to this.
‘You know what I can’t help thinking? Whoever killed Davina Stott may possibly have done a good turn to three people: her father, her mother, and perhaps even Davina herself.’
‘And you really think that’s a sensible argument?’ Christine asked him.
‘Of course not.’
Then his tone suddenly brightened.
‘Christine: previously, when Davina was locked out – where do you think she spent the night?’
‘How do I know? The vicar’s? That farmer? She certainly did not come to the Grange.’
‘You’re sure of that? Could she not have crept in without your knowledge? It’s a big enough place – she could have got in with collusion; perhaps even without it.’
‘Whose collusion? What are you talking about? It certainly never came to my knowledge.’
As he left her, there were this time no special endearments for the sake of bystanders. But any bystander – and there were a few – must have been struck by the spirit of understanding between the pair.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘The forces are gathering.’
It was Saturday, the last whole day of the Kenworthys’stay in Spentlow. Tonight would have seen the last performance of The Anathema Stone. Even their car (a Cortina, an old friend, 150,000 miles on the clock) was parked outside the cottage. The contents of its glove pocket – the Guildford section of the one-inch map, a Reader’s Digest circular that had arrived once just as they were leaving the house – had come back to them like some relics of a forgotten world. But it was beyond the car that Elspeth was looking, to where Mrs Scadbolt, holding upright an ancient high-framed bicycle, was talking to Emmeline Malkin. And a few moments later they were joined by Alice Brightmore and Doreen Malkin, who had come together out of the grocer’s shop.
‘Are your ears burning, Simon?’
He made some vacant sign with his head, and went on with his packing.
‘Don’t forget that you still have to return the key of the caravan.’
That was a subject that had barely been mentioned between them.
‘I may still be needing it,’ he said casually.
‘Still living in hope, are you?’
‘Gleed knows what I’m up to. He knows we go home in the morning. If he wants to play it my way – and he said he did emphatically enough – he knows he has to move himself.’
‘Perhaps he prefers to wait until he has the field to himself.’
‘I’d not blame him for that. But I don’t think he’d say one thing and mean another.’
The group of women were now moving off together towards the small unfinished close of modern houses that had not been Jesse Allsop’s most famous success in the sphere of development.
‘To Geraldine Cartwright’s,’ Elspeth said. ‘They must be feeling as frustrated as you are.’
Kenworthy made a third attempt to close the lid of a case.
‘These things will have to go on the back seat.’
‘I don’t even know what you’d hoped to gain by this stunt, anyway. At least, I hope I don’t –’
She was being teasing and non-vindictive, but perhaps not altogether uninvolved.
‘Confession,’ Kenworthy answered factually. ‘As I see it, there may be one witness who’ll turn Queen’s Evidence. All the rest will be inadmissible hearsay. The jury would be left weighing one woman’s word against another. And even if that were good enough for Gleed, his superiors would surely want something better. Added to which, for the sake of my own certainty –’
‘But which witness? Doreen Malkin? Alice Brightmore? Why not both of them?’
‘Because I think that only two women were in on the fatal attack.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Simon, leave my clothes to me – And you’re still hoping to prove that by a night in a trailer with Christine?’
‘I’d had something of that sort in mind. But as you say, time’s running thin –’
But not so thin as that. The Kenworthys finished their packing, all but what had to be left to the Sunday morning. They had decided not to spend the rest of today in Spentlow, but to use their renewed mobility to lunch out and see something of Staffordshire: Rudyard Lake and the Roaches.
But a few minutes before midday the Spentlow constable came to the door: a young officer, with his hair neglectfully long under the back of his helmet. He handed Kenworthy a tightly-packed quarto buff envelope and Kenworthy went back into the living-room and drew out a sheaf of carbon flimsies and Photostats.
‘We’ll lunch out all the same,’ he told Elspeth. ‘But I have to go up to the Grange. And for the sake of appearances I’d better go alone.’
‘Gleed?’
‘Has struck oil.’
When Kenworthy let himself into the caravan, Christine was at the cooker, tickling the contents of a frying-pan with a slice: a rasher or two of bacon, a tin of baked beans, a couple of eggs, two pairs of slender sausages from a plastic pack. Fortunately there was enough Calor gas left in the container. The caravan was in the clean swept state in which it had been left at the end of the season, not tarted up yet for next year; paintwork scuffed by idle heels, burns where cigarette stubs had been put down on the edge of the Formica draining-board. Kenworthy produced a bottle of Yugoslav Riesling.
‘We might as well create an air of complete dissipation.’
The cooking seemed to require Christine’s full concentration. She was wearing a lavender trouser suit with widely flared trousers, a cheap blouse open at the neck.
‘I don’t know how hungry you are.’
‘Salivating.’
‘I didn’t know whether you’d be able to hold yourself in check long enough to eat.’
Her tone was a mixture of cynicism and open options. She was clearly prepared to play whatever happened whichever way it came: and that without faith in anything or anyone.
She had scattered the contents of a holdall on to the cantilevered double bed: a diaphanous nightdress, a pair of new tights, still in the packet, a garishly floral patterned toilet bag that contained God knew what intimacies. Some time during the last week she must clearly have been out of the village on a shopping expedition. It was unthinkable that she had had this stuff in store during the full flush of her anarchy.
Kenworthy went to the window and pulled at a corner of the curtain, uncovering a narrow triangle of window.
‘Not much point
in our being here if we don’t advertise the fact.’
‘Whoops!’
She was no dab hand with a frying-pan. Getting an egg out intact must always have been a matter of chance for her.
‘You don’t seriously think that that lot are going to pay us a visit?’
‘If they don’t, I am wasting my time.’
‘Then why waste it? Wouldn’t it do for a famous policeman to be honest about what he’s here for?’
Kenworthy was at the cupboard, trying to sort out a matching set of anything in the crockery line. Two grey-filmed tumblers were all he could find for the wine.
‘I’m prepared to make the most of the company while I’m about it.’
He smiled at her as he might have smiled at his daughter. His attitude puzzled her. The only sort of smile she knew how to return was stagey and short-lived.
‘I must say, John Horrocks is being very patient and understanding,’ he said.
‘He trusts you.’
‘And you too?’
‘Listen: I’ll hear nothing against John. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have been messed up for good – been fished out by now from under some bridge with punctures all the way up my arm.’
‘I dare say. But I still think he’s being more trustful than many a man.’
‘You’re a copper, aren’t you? We’re on the right side of you, aren’t we? We want to stay there. You can have your little bit of ultimate anarchy too, if you fancy it. Do you think we care? Do you think we own each other, the way you and your wife do? You’re going away tomorrow. In any case –’
‘In any case what?’
‘John believes in you. He still thinks you’ve something up your sleeve.’
‘I have something up my sleeve.’
‘What, then?’
‘A missing link in a chain. I know precisely what happened, the night Davina Stott was killed.’
It was uncomfortable at the folding table. There was no room for their elbows or knees, barely space for their cutlery and plates. Kenworthy filled up their glasses.
‘Just the vintage for bacon and egg.’
But she ignored the sidetrack.
‘I’ll buy it,’ she said. ‘What did happen?’
Kenworthy chewed slowly.
‘We’d had a late rehearsal, remember? You weren’t there, but you must have got tired of waiting for John to come home.’
‘He was often late home.’
‘I know. He stopped off for a quick one after hours in the Recruiting Sergeant – and that often developed into several leisurely ones.’
‘So what? I dare say your own wife sometimes –’
‘Oh, certainly, yes. We family men try you women terribly hard. Including that night. I was down the lane with Davina Stott till a very late hour. Much to my wife’s concern. Though I must confess that I did not know then how closely observed I was.’
He paused.
‘Vera Scadbolt, Alice Brightmore, Emmeline Malkin: Davina and I were giving them their biggest treat of the decade. And after I’d left her I’m pretty sure they trailed her back to the Grange. And we come here to a point, my dear, on which I fear that you have been less than ingenuous with me.’
She looked at him sharply. She may not have been certain what ingenuous meant, but she did not mistake its impact.
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘You told me that Davina had not slept at the Grange since that business with Kevin O’Shea had scared her off.’
‘Nor had she – to my knowledge.’
‘On the contrary, I have reason to think that she made a regular habit of it – whenever, in fact, her mother had put the door on the chain.’
‘Yes, well, look, the Grange is a rambling place. We never did lock the door. There was nothing to prevent her from finding her way in.’
‘Not even her fear of another mass onslaught with nettles?’
‘That was done by the village women.’
‘Mostly. But she did not regain her confidence without good grounds. She came in under protection, perhaps. Whose protection would that be?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know who’d protect her.’
‘Oh, come, Christine. You do yourself less than justice. Who but John Horrocks? John – who was making it his job to protect her even from herself. He knew what she was up against, knew what her home was like, what was the muddled state of her own mind. He desperately wanted, too, to keep her out of the clutches of public welfare. Would he have denied her a bed for the night?’
‘If there was anything like that going on, I knew nothing about it.’
‘You mean there could be comings and goings about the landings of that dark old house at night that you might know nothing about? You mean that John would deceive you?’
‘I’d be surprised if he did.’
‘Or had Davina been a bone of contention between you?’
‘You don’t think I was jealous of her do you?’
Then Kenworthy suddenly laughed, and immediately took off the pressure.
‘God – why am I talking like this? Anyone would think I was interrogating you. Sorry, Christine. I suppose it gets to be a habit with me. But I do think that something was going on – something quite simple and innocuous. Let’s say, just to save misunderstanding, that nobody bothered you with it.’
She looked at him with confused comprehension.
‘So let’s say Davina came up to the Grange after she left me. Let’s say she hung about outside, waiting for John Horrocks to come home from the pub, to give her safe entry. Let’s say she was being observed from the shrubbery. Let’s say the reception committee suddenly revealed themselves – and she thought she was in for another chastisement with nettles. So what would she do?’
‘Run for it.’
‘And if she was caught – fight for it. Fight like a wild cat. Fight so she had to be restrained with more force than anyone had set out to use. Fight with her fingernails, toe-caps and sharp-shod heels. Fight and have to be held so that one of her attackers suddenly shouts, “My God – you’ve killed her.” And shall I tell you what happened next, Christine?’
She was no longer interested in the food on her plate.
‘I don’t know why you’re telling me this. As far as I am concerned –’
‘A woman found,’ Kenworthy said, ‘that for a moment of time she had a dead girl not only on her hands, but in them. She was a woman who had lost all her friends, who was standing alone at this instant with the only other crony who was still with her.
‘What am I going to do with her? What am I going to do?’
‘That’s your affair. You never did know where to draw the line.’
‘You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me get her
away from here.’
‘Why should I help you? What have you ever done for me?’
‘I’ll do anything you want.’
‘Then came the great inspiration: Dogtooth. Carry her down to the doorstep. Lay her across the Anathema Stone, leave her where she had writhed hysterically in that appalling last scene of the play. Think what a mesh of false trails that was going to create, what a turmoil of cross-scents and madcap old histories.
‘Then the other woman stated the terrible terms for her co-operation. Is this making sense, Christine?’
‘How could I possibly know? I wasn’t there.’
‘Then that terrible trek down the hill, when two women discovered that carrying a girl’s body over a long distance, before rigor has set in, is something they’ve never practised before. They quarrelled as to who should take the ankles and who the armpits. They needed to stop more and more often to rest. Once, they stopped at the spot that I pointed out to you: in the hollow of the rabbit warren. That was where the accomplice reiterated the price of her silence; and the murderess made promises that she had no intention of keeping. Then at last they were in the yard at Dogtooth, and could turn their backs on their burden.’
Kenwo
rthy pricked up his ears and held up his hand to silence any reply that Christine might make; not that she looked as if she had any words on her lips. He held up a finger and made her listen.
The Spentlow night was full of its own noises. A bullock came up to the caravan and snuffled round the window. But there were other sounds too in the field: voices whispering, feet dragging through long, damp grass. Christine’s ears picked up the sounds too, and she listened with him. There was the scrape of a key in the lock of one of the other caravans, a man’s voice and a woman’s as the couple climbed in.
Kenworthy chuckled.
‘There must be more duplicate keys than Jesse Allsop knows about.’
But Christine was no longer alert to any sense of the comic.
‘I have no idea what you have been talking about.’
‘Just let’s say it was all theory. I’m sure you’ll admit there’s a strong element of probability in it.’
‘How on earth can I know whether there is or there isn’t?’
‘Don’t you even recognize some of the things that were said – and the stages in the journey of the corpse?’
She looked at him with round eyes. For the first time she seemed to see that she was physically trapped, wedged into her seat, his bulk between her and the door.
‘It was Patricia Cave – Triss – who helped you to carry Davina down that valley. You’d been fretful that night, because John Horrocks was late from rehearsal and pub. You went out to look for him, and instead of John Horrocks, you ran into Davina, coming up through the trees, her script under her arm. I do not think that you meant to kill her. I think that the pressure of your hatred gave a strength to your fingers that simply took over. There you were, wondering what John was about, wanting him, looking forward to bed. And there was Davina, locked out again, Davina with another problem, another confession, another demand on John Horrocks’s good-natured time. How often had you been robbed of John Horrocks at bed-time by the arrival of Davina with a problem? You could even picture the next morning, as had happened before: John having to wake her, to get her up, to take her down with him to catch the school bus.’
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