A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  Grinning to himself, Wexford changed the subject. ‘There are three main questions I’d like the answers to,’ he said. ‘Why was Quentin Nightingale taking a bath at five in the morning? Or, conversely, why does he pretend be was? Why did Sean Lovell tell me he was watching a programme on the television last night that was, in fact, cancelled at the last moment? Why did Elizabeth Nightingale get on well with everyone except her only brother?’

  ‘Why, for that matter, sir, did she have no intimate friends?’

  ‘Perhaps she did. We shall have to find out. Mike, we’re coming into Clusterwell. D’you happen to know which belongs to Villiers?’

  Burden sat up straighter and turned his eyes to the window. ‘It’s outside the village, on the Myfleet side. Not yet, wait a minute .... Slow down, will you, Bryant? That’s it, sir, standing by itself.’

  Frowning a little, Wexford scanned the isolated bungalow. It was a squat, double-fronted place with two low gables under which were bay windows.

  ‘Needs a coat of paint,’ said Burden, contrasting it unfavourably with his own attractive, soon to be completely redecorated home.

  ‘Shabby-looking dump. You’d think he could afford a decent garage.’

  The front garden was a mass of Michaelmas daisies, all one colour. At one side a long drive of cracked and pitted concrete led to a prefabricated asbestos garage with a roof of tarred felt.

  A black Morris Minor stood on this drive just in front of the asbestos doors and someone had very recently cleaned it, for there were damp patches on its bodywork and a small pool of water lay in a pothole under its rear bumper.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Wexford. ‘Your sister is murdered, you pass out when you hear the news, and yet a couple of hours later you’re lively enough to give your car a wash and brush-up.’

  ‘It isn’t his car,’ Burden objected. ‘He drives an Anglia. That belongs to his wife.’

  ‘Where’s his, then?’

  ‘Still up at the Manor, I suppose, or in that revolting apology for a garage.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said it was muddy in the forest last night, would you?’

  ‘Tacky,’ said Burden. ‘We had rain at the weekend if you remember.’

  ‘Drive on, Bryant. We!ll leave the Villiers in undisturbed domestic bliss a little longer.’

  The first person they saw when they parked in Myfleet village was Katje Doorn, coming out of the general store with a bag of fruit and a bottle of shampoo. She giggled happily at them.

  ‘Do you happen to know which is the Lovells’ cottage, Miss Doorn?’Burden asked her stiffly.

  ‘Yes, look, it is that one.’ She pointed, clutching the cringing inspector’s arm and, as Wexford put it later, almost engulfing him in delectable curves. ‘The most dirty in all the village.’ As representative of perhaps the most house-proud nation on earth, she shuddered and, for the first time in their short acquaintance, lost her amiable expression. ‘They are living there like pigs, I think. His mother is a very nasty dirty woman, all fat.’ And, some six inches from her own rich contours, she described in the air a huge cello shape.

  Wexford smiled at her. ‘Will the fat lady be at home, do you know?’

  Katje ignored the smile. She was looking at Burden. ‘Maybe,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I know nothing of what these pig people do. You are liking a nice cup of tea? I think you are working very hard and would like some tea with me while your chief is in the nasty dirty cottage.’

  ‘Oh, no-no, thank you,’ said Burden, appalled.

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow, then,’ said Katje, sucking her hair. ‘All evenings I am free and tomorrow my friend must work late, serving drinks for the dance.

  Mind you are not forgetting.’ She wagged her finger at him. ‘Now I say good-bye. Do not be catching anything nasty in that very dirty place.’

  She tripped, straight-backed, yellow hair bobbing, across the road and up to the Manor gate. There she stopped and waved to them, her round breasts rising under the pink fluffy sweater.

  Wexford waved back, turned away, laughing. ‘Odds my little life, I think she means to tangle your eyes tooV

  ‘A ghastly young fernale,’ said Burden coldly.

  ‘I think she’s charming.’

  1C

  3lood heavens, if I thought my daughter ...

  ‘For God’s sake, Mike. I’m a married man, too, and a faithful husband.’ His grin dying now, Wexford patted his large belly. ‘Don’t have much chance to be otherwise, do I? But sometimes ...’He sighed. ‘God, what wouldn’t I give to be thirty again! Don’t look at me like that, you cold fish. Here we are at this very nasty dirty place and let’s hope we catch nothing more from our afternoon’s work than a nostalgie de boue.’

  ‘A whatV said Burden, trying to open the front gate without getting his hand stung by the nettles that thrust their leaves through it.

  ‘It is just,’ said Wexford with a rueful smile, ‘a long name for a kind of chronic plague.’ He laughed at Burden’s incredulous suspicious face. ‘Don’t worry, Mike, it’s not infectious and it only attacks the old.’

  5

  NOT only the front gate, but the front door too, was owergrown with nettles and their antidote, the dock. Before they had a chance to lift the knocker a grey lace curtain, re-perforated with larger holes, was lifted at a lattice window and a face appeared.

  ‘I don’t know what you want but you’ll have to go round the back.’

  The side gate fell over as they pushed it. With a shrug, Wexford laid it down flat on a luxuriant bed of weeds. The back garden was a squalid blot on a fair landscape, the magnificence of the forest showing up, like a stain on black velvet, these twenty square yards of waist-high grass, dandelions, tumbled corrugated iron and broken chicken coops. A

  reasonably shipshape shed filled one of the farthest corners, its footings hidden under heaps of rags, green glass bottles and a mattress which looked as if it had been used for bayonet practice. Among the weeds an enamel chamber-pot and several battered saucepans could be discerned.

  Wexford noticed that a gate in the back fence led directly into the forest.

  The back door opened suddenly and the woman who had spoken to them from the window put her head out.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Mrs Lovell?’

  ‘That’s right. What d’you want?’

  ‘A word with you, if you please,’ Wexford said smoothly.’We’re police officers.’

  She gave them a narrow suspicious glance. ‘About her over at the house, is it? You’d better come in. His lordship said there was police about.’

  ‘His lordship?’ queried Burden. Had the exalted circles in which they, found themselves even more exalted people, in fact titled personages, on their perimeters?

  ‘My son, my Scan,’ said Mrs Lovell, disillusioning him. ‘Come on. You can go in the lounge, if you like. In here.’

  This room, euphemistically named, was slightly less dirty than the kitchen, but it too smelt of greens, a chronic gas leak, faintly of gin. It was furnished with a new bright pink suite, already soiled, and a heterogeneous assortment of ancient cottage pieces and modern gimcrack. The Queen smiled aloofly from a calendar, pinned to the wall between newspaper cut-outs of the Rolling Stones and a large framed oil of a Roman lady stabbing herself.

  In feature she wasn’t unlike Mrs Lovell, while unable to compare with her in amplitude. There was a strong flavour of the gypsy in Mrs Lovell’s still-handsome face, the aquiline nose, full curved lips and black eyes.

  Medusa hair black and tangled, fell to her shoulders. Her embonpoint didn’t extend to her face. The impression was that fat had crept upwards to cease at the neck, deterred perhaps by the threat implicit in that strong unwrinkled chin.

  Hcr body was enormous, but not without a coarse attraction, the fat distributed hugely in the right places. The bosom of a Mother Earth goddess, sixty inches round yet discernibly cloven, matched in girth immense hips. Like Katje, Mrs Lovell lacked inhibition and when she s
at down her already low-cut blouse strained a further two inches down, corresponding to the ascent above her knees of a tight black skirt. Feeling that where feminine flesh was concerned, enough was enough for one afternoon—

  besides, in this case, the flesh could have done with a bath—Wexford looked away.

  ‘We’re just making routine enquiries, Mrs Lovell,’ he said. ‘Would you mind telling me how your son spent last evening?’

  ‘Had his tea,’ she said. ‘Then he sat about watching the TV. His lordship’s keen on the TV, and why not, being as he pays the licence V

  ‘Why not indeed? But he didn’t watch it after ninethirty, did he?’

  Mrs Lovell looked from Wexford to Burden. It was transparent she was deciding whether to lie or tell the truth, perhaps only because telling the truth is always easier. Everything about her appearance and that of the cottage testified to a gross laziness, a deadly sloth. At last she said economically, ‘He went out.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘I never asked him. I don’t interfere with his ways ..

  She picked at a ragged thumbnail. ‘... and he don’t with mine. Never have. Maybe he went down the shed. Spends a lot of time down the shed, he does.’

  ‘Doing what, Mrs Lovell?’

  ‘His lordship’s got his records down there.’

  ‘Surely he can play his records in the house?’ said Burden.

  ‘Can if he wants.’ Mrs Lovell chewed a hangnail. ‘Don’t matter to me one way or another. I don’t interfere with him and he don’t with me.’

  ‘What time did he come in?’

  ‘I never heard him. My gentleman friend come in about seven. Sean and him, they don’t hit it off all that grand. I reckon that was why his lordship took himself off down the shed. He hadn’t come in when my friend went, half ten that’d have been-but there, like I say, I don’t interfere with him and he don’t ...’

  ‘Yes, yes, I see. Sean was very fond of Mrs Nightingale, I believe V

  ‘You can believe what you like.’ Mrs Lovell gave a huge yawn, revealing fine sharp teeth. ‘Live and let live, that’s my motto. Her up at the Manor, she believed in interfering with folks, making them better themselves. Gave his lordship some funny ideas.’ She stretched her arms above her head, yawned again and swung her legs up on to the sofa.

  Wexford thought of a fat cushiony cat, purring and preening itself, unconscious of the squalor in which it lived.

  ‘What sort of ideas?’ he asked.

  ‘ ‘Bout getting into show business, singing, all that. I never took no notice. Maybe she fancied him. I never asked.’

  ‘Would you have any objection if we searched this house V

  For the first time she smiled, showing an unsuspected ironic humour.

  ‘Search all you like,’ she said. ‘Rather you than me.’

  ‘A depressing experience,’ said Wexford as they returned to the car.

  Bryant, rather pale, followed at a distance.

  ‘Never in all my years of C.I.D. work have I come across anything like it,’ Burden exploded. ‘I itch all over.’ He wriggled inside his clothes, scratching his head.

  ‘Well, your young lady friend did warn you.’

  Burden ignored this. ‘Those beds!’ he said. ‘That kitchen!’

  ‘More than I’d bargained for, I admit,’Wexford agreed. ‘The only clean place was that shed. Odd that, Mike. A

  rug on the floor, couple of decent chairs, a record-player. Could be a love-nest.’

  Burden shuddered. ‘No one’s ever going to make me believe a lady like Mrs Nightingale would have assignations there.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Wexford said reluctantly. ‘On the practical side, we didn’t unearth much, did we? One brass candlestick and a metal hot-water bottle.

  They hadn’t got blood on them and they hadn’t been cleaned, by God, in the last fifty years. And the clothes she said “his lordship” wore last night were almost natty. But what was he doing, Mike? Bryant checked on the pub and he wasn’t there. The last bus out of Myfleet goes at nine-twenty, so he wasn’t on that. A boy like Scan Lovell doesn’t traipse about admiring the beauties of nature. He gets too much of that all day long.’

  ‘Nobody,’ Burden persisted doggedly, ‘is going to make me believe there was anything between him and Mrs Nightingale. That mother of his is no more than the village trollop, if you ask me. “I don’t interfere with him”

  indeed. That’s just another way of saying you’ve always neglected your child. I know you think I’m old-fashioned, sir, and a puritan, but I don’t know what women are coming to these days. Dirty, feckless or immoral, or the whole lot together. First there’s this Mrs Nightingale with her face-lifting and her secret meetings, then there’s that Dutch girl boasting of the way she carries on, and as for Mrs Lovell ...’

  ‘I thought you’d feel that way,’ said Wexford with a kindly smile, ‘and that’s why I’m laying on something respectable for you. We are going to call on a virtuous wife, Mrs Georgina Villiers, who will, tell us, I hope, without fainting or assuring us of her broken-hearted devotion to Mrs Nightingale’s memory, just who her friends were and what her nasty brother did to make them loathe each other!

  ‘My husband’s gone back to the Manor,’ said Georgina Villiers.’He won’t be long.’

  ‘We should like to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ Mrs Villiers looked surprised and rather frightened, as if few people had ever wanted to talk exclusively to her.’Well, all right!

  She led them by way of a porridge-papered hall into a porridge-papered living room. It was as untidy and characterless as its owner, who stood awkwardly before saying in the abrupt voice of a charmless woman, ‘Well, sit down.’

  ‘We shan’t keep you long, Mrs Villiers. How is your husband after this morning’s shock?’

  ‘Oh, that. He’s all right now.’ Suddenly she became aware that her visitors wouldn’t sit down before she did and, with a slight nervous laugh, she crossed the room and perched herself on the arm of a chair. ‘Oh, dear. I’d better close the front door. Excuse me, I’ll just do that! Wexford noticed that for s.—thin and slight a woman she had a strong athletic stride. Her legs, stockingless, were well muscled, tanned a reddish brown.

  ‘Well, what did you want to ask me?’ Her voice had a brusque barking note, as if she were used to command but not always to having her commands obeyed. Hundreds of dark brown freckles peppered her skin, the white vulnerable skin of the auburn-haired. She seemed in her late twenties, a woman w~o didn’t know how to make herself pretty but who tried. The edelweiss brooch on her blouse collar, the slide in her hair, showed that she tried. ‘My husband-you really should talk to my husband. He won’t be long.’ She eyed the clock rather wildly. ‘Quen—

  my brother-in-law, that is-wouldn’t keep him long. Anyway, what did you want to ask me?’

  ‘First of all, Mrs Villiers,’ said Burden, ‘did you and your husband come straight back here after your visit to the Manor last night?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What did you do when you got home?’

  ‘We went to bed. We both went straight to bed.’

  ‘You had been driving the car I saw outside?’ Wexford put in.

  Georgina Villers shook her head so violently that her hair flew out, disclosing unsuitable pendant car-rings. ‘We went in Denys’s car. We’ve got two cars. When we got married last year I had a car and he had a car.

  Only old cars, but we kept them both. They aren’t worth much, you see.’She managed a feverish, very bright smile. ‘He’s out in his car now.’

  ‘And yours, I see,’ said Wexford in a pleasant fatherly voice, ‘has just been cleaned, Always clean your car on a Wednesday, do you, Mrs Villiers?

  I expect you’re like my wife, a special time of the week for every little chore, eh? That way nothing gets left.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. I’m not methodical.’ She blinked at him, puzzled by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I oug
ht to be, I know. Denys would like it if ... Why do you ask V

  ,I’ll tell you, Mrs Villiers. If you were very methodical and always worked to a routine you’d be conditionedto it, and then I could understand that even the violent death of your sister-in-law might not make you deviate from that routine. But since you aren’t methodical and only, I assume, clean your car when you feel like it or when it needs it, why did you choose today of all days?’

  She blushed deeply. A fear that was almost anguish showed in her eyes and she blinked again, bringing her hands together and then clasping them. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t distress yourself. Perhaps you cleaned the car because you were upset. Was that it?’ She was very slow on the uptake, Wexford thought, too frightened or too obtuse to see the loophole he was offering her. He offered it more explicitly. ‘I suppose you took the very sensible attitude that when one is unhappy or worried, work is the best thing to take one’s mind off one’s troubles?’

  Relieved at last, she nodded. ‘Yes, that was it.’ Immediately she undid the small good her agreement had done her. ‘I wasn’t very upset, not really. I mean, she wasn’t my sister.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Wexford. He drew his chair closer towards her and their eyes met, hers held by his like the eyes of a rabbit mesmerised by headlights. Suddenly Burden was excluded and the two of them were alone.

  ‘She was your husband’s sister, of course, just a sister-inlaw.’ Her face sharpened and hardened. ‘They didn’t like each other much, did they?’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’ She hesitated very briefly, sliding as if involuntarily from the arm to the seat of the chair, but not taking her eyes from Wexford’s face. ‘They didn’t get on at all,’ she said. ‘If you must know, Denys couldn’t stand her.’

  ‘Strange, Mrs Nightingale seemed to get on with everyone else.’

  ‘Did she? Oh, with the county people, you mean.’ She gave a deep quiet sigh and then spoke in a level rapid voice, ‘Elizabeth didn’t have any real friends. My husband, he thinks she was killed by a maniac, one of those men who attack women. I expect that’s what it was. She must have been mad, going into the forest at night. Really she was asking for it.’