A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I’m not sure that I can,’ said Wexford, seeing she was a kid of fifteen and you around thirty when you last met.’

  ‘How you do throw cold water on all one’s impulsive little expressions!

  I mean, of course, that it was lovely to see someone I used to know, and anyway it was always a pleasure to be with Elizabeth. An absolute beauty, you see, and what style! I love those classic English blondes.’

  ‘You ought to get married again,’ said Wexford.

  Marriott cast a shifty glance upwards and said cpigrammatically, ‘A man who marries again doesn’t deserve to lose his first wife.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Wexford, ‘you shock me. Talking of marriage, how did the Nightingales get on?’

  ‘They were a very happy couple. If you and your wife never discuss anything but the weather, are waited on hand and foot, arc childless and equally cold sexually, what is there to quarrel about?’

  ‘It was like that, was it? And may I ask how you know they were sexually cold?’

  Marriott shifted a little in his seat. ‘Well, you’ve only got to look at Quentin and ... You must allow for a little guesswork, Reg.’

  ‘I’ll do the guessing. Let’s get back to those early days, fifteen, sixteen years ago. Was Villiers living here then?’

  ‘No, he turned up a couple of years later. First day of the autumn term it was, and that makes it fourteen years ago almost to the day. We had a couple of newcomers to the staff, a science man and a second-string classics bloke. That was Denys. The Head introduced us veterans and, of course, I was thrilled to see Denys.’

  ‘But naturally,’said Wexford.

  Marriott gave him an injured look. ‘I thought his behaviour very odd, most peculiar. But then Denys is odd, the complete misanthropist. “What a stroke of luck for you,” I said, “knowing me. I can take you around and introduce you to anyone who is anyone.” You’d have thought he’d have been overjoyed, but not a bit of it. He just gave me one of his sick looks, but I thought I’d better make allowances.’

  ‘Allowances for what?’

  ‘Well, he’s a poet, as you know, and poets are curious creatures. There’s no getting away from it. I see you didn’t know. Oh, dear me, yes. Several very charming little verses of his had appeared in the New Statesman by that time, and I’d just read his collection of essays on the Lake Poets.

  Most scholarly. So, as I say, I made allowances. “Perhaps you’re relying on your sister to give you the entr6e,” I said. “Don’t forget she’s new here herself.” “My sister here?” he said, going quite white. “You don’t mean you didn’t know?” I said. “Christ,” he said, “I thought this was the last place she’d want to show her face in.” ‘

  ‘But you made sure they got together?’ said Wexford.

  ‘Naturally, my dear. I had Denys and his wife up there the same evening.’

  ‘His wife?’ Wexford almost shouted. ‘But he’s only been married a year.’

  ‘No need to blow your cool, dear old boy. His first wife. You weren’t joking when you said you didn’t know anything about these people, were you? His first wife, June, a most ...’

  ‘Look, don’t let’s get on to her yet,’ groaned Wexford. ‘Why was Villiers so upset when you said his sister was here V

  ‘I asked myself the same thing at the time, but we were all together quite a lot after that and it was plain they couldn’t stand each other.

  Odd when you think how sweet Elizabeth was to everyone else. Frankly, Reg, she acted towards him as if he’d done her some injury, and as for him ... The man’s rudeness to her was beyond belief. But you mustn’t lay too much stress on that. Denys is foul to everyone except Quentin. He’s quite different with Quen and, of course, Quen adores him. But Elizabeth and Denys were never friends. As children they were always quarrelling. Even now I can remember Mrs Villiers and my poor wife discussing it, how trying it was, you know, and how helpless it made Mrs Villiers feel. But if you want to know why they carried on with this feud of theirs, I can’t help you. Elizabeth never discussed her brother if she could help it, and if she didn’t confide in me, whom did she confide in? We were very close friends, intimate, you might say.’

  ‘Might I?’ said Wexford thoughtfully. ‘Might I indeed V He fixed Marriott with a searching look and would have pursued this further but for the entry of Hypatia, bathed, perfumed and dressed in gold trousers and a black and gold tunic.

  She had a cool smile for Wexford, a maternal one for Marriott. ‘Still nattering? Pam and Ian are here, Leo. I’ve just seen their car turn into the alley.’ She said pointedly to Wexford,’Must you go?’

  Wexford got up, shaking off Marriott’s restraining hand. ‘Will you be having another party tomorrow night, Lionel?’

  ‘Really, Reg, I’m not a complete sybarite. Tomorrow night I’ll be utterly prostrate after my tussles with the sons of yeomen, burgesses and those of the better sort. Spots before the eyes, no less.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Wexford, grinning, ‘I’ll pick you up from school and give you a lift home.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Marriott, showing for the first time a vague uneasiness. He escorted Wexford to the door, let him out and admitted two bright elderly people. ‘How marvellous to see you, my dears. You’re looking good enough to eat, Pam darling. Now do let me ..

  Wexford slipped quietly away.

  7

  THE Burden children were going back to school and from the bungalow bathroom came the sounds of retching. Pat was always sick on the first morning of term. Her parents stood in the kitchen listening to these sounds with the helpless misery of people who are just beginning to realise that their children are human beings as well as their children and that there is a point beyond which they cannot help them. This child would vomit on the first day of every term, before every interview for a job, probably too on her wedding morning.

  ‘Oh, Mike,’ said jean Burden, ‘ought we to send for Dr Crocker? Sometimes I even think about sending her to a psychiatrist.’

  ‘When you know she’ll be as right as rain as soon as she sets foot in the classroom? Keep a sense of proportion, love.’

  ‘I just wish I could help her. We’ve never been nervy. I never thought I’d have a child who was a mass of nerves.’

  ‘I’m not nervy,’ said John, coming in with satchel and shining morning face. ‘If I ever have kids and they go on like her I’ll give them a right walloping.’

  Burden looked at his son with distaste. His children, though only two years apart in age, brought up by loving and happily married parents in a solid middle-class background, had never got on. From quarrelling ever since John was a toddler and Pat able only to scream at him from her pram they had progressed through physical fights to their current daily fripping.

  He said severely: ‘You’re to stop speaking about your sister like that. I’m sick of telling you. Suppose,’ he said, a thought coming to him from the case he was engaged on, ‘suppose you and Pat were to be separated now and knew you wouldn’t see each other again till you were grown up, how would you feel then? You’d be very sorry you were so unkind to her. You don’t know how much you’d miss her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss her,’ said John. ‘I wish I was an only child.’

  , I can’t understand this dislike,’ Burden said helplessly. ‘It’s not natural.’ He put out his hand as his daughter, white-faced and with hanging head, came in under the shelter of her mother’s arm. ‘I’ll drive you to school, sweetheart. I’ll come right inside with you.’

  ‘You never drive me to school,’ said John. ‘And I’ve got further to go, a dirty great mile to walk.’

  ‘Don’t say “dirty great”,’ said Burden mechanically, and then: ‘I’ll drive you both. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t quarrel in the car.’

  The forecourt of the King’s School was thronged with boys. Burden edged the car up the drive, sending the littlest ones, John’s contemporaries, scuttling out of the way, squealing and whooping at the tops of their
voices. Sixth-formers, draped against the wall in languid groups, their ignominious caps folded and tucked into their pockets, stared at him with lofty insolence. John jumped out of the car while it was still moving and was immediately absorbed by the whooping mob.

  ‘You see, John isn’t a bit worried,’ Burden said encouragingly. ‘You know you were both bored stiff being at home so long and he’s glad to be back with his friends.’

  ‘I hate him,’said Pat.

  ‘That’s no way to talk about your brother.’ Burden reversed carefully and, making a three-point turn just inside the gates, came face to face with Denys Villiers. He nodded courteously, just raising his hand.

  Villiers looked through him, thrust his hands into his pockets, and marched in the direction of the new wing.

  ‘Stop the car, Daddy,’ Pat said as soon as they reached the open road.

  ‘I’m going to be sick again.’

  His children deposited, Burden drove down to the police station through the morning rush. He had been surprised to see Villiers, whom, he thought, tact if not grief would have kept from work for at least this week. A strange man, one who seemed to care nothing for public opinion.

  His behaviour in ignoring Burden, a policeman who had been in his house the day before and was, in any case, the parent of a King’s pupil, had beenwell, outrageous, Burden thought.

  Aware that he was twenty minutes late, he leapt into the lift and arrived breathless in Wexford’s office. The chief inspector, in an even more disgracefully shabby suit than usual, sat at his rosewood desk, leafing through stacks of papers. Standing behind him at the window was the doctor, breathing on the glass and drawing with one finger something that looked disturbingly like a plan of the alimentary canal. Burden had had enough of alimentary canals for one morning.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘My girl Pat’s always sick on the first day of term, so I hung about and drove her to school.’ He nodded to the doctor. ‘Jean wanted you called in.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t bother a busy man?’ said Crocker with a lazy grin. ‘Pat’ll grow out of it, you know. It’s all part of the human predicament from which your kids aren’t going to be absolved, hard cheese though that may be.’

  Wexford looked up with a scowl, ‘Spare us the philosophy, will you? I’ve got some lab reports here, Mike. The ash from the Manor bonfire shows distinctly that woollen cloth was burnt on it. No weapon has come to light, although our people went on combing the forest until it got dark last night and they’re at it again now.’

  ‘It could be anywhere,’ Burden said hopelessly. ‘in the river, chucked in someone’s garden. We don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘No, but we’re all going to have a hard think about that. First of all we have to decide if Mrs Nightingale’s assailant planned this murder or if it was unpremeditated.’

  Dr Crocker rubbed out his drawing with the heel of his hand. He sat down on one of Wexford’s flimsy chairs. The chief inspector’s was the only solid one in the room, a dark wood and leather throne, strong and ample enough to bear Wexford’s weight. It creaked as Wexford leaned back, spreading his arms.

  ‘Premeditated,’ said the doctor, concentrating. ‘Otherwise she wouldn’t have been killed in that way in that place. The kind of thing she was killed with isn’t the kind that people carry with them on country walks.

  Right?’

  ‘You mean that if it was unpremeditated she could only have been killed by strangling, for instance V

  ‘Roughly speaking, yes. You don’t have to bring the weapon with you in a planned murder if you know the means are going to be available. For example, Y intends to kill X in X’s drawing room, but he doesn’t take a weapon becausc he knows the poker will be where it always is, on the hearth. But in an open space there aren’t going to be any means, so he arms himself before he starts. That’s what your man did.’

  ‘Does it have to be a man?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘A man or a very strong woman.’

  ‘I agree with you. My own view is that it was planned, and that can still apply in a jealousy murder. The killer followed her, expecting to see what he did in fact see. He took the weapon with him, guessing what he was going to see and only waiting for confirmation. What do you think, Mike?’

  ‘Unpremeditated,’ said Burden coolly. ‘Our murderer was carrying with him something that could be used as a murder weapon but had some other primary purpose. As in the case of a woman cutting bread. Her husband says something to her which drives her over the edge of reason and she makes for him with the bread knife. But the original purpose of having the knife in her hand was to cut bread.’

  ‘I’m all for pre-cut loaves myself,’ said the doctor facetiously.

  A deepening frown was the only sign Wexford gave of having heard this.

  ‘Well, if we play along for the moment with Mike’s theory, what could he

  (or the very strong she) have been carrying? What do people carry when they go into a wood at nightV

  ‘A walking stick,’ said Burden promptly, ‘with a metal tip.’

  Crocker shook his head. ‘Too thin. Not the kind of thing at all. A

  shooting stick possibly, but it seems farfetched. A golf club?’

  Wexford glared at him derisively. ‘Going to have a few drives among the trees, was he? Trying to get his handicap down? Oh, give me strength!’

  ‘Well, it was moonlight,’ said the doctor. ‘Or it was till the wind came up. Metal heel of a shoe?’

  ‘Then where’s the dirt in the wound?’

  ‘You’re right. There wasn’t any.’

  Wexford shrugged and fell into moody silence. Equally silently, Burden eased the papers from under his hand and began reading them without expression. Suddenly Wexford swivelled the groaning chair round.

  ‘You said something just now, something about light.’

  ‘I did?’

  Burden said in his prim official voice: ‘Dr Crocker said that it had been moonlight until the wind came up.’ He gave a barrister-like inclination of his neat head in the doctor’s direction. Crocker raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember because I was out at Flagford, delivering a baby.

  There was a bright moon but the clouds were already coming up by eleven and by half past the moon had gone.’

  A slow grin that had nothing to do with humour and a great deal to do with triumph spread across Wexford’s face. ‘So what would anyone take with him into the wood?’

  ‘An umbrella,’ said the doctor, but Burden said, his gravity giving way to excitement, ‘A torch!’

  ‘A torch?’ said Quentin Nightingale. ‘Those we have are kept in the garden room.’ The skin under his eyes looked brown and cr~pey, the result perhaps of a second sleepless night. His hands trembled nervously as he touched his forehead, fidgeted with his tie, finally putting them behind his back and clasping them lightly together. ‘If you think ...’he muttered. ‘If you’re hoping ... Your people searched the house throughout yesterday. What can

  ...?’ He seemed incapable of ending his sentences, but let them trail away on a note of despair.

  ‘I’m pursuing a new line,’Wexford said briskly.’Where is this garden room?’

  ‘I’ll take you there.’

  As they re-entered the hall the front-door bell rang. Quentin stared at the door as if Nemesis itself awaited him on the other side of it, but he made no move, only nodding hmply when Mrs Cantrip marched out from the kitchen.

  ‘Whoever’s that now?’ she said with some exasperation. ‘Are you at home to visitors, sir?’His apathy aroused her sympathy rather than impatience.

  ‘For two pins I’d send them away with a flea in their ear.’

  ‘You’d better see who it is,’ said Quentin.

  It was Georgina Villiers and Lionel Marriott. They made a strange couple, the tall raw-boned young woman incongruously bedizened with costume jewellery, and the little sharp-eyed man. Georgina’s face registered a mix—

  ture o
f assorted emotions, hope, shyness, an intense curiosity. She carried a canvas hold-all with plastic straps and handles, more suitable for a hiker than a woman paying a morning call, and as she stepped over the threshold she broke into a disjointed stream of apology and explanation.

  ‘I felt I had to come and see how you were bearing up, Quen. It’s all so dreadful for you .... I’ve brought my own lunch so that Mrs Cantrip won’t have to be bothered cooking for me. How are you? You do look bad. Well, of course it’s the strain and everything. Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn’t have corne.’

  Quentin’s face, contorted in an effort to hide his anxiety, showed plainly that he agreed with her, but courtesy forbade his saying so. ‘No, no. It was nice of you to take the trouble. Won’t you come into the morning room?’ He swallowed hard and half-turned to Wexford. ‘Perhaps Mrs Cantrip can take you to where the torches are kept?’ The hand he put up to his sister-in-law’s shoulder to shepherd her along shook now with violent jerks that were painful to see. They moved slowly towards the room where Elizabeth Nightingale had sat in the mornings, Georgina still muttering apologies.

  ‘One moment.’ said Wexford, putting out an arm to prevent Marriott from following them. The morningroom door closed. ‘What the hell are you doing here, anyway?’ the chief inspector said wrathfully. ‘I thought you were supposed to be at school?’

  ‘I had a free period, my dear, and how use it better than by popping up here to console poor Quen?’

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me how someone without a car “pops”, as you put it, up to Myfleet from Kingsmarkham and back again in forty minutes?’

  ‘Georgina,’ said Marriott, unable to restrain a grin of triumph, ‘gave me a lift. I was standing at the school gates lost in thought, wondering in fact how I was going to accomplish my popping, the Myfleet bus having just gone, when along she came, Manor-bound. Such a relief! We had a nice little chat, planning the things we were going to say to cheer Quen up.’

  ‘Then you’d better go in and say thern,’ said Wexford, giving the little man a small shove. ‘Say them and go. I’m just about to start another massive search of this place and I don’t want a lot of cheerful nosy people interfering with my men. And don’t forget,’ he added, ‘that we have a date at four o’clock.’ He sighed, shaking his head. ‘Now, Mrs Cantrip, for the garden room.’