A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘It’s in there,’ he said.

  ‘May P’ Wexford’s tone left no room for refusal. He slit open the envelope and drew out a sheet of expensive blue writing paper headed with the Manor address. The paper was covered with a bold, rather masculine handwriting. Wexford turned it over, glanced at the foot of the reverse side and said in his strong official voice, ‘This is a perfectly legal will, sir, none the less valid and binding because it was not made on a will form or in the presence of a lawyer.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Quentin. He sat down, leaving the safe door open.

  ‘It is witnessed by-let me see-Myrtle Annie Cantrip and Lionel Hepburn Marriott and correctly signed by your wife. You’d find yourself up against a great deal of trouble if you tried to contest it.’

  ‘But I don’t want to contest it.’

  ‘I think you’d better read it before you commit yourself, Mr Nightingale.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Quentin’s face was now utterly bewildered, the smile wiped away. ‘Will you read it me, Mr Wexford?’

  ‘Very well.’ At last Wexford sat down. He cleared his throat and read in the same expressionless voice:

  “‘This is the last will and testament of me, Elizabeth Frances Nightingale, born Villiers, being of sound mind. This is my last will and revokes all other wills made by me.” ‘ Here Mrs Nightingale’s knowledge of legal lan—

  guage had apparently dried up, for she continued in a more natural manner, interspersed, however, with occasional officialese. ‘ “I leave all my money, including the money my husband invested for me, to Sean Arthur Love]], of 2 Church Cottages, Myfleet, in the county of Sussex, in the hope that he will use it in the furtherance of his ambition ....” ‘

  ‘Good heavens!’ Quentin said again. ‘Good heavens!’

  .11... and all the personal jewellery I possess to my sister-in-law, Georgina Villiers, of 55 Kingsmarkham Road, Clusterwell .” ‘ Here Wexford paused and raised his eyebrows. so that she may indulge her love of adornment, although as a virtuous woman her price is above rubies.” ‘

  ‘Elizabeth wrote that?’ Quentin asked in a hollow voice.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They were both surprised, Wexford thought, but probably for different reasons. For his part he was astonished that the woman whom her brother had described as frivolous and empty-headed should have had the wit to compose it and the knowledge to give it that malevolent bite. Quentin’s astonishment stemmed perhaps from the malevolence alone. He had gone pale.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s all. How much money did your wife leave, sir?’

  ‘Oh, nothing to speak of.’ Quentin forced a laugh. ‘She was overdrawn, as a matter of fact, on her private account. There’s about three hundred pounds that I invested for her years ago.’

  ‘Mmhm. I’m sure you won’t grudge that to young Lovell. Is something troubling you, sir?’

  ‘No, well, I ...’

  ‘Mrs Villiers,’ said Wexford thoughtfully, ‘is a lady who seems fond of jewellery, as your wife-er, pointed out. Let us hope there are a few nice pieces for her.’

  ‘A few nice pieces!’ Quentin suddenly sprang to his feet. ‘My wife’s jewellery is in those boxes.’ He plunged his hands into the safe. ‘At a rough estimate,’ he said, ‘I’d value it at thirty thousand pounds.’

  Wexford had seen too many precious stones to be dazzled by this small but brilliant collection. He was, in any case, not given to gasping, and his face was calm with a hint of taciturnity as he watched Quentin open the three boxes.

  One was of white leather, one of green and the third of teak inlaid with onyx. Quentin had placed them on his writing desk and lifted the lids to disclose more boxes, tiny caskets for rings and ear-rings, longer cases for bracelets and necklaces.

  Quentin took out one of the rings, a diamond halfhoop, set in platinum, and held it to the light.

  ‘It was her engagement ring,’ he said. ‘She wore it sometimes, when,’ he said, his voice growing hoarse, ‘I particularly asked her to.’ He looked at Wexford. ‘Perhaps I could buy it from Georgina.’

  ‘Your wife was fond of her?’

  . I don’t know,’ Quentin said hopelessly, pushing the ring back into its velvet bed. ‘I never thought much about it. She must have been ... And yet she can’t have been, can she? You couldn’t be fond of someone and leave that cruel message for them. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘We know Mrs Nightingale had a strong dislike for her brother. Perhaps that dislike extended itself to his wife.’

  Quentin closed the ring box. ‘The idea seems to have got about,’ he said carefully, ‘that my wife and her brother were at daggers drawn.’

  Wexford raised his eyebrows. ‘it isn’t true?’

  ‘It seems strange for me, her husband, to say this, but really I don’t know. Denys never found fault with her to me and as for Elizabeth ...

  Well, she never tried to stop him coming to the house, although it’s true she did sometimes say rather spiteful things to me about him when we were alone. And yet, you know, I used to see her lookwell, almost compassionately at him when we were all three together. I never saw signs of any real hatred.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re not a man who probes much into other people’s motives and emotions.’

  ‘I can’t be, can IV Quentin said sadly. ‘Otherwise I’d have seen that Elizabeth didn’t enjoy Georgina’s company and I’d have ...

  I’d have realised she was going secretly into the forest at night. No, I suppose Elizabeth and Denys did have a genuine dislike of each other and I hadn’t the perception to see it. Or I didn’t want to.’ He spoke quietly now and with slight embarrassment. ‘When you love people you want them to love each other and you convince yourself they do. I hate the idea of malicious stories going round that there was some sort of feud.’

  There was a short silence and then Wexford said, ‘Back to this will, sir.

  You evidently didn’t know of your wife’s friendship with Scan Lovell?’

  ‘I knew she took a maternal interest in him. We had no children of our own. She asked me to get a friend of mine at the B.B.C. to hear him sing and I wasn’t too keen, but I will now. It’s the least thing-and the last thingI can do for her.’

  ‘Forgive me-you never suspected the interest might be more than maternal

  ?’

  Quentin screwed up his face in distaste, shaking his head violently. ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘there can’t have been, but if there was ... I’ve no right to sit in judgment, not while I and Katje ... Mr Wexford, I don’t understand all these undercurrents. I don’t understand any of it.’

  ‘Nor do l,’said Wexford grimly.

  Meanwhile Burden was making discoveries of his own. Emerging from the Old House and from the gate to the courtyard which surrounded it, he encountered Mrs Cantrip coming from the kitchen garden with a bunch of parsley in her hand.

  ‘Oh, you startled me, sir,’ she said. ‘You walk so soft. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Getting a bit late for that, isn’t it?’ said Burden looking at his watch and seeing that it was half past five. ‘When do you knock off, anyway?’

  ‘Supposed to be at four and that’s a fact, but we’re all at sixes and sevens these days, don’t know where we are. Come on, sir, do. It’ll do you good and there’s Will waiting to have a word with you.’

  ‘What does he want me for?’ Burden walked towards the house with her.

  ‘He wouldn’t say, sir. Something about a scarf, I reckon.’

  In the kitchen Will Palmer sat at the table next to the man Burden had observed earlier talking over her gate to Mrs Lovell. They were drinking tea from cups of dark glazed earthenware. The other man’s presence in the kitchen was explained by the two rabbits, four wood pigeons and a basket of eggs that filled a checkered counter top.

  As soon as he saw Burden, Palmer got to his feet.

  ‘Got something to show you, governor.’

  ‘Well?’ B
urden took his teacup from Mrs Cantrip, removing it as far as possible from the dead game.

  ‘This is it.’ With an air of triumph, Palmer produced from under the table a wet polythene bag, its neck fastened with garden twine. Burden undid the string and pulled out a piece of material. It was dampish but not wet and it was still plainly recognisable as a silk scarf.

  The design on it was art nouveau, a stylised exquisite pattern of gold leaves on a primrose ground. Across the centre of the scarf was a long brown stain. Burden frowned. I Where did you find this?’

  ‘In a hole in the oak way down Cleever’s Vale.’

  ‘And where might Cleever’s Vale be?’

  Palmer’s face registered a stunned astonishment. It was evidently inconceivable to him that anyone, especially a policeman, should be ignorant of something that to Myfleet was as much a part of the scene as the forest itself.

  Mrs Cantrip said impatiently, ‘It’s part of the estate, sir, part of the park, the bit you come to first when you’re coming this way from Kingsmarkham.’

  ‘I was by way of clearing that old fungus from the oak,’ Palmer said, recovering from his astonishment. ‘Then I come on this hole, see? Likely an owl made it ...’

  ‘Squirrel,’ said the other man laconically, wiping his mouth. His face was very dark with a good day’s growth of beard.

  ‘Or a squirrel, as I was going to say, Alf,’ said Palmer, ruffled. ‘An owl or a squirrel, it being over-large for a woodpecker.’

  ‘Spare me the natural history.’

  ‘All right, governor, no need to get sarky.’ Palmer’s expression gained a new importance as the door to the garden opened and Sean came in to take his place at the table. ‘This hole would be about six feet up, I reckon,’ Palmer continued. ‘Level with the top of my head, it was.’

  ‘Rot,’said the swarthy man.

  Palmer glared at him, but, apparently deciding that the interjection referred to the cause of the hole rather than to the nonsensical content of his remarks, went on, ‘This old fungus were all round the hole. What we call the Oyster Mushroom, sir, on account of his cap looks like an oyster, see? The Poor Man’s Oyster we calls him in these parts and mighty good fried he is, I can tell you.’

  ‘Stewed.’

  ‘Or stewed, Alf,’ said Palmer more graciously. ‘To cut a long story short, I stuck me hand in this hole and that’s what I found, what’s in that bag.’

  ‘In the bag? Or did you put it in?’

  ‘It wasn’t in no bag, governor. just rolled up and stuffed down the hole.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it beforeV

  ‘Of course he has,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘It belonged to poor Mrs Nightingale. She used to wear it for a headscarf like when she went out walking.’ She bent over the scarf and recoiled sharply. ‘Would that be her blood, sir?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Sean Lovell jerked to his feet.

  ‘Going to be sick!’ he shouted. Moving faster than Burden would have believed possible in a woman of her age, Mrs Cantrip flung open the garden door.

  ‘Not in my kitchen, you’re noff With the unmoved scowl of the English rustic, the old gardener and the purveyor of game watched him stagger out, then listened with a quickened though still apathetic interest to the sounds of retching. Alf, hitherto monosyllabic, made what was for him a long speech.

  ‘Old stomach complaint,’ he said. ‘No guts.’ He laughed. ‘Wants to be a bleeding pop singer. Mental, I reckon he is.’

  Mrs Cantrip took his cup and saucer and put them in the dishwasher. When the man made no move to go, she said briskly, ‘I’ll say good night, then, Alf. And we don’t want no more eggs till Monday.’

  Leaving the Manor by the front and back doors respectively, Wexford and Burden encountered each other in the village street. There they exchanged news and were about to embark on one of their acrimonious but valuable discussions when Mrs Cantrip, puffed with running, caughtthem up.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ she said to Burden, ‘I am glad I caught you. I want to apologise, like, for the way those two went on, old Will and that Alf.

  Will’s that talkative and as for Alf Tawney ... He’s not got the manners he was born with. Would I be in your way if I was to walk along with you a bit?’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Cantrip,’ said Wexford graciously. He stopped by the official car and told Bryant to drive it back to the station.’Who’s Alf Tawney?’

  ‘Just a fellow we get our veg and chickens and such from, sir. He lives in a caravan on his ground at Clusterwell.’ Mrs Cantrip’s face closed into a kind of prudish blankness, just as Burden’s own sometimes did when a subject he would have described as ‘suggestive’ was about to be discussed. ‘You wouldn’t be interested in Alf,’ she said primly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Wexford. ‘Anyone associated with Mrs Nightingale interests us, even if he only supplied her with vegetables.’

  ‘Mrs Nightingale never associated with him, sir,’ said Mrs Cantrip, shocked. ‘If she’d ever heard of him it was only through that Sean.’ She sighed, as if coming to a painful decision. ‘Well, you may as well know, seeing as it’s common gossip and the scandal of the village. Alf’s carry—

  ing on with Sean’s mother.’

  ‘Dear me,’said Wexford.’That’s bad.’

  ‘There’s some as don’t blame Alf, him being a widow man since his boy was twelve and what with no one to cook his meals and see to his things. It’s her I blame. For, like the Bible says, sir, woman is a temptation to man and no two ways about it:

  ‘True,’said Wexford with feeling.

  ‘Mind you, I don’t care for that Scan myself, but there’s none as ‘d deny Mrs Lovell’s neglected him shameful. You might say he’s never had no proper mother.’

  ‘And Mrs Nightingale never had a son.’

  Mrs Cantrip turned her face up to him. Once more, as they approached ground she had decided must be forbidden, she looked guarded and resentful. ‘That Sean wouldn’t have dared think of Madam in that way,’

  she said. ‘There are limits. Besides, Mrs Nightingale-well, she looked so young and lovely, sir. She didn’t like people knowing her age. It went to my heart sometimes the way she wanted Scan and Catcher to feel she was the same age as what they were. And when Sean said-it wasn’t respectful, sir, but he doesn’t know no better-when he said she wasn’t square and once when he said she was nicer to look at than any lady for miles round, she looked so pleased and happy.’

  ‘He is a very handsome young man,’ said Wexford.

  ‘I can’t see it myself, sir, but tastes differ. Well, here’s where I live, so I’ll say good night. And I hope you’ve taken no offence at the way them two went on, sir.’

  They watched her go into the freshly painted white cottage whose patchwork-quilt garden was one of those Burden had earlier admired. She gathered into her arms a cushiony yellow cat which had strolled out to meet her, and closed the front door,

  ‘The poor neglected boy,’ said Wexford thoughtfully, ‘inherits three hundred pounds under Mrs Nightingale’s will. I wonder if he knows and if he thought it worth killing for? But we’ll leave that for the moment and call on the principal beneficiary.’

  ‘Sir?’Burden looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘I’ll tell you in the car.’ Wexford grinned broadly.

  ‘How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of him who bringeth good tidings!’

  How would she receive the news? Wexford wondered. With surprised gratification? Or with fear that the will had been disclosed to official eyes? It might be that she was genuinely ignorant of its contents or even of its existence.

  He told her baldly that Mrs Nightingale’s will was in her favour and watched her reactions. They were disappointing. She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘That’s a surprise. I had no idea.’ As usual she wore the necklace, bracelets and ear-rings which were as indispensable to her as stockings and lipstick might be to another woman, and not even the faintest flash of concupiscence crossed her fac
e to show that she would be glad to replace them with real stones. Her expression was apathetic and indifferent, almost sleepy, as if she had recently passed through some ordeal, so tumultuous that it had left her drained of all feeling.

  ‘You didn’t know she had made a will? Or you don’t know what she’s left you?’

  ‘No to both,’ said Georgina. She sat down on the arm of a chair. Her blouse was sleeveless and Wexford noticed the strong sinews of her shoulders and upper arms. Only once before had he seen such sinews on a woman’s arms and that woman had been a female wrestler.

  ‘You inherit all Mrs Nightingale’s jewellery,’ he said.

  ‘I see. When you said the will was in my favour I thought it must be something like that. Elizabeth hadn’t any money of her own and she always got through her allowance before the next was due. She was awfully extravagant.’

  ‘Mrs Villiers, this puts a rather different complexion on the circumstances of your sister-in-law’s death.’

  ‘Does it? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Let me explain then.’ Wexford paused as the door opened and Denys Villiers came in, his recently published book open in his hand.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Denys,’his wife said, getting up. Her voice was still dull and toneless. as she said, ‘Fancy, Elizabeth made a will and left me all those rings and necklaces of hers.’

  Villiers put his thumb between the pages of his book to mark the place and looked with dry amusement into the stern faces of the two policemen. Then, without warning, he burst into a roar of hysterical laughter.

  11

  HER husband’s laughter had a far more disturbing effect on Georgina than had Wexford’s tidings. Something had been slumbering under her veil of apathy. The laughter brought it to life and it showed in her eyes and her trembling lips as raw terror.

  ‘Don’t, Denys, don’t. Oh, stop!’ She clutched his arm and shook it.