A Guilty Thing Surprised

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford gave a slight embarrassed cough. ‘Rubbish,’ he said, listening to the bluster in his voice and trying to quell it. ‘I tell you, that girl had nothing to do with Mrs Nightingale’s death.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But it’s a bit funny, isn’t it? She’ll talk very freely about her goings-on with Nightingale and that waiter, but she shuts up like a clam when I try to get her to describe her drive home. And another thing, Night—

  ingale’s Mini was standing out by those stables and young Lovell was cleaning it, doing his best to get a scratch off the front bumper.’

  ‘I don’t know where all this is getting us, Mike. We aren’t looking for a damaged car but for a witness who saw something when he passed Villiers’

  bungalow.’

  ‘I like all the ends tidied,’ said Burden. ‘Anyway, I checked downstairs and no accident was reported on Tuesday night.’

  ‘Then let’s leave it, shall we?’ said Wexford crossly. ‘Get Martin to go over to Clusterwell and find out if anyone does any regular nightly dog walking. I may as well go myself,’ he added. ‘Spy out the land a bit. It’s not possible no one used that road.’

  The cottages of Clusterwell were scattered over a spider-shaped network of lanes. Sergeant Martin took the body of the spider, Wexford its legs.

  Recalling the painstaking routine work of his youth, he knocked on every door. But the inhabitants of Clusterwell took a perverse pride in their own peculiar brand of respectability. Like those of Myfleet, they stayed in at night. Virtue lay in bolting one’s doors, drawing one’s curtains and gathering round the television by nine o’clock. And, judging by the number of mongrels Wexford encountered in the lanes, their dogs exercised themselves.

  A large black one, patrolling what looked like a field of allotments, growled at him as he approached the hedge. He decided to venture no nearer the caravan-in any case clearly deserted-which stood behind runner-bean vines and stacked chicken coops. Instead he stepped back to read the words on a shabby board mounted on poles: A. Tawney. New-laid eggs, roasting chickens, veg.

  ‘Myfleet,’ he said tersely to his driver.

  Mrs Cantrip was in her rocking chair, engrossed in her paper, a little flustered because he had caught her in idleness. Katje, who had shown him in, disappeared in the direction of the study.

  ‘Alf Tawney, sir? If he’s not out on his rounds, you’ll likely find him over at Mrs Lovell’s.’

  ‘How does he travel to and fro?’

  ‘On his bike, sir. He’s got one of them big baskets on the handlebars of his bike.’

  Wexford nodded. ‘Does he stay at Mrs Lovell’s all night?’

  It was easy to shock Mrs Cant ‘ rip, who adhered to that school of thought which holds that fornication can only be committed between midnight and dawn. ‘Oh no, sir,’

  she said, flushing and looking down. ‘He’s always gone by eleven. I reckon even Mrs Lovell’s got some idea of what’s right:

  The lovers were in the middle of their evening meal. A saucepan of baked beans stood in the middle of the clothless table.

  Mrs Lovell re-seated herself. ‘His lordship been up to something?’ she asked, carving more bread and resting her gigantic bosom among the crumbs.

  ‘My visit has nothing to do with Sean.’ It was clear to Wexford that he was to be offered no tea, but a glance at the cracked cups and the scum-ringed milk bottle told him he wasn’t missing anything. ‘I hoped to have the pleasure of a little talk with Mr Tawney.’

  ‘With Alf? What d’you want with Alf V

  Wexford eyed the purveyor of eggs and vegetables, wondering how to interrogate a man who apparently never opened his mouth. The small black eyes in the swarthy hatchet face stared expressionlessly back at him.

  At last he said, ‘Spend a good deal of time here with your friends, do you, Mr Tawney?’

  Mrs Lovell gave a full-throated giggle. ‘My Sean’s no friend of his,’ she said. ‘It’s me you come to see, don’t you, Alf V

  ‘Um,’said Tawney lugubriously.

  ‘And very nice too,’ said Wexford. ‘A man needs a little feminine company after a hard day’s work.’

  ‘And his hot meals. Wasting away Alf was till I got him coming here. You fancy a cream horn, Alf?’

  ‘Um.,

  ‘What time,’said Wexford, ‘do you reckon on leaving Mrs Lovell’s to go home

  ?’

  ‘Alf has to be up betimes,’said Mrs Lovell, looking more gypsy-ish than ever. ‘He’s always gone by a quarter to eleven.’ She sighed and Wexford guessed that this early retreat had been a bone of contention between them in the past. With surprising intelligence, she said, ‘You want to know if he saw anything the night her up at the Manor got killed?’

  ‘Precisely. I want to know if Mr Tawney took a look at Mr Villiers’

  bungalow-you know the one I mean?as he was cycling back to Clusterwell.’

  ‘Don’t know about look. He tried to knock them up, didn’t you, Alf?’

  ‘Um,’ said Tawney. Very alert now, Wexford waited.

  ‘Go on, Alf. The gentleman asked you a question.’ A tremor disturbed Tawney’s body as if, by unprecedented effort, he was trying to summon speech from the depths of his stomach. ‘He was mad enough about it at the time,’ said Mrs Lovell. ‘Quite talkative for him. Go on, Alf.’

  Tawney spoke.

  ‘ ‘Twere no good,’ he said. ‘They was out and the place locked up.’

  ‘Now let’s get this straight’ said Wexford, guessing for all he was worth and mentally apologising to Burden. ‘Mr Tawney was riding home when a car passed him and nearly knocked him off his bicycle.’ Mrs Lovell’s admiring grin told him he was guessing right. ‘And he took the number of this car, intending to give it to the police so that the driver might be prosecuted.’

  ‘He never took the number.’ Mrs Lovell dipped into a paper bag for the last cream horn. ‘He knew who it was. That foreign girl fromthe Manor.’

  ‘Mr Tawney knocked at the bungalow because he wanted to use their phone?’

  Incredible to imagine Tawney explaining, apologising, dialling, explaining again.

  ‘The place was all dark,’ said Mrs Lovell with relish, the gypsy scaring children with her stories round the camp fire. ‘Alf banged and banged, but no one come, did they?’

  ‘Nope,’said Tawney.

  ‘ralk about hearsay evidence, thought Wexford. ‘What timewasit?’

  ‘Alf left here half past ten. He’d been knocking a long time when the clock struck eleven, Clusterwell church clock. Go on, Alf, you tell him. You was there.’

  Tawney swigged his last drop of tea, perhaps to lubricate his rarely used vocal cords. ‘I banged and no one come.’ He coughed horribly and Wexford looked away. ‘He’s out and she’s out, I said to myself.’

  ‘That’s right, Alf.’ Mrs Lovell beamed encouragement.

  ‘Might have known. The garage doors was open.’

  ‘And both cars was gone! So Alf give it up, and next morning-well, you cool off, don’t you? You think to yourself, Why bother when there’s no bones broken? Mind you, I’ll let that little foreign bitch know what I know if I see her about the village.’

  Poor Katje. Wexford wondered if he should drop her a gentle word of warning, closeted with her, calling her by her Christian name, even though that privilege had only been accorded him because he reminded her of some old uncle. Talk to her like an old Dutch uncle ...? He laughed to himself. Better forget it’. st ay securely tied to the mast while the siren sang for others.

  In September even the best-kept gardens usually have a ripe wild look. This one was a barren island among the fields, a sterile characterless plot in which every unruly branch and every straggling stem had been docked. The grass was brown and closely shorn and there was nothing to provide shade.

  Denys and Georgina Villiers sat in a pair of deckchairs, the uncomfortable cheap kind which have thin metal frames and economically small wooden arm-rests. Wexford observed them for a moment before makin
g his presence known. The man who said he never read newspapers was reading one now, apparently oblivious of his wife. With neither book nor sewing to occupy her, she stared at him with the rapt attention of a cinema fanatic gazing at the screen.

  Wexford coughed and immediately Georgina sprang to her feet. Villiers looked up and said with the icy unpleasantness he seemed always able to muster, ‘Control yourself. Don’t be so silly.’ , Wexford walked up to them. Over Villiers’ shoulder he looked at the newspaper and saw what he had been reading: a review of his own latest published work which occupied half a page. ‘Mr Villiers,’ he said roughly,

  ‘why did you tell me you came straight home from the Manor on Tuesday night and went to bed? This house was empty and in darkness at eleven. Why didn’t you tell me you went out again?’

  ‘I forgot,’said Villiers calmly.

  ‘You forgot? When I asked you most pointedly?’

  ‘Nevertheless, I forgot.’ Villiers’ cold face showed neither fear nor embarrassment. The man had a curious strength, an iron self-control; he seemed unbreakable. Why then have this strange sensation that he had been irrevocably broken long ago and that his strength had never been quite strong enough?

  ‘Come now, sir. You forgot you went out. Very well. Have you also forgotten where you went?’

  ‘I went,’ said Villiers, ‘where I said I was going, to the school library to look up a reference.’

  ‘What reference?’

  With cool contempt, Villiers said, ‘Would it mean anything to you if I told you?’ He shrugged. ‘All right. I was looking up the precise relationship of George Gordon Wordsworth to William Wordsworth.’

  Somewhat to his own humiliation, Wexford found that it did indeed mean nothing. He swung round on Georgina who crouched in her deckchair, gooseflesh on her arms and tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip. For once she wore no jewellery. Did the cheap gaudy stuff no longer please her now that she would be able to adorn herself with real gems? Or had she ferreted out of Nightingale the scornful words in which her sister-in-law’s bequest was couched?

  ‘Did you accompany your husband to the school, Mrs Villiers?’ He noted the faint shake of her head. ‘Had you done so you would hardly have gone in two separate cars. But you went out. Where?’

  Her voice came in a shrill squeak. ‘I drove-I drove around the lanes.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  Villiers answered for her. ‘My wife,’ he said silkily, ‘was annoyed with me for going out. She did what she often does on such occasions, took her own car and went for a country drive.’ He gave a waspish smile. ‘To cool her temper,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not convinced of any of this,’ said Wexford slowly. He glanced around the bare garden. ‘I think we could all talk more frankly down at the police station.’

  Georgina gave a wild cry and threw herself into her husband’s arms.

  Wexford expected him to repudiate her but instead he held her with almost a lover’s tenderness. Standing up now, he stroked her dry rough hair. ‘As you like,’he said indifferently.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘You must tell him. You tell him.’

  He was going to lie again. Wexford was sure of it.

  ‘What my wife wants me to tell you,’ said Villiers, ‘is that you’ve been a complete bloody fooP He patted Georgina as one pats a dog and then he pushed her away. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Chief Inspector.

  Next time you suspect anyone of murder for gain, you had better check up on the value of what they’re gaining. I’m a good liar,’he said urbanely,

  ‘but I’m not lying now. My sister’s pieces of jewellery are all fakes.

  I’d be surprised if the whole lot would fetch more than fifty pounds. You had better look elsewhere, Mr Wexford. You know as well as I do that your absurd trumped-up case against my wife has nothing but motive to make it stand up, and where is your motive now?’

  Gone with the sun, thought Wexford, watching it sink behind the misty fields. He was suddenly quite sure that this time Villiers hadn’t been lying.

  13

  KATJE was nowhere to be seen and it was Quentin Nightingale himself who this time admitted Wex ford to the Manor. But Wexford sensed her recent presence in the austere study. He felt that she had been standing here with Quentin, in his arms, kissing him, then running away when the bell rang.

  Quentin himself had an abstracted air the look of a lover dreaming of the past, impatient for ;he near future. Wexford’s news jolted him into unwelcome reality.

  ‘Every piece of jewellery Elizabeth had I bought for her,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got the receipts for most of it, if you’d care to see them.’

  ‘Later. First I should like to see the stones themselves again.’

  Quentin removed the Stubbs, opened the safe. Then he lifted the jewels from their boxes in handfuls, letting them fall through his fingers, as a child on its first visit to the seaside sifts shells and stones, its pleasure mixed with astonishment at the unknown.

  He picked out from the heap his dead wife’s engagement ring and took it to the window, but the growing dusk defeated him and, returning, he switched on the desk lamp.

  ‘My glasses,’ he said. ‘Just by your elbow. Would you mind?’

  Wexford handed them to him.

  ‘This is a fake.’ There was a small quiver in Quentin’s voice. ‘This isn’t the ring I gave Elizabeth on our engagement.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Not because I’m an expert on precious stones. I shall have to find an expert to tell us for sure about the rest. Are there any to be found around here or should I get someone down from London?’

  ‘We can find someone here. You haven’t told me how you know that ring is false.’

  Quentin said bitterly, ‘When I bought it for her I had some words engraved inside it.’ Taking the ring from him, Wexford knew he wasn’t going to be told what those words had been. ‘There’s nothing inside this one.’

  ‘No.’

  Quentin sat down. With a rapid, almost reflex gesture, he pushed the sparkling heap away from him, knocking a rivi~re of diamonds—-diamonds or paste?-on to the carpet. It lay like a glittering snake at Wexford’s feet.

  ‘I suppose,’ Quentin said, ‘that they’re all copies. Perfect copies too, aren’t they? All but one. Exquisi ‘ te f acsimiles of the real thing.

  Except one. She had the stone copied and the platinum copied but she didn’t bother to have the words copied because they meant nothing to her.

  How utterly indifferent she must have been to me .... I

  Was it this indifference, finally and irrevocably brought home to him, that made Quentin’s mind up for him? Was it this knowledge that led him to take his new and perhaps reckless step? Much later, after the cast was over, Wexford often asked himself these questions. But on the following morning, returning to the Manor from the jeweller’s, he hadn’t given them a moment’s thought and the news came to him as a complete surprise.

  Katje showed him into the drawing room and he was already unwrapping the brown paper from the jewel boxes as he followed her when he saw that Quentin wasn’t alone. Denys Villiers was with him, standing by the french windows and holding both Quentin’s hands in his. Wexford heard the tail end of what sounded like a speech.

  ‘... Anyway, my best congratulations, Quen. I couldn’t be more glad for you.’ Then Villiers saw Wexford. He dropped his brother-in-law’s hands and his face set arrogantly.

  ‘May I know what ground there is for congratulation, sir?’

  Villiers shrugged and turned his back, but Quentin, flushing, put out a hand to Katje and the girl ran to him.

  ‘Perhaps I’m indiscreet to tell you, Chief Inspector. You might read so much into this.’ Villiers made a faint derisive sound. ‘I’d like it kept secret for the time being,’ Quentin said. ‘Katje and I are going to be married.’

  Wexford put down his parcel. ‘Indeed?’ he said. They looked like father and daughter standi
ng there. There was even a slight resemblance between them, the family likeness apparent between any two people belonging to the classic north European type. ‘Then let me congratulate you also,’ he said, and again he apologised silently to Burden, whose ideas had perhaps been not so oldfashioned after all.

  ‘Naturally, we shall wait six months. A year might be more ...’

  ‘But I am not waiting a whole year, Kventin. Half a year perhaps. It is not fair if you are making me wait a whole year for my flat in London and my new fast sports car and my going all round the world for my honeymoon.’

  So she was a gold-digger, after all. Wexford thought sadly. He had been wrong. These days it seemed that he was always wrong.

  ‘Now I should like to see you alone, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Abruptly Villiers threw open the french windows and walked out of the room. Casting a dazzling smile over her shoulder, Katje followed him to pause on the lawn and survey everything around her with frank concupiscence.

  ‘She’ll go home to her parents until the wedding,’ Quentin said, and earnestly, ‘I want everything to be right. I want-what is it Antony says?

  “Read not my blemishes in the world’s report. I have not kept my square.”

  ‘

  ‘ ‘ ‘ But that to come,” ‘ Wexford capped it, ‘ “shall all be done by the rule.” ‘ I daresay, he thought, I daresay. But what of ‘that to come’ for her? Such a long future, so much money, such idleness for temptations to gain ground in. She was the last for him and he perhaps only one of the first for her. Would they dine at the Olive sometimes and be served by a waiter who had once romped with this lady of the Manor in the coverts of Cheriton Forest? Poor Kventin, Wexford thought, aping her accent. He was no longer to be envied. It was a nice game he was playing, a game which had once seemed enticing to Wexford. But not any more, not on those terms, for it wasn’t worth the exorbitant price of the candle.