Gently Instrumental (13 page)

‘It makes a link in a chain.’

‘Too circumstantial.’

‘Another link is his deception with the clothes.’

‘But – fair do’s – by then he was in a tizzy, and thinking his arrest was just around the corner.’ Capel glanced at another couple who had come in. ‘Look, you’re talking to a man who understands Leonard. Under all that phlegm he can easily be panicked into saying and doing the silly thing. He’s behaved suspiciously, that’s a fact, and you do quite right to follow it up. But look me in the eye and hear me telling you that, in his case, you’re being misled.’

‘Your faith in him is touching,’ Gently said.

‘Is there nothing I can say that will convince you?’

Gently hunched. ‘You could try a confession.’

Capel snatched his head and turned away.

Now there was quite a little influx of diners, spreading out to all corners of the lounge. Waiters followed, and a party of four pulled up chairs to face the window. Capel gulped his coffee.

‘We can’t talk here – and there’s a devil of a lot more I want to say.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘How about a stroll – across the links to Gorse Cottage?’

Gently considered the proposition. Then he put down his cup and rose.

Capel led the way to a footpath that skirted the houses at the north end of the town. The sun, a malignant disc, still glared on the horizon ahead of them. To the right were marshes, veined by ditches exposing beds of cracked, dried mud and, more distantly, clustering under trees, the white walls of a village higher up the coast. Was it cooler now . . . ? Even the long shadows still seemed envelopes of heat. Dust and chaffy ends of grass kicked up as they strode along the path.

‘My favourite walk,’ Capel explained. ‘Though usually it’s muddy, along here.’

‘It leads to Gorse Cottage . . . ?’

‘More or less. After you cross the toe-end of the links.’ He turned to slide Gently a grin. ‘I suppose that’s giving you some naughty thoughts! But frankly, the choice is quite innocent. We’ve only come here to be on our own.’

He loped ahead, a jerky figure, yet with an awkward grace in his stride; they crossed a plank bridge and came to a stile beyond which the path entered a meadow. At the stile Capel paused, his hand upon it.

‘Were you serious when you suggested a confession?’

‘Should I have been?’

‘Well, I can’t help wondering which way your ingenious ideas are straying! You’ve got old Leonard in a half-nelson, but you’re not a man to take for granted. Perhaps you’re just putting the screws on Leonard to see if you can make the other pips squeak. Isn’t that possible?’

‘You seem to think so.’

‘After all, old Leonard is a moderate prospect. You must have met murderers enough in your time to know that his face doesn’t fit the picture. Killing needs too much or too little imagination, and either way lets Leonard out. But Tom Friday and myself make the perfect combination. And you certainly won’t have overlooked that.’

Gently shrugged. ‘I’ve always preferred facts . . .’

‘But psychology is a fact, too!’

‘At the moment we have to regard it as secondary.’

Capel looked at him, sighed, then took a spring at the stile.

‘Of course you know what I’m after, don’t you?’ he said, as they resumed their way, now side by side. ‘I don’t give a hoot who killed Virtue. My single-minded target is the performance on Saturday. We’ve got our understudy. Walt’s bounced back. George V Hall is booked solid. But now the law is making passes at our good Cello, enough to throw Rostropovich off his stroke. Damn it, you’re being anti-cultural, man! Couldn’t it wait at least until after Saturday?’

Gently shook his head. ‘I’ve no powers of postponement.’

‘You could drag your feet – just a very little! It isn’t as though nations hung on the upshot. The world is no worse for the loss of Terence Virtue.’

‘Is that your opinion?’

‘Absolutely. I’m quite willing to speak ill of the dead.’

‘The
Quintet
is worth more than his dying.’

‘Infinitely more – now that he’s dead.’ Capel waved a large hand. ‘You can’t cancel it, you know, and I’m sure you’re above simple hypocrisy. Likely enough Virtue died as he lived, and that’s an end. Music is for ever.’

‘For music, I should interrupt the course of the law?’

‘Till Sunday – and it’s worth a brace of cops.’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

Capel worked his shoulders pettishly. ‘Somehow you’ve
got
to see sense before Saturday!’

He strode on with his jerky lope over the wiry straw that had once been grass. Ahead, shrivelled trees netted the sun, breaking up its last spite into fiery stilettos. In the dusty sky no birds flew, no grasshoppers chirred in the swarf beneath. But, as they approached the trees, two bats took wing to flutter round them boldly.

‘Did you check when I left The White Hart on Tuesday?’

‘Inspector Leyston had already done so.’

‘That’s a pity – it doesn’t help you. Though of course I was going spare after that.’

‘You, but not Friday.’

Capel turned to smile. ‘Only you can’t be certain of that, can you? Tom has only his daughter to vouch for him, and she’d lie like a trooper for either one of us.’

‘Do you want to bring Friday in?’

Capel chuckled. ‘He’s an option you’ll have to keep open. He made no secret of his feelings about Virtue, and would have used a strong arm if I hadn’t stopped him.’

‘The motive isn’t there.’

‘That bothersome factor!’ Capel gave a snatch of his head. ‘But people get killed for no motive, you know. You mentioned manslaughter yourself.’

‘Only Meares may have motive.’

‘That’s still guesswork.’

‘The presumption is too strong to ignore.’

Capel bounced a few paces in silence, his slanting brow creased in a frown. ‘What we need is a deep, dark motive that would have even me reaching for a blunt instrument. I did see quite a lot of Virtue, remember. He came to my house several times with Walt. And dear old Walt would never have suspected evil, even if I’d invited Virtue on his own.’

Gently gestured impatiently. ‘We’ve been through all that.’

Capel raised his hand. ‘But have you met my wife?’

‘Your wife . . . ?’

‘Tanya. I don’t want to boast, but she’s usually regarded as quite a peach.’ He turned his Mephistophelean leer on Gently. ‘You remember me telling you that Virtue was bisexual. You didn’t ask me why I was so certain – and perhaps I wouldn’t have told you, if you had.’

Gently hesitated. ‘For that you’d take a . . . blunt instrument?’

Capel nodded. ‘The first that came to hand. I love my wife. If Virtue had seduced her, somewhere, sometime, I would have killed him.’

They had come to a second stile; it admitted them to the golf links and the sweep of the heath. The sun had slipped finally beneath the horizon to leave the western sky in a lurid glow. But the glow was soiled. Mushroom pillars of smoke hung upon it right along the skyline with, at their feet, like lingering fragments of the sun, small bright eyes of flame. And faintly one could smell smoke on the warm lifeless air.

‘Our world’s alight . . .’

Capel stood gazing on the other side of the stile, his gaunt face for once empty, the lips in a slack line.

‘Leslie intends to go to Canada when he has qualified here. It’s too late for me. My generation was the one that tried to sit tight and weather it. Only the ship has let us down. Now we’re fit only for the burning.’

Gently, too, stood gazing. ‘You seem to have weathered it pretty well . . .’

‘I – yes!’ Capel angled a shoulder. ‘I dropped my line in a pleasant place. But that’s a garrison town back there, a cell that still resists the creeping anaemia. The body is sick, the brain is tumoured. Leslie will go with my blessing.’

‘Aren’t you a diagnostician?’

Capel’s mouth twisted. ‘Who is in doubt about the disease? Plato left us an account of it, and Laotse before him. When the gods seek to destroy us they send us a madness called equality. We of course interpret it as uniformity, and then the vital structure of society fails. Men are unequal. There is more than education between a fitter and a physician. Not the opportunity of princes could turn me into a Walt Hozeley. But now we make it an article of faith: and wait for Plato’s will to be done.’

‘May not the disease be reversible?’

‘Have you seen any signs of it slackening? Sometimes the patient has a better day, but that’s usual in the course of a fatal illness. Soon now we may expect a crisis, and that will answer the question for us. Either the patient will get up and walk or he will exhibit total collapse.’

‘And crime is one of the symptoms,’ Gently said.

‘Crime – like this one here.’

‘A diminished regard for the sanctity of life.’

Capel stared at the flames and said nothing.

At last he shrugged impatiently and set off again, across the fawn desert of the links: here dotted with dark thickets of furze and the gaping pits of stony bunkers. The greens they passed were unwatered ruins. No member was playing an evening round. At a distance to the right the pleasant, white-painted clubhouse stood deserted, its car park empty.

Capel nodded to it. ‘No more golf until the drought breaks,’ he said.

‘Meaning you meet few people this way.’

Capel summoned his leer. ‘You’d be lucky to meet any.’

‘So that, for an assignation . . . ?’

Capel strode on, his leer still visible. Now he had put on pace a little, as though having some fixed object in mind.

They came to the road and, crossing it, entered the lane to Gorse Cottage. Hozeley’s Rolls was parked in his drive and a light was showing in a window. The varnished gate was swung back and jammed open with a new wooden wedge. Capel halted in the gateway and turned, confronting Gently.

‘Isn’t this the place?’

‘It’s the place.’

‘And about the time?’

‘About the time.’

Capel’s expression was fiendish. ‘The place, the time . . . and one, at least, of the men involved! You know, I think we ought to improve the occasion. Why don’t we reconstruct the crime?’

He had no humour in his eyes, standing there in Hozeley’s gateway; their grey sparkle turned on Gently like a bright, thrusting probe. Gently returned the stare flatly.

‘Do you think it will do any good?’

‘Oh yes. I think there are features you could well have overlooked.’

‘Which . . . ?’

‘We don’t know, do we? They will arise from the reconstruction. But I’m convinced that if we put it together a little spark of light may fall.’

Gently hunched. ‘Better carry on, then!’

Capel leaned back against the gate. He rested his elbows on the bar and cocked one of his large feet.

‘First, a preface about the row. That was a considered act by Virtue. He intended to cut the rehearsal short and to make certain that Walt stayed away from the cottage.’

‘That’s Hozeley’s theory.’

‘It’s mine too, so you may as well take it as read. When Virtue left the Music Room on Tuesday he had something quite specific in mind. We can guess what it was – an assignation. He’d invited someone to the cottage. Only – and this is a point you may have overlooked! – the sex of that someone remains uncertain. It could have been a man, could have been a woman, and if the latter, she could have had a husband. And then you have a motive which, in my book, beats blackmail into a bran poultice.’

‘A husband – like you.’

‘Like me.’ Capel’s eyes were rock-steady. ‘Especially remembering that Tanya had an alibi that would have covered her till past midnight.’

‘May I take it that it was you?’

Capel didn’t smile. ‘I’m not in the market with a confession. But you can use my case as an example – there might well have been a husband around like me.’ He hitched up on his elbows. ‘So this way comes Virtue, just as dusk is becoming darkness. He’s expecting to meet this man/woman, perhaps just here, by the gate. But no one is waiting here – or so he thinks, as he comes tripping down the lane. But then, as he reaches the gate, X steps out . . . from behind that laurel.’ He paused briefly to glance about him before indicating the shrub. ‘Are you with me?’

Gently regarded him, then slowly shook his head. ‘I prefer the version you gave me this morning to a block alibi for the Shinglebourne Quartet.’

Capel came down off his elbows. ‘But putting us aside – with none of your naughty little suspicions aroused – bringing a completely free mind to the problem – isn’t that just how you’d see it?’

‘Only my suspicions have been aroused . . .’

‘Never mind! Try to suspend them for two minutes. Out from that laurel steps X to plant himself in front of Virtue. X is angry, X has motive, X is carrying – say – a stout cudgel, and probably without much palaver X commences an attack.’ Capel dropped to a crouch. ‘But note this! Virtue wasn’t an easy customer. He was small but he was strong, and he’d learned to fight in a tough school. So he doesn’t crumple – far from it! – he provides himself with a counter-weapon.’ Capel lunged suddenly to the spot by the gate where the flint would have been. ‘A stone-age man’s weapon – lying here so conveniently – and with that in his hand he rushes at X.’ He checked, his eyes gleaming. ‘Doesn’t it begin to seem real?’

Gently’s face was a blank. ‘Go on.’

‘Now X is in dire peril. Virtue is coming at X viciously, he certainly means business. But X is no weakling either. X dodges Virtue’s attack. Then X catches Virtue on the skull with a cracking blow, and Virtue collapses.’ Capel’s eyes came at Gently powerfully. ‘And meanwhile Walt is strolling on the shingle, Laurel is describing the row to her people, Tom and I are downing a pint and Leonard is squatting on the john.’ He spread his hands. ‘QED. That’s about as close to it as anyone will get.’

Gently held his eye. ‘Except, possibly, X.’

‘Oh yes – X!’ Capel’s mouth puckered. ‘What about the tall dark stranger seen in the vicinity by young Dave?’

‘Of course . . . you’d know about that.’

‘Of course. I had the story from Crag. And Crag was loud in his complaints about policemen and their methods.’

‘And the flint . . . ?’