Guilty Thing Surprised (14 page)

Myfleet was a pretty village even on a winter’s day. Now, bathed in mellow sunshine, it lay in its hollow beneath the forest like a sleeping beauty. This afternoon it seemed unpeopled; only the flowers in cottage gardens stood out in the open enjoying the sun.

Burden drove to the Kingsmarkham end of the village and decided to walk the rest of the way. It was a day made for strolling, for appreciating the scent of
ripening fruit and admiring the great multi-petalled dahlias, raised for a flower show or a harvest festival.

But he had been wrong in thinking the village totally deserted. Now, as he approached the Manor, he noticed Mrs Lovell leaning over the gate of her disreputable cottage, talking to a swarthy man in a cap who carried two dead and bleeding rabbits over his arm. The shifty looks he was giving the Manor—though probably the natural accompaniment to his conversation, concerned as it must be with the only topic currently of interest in Myfleet—gave him the air of a poacher. Mrs Lovell encouraged him with peals of uninhibited ringing laughter.

He found Sean in the Old House, unloading apples from a basket on to one of the racks. They were pale red and gold, Beauty of Bath, their skins striped and shiny like old silk. They boy was whistling but he stopped abruptly when Burden came in.

‘Come here often, do you?’ Burden asked softly. ‘Is this where you used to meet Mrs Nightingale?’

‘Me?’
He gave Burden a sullen glare, sat down on a stack of silver-birch logs and began to roll a cigarette. ‘It’d be a help,’ he said, ‘if I know what you was getting at. No, I don’t come here often. Fact is I never set foot in here since April.’ He cocked a thumb at the tunnel staircase. ‘On account of
him
being up there.’ Scowling, he lit his cigarette. ‘Me and old Palmer, we’ve got strict orders not to come in here disturbing him, see?’

‘You go into the garden room, though, don’t you? You go to sweep it out. Ever borowed a torch, Lovell, to light your way when you went to Mrs Nightingale in the forest?’

‘Me?’ Sean said again. ‘Are you off your nut?’ His cigarette had gone out. He relit it, blinking when the
flame caught the ragged paper and flared. Perhaps it provided a flash of mental as well as physical illumination, for he said, ‘You trying to make out I was carrying on with Mrs Nightingale? You
are
a nut and a dirty-minded nut at that.’

‘All right, that’ll do,’ said Burden, mortally offended. The supreme injustice of the accusation wounded him more than the insolence. ‘Come now,’ he said, keeping his temper, ‘you were on very friendly terms with her.’

‘Look,’ said Sean, ‘if you must know, she was interested in helping me with my career.’

‘Helping you do the
gardening?
’

The boy’s face flushed deeply. Unknowingly, Burden had returned thrust for thrust. ‘Gardening’s not my career,’ Sean said bitterly. ‘That’s just a stop-gap, just to fill in time till I get on with my real work.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘Music,’ said Sean. ‘The Scene. Up there in London.’ Again he cocked a thumb, this time north-wards. His face had grown rapt and, like Dick Whittington, he seemed to see a vision, a city paved with gold. ‘I’ve got to get there.’ His voice shook. ‘I know it all, see, like it was recorded in my head. I could tell you the way all the charts were, right back for years. I could pass exams.’ He clenched his hands and there shone in his eyes the fanaticism of the religious mystic. ‘There’s not one of them D.J.s know half of what I do.’ Suddenly he shouted at Burden. ‘Take that grin off your face! You’re just ignorant like the rest of them, like my old lad with her men and her booze. Mrs Nightingale was the only one as understood and she’s dead.’ He drew a dirty sleeve across his eyes, the artist
manqué
that the world persists in treating as an artisan.

Gentler this time, Burden said, ‘What was Mrs Nightingale going to do for you?’

‘There was this bloke in London she knew,’ Sean said, muttering now. ‘He was with the B.B.C. and she promised faithful she’d mention my name. Maybe for singing, maybe for a D.J. In a small way for a start,’ he added humbly. ‘You got to start in a small way.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know what’ll happen to me now.’

‘Best stick to your gardening, grow up a bit and get rid of some of these fancy ideas,’ Burden said. Sean’s glance of pure hatred riled him. ‘Let’s forget your ambitions for a moment, shall we? Why did you tell the chief inspector you were watching a television programme when that programme wasn’t even shown?’

Sean looked peevish rather than frightened at being caught in his lie. ‘I had been watching the telly,’ he said, ‘but I got fed up. My old lady had got her bloke in for the evening, that Alf Tawney. Grinning at me, they was, and mocking me on account of me watching Pop Panel.’ Sean clenched his fingers over an apple until his knuckles whitened. ‘One fellow after another my mum’s had ever since I was a kid and all they’ve ever wanted is to get me out of the way. I tell you, when I was about ten I saw my mum with one of them men of hers, kissing and pawing each other and I picked up the carving knife and went for her. I’d have killed her, I would, only the bloke got the knife away and hit me. I’d have killed her,’ he said fiercely, and then something he saw in Burden’s eyes silenced him. Awkwardly he said, ‘I don’t care any more, not about her, only I get—I get fed up.’ His fingers relaxed and he dropped the apple into the rack. Burden saw that his nails had pierced the rosy skin, leaving deep juicy wounds.

He said smoothly, ‘It seems to me you let your emotions get the better of you.’

‘I said I was ten, didn’t I? I’m not like that now. I wouldn’t lay a finger on her whatever she did.’

‘I take it,’ said Burden, as Sean wiped his sticky hand on his jeans, ‘I take it you’re referring to your mother?’

‘Who else’d I be referring to?’

Burden shrugged lightly. ‘So you got “fed up” with your mother and Alf Tawney. Where did you go?’

‘Down to my shed,’ said Sean. ‘I sat there all alone, thinking.’ He sighed heavily, got up and, turning his back on Burden, resumed his unloading of the apples. ‘Just thinking and—and listening.’ The bright fruit, bruised by his hands, rolled into the rack. Very softly he began whistling again. His face had coloured as vivid as a red as the apples. Getting up to leave, Burden wondered why.

‘Denys always went on holiday with them,’ said Marriott. ‘With both of them, I mean. But two years ago he had to go with Elizabeth alone. Quen caught the measles, poor thing. So humiliating. Elizabeth told me she absolutely dreaded being stuck with Denys in Dubrovnik, but Quen said he’d never forgive them if they stayed at home on his account, so they had to put up with it.

‘Well, they must have rowed the whole time because they both looked rotten when they got back and there was a distinct coldness between Denys and Quen all the following winter and Denys stopped going up to the Manor. Then, one day, in the June of the summer before last, I was up at the Manor when in walked Denys. “You are a stranger,” Quen said, but I could tell he was overjoyed. “I only came,” said
Denys, “to tell you I can’t go to Rome with you next month. I’ve promised the Head I’ll be one of the escorts to the school party.”

‘ “You?” I almost screamed. “You must be out of your mind.” I mean, it’s a joke at school, the lengths the staff go to get out of it. “You’d pass up lovely Rome,” I said, “for the lousy old Costa Brava?” “I’m going,” he said, “it’s all fixed.” You should have seen poor Quen’s face. He did his best to work on Denys but it was no use. He was adamant.’

‘What about this year, Lionel?’

‘He was married by then, wasn’t he? He met Georgina on the Costa Brava, but I’ll come to that later. No, this year they went off to Bermuda by themselves, and I think that secretly they were only too glad to have got rid of old misery face. Elizabeth said as much to me when I went up there to witness her will and …’

‘Her what?’ said Wexford slowly. ‘Did you say her
will?’

10

‘W
hy didn’t I tell you that my wife had made a will? Frankly, Chief Inspector, because I’d forgotten all about it.’ Quentin Nightingale had seemed bewildered at first, but now he smiled a slightly derisory smile as if at someone making a mountain out of a molehill. He had negotiated his own mountain and descended it with only a few bruises. Why bother him now with trivialities? ‘I don’t for a moment suppose it’s legal. It was just a piece of nonsense my wife took into her head, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ said Wexford, refusing the offer of a leather chair and standing instead against the tall bookcase. ‘I imagine that people in your position have their solicitors draw up their wills for them. Who is your solicitor, Mr Nightingale?’

‘But no solicitor was involved. I told you it was just a piece of nonsense. Really, I can’t think how you came to hear of it.’ He paused expectantly, but when it became clear to him that Wexford didn’t intend to
enlighten him, he said, with an edge of impatience to his voice, ‘I’d better tell you about it.’

‘I wish you would,’ said Wexford, leaning his head against the hard smooth bindings of Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic.

‘Well, it was last summer. My wife and I had decided on Bermuda for our holiday and naturally we intended to fly. Although my wife had flown before—when we went to America seven years ago—she didn’t like flying and we usually went on holiday by sea and car.’

‘She was afraid to fly?’

‘Oh, come. “Afraid” is putting it too strongly.’

‘If she made a will,’ Wexford retorted, ‘I suppose it was because she thought she might die. “Afraid” isn’t too strong a word to use about the anticipation of death.’

‘You’re looking at it much too dramatically,’ Quentin said with exasperation. ‘She was a little anxious but she was quite prepared to joke about it. This will was a sort of joke. I told you I never took it seriously.’

He stopped talking and listened for a second. By straining his ears Wexford too could just hear the sound of Katje’s radio from far above them. Then Quentin’s eyes met his and the other man flushed slightly. He went on in quick impatient tones. ‘One day she said she was making a will and I saw her scribbling something on a sheet of paper. I’m afraid I didn’t even look at it. I took it for one of those romantic fads very feminine women go in for. I remember my mother,’ he said, going off at a tangent, ‘when my youngest sister was born, going and having her photograph taken to be a last memento for my father in case she died in childbirth, and writing
farewell letters for all her other children. But of course she didn’t die any more than Elizabeth …’

‘But your wife did die, Mr Nightingale,’ Wexford said quietly.

Quentin looked down and clasped his hands together.

‘Yes … About this will, I took it for nonsense, as I’ve said. I doubt if it was even witnessed.’

‘One person witnessed it, at any rate,’ said Wexford ‘Lionel Marriott.’

Quentin raised his eyes and there was genuine surprise in them.

‘Mr Nightingale, I can’t just let this go by. What became of this piece of paper your wife was “scribbling” on?’

‘She gave it to me and asked me to put it in my safe.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, yes, I did. Elizabeth insisted on my doing so in her presence. Oh, it was very silly but I didn’t want to distress her.’

‘Is it still there?’

‘I suppose so,’ Quentin said wonderingly. ‘I told you, I forgot all about it and I imagine Elizabeth did too when we got back safe and sound.’

Wexford said heavily, ‘I’ll trouble you to open the safe now, sir, if you please.’

Eyeing Wexford as if he was dealing with a lunatic who needed to be humoured, Quentin lifted down from the study wall a small Stubbs oil of a phaeton and pair. Behind it, set into the wall, was a steel door. Murmuring the combination under his breath, Quentin opened it to reveal a space about the size of a large biscuit tin. The safe contained a neat stack of papers
which Wexford supposed to be share certificates and personal documents, and several leather jewel boxes. Quentin took out a handful of papers. He leafed through them and then, his expression still amused and derisive, held out to Wexford a long brown envelope.