J (15 page)

Petroc Rothschild must have asked himself the same question because he did not take at all kindly to her, barking when she changed her position too abruptly, and growling most of the time she talked. But then he’d never been overfond of Kevern either.

I enquired whether what she was describing was a recent phenomenon.

‘Being here is a recent phenomenon – for me.’

‘Of course, of course. I meant did you notice it at once or are you just noticing it now? Has there been a change.’

‘I haven’t been here long enough to make such fine distinctions,’ she reminded me, somewhat sternly, which made me somewhat excited. I like sternness in a woman. Hence Demelza. ‘But if you ask me to think about it,’ she went on, ‘then no, I have not just begun to notice a sense of – I don’t know what to call it –
intrusiveness
. Take us’ – she put her hand on Kevern’s – ‘we didn’t just meet, we were bundled into each other’s arms. Not that I’m complaining about that.’

‘I should hope not,’ Kevern said, kissing her.

Sweet, but I was more interested, I have to say, in Ailinn’s sense of being, as she put it, ‘bundled’. Professionally interested.

‘So who bundled you?’ I asked, but casually, as though I were merely making polite conversation.

‘God knows. Some busybody? The village matchmaker? Nobody I’d ever seen before, or since. I don’t know if you’ve seen him again, Kevern.’

He hadn’t.

I asked Kevern if he too felt he’d been pushed into meeting Ailinn. He couldn’t of course say yes. He had to say he saw her and was smitten. But yes, now we came to mention it, there had been someone hanging around, egging him on. For which, accompanied by another burning look deep into Ailinn’s eyes, he was immeasurably grateful.

Petroc growled so loudly that Ailinn started.

‘He doesn’t mean you any harm,’ I assured her.

‘I think he does,’ she said.

‘You don’t like dogs?’

‘No, not as a rule. We are as one on this.’

‘You and the dog?’

‘Me and Kevern.’

I told Kevern that I hadn’t on his previous visits noticed he was a dog hater, though I kept to myself my conviction that Petroc hated him.

‘I’m not. Just not a dog lover. Or at least not inside the house.’

‘Are dogs different inside to out?’

‘No but I am.’

Concerned that his curtness of manner might offend me – unless she was concerned it might offend Petroc – Ailinn explained him. ‘He doesn’t like things moving around his legs,’ she laughed. ‘Not indoors, anyway.’

‘That will make it difficult with children,’ I observed.

‘Impossible,’ they said with some vehemence together. ‘Quite impossible.’

I am not without subtlety when it comes to reading behind the words people speak. Why the vehemence, I wondered.

‘You don’t want children?’ I asked, casually. I had the feeling they had not talked it over. But I could have been mistaken.

Kevern, anyway, shook his head. ‘I am content to be the end of my line,’ he said.

‘In this, too,’ Ailinn added, ‘we are as one.’

I didn’t, for what it’s worth, believe her. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, methought.

Wherever they were on this subject, I considered it worth noting in my report that Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and Ailinn Solomons shared a detestation of dogs.

I would have bet good money against the powers that be knowing
that
.

SOMEBODY HAD SEEN
Kevern kissing Lowenna Morgenstern in the car park on bonfire night.

‘That shouldn’t make me a suspect,’ Kevern told Detective Inspector Gutkind. ‘If there’s a jealous homicidal maniac on the loose that should make me a potential victim.’

‘Unless the jealous homicidal maniac on the loose is you.’

‘I’m not on the loose.’

‘But you have been on the loose, haven’t you? No ties, no responsibilities, free to kiss whoever you like.’

Kevern had never before been presented with such a dashing portrait of his life.

‘I’m a bachelor, if that’s what you mean. Though I am in a serious relationship at the moment.’

‘At the moment? How long have you been in this serious relationship?’

‘Three months.’

‘And that amounts to serious for you?’

‘Sacred.’

‘Were you in a sacred relationship with Mrs Morgenstern?’

‘I don’t think a single kiss constitutes a relationship.’

‘What would you say it constitutes?’

‘A passing thrill.’

‘You were aware she was married when you kissed her?’

‘I was.’

The policeman waited. ‘. . . And you had no qualms about that?’

‘Not my business. She felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss.’

‘You don’t respect marriage?’

‘I think it was more that Mrs Morgenstern didn’t respect hers. I didn’t see it as my job to remember her vows for her.’

‘So knowing she wasn’t happily married, you took advantage.’

‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Grossman—’

‘Gutkind.’

‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Gutkind, that you can call it taking advantage. You could just as easily say she was taking advantage of my loneliness. But no one was taking advantage of anyone. As I have said – she’d had a few too many tequilas, I’d had a few too many sweet ciders—’

‘Sweet cider!’ Detective Inspector Gutkind pulled a face.

‘And maybe the odd half of lager shandy. I’m sorry if lager shandy disgusts you too.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s nowhere to go. That’s it. She was drunk, I was not entirely sober, she felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss . . .’

‘And whatever you feel like doing, you do?’

Kevern laughed. If only, he thought. ‘I think you have a somewhat false picture of me,’ he said. ‘The clue is in the sweet cider. I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to pleasure. As a matter of fact, I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to anything. I have a very unrelaxed attitude, for example, to your being in my house.’

It occurred to him that the picture he was painting was more likely to incriminate him than otherwise. A difficult and lonely neurotic, who laughed where laughter was inappropriate, drank pussy drinks, and was prone to introspection and self-disgust – didn’t all murderers fit that bill? And now he was telling the policeman that his presence, here, on the sofa in Kevern’s cottage, made him uneasy. Why didn’t he just confess to the crime?

‘Why do you have an unrelaxed attitude to me being here?’ the policeman asked.

‘Why do you think? No one likes to be questioned by the police. No one likes to be under suspicion.’

‘But you specifically mentioned
your house
. What is it about being questioned specifically in
your house
that upsets you?’

‘I’m a very private man.’

‘But not so private that you draw the line at kissing other men’s wives?’

‘I never brought her here.’

‘Because?’

‘I’m a very private man.’

‘And very unrelaxed about a number of things. Did you have an unrelaxed attitude to Mrs Morgenstern’s other lovers?’

‘I wasn’t aware of other lovers.’

‘You thought you were special, did you?’

‘No. She was known to be free and easy. Nor was I her lover. I didn’t think of myself that way.’

‘Was that because she repulsed you?’

Kevern laughed. Had he been repulsed? He remembered the bite. It hadn’t felt like a repulse.

‘It was bonfire night. A few fireworks went off. So did we. It was fun while it lasted.’

‘Did you see her go home with Ythel Weinstock that night?’

‘I did not.’

‘Were you aware that Mrs Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock were lovers?’

‘I was not.’

‘Were you aware that he hit her?’

‘How could I have been? I didn’t know they were intimate.’

‘Were you aware that her husband was hitting her?’

‘It’s something that happens in the village. I wasn’t aware of it but I am not surprised. Life in Port Reuben has always been harsh. But now on top of the old cruelties there’s frustration. Men are living at the edge of their nerves here. They don’t know what they’re for. They used to be wreckers, now they run gift shops and say they’re sorry. The women goad them. I read that the rest of the country is not much better.’

Worse and worse: now he was painting himself as a moral zealot.

He needn’t have worried. Detective Inspector Gutkind also had a dash of moral zealotry in his nature. He believed in conspiracies. It was not permitted to believe in conspiracies (no written law against, of course) but Gutkind couldn’t help himself. Conspiracy theorising ran in families and his father had believed in them to the point where he could see nothing else. Gutkind’s grandfather had also believed in conspiracies and had lost his job in the newly formed agency Ofnow attempting to root them out. That attempting to root out conspiracies had cost him his job proved there was a conspiracy against him. And behind him was Clarence Worthing, the Wagnerian, Gutkind’s great-grandfather who had tasted betrayal to the lees. He fed his resentments and suspicions to his son who fed them to his son who fed them, nicely incubated, to Gutkind. For as far back as the family went, somebody, some group, had been out to get them. Heirlooms in their own way, just as silk Chinese rugs were, romances of family persecution at the hands of conspirators were restricted. It didn’t do for any family to be harbouring too many, or indeed any one with too much fervour. Conspiracy theories had fed the suspicion that erupted into that for which society was still having to say sorry. And how could you say sorry when some of the reasoning behind
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
– that conspiracies were sucking the life blood from the nation – remained compelling?

Detective Inspector Gutkind understood why there could be no going backwards in this – and was, anyway, unable to point the finger anywhere but at the odd individual malfeasant, and by its nature individual malfeasance could not amount to conspiracy – but he was a prisoner of his upbringing. He had a careworn build – dapper, the unobservant thought him – lean as though from fretting, with a round face, apoplectic eyes and an unexpectedly wet, cherubic mouth. Had there been a conspiracy to accuse Gutkind of the pederasty that exercised Densdell Kroplik, his mouth would surely have been the basis for it. He looked like someone who pressed his lips where they had no business being pressed.

He smiled at Kevern and wondered if he might be allowed to remove his coat. Kevern could not conceal his awkwardness. It was bad enough that Gutkind was here at all, but a Gutkind without his coat, in his cottage, was more than his nerves could bear. ‘Of course,’ he said, taking the coat and then not knowing what to do with it, ‘that’s rude of me.’

He was surprised to see that under his coat Gutkind wore not a jacket but a Fair Isle buttoned cardigan.

Was this to relax the unwary, Kevern wondered. But if that was so, his eyes should have not have looked so combustible as they took in Kevern’s person and darted around Kevern’s room.

‘This Biedermeier?’ he asked, running his fingers over the elaborately carved back of the sofa.

Kevern started. ‘Imitation,’ he said.

‘Made down here?’

‘Kildromy.’

‘That’s a long way to go for it.’

‘I like the best. I’m a woodworker myself. I appreciate good craftsmanship.’

‘It doesn’t really go with this cottage, though, does it,’ Gutkind went on.

Kevern wanted to say that he didn’t think the policeman’s cardigan went with his job, but it didn’t seem a good idea to antagonise him further. ‘It goes with my temperament,’ he said.

‘And how would you describe that?’

‘My temperament? Heavy, ornate and unwelcoming.’

‘And out of place?’

‘If you like.’

‘Would you call yourself a loner?’

‘I wouldn’t call myself anything. I’m a woodturner, as I think I’ve told you.’

‘Business good?’

‘I make candlesticks and lovespoons for the tourist industry. There isn’t a fortune in that, but I get by.’

‘Why have local people given you the nickname “Coco”?’

‘You’d better ask them. But I think it’s ironic. “Coco” was the name of a famous circus clown. It must be evident to you that I am not an entertainer.’

‘But you entertain women?’

Here we go again, Kevern thought. He sighed and walked to the window. Not knowing what else to do with it, he was still carrying Gutkind’s coat over his arm. Though the sea didn’t look wild, the blowhole was busy, fine spray from the great white jet of water catching what there was of sunlight. He thought of Ailinn’s whale and suddenly felt weary. ‘Get the fuck out,’ he wanted to tell the policeman. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’ If ever there was a time to let go, let rip, let the bad language out of his constricted system, this was it. But he was who he was. Let’s get this over with, he thought. ‘Is this about the blood?’ he asked, not turning his head.