Put on by Cunning (22 page)

‘A
gentleman
,’ said Hicks.

‘All right, Ted, a gentleman. I thought he’d gone by the Sunday, and maybe he had, but he was back the Monday afternoon.’

‘You saw him?’

‘I
heard
him. I went in about six to check up with her what was going and what was staying, and Iheard them talking upstairs. They heard me come in and they started talking French so I wouldn’t understand, and she laughed and said in English, “Oh, your funny Swiss accent!” By the time I got upstairs he’d hid himself.’

‘Did you hear his name, Mrs Hicks?’

She shook her head. ‘Never heard his name and never saw him. She was a funny one, she didn’t mind me knowing he was there and what he was to her like, but she never wanted me nor anyone to actually see him. I took it for granted they both went off on their holidays that same evening. She said she was going, she told me, and the car was gone.’

‘What happened next day?’

‘The men came from Dorset’s nine in the morning. I let them in and told them what to take and what not to. She’d left everything labelled. When they’d gone I had a good clear-up. There was a lot of blood about in the blue bathroom, but I never gave it a thought, reckoned one of them had cut theirselves.’ Wexford remembered the deliberate cutting of Natalie’s fingertips in the bathroom in De Beauvoir Place and he almost shuddered. Muriel Hicks was more stolid about it than he. ‘I had a bit of a job getting it off the carpet,’ she said. ‘I saw in the paper they found her at Dorset’s warehouse. Was she . . . ? I mean, was
it
in that chest?’

He nodded.

She said indifferently, ‘The men did say it was a dead weight.’

Blaise Cory walked out to the car with him. It was warm today, the sky a serene blue, the leaves of the plane trees fluttering in a light frisky breeze. Blaise said suddenly and without his usual affected geniality:

‘Do you know Mrs Mountnessing, Camargue’s sister-in-law?’

‘I’ve seen her once.’

‘There was a bit of a scandal in the family. I was only seventeen or eighteen at the time and Natalie and I – well, it wasn’t an affair or anything, we were like brother and sister. We were close, she used to tell me things. The general made a pass at her and the old girl caught them kissing.’

‘The general?’ said Wexford.

‘Blaise made one of his terrible jokes. ‘Must have been caviare to him.’ He gave a yelp of laughter. ‘Sorry. I mean old Roo Mountnessing, General Mountnessing. Mrs M told her sister and made a great fuss, put all the blame on poor little Nat, called her incestuous and a lot of crap like that. As if everyone didn’t know the old boy was a satyr. Camargue was away on a tour of Australia at the time or he’d have intervened. Mrs Camargue andher sister tried to lock Nat up, keep her a sort of prisoner. She got out and hit her mother. She hit her in the chest, quite hard, I think. I suppose they had a sort of brawl over Natalie trying to get out of the house.’

‘And?’

‘Well, when Mrs Camargue got cancer Mrs Mountnessing said it had been brought on by the blow. I’ve heard it said that can happen. The doctors said no but Mrs M. wouldn’t listen to that and she more or less got Camargue to believe it too. I’ve always thought that’s why Natalie went off with Vernon Arno, she couldn’t stand things at home.’

‘So that was the cause of the breach,’ said Wexford. ‘Carmargue blamed her for her mother’s death.’

Blaise shook his head. ‘I don’t think he did. He was just confused by Mrs M. and crazy with grief over his wife dying. The dear old dad says Camargue tried over and over again to make things right between himself and Nat, wrote again and again, offeredto go out there or pay her fare home. I suppose it wasn’t so much him blaming her for her mother’s death as her blaming herself. It was guilt kept her away.’

Wexford looked down at the little stocky man.

‘Did she tell you all this when you had lunch with her, Mr Cory?’

‘Good heavens, no. We didn’t talk about that. I’m a
present
person, Chief Inspector, I live in the moment. And so did she. Curious,’ he said reflectively, ‘that rumour which went around back in the winter that she was some sort of impostor.’

‘Yes,’ said Wexford.

It was not a long drive from Moidore Lodge tothe village on the borders of St Leonard’s Forest. It was called Bayeux Green, between Horsham and Wellridge, and the house Wexford was looking for bore the name Bayeux Villa. Well, it was not all that far from Hastings, there was another village nearby called Doomsday Green, and very likely the namehad something to do with the tapestry.

He found the house without having to ask. It was in the centre of the village, a narrow, detached, late nineteenth-century house, built of small pale grey bricks and with only a small railed-in area separating it from the pavement. The front door was newer and inserted in it was a picture in stained glass of a Norman soldier in chain mail. Wexford rang the bell and got no answer. He stepped to one side and looked in at the window. There was no sign of recent habitation. The occupants, at this time of the year, were very likely away on holiday. It seemed strange that they had made no arrangements for the care of their houseplants. Tradescantias, peperomias, a cissus that climbed to the ceiling on carefully spaced strings, a Joseph’s coat, a variegated ivy, all hung down leaves that were limp and parched.

He walked around the house, looking in morewindows, and he had a sensation of being watched, though he cold see no one. The two little lawns looked as if they had not been cut for a month and there were weeds coming up in the rosebed. After he had rung the bell again he went to the nearest neighbour, a cottage separated from Bayeux Villa by a greengrocer’s and a pair of garages.

It was a comfort to be himself once more, to have resumed his old standing. The woman looked at his warrant card.

‘They went off on holiday – oh, it’d be three weeks ago. When I come to think of it, they must be due back today or tomorrow. They’ve got a caravan down in Devon, they always take three weeks.’

‘Don’t they have friends to come in and keep an eye on the place?’

She said quickly, ‘Don’t tell me it’s been broken into.’

He reassured her. ‘Nobody’s watered the plants.’

‘But the sister’s there. She said to me on the Saturday, my sister’ll be staying while we’re away.’

This time he caught her off guard. He came upto the kitchen window and their eyes met. She had been on the watch for him too, creeping about the house, looking out for him. She was still wearing the red and yellow dress of Indian cotton, she had been shut up in there for three weeks, and it hung on her. Her face looked sullen, though not frightened. She opened the back door and let him in.

‘Good morning, Mrs Zoffany,’ he said. ‘It’s a relief to find you well and unharmed.’

‘Who would harm me?’

‘Suppose you tell me that. Suppose you tell me all about it.’

She said nothing. He wondered what she had done all by herself in this house since 27 July. Not eaten much, that was obvious. Presumably, she had not been out. Nor even opened a window. It wasinsufferably hot and stuffy and a strong smell of sweat and general unwashedness emanated from Jane Zoffany as he followed her into the room full of dying plants. She sat down and looked at him in wary silence.

‘If you won’t tell me,’ he said, ‘shall I tell you? After you left me on that Friday evening you went back to Sterries and found the house empty. Mrs Arno had driven your husband to the station. As a matter of fact, her car passed me as I was driving down the hill.’ She continued to eye him uneasily. Her eyes had more madness in them than when he had last seen her. ‘You took your handbag but you left your suitcase; didn’t want to be lumbered with it, I daresay. There’s a bus goes to Horsham from outside St Peter’s. You’d have had time to catch the last one, or else maybe you had a hire car.’

She said stonily, ‘I haven’t money for hire cars. I didn’t know about the bus, but it came and I got on.’

‘When you got here you found your sister and her husband were leaving for their summer holiday the next day. No doubt they were glad to have someone here to keep an eye on the place while they weregone. Then a week later you got yourself a birthday card . . .’

‘No.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘I only posted it. My sister had bought a card for me and written in it and done the envelope and everything. She said, here, you’d better have this now, save the postage. I went out at night and posted it.’ She gave awatery vague smile. ‘I liked hiding, I enjoyed it.’

He could understand that. The virtue for her would be twofold. To some extent she would lose her identity, that troubling self, she would have hidden here from herself as successfully as she had hidden from others. And there would be the satisfaction of becoming for a brief while important, of causing anxiety, for once of stimulating emotions.

‘What I don’t see,’ he said, ‘is how you managed when the police came here making inquiries.’

She giggled. ‘That was funny. They took me for my sister.’

‘I see.’

‘They just took it for granted I was my sister and they kept on talking about Mrs Zoffany. Did I have any idea where Mrs Zoffany might be? When had I last seen her? I said no and I didn’t know and they had to believe me. It was funny, it was a bit like . . .’ She put her fingers over her mouth and looked at him over the top of them.

‘I shall have to tell your husband where you are. He’s been very worried about you.’

‘Has he? Has he
really
?’

Had she, during her semi-incarceration, watched television, heard a radio, seen a newspaper? Presumably not, since she had not mentioned Natalie’s death. He wouldn’t either. She was safe enough here, he thought, with the sister comingback. Zoffany himself would no doubt come downbefore that. Would they perhaps get her back into a mental hospital between them? He had no faith that the kind of treatment she might get would do her good. He wanted to tell her to have a bath, eat a meal, open the windows, but he knew she would take no advice, would hardly hear it.

‘I thought you’d be very angry with me.’

He treated that no more seriously than if the younger of his grandsons had said it to him. ‘You and I are going to have to have a talk, Mrs Zoffany. When you’ve settled down at home again and I’ve got more time. Just at present I’m very busy and I have to go abroad again.’

She nodded. She no longer looked sullen. He let himself out into Bayeux Green’s little high street, and when he glanced back he saw her gaunt face at the window, the eyes following him. In spite of what he had said, he might never see her again, he might never need to, for in one of those flashes of illumination that he had despaired of ever coming in this case, he saw the truth. She had told him. In a little giggly confidence she had told him everything there still remained for him to know.

In the late afternoon he drove out to the home of the chief constable, Hightrees Farm, Millerton. Mrs Griswold exemplified the reverse of the Victorian ideal for children; she was heard but not seen. Some said she had been bludgeoned into passivity by forty years with the colonel. Her footsteps could sometimes be heard overhead, her voice whispering into the telephone. Colonel Griswold himself opened the front door, something which Wexford always found disconcerting. It was plunging in at the deep end.

‘I want to go to the South of France, sir.’

‘I daresay,’ said Griswold. ‘I shall have to settle for a cottage in north Wales myself.’

In a neutral voice Wexford reminded him that he had already had his holiday. The chief constable said yes, he remembered, and Wexford had been somewhere very exotic, hadn’t he? He had wondered once or twice how that sort of thing would go down with the public when the police started screaming for wage increases.

‘I want to go to the South of France,’ Wexford said more firmly, ‘and I know it’s irregular but I would like to take Mike Burden with me. It’s a little place
inland
– ’ Griswold’s lips seemed silently to be forming the syllables St Tropez, ‘ – and there’s a woman there who will inherit Camargue’s money and property. She’s Camargue’s niece and her name is Thérèse Lerèmy.’

‘A French citizen?’

‘Yes, sir, but . . .’

‘I don’t want you going about putting people’s backs up, Reg. Particularly foreign backs. I mean, don’t think you can go over there and arrest this woman on some of your thin suspicions and . . .’

But before Wexford had even begun to deny that this was his intention he knew from the moody truculent look which had replaced obduracy in Griswold’s face that he was going to relent.

From the city of the angels to the bay of the angels. As soon as they got there the taxi driver took them along the Promenade des Anglais, though it wasout of their way, but he said they had to see it, they couldn’t come to Nice and just see the airport. While Wexford gazed out over the Baie des Anges, Burden spoke from his newly acquired store of culture. Jenny had a reproduction of a picture of this by a painter called Dufy, but it all looked a bit different now.

It was still only late morning. They had come on the early London to Paris flight and changed planes at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Now their drive took them through hills crowned with orange and olive trees. Saint-Jean-de-l’Éclaircie lay a few miles to the north of Grasse, near the river Loup. A bell began to chime noon as they passed through an ivy-hung archway in the walls into the ancient town. They drove past the ochre-stone cathedral into the Place aux Eaux Vives where a fountain was playing and where stood Picasso’s statue ‘Woman with a Lamb’, presented to the town by the artist (according to Wexford’s guide book) when he lived and workedthere for some months after the war. The guide book also said that there was a Fragonard in the cathedral, some incomparable Sevres porcelain in the museum, the Fondation Yeuse, and a mile outside the town the well-preserved remains of a Roman amphitheatre. The taxi driver said that if you went up into the cathedral belfry you could see Corsica on the horizon.