Wolf to the Slaughter (14 page)

‘It’s like a foreign country,’ she said.

It was. An uncharted place, alien, with an untranslatable language. That she should feel what he felt, identically, telepathically, made him gasp. Then he looked at her and, following her gaze upwards to the crowns of the trees, knew with a sudden sense of let-down that she meant the forest itself, and not a state of mind.

‘Have you ever been in one?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but it’s like that. And it’s like last night. Alone with you between high walls. Did you think of that when you brought me here?’ They had begun to climb an avenue which, cutting into the hillside so evenly and precisely, resembled an incision in thick black flesh or a sewn wound. ‘Did you think of that?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘That was clever of you.’ She was breathing shallowly, although the ascent was steep. To the left of them and a little way ahead, a tiny footpath threaded between the trees.

‘But there aren’t any windows here, are there?’ More than anything in the world, more at that moment even than absolute possession of her, he wanted to see that covert smile, that uplifting of the lips without parting them. She had not smiled at all since they had entered the forest and that look of hers was the essence, the very nucleus of her appeal to him. Without it he could kiss her, even achieve that culmination for which this visit had been contrived, but he would lose the savour and the scent and half his pleasure – or perhaps be saved. Already he was the slave of a fetish.

Echoing him, she said softly, ‘No windows . . . No one to watch you or stop you.’ She added breathlessly, turning to face him so that their bodies and their eyes were close, ‘I’m tired of being watched, Mark.’

A little orange square in a wall, a bell that always jangled, a querulous voice calling.

‘You’re with me,’ he said, ‘and nobody watches me.’ Usually he was subtle, but her nearness deprived him of restraint and brought out the swagger of the male animal. Before he could stop himself the appeal came out. ‘Smile for me,’ he said in a hard whisper. Her fingers closed on his shoulders, not firmly or passionately but with a light, almost calculatingly seductive pressure. The look in her eyes was quite blank and the invitation in them came entirely from the tremor of half-closed heavy lids. ‘Oh, smile . . .’

Then suddenly he was rewarded. A terrible urgency possessed him, but for all that he took her slowly in his arms, watching the smile that was the focal point of all his desire, and then bringing his own mouth down to meet it.

‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘In the dark. Take me into the dark.’ Her response was strong yet fluid. The words, spoken against his lips, seemed to flow into his body like wine and fill him with heat.

The thread of a path beckoned him and he held her against himself, half carrying her into the deep shadows of the forest edge. Above them the pine needles whispered and the sound was like the distant voices of doves. He took off his coat and spread it on the sandy floor. Then he heard her whispering to him words he could not catch but which he knew were no longer hesitant or passive. Her hands reached for him to pull him down beside her.

The darkness was almost absolute and it was this anonymous secret blackness which she seemed to have needed just as he had needed her smile. Her coquetry, her shy silence, had given place to a feverish hunger. That it was neither false nor simulated he knew when she took his face in the long hands that had become strong and fierce. He kissed her throat and her breasts and she gave a long sigh of pleasure. The darkness was a warm river to drown in. They call it the little death, he thought, and then the power to think at all melted away.

There was scarcely any delay between his knocking and the opening of the cottage door. A bright shaft of sunshine fell upon a black and mauve spotted overall and a sharp red face.

‘Turned up again like a bad penny,’ said Mrs Penistan. Burden blinked. He hardly knew whether her remark referred to his arrival or her own unexpected appearance. She clarified with one of her shrill laughs. ‘I saw Mr M’s advert and I took pity on him, said I’d come back till
she
turns up.’ Leaning towards him, her broom held aloft like a spear, she whispered confidingly, ‘If she turns up.’ She stood aside for him to enter. ‘Mind the bucket,’ she said. ‘We’re all at sixes and sevens in here. Good thing my boys can’t see what I have to contend with. If they set eyes on this place they’d have their mum out of it before you could say knife.’ Remembering the ox-like Penistan men, not surely conspicuous for filial piety, Burden could only give a neutral smile. Their mother thrust her face into his and with a laugh, this time so cheerful as to amount to glee, said, ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if there was bugs in them walls.’ A shrill peal of giggles pursued him into the studio.

Her efforts seemed to have made as yet small improvement in the general dirty disarray. Perhaps she had only just arrived. Nothing had been tidied or dusted and to the normal unpleasant smell had been added a sour stench, possibly coming from the dregs which still remained in the dozen or so empty cups on the tables and the floor. Here, as nowhere else, Ruby’s vigour and acumen were needed.

Margolis was painting. In addition to the tubes of oil colour arranged about him were various small pots of unidentifiable matter. One seemed to contain sand, another iron filings. He looked up when Burden entered.

‘I’ve decided not to think about it,’ he said with as near an approach to firmness as could be imagined. ‘I’m simply getting on with my work. Ann’ll be back.’ He added as if this clinched the matter, ‘Mrs Penistan agrees with me.’

It was hardly the impression Burden had received on the doorstep. Without comment – let the man be cheerful while he could – he held out the lighter. ‘Ever seen it before?’

‘It’s a cigarette lighter,’ Margolis said sagely. So might some authoritative archaeologist identify an obscure find in an ancient barrow.

‘The point is, is it your sister’s?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. People are always giving her things.’ He turned it over. ‘Look, it’s got her name on it.’

‘It’s got Ann on it,’ Burden corrected him.

A poised broom preceded Mrs Penistan’s entry into the studio. She seemed to find amusement not so much in her employer’s remarks as in his very existence, for, standing behind him as he contemplated the lighter, she favoured Burden with a slow deliberate wink.

‘Here, let’s have a look,’ she said. One glance satisfied her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’ This time her laughter seemed aimed at his own gullibility or possibly at his supposing Margolis to be capable of identifying anything. Burden envied her her ignorance. Not for her the dilemma of wondering how to contend with genius. Here was a man, inept in practical matters, vague in his speech; therefore he was a lunatic, affording mirth and a kind of rough pity. ‘She never had nothing like that,’ she said firmly. ‘Her and me, we used to have our coffee break mid-morning. Always had a cigarette with it, she did. You need one of them lighters, I said, seeing the way she got through umpteen boxes of matches. Get some young fellow to give you one. It was way back around Christmas, you see, and her birthday was in Jan.’

‘So she may have had it for her birthday?’

‘If she did, she never showed it to me. Never had a gas lighter, neither. My boy could get you one cost price, him being in the trade, I said, but she . . .’

Burden cut her short, his ears painfully anticipating the strident laugh the end of this story, however humourless, would certainly provoke. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said.

‘Mind the bucket!’ Mrs Penistan called after him cheerfully. He went out among the daffodils. Everything was gold this morning, the sunshine, the pale bright flowers of spring and the little object in his pocket.

Kirkpatrick’s car was on his driveway. Burden edged past it, his coat brushing the lettering and the mauve flowers.

‘He says he’s ill,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said in a loud harsh voice.

Burden showed her his card. It might have been an advertising brochure for all the notice she took of it.

‘He says he’s got a cold.’ Into this last word she put an infinite scorn as if a cold were of all afflictions the least credible and the most bizarre. She let Burden in and, leaving him alone with the two wide-eyed silent children, said, ‘You might as well sit down. I’ll tell him you’re here.’

Two or three minutes later Kirkpatrick came down. He was wearing a silk dressing gown under which he appeared to be fully clothed. Burden recalled similarly attired figures, but gayer and more debonair, who featured in those bedroom comedies of the thirties, still ruthlessly acted by local dramatic societies, to whose performances he was sometimes dragged by his wife. The setting of chintz-covered chairs and mock wood panelling enhanced this impression, but Kirkpatrick had a hangdog look. Had this been a real stage, the audience would have supposed him to have forgotten his opening lines. His face was unshaven. He managed a smile for his children and just touched the little girl’s long fair hair.

‘I’m going to make the beds,’ said Mrs Kirkpatrick. It was not, Burden thought, a statement normally capable of being interpreted as a threat, but she succeeded in putting into it an almost sinister menace. Her husband gave her an encouraging nod, smiling, as might one who wishes to foster his wife’s interest in some unusual intellectual pursuit.

‘I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling unwell.’

‘I expect it’s psychological,’ Kirkpatrick said. ‘Yesterday afternoon upset me a good deal.’

A psychological cold, Burden thought. That’s anew one. ‘Pity,’ he said aloud, ‘because I’m afraid you may have to go through the mill again. Don’t you think it would be better if we were to stop this farce about your being interested in Miss Margolis for the sake of her brother’s paintings?’ Kirkpatrick’s gaze travelled to the ceiling. From above violent noises could be heard as if his wife were not so much making the beds as breaking the furniture. ‘We know very well you were her lover,’ he said roughly. ‘You threatened to kill her. On your own admission you were in Stowerton on Tuesday night.’

‘Not so loud,’ Kirkpatrick said, an agonised note in his voice. ‘All right. It’s all true. I’ve been thinking – that’s why I feel so bloody – I’ve been thinking I’ll have to tell you. It’s not
her
,’ he said, and he looked at the boy and girl. ‘It’s my kiddies. I don’t want to lose my kiddies.’ In a low voice he added, ‘They always give custody to the mother, never mind what sort of mother she is.’

Burden gave an impatient shrug. ‘Ever seen this before?’

The colour which flooded Kirkpatrick’s face was the outward sign of an emotion Burden could not define. Guilt? Horror? He waited.

‘It’s Ann’s.’

‘Sure of that?’

‘I saw her with it.’ Dropping pretence, he said, ‘She flaunted it in my face.’

Although it was warm in the office, Kirkpatrick kept his raincoat on. He had come of his own free will, Burden told Wexford, to talk in comparative comfort away from his wife.

‘Did you give this lighter to Miss Margolis?’ Wexford asked.

‘Me? How could I afford a thing like that?’

‘Tell me how you know it’s hers.’

Kirkpatrick folded his hands and bowed his head.

‘It was about a month ago,’ he said, his voice scarcely above a whisper. ‘I called for her but she was out. Margolis didn’t seem to want to know me and I sat out in the car waiting for her to come back. Not this car,’ he said with a small painful frown, ‘the other one I had, the black one.’

He sighed and went on, his voice still low, ‘She came back in hers about half an hour later – she’d been getting it serviced. I got out and went up to her. That lighter you’ve got there, it was on the shelf in her Alpine and I picked it up. I knew she hadn’t had it before and when I saw the inscription, “For Ann who lights my life”, well, I knew her and I knew what sort of terms she’d be on with the giver.’ A tiny thread of hysteria crept into his tone. ‘I saw red. I could have killed her then. Christ, I didn’t mean that!’ He passed his hand across his mouth as if by this action he could wipe away the injudicious words. ‘I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t, don’t you?’

Wexford said very smoothly, ‘I know very little about you, Mr Kirkpatrick. You seem to have a split personality. One day you tell me Miss Margolis was merely the key into her brother’s art gallery, the next that you were passionately jealous of her. Which personality is – er, the dominant one?’

‘I loved her,’ he said stonily. ‘I was jealous.’

‘Of course you were,’ Wexford said scornfully, ‘and you don’t know a Bonnard from a bull’s foot.’

‘Go an about the lighter,’ said Burden.

Instead of continuing, the man said wretchedly, ‘My wife mustn’t know. God, I was mad, crazy, ever to go near that girl.’ Perhaps he noticed that Wexford made him no promises of discretion, noticed and understood the implication, for he said wildly, ‘I didn’t kill her, I don’t know anything about it.’

‘For a man in love you’re not showing much grief, Mr Kirkpatrick. Let’s get back to the lighter, shall we?’

Kirkpatrick shivered in the warm room. ‘I was jealous as hell,’ he said. ‘She took the lighter from me and looked at it in a peculiar way.’

‘What d’you mean, a peculiar way?’

‘As if there was something to laugh at,’ he said savagely, ‘as if it was all one hell of a big joke.’ He passed his hand across his forehead. ‘I can see her now in that spotted fur coat, beautiful, free . . . I’ve never been free like that. She was holding that little bit of gold in her hand. She read out those words on the bottom, read them aloud, and went on laughing. “Who gave it to you?” I said. “He’s got a pretty turn of phrase, my generous friend, hasn’t he?” she said. “You’d never think of anything like that, Alan. All you ever do is add two and two and make it come to about sixteen.” I don’t know what she meant.’ His fingers had left white marks where they had pressed the skin. ‘You talk about showing grief,’ he said. ‘I loved her all right, or I thought I did. If you love someone you ought to be sorry when they’re dead, oughtn’t you? But, my God, if I couldn’t have her, just me all to myself, I’d rather she was dead!’