Guilty Thing Surprised (6 page)

‘I realize this must have been a great shock to you, Wexford began. ‘It seems unfortunate that no one broke the news to you earlier.’

Villiers’ thin colourless eyebrows rose a fraction. His expression was unpleasant, supercilious. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘it makes very little difference. My sister and I weren’t particularly attached to each other.’

‘May I ask why not?’

‘You may and I’ve no objection to answering you. The reason was that we had nothing in common. My sister was an emptyheaded frivolous woman and I—well, I am not an emptyheaded frivolous man.’ Villiers glanced down at his typewriter. ‘Still, I hardly think it would be tactful for me to do any more work today, do you?’

‘I believe you and your wife spent last evening at the Manor, Mr Villiers?’

‘That is so. We played bridge. At ten-thirty we left, drove home and went to bed.’ Villiers’ voice was clipped and sharp with an edge of temper to it, a temper that could be quickly aroused. He coughed and pressed his hand to his chest. ‘I have a bungalow near Clusterwell. It took me about ten minutes to drive there from the Manor last night. My wife and I went straight to bed.’

Very tidy and brief, thought Wexford. It might all have been rehearsed beforehand. ‘How did your sister seem last night, sir? Normal? Or did she appear excited?’

Villiers sighed. More from boredom than sorrow, Wexford decided. ‘She was just as she always was, Chief Inspector, the gracious lady of the Manor whom everyone loved. Her bridge was always appalling, and last night it was neither more nor less appalling then usual.’

‘You knew she went for nocturnal walks in the forest?’

‘I knew she went for nocturnal walks in the
grounds.
Presumably it was because she was foolish enough to venture further that she met the end she did.’

‘Is that why,’ asked Wexford, ‘you weren’t surprised to hear of her death?’

‘On the contrary, I was very surprised. Naturally, I was shocked. But now that I’ve considered it, no, I’m not very surprised any more. Women on their own in lonely places do get murdered. Or so I’m told. I never read the newspapers. Matters of that kind don’t interest me.’

‘You’ve certainly made it clear that you disliked your sister.’ Wexford glanced about the large quiet room. ‘Strange, under the circumstances, that you should have been among those who accepted her bounty.’

‘I accepted my brother-in-law’s, Chief Inspector.’ White with anger or with some other emotion Wexford couldn’t analyse, Villiers sprang out of his chair. ‘Good morning to you.’ He opened the door and the dark stair well yawned ahead of him.

Wexford got up to leave. Halfway across the room he stopped and looked at Villiers, suddenly puzzled. It was impossible to believe the man could look worse, more ill, more corpselike, than when he had first seen him. But now as he stood in the doorway, one thin arm outflung, all vestige of colour, yellow-greyish pigment as it was, had drained from his skin.

Alarmed, Wexford started forward. Villiers gave a strange little gasp and fainted into his arms.

*  *  *

‘Here we are, then,’ said Crocker, who was the police doctor and Wexford’s friend. ‘Elizabeth Nightingale was a well-nourished and extremely well-preserved woman of about forty.’

‘Forty-one,’ said Wexford, taking off his raincoat and hanging it on the peg behind his office door. A couple of rounds of beef sandwiches and a flask of coffee, sent down from the canteen, awaited him on the corner of his desk. He sat down in the big swivel chair and, after looking distastefully at the topmost sandwich which was beginning to curl at the edges, started on it with a sigh.

‘Death,’ said the doctor, ‘resulted from a fractured skull and multiple injuries to the brain. At least a doxen blows were struck by a not very blunt metal instrument. I don’t mean an axe or a knife, but something with sharper edges to it, for instance, than a lead pipe or a poker. Death occurred—well, you know how hard it is to estimate—say after eleven
P.M.
and before one
A.M.
’

Burden was sitting against the wall. Above his head hung the official map of the Kingsmarkham district on which the dark mass of Cheriton Forest showed like the silhouette of a crouching cat. ‘Nothing’s come of our search of the grounds and the forest so far,’ he said. ‘What sort of a weapon had you in mind?’

‘Not my job, Mike old boy,’ said Crocker, moving to the window and staring down at the High Street below. Possibly he found this familiar sight boring, for he breathed heavily on the pane and began to draw on the breath film a pattern that might have been a pot plant or a diagram of the human respiratory system. ‘I just wouldn’t have a clue. Could be a metal vase or even a cooking utensil. Or a fancy ashtray or fire tongs or a tankard.’

‘You think?’ said Wexford, munching scornfully. ‘A fellow goes into a wood to murder a woman armed with an eggwhisk, does he, or a saucepan? A bloke sees his wife carrying on with another man so he whips out the carved silver vase he happens to have in his pocket and bops her over the head with it?’

‘You don’t mean to say,’ said the doctor, shocked, ‘that you’ve got that pillar of society Quentin Nightingale lined up for this job?’

‘He’s human, isn’t he? He has his passions. Frankly, I’d rather plump for that brother of hers, that Villiers. Only he looks too ill to lift a knife and fork, let alone hit anyone with a frying pan.’ Wexford finished his sandwiches and replaced the cap on the Thermos flask. Then he swivelled round and gazed thoughtfully at the doctor. ‘I’ve been talking to Villiers,’ he said. ‘He impressed me as a very sick man, among other things. Yellow skin, trembling hands, the lot. Just now, when I was leaving, he fainted dead away. For a minute I thought he was dead, but he came to all right and I got him over to the Manor.’

‘He’s a patient of mine,’ said Crocker, rubbing out his drawing with the heel of his hand and revealing to Wexford his favourite view of ancient housetops and old Sussex trees. ‘The Nightingales go privately to some big nob but Villiers has been on my list for years.’

‘And you,’ said Wexford sardonically, ‘being a true priest of the medical confessional, are going to keep whatever’s wrong with him locked up in your Hippocratic bosom?’

‘Well, I would if there was anything to lock. Only it so happens that he’s as fit as you are.’ Crocker eyed Wexford’s bulk, the purple veins prominent on his forehead. ‘Fitter,’ he said critically.

With an effort Wexford drew in the muscles of his abdomen and sat up straighten ‘Ain’t that amazement?’ he said. ‘I thought it was cancer, but it must be some inner torment feeding on his damask cheek. Like guilt. How old is he?’

‘Now look …’ said the doctor, fidgeting in his seat.

‘Go on, strain yourself. A man’s age isn’t something he confides to his quack behind the aseptic green shades of the consulting room.’

‘He’s thirty-eight.’

‘
Thirty-eight!
He looks ten years older and damn’ ill with it. By God, Mike here is a stripling compared to him.’

Two sets of ageing eyes focussed speculatively on Burden, who looked modestly away, not without a certain air of preening himself. The doctor said rather pettishly, ‘I don’t know why you keep on about him looking ill. He works himself too hard, that’s all. Anyway, he doesn’t look that ill or that old.’

‘He did today,’ said Wexford.

‘Shock,’ said the doctor. ‘What d’you expect when a man hears his sister’s been murdered?’

‘Just that, except that he evidently hated her guts. You should have heard the generous fraternal thing he said about her. As nasty a piece of work as I’ve come across for a long time is Mr Villiers. Come on, Mike, we’re going to call on some ladies who will melt and tell all under the effect of your sexy and—may I say?—youthful charm.’

They all went down together in the lift and the doctor left them at the station steps. The wind had dropped entirely but the High Street was still littered by the debris the gale had left in its wake, broken twigs, a tiny empty chaffinch nest blown from the
crown of a tall tree, here and there a tile from an ancient roof.

Bryant drove them out of town by the Pomfret Road, soon taking the left-hand fork for Myfleet. Their route led them past Kingsmarkham Boys’ Grammar School, more properly known as the King Edward the Sixth Foundation for the Sons of Yeomen, Burgesses and Those of the Better Sort. The sons were at present home for the summer holidays and the brown-brick Tudor building bore a lonelier, more orderly, aspect than in term-time. A large new wing—a monstrosity, the reactionaries called it—had been added to the rear and the left side of the school five years before, for the yeomen and burgesses, if not the better sort, had recently increased in alarming numbers.

The school had a dignity and grace about it, common to large buildings of its vintage, and most Kingsmarkham parents sought places there for their sons, setting aside with contempt the educational and enviromental advantages of Stowerton Comprehensive. Who wanted a magnificent steel and glass science lab, a trampoline room or a swimming pool of Olympic standard, when they could instead boast to their acquaintance of historic portals and worn stone steps trodden (though on one single occasion) by the feet of Henry the Eighth’s son? Besides, if your boy was at what everyone called the ‘King’s’ school you could quite convincingly pretend to those not in the know that he attended a public school and conceal the fact that the State paid.

Burden, whose son had been admitted there one year before on passing a complex and subtle equivalent of the Eleven-plus, now said:

‘That’s where Villiers teaches.’

‘Latin and Greek are his subjects, aren’t they?’

Burden nodded. ‘He takes John for Latin. I reckon he teaches Greek to the older ones. John says he works there a lot after school hours, doing something in the library. That’s the library there in the new wing.’

‘Research for his books?’

‘Well, it’s a marvelous library. Not that I know much about these things, but I went round it on Open Day and it impressed me no end.’

‘John like him, does he?’

‘You know what these boys are, sir,’ said Burden. ‘Those little devils in John’s class call him Old Roman Villa. Good disciplinarian, I’d say.’ And the father who had that morning mollified his own son with a gratuitous half-crown added severely: ‘You have to be tough when you’re dealing with these young lads, if you ask me.’

Grinning to himself, Wexford changed the subject. ‘There are three main questions I’d like the answers to,’ he said. ‘Why was Quentin Nightingale taking a bath at five in the morning? Or, conversely, why does he pretend he was? Why did Sean Lovell tell me he was watching a programme on the television last night that was, in fact, cancelled at the last moment? Why did Elizabeth Nightingale get on well with everyone except her only brother?’

‘Why, for that matter, sir, did she have no intimate friends?’

‘Perhaps she did. We shall have to find out. Mike, we’re coming into Clusterwell. D’you happen to know which belongs to Villiers?’

Burden sat up straighter and turned his eyes to the window. ‘It’s outside the village, on the Myfleet side. Not yet, wait a minute.… Slow down, will you, Bryant? That’s it, sir, standing by itself.’

Frowning a little, Wexford scanned the isolated bungalow. It was a squat, double-fronted place with two low gables under which were bay windows.

‘Needs a coat of paint,’ said Burden, contrasting it unfavourably with his own attractive, soon to be completely redecorated home. ‘Shabby-looking dump. You’d think he could afford a decent garage.’

The front garden was a mass of Michaelmas daisies, all one colour. At one side a long drive of cracked and pitted concrete led to a prefabricated asbestos garage with a roof of tarred felt.

A black Morris Minor stood on this drive just in front of the asbestos doors and someone had very recently cleaned it, for there were damp patches on its bodywork and a small pool of water lay in a pothole under its rear bumper.

‘That’s odd,’ said Wexford. ‘Your sister is murdered, you pass out when you hear the news, and yet a couple of hours later you’re lively enough to give your car a wash and a brush-up.’

‘It isn’t his car,’ Burden objected. ‘He drives an Anglia. That belongs to his wife.’

‘Where’s his, then?’

‘Still up at the Manor, I suppose, or in that revolting apology for a garage.’

‘I wouldn’t have said it was muddy in the forest last night, would you?’

‘Tacky,’ said Burden. ‘We had rain at the weekend if you remember.’

‘Drive on, Bryant. We’ll leave the Villiers in undisturbed domestic bliss a little longer.’

The first person they saw when they parked in Myfleet village was Katje Doorn, coming out of the
general store with a bag of fruit and a bottle of shampoo. She giggled happily at them.

‘Do you happen to know which is the Lovells’ cottage, Miss Doorn?’ Burden asked her stiffly.

‘Yes, look, that is the one.’ She pointed, clutching the cringing inspector’s arm and, as Wexford put it later, almost engulfing him in delectable curves. ‘The most dirty in all the village.’ As representative of perhaps the most house-proud nation on earth, she shuddered and, for the first time in their short acquaintance, lost her amiable expression. ‘They are living there like pigs, I think. His mother is a very nasty dirty woman, all fat.’ And, some six inches from her own rich contours, she described in the air a huge cello shape.

Wexford smiled at her. ‘Will the fat lady be at home, do you know?’

Katje ignored the smile. She was looking at Burden. ‘Maybe,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I know nothing of what these pig people do. You are liking a nice cup of tea? I think you are working very hard and would like some tea with me while your chief is in the nasty dirty cottage.’

‘Oh, no—no, thank you,’ said Burden, appalled.

‘Perhaps tomorrow, then,’ said Katje, sucking her hair. ‘All evenings I am free and tomorrow my friend must work late, serving drinks for the dance. Mind you are not forgetting.’ She wagged her finger at him. ‘Now I say good-bye. Do not be catching anything nasty in that very dirty place.’

She tripped, straight-backed, yellow hair bobbing, across the road and up to the Manor gate. There she stopped and waved to them, her round breasts rising under the pink fluffy sweater.