Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (16 page)

Burden had to stem the tide. Edie Chowney fiad only paused to draw breath. He had heard M lonely people's verbosity when at last in ^Company but this (as he told himself) was Ridiculous. J� "Mrs Chowney ..."

She said, more sharply, "All right. I've done.

know I talk too much. It's not my age, it's nature, I've always been a chatterbox, my 'band used to go on at me. What was it you ted to know about Joanne?'

"Where is she?"

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"At home, of course, or at business. Where else would she be?"

"When did you last see her, Mrs Chowney?"

She did a curious thing. It was as if she were reminding herself about which particular child they were enquiring. She viewed the photograph collection by the bed, paused for calculation, then selected a coloured one in a silver frame and looked at it, nodding.

"It would have been Tuesday evening. That's right, Tuesday, because it was the day the chiropodist comes and she always comes on a Tuesday. Joanne came in while we were having our teas. Five-ish. Maybe a quarter past five. I said, you're early, what about the shop? and she said, gallery, Mother, you always say that, the gallery's OK, Naomi's there till half past. You know who she meant by Naomi? Naomi's one of them that got murdered -- no, massacred like they say on the telly, massacred at Tancred House. Wasn't that a terrible thing? I suppose you've heard about it -- well, you would, being policemen."

"While your daughter was with you, did she say anything about going to Tancred House that evening?"

Mrs Chowney handed Burden the photograph. "She always went up there on Tuesday evening. Her and that poor Naomi, the one that was massacred, they did the shop accounts. That's her, that's Joanne, it was taken five years back but she hasn't changed much."

The woman looked overdressed in a bright pink suit with gilt buttons. A great deal of

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gold costume jewellery huddled round her neck ^ and swung from her ears. She was tall with a good figure. Her blonde hair was rather rigidly and elaborately dressed and she seemed heavily made-up, though this was hard to tell.

"She didn't tell you she was going away on holiday?"

"She wasn't," Edie Chowney said sharply. "She wasn't going anywhere. She'd have told me. What makes you think she's gone away?"

That was something Burden hardly liked to answer. "When would you expect her to visit you again?"

Bitterness entered her voice. "Three weeks. A good three weeks. It wouldn't be sooner. Joanne never comes more than once every three weeks and sometimes it's a month. She pays up and she thinks she's done her duty. Comes once in three weeks and stops ten minutes and thinks she's the good daughter."

"And your other children?" It was Vine who | asked. Burden had resolved not to. I i "Pam comes. I mean, she only lives two streets j a&ay, so coming every day wouldn't kill her. - liot that she does come every day. Pauline's i& Bristol, so you can't expect it, and Trev's on one of them oil rigs. Doug's in Telford, Wherever that may be. Shirley's got four kids sizd that's her excuse, though God knows they're IP in their teens. John drops in when it suits him, ch isn't often, and the rest of them crop up und Christmas. Oh, they all turn up together ^Christmas, a whole troop of them. What's use of that to me? I said that to them last

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Christmas, what's the good of you all coining at once? Seven of them on Christmas Eve in one go, Trev and Doug and Janet and Audrey and ..."

"Mrs Chowney," said Burden, "can you give me the addresses of ..." he hesitated, hardly knowing how to put it "... one or two of your children who live nearest? Who live around here and might know where your daughter Joanne has gone?"

* * *

It was eight before Wexford finally left for home. When the car reached the main gates and Donaldson got out to open them, he noticed something tied to each gatepost. It was too dark under the crowding trees to make out more than shapeless bundles.

He switched on the headlamp beam, left the car and went to look. More bouquets, more tributes to the dead. Two this time, one on each gatepost. They were simple bouquets but exquisitely arranged, one a Victorian posy of violets and primroses, the other a sheaf of snow-white narcissi and dark green ivy. Wexford read on one card: In grief for the great tragedy of 11 March. The other said: These violent deaths have violent ends and in their triumph die. He returned to the car and Donaldson drove out through the gateway. The message on the first bunch of flowers left on the gatepost had seemed innocuous, a rather apt quotation from Antony and Cleopatra -- well, apt if you

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had extravagantly admired Davina Flory. This later one had a faintly sinister ring. It too was probably Shakespeare but he couldn't place it.

He had more important things to think about. Phone calls to John Chowney and Pamela Burns nee Chowney had elicited only that they had no idea where their sister was and had not known she was going away. No neighbour had been told she would be absent. Her newsagent had not been alerted. Joanne Garland was not in the habit of taking a milk delivery. The manager of the card shop next door to Garlands in the Kingsbrook Centre had expected her to arrive and open the gallery on Thursday morning, one day's grace having been allowed out of respect to Naomi Jones.

John Chowney named two women he called close friends of his sister. Neither was able to tell Burden anything of her whereabouts. Each was surprised to hear of her absence. She had not been seen since five forty on Tuesday evening when she left the Caenbrook Retirement Home and the warden on duty saw her get into her car she had parked on the forecourt. Joanne Garland had disappeared.

In different circumstances, the police would

hardly have noticed it. A woman who goes

away for a few days without telling her friends

or relatives is not a missing woman. That

gftrangement to call at Tancred House at quarter

st eight on Tuesday evening altered things. If fexford was sure of anything it was that she been there, she had kept her promise. Was disappearance due to what she had seen at

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Tancred House or to what she had done?

He let himself into his house and immediately heard laughter from the dining room. Sheila's laughter. Her coat was hanging up in the hall, it must be hers -- who else would wear synthetic snow-leopard with a petrol-blue fake fox collar?

In the dining room they had had their soup and moved on to the main course. Roast chicken, not sole bonne femme. Why had he thought of that? It was an altogether different house, the whole of it would have got lost in Tancred House, they were very different people. He apologised to Dora for his lateness, kissed her, kissed Sheila and held out his hand to Augustine Casey for Casey to ignore it.

"Gus has been telling us about Davina Flory, Pop," Sheila said.

"You knew her?"

"My publishers," said Casey, "don't belong among those whose policy is to pretend to one author that they have no others on their list."

Wexford hadn't known he and the dead woman shared a publisher. He said nothing but went back to the hall and took his hat and coat off. He washed his hands, telling himself to be tolerant, to be magnanimous, to make allowances, be kind. When he was back in there and sitting down Sheila made Casey repeat everything he had said so far about Davina Flory's books, much of it unedifying as far as Wexford was concerned, and repeat too an unbelievable story that Davina Flory's editor had sent the manuscript of her autobiography to

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^^pfCasey for his opinion before they made her an < offer for it.

"I'm not usually thick," said Casey, "I'm not, am I, love?"

Wexford, wondering what was coming, winced at that 'love'. Sheila's response when appealed to nearly made him cringe, it was so adoring and at the same time so appalled that anyone, even the man himself, might deprecatingly suggest he was less than a genius.

"I'm not usually thick," Casey repeated, presumably expecting a further chorus of incredulous denial, "but I really had no idea that all that happened down here and that you ... "he turned small pale eyes on Wexford "... I mean, Sheila's father, were in -- what's the term, there must be a term -- oh, yes, in charge of the case. I know nothing about these things, less than nothing, but Scotland Yard still exists, doesn't it? I mean, isn't there something called a Murder Squad? Why you?"

"Tell me your impressions of Davina Flory," Wexford said equably, swallowing a rage that filled his mouth with hot sourness and put up red screens before his eyes. "I'd be interested to hear from someone who had met her professionally."

� "Professionally? I'm not an anthropologist. I'm not an explorer. I met her at a publisher's iparty. And, no, thank you very much, I don't jNthink I will tell you my impressions, I don't that would be at all wise. I shall keep mm. It would only remind me of the time

was done for reckless driving and the funny

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little cop who chased me on his motorbike read back everything I said to him in court, the whole of it ineluctably distorted by the filtering process of semi-literacy."

"Have some wine, darling," said Dora smoothly. "You'll like it, Sheila brought it specially."

* * *

"You haven't put them in the same room, have you?"

"Reg, that's the kind of remark I should be making, not you. You're supposed to be the liberal one. Of course I've put them in the same room. I'm not running a Victorian workhouse."

Wexford had to smile in spite of himself. "That's typical unreason, isn't it? I don't mind my daughter sleeping under my roof with a man I like but I hate the whole idea when it's a shit like him."

"I've never heard you use that word before!"

"There has to be a first time for everything. Me throwing someone out of my house, for

instance."

�T

'But you won't."

"No, I'm sure I won't."

Next morning Sheila said she and Gus would like to take her parents to dinner at the Cheriton Forest Hotel that evening. It had recently changed hands and had a new reputation for wonderful food at high prices. She had booked a table for four. Augustine Casey remarked that

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it would be amusing to see that sort of thing at first hand. He had a friend who wrote about places like that for a Sunday paper, in fact about manifestations of nineties' taste. The series was called More Money Than Sense, a title which was his, Casey's, brainchild. He would be interested not only in the food and the ambience, but in the kind of people who patronised it.

Unable to resist, Wexford said, "I thought you said last night you weren't an anthropologist."

Casey gave one of his mysterious smiles. "What do you put on your passport? Police officer, I suppose. I've always kept student. It's ten years since I left my university but I still have student in my passport and I suppose I always shall."

Wexford was going out. He was meeting Burden for a drink in the Olive and Dove. A rule, made to be broken, was that they never did this on a Saturday. He had to get out of ithe house for short spells, though he knew it Was wrong of him. Sheila caught him up in ifce hall.

f r "Dear Pop, is everything all right? Are you J>K?"

ir "I'm fine. This Flory case is a bit of a strain. UPhat are you going to do with yourselves today?" f^_"Gus and I thought we'd go to Brighton.

e's got friends there. We'll be back in heaps

" time for dinner. You will be able to make it dinner, won't you?"

He nodded. "I'll do my best."

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She looked a little crestfallen. "Gus is marvellous, isn't he? I've never known anyone like him." Her face brightened. It was such a lovely face, as perfect as Garbo's, as sweet as Marilyn Monroe's, as transcendentally beautiful as Hedy Lamarr's. In his eyes, at least. He thought so. Where did the genes dredge up from to create that? She said, "He's so clever. Half the time I can't keep up with him. The latest thing is he's going to be the writer-in-residence at a university in Nevada. They're building up a library of his manuscripts there, it's called the Augustine Casey Archive, they really appreciate him."

Wexford had scarcely heard the end of this. He was stuck -- and blissfully -- in the middle of her remarks.

'He's going to live in Nevada?"

'Yes -- well, for a year. It's a place called Heights."

"In the United States'?"

"He intends to write his next novel while he's there," said Sheila. "It will be his masterwork."

Wexford gave her a kiss. She threw her arms round his neck. Walking down the street, he could have burst into song. All was well, all was better than well, they were going to Brighton for the day and Augustine Casey was going to America for a year, the man was practically emigrating. Oh, why hadn't she told him last evening and given him a good night's sleep? It was useless worrying about that now. He was glad he had decided to go to the Olive on foot, he could have a real drink now and celebrate.

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IT'

Burden was there already. He said he had ecome from Broom Vale where, on a warrant sworn out two hours before, they were searching Joanne Garland's house. Her car was in the garage, a dark-grey BMW. She kept no pets to be fed or walked. There were no houseplants to be watered, no flowers left dying in vases. The television set had been unplugged, but some people did this every night before they went to bed. It looked as if she had left the house of her own free will.

A desk diary, with engagements meticulously entered, told Burden only that Joanne Garland had been to a drinks party on the previous Saturday, to lunch on Sunday with her sister Pamela. Her visit to her mother was marked in for Tuesday 11 March -- and that was that. The following spaces remained blank. Her handwriting was small, neat and very upright, and she had managed to squeeze quite a lot of information into the inch by three inches allowed for each entry.

- * * *

f

"We've come across this sort of thing before," Wexford said, "someone apparently disappearing and it turns out they've been on holiday. But in neither of those cases had the missing persons a host of relatives and friends, people, mark you, who in the past had been quite used to being told whenever the missing person was going away. The facts are that Joanne was going to Tancred House at a quarter past eight on