Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (20 page)

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a you, I don't reckon he ever did after he -- well, ten like."

This was her first mention of Ken and Brenda son, the first indication either of them given of the existence of their erstwhile ghbours.

en he goes away, Mrs Griffin," Barry put how long is he usually away for?"

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"Might be a couple of days, might be a week."

"I understand you weren't on speaking terms with Mr and Mrs Harrison at the time you left ... "

Burden was cut short by the crowing Margaret Griffin made. More than anything else it was like the wordless utterance of a heckler at a meeting. Or, as Karen said afterwards, a child's jeer at a playmate proved wrong, a reiterated, "Aah, aah, aah!"

"I knew it! You said, didn't you, Terry, you said they'd get on to that. It'll come out now, you said, for all Mr Harvey Labour Copeland's promises. They'll get hold of that to smear poor Andy after all this time."

In his wisdom, Burden didn't betray by the movement of a muscle or the flicker of an eyelid that he hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. He maintained a rather stern omniscient gaze as they told him.

* * *

The valuation of Davina Flory's jewellery joined the rest of Gerry Hinde's data on the computer.

Barry Vine discussed it with Wexford. "A lot of villains would consider thirty thousand pounds worth killing three people for, sir."

"Knowing they'd get maybe half that for it in the sort of markets they use. Well, yes, maybe. We've got no other motive."

"Revenge is a motive. Some real or imaginary injury perpetrated by Davina or Harvey Copeland.

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Daisy Flory had a motive. So far as we know, she inherits and no one else does. She's the only one left. I know it's a bit far-fetched, sir, but if we're talking motives ..."

"She shot her whole family and wounded herself? Or an accomplice did? Like her lover Andy Griffin?"

"All right. I know."

"I don't think the place interests her much. Barry. She hasn't realised yet what sort of money and property she's come into."

Vine turned from his computer screen. "I've been talking to Brenda Harrison, sir. She says she and the Griffins quarrelled because she didn't like Mrs Griffin hanging washing out in the garden on a Sunday."

"You believe that?"

"I think it shows Brenda's got more imagination than I gave her credit for."

Wexford laughed, then became instantly serious. "We can be sure of one thing, Barry. This crime was committed by someone who didn't know this place and these people at all and by someone else who knew both very well jndeed."

? * "One in the know and one to take instruction from him?"

"I couldn't put it better myself," said Wexford.

He was pleased with Burden's sergeant. You must not say, even to yourself, when someone had died a heroic death, or any death at all, that his replacement was a positive improvement or that tragedy was a blessing in disguise. But the

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feeling was there, or just the inescapable relief that Martin's successor was so promising.

* * *

Barry Vine was a strong muscular man of medium height. If he had held himself less well he might have been called short. Not exactly secretly but certainly privately, he went in for weight lifting. He had reddish hair, short and thick, the kind that recedes but never goes bald, and a small moustache that had grown dark, not red. Some people always look the same and are instantly recognisable. Their faces can be conjured up by memory and screened on the inner eye. Barry's was not like that. There was something protean about him, so that in certain lights and at certain angles you would have called him a sharp-featured man with a hard jawline, while at others his nose and mouth looked almost feminine. But his eyes never varied. They were rather small, a fleckless, very dark blue, that fixed friend and suspect alike with an unvarying steady gaze.

Wexford, whom his wife called a liberal, tried to be tolerant and forbearing, and often succeeded (or so he believed) in being merely irascible. Until his second marriage it had never occurred to Burden -- or he had not listened when these things had been pointed out to him -- that there might be any wisdom or virtue in holding views other than those of an inflexible conservative. He would have found nothing to dispute in the notion of the police force as the

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Tory Party with helmet and truncheon.

Barry Vine thought little about politics. He was the essential Englishman, more English in a curious way than either of his superiors. He ;voted for the party which had done most for him and his immediate circle in the recent jpast. It mattered very little whether they called ^themselves right or left wing. 'Most for him' meant, in his book, most in the area of finance, saving him money, reducing taxes and prices, wd making life more comfortable.

While Burden believed that the world would

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Myringham pub called the Slug and Lettuce, having discovered that this was where Andy Griffin's friends congregated most evenings, his antennae were quickly at work assessing the criminal potential of the four men for whom he had bought halves of Abbot.

Two of them were unemployed. That hadn't inhibited their regular attendance at the Slug and Lettuce, which Wexford would have excused on the grounds that human beings need circuses as well as bread, which Burden would have called fecklessness but which Vine set down as characteristic of men on the lookout for lucrative ways to break the law. One of the others was an electrician, grumbling about a fall-off in work caused by recession, the fourth a messenger for an overnight delivery company who described himself as a 'mobile courier'.

A phrase particularly offensive to Vine's ears was that so often heard in court, uttered by defendants or even witnesses: 'I might have been.' What did it mean? Nothing. Less than nothing. Anybody, after all, might have been almost anywhere or done almost anything.

So when the unemployed man called Tony Smith said that Andy Griffin 'might have been' in the Slug and Lettuce on the night of 11 March, Vine ignored him. The others had already told him, days ago, that they hadn't seen him that evening. Kevin Lewis, Roy Walker and Leslie Sedlar were adamant that Andy hadn't been with them, nor afterwards at the Panda Cottage. They were less positive about his present whereabouts.

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Tony Smith said he 'might have been in + the old Slug' on Sunday evening. The others couldn't say. That was one evening on which .they gave the pub a miss.

"He goes up north," Leslie Sedlar offered. , "Is that what he tells you, or do you know

3it?"

This was a distinction hard for any of them d:o make. Tony Smith insisted that he knew it. n; "He goes up north with the lorry. He goes :�p regular, don't he?"

jt "He hasn't got a job any more," said Vine. if He hasn't had a job for a year."

"When he had his driving job he went up tfegular."

a "How about now?"

*r �' He said he went up north, so he did. They 1 tibelieved him. The fact was they weren't much f| iteterested in where Andy went. Why should ||i!rtley be? Vine asked Kevin Lewis, whom he assessed as the most sensible and probably most law-abiding, where he thought Andy now.

�Off on his bike," Lewis said. ^Where, then? Manchester? Liverpool?" iffhey barely seemed to know where those *es were. To Kevin Lewis, Liverpool dredged recollections of his 'old man' talking about lething popular in his youth called the sey Sound.

'He goes up north then. Suppose I said he ssn't, he hangs about down here?" " >y Walker shook his head. "He don't. Not idy. Andy'd be in the old Slug."

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Vine knew when he was beaten. "Where does his money come from?"

'He gets the dole, I reckon," said Lewis.

'And that's it? That's all?" Keep it simple. No use asking about 'supplementary sources of income'. "He's no other money coming in?"

It was Tony Smith who answered. "He might have."

They were silenced. They had no more to offer. An enormous strain had been put on their imaginations and the result was to exhaust them. More Abbot might have helped -- 'might have'! -- but Vine felt the game wasn't worth the candle.

* * *

Mrs Virson's voice was loud, expansive, the product of an expensive girls' boarding school attended some forty-five years before. She opened the front door of The Thatched House to him and welcomed him in with a kind of high graciousness. The floral printed dress she wore upholstered her like a voluminous chair cover. Her hair had been done that day. The scrolls and undulations looked as fixed as if they had been carved. It was unlikely that all this was for him, but something had happened to change her attitude to him since his previous visit -- Daisy's own insistence on her willingness to see and talk to him?

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"Daisy's asleep, Mr Wexford. She's still very deeply shocked, you know, and I insist on her having plenty of rest.3

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He nodded, having no comment to make. "She'll be awake in time for her tea. These young things have a very healthy appetite, I've noticed, however much they may have been through. Shall we go in here and wait for her? I expect there are things you want to chat to me about, aren't there?"

He was not the man to neglect such an opportunity. If Joyce Virson had something to say to him, which was what 'chat' must mean, he would listen and hope for the best. But when they were in Mrs Virson's drawing room, sitting in faded chintz-covered chairs and facing each other across an arts-and-crafts coffee table, she seemed to have no inclination to begin a conversation. She was not embarrassed or awkward or even diffident. She was simply thoughtful and perhaps doubted where to begin. Me was very wary of helping her. In his position imy help would look like interrogation. sklShe said suddenly, "Of course what happened there at Tancred House was a terrible thing. :er I heard about it I didn't sleep for two ||tiole nights. It was simply the most appalling I've ever heard in the whole course of ttiife."

e waited for the 'but'. People who began like with an admission of their appreciation of dy or extreme misfortune, usually went on ify it. Initial empathy was to be an excuse Subsequent abuse.

ere was no 'but'. She surprised him by her ess. "My son wants Daisy to be engaged

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"Really?"

"Mrs Copeland didn't like the idea. I suppose I should call her Davina Flory or Miss Flory or something, but old habits die hard, don't they? I'm sorry, I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but a married woman will always be 'Mrs' and her husband's name to me." She waited for Wexford to say something and when he said nothing, continued, "No, she didn't care for the idea. Of course I don't mean she had anything against Nicholas. It was just some silly notion -- I'm sorry but I thought it silly -- about Daisy having her life to lead before she settled down. I could have said to her that when she was Daisy's age girls got married just as young as they could."

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"You said you could have said this to her. Did you in fact say it?"

A pucker of wariness crossed Mrs Virson's face. It passed. She smiled. "It was hardly my business to interfere."

"What did Daisy's mother think?"

"Oh, really, it wouldn't have mattered what Naomi thought. Naomi didn't have opinions. You see, Mrs Copeland was much more like a mother than a grandmother to Daisy. She made all the decisions for her. I mean, where she went to school and all that. Oh, she had very big ideas for Daisy, or Davina as she insisted on calling her, most confusing. She had her whole future mapped out, university first, Oxford naturally, and then poor little Daisy was to have a year

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travelling. Not anywhere a young girl would want to go to, I mean not Bermuda or the south of France or anywhere nice, but places in Europe with art galleries and history, Rome and Florence and those sort of places. And then she was to go on doing something at another university, if you please, another degree or whatever they call them. I'm sorry, but I don't see the purpose of all this education for a pretty young girl. Mrs Copeland's idea was for her to bury herself at some university, she wanted her to be a -- what's the name I want?"

"An academic?"

"Yes, that's right. Poor little Daisy was to have got there by the time she was twenty-five and then she was supposed to write her first book. I'm sorry, but it just seems ridiculous to me." - "What about Daisy herself How did she feel?"

**What does a girl of that age know? She jfcttows nothing about life, does she? Oh, if you p> on talking about Oxford and make it sound d glamorous place and then you keep saying Jlpw wonderful Italy is and seeing this picture ipd that statue, and how much more you can reciate things if you've been educated in this ty and that -- well, naturally, it has some effect you. You're so impressionable at that age,

*u're just a baby."

pounds "Marrying," said Wexford, "would of course a stop to all that."

Mrs Copeland may have been married three es but I don't think she was too keen on iage just the same." She leant towards

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him confidingly, lowering her voice and looking briefly over her shoulder as if someone else was in a far corner of the room. "I don't know this, I mean I don't actually know it, it's pure guesswork but I think it's pretty sound -- I'm positive Mrs Copeland wouldn't have turned a hair if Nicholas and Daisy had wanted to live together without marriage. She was obsessed with sex, you know. At her age! She'd probably have welcomed a relationship, she was all for Daisy having experience."