Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (28 page)

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"A guy? It was a man?"

"Funny that, I don't know. I sort of presumed it was."

He gave Wexford a rueful grin. It was a delicate face, not so much handsome as sensitive, the features fine as a girl's, large dark-blue eyes with thick long lashes, a short straight nose, roseleaf skin -- and the heavy stubble of a dark man who hasn't shaved for two days. The contrast was strangely arresting. "You want me to tell you what happened? I guess it was lucky I was here. I'd just got back from USM . . . "

Wexford interrupted him. "You said that before, USM. What's USM?"

Hogarth looked at him as if he must be simple-minded and Wexford quickly saw why. "I'll be going to school there, right? University of the South, Myringham, USM. What do you call it? They do this postgrad creative writing course and I've applied. I only minored in English Literature at college, Military History was my major, so I figured I needed more training if I'm going to write novels. I'd filled out the application and been over with it." He grinned. "It's not that I don't have confidence fa the British mails, I wanted to take a look fc the campus. Well, like I said, I'd delivered Bay application and got back here -- when? I l^iess around two, ten after two. There came Has hammering on my door and the rest I guess

u know." **Not quite, Mr Hogarth."

Thanny Hogarth put up his delicate dark tows. He had recovered perfect command

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of himself, a remarkable command in one so young. "She can't tell you herself?"

"No," Wexford said thoughtfully. "No, it appears she can't. What exactly did she tell you?" The idea had come to him, not too far-fetched, that Bib had been seeing ghosts, phantasms or bogy's, that perhaps she had done this before. There was no body, or what hung from that tree was a sheet of plastic, a windblown sack. The English countryside, after wind and rain, was sometimes festooned with rags of grainy greyish polythene . . . "What did she say to you? Precisely?"

"Her exact words? It's hard to recall. She said there was a body, hanging . . . She told me where and then she started sort of laughing and crying." An idea struck him, it seemed with pleasure. He suddenly wanted to help. "I could show you. I guess I could find where she said and show you."

* * *

The wind had dropped and it was very silent and still in the woods. There was a little muted birdsong, but songbirds rarely live in forests and a more usual sound was the shriek of a jay and the woodpecker's distant drilling. They left the car at the point where the by-road twisted to the south. It was an old part of Tancred woods with old standing trees and many fallen.

Gabbitas or his predecessor had done some logging in here but had left a few tree trunks lying, overgrown now with brambles, as habitats

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for wildlife. So much light penetrated that whole areas of the forest floor were bright with spring grass, but deeper in, where the trunks crowded together, a dense leafmould lay underfoot, crisp on the surface with brown oak leaves.

Here it was that Bib Mew had come, according to Thanny Hogarth. He showed them where he calculated she had abandoned her bicycle. Modest, inhibited Bib must have gone a long way in among the trees before she was satisfied she had found privacy. So long a way, in fact, that Wexford's earlier notion returned to him: that they would find nothing -- or nothing but a rag of plastic wrap flapping from a branch.

The silence they all maintained, the grim speechlessness, would seem folly, a pointless over-reacting, when the hanging object, the fluttering rag, the empty sack, was found. He was thinking along these lines, beginning to think as if it were all over, Bib's bogey seen for what it was, the whole thing to be dismissed with an exasperated exclamation -- when he saw it. They all saw it.

There were holly trees, a wall of them. They screened a clearing, and in the clearing, from one of the lower branches of a great tree, an ash or perhaps a lime, it hung by the neck. A bundle, tied up at the neck, but no rag or sack. It? had weight, the weight of flesh and bones, to Suspend it with a heavy ponderousness. This had once been human.

j*t The policemen made no sound. Thanny Hogarth said, "Wow!"

It was sunny in the clearing. The sun lit the

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hanging body with a gentle golden gleam. Rather than swinging like a pendulum, it rotated to the extent perhaps of a quarter circle as a metal weight might on the end of a plumb line. This was a beautiful place, a sylvan dell with budding branches around and the tiny yellow and white star flowers of spring underfoot. The body in this setting was obscene. An earlier thought returned to Wexford, that the man or men who did this took pleasure in destruction, delighted in spoliation.

Having stopped briefly to stare, they approached the pendant thing. The policemen went close up, but Thanny Hogarth hung back. His face was unchanged but he hung back and lowered his eyes. It wasn't in fact the exciting discovery he had envisaged, jaunty and eager back at the cottage, Wexford thought. At least, he wasn't going to throw up.

They were a yard from it now. A trousered body, track-suited, once fat, the neck stretched horribly by the noose, and Wexford saw that he had been wrong, so wrong.

"That's Andy Griffin," Burden said.

* * *

"It's not possible. His parents had a phone call from him on Wednesday night. He was up in the north of England somewhere and he phoned his parents Wednesday evening."

Sumner-Quist seemed unimpressed. "This man has been dead at least since Tuesday afternoon and very likely longer.'

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For further information they would await � his report. Burden was indignant. You cannot directly reproach bereaved parents for telling you lies about their dead son. However much he longed to have it out with them, he would have to desist. Freeborn was very keen on his officers maintaining what he called 'civilised and sensitive' relations with the public.

In any case. Burden could make an intelligent guess at what had happened. Terry and Margaret Griffin wanted to postpone any questioning of Andy as long as possible. If they could maintain a fiction that he was far away -- and how much of a fiction, after all, was it? -- if they could, when he turned up, persuade him to go to ground again, by the time his reappearance was inevitable the case might be concluded and the whole thing blown over.

"Where was he those three days, Reg? This cup north' stuff is just a blind, isn't it? Where was he between Sunday morning and Tuesday afternoon? Staying with someone?"

"Better get Barry back to his favourite hostelry, the Slug and Lettuce, and see what Andy's mates have to suggest." Wexford pondered. "It's a horrible way to kill someone," he said, "but there are no 'nice' ways. Murder is horrible. If f- we can talk about it dispassionately, hanging has 1 a lot of advantages for the perpetrator. No blood, for a start. It's cheap. It's certain. Provided you can immobilise your victim, it's easy." v "How was Andy immobilised?" ? "We'll find out when we hear something final from Sumner-Quist. Could be whoever it was

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did it administered a Mickey Finn first, but that would have its own problems. Andy was the second man? The man Daisy didn't see?"

"Oh, I think so, don't you?"

Wexford made no answer. "Hogarth was distinctly put out when I came to his door. That may be natural enough, not wanting to get involved. He perked up when he appointed himself our guide, though. Probably just likes being the centre of attention. He looks about seventeen, though he's very likely twenty-three. They go to university for four years in the United States. He says he came here at the end of last May, so that would be after he'd graduated, they do that in May over there, and he'd have been twenty-two. Making the Grand Tour, he called it. Got a well-off father, I'd guess."

"Have we checked up on him?"

"I thought it wise," Wexford said rather austerely. He told Burden of a call he had made privately to an old friend, the Vice Chancellor of Myringham University, and of Dr Perkins's equally private scanning of the enrolment applications computer.

"I wonder what Andy was up to?"

"You and me both," said Wexford.

He went to see Sylvia. He was too busy to take time to see her, and that was all the more reason. On the way he did something he had never done for her before, bought her flowers. In the florist's he found himself wishing for one of the gorgeous confections sent to dead Davina, a cushion or a heart of blossoms, a basket of lilies. There was nothing of that sort here and he

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had to settle for golden freesias and pheasant's eye narcissus. The scent of them, stronger than any perfume in a glass flagon, filled his car overpoweringly.

She was strangely touched. He thought for a moment she was going to cry. Instead she smiled and buried her face in the yellow trumpets and white petals.

"They're beautiful. Thank you, Dad."

Did she know of the quarrel? Had Dora told her?

"How are you going to feel about leaving this house?" It was a nice one, just off prestigious Ploughman's Lane. He knew why she kept moving, why she and Neil hankered after repeated change, and it added nothing to the sum of his happiness. "No regrets?"

"Wait till you see the Rectory."

He omitted to tell her he had driven past, back and forth, with her mother. He didn't tell her how appalled they had been by the size of it and its state of dilapidation. She made him tea and he ate her fruit cake, though he didn't want it and it wasn't good for him.

"You and Mother absolutely mustn't fail to come to our housewarming."

"Why should we fail?"

"Now he asks me! You're famous for never going to parties."

"This will be the exception that proves the I rule."

I* * * *

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Three days had passed since he had seen Daisy. His only contact with her was to assure himself that the watch on her at Tancred House was maintained. To this end he spoke to her on the phone. She was indignant but not angry.

"Rosemary wanted to answer the phone! I can't be doing with that. I told her I wasn't afraid of heavy breathers. Anyway, there haven't been any. I can't really be doing with Karen at all, or with Anne. I mean, they're very nice, but why can't I be here on my own?"

"You know why, Daisy."

"I just don't believe one of them's going to

"Nor do I, but I like being on the safe side."

He had tried several times to ring up her father but there was no answer from G. G. Jones in Nineveh Road, wherever -- Highbury? Holloway? That evening, having read Davina Flory's novel, The Hosts of Midian^ the one Casey liked, he began her first book about Eastern Europe and found that he didn't much like Davina. She was a high-toned snob, both social and intellectual; she was bossy, she thought herself superior to most people; she was unkind to her daughter and feudal to her servants. Although avowedly left-wing, she referred not to a 'working' but to a 'lower' class. Her books revealed her as that always suspect creature, the rich socialist.

A mixture of elitism and Marxism imbued these pages. Down-to-earth humanity was conspicuously absent, as was humour, except in a

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single area. She appeared to be one of those people who relish the idea of unbridled sex for all, find the very notion of sex lubriciously, lip-lickingly delightnil and the only provoker of fun, as readily available to the old (the intelligent and attractive old) as to the young. But in the case of the young indispensable, to be indulged in with fabulous frequency, as necessary as food and as positively nourishing.

As a result of his request in the matter of the enrolment computer, he and Dora were invited to the Perkinses' for drinks. The Vice Chancellor of Myringham University surprised him by confessing a one-time close acquaintance with Harvey Copeland. Harvey, years before, had been a visiting professor of business studies at an American university during the time he, Stephen Perkins, had taught a history class there while working for his Ph.D. According to Dr Perkins, Harvey was at that time, in the sixties, a startlingly handsome man and what he called a cwow on campus'. There was a minor scandal over a pregnant third-year student and a rather bigger one over his affair with the wife of a head of department.

"Pregnancy wasn't a commonplace among undergraduates then, especially not in the midwest. He didn't have to leave, nothing like that. He stayed his full two years, but a good many sighs of relief were heaved when he took his departure."

"What was he like, apart from that?"

"Pleasant, ordinary, rather dull. He just looked amazing. They say a man can't tell that about

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another man but there was no escaping poor Harvey's looks. I'll tell you who he looked like. Paul Newman. But he was a bit of a bore. We went over there to dinner once, didn't we, Rosie? To Tancred, I mean. Harvey was just the same as he was twenty-five years ago, a terrible bore. Still looked like Paul Newman. I mean, the way Paul Newman looks now."

"He was gorgeous, poor Harvey," said Rosie Perkins.

"And Davina?"

"D'you remember a few years back that graffiti the kids used to write up, 'Rambo Rules', 'Pistols Rule', that stuff? Well that was Davina. You could have said 'Davina Rules'. If she was there, she presided. Not so much the life and soul of the party as the boss. In a reasonably subtle way, of course."

"Why did she marry him?"

"Love. Sex."

"She used to talk about him in a very embarrassing way. Oh, I shouldn't tell him this, should I, darling?"

"How should I know when I don't know what it is?"

"Well, she was always saying very confidingly, you know, what a wonderful lover he was. She'd look sort of roguish and put her head on one side -- it really was embarrassing -- one would be alone with her, I mean, there wouldn't be any men there, and she'd just say rather winsomely how he was a marvellous lover. I can't imagine saying such a thing to anyone about my husband."

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"Thank you very much, Rosie," Perkins laughed. "She did in fact say it in my hearing once."