Sins of the Fathers (3 page)

The lane where Victor's Piece was must be somewhere about here. Those circumstantial details Wexford had been so tantalising about were coming back to him from his own memory. Surely he had read about a bus stop and a telephone box at the end of the lane? Would these be the meadows he remembered reading that Painter had crossed, desperate to conceal a bundle of bloodstained clothing?

Here was the phone box now. He indicated left and turned slowly into the lane. For a short way its surface was metalled, then it petered out into a track ending in a gate. There were only three houses: a white-plastered semi-detached pair and opposite them the late Victorian pile he had described as "a hideous dump".

He had never been as near to it as this before, but he saw noting to make him change his opinion. The roof of grey slates had been constructed—tortured almost—into a number of steep gables. Two of these dominated the front of the house, but there was a third on the right hand side and out of it grew another smaller one that apparently overlooked the back. Each gable was criss-crossed with timbering, some of it inexpertly carved into chevrons and all painted a dull bottle green. In places the plaster between the wood had fallen away, exposing rough pinkish brickwork. Ivy, of the same shade of green, spread its flat leaves and its rope-like grey tendrils from the foot of the downstairs windows to the highest gable where a lattice flapped open. There it had crept and burrowed into the mealy wall, prising the window frame away from the bricks.

Burden observed the garden with a countryman's eye. Never had he seen such a fine selection of weeds. The fertile black soil, cultivated and tended for many years, now nourished docks with leaves as thick and glossy as rubber plants, puce-headed thistles, nettles four feet tall. The gravel paths were choked with grass and mildewed groundsel. Only the clarity of the air and the soft brilliance of sunlight prevented the place from being actually sinister.

The front door was locked. No doubt this window beside it belonged to the drawing room. Burden could not help wondering with a certain wry humour what insensitive administrator had decreed that this scene of an old woman's murder should be for years the home—indeed the last refuge—of other old women. But they were gone now. The place looked as if it had been empty for years.

Through the window he could see a large shadowy room. In the grate of the amber-coloured marble fireplace someone had prudently placed crumpled newspaper to catch the drifts of soot. Wexford had said there had been blood all over that fireplace. There, just in front of the copper kerb, was where the body must have lain. He made his way round the side, pushing through a shrubbery where elders and strong little birches were threatening to oust the lilac. The panes in the kitchen casement were blurred with dirt and there was no kitchen door, only a back door that apparently opened off the end of the central passage. The Victorians, he reflected, were not too hot on design. Two doors with a straight passage between them! The draught would be appalling.

By now he was in the back garden but he literally could not see the wood for the trees. Nature had gone berserk at Victor's Piece and the coach house itself was almost totally obscured by creeper. He strolled across the shady flagged yard, made cool by the jutting walls of the house, and found himself skirting a conservatory, attached apparently to a kind of morning or breakfast room. It housed a vine, long dead and quite leafless.

So that was Victor's Piece. Pity he couldn't get inside, but he would, in any case, have to get back. Out of long habit—and partly to set a good example—he had closed all the windows of his car and locked the doors. Inside it was like an oven. He drove out of the broken gateway, into the lane and joined the traffic stream on the Stowerton road.

A greater contrast between the building he had left and the building he entered could hardly have been found. Fine weather suited Kingsmarkham Police Station. Wexford sometimes said that the architect of this new building must have designed it while holidaying in the South of France. It was white, boxy, unnecessarily vast and ornamented here and there with frescoes that owed something to the Elgin marbles.

On this July morning its whiteness glared and glistened. But if its facade seemed to welcome and bask in the sun its occupants did not. There was far too much glass. All right, said Wexford, for hothouse plants or tropical fish, but a mixed blessing for an elderly Anglo-Saxon policeman with high blood pressure and a low resistance to heat. The telephone receiver slid about in his large hand and when he had finished talking to Henry Archery he pulled down the Venetian blinds.

"Heat wave's coming," he said to Burden. "I reckon your wife's picked a good week."

Burden looked up from the statement he had begun to read. Lean as a greyhound, his face thin and acute, he often had the hound's instinct for scenting the unusual, coupled with a man's eager imagination.

"Things always seem to happen in a heat-wave," he said. "Our sort of things, I mean."

"Get away," said Wexford. "Things are always happening around here." He raised his spiky toothbrush brows. "What's happening today,' he said, "is Archery. He's coming at two."

"Did he say what it's all about?"

"He's leaving that for this afternoon. Very la-di-da manner he's got with him. All part of the mystique of how to be a gentleman on nothing a year. One thing, he's got a transcript of the trial so I shan't have to go through the whole thing again."

"That'll have cost him something. He must be keen."

Wexford looked at his watch and rose. "Got to get over to the court," he said. "Polish off those villains who lost me my night's sleep. Look, Mike, I reckon we deserve a bit of gracious living and I don't fancy the Carousel's steak pie for my lunch. What about popping into the Olive and booking a table for one sharp?"

Burden smiled. It suited him well enough. Once in a blue moon Wexford would insist on their lunching or even dining in comparative style.

"It shall be done," he said.

The Olive and Dove is the best hostelry in Kingsmarkham that can properly be called an hotel. By a stretch of the imagination the Queen's Head might be described as an inn, but the Dragon and the Crusader cannot claim to be more than pubs. The Olive, as locals invariably call it, is situated in the High Street at the Stowerton end of Kingsmarkham, facing the exquisite Georgian residence of Mr. Missal, the Stowerton car dealer. It is partly Georgian itself, but it is a hybrid structure with lingering relics of Tudor and a wing that claims to be pre-Tudor. In every respect it conforms to what nice middle-class people mean when they talk about a "nice" hotel. There are always three waiters, the chambermaids are staid and often elderly, the bath water is hot, the food as well as can be expected and the A. A. Guide has given it two stars.

Burden had booked his table by phone. When he walked into the dining room just before one he saw to his satisfaction that he had been placed by the High Street window. Here it was just out of the sun and the geraniums in the window box looked fresh and even dewy. Girls waiting on the other side of the street for the Pomfret bus wore cotton frocks and sandals.

Wexford marched in at five past. "I don't know why he can't get up at half twelve like they do in Sewingbury," he grumbled. "He", Burden knew, meant the chairman of the Kingsmarkham bench. "God, it was hot in court. What are we going to eat?"

"Roast duck," said Burden firmly.

"All right, if you twist my arm. As long as they don't mix a lot of rubbish up with it. You know what I mean, sweet corn and bananas." He took the menu, scowling. "Look at that, Polynesian chicken. What do they think we are, aborigines?"

"I went and had a look at Victor's Piece this morning," said Burden while they waited for the duck to come.

"Did you now? I see it's up for sale. There's a card in the agent's window with a highly misleading photograph. They're asking six thousand. Bit steep when you think Roger Primero got less than two for it in 1951."

"I suppose it's changed hands several times since then?"

"Once or twice before the old folks moved in. Thanks," he said to the waiter. "No we don't want any wine. Two halves of bitter." He spread his napkin over his capacious lap and to Burden's controlled distaste sprinkled wing and orange sauce liberally with pepper.

"Was Roger Primero the heir?"

"One of the heirs. Mrs. Primero died intestate. Remember I told you she'd only got ten thousand to leave and that was divided equally between Roger and his two younger sisters. He's a rich man now, but however he got his money it wasn't from his grandmother. All kinds of pies he's got his finger in—oil, property development, shipping—he's a real tycoon."

"I've seen him around, I think."

"You must have. He's very conscious of his status as a landowner since he bought Forby Hall. Goes out with the Pomfret hounds and all that."

"How old is he?" Burden asked.

"Well, he was twenty-two when his grandmother was killed. That makes him about thirty-eight now. The sisters were much younger. Angela was ten and Isabel nine."

"I seem to remember he gave evidence at the trial."

Wexford pushed his plate away, signalled rather imperiously to the waiter and ordered two portions of apple pie. Burden knew that his chief's notion of gracious living was somewhat limited.

"Roger Primero had been visiting his grandmother that Sunday," Wexford said. "He was working in a solicitor's office in Sewingbury at the time and he used to make quite a habit of having Sunday tea at Victor's Piece. Maybe he had his eye on a share of the loot when Mrs. Primero went—God knows he hadn't a bean in those days—but he seemed genuinely fond of her. It's certainly a fact that after we'd seen the body and sent for him from Sewingbury as next of kin, we had to restrain him forcibly from going over to the coach house and laying violent hands on Painter. I daresay his grandmother and Alice made a lot of him, you know, buttered him up and waited on him. I told you Mrs. Primero had her affections. There'd been a family quarrel but apparently it didn't extend to the grandchildren. Once or twice Roger had taken his little sisters down to Victor's Piece and they'd all got on very well together."

"Old people usually do get on well with kids," said Burden.

"They had to be the right kind of children, Mike. Angela and Isabel, yes, and she had a very soft spot for young Liz Crilling."

Burden put down his spoon and stared at the Chief Inspector.

"I thought you said you'd read all this up at the time?" Wexford said suspiciously. "Don't say it was a long time ago. My customers are always saying that to me and it makes me see red. If you read the account of that trial you must remember that Elizabeth Crilling, aged precisely five at the time, found Mrs. Primero's body."

"I assure you I can't remember, sir." That must have been the day he'd missed, the day he hadn't bothered with the papers because he'd been nervous about an interview. "She didn't appear at the trial, surely?"

"Not at that age—there are limits. Besides, although she was actually the first to go into the drawing room and come upon the body, her mother was with her."

"Digressing a hide," Burden said, "I don't quite get this stuff about the right kind of children. Mrs. Crilling lives over there in Glebe Road." He turned to the window and waved his hand in the direction of the least attractive part of Kingsmarkham where long streets of small terraced brown houses had sprung up between the wars, "She and the girl live in half a house, they haven't a penny to bless themselves with..."

"They've come down a lot," said Wexford. "In September 1950 Crilling himself was still alive—he died of T.B. soon after—and they lived opposite Victor's Piece."

"In one of those white semi-detached places?"

That's right. A Mrs. White and her son lived next door. Mrs. Crilling was about thirty at the time, little bit over thirty."

"You're joking," said Burden derisively. "That makes her only in her late forties now."

"Look, Mike, people can say what they like about hard work and childbearing and all that. I tell you there's nothing like mental illness to make a woman look old before her time. And you know as well as I do Mrs. Crilling's been in and out of mental hospitals for years." He paused as their coffee came and pursed his lips censoriously at the anaemic brown liquid.

"You did say black, sir?" the waiter asked.

Wexford gave a sort of grunt. The church clock struck the last quarter. As the reverberation died away, he said to Burden: "Shall I keep the parson waiting ten minutes?"

Burden said neutrally, "That's up to you, sir. You were going to tell me how Mrs. Primero and the Crilling woman became friends. I suppose they were friends?"

"Not a doubt of it. Mrs. Crilling was ladylike enough in those days and she had a way with her, sycophantic, sucking up,
you
know. Besides, Crilling had been an accountant or something, just enough of a professional man, anyway, in Mrs. Primero's eyes to make his wife a lady. Mrs. Crilling was always popping over to Victor's Piece and she always took the child with her. God knows, they must have been pretty close. Elizabeth called Mrs. Primero "Granny Rose" just as Roger and his sisters did."

"So she 'popped over' that Sunday night and found Granny Rose dead?" Burden hazarded.

"It wasn't as simple as that. Mrs. Crilling had been making the kid a party frock. She finished it by about six, dressed Elizabeth up and wanted to take her over and show her off to Mrs. Primero. Mind you, she and Alice Flower were always at loggerheads. There was a good bit of jealousy there, spheres of influence and so on. So Mrs. Crilling waited until Alice had gone off to church and went over alone, intending to go back and fetch the child if Mrs. Primero was awake. She dozed a good bit, you see, being so old.

"That first time—it was about twenty past six—Mrs. Primero
was
asleep and Mrs. Crilling didn't go in. She just tapped on the drawing room window. When the old woman didn't stir she went back and returned again later. By the way, she saw the empty scuttle through the window so she knew Painter hadn't yet been in with the coal."