Full Fury (8 page)

Crowshaw
admits that at that time he was painfully aware that this was his first murder, and that it was going wrong. Somehow the nature of a murder case always demands special attention to detail. It’s not necessary to adduce a motive—though this one was obvious—only to prove the guilt. But a murder has to be sewn up with every detail neatly in place, and he knew that this thing was still awful ragged round the edges.

The
Beeches was hidden from the road. We drove in beneath a heavily overhung belt of massive trees. The drive at that time went straight on past what was the front of the house, and I parked in a paved yard in front of a row of converted stables. Gaines’s Morris Minor was in there, and a Rover 100 saloon which I supposed belonged to Mrs Gaines.

Crowshaw
said I should go along with him and take notes, which was a bit of promotion, I suppose, due to him being annoyed with Freer. I tagged along, and we eventually found her in the garden.

Myra
Gaines was pruning her roses, or at least snipping off the dead flowers. She stood in a blue cotton dress and a kind of smock against a back-cloth of blue, distant hills and a tumbled layer of landscaping down to a brook in the valley. I guessed her age as the late twenties, so I wasn’t far out, which made her eighteen years younger than her husband. She had an impulsive, almost aggressive beauty, which I’d got time to appreciate while Crowshaw did the talking.

‘
Mr Crowshaw, isn’t it?’

‘
I felt I ought to see you.’

She
had a small wheelbarrow half full of ruined heads. ‘Don’t you think it’s a sad time of year?’ she asked.

‘
But it’s a fine day.’

She
looked at him quickly, half frowning. Her eyes were brown, far apart, level and unflinching. The brow was wide and smooth, with a high hairline, and at that time she wore her hair longer. Crowshaw found himself wondering whether her husband had ever attempted to capture some of her beauty on canvas, but certainly he could never seize and hold such a fluid flow of emotions as ran across her features. No still picture of her could record more than one of an infinite variety of poses. The impression was that she controlled her expression consciously, that she intended every second of it. Myra Gaines was a woman who played for attention, and she was enjoying being interviewed.

Then
she smiled. ‘There’s very little I can add to what I told the sergeant.’

‘
I’m finding it rather difficult to understand your husband,’ said Crowshaw. ‘Of course, this was impulse. But it’s not like the grabbing of a knife in a blind fury. It must have taken him twenty minutes to drive over to Paterson’s. It suggests a settled anger, some sort of determination that he’d built himself up to.’

She
inclined her head. Her secateurs went snip, snip, and two more soggy heads fell into the wheelbarrow.

‘
And I’ve talked with him a lot, now,’ went on Crowshaw. ‘He isn’t the type to sustain such a pitch of emotion.’

‘
But he did,’ she suggested gently.

‘
He’s a quiet man, withdrawn—’

She
caught at the word. ‘Withdrawn!’ Then the sound she made could have been a laugh or maybe a sob. ‘Neville’s in another world.’ She moved her chin in an upward arc that hinted at anger. ‘Withdrawn from existence, from all reality.’

‘
But
this
was real enough.’

Then
she relaxed. The hand with the secateurs moved in despair. ‘I never believed he could face anything. If I’d
believed
it, the whole thing might not have happened. I don’t let myself think about that. But if I’d accepted he
could
, I’d have… I don’t know… been prepared, perhaps.’

‘
The quiet men,’ he said, ‘build up inside and you can’t see it, until they must face what they’re trying not to see. And then the explosion carries them on and on… until it’s done.’

She
was looking at him in anger. On that smooth brow her frown was a mere crimpling of the surface. ‘Then why did you come here, if you understood?’

Crowshaw
smiled. ‘But I didn’t, you see. You’re helping me. You stimulate my imagination.’

It
pleased her. ‘Perhaps you’d better see his studio,’ she said, as though it might offer more stimulation.

And
a quiet man, he realized as he followed her, would be sustained by a rumbling fury at the disturbance to the gentle flow of his life. But would he sustain it as long as Gaines had? There was not just the long drive through the rain, and the subsequent hunt, but the prior preparation of approaching Lovejoy and buying the gun, and, now that the idea was growing in credibility, the approaching of somebody else and buying another.

She
took us to the left from the terrace. Along this side of the house was a large glasshouse, built against the main structure as an annexe.

‘
My father grew tropical plants in here,’ she explained.

It
was hot and humid inside, though the greenery was then confined to one end and along one side. It was perhaps forty feet long and fifteen wide, the glazed walls rising up from ground level and continuing up in one sweep of curve, over to meet the house wall. It could hardly have been more unsuitable as an artist’s studio, the sun slanting through the draped vines in a shimmering of green and gold light. Gaines had made an impractical attempt to control the light with shades, but there was such a conglomeration of cords that they’d become tangled long ago, and shades were stuck here and there so that the floor was mottled in a frantic distortion of light and shade. He had six easels scattered around the floor space, as though he had sprung from one to the other as the light changed and the inspiration seized him. Five had half-finished canvases on them, and on a table were his palette and brushes. No—no brushes, I saw; one palette knife only. And scattered about were the battered tubes of colour he had mangled in his strong fingers.

In
the far corner a fountain played, its basin overflowing into a lower basin, and so on, down to a small pool in which several goldfish swam. Along the rear glass wall was a roof-high rack stacked with finished works. A dozen or so were leaning against it, drying it seemed.

‘
You can see how good he was,’ she murmured, and Crowshaw detected sarcasm. His taste and knowledge of painting were both rudimentary. He knew what he liked, and he did not like these. Gaines had lashed at his canvases, scattering them with colour as though he hated them.

The
place was fantastic, tumbled and untidy—Neville Gaines’s refuge. For most people the house and grounds would have been sufficiently remote as a retreat from the hammerings of life. But here he had built the ultimate in refuge, of such fantasy that he would be removed completely from all reality.

They
had been married now for ten years. There was one daughter, sent to stay with an aunt until it was all over.

‘
Neville was hopeless with everything,’ Myra said, and there was just a touch of fondness in her voice. She caught Crowshaw’s eye on her and laughed softly. ‘I suppose that was why I married him. I mean, you get so tired of people fussing over you with their silly platitudes.’

I
was watching a goldfish idly waving a tail against the weak current. You couldn’t imagine Myra becoming tired of compliments, which was obviously what she meant. But her husband, by inference, had not been free with his platitudes. He’d be too introspective even to consider complimenting anybody. He would present a singular challenge.

But
Myra had taken on more than she could handle. Gaines was self-centred, yes. He was inoffensive, certainly. But he knew where he stood and how he intended to live. He was so unpractical that he’d raised it to a fine art. The changing of a razor blade became a performance of obscene mutterings and eventual bleats for help.

‘
He can dress himself and feed himself,’ Myra conceded with a shrug. ‘Though he was as difficult as hell. If we had company I had to fight him into a decent suit, and he’d sit at the table in one of his dazes, pretending he didn’t know one knife from the other. Just to embarrass me.’

She
was moving around, picking things up and putting them down. The studio was obviously as he’d walked out of it. For a moment it seemed she was not going to continue.

‘
Perhaps he was simply absent-minded,’ Crowshaw prompted.

‘
No,’ she said violently. ‘He just could not understand anything practical. Why, it took him three years to learn to drive, and that was only when I refused to drive him myself.’

‘
Refused?’

‘
I had to do something. He was digging further and further into his shell. But, d’you know, even now he can’t change gear without looking at the knob to see where the next notch is.’

Crowshaw
nodded, smiling in sympathy.

‘
Even his painting,’ she cried, picking up his palette knife. ‘He got it all down to this. One knife. He used to slash on the colours with this thing, and you wouldn’t believe the agony that went on before he could get himself to do it. He’d go into a daze, prowl around—and you couldn’t get a word through. Then he’d pounce on the canvas and for five minutes it’d be splash and slash and flick—you’d have laughed, really you would. And the poor dear never realized it was rubbish.’

I
’d been doing a tour of the easels. Her voice, in the background, was breaking towards the end. They were hideous, I thought, all crude colour and no taste, no form.

‘
The Royal Academy laughed at him,’ she said, her voice now under control. ‘The critics ignored him. But d’you think he cared. Not Neville. He just went along with his little life, and nothing I could do would shake him out of it.’

‘
But you tried?’

‘
I tried.’ She glanced at him. ‘I felt… oh, I don’t know. As though he was slipping from me, getting further and further out of touch all the time.’

There
could be four hundred canvases there. Gaines might have been hopeless, but if they hanged him they’d sell as masterpieces. Gaines might be ironically pleased at the thought.

Crowshaw
slipped it in very casually. ‘And you don’t think he could re-load an automatic pistol?’ he asked.

‘
What?’

He
couldn’t have expected such a startled response. The blood ran from her face and her eyes flickered.

‘
A technicality,’ he explained. ‘There were more shots than one gun-load, you might say.’

‘
That’s… oh, that’s ridiculous.’

‘
His re-loading it?’

‘
He just couldn’t.’ She moved a hand, dismissing it.

‘
Too unpractical? Has he
ever
loaded one, do you know?’

‘
Neville couldn’t fill a fountain pen.’ And she instantly caught her lower lip between her teeth.

‘B
ut he could certainly fire the thing.’

‘
Yes… I suppose so. I don’t know,’ she cried, her eyes bright. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

‘
I can’t help thinking about it.’

‘
No.’ She looked at him with scorn, then immediately softened. ‘It’s your job, I suppose.’

‘
Did you know he’d got it?’ I noticed he used the singular.

‘
The gun?’ She beat her right fist into her other palm and walked away from him. ‘Yes, I knew.’

‘
Yet you let him go?’

‘
Let him? How… how would I know where he was going?’

‘B
ut you knew he’d bought a gun?’

‘
Andy Paterson told me. It was ridiculous.’

‘
And how did
he
know?’

Her
eyes flickered. It had never occurred to her to wonder. ‘I don’t know.’

And
that, I thought, was probably true.

‘
Ridiculous, you said,’ Crowshaw prompted.

Her
lips moved in a sad little smile. ‘How else could Andy take it? Certainly not seriously.’

‘
Maybe he should have done.’

‘
That was his fault,’ she cried. ‘Neville’s.’ Emotion was crumbling her control. ‘The way he’d arranged things.
His
fault.’ Then it all came tumbling out as she tried to justify the claim, and Crowshaw let her get on with it.

She
had made numerous attempts to draw him out, all unsuccessful. It seemed that he treated her overtures as a game, tossing the ball back at her happily. Any lure, bribe or threat only had an adverse effect; he simply retreated even deeper into his personal seclusion. He was insisting on being carried through life, and of course Myra resented it. She hated being taken for granted, and she felt he was leaving her behind on his personal journey to somewhere she could not reach. But Neville assumed she should be pleased, even happy, to bear the burden created by his Art. Angry frustration drove her on and on, in a pathetic search for some personal recognition. If he’d only
looked
at her, really looked! But he seemed not to understand her. She could not frighten him with threats of financial hardship. He sold nothing, but she had money, so what did it matter?