Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (38 page)

Underfoot it was dry and rather slippery, for brown needles covered the road surface as well as the interstices of the wood. The sky was a great blue-white dazzlement above them. How lucky they were to live here, Wexford thought, those Harrisons and John Gabbitas, and how much they must fear the loss of it. Uneasily, he remembered his homeward journey of the previous evening and the woodsman and Daisy standing side by side in the sunlit aisle. A girl might lay her hand on a man's arm and look up into his face in that confiding way and it all meant nothing. They had been a long way distant from him. Daisy was a 'toucher', she tended to touch you as she talked, to lay a finger on your wrist, pass her hand lightly across your arm in a gesture near a caress . . .

John Gabbitas was out in his front garden, waiting for them, his right hand beating time with a frenzied impatience as if he found this delay intolerable.

Once again Wexford was struck by his looks, a spectacular handsomeness which, if it had belonged to a woman, would have led you to call it a waste, buried in such a place. The same sort of comment simply never applied

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to a man. He was reminded suddenly of Dr Perkins's remarks about Harvey Copeland and his appearance, and then Gabbitas was ushering them into the little house, into the living room and pointing with the same quivering finger that had beat time, at something which lay on a woven-raffia-topped stool in the middle of the room.

"What is this, Mr Gabbitas?" Burden asked him. "What's going on?"

"I found it. I found that."

"Where? Where it is now?"

"In a drawer. In the chest of drawers."

It was a large handgun, a revolver, of a dark leaden colour, the metal of the barrel of a slightly paler and browner shade. They looked at it, in a moment of silence.

Wexford said, "You took it out and put it there?"

Gabbitas nodded.

"You know, of course, that you shouldn't have touched it?"

"OK, I know now. It was a shock. I opened the drawer, I keep paper and envelopes in there, and it was the first thing I saw. It was lying on top of a packet of paper for printing out. I know I shouldn't have touched it, but it was instinctive."

"May we sit down. Air Gabbitas?" ^Gabbitas cast up his eyes, then nodded furiously. These were the gestures of a man ^tendering at the triviality of the request at Such a time. "It's the gun they were all killed " 1th, isn't it?"

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"It may be," said Burden. "It may not. That remains to be established."

"I phoned you as soon as I found it."

"As soon as you'd removed it from where you found it, yes. That would have been at five fifty. When was the last time you looked in that drawer, prior to five fifty?"

"Yesterday," Gabbitas said after a small hesitation. "Yesterday evening. About nine. I was going to write a letter. To my parents in Norfolk."

"And the gun wasn't there then?"

"Of course it wasn't!" Gabbitas's voice was suddenly ragged with exasperation. "I'd have got in touch with you then if it had been. There was nothing in the drawer but what's always in it, paper, notepaper, envelopes, cards, that sort of thing. The point is the gun wasn't there. Can't you understand? I've never seen it before."

"All right, Mr Gabbitas. I should try to keep calm if I were you. Did you in fact write to your parents?"

Gabbitas said impatiently, "I posted the letter in Pomfret this morning. I spent the day felling a dead sycamore in the centre of Pomfret and I had two kids doing community service to help me. We finished at four thirty and I was back here by five."

"And fifty minutes later you opened the drawer because you meant to write another letter? You seem to be an enthusiastic correspondent."

It was with a scarcely restrained fury that Gabbitas turned on Burden. "Look, I didn't have to tell you about this. I could have chucked

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it out with the rubbish and no one the wiser. ,: It's nothing to do with me, I simply found it, I found it in that drawer where someone else must have put it. I opened the drawer, if you must know, for a piece of paper on which to write an invoice for the job I did today. To the borough council's environment department. That's the way I work. I have to. I can't hang about for weeks and weeks. I need the money."

"All right, Mr Gabbitas," Wexford said. "But it was unfortunate you handled this weapon. I suppose it was with bare hands? Yes. I'm going to put through a call to DC Archbold to come over here and take care of it. It'll be wiser for no other unauthorised person to touch it."

Gabbitas was sitting down, leaning forward, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, his expression truculent and peevish. It was the look of someone who has been baulked of his desire to have authority thank him for his services. Wexford considered that there were two possible views to take. One was that Gabbitas was guilty, perhaps only of possessing this gun, but guilty of that and now afraid to hang on to it. The other was that he simply did not realise the gravity of the matter or understand what this meant, if the revolver on the stool was indeed the murder weapon.

He made his call, said to Gabbitas, "You were out all day?"

; "I told you. And I can give you the names of dozens of witnesses to prove it."

"It's a pity you can't give us the name of one

corroborate where you were on 11 March."

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Wexford sighed. "All right. I suppose there are no signs of a break-in? Who else has a key to this house?"

"Nobody, so far as I know." Gabbitas hesitated, and quickly emended what he had said. "I mean, the lock wasn't changed when I moved in. The Griffins might still have a key. It's not my house, it doesn't belong to me. I suppose Miss Flory or Mr Copeland had a key." More and more names seemed to come to mind. "The Harrisons had a key between the Griffins going and me coming. I don't know what happened to it. I never go out and leave the house unlocked, I'm careful about that."

"You might as well not bother, Air Gabbitas," said Burden drily. "It doesn't seem to make much difference."

* * *

You lost a rope and found a gun, Wexford

reflected when he was alone with Gabbitas.

Aloud he said, "I suppose much the same

applies to the keys to the machinery shed. A

lot of people have keys?"

"There's no lock on the door."

"That settles that, then. You came here last

May, Mr Gabbitas?"

"At the beginning of May, yes."

"No doubt you have a bank account?"

Gabbitas told him where, told him without

hesitation.

"And when you came here you immediately

transferred your account to the Kingsmarkham

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branch? Yes. Was this before or after the murder of the police officer? Can you remember that? If it was before or after DS Martin was murdered in that bank branch?"

"It was before."

Wexford fancied Gabbitas sounded uneasy, but he was used to his imagination telling him things like that. "The gun you found just now was almost certainly the weapon used in that murder." He watched Gabbitas's face, saw nothing there but a kind of blank receptiveness. "Of the public who were in the bank that morning, 13 May, not all came forward to make statements to the police. Some left before the police came. One took that gun with him."

"I know nothing about any of this. I wasn't in the bank that day."

"But you had already come to Tancred?"

"I came on May the fourth," Gabbitas said sullenly.

Wexford paused, then said in a conversational way, "Do you like Miss Davina Jones, Mr Gabbitas? Daisy Jones?"

The change of subject caught Gabbitas off guard. He burst out, "What's that got to do with it?"

"You're young and apparently unattached. She's young too and good-looking. She's very charming. As a result of what has happened she's in possession of a considerable property."

"She's just someone I work for. All right, she's [attractive, any man would find her attractive. *lut she's just someone I work for, so far as I'm

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concerned. And may not be working for much longer."

"You're leaving this job?"

"It's not a matter of leaving the job. I'm not employed here, remember? I did tell you. I'm self-employed. Is there anything else you want to know? I'll tell you one thing. Next time I find a gun I won't tell the police, I'll chuck it in the river."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Mr Gabbitas," Wexford said mildly.

* * *

In the Sunday Times review section was an article by a distinguished literary critic on material he had collected for a biography of Davina Flory. Most of this was correspondence. Wexford glanced at it, then began to read with , mounting interest.

Many of the letters had been in the * possession of the niece in Mentone, now dead. They were from Davina to her sister, the niece's mother, and indicated that Davina's first marriage, to Desmond Cathcart Flory, had never been consummated. Long passages were quoted, instances of unhappiness and bitter disappointment, all written in Davina's unmistakable style that alternated between the plain and the baroque. The author of the article speculated, basing his argument on evidence in later letters, as to who might have been Naomi Flory's father.

This accounted for something Wexford had

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wondered about. Though Desmond and Davina had married in 1935, Davina's only child had not been born until ten years later. He called to mind, painfully, that horrible scene at the Cheriton Forest Hotel when Casey had loudly averred that Davina had still been a virgin for eight years after her marriage. With a sigh, he finished the piece and turned over to the double-page spread on the newspaper's Literary Banquet held at Grosvenor House on the previous Monday. Wexford looked at it only in the hope of seeing a photograph of Amyas Ireland, who had been at the banquet the previous year and might be again.

The first face he saw, that leapt at him from a page of photographs, was Augustine Casey's. Casey was sitting at a table with four other people. At any rate, there were four other people in the picture. Wexford wondered if he had spat in his wineglass, and then he read the caption.

From left to right: Dan Kavanagh, Penelope Casey, Augustine Casey, Frances Hegarty, Jane Somers.

All were smiling pleasantly except Casey, whose face wore a sardonic smirk. The women were in formal evening gowns.

Wexford looked at the picture and reread the caption, looked at the other pictures on the two pages, returned to the first one. He sensed Dora's silent presence at his left shoulder. She was waiting for him to ask but he hesitated, not knowing how to frame what he wanted to say. The question came carefully.

"Who is the woman in the shiny dress?"

KGD26

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"Penelope Casey."

"Yes, I know. I can see that. What is she to him?"

"She's his wife, Reg. It looks as if he's gone back to his wife or she's come back to him."

"You knew this?"

"No, darling, I didn't know. I didn't know he had a wife until the day before yesterday. Sheila didn't phone this week so I phoned her. She sounded very upset, but all she told me was that Gus's wife had come back to their flat and he'd gone back there 'to talk it through'."

That expression again . . . He put his hand up to his eyes, perhaps to hide the picture from sight. "How unhappy she must be," he said, and then, "Oh, the poor child .

�

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22

I

CAN'T tell you if this is the same weapon as was used in the bank killing last May," the expert witness said to Wexford. "It certainly is the weapon that was used at Tancred House on 11 March."

"Then why can't you say if it was the same gun?"

"It probably is. Evidence in favour of that theory is that the chamber accommodates six cartridges -- it's a classic 'six-gun' -- and one of these was used at the bank killing, while five were used at Tancred House. Very likely the remaining five in the chamber. In a society where handguns appear constantly as murder weapons one would hardly care to hazard that. But I think it's an intelligent guess here."

"But you still can't be sure it's the same gun?"

"As I've said, I can't be sure."

"Why not?"

"The barrel's been changed," the expert said laconically. "It's not such an amazing task to undertake, you know. The Dan Wesson line of revolvers, for instance, with their variety of btael lengths, are all capable of being changed at^home by any amateur. The Colt Magnum ftttght be more difficult. Whoever embarked on would have to have the tools. Well, he must had because this is definitely not the barrel

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this gun started life with."

"Would a gunsmith have them?"

"Depends on what kind of gunsmith, I should say. Most specialise in shotguns."

"And that's what makes the marks on the five cartridges fired at Tancred House different from the one that killed Martin? A change of barrel?"

"Right. That's why I can only say this and that is probable, not that it definitely happened. This is Kingsmarkham, after all, not the Bronx. There aren't going to be unlimited caches of firearms about. It's the numbers really that point to it, the one for that poor fellow who was one of you, and the five for Tancred. And the calibre, of course. And his intent to deceive. How about that? He wasn't changing gun barrels for fun, it wasn't his hobby."

* * *

He was angry. The relief he might have felt that Sheila had been divided from that man, that she would no longer go to Nevada, was subsumed in anger. For Casey she had turned down Miss JuliG) for Casey she had changed her life and, it seemed to him, her very personality. And Casey had gone back to his wife.

Wexford hadn't spoken to her. Only the answering machine replied when he dialled her number and there were no more cheerful messages, only the clipped name and request for a message to be left. He left a message, asking her to phone. Then, when she didn't, he left

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another, one that said he was sorry -- for her, for what had happened, and for all the things he had said.

He called into the bank on the way to work. It was the branch where Martin had been killed, not his bank, but the nearest to the route Donaldson took and it had its own small car park at the back. Wexford had his Transcend card that enabled him to draw cash at all banks and all branches in the United Kingdom. The name made him grind his teeth at the misuse of words, but it was a useful card.