Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (39 page)

Sharon Fraser was still there. Ram Gopal had obtained a transfer to another branch. The second cashier this morning was a very young and pretty Eurasian woman. Wexford, who had resolved not to do this, could not keep his eyes from turning to the place where Martin had stood and had died. There should be some mark, some lasting memorial. He half expected to see Martin's blood still there, some vestige of it, while castigating himself for such nonsensical ideas.

Four people were in the queue ahead of him. He thought of Dane Bishop, ill and frightened, perhaps not even of sound mind by that time, shooting Martin from about this spot, running out and throwing down his gun as he went. The frightened people, the screams, those men who had not remained but had quietly slipped away. �ne of them, standing perhaps where he was landing now, had, according to Sharon Fraser, keen holding a bunch of green banknotes in Was hand.

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Wexford looked round to see the length of the queue behind him and saw Jason Sebright. Sebright was trying to write a cheque where he stood instead of using one of the bank's tables and chained-up ballpoint. The woman in front of him turned round and Wexford heard him say, "Do you mind if I rest my chequebook on your back, madam?"

This aroused uneasy giggles. Sharon Fraser's light came on and Wexford went up to her with his Transcend card. He recognised the look in her eyes. It was apprehensive, unwelcoming, the look of someone who would rather attend to anybody except you because, by your profession and your searching questions, you endanger her privacy and her peace and perhaps her very existence.

When Martin died people had come into the bank and laid flowers on the spot where he fell, donors as anonymous as whoever had brought these bouquets to hang on the Tancred gates. The latest offerings were dead. Night frosts had blackened them until they looked like a nest made by some untidy bird. Wexford told Pemberton to remove them and throw them on Ken Harrison's rubbish heap. No doubt they would soon be replaced by others. Perhaps it was because his mind was dwelling abnormally on love and pain and the perils of love that he had begun speculating who the donor of these flowers might be. A fan? A silent -- and rich -- admirer? Or more than that? The sight of the withered roses made him think of those early letters of Davina's and her loveless years

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until Desmond Flory went away to war.

As he approached the house, he saw a workman at the west-wing window, replacing the pane of eight-ounce glass. It was a dull still day, the kind of weather the meteorologists had taken to calling 'quiet'. The mist that hung in the air showed itself only in the distance where the horizon was blurred and the woods turned to a smoky blue.

Wexford looked through the dining-room window. The door to the hall was open. The seals had been taken off and the room opened up. On the ceiling and walls the blood splash marks still showed but the carpet was gone.

"We'll be making a start in there tomorrow, governor," the workman said.

So Daisy was beginning to come to terms with her loss, with the horror of that room. Restoration had begun. He walked across the flagstones, past the front of the house, towards the east wing and the stables behind. Then he saw something he hadn't noticed when he first arrived. Thanny Hogarth's bicycle was leaning up against the wall to the left of the front door. A fast worker, Wexford thought, and he felt better, he felt more cheerful. He even felt like speculating as to what might happen when Nicholas Virson arrived -- or was Daisy too good a manager in these matters to let that happen?

lr "I think Andy Griffin spent those two nights here," Burden said to him as he walked into the stables.

"What?"

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"In one of the outbuildings. We searched them, of course, when we did the general search of the house after it happened, but we never went near them again."

"Which outbuilding are you talking about, Mike?"

He followed Burden along the sandy path behind the high hedge. A short row or terrace of cottages, not dilapidated but not well-maintained either, stood parallel to this hedge, the roadway a sandy track. You might be quartered here for a month, as they had been, without ever knowing the cottages were there.

"Karen came out here last night," Burden said. "She was doing her rounds. Daisy said she heard something. There was no one in fact about but Karen came this way and looked through that window."

'She shone a torch, d'you mean?"

'I suppose so. There's no electricity to these cottages, no running water, no amenities at all. According to Brenda Harrison they've not had anyone living in them for fifty years -- well, since before the war. Karen saw something which made her go back this morning."

"What d'you mean 'saw something'? You're not in court, Mike. This is me, remember?"

Burden made an impatient gesture. "Yes, sure. Sorry. Rags, a blanket, remains of food. We'll go in. It's still there."

The cottage door opened on a latch. The most powerful of a variety of smells that greeted them was the ammoniac one of stale urine. There was a floor of bricks on which a makeshift bed had

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been contrived from a pile of dirty cushions, two old coats, unidentifiable rags, a good, thick and fairly clean blanket. Two empty Coke cans stood in the grate in front of the fireplace. An iron fire-basket contained grey ash and on top of the ash, thrown there perhaps after the cinders had cooled, was a wad of greasy screwed-up paper that had wrapped fish and chips. The smell of this was marginally more unpleasant than that of the urine.

"You think Andy slept here?"

"We can try the Coke cans for prints," Burden said. "He could have been here. He would have known about it. And if he was here on those two nights, 17 and 18 March, no one else was."

"OK. How did he get here?"

Burden beckoned him through the unsavoury room. He had to duck his head, the lintels were so low. Beyond the hole of a scullery and the back door, bolted top and bottom but not locked, was a wired-in plot of overgrown garden and a small walled area that might have been a coal-hole or a pig sty. Inside, half-covered by a waterproof sheet, was a motorbike.

"No one would have heard him come," Wexford said. "The Harrisons and Gabittas were too far away. Daisy hadn't come back home. She didn't come until several days later. He had the place to himself. But, Mike, why did he want the place to himself?"

They strolled along the path that bordered the wood. In the distance, to the south of the ^y-road, the whine of Gabbitas's chain saw could &e heard. Wexford's thoughts reverted to the

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gun, to the extraordinary thing that had been done to the gun. Would Gabbitas have had the means and the knowledge to change the barrel on a revolver? Would he have the tools? On the other hand, would anyone else?

"Why would Andy Griffin want to sleep up here, Mike?" he said.

"I don't know. I'm starting to wonder if this place had some sort of particular fascination for him."

"He wasn't our second man, was he? He wasn't the one Daisy heard but didn't see?"

"I don't see him in that role. That would have been too big for him. Beyond his class. Blackmail was his line, small petty blackmail."

Wexford nodded. "That's why he was killed. I think he started in a small way and it was all for cash. We know that from his Post Office Savings account. He may have operated from here quite a bit while he and his parents still lived here. I don't suppose he began on Brenda Harrison. He may well have tried it successfully on other women. All he had to do was pick an older woman and threaten to tell her husband or her friends or some relative that she'd made advances to him. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't."

"Do you think he tried something on the women here? Davina herself, say, or Naomi? I can still hear the venom in his voice when he talked to me about them. The choice language he used."

"Would he dare? Perhaps. It's something we're never likely to know. Who was he

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blackmailing when he left home that Sunday and camped here? The gunman or the one Daisy didn't see?"

"Maybe."

"And why did he have to be here to do that?"

"This sounds more like one of your theories than mine, Reg. But as I've said I think he was fascinated by this place. It was his home. He may have bitterly resented being turned away from it last year. We may well discover that he spent far more time up here and in the woods and just spying out the land than anyone's dreamed of. All those times he was away from home and no one knew where, I reckon he was up here. Who knew this place and these woods? He did. Who could have driven through them and not got bogged down or hit a tree? He could."

"But we've said we don't see him as our second man," said Wexford.

"OK, forget his ability to drive through the wood, forget any involvement in the murders. Suppose he was camping in here on 11 March? Let's say he intended to stay here for a couple of nights for purposes we as yet know nothing of. He left home on the motorbike at six and brought his stuff up here. He was in the cottage when the two men arrived at eight -- or maybe he wasn't in the cottage but outside, prowling &bout or whatever he did. He saw the gunmen ^nd one of them he recognised. How about ^at?"

te *%."*

"Not bad," said Wexford. "Who would he

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recognise? Gabbitas, certainly. Even under a woodsman's mask. Would he recognise Gunner Jones?"

The bicycle was still there. The workman was still there, putting the finishing touches to his mended window. A thin persistent drizzle began to fall, the first rain for a long time. The water washed down the stables windows and made it dark inside. Gerry Hinde had an angled lamp on above the computer on which he was building a new database: every subject or suspect they had interviewed with his or her alibis and corroborative witnesses.

Wexford had begun to wonder if there was any point their remaining so close to the scene of the murders. It was four weeks tomorrow since what the newspapers called 'the Tancred Massacre' and the Assistant Chief Constable had made an appointment for an interview with him. Wexford was to go to his house. It would seem like a social engagement, a glass of sherry featuring somewhere in the proceedings, but the purpose of it all was, he was sure, to complain to him about the lack of progress made and the cost of it all. The suggestion would be made, or more likely the order given, that they move back to Kingsmarkham, to the police station. He would again be asked how he could continue to justify the night guard on Daisy. But how could he justify to himself the removal of that guard?

He phoned home to ask Dora if there had been any sign from Sheila, got a worried negative and walked outside into the rain. The place had a dismal look in wet weather.

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It was curious how the rain and the greyness changed the presence of Tancred House, so that it seemed like a building in one of those rather sinister Victorian engravings, austere, even dour, its windows dull eyes and its walls discoloured with water stains.

The woods had lost their blueness and grown pebble-grey under a scummy sky. Bib Mew came out from round the back, wheeling her bicycle. She dressed like a man, walked like a man, you would unhesitatingly put her down as male from here or nearer. Passing Wexford, she pretended not to see him, twisting her head round awkwardly and looking skywards, studying the phenomenon of rain.

He reminded himself of her handicap. Yet she lived alone. What must her life be? What had it been? She had been married once. He found that grotesque. She mounted her bike in man's fashion, swinging one leg over, pushed hard oh the pedals, swung off along the main drive. It was apparent that she was still avoiding the by-road and the proximity of the hanging tree, and this brought him a little inner shiver.

* * *

Next morning the builders arrived. Their van was on the flagstones by the fountain before Wexford got there. Not that they called themselves builders, but 'Interior Creators' from Brighton. He went carefully through his case notes, filling by now a large file. Gerry Hinde had them all on a small disc, smaller than the old single record,

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but useless to Wexford. He saw the case slipping through his fingers now that so much time had elapsed.

Those irreconcilables remained. Where was Joanne Garland? Was she alive or dead? What connection had she with the murders? How did the gunmen get away from Tancred? Who put the gun in Gabbitas's house? Or was this some ploy of Gabbitas's own?

Wexford read Daisy's statement again. He played over Daisy's statement on tape. He knew he would have to talk to her again, for here the irreconcilables were most obvious. She must try to explain to him how it was possible for Harvey Copeland to have climbed those stairs yet be shot as if he were still at the foot of them and facing the front door; account for the long time -- a long time measured in seconds -- between his leaving the dining room and being shot.

Could she also account for something he knew Freeborn would laugh to scorn if he heard the matter raised? If the cat Queenie normally, indeed, it seemed, invariably, galloped about the upper floors at six in the evening, always at six, why had Davina Flory thought the noise upstairs was Queenie when she heard it at eight? And why had the gunman been frightened off by sounds from upstairs, which were in fact made by nothing more threatening than a cat?

There was another question he had to ask, though he was almost sure time would have blotted out her accurate memory of this just as trauma had begun to do so immediately after the event.

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The car on the flagstones, as far away from 'Interior Creators of Brighton' as could possibly be managed without parking on the lawn, was one he thought he recognised as Joyce Virson's. He was probably right in thinking Daisy would welcome a respite from Mrs Virson, perhaps an excuse for getting rid of her altogether. He rang the bell and Brenda came.

A sheet had been hung up over the dining room door. From behind came muffled sounds, not bangs, not scraping noises, but soft liquid floppings and sluicings. Accompanying these was the builders' invariable sine qua non, but turned low, the mindless dribble of pop music. You couldn't hear it in the morning room nor in the serre where they were sitting, not two but three people: Daisy, Joyce Virson and her son.