Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (6 page)

It was odd, this feeling Burden had. His image of the kind of life he had expected Davina Flory to lead, the kind of person he would have thought she was, kept returning to him. This was how he would have envisaged her bedroom, beautifully appointed, cleaned and tidied daily, but subjected by its owner to a continuous untidying process. Not through wanton disregard of a servant's labours but because she simply did not know or notice, was indifferent to the neatness of her surroundings. It had not been so. An intruder had done this.

Why then did he find something incongruous about it? The jewel box, a red leather case, empty and upturned on the carpet, expressed the truth plainly enough.

Burden shook his head ruefully, for he would not have expected Davina Flory to have possessed jewels or a case to put them in.

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* * *

Five people in the Harrison's small front room turned it into a crowded place. John Gabbitas, the woodsman, had been fetched from next door. There were not enough chairs and an extra had to be brought from upstairs. Brenda Harrison had insisted on making tea, which no one had seemed to want, but of which, Wexford thought now, they all needed the relief and comfort.

She was cool about it. She had had, of course, some half-hour in which to adjust to the shock before he got there. Nevertheless, he found her briskness disconcerting. It might have been some minor disaster befalling her employers that Vine and Malahyde had told her about, a bit of the roof blowing off, for instance, or water through a ceiling. She bustled about with the teacups and a tin of biscuits while her husband sat stunned, his head occasionally moving from side to side as if in disbelief, his eyes staring.

Before running outside to boil a kettle and lay a tray -- she seemed a hyperactive restless woman -- she had confirmed his own identification. The dead man on the stairs was Harvey Copeland, the elder of the dead women at the table Davina Flory. The other woman she identified as certainly Davina Flory's daughter Naomi. In spite of the exalted status, in anyone's estimation, of her employers, it appeared that they were all on Christian name terms here, �>avina and Harvey and Naomi and Brenda. She even had to think for a moment before recalling

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Naomi's surname. Oh, yes, Jones, she was Mrs Jones, but the girl called herself Flory.

'The girl?"

'Daisy was Naomi's daughter and Davina's granddaughter. Her name was Davina too, she was sort of Davina Flory the younger, if you see what I mean, but they called her Daisy."

"Not 'was'," said Wexford. "She's not dead."

She lifted her shoulders a little. Her tone seemed to him indignant, perhaps only because she had been proved wrong. "Oh. I thought the policewoman said they all were."

It was after this that she made the tea.

He could already tell that of the three she was to be his principal informant. Her apparent callousness, an indifference that was almost repulsive, was of no particular account. Because of it, she might make the best witness. In any case, John Gabbitas, a man in his twenties, though living in one of the Tancred Wood houses and managing the woodland, worked for himself as well, as a woodsman and tree expert, and said he had only returned an hour before from a job on the other side of the county. Ken Harrison had scarcely uttered a word since Wexford and Vine arrived.

"When did you last see them?" Wexford asked.

She answered quickly. She was not the kind of woman to take thoughts. "Seven thirty. I always did, regular as clockwork. Unless she had a dinner party. When it was just them, the four of them, I'd cook whatever it was and dish it up and put in on the heated trolley and wheel

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it in the dining room. Naomi always served it, or so I presume. I was never there to see. Davina liked to be at the table by seven forty-five sharp, same every night when she was home. It was always the same."

"And it was the same tonight?"

"It was always the same. I wheeled the trolley in at seven thirty. It was soup and sole and apricots with yoghurt. I put my head round the sare door, they were all there ..."

"Round the what?"

"The sare. That's the name they had for it. The conservatory. I said I was off and I went out the back way like I always do."

"Did you lock the back door?"

"No, of course I didn't. I never do that. Besides, Bib was still there."

"She helps out. Comes up on her bike. She's got a morning job some mornings so she mostly comes here in the afternoons. I left her here, finishing off the freezer, and she said she'd be off in five minutes." A thought suddenly struck her. Her colour changed -- for the first time. "The cat," she said, "is the cat all right? Oh, they didn't kill the cat!"

"Not so far as I know," Wexford said. "Well, no, certainly not."

Before he could add, as he had begun to, suppressing a tone of irony, "Only the people", she exclaimed, "Thank God for that!" Wexford gave her a moment. "Around eight, did you hear anything? A car? Shots?" i He knew the shots would not have been heard

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from here. Not shots fired inside the house. She shook her head.

"A car wouldn't go past here. The road ends here. There's only the main road in and the byroad."

"The byroad?"

She answered him impatiently. She was one of those people who expect everyone to know, as well as they themselves do, the workings and rules and geography of their little private world. "It's the one comes up from Pomfret Monachorum, isn't it?"

Gabbitas said, "That's the way I came home."

"What time was that?"

"Twenty past eight, half past. I didn't see anyone, if that's what you're asking. I didn't meet a car or pass one or anything like that."

Wexford thought that came out rather too pat. Then Ken Harrison spoke. The words came slowly, as if he had suffered an injury to his throat and was still learning how to project his voice. "We didn't hear a thing. There wasn't a sound." He added, wonderingly -- and incomprehensibly -- "There never was." He explained. "You can never hear anything at the house from here."

The others seemed long to have registered and accepted what had happened. Mrs Harrison had adjusted to it almost at once. Her world had altered but she would contend with it. Her husband reacted as if the news had just that moment been broken to him, "All dead? Did you say they were all dead?"

It sounded to Wexford like something out of

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Macbeth, though he wasn't sure it was. A lot of tonight was like something out of Macbeth.

"The young girl. Miss Flory, Daisy, she's alive."

But, he thought, is she? Is she still alive? Then Harrison shocked him. He thought that was impossible but Harrison did it.

"Funny they didn't finish her off, wasn't it?"

Barry Vine coughed.

"Have another cup of tea, will you" said Brenda Harrison. "No, thank you. It's getting late and we'll be off. You'll want to get to bed."

"You've finished with us, then, have you?"

Perhaps it was a favourite word with him. Ken Harrison was looking with a kind of glazed wistfulness at Wexford.

"Finished? No, by no means. We shall want to talk to you all again. Perhaps you'll let me have Bib's address. What's her other name?"

No one seemed to know. They had the address but no surname. She was just Bib.

"Thanks for the tea," said Vine.

Wexford went back to the house by car. Sumner-Quist had gone. Archbold and Milsom were working away upstairs. Burden said to him, "I forgot to mention it but I had road blocks put on all the roads out of here when the message came through."

"What, before you knew what it was about?"

"Well, I knew it was in the nature of a -- a hnassacre. She said, 'They're all dead' when she made her 999 call. You think I over-reacted, do you?

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"No," said Wexford slowly, "no, not at all. I think you were right, insofar as it's possible to block all roads. I mean, there must be dozens of ways out."

"Not really. What they call the by-road goes to Pomfret Monachorum and Cheriton. The main drive goes directly to the B 2428 into town and there happened to be a squad car on that about half a mile along. In the other direction the road goes to Cambery Ashes, as you know. It was a piece of luck for us, or it looked that way. The pair in the squad car knew about it within three minutes of her call. But they didn't go that way, they must have gone by the by-road, and then there wasn't much of a chance. No description, no index number or approximation to it, no idea what to look for. We haven't now. I couldn't have asked her anything more, could I, Reg? I reckoned she was dying."

"Of course you couldn't. Of course not."

"I hope to God she doesn't die."

"So do I," said Wexford. "She's only seventeen."

"Well, naturally one hopes for her sake she'll live, but I was thinking of what she can tell us. Pretty well everything, don't you think?'

Wexford just looked at him.

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5

THE girl could tell them everything. Davina Jones called Daisy Flory could tell them when the men came and how they came, what they looked like, even perhaps what they wanted and took. She had seen them and perhaps spoken to them. She might have seen their car. Wexford thought it likely she was intelligent and hoped she was observant. He hoped very much she would live.

Entering his own house at midnight, he thought of phoning the hospital to check on her. What good would it do, his knowing whether she lived or died?

If they told him she was dead he wouldn't sleep, because she had been young and with all of her life before her. And for Burden's reason too, he had better be honest. Because if she was dead the case would be all that much harder. But if they told him she was all right, she was doing well, he would be too hyped up at the prospect of talking to her to sleep.

Anyway, they wouldn't tell him that, but either that she was dead or 'holding her own' or 'comfortable'. In any case WPG Rosemary Mountjoy was with her, would sit outside the ward door till morning and be relieved at eight by WPG Anne Lennox.

3 He went quietly upstairs to see if Dora was *tiU awake. The light from the open door fell,

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not on her face, but in a wide band across the arm that lay outside the covers, the sleeve of her nightdress, the rather small neat hand with round pink fingernails. Deep sleep held her and her breathing was steady and slow. She could sleep easily then, in spite of what had happened earlier that evening, in spite of Sheila and the fourth member of their party he was already calling 'that wretched man'. He felt unreasonably exasperated by her. Retreating he pulled the door to behind him, went down again and in the living room hunted through the paper rack for the Independent on Sunday of two days before.

The review section was still there, pushed between the Radio Times and some freebie magazine. It was the Win Carver interview he was looking for and the big portrait photograph he remembered as a double-page spread. Page eleven. He sat down in an armchair, found the page. The face was before him, the face he had seen an hour before in death when Sumner-Quist had lifted it from the table by a handful of hair like an executioner holding aloft a severed head.

The text began as a single column on the left-hand side. Wexford looked at the picture. The portrait was of a kind a woman would only tolerate seeing of herself if she had succeeded overwhelmingly in fields distant from the triumph of youth and beauty. These were not lines on the face but the deep scoring of time and the pleating of old age. From a bird's nest of wrinkles the nose stood out beak-like and the

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lips curved in a half-smile that was both ironic and kindly. The eyes were still young, dark, burning irises and clear unveined whites in the tangle of gathered folds.

The caption read: Davina Flory, the first volume of whose autobiography The Youngest Wren of Nine is published by St Giles Press at 16 pounds 00 pence He turned the page and there she was when young: a little girl in a velvet dress with lace collar, ten years later a grown-up girl with a swan neck, mysterious smile, shingled hair and one of those dresses with no waist and a belt round the hips.

The print swam before his eyes. Wexford gave a huge yawn. He was too tired to read the piece tonight and leaving the paper open on the table, he went back upstairs. The evening past seemed immensely long, a corridor of events with at the opening of the tunnel, distant but very much there, Sheila and that wretched man.

* * *

While the reader had recourse to a magazine, the non-reader went to a book for help.

Burden let himself into his house to the sound of his son yelling. By the time he was upstairs title noise had stopped and Mark was being comforted in his mother's arms. Burden could hear her telling him, in that rather didactic confident way of hers which was immediately reassuring, that diplodocus the two-ridged reptile toad not walked the earth for two million years

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and in any case had never been known to inhabit toy cupboards.

By the time she came into their bedroom Burden was in bed, sitting up with her birthday copy of The Youngest Wren of Nine resting against his knees.

She kissed him, went into a detailed description of Mark's dream, which for a little while distracted him from the biographical note he had been reading on the back flap of the book jacket. In that moment he decided to say nothing to her of what had happened. Not till the morning. She had deeply admired the dead woman, followed her travels and collected her works. Their pillow talk of the previous night had been about this book, Davina Flory's childhood and the early influences which helped to form the character of this distinguished anthropologist and 'geo-sociologist'.

"You can't have my book till I've finished it," she said sleepily, turning over and burying her head in the pillows. "Anyway, can't we have the light out?"

"Two minutes. Just to let me unwind. Good night, love."

Unlike many writers past a certain age, Davina Flory had had no reservations about her birth date appearing in print. She had been seventy-eight, born in Oxford, the youngest of the nine children of a professor of Greek. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, with later a Ph.D. from London, she had married in 1935 a fellow undergraduate at Oxford, Desmond Cathcart Flory. Together they had set about