Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (3 page)

Martin had been killed by a shot from a Colt Magnum .357 or .38 revolver. It was impossible to tell which, because although the cartridge was a .38, the .357 takes both .357 and .38

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cartridges. Sometimes Wexford worried about that gun and once he dreamed he was in the bank watching two revolvers skating round the marble floor while the bank customers stared like spectators at some arena event. Magnums on Ice.

He went to talk to Michelle Weaver himself. She was very obliging, always willing to talk, showing no signs of impatience. But five months had gone by and the memory of what she had seen that morning when Caleb Martin died was necessarily growing dim.

"I can't have seen him throw it down, can I? I mean, I must have imagined that. If he'd thrown it down it would have been there and it wasn't, only the one the policeman dropped."

"There was certainly only one gun when the police arrived." Wexford talked to her conversationally, as if they were equals ..in knowledge and sharers of inside information. She warmed to this, she grew confident and eager. "All that we found was the toy gun DS Martin took away from his son that morning. Not a copy, not a replica, a child's toy."

"And was that really a toy I saw?" She marvelled at it. "They make them look so real."

Another conversational interview, this time with Barbara Watkin, revealed not much more than her obstinacy. She was tenacious about her description of the boy's appearance.

"I know acne when I see it. My eldest son had terrible acne. That wasn't what the boy had. I told you, it was more like birthmarks."

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'The scars of acne, perhaps?" 'It wasn't anything like that. You have to picture those strawberry marks people have, only these were the purple kind, and all blotched, dozens of them."

Wexford asked Dr Crocker, and Crocker said no one had birthmarks of that description, so that was the end of that.

There was not much more to say, nothing left to ask. It was the end of February when he talked to Michelle Weaver and the beginning of March when Sharon Fraser came up with something she had remembered about one of the missing men among the bank customers. He had been holding a bunch of banknotes in his hand and they were green notes. There had been no green English banknotes since the pound note had been replaced by a coin several years before. She could remember nothing else about this man -- did it help?

Wexford couldn't say it did, much. But you don't discourage that kind of public-spiritedness.

Nothing much else happened until the 999 call came on 11 March.

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"� THEY'RE all dead." The voice was a woman's and young, very young. She said it again. "They're all dead," and then, "I'm going to bleed to death!"

The operator who had taken the call, though not new to the job, said afterwards she turned cold at those words. She had already uttered the formula of asking if the caller wanted police, the fire service or an ambulance.

"Where are you?" she said.

"Help me. I'm going to bleed to death."

"Tell me where you are, the address ..."

The voice started giving a phone number.

"The address, please ..."

"Tancred House, Cheriton. Help me, please help me . . . Make them come quickly ..."

The time was eight twenty-two.

* * *

The forest covers an area of something like sixty square miles. Much of it is coniferous, manmade woods of Scots pine and larch, Norway spruce and occasionally a towering Douglas fir. But to the south of this plantation a vestige of the ancient forest of Cheriton remains, one of seven which existed in the County of Sussex in the Middle Ages, the others being Arundel, St Leonard's, Worth, Ashdown, Waterdown and

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Dallington. Arundel excepted, they once all formed part of a single great forest of three-and a-half-thousand square miles which, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, stretched from Kent to Hampshire. Deer roamed it and in the depths, wild swine.

The small area of this which remains is woodland of oak, ash, horse chestnut and sweet chestnut, birch and the wayfarer's tree, which clothes the southern slopes and borders of a private estate. Here, where all was parkland until the early thirties, green turf on which grew Douglas firs, cedars and the rarer Wellingtonia, an occasional half-acre of mature woodland, a new forest was planted by the new owner. The roads up to the house, one of them no more than a narrow track, wind through the woods, in places between steep banks, in others through groves of rhododendron, past trees in the prime of life and here and there overshadowed by an ancient giant.

Sometimes fallow deer can be seen among the trees. Red squirrels have been sighted. The blackcock is a rarity, the Dartford warbler common, and hen harriers are winter visitors. In late spring, when the rhododendrons come out, the long vistas are rosy pink under a green mist of unfolding beech leaves. The nightingale sings. Earlier, in March,^the woods are dark, yet glowing with the coming life, and underfoot the ground is a rich ginger gold from beech mast. The beech trunks shine as if their bark were laced with silver. But at night there is darkness and silence,

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a deep quiet fills the woods, a forbidding hush.

The land is not fenced but there are gates in the boundary hedge. All are of red cedar and five-barred. Most give access only to paths, impassable except on foot, but the main gate closes off the woods from the road that turns northwards from the B 2428, linking Kingsmarkham with Cambery Ashes. There is a sign, a plain board attached to a post and bearing the words, tancred house. private

ROAD. PLEASE CLOSE THE GATE, which Stands tO

the left of it. The gate is required to be kept closed, though no key, code or device is needed to open it.

On that Tuesday evening, eight fifty-one on 11 March, the gate was shut. Detective Sergeant Vine got out of the first car and opened it, though he was senior to most of the officers in the two cars. He had come to Kingsmarkham to replace Martin. There were three vehicles in the convoy, the last being the ambulance. Vine let them all through and then he closed the gate once more. It was not possible to drive very fast but once they were inside, on this private land, Pemberton went as fast as he could.

Later they were to learn, using it daily, that this road was always known as the main drive.

It was jd^rk, sunset two hours past. The last streetlalnp was a hundred yards down the B 2428 before the gate. They relied on their headlights alone, lights which showed up the mist that drifted through the woods as streamers of greenish fog. If eyes looked out of the forest

KQD3

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the lights did not show them up. The tree trunks were colonnades of grey pillars, swathed in scarves of mist. In the depths between was impenetrable dark.

No one spoke. The last person to speak had been Barry Vine when he said he would get out and open the gate. Detective Inspector Burden said nothing. He was thinking about what they would find at Tancred House and telling himself not to anticipate, for speculation was useless. Pemberton had nothing to say and would not have considered it his place to initiate a conversation.

In the van behind were the driver, Gerry Hinde, a scene-of-crimes officer called Archbold with a photographer called Milsom, and a woman officer, Detective Constable Karen Malahyde. The paramedics in the ambulance were a woman and a man, and the woman was driving. A decision had been taken at an early stage to display no blue lamps and sound no sirens.

The convoy made no sound but for that produced by the engines of the three vehicles. It wound through the avenues of trees where the banks were high and where the road passed across sandy plateaux. Why the road should wind like this was a mystery, for the hillside was shallow and there were no features to avoid except perhaps the isolated giant trees, invisible in the dark.

The whim of a forest planter, thought Burden. He tried to remember if he had seen these woods in their younger days but he did not know the

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region well. Naturally, he knew who owned them now, everyone in Kingsmarkham knew that. He wondered if the message left for Wexford had reached him yet, if the Chief Inspector was even now on his way, in a car a mile or two behind them.

Vine was staring out of the window, pressing his nose against the glass, as if there was something to be seen out there besides darkness and mist and the verges ahead, yellowish and shining and wet-looking in the headlights. No eyes looked out from the depths, no twin points of green or gold, and there was no movement of bird or animal. Even the sky was not to be discerned here. The tree trunks stood separated like columns but their top branches seemed to form an unbroken ceiling.

Burden had heard there were cottages on the estate, houses to accommodate whatever staff Davina Flory kept. These would be near Tancred House, no more than five minutes' walk away, but they passed no gates, no paths leading into the woods, saw no distant lights, dim or bright, on either side. This was fifty miles from London but it might have been northern Canada, it might have been Siberia. The woods seemed endless, rank upon rank of trees, some of them forty feet in height, others half-grown but tall enough. As each bend was turned and you knew that round this corner must be an opening, must be a break, a sight of the house taust at last be granted, there were only more ttees, another platoon in this army of trees, still, Sfient, waiting.

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He leaned forward and said to Pemberton, his voice sounding loud in the silence, "How far have we come from the gate?"

Pemberton checked. "Two miles and three tenths, sir."

"It's a hell of a way, isn't it?"

"Three miles according to the map," said Vine. He had a whitish squash mark on his nose where it had pressed against the window.

"It seems to be taking hours," Burden was grumbling like this, peering out at the endless groves, the infinite reaches of cathedral-like columns, when the house came into view, rearing suddenly into sight with an effect of shock. The woods parted, as if a curtain was drawn aside, and there it was, brilliantly lit as for some stage-set, bathed in a flood of artificial moonlight, greenish and cold. It was strangely dramatic. The house gleamed, shimmered in a bay of light, thrown into relief against a misty dark well. The fagade itself was punctured with lights, but orange-coloured, the squares and rectangles of lighted windows.

Burden had not expected light, but dark desolation. This scene before him was like the opening shot of a film about characters in a fairy story living in a remote palace, a film about the Sleeping Beauty. There should have been music, a soft but sinister melody, with horns and drums. The silence made you feel an essential was missing, something had gone disastrously wrong. The sound was lost without fusing the lights. He saw the woods

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close in again as the road wound into another loop. Impatience seized him. He wanted to get out and run to the house, break in there to find the worst, what the worst was, and he kept his seat petulantly.

That first glimpse had been a brief foretaste, a trailer. This time the woods fell away for good, the headlights showed the road crossing a grassy plain on which a few great trees stood. The occupants of the cars felt very exposed as they began to cross this plain, as if they were the outriders of an invading force with an ambush ahead of them. The house on the other side of it was now illuminated with absolute clarity, a fine country manor that looked Georgian but for its pitched roof and candlestick chimneys. It looked very large and grand and also menacing.

A low wall divided its immediate surroundings from the rest of the estate. This ran at right angles to the road they were on, bisecting the treeless open land. A left-hand turn branched off just before the gap in the wall. It was possible to go straight on, or turn left on this road which looked as if it would take you to the side and back of the house. The wall itself concealed the floodlights.

"Go straight ahead," said Burden.

They passed through the gap, between stone posts with ogee tops. Here the flagstones began, a vast space paved in Portland stone. The stone was golden-grey, pleasingly uneven, too close-set f�r even moss to spring between. Plumb in the centre of this courtyard was a large circular pool, l*>ped in stone, and standing in the midst of

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it, on a stone island laden with flowers and broad-leaved plants in varied marbles, green and pinkish and bronze-grey, a group of statuary, a man, a tree, a girl in grey marble, that might or might not have been a fountain. If it was, it was not at present playing. The water lay stagnant, unruffled.

Shaped like an E without the central crosspiece, or like a rectangle missing one long side, the house stood unadorned beyond this great plain of stone. Not a creeper softened its smooth plasterwork or shrub grew nearby to compromise its bands of rusticated stone. The arc lamps on this side of the wall showed up every fine line and every tiny pit on its surface.

The lights were on everywhere, in the two side wings, in the central range and the gallery above. They glowed behind drawn curtains, pink or orange or green according to the colours of the curtains, and they shone too out of uncurtained panes. Light from the arc lamps competed with these softer glowing colours but was not able entirely to quell them. Everything was quite motionless, windless, giving the impression that not only the air but time itself had been stilled.

Though, as Burden asked himself afterwards, what was there that could have moved? If a gale-force wind had been blowing there was nothing here for it to move. Even the trees were behind them now, and thousands more beyond the house, lost in that cavern of darkness.

The convoy drove up to the front door,

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passing to the left of the pool and the statuary. Burden and Vine threw open their doors and Vine made it first to the front door. This was approached by two wide, shallow stone steps. If there had ever been a porch it was gone now, and all that remained on either side of the door were a couple of unfluted recessed columns. The front door itself was gleaming white, shining in this light as if the paint on it was still wet. The bell was the kind you pull, a sugarstick rod of wrought iron. Vine pulled it. The sound it made when he tugged at the spiral rod must have clanged through the house, for it was clearly audible to the paramedics, getting out of their ambulance twenty yards away.