Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (4 page)

He pulled at the bell a third time and then he banged the brass knocker. The door furniture gleamed like gold in the bright light. Remembering the voice on the phone, the woman who had cried for help, they listened for a sound. There was nothing. Not a whimper, not a whisper. Silence. Burden banged the knocker and flapped the letter-box. Nobody thought of a back door, of what numerous rear doors there might be. No one considered that one might be open.

"We're going to have to break in," Burden said.

Where? Four broad windows flanked the front door, two on each side of it. Inside could be seen a kind of outer hall, an orangery with bay trees fnd lilies in tubs on the mottled white marble floor. The lily leaves glistened under the light From two chandeliers. What was beyond, behind

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an arch, could not be seen. It looked warm and still in there, it looked civilised, a well-appointed gentle place, the home of rich people fond of luxury. In the orangery, against the wall, was a mahogany and gilt console table with a chair placed negligently beside it, a spindly chair with a red velvet seat. From a Chinese jar on the table spilled out the long tendrils of a trailing plant.

Burden turned away from the front door and began to walk across the stone-flagged plain of this vast courtyard. The light was like moonlight much magnified, as if the moon had doubled or reflected itself in some celestial mirror. Afterwards, he said to Wexford that the light made it worse. Darkness would have been natural, he could have handled darkness more comfortably.

He approached the west wing where the window at the end, a shallow bow, had its base only a foot above the ground. The lights were on inside, reduced, from where he was, to a soft green glow. The curtains were drawn, their pale lining towards the glass, but he guessed that on the other side they must be of green velvet. Later he was to wonder what instinct had led him to this window, to reject those nearer and come to this one.

A premonition had come to him that this was it. In there was what there was to see, to find. He tried to look through the knife-blade sliver of bright light that was the gap between the edges of those curtains. He could see nothing but a dazzlement. The others were behind him, silent but close behind him. To Pemberton he

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said, "Break the window."

Pemberton, cool and calm, prepared for this, broke the glass in one of the largish rectangular panes with a car spanner. He broke one of the flat panes in the centre of the window, put his hand through the space, lifted the curtain aside, unlocked the lower sash and raised it. Ducking under the bar, Burden went in first, then Vine. Heavy thick material enveloped them and they pushed it away from their faces, drawing the curtain back with a swish, its rings making a gentle clicking sound along the pole.

They stood a few feet into the room, on thick carpet, and saw what they had come to see. From Vine came a strong indrawing of breath. No one else made a sound. Pemberton came through the window and Karen Malahyde with him. Burden stepped aside to allow them space, aside but not for the moment forward. He did not exclaim. He looked. Fifteen seconds passed while he looked. His eyes met Vine's blank stare, he even turned his head and noted, as if on another plane somewhere, that the curtains were indeed of green velvet. Then he looked again at the dining table.

It was a large table, some nine feet long, laid with a cloth and with glass and silver; there was food on it, and the tablecloth was red. It looked as if it was meant to be red, the material scarlet damask, except that the area nearest the window was white. The tide of red had not reached so far.

� Across the deepest scarlet part someone lay lumped forward, a woman who had been sitting

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or standing at the table. Opposite, flung back in a chair, another woman's body was slung, the head hanging and the long dark hair streaming, her dress as red as that tablecloth, as if it had been worn to match.

These two women had been sitting facing one another across the precise middle of the table. From the plates and the place settings, it was apparent someone else had sat at the head and someone else at the foot, but no one was there now, dead or alive. Just the two bodies and the scarlet spread between them.

There was no question but that the two women were dead. The elder, she whose blood had dyed the cloth red, had a bullet wound in the side of her head. You could see that without touching her, and no one touched her. Half her head and the side of her face were destroyed.

The other had been shot in the neck. Her face, curiously undamaged, was as white as wax. Her eyes were wide open, fixed on the ceiling where a sprinkling of dark spots might have been bloodstains. Blood had splashed the dark-green papered walls, the green and gold lampshades in which the bulbs remained alight, had stained the dark-green carpet in black blotches. A drop of blood had struck a picture on the wall, trickled down the pale thick oil-paint and dried there.

On the table were three plates with food on them. On two of them the food remained there, cold and congealing, but recognisably food. The third was drenched with blood, as if sauce had been poured liberally over it, as if a bottle of

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sauce had been emptied on to it for some horror meal.

There was doubtless a fourth plate. The woman whose body had fallen forward, whose blood had fountained and seeped everywhere, had plunged her mutilated head into it, her dark hair, grey-streaked, had been loosened from a knot on her nape and spread out among dining litter, a saltcellar, an overturned glass, a crumpled napkin. Another napkin, soaked in blood, lay on the carpet.

A trolley with food on it was drawn up close to where the younger woman was, she whose hair streamed over the back of her chair. Her blood had splashed the white cloths on it and the white dishes, and sprayed across a basket of bread. The drops of blood sprinkled the slices of French bread in speckles like currants. There was some sort of pudding in a large glass dish but Burden, who had looked at everything without his gorge rising, could not look at what the blood had done to that.

It was a long time, an age, since he had felt actual physical nausea at such sights. On the other hand, had he ever before seen such a sight as this? He felt a blankness, a sensation of being stricken dumb, of all words being useless. And although the house was warm, of sudden bitter eold. He took the fingers of his left hand in the fingers of his right and felt their iciness.

He imagined the noise there must have been, the huge noise of a gun barrel emptying itself *- a shotgun, a rifle, something more powerful? iTie noise roaring through the silence, the peace,

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the warmth. And those people sitting there, talking, halfway through their meal, disturbed in this terrible untimely way . . . But there had been four people. One on either side and one at the head and one at the foot. He turned and exchanged another blank glance with Barry Vine. Each was aware that the look he gave the other was of despair, of sickness. They were dazed by what they saw.

Burden found himself moving stiffly. It was as if he had lead weights on his feet and hands. The dining-room door was open and he passed slowly through it into the house, a constriction in his throat. Afterwards, several hours later, he reminded himself that then, during those minutes, he had forgotten about the woman who had phoned. The sight of the dead had made him forget the living, the possibly still living . . .

He found himself not in the orangery but in a majestic hall, a large room, whose ceiling, lanterned high up in the centre of the roof of the house, was also lit by a number of lamps, but less brightly. There were lamps with silver bases and lamps with glass and ceramic bases, their shades in colours of apricot and a deep ivory. The floor was of polished wood, scattered with rugs that Burden perceived as Oriental, rugs patterned in lilac and red and brown and gold. A staircase ascended out of this hall, branching into two at first-floor level where the double set of stairs mounted out of a gallery, balustered with Ionic columns. At the foot of the staircase, spreadeagled across the lowest treads, lay the body of a man.

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He too had been shot. In the chest. The stair carpet was red and his shed blood showed like dark wine-stains. Burden breathed in and, finding that he had put up his hand to cover his mouth, resolutely brought it down again. He looked round him with a slow deliberate gaze and then he saw a movement in the far corner.

The jangling crashing sound that came suddenly had the effect of unlocking his voice. This time he did exclaim.

"My God!" His voice struggled out as if someone held a hand across his throat.

It was a telephone which had fallen on to the floor, had been pulled to the floor by some sudden involuntary movement which jerked its lead. Something was crawling towards him out of the darkest part, where there was no lamp. It made a moaning sound. The phone lead was caught round it and the phone dragged behind, bouncing and sliding on polished oak. It bounced and jiggled like a toy on a string pulled by a child.

She was not a child, though she revealed herself as not much more, a young girl who crept towards him on all fours and collapsed at his feet, making the bewildered gibbering moans of a wounded animal. There was blood all over her, matting her long hair, sodden in her clothes, streaking her bare arms. She lifted her face and it was blotched with blood, as if she had dabbled in it and finger-painted the skin.

He could see, to his horror, blood welling

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out of a wound in her upper chest on the left side. He fell on his knees in front of her.

She spoke. It came in a clotted whisper. "Help me, help me . . .

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4

WITHIN two minutes the ambulance was off, on its way to the infirmary at Stowerton. This time its lamp was on, and its siren, blaring its two-tone shriek through the dark woods, the still groves.

It was going so fast that the driver had to brake for dear life and pull over sharply to avoid Wexford's car which entered the main gateway from the B 2428 at five minutes past nine.

The message had reached him where he was dining with his wife, his daughter and her friend. This was at a new Italian restaurant in Kingsmarkham called La Primavera. They were halfway through their main course when his phone started bleeping and saved him in a peculiarly drastic way, as he thought afterwards, from doing something he might be sorry for. With a quick word to Dora and a rather perfunctory goodbye to the others, he left the restaurant immediately, abandoning his veal Marsala uneaten.

Three times he had tried calling Tancred House and each time got the engaged signal. As the car, driven by Donaldson, negotiated the first bend in the narrow woodland road, he tried again and this time it rang and Burden answered.

"The receiver was off. It fell on the floor. There are three people dead here, shot dead.

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You must have passed the ambulance with the girl in it."

"How bad is she?"

"I don't know. She was conscious, but she's pretty bad." t

"Did you talk to her?"

Burden said, "Of course. I had to. There were two of them got into the house but she only saw one. She said it was eight when it happened, or just after, a minute or two after eight. She couldn't talk any more."

Wexford put the phone back in his pocket. The clock on the car's dashboard told him it was twelve minutes past nine. When the message came he had been not so much in a bad temper as disturbed and increasingly unhappy. Already, sitting at that table in La Primavera, he had begun struggling with these feelings of antipathy, of positive revulsion. And then as he checked, for the third or fourth time, the sharp comment which rose to his lips, controlling himself for Sheila's sake, his phone had rung. Now he pushed aside the memory of a painful meeting. There would be no time for dwelling on it; everything must now give place to the killing at Tancred House.

The illuminated house showed through the trees, was swallowed in darkness, reappeared as Donaldson drove up the drive and across a wide empty plain. He hesitated at the gap in the low wall, then accelerated and went ahead, swinging on to the forecourt. A statue that probably represented the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo was reflected in the dark waters of a

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shallow pool. Donaldson drove to the left of it and in among the cars.

The front door stood open. He saw that someone had broken one of the panes in a bow window on the left-hand or west wing of the house. Inside the front door, from an orangery full of lilies, a pillared screen at each end of it in what he thought was called the Adam style, an arch opened on to the big hall where there was blood on the floor and the rugs. Blood made a map of islands on the pale oak. As Barry Vine came out to him, he saw the man's body at the foot of the staircase.

Wexford approached the body and looked at it. It was a man of about sixty, tall, slim, with a handsome face, the features finely cut and of the kind usually called sensitive. His face was now waxen and yellowish. The mouth hung open. The blue eyes were open and staring. Blood had dyed scarlet his white shirt and stained blacker his dark jacket. He had been formally dressed in a suit and tie, had been shot twice from the front at close range, in the chest and in the head. His head was a mess of blood, a brownish stickiness matting the thick white hair.

"Do you know who this is?"

Vine shook his head. "Should I, sir? Presumably the guy who owned the place."

"It's Harvey Copeland, former MP for the Southern Boroughs and husband of Davina Flory. Of course you haven't been here long, but you'll have heard of Davina Flory?"

"Yes, sir. Of course."

You could never tell with Vine, whether he

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had or not. That deadpan face, that unruffled manner, stolid calm.

He went into the dining room, preparing himself, but just the same what he saw made him catch his breath. No one, ever, becomes entirely hardened. He would never reach a stage of looking at such scenes with indifference.