Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (48 page)

"Chief Peacock told me something else. Two years ago two students at Stylus were shot on campus, both men and with one thing in common. They had, successively, 'dated' the same girl. Their killer was never found.'

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* * *

The bicycle was resting up against the house wall.

'Interior Creators' were inside the house, restoring the dining room. Their van was parked close up against the window Pemberton had broken. Today the fountain was not playing. In the limpid dark water the surviving red-headed fish swam round and round.

The three policemen stood by the pool. "The second time I went to his house," Wexford said, "I saw the tools among a lot of other stuff on a table. I didn't know what they were. I think I even saw a gun barrel, but who knows what a gun barrel is when it's not in a gun?"

Burden said suddenly, "Why didn't he marry her?"

"What?" Before the shootings, I mean. If she'd

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changed her mind about him he'd have got nothing. She'd only to say she didn't want him any more after what he'd done and he'd be out in the cold."

She was under eighteen," Wexford said. She'd have needed parental consent. Can you imagine Davina allowing Naomi to consent? Apart from that, you're an anachronism, Mike, you're out of your time. They're children of today and I daresay marriage didn't occur to them. Marriage? That was for the old people and the Virsons of this world.

"Besides, it sets you apart, this kind of thing, a massacre. Maybe they understood something, that they were marked, that no one else would do for them, they had only each other."

He went up to the house and was about to pull the sugarstick rod when he saw that the door was slightly ajar, left that way no doubt by 'Interior Creators'. He hesitated, then walked in, Burden and Vine behind him.

They were in the serre, the two of them, so intent upon what they were doing that for a second they heard nothing. The two dark heads were close together. On the glass table were a pearl necklace, a gold bracelet and a couple of rings, one a ruby with diamond shoulders, the other set with pearls and sapphires.

Daisy was looking at her own finger, the third finger of her left hand on which Thanny Hogarth had perhaps just placed his engagement ring, a great cluster of diamonds, nineteen thousand pounds' worth of diamonds.

She turned round. She stood up when she saw

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who it was and, with an involuntary gesture of the diamonded hand, swept all the jewellery on to the floor.

THE END

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