Put on by Cunning (3 page)

Even as he decided this he did the very opposite. He followed the track she had made down the slope to the lake, calling her, irritably now, as he went.

The marks Ted had made when he broke the ice at the water’s edge were already obliterated by snow, while Nancy’s fresh tracks were fast becoming covered. Only the stacked ice showed where Ted had been. The area he had cleared was again iced over with a thin grey crust. The lake was a sombre sheet of ice with a faint sheen on it that the clouded moon made, and the willows, which by daylight looked like so many crouched spiders or daddy-long-legs, were laden with snow that clung to them and changed their shape. Camargue called the dog again. Only last week she had done this to him and then had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and come skittering across the ice towards him.

He began breaking the new ice with his stick. Then he heard the dog behind him, a faint crunching on the snow. But when he turned round, ready to seize her collar in the hook of the walking-stick, there was no dog there, there was nothing there but the gnome conifers and the light shining down on the white sheet of the circular courtyard. He would break up the rest of the thin ice, clear an area a yard long and a foot wide as Ted had done, and then he would go back into the house and wait for Nancy indoors.

Again the foot crunched behind him, the tree walked. He stood up and turned and, raising his stick as if to defined himself, looked into the face of the tree that moved.

The music met Chief Inspector Wexford as he let himself into his house. A flute playing with an orchestra. This was one of Sheila’s dramatic gestures, he supposed, contrived to time with his homecoming. It was beautiful music, slow, measured, secular, yet with a religious sound.

His wife was knitting, on her face the amused, dry, very slightly exasperated expression it often wore while Sheila was around. And Sheila would be very much around for the next three weeks, having unaccountably decided to be married from home, in hr own parish church, and to establish the proper period of residence beforehand in her father’s house. She sat on the floor, between the log fire and the record player, her cheek resting on one round white arm that trailed with grace upon a sofa cushion, her pale gold water-straight hair half covering her face. When she lifted her head and shook her hair back he saw that she had been crying.

‘Oh, Pop, darling, isn’t it sad? They’ve had this tremendous obituary programme for him on the box. Even Mother shed a tear. And then we thought we’d mourn him with his own music.’

Wexford doubted very much if Dora, a placid and eminently sensible woman, had expressed these extravagant sentiments. He picked up the record sleeve. Mozart, Concerto for Flute and Harp, K 229; the English Chamber Orchestra, conductor, Raymond Leppard; flute, Manuel Camargue; harp, Marisa Roblès.

‘We actually heard him once,’ said Dora. ‘Do you remember? At the Wigmore Hall it was, all of thirty years ago.’

‘Yes.’

But he could scarcely remember. The pictured face on the sleeve, too sensitive, too mobile to be handsome, the eyes alight with a kind of joyous humour, evoked no image from the past. The movement came to an end and now the music became bright, liquid, a singable tune, and Camargue, who was dead, alive again in his flute. Sheila wiped her eyes and got up to kiss her father. It was all of eight years since he and she had lived under the same roof. She had become a swan since then, a famous lady, a tele-face. But she still kissed him when he came and went, putting her arms around his neck like a nervous child. Wryly, he liked it.

He sat down, listening to the last movement while Dora finished her row in the fair Isle and went to get his supper. Andrew’s regular evening phone call prevented Sheila from getting full dramatic value out of her memorial to Camargue, and by the time she came back into the room the record was over and her father was eating his steak-and-kidney pie.

‘You didn’t actually know him, did you, Sheila?’

She thought he was reproaching her for her tears. ‘I’m sorry, Pop, I cry so easily. It’s a matter of having to learn how, you know, and then not being able to unlearn.’

He grinned at her. ‘Thus on the fatal bank of Nile weeps the deceitful crocodile? I didn’t mean that, anyway. Let me put it more directly. Did you know him personally?’

She shook her head. ‘I think he recognized me in church. He must have known I come from round here.’ It was nothing that she should be recognized. She was recognized wherever she went. For five years the serial in which she played the most beautiful of the air hostesses had been on television twice a week at a peak-viewing time. Everybody watched
Runway
, even though a good many said shamefacedly that they ‘only saw the tail-end before the news’ or ‘the kids have it on’. Stewardess Curtis was famous for her smile. Sheila smiled it now, her head tilted reflectively. ‘I know his wife-that-was-to-be personally,’ she said. ‘Or I used to. We were at school together.’

‘A young girl?’

‘Thank you kindly, father dear. Let’s say young to be marrying Sir Manuel. Mid-twenties. She brought him to see me in
The Letter
last autumn but I didn’t talk to them, he was too tired to come round afterwards.’

It was Dora who brought them back from gossip to grandeur. ‘In his day he was said to be the world’s greatest flautist. I remember when he founded that school at Wellridge and Princess Margaret came down to open it.’

‘D’you know what its pupils call it? Windyridge.’ Sheila mimed the blowing of a woodwind, fingers dancing. Then, suddenly, the tears had started once more to her eyes. ‘Oh, to die like that!’

Who’s Who
is not a volume to be found in many private houses. Wexford had a copy because Sheila was in it. He took it down from the shelf, turned to the C’s and read aloud:

‘Camargue, Sir Manuel, Knight. Companion of Honour, Order of the British Empire, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. British flute player. Born Pamplona, Spain, 3 June, 1902, son of Aristide Camargue and Ana Parral. Educated privately with father, then at Barcelona Conservatoire. Studied under Louis Fleury.

‘Professor of Flute, Madrid Conseratoire, 1924 to 1932. Fought on Republican side Spanish Civil War, escaped to England 1938. Married 1942 Kathleen Lister. One daughter. Naturalized British subject 1946. Concert flautist, has toured Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Founded 1964 at Wellridge, Sussex, the Kathleen Camargue School of Music in memory of his wife, and in 1968 the Kathleen Camargue Youth Orchestra. Recreations apart from music: walking, reading, dogs. Address: Sterries, Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham, Sussex.’

‘They say it’s a dream of a house,’ said Sheila. ‘I wonder if she’ll sell, that one daughter? Because if she does Andrew and I might really consider . . . Wouldn’t you like me living just up the road, Pop?’

‘He may have left it to your friend,’ said Wexford.

‘So he may. Well, I do hope so. Poor Dinah, losing her first husband that she
adored
and then her second that never was. She deserves some compensation. I shall write her a letter of sympathy. No, I won’t. I’ll go and see her. I’ll phone her first thing in the morning and I’ll . . .’

‘I’d leave it a day or two if I were you,’ said her father. ‘First thing in the morning is going to be the inquest.’

‘
Inquest?
’ Sheila uttered the word in the loaded, aghast tone of Lady Bracknell. ‘Inquest? But surely he died a perfectly natural death?’

Dora, conjuring intricately with three different shades of wool, looked up from her pattern. ‘Of course he didn’t. Drowning, or whatever happened to him, freezing to death, you can’t call that natural.’

‘I mean, he didn’t do it on purpose and no one did it to him.’

It was impossible for Wexford to keep from laughing at these ingenuous definitions of suicide and homicide. ‘In most cases of sudden death,’ he said, ‘and in all cases of violent death there must be an inquest. It goes without saying the verdict is going to be that it was an accident.’

Misadventure.

This verdict, which can sound so grotesque when applied to the death of a baby in a cot or a patient under anaesthetic, appropriately described Camargue’s fate. An old man, ankle-deep in snow, had lost his foothold in the dark, slipping over, sliding into water to be trapped under a lid of ice. If he had not drowned he would within minutes have been dead from hypothermia. The snow had continued to fall, obliterating his footprints. And the frost, ten degrees of it, had silently sealed up the space into which the body had slipped. Only a glove – it was of thick black leather and it had fallen from his left hand – remained to point to where he lay, one curled finger rising up out of the drifts. Misadventure.

Wexford attended the inquest for no better reason than to keep warm, the police station central heating having unaccountably broken down the night before. The venue of the inquest (Kingsmarkham Magistrates’ Court, Court Two, Upstairs) enjoyed a reputation for being kept in winter at a temperature of eighty degrees. To this it lived up. Having left his rubber boots just inside the door downstairs, he sat at the back of the court, basking in warmth, surreptitiously peeling off various disreputable layers, a khaki green plastic mac of muddy translucency, an aged black-and-grey herringbone-tweed overcoat, a stole-sized scarf of matted fawnish wool.

Apart from the
Kingsmarkham Courier
girl in one of the press seats, there were only two women present, and these two sat so far apart as to give the impression of choosing each to ostracize the other. One would be the daughter, he supposed, one the bride. Both were dressed darkly, shabbily and without distinction. But the woman in the front row had the eyes and profile of a Callas, her glossy black hair piled in the fashion of a Floating World geisha, while the other, seated a yard or two from him, was a little mouse, headscarfed, huddled, hands folded. Neither, as far as he could see, bore the remotest resemblance to the face on the record sleeve with its awareness and its spirituality. But when, as the verdict came, the geisha woman turned her head and her eyes, dark and brilliant, for a moment met his, he saw that she was far older than Sheila, perhaps ten years older. This, then, must be the daughter. And as the conviction came to him, the coroner turned his gaze upon her and said he would like to express his sympathy with Sir Manuel’s daughter in her loss and a grief which was no less a personal one because it was shared by the tens of thousands who had loved, admired and been inspired by his music. He did not think he would be exceeding his duty were he to quote Samuel Johnson and say that it matters not how a man dies but how he has lived.

Presumably no one had told him of the dead man’s intended re-marriage. The little mouse got up and crept away. Now it was all over, the beauty with the black eyes got up too – to be enclosed immediately in a circle of men. This of course was chance, Wexford told himself, they were the escort who had brought her, her father’s doctor, his servant, a friend or two. Yet he felt inescapably that this woman would always wherever she was be in a circle of men, watched, admired, desired. He got back into his coverings and ventured out into the bitter cold of Kingsmarkham High Street.

Here the old snow lay heaped at the pavement edges in long, low mountain ranges and the new snow, gritty and sparkling, dusted it with fresh whiteness. A yellowish-leaden sky looked full of snow. It was only a step from the court to the police station, but a long enough step in this weather to get chilled to the bone.

On the forecourt, between a panda car and the chief constable’s Rover, the heating engineer’s van was still parked. Wexford went tentatively through the swing doors. Inside it was as cold as ever and Sergeant Camb, sitting behind his counter, warmed mittened hands on a mug of steaming tea. Burden, Wexford reflected, if he had any sense, would have taken himself off somewhere warm for lunch. Very likely to the Carousel Café, or what used to be the Carousel before it was taken over by Mr Haq and became the Pearl of Africa.

This was a title or sobriquet given (according to Mr Haq) to Uganda, his native land. Mr Haq claimed to serve authentic Ugandan cuisine, what he called ‘real’ Ugandan food, but since no one knew what this was, whether he meant food consumed by the tribes before colonization or food introduced by Asian immigrants or food eaten today by westernized Ugandans, or what these would be anyway, it was difficult to query any dish. Fried potatoes and rice accompanied almost everything, but for all Wexford knew this might be a feature of Ugandan cooking. He rather liked the place, it fascinated him, especially the plastic jungle vegetation.

Today this hung and trembled in the steamy heat and seemed to sweat droplets on its leathery leaves. The windows had become opaque, entirely misted over with condensation. It was like a tropical oasis in the Arctic. Inspector Burden sat at a table eating Nubian chicken with rice Ruwenzori, anxiously keeping in view his new sheepskin jacket, a Christmas present from his wife, which Mr Haq had hung up on the palm tree hatstand. He remarked darkly as Wexford walked in that anyone might make off with it, you never could tell these days.

‘Round here they might cook it,’ said Wexford. He also ordered the chicken with the request that for once potatoes might not come with it. ‘I’ve just come from the inquest on Camargue.’

‘What on earth did you go to that for?’

‘I hadn’t anything much else on. I reckoned it would be warm too and it was.’

‘All right for some,’ Burden grumbled. ‘I could have found a job for you.’ Since their friendship had deepened, some of his old deference to his chief, though none of his respect, had departed. ‘Thieving and break-ins, we’ve never had so much of it. That kid old Atkinson let out on bail, he’s done three more jobs in the meantime. And he’s not seventeen yet, a real little villain.’ Sarcasm made his tone withering. ‘Or that’s what I call him. The psychiatrist say she’s a pathological kleptomaniac with personality-scarring caused by traumata broadly classifiable as paranoid.’ He snorted, was silent, then said on an altered note, ‘Look, do you think you were wise to do that?’