Some Lie and Some Die (13 page)

Tate said nothing. He went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

‘Poor little man! Never mind, we’ll take him out to dinner
tomorrow at that lovely place in Pomfret. Kiss, Nello? That’s right. No hard feelings because I like playing tricks on your old man? How is your coffee, Chief Inspector?’

‘Well, it
is
coffee, Mr Vedast. Apparently one runs a risk drinking in your establishment.’

‘I wouldn’t dare doctor your coffee. I’ve a great respect for the law.’

‘Good,’ said Wexford drily. ‘I hope you’ve enough respect to tell me what was your relationship with Dawn Stonor.’

For a moment Vedast was silent but he didn’t seem disturbed. He was waiting while Nell poured cream into his cup and then added four lumps of sugar.

‘Thank you, Nello darling. Now you run away and paint something. Your poor eye, for instance.’

‘Do I have to?’ said Nell like a child who has been told she must go to the dentist.

‘Of course you do when Zeno says so. The quicker you go the sooner it will all be over. Run along.’

She ran along. She wasn’t a child but a grown woman, shivering with cold and with a black eye. Vedast smiled indulgently. He walked to the bathroom door and paused, listening to Tate running taps and brushing his teeth. Then he came back, kicking shut the door of the drinks cabinet as he passed it, and stretched himself out full-length on the pink velvet sofa.

‘You wanted to ask me about Dawnie,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve been talking to Mummy Stonor or even Granny Peckham?’

‘They say you were at school with Dawn.’

‘So I was. So were ever such a lot of other people. Why pick on me?’

‘Mr Vedast,’ said Wexford heavily, ‘Dawn told her flatmate that you and she had remained friends since you left school, and she told her grandmother that you took her out to dinner on the Friday before she died. We know that can’t
have been true since you were in Manchester that day, but we’d like to know how well you knew Dawn and when you last saw her.’

Vedast took a lump of sugar and sucked it. He seemed completely relaxed, one leg casually crossed over the other. Still in their raincoats, Wexford and Burden were not even comfortably warm, but Vedast, almost naked, showed no sign of being affected by the cold damp wind. The golden hairs on his chest lay flat under the light gold chain which hung against them.

‘When we both lived here,’ he said, ‘she was my girl friend.’

‘You mean you were lovers?’

Vedast nodded, smiling pleasantly. ‘I was her first lover. We were sixteen. Rather moving, don’t you think? Martin Silk discovered me and all sorts of exciting things happened to me which wouldn’t interest you at all. Dawnie and I lost touch. I didn’t see her again till this year.’

‘Where did you see her?’

‘In the Townsman Club,’ said Vedast promptly. ‘Nello and Goffo and I went there as guests of a friend of mine, and there was Dawnie serving drinks. My poor little Dawnie in a yellow satin corset and tights! I nearly laughed but that would have been unkind. She came and sat down at our table and we had a long chat about old times. She even remembered what I like to drink, orange juice with sugar in it.’

‘Did you communicate with her after that?’

‘Just once.’ Vedast spoke very lightly, very easily, his fingers playing with the gold chain. ‘Nello and Goffo had gone away to see Goffo’s mum and I was rather lonely, all on my own and sad, you know.’ He smiled, the unspoilt star, the poor little rich boy. ‘Dawnie had written down her phone number for me at the club. Nello didn’t like that a bit, you can imagine. I thought, why not give Dawnie a ring?’

‘And did you?’

‘Of course I did.’ Now Vedast’s smile was apologetic, a
little rueful, the smile of the unspoilt star who longs for the companions of his humbler days to treat him as the simple country boy he really is at heart. ‘But it’s very off-putting, isn’t it, when people sort of swamp you? D’you know what I mean? When they’re terribly enthusiastic, sort of fawning?’

‘You mean you got bored?’ said Burden bluntly.

‘It sounds unkind, put that way. Let’s say I thought it better not to revive something which was dead and gone. Sorry, that wasn’t very tactful. What I mean is I choked Dawnie off. I said it would be lovely if we could meet again sometime, but I was so busy at present.’

‘When did this telephone conversation take place, Mr Vedast?’

‘Three or four weeks ago. It was just a little chat, leading to nothing. Fancy Dawnie telling Granny Peckham we’d met! Nello and Goffo could tell you when it was they went away.’ He fixed his cat’s eyes, yellowish, narrow, on Wexford, opening them very wide suddenly, and again they had a sharp sly glint. ‘And they’ll tell you where I was on June sixth. I know that’ll be the next thing you’ll ask.’

‘Where were you, Mr Vedast?’

‘At my house in Duvette Gardens, South Kensington. Nello and Goffo and I were all there. We came back from Manchester during the Sunday night and just lazed about and slept all that Monday. Here’s Goffo, all clean and purified. He’ll tell you.’

Godfrey Tate had emerged from the bathroom, blank-faced, contained, wary, but showing no grudge against Vedast for the humiliating trick to which the singer had subjected him.

‘Who’s taking my name in vain?’ he said with an almost pathetically unsuccessful attempt at jocularity.

‘Tell the officers where I was on June sixth, Goffo.’

‘With me and Nell.’ He responded so promptly, so glibly, that it was evident the stating of this alibi had been rehearsed.
‘We were all together in Duvette Gardens all day and all night. Nell can tell you the same. Nell!’

Wexford was sure she had been listening behind the door, for she exclaimed when her husband opened it as if she had been knocked backwards.

‘Of course we were all there,’ she said. She had covered herself with a long coat but she was still cold and she moved towards the window as if to close it. When Vedast, still smiling, shook his head, she sat down obediently, huddled in the coat, and at a glance from him, said, ‘We didn’t go out all day. We were exhausted after Manchester.’ One hand went up to the sore eye, hovered and fell again into her lap.

‘And now,’ said the singer, ‘tell the officers when you went off on your trip to see Goffo’s mum.’

If Tate had had a tail, Wexford thought, he would at this point have wagged it. Rather like a performing dog who loves yet fears his master and who is utterly hypnotised by him, he sat up, raised his head eagerly.

‘About a month ago, wasn’t it?’ prompted Vedast.

‘We went on May twenty-second,’ said Nell, ‘and …’

‘Came back on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth,’ her husband ended for her.

Vedast looked pleased. For a moment it looked as if he would pat his dogs on their heads, but instead he smiled at Tate and blew a kiss at Tate’s wife. ‘You see, Chief Inspector? We lead a very quiet life. I didn’t kill Dawnie out of passion, Goffo didn’t kill her because I told him to—though I’m sure he would have done if I had—and Nello didn’t kill her out of jealousy. So we can’t help you. We’ve got masses of stuff from agents to look through tonight, so may we get on with our house-hunting?’

‘Yes, Mr Vedast, you may, but I can’t promise I shan’t want to see you again.’

Vedast sprang to his feet in one supple movement. ‘No, don’t promise. I should love to see you again. We’ve had such a nice talk. We don’t see many people, we have to be so careful.’
Wexford’s hand was cordially shaken. ‘See them out, Goffo, and lock up the car.’

‘I wish you good hunting, Mr Vedast,’ said Wexford.

John Burden was at home and already in bed, having left a note for his father to tell him that Pat would be staying the night with her aunt. The key had been left under a flower-pot, which shocked the policeman in Burden while the father showed a fatuous pride in his son’s forethought. He removed the Vedast L.P. from the turntable and closed the record player.

‘One of these songs,’ he said, ‘is called “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my love”.’

‘Very appropriate.’ Wexford glanced at the record sleeve. ‘He must have written that for the Tates’ theme song.’

‘My God, yes. Why do they put up with it?’

‘She for love, he for money. Both for the reflected glory. He hit the nail right on the head when he said “Goffo” would have killed Dawn if he’d told him to. They’d do anything for him. “Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?” It’s not just love and money and glory, but the power of the man’s personality. It’s sinister, it’s most unpleasant. In a set-up of this kind that alibi goes for nothing. An alibi supported by slaves is no alibi. The Romans in their heyday were very chary about admitting slaves’ evidence.’

Burden chuckled. ‘I daresay you’re right, Caesar. How did he know he needed an alibi for the sixth of June, anyway? We didn’t tell him.’

‘Mrs Stonor or Mrs Peckham may have told him. There was something about it in the papers, about our thinking that the probable date of her death. I don’t really suppose he’s involved at all. He likes playing with us, that’s all. He likes sailing near the wind. Above all, he enjoys frightening the others.’ Wexford added in the words of the Duke of Wellington: ‘ “By God, he frightens me!” ’

The interior decorations of Leonard Dunsand’s bungalow were precisely the same as those of Miss Mowler’s. Identical red spotted paper covered the hall walls, identical birds and lilies pained the eye in the living room. But Miss Mowler, for all her genteel shudders at the builder’s bad taste, had shown little more judgment in her own and had filled the place with garish furniture and mass-produced pictures. Dunsand’s drab pieces, brown leather smoking-room chairs, late Victorian tables and, above all, shelf upon shelf of scholarly books, looked absurdly incongruous here. Little shrivelled cacti, lifeless greenish-brown pin-cushions, stood in pots on the window-sills. There was nothing in the hall but a bare mahogany table and no carpet on the floor. It was the typical home of the celibate intellectual, uncharacteristic only in that it was as clean as Mrs Peveril’s and that, on a table in the living room, lay a stack of holiday brochures, their covers even more vividly coloured than the wallpaper.

Dunsand, who had just come home from work, asked them to sit down in a colourless but cultivated voice. He seemed about forty with thinning mousey hair and rubbery face whose features were too puffy for that tight mouth. Thick glasses distorted his eyes, making them appear protuberant.
He wore an immaculate, extremely conventional dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. Neither obstructive nor ingratiating, he repeated what he had already told Burden, that he had reached home at about six-forty on June sixth and had noticed no unusual happenings in The Pathway during that evening.

‘I prepared myself a meal,’ he said, ‘and then I did some housework. This place is very ugly inside but I see no reason why it should also be dirty.’

‘Did you see anything of your neighbours?’

‘I saw Mrs Peveril go down the road at half past seven. I understand she attends an evening class in some sort of handicraft.’

‘You didn’t go out yourself? It was a fine evening.’

‘Was it?’ said Dunsand politely. ‘No, I didn’t go out.’

‘Are you on friendly terms with your neighbours, Mr Dunsand?’

‘Oh, yes, very.’

‘You go into their houses, for instance? They visit you?’

‘No. I think I misunderstood you. I simply mean we nod to each other and say a word if we meet in the street.’

Wexford sighed to himself. He found Dunsand depressing and he pitied his students. Philosophy, he knew—although he knew little about it—is not all ethics, witty syllogisms, anecdotes about Pythagoras, but logic, abstruse mathematics, points and instants, epistemological premisses. Imagine this one holding forth for a couple of hours on Wittgenstein!

‘So you can tell us nothing of Mr and Mrs Peveril’s way of life, their habits, who calls on them and so on? You know nothing of the terms they are on with each other?’

‘No, nothing.’ Dunsand spoke in the same drab level voice, but Wexford fancied that for a brief moment he had caught a certain animation in the man’s eye, a sign of life, a flash perhaps of pain. It was gone, the magnified eyes were still and staring. ‘I think I can say, Chief Inspector, that I know nothing of any private life but my own.’

‘And that is …?’ Wexford said hesitantly.

‘What you see.’ A small stubby hand indicated the books, the cacti, the brochures. Dunsand cleared his throat. ‘Beginning to rain again,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to ask me anything else I’ll go out and put my car away.’

‘Do you ever go to London, Mr Peveril?’

‘Of course I do in connection with my work.’ Peveril put a gloomy and irritable emphasis on the last word. He had once more been fetched from his studio and his fingers were actually inky. Wexford couldn’t help feeling that the ink had been put there deliberately just as the man’s hair had been purposely shaken and made to stand up in awry spikes. ‘I go up occasionally, once a fortnight, once a month.’

‘And stay overnight?’

‘I have done.’

‘When did you last go?’