Some Lie and Some Die (20 page)

‘Go on.’

‘When she got married again it was in the papers because Zeno was at the wedding and Mr Silk. I expect she’d rather have married Zeno.’

‘I daresay she would, John, but he wouldn’t have her so she took the next best thing. Catch as catch can.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Burden crossly, ‘must you fill him up with these cynical views of life?’

Wexford winked indiscreetly at the boy and for the time being said no more. He was thinking of the bald story he had been told and, more particularly, of the gaps in it which only an older person with experience of life could fill. Nell was still young. She must have been very young when she first married Dunsand. He wondered what had led to that ill-assorted marriage, what had made her choose the reserved, repressed lecturer for a husband. An unhappy home life like Dawn Stonor’s? The need to escape from some dreary backwater?
If this were so, it must have been a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. He pictured her among the faculty wives, decades her senior, the long evenings at home with Dunsand, the leather chairs, Wittgenstein, the lawn-mowing … Still a teenager at heart, she must have longed for younger people, for music, for excitement. And yet there was in her the stuff that makes a slave. Had she also been Dunsand’s slave? Perhaps. But she had escaped—into a glamorous, eventful, luxurious life that was nonetheless slavery. About two years ago, at the time the song was written.

He had sung it aloud and the others were staring at him. Pat giggled.

John said, ‘Very groovey, Mr Wexford.’

In the same parlance Wexford said, ‘I shouldn’t make much bread that way, John. Apart from not being able to sing, I don’t have the figure for it.’ He raised his heavy body out of the chair and said rather sharply to the inspector, ‘Come into the house.’

‘First thing tomorrow,’ Wexford said, ‘I want you to swear out a warrant to search Dunsand’s house.’

‘What, another fruitless search?’

‘Maybe it won’t be fruitless.’

Burden took Pat’s ballet shoes off the seat of one chair and John’s tennis racket off another. ‘On what evidence, for God’s sake?’

‘If Mrs Peveril has any value as a witness at all, Dawn Stonor went to Dunsand’s house. She was last seen going to his house and she was never seen coming out of it, never seen again. I would calculate that it’s a shorter distance from his
back fence to the quarry than from any other back fence. She was killed in that house, Mike.’

‘Will you ask Dunsand’s consent first?’

‘Yes, but he’ll refuse. At least, I think so. I shall also ask him not to go to work tomorrow. They come down this week, so he can’t have anything very pressing to do.’

Burden looked bewildered. ‘You were just as sure it happened in Peveril’s house, sir. Are you saying she knew Dunsand, that it was Dunsand she met in that pub on June first?’

‘No. I know it wasn’t. Dunsand was in Myringham on June first. Louis Mbowele told me that.’

‘And Dunsand can’t have let her in on that Monday. He wasn’t there at five-thirty. We’re as certain as can be she didn’t know Dunsand. Can you imagine him picking a girl up, asking her to come to his house?’

‘You must remember that Dunsand isn’t the only person who could have let her in. Nell Tate had a key.’

‘She used to go and see her ex-husband?’ Burden asked doubtfully.

‘I should think not,’ Wexford rejoined slowly. ‘Mrs Peveril would have seen her if she had been and Mrs Peveril never saw her. Perhaps he sent her the key in the hope that she would visit him. The fact remains that she had a key and she could have been in Dunsand’s house by five-thirty. Did you ever check on that Duvette Gardens alibi?’

Burden looked a little offended. He was conscientious, proud of his thoroughness. ‘Of course I did. Although, there didn’t seem much point when you got so interested in Peveril. I got the Met. on it’

‘And?’

‘Vedast’s car was stuck outside all day and all night, gathering his usual parking tickets. Nobody seems to have a clue whether they were inside the house. One of them may not have been. We just can’t tell.’

Wexford nodded. ‘The Tates would lie themselves black in the face to protect their master and he’d lie to protect his little
ones. I think he cares a good deal more for “Goffo” than for “Nello”, though, don’t you? I wish I could see a motive. One might suggest that Nell was jealous of Dawn’s relationship with Zeno Vedast, only there wasn’t a relationship any more. Vedast might have had a date to meet Dawn somewhere in the neighbourhood and Nell found out about it and lured her into the house to kill her. D’you fancy that idea?’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Tate might have fallen in love with Dawn when they met at the Townsman Club and got the key from his wife to use Dunsand’s house for a love nest. Then Vedast killed her to prevent her spoiling their jolly little
tria juncta in uno
. Does that suit you better?’

‘Well, I suppose anything’s possible with people of their sort.’

‘Sure it is. Nell arranged to meet Dawn there because she had Dunsand’s loneliness on her conscience. She thought Dawn might make him a suitable second wife—no less suitable than his first, at any rate—but when Dawn had confessed that Vedast had phoned her, shown interest in her, Nell got into a rage. She would, of course, have instructed Dawn to bring with her a second-hand red dress because Dunsand likes second-hand clothes, red is his favourite colour, and he prefers dresses to be a tight fit.’

Burden said distantly, ‘I don’t see the point of all this, sir. Aren’t you rather arguing with yourself? It’s you who want to search the place, not I.’

‘I expect I am, Mike,’ said Wexford. ‘I haven’t an idea how it happened, but two things I’m certain of. We shall find traces of blood in Dunsand’s house tomorrow, and Dunsand will confess to having killed Dawn Stonor from the chivalrous motive of protecting his former and still much-loved wife. It’s going to be a heavy day so I think I’ll be off home now.’

While they ransacked the bungalow, Wexford sat with Dunsand in the sombre living room. The search warrant had been shown to him and he had read it carefully, scrupulously, in total silence. He lifted his shoulders, nodded and followed Wexford into the living room, pausing at the window to pick a dead flower off one of the dehydrated cacti. Then he sat down and began to leaf through one of the travel brochures in the manner of a patient in a doctor’s waiting room. The light fell on his glasses, turning them into gleaming opaque ovals. His eyes were invisible, his thick mouth closed and set, so that his whole face was expressionless. But as he turned the pages and came to one on which some words had been pencilled in the margin, there came suddenly a tightening of those rubbery cheek muscles that was like a wince.

‘Your wife had a key to this house, Mr Dunsand.’

He looked up. ‘Yes. I sent it to her. But she’s my wife no longer.’

‘I beg your pardon. We believe she or a friend of hers was here on June sixth.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, no.’

Wexford thought he had closed his eyes, although he could not be sure. He was aware of a terrible stillness in the room,
a profound silence, which the movements in the hall and overhead accentuated rather than disturbed. Dunsand was not in the least like Godfrey Tate to look at or in manner, yet they shared this strange reticence. Both Nell Tate’s husbands possessed the rare quality of being able to answer a searching question with a straight yes or no. Had she chosen them for this or had she made them so? Had she chosen them at all? The man Wexford could be sure she had chosen was chatty, verbose, an extrovert whom some would call charming.

He tried again. ‘Do you ever see your former wife?’

‘No.’

‘Never, Mr Dunsand?’

‘Not now. I shall never see her again now.’

‘You’re aware that she’s staying at the Cheriton Forest Hotel?’

‘Yes. I saw it in the paper, a picture of her with a lot of flowers. She used to fill the house with flowers.’ He glanced at the moribund cacti and then he picked up his brochure again. Underneath it on the pile was a pamphlet advertising dishwashers and another for garden equipment. ‘I’d rather not talk any more now, if you don’t mind.’ He added curiously, ‘I’m not obliged to say anything, am I?’

Wexford left him and went into one of the bedrooms. Bryant, Gates and Loring were crawling about, examining the carpet.

‘Are there any women’s clothes in the wardrobes?’

‘No, sir, and there’s no blood. We’ve done the whole place. This is the last room. We’ve even been up in the loft.’

‘I heard you. Contents of the refrigerator?’

‘It’s empty. He’s been defrosting it. He’s very houseproud, sir. If you’re thinking of that food she bought, the dustbins have been emptied twice since June sixth.’

Aghast, suddenly weary, Wexford said, ‘I
know
she was killed here!’

‘The hall floor’s bitumastic, sir, the kind of stuff that’s poured on as liquid and then left to set. There are no joins. I
suppose we could get it taken up. We could have the tiles off the bathroom walls.’

Wexford went back into the room where Dunsand was. He cleared his throat and then found he was at a loss for words. His eyes met not Dunsand’s own but the thick baffling glass which shielded them. Dunsand got up and handed him two identical keys.

‘One of these,’ he said in a calm, neutral voice, ‘is mine. The other I sent to my former wife and she returned it to me by post.’ Wexford looked at the keys, the first of which was scraped and scarred from daily use, the second scarcely marked. ‘Mrs Tate,’ said Dunsand with awful precision, Vas never here. I should like to make a point of that.’ Things were happening, Wexford thought, at least to some extent according to the pattern he had forecast. Dunsand swallowed, looked down at the floor. ‘I found the girl here when I got home on June sixth. She must have got in by a window. The kitchen fanlight had been left unfastened. I encountered her as soon as I let myself in. She was giving the place what I think thieves call a “going over”. We struggled and I—killed her. I hit her with a bottle of wine she had left on the hall table.’

‘Mr Dunsand …’ Wexford began almost despairingly.

‘No, wait. Let me finish. She had brought some things with her, apart from the wine, some shopping in a bag and some clothes. Perhaps she thought my house was empty and she meant to camp there—“squat” is the word, isn’t it? After it got dark I put her body in the quarry and the other things into the river under the bridge. Then I washed the floor and the walls.’ Staring at Wexford, he said abruptly, ‘Aren’t you going to caution me? Shouldn’t there be witnesses to take all this down?’

‘This confession—you insist on making it?’

‘Of course. It’s true. I killed her. I knew it was only a matter of time before you arrested me.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed them against his sleeve. His naked eyes were frightening. There was something terrible yet indefinable in their
depths, a light that told perhaps of passion, of single-minded fanaticism under that flaccid exterior. He was used to teaching, to instructing. Now, in a teacher’s voice, he proceeded to direct Wexford.

‘The proper thing, I think, will be for me to go to the police station and make a statement.’ He put on his glasses, wiped a beading of sweat from above his left eyebrow. ‘I could go in my own car or accompany you if you think that wiser. I’m quite ready.’

‘Well, you were right,’ said Burden in grudging admiration.

‘Only up to a point. We didn’t find a trace of blood.’

‘He must be a nut or a saint, taking that on himself to shield a woman like Nell Tate.’ Burden began to pace the office, growing vehement. ‘That statement he made, it doesn’t even remotely fit the facts. For one thing, Dawn was let into the house. She didn’t go round the back. And for another, why should she suppose Dunsand’s house to have been empty—I mean, unoccupied? If she had, she wouldn’t have camped there on her own. She had a home to go to. Can you see Dunsand beating a woman to death because he suspected her of breaking into his house? Crocker said her killer was mad with rage, in a frenzy. That phlegmatic character in a frenzy?’

‘He and Tate,’ said Wexford, ‘are apparently both phlegmatic characters. They are still waters which not only run deep but which may have turbulent undercurrents. Strange, isn’t it? Dunsand hasn’t asked for a lawyer, hasn’t put up the least resistance. He’s behaved almost fatalistically. That woman breaks the men she doesn’t want but can’t scratch the surface of the man she does want.’

Burden shook his head impatiently. ‘What do we do now? What next?’

‘Go back to Dunsand’s place, I suppose. Have another look round and experiment with those keys a bit.’

Bright noon in The Pathway, the hottest day yet of a summer
that promised to be all halcyon. The sun had brought into blossom tiny pink flowers on the plants in Miss Mowler’s garden. In the meadows in the crook of the arm-shaped road they were cutting hay, cropping flowers far more lush and vigorous than those man had planted. The crude pink of Dunsand’s bungalow was blanched to a rosy pallor by the hard hot light.