Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (34 page)

Gunner Jones says he doesn't think he could

344

<<>

find his way through them now. Why say that � to me if he wasn't pretty confident he could'? I didn't ask him. It was simply a piece of gratuitous information. And we're talking about someone driving through the woods, not running through on foot, which provided you followed your nose or a compass would be bound to bring you out on a road sooner or later. This guy would have to be prepared to drive a cumbersome four-wheel drive vehicle through woods in the dark and the only lights he'd dare to have on would be sidelights and maybe not even those."

"The other one walked in front of him with a lantern," Wexford said drily, "like in the early days of motoring."

"Well, perhaps he did. I find it all hard to picture, Reg, but what alternative is there? There's no way they wouldn't have passed Bib Mew or Gabbitas wouldn't have met them if they were on the Pomfret Monachorum road -- unless Gabbitas was one of them, unless he was the other one."

"How d'you like the idea of a motorbike? Suppose they made their way through the woods in the dark on Andy Griffin's motorbike?"

"Wouldn't Daisy distinguish between the sound of a motorbike starting up and the sound of a car? I can't somehow see Gabbitas riding pillion on Andy's bike. Gabbitas, I don't need to remind you, has no alibi for the afternoon and early evening of 11 March."

"You know, Mike, something rather strange has happened to alibis in recent years. It's getting

KGD23 345

progressively more difficult to establish hard and fast ones. That works against villains, of course, but it also works for them. It's got something to do with people leading more isolated lives. There are more people than ever before but individual lives are more lonely."

The glazed look appeared on Burden's face which often settled there when Wexford began to talk what he categorised as 'philosophy'. Wexford was becoming ultra-sensitive to this change of expression and, since he had nothing more to say of value in the present case, he cut short his remarks and bade Burden goodnight. But his thoughts on alibis remained with him as he drove home, how suspects were able to call on less and less corroboration in support of their claims.

Men, in times of recession and high unemployment, went to the pub less frequently than they had used. Cinemas were empty as television lured away their audiences. The Kingsmarkham cinema had closed five years before and been converted into a DIY emporium. More people lived singly than ever before. Fewer grown-up children lived at home. In the evenings and by night the streets of Kingsmarkham, of Stowerton, of Pomfret, were empty, not a car parked, not a pedestrian, only freight traffic rolling through, each truck with a lone driver. At home, in single rooms, or tiny flats, a lone man or lone woman sat watching television.

This accounted, in some measure, for the problems in establishing the certain whereabouts of almost all these people on that date in March.

346

Who was there to support the claims of John Gabbitas and Gunner Jones, or come to that. Bib Mew? Who could corroborate where Ken Harrison had been, or John Chowney or Terry Griffin, but in the case of two of them their wives, whose testimony was useless? They had all been at home, or on their way home, alone or with their wives.

* * *

To say that Gunner Jones had disappeared would be putting it too strongly. A call to the sports equipment shop in the Holloway Road ascertained that Gunner had gone on a few days' holiday, he hadn't said where, he often went away. Wexford would hardly help seeing the coincidence here, if coincidence it was. Joanne Garland kept a shop and had gone away. Gunner Jones, who knew her, who corresponded with her, kept a shop and 'often went away'. Another thing, which Wexford was prepared to admit might be seen as way-out, had struck him. Gunner Jones sold sports equipment, Joanne Garland had converted a room in her house to a gym and filled it with sports equipment.

Were they together and if so, why?

The proprietors of the Rainbow Trout Inn pounds Pluxam on the Dart were most willing to *^1 DS Vine everything they knew about Mr

i G. Jones. He was a regular customer when the neighbourhood. They let a few rooms visitors and he had once stayed there, but

347

only once. Since then he had always rented the cottage next door. It was not exactly next door, in Vine's eyes, but a good fifty yards down the lane which led to the river bank.

The eleventh of March? The licensee of the Rainbow Trout knew exactly what Vine was talking about and needed no explanation. His eyes sparkled with the excitement of it. Mr Jones had certainly been there from the tenth to the fifteenth. He knew because Air Jones never paid for his drinks till he left and there was a record of his expenditure for those days. To Vine it seemed an incredibly large sum for one man. As to the eleventh, the licensee couldn't say, he had no record of Mr Jones coming in that evening, he didn't write the dates on his 'slate*.

Since then he hadn't seen Gunner Jones and hadn't expected to. There was no one in the cottage at present. The landlord told Vine he had no further bookings for Gunner Jones in the current year. He had rented the cottage four times and had always been alone. That is, he had never moved into it with someone else. The landlord had once seen him having a drink in the Rainbow Trout with a woman. Just a woman. No, he couldn't describe her beyond saying she hadn't impressed him as being too young for Gunner or, come to that, too old. The probability was that Gunner Jones was at present off fishing in some other part of the country.

But what had been contained in the envelope on the mantelpiece ir\ Nineveh Road? A love letter? Or the outline of some kind of plan? And why had Gunner Jones kept the envelope

348

when he had evidently discarded the letter? Why, above all, had he written those addresses on it and handed it so insouciantly to Burden.

Wexford ate his dinner and talked to Dora about going away for the weekend. She could go if she liked. He saw no prospect of his getting away. She was reading something in a magazine and when he asked her what interested her so deeply, she said it was a profile of Augustine Casey.

Wexford made the sound the Victorians wrote as, "Pshaw!"

"If you've finished with The Hosts ofMidian, Reg, can I read it?"

He handed her the novel, opened Lovely As A Tree which he still hadn't got very far with. Without looking up, his head bent, he said, "Do you speak to her?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Reg, if you mean Sheila why can't you say so? I speak to her the same as always only you aren't here to snatch the receiver from me."

"When is she going to Nevada?"

"In about three weeks' time."

* * *

Preston Littlebury had a small Georgian village house in the middle of Forby. Forby has been called the fifth prettiest village in England, which &e explained as his reason for having a weekend |*tmse there. If the so-called prettiest village in pingland was as near to London he would have |pi*ed there, but it happened to be in Wiltshire.

349

It was not strictly a weekend house, of course, or he wouldn't have been there on a Thursday. He smiled as he made these pedantic remarks and held his hands together up under the chin, the wrists apart and the fingertips touching. His smile was small and tight and patronising in a twinkling way.

Apparently,, he lived alone. The rooms in his house reminded Barry Vine of the partitioned off areas in an antiques emporium. Everything looked like a beautiftilly preserved, well-tended antique, not the least silver-haired Mr Littlebury in his silver-grey suit, his pink Custom Shop shirt and his rose and silver spotted bow tie. He was older than he looked at first, as is also true of some antiques. Barry thought he might be well into his seventies. When he spoke he sounded like the late Henry Fonda playing a professor.

His circumlocutory style of speaking left Vine very little the wiser as to what he did for a living than when he began describing his occupation. He was an American, born in Philadelphia, and had been living in Cincinnati, Ohio, while Harvey Copeland had been teaching at a university there. That was how they came to meet. Preston Littlebury was also acquainted with the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the South. He had been some sort of academic himself, had worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, had a reputation as an art expert and had once written a column about antiques for a national newspaper. It seemed that he now bought and sold antique silver and porcelain.

350

This much Vine managed to sort out from Littlebury's obscurities and digressions. All the while he talked he was nodding like a Chinese mandarin.

"I travel rather a lot, back and forth, you know. I pass a considerable amount of time in eastern Europe, a fecund marketplace since the cessation of the Cold War. Let me tell you of rather an amusing thing that happened as I was crossing the frontier between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia ..."

An anecdote on the perennial theme of bureaucratic bumbling threatened. Vine had endured three already and hastily cut him short.

"About Andy Griffin, sir. You employed him at one time? We're anxious to know his whereabouts during the days before he was killed."

Like most raconteurs, Littlebury was riot happy to be interrupted. "Yes, well, I was coming to that. I haven't set eyes on the man for nearly a year. You're aware of that?"

Vine nodded, though he wasn't. If he demurred he might get to hear the further adventures of Preston Littlebury in the Balkans during that year. "You did employ him?"

"In a manner of speaking." Littlebury spoke very carefully, weighing each word. "It depends on what you mean by 'employ'. If you mean, 1^id I have him on what I believe in common lance is called a 'payroll', the answer must an emphatic no. There was, for instance, question of making National Insurance

351

contributions on his behalf or applying myself to certain Income Tax adjustments. If, on the other hand, you refer to casual labour, to a role as odd-job man, I must tell you that you are right. For a short time Andrew Griffin was in receipt of what I will call an elementary emolument from me."

Littlebury put the tips of his fingers together and twinkled at Vine over the top of them. "He performed such menial tasks as washing my car and sweeping my yard." The use of this word was the first hint he had given of his Philadelphian origins. "He took my little dog -- now, alas, passed on to the rabbit warren in the sky -- for walks. Once, I recall, he changed a wheel when I had a flat -- a puncture, I should say to you. Sergeant."

"Did you ever pay him in dollars?"

If anyone had told Vine that this man, this epitome of refinement and pedantry, or as he himself would doubtless put it, of civilisation, would use the old lag's favourite phrase, he wouldn't have believed it. But that was what Preston Littlebury did.

"I might have done."

It was uttered in as shifty a way as Vine had ever heard. Now, he thought, the man would probably start using those other giveaways: 'To be perfectly honest with you' was one of them; 'To tell you the absolute truth' another. Littlebury would doubtless have no occasion to use the defendant's biggest whopper: 'I swear on the lives of my wife and children I'm innocent.' He appeared, anyway, to have neither wife nor

352

children and his dog was dead.

"Did you, sir, or didn't you? Or can't you remember?"

"It was a long time ago."

What was he afraid of? Not much. Vine thought. No more than the Inland Revenue catching up with his back pocket transactions. Very likely he dealt in dollars. Countries in eastern Europe liked them better than sterling, far better than their own currencies.

"We found a certain number of dollar notes ..." He corrected himself "... er, bills, in Griffin's possession."

"It's a universal currency, Sergeant."

"Yes. So you may have paid him occasionally in dollars, sir, but you can't remember?"

"I may have done. Once or twice."

No longer tempted to illustrate every rejoinder with an amusing tale, Littlebury seemed suddenly ill at ease. He was bereft of words. He no longer twinkled and his hands fidgeted in his lap.

Vine was inspired and said quickly, "Do you have a bank account in Kingsmarkham, sir?"

"No, I do not." It was snapped out. Vine remembered that he lived in London, this was only a weekend or occasional retreat. No doubt, though, he sometimes stayed on over Mondays and needed cash . . . "Have you anything else you want to ask me? I was under the impression this enquiry was concerned with Andrew Griffin, &ot my personal pecuniary arrangements."

"The last days of his life, Air Littlebury. jrankly, we don't know where he spent them." 'ine told him the relevant dates. "A Sunday

353

morning till a Tuesday afternoon."

"He didn't spend them with me. I was in Leipzig."

* * *

Greater Manchester Police confirmed the death of Dane Bishop. The death certificate gave the cause as heart failure and the contributory cause as pneumonia. He had been twenty-four years old and living at an address in Oldham. The reason for his failing to come to Wexford's notice before had been his lack of a record. There was only one offence recorded against him and that had taken place some three months after the death of Caleb Martin: shop-breaking in Manchester.

"I'm going to have that Jem Hocking charged with murder," Wexford said.

"He's already in jail," Burden half-objected.

"Not my idea of jail. Not real jail."

'That doesn't sound like you," said Burden.

if 354

2I

F Miss Jones had died. Miss Davina Jones, that is," said Wilson Barrowby, the solicitor, "there is no question but that her father, Mr George Godwin Jones, would have inherited the estate, would indeed have inherited everything."

"No other heirs exist. Miss Flory was the youngest of her family." He gave a rueful smile. "Indeed, we know she was the 'y�ungest wren of nine', and was in face five years younger than her youngest sibling and no less than twenty years younger than her eldest sister.