Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (40 page)

Nicholas Virson took time off whenever he felt like it, Wexford thought, saying an austere good morning. Whatever he did, was business so bad in this recession time that it mattered very little whether he went in or not?

They had been talking when Brenda brought him in and he fancied their talk had been heated. Daisy was looking determined, a little flushed. Airs Virson's expression was more than usually peevish and Nicholas seemed put out, baulked in some endeavour. Were they here for lunch? Wexford hadn't previously noticed that it was , past noon.

I i;, Daisy got up when he came in, hugging close | |p her the cat which had been lying in her lap. Its fur was almost the same shade as the blue ^tenim she wore, a bomber jacket, tight jeans.

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The jacket was embroidered and between the coloured stitching were a multiplicity of gilt and silver studs. A black and blue checked T-shirt was under the jacket and the belt in the jeans' waistband was of metal, woven silver and gold with bosses of pearly and clear glass. Inescapable was the feeling that this was a statement she was making. These people were to be shown the real Daisy, what she wanted to be, a free spirit, even an outrageous spirit, dressing as she pleased and doing as she liked.

The contrast between what she wore and Joyce Virson's clothes -- even allowing for the great age difference -- was so marked as to be ludricrous. It was a mother-in-law's uniform, burgundy wool dress with matching jacket, round her neck a silver rhomboid on a thong, trendy in the sixties, her only rings her large diamond engagement ring and her wedding band. Daisy had an enormous ring on her left hand, a two-inch-long turtle in silver, its shell studded with coloured stones, that looked as if it was creeping down her hand from first finger-joint to knuckles.

Having an objection to the word 'intrude', Wexford apologised for disturbing them. He had no intention of leaving and agreeing to come back later, and he indicated that he was sure Daisy wouldn't expect this. It was Airs Virson who answered for her.

"Now you're here, Mr Wexford, perhaps you'll come in on our side. I know how you feel about Daisy being here alone. Well, she's not alone, you put girls in here to protect her,

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though what they could do in an emergency, I'm < sorry but I really can't imagine. And, frankly, as a ratepayer, I rather resent our money being spent on that sort of thing."

Nicholas said unexpectedly, "We don't pay rates any more, Mother, we pay poll tax."

"It's all the same thing. It all goes the same way. We came here this morning to ask Daisy to come back and stay with us. Oh, it's not the first time as you know as well as I do. But we thought it worth another try, particularly as circumstances have changed as regards -- well, Nicholas and Daisy."

Wexford watched a terrible blush suffuse Nicholas Virson's face. It wasn't a blush of pleasure or gratification but, to judge by the wince which accompanied it, of intense embarrassment. He was nearly sure circumstances hadn't changed except in Joyce Virson's mind.

"It's obviously absurd for her to be here," Airs Virson reflected, and her remaining words came out in a rush. "As if she was grown up. As if she was able to make her own decisions."

"Well, I am," Daisy said calmly. "I am grown-up. I do make decisions." She seemed quite untroubled by all this. She looked faintly bored.

Nicholas made an effort. His face was still pink. Wexford suddenly remembered the description of the masked gunman Daisy had I given him, the fair hair, the cleft chin, the big | ears. It was almost as if it was this man she had been thinking of when she described him. And

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why would she do that? Why would she do it even unconsciously?

"We thought," Nicholas said, "that Daisy might come over to dinner with us and -- and stay the night and sort of see how she felt. We were planning to give her her own sitting room, a sort of suite, you know. She wouldn't actually have to live with us, if you see what I mean. She could be absolutely her own woman, if that's what she wants."

Daisy laughed. Whether it was at the whole idea or Nicholas's use of the fashionable absurdity Wexford couldn't tell. He had thought her eyes troubled and the disturbance, the anxiety in them remained, but she laughed and her laughter was full of merriment.

"I've already told you, I'm going out to dinner tonight. I don't expect to be back until quite late and my friend will certainly bring me home."

"Oh, Daisy ..." The man couldn't help himself. His misery broke through the pompous manner. "Oh, Daisy, you might at least tell me who you're going to dinner with. Is it someone we know? If it's a friend can't you bring her with you to us?"

Daisy said, "Davina used to say that if a woman talks about her friend, or her cousin even, or 'someone' she works with or 'someone' she knows, people will always assume it's another woman. Always. She said it's because deep down they don't really want women to have relationships with the opposite sex."

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," Nicholas said and Wexford could see he

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hadn't. He really hadn't.

"Well, I'm sorry," said Joyce Virson, "but all this is beyond me. I should have thought a girl who had an understanding with a young man would want to spend time with him." Her temper was going and with it her self control. It was always a tremulously balanced function. "The truth is that when freedom and a lot of money come to people too soon it goes to their heads. It's power, you see, they become power-mad. It's the greatest pleasure in life some women have, exercising power over some poor man whose only crime is he happens to be fond of them. I'm sorry, but I hate that sort of thing." She grew wilder, her voice tipping over the edge of control. "If that's women's lib or whatever they call it, women's something, horrible nonsense, you can keep it and much good may it do you. It won't find you a good husband, that I do know."

"Mother," said Nicholas, with a flash of strength. He spoke to Daisy. "We're on our way to lunch with ..." he named some local friends "... and we hoped you'd come too. We do have to go very soon."

"I can't come, can I? Mr Wexford's here to talk to me. It's important. I have to help the police. You haven't forgotten what happened here four weeks ago, have you? Or have you?"

"Of course I haven't. How could I? Mother 'didn't mean all that, Daisy." Joyce Virson &a�l turned her head away and was holding Miandkerchief up to her face while apparently

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staring with great concentration at the newly opened tulips in the terrace tubs. "She's set her heart on your corning and so -- well, so had I. We really thought we could win you over. May we come back later, on our way home from this lunch? Can we just drop in again and try to explain to you just what we had in mind?"

"Of course. Friends can call on each other when they want, can't they? You're my friend, Nicholas, surely you know that?"

"Thank you, Daisy."

"I hope you'll always be my friend."

They might not have been there, Wexford and Joyce Virson. For a moment the two were alone, enclosed in whatever their relationship was, had been, whatever secrets of emotion or events they shared. Nicholas got up and Daisy gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then she did a curious thing. She strode to the door of the serre and flung it open. Bib was revealed on the other side of it, taking a step backwards, clutching a duster.

Daisy said nothing. She closed the door and turned to Wexford. "She's always listening outside doors. It's a passion with her, a sort of addiction. I always know she's there, I can hear her start breathing very fast. Strange, isn't it? What can she get out of it?"

She returned to the theme of Bib and eavesdropping as soon as the Virsons had gone. "I can't sack her. How would I manage with no one?" She sounded suddenly like someone twice her age, an embattled housewife. "Brenda's told me they're going. I said I only sacked them in a rage, I didn't mean it, but they're going just the

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same. You know his brother runs that hire-car business? Ken's going in with him, they plan to expand and they can have the other flat over Fred's office. John Gabbitas has been trying to buy a house in Sewingbury since last August and he's just heard his mortgage has come through. He'll still look after the woods, I suppose, but he won't live here." She gave a kind of dry giggle. "I'll be left with Bib. D'you think she'll murder me?"

"You've no reason to think . . . ?" he began seriously.

"None at all. She just looks like a bloke and never speaks and listens at doors. She's feeble-minded too. As a murderer she makes a really good cleaner. Sorry, that wasn't funny. Oh God, I sound like that awful Joyce! You don't think I ought to go there, do you? She persecutes me."

"You wouldn't do what I thought anyway, would you?" She shook her head. "Then I shan't waste my breath. There are one or two things, as you rightly guessed, I'd like to talk to you about."

"Yes, of course. But there's something I have to tell you first. I was going to before, but they kept on and on." She smiled rather ruefully. "Joanne Garland phoned."

"What?"

"Don't look so amazed. She didn't know. She didn't know any of it had happened. She came back last night and went down to the gallery this morning and saw it all shut up, so she phoned me."

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He realised Daisy might not be aware of their fears for Joanne Garland, might not know anything beyond the fact that she had gone away somewhere. Why should she?

"She thought she was phoning Mum. Wasn't that awful? I had to tell her. That was the worst part, telling her what had happened. She didn't believe me, not at first. She thought it was a ghastly joke. This was only -- well, half an hour ago. It was just before the Virsons came.'

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SHE was in tears. It was because she was crying on the phone, incoherent with tears and gasps, that he had relented and, instead of asking her to come to the police station, had said he would go to her. In the house in Broom Vale he sat in one armchair and Barry Vine in another while Joanne Garland, incapacitated by the first question he had asked her, sobbed into the sofa arm.

The first thing Wexford noticed when she admitted them to the house was that her face was bruised. They were old marks, healing now, but the vestiges were there, greenish, yellowish, bruises around the mouth and nose, darker abrasions, plum-coloured at the eyes and the hairline. Her tears couldn't disguise them, nor were they the aftermath of tears.

Where had she been? Wexford asked her that before they sat down and the question drew more tears. She gasped out, "America, California," and threw herself down on the sofa in floods of weeping.

"Mrs Garland," he said after a while, "try to get a grip on yourself. I'll get you a drink of water."

i"She sat bolt upright, her bruised face s&eaming. "I don't want water." She said to e Vine, "You could get me a whisky. In that

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cupboard. Glasses in there. Have yourselves one." A heavy choking sob cut the end of the last word. From a large red leather handbag on the floor she pulled a handful of coloured tissues and rubbed at her face. "I'm sorry. I will stop. When I've had a drink. My God, the shock."

Barry showed her the soda bottle he had found. She shook her head fiercely and took a swig of the neat whisky. She seemed to have forgotten all about the offer she had made them, which in any case would have been refused. The whisky was evidently welcome. The effect it had on her was quite different from that on someone who seldom drinks spirits. It was not so much as if she had been in need of a drink -- that is, an alcoholic drink -- as thirsty. Some special kind of thirst seemed quenched by what she drank and relief spread through her.

The tissues came out again and once more she wiped her face, but carefully this time. Wexford thought she looked remarkably young for fifty-four, or if not exactly young, remarkably smooth-faced. She might have been a tired and rather battered thirty-five. Her hands, though, were those of a much older woman, webs of stringy tendons, wormed with veins. She wore a jersey suit of goose-turd green and a great deal of costume jewellery. Her hair was a bright pale gold, her figure shapely if not quite slim, her legs excellent. In anyone's eyes she was an attractive woman.

Breathing deeply now, sipping the whisky, she took a powder compact and lipstick out of the bag and restored her face. Wexford could see

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the gaze arrested by the worst of the bruises, one under her left eye. She touched it with a fingertip before applying powder in an attempt at concealment.

"We have a lot of things we'd like to ask you, Mrs Garland."

"Yes. I suppose." She hesitated. "I didn't know, you know, I didn't have a clue. They don't have foreign news -- well, it's foreign to them -- in American papers. Not unless it's a war or something. There wasn't anything about this. The first I knew was when I phoned that girl, Naomi's girl." Her lip trembled when she spoke the name. She swallowed. "Poor thing, I suppose I should be sorry for her, I should have told her I was sorry, but it threw me, it just flattened me. I could hardly speak."

Vine said, "You told no one you were going away. You didn't say a word to your mother or your sisters."

"Naomi knew."

"Maybe." Wexford didn't say what he felt, that they would never know the truth of that, since Naomi was dead. The last thing he wanted was a fresh gush of tears. "Would you mind telling us when you went and why?"

She said, like children do, "Do I have to?"

"Yes, I'm afraid you do. Eventually. Perhaps you'd like to think about your answer. I have to tell you, Mrs Garland, that your vanishing into thin air like this has caused us considerable trouble."

"Could you get me some more Scotch, please." She held the empty glass up to Vine.

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"Yes, all right, you needn't look like that, I do like a drink but I'm not an alcoholic. I specially like a drink in times of stress. Is there anything wrong with that?"

"I'm not in the business of answering your enquiries, Mrs Garland," Wexford said. "I'm here so that you can answer mine. I'm doing you the courtesy of coming here. And I want you capable of answering. Is that clear?" He half-shook his head at Vine who was standing with the glass in his hand and a what-didyourlastrservantdie-of expression on his face. Joanne Garland looked shocked and truculent. "Very well. This is a very serious matter. I'd like you to tell me when you got home and what you did."