Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (42 page)

"I'd like you to tell me what was in the letter, Mrs Garland."

"I want to see Daisy," she said. "I must go to the house and see Daisy and tell her I'm sorry. For God's sake, I was her mother's best friend."

"Wasn't she yours?"

"Don't twist my words all the time. You know what I mean."

He knew what she meant. "I've got plenty of time, Mrs Garland." He hadn't, he had Sylvia's party that he had to go to. Let the heavens fall,

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he had to go to that party. "We're going to stay here in these, two quite comfortable armchairs until you decide to tell me."

By now, anyway, apart from its relevance to the case, he was dying to know. She hadn't just awakened his curiosity with her prevarications; she had pulled it out of sleep and set its nerves on stalks.

"I gather it's not personal," he said. "It's not something about you. You need not be embarrassed."

"OK, I'll fess up. But you'll see what I mean when I tell you. Gunner never answered that letter either, by the way. Fine father he is. Well, I should have known that, never taking a scrap of interest in the poor kid from the time he scarpered."

"This was about Daisy?" Wexford asked, inspired.

"Yes. Yes, it was."

* * *

"Naomi told me," Joanne Garland said. "I inean, you have to have known Naomi to realise what she was like. Naive's not exactly the word, though she was that too. Sort of not like other people, vague, not having a clue about what goes on. I don't suppose I'm making myself clear. She didn't act like other people, so I don't reckon she really knew how other people did act. Not when they were doing things that were -- well, wrong fer not on or downright disgusting. And she Siidn't know when they were doing something

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-- well) successful or clever or special either. Am I making any sense?"

"Yes, I think so."

"She started talking about this business when we were in the shop one day. I mean, talking about like she might have said Daisy's got a new boyfriend or she was going on some school trip abroad. That's how she came out with it. She said -- I'm trying to think of her actual words

-- yes, she said, 'Davina thinks it would be nice if Harvey made love to Daisy. To sort of start her off. Initiate her. That was the word. Because Harvey's a wonderful lover. And she doesn't want Daisy to go through what happened to her.' You see what I mean by embarrassing."

Wexford wasn't shocked but he could see that it was shocking. "What was your reply?"

"Wait. I'm not done. Naomi said the fact was Davina was too old now for -- well, I don't have to spell it out, do I? Sort of physically, if I make myself clear. And it worried her because Harvey

-- this is what Davina said -- was young still and a vigorous man. Yuck, I thought, yuck, yuck. Davina really thought, apparently, that it would be great for both of them and she and Harvey had actually put it to the girl. Well, she told the girl and that same day horrible old Harvey made a sort of pass."

"What did Daisy do?"

"Told him to get lost, I imagine. That's what Naomi said. I mean, Naomi wasn't indignant or anything. She just said Davina was sex-mad, always had been, but she ought to understand not everybody felt like she did. But Naomi

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wasn't the way I'd have been -- if it was my kid, if I'd had a kid. She just said like she was talking about some difference of opinion we might have had, like whether we were going to show clothes in the gallery or not, she just said it was up to Daisy. I got mad. I said a lot of things about Daisy being in moral danger, all that, but it wasn't any use. Then I got to see Daisy. I met her when she was coming out of school, said my car had broken down and would she give me a lift home."

"You discussed this with her?"

"She laughed but you could tell she was -- well, disgusted. She'd never liked Harvey much and I got the impression she was disillusioned about her grandma. She kept saying she wouldn't have expected that of Davina. She didn't a bit mind me knowing, she was very sweet, she's a very sweet girl. And that sort of made it worse.

"They were all going off on holiday. It really worried me, I didn't know what else I could do. I kept having this picture of old Harvey -- well, raping her. It was silly, I know, because I don't suppose he could have and anyway whatever they were, they weren't that sort."

Wexford had no clear idea what sort she meant but he wouldn't interrupt. All Joanne Garland's initial shame and reticence had gone as she warmed enthusiastically to her tale.

"They were nearly due back when I ran into that chap Nicholas -- Virson, is he called? -- I knew he was a sort of boyfriend of Daisy's, the nearest she had to a boyfriend, and I thought of

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telling him. It was on the tip of my tongue but he's such a pompous ass I could just picture him going scarlet and sort of blustering out of it. So I didn't. I told Gunner. I wrote him a letter.

"After all, he is her father. I thought even bloody Gunner would rise to this. But I was wrong, wasn't I? Couldn't have cared less. I just had to rely on Daisy -- well, on her good sense. And it wasn't as if she was a child, not really, she was seventeen. But that Gunner -- what kind of a fine bloody father is that?"

* * *

Seven gunsmiths in the Yellow Pages for Kingsmarkham, five for Stowerton, three in Pomfret alone, a further twelve in the surrounding countryside.

"It's a wonder we've any wildlife left," said Karen Malahyde. "What exactly are we looking for?"

"Someone who had Ken Harrison working for him on a part-time basis and who, taught him how to change a gun barrel and lent him the j tools."

"You're joking, aren't you, sir?"*

"I'm afraid so," said Burden.

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24

FRED HARRISON in his taxi passed him as he drove to the main gates. On his way to fetch Joanne Garland, paying her visit of condolence to Daisy, he thought as he returned the man's salute. Condolence? Yes -- why not? It was amazing what abuses love survived. You had only to look at battered wives, maltreated children. She had probably kept the old admiring awe of her grandmother, tempered as it was by a real affection, and as for Harvey, she had plainly never cared for him. As to her mother, such people as Naomi Jones, eccentric in their unworldliness, their soft contented passivity, were often very lovable.

What Wexford knew about and Joanne Garland probably did not were the revelations in the letters cited in the Sunday Times review. The unconsummated first marriage to Desmond Flory. Those years of living 'like brother and sister', as the euphemism of the time had it, the impossibility in those days and that environment of seeking help. The best years of her sexual life, in anyone's estimation, from twenty-three to thirty-three wasted, lost, perhaps never to be compensated for adequately later on. And towards the end of the war, in whose last days Desmond Flory was to be killed, the meeting With a lover took place, the man who was to be Naomi's father.

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The unused energy of those years she had put into the planting of those woods. It was interesting to speculate as to whether the woods would be here now if Flory had not been incapable with his wife. Wexford wondered if Davina Flory's oversexedness wasn't perhaps due to ten years of frustration, if they had always been there in her past, those years, standing empty. She knew that whatever happened in the future they could never be filled, the gap never closed.

From something like that she had wanted to save Daisy. That was the charitable view. Wexford could think of so many other disastrous consequences of a liaison between Daisy and her grandmother's husband that the charitable view came to look like what it was, an empty excuse. She should have known better, he told himself. Good taste and common decency should have taught her better, these and something she claimed to be so keen on, civilised behaviour.

Who had the lover been? Who was this man who, like the prince in the story, had ridden up to liberate the woman in the sleeping wood? Some fellow writer, he supposed, or an academic. It wasn't hard to see Davina in the Lady Chatterley role and Naomi's father a servant on the estate.

The rain had stopped. It was damp and misty in the woods but when he left the forest road and was heading towards Kingsmarkham, a late sun had come out. The evening was fine and warm, all those clouds drawn in dense billowing masses to the horizon. The car splashed through

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a lingering puddle up on to his garage drive. Dora he found on the phone and hope sprang up, to be dispelled by her quick shake of the head. It had only been Neil's father, asking if she wanted a lift.

"What about me? Why shouldn't I want a lift?"

"He assumed you weren't going. People do take it for granted, darling, that mostly you aren't going."

"Of course I'm going to my own daughter's housewarming party."

It was unreasonable to be put out of temper by this. Wexford was enough of a psychologist to know that if he was disconcerted, this was due to guilt. Guilt that he took Sylvia for granted, loved her routinely, put her second to her sister, had to make himself think of her lest he came halfway to forgetting her existence. He went upstairs and changed. He had intended putting on a sports jacket and cords but rejected these in favour of his best suit, his only really good suit.

Why did he worry so much about that stupid girl, that ridiculous affected, actressy Sheila? Using those terrible adjectives about her, even to himself, nearly made him groan aloud. Alone in the hall, he picked up the phone and dialled her number. Just on the off-chance. When it rang more than three times and the recorded voice hadn't come on, he felt another resurgence of hope. But no one answered. He let it ring twenty times and then he put the receiver back.

Dora said, "You look very smart." And, "She Won't do anything silly, you know.3

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'I'd never even thought of that," he said, though he had.

The house Sylvia and her husband had bought was on the other side of Myfleet, about twelve miles away. A rectory was what it had been in the days when the Church of England thought nothing of putting the incumbent of a benefice into a damp, unheated, ten-bedroomed mansion on five hundred pounds a year. Sylvia and Neil had wanted it, had the late-twentieth century scorn of anything suburban and had hardly been able to wait until they could afford to leave their five-roomed semi-detached. This longing for a 'real house' was one of the few matters they agreed on, as Wexford and Dora had observed in a recent discussion. But no incompatible couple could have striven more earnestly to stay together than these two, accumulating more and more joint possessions, contriving to depend more and more on each other's services and support.

Sylvia, now she had her Open University degree, had a rather good job in the County Education Department. She seemed to like putting impediments in her own way so that she had to rely on Neil's presence and Neil's promises, just as he took on more entertaining and more foreign trips so that he could rely on hers. But buying this house, a further ten miles away from where she worked and in the opposite direction to his grandsons' school, seemed to Wexford to be going too far. He remarked on it to Dora as he drove carefully along the winding lanes to Myfleet.

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"Life's hard enough without turning it into an obstacle race."

"Yes. Has it occurred to you Sheila might be there tonight? She's invited."

"She won't be there."

She wasn't. Sylvia told him she wasn't coming -- well, she had told her a week ago she wasn't coming -- before he could ask. He wouldn't have asked, anyway. From past scenes and shows of bitter resentment, he knew the consequences of asking.

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"You're looking very smart, Dad.'

He kissed her, said the house was lovely, though it seemed bigger and starker than he remembered from the one occasion on which he had seen it before, but there was no denying it was a great place to have a party. He walked into the drawing room which was already crowded. The whole place wanted decorating, cried out with icy tears for central heating. A great log-fire in the Victorian mock-baronial fireplace looked good and the heat of fifty bodies would provide the warmth. Wexford said hallo to his son-in law and accepted a glass of Highland Spring, much embellished with ice, lime slices and mint leaves.

Everybody knew who he was. It was not exactly unease he could sense as he moved among them so much as caution, a drawing in upon themselves, a perfunctory self-examination. This was truer now than it had once been, with the current campaign against drinking and driving, and he could see men glance at Iff glasses holding an obvious inch of whisky as

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they wondered whether they could pass it off as apple juice or fall back on the old justification: My wife's driving.

Then he saw Burden. Part of a group that included Jenny and some of Sylvia's fellow educationists, the inspector stood silent, the large glass in his hand really containing apple juice. If it wasn't Mike had gone mad and asked for half a pint of Scotch. He edged his way over, having found a congenial companion for the best part of the evening.

"You're looking very smart."

"You're the third one who's seen fit to comment on my appearance. In those very words. Am I generally such a ragbag? The head model of the Oxfam catwalk?"

Burden made no reply but gave Wexford one of his small tight half-smiles accompanied by a little lift of the eyebrows. Himself dressed in charcoal cashmere sweater over a white polo-neck, charcoal washed-silk bomber jacket and designer jeans, he had perhaps not quite achieved the desired effect. Not, at least, in Wexford's eyes.

"Since we're into personal remarks," Wexford said, "that get-up makes you look like a trendy vicar. The proper occupant of this house. It's the dog-collar effect."

"Oh, nonsense," Burden said huffily. "You always say something like that, just because I don't invariably look as if I've got 'fuzz' stamped all over me. Come in here. Bring your glass. This house is a real warren, isn't it?"

They found themselves in a place that might