The Crimson Rooms (38 page)

“Wicked? I don’t think so. I’ve seen a man lie his way out of the front line. I’ve seen petty thieving. I’ve seen men blow a week’s pay on a game of cards or ten minutes in a brothel. These things aren’t wicked, are they? Ill-judged, desperate, reckless. But wicked?”

We crossed Drydell Lane and entered the bridle path, a green tunnel leading up the side of the little valley, today more sun-baked and somnolent than ever. As the quiet countryside rolled away from us, Thorne and I were well beyond sight or sound of other human beings and it dawned on me, in the hush of midafternoon, why Stella had been brought so far from the picnic spot. And I also knew that I no longer had any intention of holding back from Thorne; that instead, given that this was probably the only hour of my entire existence that I would spend alone with him—or indeed any man I found so desirable—I would take from it what I could.

Nevertheless, what I chose to say frightened me so much that I shivered, even in that airless track. “A woman called Meredith turned up on our doorstep, it was through her that I came to be at the art party because she shares a teacher with Sylvia. She claims—she is, I mean there’s no doubt about it—the mother of my brother’s son, conceived while she was a nurse in the war. My father had met her once but I didn’t know of her existence even. Or the child’s. And then last week at the party she told me that my brother had forced himself on her. You see, I cannot even bring myself to say . . .
raped her
. I adored my brother, I know he wasn’t capable of such a thing. Later she and I had such a dreadful argument that I struck her.”

The sun was very hot despite dense leaf cover, yet in places the mud underfoot was not baked dry and I had to step aside or follow a higher bit of ground. A bee, languorous with the weight of pollen, thudded against my hand. In the long silence that followed, I wondered if Thorne knew that he had just been presented with my heart.

“There, up to the left,” I said, thinking, I’ll change the subject and give him the chance to escape my confidences, “is the copse where Stella was killed.”

But Thorne said: “Are you afraid that this woman, Meredith, may be telling the truth about your brother?”

“I don’t trust her. I think her capable of manipulating anything. But one thing, I believe, is authentic. She showed me a note in my brother’s handwriting. Just her name. Nothing else. She claimed that he wrote it while he was dying. I do believe in that note and I puzzle over it, why he would have written her name, just hers, out of love or guilt or perhaps as the beginning of a message. And I suppose I am jealous that it was her name, not mine. He didn’t write to me before he died.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t think I believe her, no. But she’s sown the seeds of doubt. I thought I knew my brother inside and out. It was bad enough to realize he’d had an affair. I was a fool, naïve. I didn’t believe he’d ever loved any young woman except me.”

“Does it make any difference whether she’s telling the truth?”

“Surely it makes all the difference in the world. Above all to the memory of my brother. I loved him. I thought I knew him.”

He sighed, took my jacket, combined it with his own, slung both on his shoulder, and looked down into my face. “Miss Gifford, your brother is dead. What you have left is a mother and her son. And the memory of a boy who before the war was, I suspect, as gloriously clear-headed and ardent as you. Ever since I met you I’ve been meaning to say that I’d heard of a Gifford, a Captain James Gifford who died after nearly twenty-four hours in a shell-hole, one shoulder and one eye missing. His bravery was something of a legend. I’d heard it was a heroic death and that he’d crawled out of the trench to rescue one of his men. How old was he, nineteen, twenty? Poor boy, he had little enough time to learn how to love a woman other than you. He’s dead and surely in anybody’s book that’s punishment enough. Ah, don’t cry. This bloody, bloody war. It goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

As we faced each other across the little lane, I realized that this was the most intimate conversation I’d ever had with another soul. And I also half understood that we were laying our cards on the table one by one and that we were edging closer while maintaining a show of keeping ourselves apart.

“To look at it from another angle,” Thorne said, “why would this woman lie to you?”

“Because she can. To increase our sense of obligation?”

I walked ahead, wiping my eyes first on my sleeve then, belatedly, a handkerchief. Oh, I should not allow myself to cry; he would think me so weak and girlish. So I gathered pace and was almost running by the time I reached the little thicket where the pheasants were confined behind their wire fence and Stella had been buried under bracken. At the gate, I fumbled with the chain looped around and around the post. Thorne didn’t help but stood with folded arms, peering into the trees.

“I remember a wood in the war,” he said, “blasted clear of most of its branches, the few remaining hung with bits of bodies, gas caught in the fallen leaves so that men were stumbling about groping for their masks, blind and screaming. If that day you had told me that I would survive, and that I might stand once again at the top of an English valley, before a pheasant covert, with a woman such as you beside me and a quiet sky above, I would not have believed you.”

“And yet there’s Stella Wheeler,” I said harshly. “We’re here because she was murdered. English woods are not as peaceful as you had hoped.”

I got the gate open at last. The woods were hushed—perhaps the pheasants felt the heat and were huddled into shade and there was no wind to ruffle the leaves—and the bracken had grown higher since last time. Now the leaf cover was so thick that hardly any sunlight got through and the green was deeper, dustier. It was as though we entered an emerald cave with needles of light flickering here and there. I floated across the soft floor of the wood in a nugget of time other than my own. I had stopped crying, my heartbeat had slowed, my mind was quiet, and it seemed to me that I was half Stella—the girl whose cotton robe still drifted perfume from a hook on the back of a bedroom door—half Evelyn, and I knew, as I had known the first time, exactly what must have drawn Stella here.

“Nobody would hear the shot, that’s why he brought her so far. And I think she came willingly with whoever brought her, believing that they would make love.”

If I reached out, I could take him. He stood so close that I felt his heat and sensed the tremor of his nerve endings. My hand was still, lying against the side of my thigh, a mirror of his a few inches away. I knew without any doubt that he had engineered this trip because he couldn’t help himself. He was as absorbed by me as Peter Shaw had been, and the officer with the crimson glass bowl.

I pointed out trampled bracken and a bit of rope tied from tree to tree, marking the place where Stella had fallen. But even the shallow pit in which she’d been buried was already half covered with new undergrowth. There were signs, a beer bottle, a chocolate wrapper, that others had been here, locals and sightseers probably, taking a look at the crime scene. Thorne studied it all carefully and we consulted the map. “If he’d left the coppice this way, he’d have had to pass the manor house but eventually would have come to the Missenden Road, which would have brought him quite quickly into Chesham. Or he might have run back to Drydell Lane and gone into town that way. If, on the other hand, we pursue the theory that it wasn’t Wheeler who shot her but someone else, he might have left a car in a lane nearby and escaped in any number of directions, toward Great Missenden or Wendover or across to Hertfordshire.”

“What do you think? Could it have been anyone but Wheeler?”

“I don’t know. It was a well-planned killing. Quite neat. Wheeler lacks a plausible motive unless as you say he was jealous, so let’s suppose it was someone else who wanted Stella dead. Is it really possible that he could have known about the picnic, ensured that Wheeler went down for a couple of beers, and in the meantime lured Stella to her death, shooting her with a revolver known to be Wheeler’s? And why would anyone do that? She was just a little waitress, hardly a threat. Though Wolfe’s right that the question of the hat is intriguing. Wheeler said he found it with the picnic things, but a lady would never normally be separated from her hat. Look at you, I’ve never seen you without one. But if all we’ve got is a slight problem with a hat, it looks very bad for Wheeler: a premeditated crime like this, a shooting in cold blood for what the prosecution will say was purely financial gain, and a refusal to admit guilt.”

We decided to leave the coppice by the western gate, a route that someone other than Wheeler, intent on escaping, might have taken. “You’ve seen Wheeler,” I said. “Do you honestly think that Stella would have been persuaded to march all this way to these woods, presumably on the promise of a little lovemaking with him? If I were her I would have protested that there were plenty of other places much nearer to the picnic spot where we might have been private. And I would have complained about the damage that a frolic in woodland might do my pink dress. I would have been totally bemused, in fact. No, I don’t think Wheeler could have lured her all this way.”

It would have to be you, Nicholas, I thought. If it had been you who found me lying on a picnic blanket when Wheeler left me, if you had stood over me, held out your hand, and said: Come, I know a place . . .

We left the woods and followed the farm track up the little valley to the lane. And yes, there was a fringe of trees where an automobile might have been concealed, even a tire track in the dried mud at the edge of the road. Quarter of an hour after shooting Stella, a man might be in Great Missenden or Amersham, less than half an hour would bring him to Princes Risborough. “It is possible,” was Thorne’s verdict, “but not probable. There’s no evidence at all. In my experience the simplest explanation is usually true.”

I had stopped thinking about Stella. Nicholas walked a little ahead and I noted the immaculate crease in his trousers, the dust on his shoes. We were between trees again, in sudden shade. In a few minutes, I took my jacket from him. Soon we reached the farm and beyond it the long, sloping track leading down to the town. “It’s so hot,” he said. “I should have thought to bring a flask or such. Could we not sit for a moment?”

“Of course, if you want to.” There was nowhere obvious except a dusty verge, so I stood with my arms folded while he made a show of looking around. Then he sighed, as if with exasperation, and the next moment had taken a hold of my upper arm and was looking into my eyes. “Miss Gifford. You must forgive me. What I’m about to say is something I’ve been rehearsing for days. And I still think I’m mad to say it. But I find I must. I cannot live the rest of my life knowing I missed the chance. You must know, Miss Gifford, that I find you devastatingly attractive.”

I stood with my arm at a somewhat awkward angle, and the sleeve of my blouse rucked up under his long fingers. The fabric of his shirt was of an open weave and the collar was soft, attached, the kind Edmund might have worn. After one startled glance at his face, the look of desperate appeal, I stared instead at my scuffed shoes.

Remember this, I told myself. Never forget a single detail. There was a freckle above the knuckle of his thumb and I was amazed that I should have been given the chance to study so intricate a part of him.

At last he let go of my arm and said, very clipped: “Forgive me. Forgive me. I have behaved unpardonably,” and started to walk away. I watched the distance grow between us.

Well, Evelyn?

“I have thought, until now”—my voice was tentative, a slender thread—“that the strongest feeling I would ever have for a man was grief.” He was still. “But now there’s you.”

He was a few paces away, shaking his head, and when he looked at me at last his eyes were soft with doubt. “What are you telling me?”

“I think of you constantly, until I infuriate myself. I try to brush you from my mind, because of Sylvia.”

He bowed his head, nodded. His hat was off and the angle of the back of his head, nape to crown, reminded me of Edmund. “Very well, Miss Gifford. Evelyn Gifford. I understand you. I have behaved very badly. Let us forget I spoke.”

Voices clamored in my head: the voices of Prudence, Mother, my own. You can’t have him. You shouldn’t, you mustn’t. Be strong. Bear the hurt of parting now to avoid much worse pain later. I cried: “Do you think I will ever forget what you said? How could you be so cruel? Could you not have exercised a little more self-control?”

“It appears not.”

“Haven’t you thought about Sylvia?”

“I have tried to consider Sylvia but I can’t. I can only think of you.”

“This is just because I dare to argue. You think it’s exciting to meet someone who answers back, especially a woman. Can’t you see that? You should put me out of your . . .”

“Yes, that’s so true.” He laughed suddenly. “All true. Each time, I can’t wait to see you because I don’t know what you’ll say next, what fresh remark of mine will be demolished. You must have noticed how I’ve cropped up time and again these past few weeks. Why do you think that is? Except for the art party; to see you there was the most extraordinary shock to me—when we ran down to the jetty and you of all people stepped out of the boat in that mad dress and with your hair so wild. I think you are astonishing.”

“I’m not astonishing. It’s just that I’m educated and ambitious and you’re not used to women like me.”

He laughed again. “Miss Gifford, what gave you this abominably low opinion of yourself? Look at you. I admit, I dreamed of women during the war and they certainly weren’t like you. I wanted softness, I wanted to slide away into someone quiet and gentle and accepting. But then I met you and felt a spark in me, and I did, yes, find you exciting but beautiful too.”

The empty track rolled away on either side. His skin was damp and his smell was of soap and male sweat, so like my brother’s. I had time to imagine the heat of his mouth before he kissed me, but not its softness.