Some Lie and Some Die (18 page)

‘Now will you both listen quietly to what I have to say?’ He waited. Neither spoke. ‘Mrs Peveril, let me tell you what I think happened. In Brighton you witnessed a bank robbery.’ Her eyes opened wide. She gave a little chattering murmur. ‘That was a most upsetting experience for you, but you very properly came forward to give information to the police. You were a key witness. Naturally, the police questioned you exhaustively. You fancied yourself badgered and you became frightened, ill perhaps with fright, both from the constant visits of the police and from a notion that some revenge might be taken against you for the information you had given. You moved here to get away from that. Am I right?’

Mrs Peveril said nothing. Her husband, who never missed a cue, said, ‘Sure, you’re right. Never mind where I had my roots, my contacts, my ideal studio. Madam wanted to run away so we ran away.’

‘Please, Mr Peveril.’ Wexford turned to the woman, sensing that he must be very careful, very gentle. Her stillness, the compulsive nail biting, the hard set furrows in her face, were ominous. ‘You had only been here a few months when you realised, because of what you had seen, that you might soon be involved in another and perhaps even more disturbing criminal case. Mrs Peveril, we know you saw Dawn Stonor
on Monday, June sixth. You gave an accurate description of her, more precise than any other we have. I suggest to you—please don’t be alarmed—that you either admitted her to this house or saw her enter another house. You told us you saw her cross the fields because you believed that would be the surest way to draw our attention, the attention you find so frightening, away from you and your own neighbourhood.’

It might have been all right. She took her hand from her mouth and bit her lip. She made a little preparatory murmur. It would have been all right if Peveril hadn’t started to his feet and shouted at her, ‘Christ, is that true? You bloody fool! I thought there was something fishy, I knew it. You told lies to the police and nearly landed me right in it. My God!’

She began to scream. ‘I never saw her at all! I never saw her!’ A slap on the face would have been effective. Instead, her husband began shaking her so that the screams came out in stifled strangled gasps. She crumpled and fell on the floor. Peveril took a step backwards, white-faced.

‘Get Miss Mowler,’ snapped Wexford.

By the time he returned with the nurse, Mrs Peveril was lying back in a chair, moaning softly. Miss Mowler gave her a bracing, toothy smile.

‘We’ll get you to bed, dear, and then I’ll make you a nice strong cup of tea.’

Mrs Peveril cringed away from her. ‘Go away. I don’t want you. I want Edward.’

‘All right, dear. Just as you like. Edward can get you to bed while I make the tea.’

At the use of his Christian name Peveril frowned ferociously, but he gave an arm to his wife and helped her up the stairs. Miss Mowler bustled about, removing plates of congealing food, boiling a kettle, hunting for aspirins. A little thin woman, she was quick in her movements and efficient. She talked all the time she worked, apologising for non-existent faults. What a pity she hadn’t been on the spot when ‘it’ happened. If only she had been in her garden, for instance. How
unfortunate that, what with one thing and another, she had had to wash her hands and take off her overall before accompanying Mr Peveril to the house. Wexford said very little. He was thinking that he would be lucky to get any more out of Mrs Peveril that day.

The tea was taken up. Peveril didn’t reappear. Wexford followed Miss Mowler back into her own bungalow where newspapers were spread over the hall carpet and a kind of late spring cleaning seemed to be in progress.

‘I spilt a cup of cocoa down the wall. It’s a blessing this paper’s washable. I don’t know what you must think of me, washing walls on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘The better the day, the better the deed,’ said Wexford politely. ‘I want to have another look at the quarry, Miss Mowler. May I make my way there through your garden?’

He was permitted to do so but only after he had refused pressing offers of tea and coffee, sherry, a sandwich. Miss Mowler, having been assured that he didn’t need her to accompany him down the path and open the gate for him, returned to her work. He let himself out of the garden and into the narrow no man’s land that separated the estate from Sundays.

Heavy rains had fallen and now the sun had returned as bright and hot as ever. But it was too soon yet for new grass to show, too soon for even the beginnings of the green carpet which by autumn would once more cover the desert plain which Sundays park had become. Wexford sat down on the edge of the quarry. Here nature was winning, for the flowers and shrubs, the delicate yet lush herbage of June, had been assailed by only half a dozen trampling feet. New roses, new harebells, were opening to replace the crushed blossoms. He looked at the broken wire, the wall, the three gates, but they told him nothing more, and gradually the scented air, sun-warmed and soft, drove thoughts of the case from his mind. A butterfly, a Clouded Yellow, drifted languidly past him and alighted on a rose, its petals paler and creamier than the buttercup-coloured wings. Not so many butterflies these days as when he was a child, not so many as when even his daughters were children. Under his breath he caught himself humming a tune. At first he thought it was that song of Vedast’s which stuck in his mind and irritated him. Then he realised it wasn’t that one but a ballad of Betti Ho’s in which she prophesied that her children would never see a butterfly except in a museum. The Clouded Yellow took to the air again, hovering, floating …

‘You’re trespassing!’

Wexford started to his feet, shaking himself out of his dream.

‘You’re trespassing,’ said Silk again, half-serious, half-peevishly ironic. ‘I don’t see why I should always have the fuzz trampling over my land.’

Looking up into the irritable white face and the smiling black one, Wexford said, ‘I’m not trampling. I was sitting and thinking. What are you two up to? Planning another festival?’

‘No, we’re going to try and get a commune going here during the university vacation. Louis and I and his girl friend and about half a dozen others. Louis wants to see how it works out with a view to operating a kibbutz system in Marumi.’

‘Really?’ said Wexford blankly. He didn’t see how gathering together a house party in a fully-equipped and furnished mansion could be a rehearsal for kibbutzim in an equatorial state, but he didn’t say so. ‘Well, I think I’ll trample off now.’

‘So will I,’ said Louis unexpectedly. He gave his radiant grin and patted Silk on the grey head which reached just to his shoulder. ‘Peace be with you.’

They skirted the Peverils’ fence and emerged at the head of The Pathway. Mrs Peveril’s bedroom curtains were drawn. Dunsand was pulling puny little weeds out of his flowerless borders. Beside Miss Mowler’s car a bucket of soapy water stood unattended. It was hot, sunny, a radiant day. The English do not relax in deck-chairs in their front gardens and, apart from the crouching figure of the philosophy lecturer, the place was deserted. Louis waved graciously to him.

‘Want a lift into Kingsmarkham?’

‘Thanks,’ Louis said. ‘That way I might get the three-thirty bus to Myringham.’

Wexford’s car was a fair-sized one, but no car except perhaps Vedast’s Rolls would have been roomy enough to accommodate
Louis Mbowele comfortably. Laughing, he hunched himself inside the folds of his pony-skin and slid the passenger seat back to its fullest extent.

Wexford said, ‘When you get to the top of wherever it is you’re going, are you going to
make
them live in communes?’

‘It’s the only way of life, man.’

‘And force them to be equal and dictate the pattern of their houses and the subjects of their study and operate a censorship and forbid other political parties?’

‘For a time, for a time. It’s necessary. They have to learn. When they see it all works and the new generation’s grown up and we have peace and full bellies, then we can start to relax. It’s necessary to make them do what they aren’t just too crazy to do right now. So you have to make them for their own good.’

‘Do you know a saying of James Boswell? “We have no right to make people happy against their will”?’

Louis nodded, smiling no longer.

‘I know it, man, and I know the connection in which it was said. The slave trade. The traders excused themselves on the ground that my people would be happier on plantations than in jungles. This is different. This is for real. And it’s only for a time.’

‘Oh, Louis,’ said Wexford, turning into the Forby road, ‘that’s what they all say.’

They drove into Kingsmarkham in silence. The heat of the day, his failure to get anywhere, enervated Wexford. There seemed nothing else to do with his afternoon but go home, eat his stale lunch, maybe sleep. Then, as they approached the place where the Myringham bus stopped, he became aware of the long silence and wondered if he had offended the young African. Louis looked as if he would have a hearty appetite, and the Olive and Dove did a good Sunday lunch.…

‘Have you eaten?’ he said.

‘Sure. I cadged some bread and cheese off Len.’

‘Mr Dunsand? Why did you have to cadge? Isn’t he very hospitable?’

Louis grinned. Evidently, he hadn’t been offended, only sleepy from the sun. ‘He’s a recluse,’ he said. ‘He finds it hard to communicate. Still, I took him out to lunch a while back in Myringham—last Wednesday fortnight it was—so I guess he owed me a meal. I asked him to join our commune but he’s not together enough for that.’

‘Strange. You’d think a lecturer in philosophy would …’

‘Have found the way? Found himself?’ Louis leapt out of the car and strode round to open Wexford’s door. ‘That’s a popular misconception, man. It’s living—a broad spectrum of living—that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to
think.’

The bus was late. Louis, scorning to join the queue, sat down on the steps of the Snowdrop Cleaners, and Wexford, leaving the car at the kerb, followed him.

‘How do you get on with him?’

Louis considered. The dozen or so people in the queue bestowed upon him glances of intense, if repressed, curiosity. Few black-skinned men and women had penetrated to this country town, and to them his coat, his beads and the green silk scarf he wore round his head—although no more than fashionable ‘gear’ for black and white alike—perhaps appeared as tribal paraphernalia. He returned their looks with the gracious smile of a prince, a tawny Rasselas, and said to Wexford:

‘He’s all right as a teacher, he knows his subject. But he doesn’t seem to like people. You see, he’s afraid of them.’

‘What else is there to be afraid of?’ asked Wexford to whom this idea, in all its truth, had come suddenly as if out of the air. ‘Except, maybe, thunderstorms, floods, what insurance companies call Acts of God. If you say you’re afraid of bombs or war, it’s people who make the bombs and the war.’

‘You’re right. But, oh, man, there are a lot of people and they are frightening. And it’s worse when one of the people
you’re frightened of is yourself.’ Louis gazed into the heart of the afternoon sun. ‘Someone told me he was better when his wife lived with him. He used to go away on holidays then, the Majorca bit, the Costa Brava scramble. He doesn’t do anything now but read and paint the house and mow the lawn. But you can’t picture him married to
her
, can you?’ Louis got up, thrust out his hand. ‘Here’s the bus.’

‘Picture her? I don’t know her. Do you?’

Extending one huge furry arm to support her, Louis helped a fragile-looking old lady on to the bus platform. In the manner of one whose girlhood dreams have at last been realised and who has fallen into the hands of a sheikh, she blushed, giggled and almost panicked. The other passengers stared and whispered.

‘Come along now,’ said the driver. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

Louis grinned. Head and shoulders above the rest, he gave his fare, looking over a diminutive woman’s hat at Wexford.

‘I don’t know her. Old Silk told me who she was at the festival, pointed her out while Zeno Vedast was singing. Man, you stood next to her.’

‘I did?’

The bus started.

‘Peace be with you,’ Louis shouted.

‘And with you,’ said Wexford.

The golden car wasn’t there. Perhaps it had been silly of him to think it would be. On such a fine afternoon they would all have gone out to see the house Vedast was buying. On the almost bare forecourt, blanched ashen pale by hard sunlight, his own car looked forlorn. The Cheriton Forest Hotel seemed asleep. But the porter who had admired Nell Tate was awake. He sat in the deserted hall, reading the
Sunday Express
and smoking a cigarette which he stubbed out quickly when Wexford appeared.

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ he said in answer to the chief inspector’s
enquiry. ‘Mr Vedast and Mrs Tate went out in Mr Vedast’s car after lunch.’

‘You don’t know when they’ll be back?’

Memories of fifty-pence pieces easily earned stirred in the porter’s mind. He was obviously reluctant to deny Wexford anything. ‘Mr Tate took his coffee out into the garden, sir. Would you care for me to …?’