6     

Myringham, where the University of the South is situated, lies about fifteen miles from Kingsmarkham. It boasts a museum, a motte and bailey castle and one of the best-preserved remains of a Roman villa in Britain. And although a new centre has grown up between the university buildings and the railway station, a place of tower blocks and shopping precincts and multistorey car parks, all this red brick and concrete has been kept well away from the old town which stands, unspoilt, on the banks of the Kingsbrook.

Here there are narrow lanes and winding by-streets that call to the mind of the visitor the paintings of Jacob Vrel. The houses are very old, some—of brown brick and worm-eaten grey-brown timber—built before the Wars of the Roses, or even, it is said, before Agincourt. Not all of them have owner-occupiers or steady tenants, for some have fallen into such disrepair, such dismal decay, that their owners cannot afford to put them in order. Squatters have taken possession of them, secure in their ancient right from police interference, safe from eviction because their landlords’ are prevented by law from demolishing their property and by lack of money from repairing it.

But these form only a small colony of the Old Town. Mark Somerset lived in the smarter part, in one of the old houses by the river. In the days when England was Catholic it had been a priest’s house and in one of the walls of its garden was a narrow and beautiful stained-glass window, for this was also a wall of St Luke’s Church. The Myringham Catholics had a new church now in the new town, and the presbytery was a modern house. But here where the brown walls clustered about the church and the mill, the fifteenth century still lingered.

There was nothing fifteenth century about Mark Somerset. An athletic-looking man in his fifties, he wore neat black jeans and a tee-shirt, and Wexford detected his age only by the lines about his bright blue eyes and the veining of his strong hands. The man’s belly was flat, his chest well muscled, and he had had the good fortune to keep his hair which, having once been golden, was now silver-gilt.

‘Ah, the fuzz,’ he said, his smile and pleasant tone robbing the greeting of rudeness. ‘I thought you’d turn up.’

‘Shouldn’t we have turned up, Mr Somerset?’

‘Don’t know. That’s for you to decide. Come in, but be as quiet as you can in the hall, will you? My wife only came out of hospital this morning and she’s just managed to get off to sleep.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ said Burden fatuously—and unnecessarily, in Wexford’s view.

Somerset smiled. It was a smile of sad experience, of endurance, tinged very slightly with contempt. He spoke in a near-whisper. ‘She’s been an invalid for years. But you haven’t come to talk about that. Shall we go in here?’

The room had a beamed ceiling and panelled walls. A pair of glass doors, a later but pleasing addition, were open to a small paved garden backed by the riverside trees, and the foliage of these trees looked like black lace against the amber flare of the setting sun. Beside these doors was a low table on which was a bottle of hock in an ice-bucket.

‘I’m a sports coach at the university,’ said Somerset. ‘Saturday night’s the only time I allow myself a drink. Will you have some wine?’

The two policemen accepted and Somerset fetched three glasses from a cabinet. The Liebfraumilch had the delicate quality peculiar to some kinds of hock, that of tasting like liquid flowers. It was ice-cold, scented, dry.

‘This is very kind of you, Mr Somerset,’ said Wexford. ‘You’re disarming me. I hardly like to ask you now if we may take your fingerprints.’

Somerset laughed. ‘You can take my fingerprints with pleasure. I suppose you’ve found the prints of some unknown mystery man at Bury Cottage, have you? They’re probably mine, though I haven’t been in the place for three years. They can’t be my father’s. I had the whole place redecorated after he died.’ He spread out his strong work-broadened hands with a kind of bold innocence.

‘I understand you didn’t get on with your cousin?’

‘Well, now,’ said Somerset, ‘rather than let you interrogate me and probably put to me a lot of time-wasting questions, wouldn’t it be better if I told you what I know about my cousin and gave you a sort of history of our relationship? Then you can ask me what you like afterwards.’

Wexford said, ‘That’s exactly what we want.’

‘Good.’ Somerset had the good teacher’s succinct crisp manner. ‘You wouldn’t want me to have any squeamishness about not speaking ill of the dead, would you? Not that I have much ill to speak of Angela. I was sorry for her. I thought she was feeble, and I don’t much care for feeble people. I first met her about five years ago. She’d come to this country from Australia and I’d never seen her before. But she was my cousin all right, the daughter of my father’s dead brother, so you needn’t get any ideas she might have been an impostor.’

‘You have been reading too many detective stories, Mr Somerset.’

‘Maybe.’ Somerset grinned and went on, ‘She looked me up because I and my father were the only relatives she had in this country, and she was lonely in London. Or so she said. I think she was on the look-out for any pickings there might be for her. She was a greedy girl, poor Angela. She hadn’t met Robert at that time. When she did she stopped coming out here and I didn’t hear from her again until they were about to get married and hadn’t anywhere to live. I’d written to her to tell her of my father’s death—to which, by the way, she didn’t reply—and she wanted to know if I’d let her and Robert have Bury Cottage.

‘Well, I’d been meaning to sell it, but I couldn’t get the price I wanted, so I agreed and let it to Angela and Robert for five pounds a week.’

‘A very low rent, Mr Somerset,’ said Wexford, interrupting him. ‘You could have got at least twice that.’

Somerset shrugged. Without asking them he re-filled their glasses. ‘Apparently, they were very badly off, and she was my cousin. I have some silly old-fashioned ideas about blood being thicker than water, Mr Wexford, and I can’t shake them off. I didn’t in the least mind letting them have the place furnished at what was little more than a nominal rent. What I did mind was when Angela sent me her electricity bill for me to pay.’

‘You’d made no agreement about that, of course?’

‘Of course not. I asked her to come over here and we’d talk about it. Well, she came and spun me the old sob story I’d heard from her before about their poverty, her nerves and her unhappy adolescence with her mother who wouldn’t let her go to university. I suggested that if money was so tight with them she should get a job. She was a qualified librarian and she could easily have got a library job at Kingsmarkham or Stowerton. She pleaded her mental breakdown, but she seemed perfectly healthy to me. I think she was just lazy. Anyway, she flounced out of the house, telling me I was mean, and I didn’t see either her or Robert again until about eighteen months ago. On that occasion they didn’t see me. I was out with a friend in Pomfret and I saw Robert and Angela through the windows of a restaurant. It was a very expensive restaurant and they seemed to be doing themselves proud, so I came to the conclusion they were doing a good deal better financially.

‘We actually met again only once more. That was last April. We ran into each other in Myringham in that monstrosity the planners are pleased to call a shopping precinct. They were loaded down with stuff they’d bought, but they seemed depressed in spite of the fact that Robert had got himself this new job. Perhaps they were only embarrassed at coming face to face with me. I never saw Angela again. She wrote to me about a month ago to say that they’d want to leave the cottage as soon as they’d got a place in London, and that that would probably be in the New Year.’

‘Were they a happy couple?’ Burden asked when Somerset had finished.

‘Very, as far as I could tell.’ Somerset got up to close the glass doors as the sunset light faded and a little wind rose. ‘They had so much in common. Should I be very mean-spirited if I said that what they had in common were paranoia, greed and a general idea that the world owed them a living? I’m sorry she’s dead, I’m sorry to hear of anyone dying like that, but I can’t say I liked her. Men can be gauche and tough as they please, but I like a little grace in a woman, don’t you? I don’t want to be fanciful, but I sometimes thought Robert and Angela got on so well because they were united in gracelessness against the world.’

‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr Somerset,’ said Wexford more as a matter of form than with sincerity. Somerset had told him much he didn’t know, but had he told him anything that mattered? ‘You won’t take it amiss, I’m sure, if I ask you what you were doing yesterday afternoon.’

He could have sworn the man hesitated. It was as if he had already thought up how he must answer, but still had to brace himself to give that answer. ‘I was here alone. I took the afternoon off to get things ready for my wife’s coming home. I’m afraid I was quite alone and I didn’t see anyone, so I can’t give you confirmation.’

‘Very well,’ said Wexford. ‘That can’t be helped. I don’t suppose you have any idea as to what friends your cousin had?’

‘None at all. According to her, she had no friends. Everyone she’d ever known but Robert had been cruel to her, she said, so making friends was just to invite more cruelty.’ Somerset drained his glass. ‘Have some more wine?’

‘No, thank you. We’ve taken enough of your Saturday-night ration as it is.’

Somerset gave them his pleasant frank smile. ‘I’ll see you to the door.’

As they came out into the hall, a querulous voice sounded from upstairs: ‘Marky, Marky, where are you?’

Somerset winced, perhaps only at the ugly diminutive. But blood is thicker than water, and a man and his wife are one. He went to the foot of the stairs, called out that he was just coming, and opened the front door. Wexford and Burden said good night quickly, for the voice from above had risen to a thin petulant wail.

In the morning Wexford returned as he had promised to Bury Cottage. He had news, some of which had only just reached him, for Robert Hathall, but he had no intention of telling the widower what he most wanted to know.

Mrs Hathall let him in and said her son was still asleep. She showed him into the living room and told him to wait there, but she offered him neither tea nor coffee. She was the kind of woman, he decided, who had probably seldom if ever in her life dispensed refreshment to anyone but members of her own family. They were a strange guarded lot, these Hathalls, whose isolationism apparently infected the people they married, for when he asked Mrs Hathall if Angela’s predecessor had ever been to the cottage, she said:

‘Eileen wouldn’t have lowered herself. She keeps herself to herself.’

‘And Rosemary, your grand-daughter?’

‘Rosemary came once, and once was enough. Anyway, she’s too busy with her schoolwork to go out and about.’

‘Will you give me Mrs Eileen Hathall’s address, please?’

Mrs Hathall’s face grew as red as her son’s, as red as the wrinkled skin on a turkey’s neck. ‘No, I won’t! You’ve no business with Eileen. Find it out for yourself.’ She banged the door on him and he was left alone.

It was the first time he had ever been alone there, so he used the waiting time to survey the room. The furniture, which he had supposed to be Angela’s and had therefore credited her with taste, was in fact Somerset’s, the lifelong collection perhaps of Somerset’s father. It was the prettiest kind of late-Victorian with some earlier pieces, spindle-legged chairs, an elegant small oval table. By the window was a red and white Venetian glass oil-lamp that had never been converted to electricity. A glass-fronted bookcase contained, for the most part, the kind of works an old man would have collected and loved: a complete set of Kipling bound in red leather, some H. G. Wells, Gosse’s Father and Son, a little of Ruskin and a lot of Trollope. But on the top shelf, where previously perhaps had stood an ornament, were the Hathalls’ own books. There were half a dozen thrillers in paperback, two or three works of ‘pop’ archaeology, a couple of novels which had aroused controversy over their sexual content when they had been published, and two handsomely jacketed imposing tomes.

Wexford took down the first of these. It was a volume of colour prints of ancient Egyptian jewellery, contained scarcely any text apart from the captions beneath the pictures, and bore inside its front cover a plate which proclaimed it as the property of the library of the National Archaeologists’ League. Stolen, of course, by Angela. But books, like umbrellas, pens and boxes of matches, belong in a category of objects the stealing of which is a very venial offence, and Wexford thought little of it. He replaced the book and took out the last one on the shelf. Its title was Of Men and Angels, A Study of Ancient British Tongues, and when he opened it he saw that it was a very learned work with chapters on the origins of Welsh, Erse, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish and their common Celtic source. Its price was nearly six pounds, and he wondered that anyone as poor as the Hathalls had claimed to have been should have spent so much on something which was surely as far above their heads as it was above his own.

He was still holding the book when Hathall came into the room. He saw the man’s eyes go warily to it, then look sharply away.

‘I didn’t know you were a student of Celtic languages, Mr Hathall,’ he said pleasantly.

‘It was Angela’s. I don’t know where it came from, but she’d had it for ages.’

‘Strange, since it was only published this year. But no matter. I thought you’d like to know that your car has been found. It had been abandoned in London, in a side street near Wood Green station. Are you familiar with the district?’

‘I’ve never been there.’ Hathall’s gaze kept returning, with a kind of reluctant fascination or perhaps apprehensively, to the book Wexford still kept hold of. And for this very reason Wexford determined to keep hold of it and not to remove the finger which he had slipped at random between its pages as if to keep a place. ‘When can I have it back?’

‘In two or three days. When we’ve had a good look at it.’

‘Examined it for those famous fingerprints you’re always on about, I suppose?’

‘Am I, Mr Hathall? I? Aren’t you rather projecting on to me what you think I ought to feel?’ Wexford looked blandly at him. No, he wouldn’t gratify the man’s curiosity, though it was hard to tell now what Hathall most longed for. A revelation of what the fingerprints had disclosed? Or for that book to be laid down casually as of no account? ‘My present feeling is that you should stop worrying about investigations which only we can make. Your mind may be eased a little when I tell you your wife hadn’t been sexually assaulted.’ He waited for some sign of relief, but only saw those eyes with their red glint dart once more to the book. And there was no response when he said as he prepared to leave, ‘Your wife died very quickly, in perhaps no more than fifteen seconds. It’s possible that she scarcely knew what was happening to her.’

Getting up, he eased his finger from the pages of the book and slipped the jacket flap in where it had been. ‘You won’t mind if I borrow this for a few days, will you?’ he said, and Hathall shrugged but still said nothing at all.