It was five in the morning. Inspector Burden had seen more dawns than most men, but he had never quite become jaundiced by them, especially summer dawns. He liked the stillness, the sight of the little country town in a depopulated state, the hard blue light that was of the same shade and intensity as the light at dusk but without dusk's melancholy.

  The two men they had been questioning about last night's fight in one of Kingsmarkham's cafes had confessed separately and almost simultaneously just a quarter of an hour before. Now they were locked into two stark white cells on the ground floor of this incongruously modern police station. Burden stood by the window in Wexford's office, looking at the sky which had the peculiar greenish tint of aquamarine. A flock of birds flying in dense formation crossed it. They reminded Burden of his childhood when, as at dawn, everything had seemed bigger, clearer and of more significance than it did today. Tired and a little sickened, he opened the window to get rid of cigarette smoke and the sweaty smell of youths who wore leather jackets in the height of summer.

  Outside in the corridor he could hear Wexford saying good night—or good morning—to Colonel Griswold, the Chief Constable. Burden wondered if Griswold had guessed when he arrived just before ten with a long spiel about stamping out hooliganism that he was in for an all-night session. That, he thought unfairly, was where meddling got you.

  The heavy front door clanged and Griswold's car started. Burden watched it move off the forecourt, past the great stone urns filled with pink geraniums and into Kingsmarkham High Street. The Chief Constable was driving himself. Burden saw with approval and grudging amusement that Griswold drove at just about twenty-eight miles per hour until he reached the black and white derestriction sign. Then the car gathered speed and flashed away out of sight along the empty country road that led to Pomfret.

  He turned round when he heard Wexford come in. The Chief Inspector's heavy grey face was a little greyer than usual, but he showed no other sign of tiredness and his eyes, dark and hard as basalt, showed a gleam of triumph. He was a big man with big features and a big intimidating voice. His grey suit—one of a series of low fastening, double-breasted affairs—appeared more shabby and wrinkled than ever today. But it suited Wexford, being not unlike an extension of his furrowed pachydermatous skin.

  "Another job jobbed," he said, "as the old woman said when she jobbed the old man's eye out."

  Burden bore with such vulgarisms stoically. He knew that they were meant to horrify him; they always succeeded. He made his thin lips crease into a tight smile. Wexford handed him a blue envelope and he was glad of the diversion to hide his slight embarrassment.

  "Griswold's just given me this," Wexford said. "At five in this morning. No sense of timing."

  Burden glanced at the Essex postmark. "Is that the man he was on about earlier, sir?"

  "Well, I don't have fanmail from beautiful olde worlde Thringford as a general rule, do I, Mike? This is the Rev. Mr. Archer all right, taking advantage of the Old Pals' Act." He lowered himself into one of the rather flimsy chairs and it gave the usual protesting creak. Wexford had what his junior called a love-hate relationship with those chairs and indeed with all the aggressively modern furnishings of his office. The glossy block floor, the square of nylon carpet, the chairs with their sleek chrome legs, the primrose Venetian blinds—all these in Wexford's estimation were not "serviceable", they were dust-traps and they were "chichi". At the same time he took in them an enormous half-secret pride. They had their effect. They served to impress visiting a strangers such as the writer of this letter Wexford was now taking from its envelope.

  It too was written on rather thick blue paper. In a painfully authentic upper-class accent, the Chief Inspector said affectedly, "May as well get on to the Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, my dear. We were up at Oxford together, don't you know?" He squeezed his face into a kind of snarling grin. "All among the bloody dreaming spires," he said. "I hate that sort of thing."

  "Were they?"

  "Were they what?"

  "At Oxford together?"

  "I don't know. Something like that. It may have been the playing fields of Eton. All Griswold said was, 'Now we've got those villains wrapped up, I'd like you to have a look at a letter from a very good friend of mine called Archery. Excellent fellow, one of the best. This enclosure's for you. I'd like you to give him all the help you can. I've a notion it's got something to do with that scoundrel Painter.' "

  "Who's Painter?"

  "Villain who got the chop about fifteen or sixteen years ago," said Wexford laconically. "Let's see what the parson has to say, shall we?"

  Burden looked over his shoulder. The letter was headed St. Columba's Vicarage, Thringford, Essex. The greek e's awakened in him a small hostility. Wexford read it aloud.

  " 'Dear sir, I hope you will forgive me for taking up your valuable time...' Don't have much choice, do I? '...but I regard this matter as being of some urgency. Col. Griswold, the Chief Constable of blah blah blah and so on, has very kindly told me you are the gentleman who may be able to assist me in this problem so I am taking the liberty, having first consulted him, of writing to you.' " He cleared his throat and loosened his crumpled grey tie. "Takes a hell of a time coming to the point, I must say. Ah, here we go. 'You will remember the case of Herbert Arthur Painter...' I will. 'I understand you were in charge of it. I therefore supposed I should come to you before pursuing certain enquiries which, much against my will, I am compelled to make.' "

  "Compelled?"

  "That's what the man says. Doesn't say why. The rest's a load of compliments and can he come and see me tomorrow—no, today. He's going to phone this morning, but he 'anticipates my willingness to meet him.' " He glanced at the window to where the sun was coming up over York Street and with one of his distorted quotations, said, "I suppose he's sleeping in Elysium at this moment, crammed with distressful cold mutton or whatever parsons go to bed on."

  "What's it all about?"

  "Oh God, Mike, it's obvious, isn't it? You don't want to take any notice of this 'being compelled' and 'against his will' stuff. I don't suppose his stipend amounts to much. He probably writes true crime stories in between early Communion and the Mothers' Meeting. He must be getting desperate if he reckons on titillating the mass appetite by resurrecting Painter."

  Burden said thoughtfully, "I seem to remember the case. I'd just left school..."

  "And it inspired your choice of a career, did it?" Wexford mocked. " 'What are you going to be, son?' 'I'm going to be I detective, Dad.' "

  In his five years as Wexford's right hand man, Burden had grown immune to his teasing. He knew he was a kind of safety valve, the stooge perhaps on whom Wexford could vent his violent and sometimes shocking sense of humour. The people of this little town, indiscriminately referred to by Wexford as "our customers" had, unless suspected of felony, to be spared. Burder was there to take the overflow of his chief's rage, ridicule and satire. Now he was cast as the sponge to soak up the scorn that was rightly the due of Griswold and Griswold's friend.

  He looked shrewdly at Wexford. After a trying, frustrating day and night, this letter was the last straw. Wexford was suddenly tense with irritation, his skin more deeply wrinkled than usual, his whole body flexed with the anger that would not suffer fools gladly. That tension must find release.

  "This Painter thing," Burden said slyly, slipping into his role of therapist, "a bit run of the mill, wasn't it? I followed it in the papers because it was the big local sensation. I don't remember it was remarkable in any other way."

  Wexford slipped the letter back into its envelope and put it in a drawer. His movements were precise and under a tight control. One wrong word. Burden thought, and he'd have torn it up, chucked the pieces on the floor and left them to the mercy of the cleaner. His words had apparently been as right as possible under the circumstances for Wexford said in a sharp cool voice, "It was remarkable to me."

  "Because you handled it?"

  "Because it was the first murder case I ever handled on my own. It was remarkable to Painter because it hanged him and to his widow, I daresay. I suppose it shook her a bit as far as anything could shake that girl."

  Rather nervously Burden watched him observe the cigarette burn one of the men they had been interviewing had made in the lemon-coloured leather of a chair seat. He waited for the explosion. Instead Wexford said indifferently: "Haven't you got a home to got to?"

  "Too late now," said Burden, stifling a yawn that threatened. "Besides, my wife's away at the seaside."

  A strongly uxorious man, he found his bungalow like a morgue when Jean and the children were absent. This was a side of his character that afforded Wexford many opportunities for quips and snide remarks, this coupled with his comparative youth, his stolid stick-in-the-mud nature and a certain primness of outlook. But all Wexford said was, "I forgot." He was good at his job. The big ugly man respected him for that. Although he might deride, Wexford appreciated the advantage of having a deputy whose grave good looks were attractive to women. Seated opposite that ascetic face, warmed by a compassion Wexford called 'softness', they were more inclined to open their hearts than to a majestic fifty-five-year-old heavyweight. His personality, however, was not strong and his superior effaced him. Now, in order to channel off that sharp-edged vitality, he was going to have to risk a rebuke for stupidity.

  He risked it. "If you're going to have to argue the toss with this Archery, wouldn't it be a good idea if we had a recap of the facts?"

  "We?"

  "Well, you then, sir. You must be a bit rusty yourself on the case after so long."

  The outburst came with an undercurrent of laughter. "God Almighty! D'you think I can't see your brain working? When I want a psychiatrist I'll hire a professional." He paused and the laughter became a wry grin. "O.K. it might help me..." But Burden had made the mistake of relaxing too soon. "To get the facts straight for Mr. Bloody Archery, I mean," Wexford snapped. "But there's no mystery, you know, no cunning little red herrings. Painter did it all right." He pointed eastwards out of the window. The broad Sussex sky was becoming suffused with rose and gold, bands of soft creamy pink like strokes from a watercolour brush. "That's as sure as the sun's rising now," he said. "There never was any doubt. Herbert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the head with an axe and he did it for two hundred pounds. He was a brutal savage moron. I read in the paper the other day that the Russians call anti-social people "unpersons" and that just about describes him. Funny sort of character for a parson to champion."

  "If he's championing him."

  "We shall see," said Wexford.

  The nap Wexford had prescribed for him would have been attractive on a dull day, but not this morning when the sky was blue and cloudless and the sun promised tropical heat by midday. Moreover, Burden remembered that he had not made his bed for three days. Better have that shower and that shave instead.

  After a canteen breakfast of two eggs and a couple of rashers of the greenback he liked, he had made up his mind what he was going to do. An hour could easily be spared. He drove northwards along the High Street with all the car windows down, past the shops, over the Kingsbrook Bridge, past the Olive and Dove and out on to the Stowerton road. Apart from a new house here and there, a supermarket on the site of the old police station, and aggressive road signs all over the place, things had not changed much in sixteen years. The meadows, the tall trees burdened with the heavy foliage of July, the little weatherboard cottages were much the same as when Alice Flower had seen them on her shopping trips in the Daimler. There would have been less traffic, then, he thought. He braked, pulled in and raised his eyebrows at the youth on a motorbike who, overtaking the oncoming stream, had missed him by inches.

  The lane where Victor's Piece was must be somewhere about here. Those circumstantial details Wexford had been so tantalising about were coming back to him from his own memory. Surely he had read about a bus stop and a telephone box at the end of the lane? Would these be the meadows he remembered reading that Painter had crossed, desperate to conceal a bundle of bloodstained clothing?

  Here was the phone box now. He indicated left and turned slowly into the lane. For a short way its surface was metalled, then it petered out into a track ending in a gate. There were only three houses: a white-plastered semi-detached pair and opposite them the late Victorian pile he had described as "a hideous dump".

  He had never been as near to it as this before, but he saw noting to make him change his opinion. The roof of grey slates had been constructed—tortured almost—into a number of steep gables. Two of these dominated the front of the house, but there was a third on the right hand side and out of it grew another smaller one that apparently overlooked the back. Each gable was criss-crossed with timbering, some of it inexpertly carved into chevrons and all painted a dull bottle green. In places the plaster between the wood had fallen away, exposing rough pinkish brickwork. Ivy, of the same shade of green, spread its flat leaves and its rope-like grey tendrils from the foot of the downstairs windows to the highest gable where a lattice flapped open. There it had crept and burrowed into the mealy wall, prising the window frame away from the bricks.

  Burden observed the garden with a countryman's eye. Never had he seen such a fine selection of weeds. The fertile black soil, cultivated and tended for many years, now nourished docks with leaves as thick and glossy as rubber plants, puce-headed thistles, nettles four feet tall. The gravel paths were choked with grass and mildewed groundsel. Only the clarity of the air and the soft brilliance of sunlight prevented the place from being actually sinister.

  The front door was locked. No doubt this window beside it belonged to the drawing room. Burden could not help wondering with a certain wry humour what insensitive administrator had decreed that this scene of an old woman's murder should be for years the home—indeed the last refuge—of other old women. But they were gone now. The place looked as if it had been empty for years.

  Through the window he could see a large shadowy room. In the grate of the amber-coloured marble fireplace someone had prudently placed crumpled newspaper to catch the drifts of soot. Wexford had said there had been blood all over that fireplace. There, just in front of the copper kerb, was where the body must have lain. He made his way round the side, pushing through a shrubbery where elders and strong little birches were threatening to oust the lilac. The panes in the kitchen casement were blurred with dirt and there was no kitchen door, only a back door that apparently opened off the end of the central passage. The Victorians, he reflected, were not too hot on design. Two doors with a straight passage between them! The draught would be appalling.

  By now he was in the back garden but he literally could not see the wood for the trees. Nature had gone berserk at Victor's Piece and the coach house itself was almost totally obscured by creeper. He strolled across the shady flagged yard, made cool by the jutting walls of the house, and found himself skirting a conservatory, attached apparently to a kind of morning or breakfast room. It housed a vine, long dead and quite leafless.

  So that was Victor's Piece. Pity he couldn't get inside, but he would, in any case, have to get back. Out of long habit—and partly to set a good example—he had closed all the windows of his car and locked the doors. Inside it was like an oven. He drove out of the broken gateway, into the lane and joined the traffic stream on the Stowerton road.

  A greater contrast between the building he had left and the building he entered could hardly have been found. Fine weather suited Kingsmarkham Police Station. Wexford sometimes said that the architect of this new building must have designed it while holidaying in the South of France. It was white, boxy, unnecessarily vast and ornamented here and there with frescoes that owed something to the Elgin marbles.

  On this July morning its whiteness glared and glistened. But if its facade seemed to welcome and bask in the sun its occupants did not. There was far too much glass. All right, said Wexford, for hothouse plants or tropical fish, but a mixed blessing for an elderly Anglo-Saxon policeman with high blood pressure and a low resistance to heat. The telephone receiver slid about in his large hand and when he had finished talking to Henry Archery he pulled down the Venetian blinds.

  "Heat wave's coming," he said to Burden. "I reckon your wife's picked a good week."

  Burden looked up from the statement he had begun to read. Lean as a greyhound, his face thin and acute, he often had the hound's instinct for scenting the unusual, coupled with a man's eager imagination.

  "Things always seem to happen in a heat-wave," he said. "Our sort of things, I mean."

  "Get away," said Wexford. "Things are always happening around here." He raised his spiky toothbrush brows. "What's happening today,' he said, "is Archery. He's coming at two."

  "Did he say what it's all about?"

  "He's leaving that for this afternoon. Very la-di-da manner he's got with him. All part of the mystique of how to be a gentleman on nothing a year. One thing, he's got a transcript of the trial so I shan't have to go through the whole thing again."

  "That'll have cost him something. He must be keen."

  Wexford looked at his watch and rose. "Got to get over to the court," he said. "Polish off those villains who lost me my night's sleep. Look, Mike, I reckon we deserve a bit of gracious living and I don't fancy the Carousel's steak pie for my lunch. What about popping into the Olive and booking a table for one sharp?"

  Burden smiled. It suited him well enough. Once in a blue moon Wexford would insist on their lunching or even dining in comparative style.

  "It shall be done," he said.

  The Olive and Dove is the best hostelry in Kingsmarkham that can properly be called an hotel. By a stretch of the imagination the Queen's Head might be described as an inn, but the Dragon and the Crusader cannot claim to be more than pubs. The Olive, as locals invariably call it, is situated in the High Street at the Stowerton end of Kingsmarkham, facing the exquisite Georgian residence of Mr. Missal, the Stowerton car dealer. It is partly Georgian itself, but it is a hybrid structure with lingering relics of Tudor and a wing that claims to be pre-Tudor. In every respect it conforms to what nice middle-class people mean when they talk about a "nice" hotel. There are always three waiters, the chambermaids are staid and often elderly, the bath water is hot, the food as well as can be expected and the A. A. Guide has given it two stars.

  Burden had booked his table by phone. When he walked into the dining room just before one he saw to his satisfaction that he had been placed by the High Street window. Here it was just out of the sun and the geraniums in the window box looked fresh and even dewy. Girls waiting on the other side of the street for the Pomfret bus wore cotton frocks and sandals.

  Wexford marched in at five past. "I don't know why he can't get up at half twelve like they do in Sewingbury," he grumbled. "He", Burden knew, meant the chairman of the Kingsmarkham bench. "God, it was hot in court. What are we going to eat?"

  "Roast duck," said Burden firmly.

  "All right, if you twist my arm. As long as they don't mix a lot of rubbish up with it. You know what I mean, sweet corn and bananas." He took the menu, scowling. "Look at that, Polynesian chicken. What do they think we are, aborigines?"

  "I went and had a look at Victor's Piece this morning," said Burden while they waited for the duck to come.

  "Did you now? I see it's up for sale. There's a card in the agent's window with a highly misleading photograph. They're asking six thousand. Bit steep when you think Roger Primero got less than two for it in 1951."

  "I suppose it's changed hands several times since then?"

  "Once or twice before the old folks moved in. Thanks," he said to the waiter. "No we don't want any wine. Two halves of bitter." He spread his napkin over his capacious lap and to Burden's controlled distaste sprinkled wing and orange sauce liberally with pepper.

  "Was Roger Primero the heir?"

  "One of the heirs. Mrs. Primero died intestate. Remember I told you she'd only got ten thousand to leave and that was divided equally between Roger and his two younger sisters. He's a rich man now, but however he got his money it wasn't from his grandmother. All kinds of pies he's got his finger in—oil, property development, shipping—he's a real tycoon."

  "I've seen him around, I think."

  "You must have. He's very conscious of his status as a landowner since he bought Forby Hall. Goes out with the Pomfret hounds and all that."

  "How old is he?" Burden asked.

  "Well, he was twenty-two when his grandmother was killed. That makes him about thirty-eight now. The sisters were much younger. Angela was ten and Isabel nine."

  "I seem to remember he gave evidence at the trial."

  Wexford pushed his plate away, signalled rather imperiously to the waiter and ordered two portions of apple pie. Burden knew that his chief's notion of gracious living was somewhat limited.

  "Roger Primero had been visiting his grandmother that Sunday," Wexford said. "He was working in a solicitor's office in Sewingbury at the time and he used to make quite a habit of having Sunday tea at Victor's Piece. Maybe he had his eye on a share of the loot when Mrs. Primero went—God knows he hadn't a bean in those days—but he seemed genuinely fond of her. It's certainly a fact that after we'd seen the body and sent for him from Sewingbury as next of kin, we had to restrain him forcibly from going over to the coach house and laying violent hands on Painter. I daresay his grandmother and Alice made a lot of him, you know, buttered him up and waited on him. I told you Mrs. Primero had her affections. There'd been a family quarrel but apparently it didn't extend to the grandchildren. Once or twice Roger had taken his little sisters down to Victor's Piece and they'd all got on very well together."

  "Old people usually do get on well with kids," said Burden.

  "They had to be the right kind of children, Mike. Angela and Isabel, yes, and she had a very soft spot for young Liz Crilling."

  Burden put down his spoon and stared at the Chief Inspector.

  "I thought you said you'd read all this up at the time?" Wexford said suspiciously. "Don't say it was a long time ago. My customers are always saying that to me and it makes me see red. If you read the account of that trial you must remember that Elizabeth Crilling, aged precisely five at the time, found Mrs. Primero's body."

  "I assure you I can't remember, sir." That must have been the day he'd missed, the day he hadn't bothered with the papers because he'd been nervous about an interview. "She didn't appear at the trial, surely?"

  "Not at that age—there are limits. Besides, although she was actually the first to go into the drawing room and come upon the body, her mother was with her."

  "Digressing a hide," Burden said, "I don't quite get this stuff about the right kind of children. Mrs. Crilling lives over there in Glebe Road." He turned to the window and waved his hand in the direction of the least attractive part of Kingsmarkham where long streets of small terraced brown houses had sprung up between the wars, "She and the girl live in half a house, they haven't a penny to bless themselves with..."

  "They've come down a lot," said Wexford. "In September 1950 Crilling himself was still alive—he died of T.B. soon after—and they lived opposite Victor's Piece."

  "In one of those white semi-detached places?"

  That's right. A Mrs. White and her son lived next door. Mrs. Crilling was about thirty at the time, little bit over thirty."

  "You're joking," said Burden derisively. "That makes her only in her late forties now."

  "Look, Mike, people can say what they like about hard work and childbearing and all that. I tell you there's nothing like mental illness to make a woman look old before her time. And you know as well as I do Mrs. Crilling's been in and out of mental hospitals for years." He paused as their coffee came and pursed his lips censoriously at the anaemic brown liquid.

  "You did say black, sir?" the waiter asked.

  Wexford gave a sort of grunt. The church clock struck the last quarter. As the reverberation died away, he said to Burden: "Shall I keep the parson waiting ten minutes?"

  Burden said neutrally, "That's up to you, sir. You were going to tell me how Mrs. Primero and the Crilling woman became friends. I suppose they were friends?"

  "Not a doubt of it. Mrs. Crilling was ladylike enough in those days and she had a way with her, sycophantic, sucking up, you know. Besides, Crilling had been an accountant or something, just enough of a professional man, anyway, in Mrs. Primero's eyes to make his wife a lady. Mrs. Crilling was always popping over to Victor's Piece and she always took the child with her. God knows, they must have been pretty close. Elizabeth called Mrs. Primero "Granny Rose" just as Roger and his sisters did."

  "So she 'popped over' that Sunday night and found Granny Rose dead?" Burden hazarded.

  "It wasn't as simple as that. Mrs. Crilling had been making the kid a party frock. She finished it by about six, dressed Elizabeth up and wanted to take her over and show her off to Mrs. Primero. Mind you, she and Alice Flower were always at loggerheads. There was a good bit of jealousy there, spheres of influence and so on. So Mrs. Crilling waited until Alice had gone off to church and went over alone, intending to go back and fetch the child if Mrs. Primero was awake. She dozed a good bit, you see, being so old.

  "That first time—it was about twenty past six—Mrs. Primero was asleep and Mrs. Crilling didn't go in. She just tapped on the drawing room window. When the old woman didn't stir she went back and returned again later. By the way, she saw the empty scuttle through the window so she knew Painter hadn't yet been in with the coal."

  "You mean that Painter came in and did the deed between Mrs. Crilling's visits?" Burden said.

  "She didn't go back again till seven. The back door had to be left unlocked for Painter, so she and the child went in, called out 'yoo-hoo' or some damn thing, and marched into the drawing room when they didn't get an answer. Elizabeth went first—more's the pity—and Bob's your uncle!"

  "Blimey," said Burden, "that poor kid!"

  "Yes," Wexford murmured, "yes ... Well, much as I should like to while away the rest of the afternoon, reminiscing over the coffee cups, I do have to see this clerical bloke."

  They both got up. Wexford paid the bill, leaving a rather obviously exact ten per cent for a tip.

  "I can't see where the parson comes into it at all," Burden said when they were in the car.

  "He can't be an abolitionist because they've done away with the death penalty. As I say, he's writing a book, expects to make a big thing out of it and that's why he's laid out good money on a transcript."

  "Or he's a prospective buyer of Victor's Piece. He's a haunted house merchant and he thinks he's got another Borley Rectory."

  An unfamiliar car stood on the forecourt of the police station. The numberplate was not local and beside it was a little metal label that bore the name Essex with the county coat of arms of three scimitars on a red field.

  "We shall soon know," said Wexford.

  In general Wexford disliked the clergy. To him the dog collar was like a slipped halo, indicating a false saintliness, probably hypocrisy and massive self-regard. As he saw it vicars were not vicarious enough. Most of them expected you to worship God in them.

  He did not associate them with good looks and charm. Henry Archery, therefore, caused him slight surprise. He was possibly not much younger than Wexford himself, but he was still slim and exceedingly good-looking, and he was wearing an ordinary rather light-coloured suit and an ordinary collar and tie. His hair was thick enough and fair enough for the grey not to show much, his skin was tanned and his features had a pure evenly cut regularity.

  During the first preliminary small-talk remarks Wexford had noticed the beauty of his voice. You felt it would be a pleasure to hear him read aloud. As he showed him to a chair and sat down opposite him, Wexford chuckled to himself. He was picturing a group of tired ageing female parishioners working their fingers to the bone for the pitiful reward of this man's smile. Archery was not smiling now and he looked anything but relaxed.

  "I'm familiar with the case, Chief Inspector," he began. "I've read the official transcript of the trial and I've discussed the whole thing with Colonel Griswold."

  "What exactly do you want to know, then?" Wexford asked in his blunt way.

  Archery took a deep breath and said rather too quickly: "I want you to tell me that somewhere in your mind there is just the faintest doubt, the shadow of a doubt, of Painter's guilt."

  So that was it, or part of it. Burden with his theories that the parson was a Primero relative or seeking to buy the Primero house couldn't have been more wrong. This man, whatever axe he might be grinding, was bent on whitewashing Painter.

  Wexford frowned and after a moment said, "Can't be done. Painter did it all right." He set his jaw stubbornly, "If you want to quote me in your book you're quite welcome. You can say that after sixteen years Wexford still maintains that Painter was guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt."

  "What book is this?" Archery inclined his handsome head courteously. His eyes were brown and now they looked bewildered. Then he laughed. It was a nice laugh and it was the first time Wexford had heard it. "I don't write books," he said. "Well, I did once contribute a chapter to a work on Abyssinian cats but that hardly..."

  Abyssinian cats. Bloody great red cats, thought Wexford. Whatever next? "Why are you interested in Painter, Mr. Archery?"

  Archery hesitated. The sun showed up lines on his face that Wexford had not realised were there. Funny, he thought ruefully, how dark women age slower than fair ones but the reverse was true of men.

  "My reasons are very personal, Chief Inspector. I can't suppose that they would interest you. But I can assure you that there's no possibility of my publishing anything you tell me."

  Well, he had promised Griswold—as to that, he didn't have much choice. Hadn't he, in any case, already resigned himself to giving up most of the afternoon to this clergyman? Weariness was at last beginning to gain a hold on him. He might be equal to reminiscing, going over past familiar words and scenes; on this hot afternoon he was quite unequal to anything more exacting. Probably the personal reasons—and he confessed mentally to an almost childish curiosity about them—would emerge in due course. There was something frank and boyish in his visitor's face which made Wexford think he would not be particularly discreet.

  "What d'you want me to tell you?" he asked.

  "Why you are so determined Painter was guilty. Of course I don't know any more about this sort of thing than the average layman, but it seems to me there were a good many gaps in the evidence. There were other people involved, people who had quite definite interests in Mrs. Primero's death."

  Wexford said coldly, "I'm fully prepared to go over any points with you, sir."

  "Now?"

  "Certainly now. Have you got that transcript with you?"

  Archery produced it from a very battered leather briefcase. His hands were long and thin but not womanish. They reminded Wexford of saints' hands in what he called "churchy" paintings. For five minutes or so he scanned the papers in silence, refreshing his memory on tiny points. Then he put them down and raised his eyes to Archery's face.

  "We have to go back to Saturday, September 23rd," he said, "the day before the murder. Painter didn't appear with the coal at all that evening. The two old women waited until nearly eight o'clock when the fire was almost out, and Mrs. Primero said she would go to bed. Alice Flower was incensed at this and went out to get what she called 'a few lumps'."

  "That was when she hurt her leg," Archery said eagerly.

  "It wasn't a serious injury but it made Mrs. Primero angry and she blamed Painter. At about ten on the following morning she sent Alice down to the coach house to tell Painter she wanted to see him at eleven thirty sharp. He came up ten minutes late, Alice showed him into the drawing room and afterwards she heard him and Mrs. Primero quarrelling."

  "This brings me to the first point I want to raise," Archery said. He flipped through the transcript and, putting his finger at the beginning of a paragraph, passed it to Wexford. "This, as you know, is part of Painter's own evidence. He doesn't deny the quarrel. He admits that Mrs. Primero threatened him with dismissal. He also says here that Mrs. Primero finally came round to see his point of view. She refused to give him a rise because she said that would put ideas into his head and he would only ask for another increase in a few months' time. Instead she'd give him what she understood was called a bonus."

  "I remember all that well," Wexford said impatiently. "He said she told him to go upstairs and into her bedroom where he'd find a handbag in her wardrobe. He was to bring that handbag down to her and this, he said, he did. There was about two hundred pounds in the handbag and this he could have, take it away in the handbag and look upon it as a bonus on condition he was absolutely circumspect about bringing the coal at the required times." He coughed. "I never believed a word of it and neither did the jury."

  "Why not?" Archery asked quietly.

  God, thought Wexford, this was going to be a long session.

  "Firstly, because the stairs at Victor's Piece run up between the drawing room and the kitchen. Alice Flower was in the kitchen cooking the lunch. She had remarkably good hearing for her age, but she never heard Painter go up those stairs. And, believe me, he was a big heavy lout if ever there was one." Archery winced faintly at this but Wexford went on, "Secondly, Mrs. Primero would never have sent the gardener upstairs to poke about in her bedroom. Not unless I'm very mistaken in her character. She would have got Alice to have fetched the money on some pretext or other."

  "She might not have wanted Alice to know about it."

  "That's for sure," Wexford retorted sharply. "She wouldn't have. I said on some pretext or other." That made the parson draw in his horns. Wexford said very confidently, "In the third place Mrs. Primero had a reputation for being rather mean. Alice had been with her for half a century but she'd never given Alice anything bar her wages and an extra pound at Christmas." He jabbed at the page. "Look, she says so here in black and white. We know Painter wanted money. The night before when he hadn't brought the coal he'd been drinking up at the Dragon with a pal of his from Stowerton. The pal had a motorbike to sell and he'd offered it to Painter for a bit less than two hundred pounds. Apparently Painter hadn't a hope of getting the money but he asked his friend to hold on to the bike for a couple of days and he'd contact him the minute anything came up. You're saying he got the money before noon on Sunday. I say he stole it after he brutally murdered his employer in the evening. If you're right, why didn't he get in touch with his friend on Sunday afternoon? There's a phone box at the bottom of the lane. We checked with the pal, he didn't move out of his house all day and the phone never rang."

  It was a very tempest of fact and Archery yielded, or appeared to yield, before it. He said only: "You're saying, I think, that Painter went to the wardrobe after he'd killed Mrs. Primero in the evening. There was no blood on the inside of the wardrobe."

  "For one thing he wore rubber gloves to do the deed. Anyway, the prosecution's case was that he stunned her with the flat side of the axe blade, took the money, and when he came downstairs, finished her off in a panic."

  Archery gave a slight shiver. "Doesn't it strike you as odd," he then said, "that if Painter did it he should have been so transparent about it?"

  "Some are. They're stupid, you see." Wexford said it derisively, his mouth curling. He still had no notion what Archery's interest in Painter might be, but that he was pro-Painter was apparent. "Stupid," he said again, intent on flicking the clergyman on the raw. Another wince from Archery rewarded him. "They think you'll believe them. All they've got to say is it must have been a tramp or a burglar and you'll go away satisfied. Painter was one of those. That old tramp thing," he said. "When did you last see a tramp? More than sixteen years ago, I'll bet."

  "Let's come to the murder itself," Archery said quietly.

  "By all means." Again Wexford took the transcript, gathering with a quick glance the information he needed. "Now, then," he began, "Painter said he went over to fetch the coal at half six. He remembered the time—twenty-five past six when he left the coach house—because his wife said five minutes to go before the child's bedtime. The time's not all that important, anyway. We know it was between twenty past six and seven o'clock that she was killed. Painter went over, chopped some wood and cut his finger. Or so he said. He certainly did cut his finger—cut it deliberately."

  Archery ignored this last. "He and Mrs. Primero belonged to the same blood group," he said.

  "They were both Group O. They weren't quite so accurate about the minute grouping of blood sixteen years ago as they are now. It was handy for Painter, that. But it didn't do him any real good."

  The clergyman crossed his legs and leaned back. Wexford could see he was trying to appear relaxed and making a poor job of it. "I believe you personally went to interview Painter after the crime was discovered?"

  "We were round at the coach house by a quarter to eight. Painter was out. I asked Mrs. Painter where he was and she said he'd come back from the big house some time after six-thirty, washed his hands and gone straight out again. He'd told her he was going to Stowerton to see his friend. We'd only been there about ten minutes when he came in. His story didn't stand up, there was far too much blood around to have come from a cut finger and—well, you know the rest. It's all down there. I charged him on the spot."

  The transcript fluttered a little in Archery's hand. He could not keep his fingers quite steady. "In evidence," he said, speaking slowly and evenly, "Painter said he hadn't been to Stowerton. 'I waited at the bus stop at the end of the lane, but the bus never came. I saw the police cars turn into the lane and I wondered what was up. Presently I felt a bit faint on account of my finger bleeding a lot. I came back to my flat. I thought my wife might know what it was all about.' " After a pause, he added with a kind of pleading eagerness, "That doesn't sound like the evidence of the complete moron you make him out to be."

  Wexford answered him patiently as if he were talking to a precocious teenager. "They edit these things, Mr. Archery. They condense them, make them sound coherent. Believe me. You weren't in court and I was. As to the truth of that statement, I was in one of those police cars and I was keeping my eyes open. We overtook the Stowerton bus and turned left into the lane. There wasn't anyone waiting at that bus stop."

  "I imagine you mean that while he said he was at the bus stop he was in fact hiding some clothes."

  "Of course he was hiding the clothes! When he was working he habitually wore a raincoat. You'll see that in Mrs. Crilling's evidence and in Alice's. Sometimes it hung in the coach house and sometimes on a hook behind the back door of Victor's Piece. Painter said he had worn it that evening and had left it hanging on the back door. That raincoat couldn't be found. Both Alice and Roger Primero said they remembered having seen it on the back door that afternoon, but Mrs. Crilling was certain it wasn't there when she brought Elizabeth in at seven."

  "You finally found the raincoat rolled up in a ball under a hedge two fields away from the bus stop."

  "The raincoat plus a pullover," Wexford retorted, "and a pair of rubber gloves. The lot was sodden with blood."

  "But anyone could have worn the raincoat and you couldn't identify the pullover."

  "Alice Flower went so far as to say it looked like one Painter sometimes wore."

  Archery gave a deep sigh. For a time he had been firing questions and statements briskly at Wexford, but suddenly he had fallen silent. Little more than indecision showed on his face. Wexford waited. At last, he thought, Archery had reached a point where it was going to become necessary to reveal those "personal reasons". A struggle was going on within him and he said in an artificial tone: "What about Painter's wife?"

  "A wife cannot be compelled to give evidence against her husband. As you know, she didn't appear at the trial. She and the child went off somewhere and a couple of years later I heard she'd married again."

  He stared at Archery, raising his eyebrows. Something he had said had made the clergyman's mind up for him. A slight flush coloured Archery's even tan. The brown eyes were very bright as he leaned forward, tense again.

  "That child..."

  "What of her? She was asleep in her cot when we searched Painter's bedroom and that's the only time I saw her. She was four or five."

  Archery said jerkily, "She's twenty-one now and she's a very beautiful young woman."

  "I'm not surprised. Painter was a nice enough looking fellow if you like the type, and Mrs. Painter was pretty." Wexford stopped. Archery was a clergyman. Had Painter's daughter taken after her father and somehow come into his care as a result of her transgressions? Archery could be a prison visitor. It was right up his street, Wexford thought nastily. Anger rose in his throat as he wondered if all this sparring discussion had been engineered merely because Archery wanted his help in getting the right psychological approach to a convicted thief or confidence woman. "What about her?" he snapped. Griswold could go to hell! "Now come on, sir, you'd better tell me and have done."

  "I have a son, Chief Inspector, an only child. He also is twenty-one..."

  "Well?"

  Obviously the clergyman had difficulty in framing the words. He hesitated and pressed his long hands together. At last he said diffidently and in a low voice, "He wishes to marry Miss Painter." When Wexford started and stared at him, he added, "or Miss Kershaw, as her legal name now is."

  Wexford was all at sea. He was astonished, a rare thing for him, and he felt a sharp-edged excitement. But he had shown all the surprise he thought consistent with policy and now he spoke soberly.

  "You must excuse me, Mr. Archery, but I can't see how your son, the son of an Anglican clergyman, came to meet a girl in Miss Painter's—er, Miss Kershaw's—position."

  "They met at Oxford," Archery said easily.

  "At the university?"

  "That is so. Miss Kershaw is quite an intelligent young woman." Archery gave a slight smile. "She's reading Modern Greats. Tipped for a First, I'm told."

  If he had been asked to predict the future of such a one as Theresa Painter, what would he have foreseen for her? Children like her, Wexford reflected as he recovered from his second shock, children like Painter's little girl started life with a liability and a stain. The surviving parent, well-meaning relatives and cruel schoolfellows often made matters worse. He had hardly thought about the fate of the child until today. Now, thinking quickly, he supposed he would have counted her lucky to have become an anonymous manual worker with perhaps already a couple of petty convictions.

  Instead to Theresa Painter had apparently come the greatest blessings of civilised life: brains, advanced education, beauty, friendship with people like this vicar, an engagement to this vicar's son.

  Wexford cast his mind back to the first of only three encounters with Mrs. Painter. A quarter to eight it had been on that Sunday in September. He and the sergeant with him had knocked on the door at the foot of the coach house stairs and Mrs. Painter had come down to let them in. Whatever might have been fashionable in London at that time, the young women of Kingsmarkham were still doing their hair in a big pile on the forehead with tight curls falling to the shoulders. Mrs. Painter was no exception. Hers was naturally fair, her face was powdered and her mouth painted diffidently red. Respectable provincial matrons did not go in for eye make-up in 1950 and Mrs. Painter was of all things respectable. There seemed to be very little else to her. On her dry fine skin lines had already begun to form, little indentations which marked a regular prudish pursing of the lips, a setting of the chin that accompanied an outraged flounce.

  She had the same attitude to the police as others might have to bugs or mice. When they came upstairs she alternated her replies to their questions with reiterated remarks that it was a disgrace to have them in the house. She had the blankest, most obtuse blue eyes he had ever seen on anyone. At no time, even when they were about to take Painter away, did she show the least pity or the least horror, only this fixated dread of what people would think if they found the police had been questioning her husband.

  Perhaps she had not been so stupid as he had thought. Somewhere in that pretty respectable mouse and that great hunk of sub-humanity, her husband, must have been the spring from which their daughter drew her intelligence. "Quite an intelligent girl," Archery had said casually. Good God, thought Wexford, remembering how he had boasted when his own daughter got eight O Level passes. Good God! What were Modern Greats, anyway? Were they the same as Mods and did that mean Modern Languages? He had a vague idea that this might be the esoteric and deliberately deceptive name given to Philosophy and Political Economy. He wouldn't show his ignorance to Archery. Philosophy! He almost whistled. Painter's daughter reading—yes, that was the term, reading—philosophy! It made you think all right. Why, it made you doubt...

  "Mr Archery," he said, "you're quite sure this is Herbert Arthur Painter's girl?"

  "Of course I'm sure, Chief Inspector. She told me." He looked almost defiantly at Wexford. Perhaps he thought the policeman would laugh at his next words. "She is as good as she is beautiful," he said. Wexford's expression remained unaltered. "She came to stay with us at Whitsun. It was the first time we'd seen her, though naturally our son had written to us and told us about her. We took to her at once.

  "Chief Inspector, times have changed since I was at college. I had to face the possibility that my son would meet some girl at Oxford, perhaps want to marry her at an age when I'd thought of myself as still a boy and when Orders were a lifetime away. I'd see my friends' children marry at twenty-one and I was prepared to try and manage something for him, give him something to start life on. All I hoped was that the girl would be someone we could like and understand.

  "Miss Kershaw—I'll use that name if you don't mind—is just what I would have chosen for him myself, beautiful, graceful, well-mannered, easy to talk to. Oh, she does her best to hide her looks in the uniform they all wear nowadays, long shaggy hair, trousers, great black duffel coat—you know the kind of thing, But they all dress like that. The point is she can't hide them.

  "My wife is a little impulsive. She was hinting about the wedding before Theresa had been with us for twenty-four hours. I found it hard to understand why the young people were so diffident about it. Charles's letters had been paeans of praise and I could see they were deeply in love. Then she told us. She came out with it quite baldly. She said—I remember the very words—'I think you ought to know something about me, Mrs. Archery. My father's name was Painter and he was hanged for killing an old woman.'

  "At first my wife didn't believe it. She thought it was some sort of a game. Charles said, 'It's true. It doesn't matter. People are what they are, not what their parents did.' Then Theresa—we call her Tess—said, 'It would matter if he had done it, only he didn't. I told you why he was hanged. I didn't mean he'd done it.' Then she began to cry."

  "Why does she call herself Kershaw?"

  "It's her stepfather's name. He must be a very remarkable man, Chief Inspector. He's an electrical engineer, but..." You needn't come that rude mechanicals stuff with me, thought Wexford crossly. "...but he must be a most intelligent, perceptive and kind person. The Kershaws have two children of their own, but as far as I can gather, Mr. Kershaw has treated Tess with no less affection than his own son and daughter. She says it was his love that helped her to bear—well, what I can only call the stigma of her father's crime when she learnt about it at the age of twelve. He followed her progress at school, encouraged her in every way and fostered her wish to get a County Major Scholarship."

  "You mentioned 'the stigma of her father's crime.' I thought you said she thinks he didn't do it?"

  "My dear Chief Inspector, she knows he didn't do it."

  Wexford said slowly, "Mr. Archery, I'm sure I don't have to tell a man like yourself that when we talk of somebody knowing something we mean that what they know is a fact, something that's true beyond a reasonable doubt. We mean that the majority of other people know it too. In other words, it's history, it's written down in books, it's common knowledge." He paused. "Now I and the Law Lords and the official records and what your son means when he talks about the Establishment, know beyond any reasonable doubt, that Painter did kill Mrs. Rose Primero."

  "Her mother told her so," said Archery. "She told her that she had absolute irrefutable personal knowledge that Tess's father did not kill Mrs Primero."

  Wexford shrugged and smiled. "People believe what they want to believe. The mother thought it was the best thing for her daughter. If I'd been in her shoes I daresay I'd have said the same."

  "I don't think it was like that," Archery said stubbornly. Tess says her mother is a very unemotional woman. She never talks about Painter, never discusses him at all. She just says quite calmly, 'Your father never killed anybody' and beyond that she won't say any more."

  "Because she can't say any more. Look, sir, I think you're taking a rather romantic view of this. You're visualising the Painters as a devoted couple, kind of merry peasants, love in a cottage and all that. It wasn't like that. Believe me, Painter was no loss to her. I'm certain in my own mind he was in the habit of striking her just when the fancy took him. As far as he was concerned, she was just his woman, someone to cook his meals, wash his clothes and—well," he added brutally, "someone to go to bed with."

  Archery said stiffly, "I don't see that any of that's material."

  "Don't you? You're picturing some sort of declaration of innocence plus incontrovertible proof made to the one person he loved and whom he knew would believe in him. Forgive me, but that's a load of rubbish. Apart from the few minutes when he came back to the coach house to wash his hands—and incidentally hide the money—he was never alone with her. And he couldn't have told her then. He wasn't supposed to know about it. D'you understand me? He could have told her he had done it, he couldn't have told her he had not.

  "Then we came. We found blood flecks in the sink and faint blood marks on the kitchen wall where he'd stripped off that pullover. As soon as he came back he took the bandage off his hand to show us the cut and he handed the bandage to his wife. But he didn't speak to her, didn't even appeal to her for support. He made just one reference to her..."

  "Yes?"

  "We found the handbag with the money in it under the mattress in their double bed. Why hadn't Painter told his wife if he'd been given that money in the morning? Here it is, find it in your transcript. 'I knew the wife would want to get her hooks on it. She was always nagging me to buy things for the flat.' That's all he said and he didn't even look at her. We charged him and he said, 'O.K., but you're making a big mistake. It was a tramp done it.' He came straight down the stairs with us. He didn't kiss his wife and he didn't ask to go in and see his child."

  "She must have seen him in prison?"

  "With a prison officer present. Look, sir, you appear to be satisfied and so do all the parties concerned. Surely that's the main thing. You must forgive me if I can't agree with you."

  Silently Archery took a snapshot from his wallet and laid it on the desk. Wexford picked it up. Presumably it had been taken in the vicarage garden. There was a great magnolia tree in the background, a tree as tall as the house it partly concealed. It was covered with waxen cup flowers. Under its branches stood a boy and a girl, their arms round each other. The boy was tall and fair. He was smiling and he was plainly Archery's son. Wexford wasn't particularly interested in him.

  The girl's face was in sad repose. She was looking into the camera with large steady eyes. Light-coloured hair fell over her forehead in a fringe and down to the shoulders of a typical undergraduate's shirtwaister, faded, tightly belted and with a crumpled skirt. Her waist was tiny, her bust full. Wexford saw the mother again, only this girl was holding a boy's hand instead of a bloody rag.

  "Very charming," he said dryly. "I hope she'll make your son happy." He handed the photograph back. "No reason why she shouldn't."

  A mixture of emotions, anger, pain, resentment, flared in the clergyman's eyes. Interestedly, Wexford watched him.

  "I do not know what or whom to believe," Archery said unhappily, "and while I'm in this state of uncertainty, Chief Inspector, I'm not in favour of the marriage. No, that's putting it too coolly." He shook his head vehemently. "I'm bitterly, bitterly against it," he said.

  "And the girl, Painter's daughter?"

  "She believed—perhaps accepts is the better word—in her father's innocence, but she realises others may not. When it comes to it, I don't think she would marry my son while his mother and I feel as we do."

  "What are you afraid of, Mr. Archery?"

  "Heredity."

  "A very chancy thing, heredity."

  "Have you children, Chief Inspector?"

  "I've got two girls."

  "Are they married?"

  "One is."

  "And who is her father-in-law?"

  For the first time Wexford felt superior to this clergyman. A kind of schadenfreude possessed him. "He's an architect, as a matter of fact, Tory councillor for the North Ward here."

  "I see." Archery bowed his head. "And do your grandchildren already build palaces with wooden bricks, Mr. Wexford?" Wexford said nothing. The only sign of his first grandchild's existence was so far envinced in its mother's morning sickness. "I shall watch mine from their cradle, waiting to see them drawn towards objects with sharp edges."

  "You said if you objected she wouldn't marry him."

  "They're in love with each other. I can't..."

  "Who's going to know? Palm Kershaw off as her father."

  "I shall know," said Archery. "Already I can see Painter when I look at her. Instead of her mouth and her eyes I can see his thick lips and his bloodlust. It's the same blood, Chief Inspector, the blood that mingled with Mrs. Primero's, on the floor, on the clothes, down the water pipes. That blood will be in my grandchild." He seemed to realise that he had allowed himself to be carried away, for he stopped suddenly, blushed, and shut his eyes briefly as if wincing at the sight he had described.

  Wexford said gently, "I wish I could help you, Mr. Archery, but the case is closed, over, finished. There is nothing more I can do."

  Archery shrugged and quoted softly, almost as if he could not stop himself, " 'He took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person...' " Then he jumped up, his expression suddenly contrite. "Forgive me, Chief Inspector. That was an appalling thing to say. May I tell you what I intend to do?"

  The man lay on his back in the middle of the zebra crossing. Inspector Burden, getting out of the police car, had no need to ask where he was or to be taken to the scene of the accident. It was all there before his eyes like a horrible still from a Ministry of Transport warning film, the kind of thing that makes women shudder and turn quickly to the other channel.

  An ambulance was waiting, but nobody was making any attempt to move the man. Inexorably and with a kind of indifference the twin yellow beacons went on winking rhythmically. Up-ended, with its blunt nose poking into the crushed head of a bollard, was a white Mini.

  "Can't you get him away?" asked Burden.

  The doctor was laconic. "He's had it." He knelt down, felt the left wrist and got up again, wiping blood from his fingers. "I'd hazard a guess the spine's gone and he's ruptured his liver. The thing is he's still more or less conscious and it'd be hell's own agony to try to shift him."

  "Poor devil. What happened? Did anybody see it?"

  His eye roved across the knot of middle-aged women in cotton dresses, late homegoing commuters and courting couples on their evening stroll. The last of the sun smiled gently on their faces and on the blood that gilded the black and white crossing. Burden knew that Mini. He knew the stupid sign in the rear window that showed a skull and the words: You have been Mini-ed. It had never been funny and now it was outrageous, cruel in the way it mocked the man in the road.

  A girl lay sprawled over the steering wheel. Her hair was short, black and spiky, and she had thrust her fingers through it in despair or remorse. The long red nails stuck out like bright feathers.

  "Don't worry about her," said the doctor contemptuously. "She's not hurt."

  "You, madam..." Burden picked out the calmest and least excited looking of the bystanders. "Did you happen to see the accident?"

  "Ooh, it was awful! Like a beast she was, the little bitch. Must have been doing a hundred miles an hour."

  Picked a right one there, thought Burden. He turned to a white-faced man holding a sealyham on a lead. "Perhaps you can help me, sir?"

  The lead was jerked and the sealyham sat down at the kerb.

  "That gentleman..." Blanching afresh, he pointed towards the crumpled thing lying on the stripes. "He looked right and left like you're supposed to. Bui there was nothing coming. You can't see all that well on account of the bridge."

  "Yes, yes. I get the picture."

  "Well, he started to cross to the island like, when that white car came up out of nowhere. Going like a mad thing she was. Well, not a hundred, but sixty, I reckon. Those Minis can go at a terrible lick when they've had their engines hotted up. He sort of hesitated and then he tried to go back. You know, it was all in a flash. I can't rightly go into details."

  "You're doing very well."

  "Then the car got him. Oh, the driver slammed on her brakes for all she was worth. I'll never forget the noise to my dying day, what with the brakes screaming and him screaming too, and sort of throwing up his arms and going down like a ninepin."

  Burden set a constable to take names and addresses, turned away and took a step in the direction of the white car. A woman touched his arm.

  "Here," she said, "he wants a priest or something. He kept on asking before you came. Get me Father Chiverton, he says, like he knew he was going."

  "That right?" said Burden sharply to Dr. Crocker.

  Crocker nodded. The dying man was covered now, a folded mac under his head, two policemen's jackets across his body. "Father Chiverton is what he said. Frankly, I was more concerned for his physical than his spiritual welfare."

  "R.C. then, is he?"

  "God, no. Bunch of atheists, you cops are. Chiverton's the new vicar here. Don't you ever read the local rag?"

  "Father?"

  "He's very high. Genuflecting and Sung Eucharist and all that jazz." The doctor coughed. "I'm a Congregationalist myself."

  Burden walked over to the crossing. The man's face was blanched a yellowish ivory, but his eyes were open and they stared back. With a little shock Burden realised he was young, perhaps no more than twenty.

  "Anything you want, old chap?" He knew the doctor had given him a pain-killing injection. With his own bent body he shielded him from the watchers. "We'll get you away from here in a minute." He lied. "Anything we can get you?"

  "Father Chiverton..." it was a toneless whisper, as detached and inhuman as a puff of wind. "Father Chiverton..." A spasm crossed the waning face. "Confess ... atone ... spare Thou them which are penitent."

  "Bloody religion," said the doctor. "Can't even let a man die in peace."

  "You must be an asset to the Congregationalists," Burden snapped. He got up, sighing. "He obviously wants to confess. I suppose they do have confession in the Church of England?"

  "You can have it if you want it but you needn't if you don't fancy it. That's the beauty of the C of E." When Burden looked murderous, he added, "Don't get in a tiz with me. We've been on to Chiverton, but he and his curate are off at some conference."

  "Constable Gates!" Burden beckoned impatiently to the man noting down addresses. "Nip into Stowerton and fetch me a—a vicar."

  "We've tried Stowerton, sir."

  "O God," said Burden quietly.

  "Excuse me, sir, but there's a clergyman got an appointment with the Chief Inspector now. I could get on to the station and..."

  Burden raised his eyebrows. Kingsmarkham police station had apparently become the battleground of the Church Militant. "You do that, and quick..."

  He murmured something useless to the boy, and moved towards the girl who had begun to sob.

  Alice Flower was eighty-seven, almost as old as her employer had been at the time of her death. A series of strokes had battered her old frame as tempests batter an ancient house, but the house was strong and sturdily built. No gimcrack refinements of decoration or delicacy had ever belonged to it. It had been made to endure wind and weather.

  She lay in a narrow high bed in a ward called Honeysuckle. The ward was full of similar old women in similar beds. They had clean pink faces and white hair through which patches of rose-pink scalp showed. Every bed trolley held at least two vases of flowers, the sops to conscience, Archery supposed, of visiting relatives who only had to sit and chat instead of handing bedpans and tending bed-sores.

  "A visitor for you, Alice," said the sister. "It's no use trying to shake hands with her. She can't move her hands but her hearing's perfectly good and she'll talk the hind leg off a donkey."

  A most un-Christian hatred flared in Archery's eyes. If she saw it the sister took no notice.

  "Like a good gossip, don't you, Alice? This is the Reverend Archery." He winced at that, approached the bed.

  "Good evening, sir."

  Her face was square with deeply ridged rough skin. One corner of her mouth had been drawn down by the paralysis of the motor nerves, causing her lower jaw to protrude and reveal large false teeth. The sister bustled about the bed, pulling the old servant's nightgown higher about her neck and arranging on the coverlet her two useless hands. It was terrible to Archery to have to look at those hands. Work had distorted them beyond hope of beauty, but disease and oedema had smoothed and whitened the skin so that they were like the hands of a misshapen baby. The emotion and the feel for the language of 1611 that was with him always welled in a fount of pity. Well done, thou good and faithful servant, he thought. Thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things...

  "Would it upset you to talk to me about Mrs. Primero, Miss Flower?" he asked gently, easing himself into a bentwood chair.

  "Of course it wouldn't," said the sister, "she loves it."

  Archery could bear no more. "This is rather a private matter, if you don't mind."

  "Private! It's the whole ward's bedtime story, believe me." She flounced away, a crackling navy and white robot.

  Alice Flower's voice was cracked and harsh. The strokes had affected her throat muscles or her vocal cords. But her accent was pleasant and correct, learnt, Archery supposed, in the kitchens and nurseries of educated people.

  "What was it you wanted to know, sir?"

  "First tell me about the Primero family."

  "Oh, I can do that. I always took an interest." She gave a small rattling cough and turned her head to hide the twisted side of her mouth. "I went to Mrs. Primero when the boy was born..."

  "The boy?"

  "Mr. Edward, her only child he was."

  Ah, thought Archery, the father of rich Roger and his sisters.

  "He was a lovely boy and we always got on a treat, him and me. I reckon it really aged me and his poor mother when he died, sir. But he'd got a family of his own by then, thanks be to God, and Mr. Roger was the living spit of his father."

  "I suppose Mr. Edward left him pretty well off, did he?"

  "Oh, no, sir, that was the pity of it. You see, old Dr. Primero left his money to madam, being as Mr. Edward was doing so well at the time. But he lost everything on something in the city and when he was taken Mrs. Edward and the three kiddies were quite badly off." She coughed again, making Archery wince. He fancied he could see a terrible vain effort to raise those hands and cover the rattling lips. "Madam offered to help—not that she had more than she needed—but Mrs. Edward was that proud, she wouldn't take a penny from her mother-in-law. I never shall know how she managed. There was the three of them, you see. Mr. Roger he was the eldest, and then there was the two little mites, ever so much younger than their brother, but close together if you take my meaning. No more than eighteen months between them."

  She rested her head back on the pillows and bit at her lip as if trying to pull it back into place. "Angela was the oldest. Time flies so I reckon she'd be twenty-six now. Then there was Isabel, named after madam. They was just babies when their Daddy died and it was years before we saw them.

  "It was a bitter blow to madam, I can tell you, not knowing what had become of Mr. Roger. Then one day just out of the blue he turned up at Victor's Piece. Fancy, he was living in digs just over at Sewingbury, studying to be a solicitor with a very good firm. Somebody Mrs. Edward knew had got him in. He hadn't no idea his granny was still alive, let alone in Kingsmarkham, but he was looking up somebody in the phone book, in the line of business, sir, and there it was; Mrs. Rose Primero, Victor's Piece. Once he'd come over there was no stopping him. Not that we wanted to stop him, sir. Pretty nearly every Sunday he came and once or twice he fetched his little sisters all the way from London and brought them with him. Good as gold they were.

  "Mr. Roger and madam, they used to have some laughs together. All the old photographs they'd have out and the tales she used to tell him!" She stopped suddenly and Archery watched the old face swell and grow purple. "It was a change for us to have a nice gentlemanlike young fellow about the place after that Painter." Her voice changed to a shrill whistling shriek. That dirty murdering beast!"

  Across the ward another old woman in a bed like Alice Flower's smiled a toothless smile as of one hearing a familiar tale retold. The ward's bedtime story, the sister had said.

  Archery leant towards her. "That was a dreadful day, Miss Flower," he said, "the day Mrs. Primero died." The fierce eyes flickered, red and spongey blue. "I expect you feel you'll never forget it..."

  "Not to my dying day," said Alice Flower. Perhaps she thought of the now useless body that had once been so fine an instrument and was already three-quarters dead.

  "Will you tell me about it?"

  As soon as she began he realised how often she must have told it before. It was likely that some of these other old women were not absolutely bedridden, that sometimes in the evenings they got up and gathered round Alice Flower's bed. A tale, he thought, paraphrasing, to draw children from play and old women from the chimney corner.

  "He was a devil," she said, "a terror. I was scared of him but I never let him know it. Take all and give nothing, that was his motto. Six pounds a year, that was all I got when I first went out into service. Him, he had his home and his wages, a lovely motor to drive. There's some folks want the moon. You'd think a big strong young fellow like that'd be only too glad to fetch the coal in for an old lady, but not Mr. Bert Painter. Beast Painter was what I called him.

  "That Saturday night when he never come and he never come madam had to sit all by herself in the icy cold. Let me go over and speak to him, madam, I said, but she wouldn't have it. The morning's time enough, Alice, she said. I've said to myself over and over again, if he'd come that night I'd have been in there with them. He wouldn't have been able to tell no lies then."

  "But he did come the next morning, Miss Flower..."

  "She told him off good and proper. I could hear her giving him a dressing down."

  "What were you doing?"

  "Me? When he come in first I was doing the vegetables for madam's lunch, then I popped on the oven and put in the meat tin. They asked me all that at the court in London, the Old Bailey it was." She paused and there was suspicion in the look she gave him. "You writing a book about it all, are you, sir?"

  "Something like that," said Archery.

  "They wanted to know if I was sure I could hear all right. My hearing's better than that judge's, I can tell you. Just as well it is. If I'd been hard of hearing we might have all gone up in smoke that morning."

  "How was that?"

  "Beast Painter was in the drawing room with madam and I'd gone into the larder to get the vinegar for the mint sauce, when all of a sudden I heard a kind of a plop and sizzle. That's that funny old oven, I said, and sure enough it was. I popped back quick and opened the oven door. One of the potatoes had kind of spat out, sir, and fallen on the gas. All in flames it was and sizzling and roaring like a steam engine. I turned it off quick and then I did a silly thing. Poured water on it. Ought to have known better at my age. Ooh, the racket and the smoke! You couldn't hear yourself think."

  There had been nothing about that in the trial transcript. Archery caught his breath in the excitement. "You couldn't hear yourself think..." While you were choked with smoke and deafened by hissing you might not hear a man go upstairs, search a bedroom and come down again. Alice's evidence in this matter had been one of the most important features of the case. For if Painter had been offered and had taken the two hundred pounds in Mrs. Primero's presence in the morning, what motive could he have had for killing her in the evening?

  "Well, we had our lunch and Mr. Roger came. My poor old leg was aching from where I'd bruised it the night before getting a few lumps in on account of Beast Painter being out on the tiles. Mr. Roger was ever so nice about it, kept asking me if there was anything he could do, wash up or anything. But that isn't man's work and I always say it's better to keep going while you can.

  "It must have been half past five when Mr Roger said he'd have to go. I was up to my neck what with the dishes and worrying if Beast would turn up like he'd promised. 'I'll let myself out, Alice', Mr. Roger said, and he come down to the kitchen to say goodbye to me. Madam was having a little snooze in the drawing room, God rest her. It was the last she had before her long sleep." Aghast, Archery watched two tears well into her eyes and flow unchecked down the ridged sunken cheeks. "I called out, 'Cheeri-by, Mr. Roger dear, see you next Sunday', and then I heard him shut the front door. Madam was sleeping like a child, not knowing that ravening wolf was lying in wait for her."

  "Try not to upset yourself, Miss Flower." Doubtful as to what he should do—the right thing is the kind thing, he thought—he pulled out his own clean white handkerchief and gently wiped the wet cheeks.

  "Thank you, sir. I'll be all right now. You do feel a proper fool not being able to dry your own tears." The ghastly cracked smile was almost more painful to witness than the weeping. "Where was I? Oh, yes. Off I went to church and as soon as I was out of the way along comes Madam Crilling, poking her nose in..."

  "I know what happened next, Miss Flower," Archery said very kindly and quietly. "Tell me about Mrs. Crilling. Does she ever come to see you in here?"

  Alice Flower gave a kind of snort that would have been comical in a fit person. "Not she. She's kept out of my way ever since the trial, sir. I know too much about her for her liking. Madam's best friend, my foot! She'd got one interest in madam and one only. She wormed that child of hers into madam's good books on account of she thought madam might leave her something when she went."

  Archery moved closer, praying that the bell for the end of visiting would not ring yet. "But Mrs Primero didn't make a will."

  "Oh, no, sir, that's what worried Mrs. Clever Crilling. She'd come out into my kitchen when madam was sleeping. 'Alice,' she'd say, 'we ought to get dear Mrs. Primero to make her last will and testament. It's our duty, Alice, it says so in the Prayer Book.' "

  "Does it?"

  Alice looked both shocked and smug. "Yes, it does, sir. It says, 'But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health.' Still I don't hold with everything that's in the Prayer Book not when it comes to downright interference—saving your presence, sir. 'It's in your interest too, Alice,' she says. 'You'll be turned out into the streets when she goes.'

  "But madam wouldn't have it, anyway. Everything was to go to her natural heirs, she said, them being Mr. Roger and the little girls. It'd be theirs automatically, you see, without any nonsense about wills and lawyers."

  "Mr. Roger didn't try to get her to make a will?"

  "He's a lovely person is Mr. Roger. When Beast Painter had done his murdering work and poor madam was dead Mr. Roger got his bit of money—three thousand it was and a bit more. 'I'll take care of you, Alice,' he said, and so he did. He got me a nice room in Kingsmarkham and gave me two pounds a week on top of my pension. He was in business on his own then and he said he wouldn't give me a lump sum. An allowance, he called it, bless his heart, out of his profits."

  "Business? I thought he was a solicitor."

  "He always wanted to go into business on his own, sir. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but he came to madam one day—must have been two or three weeks before she died—and he said a pal of his would take him in with him if he could put up ten thousand pounds. 'I know I haven't got a hope,' he said, speaking ever so nice. 'It's just a castle in the air, Granny Rose.'

  " 'Well, it's no good looking at me,' says madam. 'Ten thousand is all I've got for me and Alice to live on and that's tucked away in Woolworth's shares. You'll get your share when I'm gone.' I don't mind telling you, sir, I thought then, if Mr. Roger liked to do his little sisters down he could try getting round madam to make that will and leave him the lot. But he never did, never mentioned it again, and he'd always made a point of bringing the two mites just whenever he could. Then Beast Painter killed madam and the money went like she said it would, to the three of them.

  "Mr. Roger's doing very well now, sir, very well indeed, and he comes to see me regular. I reckon he got the ten thousand from somewhere or maybe another pal came up with something else. It wasn't for me to ask, you see."

  A nice man, Archery thought, a man who had needed money perhays desperately, but would do nothing underhand to get it; a man who provided for his dead grandmother's domestic while he was struggling to get a business going, who still visited her and who doubtless listened patiently over and over again to the tale Archery had just heard. A very nice man. If love, praise and devotion could reward such a man, he had his reward.

  "If you should see Mr. Roger, sir, if you want to see him about the story you're writing, would you give him my best respects?"

  "I won't forget, Miss Flower." He put his hand over her dead one and pressed it. "Good-bye and thank you." Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

  "I suppose there isn't anything in it?'

  "In what, Mike? Liz Crilling having some dark secret her mother doesn't want extorted from her under the third degree?"

  Burden lowered the blinds against the brazen morning sky. "Those Crillings always make me uneasy," he said.

  "They're no more kinky than half our customers," Wexford said breezily. "Liz'll turn up at the Assizes all right. If not for any other reason simply because Mrs. Crilling doubts her ability to get a thousand quid out of her brother-in-law, or whoever it is supports them. And then if she's got something to tell us, she'll tell us."

  Burden's expression, though apologetic, was obstinate. "I can't help feeling it's got some connection with Painter," he said.

  Wexford had been leafing through a thick orange-coloured trade directory. Now he dropped it on the desk with a deliberate bang. "By God, I won't have any more of this! What is it, anyhow, some sort of conspiracy to prove I can't do my job?"

  "I'm sorry, sir, you know I didn't mean that."

  "I don't know a damn thing, Mike. I only know the Painter case was an open and shut affair, and nobody's got a hope in hell of showing he didn't do it." He began to calm down slowly, and he spread his hands in two large implacable fans on the directory cover. "Go and question Liz by all means. Or tell Archery to do it for you. He's a fast worker that one."

  "Is he? What makes you say so?"

  "Never mind. I've got work to do if you haven't and..." said Wexford, splendidly co-ordinating his metaphors, "I'm fed up to my back teeth with having Painter rammed down my throat morning, noon and night."

  "You don't seem to have got very far,' said Charles. He sat down in an armchair and surveyed the pleasant lounges. The maid who was operating a floor polisher thought him very handsome with his rather long fair hair and his scornful expression. She decided to give the lounge a more than usually thorough do. "The great thing is to be businesslike about it. We haven't got all that long. I start at the brewery on Monday week." Archery was rather nettled. His own parochial duties were being overlooked. "I'm sure there's something fishy about that fellow Primero, Roger Primero. I rang him up before I got here last night and I've got a date to see him this morning at half eleven." Archery looked at his watch. It was almost ten.

  "You'd better get a move on, then. Where does he live?"

  "You see? Now if I'd been in your shoes that's the first thing I'd have found out. He lives at Forby Hall. I suppose he fancies himself as the lord of the manor." He glanced at his father and said quickly, "Be all right if I have the car?"

  "I suppose so. What are you going to tell him, Charles? He might have you thrown out."

  "I don't think he will," Charles said thoughtfully. "I've found out a bit about him and it seems he's mad keen on publicity. Always trying to create an image. He hesitated, then added boldly, "I told him I was the top features man on the Sunday Planet and we were doing a series on tycoons. Rather good, don't you think?"

  "It doesn't happen to be true," said Archery.

  Charles said rapidly, "The end justifies the means. I thought I could put across a line about his early life being dogged by misfortune, father dying, grandmother murdered, no prospects—that sort of thing. And look at him now. You never know what will come out. He's supposed to be very forthcoming to the Press."

  "We'd better go and get the car out."

  It was as hot as ever, but more sultry. A thin mist covered the sun. Charles wore an open necked white shirt and rather tapering trousers. Archery thought he looked like a Regency duellist.

  "You won't want to start yet," he said. "Forby's only about four miles away. Would you like to look round the place?"

  They walked up to the High Street and over the Kingsbrook bridge. Archery was proud to have his son beside him. He knew they were very much alike but he didn't for a moment deceive himself they might be taken for brothers. The heavy muggy weather had brought on a twinge of lumbago and today he had utterly forgotten what it felt like to be twenty-one. "You're reading English," he said to Charles. "Tell me where this comes from." His memory hadn't begun to fail, at any rate. He was word perfect in the little verse. " 'Go, Shepherd, to your rest;

  Angela Primero lived in a flat at Oswestry Mansions, Baron's Court. She was twenty-six years old and the elder of Mrs. Primero's granddaughters. That was all Charles Archery knew about her—that and her telephone number which he had easily found. He rang her up and asked if he could see her on the following morning. Thinking better of his original plan, he said he represented the Sunday Planet, and the death of Alice Flower having brought once more into prominence Mrs. Primero's murder, his newspaper was running a feature on the fate of the other people concerned in the case. He was rather pleased with that. It had the ring of verisimilitude.

  Miss Primero had a grim voice for so young a woman. It was gravelly, abrupt, almost masculine. She would be glad to see him, but he did realise, didn't he, that her recollection of her grandmother was slight? Just a few childhood memories were what he wanted, Miss Primero, little touches to add colour to his story.

  She opened the door to him so quickly that he wondered if she had been waiting behind it. Her appearance surprised him for he had kept a picture of her brother in his mind and he had therefore expected someone small and dark with regular features. He had seen a photograph of the grandmother too and though the old face was both wizened and blurred by age, there were still to be seen vestiges of an aquiline beauty and a strong resemblance to Roger.

  The girl whose flat this was had a strong plain face with bad skin and a big prognathous jaw. Her hair was a dull flat brown. She wore a neat dark blue frock bought at a chain store and her figure, though overlarge, was good.

  "Mr. Bowman?"

  Charles was pleased with the name he had invented for himself. He gave her a pleasant smile. "How do you do, Miss Primero?"

  She showed him into a small very sparsely furnished sitting room. He could not help adding to the mystery by contrasting this with the library at Forby Hall. Here there were no books, no flowers, and the only ornaments were framed photographs, half a dozen perhaps, of a young blonde girl and a baby.

  She followed his gaze towards the studio portrait of the same girl that hung above the fireplace. "My sister," she said. Her ugly face softened and she smiled. As she spoke there came from the next room a thin wail and the murmur of a voice. "She's in my bedroom now, changing the baby's napkin. She always comes over on Saturday mornings."

  Charles wondered what Angela Primero did for a living. A typist perhaps, or a clerk? The whole set-up seemed too scanty and poor. The furniture was brightly coloured but it looked cheap and flimsy. In front of the hearth was a rug woven out of woollen rags. Needy nothing trimmed in jollity...

  "Please sit down," said Angela Primero.

  The little orange chair creaked as it took his weight. A far cry, he thought, from the brother's voluptuous black leather. From the floor above he could hear music playing and someone pushing a vacuum cleaner.

  "What do you want me to tell you?"

  There was a packet of Weights on the mantelpiece. She took one and handed them to him. He shook his head.

  "First, what you remember of your grandmother."

  "Not much. I told you." Her speech was brusque and rough. "We went there to tea a few times. It was a big dark house and I remember I was afraid to go to the bathroom alone. The maid used to have to take me." She gave a staccato, humourless laugh and it was an effort to remember she was only twenty-six. "I never even saw Painter if that's what you mean. There was a child across the road we used to play with sometimes and I believe Painter had a daughter. I asked about her once but my grandmother said she was common, we weren't to have anything to do with her."

  Charles clenched his hands. He felt a sudden desperate longing for Tess, both for himself, and also to set her beside this girl who had been taught to despise her.

  The door opened and the girl in the photographs came in. Angela Primero jumped up at once and took the baby from her arms. Charles's knowledge of babies was vague. He thought this one might be about six months old. It looked small and uninteresting.

  "This is Mr. Bowman, darling. My sister, Isabel Fairest."

  Mrs. Fairest was only a year younger than her sister, but she looked no more than eighteen. She was very small and thin with a pinkish-white face and enormous pale blue eyes. Charles thought she looked like a pretty rabbit. Her hair was a bright gingery gold.

  Roger's hair and eyes were black, Angela's hair brown and her eyes hazel. None of them was in the least like either of the others. There was more to genetics than met the eye, Charles thought.

  Mrs. Fairest sat down. She didn't cross her legs but sat with her hands in her lap like a little girl. It was difficult to imagine her married, impossible to think of her as having given birth to a child.

  Her sister scarcely took her eyes off her. When she did it was to coo at the baby. Mrs. Fairest had a small soft voice, tinged with cockney.

  "Don't let him tire you, darling. Put him down in his cot."

  "You know I love holding him, darling. Isn't he gorgeous? Have you got a smile for your auntie? You know your auntie, don't you, even if you haven't seen her for a whole week?"

  Mrs. Fairest got up and stood behind her sister's chair. They both gurgled over the baby, stroking its cheeks and curling its fingers round their own. It was obvious that they were devoted to each other, but whereas Angela's love was maternal to both sister and nephew, Isabel showed a clinging dependence on the older girl. Charles felt that they had forgotten he was there and he wondered how Mr. Fairest fitted into the picture. He coughed.

  "About your early life, Miss Primero...?"

  "Oh, yes. (Mustn't cry, sweetie. He's got wind, darling.) I really can't remember any more about my grandmother. My mother married again when I was sixteen. This is the sort of thing you want, is it?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Well, as I say, my mother married again and she and my stepfather wanted us to go out to Australia with them. (Up it comes! There, that's better.) But I didn't want to go. Isabel and I were still at school. My mother hung it out for a couple of years and then they went without us. Well, it was their life, wasn't it? I wanted to go to training college but I gave that up. Isabel and I had the house, didn't we, darling? And we both went out to work. (Is he going to have a little sleep, then?)"

  It was an ordinary enough tale, fragmentary and very clipped. Charles felt that there was far more to it. The hardship and the privation had been left out. Money might have changed it all but she had never mentioned money. She had never mentioned her brother either.

  "Isabel got married two years ago. Her husband's in the Post Office. I'm a secretary in a newspaper office." She raised her eyebrows, unsmiling. "I'll have to ask them if they've ever heard of you."

  "Yes, do," said Charles with a suavity he didn't feel. He must get on to the subject of the money but he didn't know how to. Mrs. Fairest brought a carry-cot in from the other room, they placed the baby in it, bending tenderly over him and cooing. Although it was nearly noon neither of them had mentioned a drink or even coffee. Charles belonged to a generation that has accustomed itself to almost hourly snacks, cups of this, glasses of that, bits and pieces from the refrigerator. So, surely, did they. He thought wistfully of Roger's hospitality. Mrs. Fairest glanced up and said softly, "I do like coming here. It's so quiet." Above them the vacuum cleaner continued to whirr. "My husband and me, we've only got one room. It's nice and big but it's awfully noisy at weekends."

  Charles knew it was impertinent but he had to say it. "I'm surprised your grandmother didn't leave you anything."

  Angela Primero shrugged. She tucked the blanket round the baby and stood up. "That's life," she said in a hard voice.

  "Shall I tell him, darling?" Isabel Fairest touched her arm and looked timidly into her face, waiting for guidance.

  "What's the point? It's of no interest to him." She stared at Charles and then said intelligently, "You can't put that sort of thing in newspapers. It's libel."

  Damn, damn, damn! Why hadn't he said he was from the Inland Revenue? Then they could have got on to money at once.

  "But I think people ought to know," said Mrs. Fairest, showing more spirit than he had thought hex capable of. "I do, darling. I always have, ever since I understood about it. I think people ought to know how he's treated us."

  Charles put his notebook away ostentatiously. "This is off the record, Mrs. Fairest."

  "You see, darling? He won't say anything. I don't care if he does. People ought to know about Roger."

  The name was out. They were all breathing rather heavily. Charles was the first to get himself under control. He managed a calm smile.

  "Well, I will tell you. If you put it in the paper and I have to go to prison for it, I don't care! Granny Rose left ten thousand pounds and we should all have had a share, but we didn't. Roger—that's our brother—he got it all. I don't quite know why but Angela knows the ins and outs of it. My mother had a friend who was a solicitor where Roger worked and he said we could try and fight it, but Mother wouldn't on account of it being awful to have a court case against your own son. We were just little kids, you see, and we didn't know anything about it. Mother said Roger would help us—it was his moral duty, even if it wasn't legally—but he never did. He kept putting it off and then Mother quarrelled with him. We've never seen him since I was ten and Angela was eleven. I wouldn't know him now if I saw him in the street."

  It was a puzzling story. They were all Mrs. Primero's grandchildren, all equally entitled to inherit in the event of there being no will. And there had been no will.

  "I don't want to see all this in your paper, you know," Angela Primero said suddenly. She would have made a good teacher, he thought, reflecting on waste, for she was tender with little children, but stern when she had to be.

  "I won't publish any of it," Charles said with perfect truth.

  "You'd better not, that's all. The fact is, we couldn't fight it. We wouldn't have stood a chance. In law Roger was perfectly entitled to it all. Mind you, it would have been another story if my grandmother had died a month later."

  "I don't quite follow you," said Charles, by now unbearably excited.

  "Have you ever seen my brother?"

  Charles nodded, then changed it to a shake of the head. She looked at him suspiciously. Then she made a dramatic gesture. She took her sister by the shoulders and pushed her forward for his inspection.

  "He's little and dark," she said. "Look at Isabel, look at me. We don't look alike, do we? We don't look like sisters because we aren't sisters and Roger isn't our brother. Oh, Roger is my parents' child all right and Mrs. Primero was his grandmother. My mother couldn't have any more children. They waited eleven years and when they knew it was no good they adopted me. A year later they took Isabel as well."

  "But ... I..." Charles stammered. "You were legally adopted, weren't you?"

  Angela Primero had recovered her composure. She put her arm round her sister who had begun to cry.

  "We were legally adopted all right. That didn't make any difference. Adopted children can't inherit when the dead person has died without making a will—or they couldn't in September 1950. They can now. They were making this Act at the time and it became law on October 1st, 1950. Just our luck, wasn't it?"

  The man who was shown into Wexford's office at nine on Monday morning was small and slender. The bones of his hands were particularly fine and with narrow delicate joints like a woman's. The dark grey suit he wore, very expensive looking and very sleek, made him look smaller than he actually was. He seemed to be surrounded, even so early in the morning and away from his home, with a great many adjuncts of elegance. Wexford, who knew him well, was amused by the sapphire tiepin, the two rings, the key chain with its heavy drop of chased—amber, was it?—the briefcase of some kind of reptile skin. How many years, he asked himself, was Roger Primero going to need to get used to wealth? "Lovely morning," said Wexford. "I've just had a couple of days at Worthing and the sea was like a millpond. What can I do for you?"

  "Catch a con man," said Primero, "a lousy little squirt posing as a journalist." He unclipped the briefcase and flicked a Sunday newspaper across Wexford's desk. It slipped on the polished surface and fell to the floor. Raising his eyebrows, Wexford let it lie.

  "Hell," said Primero. "There's nothing for you to see, anyway." His glazed eyes had a sore look in the handsome expressionless face. The man's vanity had made him rebel against glasses at last, Wexford thought, blinking slightly behind his own heavy tortoiseshell frames. "Look here, Chief Inspector, I don't mind telling you, I'm hopping mad. This is how it was. Mind if I smoke?"

  "Not at all."

  A gold cigarette case spilled out from his pocket, followed by a holder and a lighter in peculiar black and gold mosaic. Wexford watched this production of props, wondering when it was going to end. The man is furnished like a room, he thought.

  "This is how it was," he said again. "Character rang me up on Thursday, said he was on the Planet and wanted to do an article about me. My early life. You get the picture? I said he could come along on Friday and he did. I gave him a hell of a long interview, all the dope and the upshot of it was my wife asked him to lunch." He screwed up his mouth and nose like a man smelling something offensive. "Hell," he said, "I don't suppose he's ever seen a lunch like that in all his life..."

  "But no article appeared and when you rang the Planet this morning they'd never heard of him."

  "How did you know?"

  "It happens," said Wexford dryly. "I'm surprised at you, sir, a man of your experience. The time to ring the Planet was Friday morning."

  "It makes me feel such a frightful ass."

  Wexford said airily, "No money passed, I daresay?"

  "Hell, no!"

  "Just the lunch, then, and you told him a lot of things you'd rather have left unsaid."

  "That's the thing." His expression had been sulky, but suddenly he smiled and it was a likeable smile. Wexford had always rather liked him. "Oh, hell's bells, Chief Inspector..."

  "Hell's bells, as you say. Still, you were wise to come to us, though I don't know that we can do anything unless he makes a move..."

  "A move? What d'you mean, a move?"

  "Well, let me give you an example. Nothing personal, you understand. Just supposing a wealthy man, a man who is somewhat in the public eye, says something a shade indiscreet to a reputable journalist. Ten to one he can't use it because he's laying his paper open to libel action." Wexford paused and gave the other man a penetrating look. "But if he says those same indiscreet things to an impostor, a confidence trickster..." Primero had grown very pale. "What's to stop the impostor following a few leads and ferreting out something really damaging. Most people, Mr. Primero, even decent law-abiding people, have something in their pasts they'd rather not have known. You have to ask yourself, if he's not on the level, what's he up to? The answer is either he's after your money or else he's crazy." He added more kindly, "In my experience nine out of ten of them are just crazy. Still, if it'll help to set your mind at rest perhaps you could give us a description. I suppose he gave you his name?"

  "It wouldn't be his real name."

  "Naturally not."

  Primero leant confidingly towards him. During the course of his long career Wexford had found it valuable to make himself au fait with perfumes and he noticed that Primero smelt of Lentheric's Onyx.

  "He seemed nice enough," Primero began. "My wife was quite taken with him." His eyes had begun to water and he put his fingers very cautiously up to them. Wexford was reminded of a weeping woman who dare not rub her eyes for fear of smudging mascara. "I haven't told her about this, by the way. I passed it off. Wouldn't want to upset her. He was well-spoken, Oxford accent and all that. A tall fair fellow, said his name was Bowman, Charles Bowman."

  "A-ha!" said Wexford but not aloud.

  "Chief Inspector?"

  "Mr. Primero?"

  "I've just remembered something. He was—well, he was extraordinarily interested in my grandmother."

  Wexford almost laughed. "From what you've told me I think I can assure you there won't be any serious repercussions."

  "You think he's a nut?"

  "Harmless, anyway."

  "You've taken a load off my mind." Primero got up, retrieved his briefcase and picked up the newspaper. He did it rather awkwardly as if he was unused to performing even so simple a service for himself. "I'll be more careful in future."

  "An ounce of prevention, you know."

  "Well, I won't take up any more of your time." He pulled a long, but possibly sincerely sad face. The watering eyes added to his look of melancholy. "Off to a funeral, as a matter of fact. Poor old Alice."

  Wexford had noticed the black tie on which the sapphire glowed darkly. He showed Primero to the door. Throughout the interview he had kept a solemn face. Now he permitted himself the indulgence of gargantuan, though almost silent, laughter.

  "Public General Acts and Measures, 1950." Wexford took the book—was it a White Paper? Archery was ashamed to confess that he did not know—and read the title aloud. "There's something here you want me to look at?"

  Charles found the page for him. "Here." Wexford began to read. The silence was tense, almost agonised. Archery looked surreptitiously at the others, Charles who was flushed with eagerness, Kershaw trying to sit casually, but whose bright darting eyes betrayed his anxiety, Tess who looked confident, serene. Was it her mother in whom she trusted so completely or was it Charles? A good deal of Charles's poise had deserted him when, on entering the office five minutes before, he had had to introduce Tess to the Chief Inspector.

  "Miss Kershaw," he had said, "my ... the girl I'm going to marry. I..."

  "Ah, yes." Wexford had been very urbane. "Good afternoon, Miss Kershaw, Mr. Kershaw. Won't you sit down? Heatwave's coming to an end at last, I'm afraid."

  And indeed a change had come over the bright blue un-English sky. It had begun just after lunch with the appearance of a cloud that was truly no bigger than a man's hand, and this cloud had been followed by more, driven by a sudden wind. Now, as Wexford, frowning a little, read steadily, Archery contemplated the window from which the yellow blind had been fully raised, and through it the lumpy blotchy mass of cumulus, hollowed and pock-marked with grey.

  "Very interesting," said Wexford, "and new to me. I didn't know the Primero sisters were adopted. Convenient for Primero."

  "Convenient?" said Charles. Archery sighed within himself. He could always tell when his son was going to be rude or what Charles himself called forthright. "Is that all you've got to say?"

  "No," said Wexford. Few people have the confidence and the restraint to say "yes" or "no" without qualification. Wexford was big and heavy and ugly; his suit had seen better days, too many wet ones and too many hot dusty ones, but he radiated strength. "Before we go any further on this tack, Mr. Archery," he said to Charles, "I'd like to say that I've had a complaint about you from Mr. Primero."

  "Oh, that."

  "Yes, that. I've been aware for some days that your father had made the acquaintance of the Primeros. Perhaps it wasn't a bad idea and I'm sure it wasn't an unpleasant one to do so through Mrs. Primero." Archery knew his face had become white. He felt sick. "And let me say in all fairness," Wexford went on, "that I told him it was all right as far as I was concerned to make contact with the people concerned in the Primero case." He glanced briefly at Tess who didn't move. "Make contact, I said, not make trouble. Your little escapade on Friday is what I call making trouble and that I won't have!"

  Charles said sulkily, "All right, I'm sorry." Archery saw that he had to justify himself before Tess. "You're not going to tell me that your people don't occasionally invent a cover story to get what they want."

  "My people," Wexford snapped, "happen to have the law on their side." He added grandiloquently, "They are the law." The frown thawed. "Now we've got the lecture over you'd better tell me just what you and your father have found out."

  Charles told him. Wexford listened patiently, but as the evidence against Primero mounted, instead of surprise, his face registered a strange blankness. The heavy features had become brutish, like those of an old bull.

  "Of course, you'll say he had an alibi," said Charles. "I realise your people would have checked his alibi and after all these years it's going to be difficult to crack, but..."

  "His alibi was not checked," said Wexford.

  "What did you say?"

  "His alibi was not checked."

  "I don't understand."

  "Mr. Archery..." Wexford got up and rested his massive hands on the desk, but he didn't move away from behind it. "I am quite happy to discuss this whole matter with you, answer any questions you may like to ask." He paused. "But not in the presence of Miss Kershaw. If I may say so, I think you were unwise to bring her with you."

  Now it was Charles's turn to get to his feet. "Miss Kershaw is going to be my wife," he said hotly. "Anything you say to me you can say to her. I won't have any secrets from her in this."

  Casually Wexford sat down again. He drew a bunch of papers from a desk drawer and began to study them. Then he lifted his eyes slowly and said: "I'm sorry this has been a fruitless interview for you. With a little co-operation I think I could have saved you a lot of useless enquiry. But, if you'll forgive me, I'm a very busy man so I'll say good afternoon."

  "No," said Tess suddenly. "I'll go. I'll wait in the car."

  "Tess!"

  "Of course I'm going, darling. Don't you see? He can't talk about my father in front of me. Oh, darling be your age!"

  He is being his age, thought Archery miserably. Wexford knew something—something that was going to be horrible. But why was he playing this pouncing cat and mouse game with them all, why had he played it with Archery all along? Confidence and strength—but did it cover a fierce inverted snobbism, a fear that the Archeries might shake his authority and trouble the still waters of his district? And yet the man held such sway and was, beyond a doubt, a good, just man. He would never lie or even shift truth to cover a lapse. "His alibi was not checked..." If only they would stop fencing!

  Then, suddenly, Wexford stopped it.

  "No need to leave the building, Miss Kershaw," he said. "If your—your father would care to take you upstairs—straight along the corridor and turn left when you come to the double doors—you'll find we've got quite a reasonable canteen, even for a lady. I suggest a cup of strong tea and an eccles cake."

  "Thanks." Tess turned and just touched Kershaw's shoulder. He rose at once. Wexford closed the door after them.

  Charles took a deep breath, and making a brave attempt to lounge casually in his chair, said, "All right, then. What about this alibi that for some mysterious reason was never investigated?"

  "The reason," said Wexford, "was not mysterious. Mrs. Primero was killed between six-twenty-five and seven o'clock on the evening of Sunday, September 24th, 1950." He paused to allow Charles's inevitable interruption of "Yes, yes", uttered with fierce impatience. "She was killed in Kingsmarkham and at six-thirty Roger Primero was seen in Sewingbury five miles away."

  "Oh, he was seen, was he?" Charles scoffed, crossing his legs. "What do you think, Father? Does it seem remotely possible to you that he could have fixed it beforehand that he'd be 'seen'? There's always some shifty mate who'll perjure himself and say he's seen you for twenty quid."

  "Some shifty mate, eh?" Wexford was now hardly bothering to conceal his amusement.

  "Somebody saw him. All right. Who saw him?"

  Wexford sighed and the smiled was erased. "I saw him," he said.

  The letter with the Kendal postmark was awaiting Archery on the hall table when they got back to the Olive and Dove. He glanced at it uncomprehendingly, then remembered. Colonel Cosmo Plashet, Painter's commanding officer.

  "What now?" he said to Charles when Tess had gone upstairs to lie down.

  "I don't know. They're going back to Purley tonight."

  "Do we go back to Thringford tonight?"

  "I don't know, Father. I tell you I don't know." He paused, irritable, pink in the face, a lost child. "I'll have to go and apologise to Primero," he said, the child remembering its manners. "It was a bloody awful way to behave to him."

  Archery said it instinctively, without thinking. "I'll do that, if you like. I'll ring them."

  "Thanks. If he insists on seeing me I'll go. You've talked to her before, haven't you? I gathered from something Wexford said."

  "Yes, I've talked to her, but I didn't know who she was."

  "That," said Charles, severe again, "is you all over."

  Was he really going to ring her up and apologise? And why should he have the vanity to suppose that she would even come to the phone? "In the course of your enquiries, Mr. Archery, I hope you managed to combine pleasure with business." She was bound to have told her husband what she had meant by that. How the middle-aged clergyman had suddenly gone sentimental on her. He could hear Primero's reply, his colloquialism, "Didn't actually make the old pass, did he?" and her light dismissive laughter. His soul cringed. He went into the empty lounge and ripped open Colonel Plashet's letter.

  It was handwritten on rough white vellum almost as thick as cartridge paper. By the occasional fading of the ink from deep black to pale grey Archery could tell that the writer had not used a fountain pen. An old man's hand, he thought, a military man's address, "Srinagar," Church Street, Kendal... Dear Mr. Archery, he read, I was interested to receive your letter and will do my best to provide you with what information I can on Private Herbert Arthur Painter. You may be aware that I was not called to give evidence as to character at Painter's trial, though I held myself in readiness to do so should it have been necessary. Fortunately I have retained in my possession certain notes I then made. I say fortunately, for you will appreciate that Private Painter's war service covered a period of from twenty-three to twenty years ago, and my memory is no longer what I should like it to be. Lest you should be under the impression, however, that I am the possessor of information sympathetic to Painter's relatives, I must reluctantly disabuse your mind. In deciding not to call me, Painter's defending counsel must have been aware that any statement I could truthfully have made would, instead of assisting their cause, have merely made the task of prosecution easier.

  That was it, then. There would follow only another loathsome catalogue to Painter's propensities. Colonel Plashet's very idiosyncratic style and writing brought home to him more forcibly than the cold print of the transcript had done, the kind of man Charles was prepared to accept as a father-in-law. Curiosity, not hope, made him read on, Painter had been serving with His Majesty's Forces for one year when he entered my regiment. This was shortly prior to our embarkation for Burma as part of the Fourteenth Army. He was a most unsatisfactory soldier. We saw no action until we had been in Burma for three months, during which time Painter was twice put on a charge for being drunk and disorderly and sentenced to seven days' detention for gross insolence on an officer. In action his manner and bearing improved considerably. He was a naturally pugnacious man, brave and aggressive. Soon after this, however, an incident occurred in the village in which we had our camp and a young Burmese woman was killed. A Court Martial was held before which Painter was charged with her manslaughter. He was found not guilty. I think I had better say no more on this matter. In February 1945, six months before the cessation of hostilities in the Far East, Painter succumbed to a certain tropical affliction which manifests itself in severe ulceration of the legs, accelerated, I am told by his complete disregard of certain elementary hygenic precautions and his refusal to take a proper diet. He became seriously ill and responded badly to treatment. There was at this time a troopship lying off Calcutta, and as soon as Painter's condition allowed, he and certain other sick men were transported there by air. This troopship reached a United Kingdom port during the latter part of March, 1945. I have no further information as to Painter's fate except that I believe he was shortly afterwards demobilised on health grounds. If you have any other questions whatsoever to put to me regarding Painter's war service, you may be assured of my willingness to answer them to the best of my ability and discretion. You have my full permission to publish this letter. May I, however, ask your indulgence to an old man's whim, and request a copy of your book when it comes out? Yours sincerely, Cosmo Plashet

  They all assumed he was writing a book. Archery smiled a little at the colonel's grandiose style, bul there was nothing to smile at in the brief lines aboul the Burmese woman's death. The colonel's guarded. "I think I had better say no more on this matter..." told him more than a page of explanations.

  Nothing new, nothing vital. Why, then, did he have this urgent sensation of having missed something of importance? But no, he couldn't see it ... He looked again, not knowing what he was looking for. Then, as he stared at the spidery loops and whorls, he was engulfed by a hot wave of trepidation and longing. He was afraid to speak to her, yet he longed to hear her voice.

  He looked up, surprised to find how dark it had become. The summer afternoon sky simulated dusk with its covering of slate-coloured cloud. Over the housetops away to the east it was leaden tinged with angry purple and as Archery began to fold the letter, a vivid flash of lightning shocked across the room, flashing the words on the paper into relief and bleaching his hands livid white. The thunder followed it as he reached the stairs, and echoes were still curling and growling round the old building when he entered his bedroom.

  She could only refuse to speak to him. She wouldn't even have to do that herself, for she could send the Italian butler. There was no question of her berating or reproaching him personally—she could do it with far more crushing effect by proxy.

  "Forby Hall. Mr. Primero's residence."

  "It was the butler. The Italian accent distorted every word except the name to which it gave true Latin emphasis.

  "I should like to speak to Mrs. Primero."

  "What name shall I say, sir?"

  "Henry Archery."

  Perhaps she would not be with her husband when the message came. People situated as they were in an enormous house of many rooms tended to live individual lives, he in the library, she in the drawing room. She would send the butler back with a message. As a foreigner the butler would be without that intimate feel for the nuances of English and that would give her scope. She could tell him to say something subtle and apparently polite and he would not appreciate the cutting sting that underlay the words. He heard footsteps, echoing footsteps across the big hall Charles had described. The phone crackled, perhaps because of the storm.

  "Hallo?"

  Out of a bone-dry throat he tried to speak. Why hadn't he rehearsed something? Because he had been so sure she wouldn't come?

  "Hallo, are you still there?"

  "Mrs. Primero..."

  "I thought you might have got fed-up with waiting. Mario took so long about it."

  "Of course I waited." Rain burst against his window, smacking and sobbing at the glass. "I want to apologise to you for this morning. It was unforgivable."

  "Oh, no," she said. "I've forgiven you—for this morning. You didn't really take any part in it, did you? It was the other times that seem so—well, not unforgivable, just incomprehensible."

  He could imagine her little helpless gesture, the white hands spreading out.

  "One doesn't like to feel one's been used, you see. It's not that I'm hurt. I'm not likely to be hurt because I'm really very tough, much tougher than Roger. But I am a bit spoilt and I feel as if I've been kicked off my pedestal. Good for me, I expect."

  Archery said slowly, "There's so much to explain. I thought I could explain on the phone, but now I find I can't." And yet the violence of the storm made it easier for him. He could hardly hear his own words. "I want to see you," he said, forgetting his promise.

  Apparently she had forgotten it too. "You can't come here," she said practically, "because Roger's somewhere about and he might not look on your apology in the same light as I do. And I can't come to you because the Olive and Dove, being a respectable hostelry, doesn't allow visitors in residents' bedrooms." He made an inarticulate murmur. "That's the second cheap thing I've said to you today," she said. "Oh, my dear, you wouldn't want to talk in the lounge among all the fuddy-duddies, would you? I know, what about Victor's Piece?"

  "It's locked," he said, adding stupidly, "and it's raining."

  "I've got a key. Roger's always kept one. Shall we say eight? The Olive will be only too happy if you have an early dinner."

  He dropped the receiver almost guiltily as Charles put his head round the door. And yet the telephone call had not been clandestine but made at Charles's instigation. "I think I've made it all right with the Primeros," he said, and he reflected on words from an unremem-bered source. God gave men tongues that they might conceal their thoughts.

  But Charles, with the quixotry of youth, had lost interest. "Tess and her father are just off," he said.

  "I'll come down."

  They were standing in the hall, waiting. For what? Archery wondered. The storm to cease? A miracle? Or just to say good-bye?

  "I wish we hadn't seen Elizabeth Crilling," Tess said. "And yet now I wish I'd talked to her."

  "Just as well you didn't," said Archery. "You're worlds apart. The only thing you'd have in common is your age. You're both twenty-one."

  "Don't wish away my life," Tess said oddly and he saw there were tears in her eyes. "I'm not twenty-one till October." She picked up the duffel bag that served her as a weekend case and held out her hand to Archery.

  "We must love you and leave you," said Kershaw. "Doesn't seem anything more to be said, does there, Mr. Archery? I know you hoped things would work out, but it wasn't to be."

  Charles was gazing at Tess. She kept her eyes averted.

  "For God's sake say I can write to you."

  "What's the use?"

  "It would give me pleasure," he said tightly.

  "I shan't be at home. I'm going to Torquay to stay with my aunt the day after tomorrow."

  "You won't be camping on the beach, will you? This aunt, doesn't she have an address?"

  "I haven't got a piece of paper," said Tess and Archery saw that she was near to tears. He felt in his pocket, pulled out first Colonel Plashet's letter—not that, not for Tess to see—then the illuminated card with the verse and the picture of the shepherd. Her eyes were misted and she scrawled the address quickly, handing it to Charles without a word.

  "Come on, lovey," said Kershaw. "Home, and don't spare the horses." He fished out his car keys. "All fifteen of them," he said, but no one smiled.

  It was raining so heavily that he had to dash from the car into the dilapidated porch and even there the rain caught him, blown by the gusty wind and tossed in icy droplets off the evergreens. He leant against the door and staggered because it gave with his weight and swung noisily open.

  She must have arrived already. The Flavia was nowhere to be seen and he felt a shiver of self-disgust and trepidation when it occurred to him that she was being purposely discreet. She was well known in the district, she was married and she was having a secret meeting with a married man. So she had hidden her conspicuous car. Yes, it was cheap, cheap and sordid, and he, a priest of God, had engineered it.

  Victor's Piece, dry and rotten in drought, smelt wet and rotten now the rain had come. It smelt of fungus and dead things. There were probably rats under these knotted flaking floorboards. He closed the door and walked a little way down the passage, wondering where she was and why she had not come out to him when she heard the door. Then he stopped, for he was facing the back door where Painter's raincoat had hung, and there was a raincoat hanging there now.

  Certainly nothing had hung there on his previous visit to the house. He moved up to the raincoat fascinated and rather horrified.

  Of course, it was obvious what had happened. Someone had bought the place at last, the workmen had been in and one of them had left his raincoat. Nothing to be alarmed about. His nerves must be very bad.

  "Mrs. Primero," he said, and then, because you do not call women with whom you have secret assignations by their surnames, "Imogen! Imogen!"

  There was no answer. And yet he was sure he was not alone in the house. What about knowing her if you were deaf and blind, jeered a voice within him, what about knowing her by her essence? He opened the dining room door, then the drawing room. A damp cold smell came to meet him. Water had leaked under the window sill and formed a spreading pool, dark in colour, hideously evocative. This and the rusty veining on the marble of the fireplace recalled to him splashed blood. Who would buy this place? Who could bear it? But someone had bought it for there was a workman's coat hanging behind the door...

  Here she had sat, the old woman, and bade Alice go to church. Here she had sat, her eyes closing easily into sleep, when Mrs. Crilling had come tapping at the window. Then he had come, whoever he was, with his axe and perhaps she had still been sleeping, on and on over the threats and the demands, over the blows of the axe, on and on into endless sleep. Endless sleep? Mors janua vitae. If only the gateway to life had not been through an unspeakable passage of pain. He found himself praying for what he knew was impossible, that God should change history. Then Mrs. Crilling tapped on the window.

  Archery gave a start so violent and galvanic that he seemed to feel a hand squeeze his heart with slippery fingers. He gasped and forced himself to look.

  "Sorry I'm late," said Imogen Ide. "What a ghastly night."

  She should have been on the inside, he thought, pulling himself together. But she had been outside, tapping, tapping, because she had seen him standing there like a lost soul. This way it altered the aspect of things, for she had not hidden the car. It stood on the gravel beside his own, wet, silver, glittering, like something alive and beautiful from the depths of the sea.

  "How did you get in?" she said in the hall.

  "The door was open."

  "Some workman."

  "I suppose so."

  She wore a tweed suit and her pale hair was wet. He had been silly enough—bad enough, he thought—to imagine that when they met she would run to him and embrace him. Instead she stood looking at him gravely, almost coldly, two little frown lines between her brows.

  "The morning room, I think," she said. "There's furniture in there and besides it doesn't have—associations."

  The furniture consisted of two kitchen stools and a caneback chair. From the window, heavily encrusted with grime, he could see the conservatory to whose walls of cracked glass the tendrils of a dead vine still clung. He gave her the chair and sat down on one of the stools. He had a strange feeling—but a feeling not without a charm of its own—that they had come here to buy the house, he and she, had come early and were reduced to wait thus uncomfortably until the arrival of the agent who would show them round.

  "This could be a study," he would say. "It must be lovely on a fine day."

  "Or we could eat in here. Nice and near the kitchen."

  "Will you be able to bear getting up in the morning to cook my breakfast?" (My love, my love...)

  "You were going to explain," she said, and of course, there would never be a shared bed or a shared breakfast or any future at all. This was their future, this interview in a damp morning room, looking at a dead vine.

  He began to tell her about Charles and Tess, about Mrs. Kershaw's belief. Her face grew even harder and colder when he came to the bit about the inheritance and before he had finished, she said: "You really meant to pin the murder on Roger?"

  "What could I do? I was torn between Charles," he said, "and you." She shook her head quickly, the blood running into her face. "I beg you to believe I didn't try to know you because you were his wife."

  "I believe you."

  "The money ... his sisters ... you didn't know about that?"

  "I knew nothing. Only that they existed and that he never saw them. Oh God!" She screwed up her face pushed her hands over her cheeks, across her eyes and up to the temples. "We've been talking about it all day. He can't see that he was morally obliged to help them. Only one thing matters to him, that Wexford won't take it seriously as a motive for murder."

  "Wexford saw him himself that night at the crucial time in Sewingbury."

  "He doesn't know or he's forgotten. He's going to go through hell until he can pluck up courage to ring Wexford. Some people might say that's his punishment." She sighed. "Are his sisters very badly off?"

  "One of them is. She lives in a single room with her husband and her baby."

  "I've got Roger to agree to let them have what they should have had in the first place, three thousand, three hundred odd each. I think I'd better go to see them myself. He won't even notice it's gone. It's funny, you know, I knew he was unscrupulous. You can't make that amount of money without being, but I didn't know he'd stoop to that."

  "It hasn't made you...?" He hesitated, wondering what he had destroyed.

  "Never feel the same about him again? Oh, my dear, you are funny. Listen, I'll tell you something. Seven years ago it was and the month of June. My face was on the cover of six separate magazines that month. The most photographed girl in Britain."

  He nodded, puzzled and out of his depth.

  "If you reach a peak there's nothing left but to go downhill. In June of the next year I had my face on one magazine. So I married Roger."

  "You didn't love him?"

  "I liked him, you know. He saved me in a way and all the time I'm saving him." Archery knew what she meant, recalling her soft tranquillity in the Olive dining room, her hand touching a mourner's trembling arm. He expected always from her calm serenity and he was shocked when she raged suddenly: "How was I to know there was a middle-aged clergyman waiting for me—a clergyman with a wife and a son and a guilt complex as big as a mountain?"

  "Imogen!"

  "No, you're not to touch me! It was stupid to come here and I should never have done it. Oh God, how I hate these sentimental scenes!"

  He got up and walked as far from her as the little room allowed. It had stopped raining but the sky was sludge-coloured and the vine was as dead as a doornail.

  "What will they do now," she said, "your son and this girl?"

  "I don't think they know themselves."

  "And you, what will you do?"

  " 'Go to the wife of my bosom,' " he quoted, " 'the same as I ought to go.' "

  "Kipling!" She gave a hysterical laugh, and he was pained by the depths he was discovering too late. "Kipling! That's all I need."

  "Good-bye," he said.

  "Good-bye, dear Henry Archery. I've never known what to call you. Do you know that?" She lifted his hand, kissed the palm.

  "Perhaps it's not a name for dalliance," he said ruefully.

  "But it sounds well with Rev. in front of it."

  She went out, closing the door soundlessly behind her.

  "Jenny kissed me," he said to the vine. Jenny could just be short of Imogen. "So what?"

  "It isn't blood," said Wexford. "Don't you know what it is? Couldn't you smell it?" He lifted the bottle someone had found under the sideboard and held it aloft. Archery sat on the sofa in Mrs. Crilling's living room, worn, tired, utterly spent. Doors banged and footsteps sounded as Wexford's two men searched the other room. The people upstairs had come in at midnight, Saturday night happy, the man a little drunk. The woman had had hysterics during Wexford's questioning.

  They had taken the body away and Charles moved in his chair round so that he could not see the crimson splashes of cherry brandy.

  "But why? Why did it happen?" he whispered.

  "Your father knows why." Wexford stared at Archery, his grey gimlet eyes deep and opaque. He squatted opposite them on a low chair with wooden arms. "As for me, I don't know but I can guess. I can't help feeling I've seen something like this before, a long, long time ago. Sixteen years to be exact. A pink frilly dress that a little girl could never wear again because it was spoilt with blood."

  Outside the rain had begun again and water lashed against the windows making them rattle. It would be cold now inside Victor's Piece, cold and eerie like a deserted castle in a wood of wet trees. The Chief Inspector had an extra uncanny sense that almost amounted to telepathy. Archery willed his thoughts to alter course lest Wexford should divine them, but the question came before he could rid his mind of its pictures.

  "Come on, Mr Archery, where is she?"

  "Where is who?"

  "The daughter."

  "What makes you think I know?"

  "Listen to me," said Wexford. The last person we've talked to who saw her was a chemist in Kingsmarkham. Oh, yes, we went to all the chemists first naturally. This one remembers that when she was in the shop there were two men and a girl there too, a young man and an elder one, tall, fair, obviously father and son."

  "I didn't speak to her then," Archery said truthfully. The smell sickened him. He wanted nothing but sleep and peace and to get out of this room where Wexford had kept them since they had telephoned him.

  "Mrs. Crilling's been dead six or seven hours. It's ten to three now and you left the Olive at a quarter to eight. The barman saw you come in at ten. Where did you go, Mr. Archery?"

  He sat silent. Years and years ago—Oh, centuries ago!—it had been like this in school. You own up, you betray someone, or everyone suffers. Funny, once before he had thought of Wexford as a kind of headmaster.

  "You know where she is," Wexford said. His voice was loud, threatening, ominous. "D'you want to be an accessory? Is that what you want?"

  Archery closed his eyes. Quite suddenly he knew why he was prevaricating. He wanted the very thing that Charles had warned him might happen and although it was contrary to his religion, wicked even, he wanted it with all his heart.

  Charles said, "Father..." and when he got no reply shrugged, turned his dull shocked eyes to Wexford. "Oh, what the hell? She's at Victor's Piece."

  Archery realised that he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a deep sigh. "In one of the bedrooms," he said, "looking at the coach house and dreaming of a heap of sand. She asked what they would do to her and I didn't understand. What will they do to her?"

  Wexford got up. "Well, sir..." Archery noted that "sir" as one might notice the re-assuming of a velvet glove. "You know as well as I do that it's no longer lawful to punish with death for certain..." His eyes flickered over the place where Mrs. Criling had lain. "...certain heinous and grievous offences."

  "Will you let us go now?" Charles asked.

  "Until tomorrow," said Wexford.

  The rain met them at the front door like a wave or a wall of spray. For the past half hour it had been drumming on the roof of the car and seeping in through the half-open quarter light. There was water lying in a small pool at Archery's feet but he was too tired to notice or care.

  Charles came with him into his bedroom.

  "I shouldn't ask you now," he said. "It's almost morning and God knows what we'll have to go through tomorrow, but I have to know. I'd rather know. But what else did she tell you, that girl at Victor's Piece?"

  Archery had heard of people pacing a room like caged beasts. He had never imagined himself so strung with tension that in spite of utter exhaustion he would have to find release by crossing and re-crossing a floor, picking up objects, replacing them, his hands shaking. Charles waited, too wretched even for impatience. His letter to Tess lay in its envelope on the dressing table and beside it the card from the gift shop. Archery picked it up and kneaded it in his hands, crumpling the deckle edging. Then he went up to his son, put his hands gently on his shoulders and looked into the eyes that were young replicas of his own.

  "What she told me," he said, "needn't matter to you. It would be like—well, someone else's nightmare," Charles did not move. "If you will only tell me where you saw the verse that is printed on this card."

  She lay on the floor and wept. To Archery, standing by helpless, it was some measure of her total breakdown that she had come so far wide of her conventional limits as to lie there prone and shake with sobs. Archery had never in his life reached such a nadir of despair. He pitied with an anxiety that had something of panic in it this woman who cried as if the power to weep had long fallen into disuse, as if she were experimenting with some new and shattering exercise.

  He did not know how long this abandonment to grief had lasted or would last. This room with all its apparatus for living what some call a "full life" contained no clock and he had removed his watch to make room for the wrist anchorage of the bandage. Just as he was beginning to feel that she would never stop, she made a curious humping movement so that she rested like a flogged overburdened beast.

  "Mrs. Kershaw..." he said. "Mrs. Kershaw, forgive me."

  She got up slowly, her breast still heaving. The cotton dress was creased into a faded rag. She said something but he could not hear her at all and he realised what had happened. She had utterly exhausted her voice.

  "Can I get you a glass of water, some brandy?"

  Her head shook as if it were not part of her body but a separate thing quivering on a pivot. Her voice came in a hoarse croak. "I don't drink." Then he knew that nothing could fully pierce the layers of respectability. She fell into the chair from which his questions had prised her and let her arms hang limply over its sides. When he came back from the kitchen and gave her the glass of water she had recovered sufficiently to sip it and to rub with the old refinement at the corners of her lips. He was afraid to speak.

  "Does she have to know?" The words had a hollow sound to them but the roughness had gone. "My Tessie, does she have to know?"

  He did not dare to tell her that Charles would have told her already. "It's nothing these days," he said, and shed with a word two thousand years' teaching of his faith. "Nobody thinks anything of it any more."

  "Tell me what you know." He knelt at her feet, praying that all his guesses would approximate to the truth and that there would be few gaps for her to fill. If only he could deal well with this last task and save her the shame of confession.

  "You and John Grace," he said, "you lived close together in Forby. You were in love with each other, but he was killed..."

  On an impulse he took the manuscript in his hands and laid it gently in her lap. She took it as a religious takes a talisman or a relic and she said softly: "He was so clever. I couldn't understand the things he wrote, but they were beautiful. His teacher wanted him to go to college but his mother wouldn't let him. You see, his father had a bakery business and he had to go into that." Let her go on, he prayed, edging away to squat on the edge of his chair. "He still wrote his poems and his plays," she said, "and in the evenings he used to study for some exam. He wasn't strong enough to go into the forces, anaemia or something he had." Her fingers tightened on the manuscript but her eyes were dry and drained. Archery had a quick vision of the pale pointed face in the souvenir shop picture, only now it was blending into and becoming one with Tess's.

  He let his eyes linger on Irene Kershaw for a brief moment with painful compassion. They had reached a point in this telling where she must, unless he could save her, touch on that which would humiliate her most.

  "You were going to be married," he said.

  Perhaps she was afraid to hear the words he might choose. "We never did anything wrong but the once," she cried. "Afterwards—well, he wasn't nasty like other boys, and he was just as ashamed as me." Justifying herself, her head turned from him, she whispered, "I've had two husbands and then there was John, but I've never been much for that side of things." Her head swung back and her face was aflame. "We were engaged, we were going to be married..."

  Archery knew he must rush on with his conjectures. "After he was killed you knew you were going to have a child?" She nodded, silent now with the enormity of her embarrassment. "You had nowhere to go, you were afraid so you married Painter. Let me see, John Grace was killed in February 1945 and Painter got home from Burma at the end of March. You must have known him before," he said, guessing, improvising. "Perhaps he was stationed at Forby before he went to the far East?' A tiny nod rewarded him and he was prepared to go on drawing someone else's story out of an inspired imagination, out of a letter from Kendal, a photographed face, the bruises on a woman's arm. He lifted his eyes from her and clasped his hands tightly to stop the sound that might have been no more than a sigh. Even a sigh would tell her. At the open french window, against the blaze of red petals, Kershaw was standing, silent, still and powerfully alert. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Archery, transfixed, sought momentarily in his expression for suffering or anger and saw a sweetness that brought a sudden strength to his heart.

  Perhaps he was betraying this woman, perhaps he was doing the unforgivable. It was too late for such recriminations.

  "Let me try to finish," he said, and he had no idea whether he kept his voice on the same level he had used before. "You were married and you let him think he was Tess's father. But he suspected and that was why he never loved her as a father loves his child? Why didn't you tell Mr. Kershaw?"

  She leant forward and he could tell she had not heard the man behind her move almost soundlessly into the room. "He never asked me about my life with Bert," she said. "But I was so ashamed of it, of being married to a man like that. Mr. Kershaw's so good—you don't know him—he never asked me, but I had to tell him some of it, didn't I?" She was suddenly eloquent. "Think what I had to tell him, think what I had to bring him—nothing! People used to point to me out in the streets like I was a freak. He had to take that on his shoulders—Mr. Kershaw who'd never touched dirt in all his life. He said he'd take me away and give me a new life where no one'd know, he said I wasn't to blame, I was innocent. D'you think I was going to give up the one chance I'd ever had by telling him Tess was—was illegitimate?"

  Archery gasped and staggered to his feet. By the power of his eyes and his will he had been trying to force the man behind her chair to retreat the way he had come. But Kershaw remained where he was, still, a man apparently without breath or heartbeats. His wife had been rapt, her own story dulling all outer stimuli, but now she seemed to sense the atmosphere in the room, the soundless passion of two other people whose sole desire was to help her. She twisted in her chair, sketched a strange little gesture of pleading and rose to confront her husband.

  The scream Archery expected never came. She lurched a little, but whatever she was trying to gasp out was lost and muffled by Kershaw's strong embrace. He heard her say only, "Oh, Tom, Oh, Tom!" but his energy was so drained that his brain was filled with just one foolish thought. It was the first time he had ever heard Kershaw's Christian name.