Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
*
Donaldson was to follow with Barry Vine. Wexford set out along the lane that was separated from the garden by a high hedge. On the other side of it the forest encroached. There was very little mist here and the moon had risen. Out of the reach of the arc lamps, the moonlight washed the path ahead with a greenish
46
phosphorescence on which conifers laid smooth or feathery black shadows. Also black against the clear shining sky were the silhouettes of marvellous trees, specimen trees planted decades before, and even by night discernible as fantastic or strange by their immense height or curious leaf formations or contorted branches. The shadows they cast were like letters in Hebrew on an old stained parchment.
He thought of death and of contrast. He thought of the ugliest of all things happening in this most beautiful place. Of 'right perfection wrongfully disgraced'. The memory of that blood splashing the room and the table like spilt paint made him shudder.
Here, so near by, was another world. The path had a magical quality. The wood was an enchanted place, not real, a backdrop perhaps to The Magic Flute or a setting for a fairy tale, an illustration, not living landscape. It was totally silent. Underfoot he trod on pine needles and his shoes made no sound. On and on, as the path wound, opened new moonlit vistas of leafless larches, araucarias with monkey puzzle branches like anchored reptiles, cypresses pointing spires into the sky, Scots pines whose crowns were concertinas, macrocarpas dense as tapestries, junipers slender and frondy, firs with last years cones knobbing their tufted boughs. Moonlight, gaining strength, flooded the pinetum, glimmered through its alleys, was here and there excluded by a dense barrier of aeedled branches or trunks like twisted hanks of rope.
47
Nature, which should have risen up and howled, sent a gale roaring through these woods, driven the wild things to protest, the branches of trees to toss and lament, was quiet and sweet and placid. The stillness was almost unnatural. Not a twig moved. Wexford rounded a bend in the path, saw it peter out, the woods thin before him and a clearing emerge. A narrower path opened out of it, penetrating a screen of the more common sort of conifers.
The lights of houses showed gleaming at the end of the path.
* * *
Barry Vine and Karen Malahyde had been upstairs to the first and second floors to check that there were no more bodies. Curious to know what might be up there, Burden was nevertheless chary of passing Harvey Copeland until Archbold had logged the body's position, it had been photographed from all angles and the pathologist had given it his preliminary examination. To pass it he would have had to step over the dead man's outflung right arm and hand. Vine and Karen had done so, but an inhibition, squeamishness and a sense of what was fitting, stopped Burden. He made his way instead across the hall and looked into what turned out to be the drawing room.
Beautifully furnished, exquisitely tidy, a museum of pretty things and objects d'art. Somehow, he would not have imagined Davina Flory living like this, but in a more slapdash
48
or Bohemian fashion. He would have pictured her, robed or trousered, seated with like-minded spirits at some ancient and battered refectory table in a big warm untidy place, drinking wine and talking long into the night. A kind of banqueting hall it was that his imagination had conjured up. Davina Flory inhabited it, dressed like a matriarch in a Greek tragedy. He smiled to himself shamefacedly, looked again at the festooned windows, portraits in gilded frames, the jardiniere of kalanchoe and ferns, the spindle-legged eighteenth-century furniture, and closed the door on it.
At the back of this east wing and behind the hall were two rooms that seemed to be his and her studies, another that opened into a large glazed room full of plants. One or more of the dead had been an enthusiastic gardener. The place was
Donaldson was to follow with Barry Vine. Wexford set out along the lane that was separated from the garden by a high hedge. On the other side of it the forest encroached. There was very little mist here and the moon had risen. Out of the reach of the arc lamps, the moonlight washed the path ahead with a greenish
46
phosphorescence on which conifers laid smooth or feathery black shadows. Also black against the clear shining sky were the silhouettes of marvellous trees, specimen trees planted decades before, and even by night discernible as fantastic or strange by their immense height or curious leaf formations or contorted branches. The shadows they cast were like letters in Hebrew on an old stained parchment.
He thought of death and of contrast. He thought of the ugliest of all things happening in this most beautiful place. Of 'right perfection wrongfully disgraced'. The memory of that blood splashing the room and the table like spilt paint made him shudder.
Here, so near by, was another world. The path had a magical quality. The wood was an enchanted place, not real, a backdrop perhaps to The Magic Flute or a setting for a fairy tale, an illustration, not living landscape. It was totally silent. Underfoot he trod on pine needles and his shoes made no sound. On and on, as the path wound, opened new moonlit vistas of leafless larches, araucarias with monkey puzzle branches like anchored reptiles, cypresses pointing spires into the sky, Scots pines whose crowns were concertinas, macrocarpas dense as tapestries, junipers slender and frondy, firs with last years cones knobbing their tufted boughs. Moonlight, gaining strength, flooded the pinetum, glimmered through its alleys, was here and there excluded by a dense barrier of aeedled branches or trunks like twisted hanks of rope.
47
Nature, which should have risen up and howled, sent a gale roaring through these woods, driven the wild things to protest, the branches of trees to toss and lament, was quiet and sweet and placid. The stillness was almost unnatural. Not a twig moved. Wexford rounded a bend in the path, saw it peter out, the woods thin before him and a clearing emerge. A narrower path opened out of it, penetrating a screen of the more common sort of conifers.
The lights of houses showed gleaming at the end of the path.
* * *
Barry Vine and Karen Malahyde had been upstairs to the first and second floors to check that there were no more bodies. Curious to know what might be up there, Burden was nevertheless chary of passing Harvey Copeland until Archbold had logged the body's position, it had been photographed from all angles and the pathologist had given it his preliminary examination. To pass it he would have had to step over the dead man's outflung right arm and hand. Vine and Karen had done so, but an inhibition, squeamishness and a sense of what was fitting, stopped Burden. He made his way instead across the hall and looked into what turned out to be the drawing room.
Beautifully furnished, exquisitely tidy, a museum of pretty things and objects d'art. Somehow, he would not have imagined Davina Flory living like this, but in a more slapdash
48
or Bohemian fashion. He would have pictured her, robed or trousered, seated with like-minded spirits at some ancient and battered refectory table in a big warm untidy place, drinking wine and talking long into the night. A kind of banqueting hall it was that his imagination had conjured up. Davina Flory inhabited it, dressed like a matriarch in a Greek tragedy. He smiled to himself shamefacedly, looked again at the festooned windows, portraits in gilded frames, the jardiniere of kalanchoe and ferns, the spindle-legged eighteenth-century furniture, and closed the door on it.
At the back of this east wing and behind the hall were two rooms that seemed to be his and her studies, another that opened into a large glazed room full of plants. One or more of the dead had been an enthusiastic gardener. The place was
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