Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

sweet-scented from bulb plants in bloom, narcissi and hyacinths, and with that damp green feel, humid and mild, peculiar to conservatories.
    He found a library behind the dining room. All these rooms were as orderly, as sleek and tended as the first one he had looked into. They might have been in some National Trust mansion where certain rooms are open to the public. In the library all the books were contained behind screen doors of trellis-work, dark-red wood, fine gleaming glass. A single :book only lay open on a lectern. From where 3ie stood Burden could see that the print was old and he guessed at long S's. A passage led :H8vay to kitchen regions.
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    The kitchen was big but in no way cavernous. It had been newly fitted in the pseudo-farm dairy style, but he thought the cabinet doors were oak not pine. Here was the refectory table he had been imagining, glowingly polished and with fruit on a polished wooden platter in the centre of it.
    A cough behind him made him look round. Archbold had come in with Chepstow, the fingerprint man.
    "Excuse me, sir. Prints."
    Burden held up his right hand to show the glove on it. Chepstow nodded, got to work on the door handle on the kitchen side. The house was too grand to have that kitchen exit known as the 'back door'. Burden gingerly approached the open doors, one which led to a laundry room with washing machine, dryer and ironing things, the other to a kind of lobby with shelves, cupboards and a rack where coats hung. Yet another room had to be passed through before an exit to the outside was reached.
    He looked round as Archbold came through. Archbold gave a half-nod. The door had bolts but they were not secured. A key was in the lock. Burden wouldn't touch the doorknob, glove or no glove.
    "You're thinking they came in this way?"
    "It's a possibility, isn't it, sir? How else? All the other outside doors are locked."
    "Unless they were admitted. Unless they came to the front door and someone opened it and invited them in."
    Chepstow came through and did his test on
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    the doorknob, the fingerplate, the jamb. A cotton glove on his right hand, he carefully turned the knob. It gave and the door came open. Outside was cool greenish darkness with a remote wash of moonlight. Burden could make out a high hedge, enclosing a paved court.
    "Someone left the door unlocked. The housekeeper when she went home, maybe. Maybe she always left it unlocked and they only locked it before they went to bed."
    "Could be," said Burden.
    "Terrible thing to have to lock yourselves in when you're in an isolated place like this."
    "They evidently didn't," Burden said, irritated.
    He made his way through the laundry room which led, by a doorway where the door stood open, into a kind of back hall lined with cupboards. An enclosed staircase, much narrower than the principal one, mounted between walls. These then were the 'back stairs', a feature of big old houses Burden had often heard of but seldom if ever seen. He went up, found himself in a passage with open doors on both sides.
    The bedrooms seemed innumerable. If you lived in a house this size you might lose count of how many bedrooms you had. He turned lights on and then off as he proceeded. The passage turned to the left and he knew he must be in the west wing, above the dining room. The only iioor here was closed. He opened it, pressed the &fritch his ringers felt on the left-hand wall. |* Light flooded on to the sort of disorder he had |inagined Davina Flory living in. It took him an
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    instant only to realise that this was where the gunman or gunmen had been. The disturbance had been caused by them. What was it Karen Malahyde had said?
    "They took her bedroom apart, looking for something."
    The bed had not been stripped but the covers thrown back and the pillows tossed aside. The drawers in the two bedside tables were pulled out and so were two of those in the dressing table. One of the wardrobe doors was open and a shoe from inside lay on the