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

carpet. The lid of the ottoman at the foot of the bed had been raised and a length of silken fabric, a rose and gold floral pattern, trailed over the side of it.
    It was odd, this feeling Burden had. His image of the kind of life he had expected Davina Flory to lead, the kind of person he would have thought she was, kept returning to him. This was how he would have envisaged her bedroom, beautifully appointed, cleaned and tidied daily, but subjected by its owner to a continuous untidying process. Not through wanton disregard of a servant's labours but because she simply did not know or notice, was indifferent to the neatness of her surroundings. It had not been so. An intruder had done this.
    Why then did he find something incongruous about it? The jewel box, a red leather case, empty and upturned on the carpet, expressed the truth plainly enough.
    Burden shook his head ruefully, for he would not have expected Davina Flory to have possessed jewels or a case to put them in.
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    * * *
    Five people in the Harrison's small front room turned it into a crowded place. John Gabbitas, the woodsman, had been fetched from next door. There were not enough chairs and an extra had to be brought from upstairs. Brenda Harrison had insisted on making tea, which no one had seemed to want, but of which, Wexford thought now, they all needed the relief and comfort.
    She was cool about it. She had had, of course, some half-hour in which to adjust to the shock before he got there. Nevertheless, he found her briskness disconcerting. It might have been some minor disaster befalling her employers that Vine and Malahyde had told her about, a bit of the roof blowing off, for instance, or water through a ceiling. She bustled about with the teacups and a tin of biscuits while her husband sat stunned, his head occasionally moving from side to side as if in disbelief, his eyes staring.
    Before running outside to boil a kettle and lay a tray -- she seemed a hyperactive restless woman -- she had confirmed his own identification. The dead man on the stairs was Harvey Copeland, the elder of the dead women at the table Davina Flory. The other woman she identified as certainly Davina Flory's daughter Naomi. In spite of the exalted status, in anyone's estimation, of her employers, it appeared that they were all on Christian name terms here, �>avina and Harvey and Naomi and Brenda. She even had to think for a moment before recalling
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    �
    �1
    Naomi's surname. Oh, yes, Jones, she was Mrs Jones, but the girl called herself Flory.
    'The girl?"
    'Daisy was Naomi's daughter and Davina's granddaughter. Her name was Davina too, she was sort of Davina Flory the younger, if you see what I mean, but they called her Daisy."
    "Not 'was'," said Wexford. "She's not dead."
    She lifted her shoulders a little. Her tone seemed to him indignant, perhaps only because she had been proved wrong. "Oh. I thought the policewoman said they all were."
    It was after this that she made the tea.
    He could already tell that of the three she was to be his principal informant. Her apparent callousness, an indifference that was almost repulsive, was of no particular account. Because of it, she might make the best witness. In any case, John Gabbitas, a man in his twenties, though living in one of the Tancred Wood houses and managing the woodland, worked for himself as well, as a woodsman and tree expert, and said he had only returned an hour before from a job on the other side of the county. Ken Harrison had scarcely uttered a word since Wexford and Vine arrived.
    "When did you last see them?" Wexford asked.
    She answered quickly. She was not the kind of woman to take thoughts. "Seven thirty. I always did, regular as clockwork. Unless she had a dinner party. When it was just them, the four of them, I'd cook whatever it was and dish it up and put in on the heated trolley and wheel
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    it in the dining room. Naomi always served it, or so I presume. I was never there to see. Davina liked to be