She had seen that look of strained endurance on his face before, but all he said was: 'Could be. Could be.' She asked:
'Are you going to tell Grogan?'
'No. None of his business. Not relevant.'
'Not even if they arrest you for murder?'
'They won't. I didn't kill my wife.' Suddenly he said, quickly as if the words were forced out of him:
'I don't believe I deliberately let them kill him. May have done. Difficult to understand one's motives. Used to think it was all so simple.'
Cordelia said:
'You don't have to explain to me. It's none of my business. And you were a young officer at the time. You can't have been in command here.'
'No, but I was on duty that evening. Should have discovered that something was afoot, should have stopped it. But I hated Blythe so much that I couldn't trust myself to go near him. That's one thing you never forget or forgive, cruelty when you're a child and defenceless. I shut my mind and my eyes to anything that concerned him. May have shut them deliberately. You could call it a dereliction of duty.'
'But no one did. There was no court martial, was there? No one blamed you.'
'I blame myself.'
There was a moment's silence, then he said:
'Never knew he was married. No mention of a wife at the inquest. There was talk of a girl in Speymouth but she never showed herself. No talk of a child.'
'Munter probably wasn't born. And he could have been illegitimate. I don't suppose we shall ever know. But his mother must have been bitter about what happened. He probably grew up believing that the Army had murdered his father. I wonder why he took a job on the island; curiosity, filial duty, the hope of revenge? But he couldn't have expected that you would turn up here.'
'He might have hoped for it. He took the job in the summer of 1978. I married Clarissa that year, and she has known Ambrose Gorringe nearly all her life. Munter probably kept track of me. I'm not exactly a nonentity.'
Cordelia said:
'The police have made mistakes before now. If they do arrest you I shall feel free to tell them. I shall have to tell them.' He said quietly:
'No, Cordelia. It's my concern, my past, my life.' Cordelia cried:
'But you must see how it will look to the police! If they believe me about the musical-box, they'll know that Munter was in the gallery a few feet from your wife's room at about the time she died. If he didn't kill her himself, he could have seen the person who did. Taken with that shout to you of 'murderer' it's damning unless you tell them who Munter was.'
He didn't respond but stood rigid as a sentry, his eyes gazing into nothingness. She said:
'If they arrest the wrong person it's a double injustice. It means that the guilty one goes free. Is that what you want?'
'Would it be the wrong person? If she hadn't married me she'd be alive today.'
'You can't know that!'
'I can feel it. Who was it said we owe God a death?' 'I can't remember. Someone in Shakespeare's Henry IV. But what has that to do with it?'
'Nothing, I expect. It came into my mind.'
She was getting nowhere. Beneath that apparently guileless and inarticulate front of personality he harboured his private under-cover agent, a mind more complex and perhaps more ruthless than she had imagined. And he wasn't a fool, this deceptively simple soldier. He knew precisely the extent of his danger. And that could mean that he had his own suspicions; that there was someone he wanted to protect. And she didn't think that it would be either Ambrose or Ivo. She said helplessly:
'I don't know what you want of me. Am I to carry on with the case?'
'No point is there? Nothing can frighten her ever again. Better leave it to the professionals.' He added awkwardly, 'I'll pay, of course, for your time so far. I'm not ungrateful.'
Ungrateful for what? She wondered.
He turned and looked down at Munter's body. He said:
'Extraordinary business, putting that wreath on the War Memorial every year. Do you suppose Gorringe will keep up the tradition?'
'I shouldn't think so.'
'He should. I'll have a word with him. Oldfield could see to it.'
They turned to make their way across the rose garden, then stopped. Coming across the lawn towards them in the pale apricot light, their footfalls absorbed by the soft grass, were Grogan and his coterie of officers. Cordelia was caught unawares. Facing their silent, inexorable advance, their bleak, unsmiling faces, she resisted the temptation to glance at Sir George. But she wondered whether he shared her sudden and irrational vision of how the two of them must look to the police, as guilty and discomforted as a couple of poachers surprised by the gamekeepers with their dead spoils at their feet.
PART SIX. A Case Concluded
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Munter's body was taken away with a speed and efficiency which Cordelia thought was almost unseemly. By ten o'clock the metal container with its two long side-handles had been slid from the jetty on to the deck of the police launch with as little ceremony as if it had held a dog. But what, after all, had she expected? Munter had been a man. Now he was a weight of latent putrefaction, a case to be given a file and a number, a problem to be solved. She told herself that it was unreasonable to expect that the men – police officers? mortuary attendants? undertaker's staff? – would bear him away with the solemnity appropriate to a funeral. They were doing a familiar job without emotion, and without fuss.
And with this second death the suspects were able to watch the police at work. They did it discreetly from the window of Cordelia's bedroom, watching while Grogan and Buckley walked slowly round the body like a couple of marine scientists intrigued by some bedraggled specimen which had been washed up by the tide. They watched while the photographer did his job, hardly seeming to notice or speak to the police, occupying himself with his own expertise. And this time Dr Ellis-Jones didn't appear. Cordelia wondered whether this was because the cause of death was apparent or whether he was busy elsewhere with another body. Instead, a police surgeon arrived to certify that life was extinct and to make the preliminary examination. He was a large and jovial man, dressed in sea boots and a knitted jersey patched on both elbows, who greeted the police like old drinking companions. His cheerful voice rose clearly on the quiet morning air. It was only when he knelt to rummage in his case for his thermometer that the watchers at the window silently withdrew and took refuge in the drawing-room, ashamed of what had suddenly seemed an indecent curiosity. And it was from the drawing-room windows, less than ten minutes later, that they saw Munter's body borne through the archway and across the quay to the launch. One of the bearers said something to his mate and they both laughed. He was probably complaining about the weight.
And with this second death even the police questioning didn't take long. There was, after all, not a great deal that anyone could tell, and Cordelia guessed how suspiciously unanimous that little must sound. When it was her turn she went into the business room weighed down by the conviction that nothing she said would be believed. Grogan stared at her across the desk, his pale, unfriendly eyes red-rimmed as if he had gone without sleep. The two musical-boxes were on the desk in front of him, carefully positioned side by side.
When she had finished her account of Munter's appearance at the dining-room windows, of the finding of his body and the recovery of the musical-box, there was a long silence. Then he said:
'Why exactly did you go up to the tower room on Friday afternoon?'
'Just curiosity. Miss Lisle didn't want me at the rehearsal and Mr Whittingham and I had finished our walk. He was tired and had gone to rest. I was at a loose end.'
'So you amused yourself by exploring the tower?'
'Yes.'
'And then you played with the toys?'
He made it sound as if she were a tiresome child who hadn't been able to keep her hands off someone else's kiddy car. She realized with a mixture of anger and hopelessness the impossibility of explaining, of making him understand that impulse to set the whole childish menagerie working, to drown wretchedness with a cacophony of sound. And even if she had confided the cause of her distress, Ivo telling her of the death of Tolly's child, would her story have sounded any more plausible? How did one explain to a policeman, perhaps to a judge, a jury, those small, seemingly irrational compulsions, the pathetic expedients against pain, which hardly made sense to oneself? And if it were difficult for her, so egregiously privileged, how did those others cope; the ignorant, the uneducated, the inarticulate, faced with the esoteric and uncompromising machinery of the law? She said:
'Yes, I played with the toys.'
'And you are absolutely certain that the musical-box you found in the tower room played the tune 'Greensleeves'?' He smacked his great palm down on the lid of the left-hand box, then lifted the lid. The cylinder turned and the delicate teeth of the long comb once more picked out the nostalgic, plaintive tune. She said:
'I'm absolutely sure.'
'Externally, they're very alike. The same size, the same shape, the same wood, almost the same pattern on the lids.' 'I know. But they play different tunes.'
She could understand the frustration and the irritation which he was keeping so tightly under control. Had she liked him better, she might have sympathized. If she were telling the truth, then Munter had lied. He had left the ground floor of the castle some time during that critical hour and forty minutes. The only entrance to the tower was from the gallery floor. He had been within feet of Clarissa's door. And Munter was dead. Even if Grogan believed him innocent, even if some other suspect were brought to trial, her evidence about the musical-box would be a gift for the defence. He said:
'You didn't mention your visit to the tower when you were questioned yesterday.'
'You didn't ask me. You were chiefly interested in what I did and saw on Saturday. I didn't think it important.'
'There's nothing else that you didn't think important?'
'I've answered all your questions as honestly as I can.'
He said:
'Perhaps. But that isn't quite the same thing, is it, Miss Gray?'
And the small voice of her own conscience, in collusion with him, indicted her. Have you? Have you?
Suddenly he leaned across the desk and put his face close to hers. She thought she could smell his breath, sour and tainted with beer, and had to force herself not to draw back.
'What exactly happened on Saturday morning in the Devil's Kettle?'
