‘I reckon you need your beauty sleep, so I’ll be on my way.’
‘We got your present, Charlie. I wasn’t going to say nothing till the others had gone, but it’s a real grand job that record-player. It quite knocked me back when I saw it. Must have set you back a bit.’
‘I got it cost, mate.’ Another stone dropped and splashed in the darkness beneath.
‘Marilyn said she’d be writing to Lilian.’
‘She has, too. A lovely letter come from her before I went up north. A real educated girl you got there, Jack. She knows how to put a letter together all right. You don’t grudge the outlay when you get a letter like that. I brought you two together and don’t you ever forget it.’
‘Ah, you know how to pick them, Charlie. Look at Lilian.’
‘Well, I’d better get looking at her, hadn’t I?’ Charlie turned to face his friend and his shadow was short and black against Jack’s long one. He raised his hard little hand and brought it down on Jack’s resoundingly. ‘I’ll be off, then.’
‘I reckon you’d better, Charlie.’
‘And if I don’t get the chance tomorrow – well, I’m no speechmaker like Brian, but all the very best, Jack.’
‘You’ll get the chance all right. You’ll have to make a speech.’
‘Save it up till then, eh?’ Charlie wrinkled his nose and winked quickly. The shadows parted, he negotiated the stile. ‘Good night, me old love.’
‘Night, Charlie.’
The willows enclosed him. His shadow appeared again as the path rose and dipped. Jack heard him whistling, ‘Mabel, dear, listen here’ under the stars and then as the shadow was absorbed and lost in the many tree shadows, the whistle too faded and there was no sound but the gentle chatter of the stream, the Kingsbrook that flowed everlastingly over its bed of thin round stones.
Many waters cannot quench love, nor the floods drown it.
Chapter 2
Detective Chief Inspector Wexford didn’t care for dogs. He had never had a dog and now that one of his daughters was married and the other a student at drama school, he saw no reason why he should ever give one house-room. Many an anti-dog man joins the ranks of dog lovers because he is too weak to resist the demands of beloved children, but in Wexford’s household the demands had never been more than half-hearted, so he had passed through this snare and come out unscathed.
‘When therefore he arrived home late on Friday night to find the grey thing with ears like knitted dishcloths in his favourite chair he was displeased.
‘Isn’t she a darling?’ said the drama student. ‘Her name’s Clytemnestra. I knew you wouldn’t mind having her for just a fortnight.’ And she whisked out to answer the telephone.
‘Where did Sheila get it from?’ Wexford said gloomily.
Mrs Wexford was a woman of few words.
‘Sebastian.’
‘Who in God’s name is Sebastian?’
‘Some boy,’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘He’s only just gone.’
Her husband considered pushing the dog on to the floor, thought better of it, and went sulkily off to bed. His daughter’s beauty had never ceased to surprise the chief inspector. Sylvia, the elder one, was well-built and healthy, but that was the best that could be said for her; Mrs Wexford had a magnificent figure and a fine profile although she had never been of the stuff that wins beauty contests. While he… All he needed, he sometimes thought, was a trunk to make him look exactly like an elephant. His body was huge and ponderous, his skin pachydermatous, wrinkled and grey, and his three-cornered ears stuck out absurdly under the sparse fringe of colourless hair. When he went to the zoo he passed the elephant house quickly lest the irreverent onlooker should make comparisons.
Her mother and sister were fine-looking women, but the odd thing about Sheila was that her beauty was not an enlargement or an enhancement of their near-handsomeness. She looked like her father. The first time Wexford noticed this – she was then about six – he almost hooted aloud, so grotesque was the likeness between this exquisite piece of doll’s flesh and her gross progenitor. And yet that high broad forehead was his, the little tilted nose was his, his the pointed – although in her case, flat – ears, and in her huge grey eyes he saw his own little ones. When he was young his hair had been that flaxen gold too, as soft and as fine. Only hope she doesn’t end up looking like her dad, he thought sometimes with a rich inner guffaw.
But on the following morning his feelings towards his younger daughter were neither tender nor amused. The dog had awakened him at ten to seven with long-drawn howls and now, a quarter of an hour later; he stood on the threshold of Sheila’s bedroom, glowering.
‘This isn’t a boarding kennels, you know,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear her?’
‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound, Pop? Poor darling, she only wants to be taken out.’
‘What did you call her?’
‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound. She’s a mongrel really, but that’s what Sebastian calls her. She looks as if she’s made of man-made fibres you see. Don’t you think it’s funny?’
‘Not particularly. Why can’t this Sebastian look after his own dog?’
‘He’s gone to Switzerland,’ said Sheila. ‘His plane must have gone by now.’ She surfaced from under the sheets and her father saw that her hair was wound on huge electrically heated rollers. ‘I felt awful letting him walk all that way to the station last night.’ She added accusingly, ‘But you had the car.’
‘It’s my car,’ Wexford almost shouted. This argument he knew of old was hopeless and he listened to his own voice with a kind of horror as a note of pleading crept into it. ‘If the dog wants to go out, hadn’t you better get up and take her?’
‘I can’t. I’ve just set my hair.’ Downstairs Clytemnestra let out a howl that ended in a series of urgent yelps. Sheila threw back the bedclothes and sat up, a vision in pink baby doll pyjamas.
‘God almighty!’ Wexford exploded. ‘You can’t take your friend’s dog out but you can get up at the crack of dawn to set your hair.’
‘Daddy…’ The wheedling tone as well as the now seldom-used paternal appellation told Wexford that a monstrous request was to be made of him. He glared, drawing his brows together in the manner that made Kingsmarkham’s petty offenders tremble. ‘Daddy, duck, it’s a gorgeous morning and you know what Dr Crocket said about your weight and I have just set my hair…’
‘I am going to take a shower,’ Wexford said coldly.
He took it. When he emerged from the bathroom the dog was still howling and pop music was issuing from behind Sheila’s door. A degenerate male voice exhorted its hearers to give it love or let it die in peace.
‘There seems to be an awful lot of noise going on, darling,’ said Mrs Wexford sleepily.
‘You’re joking.’
He opened Sheila’s door. She was applying a face pack. ‘Just this once, then,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I’m only doing it because I want your mother to have a quiet lie-in, so you can turn that thing off for a start.’
‘You are an angel, Daddy,’ said Sheila, and she added dreamily, ‘I expect Clytemnestra has spent a penny by now.’
Clytemnestra. Of all the stupid pretentious names for a dog… But what else could you expect of someone called Sebastian? She had not, however, yet “spent a penny”. She flung herself on Wexford, yelping frantically, and when he pushed her away, ran round him in circles, wildly gyrating her tail and flapping her knitted ears.
Wexford found the lead, obligingly left by Sheila in a prominent position on top of the refrigerator. Undoubtedly it was going to be a beautiful day, a summer’s day such as is unequalled anywhere in the world but in the South of England, a day that begins with mists, burgeons into tropical glory and dies in blue and gold and stars.
‘Full many a glorious morning,’ quoted Wexford to Clytemnestra, ‘have I seen, flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.’
Clytemnestra agreed vociferously, leaping on to a stool and screeching hysterically at sight of her lead.
