No Man's Nightingale Read Online Free Page B

had become theirs when their parents died.
    ‘Best to be an only child,’ as Wexford remarked to his wife that evening. ‘Behave so horribly as an infant that they don’t have any more. Later on make sure that your parents own their house and that you get on with them. What could be worse than that you fall out with the surviving one on his or her – probably her – deathbed? Then it all goes to donkeys or kids in a developing country.’
    ‘What a cynic you are.’
    ‘No. Just a realist.’
    ‘We had two, though,’ said Dora.
    ‘Yes, but we’re the exception. Neither of our children is in need of a house.’
    Fiona Morrison had been in need of a house and the one she got on her grandmother’s death was a very pretty thatched cottage at the end of Church Lane, Stringfield. She attended to the front garden because that was the bit visitors and passers-by saw. The back garden was less pretty; Fiona got too tired to do this as well as receive the optician’s patients and send out the optician’s bills while Jeremy was too lazy to pull out weeds or mow the lawn. She didn’t reproach Jeremy because she was fond of him and he was going to give her a baby. Jeremy’s suggestion, made out of the blue, that they could adopt a baby, rather upset her, the way he said it as if it were an easy option open to anyone. ‘Or foster one like a sort of trial, see how we get on.’
    ‘What and send it back if we don’t like it?’
    She had never until very recently questioned the rightness of her choice of Jeremy, though she recognised that her decision to share her home with him had been very hastily taken. And now, as he walked in, she was again conscious of a remoteness that came over him when he entered the house or came down the stairs or even simply sat in an armchair opposite her. It was as if he enclosed himself inside his head, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, unaware particularly of her. He could move while in this condition, did move, and the only state she could compare it to was sleepwalking. Was autism like this or could it be? She didn’t know and didn’t know who to ask. Now, as several times before, she asked him if he was all right.
    He answered her in what she imagined might be a sleepwalker’s voice, the same slow monotone as when he suggested they adopt a baby. ‘Fine. I’m fine. How are you?’
    His fugue, if that was what it was, lasted perhaps five minutes and then it was over.
    Restaurants of every nationality had opened in Kingsmarkham ever since the death – sometime in the sixties – of the English cafe where fish and chips, sausage and mash, toad-in-the-hole, boiled ham and pork chops had been served. Fish and chips had never gone out of fashion while sausage and mash had come back into it and it was this which Detective Superintendent Burden had ordered in the restaurant called Spirit of Montenegro while Wexford would be having grilled sardines and couscous.
    ‘What do they eat in Montenegro, anyway?’
    ‘What we’re having, I suppose,’ said Wexford. ‘But don’t imagine the sausages are going to taste like the bangers you were brought up on.’
    ‘You can have a glass of wine but I shan’t. It doesn’t look well.’
    Both were thinking of the time Wexford, taking a well-earned respite from very hard work, had been photographed in a pub garden with a tankard in his hand, a shot which later appeared on the front page of the local paper. He had never forgotten that photograph, though it no longer mattered.
    ‘I suppose a picture of me could be in the
Courier
lying in the gutter overcome by Chardonnay and no one would turn a hair.’
    ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Burden. After all these years he still wasn’t always sure when Wexford was serious. ‘Anyway, you don’t care for Chardonnay.’
    Their food came with a glass of claret and a jug of tap water. Burden said, ‘When the body was first found by that cleaner of yours I made an assumption I shouldn’t have made. I