Free Full Fury by Roger Ormerod Page B

for his car and I left half a cup of tea in order to take him to the Gaines residence. Crowshaw said nothing to me on the way. It was a fine November afternoon that made it difficult to recall the previous fortnight’s rain. The roads had dried under the warm sun.
    Crowshaw admits that at that time he was painfully aware that this was his first murder, and that it was going wrong. Somehow the nature of a murder case always demands special attention to detail. It’s not necessary to adduce a motive—though this one was obvious—only to prove the guilt. But a murder has to be sewn up with every detail neatly in place, and he knew that this thing was still awful ragged round the edges.
    The Beeches was hidden from the road. We drove in beneath a heavily overhung belt of massive trees. The drive at that time went straight on past what was the front of the house, and I parked in a paved yard in front of a row of converted stables. Gaines’s Morris Minor was in there, and a Rover 100 saloon which I supposed belonged to Mrs Gaines.
    Crowshaw said I should go along with him and take notes, which was a bit of promotion, I suppose, due to him being annoyed with Freer. I tagged along, and we eventually found her in the garden.
    Myra Gaines was pruning her roses, or at least snipping off the dead flowers. She stood in a blue cotton dress and a kind of smock against a back-cloth of blue, distant hills and a tumbled layer of landscaping down to a brook in the valley. I guessed her age as the late twenties, so I wasn’t far out, which made her eighteen years younger than her husband. She had an impulsive, almost aggressive beauty, which I’d got time to appreciate while Crowshaw did the talking.
    ‘ Mr Crowshaw, isn’t it?’
    ‘ I felt I ought to see you.’
    She had a small wheelbarrow half full of ruined heads. ‘Don’t you think it’s a sad time of year?’ she asked.
    ‘ But it’s a fine day.’
    She looked at him quickly, half frowning. Her eyes were brown, far apart, level and unflinching. The brow was wide and smooth, with a high hairline, and at that time she wore her hair longer. Crowshaw found himself wondering whether her husband had ever attempted to capture some of her beauty on canvas, but certainly he could never seize and hold such a fluid flow of emotions as ran across her features. No still picture of her could record more than one of an infinite variety of poses. The impression was that she controlled her expression consciously, that she intended every second of it. Myra Gaines was a woman who played for attention, and she was enjoying being interviewed.
    Then she smiled. ‘There’s very little I can add to what I told the sergeant.’
    ‘ I’m finding it rather difficult to understand your husband,’ said Crowshaw. ‘Of course, this was impulse. But it’s not like the grabbing of a knife in a blind fury. It must have taken him twenty minutes to drive over to Paterson’s. It suggests a settled anger, some sort of determination that he’d built himself up to.’
    She inclined her head. Her secateurs went snip, snip, and two more soggy heads fell into the wheelbarrow.
    ‘ And I’ve talked with him a lot, now,’ went on Crowshaw. ‘He isn’t the type to sustain such a pitch of emotion.’
    ‘ But he did,’ she suggested gently.
    ‘ He’s a quiet man, withdrawn—’
    She caught at the word. ‘Withdrawn!’ Then the sound she made could have been a laugh or maybe a sob. ‘Neville’s in another world.’ She moved her chin in an upward arc that hinted at anger. ‘Withdrawn from existence, from all reality.’
    ‘ But this was real enough.’
    Then she relaxed. The hand with the secateurs moved in despair. ‘I never believed he could face anything. If I’d believed it, the whole thing might not have happened. I don’t let myself think about that. But if I’d accepted he could , I’d have… I don’t know… been prepared, perhaps.’
    ‘ The quiet men,’ he said, ‘build up inside