Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell Page A

without enthusiasm.
    "How long had you and your husband worked here, Mrs Harrison?"
    "Getting on for ten years."
    He was surprised. Ten years is a long time. He would have expected more emotional involvement with the family after so long an association, more feeling.
    "Mr and Mrs Copeland were good employers then?"
    She shrugged. She was dusting a red and blue Crown Derby owl and she replaced it on the polished surface before she spoke. Then she said in a thoughtful way, as if considerable cogitation had been going on before she came up with it, "There was no side to them." She hesitated, then added proudly, "Not with us at any rate."
    The cat got up, stretched itself and walked slowly in Wexford's direction. It stopped in front of him, bristled up, glowered and quite suddenly fled up the stairs. After a moment or two the noises began. Sounds like a miniature horse galloping along the passage, bumps, crashes, reverberations.
    Brenda Harrison switched a light on, then another. "Queenie always carries on like that about this time," she said.
    "Does she do any damage?"
    A small smile moved her features, spread her cheeks an inch or so. It told him she was one of those who find their amusement in the antics of animals. Their sense of humour is confined almost exclusively to tea-partying chimpanzees, anthropomorphic dogs, kittens in bonnets. They
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    are the sort that keep circuses going.
    "You could go up in half an hour," she said, "and you wouldn't know she'd been there."
    "And it's always at this time?" He looked at his watch: ten to six.
    "Give or take a bit, yes." She gave him a sidelong glance, grinning a very little. "She's as bright as a button but she can't tell the time, can she?"
    "I want to ask you just one more thing, Mrs Harrison. Have you seen any strangers about in the past days or even weeks? Unfamiliar people? Anyone you wouldn't expect to see near the house or on the estate?"
    She thought. She shook her head. "You want to ask Johnny. Johnny Gabbitas, that is. He gets about the woods, he's always outside."
    "How long has he been here?"
    Her answer slightly surprised him. "Maybe a year. Not more. Wait a minute, I reckon it'll be a year in May."
    "If you think of anything, anything odd or unusual that may have happened, you'll be sure to tell us, won't you?"
    By now it was growing dark. As he walked round the side of the west wing, the lights in the lee of the wall came on, controlled by a time switch. He paused and looked back towards the Woods and the road which led out of them. Last Bight the two men must have come that way or else along the by-road; there was no other
    ssible route.
    Why had none of the four people in the house
    ard a car? Perhaps they had. Three of them
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    were no longer alive to tell him. Daisy had not, that was all he could know or would know. But if one of them had heard a car he or she had not remarked on it in Daisy's hearing. Of course he would hear much more from Daisy tomorrow.
    The two men in the car would have seen the lighted house ahead of them. By eight the wall lights had been on for two hours and lights indoors for much longer. The road ran up to the courtyard, passed between the stone pillared opening in the wall. But suppose the car had not come up to the house but turned to the left before the wall was reached. Turned left and right on to the road where he now was, the road that led past the west wing, twenty yards from it, curved past the kitchen regions and the back door, skirted the garden and its high hedge, and penetrated the pinetum, which led to the Harrisons* house and that of John Gabbitas.
    Taking this route would presuppose knowledge of Tancred House and its grounds. It might presuppose knowledge that the back door was not locked during the evenings. If the car in which they came was driven that way and parked near the kitchen door, it was possible, even likely, that no one in the dining room would have heard it.
    But Daisy had heard the man she had not seen