Guilty Thing Surprised Read Free Page A

stood for a moment in perplexity before making for the stairs.

2
    I t was Detective Inspector Michael Burden’s day off. He lay in bed till nine. Then he got up, bathed, and began on the task to which he intended to devote this free day, painting the outside of his bungalow.
    A great wind, offshoot of a Caribbean hurricane the Americans called Caroline, had arisen during the night. Burden needed to use no ladders; the eaves of his bungalow were too near the ground for that, but today he didn’t even fancy ascending the steps. Certainly he wasn’t going to allow his eleven-year-old son John, home for the school holidays and an enthusiastic helper, to go up them.
    ‘You can do the front door, John,’ he said, knowing that he was conferring a special favour. All painters, particularly amateurs, long for the moment when the top coat, an excitingly contrasting colour, is due to be applied to the front door.
    ‘Blimey, can I?’ said John.
    ‘Don’t say blimey. It means God blind me, and you know I don’t like to hear you swear.’
    John, who normally would have argued the point, trotted off to fetch from the garage a virgin pot of flamingo-pink paint. There he encountered his sister Pat, feeding lime leaves to a hawk-moth caterpillar imprisoned in a shoe box. He was about to say something calculated to aggravate, something on the lines of the folly of encouraging garden pests, when his mother called to him from the back door.
    ‘John, tell Daddy he’s wanted on the phone, will you?’
    ‘Who wants him?’
    Mrs Burden said in a voice of resigned despair, ‘Can’t you guess?’
    John guessed. Carrying the tin of paint, he returned to his father, who had just put the first stroke of top coat on the picture-window frame.
    ‘Cop shop on the phone for you,’ he said.
    Burden never swore, in front of his children or in their absence. Carefully he placed his brush in a jam jar of synthetic turps and entered the house.
    His bungalow had seldom looked so attractive to him as it did this morning. Poole pottery vases filled with red dahlias (Bishop of Llandaff, very choice) graced the hall and living room; the new curtains were up; from the kitchen came the rich aroma of a steak-and-kidney pudding boiling for lunch. Burden sighed, then lifted the spotless polished receiver of the white telephone.
    The voice of Detective Chief Inspector Wexford said nastily, ‘You took your bloody time.’
    ‘Sorry. I was painting.’
    ‘Hard cheese, Picasso. You’ll have to complete the masterpiece some other time. Duty calls.’
    Burden knew better than to say it was his day off. ‘What’s up, sir?’
    ‘Do you know a Mrs Elizabeth Nightingale?’
    ‘By sight. Everyone knows her. Husband’s a Lloyd’s underwriter. Pots of money. What’s she done?’
    ‘Got herself murdered, that’s what she’s done.’
    Burden broke his rule. ‘Good God!’ he said.
    ‘I’m at Myfleet Manor. Get over here as soon as you can, Mike.’
    ‘And I’ve made this great enormous pudding,’ said Jean Burden, ‘Try and get back for lunch.’
    ‘Not a hope.’ Burden changed his clothes, grabbed his car key. John was sitting on the garden wall, waiting for starter’s orders. ‘Better leave the front door for a day or two, John. Sorry about that.’
    ‘I’d be O.K. on my own.’
    ‘Don’t argue, there’s a good lad.’ He fished in his pocket for a half-crown. ‘You were saying something about a new transistor battery … Get yourself some sweets too.’ He got into the car. ‘Here, John—isn’t a Mr Villiers that’s brother to Mrs Nightingale a teacher at your school?’
    ‘Old Roman Villa?’ said John. ‘I don’t know whose brother he is. He teaches Latin and Greek. What d’you want to know for?’
    ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Burden.
    It was a red-brick house, built during the reign of Queen Anne, and it had an air of crouching close above the road, its windows Argus eyes that gazed down over the village, its footings embowered in