The Crime and the Crystal Read online

  Andrew knew that the meal which Australians call tea was what he would call dinner and at the moment he could not imagine himself wanting any kind of solid food for a long time to come. The meals that he had endured on the aeroplane had totally taken away his appetite.

  “I believe you’re close to the sea,” he said. “I’m looking forward to swimming.”

  “We’re not five minutes’ walk to the beach,” Tony replied. “We were lucky to get the house. You’ll see, it’s nice. It was just what we wanted. And we didn’t have to have a mortgage, we were able to buy it outright, because—” He hesitated and Andrew, glancing at him sideways, saw that he was frowning as if he were wishing that he had not said what he had. But with a sound of reluctance in his voice, he went on. “Jan’s got money. She inherited it from her first husband.”

  “I didn’t know she’d been married before,” Andrew said.

  “Yes.” The way that Tony snapped his jaws shut after he had said it showed that he did not intend to continue on the subject. After a moment, however, he went on. “You’re going to stay with us for a fortnight, aren’t you?”

  “If you can put up with me for as long as that,” Andrew said. It seemed to him a very long time to exploit the hospitality of even the best of friends.

  “Why don’t you stay longer?” Tony asked. “We could take some trips. The country round Adelaide is really worth seeing. And we can show you kangaroos and emus and other things you’d like to see.”

  “Well, I’ve arranged to go to the Wilkies in Sydney,” Andrew said. Stewart Wilkie had been a post-doctoral fellow for a year in Andrew’s department and had been as pressing as Tony that Andrew should stay with him and his wife on this visit. “They’re expecting me.”

  “Still, we’ll make some plans as soon as you’ve slept off the journey,” Tony said.

  They were driving along a wide highway flanked by small bungalows standing in gardens in which oleanders, agapanthus and a spectacular red-flowering eucalypt were in bloom. The sky was an intense blue, a colour never to be seen in England and seldom even in the south of Europe. All the colours that Andrew saw seemed to have a brilliance in which he found it difficult to believe. With an English December only twenty-four hours behind him, he felt that there was a kind of exaggeration about them all that could not be natural. If he closed his eyes, he thought, then opened them suddenly, he would find that the tones had faded.

  But he made an effort not to close his eyes, for if he did so, he thought, he would only too probably drift off to sleep, and it seemed only proper, for the present, to go on talking to Tony. He asked him how he liked his job and how he felt about the move from Canberra to Adelaide, and Tony said that the job was pretty good and that he preferred Adelaide to Canberra. No one who had ever lived in Adelaide, he stated, ever wanted to live anywhere else.

  “It’s a kind of subculture,” he said. “It becomes a part of you.”

  Then he asked Andrew how the book that he was writing was coming along and Andrew said, as he always did when he was asked this question, that it was coming along pretty well. But the truth was that he had been working at it for a long time and it had the strange characteristic that it never grew any longer. It was a life of Robert Hooke, the noted seventeenth-century natural philosopher and architect, and though Andrew worked at it regularly, paying frequent visits to the library of the Royal Society to do the necessary research, he found that as he went along he could not help destroying almost as much of it as he wrote. To himself he sometimes admitted that he did not expect ever to finish the book, and that he would not know what to do with himself if he ever did so, but to other people he stuck to his statement that it was coming along pretty well.

  Having told Tony this, he went on, “I’ve heard Adelaide’s called the City of Churches.”

  “That’s right,” Tony said.

  “And I’ve also been told that in spite of its being a sedate sort of place, more bizarre murders have happened in it than anywhere else in Australia. In fact, it sounded to me as if it could compete quite successfully with what we can do in Britain.”

  Tony said nothing for a moment, then with an odd abruptness said, “Who told you that?”

  “I can’t remember,” Andrew said. “Perhaps it was Wilkie.”

  “How long ago?”

  That seemed to Andrew a curious question.

  “Some years at least,” he said. “It must have been before I retired.”

  “It’s true, of course.”

  As if a kind of excitement overcame Tony as he said this, his driving accelerated. He was already driving at a speed that made Andrew nervous, though he tried not to show his uneasiness because apparently it was no more than usual on this busy highway. Other cars frequently passed them and on the left side as well as the right, which was evidently a local custom and perfectly legal.

  “But what made you bring that up?” Tony asked after a moment.

  “What? About the murders?” Andrew said. “I don’t know. No special reason.”

  “That’s true?”

  “Absolutely.” Tony’s tone puzzled Andrew. It had become uncharacteristically aggressive. “It was a silly thing to say, but I never thought it would upset you.”

  “It hasn’t upset me.”

  “I’ve a feeling it has.”

  “Look, I tell you it hasn’t. That’s to say…”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind. What would you like when we get in? Coffee? Bacon and eggs? A bit of steak?” With resolution Tony once more changed the subject, and his face, which had had a strange shadow on it for a moment, which had looked almost hostile, regained its normal amiability.

  Andrew said that what he would really like, if it would not be inconvenient, was whisky and a small piece of cheese. For a long time now he had had a habit of eating cheese with his breakfast. He could not remember when he had heard it or read about it, but at some time he had become convinced that it was healthful to start the day with some protein, and it was so much easier to slice off a piece of cheese even than to boil an egg. And at the moment it seemed to him that some whisky and some cheese would provide a satisfying compromise for his nervous system between breakfast and dinner, whichever his next meal should turn out to be.

  They had been driving for some minutes along a road parallel to the seashore. The beach was a long, straight stretch of sand on which a few boys were playing cricket, but where there were very few other people about. Perhaps it was still too early for them to have come out. Only two or three were in the water. This was Betty Hill, Tony said, and Andrew thought that it must have been named by some early settler who had come from the north of Scotland, bringing the name of his old home with him, because there was nothing in sight that could possibly be called a hill. There had been dunes along the coast here, Tony added, but these had been cleared away and now there were bungalows along the edge of the beach.

  The Gardiners’ home did not overlook the sea, but was within a short walk of it. The road into which Tony turned was shaded with gums, with here and there a jacaranda, gloriously in bloom. Most of the bungalows looked fairly recently built, but the one in front of which he stopped the car looked as if it might date back to Victorian times. It was small and built of stone, with a roof of corrugated iron and a narrow verandah round it, roofed in the same way. Collecting Andrew’s luggage from the boot, Tony led the way through the open gate and into the house by a side door that led straight into a kitchen.

  Going through it and then along a passage that ran through the middle of the house, Tony took Andrew into a pleasant bedroom. The bed looked wonderfully inviting. Andrew longed to get out of his clothes and stretch out on it immediately. But he had asked for whisky and cheese, and by the time he had had a brief wash, combed his ruffled grey hair and decided against shaving until later, Tony had come to tell him that a drink and bread and cheese were waiting for him in the living room.

  Andrew followed him along the passage into a big, dim, square
room, shaded from the sun by Venetian blinds and with an air conditioner whirring in it. It was furnished with dark, solid Victorian pieces, probably collected with great care, for they looked good of their kind, though the general effect of them was somewhat heavy and sombre. But there were armchairs in gaily striped covers and green plants in pots on the windowsills. A tray with a bottle of whisky on it and some sandwiches made of bread and cheese had been placed on a low table beside one of the chairs.

  Andrew dropped into one of them, remarking as he did so, “That’s a nice piece of crystal you’ve got there.”

  The crystal was on the table beside the tray. It was a strangely shaped object of a milky white, faintly translucent substance, looking rather like a collection of large jagged teeth joined into a bundle somewhat bigger than a human fist.

  Tony smiled, and picked it up and fondled it.

  “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it?” he said. “I got it in an old quarry up in the Adelaide hills.”

  “You dug it out yourself, did you?” Andrew said.

  “That’s right. I’m a bit of a rock-hound. That’s our name for the people who collect these things.” Tony replaced it on the table and poured out whisky for Andrew. He had none himself. “That’s one of the best bits of quartz crystal I’ve found. I’ve found malachite, too, and tourmaline and garnets. And of course there are opals, but you have to have special mining rights to collect them. Crystal’s my favourite.”

  Andrew had begun on the bread and cheese. “How d’you dig for it?”

  “Any way you like, with pickaxes, hammers, anything. You find it in cavities in the rocks called geodes—but of course you know all that. They’re nasty-looking objects when you first get them out, but you clean them in boiling hydrochloric acid and they come out like this. I can do it in the lab.”

  “Lucky you’ve got a lab to do it in.”

  “That’s right. The only thing is…” The glow of enthusiasm that had been kindled in Tony’s face for a moment faded. “The only thing is, I don’t do it any more. And I’m not sure about having the thing on show here. I know that in her heart Jan would sooner I didn’t, but she won’t say so, because—well, it’s complicated, really.”

  Andrew watched him warily, trying not to make it too obvious that he was doing it with more than usual interest. He knew that there was something the matter with him. Having known Tony for a number of years, he was of the opinion that behind the façade of easygoing candour there was a great deal of reserve. On the surface he seemed the easiest of people to get to know, and yet Andrew believed that even after all this time he knew very little more about Tony than he had when he had first come to London as a student.

  “The fact is, there’s something I want to tell you about, but perhaps it had better wait till you’ve had a rest,” Tony said. “It’d be a bit rough to unload it on you now.”

  “Go ahead,” Andrew said. “I’m going to have at least a couple of drinks before I lie down.”

  “All right then. You see, the fact is…” But there Tony paused. Then in a voice that had suddenly become defensive, as if he expected some kind of attack from Andrew because of what he had to say, he went on, “The reason Jan didn’t come to the airport with me to meet you had nothing to do with her having to go to work. She never goes to work as early as this. She simply wanted me to tell you all about her before you meet each other. And she wanted you to hear it from me and not someone else who might give you a wrong idea about it all.”

  “Is it something I’ve got to know if it’s as difficult as all that to talk about?” Andrew asked. “I’m not normally inquisitive.”

  “That’s what I said to Jan. I said there was no need to talk about it at all. But she thinks someone else is bound to tell you about it and she’d like you to hear the true story first.” Reaching again in an absentminded way for the lump of crystal, Tony stroked it gently with his fingertips. “I told you she was married before,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “But what I didn’t mention was that her first husband was murdered, and that for a time she was suspected of having done it.”

  Andrew sipped some whisky and wondered what he ought to say. After a little thought he said, “But it’s all been cleared up, I suppose, only she worries that suspicion of some sort has stuck to her. Is that the trouble?”

  “More or less. She would have been suspected, in fact I think she might have been charged, if it hadn’t been—well, if it hadn’t been for one thing.”

  “Has anyone been charged?”

  “No.”

  “How long ago did it happen?”

  “About a year ago.”

  It occurred to Andrew that Jan had not wasted much time in getting married again.

  “Then if you’re sure you want to tell me about it, go on,” he said, “but there’s no need to, you know.”

  “All right. Well, it was up in the quarry where I dug this thing out a couple of years ago. Wilding was a rock-hound too—Luke Wilding, her first husband. He’d a sheep station near the quarry—what we call near in this country. It was only about ten kilometres away. He was a rich man and he and Jan had been married only about six weeks when he was killed. And there are people who are sure she was with him when it happened and that she at least knows who did it. Even now the police keep coming after her every month or two with new lots of questions and it drives her distracted.”

  “And where was she really?”

  “In her home.”

  “Wasn’t there anyone to say so?”

  “No. There was no one in the house. One of the men working on the station said he saw her set out for the quarry in the car with Wilding. At least, that’s what the man supposed she was doing, but no one saw her come back, and when the police arrived at the house to tell her that her husband had been found murdered she was there and told them he’d dropped her off at the shops in Hartwell—that’s the township near them—and that she’d walked back after she’d done her shopping. It was only a couple of kilometres and she liked to walk.”

  “Wasn’t there anyone in Hartwell to say she’d been there?”

  “No. That’s to say, yes. But they swore it was much later in the morning than she’d said. Only it was an old man who ran a hardware store who said it and he got muddled up when the police started questioning him, so it didn’t amount to much. She’d done the rest of her shopping in a supermarket, and you know what it’s like in those places, you go in and out without anyone taking the least notice of you. So she couldn’t produce anyone to give her an alibi. But, as I said, there was something—something rather odd—that made the police inclined to believe her.”

  “You believe her yourself, that goes without saying.”

  “Of course, and when you meet her yourself, you’ll understand… I mean, Andrew, she couldn’t hurt anyone, she simply couldn’t, and the way the suspicion’s lingered on is perfectly horrible.”

  Tony’s face had flushed and there was such distress on it that Andrew wondered whether it might not be best to stop him ploughing on through the rest of his story. That, as it happened, would have suited Andrew, for he would have liked nothing better than to finish his bread and cheese and whisky and go to bed. But he thought that in telling his story Tony was making some urgent appeal to him and that the best way of supplying the understanding that he needed was to let him tell the rest of it.

  Nodding, Andrew asked, “What motive, if any, is she supposed to have had? Her husband’s money?”

  “Partly, but that wasn’t quite the whole of it,” Tony answered. “You see, Wilding was a brute. Quite literally. He actually beat her up a couple of times after they were married. He could be uncontrollably violent. Afterwards there were always pleas for forgiveness and promises that it would never happen again, but they didn’t mean anything. She’d made up her mind to leave him when the murder happened. And she’d told her father about it and he’d spread it around the countryside without knowing it would do her damage later. He’d always
hated Wilding and wanted to get Jan home to live with him again. He’s a possessive old bastard. Luckily he rather likes me, I couldn’t tell you why, so he didn’t make the trouble I was half expecting when she told him she was going to marry me and come to live in Betty Hill.”

  “Does he live a long way off?”

  “No, he lives in Hartwell. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive away from here. He’s got a small vineyard and a few olive trees and a bit of citrus, but he’s neglected it all for some time and I don’t think he’s got much to live on except his pension. I doubt if that worries him, though. He’s been turning more and more into one of those solitary characters who don’t care much about anything so long as they’ve got enough to eat and drink. Particularly drink. But sometimes he’ll turn up here unexpectedly and start talking—there’s no stopping him when he does that—for a couple of hours, then he’ll go away as suddenly as he came. Jan’s very fond of him. Her mother died when she was a child and her father was everything to her.”

  “Did she inherit all her husband’s money?” Andrew asked.

  “No,” Tony replied. “She’s got a stepson. It sounds pretty funny, putting it like that, because he’s older than she is, but that’s the fact. She was Wilding’s second wife and he had this son, Bob, by his first marriage. Wilding left the sheep station to him and divided the rest of what he had between the two of them. Still, it’s a tidy sum, and of course, if she’d left Wilding as she’d decided to do because she didn’t hold with sticking to a man who actually knocked her about when he got in the mood for it, he’d have changed his will and cut her out. So killing him instead of leaving him would have had its points.”