"I had rather understood, from the little Woodrow has been good enough to tell me of the progress of your inquiries," Justin objects, more in the plaintive manner of an academic than a grieving husband, "that your prevailing theory was of a random killing, not a planned affair."
"Woodrow's full of shit," says Rob, keeping his voice down in deference to their hostess.
There is no tape recorder on the table yet. The notebooks of many colors lie untouched in Lesley's useful bag. There is nothing to hurry or formalize the occasion. Gloria has brought a tray of tea and, after a lengthy dissertation on the recent demise of her bull terrier, reluctantly departed.
"We found the marks of a second vehicle parked five miles from the scene of the murder," Lesley explains. "It was lying up in a gully southwest of the spot where Tessa was murdered. We found an oil patch, plus the remains of a fire." Justin blinks, as if the daylight is a bit too bright, then politely inclines his head to show he is still listening. "Plus freshly buried beer bottles and cigarette ends," she goes on, laying all this at Justin's door. "When Tessa's jeep drove by, the mystery wagon pulled out behind and tailed it. Then it pulled alongside. One of the front wheels of Tessa's jeep was shot off with a hunting rifle. That doesn't look like a random killing to us."
"More like corporate murder, as we like to call it," Rob explains. "Planned and executed by paid professionals at the behest of a person or persons unknown. Whoever tipped them off knew Tessa's plans inside out."
"And the rape?" Justin inquires with feigned detachment, keeping his eyes fixed on his folded hands.
"Cosmetic or incidental," Rob retorts crisply. "Villains lost their heads or did it with forethought."
"Which brings us back to motive, Justin," Lesley says.
"Yours," says Rob. "Unless you've got a better idea."
Their two faces are trained on Justin's like cameras, one to either side of him, but Justin remains as impervious to their double stare as he is to innuendo. Perhaps in his internal isolation he is not aware of either. Lesley lowers one hand to her useful bag in order to locate the tape recorder, but thinks better of it. The hand remains caught in flagrante, while the rest of her is turned to Justin, to this man of impeccably drafted sentences, this sitting committee of one.
"But I know no killers, you see," he is objecting — pointing out the flaw in their argument as he peers ahead of him with emptied eyes. "I hired nobody, instructed nobody, I'm afraid. I had nothing whatever to do with my wife's murder. Not in the sense you are implying. I did not wish it, I did not engineer it." His voice falters, and strikes an embarrassing kink. "I regret it beyond words."
And this with such finality that for an instant the police officers appear to have nowhere to go, preferring to study Gloria's watercolors of Singapore, which hang in a row across the brick fireplace, each priced at "l199 and NO BLOODY VAT!" each with the same scrubbed sky and palm tree and flock of birds and her name in lettering loud enough to read across the road, plus a date for the benefit of collectors.
Until Rob, who has the brashness, if not the self-assurance of his age, throws up his long thin head and blurts, "So you didn't mind your wife and Bluhm sleeping together, I suppose? A lot of husbands could get a bit ratty about a thing like that." Then snaps his mouth shut, waiting for Justin to do whatever Rob's righteous expectations require deceived husbands to do in such cases: weep, blush, rage against their own inadequacies or the perfidy of their friends. If so, Justin disappoints him.
"That is simply not the point," he replies, with such force that he takes himself by surprise, and sits upright, and peers round him as if to see who has spoken out of turn, and reprimand the fellow. "It may be the point for the newspapers. It may be the point for you. It was never the point for me, and it is not the point now."
"So what is the point?" Rob demands.
"I failed her."
"How? Not up to it, you mean?" — a male sneer — "failed her in the bedroom, did you?"
Justin is shaking his head. "By detaching myself." His voice fell to a murmur. "By letting her go it alone. By emigrating from her in my mind. By making an immoral contract with her. One that I should never have allowed. And nor should she."
"What was that then?" Lesley asks sweet as milk after Rob's deliberate roughness.
"She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed."
Unfazed by the frankness of these admissions, and the nights and days of self-recrimination suggested by them, Rob makes to challenge him. His lugubrious face is set in the same incredulous sneer, his mouth round and open like the muzzle of a large gun. But Lesley is quicker than Rob today. The woman in her is wide awake and listening to sounds that Rob's aggressively male ear can't catch. Rob turns to her, seeking her permission for something: to challenge him again with Arnold Bluhm perhaps, or with some other telling question that will bring him nearer to the murder. But Lesley shakes her head and, lifting her hand from the region of the bag, surreptitiously pats the air, meaning "slowly, slowly."
"So how did the two of you get together in the first place, anyway?" she asks Justin, as one might ask a chance acquaintance on a long journey.
And this is genius on Lesley's part: to offer him a woman's ear and a stranger's understanding; to call a halt like this, and lead him from his present battlefield to the unthreatened meadows of his past. And Justin responds to her appeal. He relaxes his shoulders, half closes his eyes and in a distant, deeply private tone of recollection tells it the way it was, exactly as he had told it to himself a hundred times in as many tormented hours.
* * *
"So when is a state not a state, in your opinion, Mr. Quayle?" Tessa inquired sweetly, one idle midday in Cambridge four years ago, in an ancient attic lecture room with dusty sunbeams sloping through the skylight. They are the first words she ever addressed to him, and they trigger a burst of laughter from the languid audience of fifty fellow lawyers who, like Tessa, had enrolled themselves for a two-week summer seminar on Law and the Administered Society. Justin repeats them now. How he came to be standing alone on the dais, in a three-piece gray flannel suit by Hayward, clutching a lectern in both hands, is the story of his life so far, he explains, speaking away from both of them, into the fake Tudor recesses of the Woodrow dining room. "Quayle will do it!" some acolyte in the permanent undersecretary's private office had cried, late last night, not eleven hours before the lecture was due to be given. "Get me Quayle!" Quayle the professional bachelor, he meant, postable Quayle, the aging debs' delight, last of a dying breed, thank God, just back from bloody Bosnia and marked for Africa but not yet. Quayle the spare male, worth knowing if you're giving a dinner party and stuck, perfect manners, probably gay — except he wasn't, as a few of the better-looking wives had reason to know, even if they weren't telling.
"Justin, is that you? — Haggarty. You were in College a couple of years ahead of me. Look here, the PUS is delivering a speech at Cambridge tomorrow to a bunch of aspiring lawyers, except he can't. He's got to leave for Washington in an hour — "
And Justin the good chap already talking himself into it with: "Well, if it's already written, I suppose — if it's only a matter of reading it — "
And Haggarty cutting him short with, "I'll have his car and driver standing outside your house at the stroke of nine, not a minute later. The lecture's crap. He wrote it himself. You can sap it up on the way down. Justin, you're a brick."