smiled. “It happens to me sometimes. So will it be gin and tonic, or rum punch?”
“Neither, sir. I can’t have alcohol, sir. Not on the job, sir,” Mumsford said.
“Neither?”
“No, sir.”
Gardner considered his answer for a moment and then threw up his hands. “Then so it will be. But none of the formalities, John, okay? Call me Peter.”
“If you don’t mind, sir,” Mumsford said, “I’d prefer to call you by your surname, sir.”
Gardner frowned and crossed his legs. “If that is what you want.”
“And me, sir. I’d prefer if you’d call me Inspector Mumsford, sir.”
“By God, John, we’re in my house.”
“I’m here on an investigation, sir. If you don’t mind, it should be Inspector Mumsford, sir.”
“Then it shall.” Gardner slapped his knees. “Ariana, ask Inspector Mumsford what he’d like to drink.”
Ariana stepped toward them.
“Orange juice will be fine,” Mumsford said.
“Orange juice and my drink,” Dr. Gardner said to Ariana. She lifted her eyes to his and then quickly lowered them. “So go now,” Gardner said and fluttered his fingers in an exaggerated gesture of irritation. She hesitated. “Go,” Gardner said softly. Her lips parted in a brief smile, and then she turned and walked to the door, her hair swinging behind her, thick and dark, the two tiny globes of her backside clearly outlined under her thin dress.
“And pin up your hair, for God’s sake.”
Yes, Mumsford had no doubt; it was she he had seen dashing across the room without a stitch of clothing on her body. There was no mistaking that, nor the desire palpable in Gardner’s voice.
“They are all the same,” Gardner said and tugged his lower lip. “She, a little better than the others, but for the most part, they have such natures that nurture can never stick.”
“Nurture, sir?”
“Upbringing, Inspector.” His head was still turned in the direction of the door that had closed behind Ariana. “They have no upbringing. And it is a waste of time to educate them.” He dropped his hand and settled back in his chair.
Mumsford reached for his briefcase on the floor. “Well, to the matter in question, sir.”
“The matter in question?” Gardner looked at him, the furrows tightening on his brow as if he didn’t understand.
“The reason I am here, sir,” Mumsford said. “The boy.”
“Ah, the boy.” The furrows smoothened, then tightened again.
“Carlos Codrington, sir.” Mumsford brought the briefcase to his lap and opened it.
“He is the one on whom nurture can least stick,” Gardner said. He sat up and flicked off a piece of lint from the leg of his trousers. “You can have no idea of the pains I took to help him. Did you know I taught him to read?”
“You taught him?”
But Gardner was not listening to him. “Ariana!” he shouted, and when she did not answer him, he called her again. “Ariana, the inspector didn’t ask you to pick the oranges. How long does it take to pour orange juice in a glass?”
The sound of glass clinking against glass filtered into the drawing room.
“Ariana!” Gardner raised his voice for the third time. This time there was silence behind the door, a quiet so complete that though Gardner had set the record player to its lowest volume, the music seemed suddenly loud, the mournful sighs of violin and piano as the needle moved to another track on the record framing the tension in the room.
“I’m not very thirsty,” Mumsford said.
Gardner looked from him to the door and back again at him.
“You were telling me you taught the boy.” Mumsford tried again, hoping to refocus him.
“I taught him to speak properly,” Gardner said.
Mumsford took his notebook and pen from his briefcase. From the corner of his eye, he could see the door crack open, a slight sliver of a crack, a line, but enough to reveal yellow flickering in the narrow space between the door frame and the door.
“Now he speaks like an Englishman,” Gardner was saying.
“He, sir?” It was Mumsford’s turn to be distracted.
“Carlos. We are speaking about Carlos, Inspector.”
“Yes, yes. Carlos.” When he looked again, the yellow was gone.
“He was speaking like the rest of them when I came here,” Gardner said. “Dat and dis and dey, as if there were no th’s in the English language. He used to say, I ’as instead of I do. Now, you wouldn’t believe it. Like a proper Englishman.”
Mumsford opened his notebook. He must have made a mistake. There was no yellow near the door. “So you would say, sir,” he said, writing determinedly, “that in some instances nurture stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“What you were saying, sir, about nature,” Mumsford said.
“Yes, I know what I was saying, Mumsford.”
“That will be Inspector Mumsford, sir. If you don’t mind, sir.”
“Yes, I know what I said, Inspector Mumsford, but if you had waited a while you would have heard the rest. Carlos speaks like an Englishman only when he is sober. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, he speaks like a common sailor.”
“An English sailor, sir?” Mumsford scribbled more notes in his notebook.
“Yes, yes, by God, an English sailor, Inspector. And he curses as one, too.”
“So you’d say on the night in question . . .”
“It wasn’t night.”
“Then day, sir?”
“Yes, day.”
“Well, you’d say on the day in question he was drunk?”
Gardner became agitated. He bent his head and picked nervously at the loose threads on the pocket of his shirt. Mumsford could see the roots of his hair. Red, English red, he was certain that was the color of Gardner’s hair before the sun had stripped it. Dirty color rust, he scribbled in his notebook.
“What are you writing now, Inspector?” Gardner snapped back his head and glared at him.
“The details of the case,” Mumsford said. And at that moment he felt a surge of pity for him. He had been sun-dried, bleached like a piece of driftwood.
“I haven’t given you the details of the case, Inspector,” Gardner said gruffly.
“About the event happening in the day, not the night, sir.”
Gardner sighed and sat back in his chair. “He was not drunk on the day in question,” he said. He looked tired, a wrinkled old man, though he was not much past fifty.
Not for me, Mumsford thought. I will not turn into a leathery old man before my time. After this matter has ended, the perpetrator put in jail, I will submit my resignation, return to England, marry a young English girl, settle down in some quiet English countryside. Next year will not find me here.
“Yes. That would have been quite another matter, indeed,” he said to Gardner, the picture he had formed in his head softening his tone.
“Another matter?” Gardner asked.
“One can