by Ruth Rendell
'How many more of you are going to come calling?'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
Ruby shifted on the blue and red sofa and stared bitterly at the uncarpeted floor.
'Fellow called Martin,' she said, 'he's only been gone ten minutes. He's one of your lot, isn't he?' Wexford nodded, mystified. 'First there comes this great big car, pink and mauve with letters on it and this fellow gets out...'
'What fellow?' Not Martin, he thought. What the hell was going on?
'No, no, that chap with the red tie in your parade. As soon as I saw his car I remembered where I'd seen him before. Twice I saw him on that Tuesday night. Outside Cawthorne's he was when I went by at ten-past eight and I saw him again at eleven, sitting in his car, staring at everyone, like he was going off his head. But I told your bloke Martin all that just now.'
It was all Wexford could do to quell the laugh that rose in his throat. Ruby's painted face was pink with indignation. Trying to sound severe, Wexford said:
'You wouldn't be saying all this because Mr Kirkpatrick asked you to, would you? You wouldn't be led into temptation by a nifty row of rhinestones?'
'Me?' Ruby drew herself up virtuously, ‘I never even spoke to him. He was just getting out of that daft car of his when your man drives up. Back he nips like one o'clock and off down the street. That Martin,' she said, very aggrieved, 'he was nasty to me. Some would call it threatening.'
'And others,' said Wexford, 'would call it saving weaker vessels from their baser instincts.'
At Stowerton crossroads Cawthorne was nowhere to be seen but his wife, bony knees displayed and earrings big as Christmas tree baubles dangling beneath yellow curls, had perched herself on a diesel pump to flirt with an attendant. In the launderette the portholes still whirled.
'You can consider yourself absolved from laundry duty tonight, Drayton,' Wexford said, chuckling.
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
'Miss Grover always comes over here to do her washing on Tuesdays, doesn't she?’
'Oh, yes, sir. I see what you mean.' There was no need for him to flush quite so deeply, Wexford thought. The dark red colour had spread to the back of his neck.
'Kirkpatrick's safe all right,' he said. 'His bribes fell on stony ground.' The metaphor sounded wrong and he added quickly, 'Those two women saw him outside Cawthorne's right enough. He's just a fool who can't let well alone. It's the inside of a divorce court he's afraid of, not a jail.'
'Straight to the Old Kingsbrook Road, sir?' Drayton asked stiffly.
'Number twenty-two's this end.' As they passed the Methodist church, Wexford leaned forward, a dull leaden weight diving to the pit of his stomach. He had feared this when Mrs Anstey gave him the address, feared it and dismissed his fear as jumping to conclusions.
'Look at that, Mike.'
'As if a bomb had dropped,' Burden said tiredly.
'I know. I feel like that too. Rather nice Georgian houses and the whole block's nearly demolished.' He got out of the car, Burden following him. In the mild afternoon light the last remaining wall stared at them. It was the inside that was displayed, green wallpaper above, the pink, stone-coloured on the ground. A dozen feet from the top an iron fireplace still clung to the plaster, and where the plaster had been stripped, to bare bricks. A great cable wrapped it and the cable was attached to a tractor, lurching through dust. Through the ochreish clouds they could see a painted board, Doherty for Demolition, and underneath the slogan, What Goes Up Must Come Down!
Burden's eye caught the number on the remaining doorpost, twenty-two. He looked disconsolately from the wall to the cable, the cable to the tractor. Then with a jerk of his head he beckoned to the tractor driver.
'Police,' Burden said sharply into a red pugnacious face.
'O.K., O.K. Only I've got my work to do, same as anyone else. What were you wanting?'
Burden looked past him to the number on the doorpost.
'There was an accountant here, chap called Smith. D'you know where he went to?'
'Where you'll never find him.' The smirk was unpleasant. 'Underground.'
'Come again?'
'He's dead,' said the tractor driver, rubbing his dusty hands.
14
'He can't be dead’ Burden said aghast.
'Can’t he? I'm only telling you what the old girl in the tea place told me.' Cocking his head towards where the little cafe had been, the workman fished in his pocket for a large filthy handkerchief and blew his nose. 'Before her place come down it was. Poor Mr Smith, she says, he'd have hated to see the old house go. All he'd got left what with his wife doing him dirt and him all on his own.'
'What did he die of ? A broken heart?'
'Something to do with his heart. The old girl could tell you more than I can.'
'You don't know when he died?' Wexford put in.
'A year, eighteen months. The place stood empty ever since and a proper mess it was in.' Burden knew the truth of this. Where rubble now was he had often sat having his tea and, leaving, had passed boarded-up windows. 'There's the undertakers up on the corner. They'd know. Always go to the nearest, I reckon.'
The man went back to his tractor and, puffing heavily as if determined to move the wall by his own unaided effort, edged the vehicle forward over mounds of brick-filled loam. Burden went over to the undertakers. The cable pulled taut. Wexford stood watching it and listening to the groans of crumbling mortar until the inspector came back.
'He's dead all right,' Burden said, picking his way through the debris. 'Died last February twelvemonth. They remember the funeral. No one there but that old woman and a girl who used to do Smith's typing. Our surefire suspect is in a grave in Stowerton cemetery.' 'What did he die of ?'
'Coronary,' said Burden. 'He was forty-two.' A low crunching tremor like the first cracking that precedes an earthquake made him look behind him. In the wall of Smith's house a fissure had appeared, running between green wallpaper and pink. From the centre of this rift brown plaster dust began to vomit down the patchy brick. 'As I see it, sir,' he said, 'the Geoff Smith business is coincidence. We have to forget him and begin again.'
'Coincidence! No, Mike, I won't have that. Its arm isn't that long. A man came to Ruby's house and said he was Geoff Smith and after he'd gone a lighter was found in that house that a man called Geoff Smith had bought eight years before. We know those things if we don't know anything else and you can't get away from them. It was in Stowerton and a man called Geoff Smith had lived in the next town, knew the place like you and I know it. That man is dead, was dead when the lighter went missing from Mrs Astey's flat, dead before Anita came to live here and stone cold dead as a doornail last Tuesday. But to deny he had any connection with the case on the grounds of coincidence is crazy. That way madness lies.'
'Then Mrs Anstey's lying. She sold Anita the lighter - she admits she's sold a lot of stuff - and happened to tell her all about her first husband at the same time. That wouldn't be coincidence, that'd be normal behaviour for her. Anita told her boy friend the name and it stuck in his subconscious.'
'Why should she lie?' Wexford scoffed. 'What would be the point? I ask you, Mike, did she impress you as a liar?'
Burden shook his head doubtfully and began to follow the Chief Inspector back to Drayton and the waiting car. ‘I don't believe her when she says she lost the lighter, at any rate,' he said.
'No, but she thinks she did,' Wexford said quickly. 'The truth is, somebody nicked it. Who? An old mate of Smith's? You know what we're going to have to do, don't you? Every friend of Smith's, every friend of Mrs Anstey's and all Anita's associates are going to have to be hunted up just to see if there's the tiniest tie-up between them.’
A shout from behind made them quicken their pace. 'Stand clear!’ The tractor gave a final heave, and with a rumble that grew into a roar, the cable sliced through the wall like a grocer's wire cutter through a piece of cheese. Then everything vanished behind a huge yellow cloud. Where the house had been there was
now nothing but a pillar of mud-coloured vapour through which could be seen clean blue sky.
'The last of Geoffrey Smith,' said Wexford. 'Come on. I want my tea.'
There was no future in it, Drayton thought. His ambitions had no place in them for such a girl as Linda Grover. Not even a single rung of his ladder could be spared to bear her weight. Now, looking back over the days, he saw that he had been culpable in associating himself at all with a girl whose father was eyed antagonistically by his superior officers, blameworthy for taking her out, appallingly foolhardy to have made himself her lover. The word with its erotic, insinuating associations made him shiver and the shiver was not for his future and his career.
It seemed that she was bribable, corruptible. He knew only that she, like her surroundings, was corrupting. And Wexford knew it too. Wexford had told him, although not knowing just what his prohibition entailed, to leave her alone. This was his chance, to obey, to yield, and in this yielding to put up a resistance to her spell sanctioned by authority.
He took his hooded coat and went down the police station steps. The evening was too warm to put it on. Cawthorne would have to go without his car hire fee tonight. Drayton made his way to the library where he got out a book on abnormal psychology.
It was seven when he came out and the library was closing. Grover's would be closed too and he would be safe if he went back to his lodgings by way of the High Street. The Stowerton to Forby bus came in as he approached the stop and he felt a strange urge to get on it and be carried far away into the anonymous depths of the countryside. Instead of the intellectual concentration abnormal psychology would demand, he wanted to lose himself and his identity; he wanted oblivion in the warm quiet air. But even as he thought this, he knew with a sudden conviction almost amounting to horror that he could not escape like this, that the wide green world was not big enough to contain him and her unless they were together. He grew cold and he began to hurry, like a man quickening his steps to stimulate circulation on a cold day.
Then he saw her. She was getting off the Stowerton bus and a young, good-looking man was helping her down with a wheel-basket full of bundled washing. Drayton saw her smile as she thanked him and it seemed to him that her smile was more coquettish and more seductive than any she had ever given him. Jealousy caught at him like a punch at the throat.
Avoidance was impossible. He had lost the will and the desire to avoid. Wexford's words — that apt crack about laundry duties — he recalled as he might remember a sermon so boring, so spurious that it sent you to sleep. But he was awake now, uncaringly reckless.
'Carry your bag, lady? Or should I say, push it?'
She smiled, a shadow of the look she had given the man on the bus. It was enough. The fetters were back. He seemed to feel their cold enclosing touch.
'My boss said I'd be a laundryman tonight,' he said, and he knew he was gabbling foolishly, wooing her anew as he did each time they met. 'He was right. Who's looking after the shop?'
'Your boss thinks a lot of you,' she said and he detected the proprietory note, the tone of satisfaction. ‘I could tell that in the cafe today.' Her face clouded. 'Dad's up,' she said. 'His back's awful, but he says he can't trust us to mind the business.'
Drayton felt a curious desire to see the father. He sighed within himself. It was not thus that he had envisaged so crucial and significant a meeting, not in these circumstances nor in this place. Ten years hence, he thought, arid a nice educated girl; a tall scholarly father with a degree, pearls round the mother's neck; a half-timbered country house with gardens and perhaps a paddock. She unlocked the shop door and the old grey smell came out to meet him.
Grover was behind the counter, shovelling up sweets someone had spilt. His hands looked dirty and there were rust marks round the rim of the jar he held. Drayton had expected him to be older. The man looked no more than forty, if that. There was no grey in the lustreless dark hair and signs of age showed only in his face muscles, screwed up in pain. When he saw his daughter he put down the jar and clapped his hand to the small of his back.
'Your mum's just off to her whist drive,' he said and Drayton thought his voice horrible. 'She wants them things ironed tonight.' He spoke to his daughter as if she were alone with him and he gave her a surly glance.
'You ought to be in bed,' Linda said.
'And let the business go to pot? Fine mess you've got these books in.' Though he was dark and she fair, the resemblance between father and daughter was so strong that Drayton had to turn away deliberately to stop himself from staring. If the man smiled he thought he would cry aloud in anguish. But there was little chance of Grover's smiling. 'This is the end of me taking things easy,' he said, ‘I can see that. Back to the grindstone tomorrow.' He came out from behind the counter as if he were going to pounce on her and, indeed, his crooked movements to some extent suggested those of a crippled and cornered animal. 'Then I'll get the car out,' he muttered. 'Don't suppose you've cleaned it since I was laid up.'
'The doctor'll have something to say about that,' she said and Drayton heard weariness in her voice. 'Why don't you go back to bed? I'm here. I'll manage.'
She took his arm as if he were in fact the ancient broken creature Drayton had imagined. Alone in the shop he felt desolate. This was no place for him and as always when here he felt a compulsion to wash his hands. Perhaps she would forget he was there, engulfed as she always was by her domestic duties, and he would be left among the suspect magazines - the hidden knives? - until night came to deepen this darkness. For he knew that he was a prisoner and that he could not leave without her.
It seemed an age before she returned and when she came he felt his face must betray God knew what enslavement, an end-of-his-tether abandonment to longing.
‘I had to hang up the washing,' she said. 'Not that it'll dry tonight. I should have taken it in the afternoon like I did last week.' As she came close to him, he put up his hands to her face, touching it as a blind man might. 'No car tonight?' she asked him. He shook his head. 'We'll take Dad's,' she said.
'No,' he said. 'We'll go for a walk.'
He knew that she could drive; she had told Wexford. What puny power remained to him would be utterly lost if he allowed her to drive him about the countryside in her father's car.
'Tomorrow, then,' she said and she looked long into his eyes. 'Promise you will tomorrow, Mark, before Dad gets mobile and - and commandeers it.'
He thought that at that moment he would have promised her his own life if she had asked for it. 'Look after me,' she said, a sudden agony in her voice. Upstairs he could hear the crippled man moving. 'Oh, Mark, Mark ...'
The river beckoned them with its quiet sheltered path.
Drayton took her in his arms on the spot where he had seen that other man kiss her, but he had forgotten this and everything else which had passed before they met. Even the desire for immediate physical gratification was less strong. He had reached a stage when his paramount wish was to be alone with her in silence, holding her to him, and in silence enclosing her mouth with his.
‘I think I was justified in calling you out,' Burden said. He stood up to let Wexford take his seat beside him on the window settle. As usual at this time, the saloon bar of the Olive and Dove was crowded.
'Wouldn't keep till the morning, I suppose,' Wexford grumbled. 'Don't sit down. You can get me a beer before you start expounding.'
Burden came back with two beers in tankards. 'Bit crowded and noisy in here, sir, I'm afraid.'
'Not half so crowded and noisy as my place. My daughter Sheila's having a jam session.'
'No,' said Burden with a smile, 'they don't call it that any more.'
Wexford said belligerently from behind his beer, 'What do they call it, then?' ‘Search me.'
They moved into a quieter corner. Wexford lifted the hem of a curtain and looked out at the street. It was dark and there were few people about. Half a dozen youths loitered at the entrance to the cinema car park, pushing each other about and la
ughing.
'Look at all those bloody green cars,' the Chief Inspector said disgustedly. 'For all we know, he's out there, driving around or in the pictures.'
'I think I know who he is,' Burden said quietly.
'Well, I didn't suppose you'd dragged me down here for the sake of the booze. Let's have it.'
Burden looked speculatively at the heavy wrinkled face. Its expression was not encouraging. For a moment he hesitated, fidgeting with his tankard. His idea had come to him, or rather had crystallized, after three hours of arguing it out with himself. When he had formulated it and catalogued the details he had become so excited that he had had to tell someone. The obvious someone now sat opposite him, already derisive and certainly prepared to scoff. The Chief Constable had evidently made up his mind that the whole investigation was so much hot air. Just as the cold light of morning is said to dispel fancies of the night before, so the atmosphere of the Olive and Dove, the sudden bursts of raucous laughter and Wexford's doubting look robbed his ingenious solution of everything cogent and left only the ingenuity. Perhaps it would be better if he drank up his drink and went without another word. Wexford was tapping his foot impatiently. Clearing his throat, Burden said lamely:
