by Ruth Rendell
‘They come here when Rhoda was a little mite. An only child she was, and used to play with my two youngest. A poor feeble thing was Agnes Comfrey, didn’t know how to stand up for herself, and Mr Comfrey was a real terror. I don’t say he hit her or Rhoda, but he ruled them with a rod of iron just the same.’ She rapped out sharply. ‘You come across that Mrs Crown yet?’
‘Yes,’ said Wexford, ‘But . . .’ Oh, not the aunt, he thought, not the by-path. She hadn’t heard him.
‘You will. A crying scandal to the whole neighbourhood, she is. Used to come here visiting her sister when her first husband was alive. Before the war, that was, and she was a real fly-by-night even then, though she never took to drink till he was killed at Dunkirk. She had this baby about three months after - I daresay it was his all right, give her the benefit of the doubt - but it was one of them mongols, poor little love. John, they called him. Her and him come to live here with the Comfreys. Aggie used to come over to me in a terrible state of worry about what Lilian got up to and tried to keep dark, and Jim Comfrey threatening to throw her out.'
‘Well, the upshot of it was she met this Crown in the nick of time and they took the house next door when they was married on account of it had been empty all through the war. And d’you know what she done then?’ Wexford shook his head and stared at the pyramid of peas which were having a mesmeric effect on him.
‘I’ll tell you. She had little John put in a home. Have you ever heard the like, for a mother to do such a thing like that? Sweet affectionate little love he was too, the way them mongols are, and loved Rhoda, and she taking him out with her, not a bit ashamed.
‘She’d have been how old then, Mrs Parker?’ Wexford said for something to say. It was a mistake because he didn’t really care, and he had to bawl it twice more before she heard.
‘Twelve, she was, when he was born, and sixteen when Lilian had him put away. She was at the County High School, and Mr Comfrey wanted to take her away when she was fourteen like you could in them days. The headmistress herself, Miss Fowler that was, come to the house personally herself to beg him let Rhoda stay on, her being so bright. Well, he gave way for a bit, but he wasn’t having her go on to no college, made her leave at sixteen, wanted her money, he said, the old skinflint.’
It was very hot, and the words began to roll over Wexford only half-heard. Just the very usual unhappy tale of the mean-spirited working-class parent who values cash in hand more than the career in the future. ‘Got shop work - wanted to better herself, did Rhoda - always shut up in that back bedroom reading - taught herself French - went to typing classes - ’ How the hell was he going to get that address? Trace her through those clothes, those antique shoes? Not a hope. The sharp old voice cackled on . . . ‘Nothing to look at - never had a boy - that Lilian always at her - “When you going to get yourself a boy-friend, Rhoda?” - got to be a secretary - poor thing, she used to get herself up like Lilian, flashy clothes and high heels and paint all over her face.’
He’d have to get help from the Press: Do You Know This Woman? On the strength of that photograph? ‘Aggie got cancer - never went to the doctor till it was too late - had an operation, but it wasn’t no use - she passed on and poor Rhoda was left with the old man - ' Well, he wasn’t going to allow publication of photos of her dead face, never had done that and never would. If only Mrs Parker would come to an end, if only she hadn’t about twenty years still to go! ‘And would have stayed, I daresay - been a slave to him - stayed for ever but for getting all that money - tied to him hand and foot - ’
‘What did you say?’
‘I’m the one that’s deaf, young man,’ said Mrs Parker.
‘I know, I’m sorry. But what was that about coming into money?’
‘You want to listen when you’re spoken to, not go off in day-dreams. She didn’t come into money, she won it. On the pools, it was one of them office what-d’you-call-its.’
‘Syndicates?’
‘I daresay. Old Jim Comfrey, he thought he was in clover. "My ship’s come in," he says to my eldest son. But he was wrong there. Rhoda upped and walked out on him, and so much for the house he was going to have and the car and all.’
‘How much was it?’
‘How much was what? What she won? Thousands and thousands. She never said and I wouldn’t ask. She come round to my place one afternoon - I was living up the road then - and she’d got a big case all packed. Just thirty, she was, and twenty years ago nearly to the day. She had the same birthday as me, you see, August the fifth, and forty-two years between us. "I’m leaving. Auntie Vi," she says, "going to London to seek my fortune," and she gives me the address of some hotel and says would I have all her books packed up and sent on to her? Fat chance of that. Jim Comfrey burned the lot of them down the garden. I can see her now like it was yesterday, in them high heels she couldn’t walk in properly and a dress all frills, and beads all over her and fingernails like she’d dipped them in red paint and . . .’
‘You didn’t see her yesterday, did you?’ Wexford yelled rapidly. ‘I mean, the day before yesterday?’
‘No. didn’t know she was here. She’d have come, though, if it wasn’t for some wicked . . .’
‘What was she going to do in London, Mrs Parker?’
‘Be a reporter on a paper. That’s what she wanted. She was secretary to the editor of the Gazette and she used to write bits for them too. I told you all that only you wasn’t listening.’
Puzzled, he said, ‘But Mrs Crown said she was in business.’
‘All I can say is, if you believe her you’ll believe anything. Rhoda got to be a reporter and did well for herself, had a nice home, she used to tell me, and what with the money she’d won and her wages . . .’
He bellowed, ‘What newspaper, d’you know? Whereabouts was this home of hers?’
Mrs Parker drew herself up, assuming a duchessy dignity. She said rather frigidly, ‘Lord knows, I hope you’ll never get to be deaf, young man. But maybe you’ll never understand unless you do. Half the things folks say to you go over your head, and you can’t keep stopping them to ask them what? Can you? They think you’re going mental. Rhoda used to say she’d written a bit here and a bit there, and gone to this place or that, and bought things for her home and whatnot, and how nice it was and what nice friends she’d got. I liked to hear her talk, I liked her being friendly with an old woman, but I know better than to think I’m like to follow half the things she said.’
Defeated, flattened, bludgeoned and nearly stunned, Wexford got up. ‘I must go, Mrs Parker.’
‘I won’t quarrel with that,’ she said tartly and, showing no sign of fatigue, ‘You’ve fair worn me out, roaring at me like a blooming bull.’ She handed him the colander and the potatoes. ‘You can make yourself useful and give these to Stell. And tell her to bring me in a pie dish.’
Chapter 5
Had she perhaps been a freelance journalist?
At the press conference Wexford gave that afternoon he asked this question of Harry Wild, of the Kingsmarkham Courier, and of the only reporter any national newspaper had bothered to send. Neither of them had heard of her in this connection, though Harry vaguely remembered a plain featured dark girl called Comfrey, who twenty years before, had been secretary to the editor of the now defunct Gazette.
‘And now,’ Wexford said to Burden, ‘we’ll adjourn to the Olive for a well-earned drink. See if you can find Crocker. He’s about somewhere, dying to get the low-down on the medical report.’
The doctor was found, and they made their way to the Olive and Dove where they sat outside at a table in the little garden. It had been the sort of summer that seldom occurs in England, the sort foreigners believe never occurs, though the Englishman of middle age can look back and truthfully assert that there have been three or four such in his lifetime. Weeks, months, of undimmed sunshine had pushed geraniums up to five feet and produced fuchsias of a size and profusion only generally seen inside a heated greenhouse. None of the three men w
ore a jacket, but the doctor alone sported a tee-shirt, a short-sleeved adolescent garment in which he made his rounds and entranced his female patients.
Wexford drank white wine, very dry and as cold as the Olive was able to produce it which, tonight, was around blood heat. The occasional beer was for when Crocker, a stern medical mentor, wasn’t around. It was a while now since the chief inspector had suffered a mild thrombosis, but any excesses, as the doctor never tired of telling him, could easily lead to another. He began by congratulating his friend on the accuracy of his on-the-spot estimate of the time of death. The eminent pathologist who had conducted the post-mortem had put it at between seven and nine-thirty.
‘Eight-thirty’s the most probable,’ he said, ‘on her way home from the bus stop.’ He sipped his warm wine. ‘She was a strong healthy woman - until someone put a knife in her. One stab wound pierced a lung and the other the left ventricle. No signs of disease, no abnormalities. Except one. I think in these days you could call it an abnormality.'
‘What do you mean?’ said Crocker.
‘She was a virgin.’
Burden, that strait-laced puritan, jerked up his head. ‘Good heavens, she was an unmarried woman, wasn’t she? Things have come to a pretty pass, I must say, if a perfectly proper condition for a single woman is called abnormal.’
‘I suppose you must say it, Mike,’ said Wexford with a sigh, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I agree that a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even twenty, such a thing wouldn’t be unusual in a woman of fifty, but it is now.’
‘Unusual in a woman of fifteen, if you ask me,’ said the doctor.
‘Look at it this way. She was only thirty when she left home, and that was just at the beginning of the stirrings of the permissive society. She had some money. Presumably, she lived alone without any kind of chaperonage. All right, she was never very attractive or charming, but she wasn’t repulsive, she wasn’t deformed. Isn’t it very strange indeed that in those first ten years at least she never had one love affair, not even one adventure for the sake of the experience?’
‘Frigid,’ said Crocker. ‘Everyone’s supposed to be rolling about from bed to bed these days, but you’d be surprised how many people just aren’t interested in sex. Women especially. Some of them put up a good showing, they really try, but they’d much rather be watching the TV.’
‘So old Acton was right, was he? “A modest woman”,’ Wexford quoted, ‘ “seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only to please him and, but for the desire for maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.” ‘
Burden drained his glass and made a face like someone who had taken unpalatable medicine. He had been a policeman for longer than Rhoda Comfrey had been free of paternal ties, had seen human nature in every possible seamy or sordid aspect, yet his experience had scarcely at all altered his attitude towards sexual matters. He was still one of those people whose feelings about sex are grossly ambivalent. For him it was both dirty and holy. He had never read that quaint Victorian manual, Dr Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, male-orientated, prudish, repressive and biologically very wide of the mark, but it was for such as he that it had been written. Now, while Wexford and the doctor - who for some reason beyond his comprehension seemed to know the work well - were quoting from it with scathing laughter and casting up of eyes, he said brusquely, interrupting them:
‘In my opinion, this has absolutely nothing to do with Rhoda Comfrey’s murder.’
‘Very likely not, Mike. It seems a small point when we don’t even know where she lived or how she lived or who her friends were. But I hope all that will be solved tomorrow.’
‘What’s so special about tomorrow?’
‘I think we shall see that this rather dull little backwoods killing will have moved from the inside pages to be frontpage news. I’ve been very frank with the newspapers - mostly via Harry Wild who’ll scoop a packet in lineage - and I think I’ve given them the sort of thing they like. I’ve also given them that photograph, for what it’s worth. I’ll be very much surprised if tomorrow morning we don’t see headlines such as “Murdered Woman Led Double Life” and “What Was Stabbed Woman’s Secret?” ‘
‘You mean,’ said Burden, ‘that some neighbour of hers or employer or the man who delivers her milk will see it and let us know?’
Wexford nodded. ‘Something like that. I’ve given the Press a number for anyone with information to ring. You see, that neighbour or employer may have read about her death today without its occurring to them that we’re still in ignorance of her address.’
The doctor went off to get fresh drinks. ‘All the nuts will be on the blower,’ said Burden. ‘All the men whose wives ran away in 1956, all the paranoiacs and sensation-mongers.’
‘That can’t be helped. We have to sort out the sheep from the goats. God knows, we’ve done it before often enough.’
The newspapers, as he put it, did him proud. They went, as always, too far with headlines more bizarre than those he had predicted. If the photograph, touched up out of recognition, struck no chords, he was sure the text must. Rhoda Comfrey’s past was there, the circumstances of her Kingsmarkham life, the history of her association with the old Gazette, the details of her father’s illness. Mrs Parker and Mrs Crown had apparently not been so useless after all.
By nine the phone began to ring.
For Wexford, his personal phone had been ringing throughout the night, but those calls had been from newspapermen wanting more details and all ready to assure him that Rhoda Comfrey hadn’t worked for them. In Fleet Street she was unknown. Reaching the station early, he set Loring to trying all the London local papers, while he himself waited for something to come from the special line. Every call that had the slightest hint of genuineness about it was to be relayed to him. Burden, of course, had been right. All the nuts were on the blower. There was the spiritualist whose sister had died fifteen years before and who was certain Rhoda Comfrey must have been that sister reincarnated; the son whose mother had abandoned him when he was twelve; the husband, newly released from a mental hospital, whose wife that he declared missing came and took the receiver from him with embarrassed apologies; the seer who offered to divine the dead woman’s address from the aura of her clothes.
None of these calls even reached Wexford’s sanctum, though he was told of them. Personally he took the call from George Rowlands, former editor of the Gazette, who had nothing to tell him but that Rhoda had been a good secretary with the makings of a feature-writer. Every well-meant and apparently sane call he took, but the day passed without anything to justify his optimism. Friday came, and with it the inquest. It was quickly adjourned, and nothing much came out of it but a reproof for Brian Parker from an unsympathetic coroner. This was a court, not a child guidance clinic, said the coroner, managing to imply that the paucity of evidence was somehow due to Parker’s having rearranged Rhoda Comfrey’s clothes. The phone calls still came sporadically on the Saturday, but not one caller claimed to know Rhoda Comfrey by name or said he or she had lived next door to her or worked with her. No bank manager phoned to say she had an account at his bank, no landlord to say that she paid him rent.
‘This,’ said Wexford, ‘is ridiculous. Am I supposed to believe she lived in a tent in Hyde Park?’
‘Of course it has to be that she was living under an assumed name.’ Burden stood at the window and watched the bus from Stowerton pause at the stop, let off a woman passenger not unlike Rhoda Comfrey, then move off towards Forest Road. ‘I thought the papers were doing their usual hysterical stuff when they printed all that about her secret life.’ He looked at Wexford, raising his eyebrows. ‘I thought you were too.’
‘My usual hysterical stuff. Thanks very much.’
‘I meant melodramatic,’ said Burden, as if that mitigated the censure. ‘But they weren’t. You weren’t. Why would she behave like that?’
‘For the usual melodramati
c reason. Because she didn’t want the people who knew Rhoda Comfrey to know what Rhoda Comfrey was up to. Espionage, drug-running, protection rackets, a call-girl ring. It’s bound to be something like that.’
‘Look, I didn’t mean you always exaggerate. I’ve said I was wrong, haven’t I? As a matter of fact, the call-girl idea did come into my mind. Only she was a bit old for that and nothing much to look at and - well . . .’
