Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, I will, and you needn’t tell me I’ve had too much already. I know it. The point is, why can’t she go on doing her job while I do mine? I don’t say hers is less important than mine. I don’t say she’s inferior and when she says others say so I think that’s all in her head. But I’m not paying her a wage for doing what other women have done since time immemorial for love. Right? I’m not going to jeopardize my career by cancelling trips abroad, or exhaust myself cleaning the place and bathing the kids when I get home after a long day. I’ll dry the dishes, OK, I’ll see she gets any laboursaving equipment she wants, but I’d like to know just who needs the liberation if I’m to work all day and all night while she footles around at some college for God knows how many years. I wish I was a woman, I can tell you, no money worries, no real responsibility, no slogging off to an office day in and day out for forty years,’

  ‘You don’t wish that, you know.’

  ‘I almost have done this week.’ Neil threw out a despairing hand at the chaos surrounding him. ‘I don’t know how to do housework. I can’t cook, but I can earn a decent living. Why the hell can’t she do the one and I do the other like we used to? I could wring those damned Women’s Libbers’ necks. I love her, Reg. There’s never been anyone else for either of us. We row, of course we do, that’s healthy in a marriage, but we love each other and we’ve got two super kids. Doesn’t it seem crazy that a sort of political thing, an impersonal thing, could split up two people like us?’

  ‘It’s not impersonal to her,’ said Wexford sadly. ‘Couldn’t you compromise, Neil? Couldn’t you get a woman in just for a year till Ben goes to school?’

  ‘Couldn’t she wait just for a year till Ben goes to school? OK, so marriage is supposed to be give and take. It seems to me I do all the giving and she does all the taking.’

  ‘And she says it’s the other way about. I’ll go now, Neil.’ Wexford laid his hand on his son-in-law’s arm. ‘Don’t drink too much. It’s not the answer.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Sorry, Reg, but I’ve every intention tonight of getting smashed out of my mind.’

  Wexford said nothing to his daughter when he got home, and she asked him no questions. She was sitting by the still open trench window, cuddling close to her Ben who had awakened and cried, and reading with mutinous concentration a book called Woman and the Sexist Plot.

  Chapter 9

  Ben passed a fractious night and awoke at seven with a sore throat, Sylvia and her mother were discussing whether to send for Dr Crocker or take Ben to the surgery when Wexford had to leave for work. The last thing he expected was that he himself would be spending the morning in a doctor’s surgery, for he saw the day ahead as a repetition of the day before, to be passed in fretful inertia behind drawn blinds. He was a little late getting in. Burden was waiting for him, impatiently pacing the office.

  ‘We’ve had some luck. A doctor’s just phoned in. He’s got a practice in London and he says Rhoda Comfrey was on his list, she was one of his patients.’

  ‘My God. At last. Why didn’t he call us sooner?’

  ‘Like so many of them, he was away on holiday. In the South of France, oddly enough. Didn’t know a thing about it till he got back last night and saw one of last week’s newspapers.’

  ‘I suppose you said we’d want to see him?’

  Burden nodded. ‘He expects to have seen the last of his surgery patients by eleven and he’ll wait in for us. I said I thought we could be there soon after that.’ He referred to the notes he had taken. ‘He’s a Dr Christopher Lomond and he’s in practice at a place called Midsomer Road, Parish Oak, London, W19.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Wexford. ‘But come to that, I’ve only just about heard of Stroud Green and Nunhead and Earlsfield. All those lost villages swallowed up in . . . What are you grinning at?’

  ‘I know where it is. I looked it up. It may be W19 but it’s still part of your favourite beauty spot, the London Borough of Kenbourne.’

  ‘Back again,’ said Wexford. ‘I might have known it. And what’s more, Stevens has gone down with the flu - flu in August! - so unless you feel like playing dodgem cars, it’s train for us.’

  Though unlikely to be anyone’s favourite beauty spot, the district in which they found themselves was undoubtedly the best part of Kenbourne. It lay some couple of miles to the north of Elm Green and Kenbourne High Street and the library, and it was one of those ‘nice’ suburbs which sprang up to cover open country between the two world wars. The tube station was called Parish Oak, and from there they were directed to catch a bus which took them up a long hilly avenue, flanked by substantial houses whose front gardens had been docked for road-widening. Directly from it, at the top, debouched Midsomer Road, a street of comfortable looking semi-detached houses, not unlike Wexford’s own, where cars were tucked away into garages, doorsteps held neat little plastic containers for milk bottles, and dogs were confined behind wrought-iron gates. Dr Lomond’s surgery was in a flat-roofed annexe attached to the side of number sixty-one. They were shown in immediately by a receptionist, and the doctor was waiting for them, a short youngish man with a cheerful pink face.

  ‘I didn’t recognize Miss Comfrey from that newspaper photograph,’ he said, ‘but I thought I remembered the name and when I looked at the photo again I saw a sort of resemblance. So I checked with my records. Rhoda Agnes Comfrey, 6 Princevale Road, Parish Oak.’

  ‘So she hadn’t often come to you, Doctor?’ said Wexford.

  ‘Only came to me once. That was last September. It’s often the way, you know. They don’t bother to register with a doctor till they think they’ve got something wrong with them. She had herself put on my list and she came straight in.’

  Burden said tentatively, ‘Would you object to telling us what was wrong with her?’

  The doctor laughed breezily. ‘I don’t think so. The poor woman’s dead, after all. She thought she’d got appendicitis because she’d got pains on the right side of the abdomen. I examined her, but she didn’t react to the tests and she hadn’t any other symptoms, so I thought it was more likely to be indigestion and I told her to keep off alcohol and fried foods. If it persisted she was to come back and I’d give her a letter to the hospital. But she was very much against the idea of hospital and I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t come back. Look, I’ve got a sort of dossier thing here on her. I have one for all my patients.’

  He read from a card: ' “Rhoda Agnes Comfrey. Age fortynine. No history of disease, apart from usual childhood ailments. No surgery. Smoker - “ I told her to give that up, by the way. “Social drinker “ That can mean anything. “Formerly registered with Dr Castle of Glebe Road, Kingsmarkham, Sussex.” ‘

  ‘And he died last year,’ said Wexford. ‘You’ve been a great help, Doctor. Can I trouble you to tell a stranger in these parts where Princevale Road might be?’

  ‘Half way down that hill you came up from the station. It turns off on the same side as this just above the block of shops.’

  Wexford and Burden walked slowly back to the avenue which they now noted was called Montfort Hill. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Wexford. ‘We know everyone else must have known her under an assumed name, but not her doctor, I wonder why not.’

  ‘Too risky?’

  ‘What’s the risk? In English law one can call oneself what one likes. What you call yourself is your name. People think you have to change your name by deed poll but you don’t. I could call myself Waterford tomorrow and you could call yourself Fardel without infringing a hairsbreadth of the law.’

  Looking puzzled, Burden said, ‘I suppose so. Look, I see the Waterford thing, but why Fardel?’

  ‘You grunt and sweat under a weary life, don’t you? Never mind, forget it. We won’t go to Princevale Road immediately. First I want to introduce you to some friends of mine.’

  Baker seemed to have forgotten his cause for offence and greeted Wexford cordially. ‘Michael Baker, meet Mike Burden, and thi
s, Mike, is Sergeant Clements.’

  Once, though not for more than a few hours, Wexford had suspected the rubicund baby-faced sergeant of murder to be certain of the undisputed guardianship of his adopted son. It always made him feel a little guilty to remember that, even though that suspicion had never been spoken aloud. But the memory - how could he have entertained such ideas about this pillar of integrity? - had made him careful, in every subsequent conversation, to show kindness to Clements and not fail to ask after young James and the small sister chosen for him. However, the sergeant was too conscious of his subordinate rank to raise domestic matters now, and Wexford was glad of it for other reasons. He, in turn, would have been asked for an account of his grandsons, at present a sore and embarrassing subject.

  'Trincevale Road?’ said Baker. ‘Very pleasant district. Unless I’m much mistaken, number six is one of a block of what they call town houses, modern sort of places with a lot of glass and weatherboarding.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Clements said eagerly, ‘but unless I’m much mistaken we were called to break-in down there a few months back. I’ll nip downstairs and do a bit of checking.’

  Baker seemed pleased to have guests and something to relieve the tedium of August in Kenbourne Vale. ‘How about a spot of lunch at the Grand Duke, Reg? And then we could all get along there, if you’ve no objection?’

  Anxious to do nothing which might upset the prickly Baker, who was a man of whom it might be said that one should not touch his ears, Wexford said that he and Burden would be most gratified, adding to Baker’s evident satisfaction, that he didn’t know how they would get on without his help. The sergeant came back, puffed up with news.

  ‘The occupant is a Mrs Farriner,’ he said. ‘She’s away on holiday. It wasn’t her place that was broken into, it was next door but one, but apparently she’s got a lot of valuable stuff and she came in here before she went away last Saturday week to ask us to keep an eye on the house for her.’

  ‘Should put it on safe deposit,’ Baker began to grumble. ‘What’s the use of getting us to . . .’

  Wexford interrupted him. He couldn’t help himself. ‘How old is she, Sergeant? What does she look like?’

  ‘I’ve not seen her myself, sir. Middle-aged, I believe, and a widow or maybe divorced. Dinehart knows her.’

  ‘Then get Dinehart to look at that photo, will you?’

  ‘You don’t mean you think Mrs Farriner could be that Comfrey woman, sir?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Wexford.

  But Dinehart was unable to say one way or another. Certainly Mrs Farriner was a big tall woman with dark hair who lived alone. As to her looking like that girl in the picture - well, people change a lot in twenty years. He wouldn’t like to commit himself. Wexford was tense with excitement. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? All the time he was frustrated or crossed by people being away on holiday, and yet he had never considered that Rhoda Comfrey might not have been missed by friends and neighbours because they expected her to be absent from her home. They supposed a Mrs Farriner to be at some resort, going under the name by which they knew her, so why connect her with a Miss Comfrey who had been found murdered in a Sussex town?

  In the Grand Duke, an old-fashioned pub that had surely once been a country inn, they served themselves from the cold table. Wexford felt too keyed-up to eat much. Dealing diplomatically with people like Baker might be a social obligation, but it involved wasting a great deal of time. The others seemed to be taking what he saw as a major breakthrough far more placidly than he could. Even Burden showed a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd,’ he said, ‘that a woman like this Mrs Farriner, well-off enough to live where she lives and have all that valuable stuff, should keep a wallet she presumably found on a bus?’

  ‘There’s nowt so strange as folk,’ said Wexford.

  ‘Maybe, but it was you told me that any departure from the norm is important. I can imagine the Rhoda Comfrey we know doing it, but not this Mrs Farriner from what we know of her. Therefore it seems unlikely to me that they’re one and the same.’

  ‘Well, we’re not going to find out by sitting here feeding our faces,’ said Wexford crossly.

  To his astonishment, Baker agreed with him. ‘You’re quite right. Drink up, then, and we’ll get going.’

  Ascending Montfort Hill on the bus, Wexford hadn’t noticed the little row of five or six shops on the left-hand side. This time, in the car, his attention was only drawn to them by the fact of Burden giving them such an intense scrutiny. But he said nothing. At the moment he felt rather riled with Burden. The name of the street which turned off immediately beyond these shops was lettered in black on a white board, Princevale Road, W19, and Burden eyed this with similar interest, craning his neck to look back when they had passed it. At the very end of the street - or perhaps, from the numbering, the very beginning - stood a row of six terraced houses. They looked less than ten years old and differed completely in style from the detached mock-Tudor, each with a generous front garden, that characterized Princevale Road.

  Wexford supposed that they had been built on ground left vacant after the demolition of some isolated old house. They were a sign of the times, of scarcity of land and builders’ greed. But they were handsome enough for all that, three floors high, boarded in red cedar between the wide plateglass windows. Each had its own garage, integrated and occupying part of the ground floor, each having a different coloured front door, orange, olive, blue, chocolate, yellow and lime. Number six, at this end of the block, had the typical invitation-to-burglars look a house takes on when its affluent and prideful owner is away. All the windows were shut, all the curtains drawn back with perfect symmetry. An empty milk bottle rack stood on the doorstep, and there were no bottles, full or empty, beside it. Stuck through the letterbox and protruding from it were a fistful of letters and circulars in brown envelopes. So much for police surveillance, Wexford thought to himself.

  It was rather unwillingly that he now relinquished a share of the investigating to Baker and Clements, though he knew Baker’s efficiency. The hard-faced inspector and his sergeant went off to ring at the door of number one. With Burden beside him, Wexford approached the house next door to the empty one. Mrs Cohen at number five was a handsome Jewess in her early forties. Her house was stuffed with ornaments, the wallpaper flocked crimson on gold, gold on cream. There were photographs about of nearly grown-up children, a buxom daughter in a bridesmaid’s dress, a son at his bar mitzvah.

  ‘Mrs Farriner’s a very charming nice person. What I call a brave woman, self-supporting, you know. Yes, she’s divorced. Some no-good husband in the background, I believe, though she’s never told me the details and I wouldn’t ask. She’s got a lovely little boutique down at Montfort Circus. I’ve had some really exquisite things from her and she’s let me have them at cost. That’s what I call neighbourly. Oh, no, it couldn’t be’ - looking at the photograph ‘ - not murdered. Not a false name, that’s not Rose’s nature. Rose Farriner, that’s her name. I mean, it’s laughable what you’re saying. Of course I know where she is. First she went off to see her mother who’s in a very nice nursing home somewhere in the country, and then she was going on to the Lake District. No, I haven’t had a card from her, I wouldn’t expect it.’

  The next house was the one which had been burgled, and Mrs Elliott, when they had explained who they were, promptly assumed that there had been another break-in. She was at least sixty, a jumpy nervous woman who had never been in Rose Farriner’s house or entertained her in her own. But she knew of the existence of the dress shop, knew that Mrs Farriner was away and had remarked that she sometimes went away for weekends, in her view a dangerous proceeding with so many thieves about. The photograph was shown to her and she became intensely frightened. No, she couldn’t say if Mrs Farriner had looked like that when young. It was evident that the idea of even hazarding an identification terrified her, and it seemed as if by so doing she feared to put her
own life in jeopardy.

  ‘Rhoda,’ said Wexford to Burden, ‘means a rose. It’s Greek for rose. She tells people she’s going to visit her mother in nursing home. What are the chances she’s shifted the facts, and mother is father and the nursing home’s a hospital?’

  Baker and Clements met them outside the gate of number three. They too had been told of mother and the nursing home, of the dress shop, and they too had met only with doubt and bewilderment over the photograph. Together the four of them approached the last, the chocolate coloured, front door.

  Mrs Delano was very young, a fragile pallid blonde with a pale blond baby, at present asleep in its pram in the porch. ‘Rose Farriner’s somewhere around forty or fifty,’ she said as if one of those ages was much the same as the other and all the same to her. She looked closely at the photograph, turned even paler. ‘I saw the papers, it never crossed my mind. It could be her. I can’t imagine now why I didn’t see it before.’

  In the display window on the left side of the shop door was the trendy gear for the very young: denim jeans and waistcoats, T-shirts, long striped socks. The other window interested Wexford more, for the clothes on show in it belonged in much the same category as those worn by Rhoda Comfrey when she met her death. Red, white and navy were the predominating colours. The dresses and coats were aimed at a comfortably-off middle-aged market. They were ‘smart’ - a word he knew would never be used by his daughters or by anyone under forty-five. And among them, trailing from an open sleeve to a scent bottle, suspended from a vase to the neck of a crimson sweater, were strings of glass beads.

  A woman of about thirty came up to attend to them. She said her name was Mrs Moss and she was in charge while Rose Farriner was away. Her manner astonished, suspicious, cautious - all to be expected in the circumstances. Again the photograph was studied and again doubt was expressed. She had worked for Mrs Farriner for only six months and knew her only in her business capacity.