Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  By six there had come in no phone calls relevant to Rhoda Comfrey, but still he waited, although it was not necessary for him to be there. He waited until seven, until half past, by which time all the exciting pyrotechnics of the storm were over and the rain fell dully and steadily. At a quarter to eight, losing faith in his omen, in the importance of this day above other days - it had been one of the dreariest he had spent for a long time - he drove home through the grey rain.

  Chapter 14

  It was like a winter’s evening. Except at night, the french windows had not been closed since the end of July and now it was August twenty third. Tonight they were not only closed, but the long velvet curtains were drawn across them.

  ‘I thought of lighting a coal fire,’ said Dora who had switched on one bar of the electric heater.

  ‘You’ve got quite enough to do without that.’ Child-minding, Wexford thought, cooking meals for five instead of two. ‘Where’s Sylvia gone?’ he snapped.

  ‘To see Neil, I think. She said something earlier about presenting him with a final ultimatum.’

  Wexford made an impatient gesture. He began to walk about the room, then sat down again because pacing can only provoke irritation in one’s companion. Dora said: ‘What is it, darling? I hate to see you like this.’

  He shrugged. ‘I ought to rise above it. There’s a story told about St Ignatius of Loyola. Someone asked him what he would do if the Pope decided to dissolve the Society of Jesus on the morrow, and he said, “Ten minutes at my orisons and it would be all the same to me.” I wish I could be like that.’

  She smiled. ‘I won’t ask you if you want to talk about it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do any good. I’ve talked about it to the point of exhaustion - the Comfrey case, that is. As for Sylvia, is there anything we haven’t said? I suppose there’ll be a divorce and she’ll live here with the boys. I told her this was her home and of course I meant it. I read somewhere the other day that one in three marriages now come to grief, and hers is going to be one of them. That’s all. It just doesn’t make me feel very happy.’

  The phone rang, and with a sigh Dora got up to answer it. ‘I’ll get it,’ Wexford said, almost pouncing oh the receiver.

  The voice of Dora’s sister calling from Wales as she mostly did on a mid-week evening. He said, yes, there had been a storm and, yes, it was still raining, and then he handed the phone to Dora, deflated. Two weeks before, just a bit earlier than this, he had received the call that told him of the discovery of Rhoda Comfrey’s body. He had been confident then, full of hope, it had seemed simple. Through layers of irrelevant facts, information about people he would never see again and whom he need not have troubled to question, through a mind-clogging jumble of trivia, a gaunt harsh face looked up at him out of his memory, the eyes still holding that indefinable expression.

  She had been fifty and ugly and shapeless and ill-dressed, but someone had killed her from passion and in revenge. Some man who loved her had believed her to be coming here to meet another man. It was inconceivable but it must be so. Stabbing in those circumstances is always a crime of passion, the culmination of a jealousy or a rage or an anguish that suddenly explodes. No one kills in that way because he expects to inherit by his victim’s death, or thereby to achieve some other practical advantage . . .

  ‘They had the storm in Pembroke this morning,’ said Dora, coming back.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said her husband, and then quickly, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t snipe at you. Is there anything on the television?’

  She consulted the paper. ‘I think I know your tastes by now. If I suggested any of this lot I might get that vase chucked at me. Why don’t you read something?’

  ‘What is there?’

  ‘Library books. Sylvia’s and mine. They’re all down there by your chair.’

  He humped the stack of them on to his lap. It was easy to sort out which were Sylvia’s. Apart from Woman and the Sexist Plot, there was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Dora’s were a detective story, a biography of Marie Antoinette and Grenville West’s Apes in Hell. His reaction was to repudiate this last, for it reminded him too forcibly of his first mistake. Women’s Lib as seen through the eyes of Shelley’s mother-in-law would almost have been preferable. But that sort of behaviour was what Burden called hysterical.

  ‘What’s this like?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Dora. ‘I’m sure it’s very well researched. As far as I’m concerned, the title’s way-out, quite meaningless.’

  ‘It probably refers to an idea the Elizabethans had about unmarried women. According to them, they were destined to lead apes in hell.’

  ‘How very odd. You’d better read it. It’s based on some play called The Maid’s Tragedy.’

  But Wexford, having looked at the portrait of its author, pipe in mouth, on the back of the jacket, turned to Marie Antoinette. For the next hour he tried to concentrate on the childhood and youth of the doomed Queen of France, but it was too real for him, too factual. These events had taken place, they were history. What he needed tonight was total escape. A detective story, however bizarre, however removed from the actualities of detection, was the last thing to give it to him. By the time Dora had brought in the tray with the coffee things, he had again picked up Apes in Hell.

  Grenville West’s biography was no longer of interest to him, but he was one of those people who, before reading a novel, like to acquaint themselves with that short summary of the plot publishers generally display on the front flap of the jacket and sometimes in the preliminary pages. After all, if this precis presents too awful an augury one need read no further. But in this instance the jacket flap had been obscured by the library’s own covering of the book, so he turned the first few pages.

  Apparently, it was West’s third novel, having been preceded by Her Grace of Amalfi and Arden’s Wife. The plot summary informed him that the author’s source had been Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, a Jacobean drama set in classical Rhodes. West, however, had shifted the setting to the England of his favourite half-timbering and knot gardens, and with an author’s omnipotent conjuring trick - his publisher’s panegyric, this - had transformed kings and princes into a seventeenth-century aristocracy. Not a bad idea, Wexford thought, and one which Beaumont and Fletcher might themselves have latched on to if writing about one’s contemporaries and fellow nationals had been more in favour at the time. Might as well see what it was like. He turned the page, and his fingers rested on the open pages, his breath held. Then he gave a gasp.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ said Dora.

  He made her no answer. He was looking at two lines of type in italics on an otherwise blank sheet. The dedication. For Rhoda Comfrey, without whom this book could never have been written.

  Chapter 15

  ‘Our first red herring,’ Burden said.

  ‘Only it wasn’t a red herring. If this isn’t proof West knew her I don’t know what would be. He’s known her for years, Mike. This book was published ten years ago.’

  It was a cool clean day. The rain had washed roofs and pavements and had left behind it a thin mist, and the thermometer on Wexford’s wall recorded a sane and satisfactory sixty-five degrees. Burden was back to a normal-weight suit. He stood by the window, closed against the mist, examining Apes in Hell with a severe and censorious expression.

  ‘What a load of rubbish,’ was his verdict. He had read the plot summary. ‘Ten years ago, yes,’ he said. ‘That Hampton guy, his publisher, why didn’t he tell you West had dedicated a book to this woman?’

  ‘Maybe he’d forgotten or he’d never known. I don’t know anything about publishing, Mike. They call Hampton West’s editor, but for all I know an editor may never see a writer’s dedication. In any case, I refuse to believe that a perfectly respectable and no doubt disinterested man like Hampton was involved in a plot to conceal from me West’s friendship with Rhoda Comfrey. And the same goes for his
literary agent and for Vivian and Polly Flinders. They simply didn’t know about the dedication.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing about the wallet, isn’t it?’ said Burden after a pause. ‘He must have given it to her. The alternative is inconceivable.’

  ‘The alternative being that he lost it and it was found by chance and deliberately kept by a friend of his? That’s impossible, but there’s a possibility between those two alternatives, that he left it behind in her house or flat or wherever she lived and she, knowing he was to be away for a month, just kept it for him.’

  ‘And used it? I don’t think much of that idea. Besides, those two girls told you he lost it, and that he asked this Polly to report the loss to the police.’

  ‘Are they both lying then?’ said Wexford. ‘Why should they lie?’

  Burden didn’t answer him. ‘You’ll have him fetched back now, of course.’

  ‘I shall try. I’ve already had a word with the French police. Commissaire Laquin in Marseilles. We worked together on a case once, if you remember. He’s a nice chap.’

  ‘I’d like to have heard that conversation.’

  Wexford said rather coldly, ‘He speaks excellent English. If West’s in the South of France he’ll find him. It shouldn’t be too difficult even if he’s moving from one hotel to another. He must be producing his passport wherever he goes.’

  Burden rubbed his chin, gave Wexford the sidelong look that presages a daring or even outrageous suggestion. ‘Pity we can’t get into West’s flat.’

  ‘Are you insane? D’you want to see me back on the beat or in the sort of employment Malina Patel marked out for me? Christ, Mike, I can just see us rifling through West’s papers and have him come walking in in the middle of it.’

  ‘OK, OK. You’re getting this Laquin to send West home? Suppose he won’t come? He may think it a bit thin, fetching him back from his holiday merely because he knew someone who got herself murdered.’

  ‘Laquin will ask him to accompany him to a police station and then he’ll phone me so that I can speak to West. That’ll be a start. If West can give me Rhoda Comfrey’s London address he may not need to come home. We’ll see. We can’t take any steps to enforce his return, Mike. As far as we know, he’s committed no offence and it’s quite possible he hasn’t seen an English newspaper since he left this country. It’s more than likely, if he’s that much of a francophile.’

  Given to non sequiturs this morning. Burden said, ‘Why couldn’t this book have been written without her?’

  ‘It only means she helped him in some way. Did some research for him, I daresay, which may mean she worked in a library. One thing, this dedication seems to show West had no intention of concealing their friendship.’

  ‘Let’s hope not. So you’re going to glue yourself to this phone for the next few days, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Wexford retorted. ‘You are. I’ve got other things to do.’

  The first should have been to question those girls, but that would have to wait until they were both home in the evening. The second perhaps to visit Silk and Whitebeam in Jermyn Street and discover in detail the circumstances of the purchase of that wallet. And yet wouldn’t all be made plain when West was found? Wexford had a feeling - what anathema that would have been to the Chief Constable - that West was not going to be easily found. He sent Loring back to the leather shop and Bryant to inquiring of every library in London as to whether any female member of their staff had not returned to work after a holiday as she should have done. Then he took himself to Forest Road. Young Mrs Parker with a baby on her hip and old Mrs Parker with a potato peeler in her hand looked at Apes in Hell not so much as if it were an historical novel as any hysterical novelty. Babies and beans might be all in the day’s work to them. Books were not.

  ‘A friend of Miss Comfrey’s?’ said Stella Parker at last. It seemed beyond her comprehension that anyone she knew or had known could also be acquainted with the famous. Grenville West was famous in her eyes simply because he had his name in print and had written things which got into print. She repeated what she had said, this time without the interrogative note, accepting the incredible just as she accepted nuclear fission or the fact that potatoes now cost fifteen pence a pound. ‘A friend of Miss Comfrey’s. Well!’

  Her grandmother-in-law was less easily surprised. ‘Rhoda was a go-getter. I shouldn’t wonder if she’d known the Prime Minister.’

  ‘But do you know for a fact that she was a friend of Grenville West’s?’

  ‘Speak up.’

  ‘He wants to know,’ said Stella Parker, ‘if you know if she knew him, Nanna.’

  'How should I know. The only West I ever come across was that Lilian.’

  Wexford bent over her. ‘Mrs Crown?’

  ‘That’s right. Her first husband’s name was West. She was Mrs West when she first come her to live with Agnes. And poor little John, he was called West too, of course he was. I thought I told you that, young man, when we was talking about names that time.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you,’ said Wexford.

  West is a common name. So he thought as he waited in the car for Lilian Crown to come home from the pub. But if Grenville West should turn out to be some connection by marriage of Rhoda Comfrey’s how much more feasible would any acquaintance between them be. If, for instance, they called each other cousin as many people do with no true blood tie to justify it. Their meeting, their casual affection, would then be explained. And might she not have called herself West, preferring this common though euphonious name over the rarer Comfrey? Lilian Crown arrived home on the arm of an elderly man whom she did not attempt to introduce to Wexford. They were neither of them drunk, that is to say unsteady on their feet or slurred in their speech, but each reeked of liquor, Lilian Crown of spirits and the old man of strong ale. There was even a dampish look about them, due no doubt to the humid weather, but suggesting rather that they had been dipped into vats of their favourite tipple.

  Mrs Crown evidently wanted her friend to accompany her and Wexford into the house, but he refused with awed protestations and frenetic wobblings of his head. Her thin shoulders went up and she made a monkey face at him. ‘OK, be like that.’ She didn’t say good-bye to him but marched into the house, leaving Wexford to follow her. He found her already seated on the food-stained sofa, tearing open a fresh packet of cigarettes.

  ‘What is it this time?’

  He knew he was being over-sensitive with this woman, who was herself totally insensitive. But it was difficult for him, even at his age and after his experiences, to imagine a woman whose only child was a cripple and an idiot not to have had her whole life blighted by her misfortune. And although he sensed that she might answer any question he asked her about her son with indifference, he still hoped to avoid asking her. Perhaps it was for himself and not for her that he felt this way, perhaps he was, even now, vulnerable to man’s or woman’s, inhumanity.

  ‘You were Mrs West, I believe,’ he said, ‘before you married for the second time?’

  ‘That’s right. Ron - Mr West, that is - got himself killed at Dunkirk.’ She put it in such a way as to imply that her first husband had deliberately placed himself as the target for a German machine-gun or aircraft. ‘What’s that got to do with Rhoda?’

  ‘I’ll explain that in a moment, if you don’t mind. Mr West had relatives, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course he did. His mum didn’t find him under a gooseberry bush. Two brothers and a sister he had.’

  ‘Mrs Crown, I have good reason to be interested in anyone connected with your late niece who bears the name of West. Did these people have children? Do you know where they. are now?’ Would she, when she hadn’t known the address of her own niece? But very likely they had no reason to be secretive.

  ‘Ethel, the sister, she never spoke a word to me after I married Ron. Gave herself a lot of mighty fine airs, for all her dad was only a farm labourer. Married a Mr Murdoch, poor devil, and I reckon they’d both be over eighty now if th
ey’re not dead. The brothers was Len and Sidney, but Sidney got killed in the war like Ron. Len was all right, I got on OK with Len.’ Mrs Crown said this wonderingly, as if she had surprised herself by admitting that she got on with anyone connected to her by blood or by marriage. ‘Him and his wife, they still send me Christmas cards.’

  ‘Have they any children?’

  Mrs Crown lit another cigarette from the stub of the last, and Wexford got a blast of smoke in his face. ‘Not to say children. They’ll be in their late thirties by now. Leslie and Charley, they’re called.’ The favour in which she held the parents did not apparently extend to their sons. ‘I got an invite to Leslie’s wedding, but he treated me like dirt, acted like he didn’t know who I was. Don’t know if Charley’s married, wouldn’t be bothered to ask. He’s a teacher, fancies himself a cut above his people, I can tell you.’

  ‘So as far as you know there isn’t a Grenville West among them?’

  Like Mrs Parker, Lilian Crown had evidently set him down as stupid. They were both the sort of people who assume authority, any sort of authority, to be omniscient, to know all sorts of private and obscure details of their own families and concerns as well as they know them themselves. This authority did not, and therefore this authority must be stupid. Mrs Crown cast up her eyes.

  ‘Of course there is. They’re all called Grenville, aren’t they? It’s like a family name, though what right a farm labourer thinks he’s got giving his boys a fancy handle like that I never will know.’

  ‘Mrs Crown,’ said Wexford, his head swimming, ‘what do you mean, they’re all called Grenville?’