Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  She tensed at that and darted him a look of terror, and he knew why. But he let it pass. Out of pity for her, his mind was working quickly, examining this which was so fresh to him, so recently realized, trying to get enough grasp on it to decide whether the whole truth need come out. But even at this stage, with half the facts still to be understood, he knew he couldn’t comfort her with that one. She hunched in a chair, the pale hair curtaining her face.

  ‘You were afraid to go out alone at night,’ he said, ‘and for good reason. You were once attacked in the dark by a man, weren’t you, and very badly frightened?’

  The hair shivered, her bent body nodded.

  ‘You wished it were legal in this country for people to carry guns for protection. It’s illegal too to carry knives but knives are easier to come by. How long is it. Miss Flinders, since you have been carrying a knife in your handbag?’

  She murmured, ‘Nearly a year.’

  ‘A flick knife, I suppose. The kind with a concealed blade that appears when you press a projection on the hilt. Where is that knife now?’

  ‘I threw it into the canal at Kenbourne Lock.’

  Never before had he so much wished he could leave someone in her position alone. He opened the door and called to Loring to come in. The girl bunched her lips over her teeth, straightened her shoulders, her face very white.

  ‘Let us at least try to be comfortable,’ said Wexford, and he motioned her to sit beside him on the sofa while Loring took the chair she had vacated. ‘I’m going to tell you a story.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I’m going to tell you how this case appears.’

  ‘There was a woman of thirty called Rhoda Comfrey who came from Kingsmarkham in Sussex to London where she lived for some time on the income from a football pools win, a sum which I think must have been in the region of ten thousand pounds. When the money began to run out she supplemented it with an income derived from blackmail, and she called herself West, Mrs West, because the name Comfrey and her single status were distasteful to her. After some time she netted a young man, a foreigner, who had no right to be in this country but who, like Joseph Conrad before him, wanted to live here and write his books in English. Rhoda Comfrey offered him an identity and a history, a mother and father, a family and a birth certificate. He was to take the name of someone who would never need national insurance or a passport because he had been and always would be in an institution for the mentally handicapped - her cousin, John Grenville West. This the young man did.'

  ‘The secret bound them together in a long uneasy friendship. He dedicated his third novel to her, for it was certain that without her that book would never have been written. He would not have been here to write it. Was he Russian perhaps? Or some other kind of Slav? Whatever he was, seeking asylum, she gave him the identity of a real person who would never need to use his reality and who was himself in an asylum of a different kind. And what did she get from him? A young and personal man to be her escort and her companion. He was homosexual, of course, she knew that. All the better. She was not a highly sexed woman. It was not love and satisfaction she wanted, but a man to show off to observers. How disconcerting for her, therefore, when he took on a young girl to type his manuscripts for him, and that young girl fell in love with him . . .’

  Polly Flinders made a sound of pain, a single soft ‘Ah’ perhaps irrepressible. Wexford paused, then went on.

  ‘He wasn’t in love with her. But he was growing older, he was nearly middle-aged. What sort of dignified future had a homosexual who follows the kind of life-style he had been following into his forties? He decided to marry, to settle down - at least superficially - to add another line to that biography of his on the back of his books.Perhaps he hadn’t considered what this would mean to the woman who had created him and received his confidences, it was not she, twelve years his senior, he intended marrying but a girl half her age. To stop him, she threatened to expose his true nationality, his illegalities and his homosexual conduct. He had no choice but to kill her.’

  Wexford looked at Polly Flinders who was looking hard at him.

  ‘But it wasn’t quite like that, was it?’ he said.

  Chapter 22

  While he was speaking a change had gradually come over her. She was suffering still but she was no longer tortured with fear. She had settled into a kind of resigned repose until, at his last sentence, apprehensiveness came back. But she said nothing, only nodding her head and then shaking it, as if she wished to please him, to agree with him, but was doubtful whether he wanted a yes or a no.

  ‘Of course he had a choice,’ Wexford went on. ‘He could have married and left her to go ahead. His readers would have felt nothing but sympathy with a man who wanted asylum in this country, even though he had used illegal means to get it. And there was not the slightest chance of his being deported after so long. As for his homosexuality, who but the most old-fashioned would care? Besides, the fact of his marriage would have put paid to any such aspersions. And where and how would Rhoda Comfrey have published it? In some semi-underground magazine most of his readers would never see? In a gossip column where it would have to be written with many circumlocutions to avoid libel? Even if he didn’t feel that any publicity is good publicity, he still had a choice. He could have agreed to her demands. Marriage for him was only an expedient, not a matter of passion.’

  The girl showed no sign that these words had hurt her. She listened calmly, and now her hands lay folded in her lap. It was as if she were hearing what she wanted to hear but had hardly dared hope she would. Her pallor, though, was more than usually marked. Wexford was reminded of how he had once read in some legend or fairy story of a girl so fair and with skin so transparent, that when she drank the course the red wine followed could be seen as it ran down her throat. But Polly Flinders was in no legend or fairy story - or even nursery rhyme - and her dry bunched lips looked parched for wine or love.

  ‘It was for this reason,’ he said, ‘that someone else was alarmed - the girl he could so easily be prevented from marrying. She loved him and wanted to marry him, but she knew that this older woman had far more influence over him than she did. August fifth was Rhoda Comfrey’s birthday. Grenville West showed her - and showed the girl too - how little malice or resentment he felt towards her by giving her an expensive wallet for a birthday present. Indicating, surely, that he meant to let her rule him? That evening they were all together, the three of them, in Grenville West’s flat, and Rhoda Comfrey asked if she might make a phone call. Now when a guest does that, a polite host leaves the room so that the person making the call may be private. You and Mr West left the room, didn’t you, Miss Flinders? But perhaps the door was left open.'

  ‘She was only telephoning her aunt to say she was going to visit her father in Stowerton Infirmary on the following Monday, but to impress you and Mr West she made it appear as if she were talking to a man. You were uninterested in that aspect of it, but you were intrigued to find out where she would be on the Monday. In the country where you could locate her as you never could on her own in London.’

  He paused, deciding to say nothing about the Trieste Hotel and West’s disappearance, guessing that she would be thankful for his name to be omitted.

  ‘On the evening of Monday, August eighth, you went to Stowerton, having found out when visiting time was. You saw Miss Comfrey get on to a bus with another woman, and you got on to it too, without letting her see you. You left the bus at the stop where she left it and followed her across the footpath - intending what? Not to kill her then. I think you wished only to be alone with her to ask why and to try to dissuade her from interfering between you and Mr West. But she laughed at you, or was patronizing, or something of that sort. She said something hurtful and cruel, and driven beyond endurance, you stabbed her. Am I right, Miss Flinders?’

  Loring sat up stiffly, bracing himself, waiting perhaps for more screams. Polly Flinders only nodded. She looked calm and thoughtful as if she had been asked for verbal confirmat
ion of some action, and not even a reprehensible action, she had performed years before. Then she sighed.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I killed her. I stabbed her and wiped the knife on the grass and got on another bus and then a train and came home. I threw the knife into Kenbourne Lock on the way back. I did it just like you said.’ She hesitated, added steadily, ‘And why you said.’

  Wexford got up. It was all very civilized and easy and casual. He could tell what Loring was thinking. There had been provocation, no real intent, no premeditation. The girl realized all this and that she would get off with three or four years, so better confess it now and put an end to the anxiety that had nearly broken her. Get it over and have peace, with no involvement for Grenville West.

  ‘Pauline Flinders,’ he said, ‘you are charged with the murder on August eighth of Rhoda Agnes Comfrey. You are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence.’

  ‘I don’t want to say anything,’ she said. ‘Do I have to go with you now?’

  ‘It seems,’ said Burden when Wexford phoned him, ‘a bit of a sell.’

  ‘You want more melodrama? You want hysterics?’

  ‘Not exactly that. Oh, I don’t know. There seems to have been so many oddities in this case, and what it boils down to is that it was this girl all along. She killed the woman just because she was coming between her and West.’ Wexford said nothing. ‘I suppose she did kill her? She’s not confessing in an attempt to protect West?’

  ‘Oh, she killed her all right. No doubt about that. In her statement she’s given us the most precise circumstantial account of times, the geography of the Forest Road area, what Rhoda Comfrey was wearing and even the fact that the London train, the nine-twenty-four Kingsmarkham to Victoria, was ten minutes late that night. Tomorrow Rittifer will have Kenbourne Lock dragged and we’ll find that knife.’

  ‘And West himself had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘He had everything to do with it. Without him there’d have been no problem. He was the motive. I’m tired now, Mike, and I’ve got another call to make. I’ll tell you the rest after the special court tomorrow.’

  His other call was to Michael Baker. A woman with a soft voice and a slight North Country accent answered. ‘It’s for you, darling,’ she called out, and Baker called back, ‘Coming, darling.’ His voice roughened, crackling down the phone when he heard who it was, and implicit in his tone was the question, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ though he didn’t actually say this. But when Wexford had told him the bare facts he became immediately cocky and rather took the line that he had predicted such an outcome all along.

  ‘I knew you were wasting your time with all those names and dates and birth certificates, Reg. I told you so.’ Wexford had never heard anyone utter those words in seriousness before, and had he felt less tired and sick he would have laughed. ‘Well, all’s well that ends well, eh?’

  ‘I daresay. Good night, Michael.’

  Maybe it was because he forgot to add something on the lines of his eternal gratitude for all the assistance rendered him by Kenbourne police that Baker dropped the receiver without another word. Or, rather, without more than a fatuous cry of ‘Just coming, sweetheart,’ which he hardly supposed could be addressed to him.

  Dora was in bed, sitting up reading the Marie Antoinette book. He sat down beside her and kicked off his shoes.

  ‘So it’s all over, is it?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve behaved very badly,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve strung that wretched girl along and told her lies and accepted lies from her just to get a confession. I’ve got a horrible job. She still thinks she’s got away with it.’

  ‘Darling,’ Dora said gently, ‘you do realize I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes, in a way I’m talking to myself. Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one’s other self listening.’

  ‘That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me.’

  He went into the bathroom and looked at his ugly face in the glass, at the bags under his tired eyes and the wrinkles and the white stubble on his chin that made him look like an old man.

  ‘I am alone the villain of the earth,’ he said to the face in the glass, ‘and feel I am so most.’

  In court on Saturday morning, Pauline Flinders was charged with the murder of Rhoda Comfrey, committed for trial and remanded in custody. After it was over Wexford avoided the Chief Constable, it was supposed to be his day off, wasn’t it? - and gave Burden the slip and pretended not to see Dr Crocker, and got into his own car and drove to Myringham. What he had to do, would spend most of the day doing, could only be done in Myringham.

  He drove over the Kingsbrook Bridge and through the old town to the centre. There he parked on the top floor of the multi-storey car park, for Myringham was given over to shoppers’ cars on Saturdays, and went down in the lift to enter the building on the opposite side of the street.

  In marble this time, Edward Edwards, a book in his hand, looked vaguely at him. Wexford paused to read what was engraved on the plinth and then went in, the glass doors opening of their own accord to admit him.

  Chapter 23

  For years before it became a hotel - for centuries even - the Olive and Dove had been a coaching inn where the traveller might not get a bedroom or, come to that, a bed to himself, but might be reasonably sure of securing a private parlour. Many of these parlours, oak-panelled, low-ceilinged cubbyholes, still remained, opening out of passages that led away from the bar and the lounge bar, though they were private no longer but available to any first-comer. In the smallest of them where there was only one table, two chairs and a settle,

  Burden sat at eight o’clock on Sunday evening, waiting for the chief inspector to come and keep the appointment he had made himself. He waited impatiently, making his half-pint of bitter last, because to leave the room now for another drink would be to invite invasion. Coats thrown over tables imply no reservation in the Olive at weekends. Besides, he had no coat. It was too warm.

  Then at ten past, when the bitter was down to its last inch, Wexford walked in with a tankard in each hand.

  ‘You’re lucky I found you at all, hidden away like this,’ he said. This is for plotters or lovers.’

  ‘I thought you’d like a bit of privacy.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.’

  Burden raised his tankard and said, ‘Cheers! This dog’s going to bark. I want to know where West is, why he stayed in that hotel, who he is, come to that, and why I had to spend Friday afternoon inspecting mental hospitals. That’s for a start. I want to know why, on your admission, you told that girl two entirely false stories and where you spent yesterday.’

  ‘They weren’t entirely false,’ said Wexford mildly. ‘They had elements of the truth. I knew by then that she had killed Rhoda Comfrey because there was no one else who could have done so. But I also knew that if I presented her with the absolute truth at that point, she would have been unable to answer me and not only should I not have got a confession, but she would very likely have become incoherent and perhaps have collapsed. What was true was that she was in love with Grenville West, that she wanted to marry him, that she overheard a phone conversation and that she stabbed Rhoda Comfrey to death on the evening of August eighth. All the rest, the motive, the lead up to the murder and the characters of the protagonists to a great degree - all that was false. But it was a version acceptable to her and one which she might not have dreamed could be fabricated. The sad thing for her is that the truth must inevitably be revealed and has, in fact, already been revealed in the report I wrote yesterday for Griswold.'

  ‘I spent yesterday in the new public library in Myringham, in the reference section, reading Havelock Ellis, a biography of the Chevalier d’Eon, and bits of the life histories of Isabelle Eberhardt, James Miranda Barry and Martha Jane Burke if those names mean anything to yo
u.’

  ‘There’s no need to be patronizing,’ said Burden. ‘They don’t.’

  Wexford wasn’t feeling very light-hearted, but he couldn’t, even in these circumstances, resist teasing Burden who was already looking irritable and aggrieved.