by Ruth Rendell
‘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 wore 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 t
here, 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 melodramatic 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…’
‘Well, what? She was the only virgin prostitute in London, was she? It’s a new line, Mike, it’s an idea. It’s a refreshing change in these dissolute times. I can think of all sorts of fascinating possibilities in that one, only I wouldn’t like to burn your chaste ears. Shall we try to be realistic?’
‘I always do,’ said Burden gloomily. He sat down and rested his elbows on Wexford’s desk. ‘She’s been dead since Monday night, and it’s Sunday now and we don’t even know where she lived. It seems hopeless.’
'That’s not being realistic, that’s defeatist. She can’t be traced through her name or her description, therefore she must be traced by other means. In a negative sort of way, all this has shown us something. It’s shown us that her murder is connected with that other life of hers. A secret life is almost always a life founded on something illicit or illegal. In the course of it she did something which gave someone a reason to kill her.’
‘You mean we can’t dismiss the secret life and concentrate on the circumstantial and concrete evidence we have?’
‘Like what? No weapon, no witnesses, no smell of a motive?’ Wexford hesitated and said more slowly, ‘She seldom came back here, but she had been coming once or twice a year. The local people knew her by sight, knew who she was. Therefore, I don’t think this is a case of someone returning home after a long absence and being recognized – to put it melodramatically, Mike – by an old enemy. Nor was her real life here or her work or her interests or her involvements. Those, whatever they were, she left behind in London.’
‘You don’t think the circumstances point to local knowledge?’
‘I don’t. I say her killer knew she was coming here and followed her, though not, possibly, with premeditation to kill. He or she came from London, having known her in that other life of hers. So never mind the locals. We have to come to grips with the London life, and I’ve got an idea how to do it. Through that wallet she had in her handbag.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Burden with a sigh.
‘I’ve got it here.’ Wexford produced the wallet from a drawer in his desk. ‘See the name printed in gold on the inside? Silk and Whitebeam.’
‘Sorry, it doesn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘They’re a very exclusive leather shop in Jermyn Street. That wallet’s new. I think there’s a chance they might remember who they sold it to, and I’m sending Loring up first thing in the morning to ask them. Rhoda Comfrey had a birthday last week. If she didn’t buy it herself, I’m wondering what are the chances of someone else having bought it for her as a gift.’
‘For a woman?'
‘Why not? If she was in need of a wallet. Women carry banknotes as much as we do. The days of giving women a bottle of perfume or a brooch are passing, Mike. They are very nearly the people now. Sic transit gloria mundi.’
‘Sic transit gloria Sunday, if you ask me,’ said Burden.
Wexford laughed. His subordinate and friend could still surprise him.
Chapter 6
As soon as he had let himself into his house, Dora came out from the kitchen, beckoned him into it and shut the door. ‘Sylvia’s here.’
There is nothing particularly odd or unusual about a married daughter visiting her mother on a Sunday afternoon, and Wexford said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be? What d’you mean?’
‘She’s left Neil. She just walked out after lunch and came here.’
‘Are you saying she’s seriously left Neil just like that? She’s walked out on her husband and come home to mother? I can’t believe it.’
‘Darling, it’s true. Apparently, they’ve been having a continuous quarrel ever since Wednesday night. He promised to take her to Paris for a week in September – his sister was going to have the children – and now he says he can’t go, he’s got to go to Sweden on business. Well, in the resulting row Sylvia said she couldn’t stand it any longer, being at home all day with the children and never having a break, and he’d have to get an au pair so that she could go out and train for something. So he said – though I think she’s exaggerating there – that he wasn’t going to pay a girl wages to do what it was his wife’s job to do. She’d only train for something and then not be able to get a job because of the unemployment. Anyway, all this developed into a great analysis of their marriage and the role men have made women play and how she was sacrificing her whole life. You can imagine. So this morning she told him that if she was only a nurse and a housekeeper she’d go and be a nurse and housekeeper with her parents – and here she is.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In the living room, and Robin and Ben are in the garden. I don’t know how much they realize. Darling, don’t be harsh with her.’
‘When have I ever been harsh with my children? I haven’t been
harsh enough. I’ve always let them do exactly as they liked. I should have put my foot down and not let her get married when she was only eighteen.’
She was standing up with her back to him. She turned round and said, ‘Hallo, Dad.’
‘This is a sad business, Sylvia.’
Wexford loved both his daughters dearly, but Sheila, the younger, was his favourite. Sheila had the career, the tough life, had been through the hardening process, and had remained soft and sweet. Also she looked like him, although he was an ugly man and everyone called her beautiful. Sylvia’s hard classical features were those of his late mother-inlaw, and hers the Britannia bust and majestic bearing. She had led the protected and sheltered existence in the town where she had been born. But while Sheila would have run to him and called him Pop and thrown her arms round him, this girl stood staring at him with tragic calm, one marmoreal arm extended along the mantlepiece.
‘I don’t suppose you want me here, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’d nowhere else to go. I won’t bother you for long. I’ll get a job and find somewhere for me and the boys to live.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that, Sylvia. Please don’t. This is your home. What have I ever said to make you speak to me like that?’
She didn’t move. Two great tears appeared in her eyes and coursed slowly down her cheeks. Her father went up to her and took her in his arms, wondering as he did so when it was that he had last held her like this. Years ago, long before she was married. At last she responded, and the hug he got was vice-like, almost breath-crushing. He let her sob and gulp into his shoulder, holding her close and murmuring to this fugitive goddess, all magnificent five feet ten of her, much the same words that he had used twenty years before when she had fallen and cut her knee.
More negative results awaited him on Monday evening. The phone calls were still coming in, growing madder as time went by. No newspaper in the country knew of Rhoda Comfrey either as an employee or in a freelance capacity, no Press agency, no magazine, and she was not on record as a member of the National Union of Journalists. Detective Constable Loring had left for London by an early train, bound for the leather shop in Jermyn Street.
