by Ruth Rendell
‘A suitcase. He may have had a handbag as well.’ Although Hetherington was strictly correct in employing this word, the rather quaint usage made Wexford want to repeat, in Lady Bracknell’s outraged echo, ‘A handbag?’ But he only raised his eyebrows, and Hetherington said, ‘He asked if he could garage his car – he didn’t want to leave it on the hardtop parking – so I let him have number five which happened to be vacant. He put the car away himself.’ There was a small hesitation. ‘As a matter of fact, it was a little odd now I come to think of it. I offered to get the car garaged for him and asked for his key, but he insisted on doing it himself.’
‘When did you last see him?’ Baker asked.
‘I never saw him again. He ordered breakfast in his room on the Monday morning. No one seemed to have seen him go out. I expected him to vacate his room by noon on Wednesday but he didn’t appear to pay his bill.’ Hetherington paused, then went on to tell the story broadly as Wexford had heard it from Clements. When he had finished Wexford asked him what had become of West’s room key.
‘Heaven knows. We do stress that our guests hand in their keys at reception when they go out, we make them too heavy to be comfortably carried in a pocket, but it’s of no avail. They will take them out with them. We lose hundreds. I have his suitcase here. No doubt you will wish to examine the contents.’
For some moments Wexford had been regarding a suitcase which, standing under Hetherington’s desk, he had guessed to be the luggage West had left behind him. It was of brown leather, not new but of good quality and stamped inside the lid with the name and crest of Silk and Whitebeam, Jermyn Street. Baker opened it. Inside were a pair of brown whipcord slacks, a yellow roll-neck shirt, a stone-coloured lightweight pullover, a pair of white underpants, brown socks and leather sandals.
‘Those were the clothes he arrived in,’ said Hetherington, his concern for West temporarily displaced by distaste for anyone who would wear trousers with a shiny seat and a pullover – with a frayed cuff.
‘How about this address book?’ said Baker.
‘Here.’
The entries of names, addresses and phone numbers were sparse. Field and Bray, Literary Agents; Mrs Brenda Nunn’s personal address and phone number; several numbers and extensions for West’s publishers; Vivian’s Vineyard; Polly Flinders; Kenbourne Town Hall; a number for emergency calls to the North Thames Gas Board; London Electricity; the London Library and Kenbourne Public Library, High Road Branch; some French names and numbers and places – and Crown, Lilian, with the Kingsmarkham telephone number of Rhoda Comfrey’s aunt.
Wexford said, ‘Where’s the car now?’
‘Still in number five garage. I couldn’t move it, could I? I hadn’t the means.’
I wonder if I have, thought Wexford. They trooped out to the row of garages. The red Citroen looked as if it had been well maintained and it was immaculately polished. The licence plates showed that it was three years old. The doors were locked and so was the boot.
‘We’ll get that open,’ Baker said. ‘Should have a key to fit, or we’ll get one. It won’t take long.’
Wexford felt through the jangling mass in his pocket. Two keys marked with a double chevron. ‘Try these,’ he said. The keys fitted. There was nothing inside the car but a neat stack of maps of Western Europe on the dashboard shelf. The contents of the boot were more rewarding. Two more brown leather suitcases, larger than the one West had left in his room, and labelled ‘Grenville West, Hotel Casimir, Rue Victor Hugo, Paris’. Both were locked, but the opening of suitcases is child’s play.
‘To hell with warrants,’ Wexford said out of range of Hetherington’s hearing. ‘Can we have these taken back to the nick?’
‘Surely,’ said Baker, and to Hetherington in the grating tones of admonition that made him unpopular with the public and colleagues alike, ‘You’ve wasted our time and the taxpayers’ money by delaying like this. Frankly, you haven’t a hope in hell of getting that bill paid.’
Loring drove the car back with Baker beside him, while Wexford went with Clements. A lunchtime traffic jam held the police car up, Clements taking this opportunity during a lull in events to expound on lack of public cooperation, laxity that amounted to obstruction, and Hetherington’s hair which he averred had been bleached. At last Wexford managed to get him off this – anyone whose conversation consists in continual denunciation is wearying to listen to – and on to James and Angela. By the time they got to the police station both cases had been opened and were displayed in the centre of the floor of Baker’s drab and gloomy sanctum.
The cases were full of clothes, some of which had evidently been bought new for West’s holiday. In a leather bag was a battery-operated electric shaver, a tube of suntan cream and an aerosol of insect repellant, but no toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, sponge or flannel, cologne or after-shave.
‘If he’s a homosexual,’ said Wexford, ‘these are rather odd omissions. I should have expected a fastidious interest in his personal appearance. Doesn’t he even clean his teeth?’
‘Maybe he’s got false ones.’
‘Which he scrubs at night with the hotel nailbrush and the hotel soap?’
Baker had brought to light a large brown envelope, sealed.
‘Ah, the documents.’ But there was something else inside apart from papers. Carefully, Baker slit the envelope open and pulled out a key to which was attached a heavy wood and metal tag, the metal part engraved with the name of the Trieste Hotel and the number of the room West had occupied for one night.
‘How about this?’ said Baker. ‘He isn’t in France, he never left the country.’
What he handed to Wexford was a British passport, issued according to its cover to Mr J. G. West.
Chapter 18
Wexford opened the passport at page one.
The name of the bearer was given as Mr John Grenville West and his national status as that of a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Page two gave West’s profession as a novelist, his place of birth as Myringham, Sussex, his date of birth 9 September 1940, his country of residence as the United Kingdom, his height as five feet nine, and the colour of his eyes as grey. In the space allotted to the bearer’s usual signature, he had signed it ‘Grenville West’.
The photograph facing this description was a typical passport photograph and showed an apparent lunatic or psychopath with a lock of dark hair grimly falling to meet a pair of black-framed glasses. At the time it was taken West had sported a moustache. Page four told Wexford that the passport had been issued five years before in London, and on half a dozen of the subsequent pages were stamps showing entries to and exists from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States, and there was also a visa for the United States. West, he noted, had left the country at least twelve times in those five years.
‘He meant to go this time,’ said Baker. ‘Why didn’t he go? And where is he?’
Wexford didn’t answer him. He said to Loring:
‘I want you to go now, as fast as you can make it, to the Registry of Births and look this chap West up. You get the volume for the year 1940, then the section with September in, then all the Wests. Have you got that? There’ll be a lot of them but it’s unlikely there’ll be more than one John Grenville West born on 9 September. I want his mother’s name and his father’s.’
Loring went. Baker was going through the remaining contents of the envelope. ‘A cheque-book,’ he said, ‘a Eurocard and an American Express card, travellers’ cheques signed by West, roughly a thousand francs… He meant to come back for this lot all right, Reg.’
‘Of course he did. There’s a camera here under some of these clothes, nice little Pentax.’ Suddenly Wexford wished Burden were with him. He had reached one of those points in a case when, to clear his mind and dispel some of this frustration, he needed Burden and only Burden. For rough argument with no punches pulled, for a free exchange of insults with no offence taken if such words as ‘hysterical’ or ‘prudish’ wer
e hurled in the heat of the moment. Baker was a very inadequate substitute. Wexford wondered how he would react to some high-flown quotation, let alone to being called a pain in the arse. But needs must when the devil drives. Choosing his words carefully, toning down his personality, he outlined to Baker Burden’s theory.
‘Hardly germane to this inquiry,’ said Baker, and Wexford’s mind went back years to when he and the inspector had first met and when he had used those very words. ‘All this motive business. Never mind motive. Never mind whether West was this Comfrey woman’s second cousin or, for that matter, her grandmother’s brother-in-law.’ A bigtoothed laugh at this witticism. ‘It’s all irrelevant. If I may say so, Reg – ’ Like all who take offence easily, Baker never minded giving offence to others or even noticed he was giving it – 'if I may say so, you prefer the trees to the wood. Ought to have been one of these novelist chappies yourself. Plain facts aren’t your cup of tea at all.’
Wexford took the insult – for it is highly insulting to be told that one would be better at some profession other than that which one has practised for forty years – without a word. He chuckled to himself at Baker’s mixed metaphors, sylvan and refective. Was refective the word? Did it mean what he thought it did, pertaining to mealtimes? There was another word he had meant to look up. It was there, but not quite there, on the tip of his tongue, the edge of his memory. He needed a big dictionary, not that potty little Concise Oxford which, in any case, Sheila had appropriated long ago…
‘Plain facts, Reg,’ Baker was saying. ‘The principal plain fact is that West scarpered on the day your Comfrey got killed. I call that evidence of guilt. He meant to come back to the Trieste and slip off to France but something happened to scare him off.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like being seen by someone where he shouldn’t have been. That’s like what. That’s obvious. Look at that passport. West wasn’t born in London, he was born somewhere down in your neck of the woods. There’ll be those around who’ll know him, recognize him.’ Baker spoke as if the whole of Sussex were a small rural spot, his last sentence having a Wind in the Willows flavour about it as if West had been the Mole and subject to the scrutiny of many bright eyes peering from the boles of trees. ‘That’s where these second cousins and grandmother’s whatsits come in. One of them saw him, so off into hiding he went.’
‘Under the protection, presumably, of another of them?’
‘Could be,’ said Baker seriously. ‘But we might just as well stop speculating and go get us a spot of lunch. You can’t do any more. I can’t do any more. You can’t find him. I can’t find him. We leave him and his gear to the Yard, and that’s that. Now how about a snack at the Hospital Arms?’
‘Would you mind if we went to Vivian’s Vineyard instead, Michael?’
With some casting up of eyes and pursing of lips. Baker agreed. His expression was that of a man who allows a friend with an addiction one last drink or cigarette. So on the way to Elm Green Wexford was obliged to argue it out with himself. It seemed apparent that West had booked into the Trieste to establish an alibi, but it was a poor sort of alibi since he had signed the register in his own name. Baker would have said that all criminals are fools. Wexford knew this was often not so, and especially not so in the case of the author of books praised by critics for their historical accuracy, their breadth of vision and their fidelity to their models.
He had not meant to kill her, this was no premeditated crime. On the face of it, the booking into the Trieste looked like an attempt at establishing an alibi, but it was not. For some other purpose West had stayed there. For some other reason he had gone to Kingsmarkham. How had his car keys come into Rhoda Comfrey’s possession? And who was he? Who was he? Baker called that irrelevant, yet Wexford knew now the whole case and its final solution hung upon it, upon West’s true identity and his lineage.
It was true that he couldn’t see the wood for the trees, but not that he preferred the latter. Here the trees would only coalesce into a wood when he could have each one before him individually and then, at last, fuse them. He walked in a whispering forest, little voices speaking to him on all sides, hinting and pleading – ‘Don’t you see now? Can’t you put together what he has said and she has said and what I am saying?’ Wexford shook himself. He wasn’t in a whispering wood but crossing Elm Green where the trees had all been cut down, and Baker was regarding him as if he had read in a medical journal that staring fixedly at nothing, as Wexford had been doing, may symptomize a condition akin to epilepsy.
‘You OK, Reg?’
‘Fine,’ said Wexford with a sigh, and they went into the brown murk of Vivian’s Vineyard. The girl with the pale brown face sat on a high stool behind the bar, swinging long brown legs, chatting desultorily to three young men in what was probably blue denim, though in here it too looked brown. The whole scene might have been a sepia photograph. Baker had given their order when Victor Vivian appeared from the back with a wine bottle in each hand.
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo!’ He came over to their table and sat down in the vacant chair. Today the T-shirt he wore was printed all over with a map of the vineyards of France, the area where his heart was being covered by Burgundy and the Auvergne. ‘What’s happened to old Gren, then? I didn’t know a thing about it, you know, till Rita here gave me the low-down. I mean, told me there was this hotel chap after him in a real tizz, you know.’
Baker wouldn’t have replied to this but Wexford did. ‘Mr West didn’t go to France,’ he said. ‘He’s still in this country. Have you any idea where he might go?’
Vivian whistled. He whistled like the captain of the team in the Boy’s Own Paper. ‘I say! Correct me if I’m wrong, you know, but I’m getting your drift. I mean, it’s serious, isn’t it? I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday.’
From a physical point of view this was apparent, though less so from Vivian’s mental capacity. Not for the first time Wexford wondered how a man of West’s education and intelligence could have borne to spend more than two minutes in this company unless he had been obliged to. What had West seen in him? What had he seen, for that matter, in Polly Flinders, dowdy and desperate, or in the unprepossessing, graceless Rhoda Comfrey?
‘You reckon old Gren’s on the run?’
The girl put two salads, a basket of rolls and two glasses of wine in front of them. Wexford said, ‘You told me Mr West came here fourteen years ago. Where did he come from?’
‘Couldn’t tell you that, you know. I mean, I didn’t come here myself till a matter of five years back. Gren was here. In situ, I mean.’
‘You never talked about the past? About his early life?’
Vivian shook his head, his beard waggling. ‘I’m not one to push myself in where I’m not wanted, you know. Gren never talked about any family. I mean, he may have said he’d lost his parents, I think he did say that, you know, I think so.’
‘He never told you where he’d been born?’
Baker was looking impatient. If it is possible to eat ham and tomatoes with an exasperated air, he was doing so. And he maintained a total disapproving silence.
Vivian said vaguely, ‘People don’t, you know. I mean, I reckon Rita here was born in Jamaica, but I don’t know, you know. I don’t go about telling people where I was born. Gren may have been born in France, you know, France wouldn’t surprise me.’ He banged his chest. ‘Old Gren brought me this T-shirt back from his last hols, you know. Always a thoughtful sort of chap. I mean, I don’t like to think of him in trouble, I don’t at all.’
‘Did you see him leave for this holiday of his? I mean…’ How easy it was to pick up the habit! ‘When he left here on Sunday, the seventh?’
‘Sure I did. He popped in the bar. About half-six it was, you know. “I’m just off, Vie,” he says. He wouldn’t have a drink, you know, on account of having a long drive ahead of him. I mean, his car was parked out here in the street, you know, and I went out and saw him off. “Back on September fourth,” he says, and I remembe
r I thought to myself, his birthday’s round about then, I thought, eighth or the ninth, you know, and I thought I’d look that up and check and have a bottle of champers for him.’
‘Can you also remember what he was wearing?’
‘Gren’s not a snappy dresser, you know. I mean, he went in for those roll-neck jobs, seemed to like them, never a collar and tie if he could get away with it. His old yellow one, that’s what he was wearing, you know, and a sweater and kind of dark-coloured trousers. Never one for the gear like me, you know. I’d have sworn he went to France, I mean I’d have taken my oath on it. This is beyond me, frankly, you know. I’m lost. When I think he called out to me, “I’ll be in Paris by midnight, Vie,” in that funny high voice of his, and he never went there at all – well, I go cold all over, you know. I mean, I don’t know what to think.’
Baker could stand no more. Abruptly he said, ‘We’ll have the bill, please.’
‘Sure, yes, right away. Rita! When he turns up – well, if there’s anything I can do, you know, any sort of help I can give, you can take that as read, you know. I mean, this has knocked me sideways.’
It was evident that Baker thought the representatives of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary would return to their rural burrow almost at once. He had even looked up the time of a suitable train from Victoria and offered a car to take them there. Wexford hardened himself to hints – there were so many other hints he would have softened to if he had known how – and marched boldly back into the police station where Loring sat patiently waiting for him.
‘Well?’
‘Well, sir I’ve found him.’ Loring referred to his notes. ‘The birth was registered at Myringham. In the county,’ he said earnestly, ‘of Sussex. 9 September 1940. John Grenville West. His father’s name is given as Ronald Grenville West and his mother’s name as Lilian West, born Crawford.’
