by Ruth Rendell
Then he said good night. He didn’t mean to look back. Something impelled him. She was standing in the doorway, framed in yellow light, a curious outlandish figure in that gypsy gilded shawl, her hair so bright that it seemed on fire. She waved to him tentatively, rather shyly, her other hand smoothing away the tears from under her eyes. He had seen pictures of women like her but never known them, never spoken to them. Briefly he wondered if he wanted the child found, wanted it so passionately, because that would mean he need never see her again. He turned sharply towards the street and went to summon Dr. Lomax.
A great moon drifted above the fields, pale and misty as if it drifted in a pool of water. Burden waited until the searchers got back at midnight. They had found nothing.
Grace had left a note for him: “John waited up till eleven for you to help him with his maths. Could you just glance at it? He was in quite a state. G.”
It took Burden a couple of seconds to adjust to the fact that his own son was also called John. He glanced at the homework and, as far as he could see, the algebra was correct. A lot of fuss about nothing. These little nagging notes of Grace’s were getting a bit much. He opened the door of his son’s room and saw that he was fast asleep. Grace and Pat slept in the room that had been his and Jean’s—impossible as his bedroom after her death—and he couldn’t very well open that door. In his own room, once Pat’s, a little room with ballet dancers cavorting on the walls as appropriate for an eleven-year-old, he sat on the bed and felt lie tiredness ebb away, leaving him as alert as at eight in the morning. He could be weary to the point of collapse, but let him come in here, be alone with himself, and immediately he would be filled with this frightful, degrading urgency.
He put his head in his hands. They all thought he missed Jean as a companion, as someone to talk to and share trouble with. And so he did, terribly. But what assailed him most every day and every night, without respite, was sexual desire, which, because it had had no release in ten months, had become sealed-up, tormented sexual madness.
He knew very well how they all thought of him. To them he was a cold fish, stem when confronted by licence, mourning Jean only because he had become used to marriage and was what Wexford called uxorious. Probably, if they had ever thought of it, they imagined him and Jean making love once a fortnight with the light out. It was the way people did think about you if you were the sort of man who shied away from dirty jokes and found this permissive society foul.
They never seemed to dream that you could hate promiscuity and adultery because you knew what marriage could be and had experienced it to such a degree of excellence that anything else was a mockery, a poor imitation. You were lucky but … Ah, God, you were unlucky too!—cast adrift and sick when it was over. Jean had been a virgin when he married her and so had he. People said—stupid people and the stupid things they said—that it made it hard when you married, but it hadn’t for him and Jean. They had been patient and giving and full of love and they had been so fulsomely rewarded that, looking back as from a desert, Burden could hardly believe it had been so good almost from the start, with no failures, no disappointments. But he could believe it because he knew and remembered and suffered.
And if they knew? He was aware what their advice would be. Get yourself a girl friend, Mike. Nothing serious. Just a nice easy girl to have a bit of fun with. Perhaps you could do that if you’d been used to kicking over the traces. He had never been any woman’s lover but Jean’s. Sex for him had been Jean. They didn’t realise that telling him to get another woman would be like telling Gemma Lawrence to get another child.
He took off his clothes and lay face downwards, his fists carefully clenched and pushed under the pillow.
4
If Mike made the slightest effort at an apology, Grace decided, she wouldn’t say a word. Of course, he had to work and many times he couldn’t get away without putting his job in jeopardy. She knew what that meant. Before she came to be his housekeeper she had had men friends, some who were just friends and some, a few, who were lovers, and often she had had to break a date because there was an emergency on at the hospital. But the next day she had always phoned or written a note to explain why.
Mike wasn’t her lover but only her brother-in-law. Did that mean he owed her nothing, not even common politeness? And had you the right to stand up your children without a word, even when your son was trembling with nerves at nearly midnight because he couldn’t believe he’d got his algebra right and old Parminter, the maths man, would put him in detention if he hadn’t?
She cooked eggs and bacon for the lot of them and laid the dining table with a clean cloth. Not for the first time she wished her sister hadn’t been such an excellent housekeeper, so correct and near-perfect in everything she did, but at least slackened to the extent of serving breakfast in the kitchen. Living up to Jean made life a bit of a burden.
She hadn’t meant to make a pun and she didn’t laugh. Her face hardened when Mike came down, grunted to the children and took his place at the table without a word. He wasn’t going to mention last night. Well, she would.
“That algebra was perfectly O.K., John.”
The boy’s face lit as it always did when Burden spoke to him.
“I reckoned it was. I don’t really care about it, only old Mint Face will keep me in if it’s not. I don’t suppose you’d give me a lift to school.”
“Too busy,” said Burden. “The walk does you good.” He smiled, but not too kindly, at his daughter. “And you too, miss,” he said. “Right, get going. It’s nearly half past.”
Grace didn’t usually see them to the door but she did today to make up for their father’s hardness. When she came back Burden was on his second cup of tea and before she could stop herself she had burst into a long tirade all about John’s nerves and Pat’s bewilderment and the way he left them all alone.
He heard her out and then he said, “Why is it that women”—he corrected himself, making the inevitable exception—“most women—can’t realise men have to work? If I didn’t work God knows what would happen to the lot of you.”
“Were you working when Mrs. Finch saw you sitting in the car in Cheriton Forest?”
“Mrs. Finch,” he flared, “can mind her own bloody business!”
Grace turned her back. She found she was slowly counting to ten. Then she said, “Mike, I do understand. I can imagine how you feel.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, I think I can. But John and Pat can’t. John needs you and he needs you cheerful and matter-of-fact and—and like you used to be. Mike, couldn’t you get home early tonight? There’s a film they’d both like to see. It doesn’t start till seven-thirty, so you wouldn’t have to be home till seven. We could all go. It would mean so much to them.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do my best. Don’t look like that, Grace. I’ll be home by seven.”
Her face lit up. She did something she hadn’t done since his wedding. She bent over and kissed his cheek. Then she began quickly to clear the table. Her back was to him so that she didn’t see the shiver he gave and the way he put his hand up to his face like a man who has been stung.
Gemma Lawrence had put on clean jeans and a clean thick sweater. Her hair was tied back in a bunch with a piece of ribbon and she smelt of soap like a good clean child.
“I slept all night.”
He smiled at her. “Cheers for Dr. Lomax,” he said.
“Are they still searching?”
“Of course. Didn’t I promise you? We’ve borrowed a whole army of coppers from all the surrounding districts.”
“Dr. Lomax was very kind. D’you know, he said that when he was living in Scotland before he came here his own little boy was missing and they found him in a shepherd’s hut lying asleep, cuddling the sheep-dog. He’d wandered for miles and this dog had found him and looked after him like a lost lamb. It reminded me of Romulus and Remus and the wolf.”
Burden didn’t know who Romulus and Remus were, but
he laughed and said, “Well, what did I tell you?” He wasn’t going to spoil her hopes now by pointing out that this wasn’t Scotland, a place of lonely mountains and friendly dogs. “What are you going to do today? I don’t want you to be alone.”
“Mrs. Crantock’s asked me to lunch and the neighbours keep coming in. People are very kind. I wish I had some closer friends here. All my friends are in London.”
“The best thing for worry,” he said, “is work. Take your mind off things.”
“I don’t have any work to do, unfortunately.”
He had meant housework, cleaning, tidying, sewing, tasks which he thought of as naturally a woman’s work, and there was plenty of that to be done. But he could hardly tell her that.
“I expect I’ll just sit and play records,” she said, shifting a dirty cup from the record player to the floor. “Or read or something.”
“As soon as we have any news, I’ll come to you. I won’t phone, I’ll come.”
Her eyes shone. “If I were the Prime Minister,” she said, “I’d make you a superintendent.”
He drove to Cheriton Forest where the search was now centred and found Wexford sitting on a log. It was misty this morning and the chief inspector was wrapped in an old raincoat, a battered felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
“We’ve got a lead on the car, Mike.”
“What car?”
“Last night when they were out in the fields one of the search party told Martin he’d seen a car parked on Mill Lane. Apparently, he had a week off in August and he took his dog walking regularly up Mill Lane and three times he noticed a car parked near the spot where Mrs. Mitchell saw the man. He noticed it because it was obstructing the lane, only leaving room for single-line traffic. A red Jaguar. Needless to say, he didn’t get the number.”
“Did he see the man?”
“He didn’t see anyone. What we want now is to find someone who regularly uses that road. A baker, for instance.”
“I’ll see to that,” said Burden.
In the course of the morning he found a baker’s roundsman who used the road every day and the driver of a van delivering soft drinks who used it only on Wednesdays and Fridays. The baker had seen the car because, coming round a corner one afternoon, he had almost hit it. A red Jaguar, he confirmed, but he hadn’t taken the number either. And although he had been on the road the day before, he had passed the swings-field hedge at two and the car wasn’t there then. At half-past four two women in a car had asked him if he had seen a little boy, but he was almost into Forby by then. The red Jaguar might have passed him, might have contained a child, but he couldn’t remember.
The soft-drinks man was less observant. He had never noticed anything out of the way on that road, either recently or in August.
Burden went back to the station and had a quick lunch in Wexford’s office. They spent the afternoon interviewing a sad little stream of men, all shifty and most undersized, who at some time or other had made overtures to children. There was the retarded nineteen-year-old whose speciality was waiting outside school gates; the middle-aged primary-school teacher, sacked by the authority years ago; the draper’s assistant who got into train compartments that contained a solitary child; the schizophrenic who had raped his own little daughter and since been discharged from mental hospital.
“Lovely job, ours,” said Burden. “I feel slimy all over.”
“There but for the grace of God …” said Wexford. “You might have been one of them if your parents had rejected you. I might if I’d responded to the advances made to me in the school cloakroom. They sit in darkness, they’re born, as Blake or some clever sod said, to endless night. Pity doesn’t cost anything, Mike, and it’s a damn sight more edifying than shouting about flogging and hanging and castrating and what you will.”
“I’m not shouting, sir. I just happen to believe in the cultivation of self-control. And my pity is for the mother and that poor kid.”
“Yes, but the quality of mercy is not strained. The trouble with you is you’re a blocked-up colander and your mercy strains through a couple of miserable little holes. Still, none of these wretched drop-outs was near Mill Lane yesterday and I don’t see any of them living it up in a red Jaguar.”
If you haven’t been out in the evening once in ten months the prospect of a trip to the cinema in the company of your brother-in-law and two children can seem like high living. Grace Woodville went to the hairdresser’s at three and when she came out she felt more elated than she had the first day Pat came to kiss her of her own accord. There was a nice golden-brown sweater in Moran’s window, and Grace, who hadn’t bought a garment in months, decided on an impulse to have it.
Mike should have a special dinner tonight, curried chicken. Jean had never cooked that because she didn’t like it, but Mike and the children did. She bought a chicken and by the time John and Pat came home the bungalow was filled with the rich scents of curry sauce and sweet-sour pineapple.
She had laid the table by six and changed into the new sweater. By five to seven they were all sitting in the living room, all dressed-up and rather self-conscious, more like people waiting to be taken to a party than a family off to the local cinema.
The telephone calls had begun. They came in to Kingsmarkham police station not only from people in the district, not only in Sussex, but from Birmingham and Newcastle and the north of Scotland. All the callers claimed to have seen John Lawrence alone or with a man or with two men or two women. A woman in Carlisle had seen him, she averred, with Stella Rivers; a shopkeeper in Cardiff had sold him an ice-cream. A lorry-driver had given him and his companion, a middle-aged man, a lift to Grantham. All these stories had to be checked, though all seemed to be without foundation.
People poured into the station with tales of suspicious persons and cars seen in Mill Lane. By now not only red Jaguars were suspect but black ones and green ones, black vans, three-wheelers. And meanwhile the arduous search went on. Working without a break, Wexford’s force continued a systematic house-to-house investigation, questioning most particularly every male person over sixteen.
Five to seven found Burden outside the Olive and Dove Hotel in Kingsmarkham High Street, facing the cinema, and he remembered his date with Grace and the children, remembered, too, that he must see Gemma Lawrence before he went off duty.
The phone box outside the hotel was occupied and a small queue of people waited. By the time they had all finished, Burden judged, a good ten minutes would have passed. He glanced again at the cinema and saw that whereas the last programme began at seven-thirty, the big picture didn’t start until an hour later. No need to phone Grace when he could easily drive to Stowerton, find out how things were with Mrs. Lawrence and be home by a quarter to eight. Grace wouldn’t expect him on time. She knew better than that. And surely even his two wouldn’t want to sit through a film about touring in East Anglia, the news and all the trailers.
For once the front door wasn’t open. The street was empty, almost every house well-lit. It seemed for all the world as if nothing had happened yesterday to disturb the peace of this quiet country street. Time passed, men and women laughed and talked and worked and watched television and said, What can you do? That’s life.
There were no lights on in her house. He knocked on the door and no one came. She must have gone out. When her only child was missing, perhaps murdered? He remembered the way she dressed, the state of her house. A good-time girl, he thought, not much of a mother. Very likely one of those London friends had come and she’d gone out with him.
He knocked again and then he heard something, a kind of shuffling. Footsteps dragged to the door, hesitated.
He called, “Mrs. Lawrence, are you all right?”
A little answering sound came to him, half a sob and half a moan. The door quivered, then swung inwards.
Her face was ravaged and swollen and sodden with crying. She was crying now, sobbing, the tears streaming down her face. He shut the door behind him and switched
on a light.
“What’s happened?”
She twisted away from him, threw herself against the wall and beat on it with her fists. “Oh God, what shall I do?”
“I know it’s hard,” he said helplessly, “but we’re doing everything that’s humanly possible. We’re …”
“Your people,” she sobbed, “they’ve been in and out all day, searching and—and asking me things. They searched this house! And people kept phoning, awful people. There was a woman—a woman … Oh my God! She said John was dead and she—she described how he died and she said it was my fault! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, I shall gas myself, I shall cut my wrists …”
“You must stop this,” he shouted. She turned to him and screamed into his face. He raised his hand and slapped her stingingly on the cheek. She gagged, gulped and crumpled, collapsing against him. To stop her falling, he put his arms round her and for a moment she clung to him, as in a lover’s embrace, her wet face buried in his neck. Then she stepped back, the red hair flying as she shook herself.
“Forgive me,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with crying. “I’m mad. I think I’m going mad.”
“Come in here and tell me. You were optimistic earlier.”
“That was this morning.” She spoke quietly now in a thin broken voice. Gradually and not very coherently she told him about the policeman who had searched her cupboards and tramped through the attics, how they had torn away the undergrowth that swamped the roots of old trees in that wild garden. She told him, gasping, of the obscene phone calls and of the letters, inspired by last night’s evening-paper story, the second post had brought.
“You are not to open any letters unless you recognise the handwriting,” he said. “Everything else well look at first. As to the phone calls …”
“Your sergeant said you’d have an arrangement to get my phone monitored.” She sighed deeply, calmer now, but the tears were still falling.
