by Ruth Rendell
“Not wrote down, I daresay. Not all our misdemeanours is recorded, Mr. Wexford, not by a long chalk. I’ve heard it said there’s more murderers walking the streets free as ever got topped on account of them as they murdered being thought to have died natural.”
Wexford rubbed his chin and looked thoughtfully at Monkey. “Let’s see your friend,” he said, “and hear what he’s got to say. It might be worth a few bob.”
“He would want paying.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“He made a point of that,” said Monkey conversationally.
Wexford got up and opened a window to let some of the smoke out. “I’m a busy man, Monkey. I can’t hang about fencing with you all day. How much?”
“A monkey,” said Monkey succinctly.
In a pleasant but distant voice, tinged with incredulous outrage, Wexford said, “You must be off your nut if you seriously think the government is going to pay five hundred pounds to a clapped-out old lag for information it can get for nothing out of a file.”
“Five hundred,” Monkey repeated, “and if it all works out nice, the two thou reward the uncle’s putting up.” He coughed thickly but with no sign of distress. “If you don’t want nothing to do with it,” he said sweetly, “my friend can always go to the chief constable. He’s called Griswold, isn’t he?”
“Don’t you bloody threaten me!” said Wexford.
“Threaten? Who’s threatening? This info’s in the public interest, that’s what it is.”
Wexford said firmly, “You can bring your friend along here and then we’ll see. Might be worth a couple of nicker.”
“He won’t come here. He wouldn’t go voluntary like into a fuzz box. Different to me, he is. But him and me, we’ll be in the Pony six sharp tonight and I daresay he’d accept a friendly overture in the form of liquor.”
Was it possible that there was something in this story? Wexford wondered after Monkey had gone. And immediately he recalled Rivers’ hints as to the death of Swan’s aunt. Suppose, after all, that Swan had hastened the old lady’s departure? Poison, maybe. That would be in Swan’s line, a lazy, slow way of killing. And suppose this friend of Monkey’s had been in service in the house, an odd-job man or even a butler? He might have seen something, extracted something, kept it hidden for years in his bosom …
Wexford came down to earth and, laughing, quoted to himself a favourite passage from Jane Austen: “Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?”
Long ago he had learned these lines by heart. They had been of constant service to him and, when inclined to sail away on flights of fancy, kept his feet firmly on the ground.
It was much too late now to go out for lunch. The staff of the Carousel looked askance at you if you arrived for your midday meal after one-thirty. Wexford sent to the canteen for sandwiches and had eaten the first half-round when the report on the lock of hair came in from the lab. The hair, Wexford read, was a child’s but not John Lawrence’s. Comparison had been made with the strands taken from John’s hairbrush. Understanding only about twenty-five per cent of the technical jargon, Wexford did his best to follow just how they could be so certain the hairs in the brush differed from the hairs in the cut lock, and finally had to be content to know that they did differ.
His phone rang. It was Loring from the room where all the calls connected with the Lawrence and Rivers cases were received and checked.
“I think you’ll want to take this one, sir.”
Immediately Wexford thought of Monkey Matthews and just as quickly dismissed the thought. Monkey had never been known to use a telephone.
“Record it, Loring,” he said, and then, “Is it from a call box?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. We can’t trace it.”
“Put him on,” said Wexford.
As soon as he heard the voice he knew an attempt was being made to disguise it. A couple of pebbles in the man’s mouth, he decided. But some quality, the pitch perhaps, couldn’t be disguised. Wexford recognised the voice. Not its owner, nor could he recall where he had seen the speaker, what he had said or anything about him. But he was sure he recognised the voice.
“I’m not prepared to give my name,” it said. “I’ve written to you twice.”
“Your letters were received.” Wexford had stood up to take the call and from where he stood he could see the High Street and see a woman tenderly lifting a baby from a pram to take it with her into a shop. His anger was immense and he could feel the dangerous blood pounding in his head.
“You played around with me this morning. That’s not going to happen tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Wexford said evenly.
“I shall be in the grounds of Saltram House tomorrow by the fountains. I’ll be there at six p.m. with John. And I want the mother to come for him. Alone.”
“Where are you speaking from?”
“My farm,” said the voice, growing squeaky. “I’ve got a three-hundred-acre farm not so far from here. It’s a fur farm, mink, rabbits, chinchillas, the lot. John doesn’t know I keep them for their fur. That would only upset him, wouldn’t it?”
Wexford caught the authentic note of derangement. He didn’t know whether this comforted or distressed him. He was thinking about the voice which he had heard before, a thin high voice, its possessor quick to take offence, looking for insult where none existed.
“You haven’t got John,” he said. “That hair you sent me wasn’t John’s.” Scorn and rage made him forget caution. “You are an ignorant man. Hair can be as precisely identified as blood these days.”
Heavy breathing at the other end of the line succeeded this statement. Wexford felt that he had scored. He drew breath to let loose vituperation, but before he could speak the voice said coldly:
“D’you think I don’t know that? I cut that hair from Stella Rivers.”
13
The Piebald Pony is not the kind of pub connoisseurs of rural England normally associate with her countryside. Indeed, if you approach it from the direction of Sparta Grove, and if you keep your eyes down so that you cannot see the green surrounding hills, you would not suppose yourself in the country at all. Sparta Grove and Charteris Road which it joins at a right angle—on this corner stands the Piebald Pony—resemble the back streets of an industrial city. A few of the houses have narrow front gardens, but most doors open directly on to the pavement, as do the entrances to the Pony’s public and saloon bars.
One of these rooms fronts Sparta Grove, the other Charteris Road. They are the same shape and size and the saloon bar is distinguished from the public only in that drinks cost more in the former, about a third of its stone floor is covered with a square of brown Axminster and its seating includes a couple of settees, upholstered in battered black, of the kind that used to be seen in railway waiting rooms.
On one of the settees, under a poster recommending the Costa del Sol and displaying a photograph of a girl in a wet-look bikini leering at a bull in its death throes, sat Monkey Matthews with an old man. He looked, Wexford thought, very much by time’s fell hand defaced and in nearly as bad case as the bull. It wasn’t that he was thin or pale—in fact his squarish toad’s face was purple—but there was an air about him of one who has been physically ruined by years of bad feeding, damp dwellings and nasty indulgences whose nature Wexford preferred not to dwell on.
Each man had an almost empty half-pint glass of the cheapest obtainable bitter and Monkey was smoking a minuscule cigarette.
“’Evening,” said Wexford.
Monkey didn’t get up but indicated his companion with an airy wave. “This is Mr. Casaubon.”
Wexford gave a tiny sigh, the outward and audible sign of an inward and outrageous scream. “I don’t believe it,” he said thinly. “Just enlighten me to which one of you two intellectuals is acquainted with George Eliot.”
Far from living up to Monkey’s image of a man intimidated by the police, Mr. Casaubon had brightened as soon as Wexford spoke and now rejoined in thick hideous cockney, “I see him once. Strangeways it was, 1929. They done him for a big bullion job.”
“I fear,” Wexford said distantly, “that we cannot be thinking of the same person. Now what are you gentlemen drinking?”
“Port and brandy,” said Mr. Casaubon almost before the words were out, but Monkey, to whom what could be inhaled always took priority over what could merely be imbibed, pushed forward his empty bitter glass and remarked that he would appreciate twenty Dunhill International.
Wexford bought the drinks and tossed the crimson and gold package into Monkey’s lap. “I may as well open the proceedings,” he said, “by telling you two jokers you can forget about five hundred pounds or anything like it. Is that clear?”
Mr. Casaubon received this in the manner of one used to frequent disappointment. The liveliness which had briefly appeared in his watery eyes died away and, making a low humming sound that might have been a long-drawn murmur of assent or just an attempt at a tune, he reached for his port and brandy. Monkey said, “When all’s said and done, me and my friend would settle for the reward.”
“That’s very handsome of you,” said Wexford sarcastically. “I suppose you realise that money will be paid only for information leading directly to the arrest of the murderer of Stella Rivers?”
“We wasn’t born yesterday,” said Monkey. This remark was so obviously true, particularly in the case of Mr. Casaubon, who looked as if he had been born in 1890, that the old man broke off from his humming to emit a cackle of laughter, showing Wexford the most hideous, dilapidated and rotting set of teeth he had ever seen in a human mouth. “We can read what’s in the papers as well as you,” Monkey went on. “Now then, cards on the table. If my friend tells you what he knows and what he’s got papers to prove, are you going to do fair by us and see we get what’s our right when Swan’s under lock and key?”
“I can get a witness, if that’s what you want. Mr. Burden perhaps?”
Monkey puffed smoke out through his nostrils. “I can’t stomach that sarcastic devil,” he said. “No, your word’s good enough for me. When folks run down the fuzz I always say, Mr. Wexford’s hounded me, God knows, but he …”
“Monkey,” Wexford interrupted, “are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”
“Not here,” said Monkey, shocked. “What, give you a load of info that’ll put a man away for life here in what you might call the market place?”
“I’ll drive you back to the station, then.”
“Mr. Casaubon wouldn’t like that.” Monkey stared at the old man, perhaps willing him to show some sign of tenor, but Mr. Casaubon, his eyelids drooping, simply continued to hum monotonously. “We’ll go to Rube’s place. She’s out babysitting.”
Wexford shrugged his agreement. Pleased, Monkey gave Mr. Casaubon a poke. “Come on, mate, wakey-wakey.”
It took Mr. Casaubon quite a long time to get on to his legs. Wexford walked impatiently to the door, but Monkey, not usually renowned for his considerate manners, hovered with some solicitude at his friend’s side, and then, giving him an arm, helped him tenderly out into the street.
Burden had never phoned her before. His heart palpitated lightly and fast as he listened to the ringing tone and imagined her running to answer, her heart beating quickly too because she would guess who it was.
The steadiness of her voice took the edge off his excitement He spoke her name softly, on a note of enquiry.
“Yes, speaking,” she said. “Who is it?”
“Mike.” She hadn’t recognised his voice and his disappointment was profound.
But immediately he had identified himself she gasped and said quickly, “You’ve got some news for me? Something’s happened at last?”
He closed his eyes momentarily. She could only think of that child. Even his voice, her lover’s voice, was to her just the voice of someone who might have found her child. “No, Gemma, no, there’s nothing.”
“It was the first time you ever phoned me, you see,” she said quietly.
“Last night was a first time too.”
She said nothing. Burden felt that he had never known so long a silence, aeons of silence, time for twenty cars to drone past the phone box, time for the lights to change to green and back again to red, time for a dozen people to enter the Olive and leave the door swinging, swinging, behind them until it lapsed into stillness. Then at last she said, “Come to me now, Mike. I need you so.”
There was another woman he had to have speech with first.
“I’m just going out on a job, Grace,” said Burden, too straitlaced, too innocent perhaps, to see a double entendre which would have had Wexford in stitches. “I may be hours.”
They were given to pregnant, throbbing silences, his women. Grace broke the one she had created with a sharp ward sister’s snap. “Don’t lie to me, Mike. I just phoned the station and they said you had a free evening.”
“You had no business to do that,” Burden flared. “Even Jean never did that and she had the right, she was my wife.”
“I’m sorry, but the children asked and I thought … As a matter of fact, there’s something special I want to discuss with you.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Burden thought he knew these discussions of Grace’s. They were always about the children, more precisely about the children’s psychological problems or what Grace imagined those problems to be: Pat’s supposedly butterfly mind and John’s mental block over his mathematics. As if all children didn’t have their difficulties which were a part of growing up and which he in his day, and surely Grace in hers, had faced satisfactorily without daily analysis. “I’ll try to be in tomorrow night,” he said weakly.
“That,” said Grace, “is what you always say.”
His conscience troubled him for about five minutes. It had long ceased to do so before he reached the outskirts of Stowerton. Burden had yet to learn that the anticipation of sexual pleasure is the most powerful of all the crushers of conscience. He wondered why he felt so little guilt, why Grace’s reproach had only momentarily stung him. Her words—or what he could recall of them—had become like the meaningless and automatic admonition of some schoolteacher spoken years ago. Grace was no longer anything to him but an impediment, an irritating force which conspired with work and other useless time-wasters to keep him from Gemma.
Tonight she came to the door to meet him. He was prepared for her to speak of the child and her anxieties and her loneliness, and he was ready with the gentle words and the tenderness which would come so easily to him after an hour in bed with her but which now his excitement must make strained and abrupt. She said nothing. He kissed her experimentally, unable to guess her mood from those large blank eyes.
She took his hands and put them against her waist which was naked when she lifted the shirt she wore. Her skin was hot and dry, quivering against his own trembling hands. Then he knew that the need she had spoken of on the phone was not for words or reassurance or searching of the heart but the same need as his own.
If Mr. Casaubon had been capable of inspiring the slightest sentimentality, Wexford reflected, it would have been impossible to witness Monkey’s extravagant care of him without disgust But the old man—his real name would have to be ferreted out from some file or other—was so obviously a villain and a parasite who took every advantage of his age and an infirmity that was probably assumed that Wexford could only chuckle sardonically to himself as he watched Monkey settle him into one of Ruby Branch’s armchairs and place a cushion behind his head. No doubt it was obvious to the receiver of these attentions as it was to the chief inspector that Monkey was merely cosseting the g
oose that would lay a golden egg. Presumably Mr. Casaubon had already come to some financial agreement with his partner of impresario and knew there was no question of affection or reverence for old age in all this fussing with cushions. Humming with contentment in the fashion of an aged purring cat, he allowed Monkey to pour him a treble whisky, but when the water jug appeared the hum rose a semitone and a gnarled purple hand was placed over the glass.
Monkey drew the curtains and placed a table lamp on the end of the mantelpiece so that its radiance fell like a spotlight on the bunchy rag-bag figure of Mr. Casaubon, and Wexford was aware of the dramatic effect. It was almost as if Monkey’s protégé was one of those character actors who delight to appear solo on the London stage and for two hours or more entertain an audience to a monologue or to readings from some great novelist or diarist. And Mr. Casaubon’s repetitive nodding and humming rather enhanced this impression. Wexford felt that at any moment the play would begin, a witticism would issue from those claret-coloured lips or the humming would give place to a speech from Our Mutual Friend. But because he knew that this was all fantasy, deliberately achieved by that crafty little con-man Monkey Matthews, he said sharply: “Get on with it, can’t you?”
Mr. Casaubon broke the silence he had maintained since leaving the Piebald Pony. “Monk can do the talking,” he said. “He’s got more the gift of the gab than me.”
Monkey smiled appreciatively at this flattery and lit a cigarette. “Me and Mr. Casaubon,” he began, “made each other’s acquaintance up north about twelve months back.” In Walton gaol, Wexford thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. “So when Mr. Casaubon was glancing through his morning paper the other day and saw about Mr. Ivor Swan and him living in Kingsmarkham and all that, his thoughts naturally flew to me.”
“Yes, yes, I get all that. In plain English he saw the chance to make a little packet and thought you could help him to it. God knows why he didn’t come straight to us instead of getting involved with a shark like you. Your gift of the gab, I suppose.” A thought struck Wexford. “Knowing you, I wonder you didn’t try putting the black on Swan first.”
