No More Dying Then

by Ruth Rendell

  In the same voice she said, “I will marry you if … if life is to go on like this with nothing, I’ll marry you.”

  “Stop play-acting.”

  She got up. “I wasn’t acting.”

  “I wish you’d take those things off,” he said.

  “You take them off.”

  Her huge staring eyes made him shiver. He reached out both hands and lifted the bunch of chains from her neck, not speaking, hardly breathing. She lifted her right arm, curving it in a slow sweep and then holding it poised. Very slowly he slid the bracelets down over her wrist and let them fall, pulled the rings from her fingers one by one. All the time they stared into each other’s eyes. He thought that he had never in his life done anything as exciting, as overpoweringly erotic, as this stripping a woman of cheap glittering jewellery, although in doing so he had not once touched her skin.

  Never … He hadn’t even dreamed that such a thing might be possible for him. She stretched out her left arm and he made no other move towards her until the last ring had joined the others in a heap on the floor.

  It wasn’t until he awoke in the night that he realised fully what had happened, that he had proposed and been accepted. He told himself that he ought to be elated, in a seventh heaven of happiness, for he had got what he wanted and there would be no more agony or struggling or loneliness or dying small daily deaths.

  The room was too dark for him to see anything at all, but he knew exactly what the first light would show him here and downstairs. Yesterday it hadn’t mattered much, the mess and the chaos, but it mattered now. He tried to see her installed in his own house as its mistress, caring for his children and cooking meals, tending on them all as Grace did, but it was impossible to conjure up such a picture, he hadn’t enough imagination. What if Wexford were to call one night for a chat and a drink as he sometimes did and Gemma appear in her strange dress and her shawl and her long beads? And would she expect him to have her friends there, those itinerant sub-actors with their drugs? And his children, his Pat …!

  But all that would change, he told himself, once they were married. She would settle down and be a housewife. Perhaps he could persuade her to have that mane of hair cut, that hair which, at one and the same time, was so beautiful and so evocative of desire and yet so unbecoming in a policeman’s wife. They would have a child of their own, she would make new suitable friends, she would change …

  He did not allow himself to dwell on the notion that such changes as he envisaged would destroy her personality and dull all the strangeness that had first attracted him, but it touched the edges of his mind. He pushed it away almost angrily. Why make difficulties where none existed? Why seek always to find flaws in perfect happiness?

  Gemma and he would have love, a nightly orgy for two, an endless honeymoon. He turned towards her, pressing his lips against the mass of hair of which he planned to deprive her. Within minutes he was asleep and dreaming that he had found her child, restoring him to her and seeing her, by that gift, transformed into everything he wanted her to be.

  “Kingsmarkham?” said Mrs. Scott, smiling comfortably at Wexford. “Oh, yes, we know Kingsmarkham, don’t we, dear?” Expressionless, her husband gave a tiny nod. “We’ve got a niece lives in ever such a nice little house near Kingsmarkham, built back in the seventeen hundreds, it was, and we used to go there regularly for our holidays right up till this year. But now …”

  Wexford, who while she was speaking had been taking stock of the room and looking particularly at the framed photographs of those older Scott children who had survived, middle-aged now and with teenage children of their own, followed her gaze towards their progenitor.

  No need to ask why they wouldn’t go back to Kingsmarkham or to question the implication that they would take no more holidays. Scott was a little old man, nearing eighty, whose face was badly twisted, especially about the mouth. Two sticks hung from the wings of his chair. Wexford supposed that he was unable to walk without their aid and, from his silence, was beginning to suppose that Ralph Scott had also lost the power of speech. It was something of a shock when the distorted mouth opened and a harsh voice said:

  “What about a cup of tea, Ena?”

  “I’ll have it ready in a jiffy, dear.”

  Mrs. Scott jumped up and mouthed something to Wexford, indicating that he should join her in the kitchen. This was a sterile-looking place full of gadgets, and it was modern enough to gladden the heart of any house-proud woman, but Mrs. Scott seemed to think it needed apology.

  “Mr. Scott had a stroke back in the winter,” she said as she plugged in an electric kettle, “and it’s really aged him. He’s not at all the man he was. That’s why we moved out here from Colchester. But if he was himself I’d have had everything automatic here, he’d have done the lot himself, not left it to those builders. I wish you could have seen my house in Colchester. The central heating was too hot. You had to have the windows open night and day. Mr. Scott did all that himself. Of course, him being in the trade all his life, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about heating and pipes and all that.” She stopped, stared at the kettle which was making whining noises, and said in a voice that seemed to be suppressing something explosive, “We saw in the papers about that man Swan and you digging all that up again about his little girl. It made Mr. Scott ill, just seeing his name.”

  “The child died back in the winter.”

  “Mr. Scott never saw the papers then. He was too ill. We never knew Swan lived near our niece. We wouldn’t have gone if we had. Well, he was living there the last time we went but we didn’t know.” She sat down on a plastic-upholstered contemporary version of a settle and sighed. “It’s preyed on Mr. Scott’s mind all these years, poor little Bridget. I reckon it would have killed him to have come face to face with that Swan.”

  “Mrs. Scott, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but in your opinion, is it possible he let your daughter drown? I mean, is it possible he knew she was drowning and let it happen?”

  She was silent. Wexford saw an old grief cross her face, travel into her eyes and pass away. The kettle boiled with a blast and switched itself off.

  Mrs. Scott got up and began making the tea. She was quite collected, sorrowful but with an old dry sadness. The fingers on the kettle handle, the hand on the teapot, were quite steady. A great grief had come to her, the only grief, Aristotle says, which is insupportable, but she had borne it, had gone on making tea, gone on exulting in central heating. So would it be one day for Mrs. Lawrence, Wexford mused. Aristotle didn’t know everything, didn’t know perhaps that time heals all pain, grinds all things to dust and leaves only a little occasional melancholy.

  “Mr. Scott loved her best,” Bridget’s mother said at last. “It’s been different for me. I had my sons. You know how it is for a man and his little girl, his youngest.”

  Wexford nodded, thinking of his Sheila, his ewe lamb, the apple of his eye.

  “I never took on about it like he did. Women are stronger, I always say. They get to accept things. But I was in a bad way at the time. She was my only girl, you see, and I had her late in life. In fact, we never would have had another one, only Mr. Scott was mad on getting a girl.” She looked as if she were trying to remember, not the facts, but the emotions of the time, trying and failing. “It was a mistake going to that hotel,” she said. “Boarding houses were more in our line. But Mr. Scott was doing so well and it wasn’t for me to argue when he said he was as good as the next man and why not a hotel when we could afford it? It made me feel uncomfortable, I can tell you, when I saw the class of people we had to mix with, Oxford boys and a barrister and a Sir. Of course, Bridget didn’t know any different, they were just people to her and she took a fancy to that Swan. If I’ve wished it once I’ve wished it a thousand times that she’d never set eyes on him.

  “Once we were in the lounge and she was hanging about him—I couldn’t stop her. I did try—and he gave her such a push, not saying anything, you know, not talking to her, that
she fell over and hurt her arm. Mr. Scott went right over and had a go at him, told him he was a snob and Bridget was as good as him any day. I’ll never forget what he said. “I don’t care whose daughter she is,” he said. “I don’t care if her father’s a duke or a dustman. I don’t want her around. She gets in my way.” But that didn’t stop Bridget. She wouldn’t leave him alone. I’ve often thought since then that Bridget swam out to that boat so as she could be alone with him and no one else there.”

  Mrs. Scott picked up her tray, but made no other move to return to the sitting room. She seemed to be listening and then she said:

  “She couldn’t swim very far. We’d told her over and over again not to go out too far. Swan knew, he’d heard us. He let her drown because he just didn’t care, and if that’s killing, he killed her. She was only a child. Of course he killed her.”

  “A strong accusation to make, Mrs. Scott.”

  “It’s no more than the coroner said. When I saw in the paper about his own little girl I didn’t feel sorry for him, I didn’t think he’d got his deserts. He’s done the same to her, I thought.”

  “The circumstances were hardly the same,” said Wexford. “Stella Rivers died from suffocation.”

  “I know. I read about it. I’m not saying he did it deliberately any more than I’m saying he actually pushed Bridget under the water. It’s my belief she got in his way too—stands to reason she would, a stepdaughter and him newly married—and maybe she said something he didn’t like or got too fond of him like Bridget, so he got hold of her, squeezed her neck or something and—and she died. We’d better to go back to Mr. Scott now.”

  He was sitting as they had left him, his almost sightless eyes still staring. His wife put a teacup into his hands and stirred the tea for him.

  “There you are, dear. Sorry I was so long. Would you like a bit of cake if I cut it up small?”

  Mr. Scott made no reply. He was concentrating on Wexford and the chief inspector realised that no explanation of his visit had been given to the old man. True, there had been a passing reference to Kingsmarkham and a cousin, but Wexford had not been identified by name or rank.

  Perhaps it was the look in his wife’s eyes or perhaps something that he had overheard while they were in the kitchen that made him say suddenly in his harsh monotone:

  “You a policeman?”

  Wexford hesitated. Scott was a very sick man. It was possible that the only real contact he had ever had with the police was when his beloved daughter died. Would it be wise or kind or even necessary to bring memories back to that exhausted, fuddled brain?

  Before he could make up his mind, Mrs. Scott said brightly. “Oh, no dear. Whatever gave you that idea? This gentleman’s just a friend of Eileen’s from over Kingsmarkham way.”

  “That’s right,” said Wexford heartily.

  The old man’s hand trembled and the cup rattled in its saucer. “Shan’t go there any more, not in my state. Shan’t last much longer.”

  “What a way to talk!” Mrs. Scott’s brisk manner did little to cover her distress. “Why, you’re almost your old self again.” She mouthed incomprehensible things to Wexford and followed them up with a louder, “You should have seen him last March, a couple of weeks after he had that stroke. More dead than alive he was, worse than a new-born baby. And look at him now.”

  But Wexford could hardly bear to look. As he left them, he reflected that the interview hadn’t been entirely fruitless. At least it would spur him on to take Crocker’s tablets with renewed zeal.

  18

  The impressions Swan made on other people had subtly altered Wexford’s own image of him, investing him with a callous coldness and a magnetic beauty, making him godlike in appearance and power, so that when he came face to face with the man himself once more he felt a sense of letdown and almost of shock. For Swan was just Swan, still the idle good-looking young man leading his slow aimless existence. It was strange to reflect that the mere mention of his name might be enough to kill Mr. Scott and that, incubuslike, he lived a separate life as the haunter of Frensham’s dreams.

  “Does Roz have to know about this?” he asked, and went on when Wexford looked surprised, “I’d more or less forgotten it myself, except that going to that inquest brought it back. Do we have to talk about it?”

  “I’m afraid we do.”

  Swan shrugged. “We won’t be overheard. Roz is out and I got rid of Gudrun.” Wexford’s face showed the absurd effect this had on him and Swan gave a low ironical laugh. “Told her to go, sacked her, I mean. What did you think I’d done? Made away with her? In your eyes my path is strewn with corpses, isn’t it? Roz and I love to be alone and Gudrun got in our way, that’s all.”

  That phrase again. “She got in his way …” Wexford was beginning to get the shivers every time he heard it.

  “D’you want a drink? It’ll have to be something out of a bottle. Making tea and coffee is Roz’s province and, anyway, I don’t know where she keeps the things.”

  “I don’t want a drink. I want to hear about Bridget Scott.”

  “Oh God, it was such a hell of a long time ago, ancient history. I suppose you’ve already had a splendid selection of biassed accounts.” Swan sat down and rested his chin in his hands. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I went to this hotel with another man and a girl. If you’ll give me a minute I’ll try and remember their names.”

  “Bernard Frensham and Adelaide Turner.” Poor Frensham, Wexford thought. Swan lived on in his dreams but he had no reciprocal place in Swan’s memory.

  “Why ask me if you’ve already talked to them?”

  “I want your version.”

  “Of what happened on the lake? All right. I did let her drown, but I didn’t know she was drowning.” Swan’s face was petulant. In the November light, fitful and fading, he might have been nineteen again, but Wexford could see no shadow of vine leaves in his hair. “She plagued the life out of me,” he said, the sullen look deepening. “She hung about me and tried to get me to go swimming and walking with me and she staged scenes to attract my attention.”

  “What sort of scenes?”

  “Once she was out in a rowing boat and I was swimming and she started shouting she’d dropped her purse overboard and would I dive for it. I didn’t but what’s-his-name—Frensham—did and after we’d all been messing about for about ten minutes she produced it from the bottom of the boat. It was all a ploy. Then she came into my room once in the afternoon when I was trying to sleep and said if I wouldn’t speak to her she’d scream and when people came she’d tell them I’d done something to her. A kid of eleven!”

  “So that when you heard her cry for help you thought it was another ruse to attract your attention?”

  “Of course I did. That other time when she’d threatened to scream, I said, “Scream away.” I can’t be taken in by that kind of thing. Out in the boat, I knew she was putting on an act. I couldn’t believe it when they said she’d diowned.”

  “Were you sorry?”

  “I was a bit shattered,” said Swan. “It made an impression on me, but it wasn’t my fault. For quite a long time after that I didn’t like having kids of that age around me. I don’t now, come to that.”

  Had he realised what he had said? “Stella was just that age when you first saw her, Mr. Swan,” said Wexford.

  But Swan seemed unaware of the innuendo. He went on to make matters worse. “She used to try the same things on, as a matter of fact, always trying to get attention.” The petulance returned, making him almost ugly. “Could she have a dog? Could she have a horse? Always trying to involve me. I sometimes think …” He directed at Wexford a gaze full of fierce dislike. “I sometimes think the whole world is trying to get between me and what I want.”

  “And that is?”

  “To be left alone with Rosalind,” said Swan simply. “I don’t want children. All this has made me loathe children. I want to be in the country with Roz, just the two of us, in peace. She’s the onl
y person I’ve ever known who wants me for what I am. She hasn’t made an image of me that’s got to be lived up to, she doesn’t want to jolly me along and encourage me. She loves me, she really knows me and I’m first with her, the centre of her universe. Once she’d seen me she didn’t even care about Stella any more. We only kept her with us because I said we ought, that Roz might regret it later if she didn’t. And she’s jealous. Some men wouldn’t like that, but I do. It gives me a wonderful feeling of happiness and security when Roz says if I so much as looked at another woman she’d do that woman the worst injury in her power. You don’t know what that means to me.”

  I wonder what it means to me? Wexford thought. He said nothing but continued to keep his eyes fixed on Swan who suddenly flushed. “I haven’t talked so much to anyone for years,” he said, “except to Roz. That’s her coming in now. You won’t say anything about …? If she began suspecting me I don’t know what I’d do.”

  It was the sound of a car Swan had heard, the Ford shooting brake crunching on the gravel outside Hall Farm.

  “I was under the impression you couldn’t drive a car, Mrs. Swan,” he said as she came in.

  “Were you? I let my licence lapse while I was out in the East but I took a new test last month.”

  She had been shopping. In London perhaps, at any rate in some more sophisticated place than Kingsmarkham. Her packages were wrapped in black paper lettered with white, scarlet printed with gold. But she hadn’t been buying for herself.

  “A tie for you, my lover. Look at the label.” Swan looked and so did Wexford. The label said Jacques Fath. “And some Russian cigarettes and a book and … It doesn’t look very much now I’ve got it all home. Oh, how I wish we were rich!”

  “So that you could spend it all on me?” said Swan.

  “Who else? Did you remember to ring the electric people, darling?”

  “I never got around to it,” said Swan. “It went right out of my head.”