by Ruth Rendell
“Would it be a quick death, the sea?” she said.
He shivered, watching the running tide. “I don’t know. Nobody who has died in it has ever been able to tell us.”
“I think it would be quick.” Her voice was a child’s, gravely considering. “Cold and clean and quick.”
In the afternoons Burden made love to her—he had never been more conscious of and more satisfied with his manhood than when he saw how his love comforted her—and afterwards, while she slept, he walked down to the shore or over the cliff to Chine Warren. There was still a little warmth left in the sunshine and the children came to build sandcastles. He had discovered that they were not a family, the couple not husband and wife, but that four of the children belonged to the man and the other one to the woman. How teasing and deceptive were first impressions! He looked back now with self-disgust on his romancing, his sentimental notion that this pair, known to each other perhaps only by sight, had an idyllic marriage. Illusion and disillusion, he reflected, what life is and what we think it is. Why, from this distance he couldn’t even tell if the solitary child were a boy or a girl, for it was capped and trousered and booted like all the children.
The woman kept stooping down to collect shells and once she stumbled. When she stood up again he noticed that she dragged her leg and he wondered if he should go down the seaweedy steps and cross the sands to offer her his help. But perhaps that would mean bringing her back to the hotel while he fetched his car, and the sound of the child’s voice would awaken Gemma….
They rounded the foot of the cliff, going towards Chine Warren. Receding fast, the tide seemed to be drawing the sea back into the heart of the red sunset, a November sunset which is the most lovely of the whole year.
Now the great wide sweep of beach was deserted, but its young visitors had left evidence behind them. As sure as he could be that he was unobserved, Burden walked down the steps, pretending to stroll casually. The two sandcastles stood proudly erect, as if confident of their endurance until the sea conquered them, rushing them away when it returned at midnight. He hesitated, the rational sensible man momentarily intervening, and then he kicked over their turrets and stamped on their battlements until the sand they were made of was as flat as the surrounding shore.
Once more the beach belonged to him and Gemma. John or his deputies, his representatives, should not take her away from him. He was a man and any day a match for a lost dead child.
Rushworth came to the door in his duffel coat.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I was just going to take the dog out.”
“Postpone it for half an hour, will you?”
Not very willingly, Rushworth took off his coat, hung up the lead and led Wexford into a living room amid the cries of the disappointed terrier. Two teenage children were watching television, a girl of about eight sat at the table doing a jigsaw puzzle, and on the floor, lying on his stomach, was the most junior member of the family, Andrew, who had been John Lawrence’s friend.
“I’d like to talk to you alone,” said Wexford.
It was a biggish house with what Rushworth, in one of his house agent’s blurbs, would perhaps have described as three reception rooms. That evening none was fit for the reception of anyone except possibly a second-hand-furniture dealer. The Rushworths were apparently acquisitive creatures, snappers up of anything they could get for nothing, and Wexford, seating himself in this morning room-cum-study-cum-library, observed a set of Dickens he had surely last seen in Pomfret Grange before the Rogerses sold out and two stone urns whose design seemed very much in keeping with the other garden ornaments of Saltram House.
“I’ve racked my brains and I can’t tell you another thing about the fellows in that search party.”
“I’ve not come about that,” said Wexford. “Did you pinch those urns from Saltram House?”
“‘Pinch’ is a bit strong,” said Rushworth, turning red. “They were lying about and no one wanted them.”
“You had your eye on one of the statues too, didn’t you?”
“What’s this got to do with John Lawrence?”
Wexford shrugged. “I don’t know. It might have something to do with Stella Rivers. To put it in a nutshell, I’m here to know where you were and what you were doing on February 25th.”
“How can I remember that far back? I know what it is, it’s Margaret Fenn putting you up to all this. Just because I complained my girl wasn’t doing as well as she should at her riding lessons.” Rushworth opened the door and shouted, “Eileen!”
When she wasn’t at work, typing specifications for her husband, Mrs. Rushworth managed this sprawling household single-handed and it showed. She looked dowdy and harassed and her skirt hem was coming down at the back. Perhaps there was some foundation in the gossip that her husband chased the girls.
“Where were you that Thursday?” she enquired of him. “In the office, I suppose. I know where I was. I got it all sorted out in my mind when there was all that fuss about Stella Rivers being missing. It was half-term and I’d taken Andrew to work with me. He came with me in the car to pick Linda up from Equita and—oh, yes—Paul—that’s my eldest—he came too and dropped off at the cottage. There was a little table there we thought we might as well have here. But we didn’t see Stella. I didn’t even know her by sight.”
“Your husband was in the office when you got back?”
“Oh, yes. He waited for me to get back before he went out in the car.”
“What kind of a car, Mr. Rushworth?”
“Jaguar. Maroon colour. Your people have already been all over my car on account of its being a Jaguar and a kind of red colour. Look, we didn’t know Stella Rivers. As far as we know, we’d never even seen her. Until she disappeared I’d only heard of her through Margaret always going on about how marvellous she was on a horse.”
Wexford favoured them with a hard, unsympathetic stare. He was thinking deeply, fitting in puzzle pieces, casting aside irrelevancies.
“You,” he said to Rushworth, “were at work when Stella disappeared. When John disappeared you were in Sewingbury waiting for a client who never turned up.” He turned to Mrs. Rushworth. “You were at work when John disappeared. When Stella vanished you were driving back from Equita along Mill Lane. Did you pass anyone?”
“Nobody,” said Mrs. Rushworth firmly. “Paul was still in the cottage. I know that—he’d put a light on—and, well, I’d better be quite frank with you. He’d actually been in Margaret Fenn’s place too. I’m sure he had because the front door was open, just a little bit ajar. I know he shouldn’t, though she does always leave her back door unlocked and when he was little she used to say he could let himself in and see her whenever he liked. Of course, it’s different now he’s so old, and I’ve told him again and again …”
“Never mind,” Wexford said suddenly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If you wanted to talk to Paul … I mean, if it would clear the air …?”
“I don’t want to see him.” Wexford got up abruptly. He didn’t want to see anyone at all. He knew the answer. It had begun to come to him when Rushworth called out to his wife and now nothing remained but to sit down somewhere in utter silence and work it all out.
21
“Our last day,” said Burden. “Where would you like to go? Shall we have a quiet drive somewhere and lunch in a pub?”
“I don’t mind. Anything you say.” She took his hand, held it against her face for a moment, and burst out, as if she had kept the words inside her, burning and corroding for many hours, “I’ve got a dreadful feeling, a sort of premonition, that when we get back we’ll hear that they’ve found him.”
“John?”
“And—and the man who killed him,” she whispered.
“They’d let us know.”
“They don’t know where we are, Mike. No one knows.”
Slowly and evenly he said, “It will be better for you when you know it for sure. Terrible pain is better than terrible anxiety.�
�� But was it? Was it better for him to know that Jean was dead than to fear she would die? Terrible anxiety always contains terrible hope. “Better for you,” he said firmly. “And then, when it’s behind you, you can start your new life.”
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go out.”
It was Saturday and still no one had been charged.
“There’s an uneasy sort of lull about this place,” said Harry Wild to Camb. “Quite a contrast to all the activity of yore.”
“My what?” said Camb.
“Your nothing. Yore. Days gone by.”
“No good asking me. Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“Life,” said Wild, “is passing us by, old man. Trouble with us is we’ve not been ambitious. We’ve been content to sport with Amaryllis in the shade.”
Camb looked shocked. “Speak for yourself,” he said, and then, softening, “Shall I see if there’s any tea going?”
Late in the afternoon Dr. Crocker breezed into Wexford’s office. “Very quiet, aren’t we? I hope that means you’ll be free for golf in the morning.”
“Don’t feel like golf,” said Wexford. “Can’t, anyway.”
“Surely you’re not going to Colchester again?”
“I’ve been. I went this morning. Scott’s dead.”
The doctor pranced over to the window and opened it. “You need some fresh air in here. Who’s Scott?”
“You ought to know. He was your patient. He had a stroke and now he’s had another. Want to hear about it?”
“Why would I? People are always having strokes. I’ve just come from an old boy down in Charteris Road who’s had one. Why would I want to know about this Scott?” He came closer to Wexford and bent critically over him. “Reg?” he said. “Are you all right? My God, I’m more concerned that you shouldn’t have one. You look rotten.”
“It is rotten. But not for me. For me it’s just a problem.” Wexford got up suddenly. “Let’s go down the Olive.”
There was no one else in the lush, rather over-decorated cocktail bar.
“I’d like a double Scotch.”
“And you shall have one,” said Crocker. “For once I’ll go so far as to prescribe it.”
Briefly Wexford thought of that other humbler hostelry where Monkey and Mr. Casaubon had both disgusted him and whetted his appetite. He pushed them from his mind as the doctor returned with their drinks.
“Thanks. I wish your tablets came in such a palatable form. Cheers.”
“Good health,” said Crocker meaningfully.
Wexford leaned back against the red-velvet upholstery of the settle. “All the time,” he began, “I thought it must be Swan, although there didn’t seem to be any motive. And then, when I got all that stuff from Monkey and Mr. Casaubon and the more accurate stuff about the inquest, I thought I could see a motive, simply that Swan got rid of people who got in his way. That would imply madness, of course. So what? The world is full of ordinary people with lunacy underlying their ordinariness. Look at Bishop.”
“What inquest?” Crocker asked.
Wexford explained. “But I was looking at it from the wrong way round,” he said, “and it took me a long time to look at it the right way.”
“Let’s have the right way, then.”
“First things first. When a child disappears one of the first things we consider is that he or she was picked up by a car. Another disservice done to the world by the inventor of the internal-combustion engine, or did kids once get abducted in carriages? But I mustn’t digress. Now we knew it was very unlikely Stella accepted a lift in a car because she had already refused the lift we knew had been offered to her. Therefore it was probable that she was either met and taken somewhere by someone she knew, such as her mother, her stepfather or Mrs. Fenn, or that she went into one of the houses in Mill Lane.”
The doctor sipped his sherry austerely. “There are only three,” he said.
“Four, if you count Saltram House. Swan had no real alibi. He could have ridden to Mill Lane, taken Stella into the grounds of Saltram House on some pretext, and killed her. Mrs. Swan had no alibi. Contrary to my former belief, she can drive. She could have driven to Mill Lane. Monstrous as it is to think of a woman killing her own child, I had to consider Rosalind Swan. She worships her husband obsessively. Was it possible, in her mind, that Stella, who also worshipped Swan—little girls seem to—would in a few years’ time grow into a rival?”
“And Mrs. Fenn?”
“Tidying up at Equita, she said. We had only her word for it. But even my inventive mind, twisted mind, if you like, couldn’t see a motive there. Finally, I dismissed all those theories and considered the four houses.” Wexford lowered his voice slightly as a man and a girl entered the bar. “Stella left Equita at twenty-five minutes to five. The first house she passed was the weekenders’ cottage, but it was a Thursday and the cottage was empty. Besides, it dated from about 1550.”
Crocker looked astonished. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“You’ll see in a minute. She went on and it began to rain. At twenty to five the Forby bank manager stopped and offered her a lift. She refused. For once it would have been wise for a child to have accepted a lift from a strange man.” The newcomers had found seats by a far window and Wexford resumed his normal voice. “The next cottage she came to is owned, though not occupied, by a man called Robert Rushworth who lives in Chiltern Avenue. Now Rushworth interested me very much. He knew John Lawrence, he wears a duffel coat, he has been suspected, perhaps with foundation, perhaps not, of molesting a child. His wife, though warned by Mrs. Mitchell that a man had been seen observing the children in the swings field, did not inform the police. On the afternoon of February 25th he could have been in Mill Lane. His wife and his eldest son certainly were. All the family were in the habit of going into their cottage just when it pleased them—and Mrs. Rushworth’s Christian name is Eileen.”
The doctor stared blankly. “I don’t follow any of this. So what if her name is Eileen?”
“Last Sunday,” Wexford went on, “I went down to Colchester to see Mr. and Mrs. Scott, the parents of Bridget Scott. At that time I had no suspicion at all of Rushworth. I simply had a forlorn hope that one or both of the Scotts might be able to give me a little more insight into the character of Ivor Swan. But Scott, as you know, is—was, I should say—a very sick man.”
“I should know?”
“Of course you should know,” said Wexford severely. “Really, you’re very slow.” Having for once the whip hand over his friend was cheering Wexford up. It was a pleasant change to see Crocker at a disadvantage. “I was afraid to question Scott. I was uncertain what might be the effect of alarming him. Besides, for my purposes, it seemed adequate to work on his wife. She told me nothing which increased my knowledge of Swan, but unwittingly, she gave me four pieces of information that helped me solve this case.” He cleared his throat. “Firstly, she told me that she and her husband had been in the habit of staying for holidays with a relative who lived near Kingsmarkham and that they had stayed there for the last time last winter; secondly, that the relative lived in an eighteenth-century house; thirdly, that in March, a fortnight after he had been taken ill, her husband was a very sick man indeed; fourthly, that the relative’s name was Eileen. Now, sometime in March might well be a fortnight after February 25th.” He paused significantly for all this to sink in.
The doctor put his head on one side. At last he said, “I’m beginning to get this clear. My God, you’d hardly believe it, but people are a funny lot. It was with the Rushworths that the Scotts were staying, Eileen Rushworth was the relative. Scott somehow induced Rushworth to make away with Stella in revenge for what Swan had done to his own child. Offered him money, maybe. What a ghastly thing!”
Wexford sighed. It was at times like this that he most missed Burden, or Burden as he used to be. “I think we’ll have another drink,” he said. “My round.”
“You don’t have to act as if I was a complete f
ool,” said the doctor huffily. “I’m not trained to make this sort of diagnosis.” As Wexford got up, he snapped vindictively, “Orange juice for you, that’s an order.”
With a glass of lager, not orange juice, before him, Wexford said, “You’re worse than Dr. Watson, you are. And while we’re on the subject, though I’ve the utmost respect for Sir Arthur, life isn’t much like Sherlock Holmes stories and I don’t believe it ever was. People don’t nurse revenge for years and years nor do they find it possible to bribe more or less respectable estate agents, fathers of families, into doing murder for them.”
“But you said,” Crocker retorted, “that the Scotts were staying with the Rushworths in their cottage.”
“No, I didn’t. Use your head. How could they have been staying in a house that was let to another tenant? All that made me consider that house was that it dated from about 1750. I had forgotten all about the Scotts’ relative being called Eileen—it was only mentioned in passing—but when I heard Rushworth call his wife Eileen, then I knew. After that I only had to do some simple checking.”
“I am so entirely in the dark,” said Crocker, “that I don’t know what to say.”
For a moment Wexford savoured the experience of seeing the doctor at a loss. Then he said, “Eileen is a fairly common name. Why should Mrs. Rushworth be its only possessor in the district? At that point I remembered that someone else had told me she had two Christian names, was called by the first by half the people she knew and by the second by the rest. I didn’t care to enquire of her personally. I checked with Somerset House. And there I found that Mrs. Margaret Eileen Fenn was the daughter of one James Collins and his wife Eileen Collins, née Scott.
“Beyond a doubt, it was with Mrs. Fenn that the Scotts had been staying in February, at Saltram Lodge which is also an eighteenth-century house. They stayed with her, and on February 25th, after saying good-bye to Mrs. Fenn before she left for work at Equita, they too left by taxi to catch the three-forty-five train from Stowerton to Victoria.”
