No More Dying Then

by Ruth Rendell

  Crocker held up his hand to halt Wexford. “I remember now. Of course I do. It was poor old Scott who had that stroke on the platform. I happened to be in the station, booking a seat, and they sent for me. But it wasn’t at a quarter to four, Reg. More like six o’clock.”

  “Exactly. Mr. and Mrs. Scott didn’t catch the three-forty-five. When they got to the station Scott realised they had left one of their suitcases behind at Mrs. Fenn’s. You ought to know that. It was you who told me.”

  “So I did.”

  “Scott was a strong, hale man at that time. Or so he thought. There wasn’t a taxi about—mind you I’m guessing this bit—and he decided to walk back to Mill Lane. It took him about three quarters of an hour. But that wouldn’t have worried him. There wasn’t another train that stopped at Stowerton till six-twenty-six. He had no difficulty in getting into the house, for Mrs. Fenn always leaves her back door unlocked. Perhaps he made himself a cup of tea, perhaps he merely rested. We shall never know. We must now go back to Stella Rivers.”

  “She called at Saltram Lodge?”

  “Of course. It was the obvious place. She too knew about the unlocked back door and that Mrs. Fenn, her friend and teacher, had a phone. It was raining, it was growing dark. She went into the kitchen and immediately encountered Scott.”

  “And Scott recognised her?”

  “As Stella Rivers. Not knowing what her correct name was, Mrs. Fenn spoke of her sometimes as Rivers, sometimes as Swan. And she would have spoken of her to Scott, her uncle, and pointed her out, for she was proud of Stella.

  “As soon as she had got over her surprise at finding someone in the house, Stella must have asked to use the phone. What words did she use? Something like this, I fancy: “I’d like to phone my father”—she referred to Swan as her father—“Mr. Swan of Hill Farm. When he comes, we’ll drive you back to Stowerton.” Now Scott hated the very name of Swan. He had never forgotten and he had always dreaded a chance meeting with him. He must then have checked with Stella that it was Ivor Swan to whom she referred and then he realised that here he was, face to face with the daughter—or so he thought—of the man who had left his own child to die when she was at the same age as this child.”

  22

  When they came back to Eastover from their drive the sun had set, leaving long fiery streaks to split the purple clouds and stain the sea with coppery gold. Burden pulled the car into an empty parking place on the cliff-top and they sat in silence, looking at the sea and the sky and at a solitary trawler, a little moving smudge on the horizon.

  Gemma had withdrawn more and more into herself as the days had passed by and sometimes Burden felt that it was a shadow who walked with him, went out with him in the car and lay beside him at night. She hardly spoke. It was as if she had become bereavement incarnate or, worse than that, a dying woman. He knew she wanted to die, although she had not directly told him so. The night before he had found her lying in the bath in water that had grown cold, her eyes closed and her head slipping down into the water, and, although she denied it, he knew she had taken sleeping tablets half an hour before. And today, while they were on the downs, he had only just succeeded in preventing her from crossing the road in the path of an oncoming car.

  Tomorrow they must go home. Within a month they would be married and before that he would have to apply for a transfer to one of the Metropolitan divisions. That meant finding new schools for the children, a new house. What kind of a house would he find in London for the price he would get for his Sussex bungalow? But it must be done. The mean, indefensible thought that at any rate he would only have two children to support and not three, that in her state his wife would not vex him with riotous parties or fill the place with her friends, brought a blush of shame to his face.

  He glanced tentatively at Gemma, but she was staring out to sea. Then he too followed her gaze and saw that the beach was no longer deserted. Quickly he started the car, reversed across the turf and turned towards the road that led inland. He didn’t look at her again, but he knew that she was weeping, the tears falling unchecked down those thin pale cheeks.

  “Scott’s first thought,” said Wexford after a pause, “was probably just to leave her to it, flee back the way he had come away from these Swans. They say murder victims—but this wasn’t really murder—are self-selected. Did Stella point out that it was pouring with rain, that he could have a lift? Did she say, ‘I’ll just phone. He’ll be here in a quarter of an hour?’ Scott remembered it all then. He had never forgotten it. He must stop her using that phone and he got hold of her. No doubt she cried out How he must have hated her, thinking he knew what she meant to the man he hated. I think it was this which gave him strength and made him hold her too tight, press his strong old hands too hard about her neck …”

  The doctor said nothing, only staring the more intently at Wexford.

  “It takes half an hour to walk from Rushworth’s cottage to Saltram House and back again,” the chief inspector resumed. “Less than that from Saltram Lodge. And Scott would have known about the fountains and the cisterns. He would have been interested in them. He was a plumbing engineer. He carried the dead child up to the Italian garden and put her in the cistern. Then he went back to the lodge and fetched his case. A passing motorist gave him a lift back to Stowerton. We may imagine what sort of a state he was in.”

  “We know,” said Crocker quietly, “he had a stroke.”

  “Mrs. Fenn knew nothing of it, nor did his wife. Last Wednesday he had another stroke and that killed him. I think—I’m afraid—that it was seeing me and guessing what I was that really killed him. His wife didn’t understand the words he spoke to her before he died. She thought he was wandering in his mind. She told me what they were. “I held her too tight I thought of my Bridget.’”

  “But what the hell are you going to do? You can’t charge a dead man.”

  “That’s in Griswold’s hands,” said Wexford. “Some noncommittal paragraph for the press, I suppose. The Swans have been told and Swan’s uncle, Group Captain what’s-his-name. Not that he’ll need to pay up. We shan’t be arresting anyone.”

  The doctor looked thoughtful. “You haven’t said a word about John Lawrence.”

  “Because I haven’t a word to say,” said Wexford.

  Their hotel had no rear entrance, so it was necessary to come at last out of the hinterland on to Eastover’s little esplanade. Burden had been hoping with all his heart that by now, in the dusk, the beach would be empty of children, but the pair who had brought tears to Gemma’s eyes were still there, the child that ran up and down at the water’s edge and the woman who walked with him, trailing from one hand a long ribbon of seaweed. But for the slight limp, Burden wouldn’t have recognised her, in her trousers and hooded coat, as the woman he had seen before, or indeed as a woman at all. Inanely, he tried to direct Gemma’s gaze inland towards a cottage she had seen a dozen times before.

  She obeyed him—she was always acquiescent, anxious to please—but no sooner had she looked than she turned again to face the sea. Her arm was touching his and he felt her shiver.

  “Stop the car,” she said.

  “But there’s nothing to see …”

  “Stop the car!”

  She never commanded. He had never heard her speak like that before. “What, here?” he said. “Let’s get back. You’ll only get cold.”

  “Please stop the car, Mike.”

  He couldn’t blind her, shelter her, for ever. He parked the car behind a red Jaguar that was the only other vehicle on the sea front Before he had switched off the ignition she had got the door open, slammed it behind her and was off down the steps.

  It was absurd to remember what she had said about the sea, about a quick death, but he remembered it. He jumped from the car and followed her, striding at first, then running. Her bright hair, sunset red, streamed behind her. Their footsteps made a hard slapping sound on the sand and the woman turned to face them, standing stock still, the streamer of seawee
d in her hand whirling suddenly in the wind like a dancer’s scarf.

  “Gemma! Gemma!” Burden called, but the wind took his words or else she was determined not to hear them. She seemed bent only on reaching the sea which curled and creamed at the child’s feet And now the child, who had been splashing in shallow foam to the top of his boots, also turned to stare, as children will when adults behave alarmingly.

  She was going to throw herself into the sea. Ignoring the woman, Burden pounded after her and then he stopped suddenly as if, unseeing, he had flung himself against a solid wall. He was no more than ten feet from her. Wide-eyed, the child approached her. Without seeming to slacken her speed at all, without hesitation, she ran into the water and, in the water, fell on to her knees.

  The little waves flowed over her feet, her legs, her dress. He saw it seep up, drenching her to the waist He heard her cry out—miles away, he thought, that cry could have been heard—but he could not tell whether it brought him happiness or grief.

  “John, John, my John!”

  She threw out her arms and the child went into them. Still kneeling in the water, she held him in a close embrace, her mouth pressed hard against his bright golden hair.

  Burden and the woman looked at each other without speaking. He knew at once who she was. That face had looked at him before from his daughter’s scrapbook. But it was very ravaged now and very aged, the black hair under the hood chopped off raggedly as if, with the ruin of her career, she had submitted to and accelerated the ruin of her looks.

  Her hands were tiny. It seemed that she collected specimens, botanical and marine, but now she dropped the ribbon of weed. Close to, Burden thought, no one could mistake her for a man—but at a distance? It occurred to him that from far away even a middle-aged woman might look like a youth if she were slight and had the litheness of a dancer.

  What more natural than that she should want John, the child of her old lover who had never been able to give her a child? And she had been ill, mentally ill, he remembered. John would have gone with her, quite willingly, no doubt, recalling her as his father’s friend, persuaded perhaps that his mother had temporarily committed him to her care. And to the seaside. What child doesn’t want to go to the seaside?

  But something would happen now. As soon as she got over her first joy, Gemma would tear this woman to pieces. It wasn’t as if this was the first outrage Leonie West had committed against her. Hadn’t she, when Gemma was only a few months married, virtually stolen her husband from her? And now, a more monstrous iniquity, she had stolen her child.

  He watched her rise slowly out of the water and, still keeping hold of John’s hand, begin to cross the strip of sand that separated her from Leonie West.

  The dancer stood her ground, but she lifted her head with a kind of pathetic boldness and clenched the little hands Mrs. Mitchell had seen picking leaves. Burden took a step forward and found his lost voice.

  “Now listen, Gemma. The best thing is …”

  What had he meant to say? That the best thing was for them all to keep calm, to discuss it rationally? He stared. Never would he have believed—had he ever really known her?—that she would do this, the best thing of all, the thing that, in his estimation, almost made a saint of her.

  Her dress was soaked. Oddly, Burden thought of a picture he had once seen, an artist’s impression of the sea giving up its dead. With a soft, tender glance at the boy, she dropped his hand and lifted Leonie West’s instead. Speechless, the other woman looked at her, and then Gemma, hesitating only for a moment, took her into her arms.

  23

  “It would never have worked, Mike. You know that as well as I do. I’m not conventional enough for you, not respectable, not good enough if you like.”

  “I think you are too good for me,” said Burden.

  “I did say once that John—if John was ever found I wouldn’t marry you. I don’t think you quite understood. It will be better for both of us if I do what we’re planning and go and live with Leonie. She’s so lonely, Mike, and I’m so dreadfully sorry for her. That way I can have London and my friends and she can have a share in John.”

  They were sitting in the lounge of the hotel where they had stayed together. Burden thought she had never been so beautiful, her white skin glowing from her inner joy, her hair mantling her shoulders. And never so alien in the golden dress Leonie West had lent her because her own was ruined by salt water. Her face was sweeter and gentler than ever.

  “But I love you,” he said.

  “Dear Mike, are you sure you don’t just love going to bed with me? Does that shock you?”

  It did, but not so much, not nearly so much, as once it would have. She had taught him a multitude of things. She had given him his sentimental education.

  “We can still be loving friends,” she said. “You can come to me at Leonie’s. You can meet all my friends. We can sometimes go away together and I’ll be so different now I am happy. You’ll see.”

  He did see. He almost shuddered. Go to her with her child there? Explain somehow to his own children that he had a—a mistress?

  “It would never work,” he said clearly and firmly. “I can see it wouldn’t.”

  She looked at him very tenderly. “‘You’ll court more women,’” she said, half-singing, “‘and I’ll couch with more men …’”

  He knew his Shakespeare no better than he knew his Proust. They went out on to the sea front where Leonie West was waiting with John in her red car.

  “Come and say hallo to him,” said Gemma.

  But Burden shook his head. No doubt it was better this way, no doubt he would one day be grateful to the child who had robbed him of his happiness and his love. But not now, not yet. One does not say hallo to an enemy and a thief.

  She lingered under the esplanade lights, turning towards him and then back again to where John was. Torn two ways, they called it, he thought, but there was little doubt who had won this tug of war. That light in her eyes had never been there when they looked at him, was not there now, died as soon as she ceased to face the car. She was parting from him not with regret, not with pain, but with politeness.

  Always considerate, always ready to respect another person’s conventions—for they were in a public place and people were passing—she held out her hand to him. He took it, and then, no longer caring for those passers-by, forgetting his cherished respectability, he pulled her to him there in the open street and kissed her for the last time.

  When the red car had gone he leant on the rail and looked at the sea and knew that it was better this way, knew too, because he had been through something like it before, that he would not go on wanting to die.

  Wexford was genial and sly and almost godlike. “What a fortunate coincidence that you happened to be in Eastbourne with Miss Woodville and happened to go to Eastover and happened—Good God, what a lot of happenings!—to meet Mrs. Lawrence.” He added more gravely, “On the whole, you have done well, Mike.”

  Burden said nothing. He didn’t think it necessary to point out that it was Gemma who had found the lost boy and not he.

  Quietly, Wexford closed the door of his office and for a few moments regarded Burden in silence. Then he said, “But I don’t much care for coincidences or for melodrama, come to that. I don’t think they’re in your line, do you?”

  “Perhaps not, sir.”

  “Are you going to go on doing well, Mike? I have to ask, I have to know. I have to know where to find you when you’re needed and, when I find you, that you’ll be your old self. Are you going to come back and work with me and—well, to put it bluntly—pull yourself together?”

  Burden said slowly, remembering what he had once said to Gemma, “Work is the best thing, isn’t it?”

  “I think it is.”

  “But it has to be real work, heart and soul in it, not just coming in every day more or less automatically and hoping everyone will admire you for being such a martyr to duty. I’ve thought about it a lot, sir, I’ve decided
to count my blessings and …”

  “That’s fine,” Wexford cut off his words. “Don’t be too sanctimonious about it, though, will you? That’s hard to live with. I can see you’ve changed and I’m not going to enquire too closely into who or what has brought that change about. One good thing, I’m pretty sure I’m going to find that the quality of your mercy is a lot less strained than it used to be. And now let’s go home.”

  Half-way down the lift, he went on, “You say Mrs. Lawrence doesn’t want this woman charged? That’s all very well, but what about all our work, all the expenditure? Griswold will do his nut. He may insist on charging her. But if she’s really a bit cuckoo … My God, one culprit dead and the other crazy!”

  The lift opened, and there, inevitably, was Harry Wild.

  “I have nothing for you,” Wexford said coldly.

  “Nothing for me!” Wild said wrathfully to Camb. “I know for a fact that …”

  “There was quite a to-do in Pump Lane,” said Camb, opening his book. “One police van and two fire engines arrived at five p.m. yesterday—Sunday, that was—to remove a cat from an elm tree …” Wild’s infuriated glance cut him short. He cleared his throat and said soothingly, “Let’s see if there’s any tea going.”

  On the station forecourt Wexford said, “I nearly forgot to tell you. Swan’s uncle’s going to pay out the reward.”

  Burden stared. “But it was offered for information leading to an arrest.”

  “No, it wasn’t. That’s what I thought till I checked. It was offered for information leading to a discovery. The Group Captain’s a just man, and not the sort of just man I mean when I talk about his nephew. That’s two thousand smackers for Charly Catch, or would be if he wasn’t a very sick old man.” Absently, Wexford felt in his pocket for his blood-pressure tablets. “When Crocker arrived in Charteris Road last night there was a solicitor at his bedside and Monkey keeping well in the background because a beneficiary can’t also be a witness. I must work out sometime,” said the chief inspector, “just how many king-size fags you could buy with all that boodle.”