by Ruth Rendell
“Can I, dear? But he's still dead somewhere, isn't he?”
A Passage to India was darkish and cool. A ceiling fan, not too aggressive, blew the air about and faintly agitated the colored streamers, figured in red and blue and gold, which hung against the walls. It was hard to tell if these were Indian decor or early Christmas decorations. Wexford and Burden were shown to what Rao the proprietor was starting to call “their” table.
Burden wore his silk suit. It was very discreet, charcoal gray with knife-edge creases to the trousers and long lapels to the jacket. But still it was silk and Wexford thought it a bit much, though he kept this to himself. Burden's shirt was plain white and his tie light gray with a single slightly off-center vertical stripe in black, as if he was trying to play down the effect of the suit, which he too perhaps knew was over the top. Matea, the beautiful Somali girl, brought menus and asked them in her heavily accented soft voice what they would like to drink. Water, of course, it would have to be water. She seemed to sense their reluctance and she smiled. Wexford asked her if they could have the fan off and she said she'd tell Rao.
When she had disappeared behind the bead curtain, he said to Burden, “If I didn't know you for an uxorious man, I'd suspect all this sartorial elegance being designed to impress or better still attract Matea.”
“Utter nonsense.” Burden never blushed. His face retained its even biscuit color through all embarrassments. “When I got dressed this morning I didn't even know we'd come here. It was your idea, if you remember. Since we're in the long-words department, my attitude to Matea is paternal or maybe avuncular.”
“Really? I hope you don't go telling people that old one about her being your niece. With your coloring no one would ever believe you.”
Burden laughed. “You were wrong about the body in the cellar being Charlie Cummings. He was far too tall.”
“Yes.” Wexford hesitated. “God knows who it is. We know the remains are those of a man and he was between forty and fifty when he died. Carina's now saying he's been dead eight years. We've run out of possible people he might be.”
“Could we try the National DNA Database?”
“Try it with what, Mike? The man in the cellar's DNA won't be on it. He died too long ago.”
Matea came back with a large jug of iced water and took their order. The long black hair that had hung loose when Wexford saw her at the inaugural meeting of KAAM had been wound up onto the top of her head and secured there with long jewel-headed pins. It struck him that she didn't wear the hijab. It would have been a shame if she had, he thought, the scarf covering her crowning glory. Perhaps she was one of those modern progressive Moslems who had broken with the old traditions, or maybe she wasn't a Moslem at all. Some Somalis were Christians, he had heard, some animists. Her hairstyle gave Matea a regal look. With her head held high and her back plumb-line straight, she walked, as Burden remarked, like some African queen.
“Seen many, have you?” Wexford made a face. “All we really know is that the clothes in the kitchen belonged to the man in the cellar. We don't know why he took them off or why, wearing only a vest and pants, he went down into that filthy cellar. Or was he killed elsewhere? There were no keys, no identification. Did his killer take those things?”
Wexford broke off as sweet-scented spicy dishes were brought, a large bowl of fragrant rice, little stone pots of green and scarlet pickles, a basket of naan. Matea asked if everything was all right.
“Excellent, thank you,” said Burden. “Delicious.”
But it was Wexford who she glanced at, did more than glance, let her eyes rest on him for a few seconds, hesitating as if there was something she wanted to say. But she said nothing, half smiled a little shyly, the first sign of awkwardness they had seen her give, and walked quickly away.
“Those Tredown women,” Burden said, “that was all a bit odd. I said it was done to distract us. I think they made two attempts, the first one being when they thought we were still interested in Douglas Chadwick and they tried to make us believe he'd been having an affair with Louise Axall. Very clumsy, that. The woman wasn't even living there then.”
“And then they moved on to Irene McNeil. Again a vague insinuation. Mrs. McNeil went in and out of Grimble's house. When that didn't seem to impress us they said she stole things, removed things from the house. You could tell it was an afterthought. But why, Mike? Why all this?”
“As I said, to distract us from something they don't want looked into.”
“Yes, but what? There is one thing or rather one person they might want to deflect us from, the one person among all the people in that corner of Flagford we haven't questioned, we haven't even seen.”
“Tredown,” said Burden.
“Exactly. The great author. There he is, shut up in his ivory tower, writing for all he's worth to keep those two in comfort, his nose apparently kept to the grindstone by them but protected by them as well. Interesting, don't you think?”
Matea brought the bill, and Wexford gave her his credit card. Burden went off to the men's room and was still there when she came back. She said in her low sweet voice, “Mr. Wexford?”
How did she know his name? From the card, of course, or because she remembered it from the meeting. He smiled at her.
“I want to ask-”
The sentence was cut off by Rao the proprietor coming up to her and asking her to show two more customers to a table. Burden came back and asked what she had said to him. “She wanted to ask me something but didn't say what.”
“Perhaps some question of asylum or immigration or whatever.”
“Perhaps,” said Wexford.
It was Halloween, a celebration he disliked. Every window he passed on his way home, or every window behind which children lived, had a skeleton mobile dancing on strings or a pumpkin with a grinning mouth cut out. Guy Fawkes Night wasn't among his favorite festivals, but it was an improvement on this. Was it on its way out, soon to be superseded by this dumbed-down black magic? At the corner of his own road he passed a group of preteens dressed in black and gathered under a streetlamp, the chemical light showing up their painted cheeks and foreheads, blotched in green and purple but for one whose face was made up to look like a skull. Their demand that he choose trick or treat failed to break his silence and he passed them without another glance.
Dora was out. She had driven herself over to Sylvia's to babysit Mary and the house was empty. He poured himself a glass of claret, stood at one of the front windows eyeing the street until his presence attracted first one group of trick-or-treaters, then two boys, combining Halloween with Guy Fawkes Night and wheeling up his path a homemade skeleton in a stroller. He drew the curtains and retreated as fireworks were set off in one of the neighboring gardens, a series of explosions, then the whistle and scream of a rocket. His next-door neighbors' dog began to howl.
He went into the kitchen, took out of the oven the lasagne Dora had left for him, and sat down to eat it at the kitchen table. The doorbell rang and someone pounded on the knocker. He took no notice. When he had finished his meal, he poured a second glass of wine and went to stand at the small window to the right of the front door. From there, with no lights on, he could watch the street unseen. Dora would be back soon. The moment she turned the car into their own drive she would be mobbed by the trick-or-treat throng if he wasn't there to stop them.
The phone ringing called him away. It was Sheila, wanting to talk about plans for The First Heaven film. Fireworks were deafening, both here and outside her Hampstead home. He was saying, “Sorry, my dear, we'll have to carry on with this conversation another time,” when another machine-gun rattle from firecrackers made further speech impossible. Immediately after the explosions, as he put the phone down, there came another knock at the front door. Repeated knocks, in fact, echoing the fireworks' chatter, as if his caller had previously tried the doorbell in vain.
Of course he wasn't going to answer it. It might be an innocent and harmless Halloweener, surfing t
he place on his own, someone who didn't know that no householder in his street was imprudent enough to open a front door on October 31, but still he wasn't going to answer it. Very softly he made his way back to the little window in the dark. The doorbell rang but it was a rather timid, diffident summons this time. He hadn't realized that only the side wall of the porch was visible from this point and he was on the point of giving up, was walking away, when he turned his head.
The caller who had knocked and rung had made her final attempt and was just closing his gate behind her. Not a teenage boy or girl but a woman. Her head was covered and she was wrapped in a thick dark coat. Could it be Matea? There was nothing to tell him if it was, only the woman's upright carriage and light step. A fire-work, exploding next door without warning, temporarily blinded him, and when he could see again the woman had disappeared.
It took him a moment to find his keys. He fished them out of his raincoat pocket, shut the door behind him, and ran after her up the street, but she had taken a left or a right turning and there was no sign of her.
11
Though it was a sunny morning, the weather forecast predicted heavy showers. Barry Vine hadn't taken his raincoat off its peg since he brought it home from Wales. Unlike most of his contemporaries who preferred various types of waterproof jacket, he possessed a raincoat because he thought it lent him dignity. It made him look like a detective, the sort of detective found in films from the forties. It was the belt that did it, an adjunct he thought suited him because it hid his thickening waistline. Getting into his car, he felt in the pocket, found only a sheet of folded newspaper, and remembered his keys were in his trousers pocket.
He nearly threw the paper away. He would have done if he could have found a recycling bin. Instead he put it, unfolded, on his desk in the office he shared with Hannah Goldsmith and Damon Coleman. Why had he wanted to read it in the first place? Because that uncouth woman Dilys Hughes had been reading it? Surely not. He had just glanced at the headline: “Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father” by Selina Hexham, when he was summoned to Wexford's morning conference. It must have been those words “gone without trace” and that word “lost” that attracted his attention. Everyone at the conference lived, ate, drank, and slept with those words on the tip of their tongues but so far it hadn't got them far.
Wexford canceled the appointment he had made with Maeve Tredown and Claudia Ricardo, and instead of making a new one, decided to surprise the occupants of Athelstan House. As he said to Burden, he had no grounds on which to question Tredown, certainly none on which to arrest him and therefore take him to the police station. All he had was an inner conviction that refused to go away, that Tredown was being protected, hidden, by Claudia and Maeve, who apparently ruled him.
He and Burden had chosen midafternoon for their call. “He can't be hard at work all the time,” Wexford said. “If he writes every morning and part of the afternoon, he must have some sort of respite. About now might be a good time.”
They expected they would have to infiltrate the women's defenses. Maeve would open the door, Claudia would be a few yards inside, and together they would offer one excuse after another why Tredown couldn't be seen. He was resting, he was asleep, he was back at his writing, and it would all be delivered in that jokey way they had, a mixture of zaniness and giggles, apparent frankness and apparent stupidity. Plus a lot of what Burden called off-color remarks from Claudia. Things turned out differently.
The predicted heavy showers had never come. It was one of those early November days when the sky is blue, the sun brilliant, and visibility nearly perfect. From the Kingsmarkham to Flagford road you could see Cheriton Forest spread out, still leafy in colors varying from dark green to pale yellow, and in the pure clarity of the air, the Downs rose smooth but distinct against the mistless horizon. Donaldson drove into the village byway of the road that led past Morella's fruit farm and the church and the long row of Flagford's picturesque but grotesquely uncomfortable cottages. All right if you were no more than five feet three, Wexford remarked to Burden, but the ceilings were far too low for modern man, as he knew to his cost.
In the clear bright light, even Athelstan House seemed attractive, a multicolored Victorian curiosity. As they approached up the drive Wexford spotted a tall, rather stooped figure, walking along the side of the house toward the rear. He told Donaldson to stop where they were and park there. He and Burden would follow the man. He must surely be Owen Tredown. The sun was low in the sky, offering dazzling glimpses of itself through trees which looked black against it. A blackbird sang in one of those trees, sweet as a nightingale. There was so little wind that the leaf fall seemed suspended until a single one, fan-shaped from a chestnut tree, floated gently down past Burden's face.
Tredown it was. They could see him clearly now and Wexford recognized the writer from a photograph on a book jacket. He had crossed the wide lawn and sat down on a wooden seat at the edge of a shrubbery in which rowans and dogwoods were shimmering red among the fading greens. It was a largely uncultivated place where nothing had been pruned and nothing planted. Only the grass had been tended and closely mown. Lengthening shadows stretched out across the lawn, among them those of the two policemen who Tredown must have seen, for he turned to watch them approach. He seemed unsurprised. He smiled.
Without asking who they were-could he tell by looking at them?-he said in one of the most mellifluous voices Wexford had ever heard, “You see me, like the Lord God, walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”
He was smoking a pipe, a habit Wexford hadn't seen anyone indulge in for a long time. The smell was pungent. It wasn't tobacco, but something herbal, something culinary.
He introduced himself and Burden. Without getting up, Tredown shook hands, an action Wexford rather disliked in these circumstances. You never knew how the relationship might deteriorate and in the not too far distant future. It was awkward to find yourself arresting and cautioning someone with whom you had been on matey terms. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Perhaps we could sit down?”
“Of course.” Tredown shifted along the seat. “How remiss of me. I hope you don't mind my smoking.”
“Not at all,” said Wexford. “But I'd like to know what it is. It smells like sage.”
“Sage it is. Salvia divinorum, a powerful hallucinogenic.” Tredown looked from one to the other of them, perhaps expecting a reaction and met impassivity. “This is my second pipe of the day, so I had my out-of-body experience this morning. This one expands my mind and makes me sweat, but that is all.”
“Your out-of-body experience?” Wexford's eyebrows went up.
“Oh, yes. Does that surprise you? Sage brings transcendence, not to say hallucinations of the most interesting kind.”
Owen Tredown was even taller than Wexford and a great deal thinner, almost cadaverous, and he remembered that the man had cancer. His skin was greenish-yellow. His was one of those concave faces, the brow high, the nose short, the chin prominent, and the mouth an almost lipless line. The hair, which had once been flaxen, was still abundant, a streaky brownish-gray, falling across his sallow forehead and pushed back behind his ears. He was dressed in baggy khaki trousers and an open-necked denim shirt. On the third finger of each long bony hand was a plain gold ring. One for each wife? Wexford wondered briefly about that before he spoke.
“We found, Mr. Tredown, that we had talked to everyone who lives in this immediate neighborhood except you. That seemed an omission that should be remedied.”
“I doubt if I can tell you much.” He spoke like someone coming out of a dream. The pipe held at arm's length now, he seemed to be addressing it rather than the two policemen. “The elder Mr. Grimble I can't recall ever speaking to. Of course, we were far from happy at the younger Mr. Grimble's plans to build four houses next door to us. As you see,” he said to the pipe, “we are not at all overlooked at present. But I expect my wife and Miss Ricardo have told you that.”
So that was h
ow he dealt with the two-wives problem. Come to that, how else could he have dealt with it?
“In fact, I expect they have told you everything we know, the digging of the trench, for instance, and the burglary we had about that time and-oh, the necessary filling in of the trench when planning permission was refused. They do like to save me trouble, you know. They protect me from the wickedness of the world.”
Tredown laughed. It was an unexpected sound, a high-pitched neighing, in contrast to the soft honeyed voice. They let him have his laugh out, listened indulgently, though nothing in the least amusing had been said, only a confirmation of what Wexford had suspected. He glanced at Burden, who said, “What burglary was that, Mr. Tredown?”
Tredown took the pipe between his lips and drew on it, shivering a little. “Oh, didn't they tell you? Nothing much was taken. As a matter of fact I heard none of it. I was asleep in bed. It was quite some time before Miss Ricardo told me there had been a break-in. She and my wife are so kind. They always want to save me anxiety.”
“Exactly when was this, sir?” Wexford asked.
“Let me see. I'd say it was sometime in the weeks between the elder Mr. Grimble's death and the younger Mr. Grimble digging his trench. But my wife and Miss Ricardo would know.”
Burden asked what had been taken.
“Oh, only some cutlery, nothing valuable, not even silver, and, rather oddly, I thought, some bed linen.”
Something made Wexford glance toward the French windows. On a sunny day-the sun hadn't yet set-it is impossible to see much through glass of what lies behind it. He could just make out two figures watching them, and then one of them moved away.
“Here comes Miss Ricardo now,” said Tredown. “She can tell you better than I can.”
Claudia was crossing the lawn, her long lacy black skirt sweeping the grass. Which ring on those long fingers was for her? Or had neither any connection with those two women?
