by Ruth Rendell
That morning Kingsmarkham magistrates had committed him for trial on a charge of murder and remanded him in custody until the trial was due. Even Burden could see now that there could be no other murder charge for him to face, that it was impossible for him to have been guilty of the death of Gwen Robson. He had seen Clifford driven away to the remand prison at Myringham before he and Wexford left for Ash Farm and had not mentioned him since. But now he came into Wexford’s office and spoke abruptly.
“I felt I should have stood up before the magistrates and said I wanted to make a statement. I should have admitted my responsibility—well, my share in what that poor little guy did.”
” ‘Poor little guy,’ is it now? What’s become of your much-vaunted principle of reserving pity for the victim?” Wexford was reading a letter, nodding from time to time as if what he read brought him a long-awaited satisfaction. He winced at the sounds that were coming from the depths of the building, a steady crash-crash-crash, and looked up at Burden irritably.
“I’ve let him down all along the line. I should have publicly admitted my part in what he did.”
“You’d make yourself a laughing-stock. Imagine what used to be called the press, and are now for some daft reason called the media, would make of that. Excuse me.” Wexford’s phone was ringing and he picked up the receiver. “Yes, yes, thanks,” he said. “You’ve a record of that on your computer, have you? Is it possible for me to have some sort of print-out? Yes … yes. Someone will come down for it before the library closes. When do you close? Six-thirty tonight? That’s just about an hour. All right. Thanks for your help.”
“What’s that noise?” Burden opened the door a crack the better to hear the banging. When Wexford shrugged, he asked in a tone of minimal interest, “What was all that about?”
“A woman’s alibi. And another one has just fallen neatly into place. Just a matter of clearing things up really, eliminating remote possibilities. Do you remember that gale we had in the middle of last month? It blew down the phone lines at Sundays and Ash Lane.”
“You think I’m a maundering idiot, don’t you? It’s all hot air and bullying with me, but underneath I’m weak as water. I was scared of Clifford, do you know that? When he came to my house, I was afraid to answer the door.”
“You did answer it though.”
“Why was I so set on it? Why did I make up my mind it had to be him when all the evidence was against it?”
“At any rate you admit that now.” Wexford sounded bored, languid. “What can I say? Anything I say sounds like saying I told you so. Well, no, I might tell you to let it be a lesson to you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He got up and looked out of the window at the tree with its winking lights, the red, blue and white sequence, the yellow, green and pink sequence. The sky was dark but clear, a dome of deepening blue with stars. “Mike, I truly think that if he hadn’t killed her then, he would have killed her one day. Tomorrow or next week or next year. Murder’s infectious too. Have you ever thought of that? Clifford killed his mother because she was there and because she was restraining him and … to draw your attention to him. But perhaps he also killed her because the idea had been put into his head, because he knew, if you like, that it was possible to kill people. He had seen a murdered woman he thought at first was his mother. Hoped it was his mother? Maybe. But the idea was planted, wasn’t it? Others could do it, so he could do it. It infected him.”
“Do you really think so?” Burden’s face was desperately hopeful, the face of a man who may drown if the flung hand can find nothing stronger than a straw. “Do you honestly think that?”
“Ask Olson, he’ll tell you. Let’s go home, Mike, and make a few enquiries about our prisoner on the way.”
The phone rang again as they reached the door and Wexford went back and picked it up. The voice at the other end was so clear that even Burden heard from three yards away, “I have Sandra Dale on the line.”
Wexford said into the phone, “It doesn’t matter, I don’t need it any longer,” and after listening for a moment, “that doesn’t surprise me. You won’t find it now.”
He thanked her and said goodbye and they went downstairs. PC Savitt told them that Carroll, who had been put in the cell previously occupied by Clifford, was quiet now. Dr. Crocker had seen him and offered him a sedative, which Carroll had surprisingly accepted. Before that he had threatened to break the place up, though had got no further than a regular lifting up of two of the legs of the iron bedstead prior to letting them crash on to the floor.
“Could you hear him, sir?”
“I should think they could hear him in the Barringdean Centre.”
Burden stood on the steps outside the swing doors. “It’s a funny thing the way you can do something, take a determined course of action over a length of time and be absolutely sure you’re right, not have a shadow of doubt. And a week later you can look back amazed at what you did, hardly able to realize it was you who did it, and wonder if anyone like that can actually be sane. I mean, I wonder if anyone like me can be.”
“I’m cold,” said Wexford. “I don’t want to stand about here.”
“Yes, all right, sorry. What was that you were reading?”
Wexford got into his car. “It was the letter Lesley Arbel was searching for and Sandra Dale has been searching for, which I have been searching for and have at last found.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me what was in it?”
“No,” said Wexford and he shut the car door. Rolling down the window halfway, he said, “I would have done but you’re too late, you’ve missed the boat. I’ll tell you in the morning.” He grinned. “I’ll tell you everything in the morning.”
And he drove away, leaving Burden standing there watching the car depart, not sure if he understood quite what “everything” implied.
20
BURDEN DROVE THE CAR DOWN TO THE SECOND LEVEL and parked as near as he could to where Gwen Robson’s body had lain nearly a month before. Every space on the level was now full and would be all day, every day, up until Christmas and beyond during the end-of-the-year sales.
Serge Olson was the first to get out of the car. He had come into the police station just as they were leaving to enquire when and how he would be permitted to visit Clifford Sanders in the remand prison, and Wexford had invited him to go with them. An Opel Kadett and a Ford Granada were now parked where Gwen Robson’s Escort and the Brooks’ blue Lancia had been. A Vauxhall came nosing round looking for a space and proceeded down the ramp towards the third level. But apart from themselves there were no people. It was car world, an area of car life where bodies were cars and people their brains or moving spirits. Oil and water lay in pools, car excrement, and the place smelt of car sweat.
Wexford shook himself out of fanciful imaginings and said, “Lately we seem to have lost sight somewhat of our victim, of Gwen Robson. But if she wasn’t the first to be murdered, she was at any rate the first we knew of—the first to draw our attention to this case.” Burden looked enquiringly at him, but he only shook his head.
“She brought her death on herself; she was a blackmailer. But like a lot of blackmailers she was—I won’t say innocent, she was naive. She tangled with the wrong person. And I think she justified what she was doing by the reason for which she wanted the money, which was to pay for her husband’s hip replacement. If he was to have this operation on the National Health service, it was possible he would have had to wait up to three years, by which time she feared he might be totally crippled. Three or four thousand pounds would pay for the replacement to be done privately and for hospitalization. At the time of her death, she had accumulated about sixteen hundred.” Wexford’s glance took in Olson and his driver. “Let’s go into the centre, shall we?”
It was one of those freak December days that are like April; all that was missing were the leaf buds on the trees. The flags on the turrets of the Barringdean building fluttered in a light breeze and the sky was milky-blue with clouds
like shreds of foam. They came out of the metal lift with its graffiti into mild sunshine.
” ‘This castle hath a pleasant seat,’ “ Wexford said dryly. And if you half-closed your eyes the centre’s medieval fortress look was compounded by the trolleys tumbled about the car-park entrance and across the roadway like siege-engines abandoned by their users. “I’ve already discussed this with you, Mike. We know that Lesley Arbel brought her aunt photocopies of letters received by the agony aunt of Kim, the magazine she worked for, in disregard of the undertaking she had given when she got the job not to divulge or discuss the contents of such letters. Nevertheless, she did make photocopies of certain letters and she did show them to Gwen Robson. Now Gwen Robson, being a salacious woman, was interested in a general way in what she was shown, but she was far more deeply interested in letters coming from people who lived in this neighbourhood.”
Walking along the covered way that would bring them to the doors in the middle of the central gallery, Wexford went on, “I don’t know what gave her the idea of blackmail, but it was an idea both obvious and clever. True, she might have picked up information of a damaging kind about her clients while she was working, but it was unlikely she would have been able to acquire documentary evidence. She had tried other ways of raising money, but these ways had either ceased—the old people who paid for special indulgences had died, for example—or failed, as in the case of Eric Swallow whom she was unable to induce to make a will in her favour. Blackmail remained, the blackmail of women whose secrets they dared only divulge to a more or less anonymous oracle, an agony aunt.
“Two letters particularly interested Gwen Robson both because of their sensational content and the addresses of the women who had written them. One was from a Mrs. Margaret Carroll of Ash Farm Lodge, Ash Lane, Forbydean, and the other … well, here we are halfway between Tesco and British Home Stores. Shall we go into the cafe for coffee, or a healthful veggie juice in Demeter?”
The dissenting voice was Olson’s, who would have preferred the vegetable juice. But he gave way gracefully, only stipulating decaffeinated coffee.
“I believe,” Wexford went on, “that Gwen Robson’s blackmailing efforts had been successful up to a point, that is, her two women victims had been paying her for her silence over a period of weeks or months. No doubt because, poor things, they couldn’t raise a lump sum. Let us come to the day in question, November 19, a Thursday and four-thirty in the afternoon, the time when more of the residents of Kingsmarkham seem to be in here than at any other. Gwen Robson arrived at four-forty, parked her car in the second level and came in most probably by the way we did, under the covered way and through the central door. Now we know what shopping she did, though not the order in which she did it, and we have no way of knowing how much window-shopping she indulged in. But we can make an intelligent guess that she started at British Home Stores where she bought her light bulbs and went on to Boots for her toothpaste and talcum powder. Let us say that brings us to five o’clock.
“Helen Brook is in Demeter next door here, buying calendula capsules. She sees Mrs. Robson out of the window and at once recognizes her as the busybody home help who criticized her lifestyle and said she hoped she would never have children—this presumably because she feared they would be illegitimate. Helen Brook intends to show herself to Mrs. Robson as ample proof that she is indeed about to have a child, but before she can do this she actually goes into labour, or has her first labour pain. However, she has already noticed that Mrs. Robson is in conversation with a very well-dressed girl. Whom do we know that we should describe like that? Lesley Arbel. The Robsons’ niece Lesley Arbel, whom we know to have been in Kingsmarkham that afternoon.”
The coffee came and with it a slice of Black Forest cake for Burden. He must be eating for comfort. Not for the first time Wexford marvelled at the manifest untruth expressed by healthy eating experts: that if you give up sweet things, you soon lose your sweet tooth. He turned his eyes from the chocolate cake, the cream and the cherries, and looked out at the concourse where in time for Christmas a subaqueous arrangement of coloured lights turned the fountain jets to red and blue and rose.
“The killer had in his or her possession, or so we have supposed,” he went on, “a circular knitting needle of some high-numbered gauge—that is with thicker pins at each end of the wire. But suppose it was Mrs. Robson herself who had it, and her killer took it from her? This is possible if in her innocence she showed it to her killer. She might have been into the wool and crafts shop immediately prior to her meeting with the well-dressed girl. Why did Lesley Arbel come in here when she knew she would see her aunt on the following day anyway? She wanted the photocopies of those letters back; she was starting to regret ever leaving them in Gwen Robson’s possession.
“Lesley Arbel is a narcissist, entirely self-absorbed, interested only in her appearance and the impression she makes on others. You’ll have to tell me if this is a sound description, Serge?”
“Near enough,” said Olson. “Narcissism is extreme self-love. The soul-image is not projected and a relatively unadapted state develops. A narcissist would be suspended in an early phase of psychosexual development where the sexual object is the self. This girl, does she have friends? Boyfriends?”
“We never heard of any. The only person she seems really to have liked was her aunt. How do you account for that if they don’t care for others?”
“The aunt might simply be a mirror. I mean—it’s Gwen Robson you’re talking about, isn’t it?—if Gwen Robson was much older than she and nothing much to look at, but really admired Lesley and flattered her and showed her off, that would be the only kind of ‘friend’ Lesley could tolerate. Her function would be to reflect the most flattering kind of Lesley-image. A lot of girls have that kind of relationship with their mothers—and we call those good relationships!”
“I think that was it,” said Wexford. “I think she also liked and valued her job and was very much afraid of losing it. Not only are jobs hard to come by anyway, but she feared that if she lost her job on Kim for this particular reason, a flagrant breach of confidence, she would in some way be blacklisted among magazines—and for all I know she was right. She wanted those letter copies back and she wanted to be sure they had not been copied in their turn.”
“Why would she kill Gwen Robson for that?” Olson asked, his frown deepening, his eyes very bright.
“She wouldn’t. She didn’t. It was only after she knew her aunt was dead that she became afraid about the photocopies and took the place apart trying to find them. As far as we know Gwen Robson didn’t knit: there was no evidence of her knitting in the house. And I am sure Lesley Arbel didn’t. Neither of them bought a circular knitting needle on the afternoon in question. Lesley, anyway, wasn’t even there. It is true, as she said, that she came to Kingsmarkham, but she came for the purpose she said she did—to make certain she was properly registered for her word-processor course. According to British Telecom the phones at Sundays were out of order all that day, the cables having been damaged by wind on the previous night. Lesley was unable to get through on the phone, so down she came. All quite clear and reasonable. Far from entering the Barringdean Centre, she went straight to the station and was on a train before her aunt left home.”
Burden objected. “But Helen What’s-her-name saw her.”
“She saw a well-dressed girl, Mike. The well-dressed girl was talking to Gwen Robson out in the Mandala concourse and the time was about five. Clifford Sanders was half-way through his session with you, Serge. Where was Dita Jago? Now from the first, I was very interested in Dita Jago. She of all possible suspects possessed the weapon—or versions and repeats of the weapon: she had in her house probably half a dozen circular knitting needles in various sizes, of small and large gauge. She is a heavily-built woman, but strong and light on her feet. Suppose she was another of Gwen Robson’s blackmailees—the hold which her neighbour had over her being the fact that far from being on the receiving end, so to
speak, in Auschwitz, she had in fact assisted the authorities? That afternoon we know that her daughter took her own two daughters and Dita Jago shopping, dropping her mother off at the public library and presumably leaving the two children with her. But perhaps that is only an alibi concocted by the two women. Perhaps Dita went with her daughter but instead of going into the centre, preferred to sit and wait for her inside the car in the car park.”
“Would anyone prefer sitting in that car park?”
“Someone like Dita Jago might, Mike, if she had something to knit or to read—both quite likely occupations in her case. Let us say that Gwen Robson parted from the very well-dressed girl, whoever she may be, and entered the Tesco supermarket on her own where she helped herself to a trolley and began her shopping. Now your Linda Naseem, Mike, says she saw her at about five-twenty but it might have been a bit after that. Most probably it was a little before five-thirty. Again she was observed talking to a girl, but this time only the girl’s back was seen. It may have been the same girl and it may not. All we know of her was that she was a girl, was slim and wearing some kind of hat. By now, Serge, Clifford is just about taking his leave of you prior to beginning his meditations in the car in Queen Street.
