by Ruth Rendell
“If you’ve finished, shall we pay the bill and take a walk? You’ve got chocolate icing on your chin, Mike.”
“Ratepayers?” queried Olson, eyeing the chit.
“I don’t see why not.” Wexford led them out into the I-shaped gallery, crossed the wide area between the line of seats and moved towards the concentric circles of flowers: poinsettias again today, fleshy-leaved kalanchoe and the Christmas cactus with spiky vermilion blossoms.
“The Mandala,” said Olson. “Schizophrenics and people in states of conflict dream of these things. In Sanskrit, the word means a circle. In Tibetan Buddhism, it has the significance of a ritual instrument or mantra.”
Looking at the flowers but taking in Olson’s words, Wexford couldn’t help seeing the instrument, also circular when so manipulated, that had killed Gwen Robson. And then he remembered his own dreams after the bomb—the circular images full of patterns, kaleidoscopic designs of extreme and severe symmetry. And there was comfort in what Olson was saying: “Its order compensates for the disorder and confusion of the psychic state. It can be an attempt at self-healing.”
They paused outside the window and the wool and crafts shop. Today the display was of canvases for tapestry work; the hanks of wool and needles had disappeared.
“Go on, Reg,” said Olson.
“Gwen Robson talks to the girl in the hat, packs her shopping into two carrier bags and leaves the centre by the Tesco supermarket exit which brings her out some two hundred yards or so to the left of the covered way. She follows the path through the car park, probably pushing her two bags in a trolley which she abandons in the trolley park at the lift-head, then goes down in the lift to the second level. It is still full of cars, the time being no more than five-forty.
“Dita Jago, sitting in her daughter’s car knitting, sees her come in and also sees her opportunity. She pulls the circular needle out from her work, leaves the car, goes up behind Gwen Robson on her light feet, and, as Gwen Robson is unlocking the door of the Escort, strangles her with this highly efficient garrote.”
“Is that really what you think happened?” asked Burden as they entered Tesco. He took a wire basket, having always in such places an uneasy feeling that to walk through without one might not be illegal but was suspect and reprehensible behaviour, likely to lead store detectives to the belief that you were up to no good. He even helped himself to a can of aerosol shoe polish. “You really think she is our perpetrator?”
“You’ll destroy the ozone layer,” Wexford said. “You’ll coat the earth in black froth—and all for the sake of shiny shoes, you narcissist. No, I don’t think Dita’s our perpetrator; I know she isn’t. The librarian at the High Street branch of the library remembers her being there with the two little girls from somewhere around four-fifty until about five-thirty, when her daughter came back to collect her. She was checking up on facts for this book she’s writing, we now know. The librarian remembers because the little girls kept asking the time; they were supposed to be reading, but they kept asking their grandmother if it was half-past five yet and then they asked other people and had to be hushed. Dita Jago took out three books and the date is on the library’s computer.”
Burden took his aerosol to Linda Naseem’s checkout. If she recognized him she gave no sign of it, but as they passed on he looked back and saw her chattering in whispers to the girl next to her. The main exit doors slid open to let them pass through into the sunshine. There was a seat out there, just outside, with a strip of turf dividing the centre from the biggest above-ground car park. Wexford sat down in the middle of it with Olson on his left and Burden—after examining his purchase, scrutinizing the label to see if what Wexford had said of it might be true—on his right.
Wexford said, “We’ll return to those letters. Now I knew that these particular letters would have to be out of the common run, not quite of the my-boyfriend-keeps-pressurizing-me-to-go-all-the-way genre. They were going to be of the kind that even in these days Kim wouldn’t care to print. The agony aunt’s assistant gave me an example of this type when she said someone had enquired about the protein content of semen.”
“You don’t mean it?” said Burden, horrified. “You’re joking.”
“I only wish I had that much imagination, Mike.” Wexford grinned. “One thing I did understand—where the letter copies had gone. The killer took them out of Gwen Robson’s handbag after the deed was done, that much seemed obvious. The killer’s own letter and the other. One of the writers was Mrs. Margaret Carroll, but Gwen Robson never blackmailed her; she had nothing to blackmail her about. So we come to the other.
“My daughter Sylvia brought me copies of Kim magazine covering four years, about two hundred copies therefore. When I read through the agony aunt’s pages I wasn’t looking for a letter. I was looking for an answer, only because I was hoping against hope that this would be one of those appeals considered too … well, what? Obscene, indecent—hardly. Too open and revealing perhaps to print. But the agony aunt’s reply would be printed under a heading with enough information to give me more than a clue as to who the writer was.
“There are common initials to have and highly unusual ones. I’d say mine, RW are pretty ordinary—and yours too, Mike, MB. And your wife and your elder son both with JB even more so. ‘JB, Kingsmarkham’ wouldn’t convey much, would it? But your initials, Serge, are something else; SO isn’t a usual combination at all. And the combination I was looking for must be even rarer.
“Well, I found it. Take a look at this.”
He had made a copy of the relevant back page of Kim and he passed the original to Burden and the copy to Olson.
Burden read his aloud: “‘NQ, Sussex: I understand and sympathize with you in your dilemma. Yours is certainly a difficult and potentially tragic situation. But if there is the slightest possibility that the man you mention could be an AIDS carrier, you must see your doctor at once. Tests can be easily and quickly carried out and your mind set at rest once and for all. Feeling guilty and ashamed is pointless. Better realize that by delaying you are putting your husband, your marriage and your family life in danger. Sandra Dale.’ “
“Nina Quincy?” said Burden when he had finished. “Mrs. Jago’s daughter?”
“The letter that was never printed was photocopied by Lesley Arbel and shown to Gwen Robson. The full name and address were on that, of course. And Gwen Robson knew at once who it was; she had met Nina Quincy in Mrs. Jago’s house when she was hunting for two people to witness Eric Swallow’s will. She was introduced to her and noted the unusual name. Nina Quincy lives in a big house in Down Road, she has her own car. To someone like Gwen, she would appear rich and a fine potential subject for blackmail.
“And for a time, I believe, she paid up. She has a part-time job of her own, and the likelihood is that for some weeks she was giving a considerable part of her salary to Gwen. You must understand that she was worried sick. Picture what it must have been like. Her husband had been away abroad on business and she had gone to a party, drunk too much, spent the night with a man she afterwards discovered to be bisexual and actually living with someone dying of AIDS. She was afraid to go to a doctor, especially as by the time she made her discovery her husband had been home for some time and they had been leading a normal sex life. Or so I suppose. I haven’t seen this letter because the copy of it no longer exists and Kim, who claim to keep all letters sent to them for a three-year-period, are unable to find either this or the Carroll letter.
“On November 19, Nina Quincy—who still had not consulted her doctor or said anything of this to her husband, though the reply to the letter appeared in Kim last May—went as usual to the Barringdean Centre, having dropped off her mother and the two children at the library, entering here at about five to five. The first shop she went to was the wool and crafts place where she bought the first item on her mother’s shopping list, a circular knitting needle gauge number eight—that is, a length of plastic-covered wire with a stout peg at each end mea
suring perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter. This, or something similar, would be a purchase she had often made in the past for her mother.
“Coming out of the shop, she encountered Gwen Robson by the Mandala. It wasn’t very imaginative of us to conclude that someone Helen Brook thought well-dressed would also appear well-dressed to us—at least to Mike and me, a couple of conventional coppers. Helen Brook would have turned her nose up at Lesley Arbel’s pencil skirts and high heels. But Nina Quincy was dressed in just the way Helen admired: elaborate tapestry knits, a patterned beret and her hair down her back, a fringed shawl no doubt, a peasant-style skirt, jacquard socks. You see how I’ve worked on getting my terms right. Anyway, that’s well-dressed in Ashtoreth’s mother’s book. What did she have to say to Gwen Robson? I think she pleaded with her to ask for no more. I think she told her that it was impossible to go on paying her at this rate—fifty pounds a week or perhaps more? And we must conclude that Gwen Robson did not relent, but said something to the effect of her need being greater than Nina’s and perhaps that Nina shouldn’t have done what she did if she didn’t expect to pay for it. She was that sort of woman, was Gwen.
“If you’ve sunned yourselves enough we may as well take a look at their Christmas tree, see if it’s as good as ours, then we’ll go underground once more.”
“Are you going to tell us,” said Olson, “that Nina followed her while she was shopping? That sounds grotesque.”
“Not necessarily; they may have encountered each other again at the checkout. After all, whatever trouble she was in Nina did continue to lead the life of a housewife and mother; she did do her own shopping and her mother’s. She had to do it and then she had her mother and her daughters to pick up at five-thirty. So, yes, we’ll say they met again at the checkout and more words passed between them, only a back view of Nina and her beret being visible to Linda Naseem. But they left the Tesco separately, meeting for the third time that afternoon only when they were both in the car park.
“Those white lights look a bit stark, don’t you think? I prefer our rainbow effect.”
The three of them stood underneath the Norway spruce which towered to a height of thirty feet. A notice at its foot announced that Father Christmas would be in the centre to meet children every day from Tuesday December 22. The date reminded Wexford of what today’s was, one week before that, and raised into the forefront of his mind Sheila’s court appearance. She would have left the court some hours ago and the waiting photographers and television cameras would have departed. By now it would be in the papers. Not for her the angry hand pushed against the lens, the averted head or coat held up like a yashmak, the veil to inhibit recognition. She would want to be seen, want the whole nation to know … He made one of those shifts that are much a remarkable feature of man’s mental processes, as if a lever were lifted and a new picture dropped into place, or a kaleidoscope shaken. With the others following, he stepped into the shade and cold of the covered way.
“We can’t tell exactly what happened next,” he said, “but Nina Quincy—having settled matters at last, having taken action and perhaps feeling relief—had got into her car and driven away. She picked up her mother and her children and took them home. The blackmail was over; Gwen Robson would never menace her again. She, however, had something left to do. Now that this particular threat was past, she had to go to her doctor and arrange to have that test.
“Well, eventually she did and the test was negative. She had nothing to fear and she knew her husband was an unforgiving man. Yet when he confessed to her some indiscretion of his own which he’d committed while he was in America, she was silly enough to tell him the whole story … and he left her.”
Beyond the open gates, across Pomeroy Road in his window sat Archie Greaves. Wexford put up his hand in a salute, though sure the old man wouldn’t be able to see him, certainly wouldn’t recognize him. But there was an answering wave from beyond the glass, the wave Archie would give to any friendly customer in the Barringdean Centre. They went down in the lift and stepped out at the second level. A car went round rather too fast, splashing oil from a puddle—a red car, of course.
“You didn’t say anything about her taking the letter copies from Mrs. Robson’s bag,” said Burden.
“She didn’t take them.”
“But someone—”
“Once she had made her decision, she had nothing to fear from that letter. She had already told Gwen Robson while they were in the centre that blackmail was pointless as she intended to go to her doctor and confess to her husband.”
There was a space now where the Robson Escort had been parked, and the space where the blue Lancia had been was empty too. Burden stood in the middle holding out his arms in rather a dramatic way, a foot on either side of the dividing white line. And in a voice made shrill by exasperated bewilderment, he demanded to know why it was then that Nina Quincy had done murder.
21
THEY STOOD FOR A WHILE ON THE SPOT WHERE Gwen Robson had died.
“You know, Mike,” Wexford said, “I don’t think we’ve considered sufficiently what a horrible crime this was. We’ve accepted it, not put it into perspective. Only a very few people would be capable of committing such a crime. What—approach a woman either from behind or face-to-face and garrote her with a wire? Imagine the horror of it, the helpless thrashings of the victim, her struggles … who but one of those psychopaths you’re so keen on could stand it?”
“I must say,” Olson put in, “I wouldn’t have thought a … well, fairly sheltered ordinary middle-class sort of girl like Nina Quincy with a conventional lifestyle capable of it. But I’m not a policeman, I don’t know. The affectivity might be there, but it’s just that a young mother—that’s the last category you’d pick on for this kind of crime. In my game, that is.”
“And in mine,” said Wexford. “When I said that Nina Quincy felt satisfied because she had taken action, I meant only that the action she had taken was her defiance of Gwen Robson, her decision to get medical help at last. Of course she didn’t kill her, though I daresay she sometimes would have liked to, which is what I think you mean. But she didn’t kill her. In order to be back in the High Street and at the library by five-thirty, she must have left the Barringdean Centre by five-twenty at the latest, and we know the earliest time at which Gwen Robson could have died was five-thirty-five.”
THE ACRID STENCH OF PETROL MADE WEXFORD WRINKLE up his nose. “If we want to save our lungs, we’d better get back in the car,” he said. “Before we go into the next sequence of events, perhaps we should take a look at the couple called Roy and Margaret Carroll. We already know that the writer of the other letter was Margaret Carroll—a woman with something of a social conscience, a woman who was upset when she discovered that her neighbour was in the habit of punishing her little boy by shutting him up in cold, dark attics.”
“Do you know who they are?” Burden said to Olson. “Neighbours of Clifford and the late Dodo Sanders? Does it mean anything to you?”
“Clifford mentioned her,” Olson said carefully. “He said she once threatened his mother with the cruelty-to-children people.”
“That’s right. She was also concerned about another aspect of the Sanders’ life, though this was something she didn’t begin to suspect until last summer. Strange, isn’t it, how all these things erupted last summer around May and June? Her own life was none too easy, I suspect, with a husband of a kind usually called a brute—a Cold Comfort Farm kind of character, only grimly for real. He was going to have a go at us last night with a twelve-bore. Did Mike tell you?”
Olson raised his brown tufty eyebrows. “Where is he now?”
“In custody, where I hope he’ll remain for quite a while.”
“And the wife? What’s happened to her?”
“She left him last summer—something else that happened then, about June, I think. The wonder was that she didn’t go years ago. Well, no, I’m deceiving you and I don’t want to do that. Let’s say only
that she seems to have left him; at any rate she disappeared. Clifford believes there was a man friend and Carroll gives the impression of believing that too. I don’t. I think Margaret Carroll is dead, just as Charles Sanders is dead. A year after Roy Carroll and his wife came to live at Ash Farm Lodge, Charles Sanders died. That was why he never came back to see his little boy, why he seemed to abandon his old mother, why he contributed nothing to his son’s support, why his wife was obliged to live on what she drew from their joint account—an account steadily though meagrely fed from Charles Sanders’ investments—and incidentally why Mike hasn’t been able to find him.
“Let’s go back, shall we? We’ve renewed our acquaintance with the place; we can hold what we need to in our mind’s eye.”
Burden reversed the car and circled slowly towards the upward ramp. “Is that what they’re doing up there at Ash Lane, searching for Charles Sanders’ body?”
“Well, the remains of it, Mike. It’s eighteen years past and there won’t be much left. Frankly, I don’t know where to begin the search for Mrs. Carroll, but there are ways of help open to us.
“You see, Mrs. Carroll suspected Sanders was dead when she was in her branch of the Midland Bank and saw Dorothy Sanders drawing a cheque on a joint account. She happened to stand next to her and quite innocently saw this over her shoulder. At any rate I think so; it’s an intelligent enough guess. Did other pieces then begin to fall into place? The sudden and quite unexpected death of Charles Sanders’ father? This death immediately followed by the departure of Charles? The memory soon after of secret digging? Not enough for her to come to us—or perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to the enormity of such a step. It was a pity she didn’t; she might be alive today if she had.”
When the car turned into the High Street something recalled Wexford’s mind to Sheila and the tribulations of her day. She or someone representing her would have phoned Dora by now. What had happened to her—an account of what had happened with pictures—would be in the evening paper. It would be on the streets by now; the London evening papers were always on Kingsmarkham streets by three and it was nearly four. The sun was setting, dyeing the sky a gold that would fade to pink and darken to dusky purple. He caught sight of a newsboard with something on it about missile treaty talks and felt a ridiculous relief because Sheila’s name wasn’t there. As if Sheila’s court appearance, Sheila’s fate must as a matter of course be the lead story.
