Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  A leather-bound directory lay on a table by the telephone. Wexford himself held his daughters’ phone numbers in his head. He was justly and secretly proud of his memory, knowing it to be exceptional.

  ‘What’s the daughter’s married name?’

  ‘Her surname? That I wouldn’t know. I’d no reason ever to be told that, had I? Jennifer, they call her. Mr Knighton could tell you.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve no doubt he knows his own daughter’s name,’ said Wexford. ‘You can go home now, Mrs Thompson, if you like. I expect we’ll want to see you again. We’ll let you know.’

  ‘Don’t I get a lift home then?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I should think the least you could do is one of you run me home. I reported finding her, didn’t I? I’ve helped you with your enquiries. It’s usual to arrange for transport under the circumstances.’

  Wexford was amused. ‘Not in this neck of the sticks it isn’t. Maybe in Y Division or Los Angeles. You’ve been watching too many crime serials.’

  Renie Thompson stuck her chin in the air and flounced out. Wexford laughed.

  ‘She only lives in Paunceley,’ said Burden. ‘You don’t think she could have done it?’

  ‘Come on. She couldn’t tell a Beretta from a bottle opener. Have you finished, Murdoch? Better get back then. Martin, I want Knighton’s daughter found—she lives somewhere in Sewingbury—and the sons too if possible. I want a house-to-house between here and Sewingbury and the other side of Thatto Vale through Paunceley. Luckily, or maybe unluckily, there aren’t that many houses.’

  ‘What are we looking for, sir?’

  ‘Any suspicious happenings during the night, any strange cars seen, strangers on foot yesterday or in the night. Oh, and we’re looking for Knighton. Very keenly are we looking for Knighton.’

  When they had gone Wexford began telling Burden about China. Not about the trip in general—with restraint he had done that weeks before—but everything he could recall of Adam and Adela Knighton. It wasn’t much. By a curious irony he had paid more attention to the other members of the train party than he had to the Knightons and their friend. Perhaps it was because the others had been rather thrust upon him and when, belatedly, he had made the Knightons’ acquaintance it was at a time when he was being most bedevilled, haunted, plagued by that fantasy or hallucination or whatever you liked to call it. To the women he had hardly spoken a word, to Knighton … What could he remember of him? A tall, thin, silver-haired man in his sixties who had looked for a moment as if he had seen a vision and who had recited, for no apparent reason, a strange little piece of Chinese poetry. To Burden, now that he told all this—leaving out only the bit about his own visions—and delved in that excellent memory of his, he was able to reproduce, accurately, he was sure, every sentence he had heard Adam and Adela Knighton utter.

  ‘It may be useful,’ said Burden not very encouragingly.

  Wexford retorted rather obscurely, though Burden understood. ‘Well, it wasn’t a burglar, was it? She didn’t get up and go down for a burglar. A burglar didn’t come up behind her and stick a gun in the back of her head. It wasn’t like that. And where the hell is Knighton?’

  ‘Murdered his wife and run off with her friend. No, but seriously, it looks as if he might have. Not run off with the friend, I don’t mean that. Not at their ages. But had a row with her in the night and shot her and then got the hell out. Why not? It’s the most likely thing. He could be out of the country by now, probably is. People in his position always have wealthy and influential friends.’

  ‘You don’t need wealthy and influential friends,’ snapped Wexford. ‘You just need to buy a plane ticket. On American Express. It’s all made so damned easy these days. OK, I agree it’s quite likely, though I’d have expected them to be upstairs having their row if she was in her nightdress, and I certainly wouldn’t have expected an English gentleman like Knighton to shoot anyone, let alone his wife, through the back of the head.’

  ‘That’s going to bother you a lot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They were in the living room. Once three or four small rooms, now made into one, it was about thirty feet long with french windows at the back and casements giving on to the front lawns and the drive. A grandfather clock began chiming eleven with rich sonorous notes. Wexford heard another sound. He moved to one of the windows and looked out. A car was coming up the drive, a large dark blue Ford.

  ‘That’s one of the Kingsmarkham station taxis,’ said Burden.

  ‘Yes.’

  The car drew up. A man got out of the back of it, paid the driver and picked up a black leather suitcase of overnight bag size which he had set down on the gravel for a moment, and walked towards the front door where he was lost to their view.

  ‘Knighton,’ said Wexford.

  His key turned in the lock. The two policemen stood absolutely still, waiting. The front door opened and closed, footsteps sounded across the hall and Knighton’s voice called, ‘Adela!’

  It was time to declare themselves. Wexford coughed but perhaps Knighton didn’t hear, for when he saw the two men emerge from his living room he gave a violent start.

  ‘What on earth …!’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Knighton,’ Wexford said. ‘Yes, we’ve met before. In China. I see you recognize me as I do you. Chief Inspector Wexford of Kingsmarkham CID. This is Inspector Burden.’

  ‘Mr Wexford, yes. I do remember you, though I had no idea … What are you doing in my house? Has there been some sort of robbery or what …?’

  ‘That we don’t yet know. However, something very serious has taken place. You must be prepared for …’

  ‘Where’s my wife?’

  Wexford told him. All the colour went out of Knighton’s face. He walked into the living room and sat down in an armchair.

  ‘Shot?’ he said. ‘Adela—shot?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s true, sir.’

  ‘Shot by some intruder? She’s dead?’

  ‘Yes, it appears she was shot by someone who forced an entry to this house during the night.’

  Knighton passed a hand across his face. ‘And you—you’re a policeman in Kingsmarkham? You came in here and found my wife dead?’

  ‘I among others. Your cleaner notified us.’

  ‘Good God. Good God in heaven!’

  Burden had sat down and now Wexford sat down too. Knighton’s face was still paper-white, his eyes glassy with shock. Wexford could have sworn it had been a shock. He noticed something that hadn’t really struck him while they were in China—his wretched preoccupation with the old woman with bound feet, no doubt, had distracted him—he noticed how extraordinarily good-looking Knighton was. He was still good-looking now, though he looked ill with shock. What must he have been like when young? He still had a boy’s figure, a young man’s lithe carriage, and his features were of the classical sort, grown somewhat marble-like with age. His golden locks time had to silver turned. Adela Knighton, on the other hand, had been very plain, ugly even. And hers was the kind of ugliness not created by time but bred in the bone.

  All that, of course, might be quite irrelevant. Wexford asked the classic requisite question that always made him feel like a character in a detective story.

  ‘Where were you last night, sir?’

  ‘Where was I? Staying with a friend in London. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Routine.’

  ‘Good God.’ A sort of horrified understanding twisted Knighton’s mouth. ‘I thought you said a burglar …’

  ‘If you could just tell us where you were last night, sir, the name of your friend and so on, we should be able to get through this painful business a good deal faster.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Knighton hesitated a fraction. ‘An old friend of mine, Henry Lacey,’ he said, ‘was giving a dinner party at a club to which both he and I belong. The Palimpsest in St James’s. It was to celebrate his fifty years at the bar, what it would be the fashion to call a Gold
en Jubilee, I suppose. I was invited. On such occasions I stay in London as I have never cared to fetch my wife out with the car at one o’clock in the morning. And the station taxi service is not available at that hour, as you doubtless know.’

  ‘You stayed at the club?’

  ‘No, with a friend who has a flat in Hyde Park Gardens.’

  The phone rang. Knighton gave another violent start. Wexford was rather surprised that he glanced at him for the go-ahead before answering it. He nodded.

  Knighton gave the number in a steady low voice. Whoever was at the other end, unless exceptionally insensitive, would have recognized it as the voice of one recently bereaved. A cruel estimate, Wexford thought, but just. Knighton was shocked but he was not unhappy—perhaps unhappiness would come hereafter.

  ‘Oh, Jennifer …’ It was the daughter. ‘The police have told you? Have you talked to Rod? Yes, please do come …’ He put the phone down, again touched his forehead with his hand. ‘My son is coming and my daughter and son-in-law.’

  ‘I understand you have four children?’

  ‘A daughter and three sons. One is in America and one in Turkey.’

  ‘While we’re waiting for your son and Mr and Mrs …?’

  ‘Norris. My son-in-law is a solicitor with Symonds, O’Brien and Ames in Kingsmarkham.’

  ‘While we’re waiting for them, perhaps you’ll give me the name of your friend in Hyde Park Gardens and the address of Mr Henry Lacey.’

  Jennifer and Angus Norris got there first. She was a plain young woman, dumpy and freckled, who resembled her mother. She was also about seven months pregnant and Wexford remembered Adela Knighton speaking of another grandchild ‘on the way.’

  Her brother Roderick turned up soon afterwards in a yellow Triumph TR7, having driven very fast from London. He was handsome and tall like his father, though anxious-looking and a good deal older than his sister. A barrister also, Wexford gathered. The law was well represented in the Knighton family to whom this lawless thing had happened. The spry little son-in-law, no taller than his wife and with a shock of dark curly hair surrounding a bald spot, he had sometimes seen in the Magistrates’ and Crown Courts.

  Young Mrs Norris had a manner Wexford had met before in women of the upper middle class who have led indulged lives. She called her parents Mummy and Daddy and spoke of her family and its immediate circle as of an élite.

  ‘It’s so awful, I feel it just can’t be happening to us. Daddy was at the criminal bar, you know, and I remember Mummy saying how that really brought home to one what a horrendous lot of murders there actually are. And Daddy used to say she needn’t worry because only a fraction of those murders happened to people like us, they were nearly all confined to the lower classes. And now poor Mummy … I mean, it seems so unfair. You lead a decent life and try to keep up some sort of standard and then an appalling thing like this has to happen.’

  No doubt she would have found the murder more comprehensible if Renie Thompson had been the victim. But for those remarks of hers Wexford might not have asked where she and her husband had been on the previous night.

  ‘What sort of time had you in mind?’ said Norris. ‘What does “night” mean?’ He spoke in the style he used when cross-examining nervous witnesses. ‘What time did all this take place?’

  ‘Let’s just stick to “night” for the moment, Mr Norris.’

  ‘I asked because it so happens I took my wife out for a while during the evening.’

  Jennifer Norris made a sound which in the circumstances couldn’t have been laughter but which came very near it, an unamused grim laugh. Her brother turned cold magisterial eyes on her.

  ‘Yes, but really, Angus, you took me out! What he means, Rod, is that we walked down to the river and back and had a drink at the Millers’, the usual extent of our wining and dining these days …’

  Wexford coughed.

  ‘Yes, well, Chief Inspector,’ began Norris who had gone rather pink, ‘we went to bed early, we …’

  ‘Oh, Angus, let me tell him. My doctor gives me a mild sedative and the result is I sleep like a log. And lately we’ve been taking the phone off the hook, so if poor Mummy had tried to get through …’ It was plain to Wexford that she couldn’t for a moment imagine she or her husband might come under suspicion. This was murder in the course of robbery. This was a ‘lower class’ crime. ‘We live in Springhill Lane, actually,’ she volunteered. ‘In one of the old houses.’ This was a facet of local snobbism Wexford had encountered once or twice before. People living in this prestigious district of Sewingbury had an edge on their neighbours if they possessed one of the original seventeenth-century houses. There were perhaps half a dozen of these, around and among which new building had taken place during the past twenty years.

  ‘Mummy can’t have heard that glass breaking. She had a phone by her bed and even if she couldn’t get through to us she’d have tried to phone the police. I mean, how could she have hoped to deal with some rough type like that?’

  ‘He forced an entry by breaking a window?’ asked Norris.

  ‘Not exactly, Mr Norris. Rather let’s say a pane of glass was cut out from a window. And what were your movements last night, Mr Knighton?’

  Roderick Knighton had a breezy manner. He glanced frequently at his watch. Already he had made several phone calls, declaring during the intervals between them that he didn’t know what use he could be here but if there was anything he could do his father, sister and the Chief Inspector had only to ask. He yawned, looked once more at his watch and replied to Wexford that he had hardly slept a wink on the previous night, he and his wife and the au pair having been up for most of it with the youngest child who was ill.

  ‘Mumps, actually,’ he said. ‘Poor little scrap.’

  Jennifer Norris had put her feet up. Her husband was standing by one of the windows, looking thoughtful. He seemed worried or puzzled, perhaps only concerned that a man in his position—as he would doubtless refer to himself—could suddenly find himself involved in so unsavoury a business. And Wexford’s next remark made him turn slowly round to exchange with his wife a glance of dismay or possibly incredulity.

  ‘I’d like to see what we can do by way of making an inventory of Mrs Knighton’s missing jewellery.’

  For Knighton this was a hopeless task. He now seemed stunned or bemused by what had happened and his face was drained of all colour and animation. He sat limply in an armchair, gazing at a fixed point and occasionally shaking himself out of his reverie with a shiver. Wexford’s suggestion fetched from him a vague shake of the head. Roderick was on the phone again, whispering discreetly, sometimes cupping his hand round the mouthpiece.

  ‘Is any jewellery actually missing?’ asked Norris in his courtroom drawl.

  ‘One would suppose so. There’s none in the house.’ Wexford said dryly, ‘I’m assuming Mrs Knighton possessed jewellery apart from her wedding ring.’

  ‘Of course she did,’ said Jennifer very sharply. Wexford wondered how much of that steel-trap snapping Norris had to put up with. ‘There was a gold bracelet that had been my grandmother’s,’ she said, and added with a resounding lack of discretion, ‘that she always said would be mine one day.’ Norris closed his eyes and winced. ‘And her pearls, of course. A few rings and brooches, a couple of watches. We aren’t the sort of people who decorate ourselves like Christmas trees. Mummy thought it dreadfully vulgar to have your ears pierced.’

  ‘I’d like you to do your best to make a list, Mrs Norris. No doubt your father gave her presents of jewellery over the years?’

  Knighton said nothing. Wexford suddenly noticed the large, square-cut diamond on the daughter’s small red left hand. ‘I don’t actually think he did much,’ she said.

  Dr Moss, who was Crocker’s partner and Adam Knighton’s GP, arrived at one and offered Knighton sleeping pills, tranquillizers and restrained sympathy. Roderick said he would be off but if there was anything he could do they had only to ring him. He left a string
of phone numbers. Jennifer Norris remarked to her husband that they could phone her brother in Washington now, it would be eight in the morning in Washington. To her brother in Ankara she had sent a cable.

  Wexford went back to the police station.

  The house-to-house had produced nothing. Wexford hadn’t thought it would. Thatto Hall Farm was too isolated. Pending Sir Hilary Tremlett’s report, Crocker had volunteered that death had taken place approximately between two and four a.m. It would be at least tomorrow before they knew more: the type of gun used, the precise cause of death, other injuries, if any, to the body.

  ‘It wasn’t a burglary, was it?’ asked Burden. ‘It was a clumsy half-hearted attempt to make it look like a burglary.’

  Wexford nodded. ‘Possibly not even what Jennifer Norris calls a “rough type”.’

  ‘Knighton,’ said Burden cautiously, ‘is not what anyone would call a rough type.’

  Wexford’s eyebrows went up.

  Burden sat down in the only other seat apart from Wexford’s swivel one that might remotely be called an armchair. ‘He’s fixed himself up a wonderful alibi for an innocent man. Going up to London, dining in St James’s, staying in Hyde Park Gardens. He hardly ever spends a night away from home but the very night he does his wife gets murdered. Would you have reckoned when you met him in China that he was—well, fond of his wife? I mean, was it a happy marriage?’

  ‘Marriage is a funny old carry-on altogether, isn’t it? Hard to say. I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Helpful. I really came to say do you feel like a spot of lunch? The Pearl of Africa? Oh, God, I can see it in your face, you want to go Chinese again. The day is coming when I shan’t be able to face another crispy noodle.’

  ‘I can’t resist impressing people with my dazzling virtuosity with the chopsticks,’ said Wexford as they walked down Queen Street towards the Many-Splendoured Dragon. ‘D’you know, Mike, I wish I’d paid more attention to the Knightons in China. I’ve a feeling it would have been profitable. But all I can really remember is Knighton sitting at a table and suddenly looking as if he’d seen a ghost. Or maybe not a ghost.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the Holy Grail or the City of God or, if he were Dante, Beatrice.’