Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford, who had been silent, sat down at his desk and, taking the replica gun, turned it slowly over and over in his hands, saying, ‘He was sitting on that roof, drinking cassia wine, and suddenly he saw something that utterly astounded him. Not something unpleasant, mark you, rather the reverse. I could almost hazard a guess he saw something wonderful. But what did he see?’

  ‘A pretty girl,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Oh, come on. You’d only look like that when you saw a pretty girl if you’d been shut up in solitary confinement for the past twenty years.’

  ‘An old friend?’ said Burden. ‘Someone maybe he’d defended in court years ago and thought he’d never see again?’

  ‘In that case why didn’t he immediately get up and go and speak to him? Why did he go and lean over the parapet and start muttering Chinese poetry?’

  ‘You’d better ask him.’

  ‘I will, but I’m sure he’ll lie about it. One of the things we have to do is find out just who knew he was going to be away last Tuesday night. We haven’t done much about that but it’s on the cards a good many people did know. Everyone at that Golden Jubilee party at the Palimpsest Club for a start. Probably most of Mrs Knighton’s acquaintances in Sewingbury. Friends or relations she may have written to or talked to on the phone.’

  ‘You mean,’ said the doctor, ‘it’s a bit fishy it happened that night. I mean here’s a chap stays away from his home once a year and on the very night he’s away his wife gets murdered.’

  ‘At any rate it teaches us that it was planned. It may have been planned by one of those people who knew he’d be away or it may have been planned by Knighton himself in collusion with someone else or Knighton may have done it alone.’

  ‘Everyone in Hyde Park Gardens,’ said Burden, ‘is being questioned as to the possibility of their having seen Knighton that night.’ He hesitated, said in a rather embarrassed way, ‘You may think this very far-fetched …’

  Wexford countered, ‘I’m the one that gets accused of that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s infectious. Maybe it’s because I—well, I sort of read more than I used.’ It was well known that Burden’s cultured wife was in the habit of recommending books to him, was one of those rare people who like being read to and had discovered in her husband an unexpected histrionic talent for reading aloud. Burden’s face had become a little pink. ‘Fiction, you know. I must admit to having read only novels lately.’

  Wexford exploded into a quotation from Jane Austen.

  ‘Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!’

  ‘OK, let him tell us his idea,’ said Crocker.

  ‘It’s just that—well, it sounds like something out of Conan Doyle really. On the other hand, you do read in the papers sometimes …’ Seeing Wexford’s eyes sharpening with rage, Burden went on hurriedly, ‘You hear of old lags, or any villains really, getting sent down by a judge and swearing to get back at him later. Right? And I’m pretty sure I’ve come across actual cases—attempts anyway. It did strike me it might be something like that which had happened here.’

  ‘Knighton wasn’t a judge.’

  ‘No, but someone accused of a crime in a case where he was prosecuting might feel much the same towards him as towards the judge. He might easily feel that Knighton’s presentation of the evidence against him had more effect on the jury than the judge’s summing up. Say that because of what Knighton said for the prosecution some guy either got convicted when he expected to be acquitted or got sent down for twice as long as he anticipated. Mightn’t he then resolve to get back at Knighton when he came out? And I reckon Knighton’s prosecuted in dozens of possible cases. His name was always in the papers.’

  ‘You mean this chap shot Mrs Knighton to get revenge on her husband?’ Wexford was interested. He didn’t dislike the idea. ‘It’s a possibility, especially if as you say Knighton got him put away for ten years instead of four or five. Wouldn’t he shoot Knighton, though?’

  ‘There’s many a married man,’ said Burden, ‘whose life wouldn’t be worth living without his wife.’ He gave the doctor an uneasy look as if he expected to be laughed at. ‘I know I felt that way when Jean died and if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous I’d feel it now about Jenny.’ The others didn’t laugh but Burden himself did in a high embarrassed sort of way.

  ‘Knighton had been married a very long time too,’ said Crocker. ‘If you believe the funny postcards and the cartoons and whatever, you’d think that made people less fond. But it doesn’t. The long habit of the years, the shared things, the curious kind of oneness—my God! You haven’t had a chance yet, young Mike. You don’t know the half of it.’

  And nor did Irene Bell, thought Wexford. He quoted:

  ‘Shoot not the wild geese from the south;

  Let them northward fly.

  When you do shoot, shoot the pair of them,

  So that the two may not be put asunder.’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’

  Wexford told them. ‘I got the library here to trace it for me. It’s a Chinese poem from a collection of T’ang verse, ninth century. The poet was called Shen Hsun and a curious note to it is that he and his wife were murdered by a slave.

  ‘We keep coming back to China, don’t we? I’ve got a feeling, I’ve had it almost since the murder really, that the key to all this was in China.’

  ‘You can’t very well go back there,’ said the doctor.

  ‘No, but I can at least see the people Adela Knighton travelled across Asia with. I met them too, remember. There were some strange things …’ He told them about the two men who hadn’t spoken to each other from Irkutsk to Kweilin, about Wong who had drowned. ‘She and he took photographs in China, they were always making with the camera. What’s happened to those photographs? Why aren’t they in her album or sculling about the house in packets? No, I’m more and more sure it’s to China and what happened there that we have to look. I just wish I’d taken more notice. I wasn’t to know, of course, but usually I like watching people, seeing how they behave. I was too damned preoccupied with that woman with the bound feet.’

  Crocker looked at him. ‘What woman?’

  Diffidently Wexford told him. He had often felt he should have told him long before but he never had. When the symptoms disappear who cares about the cause of the disease? Crocker, who hadn’t even smiled at Burden’s marital confidings, now burst out laughing.

  ‘What had you been reading?’

  ‘OK, I know, something called Masterpieces of the Supernatural and I never finished it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have your imagination for all the tea in China.’

  ‘Sure, but all hallucinations are from the imagination. That doesn’t make them any less real to the hallucinator. D’you think it was just that book and lack of sleep?’

  ‘And getting dehydrated and drinking that filthy Maotai you brought home a bottle of.’

  ‘Start getting worried,’ said Burden, ‘when you see the lady tottering over the Kingsbrook Bridge.’

  Wexford gave him a bland look. ‘We mustn’t risk not investigating the possibilities of this revenge motive, so you can make it your business to inquire into the present circumstances of every villain Knighton prosecuted in, say, the fifteen years prior to his retirement. And for good measure into those of every villain he failed successfully to defend. That should keep you busy for a bit.

  ‘As for me, I shall “fire a mine in China here with sympathetic gunpowder”.’

  Donaldson went off to find somewhere to park the car and Wexford crossed Kensington Church Street to the shop above whose window in gilt Times Roman was the single name ‘Vinald’. In the window itself, in solitary splendour, stood a vase. Not one of those Vinald had collected in China, but a vessel as tall as a small man and of dully gleaming black porcelain with a design on it of a bl
ood-red gilt-clawed dragon.

  Inside, deep soft black carpet like cat’s fur. The place was discreetly lit by wall lights in gilt rococo brackets and by a single spot that fell upon a spinet or harpsichord or some such thing. A few other objets d’antiquité were set about the long room, wax fruit under a glass bell, a china clock around whose face a Chelsea china Eros and Psyche sported, a tall slender glass jug, and on a console table a book of Audubon prints open at a picture of green and yellow birds.

  Wexford introduced himself to the woman in charge and asked for Gordon Vinald. She was afraid Mr Vinald was at a sale and not expected back until late afternoon. Was it very important? Wexford said yes but he would come back.

  ‘Would it help to see Mrs Vinald? I know she’s in. She phoned just a couple of minutes ago.’

  Surely he hadn’t been married when Wexford had last seen him? ‘I didn’t know there was a Mrs Vinald.’

  She smiled in the way people do who find something sweet or touching about matrimony in its early stages. ‘Mr and Mrs Vinald have only been married a month. Shall I give her a ring? Their house is just round the corner in Searle Villas.’

  He realized what had happened. Hadn’t he foreseen it? Vinald had married Margery Baumann.

  ‘Mrs Vinald says if you’d like to go straight over, Mr Wexford, she’ll be happy to see you.’

  Searle Villas was indeed just round the corner. The garden of number sixteen must have backed on to the shop. It was a house in a Victorian terrace that no one would have looked at twice in Kingsmarkham but here was no doubt worth about half a million. He was admitted by a young black woman in jeans with a duster in her hand. She pushed a door open and said to him indifferently, ‘She’s in there.’

  The room was a museum, seemingly furnished with overflow from the shop. In the middle of the Chinese carpet sat a very large stout lushly-furred tabby cat which ceased washing itself to stare at him with glittering zircon eyes. Standing by the marble fireplace, one white arm extended along the mantel, was the beautiful black-haired Pandora.

  She didn’t recognize him. Probably she hadn’t even noticed him on that previous occasion. While a man of Wexford’s age will inevitably notice and remember such a woman, to her he may be invisible.

  Her hair was longer, cut now with a fringe that curved symmetrically down into a page-boy, the Egyptian queen look. Her mouth was as red as cinnabar and her eyelids painted jade. Wexford felt that either he had seen her before—and he meant before the encounter on the hotel roof—or that she reminded him strikingly of some famous beauty. A film star from when he was young? Hedy Lamarr? Lupe Velez? She wore a clinging black silk jersey and a skirt of black and red printed velvet and her legs were the best he had ever seen, better even, he thought disloyally, than his daughter Sheila’s.

  ‘I think you’ve come to talk about the late Mrs Knighton. Am I right?’

  He was surprised and his eyebrows went up.

  ‘What else could it be?’ Her twang brought her down to earth, made her less of a goddess. ‘I travelled with her to Hong Kong. Well, all the way to England, if you count being in the airplane. Don’t you care to sit down?’

  The cat leapt—gracefully for one of her girth—up on to the chair before he could sit in it.

  ‘Oh, get out, Selima.’ She picked it up and dumped it on to a chaise longue. ‘She’s called the Pensive Selima for some reason known to my husband, some poem.’

  ‘Demurest of the tabby kind,’ said Wexford.

  ‘Maybe. I’m not poetical myself.’ In a way she was, though. Any man would have wanted to write a poem to her or about her. But with a faint feeling of disappointment he saw what she meant. Despite her looks, the Hollywood profile, she was of the earth, earthy. ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Vinald, I’m a bit in the dark. You didn’t travel on that train across Asia, did you?’

  She shook her head. ‘We met up with the train party in a place called Kweilin. I first met my husband in the hotel there. I was doing a kind of world tour. We’d come from Auckland to Jakarta, Jakarta to Singapore, Singapore to Peking. It was going to be Bombay after Hong Kong but—well, London suddenly seemed that much more attractive! But I have to tell you, I don’t think I spoke one single word to that poor Mrs Knighton. I only know her name because Gordon said who she was after we saw in the papers about her getting murdered.’

  Wexford thought it was time he explained that he too had been in China. She was astonished and then confused. Had he been there tailing Mrs Knighton, watching her or what? No, she couldn’t follow it. He’d actually seen her, Pandora Vinald, before? It is always hard to understand that someone very beautiful, particularly someone with a sensitive face and a sweet expression, may be quite stupid. Pandora Vinald, he decided, was—to put it as kindly as possible—not very intelligent. Not a patch really—except in one vital way—on Margery Baumann.

  ‘Have you seen any of the train party people since you came here?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we haven’t. Gordon says holiday friendships are a dead loss, they never lead to anything.’

  ‘Unlike holiday romances.’

  It took her a moment to understand but when she did she broke into merry gratified laughter. The Pensive Selima sat up and began frantically washing her face in the way cats do, as if they have suddenly been warned by some inner voice of a disfiguring smut. Pandora Vinald said, ‘We did have a photo sent us by a Mrs Knox. I mean Gordon did. We were in it, you see, and a lot of other people. You couldn’t see us very well, it wasn’t very good. Gordon said not to answer, it would only encourage her, but I didn’t think that was very kind, I thought of how she’d feel, you see.’ She smiled and said naively, ‘So I wrote back and thanked her and said it was very nice, though it wasn’t, and mentioned we were getting married.’

  ‘Do you still have her address?’

  The cat jumped off the chaise longue, stalked to the door and emitted a shrill impatient mew. Because the mew wasn’t attended to she followed it up with a series of near-screams.

  ‘Oh, Selima, you noisy beast. She’s a terribly spoilt cat. Gordon’s ex-wife let her do anything she wanted, scrape her claws down some practically priceless old pieces, just awful.’ The door was opened and the cat went out with a slowness that was insolent. ‘Address, did you say? I’ve got all their addresses, as a matter of fact. The tour company sent Gordon a list of the people going, with their addresses, before he went, and it’s right here in the top of the desk. Would that be of use to you?’

  There they all were in alphabetical order:

  Mrs H. Avory, 19 Oswestry Place, Rosia Bay, Gibraltar.

  Dr and Mrs C. Baumann, Four Winds, Southwood Hill, Purley, Surrey.

  Dr M. Baumann, 2 Crestleigh Drive, Guildford, Surrey.

  Miss I.M. Bell, Flat 6, Meleager Court, Queen Charlotte Road, London NW3.

  Mr L. Fanning (tour leader), 105a Kingsland House, New King’s Road, London SW6.

  Mr and Mrs A.D. Knighton, Thatto Hall Farm, Myringham Road, Sewingbury, Sussex.

  Mrs L. Knox, 26 Redvers Lodge, Redvers Road, Rosia Bay, Gibraltar.

  Mr A.H. Purbank, 10 Fairmead Farm Court, Disraeli Road, Buckhurst Hill, Essex.

  Mr G.W.M. Vinald, 16 Searle Villas, London, W8.

  He thanked Mrs Vinald and said goodbye to her. Outside, ornamenting the top of one of the columns that flanked the gate, sat Selima like a sphynx. Unwisely Wexford put out a hand to stroke her and got a scratch that made the blood run.

  Only Lewis Fanning’s wife was at home in the mansion flat down below the World’s End; a stringy woman with grey roots showing in her henna’d hair. She was short with Wexford and indifferent. Her husband was away again, shepherding a party round the Aegean, and wouldn’t be back till the end of the month.

  Purley, where the Baumanns lived, would be passed through on the homeward journey; it was on the route of the Brighton Road. Before that Wexford thought he might take a look at what had been the Knighton’s home before
their permanent removal to Sussex. He told Donaldson to take him up to Hampstead.

  His knowledge of London was better than Burden’s but it was still full of gaps. It was only seeing a sign to Swiss Cottage which reminded him that Irene Bell had said she lived there, though to him the postal address looked like Hampstead.

  ‘See if you can find Queen Charlotte Road.’

  But Donaldson who, long before he joined the force, had thought of being a London taxi driver and had gone so far as to ride round on a bicycle to acquire the ‘knowledge’, knew where it was without a map. Meleager Court was a block that seemed to be composed entirely of red brick balconies set among plane trees. Irene Bell looked more the way he remembered her today, in a grey trousered garment which, when he was young in the forties, had been called a ‘siren suit’. She showed no great surprise at seeing him.

  ‘I’ve just made a pot of our favourite poison, Chief Inspector. Come in. Mind the step. It takes a true-born Englishman to fancy tea at one pip emma, that’s what I say. I’ve made a sandwich too or have you had lunch?’

  ‘I was thinking of having it at my daughter’s. She lives up the hill in Keats Grove, only I’ve just remembered it’s Thursday and she’s got a matinee.’

  ‘Sheila Wexford,’ said Miss Bell. ‘That’s who you are, her father. I mean apart from what else you are. Sluttish Time still running, is it? Not my kind of play but I loved her in it, she’s a joy to look at.’

  Wexford felt that he really liked Irene Bell very much. He accepted tea and a ham sandwich. Perhaps she could tell him, he said, whereabouts in Hampstead the Knightons had lived. She told him, pouring a second cup for both of them.

  ‘I should have been more forthcoming the other day,’ she said. ‘I was upset and it didn’t seem right. But there’s quite a bit more to say, though I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you want to hear.’