Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Good night, Mr Vinald,’ Wexford said firmly. Far better to confront the man in the morning and hear it face to face. He rather enjoyed the feeling of suspense, of revelation deferred. Tomorrow, perhaps, indeed probably, Vinald was going to tell him what had so affected Knighton on the roof.

  But that, though not in detail, Wexford thought he already knew. Knighton had seen Pandora Vinald. Of course it wasn’t the sight of a pretty girl which had brought that look to his face. The people who had suggested that to him simply hadn’t thought what they were saying. It was this particular pretty girl, and Knighton hadn’t looked like that because he was seeing her for the first time but because he was seeing her again, perhaps after the passage of years.

  A girl who had once meant a great deal to him—whom he had loved?—had walked out on to that roof and by the merest chance he had been there, had looked up and with joy and wonder and fear had seen her.

  Inspector Burden was a conventional conservative man who believed passionately in law and order. The slightest offence against those principles irked him and he loathed crime. That curious understanding of the criminal mind and its workings which some policemen have to such a degree that there is not much to choose between them and their morality and the criminals and theirs, was foreign to Burden, was distasteful to him. That perhaps was why he was a less successful policeman than he might have been. For between them and him a great gulf was fixed which grew wider and deeper as he grew older.

  He was insensitive and he lacked sympathy. Supporting a cliché he didn’t know to be one, he would often say he reserved his compassion for the mugger’s victim, the beleaguered householder or even the Inland Revenue. He was a believer in retribution and was one of that majority of policemen—to which Wexford did not belong—who favoured the reintroduction of capital punishment. And this not solely for the taking of the lives of policemen. That the French, who had been sensible enough to keep the guillotine for so long, were now proposing to get rid of it was beyond his comprehension.

  More even than young rioters and muggers he disliked recidivists. This was a word his wife had taught him, he had always called them old lags himself, but it came to the same thing. It was just his luck, as he remarked to Jenny on leaving the house, that he should have to spend the day, maybe the next few days, hunting them out. And that without even the satisfaction of the house-wife hunting cockroaches, in that there was nothing he could do to them when he found them.

  He had taken an unprofessional dislike to Adam Knighton but he had to see him first. Renie Thompson opened the front door to him. She showed him into the living room where to his mild surprise he saw his chief already there, seated opposite Knighton and in the throes of an enquiry into the topic that was at present obsessing him. Knighton had grown gaunt in the past few days, his feet were in carpet slippers and a grey heavy knit cardigan was wrapped round his shoulders. He had become an old man, all that style and presence gone.

  Wexford gave Burden a nod but the other man made a gesture of rising from his chair.

  ‘Don’t get up, Mr Knighton,’ Wexford said. ‘I’d like you to give a little more thought to what I’ve been asking, if you please.’

  Knighton moved his shoulders. He was frowning. ‘I told you, I remember very little about it. My memory has been affected by all this,’ he said bitterly, as one recalling a tranquil time that can never return. ‘It was all very beautiful, wasn’t it? The most beautiful view I think I’ve ever seen. If I looked astonished up on that roof I suppose it was at the beauty of the sight.’ A ghastly smile widened across his face and turned it into a death’s head.

  With a shrug Wexford turned to Burden. He had tried his best. The man was lying, of course, or at least that last sentence of his was highly ambiguous. Burden suggested the possibility that the murder had been committed by someone out to ‘get his own back’ on the former prosecuting counsel. The smile shrivelled on Knighton’s face, he looked almost faint. He took from Burden the lists Brownrigg had compiled.

  It took him a few moments to collect himself. But he made the effort. He spoke in an almost normal conversational tone.

  ‘I see Hayward’s name is here. Gilbert or “Gib” Hayward. He threatened me, actually threatened me in court. The jury had returned a verdict of guilty and he was awaiting sentence. When the judge asked him if he had anything to say he began shouting threats at me. It was really rather alarming, though of course there was nothing he could actually do.

  ‘I’ve had anonymous letters too but they won’t be much use to you, will they, since they were anonymous?’ Knighton was burbling on in this half-crazed way, Burden thought, for the sake of saying something, anything, rather than reveal his true feelings, his deep fears. ‘Oh, and there was this other chap here, one Peter Kevin Smith. I was defending him. For some reason he thought I hadn’t done a good enough job. He went to prison for five years and the next day his mother came in to see me, made her way into chambers, if you please, burst in threatening he’d shoot me when he came out.’

  ‘When you look at these names, sir, does any one or more of them give you a feeling that, yes, here’s someone who might have done more than threaten?’

  Knighton gave the lists back as if he didn’t like holding them, as if he didn’t care for the feel of them on his hands. ‘None of them ever did. I can’t imagine anyone carrying out such a threat against my—my wife. And do men have such long memories?’

  ‘Some do,’ Wexford said rather enigmatically, and he added, ‘It depends on how much they want to remember.’

  Now how to act on the information in the lists?

  Those people whom Knighton had successfully defended and those whom he had unsuccessfully prosecuted could be ignored. But this still left so many that Burden realized he was going to have to be ruthless, categorize them according to the circumstances of the case, perhaps decide to disregard all petty crime and go only for killers and perpetrators of manslaughter, robbery with violence and grievous bodily harm. Could he dare assume it wasn’t a woman? For a start he thought he could. He just couldn’t see a woman not personally antagonistic to Adela Knighton getting her out of bed and forcing her downstairs and shooting her in cold blood. A girlfriend of Knighton’s who had had reason to hate or resent Adela, that would be a different thing. But Knighton had no girlfriend.

  The murderer wasn’t going to be in his dotage either. Knighton’s own age was just about the oldest at which Burden could imagine anyone climbing up and squeezing through that window, and Knighton was a well-preserved thin sixty-three. The murderer was going to have to be thin, no more than middle-aged. He had started making his list and on it, prominently, were ‘Gib’ Hayward and Peter Kevin Smith, the former now fifty-two years old, the latter forty-six. They might be fat, though, they might even be dead.

  Hayward had killed a man in a fight outside a West London pub and Peter Kevin Smith had hit an old woman in the stomach, rupturing her spleen, prior to breaking into the till in her tobacconist’s shop. Narrowing down, rejecting women, people over sixty-five, forgers, con men, straight burglars, bank robbers—though he didn’t know if he could afford to do this—he had ended up with a total of sixteen men. In fact there had been more clients in Brownrigg’s records with reason to be grateful to Knighton than inimical towards him. Certainly he had been the kind of counsel newspapers and hardened villains adore, spectacular, unscrupulous, witty, savage and subtle.

  He went up to London with Wexford where their ways diverged. Though he had set Martin on to ‘Gib’ Hayward in Brighton, he intended to see Peter Kevin Smith personally.

  ‘He’s still living with that loyal and supportive mother of his,’ Burden said as they parted. Wexford kept the car and Burden got into the train for Mile End.

  The Pensive Selima was sitting in the shop window this time. Not on the lofty vase’s side but on the edge of the blue plush drapery that covered its plinth. She sat cosily folded up into roughly the shape of a fat tawny brown armchair. The woman in the b
ig glasses wasn’t there. If he hadn’t been seeing him at the appointed time and in his natural habitat, Wexford might not have recognized Vinald. In China he had always worn jeans. He looked quite different in a suit of dark grey fine tweed, pure white shirt and grey tie with a silver zig-zag down it. He looked older, cleverer and much more suave.

  ‘Chief Inspector, do sit down. It’s good of you to come.’

  Wexford thought this remark strange since it must have been obvious to meaner intelligences that he had come out of duty rather than altruism. He chose a chair which, because he had once apprehended a man who had stolen half a dozen like it, he suspected of being by Hepplewhite. Vinald sat down opposite him on the yellow satin cushion of a love seat. He leant forward in an intimate fashion and, low-voiced, plunged into a—what? The answer to an unasked question? A lecture on iconoclasm? Or just a defence?

  ‘Chief Inspector, China is an extremely long way away and pretty alien to us anyway, I’m sure you’ll agree. And who knows how long the present regime will last? What’s thirty years? Nothing in historical terms. The next lot to get into power would only do so by bloody revolution. And what’s going to happen during any new insurrection? Much the same as happened during the Cultural Revolution. Anarchy. Armies of sixteen-year-old boys told by the highest authority to destroy anything old they could lay their hands on. Did you know that every village in China had its own temple, Taoist, Buddhist or Confucian, and many of them had all three? Where are they now? We know the answer to that. Destroyed. Razed to the ground and the very sites ploughed over as with ancient Carthage. When I hear sentimentalists groaning over our so-called thefts from China in, say, the Boxer Rebellion, I thank God for those—appropriations. Thank God we do have the Dowager Empress’s throne in the British Museum. What do you suppose the Red Guards would have done with that?’

  Wexford was not at all sure what Vinald was driving at but the man was evidently very very guilty over something. ‘What indeed?’ he said equably.

  ‘Again only a romantic idealist would insist that the means are never justified by the end. The end here is to save priceless art treasures for the world. And these are not China’s but indisputably the property of all mankind. They are our heritage, for in art all men are brothers. So therefore I maintain we should get our hands on what we can of it by fair means or foul—not that my means were foul, not at all.’ Wexford’s mystification, though veiled by experience, was now reaching him. ‘And my scale is small enough,’ he said more confidently. ‘I would hardly have thought it worth anyone’s while …’

  ‘If we in the force decided that what you call things on a small scale weren’t worth our while, Mr Vinald, I think we might very soon have anarchy in our own country.’ He would get to the bottom of what Vinald was on about but not now. ‘Since you’re being so frank with me I’m sure you won’t mind answering a couple of questions.’ Vinald was looking very nervous indeed now. ‘Like where you were on the night of October the first, for a start.’

  It surprised him that Vinald didn’t have to pause to think. Still, there were people with very good memories, people who in a flash could tell you exactly what they had been doing on any evening in the past fortnight. Wexford himself was one of them.

  ‘I was at home with my wife. You know where I live, just round the corner in the Villas. My wife’s mother brought a friend of hers round to meet us after dinner, a film cameraman or some such thing. They stayed till nearly midnight and after that my wife and I went to bed.’

  Wexford asked him for his mother-in-law’s address and was told she had a flat in Cadogan Avenue.

  ‘I can’t tell you where the guy she brought with her lives. His name’s Phaidon, Denis Phaidon with a ph.’

  As if to leave, Wexford got up and said with deceptive indifference. ‘By the by, what did you and Mr Purbank quarrel about in the train on the way to Irkutsk?’

  ‘What?’

  Patiently Wexford repeated his question.

  ‘What can this possibly have to do with it?’

  ‘To do with what, Mr Vinald?’

  ‘My buying antiques,’ Vinald muttered, ‘or the fact that this Mrs Knighton was murdered.’

  ‘It’s just one of those small things we think it worth our while to bother about,’ said Wexford.

  Vinald shrugged. ‘I don’t remember anyway. It was a long time ago and no doubt I did my best to forget it and forgotten it I have. The man was simply a very nasty piece of work.’

  Cats never make a sound when they move. Wexford was aware that the Pensive Selima had left the window only when he felt the faintest susuration against his trouser leg. She stalked slowly into the back regions as if she owned the place and no one else was present.

  The old woman herself came to the door, eyeing Burden with such contemptuous hatred that he knew it would be useless to place credence on any alibi she might produce for her son.

  But as it had happened no alibi of hers was needed. For one thing, Peter Kevin Smith had grown far too fat in the ten years since he had come out of prison to have got through that window. For another, his right hand was in plaster and he was a right-handed man. He had broken it falling in the street—drunk, Burden supposed—and to prove the break had occurred before 1 October, exhibited an appointments card from an orthopaedic hospital with appointments listed back to 18 September.

  Next on the list was Sidney Maurice Wills of Southwark. He was more interesting than Smith, being thin and wiry and in fit condition. Also he was still in his early thirties, having been out of prison not more than a year. Knighton had been prosecuting counsel in a curious case in which Wills had been found guilty of being an accessory to murder and of concealing a body. He had undertaken to dispose of the corpse of a woman stabbed to death by an acquaintance of his and had subsequently buried it among roadworks.

  ‘What you want to do instead of wasting your time on me is find out who that bastard Knighton paid to do it for him.’

  ‘Oh, he paid someone?’

  ‘Only natural, isn’t it? He wouldn’t do it himself, no more than he’d fix up his electric wiring or service his own Rolls-Royce motor car himself. He’d call in a professional. Like Chipstead, for instance. Used to be with Lee’s mob, could be dead for all I know, I never mix with them sort of people these days, but he’s just an example. Christ, do I have to teach you your job?’

  Wills had an alibi nearly as good as Smith’s, or would have once it was verified. He had been on a week’s holiday in Minehead with a girl he called his fiancée, returning to London on 3 October.

  There were eight more Londoners to see. The other men on the list lived in the north of England and would be seen by their local police. Of the London eight, George Lake had been celebrating his Silver Wedding at a restaurant in his home suburb of Wandsworth until I a.m.; Mojinder Singh, a Sikh from Southall, had been at home with his huge family of wife, parents-in-law, two brothers and six children; Norman Trimley and Brian Gage were far too fat; Henry Rossi was seventy-two and growing feeble; George Catchpole had been working a night shift; and Walter ‘Silver’ Perry …

  ‘Silver do harm to Mr Knighton?’ Mrs Perry screamed at him in the council flat on the top of the Bethnal Green tower. ‘Silver worships the ground Mr Knighton treads on. Didn’t he save his life?’

  Burden nearly groaned aloud. He realized he had muddled the lists. That was what came of doing a task as distasteful to him as this was. Silver Perry had coshed and killed a night watchman and had done so some years before the abolition of capital punishment. Or it was generally believed by every newspaper reader in the country that this was what he had done, yet the skill of Adam Knighton had acquitted him. Burden vaguely remembered the man’s story sold to the News of the World and, as he was recalling it, a scrapbook was thrust into his hands by Mrs Perry. There was the half page of cutting, the first instalment, yellowed by time. ‘I firmly believe I owe Mr Knighton my sanity and indeed my very life …’ These ghost writers! He was handing the scrapbook back wh
en Perry himself walked in.

  He was a tall man, getting on for sixty, with hair like that of an elderly woman who has just had a rinse, styling and ‘set’. Silver’s hair, however, was naturally metallic-looking and naturally wavy and had looked just the same, according to the News of the World photograph, when he was thirty-three. He gave Burden a parsonical look and said gravely, ‘I would lay down my life for Mr Knighton.’

  ‘Really? I don’t know what use that would be to him.’

  Silver went on as if Burden hadn’t spoken. ‘I was grieved to hear of his great loss, and him such a devoted husband by all accounts …’

  Burden hadn’t heard of Knighton as a devoted husband by any accounts. He left and when the lift didn’t come walked down by the stairs, all the hundred and fifty feet.

  There was one more man to see. Coney Newton, who also lived in the East End, had raped a girl and afterwards stabbed her, though not fatally. Nearly a year later, when the girl was at last recovered, Knighton had held her up to ridicule in the witness box, but the jury would have none of it and Newton had gone to prison for eight years. No one could say, except perhaps the paranoid Newton, that Knighton hadn’t done his best for him.

  ‘I don’t bear a grudge, mind. I said to Silver, I don’t bear a grudge and I don’t hold you to blame …’

  ‘Silver?’ said Burden.

  ‘Silver Perry. He’s a mate of mine. It was on account of him, what he’d said in the papers like, that I was set on getting that Knighton to defend me. I said to them, I want a fella called Knighton and then I’ll be OK. I don’t bear a grudge, mind, but I might have saved me breath. All that carry-on, that telling the jury the girl was asking for it, that wasn’t to help me, that was just for show. Using a lot of long words and making her colour up and getting a laugh, that was for show. What he should have done, what I told him again and again, was just stick to it I wasn’t there. That was the truth, I wasn’t there. All I wanted was him to tell the true fact which was, I wasn’t there.’