Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Sometimes you talk like a mid-Victorian beadle. I don’t see why a call girl shouldn’t be as truthful as anyone else. Look at it how you will, it’s an honest trade, it parts with what it’s paid for. Enough of this rubbish anyway. She picked him out from a group photograph, so of course I have to believe her.’

  Burden shrugged. ‘If it’s true, and I suppose it is, things look bad for Knighton. The presumption would be that immediately he and Dobson-Flint had retired to their rooms, he prepared to go out again. No doubt he hung about while Dobson-Flint used the bathroom, then he slipped out, taking with him one of the bunches of keys from the hall table. It was too late for a train, so he must have had the taxi take him to wherever he had a rented car waiting. Who knows? He might have rented a car somewhere near Victoria Station and left it parked and waiting for him. He’d have hired that when he got to London and put enough in the meter to last him till six fifteen. With meter charges stopping at six thirty he wouldn’t have had to worry. I suppose that means checking on the car hire places round Victoria now.

  ‘If he took the taxi at twenty to one he would have been in Victoria by ten to. I may be ignorant of London but even I know there wouldn’t be much traffic at that time of night. By one at the latest he would have been in that car and starting his drive. It wouldn’t take him more than an hour so we’ll say he got there at two.’

  ‘A quarter of an hour to cut out the pane of glass, maybe a few minutes to steel himself—yes, it just about works out.’

  ‘He didn’t have to get through the window, he had a key.’

  ‘He still had to cut out the glass.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Burden. ‘I’m a fool. Of course he did. And he wouldn’t have done it after he’d killed her. There’s one thing, though—can you imagine him hoicking her out of bed and bringing her downstairs and shooting her through the back of the head?’

  ‘There are a lot of things I can’t imagine human beings doing but still they do them, Mike.’

  ‘Well, I can’t swallow it. Not a woman you’d been married to for over forty years. Not your own wife. And Knighton’s not one of these yobs I’ve been hob-nobbing with, is he? Wouldn’t we, I mean wouldn’t anyone, call him a civilized sort of man?’

  ‘Look, there are a lot of things I don’t like too. I don’t like any of it much but this is evidence we’ve got, Mike. Sharon Elf saw him at twelve forty slipping out of Dobson-Flint’s flat. Bingley saw a man walking back to Sewingbury around three and it wasn’t Vinald he saw. Adela Knighton died between two fifteen and three forty-five. The timing works out very neatly. What was he doing, taking a taxi at twenty to one in the morning when his friend thought him in bed asleep, if he wasn’t going clandestinely back to Sussex? We have to see him, we have to get him down here again. We have to know where that gun is now.’

  ‘I don’t see any motive.’

  ‘Motive sometimes has a way of showing itself rather late in the day. Anyway, someone said that every married man has a motive for murder.’

  But as Wexford reached for the phone, it rang. The switchboard again, announcing a second visitor.

  ‘There’s a Mr Shah here, sir, asking to see you.’ The voice went lower. ‘A Chinese.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound Chinese.’

  Sha? Shah? Did they mean Indian or maybe Tibetan? For a moment Wexford was mystified. Then a little tug of excitement caught at his throat. The name might be pronounced more or less Shah but in fact it was Hsia.

  His visitor was Purbank’s next-door neighbour in Fairmead Farm Court, Buckhurst Hill.

  ‘I’d like you to stay,’ he said to Burden.

  The tall man in the dark suit that Wexford had encountered in the lobby of the flats came into the office. He was wearing a dark suit of a slightly different shade today and he still carried his briefcase. His black hair was so smooth and sleek it seemed to have been painted on his scalp. His eyes were mild, intelligent, his expression one of gentle impassivity. He held out to Wexford a narrow pale brown hand on which he wore a signet ring in obsidian and gold.

  ‘My colleague, Inspector Burden,’ said Wexford. ‘Mr Hsia.’

  Hsia sketched a slight bow. ‘It’s Chief Inspector Wexford, I believe? I hope I haven’t come at an inconvenient time?’

  ‘Not at all. Won’t you sit down? I think we might all have some tea, don’t you?’ Wexford put his finger on the buzzer.

  Sitting down, Hsia kept his arms tensely along the arms of the chair, then, as if by some oriental relaxation technique, lifted them and laid his hands calmly in his lap.

  ‘Chief Inspector, I have come here to tell you something my friend and neighbour Mr Purbank cannot bring himself to tell you. It may seem I am betraying a trust, you see, but while this secrecy goes on I fear very much he will become ill. He is very much frightened, you see, so for his relief I must speak the whole truth to you.’ Hsia’s face relaxed and he gave a sort of rueful chuckle. ‘You may feel, you see, that I am the one who should need to keep the secret, for I am the criminal. May I begin now?’

  Wexford nodded. The tea came in. It rather surprised Wexford to see Hsia take milk and two lumps of sugar.

  ‘My name is Hsia Yu-seng,’ he began. ‘You know where it is I live. I work for the Kowloon and Fuchow Bank in London Wall.’ He paused and Wexford thought that ‘work for’ was probably a modest understatement. ‘Most people,’ Hsia went on, ‘suppose that I am originally from Hong Kong or Taiwan, you see, but this isn’t so. I was born in Shao-shan in the People’s Republic—in fact, you know, in the very birthplace of the late Chairman, Mao Tse Tung. I was born in that place ten years before what they call liberation.’

  ‘How did you come to leave China?’ Wexford asked.

  Hsia raised his teacup to his lips and drank a little. ‘May I?’ he said, reaching the ringed hand out for a Garibaldi biscuit. ‘I committed a crime,’ he said. ‘I was twenty-one. If I had been caught—and I should have been caught, there is no hiding such things in China, you see—I would have been executed.’

  Wexford moistened his lips. Inescapably, he associated capital punishment with murder. ‘What crime?’

  ‘I raped someone,’ said mild sleek Mr Hsia, and he turned up the corners of his mouth in an apologetic smile.

  Burden made a choking sound over his tea. he wiped his mouth with a crisp white initialled handkerchief. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘You raped someone?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘I and three others. You don’t know how it was, the life there, the deprivation, the oppression, the repression. This girl, she asked us, you see, she teased us, it was an invitation with the eyes, the walk. And then, when it is happening first with my friend, then with me, she is frightened and later she tells her father who is Party cadre.’ With the stress of telling, Hsia’s English worsened, approaching pidgin. He recovered himself and loosened his clenched hands. ‘For this in China there is execution. There was then and there is now. My uncle, my mother’s brother, he was a truck driver, driving every week to Canton. He took me in the truck, hid me, and from Canton I got into the New Territories. I am cutting a long story short, you see, but that was how it was. I walked to the border, crossed into the New Territories and came to Hong Kong. English I could speak a little, I had studied it at the University of Chang-sha, so after a while I came to England with my wife that I had married in Hong Kong, you see, and whose father is director of the Kowloon and Fuchow Bank. And from then on all goes very well for me.’ He smiled again and this time slightly inclined his head.

  Wexford looked at him, the bland parchment-coloured face, the still features that have led to ‘inscrutable’ being the adjective invariably associated with the Chinese. Undreamt-of adventures, terrors, privations, struggles, lay hidden between the lines of that long story cut short. A less likely rapist than Hsia Yu-seng, Wexford had never seen.

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ he said, ‘but what has it to do with Mr Purbank?’

  ‘I am coming to it,’ Hsia said,
nodding. ‘I have said all goes well for me and this is true, you see, except in one respect. That is my mother. My father died, you see, in the fighting of 1949 and my mother is widow, living with my brother and his family. But I was her favourite and always I have been very sad that I cannot get news to her. Always I have been afraid for her sake, you see, to send a letter and it is out of question for me ever to set foot in People’s Republic. Often I have been thinking of ways to get news but find nothing better than what my father-in-law already has done—send her message only that I am alive. Then one day my neighbour Mr Purbank says to my wife that he is going in a train to China.’

  ‘I begin to see,’ said Wexford. ‘Mr Purbank’s itinerary would take him to Shao-shan and you asked him to deliver a message to your mother.’

  ‘I asked him if he would take a letter to my mother. I had heard through my father-in-law that my brother’s wife is cook in Wu Jiang Hotel, you see, so I thought to myself, there can be no trouble for Mr Purbank, who will surely eat there when he visits Mao’s birthplace, to ask for the cook in order to praise his meal. He was to ask her name and if she answers, ‘Mrs Hsia,’ to slip her my letter.

  ‘But all this goes wrong, you see, for Mr Purbank lost my letter when some things were stolen from his bags in Russia. And this made him very nervous and anxious to do the right thing, but he didn’t know how to do it, you see. So he asked the interpreter to say to the cook, ‘Your brother’s friend is here,’ which he does and my sister-in-law, very excited, you see, sends home for my mother who is an old woman now, more than seventy years old.’

  With bound feet, Wexford thought. And when he had seen her that first time, then, when he had seen her as he was lunching in the Wu Jiang Hotel, it was no green tea hallucination. It had been a real woman that time that he had seen standing by the screen and waiting for news of her son. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Well, then it was that Mr Purbank became really frightened, for whatever he said he must say through this interpreter, this official guide and interpreter from Lu Xing She. He knew I had been criminal, you see, and feared that if this was known he and the party might be expelled from China, so to my mother and sister-in-law, through the interpreter, he says that he has made a mistake, there has been a misunderstanding.

  ‘But with this my mother was not content. She guessed, I think, that Mr Purbank has much to say but was frightened to say it, so next day when my cousin, the son of my uncle who saved my life, when he drives to Chang-sha she goes with him to look for Mr Purbank …’

  The second sighting, Wexford thought, on Orange Island.

  ‘… and there she finds him but they cannot communicate, you see, except by signs and by then both are afraid, Mr Purbank and my poor mother. Then, as luck would have it, while Mr Purbank is walking in the street in Chang-sha a student called Wong comes to him and asks to practise his English.’ Hsia had gone entirely into the present tense now and Wexford remembered reading somewhere that Mandarin has no tenses. ‘Perhaps this happens often in present-day China?’ Hsia asked.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘So Mr Purbank has bright idea, you see, of asking this Wong to be interpreter for him. My mother still sits, waiting, in lobby of Wu Jiang Hotel. Mr Purbank tells Wong all about me, how I live in England, work in Kowloon and Fuchow Bank, have wife, have two boys at boarding school, everything about me, and Wong tells my mother who is made very happy and goes off full of happiness when my cousin calls back for her. But this is not, you see, the end of the story for Mr Purbank.

  ‘This Wong is himself perhaps a criminal element or perhaps it’s true he wants only to escape from People’s Republic. Again to cut the story short, he follows Mr Purbank on the train to Kweilin, pleading with him to get him out of China. Also, Mr Purbank says, he asks always for money, you see, as if to threaten Mr Purbank that he has done a wrong thing that will get him in trouble unless he gives money.’

  ‘You mean this Wong was blackmailing Mr Purbank? Unless Mr Purbank agreed to help get him out of China and gave him money, he would make the whole story of your contact with your mother known?’

  ‘Something of that kind, yes. Mr Purbank was very frightened by now, always to be followed everywhere by this Wong, and although it was dreadful thing to happen he wasn’t so very distressed when there was accident on the Li River boat and Wong was drowned.’ The still features widened into a reflective smile. ‘Mr Purbank then thought his troubles at an end till when he got home, a good while after, this Mrs Knighton, whom someone has shot, sends him photographs of the Li River trip. In them he is talking with Wong, and Mr Purbank is very afraid once more …’

  ‘Did you see these photographs, Mr Hsia?’

  ‘No, I didn’t but I was told of them. Mrs Knighton’s husband, you see, is in some way connected with the law and Mr Purbank thinks, suppose this whole story comes out and causes international incident, you see. So he burns the pictures and the negatives and sends the rest back to you and then he becomes nervous again in case you think he shot this Mrs Knighton …’

  Wexford very nearly laughed. There was something he knew and Hsia very evidently didn’t which stopped him laughing.

  ‘It was wise of you to come to me,’ he said.

  ‘I thought it best. And now I shall tell you where Mr Purbank was on the night of October first till after midnight—with me and my wife in our flat.’ Getting up to leave, extending his hand, Hsia added, ‘I fear he thinks it safer to be suspected of Mrs Knighton’s murder than have it known he associates with such politically dangerous people as ourselves.’

  From the window Wexford watched him cross the police station forecourt and get into this year’s registration dark blue BMW. Strange to reflect that this sleek capitalist was the son of that old woman with the hoof-like mincing feet, that forerunner and instigator of hallucinations.

  ‘Can you believe that?’ Burden said. ‘Can you believe Purbank was actually afraid of high-level repercussions because photographs existed of himself in conversation with a dissident Chinese?’

  ‘Hsia believes it.’

  ‘Sure he does. He grew to manhood in a country with perhaps the most repressive political system on earth.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think for what it’s worth,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ll never be able to prove it, I’ve nothing to go on but my own feelings, but it’s my belief Purbank pushed Wong overboard. He was harassed by Wong’s persecution and when they were on the boat and he came up behind Wong squatting down in the bows, he gave him a shove and pushed him overboard. Not intending to kill, I daresay, intending to frighten, to show Wong in his muddled way that he wasn’t going to be used and battered on in the way Wong hoped.

  ‘Back home I expect he soon forgot about it. We all know the old postulation: if by raising your hand you could acquire a million pounds and kill a Chinaman, would you do it? It’s generally believed that few would hesitate long. Maybe it semed a little like that to Purbank. After Wong was drowned I asked Adela Knighton what had happened and she said indifferently that someone had been drowned—“Not one of us,” she said. “A Chinese”. Purbank had raised his hand and acquired peace if not money and it was all twelve thousand miles off and there are a lot of Chinese anyway … until the picture came with his hand reaching towards Wong’s back.’

  Burden nodded. It was likely enough. Suspects were being cleared, others implicated. Rape had reminded him of Coney Newton and what he had to tell Wexford of the El Video Club. Loring had been there the night before, making inquiries.

  ‘It’s managed by a man called Jimmy Moglander—“Moggy” to his associates. Newton was in there all right. He and three or four other men he was with were there until they closed on the Wednesday morning. The lives these villains lead! Moglander and the barman both remember Newton being there. So that seems to clear each and every old lag that might have had a grudge against Knighton.’

  ‘So how about Knighton?’

  ‘He’ll keep till the morning, I should think.’ />
  ‘You’re right.’ Wexford thrust back his chair and got up. ‘I’m going home, Mike. If I hang about here someone’ll be bound to drop in and tell me how he saw an old woman with bound feet climbing in through Knighton’s loo window. We’ll leave Knighton till tomorrow.’

  But for Adam Knighton tomorrow never came. It was like déjà vu, Wexford thought in the morning, or the rerun of a tape. It was like going to see a film and sitting through the whole programme to see the beginning again. Only you usually did that because you liked the film. He hadn’t liked this one the first time round, and as for the second …

  The same credit titles, the same opening. It started with Renie Thompson phoning the police station at nine, with Burden and the fingerprint man and the scene-of-crimes man and Dr Crocker all going up to Thatto Hall Farm. The sun was shining and there was dew on the grass, and if the Michaelmas daisies were a little more mature and frost had shrivelled the leaves of the dahlias, if the sun was a little higher because the clocks had gone back an hour, only a purist would have noticed. All things up until this point seemed the same. They found a divergence only when they were inside the house, for this time it was Knighton who lay dead and by his own hand.

  ‘Two times in a month,’ said Mrs Thompson. ‘It makes you think twice about going into a person’s house. I thought he must be having a lay-in but the bedroom door wasn’t shut, it was like on the jar, so I just gave a tap and put my head round …’

  Since Wexford’s last visit, Knighton had moved back into the room he had shared with his wife and there, on the evening before, he had undressed, put on blue cotton pyjamas and a brown wool dressing gown, lain on his bed and surrendered himself to death. On the bedside table beside him was an almost empty brandy bottle, an empty wine, not brandy, glass, and a cylindrical plastic container that had once held fifty capsules of tuinal.

  ‘His doctor prescribed that for insomnia, presumably.’

  ‘Not me, thank God,’ said Crocker. ‘I’d have given him mogadon. The only way you can kill yourself with mogadon is stuff down so many you choke to death.’