Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford nodded. She fetched ice and poured whisky on to it in big glasses.

  ‘We found a sort of banqueting room, a great empty gloomy place, and we went in there and talked. You were in that hotel too, Adam said. Isn’t that strange? I wonder where you were then.’

  ‘Being shown his porcelain collection by your son-in-law.’

  The delicate dark eyebrows went up. ‘He’s scared stiff of you because he thinks you’re after him for selling something or other to an American. Are you?’

  Wexford smiled. ‘I think the Chinese would be after him if they knew. China’s a long way away.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice grew grave again. ‘China’s a long way away. Adam once told me about the Chinese mandarin, how most people wouldn’t think twice about killing a Chinese mandarin if they could get a million pounds by doing so. China is so far away, so remote, even today. If one just had to make a sign, he said …’ She sat down again, looking at him. ‘In China, that night, everything seemed simple. Adam could leave Adela. Time had sorted things out for us and we could be together.’

  ‘You still wanted to? After a quarter of a century? After your marriage?’

  She delayed answering, drank some of her drink. ‘I will be honest,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t feel the same as I had. How could any ordinary realistic person feel the same? Adam wasn’t an ordinary realistic person. I’m not flattering myself when I say he felt just the same, perhaps even more so.

  ‘I wanted to make him happy. I would have liked to remarry and to be married to him. Oh, yes, I would have liked it.’

  ‘So he went home and you and your daughter went to England all on the same plane. Did you speak to Adela Knighton?’

  ‘No. She had seen me once, thirty years ago at a dinner party and naturally she had forgotten me. Adam and I didn’t speak to each other again until we saw each other in London. Pandora and Gordon were instantly attracted to each other. That was why it was easy to get straight to London, Pandora wanted it, she would have gone without me if I’d objected. In London I took a lease of this flat and Adam came to see me here. He and Adela used to have days out in London, they’d come up together on the train and he’d go and look up various old cronies while she went shopping and called on some friend of hers in Primrose Hill. I replaced the old cronies.

  ‘It was very much like it had been twenty-five years ago. Patterns repeat themselves, don’t they? There was I with my flat and there was Adam living with his wife. We were ruled by the clock as we had been. Almost from the first I knew he wasn’t going to leave Adela. I tackled him about it and he—he wept, he actually cried, poor Adam, it was dreadful. He couldn’t leave her, he said, not after forty years. He couldn’t face her and his children with a thing like that. That quarter of a century might never have been. I’d married and had a child and lived on the other side of the world and he’d become a QC and retired and was a grandfather—but everything was just the same, it was uncanny. And yet he did love me, he loved me more than I loved him, poor Adam.

  ‘And then I tried to break it off just as I had before. I said it was hopeless going on in this way, simply history repeating itself. I said I was too old for that kind of thing and when the lease of this place was up I’d go home to my house in Auckland.’

  ‘You mean you held that over him as a threat?’

  She lifted her shoulders and there came to her lips the ghost of a Milborough Lang smile. ‘He knew I’d go unless things could be made more permanent, yes.’

  The smile angered him. ‘You might say then, Mrs Ingram, that you share some of the responsibility for Adela Knighton’s murder and hence for Adam Knighton’s own death.’

  She jumped up, her serenity gone, and cried out to him, ‘That’s not true! Adam didn’t kill her. Haven’t I told you he couldn’t have killed her?’

  ‘He’s admitted it. Before his confession we were pretty certain—all the evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, pointed to his having killed her. He had motive and opportunity and he was there.’

  ‘He was not there,’ she said more calmly. ‘He was here with me.’

  ‘It sounds ridiculous,’ she said, ‘a man of over sixty sneaking out of his friend’s house and dashing across London in a taxi to be with the woman he loves—a woman of fifty-five. To spend the night with her and go back at dawn. A superannuated Romeo and Juliet. It really does happen, it did happen.’

  He believed her. It was so evidently true. ‘What time did he come?’

  She replied at once. Had it been the only whole night they had spent together? ‘A few minutes after one.’

  Knighton wasn’t the first man to confess to a murder he hadn’t committed, Wexford thought. And yet …

  ‘No doubt you saw him several times after that?’

  ‘We talked a lot on the phone. I saw him—oh, three times? Four?’

  ‘He never said anything to you to suggest he had killed his wife?’

  ‘How could he have when I knew he was here with me at the time? I could tell he was unhappy, he seemed tormented. But his wife had been murdered and however he felt about her and me, she was his wife.’ Milborough Ingram put her hand to her forehand and leaned her face forward on it. Her voice had taken on a faltering note. ‘He never said any more about our marrying, about our being together. He was different, changed. I thought he was ill. I said he ought to have a holiday and I’d go with him. He just stared at me, he held my hand and stared at me.’ She reached for her whisky. ‘Oh, God, I mustn’t have any more to drink. I’ll get drunk and that won’t help. Ever since I was eighteen I’ve had it dinned into me I mustn’t drink because it’d spoil my figure and my face, and it dies hard, all that. What does it matter now?’

  He got up to go. She was composing herself but hysteria trembled beneath the surface of her composure.

  ‘Would you like me to get your daughter to come to you?’

  ‘I’m better alone. Really.’

  He turned his eyes away from that ravaged, once-beautiful face. They lighted on the ikon. He remembered where he had seen it before—in Vinald’s bedroom in the Kweilin Hotel.

  ‘I gave my son-in-law two hundred pounds for that.’

  Wexford heard a rasp in her voice. ‘I’m sure it’s worth it,’ he said politely.

  ‘Oh, no doubt. Only Pandora told me afterwards he gave two pairs of jeans for it and one of those wasn’t even his own.’

  She had spoken in the bitterness of her heart. It was an anger with the injustice of the world she was venting on Gordon Vinald. Already she looked ashamed of her indiscretion.

  ‘What does it matter now?’ she said again.

  Wexford made no reply. He said goodbye to her and went down to where Donaldson and the car waited.

  Tabard Road, Kingsmarkham, the bungalow that was almost as familiar to Wexford as his own home over the other side of the town. Dora Wexford had dealt with the problem of being a policeman’s wife by acceptance, by patience, but Jenny Burden solved it more positively, filling her evenings with learning—and teaching—at classes, with drama groups and string trios. She was out this evening, at a rehearsal, Burden said. He fetched two cans of beer from the fridge.

  ‘Knighton wasn’t mad,’ Wexford said. ‘It wasn’t a matter of having some sort of delusion he’d done it. He knew he hadn’t held the gun and squeezed the trigger and shot her. He meant he was morally responsible, he instructed someone else to do it.’

  ‘Not someone he paid. We know he parted with no large sums.’

  Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘I don’t think it was anything as direct as that. I think it was more a matter of nodding, of raising one’s hand and killing the mandarin.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’ Burden had put on his obtuse look, the one he wore less and less since his second marriage. Once it had inspired Wexford to say he was reminded of Goering who said that whenever he heard the word culture he reached for his gun. Sometimes it came back to make the Inspector’s normally intuitive face mulish. ‘I haven�
�t a clue what all that means,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t enlighten you. I’m not being purposely obscure, I don’t know any more yet. Let me tell you about Vinald and Purbank instead. I can tell you what they quarrelled about. Vinald pinched a pair of Purbank’s jeans to pay for an ikon.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘I imagine he discovered this ikon in the possession of some peasant in the far east of Russia. Russians are crazy to get their hands on denim jeans, or so I’ve heard. Probably Vinald hadn’t got very long there, wherever it was, or the ikon vendor wouldn’t hang about, so Vinald went back to the train and fetched a pair of his own jeans. Because he hadn’t any more of his own clean or didn’t want to part with them or something he took Purbank’s. No doubt he explained to Purbank afterwards and maybe offered to pay for them but Purbank was outraged and refused to have any more to do with him.’

  Burden laughed. ‘But why not tell us?’

  ‘Vinald wouldn’t because it makes him look such a crook. Purbank wouldn’t because it makes him look a fool. What could be more undignified than someone nicking a pair of your trousers? It’s a kind of vicarious debagging.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ Burden said. ‘Put that cat down if you don’t want it.’

  Jenny’s Abyssinian, as lithe and sinuous as the Pensive Selima was stout, had sprung up delicately on to Wexford’s lap. He drew his hand down the smooth slippery back.

  ‘Is Vinald a crook, d’you think?’

  ‘D’you remember when we went to the V and A I paid particular attention to the Sung ware? Celadon, they call it. White or pale grey or pale green, an attempt to imitate jade, around a thousand years old. While we were in Kweilin Vinald showed me the Celadon ware he’d bought, trusting, and rightly, to my ignorance. He said it was a hundred years old, Ching stuff, and of course I believed him. He had a whitish bowl, a dull plain thing, and I remember thinking to myself that Dora wouldn’t have given it house room. You wouldn’t reckon on anyone paying ten thousand pounds for a thing like that, would you?’

  ‘Ten grand? For a white pot a hundred years old?’

  ‘Well, not a hundred years old, Mike. That’s rather the point. Say eight hundred? I saw the stick of red sealing wax in Vinald’s hotel room and it meant nothing to me. I didn’t know then that any antique you bring out of China has to have the government’s red seal on it. Vinald was getting hold of priceless pieces from people who didn’t know any better, paying virtually nothing for them, and then putting the red seal on himself. Especially that bowl—which he took up to Birmingham on October the first and sold to the agent of a South American purchaser for ten thousand pounds.’

  ‘Can we do anything to him?’

  ‘Like what? Extradite him to China? Do you know what he’d answer if we said to him what I’ve just said to you? That he gave a fair price for the bowl, believing it to be Ching. Of course it had the seal on it. What can we mean? It was only when he got it home and examined it carefully that he discovered he’d paid five quid for a piece of Sung.’

  As Wexford stroked it the cat began emitting a harsh rumbling purr. Still shaking his head over man’s chicanery, Burden fetched more beer. Wexford changed the subject. ‘When you went hunting up those old lags—what you might call recidivisiting—you had two lists, didn’t you? The men Knighton had helped send down and those that had got off or got off lightly because of his defence?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was the point of the alternative list?’

  ‘You mean the ones he got off?’

  ‘I mean, what was the point of listing people who have had no motive for revenge on him?’

  ‘There wasn’t a point really. Brownrigg and I simply made a note of every case Knighton had been involved in that we thought important enough. I put those friendly to Knighton in the right-hand column and those—well, possibly revengeful on the left. I got them muddled too, I …’

  But Wexford didn’t want to hear about that. ‘You’ve still got the lists?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  In the morning Wexford looked at them.

  ‘This Coney Newton seems to be on both lists. What did he get sent down for?’

  ‘Rape and attempted murder,’ said Burden. ‘He’s on both lists because—well, I thought he might have reason to be grateful to Knighton for getting him off with only seven years or vindictive towards Knighton for not getting him off altogether. And funnily enough, he didn’t seem vindictive, he just seemed to think Knighton hadn’t made a very efficient job of his defence. Anyway, he’s got a good alibi for that night and he alibis Silver Perry.’

  ‘That’s fine for him then, isn’t it, having his word backed up by a really exemplary citizen like that?’

  ‘They were in a club together,’ Burden said, slightly offendedly. ‘I went to the club. There’s no question …’

  ‘All right. Who’s Henry Thomas Chipstead?’

  ‘Once upon a time he was an East End of London gangster. Around twenty years ago he was up on a charge of grievous bodily harm and Knighton got him off. Wills—’ Burden indicated with his finger the name in the left-hand column. ‘Wills suggested to me that Knighton might have called in “a professional like Chipstead”. Those were his words, not mine. He said Chipstead had been with Lee’s mob, might be dead now for all he knew. He’s not dead, though, he’s alive and living in Leytonstone. But he’s over seventy now and in any case we know Knighton didn’t pay anyone.’

  ‘And what was this Wills’s contribution to the disintegration of society?’

  Burden grinned wryly. ‘Aiding and abetting. He didn’t actually kill this woman but he was an accessory. He concealed the body by night in roadworks on a motorway, only one of the workmen discovered it before they laid the road surface … What’s the matter?’

  ‘I know where he put that gun,’ Wexford said slowly.

  ‘Where who put it?’

  ‘Ah, that’s something else. I mean I know where whoever our perpetrator is put the weapon. You just told me. What you said about this Wills and roadworks told me.’

  ‘It did?’

  ‘The weir, Mike, the weir at Sewingbury Mill.’

  It was a long shot. Burden’s opinion was that ‘they’ would never be got to demolish all that concrete and brickwork, embankment and paving, for the sake of finding a gun, it wasn’t as if it was a body. And the chances, he said pessimistically, were that the gun wasn’t there anyway.

  ‘Once I’ve got a warrant,’ said Wexford, ‘they’d get on with the demolition if it was a pin they were looking for and Sewingbury Agricultural College they were demolishing.’

  Colonel Charles Griswold, the Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, was as uneasy about it as Burden. And perhaps Wexford would never have been allowed to swear out that warrant but for the clerk of works who had supervised the construction of the ‘weir’ for the county authority telling the chief constable that; when the workmen knocked off for the day at five on 1 October, only the paved area remained to be completed. At that time, on that afternoon, he said, the areas waiting to be paved had lain open and uncovered except for a foundation of ‘hard core’ spread on the soil.

  ‘Suppose we say he left his car in the market square in Sewingbury,’ Wexford said. ‘He made his way by the footpath to Thatto Vale and got to Thatto Hall Farm at about two. There he either entered by the washroom window or let himself in with a key, having made it appear as if he entered by the window. He woke Mrs Knighton, brought her downstairs at gun-point, shot her, feebly faked a burglary and returned by the path where he was seen by Bingley at around three. At the Sewingbury end of the footpath he spotted the nearly completed paving work on the weir and it would have been the work of only a few moments to bury the gun in the soil under the hard core.’

  It was a cold day with a bitter wind blowing. The Kingsbrook, swollen by recent rains, rushed and tumbled under the Springhill bridge and through the new channel constructed for it. The same contractors that had built the �
��weir’ came to knock part of it down again. As soon as they had the paving stones up, Sergeant Martin and Archbold were to go along and grub about under the hard core for the gun. Wexford looked in for a few moments at the inquest on Adam Knighton. Angus Norris was there but otherwise the family was not represented.

  Wexford knew there could be no possible outcome but that the inquest be adjourned. Dr Parkinson was reading aloud Knighton’s confession and now and then quoting Wexford’s own words that Knighton could not himself have been physically responsible for his wife’s death. Wexford crept out of the court. At the far side of the quadrangle that divided the courts from the police station Donaldson was awaiting him at the wheel of his car, Burden already seated in the back. The wind struck him with a sharp gust and blew out his scarf like a flag.

  ‘The river bank is no place to be this morning,’ said Burden, rubbing his hands.

  ‘You sound like Mole.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re going up to the Smoke anyway. Or near enough. The Haze, we should maybe call it. Is Leytonstone the sort of place we can get lunch in, Donaldson?’

  But the London expert, to his own evident chagrin, didn’t know, he had never been there.

  ‘Chipstead, I suppose,’ Burden said.

  ‘Henry Thomas Chipstead, fifty-two Dogshall Road, Leytonstone. He’s seventy-three and doesn’t seem to have been up to anything in the hit man line since Knighton got him off the hook when he was fifty. But he’ll do for a start.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain to me what you meant about that killing the mandarin.’

  They were on the motorway now, heading for London. The wind was so strong that gusts of it shifted and swayed the heavy car. Occasionally spatters of rain in large drops dashed against the windscreen.

  ‘I think that years and years ago,’ Wexford said, ‘Knighton had reason to be in contact with some villain who was a professional assassin or hit man. Defended him, presumably. After the case he went to Knighton and said to him something on the lines of, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, Mr Knighton sir, you’ve only to say the word, you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, anything you want done on the quiet, and Knighton, no doubt, got all upstage with moral indignation, but later on he got to thinking about it. Much later on and when it would really have suited him to have someone put out of the way.