by Ruth Rendell
He burst out, ‘I’ve got to have that miscreant here for a whole weekend!’
‘Reg, don’t. Don’t begin like that. We’ve only met him twice.’
‘The first time she brought him here,’ said Wexford, ‘he stood in this room in front of my books and he took them out one by one. He looked at them in turn with a little contemptuous smile on his face. He took out the Trollope and looked at it like that. He took out the short stories of M. R. James and shook his head. I can see him now, standing there with James in his hand and shaking his head slowly, very slowly from side to side. I expected him to turn his thumbs down. I expected him to do what the Chief Vestal did when the gladiator had the net-man at his mercy in the arena. Kill. That’s the verdict of the supreme judge, kill.’
‘He has a right to his opinion.’
‘He hasn’t a right to despise mine and show he despises it. Besides, Dora, that’s not the only thing and you know it isn’t. Have you ever met a man with a more arrogant manner? Have you ever – well, as a friend in your own family circle or that you know well – have you ever come across anyone who so plainly made you feel he despised you? You and me. Everything he said was designed to show his loftiness, his cleverness, his wit. What does she see in him? What does she see in him? He’s small and skinny, he’s ugly, he’s myopic, he can’t see further than the end of his twitching nose . . .’
‘You know something, darling? Women like small men. They find them attractive. I know big tall ones like you don’t believe it, but it’s true.’
‘Burke said . . .’
‘I know what Burke said. You’ve told me before. A man’s handsomeness resides entirely in his height, or something like that. Burke wasn’t a woman. Anyway, I expect Sheila values him for his mind. He’s a very clever man, you know, Reg. Perhaps he’s a genius.’
‘God help us if you’re going to call everyone who was short-listed for the Booker prize a genius.’
‘I think we should make allowances for a young man’s pride in his own achievements. Augustine Casey is only thirty and he’s already seen as one of this country’s foremost novelists. Or so I read in the papers. His books get half-page reviews in the book section of The Times. His first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award.’
‘Success should make people humble, modest and kind, as the donor of that prize said somewhere.’
‘It seldom does. Try to be indulgent towards him, Reg. Try to listen with – with an older man’s wisdom when he airs his opinions.’
‘And you can say that after what he said to you about the pearls? You’re a magnanimous woman, Dora.’ Wexford gave a sort of groan. ‘If only she doesn’t really care for him. If only she can come to see what I see.’ He drank his beer, made a face as if the taste were after all not congenial to him. ‘You don’t think –’ he turned to his wife, appalled ‘– you don’t think she’d marry him, do you?’
‘I think she might live with him, enter into – what shall I call it? – a long-term relationship with him. I do think that, Reg, really. You have to face it. She’s told me – oh, Reg, don’t look like that. I have to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘She says she’s in love with him and that she doesn’t think she’s ever been in love before.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘For her to tell me that, she never tells me things – well, it has to be significant.’
Wexford answered her melodramatically. He knew it was melodramatic before the words were out but he couldn’t stop it. The histrionics brought him a tiny consolation.
‘He’ll take my daughter from me. If he and she are together that’s the end of Sheila and me. She will cease to be my daughter. It’s true. I can see it. What’s the use of pretending otherwise, what is ever the use of pretending?’
He had blocked off that Tuesday evening’s dinner. Or the events at Tancred House and their consequences had blocked them off for him, but now he opened his mind to them, the second beer he poured opened his mind, and he saw that man entering the little provincial restaurant, eyeing his surroundings, whispering something to Sheila. She had asked how her father, their host, would like them to sit at the table they were shown to, but Augustine Casey, before Wexford had a chance to speak, had chosen his seat. It was the chair backing a corner of the room.
‘I shall sit here where I can see the circus,’ he had said with a small private smile, a smile that was for himself alone, excluding even Sheila.
Wexford had understood him to mean he wanted to watch the behaviour of the other diners. It was perhaps a novelist’s prerogative, though scarcely that of such an extreme post-post-modernist as Casey was. He had already written at least one work of fiction without characters. Wexford had still been trying to talk to him then, to get him to talk about something, even if the subject was himself. Back at the house he had spoken, had delivered some obscure opinions on poetry in eastern Europe, every phrase he used consciously clever, but once in the restaurant he became silent, as if with boredom. He confined his speech to answering briefly requests that had to be made.
One of the things about him which had angered Wexford was his refusal ever to use an ordinary phrase or to indulge in the usage of good manners. When ‘How do you do?’ was said to him, he replied that he was not at all well but it was useless to enquire because he seldom was. Asked what he would drink he requested an unusual kind of Welsh mineral water which came in dark-blue bottles. This unavailable, he drank brandy.
His first course he left after one mouthful. Halfway through the meal he broke his silence to talk about pearls. The view from where he sat had afforded him a sight of no fewer than eight women wearing pearls round their necks or in their ears. After using the word once he didn’t repeat it but referred to ‘concretions’ or ‘chitinous formations’. He quoted Pliny the Elder who spoke of pearls as ‘the most sovereign commodity in the whole world’, he quoted Indian Vedic literature and described Etruscan jewellery, he delivered a thousand words or so on the pearls of Oman and Qatar that come from waters one hundred and twenty feet deep. Sheila hung upon his words. What was the use of deceiving himself? She listened, gazing at Casey, with adoration.
Casey was eloquent on the subject of Hope’s baroque pearl that weighed eleven ounces and on La Reine des Perles which was among the crown jewels of France stolen in 1792. Then he talked of the superstitions associated with ‘concretions’, and with his eyes on the modest string round Dora’s neck, spoke of the folly of older women who used to believe, and no doubt still did, that such necklaces would restore their lost youth.
Wexford had made up his mind then to speak, to rebuke, but his phone had started bleeping and he had left without a word. Or without a word of admonition. Naturally, he had said goodbye. Sheila kissed him and Casey said, as if it were some received rubric of farewell, ‘We shall meet again.’
Anger had fulminated, he had been boiling with rage, up through the dark, the cold woods. Enormous tragedy neutralised it. But the Tancred tragedy was not his, and this was, or might well be. The pictures kept on coming, the imagined future scenarios, their home. He thought of how it would be when he phoned her and that man answered. What message of arcane wit would that man have recorded on his and Sheila’s answering machine? How would it be when, on some necessary trip to London, Sheila’s father dropped in on Sheila as he so dearly loved to do, and that man was there?
His mind was filled with it and when he went to bed he expected a dream of Casey to be its natural consequence. But the nightmare which came, towards dawn, was of the massacre at Tancred. He was in that room, at that table, with Daisy and Naomi Jones and Davina Flory, Copeland having gone to investigate the noises upstairs. He could hear no noises, he was examining the scarlet tablecloth, asking Davina Flory why it was such a bright colour, why it was red. And she, laughing, told him he was mistaken, perhaps he was colour-blind, many men were. The cloth was white, as white as driven snow.
She didn’t mind using a hackneyed expression like th
at one? he had asked her. No, no, she said and she smiled, she touched his hand with her hand, clichés like that were often the best way to describe something. You could be too clever.
The shot came and the gunman walked into the room. Wexford slipped out, he escaped unseen, the window with its panes of curved eight-ounce glass melted to allow his passage, so that he was in time to see the getaway car slide on to the courtyard, driven by the other man. The other man was Ken Harrison.
* * * *
At the stables in the morning – he had stopped calling it an incident room, it was the stables – they showed him the composite picture made from Daisy’s description. It would appear in television news programmes that evening, on all networks.
She had been able to tell him so little! The pictured face was blander and blanker than any real face ever can be. Those features she had been able to describe, the artist seemed to have accentuated, perhaps unconsciously. After all, these were all he had to work on. So the man who looked out of the paper at Wexford had blank wide-apart eyes and a straight nose, and lips neither full nor thin, but a strong chin with a cleft dividing it, large dramatic ears and a copious thatch of pale hair.
He gave Sumner-Quist’s post-mortem reports a summary examination, then had himself driven down to Kingsmarkham to put in an appearance at the inquest. As he expected, it was opened, the pathologist’s evidence heard, and the proceedings adjourned. Wexford walked across the High Street, down York Street and into the Kingsbrook Centre, to find Garlands, the craft gallery.
Although a notice inside the glass door informed prospective shoppers that the gallery would be open five days a week from 10 a.m. until 5.30 p.m., on Wednesdays from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. and closed on Sundays, it was shut. The windows on either side of this door contained a familiar assortment of pottery, dried flower arrangements, basketwork, marble photograph frames, shell pictures, ceramic cottages, silver jewellery, inlaid wooden boxes, glass baubles, carved, woven, moulded, knitted, blown-glass and sewn miniature animals, as well as a great quantity of household linen with birds and fish and flowers and trees printed on it.
But no lights were on to illuminate this plethora of uselessness. A dimness, becoming a darkness in the depths of the gallery, just allowed. Wexford to make out larger items hanging from fake antique beams, gowns perhaps, shawls and robes, and a cash desk set up between a pyramid of what seemed like grotesque felt animals, the reverse of cuddlesome, and a display case showing behind dim glass, terracotta masks and porcelain wall-vases.
It was Friday and Garlands was closed. The possibility that Mrs Garland had closed her gallery for the remainder of the week out of respect for the memory of Naomi Jones, her partner, who had died so dreadfully, did not escape him. Or she might have failed to open because she was simply too upset. The degree of her friendship with Daisy’s mother was still unknown. But the purpose of Wexford’s call had been to enquire about the visit she might or might not have paid to Tancred House on the Tuesday evening.
If she had been there why had she not come to tell them? The publicity, the coverage, had been enormous. Everyone with the least knowledge of events, everyone with the smallest connection with Tancred House, had been appealed to. If she had not been there why had she not told them why not?
Where did she live? Daisy had not said, but it was a simple matter to find out. Not over the gallery, at any rate. The three floors of the centre were entirely devoted to the establishments of retailers, boutiques, hairdressers, a vast supermarket, a DIY place, two fast-food restaurants, a garden centre and a gym. He could call in to the incident room and have the address within minutes, but the main Kingsmarkham Post Office was only on the other side of the road. Wexford went in and, avoiding the queue for stamps, pensions and allowances, which coiled serpentinely around a roped-off winding lane, asked to see the electoral register. It was what he would have done long ago, before the advent of all this technology. Sometimes, defiantly, he liked doing these old-fashioned things.
The voters’ list was arranged by street, not surname. It was a task for a subordinate but he was there now, he had begun. Anyway, he wanted to know, he very much wanted to know, and as soon as possible, why Joanne Garland had closed her shop, and presumably closed it for three days.
He found her at last, and only a couple of streets from where he lived himself. Joanne Garland’s house was in Broom Vale, a somewhat more spacious building and a rather superior location to his own. She lived alone. The register told him that. Of course, it wouldn’t have told him if she had anyone under eighteen living with her, but this was unlikely. Wexford went back to the court where his car was. Parking in the town was not something to be engaged in lightly these days. He could just imagine the piece in the Kingsmarkham Courier, some bright young reporter – perhaps Jason Sebright himself? – spotting that it was Chief Inspector Wexford’s car on the double yellow line, trapped in the jaws of the wheel clamp.
There was no one at home. Next door, on both sides, there was no one at home either.
When he was young, you usually found a woman at home. Things had changed. For some reason, this reminded him of Sheila, and he sternly chased away the thought. He had a look at the house, which he had never bothered to study before, though he had passed it hundreds of times. It was quite ordinary, detached, set in its garden, well kept, newly painted, probably four-bedroomed, two-bathroomed, with a television dish sticking out by an upstairs window. An almond tree was coming into bloom in the front garden.
He considered for a moment then walked round the back. The house looked closed up. But at this time of the year, early spring, it would look closed up, windows wouldn’t be open. He looked through the kitchen window. Inside it was tidy, though there were dishes on the draining board, washed and stacked against each other to dry.
Back to the front of the house and a squint through the keyhole in the garage door. There was a car inside but he couldn’t make out what kind. A glance through the tiny window to the right of the door showed him newspapers on the floor and a couple of letters. Perhaps only this morning’s papers? But no, he could see one Daily Mail masthead against the edge of the mat and another half-hidden by a brown envelope. Wexford twisted his head, striving to make out the name of the third paper of which he could only see a corner and a section of a picture. The photograph was a full-length shot of the Princess of Wales.
Returning to Tancred House, he had the car stop at a newsagent. As he had expected, the Princess of Wales’s photograph was on today’s Mail. Therefore, three newspapers had arrived for Joanne Garland since she had last been in the house. Therefore she had not been there since Tuesday evening.
* * * *
Barry Vine said in his slow laid-back way, ‘Gabbitas may have been in that wood on Tuesday afternoon, sir, and he may not. Witnesses are what you might call thin on the ground out where he was. Or says he was. The wood’s on land belonging to a man who owns five hundred acres. He calls it organic farming what he does on some of it, cattle just roaming around, if you know what I mean. He’s planted some new woodland and he’s got some of that set-aside the Government pays you not to grow things on.
‘The point is, the wood where Gabbitas says he was is miles from anywhere. You go down this lane for two miles, it’s like the end of the world, not a roof to be seen, not even a barn. Well, I’ve lived in the country all my life but I wouldn’t have believed there was anything like that in the Home Counties.
‘They call it coppicing, what he was doing. It’d be pruning if it was roses, not trees. He’s done some, that’s for sure, and you can see he’s been there – we checked the track marks with his Land-Rover. But your guess is as good as mine, sir, if he was there on Tuesday.’
Wexford nodded. ‘Barry, I want you to get down to Kingsmarkham and find a Mrs Garland, Joanne Garland. Failing finding her – I don’t think you’ll find her – see if you can discover where she’s gone, in fact her movements since Tuesday afternoon. Take someone with you, take Karen. She lives in
Broom Vale, at number fifteen, and she’s got one of those kitschy shops in the Centre. See if her car’s gone, talk to the neighbours.’
‘Sir?’
Wexford put up his eyebrows.
‘What’s a kitschy shop?’ Vine placed the stress on the first word, as in fish shop. ‘I’m sure I ought to know but it’s slipped my mind.’
Somehow, this reminded Wexford of distant days and his grandfather, who managed an ironmonger’s in Stowerton, telling a lazy boy assistant to go out and buy a pound of elbow grease and the boy obediently going. But Vine was neither lazy nor stupid, Vine – de mortuis notwithstanding – was cuts above poor Martin. Instead of telling this tale to Vine, he explained the word he had used.
Wexford found Burden eating lunch at his desk. This was behind screens in the corner where Daisy’s furniture, bookcases, chairs, floor cushions, were carefully covered up in dust sheets. Burden was eating pizza and coleslaw, not among Wexford’s favourite foods, either apart or associated, but he asked where it came from just the same.
‘Our caterers’ van. It’s outside and will be every day from twelve thirty till two. Didn’t you fix it?’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ said Wexford.
‘Get Karen to go out and fetch you something. That’s quite a selection they’ve got.’
Wexford said Karen Malahyde had gone down to Kingsmarkham with Barry Vine but he’d ask Davidson to get his lunch. Davidson knew what he liked. He sat down opposite Burden with a mud-coloured coffee from the machine.
‘How about these Griffins then?’
‘The son’s unemployed, living on the dole – well, no, Income Support, he’s been unemployed too long for the dole. He lives at home with his parents. He’s called Andrew or Andy. The parents are Terry and Margaret, late middle-age to elderly.’
‘Like me,’ said Wexford. ‘What telling phrases you do use, Mike.’
Burden ignored him. ‘They’re retired people with not enough to do, they struck me as being at a loose end. And they’re raving paranoiacs as well. Everything’s wrong and everyone’s against them. When we got there they were waiting for Telecom to fix their phone, that’s who they thought we were, and they both gave us a blast before we got a chance to explain. Then as soon as the name Tancred was mentioned, they started whingeing on about the best years of their lives they gave up to the place and the iniquities of Davina Flory as an employer, you can imagine. The funny thing was that although they must have known, I mean it was clear that they knew, all about what happened on Tuesday night – there was even yesterday’s paper lying there with all the photos – they never said a word about it till we did. I mean, not even a comment on how terrible it was. Just an exchanged glance when I said I believed they’d worked there, Griffin said rather grimly that they’d worked there all right, they’d never forget it, and then they were off, the pair of them, until we had to – well, stem the tide.’
