by Ruth Rendell
No postcodes then. Just the town or village and the county. Writing that letter was difficult but he did it, suggesting he might call and see her when he had a week's holiday in August. No answer came and he was deterred for a while. Then Ventura sent him to Cornwall to interview a man the Cornish police were holding on suspicion of his being involved in a bank robbery in Kingsmarkham. William Raw was taking refuge with his mother in St Austell when he was arrested and, with the interview fixed for the following morning, Wexford would have a free late afternoon and evening. Port Ezra was no more than seven miles away along the coast towards Plymouth.
It was now or never. This was a long-distance call, costly and not to be made lightly. He could have done it from the police station but too many of his colleagues did that sort of thing and he wasn't going to. Presumably, she lived with her parents. Most young girls did then and most young men too. But it was she who answered, her voice not quite what he had hoped for. What kind of a snob was he that he was daunted by a Cornish burr?
'I'd like to meet you,' she said. 'Could you come about six? Mum and Dad will be home by then.'
Meeting her parents wasn't part of his plan but he made enthusiastic noises and said he would like to take her out to dinner. Was there a restaurant nearby?
'Not in Port Ezra,' she said and she giggled. 'There's the Pomeroy Arms but that's just for drink.' It was long before the days when pubs did food. 'You could have supper here with us.'
He said he'd be with her by six. That giggle was another point against her but he castigated himself for his rigidity.
Port Ezra was a strange name, he said to his landlady before he left the boarding house where he and DC Bryson were staying. Not so strange for Cornwall, she said, where they had Cairo and Indian Queens, transliterations from the old Cornish language. The nearest English equivalent to Medora's home town was Port Ezra, so that was how it was known.
He and Bryson had come to St Austell by train. They had no car at their disposal. He took the bus that followed the coast road to Port Ezra and beyond. It was less a town than a village with two shops and a pub, a dour grey church, white cottages with fuchsia hedges in full red and purple blossom, newest bungalows in its half-dozen streets leading off the cliff road and a magnificent view of dark blue sea pierced by jagged black rocks like a thousand islands. Number 14 Denis Road was one of the bungalows. The small car called the Mini had been on sale in Britain for a year or two, in just two colours at first, pale blue and red, and the Holland's had a red one standing on their driveway. Now he was outside the house Wexford hadn't the least idea as to what he would say. 'I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die' would hardly serve as an opening move with her mother or father.
But it was she herself who opened the door.
'So here you are then,' she said in a broad Cornish accent, a burr as thick as a television actor might have with a part in Jamaica Inn. 'I never thought you'd actually come.'
He had to remind himself that he had a Sussex accent. For years he had thought he spoke the Queen's English, pure BBC, and then he had heard a recording made of his own voice and been disillusioned.
'Anyway, come on in,' she said.
She was wearing dark green trousers that they called slacks then and a low-cut green floral blouse. The clothes didn't suit the girl he had previously seen in tight-waited full-skirted pink. His mother would have thought that blouse daring and even close on indecent. But her skin was perfect and her dark hair as glossy as satin. By this time he had been in dozens of strangers' living rooms and there was nothing out of the ordinary in this one, from the flying china mallards on the wall to the beige uncut coquette three-piece suite. Perhaps there were rather more framed photographs than usual. And which parent owned the Complete Works of Byron sitting among the cookery books and the Dennis Wheatleys? It comforted him to see it there, almost as if a sympathetic old friend were sitting in on their meeting.
'You're a cop, Josie says.' She smiled invitingly.
'Yes. A detective sergeant.'
Her perfume was musky and suitable for a woman twice her age. He sat down in one of the armchairs but when she patted the sofa cushion beside hers he moved to sit next to her.
'Fancy you seeing me and wanting to take me out. That's very romantic.' Now her face was quite close to his he could see how heavy was the make-up she wore. Had it been like that in the church but he not near enough to notice? Where were the parents? Not home yet? In another part of the house? 'I never lost that book. That was just a way of getting to meet me, wasn't it?'
He nodded. Her rather aggressive tone disconcerted him.
'Poems written by a woman hundreds of years ago. Not exactly my cup of tea.'
'Whose is the Byron then?' he had asked.
'Oh, that. My dad's. He's a bit of an egghead or used to be. Shall we have a drink? We've got sherry, Bristol Cream or Dry Fly?'
'Should we wait for your mother and father?' He was still anxious to do everything right. She must be nervous and that would account for the way she spoke and the words she used. 'They'll be home soon, won't they?'
'I don't know why you're bothered about them. I thought you'd like to be alone with me.'
Her face was very near to his now, the mouth half open. He edged backwards along the sofa, conscious of how this must look. It was no use any longer telling himself her behavior was due to nerves. Then he heard a footstep overhead. So there was someone in the house, those parents or someone else? You're a cop, she had said, and it was being a cop that stood him in good stead now. But instead of standing up, leaving without ceremony, he turned back to face her and as he did so, she took him by the shoulders and pulled him down on top of her. At some point she must have ripped the green blouse because he saw her naked breasts and, in spite of himself, was excited by them.
It hardly mattered because she screamed, a shattering sound from strong young lungs. There was a pounding on the stairs, the door burst open and a man came in. Not her father, but a young man about his own age. He was big, burly and red-faced.
'What's going on here? Get off her.'
'With pleasure,' Wexford said, extricating himself.
'He assaulted me,' the girl said. 'Jumped on me and tore my blouse.'
She was holding the two sides of it together. 'Look at that, Jim. That's what he did.'
'You're going to pay for this,' Jim said.
Wexford stood up. 'And who are you?'
'He's my fiancé.'
'I see. I'd strongly advise you not to marry her,' he said to the man, 'not unless you fancy visiting your wife in prison.'
He expected this to have an inflammatory effect but instead a shifty look crossed Jim's face. 'Let's talk about this,' he said. 'There's no need to take it further. I mean, I was going to call the police . . .' He stopped when Wexford began to laugh. 'All right, all right. Only we'll need paying. Or Middy will. Her blouse is ruined for one thing and you've frightened her. We'll say fifty quid and we'll forget about it.'
It was an old trick. Wexford had been told about it but never personally come across it before. Usually, he understood, the players in the game were a prostitute, her pimp and a client. Perhaps the situation wasn't that different. 'Forget about it, is right. For one thing I don't carry fifty pounds about on me.' It was a very large sum then. Laughable as the price for a blouse which might have cost two pounds. 'And even if I did,' he said. 'I'd not hand it over to a thug like you when I've done nothing.'
The two of them, Medora still clutching her blouse, had moved over to bar the door. The man called Jim pressed himself against it with arms outspread. The girl stood next to him, glowering at Wexford.
'Open the door,' he said.
'Make me.'
'All right, I will.'
He grabbed Jim's left arm to pull him away when the other arm came up and struck him a glancing slap across the face. That was it. Wexford was young and strong and could throw a hefty punch. He took a step back and struck the other man a
blow to his jaw. It wasn't all that hard, not half as hard as he could have made it, but Jim's knees buckled and he fell to the floor. Medora was screaming, real heartfelt terrified screams, quite different from the sounds she made when claiming to be raped.
'Stop that noise,' Wexford said. 'He's not hurt.' Jim was struggling to sit up. 'Well, not much hurt.'
'You've busted my jaw,' said Jim. Wexford knew he couldn't have if the man could speak. 'You've not heard the last of this.'
Wexford gave him a poke in the thigh with the toe of his shoe. 'Goodnight,' he said and let himself out of the front door. Down the garden path, past the parked Mini. Jim's car? Out into the street, pulling the gate shut behind him. No one tried to stop him. He was quite sure he would hear no more about it and was in no doubt he had done the right thing in hitting Jim but he still felt all kinds of a fool. A fool for going there, a fool for not walking out when she said he'd like to be alone with her and most of all a fool for letting himself become obsessed with a girl he had never even spoken to just because she was pretty, wore a rose-pink hat and had a romantic name. Walking up Denis Road towards the beach and the bus stop, he resolved that he would never again let an obsession master him, not realizing then that the peculiarities of our psyches are not so easily conquered and subdued. In those days, if he decided on something he was certain he would keep to it, for he was full of self-confidence. This particular resolution was doomed to failure from the start and even today Burden often cautioned him about another fixation. Hadn't he, after all, been obsessed for half his life with Eric Targo?
The buses from Port Ezra to St Austell were infrequent and he had walked for nearly two miles in sight of the sea before his reaching a bus stop coincided with the arrival of the bus. He had enjoyed walking in those days, walking fast and vigorously, in contrast to today when it was done purely for exercise and to offset the results of red wine and cashew nuts. In St Austell he found a pub and asked for a half of bitter. He took his drink to a table in the corner because he wanted to be alone to think. But when he was sitting down he realised that there was nothing to think about, he had done all the cogitation and recriminating that was necessary.
'Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new,' or in other words to interview William Raw and take him back to Kingsmarkham. He looked forward to another ride on the Cornish Riviera back to Paddington.
His experience put him off Cornwall. Medora Holland and her boyfriend had tainted the county for him and when his mother wanted him to go on holiday to New quay with her he contemplated a flat refusal. But his father had died six months before, her sister – the aunt who said she wouldn't give someone or other the satisfaction – six weeks before, and she seemed puzzled, forlorn and lost. Anywhere else, he said at first. Lime Regis was supposed to be very nice (and he could see where Jane Austen's Louisa Musgrove jumped off the Cobb) or how about Teignmouth, where Keats had written about going over the hill and over the mead to Dollish? Ultimately, he couldn't refuse her. New quay on the north coast was quite a long way from Port Ezra on the south.
It was the first time in his life he had stayed in a hotel. Up till then it had been boarding houses which later on became B & Bs. The hotel wasn't very big and not at all grand but it had a dining room with separate tables and at one of them, not on their first evening but on their second, sat a middle-aged man and woman with their son and daughter. He could tell they were the couple's children because the boy looked exactly like the man and the girl very much like her mother. Doing Latin at school, he had come across the phrase, mater pilchard, filial punchier.
He said it aloud, not really intending to.
'What does that mean, dear?' his mother asked.
He laughed. 'Beautiful mother, more beautiful daughter.'
'Oh, yes. They are good-looking, aren't they? The girl is lovely. But I would never have thought dark hair and blue eyes your type.'
She was thinking of Alison, the last girlfriend of his he had thought it prudent for her to know about. 'Exactly my type,' he said, and then, as they were leaving the dining room he heard her mother call her Dora. That was enough to put him off for the night and half a day. The book he had brought with him to read was David Copperfield. He was about halfway through it when he came upon a highly relevant sentence. '"Dora," I thought. "What a beautiful name."' He had laughed, had his own version, 'What an ugly name.' He dreamt about Medora that night and her hateful embrace. Next day, while they were having lunch at a restaurant by the sea his mother told him she'd invited the couple, the boy and Dora to have a drink with them that evening.
How decorous it all was! How different from how it would be today, even if you could imagine people of their age – in their twenties – going on holiday with their parents. Even then he found it deeply dull and pedestrian. In the unlikely event of this Dora – horrible name – being the girl for him, would he want to meet her, his fate, his future, in company with his mother, her mother and father and her brother, over Dry Fly sherry in a hotel bar in New quay? Who knew then that New quay would one day become fashionable as a surfing resort and rival Ibiza as a venue for young people's raves and binge-drinking?
She had a pretty voice as well as a beautiful face and figure. She was witty and sharp. He fell in love three days later, forgot the awfulness of the name and came to love it, took her away from her family and abandoned his mother to the – acceptable and perhaps preferred – company of Dora's mother and father. It is said that we all have a peak experience, one day that is to be the best of our lives. Perhaps his was the fifth day since his meeting with Dora, when they were walking by the sea. When he told her he loved her she lifted her face to his and said she loved him too.
To meet your future wife in a hotel where you are on holiday with your mother and she on holiday with her parents seems the reverse of romantic. He was learning that romance has little to do with location or the exotic or glamorous circumstances and everything to do with feelings. And learning too that you like a name because you love the person who is called by it.
Chapter 9
All the time he was engaged Wexford thought how wonderful it would be if Dora were living in his flat with him. She was often there, of course she was, but she always went home to Hastings where her parents lived. It became an obsession with him to long for her when he was alone, to imagine her letting herself in with her own key, making a phone call to a friend on his phone, running a bath and walking about the flat in his dressing gown. Because of this, because he wanted to see a dream made reality, they went back to Kingsbrook Court after their wedding – a small quiet affair – before going away on their honeymoon. And the real thing was better than the imagined cameos.
His expected promotion had come. This meant they could afford to take out a mortgage on a house and they had just moved in when their first daughter was born. It also meant more responsibility, longer hours and more traveling. Dora bore the evenings he was late, the evenings he had promised to take her out until work got in the way, the nights when it was his turn to get up for the baby but in the event was too tired even for her crying to wake him. She bore them with some resentment and he took her resentment patiently because it meant she loved him and wanted his company.
He was happy and doing well. Another baby was on the way. He hadn't forgotten Targo and the man was always at the back of his mind, sometimes at the forefront. When Targo had sold his mother's house and was back in Birmingham, sometimes with Tracy Thompson and sometimes alone, later while he was in Coventry, Wexford had interested himself in the murders that took place in those particular areas of the Midlands. Several were of women who had plainly been killed by husbands or live-in partners. There were the inevitable child murders, most of them also associated with sexual abuse. Only one case was a strangling. The woman was a prostitute called Shirley Palmer, eighteen years old, and the suspect had previously been convicted of a serious assault on a woman in Stowerton, for which he had served a prison sentence. This gave Wexford a reason to go up to
Coventry and sit in on the questioning.
To the investigating officers, and to a lesser extent himself, it was clear that Thomas Joseph Mullen was guilty, but Targo was always in his mind. Targo had killed once and would kill again. He was living nearby. He had strangled Elsie Carroll, or Wexford firmly believed he had, and that he had no apparent connection with the victim was in line with his part in the Carroll case. But this very fact made it impossible for Wexford to suggest to Detective Inspector Tillman that it might be worth questioning him or at least checking if Targo had an alibi. He could imagine the conversation.
'He stared at you? You think he stalked you?'
'I'm sure he did. On three separate occasions. There's no doubt about it.'
'And this goes to show he killed this woman he didn't know? You've no evidence, have you?'
It was impossible. He was starting to see that there was no one he could confide in, no one to whom he could tell that he believed Targo to be a murderer, and expect not to be met with incredulity. Of course he hadn't tried. He tried no one until he began telling the story to Burden all those years later.
At last, late in the evening, Mullen was charged with murder and Wexford went back to the hotel where he was staying the night. He phoned Dora to ask how she was and how his little girls were. Sheila had had a temperature when he left. Dora said she was fine now, both of them were fast asleep. In those days no one said 'I love you' as an invariable concomitant of a phone call to one's wife and no one said 'Lots of love' when terminating a conversation.
'I miss you,' Wexford said instead and she said, 'I miss you too and I haven't got all the excitement of a wet night in Coventry.'
After that he went downstairs to the bar and asked for a glass of red wine. People were just starting to drink wine instead of beer or spirits.
'Claret or burgundy, sir?'
