Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  They had forgotten Wexford was there. He coughed. Dr Akande said miserably. ‘That’s why she split up with him. She was just as shocked and upset as we were. She hasn’t gone back to him, I’m sure of that.’ ‘Dr Akande,’ said Wexford, ‘I’d like you to come down to the police station with me and report Melanie missing. I think this is a serious matter. We have to search for your daughter and keep on searching till we find her.’ Alive or dead, but he didn’t say that. There was nothing Caucasian about the face in the photograph. Melanie Elizabeth Akande had a low forehead, a broad, rather flat nose, and full, thick, protuberant lips. Nothing of her mother’s classical cast of feature showed in that face. Her father was an African from Nigeria, Wexford now discovered, her mother from Freetown in Sierra Leone. The eyes were huge, her thick black hair a mass of tight curls. Wexford, looking at the photograph, made a strange discovery. Though she was not beautiful to him, he could see that by the standards of others, of millions of African people, Afro-Caribbean people and African Americans, she might be considered very lovely. Why was it always the white people who set the standard? The missing persons form, filled in by her father, described her as being five feet seven, hair black, eyes dark brown, and gave her age as twenty-two. He had to phone his wife at the hospital to be reminded that Melanie weighed nine stone two (or 128 pounds) and had been wearing blue denims, a white shirt and a long embroidered waistcoat when last seen. ‘You also have a son, I think.’ ‘Yes, he’s a medical student at Edinburgh.’ ‘He can’t be there now. Not in July.’ ‘No, he’s in South East Asia. So far as I know. He went off in a car about three weeks ago with two friends. They were making for Vietnam, but of course they can’t be there yet . . .’ ‘At any rate, his sister couldn’t have gone to him,’ said Wexford. ‘I have to ask you this, doctor. What sort of terms were you and your wife on with Melanie? Were there disagreements?’ ‘We were on good terms,’ the doctor said quickly. He hesitated and then qualified that statement. ‘My wife has strict ideas. No harm in that, of course, and there’s no doubt we had high expectations for Melanie, which perhaps she couldn’t fulfil.’ ‘Does she like living at home?’ ‘She really doesn’t have much choice. I’m not in a position to provide accommodation for my children and I don’t think Laurette would much care for . . . I mean Laurette expects Melanie to live at home until she . . .’ ‘Until what, doctor?’ ‘Well, take this idea of retraining. Laurette expects Melanie to live at home while she does that and perhaps not move away until she’s earning enough and responsible enough to buy somewhere for herself.’ ‘I see.’ She was with the boyfriend, Wexford thought. She had met him, according to her father, when they both found themselves in their first term at what was then Myringham Polytechnic, before such institutions were elevated to university status. Euan Sinclair came from the East End of London, had graduated at the same time as Melanie, though by then the quarrel with its anger and insults had divided them. One of Euan’s children,

  now nearly two, had been born when he and Melanie had been going out together for over a year. Akande knew his present address. He spoke as if it was written in bitterness on his heart. ‘We’ve tried to phone him but the number is unobtainable. That means it’s been cut off for non-payment of his bill, doesn’t it?’ ‘Probably.’ ‘That young man is a West Indian.’ Snobbery raised its head in these areas as well, did it? ‘An Afro-Caribbean, as we’re supposed to call them. Her mother sees him as someone who could potentially wreck Melanie’s life.’ It was Detective Sergeant Vine who went to London to seek Euan Sinclair in his rented room in a Stepney street. Akande had told him he wouldn’t be surprised if Euan was living there with one of the mothers of his children and perhaps the child as well. This would make it very unlikely that Melanie was there too but Vine didn’t say so. Myringham Police had undertaken to send an officer round to the home of Laurel Tucker. ‘I shall look in at the ESJ myself,’ Wexford said to Burden. ‘The what?’ ‘The Employment Service and Jobcentre.’ ‘Then why isn’t it the ESAJC?’ ‘Maybe it’s really Employment-Service-Job-Centre, all one word. I’m afraid that those civil servants who remodel our language have made Jobcentre into one word as they have “jobsearch”.’ For a moment Burden said nothing. He was trying to read, with increasing incredulity, a PR handout from a company guaranteeing to make private cars thief-proof. ‘It shuts them up in a metal cage. After two minutes it stops and nothing will start it. Then it makes these blood-curdling howls. Imagine that on the M2 at five-thirty, the obstruction, the safety hazard . . .’ Burden looked up. ‘Why you?’ he said. ‘Archbold could do that or Pemberton.’ ‘I daresay they could,’ said Wexford. ‘They go there often enough when someone’s assaulted an admin officer or started taking the place apart. I’m going because I want to see what it’s like.’

  Chapter Three It was going to be a fine day, if you could stand the humidity. The air was still, not so much misty as with a thick feel to it. You wanted to fill your lungs with fresh air but this was fresh air, all you were going to get. A hot sun was filtered through meshes of cloud behind which the sky must be a rich dark blue but which looked like a pale opal and was covered with an unmoving thready network of cirrus. Fumes from traffic were trapped under the cloud ceiling and by the still air. Along the pavement Wexford found himself passing through areas where someone had stopped to talk while smoking. The smell that still hung there was of cigarettes, in one spot a French cigarette, in another a cigar. Though it was still early, not quite ten, a reek of stale seafood swung out from the fishmonger’s. To pass a woman from whose skin came light floral scent or musky perfume was a pleasant relief. He paused to read the menu inside the window of the new Indian restaurant, the Nawab: Chicken Korma, Lamb Tikka, Chicken Tandoori, Prawn Biryani, Murghe Raja – all the usual stuff, but you might say that about roast beef and fish and chips. It all depended on the cooking. He and Burden could try it for lunch, when they had a moment. Otherwise, it would be takeaway from the Moonflower Instant Cantonese Cuisine. The Employment Service Jobcentre was this side of the Kingsbrook Bridge, a little way down Brook Road between the Marks and Spencers foodstore and the Nationwide Building Society. Not a particularly sensitive location, Wexford thought, considering this for the first time. The people who came to sign on would be made to wince at anything which reminded them of burdensome mortgages and repossessed houses and hardly cheered by the sight of shoppers coming out of the doors on the other side with carrier bags full of food specialities they could no longer afford. Still, nobody who had a say in it had thought of that and perhaps the ESJ came there first. He couldn’t remember. A car park at the side – ‘Strictly ESJ Staff Only’ – had access into the High Street. Steps with chipped stone balustrades led up to double doors of aluminium and glass. Inside, the atmosphere smelt stale. It was hard to say what it smelt of, for Wexford could see two notices that forbade smoking (‘Strictly Prohibited’) and no one was disobeying. Nor was it the smell of bodies. If he were to be fanciful, and he decided he had better not be, he would have said it was the odour of hopelessness, of defeat. The large room was divided into two sections; one area, the larger, was the Benefit Office, where you went to give proof of life, proximity and continuing unemployed status by signing on; the other offered jobs. On the face of it, an abundance of jobs. One free standing notice board advertised receptionists, another housekeepers and catering, a third shops, managerial, drivers, bar staff and miscellaneous. A closer look showed him that in all cases only the experienced need apply – references were required, CVs, qualifications, skills – yet it was obvious that only the young were wanted. None of the cards actually said, ‘Up to age 30’, but energy was stressed as a requirement, or a vigorous and youthful outlook.

  People sat about on three rows of chairs. All must have been under sixty-five but the older ones looked more. The young ones looked particularly hopeless. The chairs they sat on were a neutral shade of grey and now he noticed there was a colour scheme here, a rather unfortunate combination of a buttery-cream shade, navy blue and thi
s grey. At the end of each row of chairs, on the mottled carpet, stood a plastic houseplant in a plastic Grecian urn. Several doors at the side were marked ‘Private’ and one, that seemed to lead to the car park, ‘Strictly Private’. They had a passion for strictness in here. Apparently, when you arrived you took a card with a number on it from a kind of ticket machine. When your number and the number of one of the desks came up in red neon you went up and signed your claim. That was the way it looked, a bit like the doctor’s. Wexford hesitated between the ‘Jobseekers’ counter (another new composite word) and the numbered desks. At each one of these someone stood or sat, discussing complications of his or her claim with a staff member. The grey and navy badge the one nearest to him wore on her blouse proclaimed her as Ms I. Pamber, Admin Officer. The next desk was temporarily free. Wexford went up to Ms W. Stowlap, Admin Officer, and asked politely if he could see someone in authority. She glanced up, said gruffly, ‘You have to wait your turn. Don’t you know you’re supposed to take a card from the machine?’ ‘This is the only card I have.’ She had riled him. It was his warrant card he produced as he snapped, ‘Police.’ She was a thin freckled woman with white eyebrows and blushing didn’t become her. The pink tide spread to the roots of her pale ginger hair. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ll want the manager – Mr Leyton, that is.’ While she was away finding him Wexford wondered what the reason could be for all this formality, the ‘Ms’ and ‘Mr’ stuff, the initials instead of Christian names. It seemed out of tune with contemporary attitudes. Not that he minded that, recalling the way Ben and Robin called everyone by first names, even Dr Crocker, nearly sixty years their senior. Discreetly, not staring, he surveyed the people who waited. Quite a lot of women, at least half. Before his wife laid into him, calling him a sexist, a chauvinist and antediluvian as well, Mike Burden had been in the habit of saying that if all these married women didn’t take the jobs the unemployment figures would be halved. A black man, someone vaguely South East Asian, two or three Indians – Kingsmarkham was becoming more cosmopolitan daily. Then, in the back row, he spotted the fat young woman who had been in the waiting room at the medical centre. Wearing red and green floral leggings and a tight white tee-shirt, she slumped in her chair with her legs apart, gazing at the poster which, under a drawing of a gaily coloured gas balloon, advertised the ‘Jobplan Workshop’ and advised candidates for it to ‘give your jobhunting a lift’. It was with unseeing eyes, Wexford thought, that she gazed. She looked as if sledgehammered into apathy, without thoughts, without even resentment, in utter despair. Today Kelly wasn’t with her, the little girl who had run along the chairs and torn up magazines. Left with a mother or a neighbour probably, not, he hoped, in one of those toddler farms, where they strapped the infants into pushchairs in front of videos of rampaging monsters. Better that, though, than left alone. Next to her, in fact two empty seats away, a trim handsome girl provided a cruel contrast. Middle-classness stamped her, from her long corn-coloured hair, shining clean and cut as evenly as a curtain hem, her white shirt and blue denim skirt to the brown loafers she wore. Another Melanie

  Simisola

  Akande, Wexford thought, a new graduate who had found a degree doesn’t automatically confer a job . . . ‘Can I help you?’ He turned round. The man was about forty, red-faced, black-haired, with big features, the kind who looks as if his blood pressure would be high. To his grey tweed sports jacket was pinned the badge with his name and status: Mr C. Leyton, Manager. He had a harsh grating voice, an accent from somewhere north of the Trent. ‘Do you want to go somewhere private?’ Leyton asked the question as if expecting the answer ‘no’ or ‘no, don’t bother’. ‘Yes,’ said Wexford. ‘What’s all this about then?’ He asked it over his shoulder as he led Wexford past the counter and the New Claims booths. ‘It can wait till we’re in your somewhere private.’ Leyton shrugged. The heavy-set bullet-headed man who stood outside the door moved off as they approached. The Benefit Office was more in need of a security guard than most banks and it was the regular haunt of members of the uniformed branch. Desperation, paranoia and indignation, resentment, fear and humiliation all breed violence. Most people who came here were either angry or afraid. Rather late in the day the manager said, ‘I’m Cyril Leyton.’ He closed the door behind them. ‘What’s the trouble?’ ‘I hope there won’t be any. I want you to tell me if a certain . . . er, claimant came here on Tuesday to see one of your New Claims Advisers. Tuesday, July the sixth at two- thirty.’ Leyton curled his lip and put up his eyebrows. His expression would have been appropriate for the Head of MI5 when asked by some minion, a cleaner or driver perhaps, for access to top secret papers. ‘I don’t want documentation,’ said Wexford impatiently. ‘I only want to know if she came here. And I’d like to talk to the New Claims Adviser she saw.’ ‘Well, I . . .’ ‘Mr Leyton, this is a police investigation. I suppose you know I could get a warrant in a couple of hours. Is there any point in delaying things?’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Melanie Akande. A, K, A, N, D, E.’ ‘If she came on Tuesday,’ said Leyton grudgingly, ‘it should be on the computer by now. Just wait a minute, will you?’ His manner was unfortunate, cold, sour, rebarbative. Wexford guessed that the greatest pleasure he got out of life was derived from putting spokes in wheels. What effect must he have on claimants? Perhaps he never saw them, perhaps he was too ‘high up’ (as Laurette Akande put it) for that. The room was all grey, lined with filing cabinets. There was a grey chair like those the claimants sat on, a small grey metal desk and on it a grey telephone. The view from the window seemed a riot of colour, though it was only of the shoppers’ pick-up bay at the back of Marks and Spencers. Cyril Leyton came in, holding a millboard with papers attached to it by an elastic band. ‘Your Miss Akande came in for her appointment at two-thirty and brought back her ES 461. That’s the form required by . . .’ ‘I know what it is,’ Wexford said.

  ‘Right. The NCA she saw – that is, New Claims Adviser – was Miss Bystock, but you can’t talk to her, she’s off sick.’ Leyton unbent an inch. ‘One of these viruses.’ ‘If she’s off sick how do you know it was Miss Bystock Melanie Akande saw and not Mr Stanton?’ ‘Come on. Her initials are on the claim. See?’ Ostentatiously covering up everything but the bottom right hand corner of the sheet, Leyton showed Wexford the pencilled initials: A.B. ‘Did anyone else see her? Any of the other NCAs? The administration officers?’ ‘Not that I know of. Why would they?’ Wexford said suddenly, with extreme sharpness, ‘Don’t ask me. It doesn’t help to be obstructive.’ Leyton’s mouth opened but no sound came. ‘Mr Leyton, it is an offence to obstruct the police in their duties. Did you know that? Melanie Akande is missing from home. She hasn’t been seen since she left this building. This is a very serious matter. I suppose you read the newspapers? You watch television? You know what happens in the world we live in? Have you some reason for jeopardizing this enquiry?’ The man went a darker red. He said slowly, ‘I didn’t know. I’d have been . . . well, I had no idea.’ ‘You mean that what I’ve been treated to is your normal manner?’ Leyton said nothing. Then he seemed to take hold of himself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m under a lot of pressure here. Has . . . has something happened to her? This woman?’ ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Wexford showed him the photograph. ‘Will you ask your staff, please?’ This time he waited outside that stuffy grey room. He thought of the hymn line: ‘Frail children of dust. . .’. That room was like a cell spun and carved out of dust. He read the other posters, the one advocating work trials, whatever they were, and the one that asked employers: ‘Do you always choose the right person to fill your vacancy?’ He decided to fill his own vacancy by reading one of the leaflets which lay about. It was curiously apposite. ‘Be alert’, it said. ‘Be safe when jobseeking.’ Inside he read, ‘DO – tell a friend or relative where you are going and what time you expect to be back . . . arrange to be collected from the interview if it takes place outside working hours . . . find out as much as you can about the company before the interview, especially i
f there are no details in the job advert . . . make sure that the interview takes place at the employer’s premises or, if not, in a public place. DON’T – apply for a job which seems to offer too much money for very little work . . . agree to continue the interview over drinks or a meal, even if it seems to be going very well . . . let the interviewer steer the conversation towards personal subjects that have nothing to do with the job . . . accept a lift home from the interviewer. . . .’ Melanie hadn’t been offered a job, she hadn’t been sent for an interview – or had she? Cyril Leyton came back with the admin officer labelled Ms I. Pamber, a dark-haired pretty girl with dazzling blue eyes, in her late twenties, wearing a grey skirt and pink shirt. None of the staff wore jeans, Wexford had noticed, everyone was dressed in a neat, rather outdated, way. ‘I saw her, this girl you’re looking for.’ Wexford nodded. ‘Did you speak to her?’ ‘Oh, no. I’d no call to. I was on the counter. I just saw her go up and talk to Annette . . . er, Miss Bystock.’