Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  the manager of Silk’s and Varcava’s landlady, who nearly came to blows with Varcava and Euan Sinclair over the mayhem they were making in her house in the small hours.’ ‘So what happened to Melanie in those few minutes after she left the unemployment place? The last person she saw, according to you, was this Annette Bystock, the New Claims Adviser. Is there any point in talking to her?’ ‘She was off sick,’ said Wexford. ‘She may be back at work by now, though people don’t usually go back on a Friday, they take the whole week. But what are we saying, Mike? That Melanie Akande confided the details of some secret appointment to a complete stranger? A woman she’d talked to for fifteen minutes and talked to surely only about filling in a form and job prospects? Come to that, what secret appointment? She’d already got one of those with Euan. Now she’s having another with some other chap just an hour before she meets Euan?’ Burden shrugged. ‘Well, you said all that. I didn’t. My imagination hasn’t travelled that far. All I’m saying is, we ought to talk to Annette Bystock, solely on the grounds that she was the last person to see Melanie. . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You were going to say “alive”, weren’t you?’ There but for the grace of God go I, was not a reflection Michael Burden was ever likely to quote. He neither said it to himself when he saw famine victims on television, nor if he passed the half dozen or so homeless who slept on the street in Myringham. He didn’t say it now, entering the Benefit Office and contemplating the jobless who sat about waiting on the grey chairs. That he wasn’t among them had nothing to do with God’s grace in his opinion, and everything to do with his own industry, determination and hard work. He was one of those who ask the unemployed why they don’t get a job and the homeless why they don’t find a place to live. If he had been in Paris in the 1780s he would have told the starving who begged for bread to eat cake. Now, wearing his immaculate beige trousers and new jacket of beige linen with a navy fleck – one thing, as Wexford sometimes said, no one would have taken him for a policeman – he contemplated the unemployed and reflected on what a hideous garment the shellsuit was. Marginally worse than the tracksuit. It had never occurred to him that these clothes are cheap, warm in cold weather and cool in hot, easy to wash, resistant to creases and very comfortable, and he didn’t consider the matter now. He turned his attention to the administrative assistants behind their desks, deciding which one he should approach. Jenny Burden said of her husband that if he had a choice, he would always enquire of a man rather than a woman, ask a man the way somewhere, go up to a male assistant in a shop, take the seat in a train next to a man. He hadn’t liked that, he said it made him sound homosexual, but that wasn’t what she meant at all. In the Benefit Office he had a choice, for behind the desks sat a man and three women. The man, however, had a brown skin and wore a label with the name Mr O. Messaoud. Burden, who hotly denied that he was a racist in any degree, nevertheless rejected Osman Messaoud on the grounds (of which he was only subliminally aware) of his skin colour and his name, and went up to freckled, ginger-haired Wendy Stowlap. She happened to be briefly free and this was the reason Burden would have given for choosing her. ‘Is it about that girl who’s missing?’ she asked after he had enquired for Annette Bystock. ‘Just routine enquiries,’ said Burden blandly. ‘Is Miss Bystock back yet?’ ‘She’s still off sick.’

  He turned away, almost colliding with Wendy Stowlap’s next client, a big heavy woman in a red shellsuit. She smelt powerfully of cigarettes. They can always afford to smoke, Burden said to himself. Two of the boys sitting on the stone balustrade were also smoking, their feet dabbling in a litter of ash and cigarette ends. Burden gave them a long severe look, drawing his brows together. His eyes lingered particularly on the black boy with the Rastafarian hair, a mountainous crest of matted dreadlocks, on top of which rested a woolly cap, knitted in concentric circles of colour. It was the sort of hat he called a tam-o’-shanter, as his father would have done and his grandfather before him. The boys took absolutely no notice of him. It was as if his body was transparent and their eyes penetrated it to the stonework behind him, the pavement, the corner where Brook Road turned into the High Street. They made him feel invisible. With an angry shrug he went back to the car he had parked in the ‘strictly private’ area for ESJ staff only. The address Wexford had given him was in south Kingsmarkham. It was formerly one of the best parts of the town where, in the late nineteenth century, the most prosperous of its citizens had built themselves large houses, each standing in an acre or two of garden. Most of them were still there but partitioned now, and their gardens ‘infilled’ with new houses and rows of garages. Ladyhall Gardens had come in for this treatment, but the Victorian relics were smaller and each one divided into two or three flats. Someone had pretentiously named number fifteen Ladyhall Court. It was a gabled house on two floors, built of the ‘white’ brick which was the fashionable building material here in the 1890s. A screen of copper sycamores hid much of the ground floor from the road. Burden guessed there were two flats on each floor, the two at the rear accessible from a side door. Above the bell for the upper floor a card read: John and Edwina Harris, and above the bell for the lower flat: Ms A. Bystock. When there was no answer from Flat One, he rang the Harrises’ bell. No answer there either. The front door had a lock at the top, a lock in the middle, and a brass knob, now tarnished black. On the off chance Burden tried the handle and to his surprise – and disapproval – it came open. He found himself in a hallway with plaster scrollwork on the ceiling and uncompromisingly modern vinyl tiles on the floor. The staircase had an iron balustrade and grey marble steps. There was only one door, dark green with the figure 1 painted on it in white. The knocker was brass and so was the knob, but polished brass, and the bellpush bright as gold. Burden rang the bell, waited. She might be in bed. If she was ill she might well be. He listened for sounds of movement, for footsteps or the creak of a floorboard. He rang the bell again. The little knocker was almost useless, it made a frenzied clack-clack, like a child trying to make its small voice heard. Probably she was simply not answering the bell. If he was ill in bed, alone in the house, and some unexpected caller rang the bell he wouldn’t answer it. There might be someone looking after her, of course, some neighbour perhaps, and that person would have a key. He knelt down and looked through the letter box. Inside it seemed quite dark, darker than in the corridor. Gradually, through the small open rectangle, he made out a shadowy hallway with red fitted carpet, a small console table, dried flowers in a little gilded basket.

  He stood up, rang the bell again, banged on the baby knocker, squatted down and called her name through the aperture: ‘Miss Bystock!’ and, louder, ‘Miss Bystock! Are you at home?’ For one last time he called her name and then he went out of the house and round the side, pushing aside the sycamore branches with their leathery leaves that made everything so dark. This little window would be the kitchen, this one the bathroom. No sycamores here, only waist-high golden rod on either side of a concrete drive. Behind the last window by the side door the curtains were closed. For some reason he looked behind him, the way we do when we think we are being watched. On the opposite side of the street, in a 1900-ish house with a short front garden, someone was looking at him from an upstairs window. A face that looked as old as the house, crinkled, frowning, glaring. Burden turned back to the window. He thought the drawn curtains a bit strange. How ill was she? Ill enough to need a darkened room to sleep in midmorning? The thought came to him that perhaps she wasn’t ill at all, that she was skiving off work and had gone out somewhere. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the old watcher at the window had come downstairs and crossed the road and tapped him on the shoulder. In the expectation of this he turned round once more. But the face was still there, its expression unchanged, and it was perfectly still, so much so that for a moment Burden asked himself if this was a real person or some sort of facsimile, a wooden cutout of a glaring and evil- countenanced observer, placed there by the occupier as some people keep a painted chipboard cat in their gardens to frighte
n real ones. But this was nonsense. He squatted down and tried to see between the curtains but the gap was infinitesimal, the merest line. In defiance of what the watcher over the way might think or do, he knelt down on the concrete paving and tried to look under the hem of the curtains. Here was a gap of perhaps half an inch between curtain hem and lower window frame. It was dim in there. He couldn’t see much. At first he could see scarcely anything. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the subfusc interior of the room, he made out the edge of a table, possibly a dressing table, the polished wooden foot of something on blue carpet, a segment of flowered material touching the floor. And a hand. A hand, which hung down against those printed lilies and roses, a white immobile hand, the fingers extended. It must be made of china, of plaster, of plastic. It couldn’t be real. Or it could be real and she asleep. What sort of sleep was maintained through all that shouting? Almost involuntarily, forgetting possible watchers, he drummed on the glass with his knuckles. The hand didn’t move. The hand’s owner didn’t leap up with a cry. Burden ran back into the house. Why had he never learned how to pick a lock? Opening this one would be child’s play to a lot of men and women he encountered in a day’s work. Doors in the movies cave in with ease at the pressure of a shoulder. It always made him laugh angrily when he saw actors on television run up against stout doors and send them crashing in at one shove. It was so silent too, the way they did it. He knew his own efforts would be noisy and very likely bring the neighbours. But it couldn’t be helped. He ran up against the door, applying his shoulder. It juddered and creaked but his action hurt him more than it hurt the door. He rubbed his shoulder, took a deep breath, and hurled himself at it – once and again and once more. This time he kicked it, more of a punch with his foot, and the door groaned. Another foot-punch – he hadn’t kicked like

  that since on the soccer field at school – and the door split and flew open. He stepped over the broken wood and paused to get his breath. The hallway was tiny. It turned the corner and became a passage. All five doors were shut. Burden went down it, guessed at the bedroom door, opened it and found a broom cupboard. Next to it must be the bedroom, its door not quite closed, half an inch ajar. First taking a deep breath, he pushed it open. She lay as if asleep, her head on the pillow, her face turned into it and hidden by a mass of dark curly hair. One shoulder was bare, the other and the rest of her body covered by the bedclothes and the flowered quilt. From the naked shoulder extended her rather plump white arm with the hand he had seen, trailing almost to the floor. He touched nothing, not the curtains, not the bedclothes, not that buried head, nothing but the hanging hand. One finger he put out to feel it, the back of it above the knuckles. It was stiffening as if frozen and as cold as ice.

  Chapter Five They filled the place, it was so small; the pathologist, the photographers, the scene-of- crime officers, everyone indispensable, each with a specific task. Once the windows had been photographed and the curtains drawn back it was better, and when the body was taken away most of them went with it. Wexford lifted the lower sash in the bay and watched the van bearing Annette Bystock’s remains disappear in the direction of the mortuary. There would have to be formal identification but he had identified her from the passport he found in a dressing table drawer. The passport was a newish one, in the dark red and gold binding of the European Union, issued just over twelve months before. It gave the holder’s name as Bystock, Annette Mary, her status as a British Citizen and her date of birth, 22.11.54. The photograph was plainly of the dead woman, clearly identifiable, in spite of the effects on her face of strangulation, the swelling, the cyanosis, the tongue protruding between the teeth. Her eyes were the same. She had stared into the camera with almost the same degree of horrified apprehension as she had looked into her killer’s face. They were round dark eyes. Her hair was dark and fussy, a dense bush of it which must have made a wide frame for her face unless she had somehow confined it. When Burden found her she had been wearing a pink nightdress patterned with white flowers. Across the quilt had lain a white wool cardigan that had evidently done duty as a bedjacket. Thee were no rings on the hands, no earrings in her ears. On the left-hand bedside cabinet were her watch, gold with a black strap, a gold ring with a red stone, probably a ruby, that looked valuable, a comb and a half-empty bottle of aspirins; on the right-hand cabinet were a novel by Danielle Steel in paperback, a glass of water, a packet of throat pastilles and a Yale key. A bedlamp stood on each cabinet, each one a simple white vase-shaped base with a pleated blue shade. The one on the right of the bed, farthest from the door, was intact. The other had a chip out of its base and its cord torn from the base. This cord, with plug still attached, had gone now, had been removed in a plastic bag by DC Pemberton, but when they first came into the bedroom it had been lying on the floor within inches of Annette Bystock’s hanging hand. ‘She’s been dead at least thirty-six hours,’ Sir Hilary Tremlett, the pathologist, had said to Wexford. ‘I’ll be able to tell you more precisely when I’ve had a closer look. Let me see, it’s Friday, isn’t it? On the face of it, I’d say she died on Wednesday night, certainly before midnight on Wednesday.’ He left before the van bearing the body was out of sight. Wexford closed the bedroom door. ‘A confident killer,’ he said. ‘An experienced killer, I’d say. He must have been very sure of himself. He didn’t bother to bring a weapon with him, he was sure he’d find one

  to hand. Everyone has electric leads in their home, but if by chance he couldn’t find a suitable one, everyone has knives, heavy objects, hammers.’ Burden nodded. ‘Or he was familiar with the place. He knew what was on offer.’ ‘Must it be a he? Or are you just being politically incorrect?’ Burden grinned. ‘Old Tremlett may be able to help us there. I can’t somehow imagine a woman breaking into a place and tearing a lead out of a lamp to strangle someone.’ ‘You’re well known for having quaint ideas about women,’ said Wexford. ‘He or she didn’t break in, though, did they? There’s no sign of a break-in. They were let in or they had a key.’ ‘Someone she knew, then?’ Wexford shrugged. ‘How’s this for a scenario? She started to feel ill on Tuesday evening, went to bed, felt worse in the morning, so she phoned the Benefit Office to say she wasn’t coming in and then she phoned a friend or a neighbour and asked them to fetch something in for her. Look at this.’ Burden followed him into the kitchen. It was too small to contain a table but on the narrow counter, on the left side, was a grocer’s cardboard box, twelve inches by nine and about nine inches high. The items inside seemed untouched. On top of them lay a supermarket print-out, dated 8 July. Beneath it were a packet of cornflakes, two small pots of strawberry yogurt, a carton of milk, a small wholemeal loaf wrapped in tissue paper, a packet of pre-sliced Cheddar cheese and a grapefruit. ‘So the friend that was shopping for her brought that in yesterday,’ Wexford said. ‘If the friend works, the likelihood is it was yesterday evening . . . Yes, Chepstow, what is it?’ The fingerprint man said, ‘I haven’t done in here yet, sir.’ ‘We’ll clear out of your way then.’ ‘There’s a key on the bedside table. Why not give the friend a key?’ Burden asked as they moved into Annette Bystock’s living room. ‘The front door was unlocked when I got here. Did she leave her own front door on the latch? Why do that in this day and age?’ If Wexford winced Burden didn’t notice. ‘It’s just inviting a burglar.’ ‘She couldn’t give the friend a key if the friend wasn’t there, Mike. Man hasn’t yet mastered the technique of sending solid objects by phone, radio or satellite transmission. If she didn’t want to get out of bed to let him or her in she could only leave the door on the latch. Once the friend had come she could hand over a key.’ ‘But someone else came in while the door was on the latch?’ ‘It looks like it.’ ‘We have to find the friend,’ said Burden. ‘Yes, I’m wondering if it was a neighbour or if she only made one phone call on Wednesday morning, if she killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. After all, Mike, who are our friends? Mainly, the people we were at school with or trained with or met at work. I think it’s very likely the Good Sa
maritan who brought the yogurt and grapefruit works at the Benefit Office.’ ‘Karen and Barry are doing the neighbours now, but most of them are at work.’ Wexford had been standing at the window but now he turned round and surveyed the room. He looked at Annette Bystock’s pictures on the wall, a bland and innocuous pen and ink drawing of a windmill, a bright watercolour of a rainbow over green hills; at her framed photographs, one in black and white of a girl of about three in a frilly dress and white socks, one of a couple in a suburban garden, the woman with her hair in sausage