by Ruth Rendell
‘We’ve nothing specific, sir.’ Wexford read a lot into that emphatic ‘sir’, probably a good deal more than Burden was aware of. He heard in the stress a real effort on the inspector’s part to treat this man just as he would any other man in the doctor’s position. And he could tell that Burden, who had encountered very few black people, was ill-at- ease, not at a loss but nervous, unsure how to proceed. ‘We’ve done all we can to find your daughter. We’ve done everything that’s humanly possible.’ The doctor must have thought, as Wexford did, that this was meaningless. His knowledge of psychology, and perhaps of white men, enabled him to see through Burden. Wexford thought he could detect the ghost of a sneer on Akande’s unhappy face. ‘What are you trying to say to me, Inspector?’ Burden didn’t like that ‘trying’. There had been a faintly sarcastic emphasis on the participle. Wexford took over, rather too hastily. ‘You must prepare yourself, Dr Akande.’ His short bark of laughter was shocking in that context. It was a single ‘Ha!’ and then it was gone, the doctor’s face wretched again – worse than wretched now, distraught. ‘I am prepared,’ he said in a stoical voice. ‘We are prepared. You’re going to tell me to accept that Melanie must be dead?’ ‘Not quite that. But, yes, there’s a very strong probability.’ Silence fell. Akande put his hands into his lap and forced himself to relax them. He gave a heavy, profound sigh. To his horror, Wexford saw a tear fall from each of those tragic eyes. Akande was unembarrassed. He removed the teardrops with the forefingers of each hand, wiping them across his cheeks, then contemplating the fingertips with bent head. To keep his face hidden, without looking up, he said quietly, in an almost conversational tone. ‘There is something I’ve wondered about. Since I saw the television news last evening and read this morning’s paper. The murdered woman in Ladyhall Avenue, her name is the same as the one Melanie had her appointment with last Monday: Annette Bystock. The paper called her a civil servant and I suppose that’s what she was. Is it a . . . coincidence? I’ve wondered if there could be a connection. As a matter of fact, I was awake all last night thinking about it.’ ‘Melanie had no previous knowledge of Annette Bystock, doctor?’ ‘I’m sure she didn’t. I remember her exact words. “I have to see the New Claims Adviser at two-thirty,” she said, and then, a while later, “a Ms Bystock,” she said.’ Wexford said gently that the doctor had not told him that before. Mrs Akande hadn’t told him that on the single occasion he had talked to her. ‘Maybe not. It came back to me when I saw the name in the paper.’ Wexford deeply distrusted evidence which ‘came back to’ witnesses when they saw a name in the paper. Poor Akande said he was prepared, he could accept, but he hoped just the same. Hope may be a virtue but it causes more pain, Wexford thought, than despair. He considered asking the doctor if he knew of anything Melanie might have said to Annette Bystock that would have put both their lives in jeopardy, and then he thought how pointless such a question was. Of course Akande didn’t know. He said instead, ‘What is the name of this white boy she had a drink with?’ ‘Riding. Christopher Riding. But that was months ago.’ Akande, seeing them to the door, struggled not to say it. He lost the fight, wincing before he spoke. ‘Is there any . . . is there the slightest hope she may be . . . still alive?’
Until we find her body we can’t regard her as dead. Wexford didn’t use those words. ‘Let’s just say you must prepare yourself, doctor.’ He couldn’t give hope, knowing almost for sure that in a day or two he would snatch it away again. The women filled the school hall, at least three hundred of them. With ten minutes still to go before the meeting started, they were still arriving and one of the organizers was bringing in more chairs. ‘It’s not us they’re coming for,’ Susan Riding whispered to Wexford. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. And finding out how to blind and maim a rapist is only part of it. No, they’ve come for her. To see her. It was a good move getting her in the chair, wasn’t it?’ Wexford looked across the platform at Anouk Khoori. He had a feeling he had seen her somewhere before, though he couldn’t remember where. Perhaps it had only been a photograph in a paper. She was a big fish in a small pond, he thought, on her way to becoming Kingsmarkham’s First Lady. Presumably, that suited her. If it was true that most of these women had come for a sight of her in the flesh, to see what she wore and hear how she talked, their aspirations were not high. In her small way she was like one of those international celebrities whose pictures are always in the papers, whose names are household words and who are favourites for TV chat shows, but of whom it would be hard to say what they did and impossible to know what they had achieved. ‘She doesn’t look Middle Eastern,’ he said and immediately wondered if that was a racist remark. Susan Riding only smiled. ‘Her family are from Beirut. Anouk is a French name, of course. We knew them slightly when we were in Kuwait. His young nephew needed a minor op and Swithun did it.’ ‘They left because of the Gulf War?’ ‘We did. I don’t think they ever left. They’ve a house there and one in Menton and an apartment in New York, or so I’ve heard. I knew they’d bought Mynford Old Hall so I plucked up my courage and asked her if she’d do this and she was charming about it. Swithun’s here, by the way, and it looks as if he’s going to be the only man down there. Still, he won’t mind, he takes that sort of thing in his stride.’ Wexford spotted the paediatric surgeon sitting one row from the back, looking as urbane as his wife had suggested he would be. Why was it that when women sat with their legs crossed they rested calf on kneecap but when men did it they placed ankle on femur? Out of modesty in the women’s case, presumably, but that wouldn’t apply now they wore trousers all the time. Swithun Riding was sitting with his ankle on his femur and clasping it with a long elegant hand. Next to him sat a girl with corn-coloured hair so like him she must be his and Susan’s daughter. Wexford recognized her. The last time he saw her she had been waiting to sign on at his first visit to the Benefit Office. ‘Your son couldn’t bring himself to give his father moral support?’ said Wexford. ‘Christopher’s away for a week. He went off to Spain with a bunch of friends.’ So much for another tentative theory. Across the room Mrs Khoori laughed, a long musical peal. The man she was talking to, an ex-mayor of Kingsmarkham, smiled at her, evidently already smitten. She gave him a light pat on the arm, a delightful and strangely intimate gesture, before moving back behind the table to the central chair. There, she adjusted her microphone with the ease of someone accustomed to public speaking. ‘I’ll introduce you,’ said Susan Riding.
Wexford expected an accent but there was none, only the faintest French intonation, the ends of her sentences rising instead of falling. ‘How do you do?’ She held his hand a little longer than was necessary. ‘I knew I should meet you here, I felt it.’ Not surprising, he thought, since his name as a speaker was in the programme. He was a little disturbed by her eyes, which seemed to be assessing him, calculating something about him. It was as if she was speculating how far she could go with him, at what point she would need to draw back. Oh, nonsense, imagination . . . They were black eyes, and that must be what disconcerted him, such dark eyes in contrast to that creamy-olive skin and very fair hair. ‘Are you going to tell us poor creatures how to fight big strong men and protect ourselves?’ Anyone less like a poor creature it would be hard to find. She was at least five feet nine, her body sinuous and strong in the pink linen suit, arms and legs muscular, her skin glowing with health. On the hand he hadn’t held was a huge rock of a diamond, a single uncluttered stone on a platinum band. ‘I’m not a martial arts expert, Mrs Khoori,’ he said. ‘I shall be leaving that to Mr Adams and Mr Pollen.’ ‘But you are going to speak? I shall be so disappointed if you aren’t going to speak.’ ‘A few words.’ ‘Then you and I must have a chat afterwards. I’m worried, Mr Wexford, I am seriously worried about what is happening to us in this country, child murders, all these poor young girls assaulted, raped and worse. That’s why I’m doing this, to do what I can in my small way to . . . well, turn the tide of crime. Don’t you think we each and every one of us ought to do that?’ He wondered about that
‘us’. How long had she been living here? Two years? He wondered if he was being unreasonable, resenting her claims to Englishness while he honoured Akande’s. Her husband was an Arab multi-millionaire. . . . He was saved from making any reply to her earnest, though oddly vague, remarks by a whispered, ‘Anouk, we’re ready to start,’ from Susan Riding. With great confidence Anouk Khoori stood and surveyed her audience. She waited for their silence, their total silence, holding up her hands, the great ring catching the light, before she began to address them. An hour later, if he had been asked to give a résumé of what she had said, he couldn’t have recalled a word of it. And at the time he was aware that she had that great gift, on which so many politicians have founded their success, of being able to say nothing at length and in a flowing sequence of polysyllabic fashionable words, of talking meaningless nonsense in fine mellifluous phrases with absolute self-confidence. From time to time she paused for no apparent reason. Occasionally she smiled. Once she shook her head and once she raised her voice on an impassioned note. Just when he thought she would go on for half an hour, that nothing but physical force would stop her, she ceased, thanked her audience and, turning to him graciously, began to introduce him. She knew a lot about him. Wexford heard, to his amusement rather than dismay, his whole curriculum vitae reeled off. How did she know he had once been a copper on the beat in Brighton? Where did she find out he had two daughters? He got to his feet and talked to the women. He told them they must learn to be streetwise but told them too that they must cultivate a balanced attitude to what they heard and read about crime on the streets. With a glance of mild displeasure at the Kingsmarkham Courier reporter, taking notes from the front row, he said that newspapers
were to blame for a great deal of the hysteria over crime in this country. An example would be an account he had read recently of pensioners in Myfleet afraid to leave their homes for fear of the mugger who stalked the village and was responsible for numerous attacks on women and elderly people. The truth, on the other hand, was that one old lady, walking home from the bus stop at 11.00 pm, had had her purse snatched by someone who asked her the way. They must be sensible, avoid taking risks, but not become paranoid. In the rural areas of the police district the chances of a woman being attacked in the street were ninety-nine per cent against, and that they should remember. Oliver Adams spoke and then Ronald Pollen. A video was shown in which actors simulated an encounter on the street between a young woman and a man with a stocking over his face. When grasped from behind, her attacker’s hands at her waist and her throat, the actress showed how to draw the high heel of her shoe down the man’s calf and grind it into his instep. This drew delighted cheers and clapping from the audience. They recoiled a little from a demonstration of how to stick your thumbs in an assailant’s eyes but shocked gasps soon became sighs of pleasure. Everyone, Wexford decided, was enjoying herself a lot. The atmosphere became grimmer when WPC Clare Scott began to talk about rape. How many of these women, if raped, would report it? Half, maybe. Once you could have said no more than ten per cent. Things had changed for the better, but he still wondered if the pictures now coming up on the screen of the comfortable ‘suite’ at the new Rape Crisis Centre in Stowerton would go far in enticing women to be open about the only crime in which authority often treated the victim worse than the perpetrator. They were applauding now. They were writing down their questions for the four speakers. In the sea of faces he spotted Edwina Harris and, a dozen seats along from her, Wendy Stowlap. A quarter of an hour, he thought, and he could go home. There was no way he was going to become involved in a chat with Anouk Khoori about crime waves and dangerous Britain. The first question was for PC Adams. Suppose you hadn’t a car phone and your car broke down after dark on an A road where there were no roadside phones? What should you do? After Adams had done his best to answer this WPC Scott, the rape adviser, was asked a difficult question about so-called ‘date rape’ from someone who sounded like a victim. Clare Scott did her best to answer the unanswerable and Mrs Khoori, having opened the next folded paper, handed it to her. The rape adviser read it, shrugged and after a small hesitation handed it to Wexford. He read the question aloud. ‘If you know a member of your family is a rapist, what should you do?’ There was a sudden silence. Women had been whispering to each other, one or two at the back were gathering their things preparatory to leaving. But now all was still. Wexford saw Dora’s face in the second row from the front with Jenny beside her. He said, ‘The obvious answer is, tell the police. But you know that already.’ He hesitated, then said in a strong voice, ‘I would like to know if this question is simply academic or if the member of the audience who wrote this had a personal reason for asking.’ Silence. It was broken by three women in the back row leaving. Then someone broke into prolonged coughing. Wexford persisted. ‘You’ve been told you remain anonymous when you ask these questions, but I should like to know who asked this one. Outside the hall, behind the stage here, there’s a door marked Private. I’ll be inside that door for half an hour after the meeting with WPC Scott.
You only have to come round the side of the hall and knock on that door. I very much hope you will.’ After that there were no more questions. The youngest girl pupil at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive came up to the stage and presented Mrs Khoori with a bouquet of carnations. She thanked her effusively, she bent over and kissed her. The audience began filing out, some lingering in groups to talk over what had been discussed. Although smoking was banned from the hall, Anouk Khoori was evidently unable to wait a minute longer for a cigarette. When Wexford saw her put the kingsize to her lips and bring the lighter to it, he remembered who she was. He recognized her. She had looked very different then, in her tracksuit and without make-up, but there was no doubt she was the woman in the medical centre who had come to see Dr Akande about some malady suffered by her cook. He walked out into the car park, saw Susan Riding step into a Range Rover, Wendy Stowlap toss her holdall into the boot of a tiny Fiat, and then he retreated by the side door into the room at the back, a storeplace for chairs and trestle tables. Clare Scott unfolded a couple of chairs, he sat on one and she on the other. A clock on the wall with a large face and a loud tick gave the time as five past ten. He and Clare talked about the morality of betraying family members in aid of the greater good, whether one never should but keep silent out of loyalty or whether one always should and whether there were exceptions. They talked about the heinousness of rape. Perhaps it was right to betray the perpetrator only in the case of a crime of violence. You wouldn’t report your wife’s shoplifting, would you? The time went by and no one knocked at the door. They gave it another five minutes, but when they came out of the room at twenty to eleven the hall was empty. There was no one outside. The place was deserted.
Simisola
Chapter Seven His face looked back at him from the front page of the Sunday paper, a so-called ‘quality’ Sunday paper. And not only his face. The photograph showed himself and Burden at the table outside the Olive and Dove, only there wasn’t much of Burden. Burden would be unrecognizable except to those who knew him well. His, on the other hand, was an excellent likeness. He was smiling . . . well, laughing, to tell the truth, as he raised to his lips the brimming tankard of Heineken. In case there was any doubt, the caption said: Wexford hunts Annette’s killer, and underneath was the legend: Chief Inspector in charge of Kingsmarkham murder has time to relax with a pint. There hadn’t been a moment, he reflected bitterly, when his thoughts hadn’t been occupied with Annette Bystock and her death. But to whom could he tell that without seeming absurdly defensive? He could do nothing but pretend he didn’t care and thank God the Deputy Chief Constable bought The Mail on Sunday. Things were not improved by the arrival of Sylvia with Neil and the boys. His daughter, having forgotten which newspaper he took, had brought her own copy of the offending one to show him on the grounds that he would ‘want to see it.’ And no amount of arguing on the part of her mother and her husband could persuade her that there was any iron
y in the caption. In her eyes it was ‘nice’, the best photograph she had seen of her father in years and did he think the newspaper would let her have a copy? Sylvia dominated the conversation at lunch. She was fast becoming an expert on the provisions made by government for its jobless citizens and their dependants. Wexford and Dora had to listen to a lecture on Unemployment Benefit and who was entitled to it, the differences between it and Income Support, and the amenities of something called a ‘Job Club’ which she was engaged in pulling strings for Neil to join. ‘They have all the main newspapers there and free use of the phone, which has to be taken into consideration. And they supply envelopes and stamps.’ ‘Sounds a breeze,’ said her father sourly. ‘Somebody once took me to lunch at the Garrick and there weren’t any free stamps there.’ Sylvia ignored him. ‘After he’s been unemployed another three months he can go on a training course. A TFW course might be best. . . .’ ‘A what?’ ‘Training For Work. And I think I might do one for computers. Robin, be a love, and get the leaflets from my handbag, will you?’ ‘Nitcho vo,’ said Robin. Unable to bear another run-through of the most boring brochures he had ever seen in his life, Wexford made an excuse and resorted to the living room. Sport dominated the television programmes and he baulked at switching to the news in case, mysteriously, his own portrait had found its way to the screen. It was paranoia but he knew no way of conquering it. He even speculated if it could be a journalist’s revenge for what he had said the previous night about the press fomenting people’s fears of violence.
