Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  That should stir him up a bit. Wexford wouldn’t have been surprised if Snow had called back himself, unable to wait to know the worst, but no call came. He gave it a quarter of an hour before dialling the number again. ‘Mr Snow is in a meeting.’ ‘Did you give him the message?’ ‘Yes, I did, but he had this meeting straight after he came off the phone.’ ‘I see. How long will this meeting last?’ ‘Half an hour. Mr Snow has his next meeting at eleven-fifteen.’ ‘Give him another message, will you? Tell him to cancel his other meeting as Chief Inspector Wexford will see him in his office at eleven.’ ‘I can’t possibly . . .’ ‘Thank you.’ Wexford put the phone down. His temper had started to rise. He remembered his blood pressure. Then he had a good idea which made him laugh to himself before he picked up the phone again and asked DS Karen Malahyde to come up and see him. Karen Malahyde was very much the new woman. Young, fairly good-looking, she did little to enhance her looks. Her face was always without make-up of any kind, her fair hair was very short as were her fingernails. Many with fewer advantages than she had made themselves into beauties. She could do nothing, however, to disguise the excellence of her figure. Karen was a beautiful shape and had the sort of long legs that looked as if they started at her waist. She was a feminist and almost a radical one, a good police officer but one who had sometimes to be cautioned not to lean too hard on men or favour women. ‘Yes, sir?’ ‘I want you to come with me on a visit to a gallant lover.’ ‘Sir?’ Wexford told her some of Annette Bystock’s love story. Instead of castigating Snow as a bastard, which was what he expected, she said rather gloomily, ‘These women are their own worst enemies,’ and then, ‘did he kill her?’ ‘I don’t know.’ They entered the old house by the front door in York Street. Inside it was poky and low-ceilinged but authentically ancient, the kind of place that is generally said to be full of character. There was no lift. The receptionist left her desk and took them upstairs, up a narrow creaking oak staircase, winding to a passage at the top. She knocked on a door, opened it and said rather cryptically, ‘Your eleven o’clock appointment, Mr Snow.’ The man in the photograph Burden had found came up to them with outstretched hand. Wexford pretended not to have seen it. For a moment he thought Snow hadn’t been told who his callers were. Surely if he had known he could hardly have been so confident, would hardly have smiled so winningly. ‘I’m happy to tell you it’s turned up,’ he said. They were evidently at cross-purposes but how and why Wexford couldn’t tell. He thought that if he didn’t keep a watch on himself he might start enjoying this. It was going to be good. ‘What has turned up, sir?’ ‘My driving licence, of course. There were five places it could have been, I looked in them and there it was in the fifth and last.’ Snow realized that something was wrong but he was only disconcerted, not fearful. ‘I’m sorry. What did you want to see me about?’

  Karen was looking offended at being taken for a traffic cop. Wexford asked, ‘What do you think we want to see you about, Mr Snow?’ A wariness in his eyes showed that realization was dawning. He put up his eyebrows, his head a little on one side. He was a tall thin man, his bushy dark hair greying, not good-looking but with an air of distinction. Wexford thought he had a mean mouth. ‘How should I know?’ he said in a voice that was a little shriller than it had been. ‘May we sit down?’ Karen, when she was seated, couldn’t help showing a lot of leg. Even in those awful brown lace-ups with their Cuban heels, her legs were spectacular. Snow gave them a swift but significant glance. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know why we’ve come, Mr Snow,’ Wexford said. ‘I’d have thought you’d be expecting us.’ ‘I was. I told you, I thought you were here because I couldn’t produce my licence when I was stopped on Saturday.’ He knew, Wexford could tell. Was he going to brazen it out? Snow’s fingers fidgeted with objects on his desk, straightening a sheet of paper, replacing the cap on a pen. ‘So what is it then?’ ‘Annette Bystock.’ ‘Who?’ If it hadn’t been for those restless fingers, now busy with the telephone lead, those eyes that held a gleam of real panic, Wexford might have doubted, might have thought the dead woman a paranoid fantasist, Jane Winster an oracle and Ingrid Pamber queen of the liars. He glanced at Karen. ‘Annette Bystock was murdered last Wednesday,’ said Karen. ‘Don’t you watch television? You haven’t seen the papers? You and she had a relationship. You’d been having a relationship with her for nine years.’ ‘I what?’ ‘I think you heard me, sir, but I don’t mind repeating it. You had been having a relationship with Annette Bystock for . . .’ ‘That is absolute nonsense!’ Bruce Snow got to his feet. His thin face had gone a dark red and a pulse beat in a bluish vein on his forehead. ‘How dare you come into my office and make these totally false suggestions!’ For some reason Wexford thought suddenly of Annette coming here, hiding in the alley, tapping on the back door, being brought up that winding stair by Snow to this office where there wasn’t even a couch, where there was not the means to produce a drink or even a cup of tea. The phone was there, though, in case his wife called him. He got up and Karen, taking her cue from him, also rose to her feet. ‘No doubt it was a mistake coming to your office, Mr Snow,’ he said. ‘I apologize.’ He watched Snow relax, breathe again, gather up his energy for a final blustering. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll come to your home this evening and talk about it there. Shall we say eight? That’ll give you and your wife a chance to have your evening meal first.’ If it hadn’t worked it would have shown he was wrong, one or both of the women were fantasists, he’d imagined every sign he’d detected in Snow, and he’d be for the high jump. Freeborn would like this a lot less than newspaper photographs of merry-making. But it worked. Snow said, ‘Sit down, please.’ ‘Are you going to tell us about it, Mr Snow?’

  ‘What is there to tell? I’m not the first married man to have a girlfriend. As it happens, Annette and I had decided to break up. It was over.’ Snow paused, cleared his throat. ‘There is no point in my wife’s knowing now. I may as well tell you I went to great lengths to conceal my relationship from my wife. I was anxious not to cause her pain. Annette understood that. Our relationship was, not to put too fine a point on it, purely physical.’ ‘Then you never intended to leave your wife and marry Miss Bystock once your youngest child was off your hands?’ ‘Good heavens, no!’ Karen said, ‘Where did you meet, Mr Snow? At Miss Bystock’s home? At an hotel?’ ‘I can’t see that that’s relevant.’ ‘Perhaps you’d answer the question just the same.’ ‘At her home,’ said Snow uncomfortably. ‘We met at her home.’ ‘That’s odd, sir, because we didn’t find any fingerprints in Miss Bystock’s flat apart from her own and those of a woman friend. Perhaps you wiped surfaces clean of prints.’ Karen seemed to rack her brains. ‘Or – yes, that would be it – you wore gloves.’ ‘Of course I didn’t wear gloves!’ Snow was growing angry. Wexford watched the beating pulse, the bloodshot eyes. Had he no grief for Annette Bystock at all? After all that time was there no sorrow, no nostalgia even, no regret? And what did the man mean with his ‘purely physical’ relationship? What did anyone ever mean? That there had been no words exchanged, no endearments, no promises? One at least he had extracted from the dead woman, that she tell nobody. She had very nearly kept it. ‘When did you last see her?’ ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think. A few weeks ago, I think it was a Wednesday.’ ‘Here?’ said Karen. He shrugged, then nodded. Wexford said, ‘I’d like you to tell me where you were between 8.00 pm and midnight last Wednesday. Wednesday, July the seventh.’ ‘At home, of course. I’ve always got home by six.’ ‘Except when you were meeting Miss Bystock.’ Snow winced and coughed as if screwing up his face was a normal preliminary to clearing his throat. ‘I got home by six last Wednesday and I stayed at home. I didn’t go out again.’ ‘You spent the evening at home with your wife and – your children, Mr Snow?’ ‘My elder daughter doesn’t live at home. The younger one, Catherine, she’s . . . well, she’s not often in in the evenings . . .’ ‘But your wife and your son were with you? We shall need to talk to your wife.’ ‘You can’t bring my wife into
this!’ ‘You have brought her into it yourself, Mr Snow,’ Wexford said quietly. Bruce Snow’s 11.15 appointment had been cancelled and now he was obliged to postpone the one he had with a Tax Inspector at 12.30. Wexford didn’t think his misery had anything to do with guilt, or rather, with any responsibility for Annette’s death. It was terror, the fear of his orderly world falling to pieces. But he couldn’t be sure. ‘Now you last saw Miss Bystock on a Wednesday some weeks ago. How many weeks, sir?’ ‘Do you really want me to be precise about it?’

  Simisola

  ‘Certainly I do.’ ‘Three weeks, then. It was three weeks.’ ‘And when did you last talk to her on the phone?’ Snow didn’t want to admit it. He screwed up his eyes like someone in a smoky room. ‘It was Tuesday evening.’ ‘What, the Tuesday before her death?’ Karen Malahyde was surprised. ‘Tuesday the sixth?’ ‘I phoned her from here,’ Snow said in a rush. ‘I phoned her from this office just before I went home.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘To make a date, if you must know. For the next night. God, this is my private life you’re putting on the line. Anyway, it wasn’t important, there was nothing, she just said she wasn’t well. She was in bed. She’d got flu or something.’ ‘Did she mention a girl called Melanie Akande? Did she say anything about giving information to the police?’ This gave Snow a sort of hope. Here was something else. The heat had, at least temporarily, gone off his long and suddenly reprehensible affair with Annette. But he gave a heavy sigh. ‘No, I don’t – wait a minute, did you say Akande? There’s a doctor called that in the same practice as my doctor. Coloured chap.’ ‘Melanie is his daughter,’ said Karen. ‘Well, what about her? I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know him, I didn’t know he had a daughter.’ ‘Annette did. And Melanie Akande has disappeared. But no, of course not, Annette wouldn’t have mentioned anything to you because yours was a purely physical relationship, you said, conducted in silence.’ Snow was too wretched to lash back. He did ask when Wexford intended to speak to his wife. ‘Oh, not yet, Mr Snow,’ Wexford said. ‘Not today. I’ll give you a chance to tell her yourself first.’ He dropped the faintly bantering tone and became serious. ‘I suggest you do that, sir, at the first possible opportunity.’ William Cousins, the jeweller, took a good look at Annette Bystock’s ring, pronounced it a fine ruby and valued it at two thousand, five hundred pounds. Give or take a little. That was around the sum he would be prepared to pay for such a ring if it was offered to him. He could probably sell it for much more. Tuesday was one of Kingsmarkham’s two market days, the other being Saturday. As a matter of routine, Sergeant Vine cast his eye over the goods for sale on the stalls in St Peter’s Place. The stolen stuff either turned up here or at the car boot sales in gardens or on waste ground that had become a regular weekend feature. He generally went round the stalls first, then headed for the sandwich bar to collect his lunch. Leaving Cousins’s, he began his investigation of the market and on the second stall he looked at saw for sale a radio-cassette player. It was made of a hard white plastic substance and across the top of it, just above the digital clock, was a dark red stain someone had tried in vain to eradicate. For a moment or two Vine thought the stain was blood, and then he remembered.

  Chapter Nine The worst thing, Dr Akande told Wexford, was the way everybody asked them if there was any news of their daughter. All his patients knew and they all asked. At last, unable to keep the truth from him any longer, Laurette Akande had told her son when he telephoned from Kuala Lumpur. Immediately he said he would come home. As soon as he could get a cheap flight he would come back. ‘The death of that other girl made me believe Melanie must also be dead,’ Akande said. ‘I should be raising false hopes if I told you not to think that way.’ ‘But I’ve told myself there’s no connection. I have to keep hoping.’ Wexford had come to them as he did most mornings on his way to work or evenings on his way home. Laurette, changed out of her navy and white uniform into a linen dress, impressed him with her handsome looks, her dignified demeanour. He had seldom seen a woman with a straighter back. She showed less emotion than her husband, was always under control, cool, steady-eyed. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what Melanie did the day before she . . . disappeared,’ he said. ‘On the Monday. What did she do that day?’ Akande didn’t know. He had been at work but it was Laurette’s day off. ‘She wanted a lie-in.’ Wexford got the impression that here was a mother who disapproved of staying in bed late. ‘I got her up at ten. It’s no good getting into those habits if you want to get on in life. She went down to the shops, I don’t know what for. In the afternoon she went for a run – you know, jogging that they all do. She always took the same route, Harrow Avenue, Eton Grove, uphill all the way, horrible in this heat, but it would have been pointless saying so. The world would be a better place if they thought as much about their responsibilities as they do about their figures. My husband came home, we had our meal, the three of us . . .’ ‘She talked about getting a job,’ said the doctor, ‘about this appointment she had and the possibility of getting a grant to do business training.’ He made an effort at a laugh. ‘She got cross with me because I said she’d have to think about working her way through college the way they do in America.’ ‘Well, we couldn’t afford to pay,’ Laurette said sharply. ‘And she’d had one grant. It wasn’t as if her first degree was any good, they do take that into account, I told her. She got sulky about it. We all watched some television. She phoned someone, I don’t know who, possibly that Euan, God forbid.’ ‘My wife,’ said Dr Akande, in almost reverential tones, ‘had a degree in physics from University College, Ibadan, before she studied nursing.’ Wexford was beginning to pity Melanie Akande, a seriously pressurized young woman. The irony was that it looked as if she had had no more chance of escape from forcible education than a Victorian girl had from its denial. And like that Victorian, she was obliged to live at home for an unforeseeable future.

  He referred back to her afternoon’s jogging. ‘She told you nothing of what she had seen while she was out, anyone who had spoken to her, anything at all?’ ‘She didn’t tell us anything,’ said Laurette. ‘They don’t. They’re experts at that. You’d think she’d taken a course in secrecy.’ Wexford got into the car, driving himself, but instead of heading for home, took the Glebe Lane direction. Asking himself if it was possible either of the Akandes was responsible for Melanie’s disappearance, perhaps Melanie’s death, he had to face the chance that it was. But he still went and talked to them. To allege that Akande might be guilty of such a crime was to presuppose him mad or at least a fanatic. The doctor appeared neither of those things and not at all obsessed about Euan Sinclair’s association with his daughter. Wexford had never checked out Akande’s alibi, hardly knew if he had an alibi. But he could see that there was one car Melanie would have got into while she was on her way from the Benefit Office to the bus stop – her father’s. Then had Akande lied? As Snow had, as surely Ingrid Pamber had? It was strange how he knew she had been lying without knowing what she was lying about. He drove into Glebe Lane, over the cobbles. She came down to let him in and said she was at home alone. Lang had gone to see his uncle, a strange excuse that immediately made Wexford suspicious, though he hardly knew of what. Her eyes met his. It spoke of a sublime self- confidence, or an ability to lie effectively, when someone could look you so boldly in the eye and hold the gaze. She wore a long patterned skirt, blue with paler blue flowers, and a silk sweater. Her dark shiny hair was twisted up on top of her head. ‘Miss Pamber, you’ll think I have a bad memory but I wonder if you’d tell me all over again just what happened when you called on Miss Bystock last Wednesday? When you took her a pint of milk and she asked you to fetch her some shopping on the following day?’ ‘You haven’t really got a bad memory, have you? You’re just testing me to see if I’ll say the same things.’ ‘Perhaps I am.’ The blue she wore made him think all blue-eyed women should wear that shade. She was an ornament to the room so that it seemed to need no other. ‘I bought the milk at the corner shop where Ladyhall Avenue
crosses Lower Queen Street. Did I say that before?’ She must know she hadn’t. He said nothing. ‘It’s easy to park there, you see. It was just a bit after five-thirty when I got to Annette’s. The front door to those flats has been unlocked every time I’ve been there – I don’t think that’s very secure, do you?’ ‘Evidently not.’ ‘I think I said Annette had left her door on the latch. I put the milk straight in the fridge and then I went into the bedroom. I knocked on the door first.’ All these details were being given to tease him. He realized that but didn’t mind. Any detail, however small, might be relevant in a case like this. ‘She said, “Come in”. I think she said, “Come in, Ingrid”. I went in and she was in bed, sort of half-sitting up, but she looked quite ill. She said not to come near her because she was sure she was infectious, but would I get her the things on this list she’d made. It was a loaf and cornflakes and yogurt and cheese and grapefruit and more milk.’ Wexford listened, deadpan. He didn’t move. ‘She had two keys on the bedside table. She gave me one – that was the nearest I got to her, I really didn’t want to catch it – and she said, now you’ll be able to let yourself in tomorrow. So I said I would, yes, I would, and I’d get the things and to get well soon, and