by Ruth Rendell
‘I could see her, long way away, long way off down the road.’ ‘Tell me what she was wearing.’ ‘Had a cloth round her head, a kind of a blue cloth. A dress with flowers, white with pink flowers, and shoes like Raffy wear.’ Both policemen looked at Raffy’s feet, twisted round the chair legs. Black canvas lace- up half-boots with rubber welt and soles, perhaps the cheapest footwear obtainable in Kingsmarkham’s most down-market shoe shop. ‘Can you remember which direction she came from, Mrs Johnson?’ ‘I never see her till she’s there, talking in my ear. I don’t see her coming from the High Street, so maybe she come from other end. Maybe she come from Glebe Lane end where there’s fields. Maybe she drop from helicopter into field, huh?’ ‘She talked to you in Yoruba,’ said Wexford. ‘But she could speak English?’ ‘Oh, sure. Little bit. Like me when I come here. I say to her, you go down there, long way down, and you in High Street, you turn right and after little way right again and there’s ESJ between Nationwide and Marks and Spencers. It all English words so I say it in English. And she nods her head like this . . .’ Oni Johnson nodded her bandaged head vigorously, ‘and say what I say, down here and right and right again, and here it is between Nationwide and Marks and Spencers. And then I ask her who been beating her.’ ‘Mrs Johnson, can you remember anything about her manner? The way she was? Was she out of breath? Had she been running? Was she happy or sad? Was she nervous?’ The smile which had come back into Oni’s face slowly faded. She frowned a little and nodded again, but less energetically. ‘It was like someone is after her,’ she said, ‘someone chasing after her. She was frightened. But after she gone I watch and the place empty, no one is after her, no one chasing. But I can tell you, she very frightened.’ ‘We can discount being dropped from a helicopter,’ Wexford said in the car. ‘Though the idea does have its attractions. She came from somewhere in the neighbourhood, Glebe Road, Glebe Lane, Lichfield Road, Belper Road . . .’ He considered, seeing the topography in his mind’s eye, ‘Harrow Avenue, Wantage Avenue, Ashley Grove . . .’ ‘Or across the fields beyond Glebe End.’ ‘What – from Sewingbury or Mynford?’ ‘Why not? Neither of them are that far.’ Burden considered. ‘Bruce Snow lives in Harrow Avenue, or he used to. He was living there on July the fifth.’ ‘Yes. But if you can think of some reason for Bruce or Carolyn Snow to be chasing a terrified black girl down Glebe Road at three-thirty in the afternoon, you’re a better scenario-maker than I am. Mike, this isn’t a very big place even now. She could have come from anywhere north of the High Street and that includes your house and mine.’ ‘And the Akandes,’ said Burden. ‘Those shoes – is there any point in asking around the shoe shops to see if a black woman bought those sort of shoes recently?’ ‘It can’t do any harm,’ said Wexford, ‘though she’s not likely to have left her name and address on their mailing list, is she?’ ‘Meanwhile, we’ve got all this new stuff but we’re no nearer knowing who she was, are we?’ ‘We probably are but we don’t know it yet. For instance we know the motive behind the attack on Oni. Someone wanted to stop us getting that information about Sojourner out of her.’ ‘Then why not do it two weeks ago?’ Burden objected.
‘Very likely because although he, whoever he is, knew Oni Johnson had that information, he never supposed we would run her to earth. He never imagined we’d get to speak to someone whose tenuous connection with Sojourner was merely that she happened by chance to ask her the way in the street. But last Thursday he realized he was wrong. He saw Karen and me talking to Oni outside the Thomas Proctor.’ ‘He?’ ‘He or she, or let’s say, his or her agent. Someone in the know saw us. The rest was guesswork and he had just about an hour in which to get to Castlegate and wait at the top of those stairs. We’re going to do a house-to-house, Mike. We’re going to question every householder in Kingsmarkham north of the High Street.’ At the Benefit Office they found themselves asking the same questions that Barry Vine had asked an hour before. But Barry had only conjectured that Sojourner had been there without knowing when; Wexford was almost positive that she had come into the building on Monday, 5 July, no later than four o’clock in the afternoon. ‘Looking for work,’ he said to Ingrid. ‘Aren’t they all?’ Ingrid turned the blue beam of her eyes on him and lightly lifted her shoulders. ‘I wish I’d seen her, I really do.’ The implication was that she wished it for his sake, so that she could please him. ‘But I would remember on account of seeing Melanie Akande next day. I’d have thought when I saw Melanie, wow, look at that, how odd, another black girl I’ve never seen in here before.’ She gave him a rueful smile. ‘But I didn’t see her.’ ‘She may have lived near you,’ Wexford persisted. ‘In Glebe Lane or at Glebe End. If you didn’t see her in here that day, do you think you ever saw her near where you live? In the street? Looking out of a window? In a shop?’ She looked as if she pitied him. He had this onerous task to perform, this quest to make, this job to do, and she was so sorry . . . If only she could help, if only there was something she could do to make his burden lighter. Her head was a little on one side, a characteristic gesture. He thought how it would be if he were, say, twenty-five again, and there was this girl that he was obliged to keep meeting, a girl who was spoken for in a way, but only in a way, and he wondered how he would have gone about cutting Jeremy Lang out. Not ‘if’ but ‘how’, for he was sure he would have attempted it, if only for the bluest eyes on earth. . . . ‘I’ve never seen her in all my life,’ Ingrid said and, suddenly brisk again, she pressed the buttons on her machine that would light up the next client’s number above their heads. Deep in thought, Wexford made his way back through the Job Centre area and the free- standing advertising on which potential employers offered what situations were vacant. Most of them gave no names and no locations, stating only pitifully low wages and curious trades, some of which he had never before heard of. He was momentarily distracted and let his eye run down the ranks of cards. In fact, there were few jobs here that anyone, however desperate, would want to apply for and a phrase came into his mind: ‘needy nothing trimmed in jollity. . . .’ Inadequate salaries were offered to those willing to care full time for three children under four or combine twenty hours a week assisting in a boarding kennels with keeping house for a family of five. He didn’t know why an advertisement for a children’s nanny (no previous experience required) while the parents were abroad on business seemed to ring a bell in his mind.
But he knew his intuition was usually sound and he was searching back in his memory, trying to find a link, when he went outside to find Burden. The boys sitting on the wall outside had already been shown Sojourner’s photograph by Barry Vine. ‘That other one’, was how the short boy with the golden hair described him. The boy with the ponytail seemed to be doing his best to get through his packet of twenty cigarettes by lunchtime, for eleven stubs lay in the ash round his feet. Burden pinned his hopes on their ability now to be more specific. ‘On a Monday afternoon,’ he said. ‘The first Monday of July. At about four.’ The shaven-headed boy with the range of tee-shirts – he was in a faded red one today with Michael Jackson’s face on it – looked at the photograph and, armed with these new details, said as if squeezing the statement out, as if it was the result of tremendous intellectual effort, ‘I might’ve.’ ‘You might have seen her? You might have seen her go into the Benefit Office?’ ‘The other one asked me that. I don’t mean that. I said I never see her go in there.’ Wexford said quickly, ‘But you did see her.’ A glance at ponytail and, ‘What d’you reckon, Danny? It’s a long time back.’ ‘I never seen her, man,’ said Danny, stubbing out his cigarette and coughing. With nothing to do with his hands, he began picking at the skin round his fingernails. The boy with the golden hair said, ‘I never seen her neither. D’you reckon you saw her, Rossy?’ ‘I might’ve,’ said the one in the tee-shirt. ‘I might’ve seen her across the road. Standing over there looking. There was me and Danny and Gary and a couple of other kids, don’t know what they call them, we was all on the steps like now, only more of us, and she was over there looking.’ He had said
so before. Burden remembered now. In the early days of the hunt for Melanie Akande, he had mentioned seeing a black girl on the Monday. ‘And that was on July the fifth in the afternoon?’ he asked, full of hope. But if it had been that Monday he had now forgotten. ‘Don’t know about that, don’t know the day or the time. It was hot, I do know that. I took me top off to get a bit of sun and this old bat come along and says to me, that’s the way to get skin cancer, young man. I told her what she could do, silly old cow.’ ‘The girl on the other side, do you think she wanted to go into the Benefit Office?’ Danny spoke while still picking bits of his cuticles, ‘If she’d wanted to, why’d she never cross the road? She’d only to cross the road.’ ‘But you didn’t see her, did you?’ Burden asked. ‘Me? No, I never see her. But it stands to reason, she’d only to cross the road.’ ‘She never did,’ said Rossy, and losing interest, ‘Give us one of your fags, Dan.’ Half an hour before, standing on the same spot, Diana Graddon had said to Vine, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ They were about to get into his car. ‘I’d rather you waited till we’ve got you home.’ She shrugged and compressed her lips. He was fascinated by her resemblance to Annette Bystock. They might have been sisters. This woman was the younger by a few years and she was slimmer than Annette, less voluptuous, but they had the same dark curly hair, similar bold features, big mouth, strong nose and round dark eyes, only Annette’s had been brown and this woman’s were a bluish-grey. Asked about Snow, she had made no attempt to deny the relationship, though she showed considerable surprise. ‘It was ten years ago!’
‘D’you mind telling me if it was you introduced him to Annette Bystock?’ Surprise was renewed. She was incredulous. ‘How could you possibly know?’ Vine, of course, was well-practised in parrying such enquiries. ‘The relationship hadn’t lasted long, I’d guess.’ ‘A year,’ said Diana Graddon. ‘I found out he’d got children. The youngest was only three. Funny, how it all comes back. I haven’t thought about any of this for years.’ ‘But you didn’t split up then?’ ‘We started having rows. Look, I was only twenty-five and I didn’t see why I should settle for him sneaking round for an hour in the evening and then not hearing a word for a week and then a phone call and another bang-bang, thank you very much, sir. He did take me out but only once in a blue moon. I didn’t want him permanently either, I mean I wasn’t thinking marriage or anything like that. I was young but I wasn’t daft. I could just envisage what that’d be, living with a guy who’d got three kids and a wife to keep and a possessive wife by all accounts.’ She drew breath and Vine, drawing up outside the house in Ladyhall Road, was wondering how much more of this he wanted to hear when she said, ‘He came round one evening when Annette was there. Oh, I knew he’d come, he always phoned first, but I thought, so what? We’ll have a social evening for once, we’ll actually manage to meet without having sex, see what he thinks about that, though I could imagine. Funny how it all comes back, isn’t it? Annette didn’t know who he was or . . . well, what we were to each other, if you see what I mean.’ An unpleasant thought seemed to strike her. ‘You don’t mean you think he did it? Killed her, I mean?’ Vine smiled. ‘Can we go into the house, Miss Graddon?’ ‘Oh, yes, sure.’ She unlocked the door. Helen Ringstead appeared not to be at home. They went into the living room. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘he and Annette, they hardly knew each other. I don’t suppose they ever met again.’ So she didn’t know . . . he was amused. Odious though Snow might be, you had to hand it to him, he had it all worked out. Vine was going to ask another question but he didn’t have to. ‘He broke things off soon after that. He told me his wife had found out. Someone she knew had seen us together in a restaurant on one of the rare occasions he gave me dinner. This woman had heard him call me Diana. He confessed it all to her, threw himself on her mercy, or so he said.’ ‘Was it about then that you told Annette there was a flat for sale opposite?’ ‘It must have been. She’d got divorced a little bit before that. We were still friends then.’ Diana Graddon lit the cigarette Vine had denied her in the car. She drew in a long inhalation. ‘The fact is, I don’t know why we stopped being friends. You’d think we’d have been in and out of each other’s houses, living more or less opposite, but we sort of drifted apart, and I think it was her doing. She sort of withdrew into herself. And what’s more, I don’t think she’s had a boyfriend since she split up with Stephen. But I’m just amazed when you say you suspect Bruce.’ He hadn’t said it. Vine marvelled at Snow’s structure of deceit and double-dealing. However much as a human being he deplored Snow’s behaviour, as a man he could not fail to admire his chicanery. He had kept his affair with Diana a secret from Annette and his affair with Annette a secret from Diana, and if he had not succeeded in keeping Diana a secret from his wife he had lulled Carolyn for nine years into the belief that her marriage was inviolable. Had Annette’s move to Ladyhall Gardens, opposite Diana, dismayed him? Or had it rather given him the perfect reason for his new relationship to remain on the level of a simple sexual transaction, continually repeated? It was obviously
Simisola
unwise to entertain a girlfriend in a restaurant and indiscreet to go to her home, so he was protected against closer involvement. What had he said to Annette? Don’t be too friendly with Diana, she knows my wife? Or even, she’s quite capable of getting in touch with my wife? The best liars stick as close to the truth as mendacity allows. ‘I mean, Bruce would have had to know her,’ Diana persisted. ‘He’d have had to have a motive, wouldn’t he? Believe me, I’d have seen him if he’d ever been to see her here and I never did. I mean, I saw everyone Annette knew, I must have seen everyone who ever called there.’ She hesitated, coughed a little. The cigarette trembled in her fingers. ‘It’s funny, but I was sort of fascinated by her. I wonder why that was? I don’t know why I’m asking you, you’re not a psychologist, but I wonder if a psychologist would say it was because she . . . well, she rejected me really, didn’t she?’ Vine, who knew Wexford’s methods, waited in silence. He might not be a psychologist but he knew what psychotherapists did. They put the patient or client or whatever on a couch and they listened. A word uttered at the wrong time might be fatal. He would listen, though he didn’t know what he was listening for. Nor did Freud, he thought. ‘I suppose I resented that. I used to say to myself, who does she think she is, giving me the cold shoulder? I saw her come in with that pretty girl sometimes, the one from the employment office that she worked with, and she was a bit pally with Edwina What’s- her-name. But, d’you know, that was all. Well, I saw her cousin there once or twice, a Mrs Winster, I can’t remember her first name. Joan, Jean, Jane. No man ever set foot in the place, it was like a nunnery. I mean, the idea of Bruce going in there, it’s a laugh really.’ She smiled a little at the absurdity of the notion. ‘Old Bruce,’ she said. ‘What’s he up to these days? Apart from murdering women he doesn’t know?’ The smile split into laughter. Disappointment slumped Vine’s shoulders. She had nothing to tell him. It was all over. He thought of revealing all to her in the hope that disbelief, the slow dawning of enlightenment, the subsequent rage, would bring forth revelations. But if there were no revelations to deliver? He said idly, preparing to go, ‘You told me you last saw her on the Monday evening?’ ‘Yes, I was going away to stay with my boyfriend in Pomfret.’ She gave a sidelong smile, glad of the opportunity to tell him Snow had a successor. ‘It was always a bit awkward, you can imagine, Annette and me, we sort of avoided each other, but we happened to look across the road at the same time. She said hallo and I said hallo and then I remembered I’d left a sweater I wanted behind, so I went back. ‘When I came out again – oh, it was no more than two minutes, if that – she’d gone into the flats and there was this girl standing outside the door, the front door of Ladyhall Court, I mean. Well, Annette must have gone straight into her livingroom to open the window. She leaned out and saw the girl and the girl – she was a black girl, incidentally – she went over to the window and said something and that . . . well, that was the last time I ever saw A
nnette.’
Chapter Nineteen Which way is it to find work? She had asked Oni Johnson this in an obscure language because there was something about Oni that told her this woman was Nigerian too. And Sojourner had done what she was told and walked on, southwards to the High Street, fearful of some pursuer, but reaching there unscathed, reaching the Benefit Office too. Instead of going in, she had waited on the other side of the street, staring. Why hadn’t she crossed the road, as Rossy suggested, and gone in? ‘Men,’ said Wexford. ‘She was scared of men. Yes, OK, I know Rossy and Danny and Co don’t seem very intimidating to us, but neither you nor I is a seventeen-year-old and, I suspect, extremely unsophisticated black girl. She’s got an inbuilt fear and distrust of whites anyway. Some man had been beating her and she was going to tell Oni about it but just at that moment those kids had to come out of school. ‘Men are more frightening to women than other women are. Yes, they are, Mike, whether you like it or not. And here are this lot, one of them stripped down to nothing but his jeans, sitting there, more of less barring the door. And to crown it all, when a woman comes along and speaks to one of them he shouts at her, gives her some obscene instruction, calls her a silly old cow – or worse. That’s what he tells you he calls her.’ The house-to-house enquiries had begun. With a street plan of north Kingsmarkham in front of him, Wexford was beginning to see how the town had expanded since first he came there. Estates as big as villages had been built on the northern outskirts. In the inner areas old houses had been pulled down, as in Ladyhill Avenue, and each one replaced by a dozen small ones and yet another block of flats. The ward in which he would vote in the council election had once comprised the whole town; now it was a small section of it. He looked up from the map as Burden said, ‘So Sojourner hangs about on the opposite pavement – what for? Just in the hope that they’ll go away?’ ‘Or that someone will come out. She’ll have seen clients go in and come out again but no one after about three-thirty, remember. No one signs-on on a Monday and the New Claims Advisers have their last appointment at three-fifteen. So anyone who comes out at four-thirty is going to have to be working there.’ ‘You’re saying she followed Annette home?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘You mean it was just chance she picked Annette?’ ‘Not quite,’ said Wexford. ‘Most of the other people that work there have cars parked in the car park at the back. They wouldn’t come out the front way.’ ‘Stanton doesn’t take his car to work,’ Burden objected. ‘And nor does Messaoud. His wife has it in the day.’ ‘They’re men. Sojourner wouldn’t have followed a man.’ ‘All right, she follows Annette across the High Street, down Queen Street over there . . .’ as if Wexford hadn’t a street plan in front of him, ‘along Manor Road and into Ladyhall
