by Ruth Rendell
Chapter Twenty-One In the seclusion of the booth he made a cross on his voting paper. There were three names: Burton K.J., British National Party; Khoori A.D., Independent Conservative and Sugden M., Liberal Democrat. Sheila said the Lib-Dem didn’t stand a chance and the only way to keep out the BNP was by drumming up big support for Anouk Khoori. But Wexford now had serious reasons against voting for Mrs Khoori and he made his cross next to the name of Malcolm Sugden. Maybe it was a wasted vote but he couldn’t help that. He folded his paper in half, turned round and dropped it through the slot in the ballot box. Since he went into the Thomas Proctor Primary School some five minutes before, Anouk Khoori had arrived in a car driven by her husband, a gold-coloured Rolls Royce. Burton of the BNP was already there, standing on the asphalt forecourt, surrounded by ladies in silk dresses and straw hats, the former vanguard of the Conservatives, seduced away by the attractions of the far right. He was smoking a cigar, the fumes of which hung heavily and reached distantly, on this warm still morning. Mrs Khoori stepped from the car like a royal personage. She was dressed like one, but of the younger set, in a very short white skirt, emerald green silk shirt, white jacket. Her hair hung like a yellow veil from under her white hat brim. When she saw Wexford she put out both hands to him. ‘I knew I should find you here!’ He marvelled at the confidence which enables someone who is almost a stranger to speak in the tones of a lover. ‘I knew you would be among the first to vote.’ Her husband materialized behind her, smiled a big broad studied smile and thrust his hand in Wexford’s direction. The thrust was strong, like he imagined a boxer’s might be, but the handshake was limp and it was as if his own hand held a wilted lily. He withdrew it and remarked that they had a fine day for the poll. ‘So English,’ said Mrs Khoori, ‘but that’s what I love. Now I want you to promise me something, Reg.’ ‘What would that be?’ he said, and even in his own ears his voice sounded off- puttingly grave. She was quite undeterred. ‘Now that County Councils are disappearing, this authority of ours is going to expand and become very important. I am going to need an adviser on crime prevention, on public relations, on my approach to the people of this sleepy old town – right? You will be that adviser, won’t you, Reg? You’ll help me? You’ll give me the support I’m going to need more than I’ve ever needed support all my life. What do you say?’ Wael Khoori was grinning all over his face, as well he might, but this was a genial empty smile directed at whoever passed. Wexford said, ‘You’ll have to get in first, Mrs Khoori.’
‘Anouk, please. But I am going to get in, I know it, and when I’m there you’ll help me?’ It was absurd. He smiled but said nothing, avoiding the direct snub. The time was five to nine and Raymond Akande’s morning surgery started at eight-thirty. Laurette would have left in time to start the day shift at eight. In the five minutes it took him to drive to Ollerton Avenue, Wexford thought of all those visits he had paid to this house, the doctor’s misery, the boy’s tears. He remembered taking those parents to the mortuary and Laurette’s hysterical rage. There was nothing to be done about all that. He could hardly charge any more people with wasting police time as that itself was a waste of police time. The chances were he would never come here again. This was his last visit. Even after yesterday, after identification and explanation, it was a shock to see the photographed face, the dead face, alive. She opened the door to him and for a moment he was silenced by the very fact of her, her existence. ‘There’s no one here but me,’ she said. ‘Christopher would hardly be welcome, I suppose?’ ‘He’s gone back home. I don’t ever want to see him again. It was his sister that was my friend, it was Sophie, not him.’ Wexford followed the girl into the living room whose walls had heard her parents ask if there was any hope of her being alive. She smiled at him, tentatively at first, then serenely. ‘I’m feeling happy, I don’t know why. It must be getting shut of the Epson kids.’ ‘How much did they pay you?’ ‘A hundred. Half before they left and the other half last night.’ Wexford showed her the photograph of the dead Sojourner. ‘Have you ever seen her?’ ‘I don’t think so.’ This expression, of course, means no, but a not entirely unqualified no. ‘Sure?’ ‘I’ve never seen her. Are you allowed to take photographs of dead people and show them around?’ ‘What alternative would you suggest?’ ‘Well, records kept of everyone with photos and fingerprints and DNA and whatever, a central computer with details of everyone in the country on it.’ ‘Our job would be a lot easier if we kept records like that but we don’t. Tell me what you did the day before you went to the Benefit Office and met Mrs Epson.’ ‘What do you mean, what I did?’ ‘How you spent the day. Your mother said you went for a run.’ ‘I go for a run every day. Well, I couldn’t when I had those kids to look after.’ ‘All right. You went for a run – where?’ ‘My mother doesn’t know everything, you know. I don’t always go the same way. Sometimes I go up Harrow Avenue and along Winchester Drive and sometimes I take Marlborough Road.’ ‘Christopher and Sophie Riding live in Winchester Drive.’ ‘Do they? I’ve never been to their house. I’ve told you, I’d only seen him a couple of times before he followed me back to the Epsons’. I knew Sophie at college.’ If she had been happy five minutes before, she now looked disproportionately distressed. He wondered what would become of her, if the bullying tactics of that
Simisola
domineering mother would drive her to seek out Euan Sinclair again. He eased the subject back to the route she had taken while out running. ‘So which was it that day?’ Melanie seemed pleased to cross him. ‘I didn’t go there at all that day. I went across the fields to Mynford. By the footpaths.’ He was disappointed, though he hardly knew why. By asking these questions, whose significance he felt rather than knew, he had hoped to intuit something. She fixed her eyes on him the way her father did. ‘I went nearly to Mynford New Hall. It gave me a bit of a shock, seeing the house. I didn’t know I was so near it.’ Her gaze bored into him mesmerically. ‘That was the day I went to the Benefit Office. You are talking about that, aren’t you?’ ‘It’s the day before you went to the Benefit Office I want to know about.’ He tried to keep his patience. ‘The Monday.’ ‘Oh, the Monday. I’ll have to think. I went along the Pomfret road on Saturday, and then on Sunday – it was the same Sunday and Monday, along Ashley Grove, up Harrow Avenue, along Winchester Drive and into Marlborough Road. It’s nice up there, nice air, and you can look down and see the river.’ ‘While you were out on these runs you never saw this girl?’ He had the photograph out again and she looked at it again, but quite dispassionately this time. ‘My mother said you got them to identify a corpse as me, only it wasn’t me. Was it her?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Wow. Anyway, I never saw her. I hardly ever saw anyone on foot. People don’t walk, do they? They go in cars. I bet you’d be suspicious, wouldn’t you, if you saw someone walking up there? You’d stop them and ask what they are doing.’ ‘It hasn’t come to that yet,’ said Wexford. ‘You never saw her face at a window? Or saw her in a garden?’ ‘I’ve told you, I never saw her.’ It was hard to remember Melanie Akande was twenty-two. Sojourner at seventeen, he was sure, would have seemed older. But Sojourner, of course, had suffered, had been through the mill. The Akandes had kept their daughter a child by treating her as an irresponsible person, fit only to be controlled and directed by others. It made him shudder to think of her having a baby in order to escape. The house-to-house was over. Nothing had come out of it, so when he said that they were off to Ashley Grove, Burden wanted to know what was the point of that. ‘We are going to pay a visit to an architect,’ he said to Burden when he had told him of the interview with Melanie. ‘Or perhaps an architect’s wife before she goes out doing good works in the parish.’ But this was not Cookie Dix’s day for taking reading matter to the sick. She was at home with her husband, though it was neither of them that admitted Wexford and Burden to the house. And what a house! The hall, which was circular and from which a white staircase arced up, bulging like the prow of a sailing ship, had a marble floor on which lemon trees in pots flowered and fruite
d simultaneously. Other trees grew in the soil itself, of which beds had been created, ficus with rustling leaves and feather-leaved alders, pen-thin cypresses and silver willows with distorted trunks, all reaching up to the light from the
glass dome high above them. The maid, black-haired, black-eyed and sallow, kept them waiting under the trees while she went away to announce their presence. She was back within thirty seconds and led them through a pair of double doors – Wexford had to duck under a branch – through a kind of ante-room, stark black and white, and another pair of doors, into a yellow and white sun-flooded dining room where Cookie and Alexander Dix sat eating their breakfast. In a reversal of the usual order of things, Cookie got to her feet while her husband remained seated. He had The Times in one hand and a piece of croissant in the other. In response to their good morning he said nothing but called out to the departing servant, ‘Margarita, bring some more coffee for our guests, will you?’ ‘We are rather late getting started this morning,’ said Cookie. If she had been questioned the day before by Pemberton or Archbold she said nothing about it. She was wearing a dark green satin garment, more like a dressing gown than anything else but not much like one, being extremely short and tied round the waist with a jewelled cummerbund. Her long black hair was fastened on to the top of her head where it sprouted in fronds rather like the top of a frost-blackened carrot. ‘Do sit down.’ She waved a vague hand at the other eight chairs ranged round the glass-topped table with its verdigris encrusted legs. ‘We were out on the toot last night . . . well, at a party. It was the small hours – the tiniest of hours – when we got home, wasn’t it, darling?’ Dix turned the page and started reading Bernard Levin. Something made him laugh. His laughter was the sound sappy wood makes when burning, a crackling and spitting. He looked up, still smiling, watched Wexford sit down, then he watched Burden, and when they were in chairs opposite each other, said, ‘What can we do for you gentlemen?’ ‘Mr and Mrs Khoori are friends of yours, I believe?’ Wexford said. Cookie glanced at her husband. ‘We know them.’ ‘You were at their garden party.’ ‘So were you,’ said Cookie. ‘What about them, anyway?’ ‘At that party you said Mrs Khoori had a maid who had recently left her and that she was the sister of your maid.’ ‘Of Margarita, yes.’ Wexford felt a pang of disappointment. Before he could say any more Margarita came back with the coffee on a tray and two cups. It was impossible to imagine her and Sojourner being related, still less sisters. Cookie, who was very quick off the mark, said something to her in rapid fluent Spanish and the answer came back in that language. ‘Margarita’s sister went home to the Philippines in May,’ Cookie said. ‘She wasn’t happy here. She didn’t get on with the other two maids.’ Having poured the coffee and held out the milk jug and sugar basin to each of them in turn, Margarita stood passively, her eyes downcast. ‘They came over together?’ Wexford asked and at Cookie’s nod said, ‘On the six months’ stay allowance or for twelve months because their employers were living here?’ ‘Twelve months. That’s renewable – I mean, the Home Office – is it, darling? They’ll – what will they do, Alexander?’ ‘She will apply to have her stay extended by successive periods of twelve months and after four years, if she wants to remain longer, she can apply to stay indefinitely.’ ‘How did you and the Khooris come to have sisters working for you?’ ‘Anouk went to an agency and told me. There’s this agency that recruits women in the Philippines.’ She said something in Spanish and Margarita nodded. ‘She can speak English quite well if you want to talk to her. And she can read it. When she and her sister
came into this country they had to be interviewed by the entry clearance officer and they were given a leaflet explaining her rights as a – what is it, darling?’ ‘Domestic entering the United Kingdom under the Home Office Immigration Act 1971,’ said Dix without looking up from Levin. Overnight Wexford had read it all up from Sheila’s literature. He said to the waiting woman, ‘Was there anyone else working with your sister apart from . . .?’ ‘Juana and Rosenda,’ said Margarita. ‘Those two not nice to Corazon. She cry for her children in Manila and they laugh.’ ‘But no one else?’ ‘No one. I go now?’ ‘Yes, you can go, Margarita. Thank you.’ Cookie sat down and helped herself to coffee from the new pot. ‘My head’s a bit rough this morning.’ Wexford would never have guessed it. ‘Corazon has four children and an unemployed husband at home. That’s why she came to work here, for money to send home. Margarita hasn’t children and she isn’t married. I think she came . . . well, to see the world, don’t you, darling?’ Dix’s laughter might have derived from her rather inane enquiry or from the article he was reading. He reached over and patted her hand with a scaly claw of the kind usually seen in the Natural History Museum. Cookie shrugged her green satin shoulders. ‘She gets around a bit, has herself some fun. I think she’s found a boyfriend, hasn’t she, darling? We don’t exactly keep her locked up like some do.’ There was a pause. ‘Such as the Khooris,’ said Alexander Dix with devastating timing. Burden set his coffee cup back in its saucer. ‘Mr and Mrs Khoori keep their servants locked up?’ ‘Darling Alexander does exaggerate, but yes, you could call them rather restrictive. I mean, if you live at Mynford Old Whatsit, you can’t drive and there’s no one to drive you – ever – and you’ve got the whole of that huge house to keep spick and span – what on earth do those words mean, I wonder, “spick” and “span”? – never mind, we all get the sense of it. If you live like that, what can you do if you are let out, but walk across the fields into the outermost reaches of Kingsmarkham?’ Involuntarily Burden glanced at Wexford and Wexford glanced at him. Their eyes met for an instant. ‘They’ve had no other servants?’ ‘Not so far as I know,’ Cookie said, wavering. ‘Margarita would know,’ said Dix, ‘and she says not.’ ‘But Margarita never actually went there, darling.’ Cookie pursed her lips and gave a silent whistle. ‘Are you looking for someone shut up in the house? A sort of madwoman in the attic?’ ‘Not quite that,’ said Wexford and he said it sadly. Dix must have picked up the note in his voice, for he said in a hospitable way, ‘Is there anything else we can get you?’ He surveyed the table and found it wanting. ‘A biscuit? Some fruit?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘In that case, perhaps you’ll excuse me. I have work to do.’ Dix got up, a very small diplodocus on its hind legs. He made a small bow to each of them, then to his wife. He would perhaps have clicked heels had he not been wearing sandals. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and, ‘Cornelia,’ thus answering one of Wexford’s unspoken questions. Cookie said confidingly when he was out of earshot, ‘Darling Alexander is so excited, he’s starting a new business. He says we’re about to see the dawn of a new Renaissance
in building in this country. He’s found this marvellous young man who’s going into partnership with him. He advertised and this brilliant person answered just out of the blue like that.’ She smiled happily. ‘Well, I do hope I’ve been of help.’ Wexford marvelled at her disconcerting habit of seeming to read his thoughts. ‘You won’t find Anouk at home today, you know. She’ll be riding about on a float, exhorting the populace to vote for her.’ From the front drive they looked back at the house, an intricate arrangement of glass panels, black marble panels and sheets of what looked like wafer-thin alabaster. ‘You can’t see in,’ said Burden, ‘you can only see out. Don’t you think that’s claustrophobic?’ ‘It would be if it was the other way about.’ Burden got into the driving seat. ‘That woman, Margarita I mean, she seemed happy in her work.’ ‘Sure. There’s no objection to people employing servants if they treat them properly and pay them what they’re worth. The labourer is worthy of his hire. And the Act’s all right, Mike, as far as it goes. In fact, on the surface it looks very good, it looks as if it deals with all contingencies. But it’s open to terrible abuse. Domestic workers coming into the country aren’t given immigration status independent of the household they work for. They may not leave and they may not take up any other form of work. That’s what we’re looking for, something of that sort.’ Instead of Anouk Khoori, it was the BNP’s
float which passed them as they came back into the High Street. Ken Burton, the candidate, unselfconscious in black jeans and a black shirt – was its significance largely lost on observers? – rode standing up where the passenger seat should have been, blasting out his manifesto through a megaphone. He might be of the British Nationalists but, with some subtlety, it was England for the English that he was promoting in this sweet warm corner of Sussex. Posters plastered over the back of the van not only exhorted the electorate to vote for Burton but also to join the march of the unemployed which was scheduled to take place from Stowerton to Kingsmarkham on the following day. ‘Did you know about that?’ Burden asked. ‘I’ve heard rumours. The uniformed branch have it sewn up.’ ‘You mean they’re expecting trouble? Here? Here?’ ‘In this green and pleasant land? Well, Mike, there are a lot of people out of work. It’s much higher than the national average in Stowerton, about twelve per cent. And tempers do run high.’ ‘It’s time to pay a visit to Mynford New Hall, I think.’ ‘She won’t be there, sir. She’s out drumming up defaulters.’ ‘So much the better,’ said Wexford. ‘You mean we talk to the servants?’ ‘It’s not a servant we’re looking for, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘We’re looking for a slave.’
Chapter Twenty-Two This was the long way round, by the road that took in Pomfret and Cheriton. You could walk it across the fields from Kingsmarkham in forty minutes or run it in twenty-five, it was only about two miles, but seven this way. Burden, who was driving, had never seen Mynford New Hall before. He asked if it was as old as it looked but, on hearing building had barely been completed at the time of the garden party, lost interest. Wexford had expected election posters, even though Mynford was outside the ward for which Mrs Khoori was standing. But there was nothing on the gateposts and nothing in the windows of the mock-Georgian house. Someone had planted full-grown, fully- blooming geraniums in the beds that had been bare a fortnight ago. A bell-pull had been added since his first visit and a pair of the biggest and most elaborate carriage lamps he had ever seen. But he doubted if the bell-pull was connected, either that or there really was no one at home. It was Burden who looked up and saw the face looking down at them, a pale oval face and head whose black hair was invisible in the blackness behind it. Wexford, who had rung that bell four times, called out, ‘Come down and let us in, please.’ Obedience was not prompt. Juana or Rosenda continued to stare impassively for some moments. Then she gave a little nod, a bob of the head, and disappeared. And when the door was finally opened it was not she who opened it but a woman with brown skin and Mongolian features. Wexford had not exactly expected a uniform but he was surprised by the pink velour tracksuit. It was very cold in the house, with the same feel that you get when entering the chilled food area in a supermarket. Perhaps they had the same air conditioning system as that installed in the perishable food departments of Crescent Stores. He and Burden produced their warrant cards. The woman looked at them with interest, apparently deriving some amusement from a comparison between photographs and the living men. ‘You got old since this one,’ she said to Wexford with a scream of laughter. ‘What’s your name, please?’ The laughter was switched off and she looked at him as if he had said something very impertinent. ‘Why you want to know?’ ‘Just give us your name, please. Are you Juana or Rosenda?’ The change from affront to sullenness was rapid. ‘Rosenda Lopez. That one Juana.’ The woman whose face had stared down at them had come silently into the hall. Like Rosenda she wore white trainers but her tracksuit was blue. Her accent was the same as Rosenda’s but her English was better. She was younger and might almost have given justification to Dix’s Mikado parody that the Khooris’ maids were barely out of their teens.
