Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  way and, moving between the Range Rover and the car ahead, stepped up inside the swinging door. ‘Don’t try the same thing with me, will you?’ he said. He unlocked the nearside rear door and helped the girl out. Her face was awash with tears. She held on to him, her hands gripping his sleeves. A stream of invective pouring from Riding made her tremble. He thrust his face at the open door, shouting in Burden’s direction, ‘What’s it to you if I stop my own daughter making a foul exhibition of herself? What business is it of yours, for Christ’s sake?’ The girl shook. Her teeth had begun to chatter. Christopher, now free and rubbing his crushed legs, stood up and put out one hand to her in a gesture of appeasement. She screamed at him, ‘Get away from me!’ Wexford said, ‘All of you are coming to the police station now.’ Blood was running down Burden’s face. He mouthed something, while holding on to his head. The howling siren of an ambulance, summoned by Stafford, sent the crowd falling back, splitting now into two distinct groups, one solidly behind Burden, the rest spectators by the churchyard wall. The ambulance came out of York Street and blocked the road, parking where the column had marched. Ahead the marchers had gone out of sight and with the appearance of the paramedics, two of them with a stretcher Burden scowled at, the first drops of rain began to fall. Riding had unlocked his driver’s door. His face dark red, he stepped down and said to Wexford. ‘Look, what I did was entirely justifiable. I told my daughter I’d stop her if she joined the march, she knew what was coming to her. That chap seemed to think he was making some sort of citizen’s arrest . . .’ ‘That chap is a police officer,’ Wexford said. ‘O God, I didn’t. . .’ ‘If you’ll get into the car we’ll go to the police station. You can do your explaining there.’ The girl was tall and strong and straight. She looked what she was, the product of twenty- two or -three years of top-grade feeding, fresh air, care and attention, the best of schools. Wexford didn’t know when he had seen a more vulnerable face. There was no bruising on it but still it looked bruised. The skin was soft beyond belief, almost transparent, the eyes puffy, the lips chapped and that in high summer. Her hair, the colour of the ripe barley they had been cutting in the fields up at Mynford, looked unnatural framing that suffering face, it looked like false hair worn by an actress miscast for her part. She said to Karen Malahyde, ‘I can go home if they’re not there.’ ‘Well,’ said Karen, but she said it kindly, ‘just at the moment you aren’t going anywhere. Would you like a cup of tea?’ Sophie Riding said she would. Carefully, Wexford said to her, ‘We won’t go in the interview room. They aren’t very pleasant places. We’ll go up to my office.’ Suddenly, he thought of Joel Snow and he knew Karen was thinking of him too. This was different, of course it was – wasn’t it? Joel too had been unwilling while this girl knew it was the only way. He said to her in the lift, ‘It won’t take long.’ ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Something I wish I’d been able to ask you to do two weeks ago.’ They went into his office. The rain was heavy enough to blind the windows and make it dark. Karen put on lights and the sky outside the window turned to a streaming twilight. She gave Sophie a chair.

  Wexford sat down behind his desk. ‘It was you sent me that question about a rapist at the Women, Aware! meeting?’ She was eager to talk but she was afraid too. ‘Oh, yes! I wanted to come round afterwards, like you said. I would have done if I could, I hope you believe me.’ Suddenly, preceding the thunder by seconds, a brilliant zig-zag of lightning expelled everything, seeming to hold the streaming water suspended, making the dark sky invisible, until the crash came and the world went on. Sophie shuddered and made a little sound, like a protest. There was a tap at the door and Pemberton came in with tea. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then took them away to show the tears flowing down her cheeks. Karen pushed the box of tissues at her. ‘I believe you,’ Wexford said. ‘I understand what stopped you coming to me.’ Sophie took a tissue. ‘Thanks.’ She said to Wexford, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Make a statement. Tell us about it. It won’t be difficult, practically speaking. It may be difficult emotionally.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t go on like I have been. It has to stop. I can’t go another day, not another minute.’ He said fairly, ‘There are other ways. We’ll manage without your statement. You don’t have to do it. But if you don’t, I’m afraid . . . well, there may be more . . .’ Karen said into the recording device, ‘Sophie Riding at Kingsmarkham Police Station on Friday, July twenty-ninth. The time is 12.43pm. DCI Wexford and DS Malahyde are present . . .’ When it was over and he had heard it all, Wexford went downstairs to where Sophie’s father sat in Interview Room One with DC Pemberton. He looked chastened. His face had resumed its normal colour. The twenty minutes he had waited down here had no doubt brought him to regret his hasty behaviour. A man who has hit another man is always aghast to discover that the other is a policeman. He got up when Wexford came in and began to apologize. His reasons for behaving as he had came out with easy fluency and they were the excuses of the man who has always been able to buy or talk his way out of trouble. ‘Mr Wexford, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this. Needless to say I wouldn’t have struck your officer if I’d had any idea. I took him for a member of the public.’ ‘Yes, I expect you did.’ ‘This doesn’t have to go any further, does it? If my daughter had been reasonable and got into the car – after all, she’d completed the best part of that damn fool march – if she’d done that none of this would have happened. I’m not a harsh father, I adore my children . . .’ ‘Your treatment of your children isn’t in question,’ Wexford said. ‘Before you say any more I should warn you that anything you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence . . .’ Interrupting, Riding shouted, ‘You’re not charging me with hitting that chap!’ ‘No,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m charging you with murder, incitement to murder and attempted murder. And when I have done that I shall go into the room next door and charge your son with rape and attempted murder.’ ‘Without Sophie Riding’s statement,’ Wexford said, ‘I doubt if anything could have been made to stick. We have no evidence and no proof, no more than conjecture.’

  Burden’s face was swollen like a Victorian cartoonist’s image of a man with toothache. ‘Assault on a police officer is the least of his worries, I suppose. Odd, isn’t it, I was the one most impressed by what Mavrikiev said about killing someone with your fists and it was me who really had it brought home to me. ‘It’s a funny thing, you see these characters in films, westerns and that sort of thing, they knock each other around but it never seems to have any effect, they get a great swinging blow to the jaw but they’re up again in a flash and hammering away at the other one. And you see them in the next scene with not a mark on them, all spruced up with a girl on their arm, taking her out for a night on the town.’ ‘Hurts, does it?’ ‘It’s not so much that it hurts. It feels so enormous. And it doesn’t feel as if it’ll ever work again. At any rate he left me all my teeth. So, are you going to tell me about it?’ ‘Freeborn’ll be here in half an hour and I’ll have to tell him.’ ‘Well, you can tell me first,’ said Burden. Wexford sighed. ‘I’ll play you the tape of Sophie Riding’s statement. You realize, of course, that Sojourner knew of the existence of the Benefit Office through Sophie. She’d heard Sophie talking about it, about going there and signing on and so forth, though she didn’t know where it was.’ ‘What, talking about it to her parents?’ ‘And her brothers and her little sister, no doubt. Sojourner waited on them, she’d always have been in and out, though never out of the house.’ ‘How did they get her into the country in the first place?’ ‘Sophie doesn’t know. She wasn’t there, she was already at Myringham Polytechnic that’s now Myringham University and before that she’d been at boarding school here. But she’d seen Sojourner at their home in Kuwait when she was there in the holidays and she remembers when Sojourner first came. Her idea is that she was brought here as the boy’s girlfriend. In a hideous kind of way, she was, if “girlfriend” is one definition of the woman you have forcible sexual intercourse with.�
� ‘That was going on?’ ‘Oh yes. The father too, I daresay, though I don’t know – yet. Listen to Sophie.’ Wexford wound the tape on, pressed ‘play’, reversed and got the point in the statement he wanted. The girl’s voice was soft and plaintive, yet outraged too. It came over as a cry for help, yet there was no appeal in it. My mother told me a Kuwaiti man bought her from her father in Calabar, Nigeria, for five pounds. He meant to educate her and treat her like a daughter but he died and she had to be a servant. My mother talked as if we’d done her a great favour, as if it was the best thing in the world for her finding a ‘good home’ with us. ‘Good home’ is the expression they use about dogs that get rescued, isn’t it? I think she was about fifteen then. I never thought much about it. I know I should have but I wasn’t at home with them very much. I liked it here in England, I was always longing to get back to England. When the Gulf War started they came home. It wasn’t a problem for my father, he could work anywhere, he’s a brilliant paediatric surgeon. I don’t like saying it, I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s true. He loves babies, you should see him with a baby, and he loves all of us, his family, his children. But we’re different, as far as

  he is concerned, we’re what he calls the upper crust. He says some people are destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. I think that comes from the Bible. For him some people are born to be slaves and wait on others. I must have been very naive. I didn’t know what the bruises on her were . . . well, the bruises and cuts and all the other marks. In Kuwait I’d thought she was pretty to look at but she wasn’t pretty in England. I’d graduated and I was home all the time and it was all a mystery to me. I never saw anyone hit her but I could tell she was frightened of my father and my brother. And my other brother David when he was at home, though mostly he wasn’t, mostly he’s away at college in America. The bad part – for me, that is – the bad part was that I thought she was stupid and clumsy, I could even see what my mother meant when she said she wasn’t fit to sleep in a proper bedroom. The machine on pause, Wexford went on, ‘Psychologists say that someone ugly and dirty is a ready candidate for abuse. That your own abuse has resulted in the ugliness makes no difference. The reasoning behind it seems to be that ugliness deserves punishment and dirt and neglect of personal hygiene even more so. It got to a point where Sojourner was being beaten and struck for every small fault. She worked twelve or fourteen hours a day but that wasn’t enough. Susan Riding told me herself they had six bedrooms in that house but that didn’t mean they had one for Sojourner. She slept in a small room off the kitchen. All the rooms on the ground floor at the back have bars at the windows, to keep out burglars no doubt, but very convenient if you want to prevent someone escaping. ‘I’ve just been to the house, I’ve seen it. It used to be a dogs’ room and they’ve got a dog in there now. Susan Riding says it was more “appropriate”, her word, for Sojourner to be in there, “in case they wanted her to do anything for them in the night.” The mattress on the floor was apparently “what she’d been used to”, she “wouldn’t know what to do with a bed.” Here’s Sophie again.’ The girl’s voice sounded clearer and more confident this time. I needed a job, so I did the obvious thing, I went to the Job Centre and I signed on, only it wasn’t the obvious thing to my parents. My father said it was a disgrace, that was for the working classes. He was quite prepared to keep me. Education wasn’t for anything, he said, it was to make you a finer, better person. He’d make me an allowance. Hadn’t he always kept me? My mother actually said they would keep me until I got married. We argued about this a lot and that poor girl overheard. Her English was never brilliant but she’d have understood that. She’d have known there was a place nearby you could go to and ask them to find you work and if there wasn’t any work they’d give you money. It was the beginning of July, the first or the second, when my brother Christopher asked her to wash his running shoes for him . . . well, told her to. They were white trainers. She made a mess of it, I don’t know what she did, but she was terrified. Anyway, he beat her up for it. That was when I first realized what went on. It sounds absurd, I know, that I didn’t know before, but I suppose I just didn’t want to believe that of

  my own brother. I love my brother, or I did love him, he’s my twin, you know. I saw Christopher go into her room and come out again after about twenty minutes. I’d have gone in but she didn’t make a sound, not through all that beating she never made a sound. But when I saw her next day I knew. I asked my brother and he denied it. She was clumsy, he said, I should know that, she always had been, she wasn’t really fit to live in a civilized house. He made a lot of remarks about mud huts and he said she couldn’t cope with furniture, she was always knocking into furniture. Well, I wasn’t satisfied, I told my father but all that happened was he flew into a rage. If you haven’t seen him in a rage you can’t know what I mean. He’s terrifying. He accused me of being disloyal to my family, he wanted to know where I’d ‘picked up these ideas’ and was it from my ‘Marxist’ friends I’d met at the Job Centre. I know I should have done more. I have a lot of guilt about that. Somehow, then, I knew what I’d been hiding from myself all this time, that Christopher had raped her too, over and over, there had been all the signs I pretended not to see. All I did was send you that question at the meeting and that was worse than useless. On the Monday after the beating she disappeared. My father was at the hospital and Christopher was in London at a job interview of all things. I guessed she’d run away and my mother thought she had, but we didn’t know what to do, and in the evening my mother had to go out to a committee preparing for that Women, Aware! meeting. She left a note for my father. I said we ought to tell the police but my mother got into a panic at that. Of course I can understand why now. I had a date and when I got in at about eleven-thirty my mother was in bed and Christopher was out but my father was there. He said he didn’t know what we were in a flap about, he’d told my mother. He’d sent the girl home, she was worse than useless and it made him sick seeing her about the house. He said he’d sent her back to Banjul on British Airways but there isn’t a BA flight to Banjul on a Monday, the only flights are on Sunday and Fridays, I checked. My brother was out all evening and my father told me and my mother he was driving her to Heathrow but he can’t have been because there wasn’t a flight. I didn’t believe any of it. For some reason I thought she’d be in her room. They’d have beaten her up when she came back and she’d be in there lying on her mattress. I tried the door but it was locked. Well, you know, in a house like ours – a house like theirs – all the inside keys fit all the locks. I got another key and unlocked the door and everything was gone. She hadn’t got much, just the two dresses that were my mother’s cast-offs from years back and those awful black lace-up canvas boot things my mother bought her, the cheapest you can get. But it was all gone, all but the mattress and her headcloth. I don’t know why they didn’t find it when they cleaned the blood up but they didn’t. It was on the mattress and the mattress was sort of red and blue. Well, the cloth was blue and red – red with the blood on it.

  I’ve kept it. It was like a kind of madness, keeping it. I longed to throw it away but I couldn’t. Even then it didn’t occur to me that she might be dead. My brother was out that night for hours. I heard him come in, it must have been two-thirty or three, and he went off on his holiday to Spain next morning, so I never had a chance to talk to him. Anyway, I was afraid to talk to him, this wasn’t my brother, this wasn’t Chris that had been closer to me than anyone. Then I found his sweater in the wash with blood all over it. I thought maybe my father had got her taken to hospital secretly because my brother had gone too far. My father has a lot of influence, I don’t know if he could do that, but I thought he could. All I could think of then was my brother raping her, my brother raping anyone. I didn’t blame my father much then, I thought maybe he was just protecting his own son, I went to the Women, Aware! meeting with him and I wrote that question to you on an impulse. My father didn’t see what I’d asked. I told him I’d asked
whether it was legal to carry a CS gas canister. But I couldn’t come up afterwards and explain, I couldn’t get away from him. Chief Constable Freeborn seemed to have forgotten about Wexford’s ‘carousing’ picture in the paper. If the three weeks it had taken to catch the murderer of the two women still rankled, he gave no sign of it. He was all affability. To the old ‘snug’, a tiny room containing a table and three chairs, in the deepest recesses of the Olive and Dove, a barmaid brought the three beers he had ordered. Wexford sat down in the chair with the arms. He thought he deserved it. ‘You have to remember,’ he began, ‘that she knew nothing about what rights she had under the Immigration Act, she didn’t know there was an Immigration Act. She knew she wasn’t allowed to work, but “work”, it had been explained to her long ago, was what you got paid for and she was never paid, she was simply given “a good home”. Susan Riding called her the “au pair” – or that’s what she called her to me after Sojourner was dead. To do Mrs Riding justice, and I suppose everyone merits justice, I don’t think she knew much about Sojourner’s fate. She let her sleep on a mattress on the floor in the “dog’s room” because she’s that sort of woman, the kind that used to talk about the poor keeping coal in the bath if you gave them bathrooms. In buying Sojourner the cheapest footwear she could get, she probably thought she was being very bountiful. I wonder what she’d say if she knew the shop assistant put her down as a bag lady who slept on the street? ‘But she knew nothing about the rape or the violent assaults, and if she suspected she shut her eyes to it, told herself not to let her imagination run wild. That evening when she came home from the committee meeting, her husband told her he’d sent the girl home and Christopher was out driving her to the airport. According to Mrs Riding, Sojourner had become “dirty and lazy” and was worse than useless. Except that she needed help in the house, she was glad to see the back of her. ‘What had in fact happened was that Sojourner ran away on the Monday afternoon. Riding was out, the boy Christopher was in London and the young sister was at school. She didn’t know where to go, she had never been out before, not out of their grounds, that is, but she knew there was a place where you went to find a job. She must have reasoned that anywhere she could find work couldn’t be worse than what she’d left behind.’