Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  Freeborn interrupted. ‘You say she didn’t know where to go. Winchester Avenue’s a good way from the – what-d’you-call-it – ESJ, how did she know the way?’ ‘She didn’t, sir. Perhaps she followed the river. You can see the Kingsbrook if you look down from there over the gardens. Melanie Akande liked to look at it while she was out running. Maybe some instinct led Sojourner towards the river, downhill, maybe she knew a town is often on a river. Her instinct led her to Glebe Road and she encountered Oni Johnson who directed her to the Benefit Office. The rest you know, how she followed Annette home and, failing to get the help she wanted from her, she had no choice but to return to where she had come from.’ ‘Pity this Annette didn’t send her to us,’ said Freeborn. The understatement of all time, Wexford thought, but of course he didn’t say so. ‘She doesn’t seem to have gone home at once or perhaps it took her a while to find her way back. At any rate, she didn’t get there until Susan Riding and Sophie had gone out. Let us take it that she went in the back way and into her room where Swithun Riding found her. ‘I don’t say he meant to kill her. There seems no reason why he would. He asked her where she had been and when she told him he asked if she had spoken to anyone. Yes, the woman who takes the children across the road and this woman from the place where they give you jobs or they give you money. What’s her name and where does she live? She tells him and it all comes out. Riding’s daughter has described his rages. He flew into one then and set about her with his fists. Mike knows what his fist feels like and she was a young girl, thin and frail. They fed her pretty badly. Even so, she didn’t die from his fists but from striking her head against the steel frame round the window bars. When you’re in that room you can see how it happened.’ ‘So he got his son to help him dispose of her,’ said Burden. ‘Young Christopher took the body to Framhurst Woods and buried it, did he?’ ‘That was when he was supposed to be driving their erstwhile slave to Heathrow. I doubt if he knew where to do the deed, just drove out into the country until he found somewhere suitable. The road isn’t busy and he’d have waited till dark.’ ‘And after that Riding had to make up his mind what to do about Annette and Oni.’ ‘I don’t think he meant to do anything about Oni. After all, the Oni connection was a bit tenuous. Oni wouldn’t go to the police, she had nothing to go with, but Annette was different. He must have gone nearly mad wondering what Sojourner had told Annette. He wouldn’t have got much sleep that night. Just after Annette made her phone call to the Benefit Office next day a man phoned and asked for her. Ingrid Pamber thought it was Snow but it wasn’t, it was Riding. And he got an answer that gave him a little breathing space. Annette was at home ill in bed.’ ‘How did he know her name?’ Freeborn wanted to know. ‘Sojourner got it off the plate above the bell at Ladyhall Court. His next move was to get hold of Zack Nelson. Nelson owed him one, you see. It was Riding who performed the operation on Zack’s son when the child was found to have some kind of heart malformation at a few weeks old. No doubt, Nelson had made extravagant promises at the time – “Anything in the world I can do for you, doc, any time, you only have to ask,” – you can imagine the kind of thing. ‘Zack needed money too. He needed somewhere for his girl friend and their child to live. But Zack botched it up, he let Percy Hammond see his face and he had to go back on Riding’s instructions for a somewhat less venal offence – burglary. He knew he’d go down for that, he wanted to go down for that, so he got Riding to pay the blood money into an account he opened for Kimberley Pearson.

  ‘So it looked as if Riding and his son were in the clear, until that is our treasure- seeking plumber dug up the body. Even then it must have been clear to Riding no one had the faintest idea who Sojourner was. The real fear started when he was picking up his younger daughter from the Thomas Proctor School and he saw me homing on Oni Johnson. ‘I saw the Range Rover pull away from outside the Thomas Proctor the day of the attack on Oni but of course I didn’t make the connection. I thought it was her son Raffy we wanted to talk to, not Oni. Riding easily got to Castlegate before she got home – or else his son went: Christopher may also have seen me, for he was there in the Epsons’ pink Escort, picking up the Epsons’ older child. By the way, unpleasant though it is to contemplate, I think Christopher followed Melanie to Stowerton on that previous occasion because he had acquired a taste for black girls, it was black girls he fancied. Luckily for her, Melanie didn’t fancy him and he was no doubt afraid to attempt the rape of a free and independent young woman. ‘I don’t yet know which of them made the attempt on Oni’s life. We shall find out. I do know that it was Riding who went into the Intensive Care Ward next day and – with very little time or privacy at his disposal – pulled the IV line out from Oni’s arm. It didn’t work but it was worth a try.’ ‘Who picked the Riding child up from school the day Sojourner ran away?’ Burden speculated. ‘Not Riding or his wife obviously. A friend probably, they very likely had a rota system. Because if he’d done it or his wife had done it they’d have caught Sojourner before she got to Annette or Oni and none of it would have happened. I wonder if he thinks of that now?’ Freeborn, who had finished his drink in one single long swig, said irritably, ‘Why do you call her that? What does it mean?’ ‘I didn’t fancy Miss X. We hadn’t a name for her.’ ‘Well, you know it now, presumably?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ said Wexford. ‘I know it now. If she ever had a surname no one seems to remember it. Sophie never forgot the first name she gave them when she was handed over from the man who died, but the others had forgotten it. She was called Simisola.’ He got up. ‘Shall we go?’

  Simisola

  Acknowledgement The author is grateful to Bridget Anderson for permission to quote in this novel passages from her book Britain’s Secret Slaves published by Anti-Slavery International and Kalayaan.

  About the author Since her first novel, From Doon With Death, published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in my View, and the Arts Council National Book Awards – genre fiction for The Lake of Darkness in 1980. In 1985 Ruth Rendell received the Silver Dagger for The Tree of Hands, and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for A Dark-Adapted Eye. She won the Gold Dagger for Live Flesh in 1986, for King Solomon’s Carpet in 1991 and, as Barbara Vine, a Gold Dagger in 1987 for A Fatal Inversion. Ruth Rendell won the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writer’s Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996, she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States. Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.