by Ruth Rendell
The sheet of water that covered most of the road reminded him of the winter floods. Not again, please. The rain had stopped but it was obviously no more than a lull. He was putting out the recycling box onto the pavement, and thus breaking one of the local authority’s rules. You weren’t supposed to put the newspapers, cans, and bottles out till the following morning but the rain might be torrential in the morning . . .
It was a funny thing, he thought, how you were always distracted from this task by reading whatever was on top of the pile. You wouldn’t normally read it when you’d sat down with the newspaper it was in, you wouldn’t dream of reading a piece about waterproof mascara or Burmese cats or the latest fifteen-year-old pop sensation, but somehow you couldn’t resist it in these particular circumstances. The article that caught his eye was on a cookery page. It happened to be lying open on the top, although the date on it was a week ago. Its illustrations in full color, it showed a starter of avocado and grapefruit in lime coulis, a monkfish confection, and a tarte Tatin with cream . . .
But wait a minute, wasn’t that the menu Sophie had described as Joanna preparing for this dinner on the fateful Saturday night three months ago? He looked at it again, standing there in the road, under the street lamp. Coincidence? He didn’t think so. More likely, it was proof of the extent to which the girl had lied. She had read that page while at her grandmother’s and remembered its details when they were needed . . .
Chapter 22
SINCE HE AND SHARONNE WERE detained there over Christmas, Peter Buxton had not been back to Passingham Hall. Events had given him a dislike of the place. He had even thought of selling it. But could he sell it while the discovery of a body in a car in the grounds was fresh in people’s minds? He had tentatively suggested the possibility of selling to Sharonne, but she had been adamant. She had been aghast, then furious.
“But we must have a country place, Pete.”
“Why must we? Sell it and we could buy a bigger house up here. Think about it. We haven’t been there for two months. I don’t suppose we’ll go again before Easter, if then. The council tax still has to be paid, and Pauline. The house eats up fuel.”
“What am I going to say to people? That we don’t have a country place? Oh, no. I should coco.” Incongruously, since she so obviously wanted to hold on to Passingham Hall, she added, “Besides, nobody would buy it. Not since you advertised the fact there was a dead body in the grounds.”
The Warrens had invited them to their Silver Wedding party. The anniversary itself was on Valentine’s Day but that happened to fall on a Wednesday that year so the party was fixed for Saturday the seventeenth. It was to be a big affair, half the county there. Sharonne was determined to go.
“Of course we’re going, Pete. Why ever not?”
“You go,” Peter said daringly.
“What, and leave you here on your own?” As if he were a child or senile, as if he were likely to set the place on fire or invite other women in. “Absolutely not. God knows what you’d get up to.”
What was that supposed to mean? What he’d get up to! Was she as pure as driven snow? That phone number was still hovering beneath the surface of his mind, he had long known it by heart. Every time he came home and found himself alone with the phone, he dialed 1471 but its records had never divulged that number again.
He would have to go to Passingham some time. It was obvious he must either go there or sell it, and Sharonne wouldn’t let him sell it. Peter was beginning to think the unthinkable and wonder what exactly he got out of his marriage. He could see what he put into it— money, companionship, money, obedience, money, a continual yielding to pressure—but what did Sharonne put in? Herself, he supposed, herself. He felt most frightened and most like shying away from the whole subject when he began asking what that self amounted to. A caring—but deceitful?—bossy clotheshorse . . . Last week he had asked her about starting a family and she had reacted as if he had suggested she navigate the globe single-handedly in an open boat or make her own clothes or something equally fantastic. They had never discussed it before. Naively, he had supposed all women wanted babies just as he had supposed they could all cook.
Of course, they went to Passingham. As they were leaving on the Friday evening the phone started ringing. After three rings it stopped and switched over to the answering service. It never crossed Peter’s mind that this might be Kingsmarkham Police calling to fix a time to interview him. After all, he could check the message on Sunday night.
As they turned down the lane toward the Hall, she began on the body in the car.
“They never would have found it if you hadn’t phoned and told them.”
“Well, I did phone. It’s too late now.”
“When all’s said and done, I think we’re very lucky the Warrens asked us. They must be very tolerant people to overlook a thing like that. Most people would give us the cold shoulder.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Peter in a rough tone. “We didn’t put that car there. We didn’t put that woman in it. It was just our luck.”
“Well, I know that, but others don’t. Others would say there was no smoke without fire and we must have had something to do with it.”
“You mean you would.”
It was in a state of mutual resentment that they entered the house, Peter lugging all his wife’s three suitcases, one under his arm, two dragged behind him, a task she said was obviously his to perform. He reached for the light switch but the bulb was defunct and for a few moments they blundered about in the pitch dark. As Sharonne located the panel of switches in the drawing room but before the light came on, the phone began to ring. Peter felt for it, knocked the receiver off, and was crawling about the floor feeling for it when light poured out from behind the half-open drawing room door. Kicking over the largest of Sharonne’s suitcases in his haste, he gasped out, “Hello?”
“I seem to have phoned at a bad time,” said a voice he recognized as belonging to Chief Inspector Wexford. “Kingsmarkham Crime Management.”
“What do you want?” Peter asked. Sharonne was standing in the doorway, watching him intently. “It is a bad time, very bad.”
“I’m sorry about that. I’m not at liberty to be tactful about these things. You’ll be staying at Passingham for the weekend?”
“Why?”
“Because I’d like to talk to you tomorrow morning as a matter of urgency, Mr. Buxton.”
Peter looked at Sharonne’s stony face, thought with a disloyalty that amazed him, how anger reduced her to ugliness, and wondered how he could keep from her whatever it was this policeman wanted. He said a cautious “All right.”
“You have a car with you? I’d like you to come here. In the morning.”
The Warrens’ lunch party . . . “What time in the morning? Early preferably.”
“I was thinking of eleven.”
“Could you make it ten?” Sharonne was listening intently. “Ten would suit me better.”
“It wouldn’t suit me,” said Wexford. “I’ll see you at eleven.”
What could he say? In Sharonne’s presence, he dared not ask what the police wanted this time. He thought only of the blamelessness of his life these past six weeks. Surely they hadn’t found anything else on his land . . . ? He dared not ask. Wexford said he would see him at eleven in the morning and rang off. Peter carried the suitcases upstairs and dumped them on the bedroom floor. The house felt damp and chill as the central heating began to cool. He went downstairs and after a good deal of grubbing about in the kitchen, dislodging stacks of heterogeneous rubbish, receipted bills, empty cardboard boxes, plastic bags, out-of-focus photographs, used matchbooks, triple A batteries, keys that locked no known doors, at last found a 100-watt lightbulb in the back of a cupboard. Once he had managed with some difficulty to slot it into the socket, he went into the by now cold drawing room and poured himself a large Scotch.
“Did you take my cases upstairs?” Sharonne asked. Getting a surly nod in response, she remarke
d that she was disappointed to see him lapsing back into his old drinking habits. “You’ve been so good about it lately.”
Not all worms turn but some do. “I haven’t been good. I haven’t cut down on my drinking, I’ve just done it when you weren’t there. I’m a grown man, Mummy, I’m not a child. No one tells me what to do.” He picked up his whisky. “I’m going to bed now. Good night.”
They had shared their bed but distantly, each one lying on an extreme edge. Peter woke up very early and got up. He couldn’t lie there wondering if something else had turned up on his land, those children’s bodies, for instance, or clothing or some weapon. He should have asked. But he couldn’t, not with Sharonne looking at him so accusingly. So far she hadn’t said a word about that telephone conversation.
It was still dark but dawn was coming. A fine precipitation, halfway between drizzle and mist, hung in the grayish air. In Barbour, rubber boots, country gentleman’s tweed cap and gauntlets, he explored the wood, expecting at any moment to see blue and white crime tape showing brightly among the tree trunks. But there was nothing. The Dancing Floor lay passive within its encircling trees, a brighter green than he had ever seen it, quagmire green, bog green, in the increasing light waterdrops glittering on every blade of grass. No one could walk on it at present, still less dance. His search yielding nothing that might be construed as incriminating, he felt a little better and he returned to the house with a renewed appetite for breakfast.
He was making toast and, in some trepidation, boiling an egg, when Sharonne appeared unprecedentedly early. She had cleaned up her face before going to bed but not removed her eye makeup so that this morning she looked as if she had received a double whammy during the night. In her not very clean white dressing gown and with her hair sticking up in tufts, but not in a fashionable way, she was an unappetizing sight.
“You never told me,” she said, “who that was on the phone last night.”
“The office,” he lied.
“You’re never going into the office at eleven this morning?”
“Why not?”
“Well, for a start, what for? You never work on Saturdays. You once said it was a rule, no one in your firm worked on Saturdays or Sundays. Not ever.”
Peter didn’t answer. He took the pan off the ring and rather clumsily cut the top off his egg. It had boiled hard, the way he disliked it. Sharonne sat down at the table and poured herself some coffee.
“You’re not going to the office, are you? I can read you like a book, Pete. That wasn’t the office on the phone, it was someone else.”
“If you say so.” He might say much the same to her concerning phone calls, but he didn’t. He was afraid.
“Well, we’re due at the Warrens’ by twelve thirty at the latest and I hope I don’t need to remind you Trollfield Farm is fifteen miles away. So you’d better not be wherever you’re going for more than half an hour.” She studied his face, reading him like a book. “I know who it was,” she said. “It was the police.”
He shrugged.
“You’re going to Toxborough police station. Well, Trollfield Farm is between here and Toxborough, so that’s all right. What do they want? I thought all that business was over. What have you been doing, Pete?”
“Me? I haven’t done a thing. I never have done. All I did was find a car with a body in it.”
She stood up, hands on hips. “No, that wasn’t all you did. All you did was go and look at it, mess about with something that was no business of yours. All you did was go and tell the police and bring them here so that this place has got a bad name and we’ll never be able to sell it.”
“But you don’t want to sell it!”
“That’s got nothing to do with it. It’d be all the same if I did, you never take any notice of what I want. And now they suspect you of something else. Putting that car there, I expect, and maybe you did— how would I know? I’d be the last to know.”
Peter picked a piece of toast out of the toaster and hurled it across the room. He tipped the remains of his egg into the sink. “It’s not Toxborough, it’s Kingsmarkham. And there’s no way I can get back here before half past one.” Like a child, he added, “So there!”
She stared at him, gathering her rage for an outburst.
“And you can’t have the car,” he said. “I want it.”
“If you go to Kingsmarkham,” she shouted, “and I can’t go to the Warrens’, I’ll never speak to you again.”
He found the nerve that had been in abeyance for three years. “Good,” he said.
The single sentence of that altercation that stayed in his mind was the one she had uttered about the police suspecting him of putting the car in the quarry. Maybe they did, he thought as he began the drive to Kingsmarkham, maybe that was what it was all about. But they couldn’t. On what grounds? He didn’t know the dead woman, he didn’t know those missing kids. He should have asked that policeman. But Wexford’s tone had been so cold and repressive that he had sensed he’d get no more out of him on the phone.
At two minutes to eleven he drove on to the parking area outside Kingsmarkham Police Station. Before he had opened the driver’s door, a young policeman was saying very respectfully to him, “Sorry, sir, you can’t park here.”
“Where can I park, then?” Peter asked irritably.
“It’ll have to be in the street, sir. On the ‘pay and display, ’ sir, if you please, not the residents’ parking.”
“I know that. I’m not a resident of this place, thank God.”
It took him more than ten minutes to find somewhere to park in a side street and walk back to the police station, so that when he was shown into Wexford’s office the Chief Inspector was pointedly looking at his watch. But the interview, which he by now expected to be a grueling interrogation, lasted no time at all. Wexford only wanted to know what he had been doing on the afternoon and evening of November 25 of the previous year. Of course he couldn’t produce an alibi, though he could have done for almost every other Saturday night of the year, Sharonne enjoying such a very social lifestyle. In fact, that was why he remembered that Saturday without reference to his diary. Simply because, almost uniquely, they had been home alone together.
Wexford seemed not at all perturbed. He didn’t even seem interested. He thanked Buxton for coming, made a few remarks on the weather, and then said he’d escort him downstairs to the front entrance himself. They took the lift and crossed the black and white checkerboard floor toward the swing doors. He vaguely thought he recognized the girl of thirteen or fourteen who was sitting on an upright chair next to an elderly woman. Her picture had been in the news lately. For being murdered? For winning something? Having not yet seen a morning paper, he couldn’t remember. She was gazing at him in a rude, brash sort of way but he soon forgot her.
He had been so short a time in the police station that he had a good chance of getting back to Passingham by noon. It was still only twenty-five past eleven when he got back into his car. Unfortunately for him (and for the victims of the accident) a container lorry had hit a car full of holidaymakers as the driver overtook a line of vehicles this side of the Toxborough turn-off. The traffic queue extended back from the crash site for two miles by the time Buxton reached the tail end of it. Eventually, when an ambulance had taken away the injured, when the broken and twisted metal that had been a people carrier was cleared from the road and the lorry towed away, the line of cars slowly proceeded toward Toxborough and London. The time was twelve twenty and it was ten to one when Buxton reached the Hall.
He knew Sharonne must be still there, however enraged and threatening, because he had the car and she no means of getting to Trollfield unless she’d called a taxi. If she’d done that she’d have had to explain to the driver she hadn’t got a car. That wasn’t Sharonne’s way. But she wasn’t there. He went around the house calling her name, a large whisky in his hand. Someone must have called for her, someone must have taken her to the Warrens’. Well, she’d be back.
Later, on the news, he saw that Sophie Dade had been found or come home of her own accord. It wasn’t clear which of these possibilities was the true one. So that was the girl he’d seen at the police station. There was a little whisky left in the bottle. He might as well drink it. It was wasteful leaving dregs. Reminding himself that what Sharonne had been to was a lunch party, he saw that it was after six. Soon afterward he fell asleep and dreamed about the phone number disclosed to him when he dialed 1471. Once, just once. The chap had never phoned again. Because Sharonne had cautioned him not to? It was pitch dark and very cold when he woke up. Finding that it was four in the morning was a bit of a shock. Once again, though this time in a shaky state, he toured the house calling her name. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t come back. Maybe the phone number man, the lover, if he was a lover, had driven her back to London. After a hair of the dog and some work with an electric toothbrush to get the foul taste out of his mouth, he dialed his London number, got his own voice asking him to leave a message.
He slept again. He phoned his London home again, eventually phoned the number that had been haunting him. An answering service responded, only repeating the number he had dialed but giving no name and asking very tersely for the caller to leave a message. The only satisfaction he got, if satisfaction it was, was from the voice being male. By the middle of the morning it was plain to him that she had left him and instead of sadness, he felt a terrible rage. He took Colman’s card out of his pocket and dialed not the main phone number but that of the man’s mobile. Colman answered smartly.
