by Ruth Rendell
Wexford turned from him to speak to a boy who touched his arm and said, ‘There was a girl in our party who’s disappeared. No one’s seen her since this morning. We thought she’d gone home. She wasn’t enjoying herself much.’
‘How was she dressed?’
The boy considered and said, ‘Jeans, I think, and a green top.’
‘Fair hair? Mauve tights and shoes?’
‘God, no. She’s dark and she wasn’t wearing anything like that.’
‘It isn’t she,’ said Wexford.
The rain was coming. He had a brief nightmarish vision of rain descending in torrents on the encampment, turning the trodden grass into seas of mud, beating on the fragile tents. And all the while, throughout the night certainly, he and every policeman he could get hold of would have to interrogate wet, unhappy and perhaps panicky teenagers.
The photographers had come. He saw their car bumping over the hard turf and stop at the wooden bridge. Once she had been photographed, he could move her and perhaps begin the business of identification. He felt a dash of cold water on his hand as the first drops of rain fell.
‘I’ve been wondering if we could get them all into the house,’ said Silk.
Eighty thousand people into one house? On the other hand, it was a big house …
‘Not possible. Don’t think of it.’
Behind him a girl cleared her throat to attract his attention. Two girls stood there, one of them holding a black velvet coat.
‘Yes?’ he said quickly.
‘We haven’t seen our friend since last night. She left her coat in the tent and just went off. We can’t find her or her boy friend, and I thought—we thought …’
‘That she might be the girl we found? Describe her, please.’
‘She’s eighteen. Very dark hair, very pretty. She’s wearing black jeans. Oh, it isn’t her, is it? She’s called Rosie and her boy friend …’
‘Is Daniel.’ While the girl stared at him, round-eyed, marvelling at this omniscience, he said, ‘Rosie’s all right.’ He pointed. ‘She’s over there, in that tent.’
‘Thanks. God, we were really scared.’
How much more of this was there to be, he wondered, before he had to say yes, yes, it sounds like her? Then he saw Dr Crocker, lean, trim and energetic, stalking towards him. The police doctor wore a white raincoat and carried an umbrella as well as his bag.
‘I’ve been away for the weekend, Reg, taking your people’s advice. I thought I was going to keep clear of all this. What’s it about?’
‘Didn’t they tell you?’
‘No, only that I was wanted.’
‘There’s a dead girl in the quarry.’
‘Is there, by God? One of them?’ Crocker pointed vaguely into the crowd.
‘I don’t know. Come and see.’
The rain was falling lightly, intermittentiy, the way rain does after a drought and before a deluge, as if each drop was being squeezed painfully out. Three police cars had succeeded in negotiating the rough ground and were parked at the quarry edge. In the quarry itself the photographers had completed their work, the undergrowth had been cut away and a tarpaulin canopy erected to screen the body from view. In spite of this, a crowd of boys and girls squatted or lolled all round the quarry, speculating among themselves, their eyes wide.
‘Get back to your tents, the lot of you,’ Wexford said. ‘You’ll get wet and you won’t see anything.’ Slowly, they began to move. ‘Come on now. Ghoulishness is for ignorant old people. Your generation is supposed to be above this sort of thing.’
That did it. One or two of them groaned sheepishly. By the time Wexford and the doctor had scrambled down on to the little lawn—the harebells trodden to a mush—the sightseers had dispersed. Crocker knelt by the body and examined it. After about five minutes he got up.
‘She’s been dead at least five days.’
Wexford felt himself relax with relief.
‘She was dead before the festival started,’ said Crocker, ‘and she wasn’t a teenager. I’d say at least twenty-seven, maybe thirty.’
Under the canopy the flies were thick and noisy. Wexford rolled the body on to its side, revealing a large handbag of mauve patent leather which lay beneath it. Handbag, shoes and tights matched each other and clashed with the dark red dress. He opened the bag, spilling the contents on to a sheet of plastic. An envelope addressed to Miss Dawn Stonor, 23 Philimede Gardens, London, S.W.5, fell out. There was a letter inside it addressed from Lower Road, Kingsmarkham: Dear Dawn, I will be glad to see you Monday but I suppose it will be one of your flying visits and you won’t condescend to stop the night. Granma has had one of her bad turns but is all right again now. I got the mauve slacks and blouse from the cleaners that you left there and you can take it away with you. They charged 65 p. which I will be glad of. See you Monday. Love, Mum.
He noted the illiteracies, the badly formed writing. Something else in the letter struck a chord in his mind, but he could think about that later. The main thing was that she had been easily and rapidly identified. ‘Have the body removed,’ he said to Sergeant Martin, ‘and then I want the quarry searched.’
There was blood on his hand, fresh blood. How could that have come from a body five days dead? He looked again and saw that it hadn’t. The blood was his own, flowing from a small wound near the base of his thumb.
‘Broken glass everywhere,’ he said wonderingly.
‘Have you only just noticed?’ Crocker gave a harsh, humourless laugh. ‘You needn’t bother to search for a weapon.’ They had come gaily and noisily, erupting from cars and trains and buses, arriving on a summer’s day to hear music and bringing their own music with them. They left downcast, in silence, trudging through the rain. Most of them had had no more than a dozen hours of sleep throughout the weekend. Their faces were shocked and dirty and pale.
No one ran. There was no horseplay. They dismantled their wet tents, shouldered their baggage, leaving behind them greyish-white mountain ranges of rubbish. Moving towards the gates in long ragged files, they looked like refugees leaving a place of disaster. Daniel walked with Rosie, one arm embracing her, the other shouldering a rolled tent which bumped against his khaki pack. Louis Mbowele passed through the gates without looking up from the book he was reading. They chewed sweets, passed wine bottles from hand to hand in silence, indifferent in their saddened freemasonry as to who paid or who drank. Huddled together, they lit cigarettes, sheltering match flames from the downpour.
Lightning split the sky over Stowerton and the thunder rolled, grumbling in the west. From fast-travelling clouds, blue and black and roaring grey, the rain cascaded, sweeping people and their belongings into the avenue like so much debris buffeted by the tide. The cedars lifted their black arms, sleeved in spiky foliage, and slapped them, rattling, up and down on what had been turf. It was turf no longer. Thousand upon thousand of strong young feet had shaved the grass to stubble, to final scorched aridity. The rain fell on to acres of brown desert.
Someone had abandoned a torn tent, a red canvas tent that bounded in the wind like a huge drowning butterfly until it became waterlogged and collapsed against the footings of the stage. The river began to fill, carrying with it as it plunged under the Forby road a bobbing flotsam of paper, cans, transistor batteries and lost shoes.
5
With the rain came a kind of false night, a streaming, early twilight. It drove everyone indoors, everyone, that is, but the departing young people who trudged through the downpour into Kingsmarkham. Soaked and shivering, the long processions came on towards the buses, towards the station. Some stayed behind on the Forby road, hoping to hitch, doggedly resigned when cars passed without stopping, when motorists, put off by their draggled clothes and their long wet hair, rejected them.
They invaded the centre of the town, queueing for any bus that might come, forming dispirited lines that stretched the length of the High Street. A conglomeration of youth filled the centre, but the outskirts, the back streets,
were deserted. In Lower Road where all the doors and windows were shut, every curtain drawn, rain drumming on rows of pavement-parked cars, it might have been the depths of winter. Only the roses in the front gardens of these squat red-brick council houses, the drooping foliage on cherry trees, showed that there should have been sunshine, that it was a June evening.
Number fifteen was a house just like its neighbours, a similar Dorothy Perkins trailing over the front door, its acid pink flowers clashing with ochreish red brick, similar white net curtains, draped crosswise like the bodice of a négligé, across its windows. A scaffolding of television aerials sprouted from its single chimney and juddered in the gale.
Wexford went slowly up the path. The rain was falling so heavily that he had to put up his umbrella even for this short distance from the car to the front door. He hated having to question the bereaved, hated himself for intruding on their grief and for feeling, if not showing, impatience when memories overcame them and tears silenced them. He knew now that Dawn Stonor had had no father. It was a woman in the barren country of deep middle age, alone and perhaps utterly broken, he had to interview. He tapped softly on the door.
Detective Polly Davies let him in.
‘How is she, Polly?’
‘She’s O.K., sir. There wasn’t much love lost between mother and daughter, as far as I can see. Dawn hadn’t lived at home for ten years.’
Dreadful to feel relief at a lack of love … ‘I’ll talk to her now.’
Mrs Stonor had been driven to the mortuary and home again in a police car. Still wearing her coat, her red straw hat on the arm of her chair, she sat in the living room, drinking tea. She was a big, florid-faced woman of fifty-five with bad varicose veins, her swollen feet crushed into court shoes.
‘Do you feel up to giving me some information, Mrs Stonor? I’m afraid this has been a bad shock for you.’
‘What d’you want to know?’ She spoke abruptly in a shrill, harsh voice. ‘I can’t tell you why she was in that quarry. Made a proper mess of her, didn’t he?’
Wexford wasn’t shocked. He knew that in most people there is something sado-masochistic, and even the newly-bereaved have an apparently ghoulish need to dwell with pleasurable horror on the injuries inflicted on dead relatives. Whether or not they express these feelings depends on their degree of cultivated repression rather than on grief.
‘Who was “he”, Mrs Stonor?’
She shrugged. ‘Some man. There was always some man.’
‘What did she do for a living?’
‘Waitress in a club. Place called the Townsman up in London, up West somewhere. I never went there.’ Mrs Stonor gave him a lowering, aggressive look. ‘It’s for men. The girls get themselves up in daft costumes like bathing suits with skirts, showing off all they’ve got. “Disgusting!” I said to her. “Don’t you tell me about it, I don’t want to know.” Her dad would have turned in his grave if he’d known what she did.’
‘She came here on Monday?’
‘That’s right.’ She took off her coat. He saw that she was heavily built, rigidly corseted. Her face was set in grim, peevish lines, and it was hard to tell whether it was more grim and peevish than usual. ‘You wouldn’t find a decent girl going to that quarry with a man,’ she said. ‘Had he done anything to her?’
The question was grotesque between people who had seen for themselves, but he knew what she meant. ‘There was no sexual assault and intercourse hadn’t taken place.’
She flushed darkly. He thought she was going to protest at his fairly blunt way of speaking but instead she rushed into an account of what he wanted to know. ‘She came down by train, the one that gets in at half past eleven. I’d got her dinner for her, a bit of steak. She liked that.’ The harsh voice wavered a little. ‘She liked her bit of steak, did Dawn. Then we chatted a bit. We hadn’t really got nothing in common any more.’
‘Can you tell me what you talked about?’
‘Nothing about men, if that’s what you mean. She was fed-up on account of some little kid in the train had wiped his sticky fingers down her dress. It was a new dress, one of them minis, and it showed all her legs. I said she’d have to change it and she did.’
‘She put on the dark red dress she was found in?’
‘No, she never. That wasn’t hers. I don’t know where that come from. There was a mauve thing she had here as I’d fetched from the cleaners for her—they call them trouser suits—and she put that on. She was wearing mauve shoes so it looked all right. Well, like I said, we chatted a bit and she went up to see her gran—that’s my mother as lives with me—and then Dawn went off to catch the four-fifteen train. Left here just before four.’
Wexford looked thoughtful. ‘You thought she was going straight back to London?’
‘Of course I did. She said so. She said, “I’ve got to be in the club by seven.” She took the blue dress with her in a bag and she said she’d have to run not to miss her train.’
‘Two more things, Mrs Stonor, and then I’ll leave you in peace. I’d like you to describe the trouser suit, if you would.’
‘Very showy, it was. More like pyjamas than something you’d wear in the street. There was slacks, sort of flared, and a kind of tunic. It was mauve nylon stuff with a bit of darker mauve round the sleeves and the bottom of the tunic. Dawn liked to dress flashy.’
‘Have you a photograph of her?’
Mrs Stonor gave him a suspicious glare. ‘What, got up in them clothes?’
‘No. Any photograph.’
‘There was a photo she sent me for Christmas. Funny idea giving your mum a photo of yourself for Christmas, I thought. You can have that if you like.’
The photograph, a studio portrait, was brought. It had never been framed and, from its pristine condition, Wexford supposed that it had never been shown with pride to Mrs Stonor’s friends but kept since its arrival in a drawer. Dawn had been a heavy-featured, rather coarse-looking girl, who wore thick make-up. The blonde hair was piled into puffs and ringlets, a massy structure reminding him of the head-dresses of eighteenth-century belles or perhaps of actresses playing such parts. She wore a blue silk evening gown, very low-cut and showing a great deal of fleshy bosom and shoulder.
Mrs Stonor eyed it irritably, peevishly, and Wexford could see that it would have been a disappointing gift for a mother of her type. Dawn had been twenty-eight. To have met with maternal favour, the picture should have shown not only a daughter but grandchildren, a wedding ring on those stiffly posed fingers, and behind the group the outline of a semidetached house, well kept-up and bought on a mortgage.
He felt a stirring of pity for this mother who was a mother no longer, a flash of sympathy which was dissipated at once when she said as he was leaving:
‘About that trouser suit …’
‘Yes?’
‘It was more or less new. She only bought it back in the winter. I mean, I know a lady who’d give me five pounds for that.’
Wexford gave her a narrow glance. He tried not to show his distaste.
‘We don’t know what’s become of it, Mrs Stonor. Perhaps the lady would like the shoes and the bag. You can have them in due course.’
The exodus continued. By now it was dark, a windswept, starless night, the rain falling relentlessly. Wexford drove back to the Sundays estate where, on both sides of the Forby road, police cars cruised along the streets or stood parked in lakes of trembling black water. Presently Burden found him and got into the car beside him.
‘Well? Anything startling?’
‘Nothing much, sir. Nobody remembers seeing a girl in a red dress down here during the week. But last Monday afternoon one woman from Sundays Grove, a Mrs Lorna Clarke, says she saw a blonde girl, answering Dawn’s description, but wearing a …’
‘Mauve trouser suit?’
‘That’s right! So it was her? I thought it must be from Mrs Clarke talking about mauve shoes and a mauve bag. Where did the red dress come from then?’
Wexford shook hi
s head. ‘It’s beginning to look as if she died on Monday. She left her mother’s house just before four that afternoon. When and where did your Mrs Clarke see her?’
‘She got off the five-twenty-five bus from Kingsmarkham. Mrs Clarke saw her get off the bus and cross the road towards The Pathway. A few minutes later someone else saw her in The Pathway.’
‘Which backs on to the quarry. Go on.’
‘There are only five houses in The Pathway, two bungalows and three proper houses. If you remember, they didn’t do any more building down there. People made a fuss about it and the ministry reversed the decision to grant planning permission. She was next seen by a woman who lives in the last house.’
‘Not the wife of that bloke who came out making a to-do on Saturday night?’
Burden nodded. ‘A Mrs Peveril, sir. They’re both at home all day. He’s a graphic designer, works at home. His wife says she saw a blonde girl in mauve go down the road at five-thirty and enter the public footpath that goes across the fields to Stowerton. She gave a very detailed description of the trouser suit, the shoes and the bag. But, of course, I couldn’t be sure it was Dawn. I couldn’t understand her being dressed in mauve. Mrs Peveril says the girl was holding a brown carrier bag.’
‘Mm-hm. It certainly was Dawn. She changed out of a blue dress into the mauve thing and it was obviously the blue one she was carrying in the bag. She seems to have gone in for a lot of clothes changing, doesn’t she? I wonder why. No other help from The Pathway?’
‘No one else saw her. Each of the bungalows has only one occupant and they were both out at the relevant time. Miss Mowler’s a retired district nurse and she was out on Monday till eight. Dunsand—he’s a lecturer at the University of the South, philosophy or something—didn’t get home from work till after half past six. I can’t find anyone else who saw her on Monday or at any other time. My guess is she picked up some bloke and made a date to meet him between Sundays and Stowerton that evening.’
