by Ruth Rendell
‘Excitement! I like that. A nice way to talk when Dawn’s had her head bashed in by a maniac. Come along now. I’ll take your arm up the stairs.’
A small devil in Wexford’s head spoke for him. ‘Mrs Peckham should stay. She may be able to help.’ He said it more to irritate Mrs Stonor than because he thought her mother would be able to furnish them with information.
Mrs Peckham grinned with pleasure, showing a set of over-large false teeth. Reprieved, she helped herself to a sweet from the bag on a table beside her and began a ferocious crunching. Her daughter turned down the corners of her mouth and folded her hands.
‘Can you think of anyone, Mrs Stonor?’
Still sulky from having her wishes baulked, Mrs Stonor said, ‘Her dad never let her have boy friends. He wanted her to grow up respectable. We had a job with her as it was, always telling lies and staying out late. My husband tried every way we could think of to teach her the meaning of decency.’
‘Tried his strap, mostly,’ said Mrs Peckham. Protected by the presence of the policemen, she gave her daughter a triumphant and unpleasant grin. Wexford could see that she was one of those old pensioners who, dependent for all her needs on a hated child, was subservient, cringing, defiant or malicious as her fancy took her or circumstances demanded. When Mrs Stonor made no reply but only lifted her chin, her mother tried another dig. ‘You and George ought never to have had no kids. Always smacking her and yelling at her. Knock one devil out and two in, that’s what I say.’
Wexford cleared his throat. ‘We don’t seem to be getting very far. I can’t believe Dawn never mentioned any man she was friendly with.’
‘I never said she didn’t. You’ll get your stomach trouble again, Mother, if you don’t leave them acid drops alone. The fact is, it was all lies with Dawn. I got so I let what she said go in one ear and out the other. I do know she had this man Wickford on account of her bringing him down here for the day last year. They didn’t stop long. Dawn could see what I thought about him. A divorced man, running a garage! That was the best she could do for herself.’
‘There was no one else?’ Burden asked coldly.
‘I said I don’t know. You’re not going to tell me she got herself done in by some boy she was at school with, are you? That’s all the local boys she knew.’
Mrs Peckham, having incompletely unwrapped her latest sweet, was removing shreds of paper from her mouth. ‘There was Harold Goodbody,’ she said.
‘Don’t be so stupid, Mother. As if Harold’d have anything to do with a girl like Dawn. Harold climbed too high for the likes of her.’
‘Who is this man?’ asked Wexford.
The sweet lodged in a wizened cheek pouch, the noisy sucking abated, Mrs Peckham heaved a heavy but not unhappy sigh. ‘He was a lovely boy, was Harold. Him and his mum and dad used to live round here in the next street. I wasn’t here then, I had my own cottage, but I used to see Harold when I had my job serving dinners at the school. Oh, he was a lad! Always one for a joke was Harold, April Fools all the year round for him. Him and Dawnie was pals from their first day at school. Then I come here to live with Phyllis and George and Dawnie’d bring him back to tea.’
‘I never knew that,’ said Mrs Stonor, bristling. ‘George wouldn’t have had that.’
‘George wasn’t here, was he? And you was working at that shop. I didn’t see no harm in Dawnie bringing her friend home.’ Mrs Peckham turned her back on her daughter and faced Wexford. ‘Harold was a real freak to look at, all bones and his hair nearly as white as mine. I’d have boiled eggs all ready for the three of us, but when Dawnie and me started cracking ours we’d find just the empty shells. Harold’d brought a couple of empty shells to fool us. Ooh, he was funny! He had a joke ink blot and a rubber spider. Made us scream, that spider did. One day I caught him playing with the phone. He’d rung this number and when the woman answered he said he was the engineers. He said to her there was an emergency. She was to pour boiling water down the receiver, leave it for ten minutes and then cut the lead with scissors. She was going to too, she believed him, but I put a stop to that, though I was laughing fit to die. Harold was a real scream.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Wexford. ‘How old was he when all this fun and games was going on?’
‘About fifteen.’
‘And he still lives round here?’
‘No, of course he don’t. That Mr Silk from Sundays took him up and he left home and went to London when he was seventeen and got famous, didn’t he?’
Wexford blinked. ‘Famous? Harold Goodbody?’
Mrs Peckham wagged her gnarled hands impatiently. ‘He changed his name when he got to be a singer. What did he call himself? Now I’m getting on I seem to forget everything. John Lennon, that was it.’
‘I hardly think …’ Wexford began.
Mrs Stonor, who had remained silent and scornful, opened her mouth and snapped, ‘Zeno Vedast. He calls himself Zeno Vedast.’
‘Dawn was at school with Zeno Vedast?’ Wexford said blankly. So it hadn’t been all boasting, vain name-dropping? Or some of it hadn’t. ‘They were friends?’
‘You don’t want to listen to Mother,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I daresay Dawn saw a bit of him when they were at school. She never saw him in London.’
‘Oh, yes, she did, Phyllis. She told me so last Monday when she was home. She’d tell me things she’d never tell you. She knew you’d pour cold water on everything she did.’
‘What did she say, Mrs Peckham?’
‘She come into my room when I was in bed. You remember Hal, don’t you, Gran? she says. We always called him Hal. Well, I went out to dinner with him Friday night, she said.’
‘And you believed her?’ Mrs Stonor gave the brittle laugh that is not a laugh at all. ‘Harold Goodbody was in Manchester Friday night. I saw him myself on telly, I saw him live. She was just making up tales like she always did.’
Mrs Peckham scrunched indignantly. ‘She got the night wrong, that’s all. Poor little Dawnie.’
‘Don’t you be so stupid. He’s a famous singer. Though what’s so wonderful about his voice I never shall know. Richard Tauber, now that was a man who had a voice.’
Burden asked, ‘Do his parents still live here?’
Mrs Stonor looked for a moment as if she was going to tell him not to be so stupid. She restrained herself and said sourly, ‘When he got rich he bought them a great big detached place up near London. All right for some, isn’t it? I’ve always been decent and brought my daughter up right and what did she ever do for me? I well remember Freda Goodbody going round to her neighbours to borrow a quarter of tea on account of Goodbody spending all his wages on the dogs. Harold never had more than one pair of shoes at a time and they was cast-offs from his cousin. “My darling boy” and “my precious Hal” she used to say but she used to give him baked beans for his Sunday dinner.’
Suddenly Mrs Peckham waxed appropriately biblical. ‘ “Better a dish of herbs where love is”,’ she said, ‘ “than a stalled ox and hatred therewith”.’ She took the last acid drop and sucked it noisily.
‘There you are, sir,’ said Burden when they were in the car. ‘A lifelong friendship, like I said.’
‘Well, not quite like you said, Mike. Zeno Vedast doesn’t live in Stowerton, he has no wife, and I don’t suppose he makes a habit of eating tinned food in fields with waitresses. The odd thing is that she did know him. It seems to bear out what Joan Miall said that, in the nature of things, even a chronic liar must tell more truth than lies. We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf. Dawn Stonor was a lion-hunter. She cried lion and this time the lion was real. But we haven’t a shred of evidence to connect Vedast with her last Monday. Very likely he was still in Manchester. All I can say at the moment is that it’s intriguing, it’s odd.’
‘Surely you think we ought to see him?’
‘Of course we must see him. We must see every man Dawn knew, unless he has a watertight alibi for that Monday night. We still don’t kno
w what Wickford was doing after seven.’ The chief inspector tapped his driver’s shoulder. ‘Back to the station, please, Stevens.’
The man half-turned. He was young, rather shy, recently transferred from Brighton. He blushed when Wexford addressed him, rather as he had coloured under Mrs Peveril’s stare.
‘Did you want to say something to me?’ Wexford asked gently.
‘No, sir.’
‘Back to the station, then. We can’t sit here all day.’
By Wednesday Paul Wickford had been cleared of suspicion. After leaving Joan Miall at the Townsman Club in Hertford Street, he had gone into a pub in Shepherd Market where he had drunk one vodka and tonic before driving back to Earls Court. Waiting for him in his flat was his brother who brought the news of their mother’s serious illness and asked Paul to drive with him immediately to Sheffield. Paul had then asked the tenant of the second floor flat to cancel his milk and papers and, if he happened to see Dawn Stonor, to tell her where he had gone. The two brothers had reached their mother’s house in Sheffield soon after midnight, and by the following morning she was dead.
In spite of there being only thin evidence of Dawn’s killer having lived on the outskirts of Stowerton, a house-to-house investigation had begun on Tuesday afternoon of the whole district. No one had seen Dawn; no one had seen a girl in mauve alone or with a man. Only two wives had been absent from home on the evening in question, one with her husband and one leaving him behind to mind their four children. No wife had been away for the whole night and no wife had missed a red dress. Wexford’s men searched the fields for the trouser suit and the food. It was dreary work, for the rain fell heavily and there were fears that the river would flood.
Mrs Clarke and Mrs Peveril remained the only people who had seen Dawn after five-twenty, Mrs Peveril the last person—except her killer—to have seen her alive. Wexford concentrated on these two women, questioning them exhaustively, and it wasn’t long before he found something odd in their evidence. It had not previously occurred to him that they might know each other, and it was only when, sitting in Mrs Clarke’s living room, listening to her answer the phone, that the thought occurred to him.
‘I can’t talk now, Margaret. I’ll ring you later. I hope Edward soon feels better.’
She didn’t say who had been at the other end of the line. Why should she? She sat down with a bright, insincere smile. ‘So sorry. You were saying?’
Wexford said sharply, ‘Were you talking to Mrs Peveril?’
‘How could you know? I was, as a matter of fact.’
‘Then I imagine you are the one person she claims acquaintance with in this district?’
‘Poor Margaret. She’s so neurotic and she has an awful time with Edward. I suppose I am her only friend. She doesn’t make friends easily.’
‘Mrs Clarke, you were first questioned about Dawn Stonor last Sunday evening, I think? We questioned people on this side of the estate first.’
‘Well, you ought to know that better than me.’
She looked a little offended, bored, but not at all frightened. Wexford considered carefully. Burden and Martin and Gates had begun their questions here at seven, not reaching The Pathway till nine. ‘Did you phone Mrs Peveril on Sunday evening before nine?’ Her glance became wary, defensive. ‘I see you did. You told her you’d been questioned and, moreover, that you’d been able to help. It was only natural for you to talk to your friend about it. I expect you described the girl to her and told her which way you’d seen her go.’
‘Is there anything wrong in that?’
‘Discretion would have been wiser. Never mind. Describe Dawn Stonor to me again now, please.’
‘But I’ve done it hundreds of times,’ cried Mrs Clarke with exasperated exaggeration. ‘I’ve told you over and over again.’
‘Once more, for the last time.’
‘I was coming along to get the bus into Kingsmarkham. I saw her get off the bus that went the other way. She crossed the road and went into The Pathway.’ Mrs Clarke spoke slowly and deliberately as might a parent explaining for the dozenth time to a not very bright child the point of a simple story. ‘She had fair hair, she was in her twenties, and she wore a lilac-coloured trouser suit and mauve shoes.’
‘That was what you told Mrs Peveril?’
‘Yes, and you and all your other people. I couldn’t say any more because I don’t know any more.’
‘You didn’t, for instance, notice her large mauve bag with a gilt buckle or that there was a darker edging to the suit?’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t notice that and you saying it doesn’t bring it back to me or anything. I’m sorry but I’ve told you everything I know.’
He shook his head, not in denial of her statement, but at his own bewilderment. At first, briefly, when she put the phone down he had suddenly been certain that Mrs Peveril had never seen Dawn at all, that the news from her friend had sparked off an urge for sensationalism, giving her an opportunity to make herself important. He remembered how, although she said she had taken careful note of the girl’s appearance in order to tell her husband about her, she had never told him. But now he knew she must have seen her. How else could she, and she alone, have known of the bag and the purple border to the tunic?
9
Three houses that backed on to Sundays, three garden gates opening on to a narrow strip of land beyond which was the quarry.… Each garden separated from its neighbours by high woven chestnut fencing, a strip of land overgrown with dense bushes and quite tall trees. Wexford thought how easy it would have been to carry a body out of one of those houses by night and drop it into the quarry. And yet, if Dawn had gone into one of those houses instead of across the fields, if Mrs Peveril had seen her do so and was a seeker after sensation, wouldn’t these facts have made a far greater sensation?
‘I thought you’d leave me alone after I’d told you the truth,’ said Mrs Peveril fretfully. ‘I shall be ill if you badger me. All right, Mrs Clarke did phone me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see her too, does it? I saw her and I saw her walk across those fields.’
‘She couldn’t have gone into any of those houses, anyway, sir,’ said Burden. ‘Unless it was into Mrs Peveril’s own house. In which case Mrs P. presumably wouldn’t say she’d seen her at all. Dawn can’t have gone into Dunsand’s or Miss Mowler’s. We’ve checked at Myringham, at the university, and Dunsand didn’t leave there till six. He’d have been lucky to get home by six-thirty, more like twenty to seven. Miss Mowler was with her friend in Kingsmarkham till a quarter to eight.’
They went back to the police station and were about to enter the lift when a sharp draught of wind told Wexford that the double doors to the entrance foyer had been swept unceremoniously open. He turned round and saw an extraordinary figure. The man was immensely tall—far taller than Wexford who topped six feet—with a bush of jet-black hair. He wore an ankle-length pony-skin coat and carried a canvas bag whose sopping wet contents had soaked the canvas and were dripping on to the floor. Once inside, he paused, looked about him confidently and was making for Sergeant Camb who sat drinking tea behind his counter when Wexford intercepted him.
‘Mr Mbowele, I believe? We’ve met before.’ Wexford put out his hand which was immediately gripped in a huge copper-coloured vice of bone-crushing fingers. ‘What can I do for you?’
The young African was extremely handsome. He had all the glowing virile grace which has led clothes designers and model agencies and photographers to take up the slogan—‘ Black is beautiful’. Beaming at Wexford, his soft, dark eyes alight, he withdrew his hand, dropped the sodden bag on to the floor and undid the collar of his coat. Under it his chest was bare, hung with a chain of small green stones.
‘I don’t altogether dig this rain, man,’ he said, shaking drops of water off his hair. ‘You call this June?’
‘I’m not responsible for the weather.’ Wexford pointed to the bag. ‘And rain wasn’t responsible for that unless the floods have started.’
<
br /> ‘I fished it out of the river,’ said Louis Mbowele. ‘Not here. At Myringham. That’s quite a river now, your little Kingsbrook, man. I go down the river every morning and walk. I can think down there.’ He stretched out his arms. It was easy to imagine him striding by the full flowing river, his mind equally in spate, his body brimming with vibrant energy. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘about Wittgenstein’s principle of atomicity.…’
‘About what?’
‘For an essay. It’s not important. I looked in the river and I saw this purple silk thing …’
‘Is that what’s in the bag?’
‘Didn’t you get that? I knew what it was, man, I’d read the papers. I waded in and fished it out and put it in this bag—it’s my girl friend’s bag—and brought it here.’
‘You shouldn’t have touched it, Mr Mbowele.’
‘Louis, man, Louis. We’re all friends, aren’t we? I’ve no prejudice against the fuzz. The fuzz have their place in a well-organised state. I’m no anarchist.’
Wexford sighed. ‘You’d better come upstairs and bring the bag with you.’
In the office Louis made himself immediately at home by taking off the pony-skin coat and drying his hair on its lining. He sat on a chair like one who is more accustomed to sit on the floor, one long leg stuck out and the other hooked over the chair arm.
‘Exactly where did you find this, Louis?’
‘In the river between Mill Street and the college grounds. It’d been swept down from round here somewhere. Look, why freak out about it? If I’d left it there it’d be down by the sea somewhere now. Keep your cool, man.’
‘I am not losing my cool,’ said Wexford who couldn’t help smiling. ‘Was there anything else in the river?’
‘Fish,’ said Louis, grinning, ‘and sticks and stones and a hell of a lot of water.’
