by Ruth Rendell
It was pointless, anyway, to ask about the paper carrier of food. What carrier bag, what cardboard cartons, would survive ten days and fifteen miles of pounding in that swollen stream? The can and the jar would survive, of course. But only a miracle would have brought them to precisely the same spot in the river as the trouser suit when Louis Mbowele had found it. Maybe the Wittgenstein principle provided for that sort of coincidence, but Wexford decided not to pursue it. The bag and, to a lesser extent the coat, were soaking his carpet.
‘Well, I’m very grateful to you. You’ve been most public-spirited.’ Wexford risked his hand again and managed not to wince when the vice enclosed it. ‘There’s a bus goes to Myringham at ten past which you ought to be in time for.’
‘I ought if I’m going to get to Len’s tutorial.’ He glanced at the window. It was pouring. ‘Have you ever been to Marumi?’
‘Marumi?’
‘My country. Sometimes you get no rain there for three years. Man, is that country dry! You like the sun?’
‘It makes a change,’ said Wexford.
‘You said I was to remember you when I came into my kingdom. It won’t be a kingdom but I’ll need fuzz and I could get along great with you if you got rid of your hang-ups. How does it grab you?’
‘I’ll be too old by that time, Louis.’
‘Age,’ said the philosopher, ‘is just a state of mind.’ He looked, Wexford thought, about twenty. ‘It won’t be that long, man, not long at all. Get yourself together. Think it over.’
From the window Wexford watched him cross the street, swinging the wet, empty bag. He chuckled. When Burden came into the room, he looked up from the mauve rags he was examining.
‘Just been offered a job, Mike.’
‘Doing what?’
‘My own thing, man, my own thing. When the rain and boredom here freak me out I can go boss the fuzz in a sort of black Ruritania. Can you see me in epaulettes with a Mauser on each hip?’
‘My God,’ said Burden. He fingered the torn material fastidiously. ‘Is that the missing suit?’
Wexford nodded. ‘Down to the purple edging, as described by our accurate Mrs Peveril. Louis Mbowele found it in the river at Myringham. It had obviously been washed down there by the heavy rains.’
‘From those fields?’
‘From up there somewhere. She was killed up there. I’m as sure of that as I’m sure I’ll never be the Maigret of Marumi.’
Wexford remembered Miss Mowler from when she had been a district nurse in Kingsmarkham. His wife had broken her ankle and Miss Mowler had called three times a week to bath her and keep an eye on the plaster cast. She greeted him like an old friend.
‘Mrs Wexford not been climbing any more ladders, I hope? And how are your lovely girls? I saw Sheila on television last week. She’s getting quite well known, isn’t she? And amazingly good-looking.’
‘You mean it’s amazing with me for her dad?’
‘Oh, Mr Wexford, you know I didn’t mean that!’ Miss Mowler blushed and looked very confused. She tried to cover her gaffe with a string of explanations, but Wexford laughed and cut her short.
‘I’ve come to talk to you about this murder, Miss Mowler.’
‘But I can’t help you. I wasn’t here.’
‘No, but you were here later in the evening. If there was anything you noticed, any little oddity …’
‘I really can’t help you,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’ve only been here three months and I hardly even know my neighbours.’
‘Tell me what you do know of them, of the Peverils especially.’
The hall of the bungalow was rather garishly decorated, black and gilt predominating. The black bitumastic flooring curved upwards at the edges to meet an astonishingly hideous wallpaper. Wexford was rather surprised that sprays of lipstick-red flowers, each petal a pear-shaped scarlet blot, with spiralling black stems and glossy golden leaves, should be to Miss Mowler’s taste. He did not tell her so as she led him into the living room, but he must have looked it, for she plunged into characteristic excuses.
‘Awful, isn’t it? The builder finished both these bungalows completely before he sold them. Dreadful taste. You see I’ve got blue birds and orange lilies on the walls in here. And Mr Dunsand’s next door is exactly the same. I believe he’s going to re-decorate completely in bis holidays. But doing that is so expensive and arduous if you’re a lone woman like I am. The trouble is it’s very good-quality paper and completely washable. I don’t know if the Peverils’ is the same. I believe they were able to choose their own decorations, but I’ve never been in there.’
‘Mrs Peveril is a strange woman.’
‘A very neurotic one, I should think. I heard her quarrelling once in the garden with her husband. She was crying quite hysterically.’
‘What were they quarrelling about, Miss Mowler?’ Wexford asked.
‘Well, she was accusing him of being unfaithful to her. I couldn’t help overhearing.’ Afraid of another digression in which a spate of excuses would be put forward, Wexford shook his head and smiled. ‘Oh, well, it’s different rather with a policeman, isn’t it? It’s not gossip. Mrs Peveril’s talked to me in the street. I hardly know her but that doesn’t stop her saying the most—well, intimate things. I do think it’s a mistake for a man to work at home, don’t you?’
‘Why, Miss Mowler?’
‘He and his wife never get away from each other. And if the wife’s possessive and jealous she’ll resent it and begin suspecting things if ever he does go out without her. Mrs Peveril seems to depend on her husband for every sort of support, and of course the poor man isn’t adequate. Who is? I don’t think he wanted to come here. She was the moving spirit behind that … Oh, I didn’t mean to make a pun. She’s the sort of woman who’s always running away if you know what I mean.’
‘Does she ever go out without her husband?’
‘Oh dear, women like that can never appreciate that what’s sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander. She certainly goes out to her dressmaking class every Monday evening and sometimes she has another evening out with Mrs Clarke.’
‘I suppose you knew Dawn Stonor?’
Any allegation that she might have been acquainted with a murder victim might have been expected to evoke fulsome excuses from a woman of Miss Mowler’s temperament. Instead, she set her mouth and looked affronted. ‘Very selfish, flighty sort of girl. I know the family very well. Naturally, I look in on the grandmother, Mrs Peckham, from time to time. It would have made a world of difference to that old lady’s life if Dawn had bothered to go home more often. But there you are, that’s the young people of today all over. While I was still working I used to tell Dawn about it but she fired right up at me, said she couldn’t stand the place or her mother. There was some nonsense about having had an unhappy childhood. They’ve all had unhappy childhoods, Mr Wexford, to account for every bit of bad behaviour.’ She tossed her head. ‘I haven’t seen her for two or three years now and I can’t say I’m sorry.’
It was such a change for Miss Mowler not to be able to say she was sorry that Wexford concluded Dawn’s firing up must have riled her excessively. He thanked her and left. Dunsand’s bungalow had the closed-up, discouraging look of a house that is seldom occupied by day, all the windows shut, a milk bottle with a note stuck in it on the doorstep. He caught sight of Mrs Peveril, neatly overalled, watering a window box. She saw him, pretended she hadn’t, and rushed indoors, slamming the front door.
She was a biggish woman, the victim of premature middle-aged spread, several stones heavier than Miss Mowler who was twenty-five years her senior. He hadn’t really noticed that before. She wouldn’t be a size twelve, more a sixteen. But a woman can put on a lot of weight in seven years, and Joan Miall had said the dress was seven or eight years old …
He had himself driven to Lower Road and again he was aware of a fidgety unease on the part of young Stevens, his driver. These days the man seemed always on the point of saying some
thing to him, of unburdening his soul perhaps. He would say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’, but there was no finality about these responses, rather a vague note of hesitation and often a preoccupied pause before the man turned away and started the car. Wexford tried asking him what was the matter but he was always answered by a respectful shake of the head, and he concluded that Stevens had some domestic trouble weighing on him that he longed to discuss but was too shy and too reticent to reveal.
Mrs Stonor was in her kitchen, ironing, her mother in a rocking chair beside her. It was a chair which squeaked each time it was moved and Mrs Peckham, who seemed in an even more maliciously cheerful frame of mind today, moved it constantly, taking delight in the noise it made—they say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself—and munching Edinburgh rock.
‘I never heard her mention no Peveril,’ said Mrs Stonor, passing her iron across a pair of pink locknit knickers that could only have belonged to her mother yet were capacious enough to have contained the whole of that little, dried-up body. ‘She was proud of not knowing anyone around here, called them provincials or some fine thing. There’s ever such a nice woman as is manageress of the cleaners and she’d known Dawn all her life. Dawn had to pretend she’d never seen her before. What d’you think of that?’
Wexford had to keep his thoughts to himself. He was marvelling, not for the first time, at certain popular fallacies. That children naturally love their parents is a belief which has all but died away. The world still holds that parents love their children, love them automatically, through thick and thin, through disappointment and disillusion. He himself had until recently believed that the loss of a child is the one insupportable grief. When would people come to understand that the death of a son or daughter, removing the need of a parent to put a good face on things, to lie to neighbours, to sustain a false image, can be a relief?
‘If she had fallen in love with a local man,’ he said carefully, ‘perhaps these prejudices of hers wouldn’t have counted for much.’ He knew as he spoke that he was talking a foreign language to Mrs Stonor.
She seized upon the one point that meant anything to her. ‘She wasn’t capable of loving anyone.’
Mrs Peckham snorted. With surprising psychological insight, she said, ‘Maybe she didn’t know how. Kids don’t know how if they don’t get none theirselves. Same thing with dogs.’ She passed Wexford the bag of rock and grinned grimly when he took a piece. ‘And monkeys,’ she added. ‘I read that in me Reader’s Digest.’
‘We’re wondering, Mrs Stonor, if she went into a man’s house.’ With any other bereaved mother he would have softened his words; with this one any tact seemed a superfluous sentimentality. ‘We think she may have had an assignation with a local man while his wife was away.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past her. She hadn’t got no morals. But she wouldn’t go to a fellow’s house—even I can see that. That’s stupid. She’d got a flat of her own, hadn’t she? Them girls was only too ready to make themselves scarce if the other one was up to any funny business.’ It was atrociously put, but it was unanswerable. ‘Dawn didn’t even have the decency to hide any of that from me,’ Mrs Stonor said fiercely. ‘She told me she’d been with men in that way. She called it being honest and leading her own life. As if she knew the meaning of honesty! I’d have died before I’d have told such things to my mother.’
A shrieking cackle came from Mrs Peckham. ‘You’d nothing to tell, Phyllis. You aren’t ’uman.’
‘Don’t be so stupid, Mother. The sergeant don’t want you poking your nose in all the time, and it’s time you had your rest. You’ve been fancying yourself ever since that young man come to see you this morning, buttering you up like I don’t know what.’
Amused at his sudden demotion two rungs down the ladder, Wexford, who had risen to go, gave the older woman a conspiratorial half-smile. ‘A grandson, Mrs Peckham?’
‘No, I never had no kids but Phyllis. More’s the pity.’ She said it not as if she pined for a replica of Mrs Stonor but perhaps for her antithesis. ‘Mind you, he was like a grandson in a way, was Hal.’
‘Will you do as I ask, Mother, and get off to bed?’
‘I’m going, Phyllis. I’m on me way.’ An awareness that, after all, she depended for her bed and board on her daughter’s good graces briefly softened Mrs Peckham’s asperity, but not for long. She heaved herself up, clutching her sweets. ‘You’ve got it in for poor Hal just because he wasn’t all over you like he was me. He kissed me,’ she said proudly.
‘Mrs Peckham, am I right in thinking that Zeno Vedast has been here to see you? Do you mean while the festival was on? You didn’t tell me that before.’
She propped herself on her walking aid, hunching her thin shoulders. ‘He come this morning,’ she said. ‘Looking out for a house for hisself round here, one of them big places as we used to call gentlemen’s houses. Ooh, he’s very grand in his ideas, is Hal. He’s got a whole suite to hisself at that big hotel in the Forest, but he wasn’t too proud to come and see old Granny Peckham and say how cut up he was about poor Dawnie. He come in a big gold car and he kissed me and brought me a two-pound box of Black Magic.’ Her eyes gleamed greedily at the thought of the chocolates, waiting for her perhaps in her bedroom. She sighed contentedly. ‘I’ll get off for me lay-down now,’ she said.
10
The Burden children were old enough now to come home to an empty house and get their own tea, but more often they went straight from school to the house of their Aunt Grace, and in the holidays Pat Burden spent most of her time there, playing with the baby. Her brother led the marauding life of a teenage boy, wandering with a small gang of contemporaries in the velds, fishing in the Kingsbrook or playing the jukebox at the Carousel café. Burden knew very well that his son’s life would have differed very little from this pattern even if there had been a mother at the bungalow in Tabard Road. He understood that a girl child needs an adult female on whom to model herself and he knew that she had that in Grace. But he worried incessantly about his children. Would John become a delinquent if he were out after nine in the evening? Would Pat carry a trauma through life because at the age of thirteen she was occasionally expected to open a tin or make tea? Did he give them too much pocket money or not enough? Ought he, for their sakes, to marry again? Innocent of any, he was loaded down with guilt.
He went to absurd lengths to ensure that neither of them had to do any work they would not have done had his wife lived. For this reason he was always taking them out to meals or rushing home with packages of expensive frozen food. Pat must never walk the half-mile from Grace’s house to Tabard Road. He would have let her walk it without a thought if Jean had lived. But motherless children had to be fetched in father’s car. He suffered agonies of frustration and recrimination if he was busy on a case and Pat had to wait an hour or even be abandoned to her aunt for an evening.
Wexford knew this. Whereas he would never excuse Burden from essential work on these grounds, he regretfully gave up the practice of detaining the inspector after hours to sit with him in the Olive and Dove and thrash out some current problem. Burden was worse than useless as a participant in these discussions. His eyes were always on the clock. Every drink he had was ‘one for the road’, and from time to time he would start from his seat and express the worry uppermost in his mind. Had John come in yet?
But old habits die hard. Wexford preferred the atmosphere in the Olive to the adolescent-ruled, untidy living room of the bungalow. He felt guilty when Pat was prevented from doing her ballet exercises and John had to turn off the record player, but he had to talk to Burden sometimes, discuss things with him outside hours. As he came to the door that evening, he heard the pom-pom, the roar and the whine of pop music before he rang the bell.
Burden was in his shirt sleeves, a plastic apron round his waist. He took this off hurriedly when he saw who his caller was. ‘Just finishing the dishes,’ he said. ‘I’ll nip out for some beer, shall I?’
‘No need. I’ve
brought it. What did you think I’d got in the bag? More treasures from the river? Who’s the vocalist, John?’
‘Zeno Vedast,’ said John reverently. He looked at his father. ‘I suppose I’ll have to turn it off now.’
‘Not on my account,’ said Wexford. ‘I rather like his voice.’
Vedast wasn’t singing any of the festival songs but an older hit which had for so long been number one in the charts that even Wexford had heard it. Once or twice he had heard himself humming the melody. It was a gentle folk song about a country wedding.
‘Dad’s going to buy me the Sundays album for my birthday.’
‘That’ll set you back a bit, Mike.’
‘Six quid,’ said Burden gloomily.
‘I wonder if any of these songs will live? We tend to forget that some of the greatest songs were pop in their day. After The Marriage of Figaro was first performed in the seventeen-eighties, they say Mozart heard the errand boys whistling Non piu andrai in the streets of Vienna. And it’s still popular.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Burden politely and uncomprehendingly. ‘You can turn it off now, John. Mr Wexford didn’t come round here to talk about Zeno Vedast or Goodbody or whatever his name is.’
‘That’s just what I did come for.’ Wexford went into the kitchen and picked up a tea towel. He began polishing glasses, resisting Burden’s efforts to stop him. ‘I’ve a feeling that before we go any further we ought to see Dawn’s lion, the lion who roars like any sucking dove.’
‘Wherever he may be at this moment.’
‘That’s no problem, Mike. He’s here. Or, at any rate, he’s at the Cheriton Forest Hotel.’ Wexford drank the half-pint Burden had poured out for him and told the inspector about his talk with Mrs Peckham. ‘I don’t know that it means much. He may make a point of visiting old ladies rather on the lines of a parliamentary candidate nursing babies. Never neglect any opportunity of currying favour and influencing people. Or he may be an ordinary nice bloke who wanted to condole with the dead girl’s grandma. It certainly doesn’t mean he’d seen Dawn recently.’
