by Ruth Rendell
Wexford was sure she had been listening behind the door, for she exclaimed when her husband opened it as if she had been knocked backwards.
‘Of course we were all there,’ she said. She had covered herself with a long coat but she was still cold and she moved towards the window as if to close it. When Vedast, still smiling, shook his head, she sat down obediently, huddled in the coat, and at a glance from him, said, ‘We didn’t go out all day. We were exhausted after Manchester.’ One hand went up to the sore eye, hovered and fell again into her lap.
‘And now,’ said the singer, ‘tell the officers when you went off on your trip to see Goffo’s mum.’
If Tate had had a tail, Wexford thought, he would at this point have wagged it. Rather like a performing dog who loves yet fears his master and who is utterly hypnotised by him, he sat up, raised his head eagerly.
‘About a month ago, wasn’t it?’ prompted Vedast.
‘We went on May twenty-second,’ said Nell, ‘and …’
‘Came back on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth,’ her husband ended for her.
Vedast looked pleased. For a moment it looked as if he would pat his dogs on their heads, but instead he smiled at Tate and blew a kiss at Tate’s wife. ‘You see, Chief Inspector? We lead a very quiet life. I didn’t kill Dawnie out of passion, Goffo didn’t kill her because I told him to—though I’m sure he would have done if I had—and Nello didn’t kill her out of jealousy. So we can’t help you. We’ve got masses of stuff from agents to look through tonight, so may we get on with our house-hunting?’
‘Yes, Mr Vedast, you may, but I can’t promise I shan’t want to see you again.’
Vedast sprang to his feet in one supple movement. ‘No, don’t promise. I should love to see you again. We’ve had such a nice talk. We don’t see many people, we have to be so careful.’ Wexford’s hand was cordially shaken. ‘See them out, Goffo, and lock up the car.’
‘I wish you good hunting, Mr Vedast,’ said Wexford.
John Burden was at home and already in bed, having left a note for his father to tell him that Pat would be staying the night with her aunt. The key had been left under a flower-pot, which shocked the policeman in Burden while the father showed a fatuous pride in his son’s forethought. He removed the Vedast L.P. from the turntable and closed the record player.
‘One of these songs,’ he said, ‘is called “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my love”.’
‘Very appropriate.’ Wexford glanced at the record sleeve. ‘He must have written that for the Tates’ theme song.’
‘My God, yes. Why do they put up with it?’
‘She for love, he for money. Both for the reflected glory. He hit the nail right on the head when he said “Goffo” would have killed Dawn if he’d told him to. They’d do anything for him. “Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?” It’s not just love and money and glory, but the power of the man’s personality. It’s sinister, it’s most unpleasant. In a set-up of this kind that alibi goes for nothing. An alibi supported by slaves is no alibi. The Romans in their heyday were very chary about admitting slaves’ evidence.’
Burden chuckled. ‘I daresay you’re right, Caesar. How did he know he needed an alibi for the sixth of June, anyway? We didn’t tell him.’
‘Mrs Stonor or Mrs Peckham may have told him. There was something about it in the papers, about our thinking that the probable date of her death. I don’t really suppose he’s involved at all. He likes playing with us, that’s all. He likes sailing near the wind. Above all, he enjoys frightening the others.’ Wexford added in the words of the Duke of Wellington: ‘ “By God, he frightens me!” ’
12
The interior decorations of Leonard Dunsand’s bungalow were precisely the same as those of Miss Mowler’s. Identical red spotted paper covered the hall walls, identical birds and lilies pained the eye in the living room. But Miss Mowler, for all her genteel shudders at the builder’s bad taste, had shown little more judgment in her own and had filled the place with garish furniture and mass-produced pictures. Dunsand’s drab pieces, brown leather smoking-room chairs, late Victorian tables and, above all, shelf upon shelf of scholarly books, looked absurdly incongruous here. Little shrivelled cacti, lifeless greenish-brown pin-cushions, stood in pots on the window-sills. There was nothing in the hall but a bare mahogany table and no carpet on the floor. It was the typical home of the celibate intellectual, uncharacteristic only in that it was as clean as Mrs Peveril’s and that, on a table in the living room, lay a stack of holiday brochures, their covers even more vividly coloured than the wallpaper.
Dunsand, who had just come home from work, asked them to sit down in a colourless but cultivated voice. He seemed about forty with thinning mousey hair and rubbery face whose features were too puffy for that tight mouth. Thick glasses distorted his eyes, making them appear protuberant. He wore an immaculate, extremely conventional dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. Neither obstructive nor ingratiating, he repeated what he had already told Burden, that he had reached home at about six-forty on June sixth and had noticed no unusual happenings in The Pathway during that evening.
‘I prepared myself a meal,’ he said, ‘and then I did some housework. This place is very ugly inside but I see no reason why it should also be dirty.’
‘Did you see anything of your neighbours?’
‘I saw Mrs Peveril go down the road at half past seven. I understand she attends an evening class in some sort of handicraft.’
‘You didn’t go out yourself? It was a fine evening.’
‘Was it?’ said Dunsand politely. ‘No, I didn’t go out.’
‘Are you on friendly terms with your neighbours, Mr Dunsand?’
‘Oh, yes, very.’
‘You go into their houses, for instance? They visit you?’
‘No. I think I misunderstood you. I simply mean we nod to each other and say a word if we meet in the street.’
Wexford sighed to himself. He found Dunsand depressing and he pitied his students. Philosophy, he knew—although he knew little about it—is not all ethics, witty syllogisms, anecdotes about Pythagoras, but logic, abstruse mathematics, points and instants, epistemological premisses. Imagine this one holding forth for a couple of hours on Wittgenstein!
‘So you can tell us nothing of Mr and Mrs Peveril’s way of life, their habits, who calls on them and so on? You know nothing of the terms they are on with each other?’
‘No, nothing.’ Dunsand spoke in the same drab level voice, but Wexford fancied that for a brief moment he had caught a certain animation in the man’s eye, a sign of life, a flash perhaps of pain. It was gone, the magnified eyes were still and staring. ‘I think I can say, Chief Inspector, that I know nothing of any private life but my own.’
‘And that is …?’ Wexford said hesitantly.
‘What you see.’ A small stubby hand indicated the books, the cacti, the brochures. Dunsand cleared his throat. ‘Beginning to rain again,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to ask me anything else I’ll go out and put my car away.’
‘Do you ever go to London, Mr Peveril?’
‘Of course I do in connection with my work.’ Peveril put a gloomy and irritable emphasis on the last word. He had once more been fetched from his studio and his fingers were actually inky. Wexford couldn’t help feeling that the ink had been put there deliberately just as the man’s hair had been purposely shaken and made to stand up in awry spikes. ‘I go up occasionally, once a fortnight, once a month.’
‘And stay overnight?’
‘I have done.’
‘When did you last go?’
‘Oh God, it would have been June first, I think. I didn’t stay.’ Peveril glanced towards the closed door which excluded his wife. ‘Scenes,’ he said stiffly, ‘are made if I venture to spend a night away from the matrimonial nest.’ Misanthropic, his whole manner showing how distasteful he found this probing, he nevertheless was unable to resist making frank disclo
sures. ‘You’d imagine that a woman who has everything soft and easy for her, never earned a penny since she found someone to keep her, wouldn’t deny the breadwinner a few hours of freedom. But there it is. If I go to London I have to phone her when I get there and leave a number for her to call me whenever she fancies, that means about three times in one evening.’
Wexford shrugged. It was not an uncommon type of marriage that Peveril had described; he was only one of many who had elected to make the dreariest and the longest journey with a jealous foe. But why talk about it? Because it would induce his interrogator to believe that such surveillance kept him from other women? Wexford almost smiled at such naivety. He knew that good-looking, dissatisfied men of Peveril’s stamp, childless men long out of love with then-wives, could be Houdini-like in the facility with which they escaped from domestic bonds. He left the subject.
‘Your wife went to an evening class on that Monday evening,’ he said. ‘Would you mind telling me what your movements were?’
‘I moved into my studio to work and I didn’t move out of it until my wife got back at eleven.’
‘There are no buses at that time of night. She didn’t take your car?’
An edge of contempt to his voice, Peveril said, ‘She can’t drive. She walked into Kingsmarkham and some woman gave her a lift back.’
‘You didn’t think of driving her, then? It was a fine evening and it isn’t far.’
‘Damn it all!’ said Peveril, his ready temper rising. ‘Why the hell should I drive her to some daft hen party where they don’t learn a bloody thing? It’s not as if she was going to work, going to bring in some much-needed money.’ He added sullenly, ‘I usually do drive her, as a matter of fact.’
‘Why didn’t you that night?’
‘The worm turned,’ said Peveril. ‘That’s why not. Now I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get on with my work.’
It was on the red dress that Wexford concentrated that Friday. He called a semi-informal conference consisting of himself, Burden, Dr Crocker, Sergeant Martin and Detective Polly Davies. They sat in his office, their chairs in a circle, with the dress laid on his desk. Then Wexford decided that for them all to get a better view of it while they talked, the best thing would be to hang it from the ceiling. A hanger was produced by Polly, and dress and hanger suspended from the lead of Wexford’s central light.
Laboratory experts had subjected it to a thorough examination. They had found that it was made of synthetic fibre and that it had been frequently worn probably by the same person, a brown-haired, fair-skinned Caucasian. There were no sweat stains in the armpits. In the fibre had been found traces of an unidentified perfume, talcum powder, anti-perspirant and carbon tetrachloride, a cleaning fluid. Other researches showed the dress to have been manufactured some eight or nine years previously at a North London factory for distribution by a small fashion house that dealt in medium-priced clothes. It might have been bought in London, Manchester, Birmingham or a host of other towns and cities in the British Isles. No Kingsmarkham store had ever stocked the garments from this fashion house, but they were, and had for a long time been, obtainable in Brighton.
The dress itself was a dark purplish red, darker than magenta and bluer than burgundy. It had a plain round neck, three-quarter-length sleeves, a fitted waist with self belt and a skirt designed just to show the wearer’s knees. This indicated that it had been bought for a woman about five feet seven inches tall, a woman who was also, but not exceptionally, slim, for it was a size twelve. On Dawn Stonor it had been a tight fit and an unfashionable length for this or any other epoch.
‘Comments, please,’ said Wexford. ‘You first, Polly. You look as if you’ve got something to say.’
‘Well, sir, I was just thinking that she must have looked really grotty in it.’ Polly was a lively, black-haired young woman who habitually dressed in the ‘dolly’ mode, miniskirts, natty waistcoats and velvet baker-boy caps. Her way of painting her mouth strawberry red and blotching two red dabs on her cheeks made her look less intelligent than she was. Now she saw from Wexford’s frown that her imprecise epithet had displeased him and she corrected herself hurriedly. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t have suited her and she’d have looked dowdy and awful. A real freak. I know that sounds unkind—of course she looked dreadful when she was found—but what I’m trying to say is that she must have looked dreadful from the moment she put it on.’
‘You’d say, would you, that the dress itself is unattractive as a garment? I’m asking you particularly, Polly, because you’re a woman and more likely to see these things than we are.’
‘It’s so hard to say, sir, when something’s gone out of date. I suppose with jewellery and so forth it might have looked all right on a dark person it fitted well. It wouldn’t have looked good on Dawn because she had sort of reddish-blonde hair and she must have absolutely bulged out of it. I can’t think she’d ever have put it on from choice. And another thing, sir, you said I’m more likely to notice these things than you are, but—well, just for an experiment, could you all say what you think of it as, say, a dress you’d like your wives to wear?’
‘Anything you say. Doctor?’
Crocker uncrossed his elegant legs and put his head on one side. ‘It’s a bit difficult,’ he began, ‘to separate it from the unpleasant associations it has, but I’ll try. It’s rather dull. Let me say that if my wife wore it I’d feel she wasn’t letting me down in any way. I wouldn’t mind who saw her in it. It’s got what I believe they call an “uncluttered line” and it would show off a woman’s figure in a discreet kind of way. On the other hand, supposing I was the sort of man who took other women out, I don’t think I’d feel any too thrilled if my girl friend turned up to a date wearing it because it wouldn’t be—well, adventurous enough.’
‘Mike?’
Burden had no wife, but he had come to terms with his condition. He was able to talk of wives now without inner pain or outward embarrassment. ‘I agree with the doctor that it’s rather distasteful to imagine anyone close to you wearing it because of the circumstances and so on associated with it. When I make myself look at it as I might look at a dress in a shop window I’d say I rather like it. No doubt, I’ve no idea of fashion, but I’d call it smart. If I were—er, a married man I’d like to see my wife in it.’
‘Sergeant?’
‘It’s a smart dress, sir,’ said Martin eagerly. ‘My wife’s got a dress rather like it and that sort of shade. I bought it for her last Christmas, chose it myself, come to that. My daughter—she’s twenty-two—she says she wouldn’t be seen dead in it, but you know these young girls—beg your pardon, Polly. That’s a nice, smart dress, sir, or was.’
‘Now for me,’ said Wexford. ‘I like it. It looks comfortable and practical for everyday wear. One would feel pleasantly uxorious and somehow secure sitting down in the evening with a woman in that dress. And I think it would be becoming on the right person. As the doctor says, it follows the natural lines of a woman’s figure. It’s not daring or dramatic or embarrassing. It’s conservative. There you are, Polly. What do you make of all that?’
Polly laughed. ‘It tells me more about all you than the dress,’ she said pertly. ‘But what it does tell me is that it’s a man’s dress, sir. I mean, it’s the sort of thing a man would choose because it’s figure-flattering and plain and somehow, as you said, secure. Dr Crocker said he wouldn’t want to see his girl friend in it. Doesn’t all this mean it’s a wife’s dress chosen by a husband partly because he subconsciously realises it shows she’s a good little married lady and any other man seeing her in it will know she’s not made of girl-friend stuff?’
‘Perhaps it does,’ said Wexford thoughtfully. The window was open and the dress swayed and swivelled in the breeze. Find the owner, he thought, and then I have all I need to know. ‘That’s intelligent of you, Polly, but where does it get us? You’ve convinced me it was owned at one time by a married woman who bought it to please her husband. We already know Dawn didn’
t own it. Its owner might have sent it to a jumble sale, given it to her cleaner or taken it to the Oxfam shop.’
‘We could check with the Oxfam people here, sir.’
‘Yes, Sergeant, that must be done. I believe you said, Mike, that Mrs Peveril denies ownership?’
‘She may be lying. When it was shown to her I thought she was going to faint. With that stain on it it isn’t a particularly attractive object and there are, as we’ve said, the associations. But she reacted to it very strongly. On the other hand, we know she’s a nervy and hysterical woman. It could be a natural reaction.’
‘Have you talked to Mrs Clarke again?’
‘She says her friend had some sort of mental breakdown last year and lost a lot of weight, so it hardly looks as if she was ever slim enough to wear the dress. But Mrs Clarke has only known her four years.’
‘Eight years ago,’ Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘the Peverils might still have been on romantic terms. He might have been choosing clothes for her that were particularly to his taste. But I agree with you that the question of size makes that unlikely. Well, I won’t detain you any longer. It’s a massive plan I’ve got in mind, but I think it’s the only course to take. Somehow or other we’re going to have to question every woman in Kingsmarkham and Stowerton between the ages of thirty and sixty, show them the dress and get reactions. Ask each one if it’s hers or, if not, whether she’s ever seen anyone else wearing it.’
His announcement was received with groans by all but the doctor, who left quickly, declaring that his presence was needed at the infirmary.
13
The response to Wexford’s appeal was enormous and immediate. Women queued up outside the Baptist church hall to view the dress as they might have queued on the first day of a significant sale. Public-spirited? Wexford thought their enthusiasm sprang more from a need to seem for a little while important. People like to be caught up in the whirlwind of something sensational and they like it even more if, instead of being part of a crowd, each can for a brief moment be an individual, noticed, attended to, taken seriously. They like to leave their names and addresses, see themselves recorded. He supposed they also liked to feast their eyes on the relic of a violent act. Was it so bad if they did? Was it what the young festival visitors would have called sick? Or was it rather evidence of a strong human vitality, the curiosity that wants to see everything, know everything, be in the swim, that when refined and made scholarly, is the prerogative of the historian and the archaeologist?
