by Ruth Rendell
The bus was late. Louis, scorning to join the queue, sat down on the steps of the Snowdrop Cleaners, and Wexford, leaving the car at the kerb, followed him.
‘How do you get on with him?’
Louis considered. The dozen or so people in the queue bestowed upon him glances of intense, if repressed, curiosity. Few black-skinned men and women had penetrated to this country town, and to them his coat, his beads and the green silk scarf he wore round his head—although no more than fashionable ‘gear’ for black and white alike—perhaps appeared as tribal paraphernalia. He returned their looks with the gracious smile of a prince, a tawny Rasselas, and said to Wexford:
‘He’s all right as a teacher, he knows his subject. But he doesn’t seem to like people. You see, he’s afraid of them.’
‘What else is there to be afraid of?’ asked Wexford to whom this idea, in all its truth, had come suddenly as if out of the air. ‘Except, maybe, thunderstorms, floods, what insurance companies call Acts of God. If you say you’re afraid of bombs or war, it’s people who make the bombs and the war.’
‘You’re right. But, oh, man, there are a lot of people and they are frightening. And it’s worse when one of the people you’re frightened of is yourself.’ Louis gazed into the heart of the afternoon sun. ‘Someone told me he was better when his wife lived with him. He used to go away on holidays then, the Majorca bit, the Costa Brava scramble. He doesn’t do anything now but read and paint the house and mow the lawn. But you can’t picture him married to her, can you?’ Louis got up, thrust out his hand. ‘Here’s the bus.’
‘Picture her? I don’t know her. Do you?’
Extending one huge furry arm to support her, Louis helped a fragile-looking old lady on to the bus platform. In the manner of one whose girlhood dreams have at last been realised and who has fallen into the hands of a sheikh, she blushed, giggled and almost panicked. The other passengers stared and whispered.
‘Come along now,’ said the driver. ‘We haven’t got all day.’
Louis grinned. Head and shoulders above the rest, he gave his fare, looking over a diminutive woman’s hat at Wexford.
‘I don’t know her. Old Silk told me who she was at the festival, pointed her out while Zeno Vedast was singing. Man, you stood next to her.’
‘I did?’
The bus started.
‘Peace be with you,’ Louis shouted.
‘And with you,’ said Wexford.
The golden car wasn’t there. Perhaps it had been silly of him to think it would be. On such a fine afternoon they would all have gone out to see the house Vedast was buying. On the almost bare forecourt, blanched ashen pale by hard sunlight, his own car looked forlorn. The Cheriton Forest Hotel seemed asleep. But the porter who had admired Nell Tate was awake. He sat in the deserted hall, reading the Sunday Express and smoking a cigarette which he stubbed out quickly when Wexford appeared.
‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ he said in answer to the chief inspector’s enquiry. ‘Mr Vedast and Mrs Tate went out in Mr Vedast’s car after lunch.’
‘You don’t know when they’ll be back?’
Memories of fifty-pence pieces easily earned stirred in the porter’s mind. He was obviously reluctant to deny Wexford anything. ‘Mr Tate took his coffee out into the garden, sir. Would you care for me to …?’
‘No, I’ll find him myself.’
‘As you like, sir,’ said the man, philosophically contemplating the smaller coin his efforts had won him.
Wexford strolled round the gabled, studded, mullioned and heavily rose-hung building. There was nobody about. Birds sang sleepily in the deciduous trees which bordered the fir plantations. He reached the back and saw the elderly couple with whom he had shared the Shakespeare Lounge snoring in long chairs on the terrace. A gravel path wound between rose-beds to a small round lawn in the middle of which was an umbrella with a table and chair under it. A man sat in the chair, his back to the terrace. The porter, a tactful servant, had described Tate as taking his coffee in the garden and there was certainly a diminutive cup on the table beside him. But what Tate was taking was brandy. An eager hand had just grasped the bottle of Courvoisier and was about to tip a further measure into the already half-full glass.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Tate.’
If Wexford had hoped to make Tate jump he was disappointed. The man didn’t get up. He filled his glass, replaced the bottle top and said, ‘Hallo. Have a drink.’
Wexford remembered that he was driving, that he had had no lunch, and he refused. ‘I’d like to talk to you. D’you mind if I fetch myself a chair?’
‘No,’ said Tate economically.
Wexford fetched himself a deck-chair and drew it under the umbrella’s shade. Tate didn’t say anything. His face quite blank, he contemplated the view of the hilly forest, lying black and furry-looking and a smooth blue sky. He wasn’t in the least drunk. Alcoholics never get drunk. Wexford thought that this was probably Tate’s misfortune, that he had drunk so much and drunk so chronically that, perpetually intoxicated, he could never now enjoy the felicity of what most people call intoxication. His skin was a rough greyish red, his eyeballs veined with red, their rims vermilion and moist. And yet he was a young man still, unlined, thin, not bad-looking, his hair untouched by grey.
‘Mr Tate, I really wanted to talk to your wife.’
‘She’s gone out with Zeno to see the new house.’
As he had thought. ‘So Mr Vedast found one to his liking?’
Tate agreed that this was so. He sipped his brandy. ‘It’s called Cheriton Hall.’
‘Ah, yes. I think I know it. On the Pomfret side of the forest. Will you all live there?’
‘We go where Zeno goes.’
Guessing, hoping, very much in the dark, Wexford essayed, ‘Your wife won’t find it awkward living so comparatively close to her ex-husband?’
The unhealthy colour in Tate’s face deepened, the grey overpowering the red. He made no answer but he fixed on Wexford a truculent and rather puzzled stare.
‘I’m right in thinking your wife was once married to Mr Dunsand?’ Tate shrugged. The shrug implied an indifference to Wexford’s opinions rather than a doubt as to their veracity. ‘For the past week,’ Wexford went on, ‘I’ve been trying to discover a connection between Dawn Stonor and some resident of the Sundays estate, especially of The Pathway. Until now I’ve been unable to succeed.’
‘Small world,’ said Tate uneasily.
‘Is it? I think it’s an enormous world. I think it’s extraordinary that Dawn should have last been seen alive in The Pathway where Mrs Tate’s ex-husband lives. I think it particularly odd now that I know Dawn was once a close friend of Zeno Vedast who is now a—er, close friend of your wife’s. And yet I’m to dismiss it as being due to the smallness of the world.’
Tate shrugged again. ‘Zeno and Nell and me were all in Duvette Gardens that night you’re talking about.’ He put Vedast’s name before his wife’s, Wexford noticed. ‘We were all together and that guy Silk looked in about ten to talk about the festival.’ Morosely, he said, ‘We’ve never been near that place.’
‘Surely you were when you were at the festival, very near? Didn’t your wife point Mr Dunsand’s house out to you?’
It was a trap and the slow-witted Tate fell into it. ‘She said, that’s Len’s house, yes.’
Wexford pounced. ‘So she knew it? He’d only lived there a matter of weeks but she knew it. Not by the street name and the number. She knew it by the look of it!’
‘I shouldn’t like to have your job, meddling in people’s private affairs.’
‘And I shouldn’t like to have yours, Mr Tate,’ said Wexford crisply. He leant across the table, forcing the other man to look at him. ‘Whose wife is she, yours or that singer you fawn on? Yours or the man who divorced her? What sort of a set-up are you running here? Or do you do just what you’re told, lie, pimp, connive at obstructing the police, anything he and she tell you?’
There was too li
ttle of one kind of spirit in Tate and too much of the other for him to react violently to these insults. He passed a hand across bleary eyes as if his head ached and said in a sour cowed voice, ‘Christ, how you do go on! Never you mind my wife. I can deal with her.’
‘By blacking her eye?’
‘She told you? I bet she didn’t tell you why.’
‘I think it was because you found out she’d been seeing Dunsand. At the festival when she pointed out his house you put two and two together. You didn’t mind about Vedast, that was different. Maybe you found she’d got a key to his house so you had it out with her and blacked her eye.’
Tate half-smiled. It was the smile of one who is accustomed to subservience to a superior intellect, a smile of grudging admiration. He took something out of his trouser pocket and laid it on the table. A key.
‘I found it in her handbag. It’ll be safer with you. She might get it away from me and use it again.’ He got up abruptly, took his bottle and walked very carefully and steadily up the terrace steps and into the hotel.
Wexford pocketed the key. He tiptoed past the old couple, made his way through a cool and shadowy corridor to the front entrance. Then, seeing the golden car had arrived, he slipped back into the porch and waited.
Nell and Zeno Vedast got out. The swelling had gone down from the girl’s eye and her painted face was almost serene. Her hair, freshly washed, was a yellow cloud but the bright light showed darker roots. Vedast, wearing jeans and a thin embroidered waistcoat, took a springy stride towards Wexford’s car and stood contemplating it, smiling, his head on one side. His face wore very much the expression Wexford had seen there just before Tate drank the doctored liquor, and he heard him say:
‘That parking ticket we got, shall we put it on his windscreen?’
‘What’s the point?’ said Nell.
‘Fun is the point, Nello darling. A joke. He’ll twig it in two seconds but think how mad he’ll be first. Go and get it, Nello. It’s on the back seat.’
She opened the rear door of the Rolls. Hypnotised by him, obedient as ever, she gave him the ticket. But as he was lifting one of the wipers she broke out:
‘I’m sick of jokes. Why can’t we grow up, do things for real? I hate always playing games.’
‘Do you really, Nello? You are a funny girl.’ Vedast clipped the ticket under the wiper and laughed. He shook back his hair and his yellow eyes glowed. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you liked all that funny dressing up and pretending to be good and making cozy little plans.’ He took her hand, kissed her cheek lightly. ‘That’s why we get on so well, dear, you and me with our little fantasies. Shall we go and rouse Goffo from his Sunday stupor?’
She nodded, clutching his arm. They went off towards the rose garden. When they had disappeared around the side of the hotel Wexford emerged thoughtfully. Having a strong objection to the scattering of litter, he placed the parking ticket under the paws of the golden lion and then he drove away.
17
Some little good had come out of Mrs Peveril’s hysterical breakdown. The information she was now willing to give was imparted too late to be of much use—Wexford knew it already, or most of it—but her despair had shocked her husband into anxiety for her.
He said soberly, ‘You were pretty decent, very patient actually. I never realised what a bad state she’d got herself into. Will she have to appear in court?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Peveril. I still don’t quite know what she did see. I must have a final word with her.’
‘If she does have to I’ll be there. She won’t mind so much if I’m with her. The fact is I’ve been too wrapped up in my work. I let her face all that business in Brighton alone and it was too much for her. When this is over I’m going to scrape up the cash and take her away for a good holiday.’
The uxoriousness wouldn’t last, Wexford knew that. Such a volte-face often takes place at crises in a marriage but it is only in romances that it becomes a permanency.
And Peveril revealed just how ephemeral it was when, as they went upstairs to see his wife, he muttered, ‘You have to bloody wet-nurse some women all their lives, don’t you? If I’m not wanted for the next half-hour I may as well catch up on a spot of work.’
Mrs Peveril, wan-looking but calm, sat up in bed wrapped in a jaded broderie anglais dressing gown.
‘It was like you said,’ she admitted. ‘I wanted to make you all think she’d gone a long, long way from here. I wanted to be left in peace. When I first saw her I meant to tell Edward what I’d seen but I didn’t because he gets cross with me if I gossip. He says he works for me all day and all I’ve got to do with myself is look out of the window and tell stories about the neighbours.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Then when Mrs Clarke phoned me on that Sunday night and said you were coming round asking, I thought I’d say she’d gone into the fields. If I’d said she’d gone next door you’d never have left me alone. I thought saying I hadn’t seen her at all would be perjury.’
Wexford shook his head. It was quite useless to point out to her that what she had said was equally perjury.
‘You saw her go next door to Mr Dunsand’s? At what time?’
‘At half past five. I did say,’ said Mrs Peveril, eagerly attempting to retrieve her integrity, ‘I saw her at five-thirty. I watched her. I saw her go into the porch and someone must have let her in because she never came out again.’ Prevarication at an end now, Mrs Peveril was cheerfully burning her boats, gabbling out belated information. Wexford knew she was speaking the truth. ‘I was very interested. You see, I couldn’t think who she could be. Mr Dunsand never has any visitors except sometimes his students.’
‘Never?’ Wexford asked quickly.
She said ingenuously, ‘Oh, no, I should have noticed. I spend a lot of time at my window when Edward’s in his studio and you can see everything these light evenings, can’t you? That’s why I was so intrigued by this girl.’ Fear touched her afresh and the wan look returned. ‘You’ll protect me, won’t you? I mean, when I’ve been to the court and said how Mr Dunsand did it you won’t let me come to any harm?’
‘When you have been to the court and told the truth, Mrs Peveril,’ Wexford corrected her, ‘we’ll see that you’re quite safe.’
With a passing, thoughtful glance at Dunsand’s bungalow, its windows closed against the midsummer evening, Wexford drove to Tabard Road. He found Burden and the children in the garden and for once there was no music playing. Burden was too respectable and had far too much social conscience to allow record players or transistors out of doors. The boy and girl sat at a wicker table, arguing and making some pretence of doing their homework. John, who was always pleased to see the chief inspector whom he regarded as an ally and friend of oppressed youth, fetched him a chair and said:
‘Could you give me a bit of help, Mr Wexford? I’ve got to do an essay on the French Revolution, and Dad’s no use. He’s not educated.’
‘Really!’ spluttered Burden. ‘Don’t be so rude.’
His son ignored him. ‘I’ve left my book at school and I can’t remember the new names the Convention gave to the months. I’ll have to know them and I thought …’
‘I’ll try.’ Wexford hesitated. ‘We’re in Messidor now, that’s June. You’re supposed to start with September. Let’s see … Vendemiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire; Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose; then Germinal like Zola’s book, Floreal and Prairial; Messidor, Thermidor and—wait …’
‘Fructidor!’ exclaimed John.
Wexford chuckled. ‘You might care to know the contemporary and rather scathing English translation: Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy; Slippy, Drippy, Nippy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Wheaty, Heaty, Sweety. There, you can put that in your essay and maybe you’ll get an A.’ He cut short the boy’s thanks and said, ‘One good turn deserves another. Now I want a bit of help from you.’
‘Me?’
‘Mm-hm. About Zeno Vedast. Or, more precisely, about Godfrey Tate. You must know something about him. You told your father
who his wife was.’
‘I read about it,’ John said, ‘in the Musical Express. Anything about Zeno’s news, you see.’ He put down his pen and flashed a look of triumph at his father. ‘What d’you want to know, Mr Wexford?’
‘Anything about Zeno. What you read.’
‘Zeno ran her over in his car …’
‘He what …?’
‘It was like this. He went to Myringham to give a concert—it was sponsored by that Mr Silk, Silk Enterprises—and there was a big crowd outside the theatre afterwards and she got in front of his car and got hurt. It said in the paper that Silk Enterprises paid for a private room in the hospital for her and sent her flowers and fruit and things. I expect Zeno thought that would be good publicity, don’t you? It was about two years ago, maybe three. Dad,’ said John resentfully, ‘won’t let me save copies of old magazines. He says it’s hoarding. She was married to someone else then. I think he was called Dunn, something like Dunn.’
‘Go on.’
‘When she got married again it was in the papers because Zeno was at the wedding and Mr Silk. I expect she’d rather have married Zeno.’
‘I daresay she would, John, but he wouldn’t have her so she took the next best thing. Catch as catch can.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Burden crossly, ‘must you fill him up with these cynical views of life?’
Wexford winked indiscreetly at the boy and for the time being said no more. He was thinking of the bald story he had been told and, more particularly, of the gaps in it which only an older person with experience of life could fill. Nell was still young. She must have been very young when she first married Dunsand. He wondered what had led to that ill-assorted marriage, what had made her choose the reserved, repressed lecturer for a husband. An unhappy home life like Dawn Stonor’s? The need to escape from some dreary backwater? If this were so, it must have been a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. He pictured her among the faculty wives, decades her senior, the long evenings at home with Dunsand, the leather chairs, Wittgenstein, the lawn-mowing … Still a teenager at heart, she must have longed for younger people, for music, for excitement. And yet there was in her the stuff that makes a slave. Had she also been Dunsand’s slave? Perhaps. But she had escaped—into a glamorous, eventful, luxurious life that was nonetheless slavery. About two years ago, at the time the song was written.
