by Ruth Rendell
‘This place will have to be taken apart,’ Burden said, crossing the passage and entering the bathroom. ‘If it was done without leaving any apparent trace it must have been done in here.’ He looked at the gleaming taps, the spotless bath and basin. The sunlight showed no film of dust on glass, no fingermarks on mirrors.
Wexford nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the tiles off, the pipes out. And if that yields nothing, the same with the kitchen.’
‘Dunsand may crack. He may tell us what at the moment he’s doing his utmost to conceal.’
‘If he has anything to conceal.’
‘Come on, sir. He must know more than he’s told us. He must know why his wife would kill an unknown girl in his house, how it happened, the circumstances. He must know that.’
‘I wonder?’ said Wexford. ‘Does he know any more than that his wife—the woman he still thinks of as his wife—may be in danger? I believe he knows very little, Mike, as little of the whole of it as the girl who died.’
Wexford stared up at the ceiling, scanned the smooth glossy walls. The whole place smelt soapy, too clean.
‘Mind you don’t trip,’ said Burden. ‘Your shoelace is undone. It’s no good looking up there. It’s no use looking at all. If she was killed here, someone worked a miracle of butchery.’
Wexford stooped down to re-tie the lace. A bright circle of gold, a little sunbeam refracted through a pane, had lighted on the wall beside his left leg. He stared at the trembling illumination. The gold flowers occurred on the paper in vertical lines about two inches apart, a thin black stripe dividing each line from the next, and the red leaves, pear-shaped, were printed in clusters of three between each flower. Flower, cluster, flower, followed each other immaculately and evenly to meet the bitumastic ridge. There were signs of faint blurring on the pattern, the result perhaps of washing the paper, but nothing had been obliterated. Three leaves, flower, three leaves …
‘Mike,’ he said in a strange voice, ‘your sight’s better than mine. Have a look at this.’
‘I looked before and you stopped me. It’s been washed. So what?’
‘You were looking for signs of washing, maybe for a missing bit of the pattern. Look again.’
Impatiently Burden got to his knees. He concentrated on the puddle of light.
‘Not a missing leaf,’ said Wexford. ‘In the lowest cluster there aren’t three leaves but four.’
They squatted down side by side and examined the paper.
‘You see,’ Wexford said excitedly, ‘in this one and this one, in all of them, there are three little pear-shaped leaves like the leaves in a fleur-de-lis. But in the one we’re looking at there’s a fourth leaf under the centre one.’
‘And it’s not quite the same colour. It’s darker, it’s browner.’
‘It’s blood,’ said Wexford, and he added wonderingly, ‘One little spot of blood.’
‘Shall I …?’
‘No, don’t touch it. The experts can come here, get their sample themselves. It’s too precious for us to mess about with. Mike, d’you realise that’s the one real piece of evidence we’ve got?’
‘If it’s blood, if it’s hers.’
‘I know it’s hers. It has to be.’
They went outside where the sun blazed on the road, melting tar and creating, where concrete ended and fields began, a mirage like a veil of shimmering water. The car was oven-hot inside, its seats burning to the touch. Burden rolled down his window and drove in his shirt sleeves.
‘Now to check the key,’ said Wexford.
‘Which one, sir? The one that didn’t fit?’
‘Yes. I think we’ll find a door that it will open.’ Sweating profusely, Wexford pulled down the eyeshade across the windscreen. ‘But that’s a simple job, a job for Martin.’
‘I’m not with you,’ said Burden, falling into line behind the bus that, with its load of Sundays estate passengers, made its way along the sunny road to Kingsmarkham. ‘I haven’t a clue what particular door you expect it to unlock.’
Wexford smiled. ‘A lot of doors are beginning to unlock inside my head, Mike, but this one, this actual door, is in Myringham. It’s the door to the house Dunsand lived in before he moved here.’
The afternoon wore on and the heat seemed to mount, reaching the eighties by four o’clock. Wexford shut himself up in his office, the windows open, the blinds down. He sat alone, waiting, thinking, and then, on the principle that it is better to shut away a problem whose answer continually eludes one, to exclude it and return to it later, he resumed work on that crime-prevention directive which had lain unattended since before the festival.
The reports began to come in. The blood was human and of Dawn Stonor’s group. The key which Tate had given him in the hotel garden opened the door of Leonard Dunsand’s former home in Myringham. But at Sundays, where questioning of housewives had continued all the afternoon, no one had been found to say that she had ever seen Nell Tate, much less observed her call at Dunsand’s house.
The five-twelve bus stopped outside the Baptist church. Wexford watched the passengers get on it. A girl came out of the Luximart, carrying a brown paper bag. She wasn’t wearing mauve, she wasn’t in the least like Dawn, and she was going to her new house at Sundays, not to her death. Wexford phoned the Cheriton Forest Hotel. Yes, Mr Vedast was still there. Mr Vedast planned to leave that evening. The receptionist couldn’t say any more, perhaps, if Wexford was the press, she had said too much already …
He turned the sheets of the crime-prevention directive face downwards. He returned to his problem as the day began to cool and the sun’s rays slanted. At seven he went across the road to the Carousel café where he found Burden and his children eating steak and salad while Emmanuel Ellerman’s hit song ‘High Tide’ brayed at them from wall speakers.
‘Pity you’ve eaten,’ said Wexford. ‘I was going to take you out to dinner at the Cheriton Forest.’ He ordered a sandwich. ‘We shall have to be content to take our coffee with Zeno Vedast instead.’
‘I don’t suppose …’ began John wistfully.
‘I’m afraid you can’t come, John. This is a serious visit, an official visit.’
‘Pat and I were going to hang about in the High Street to see him pass through. He’s going back to London tonight.’
‘I don’t think he’ll be going just yet,’ said Wexford.
20
The receptionist put a call through to the Elizabethan Suite. ‘Mr Vedast says will you wait, please? Mr Vedast is engaged at present.’ She was young, the right age to be among Vedast’s adorers. ‘If you’d care to go into the Shakespeare Lounge, it’s over there on the …’
‘We know the way,’ said Wexford.
There was no one in the lounge but the dog. It got up when they came in, stared at them morosely, then collapsed again some two yards from where it had previously been lying.
‘I’m in the dark,’ said Burden, impatiently rejecting the magazines Wexford passed to him. ‘I think you ought to tell me why we’re here.’
‘Why are we ever anywhere?’ Wexford sighed. ‘To ask, to deduce, to conclude and to catch. Only it’s a little different this time.’
‘Oh, riddles, philosophy. What I want to know is …’
‘Wait.’
Godfrey Tate had come very quietly into the room, Godfrey Tate in his usual dapper black that made his torso look as thin as a teenager’s and his limbs spidery.
‘Zeno’s got that guy Silk with him,’ he said, without greeting, without preamble. ‘He says to ask you what you want.’
Wexford said quietly, ‘I want to tell him what I think of him.’
Tate was bemused with drink, not ‘high’ on alcohol, but low, dulled, cut off, almost somnambulistic. ‘Do I tell him that?’
‘Mr Tate, it’s a matter of indifference to me what you tell him. Why is Silk here?’
‘He’d heard Dunsand’s been arrested. He came to tell Nell.’
‘And now you’re celebrating?’
Tate blinked at him. He turned, shuffled towards the door.
‘See you,’ said Wexford, looking at his watch, ‘in ten minutes.’
But before the ten minutes were up—minutes in which Burden had picked up magazine after magazine, discarding them all, and Wexford had sat still, watching the hall—Martin Silk emerged from the lift. Long hair on the elderly makes its wearer look like a nineteenth-century statesman, but in Silk’s case the resemblance ended at his neck. He wore a white tee-shirt with a bunch of grapes appliqued on the chest. As he passed the reception desk he swaggered like a proud adolescent, thrusting his hips forward, but as he neared the lounge door he began to scuttle, an old man getting away from trouble.
‘Mr Silk!’
Silk stopped and forced a broad smile, creasing his face into a thousand wrinkles, enclosing his eyes in cracked parchment skin.
‘I hope we haven’t driven you away,’ said Wexford. ‘You’re welcome to stay as far as we’re concerned.’
Sidling into the lounge, Silk perched himself on the arm of a chair. His knee joint cracked as he swung one leg.
‘Merely a social call,’ he said. ‘I dropped by to tell Zeno there’s quite a crowd waiting in Kingsmarkham to give him a send-off. Of course,’ he added spuriously, ‘I shall be seeing a lot of him now he’s bought this lush pad.’
‘But you’ve always seen a lot of him, haven’t you, Mr Silk? One might say that you’ve been a sort of …’ Wexford glanced meaningly at the shaggy grey hair, ‘… a sort of éminence grise in his life. Or are you another slave?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘But for you he’d still be Harold Goodbody and he never would have met Nell Dunsand.’
Silk stared at him. ‘I acted for the best. We can’t know what tragedies may hang on our small actions. I gave to youth a musical genius. If Dunsand freaked out, if certain people were—well, expendable …’
‘Is that how you see it? Mr Silk, you interfere too much. You organise too much. Be warned, and don’t interfere with Louis Mbowele. You might cause a war this time.’
‘Really, I think you’re twisted, sick. You’re not together. Who is, at your age?’ He sneered. ‘The hung-up generation.’
‘If I belong to it,’ Wexford retorted, ‘so do you. We’re the same age. Only I know it, I accept it. You don’t. I accept that all the sport is stale and all the wheels run down. And when I consider what some people call sport, I’m not all that sorry.’
At Wexford’s words, particularly the reminder of his true age, a look of real pain crossed Silk’s face. Mirrors show us what we want to see, but sometimes we look into living, human mirrors and then, briefly, the fantasising has to stop. Wexford was fat, Silk skinny, the one in a crumpled old suit, the other in tee-shirt and jeans, but they were both sixty. The mirror comparison lay in their shared age, the shared weariness of muscle and bone, and painfully Silk saw it.
He said shrilly, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Talking to you at the moment. Now we’re going upstairs to talk to your genius.’
‘But you’ve got Dunsand. Zeno wasn’t even there. I was with Zeno and the Tates in Kensington. You’ve got Dunsand under lock and key!’
‘What an old-fashioned expression!’ Wexford mocked. ‘Can’t you find a more trendy way of putting it? Come on, Mike, we’ve wasted enough time.’
They walked up. Silk stood at the foot of the staircase watching them, hesitating, torn perhaps between a fear of his protégé coming to harm and an even greater fear of more cruel jibes levelled at him concerning his age.
Wexford said, ‘He knows nothing about it. He knows less even than Dunsand.’ He smiled obscurely, tapped on the door of the Elizabethan Suite.
They were packing. At last they were going home. His face an even duskier red than usual, Tate was on his knees, trying to fasten an overfull suitcase, while Vedast sat cross-legged on top of a lacquer cabinet watching him. Wordlessly, Nell led them through the labyrinth of piled luggage and mountains of frippery, magazines and records.
Dead flowers, smelling foetid, were heaped on the balcony. Fresh flowers had arrived that day, perhaps that afternoon, roses, lilies, carnations, and they were dying too. No one had bothered to put them in water.
Nell was as carefully dressed and made-up as usual, but her exertions in the heat had given her an air of dishevelment, for it was still hot, the evening air windless, the sun a smouldering crimson knot over the forest. She scowled at the policemen, met Vedast’s cool gaze, and turned immediately to look at herself in one of the mirrors. Vedast gave a light laugh.
‘Fasten that case, Goffo. Get a move on, dears. Why don’t you go and order some coffee, Nello?’ He swayed his body towards Wexford. ‘That will give her a chance to repair her poor face,’ he said as if she wasn’t there.
Burden, who had followed the chief inspector’s example and cleared a seat for himself, said gruffly, ‘No coffee for us.’
‘Just as you like.’ Vedast flicked his fingers at Nell, who, still in front of the mirror, was apathetically fidgeting with her hair while watching the policemen in the glass. She sprang round as if those snapping fingers had actually touched her, fetched his orange juice and handed it to him with a pleading look. He removed a lump of ice and licked it. ‘How glum you all look!’ he said, surveying the four faces. ‘You’re frightening my little ones, Chief Inspector. Why don’t we take it as read. I know what happened and so, presumably, do you—now. It did take you a long time. But you can’t prove it. So why don’t we just congratulate each other like clever cats and mice and you pop off home?’
Wexford quoted softly, ‘ “What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account?” ’
The Tates looked at him uncomprehendingly, Nell edging closer to Vedast, who said, ‘Macbeth. I sometimes think of changing over to the legitimate theatre. I’ve had no end of offers.’ He swallowed what remained of his ice cube. ‘But I don’t want to start now, thank you so much. We’re none of us feeling quite strong enough for drama.’
‘You mean you’ve had enough of it? You’ve made your tragedy and now you’re exhausted? The function of tragedy, as I’m sure you know, Mr Vedast, is to purge with pity and terror, and that’s what I’m going to try to do to you—or some of you. So sit down, Mr Tate, and you too, Mrs Tate, and listen to me.’
Both Nell and her husband looked doubtfully at Vedast for instructions. He nodded lightly.
‘Do what the man says, dears.’
Nell flounced on to the sofa, tipping off a heap of dirty clothes and what seemed to be a stack of fan letters. A full glass in his hand, a hand which trembled, Tate crept towards her.
She made a slight movement of rejection, turning her shoulder and at the same time spreading out her thick, stiffly embroidered skirts so that there was no room for her husband to sit beside her. He gave her a bitter look, a look of dark reproach, from under swollen veined eyelids. Clasping his drink as if it were a protective talisman, he perched himself on the sofa arm.
The singer watched them, amused that they had obeyed so easily. A law unto himself, he got down from the cabinet and lounged against the open french window. With the setting of the sun, a light breeze had begun to blow. It fanned his hair, lifting it into a golden aureole. Outside the blue of the sky was deepening to violet, feathered with flamingo red. The frosty orange glass glowed in his hand like a lamp. He stood as if he were about to sing, his chin lifted, his hips thrust forward, quite still, utterly relaxed.
‘A tragedy,’ said Wexford, ‘in two parts.’
‘It concerns,’ he began, ‘two people who by their looks and the power of their personalities were able to command obsessive love. You, Mr Vedast, and you, Mrs Tate. I’m not flattering you. Anyone may become the object of such love and, in my experience, those who do are usually shallow, narcissistic and self-centred.’
Nell said shrilly, ‘Are you going to let him talk to me like that, Godfrey?’
Hunched up,
nursing his glass, Tate gave her a black look. He said nothing. The breeze chilled him, making the dark hairs on his wrists stand erect.
‘The need to love like this lies in the characters of the lovers who fasten generally on the first desirable person who comes in their way, fasten and, if they can, hold on. Unfortunately, the beloved objects trade on this and use it for their own ends, for cruelty and victimisation. Just in case Mrs Tate is under any misapprehension as to whom I mean when I speak of the man who loves her obsessively, in case she should be so obtuse as to suppose I mean Mr Vedast, I’ll tell her now that I refer to her first husband, Leonard Dunsand. A foolish, clever, learned, dull and conventional little man who has loved her since she was eighteen when he married her.’
One of those people who will bear any insult provided it carries with it a hint of flattery, Nell apparently couldn’t resist preening herself at this. She crossed her long and very shapely legs and gave a sidelong glance in Vedast’s direction. Vedast stroked the string of beads he wore, running them through his fingers.
Wexford went on: ‘Who is probably the only man sufficiently capable of self-delusion to love her sincerely, the only man who ever will.’ He waited for some reaction from Nell’s present husband. Tate reacted characteristically, behaving as he always did in crises or threatened crises. Without getting up, he reached for the brandy bottle. ‘If you are in a position to be thankful for anything, Mr Tate, be thankful that you are more sophisticated and have eyes to see. Pity you’ve clouded them so much with that stuff.’
‘I can look after myself,’ said Tate in a low voice.
‘I never saw a man less capable of doing so, unless it is Mr Dunsand.’
‘I’ll look after Goffo.’ Vedast turned idly, smiling, cooling his hands on the glass, caressing it. ‘Do tell us who’s in love with me. I’m dying to know.’
‘Thousands, I imagine. The one in particular I speak of is dead. She was dying for you too often and at last she really died. You were her first lover. That’s supposed to have some profound effect on a woman and, whether it’s true or not, it had a profound effect on Dawn Stonor. I wonder how much of that story Mr and Mrs Tate know?’ While Vedast resumed his scanning of the sky in which a few pale stars had appeared, Wexford leant towards the Tates. ‘They were at school together, Dawn and a boy called Harold Goodbody, a boy who went to tea with his girl friend’s grandmother because he only had baked beans at home; Harold Goodbody who wore his cousin’s cast-off shoes and whose father spent the housekeeping money on dog racing; Harold Goodbody who played April Fool tricks to amuse his friends, who doubtless carried young Dawn’s satchel for her. A rustic idyll, wasn’t it? Dawn Stonor and her first love, Harold Goodbody.’
