by Ruth Rendell
That this man and this woman might be capable of the literate letter he had found in Stephen Devenish’s desk seemed questionable. The language used would scarcely have been available to them.
“When exactly did you leave Seaward, Mr. Ferry?”
“I like ‘leave,’ “said Ferry with an unamused laugh. “It’s almost as good as ‘letting go.’ I left in July, exactly two years ago, struggled to keep up the payments on my house, which, incidentally, was in Kingsbrook Valley Drive, Kingsmarkham - a nice part if you know it - failed, sold it for a lot less than I gave for it, and bought this dump.”
“So you don’t know if the threats went on coming after July two years ago?”
“No, and he can tell you, can he? Maybe his widow can.”
At least we know he had a letter very recently, Wexford thought. He was rather surprised to hear Burden ask the name of the private preparatory school where Gillian Ferry taught.
“The Francis Roscommon in Sewingbury.”
“Quite a distance,” Burden said. He was remembering the plastic-hooded bicycles in the passage outside. “You no longer run a car?”
“She gets the bus,” Ferry said shortly.
Fay took him out into the garden. It was one of the rare mornings of that cool, wet summer when sitting outdoors was just possible. When the sun was out, it was almost too hot, and when the clouds surged up once more and covered it, too cold. Three wicker chairs were arranged around a wicker table on the broadest area of lawn, under a mulberry tree, so that it looked as if they were expected. But Fay said the neighbours kept coming in. She made them tea and they gave her their condolences, though what sympathy they felt was due to her she couldn’t imagine, as most of them had been alerted by the police and the Social Services under Operation Hurt-Watch of her situation with her husband.
The little girl, Sanchia, had a blanket on the grass, on which stood a glass of orange-coloured liquid (or so it appeared from its dregs) that she had managed to knock over, an opened can of Coke, a packet of custard-cream biscuits and another of chocolate-chip cookies, and a welter of toys. It was a happy, comfortable mess and one that, Wexford was sure, Devenish would never have tolerated. Passing through the house with Fay, he had noticed that on only the third day after the man’s death it was already less immaculate, less tidy. At ten-thirty in the morning two wineglasses with wine dregs in them stood on a table in the living room, had certainly been drunk from the evening before and left there.
“Jane’s gone back to Brighton just for the day,” Fay said to him. “She was here last night and we drank - oh, nearly a bottle of wine between us. I’m getting sloppy, I haven’t cleared up.” It was still necessary for her to make excuses for untidiness. “I don’t know what I’d do without Jane. I had to do without her for so long.”
She looked a lot better. It was strange; to anyone who hadn’t known what went on in that house it would have been monstrous. Her eyes were brighter, her color better, she even looked younger. Somehow he guessed that the clothes she wore, a short denim skirt, a top that was rather low-cut, had long been banned but never disposed of, had thankfully been put on now the censor and brutal judge was gone.
“My boys are coming home today. I’ve missed them. It’ll be good to have them back.”
“They both go to the same school, I think you said?”
“That’s right. In Sewingbury. Edward will be leaving next year to go to Oundle.”
“Don’t let them tire you out.”
“I don’t think I shall get tired the way I used to. The only thing is, I cry all the time. I just start to cry for no reason.”
“I think you’ve plenty of reason,” he said, then, “Mrs. Devenish, do you remember the threats made against your husband by a man called Carl Meeks? Do you remember how he came to the Kingsmarkham office of Seaward Air, then to Gatwick? And your husband threw him out, allegedly injuring him?”
She said, but without bitterness, “He was great at injuring people.”
“But you remember these incidents?”
“He never said much to me about them. He didn’t talk about his work, but he did tell me about this man Meeks. He was proud of hurting him.”
“Do you think Carl Meeks could have sent these threatening letters? They threatened your husband’s life, didn’t they?”
“He said he’d kill him, yes.” She spoke dreamily, almost as if with a longing for some wished-for event. Then she said, in quite a different tone, “I loved him so much once. When we were engaged, he was so gentle and thoughtful He hit me while we were on our honeymoon, but that was because he was jealous of me talking to a man in the hotel, and he was so sorry afterwards. Only even then, you know, he said I’d made him do it, it was my fault for being - for being flirtatious.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She made a little sound that was between a gulp and a sob, and Sanchia came over to her with the biscuit packet, an offering of comfort. “Mummy not cry.”
“Mummy won’t cry darling,” Fay said, and it was true, she had stopped crying. She put her arms around the little girl and kissed the top of her head. “I’m so lucky. Look what I’ve got, all my lovely children, and my health and I’m free, but somehow I keep crying. You see, I always loved Stephen, somewhere the love I had for him was still there. He tried to beat and kick and knock it out of me, and in the end he nearly did, but when I think of the love I once had, I cry. And it was true I was the only woman for him, the only one he ever loved, it was true. It was just that he had . . . well, a funny way of showing it . . .”
Chapter 23
The builders working on the restoration of 16 Oberon Road were sitting on the front step, having their mid morning coffee break. So far, all they had done was put back the tiles that had come off the roof during the fracas led by the Kingsmarkham Six. The graffiti still remained, filth, pedo, and killer, among the decapitated bodies and the snarling animal faces, all done in red and pink and blue and yellow. The builders would leave repainting till last. Later in the day, unless it rained, which it looked likely to do, they would set about replacing the glass in the upstairs windows.
They finished their coffee and were just having their second smoke when a van drew up outside from Kingsmarkham Borough Council’s Domestic Environment and Landscape Department. The logo on its side was of a female doll holding a spade and a male doll with a bunch of flowers. This reversal of what some would call the accepted order of things had taken place in response to the demands of the militant feminist element on the council. The driver of the van, who had long red hair like a teenage girl, and his mate, with an open mouth and protruding tongue in much the same sort of red tattooed on one wrist, got down from the cab and went around the back to size up the situation.
Daunted by the now waist-high grass, the giant hog-weed, and man-height thistles, not to mention the iron bedstead, they came back to have a cigarette with the builders. The driver said it was a job for a JCB. All the department’s mechanical diggers were in use, so it would be at least three months before one could be spared to start on this garden, and in his opinion they would be lucky if they got it done by Christmas. There was the added problem of getting a JCB around the back of No. 16.
From her second-floor window in the Muriel Campden tower, Rochelle Keenan was filming the four men on her camcorder. Kingsmarkham Council had just banned all its employees from smoking in public places, and Rochelle intended to produce her film as part of her revenge campaign against the driver of the van. She had had a brief affair with him a couple of years back while her husband was in Stowerton Royal Infirmary (about to be renamed the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic) having a hernia operation. He had been the one to end it, and now when she saw him, he pretended not to know her. She watched him light another cigarette before sitting down on a camp stool one of the builders had produced from inside the house.
John Keenan didn’t know about the affair, but he suspected something, largely owing, Rochelle believed, to the youngest Keenan child, Win
ona, having red hair. He said that as soon as he could raise the £300 it cost, he was going to get one of those home DNA-testing kits and find out for sure. To make certain of getting it right he had already tried taking a swab from the inside of Winona’s mouth, only the enterprise had come to nothing because the little girl had swallowed it. Rochelle didn’t know which of them was Winona’s dad and she didn’t much care. She was far more interested in her video and in getting the redheaded driver the sack or at least a severe reprimand.
A stone’s throw away in Titania Road – “a stone’s throw” at Muriel Campden being more a fact of life than a figure of speech - Maria Michaels had a date with Miroslav Zlatic. He admired powerful women and had somehow managed to make her understand with signs but without words that he had fallen in love with her when he saw her put the shot that broke the police station window.
Their meeting planned for this morning was to be in the derelict house on the outskirts of Myringham, where Miroslav had taken Lizzie Cromwell and perhaps other young women as well. Leaving the despised Monty Smith in bed, Maria was off to catch the Myringham bus at the York Street stop.
Wexford saw her as his car entered the approach road but he ignored her cheerful wave. Although not one of the Kingsmarkham Six, she was almost certainly responsible for a great deal of the criminal damage caused on the day of Hennessy’s death. The difficulty was that, along with other people’s involvement, he couldn’t prove it. Donaldson drove him the long way around, up Titania and along Puck, for the purpose of assessing what was going on, if anything. On the street sign the name of this latter road had once more been defaced. “I don’t know why they don’t rechristen it another name from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he said to Karen Malahyde. “Call it Bottom or something.”
“I’m not sure that would be a wise choice, sir.”
“What? No, I suppose not.”
The first few spots splashed against the windscreen, then the rain came in torrents. Donaldson put the wipers on at fast speed, but still he felt it wiser to stop until the heavy shower had passed. Someone in No. 2 Oberon Road shut an upstairs casement with a slam. Wexford rubbed at the steam on the window but could still see nothing out there, not even the graffiti on No. 16, beyond glassy streams and dazzlement.
“This Meeks, sir,” Karen said. “I suppose he’s on the benefit?”
“He’s unemployed at any rate.”
“Living on our taxes, and from what I hear they’re both obese.”
“Being overweight has nothing to do with affluence,” said Wexford. “It’s not so much a matter of you can’t be too rich or too thin as you have to be rich to be thin.”
“Cheap food makes you fat,” said Donaldson sagely, “all those pies and chips.” He switched on the ignition and they were off once more, the rain having subsided into a drizzle.
Wexford put on the plastic mac. “I suppose I shall have to buy a new raincoat,” he said to no one in particular, but Donaldson’s shoulders hunched a little.
No one had blamed him for Wexford’s loss, but he sometimes felt he had been negligent. He was thinking how, if he chanced to see Charlene Hebden while he was up here, he would confront her and get the truth out of her, when he found himself outside 24 Oberon Road and Wexford was telling him to stop and let him and DS Malahyde out.
Karen Malahyde never seemed to notice rain. Her clothes had a rainproof look to them, even skirts and blouses, and on a man her hairstyle would have been called a crew cut. She stood on the front path, surveying the house, leaving it to Wexford to find shelter under the diminutive porch and ring the bell.
Linda Meeks was immediately recognizable, an often-seen figure in those riotous assemblies. She should have been in the hierarchy, he thought, important enough to enlarge it to the Kingsmarkham Seven, though she had never been one of the ringleaders. A large woman, soft and cushiony, she looked as if her plump, dimpled flesh, mottled pink and white, would hold the impress if a finger was dug into it. It was evident from a flicker of alarm in her pale blue eyes that she expected these two police officers to question her on the subject of DS Hennessy’s death. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just the same, she had hoped the first time would also have been the last.
Wexford had a feeling he had set her mind at rest when he said he wanted to talk to her and her husband about her brother-in-law who had died in a car crash on his way to Harwich.
“My brother,” said Linda Meeks, “not my brother-in- law.” She looked relieved, positively cheerful. “Come in. You want a cup of tea?”
Wexford said no, thanks, and Karen said no, not now, which for both of them was a way of saying that this matter was too serious for sociable cups of tea. Both expected Meeks to be in front of the television with a can of something and a bag of crisps, which behaviour, as Barry Vine, a golfer, put it, was par for the course at Muriel Campden. Instead, he was out in the garden, in a shed, doing woodwork. He appeared to be making a table, for the legs and base were finished and he was planing what appeared to be the top. When he saw them, he laid the plane down carefully on its side and came out, putting up an umbrella.
The garden was exquisitely neat. Vegetables grew in it where others might have flowers. That is, they were not planted in rows as on an allotment, but in clusters as in an herbaceous border: lettuces making a nice contrast with beetroot, and runner beans in full scarlet bloom climbing up the fences instead of clematis.
Meeks spotted a tiny plant that shouldn’t have been there and, in spite of the rain, pulled it out. “Never pass a weed,” he said philosophically.
He was a little man, shorter than his wife, and with his fatness, as is often the case in middle-aged male beer drinkers, concentrated on his belly. This area of his body. was so large and protuberant as to make an onlooker feel uneasy. It looked as if its possessor must be uncomfortable, embarrassed by what was almost a deformity ashamed of such grotesqueness. But if Meeks felt any of this, he gave no sign of it. He walked very upright, carrying all before him, as he led them back to the house where he dropped the weed into a waste bin.
In the living room, the boy Scott had the television on, playing a video game in which the player won points if he could steer a surfer through a stormy sea without bumping into islands, ships, and other obstacles. His father was going to leave it - keep him quiet, it’s harm less - but Wexford asked him to switch it off and leave them. Scott. Meeks, who had never been spoken to like that before, gave Wexford a glowering look, his underlip stuck out, but he did as he was told and departed, slamming the door behind him.
“I’d like to talk to your wife as well, Mr. Meeks,” Wexford said, “but not till after I’ve had a word with you. Tell me about this trouble with your brother-in-law. For a start, what was his name?”
“Jimmy - well, James, I suppose, James Crabbe.”
If Meeks was surprised to find the police at last taking an interest in his brother-in-law’s wrongs, he gave no sign of it. Rather, he seemed pleased to have a chance of talking about what had evidently become an obsession, and before Wexford could ask him anything else, he had launched on a muddled account of the fateful happenings at Gatwick.
“They was all dead against him from start to finish, don’t tell me they don’t make no difference between passengers and whatever, they was set against letting him on that plane from the start, and it’s my belief it was on account of he was wearing shorts, shorts and sandals, and that got up their noses, so they was set on making him a victim, it’s my belief they paid those folks to - what do they call it - overbook and then - ”
“Just a moment, Mr. Meeks,” said Karen. “Would you tell us how you know all this? You weren’t there, were you?”
“He gave us a bell, Jimmy did. Him and Linda, they was very close. I mean, they was twins. It hit her very hard, him dying like that, I can tell you. I mean, it upset me, but her, she was devastated, it knocked her for six, they thought she was going to have a mental break down. Well, like I was saying, he gave us a phone. He was ov
er the moon, like out on cloud nine, bubbling over he was, how he’d got this money out of Seaward and he was going to spend it on a chauffeur-driven car to the ferry.”
“What was he going to Amsterdam for?” Wexford asked. Jimmy Crabbe wasn’t gay, he thought, or was he? He wasn’t going to buy cheese or porcelain or look at The Night Watch. “Was it just a holiday?”
“It was his girlfriend. She’d got a job as a nanny over there. He was going to have the weekend with her while the folks she worked for was away. But he never made it. The car he hired crashed on the M25 soon after it come out of the Dartford Tunnel. Big truck jackknifed and went smack into it.”
“But surely that was no one’s fault,” said Karen. “Well, maybe the truck driver’s fault or the hire-car driver’s fault but not Seaward Air. All they did was give him the money.”
Whose side are you on? Meeks may have been thinking. “They shouldn’t put temptation in a poor man’s way,” he said sententiously. “Folks like Jimmy, they need looking after, they need to be protected.”
“Your brother-in-law wasn’t” - Wexford sought about for something reasonably PC and failed lamentably - ”he wasn’t mentally afflicted, was he?”
Meeks jumped up. “What are you insinuating? That Jimmy was backward, is that what you’re saying? I never said that, I never meant that. I mean he’d never been nowhere or done nothing, he said as much, he had that car because he’d never been in a chauffeur-driven car. He was thirty-six years old and he’d never even had a girl friend before this one. Those Seaward folks put temptation in a poor man’s way when they should have been putting him on that plane and looking after him, and the air hostesses bringing him beer and a sandwich. D’you know, he’d never been on a plane before? Well, he never went on that one, did he? Thanks to them. Thanks to that bastard Stephen Devenish, he was the one made the rules, he was the one said what they all had to do.”
