by Ruth Rendell
Linda Meeks put her head around the door. “I heard you shouting, Carly. You all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. I just got a bit aerated.”
“Leave us for a while longer, Mrs. Meeks, will you?”
She retreated without argument, and as the door closed, Wexford changed tack completely and asked Meeks in an abrupt tone where he had been on the previous Tuesday at eight in the morning.
Meeks looked astonished but he apparently failed to make the connection. “Out with my dog. I’m always out with my dog at eight in the morning.”
“I don’t see any dog.”
“He’s in the kitchen with Linda.”
Wexford asked if Meeks had a car and then if anyone saw him while he was out, got a “No” to the first and an “I don’t know” to the second, qualified by “I go out at half-seven and there’s not many about then. Folks round here may have seen me. I go in York Park or out in the fields and there’s no one there so early.” Either he was acting or the purpose of these inquiries hit him, rather late in the day. “He’s dead, isn’t he? That Stephen Devenish? He was murdered.” More light dawned, an unpleasantly searching light. “You think I done that? I murdered him?”
“We don’t think anything, Mr Meeks,” Karen said. “We’d just like to eliminate you from our inquiries. You threatened Mr. Devenish, didn’t you? You made threatening phone calls and wrote threatening letters and went along to Seaward Air and threatened him.”
Carl Meeks was shaking his head. “I never wrote no letters.” He seemed to be making up his mind to come out with a confession, he even closed his eyes briefly, screwed up his face, said in a rush, “I’m not much at writing and reading, never seemed to get the hang of it, I reckon it’s not up my street.” He brightened a little. “The wife can write and read.”
“I think we’ll have Mrs. Meeks in now,” said Wexford.
“And bring Buster with you,” Carl Meeks called out.
Linda had changed out of leggings and T-shirt into an all-enveloping check dress like a tablecloth with sleeves. For their benefit? Or because she was going out? But it wasn’t her appearance that made the impact. She was pulled into the room, as a bowfront carriage might be pulled with a frisky horse in harness, by the biggest dog Wexford had ever seen. It seemed to be a Great Dane, of a slate blue color, and it slipped its lead, making straight for Carl, placing its paws on his shoulders and licking his face with a huge, slimy, dark blue tongue.
“Down, boy, down! Get off me! That’s enough now. Get down!”
“I think I’ve seen enough,” said Wexford dryly, “to know you genuinely do possess a dog. Perhaps you’d remove Buster to the kitchen, Mrs. Meeks. Thank you.” He waited until she came back, panting from her exertions, and said nothing until she was sitting down, catching her breath. “You didn’t much like Stephen Devenish, did you, Mrs. Meeks?”
“I didn’t mind him,” she gasped. It took her a few moments to be able to speak Then she said, “I didn’t know him - well, only by sight. It wasn’t just him. It was all of them Seaward people.” Once started, she was voluble. “That driver was drunk, they found I don’t know how many pints of whatever in his blood, and it was those Seaward people told Jimmy to go to them, they said to him what’s his name was a good driver, they recommended him, and what did he know? He just did what they said and it killed him, they killed him. You said, did I like Stephen Devenish, and I say, what d’you expect when someone throws your husband down the stairs?”
“We heard he’d thrown him out of his office,” Karen said.
“Well, you heard wrong, then. He kicked him out of the office and then he picked him up by his coat collar and dragged him to the top of the stairs and threw him down.”
“Is that how it was, Mr. Meeks?”
Meeks nodded. He seemed less than pleased, though, that his wife had shown him in such an abject light, as a man who could be thrown hither and thither, wherever his attacker’s fancy took him. “He was a bastard,” he said at last. “It’s a blessing he’s dead.”
“But you didn’t kill him?”
That made Linda Meeks give a thin shriek. Her said, “Do me a favour. He was about twice as big as me.”
Compounding her offences, Linda Meeks said, her expression quite serious, “He wouldn’t have let Carl kill him.”
“There’s a lot in that,” Wexford said to Burden later. “We know that whoever stabbed Devenish was shorter than he, so there’s your question, why did he let whoever it was kill him?”
“I suppose he was taken by surprise.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have been taken by surprise by Meeks. If Meeks was the stranger Edward Devenish saw and his mother heard, he was no stranger to Devenish. The moment he was let into that study, Devenish would have known who he was and that he meant to do him harm. Are you saying that after Devenish cut his wife’s hand he left the knife he used, the certainly bloodstained knife, lying on his desk or a table? And that when Meeks came in, he continued to leave it there for Meeks to pick up and use?”
“Because the knife must have been there, Mike. God knows where it came from, perhaps he kept a knife in a drawer. Why not? He had a whip. He maybe kept it for the express purpose of chastising his wife, used it that morning, and then what? It wasn’t in the study, he didn’t throw it out of the window - why would he?”
Burden said thoughtfully, “He could have cut her and then handed her the knife and told her to take it away and wash it.”
“D’you know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of that directive in the Jewish law. ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in the milk of its mother.’ It’s adding insult to injury.”
“But he was capable of it.”
“I believe he was.” Wexford sat silent for a moment, reflecting with no great pleasure on human iniquity. “We’ve had the report on the knives that were in the kitchen. They’re expensive knives with horn handles. No traces of human blood on any of them. Her fingerprints on all but two, his on none.”
“Does any of them have a blade that fits those wounds?
“Two do. But you needn’t look like that. These blades are - well, a standard size. Thousands of knives in people’s kitchens and on sale in shops are that size and would fit those wounds. The evidence we need is Devenish’s blood on a knife, and as I say, there was no blood. Perhaps it was one of those knives, but more likely it wasn’t and the knife that was used was taken away.”
“By Carl Meeks?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. The sequence of events is that Devenish’s killer either brought a knife with him and that knife happened to have the same size blade as one of those in the Devenishes’ knife block or that he used the knife Devenish had left lying on the desk after he cut Fay. It has to be one or the other. If it is as you say and he gave the knife to Fay to wash, could she wash it so thoroughly as to remove all trace of its previous use? But why would she want to? So the likelihood is that the killer used that knife and took it away with him.”
“Unless there were eight, not seven, knives in the knife block.”
“I don’t think there were, because what Fay says is true, and though there are eight slots in the block, if you put eight knives in, they jam up against each other. I know, I’ve tried it.”
“And Meeks?”
“We’ve a house-to-house going on at Muriel Campden to see if any of the neighbours saw him out with his dog at eight that morning. His dog is an enormous Great Dane, a bluish-gray thing, name of Buster. It’s not the kind of animal you’d miss. Once seen, never forgotten.”
“The way things are going,” said Burden, “we shall soon know that Muriel Campden lot better than our own families.”
It was a fine evening if rather muggy The residents of Oberon, Titania, and Puck Roads, and of the tower, sat on their front doorsteps if they had them or in deck chairs on the tower green if they didn’t.
“Like a bloody caravan camp,” said Tony Mitchell, who thought it was common, the kind of thing people
did who lived in tenements.
They gossiped. They had been talking for weeks about who might or might not have thrown the petrol bomb that killed Ted Hennessy, and all of them had different views, depending on the side they took in personal vendettas or the degree of their paranoia. Now they had Carl Meeks to talk about, a subject made even more enthralling by the arrival on the scene of three police officers doing a house-to-house.
Maria Michaels said she was sitting outside to save them the trouble of ringing her bell. She had just seen her old friend Tasneem Fowler go into her own house accompanied by a woman called Tracy something, and Maria had called out to them and said to come over and have a drink when they’d done their business or whatever with Terry and the kids. Maria went into the house and fetched two chairs, which she put on the bit of grass in the front garden, and she was going back for a third when she met Monty Smith coming downstairs, carrying all his belongings in two Tesco carrier bags.
“For two pins,” said Monty, “I’d smash your face in.”
“You wouldn’t do it twice, my darling. I’m not like that poor little cow Tasneem.” Memories of glorious shot- putting days came back to her. “When I get going, you wouldn’t know what hit you. Don’t shut the door, I’m bringing another chair and a table out.”
Despised, rejected, and expelled, Monty Smith went off down Oberon toward the York Street bus stop. Halfway down he met Detective Constable Archbold, who asked if he could have a word. The word was to ask where Monty was at eight on that Tuesday morning and if he had seen Carl Meeks out with his dog. Monty said Archbold must be joking as he never got out of bed before ten, or that had been his habit, but God knew what the future held.
Shirley Mitchell was on the green, picking up litter by hand and dropping the beer cans, crisp packets, cigarette ends, fish-and-chip paper, and take-away and hire-car flyers into a shopping trolley she had lined with a plastic bag. Archbold asked her about Carl Meeks, and she burst into a long diatribe about dog owners whose pets fouled the pavements. That Buster was one of the worst offenders. She had personally offered to supply Mr. and Mrs. Meeks with a dustpan, rake, and hygienic bags for the disposal of the Great Dane’s waste, but they had laughed in her face. No, she couldn’t say if she had seen Carl Meeks out with the dog on Tuesday morning, but she saw him every morning, or almost every morning, and it was just as well she did, for she was able to run outside and clean up the mess before her unfortunate neighbours trod in it.
One of the few Muriel Campden residents who wasn’t sitting outside was Terry Fowler. He and his sons were watching a video he had made of the France-Brazil final in the World Cup. They had seen the match live, and since then they had looked at the video twice. This was the third time, but Terry, Kim, and Lee Fowler never tired of football, especially international matches of this caliber. France had just scored their first goal when a key was heard in the front door lock and Tasneem walked into the room with a strange woman.
She had only got up the courage to come because Tracy had egged her on and promised to go with her. On the way they were stopped by Lynn Fancourt and asked about Carl Meeks. Both found this quite exciting but, regretfully, had to say they didn’t know because they didn’t live here, they were just visiting. The idea of “just visiting” her own home brought tears into Tasneem’s eyes, and the marks of the tears were still there when she entered the house and confronted, after many months, her husband and her children.
“What are you doing here?” said Terry, ignoring Tasneem’s timid introduction of her friend. “You reckon you can go away when you want and stay away for a fucking year, do you, and then walk in here as bold as bloody brass like you’ve just been round the shops?”
Kim and Lee hadn’t even looked at her. They were watching France go on to score their second goal.
Tracy Miller glanced about her and said, “This place is filthy, I bet it wasn’t like this when Tas lived here.”
Tracy crossed to the set and turned it off. A great wail went up from the boys. Terry leapt to his feet and there ensued what Tracy’s dad used to call a slanging match, beginning with Terry calling Tracy a slag and an interfering bitch, and her calling him an animal.
A string of name-calling ensued, Terry dubbing Tasneem with epithets of such richness and obscurity that Tracy had never heard of half of them. The boys both burst out crying and Tracy’s heart bled for them. She thought Terry was going to hit Tasneem and she was wondering whether to get between them - as if she hadn’t had enough of that in her own married life - when Tasneem said, “Okay, I’m going, and that’s it, I’ve had it up to my eyes.”
They got out into the hallway and heard the television go on again. Terry and Lee sat down once more but Kim came running after them, got hold of Tasneem’s trousers - she was wearing the salwar kameez - and sobbed, “Don’t go. I don’t want you to go.”
Tasneem set up a wail of grief but Tracy said quite firmly’ “You stop crying now, love. You and your brother’s going to come and live with your mum and everything’ll be fine.”
God knew whether it was true. Tracy got Tasneem out of the house and more or less dragged her down to Maria Michael’s. Maria was sitting on a chair in the front garden with an elegant little table in front of her, on which were a tray with glasses, a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of gin, two cans of ginger ale, and two of orange crush. She said hi to Tracy, that she was pleased to meet her, and what was it to be, my darling, whiskey or mother’s ruin? Tasneem, being a Moslem, asked for orange crush, but Maria insisted on something stronger to “put some lead in her pencil.”
“Come on, that’s men,” Tracy said, but Maria said, so what? And hadn’t Tracy ever heard of the equality of the sexes?
Both women put their arms around Tasneem, and Tracy held the whiskey to her lips like a nurse with a feeding cup. Then Maria said she’d something to tell them that would cheer them up, a real bundle of laughs. She’d thrown Monty Smith out, the lazy bugger, and - how about this? - she’d got somebody else. Maria was telling them how Miroslav Zlatic had been a freedom fighter in Sarajevo, had had to flee with a price on his head, and how great he was in the sack, when DC Kevin Cox opened the gate, came up the path, and asked her about Carl Meeks.
Maria was only too happy to help. She offered Cox a drink, but Cox, who had been looking longingly at the gin, was obliged to refuse. Carl Meeks, she said, was a regular out with his dog at eight in the morning. That is to say, she often saw him when she was on her way to work, and that dog was more the size of a horse, but not every day, my darling, not this morning, for instance. This morning she’d had the day off and she smiled dreamily, remembering.
“What about last Tuesday morning?” said Cox.
“Well, I saw him, but whether it was Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or what, I couldn’t say. As I say, I don’t see him every day. Some days he goes down the fields. He goes in the park.”
“I’d like a dog,” said Tasneem. “When I get my boys back, we’ll have a dog.”
“Of course you will, my darling, and a cat and a rabbit and a bloody alligator too if you want.”
Cox went off, drew a blank at the remaining houses in Titania Road where the occupants were out, and called on the Crownes and Sue Ridley, and the people next door and the people next door to them, but three sets of them didn’t know Carl Meeks, not even by sight, or they said they didn’t, and the Crownes got up too late to see him out with the Great Dane. At the Meekses’ house in Oberon Road, Lynn Fancourt was questioning Darren Meeks. Darren was still doing his paper round, so Lynn thought he of all people might know where his father had been that Tuesday morning, but Darren didn’t know, he left for his round three-quarters of an hour before eight. Still, he reckoned his dad must have taken Buster out. The dog made so much racket, whining and howling for his walk, that you took him out just to get a bit of peace.
“So what’s new up in millionaires’ row?” Maria wanted to know after Tasneem had told her Tracy worked for a lady in Ploughman’s Lane.
“That bastard as was murdered,” said Tracy, “he was another of them, used to beat her up something disgusting. Nobody knew till she kidnapped her own kid to get her out of his clutches and then it all came out. The neighbours was warned to keep an eye on him. Talk about bloody useless when those great places up there are all about ten miles apart.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, then,” said Maria. “I suppose she did it.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it, not with them asking us all that about what’s his name.”
“Oh, I reckon she did it, my darling. I would have.”
Lord Tremlett’s medical report showed that Stephen Devenish had received three stab wounds to his chest, and in Tremlett’s opinion, these wounds had been inflicted in a frenzy. The one that killed him had pierced the left ventricle of the heart. A woman could have inflicted them, but it was impossible to say whether the perpetrator was a man or a woman. He or she was probably shorter than Devenish, because the dead man had been so tall.
The murder had been committed between seven forty- five and eight-thirty, the original estimate. Tremlett was unable to narrow the time down further. The weapon used was a kitchen knife with a blade two inches wide at its widest point and between eight and ten inches long. Devenish, prior to his death, had been a healthy man in his mid-thirties, of an exceptionally powerful physique, a well-made man without bodily flaws or scars. The inquest was opened and adjourned.
Wexford, who had attended the brief proceedings, went to see the widow and told her the funeral could take place whenever she chose.
Jane Andrews was at Woodland Lodge, was apparently staying there, and Fay’s two Sons were back home. It might have been Wexford’s imagination, but he felt that Sanchia was already a calmer, quieter, and perhaps happier child. For the first time he noticed that she was also pretty, looking, perhaps, as her mother had at her age, pink-checked with satiny skin and regular features, big, gray-blue eyes, and fine, shining hair. That hair was much longer than when the family group photograph was taken, and now there would be no confusing her with a boy. It was a feminine, delicate face. She looked up at him and smiled. And he thought how dreadful it was that anyone could die, and moreover die by violence, and leave behind him so much relief and thankfulness.
