by Ruth Rendell
They went into a spacious living room, its french windows wide open. He had already learnt that the Marshalsons were interior designers, based at Marshalson’s Studio, Design and Restoration, in the Kingsbrook Centre of Kingsmarkham but he would have known without being told. Such people’s homes are always unmistakable, beautiful, the taste displayed impeccable, the ornaments just right and not too numerous, the colours exactly what one would have chosen if one possessed the gift for it, and at the same time the reverse of cosy, not the kind of place in which one would feel like curling up with a book and a glass of wine. Wexford sat down on a dark-grey sofa, Hannah on a pale-grey armchair, Diana Marshalson in another, which looked as if it had started life in a palace in Mandalay. Carved faces of angry gods glowered from its high arched back
‘What made your husband go out into the lane first thing this morning, Mrs Marshalson? What time was it exactly?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was asleep. He worried terribly when she was out at night. I suppose he realised she hadn’t come in.’
‘He went out to look for her?’ Hannah sounded incredulous.
‘I suppose so. He must have known - well, either that she wouldn’t be there or that something awful had happened. But I don’t know. He went out. I woke up when the child cried. That was at six thirty’ She listened as if for just such a cry. ‘I must go and check on George. Do you mind waiting a minute? I’ll be back with you as soon as I can.’
As she went out the little boy came in, still on all fours, but managing to pull himself up by holding on to the edge of an inlaid table that looked as if made of ebony and some pale blond wood. He was a handsome boy, olive-skinned but with red cheeks, his hair dark and curly, clustering in those rings only seen in very young children.
‘Hello,’ said Wexford. ‘What’s your name? Let me guess. James? Jack? The most popular name of the moment is Archie, they tell me.’
‘He’s too young to know what you’re saying, guy.’
Resisting the temptation to tell her he knew that, he’d had two of his own and four grandchildren, he said mildly that small children like people to talk to them, they like the sound and the attention. It doesn’t much matter what you say. Hannah achieved a minimal shrug, a favourite gesture of hers. Diana Marshalson, he thought, looked young enough to be this child’s mother but only just. Maybe forty-five or forty-six, a second wife who had perhaps never been married before and wanted a baby before it was too late. He rather admired her looks. Tall, handsome, dark-haired women with full figures were his type. His own wife was such a one.
She came back. ‘He’s fast asleep. It’s the best thing for him, though I dread what it will be like when he wakes. He’ll have to wake some time. He adored Amber. She was only just eighteen. What happened?’
‘Early days to say,’ said Hannah. ‘She’s dead. She was attacked. Really, that’s all we know.’
The little boy tried to climb on to Diana Marshalson’s lap. To Wexford it seemed that she hauled him up wearily and without much enthusiasm. Amber went out last evening? What time would that have been and where did she go?’
Amber’s stepmother was choosing her words care fully. ‘She went clubbing. To a place called Bling-Bling in Kingsmarkham. Between eight thirty and nine, I’d say. It sounds awful, I know, but they all do it. The friend who brought her home would have dropped her at the end of Mill Lane. It’s happened before, she went to the club regularly and she was always all right.’ The child caught hold of the pearl string she was wearing and began tugging at it. ‘No, Brand, no, please.’ She prised his fingers apart. Amber was waiting for her A level results. She’d just left school. Look, my husband’s asleep but I think I should be with him. Sitting with him, you know. In case he wakes. I can’t leave him alone any longer.’
‘We’d just like . . .‘ Hannah began but Wexford stopped her.
‘We will come back later in the day, Mrs Marshalson. Then perhaps you or your husband can give us the name of the friend and a few more details about Amber herself. We’ll leave you now.’
Diana Marshalson stayed just long enough to open the door for them, the little boy seated on her hip.
‘We could have got the friend’s name, you know, guv,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s not like she was the woman’s mother.’
Although he knew it was accepted practice in police forces all over the country, Wexford very much disliked being called ‘guv’. He didn’t expect ‘sir’ these days but he would almost rather she had called him by his given name than that awful abbreviation. When she first joined his team he had gently asked her not to do it but it was as if he hadn’t spoken. If she had been in any way disrespectful he would have had reason to reprove her but she hadn’t, she never was. He was sure she liked, even admired, him - apart, that is, from his old-fashioned speech patterns and terminology
Now she repeated what she had said because he hadn’t replied. ‘She may have been very attached to the girl,’ he said. ‘We don’t yet know how long she had been her stepmother. Maybe from Amber’s early childhood.’
Returning to the crime scene, Hannah said no more. It irked her that Wexford used the word ‘girl’. Amber was a woman, she was eighteen. He would have to learn correct terms, she thought, or the rapidly changing world would simply leave him behind. Only the other day she had heard him talk about ‘people’ when he meant ‘community’.
The body had gone. There were still several uniformed officers standing on the grass, half a dozen cars filling the entrance to the lane and the scene-of-crime officer stretching blue and white crime tape round the place where Amber Marshalson had lain. DS Karen Malahyde was standing next to a woman of about forty wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
‘This is Miss Burton, sir. She lives in one of those houses opposite. She was out last night and came home about midnight.’
‘Lydia Burton,’ the woman said. ‘I live at number three Jewel Terrace. I was out with a friend. He brought me home in his car and after he’d gone I took my dog for a walk Not for long, you know. But you have to walk them or they make a fuss.’
She was pretty rather than beautiful, with healthy pink skin and curly fair hair, her face without make-up but for mascara on her long eyelashes. This and the dangling silver dog-face earrings she wore gave a frivolous note to her austerity
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said in answer to his question as to whether she had known Amber Marshalson. ‘I’m the head teacher of Brimhurst Primary School. Amber was there for two or three years when her father first came to Brimhurst.’
‘You saw her last night?’
‘I only wish I had.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not a very observant person.’ Hannah Goldsmith disliked hearing people, women especially, belittle themselves. A sign of low self-esteem perhaps. It was surely by now a well-known fact that everyone was as valuable as everyone else. All had skills and gifts, and each was uniquely her (or just possibly his) own person. ‘You took your dog out at - what? Twelve thirty?’
‘I suppose so. About that. It was very dark down the lane because of the trees and I hadn’t brought a torch. There was a bit of a moon and I walked the other way, up to the Myfleet road, and went along perhaps two hundred yards.’ Metres, thought Hannah, metres. Why did it take people so long to learn? ‘When I was coming back - back to the corner of Mill Lane, I mean - I saw a man. He was standing among the trees, in there.’ Lydia Burton pointed into the woodland where Amber Marshalson’s body had been found. ‘It gave me quite a shock He had his back to me. I don’t think he saw me. I, crossed the road. I was anxious to get home - I mean, seeing him there made me want to get home.’
‘Can you describe this man, Miss Burton?’
Hannah shook her head impatiently. Why couldn’t Wexford remember to say ‘Ms’? ‘I didn’t see his face. He was wearing a hood. I mean, he was wearing a fleece with a hood. Well, mostly it’s the young that wear them. I don’t think he was that young. He wasn’t
a boy.’
‘Tall or short? Fat or thin? How old?’
‘Tallish,’ she said. ‘Quite thin, I think. I wish I’d taken more notice. But people always say that, I expect, don’t they? I don’t think he was that young, though I couldn’t say how I know. Forty, I think. At least forty.’
‘A pity you can’t be more precise,’ said Hannah. ‘You didn’t see Amber? No, I suppose not. Do you know if she often went clubbing?’
Wexford wished Hannah could bring herself to sound less censorious. She was a beautiful woman in any man’s eyes, tall, slender, with the face of an El Greco saint and raven’s-wing hair, but he wondered if she had ever been clubbing or possibly been up after eleven p.m. except in the course of duty.
‘I really don’t know,’ Lydia Burton said. ‘I was never close to Amber. We just said hi when we saw each other.’ Wexford asked her who lived in the other houses in Jewel Terrace. ‘The elderly man at number one is Mr Nash, then Mr and Mrs Brooks at number two, they’re called John and Gwenda.’
They watched her let herself into the first house in the terrace, a neat cottage as each of them was, red brick with a slate roof. Her front garden was a small square lawn surrounded by lavender bushes, Mr Nash’s a plantation of huge sunflowers, ten feet tall, their sun-shaped faces turned skywards, the Brookses’ stone paving within a rectangle of closely trimmed box hedges. The morning was already very hot with that heat which is peculiarly English, the air heavy with humidity the sun scalding where it touched. Hannah Goldsmith looked to Wexford as unruffled as ever, her pale smooth skin as white as in winter, not a hair out of place.
‘You can start on Jewel Terrace, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Before the occupants go to work Take Baljinder with you.’
They made a beautiful couple, he thought, as Hannah and DC Bhattacharya crossed the road, the woman so slender, her hair streaming down her back like a dark waterfall, and the tall very upright man, impossibly thin, his cropped hair making hers look brown, his own was so pitch-black. Their profiles were somewhat alike, regular, classical, utterly Caucasian. They might have been brother and sister, offspring per haps of a father from Iran and a mother from Iberia.
Thinking how this area had changed in the short time since the Simisola case, when there had been no more than twelve people from ethnic minorities, he walked with Karen Malahyde back to his car where Donaldson waited at the wheel.
‘Going to be a hot day, Jim.’
Donaldson said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in a stony way, treating this deeply banal remark with the contempt it deserved.
‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. To Brimhurst, I mean.’
‘It’s not the sort of place you come to unless you know someone. All there is is the village hail and the church, and that’s been locked up since the vicar went. The shop closed ten years ago.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘My mum lives here,’ said Donaldson. ‘People like it because it’s quiet. Nothing ever happens - well, not till this.’
‘No. Can you turn up the air-conditioning?’
Post-mortems held no attractions for him but he attended them, looking the other way as much as he could. Detective Inspector Burden was less squeamish than he and fascinated by forensics. They sat and watched or, in Wexford’s case, pretended to watch, while the pathologist opened Amber Marshalson’s body and examined the dreadful damage to her head where she had been struck by some heavy object. He had asked the time of death and been told between midnight and three in the morning. More precisely than that she wouldn’t commit herself.
‘A brick was the weapon, I should think,’ said Carina Laxton, ‘but of course you won’t take my word for that.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Burden who disliked her. Apart from her name and her lack of a thyroid cartilage, he had said to Wexford, she might as well be a man, and perhaps she once had been. You never knew these days. She had no breasts, no hips, her hair was crew-cut and no scrap of make-up had ever settled on her virgin face. He had, however, to admit that she was good at her job, less sharp-tongued and plain rude than Mavrikian and her attitude a far cry from the pomposities of Sir Hilary Tremlett.
‘She died from that blow to the head, as I don’t need to tell you,’ she now said. ‘It’s not of course my place’ - this said with an old-fashioned primness barely concealing arrogance - ‘to identify the weapon. No doubt you will need the services of a plinthologist.’
‘A what?’
‘A brick expert.’ Carina enunciated the words slowly and with great care in case he had difficulty under standing plain English.
‘No doubt,’ said Burden.
‘Because a brick is not just a brick, you know.’ Once she had left this to sink in, Carina said, ‘There was no sexual assault. It’ll all be in the report. She’d had a child, as I expect you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Wexford, astonished. ‘She was only eighteen.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean, Reg?’ Carina Laxton shook her head at him and pursed her lips. ‘If she’d been twelve, that might have been cause for comment. Just.’
Brand, he thought. I wonder. Is he Amber’s child, not Diana’s? And is it Brand as in Ibsen or Brand as in Brandon? He said to Burden, ‘Come up to my office, Mike, and later on we can go back to Mill Lane and see the Marshalsons together.’
They worked as a team whenever they could and particularly when Wexford felt that another hour or two in the company of Hannah Goldsmith might make him say things he would regret. They got on, he and Mike. If they couldn’t quite say everything that came into their heads to each other, they got as near to doing this as two people ever can. He liked Mike better than anyone he knew after his own wife, children and grandchildren - and perhaps not exactly after them. For those seven people he loved and no one knew better than he that liking and loving are two different things. Even the Catholic Church at its most stringent had never attempted adjuring the faithful to like each other.
Up in his office with the new grey carpet, which was the gift of the grateful council-tax payers of Kingsmarkham, and the two yellow armchairs which were not but his own property, Burden took his characteristic perch on a corner of the rosewood desk. This large piece of furniture also belonged to Wexford, who kept it there along with the armchairs to show to the local media when they came nosing around, looking for evidence of police profligacy and corruption. Burden, always a sharp dresser, had lately taken to the kind of clothes known in the trade as ‘smart casual’. The beautiful suits had gone to the back of the wardrobe or, in the case of the older ones, to the charity shop, and the detective inspector appeared in jeans and suede jacket over a white open-necked shirt. One of the things that came into Wexford’s head which he couldn’t say aloud was that his friend was just a fraction too old for jeans. Still, it was only a fraction and Burden was thin enough to wear them with elegance.
He had laid out on his desk the things that had been found in the pockets of Amber Marshalson’s jacket. This white cotton garment, heavily stained with blood, had gone to the lab, as had her pink miniskirt, black camisole and bra, and pink and black thong. The contents of her pockets lay on the dark-red leather top of the desk.
‘They don’t have handbags any more,’ said Wexford.
Burden was looking at a front-door key on a Gollum-faced ring to match her watch, a tube made of transparent plastic holding some bright pink substance, presumably a kind of lipstick, the packet with two cigarettes in it, the half-melted chocolate, still wrapped in foil, and the condom. Still a bit of a prude, he let his eyes linger on this last object and his mouth tightened.
‘Better have one than not, surely,’ said Wexford.
‘That depends on how you intend to spend your evening. Wasn’t she carrying any money?’
Wexford opened a drawer and brought out a transparent plastic bag with notes inside. Quite a lot of notes and all of them fifties.
‘It still has to be checked for prints,’ he said. ‘There’s a
thousand pounds in there. It was loose in her right- hand jacket pocket along with the key and that tube of what, I believe, is lip gloss. The contraceptive, the cigarettes and the sweet were in the other pocket.’
‘Where did she get hold of a thousand pounds?’
‘That we shall have to discover,’ said Wexford.
Chapter 4
The car turned into Mill Lane. Along the grass verge uniformed policemen — jacketless and without caps - were searching the ditch and the field on the other side of the hedge for the weapon. Crime tape, stretched along the pavement edge, isolated the area. On the opposite side of the road an old man stood among the sunflowers, leaning on a stick, staring at the searchers.
‘It’s been so dry for so long,’ Wexford said. ‘The killer could have parked a car anywhere along that verge without leaving a mark.’
The house called Clifton seemed to lie among its trees and shrubs peculiarly still and passive. It had that look of resting, of shutting down, buildings have at times of great heat. Alert expectancy would be for the bitter cold of deep winter. Windows were wide open but no one was to be seen. Though it was early evening, they got out of the car’s cool interior to be met by a wall of heat.
‘It feels like stepping out of the aircraft when you go away on holiday to Greece,’ said Wexford. ‘You can’t believe it, it feels so good. In the middle of the night, as likely as not. But we hardly ever have warm nights here. Why don’t we?’
‘Search me. Something to do with the Gulf Stream, I expect. Most weather things are.’
‘The Gulf Stream makes things warm, not cold.’
This time there was no one to meet them. Wexford rang the doorbell and Diana Marshalson opened the door. Again the little boy was with her, managing to stand if he clutched at the side of her loose trousers.
‘I took it for granted this morning that he was yours,’ Wexford said. ‘But Amber was his mother, wasn’t she?’
