by Ruth Rendell
‘One thirty it is, Mr Brooks.’
They had begun searching the towns and the surrounding countryside. Prinsip was asked to furnish them with the names of everyone Megan knew and struggled to do so. In the end, it was Sandra Warner and her daughter Lara who had to do the job for him. The lead the police wanted would come when they found someone known to both Megan and Amber. Ben Miller, Chris Williamson and James Sothern came, of course, into this category, but all of them said they had only once met Megan and that was on the single occasion when Lara brought her sister to Bling-Bling. It was much the same for the girls, Samantha Collins, Charlotte Probyn and Veryan Colgate. Samantha alone had encountered Megan on more than one occasion and she had disliked Amber but it took a wilder stretch of the imagination than anyone in Wexford’s team possessed to see plump little Samantha in the role of a concrete block dropper and brick-wielding assassin.
Wexford took Sergeant Vine and PC Overton with him to the Marshalsons. George appeared horribly shocked when asked if his daughter could have been involved in drug trafficking. ‘She has a baby while she’s still at school, she stays out half the night at clubs and now you tell me she carried drugs to Thailand and into Europe. Where did I go wrong? Is all this because her mother died when she was still a child? I did my best. I thought I’d found her another mother. . .‘
‘Mr Marshalson,’ Wexford said, ‘we aren’t saying Amber was involved in this trade, only that she could have been. It may be that with your co-operation we can establish that she was not.’
‘My co-operation?’
‘We would like to search this house with the help of a.. . a sniffer dog. Would you object?’
George said he didn’t like it but as for objecting, no, he wouldn’t do that. It seemed to bring him no pleasure, though it brought a lot to Wexford, to see Brand’s delight at the appearance on the scene of Buster. Whether a sniffer dog of Buster’s eminence should be permitted, on grounds of noblesse oblige and hygiene, to lick enthusiastically the face of a one-year-old client he hardly knew, but Brand loved it and for the first time Wexford heard the little boy laugh. His peals of laughter echoed through that sad house as he put up his arms to hug the golden spaniel.
But Buster had work to do. He concentrated mainly on Amber’s bedroom, covering every inch of floor, the insides of drawers and the inner recesses of cupboards, like the expert he was. His search was in vain and if an animal could look disappointed, Buster did. He had found nothing.
‘I suppose the time will come when I’ll have to get the child a dog,’ said George, his voice empty of all enthusiasm. ‘I don’t suppose you’re interested, this is something I have to teach myself to come to terms with, but I can’t contemplate the future with this child growing up in my house and Diana and I having to look after him. Get him a dog, like I said, or a cat maybe. Find a school for him. Get him to the doctor for all those injections they have to have. Find friends for him to play with. I can hardly contemplate it. I seem to have made a mess of it last time. Why should I be better now? I’ve lost my beloved daughter. I’m older and I’m tired and, well, broken-hearted. I’m an old man. Is that how I’m to spend my retirement, bringing up another child?’
Maybe they’ll take him away from you, Wexford thought, and someone will adopt him, someone who desperately wants a child. ‘This missing girl,’ he said, ‘Megan Bartlow. She and Amber went to Frankfurt together. Now, Mr Marshalson, you know as well as I do that a couple of young British girls don’t go to Frankfurt on holiday, any more than a couple of young German girls would come to Birmingham. So why did they go there?’
‘You think they were carrying.. . well, hard drugs?’
‘It’s a possibility Wexford avoided looking at George’s stricken face. ‘Megan Bartlow doesn’t appear to have been a close friend. Not before that weekend, at any rate.’
‘A lot of girls came here. She may have been one of them. I’d never heard her name till Amber said they were going to Frankfurt together. I answered the phone to her around that time and I must say she hadn’t the sort of accent I’d like to think of my daughter’s friends having.’
‘It wasn’t a friendship, was it? It was a business arrangement.’
‘What did Amber know about business?’
People pick up that sort of knowledge very fast when there’s money to be made, thought Wexford, but he didn’t say it aloud.
No sooner had Hannah parked her car on an area restricted to ‘Staff and Bona Fide Visitors’ than John Brooks came down a flight of concrete steps from a green-painted door on the end of the block. He came towards her, smiling and holding out his hand, so that she wondered what he had told colleagues as to her identity. Certainly he wouldn’t have revealed that she was a police officer. A prospective client perhaps? Some sort of health and safety inspector? He opened the green door and ushered her into a small office full of filing cabinets. John Brooks evidently made his own tea and coffee and now, plugging in the electric kettle, he offered her a choice.
‘Nothing, thank you.’ She wasn’t going to turn this into a social occasion, a cosy chat over the teacups.
‘Pity. Are you sure? Well, if you won’t you won’t.’
‘Mr Brooks, let’s get down to why I’m here. I want to know where you go on these night drives of yours. Is that why your wife sleeps in one bedroom and you sleep in the other? It’s not really to do with your snoring, is it? You fake the snoring so you’ve an excuse for sleeping elsewhere, which makes it easier to get out for a drive.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’
‘Where you go. Please don’t say you just drive around.’
Brooks put a teabag into one of the mugs and poured boiling water on to it. He opened a drawer and took out a packet of chocolate chip cookies. ‘Biscuit?’
‘No, thank you. Do you visit a woman?’
‘If I said yes and told you who, would it go any further?’
‘If you mean would we tell your wife, no, I shouldn’t think so.’ Her contempt had crept into her voice and she saw him shrink. ‘If this woman confirms that you visit her by night and that you did so on the night of Amber’s death, no one else need know. A name and address, please, Mr Brooks.’
He wrote down a name and an address in Pomfret on a piece of scrap paper. After that, he escorted her down the flight of steps to her car. Anxious to get her off the premises, she thought as she drove away. Once he knew she was out of the way he’d be on the phone to this woman, this Paula Vincent of Foster Way, Pomfret.
Brooks’s girlfriend was not at all as she had expected. Someone a few years younger than Gwenda was most likely and a glamorous contrast to her, a sort of bimbo in a miniskirt. The woman who opened the door to her, saying nothing but slightly raising her eyebrows, was forty at least, her short hair lank and dark, her face free of make-up and her figure far from what beauty editors in magazines call ‘toned’. The only name for her trousers, Hannah thought, was one her own mother used, ‘slacks’. She had on a dirty whitish jumper and quilted slippers.
Hannah was not to be invited further in than the narrow hallway. In answer to her questions, Paula Vincent said, yes, she and John Brooks were ‘in a relationship’. They would marry when he was divorced. She, Paula, was a widow. He sometimes visited her in the night. It was the only time he could get away. Hannah merely noted all this down, saying nothing, but thinking what fools these women were. If he was going to get divorced, what stopped him telling his wife he’d got a girlfriend? Because he wasn’t going to get divorced, of course, he was a deceiver as so many of them were. Briefly, she thought of Bal with whom she’d be dining five hours from now. Was he different?
On her way back to Kingsmarkham she passed the searchers, most of them a group of a dozen or so public spirited volunteers under the direction of a single police officer. She waved to Lynn Fancourt and half a mile further on to Karen Malahyde. Burden she didn’t see but he was there with DC Damon Coleman and four members of the public, exploring t
he streets, lanes and open spaces of Pomfret. While Hannah went back to the murder room in Brimhurst village hall, Lynn and Karen and their teams moved up to Sewingbury, and Burden took his group to the larger and more formidable Stowerton.
Darkness would fall at about nine after a prolonged twilight, so the searching of unlit places could continue well into the late evening. Burden went home for his dinner at six thirty and was back in Stowerton by seven fifteen, at which time Damon Coleman was released to eat pizza with Lynn Fancourt in a Sewingbury café. He returned as the evening began to darken.
Stowerton, with a huge industrial estate on its out skirts and an inner-town network of streets criss-crossing each other and lined with terraces of small houses, originally built to accommodate chalk quarry workers, was not an attractive place. Residents of Kingsmarkham and Pomfret, especially, regarded it as an eyesore, though most admitted that its appearance was much improved by the little houses in Oval, Rectangle and Pyramid Roads being bought and refurbished by upwardly mobile couples. They found the freshly painted front doors pleasing - Wexford called the occupants the Rainbow Nation - the window boxes artistic and the flowering trees and trimmed box hedges a mark of civilisation. Stowerton was within commuting distance of London if you didn’t mind spending two hours of every day five days a week sitting, or more likely standing, in a train.
Burden, with Lynn Fancourt, Damon Coleman and a team of uniformed men and women, had searched the open spaces and those of the gardens which were wild or overgrown. But the town wasn’t entirely composed of a sprawl of factories and £150,000 two-up, two-down cottages. In its centre, dating from when it had been a place of nineteenth-century elegance, were streets of houses built in the 1840s. The long walled gardens of Victoria Terrace backed on to the tiny fenced gardens of Oval Road. Frontages had long sash windows, elegant lace work balconies and steps up to a front door, flanked by pillars. They might have been in Chekenham or Bath and they had once been as pretty as anything comparable in Kingsmarkham. For years now they had been divided into flats and single rooms or occupied by small struggling businesses and were sadly in need of refurbishment. These houses had recently been bought en bloc by a property developer who was about to have them renovated. Scaffolding had been mounted against their façades, the whole covered in green netting. No builders had yet started work, though front gardens were stacked with bricks, breeze blocks and new window frames.
The back gardens of Victoria Terrace looked like a meadow that is fast becoming a wood, the walls between them overgrown and obscured by brambles, wild roses, ivy and the clematis which at this time of year was covered with the fluffy seedheads of Old Man’s Beard. Burden and his team searched this wilderness from end to end, beating down nettles and lifting matted webs of brambles in the warm sultry glow of the set ting sun. They found empty cans, chip papers, condoms, ice-cream wrappers, beer bottles, a single high-heeled shoe, an ice tray from a fridge, a syringe, a Lotto ticket and a DVD of Apocalypse Now. The shoe caused some excitement until Lynn pointed out that it was a size 41 while Megan wore a size 38.
Dusk came slowly but they would soon need lights to help them.
‘We’ll call it a day,’ Burden said.
A woman should never dress up for a man. Hannah firmly believed this. It was one of her rules of life. For one thing, men never noticed what a woman wore, only that she looked good or not, and for another, why pander to men in this way when it wouldn’t cross a man’s mind to buy something new to wear when out on a date? She believed in this principle and had usually adhered to it. Today was different, though of course it should make no difference to abiding by her rule. But it did. She admitted to herself as she took her third shower of that hot day that she really fancied Bal, quite uncomfortably so, and the best thing would be to get things on a clear footing from the start. Like tonight. So, rule or no rule, she was going to wear the sexiest stuff she had, take a long time over her face and leave this new conditioner on her hair for an extra five minutes.
Very tall, she was anxious not to wear shoes that would raise her head above Bal’s but as soon as that thought formed she castigated herself for even thinking it. Why fall into that trap? What authority or power or arbiter decreed that a man must be taller than a woman? And even if such a power had done so once, it was out dated now and of no account. She slipped her feet into the highest-heeled shoes she had; black patent and backless, they were very hard to walk in but she didn’t intend to walk much. Scented with Donna Karan’s Cashmere Mist and lightly made up, she was ready to meet Bal. Not, of course, at seven thirty precisely but, as was more suitable for a woman not wanting to look too keen, at twenty-five minutes to eight.
Halfway through dinner Hannah steered the conversation away from shop. It was only natural that at first this was what they talked about for this was what they had in common. From crime and crime management it was a swift step to the personalities of their fellow officers and Hannah had no qualms about discussing Wexford’s character with someone who was her subordinate. After all, she had nothing but praise for him. There was no need to mention his outdated attitude to certain things, language mostly, and his peculiar preference for books over videos, DVDs and CDs, which after all wasn’t surprising.
But after half an hour of this she felt, in a favourite phrase of hers, that it was time to move on. She had drunk a good deal of wine but it wasn’t the wine that was making her feel amorous. One look at Bal was enough to do that. He, of course, was driving so had confined himself to one half of Chablis and had been drinking mineral water ever since. But why should it be ‘of course’? They didn’t live very far from each other. She had come to the restaurant in a taxi and they could have shared one going home. She felt unreason ably annoyed because Bal, though smiling at her in a rather sweet way across the table, hadn’t moved to lay his hand upon hers, which she had rested rather obviously on the cloth. Nor had his eyes once met hers. Not surprising, perhaps, while he was talking so enthusiastically about Inspector Burden’s pleasant manner with the team and had Hannah ever noticed that he was the complete reverse of rude abrupt DIs on television?
She guided the talk on to their own personal lives and learnt that Bal’s parents lived in Somerset. His father was an accountant, his mother — well, she had never worked but was just mother to him, his brother and two sisters, and wife to his father. Hannah disapproved, of course, but now wasn’t the time to say so. She was even more appalled to hear that his elder sister had had an arranged marriage. The shock she felt was impossible to conceal.
Bal laughed. ‘I said “arranged”, not “forced”.’
‘Just the same . . .‘
‘The point is, Hannah, that it’s not just the same. Lamila’s husband was a sort of cousin, second or third cousin. They didn’t know each other but they were introduced and as a matter of fact they fancied each other from the start. If she hadn’t liked him or he hadn’t liked her that would have been that. There was no coercion. I can’t see that it’s so different from meeting someone through a dating agency except that our way is safer and, well, more decorous. Lamila and Kanti are very happy, and Lamila’s going to have a baby. It’ll be my parents’ first grandchild. You can imagine how excited they are.’
‘Would you do that? Have an arranged marriage?’
‘We’re not talking about me,’ he said and she thought, no, we haven’t been. Not at all. Just about your family. Not a word about what you want and aim for and dream of. Nothing about girlfriends and there must have been lots. With those looks he’d have had to fight them off. ‘Now you can tell me the story of your life,’ he said, pouring more wine for her.
She was less discreet than he had been. The last thing she wanted was for him to have the impression that she had led his sisters’ kind of life, surely one of unblemished chastity until that arranged marriage was signed and sealed. She talked of the ‘relationships’ she had been in, those to which she had made a ‘commitment’ and those far more numerous encounters that had been
casual. It would be disastrous were he to get the idea that she was interested only in serious long-term partnerships. The notion of the light-hearted but passionate affair was what she hoped in plant in his mind. As she spoke she watched his face but his expression was unchangingly pleasant and friendly. He seemed interested but not involved.
Dessert wine was offered her with her panna cotta but she refused it, taking caffeine-free coffee instead. To be sexy is one thing, unsteady on one’s feet and - awful thought! - hiccuping, quite another. It was such a warm evening that she had no coat to be helped into, so no opportunity for Bal to lay his arm round her shoulders. Outside the restaurant it was brightly lit, but darkish in the car park. Town car parks are no places for dalliance but those in the country may be quite different, enclosed by hedges, overhung by foliage swaying from heavy branches, not even packed with cars except on Saturday nights. Walking across lawns and under a yew arch, Bal might have taken her hand or hooked her arm in his but he didn’t. He even managed to open the car door for her without touching her shoulder.
The first thought of a woman in Hannah’s situation is that the chosen man may be gay. She knew Bal wasn’t without being able to say precisely how she knew. If anyone else had said to her, about knowing some fact, that she ‘just had a feeling’ she would have despised this answer but that was how it was for her. She had a feeling; she knew. Once they were back at her flat, of course, things would be easier. She had put a bottle of champagne in the fridge that afternoon. Although they had been changed just two days before, she had put fresh sheets on the bed. He lived only about a quarter of a mile away and in any case it wouldn’t matter how much he drank since he’d be spending the night with her.
‘You’ll come in, Bal?’
He had pulled up outside Drayton Court and made her heart leap when he took the key out of the ignition. All the way home a voice had been whispering, but sup pose he says no? He said yes, opened the car door for her and then the gate to the flats’ garden. Her heart gave another little blip when he turned and pressed the remote that locked the car doors. He wouldn’t have done that if he meant no more than to see her up the stairs and into her own domain.
