by Ruth Rendell
Sullen and rather late, Colin Fry turned up at the police station wearing a padded jacket with a hood. This made Wexford vow to himself that he would henceforth reject hoods as having any bearing on the case. When asked once more who Ross Samphire’s companion was, Fry again said he didn’t know.
‘Have you ever seen her, Mr Fry?’
Fry was silent, considering, though this was some thing no honest person would need to think about for long. ‘I might have,’ he finally said cautiously.
'What does she look like?’
‘Late thirties, early forties. Nice figure. Sort of good- looking - I don’t know. I’m no good at saying what people look like.’
‘Is her name Lydia Burton?’
‘It might be.’ Fry sounded cautious. ‘I reckon.’ His eyes met Wexford’s, shifted away. ‘I don’t want Ross knowing I said that,’ he said. ‘I don’t. You got to remember Ross is my. . . well, my livelihood. I depend on him. You people don’t care if you put a bloke out of a job. It’s all in the day’s work to you.’
From the window, Wexford watched him leave, cross the forecourt to where his van was parked, pulling his padded coat round him and hunching his shoulders. It was turning cold. ‘Unseasonable’ was Burden’s word for it, which Wexford said was a misnomer for any weather at any time of year in this country. Because he’d known snow in June and sitting-out-of-doors days in December. Their next call was on Mrs Brooks’s Sharon Lucas. The car had been standing out on the police station forecourt for no more than an hour but Donaldson had to de-ice the rear window and windscreen before they set off.
‘To think’, said Burden, ‘that when this case began it was incredibly hot and the day Amber was killed was the hottest since records began.’
‘That’s the way it goes.’ Wexford was in a cross mood. As for its being incredible, I have no difficulty in believing it. I wouldn’t have’, he said, soaring away in: flights of fantasy, ‘if it snowed tomorrow or the temperature went up forty degrees, or by the time we got to Myringham a thunderstorm had started.’
Burden said no more, recognising the early signs of rage. Calmer after a moment or two, Wexford said, ‘I wish I could say all Damon’s work hasn’t been in vain. I wish we could have shown Fry to be keeping a brothel because that means he’s discredited and his status as the provider of alibis comes to nothing. But as he said himself, there’s nothing to stop anyone lending their home to friends for an evening. And if he takes payment for it, so what? You can employ housesitters, if you want to, or babysitters or dog and catsitters, and you pay for that.’
‘It’s shown us Ross Samphire as an adulterer.’
‘I believe adultery’s a crime in some of the Emirates and in parts of Africa but it isn’t here and I for one hope it never will be.’
‘No, but his conduct discredits him. He’s no longer whiter than white.’
‘Was he ever, Mike? He looks pure but we know he isn’t. We knew he wasn’t before Damon started his surveillance. We know Rick killed those girls and Ross is covering up for him.’
‘There’s one little problem there, though, isn’t there? Colin Fry Fry’s no saint but he wouldn’t lie about Rick’s whereabouts if he really thought Rick had killed Megan. He says Rick was in the old bank building with him on the first of September. I don’t think he’d say that, Reg, if he believed Rick had killed Megan.’
‘Then what does he think he’s supplying these alibis for?’
‘What people have always believed or convinced themselves of. That we’ve got it in for someone because he’s got form. If he can help a friend out of trouble, why not? That’s a far cry from trying to save a friend from a murder charge.’
The flat she lived in was very small, not much more than a studio. It consisted of a single room perhaps fifteen feet by twelve and the two open doors in one of the long walls showed a tiny kitchen and tinier shower room. Wexford’s first thought was that no Social Services home assessment would have approved this as a fit space for a child to grow up in. It was too small and too much in the nature of a pied-a-terre. Sharon Lucas’s bed was the kind that lifts up and folds away inside the wall but today no one had folded it away, although it was nearly midday. The baby lay in a drawer. Burden cast an inscrutable glance at this subsitute for a cot but Wexford had heard of it before. His grandmother had told him that this was what ‘the poor’ did rather than acquire what she called a bassinet.
He was a black baby, or rather, a pale coffee colour with the beautiful face and noble head Wexford associated (possibly erroneously) with Somali people. His hair was black and as tightly curled as an astrakhan cap on this shapely skull. Wide awake and quite calm, he had lifted plump brown arms out from under the covers and was waving them in the air, watching the moving shadows they made on the white wall. If this child was born two, or even four, weeks ago, Wexford thought, I’m Sherlock Holmes. I only wish I were.
The rage which had been simmering on the journey here now swelled and threatened to explode. He was glad this character Quickwood wasn’t here. Violence done to the man would mean the end of Wexford’s career. And he wouldn’t have been able to resist striking him. . . . He drew a deep breath, looked, properly, almost for the first time, at the woman they had come to see. She was a poor thing, he thought, his anger dying into a kind of despair, a skinny little wizened woman of forty with over-bright eyes and milk-white skin, anaemic, almost albino-white.
‘I’d like to ask you a few questions,. Mrs Lucas,’ he began, introducing Burden and sitting down on the bed.
‘Actually, it’s Ms,’ she said but in a tone so apologetic as to be almost ingratiating.
Not liking to take the only armchair, Burden perched himself on a kitchen stool. He too looked at the baby and his expression became pensive. Wexford’s next question surprised him.
‘What’s the baby’s name?’
‘Elkanah,’ said Sharon Lucas.
‘Really? Did you get it from the Bible?’
She shook her head. ‘You know Elkanah Jones who’s Dr Steadman in Casualty? On the TV?’
t was easier to accept and enquire no further.
‘He black, you see, and ever so good-looking.’
‘I dare say,’ said Wexford. ‘Your Elkanah is black too, isn’t he? You’re not. Is his father?’
‘Oh, no. Anyway, I’ve not seen him for months and months.’ She didn’t seem to understand that they found this explanation inadequate.
Wexford couldn’t remember when he had been so at a loss. For a moment he could think of nothing to say to her. He had no language; they didn’t speak the same one. She seemed not to speak any of the languages he could assume for the various strange people he was obliged to interview. She was looking at him with large, blank, simple eyes. There was an artless innocence about her which struck him dumb. While he tried for words, Burden said, ‘You went on a tour to Africa, did you, Ms Lucas?’
‘A Miracle Tour,’ she said.
‘And where was this arranged?’
‘Pardon?’
Burden tried again. ‘Tell us about your trip to Africa, Ms Lucas. You went to Nairobi,- is that right? Was this a holiday?’
She surprised him. ‘It was fertility treatment.’
‘In Africa?’
With an almost indignant shake of the head, she said, ‘The treatment was here. We had to eat special things, take vitamins and not have alcohol or coffee. We did that for six months. Then we went to Nairobi for the miracle.’
‘What was that?’ Wexford asked, grateful to Burden for preparing the ground.
‘I don’t know about the others. I never saw them again. They didn’t come from around here. I went to this nursing home. It was a house, very nice and clean, with a doctor in a white coat and two nurses. They were black people. The doctor gave me an injection and I went to sleep.’
‘This was an anaesthetic?’
‘Yes, it was. When I woke up they put my baby in my arms.’
‘Just like that?’
&n
bsp; ‘The nurse said it was a very easy birth and I could leave with Elkanah in a couple of hours. We were ten on the flight but they all came from different places. When I went home with Elkanah the man with us - they called him a courier - he brought me Elkanah’s passport. It was really sweet him having a passport at his age.’
By this time Elkanah had grown weary of watching the shadows his hands made on the wall and begun a soft grizzling. Sharon picked him up in stick-like white arms which looked too fragile to bear his weight. But as she held him up to her shoulder, his fat brown cheek against her bony jaw, a look of such tender adoration came into her face as to transform her almost into beauty. Wexford was reminded of another woman with a child, a woman whose attitude to that child was the reverse of this, and for a moment he seemed to see Diana Marshalson’s patient indifference.
‘Ms Lucas, would you mind telling us what you paid for your Miracle Tour?’
‘It cost a lot. They explained about that.’ She carried Elkanah into the kitchen and took a feeding bottle from the minuscule refrigerator. Juggling then began as she struggled to hold the bottle under the running hot tap while keeping the now screaming baby’s clutching hand as far from it as she could. Wexford wondered how old he in fact was. The passport would say - or this false pass port would say something. Satisfied that the bottle’s con tents were now warm enough, Sharon thrust the teat into Elkanah’s mouth and sat down with him, smiling happily. ‘I had to take out a mortgage on my flat. Ten thousand pounds it was. But that was for everything, the diet treatment, the flight, the birth and Elkanah’s passport.’
‘Do you have a job, Ms Lucas?’
‘I work nights on the checkout at Tesco. Four nights a week. My mum keeps an eye on Elkanah.’ She seemed to realise, in a dim puzzled way, that rather more explanation was needed for this expenditure than she had given. ‘I did want a baby of my own, you see. I’d tried and tried. I just longed for a baby. I used to look at other women with babies and I don’t know why I didn’t take one of them, I was that sick about it.’ Elkanah was sucking on his bottle with enthusiasm and at great speed. Sharon stroked his head with infinite gentleness. ‘But I’m all right now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my own baby.’
And we’ve got to take him away from her,’ Wexford said.
‘We’ve got to take the babies away from all those women, or someone has. I almost feel I haven’t the heart to do it. I haven’t the heart to go ahead with this. Why not pretend we never heard any of that from Gwenda Brooks?’
‘You’re joking, of course.’ Burden said it sternly, almost fiercely. ‘Of course we have to go ahead with it. Of course we do. What, let these villains go on conning these fool women? Go on raking in ten thousand a time for one of the dirtiest scams I’ve ever come across?’
‘I was joking, Mike, if joking can be the word in this context. He has to be stopped. It’s just that I wish. well, I wish people weren’t so wicked. That sounds daft, doesn’t it? An old copper like me. So we send Hannah into Miracle Travel, posing as a baby-hungry would-be mum?’
‘I think so. You wouldn’t believe it, though, would you? You couldn’t invent it. A whole bunch of women who want babies so much they’re prepared to think they can go to Africa, give birth without being pregnant and bring back an African baby as their own child?’
‘I once learnt by heart something Bertrand Russell said. Let’s see if I can- remember it. “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it isn’t utterly absurd. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
‘It’s not labour, darling,’ said Mary ‘You’re having Branxton-Hicks contractions. It probably means baby’s coming in a week or two. Could be sooner.’
Sylvia heaved her great bulk up off the sofa. ‘I had them with Ben but I’d forgotten. I’ve got to the stage now when I just want it to stop. I mean I just want to get it over with. Have you noticed something? Unless you have and haven’t told me, we haven’t heard a word from Naomi for two whole days.’
‘I have.’
'And something’s happened to stop you telling me.’
Mary went out to the kitchen, was gone perhaps two minutes and came back with a bottle of sparkling water flavoured with elderflower and two glasses. She filled the glasses, held one out to Sylvia and said, ‘I don’t know how you’ll feel but somehow I think you won’t like it much. Women don’t, even if they no longer care for the man.’
‘For God’s sake, what is it?’
‘Naomi and Neil are getting married in two weeks’ time.’
Sylvia sipped from her glass. She set it down. ‘It’s nothing to me, is it? If it weren’t her it’d be someone else. I left him, anyway. I’ve nothing to complain of.’ She closed her eyes, said slowly, ‘Yes, I suppose I do mind, I don’t like it. Oh, what a fool I am, Mary.’
She began to cry, the tears trickling out from under her closed lids. Mary came to sit beside her and took her hand.
Chapter 27
In the fur coat she borrowed from her mother, Hannah set off for London by the ten fifty-one train from Kingsmarkham. She wore grey flannel trousers, ankle boots and, tied round her head, a silk scarf with a pattern on it of harness and horse brasses. Dressing like this depressed her and made her self-conscious. Never, in her real undisguised life, would she have dreamt of wearing ranch mink or a headscarf or trousers with a long coat. At least she was warm. She had no high heels to impede her if she had to run or tights to ladder. She took off the headscarf in the train and felt a little better.
Having been to university in London, Hannah knew it well. She took the tube from Victoria to Green Park and walked up. It was rather less cold than in Sussex — it mostly was - but she had put back the headscarf. They said London was warmer because of all the hot- water pipes. Could that be true? She passed Nicky Clarke, the hairdresser, and had the ridiculous thought that the people inside must all be looking at her, thinking how dowdy she was and that her hair must be horrible if she needed to cover it up.
Miracle Tours was a little way along. The travel agent’s wasn’t so much a shop as a bow-windowed office squeezed between two tall houses of Georgian elegance. A bell had to be pressed to let you in. She was the last person they’d let in if they knew what she was up to, Hannah thought. She pressed the bell and the door made a little growling sound allowing her to push it open.
Inside the small and cosily warm office a young woman with long blonde hair sat at a desk stacked with the usual brochures. The emerald-green carpet was thick and soft, the furniture of blond wood and steel. On the walls were the usual posters, advertising holidays in Sharm-el-Sheik, Innsbruck, Penang and Rio de Janeiro but all framed in steel.
‘How may I help you?’
Hannah wished she could have her nails done like this girl’s but she never could. It was out of the question. They were immensely long, obviously with artificial extensions, and on each was a tiny picture of a tropical beach with silver sand, palm trees and iridescent blue sea. She looked longingly at them, averted her eyes and began on what she had come for.
‘I hear you arrange, er, miracle tours.’ She sounded nervous, she could tell, but all the better. Anyone asking about a thing like that would be nervous.
The girl said cagily, ‘We are Miracle Travel. Did someone you know recommend us?’
‘Mrs Brooks,’ Hannah said and when this seemed to have no effect, was suddenly inspired. ‘She sent me to Mr Quickwood.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Miss Tropical Beach’s accent had gradually been growing more refined and from this Hannah took heart. She must be making the right impression. ‘Yes, that’s excellent. May I know your name?’
‘It’s Anna Smithson,’ said Hannah.
‘And your home address?’
Hannah gave her own. Who could prove no Anna Smithson lived there?
‘What kind of miracle tour did you have in mind?’
The time had come for a fra
nk avowal, an opening of the heart woman-to-woman. ‘I’m desperate to have a baby. I’ve tried everything. Miracle Travel is my last hope. I’m so depressed, I think I’ll do something, well, something awful, put an end to everything if I can’t have a child. Do you think I’m a fool?’
It went against the grain with Hannah to talk like this. The words almost stuck in her throat but she realised that this choking awkwardness was all to the good. This was ten times better than a smooth stating of the case. A spark of sympathy had appeared in Miss Tropical Beach’s glassy blue eyes.
‘It’s best if you speak to our managing director but he won’t be up till this afternoon. Could you come back at three . . . well, say three-thirty?’
Hannah could. Going out into the cold was very unpleasant and there was no car to dive into. What had that girl meant by ‘up’? ‘He won’t be up till this after noon’? That he wouldn’t be up to London, say, or he wouldn’t be out of bed? Surely not the latter. Wexford had said to go shopping. Why not? Reappearing with a couple of Bond Street bags could only add verisimilitude to her disguise when she returned and it was ages since she had bought anything new...
On the concrete slab outside the bungalow, instead of the aged Volvo stood a new red Toyota. On closer inspection it turned out not to be quite new and, though a gift from Ross, had been given from necessity not simply altruism. Rick had managed to write off the little Volvo, tough car though it was, by reversing it down a one-way street and crashing it - more violently and disastrously than could have been conceived of in those circumstances into a big four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser parked by the kerb.
‘They say I’m accident-prone,’ said Rick. He presented a sorry sight, limping from jarring his left knee, his right arm in a sling from a sprained wrist and a plaster half covering his forehead from where he had struck it on the rear mirror. ‘I never saw that four-by-four. I told the guy it belongs to I reckon I had a stroke. They said at the Princess Diana I hadn’t but that’s all that accounts for it.’
