Wexford 20 - End In Tears

by Ruth Rendell

  They were outside the door now. She heard the key turn in the lock. The chain pressed into the palm of her hand was strangely comforting.

  He hadn’t been given a chance to tell the guv about the other thing he had remembered. Of course he knew very well why Wexford had stopped him being one of the team going to Hannah’s rescue. It was because he thought Bal was having an affair with Hannah. Or a ‘relationship’, as she would have called it. He thought of her tenderly as he quoted her in his mind, gently and with some amusement. ‘Relationship’ was the most passion-killing term he could imagine, guaranteed to make you think of an earnest couple in anoraks and walking boots camping in Snowdonia.

  Could he really think that what he remembered hearing in that absurd yellow-satin drawing room had any significance? Yet why would Arlen have talked about a road and a bridge unless he saw a dangerous corner as potentially useful to him? Useful one day. You never knew when you’d need it. On the other hand he might be a villain - he was - but he was a citizen as well. He must have the same concerns about safety and the environment as anyone else.

  Bal didn’t go home. He sat in his car a little way down the High Street and watched the three cars move off It was very cold and he didn’t want to heat the car by running the engine while stationary Of course, if he went off to Yorstone he could put the heater on. Going there couldn’t do any harm. If he went home he wouldn’t sleep, he’d lie there wondering if he ought to have insisted on talking to Wexford, shouted above all the talk, followed him out to his car instead of doing what he was told and leaving. He switched on the ignition and the heater. As usual, icy air came out of it before it warmed up, a blast like a force eight gale. Bal wasn’t exactly sure where Yorstone was — somewhere west of Cheriton Forest and on the way to Sewingbury? This country was so badly signposted compared with every where else. The signs kept saying Sewingbury and Stowerton, Yorstone only when the turn-off was a hundred yards away. Even then it didn’t say Yorstone Lane. He knew that was what it had to be because to the left of him loomed the darkness of Yorstone Wood. He turned down the unlit narrow lane. His headlights on full beam created a bluish mist ahead of him and in the mist tree trunks reared up, dark and straight like figures in a fantasy

  The lane turned sharp left, almost at a right angle. But for the black and white arrows on the right-hand side he might have gone straight on and ploughed in among the tall dark shapes. He was beginning to realise that his whole enterprise was stupid, based on nothing but a sort of hunch that had no real foundation. As he pulled up and parked under the trees, he felt for the first time true terror for Hannah, a real dread that some thing terrible had happened to her

  When they got to Pomfret Hall lights were shining from every window. Wexford got out of the car, went up to the front door and pulled the bell, Burden and Karen behind him, the rest a few yards back No one came to the door. Wexford rang the bell again, hammered on the panelled wood with his fists. He told Barry and Damon to go round the back. The house was so big that ‘round the back’ required a walk of several hundred yards. Its rear, as Wexford said, was more in the nature of a ‘garden front’, with another double flight of stairs ascending to a terrace and another pair of double doors. Lawns, flower beds, shrubberies and outlying meadows lay glittering under frost from the blaze of light that poured from the windows.

  Ringing the bell and pounding on the door fetched no one. There was no sound except for the sound they made themselves.

  ‘We have to go in there,’ Wexford said. ‘Break the door down.’

  They couldn’t do it. The combined efforts of Burden, Barry Vine and Damon Coleman failed to move those heavy oak doors. Damon went down into an area behind the stairs, which housed two large stone urns and a ladder, and found a humbler door in the wall. This yielded the second time he ran at it, shivering the wood and splitting the lock. They all went in, through rooms full of flowerpots and brooms and garden tools, then a kind of laundry, on to the kitchens, newly refurbished with state-of-the-art equipment.

  ‘One guy lives here on his own?’ Damon had never seen anything like it.

  Lights seemed to be on in every room. ‘Why is that?’ Barry asked but no one knew the answer. ‘Surely not to make anyone calling think there were people in here.’

  ‘Maybe he’s afraid of the dark,’ said Burden. ‘Come to think of it, it was early afternoon when Bal and I came here but he had a lot of lights on then.’

  Just as the place was brightly lit, so it was as warm as a sunny summer’s day. Wexford thought briefly of such a day in August when Amber’s body had been found.

  They climbed the stairs to the gallery and the first floor, and as they came to a pair of double doors, Damon said suddenly, “Where’s Hannah’s car?’

  ‘She didn’t come by car,’ Burden said. ‘Her car’s parked outside the station. But wait a minute, how did she get here?’

  ‘Taxi?’ Wexford opened the doors. Revealing a huge bedroom with four-poster bed, the whole place as neat as if no one had ever undressed, slept and dressed in it. ‘She must have taken a taxi. Get on to the station, Damon, and have someone start calling taxi firms now.’

  If she came here, he thought, if she was ever here. All we know is that she was going to see Arlen. She might have been meeting him somewhere on neutral ground. The others seemed to have the same thought, voicing it as they walked through the bedrooms.

  Karen and Barry spoke almost in unison: ‘We don’t know she came here.’

  ‘No, but we have to search,’ said Wexford.

  They went up to the third floor, more empty rooms, more light. Down again, across the gallery, down the great wide curving staircase into the hail, the dining room, the yellow drawing room where Bal might or might not have seen a gun. Back into the hail again, having been through an empty silent house that felt as if no one had lived in it for years, as if it were merely a showplace, open for tours and tour guides on certain days of the week

  ‘What now, sir?’ said Barry.

  Wexford didn’t answer. He bent down and picked up from the floor a thin gold chain, fine as a hair. ‘She has been here,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen her wearing this.’

  ‘So have I,’ said Karen. ‘It was a present from Bal.’

  Wexford considered. ‘It was a mistake sending Bal home. He may know more than we do. I’ll call him.’

  In the distance he heard the sound of the four-by-four’s engine. Its lights showed between the tree trunks and then it appeared, coming slowly and cautiously down Yorstone Lane. His heart had leapt but now he thought, it’s just a car. It’s someone going home from a party or a long-distance drive. But no, it was a silver car - Hannah’s mother had one just like that. There were hundreds like it. It was probably the most popular car in the neighbourhood. They’ll go over the bridge and on up the lane on the other side, he thought. But a dozen yards this side of the bridge the car stopped and a man got out. It was Rick Samphire.

  He was hooded as usual. He moved on to the bridge and looked down at the road below, every movement shown up clearly in the four-by-four’s headlights. If it’s just him, Bal thought, I can handle him on my own, no problem. He was asking himself where Arlen was when the man got out of the driver’s seat. Were there any more? Shocking him, his phone suddenly rang.

  It could only be Wexford or Burden. If he answered it they would tell him. . . what would they tell him? Something unacceptable, he was sure. He let it ring, hating the sound of it. Then he saw Hannah’s face. It appeared at the window by the passenger seat. He answered the phone.

  Wexford’s voice said, ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘At Yorstone Bridge,’ said Sal, ‘sir. They’ve got Hannah here.’

  He put the phone down, knowing it might cost him his job.

  What were they going to do? A cold shiver like icy water trickling the length of his back ran down his spine. She wouldn’t stay there unless they were forcing her to do so. And, co-occurring with the thought, she was staying there no longer.
The door opened and she stepped down from the passenger seat, as if of her own volition. Then he saw there was someone behind her and he recognised to his, astonishment the man called Lawson who was Rick’s alibi for the eleventh of August. He must be holding something pressed to the small of her back - the gun he had seen that day in the yellow drawing room?

  Rick had crossed to the other side of the bridge and Norman Arlen with him. They were looking down over the low parapet and as they did so a car passed underneath them. Just as Amber Marshalson’s had passed when Rick had dropped that lump of concrete. Hannah was still standing there, almost leaning, it seemed, against the burly thickset figure of Lawson. They’ll put her back in the car, he thought, and - throw her over the bridge? Try to do that . . But they didn’t. Rick was still on the far side of the bridge but Arlen was coming back. Whatever means was being used to keep Hannah rigid and leaning backwards, Arlen took it over. Lawson got back into the car, into the driving seat, reversed it with a roar of the engine and drove it forwards down the slope towards the bridge.

  It was the sight of the handcuffs that galvanised Bal. He watched Arlen, unmistakably a gun in one hand, unlock the handcuffs with the other and Hannah lift up her hands to cover her face. Bal leapt from his car, with out a thought, without the least caution or fear. Later he was to think, so that’s how it feels in a battle, how it felt when they used to go ‘over the top’, when adrenalin surges and puts the frightened mind to sleep.

  He leapt upon Arlen like an animal on its prey. His onslaught was so violent that he barely noticed the crash as the four-by-four went over the parapet, Lawson leaping out on to the bridge at the last moment. Arlen sank to his knees, swaying, then falling forwards. In that moment Bal saw what the gun was, a child’s toy of light weight gunmetal plastic. Rick was running back now but Hannah, her hands free, swung round and delivered a high kick which caught him in the crotch. As he doubled up, Lawson came at her, reaching with his hands for her throat. This time it was Bal who kicked out, toppling him and seeing his agonised face in the blazing lights of the police cars coming down the lane.

  Rick turned to run the other way as Hannah gave chase. Halfway across the bridge he turned round to face her but pain from Hannah’s kick seemed to catch him. He doubled up, clutching the tops of his thighs, as Hannah came at him again. As if he dreaded another onslaught, he first flinched and, as her hands made to seize him, reared backwards like someone in muscle spasm from a poisonous alkaloid. He fell backwards across the parapet, whimpered something, cried out something and struggled to get back on his feet. But his heels slipped on the wet ice, his arms rose and wind- milled in the air and he went over with a scream, thirty feet down to the road below.

  Chapter 31

  ‘What was it he said before he went over?’ Burden asked.

  ‘Something about bloody women,’ said Wexford. ‘Ironical, wasn’t it? He was obsessed with this idea that women meant to destroy him and in the end it was a woman...’

  ‘I didn’t mean him to die, guv.’

  ‘Everyone knows you didn’t, Hannah. He’d happily have destroyed you. You’d better go to hospital, you know. There’s an ambulance down there waiting to take you.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  He laughed tiredly just when he was thinking he’d never laugh again. ‘No, you don’t have to. Bal can take you home.’

  By this time it was raining heavily and they were all soaked. Barry Vine and Damon Coleman got Norman Arlen into the car and took him away to the police station, where he would spend what was left of the night in a cell before appearing before the magistrates in the morning.

  ‘What are we going to charge him with?’ Burden asked when he and Wexford were under cover. ‘Possession of a firearm? Attempted murder? False imprisonment?’

  All that and a good deal more. Deception, for one thing. Perverting the course of justice. There’ll be more charges later.’

  Donaldson got out and opened the car doors for them. Getting in, Burden said, ‘Were all those women really fools enough to believe they could go to Africa, be given an anaesthetic and wake up with a baby? A black baby?’

  ‘I don’t think we, as men, will ever quite understand the longing some women, many women, have for a child. We hear talk about sex and self-preservation being the strongest of human instincts or urges. Maybe they are in men. In women the strongest can be the passion for a child of their own. Those women Norman Arlen deceived wanted to believe, they psyched them selves up to believe against all reason because each one of them wanted a baby of her own more than anything in the world. Ten thousand pounds apiece? Twenty? A child of one’s own would be cheap at the price. Fly to Africa, undergo an anaesthetic, do something with pass ports you know in your heart must be illegal - all that is nothing as the price for having your own precious baby. By the way, my daughter Sylvia’s had a girl and she’s keeping it. Bye-bye surrogacy.’

  ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Meanwhile, we have to get some sleep.’

  When they got to her flat he meant to carry her upstairs. Vague memories returned to him of once seeing a video of Gone With the Wind, of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up a great ante-bellum staircase. He did try but the flights up to Hannah’s flat were steeper than those in eighteen-sixties Atlanta and at the sixth tread they both collapsed in a giggling heap and began a passionate kissing. With a muffled ‘We can’t stay here’, Hannah finally got up, pulled him up after her and, clinging to each other, they got inside her flat.

  ‘I feel so dirty,’ Hannah said.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘We could have a bath.’

  ‘We could have a bath in the morning,’ said Bal and his next effort at carrying her he did manage. He carried her to bed. As her clothes were hurled past him, landing on various pieces of furniture, he stripped off his own, leaving jeans and pants and sweater and shirt on the floor. When he had switched off the light and got into bed beside her, she was already fast asleep. He lay close to her, spoons-fashion, his arm round her waist, smiling in the dark All those weeks he had refused her and now he was willing - more than willing, urgently desirous - she was refusing him. But the morning would come.

  After Norman Arlen had been charged on several counts and remanded in custody, Wexford and Burden came away from the court and walked across towards the police station. After snow, rain and finally hail in the small hours, it was a mild clear morning, a pale sun shining, the streets still wet and gleaming.

  ‘What are you going to do about Bhattacharya?’ Burden asked.

  ‘I’ve done it. Nothing. Told him off, that’s all. He rescued her. She’d probably be dead now but for him. I hope gratitude won’t spoil things for them.’

  Burden looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Well, you know the old joke. Why does he hate me so much? I never did him any good.’

  Burden changed the subject. ‘D’you remember the day we had that fry-up? I’d like to go back there. Not for egg and chips but a coffee and a huge Danish pastry’

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Wexford, ‘but I will. I was too tired to have breakfast.’

  It wasn’t that the superior greasy spoon in Queen Street looked more inviting than on the previous occasion but that this time they saw how much more it had on offer. Ten different kinds of coffee seemed impossibly sophisticated and it was hard to choose between Danish pastries and Florentines.

  ‘It’s a funny thing’, said Wexford when they had sat down at a table in the window, ‘that everyone but the Danes call these things Danish pastries.’

  'What do they call them, then?’

  ‘Viennese bread.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Wexford. ‘There must be a reason but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Never mind the Danish pastries. You said you were going to tell me everything and so far all you’ve told me is Arlen’s multitude of sins. Did you mean you know it
all? The whole thing?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I like coffee with chocolate on the top, though I expect it’s very bad for me.’ Wexford sipped the chocolatey froth, set his cup down and after a moment’s silence, began.

  ‘This all started when George Marshalson’s first wife died when Amber was seven,’ Wexford said. ‘Or, rather, it started when he married again. Diana’s first husband left her a house worth two million and assets of another four million. Why she married George is a mystery. I suppose she loved him. Perhaps she thought she would eventually get on with Amber. George certainly thought he’d be giving her a second mother. Neither of these things happened Amber disliked Diana from the first What efforts Diana made to get on with her we don’t know but they failed. George adored his daughter and this can’t have made things easy between him and his wife.

  ‘Amber was very good-looking and bright and lively. Of course, she had a boyfriend and she became pregnant She was five months pregnant before George and Diana found out. Or, I should say, Diana found out. Diana saw. Both of them would have advised her to have an abortion if they had known sooner. She had taken her GCSEs more than a year before, intended to do A levels and eventually go to university. What would happen to all that now?’

  Burden interrupted him. ‘Amber would have been what? Seventeen by then?’

  ‘Seventeen in the July and Brand was born in September. It soon became clear she had no intention of leaving school. No, she’d go back to school, leaving the baby at home with George and Diana, which in effect meant Diana because in these cases, as you know, the man goes on with his job and the woman . . . makes accommodations.’

  ‘I have good reason to know,’ said Burden, whose first wife had died and his children been cared for by her sister in often difficult circumstances.