by Ruth Rendell
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 around 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 suppose 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.
But not far in and not for long. He refused a drink.
“You know how it is, Hannah. When one of us is over the limit it’s the end. It’s not like a member of the public who can weather it.”
“Half a glass wouldn’t put you over the limit.”
They were sitting side by side on her sofa. At her pleading look, he laid one hand on her knee, leaned toward her, smilingly shaking his head. She felt rather faint and it wasn’t the drink but that long slender hand on her leg.
“You don’t have to go home.” She would never have believed she’d feel so diffident, so bashful, making a remark she’d made, in various versions, so many times before. “You could stay here.” He listened, one eyebrow raised. “With me,” she added.
It was suddenly as if he were very much older than she was instead of a year or two younger. With the hand that had rested on her knee he lifted her hand and brought it to his lips. Then he was on his feet, his face humiliatingly kind. “I’m enormously flattered. You’re just about the most beautiful woman I know, Sergeant Goldsmith. And nice with it.” He kissed her cheek. “I’m going now, but sometime soon I’ll tell you why I won’t stay the night with you.”
Speechless, she nodded.
“I’m not gay and I’m not involved with anyone else. Good night.”
They had come out into Victoria Terrace and were making for car and van when an elderly woman came up to them, not to Burden but to PS Peach. Later on Burden was to be thankful for “uniform.” If his team had all been in plainclothes their discovery might have been delayed for weeks. For the woman who was plaintively imploring a rescue operation be mounted for her lost cat would never, he was sure, have approached them if she hadn’t seen the reassuring and comforting dark-blue jacket, trousers, and cap of four of their number.
She gave her name as Mrs. Lyall, Pauline Lyall. “I’m not asking you to look for him,” she was saying. “I know where he’s got to. I can see him. Look up there.”
Burden looked. It was still light enough to make out, in a gap between the sheets of green netting, the orange and white shape of a large cat at an upstairs window. The cat’s mouth was stretched wide open in what seemed a continuous wail. The last thing he wanted to do at this hour was somehow find a way into that house and catch, possibly with difficulty, this stupid animal. Burden disliked cats. But of course they had to go in; there was no choice about it.
“What’s the best way to get in there, Sergeant?” he said to Peach.
“Back door, sir. It didn’t look too secure. I noticed it when we were in the back.”
The cat’s owner asked if she could come too. She would be a nuisance, he thought, but on the other hand the creature was more likely to go to her than to any of them. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”
Lynn Fancourt, Damon Coleman, and the rest were sent home. Burden, Peach, and Pauline Lyall went around the back through waist-high weeds, snagging brambles, and nettles which disobeyed the rule about not stinging when an R was in the month. Four steps led up to the back door of number four. Battens had been nailed diagonally across the door in which was a pane of glass. Burden didn’t want to have to break that glass and there was no need, for when the battens were off, the door came open easily, its lock being broken. They stepped into a large kitchen, fitted up in the style fashionable in 1950. Once they were out into the hallway, from which an elegant curved staircase wound, the cat’s yowls could be plainly heard.
“Oh, poor Ginger,” cried Mrs. Lyall. She was more agile than she looked and had begun running up the stairs.
Burden was no student of early Victorian elegance or he would have eyed the ceiling moldings, the arched alcoves, and the curving balusters, all scuffed and crazed and dilapidated as they were, with more interest. The house smelled of rotting wood and urine, and something else Peach said was mice. “Which might account for that Ginger finding his way in here, sir,” Peach added.
Burden didn’t care about Ginger’s motivation, nor did he think the smell was mice. He had smelled it before and had hoped never to smell it again. Dreading what might be at the top, he followed Peach up the stairs. But there was nothing—except the smell. All the doors to the three rooms on this floor were wide open and Mrs. Lyall stood just inside the largest one, holding a cat the size of a lynx in her arms and crooning softly to it.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
He wanted her out of there. Of course, if it was what he thought it was…“I’ll just have your home address, madam, if you please.”
“Oh, yes, with pleasure. It’s fifty-two Oval Road.”
“Right, then. If you’ll just take—er, Ginger, is it?—home we’ll do our best to lock up here.”
Calling back more thanks, she went downstairs carrying the cat. Burden heard her feet on the steps outside the back door.
“It’s somewhere,” he said to Peach. “I don’t suppose the lights in this place work, do they?”
“No, sir. I tried.”
“I’ll call in for backup. And lights.”
When Burden had made his call they explored the rooms on this floor. There was a cupboard in each, one a large walk-in place, almost a room in itself, but nothing in any of them but rolls of carpet, rolls of wallpaper, and a dead mouse. Peach seemed to think this mouse vindicated him, but he admitted it wasn’t what they were looking for. By now it was dark, the only light coming from street lamps on stilts but muted by the sheets of netting; it was an unearthly yellowish-green light that lay like a gilt varnish across floors and up walls. They went on up to the next floor, their footfalls noisy on the uncarpeted stairs, the smell growing stronger as they mounted. The stuffy heat was almost intolerable and Burden, a fastidious man, felt sweat roll down his sides, staining his oyster-colored shirt. Fortunately, it was too dark for the wet patches to show. He thought that forever after when he saw that sour lime-green color he would associate it with the smell of death.
At the top of the stairs was a landing from which three doors opened. Here, when he opened the first door, he experienced a revulsion so strong that he almost gagged. The room was bare, a
rectangle of sulfurous chrome light lying across the wooden floor, the color of jaundice. In the far corner, beyond the yellow glaze and in deep shadow, he could just make out a door with a round knob and a keyhole.
“He’ll have locked it and taken the key.”
“A cupboard, is it, sir? You want me to break the door down?”
“Check that it’s locked first.”
Of course it was. A heavy muscular man, Peach put his shoulder to it and at the second attempt the door gave way and burst open. Burden would have said the smell couldn’t have been worse, but it was. His eyes accustomed now to the darkness, he could just make out its source. He could see the bilious sheen of lamplight on long blond hair and, with his handkerchief held against his nose, was stepping forward to take a closer look when the footfalls of those coming to help them sounded on the stairs.
The lights they brought showed, slumped against the rear wall of the cupboard, the body of a girl. The hair, which in the near-dark had looked glossy, even dazzling, now appeared as it truly was, streaked and matted with dried blood. Dark red brick dust was on her face and marking the black T-shirt she wore. Her high-heeled white sandals were still on her feet and her white handbag was still hooked over one arm.
Burden had seen a version of that handbag before but of black leather, as ornamented with gilt buckles and studs and as heavily embellished with small buckled purses, on the arm of Sandra Warner, Megan Bartlow’s mother.
CHAPTER 14
* * *
There was never any doubt that the dead girl was Megan Bartlow. The handbag that had been with Megan’s body contained her credit card but nothing like the sum of money that had been found on Amber’s and no banned substances. Unless the murderer had ransacked the bag, it confirmed Wexford’s opinion that some women carry handbags simply as an attractive accessory and may keep nothing much in them. Megan’s wallet had a ten-pound note and a fiver in it, several pound coins and a fifty-pence piece, no makeup, no tissues, no mobile phone, no cigarettes, nothing else but a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing.
Wexford and Burden sat in Wexford’s office, leaving the team to a house-to-house inquiry in the Victoria Terrace–Oval Road area and a search for the owners of the house in the terrace.
“It has to be drugs,” Burden said. “Where else would Amber Marshalson have got that kind of money? How else would Megan and Prinsip have got all that equipment except by dealing or trafficking?”
“We’ve no evidence that Megan used drugs or sold them or trafficked in them,” said Wexford. “All we have to link the girls is the fact that they met, they made phone calls to each other and went to Germany together. And when you come to think of it, this is odd in itself. The class thing has changed enormously since I was young, but some things about human nature never change. Amber came from a well-off if not rich background. She didn’t go to a private school, true, but to a state school with a very high profile and then to a reputable sixth-form college. She herself went back there after her child was born to do her A levels. She intended to go to a university. Her boyfriend and the father of her child comes from a similar background. His father is an ex–Member of Parliament and the son is at Edinburgh University.
“But take poor little Megan. Brought up in various dumps by a mother generally called a single parent in spite of the stepfathers she has given her daughters. Left school, I’ve no doubt, at sixteen. Shop assistant. Lives with Keith Prinsip, who is one of these people who probably have never worked and, unless things change very much in this country, will take damn good care he never does work. What could have brought those girls together except some sort of business partnership, to put it grandiosely?”
“Drugs, like I said,” said Burden. “As to what brought them together, Megan’s sister Lara did. She was Amber’s friend originally.”
“Yes, but though she came out of the same nest, Lara is a very different creature altogether. A cuckoo, maybe. She was at a different school from her sister, Amber’s school, or at any rate she stayed on longer. She means to get on in life. Look how she dresses, how she’s put some upward mobility into her accent. When she introduced Amber to her sister I don’t think it was with a view to their becoming friends. I think it was because they were out together somewhere, happened to meet her sister and introductions were inevitable.”
“But it wasn’t a one-off, was it? They must have got in touch without Lara’s knowledge. One of them, Megan probably, recognized something in Amber, something in her appearance or what she said, maybe the words she used, that told her she’d be a suitable, well, business partner.”
“I can see all that. You’re almost certainly right. But was it drugs she saw there? That which ‘defeats the steady habit of exertion but creates spasms of irregular exertion. It ruins the natural power of life, but it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power’?”
“What?”
“De Quincey. I’ve been reading his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” Getting up, Wexford almost laughed at his friend’s bemused, slightly aghast, face. Adding to his consternation, he said, “Not for work. For fun.”
“Oh.” Burden put on his polite face that was so uncomprehending it made Wexford smile.
“Anyway, if they were trafficking it wasn’t opium. And traffickers don’t use—usually. But I don’t think it was drugs they were in partnership about.”
All of them, not just Wexford and Burden, knew the danger of holding a preconceived theory, yet each of them was doing this. The idea of the man in the hood was imprinted in their minds. A man in a hood had been seen on Yorstone Bridge at the time of the car crash; a man in a hood had been seen among the trees on August 11 when Amber was killed. And Amber and Megan were connected. Their deaths were connected, one surely consequent upon the other. So all of them, beginning their house-to-house investigation, were waiting to hear that a man in a hood had been seen in the vicinity of Victoria Terrace. But none of the people they talked to gave them the information they expected.
Mrs. Lyall’s house was furnished as a cat’s abode. A kind of climbing frame the size of a small tree and composed of posts and bars and platforms, all covered in felt or bound with cords, dominated the living room. A scratching post and claw-exercising tray occupied another corner. Ginger’s water bowl, feeding bowl, and dish of snacks took up the area beneath the bay while the symmetry of the French windows had been ruined (in Burden’s view) by the insertion of a cat flap of what looked like advanced design. Abandoned beside it, like a child’s cast-off toy, lay a much-chewed cloth rabbit. The possessor of all this largesse lay asleep in the middle of a three-seater sofa, the length of its outstretched body making it impossible for anyone else to sit alongside it.
Burden took a small upright chair and, while Mrs. Lyall went to make tea, directed at Ginger in a sibilant whisper a few well-thought-out insults. Tea and cakes were brought. Ginger slept on, snoring lightly and twitching as he dreamed. Burden asked about number four Victoria Terrace. Mrs. Lyall’s garden backed onto the garden of number four. What had she seen from these French windows in the past week? Had she seen anyone go in by the back door or come out? Or go in by the elegant if dilapidated French windows of number four with their panels of stained glass and their bars in art nouveau curves?
“If only Ginger could talk,” said Mrs. Lyall, “he’d have some tales to tell. He spends so much time in that garden, it’s like a little woodland to him. Of course, he understands every word that’s said to him, he’s a particularly intelligent cat. It’s just that he doesn’t talk.” Anxious to justify this deficiency on the part of her pet, she added, “It’s not that cats aren’t bright enough. It’s something to do with the shape of their throats. I read that in my cat magazine.”
“But what have you seen, Mrs. Lyall?”
“I sometimes think it’s wrong of me to let him go out there. Go outside at all, I mean. My friends tell me I shouldn’t and it’s true I do worry when he’s missing. I mean, anything might have
happened to him when he was in that house. Whoever killed that girl wouldn’t hesitate to kill an animal, would he?”
“Probably not.”
Burden told himself that, come what might, come what further ghastly anthropomorphic tributes to Ginger and admissions of exaggerated fears for his safety, he must maintain his politeness and pursue these inquiries with tact and consideration. Perhaps he should even take a tack more congenial to this household and gear his questions from Ginger’s point of view. Swallowing hard and taking a deep breath, he began again.
“Do you think Ginger saw anyone behaving suspiciously around the back of number four Victoria Terrace? Would he be nervous, for instance, if he encountered a strange man in his, er, his haunts?”
Thank God he had come here alone! Imagine Barry Vine or Karen Malahyde hearing him talk this crass nonsense. It was clearly the right line to take. Laying a caressing hand on Ginger’s large pointed head, Mrs. Lyall hastened to assure Burden that her cat was afraid of nothing and no one. He was as brave as a lion. Just the same, about a week ago, the Saturday evening, as it was beginning to get dark, he had come through his cat flap from outside at tremendous speed and with a crash that set the flap swinging. She had looked out, naturally she had, and seen a man looking through one of the glass panels in the French windows of number four.
Burden was too old a hand at this to ask her if the man had worn a hood. The question was there, though, in his mind. “What did he look like?”
He had his back to her, Pauline Lyall said. He wasn’t doing anything, just staring in, but she hadn’t liked him being there and had seriously considered calling the police, but suddenly the man had turned away and made his way across the gardens to where a portion of the wall was crumbling, giving access to Pyramid Road.
“Perhaps I should have called them. It’s not right a man going about frightening an animal like that, is it?”
