by Ruth Rendell
“Would you know this man again? Can you describe him?”
Pauline Lyall poured Burden another cup of tea. He thought he detected disappointment in her face that she couldn’t pour one for Ginger.
“All I know is he was thin and tallish. It was getting dark, you see.”
“Did he have a hood?” Now he had to ask.
“A hood? Oh, no. It was so warm. You know how it’s been. He was in one of those—what do you call them?—T-shirts.”
Burden thanked her for the tea and left, cursing under his breath and picking ginger hairs off his charcoal linen trousers. At least ten of the little houses in this street backed onto the gardens of Victoria Terrace. Karen Malahyde came out of number forty-eight as he walked past its gate.
“The old man who lives there says his sight isn’t good enough to see to the end of his garden, let alone to that back door, but there’s a woman at forty-seven who’s positive those battens weren’t nailed across the door until this week.”
“Have you been to forty-six?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“We’ll both go,” said Burden.
Mrs. Spear, catless but with a small suspicious-looking pug at her heels, had an invalid husband in a wheelchair and a blue budgerigar in a cage. John Spear’s chair was positioned immediately in front of the French windows and, as his garden sloped a little toward its rear wall, the whole panorama of the Victoria Terrace land lay in his view. On the table beside him sat a small pair of binoculars.
“Nothing very exciting to see most of the time,” he said to Burden, “but I get some surprises. There was a fox made her home down there in the spring—well, nest, I should say. She had her cubs there and I sat here and watched them playing for hours, didn’t I, Eileen?”
The residents of Oval Road were animal-obsessed, Burden thought, but Mr. Spear might be a godsend just the same. He wasn’t likely to find anyone else rooted to the spot, so to speak, and the spot the best vantage point in all the ten houses.
“Get a lot of birds, too. They wake me up in the small hours with their singing. Still, better them than the courting couples. If courting’s what they’re doing. We had a different word for it when I was young and we thought you ought to get married first.”
“Did you notice the battens on the back door over there, Mr. Spear?”
“I noticed when they were there. One day they weren’t, they never had been, not in all the twenty-five years we’ve lived here, and the next they were. Eileen wheeled me over here eight o’clock in the morning, the way she always does, and I took one look out here and said to her, ‘Them bits of wood are new,’ and she said, ‘What bits of wood?’ and I said, ‘On that back door at number four in the terrace.’”
“And he was right,” said Mrs. Spear. “I looked and then I said, ‘You’re right, Jack. Them bits of wood are new. I wonder why they put them there,’ I said, and he said, ‘Somebody’ll have broken in there and that’s why they’ve done that.’”
“Can you remember which day it was that you saw the battens for the first time?” Karen asked.
“Let me think.”
The budgerigar began twittering while John Spear thought. Outside, in the wilderness, a gust of wind blew through the bushes and set the leaves fluttering. No foxes, no human beings, no birds to be seen, but the hot strong sun blazing down.
“Got it,” said John Spear suddenly. “It wasn’t the day after we saw the young lady out there but the day after that. The day we saw her, like early evening it was, maybe sixish, it had clouded over and I said to Eileen, ‘The weather’s breaking at last.’ But it didn’t and the heat come back next day and the day after that them bits of wood went up.”
“What young lady would that be, Mr. Spear?”
“Well, I say ‘young lady’ but I don’t call them ladies when they wear them miniskirts. She had one of them on and she was walking about in them bushes. I reckon she came in where they all do, through Pyramid Road where the wall’s falling down. She went up to that door and looked at it. Didn’t try it nor nothing like that, just looked and went away.”
Karen produced the photograph of Megan Bartlow and both Spears looked at it.
“Couldn’t be sure, but it looks a lot like her. Like her hair, isn’t it, Eileen?”
“That’s definitely her,” said Mrs. Spear.
“Are you quite sure this was two days before the battens went up? Megan was murdered some time on September the first. The battens would have gone up to secure the door that same evening or night, and you saw them in the morning. She was here on the first, not August the thirty-first.”
“It was the thirty-first I saw her,” Mr. Spear persisted. “It was the day when the sky clouded over and I reckon it was a Monday. It was a Monday, wasn’t it, Eileen?”
“Definitely,” said Eileen. “We couldn’t have seen her on the Tuesday because that was the day the ambulance came to pick up Jack and take him to his physio. Well, not an ambulance, they’ve got some other fancy name for it now. ‘Incapacitated people carrier’ or some such. Well, that was supposed to come at nine and it didn’t come till twenty to ten but you have to be out in the front ready for it, don’t you? And then you’re there all day.”
“I couldn’t have seen her on the Tuesday because I was all day till four at the hospital like Eileen says.”
“It’s the wrong day,” Burden said as he and Wexford walked across to the mortuary. “But he insists he saw the girl on the Monday and not Tuesday when she was killed. A man was seen looking in at the windows of number four but not our perpetrator in a hood.”
“Our perpetrator without a hood, then? It was hot, as your Mrs. Lyall said.”
“It was hot on August the eleventh, but he was wearing a hood then. Is there any significance in the fact that both girls died on a Tuesday?”
“We don’t know for sure if Megan did.”
But Carina Laxton confirmed the day. “She died on Tuesday the first,” she said an hour later. “She’d been dead four days when the body was found and I’d say early on that day, not after four in the afternoon. Certainly not. It would have been midmorning.”
“Can’t you be a bit more precise?” Burden said, sounding querulous.
“Not with this heat, I can’t, and the body shut up in a cupboard. I suppose you know she was pregnant?”
“I didn’t,” said Wexford.
“She was well advanced in pregnancy. About fourteen weeks, I’d say.”
Wexford and Hannah found Prinsip at the home of Sandra and Lee Warner. In the absence of Lara, the place seemed strangely to take on an untidy, even squalid, look. It was as if, while the girl was there, her surroundings picked up something of her neatness and order but once she was gone it reverted to its normal state with a sigh of relief. This flat on the Muriel Campden Estate was a house of mourning, but grief hadn’t extended to Lee Warner’s appetite. He was sitting in front of the television on a sagging sofa eating a burger with a fried egg on top of it, a large portion of fries, and a thick slice of fried bread, the lot doused in tomato ketchup. His wife, who had let them in, wore a soiled whitish dressing gown hanging open over a T-shirt and sweat pants. She excused herself briefly and came back carrying a box of tissues with which she began wiping her dry eyes. Prinsip had a similar plate to Warner’s on his lap, the food on it congealed as it lay there untouched. Laying a hand on his slumped shoulders, Sandra said, “Have you got the animal who did this, then?”
“You didn’t tell us Megan was pregnant,” said Hannah.
“You what?”
“Megan was pregnant, Mrs. Warner. I assume you didn’t know.”
“Too bloody right I didn’t and nor did Keithie. What d’you mean, pregnant? There’s got to be a mistake.”
“On account of I’ve had the chop.” Prinsip lifted his gray face to them, his mouth hanging open.
The plate would have slid off his lap if Sandra hadn’t fielded it with considerable dexterity. “He means he’s had his tubes tied
,” she said.
“A vasectomy—oh, I see.” Hannah was quite unperturbed by this revelation, Wexford not surprised. “Nevertheless, she was pregnant.”
“Keithie,” said Sandra Warner, sitting down and lighting a cigarette, “has got six kids. Or is it seven, Keithie? No, six. From a”—she paused, racked her brains and came out with it—“a previous relationship. It stands to reason he didn’t want no more. Megan’s got a kid, of course. I mean, it’s been adopted, best thing for it when all’s said and done. Megan wanted it to have the best start in life, which she wasn’t in no position to give it, though giving it up was a wrench.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette into the coagulated egg, burger, and chips on Prinsip’s plate.
“It doesn’t tie up,” Burden said as they sat in Wexford’s office, eating the sandwiches brought in by Lynn Fancourt. “What was Megan doing in Victoria Terrace on the Monday? It was Tuesday she was there. And what was our perpetrator doing there on the previous Saturday evening?”
“You can make all those things fit,” said Wexford, “if you look at it this way. Our perpetrator, or OP, made a date with Megan and this meeting had some connection with the trade she and Amber were in and which he, presumably, was organizing. Number four Victoria Terrace would have been his choice for a venue. Why, we don’t yet know. Possibly he’d once worked there or had even lived there. On the Saturday he went there to check up on it and find the easiest way to get in.
“He arranged with Megan to meet her there at, say, nine-thirty on the morning of Tuesday, the first of September. He would have told her the houses were empty, about to be converted, and with neglected gardens at the back. She was to come through those gardens from Pyramid Road, recognize number four by some sign, the color of the paint on the door or the stained glass in the French window, something like that. Go up the four steps and she would find the door unlocked at the top.”
“Yes, all right.” Burden lifted the top slice of bread from his sandwich and contemplated the salt beef, potato salad, and half-tomato underneath. “Margarine,” he said. “But what can you expect? All you’ve said is fine. I see all that. Only she was supposed to do that on the Tuesday, not the Monday.”
“No, but suppose she was a bit nervous about going there. OP may have been a frightening figure in her life—and with good reason, as we now know. What could be more natural than that she should try out his instructions and go over to Pyramid Road after she’d finished work on the Monday? Go into those gardens, have a look around, try the door—or just look at the door. If everything was the way he said it was she’d be reassured up to a point.
“She went back on the Tuesday morning. She left the note on the door at Gew-Gaws, got the bus to Stowerton, went into the gardens via Pyramid Road, and found the back door to number four unlocked. Your Jack Spear didn’t see her because he was in the front of his house, waiting for the ambulance to take him to hospital for his physiotherapy. How’s that?”
“Okay. It probably was like that. How’s your sandwich?”
“It’d be all right without the mayonnaise, only the filling’s nearly all mayonnaise and I hate the stuff. Hannah found the owners of Victoria Terrace, by the way. They’re called Ian-noides PLC. There are two of them, cousins, living in Cyprus. As you might expect, they’re totally uninterested in poor Megan except insofar as her being killed on their property may affect sales of the flats when they’ve been done.”
“Have they got builders on contract yet?”
“Fish and Son of Stowerton to do the major work and Surrage-Samphire for the decorating. Apparently, these flats or ‘apartments,’ as the developers call them, I quote from their prospectus, are to be ‘recreated’ in a very classy way. Victorian moldings on the ceilings, paneling, carved woodwork, antique doorknobs and fingerplates, all that sort of thing. Surrage-Samphire are specialists in wood and plasterwork, restoration techniques, and so forth.”
“Funny name, isn’t it?” said Burden. “Not a name you’d forget. Have any of these people been into number four yet?”
“I imagine they all have. To take a look and give an estimate. Work’s not due to start till the end of next month.”
As he walked home in the warm glowing dusk, Wexford thought about Megan Bartlow. She already had one child and had been pregnant again. What would have been that child’s destiny? Children appeared to be treated in a very cavalier fashion by some of these people, easily conceived, no doubt, but easily disposed of once born, yet this in a time when “the family” was spoken of with more weight and reverence than had perhaps ever been accorded it before. Keith Prinsip had six children, abandoned to their mother or mothers, no doubt. Then there was Brand—his thoughts often returned to Brand.
The little boy had another grandmother. If Vivien Hilland hadn’t seemed a very maternal sort of woman to him, Wexford, that impression he had of her had nothing to do with the way she might be with Brand or the way Brand might see her. He recalled his visit to the house on the gated estate, trying to remember any sign of tenderness or sensitivity in Mrs. Hilland, but finding none he did, at least, recover something else. That was where he had seen the name Samphire, on the sign in the Hillands’ front garden: SURRAGE-SAMPHIRE, SPECIALIST DECORATORS AND RESTORERS. One of them, the man she called Ross, had put his head around the living-room door while they were questioning her and she had said Diana Marshalson had recommended him. Was this connection of any significance?
His daughter’s car was parked at the curbside. He told himself he was always happy to see his children, but just at this moment, this evening, he would have preferred to be alone with his wife without Sylvia. Not that Dora had been her usual self recently. When they were alone together she never ceased to bemoan Sylvia’s behavior and constantly took him to task for being “too lenient” with her.
Still, here was Sylvia now, inside and weathering her mother’s scolding. He saw his grandsons first. Unaware of his arrival, they were at the bottom of the garden playing in the fountain made by the hose. Sylvia was sitting in an armchair she had turned around to face the wide-open French windows beside her mother, who was in another chair. This time it was his daughter who was holding forth, his footsteps unheard as he came into the room.
“It isn’t that I mind Mary, she’s a perfectly nice woman, but I do mind the fact that Naomi’s set her to spy on me and she’s happy to go along with it. She’s taken to dropping in. She always wants to know how I’m feeling and if she can do any shopping for me or sit with the kids while I go out.”
“Some would call that very kind,” said Dora in her new scathing tones.
He made his presence known. “Just in case you think I’m spying on you.”
“Oh, Dad.”
He went up to her and kissed her. “Where does Naomi come into all this?”
“I was just telling Mother that Naomi’s friendly with this woman who lives on the corner of my road and I know she’s fixed up with her to sort of keep an eye on me. She’s a midwife, you see.”
“Who, Naomi?”
“No, Dad, this Mary. Naomi doesn’t trust me to look after myself properly while I’m pregnant. Oh, it’s not me she cares about. It’s the baby, her baby. Mary came in yesterday evening—without being asked of course—and said would I like her to check on the vitamins and supplements I’m taking to see if they’re all right. And then she asked if I was eating properly. I’m not very big, was what she said, and she hoped I wasn’t on a diet to keep my baby small. Mind you, she was laughing when she said it. She’s always laughing even when things aren’t in the least funny. And the awful thing is the boys adore her. She never gets cross, Ben says. Of course she doesn’t, I said, she’s not your mother. And then he said, and this really hurt, ‘I wish she was. I wish she was my mother.’”
“Children,” said Wexford, “do say that sort of thing. I don’t suppose there’s a child who hasn’t said it some time or other to a mother or a father. You said it to me once when I wouldn’t let you go swimming on an icy
day in May. It was an outdoor pool and your best friend Louise Cole was going. ‘I wish Mr. Cole was my father,’ you said and it was like a slap in the face. But I came to learn that while you meant it at the time you didn’t mean it for long, and that’s how it is with Ben. You’ll see.”
Apparently touched by this story, Sylvia reached for his hand and held it. “Mary’s the real problem. I don’t want her interfering in this. It’s not that I don’t like her. Actually, I don’t think anyone could help liking her. It’s knowing she only comes around because Naomi’s sent her.”
“As far as you know,” said Wexford. “Maybe she’s been sent once and goes on coming of her own accord. If you like her you haven’t a problem. Can’t you just relax and enjoy her? And now I’m going down the garden to see my grandsons and after that I want a drink and my supper. I’m starving.”
Dora said nothing, watching him with cold eyes.
“I really hate that Naomi,” said Sylvia in the manner of a teenager. “Sometimes I think I’d like to kill her.”
Wexford laughed. “You’re not supposed to say things like that to me. I’m a police officer—remember?”
CHAPTER 15
* * *
It was a Sunday. Thinking how pleasant it would have been to be meeting Bal for coffee or a drink and then how embarrassing and awful any encounter with him must now be, Hannah phoned Karen Malahyde and asked her if she was free.
They met at the Parasol Café recently opened by the Olive and Dove Hotel on the west bank of the Kingsbrook. Wooden tables and chairs were arranged under red and yellow striped umbrellas. The umbrellas were all unfurled this morning, as they had been every morning for months, keeping off the South of France–style sun.
“This is nice,” Karen said. “The Costa del Kingsmarkham. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not in the least. Make the most of it. I’m sure they’ll soon ban it in public places.”
