by Ruth Rendell
They ordered caffè lattes and, because it was close on midday and a Sunday, glasses of wine. The tables began to fill up, mostly with couples, as the Parasol Café offered a bistro lunch.
“Sundays are no good if you’re single, are they?” Karen was expressing Hannah’s own, highly unwelcome, thoughts. “I don’t know why they should be so different from Saturdays. Most of the shops are open. No one goes to church anymore. The cinema’s got the same program as it’s had all week. They shouldn’t be different from Saturdays, but they are.”
“Yes, you’re right.” Hannah didn’t want to agree with her. She wanted to be able to say it didn’t apply to her, she had a boyfriend. Only she hadn’t. And if she had Bal in mind, she never would have. “But…if, for instance, we were married we might be expected to be home now cooking roast beef for a spouse. Oh, don’t look like that, we wouldn’t, not you and me, but we’d probably give in when it came to watching rugby all the afternoon and having tea with his old mum. As it is, we’re free and—” She broke off, her attention caught by two women who had come to sit at a table nearer to the riverbank.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I think my eyes must be deceiving me. You see those two women at the table over by the tree, the copper beech? The one in the pink skirt and beads is Gwenda Brooks of Jewel Terrace and the other one is her husband’s girlfriend.”
“You have to be joking.”
“I know, but I’m not. That is Gwenda Brooks and that is Paula Vincent. When I interviewed John Brooks he told me he was having an affair with that woman and sent me to her address in Pomfret to check out he’d spent the night with her.”
“And here she is about to have lunch with the wife. What d’you think it means?”
“I don’t know, Karen, but I’m going to find out. No, wait…” Hannah clutched her friend’s arm. “That’s him. That’s the husband!”
John Brooks was approaching the table by the copper beech tree. Instead of kisses, he gave both women a little pat on their shoulders and sat down.
“Finding somewhere to park the car,” Hannah whispered. She got up and walked over to the Brookses’ table, Karen behind her. Afterward, she thought how with people more used to keeping cool heads, it might have been possible to bluff it out. Some kind of ménage à trois scenario might have been suggested by Brooks, and Gwenda might just have confirmed it to maintain the respectability she was so fond of. But their reactions to the sight of her were very different, or those of Brooks and Paula Vincent were. He went white and she crimson. He stood up so abruptly that he knocked over a glass, which fell and rolled across the grass. Gwenda plainly had no idea what was happening. She stared.
“Perhaps you’d like to explain, Mr. Brooks,” Hannah said, and suddenly she knew. She needed no explanation. Seeing John Brooks and Paula Vincent together she saw how marked was the resemblance. They might have been twins. Perhaps they were. “Ms. Vincent is your sister, isn’t she?”
It was Gwenda who answered her. “Of course she is. Why shouldn’t she be? What do you want?”
“At present, Mrs. Brooks, nothing from you.” Hannah turned to Paula Vincent, whose color had subsided and who was looking defiant. “Would you care to explain, Ms. Vincent?”
“There’s nothing to explain. I did what John wanted, that’s all.”
“I don’t think so. You lied to the police.”
“What is all this?” Gwenda Brooks was shouting now. “What’s going on? I want to know. I’ve a right to know.”
Ignoring her, Hannah said, “Lying to the police is an offense, Ms. Vincent. The same applies to you, Mr. Brooks. Whaever else may come of this I can’t tell. For the present, however…”
Karen intervened at a nod from Hannah. “You’ll both be charged with wasting police time.”
Back at her flat where Hannah set out smoked salmon and salad on the table on her little balcony, Karen pointed out drily that since Brooks had obviously not been committing incest in Pomfret, he must have been up to some other illicit, if not illegal, activity.
“Yes, but what?” Hannah poured orange juice into two ice-filled glasses.
“At the moment, without having given it much thought, I can’t see why if he was visiting some woman he couldn’t give you her name instead of the one he did. After all, until you spotted the sister with Gwenda, you and the DCI believed he was committing adultery. So what difference does it make who it was?”
“It does make a difference,” Hannah said. “Come and eat. Of course it makes a difference. For one thing, the real woman might not have been quite so willing to tell us he was with her. She may have a husband or live-in boyfriend. I realize that’s unlikely seeing that Brooks visited her by night, but it’s possible if, for instance, husband or boyfriend worked nights. Also, you’ve got to remember that if his sister’s name got back to his wife all she’s going to do is enjoy the joke. It’s quite another thing if the real woman’s name gets back to her.”
Karen laughed. “He was taking quite a risk having that little lunch party with both wife and sister.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The public doesn’t believe we have private lives. When we’re not on duty or in uniform, as the case may be, they think we get into our boxes and pull down the lids till our next shift starts.”
“Then what about all those cop sitcoms they see on TV?”
“They know that’s not real,” said Hannah, “and they’re right.”
After Karen had gone Hannah found her sunglasses, rather a nice Armani pair, lying on the arm of her sofa, and when the phone rang an hour later she was so sure of who it was that as she lifted the receiver she said, “Hi, Karen. They’re here.”
Bal’s voice said, “Who are there? Are you having a party?”
Blushing when one is alone is so absurd as to make one blush again. This was what happened to Hannah as she struggled to find a voice, her cheeks burning and the sun pouring in at the open balcony doors. “I thought you were a pair of sunglasses. I mean I thought you’d lost a pair of sunglasses.”
“Never wear the things. If you’re not having a party will you come out and have a drink with me?”
She was astounded. After the last time, what did he want of her? She couldn’t ask. “All right,” she said.
“I’ve had more enthusiastic responses to my invitations. But no matter. Shall I come around in about an hour?”
Friday might never have happened. He was nice, warm, with plenty to talk about. Except that he obviously wasn’t gay, he behaved rather like her gay friends did when she was out with them. She could be relaxed with them, free and easy, because she knew they would never make a pass. Yet, what was she thinking of? The other night Bal making a pass was what she had passionately wanted…
She hadn’t dressed up like last time. If she changed the white trousers for a black pair it was only because on a hot day white doesn’t look fresh after a few hours. They sat in the garden of the Olive and Dove and after a time, after they had talked about everything under the sun but their work and his private life, she started thinking, but he’s not gay, he’s not. The appreciative look he’d given her when they met confirmed that. On an impulse she said, “Bal, have you got a girlfriend? Is that what it is?”
He laughed. “Is that what what is?”
Usually so open, she couldn’t put it into words and she fell back on the feeble, “Oh, you know. You know what I mean.”
His smile was that of a man who is going to let someone off the hook or just give up teasing. “Right, I suppose I do. No, I haven’t got a girlfriend. If it’s possible, I hope—no, I won’t say that. Not yet.”
She laid her hand on his and he let it lie. It was a nice hand, she thought narcissistically, long and smooth and slender, the nails longish but unpolished. She hated nail varnish, and by the way he looked at her hand, so did he.
“If you mean,” she said, “what I think you mean—no, I can’t ask. I’m not as uninhibited as I thought.”
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nbsp; “Hannah.” He leaned toward her across the table, said, “Come on, let’s walk. It’s a lovely night. I can’t say what I have to say with all these people around.”
She was going to walk beside him but without touching him. As they went down the flight of stone steps that led to the footpath across the meadows, he took her hand and hooked it over his arm. The air was still and quite cool by now, and from a dark horizon a red harvest moon was rising.
“If I know my Kingsmarkham as well as I think I do, I can walk you home across these fields and call in at that little pub on the Kingsbrook on the way. Meanwhile, I’ll try to explain.”
In the little pub on the Kingsbrook, once called the Anchor, now renamed the Gooseberry Bush, Wexford and Burden and their wives were having a last drink. Neither man would have dreamt of dividing the party into two groups, the men to talk shop and the women left to domestic issues, but Jenny had divided it herself, wanting only Dora’s ears for her diatribe on the horrors of fitting twenty-first-century teenagers for their A levels. Snatches of the conversation reached Wexford, expressions such as “national curriculum,” “dysfunctional families,” and “parental responsibility,” but when he attempted a remark he was too forcibly squashed by Dora to try again.
“Why the Gooseberry Bush?” he said, changing the subject.
The barman didn’t know.
“I suppose they just liked the sound of it,” said Burden. “No one eats gooseberries anymore, though.”
“I made gooseberry jam two years ago,” Jenny said, “but no one wanted to eat it.”
Wexford laughed. “A gooseberry bush is what you find babies under. That’s what my grandmother told me. Even then it was an out-of-date version of the facts of life. When she was a child she’d been told it was the stork brought babies. That was the favorite explanation, which is odd when you consider there have never been storks in England.”
Dora cast up her eyes, he didn’t know why, her scorn causing a break in the conversation. Burden rushed in to fill the gap with his continuing certainty that drug smuggling was at the bottom of the two girls’ deaths. If only they could find a witness, if only there were a shred of evidence. But he, Burden, would find it, he would never give up.
“A kind of human Buster, are you?”
“If you like to put it like that,” Burden said rather stiffly.
“I think it’s something else. The trouble is I don’t know what else. It’s a matter of finding what could have brought them that kind of money and I don’t know.” He saw Dora move her chair and turn her back on him. Waiting for Burden to argue and realizing he wasn’t going to, he said, “I’ve got two things on my mind that on the face of it don’t seem important yet I feel they are. Very.”
“Oh, yes?” Burden was smarting a little from the comparison with Drusus, the drugs-busting dog. “Like what?”
“I’d very much like to know what the website was Amber tried to get access to but couldn’t and wanted it so much she asked for John Brooks’s help.”
“Probably some company putting out cheap pop CDs or the sort of things teenage girls want. You know, you’ve had two. Fancy face creams or stuff for waxing their legs.”
“I expect you’re right. No doubt you’ll dismiss the other thing with equal facility.”
“Try me.”
Wexford thought, Dora said when we first knew about this baby that Sylvia’s behavior would wreck our family. Is it starting to wreck my marriage? Aloud he said, “The Hillands offered Amber their flat in mid June, to have possession in November. What they never said to us and we didn’t ask about was the rent. Was it to be rent free?”
“Surely.”
“You really think that? I’d say surely not. Crenthorne Heath isn’t a very upmarket suburb but it’s nearer to London than Croydon and it’s on a tube line. If they let the flat they could get two or three hundred pounds a week at present prices. Are they so well off they could afford to miss out on that for what might be years?”
“You’re saying,” said Burden slowly, “that they offered the flat to Amber but probably at a reduced rent. Of course she accepted, but she knew she had to start making money. Old Marshalson wouldn’t pay it.”
“No. He’d have wanted to avoid losing his daughter even if that also meant keeping Brand.” Wexford’s eye caught his sergeant and one of his DCs entering the bar together. Well, it was as he had thought…“Tomorrow, we’ll find out,” he said.
The giant in the “Riverbank” T-shirt was again on duty at the Hillands’ gates but more affable this morning. He let their car in with a smile and a cheerful “Good morning, gentlemen.” Wexford was surprised to see Surrage-Samphire’s board still up in the Hillands’ front garden. The work seemed to be completed and very stylish it was, if somewhat over the top. The hallway of this house was just a little too small and its ceiling a little too low to carry such grand linenfold paneling, such ornately carved shields and elaborate Tudor roses. But Surrage-Samphire certainly knew their business.
Vivien Hilland seemed rather taken aback by his praise of the workmanship, as if she expected policemen to confine their comments entirely to forensic matters. Neither Cosima nor Daniel was anywhere to be seen this morning. With both her children absent, Mrs. Hilland seemed calmer and under less strain. But when Wexford told her that Daniel’s friends had provided him with satisfactory alibis for the night of August 10, instead of relief she showed indignation: “Well, of course. What else would one expect?”
He asked her about the rent of the Crenthorne Heath flat.
“We were charging her a token rent.” She sounded defensive and he understood why when, asking her to be more specific, she said, “Well, actually, a hundred a week.”
“Where was she going to find a hundred a week, Mrs. Hilland?”
No doubt she hadn’t much cared for Burden’s tone. Her defensiveness was even more marked when she said, “That really wasn’t our concern. It was actually about a third of what she would have had to pay for the flat if she’d been let it by anyone else. As a matter of fact her father phoned me to say paying rent meant she couldn’t take the flat, but that was all nonsense, that was just him saying anything to stop her going, he was so besotted with her. As for Diana, she’s got plenty of money and I think she’d have paid the rent herself just to get rid of the girl. Let me tell you something. I think girls like her need to be taught responsibility and the value of money, and that’s exactly what our offer would have done.”
There seemed no more to be said. As both got up to leave, the front-door bell rang. “That will be the men coming back for their tools,” said Mrs. Hilland.
Someone else’s footsteps crossed the hall to answer the bell and when Wexford and Burden came out of the room they found Cosima there with a fair ruddy man of about thirty. Wexford, who had expected to see the man called Ross who had been there on a previous occasion, introduced himself and asked him who he was.
“Colin Fry’s my name,” said the rugby player, his eyes following Cosima’s long legs moving up the stairs.
“You work for Surrage-Samphire?”
“Got it in one,” said Fry.
“Who else does?”
“There’s me and Rick and Mr. Samphire. That Megan something, that’s what all this is about, is it? If you want to know about that place and the work and all, you want Mr. Samphire. Mr. Ross Samphire. He’ll know all about it.”
CHAPTER 16
* * *
Leaving the inquest on Megan Bartlow, Wexford walked down toward Gew-Gaws, the shop where she had worked. When he pushed open the door Jimmy Gawson’s bell rang, summoning him from the back regions. Wexford had known Gawson slightly for years, long before the opening of the shop, and rather liked talking to him for the pleasure of hearing an accent so Etonian—or ham actor outrageously overplaying Etonian—that it strained credulity yet never lapsed.
“Ah, good morning, Chief Inspector,” he now said, extending a pale and rather damp hand. “I’ve told your good peop
le absolutely everything I can about that fateful morning, you know. Which, actually, amounts to very little. I wasn’t here and by the time I was here poor little Megan had vanished and her note was on the door.”
“I know. I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about her. What you know of her.”
Gawson waved his hand at a seat for Wexford and sat down himself behind a counter laden with plastic models of Big Ben, miniature London buses, stick-on Union flags, photographs of Princess Diana, and nodding-head bulldogs. He took an inhaler off a shelf, inserted a nicotine cartridge and drew heavily on it.
“Just as good as a cig,” he said, “but cheaper and good for you. Marvelous, isn’t it? I’ve been on them for three years now.”
Doubting that Gawson was using his device for quite the purpose it was designed for, Wexford made no comment. “You were going to tell me about Megan.”
“You mean you thought I was going to tell you about Megan. The question is, do I know anything about her? She was most awfully common, you know. The sort of person this government calls socially excluded. Nice expression, that, don’t you think? She would certainly have been excluded from any society of mine.”
Wexford knew that if he was rude to the man, he ran the risk of getting no more out of him but he couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know that I’m much interested in your views on the class system, Jimmy. Apart from being several miles beneath the likes of a purveyor of tourist trash, what sort of a girl was she? Did you like her? Silly question, I suppose. You’re too grand for likings.”
“Now come on, my dear. You know all I said was my little joke. Where’s your sense of humor? There was no harm in Megan, I suppose. Her accent hurt my ears. I actually believe one of my tympanic membranes was permanently damaged by her assaults on it.”
Wexford watched him take his third or fourth draw on the nicotine inhaler. “Did you ever see her, well, engage in any transactions in here that weren’t strictly a matter of flogging mini–Buckingham Palaces to unsuspecting visitors?”
