by Ruth Rendell
“Listening to you,” he said, “anyone would think I’d been in a brothel.”
“Which would probably do less harm to your heart.” She introduced him to her companion. “This is Mary Beaumont. Mary, this is my father and this is Mike Burden.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Mary said, apparently including both of them. “Policemen, aren’t you? I don’t care what others say, I think you’re doing a grand job. Grand. Your profession wouldn’t suit me. You could get a knife in you or a bullet through you at any minute.”
“We’re not used to so much praise,” Wexford said. “Stick is what we usually get, but not bullets. Not often, anyway.”
She laid her hand on his arm and smiled broadly up into his face. She was a very plump black woman in her forties in a scarlet dress with large black-and-white flowers all over it, and her smile was like an advertisement for cosmetic dentistry. “I’m just giving Sylv a hand with her shopping. ‘I don’t need you, Mary. I’ve got the car,’ she said, but I said, ‘So you can take the car into the supermarket? You can take it up the escalator at Marks & Sparks?’”
In a frosty tone, Sylvia (who was never called Sylv) said, “Mary has been very kind.”
“And don’t think it’s just because Naomi asked me. It’s my pleasure, you have to know that.”
Wexford and Burden said good-bye and it was nice meeting her. “Sandra Warner now, I suppose?” said Burden.
“Mike, I think we’ll have her and Prinsip over at the station. I can’t stomach that place of hers and that husband of hers. Not after eating that fry-up I can’t.”
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Prinsip, sitting under the butcher’s block painting, from the way he ground his heavily studded boots back and forth across the carpet, seemed determined to gouge a trough out of it. This behavior irritated Sandra Warner, who told him to stop it.
“I can’t. It’s my nerves,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been through.”
“I’ve been through it too,” said Sandra.
Since Wexford last saw her she had had her hair dyed jet-black. It couldn’t be for mourning, the idea was too bizarre, but it seemed to him an unfortunate coincidence. Huge rings in gold metal, each the size of a bangle, hung from her ears. She wore a very short red skirt and tight T-shirt. Both she and Prinsip chain-smoked. Suggestions were frequently made that Kingsmarkham police station should become a smoke-free zone, but opposition from the Chief Constable, himself a smoker, and from Wexford, who considered it a bit mean-spirited, had delayed this move indefinitely. Now, he thought, he was paying the price of his tolerance with what felt like the onset of asthma.
He tried not to cough, which made his coughing worse. Naturally, Prinsip and Sandra thought he was putting it on, and Prinsip lit another cigarette from the stub of the last one, continuing to grind his right boot into the carpet.
Seeing Wexford temporarily incapacitated, Burden took up the questioning: “You’ve no idea who this man might be?”
“Me, I’ve got my own ideas,” said Prinsip.
“Okay. Can we hear them?”
“He’s like the father, innit?”
“The father?”
Flicking back a long lock of black hair, Sandra answered for him. “You don’t want to listen to him. He’s like obsessed. He’s got this obsession there’s a chap Meg was meeting that’s the father of the kid she was carrying. Well, you can’t blame him, can you? There must have been someone. You don’t get that way selling Union Jacks in souvenir shops.”
“So your opinion, Mrs. Warner, is that this man”—Burden hesitated while he decided how best to put this—“was in an…er, a relationship with Megan?” He looked away from Wexford’s wince. “Mr. Prinsip?”
“Course it was,” said Prinsip. “What else? If he’d of come near me I’d’ve killed him.” Slow though he was, Keith Prinsip seemed to realize in a dim way that it is unwise to say this sort of thing to two policemen. He amended this remark. “I’d’ve made him sorry.” With no idea of what he was implying, he added, “He wouldn’t’ve done it twice.”
Believing she should defend her daughter’s virtue, Sandra said, “It wasn’t nothing like that. This bloke was maybe a customer in the shop she met once. My belief is that this kid she was carrying was Keithie’s. It’s a well-known fact them vasectomies aren’t a hundred percent.” She smiled fondly at Prinsip. “Not when a bloke’s young and fit like Keithie.”
The young and fit Prinsip sighed heavily, his face gray and sagging, his chest concave and his hands trembling. “Do leave off what you’re doing to that carpet, Keithie,” Sandra said, “and have another cig. And you can give me one.”
Finding a presentable voice, Wexford said, “We believe this man was Megan’s killer. I realize all this is very distressing for you both, but I think it necessary to explain. We believe Megan saw him coming away from Yorstone Bridge through the woods where your mother lives, Mrs. Warner. The probability is that she threatened to come to us unless he paid her to keep quiet. I am sorry to have to tell you this.”
Regret was unnecessary, for Sandra had failed to understand him. “Yeah, well, I don’t know what you’re on about. Who is this bloke?”
Burden sighed, but with his inner voice. His face remained calm and patient. “We hoped you could tell us that, Mrs. Warner.” He looked from her to Prinsip and back at her. “Did Megan mention any of this to you—either of you? Did she ever say she’d seen a man she suspected might be involved in causing the road crash under Yorstone Bridge? She said nothing about seeing a man in the woods on the evening she had been to Mrs. Morgan’s? Nothing about recognizing him when she saw him again?”
“It don’t mean a thing to me,” said Prinsip.
“Nor me, Keithie.”
A concrete block, a brick, maybe two kinds of bricks…“Do you know anyone in the building trade, Mrs. Warner?” Wexford asked. “Did Megan? Do you, Mr. Prinsip?”
“Only my Lee,” said Sandra, “and he’s been out of it ever since he put his back out in ninety-six.”
“I think she just saw him in the street,” said Burden after they had gone. “Saw him and recognized him as the man she’d seen in the wood.”
Wexford took up the reconstruction. “We have to remember that the first time she saw OP she probably didn’t know him. He was just a man walking through a wood at night. It was dark and she’d have been, if not frightened, a bit alarmed, aware of his presence. That’s going to be why she noticed him. I dare say she wouldn’t have remembered him later if she’d seen him in broad daylight in the High Street, but she saw him after dark in the wood. Saw him, no doubt, by the light of her bicycle lamp.”
“Where did she see him again, then?”
“If we knew that we’d be close to answering the whole thing.”
They went up to Wexford’s office, a room where the slatted blinds had been kept half closed for weeks to keep out the brilliant light. This morning that unseasonable sun had been veiled first in thin cloud and was covered by now in piling cumulus. Wexford opened the blinds, then raised them on to a sky panorama of clouds like mountain ranges, like the view from an aircraft where white and gray and purple vapor has tumbled and swelled into a fantastic landscape.
“It’s still hot,” he said, then, “We’ve never done a, well, a character analysis of the man we’re looking for. It is a man, isn’t it?”
“I think so. We ought to assume it’s a man while leaving the possibility open that it could be a very strong woman.”
“He’s young middle-aged, I’d say. Forty or a little more. The district is well known to him. He has a car or a van. Possibly unemployed. On the side, somehow or other, he’s engaged in some illegal trade.”
“Drug trafficking,” said Burden.
“Delenda est Carthago. He’s engaged in some illegal trade. Something involving that trade was his motive for attempting to kill Amber in June. That was his motive for killing her in August.”
“But not his m
otive for killing Megan?”
“We’ve already settled for that motive being to silence a blackmailer.”
“But that doesn’t work,” Burden objected. “The two girls knew each other. They went to Frankfurt together carrying drugs. Please don’t say that ‘delenda’ stuff. They went to Frankfurt together for business reasons. Not because they were friends but they did know each other, through, no doubt, Megan’s sister Lara. They also, both of them, knew OP. OP knew them. He got them to go on the trip. That means when Megan saw him in the wood she already knew him. He was, in a manner of speaking, her employer.”
“So?”
“Would she have dared blackmail him? She’d know him for a ruthless dealer. She’d have had a good idea what he was capable of. In fact, she’d know. She knew he’d first attempted to kill Amber, then succeeded in doing so.”
Wexford sat down behind his desk. The air felt heavy. He was beginning to get that feeling some people suffer from when the air pressure suddenly falls, a tiredness, a throbbing in the head. “It doesn’t work, Mike,” he said, “because of your insistence on drugs, because you’re determined that OP employed those girls to do his drug running for him. Oh, I know the two of them were up to something they shouldn’t have been, that’s for sure, but there was no dealer involved, no ruthless character paying them to carry class A substances to Germany. How many of your old drugs contacts have you questioned about this?”
“Twenty-nine,” said Burden promptly.
“And have you got a word out of any of them implicating Amber and Megan? You haven’t, have you?”
“Since you put it like that, no.”
“Those girls didn’t know OP. Neither of them knew him until Megan saw him in the wood. She didn’t recognize him then, as she’d never seen him before. Some time later—probably weeks later—she read or someone told her about the concrete block dropped from the bridge and Amber’s involvement in the crash. It came to her then that the man she’d seen might be the perpetrator. Time went by, weeks went by, and during that time maybe the two girls met for whatever purpose they had previously traveled to Frankfurt together. Then Amber was killed. In the days that followed or the weeks that followed, Megan saw OP—in the street, in the shop, driving a car—and recognized him. She found out where he lived and they met. Maybe he paid her once, but OP doesn’t waste time. When she demanded money the second time he killed her. Right?”
Burden nodded, unconvinced. He turned to look at the window as, far away, like gunfire in the siege of a distant city, thunder rolled. “What now?” he said, walking to the door and leaving the question unanswered. Wexford stood where he had left him, looking from the darkening cloud-piled sky down to the yellowed grass, the dry rattling leaves, and the dusty roadway, when he saw Lara Bartlow cross the High Street and enter the police station forecourt. He hadn’t asked her to come. No one had. She was coming of her own accord. A small surge of excitement made him pick up the phone and ask the duty sergeant to send Miss Bartlow straight up here.
She was in the same black trouser suit. Her white T-shirt was very white and her face was free of makeup. She took the place in her stride, not fazed, scarcely hesitant. “All right if I sit down?”
“Why don’t you take that chair?” Wexford went behind his desk. “I’ll sit here. What did you want to say to me?”
“There’s things I should have said and I didn’t. That day in your car, I mean. When you gave me a lift to college.” She paused, looked steadily at him. “Meg wasn’t dead then.” She corrected herself. “Well, she was but I didn’t know it. I didn’t want to tell on my sister. But you can’t—well, betray, that’s what I mean—you can’t sort of betray someone that’s dead, can you? I wish she’d not been with that Prinsip, though. I wish she’d got shot of him first.”
“You know Megan was pregnant, Miss Bartlow?”
“Call me Lara, please. Oh, I know. Not that Meg told me. It was Mum that said. It wasn’t that Keith’s, I’m glad of that, though I don’t know why I say it. The poor baby’s dead too, isn’t it?”
“What did you mean about betrayal, Miss…er, Lara?”
She looked up at him, a steady gaze. She was no prettier than her sister, though Megan’s had been a face he wanted to call unfinished, as if it were made from clay and the potter had got bored and knocked off early. The nose had been spread and too long, the eyes small, the mouth wide and uneven. Lara’s skin was equally fair, would be ruddy in middle age, and her hair equally strawlike, but there was character in those features, astuteness, determination, and perhaps some quality of soldiering on against the odds.
“I’d better tell you for a start that I don’t know what they were up to, her and Amber. ‘In business together,’ that’s what Meg called it. Of course I said, ‘What business?’ and she said she’d only tell someone if they were in it too, if they had what she called ‘the qualification.’”
“The qualification?” said Wexford.
“I hadn’t got it, she said, so it was useless thinking I could come in on it. If I didn’t know, she said, I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t like that much because it was through me she met Amber. I mean, Amber was my friend. I said I could still go to the police. It’s not against the law, she said, and then she sort of thought and said, well, maybe it could be if it goes the way I reckon it will.”
“This wasn’t drugs, was it, Lara?”
She shook her head vigorously. “I know it wasn’t. Meg wouldn’t touch drugs. That Keith uses grass and I’ve known him use speed and E. Meg tried E once. It was after her baby was born—you know she had a baby when she was fifteen?—and it made her so sick. They took her into the hospital, but she never said what was wrong—well, Mum told them it was food poisoning. Meg never touched the stuff after that and she wouldn’t have been dealing, I know that.”
It looked as if Carthage had finally been destroyed…“This business, as you call it, Lara—presumably the aim was to make money?”
“I asked her. She said you couldn’t make megabucks but it was a nice little earner. When they went to Frankfurt, that was really Meg like introducing Amber to the business. They were going to meet some people there and there’d be what Meg called a ‘transaction.’ Amber told her the word, she said.”
“But what was it?” Wexford said.
“Look, I really wanted to know. I said, you’ve got to tell me. Well, you’ll get to know in time, she said. Mind you, I think she liked making a mystery out of it. One thing I do know. It started with the Net. She hadn’t got access then, but Amber had. Later on, when she’d made a bit of money, her and Keith bought a computer and all the accessories and CD players and a digital camera, the lot. But not then. That’s how I think it started with the two of them, I mean their sort of partnership. Meg came to Bling-Bling with me one night. Prinsip was up in Brum seeing his old dad. I reckon he’d got money to leave. Nothing else’d have fetched him up there so often. Anyway, Meg came to the club. That’d have been…oh, wintertime. February, I reckon. Amber was there with Ben Miller and Samantha and—I don’t remember how it came up—Amber said she’d been looking something up on the Net and Meg said, oh, you’re lucky, or something like that. You see, I think that up to then she’d been doing the best she could in the Internet café. I know she went to Amber’s place in Brimhurst because she told me what a great place it was. She called it a mansion. That was her word, a mansion.”
February, he thought. “Exactly when was the Frankfurt trip?” he asked. “Refresh my memory.”
“She’d never been to Europe before,” said Lara. “Well, only over to France, picking up cheap booze and cigarettes with that Keith. She sent me a postcard with a picture of the hotel her and Amber stayed at.”
Again that quickening of the blood, that jump of the heart. “Have you still got it?”
“No. I never kept it.”
“Pity.”
“Mum got one too. I remember the date. It was May the twenty-second.”
A month later, Am
ber had been in the car crash. The offer of the Hillands’ flat had already been made to her, and in early July she had become eighteen. She never went away again and, apparently, neither did Megan. On August 11 Amber was killed and Megan killed exactly three weeks later, on September 1.
“Do you often go and see your grandmother, Lara?”
It was a surprise question and he could see she didn’t like it. “Not as often as I ought. It must be a couple of months.” She leveled at him once more that direct gaze. “To be honest, I don’t want to go through the woods. The woods are scary.”
“Are they? Why?”
“There’s been two girls murdered here since August. I don’t want to be the third one. The man who was trying to kill Amber with that rock, he could have gone through there.”
“Megan never mentioned to you who he might be? I think it was someone she knew.”
“She didn’t know anyone but us, Mum and Lee and me, oh, and Nana, and Keith’s people and she really hated them.”
“The baby that was adopted—did she ever see him? Him or her?”
“It was a little girl. No, she never did. She was my sister and I loved her and I don’t want you thinking I didn’t, but she could be quite cold-hearted when it came to kids. She never wanted any, she said, and she was glad to see the back of Kili—that was her baby—never had a moment’s regret about having her adopted. I suppose she’d have done the same with this one.”
CHAPTER 18
* * *
He put the question to Burden and Hannah. “What qualification could Amber and Megan have had in common?” he asked them. “Nothing academic, I don’t mean that. Some physical peculiarity?”
“Both young,” said Burden. “Both female white Caucasians. Much the same sort of height and figure.”
