by Ruth Rendell
They went up the concrete staircase of the flats on the Muriel Campden Estate and took the walkway five doors along to Sandra Warner’s. Lara had already left for her business college. Lee Warner was close in front of the television set, his shoulders hunched and his head thrust forward like a turtle’s from its shell. Breakfast things, however, had been cleared away, and Sandra divested of her dressing gown and wearing a mauve tracksuit. Lee took no notice of the two officers. As far as he was concerned, they might not have come in, but, rather to Wexford’s surprise, Sandra was pleased to see them and gratified by their visit, which she seemed to take as a kind of condolence call.
“It is good of you. We appreciate it, don’t we, Lee?” No answer from the television watcher. “It’s true like my Lara says about the police being more community-friendly.”
“Then perhaps you’ll give us a few moments of your time, Mrs. Warner,” Wexford said. “I have some questions for you.”
“I don’t mind,” said Sandra graciously. “What was you wanting to know?”
“Number four Victoria Terrace,” Hannah began. “I’m sorry to have to remind you of the place where your daughter was found.”
Sandra made her reply quite cheerfully. “That’s all right.”
“Did she know the house? Did she ever talk of it? Say she’d been there?”
“She never did to me. It’s funny you ask because my Lara said to me only yesterday, ‘Meg never mentioned that place, did she?’ she said. ‘Whatever made her go there?’”
“At the time of her death,” Hannah said, “Megan was approximately fourteen weeks pregnant.”
“As long as that, was it?”
“About fourteen weeks, yes. That takes us back to conception having taken place about the last week of May.”
“Right,” said Sandra uncertainly.
Wexford said, “Megan was in Frankfurt in Germany from the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth of May. Have you any idea if she might have met the father of her child during that weekend?”
“Well, she never said. Mind you, she wouldn’t. Not with her being with Keith. I mean, like being married really, isn’t it?”
“Did she ever mention the name Samphire to you?”
Before Sandra could reply, Lee turned his head and said irritably, “Can’t you go in the other room? It’s not some film I’m watching, it’s the Cup.”
“We’ll go in the kitchen, love.” Sandra turned to Wexford. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. I’m sure it’s the least I can do.”
The kitchen was barely big enough to contain three people. Wexford was crammed up against a fridge whose door was stuck all over with postcards attached to it with magnets of teddy bears and ducks. Hannah had to sit on a stool and Sandra, waiting for her kettle to boil, propped herself up on one corner of a washing machine.
“Samphire,” Wexford said, trying to jog her memory.
“I’ve never heard that name.”
“Did she ever speak of someone called Ross?”
“Not to me she didn’t.”
A teacup was passed to Wexford. Reaching to take it from Sandra’s hand, he brushed his arm against the fridge door and dislodged one of the cards and its teddy bear magnet. Getting down on his hands and knees in that none-too-clean place wasn’t much to his taste but he did it, picked up the fallen card and in doing so spotted another one a little way underneath the fridge. This had perhaps been dislodged in the same way weeks before.
At once he knew what it was. The card showed a house with steep red roofs, green shutters, a sign that said HOTEL DIE VIER PFERDE above a picture of four brown horses with blond manes pulling a carriage. The date on the postmark was May 22. That was before Sandra’s recent marriage and Megan had addressed it to Mrs. Sandra Lapper. In an unformed, rather shaky hand she had written, Wish you were hear. The sunshine is nise. Luv Meg.
“This is the card Megan sent you from Germany, Mrs. Warner.”
“Ooh, let’s have a look. So it is. I wondered where that had got to. Funny writing, innit?” She scrutinized the Gothic script in which the name of the hotel was lettered on the old-fashioned inn sign. “More like Chinese. However do they read that?”
“May I have it?”
“Ooh, I don’t know. It’s like the last thing of hers I’ve got. I’d best hang on to it. I’d feel funny if I let you have that.”
They left soon afterward. Wexford went up to his office and noting that the time in countries on the continent of Europe was eleven A.M., one hour ahead of here, asked International Directory Inquiries for the number of the Hotel die Vier Pferde in Frankfurt.
The building in Kingsmarkham High Street which had once housed the Westminster Bank had been put up at the time when banks were grand edifices, red brick or white stucco with porticoes and double oak doors, long stately windows and, inside, high decorated ceilings, paneling made from tropical hardwoods, and marble floors. Like Victoria Terrace in Stowerton, it was to be transformed into luxury apartments and the work of conversion had already been done. Burden found Ross Samphire there on his own. He was putting the finishing touches to paneling in the hallway of the penthouse flat, much the same kind of design as that fitted into the Hillands’ house.
Wexford had noticed when encountering him in the Hillands’ house that he was a handsome man with blue eyes and classical features. Had he been there, it would have struck him now that this face was very like that of Michelangelo’s David, only a David approaching middle age. Such comparisons were never apparent to Burden. Ross put down the tool he was holding, came over to him, and shook hands. They had met before at Ross’s home and there was nothing wrong in this; no doubt he was merely being friendly and cooperative. But to Burden it nevertheless seemed as if the man wanted to put himself on the same level as a fairly high-ranking police officer, show himself as being on that police officer’s side, rather, as Wexford might have said—Burden had often heard him say it—himself and Samphire contra mundum.
“I honestly can’t tell you if I ever met Amber Marshalson, Inspector Burden,” Ross said, using style and surname like an equal, almost like a friend. “I may have done. I simply don’t remember.”
“She was a very good-looking girl.”
“Ah, now, Inspector, I’m a happily married man. An eye for the girls is something I haven’t had since I married. Do you know what I say to myself? I say, what would my children think of me if they saw me looking at girls?”
Burden thought of the nude on the man’s living-room wall. “Let me refresh your memory. I think you met Amber at Mrs. Hilland’s in July. She came over with her little boy.”
The gesture Ross made was theatrical, a throwing back of his head, a striking of his forehead with his hand, and a punching of the air with that hand. “So I did, so I did,” he cried. “My God, I’d forgotten all about it.”
Quite a performance, Burden thought.
“Where do you live, Mr. Samphire?”
The question surprised him. “Pauceley Avenue. Why?”
“Perhaps you can also remember seeing Megan Bartlow. When she’d been to visit her father in Pauceley she was in the habit of walking back to the bus stop along Pauceley Avenue.”
Ross made no reply to this, merely shaking his head. Perhaps he thought he couldn’t be responsible for everyone who walked past his house over the years. Burden asked him if Colin Fry was in the building, to be told he wasn’t. He had other jobs apart from helping Ross out. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. It was the bank’s grand staircase, of marble with wrought-iron banisters, which now served all the flats, and the footfalls sounded unmuffled on the stone. A strange expression showed on Ross’s face. If Burden had had to define it—and Wexford would have been better at this—he would have called it “caring.” Perhaps “considerate” would have been better or even “protective.” But Ross didn’t express his feelings in words. A man came into the room, carrying a large loose-leaf book.
Almost unbelievable as it was, this man was Ross’s twin. This was
Rick Samphire, precisely Ross’s own age, to the same hour. Superficially, he wasn’t at all like Ross, but he looked as Ross might have done if he had been confined for a couple of years in a brutal prison camp. He looked worn out, a shadow man, his hair thinning and gray-streaked, his face lined and hollow-cheeked, his eyes faded. Only the profile he turned to Burden when speaking to Ross was identical to his brother’s.
Ross said gently, putting his hand on the other man’s shoulder, “Everything’s quite okay, Rick. Nothing to be worried about but this gentleman is a police officer, Inspector Burden.”
Rick Samphire looked at Burden with the kind of horror dawning on his face that is seen in film characters when confronted by the beast from ten thousand fathoms. He shook off Ross’s hand, leapt for the door, and pounded down the stairs. Not waiting to hear Ross’s explanations or apologies, Burden went after him.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
The manager came on the line. And there Wexford’s excitement took a dive, his high dropped and he knew that somehow, somewhere, the postcard had led him astray. For Frau Stadler, rapidly checking guest lists on a computer, checking them again when he asked her to do so, could find no record of a Miss Megan Bartlow and a Miss Amber Marshalson having stayed there in May or at any other time, separately or together. He asked her if it would be possible to stay in her hotel under a false name. Frau Stadler seemed shocked at the suggestion. “We ask for our visitors’ passports and keep these for twelve hours. If a visitor had a false passport…” She left the monstrous suggestion hanging in the air.
“A postcard was sent from your hotel to England on the twenty-second of May,” Wexford said. “Would a visitor staying somewhere else go into your hotel and buy a postcard at reception? Does that happen?”
“We don’t like this. We—what is the word?—discourage this. But naturally it happens. It happens especially when there are many at the reception and the staff is busy. It is possible one of the ladies you mention came into the hotel, perhaps took tea there or met a friend in the bar, and then bought a postcard. That we cannot stop.”
He could imagine it only too easily. His Internet skills were still in their infancy—they might never progress beyond a second childhood—and his first attempt at summoning up a catalog of hotels in Frankfurt somehow managed to land him in a list of Frankenstein films. But at last he got what he wanted. The Vier Pferde (apparently named for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse when it or its forerunner was an inn in the Middle Ages) had been accorded four stars, was described as “comfortable with some luxurious suites, excellent cuisine awarded a star in the Michelin Guide, and pleasant inner-city garden.” Plainly, it had not been the kind of hotel Megan and Amber would have used. Probably they had stayed at the German equivalent of a B-and-B and had gone to the Vier Pferde, just as Ingrid Stadler suggested, and bought the card or cards after having a drink in the bar. It was the kind of thing that appealed to the young, to pretend “for a laugh” that they were staying in a four-star hotel while in reality sharing a room in a poky boardinghouse with a bathroom at the end of the passage. None of this came near explaining why they had gone to Frankfurt in the first place.
Chasing after a man who ran away when he discovered you were a policeman was something you did as a matter of course. Burden had been doing it since he was eighteen. Sometimes he had caught his quarry and sometimes not. Today was going to be one of the second sort. Rick Samphire had had a good start on him and though appearing unfit, had contrived to vanish somewhere outside the makeshift doors put up on the old bank building. Burden toiled back up the marble stairs to where Ross had calmly returned to whatever he was doing to the paneling.
“What was that about?” Burden asked.
Favoring him with the charming smile that appeared to be his stock-in-trade, Ross laid down his tools. He spoke patiently. “You have to understand that my brother’s…well, not disturbed, I wouldn’t say disturbed. He’s not mentally ill, but he’s very nervous. He’s had a lot to bear.”
“Oh, yes?”
“People have treated him badly. Losing his children is very hard on a man, especially when he thinks he’s done nothing to deserve it.”
“So he runs away at the sight of a police officer?”
“Well, actually, yes. That’s what he would do. You’ll find out, so I may as well tell you. He’s got a couple of convictions. He’s been in prison. But he’s completely harmless. I don’t mind telling you I see it as my mission in life to look after him. My twin brother and all that, you know. To be frank, he’s not capable of a company secretary’s job, he’s not a real accountant, but…well, like I said, I look after him. I suppose you’d think me a fool if I said I love him.”
Taking in the sweet sad smile, the corners of those blue eyes crinkled, the well-marked black brows lifted, Burden had no intention of saying what he thought about fraternal love or anything else. “Twins, are you? You don’t even look like brothers. You’re not much alike.”
“We were once.”
Ross’s tone was rueful, yet it seemed to Burden that he rather liked being told he and his brother didn’t resemble each other. To be fair, no one could want to look like Rick Samphire. “Where does he live?”
“Potter’s Lane, Pomfret. Go easy with him. He’s harmless.”
But Rick hadn’t reached home by the time Wexford and Burden got to Potter’s Lane. It was a street of mixed houses running parallel to that in which Paula Vincent lived. Number twenty-six was a bungalow standing between a small redbrick villa and a purpose-built block of nineteen-thirties flats with metal frame windows and a sunray entrance door. Rick’s bungalow was so stark and dismal in appearance as to be grim, its paintwork peeling, several tiles missing from its shallow roof, concrete path cracked. No plant or tree grew in its vicinity. The front wall had been removed and the former front garden concreted over as a parking place for Rick’s car.
After about ten minutes, they saw a blue Volvo turn the corner out of Pomfret High Road and pull over onto the concrete slab garden. The man Burden had chased down the stairs got out of the car and, without looking in their direction, walked up the path, his shoulders stooped and his head lowered against the rain. He walked as might one who has ceased to resist and who knows when to abandon hope. Once he had let himself in at the front door and closed it behind him without looking back, Wexford and Burden left their car and crossed the road. They were halfway across the pavement when Rick Samphire opened the door and stood waiting for them with bowed head. He might have been waiting to be summoned to his own execution.
Of the interior of this house, Wexford said afterward that if he had had to live in that he’d have committed suicide. The tiny room at the back into which Rick took them was furnished with a television set, an old sofa covered in torn and very dirty red velvet, and a kitchen stool with a plastic seat. No curtains hung at the window, no carpet or rug covered the bare board floor. A calendar, depicting gloomy paintings of sailing ships, hung on one wall, no pictures on any.
But it was what they saw outside the room, in the narrow passage that ran from the front door to the back of this small house, that brought to each of them a hope they had come to the right place and to see the right man. At the end of this passage, on one of the curved horns of the coat-stand, hung a gray fleece with a hood.
If Rick Samphire saw them eyeing this garment he gave no sign. His hangdog face showed no change. His eyes looked dead. Wexford and Burden sat down and, after a slight hesitation, Rick sat down too, on the edge of the stool, his hands hanging limply between his knees. Wexford began, asking him if he knew Amber Marshalson and showing him her photograph, then doing the same in respect of Megan Bartlow.
The reply was unusual: “I don’t know.”
“You didn’t know them, Mr. Samphire, or you don’t know if you knew them?”
“I don’t know,” Rick said again. “I don’t know if I knew them. I may have seen them. I can’t remember. I’ve got a bad memory. My ex-wife
wrecked my memory.”
Deciding not to pursue this, Burden asked him if he knew Yorstone Wood.
“Where?” Rick’s somber mood had changed. He was suddenly a little wary, conscious apparently that he must now take care what he said, be cagey.
“Yorstone Wood. It lies to the south of the Kingsmarkham-to-Lewes road, about halfway between Stringfield and Pomfret Monachorum. Have you ever been there?”
“I don’t go in woods,” said Samphire. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Samphire. You tell me.”
Wexford asked him, “Were you in Yorstone Wood on the evening of the twenty-fourth of June? Did you park your car in the wood and walk toward Yorstone Bridge past the woodman’s cottage, carrying a backpack with a weapon in it in the shape of a concrete block?”
“In the shape of what?”
“A lump of concrete.”
“I’ve never been there. Not ever.”
“When you were in Yorstone Wood and again when you were in Mill Lane, Brimhurst, did you wear that gray fleece with the hood?”
Silence. Then Rick said in a slow truculent tone, “I don’t want to talk to you. I’ve had enough trouble with the law. The law’s always had it in for me. It took away my house and my money and my kids.”
“Mr. Samphire,” Wexford said, “we’d like to know where you were on the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, the night of the tenth to eleventh of August and the morning of the first of September. This is very important. Perhaps you’ll think about it and tell us when we come back tomorrow.”
“I won’t be here. I’ll be at the old bank building tomorrow.”
“We’ll see you there,” said Burden. “At nine.”
The blue Volvo on the concrete slab was an old car, perhaps fifteen years old; its paintwork had long lost its gloss and become dull. It was covered with scratches, some old, some not so old, and some apparently new. They walked around it, looking at those scratches, before they left.
