by Ruth Rendell
“I dare say that’s because he doesn’t know what it means,” said Burden gloomily.
“There was another thing. I can’t be sure, it may have been something quite different—but did you notice how he went over to that fancy gilt table and opened the drawer?”
“I believe so.”
“When we went in there was something lying on that table, and after he’d opened the drawer there wasn’t. He put it away. I could be wrong but it looked like a gun.”
“We’ll never get a warrant on that evidence,” said Wexford. “We can’t search a man’s house because Bal thinks he may have seen a gun but can’t be sure.”
“We can bear in mind that it may be there, though.”
“Yes, we can do that. Of course we will do that. Now the tighter these alibis get and the more unassailable they become, the less anybody can believe them. Yet in court everyone will have to believe them, simply because their statements are watertight, so it’s impossible for us to bring charges. We know before we start that any charges will fail. It’s not natural to produce mates who’ll swear to your being somewhere at a precise time three months ago, yet it’s the only thing that will satisfy the court. Anything else will be shot down in flames.”
“Bal’s been to the Mermaid,” said Burden. “They know Arlen and they know Rick Samphire. They’ve seen them in there together. But of course they can’t remember if they were in there together on the twenty-fourth of June and not one of them is going to say they weren’t.”
Even more incredible and even less destructible was Rick’s alibi for the night between the tenth and eleventh of August. He had left his ex-wife’s house in Myringham at about eleven-fifteen, a time vouched for by Alison Rowley (as she now called herself) and her partner. Wexford thought them reputable witnesses, while asking himself if the reason for his thinking in this way was partly because Alison had left Rick. Hannah Goldsmith liked them for their lifestyle and this in her eyes vindicated their honesty. It was afterward that the difficulties arose. Rick had come up with this story of his car breaking down and a subsequent encounter with a motorist. Wexford and his team had gone to a great deal of trouble to find this motorist, were on the point of giving up, when a middle-aged man with a bald forehead and large glasses walked into the police station and announced to the duty sergeant that he had been away on holiday for the past two weeks and had only now heard that the police were looking for him.
He gave his name as Stephen Lawson, his address as Lady Lane, Forby, and his occupation as fund-raiser for a Kingsmarkham-based charity. “I’d have presented myself a couple of weeks ago if I’d known I was wanted,” he said. “Any sort of subterfuge is very distasteful to me. I couldn’t sleep at night if I thought I was evading my duty.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Wexford said, “but what exactly have you come for?”
“I,” said Lawson, drawing himself up, “am Stephen Lawson. I am the driver who stopped and offered a lift to a man whose car broke down. In the nighttime. At one A.M., that is, on August the eleventh.”
“All right. DS Goldsmith will take a statement from you if you’d like to follow her.” They were leaving the office when Wexford called after them, “Know Mr. Rick Samphire well, do you?”
“Who?” Lawson turned his head, his face wearing a puzzled look.
“I was returning to my home in Forby on the A3923 from Myfleet,” Lawson’s statement ran, “where I had been spending the evening with friends at the Cheriton Forest Hotel, when I passed a stationary car which had evidently broken down. Its driver had lifted up the bonnet and was looking inside. The clock on my dashboard gave the time as twelve thirty-two. I pulled into the grass verge and asked the driver if I could help. He appeared to have no phone in his car, which was a blue Volvo, about fifteen years old. I cannot remember the index number but it had the letters VY in it and the number 7.
“The driver said he had been trying to restart the car for the past twenty minutes. Two cars had passed him but neither had stopped. I asked him if I could phone one of the motoring organizations for him, the AA or RAC, but he said he was not a member of either. I then took a look at the car myself and could tell the battery was flat but not being a motor mechanic could not help. I asked if there was anyone I could phone for help and he said, ‘My brother, but not at this time of night. I wouldn’t disturb him at this hour.’
“I did not ask him for his brother’s name or phone mumber. He said his own name was Richard but did not give a surname. I offered him a lift but as he was heading for Pomfret and I was going in the opposite direction he refused. It would have been about eight miles to Pomfret from where we were and he said there was nothing for it but to start walking. I watched him set off and then I drove on home. I looked at my car clock again when I started and saw that the time was twelve fifty-two.”
The “friends at the Cheriton Forest Hotel” turned out to be a couple and a single woman friend from Birmingham spending a week’s holiday there. Their story had some interesting aspects. DS Vine spoke to them, first on the phone, then to their woman companion at her office in London. It was true that they had spent a few days at Cheriton Forest but Stephen Lawson was unknown to them before they went there.
“He picked me up,” the woman said. “I may as well be honest about it. I was waiting for my friends in the bar and he came over and asked if he could buy me a drink. This was at about eight on the Tuesday evening. I didn’t see why not. My friends didn’t come down for about half an hour. We had a chat and then when my friends came we all went in to dinner.”
“Mr. Lawson joined you?”
“Not then. We had a table for three and he was alone. About halfway through the meal I said to my friends, should we invite him to have coffee with us and we did. Well, I did. We all had coffee brought into the lounge.”
Vine asked her what they had talked about.
“The Forest, I suppose, and the countryside. It’s very pretty around there. He said he lived in a place called Forby which had been called the fifth prettiest village in Britain and I said how awful to be only the fifth, and then he told us he was a fund-raiser for a society giving aid to Uganda—no, Kenya. He went on and on about poverty and disease, and how the women had dozens of babies and left them on rubbish dumps because they couldn’t afford to bring them up. I don’t think my friends liked any of this much. They told me afterward they hadn’t liked him and when it got to about half past ten they said they were going to bed. I thought he’d go then, but he didn’t. He asked me to come into the bar with him while he had one for the road.
“Anyway, I did. There wasn’t anything—well, I mean, he never made a pass or anything. We sat at a table in the bar and I had a glass of wine and he had a tomato juice he called a Virgin Mary because it hadn’t got any vodka in it. He went on talking about the Kenyan women and how tragic it was, and at about half-eleven he said he’d soon have to go. He asked me for my phone number and I…well, I gave him one I made up because I really didn’t want to see him again.
“After that I said good night and went to bed. He was still in the bar, but they closed at midnight so I suppose that was when he left.”
And drove the three miles along the little unclassified road through Cheriton Forest, Wexford calculated, joined the A3923 at Myfleet and went northward. He must have taken things at a leisurely pace because it was just after half past midnight when he reached the point where Rick Samphire claimed his car had broken down. Wexford had no doubt he had driven that route at that time. The organizers of this alibi did their work thoroughly. Rick’s car contained the letters X and Y and the number 7. The doubt came when he was asked to believe that Rick Samphire’s car or Rick Samphire were there. It was a job for Hannah and Bal to find out if that car had been in for repairs the next day.
“It was taken to my brother’s house and he had Col pick it up,” said Rick to Hannah. “Got a towbar on the van and he’s a good little mechanic.”
No one was going to be able to pr
ove that Colin Fry had towed Rick’s broken-down Volvo from Pauceley to Kingsmarkham or, come to that, that he had not. “Of course he’ll say he did,” Hannah said as they drove along Glebe Road. “He’ll say he had to repair the big end or the distributor or whatever goes wrong in cars.”
“You don’t know?” Bal smiled the smile that induced in her something near enslavement. “I thought you’d be an expert. I think of you as being good at everything you do, Hannah.”
“You thought wrong,” she said sharply. Enslaving smile or not, she was getting angrier with him by the day. “Nobody’s perfect.”
Colin Fry’s white van was parked outside the dry-cleaners in Glebe Road and Colin and his girlfriend Emma were both at home, eating cold Thai takeaway leftovers for their lunch. The weather having turned rather cold, Emma was in combat trousers and a skintight white sweater. Hannah thought Bal looked at her rather longer than he need have. I bet he’d do it with her at the drop of a hat, she said to herself. He wouldn’t respect her or need to be serious about her the way he is with me. She asked Colin about Rick’s car in a voice so gruff that Bal gave her a glance of surprise.
“Yeah, I fetched that old jalopy of his from Ross’s place. What day? I can tell you that straight off. It was the hottest day since records began. They said that on the telly, the hottest day since records began.”
“Were you able to repair it, Mr. Fry?”
“Needed a new battery. I went down to the Volvo shop in Kingsmarkham and got one for him. It was in by midday, wasn’t it, Em?”
“What did all that set him back?” Bal asked.
“Not him. Ross paid. He always does. They think the world of each other, Ross and Rick. There’s nothing Ross wouldn’t do for Rick, and Rick’s grateful, isn’t he, Em? I’ll say that for him. He knows the meaning of gratitude.”
Two other police officers called on Colin Fry and Emma Sams that day. They were DS Vine and DC Fancourt and they presented themselves as Barry and Lynn, inquiring if they could book the flat from seven P.M. till eleven P.M. that evening. Or any evening that week.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Colin Fry.
“We got your name from Mr. Robinson,” said Barry. “He recommended you.”
“No, he didn’t. I don’t know any Mr. Robinson.” Fry slammed the door so violently that Lynn had to jump backward. But his shocked reaction and aggressive antagonism did as much for Wexford as a willing response, and he put DC Coleman on to watch the place.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
Letters were unusual these days. Wexford regretted this, though he admitted to himself that e-mails were quicker and easier, and phone calls even better. If the post brought anything anymore it was bills and flyers and catalogs. So the letter in a cream laid envelope addressed to “The Officer-in-charge,” with the direction in a large forward-sloping hand and with a German stamp, came as a surprise. It began “Dear Sir” and the written English was as impeccable as Ingrid Stadler’s spoken English.
Dear Sir,
As you see from the heading on this paper, I live just outside the German city of Frankfurt. I shall be in your country on business on Monday, 10 October, and would like to come to see you and discuss a serious matter. If you will excuse me, I prefer not to enter into details in a letter. Would Tuesday, 11 October, or Wednesday, 12 October, be a suitable date at 3 or 4 p.m.?
I enclose my e-mail address and phone number.
Yours truly,
Rainer König-Hensel
“Unless I’m much mistaken,” said Wexford, “this chap is one of those unfortunates who used Megan or Amber as surrogate mothers. Megan, probably. He may even be the father of the child she was carrying when she was killed.”
Burden took the letter from him and read it again. “One of the possible fathers, you mean.”
“At least he’ll tell us what the arrangements were and what he paid the girl, and I suppose there’s a chance he’ll tell us where those Samphires and their henchmen came in. It may be that Ross organized the whole thing. They’ve got to have been involved somewhere and so far we’ve found nothing.”
Being black made shadowing someone or watching a property more difficult than it would have been for DS Vine, for instance, or DC Archbold. In Kingsmarkham, at any rate, Damon Coleman thought, only a very few years back anyone of African descent stood out like a single kidney bean in a packet of haricots. Now that their numbers had quadrupled, someone as dark as he was no longer a freak to be stared at in the street. But he was still noticed more than a young white man would have been, and the irony was that he, a black officer of the law, was looked on with greater suspicion than a white thug. A good many people, especially the elderly, concluded that his standing about, looking in shop windows, taking a walk around the block, or sitting at the wheel of his car was loitering with intent to commit a felony. Possessed of a sense of humor, Damon got considerable amusement out of their disapproving glances but was still often apprehensive that one of them might summon a policeman.
He had been watching the dry-cleaners above which Colin Fry lived for several evenings in succession. The clocks had still not been put back and darkness didn’t start to fall before six. After that the street lamps showed him up even more. Sitting in his car was probably the most secure option, but the very presence of his car there evening after evening was suspicious. Colin Fry and that piece of jailbait, his girlfriend, had stared through the passenger window as they passed two nights ago, and after that he had borrowed Bal’s car and left him his. That particular evening, the first he had seen Colin and Emma go out, though he had seen no one go in since his arrival at five forty-five, he had had high hopes of a couple emerging at eleven. But Colin and the girl had returned long before that hour in an unsteady and amorous condition, and he had abandoned his watch until next day.
No one had gone in that evening, nor had the tenants gone out. As far as he knew, that is. But at seven, after he had seen a man of about thirty-five let himself in at the red front door and a woman rather younger admitted by this same man ten minutes later, he left Bal’s car where he had parked it and went to investigate the back of the building. From the parallel road, the rear of the little row of shops was hidden by tall trees still in leaf, but Damon discovered an alley that led, not into Glebe Road itself but, by describing a wide curve, into Glebe Lane. Halfway along, he could see the back of the dry-cleaners and the flat above it, and make out in the lamp-lit dark an iron fire escape running in zigzag flights from the upper floor to the backyard and a path to this very alley.
So Colin and Emma had spotted him the night before, probably without absolutely identifying who and what he was, and prudently made their escape this way rather than coming out into the street. He couldn’t be in two places at once, but he could station himself in the alley and, once he had seen Colin’s and Emma’s departure, be back in Glebe Road in two minutes, plenty of time to see a couple arrive. Or would the pair “borrowing” the flat also use the fire escape?
Apparently they would. Or else no one had gone out and no one had come in on the following night. After a fruitless hour in the alley, Damon went back to his car at seven-thirty and, glancing up at a lighted window in the flat above, saw Colin Fry looking down. But not at Bal’s car. He was scrutinizing the street for Damon’s own car, whose make, color, and index number he had no doubt memorized, or for Damon himself lurking in a doorway. Though he must have satisfied himself that Damon wasn’t there and the coast was clear, he seemed to have no intention of leaving the flat that night. Damon stayed there for another hour, finally going home just before nine.
Tomorrow, he thought, he would park Bal’s car as far away as he dared while still keeping the flat under surveillance.
“First it was drugs, now it’s having a baby for someone else,” said George Marshalson. “To me she was an innocent child and you’re making her into a monster.”
He was in sole charge of Brand this evening. Diana, he said, had gone
to see her sister in Myfleet. She had put the little boy to bed before she left and said he was asleep, but George was sure he had heard him cry out and had been on the point of going upstairs to investigate when Wexford and DS Goldsmith had arrived. As he spoke, a loud wail came from upstairs and George got reluctantly to his feet. He went to the door and listened, the expression on his face exasperated, but when the cry wasn’t repeated he returned to the ornate oriental chair he had been sitting in.
“I asked you if your daughter ever mentioned surrogacy to you, Mr. Marshalson,” Hannah said. “As a concept, I mean. Not as something she intended to take on herself.”
“Not that I remember,” said George. “Well, I would remember. I certainly would remember any proposal she might have had to bring another child into this house.”
“The idea wouldn’t have been to keep the child herself, Mr. Marshalson,” said Wexford, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“The idea, as you call it, is preposterous.”
Wexford turned his attention to the Samphire brothers. “You told me last time we talked about this, sir, that you doubted if these people had ever come in contact with Amber. Can you be absolutely sure of that?”
“I can’t account for what she did and whom she met when she wasn’t at home here, can I? Pretty obviously I can’t. If I’d had any control over that none of these appalling things would have happened. Maybe she knew Ross Samphire or the other one—what’s he called? Rick, is it?—maybe she knew them. I wouldn’t know. She didn’t meet them in my presence.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Mr. Marshalson, and what I hope may be confirmed later this week.” When König-Hensel comes and reveals everything? “Your daughter and Megan Bartlow were concerned together in some kind of, er, business of being surrogate mothers. It may have been perfectly legal.” He was certain it wasn’t.
