by Ruth Rendell
“Legal,” said George, “but hardly moral.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. They may have started this on their own, but it seems likely they got into the hands of someone—let’s call him their organizer.”
“You make him sound like a pimp.”
“We think this may have been one of the Samphire brothers or both of them,” said Hannah, getting a frown from Wexford, “but as Chief Inspector Wexford says, we hope soon to get more evidence of that. Meanwhile, do you have any views?”
“All I know of Surrage-Samphire is that they did some interior decoration work for us, it was perfectly satisfactory, and I’d have no hesitation in employing them again. My wife will say the same. She probably saw more of them than I did.”
He jumped to his feet, slapping his hand into the small of his back with a soft groan as renewed cries came from upstairs, insistent this time.
“I’ll have to see to him,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll know what’s wrong. But it’s no use leaving him to cry. That’s just storing up trouble for later on and we don’t want to be up half the night.”
Dining with friends in Savesbury the following evening, Hannah sat next to the only man she had found really attractive since she met Bal. She knew he was going to ask her out and he did. Of course she said no—and regretted it all the way home, thinking what utter nonsense this was, being constant to a man who in anyone else’s eyes was no more than a friend.
Then, as autumn came, brown and tired and sunless, he asked her to come away for the weekend with him, to a hotel in a village in Somerset. Which weekend? The first they both had off at the same time from the Friday evening till the Monday morning.
So it was to be the weekend after next. For the first time in months they would both be off duty from the Friday till the Monday morning. They could drive down in time for dinner on the Friday. He made this suggestion while they were dining at the Cheriton Forest Hotel, having had a predinner drink in the bar where Stephen Lawson had ingratiated himself with the visitor from Birmingham.
Hannah was sick and tired (as she put it to herself) of sitting up at bars with Bal and facing him across dinner tables. It was extremely expensive and she insisted on paying her way. Only one of them was able to drink more than a small glass of wine. By this time they had been to every half-decent restaurant in Kingsmarkham, Pomfret, and Myfleet, and to the few grand ones as well. If only they could have stayed at home and done their own cooking, played their own music, poured their own drinks and had as much as they liked—but then the inevitable would have happened and Bal’s aim was to avoid the inevitable until the time was ripe. Until they really knew each other. Hannah felt she knew everything about Bal from his infancy, childhood, teenage years, school, university, recruitment into the police, his family, his siblings, his parents. His tastes, his inclinations, his favorite music, his reading matter. And he knew all that about her.
“That sounds nice,” she said in response to his invitation for the weekend after next. But his conduct of their relationship—if that was the word—had so inhibited her that she couldn’t ask outright if these days were calculated to see its consummation. She could only manage, “You do mean to stay the nights?” and like some maiden in times gone by, blush when he laughed and said of course, that was the idea.
Soon after that he drove her home, gave her one of his chaste kisses, and didn’t even come up to the flat.
He was not at all the idea of a German even intelligent Englishmen hold in their minds to this day, the large burly blond with a shaven bullet head. Rainer König-Hensel was of medium height, thin, with austere regular features, gray eyes, and olive skin. He wore the kind of beautiful suit Burden favored (but wasn’t wearing today) in a fine charcoal-gray tweed. Wexford noticed these things while confessing sadly to himself that if he possessed such a suit it would have become a wrinkled wreck within days.
They shook hands and König-Hensel took the chair on the other side of the desk to Wexford. If he was embarrassed, his face showed nothing of it but remained set, almost rigid. He was the kind of man whose face would show nothing, Wexford thought, no matter what he was feeling. If it were possible to say such a thing, his speech was more accented than his handwriting and perhaps a little too correct and with far too many insertions of “you know.”
“My wife and I,” he began, “are unable to have children. That is to say, my wife is unable. Treatment for cancer when she was still not twenty years of age left her infertile. She knew this and I knew it when we married ten years ago.” He paused and turned his calm blank gaze on Wexford.
“Please go on, Mr. König-Hensel.”
“This did not worry me, you know. It was not a problem. Often it is not, you know, with men. But Sabine starts to long for a child and we explore the possibility of in vitro fertilization but in our case this too is not possible. Then we hear of surrogacy. The child would be mine but not my wife’s, you know. To cut a long story short, Chief Inspector, we join a group we hear about in Frankfurt and talk to others in a like situation to ours. We also consult the Web and there we find the website of Babies for All. We sign up and after a time names of suitable surrogates are sent to us. Are you following me?”
“I am,” said Wexford.
“But none is to our taste, you know, nor do we care for the counseling which is offered to us. I must explain here that my wife has a horror of discussing these things with so-called experts, of speaking of her private life and other personal matters. Also, Babies for All warns those who sign up to it that to find a surrogate that suits one may take months or even years. My wife is now forty-two and I am six years older. We feel we cannot wait so long, you know. Still, we have given our name to Babies for All, you know, since there seems no harm in doing so and one day last April we receive an e-mail from a Miss Megan Bartlow.”
“Ah,” said Wexford.
“You say that, Chief Inspector, as if you know what I am about to say.”
“I have an idea. But go on.”
König-Hensel hadn’t moved in his chair since he had first sat down but now he shifted a little and leaned forward. “This e-mail told us that Miss Bartlow was not herself on the books, you know, of Babies for All but that she had access to their list of intended parents. She and her friend, a Miss Amber Marshalson, were anxious to be surrogates…”
“Excuse me, Mr. König-Hensel, but do you happen to have a copy of that e-mail?”
“I have taken it with me.”
It was the first mistake in his perfect English. From his briefcase he handed Wexford a single sheet of printout. It may be in Megan’s name, Wexford thought, but Amber wrote it and in text message style without benefit of capital letters.
my friend miss amber marshalson and i are anxious to become surrogates. we want to do this for couples who cannot have children of their own. if you take advantage of our offer you will not have to wait or be vetted or counseled and the process will not take months. we could be with you in frankfurt within weeks. we are young, fit, and healthy and each of us has had a child before. please reply by mail as we have no internet access of our own. megan bartlow, 235 high street, kingsmarkham, e.sussex km13dl.
And they fell for this? König-Hensel seemed to read his thoughts. “I was suspicious from the start, you know, but my wife was made so happy by it. ‘What do we have to lose?’ she kept saying. Our group in Frankfurt has already told us that many surrogacies are privately arranged. ‘They have had children,’ she kept saying to me. ‘We know they can do it,’ and then she said, very sadly, ‘They are not like me, they can do it.’”
“You wrote back?”
“Oh, yes. After about a week. I asked for more information. Miss Bartlow sent me copies of their children’s birth documents—certificates, that is. She sent me a photo of herself and of Miss Marshalson, both lovely girls. ‘What have we to lose?’ my wife said. So I did as she asked and suggested they come to Frankfurt, all expenses paid of course.”
“What
fee were you to pay Megan Bartlow?”
“Two thousand pounds in advance and another two thousand when we…when we received the child.”
“She came at the end of May and Amber Marshalson with her?”
“Before that I had discussed this matter with the group I told you about and a couple said they also were interested, you know, and would like to meet the young ladies.”
Wexford sighed, but inaudibly. “Let me guess,” he said. “They came. You paid for them to stay in a moderately priced hotel. Not, I think, at the Hotel die Vier Pferde?”
“No, indeed. At the Hotel Jägerhof. Not at a four-star hotel. That was not necessary. Beyond—as I believe you say—the call of duty. I did take a suite in the Hotel die Vier Pferde for just one night.” He hesitated and a slight flush colored his pale skin. “For the, er, transaction to take place, you know. After Ms. Bartlow and Ms. Marshalson had left, my wife and I remained for dinner and the night.”
He could imagine. For this uxorious man, having his wife there, staying in some luxury, spending the night there together, would partially remove something of the squalor and absurdity that must attach to these things. And also a way of celebrating conception? It might even help to give her the illusion the child would be hers as well as his. “By the ‘transaction’ you mean you provided a sperm sample?”
“Yes. My friend Mr. Dieter Weinstock provided a sample to Miss Marshalson at the Hotel Jägerhof.”
“And you never heard from either of them again?”
“Not at all. We heard. E-mails came, to tell us conception had taken place in each case and then again in July came word that both were well and the pregnancies proceeding normally. My wife was so happy. Miss Bartlow wrote again on the first of September to say she was well and would be in touch again in one month’s time. She promised to send a photo of herself when her pregnancy, er, was visible. After the month we heard no more, we heard nothing until my friend Mr. Weinstock was over here in the UK three weeks ago, you know. On the flight he received a copy of an English newspaper and in it was an article, only a few lines, saying police had not yet found the killer of Miss Amber Marshalson.”
“I don’t think I have ever felt so hostile to murder victims as I do to those two,” Wexford said as he and Burden sat over a beer in the snug of their old haunt, the Olive and Dove. “I feel vindictive and I know I shouldn’t. But if you’d heard that man…”
Burden shrugged. “I hope you told him he’d been very foolish.”
“Of course I did—but gently. He seemed to think the whole business was far less important to the Weinstocks than it was to him and his wife, and it comforted him to know that at least Megan had become pregnant. Amber, of course, had not. Whether she actually tried to impregnate herself with the gullible Weinstock’s sperm or threw it down the pan no one will ever know. I didn’t tell König-Hensel that it was very likely the child Megan was carrying wasn’t his. Why make it worse for him? Megan’s child may have been Prinsip’s or that of one of the members of SOCC. I’m sure those two contacted them. Remember that thousand pounds she had in her jacket pocket. Before Amber went to the Bling-Bling I think it’s practically a certainty she’d popped along to some hotel room—maybe even in here—and taken delivery of another phial of the magic fluid.”
Burden made a face. “When you come to think of it, they could have hoaxed dozens of couples like this.”
“Hardly dozens, Mike. Let’s hope there aren’t too many desperate people who’d fall for this scam of theirs. Maybe three or four.”
“What I want to know is where does Rick Samphire come into all this?”
“George Marshalson said he sounded like a pimp and there may be something in that. Whenever silly ignorant girls get on to making what looks like easy money, there’ll always be some unscrupulous man ready to take them over and organize them.”
“Except that it looks as if Megan and Amber did their own organizing.”
“He may have put the idea into Megan’s head in the first place. Or more likely Ross did. He may have found out all this background stuff for them. The existence of the Sussex Overcoming Childlessness Circle, for instance. We don’t know how Megan first got on to the surrogacy thing. My suggestion that she read about a case in the newspaper was only an idea. He may have put it to her.”
Burden went up to the little snug bar and asked for two more lagers. The barman insisted on bringing them to their table, perhaps to have the chance of also offering a big bowl full of exceptionally large and succulent-looking cashew nuts. Wexford groaned when he saw them and sat on his hands.
Burden smiled. “You’ll have to bring your hands out again unless you’re going to lap your drink.”
“I know. Could you eat what you want of those things and then put them somewhere out of sight?”
Burden ate a single nut, then carried the bowl to the windowsill where he hid it behind the curtain hem. “There. Out of temptation’s way. That theory of yours doesn’t work, Reg. It presupposes that Megan knew Rick Samphire, knew him well enough to enter into a conspiracy with him. But we’ve already established that he killed her because she recognized him some weeks later as the man she’d seen in Yorstone Wood. If he was her fellow conspirator and, in Marshalson’s words, her pimp, she’d have known him immediately she saw him in the wood.”
“Perhaps she did,” said Wexford.
“What, she saw him and knew him, and he of course knew her and he just let her go, knowing the connection she’d make between him and Amber’s accident?”
“Remember, Amber hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t even been injured. When the accident was reported in the paper there was nothing about Amber’s involvement. Only the Ambroses were mentioned. Why should Megan have suspected Rick Samphire of dropping that lump of concrete off the bridge just because she’d once seen him in Yorstone Wood? Probably she’d no idea of the date when she saw him or when the accident happened. But when Amber was killed and the story of her involvement in the concrete-block-dropping business came out, then it was worth making the connection. She knew Rick. It was easy for her to approach him, a simple matter to meet him at an agreed venue, that is number four Victoria Terrace. Very likely she’d met him there before to discuss details of their next surrogacy con or to hand over his cut of the money they took from the unfortunate ‘intended parents.’”
“So you’re saying,” said Burden, “that Rick killed Megan because she was blackmailing him. But why did he kill Amber? I’m sorry if this is an unfortunate comparison, but wasn’t she the goose that laid the golden eggs?”
Wexford looked for SOCC in the phone book but they weren’t there. In spite of the help it had been to him, the Internet was always the last source to come to mind. Halfheartedly, he entered SOCC and, to his surprise, a display headed “The Stork Can Come to You Too” appeared on the screen. For the first time he had succeeded in conjuring up out of that infernal machine exactly what he wanted. It must have been because he was relaxed about it—or hopeless.
Above the acronym was a picture of a flying stork carrying a shawled baby in its beak. “The Sussex Overcoming Childlessness Circle,” he read,
can really help you become a parent. We offer counseling, group work, psychotherapy, and down-to-earth practical help. Not just by putting our members in touch with IVF treatment but by introductions to adoption societies, surrogacy agencies, and absolutely new systems of acquiring the child of your dreams. Needless to say, everything is within the law and above board.
You can join today by the simple method of entering your name and e-mail address on page two. No payment is required until you have entered one of our programs.
Now touch Next.
Wexford clicked on Next and page two appeared in the shape of an entry form, surrounded by photographs of ecstatic pregnant women and happy mothers with babies.
“I wonder what the ‘absolutely new systems of acquiring the child of your dreams’ are?” said Burden who had come up behind him.
“It can’t mean surrogacy because they mention that.”
“Nor IVF because they mention that too.”
“I said the other day that I’ve known the facts of life for some forty years but now I sometimes wonder. Maybe there’s some amazing secret of procreation that’s never come my way.” Wexford shook his head, more in incredulity than doubt. “Their address and phone number are there underneath that touching picture of a fat lady with twins: 167 High Street, Kingsmarkham.”
Walking up and down on the opposite side of the High Street, Wexford decided that the premises of SOCC must be somewhere in the block of shops that included Gew-Gaws at number 163, above which was the flat Megan Bartlow had lived in. But 161 was an off-license, 165 a hairdresser, 167—which should have been SOCC—was a pet-food supplies store, 169 a newsagent, and 171 an optician. He had already tried phoning the number on the website and after ten rings had an answering service reply.
He crossed the street on the pedestrian crossing and walked along examining all the shop fronts and the doors beside them that led into hallways and upstairs to upper-story flats. Prinsip and Bartlow was still there, unaltered since Megan’s death. Other names were on bell pushes beside other doors, some no longer decipherable. He pushed open the door of Gew-Gaws and Jimmy Gawson’s bell jangled. Jimmy was standing in the middle of the shop beside a table, arranging on top of it a pyramid of chocolate bars in Union flag wrappings surrounded by four-inch-high models of the London Eye. On the edge of an ashtray, probably designed to look like the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park, rested his current inhalator.
When he saw Wexford he put it into his mouth and sucked noisily on it. “Well, my dear,” he said, “if these things had been invented when I was young I’d have got hooked on them instead of those damned cigs. What can I do for you, Reggie?”
“Have you ever heard of something called SOCC? The Sussex Overcoming Childlessness Circle, to give it its full title.”
