by Ruth Rendell
“It’s Anna Smithson,” said Hannah.
“And your home address?”
Hannah gave her own. Who could prove no Anna Smithson lived there?
“What kind of miracle tour did you have in mind?”
The time had come for a frank avowal, an opening of the heart woman-to-woman. “I’m desperate to have a baby. I’ve tried everything. Miracle Travel is my last hope. I’m so depressed, I think I’ll do something, well, something awful, put an end to everything if I can’t have a child. Do you think I’m a fool?”
It went against the grain with Hannah to talk like this. The words almost stuck in her throat but she realized that this choking awkwardness was all to the good. This was ten times better than a smooth stating of the case. A spark of sympathy had appeared in Miss Tropical Beach’s glassy blue eyes.
“It’s best if you speak to our managing director, but he won’t be up till this afternoon. Could you come back at three…well, say three-thirty?”
Hannah could. Going out into the cold was very unpleasant and there was no car to dive into. What had that girl meant by “up”? “He won’t be up till this afternoon”? That he wouldn’t be up to London, say, or he wouldn’t be out of bed? Surely not the latter. Wexford had said to go shopping. Why not? Reappearing with a couple of Bond Street bags could only add verisimilitude to her disguise when she returned and it was ages since she had bought anything new…
On the concrete slab outside the bungalow, instead of the aged Volvo stood a new red Toyota. On closer inspection it turned out not to be quite new and, though a gift from Ross, had been given from necessity not simply altruism. Rick had managed to write off the little Volvo, tough car though it was, by reversing it down a one-way street and crashing it—more violently and disastrously than could have been conceived of in those circumstances—into a big four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser parked by the curb.
“They say I’m accident prone,” said Rick. He presented a sorry sight, limping from jarring his left knee, his right arm in a sling from a sprained wrist, and a plaster half covering his forehead from where he had struck it on the rear mirror. “I never saw that four-by-four. I told the guy it belongs to I reckon I had a stroke. They said at the Princess Diana I hadn’t, but that’s all that accounts for it.”
Burden shook his head. “You’re lucky to have your brother, aren’t you?”
Rick gave him a resentful look. “Haven’t I always said so? I’m sure I know the meaning of gratitude.”
He began rolling himself a cigarette. Burden could have sworn the soup plate in use as an ashtray hadn’t been emptied since he was last in this house. He thought he recognized one particular twisted cigarette end with a grease stain on its tip. There was an art in surprising someone you were questioning and while Barry Vine asked Rick more about his road accident, Burden planned his attack.
Rick uttered his final miserable monosyllable and Burden said, “How long has Ross been seeing Lydia Burton?”
As a shock tactic, it was disappointingly ineffective. “With her now, is he?” Rick said, his habitually depressed tone unchanged. “One woman’s enough for any man, if you ask me. You have two on the go and all it means is that they’ll both of them get your money off you and if one gets your home off you, the other one’ll get your kids.”
Naomi sounded excited. Cold weather suited her, she said. “Actually I’m on top of the world, Sylvia. All these years I’ve been against marriage, but somehow, when Neil asked me, I went all weak at the knees. It means a man really loves you, doesn’t it, when he proposes?”
This served, unexpectedly, to remind Sylvia of when Neil had proposed to her. They had both been very young and very much in love. It hadn’t been snowing then but a moonlit midsummer, and the way they felt had, of course, been going to last forever. Sylvia knew she ought to say she hoped Naomi would be very happy. She ought to feel happy for her and Neil because she had read in the paper only that morning that the children of couples who are married to each other grow up in a more stable environment than those of people cohabiting. And these two were going to have a child. As if to confirm this, the child they were going to have gave a great lurch and a kick. She could see it, not just feel it.
“I hope you’ll be very happy,” she said in the voice of someone breaking bad news.
“I think we will. The wedding’s on Saturday week. We’d actually love you to come, but I don’t suppose…?”
“You don’t suppose right,” said Sylvia. “I’m not as big as a house. I’m as big as a palace.”
“Well, not long now. Bye-bye. I’ll call you again tomorrow. And don’t worry about the snow. It won’t settle.”
Quite alone, the boys at school and Mary at work at the Princess Diana Hospital, Sylvia tried to phone her mother but got the answering service. Her sister was in a place called Bora-Bora. She didn’t even know where that was, but presumably it was reachable by mobile. The idea of trying the number and failing to get it depressed her. She lay down on the sofa, picked up the book she was reading, but read nothing. She looked at the snow powdering the lawn, then covering it so that blades of grass could no longer be seen. Watching paint dry was supposed to be the slowest thing you could do; waiting for a baby to come was slower. And usually you got the reward for your patience of a baby at the end of it. Not this time, though, not this time.
Spending a great deal of money, far more than she could afford, on a party dress for Christmas and a trouser suit, Hannah economized on lunch, eating a sandwich in a café off Oxford Street. As if, as she said to herself afterward, saving ten pounds would make a difference when you’d spent several hundred. She walked back to Carlos Place carrying her two large glossy bags and thinking about Bal. They barely spoke these days. Still, she thought of wearing the party dress while out with him on, say, Christmas Eve. She thought of him suddenly asking her out in a way she couldn’t refuse and making it clear he’d had a change of heart and wanted her, really wanted her and spontaneously.
Miss Tropical Beach let her in, said, “The managing director will see you now.”
Didn’t he have a name? Hannah supposed she would find it out, but when she was shown into a room at the back, the man who came to greet her merely held out his hand and said how nice it was to meet her. He reminded her of David Suchet playing Poirot, but minus the mustache. There were no posters here and no brochures but a little drawing room full of eighteenth-century French furniture. Two paintings on the walls looked to Hannah like Gainsboroughs. The one opposite her was of a very young woman in a low-cut white gown and a huge white hat covered with ribbons and feathers. Something strange about the room puzzled her, and then she realized it had no windows.
He offered her a cigarette. It wasn’t quite the first Hannah had been offered in the past ten years, but probably only the third.
“Oh, no, thank you.” She had already slipped into a gushing tone.
“You won’t mind if I do?”
“Of course not. These are your premises.” She gave him a sad smile. “I don’t know if the young lady told you how, well, how desperate I am for a baby. My husband and I, I mean, well, I’ll go anywhere, do anything…”
He smiled, exhaling blue smoke. “You won’t have to do anything much, Mrs. Smithson. What you have to do will be, I hope, a pleasure. A comfortable flight to a beautiful part of Africa, an excellent hotel to stay in, a tour including a two-night safari, and—and what you want at the end of it.”
If only she could be recording this, but it would hardly be admissible in court…“I shall actually give birth at the end of it.”
He didn’t answer. “You have already talked to Ms. Brooks, I believe?”
“That’s right.”
“Good. Then you’ll know some preparation is necessary. The usual period is six months in which clients build themselves up with a diet and exercise regimen.”
She persisted. “Will I…will I give birth in Nairobi?”
“The fact is the nursing home has excell
ent facilities and a trained staff including two senior medical practitioners. Sam will give you a brochure on your way out and a diet sheet and so on. But I don’t want to rush you into anything. I’d like you to study the brochure and the other information, discuss the matter with your husband, and then come and see me again. Now you live in Kingsmarkham, I believe?”
“That’s right.”
“The fact is I have a home near Pomfret myself. Perhaps you’d come and see me there when you’ve made up your mind.”
“I’ve made it up already,” said Hannah.
He smiled in fatherly fashion. “No, Mrs. Smithson, believe me you haven’t. You need to think some more about it and then, if you want to, come and see me again. As a matter of fact, you can give me a ring here and we’ll fix a date.”
Again they shook hands. He hadn’t told her his name and he had avoided confirming the purpose of the Miracle Tour. She had mentioned birth and babies, but he hadn’t. She could almost admire his skill in calling the doctors involved “medical practitioners” instead of obstetricians. Outside, in the office where Sam Tropical Beach presented her with a prettily packaged sheaf of papers, Hannah asked her what the managing director was called.
“Oh, Mr. Arlen. Mr. Norman Arlen. Didn’t I say?”
CHAPTER 28
* * *
You could have gone through those sheets with a fine-tooth comb, as Wexford put it, without reading a word to tell you that the aim of this tour was to acquire a baby and a passport for that baby, and bring him or her home to the United Kingdom. The words “baby” and “birth” appeared nowhere. An expert deciphering cryptic notes could have found nothing beyond the advertising of a trip to Africa, the only odd thing about it its high cost for what it appeared to be. The diet sheet that came with it, a small, brightly colored and glossy booklet, suggested no reason why readers might need to eat sweet potatoes, white radishes, peppers, and coconut, swallow multivitamins, gingko, and devil’s claw. Why it recommended bush meat, available in some London markets—Hannah recoiled in horror from this—wasn’t explained either.
“What strikes me,” said Wexford, “is that these foodstuffs all have their origins in Africa or are found in Africa. It’s as if Arlen or whoever writes this stuff wants to give his gullible clients the idea that eating African vegetables will somehow make them more suitable as the mothers of African babies.”
Hannah turned to the brochure that set out the conditions and amenities of the tour. “It costs enough,” she said. “Ten thousand seems to be the basic minimum. A really downmarket hotel, no courtesy car available. A top-grade one can run you into over twenty thousand.”
“What I’m wondering is where these babies come from. Are they kidnapped? Or do their impoverished mothers sell them?” Wexford asked. “Either way it’s grim to think of.”
“But we’re there, aren’t we?” said Burden. “We discredit Arlen and Rick’s alibi for Midsummer Night falls. Ross’s alibi for the night of August the tenth to eleventh falls.”
Wexford looked up from the brochure. “Aren’t you being over-optimistic? Lawson still alibies Rick for the August date, but what of Ross who in the absence of Arlen has no alibi? Neither Rick nor Ross is really alibied for the first of September. Colin Fry genuinely believes he was in the old bank building with both of them, but they were on the ground floor and he on an upper floor. Either of them could have gone out for an hour without his knowing. And Megan recognized Ross as the man she’d seen in Yorstone Wood while he was in fact absent on holiday in Spain.”
“She made a mistake.”
“What, he let her blackmail him when he knew she couldn’t have recognized him? He still silenced her? He got Rick to kill her when he could have proved he was absent in Spain? I don’t think so. As for the night of the tenth to eleventh of August, we don’t like Lawson and his offer of help. We’re sure Lawson’s whole story is a positive tapestry of lies. But a jury would believe him, particularly when Colin Fry says Rick’s car did break down, he did have a flat battery, which Colin replaced himself the next day. After thoughtful brother Ross had had the car at his place with ample time to tinker with it.
“And you have to remember that, though strictly speaking we don’t need to supply a motive, it would be a help to know what it was. We haven’t a clue what it was. Rick kills young girls because he’s a psychopath? We’ve no evidence he is. He’s capable of violence, we know that. But beating up your wife and knocking a man unconscious outside a pub are not exactly precursors of killing girls you don’t know, apparently at random. Rick hates women because of what he sees as the injury his wife has done him? Then why kill two girls who are not wives, two girls he’s never seen before? Above all—and we’ve never yet asked ourselves this—what’s in it for him?”
“What d’you mean, guv?”
“I rather think,” said Wexford, “that Rick would do anything for money. He’s always moaning about his ex-wife taking his money. What else would he kill for? And he did kill. I’m sure of it. I could almost say I know it. As Sherlock Holmes says, ‘When all else is impossible that which remains must be so.’ It’s impossible that Rick killed out of simple hatred or for revenge or passion or fear, so what remains is money. He killed but someone else had the motive. He did these crimes for money, which someone else gave him and he was given it through Ross. It’s just what Ross would do—do his brother a favor by giving him the job. Rick’s being very careful not to spend the money yet. Not perhaps for a long while.”
“What’s he done with it, then?” Burden asked.
“Shall I make a guess? Not put it in his own bank account. Not bought ISAs with it or National Savings bonds. He hasn’t kept it in his house for fear we might come searching. No, he’s handed it to Ross, to dear old lovable brother Ross, for safekeeping.”
“That doesn’t explain why whoever paid for this wanted the girls killed,” said Hannah.
Studying the brochure and the diet sheet once more, she realized that there was little point in this scrutiny as she intended to phone Norman Arlen in any case. She intended, as soon as possible, to go and see him at Pomfret Hall. The only decision to be made was whether she dared record their conversation.
Three days had passed since her visit to Miracle Tours in Carlos Place and it seemed time to phone him. The woman who answered sounded very unlike Miss Tropical Beach. She said Mr. Arlen wasn’t in but, when Hannah introduced herself as Mrs. Smithson, gave her the Pomfret Hall number. It wasn’t Arlen who answered when she dialed it, yet she thought she recognized the voice. Sometime in the past month or so she had heard that voice, the east London suburban accent they called estuary English. He transferred the call to Arlen.
“You’ve made your mind up very quickly, Mrs. Smithson.”
“I told you I wanted to do it when I saw you in London.”
“Well, that’s a fact,” he said. “Why don’t you come and see me here—well, shall we say next Tuesday? Tuesday at three in the afternoon? You’ll drive, I suppose?”
Hannah said she would, though she immediately realized this wouldn’t be wise. She would have a taxi. But whose was that voice?
Summoned to the police station for a second interview, Stephen Lawson repeated almost word for word what he had said last time but with some embellishments. These almost uncannily matched the account given of his meeting with “the friends in the Cheriton Forest Hotel” by the woman he had picked up in the bar. This recalled to Wexford how the woman in her statement had said Lawson had talked about his fund-raising for a society giving aid to Africa and talked too about babies abandoned like so much rubbish.
Was there any connection between this and Miracle Tours? Asked, Lawson declared he had never heard of Arlen or his travel agency. Wexford took him back to his encounter with Rick and his broken-down car, and Lawson finished his account exactly as he had done on the previous occasion. It was then that Wexford realized he must be telling the truth about every aspect of his evening, from his dinner in the Cherit
on Forest Hotel to his drive across the lonely country road to his final arrival at home. The only addition need be his meeting with Rick. But that the story was set up and every detail prearranged, probably by Ross Samphire, he was sure.
When Lawson left the police station to walk to his car, the first flakes of snow began to fall. Wexford watched the snow from his window, turning around to hear Burden say, “It won’t settle. Not at this time of the year it won’t.”
As the birth of her third child approached Sylvia was uneasily aware that her older children were rejecting her. That was perhaps putting it too strongly. Better say they had withdrawn that easy confident affection she usually received from them and both looked at her with puzzled resentful eyes. They simply failed to understand what she was doing or why she might want to do it. Young as they were, it was as if in some mysterious way they comprehended that this was not the way things should be. This was not the way things had traditionally and acceptably always been, had been taken for granted. This was an affront to society and custom and families. Did she recognize it herself, then?
No, she told herself, it was only that she realized that her sons, more conventional and conservative than she, the grownup, wanted the normal and the ordinary to endure. What she was doing was the right thing. Not even, probably, the new thing, for she had no doubt women had done this for other women and their men throughout history, only in more prudish times it had never been talked about. She was right but still their near-ostracism left her feeling very lonely. Her mother, to whom she had always been close, had been cold toward her for months now. It was a long time since they had been in the mutually reassuring habit of phoning each other every day. As for her father, he was fine with her, once, that is, he had got over the initial shock. But she knew he didn’t really approve. He didn’t like it.
