by Ruth Rendell
‘She says she rang the back-door bell and when Ms Hussain didn’t answer she came in. Apparently that had happened before. If the vicar was upstairs she might not hear the bell. The back door was left unlocked in the daytime. Maxine called out to her, called her by her Christian name, which most people did –’
‘Which I think you should do with me. It’s the way we live now.’
‘Yes, sir, I know, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be respectful.’
‘Try,’ said Wexford. ‘Go on about Maxine.’
‘When she didn’t seem to hear her she looked in the study, then went into the living room and found her body on the carpet. She’d been strangled.’
‘It was,’ said Burden, taking up the narrative, ‘as she kept on saying, a terrible shock. She phoned us – well, she called 999 – and we got there in under five minutes. I must say, she acted very properly apart from talking too much. The shock hadn’t deprived her of her voice. It was such an unusual killing, such a dramatic event you might say, that I went along with Lynn and Barry Vine. And in a few minutes Mavrikiev turned up. Remember him?’
‘How could I forget the prince of the pathologists? A white-blond creature of moods, ice and incandescence. He got the news of his first child’s birth while he was poking about with some corpse here and it changed him for the better.’
‘He’s got four kids now and I don’t notice much of a change. He wouldn’t say much beyond telling me she’d been killed sometime between two and five in the afternoon and the strangling was from the front. Her killer facing her, in fact. It was half past six when Maxine Sams called us. He’d maybe be more precise later on and there followed some rude remarks about how the police in their ignorance – his words – expected pathologists to be clairvoyants.’
They had come in sight of the Vicarage, a Victorian building, dating from the ugliest architectural phase of the nineteenth century, now festooned in blue-and-white tape round its front garden and the temporary porch of battens and tarpaulin covering its front door. The back door, in fact on the side of the house, stood open and PC Copeland was on the top one of the three steps leading up to it.
He said, ‘Good morning, sir,’ and it took Wexford a second or two to realise that this relative newcomer to the force wasn’t addressing him but Burden. This was something he must get used to and perhaps increasingly in the next few days.
They went inside, finding themselves in a kind of vestibule at the end of a passage. This Victorian Gothic house was one of the few vicarages or rectories which hadn’t been sold off to wealthy people wanting weekend houses, but retained as incumbents’ homes. As they moved along into a hall large enough to be the entire ground floor of a modern house, Wexford thought of the family that would have lived here 150 years before, the paterfamilias on a stipend of perhaps eight hundred a year if he was lucky and had a good living, his wife old before her time, worn out with child-bearing, and their progeny, seven or eight of them, all the boys expensively educated at public school because these people were gentry, the girls learning French, music and needlework at home from Mother, another task for the parson’s wife to perform. And now the incumbent was or had been a woman with one child.
Burden opened the door to the study. ‘It’s all of it still as she left it, desktop computer, printer, tablet or whatever you call it. A good many books and not all them theological by any means.’
‘That isn’t her, is it?’ Wexford indicated a framed photograph on the desk. It looked about the same age as the woman in the Guardian picture or a little older but far better-looking, even beautiful. He couldn’t recall ever having seen the Reverend Sarah Hussain but this was no forty-eight-year-old woman.
‘Her daughter Clarissa, sir,’ said Lynn.
‘Does she live here?’
‘She did,’ Burden said. ‘We were afraid she might arrive while we were all here and the cars outside and – well, you can imagine. Lynn here found the dead woman’s mobile and Clarissa’s number on it.’
‘She wasn’t answering and I couldn’t leave a message on her voicemail, not a message like that. Maxine told us there was a man called Dennis Cuthbert who’s something called the vicar’s warden and I phoned him but when he heard what had happened he got in such a state he was useless. In the end I rang a friend in Kingsmarkham and got her to agree to leave a message for Clarissa saying her mother had had an accident and to come to her house. She’s a woman called Georgina Bray who was a friend of Sarah Hussain and Maxine gave me her number. I went round to her place later, it’s in Orchard Road, so I was there when Clarissa arrived. It was pretty awful – well, like Mr Burden says, you can imagine, sir.’
The living room where the body had lain was even bigger than the hall, a huge chamber with a vaulted and beamed ceiling, windows with peaked tops that faced the front, a pair of French windows, evidently a fairly recent addition, and a good deal of heavy dark brown woodwork. There was no longer any trace of what had taken place there but that would have been true once the body had been removed. Strangling is as fatal as shooting or stabbing, and in a dreadful way, he thought, cleaner. He looked away from the floor where she had lain and up to the wall above the fireplace where there hung a portrait in oils of the girl in the photograph.
‘She looks less Indian than her mother,’ Lynn said. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t say that, it’s maybe politically incorrect. Actually, she’s very attractive, isn’t she? She looks like someone in one of those Bollywood films.’
Wexford noticed how fair-skinned the girl in the portrait was and beautiful rather than ‘attractive’. ‘Where is she now?’
‘Still with Ms Bray, sir. She’s at school here, Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. They’re one of those schools that have kept a sixth form. Mr Burden will know all about that.’
‘Jenny’s her form teacher,’ Burden said. ‘Clarissa’s still off school and will be for a week or so, I suppose.’
They did no more than put their heads round the doors of the dining room and other downstairs rooms. The kitchen had been refitted at about the same time as the French windows put in. It hadn’t aged as well as the windows and with its woodgrain cupboard doors and mottled blue-and-white tiling now looked antique. Letting Lynn go before them up the stairs, Burden said quietly to Wexford, ‘Can you make it for lunch tomorrow? I’d like to give you some details.’
‘Of course,’ Wexford said, relieved because he was asked and didn’t have to ask.
‘I remember how you used to say, “We will talk further on’t,” which you said was a quotation from Shakespeare.’
Wexford laughed. ‘I expect I did.’
Sarah Hussain’s bedroom was bleakly furnished, not exactly a nun’s cell but conspicuously austere: a single bed, one small mirror rather high up, a wicker chair and small round-topped wicker table serving as a bedside cabinet. The books on it were Herbert’s collected poems and Newman’s APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, Sarah Hussain’s place marked with a folded letter. Another book that threatened to be dull but was anything but, thought Wexford who had read it. While Burden was opening the door to the built-in cupboard, Wexford put the letter in his raincoat pocket. After that bedroom, the cupboard’s contents were, with one exception, no surprise to him. Two dark trouser suits, two dark skirt suits, a black wool dress, two cotton dresses, a cotton skirt, two cardigans and two pairs of Indian dress trousers and two patterned tunics. On a shelf above the hanging clothes were some neatly folded sweaters.
‘What was she wearing when she was killed?’
Burden seemed surprised at Wexford’s question. ‘Lynn? I’m afraid I don’t remember.’
‘The salwar kameez,’ Lynn said. ‘Very much like one of those in there, sir. And a necklace of coloured stones, the kind they call sea glass.’
‘Did she often dress like that?’
‘Never in church, apparently. But sometimes when she was at home.’
Clarissa’s room was exactly what one would expect of a seventeen-year-old’s, highly coloured, a blind in
stead of curtains, a duvet without a cover, clusters of photographs on the walls and two posters, Blur on one and Lady Gaga on another. Wexford picked up a framed photograph off the Ikea desk.
‘She was close to her mother?’
‘It would seem so, sir.’
If the daughter looked like a Bollywood star, the mother was more a younger version of Indira Gandhi, the face gaunt, deeply intelligent, dedicated.
‘She looks clever, doesn’t she, sir?’
‘Stop it, Lynn,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m not “sir” to anyone any more. If you can’t bring yourself to call me Reg or, come to that, Mr Wexford, when I was a young copper my contemporaries used to call me Wex.’
Lynn only smiled and they went downstairs.
Burden said to her, ‘Time to get over to Orchard Road. Clarissa’s expecting you. She may feel more able by now to talk about Thursday, how much she knows of what happened that day starting with breakfast.’
‘I’d like to go with her,’ Wexford said rather tentatively. ‘It’s on my way home.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Burden said. ‘I don’t have to warn you to go easy with her, I know that.’
Except that saying it was itself a warning. Their route took them along Vicarage Lane past a big house called Dragonsdene whose garden, Burden said, abutted on the Vicarage garden. There were no others nearby. ‘At first I thought the way everyone else did, certainly the way the media did, that this was the work of some lunatic-at-large, some nut without a motive. The kind of character newspapers love who go about the country killing women and elderly couples, the people who leave their doors unlocked because nothing ever happens in the country, the country is safe. And it may be so but I’m not thinking that way any more. She wasn’t that sort of victim, her past was too – what shall I say? – too involved, too exotic.’
‘You’re going to tell me more tomorrow?’
‘I am,’ said Burden, leaving them to return to the police station.
The woman who opened the door of number 14 Orchard Road had been crying and began crying again as soon as she saw them. Not the best kind of carer for an orphan whose mother had just been murdered, Wexford thought, but he could be wrong. This kind of overflowing sympathy might be just what the girl needed.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Georgina Bray. ‘I can’t seem to stop crying. It’s all so awful. Clarissa’s in here, she doesn’t cry, I really wish she would.’
Sarah Hussain’s daughter was at least as beautiful as her portraits. She had a calm, still face, perfect features and ivory skin. Nodding to Lynn, she turned her large blue eyes on Wexford.
He glanced from one woman to the other. ‘I’m not a police officer, though I used to be. If you’d rather I wasn’t present when DC Fancourt talks to you I can easily go.’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have to put up with me.’
‘No, please stay.’ Georgina Bray looked at Clarissa and Clarissa nodded her head once more.
Suddenly, having been absolutely silent, she spoke. ‘It’s not just that it’s devastating, what happened to my mother, not just that it’s so horrible but that it’s so unfair. She’d had such a hard life, such a lot of things to make her unhappy. Now she was like due for some sort of compensation and what she got was being – being choked to death . . .’
Whatever those things were that had happened to Sarah Hussain, he thought, now was not the time to ask about them. But perhaps Lynn or Burden or Karen Malahyde knew already. Lynn was waiting as if she knew Clarissa would go on talking, that she would need no prompting, and she was right.
‘I don’t believe in God. I haven’t for years, though I never told Mum. I didn’t want to make her unhappy, not now when she’d come here and was – well, she called it serving God. It didn’t matter her getting those filthy letters and being told she wasn’t fit to be a priest and her parishioners turning their backs on her and that man Cuthbert disapproving of her, she could bear all that because she had the love of God.’ Tears welled in the girl’s eyes but her voice remained steady. ‘She thought God had deserted her when her parents died and then when her husband died and then more awful things happened, but God came back and told her to study theology and get ordained and she did and she was happy at last because God loved her. But He didn’t, did He? He doesn’t love anyone. He never told her anything because He doesn’t exist.’ Wexford thought the tears would come now and overflow but they didn’t. Her face had grown stony white and hard as marble. ‘I was the one good thing in her life apart from God.’ She turned to Georgina. ‘I think I’ll go up to my room now. I’m tired, I’m tired all the time.’
They sat in silence as she left the room and closed the door quietly behind her.
Wexford was the first to speak. ‘Ms Hussain was a good friend of yours, Ms Bray?’
Wexford didn’t really know if they were Miss or Mrs or one of each but he seemed to have got it right as Georgina didn’t correct him. Her eyes were wet but the weeping had stopped. ‘I met her at university. That was thirty years ago and we lost touch, sent each other Christmas cards, that sort of thing. Her coming here to St Peter’s was a bit of a coincidence, she’d no previous connection with Kingsmarkham, and I was living here because my husband’s work is here. I don’t go to church but I do take part in local activities and we met at the Mothers’ Union.’ She stared defiantly at Wexford. ‘Don’t laugh. The Mothers’ Union does lots of good work especially in the area of domestic violence, something I know a lot about.’
‘I wasn’t going to laugh,’ said Wexford mildly. ‘You campaign against domestic violence?’
‘I don’t campaign against anything. I just know about it.’
The way she said it made her seem personally involved. Wexford thought he had said enough for now and left the field to Lynn.
‘You said last time I saw you that you were her only friend.’
‘That was what she said, though she did have a friend in Reading where she once lived. Oh, and she said she seemed to have missed out on the knack of making friends. She didn’t know how it was done but I did, she said, and our reunion came about through me. But still I felt guilty. I’ve got a husband, as you know, and three children, but they’re grown up and gone. I do voluntary work. I didn’t have the time for her I should have had. I keep saying to myself that I should have been at the Vicarage that afternoon, I should have been with her, poor darling Sarah . . .’
‘You had made no arrangement to call in at the Vicarage, had you?’ For a moment Lynn hoped she might be on to a lead.
‘Oh, no, no. If only I had. I would have been there and none of it would have happened. I shouldn’t blame myself but I do, I do.’ And Georgina Bray burst into noisy tears, soaking handfuls of the tissues.
When he walked in Dora was at home and Maxine, on the point of leaving, never a swift process, was telling her the tale of his perfidy. ‘Well, like I said, I’m sure I’m very sorry but I couldn’t clean the bathroom. If you find a nasty tidemark round the bath Mr Wexford has only himself to blame. Mind you, the idea of having a bath when you’ve got two showers in the house seems very peculiar to me, not to say weird. But to cut a long story short, I went upstairs with the Mr Muscle and the sponge et cetera and found the door shut as I expected. He’d been a long time in the bath but if people are going to use all that water when we’ve got a drought on the horizon, they may as well make the most of it, is what I say.’ Here a long stare at Wexford, lips temporarily compressed. ‘Well, I went back after a good twenty minutes and the door was still shut. Locked, I suppose, though I wasn’t going to try it, was I?’
‘I don’t know why not,’ interrupted Wexford.
A humourless laugh and, ‘Well, if you don’t know I’m certainly not going to tell you.’ Maxine proceeded to do so. ‘Naturally, I presumed you was in there in the altogether, though I must say an hour and a half had gone by. It was all of twelve, past midday, and then Mrs Wexford come in and I felt I was called upon to explain, not that she did call upon me. I hope I know my duty
, that’s all.’
Dora placated her, checked that she had taken her money, exchanging those smiles of wonder and exasperation women typically produce at the incomprehensible behaviour of men, and hurried her out.
‘Why did you have a bath at ten thirty in the morning?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t. I said I was going to. But maybe I will on Maxine’s days in future. If I hadn’t escaped I think I’d have sacked her.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t do that, Reg.’
Maxine spent ten minutes chatting without respite to Dr and Mrs Crocker while they tried to watch a DVD of Mad Men, season three. She had given them a biographical account of her son Jason from his breech birth – an agonising labour, they nearly lost him and her – until the present day, so now embarked on her horrible discovery at St Peter’s Vicarage. Dr Crocker was an altogether tougher customer than Wexford when it came to being forceful with women and told her to get on with her work, he and his wife were concentrating on the television. Maxine left them alone for about a quarter of an hour, she had to while she swept leaves from the front path and the patio, but then returned to remark that there were some people who said you shouldn’t watch TV in the daytime, it was bad for your health, not to mention your eyesight, and she’d never allowed her kids to watch it before 6 p.m.
‘I’m the health expert, not you,’ said Dr Crocker. ‘You leave our eyesight to me. Now off you go and shut the door behind you.’
It wasn’t the way she was accustomed to her clients talking to her, as she told Jason and Nicky when she dropped in on them on her way home.
‘Is that what you call them? Clients?’ Nicky didn’t dislike her mother-in-law – well, as good as a mother-in-law or as bad as – but she kept up a mild feud with her because you weren’t supposed to get on with your husband’s mother, it was a well-known fact. ‘That’s really weird.’
Maxine was a worthy adversary for she too approved of mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law discord. ‘Don’t you use words like that to me. I happen to know you left school without no GCSEs.’
