by Ruth Rendell
‘Knock it off, Mum,’ said Jason. He was watching television with Isabella on his knees. ‘Weird’s not a bad word. Nicky wouldn’t use one of them in front of Issy. Go on about Dr Crocker.’
So Maxine went on about Dr Crocker, her audience expressing the opinion that his conduct was very likely the onset of Alzheimer’s, the same applying to Wexford when the tale was told of his bath or non-bath.
‘I saw him this morning when I was out with Issy. He’s aged since he retired. Going into the churchyard he was with a cop and a lady cop and then on to take a look at the Vicarage, I reckon. Well, I don’t know but that’s what it looked like, didn’t it, Issy?’
‘Dada, Dada,’ said Isabella, repeating the only word she so far knew.
‘That’s my sweetheart,’ said Jason, kissing the top of her head. ‘She’s talking very early. It’s a sign of intelligence. I’ll not be surprised if she gets to uni, maybe Oxford. Unless she does modelling. Why not both?’
No one argued. This was a subject on which they were unanimous. ‘Time for bed, my honey,’ said Jason and took her upstairs himself. ‘Mum will come up and say goodnight.’
Left alone with Nicky, Maxine reinstituted the bickering. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, getting hold of a fella like him. You don’t have to do a stroke for that baby.’
‘Leave it out, will you?’
Nicky went off upstairs to say goodnight to Isabella and without waiting for either of them to come down, Maxine started for home. On the corner of Peck Road and Khouri Avenue (named after a local council leader of Asian parentage) she met Jeremy Legg who was Jason and Nicky’s landlord. They had never been on good terms – no one except his girlfriend was on good terms with Legg – but they spoke, they even maintained a show of politeness.
‘Good evening,’ said Maxine. It was a form of greeting uttered in a scathing tone that she wouldn’t have used to anyone else.
‘Hiya,’ said Legg. ‘Been to see your son, have you?’
‘There’s a broken window in the front bedroom needs seeing to. Little job for you when you can spare the time from your busy schedule.’
Everyone knew that Legg, who had suffered from a mysterious back complaint since he was twenty-nine, subsisted on the Disability Living Allowance, his rents and his girlfiend’s income. ‘Tenant does repairs, not landlord,’ he said, remembering to limp a bit before getting into his car. He drove home to Stringfield and Fiona’s cottage.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ONE PROPERTY Jeremy Legg owned was in Ladysmith Road and had been left him by his mother when she died five years before. This was let to an immigrant couple. His other house, the one in Peck Road, was not his at all but belonged to Kingsmarkham Borough Council. He had lived there for years with his wife, now long departed with another man. No more social housing was available in Kingsmarkham or the villages or was likely to be in future, so the sole recourse open to young couples who could only dream of getting a mortgage to buy a house, was to rent. The pretty cottage he lived in with Fiona Morrison belonged to her. They had met in a pub where Fiona was drinking whisky and Jeremy orange juice. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t drink or smoke while she did both. She had drunk so much that night that he’d had to drive her home. He was quite a bit older than her, nothing special to look at, and he had that limp which came and went when it suited him, but she fell in love with him. That also suited Jeremy. If he could move in with her he could let the Peck Road house he was living in on the Muriel Campden Estate. He could and he did.
Fiona had it all worked out. She wanted a baby and at forty-one she reckoned she had about three years left in which to conceive. Jeremy was the ideal partner and putative father of this dream-child. He had his Disability Living Allowance plus two lots of rent, each of which amounted to about twice as much as the DLA, he had a car and – this was as important as anything – he stayed at home, was a house husband, idle, and had no desire ever to get a job. And as a result, she could return to her work as an optician’s receptionist after the baby was born. In a property-owning nation, as the United Kingdom once was and possibly still was, it was inevitable that a great many people lived in houses or flats which had become theirs when their parents died.
‘Best to be an only child,’ as Wexford remarked to his wife that evening. ‘Behave so horribly as an infant that they don’t have any more. Later on make sure that your parents own their house and that you get on with them. What could be worse than that you fall out with the surviving one on his or her – probably her – deathbed? Then it all goes to donkeys or kids in a developing country.’
‘What a cynic you are.’
‘No. Just a realist.’
‘We had two, though,’ said Dora.
‘Yes, but we’re the exception. Neither of our children is in need of a house.’
Fiona Morrison had been in need of a house and the one she got on her grandmother’s death was a very pretty thatched cottage at the end of Church Lane, Stringfield. She attended to the front garden because that was the bit visitors and passers-by saw. The back garden was less pretty; Fiona got too tired to do this as well as receive the optician’s patients and send out the optician’s bills while Jeremy was too lazy to pull out weeds or mow the lawn. She didn’t reproach Jeremy because she was fond of him and he was going to give her a baby. Jeremy’s suggestion, made out of the blue, that they could adopt a baby, rather upset her, the way he said it as if it were an easy option open to anyone. ‘Or foster one like a sort of trial, see how we get on.’
‘What and send it back if we don’t like it?’
She had never until very recently questioned the rightness of her choice of Jeremy, though she recognised that her decision to share her home with him had been very hastily taken. And now, as he walked in, she was again conscious of a remoteness that came over him when he entered the house or came down the stairs or even simply sat in an armchair opposite her. It was as if he enclosed himself inside his head, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, unaware particularly of her. He could move while in this condition, did move, and the only state she could compare it to was sleepwalking. Was autism like this or could it be? She didn’t know and didn’t know who to ask. Now, as several times before, she asked him if he was all right.
He answered her in what she imagined might be a sleepwalker’s voice, the same slow monotone as when he suggested they adopt a baby. ‘Fine. I’m fine. How are you?’
His fugue, if that was what it was, lasted perhaps five minutes and then it was over.
Restaurants of every nationality had opened in Kingsmarkham ever since the death – sometime in the sixties – of the English cafe where fish and chips, sausage and mash, toad-in-the-hole, boiled ham and pork chops had been served. Fish and chips had never gone out of fashion while sausage and mash had come back into it and it was this which Detective Superintendent Burden had ordered in the restaurant called Spirit of Montenegro while Wexford would be having grilled sardines and couscous.
‘What do they eat in Montenegro, anyway?’
‘What we’re having, I suppose,’ said Wexford. ‘But don’t imagine the sausages are going to taste like the bangers you were brought up on.’
‘You can have a glass of wine but I shan’t. It doesn’t look well.’
Both were thinking of the time Wexford, taking a well-earned respite from very hard work, had been photographed in a pub garden with a tankard in his hand, a shot which later appeared on the front page of the local paper. He had never forgotten that photograph, though it no longer mattered.
‘I suppose a picture of me could be in the Courier lying in the gutter overcome by Chardonnay and no one would turn a hair.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Burden. After all these years he still wasn’t always sure when Wexford was serious. ‘Anyway, you don’t care for Chardonnay.’
Their food came with a glass of claret and a jug of tap water. Burden said, ‘When the body was first found by that cleaner of yours I made an assumption I
shouldn’t have made. I almost took it for granted the perpetrator was one of those nutters who go about quite a wide area killing lone women. But I’ve told you about that. There’d been a woman who lived alone in a cottage outside Myringham a couple of weeks ago and I was foolish enough to think Sarah Hussain might have been another one of his victims. Of course I was wrong. The Myringham psycho was caught the following day and he was being questioned by police at the time of her murder.’
‘Anyway,’ said Wexford, ‘Sarah Hussain wasn’t a lone woman, was she?’
‘You mean she had her daughter living with her? Yes and no. Seventeen-year-old girls, as you must know, don’t usually spend their evenings at home alone with their mothers. Whoever did this may have known Clarissa lived there but also that she either came home from school and went out again pretty soon or went straight from school to whatever she did.’
‘So you gave up your stranger as killer theory?’
‘I’d moved on to a new one. We’d no possible witnesses, you see. It was odd. We’d done a house-to-house, looked at all the CCTV – not that there’s much, though there is a camera on the church porch. It was installed because of the increase in metal theft from churches. Nothing that was on the tape would have helped with finding whoever went into the Vicarage between two and five that afternoon.’
Burden nodded doubtfully. ‘How’s your fish?’
‘Not at all bad. Why is it that fresh sardines are so different from sardines in a tin? They might almost be a different breed of fish. It’s the same with pineapple.’
Burden knew Wexford well enough not to have to ask for elucidation. ‘These sausages are over-spiced and vastly over-garlicked. The mash comes out of a packet.’ He gave a small sigh and shook his head. ‘The Vicarage furniture – well, you’ve seen it – is nearly all what old Mr Kirkbride left behind. We got a lot of fingerprints off it: Sarah Hussain’s, Clarissa’s, Maxine Sams’s, no men’s. A woman could have killed her, of course. A lot of women are strong enough for that these days.’
‘I take it you got nothing from the house-to-house?’
‘Well, there aren’t really any houses to call at, are there? Vicarage Lane is mostly deserted unless someone’s calling at the Vicarage – as of course someone was that afternoon.’
‘The man in the gloves.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He must have worn gloves, mustn’t he? Just to enter the house, just to be there. If, that is, the killing was premeditated.’
‘True. We did a house-to-house in the lane at the back. St Peter’s Path. That meant calling at the most at six cottages because the rest of it is all lock-up garages. No one saw a stranger in St Peter’s Path. The most important witness, in a negative kind of way, is the chap who was working in the garden of the nearest house to the Vicarage, whose land has a boundary with the Vicarage garden in fact. That’s the place called Dragonsdene – don’t ask me why – we passed yesterday. The gardener, who’s called Duncan Crisp, was planting bulbs in flower beds in a big paved area close to the Vicarage fence. He’s only been living here for a month or so and he’s only been doing the Dragonsdene garden for two or three weeks. He told Barry Vine he saw no one come into the Vicarage garden from St Peter’s Path all the time he was there.’
‘And that was when?’
‘The relevant time. He started at one and knocked off at four thirty. Barry Vine had a good look at the next-door garden and if anyone had come into the Vicarage garden he would have seen them. It was a fine sunny day. Crisp is an elderly man but there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight.’
‘What’s your definition of elderly? It’s a sensitive point with me as you may imagine.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Sixty to eighty.’
‘And what happens after that?’
‘Ask me again when you get there,’ said Burden, laughing. ‘Do you want a dessert?’
‘No, I want a pudding but I’m not going to have one. Coffee, please. So when you’d abandoned your wandering psychopath theory, what did you light on next?’
‘Well, I do try to be politically correct without being ridiculous,’ said Burden, ‘but the fact is she was half-Indian and there’s a lot of sort of apologetic racism around here. I can say Indian, can’t I?’
‘You can say it as far as I’m concerned but “Asian” might be wiser.’
‘A whole lot of people objected to her being half-Asian and – well, being a woman. Including, apparently, Dennis Cuthbert, the vicar’s warden. But he objects to everything in the Church that’s different from what it was a hundred years ago. You’d think they’d have got used to women clergy by now. God knows how many women vicars there are in this country.’
‘My wife would say He does know, but I don’t, except that there are a lot. I know because Dora has told me that there was a good deal of feeling against poor Sarah Hussain but I thought that had died down. She also mentioned Cuthbert. With the sort that do have that kind of feeling, they seem to have disliked her a lot less once it became known that she’d converted to Christianity from Hinduism when she was very young, in her teens, I think.’
‘When she was fifteen, according to the Guardian.’
Burden turned his attention to the cappuccino he had ordered, scooping foam from its top and pronouncing it not bad considering it came from Montenegro. ‘That’s what I call “apologetic racism”,’ said Wexford. The more austere double espresso that was his own choice he tasted without comment. ‘But you’ve given up on race and religion and gender possibilities?’
‘I wouldn’t say “given up”. I’ve not given up on anything.’
‘What did you mean yesterday when you said her past was involved?’
‘Well, I suppose she’d once been married but what happened there I don’t know. I think her husband died in a car crash. Clarissa must be the result of a subsequent arrangement. If she knows who her father was she hasn’t told us. Sarah had been a teacher at a school in Reading and it was while she was there that Clarissa was born, then while her baby was small she lived by teaching English to immigrant Urdu speakers. Apparently she was fluent in Urdu or Hindi or something and she had some sort of qualification in teaching English to foreign students. After that she went to live in India with her grandmother for a couple of years. She’d gone to Nepal originally with an aid agency, taking the baby with her of course, but she couldn’t stand some of the sights she saw – or that’s what Clarissa said – had some sort of breakdown and it was after that she and the child went to her grandmother’s in Darjeeling.
‘She seems to have come into contact with a good many of those Christian missions of the kind we associate Mother Teresa with, but apparently there are lots of them all over the place, rescuing the dead and dying off the streets, we know the kind of thing. The two of them came back here when Clarissa was four. She went on teaching English to migrants for a while – you’d have thought there’d have been ample scope for that considering the number there are – and maybe lack of decent accommodation contributed to her decision, because she got herself ordained. Her first – what-d’you-call-it? incumbency? living? – was a curacy in Colchester and when old Mr Kirkbride died she was sent here. That’s about it. Detailed enough for you?’
‘It’s not the details that are the problem,’ said Wexford.
‘That means something else is.’
‘The whole spiel is riddled with apologetic racism.’
‘Well, thanks a bunch.’
‘Never mind, it was a nice lunch. Thank you.’
‘We’ll talk further on’t,’ said Burden drily.
‘One more thing. Can I talk to Dennis Cuthbert? It would be quite informal. Off the record.’
‘All you like,’ said Burden without much interest.
Wexford was an atheist fascinated by religion; a not uncommon position, he had found. As he walked home, he thought how interesting it was that Gibbon and Newman, from whose autobiography he had appropriated the letter, were deeply critical of supers
tition in other faiths while exempting Christianity from their strictures. Rational, enlightened and with a splendid sense of irony, Gibbon could write about the darkness that fell over the earth at the time of Christ’s crucifixion as if it were historical fact, the laws of nature suspended. Had Sarah Hussain believed that sort of thing? Or was it something to which present-day Christians no longer gave credence?
CHAPTER FOUR
WEXFORD AND DORA had a second home in London. It was in Hampstead, a pretty little converted coach house in the grounds of their daughter Sheila’s home, a ‘mansion’, as the media had it and its kind, on the edge of the Heath. Wexford called this second home ‘a grace-and-favour apartment’ because it was elegant and charming, they paid nothing for it and it was theirs owing to Sheila’s favour and graciousness.
They spent the weekend there, going to the National Theatre on Saturday night to see her in The Changeling and on Monday morning walking across the Heath to Highgate. Warned by his wife that Maxine would be in the house when they got back to Kingsmarkham, Wexford asked why they couldn’t leave two hours later, only to be told that this was impossible as Dora had to speak at a lunch organised by a children’s charity of which she was chair.
Not for the first time Wexford objected to the term.
‘I’m not going to say a human being can’t be a piece of equipment for sitting on. We’ve been there before. But if it’s offensive to call a woman a bicycle, and it is, why isn’t it to call her a chair?’
‘I don’t know, darling. I don’t make the rules. To change the subject a little, couldn’t you look on Maxine as a possible source of information? Before you retired you used to have to question possible witnesses but now people like Maxine come to you. You don’t have to ask.’
‘True,’ said Wexford, ‘but it isn’t necessarily the information I want.’
In this case, though, it was. And no probing was needed. He was back with the Roman Empire and Dora had gone to her charity lunch when Maxine trotted briskly into the conservatory with a basketful of cleaning fluids, sponges, dusters and glass polish but without the vacuum cleaner. Lifting his eyes from his book, Wexford noted its absence, always a bad sign. The Hoover left behind in its cupboard, Maxine had no competition, need not even raise her voice or repeat herself, but could launch into a flowing riverine narrative, uninterrupted by the need to draw breath or clear her throat.
