No Man's Nightingale

by Ruth Rendell

  An hour or so had passed when Dora came into the room and asked him if he remembered they were due to have lunch with Sylvia whose day off from work it was. Now that his daughter lived within Kingsmarkham, the Old Rectory at Great Thatto having been sold, they could walk there, Dora said. Wexford agreed. Not that he much wanted to but it was good for him. His love of walking was mainly confined to London. He looked around for a bookmark and in doing so remembered the letter he had taken out of Sarah Hussain’s copy of Newman’s autobiography. That he certainly should not have taken out . . .

  It was possibly one of those letters Maxine called ‘anonimable’, foul and at the same time dull and illiterate – but no, Sarah wouldn’t have used such a thing as a bookmark. He put on his raincoat and felt for the letter in the right-hand pocket. It wasn’t any of those things but apparently from a friend. He read it while Dora was upstairs getting ready.

  The address at the top was 21 Miramar Close, Reading, with a postcode, the date three months ago in the middle of July.

  Dear Sarah [he read]

  It is such a long time since we worked here together and shared a home that I wonder if you have forgotten me but I don’t think you can have. I think you have moved several times since you lived here and Clarissa with you. She is my goddaughter and I would have liked to remember her on birthdays but I had lost touch and didn’t know where you were. Then I saw that paragraph in The Times that said you were now an ordained priest (you see I remember the correct terminology) with a living in Kingsmarkham. You know, I wasn’t altogether surprised. This, I thought, was what you always ought to have been.

  I am married now but still living in Reading not far from where we had our flat nineteen years ago. My husband preferred me not to work and to tell you the truth I was glad to give up. I have taken my husband’s name but I am still the old Thora Watson who was, I think, your best friend. You and I were so close like the sisters we neither of us ever had. Do let me hear from you.

  With love,

  Thora (Kilmartin)

  So this was the Reading woman Georgina Bray had mentioned when she corrected her claim to have been herself Sarah’s only friend. This woman was a lapsed friend but might be the one to tell them something about Sarah Hussain that others wouldn’t or couldn’t. Had Sarah replied to the letter? You don’t keep a letter as a bookmark, Wexford decided as he and Dora walked along York Street, unless you’ve answered it or intend to answer it. It would be a permanent reminder to you and make you feel guilty. Talking of which, though he wasn’t . . .

  ‘You’re very silent,’ Dora said. ‘Gibbon on your mind?’

  ‘I was thinking of Sarah Hussain. You went to church most Sundays. What kind of sermons did she preach?’

  ‘The controversial kind. There was one about her idea that royal family members shouldn’t wear military uniforms. I told you about it.’

  ‘Dennis Cuthbert told me about one in support of single parents and wasn’t there one advocating gay marriage?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dora. ‘Her idea was that – well, in everything, not only gay marriage – the important thing was love. That was a central tenet of Christianity, she said. “Little children, love one another”, which of course comes from the New Testament and there’s nothing about only heterosexuals loving one another. If the Church held on to that, she said, the Church and clerics, there wouldn’t be any banning of men marrying men and women women provided they loved each other.’

  ‘I don’t suppose her bishop was overjoyed at that.’

  ‘No, I gather she got a dressing-down.’

  Sylvia had cooked one of her father’s favourite dishes for lunch, a fish pie, and her elder son was at home to help him eat it. Always interested in the way families behave, the patterns they follow, Wexford had often noticed that a grown-up child, in his or her early twenties, say, will make a point of being present when grandparents come, make conversation with them and eat with them, but depart pretty fast after the meal is over, leaving Mother to explain the pressing business that has taken him away. So it was in Robin’s case, though he explained the business himself while Wexford listened politely. When his grandson had left and Dora gone upstairs to be shown a dress Sylvia had bought for someone’s wedding, he reflected that while Robin was obviously totally bored by his pursuits, so was he by Robin’s. Gibbon held no more interest for the grandson than recording the latest production of a local rock group did for the grandfather. It must always be so. ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,’ only he didn’t think he was crabbed – but what elderly person did think that of himself?

  But he did wonder if the rock group was the same one that Sarah Hussain had hoped would perform in St Peter’s Church and then his thoughts went back to Thora Kilmartin’s letter. Not so much to the letter as to his abstracting it without a word to Burden or any police officer, abstracting it moreover from a crime scene. Guilt wasn’t a feeling with which he was very familiar but he recognised it when he had it. It wasn’t just the guilt that troubled him but the necessity of confessing his offence to Burden. It was necessary, he had to do it, but he could hardly think of anything he wanted to do less. In the past Burden had confessed his mistakes and lapses to him, he was the appropriate person, the superior officer. Now their roles were reversed or almost. There was no way out. To ignore it, to forget the letter, was unthinkable. Not only should Burden and his team meet Thora Kilmartin and talk to her, want to meet her and talk to her, but to withhold that letter and pretend it didn’t exist was the kind of act that made him feel – in a phrase he had always despised when others used it – unable to live with himself.

  Dora and Sylvia came downstairs, announced that tea would soon be coming and looked at him as if they had expected him to be asleep.

  Most of the time Jeremy Legg watched television. Fiona would put up with it in the morning for the news and weather forecast but always turned it off when she left for work in her Aztec gold Prius. Jeremy switched it on again, playing about with various channels but mostly just sitting and gazing in a relaxed sort of way at ITV1 or, as the morning wore away to lunchtime, Sky Movies Premiere. He was a house husband but he performed few tasks. Seldom bored, he preferred his own company to anyone else’s, and if he wanted a change of scene he got in his car, a battered-about Nissan, for Jeremy wasn’t a careful driver, and went for what he called (and his grandfather had called) ‘a spin’. This took him up Ladysmith Road to have a look at the house which had been his mother’s and was now rented to Mr and Mrs Patel.

  He liked to sit outside in his car and build up his ego thinking that he was a landlord and this just one of his lucrative properties. A house further up the road similar to this one was for sale. It was going for two hundred thousand, cheap in an area considered within commuting distance to London. If he could get Fiona interested she might pay the deposit and he could pay the mortgage out of his rents. She might help there as well. He moved off towards the Muriel Campden Estate and Peck Road, parking opposite but a few yards away from his house. Strictly speaking Diane was the tenant but so long as the rent got paid the council didn’t pay much attention to where it came from.

  After a little while, the time it took to smoke a cigarette – Fiona didn’t know he smoked or so he fondly believed – Jason Sams’s woman came out with the baby in one of those enormous buggies, as big as an adult’s wheelchair and much more lushly upholstered. A child would never learn to walk if it could ride in one of those. Jeremy almost envied that baby girl, all dressed up in a fleecy jumpsuit and enthroned in sheepskin cushions. When Fiona had a baby they would have one of those and he would push it round the Stringfield lanes. He wondered how he would get on. Would he like it?

  Would they ever have a baby? ‘Make a baby’, as Fiona put it. He supposed he knew how that was done: have sex without using or swallowing anything, he supposed, and a baby would come. Only they did and it didn’t. Was he doing it right? He’d never had a baby with Diane and they’d been together years an
d years. Thinking about it, he felt himself lapse into one of those dream states of his when a stillness took hold of him and his mind emptied. He called it a fugue because somewhere he had read that’s what it was. He remained sufficiently aware to know not to drive while in this condition. It would pass, he would come back to life and be as he was before.

  After about a quarter of an hour he returned to full consciousness, waking, so to speak, to where he had broken off: making a baby, Fiona looking after a baby, looking after the baby himself. Maybe he could go to a class where they taught you baby-caring. Jeremy had been to many classes and joined many courses in his adult life, exercise, elocution, t’ai chi, Spanish, country dancing, woodwork, even origami, but had completed none of them. Of the t’ai chi and the Spanish he had attended only a single session. But would Fiona have a baby? They didn’t have a lot of sex. He had never been very keen on it, believing Fiona was keen enough for both of them. Making an effort was called for if he was to get her pregnant and persuade her to buy that house. But maybe she was pregnant already, and being still in doubt, hadn’t said.

  He sat in Peck Road for a long time and then he drove home to Stringfield, at so slow a pace as to arouse the ire of other motorists who hooted at him and shouted abuse.

  Considering Wexford had no intention – not for a moment – of failing to confess to Burden, wouldn’t have dreamt of it, it was strange that this was exactly what he did, he dreamt of it. He wasn’t at home in Kingsmarkham but in the kitchen in the Hampstead coach house, quite alone, holding Thora Kilmartin’s letter in his hand. The letter was still folded up as it had been when it served as a bookmark. He opened it and tried to read it again but the handwriting was unreadable and all that he could see was a grey blur. Nevertheless, he interpreted it as horribly condemnatory of himself, as a denunciation of his whole life, exposing his career as dishonourable, his marriage as a fake, his efforts at parenthood as ludicrous and his preference for classical music and such literature as Gibbon as a pretentious sham. Out of a drawer in the cabinet he took that object so seldom used these days, a box of matches, dropped the letter into a saucer and, intending to burn it, struck a match. The sound, the flash, the sudden brightness, woke him and he sat up to ask Dora why she had put the light on.

  ‘You were thrashing about and moaning. Are you all right?’

  ‘I am now,’ he said.

  It had been one of those dreams whose absolute horror is exorcised by the relief of knowing it’s not true. Its content never happened. In the morning, as soon as he felt he decently could, he phoned Burden and asked if he could come and see him. It was important – well, it was to him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Burden. ‘You ought to know you don’t have to ask. I’m usually here.’

  It was a case, Burden said, of who shall have custody of the custodian. Duncan Crisp, the negative witness, had seemed a valuable custodian, working in the Dragonsdene garden at the time, all the possible time, someone was murdering Sarah Hussain next door. He had been exhaustively interviewed, had now phoned in to say he had a confession to make. When talking to DS Karen Malahyde he had said he had been in the garden for three hours without a break. Now he remembered he had gone into the house called Dragonsdene for a cup of tea at two thirty and stayed there to put a washer on a tap because there was no one else around to do it. Karen had gone back to Dragonsdene to talk to him, Burden told Wexford.

  It was a bit strange, wasn’t it, forgetting something that must have taken, if you included the tea drinking, half an hour?

  ‘It seems he’d been going in there every day he worked there – only a few weeks, though – and he always went there at two thirty.’

  ‘And Mrs Morgan and Miss Green – is that what they’re called? – do they remember?’

  ‘No, they don’t. Only that when he started there they’d asked him in for tea. Apparently they did this for their previous gardener and so they carried on the custom with Crisp.’

  ‘What are you saying? That he missed seeing the perpetrator come or that he’s the perpetrator himself? For what reason? Because he nursed some sort of grudge against her?’

  ‘You know that finding a motive is never our principal concern. He may not have been in the garden or he may have been there up until three. Mavrikiev is positive now that she died between two and four, nearer to three.’

  Wexford liked that ‘our’ but wondered if he would ever hear it again in that context after he had said what he had come to say. ‘Mike,’ he began, ‘I’d like to get it over if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You what? Oh, yes, this confession of yours.’

  ‘You may not make so light of it when you know what it is.’ He drew a deep but silent breath and laid the letter on Burden’s desk. ‘You remember we all went into Sarah Hussain’s bedroom, you and I and Lynn, and looked around a bit. There was a book she’d been reading on the bedside table. It was Newman’s Apologia. Well, she’d been using this letter as a bookmark. I took it out and put it in my pocket, I just took it without saying anything to you. I didn’t ask, I just took it.’

  Burden said, ‘I know. I saw you. What’s the problem?’

  ‘You saw me?’

  ‘Sure I did. I meant to say something to you about it, like it couldn’t have anything to do with her murder, it was useless to us, but something came up and I forgot. Why, do you think it’s worth following up?’

  Wexford was almost stunned by relief. He could hardly speak but he managed to mutter that he did think that and maybe Thora Kilmartin should be contacted.

  ‘OK, I’ll get Lynn to call her, shall I? Maybe you and she could see the woman. Are you all right, Reg? You’ve gone white.’

  ‘I’m fine. Now I’ve made my own apologia I’ll go. Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’ said the puzzled Burden.

  Out in the street, going home, he thought not so much about guilt and confessions as about how we magnify a small fault into an enormous transgression with no real basis for doing so. He ought to have known Burden better, he ought to have realised that the worst that could have happened was his old friend, the new detective superintendent, saying, ‘Well, that wasn’t like you,’ or, ‘You must have been having an amnesia moment.’ But even that hadn’t taken place. Burden had seen him take it and hadn’t cared. If we weave a tangled web when we practise to deceive, isn’t it equally true that we dig a pit of horror for ourselves when we pay the price of having a conscience?

  He felt so happy and serene that for once his heart failed to sink when the voice of Maxine greeted him before he even saw her. ‘You know something, I thought you was reading your travel book in the greenhouse and I’ve been talking to you like a fool for the past ten minutes, well, maybe not as much, but talking I was and then I heard the front door and I saw my mistake or heard I should say. What a fool. My Jason says I talk too much but I don’t know. What do you think?’

  Called upon to answer because now she was standing in front of him, Wexford said, remembering how hard it was to find a good cleaner, ‘I wouldn’t like to to say.’

  ‘You can. I won’t take offence.’ Greatly to his relief, she gave him no chance to reply but charged ahead on one of her tangents. ‘Mind you, them two, Jason and that Nicky, they never talk. To each other, is what I mean. It’s the telly as has done it. Why talk when it talks for you? And the same applies to the Internet. I call it the mini-telly. Jason says Isabella is an early talker and I don’t like to correct him there. Well, you don’t, do you? Not when it’s his kid. But as for early, his sister Kelli with an i, she was talking at ten months and the one we call Barb, though Barbaretta’s her name, she was reading the Sun at two.’

  Seated in the nearest armchair, Wexford had fallen asleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THOUGH BURDEN CLUNG to his theory that whoever had killed Sarah Hussain had figured significantly in her past life, he still felt that Duncan Crisp might join his sparse list of suspects. After all, the man had lied or had suffered a lapse of memory so great a
s to make all his behaviour suspicious. Either he was guilty himself or he had seen someone else come across the Vicarage garden during the course of the afternoon and enter the house by the back door.

  When questioned by DI Barry Vine in his own home, a flat on the Deepvale Estate, Crisp had begun by being truculent, then aggressive. By a rather unfortunate chance he turned out to have attended the same primary school as Vine’s father, some half-century before, when Crisp had been a form captain or monitor.

  ‘I was your superior then,’ he said to the inspector, ‘and as far as I’m concerned I am still. Your DI letters don’t cut no ice with me. I’m not saying no more.’

  So Vine took him in, Crisp’s feeble resisting arrest doing him no good.

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ said Crisp to Burden in the interview room.

  ‘Later,’ said Burden. ‘Now Mrs Morgan of Dragonsdene House says you spent half an hour in her kitchen having tea with her housekeeper and herself on Thursday afternoon from approximately two thirty to just before three. You also replaced a washer on a tap. And the housekeeper, Linda Green, confirms this. Your story is that you were outside in the garden all that time. You weren’t though, were you?’

  ‘I forgot. I can’t remember every time I have a cup of tea – more like dishwater it was – with a couple of old hens. I went in there and had tea like I do every bloody day I work there. What time it was I don’t know and I don’t care. I want a lawyer.’

  ‘Later,’ said Burden. ‘How well did you know the Reverend Hussain?’ Wexford would have winced or cringed at this usage but he wasn’t there to hear it. ‘Speak to her, did you? Pass the time of day?’

  ‘I never did. My old mum what passed away last year, Lord rest her, didn’t hold with females in pulpits, that’s what she called them, females in pulpits and no more do I. I wouldn’t have spoke to her if she’d spoke to me but she never did.’

  ‘Have you ever been in the Vicarage?’