by Ruth Rendell
‘No, I never. What would I go in there for? Two women living there, two Asiatics? Asians they call them now, but Asiatics is what they are. Coloured and got black hair, dressed up like in fancy dress. Now can I have a lawyer? How many times do I have to ask?’
‘Not any more,’ said Burden. ‘What do you want one for? I’m not going to arrest you. You can go. But,’ he added in a magisterial tone, ‘we shall talk again in the not too far distant future.’
Meanwhile, Lynn had spoken to Thora Kilmartin on the phone and been told that she was coming to Kingsmarkham in two days’ time to meet Clarissa at Georgina Bray’s. She had met Georgina in the past and it was Georgina who had been in touch with her. Reading between the lines or between the sentences, Lynn got the impression that Georgina was anxious that Clarissa should continue to stay with her.
‘Clarissa’s still at school. She’s at school now. And with her A levels next summer it would be very wrong for her to miss classes.’
Lynn had just terminated the call when another came in. This time it was from Wexford. Did Lynn know about the Congolese community living in Stowerton, members of which had apparently attended St Peter’s church services? Lynn did. She had heard from another source.
‘Wouldn’t you to have expected them to go to the Catholic church?’
Lynn said in a very apologetic tone that she didn’t know much about religion. ‘I don’t know anything about religion in Congo,’ Wexford said, ‘or the Democratic Republic of Congo, as I suppose I should say. A misnomer if ever there was one. But since it was once – notoriously – a Belgian colony I thought they’d be Catholic and French-speaking.’
‘There’s a woman in Oval Road I interviewed a few months back. Her name is Nardelie Mukamba – not the kind of name you’d forget, is it? She witnessed a burglary. I could talk to her. Would you like to come with me?’
‘I would,’ said Wexford.
The area had always been a poor one, the little houses, ranged in terraces, originally built in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate workers in the chalk quarries and their families. Now it was run-down, the small front gardens repositories of bicycles, a couple of worn-out motorbikes, no longer habitable rabbit hutches and birdcages and the local authority issue bins for recyclable paper and cardboard, glass and metal and a larger one for general rubbish. A woman in a tall turban and elaborately pleated red-and-pink dress was in the act of dropping a couple of lager cans into the appropriate bin.
Leaving Wexford in the car, Lynn went up to her. ‘Mrs Mukamba, do you remember me? I talked to you about a break-in at number 30.’
Nardelie Mukamba looked in her mid-twenties. Wexford saw that she was beautiful, her skin a deep smooth bronze, her eyes obsidian black. He got out of the car. Lynn didn’t introduce him but included him in her explanation. ‘We are inquiring about the murder of the vicar, Ms Hussain. Did you ever go to her church? Did you ever go to St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham?’
Her reply came in fluent English with that accent which most British people recognise as African as distinct from Caribbean.
‘Me and my children went there most Sundays.’
‘Did you ever speak to the Reverend Hussain?’
‘I shook hands with her. Everyone did. When you’d been two, three times she kissed you. She said, Welcome to God’s house. She made you feel you were a guest in the home of the Lord and that was nice. My boy Jean-Jacques and my boy Aristide, they loved her. She let them run around the church during the service and there was a woman who complained. Sarah – she asked us to call her that – she said, We must all love the little children because Our Lord told us to.’ Nardelie looked at Wexford and smiled, a divine smile, he thought it was, warm, wide and showing those glorious teeth it had become an unwelcome cliché to remark on.
For a few minutes he and Lynn sat in the car outside Nardelie’s house, waiting for what he didn’t know, if they were waiting. A couple who looked as if they were Congolese came along and went into the house next door and then a tall white man, quite young but who reminded Wexford of someone much older. He went up to the front door of Nardelie’s and stood there, apparently searching for his key. He was wearing gloves but took the right one off in order to feel in his pocket, exposing a dark blue and red tattoo covering the back of his hand. Wexford could just make out a female figure in a robe but he saw the man hastily put the glove back on once he had got the door open.
‘Yes, I saw him here before,’ Lynn said. ‘He lives in Nardelie’s place.’
‘Her husband? Partner? Boyfriend?’
‘I don’t know, but somehow I think he’s just a tenant of the top floor. What do you think of tattoos, sir?’
Wexford laughed. ‘I don’t like them. But you could have guessed that, Lynn, without asking.’
He had to refuse her invitation to come back with her that afternoon, reminding her that one of them was due to meet Thora Kilmartin.
‘Would you do that, Reg?’ she asked, making a real effort.
It was the first time she had obeyed him and called him by what Sarah Hussain would no doubt have called his Christian name.
‘Of course. And I’ll record our conversation – if she’ll let me.’
Two women of comparable age and education, both middle class and belonging to the same ethnic group, could scarcely have looked more disparate. Haggard and strained, with the kind of thinness that is due to stress, Georgina Bray looked no older than her mid-forties but an unhealthy mid-forties, strained and tired. But she had made a sartorial effort for these guests with what Wexford would once have known as an afternoon dress, burgundy-coloured and too short, and high-heeled court shoes her fidgeting feet told Wexford she would like to shed. Thora Kilmarton, on the other hand, was fat. No two ways about it. She wasn’t overweight or plump or any of the other euphemisms. She was uncompromisingly fat and apparently happy to be so. He had seldom seen a woman who looked so pleasantly contented. She was appropriately dressed in a tweed skirt, beige jumper and dark brown cardigan, no jewellery but her wedding ring, brown lace-up brogues, her sole frivolity lacy but thick brown tights.
It was Clarissa’s half-term break and she was out with a friend. She would soon be back but they wouldn’t wait for her. Now Wexford was here she would make coffee.
‘Or would you prefer tea?’
He had noticed lately that, with the advance of age, people often assumed that tea would be his drink, the pensioner’s beverage of choice. ‘Coffee will be fine,’ he said.
Much as he had hoped to get Thora Kilmartin alone, he realised that the time Mrs Bray took to bring in the coffee, even if she had to grind the beans before brewing the drink, would be inadequate for his purposes. In his position, as the rather absurdly named Crime Solutions Adviser (unpaid), he could hardly banish Georgina from her own living room. The question he most of all wanted to ask, but not in front of Clarissa or, come to that, Mrs Bray, might have to be put on hold until another time. Thora was waiting, smiling as she looked round the room, evidently admiring her surroundings.
‘Lovely house, isn’t it?’
‘Very nice, yes.’ It was the same vintage as his own, one of a number of houses, detached, four-bedroomed, which had been built soon after the Second World War. ‘Mrs Kilmartin, I have to tell you I have read the letter you wrote to Ms Hussain last July.’
‘She kept it then?’
‘As a bookmark in the book she was reading at the time of her death. I think that shows it meant a lot to her.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Did she reply?’
‘To my letter? Oh, yes, she did. We lived rather too far apart to drop in on each other. I invited her to come and stay in the summer holidays but she said it would be too hard for her to get a locum – or whatever they call them in the Church. She invited me but my husband wasn’t keen. He has an idea of a female clergy person as a formidable woman.’ She laughed and Wexford did too, though Mr Kilmartin’s view wasn’t far from his own. A lot of people had disappro
ved of poor Sarah Hussain and all of them men. ‘Still, we talked on the phone and made definite plans to meet. I was anxious to see Clarissa. She was a baby when I last saw her.’
Here was his opportunity to ask the awkward or intrusive question but Georgina Bray chose the moment to return with the coffee.
‘Clarissa will be here at any moment,’ she said, ‘so I brought a cup for her. Do go on talking. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll be deep in my book.’
But as she opened Pride and Prejudice at a point halfway through, he heard the front door close and Clarissa came in. In the current culture, she was too old for school uniform and wore a knee-length grey skirt, white blouse and grey-and- burgundy blazer. Thora got up, said how glad she was to meet her at last and they shook hands. She looked as if she would have liked to kiss the girl and even leaned a little towards her but there must have been something in Clarissa’s eyes or an almost imperceptible flinching which told her not to touch. The kind of small talk that Wexford could have himself composed word for word ensued.
After a few minutes of this Georgina got up and said, ‘Come along, Clarissa. I’ve got something upstairs I want to show you.’
‘What sort of something?’
Wexford was reminded of a scene from the very book Georgina had been reading where Mrs Bennet takes her daughters away to allow a visitor privacy to propose to the daughter who remains. The daughters react much as Clarissa had done and Mrs Bray much as Mrs Bennet.
‘You’ll soon see. Come along now.’
The girl went with her and Wexford thought it just as well the Bray children were grown up and gone or she would have been shepherding a flock to some non-existent treat. Thora Kilmartin looked as if she shared his amusement but her face with its perpetual half-smile suddenly saddened as he said he wanted to ask her something about Sarah Hussain’s life when they lived together.
‘You know you don’t have to talk to me, Mrs Kilmartin. I’m no longer a police officer.’
She nodded. ‘I know that. But there are things I’d like to tell you about Sarah and I think I can be pretty sure nothing I tell you will be made public.’
‘It will not,’ Wexford said firmly. He felt a little surge of excitement at the prospect of something interesting or out of the ordinary at last. ‘I was going to ask you if I might record this conversation but I’ve changed my mind. Even at my age I’ve got a pretty good memory.’
That made her smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘First, tell me if I’ve got these facts right. Sarah’s husband died in a car crash. They hadn’t been married very long so Sarah and perhaps both of them were very young?’
‘That’s right. Sarah had come down from university with, incidentally, a very good honours degree. Her husband Leo was a couple of years older. I didn’t know her then of course. They lived in Basingstoke and were married in church there. She got herself a qualification teaching English to foreign students and found herself some private pupils. She was bilingual, you know, Urdu was as much her first language as English was. Leo was a landscape architect. It sounds quite grand but she told me he didn’t earn very much though he would have done if he’d lived, apparently. But he didn’t live.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was driving his father’s car on some motorway. His father was sitting beside him. They had been to a football match. It was foggy and there was one of those sudden pile-ups. Leo had been the end of the queue and a lorry came up behind him going much too fast. It crashed into their car, destroying the entire back and forcing them so far into the car in front that they came out the other end. Apparently Leo and his father were killed instantly. Leo was only twenty-eight, Sarah a widow at just twenty-six.’
Wexford didn’t interrupt. He let her continue, soon realising that Burden’s version of Sarah’s life had got things out of order.
‘Left alone, she went to India – Darjeeling, it was – to live with her grandmother, her father’s mother. There was an uncle and an aunt and several cousins already living there. Grandmother was quite well off and it was a large comfortable compound.’
‘That was before Clarissa was born?’
It was a slightly different story from the one Burden had. ‘Oh, yes.’ Thora’s tone had become weary, almost grim. ‘Sarah had gone to India originally with an aid agency but she couldn’t stand some of the sights she saw, the poverty, the disease. She had some sort of breakdown and took refuge with the grandmother. She stayed there for two years. After that Sarah said she felt she needed to earn her own living, she couldn’t go on taking the grandmother’s charity, though the old lady was perfectly willing to support her, would have done so, I gathered, for the rest of her life.’
Wexford calculated that Sarah Hussain must by this time have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine. ‘She came back here?’
‘She got a job teaching at Bridgwell Comprehensive. I was teaching history there, we got to know each other, became friends and shared a flat. Sarah met a man she liked, the first man in her life since her husband died. I suppose you’ll want to know his name?’
‘He was Clarissa’s father?’
‘Oh, no. Unfortunately, no. Sarah was – well, not prudish or strict, but let’s say she wouldn’t have lived with a man without marriage.’
‘Then, how –’
Thora said almost brutally, ‘She was raped. Clarissa is the result of rape.’
It was at this point that Georgina Bray put her head round the door and said in a curiously coquettish tone, ‘Have you finished with all your secrets? Can Clarissa and I come back now?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
WEXFORD WAS WONDERING how and where he could prolong this interview when Thora Kilmartin came to his rescue. ‘Oh, Georgina, I think I told you earlier that I haven’t yet looked in at the Olive and Dove hotel where I’m staying tonight. I wonder if Mr Wexford would be kind enough to give me a lift there. I think it may be on his way.’
Wexford said, of course. It would be a pleasure.
‘And since you and Clarissa will be having dinner with me tonight perhaps you’ll meet me there at seven?’
At the wheel, he didn’t speak. He was sure she would if he kept silent for a moment or two and he was right.
‘We were talking about the awful thing that happened to Sarah.’
‘Did she report it to the police?’
‘When she told me I wanted her to but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t face the questions and the – well, the doctor examining her. And if it came to court, that would be impossible. I think she thought she could forget it, just put it out of her head. But she couldn’t because she found she was pregnant. I tell you frankly I wanted her to have an abortion. It was the obvious thing to do but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t take a life, she said. The man she was going out with left her. He refused to believe her story, said she’d invented the rape when she found she was pregnant. I think she was well rid of him.
‘Then she said a funny thing. She was crying, she cried a lot at the time, she said the rapist was young and quite good-looking and an Asian. I asked her what difference that made, and she said, at least it might be a beautiful baby. And it was.’
‘Poor woman,’ Wexford said, a comment he wouldn’t have made in these circumstances when he was a policeman. He drove on to the forecourt of the Olive and Dove, parked in the last marked space. ‘And that was Clarissa. Why the name?’ Another remark he wouldn’t have made.
‘Oh, because she spent a good deal of the pregnancy reading Richardson’s Clarissa. She loved it. In a way it’s about rape, I suppose. It’s the most boring novel I’ve ever read.’
Wexford had enjoyed it but he said nothing. ‘What happened next?’
‘Well, of course, she loved the child. She adored her. They were with me until Clarissa was about four. Sarah supported herself and the child by teaching English to foreign students and translating Urdu and Hindi into English for non-English-speaking immigrants. People from India and Pakistan may be able to t
alk to their neighbours but can’t read forms and instruction books and so on. You’d be surprised.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Wexford. ‘There can’t be much money in it.’
‘There isn’t. Most of the time, anyway, she wouldn’t let them pay her. She had to go back to teaching and she did once Clarissa was old enough to go to school. By then she had moved away and the last address I had for her was somewhere in Essex. She had a teaching job there.’
Wexford said, ‘I don’t want to keep you but there are a few more details I’d like to have.’
‘You aren’t keeping me,’ Thora said. ‘I’ve nothing else to do but hang about here waiting for Georgina and Clarissa to come at seven. Why don’t you come in and let me give you tea?’
For all the years he had worked in Kingsmarkham Wexford had been a habitué of the Olive and Dove. He had seen it change from a typical English country hotel where people, driving through on their way to the south coast, could stop without booking ahead and eat in a sunlit dining room a heavy lunch of soup, roast lamb, lemon meringue pie and cheese and biscuits, to what it was today, smart, four-starred, every bedroom with an en suite bathroom, TV, a computer and a basket of exotic fruits. Over the years the public bar had gone, the ‘snug’ had gone and the all-pervading cigarette smoke had gone. Food was available almost round the clock and wine from New Zealand had to a great extent replaced beer and spirits. But as with so many public buildings today, from shops to cathedrals, deconstruction and construction work was going on. The hallway they passed through was apparently about to lose its lift and a new one would replace it. Much of the area was boarded off, but as he passed Wexford caught a glimse of the discarded lift waiting, it seemed, to be taken away to the dump or landfill. The manufacturer’s name on it was one he had recently come across in another context: Cuthbert & Son.
As a waitress was bringing the tea things to one of the tables, Wexford reflected that though he had probably drunk gallons of wine, beer and (once) whisky in this place, he had never before drunk tea here. Regretfully, he declined one of the pink, blue or purple meringues and the chocolate marzipan slices. Thora Kilmartin, overweight though she was, didn’t hesitate but helped herself to a blue meringue.
