No Man's Nightingale

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Now Mr Wexford is here,’ said Burden in a mildly scathing tone, ‘perhaps you’d like to start again, Lynn.’

  He wasn’t late. He knew he wasn’t. ‘She calls me Reg,’ he said.

  Burden said nothing. His expression said for him, ‘She’s not going to call me Mike.’

  ‘Right.’ Lynn looked from one to the other, as a patient mother might to her two little boys. ‘I didn’t record the conversation I had with Clarissa Hussain. I couldn’t, we were in a cafe. The first part of it is in my report, that’s the stuff about the rapist, the man who we think may be her father. The second part – Mr Burden said you’d like to hear it.’

  ‘Especially because you and Barry met the man, Reg.’ Burden seemed to have forgotten his previous irritability.

  ‘Yes, well, I asked her if she knew a man called Watson, Gerald Watson. Frankly, I expected her to say she’d never heard of him. But she actually knew him – well, she knew him by sight. She described him to me, said he had a sort of flat face and very small eyes. She said he was pompous. Is that right?’

  ‘Exactly right,’ Wexford said.

  ‘He’d been stalking her mother or something very like it. For about six months before she died. Clarissa said he never came to the Vicarage or as far as she knew he never did, though once he came into the garden through the back lane. She said he drove here. From Stevenage would be quite a long way. I asked her what her mother’s reaction was to these visits but she didn’t really know. Was she frightened? Clarissa said no. They had once been what she called “good friends”. Why had Sarah never invited him to the Vicarage? Clarissa didn’t know and apparently never asked. I suppose when you’re seventeen you’re not interested in the friendships or relationships of your parents. Perhaps she did invite him, perhaps he came and Clarissa never knew. She told me her mother didn’t seem in the least troubled by Watson’s turning up every couple of weeks, just walking past and waving to her or sitting in his car till she came out and calling to her, engaging her in conversation, and that was all. It didn’t worry Sarah and because it didn’t Clarissa wasn’t worried either. “I once called him her stalker,” she said, “and Mum was quite annoyed, said that was an awful thing to say about a perfectly innocent man.”’

  ‘Do we know where he was at the relevant time?’ Burden asked.

  ‘Of the murder, sir? It’s in the report.’

  Burden had it in front of him. ‘He refused to say? We shall have to see him again. Your talk with Clarissa puts things in a very different light. Perhaps he’ll respond better to you, Lynn.’

  ‘You could have him in here.’

  ‘I could try. If he said no there’s nothing I could do. I think I’ll go and see him myself and you could come with me. He knows you.’

  ‘Yes and it’s quite within the bounds of probability that when he sees me he won’t speak a word.’

  In the end they all went, but in two cars in case it was necessary to bring Gerald Watson back with them.

  ‘Donaldson will drive us,’ Burden said in the tone a fond father uses when promising his small son a visit to a theme park. Donaldson had once been Wexford’s own driver and Wexford acknowledged that he would be pleased to see him. For the first time in their fifteen-year-long association they shook hands and Wexford said he would sit in the front. It amused him, but not in an unkind way, to see that Burden was put out.

  In his opinion it was a big entourage to undertake such a mission, the questioning of a man who had done no more than tell a face-saving lie to the police. Burden, of course, was convincing himself that Watson had done more than that. He had a particular hatred of stalkers and he had cast Watson in that role without much evidence for it. Surely the definition of a stalker was one whose attentions annoyed or frightened his victim, but Sarah Hussain seemed to have been on friendly terms with Watson.

  It was a long drive. Lynn with Barry Vine got there just ahead of them. They all encountered each other outside the storm-cloud-grey tower where Watson’s office was. Wexford said he would stay in the car, have a chat with Donaldson about times gone by. The look on Burden’s face showed he had plenty to say about that but Wexford knew he wouldn’t in front of the driver. He, Barry and Lynn went through the heavy revolving doors and Donaldson began the tedious process of finding somewhere to park in case they needed to leave the car. The only possibility was underground which made Wexford wonder what it must be like these days to be a claustrophobe. They sat in the car amid concrete pillars, facing a concrete wall, and Wexford asked Donaldson about his wife and children and the clever one who had started at his Oxford college a month before and his mother-in-law’s recovery from cancer and they talked until Burden came on the phone to say Barry and Lynn had already left while he was ready to be picked up and he would be bringing Watson with him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DORA WAS OUT somewhere. It wasn’t one of Maxine’s days. Wexford made himself a cheese and tomato sandwich and settled down with Gibbon, the only interruption a phone call from Sylvia to ask him his opinion of her plan to let a room in her house now only she and two of her children were living there.

  ‘You don’t want my opinion,’ he said. ‘You want me to say you think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘I don’t think letting part of your house is ever a good idea unless you need the money.’

  After he had ended the call he remembered Clarissa Hussain and Lynn’s half-promise to help her find somewhere to live. And then he thought of Georgina Bray and Thora Kilmartin and asked himself, why stir it? More Gibbon, then a phone call from Burden.

  ‘Watson’s gone back to Stevenage. Well, I questioned him for a time and then I had him taken back. He cried.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘You heard. I mean, he wept, shed tears. When I got him on to his feelings for Sarah Hussain.’

  ‘Come round and have a drink.’

  Burden arrived looking gloomy and morose. ‘When we were in his office he blustered a bit more. Then he suddenly said, “Oh, what’s the use?” and admitted to being deeply depressed ever since his wife died about a year ago. Well, I knew all about that as you can imagine but somehow I didn’t feel much sympathy.’

  Wexford remembered the death of Burden’s first wife and his grief. ‘You said “admitted”,’ he said. ‘You have to admit to depression?’

  ‘His word, not mine. “I admit I was very depressed,” he said.’

  ‘Admit, I suppose, because to be depressed is seen as weakness.’ Wexford offered him red or white wine or whisky.

  ‘Better not. I’m driving. That was when I brought him back here. Anyway, he said that Sarah Hussain was the only girlfriend he had ever had before he met his wife and he began thinking of her, wondering where she was, what had happened to her and so forth. Well, he googled her and what he got was St Peter’s website. I was amazed. I didn’t know St Peter’s had a website, did you?’

  ‘No, but I wouldn’t.’

  ‘That was when the stalking started if you can call it that. I don’t know. He came down here and sat about in his car outside the church and outside the Vicarage until he saw her.’

  ‘Why not write to her, or phone her, come to that?’

  ‘He says he was afraid of a rebuff.’

  ‘Considering the way he’d treated her I’m not surprised. But eventually he didn’t get a rebuff, is that right?’

  ‘So he says. And so Clarissa says. Sarah spotted him and came up to his car and spoke to him and apparently he asked her if he could take her out. To dinner or something. She said no. Then he asked if she minded if he sometimes came here just to see her, he told her he was in love with her and always had been. “Have pity on me,” was what he says he said.’

  Wexford laughed. ‘Contrary to what the poets tell us, that one never goes down well with women.’

  ‘When he told me that he started to cry. Lynn fetched him a glass of water. He put his head down on the desk and sobbed. I told him this wouldn
’t do and to pull himself together. The result of that was an outpouring of his feelings about Sarah Hussain. On one occasion, he said, she invited him into the Vicarage. They talked and she said his following her and waiting outside to see her must stop but he told her he couldn’t live without her even if that meant just an occasional sight of her. When he left he encountered Clarissa coming home from school and was introduced but he didn’t know and doesn’t know now that she was the result of the rape. He thought Sarah must have had an affair with someone.’

  Wexford fetched himself a glass of red wine. ‘You must have decided not to charge him with anything?’

  ‘I asked him if he would mind our taking fingerprints and he said no, that was all right. After that he said his life was over when he heard she’d been killed. It didn’t occur to him that he might be a suspect, or so he says.’

  ‘D’you believe that? The man’s a solicitor, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I don’t know, Reg. I really don’t know.’

  Wexford told him about Sylvia’s proposal to let a room in her house. ‘If she decides to do this, and I think she will, would it be out of order for me to suggest Clarissa Hussain as a tenant?’

  ‘Clarissa’s living with Georgina Bray, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but she doesn’t like it. She wants to be on her own.’

  ‘I dare say,’ said Burden. ‘Don’t they all? Why shouldn’t you suggest Clarissa? It wouldn’t do if it was my Pat wanted to let a room to her but you’re – well, a private citizen.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I am.’

  Still, he would wait a while. Be sure of Sylvia’s intention first and then check that Clarissa hadn’t changed her mind. Sylvia phoned just after Burden left and Wexford heard Dora talking to her. The subject of their conversation was clear from Dora’s remarks: ‘You surely don’t need the money’ and ‘Will you bring yourself to evict him or her if they wreck your home?’

  Wexford said, ‘Let me talk to her when you’re done.’

  Dora handed him the phone. Rather angrily, Sylvia, who often had spats with her mother, launched into a tirade against Dora for her ‘interference’ and treating her ‘like a child’. But Sylvia’s intention remained.

  ‘Leave it to me, will you, before you advertise?’

  Dora wanted to know what he was up to and said to him in a gloomy tone that he would land himself in a lot of trouble. Ignoring this advice, he wrote a note to Clarissa care of Georgina Bray giving her Sylvia’s phone number. ‘I have a mobile number for Clarissa,’ he said, and rather humbly, ‘You can send texts to mobile numbers, can’t you? Would you show me how to send a text?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I would, Reg. It would be teaching her to do a rude and underhand thing to a woman who’s shown her hospitality.’

  ‘But I’ve written her a letter. It comes to the same thing, only it takes a little longer.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I think that’s why I’ve loved you all these years,’ said Wexford. ‘Your undiminished and sometimes absurd integrity.’

  Next day an ecstatic phone call came from Clarissa, a satisfied phone call from Sylvia and a visit from a furious Georgina Bray. Dealing with all this, Wexford postponed reading his newspaper until the afternoon. He sat with Gibbon in the conservatory, but not reading, going over instead the events of the past few hours, two of them pleasant, the third anything but. It is always nice to know you have pleased your child and Sylvia sounded very pleased at the idea – if not yet the actual presence – of her new tenant. Because her father had recommended her, she thought she could waive a deposit on the room and the girl seemed quite willing to pay the rent Sylvia asked. Clarissa had phoned two hours later to tell him she had been interviewed by Sylvia and seen the room. It was a bit small and the rent, she thought, a bit high but she had liked Sylvia and she hoped Sylvia had liked her and it was all due to him, Wexford, so thank you very very much.

  Georgina Bray’s visit was unexpected. Dora was out, Maxine had left and Wexford had just picked up Gibbon. The doorbell rang and the knocker banged but the bell was ringing as if a finger was held on it, kept on it and pressed hard while the knocker crashed simultaneously again and again. Whoever was on the doorstep must have been using both hands. The phone was also ringing but Wexford let it ring while he answered the door before the noise aroused the neighbours.

  The woman looked as if she was about to spit in his face. He stepped back. This gave her the chance to burst in and kick the door shut behind her.

  ‘How dare you, how dare you, how dare you,’ she shouted. ‘I can have you charged with abduction. I can have you charged with false imprisonment.’ A string of imprecations followed, including expressions referred to in print by so-called family newspapers with a letter succeeded by a string of asterisks. Wexford was reminded of descriptions in novels he had read of sophisticated men being amazed by the language used by respectable and proper women in moments of extreme stress. ‘I wouldn’t have believed she knew such words,’ they were supposed to have said. He knew better than to have supposed that and waited patiently until she finished with a ‘You fucking bastard!’

  ‘Let’s not stand here,’ he said mildly as both his landline and mobile began to ring. ‘Come in here. It’s warmer.’

  She had started to cry, a frequent consequence of outbursts such as hers, but followed him into the living room. Burden would have told her to pull herself together but Wexford’s reaction, after handing her that old-fashioned solace, a clean handkerchief, was to ask her if she’d like a drink. He would have one if she would, in spite of its being three o’clock in the afternoon. She nodded miserably, said if he had any whisky that was what she would like. When he came back with the two glasses, she launched into a diatribe against her husband. It was as if this onslaught was as much the purpose of her visit as to attack him for his interference.

  It all came out, the man’s ill-tempered criticism, his sarcasm, his protracted silences, what she called his verbal abuse. Clarissa had been a companion for her, a comfort, and now she was going. Knowing he was being biased and judgemental, Wexford thought how unattractive she was, how grating her voice, how bitter her expression. He wanted to say that living with her and Mr Bray – if her name was his name – must have been an experience miserable enough to drive Clarissa away but of course he couldn’t. The poor woman was to be pitied.

  She emptied her glass but he didn’t offer her any more. Her home was in easy walking distance but he saw that a second drink would lead to a third and then most probably to her falling asleep on his sofa.

  ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said and thought up a reason for accompanying her. ‘I have to go to the corner shop.’

  His mobile started up again as they were leaving the house. Instead of answering it Wexford turned it off. ‘I can never bring myself to let a phone ring,’ she said conversationally. It was as if there had been no outburst of rage, no stream of abuse.

  He saw her to the end of Orchard Road. ‘Thank you for the drink,’ she said and trotted off rapidly up the street. Wexford went into Mr Mahmood’s shop and bought a small wholemeal loaf and a half-pint (or whatever you called it these days) of semi-skimmed milk.

  There were three messages on his answerphone. Just as he marvelled at the behaviour of those people who contemplate a sealed envelope, speculating as to who the sender might be, so now he had no intention of doing the equivalent with a ‘sealed-up’ phone message. All three were from Burden and all were much the same, recommending that he read that morning’s newspaper.

  He read it, a single paragraph under the heading: DEATH OF LAWYER. Why didn’t journalists accept that while ‘lawyer’ was correct American English, British English called them ‘solicitors’? Maybe it was a question of the number of letters.

  Gerald Watson, 43, a partner in the law firm of Newman, Watson, Kerensky, was found dead in his home on Cleland Avenue, Stevenage, this morning. His body was found by Mrs Maureen Jones, a
cleaner. Foul play is not suspected.

  ‘How about that?’ said Burden on the phone. ‘Where have you been, anyway?’

  ‘Having a row with Georgina Bray.’

  ‘I suppose Clarissa’s told her she’s moving in with Sylvia and Georgina took exception.’

  ‘Something like that. What are you going to do about poor old Watson?’

  There was a pause. ‘I’ve got a meeting in about twenty minutes with a DI Stewart of Herts Constabulary. Shall I come in on my way back?’

  The first thing Burden did when he walked in was hand Wexford a letter.

  ‘It’s for you. Left for you by Gerald Watson.’

  ‘I didn’t know him,’ Wexford said. ‘I only spoke to him once.’

  ‘You’d better read it.’

  There was no ‘Dear’ nor that irritating ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi there’. Watson had begun with Wexford’s name, underlined.

  You seem a decent man, which is more than I can say for most policemen I have known. If I wrote to you, I thought you might not scoff or mock me, though I do not expect sympathy. I was in love with Sarah Hussain and had been for more than twenty years but pride and vanity prevented me from getting in touch with her after her child was born. When I tried again years later I could not find her. That was before the days of easy discovery of a person’s whereabouts. By that time I was married. I had always been a solitary and, I suppose, inhibited repressed sort of man, and my wife was a companion if nothing else.

  She died, and though I felt considerable guilt, I am disgusted with myself when I say there was relief too. Her death meant I could begin looking for Sarah once more. When I found her, and in such extraordinary circumstances, I began to feel happy for the first time since I deserted her when most she needed me. I was not stalking her, I want to make that finally clear. By coming to Kingsmarkham as often as I could, as often as I dared, I got to see her, to understand her life, observe her daughter (who might if things had been different have been mine) and she never rejected me. She was too kind for that. One day, I think, I truly believe, she would have really responded to me. She would have agreed to marry me. She had already asked me into the house, given me tea and talked to me about those past eighteen years. I could talk to her then about the real reason for my desertion of her, my mother’s opposition to the marriage we contemplated. Perhaps it is needless to say that she objected to Sarah’s race and I lacked the strength of will to defy her.