by Ruth Rendell
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes once they were outside. It was mild for the time of year, the sun going down in a brilliant display of red and gold streaked with strips of black cloud. The walk they were to take led only as far as a garage on the other side of the street and Wexford was shown into the passenger seat of the car inside. They were almost at the end of Thora’s road before an explanation was forthcoming and then not much of one.
‘I want to show you where Sarah and I were living at the time.’ She left it to him to deduce at the time of what. ‘And where the man who raped her was living at the time. Quercum Court,’ she said. ‘It’s at the bottom of this street and we lived over there in the lower half of that house.’
It was one of a row of small Victorian houses called Jameson Villas. The flat must have been tiny, two small rooms, a shower room and a kitchen, Wexford guessed. The sun had gone and a late-autumn dusk come. Lights were coming on everywhere. Thora parked the car outside Quercum Court, a large block of flats with bay windows on the ground floor and balconies above. It looked from where they sat as if a single apartment would fill the lower half of the little house.
‘I begged her to go to the police or at least to see a doctor. It was the time when everyone was very anxious about Aids and drugs for it weren’t as effective as they are now. She did go to an Aids clinic and get herself tested. She was all right.’
‘So nothing more was done?’
‘Nothing more was done by Sarah so far as I know. There was something I did. I went round to Quercum Court a few weeks later, a month later maybe, and I looked at the mailboxes in the hallway. There was no one with an Asian name of any kind there. A porter came up to me and asked me if he could help me but when I asked he said he wasn’t allowed to divulge the names of residents.’
Asians don’t necessarily have Asian-sounding names, Wexford thought. And surely she would have known a porter wouldn’t make a guess of that kind. It would be more than his job was worth. But he let it pass. He wanted to ask her about her husband. Had he disliked Sarah Hussain or disbelieved her? He couldn’t. He was no longer a policeman.
‘This was all before you were married, Mrs Kilmartin?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘We knew each other. We were friends. I didn’t feel I could leave Sarah and I didn’t until after Clarissa was born and she’d moved away herself. I got married soon after. I may as well tell you that my husband never cared much for Sarah. He doesn’t care to talk about her. I honestly don’t know why and as he prefers not to to talk about her I don’t attempt it.’
By now it was getting dark. Only ten to four but dusk was closing in. Thora began the drive back. ‘I don’t know whether the Asian man had moved or never lived there. Sarah could simply have got that part of it wrong. It was down there the rape took place, more or less between where he lived and she lived.’
It was an alleyway, a lane between back gardens, overhung by trees, now leafless. Lamps were alight at intervals along the lane which was perhaps a hundred yards long. Had Sarah entered it from the south, heading for Jameson Villas, and the rapist followed her into the lane?
‘There weren’t any lights down there then,’ said Thora Kilmartin. The pause that followed was the kind that seems to throb with unspoken words. Then she said, ‘Would you mind not mentioning Sarah’s name to my husband?’
Wexford answered her question with another. ‘Why does he think I’m here?’
It was something he would never normally have asked, it was an intervention between husband and wife. Maybe she would say no more. She didn’t reply to it but, pulling into the kerb and turning off the engine, volunteered a lot he would never have asked for.
‘I first met Tony while Sarah and I were living here. We were friends but not close friends. He never liked her nor she him and when the – well, the rape happened there was a sort of breach between us. He didn’t believe me when I told him she’d been raped. He said no woman would have that done to her and either not have an abortion or not go to the police. We quarrelled and I didn’t see him again for years. Then when we met again – by chance incidentally – we – well, we fell in love.
‘By the time we married Sarah and I – well, we weren’t estranged but we’d just sort of moved apart, the way friends sometimes do without any sort of quarrel. Tony never mentioned her, I sometimes thought about her. Then I read in the paper that she’d been ordained. It was a story, you know, because of her being what they call “mixed race” and a single parent. On an impulse I wrote to her. I didn’t tell Tony, though perhaps I should have. I’d never told him about Clarissa and that she was my godchild but I have now.’
‘He realised it was Sarah who had been murdered?’
‘Oh, yes. He was – well, how can I put it? Not like the man I fell in love with, a different man, I thought. He said – not that she deserved all she got but that women who lived like she had generally paid a heavy price.’
She put her head in her hands for a moment, then said, ‘Tony thinks you’ve come here to talk about Clarissa’s future. He doesn’t really know who you are or what you do.’
‘I do nothing now,’ said Wexford.
This rather lugubrious response she ignored. ‘Would you mind terribly if I don’t take you back to the house? I mean, if I drop you where your car’s parked?’
It would be a relief, he thought. To have to deceive a man at his wife’s request and in his wife’s presence wasn’t a course of action that appealed to him. Still, it was an odd request and seemed out of character. Was this the woman who had been so gracious when they were in Kingsmarkham? ‘Not at all,’ he said, and said it rather coldly.
She had left him with plenty to think about. Were all Sarah Hussain’s women friends married to difficult men? It came back to him how Georgina Bray had hinted at what she called verbal abuse from her husband. There was a mystery here but perhaps a minor one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DRIVING AWAY FROM the house in Peck Road on Friday morning in the van he had picked up the night before, Jason left Nicky still in bed and Isabella snuggled up beside her. Nicky muttered something about getting up soon and expecting Jeremy to pick her and Isabella up at nine. The rush hour was still a long way off and he drove through almost empty streets to his mother’s house on the Pomfret side of Kingsmarkham. His sister Clodella let him in but his mother almost immediately appeared, talking (as she put it) nineteen to the dozen about the weather, what Mrs Crocker said to her yesterday, the paper fastener she had found inside a Cornish pasty and Kingsmarkham Borough Council withdrawing their garden waste recycling service on economy grounds.
‘Let’s get on with moving the bits and pieces,’ said Jason.
The three of them shifted into the van a kitchen stool, a grandfather clock, once the property of Maxine’s own grandfather, a broken table lamp that could perhaps be mended, a china donkey with laden panniers, A Present From Marbella on its base, and a cardboard box full of kitchen utensils. Maxine asked him if he had had any breakfast, and when he said he didn’t want any, made him drink a cup of tea ‘to keep his strength up’. Jason got away just as the high street shops were opening, the same time as traffic wardens started on the prowl. The furniture they had ordered and paid for was difficult to locate, it being apparently still in the warehouse at the back of the shop, still bandaged in brown paper. Jason was offered a cup of coffee while he waited and got angrier and angrier. But eventually the two burgundy-coloured armchairs and a sofa were fetched out and upwrapped. Unusually patient for her kind, the traffic warden had waited quite a long while but eventually gave him a ticket which he doubted he could foist on to the van-hire company. He was growing angrier and angrier because he still had no key. Jeremy’s promise to pass it on to him before this had come to nothing. Presumably he had decided to give it to Nicky. Having started early that morning, he drove off late, reaching 123 Ladysmith Road just before ten.
Jeremy must already have come and gone with Nicky and Isabella. It seemed unlik
e him to be punctual and prompt but Jason admitted that he didn’t know him very well. There appeared to be no one in the house. He rang the doorbell, then pounded on the knocker, calling through the letter box, ‘Nicky?’ and ‘Where’s my sweetheart?’ No answer. No one was in the house. He called Nicky’s mobile and got nothing, not even her voicemail. Emerging on the pavement in a thin rain which had begun to fall, he stood looking helplessly about him as if his missing family were likely to appear, smiling and gleeful, from down the road or the house next door.
Jeremy had promised to borrow a baby car seat from Fiona’s sister. But in the event he left it too late and when he went to her place in Stowerton she had already gone to work. It didn’t seem important. He had a vague idea that a baby or small child was not allowed to sit in the front in the passenger seat, so showed Nicky and Isabella into the back where the child could sit on her mother’s lap. Nicky complained about that and about the state of the car and the uncomfortable conditions on the back seat. She went back into the house and fetched the four rather shabby pillows she and Jason had deemed unworthy to go to the new house and which would anyway be replaced by new bedding. These she arranged to make a kind of nest for Isabella between herself and the nearside rear door.
It was as well she did.
Her efforts at making his car more comfortable, accompanied by little snorts of exasperation and pursing of lips, were making Jeremy increasingly nervous. The second time she went back into the house he took a surreptitious swig from his flask, this time containing grappa. He got the flask tucked away just in time. She stuck her head through the driver’s window.
‘I don’t know why we’re messing about with all this. Me and Isabella could easily have walked.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t have had that,’ said Jeremy with a wild laugh.
The swig of spirits seldom made him feel cautious but this one did. Perhaps it was the presence of a woman and child in the car – well, of anyone in the car. Usually, travelling in any car but his own meant being driven by Fiona in hers. He was cutting it too fine, that was the trouble. Today was the 23rd and this afternoon Diane and this Heinemann guy would be arriving. But now he was wary and this unusual feeling made him avoid the bypass and take the network of small roads that culminated in the long straight Kingsbrook Street that led down into Ladysmith Lane and then Ladysmith Road.
It was on that sharp corner, a junction in fact, for the Sewingbury traffic came along from the right, that the accident happened. But cars from that direction were infrequent and Jeremy, when he took the turn, had got into the habit of not looking to his right. He was in any case the kind of driver who relies on other drivers in the vicinity to do the looking for him. He began to turn. The driver of the large green van coming at fairly high speed from the right swerved to avoid him and smashed head-on into the Mini approaching also quite fast from the left. Meanwhile Jeremy screeched to a stop and the Lexus behind him ran into his rear. This wasn’t the end of it, as the very large black Mercedes estate, the kind of car that Wexford said looked like an old-time hearse, slid into the green van–Mini pile-up.
The police were there very quickly because the vehicle following the Lexus, though some fifty yards behind, was a police patrol car. Its driver was on the phone for help before he reached the corner and the accident site. PC David Rouse got out of the car and walked into the chaos, surveying the damage and the single fatality. This was the driver of the Mini, a young woman from Stowerton on her way to work in Pomfret. The policeman could see she was dead, could not in any case have moved the crushed and hemmed-in body. The driver of the van, covered in powdered glass but otherwise unhurt, was pacing up and down moaning that it wasn’t his fault, he had swerved to avoid something like this happening.
The nest of pillows had saved Isabella Sams. She had been squeezed between her mother and the back of the front seats, a well-padded crushing, and it seemed that her only injury was bruising. She had banged her head and if she lost consciousness for a moment or two no one noticed except that she was very briefly silent. Nicky was screaming even louder than her daughter but from indignation and rage rather than pain. As for Jeremy, he did what he always did in a crisis – though he had never been in one as bad as this before. He went back to the womb – in other words, curled up, drew his knees up under his chin and tucked his head in his arms. It was like this that PC Rouse found him. By this time ambulances had arrived and Nicky and Isabella were taken away to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital, but it was apparent that Jeremy was not seriously injured. The accident, strictly speaking, wasn’t his fault, for the green van and the Mini drivers had both been exceeding the sixty miles an hour speed limit. However, the interior of Jeremy’s car reeked of grappa (or ‘seriously strong liquor’, as PC Rouse put it to PC Evans) as they proceeded to get him to his feet and breathalyse him.
‘There was so much alcohol in his blood,’ David Rouse later said to his wife, ‘it was a wonder there was any room left for haemoglobin.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
JASON HAD UNLOADED the new furniture and the ‘bits and pieces’ into 123 Ladysmith Road but been obliged to leave the sofa in the van until help came. He phoned his mother. When things went wrong he usually phoned his mother and this time what went wrong was that Nicky and his precious Isabella had apparently disappeared. Maxine was ‘turning out’ the Wexfords’ bedroom and was in the middle of changing the bedlinen but she dropped everything and ran downstairs to tell Wexford what had happened.
He was sitting in the room Dora called his study, though he had never studied anything there apart from what he happened to be reading at the moment. Gibbon stimulated thought and that morning he was thinking, or trying to imagine, what it must have been like, literally, to fall on your sword or get your devoted slave to hold the sword for you to fall on, when Maxine burst in. She was not supposed to come into the study at all, not even when he wasn’t there, but this was an injunction of which she had never taken any notice and he was tired of telling her. He looked up and resigned himself to listening as she began on this tale of a vanishing mother and child.
‘I always said he was bonkers, that Jeremy Legg. Out of his tree he is. Do you reckon he’s kidnapped them and he’s going to ask for a ransom? It could be. Stranger things have happened. Well, he’ll be lucky. Every penny my Jason’s got has gone on new furniture and it’ll be no good coming to me or his sisters.’
‘Has Jason called the police or the hospital?’
As Wexford uttered those words, the Princess Diana Hospital was calling Jason to tell him his partner and daughter had been brought into the emergency department and they would call him when they had further news. Jason jumped in the van, the cumbersome sofa still in the back, and drove as fast as he dared to Stowerton and the Princess Diana.
That he found his daughter fit and well, running about the Prince William children’s ward, did something to allay Jason’s anxiety but nothing to cool his anger. Nor did the sight of Isabella’s bruises soften it when she proudly held up her arm to show him the purple patches on the smooth white skin. Nicky had a tale to tell, an exaggerated version of the truth, naming Jeremy Legg as ‘blind drunk’ and ‘hardly able to stand up’. Jason, of course, wanted to know why she had even got into the car, why she hadn’t called him, putting ‘his’ daughter in serious danger. And look what had happened! The hospital refused to tell him the whereabouts of Jeremy Legg. However, he was able finally to get the key, Jeremy having at last handed it to Nicky just before the crash.
Jeremy was, in fact, in the same hospital, cut and bruised and suffering from a hangover. At 1.30 p.m. he received a furious call on his mobile from Diane who, accompanied by Johann Heinemann, had taken an earlier flight, this one from Barcelona, and on arriving at the Muriel Campden Estate, found that the lock on the house in Peck Road had indeed been changed and her key failed to open the front door. This being the least of his troubles, Jeremy sent her to 123 Ladysmith Road, beyond caring by this time if the extent of his
duplicity came out. He remembered now, very late in the day, that the lock had been changed when Jason and Nicky moved in.
All these details were relayed to Wexford or Dora and/or the Crockers by Maxine; they pooled their knowledge over a drink and at first the whole story was a source of amusement, pronounced ‘hilarious’ or ‘absurd’. Exasperated or bored by Maxine, Wexford had always found her anecdotes or longer stories funny, especially in retrospect, but the humour vanished from this one as events took a different turn. First he heard that Jeremy had been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and driving with over the prescribed limit of alcohol in his blood. It wasn’t an item of news to be imparted to Maxine. In fact he never imparted anything to her, founding their relationship on her talking and him more or less listening. Whether Maxine’s son knew about this he had no idea. After all, the fatality was the driver of the Mini and no connection to Jason Sams.
When the news came that made the comedy into something like a tragedy, Wexford was in Burden’s office drinking coffee and being told that Duncan Crisp the gardener had finally been arrested and charged with the murder of Sarah Hussain.
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Well, yes, Reg, I am. His alibi doesn’t stand up and in each account that he’s given us times differ. He has a history of violence against women, if no convictions, but when he was kicking his wife around – twenty years ago, she’s dead now, poor woman – we weren’t treating domestic violemce very seriously. He’s known around here as being what I could reasonably call a militant racist and is a member of the BNP. He doesn’t attempt to deny it.’
