No Man's Nightingale

by Ruth Rendell

  For about five minutes Georgina digressed into a long and very repetitive description of Sarah’s grief, the poetry she wrote, all for Leo, the diary she had kept throughout her short married life and frequently reread, his mother she kept in touch with, often staying with her – all this coming to an end when Clarissa was born.

  ‘But you didn’t know her then, did you?’

  ‘She told me.’ It seemed to Wexford that Georgina explained herself rather too hastily. ‘She said she didn’t talk about her husband any more. She thought about him just as much but she no longer talked about him. When I got to know her really well I asked her how Clarissa had – well, how she came to exist. Leo, her husband, had died years before. She looked me straight in the eye and said she’d prefer not to say. She liked to be open and honest about things but there were some things that just had to stay private. There were questions I wanted to ask but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, I felt too awkward. I’m sure I was blushing all the time.’

  Wexford thanked her and left. Sylvia had invited him to lunch, it being her day off. The altercation over Robin and Clarissa apparently forgotten, she had been doing rather a lot of this lately and he thought it was therapy for what she must consider an idle life. Poor old Dad, not enough to do, often at a loose end, give him one of his favourite unhealthy dishes, perk him up. It need not happen more than, say, once a fortnight. She mentioned her son and his girlfriend only to say that they had been busying themselves in arranging Sarah Hussain’s memorial service.

  The dish today was lamb’s liver and bacon, mashed potatoes and peas that had once been frozen but tasted like the fresh kind. Women, he thought, were no longer prepared to sit down with a colander and shell peas. It puzzled him that they had done it for so long. Ever since Georgina had told him about Sarah’s insistence on privacy and how she, Georgina, had blushed as if she detected something to her unmentionable, he had been silently speculating. Now he brought it out into the open.

  ‘Have you ever known anyone who inseminated herself?’

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Come on, Sylvia, you heard. Have you?’

  ‘The thing is to use a turkey baster, I believe, but I’m not really sure what that is. I never needed that kind of thing myself.’

  ‘Don’t pull your rank,’ said Wexford.

  She laughed. ‘I heard of someone doing it and she chose a gay friend to be the donor. Apparently, he was very good-looking and had a nice personality.’

  He left it, moving on to another enquiry. He thought he’d better ask even if she bit his head off. ‘What news on the Robin–Clarissa front?’

  ‘It’s still going strong.’ There was to be no severing of heads. ‘I wouldn’t tell Mother, she’d be shocked, but I bought a whole lot of packets of condoms for Robin. The pharmacist did a double take in case I might be a transvestite but he sold them to me. Robin was grateful.’

  ‘So I should think would Clarissa be.’

  ‘I wasn’t bothered about her,’said Sylvia, bringing in the Eve’s pudding. ‘I don’t want to be a grandmother just yet.’

  Happy to be on good terms with his daughter once again, Wexford walked home by a circuitous route and one which took him along Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham’s millionaires’ row, from the heights of which he could have a panoramic view of Cheriton Forest and the Downs. Such walks were not so much for his health and his figure as for thought. He had sometimes read of writers and artists giving interviews in which they said how much more fruitful a walk was for thoughts and the working out of problems than sitting at a desk or standing at an easel, where you only fell asleep. Falling asleep was not possible even while taking a break by sitting on the bench at the crown of the hill. It was a day of sudden gusts of wind which would blow you awake if you momentarily dozed off.

  There was no one on the bench just as he had met no one while climbing the hill. The citizens of Kingsmarkham were not inclined to walking, especially in December. A good many of them had gone by in their cars.

  The thoughts and observations that had gone through his mind in the past quarter of an hour were mainly concerned with Georgina Bray and brought him to the conclusion that she was a fantasist. Or ‘fabulist’, which he thought an even better word for it. She invented events but she also embroidered. He was sure about her mentioning the meeting at university. He wouldn’t have been mistaken about that. Was the woman’s motive to impress her hearer, to make that hearer believe that she was cleverer (‘brainier’ as she would put it) than might be assumed from her conversation? In that case, why tell him her intelligence was so inferior to Sarah Hussain’s? When he had been a working policeman and interrogating a suspect or just a potential witness, he had put probable liars to the test by asking them to repeat the story they had just told him. It was rare for such people to succeed in repeating the same narrative in accurate detail. But he could hardly ask Georgina Bray to do that. He was a policeman no longer.

  If she was lying – ‘fantasising’ would be the kinder term – there was the implication that everything she had told him was untrue. No doubt Sarah’s husband really was called Leo Steyner and he really had died in a car crash but had he a an identical twin brother? Was he called Christian? He took out of his pocket the piece of paper on which Georgina Bray had written Leo’s name: Leo Steyner. Why did he want to know it anyway? It was of no use. Would there be any point in finding Christian Steyner, a man no doubt long married and probably a father, a man who by now had half forgotten Sarah Hussain?

  Perhaps he could put all this to the test by trying it out on Thora Kilmartin. Thora he could trust. She was, of course, lumbered with that difficult husband. But there was a way of circumventing him. One of the advantages of the mobile phone, he sometimes thought, was that the chances were that when you made a call on it you were sure of the identity of the woman or man who answered. Possibly there were instances of someone lending her phone to someone else but they must be rare. At any rate, he knew that when he called Thora’s number it would be she who answered and not Tony Kilmartin.

  He completed his homeward walk thinking of Jason Sams and his intervention in the case of Duncan Crisp, made no doubt not, as Jason’s mother thought, out of public-spiritedness or respect for the law but just to look well with the police. Laughing at Maxine’s tales of Jason and his partner, child and siblings had been suspended around the time of Jeremy Legg’s car accident but he and Dora had revived it again once danger seemed past. After all, the prospect of another anecdote of Jason’s business succees, wild estimate of Isabella’s future or comment on Nicky’s good fortune in having such a partner, had been something to mitigate the presence of Maxine in the house. Now, cautiously, they could start being amused again.

  Thora Kilmartin he called when he got home. Their parting had been friendly in a cold sort of way but now she seemed genuinely pleased to hear his voice. Of course they must meet again but she would be coming to Kingsmarkham for Sarah’s memorial service. Would he be there? He had forgotten about the memorial service but now he knew it was taking place he would. Perhaps they could talk afterwards. Thora said her husband wouldn’t be with her, and from her tone when she mentioned the man’s name, he could almost see the distortion of her face and the casting up of eyes.

  Wexford and Dora had their shared laughter and their amused mulling over Maxine’s narrative of the morning – they had it just once. Although they didn’t know it, the laughter was due to stop. Almost from this moment Jason Sams was no longer funny. It would not be an exaggeration to call Jason Sams a figure of tragedy. For them it began with Maxine not coming in to work and not phoning to explain why not, an almost unheard-of happening.

  ‘Lost her mobile, I expect,’ said Dora.

  ‘Hasn’t she looked down the back of the sofa?’

  Maxine hadn’t lost her phone. She was not thinking about phones except of their use as a means of summoning medical help and this had been done within two minutes of Jason going into his daughter’s bedroom at
seven thirty in the morning. In spite of Nicky’s telling him to leave her alone, be thankful for a bit of peace, he had been surprised by no sound coming from Isabella’s room, no crying or shouting and no sudden appearance of the child calling out for Daddy. She was still in her cot and she was jerking up and down, her whole body making violent rhythmic movements. Jason called her name, ‘Isabella!’

  All her attention seemed concentrated on these dreadful jerks. She was voiceless, not crying, showing no pain or fear, simply caught up in what her father could recognise, though he had never seen it before, as a fit. Standing there, aghast, sick with terror, he pulled his mobile from his pocket and dialled first 999 and then his mother. Then he shouted out to Nicky. She came in, the words of reproach for his calling her from sleep stilled on her lips. She ran to Isabella and would have lifted her up but for Jason’s shouting at her to leave the child alone, help was coming, an ambulance was coming.

  Maxine arrived a minute before the paramedics. She had seen a baby ‘fitting’ before, her own brother when she was five and he was nearly one and she had never forgotten it. But what had caused it she couldn’t remember, if she had ever known. He had grown out of it and while she was telling Jason that Isabella would surely grow out of it the ambulance arrived, the paramedics were let in by Nicky and came upstairs. They called Isabella’s condition a seizure which sounded worse than ‘fit’ to Jason. The jerks had stopped now, she was still, her lips were blue and she seemed to have fallen asleep.

  ‘Maybe it’s in the family,’ said Maxine.

  ‘Not in mine,’ shouted Nicky.

  ‘Never,’ said Jason grimly. ‘I know what’s caused it. I know.’

  But no one was very interested in Jason’s diagnosis. Isabella was taken to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital and her parents and grandmother went with her. There the doctor told them that seizures were quite common in infants, the cause often unknown, they seldom lasted more than a minute and seemed not to cause any permanent harm. They would do some tests and meanwhile she was sure there was nothing to worry about.

  Jason could have gone to work, Isabella was in no danger, but he said in an ominous tone that he had better things to do and phoned in to say his daughter was seriously ill. They would have the test results in a day or two but meanwhile – a favourite word with the lady doctor – they should take her home. Jason also returned home and went immediately on to the Internet where he looked up seizures and children and found that such phenomena could be caused, as he already knew, by some accident or trauma to the head. A doctor would have told him how unwise it was to consult the Internet about medical matters. But Jason didn’t ask a doctor and if he had done he would only have interpreted such advice as fear of patients taking away their jobs. He didn’t ask anyone. He jumped into his car and drove straight to Stringfield.

  Having been released on police bail, Jeremy Legg was at home. Jason saw him peering out of one of the upstairs windows. He parked the car in the lane, close up under the overhanging hedge which was dripping water from the recent rain. All the way here he had been feeding his rage, reminding himself how Jeremy had insisted on driving Nicky and Isabella the shortish distance to Ladysmith Road, how he had withheld the key until the last possible moment and, worst of all, how he had been drinking prior to that drive. Jason himself wasn’t much of a drinker. He was one of those people who seldom drink because they don’t like the taste. Therefore, he deeply disapproved of people who drank, particularly those who drank to excess. All these things that he had been thinking about on the way to Stringfield had exacerbated his anger. If he had looked at himself in the car’s mirror he would have seen that his normally whey-coloured face had grown a blotchy dark pink. He could feel a pulse beating in his neck. He clenched his fists and on his way up the path kicked at a tree trunk.

  Jeremy was at home alone and expected to be for the next two days. Fiona was going to her mother’s in Pomfret after work and intended to stay there, returning home on Friday. Audrey Morrison was down with flu and Fiona would be looking after her, doing the shopping, and monitoring her condition as her mother had a tendency to pneumonia. Jeremy was glad to see the back of Fiona for a while. It seemed to him that when she was with him she talked of nothing but the coming baby and her talk consisted mainly in lecturing him on how to care for infants, what you fed them on, watching them for signs of malaise and, worst of all, changing their nappies. A new trouble had come upon him. Diane had phoned and followed up her call with one of her handwritten letters, not an email. The house in Peck Road was in ‘a disgusting state’. The carpets were stained, with blood and ‘worse’. Someone had papered the walls in the bedrooms, one with a paper patterned in scenes from SpongeBob SquarePants, the other with bunches of red roses and blue ribbons, her pictures, which still hung on the walls when she left for Spain, had been taken down and stacked in the cupboard under the stairs, two of them with their glass cracked. She had estimated the cost of the damage at eight hundred pounds and expected to retrieve that sum of money either from him or ‘those people who have been illegally squatting in my house’. He could have a week in which to pay up or he could deal with her solicitor. There was no mention of the house being rented and not belonging to her.

  Jeremy was rereading this letter and sipping grappa from the bottle when the doorbell rang. Having seen him come, he already knew it must be Jason at the door. Was he going to take this opportunity of asking him about Diane’s money? His usual course in like situations was to postpone, always to put off till tomorrow what he could do today. He opened the front door, said ‘Hi’ and stepped aside to let Jason in.

  Jason said nothing. He went inside and slammed the door behind him. Jeremy said in an ingratiating tone, ‘Come along through. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You’ve done enough,’ said Jason, smelling the grappa on Jeremy’s breath. Pulling back his right arm, he punched him on the jaw. Jeremy gave a choking cry as his body crumpled, sinking from the waist down, his horrified eyes staring as he fell. But before he touched the ground, Jason had grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. Pushing him against the wall, which he began feebly to slide down, Jason aimed a second punch at him and as he fell, groaning, kicked his crumbling shins.

  He was still lying there, moaning now, his eyes staring, when Jason left, walked out to his car and drove to the supermarket. At least he could put in half a day’s work. Unable to resist telling someone what he had done, he first phoned Nicky, then his mother. Nicky he first asked how Isabella was, was told she was fine, then gave an account of his prowess at Stringfield that morning. Instead of congratulating him, Nicky asked what he wanted to do that for and she hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. His mother was a more gratifying audience. Jeremy Legg had got what he’d been asking for. Driving drunk and with an innocent baby in the car! Could she tell Mr Wexford what had happened? Would he mind? Tell him what you like, said Jason. I’m in good with the cops, they love me.

  Jeremy had promised to call Fiona at her mother’s that evening but this promise, like most that he made, was broken. When it got to nine thirty she phoned him but got no reply. This wasn’t unusual. His mobile phone was stuffed full of unread messages, and as for the landline, he seldom got to it in time. She wasn’t worried. Knowing that she might not be in touch with him for forty-eight hours hardly perturbed her. She would see him soon enough. Since she had discovered her pregnancy, Fiona had almost ceased to think about Jeremy. Her thoughts and inner musings were concentrated on the coming baby. Jeremy she already regarded as a childminder but one without as yet a child to mind. She tried phoning him again in the morning from the optician’s but after four rings she ended the call, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  The weekend came and with it, on the Saturday, Sarah Hussain’s memorial service. Dora and Wexford attended it, she because she was a parishioner and a church attender, he in the hope of seeing everyone who knew the murdered vicar gathered together under St Peter’s angel roof. They were amon
g the first arrivals as were their grandson Robin and Clarissa Hussain, probably the first occasion in their lives, Wexford thought unkindly, that those two had been on time for anything. Both were unsuitably dressed in jeans (in Robin’s case, the ragged kind, with holes in the knees), T-shirts with pictures on them of endangered species, and distressed leather jackets. Stepping out of an ancient Jaguar just outside the church gate, and on a double yellow line, was an old woman in an equally ancient fur coat holding the arm of a man in his late forties, a tall handsome man whose once-golden hair had faded to straw, his light complexion reddened and his blue eyes paled to silver, as often happens with very fair men. He reminded Wexford of someone, not his colouring but his classical features, but who it was he couldn’t remember. Left behind in the old Jaguar, seated at the wheel, was a dark-haired man of much the same age, good-looking in a surly way, who looked as if he intended to remain there, for he had taken a book from the glove compartment and was reading it. Had he stayed where he was in case some assiduous traffic warden told him to move? Was he waiting for the fair man and the old woman to return at the end of the service?

  Wexford and Dora went into the church and were presented with an order of service. Just ahead of them was Dennis Cuthbert holding on to the arm of a man in his thirties who looked rather like him and was even taller. Dora nodded to both of them, smiling in the decorous way that is correct at such functions. Nardelie Mukamba, the Congolese woman from Oval Road, Stowerton, was a surprise attender, though Wexford reproved himself with racism for thinking that way. The organist was playing a voluntary. Handel, Wexford recognised, but which Handel he couldn’t tell, only that it wasn’t the Dead March in Saul. They took their seats more or less in the middle and found themselves one row in front of Dennis Cuthbert who was now seated next to a woman Dora whispered was the president of the Young Wives’ Group. Cuthbert could be heard speaking scornfully about the ‘modern’ hymns Clarissa had chosen, scoffing at the folk singer she had chosen to sing ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ and pontificating in outraged tones about the Alternative Service Book. The people who had been in the Jaguar were in the front row as if they were family, which Wexford doubted they could be.