by Ruth Rendell
‘Where is he now?’
‘Crisp? Back home. He’s not going anywhere, so I’ve left him there. But he killed her, Reg, I’m sure of it. I won’t leave him there for long. I never had much faith in that alibi of Jason Sams. All he wanted was to look well with us. He’s probably something of a psychologist. He knew that if he said that row happened on October the eleventh those women would agree with him. They’d take it that he knew and if they disagreed they must be wrong.’
Was it possible, Wexford asked himself, that Crisp had been telling the truth? It was well known that elderly people’s memories often behaved in a peculiar way. They often forgot what had happened yesterday while having very clear recall of the events of fifty years before. Was Crisp such a one? Old men forget, as Henry the Fifth has it, but some significant things they remember. Wexford could be called elderly himself and was making himself admit it; he was unaware of such things happening to him but maybe they were imminent. Crisp might recall his schooldays without even trying while the sighting of the dark young ‘Asiatic’ man had slipped his mind for weeks, for months. Burden would never be got to believe this. He had been set against Crisp from the start and been disappointed when Jason Sams came up with that alibi.
If the dark man was a fact, a real person who had really appeared to Duncan Crisp at Sarah Hussain’s back door (and presumably been admitted), could he possibly be the rapist? As soon as this thought came to Wexford he realised he was letting his imagination run away with him. Such an idea presupposed that the man was much older than Crisp had said (elderly people generally saw the middle-aged as young), that he had become acquainted with Sarah, that they were on speaking and calling terms. Impossible, he told himself, don’t be ridiculous. Mike had always said he had too much imagination and now he realised it himself. Crisp was a liar, Crisp was old, Crisp had killed Sarah Hussain because he disliked the colour of her skin and the race she came from. It was a crime thousands committed for a motive thousands had.
For the walk homeward, he took the long way round, giving him more time to think. If it were the plain undeniable truth he would have to accept it. Passing the end of Sylvia’s road, he decided against calling on her. She would almost certainly be at work anyway. He stood for a moment looking up towards her house when Clarissa Hussain emerged from the front garden and began to walk in his direction. As she approached him, he recalled certain facts about her and her life which, in the past few weeks, had slipped his mind. Her date of birth was one of them.
But the first thing he noticed about her, after they had said hello and she had stopped to talk, was the blueness of her eyes. They were dark but still as blue as the sea under a cloudless sky. It was impossible that she should have come from brown-eyed parents.
‘How do you like living at Sylvia’s?’ he asked her.
‘I love it. It’s really nice. I’m so happy I left the Brays’ and came there.’ A smile made her even more beautiful. ‘Most of all because I met Robin.’
‘That’s good.’ He must ask. Who else would know? ‘When will you be eighteen, Clarissa?’
‘On January the twentieth,’ she said, and then she answered the question he felt he couldn’t ask. ‘Mum was going to tell me about my – well, about my birth when I’m eighteen. I don’t care so much about that but it’s incredibly awful Mum not being here to tell me.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘I said I was happy and part of me is but I do miss Mum so much. I’ll never get over that.’
In most circumstances when young people said they would never get over some pain or loss he would have told them that in time they would, it was only a matter of time, but it was different here. Very likely Clarissa would never fully recover from her mother’s death. That death and memories of her mother would always be with her, just under the surface of her life, lying beneath but emerging when she was alone, in dreams, in recollections, awakened by objects, by names and by words once uttered. People who killed others never thought of those others’ perpetual remembering, the pain, the sadness, the inability ever to put the crime behind them. Or they didn’t care.
‘Robin’s been marvellous,’ she said, her face glowing when she thought of him. ‘I never knew a boy could be so kind. Like thoughtful, you know?’
‘I’m glad,’ he said.
It was always good to hear of one’s grandchildren’s academic success, the passing of exams, the graduation, but surely just as satisfying to be told of kindness to a girlfriend. Robin in the role of comforter to a bereaved young woman was unexpected and immensely pleasing. He went on his way, feeling more cheerful and content than he had in the past week, feeling that peculiar gratification that only comes from hearing praise of a family member, close to one for the whole of his life.
There was no one at home. Dora was spending the day in London with their younger daughter Sheila. She had picked up the post from the front doormat and put it into the brass plate on the hall table. Most of it consisted of flyers, brightly coloured advertisements of pizza and curry restaurants and a rather pathetic misspelt offer on lined paper of the services as cleaner (willing also to iron and mend) of a woman called Parveen, describing herself as honest, reliable and with references. A replacement for Maxine? He was sure Dora wouldn’t want to take this poor woman on.
The only ‘real’ letter in the pile had a Reading postmark. A reply at last to his letter suggesting another meeting with Thora Kilmartin? Probably, but he didn’t recognise the handwriting. He took it into the living room where it was very warm and opened it. The address at the top of the sheet of paper was Miramar Close but the writer was Tony Kilmartin. Reading only the preliminary Dear Mr Wexford, he thought for a moment that the man who had seemed when they met to have disliked him was warning him off writing to his wife. But no. This was quite other and wholly unexpected.
Dear Mr Wexford,
No doubt you will be surprised to hear from me. Perhaps I should have emailed you but I have no email address for you and wasn’t willing to ask my wife. I found this address in her address book. Reprehensible, you may say. But there are some cases where the end justifies the means.
The object of this letter is to ask you if we might meet. What I have to say can’t easily be said on the phone. I will gladly come to Kingsmarkham if that suits you. Christmas will be upon us in two weeks’ time and if possible I would like our meeting to be in advance of that. I suggest Tuesday the 18th or Wednesday the 19th of December. I will drive, so suggest reaching Kingsmarkham in the late morning or early afternoon.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Kilmartin
Wexford was pleasantly mystified. What on earth could the man have to say to him? His wife had said he disliked Sarah Hussain and had no interest in discussing her or her death, so it couldn’t be that. Wexford had not been welcome back in the house, had almost been warned against returning there with her. It began to look as if he was to be warned again but this time against having further contact with Thora. Could it possibly be jealousy? Like most men, Wexford had a specific taste for a type of woman. There were of course exceptions but his own wife had exemplified that type, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with handsome regular features and an hourglass figure. The full bosom, small waist and good legs were (as the horrid fashionable phrase had it) key, and these attributes Dora had gracefully retained into post-middle age. No fat or overweight woman would ever have attracted him. Tony Kilmartin didn’t of course know this. Wexford had noticed, in private life and as a police officer, that men married to the ugliest of women, those whom to call plain would be charitable, were among the most jealous, the most likely to imagine other men were gazing lustfully on their wives.
That evening, when she returned from London, he did something he would never have done while a serving police officer. He showed the letter to Dora. She laughed at his theory, then apologised. ‘Of course you’re very attractive to me, darling, but do you think you’re likely to appeal to this fat lady?’
<
br /> ‘Of course not,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s just that I can’t account for his wanting to meet me.’
‘If it were jealousy,’ she said, still laughing, ‘he’d be more likely to want to fight you.’
Next morning he wrote back to suggest 18 December at his home. The man would hardly pick a fight or threaten him in his own home. He would come off badly if he did, Wexford being about eight inches taller and getting on for twice as heavy.
Christmas was to be spent this year with Sheila, her husband and their small daughters. Sylvia and Mary would join them while Ben had elected to stay with his father and stepmother. Robin and Clarissa would be camping in Mallorca. Previous Christmases had entailed weeks of preparation but this one left Wexford and Dora with almost nothing to do except amass the necessary presents, something Dora had started doing months before.
Wexford told himself to stop speculating, to dismiss any possible subjects of this meeting with Tony Kilmartin from his mind as unprofitable and probably wrong, but still he couldn’t stop sometimes thinking about it. Burden’s asking him if he would ‘sit in on’ yet another interview with Duncan Crisp took his mind off Kilmartin and gave him something else to occupy his thoughts. Persuading himself that Jason Sams was an unreliable witness and therefore totally unsound, Burden hadn’t yet rearrested Crisp, though this was the fourth time he had had him in for questioning. And probably the third time he had asked him about the dark man glimpsed through glass.
This time he asked him why he remembered this man and Crisp replied that he always remembered ‘one of them Asiatics’. They stayed in the mind because they shouldn’t be here. Wexford listened, he didn’t say anything. Burden asked him, not for the first time, if he had seen the man on entering Dragonsdene for his tea or on leaving the house to return to his gardening.
‘When I was coming back,’ Crisp said.
‘You told me before,’ said Burden, pretending to look at notes, ‘that it was on your way into the house.’
‘You can’t expect me to remember everything, not when you put me through this third degree.’
Karen Malahyde intervened to ask Crisp how old the man was. Crisp glared at her. He seemed to be a misogynist as well as a racist. ‘Have I got to answer a lady detective?’
‘Yes, you have,’ said Burden, though not having charged the man he couldn’t enforce anything.
‘I don’t know how old he was. Young. I said young. He was young to me. How good d’you think you’d be guessing someone’s age in a bad light through glass?’
‘If you were really seeing this person through glass,’ said Burden. ‘If it wasn’t an optical illusion or a shadow or the Reverend Hussain herself.’
Wexford stayed for a cup of tea and a renewed declaration from Burden that he’d let Crisp get Christmas over and then he’d arrest and charge him. ‘He’s not going anywhere in the next couple of weeks,’ he said.
Parveen was due to start work after Christmas, not because Dora had high hopes of her but because she was sorry for her. Meanwhile she was doing the housework. In theory she and Wexford were sharing it but as she had known from the start she was doing almost all of it. It wasn’t that he was unwilling but that he was so bad at it. Like many a woman in her position she watched him attempting to dust, make a sandwich, clean the oven, and said, ‘Never mind, darling. I’ll do it.’
He watched her, lost in admiration, not to say incredulity. How did they do it? How could they bear it, day after day and probably for a lifetime? He’d do the sweeping up outside, he said, he’d clean the windows, but it snowed so much, then rained, that no outdoor cleaning or sweeping was possible. On 18 December there was neither snow nor rain, nothing to stop Kilmartin driving here. At least, Wexford told himself, he could do the shopping. He bought smoked salmon, quails’ eggs, asparagus, white peaches and black cherries for their lunch and Dora said if he went on like that he’d impoverish them.
Out of his own environment, Tony Kilmartin was a changed man. He was still very thin, of course, his hair sparse and his back more hunched than it should be in a man barely in his fifties. But his smile transformed him still further as a smile does with many dour or grim-faced people. Wexford had long ago stopped offering wine or beer to those who had been driving and would soon be driving again. Tony Kilmartin had water and so did he, though it went against the grain, and his visitor’s remark, as the glass was handed to him, he found astonishing.
‘What I’d really like would be a stiff whisky. To prepare me for what I’ve got to say to you. But I know I can’t have it. I have to drive back.’
The wild thought came to Wexford that the man was going to confess to murder. But it couldn’t be, not unless he was mad. ‘If it’s like that,’ he said, ‘you’d better get it over before we have lunch.’
‘Yes,’ Kilmartin said, ‘yes.’ He drank some water. ‘It concerns my wife. My wife, Thora. You may think me disloyal and what I am about to do indefensible. But I have to do it.’ He hesitated, briefly closed his eyes. Opening them and looking away, he said, ‘I hope it isn’t being rude to you when I say that if you’d still been a police officer she wouldn’t have said what she did. She wouldn’t dare. I tell you this in case you think she doesn’t know what she’s doing but she does. Oh, she does.’
‘Knows what, Mr Kilmartin?’
‘Tony, please. Here goes, then. My wife is a fantasist. I mean by that that she invents things, stories, narratives. When I first knew her I believed them, she is tremendously plausible. Then one after another I found they weren’t true. I know a lot about fabulists now and the first thing to know is that you can’t find them out, confront them and get them to admit what they told you is a lie. They come up with every excuse, every defence.
‘Now I know my wife gave you a life history of Sarah Hussain while she was over here after Sarah died. Some of it will have been true, some of it always is, but not the gist of it and not the main points. That’s why she didn’t want you to see much of me when you came to lunch with us. In case you brought the subject up with me. Did she tell you I disliked Sarah?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘Not at all. On the few occasions I met her I liked her very much. Did she tell you the girl – what’s she called? Clarissa? – did she tell you the girl was the result of rape? And that the rapist was a very good-looking young Asian living in a block of flats called Quercum Court?’
‘Yes to all of that,’ said Wexford.
‘And you believed it. Naturally you did. Everyone always believes Thora. She’s so plausible, she looks so honest and straightforward. I used to believe it. The effect is of course that I scarcely believe a word she says now. I mean, she’ll say someone phoned for me and I don’t believe it. I don’t call them back and they call me and ask if I’m all right. Even so, in the nature of things she’ll tell more of the truth than lies. The most accomplished liar does that.’
Wexford wanted to ask why Kilmartin put up with it, why he stayed, but of course he couldn’t. But his visitor must have seen the question in his eyes. ‘I love her, you see. And I’m sorry for her.’
‘Let’s go and have lunch.’
According to their prior arrangement, Dora had had her lunch and gone out. They ate alone, Wexford disinclined to that expensive luxury food but Kilmartin tucking in enthusiastically.
‘I should tell you,’ he said, ‘that if my wife wants to meet you again I will do my best to stop her. Well, I shall stop her. I always do this – I mean, stop her seeing the people she’s told her fantasies to. She thinks I’m jealous and of course she rather likes that.’ He paused. ‘I’m being very frank with you.’
‘Yes. You are.’
‘May I ask if you’ve passed this tale of Thora’s on to anyone else? I mean the police, of course.’
‘I have,’ Wexford said unwillingly. But what a blessing it was that Burden had been only mildly interested in the so-called rapist, had never really been able to see this man or anyone connected with him as a possible sus
pect. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on some of what you’ve told me.’
‘Oh, yes, I know. People always do. Depending of course on how fantastic and dramatic Thora’s tales are, they can’t resist passing them on to their families and friends. And why not? They believe what she’s told them. You believed. I have to undo it as best I can.’ Tony Kilmartin sighed. He took a long draught of water. ‘Believe me . . .’ Saying that made him laugh. ‘Believe me, I don’t usually tell people my wife is a liar. I try to tone it down a bit. I’ve told you because – well, I suppose I thought I could trust you and I think I can.’
Half an hour later, when he was leaving and they had talked about the weather and Christmas and what the traffic would be like on the way back to Reading, he said, ‘D’you know what I’m really relieved about?’
Wexford waited.
‘That she didn’t tell this fantasy of hers to the girl.’ He said in a different tone, ‘She didn’t, did she?’
‘No, oh, no. I know she didn’t.’
Sick of having to confess to Burden, he nevertheless did so that afternoon, walking into the detective superintendent’s office as he had been asked to do, with a prior knock but without a prior phone call. Burden said, ‘I never really believed it, anyway.’
‘You put up a good imitation of believing it.’
‘Well, it was the idea of it rather than its being true,’ said Burden. ‘Amazing a woman inventing that.’
‘Is it?’
‘It seems to me like a man’s fantasy.’
Wexford suddenly felt grateful to Burden. His friend was growing into a better and wiser policeman every day, he thought. What a disaster it would have been if a full-scale hunt for the man, the non-existent man Burden had once called Ahmed X, had been set in motion. As it was, because of Burden’s lukewarm response to Thora Kilmartin’s story, all that had happened was a new DC spending an hour or two trawling through the Internet and another pointless conference.
