by Ruth Rendell
‘Instead,’ he said, ‘you’ve got another dark man glimpsed through glass.’
‘And that’s just as unbelievable as Thora Kilmartin’s story. If ever there was a farrago of lies. What’s a farrago, anyway? I’m sure you can tell me.’
‘I looked it up once,’ said Wexford. ‘It means “mixed fodder for cattle”.’
‘The things you know,’ said Burden in a rather scathing tone.
But once again Burden, who might have been severe with him, had been nothing more than indifferent. When I was in his place, he thought, I don’t think I would have been as mild and kind with an elderly retired cop. But we are friends too, we are good friends. And he sat down in the conservatory, now decorated all over with Christmas cards, and read Gibbon.
The Huns were ambitious of displaying those riches which were the fruit and evidence of their victories; the trappings of their horses, their swords, and even their shoes, were studded with gold and precious stones; and their tables were profusely spread with plates, and goblets, and vases of gold and silver, which had been fashioned by the labour of Grecian artists. The monarch alone assumed the superior pride of still adhering to the simplicity of his Scythian ancestors. The dress of Attila, his arms, and the furniture of his horse, were plain, without ornament, and of a single colour. The royal table was served in wooden cups and platters; flesh was his only food; and the conqueror of the North never tasted the luxury of bread.
We judge people by ourselves, Wexford thought, and by our own beliefs, customs and prejudices. How disapproving almost everyone would be these days of a diet composed entirely of meat. It gives you scurvy and bowel cancer was what would be said and imagine thinking of bread as a luxury. Men and women died before they were fifty and often they died violent deaths. He caught up with Attila’s death some thirty pages later. It wasn’t of bowel cancer but in bed on his wedding night (to one of his ‘innumerable wives’) when an artery burst. The men brought to dig his grave were all massacred afterwards. And foolish people, thought Wexford, look back nostalgically and say life was better in former times.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ON THE WAY to Hampstead on Christmas Eve Dora picked up on an innocent remark her youngest grandchild Mary made about holidays on islands. Why did people like staying on islands? Why were Robin and Clarissa going to an island? Which island was that then? Not only Robin and Clarissa’s destination had escaped Dora but also that they were going together. Wexford, inwardly amused, could tell by the look on his daughter’s face that there had been some deliberate deception here.
‘Don’t you think you’re to some extent in loco parentis?’ said Dora.
Provokingly, Sylvia said, ‘I am Robin’s parent.’
‘You know what I mean, Sylvia. Letting that girl go with him to Mallorca.’
‘It’s not a matter of letting her, Mother. She’ll be eighteen in a month’s time. If she were sixteen it still wouldn’t be my business. This is the twenty-first century, you know.’
‘I wonder,’ said Dora, ignoring this, ‘what her mother would have said. I knew her, you know, which none of you did. There was no one in her life after her husband died.’
If both Wexford and his daughter thought simultaneously that the subject of this admonition must in that case have come into the world by parthenogenesis, neither of them commented. Wexford said quickly that they should change the subject and Mary asked promptly if she and Sylvia, Robin, Ben and Clarissa could all go on holiday to the Isle of Wight.
No more was said on the subject but a phone call came to his mother from Robin on the 25th wishing everyone a happy Christmas and sending Clarissa’s love. Dora said nothing, she didn’t even make a disapproving face. She always knew when she had failed, Wexford thought, and accepted it with a good grace, in this case smiles at both her daughters. He was pleased to have received no socks among his Christmas presents and only one scented candle. The iPod from his grandson Ben he thought a beautiful colour – it was iridescent turquoise – but had to ask what it was for. Reading Gibbon or anyone else would be condemned as antisocial, so he thought instead, principally, about Clarissa and her eighteenth birthday. Let him get home and the almost two weeks that constituted Christmas in this present day be over. Burden, though, and Kingsmarkham Crime Management wouldn’t take two weeks off. He would be surprised if they weren’t back at work for the last three days of the old year. Burden might even spend them at last charging Duncan Crisp with murder.
The detective superintendent waited until after the new year. Wexford knew he had been arrested and charged only from the newspaper, though Burden apologised next day for not informing him in advance. He looked and sounded slightly ashamed. Not so much, Wexford thought, for ‘forgetting’ to tell him as for charging the man at all. Had he done it because of continued pressure from the media ‘to bring the killer to justice in this high-profile murder’ and because he couldn’t find any other perpetrator?
When Wexford was told, he was sitting in Burden’s office, listening to his friend trying to change the subject by describing, in a tone of mixed fascination and horror, a Chrismas present he had been given, a wall clock with on its face a British bird pictured and a few notes from that bird’s song sounding at every hour.
‘I’ve seen one of those,’ Wexford said. ‘They’ve got two batteries. Take out the lower one and you won’t have any more cuckoos or hoots. But, Mike, back to Crisp. Can you really see that man in the role you’ve assigned to him? All he was to Sarah Hussain was next door’s gardener, an elderly man she may have seen but can barely have noticed. A man deeply prejudiced on his own admission against immigrants from the subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean, immigrants and their children and grandchildren, a violent dislike based on nothing but colour of skin, but who had never, again on his own admission, spoken to her. Every afternoon, while he is working there, he goes into the house next door and has tea – a cup of tea and a biscuit – with his employer and her housekeeper. One day, according to your theory, he doesn’t go straight back to his gardening – even you aren’t suggesting he might have done the deed on the way to have his cup of tea – he goes into the Vicarage by the back which is always left unlocked – how did he know that? – puts on a pair of gardening gloves he happens to have with him and finds Sarah Hussain. He has never spoken to her but now he does. He confronts her, and accusing her of something even he must know she can’t help, the colour of her skin, charges at her and strangles her . . .’
Burden had held up one hand. ‘It wasn’t like that. I’m not for a moment saying it was like that. You seem to believe everything Crisp says while I believe almost nothing. Of course he had spoken to Sarah Hussain, probably they’d had arguments and quarrels that almost came to blows before. The gardening gloves he had been given by Mrs Morgan. She had heard you could get tetanus through the soil round here if you had a scratch or scrape on your hand. He never wore them, he refused to, but he had them. He knew the back door was always open because he had gone in that way many times before. His prejudice was far worse than you seem to think. It was paranoia and in this case it was coupled with his dislike – that’s an understatement – of women clergy.’
‘He never went to church, did he? He had no knowledge on which to base this?’
‘They don’t need knowledge. It’s almost instinct. The way cats feel about dogs.’
Wexford laughed. ‘And what of the dark man inside the Vicarage living room that he saw through the glass?’
‘You noticed it was a dark man. In his book good is fair and bad is dark. My mother once told me that when she was a child fair-haired children were prized above dark ones. And I’m talking about hair, not skin colour. Black or brown skin would have been beyond the pale in those days – sorry about the pun. Crisp went in there and saw an Indian woman in Indian dress and that sent him over the edge.’
Wexford had to accept it. He had no choice. But that didn’t mean he had to give up looking. In the past few weeks a possibility had bee
n building up in his mind, increasing until it had become a conviction, that whoever had killed Sarah Hussain was closely linked to Sarah’s daughter. This certainty had nothing to do with reason, it was some kind of intuition. And yet no one was closely linked to Clarissa. Since her mother’s death she had been alone in the world. Her grandmother was dead and she appeared to have no relatives, no aunts or uncles, no cousins. She had a father, that anonymous invisible man. He would ask Lynn if she would search for him but probably she would have to say no. The case was closed. There were websites which would search for family members but he knew himself incapable of instigating such a search. Robin or Sylvia would do it for him but both were too near to Clarissa for him to ask them. Could he ask Clarissa? It was so simple he hadn’t thought of it before.
She was off school at the moment. The new term was about to begin but there were still a few days to go. That evening he was thinking about phoning her when the front doorbell rang and there they were, she and Robin, on their way to the cinema.
It amused him, in a fond kind of way, how people of their age always suppose that their company is not just acceptable to their elders but positively sought-after. They don’t even have to tell mother and father, grandma and grandad, that they will drop in. They just come, and if not greeted with rapture, are not simply offended but incredulous. Dora, however, had greeted them with the requisite joy – or had greeted Robin that way, Clarissa a tad less warmly – before Wexford even saw them. He performed his effusive grandfather act, only delighted to see his wife in conversation with the girl. Such a beautiful girl, those blue eyes that seemed to shed an azure light of their own, that skin the colour of a tea-rose petal.
Dora was offering coffee. They looked politely dismissive of this idea and brightened up when Wexford suggested wine. He was opening the bottle and thinking of ways to broach the subject of her family or non-family, if need be in the presence of Dora and Robin, when she asked him if he thought it would ‘be all right’ for her to go into the Vicarage.
‘I mean, just have a look round.’
He couldn’t ask her why. It wasn’t for him to do that. ‘I don’t see why not. I can ask for you.’
‘I’ve still got a key,’ she said.
He was sure Burden wouldn’t like that. Maybe the Church of England wouldn’t like that. She shouldn’t have a key. ‘I’ll ask Superintendent Burden, shall I?’
‘Please.’ She drank her wine at a gulp as if it were medicinal and a lifesaver.
‘Why does she want to go in there?’ Dora asked after they had gone. ‘That’s a rhetorical question. I quite see you couldn’t ask.’
‘Sentimental reasons, if that’s the word. Nostalgia? I would think that would be painful. Just the last time, maybe.’
‘Or there are papers in there she wants to look at.’
She turned out to be right.
Burden didn’t want her going into the Vicarage alone. He gave no reason for this prohibition. ‘I want someone with her. Lynn perhaps or Tim.’ Tim was the new DC. ‘Or you. Would you?’
‘Sure,’ said Wexford. ‘I wouldn’t mind taking another look at the place myself.’
‘Well, don’t get any ideas. The case is closed. Crisp did it and Crisp is safely on remand. Oh, and you can take that key from her when you’re finished or get her to bring it round here.’
He thought she might resent his presence but she seemed glad of his company. It rather surprised him that she had shed the faded ragged jeans for a wool dress under a thick winter coat. In his honour? Or out of some kind of respect for the house and the memory of her mother? He asked her, sure she wouldn’t mind, if she had any relatives she knew of, any aunts and uncles – he knew she hadn’t – any distant cousins. But no, she hadn’t. She was alone in the world and she smiled ruefully when she said that. She unlocked the front door and they went inside. It was very cold. The heating had been off for nearly three months. A dull sour smell pervaded the place and cobwebs had appeared, a cluster of them linking the brass chandelier in the hall to a Gothic beam.
‘I may as well tell you I’m looking for a letter,’ Clarissa said, lifting the lid of the desk in the living room. ‘There might not be one – it would be in an envelope addressed to me – but I have to find out.’ All that was inside the desk were receipted bills and a couple of notices from the local authority. She opened two drawers in a chest but if they had once held papers these had been cleared out. ‘There’s a desk in Mum’s bedroom. She told me there was a copy of her will in there but it wasn’t important because the will itself was with her solicitors. But we could look in there.’ On the way upstairs she said that probate had been granted and some two thousand pounds which amounted to her mother’s savings had come to her as well as a few pieces of jewellery. ‘It’s not very valuable but it has a lot of sentimental value.’ Clarissa’s voice broke. ‘Her wedding ring and engagement ring. She sometimes wore them, you know, but like only when she was alone. I once saw them on her finger.’ On the top stairs she sat down and sobbed.
If she had been his granddaughter he could have taken her in his arms and hugged her but she wasn’t and he couldn’t. All he could do was hand her his snowy, beautifully folded handkerchief. Thanking him as she took it from him, she looked at it in wonder. In a world of tissues it was probably the first time she had seen such a thing.
‘It doesn’t seem right to spoil it with my tears,’ she said as she dabbed her face.
It seemed that no one had been in to clear the place. Perhaps the Church of England waited until just before the new incumbent arrived. The bedroom was unchanged. There were the portraits and still on the bedside table Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua from which he had taken the letter that had brought him so much anxiety and stress. Thinking of it prompted him to ask if she ever heard from her godmother Thora Kilmartin.
‘I had a Christmas card.’
Wexford guessed that a strict talking-to from Tony Kilmartin had warned Thora to back off. Any contact with Clarissa might lead to some fresh farrago (Burden’s favoured word) of myths being imparted to her. The bedside-table drawer open, Clarissa had found the copy of the will she discarded as unimportant and a blank envelope stuffed full. But they were postcards from long ago, sent by school friends from seaside resorts. ‘There’s one more place to look,’ Clarissa said.
It was a safe. As in a hotel bedroom, it was in the bottom of the wardrobe, hidden under the hem of a long black skirt. Clarissa knew the combination. Presumably, no one else did, which was why the safe had never been opened. Inside was a packet of letters, all in their envelopes, the lot rather grimly tied with black ribbon.
‘They’re not for me,’ Clarissa said and the tears began again, silently flowing down her cheeks. ‘They’re from her husband. You know he was a landscape architect and when he had to go away he wrote to her every day. She kept them all.’ A tear splashed on to the ribbon. ‘I don’t want to leave them here. What shall I do?’
‘Take them with you,’ said Wexford rashly. This time he would tell Burden at once. ‘They’re no use to anyone else. You take them.’
But no letter addressed to Clarissa could be found. It was less cold outside than in, a mild sun shining out of a watery sky. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘We’ll go and have coffee in that little place round the corner.’
‘Tallulah’s, it’s called,’ said Clarissa. ‘My friend’s waitressing there.’
The friend, Maeve, was as pretty as Clarissa but a dazzling blonde. They sat down at a table in the window and ordered black coffee for Wexford and an elaborate variety of cappuccino for Clarissa. While they waited for it to come, she said, ‘You haven’t asked me what would be in the letter that never was.’
‘I didn’t think it was my business.’
‘I’ll tell you anyway.’ He thought she was going to cry again but she made a big effort to control herself. ‘My mother said she was going to tell me about my – well, she didn’t say “my father” but what my parentage was. She’d tell me
when I was eighteen. She can’t do that now because she’s dead.’ In a harsh voice she repeated her last words. ‘She’s dead.’ She took a little time, a second or two, before going on. ‘But I thought she might have written it down. I mean, written it in a letter to me and put it in the safe. But why would she? She didn’t know she was going to die.’
She put her head in her hands. The coffee came and she lifted her tear-stained face. ‘Will I ever get over it?’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said. His black coffee tasted more like gravy. Probably it would be improved by milk and sugar but there was none and he didn’t feel like asking for it. ‘So she didn’t give you a hint as to who your father was?’
‘Not really. She was like very strict about a lot of things but I don’t think she would have found much wrong with having a relationship with someone. Well, provided he wasn’t married. I suppose I think she was going to tell me about this lover she had and maybe he was married and he was my father and his wife found out – and well, I don’t know but something like that.’
He walked back with her to Sylvia’s house but as Sylvia was at work he didn’t go in. Robin was there, she said. Robin would comfort her, he always did, he was so wonderful. Wexford heard her call out to him as she opened the front door and a distant voice answering. At any rate, the course of true love seemed to be running smooth. Was there no family member to be found that he could talk to? She had said no but might there not be a family connection? His mind went back to the memorial service, the car with the surly-faced driver at the wheel, the old woman in the fur coat walking into the church with her son. She had known Sarah and known her well while she was married to her other long-dead son. Sarah had stayed with her after the death of their husbands and she had cared for her enough to come to her memorial service. She was no relation to Clarissa but no one was related to Clarissa. Now if I knew her name, he started to say to himself, and then he remembered that he did. Steyner, she was called, and the driver of the Jaguar had called her Victoria. There couldn’t be many Victoria Steyners about.
