by Ruth Rendell
What tale did she want to spin this time? But for a moment he wavered. Suppose she had been telling the truth and it was Tony Kilmartin who was the fabulist? It was the kind of doubt that makes your heart turn over. But no. Kilmartin’s story had all the elements of truth while hers was hedged about with caveats and warnings: ‘Don’t see my husband again’, ‘My husband disliked Sarah.’ Believing her was to swallow the description of the handsome Indian at Quercum Court, to ignore Clarissa’s blue eyes, to accept Sarah’s refusal either to have an abortion or to go to the police. But still his mind travelled forward to 20 January. Absurd as it was, he still seemed to see an emissary appearing on that day, a messenger from beyond the grave, come to the girl to tell her that indeed she was the result of rape.
His phone call to Georgina Bray was welcomed. ‘I am glad to hear from you. I’m still so ashamed of the way I spoke to you when Clarissa left me.’
‘Please don’t be,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten it.’
‘Well, I can’t believe that but if we can both put it behind us it would be a great relief to me. One thing – I think I must have misled you. I told you I’d been at university with Sarah and then I told you or I told that nice woman detective Lynn Fancourt that I’d only been friends with her for four years. I didn’t mean to mislead. The fact is that I barely knew Sarah at Keele, I’m two years older than she was. We only became friends when she came here.’
Interesting. He thanked her. A meeting with Burden first, though. Of course Georgina’s truthfulness made no difference to Thora’s veracity or lack of it but in a strange way he felt it did. He asked her if they could have a talk about Sarah’s family and the Steyners and she agreed. Would he call round at about seven and they could have a drink? She felt strange, she said, a woman asking a man round for a drink. Was that all right. ‘Quite all right,’ he said.
It troubled him a little that now Burden had someone awaiting trial for the murder of Sarah Hussain he had no objection to being seen drinking in public. Any press photographer could come into the bar at the Olive and Dove and get a shot of him sitting at a table with a glass of wine in his hand. If they printed it no one could say he was fiddling while Rome burned. Wexford wondered if Gibbon mentioned that or was it just another myth? For the first time in years, sitting together like this, he and Burden had nothing to say to each other. The weather, of course, that could always be discussed. They were Englishmen. The health of their children, and now in both cases grandchildren, could be enquired after. Desperate for something to say, Wexford mentioned that he was due at Georgina Bray’s at seven, and immediately the words were out he could see that this went down badly with his friend.
‘It’s too late for that, Reg,’ Burden said. ‘It’s flogging a dead horse. Since I can’t imagine that you’ve started up a personal friendship with that woman I can only suppose you’re drinking with her to manufacture a new perpetrator for the Hussain murder.’
‘Not manufacture, Mike. I don’t believe Crisp did it and I don’t think it’ll be long before you come round to my way of thinking.’
‘I notice you never come up with an alternative.’
‘Not yet,’ said Wexford, ‘but I will.’
Their meeting had lasted less than an hour and it was obvious to both that this coolness would resist, at least for this evening, any warming-up attempts. They parted outside the Olive, Burden to take a taxi home – first checking that no reporter from the Kingsmarkham Courier was on the watch – Wexford to walk through the lightly falling snow to Orchard Road. A Christmas tree was still standing on the table by a front window in the Brays’ house and still hung with fairy lights. It pleased him that Georgina Bray hadn’t dressed up for him but was wearing the clothes she had obviously been wearing all day, jeans and the kind of heavy dark blue sweater that is called a Guernsey. She and her husband Trevor were identically dressed, only the colour of their trainers differed, and it struck Wexford that it was only since the mid twentieth century that such costume, common to both men and women, was possible.
He accepted a glass of Chilean Sauvignon, glad that neither of them were wine snobs and about to subject him to a mind-blowingly boring disquisition on the superiority of western South American wine to southern South American or some such tedium. Trevor Bray seemed to read his mind. ‘I know it’s plonk but it’s quite good plonk.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘You want to talk to Georgie. Would you like me to go? I can take my wine upstairs and watch TV in our bedroom.’
Georgina was starting to say that their discussion should be private when Wexford interrupted to ask him to stay. ‘There’ll be no secrets,’ he said. He turned to Georgina. ‘Now, Clarissa. We’ve talked about her before. You think she was the result of artificial insemination and Sarah did it herself.’
‘That’s right. Of course, I don’t know that. Sarah and I never talked about things like that. I mean sex and bodily functions and biology sort of stuff.’ Wexford’s eye unintentionally caught Trevor Bray’s and rather to his horror intercepted Bray’s gesticulations, unseen by his wife and aimed evidently at him, the casting up of eyes, the pursing of lips and the wrinkling of nose. He quickly looked away. ‘I don’t actually suppose she told anyone. Well, she must have told the what-d’you-call-it, the donor.’
In a sarcastic tone, Trevor said, ‘Oh, she must, she must.’
Wexford was beginning to wish he had taken up the man’s offer to go. ‘Clarissa’s got blue eyes,’ Georgina said. ‘I never actually noticed that before but I did when she was staying with me. So I think Sarah must have picked a donor with fair hair and blue eyes.’
This was telling him nothing he didn’t already know. Trevor was smiling and shaking his head. ‘I believe it was you invited the Steyners to the memorial service.’
‘Well, I don’t really know them. All I know is what I got from Sarah. Old Mrs Steyner was after all her mother-in-law, or had been. If your husband is dead is his mother still your mother-in-law?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s of such vital importance,’ said Trevor Bray.
Georgina ignored him but a look of distress came into her face. ‘I don’t think Sarah ever saw Mrs Steyner after she came to St Peter’s but she did write to her and phone her. She never saw Christian Steyner or his boyfriend.’
‘What a word! Don’t you mean his catamite?’
Georgina set down her glass so heavily that Wexford feared it would break. She said in a voice as shrill as Victoria Steyner’s but firmer, ‘That’s enough. I can’t go on with this conversation if you’re going to carry on making these stupid comments.’ She stood up, ‘If you won’t go I will. I’ll take Mr Wexford into the kitchen and we’ll have another glass of wine. God knows I need it.’
‘I’ll go,’ Wexford said.
‘No. Please don’t.’ Trevor Bray was laughing. ‘My wife isn’t endowed with a sense of humour.’
‘Nor am I,’ Wexford said and followed Georgina into the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, crying, her head in her hands. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘It’s not you. It wouldn’t have mattered who it was. He’s like this with almost everyone. Not friends of his own, just mine. Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to call you a friend, that would be presumptuous.’
‘Not at all,’ said Wexford.
‘He was awful with Clarissa but still I didn’t want her to leave. She was a companion for me and he’s not always here. He has to go to work.’
She poured more wine for herself but he refused, shaking his head. He had already had a glass here and one with Burden. ‘You were going to tell me about Sarah’s relationship with Christian Steyner.’
‘There wasn’t one,’ she said, still tearful. ‘She’d only seen him once or twice since Leo died and that was years and years ago. What’s a catamite?’
‘A man’s homosexual lover of rather lower status than his, maybe a slave.’
‘Well, Timon Arkwright’s not like tha
t. He’s a millionaire, according to Victoria. He’s got a business making classy handbags. Fifteen hundred pounds apiece they sell for.’ She dried her eyes on the drying-up cloth. ‘I’d leave Trevor, you know. I’d love to leave him. He hates all my friends. He dislikes his own children. I think he’s a psychopath. But where can I go? And he wouldn’t keep me. He’d go to jail before he’d pay a penny for me if I wasn’t here in this house. I mean it. I wait on him hand and foot but it’s never enough. And when I say I’ll leave him he laughs at me. He just laughs.’
The stream of invective and denunciation continued to pour out of her. He felt he couldn’t leave while she was like this and the husband in the next room quietly laughing. He could hear the laughter, the soft but penetrating chuckles that reminded him unpleasantly of a demon’s mirth in one of those Hollywood exorcism or necromancy films. After a while, as he sat there thinking of his dinner which awaited him at home, of his marriage which in spite of vague ups and downs seemed like Eden compared to this one, his children who never stayed away because of a parent’s unpleasantness, she eventually quietened and he got up to go.
‘What you must think of us,’ she said as he knew she would. There was no reply to that. ‘You must come back sometime when he’s not here if it’s not being forward of me to suggest it.’
‘Not at all,’ he said, a response he seemed to be making all the time these days.
It was snowing heavily but he wasn’t far from home. Trevor Bray’s behaviour, the wanton cruelty of it, stayed in his mind to the exclusion of all else. He so evidently enjoyed upsetting his wife, it was almost like a game to him, that Wexford saw it as a kind of verbal sadism. Was Georgina alone the recipient of this sarcasm and scorn or were his children also subjected to it? He wondered too if it was exclusively confined to words or if she was made to suffer physical abuse and of a similar kind, an actual stabbing with pins perhaps.
It was next morning before he sat down to write a letter in reply to Thora Kilmartin. Writing at all, applying that is a pen to paper, putting the address at the top and the date underneath it, seemed to him – although he was a stumbling practitioner online – to be archaic, an obsolescent means of communicating that would very likely soon be lost to the world. As the old died, handwriting would remain only in documents for scholars to study. Passing away, he thought, as we were now supposed always to refer to death as if the elderly, faded to shadows, disappeared into the mists where another country existed beyond the crematorium urn. Enough, he said to himself, and laughed as he told Thora Kilmartin of Clarissa’s present whereabouts and politely refused for Dora and himself her invitation to have dinner with her. It would be interesting to see if she persisted, and if she did, to find out why.
Dora had a piece of news which she prefaced by telling him that she didn’t suppose he would be interested.
‘Try me,’ he said, attaching a first-class stamp to Thora Kilmartin’s envelope.
‘We’ve got a new vicar at St Peter’s. A replacement for poor Sarah Hussain.’
‘Woman or man?’ he asked, thinking she would prefer the two sexes placed in that order.
If she did she gave no sign of it. ‘Man. He’s been a curate somewhere up in the Midlands. The Reverend Alan Conroy and he’s quite old. Anyway, he’s retired. Apparently, that’s quite common these days. Young people can’t exist on the salary the C of E pays – stipend I suppose you’d call it.’
‘Has he started yet?’
‘Next week. They’ve got people in cleaning the place up but they’re not redecorating it. Too mean. That’s my opinion, not Mr Cuthbert’s. I’ve been talking to him and he’s delighted. Largely, I gather, because the new vicar’s not a woman.’
‘I didn’t know you knew Dennis Cuthbert.’
‘I know everyone connected with the church,’ said Dora.
I think I’ll go and have another talk with him, Wexford thought. He was due to vacate the room as Parveen intended to ‘turn it out’. She was at least as good a cleaner as Maxine and far less talkative. In fact, she seldom spoke at all and only to request replenishment of polish or bathroom cleanser. He could hardly have said he missed Maxine and most employers would have found Parveen a perfect replacement, but it troubled him that she looked so sad. Dressed as she always was in a pale blue sari and dark grey veil over her head, she was a tall and slender figure, elegant and upright, the tragic muse he called her to himself. Dora said she had a husband who was some sort of technician and two children known at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive for their formidable intelligence and Oxford prospects. But her otherwise handsome face looked as if she carried all the sorrow of the world on her shoulders and as if she had never smiled. He told her he would leave her to get on as he was going out and this she acknowledged with a gracious nod of the head.
He had phoned Dennis Cuthbert and been told that he ‘could come round’ if he could put up with him doing the decorating. There was to be no ‘electric fire’ this time. Wexford walked there, treading carefully where the snow lay three or four inches deep. Should he mention the discarded lift he had seen in the hallway at the Olive and Dove? Maybe not. A business that was evidently no longer in existence might be something he didn’t want to be reminded of. The place was ice cold. The upper part of his body covered in a canvas coat as once worn by assistants in hardware shops and the lower part in the trousers of an old suit, both garments splashed with paint of different shades from the pastel green he was applying to the walls with a roller, Cuthbert descended a few rungs of the steps and extended a hand, not entirely free of green paint spots, to Wexford.
‘Take a seat.’ Cuthbert reached for the cigarette he had left in a saucer on a higher rung. ‘How are you? All right?’ His occupation, perhaps a favourite, seemed to have put him in a good mood. Definitely a bad idea to mention defunct lifts. ‘Heard we’ve got a new incumbent, have you? And a gentleman, for a welcome change. He’s been here and d’you know the first thing he did? Called on me and introduced himself. She never did that. And don’t say I’m speaking ill of the dead, it’s only the truth.’
Wexford took a seat in front of the bedspread tapestry, now covered with a dust sheet. This morning Dennis Cuthbert needed no encouragement. ‘Of course, he’s not one of these young ones. My age he is if not a year or two older. None the worse for that. And lost his dear wife to cancer like me. We have a lot in common. He’s got one son too, a university lecturer. And that’s where we differ. My boy’s the reverse of that, what they call a bad lot.’ Cuthbert gave a final sweep with the roller, surveyed his morning’s work and began to come down. The roller immersed in a tank of paint remover, he sat down and proceeded to clean his hands with rags soaked in the same stuff. ‘Not to me, though, not to me,’ he said ruminatively. ‘Always good to me.’ Was he talking of his son still? ‘I’ll make a cup of tea in a minute,’ he said, reverting to the new vicar. ‘Conroy’s his name, the Reverend Alan Conroy. A fine-looking man in my estimation. Gone back to Coventry for a few days now and then he’ll be here permanently. He knew her, you know.’
‘Knew Sarah Hussain?’
‘That’s right. They met at a retreat. I can see by your face you don’t know what a retreat is. Well, I do. I’ve been at one myself. It’s in some country place where the clergy and a few people like me can go and have a quiet time, praying and meditating, most of it in silence and a very pleasant change it is. He told me he met her at a weekend retreat and they talked. There’s not much talking at these things but you can if you want. I dare say they were lonely. People like us are, widowers and widows. I’ll go and make that tea.’
This was unexpected. Wexford was wondering how well the new vicar had known Sarah Hussain when Cuthbert came back with tea in two mugs and told him without any prompting. ‘They met at this retreat, he said, but he already knew her husband or had known him. They were at university together. Oh, yes, I know Mr Conroy was a good twelve years older but that was because he went there much later than those Steyner twins, he went to do a
theology degree. He told me all this. He was very open. When he and she met at the retreat I dare say they talked about her late husband and that would have made a sort of bond, wouldn’t it?’
Wexford agreed that it would. He expected Cuthbert to say something about Duncan Crisp but he seemed to have forgotten the man’s existence. He was full of Alan Conroy and the new vicar had driven everything else out of his head.
‘He’s going to use the Book of Common Prayer whenever he can. He made a point of telling me that. I expect he knew how much it means to me. He said he’d have morning prayer from it regularly on the first Sunday in the month. I could read his mind by then and I could tell he’d like to have all the services from it but his bishop wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be such a pleasure to me to have the General Confession again.’
‘When is he coming?’
‘He hasn’t got much furniture but what he has got is coming next week sometime and he actually moves in on Saturday the nineteenth. He’ll take his first matins next day, the Sunday, but it’ll be the Alternative Service Book, I’m sorry to say.’
Wexford drank his tea and left, reflecting that the first Sunday of Alan Conroy’s incumbency would also be Clarissa Hussain’s eighteenth birthday. It was easy (and absurd) to see the new vicar as representing that messenger from beyond the grave who would bring the girl a revelation. Of course it was impossible. She probably knew of Alan Conroy’s existence but she might never have met him. Wexford began the homeward drive carefully, avoiding the narrow side streets where the snow had settled while he had been in the vicar’s warden’s house, and making a detour which took him past Kingsmarkham Comprehensive School. Clarissa Hussain, inadequately dressed as most of them were, was coming out of the main gates.
