No Man's Nightingale

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford pulled in and leaned across to open the passenger door. ‘Get in. I’ll take you home.

  ‘I don’t mean to be intrusive,’ he said, ‘but tell me why you teenagers never wear winter coats or even raincoats or sweaters or cardigans. I’m sure you’ve got them.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s not cool,’ she said.

  It was the reply he expected. He wanted to ask her about Alan Conroy but decided not to. Let her tell him without being asked. He would wait. Instead he said, ‘Do you ever go to church? I never do but not because I’m not a believer, though I’m not. I’d go to hear the words if they were the beautiful old ones.’

  Plainly, she didn’t know what he meant. ‘I haven’t been since Mum died. I used to go just to please her. Maybe I’ll go when the new man comes. I sort of know him. Well, I like met him once.’ She changed the subject. ‘Robin’s got a job. Did you know? With his First he shouldn’t have to stack shelves at Tesco on the minimum wage but what do you do when there’s no work?’

  He dropped her at Sylvia’s. It was snowing heavily now and he drove home more slowly than he could have walked. His front garden had accumulated a thick white covering while he had been out. He left the snow-canopied car on the snow-clogged drive and waded slowly to the front door, the fall clothing him. Dora had seen him arrive and opened the door. For no special reason he felt that he wanted to seize her in his arms – because he wasn’t one of the lonely forsaken ones? – but didn’t. Snowmen don’t.

  They each had a glass of sherry, that drink that Clarissa and Robin and their contemporaries have never heard of, while they watched a more than usually interesting weather forecast. Snow everywhere, fallen, falling and to come. Gradually he was coming to realise that what he had hoped for had happened. No messenger from beyond the grave was coming but an ordinary man, that someone who had known Sarah Hussain and might even remember the confidences she had placed in him and have some insights into her past. They had been at a retreat together. If one talked at a retreat surely that meant any conversation they had had would have been of an intimate and confiding nature. And if it did would he feel able to disclose it now? This future encounter had the potential of being far better than Victoria Steyner – more than that, because Mrs Steyner had been no use at all.

  The fate of Duncan Crisp had begun to worry him. A man in his sixties – in his late sixties? – shouldn’t be in a remand prison even if it was a good one, more like an open prison, according to Burden. Wexford didn’t really believe this. He had never heard it before. He even thought of going to visit Crisp, or trying to. He was sure Crisp wouldn’t want to see him, would refuse to see him. If he was no longer a police officer, he had recently been one, a detective chief inspector, and for many years. And in the unlikely event of Crisp agreeing to a visit what could he, Wexford, do? Only what he was doing now, find the real perpetrator.

  Mrs Morgan, doyenne of Dragonsdene, approached on the phone via her housekeeper Linda Green, was happy to agree to his request to walk round her garden. That was how he had put it, ‘walk round her garden’, which she translated herself into ‘see if you can see what poor Mr Crisp says he saw’.

  ‘I didn’t know I was so transparent,’ he said to her when, encountering her in her own handsome drawing room, he accepted, instead of the eternal cups of tea, a glass of claret.

  ‘Isn’t that what we are all supposed to be these days? Governments are always saying we should have more transparency. Not that they do, they and the banks.’

  She was a pretty woman in her late fifties, Linda Green much the same age but one of these ultra-thin people whose emaciation owes nothing to dieting. She was very likely a hearty eater, Wexford thought.

  ‘No one’s been here,’ she said, ‘to check on whether Mr Crisp could have seen the Vicarage French windows from where he says he did. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  What he thought strange was that Daphne Morgan knew that this was something Duncan Crisp claimed to have done. When he was a police officer he wouldn’t have asked this question but he could now. ‘How do you know that, Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘What, that he says he saw the French windows and a figure behind the glass when he was coming from my back door? I know because he told me.’

  Wexford had been sure Crisp wasn’t lying but that his memory had been at fault. ‘May I ask you when he told you?’

  ‘No one’s asked me any of this before. Now when was it? Not that afternoon. He didn’t come back to tell me. You see, it wasn’t at all important then. He didn’t know he was probably seeing a murderer. When he came back to the gardening – about a week later – he told me and I said he should tell the police but he must have forgotten. I suppose he didn’t want to tell them, he didn’t want to get any more involved with them. We do forget to do things we don’t want to do, don’t you think?’

  Wexford nodded. ‘Was there a light on behind those windows?’

  ‘I don’t know. He looked at them, I didn’t. I’m not tall enough to see over the wall, anyway. But it was a bright sunny day and the clocks hadn’t yet gone back, not on October the eleventh, so I don’t think a light could have been on. Let me take you outside and show you those windows.’

  The wall between Dragonsdene ground and that of the Vicarage was about five feet three inches high, at present with a three-inch crust of snow on top of it. Uneasy with the metric system, Wexford still privately thought in feet and inches. Plainly, Daphne Morgan couldn’t see over it but it presented no problems to Wexford and probably would not have done to Duncan Crisp. Three steps came down from the back door into a paved passageway. But if Crisp had paused on the bottom step and looked to the right he would have had an uninterrupted view of those windows. Wexford tried it, not even needing to crane his neck to see what Crisp had seen. And more than he had hoped to see. It happened that this was the day Alan Conroy’s furniture was being brought into the Vicarage. Wexford had seen a self-hire van parked outside but thought little of it. Now it seemed he was in luck, for, as he stood there eyeing the windows, two men appeared behind the glass carrying a table which they set down near the window.

  From the top step Mrs Morgan could just about see. ‘So it’s quite possible,’ she said. ‘It looks as if the new vicar is moving in.’

  ‘His stuff is. He’s not coming till the nineteenth.’

  They went back into the house. ‘Are you a churchgoer, Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘I was brought up to it, you know. I feel guilty if a Sunday morning passes and I haven’t been. I do hope they’ll realise poor Mr Crisp didn’t do it, don’t you?’

  Indiscreet as he had already been, he didn’t feel he could openly agree with this. He smiled, lifted his shoulders.

  In a burst of confidence, she said, ‘He’s not a very nice man, you know. Quite a good gardener but quite rude too. I think taciturn is the word. I don’t really like him but that has nothing to do with it, has it?’

  Here Wexford could readily agree that it had not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  RAIN CAME AND cleared away the snow. Icicles that had hung by the wall fell off and turned into puddles. Clarissa who had talked about having a party for that significant eighteenth birthday gave up the idea and did nothing, Robin having taken her to London for the preceding weekend, Saturday-evening dinner at the Wolseley and a night at the Dorchester.

  Sylvia’s comment was that he must be the only supermarket shelf-stacker ever to stay there.

  ‘What a wet blanket you are,’ her father had said. ‘They’ll have had a lovely time.’

  The new incumbent had arrived at St Peter’s on the Saturday and held matins at eleven on the Sunday morning. The congregation, often confined to no more than twenty persons, was much larger.

  ‘About fifty, I’d say,’ said Dora who had attended. ‘That Mrs Morgan from Dragonsdene was there and Mr and Mrs Bray and who d’you think? Mike and Jenny. I was amazed. Mike’s just the sort of man who would have a Damascene conversion.’

 
; ‘No, he’s not. I am.’

  Dora laughed in a derisive way.

  While she was in church he had been reading the Sunday Times supplement called ‘The Rich List’, or rather, dipping into it. Somewhere down the list, at number 88 which still made him very rich indeed, was a name he recognised among all the unknown billionaires: Timon Arkwright. There was a photograph, of course there was, a picture of a tall handsome man with longish dark hair; too long for someone who was clearly in his forties, one who probably thought that forty-five was the new twenty-nine. But who was he? But of course, the partner of Christian Steyner.

  He was reading Gibbon next morning and vaguely wondering how to approach Alan Conroy when the new vicar came to him. It must have been to him because Conroy had already met Dora, exchanged a few words and shaken hands with her after the service. Gibbon endeared himself even more than usual with a passage in Chapter 35 of The Decline and Fall and Wexford was reading it again, the more fully to digest it.

  The sister of Valentinian was educated in the palace of Ravenna; and as her marriage might be productive of some danger to the state, she was raised, by the title of Augusta, above the hopes of the most presumptuous subject. But the fair Honoria had no sooner attained the sixteenth year of her age than she detested the importunate greatness which must for ever exclude her from the comforts of honourable love: in the midst of vain and unsatisfactory pomp Honoria sighed, yielded to the impulse of nature, and threw herself into the arms of her chamberlain Eugenius. Her guilt and shame (such is the absurd language of imperious man) were soon betrayed by the appearances of pregnancy . . .

  Wexford was savouring and approving Gibbon’s broad-mindedness, in the 1770s moreover, his tolerance and great sense of humour, when Parveen showed Alan Conroy into the room. She did it with all the self-effacing meekness of a parlourmaid in Gibbon’s own day and Wexford couldn’t imagine where she had learned it.

  ‘The Reverend Mr Conroy!’

  Sneakily shoving the book under a cushion, Wexford got up and held out his hand. It was quite enough impressing a visitor with a perfect domestic without arousing admiration for one’s intellectual tastes. Alan Conroy said, ‘How do you do?’ a meaningless but polite phrase he hadn’t heard on a new acquaintance’s lips for several years. Conroy wasn’t a small man but still one who wouldn’t have been able to see over the wall between Dragonsdene and the Vicarage, his reddish hair sprinkled with grey, his face reddish too and his eyes a clear bright blue. Blue eyes fade as the years pass but his hadn’t. From the moment Parveen brought him into the room, Wexford had been wondering if he was in for a session of proselytising but the new vicar quickly made it clear this was far from his intention.

  ‘I haven’t come to ask you if you believe in God, that would be impertinent when I’m never really sure if I do myself.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to?’

  Conroy laughed. ‘Few of us are as devout and – well, committed – as poor Sarah was.’

  A way in, Wexford thought. ‘You knew her?’

  ‘I met her at a retreat. Some of these things are very rigid, like a bunch of Trappists, but this one wasn’t. Silence wasn’t demanded, just quietness and reflection. It was in a very beautiful setting too, in Shropshire. We talked. More than we should have done, but we got on so well. I miss her very much.’

  This was the retreat Cuthbert had mentioned. ‘I don’t know much about retreats but I don’t suppose Ms Hussain brought her daughter along, did she?’

  ‘Oh, no. Liberal as the people who ran it were, that wouldn’t have been allowed. Sarah talked a lot about her, though. She showed me photographs. I remember she had forty photos of Clarissa on her mobile phone. A very beautiful girl.’

  ‘Indeed. She’s going out with my grandson.’

  This piece of information (which might have enraged Sylvia) seemed to delight Alan Conroy but shifted the subject away from Sarah Hussain. They talked a little more, this time about Kingsmarkham and the surrounding countryside which the new vicar seemed to know well. How well had he got to know Sarah? The way Conroy talked it sounded as if quite an intimate relationship had grown up between them. But not sexual, Wexford was sure of that. He was beginning to think that Sarah’s only sexual experience had been with her husband.

  Dora had sent Clarissa an eighteenth-birthday card, one of only a few which had come that day, according to Sylvia on the phone to her father. ‘I sent her one, of course, and I think one came from that fat woman. Anyway, it had a Reading postmark.’ Since losing an alarming amount of weight on the Dukan Diet, Sylvia had been inclined to dub all even slightly overweight people fat. ‘I must say she hasn’t paid Clarissa much attention since failing to carry her off to Reading. She had a very nice card from that Mrs Bray and a package with a pretty silver chain in it. She showed me. And what do you think Robin’s given her? An iPad! He’s been shovelling snow and cleaning cars to raise the money, not to mention taking her to the Dorchester. But she deserves it, she’s a really nice girl.’ You’ve changed your tune, thought Wexford, but he didn’t say it aloud. ‘You’ll tell me I’m nosy, Dad, but I couldn’t help noticing a letter that came for her with a London SW7 postmark. She took it upstairs and I couldn’t exactly ask, could I?’

  ‘It will be her mother’s former mother-in-law,’ said Wexford. ‘She lives around there.’ It was only after she had rung off that he remembered that Victoria Steyner lived in W8 not SW7, which bordered on it. Still, people go for walks, they go shopping, and post a letter when they pass a pillar box. If they indulge in the near-obsolete practice of posting a letter at all. But would Mrs Steyner know the date of Clarissa’s birthday and, come to that, know it was her eighteenth? Perhaps. She had known Sarah quite well, had apparently loved her. There might have been conversations at those meetings they had had over the years concerning Sarah’s daughter. There might have been, but the more Wexford thought of it the more he felt sure there hadn’t been. Only the child of her son Leo, conceived within marriage, would have been acceptable to the flirtatious old woman in the pink frills.

  Burden was offended with him. He was taking exception to what he saw as Wexford’s interference in what was no concern of his. Or that, at any rate, was the idea in the forefront of Wexford’s mind. He had meddled – Burden would see it that way – in the whole Duncan Crisp business, in the man’s arrest, charge and detention on remand, daring to be anxious about the conditions in which Crisp, as an old man, was kept.

  He was wrong. Like a good 10 per cent of the population of Kingsmarkham, Burden had the flu. It was real flu, Jenny said on the phone, not just a bad cold, the authentic virus, not responsive to any antibiotic or antiviral. His temperature had gone up to 102 degrees (translated for Wexford’s benefit, for if that had been a Celsius measurement poor Burden would have been dead, his blood boiling over). Dr Crocker, officially retired but still seeing favoured patients, said that if his temperature didn’t come down by next day he’d have him removed to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital.

  Wexford went to see him but Jenny refused to let him get past the bedroom door, making his exclusion worse by telling him that at his age he should be careful to avoid infection. He walked home the long way round by way of Ladysmith Road, hoping not to encounter Nicky Sams but not avoiding the area on that account. If he met with another torrent of abuse – well, so be it. But Nicky and Isabella were nowhere to be seen. Instead he found himself approaching a man he recognised as the one he had seen letting himself into Nardelie Mukamba’s house, tall, dark, about forty. They didn’t know each other but still he found himself saying good morning.

  The greeting was returned but with a ‘Hi. How are you?’

  Not the words but the accent surprised him and he immediately reproached himself for making such a judgement. Had he really taken it for granted that a man who had lived in that part of Stowerton, and now perhaps lived here, wouldn’t speak with the voice of a Cabinet minister?

  Burden escaped being sent to hospital and in a day or
two he was allowed visitors. Wexford was admitted to what he called the ‘pesthouse’, his friend’s rather beautiful bedroom, as elegant in shades of cream and caramel as its occupant. Burden was up, sitting in an armchair upholstered in autumn-leaf-coloured satin, a fleecy cream blanket over his knees.

  ‘Crocker’s let me get up because I want to get back to work. He says no to tomorrow but I think he’ll let me back on Thursday.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed things coming to a standstill without your guiding hand,’ said Wexford.

  ‘That’s because I’m guiding them from in here. Thank God for technology. I hate to encourage you but your pal Duncan Crisp’s not well. Nothing to do with him being banged up. Apparently, according to Crocker, he’s got cancer. Or he very probably has. At his age it’s more than likely, poor devil.’

  ‘What sort of cancer?’

  ‘Prostate,’ said Burden, reaching for the glass of orange juice on his bedside table. ‘They’ll only be sure when they’ve done some tests.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. And even I can’t blame that on remand prison conditions. People call it “prostrate”, you know. I’ve heard nurses call it that. And women think they can get it. The other day I heard a woman Dora knows say that a female friend of hers had cancer and they weren’t sure yet but they thought it might be prostrate.’

  Burden laughed, then stopped as suddenly. ‘D’you know, twenty years ago if anyone had told me I’d be amused by anything to do with cancer I don’t know what I’d have done. Hit him, I think.’

  Remembering the death of Burden’s first wife from breast cancer, Wexford said, ‘Why have I escaped that fate?’

  ‘You told me to get over it but not to laugh,’ said Burden.

  ‘Are they going to do these tests then?’

  ‘They are but not inside. Haven’t got the facilities, they say. They’ll have to take him to the Princess Diana in an ambulance, or we will, with a guard.’