by Ruth Rendell
‘He’s hardly likely to make a run for it,’ said Wexford as Jenny came in with tea on a tray.
‘Mike looks much better, Reg,’ she said. ‘Must be your therapeutic presence. I can go back to school tomorrow.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE DUKAN DIET – Wexford said it was much the same as the Atkins Diet of twenty or thirty years ago – had changed Sylvia’s appearance so radically that he said untruthfully that if he’d passed her in the street he wouldn’t have known her. It was only, he added, because she was sitting with her mother in the Wexfords’ living room that he recognised her as his daughter.
‘You only say that out of envy, Dad.’
‘If envy means wanting to live on nothing but protein, no thanks.’ Cancer was on his mind. Poor old Crisp. ‘Too much of that and you’ll get bowel cancer.’
‘Oh, Reg, really!’
‘Really what? She doesn’t take any notice of what her father says, anyway. She’d be an unnatural child if she did.’
‘Well, now I’m going to,’ Sylvia said. ‘Clarissa wants you for a go-between, a sort of middleman.’
‘She what?’
Dora got up. ‘I don’t know what this is about but I think we should all have a drink. Something white, some of that Cloudy Bay stuff.’ She went to the kitchen to fetch it.
‘You remember that letter I told you about, the one with the London SW something postmark? Well, she told me it was from someone in her mother’s past. She didn’t say who. Not that it would have meant anything to me so I don’t know why not. Anyway, she wants someone else to meet this person before she does, find out what it’s about, and it’s you she wants to do this. I was amazed, I didn’t know she knew you that well.’
‘Whoever this person is, does he want a go-between? Does he even know there is to be a go-between?’ Wexford paused. ‘If there is.’
Dora came back with the Cloudy Bay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE PRISON WHERE Crisp was held in Myringham was by no means as unpleasant as Wexford had feared. And the sickroom, or ‘san’, for sanatorium, as it was known, was a pleasant enough unit containing five beds, one of which had been occupied by Crisp since he had suffered a haemorrhage a few days before. Consultation between the prison doctor and the urologist at the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital had resulted in a decision to remove Crisp to Stowerton for tests with a view to possible surgery.
Crisp was sixty-nine, not very old by today’s standards, but his stay in the prison had aged him and the prison doctor referred to him as a ‘poor old guy’. His back, never very straight, had become bent, gardening would no longer be possible for him, and it was hard, even for Burden, to imagine him having the strength to strangle a strong woman in the prime of life. It was easier to picture death coming before justice caught up with him. The doctor, a cheerful soul, said that surgery and hormone treatment would very likely make a world of difference to his health and appearance.
The ambulance, driven by one paramedic and carrying another, arrived in Myringham at nine in the morning of Monday 28 January. It was very cold, several degrees below freezing. Not on a stretcher but seated in a wheelchair, Duncan Crisp, wearing a thick wool dressing gown over pyjamas, wool socks and slippers, a woolly hat and wrapped in a blanket, was brought out and lifted, still in the chair, into the ambulance. Accompanying him was a prison officer. The paramedics introduced themselves to Crisp and his guard as Michelle Fox and Keith Turner, the prison officer said his name was Dave Cresswell and for some reason, known to no one but due perhaps to his age or perhaps because he was on remand, presented the prisoner as ‘Mr Crisp’.
Very little snow was lying but the grass verges along the country roads were white with frost. Hoar frost, that Christmas- decoration-like silvering, coated the tree branches, while on the lanes where old melted snow had frozen on the road surface, care had to be taken to avoid skidding. Keith, who was driving, did avoid it, they moved on to the bypass and proceeded in silence towards the Stowerton exit road. Keith and Michelle would have had no objection to a chat but Dave made it plain silence was preferred. Duncan Crisp, swathed in his blanket, had pulled the woolly hat down to cover his eyes and appeared to have fallen asleep. It was more or less at this point that Jeremy Legg had been involved in that collision that resulted (or didn’t result) in Isabella Sams’s fit and ultimately in Jeremy’s death.
Half a mile further on, Keith turned left on to the Stowerton Road. A nondescript green van overtook the ambulance, raced ahead and pulled sharply to the left, creating a barrier across the road. Keith hooted. No notice was taken. He stopped and got down from the cab as Dave moved towards the rear doors. Two men got out of the van, both wearing masks, and one of them wearing gloves. Keith stood still and shouted at them as to what was going on. He said afterwards that he was lucky they didn’t kill him, for before they grabbed him and bundled him into the van, he saw that each had a gun.
Dave too was seized. He was armed but it turned out later that he had never in fact used his weapon. He was not to use it this time, for his wrists were handcuffed behind his back and a sack pulled over his head and upper body. He staggered, fell and was lifted into the van along with Keith. Michelle showed more enterprise than the men, calling 999 and asking for the police before she got down from the ambulance. Using the doctor’s words, she said to the two men with the guns, ‘He’s a poor old guy. He can’t do any harm. You leave him alone.’
They took her phone from her but not before she had told them she’d called the police. One of them, the bigger of the two, punched her in the face, breaking her jaw. She fell on the roadway where they left her, went into the ambulance and brought Crisp out. He was screaming but they didn’t attempt to stop him, pushing his chair to the back of the van. They lifted him out and threw him in along with Keith and Dave. Two miles down the road they turned into a farm track and drove up to a barn. Keith and Dave were taken out and dragged into the barn where they were blindfolded and their ankles bound together with rope. The barn door was slammed shut, but as there was no key or padlock, not locked. The two who had left them there returned to the van and out on to the road.
The police arrived quite quickly and another ambulance. The first thing they did was lift Michelle up from the frozen ground and carry her into the new ambulance, though the one the four had been in was still there, undamaged. Because her jaw was broken she could tell them nothing. The ambulance took her away to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital where Duncan Crisp should by now have arrived.
At this time, Burden had no fear for Crisp’s life. He wondered what the motive could have been for taking him but reached no conclusion. Crisp had been ‘sprung’, but why? Were the men who had taken him mates of his, the whole thing a set-up? He must be paying them and paying them handsomely. They had guns. They were risking, if not their lives, their liberty. Duncan Crisp had only his pension and what Mrs Morgan paid him and would by now have ceased to pay him.
The snatch was the lead story in the Evening Standard and the lead item on the BBC’s regional news at six thirty. By this time it was as dark as midnight and very cold, the frost returning with ferocity. Keith Turner and Dave Cresswell were rescued about ten minutes later by the farmer on whose land the barn was. He had driven down there to fetch a bale of straw for a farrowing sow and found the two men, both of whom were rushed to hospital.
They sat in Burden’s office that had once been Wexford’s office and was now minus the rosewood desk that had been his pride and joy. Its present home was in his house, filling almost a whole wall in the tiny study. Since he was last there Burden had got a new calendar which appeared to be of Cornish pondlife.
‘In this age of technology,’ said Burden, ‘we’ve no need to be here. We might as well be down the pub or at least in the Olive. We might as well be at home. But somehow I know I’d feel guilty if I’m not here awaiting news.’
‘You can have a drink. We can have a drink. We’re not going to drive anywhere.
On the last day this office was mine I left a bottle of amontillado in that cupboard. I suppose you’ve drunk it by now.’
‘I certainly have not,’ said Burden. ‘You have a glass if it’s still drinkable. Go on. I won’t. I’ll get someone to bring me a cup of tea.’
‘Potable,’ said Wexford. ‘That means “fit to drink”, doesn’t it? It’s not a term anyone uses any more.’
The bottle was still there and two sherry glasses. As he was pouring the pale golden wine into one of them Burden’s tea arrived. The landline phone was ringing but it was only Karen Malahyde to say that Keith Turner and Dave Cresswell would be fit to talk in half an hour’s time.
There was no news of Duncan Crisp and the green van had not been traced. Wexford said that the sherry was indeed potable, in fact improved by its sojourn in the cupboard. ‘I wish there was something we could do. But short of roaming about the countryside looking in barns and abandoned vehicles and catching hypothermia like those two, there isn’t.’
‘You can go home, Reg. You might as well.’
‘Not yet. I’ll wait a bit longer.’
‘Tell me a story,’ said Burden. ‘Tell me what’s happening with that girl and what she was supposed to be told on her eighteenth birthday. It’s not in the least relevant to Crisp, I’m sure, but it might be a distraction.’
So Wexford told him about Christian Steyner whose partner Timon Arkwright was a wealthy tycoon (or something of that sort) and on the Sunday Times Rich List, whose mother was a flirtatious little old woman who lived in Kensington and whose twin brother Leo had been Sarah Hussain’s husband. He told him about the car crash that had killed Leo and his father and that he, Wexford, had learned only that day from talking on the phone to Victoria Steyner that her daughter-in-law had been pregnant when Leo was killed but suffered a miscarriage two days after the accident.
It was Arkwright Burden picked up on. ‘Must be awkward being called Timon. Everyone will call him Simon by mistake and he’ll spend half his life correcting them.’
‘Yes, well, I think Christian wants to tell Clarissa that Leo died in possession of a sum of money left to him by some relative and wanted him to pass this on to Sarah’s child.’
‘But as it happened there wasn’t a child. Or not that child.’
‘No, but maybe he said “Sarah’s child” and that could be stretched to any child.’
‘A bit far-fetched, isn’t it?’
‘You always say my ideas are far-fetched,’ said Wexford.
Burden laughed. ‘Why not make a will?’
‘Why not indeed. Of course he can’t have known he was going to die. He was only about thirty. I may well be wrong. But I can’t think of anything else he could have to tell her.’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Burden. ‘People are weird, as we’ve remarked before. It’s good to hear something that has nothing to do with Crisp, though more than anything I want to know where he is. I think I’ll go home now. It’s nearly midnight. Donaldson can drop you off and take me home. I might as well get the enlightening phone call there as here.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NO PHONE CALL came, enlightening or otherwise. Karen Malahyde kept what Turner and Cresswell had to tell her until the following morning when she passed it on to Burden face-to-face. He wanted to know what the men who had taken them away looked like but Turner and Cresswell had only been able to say that they wore masks and one of them was very tall and heavy. She had a better result from her visit to Michelle Fox who was still unable to speak but put down some interesting information on a sheet of paper.
The one that punched me has a tattoo on his right wrist. He lifted his arm to punch me and I tried to duck but still I saw the tattoo. It is of a woman in a long dress with a hat on and sort of rays coming out of it, maybe supposed to be an angel.
Karen read it to Burden and then handed him the sheet of paper. ‘They’re going to operate to mend the jaw today but it’ll be a day or two before she can talk.’
‘Have any of these people you’ve seen got a clue or a theory as to why anyone would want to snatch Crisp?’
‘Not that they told me and of course I did ask them.’
A search had started. Not just for the green van, but for Crisp himself, ‘the poor old guy’, as everyone now called him, even though he had been awaiting trial for murder. As many officers as Burden could muster were set to search every barn, garage and outhouse in an area of about sixty square miles, a gargantuan task.
Wexford had his own idea of the reason for the snatch. It had nothing to do with setting free a man whom many people thought innocent. These were no just deliverers and they were no friends of Crisp’s. His own idea was a grim one but he told no one. What would be the point of telling Burden? Everything was being done to find Crisp and revealing a theory the detective superintendent would only call far-fetched would do nothing to aid the search. Michelle’s note was read to him over the phone and he got himself into a bad temper by brooding on the way people thought angels were female – the influence of Hollywood, no doubt.
A chance meeting with Dr Crocker in the high street had resulted in an invitation to call in for coffee. It would be something to do with his blood pressure, Wexford thought, for although Len Crocker was retired and Wexford was registered with a young GP, his old friend still took a keen interest in his health. In accepting, Wexford had forgotten Maxine still worked for the Crockers, but even if he had remembered he wouldn’t have avoided the house in Wessex Road. That was no way to live. Such hazards had to be faced up to and a confrontation, if it came, taken in one’s stride.
It came sooner than he expected. He walked up the Crockers’ front path, admiring the Christmas roses and the daphne in the borders, and rang the bell. The door was answered by Maxine. The anticipated torrent of abuse or even spittle never came. She stood staring at him in silence. He said nothing. She stood aside and moved back, holding the door open for him to pass into the hall. By this time Dr Crocker had appeared from the living room. Wexford said, because it amused him to say it, confronted by Maxine’s stony face, ‘Mrs Sams and I are not on speaking terms.’
Maxine made a snorting sound. Inside the living room, the door closed, Dr Crocker asked what ‘all that was about’.
‘I revealed to the law something about her son she thought she had told me in confidence and maybe she had.’
‘Oh dear. Would you rather have a drink than coffee even though it is only midday?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ve been thinking how much easier police work must be in a warm climate than here, for instance. Not to mention in Scandinavia, so fashionable at the moment for crime and crime TV and crime fiction. I’ll tell you what I mean.’
‘I’ll take your blood pressure first.’ The doctor was waving his sphygmomanometer about. ‘Before you raise it with alcohol.’
His blood pressure satisfactorily showing a measurement of 130 over 70, Wexford went on, ‘In California, for instance, or practically anywhere in southern Europe, not to mention Africa, people have big areas of skin exposed. They wear vests or T-shirts with short sleeves, women have bare legs and short skirts. While here, from October till May everyone except teenagers covers up. Scars are hidden, hairiness is hidden and tattoos are.’
‘It’s worse in Muslim countries,’ said Crocker, bringing him a glass of Cloudy Bay. ‘Women veiled from head to foot with only the eyes exposed. What’s the point of this anyway?’
‘A tattoo,’ said Wexford. ‘You’ll have seen about the abduction of a man who was in prison on remand.’
‘Crisp, yes. Poor old guy.’
‘Well, the paramedic who got punched in the face saw a tattoo on the arm of one of the men who took him. A picture of some saint or madonna, it sounds like. She only saw it because, although it was freezing cold, he rolled up his sleeve before he hit her. The chances are this tattoo would be hidden all through the winter. I suppose he forgot about it.’
If Wexford had hoped that Croc
ker would say, Why, yes, he knew who that was, it was one of his patients, he was disappointed. In fact, he thought he had seen the telltale arm somewhere himself, exposed in some setting where the cold wouldn’t be felt, but he couldn’t remember where. He had tried and tried but couldn’t remember.
‘What do you think this madonna man has done with Crisp?’
‘Nothing, I hope,’ said Wexford. ‘But where is he? We always bear in mind that it’s much harder to hide a living man than a dead body. He’s been gone two days now.’
It was Dr Crocker who saw him to the front door and let him out. There was no sign of Maxine.
Clarissa had told Robin all about the coming meeting with Christian Steyner, his grandfather’s role in the encounter and details of her speculations as to what this could be about. Wexford had given her no clue as to his theory of the matter Steyner might wish to impart to her. He was possibly wrong anyway. He had suggested to Clarissa that he and she should meet in advance of Friday 8 February, the scheduled date, but he hadn’t expected she would bring Robin with her. He should have known, he told himself. Those two did everything together, being apart only for Clarissa to go to school and Robin to stack shelves.
‘Have you like any idea what it’s about?’ This was Clarissa. ‘It would be good to have – well, a clue.’
‘I know nothing as yet,’ Wexford said, dispensing wine. ‘We have to wait and see. If I were to suggest anything it would only be guesswork.’
‘You mustn’t worry,’ Robin said, putting his arm round Clarissa. ‘Remember, I’ll be there.’
‘I’m afraid you won’t,’ said his grandfather. ‘We don’t know this man, we know very little about him, but we do know that he wants just Clarissa to be there and one witness or arbiter, and that’s me. Sorry, but that’s the arrangement.’
‘You’ll be able to wait outside or just downstairs.’ She gazed adoringly into Robin’s eyes. ‘There’ll only be a wall and a staircase – well, a lift – between us.’
