by Ruth Rendell
At home Wexford looked at his list again, a needless exercise as all the names on it were committed to his memory. He dreamt about it, the dead Watson coming back, a pale and diminished ghost, saying in a horror-film voice that he would have the law on anyone who took his name in vain. In the morning he read through the names once more, stopping halfway at the one name on the list that might have a connection with Martin Dennison. He phoned Burden who took his suggestion grudgingly.
‘But do people find pseudonyms that way?’
‘Why not? It sounds likely to me.’
‘D’you want to go round there?’
‘Can I?’ Wexford didn’t quite want to articulate the correct ‘May I?’ ‘If I may, with Barry, say, or Karen . . . ?’
‘Are you thinking about a search?’
‘I’m thinking about a talk,’ Wexford said.
He met Barry Vine on the police station forecourt. ‘Dennis-son, you see. Is it a long shot?’
‘I reckon the boss thinks so.’
They had never called Wexford the boss but he acknowledged that the title seemed to suit Burden. ‘But he’s letting you go. And he lets me go.’
‘Sure, but for now we’re only talking.’
They walked. Wexford had often noticed that the weather conditions which were said to be the perquisites of certain months, rain in February and April, sunshine in May, heat in June, continuous greyness in November, were seldom accurate. Today, for instance, and for the past week, where were the sharp and icy March winds? It was a mild still day, blue-skied, the sun a gentle harbinger of spring to come. Their walk took them through the old parts of Kingsmarkham, the little streets and alleys that lay between Queen Street and York Street. The tall nineteenth-century house stood alone, too narrow for its height, too ugly for this area of stucco or stone or half-timbered dwellings. Wexford, who had never taken much notice of it before, observed as if for the first time the disproportionate windows, the clashing yellow and purplish-red of the brickwork, the steep tiled roof more suited to a house in a Belgian or northern German street than an English country town.
If he had thought that Dennis Cuthbert suffered from Parkinson’s on the previous occasions they had met, he now saw that he had been mistaken. Cuthbert no longer shook but he smoked as heavily. Allowed to enter grudgingly, they stepped into a grey fog, reminiscent of a pub’s public bar in days gone by. If possible, the clouds of it were even denser in the living room. Repainted not long before by Cuthbert, the pale surfaces (apple white) were already stained yellow by smoke while the skin of Cuthbert’s right forefinger was dark brown.
He made no attempt to deny that Martin Dennison was his son, even saying, ‘I thought you knew.’ Then he said, ‘You expect me to be ashamed of him, don’t you? I’m not. Whatever he’s done, he’s been a good son to me. I don’t suppose you people ever read your Bible.’ He paused, perhaps expecting rebuttal or agreement. When none came, he said, ‘In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Our Lord tells how the father forgave his son for his iniquity and made a feast to welcome him home. He even said to his good son that he mustn’t be envious of his brother because “all that I have is thine”. We’re all forgiven, you know, no matter what we’ve done. No matter how bad it is.’
Neither Wexford nor Vine made a comment on this but after a few seconds of silence Wexford said, ‘Where is your son Martin now, Mr Cuthbert?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He doesn’t live with you, does he?’
‘He does sometimes,’ said Cuthbert. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the last one and this time the inhalation set him coughing. He repeated what he had said. ‘He does sometimes.’
Wexford had the curious impression that he had had before in questioning people who had a deep aversion to lying. They were Jesuitical, in that they would tell a truth they intended to be perceived differently from the usual meaning of the words. For instance Cuthbert’s ‘I don’t know’ might mean, not that he didn’t know where in the country or the world his son might be but that he didn’t know in which room of the house he was at that moment. And Cuthbert now came near to confirming this conjecture by looking up at the ceiling and, realising what he had done, jerked his head down again.
‘Martin Dennison, otherwise known as Martin Cuthbert,’ said Vine heavily, ‘is wanted for murder. I think you know that, don’t you?’
‘Even for murder,’ Cuthbert said, ‘we’re forgiven.’
They crossed the street and stood behind the rear wall of a bus shelter, from where they would be invisible from Cuthbert’s house.
‘I’m going to call someone to take over from me,’ Vine said. ‘Keep the house under surveillance. Rouse, I think. I’ll wait here till he comes.’
‘And I shall go back and talk to the boss,’ said Wexford. ‘If Marty’s not in there but staying with a girlfriend in the Isle of Man I shall look rather foolish but never mind. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Having rejected Wexford’s theory of alias selection, Burden was now impressed as what he called his friend’s ‘guesswork’ turned out to have been right.
‘You’ll get a warrant?’
‘I’ll have to,’ Burden said. ‘From what you say, Cuthbert’s not likely to welcome us in to search his house without one. The prodigal son, indeed.’
The warrant secured, Burden announced his intention of being present while the search went on. David Rouse, who was already outside the house, Barry Vine, Lynn and Karen were joined by two uniformed officers. Wexford thought he would be expected to go home but Burden said, ‘Stay,’ which Wexford said made him feel like an obedient dog. Both men had looked up to the steep roof which would certainly house a loft. Indoors, they all left the silent and stony-faced Cuthbert to ‘smoke himself to death’ as Burden put it, in the living room, and began the climb up the steep flights of stairs.
Everyone seemed to have decided Martin Dennison’s favoured hiding place would be in the loft. As Burden said, the loft was ‘a gift’ but also too obvious. Still, he sent Rouse down to ask Cuthbert if he had a ladder. At first Cuthbert said no, a refusal which only aroused suspicions once more. Vine came down to join Rouse and to say that if Cuthbert refused the loan of the ladder (which he ‘must possess’) they would send out for one and that would only delay things. Cuthbert produced the ladder and Rouse and Vine carried it up four flights of stairs. Karen climbed up into the loft, saying indignantly that just because she was a woman there was no reason to keep her from this vital area of the search. She was a lot fitter that most of them, she said bluntly. But in the loft all that was to be seen were two water tanks, no piles of old newspapers, no defunct machinery, no crates full of broken crockery and no Marty Dennison. The trapdoor was put back and the ladder taken down.
As was usually the case with houses of this age, all the rooms were small. Cuthbert slept on the first floor, and like all the rooms in this bleak house there was the bare minimum of furniture, a single bed, a marble-topped table with metal legs, two upright chairs with broken cane seats. In a room above it on the second floor, some clothes hanging in a cupboard and a couple of crumpled shirts in a drawer suggested that it was occasionally occupied, as did the sheets on the bed.
‘I didn’t say he never slept here,’ said Cuthbert. ‘I said he wasn’t here now.’
An Authorised Version of the Bible was in the drawer of the bedside table in Cuthbert’s bedroom.
‘Hotels used to do that,’ Wexford said. ‘Maybe they still do.’
The only furniture apart from bed and bedside table was a cupboard and a chest of drawers he thought might be called a tallboy. It reached up to his shoulder and above it there was a picture, the lower edge of whose tarnished gilt frame reached within an inch of the top of the chest. The picture was a reproduction of a nineteenth-century painter’s rendering of the marriage at Cana with a bearded and robed Jesus turning water into wine amid a crowd of wedding guests. Wexford gave the tallboy a shove, moving it a few inches away from the wall. He lifte
d the lower edge of the frame so that a darker rectangle of wallpaper, brown chrysanthemums with bright green leaves instead of yellow flowers and grey leaves as papered the rest of the room, was revealed. He looked more closely, then Burden did, then Vine.
‘The paper has faded,’ Vine said, ‘but they kept a bit of the original stuff and pasted it on over – what?’
The pasted-on rectangle was the size of an interior door. Vine measured it. The house was damp in places and Vine was able to peel a section of it away from the upper right-hand edge but underneath was no door or doorway, only the same sort of plaster as the rest of the wall.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Vine said.
Wexford had an idea but that didn’t really make sense either. ‘Let’s see what’s directly underneath.’
Underneath was the living room. Cuthbert was there, sitting in front of the electric heater, extinguishing his most recent cigarette in a pottery bowl that was already half full of stubs. He immediately lit another. It was as if he had set himself a target to fill the bowl by a certain time, say twelve noon. The police officers made no attempt to suppress their coughing and Burden coughed more loudly than any of them. Cuthbert inhaled deeply, took the Book of Common Prayer off the table and began to read it, causing Wexford to reflect there must be very few occasions in life when these two activities were practised simultaneously.
Directly underneath the chest of drawers, the painting and the mysterious sheet of wallpaper hung the bedspread Wexford had noticed before but had barely registered. Burden said, ‘What’s behind that?’
‘A door,’ said Cuthbert without laying aside his book. ‘A cupboard.’
‘Would you remove the curtain, please?’
‘Do it yourself.’ But now Cuthbert got to his feet.
The bedspread was hung from a wooden curtain rail and could be drawn back. Behind it was a metal door. For a moment Wexford thought he was looking at the door to a large safe. He realised, almost incredulously, that he knew what it really was, when Burden opened the door and revealed another inside, one of metal mesh. It was a lift, a very old and old-fashioned Cuthbert & Son lift, which had perhaps been in this house for a century.
Cuthbert seemed to have given up the struggle. He said, ‘Sorry, son,’ and put his head in his hands.
The metal mesh door slid aside to disclose a man slumped on the floor. The lift, no more than a box large enough to hold two people, was lined in woodgrain wallpaper that was peeling off in places. Unmistakably Marty Dennison, the man on the floor was dark with several days’ growth of beard. His short-sleeved T-shirt, a faded green with a turtle pictured on the front, showed the tattoo that identified him. The half-empty bottle of water on the floor beside him was no surprise to Wexford. Even the incarcerated, even the fugitive, seemed to need perpetual water these days. Dennison stood up, and in that public-school accent that went so incongruously with his appearance, said, ‘My great-grandfather put this in. His wife got ill and couldn’t climb stairs. Handy, isn’t it, even if it doesn’t work any more?’
His father stood up. Marty Dennison, who had once been Martin Cuthbert, put his arms round him, laid his head on his shoulder and held him. ‘See you, Dad,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WEXFORD WAS THINKING of a line from somewhere about two thieves kissing, Shakespeare probably, but he couldn’t place it. ‘I shan’t get sentimental about a couple of villains who appear to be devoted to each other.’
‘Nor me,’ said Burden when they had both Cuthberts at the police station. ‘A Cuthbert has lived in that house since it was built, apparently. One of them had a factory in Stowerton making lifts. They’ve still got one of their lifts in the Golden Lion hotel in Myringham. Got a modern one as well, of course. The one in the Olive and Dove has just been taken out. If you heard that Marty speak and couldn’t see him you’d think you were listening to a Cabinet minister.’
‘I know. Would you call yourself an accentist?’
‘A what? Oh, I see, like a sexist or a racist. I don’t know. Would you?’
‘I talk Sussex,’ said Wexford, ‘so I couldn’t.’
‘Do you think the media would get wind of it and say offensive things about me if I suggested we went out for a late lunch?’
‘You must learn to ignore them, though I never could.’
The newly opened Persian restaurant called Halle was Burden’s choice. It was on the opposite side of the high street to the Cuthbert house, with a smart frontage all polished wood and gilding and a menu in an ornate gold frame beside the entrance. A single white calla lily that looked and felt real decorated every table. No one was there, though several tables had a reserved sign beside the calla in its crimson vase.
The dishes on the menu were different from anything they had eaten before. Burden chose a yogurt dish to start and Wexford kashke bademjan which was grilled artichokes.
‘I daren’t have anything alcoholic.’ Burden was cautiously eyeing a weedy little man with red hair and a green pullover and his companion, a small thin girl who wore shorts over black leggings, moving towards one of the reserved tables. ‘One if not both of them look like journalists.’
‘I’m going to have Persian wine,’ said Wexford. ‘It will make me feel like Omar Khayyam. What are you doing with those two Cuthberts?’
‘Barry and Karen are questioning the so-called Dennison now. He’s asked for a lawyer who has probably arrived by now.’
‘You haven’t charged him?’
‘Not yet. He’ll be charged with just one murder and I’ll keep the other in reserve.’
Wexford looked at him speculatively. ‘That’s how you see it, then? Marty Dennison is the perpetrator in both cases?
‘What else?’
The wine came, almost immediately afterwards the mast va khiar damavand and the kashke bademjan arrived. ‘I sometines wonder what the vintners buy,’ quoted Wexford, ‘one half so precious as the goods they sell.’
‘Never mind that, Gibbon or whatever it is. What did you mean? Don’t you think Marty Dennison is the perpetrator in both cases?’
‘I thought you knew. I mean, I thought you’d seen it too. It wasn’t Marty but his father who killed Sarah Hussain.’
Burden said nothing. He ate nothing either.
‘It was Dennis Cuthbert that Duncan Crisp saw through that window. And Cuthbert saw him. They didn’t know each other, you see. Each of them just saw a man he’d never seen before. Crisp was new to the place, he’d only been there a few weeks, and Cuthbert seldom went to the Vicarage. He hated Sarah Hussain for all the changes she was making in the church services and the liturgy, and more that she threatened – well, promised, she said – to make. He went there that afternoon to tell her she mustn’t change any more of the old hymns.’
‘Are you saying Cuthbert killed her for that?’
‘I don’t think he meant to kill her. She must have said that she meant to go ahead with her plans. I’m sure she said it nicely. After all, she’d always been nice to him. On a previous occasion – to his rage – she’d kissed him. I think that rage sort of rose up in him again, he threw himself at her and put his hands round her throat.’
Burden nodded. ‘I think you’re right. D’you know, I hate having to admit it but I think you’re right. Where does Marty Dennison come into all this? Only as the killer of poor old Crisp, I suppose.’
Their main course came. Both were having the koofteh berenji, meatballs with rice and split peas and plums. ‘I like meat with fruit,’ Wexford said.
He started to eat, leaving further explanation for a few minutes. Burden too began on the meatballs. The couple at the reserved table were evidently not interested in them and by this time more lunchers had arrived. Wexford thought how much he would have liked to drink the whole bottle of wine and how much he would regret it later.
‘Marty Dennison is devoted to his father,’ he said. ‘You will tell me they’re a worthless pair of villains and I’d go along with that but even men
like that can have a selfless love for each other. Marty Dennison would do anything for his father and he did. When he wanted a tattoo he even had a picture of a saint. He carried out a brutal abduction of poor old Crisp, followed by a brutal killing, so that Cuthbert could never be identified as Sarah’s murderer.’
‘They’re very different.’
‘So are most fathers and sons, I’d say. Dennison’s devotion shows in his taking his father’s name as his alias. He needed an alias not to bring shame on his father. But he’d gone to the bad, it was a life that suited him and his father never blamed him or even showed his disappointment. That’s what I think, I don’t know. Marty went home from time to time and he always had a room or a flat in the neighbourhood. One day when he was at home Dennis Cuthbert told him Duncan Crisp hadn’t killed Sarah Hussain, he had and that he was sure Crisp had seen him through the Vicarage French windows. Marty said to leave it to him. Did he know what Marty planned to do with the help of Birjar whom Cuthbert had probably never heard of? Very likely Cuthbert knew nothing about it. He would only know that just as he had never reproached or threatened his son for the way he behaved, so his son would say nothing to condemn him for the murder of Sarah Hussain.’
‘I shan’t threaten or reproach you for seeing what I didn’t,’ said Burden. ‘Not that I wouldn’t like to.’
‘You’re tired. You look worn out. You could go home now.’
‘No, I couldn’t. There’ll be two lawyers to deal with, I suppose. One each. I have to be there. I have to put up with them asking if I’m going to charge “Mister” Cuthbert and “Mister” Dennison and then I have to do it and be sure to be bright and early tomorrow morning when they’re up in court.’
