by Ruth Rendell
'You mean you held that over him as a threat?'
She lifted her shoulders and there came to her lips the ghost of a Milborough Lang smile. 'He knew I'd go unless things could be made more permanent, yes.'
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The smile angered him. 'You might say then, Mrs Ingram, that you share some of the responsibility for Adele Knighton's murder and hence for Adam Knighton's own death.'
She jumped up, her serenity gone, and cried out to him, 'That's not true! Adam didn't kill her. Haven't I told you he couldn't have killed her?'
'He's admitted it. Before his confession we were pretty certain- all the evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, pointed to his having killed her. He had motive and op- portunity and he was there.'
'He was not there,' she said more calmly. 'He was here with me.'
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'It sounds ridiculous,' she said, 'a man of over sixty sneaking out of his friend's house and dashing across London in a taxi to be with the woman he loves - a woman of fiftyfive. To spend the night with her and go back at dawn. A superannuated Romeo and Juliet. It really does happen, it did happen.'
He believed her. It was so evidently true. 'What time did he come?'
She replied at once. Had it been the only whole night they had spent together? 'A few minutes after one.'
Knighton wasn't the first man to confess to a murder he hadn't committed, Wexford thought. And yet. . .
'No doubt you saw him several times after that?'
'We talked a lot on the phone. I saw him - oh, three times? Four?'
'He never said anything to you to suggest he had killed his wife?'
'How could he have when I knew he was here with me at the time? I could tell he was unhappy, he seemed tor- mented. But his wife had been murdered and however he felt about her and me, she was his wife.' Milborough Ingram put her hand to her forehand and leaned her face forward on it. Her voice had taken on a faltering note. 'He never said any more about our marrying, about our being together. He was different, changed. I thought he was ill. I said he ought to have a holiday and I'd go with him. He just stared at me, he held my hand and stared at me.' She reached for her whisky. 'Oh, God, I mustn't have any more to drink. I'll get drunk and that won't help. Ever since I
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was eighteen I've had it dinned into me I mustn't drink because it'd spoil my figure and my face, and it dies hard, all that. What does it matter now?'
He got up to go. She was composing herself but hysteria trembled beneath the surface of her composure.
'Would you like me to get your daughter to come to you?'
'I'm better alone. Really.'
He turned his eyes away from that ravaged, once-beautiful face. They lighted on the ikon. He remembered where he had seen it before - in Vinald's bedroom in the Kweilin Hotel.
'I gave my son-in-law two hundred pounds for that.'
Wexford heard a rasp in her voice. 'I'm sure it's worth it,' he said politely.
'Oh, no doubt. Only Pandora told me afterwards he gave two pairs of jeans for it and one of those wasn't even his own.'
She had spoken in the bitterness of her heart. It was an anger with the injustice of the world she was venting on Gordon Vinald. Already she looked ashamed of her indiscretion.
'What does it matter now?' she said again.
Wexford made no reply. He said goodbye to her and went down to where Donaldson and the car waited.
Tabard Road, Kingsmarkham, the bungalow that was almost as familiar to Wexford as his own home over the other side of the town. Dora Wexford had dealt with the problem of being a policeman's wife by acceptance, by patience, but Jenny Burden solved it more positively, filling her evenings with learning - and teaching - at classes, with drama groups and string trios. She was out this evening, at a rehearsal, Burden said. He fetched two cans of beer from the fridge.
'Knighton wasn't mad,' Wexford said. 'It wasn't a matter of having some sort of delusion he'd done it. He knew he hadn't held the gun and squeezed the trigger and shot her.
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He meant he was morally responsible, he instructed someone else to do it.'
'Not someone he paid. We know he parted with no large sums.'
Wexford said thoughtfully, 'I don't think it was anything as direct as that. I think it was more a matter of nodding, of raising one's hand and killing the mandarin.'
'I don't follow you.' Burden had put on his obtuse look, the one he wore less and less since his second marriage. Once it had inspired Wexford to say he was reminded of Goering who said that whenever he heard the word culture he reached for his gun. Sometimes it came back to make the Inspector's normally intuitive face mulish. 'I haven't a clue what all that means,' he said.
'I can't enlighten you. I'm not being purposely obscure, I don't know any more yet. Let me tell you about Vinald and Purbank instead. I can tell you what they quarrelled about. Vinald pinched a pair of Purbank's jeans to pay for an ikon.'
'He did what?'
'I imagine he discovered this ikon in the possession of some peasant in the far east of Russia. Russians are crazy to get their hands on denim jeans, or so I've heard. Probably Vinald hadn't got very long there, wherever it was, or the ikon vendor wouldn't hang about, so Vinald went back to the train and fetched a pair of his own jeans. Because he hadn't any more of his own clean or didn't want to part with them or something he took Purbank's. No doubt he explained to Purbank afterwards and maybe offered to pay for them but Purbank was outraged and refused to have any more to do with him.'
Burden laughed. 'But why not tell us?'
'Vinald wouldn't because it makes him look such a crook. Purbank wouldn't because it makes him look a fool. What could be more undignified than someone nicking a pair of your trousers? It's a kind of vicarious debugging.'
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'I suppose it is,' Burden said. 'Put that cat down if you don't want it.'
Jenny's Abyssinian, as lithe and sinuous as the Pensive Selima was stout, had sprung up delicately on to Wexford's lap. He drew his hand down the smooth slippery back.
'Is Vinald a crook, d'you think?'
'D'you remember when we went to the V and A I paid particular attention to the Sung ware? Celadon, they call it. White or pale grey or pale green, an attempt to imitate jade, around a thousand years old. While we were in Kweilin Vinald showed me the Celadon ware he'd bought, trusting, and rightly, to my ignorance. He said it was a hundred years old, Ching stuff, and of course I believed him. He had a whitish bowl, a dull plain thing, and I remember thinking to myself that Dora wouldn't have given it house room. You wouldn't reckon on anyone paying ten thousand pounds for a thing like that, would you?'
'Ten grand? For a white pot a hundred years old?'
'Well, not a hundred years old, Mike. That's rather the point. Say eight hundred? I saw the stick of red sealing wax in Vinald's hotel room and it meant nothing to me. I didn't know then that any antique you bring out of China has to have the government's red seal on it. Vinald was getting hold of priceless pieces from people who didn't know any better, paying virtually nothing for them, and then putting the red seal on himself. Especially that bowl - which he took up to Birmingham on October the first and sold to the agent of a South American purchaser for ten thousand pounds.'
'Can we do anything to him?'
'Like what? Extradite him to China? Do you know what he'd answer if we said to him what I've just said to you? That he gave a fair price for the bowl, believing it to be Ching. Of course it had the seal on it. What can we mean? It was only when he got it home and examined it carefully that he discovered he'd paid five quid for a piece of Sung.'
As Wexford stroked it the cat began emitting a harsh
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rumbling purr. Still shaking his head over man's chicanery, Burden fetched more beer! Wexford changed the subject. 'When you went hunting up those old lags - what you might call recidivisiting - you had two lists, didn't you? The men Knighton had helped send down and those that had got off or got
off lightly because of his defence?'
'That's right.'
'What was the point of the alternative list?'
'You mean the ones he got off?'
'I mean, what was the point of listing people who have had no motive for revenge on him?'
'There wasn't a point really. Brownrigg and I simply made a note of every case Knighton had been involved in that we thought important enough. I put those friendly to Knighton in the right-hand column and those- well, possibly revengeful on the left. I got them muddled too, I. . .'
But Wexford didn't want to hear about that. 'You've still got the lists?'
'Of course I have.'
In the morning Wexford looked at them.
'This Coney Newton seems to be on both lists. What did he get sent down for?'
'Rape and attempted murder,' said Burden. 'He's on both lists because - well, I thought he might have reason to be grateful to Knighton for getting him off with only seven years or vindictive towards Knighton for not getting him off altogether. And funnily enough, he didn't seem vindictive, he just seemed to think Knighton hadn't made a very efficient job of his defence. Anyway, he's got a good alibi for that night and he alibi's Silver Perry.'
'That's fine for him then, isn't it, having his word backed up by a really exemplary citizen like that?'
'They were in a club together,' Burden said slightly offendedly. 'I went to the club. There's no question. . .'
'All right. Who's Henry Thomas Chipstead?'
'Once upon a time he was an East End of London gangster. Around twenty years ago he was up on a charge of
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grievous bodily harm and Knighton got him off. Wills-' Burden indicated with his finger the name in the left hand column. 'Wills suggested to me that Knighton might have called in "a professional like Chipstead". Those were his words, not mine. He said Chipstead had been with Lee's mob, might be dead now for all he knew. He's not dead, though, he's alive and living in Leytonstone. But he's over seventy now and in any case we know Knighton didn't pay anyone.'
'And what was this Wills's contribution to the disintegration of society?'
Burden grinned wryly. 'Aiding and abetting. He didn't actually kill this woman but he was an accessory. He concealed the body by night in roadworks on a motorway, only one of the workmen discovered it before they laid the road surface. . What's the matter?'
'I know where he put that gun,' Wexford said slowly.
'Where who put it?'
'Ah, that's something else. I mean I know where whoever our perpretator is put the weapon. You just told me. What you said about this Wills and roadworks told me.'
'It did?'
'The weir, Mike, the weir at Sewingbury Mill.'
It was a long shot. Burden's opinion was that 'they' would never be got to demolish all that concrete and brickwork, embankment and paving, for the sake of finding a gun, it wasn't as if it was a body. And the chances, he said pessimistically, were that the gun wasn't there anyway.
'Once I've got a warrant,' said Wexford, 'they'd get on with the demolition if it was a pin they were looking for and Sewingbury Agricultural College they were de- molishing.'
Colonel Charles Griswold, the Chief Constable of MidSussex, was as uneasy about it as Burden. And perhaps Wexford would never have been allowed to swear out that warrant but for the clerk of works who had supervised the
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construction of the 'weir' for the county authority telling the chief constable that, when the workmen knocked off for the day at five on 1 October, only the paved area remained to be completed. At that time, on that afternoon, he said, the areas waiting to be paved had lain open and uncovered except for a foundation of 'hard core' spread on the soil.
'Suppose we say he left his car in the market square in Sewingbury,' Wexford said. 'He made his way by the footpath to Thatto Vale and got to Thatto Hall Farm at about two. There he either entered by the washroom window or let himself in with a key, having made it appear as if he entered by the window. He woke Mrs Knighton, brought her downstairs at gun-point, shot her, feebly faked a burglary and returned by the path where he was seen by Bingley at around three. At the Sewingbury end of the footpath he spotted the nearly completed paving work on the weir and it would have been the work of only a few moments to bury the gun in the soil under the hard core.'
It was a cold day with a bitter wind blowing. The Kingsbrook, swollen by recent rains, rushed and tumbled under the Springhill bridge and through the new channel constructed for it. The same contractors that had built the 'weir' came to knock part of it down again. As soon as they had the paving stones up Sergeant Martin and Archbold were to go along and grub about under the hard core for the gun. Wexford looked in for a few moments at the inquest on Adam Knighton. Angus Norris was there but otherwise the family was not represented.
Wexford knew there could be no possible outcome but that the inquest be adjourned. Dr Parkinson was reading aloud Knighton's confession and now and then quoting Wexford's own words that Knighton could not himself have been physically responsible for his wife's death. Wexford crept out of the court. At the far side of the quadrangle that divided the courts from the police station Donaldson was awaiting him at the wheel of his car, Burden already
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seated in the back. The wind struck him with a sharp gust and blew out his scarf like a flag.
'The river bank is no place to be this morning,' said Burden, rubbing his hands.
'You sound like Mole.'
'Who?'
'It doesn't matter. We're going up to the Smoke anyway. Or near enough. The Haze, we should maybe call it. Is Leytonstone the sort of place we can get lunch in, Donaldson?'
But the London expert, to his own evident chagrin, didn't know, he had never been there.
'Chipstead, I suppose,' Burden said.
'Henry Thomas Chipstead, fifty-two Dogshall Road, Leytonstone. He's seventy-three and doesn't seem to have been up to anything in the hit man line since Knighton got him off the hook when he was fifty. But he'll do for a start.'
'I wish you'd explain to me what you meant about that killing the mandarin.'
They were on the motorway now, heading for London. The wind was so strong that gusts of it shifted and swayed the heavy car. Occasionally spatters of rain in large drops dashed against the windscreen.
'I think that years and years ago,' Wexford said, 'Knighton had reason to be in contact with some villain who was a professional assassin or hit man. Defended him, presumably. After the case he went to Knighton and said to him something on the lines of, if there's ever anything I can do for you, Mr Knighton sir, you've only to say the word, you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, anything you want done on the quiet, and Knighton, no doubt, got all upstage with moral indignation, but later on he got to thinking about it. Much later on and when it would really have suited him to have someone put out of the way.
'No money would have to pass, you see. That would be the beauty of it. He wasn't going to have to be specific with this old lag, wasn't going to have to give him three or four
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grand in used oncers or anything like that. Beforehand he might even be able to think he wasn't really the instigator. Suppose it was no more than a matter of making a phone call and saying something like, My wife's going to be alone on the night of October the first? Suppose it was even more subtle and slight than that?
'But afterwards the remorse and the guilt, to a man like Knighton, would be as great as if he had paid an assassin or pulled the trigger himself.'
'Well, he'd be just as guilty,' said Burden.
'Of course he would, but a good many men wouldn'tleel just as guilty. That's the analogy with the mandarin. One of China's teeming thousand millions is just as much a human life as one's wife or child, but it doesn't feel like that because it's so remote, so far out of sight. And if one only has to raise one's hand. . . I think maybe Knighton only had to raise his hand, or do something as slight as that, to rid himself of his
wife and have Milborough Ingram.'
They came into London through the Blackwall Tunnel. From its northern end it wasn't far to Leytonstone. Dead leaves from the fringe ends of Epping Forest whirled in the wind. Dogshall Road was a long straight street that passed with a hump over one suburban railway line and in a dip under another. The gutters were choked with leaves, the trees in the pavement, three times as tall as the little squat terraces of houses, were shedding leaves into the wind. There was a red brick church and a pre-fab church hall with an asbestos roof but nothing else to relieve the long monotony of Victorian terraces, the long double row of parked cars. Donaldson pulled into a gap a little way down from number seventeen.
'Moralizing would be out of place,' said Redford, 'but this is a fine illustration of how crime doem't pay, don't you think? Chipstead made his living for years, for most of his life, out of violent crime. I'm not saying it was in vain, it wasn't, it caused a lot of suffering, it damaged society,
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- provoked fear, made work for the police, cost the taxpayer money. But it didn't profit Chipstead himself much, did it?'
The three men looked at what Chipstead had got out of it, a hundred-year-old brown brick box with six feet of concrete, on which stood a dustbin and a dead geranium in a tub, separating it from the street. There were only three windows at the front of the house and at all of them the curtains were drawn. Wexford got out of the car and Burden followed him.
The house had a dead empty look as if its occupants had closed it up and gone away, and Wexford, banging hard on the knocker, for there was no bell, had very little hope of an answer. But after a moment or two a woman's voice was heard saying something and then footsteps sounded on the stairs.
The door was opened to them by Renie Thompson.
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'Henry was my brother,' she said.
They stood in the hall. There was a light on upstairs and women whispering.
'Was?' said Wexford.
'He's dead, isn't he? You mean you didn't know? Today's the funeral. To tell you the truth, when you knocked I thought it was the undertakers come.' She wore a grey coat and a black felt hat. She looked at them truculently, at their dubious suspicious faces. 'You'd like to make something out of it, wouldn't you? I know. There's nothing to make.'