by Ruth Rendell
‘This is Mr Eric Swallow we’re talking about?’ Wexford asked, making a valiant effort to drink his hibiscus tea.
‘Old Eric, yes. I don’t think I ever knew his other name, did you, Trev? Anyway, he used to tell everyone about this three thousand in the bank; he used to boast about it. And I heard him say his daughter was counting on getting that but she mustn’t think it was automatic; it was his money to do as he liked with. Mind you, he was whingeing about her at the time, he hadn’t had a word from her for weeks.’
‘What was this about a will?’
‘It must have been a year ago or more - at least that. She’d just given up being a home help, but she was in and out over the road every day. I was sitting here working on our catalogue and Trev was here too when she came to the door and asked if we would witness some document old Eric had got. It was quite a surprise - I mean, I’d hardly spoken to her before that and she’d ignore me if she saw me in the street. She said he had to sign this form and he needed two witnesses. And then do you know what she said? That we’d be better not being married, not being connected with each other! I was amazed. Well, I thought maybe it was something to do with this supplementary benefit and I was going to go, but Trevor asked Gwen what it was and all she said was it was nothing, we need worry about, just a form. Well, naturally, that wasn’t good enough for Trev and he said we had to know what we were signing before we went over there, and then she said it was Eric’s will.’
‘And that put me off quite a bit, as you can imagine,’ said Trevor. ‘It smelt, if you know what I mean.’
‘That’s absolutely right, it smelt. Anyway, I just said we were a bit busy and to count us out. Gwen said that was OK; she’d soon find someone and anyway her niece would be down the next night. I expect you know that niece, don’t you, the one that looks like she was modelling clothes?’
It was all interesting enough, and would have been useful if Gwen Robson had been suspected of murder and Eric Swallow and any of these other old people her victims. But it was she who had been the victim. Wexford asked his question about Ralph Robson’s movements and Nicola Resnick was able to tell him that she had heard sounds from next door late on Thursday afternoon. The wall between the houses was thin and you could hear the click of lights being switched on and off, the thump-thump of Robson’s stick and of course the television.
How could she particularly remember last Thursday?
Robson had had the children’s programme Blue Peter on, she told him. That began at five-past five and was followed by a health programme about trace elements as food supplements. Nicola Resnick was interested in that and she had switched on her own set though Robson had his so loud she need scarcely have bothered.
Thursday afternoon once more, a week since the killing. Seven days ago Clifford Sanders had entered Queen Street from the High Street in his mother’s car and parked it on the left-hand side on a meter, inserting into the slot, if he were to be believed, the forty pence that would ensure him one hour’s parking. But it was already twenty minutes to five when he arrived, so that when he left Olson ten minutes on the meter still remained to run. And he had sat out those ten minutes, brooding on the things he had talked about to Olson, all that Dodo rubbish. Not that Burden believed that for a moment.
He went into all the shops on both sides of this part of Queen Street, the grocer’s, a fishmonger, a fruiterer, a wine-shop, two cheap clothes boutiques and Pelage the hair dressers. No one remembered seeing Clifford Sanders sitting in a car on the meter outside Pelage. The difficulty was that the red Metro was, regularly parked on one of those meters on a Thursday afternoon, so it was hard to Sort out when it had been there and when it hadn’t, and when Clifford had been seen sitting in it and when he had not. One of the stylists at Pelage was very definite about having sometimes seen him sitting in the car in the driving-seat, just sitting there as if lost in thought, not reading or looking out of the window or anything.
From the cover of the wine supermarket window, Burden watched Clifford arrive at ten minutes to five. There was no meter free and he drove as far as where Castle Street cut across, then turned and came slowly back. By now someone was pulling out so Clifford waited, moved the Metro into the space, got out of the car and locked it. The day was damp and very cold and he wore a grey tweed overcoat and grey knitted hat pulled down well over his ears. From a distance, Burden had to admit, he looked not so much like a girl as an old woman. He put a couple of coins into the meter, which must still have had time to run from the previous insertion. Then he came quite slowly across the road as if he had all the time in the world instead of being, as was in fact the case, nearly twenty-five minutes late for his appointment. Burden felt a sneaking admiration for Serge Olson’s technique in deliberately naming a time for this client half an hour in advance of the five o’clock when he knew he would arrive.
After Clifford had disappeared into the entrance at the side of Pelage, Burden went off along Castle Street to have a cautionary word with a jeweller he suspected of being a fence. Then into a call box to phone his wife and say he might be late but not very late - say around eight-thirty. A cup of tea and a cake in the Queen’s Café and it was two minutes to six when he came back down Queen Street. An icy rain had begun to fall and the dark was the darkness of midnight, though brightly illuminated here by dripping, fuzzy yellow and white lights that turned the pavements a gleaming dirty gold and silver. Snowflakes started appearing among the silvery rods of rain.
Clifford came out of Olson’s door at two minutes past six. He wasn’t hurrying, but he was moving a good deal faster than when he had arrived. Burden sheltered from the rain and Clifford’s view in the doorway of the greengrocer’s; they were closing up and people kept pushing past him to carry in trays of chicory and aubergines. Clifford got into the car without even glancing at the meter; he started up and was away as the hands of Burden’s watch moved to five-past six.
Wexford had read and heard about people seeing on some one else’s arm the brand mark of the concentration camps, but he had not had that experience himself; and he didn’t have it now - Dita Jago on this cold afternoon having her arms covered by a woolly garment that was itself a work of art: a knitted tapestry of greens and purples, rich reds and jewel blues. But when he glanced enquiringly at the great pile of manuscript which lay on the table in this strange cluttered room, the perhaps orderly muddle of notebooks and loose leaves, scrawled-on envelopes and works of reference, she had nodded to him.
‘My great work,’ she said. A smile made the remark a modest one. ‘My memoirs of Oswiecim.’
‘Auschwitz?’ he said.
She nodded and, lifting up the topmost sheet of manuscript, turned it over so that only a blank side showed.
Chapter 9
The room was of the same size and shape as the one in which he had talked to Robson and his niece; as the room Trevor Morrison and Nicola Resnick used as their office; as John Whitton’s nursery. It was on the other side of the street and faced the opposite way, but the main difference from all those others lay in its rich clutter, the abundance of curious interesting things, the piles of books and papers and the adornment of its walls which was like nothing Wexford had ever seen before.
Unless you looked out of the window - seeing the trim little roadway, the trees in the pavement grass plots, the semi-detached houses - you might have believed yourself anywhere but on a local authority housing estate outside an English country town. What the walls were papered or painted with it was impossible to say, for they were covered all over with hangings which to Wexford had at first looked like lavish and elaborate embroideries but which, on examining them more closely, he saw to be knitted. Dora’s efforts at what has been called ‘the common art’, resulting in jumpers for grandsons, at least told him that much. But this knitting was in all colours of the spectrum, those colours subtly matched and contrasted, creating abstract designs of immense complexity as well as pictures that in the execution of their strong primitive imager
y reminded him of the paintings of Rousseau. In one a tiger crept through a jungle of green fronds and dark fruit-laden branches: in another a girl in a sarong walked with peacocks. The biggest, which covered the whole of one wall and had evidently been constructed in panels, was Chinese rather than tropical and showed a green landscape with little temples on the summits of hills and a herd of deer browsing between the woodland and the lake.
She was smiling at his wonderment. He only knew she was the creator of all this by the piece of work now in progress, another jungle picture taking shape from a circular needle, which lay on a round table beside Venetian glass animals and painted porcelain eggs. She had completed per haps half of it.
‘You’re a busy woman, Mrs Jago,’ he observed.
‘I like to keep occupied.’ Her accent was a rather unfamiliar guttural, Polish perhaps or Czech, but the English itself was grammatically and syntactically flawless. ‘I have been writing my book for two years now and it’s nearly done. God only knows if anyone will ever publish such a book, but I wrote it for my own satisfaction, to get it all down on paper. And it’s true what they say.’ She smiled at him again. ‘Get it down, write it out and it’s no longer such a terrible thing to remember. It doesn’t cure but it helps.’
‘The writer is the only free man, as someone said.’
‘Whoever that someone was knew what he was talking about.’
She sat down facing him and picked up her knitting. Supplied with hibiscus tea by Nicola Resnick and Earl Grey by a Miss Margaret Anderson - who claimed never to have spoken to Mrs Robson or heard of her until she was dead - Wexford was rather relieved that Mrs Jago offered him no refreshment. Her fingers worked skilfully, moving with assurance a complex mass of coloured threads, selecting one, taking two or three stitches with it, abandoning this first shade and joining in another. Plump and tapering these fingers were, the wedding ring cutting deeply into the flesh. She was a mountain of a woman, yet somehow neither gross nor ungainly, her legs shapely with fine ankles and small feet in tiny black pumps. Remains of a gipsyish beauty showed in her full, pink-cheeked face. Her eyes were black, bright and in their cobweb wrinkles like jewels in a fibrous nest. Hair that was still dark was drawn back with combs into a large glossy bun.
‘You came in and offered to do some shopping for Mr Robson,’ he began. ‘That ,makes me think you must have known them fairly well.’
She looked up at him and the fingers were momentarily stilled. ‘I didn’t know them at all. I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that was only the second time I’d ever spoken to him except to say good morning.’
Wexford was disappointed. His hopes of this woman, though quite unjustifiable, had been high. Something about her made him feel she was essentially truthful.
‘He was a neighbour,’ she said. ‘He’d lost his wife. She had been killed in a horrible way and it was the least I could do.’ She remembered his name, though she had only briefly seen his warrant card. ‘It was no trouble to me, Mr Wexford. I’m no Good Samaritan. My daughter takes me shopping or does it for me.’
‘You may not have known him but you knew her, didn’t you?’
She came to the end of her row, turned the linked needles. ‘Hardly. Will you believe me If I tell you that was the first time I’d ever been in their house? Let me tell you something. I don’t want you to waste your time on someone who can tell you very little. When I came out of the camp, they put me in a hospital the army ran. There was a man there, a soldier who was a ward orderly, and he fell in love with me. God knows why, for I was a skeleton and my hair had all fallen out.’ She smiled. ‘You wouldn’t think that to see me now, would you? And I used to long and long to put on weight like they said I must. Well, this man - Corporal Jago, Arthur Jago - he married me and made me an English woman.’ She pointed to the pile of manuscript. ‘It is all in the book!’ Her knitting resumed, she said, ‘But though I have tried I have never become very English, Mr Wexford. I have never quite learned to get on with the English way of always pretending everything in the garden is lovely. Do you under stand what I mean? Everything in the garden is not lovely. There is a snake in the bush and worms under the stones and half the plants are poisonous . . .’
He smiled at the image she created.
‘For example, Mr Robson - that poor man - he will say that what is to be will be; perhaps it is all for the best, life must go on. And Miss Anderson down the street who found a man who wanted to marry her at last when she was sixty years old . . . when he died a week before the wedding, what does she say? Maybe it was too late, maybe they’d both have regretted it. I cannot do with this.’
‘But these are the tenets of survival, Mrs Jago.’
‘Perhaps. But I cannot see that you survive any less if first you cry and rage and show your feelings. At least, it isn’t my way and I am not comfortable with it.’
Wexford, who would have been quite happy to continue with this exploration of English emotion or lack of it, nevertheless thought it was time to move on. Weariness had come to take hold of him and his headache was back, a tight band wound around above the eyes. It was a piece of luck, sheer serendipity, that made him speak the name of the old man who had lived a few houses away in Berry Close.
‘Eric Swallow,’ he said. ‘Did you have the same slight acquaintance with him?’
‘I know who you mean,’ she said, laying the knitting in her lap. ‘That was rather amusing, but nothing to do with poor Mrs Robson being killed. I mean it couldn’t be any thing, really.’
‘All right. But if it’s amusing I’d like to hear it. There’s little enough in this business to make us laugh.’
‘The poor old man was dying. That isn’t funny, of course. If I were English I would say maybe it was a merciful release, wouldn’t I?’
‘Was it?’
‘Well, he was very old, nearly ninety. He had a daughter but she was in Ireland and she wasn’t young, naturally. Mrs Robson used to do a lot for him; I mean, after she stopped being a home help and getting paid for it, she still went in there nearly every day. In the end when he got so that he couldn’t get out of bed, they took him away and he died in the hospital . . .”
Wexford had had his eyes on the great landscape tapestry, but the sound of a car door slamming made him turn his head and then almost immediately the doorbell rang. Mrs Jago got up, excused herself and went out into the hall with a surprisingly light, springy tread. Voices could be heard, the clamorous treble of children. Then the front door closed again and Mrs Jago came back with two little girls: the younger of them, though too big to be carried, was in her arms; the other, who looked about five or six and who wore a school uniform of navy coat, yellow and navy scarf and felt hat with stripey band, walking by her side.
‘These are my granddaughters, Melanie and Hannah Quincy. They live in Down Road, but sometimes their mummy brings them to me for an hour or two and we have a nice tea, don’t we, girls?’ The children said nothing, appearing shy. Dita Jago put Hannah down. ‘Tea is all ready and we shall have it at five sharp. You can tell me when it is three minutes to five, Melanie; Mummy says you can tell the time now.’
Hannah went immediately to the table where the painted eggs and glass animals were. And though the older child had a book to read and had opened it, she was keeping a sharp cautionary eye on her sister’s handling of the fragile things. Wexford, from personal experience, knew only too well the advantages and the pitfalls of that particular relationship, the stresses created in infancy that lasted a lifetime.
Dita Jago was placidly knitting once more. ‘I was telling you about old Mr Swallow. Well, one afternoon - a Thursday I think it was, a year ago or a bit more - the front-door bell rang and there was Mrs Robson. She wanted me to come into Mr Swallow’s with her and be a witness to something. In fact, she wanted two people and she’d seen my daughter’s car outside, so she knew Nina was here. I found out afterwards that she had already been to a couple who live on the other side. He’s called Morrison, I don’t know her
name, but anyway for some reason they wouldn’t do it.’
‘As I’ve said, I don’t suppose I’d ever spoken more than two words to her and she’d never met Nina. I had to introduce them. But that didn’t stop her asking us both to go down there and witness this form.’
‘Hannah, I’m going to be very cross if you break that little horse,’ said Melanie.
A struggle ensued as the elder granddaughter did her best to prise from her sister’s fingers a blue glass animal. Hannah stamped her foot.
‘Grandma is going to be very unhappy if you break it. Grandma will cry.’
‘No, she won’t.’
‘Give it to me, please, Hannah. Now do as you’re told.’
‘Hannah will cry! Hannah will scream!’
Shades of Sylvia and Sheila . . . Dita Jago intervened, drawing the younger child - who was by now carrying out her threat - on to her lap. Melanie looked mutinous, frowning darkly.
‘Birds in their little nests should agree,’ Mrs Jago said, not without irony, Wexford thought. She stroked the little girl’s mane of dark curly hair. ‘We thought it was something to do with the money he wanted to get from the what-do-you- call-it? DH-something - the supplementary benefit. There are always forms, aren’t there? Anyway, we went down to Mr Swallow’s with her and when we got there we found him asleep in bed. Mrs Robson was a little bit put out. My daughter said what was this form and had he already signed it? Well, you could see Mrs Robson didn’t want to say. She said she’d wake Mr Swallow up; it was important and he’d want her to wake him.’
Hannah, her crying over, placed one thumb in her mouth and opening the other fist, showed her sister the blue glass horse, clenching her hand as soon as Melanie made a pounce for it.
Melanie turned away loftily. ‘Five minutes to five, Grandma,’ she said.