by Ruth Rendell
‘Tomorrow, then, Ms Baird?’
‘I’m taking the rest of the week off work. I’ve got holiday owing to me. Would you like to come along around ten?’
He said he would, flattered by her trust in him, intrigued by her hints that what she had to tell him might be a breakthrough. She had been with Scott-McGregor for years, yet she had apparently shaken him off in a couple of hours, turned him out and sighed with relief. Of course, the euphoria would pass and soon and regret and recriminations set in. For the first time he put his fear – or was it hope? – that the young woman’s body in the tomb might be Vladlena’s. No, it was fear. He already felt too much pity for her, fugitive that she had been, to hope for such an end.
They would definitely go to the cinema, he told Dora. Was it Revolutionary Road she wanted to see or Bright Star? She wasn’t sure, she would tell him when he came back from wherever he was going. Mapesbury Road, Cricklewood, to take another look at the clothes the young woman’s corpse had worn.
Tom was out. Miles Crowhurst showed him once more the pathetic collection. Whore’s garments, he thought, and immediately castigated himself for his harshness. Many perfectly decent girls – ‘good girls’, as they were once called – wore tight T-shirts, biker’s jackets, tight mini-skirts, hold-up fishnet stockings and knee-high boots. But wore them without underwear?
He said to Miles, ‘Where are her bra and knickers?’
‘She wasn’t wearing any, sir.’
‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘You’re a heterosexual male. I don’t know about these things any more but you do. Would a normal, ordinary girl go about without underwear?’
‘Not in my experience,’ said Miles.
Wexford had seen those clothes before, seen them when he saw the men’s clothes and the La Punaise note and the jewellery from Teddy Brex’s pockets, but this point about the lack of underwear hadn’t struck him. It hadn’t struck Tom either. Would Sophie Baird be able to resolve several puzzles tomorrow morning?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BRIGHT STAR MADE him want to go and see Keats’s house. It was no distance away. Grove End Road first, though, and what he learnt there might make him put everything else off till a later date. He was setting off when Sophie Baird phoned. Would he meet her at David Goldberg’s house instead? Wexford said he would. She volunteered answers to questions he hadn’t asked.
‘I’d feel better away from this house. Just for a while. It’s my house and John’s gone, but somehow I feel he’s still here and listening to what I say.’
‘That’s quite all right with me, Ms Baird.’
‘David’s a good friend. I don’t know what I’d do without David.’
Wexford took the 13 bus down the Finchley Road. Sitting on the top at the front, he thought about the short conversation he had just had. Sophie Baird’s tone had given a weight to what she had said which wasn’t in her actual words. Had she made significant discoveries and was it only now that she meant to share them with David Goldberg?
He walked to Goldberg’s house by way of Orcadia Place. The fat young woman with the baby in a pushchair was once more outside Orcadia Cottage, staring up at an upstairs window where she had perhaps just seen the silhouetted head of Martin or Anne Rokeby. Wexford nodded to her and she smiled. He thought how when his father was a young man most men wore hats and raised them to women they knew or even women they just knew by sight. Would he like a return to that custom? Not really.
Sophie Baird came to David Goldberg’s door when Wexford rang the bell. She looked, he thought, quite different from when he had last seen her, younger, healthier, the transformation he had noticed when she smiled, now there all the time. It was a fine day and the French windows to the garden were open. Goldberg was sitting by them, but when Wexford came in he got up and closed them, saying, ‘It’s too late in the year for all this fresh air.’
Sophie brought in coffee and fruit juice and water, plates of cake and plates of biscuits. ‘I wasn’t expecting a party,’ Wexford said.
‘I just felt like doing it,’ she said. ‘A little celebration. I keep saying to myself, “Thank God I never married John.” He wanted it. But even when we were at our best some warning voice inside me said, “Don’t do it.”’
David Goldberg’s eyebrows went up and he smiled a little. Sophie sat next to him and took hold of his hand. A classic case, Wexford thought, of a woman whose best friend is a gay man. ‘Ms Baird,’ he began, ‘I hope you’re going to tell me what you know of the whereabouts of Vladlena.’
She looked at him. It was the first time she had looked him in the eye. Their eyes met and then she turned hers away. ‘I’ve told David everything I know,’ she said. ‘I mean, just before you came I told him. I lied to him before. It was wrong, I know that. I didn’t know he’d considered marrying her. I’d have told him everything if I’d known. But I told John, you see.’
‘And that was a mistake?’
‘If ever there was an understatement … ! He went mad. He shouted at me that I was aiding and abetting an illegal immigrant. I could go to prison. Is that true?’
‘Of course not,’ Wexford said.
‘I believed him. He frightened me, he was always frightening me. He was jealous of David, and tried to stop me seeing him. Oh, I mustn’t go on. It’s all over now. The upshot was that I didn’t tell David, but I have now and now I’ll tell you.’
She had met Vladlena in the café as arranged. It must have been a curious meeting, Wexford thought, with one woman neurotically fearful that her partner was lurking somewhere and able to hear all she said, while the other (with rather more reason) feared that representatives from the UK Border Agency were sitting disguised at the next table. Vladlena had found a room in Willesden and a job in a hand car wash. She was due to start next day.
‘I asked her if Mrs Kataev knew she was going and she said no, she didn’t want to tell her. She meant just to disappear. She was good, she said, at disappearing. And then she said that the man who had driven her and her sister and the others across Europe, she’d seen him again. I don’t know who he was. She said he came up to her in the street and offered to buy her a drink. He’d been watching her, he said, when she was working for old Mildreadful and David. She knew he wasn’t immigration or the police, so she went with him. They went into a pub in Kilburn High Road.
‘Vladlena’s English was quite good. It had to be because she never encountered anyone who spoke her own language except the cousin who was – well, off-limits for various reasons. So she understood what this man said to her. He asked her if she was a virgin.’
‘What?’ said Wexford.
‘Yes. You did hear what I said.’ Sophie squeezed David Goldberg’s hand and dropped it. ‘He asked her if she was a virgin and she asked him why did he want to know. “I can get a thousand pounds for you if you are,” he said.’
Though he had presumably heard it before, Goldberg made a face and a sound of disgust.
‘I’m sorry, David. It’s hateful, I know. You’re like me. You thought it was only old lechers in Victorian times who thought like that. But it’s not. It happens today. There are people who think having a virgin is a cure for AIDS. Vladlena didn’t think that. It sounded as if she didn’t think much about it, only about the money. If she had a thousand pounds she could buy herself a passport, she said. I told her that this man might get a thousand pounds from someone, but what made her think she would see even half of it?’
‘What did she say?’
‘That I shouldn’t worry because he’d told her that would be her share. The people who – well, organised it would get much more. Anyway, she might not do it through him. He’d given her the idea.’
‘I take it,’ Wexford said slowly. ‘that those girls and Vladlena herself had been destined for – what was it? Some sort of massage parlour that’s really a brothel? At best, a call-girl agency?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ said Sophie Baird. ‘It sounds ridiculous, but I was so shocked. And John, whe
n I told him, he was horrified. He said he’d never heard of such a thing, but he must have heard of trafficked women. It’s always in the papers, that stuff. She told me the name of the driver – well, she told me his first name – it was Gregory or something close to that. Whether she went to him or not I don’t know. She wouldn’t give me his address. Well, I didn’t ask for it. I’d arranged to meet her again, but I didn’t keep the appointment. John frightened me, he was so angry. He hit me and he’d never done that before.’
*
Tom listened to Wexford’s account of his interview with Sophie Baird with attention which was almost enthusiasm. ‘Yes, but it’s all rather vague,’ Wexford said. ‘A driver of a minibus trafficking girls is called Gregory, but with no surname. Vladlena has a cousin whose name is unknown. Vladlena’s own surname is unknown.’
‘That’s a rather defeatist attitude, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe. I didn’t mean I was giving up. Sophie Baird was in a – well, a heightened emotional state. She may remember more when I talk to her again.’
‘Better go with Lucy this time. As I said before, a woman to talk to a woman. That’s best. I’m not saying you haven’t done well, Reg, but you’re very hot on all this psychology and knowing human nature and all that, but I don’t think you’re allowing for the fact that this Sophie Baird may have been jealous of Vladlena. Much younger than her, wasn’t she? A pretty blonde and alone with this Goldberg day after day. It may be best to go back to Mrs Jones, see if she can put a different complexion on things. You and Lucy go back to Mrs Jones. Talk to the other neighbours, those Milsoms, for instance. They may have talked to her. Even the Rokebys. You didn’t think of them, did you? But they’re back living in Orcadia Cottage now.’
In his own kind of phraseology, Tom had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Wexford was sure all these people would be useless, especially Mildred Jones who would have made a point of knowing nothing of her cleaner’s background. It might be that even now the burnt shirt still rankled with her.
‘Remember I like the idea of this Vladlena,’ were Tom’s parting words. ‘Tongue-twister of a name, isn’t it? I like it. She could be our girl in the patio-tomb. It’s more than likely.’
‘I’d like to bring Sophie Baird here to look at those clothes.’
‘Good idea. You do that small thing. Must go, I’ve a busy afternoon. And then the Harvest Supper at my church.’
Sophie Baird couldn’t be reached until the following day. He tried her at home in Hall Road, on a mobile that seemed permanently switched off and finally got her on David Goldberg’s landline. No, she wasn’t living there; she hadn’t moved in. She was going back home that day. Would she come with him to the Met Headquarters in Mapesbury Road, Cricklewood? They would send a car for her.
‘Can I ask what for?’
‘I want to show you some clothes that may have belonged to Vladlena.’
‘Belonged to a girl whose body has been found’ was what he should have said. But so far he hadn’t told Sophie why he was so interested in Vladlena and she hadn’t asked. Lucy went in the car to fetch Sophie Baird. Wexford was waiting for her when she arrived and showed her the clothes. Sophie herself was dressed much as she usually was in a tweed skirt and jumper with cream-coloured jacket and brown leather court shoes. The garments which had been on the young woman’s body in the vault had become pathetic in Wexford’s eyes; they so objectified their wearer and almost certainly had been worn not because she liked them or chose to wear them but as the uniform of her trade. Sophie Baird’s reaction was very different. She recoiled, she blushed. Wexford had been about to ask her not to touch anything, but any caution of that kind was unnecessary. She actually stepped back from the table on which the boots, the jacket and the fishnet tights lay.
‘I never saw Vladlena wear anything like that,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘How did you – the police – get hold of these?’ A possible solution occurred to her and she shuddered. ‘Were they – were they on a dead body?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘The three times I saw Vladlena she was wearing a summer dress – well, a cotton dress, quite faded and shabby, and once a thick winter coat over it. Her shoes looked very worn and she also wore flip-flops.’
‘But if she was going to do what she suggested to you she would do for the sake of a thousand pounds, she might have worn clothes such as these?’
‘I suppose she might have,’ said Sophie Baird.
‘One more question before I take you in to see Detective Superintendent Ede. Would Vladlena have worn underwear?’
‘Well – I don’t understand. What do you mean, worn underwear? Of course she would. Everyone does.’
‘So you believe she would have?’
‘I assume she would. I don’t know, though. I really don’t know.’
Tom Ede asked her if Vladlena had any jewellery. Sophie Baird said she couldn’t remember; perhaps a ring. The necklaces and rings and bracelets they had concluded had all belonged to Harriet Merton, were shown to her but she had scarcely glanced at them when she shook her head impatiently.
‘You don’t understand. She was poor. She was much poorer than the poor in this country are. She had nothing. She earned enough to pay her rent to Mrs Kataev and buy food and that was all.’
‘You mentioned the possibility of a ring,’ Tom said.
‘Yes, but I’m not sure I’m not imagining it. I seem to remember something silver she wore, a ring, a pendant. I seem to, but that’s all I can say.’
Getting ready to drive himself and Dora back to Kingsmarkham for the weekend, Wexford asked himself what steps Vladlena would have taken to carry out her plan. The driver called Grigor or Gregory seemed the most likely for her to have contacted. But where was he to be found? If the transaction had reached a stage of Vladlena prostituting herself, where would she have done it? Not in a room at Irina Kataev’s. In a hotel room booked for her? He didn’t think so. More likely in a brothel disguised as something else. He had little experience of such places. So far as he knew there had never been in Kingsmarkham what used to be called a disorderly house.
But there he was wrong, as Mike Burden told him on the Saturday evening. The drinks they enjoyed together after work in the old days had come to an end when Wexford retired and Burden was promoted but had been replaced by meeting – often in a new and previously unvisited pub – every weekend Wexford returned home. It was becoming a tradition with a ritualistic quality to it. Many pubs had closed in the surrounding villages, largely due to would-be visitors intimidated by the drink-driving laws, but in Kingsmarkham itself the Olive and Dove still ruled supreme and the Dragon did a brisk trade. This evening they were to meet in the Mermaid, a small snug pub in a narrow lane off York Street.
But before that Wexford and Dora had spent half a day, a night and more than half the next day in their own house. Both their grandsons were at home and Robin had brought a fellow-student home with him. When he was young, though he had not attended one himself, Wexford said universities used to discourage if not expressly forbid undergraduates to go home for the weekend. All that had changed. Ben was there, too, his school having closed for half-term. With a fairly good grace, Sylvia gave up the bedroom she shared with her daughter to her parents, but made them feel guilty by whining miserably about her and Mary having to share a single bed put up in the dining room.
‘How to make one feel one should have booked a room in a hotel,’ said Dora.
‘Why did we come, anyway?’
‘We’d forgotten – if we ever knew – how many people there would be here.’
Matters weren’t helped by an encounter Wexford had on his way to the Mermaid. He was halfway down York Street when a man and a woman came out of one of the houses and the man unlocked a car parked at the kerb with a remote. Wexford recognised them at once as the Wardles, parents of the dead Jason. And they knew him. They looked, stared and ostentatiously turned their heads away.
‘I wonder,’ he sai
d when he saw Burden, ‘what third thing is going to happen to make me feel guilty.’
‘You don’t believe in that stuff about things coming in threes, do you?’
‘I didn’t last week, but all this makes me nervous.’
Burden fetched Wexford a glass of claret and himself a Chardonnay. Nuts, once an enemy yet desired, had become no more or less than a pleasant adjunct to their drinks.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look quite different.’
‘That may be no bad thing. What were you going to tell me about brothels?’
‘We had one here,’ said Burden. ‘A couple of months ago.’
‘What, you mean a massage place or beauty and tanning and waxing, do you?’
‘This was in a flat over a shop in the High Street. It was a clothes shop, highly respectable and selling dresses and suits for sizes 16 to 28.’
‘If I’d been a transvestite they’d just about have suited me in days gone by.’
Burden laughed. ‘A lot of men had been seen coming to the door at the right side of the shops in the evenings. I sent DC Thompson in there, posing as a punter. The girls he had to choose from were presented to him, but he obeyed my prudish instructions, said no thanks politely and walked out. We raided the place on the following evening.’ He took a swig of his Chardonnay. ‘It was quite exciting.’
‘I can’t remember the rule. It has to be more than one girl to constitute a brothel, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s right. I wasn’t there but Thompson told me one of the men fell on his knees and swore on his mother’s head that if it didn’t come out that he was there he would never do it again.’