by Ruth Rendell
‘Well, what? She was the only virgin prostitute in London, was she? It’s a new line, Mike, it’s an idea. It’s a refreshing change in these dissolute times. I can think of all sorts of fascinating possibilities in that one, only I wouldn’t like to burn your chaste ears. Shall we try to be realistic?’
‘I always do,’ said Burden gloomily. He sat down and rested his elbows on Wexford’s desk. ‘She’s been dead since Monday night, and it’s Sunday now and we don’t even know where she lived. It seems hopeless.’
'That’s not being realistic, that’s defeatist. She can’t be traced through her name or her description, therefore she must be traced by other means. In a negative sort of way, all this has shown us something. It’s shown us that her murder is connected with that other life of hers. A secret life is almost always a life founded on something illicit or illegal. In the course of it she did something which gave someone a reason to kill her.’
‘You mean we can’t dismiss the secret life and concentrate on the circumstantial and concrete evidence we have?’
‘Like what? No weapon, no witnesses, no smell of a motive?’ Wexford hesitated and said more slowly, ‘She seldom came back here, but she had been coming once or twice a year. The local people knew her by sight, knew who she was. Therefore, I don’t think this is a case of someone returning home after a long absence and being recognized - to put it melodramatically, Mike - by an old enemy. Nor was her real life here or her work or her interests or her involvements. Those, whatever they were, she left behind in London.’
‘You don’t think the circumstances point to local knowledge?’
‘I don’t. I say her killer knew she was coming here and followed her, though not, possibly, with premeditation to kill. He or she came from London, having known her in that other life of hers. So never mind the locals. We have to come to grips with the London life, and I’ve got an idea how to do it. Through that wallet she had in her handbag.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Burden with a sigh.
‘I’ve got it here.’ Wexford produced the wallet from a drawer in his desk. ‘See the name printed in gold on the inside? Silk and Whitebeam.’
‘Sorry, it doesn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘They’re a very exclusive leather shop in Jermyn Street. That wallet’s new. I think there’s a chance they might remember who they sold it to, and I’m sending Loring up first thing in the morning to ask them. Rhoda Comfrey had a birthday last week. If she didn’t buy it herself, I’m wondering what are the chances of someone else having bought it for her as a gift.’
‘For a woman?'
‘Why not? If she was in need of a wallet. Women carry banknotes as much as we do. The days of giving women a bottle of perfume or a brooch are passing, Mike. They are very nearly the people now. Sic transit gloria mundi.’
‘Sic transit gloria Sunday, if you ask me,’ said Burden.
Wexford laughed. His subordinate and friend could still surprise him.
Chapter 6
As soon as he had let himself into his house, Dora came out from the kitchen, beckoned him into it and shut the door. ‘Sylvia’s here.’
There is nothing particularly odd or unusual about a married daughter visiting her mother on a Sunday afternoon, and Wexford said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be? What d’you mean?’
‘She’s left Neil. She just walked out after lunch and came here.’
‘Are you saying she’s seriously left Neil just like that? She’s walked out on her husband and come home to mother? I can’t believe it.’
‘Darling, it’s true. Apparently, they’ve been having a continuous quarrel ever since Wednesday night. He promised to take her to Paris for a week in September - his sister was going to have the children - and now he says he can’t go, he’s got to go to Sweden on business. Well, in the resulting row Sylvia said she couldn’t stand it any longer, being at home all day with the children and never having a break, and he’d have to get an au pair so that she could go out and train for something. So he said - though I think she’s exaggerating there - that he wasn’t going to pay a girl wages to do what it was his wife’s job to do. She’d only train for something and then not be able to get a job because of the unemployment. Anyway, all this developed into a great analysis of their marriage and the role men have made women play and how she was sacrificing her whole life. You can imagine. So this morning she told him that if she was only a nurse and a housekeeper she’d go and be a nurse and housekeeper with her parents - and here she is.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In the living room, and Robin and Ben are in the garden. I don’t know how much they realize. Darling, don’t be harsh with her.’
‘When have I ever been harsh with my children? I haven’t been harsh enough. I’ve always let them do exactly as they liked. I should have put my foot down and not let her get married when she was only eighteen.’
She was standing up with her back to him. She turned round and said, ‘Hallo, Dad.’
‘This is a sad business, Sylvia.’
Wexford loved both his daughters dearly, but Sheila, the younger, was his favourite. Sheila had the career, the tough life, had been through the hardening process, and had remained soft and sweet. Also she looked like him, although he was an ugly man and everyone called her beautiful. Sylvia’s hard classical features were those of his late mother-inlaw, and hers the Britannia bust and majestic bearing. She had led the protected and sheltered existence in the town where she had been born. But while Sheila would have run to him and called him Pop and thrown her arms round him, this girl stood staring at him with tragic calm, one marmoreal arm extended along the mantlepiece.
‘I don’t suppose you want me here, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’d nowhere else to go. I won’t bother you for long. I’ll get a job and find somewhere for me and the boys to live.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that, Sylvia. Please don’t. This is your home. What have I ever said to make you speak to me like that?’
She didn’t move. Two great tears appeared in her eyes and coursed slowly down her cheeks. Her father went up to her and took her in his arms, wondering as he did so when it was that he had last held her like this. Years ago, long before she was married. At last she responded, and the hug he got was vice-like, almost breath-crushing. He let her sob and gulp into his shoulder, holding her close and murmuring to this fugitive goddess, all magnificent five feet ten of her, much the same words that he had used twenty years before when she had fallen and cut her knee.
More negative results awaited him on Monday evening. The phone calls were still coming in, growing madder as time went by. No newspaper in the country knew of Rhoda Comfrey either as an employee or in a freelance capacity, no Press agency, no magazine, and she was not on record as a member of the National Union of Journalists. Detective Constable Loring had left for London by an early train, bound for the leather shop in Jermyn Street.
Wexford wished now that he had gone himself, for he was made irritable by this enforced inactivity and by thoughts of what he had left behind him at home. Tenderness he felt for Sylvia, but little sympathy. Robin and Ben had been told their father was going away on business and that this was why they were there, but although Ben accepted this, Robin perhaps knew better. He was old enough to have been affected by the preceding quarrels and to have understood much of what had been said. Without him and Ben, their mother would have been able to lead a free, worthwhile and profitable life. The little boy went about with a bewildered look.
That damned water rat might have provided a diversion, but the beast was as elusive as ever.
And Neil had not come. Wexford had been sure his son in-law would turn up, even if only for more recriminations and mud-slinging. He had neither come nor phoned. And Sylvia, who had said she didn’t want him to come, that she never wanted to see him again, first moped over his absence, then harangued her parents for allowing her to marry him in the first place. Wexford had had a bad night because Dora had hardly s
lept, and in the small hours he had heard Sylvia pacing her bedroom or roving the house.
Loring came back at twelve, which was the earliest he could possibly have made it, and Wexford found himself perversely wishing he had been late so that he could have snapped at him. That was no way to go on. Pleasantly he said: ‘Did you get any joy?’
‘In a sort of way, sir. They recognized the wallet at once. It was the last of a line they had left. The customer bought it on Thursday, August fourth.’
‘You call that a sort of way? I call it a bloody marvellous break!'
Loring looked pleased, though it was doubtful whether this was praise or even directed at him. ‘Not Rhoda Comfrey, sir,’ he said hastily. ‘A man. Chap called Grenville West. He’s a regular customer of Silk and Whitebeam. He’s bought a lot of stuff from them in the past .’
‘Did you get his address?’
‘Twenty-two, Elm Green, London, West 15,’ said Loring.
No expert on the metropolis, Wexford nevertheless knew a good deal of the geography of the London Borough of Kenbourne. And now, in his mind’s eye, he saw Elm Green that lay half a mile from the great cemetery. Half an acre or so of turf with elm trees on it, a white-painted fence bordering two sides of it, and facing the green, a row of late Georgian houses, some with their ground floors converted into shops. A pretty place, islanded in sprawling, squalid Kenbourne which, like the curate’s egg and all London boroughs, was good in parts.
It was a piece of luck for him that this first possible London acquaintance - friend, surely - of Rhoda Comfrey had been located here. He would get help, meet with no obstruction, for his old nephew, his dead sister’s son, was head of Kenbourne Vale CID. That Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune was at present away on holiday in the Canary Islands was a pity but no real hindrance. Several members of Howard’s team were known to him. They were old friends.
By two Stevens, his driver, was heading the car towards London. Wexford relaxed, feeling his confidence returning, Sylvia and her troubles pushed to the back of his mind, and he felt stimulated by the prospect before him when Stevens set him down outside Kenbourne Vale Police Station.
‘Inspector Baker in?’
It was amusing, really. If anyone had told him, those few years before, that the day would come when he would actually be asking for Baker, wanting to see him, he would have laughed with resentful scorn. For Baker had been the reverse of pleasant to him when, convalescing after his thrombosis with Howard and Denise, he had helped solve the cemetery murder. But Howard, Wexford thought secretly, would have refused that word ‘helped’, would have said his uncle had done all that solving on his own. And that had marked the beginning of Baker’s respect and friendship. After that, there had been no more barbs about rustic policemen and interference and ignorance of London thugs. His request was answered in the affirmative, and two minutes later he was being shown down one of those bottlegreen painted corridors to the inspector’s office with its view of a brewery. Baker got up and came to him delightedly, hand outstretched.
‘This is a pleasant surprise, Reg!’
It was getting on for two years since Wexford had seen him. In that time, he thought, there had been more remarkable changes, and not just in the man’s manner towards himself. He looked years younger, he looked happy. Only the harsh corncrake voice with its faint cockney intonation remained the same.
‘It’s good to see you, Michael.’ Baker shared Burden’s Christian name. How that had once riled him! ‘How are you? You’re looking fine. What’s the news.’
‘Well, you’ll know Mr Fortune’s away in Tenerife. Things are fairly quiet here, thank God. Your old friend Sergeant Clements is somewhere about, he’ll be glad to see you. Sit down and I’ll have some tea sent up.’ There was a framed photograph of a fair-haired, gentle-looking woman on the desk. Baker saw Wexford looking at it. ‘My wife,’ he said, self-conscious, proud, a little embarrassed. ‘I don’t know if Mr Fortune mentioned I’d got married - ’ a tiny hesitation ‘ - again?’
Yes, Howard had, of course, but he had forgotten. The new ease of manner, the happiness, were explained. Michael Baker had once been married to a girl who had become pregnant by another man and who had left him for that other man. Finding that out from Howard had marked the beginnings of his toleration of Baker’s rudeness and his thinly veiled insults.
‘Congratulations. I’m delighted.’
‘Yes, well . . .’ Awkwardness brought out shades of Baker’s old acerbity. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about my domestic bliss. You came about this Rose - no, Rhoda - Comfrey. Am I right?’
Wexford said on a surge of hope, ‘You know her? You’ve got some . . . ?’
‘Wouldn’t I have been in touch if I had? No, but I read the papers. I don’t suppose you’ve got much else on your mind at the moment, have you?’
Sylvia, Sylvia . . . ‘No, not much.’ The tea came, and he told Baker about the wallet and Grenville West.
‘I do know him. Well, not to say “know”. He’s what you might call our contribution to the arts. They put bits about him in the local paper from time to time. Come on, Reg, I always think of you as so damned intellectual. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Grenville West?’
‘Well, I haven’t. What does he do?’
‘I daresay he’s not that famous. He writes books, historical novels. I can’t say I’ve ever set eyes on him, but I’ve read one of his books - bit above my head - and I can tell you a bit about him from what I’ve seen in the paper. In his late thirties, dark-haired chap, smokes a pipe - they put his photo on his book jackets. You know those old houses facing the Green? He lives in a flat in one of them over a wine bar.’
Having courteously refused Baker’s offer of assistance, sent his regards to Sergeant Clements, and promised to return later, he set off up Kenbourne High Street. The heat that was pleasant, acceptable in the country, made of this London suburb a furnace that seemed to be burning smelly refuse. A greyish haze obscured the sun. He wondered why the Green looked different, barer somehow, and bigger. Then he noticed the stumps where the trees had been. So Dutch Elm disease denuded London as well as the country. He crossed the grass where black children and one white child were playing ball, where two Indian women in saris, their hair in long braids, walked slowly and gracefully as if they carried invisible pots on their heads. The wine bar had been discreetly designed not to mar the long elegant facade, as had the other shops in this row, and the sign over its bow window announced in dull gold letters: Vivian’s Vineyard.
The occasional slender tree grew out of the pavement, and some of the houses had window boxes with geraniums and petunias in them. Across the house next door to the bar rambled the vines of an ipomaea, the Morning Glory, its trumpet flowers open and glowing a brilliant blue. This might have been some corner of Chelsea or Hampstead. If you kept your eyes steady, if you didn’t look south to the gasworks or east to St Biddulph’s Hospital, if you didn’t smell the smoky, diesely stench, it might even have been Kingsmarkham.
He rang repeatedly at the door beside the shop window, but no one came. Grenville West was out. What now? It was nearly five and, according to the notice on the shop door, the Vineyard opened at five. He sat down on one of the benches on the Green to wait until it did. Presently a pale-skinned black girl came out, peered up and down the street and went back in again, turning the sign to ‘Open’. Wexford followed her and found himself in a dim cavern, light coming only from some bulbs behind the bar itself and from heavily shaded Chianti-bottle lamps on the tables. The window was curtained in brown and silver and the curtains were fast drawn. On a high stool, under the most powerful of the lamps, the girl had seated herself to leaf through a magazine. He asked her for a glass of white wine, and then if the owner or manager or proprietor was about.
‘You want Vie?’
‘I expect I do if he’s the boss.’
‘I’ll fetch him.’
She came back with a man who looked in his early forties. ‘Vi
ctor Vivian. What can I do for you?’
Wexford showed him his warrant card and explained. Vivian seemed rather cheered by the unexpected excitement, while the girl opened enormous eyes and stared.
‘Take a pew,’ said Vivian not ineptly, for the place had the gloom of a chapel devoted to some esoteric cult. But there was nothing priestly about its proprietor. He wore jeans and a garment somewhere between a T-shirt and a windcheater with a picture on it of peasant girls treading out the grape harvest. ‘Gren’s away. Went off on holiday to France, you know - let’s see now - last Sunday week. He always goes to France for a month at this time of the year.’
‘You own the house?’
‘Not to say “own”, you know. I mean, Notbourne Properties own it. I’ve got the underlease.’
He was going to be an ‘I mean-er’ and ‘you know-er’. Wexford could feel it coming. Still, such people usually talked a lot and were seldom discreet. ‘You know him well?’
‘We’re old mates, Gren and me, you know. He’s been here fourteen years and a damn good tenant. I mean, he does all his repairs himself and it’s handy, you know, having someone always on the premises when the bar’s closed. Most evenings he’ll drop in here for a drink, you know, and then as often as not I’ll have a quick one with him, up in his place, I mean, after we’ve knocked off for the night, and then, you know . . .’
Wexford cut this useless flow short. ‘It’s not Mr West I’m primarily interested in. I’m trying to trace the address of someone who may have been a friend of his. You’ve read of the murder of Miss Rhoda Comfrey?’
Vivian gave a schoolboy whistle. ‘The old girl who was stabbed? You mean she was a friend of Gren’s? Oh, I doubt that, I mean, I doubt that very much. I mean, she was fifty, wasn’t she? Gren’s not forty, I mean, I doubt if he’s more than thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Younger than me, you know.’