Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘But I told this one. I’m so ashamed.’

  The coffee arrived and a plate of ham sandwiches. She took one and held it but didn’t begin to eat. ‘It was about Polly,’ she said. ‘Polly never goes out in the evenings alone, but never. If she goes to Grenville’s he always runs her home or puts her in a taxi. She had a horrible thing happen about a year back. She was walking along in the dark and a man came up behind her and put his arms round her. She screamed and kicked him and he ran off, but after that she was afraid to be out alone in the dark. She says if people were allowed to have guns in this country she’d have one.’

  Wexford said gently, ‘Your deliberate lie. Miss Patel? I think you’re stalling.’

  ‘I know I am. Oh, dear. Well, I told you Polly was at home with me that Monday evening, but she wasn’t. She went out before I got home from work and she came back alone - oh, I don’t know, after I was in bed. Anyway, the next day I asked her where she’d been because I knew Grenville was away, and she said she’d got fed up with Grenville and she’d been out with someone else. Well, I knew she’d been unhappy about him for a long time, Grenville, I mean. She wanted to go and live with him. Actually, she wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t even kiss her.’ Malina Patel gave a little shudder. ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t have wanted him to kiss me! There’s something really funny about him, something queer - I don’t mean gay-queer, or I don’t think so but something sort of hard to . . .’

  ‘On with your story, please, Miss Patel!’

  ‘I’m sorry. So what I was going to say was that Polly had met this man who was married and that Monday they’d been to some motel and had a room there for the evening. And she said this man of hers was afraid of his wife finding out, she’d put a private detective on him, and if that detective came round, would I say she’d been at home with me?’

  ‘You thought I was a private detective!'

  ‘Yes! I told you I was mad. I told Polly I’d do what she said if a detective came, and a detective did come. It didn’t seem so very awful, you see, because it’s not a crime, sleeping with someone else’s husband, is it? It’s not very nice but it’s not a crime. I mean, not against the law.’

  Wexford did his best to suppress his laughter and succeeded fairly well. Those remarks of hers, then, which he had thought witty and made at his expense, had in fact come from a genuine innocence. If she wasn’t so pretty and so sweet, he would have been inclined to call her - it seemed sacrilege - downright stupid. She ate a sandwich and took a gulp of coffee.

  ‘And I was glad Polly had got someone after being so miserable about Grenville. And I thought private detectives are awful people, snooping and prying and getting paid for doing dirty things like that. So I thought it didn’t really matter telling a lie to that sort of person.’

  This time Wexford had to let his laughter go. She looked at him dubiously over the top of her coffee cup. ‘Have you ever known any private detectives. Miss Patel?’

  ‘No but I’ve seen lots of them in films.’

  ‘Which enabled you to identify me with such ease? Seriously, though . . .’ He stopped smiling. ‘Miss Flinders knew who I was. Didn’t she tell you afterwards?’

  It was the crucial question, and on her answer depended whether he accompanied her at once back to Kenbourne Vale or allowed her to go alone.

  ‘Of course she did! But I was too stupid to see. She said you hadn’t come about the man and the motel at all, but it was something to do with Grenville and that wallet he’d lost and she was going to tell me a whole lot more, but I wouldn’t listen. I was going out, you see, I was late already, and I was sick of hearing her on and on about Grenville. And she tried again to tell me the next day, only I said not to go on about Grenville, please, I’d rather hear about her new man , and she hasn’t mentioned him - Grenville, I mean - since.’

  He seized on one point. ‘You knew before that the wallet had been lost, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes! She’d been full of it. Long before she told me about the motel and the man and the private detective. Poor Grenville had lost his wallet on a bus and he’d asked her to tell the police but she hadn’t because she thought they wouldn’t be able to do anything. That was days before she went to the motel.’

  He believed her. His case for indentifying Rhoda Comfrey as Rose Farriner was strengthened. What further questions he asked Malina Patel would be for his amusement only.

  ‘May I asked what made you come and tell me the awful truth?’

  ‘Your picture in the paper. I saw it this morning and I recognized you.’ From that picture? Frivolous inquiries may lead to humiliation as well as amusement.

  'Polly had already gone out. I wished I’d listened to her before. I suddenly realized it had all been to do with that murdered woman, and I realized who you were and everything. I felt awful. I didn’t go to work. I phoned and said I’d got gastro-enteritis which was another lie, I’m afraid, and I left a note for Polly saying I was going to see my mother who was ill, and then I got the train and came here. I’ve told so many lies now I’ve almost forgotten who I’ve told what.’

  Wexford said, ‘When you’ve had more practice you’ll learn how to avoid that. Make sure to tell the same lie.’

  ‘You don’t mean it!’

  ‘No, Miss Patel, I don’t. And don’t tell lies to the police, will you? We usually find out. I expect we should have found this one out, only we’re no longer very interested in that line of inquiry. Another cup of coffee?’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve been awfully nice to me.’

  ‘You don’t go to prison till next time,’ said Wexford. ‘What they call a suspended sentence. Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and we’ll see if we can fix you up with a lift to the station. I have an idea Constable Loring has to go that way.’

  Large innocent eyes of a doe or calf met his. ‘I’m afraid I’m being an awful lot of trouble.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ Wexford said breezily. ‘He’ll bear it with the utmost fortitude, believe me.’

  Once again he got home early with a free evening ahead.

  Such a thing rarely happened to him in the middle of a murder case. There was nothing to do but wait and wonder. Though not to select or discard from a list of suspects, for he had none, nor attempt to read hidden meanings and calculated falsehoods between the lines of witnesses’ statements. He had no witnesses. All he had were four keys and a missing car; a wallet that beyond all doubt now had been lost on a bus; and a tale of a phone call overheard by a man who, against all reasonable probability, loved withered middle-aged gawky Rhoda Comfrey so intensely that he had killed her from jealousy, not a very promising collection of objects and negativities and conjectures.

  The river was golden in the evening light, having on its shallow rippling surface a patina like that on beaten bronze. There were dragonflies in pale blue or speckled armour, and the willow trailed his hoar leaves in the grassy stream.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ said Robin 'if the river went through your garden?’

  ‘My garden would have to be half a mile longer,’ said Wexford.

  Water rats having failed to appear, the little boys had taken off sandals and socks and were paddling. It was fortunate that Wexford, rather against his will, had consented to remove his own shoes, roll up his trousers and join them. For Ben, playing boats with a log of willow wood, leant over too far and toppled in up to his neck. His grandfather had him out before he had time to utter a wail.

  ‘Good thing it’s so warm. You’ll dry off on the way back.’

  ‘Grandad carry.’

  Robin looked anything but displeased. ‘There’ll be an awful row.’

  ‘Not when you tell them how brave grandad jumped in and saved your brother’s life.’

  ‘Come on. It’s only about six inches deep. He’ll get in a row and so will you. You know what women are.’

  But there was no row, or rather, no fresh row to succeed that already taking place. How it had begun Wexford didn’t know, but
as he and the boys came up to the french windows he heard his wife say with, for her, uncommon tartness, ‘Personally, I think you’ve got far more than you deserved, Sylvia. A good husband, a lovely home and two fine healthy sons. D’you think you’ve ever done anything to merit more than that?’

  Sylvia jumped up. Wexford thought she was going to shout some retort at her mother, but at that moment, seeing her mudstained child, she seized him in her arms and rushed away upstairs with him. Robin, staring in silence, at last followed her, his thumb in his mouth, a habit Wexford thought he had got out of years before.

  ‘And you tell me not to be harsh with her!’

  ‘It’s not very pleasant,’ said Dora, not looking at him 'To have your own daughter tell you a woman without a career is a useless encumbrance when she gets past fifty. When her looks have gone. Her husband only stays with her out of duty and because someone’s got to support her,’

  He was aghast. She had turned away because her eyes had filled with tears. He wondered when he had last seen her cry. Not since her own father died, not for fifteen years. The second woman to cry over him that day. Coffee and sandwiches were hardly the answer here, though a hug might have been. Instead he said laconically, ‘I often think if I were a bachelor now at my age, and you were single - which, of course, you wouldn’t be - I’d ask you to marry me.’

  She managed a smile. ‘Oh, Mr Wexford, this is so sudden. Will you give me time to think it over?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry. We’re going out to celebrate our engagement.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘Come on. Now. We’ll go and have a nice dinner somewhere and then we’ll go to the pictures. You needn’t tell Sylvia. We’ll just sneak out.’

  ‘We can’t!’

  ‘We’re going to.’

  So they dined at the Olive and Dove, she in an old cotton dress and he in his water-rat-watching clothes. And then they saw a film in which no one got murdered or even got married, still less had children or grandchildren, but in which all the characters lived in Paris and drank heavily and made love all day long. It was half past eleven when they got back, and Wexford had the curious feeling, as Sylvia came out into the hall to meet them, that they were young lovers again and she the parent. As if she would say: Where had they been and what sort of a time was this to come home? Of course she didn’t.

  ‘The Chief Constable’s been on the phone for you, Dad.’

  ‘What time was that?’ said Wexford.

  ‘About eight and then again at ten.’

  ‘I can’t phone him now. It’ll have to wait till the morning.’

  Sharing the initials and, to some extent, the appearance of the late General de Gaulle, Charles Griswold lived in a converted farmhouse in the village of Millerton - Millerton Les-Deux eglises, Wexford called it privately. Wexford was far from being his favourite officer. He regarded him as an eccentric and one who used methods of the kind Burden had denounced on Parish Oak station platform.

  ‘I hoped to get hold of you last night,’ he said coldly when Wexford presented himself at Hightrees Farm at nine-thirty on Saturday morning.

  ‘I took my wife out, sir.’

  Griswold did not exactly think that policemen shouldn’t have wives. He had one himself, she was about the place now, though some said he had more or less mislaid her decades ago. But that females of any kind should so intrude as to have to be taken out displeased him exceedingly. He made no comment. His big forehead rucked up into a frown.

  ‘I sent for you to tell you that this warrant has been sworn. The matter is in the hands of the Kenbourne police. Superintendent Rittifer foresees entering the house tomorrow morning, and it is entirely by his courtesy that you and another officer may accompany him.’

  It’s my case, Wexford thought resentfully. She was killed in my manor. Oh, Howard, why the hell do you have to be in Tenerife now? Aloud he said, not very politely: ‘Why not today?’

  ‘Because it’s my belief the damned woman’ll turn up today, the way she’s supposed to.’

  ‘She won’t, sir. She’s Rhoda Comfrey.’

  ‘Rittifer thinks so too. I may as well tell you that if it rested on your notions alone the obtaining of this warrant wouldn’t have my support. I know you. Half the time you’re basing your inquiries on a lot of damn-fool intuitions and feelings.’

  ‘Not this time, sir. One woman has positively identified Rhoda Comfrey as Rose Farriner from the photograph. She is the right age, she disappeared at the right time. She complained of appendicitis symptoms only a few months after we know Rhoda Comfrey went to a doctor with such symptoms. She . . .’

  ‘All right, Reg.’ The Chief Constable delivered the kind of dismissive shot of which only he was capable. ‘I won’t say you know your own business best because I don’t think you do.’

  Chapter 12

  The courtesy of Superintendent Rittifer did not extend to his putting in an appearance at Princevale Road. No blame to him for that, Wexford thought. He wouldn’t have done so either in the superintendent’s position and on a fine Sunday afternoon. For it was two by the time they got there, he and Burden with Baker and Sergeant Clements. Because it was a Sunday they had come up in Burden’s car and the traffic hadn’t been too bad. Now that the time had come he was beginning to have qualms, the seeds of which had been well sown by Burden and the Chief Constable.

  The very thing which had first put him on to Rose Farriner now troubled him. Why should she go to a doctor and give only to him the name of Rhoda Comfrey while everyone else knew her as Rose Farriner? And a local doctor too, one who lived no more than a quarter of a mile away, who might easily and innocently mention that other name to those not supposed to know it. Then there were the clothes in which Rhoda Comfrey’s body had been dressed. He remembered thinking that his own wife wouldn’t have worn them even in the days when they were poor. They had been of the same sort of colours as those sold in the Montfort Circus boutique, but had they been of anything like the same standard? Would Mrs Cohen have wanted to get them at cost and have described them as ‘exquisite’? How shaky too had been that single identification, made by a very young woman who looked anaemic and neurotic, who might even be suffering from some kind of post-natal hysteria.

  Could Burden have been right about the wallet? He got out of the car and looked up at the house. Even from their linings he could see that the curtains were of the kind that cost a hundred pounds for a set. The windows were doubleglazed, the orange and white paintwork fresh. A bay tree stood in a tub by the front door. He had seen a bay tree like that in a garden centre priced at twenty-five pounds. Would a woman who could afford all that steal a wallet? Perhaps, if she were leading a double life, had two disparate personalities inside that strong gaunt body. Besides, the wallet had been stolen, and from a bus that passed through Kenbourne Vale. Before Baker could insert the key Mrs Farriner had given Dinehart, Wexford tested out the two which had been on Rhoda Comfrey’s ring. Neither fitted.

  ‘That’s a bit of a turn-up for the books,’ said Burden.

  ‘Not necessarily. I should have brought all the keys that were in that drawer.’ Wexford could see Baker didn’t like it, but he unlocked the door just the same and they went in.

  Insufferably hot and stuffy inside. The temperature in the hall must have been over eighty and the air smelt strongly. Not of mothballs and dust and sweat, though, but of pinescented cleansers and polish and those deodorizers which, instead of deodorizing, merely provide a smell of their own. Wexford opened the door to the garage. It was empty. Clean towels hung in the yellow and white shower room and there was an unused cake of yellow soap on the washbasin. The only other room on this floor was carpeted in black, and black and white geometrically patterned curtains hung at its french window. Otherwise, it contained nothing but two black armchairs, a glass coffee table and a television set.

  They went upstairs, bypassing for the time being the first floor, and mounting to the top. Here were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of these bedrooms was tota
lly empty, a second, adjoining it, furnished with a single bed, a wardrobe and a dressing table. Everything was extremely clean and sterile-looking, the wastepaper baskets emptied, the flower vases empty and dry. Again, in this bathroom, there were fresh towels hanging. A medicine chest contained aspirins, nasal spray, sticking plaster, a small bottle of antiseptic.

  Wexford was beginning to wonder if Rhoda Comfrey had ever stamped anything with her personality, but the sight of the principal bedroom changed his mind. It was large and luxurious. Looking about him, he recalled that spare room in Carlyle Villas. Since then she had come a long way. The bed was oval, its cover made of some sort of beige-coloured furry material, with furry beige pillows piled at its head. A chocolate-coloured carpet, deep-piled, one wall all mirror, one all glass overlooking the street, one filled with built-in cupboards and dressing table counter, the fourth entirely hung with brown glass beads, strings of them from ceiling to floor. On the glass counter stood bottles of French perfume, a pomander and a crystal tray containing silver brushes.

  They looked at the clothes in the cupboards. Dresses and coats and evening gowns hung there in profusion, and all were not only as different from those on Rhoda Comfrey’s body as a diamond is different from a ring in a cracker of considerably higher quality than those in Mrs Farriner’s shop. On the middle floor the living room was L-shaped, the kitchen occupying the space between the arms of the L.A refrigerator was still running on a low mark to preserve two pounds of butter, some plastic-wrapped vegetables and a dozen eggs. Cream-coloured carpet in the main room, coffee-coloured walls, abstract paintings, a dark red leather suite - real leather, not fake. Ornaments, excluded elsewhere, abounded here. There was a good deal of Chinese porcelain, a bowl that Wexford thought might be Sung, a painting of squat peasants and yellow birds and red and purple splashes that surely couldn’t be a Chagall original - or could it?