Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  He tried placing one letter of the alphabet after another to follow the diphthong after the O and settled at last with absolute conviction for ‘aeonism’. Which must have something to do with aeons. So she had only meant that, in order for sexual equality to be perfected, those who desired it would have to transcend the natural course of time. He felt disappointed and let down, because, with a curious shiver in that heat, he had felt he had found the key. The word had not been entirely new to him. He fancied he had heard it before, long before Sylvia spoke it, and it had not meant transcending time at all.

  Well, he wasn’t getting very far cogitating like this. He might as well go back. It was after five, and by now Burden might have got results. He left the cemetery as they were about to close the gates and got a suspicious look from the keeper who had been unaware of his presence inside. But outside the library he thought of that elusive word again. He had a large vocabulary because in his youth he had always made a point of looking up words whose meaning he didn’t know. It was a good rule and not one reserved to the young. This was the place for which Grenville West had a ticket and where Wexford himself had first found his books. Now he spared them a glance on his way to the reference room. Four were in, including Apes in Hell, beneath whose covers Rhoda Comfrey’s name lurked with such seeming innocence.

  The library had only one English dictionary, the Shorter Oxford in two bulky volumes. Wexford took the first one of these down, sat at the table and opened it. ‘Aeolism’ was not given, and he found that ‘aeolistic’ meant what he thought it did and that it was an invention of Swift’s. ‘Aeon’ was there - an age, or the whole duration of the world, or of the universe; an immeasurable period of time; eternity’. ‘Aeonian’ too and ‘aeonial’, but no ‘aeonism’ Could Sylvia have made it up, or was it perhaps the etymologically doubtful brain-child of one of her favourite Women’s Lib writers? That wouldn’t account for his certainty that he had himself previously come across it. He replaced the heavy tome and crossed the street to the Police Station.

  Baker was on the phone when he walked in, chatting with such tenderness and such absorption that Wexford guessed he could only be talking to his wife. But the conversation, though it appeared only to have been about whether he would prefer fried to boiled potatoes for his dinner and whether he would be home by six or could make it by ten to, put him in great good humour. No, no calls had come in for Wexford. Loring had not returned, and he, Baker, thought it would be a good idea for the two of them to adjourn at once to the Grand Duke. Provided, of course, that this didn’t delay him from getting home by ten to six.

  ‘I’d better stay here, Michael,’ Wexford said rather awkwardly, ‘If that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Be my guest, Reg. Here’s your young chap now.’

  Loring was shown in by Sergeant Clements. ‘She came in at half past four, sir. I told her to expect you some time after six-thirty.’

  He had no idea what he would say to her, though he might have if only Burden would phone. The word still haunted him. ‘Would you mind if I made a call?’ he said to Baker.

  Humouring him had now become Baker’s line. ‘I said to be my guest, Reg. Do what you like.’ His wife and the fried potatoes enticed him irresistibly. ‘I’ll be off then.’ With stoical resignation, he added, ‘I daresay we’ll be seeing a good deal of each other in the next few days.’

  Wexford dialled Sylvia’s number. It was Robin who answered.

  ‘Daddy’s taken Mummy up to London to see Auntie Sheila in a play.’

  The Merchant of Venice at the National. She was playing Jessica, and her father had seen her in the part a month before. Another of those whispers hissed at him from the text - ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.’ To the boy he said:

  ‘Who’s with you, then? Grandma?’

  ‘We’ve got a sitter,’ said Robin. ‘For Ben,’ he added.

  ‘See you,’ said Wexford just as laconically, and put the receiver back. Clements was still there, looking, he thought, rather odiously sentimental. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘would you by any chance have a dictionary in this place?’

  ‘Plenty of them, sir. Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, you name it, we’ve got it. Have to have on account of all these immigrants. Of course we do employ interpreters, and a nice packet they make out of it, but even they don’t know all the words. And just as well, if you ask me. We’ve got French too and German and Italian for our Common Market customers, and common is the word. Oh, yes, we’ve got more Dick, Tom and Marias, as my old father used to call them, than they’ve got down the library.’

  Wexford controlled an impulse to throw the phone at him. ‘Would you have an English dictionary?’

  He was almost sure Clements would say this wasn’t necessary as they all spoke English, whatever the hoi polloi might do. But to his surprise he was told that they did and Clements would fetch it for him, his pleasure. He hadn’t been gone half a minute when the switchboard, with many time-wasting inquiries, at last put through a call from Burden. He sounded as if the afternoon had afforded him work that had been more distressing than arduous.

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long. I’m not so tough as I think I am. But, God, the sights you see in these places. What it boils down to is that John Grenville West left the Abbotts Palmer when he was twenty . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t get excited,’ Burden said wearily. ‘Only because they hadn’t the facilities for looking after him properly. He isn’t a mongol at all, whatever your Mrs Parker said. He was born with serious brain damage and one leg shorter than the other. Reading between the lines, from what they said and didn’t say, I gather this was the result of his mother’s attempt to procure an abortion.’

  Wexford said nothing. The horror was all in Burden’s voice already. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell me,’ said the inspector savagely, ‘that it was wrong to legalize abortion.’ Wexford knew better than to say at this moment that it was Burden who had always told himself, and others, that.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘In a place near Eastbourne. I went there. He’s been nothing more than a vegetable for eighteen years. I suppose the Crown woman was too ashamed to tell you. I’ve just come from her. She said it was ever so sad, wasn’t it, and offered me a gin.’

  Chapter 20

  The dictionaries Clements brought him, staggering under their weight, turned out to be the Shorter Oxford in its old vast single volume and Webster’s International in two volumes.

  ‘There’s a mighty lot of words in those, sir. I doubt if anyone’s taken a look at them since we had that nasty black magic business in the cemetery a couple of years back and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to spell mediaeval.’

  It was the associative process which had led Rhoda Comfrey to give Dr Lomond her address as 6 Princevale Road, and that same process that had brought Sylvia’s obscure expression back to Wexford’s mind. Now it began to operate again as he was looking through the Addenda and Corrigenda to the Shorter Oxford.

  ‘Mediaeval?’ he said. ‘You mean you weren’t sure whether there was a diphthong or not?’ The sergeant’s puzzled frown made him say hastily, ‘You weren’t sure whether it was spelt i, a, e - or i, e, was that it?’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’ Clements’ need to put the world right - or to castigate the world - extended even to criticizing lexicographers. ‘I don’t know why we can’t have simplified spelling, get rid of all these unnecessary letters. They only confuse schoolkids, I know they did me. I well remember when I was about twelve . . .’ Wexford wasn’t listening to him. Clements went on talking, being the kind of person who would never have interrupted anyone when he was speaking, but didn’t think twice about assaulting a man’s ears while he was reading. ‘. . . And day after day I got kept in after school for mixing up “there” and “their”, if you know what I mean, and my father said . . . ’

  Diphthongs, thought Wexford. Of course. That ae was just an angliciz
ation of Greek eeta, wasn’t it, or from the Latin which had a lot of ae’s in it? And often these days the diphthong was changed to a single e, as in modern spelling of mediaeval. So his word, Sylvia’s word, might appear among the E’s and not the A’s at all. He heaved the thick wedge of pages back to the E section. ‘Eolienne’ - ‘a fine dress farbric’ . . . ‘Eosin’ - ‘a red dye-stuff . . . Maybe Sylvia’s word had never had a diphthong, maybe it didn’t come from Greek or Latin at all, but from a name or a place. That wasn’t going to help him, though, if it wasn’t in the dictionaries. Wild ideas came to him of getting hold of Sylvia here and now, of calling a taxi and having it take him down over the river to the National Theatre, finding her before the curtain went up in three-quarters of an hour’s time . . . But there was still another dictionary.

  ‘Harassment, now,’ the sergeant was saying. ‘There’s a word I’ve never been able to spell, though I always say over to myself, “possesses possesses five s’s”.’

  Webster’s International. He didn’t want it to be international, only sufficiently comprehensive. The E section. ‘Eocene’, ‘Eolienne’ - and there it was.

  ‘Found what you’re looking for, sir?’ said Clements.

  Wexford leant back with a sigh and let the heavy volume fall shut. ‘I’ve found, Sergeant, what I’ve been looking for for three weeks.’

  Rather warily, Malina Patel admitted them to the flat. Was it for Loring’s benefit that she had dressed up in harem trousers and a jacket of some glossy white stuff, heavily embroidered? Her black hair was looped up in complicated coils and fastened with gold pins.

  ‘Polly’s in an awful state,’ she said confidingly. ‘I can’t do anything with her. When I told her you were coming I thought she was going to faint, and then she cried so terribly. I didn’t know what to do.’

  Perhaps, Wexford thought, you could have been a friend to her and comforted her, not spent surely a full hour making yourself look like something out of a seraglio. There was no time now, though, to dwell on forms of hypocrisy, on those who will seek to present themselves as pillars of virtue and archetypes of beauty even at times of grave crisis.

  Making use of those fine eyes - could she even cry at will? - she said sweetly, ‘But I don’t suppose you want to talk to me, do you? I think Polly will be up to seeing you. She’s in there. I said to her that everything would be all right if she just told the truth, and then you wouldn’t frighten her. Please don’t frighten her, will you?’

  Already the magic was working on Loring who looked quite limp. It had ceased to work on Wexford.

  ‘I’d rather frighten you, Miss Patel,’ he said. Her eyelashes fluttered at him. ‘And you’re wrong if you think I don’t want to talk to you. Let us go in here.’

  He opened a door at random. On the other side of it was a squalid and filthy kitchen, smelling of strong spices and of decay, as if someone had been currying meat and vegetables that were already rotten. The sink was stacked up to the level of the taps with unwashed dishes. She took up her stand in front of the sink, too small to hide it, a self-righteous but not entirely easy smile on her lips.

  ‘You’re very free with your advice,’ he said. ‘Do you find in your experience that people take it?’

  ‘I was only trying to help,’ she said, slipping into her little’ girl role. ‘It was good advice, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You didn’t take my good advice.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Not to lie to the police. The scope of the truth, Miss Patel, is very adequately covered by the words of the oath one takes in the witness box. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. After I had warned you, you obeyed - as far as I know - the first injunction and the third but not the second. You left out a vital piece of truth.’

  She seized on only one point. ‘I’m not going into any witness box!’

  ‘Oh, yes you will. One thing you may be sure of is that you will. Yesterday morning you received a phone call, didn’t you? From the manager of the Trieste Hotel.’

  She said sullenly, ‘Polly did.’

  ‘And when Miss Flinders realized that Mr West’s car had been found, you told her that the police would be bound to find out. Did you advise her to tell us? Did you remember my advice to you? No. You suggested that the best thing would be to bring her to us with the old story that your conscience had been troubling you.’

  She shifted her position, and the movement sent the dirty plates subsiding over the edge of the bowl.

  ‘When did you first know the facts, Miss Patel?’

  A flood of self-justification came from her. Her voice lost its soft prettiness and took on a near-cockney inflexion. She was shrill. ‘What, that Polly hadn’t been in a motel with a married man? Not till last night. I didn’t, I tell you, I didn’t till last night. She was in an awful state and she’d been crying all day, and she said I can’t tell him that man’s address because there isn’t a man. And that made me laugh because Polly’s never had a real boy-friend all the time I’ve known her, and I said, “You made it up?” And she said she had. And I said, “I bet Grenville never kissed you either, did he?” So she cried some more and . . .’ The faces of the two men told her she had gone too far. She seemed to remember the personality she wished to present and to grab at it in the nick of time. ‘I knew you’d find out because the police always did, you said. I warned her you’d come, and then what was she going to say?’

  ‘I meant,’ Wexford tried, ‘when did you know where Miss Flinders had truly been that night?’

  Anxiety gone - he wasn’t really cross, men would never really be cross with her - she smiled the amazed smile of someone on whom a great revelatory light has shone. ‘What a weird thing! I never thought about that.’

  No, she had never thought about that. About her own attractions and her winning charm she had thought, about establishing her own ascendancy and placing her friend in a foolish light, about what she called her conscience she had thought, but never about the aim of all these inquiries. What a curiously inept and deceiving term Freud had coined, Wexford reflected, when he named the conscience the super-ego!

  Chapter 21

  ‘It never occurred to you then that a girl who never went out alone after dark must have had some very good reason for being out alone all that evening and half the night? You didn’t think of that aspect? You had forgotten perhaps that that was the evening of Rhoda Comfrey’s murder?’

  She shook her head guilelessly 'No, I didn’t think about it. It couldn’t have had anything to do with me or Polly.’

  Wexford looked at her steadily. She looked back at him, her fingers beginning to pick at the gold embroideries on the tunic whose whiteness set off her orchid skin. At last the seriousness of his gaze affected her, forcing her to use whatever powers of reasoning she had. The whole pretty sweet silly facade broke, and she let out a shattering scream.

  ‘Christ,’ said Loring.

  She began to scream hysterically, throwing back her head. The heroine, Wexford thought unsympathetically, going mad in white satin. ‘Oh, slap her face or something,’ he said and walked out into the hall. Apart from the screeches, and now the choking sounds and sobs from the kitchen, the flat was quite silent. It struck him that Pauline Flinders must be in the grip of some overpowering emotion, or stunned into a fugue, not to have reacted to those screams and come out to inquire. He looked forward with dread and with distaste to the task ahead of him.

  All the other doors were closed. He tapped on the one that led to the living room where he had interviewed her before. She didn’t speak, but opened the door and looked at him with great sorrow and hopelessness. Everything she wore and everything about her seemed to drag her down, the flopping hair, the stooping shoulders, the loose overblouse and the long skirt, compelling the eye of the beholder also to droop and fall. Today there was no script on the table, no paper in the typewriter. No book or magazine lay open. She had been sitting there waiting - for how many hours
? - paralysed, capable of no action.

  ‘Sit down. Miss Flinders,’ he said. It was horrible to have to torture her, but if he was to get what he wanted he had no choice. ‘Don’t try to find excuses for not telling me the name of the man you spent the evening of August eighth with. I know there was no man.’