by Ruth Rendell
‘Grenville West was born in London. He has a degree in history. His varied career has led him from teaching through freelance journalism, with short spells as a courier, barman and antique dealer, to becoming a highly successful writer of historical romance. In the twelve years since his first book, Her Grace of Amalfi, was published, he has delighted his readers with nine more novels of which several have been translated into French, German and Italian. His novels also appear in the United States and are regularly issued in paperback. Apes in Hell was made into a successful television play, and Arden’s Wife has been serialized for radio. ‘Mr West is a francophile who spends most of his holidays in France, has a French car and enjoys French cooking. He is 35 years old, lives in London and is unmarried.’
On the face of it, Wexford thought, the man would appear to have little in common with Rhoda Comfrey. But then he didn’t really know much about Rhoda Comfrey, did he? Maybe she too had been a francophile. Mrs Parker had told him, that when a young woman, she had taught herself French. And there was firm evidence that she had wanted to write and had tried her hand at journalism. It was possible that West had met her at a meeting of one of those literary societies, formed by amateurs who aspire to have their work published, and who had invited him to address them. Then why keep the relationship dark? In saying that there was nothing unpleasant in West’s secretiveness, Vivian had only succeeded in suggesting that there was.
The library was about to close. Wexford went out and made a face at Edward Edwards who looked superciliously back at him. Stevens was waiting for him on the pavement, and together they walked back to the car which had necessarily been parked a quarter of a mile away. He had made a mental note of the name of West’s publishers, Carlyon Brent, of London, New York and Sydney. Would they tell him anything if he called them? He had a feeling they would be cagily discreet.
‘I don’t see what you’re hoping to get, anyway,’ said Burden in the morning. ‘He’s not going to have told his publishers who he gives birthday presents to, is he?’
‘I’m thinking about this girl, this Polly something or other,’ Wexford said. ‘If she does his typing in his flat, which it seems as if she does, it’s likely she also answers his phone. A sort of secretary, in fact. Therefore, someone at his publishers may be in the habit of speaking to her. Or, at any rate, it’s possible West will have told them her name.’
Their offices were located in Russell Square. He dialled the number and was put through to someone he was told was Mr West’s editor. ‘Oliver Hampton speaking.’ A dry cool public-school voice. He listened while Wexford went somewhat awkwardly into his explanation. The awkwardness was occasioned not by Hampton’s interruptions – he didn’t interrupt – but by a strong extra-aural perception, carried along fifty miles of wires, that the man at the other end was incredulous, amazed and even offended.
At last Hampton said, ‘I couldn’t possibly give you any information of that nature about one of my authors.’ The information ‘of that nature’ had merely been an address at which West could be written to or spoken to, or, failing that, the name of his typist. ‘Frankly, I don’t know who you are. I only know who you say you are.’
‘In that case, Mr Hampton, I will give you a number for you to phone my Chief Constable and check.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m extremely busy. In point of fact, I have no idea where Mr West is at this moment except that he is somewhere in the South of France. What I will do is give you the number of his agent if that would help.’
Wexford said it might and noted the number down. Mrs Brenda Nunn, of Field and Bray, Literary Agents. This would be the woman Vivian had said was middle-aged and with a husband living. She was more talkative than Hampton and less suspicious, and she satisfied herself on his bona fides by calling him back at Kingsmarkham Police Station.
‘Well, now we’ve done all that,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I really can’t be much help to you. I don’t have an address for Mr West in France and I’d never heard of Rhoda Comfrey till I read about her in the papers. I do know the name of this girl who works for him. I’ve spoken to her on the phone. It’s – well, it’s Polly Flinders.’
‘It’s what?'
‘I know. Now you can see why it stuck in my mind. Actually, it’s Pauline Flinders – heaven knows what her parents were thinking about – but Grenville – er, Mr West – refers to her as Polly. I’ve no idea where she lives.’
Next Wexford phoned Baker. The search of the electoral register had brought to light no Comfrey in the parliamentary constituency of Kenbourne Vale. Would Baker do the same for him in respect of a Miss Pauline Flinders? Baker would, with pleasure. The name seemed to afford him no amusement or even interest. However, he was anxious to help, and in addition would send a man to Kenbourne Green to inquire in all the local shops and of Grenville West’s neighbours.
‘It’s all so vague,’ said Dr Crocker who came to join them for lunch at the Carousel Cafe. ‘Even if the Comfrey woman was going under another name in London, this girl would have recognized her from the description in the papers. The photograph, unlike as it is, would have meant something to her. She’d have been in touch, she’d have read all your appeals.’
‘So therefore doesn’t it look as if she didn’t because she has something to hide?’
‘It looks to me,’ said Burden, ‘as if she just didn’t know her.’
Waiting to hear from Baker, Wexford tried to make some sort of reasonable pattern of it. Rhoda Comfrey, who, for some unknown motive, called herself something else in London, had been a fan and admirer of Grenville West, had become his friend. Perhaps she performed certain services for him in connection with his work. She might – and Wexford was rather pleased with this notion – run a photocopying agency. That would fit in with what Mrs Crown had told him. Suppose she had made copies of manuscripts for West free of charge, and he, in gratitude, had given her a rather special birthday present? After all, according to old Mrs Parker, she had become fifty years old on 5 August.
In some countries, Wexford knew, the fiftieth birthday was looked on as a landmark of great significance, an anniversary worthy of particular note. He had bought the wallet on the fourth, given it to her on the fifth, left for his holiday on the seventh, and she had come down to Kingsmarkham on the eighth. None of this got him nearer finding the identity of her murderer, but that was a long way off yet, he thought gloomily. Into the midst of these reflections the phone rang.
‘We’ve found her,’ said the voice of Baker. ‘Or we’ve found where she lives. She was in the register. West Kenbourne, All Souls Grove, number fifteen, flat one. Patel, Malina N. and Flinders, Pauline J. No number in the phone book for either of them, so I sent Dinehart round, and a woman upstairs said your Flinders usually comes in around half-four.
'D’you want us to see her for you? It’s easily done.’
‘No, thanks, Michael, I’ll come up.’
Happiness hadn’t eroded all the encrusting sourness from Baker’s nature. He was still quick to sense a snub where no snub was intended, still looking always for an effusively expressed appreciation. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said gruffly. ‘D’you know how to find All Souls Grove?’ Implicit in his tone was the suggestion that this country bumpkin might be able to find a haystack or even a needle in one, but not a street delineated in every London guide. ‘Turn right out of Kenbourne Lane Tube station into Magdalen Hill, right again into Balliol Street, and it’s the second on the left after Oriel Mews.’
Forebearing to point out that with his rank he did rate a car and a driver, Wexford said only, ‘I’m most grateful, Michael, you’re very good,’ but he was too late.
‘All in a day’s work,’ said Baker and put the phone down hard.
Wexford had sometimes wondered why it is that a plain woman so often chooses to live with, or share a flat with, or be companioned by, a beautiful woman. Perhaps choice does not enter into it; perhaps the pressure comes from the other side, from the beautiful one whose looks are
set off by the contrast, while the ill-favoured one is too shy, too humble and too accustomed to her place to resist. In this case, the contrast was very marked. Beauty had opened the front door to him, beauty in a peacock-green sari with little gold ornaments, and on hands of a fineness and delicacy seldom seen in Western women, the width across the broadest part less than three inches, rings of gold and ivory. An exquisite small face, the skin a smoky gold, peeped at him from a cloud of silky black hair.
‘Miss Patel?’ She nodded, and nodded again rather sagely when he showed her his warrant card. ‘I’d like to see Miss Flinders, please.’
The flat, on the ground floor, was the usual furnished place. Big rooms divided with improvised matchwood walls, old reject furniture, girls’ clutter everywhere – clothes and magazines, pinned-up posters, strings of beads hanging from a door handle, half-burned coloured candles in saucers. The other girl, the one he had come to see, turned slowly from having been hunched over a typewriter. An ashtray beside her was piled with stubs. He found himself thinking:
Little Polly Flinders
Sat among the cinders,
Warming her pretty little toes…
As it happened, her feet were bare under the long cotton skirt, and they were good feet, shapely and long. Perhaps, altogether, she wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t seen Malina Patel first. She wouldn’t have been bad at all but for that awful stoop, assumed no doubt in an attempt to reduce her height, though it was less than his Sylvia’s, and but for the two prominent incisors in her upper jaw. Odd, he thought, in someone of her years, child of the age of orthodontics. She came up to him, unsmiling and wary, and Malina Patel went softly away, having not spoken a word. He plunged straight into the middle of things.
‘No doubt you’ve read the papers, Miss Flinders, and seen about the murder of a Miss Rhoda Comfrey. This photograph was in the papers. Imagine it, if you can, aged by about twenty years and its owner using another name.’ She looked at the photograph and he watched her. He could make nothing of her expression, it seemed quite blank. ‘Do you think you have ever seen her? In, let us say, the company of Mr Grenville West?’
A flush coloured her face unbecomingly. Victor Vivian had described her as a blonde, and that word is very evocative, implying beauty and a glamorous femininity, a kind of Marilyn Monroe-ishness. Pauline Flinders was not at all like that. Her fairness was just an absence of colour, the eyes a watery pale grey, the hair almost white. Her blush was vivid and patchy under that pale skin, and he supposed it was his mention of the man’s name that had caused it. Not guilty knowledge, though, but love.
‘I’ve never seen her,’ she said, and then, ‘Why do you think Grenville knew her?’
He wasn’t going to answer that yet. She kept looking towards the door as if she were afraid the other girl would come back. Because her flat-mate had teased her about her feelings for the novelist?
‘You’re Mr West’s secretary, I believe?’
‘I had an advertisement in the local paper saying I’d do typing for people. He phoned me. That was about two years ago. I did a manuscript for him and he liked it and I started sort of working for him part-time.’ She had a graceless way of speaking, in a low dull monotone.
‘So you answered his phone, no doubt, and met his friends. Was there anyone among his friends who might possibly have been this woman?’
‘Oh, no, no one.’ She sounded certain beyond a doubt, and she added fatuously, with a lover’s obsessiveness, ‘Grenville’s in France. I had a card from him.’ Why wasn’t it on the mantelpiece? As she slipped the postcard out from under a pile of papers beside her typewriter, Wexford thought he knew the answer to that one too. She didn’t want to be teased about it. A coloured picture of Annecy, and ‘Annecy’ was clearly discernible on the otherwise smudged postmark. ‘Greeting from France, little Polly Flinders, the sunshine, the food, the air and the belle aujourd’hui. I shan’t want to come back. But I shall – So, see you. G.W.’ Typical of one of those literary blokes, he thought, but not, surely, the communication of a lover. Why had she shown it to him with its mention of her whimsical nickname? Because it was all she had?
He brought out the wallet and laid it down beside the postcard. What he wanted was for her to shriek, turn pale, cry out, ‘Where did you get that?’ – demolish the structure of ignorance he fancied she might carefully have built up. She did nothing but stare at it with that same guarded expression.
‘Have you ever seen this before, Miss Flinders?’
She looked at it inside and out. ‘It looks like Grenville’s wallet,’ she said, ‘the one he lost.’
‘Lost?’ said Wexford.
She seemed to gain self-confidence and her voice some animation. ‘He was coming back from the West End on a bus, and when he came in he said he’d left the wallet on the bus. That must have been Thursday or Friday week. Where did you find it?’
‘In Miss Rhoda Comfrey’s handbag.’ He spoke slowly and heavily. So that was the answer. No connection, no relationship between author and admiring fan, no fiftieth birthday present. She had found it on a bus and kept it. ‘Did Mr West report his loss?’
When she was silent she tried to cover her protruding teeth, as people with this defect do, by pushing her lower lip out over them. Now the teeth appeared again. They caused her to lisp a little. ‘He asked me to but I didn’t. I didn’t exactly forget. But someone told me the police don’t really like you reporting things you’ve lost or found. A policeman my mother knows told her it makes too much paperwork.’
He believed her. Who knew better than he that the police are not angels in uniform, sacrificing themselves to the public good? Leaving her to return to her typewriter, he went out into the big gloomy hall of the house. The flat door opened again behind him and Malina Patel appeared with a flash bright as a kingfisher. Her accent, as English and as prettily correct as his Sheila’s surprised him nearly as much as what she said.
‘Polly was here with me all the evening on the eighth. She was helping me to make a dress, she was cutting it out’ Her smile was mischievous and her teeth perfect. ‘You’re a detective, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What a freaky thing to be. I’ve never seen one before except on the TV.’ She spoke as if he were some rare animal, an eland perhaps. ‘Do people give you a lot of money? Like “Fifty thousand dollars to find my daughter, she’s all the world to me” that kind of thing?’
‘I’m afraid not, Miss Patel.’
He could have sworn she was mocking her friend’s dull naivety. The lovely face became guileless, the eyes opened hugely. ‘When you first came to the door,’ she said, ‘I thought you might be a bailiff. We had one of those before when we hadn’t paid the rates.’
Chapter 8
A red-hot evening in Kenbourne Vale, a dusty dying sun.
The reek of cumin came to him from Kemal’s Kebab House, beer and sweat from the Waterlily pub. All the eating and drinking places had their doors wide open, propped back. Children of all ages, all colours, pure races and mixed races, sat on nights of steps or rode two-and three-wheelers on hard pavements and up and down narrow stuffy alleys. An old woman, drunk or just old and sick, squatted in the entrance to a betting shop. There was nothing green and organic to be seen unless you counted the lettuces, stuffed tight into boxes outside a green-grocer’s, and they looked as much like plastic as their wrappings.
One thing to be thankful for was that now he need not come back to Kenbourne Vale ever again if he didn’t want to. The trail had gone cold, about the only thing that had this evening. Sitting in the car on the road back to Kingsmarkham, he thought about it. At first Malina Patel’s behaviour had puzzled him. Why had she come out voluntarily to provide herself or Polly Flinders with an unasked-for alibi? Because she was a tease and a humorist, he now reflected, and in her beauty dwelt with wit. Everything she had said to him had been calculated to amuse – and how she herself had smiled at the time! – all that about telly detecti
ves and bailiffs. Very funny and charming from such a pretty girl.
But no wonder Polly kept the postcard hidden and feared her overhearing their conversation. He could imagine the Indian girl’s comments. But if she hadn’t been listening at the door how the hell had she known what he had come for? Easy. The woman upstairs had told her. One of Baker’s men – that none too reliable Dinehart probably – had been round earlier in the day and let slip not only that the Kingsmarkham police wanted to talk to Polly but why they had wanted to talk to her. Malina would have read the papers, noted the date of Rhoda Comfrey’s death. He remembered how closely and somehow complacently she had looked at his warrant card.
Rather a naughty girl she was, playing detective stories and trying to throw cats among pigeons to perplex him and tease her flatmate. Ah, well, it was over now. Rhoda Comfrey had found that wallet on a bus or in the street, and he was back where he started.
Just before nine he walked into his own house. Dora was out, as he had known she would be, baby-sitting for Burden’s sister-in-law, Sylvia nowhere to be seen or heard. In the middle of the staircase sat Robin in pyjamas.
‘It’s too hot to go to sleep. You aren’t tired, are you, Grandad?’
‘Not really,’ said Wexford who was.
‘Granny said you would be but I know you, don’t I? I said to Granny that you’d want some fresh air.’
‘River air? Put some clothes on, then, and tell Mummy where you’re going.’
Twilight had come to the water meadows. ‘Dusk is a very good time for water rats,’ said Robin. ‘Dusk.’ He seemed to like the word and repeated it over and over as they walked along the river bank. Above the sluggish flow of the Kingsbrook gnats danced in lazy clouds. But the heat was not oppressive, the air was sweet and a refreshment to a London jaded spirit. However, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had it for tonight,’ Wexford said as the darkness began to deepen.