by Ruth Rendell
‘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. Neithe
r 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 totally 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?
‘No wonder she wanted us to keep an eye on it,’ said Baker, and Clements began on a little homily, needless in this company, on the imprudence of householders, the flimsiness of locks and the general fecklessness of people who had more money than they knew what to do with.
Wexford cut him short. ‘That’s what I’m interested in.’ He pointed to a long teak writing desk in which were four drawers and on top of which stood a white telephone. He pictured Rhoda Comfrey phoning her aunt from there, her companion coming in from the kitchen perhaps with ice for drinks. Dr Lomond had warned her to keep off alcohol. There was plenty of it here in the sideboard, quite an exotic variety, Barcardi and Pernod and Campari as well as the usual whisky and gin. He opened the top drawer in the desk. A cardboard folder marked ‘Car’ held an insurance policy covering the Citroen, a registration document and a manufacturer’s handbook. No driving licence. In another, marked ‘House’, a second policy and a mass of services bill counterfoils. There was a third folder, marked ‘Finance’, but it held only a paying-in book from Barclays Bank, Montfort Circus, W19.
‘And yet she didn’t have a cheque-book or a credit card on her,’ Wexford remarked more or less to himself.
Writing paper in the second drawer, with the address of the house on it in a rather ornate script. Under the box was a personal phone directory. Wexford turned to C for Comfrey, F for father, D for dad, H for hospital, S for Stowerton, and back to C for Crown. Nothing.
Burden said in a curiously high voice, ‘There’s some more stuff here.’ He had pulled out the drawer in a low table that stood under the window. Wexford moved over to him. A car door banged outside in the street.
‘You ought to look at this,’ Burden said, and he held out a document. But before Wexford could take it there was a sound from below as of the front door being pushed open.
‘Not expecting any more of your people, are you?’ Wexford said to Baker.
Baker didn’t answer him. He and the sergeant went to the head of the stairs. They moved like burglars surprised in the course of robbery, and ‘burglars’ was the first word spoken by the woman who came running up the stairs and stopped dead in front of them. ‘Burglars! Don’t tell me there’s been a break-in!’
She looked round her at the open drawers, the disarranged ornaments. ‘Mrs Cohen said the police were in the house. I couldn’t believe it, not on the very day I come home.’ A man had followed her. ‘Oh, Bernard, look, my God! For heaven’s sake, what’s happened?’
In a hollow voice, Baker said, ‘It’s quite all right, madam, nothing has been taken, there’s been no break-in. I’m afraid we owe you an apology.’
She was a tall well-built woman who looked about forty but might have been older. She was handsome, dark, heavily made-up, and she was dressed in expensively tailored denim jeans and waistcoat with a red silk shirt. The man with her seemed younger, a blond burly man with a rugged face.
‘What are you doing with my birth certificate?’ she said to Burden.
He handed it to her meekly along with a certificate of a divorce decree. Her face registered many things, mainly disbelief and nervous bewilderment. Wexford said: ‘You are Mrs Rose Farriner?’
‘Well, of course I am. Who did you think I was?’ He told her. He told her who he was and why they were there.
‘Lot of bloody nonsense,’ said the man called Bernard. ‘If you want to make an issue of this, Rosie, you can count on my support. I never heard of such a thing.’
Mrs Farriner sat down. She looked at the photograph of Rhoda Comfrey, she looked at the newspaper Wexford gave her. ‘I think I’d like a drink, Bernard. Whisky, please. I thought you were here because burglars had got in and now you say you thought I was this woman. What did you say your name was? Wexford? Well, Mr Wexford, I am forty-one years old, not fifty, my father has been dead for nine years and I’ve never been to Kingsmarkham in my life. Thanks, Bernard. That’s better. It was a shock, you know. My God, I don’t understand how you could make a mistake like that.’ She passed the documents to Wexford who read them in silence.
Rosemary Julia Golbourne, born forty-one years before in Northampton. The other piece of paper, which was a certificate making a decree nisi absolute, showed that the marriage which had taken place between Rosemary Julia Golbourne and Godfrey Farriner at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, in April 1959 had been dissolved fourteen years later at Kenbourne County Court.
‘Had you delayed another week,’ said Mrs Farriner, ‘I should have been able to show you my second marriage certificate.’ The blond man rested his hand on her shoulder and glowered at Wexford.
‘I can only apologize very profoundly, Mrs Farriner, and assure you we have done no damage and that everything will be restored as it was.’
‘Yes, but look here, that’s all very well,’ said Bernard. ‘You come into my future wife’s home, break in more or less, go through her private papers, and all because…’
But Mrs Farriner had begun to laugh. ‘Oh, it’s so ridiculous! A secret life, a mystery woman. And that photograph! Would
you like to see what I looked like when I was thirty? For God’s sake, there’s a picture in that drawer.’ There was. A pretty girl with dark brown curls, a smiling wide-eyed face only a little softer and smoother than the same face now. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t laugh. That poor creature. But to mix me up with some old spinster who got herself mugged down a country lane!’
‘I must say you take it very well, Rosie.’ Mrs Farriner looked at Wexford. She stopped laughing.
He thought she was a nice woman, if insensitive. ‘I shan’t take it further, if that’s what you’re worrying about,’ she said. ‘I shan’t complain to the Home Secretary. I mean, now I’ve got over the shock, it’ll be something to dine out on, won’t it? And now I’ll go and make us all some coffee.’
Wexford wasn’t over the shock. He refused Baker’s offer of a lift to Victoria. Burden and he walked slowly along the pavement. Well-mannered as were the residents of Princevale Road, a good many of Mrs Farriner’s neighbours had come out to watch their departure. What some of them were afterwards to call a ‘police raid’ had made their weekend, though they pretended as they watched that they were clipping their hedges or admonishing their children. The sun shone strongly on Kenbourne Tudor, on subtly coloured paintwork and unsubtly coloured flowers, petunias striped and quartered like flags, green plush lawns where sprinklers fountained. Wexford felt hollow inside. He felt that hollow sickness that follows exclusively the making of some hideous howler or faux pas.
'There’ll be an awful row,’ said Burden unhelpfully, using the very words Robin had used two days before,
‘I suppose so. I should have listened to you.’
‘Well… I didn’t say much. It was just that I had this feeling all the time, and you know how I distrust “feelings”.’
Wexford was silent. They had come to the end of the street where it joined Montfort Hill. There he said, ‘What was the feeling? I suppose you can tell me now.’
‘You’ve asked me at exactly the right point, OK, I’ll tell you. It struck me the first time we passed this spot.’ Burden led the chief inspector a little way down Montfort Hill, away from the bus stop they had been making for. ‘We’ll suppose Rhoda Comfrey is on her way to Dr Lomond’s, whose name she’s got out of the phone book. She isn’t exactly sure where Midsomer Road is, so she doesn’t get the bus, she walks from Parish Oak station. For some reason which we don’t know she doesn’t want to give Dr Lomond her true address, so she has to give him a false one, and one that’s within the area of his practice. So far she hasn’t thought one up. But she passes these shops and looks up at that tobacconist, and what’s the first thing she sees?’