by Ruth Rendell
“Will that be two, then, madam? Car park straight on.”
“Police,” said Nicky, showing him her warrant card instead of the expected cash. “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Royall.”
He was no stranger to police inquiries, Nicky could tell. The police always can. He thumped his chest with his fist and said, “James Royall at your service, ma’am. What can I do for you?”
Nicky knew that “ma’am” wasn’t politeness or deference but intended as a joke, a parody of the style policemen use when addressing a senior female officer. James Royall was being funny.
“I’d like to talk to you about your son. Brendan—is that right?”
“Now I can’t leave my post, can I, ma’am?”
Damon Slesar turned his head, craning from side to side. “I don’t see any rush, do you? They’re not exactly queueing up.”
“We’d like to talk to you now, Mr. Royall,” Nicky said. “Whether you leave your post or find someone else to man it is immaterial to me.”
The little office or hut had an inner room. Nicky opened the door to it, walked in, and beckoned to James Royall. There were two kitchen chairs and a table doing duty as a desk. The walls were lined with shelving on which stood dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artifacts from the theme park, figurines, plastic animals, sections of tree, dollhouse, boat, all broken, all apparently awaiting repair.
Royall picked up the phone, said into it, “Mag, can you get down here. Something’s come up.” He looked toward Damon. “What about his nibs, then?”
“We’re anxious to get in touch with your son, Mr. Royall. Do you know where he is?”
“Ask me another.” Royall shrugged his shoulders. “You’ve come to the wrong shop, you know. Him and me and his mum, we’re what you might call ‘estranged.’ In other words, not exactly on speaking terms.”
“And what accounts for that, Mr. Royall?”
He transferred his glance to Nicky, whose appearance and tone, and perhaps also her rank and profession, he seemed to find amusing. A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth under the drooping mustache.
“Well, ma’am, I don’t know that that’s any business of yours, but speaking as an easygoing man, I’ll tell you. In the first place my son Brendan thought for some mysterious reason, unfathomable to me, that when I came into my old man’s property I should pass it over lock, stock, and barrel to him. Nice expression that, don’t you think? Lock, stock, and barrel. Refers to guns, of course. But you’d know all about that, ma’am. The twenty K I did give him from the sale of said property wasn’t enough, oh dear, no. So he kept coming back for more. But he didn’t care for our Euro-theme. The bull and the matador, they were among what he took exception to …”
“And the moles, dear,” said a woman’s voice from the doorway.
“Oh, and the moles, Mag. You’re right. Not wanting this place to resemble the Alps, being as we already had our Swiss area, we had the cheek to call in the mole exterminator without consulting his nibs first, and that, you might say, cooked our goose.”
Mrs. Royall, called to the receipt of custom and now perhaps unwilling to relinquish it, hovered in the doorway, continually glancing over her shoulder lest a car or party should slip past her unawares. She said to Nicky in a rather helpless way, “I’m Brendan’s mother.”
“Can you tell us your son’s whereabouts, Mrs. Royall?”
“I only wish I could. It’s been a cause of great sadness to me being cut off from my only child, and all over this passion he’s got for animals. We love animals too, I said to him, only you have to be practical in this world.”
Royall made the sound usually written as “pshaw!” “It’s not animals, it’s money. And you know damn well where he is. Keeping an eye on his future prospects. Sucking up to them as are in his grandad’s shoes.”
“And where might that be, sir?”
“Marrowgrave Hall, ma’am. As I sold to my cousin Mrs. Panick some seven years ago and passed on a fair whack of the proceeds to that greedy grasping monkeylover …”
“Oh, Jim!” wailed Mrs. Royall.
They left as another car arrived, this time with Austrian registration plates. Nicky wondered what its occupants would think of the section devoted to their motherland with its gilt-caparisoned plastic horse, bust of Mozart, and music box that played Viennese waltzes on the insertion of a ten-pee coin.
“It wasn’t the same people who brought Roxane in or Kitty and Owen in,” said Dora. “Or, rather, I’m not sure about the tall one, it might have been him, but the driver, it wasn’t him this time. This man was taller, though not so tall as the tall one, and he was thinner, and I think he was younger.
“The tall one, his was the only face I ever saw, and I saw it through a tan-colored stocking. A fairly thick stocking, twenty denier, if you know what that means. He was white, Caucasian, as they say, his features might have been sharp or they might actually have been rubbery. I couldn’t identify him. If you showed me photographs I could say he looks a bit like that or that or that, but I couldn’t positively say. I’ve no idea what color his eyes were. There was only one of them whose eye color I actually saw.
“The driver I’ve told you about. I don’t think I can add to that. I never saw his eyes. Until the very end, I never heard any of them speak, they never spoke to us. The third one, the one who helped bring Roxane in—there was a fourth, but he didn’t appear till the next day—the third had a tattoo on his arm.”
“A tattoo?”
Wexford and Burden had the same thought. This is the detective story clue, even the old-fashioned detective story clue, the ineradicable mark that is the perfect giveaway. But now, today, in reality?
“He had a tattoo on his arm?” Wexford said. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I didn’t see it till the next day. Not till Wednesday. It was a butterfly tattoo, red and black, but I suppose all tattoos are. I’ll tell you more about it when I come to that, shall I?”
“Right.”
“I said there was a fourth man the next day,” she went on. “He was one of those who brought our breakfast. He was another tall one, the same height as the first tall one, and I honestly don’t know what to say about him. He even wore gloves, so I don’t know what his hands were like. He was just a tall masked figure, tall, thin, straight, with an athletic stride, frightening really, though I’d stopped being frightened by then. I got angry, you see, and that kills fear. I couldn’t identify any of them and I don’t think the other hostages could.”
“But you didn’t see this fourth one, the gloved one, till the next day, the Wednesday?”
“That’s right. I shouldn’t have got on to him now. I shouldn’t have got on to the tattoo. You’re telling me off in the nicest possible way, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” Karen Malahyde laughed. She hesitated, then said, “Why did they let you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said one of them spoke to you?”
“It was yesterday evening. About ten. I was alone by then with Ryan, just the two of us. The others had been taken away. The tall one who wore gloves came in with the tattooed one. I was sitting on my bed—I mostly was. They motioned me to get up and hold out my hands and I did. And then they put handcuffs on me.”
Wexford made a sound, turned it into a cough. He clenched his fists and unclenched them. She looked at him, made a rueful face.
“They took me outside. I didn’t struggle or protest. I’d seen what they did to those who did that—well, to one who did that. I didn’t even say good-bye to Ryan. Well, I thought I’d be coming back. Then they put the hood on me. That was when the tattooed one spoke to me. It was only about a minute after I’d been led out but—well, that was a bad minute. I thought they were going to kill me. Still, let’s pass on. It was a shock hearing his voice.”
“What was it like?”
“His voice? Cockney, but not natural. I mean, it was like cockney that’s been learned.”
&nb
sp; Burden caught Wexford’s eye and nodded. The man who had phoned Tanya Paine had a cockney accent he thought sounded as if learned from tapes. He said to Dora, “What exactly did he say?”
“I’ll try to remember accurately. Now then—‘Tell them the suspension has been noted. Suspension isn’t enough. Work has to stop permanently. Tell them negotiations start on Sunday.’ Then he told me to repeat it and I did. I’d lost my voice from nerves, but it came back because if they were giving me a message I knew they must be sending me home.”
“They put you in a car? Did you see the car?”
“Not then. They turned the hood around so that I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see any more of the place where we were than when I arrived. They put me in the backseat of a car and fastened the seat belt on me. The drive took about an hour and a half. I’d have moved the hood around so that I could see out but what with the seat belt and the handcuffs I couldn’t. When the car stopped the driver opened the door, came around, and took off the hood. It was dark but I could see it was the same man who had brought me, the short, dark-bearded man. The one who smelled. He still smelled. He’d put on dark glasses. Shades, do they call them?
“He took off the handcuffs, undid the seat belt, and helped me out. He gave me my handbag—it was the first I’d seen of it since Wednesday. He didn’t speak, I never heard his voice. The car was parked alongside the cricket field, which is about a quarter of a mile from our house. I think he parked there because it’s just field on one side and the Methodist church and graveyard on the other. No one to see, I suppose.
“It was past midnight and all the street lamps were out. He got back into the car, leaving me there. I tried to see the registration, but it was too dark. As for the make and color, it was lightish, it could have been any of those creamy-gray colors or grayish or light blue. He didn’t put his lights on until he was a good fifty yards away. The number started with an L and ended with a five and a seven.
“After that I walked home. My house keys were in my bag. I tried to let myself in the back way but the door was bolted on the inside, so I went around to the front. But you asked me why they let me go. I’m sorry, I never really answered that. Just to deliver the message? It couldn’t be just that. I honestly don’t know why.”
“All right,” said Wexford, “that’s enough for today. You can talk some more to me at home, if you like, but that’s an end of the formal stuff for now. You’ve given us plenty to go on.”
It was as ugly a house as only the Victorians in their later architectural phases could build. The remarkable thing, as Hennessy remarked to Nicky Weaver, was that it had evidently been intended as a dwelling house and not an institution. The principal building material was brick of a yellowish khaki, the sickly color occasionally broken by lines of red tile. Eight sash windows were close up underneath the shallow slate roof. There were eight more below, these slightly deeper, but on the ground the three on either side of a front door that stood plumb in the center were set in pointed Gothic arches. It was a mean, squat front door without benefit of paneling, with no porch, not even set in a recess. Still, Marrowgrave Hall was an enormous place, as Damon Slesar saw when he walked around the side, for the whole front edifice was repeated on the back, the roof merely taking a kind of dip in the middle.
The only outbuilding was a garage, a prefabricated affair that stood separate from the house. Hennessy looked through the single window at the back but there was nothing inside except a pile of empty sacks. Nicky rang the doorbell. It was answered by a woman of enormous girth, one of those people who are so hugely fat that it is a wonder they can bear the daily heaving of this mass of flesh from place to place. She was probably still in her forties, with a pale moonface and loose mouth, a little thin reddish hair. A floral tent enveloped her, reaching to her heavily bandaged knees and shins.
“Mrs. Panick?” said Nicky.
“You’re the police, dear. We’ve been expecting you. We had a call.”
“May we come in?”
The smell was of food. It was quite a nice smell, especially if you happened to be hungry, a compound of vanilla and burnt sugar and something fruity. An occasional whiff of cheese joined in as they were led down a dour corridor, then frying bacon, finally as they entered a cavernous kitchen a heady amalgam of the lot, rich, hot, almost succulent. Their progress was necessarily slow as Patsy Panick lumbered ahead of them with difficulty. In the kitchen she stood, hanging on to a chair, getting her breath.
An elderly man was sitting at a long pine table, eating a meal, presumably his lunch, though it was not much past eleven-thirty. He was nearly but not quite as fat as his wife. Women and men put on weight differently and while his wife’s was distributed more or less evenly all over her, Robert Panick’s had rested, accumulated, swelled, and become mountainous, only on his stomach. Slesar remarked afterward, when they were on their way back through Forby, that he had read somewhere about Thomas Aquinas having to have a great ellipse cut out of the table at which he worked to accommodate the Angelic Doctor’s huge belly. Robert Panick could have done with an ellipse cut out of this one but no one had thought of it and he was obliged to sit some two feet back from the table and bend as far forward as his girth allowed to eat his food.
It had apparently been a plateful of fried meat, liver and bacon perhaps, with chips, peas, and fried bread. More of the same sizzled in two pans on the stove. A plate of Mrs. Panick’s half-eaten meal was also on the table and, approaching it, she absentmindedly lifted a forkful to her mouth.
“Give them something to eat, Patsy,” said Panick, who hadn’t otherwise seemed to notice their presence. “Some of those chocolate biscuits with the jelly in or we’ve got some frozen Mars in the freezer.”
“No, thanks,” said Slesar for all of them. “Very good of you but, no thanks all the same. We wanted to ask you about the house. You bought it off a Mr. James Royall about seven years ago, I believe?”
“That’s right, dear. Only it was six years. Jimmy’s my cousin. His daddy that lived here was my uncle. We’d always loved this house, hadn’t we, Bob? It’s a lovely old house, a real lovely antique, and when we got the chance to have it—well, Bob had done ever so well in business and just sold up, and why not blow some money on the house of our dreams? That’s what we said.”
Her husband nodded and, having finished up the last scrap of fried bread, passed his plate to her for a refill. Most of the contents of the two pans went onto it. Mrs. Panick sat down in front of her own plate and the chair emitted a long painful creak.
“You don’t mind if I go on with my meal, do you? I wish you’d have something yourselves. A nice piece of Victoria sponge? I made it myself this morning. Well, all right, if you’re sure. Our needs are very modest, dear, as you see, and we don’t run a car, there’s a very nice delicatessen in Pomfret that delivers twice a week, so we felt we could afford the place and the upkeep, and we manage quite okay, don’t we, Bob? Mind you, I think my cousin Jimmy made a special price for us, us being family.”
“The son, Brendan,” Nicky said, “I suppose you know him too?”
“Know him? He’s more like a son to us. I mean, first cousin once removed, that’s a laugh. He’s like our own. And he won’t have anything to do with Jimmy and Mag, dear. Says his dad’s cruel to animals as well as cheating him out of his inheritance and it is true my uncle John often said Brendan could have the place when he went. His dad did give him a bit of the money we paid over but he spent most of it on his Euro-theme. Still, I said to Brendan, ‘Don’t you worry, dear, it’ll be yours one day.’ ”
“Meaning?”
“That we’d leave it to him in our wills.”
“So you see him?”
“See him? He always pops in when he’s down this way. I say to Bob, Brendan’s made us his parents since his own was so unsatisfactory. We’re—what’s the term I want?—yes, surrogate, we’re surrogate parents for Brendan. And I think he knows he’ll always get a good meal here. Now you’ve
eaten all the rest of that fry-up, Bob, I’m going to have to find myself something else.”
“There’s a pudding, isn’t there?” said Panick in the tone of someone asking a bank manager if it can possibly be true his account is in the red.
“Of course there’s a pudding. When have I served you a meal without a pudding? Not in all our married life. But I’ve got an empty corner wants filling now and I reckon I’ll have to attack the Camembert the way the French do, before the dessert, right?”
“Do you know where Brendan is now, Mrs. Panick?”
“Well, he won’t be with his mum and dad, dear. That’s for sure. Nottingham maybe? He was down here a couple of weeks back, no, I tell a lie, more like a month, something to do with butterflies or frogs, he loves animals, does Brendan. That’s his work, you know, saving animals, a bit like the RSPCA. And he came in to see us and we happened to be having pheasant that night, frozen of course, the season not starting till next month, but none the worse for that, and I did bread sauce and orange sauce though that’s not strictly the thing with pheasant, and oven chips and a suet roll to fill up and a chocolate roulade with clotted cream.
“He came rolling down our drive as happy as a lark at just on five and parked the van right outside the kitchen window so that he could get the cooking smells, he said.”
“He lives in a van?” said Hennessy, trying not to sound too aghast.
“Well, a Winnebago is the correct term, dear. He’s always on the move. You never know where he is from one moment to the next.”
“He hasn’t a fixed address?”
“Not what you’d call fixed. Not unless you count this one.”
“We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know if he turns up here.”
“You can be sure of that,” said Patsy Panick, which wasn’t at all what Nicky expected.