by Ruth Rendell
“And Miller, did he bring a manuscript?”
“You asked me that before,” she said. “He may have. How would I know? If he did Owen didn't say anything to me about it. He didn't like us laughing at them. He's got a soft heart, poor old thing, so maybe he kept it dark. He was well then, of course.”
Wexford wondered which piece of information that he had given her or question he had asked was responsible for the huge improvement in her spirits since she first walked into the house. Then she had been tense, anxious, but now as they left, her step was lighter and she looked young. It was no longer too difficult to believe that eleven years ago she had been the lover of a man of thirty-two.
“I'm off to see Owen,” she said conversationally. “With Maeve, of course. I mean, she'll have to drive me. I'm not prepared to go on the bus. You wouldn't give me a lift, I suppose?”
“I'm afraid not, Miss Ricardo,” he said.
His destination led him in the opposite direction to hers, back into Kingsmarkham. This suburban estate-many like it had sprung up around the town-lay quietly under a mother-of-pearl sky, November's sunset colors. One of the residents daringly mowed his lawn, another was cutting the last roses of the year, the bruised and misshapen flowers of late autumn. Irene McNeil's house had the indefinable look homes have in the daytime when their occupants are asleep. A shuttered silent look, a stillness.
If he hadn't known someone must be at home, Wexford would have given up after the second ring. But he pressed the bell a third time, there was a patter of soft footsteps, and Greg opened the door. Five minutes before, Wexford was sure, he had been asleep, had combed his hair on the way to let him in. His face was like the face of an infant who has been wakened too soon. But he wasn't one to lose his cool, as he might have said himself.
“Hi, Mr. Wexford, how're you?”
When this vacuous greeting started to become commonplace, Wexford resolved not to answer it in any circumstances. “I'd like to see Mrs. McNeil.”
“Oh, dear, she's fast asleep.”
“You'll do,” Wexford said. “In fact, you may do even better.”
Greg's smile grew wary as he invited Wexford in. “My pleasure,” he murmured but looked rather startled when asked for his full name.
“Gregory Brewster-Clark,” he said, and then, “May I ask why you want to know?”
“Well, yes, you may.” For a moment Wexford considered telling him he might ask but not necessarily get an answer. He relented. “You may think it outdated of me,” he said, “but I don't much care to call people I don't know by their given names.”
It was plain that Greg didn't know what a given name was. But he had got his answer and cheered up, skipping into the kitchen and asking if he could get him anything. Wexford thought he was more like a hairdresser than a carer. He could imagine him with scissors in his hand, asking a client if he wanted a teeny fraction more off the back.
“I'd like to see inside the cupboards and drawers,” he said.
Greg seemed to see nothing odd about this request. As far as he was concerned, any visitor male or female must have a burning desire to see his handiwork. Everything was clean and neat, sterile-looking and smelling of chlorine, as if an anesthetized patient might be brought in at any moment to await surgery. Happily, Greg opened one wall cupboard after another, displaying rows and stacks of matching china and glass. If there was food in this place it must all have been kept inside the fridge. A knife rack caught Wexford's attention but there was nothing of interest to be found in it.
Fortunately, it never seemed to occur to Greg to ask him what right he had to search Mrs. McNeil's kitchen. The word “warrant” would perhaps have been foreign to him. Wexford had expected an argument but, as he told Burden later, all he got was smiling acquiescence and a cup of excellent tea.
“First I had a look at the knife rack but the knives were all the same, with plain black handles. Then I asked to see inside the drawers. Greg showed not the least sign of suspicion. Maybe it's normal in the households where he works for visitors to scrutinize the culinary arrangements. Anyway, no knife. I asked him if there'd been a knife in any of the cupboards or drawers when he first arrived and did all this tidying up but he said no. I said I'd wait for Mrs. McNeil to wake up. I wanted to get back to this story of hers about the knife being stolen by the cleaner. For some reason I'd begun to believe it.”
Up till now having looked increasingly bored, Burden brightened. He lifted his beer tankard to his lips as if celebrating.
“Greg gave me tea. He gave me biscuits. He talked to me about all the various jobs he'd had, the hotels he'd worked in, his training as a nurse, as an overnight carer, on and on. I thought she'd never wake up. In the end I got him to wake her and he did-gently yet effectively, I must say.”
Burden nodded. “What happened?”
“I asked her. It always amazes me, Mike, the way our-er, customers lie and lie and when we finally tell them we know they've lied, we can prove they've lied, their lying is a fact, they're not ashamed, they don't say they're sorry or they feel guilty and what must we think of them, they just say, ‘Okay,’ or, ‘Right, so what?’ ”
Burden was quickly dismissive. “Well, they're a bunch of villains, aren't they? Low life. And Irene McNeil may be an upper-class snob, but she's as bad as any of them. What did she say?”
“When she went back to the house two years ago-on her way to have tea with the Pickfords, if you recall-she says she didn't look at the body, but she saw the knife lying on the floor of the cellar. She put it in her bag, where it presumably remained during the old ladies' tea party, then took it home with her. At this point she seems to have got confused because instead of seeing it as a useful piece of evidence in Ronald McNeil's defense, she decided it was a dangerous weapon, as indeed it is, and would somehow further implicate her husband and herself. I was angry by this time, Mike. I asked her if she knew wasting police time was an offense and she had recourse to ‘women's weapons, waterdrops.’ ” Wexford shook his head ruefully. “Hannah would lose all respect for me if she heard me say that.”
“You mean she cried?”
“That's it. Then she says she had a cleaner at the time-I had to listen to a long catalog of the woman's shortcomings-and this cleaner found the knife in a drawer somewhere and stole it.”
“And you believed her?”
“Just wait. I got the woman's name out of her and who do you think it is?”
“How should I know, Reg?”
“You're exactly the one who would know. She's called Leeanne Fincher, mother of Darrel Fincher. Remember her? She's the woman who gave her son a knife ‘for his own protection.’ ”
Burden laughed. “Amazing. We took the knife off him. We've still got it.”
“Excellent,” said Wexford. “I may add obstructing the police to the charges she already faces just the same. I've lost patience with Mrs. M. She may be old, but she's old in sin too. I'm going to show that knife to Bridget Cook, though I'm not at all sure what's the point of it, no pun intended.”
“So Miller did take the knife into the bathroom with him?”
“I don't think so. After McNeil shot Miller I think he searched the clothes in the kitchen, found the thousand pounds, which of course he was far too upright and honest to touch, but he also found the knife. He put it in the bathroom beside the body and later removed it to the cellar, maybe thinking it would help his cause with his wife if she could be made to believe he'd acted in self-defense.” Wexford cast up his eyes. “He need not have bothered. She's quite as ruthless as he was.”
22
He met Iman Dirir by chance in the High Street as she was coming out of Kingsmarkham's only Asian dress shop. She was carrying one of their black and gold bags.
“They're not supposed to be for Africans, but we wear much the same clothes,” she told Wexford. “I've been buying a salwar kameez for my niece's wedding. She's marrying a very handsome Englishman at St. Peter's next Saturday.”
We
xford looked his inquiries.
“She's a Christian, Mr. Wexford. You get all sorts in Somalia, animists too.”
As far as he knew, the latter worshipped stones and trees but he might be wrong, so he left it. “Will the Imrans be there?”
“At the wedding? Oh, no, I doubt it. My sister and her husband hardly know them, and my niece doesn't at all.”
“But they'll be back by then?”
“I think so. I think they're expected back on Thursday.”
He walked back to the police station, passing A Passage to India, where, behind the glass, the shimmering curtains, and the artificial lilies, he glimpsed Matea setting tables. Bridget Cook was expected in his office at two. Williams, the partner apparently without a first name, put up no opposition to her traveling to Kingsmarkham, though Wexford doubted if she had told him the true reason for her journey. As he waited he thought about people who make prisons for themselves where none need exist. This woman had landed herself with a man who was a jealous jailer, simply to avoid being alone. Tredown, who evidently cared very little for either of his two wives, had been put under house arrest by them, who wanted him only as a slave to labor for their keep. Now that The First Heaven was to be a film, for which Tredown had no doubt been liberally paid and from which his widow and ex-wife would enjoy the royalties, they were indifferent to his life or death.
Hannah brought Bridget into the office. An old-fashioned expression came into his mind when he saw her: “raw-boned.” A description everyone understood but which seemed meaningless. She wasn't thin yet the bones seemed to protrude through her skin. Her hands were like a man's and the ring on the left one, with its delicate tracery of leaves, looked incongruous. She sat down heavily but flinched a little when Wexford showed her the knife.
“I don't know,” she said. “I only saw it the once. It was the guys he hung out with, a rough lot, they were. He said he needed it for his own protection. He never used it, though. I'm sure he never did.”
“You said he was a poet. He wrote poetry to you.” Wexford was conscious of how absurd this would sound and look to an unseen observer, the human fly on the wall. This woman and poetry could hardly be set side by side without raising a raucous laugh. Yet love, he knew, is no respector of beauty or grace. Like the wind that blows where it lists, it can strike almost anyone for almost anyone else. People have no need of love potions in order to fall in love with the ass's ears. He noted the serious nod she gave, the acceptance that she was worthy of verses dedicated to her. “Did he write anything else?” he asked. “A play? A piece of fiction?”
“I don't know. Maybe. He wasn't educated, but he told me he'd written a book once. Poems and a sort of diary, he said it was.”
“When did you first meet Samuel Miller, Miss Cook?”
“Sometime in '98, it would have been. He moved in with me like in the winter. We was on a site near Southend then. He'd go away a bit, but he always came back. We went strawberry picking up near Hereford in the June, and he said they wanted pickers at Morella's in Flagford in the September. That was when he said we'd best get married. I said I was years older than him, but he said, So what? He'd always fancied older women.”
Claudia Ricardo, Wexford thought. “He'd been to Flagford three years before?”
“That's right. Morella's had got a proper campsite, not like the field they had to camp on when he was there before and two guys went after them with guns.”
“Guns?”
“That's what he said.”
Adam Thayer brought in the tea. It was scalding hot, but Bridget Cook drank hers greedily. “Go on, Miss Cook.”
“He wanted to look up old pals while he was there, he said. Them was his words, ‘old pals.’ There might be some money in it. They owed him. The day after he'd fixed up our wedding we went picking-it was Victorias-and when we got back he said he was off to see his pals and then have a bit of a wash in a house that was empty on account of our shower going wrong. I waited and waited for him, but when it got to midnight I just knew he wasn't coming back. I just knew, I don't know how. It was a funny thing because I thought he really liked me. Maybe it's just that men are a funny lot-sorry, I didn't mean you.”
Wexford assured her he hadn't taken it personally. That made two women who waited for their men to come back and waited in vain, one eleven years before, the other three years after that. He still couldn't tell if there was any connection between the two men, but nor could he believe in so great a coincidence.
Sheila was with her mother on the following evening. She had left the children at home with their father and the nanny while she attended the second meeting of the African Women's Health Action Group. Wexford thought of telling her about the Imrans taking their five-year-old daughter home to Somalia and his questioning of their motives. He thought of it and dismissed it. She would launch into one of her impassioned speeches, a denunciation of injustice, wanton cruelty, child abuse, and, most telling for him, a catalog of instructions as to what violent action he ought to take, and take within the next couple of hours. Instead he asked her about the film. Had shooting started yet?
“It won't for ages, Pop. Months.”
“I hope they're paying you well, though I don't suppose it's Hollywood sort of money.”
“Well, no,” she said, “but it's not bad. Did you know the author's very ill? He's not expected to live to see the film. Isn't that sad?”
“They must have paid him a lot for the rights.”
“You're untypically interested in money today, Pop.”
He laughed. “I've met him, you know. I could say I know him. I suppose it will all go to his wife.”
“Who else?” said Sheila and she went off to get ready for her meeting.
Dora went with her in the black Mercedes with the handsome driver, but Wexford sat on, watching rain, then hailstones, lash the French windows, waiting for Burden to come and share his red-wine ration. No doubt the inspector would defer leaving his house until the rain, forecast as only a shower, passed away over the horizon. He turned his thoughts toward Tredown in the Pomfret hospice. Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days. Where did that come from? The funeral service, he thought. It was only those with a terminal illness who knew these things and then not accurately. Tredown could only say, I have sixty days at most and (for example) twenty days at least. Did he look back on his life and think it had been good? A wife he had divorced, a second wife whom it was hard to believe anyone could love, those dull Bible-based novels, that one good enduring book he had written… If he had written it.
The doorbell ringing made Wexford jump. He got up to let Burden in. The inspector was rather wet, his hair plastered down, raindrops on his face like tears except that he was smiling. “I got caught in it, stood under a tree till it stopped. Don't say I might have been struck by lightning, I know that already.”
“There wasn't any lightning, was there?”
“According to my wife, there's always lightning when there are hailstones.”
Wexford poured two large glasses of claret. “I was thinking about Tredown.” He raised his glass, said, “Owen Tredown. May he have a peaceful end, and soon.”
Burden raised his eyebrows. “Tredown by all means,” he said, “but why now?”
“He can't live long. I suppose I pity him. I may be wrong, but I imagine him lying in that place-that very nice place, I'm sure-regretting what he's done, regretting that he stole Samuel Miller's manuscript. Because I think it was Miller's. I think Miller wrote The First Heaven, or at any rate wrote an outline for it or a draft.”
“That roughneck? That knife-carrying lowlife?” Wexford had never seen such a look of distaste mixed with incredulity on his friend's face. “Claudia Ricardo told you he was always getting manuscripts sent him by people he'd taught in creative writing classes. Why not one of them?”
“Look at the facts, Mike. Eleven years ago Tredown and the two women were scraping along on what Tredown was making out of those books of his
. That and the little bit he got from teaching. And it would have been a little bit. There aren't that many creative writing courses in this country and the ones there are don't pay generously. Neither of the women worked, remember. Claudia boasted that she'd never worked in her life.
“Then along comes Samuel Miller. A roughneck, a lowlife, as you put it, but have we any reason to believe great artists-for the author of The First Heaven is or was a great popular artist-have we any reason to believe such people are all respectable middle-class law-abiding citizens? Genet spent most of his life in prison, Marlowe died in a tavern brawl, Baudelaire was a syphilitic drug addict-no, that argument doesn't work.”
“You're saying Miller brought this manuscript with him on a couple of weeks of fruit picking in Flagford? Would he have known Tredown lived here?”
“Why not? He may have attended one of Tredown's classes. The fact that Bridget Cook doesn't know it means nothing. This would have been three years before Bridget met him. Even if he hadn't been Tredown's student, pupil, or whatever, the location of Tredown's home if not his actual address appears on the jackets of his books. Can't you imagine him finding out fruit-pickers were wanted in a Sussex village called Flagford and that name resonating with him?” He could see he had awakened Burden's interest-more than that, his enthusiasm. Burden's face wore that narrow-eyed speculative look that commanded his features when he was on the verge of excitement. He had drawn his brows together. “Go on,” Wexford said. “You take it from there.”
Burden nodded. “Okay. So he's written this book or done this plan and draft or whatever they do and he takes it with him to Flagford in the hope he may find a way of seeing Tredown. Probably he doesn't know the field they set up camp on is next door to Tredown's house, but he soon finds out. They haven't been camped there that long when Grimble junior and his pal Bill Runge turn up and drive them off the land with sticks…”