Exhibit No. Thirteen

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘In one.’

  ‘The head prefect, captain of the eleven and fifteen, classical scholar, and God knows what else … Well I’ll be damned! Talk about the past coming up and hitting you one when you’re least expecting it.’ He came to his feet and crossed to the door. ‘If ever I’ve known a time for celebration, this is it. I’ll get Anne to cook up something special and we’ll make it a real reunion …’

  ‘You’re not forgetting I’m here on business?’

  Kremayne came to a halt with his right hand on the door handle. ‘That’s right. But you’re supposed to be some sort of policeman, aren’t you?’

  ‘A split, to be technical.’

  ‘What the hell’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘A detective. Detective-Sergeant Rusk.’

  ‘Detective-Sergeant … ? Come off it, cock. I know you used to reckon I was one bloody clot, but even in my worst moments I wouldn’t swallow this one. Who are you, in fact? Chief Constable?’

  ‘Detective-Sergeant.’

  ‘You really mean that? You’re only a detective-sergeant?’

  ‘That’s the story.’

  Kremayne stared at Rusk, his large forehead creased with wrinkles of perplexity. ‘Good God!’

  Rusk lit another cigarette. Did the other have to make everything so very clear? Surely he’d learned some tact since his school days?

  ‘Old Rusky of the sixth! I’ll tell Anne to …’

  ‘You’re still forgetting the business.’

  ‘I’ll forget my own name in a minute.’ Kremayne fingered his lips, running his right forefinger along them. ‘Let’s get it over with and out of the way. What’s the trouble, officer, and I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Gawd.’

  ‘Were you convicted of indecent assault on a girl fifteen years ago?’ Rusk studied Kremayne. It was like watching a double take of a balloon deflating. At first, Kremayne was worried, unable to gain the full purport of what had been said, then his lips parted and he seemed to go pop. His body sagged slightly, and he hastily sat down in the nearest chair. Without thought, he reached over and stabbed out his cigarette in an ash-tray.

  ‘Anne … She doesn’t know. It happened before we were married.’ Kremayne looked up and his face was flushed. ‘What the hell d’you mean by raking that up? I was bloody innocent and I kept tellin’ ’em so but they were all so stupid. I picked the girl up because she lived near and was looking tired. Half-way there the kid said she’d been stung by a wasp. I stopped the car and drew off the road so as not to block it, asked the kid where the sting was and she began crying and said it was between her legs and the pain was agonising. I pulled her skirt up to have a look, couldn’t see anything and felt over her legs for a lump. The kid started to get all hysterical so I drove like the clappers to her house and told her mother what had happened. The stupid bitch went straight off to the police and told ’em I’d assaulted her precious daughter. She said her kid had never said she’d been stung and that I’d stopped the car without warning and tried to strip her … There wasn’t a single person willing to take my word against that of a dirty snivelling brat who thought it fun to cause trouble.’ Kremayne raised his right fist and thumped it down on the arm of his chair. ‘They found me guilty and I wanted to appeal but my counsel was scared and said it wouldn’t be worth it, so I let the thing ride. So what happens? You bring out the muck-rake and sling the whole thing in my face.’

  ‘There wasn’t any choice. I’m investigating the murder of Brenda Ellery.’

  ‘The girl who was raped and stabbed in Swayton Woods?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Kremayne pushed himself up from the chair and crossed to the far side of the room. He opened the top flaps of a movable cocktail cabinet that was there and a shelf of bottles swung upwards into line with the flaps. ‘I’ll take a stiff whisky right now. How about changing your mind?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  Kremayne poured himself out a king-sized whisky and added a commoner-sized soda. He returned to his chair, sat down, lit a cigarette. ‘Why the hell bring me into the Ellery killing? Was she supposed to have been stung by a wasp?’

  ‘I’m here because you have a record for a sex offence.’

  ‘Goddamn the record. I’ve just told you. I was completely innocent.’

  ‘The books say guilty.’

  Kremayne drank quickly and nosily. He puffed at the cigarette and the fingers of his left hand beat a tattoo on the arm of the chair. With an effort that was apparent, he forced himself to become calmer. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been shouting my head off, but when you’ve forgotten something as hard as I had and it suddenly comes to light, it kicks you in the crotch. Look, old man, you won’t tell Anne anything about that kid, will you?’

  ‘It’s up to you to explain or not to explain.’

  ‘God knows, she’s broad-minded, but … let’s forget it, eh?’

  ‘That’s O.K by me … About Brenda Ellery. Did you know her?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Where were you between ten-thirty at night on the eleventh and one in the morning on the twelfth?’

  ‘That’s the night before last, isn’t it? I was here. Got the last of the hay in undercover and was damned tired, so went to bed, early.’

  ‘Then that’s that.’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘The exhausting and vicious questioning is over.’ Rusk smiled. ‘If your wife will confirm you turned in early, I shall cease to bother you.’

  ‘She’ll confirm, no trouble there. But what reasons are you going to give for asking? You can’t say it was because of … that trouble.’

  ‘I’ll call it a general check.’

  Kremayne finished the whisky in his glass and stood up. ‘How about that lunch?’

  ‘Business calls, so I just can’t make it. I’ve several other people to see.’

  ‘Have they all been in trouble in the past?’

  ‘Of one sort or another.’

  Kremayne hastily spoke again as if, having deliberately broached the painful subject, he wanted as deliberately to sheer away from it. ‘If you can’t stop on now, come back tonight for dinner?’

  Rusk said yes. The DI could be informed that further inquiries had to be made.

  ‘Then that’s settled! We’ll kill the fatted calf and fill the air with talk about the good old days. Detective-Sergeant Rusk. Well, I’ll be damned!’ Kremayne crossed to the far door and opened it. ‘Anne,’ he bellowed, ‘lay on the coffee.’ He turned. ‘Hang on, weren’t you going in for the law when you left school?’

  ‘I read for the Bar and was called, but clients didn’t beat too strong a path to the door of my chambers.’ That was the understatement of the century.

  Anne Kremayne returned to the room. She carried a silver tray on which were fluted Georgian coffee and milk jugs and sugar-bowl, and three cups and saucers. She placed the tray on the table in the centre of the room. ‘I’ve put a cup on for you, Jonathan, in case you felt like it. All your business finished?’

  Her husband laughed loudly. ‘All finished and I’m to be allowed to stay free.’

  She turned and studied Rusk with a slow and deliberate look.

  He wondered whether she and the Jerk were of as opposite characters as they superficially appeared to be. ‘I’d better qualify that,’ he said, with deliberately laboured seriousness. ‘Will you tell me where your husband was on the late night of the eleventh and the early morning of the twelfth?’

  She looked quickly at her husband, then back at him. ‘Here, in this house.’

  ‘Good. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll have a cup of coffee after all,’ said Kremayne, and his loud voice was once more booming. He stepped across to the table. ‘Black and white, Rusky? … I’d like to have your honest opinion on what you think of this. Get the beans sent down from a little place in Soho I know — costs more, of course, but I reckon it’s worth it. If you want worthwhile things in this
world, you have to pay for ’em. Women, cows, or coffee, it’s all the same.’

  Rusk wondered what had really happened to that girl of twelve.

  *

  George Younger lived in the middle cottage of a row of three, set on the slight rise at the back of the village of Crepet. The rent was seven shillings and eightpence per week. Younger, a man who knew his rights, refused to do anything in the way of decorations or repairs to his home because that would have made him enrich the rapacious landlord. Fifteen panes of glass were missing from the various windows but the certain knowledge that the landlord would provide the glass and putty if he would mend them did nothing to shake his resolution.

  Younger opened the back door — almost entirely stripped of paint. He wore a collarless shirt open down to the second button to show that, despite the close heat of the day, he still kept on his thick woollen underwear. His trousers had a tear in the right knee and no attempt had been made to mend it.

  ‘George Younger?’ asked Rusk.

  Younger’s watery eyes looked beyond Rusk at the car which was parked by the hedge of lonicera nitida that managed to continue to grow despite the octopus-like grip of a nearby complete coating of bindweed.

  ‘I’m Detective-Sergeant Rusk.’

  Youngers watery eyes expressed sullen fright. ‘You wanting to come in?’

  ‘It’ll be easier.’

  The door was opened fully. Rusk went into the kitchen. It smelt of damp and dirt, of human beings and of decaying food. They passed through to the front room. The table in the centre was littered with the remains of several meals. Three glasses held dregs of beer in them and in two of these were drowned blue-bottles.

  Rusk lit a cigarette. The scene of poverty was something that tied a tight knot inside him because he could all too easily imagine himself suffering it. When such poverty was self-induced, he felt both revulsion and anger. Younger had a pension from his previous employers, the old-age pension, and a supplemental income from odd-job gardening — yet he chose to live as if teetering on the bread-line.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ mumbled Younger. ‘You’ve been knocked down for young boys, haven’t you? Three times?’

  ‘Done me time quietly.’

  ‘Where were you, the night of the eleventh?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let’s have the answers first.’

  ‘Been with me daughter-in-law, that’s where and you try and make something of that. Got back last night and glad to be’ere. She don’t like me and says so, and I ain’t never been the one to stay on where I ain’t wanted.’

  ‘What’s her address?’

  ‘Much good she’ll do you, that’s a fact. She’s one of them women what’s so tidy she’s barmy. If a bloke’s reading a paper and puts it down by’is side, there ain’t no call for a woman to yell and call’im a lot of names for being untidy, now is there? I told me son what I thought, but he wasn’t bom with no backbone. His Ma used to be proper daft and turned’im soft. I’m telling you, if I was married to that wife, I’d give’er …’

  *

  Rusk ate his lunch in a pub. The building was old but the brewery had been unable to leave well alone and had recently ‘renovated’ the bars. They now had shiny walls, plastic-tiled floors, and bright wooden bars. They had also lost all character.

  He drank a pint of cider and ate two cheese sandwiches. He wondered in which part of the country a killer was walking around, and what were the thoughts of that killer. Boastful, remorseful, or forgetful? Had the shutters already dropped, so that now he no longer remembered?

  He ordered a further half-pint of cider. If he had sufficient money, he’d never touch anything but wine. His father had always kept a modest cellar and the family had drunk wine every night. That was how he had developed a champagne taste on a beer income. Was it better to have tasted once upon a time, than never to have tasted at all?

  He left the pub and crossed to the car which was parked on the far side of the road. He drove off, turned in a farm gateway, and went back in the direction of Swayton.

  The sunlight twinkled through the pattern of trees. Because it had once filtered through the outstretched leaves of an enormous chestnut tree into Hall and flickered on the tiled floor with a restless, dancing movement, his mind was jerked back to the day Kremayne had been expelled. School had been assembled; the masters, with faces solemn and forbidding, sat on the dais. The headmaster, long, lean, and hungry, strode into Hall and stood behind the tall desk from which he read the lesson every Tuesday morning. He’d looked around him, a Zeus of wrath. Kremayne had been led in by the head porter. The headmaster had raised his pointed chin, spoken in a voice of doom and with words of almost biblical force. Kremayne was to be expelled. For many, many years no disgrace had touched the school, but now it had been clothed in the sordid coat of degradation. Only the severest action — no matter how painful to the one who spoke — could root out the canker, destroy the corrupting influences of a youth who … Who what? Rusk searched his mind. Smoking, drinking? Certainly the Jerk had indulged in those pleasures in an effort to appear worldly and old beyond his years; but he, Rusk, was convinced that the Jerk hadn’t been expelled for either of those reasons. What else did schoolboys normally get up to … ? All his mind would produce was the memory of the head’s leaning forward and with voice of ice detailing the dreadful and pitiless future that lay before a boy who … Who did what?

  The car came to the crossroads of Swayton village. On the left were council houses, the pub, and the cricket ground, on the right the local store and two rows of cottages that had been erected in the 1870s. Rusk turned right and soon came to the line of parked cars by the woods. A uniformed constable was on duty and he guided Rusk on to the grass verge.

  A second trailer, larger than the first one — it was for police conferences or interviews — had been parked in the field opposite the woods, and Vernon was standing by it. Rusk went up to the detective-constable.

  ‘Where’s the DI?’

  Vernon jerked a thumb in the direction of the first trailer. ‘In with the Old Man and Ampforth. Spitting tacks. You wouldn’t get me transferred, would you, Skipper?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to for months.’

  ‘And I never suspected you felt that way about me. More good news. The loonies have started rolling up. One of ’em’s sitting over there, has been since I don’t know when. I tried to clear him off but he’s demanding to see someone in authority. I mentioned him to the DI and nearly got my head chopped off. Just doesn’t pay in this world to try and help.’

  ‘It’s the bloke with the beard?’

  ‘That’s the Charlie.’

  Rusk sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll have to sort him out. Anything of importance broken?’

  ‘None of the results have come through from the lab. The DI has asked for fifty more men to help in the search for the knife and they’re giving him eight — they say the army’s going to be brought in with mine detectors. Two dogs are in the fields round about, doing the hedges. Nothing’s really happening, so why can’t we all go down to the sea and have a swim?’

  Rusk turned and crossed the field. Because of Vernon’s words, he became acutely aware of the sun and the warmth. Vernon was so right. It was the day for the beach and lazy waves.

  The man with the pointed beard was small and very dirty. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours,’ he snapped. His voice was high-pitched, and it carried with it a solid streak of garlic.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ replied Rusk. The beard jutted out more firmly. ‘Are you a person of authority?’

  ‘Of some small measure. Not enough to corrupt me, though.’

  The irrelevance was brushed aside. ‘I killed her, arrest me.’

  Rusk crossed his arms in front of his chest and watched a lark spring up into the air, swing round, drop back to earth. ‘Whom did you kill?’

  ‘The whore of Babylon. She was evil, and evil must be destroyed. Arrest me and arraign me before the highest tribunal
in the kingdom. I killed her with a sacred knife. She was painted red, her nails were red, her lips were red, and her heart was red. Her blood had to be made to run red, red, red.’

  Rusk saw the superintendent, Ampforth, and the DI leave the trailer. They looked as though they’d been arguing over something.

  ‘I plunged the dagger deep into her body to render pure that which was impure, to bring light into darkness, to transmute evil into goodness, to …’

  CHAPTER 5

  Kremayne was drinking too much. His movements were beginning to become loose, the sweat kept gathering on his brow, and he was becoming over-eager to re-fill the wine glasses.

  ‘So the Bar didn’t turn out too well, eh? Fancy that. D’you know something, when you were little god, we were all certain you’d be prime minister, or a lord chief justice, or a millionaire.’

  ‘You’ve told Mr Rusk that once already,’ said Anne Kremayne.

  ‘You’re a woman so you wouldn’t understand. At school you had God, big god, the headmaster, and little god, the man who was a classical scholar, head prefect and head of school, captain of the cricket eleven, captain of the rugby fifteen … He was so brilliant there wasn’t anything in the world he couldn’t do. He’d become famous and rich and shine more illustrious reflected light on the jolly old school than any previous six old boys.’ Anne Kremayne looked quickly across the dining-room table and for a brief second it seemed to Rusk as though she was trying to apologise for her husband’s behaviour. Then her gaze flicked away from Rusk’s.

  ‘And now he’s a detective-sergeant. Talk about …’ Kremayne cut short what he had been about to say. He stood up, using his right hand to maintain balance, and picked up a bottle of Pommard. ‘Drink up, Rusky, there’s plenty more where this one came from. I don’t employ the best accountant in London for the sake of his health.’ Rusk watched his glass as it was filled. It was years since he had drunk wine as good as this. Ruth and he used to celebrate birthdays by going to a restaurant for dinner and ordering the best, but when she went off with Big Buddy it had been far too painfully ironic to continue the custom on his birthday. He watched Anne Kremayne place a hand over her glass so that it could not be re-filled. She looked as though she had sat through much of her husband’s drinking.