Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I want to hear everything.’

  ‘Old stuff from years ago?’ She frowned, thinking back. Then she said, ‘I’d like you to find who killed Adela and I’d like him to get his just desserts. Not that that’ll be much these days—five years inside doing an Open University degree, I daresay, and then let him out with a new suit and fifty quid out of the poor box.’

  ‘Not quite that,’ said Wexford who couldn’t help smiling.

  She said abruptly, ‘They had to get married, you know.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Adam and Adela. You know what the expression means, I suppose? They used it in your young days as well as mine. Don’t any more of course. Girls have babies or abortions and as often as not from what I hear it’s the boys who beg the girls to marry them. Adela fell in love with Adam the first moment she saw him. His sister had been at school with us too and she asked us to be her bridesmaids and that’s how we came to meet Adam. We were all twenty-four and Adam was twenty-one. He was up at Oxford. Well, I’ve never been much for men as I think I said the other day but Adam was something else again as the young folks say. He wasn’t handsome, he was beautiful. You hear people talk about ‘tall, dark and handsome’ but to my mind there’s nothing to beat a really good-looking fair man. Sound soppy, don’t I, but he was like a god in a painting.

  ‘I was very fond of Adela, very. Anyway I think she’d have been the first to agree with me she was never much to look at. Mind you, she came from a very good family. The Aylhursts, you know. They’re a cadet branch of the Staffordshire Aylhursts, nothing wrong there.’ She hesitated. Wexford hadn’t guessed her a snob and was surprised to find such frank snobbery in her. But there, she had been Mrs Knighton’s closest friend… ‘Gerald Aylhurst was her father. He was the Recorder of Salop. I can’t tell you how Adam came to be interested in her. I don’t know. Perhaps he was flattered because she was older or something. I’ve heard men of my generation say they used to suffer from terrible sex frustration when they were young—far cry from these days, eh?—so maybe it was that. Adela didn’t say no, though you’ll no doubt recall that nice girls usually did say no in 1939. Anyway she got pregnant and of course there were no two ways about it, Adam had to marry her. I don’t think he ever questioned that he had to marry her but he told his sister and his sister told me that when they sort of first made it clear to him he decided he’d rather die. He said he was in love with someone else and he’d kill himself before he married Adela.’

  ‘Who was the someone else?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. You needn’t look like that. It wasn’t me. Come on, Adam Knighton wouldn’t have looked twice at me. I don’t know who it was, some girl at Oxford, and it can’t matter now, not after forty years.’

  Wexford agreed that it couldn’t matter now. Irene Bell went on, ‘He didn’t kill himself as we know. The Aylhursts fixed up a big white wedding at their village church. Very bad taste, with Adela four months gone and showing it. Adam went back to Oxford and took his finals, and got himself a First incidentally, and in September Julian was born.

  ‘They must have got on well enough because the next year, in the November, Adela had Roderick. That was 1941 and Adam had to go off with his regiment to the Far East somewhere, Burma, I think it was. He was away four years. When he came home he went back to reading for the bar and he was called and everything and he made quite a success for himself, as we all know. I used to see quite a bit of them. I was sharing a flat with another girl in Maitland Park and they were living in one of those roads off Haverstock Hill near Belsize Park station. He had a funny way of treating her, sort of tolerant exasperated patience. I don’t know if I make myself clear? These days they’d say he was always putting her down. I remember once—they’d just got their first TV set—he said he was going to watch The Brothers Karamazov and Adela said, “Is that from the London Palladium, darling?” Well, I happened to know it was a famous sort of Russian novel, though I’d never read it, but it was the kind of mistake anyone might make. It does sound like acrobats, doesn’t it? Adam called the boys in and said, “Come and hear what your intellectual mama’s just said,” and then when that pansy phoned, that Dobson-Flint, he repeated it to him.

  ‘Adela had the other two children. I think she did that to keep a hold on Adam. I don’t know for sure but that’s what I think.’

  ‘You mean he was straying?’

  ‘I don’t know. It got so that he was never at home. Working, he used to say, and perhaps he was. He had to do a lot of entertaining too, he said, though Adela always entertained well at home for him. She was a good wife, like I said, she cared, she went to a lot of trouble. Anyway she had Jennifer and Colum but that didn’t seem to have much effect on Adam. He slept at home, they’d moved to Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and that’s about all you can say. It’d be true that for—what? Five years?—anyway for years after Colum was born Adela had a husband insofar as there was a man sleeping in the other bed in her room.

  ‘And then, suddenly, I remember it well, some time in the late fifties it must have been, he came back. He lived at home, he had his meals there, he started taking Adela out—the lot. It was as if he’d had a shock and come to his senses. It’s my belief she threatened to leave him and take the children with her, take them away from him. He was fond of his kids all right. Anyway back he came and there he stayed. They were quite a model couple after that except that they never had anything to say to each other. All the old Adam had gone out of Adam, that’s for sure. He was bored stiff but he was resigned. And poor old Adela, she went on beavering away at being a good loving wife, but she had to take me on holiday with her, there are limits to how much you can stand of a man who doesn’t say two words to you for hours on end.

  ‘Good God,’ said Irene Bell, ‘do you wonder I don’t think much of marriage when that was the marriage I saw at close quarters?’

  A fine house of many rooms, rose madder brick, Edwardian probably, with the gables and diamond panes the Edwardians loved. It stood about half-way up the big hill to Hampstead on the right-hand side. Its garden was a shrubbery of rhododendrons, an ilex, in the oval lawn a monkey puzzle. As Wexford looked from the car at the house where the Knightons had lived in such sad contiguity, a hook-nosed man in a burnous came out of the front door. Only an Arab could have afforded to buy the house and live there now.

  ‘Marriage,’ murmured Wexford, as if to himself, ‘is a desperate thing. The frogs in Aesop were extreme wise. They had a great mind to some water but would not leap into the well because they could not get out again.’

  Donaldson said nothing to this. But he remarked some time afterwards to Loring that life was full of surprises, he had always thought the Chief Inspector got on OK with Mrs Wexford.

  ‘Purley now, sir?’ he said after a minute or two.

  ‘Purley it is and then Guildford.’

  But from that particular journey across Surrey they were to be saved. Just as Wexford had been taken aback not to see Margery Baumann open Vinald’s front door to him, so he was surprised to see her open this one. She recognized him at once and was herself as astonished as anyone would be to find a man she had encountered by chance in China three months before standing on her parents’ front doorstep.

  He explained who he was and why he had come. Margery Baumann understood more readily than Pandora Vinald had done. Since she had no late surgery on Fridays, she said, she always spent those evenings with her father and mother. By that time they had passed through the panelled hall of the Baumanns’ rather opulent thirties house and entered a living room where the Baumanns were having a thirties tea. Cucumber sandwiches, bread and butter, strawberry jam, Victoria sponge and custard creams. Dr Baumann wore grey flannels, white shirt, college tie, sports jacket, his wife a flowered afternoon dress and pearls. She was in the act of pouring from a silver teapot. It looked exactly like a stage set for a piece from the vintage days of drawing room comedy, and but for the autumnal state of the garden and the grey of the sky, one
would have expected at any moment the entry from the french windows of a young man in flannels holding a tennis racquet.

  All this Wexford remarked while Margery went through the business of explaining to her parents his status and the reason for his visit. They seemed very little less puzzled when she had finished than when she began.

  ‘Now you’re here, do sit down and have a cup of tea,’ said Mrs Baumann rather faintly.

  ‘I expect he would like a piece of your splendid cake, Lilian.’ Dr Baumann got up. ‘I shall go and fetch him a plate. I can’t say it’s at all clear to me why he’s here but he’s not the man I take him for if he won’t enjoy Mother’s excellent cake.’

  ‘Milk and sugar, Mr Wexford?’

  ‘No sugar, thank you.’

  ‘What exactly did you want us to tell you then?’ Margery asked.

  ‘For a start, everything you can remember about the Knightons. Oh, thank you, very kind of you.’ Dr Baumann had returned with a tea plate and a small napkin with lace round it. Wexford, who was always more or less on a diet, was obliged to accept a large slice of yellow sponge cake with jam filling. ‘You travelled in the train with them. I’d like to know whatever you can recall about them.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Dr Baumann, ‘so that’s what he wants. Well, my dear? Well, Margery? He’ll be surprised to find what an observant couple of girls I’ve got, I daresay.’ He barked at Wexford, ‘How d’you find the cake?’ It was the first time he had addressed him directly. Wexford had been beginning to think the doctor had acquired his habit of speaking in the third person from constant reference for the benefit of students to bedbound patients.

  ‘Very nice. Do you think you could give me your impressions of the Knightons, Mrs Baumann?’

  He had utterly floored her. ‘I didn’t have any impressions. They were just—well, quite nice, ordinary people. That’s what we said, wasn’t it, Cyril? At the time, I mean, when we were talking about the other people in the party, you know the way one does. I said to my husband that the Knightons seemed quite nice and that Miss Bell they were with, she seemed quite nice. Mr Knighton had been a lawyer, I remembered seeing his name in the papers. He was a very well-informed man, I thought.’

  Margery said suddenly, ‘She was anti-Semitic.’

  A shadow passed across Mrs Baumann’s face and was gone. Her husband smiled, a little too widely and tolerantly. It hadn’t occurred to Wexford before that they were Jewish, but of course they were.

  ‘That sort of thing is very nasty,’ Margery said. ‘It was embarrassing. I didn’t like hearing somebody or other called a “Jewboy” and her call her husband an old Jew when he didn’t want to spend money on something. But my mother lost all her family in the Holocaust—did Mrs Knighton consider how she must have felt?’

  ‘That wasn’t the first time your mother and I have had to put up with that kind of thing and it won’t be the last.’ Baumann took his wife’s hand. ‘He doesn’t want to hear about that. He wants to hear about threats and blackmail and murder attempts. About revolvers fired at the dead of night and arsenic in the chop suey.’

  ‘I hardly think …’

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no. There was nothing of that. But I know what you chaps like, something to get your teeth into. He doesn’t think I’ve ever read a detective story, Margery.’

  Wexford suppressed a sigh. A light rain was falling now and the dusk was coming down. Margery switched on a couple of wall lights and a table lamp with a galleon painted on its parchment shade. ‘We really didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the Knightons, Mr Wexford.’

  ‘Then let me ask you something else. Do you remember when we were all sitting at a table on the roof of the hotel at Kweilin? The three of you, I, Mr Vinald, the Knightons and Miss Bell. Knighton saw something that astonished him, he looked as if he had had a tremendous, though not unpleasant, shock. I want to know what it was he saw.’

  Dr Baumann laughed at that and shook his head from side to side several times as if at some amusing idiosyncracy. The idiosyncracy, though, he seemed to make clear, was Wexford’s and not Knighton’s. What a question to ask! What kind of answer could he expect?

  ‘I can’t say I noticed that,’ said Mrs Baumann complacently.

  Her daughter looked at Wexford. ‘It was that very good-looking girl of course, the one that got so friendly with Gordon Vinald on our way home. Pandora Something. A girl from New Zealand. She walked out on to the roof and all the men were looking at her.’ Her voice when she mentioned Vinald had an edge of awkwardness but not perhaps pain. ‘I did happen to notice the expression on Mr Knighton’s face. He was just startled at suddenly seeing such a very striking—well, beautiful girl.’

  ‘I didn’t even see her,’ said Dr Baumann in a triumphant way.

  ‘Well, maybe not, Dad, you wouldn’t. But I should think every other man on that roof did. I know exactly what Mr Wexford means, I saw it just as he did. I expect Mr Knighton is very sensitive to beauty and there hadn’t been much in that line, had there? What struck me about those tour parties was that we were all as old as the hills.’

  ‘Margery!’ said her mother. ‘A young woman like you! I’m sure I didn’t see much to write home about in that Miss Pandora Whatever-it-was.’

  ‘Mrs Vinald now,’ said Wexford.

  Mrs Baumann looked cross, her daughter wryly amused. ‘I’m sure he’s welcome,’ said Mrs Baumann. ‘I never liked the man, he wasn’t a nice man at all. And I’m sure he wasn’t honest, I don’t believe antique dealers ever are quite honest.’

  ‘Oh, Mother! He was very kind to us. You know how pleased you are with that little vase and you never would have bought it if Gordon hadn’t said it was worth far more than the man was asking. And it was too. My father had it valued, Mr Wexford, and the valuer put it at three hundred pounds. Not bad when Mother gave twenty for it.’

  She picked up from a coffee table a small blue and white jar and handed it to Wexford. It was inconceivable to him that anyone would give three hundred pounds for such a thing, a whitish mottled thick piece of pottery with a blue bird and some squiggles on it. On its base was a small red seal.

  ‘You can’t take anything out of China that’s more than a hundred and twenty years old,’ Margery said. ‘They put the red seal on an antique piece to show you it’s within the limit and therefore all right.’

  Wexford handed it back. ‘Do you happen to know what it was Mr Vinald and Mr Purbank quarrelled about so that they didn’t speak to each other after the train left Irkutsk?’

  Now it was Margery’s turn to laugh. ‘I know they didn’t but I haven’t the faintest idea why. Gordon just said he was a “nasty piece of work” and left it at that.’

  He went home to another good, almost elderly, marriage—his own. Dora was watching an old British film on television, The Snow Moth with Trevor Howard and Milborough Lang.

  ‘I wonder if people will see old films of Sheila’s in thirty years time.’

  ‘Considering she’s never made any,’ said Wexford, ‘they don’t stand much chance. You don’t want her going off to Hollywood, do you?’

  ‘I’d like her to make just one or two really good films as well as acting on the stage. There’s that old TV series of hers, of course, I don’t count that. I’d like to think of her—well, her beauty recorded for posterity. In a lovely setting, in a sensitive film like this one. After all, what do you suppose Milborough Lang looks like now? She must be fifty-five.’

  Wexford always did his best to jolly his wife out of these alas-for-my-lost-looks moods of hers. To him, of course, she looked much the same as she had done when he first married her. As the credit titles came up he switched off the set.

  ‘I wish to God you’d been with me in Kweilin. You’d have observed people. You’d have talked to people, you always do, you’d have got to know them. You wouldn’t have been distracted like I was by—hallucinations.’

  She looked a little worried. ‘Reg, I wish we knew what those hallucinations of y
ours actually were.’

  ‘Lack of sleep; Maotai.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I doubt if you had more than a couple of sips of the stuff.’

  Wexford shrugged. ‘You might have been able to tell me why a man who sees a pretty girl walk across a roof looks more like he’s seen the Virgin Mary.’

  The phone rang. It was Burden.

  ‘I’m getting more help than I expected from that chap Brownrigg who’s the Clerk to Chambers where Knighton used to be. He’s a meticulous old boy and he’s got records of all the cases they’ve handled back for twenty years. But what I’m phoning for is because a fellow by the name of Vinald’s been on the blower for you three times since midday. I’ll give you his number.’

  Wexford dialled it. Vinald himself answered. ‘Oh, Chief Inspector, how super of you to phone. I’ve been trying to get in touch ever since my wife said you’d been here.’ The voice was hearty, ingratiating. It was also very nervous. ‘I really did want to know precisely what you wanted of me.’

  ‘Any little bits of help you or your wife could give me on the background of Mr and the late Mrs Knighton, Mr Vinald, that’s all.’

  There was a short silence. Vinald cleared his throat. ‘There’s more to it than that, though, isn’t there? I don’t think it can be just that, eh?’

  Wexford thought quickly. He would play along, though in the dark. ‘I expect,’ he said, ‘you remember that last evening in Kweilin as well as I do.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. And I realize a fuller explanation is actually called for here. I suppose I should begin at the point we all met up in that roof bar place …’

  ‘Mr Vinald,’ said Wexford heavily, ‘I don’t want to hear this on the phone. I’ll come along and see you tomorrow. I’ll see you in your shop at noon sharp.’

  ‘Well, of course. I’ll make a point of being there. I can assure you there’s a perfectly simple and reasonable explanation for the whole thing …’