Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  He closed Knighton’s pale blue staring eyes. On the dressing table were two sealed envelopes, both addressed in Knighton’s bold and beautiful hand. One of them was to the coroner.

  ‘Who’s Mrs M. Ingram?’ asked Crocker.

  ‘God knows.’ Wexford read the address, Thain Court, Cadogan Avenue, London, SW1, and then he knew. ‘It would seem she’s the mother-in-law of an antique dealer I happen to know. I see he’s provided a stamp but I think I’ll deliver this by hand.’ Outside, below the window, the gravel crunched. Wexford looked out. ‘Angus and Jennifer,’ he said and he stuffed the letters into his pocket.

  Knighton’s yellowish-white waxen face looked as long dead as the Marquise of Tai’s. It looked as if it were made of porcelain but a porcelain they had forgotten to colour before the glaze went on.

  ‘Poor devil,’ Wexford said. ‘There was no loophole left for him.’

  ‘He did kill her then?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I’ve a feeling his predicament was a moral one, that it was his conscience he couldn’t escape.’ They left the room and closed the door. ‘I never thanked you for the book.’

  ‘I’m not sure if it would really happen.’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Wexford cryptically.

  Jennifer and her husband were in the hall. Her expression was as surly as ever. As he came down the stairs Wexford heard the tail end of what she was saying to Mrs Thompson, something about having no help in the house and a shock like this being enough to send her into premature labour. But Angus Norris looked as shocked and distressed as if Knighton had been his own father.

  ‘This is a bad business, Mr Norris,’ Wexford said. It was a phrase he used when he found himself in these or similar circumstances. Non-committal, it nevertheless expressed everything needful.

  Norris took it au pied de la lettre. He spoke with a kind of tragic enthusiasm. ‘A dreadful business, dreadful.’ His face was rather pale and lined in a way some adolescents’ faces are, though this ages them not at all. He looked round for his wife, to comfort her perhaps or be comforted, but Jennifer had gone into the living room and was lying in a chair with her feet up.

  He said carefully, in a more controlled tone, ‘Was there—a suicide note or anything of that sort?’

  ‘Something of that sort,’ said Wexford and he followed the doctor out through the front door.

  Roderick Knighton’s yellow TR7 had just joined the Norrises’ worn-out Citroën on the gravel drive. The barrister got out of it and rushed into the house, closing the front door behind him with almost a slam.

  The letters burned Wexford’s pocket. He would have been justified in opening the envelope addressed to Mrs Ingram and reading the contents. A suicide has forfeited his right to privacy and this suicide was also a prime suspect in a murder case. Who was Mrs Ingram, apart from being Pandora Vinald’s mother? What had she been to Adam Knighton that he had written her a letter from his deathbed?

  He wouldn’t open it without phoning her first. He picked up the phone to ask the switchboard to find her number for him, then put it down again. On the hotel roof in Kweilin there had been another woman with Pandora, a much older woman, white-haired. In all the thought he had given to the events of that evening at the rooftop bar, in all his recollections of the people involved, that woman had never figured. The beauty of Pandora had eclipsed her.

  For him perhaps, for almost everyone who saw them together, but not for Knighton. Knighton, sitting at that table with his wife, had seen her as Dante saw Beatrice and in a moment his life and his hopes had been transformed. But unlike Dante he wasn’t seeing her for the first time. Wexford was sure of that. There was a romantic side to his nature that had a weakness for the phenomena of passion, yet he couldn’t admit of the possibility of a man of Knighton’s age falling in love at first sight with a woman of Mrs Ingram’s.

  He must have known her before, perhaps years ago. When they had interrogated him he had said that his career would have been damaged if he had ‘deserted my wife and children for a young actress’. Mrs Ingram would have been young then, when the Knightons lived in Hampstead during the week and Sussex at the weekends, when Jennifer and Colum were babies, when Knighton by his eloquence was saving at least one murderer from execution.

  The interesting thing was that the first time he saw her in London Pandora had reminded him of some famous beauty of thirty years back. He had thought of Hedy Lamarr or Lupe Velez. Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime … Mrs Ingram had friends in the film world. She had brought a film cameraman to meet her daughter and son-in-law.

  ‘What do you suppose Milborough Lang looks like now?’ Dora had said, watching The Snow Moth. ‘She must be fifty-five.’

  The letter to the coroner, Dr Neville Parkinson, Wexford delivered in person. Then he went off to meet Burden for lunch at the Many-Splendoured Dragon.

  ‘It’s unlike you not to be hungry,’ said Burden.

  Wexford was picking rather listlessly at his food. ‘It’s Setzuan here too,’ he said. ‘Nicer than the Hunan we mostly got served with.’

  Burden looked impressed. ‘Have you ever heard of a play called The Good Woman of Setzuan by a chap called Brecht? The drama society here is doing it at the end of the month. You ought to go.’

  ‘I suppose your wife’s playing the lead?’ Wexford could tell from Burden’s sheepish look that he had guessed right. He dipped in his chopsticks to catch a curl of okra while Burden, resigned to a spoon, watched him warily. Wexford dismissed the versatile Jenny Burden with a wry smile. ‘Fishing for trouts in a peculiar river,’ he said. ‘Knighton was too old for that kind of thing. He was too old to have a mistress and too old to murder his wife.’

  ‘What did Parkinson’s letter say?’

  ‘It was very short. I can probably quote it from memory. “This is to inform you that on the morning of 2 October I killed my wife, Adela Knighton, by shooting her with a Walther PPK automatic pistol. As a consequence of that act I shall, by the time you read this, have taken my own life.” And he signed it. That was all.’

  Burden poured himself a glass of mineral water. ‘I wonder where he got the gun and, come to that, what he did with it afterwards.’

  ‘I wonder about a lot of things. Frankly, Mike, I think it’s all these doubts I have that are making me—well, I won’t say upset. Uneasy.’

  ‘You don’t mean you think it’s a false confession?’

  Wexford didn’t answer him directly. ‘He was devoured by guilt, wasn’t he? You could tell that.’ He pushed away his plate. For a moment he hesitated, then he asked the waiter to bring a pot of green tea. ‘And certainly he wanted her dead. He left Dobson-Flint’s and came back here that night. He must have killed her. Why say so if he hadn’t? It’s not your run-of-the-mill false confession. The man killed himself. The whole point of a false confession is to attract attention and the kind of hysteric who does that doesn’t defeat his own object by committing suicide immediately afterwards.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Burden firmly.

  ‘Let’s go. I have to phone Mrs Ingram and then I have to see her.’

  Fashion had come full circle and the clothes she wore were not unlike those she had been dressed in for her films, a little grey flannel suit with a straight skirt, a pearl-coloured silk blouse with a high pleated neckline, stockings with seams, high-heeled shoes. Her figure seemed unchanged. But that kind of black silk hair is perhaps of all shades the most vulnerable to time. It was whiter than her skin now and that skin itself webbed with lines.

  She hadn’t sounded surprised by his phone call. Why should she have been? For weeks now she must have been waiting for the police to come to her. Why he had come, that was something else again. She greeted him with a gentle, ever so slightly ironical, friendliness.

  They went into a living room. The flat was in a small block of apartments for rent on short leases, smart, even luxurious, in one of the most highly desirable residentia
l areas on earth. It lacked any particle of character. It was a suite of motel rooms, biscuit-coloured Wilton on the floors, chocolate-coloured linen at the windows and upholstering the furniture, here and there murals that were blends of Samuel Palmer and Rowland Hilder or montages of beaten tin cans and bits of bamboo. She had added pieces of her own, a pair of water colours, a red, blue and gold ikon, a vase or two that very likely came from Vinald, and flowers in abundance. She had filled vases and bowls with what October afforded in the way of dahlias and chrysanthemums and what October couldn’t afford but she evidently could, roses and gladioli and carnations.

  She sat down on the sofa, her knees together, her body held a little to one side, her head up, a very Milborough Lang attitude. Suddenly Wexford’s heart felt heavy. He was desperately sorry for her.

  ‘I believe you knew Adam Knighton well?’ he began.

  She was immediately apprehensive. ‘ “Knew”?’ she said. ‘What does “knew” mean? I know him, yes.’

  This was how the man felt who drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night. And like Priam, she had begun to guess. ‘Mrs Ingram, I used the word advisedly. I have bad news for you. I think it will be bad news.’ She was very still, her eyes on him. ‘You must prepare yourself for a shock. Mr Knighton is dead.’

  Her lips parted. She brought her hands together.

  ‘He was found dead this morning,’ Wexford said.

  ‘Do you mean—he killed himself?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘How?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Brandy and an overdose of sleeping pills. He left a note for the coroner and a note for you. I have brought yours with me.’

  On the third finger of the thin veined hand she put out to him was a diamond cluster as big as a grape. She wore a diamond watch and diamond earrings. From the neck up she had grown some ten years older since he had told her of Knighton’s death.

  ‘It was kind of you to come personally to tell me.’ She started to get up. She was politely dismissing him.

  ‘I’m sure you would like to read your letter in private,’ he said, ‘but after that I’m afraid I shall have to see it.’

  She held it against her breast, her hands crossed over it in the traditional gesture of a girl keeping a love letter from father or husband. She was still an actress.

  ‘I shall have to see it, Mrs Ingram. It may be of great relevance to Mrs Knighton’s murder. I must see the letter and then you and I must have a talk.’

  ‘If I don’t show it to you, could you get an order or a warrant or something like that to force me to?’

  He nodded. ‘Something like that. But I’m sure you’ll let me see it without that, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pushed her thumbnail under the flap of the envelope and began to open it. ‘Excuse me if I go away to read it.’

  He was taking a small risk but he hadn’t the heart to refuse her. While she was absent, the door between the communicating rooms left ajar as if she guessed what he slightly feared, he thought of what Irene Bell had told him about Knighton’s attitude towards his family in the past. ‘For five years after Colum was born Adela had a husband insofar as there was a man sleeping in the other bed in her room.’ Colum Knighton would be about thirty. It fitted. ‘And then suddenly Adam came back. He lived at home, he had his meals there, he started taking Adela out—the lot.’ What else had she said? ‘It was as if he’d had a shock and come to his senses.’ What in fact had happened was that after a five-year-long love affair Milborough Lang had left him and married someone else.

  She came back and gave him the letter in a quick, almost disdainful gesture. A lamp was on but he took it to the window and read it by the dying daylight.

  My darling, I shall be dead when you come to read this. I had dreamed of our being so happy together, I had longed for it and it really did seem within our grasp for a little while. I believed I could live with anything so long as you and I had each other at last, but I was wrong. The love I have for you is the strongest emotion I have ever felt for anyone, stronger than my feeling for my children. I have loved you for thirty years and kept the image of you always in my mind.

  But remorse is stronger than love. When I killed Adela I did not know myself. Though I had spent a lifetime in association with evil, I did not know how insidious evil is, how it destroys the joy of everything, even the joy of love. I had never considered that this act which was designed to bring me happiness would instead show me a hell of shame and self-hatred, a hell that is with me night and day, every moment of every day.

  That is not something I can live with or expect you to share with me. Therefore I have resolved to put an end to it. Twenty-five years ago my children and my responsibilities and my own fear held me back. This time I think I shall have the courage. Not so much courage, perhaps, as the lack of it, lack of fortitude for a continuance of the life I am living now.

  Do you remember how we read the Chinese poems together? Here are two lines from Chang Chi.

  So I now return your shining pearls with a tear on each.

  Regretting that we did not meet while I was still unwed.

  Good night, my darling, and God bless you, Adam.

  She hadn’t cried when she read the letter but the sight of him reading it brought the tears. They fell silently, she hardly seemed aware of them.

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs Ingram. Do you feel able to talk about this or would you rather wait a while?’

  ‘It may as well be now.’ She spoke the ungracious words graciously. She sat down. ‘I should like my letter back, please.’

  ‘Later. You shall have it before I go. Now I should like you to tell me the whole story.’

  She made a movement of recoil, she shook her head. ‘He didn’t kill her, whatever he says. He couldn’t have killed her.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to accept that he could and did. Now you’re going to tell me about yourself and him. It will be good for you as well as for me. Have you anyone else you can tell it to? Anyone at all who will care enough to listen?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  He had been thirty-two, she twenty-five. They had met at a dinner party given by that very Henry Lacey who had entertained Knighton on the eve of his wife’s death. Adela had been there too. The young Milborough Lang had become famous overnight when her first film was shown, a curious and almost mystical story of a deaf girl called The Snow Moth, and she had followed this with a stage success as Petra in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Wexford remembered seeing The Snow Moth when it first came out. As was probably true of Garbo, it was the star’s beauty and grace of movement and look of other-worldliness which had brought her fame rather than her acting ability. Milborough Lang had been wonderfully beautiful.

  ‘We were a handsome couple,’ she said, seeming to read his thoughts. ‘Isak Dinesen says that life is but a process for turning frisky young puppies into mangy old dogs. Only we never were a couple really. Adam had Adela and he had four children. Colum had been born just three months before we met. He told me Adela had had his two younger children to ensure he stayed with her, and it worked, it did ensure that.

  ‘We saw as much of each other as we could. Technically, he still lived with Adela, he slept under her roof. It was very cruel, it was a hateful way to behave to her, I know that. I think I felt more guilty than he did.’ She paused and put her fingers to her cheeks to wipe away the drying tears. ‘We paid for it, of course. We were punished. The times we had together were always a rush, always a race against the clock. He had to get back to work, to court, to Adela, and I had my career too. I got this Hollywood offer and I went to Hollywood and made that terrible Mind Over Matter, but I couldn’t stay there without Adam.

  ‘I was the one who made the break. We couldn’t have gone on like that. It had been five years but Colum was still only five, and it would have meant another fifteen years maybe of rush and subterfuge and passion and mad muddle. Besides, it had never had the chance to become a real wor
kaday relationship, it was a romance.

  ‘I met Ryan Ingram. He wanted to marry me and take me away to New Zealand. I think he saw himself, poor dear Ryan, as a sort of new world Prince Rainier, transporting his beloved from the rat race of the screen into a life of wealth and peace. I seem to be predisposed to these romantic men, don’t I? Anyway, I did marry him and I did go away with him and Adam and I didn’t write to each other or see each other for twenty-five years—until I walked out on to the roof in that place in China.’

  Ryan Ingram had died of a coronary three years before. Their daughter Pandora had made a mistaken marriage when nineteen. It was partly to distract her mind from this and from the subsequent divorce that she and her mother had come on the trip that had been intended to take them round the world but had ended, in each case because of a love affair, in London.

  ‘Adam recognized me at once. It must be true that love is blind because I think I’ve altered more than most people do in twenty-five years. I recognized him, of course. It was an extraordinary sensation, seeing him sitting there, still with Adela.’

  She got up and drew the curtains on the dark late afternoon. When the lamp beneath it went on, the rich colours of the ikon, the gold in its border and the Virgin’s crown, glowed in the light. Wexford suddenly recalled reading an illustrated article in a Sunday supplement about ikons that looked like that and which came from the neighbourhood of Lake Baikal … Milborough Ingram smiled, a little sadly, a little ruefully, and went on, ‘Adela went to bed. He came over to our table and said—to be prudent, you know. Oh, that eternal prudence!—“Miss Lang, we met years ago at Henry Lacey’s house in London. I don’t suppose you remember.” “I remember,” I said. Pandora was talking to some Australians, I don’t think she noticed Adam. The young don’t notice, they aren’t interested in us. Why should they be? He said—his voice was shaking—“May I buy you a drink?” I excused myself to the others and we went inside the hotel. I never had that drink—I think I’d like one now, though. Will you?’