Speaker of Mandarin

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘No money would have to pass, you see. That would be the beauty of it. He wasn’t going to have to be specific with this old lag, wasn’t going to have to give him three or four grand in used oncers or anything like that. Beforehand he might even be able to think he wasn’t really the instigator. Suppose it was no more than a matter of making a phone call and saying something like, My wife’s going to be alone on the night of October the first? Suppose it was even more subtle and slight than that?

  ‘But afterwards the remorse and the guilt, to a man like Knighton, would be as great as if he had paid an assassin or pulled the trigger himself.’

  ‘Well, he’d be just as guilty,’ said Burden.

  ‘Of course he would, but a good many men wouldn’t feel just as guilty. That’s the analogy with the mandarin. One of China’s teeming thousand millions is just as much a human life as one’s wife or child, but it doesn’t feel like that because it’s so remote, so far out of sight. And if one only has to raise one’s hand … I think maybe Knighton only had to raise his hand, or do something as slight as that, to rid himself of his wife and have Milborough Ingram.’

  They came into London through the Blackwall Tunnel. From its northern end it wasn’t far to Leytonstone. Dead leaves from the fringe ends of Epping Forest whirled in the wind. Dogshall Road was a long straight street that passed with a hump over one suburban railway line and in a dip under another. The gutters were choked with leaves, the trees in the pavement, three times as tall as the little squat terraces of houses, were shedding leaves into the wind. There was a red brick church and a pre-fab church hall with an asbestos roof but nothing else to relieve the long monotony of Victorian terraces, the long double row of parked cars. Donaldson pulled into a gap a little way down from number seventeen.

  ‘Moralizing would be out of place,’ said Wexford, ‘but this is a fine illustration of how crime doesn’t pay, don’t you think? Chipstead made his living for years, for most of his life, out of violent crime. I’m not saying it was in vain, it wasn’t, it caused a lot of suffering, it damaged society, provoked fear, made work for the police, cost the taxpayer money. But it didn’t profit Chipstead himself much, did it?’

  The three men looked at what Chipstead had got out of it, a hundred-year-old brown brick box with six feet of concrete, on which stood a dustbin and a dead geranium in a tub, separating it from the street. There were only three windows at the front of the house and at all of them the curtains were drawn. Wexford got out of the car and Burden followed him.

  The house had a dead empty look as if its occupants had closed it up and gone away, and Wexford, banging hard on the knocker, for there was no bell, had very little hope of an answer. But after a moment or two a woman’s voice was heard saying something and then footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  The door was opened to them by Renie Thompson.

  ‘Henry was my brother,’ she said.

  They stood in the hall. There was a light on upstairs and women whispering.

  ‘Was?’ said Wexford.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? You mean you didn’t know? Today’s the funeral. To tell you the truth, when you knocked I thought it was the undertakers come.’ She wore a grey coat and a black felt hat. She looked at them truculently, at their dubious suspicious faces. ‘You’d like to make something out of it, wouldn’t you? I know. There’s nothing to make.’

  ‘Give us the raw materials, Mrs Thompson, and we’ll decide that.’

  A woman had begun coming down the stairs, evidently a sister. She stood there, staring, listening, holding the banister.

  ‘I’d worked for Mrs Knighton since nineteen sixty. Him and her, they was the best employers you’d find anywhere. Henry had to come up in court for something he never done and I said, you want Mr Knighton to speak up for you and he got Mr Knighton, Mr Knighton was on his side on account of knowing me, and he got Henry off, of course he did, considering Henry never done it.’

  The woman on the stairs clicked her tongue.

  ‘Henry thought the world of Mr Knighton.’

  ‘So did you too, Renie,’ said the woman on the stairs.

  ‘You a Sewingbury family, are you?’ Burden asked. They both nodded, eyeing him warily. ‘Had your brother been ill prior to his death?’

  The third sister now came down, buttoning herself into a black astrakhan coat.

  ‘In the hospital six months,’ said Renie Thompson. ‘He had it in his chest, you see, the lung, and then it went to his spine.’

  The door knocker rattled. The woman in astrakhan went to the door and the wind blew a dead leaf in to cling to her coat. Two men in black stood outside, their hats in their hands.

  ‘All right,’ said Wexford, ‘we won’t trouble you any more at the moment.’

  Among the other parked cars two black Daimlers now waited, one empty, one bearing the body of the former gangster in a coffin laden with flowers. Wexford and Burden went back to their car. Donaldson said a message had come through on the radio that the gun had been found under the paving stones at the ‘weir’.

  Wexford nodded. He was watching Chipstead’s house. Until now it hadn’t occurred to him that there had been others inside as well as the three sisters. These people, no doubt, had been sitting in silence behind the bay window with the drawn curtains, waiting to follow Chipstead’s body to the grave or the fire. They came trooping down the path, an elderly man and woman arm-in-arm, a boy of eighteen in a borrowed black jacket and tie, a little man with red hair, a fat man with practically no hair, a tall man with silver hair.

  ‘Silver Perry,’ Burden said.

  ‘Were they old pals or something?’

  ‘Evidently. It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  The Daimler took the sisters and the old couple. The rest of the mourners got into an old dark blue Ford Popular.

  ‘Where do you suppose they’re going, Donaldson?’ asked Wexford.

  ‘City of London Crematorium, Manor Park, sir,’ Donaldson said promptly. ‘Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes for a hymn and our-dear-brother-to-the-fire, twenty minutes back.’

  ‘We may as well go and have lunch then.’

  The wind had dropped and it became very dark, dark enough to have the light on in the front room at 52 Dogshall Road. The light shimmered through unlined green curtains. The boy was the first to leave, dressed in leathers now and carrying a crash helmet. He got on the Yamaha parked next to the Ford Popular and roared off in the direction of the bridge. A little while later the front door opened again and Silver Perry came out. Conventionally dressed in a dark suit and dark waisted overcoat, he had something of a look in the fading light of Adam Knighton, but of Knighton debased, vulgarized, roughened. He was a little less tall and lacked the presence of the man for whom he had said he would do anything, would lay down his life.

  ‘He used those words?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘Well, in a newspaper,’ said Burden. ‘I was going to tell you, I nearly did tell you only you interrupted me with your idea about the gun, they remember Coney Newton being in the El Video till three or whatever and Newton says he was there with Perry but no one in the club said a word to me about seeing Perry.’

  On the doorstep Perry kissed Renie Thompson and then walked quickly away. Wexford thought he would get into the Ford but evidently it wasn’t his, he had come on foot. And on foot he was departing through the thin grey drizzle that had now begun to fall steadily. The street lights had come on, lozenges of fruit drop orange among the stripped branches of the trees. Perry turned up the collar of his coat and trudged along, hands in pockets. He was heading, probably, for the tube station, a quarter of a mile up the hill past the hump in the road.

  The car crawled after him, Donaldson driving very slowly. A van behind started hooting but Donaldson took no notice.

  ‘He thinks he’s going to cross here,’ said Wexford. ‘Pull round the corner.’

  Donaldson turned sharply to the left just as Perry approached the edge of the pavement to cross the str
eet. The side of the car presented itself in front of him like a wall. Silver Perry took a step back as the car door was thrown open and Wexford got out.

  ‘Care for a lift, Silver?’

  Wexford had his warrant card out but he need not have troubled. Perry belonged in that category of men who could pick out a policeman on a nude beach or at a fancy dress ball. It was child’s play to him to detect three of them in a London suburb, in a car, in the rain. For all that, he looked for a split second as if he might try making a run for it. In that second his face showed the spark of hope, the flare of panic, the commonsense realization that quenched them. He shrugged and got into the car. Rain was running off the glossy white cap of hair.

  ‘D’you know where Cyril Street, Bethnal Green is, Donaldson?’ asked Burden.

  ‘I can find it, sir.’

  ‘Off Globe Road,’ said Perry.

  ‘Or do we take him straight back with us? Your gun’s been found, Perry. Shooters usually do turn up in the long run.’

  ‘Shooter? What shooter?’ asked Perry.

  ‘Cyril Street first, I think,’ Wexford said, ‘and then maybe we can think again. Enjoy yourself at the funeral, did you, Silver? By God, but you niff of Cyprus sherry.’

  ‘I suppose you think you’re funny. I didn’t go to enjoy myself. Henry Chipstead was a lifelong friend.’

  ‘And we all know how good you are to your friends. Laying down your life and so forth. Or laying down other people’s lives.’ Wexford looked into the man’s pale blue eyes, watery eyes, narrower and shiftier than Knighton’s. ‘You’ve no alibi for the night of October the first. And you were seen near Thatto Hall Farm. You were seen walking along the footpath to Sewingbury from Thatto Vale at three in the morning.’

  Silver Perry said nothing. The car wound its way along a one-way street system, through back doubles, from the eastern suburbs into the East End of London. It was raining hard now and the wipers were on at high speed.

  ‘You left your car in the market square at Sewingbury,’ said Burden. ‘You must know the area well.’

  Perry admitted nothing. In a low voice he said, ‘Renie and me—like a hundred years ago I used to know Renie pretty well.’

  ‘When you came back you saw the building works and you buried the gun, knowing it would be concreted in next day.’

  Perry tapped Donaldson’s back. ‘Second one on the left now, son.’

  ‘I reckon Knighton must have given you something for your trouble,’ said Burden. ‘Reimbursed you for the shooter at any rate.’

  Perry sighed. ‘The wife’s out, round at her sister’s. I wouldn’t want her brought in on this.’

  The tall stalk of a tower, punctured all over now with squares of light, and its fellow stalks, vertical dormitories. There were several hundred cars now on the shiny black wet tarmac that was clean of shed leaves since there were no trees here to shed them. Wexford sent Donaldson off for a cup of tea in a Globe Road café. The lift took them up what felt like ten miles to Perry’s eyrie and the kind of view that would once have made men gasp but now is commonplace to air travellers and frequenters of revolving restaurants.

  No one was at home. The place was dark. Perry put on a light or two and took them into the room that had nothing in common with the accepted notion of a pent-house except altitude. He said, ‘I’ll tell you about it. It’s too late to worry about Mr Knighton now. There’s nothing can harm him where he’s gone.’

  The cheap sentimentality of these people! Wexford thought. It was typical. Perry had once shot a man in cold blood, had since then done appalling violence, to say nothing of accepting Knighton’s commission to kill his wife, yet he talked like some guiltless and gullible old woman.

  ‘You, however,’ said Wexford, ‘aren’t yet in that happy hereafter and there’s plenty of harm can come to you.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to caution me?’

  Wexford shook his head. ‘Not yet. Tell us about when you first knew Mr Knighton.’

  ‘It’s twenty-five years. More. But for him they’d have hung me.’ Silver looked at Burden. ‘You know how it was. I wrote my story for the paper and I cut the piece out and sent it to Mr Knighton. He never answered, naturally he didn’t, a man in his position. I waited for him in Lincoln’s Inn one evening and we got talking.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Wexford tried to imagine it, this shifty tyke and Knighton meeting, getting ‘talking’. Knighton would surely have frozen him with a stare and, if he persisted, threatened him with the police.

  ‘Not “just like that”,’ Silver said. ‘I never pestered him, I never annoyed him. I just said I wanted to thank him properly, I said it quiet like. I told him there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for him.’

  And then Wexford did see. Knighton’s integrity was already shaky, he was already becoming corrupted. For five years he had been Milborough Lang’s lover but by then he knew they couldn’t continue on that impermanent, uneasy basis. She would go and he would be left with Adela. Unless …

  ‘By all this “anything in the world” claptrap you meant you’d get rid of his wife for him, didn’t you?’

  Silver winced at the plain speaking. ‘He knew what I meant. I knew and he knew, there wasn’t no need to put it into words. Help him get what he wanted, that’s what I meant and he knew what I meant.’

  ‘How did you know what he wanted?’ asked Burden.

  ‘I said I waited for him. It was a few times I did that and I followed him before I got him alone and we got talking. A couple of times I saw him meet this girl. Actress, she was, world-famous.’

  ‘Still, Knighton didn’t take you up on your generous offer?’

  ‘He had a lot of scruples, had Mr Knighton,’ said Silver with a kind of sage reverence. ‘Well, you have to in his position. I said to him I’d never forget what he’d done for me and any time he wanted you know what, any time, he’d only to let me know. I wouldn’t bother him, I said. I knew a man in his position don’t want to be seen with the likes of me, I understood that. I was living in rooms in Cambridge Heath then. When the council put us in here I dropped him a line with my address and my phone. He never answered, naturally he didn’t.’ Silver looked up, straight into Wexford’s eyes. ‘It used to bother me, I used to think about it a lot, the fact that I’d never done a thing to repay him, I had it on my conscience.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘I know the meaning of gratitude, the same as other folks.’

  ‘No, not the same as other folks, Silver,’ said Wexford. ‘The way you know it is pathological.’ He shook his head reflectively. ‘What was he supposed to do, give you a ring and say he’d changed his mind?’

  ‘I told you we never put it into words. It was subtle like, we understood each other. He had to give me a ring, yes. I arranged it, I knew he wouldn’t want to ask me outright.’ Silver shifted in his seat. He had kept his black overcoat on but now he pulled himself out of it and threw the coat across the arm of a chair. Behind him the glittering view twinkled like a million fallen stars. ‘I said to him, if ever you want you-know-what, you give me a tinkle. He never said a word. I looked him in the eye. You don’t even have to say it, I said. You dial my number, I said, and when I answer you say one word. Any word you like, I said, so long as I know it.’ There were beads of sweat on Silver’s forehead now, up near the wig-like white hairline. ‘He never answered me direct. He just looked at me and started telling some story about a Chinese mandarin, I don’t recall the ins and outs of it now. That’s it, I said, mandarin. You give me a call and when I answer you say “Mandarin” and I’ll know. That was all of twenty-five years ago, nearer twenty-six. “Mandarin”, I said, “any time, you say that one word and I’ll know—and I’ll do it”.’

  What had passed through Knighton’s mind at the time? Had he conceived it as possible even in those days? Or had he merely been humouring Silver Perry, jollying him along, preparatory to getting rid of him for good? Wexford supposed they had been in a pub or even on a pa
rk bench somewhere. Just the one meeting, he was sure of that. Perry eager, grateful, gratified that this august man would condescend to converse with him, Knighton inexpressibly shocked, horrified, yet tempted. Raise the hand, say the word, do nothing more and she will die and you may have your heart’s desire. What evil wicked nonsense! Better take one’s own life in one’s misery than countenance this, than even stay here listening to this. But ‘Mandarin’, one word…

  ‘But one day, not long ago, he did ring you and he did say the word,’ said Burden.

  ‘Early in September it was. I picked up the phone and no one spoke for a bit, though you could hear breathing, and I was just thinking this was some joker when this voice says it. Stuttered a bit and spoke very low. The funny thing was, I’d forgotten. I mean I’d never seen Mr Knighton all that time, I’d never heard his voice. I’d had a bit of news via Renie over the years, but not for a long time, I never even knew he was retired, I never knew they lived in Sussex permanent like.

  ‘The voice said this word. I could hear it started “man” and I thought what it said was “managing”, but the receiver was put back before I could say anything. But I must have like recognized it in my subconscious or whatever on account of it kept haunting me all day. And suddenly it came to me. After all those years I could repay Mr Knighton at last, I could fulfil my promise.’

  Wexford got up and turned his back. ‘You make me sick.’ He stood at the window, looking down on lurex-embroidered London, up at a homing aircraft laden with lights, breathing steadily to command his anger. ‘Get on with it,’ he said, ‘and we can dispense with the noble sentiments.’

  ‘You went ahead on that single word, a word you didn’t even hear properly?’ Burden put in.