by Ruth Rendell
‘I knew,’ said Silver. ‘I hung about his chambers but he never come out and then I saw his name gone from the list at the door. I went up to Hampstead but I only had to take one look to see the place was full of bleeding Arabs. A couple of times I rung Thatto Hall Farm and he answered the first time and she answered the second but that didn’t help me any.’
‘Help you?’
‘I had to know her movements, didn’t I? I had to get her alone. Then one day I saw him. Coming out of Victoria Station it was, round about four in the afternoon, Wednesday, October the first. He was carrying this overnight bag, I knew he’d gone away for the night.’
‘What were you doing at Victoria?’
‘I have to work, don’t I? I’ve got my living to earn. I was driving the mini-cab, I’d just dropped a fare. He was looking for a taxi, Mr Knighton was, and I thought to myself, why don’t I offer him a lift to wherever he’s going? But I knew I was the last person he’d want to be seen with. Besides, I’d had a better idea. Seeing that overnight bag gave it to me. He’d come up to town for the night and she’d be alone. I reckoned on her being alone. I’d been to see poor old Henry in the hospital, you see, a couple of weeks before, and Renie was there and she said the daughter was married and expecting a kid and all. So I reckoned on the old woman being alone. I reckoned if I was going to do it I’d better get on with it, I’d better get it over with that night.’
Wexford thought he heard the front door click. There were sounds of movement in the hall and the woman who had screamed at Burden came in. Like her husband, she knew policemen by instinct and she gave Wexford a look others reserve for a thief or a vagrant. Wexford and Burden went out into the hall.
‘Do we take him back with us and charge him?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Nothing to charge him with. I doubt if we could even make conspiracy stick.’
When they went back into the room the woman had disappeared and Silver Perry was drinking something that looked like whisky. It appeared to have been rationed out to him, as if for medicinal purposes.
‘I was working till midnight. I got on to a pal of mine, never mind who, it don’t matter now, I got on to him to say I’d been with him at the El Video if there was questions asked. Anyway, my last fare kept me a good half-hour over the odds and it was gone two, more like two fifteen, two twenty, before I got to Sewingbury. I left my vehicle in the market square and I walked. I came back by the footpath but I went by the road, not being too sure of my bearings if the moon was to go in.
‘It was well after three when I got to Thatto Hall Farm. I got out my glass cutter and cut out that pane in the toilet window. Must have taken me ten minutes, maybe fifteen. The house wasn’t that dark inside because of the moon shining in. I took my shoes off and went upstairs.
‘All the bedroom doors was open and I went in the big front one, thinking to find her there. There was twin beds and one of them had the bedclothes turned back. I went back there later and took her jewel box and chucked some of her bits and pieces away to make it look like an outside job. He was an amateur, you see, he didn’t know what’s what. But first I looked in the other rooms and when I couldn’t find her I went downstairs again. I was beginning to wonder what was up, I can tell you.’
Silver drank his drink and put the glass down heavily.
‘I found her on the floor. She was dead, she’d been shot dead. I knew what it was right away, Mr Knighton had got there before me and done it himself.’
Wexford held the gun in his hands. Everything that could be deduced from an examination of it was in the report on the desk in front of him. It was a Walther PPK 9 mm automatic and approximately halfway along the barrel, on the underside, was a minute wart-like fault in the metal which would mark each bullet that passed through it with a fine hairline scratch. Burden, looking over his shoulder, said, ‘What was Perry going to use? His bare hands?’
‘I daresay. They’re weapons you don’t have to dispose of. A strange business, wasn’t it? Perry was sure Knighton had killed her, not knowing she didn’t die till some eleven hours after Knighton’s departure for London. He thought Knighton had got tired of waiting for him to keep his promise and had killed her himself.’ Wexford put the gun down on the desk. ‘I’ve no time for a villain like that, Mike, but I believe him when he says he was ashamed of himself for having failed Knighton. Because he had shilly-shallied since the beginning of September, Knighton had been driven to do it himself. And because he thought Knighton hadn’t done a sufficient job of faking a break-in and burglary, hadn’t done any sort of job of that at all, he himself took the jewel box out of the house and having no great opinion of our acumen, scattered its contents about the front garden.’
According to Perry, in spite of his ploy with Mrs Knighton’s pieces of jewellery, in spite of the evidence of break-in, he had expected Knighton to be arrested and charged with his wife’s murder almost at once. He had cursed himself for the delay which he saw as having led Knighton to commit the crime. When nothing had happened to Knighton he had simply put this down to police ineptitude. If he had ever doubted Knighton’s guilt, that doubt had been dispelled by his suicide.
‘And certainly Knighton believed Perry had killed her,’ Wexford went on. ‘From the moment he came home on October the second and I told him his wife had been shot he believed Perry had done it and done it on his instructions. That accounts for the feeling we always had of his being surprised yet not surprised, guilty yet innocent. That day he phoned Perry at the beginning of September—I wonder what impelled him to do that, what particular thing happened? We shall never know now. Had Adela found out about Milborough Ingram and threatened or ridiculed? Had Mrs Ingram begun to talk of going home? Or had Adela begun talking of another long holiday—we know she wanted to go to India and Nepal in February—which would take him away from Milborough again? Whatever it was, a temptation that was a quarter of a century old came back and this time he succumbed. But I can’t think he really believed in it, Mike. It must have seemed like fantasy. With anyone but Silver Perry, who isn’t, I think, quite sane, it would have been fantasy.
‘You can imagine him leaving Milborough Ingram’s flat late one afternoon, going off to meet Adela and travel home with her. Maybe it was on a street corner or in a station that he saw the empty call box and remembered the past, remembered “Mandarin”.
‘Of course it was all nonsense, it could never happen now. “Mandarin” was all he had to say and the murder would be done and his happiness secured. In fantasy, in dreams, not really. But he went into the phone box and he dialled and he said it. At any rate he said something like it and then he went off and met Adela and no doubt told himself what a fool he was.’
Burden came round the desk and sat down. He was frowning.
‘He must have wondered if anything would happen.’
‘Perhaps. Nothing did, though, did it? Three or four weeks went by and nothing had happened. He must have thought Silver Perry had forgotten “Mandarin” or got old or reformed or had never really meant it in the first place. But as soon as Adela was killed he knew. But happiness wasn’t secured. There was no freedom, no future, no joyful looking-forward. Not happiness, but remorse. For he believed Perry had done it on his word, though that word was a muttered whisper given after a gap of twenty-five years.’
‘He killed himself in vain,’ said Burden. ‘He killed himself for an illusion. He might have been happy, he might have re-married. He’d done nothing and Perry had done nothing.’
‘The intention was there, Mike,’ Wexford said thoughtfully. ‘And it was more than just a wish for his wife to die, wasn’t it? However slight, it was an express instruction and he had delivered it to a dirty little crook and murderer he shouldn’t have lowered himself to speak to. Even if we’d found someone for this job while he was alive he’d still have had that on his mind, wouldn’t he? On his conscience, disgusting him with himself and, I suspect, pretty well poisoning the feelings he had for the great love of his life. Me
n like Knighton had better not commit crimes even vicariously, they had better not be involved in crimes they imagine they have committed vicariously.’
Burden looked at his watch. ‘He should be in by now. It’s just gone ten.’ When Wexford didn’t respond he said more sharply, ‘The one that really committed it, I mean. You said you didn’t want him fetched from home.’
‘Not in the circumstances, no.’ Wexford sighed. ‘Not that it’s going to make much difference, maybe a couple of hours. I’m not planning on talking to him much, we don’t need a confession. It’s all as clear as glass. I should have seen it from the start, only China intruded, China and what went on there confused me. Not that China didn’t have a good deal to do with his motive, it did.’
‘He bought the gun,’ said Burden, ‘quite openly from a very respectable gunsmith’s, Warrington Weapons & London Wall. It was easy. And it makes our task easier.’
‘The books he was keeping, or not keeping, are going to be pretty damning evidence too. We’ll be spending the rest of the day looking into his financial juggling, Mike. Come on, then, let’s go and take him.’
They had finished. There was nothing more to do until the special court in the morning. It had been dark for hours, the damp foggy dark of November. Wexford picked up his coat and slung it over him. ‘I feel like a drink.’
‘Come back to my place,’ Burden said.
Wexford felt deeply tired, as tired as he had been after those white nights in China. His head floated, it seemed full of a crowding of figures and prevarications and lies. Yet there was nothing to think of or talk about except what they had done that day and he went on talking about it.
‘But surely it was Perry that Bingley saw in the wood?’ Burden had asked.
‘How can it have been? Confused as Bingley was, he was sure the man he saw was walking back from Thatto Vale, not going towards it. Besides that, Perry went by the road and only came back by the footpath. Now if Perry didn’t get to Thatto Hall Farm till three, took ten to fifteen minutes cutting out that glass and another ten going over the house and finding the body, it would have been more like ten to four before he passed the spot where Bingley was. Or had been, for by that time Bingley had certainly gone off home.’
They got into Wexford’s car. Jenny had taken Burden’s. Wexford drove slowly because he was tired.
‘It was a grey-haired man he saw,’ Burden insisted.
‘But was it? He came to see us in the first place because his niece told him he ought to. He had seen a man walking that footpath back to Sewingbury at three in the morning of October the second. But he was nervous about coming to us because he’d been poaching. So to please us he makes his story as near to what he thinks we want as he can. Knighton is tall and has grey or silver hair. He either knows Knighton by sight or has seen his picture in the paper. Therefore he describes the man he saw as tall and with grey hair. But when I show him photographs that’s a different matter. He is reminded then of what the man in the wood really looked like. Of the figures in the pictures he’s shown he doesn’t pick out Knighton, who resembles Silver Perry more than any of them. He picks out Gordon Vinald who doesn’t resemble him at all but is youngish, dark, rather short and slightly built.’
Burden’s porch light was on. The bungalow itself was in darkness. Wexford got out of the car and walked up the path towards the light and something soft and slinky came out of the shadows and rubbed itself against his trouser leg. He jumped because he was weary and it had been a long day. Burden unlocked the front door and Wexford followed him into the house, holding the cat in his arms.
‘Bingley couldn’t pick out the man who killed Adela Knighton from the photographs because he wasn’t in them. So he picked out the man most nearly like him. He chose the only man in the group who was also young, dark, short and slight.’
The centre light in the living room came on but the bulb in the table lamp flashed, fizzled and went dark. The bright glare from the middle of the ceiling made Wexford wince and blink. Burden switched it off.
‘I’ll get another bulb. I’ll just have to think where it is Jenny keeps them. And then what? Scotch?’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Wexford in much the same way Milborough Ingram had, though he was thinking more of his health than his face and figure. ‘But I will.’
He sat in the dark, a little light coming in from the hall. The back door slammed as Burden went out to the garage. The cat began doing that uncanny thing cats do, staring at nothing, following nothing round the room with its eyes. It slid off Wexford’s lap and sat with its tail faintly moving, gazing towards the doorway and the light.
An old Chinese woman with bound feet, in dark trousers and a quilted jacket, walking with small mincing steps, came out of the light—out of nowhere, it seemed—and stood on the threshold. His heart simply stopped. It felt as if it had stopped and the restarting, the thuds of its beat, were almost painful.
‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ Jenny Burden asked. ‘Where’s Mike?’
He managed to speak in his normal voice. ‘Gone to find a light bulb.’
She retreated into the kitchen, the high wooden-soled sandals she wore restricting her walk, and came back at once with a bulb. The table lamp came on and showed him Burden’s wife, made up to look Chinese but not to look old, a black wig covering her fair hair. The cat rubbed itself against her, winding in and out between her ankles.
‘The Good Woman of Setzuan, I presume?’
‘It was our dress rehearsal. It was dark so I thought I might as well come home just as I was.’ She kissed Burden who came in with their drinks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and take all this lot off.’
‘My God,’ said Burden. ‘I wonder you didn’t think you were hallucinating again.’
Wexford said nothing. He took his whisky with a steady hand.
‘So it was Angus Norris that Bingley saw?’ Burden said.
‘Of course. Having let himself into Thatto Hall Farm with his wife’s key, got his mother-in-law out of bed, brought her downstairs and shot her, he made his way home again along that footpath, thus enabling Bingley to see him at three o’clock.’
‘I suppose he told her,’ said Burden, ‘that his wife had been taken ill or gone into early labour or some such thing and they hadn’t been able to get through on the phone. He shot her through the back of the head because, like the gentleman he is, he let a lady procede him into a room. And that wife of his is having a baby any minute …’
‘I hope it may be a consolation to her,’ Wexford said sombrely. ‘Mother, father and now this. Norris was shattered by Knighton’s suicide. Did you see his face? He hadn’t expected that. I daresay he thought he was doing Knighton a favour, killing Adela. Mind you, I don’t think he planned it, or not very far in advance. He didn’t go up to London and Warrington Weapons and buy the gun with that in mind. He bought the gun because he collects firearms. Then—maybe not till the very day of October the first—his wife told him her father would be going to London for the night.
‘Jennifer slept soundly because she was sedated. She would have been unaware of it if he was absent for an hour. I think he was desperate. He had married someone who expected to be kept in the style of her mother, of her older brothers and their wives, but he couldn’t make the grade. He had only what he earned as an assistant solicitor with Symonds, O’Brien and Ames. I’m guessing here but I hardly think it can be otherwise, that he bought that house on a mortgage far above what he could afford. The cost of living went on rising and mortgage interest rates edged up too. It’s apparent the house isn’t even adequately furnished. We’ve seen enough of his financial affairs today to know that he was substantially in debt. And now there was a baby on the way which probably meant Jennifer would demand some sort of living-in help.
‘He was frantic with money worries. He took his gun and walked to Thatto Hall Farm and killed Jennifer’s mother, believing it would be thought she had come down and admitted some stranger who had knocked
at the door. Norris, you see, is tarred with the same brush as his wife’s family—he thinks he belongs to an élite that is above suspicion of criminality.’
Burden said, ‘His firm were Mrs Knighton’s solicitors, they drew up her will for her, so he knew what was in it—fifty thousand pounds for his wife.’
‘That was a contributory motive only. That was a bonus. His motive was Mrs Knighton’s holiday fund.’
‘We didn’t find a single record of that, not a word referring to it.’
‘I daresay Norris felt it was safer that way. I daresay he even had a bold dream that if ever it came to the crunch he could deny that his mother-in-law had entrusted him with a large sum to invest. But to do that would have meant cutting himself and his wife off from her family entirely and certainly losing that future inheritance. Anyway, he didn’t have the nerve. He only had nerve enough to kill her.’
‘I suppose he had drawn on the fund for his own use and was hoping against hope that by some means or other he could make up the deficit before Adela demanded a really large sum.’
Wexford nodded. ‘After all, last April he had had to provide her with four thousand pounds to go to China, a substantial amount for one holiday.’
‘But that was more than six months ago. Why kill her now?’
‘Because she asked for more. She wanted to go to India and Nepal in February. What would that have cost for the two of them? At least as much as the China trip. Very likely he didn’t even have that much remaining in the fund. With Jennifer’s inheritance he could pay his debts. He could make good what he had helped himself to out of the fund and present the money intact as soon as Knighton or a brother-in-law started asking questions.’
‘Strange, isn’t it, that a man would rather do murder and thereby shut himself up for fifteen years, not to mention losing his wife and child—for I’m sure he will—he’d rather do that than stand up and confess to having lost a sum of money?’