by Ruth Rendell
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘Somewhere in north London. He’s married again. Come into the house, if you want, and we could find where he lives.’
The front door and the inner door were not locked. Wexford followed her in. The closing of the door behind them made the chandeliers tremble and ring. The lilies in the orangery had an artificial smell, like the perfumery department of a big store. Here in the hall she had crawled to the telephone, leaving a trail of blood across this shiny floor, had crawled past the body of Harvey Copeland, spreadeagled across those stairs. He saw her glance at the stairs where a great area of carpet had been cut away to show the bare wood beneath. She went to the door at the back which led into Davina Flory’s study.
He had not previously entered it. Every wall was lined with books. Its single window gave on to the terrace, of which the serre formed one wall. He had expected this, but not the fine terrestrial globe of dark-green glass on the table, nor the bonsai garden in a terracotta trough under the window, nor the absence of word processor, typewriter, electronic equipment of any kind. On the desk, beside a leather writing case, lay a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen. In a jar, made perhaps of malachite, were ballpoints, pencils and a bone-handled paper-knife.
‘She wrote everything by hand,’ Daisy said. ‘She couldn’t type, never wanted to learn.’ She was searching a top drawer of the desk. ‘Here. This is it. She called it her “unfriendly” address book. She kept it for people she didn’t like or it didn’t – well, benefit her to know.’
There were an uncomfortably large number of names in the book. Wexford turned to the J’s. The only Jones had the initials G.G. and an address in London N5. No phone number.
‘I don’t quite understand this, Daisy. Why would your grandmother have your father’s address and not your mother? Or did your mother have it too? And why “G.G.”? Why not his first name? After all, he’d been her son-in-law.’
‘You really don’t understand.’ She managed a fleeting smile. ‘Davina liked keeping tabs on people. She’d want to know where he was and what he was doing, even if she’d never see him again as long as she lived.’ At this she bit her lip but continued, ‘She was very manipulative, you know. Very organising. She’d know exactly where he was, no matter how often he’d moved. You can be sure that’s the right address you’ve got. I expect she thought he’d turn up sometime and – well, ask for money. She used to say that most people out of her past turned up sooner or later, she called it “coming out of the woodwork”. As for Mum, I doubt if Mum even kept an address book.’
‘Daisy, I’m trying to find a kind and tactful way of asking this and I’m not sure if there is one. About your mother.’ He hesitated. ‘Your mother’s friends . . .’
‘You mean, did she have boyfriends? Lovers?’
Once again, he was astonished at her intuitiveness. He nodded. ‘She can’t have seemed young to you but she was only forty-five. Besides, I don’t think age is of much importance in this area, in spite of what people say. People have friends of the opposite sex, friends in the romantic sense, at any age.’
‘Like Davina would have had.’ Daisy grinned suddenly. ‘If Harvey had dropped off his perch.’ She realised what she had said, the awfulness of it. Her hand went up to cover her mouth and she gasped. ‘Oh, God! Forget I said that. I didn’t say it. Why do we say these things?’
Instead of answering, for he couldn’t answer (‘Come back all I said’), he reminded her gently that she had been telling him about her mother.
She sighed. ‘I never knew her go out with anyone. I never heard her mention a man. I just don’t think she was interested. Davina used to tell her to get herself a man, that would “take her out of herself”, and even Harvey had a go. I remember Harvey bringing some chap home, some political bloke, and Davina saying wouldn’t he do for Mum? I mean, they didn’t think I understood what they meant but I did.
‘When we were all up in Edinburgh last year – you know we went up for the Festival, Davina was doing something at the Book Festival – Mum got flu, she spent the whole two weeks in bed, and Davina moaned about what a shame it was because she’d met this son of a friend of hers who would just have done for Mum. That’s what she said to Harvey, that he’d just have done for Mum.
‘Mum was all right as she was. She liked her life, she liked pottering about in that gallery and watching the telly and not having any responsibilities, doing her bit of painting and making her own clothes and all that. She couldn’t be bothered with men.’ A look of extreme despair suddenly descended upon Daisy’s face. It fell into a disconsolate childlike grief. She leant forward across the table where the green glass globe was and pressed her fist up against her forehead. She pushed her fingers through her hair. He expected a sudden outburst of anger against life and the way things were, a cry of protest at what had happened to her simple, innocent, contented mother, but instead she lifted her head and said quite coolly, ‘Joanne’s the same, so far as I know. Joanne spends thousands on clothes and having her face done and her hair and massage and whatever, but it’s not for a man. I don’t know what it’s for. Herself, maybe. Davina was always on about love and men, she called it having a full life, she thought she was so modern, her word, but actually women don’t care about that any more, do they? They’re just as pleased to be seen about with women friends. You don’t have to have a man to be a real woman, not any more.’
It was as if she were justifying something in her own life, making it seem right. He said, ‘Mrs Virson says your grandmother wanted you to be like her, to do all the same things.’
‘But without her mistakes, yes. I told you she was manipulative. I wasn’t asked if I wanted to go to university and travel and write books and – and have sex with a lot of different people.’ Daisy looked away from him. ‘It was just taken for granted I would. I don’t as a matter of fact. I don’t even want to go to Oxford and – and, well, if I don’t even do my A levels I can’t. I want to be me, not someone else’s creation.’
So time had begun doing its stuff, he thought. It was working. And then what she said next made him revise.
‘Insofar as I want to do anything. So far as I give a toss what happens.’
He made no comment. ‘There’s one thing you might want to do. Would you like to come and see how we’ve turned your sanctum into a police station?’
‘Not now. I’d like to be alone now. Just me and Queenie. She was so pleased to see me, she jumped on to my shoulder from the banisters the way she used to, purring like a lion roaring. I’m going to go all over the house and just look at it, get reacquainted with it. It’s changed for me, you see. It’s the same but it’s quite different too. I shan’t go into the dining room. I’ve already asked Ken to seal up the door. Just for a while. He’s going to seal it up so that I can’t open it if I – if I forget.’
It is rare to see people shiver. Wexford, watching her, did not see this galvanic movement of the body, only the outward signs of the inner shudder, the draining of colour from her face, a goose-pimpling on her neck. He considered explaining to her what he had in mind for her protection but thought better of it. Decidedly more sensible would be to present her with a fait accompli.
She had closed her eyes. When she opened them he saw she had made an effort not to cry. The lids were swollen. He thought that after he had gone she would allow herself a transport of grief, but as he was leaving the telephone rang.
She hesitated, lifted the receiver, and he heard her say, ‘Oh, Joyce. It’s nice of you to phone but I’m quite all right. I’ll be fine . . .’
Karen Malahyde would spend the night at Tancred House with Daisy, Anne Lennox the following night, Rosemary Mountjoy the next one, and so on. He thought of mounting a further guard from the stables, two men on duty throughout the twenty-four hours, but his heart quailed at the idea of the Deputy Chief Constable’s response to that. They were short-handed, anyway, they usually were. The girl had no business to be there on her own, she had frien
ds to stay with, he could hear Freeborn saying it; it wasn’t for them to spend public money for the protection of a young woman who had chosen to return to this great lonely place on a whim.
But Karen and Anne and Rosemary were only too pleased. None of them had ever slept under a roof that covered more than a three-bedroomed semi or a block of flats. His decision to let Karen tell Daisy was formed on the spur of the moment. He was protecting her but this was to protect himself. Whenever it was avoidable, he must not see her. Briefly, he thought he understood the meaning of that sense of warning and alarm he had experienced in St Peter’s.
It horrified him. For a whole ten minutes, sitting at his desk in the stables, staring at the Persian cat cactus, but unseeing, unseeing, he believed he was in love with her. He saw it as some terminal disease Dr Crocker might have enlightened him about, some fearful blight, he saw it as Jem Hocking saw the fate that would surely overtake him.
Of course there had been instances in the past. He had been married to Dora for more than thirty years, so of course there had been instances. That young Dutch girl, pretty Nancy Lake, others apart from his work. But he loved Dora, his was a happy marriage. And this was so ridiculous, he and this child. But how the whole day lit up for him when he saw her, when he saw her sad face! How happy he was when she talked to him, when they sat together talking! How beautiful she was, and clever, and good!
He put it to the test, the only test. He tried to imagine making love to her, her nakedness and wanting to make love to her, and the whole concept was grotesque. It wasn’t that he wanted her, it wasn’t that at all. A positive revulsion from that made him flinch. He couldn’t have contemplated touching her with the tip of his finger, not even in some secret fantasy. No, he knew what it was he felt. Instead of groaning, which he had felt like doing ten minutes before, he let out a sudden guffaw, a bellow of laughter.
Barry Vine, previously glued to a report he was reading, turned round to stare. Wexford cut off the laughter and made his face grim. He thought Vine was going to say something, ask some fool question as poor Martin might have done, but he constantly underestimated DS Vine. The man was back to his clipboard and Wexford revelling now in the realisation of what it was that had happened. Not sex, not being ‘in love’, thank God. His mind had merely replaced the lost Sheila with Daisy. He had lost a daughter and found one. What a strange thing was the human psyche!
Thinking about it, he saw that this was exactly what had happened. He saw her as a daughter, for he was a man who needed daughters. Guilt touched him that he had not instead turned to that other, to Sylvia, his elder girl. Why go a-whoring after strange goddesses when he had his own near at hand? Because the feelings and the needs blow where they list, he thought, without regard for what is fitting and what is appropriate. But he made up his mind to see Sylvia soon, perhaps to take her a present. She was moving house, moving to some old rectory in the countryside. He would go and ask her about her move, how he could help. And meanwhile that resolve to see less of Daisy might stand, lest the less dangerous love become as consuming as that other fearful sort.
He sighed and this time Barry Vine didn’t turn round. The London phone directories had been brought here when they moved in and Wexford went to look in the book that used to be pink, E–K, and on whose cover pink still predominated in the picture. Of course there were hundreds of Joneses, but not too many G.G. Joneses. Daisy had been right when she said Davina would have the correct address for her father. Here it was: Jones, G.G., 11 Nineveh Road, N5, and a phone number on the 832 exchange. On the 071 area code, no doubt, it was inner London. But Wexford didn’t pick up the phone. He sat wondering what those initials stood for, and wondering too why such an absolute breach had been established between Jones and his daughter.
He thought about inheritance too and the variously different outcomes there might have been if, say, Davina had been the one not to die, or Naomi had been. And what, if any, significance was there in the fact that neither Naomi nor her friend Joanne Garland had been interested in men, had apparently preferred each other’s company?
A report in front of him expressed the opinion of a small-arms expert. His mind relieved, he read it again and more carefully. The first time, when he feared he was in the grip of the most overwhelming of obsessions, he hadn’t taken it in. The expert was saying that though the cartridges used in the Martin killing appeared different from those used at Tancred House, they might not in fact be. It was possible, if you knew what you were doing, to tamper with the barrel of a pistol, to engrave on the inside of it lines which would be themselves imprinted on a cartridge passing through it. In his view this might well have been done in the present case . . .
He said, ‘Barry, it was true what Michelle Weaver said. Bishop threw down the gun. It skidded across the floor of the bank. Strange as it seems, there were two guns careering around that floor after Martin was shot.’
Vine came over, sat on the edge of his desk.
‘Hocking told me Bishop threw the gun down, the Colt Magnum. It was a Colt Magnum .357 or .38, no way of telling. Someone in the bank picked that gun up. One of the people who didn’t hang around till we came. One of the men. Sharon Fraser had the impression the ones that went were all men.’
‘You only pick up a gun with malice aforethought,’ said Vine.
‘Yes. But perhaps no particular malice. A mere generalised bias towards law-breaking.’
‘In case it might come in useful one day, sir?’
‘Something like that. The way my old dad used to pick up every nail he saw lying in the gutter. In case it came in handy.’
His phone was bleeping. Dora or the police station. Anyone who wanted them in connection with the Tancred murders would presumably know to call on the freephone number that had daily appeared on television screens. It was Burden, who had not come up to the stables that day.
He said, ‘Reg, a call’s just come through. Not a 999. A man with an American accent. Phoning on behalf of Bib Mew. She lives next door to him, hasn’t got a phone, says she’s found a body in the woods.’
‘I know who you mean. I’ve spoken to him.’
‘She found a body,’ said Burden, ‘hanging from a tree.’
Chapter Sixteen
She let them in but said nothing. To Wexford she gave the same sort of blank hopeless stare she might have bestowed on a bailiff come to make an inventory of her goods. That typified her attitude from the beginning. She was stunned, despairing, unable to struggle against these waters which had closed over her head.
Oddly enough, she looked more masculine than ever in corduroy trousers, check shirt and V-necked pullover, the earring missing today. ‘I could find it in my heart to disgrace my man’s apparel and cry like a woman,’ thought Wexford. But Bib Mew wasn’t crying and wasn’t that a fallacy anyway, that women wept and men did not?
‘Tell us what happened, Mrs Mew,’ Burden was saying.
She had led them into the stuffy little parlour that lacked for romantic authenticity only a shawled old woman in an armchair. There, without a word to them, she subsided on to the old horsehair sofa. Her eyes never left Wexford’s face. He thought, I should have brought a WPC with me, for here is something I haven’t understood till now. Bib Mew is not simply eccentric, slow, stupid if the term isn’t too harsh. She’s backward, mentally handicapped. He felt a rush of pity. For such people shocks were worse, they penetrated and somehow overturned their innocence.
Burden had repeated his question. Wexford said, ‘Mrs Mew, I think you should have a hot drink. Can we get that for you?’
Oh, for Karen or Anne! But his offer had unlocked Bib’s voice. ‘He gave me that. Him next door.’
It was no good expecting what Burden expected. This woman wasn’t going to be able to give them any sort of factual account of what she had found. ‘You were in the woods,’ Wexford began. He looked at the time. ‘On your way to work?’
The nod she gave was more than frightened. It was the terrified movement of
a creature cornered. Burden left the room silently, in search, Wexford guessed, of the kitchen. Now for the hard part, the bit that might set her off screaming.
‘You saw something, someone? You saw something hanging from a tree?’
Again a nod. She had begun to wring her hands, a series of rapid dry washing movements. Speech from her surprised him. She said, very warily, ‘A dead person.’
Oh God, he thought, unless it’s in her mind, and I don’t think it’s in her poor mind, this is Joanne Garland. ‘Man or woman, Mrs Mew?’
She repeated what she had said. ‘A dead person,’ and then, ‘hanging up.’
‘Yes. Could you see it from the by-road?’
A fierce shake of the head and then Burden came in with tea in a mug printed with the faces of the Duke and Duchess of York. A spoon stuck out of it and Wexford guessed Burden had put enough sugar in to make the spoon stand up.
‘I phoned in,’ he said. ‘Got Anne to come up here.’ He added, ‘And Barry.’
Bib Mew held the mug close to her chest and closed her hands round it. Incongruously Wexford recalled someone telling him how the people of Kashmir carry pots of hot coals under their clothes to warm them. If they hadn’t been there he thought Bib would have put the mug up under her sweater. She seemed to take comfort from the tea as a heater rather than a drink.