by Ruth Rendell
Chapter Two When the Akande family had moved to Kingsmarkham a year or so before, the owner- occupiers on either side of number twenty-seven Ollerton Avenue put their houses up for sale. Insulting as this was to Raymond and Laurette Akande and their children, from a practical point of view it was to their advantage. The recession was at its height and the houses took a long time to sell, their asking prices regularly falling, but when the newcomers arrived they turned out to be nice people, as friendly and as liberal-minded as the rest of the Ollerton Avenue neighbours. ‘Note my choice of words,’ said Wexford. ‘I said “friendly”, I said “liberal”, I didn’t say “non-racist”. We’re all racist in this country.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ said Detective Inspector Michael Burden. ‘I’m not. You’re not.’ They were in Wexford’s dining room, having coffee, while the Fairfax boys, Robin and Ben, and Burden’s son Mark watched Wimbledon on television in the room next door with Dora. It was Wexford who had begun this topic of conversation, he hardly knew why. Perhaps it had arisen out of Sylvia’s accusation when they discussed the Epsons. He had certainly been thinking about it. ‘My wife’s not and nor is yours,’ Burden said, ‘nor our children.’ ‘We’re all racists,’ said Wexford as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Without exception. People over forty are worse and that’s about all you can say. You were brought up and I was brought up to think ourselves superior to black people. Oh, it may not have been explicit but it was there all right. We were conditioned that way and it’s in us still, it’s ineradicable. My wife had a black doll called a gollywog and a white one called Pamela. Black people were known as negroes. When did you ever hear anyone but a sociologist like my daughter Sylvia refer to white people as Caucasians?’ ‘As a matter of fact, my mother referred to black people as “darkies” and she thought she was being polite. “Nigger” was rude but “darky” was OK. But that was a long time ago. Things have changed.’ ‘No, they haven’t. Not much. There are just more black people about. My son-in-law said to me the other day that he no longer noticed the difference between a black person and a white one. I said, you don’t notice the difference between fair and dark, then? You don’t notice if one person’s fat and another’s thin? What possible help to overcoming racism is that? We’ll be getting somewhere when one person says to another of someone black, “Which one is he?” and the other one says, “That chap in the red tie.” Burden smiled. The boys came in, banging the door behind them, to announce that Martina had won her first set and Steffi hers. Surnames scarcely existed as far as they and their contemporaries were concerned. ‘Can we have the chocolate biscuits?’ ‘Ask your grandmother.’
‘She’s gone to sleep,’ said Ben. ‘But she said we could have them after lunch and it’s after lunch now. It’s the ones that are chocolate with chocolate chips and we know where they are.’ ‘Anything for a quiet life,’ said Wexford, and he added gravely, with a hint of scolding in his voice, ‘but if you start on them you must finish the whole packet. Is that understood?’ ‘Kein Problem,’ said Robin. After the Burdens and Mark had gone Wexford picked up the booklet his son-in-law had left him to look at, the ES 461. Or rather, the Xerox of the booklet. The original had gone back with Neil to his interview with the Employment Service. Neil, whose method of handling his misfortunes was to wallow in them, with the maximum self-created humiliation, had gone to the trouble of photocopying all nineteen pages of what the Employment Service chose to call a ‘form’. He had taken the collection of turquoise blue, green, yellow and orange papers to Kingsmarkham Instant Print where they had a colour copier so that Wexford could see an ES 461 in all its glory (his words) and read the demands a beneficent government made of its unemployed citizens. A new word had been coined for the first page: ‘jobsearch’. There were three pages of notes to be read before completing the ‘form’ and then forty-five questions, many of them multiple enquiries, which made Wexford’s head spin to read. Some were innocuous, some desperately sad, some sinister: Does your health limit the work you can do? asked number thirty, following twenty-nine’s, What is the lowest wage you are willing to work for? Sights were set humbly for the enquiry, Do you have any academic qualifications (for example, O Levels, GCSEs, City and Guilds)? Do you have your own transport? asked number nine. Four wanted to know: If you have not worked for the last twelve months, how have you spent your time? This last made his anger rise. What business was that of these Client Advisers, these small-time civil servants, this government department? He asked himself what answers they expected apart from ‘looking for work’. Having a fortnight on Grand Bahama? Dining at Les Quat’ Saisons? Collecting Chinese porcelain? He pushed the coloured pages aside and went into the living room where Navratilova was still battling it out on Centre Court. ‘Move up,’ he said to Robin on the sofa. ‘Pas de problème.’ Doctors used to tell you to come back and see them next week or ‘when the symptoms have cleared up’. These days they are mostly too busy to do that. They don’t want to see patients without symptoms, not if they can help it. There are too many of the other kind, the ones that really ought to be in bed and visited at home, but who are obliged to stagger down to the medical centre and spread their viruses round the waiting room. Wexford’s virus had apparently flown away at the moment Dr Akande spoke his magic words. He had no intention of going back for a mere check-up and even disobeyed the doctor in taking no days off. From time to time he thought about that question, the one that asked how the victim of ‘jobsearch’ had spent his or her time, and he wondered how he would answer. When he wasn’t at work, for instance, when he was on leave but hadn’t gone away. Reading, talking to grandchildren, thinking, drying the dishes, having a quick one in the Olive with a friend, reading. Would that satisfy them? Or was it something quite other they wanted to hear?
But when Dr Akande phoned him a week later, he was first guilty, then apprehensive. Dora took the call. It was getting on for nine in the evening, a Wednesday in early July, and the sun not yet set. The french windows were open and Wexford was sitting just inside them, reading Camus’ The Outsider, thirty years after he had first read it, and swiping at mosquitos with the Kingsmarkham Courier. ‘What does he want?’ ‘He didn’t say, Reg.’ It was just remotely possible that Akande was so thorough and painstaking a general practitioner that he troubled to check up on patients who had been no more than marginally unwell. Or else – and Wexford’s heart gave a little hop and a thud – that ‘falling sickness’ he had had wasn’t the minor matter Akande had diagnosed, wasn’t the result of a generalized but petty plague, was in fact much more serious, its symptoms the forerunner of . . . ‘I’m coming.’ He took the receiver. From Akande’s first words he knew he wasn’t to be told anything but asked something; the doctor wasn’t dispensing wisdom but coming cap in hand; this time it was he, the policeman, who must make the diagnosis. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you with this, Mr Wexford, but I hoped you might help me.’ Wexford waited. ‘It’s probably nothing.’ Those words, no matter how often he heard them, always caused a small shiver. In his experience, it was nearly always something and, if brought to his attention, something bad. ‘If I was really worried I’d get in touch with the police station but it isn’t on that scale. My wife and I don’t know many people in Kingsmarkham – of course, we’re relatively new here. You being my patient . . .’ ‘What has happened, doctor?’ A small deprecating laugh, a hesitation, and Akande said, using a curious phrase, ‘I’m trying in vain to locate my daughter.’ He paused. He made another attempt. ‘I suppose what I mean is, I don’t know how to find out where she is. Of course, she’s twenty-two years old. She’s a grown woman. If she wasn’t living at home with us, if she was somewhere on her own, I wouldn’t even know she hadn’t come home, I wouldn’t . . .’ Wexford cut in, ‘Do you mean your daughter is missing?’ ‘No, no, that’s putting it too strongly. She hasn’t come home and she wasn’t where we expected her to be last night, that’s all. But as I say, she’s grown up. If she changed her mind and went somewhere else . . . well, she has that right.’ ‘But you would ha
ve expected her to let you know?’ ‘I suppose so. She’s not very reliable about that kind of thing, young people aren’t, as you may know, but we’ve never known her to . . . well, it looks as if she’s deceiving us. Telling us one thing and doing another. That’s the way I personally see it. My wife, on the other hand, is worried. That’s an understatement, she’s very anxious.’ It was always their wives, Wexford thought. They projected their emotions on to their wives. My wife is rather anxious about it. It’s bothering my wife. I’m taking this step because, frankly, the whole thing is affecting my wife’s health. As strong men themselves, macho men, they would like you to believe they were prey to no fears, no anxieties, and to no desires either, no longings, no passions, no needs. ‘What’s her name?’ he asked. ‘Melanie.’
‘When did you last see Melanie, Dr Akande?’ ‘Yesterday afternoon. She had an appointment in Kingsmarkham and then she was going over to Myringham on the bus to her friend’s house. The friend was having a twenty-first birthday party last evening and Melanie was going to it and afterwards to stay the night. They have their majority at eighteen, so what they do is have two parties, one for eighteen and one for twenty-one.’ Wexford had noticed. He was more interested in the suppressed terror he could detect in Akande’s voice, a terror the doctor overlaid with a pathetic optimism. ‘We didn’t expect her home till this afternoon. If they don’t have to they don’t get up before noon. My wife was working and so was I. We expected to find her at home when we got in.’ ‘Could she have been in and gone out again?’ ‘I suppose she could. Of course she has her own key. But she was never at Laurel’s – that’s the friend. My wife phoned them. Melanie hadn’t turned up. And yet I can’t see that that’s too much to worry about. She and Laurel had had a row . . . well, a disagreement. I heard Melanie say on the phone to her, I can remember her very words: “I’m going to ring off now and don’t count on seeing me on Wednesday.” ’ ‘Has Melanie a boyfriend, doctor?’ ‘Not any longer. They broke up about two months ago.’ ‘But there might have been a . . . a reconciliation?’ ‘I suppose there might.’ He sounded grudging. When he said it again he sounded hopeful. ‘I suppose there might. You mean, she met him yesterday and they’ve gone off somewhere together? My wife wouldn’t like that. She has rather strict ideas on these matters.’ Presumably, she’d prefer fornication to rape or murder, thought Wexford rather sourly but he didn’t, of course, say this aloud. ‘Dr Akande, you’re probably right when you say this is nothing. Melanie is somewhere where she has no access to a phone. Will you give me a ring in the morning, please? As early as you like.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, after six. Whatever happens, whether she appears or phones or doesn’t appear or phone?’ ‘I’ve got a feeling she’s trying to get through to us now.’ ‘In that case let’s not occupy the line any longer.’ His phone rang at five past six. He wasn’t asleep. He had just woken up. Perhaps he awoke because he was subconsciously troubled about the Akande girl. As he picked up the receiver, before Akande spoke, he was thinking, I shouldn’t have waited, I should have done something last night. ‘She hasn’t come back and she hasn’t phoned. My wife is very anxious.’ I expect you are too, Wexford thought. I would be. ‘I’ll come and see you. In half an hour.’ Sylvia had married almost as soon as she left school. There had been no time to worry about where she was or what was happening to her. But his younger daughter Sheila had caused him sleepless nights, nights of terror. Home in the holidays from drama school, she had made a speciality of disappearing with boyfriends, not phoning, giving no clue to her whereabouts until, three or four days later, she’d phone from Glasgow or Bristol or Amsterdam. And he had never got used to it. He would tell reassuring stories of his own experiences to the Akandes, he thought, as he showered and put his clothes on, but he would also report Melanie as a missing person. She was female, she was young, therefore they would mount a search for her.
Some days he walked to work, for his health’s sake, but it was usually two hours later than this that he started off. This morning was hazy, everything was still, the sun a brighter whiteness in a white sky. Dew lay on the roadside turf high summer had burnt straw colour. He didn’t see a soul in the first two streets, then as he turned out of Mansfield Road, he met an old woman walking a minuscule Yorkshire terrier. No one else. Two cars passed him. A cat carrying a mouse in its mouth crossed the road from thirty-two Ollerton Avenue to twenty-five and dived through a flap in the front door. Wexford didn’t have to knock at twenty-seven. Dr Akande was already waiting for him on the step. ‘It’s very good of you.’ Resisting the temptation to say ‘no problem’ in one of Robin’s polyglot versions, Wexford stepped ahead of him into the house. A nice, dull, ordinary sort of place to live in. He couldn’t recall having been into any of the detached four-bedroomed houses of Ollerton Avenue before. The street itself was treelined, heavily tree-shaded at this time of the year. It would rob the interior of the Akande house of light until the sun came round and for a moment, until he was inside the room, he failed to see the woman who stood at the window, looking out. The classic stance, the time-honoured position, of the parent or spouse or lover who waits and waits. Sister Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming? I see only the green grass and the yellow sand. . . . She turned round and came towards him, a tall slender woman of about forty-five dressed in the uniform of a ward sister at Stowerton Royal Infirmary – short-sleeved navy blue dress, navy belt with a rather ornate silver buckle, two or three badges pinned at the left breast. Wexford hadn’t expected someone so handsome, so striking to look at, such an elegant figure. Why hadn’t he? ‘Laurette Akande.’ She held out her hand. It was a long slender hand, the palm corn-coloured, the back deep coffee. She managed to smile. He thought, they always have these wonderful teeth, and then the blood rushed up into his face the way it hadn’t done since he was a teenager. He was a racist. Why, from the instant he’d walked into this room he’d been thinking, how odd, it’s just the same in here as in anyone else’s house, same sort of furniture, same sweet peas in the same sort of vase. . . . He cleared his throat, spoke firmly. ‘You’re worried about your daughter, Mrs Akande? ‘We both are. I think we’ve cause for worry, don’t you? It’s two days now.’ He noted she didn’t say it was nothing, she wasn’t saying it was just the way young people behaved. ‘Sit down, please.’ Her manner was peremptory, a little offhand. She lacked her husband’s Englishness, perhaps his bedside manner. This was no time, he thought, for tales of the adolescent Sheila’s truancy. Laurette Akande spoke briskly, ‘It’s time we did this officially, I think. I mean, we have to report her missing. Aren’t you too high up to take care of it?’ ‘I’ll do for now,’ Wexford said. ‘Perhaps you’ll give me some details. We’ll start with the name and address of these people she was supposed to spend the night with. I’ll have the boyfriend’s name too. Oh, and what was this appointment she had in Kingsmarkham before she was due to leave for Myringham?’ ‘It was at the Job Centre,’ said Dr Akande. His wife corrected him with precision. ‘The Employment Service Job Centre. The ESJ, as it’s now called. Melanie was looking for a job.’
‘She was trying to find work long before she finished her course,’ said Laurette Akande. ‘That was at Myringham. She graduated this summer.’ ‘The University of the South?’ Wexford asked. Her husband answered. ‘No, Myringham University, the old Polytechnic that was. They’re all universities now. She was studying music and dance, “Performance Arts”, it’s called. I never wanted her to do that. She got a good history A Level – why couldn’t she have read history?’ Wexford thought he knew what the objection was to music and dance. ‘They make such wonderful dancers’, ‘They have these great singing voices. . . .’ How often had he heard those seemingly generous remarks? Laurette said, ‘You may or may not know that black Africans are the most highly educated members of British society. Statistics show that. In view of this, we have high expectations of our children, she should have been preparing herself for a profession.’ She seemed suddenly to recollect that it wasn’t Melanie�
��s education or the lack of it that this crisis was about. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now. There were no openings for her in what she wanted to do. Her father had told her there wouldn’t be but they never listen. You’ll have to retrain in business management or something, I said to her. She went to the ESJ and picked up a form and got an appointment to see a New Claims Adviser there at two-thirty on Tuesday.’ ‘So when did she leave here?’ ‘My husband had his afternoon surgery. It was my day off. Melanie took an overnight bag with her. She said she expected to get to Laurel’s by five and I remember I said, don’t count on it, having that appointment at two-thirty doesn’t mean she’ll see you then, you could easily wait an hour. She left here at ten past two to give herself plenty of time. I know that because it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the High Street from here.’ What an admirable witness Laurette Akande would make! Wexford found himself hoping she would never be called upon to be one. Her voice was cool and controlled. She wasted no words. Somewhere, under the accent of South East England, was a hint of the African country she had come from perhaps as a student. ‘You had the impression she was going straight from the ESJ to this place in Myringham?’ ‘I know she was. By bus. She hoped to catch the four-fifteen, which was why I said that about having to wait to see the New Claims Adviser. She wanted to take my car but I had to say no. I needed it in the morning. I was due at the hospital by eight when the day shift starts.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I am today. The traffic at this hour makes a ten- minute journey into half an hour.’ So she was going to work? Wexford had waited for a sign of that anxiety Dr Akande had been so insistent his wife was prey to. There was none. Either she wasn’t worried or she was under an iron control. ‘Where do you think Melanie is, Mrs Akande?’ She gave a small light laugh, a rather chilling laugh. ‘I very much hope she isn’t where I think it most likely she is. In Euan’s flat – room, rather – with him.’ ‘Melanie wouldn’t do that to us, Letty.’ ‘She wouldn’t see it as doing anything to us. She has never appreciated our concern for her security and her future. I said to her: Do you want to be one of those girls these boys get pregnant on purpose and are proud of it? Euan’s already got two children with two different girls and he’s not twenty-two yet. You know that, you remember when she told us about those children.’