Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Can you remember what time that was?’ ‘Well, her appointment was for two-thirty and no one’s allowed more than twenty minutes. I suppose it must have been twenty to three, something like that.’ ‘If she was able to see Miss Bystock on time. Was she? Or did she have to wait half an hour?’ ‘No, she couldn’t have done. A Claims Adviser’s last appointment is at three-thirty, and I know Annette had three to see after her.’ So Laurette Akande had been wrong about that. He asked Leyton for Annette Bystock’s address. While the manager was away finding it, he said, ‘Did you see her leave the building? Go out through those doors?’ ‘I just saw her talking to Annette.’ ‘Thank you for your help, Miss Pamber. By the way, tell me something, in these days of universal first names, why do you all have Ms or Mr and your surname and an initial on your name tags? It seems very formal.’ ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said. She had a charming manner, he thought, warm and just a touch flirtatious. ‘Actually, I’m Ingrid. No one calls me Ms Pamber, not anyone. But they say it’s for our protection.’ She looked up at him through long dark eyelashes. Her eyes were the bluest he had ever seen, the blue of a gentian or a Delft plate or a star sapphire. ‘I don’t follow.’ ‘Well, most clients are OK, I mean they’re nice, most of them. But you do get some nuts – crazy people, you know? I mean, we had someone in here threw acid at Cyril – Mr Leyton, that is. He didn’t hit him but he had a go. Don’t you remember?’ Vaguely, Wexford did, though he’d been on leave at the time. ‘Hopefully, there’s very few that would do that. But if we had our full names on our tags, like “Ingrid Pamber”, say, they could look us up in the phone book and . . . well, you might get someone who thought he was in love with you or someone – and that’s more likely – who hated you. You know, we’ve got jobs and they haven’t, that’s what it’s about.’ Wexford wondered how many ‘I. Pambers’ there were in the Kingsmarkham and District telephone directory and guessed at just one. Still, as a safety measure keeping first names a secret was wise. The thought came to him that quite a lot of people might fancy themselves in love with Ingrid Pamber. Another poster caught his eye, this one warning those seeking jobs not to pay anyone money for finding them work. The system seemed open to many abuses. With Annette Bystock’s address in his pocket, he went out and down the steps. In the half-hour since he had gone in there several young men had arrived to seat themselves on the stone balustrades, two of them smoking, the others staring vacantly at nothing. They took no notice of him. Lying on the pavement where someone, perhaps one of them, had discarded it, was an ES 461, the highly coloured questionnaire form. It was open at page three and when Wexford bent to pick it up he saw that the egregious question four: ‘If you have not worked for the past twelve months, how have you spent your time?’ had been answered. Carefully printed in the allotted space was the single word, ‘Wanking’. That made him laugh. He began trying to retrace what might have been Melanie Akande’s footsteps on leaving the ESJ. According to Ingrid Pamber, she would have been in plenty of time for the three-fifteen bus to Myringham, no more than five minutes’ walk away.

  Wexford timed himself to the nearest bus stop. These periods of time were nearly always shorter than you anticipated and he found it took him, not five minutes, but three. However, there was no earlier bus she could have caught. He studied the timetable in its frame, somewhat vandalized, with a diagonal crack across the glass, but still readable. The buses went once an hour, on the first quarter. She would have had to wait at least twenty minutes. It was during that sort of enforced waiting, he thought, that women accepted lifts. Would she have done that? He must ask the parents if she ever, for instance, hitched lifts. Wait, though, until Vine’s report came in and there was some information from the Myringham end. Meanwhile, had anyone in the neighbourhood of this bus stop seen anything? In the dry cleaners he drew a blank. You couldn’t see the street from the interior of the wine shop. Its windows were too densely stacked with bottles and cans. He went into Grover’s the newsagent. They were his newsagents, the shop that supplied his daily paper and had done for years. As soon as she saw him the woman behind the counter began apologizing for the recent late deliveries. Wexford cut her short, said he hadn’t noticed, and anyway he didn’t expect some schoolboy or schoolgirl to get up at the crack of dawn to bring his Independent by seven-thirty. He showed her the photograph. Melanie Akande’s being black was to their advantage. In a place where there were very few black people, she was known, remembered, even by those who had never spoken to her. Dinny Lawson, the newsagent, knew her by sight but, as far as she knew, Melanie had never been into the shop. As to bus queues, she sometimes noticed them and she sometimes didn’t. It was Tuesday afternoon Wexford was talking about? One thing she could tell him was that no one, black or white, got on the three-fifteen to Myringham bus, no one at all. ‘How can you be so sure?’ ‘I’ll tell you. My husband said to me, it must have been Saturday or Sunday, he said it was a wonder they went on running that bus in the afternoons on account of no one went on it. Mornings, yes, specially the eight-fifteen and the nine-fifteen, and the ones that come back in the evening, they’re busy. So I said, I’ll keep an eye open and see. Well, we’ve kept the shop door open all day this week, it’s been so hot, and I could see without even going to the door. And he was right, it’s a fact, no one’s got on the two-fifteen, the three-fifteen or the four-fifteen Monday, Tuesday or yesterday. My husband said to have five pounds on it and was I glad I didn’t take him up on that . . .’ So she had disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office and the bus stop. No, ‘disappeared’ was too strong a word – yet. No matter what she told her parents, perhaps she had never intended to take that bus. Perhaps she had arranged to meet someone as soon as her appointment with the New Claims Adviser was over. In that case, was there a chance she had mentioned this to Annette Bystock? For all he knew, Annette Bystock might be one of those warm friendly people whose effect on others is to invite confidences, and confidences which have no apparent connection with the matter in hand. It was quite possible Annette had asked her if she’d be available for an interview that day and Melanie had said no, she was going to meet her boyfriend. . . . Or there had been no meeting with a boyfriend, no confidences, nothing to confide, and Melanie had accepted a lift to Myringham from a stranger. After all, Dinny Lawson hadn’t said there had been no one in the vicinity of the bus stop all afternoon, only that she had seen nobody get on the bus when it came.

  Dora Wexford had got into the habit of preparing large quantities of quite elaborate food for her daughter and her daughter’s family when they came to meals. Her husband had pointed out to her that though Neil and Sylvia were unemployed, they weren’t poverty- stricken, they weren’t on the breadline, but this had little effect. He came home that evening just in time to share in the servings of carrot and orange soup before a main course of braised lambs’ kidneys, spinach and ricotta cheese in filo pastry, new potatoes and french beans. Dessert spoons on the table indicated the arrival later of that rarity, that luxury that never happened when the two of them were alone, a pudding. Pale weedy Neil ate hugely, as if for comfort. As Wexford joined them and sat down, he was describing to his mother-in-law his abortive visit to the Benefit Office. No payments could be made to him because, before losing his work, he had been self- employed. ‘What difference does that make?’ Wexford asked. ‘Oh,’ he explained quite carefully. ‘As a self-employed person I didn’t pay Class One National Insurance contributions during the two tax years prior to the tax year in which I’m making my claim.’ ‘But you paid them?’ ‘Oh, I paid them but in another class. He explained that too.’ ‘Who was it?’ Wexford said. ‘Ms Bystock or Mr Stanton?’ Neil goggled at him. ‘How do you know?’ Enigmatically, ‘I have my reasons.’ Wexford relented. ‘I was there today about something else.’ ‘It was Stanton,’ Neil said. Wexford wondered suddenly why Sylvia was looking so smug. Anxious not to put on weight, she had eaten the kidneys, refused the pastry and had now laid her knife and fork precisely down diagonally across her
plate. A little smile lifted the corners of her mouth. One after the other, Ben and Robin asked for more potatoes. ‘You promise to eat every bit then.’ ‘Problem yok,’ said Robin. ‘So what are you going to do? They must do something for you.’ ‘Sylvia has to claim, if you can believe it. She was only part-time but she got in just enough hours to claim, so she’s doing it for herself and me and the boys.’ Having told Ben to chew his food properly and not swallow in lumps, Sylvia said with undisguised triumph, ‘I sign on every other Tuesday. It’s A to K on Tuesdays, L to R on Wednesdays and S to Z on Thursdays. I get benefit for all of us. And they’ll pay the mortgage. Neil hates me doing it, don’t you, Neil? He’d rather I went out cleaning.’ ‘That isn’t true.’ ‘It is true. I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy it because I do. How d’you think I feel after years of my husband telling me first that I wasn’t capable of earning and then when I was that what I earned wasn’t worth the trouble of working, it’d all go in tax.’ ‘I never said any of that.’ ‘It feels great,’ Sylvia said, ignoring him. ‘The whole lot of them depend on me now. All the money, quite a lot of it, will be paid to me personally. So much for sexism, so much for chauvinism . . .’ ‘They won’t pay the mortgage,’ Neil interrupted her. ‘Almost everything you say is wildly inaccurate. They’ll pay the interest on the mortgage and they’re putting a ceiling on the amount of mortgage they’ll pay up to. We shall put the house on the market.’ ‘We shall not.’

  ‘Of course we shall. We have no option. We shall sell it and buy a semi in Mansfield Road – if we’re lucky. That looks like Eve’s pudding, Dora, one of my favourites. You don’t improve the situation, Sylvia, by telling a pack of lies as a vindication of the rights of women.’ Ben said, ‘You know men have Adam’s apples, don’t you?’ Silently blessing him for the distraction, Wexford said yes, he did know, he supposed everyone knew. ‘Yes, well, d’you know why they’re called that? I bet you don’t. It’s because when the snake gave Eve the apple she could swallow it all right but a lump of it stuck in Adam’s throat and that’s why men have got that bit sticking out . . .’ ‘If that story isn’t rank sexism, I don’t know what is. Are you ever going to eat up those potatoes, Robin?’ ‘No pasa nada.’ ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Sylvia crossly. ‘Come on, Mum. Can’t you guess?’ Refusing pudding and coffee, Wexford went out into the hall to phone Detective Sergeant Vine. It had taken Barry Vine a long time to find Euan Sinclair. He had only just got back from London. After he had eaten he was going to write his report. It would be on Wexford’s desk by nine in the morning. ‘Give me a résumé now,’ said Wexford. ‘I didn’t find the girl.’ Vine had gone first to the address provided by Dr Akande. It was a fairly large Victorian house in the East End of London, occupied by three generations of the Sinclair and Lafay families. An old grandmother, though domiciled there for thirty years, spoke only a version of the patois. Three of her daughters also lived in the house and four of their children, though not Euan. He had moved out some three months before. Deeply distrustful of the police, the women spoke to him with a kind of laconic suspicion. Euan’s mother Claudine who occupied the ground floor with her partner and father of her two younger children, a man called Samuel Lafay, the brother incidentally of the elder sister’s ex-husband . . . ‘Oh, get on with it,’ Wexford said. It was clear that Vine was expounding with relish on the complexities of this intricate family. He seemed to have enjoyed his day. After asking rhetorically why she should tell him anything about her son who was a good, clean-living and honourable man, an intellectual, Claudine Sinclair or Lafay had sent him to a council flat in Whitechapel. This turned out to be the home of a girl called Joan-Anne, mother of Euan Sinclair’s daughter. Joan-Anne never wanted to see Euan again, if he came into a million she wouldn’t accept a penny of it in child-support for Tasha, if he went on his knees to her she wouldn’t, she had a good man now who had never been without so much as a day’s work in his life. She gave Vine an address in Shadwell, home of Sheena (‘poor cow, lets him walk all over her’) who was the mother of Euan’s son. Euan had gone to sign on, Sheena told him. Thursday was his day. After signing on he usually went for a drink with some friends, but he’d turn up sometime, she couldn’t really say when. No, Vine couldn’t wait for him, she couldn’t have that. The idea made her nervous, Vine could see, probably on account of the neighbours. The neighbours would have identified him in the mysterious way some people can always spot a policeman and

  they’d make a note of how many hours Vine spent in Sheena’s flat. All this time Euan’s son was screaming his head off in the next room. Sheena went to attend to him and came back with a handsome angry boy who already looked too big for his diminutive mother to carry. ‘Oh, stop your noise, Scott, stop your noise,’ she said ineffectually, over and over. Scott roared at her and roared at the visitor. Vine left and went back at four. Sheena and her son were still alone. Scott was still intermittently roaring. No, Euan hadn’t been back. Phone her? What did he mean, phone her? Why would he? Vine gave up. Sheena gave Scott a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and stuck him in front of a video of what appeared to be Miami Vice. When he was quiet, Vine asked her about Melanie Akande but it was plain Sheena had never heard of her. While Vine probed a bit, Euan Sinclair came in. Tall, handsome, very thin, Euan had the sort of looks that reminded Vine of Linford Christie. His hair was very short, a week’s growth, Vine guessed, after a total shave. He walked with the peculiar grace of the young black man, all movement from the hips, the torso erect and still. But it was his voice that surprised Vine. Not Creole English, one generation removed, not East End Cockney, not Estuary but nearer Public School. Wexford said, half-joking, half-serious, ‘So you’re a snob as well as a racist, Barry.’ Vine didn’t deny it. He said he’d had the impression Euan Sinclair had taught himself to talk like that for some unknown reasons of policy. It suddenly struck him – for the first time – that Euan might deny knowledge of Melanie in Sheena’s presence. ‘That would have been the first thing I’d have thought of,’ said Wexford. ‘He didn’t, though. That was the funny thing. I could see it was all news to her and she didn’t like it. He couldn’t have cared less.’ He’d seen Melanie the previous week. At the Myringham graduation ceremonies. They had a talk and she agreed to meet him the following Tuesday in Myringham. By this time Sheena was staring at him with a kind of horror. Melanie was going to Laurel Tucker’s party, Euan said, and he could come too. Vine asked where they were meeting and Euan named a pub in Myringham. At around four. The Wig and Ribbon in the High Street opened from 11.00 am till 11.00 pm. She hadn’t turned up, though Euan waited till five-thirty. At this point he saw a man he knew, another alumnus of Myringham University. The two of them got together, went to another pub and then another, and Euan spent the night sleeping on the floor in this man’s room. Sheena could contain herself no longer. ‘You told me you were at your grandma’s.’ He said to her, in the sort of voice a man uses to say it’s raining, ‘I lied.’ Sheena stalked to the door. Just before it closed behind her Euan called out, ‘You’d better not leave me alone with him. I’m no baby-minder. That’s women’s work, right?’ ‘I’ll check it out with this bloke he says he met,’ said Vine, ‘but I believe him. He gave me the fellow’s name and address without turning a hair.’ ‘It looks as if Melanie never reached Myringham,’ Wexford said. ‘Something happened to deflect her in Kingsmarkham High Street. Somewhere on about two hundred yards of pavement. We have to find out what it was.’

  Chapter Four The Tucker Family, Laurel and Glenda Tucker, their father and stepmother, had little that was new to offer. They were plainly unwilling ‘to get mixed up in anything’. It was true that Laurel had expected Melanie on the late afternoon of 6 July and had been displeased when it was clear she wasn’t coming. But she hadn’t been all that surprised. After all, they had quarrelled. The detective sergeant from Myringham who had been asking the questions said, ‘What was that about then?’ Laurel had been at the graduation ceremony, witnessed the meeting between Melanie and Euan Sin
clair and seen the two of them go off together. Melanie phoned her next day, said she was thinking of getting back with Euan, he was lonely, there had been no one in his life since they split up, and she’d told him she’d bring him to Laurel’s party on Tuesday. I don’t want him, Laurel said, I don’t like him, I never did. I’m not surprised he hasn’t been seeing anyone else – who’d want him? Melanie said if Euan couldn’t come to the party she wasn’t coming either, and they had a row. ‘She did tell her parents she was going to this party,’ Burden said to Wexford. ‘She was going to the Tucker house first and then on to this party.’ ‘Well, she wouldn’t tell them she had a date with this Euan, would she? They can’t stand him, haven’t got a good word to say for him. Mother’s something of a formidable woman, I’d almost say she’d be capable of locking a daughter up. By this time Melanie had obviously decided she wasn’t going to the party. She was going to stick to what she’d said and not go if Euan wasn’t also welcome. She was going to meet Euan in the Wig and Ribbon and there’s not much doubt she meant to stay with him, spend the night with him.’ ‘Yes, but where? Not at this Sheena’s place. People that age don’t hire hotel rooms, do they?’ Wexford laughed. ‘Not if they’re living on the IS they don’t.’ ‘The what?’ ‘Income Support. If Melanie thought about that aspect at all I expect she thought they’d go to Euan’s mother’s place in Bow. She’d very likely been there before. And next day she’d come home.’ ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Burden, looking down his nose. ‘They’ve got no jobs, they’re living on what-d’you-call-it, IS, and they still splash out on drinks and dates with girls and God knows what for train fares.’ ‘It doesn’t matter much, Mike, because we know she didn’t go to London. She didn’t even go to Myringham. She didn’t meet Euan because Euan – ’ Wexford had another look at Vine’s latest report ‘ – spent the evening with someone called John Varcava in the Wig and Ribbon, the Wild Goose and Silk’s Club before returning to Varcava’s rented room in Myringham at three in the morning. It’s all confirmed by a barman, a barmaid,