Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  made Annette tell me, I think. Or it might have been that one evening when I did go into her place and while I was there the phone rang and it was him. That was when she made me promise not to tell anyone what she was going to tell me. ‘She’d been so jumpy before the phone rang. I’d guess he’d promised to phone at seven and it was nearly eight. She grabbed that phone like it was . . . well, a matter of life and death. Afterwards she said, “Can you keep a secret?” and I said of course I could and she said, “Well, I’ve got someone too. That was him,” and then it all came out.’ ‘His name, Miss Pamber?’ ‘Bruce. His name’s Bruce. I don’t know Bruce What.’ ‘This was the man you thought had phoned the Benefit Office after Miss Bystock phoned to say she wouldn’t be coming in?’ She nodded, untroubled by that earlier lie. ‘You know where he lives?’ Vine asked. ‘My boyfriend and me, we were going to Pomfret one day and we gave Annette a lift. She was going to see her cousin. It was sort of Christmas, the day before Christmas Eve, I think. Annette was sitting in the back and as we passed this house she tapped on my shoulder and said, “Look at that, that house with the window in the roof, that’s where you-know-who lives.” That was what she said, “you-know-who”. ‘I don’t know the number. I could show you.’ Furious faces of discouragement made by Jeremy weren’t lost on Wexford. Ingrid saw them and sighed happily. ‘I could describe it. I will. You mustn’t make silly faces, lovey. Now run away and cook my breakfast.’ ‘What did you do with the key to Miss Bystock’s flat,’ Wexford asked, ‘when you left on Thursday?’ She answered promptly – too promptly. Sitting in the car outside number 101 Harrow Avenue, a biggish Victorian house on three floors to which a fourth had been added with a dormer window in the mansard roof, Wexford gave Burden an account of what Ingrid Pamber had told him. They had already been to the house and found no one at home. It was about as far from the street in which Annette lived as was possible and still be in Kingsmarkham. The electoral roll had shown its occupants to be Snow, Carolyn E., Snow, Bruce J., and Snow, Melissa E. Wife, husband and grown-up daughter, Wexford guessed. No hint, of course, was given in the list of those eligible to vote as to how many other children the Snows might have. ‘She’d been having this affair with him for nine years,’ Wexford said. ‘Or so she told Ingrid Pamber, and I can’t think of any reason why even a liar like her should lie about that. It was one of those situations in which the married man tells his mistress he’ll leave his wife for her as soon as the children are off their hands. Nine years ago Bruce Snow’s youngest child was five, so you could say if you were a cynic like me that he was on to a good thing.’ ‘Right,’ said Burden in a heartfelt way. Wexford cast up his eyes. ‘Wait for it. It gets better. They had to meet somewhere but he never took her to an hotel, he said he couldn’t afford it. After that trip past the house in the boyfriend’s car Ingrid asked her what Bruce had given her for Christmas and Annette said nothing, he never gave her anything, she’d never had a present from him. He needed everything he had for his family. Mind you, according to Ingrid, Annette wasn’t resentful, she never criticized him. She understood.’

  ‘I take it that after the first confidings there were more on other occasions?’ ‘Oh, yes. Once she’d started there was no stopping her. It was Bruce this and Bruce that whenever she and Ingrid were alone together. I imagine it was a relief to the poor woman to have someone she could talk to.’ Wexford took another look at the house, at the signs of prosperity about it, the evidently recent rooftop extension, the new paint, the satellite dish outside an upper window. ‘As I said,’ he went on, ‘Snow never took her to an hotel and of course they couldn’t go to his house. She had her flat but he refused to go there. Apparently, there was some friend or relative of his wife living opposite. So he summoned her to his office after hours.’ ‘You’re joking,’ said Burden. ‘Not unless Ingrid Pamber is and I doubt if she’d have the imagination. Snow never wrote to her, which is why we found no letters. He gave her nothing, not even a photograph of himself. He phoned, at appointed times, “when he could”. But she loved him, you see, and that was why all that was OK, was reasonable in her eyes, was prudent. After all, it would only go on so long as the children were young.’ Burden used his small son’s currently favourite word, ‘Yuck!’ ‘I couldn’t put it better myself. When he wanted to meet her, or let’s say when he wanted his bit on the side . . .’ Wexford ignored Burden’s pained expression, ‘he’d ask her to come to his office. He’s an accountant with Hawkins and Steele.’ ‘Is he now? In York Street, aren’t they?’ ‘In one of those very old houses that overhang the street. The back way has access into Kiln Lane, that sort of alley that comes out in the High Street the other side of St Peter’s. There’s never a soul about down there after the shops close and Kiln Lane is just an alley between high walls. Annette could sneak down there and he’d let her in by the back door. The best part of this – or the worst part, depending on how you look at it – is that he explained his choice of venue by saying that if his wife phoned the office he’d be there to answer it and she’d know he was working late.’ Lights were coming on in the houses but 101 remained in darkness. Wexford and Burden left the car again and walked up the drive. A side gate was unlocked and they went into the rear garden, a large area of lawn and shrubs whose end was lost in a cluster of tall trees, darkening as the dusk came. ‘She did that for nine years?’ said Burden. ‘Like a call girl?’ ‘A call girl would expect a bed, Mike, and probably a glass of something stimulating. Call girls, I’m told, expect bathrooms. And very definitely to get paid.’ ‘It explains the underwear.’ Burden described what he had found at the flat in Ladyhall Court. ‘She’d always be ready for him. I wonder what’s going through his mind now?’ ‘Is he the guy in the photo, d’you think? What I’m wondering is if he’s away on holiday.’ ‘He won’t be, Reg. Not if his youngest is only fourteen. He’ll wait for the school term to end and that won’t be for a couple of weeks.’ ‘We have to see him and soon.’ Burden considered. ‘What makes you say this Ingrid’s a liar?’ ‘She told me she left the key Annette gave her behind in the flat after she left on Thursday. If she did, where is it?’ ‘It was on the bedside table,’ said Burden promptly. ‘No, it wasn’t, Mike. Not unless she was lying when she said there were two keys there on Wednesday. One of those statements of hers has to be a lie.’

  Chapter Eight Only two samples of fingerprints had been found in Annette Bystock’s flat. Most were those of Annette herself, the other set of women’s prints, on the surface of the grocer’s box, the kitchen door, the front door and the hall table, were those of Ingrid Pamber. Not another print had been found in the whole place. It seemed as if Annette’s home had not only been her castle, it had been the cell where she passed her solitary confinement. The thief of the electronic equipment had worn gloves. Her killer had worn gloves. Bruce Snow had never set foot or finger inside the home of the woman who had been his mistress for nearly a decade. No friend, apart from Ingrid, had come there. It was likely, Wexford thought, that Annette had discouraged potential friends. Such visitors might overhear one of her conversations with Snow, might betray her; more to the point as she saw it, might by some indiscretion destroy Snow’s carefully planned cover. So, for love’s sake, she lived this lonely life. It was the saddest story. . . . The one friend she had she must have trusted to be discreet. And if Ingrid was to be believed her trust was not misplaced, for Ingrid had told no one until after Annette was dead. It seemed that her death had occurred about seven months after she had first confided in Ingrid, so it was hardly likely to be the result of her divulging the secret or divulging more details. Wexford sighed. Annette had died in the region of thirty-six hours before Burden found her body on Friday morning. Not earlier than 10.00 pm on the Wednesday and not later than 1.00 am on the Thursday. By the time Ingrid Pamber went into the flat at five- thirty on Thursday, Annette had been dead for a day and half a night. Death was due to strangulation with a ligature, in this case a length of electric lead. He knew that already and such medical details
were always incomprehensible. Tremlett offered his opinion that a strong woman might have been the perpetrator. Until her death Annette had been a normal healthy woman with no distinguishing marks, not a scar on her body, no peculiarities or minor deformities. She was of normal weight for her height. There was no disease of any kind present. The flat had been clean but still a considerable amount of hairs and fibres had been gathered from the bed, the bedside tables and the floor. How helpful it would be, Wexford thought as he often did, if one of the investigating officers had picked up a spent cigarette end in the vicinity of the body, as happened in detective stories. Or if a button torn from the killer’s jacket, and obligingly retaining a fragment of tweed on its shank, had been found clutched in poor Annette’s lifeless hand. Such clues never came his way. Of course it was true that nobody goes anywhere without leaving a vestige of himself behind and taking a vestige of where he has been away with him. That was only useful if you had a clue who and where he might be. . . . He was leaving for the local studios to make his television appeal for help from the public when his phone rang. The switchboard said it was the Chief Constable for him, calling from his home in Stowerton.

  Freeborn, a cold man, always went straight to the heart of things. ‘I don’t want to see pictures of you carousing.’ ‘No, sir. It was unfortunate.’ ‘It was more than that, it was bloody disgraceful. And in a good newspaper too.’ ‘I can’t see it would have been any better in a tabloid,’ said Wexford. ‘Then that’s just one of the many things you ought to see and don’t.’ Freeborn went on for quite a long time about the need to catch Annette’s murderer fast, about the increase in violent crime, about this lovely, safe, once secure, place in which they lived, quickly becoming as dangerous as some inner suburb of London. ‘And when you go on TV try not to have a glass in your hand.’ They allowed him only two minutes and that, he knew, would be cut to thirty seconds. Still, it was better than nothing. His appeal would call forth from a public who longed to be important its imagined and fantasized sightings of a killer in the vicinity of Ladyhall Road, confessions to the crime, offers from clairvoyants, claims to have been at school with Annette, at college with her, to have been her lover, her mother, her sister, to have seen her in Inverness or Carlisle or Budapest after she was dead and, perhaps, one genuine and valuable piece of information. He got to bed late. But he was up early just as the post came. Dora came down in her dressing gown to get his breakfast, an affectionate but unnecessary move as he was only having cereal and a piece of bread. ‘One letter and it’s for both of us. You open it.’ Dora slit the envelope and drew out a card, deckle-edged. ‘Goodness, Reg, she must have taken a fancy to you.’ ‘Who must? What are you talking about?’ Strange that his thoughts ran straight to pretty Ingrid Pamber. ‘Invitations to this party are like gold dust, Sylvia says. She’d love to go.’ ‘Let’s have a look.’ What a fool! Why did he take these fancies into his head at his age? He read aloud what was on the card. ‘ “Wael and Anouk Khoori request the pleasure of the company of Mr and Mrs Reginald Wexford at a Garden Party at their home, Mynford New Hall, Mynford, Sussex, on Saturday, July 17th, at 3pm.” ’ At the foot of the card was the addendum: ‘In aid of CIBACT, the Cancer in Babies and Children Trust’. ‘They’re not giving us much notice. It’s the thirteenth today.’ ‘No, well, that’s what I mean. We obviously weren’t on the guest list. And then she took a shine to you last Saturday night.’ ‘I bet Freeborn’s on the list,’ Wexford said gloomily. ‘Everyone will be expected to fork out at least a tenner, which is a bit of a nerve when you consider Khoori’s a millionaire. He could underwrite this CIBACT himself without fund-raising bonanzas. Anyway, it doesn’t matter since we shan’t go.’ ‘I should like to go,’ Dora said as her husband disappeared out of the door. She called after him, ‘I said I should like to go, Reg.’ There was no answer. The front door closed quietly. The inquest on Annette Bystock opened at 10.00 am and was adjourned pending further evidence at ten past. Jane Winster, who was Annette’s cousin, though not attending it, was waiting for Wexford when he got back to the police station. Somebody – some fool, he thought – had put her in one of the bleak interview rooms where she sat on a tubular metal chair in front of the chipboard table, looking puzzled and a little alarmed.

  ‘You have something you want to tell me, Mrs Winster?’ She nodded. She looked about her, as well she might, at the cream-painted brick walls, the uncurtained window. ‘Come upstairs to my office,’ he said. Someone’s head ought to roll for this. What did they take her for, this small middle- aged woman buttoned up in her raincoat, a damp scarf tied round her head? A shoplifter? A bag-snatcher? She looked like a school dinner lady who could have done with a good helping of what she purveyed. Her face was thin and pinched, her hands bony and veined, prematurely aged. Once in the comparative comfort of his office, carpeted and with seats that were almost armchairs, he expected her to complain of her treatment, but she only gave the room the same wary look. Perhaps all new places overawed her, so sheltered and circumscribed was her life. He asked her to sit down and he repeated what he had said to her downstairs. For the first time she spoke, having seated herself on the edge of the chair, her knees pressed together. ‘The policeman who came, there was something I forgot to tell him. It was a bit . . . I mean, I was. . . .’ Vine’s briskness had intimidated her, he supposed. ‘It doesn’t matter, Mrs Winster. You’ve remembered now, that’s the main thing.’ ‘It was a shock, you see. I mean, we weren’t . . . well, we weren’t close, Annette and me, but . . . well, she was my cousin, my own auntie’s daughter.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And having to go to that place and see her . . . well, dead like that, that was a shock. I’ve never had to do anything like that before and I. . . .’ A woman who left sentences unfinished through self-doubt and perhaps uncertainty that anyone would ever take her seriously. He realized that all this was in the nature of an apology. She was apologizing for having emotions. ‘I did tell him we phoned each other. I mean, I said we spoke on the phone but he was . . . well, he was more interested in when I’d last seen her. I hadn’t seen her since she came to our wedding anniversary, and that was April, April the third.’ ‘But you had spoken on the phone?’ She was going to need a lot of prompting and of the kind Vine wasn’t the man to give. She looked at him appealingly. ‘She phoned me on the Tuesday before she . . . last Tuesday, I mean. . . .’ The day Melanie Akande spoke to her. ‘Was that in the evening, Mrs Winster?’ ‘In the evening, about seven. I was getting my husband’s meal on the table. He doesn’t . . . well, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. I was a bit surprised she phoned but then she said she wasn’t feeling too good, she thought she’d go to bed early . . .’ Mrs Winster hesitated. ‘My husband . . . well, my husband was making signs to me, so I put the phone down for a minute and he said – I know you’ll think this sounds awful . . .’ ‘Please go on, Mrs Winster.’ ‘My husband – it’s not that he didn’t like Annette, it’s really that’s he doesn’t care for any outsiders. Our own family’s enough for us, he always says. Of course, Annette was family in a way but he always says cousins don’t count. He said to me, I mean when Annette was on the phone, he said, don’t get involved. If she’s ill she’ll expect you to go over there getting her shopping and all the rest of it. Well, I suppose she did expect that, that’s why she phoned, and I felt awful saying I was busy, I couldn’t talk then, but I have to put his wishes first, don’t I?’

  If this was all, he was wasting his time. He had to be patient. ‘You rang off?’ ‘Well, no. Not at once. She said, could she call me back later? I didn’t know what to say. Then she said there was something else, something she wanted to ask me about, maybe ask Malcolm too – Malcolm’s my husband – it was whether she ought to go to the police.’ ‘Ah.’ This was it then. ‘She told you what this was about?’ ‘No, because she was going to call me back. But she didn’t.’ ‘You didn’t phone her?’ Jane Winster flushed. She looked defiant. ‘My husband doesn’t like me making unnecessary phone calls. And it’s up to him, isn’t it? He ear
ns the money.’ ‘Tell me exactly what your cousin said to you about going to the police.’ Wexford was beginning to understand Vine’s impatience with her as a witness, even understand whoever it was who had incarcerated her in that grim interview room. His sympathies were fast diminishing. Here was just another person who had rejected Annette Bystock. She was fidgeting with her handbag, pursing her lips; a woman, he guessed, who though an expert at putting herself down would deeply resent anyone else’s criticism. ‘I can’t do the exact words, or I don’t . . . well, it was something like, “There was something happened through work and I think maybe I should go to the police but I want to see what you think and maybe Malcolm too.” That was all.’ ‘You mean “at” work, don’t you?’ ‘No. “Through work” is what she said.’ ‘You never spoke to her again?’ ‘She never phoned back and I. . . . No, I . . . I hadn’t any call to speak to her.’ He nodded. Her cousin having failed her, Annette had called on the slightly more sympathetic Ingrid to come in, do her shopping, pay her the small attentions needed by someone with ‘the falling sickness’. As for the police, she had changed her mind, or more likely, postponed the phone call she should have made until she was better. But she was never better, she was much much worse and it was too late. ‘Did your cousin ever mention a man called Bruce Snow?’ She looked up with indifference. ‘No. Who’s he?’ ‘You’d be surprised to learn he was a married man Miss Bystock had been in a relationship with for several years?’ Jane Winster was more shocked than she had been by her cousin’s death, more shocked than when she saw Annette’s dead face in the mortuary. ‘I’ll never believe that. Annette would never have done a thing like that. She wasn’t that sort of person.’ Astonishment had made her articulate. ‘My husband would never have had her in the house if there’d ever been a suspicion of any of that. Oh, no, you’ve got it wrong there. Not Annette, Annette wouldn’t have done that.’ When she had gone, Wexford had a call put through to Hawkins and Steele and asked to speak to Mr Snow. Waiting while a tape played ‘Green-sleeves’, he thought about Snow and wondered how appalling a shock hearing who was calling him would be. Annette, after all, had been found dead on the previous Friday, it had been on television on Friday, in the papers on Saturday. But no one knew of their liaison except Annette and himself, did they? And Annette was dead. He must think he had got away with it. Got away with exactly what, though, Wexford asked himself. ‘Mr Snow is on his other line. Will you hold?’ ‘No, I won’t. I’ll call back in ten minutes. You can tell him it’s Kingsmarkham Police.’