by Ruth Rendell
she said would I draw the curtains in the living room on my way out. So I did that and I called out goodbye and . . .’ Ingrid Pamber looked at him ruefully, her head on one side, ‘I may as well come out with it. You’re not going to eat me, are you?’ Had he looked as if he wanted to? ‘Go on.’ ‘I forgot to lock the door after me. I mean, I left it on the latch like it was. I just did. It was awful of me, I know, but it’s easy to do with those sort of doors.’ ‘So the door was left unlocked all night?’ Before replying, she got up, walked across the room and felt for something behind the books on a shelf. Over her shoulder she smiled at him. Wexford repeated what he had said. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘It was locked when I got there on Thursday. Are you very very angry with me?’ She hadn’t seen. She had no realization of what she had done. Her eyes were warm and full of happy light as she handed him Annette Bystock’s key. Carolyn Snow was out. She was taking her son Joel to school, the cleaning woman told Wexford. He decided to take a walk round the block, though ‘block’ was not the word for it. ‘Park’ would have been better or ‘enclave’. The Snows’ house, though twice the size of Wexford’s own, was one of the smallest in this neighbourhood. Houses seemed to get bigger and be farther apart as he reached the corner and turned into Winchester Drive. He couldn’t remember the last time he was in this part of Kingsmarkham, it must have been years, but he did now recall that he was in the vicinity of the route Laurette Akande said her daughter took when she went running. The hallmark of desirability in dwelling places is when a suburb looks like a stretch of woodland and no houses are visible, where there are no gates and all that shows that people live somewhere in there are the letter boxes, discreetly positioned in gaps in the hedge. It was very high up, a green thickly treed ridge, beyond which, far below, he could catch glimpses of the winding Kingsbrook. In Winchester Drive green lawns terminated in high hedges or low walls at the pavement and, because you knew it must be there, you fancied you caught the faintest glimpse of mellowed brick between the great grey beech trees, the delicate silver birches and the branches of a majestic cedar. The presence of two people on one of these lawns, a woman with a basket of shiny dark red fruit, a young man a little over twenty putting a ladder up against a cherry tree, did a little more to damage this image of wooded countryside. Wexford was surprised to identify the woman as Susan Riding, though he hardly knew why he should be. She must live somewhere and was reputed to be well-off. The boy was startlingly like his father with the same straw-coloured hair and Nordic looks, the high forehead, blunt nose, long upper lip. Wexford said good morning. She came a little way towards him. If you didn’t know who she was and had encountered her away from her own environment, you would have taken her for one of the dossers who slept on Myringham High Street. She wore a cotton skirt with half the hem coming down and a tee-shirt that must have originated with one of her children, for ‘University of Myringham’ was printed across the faded red material. An elastic band held back her greyish frizzy fair hair. He thought how her smile transformed her. In an instant she was almost beautiful, beggarwoman into earth mother.
‘The birds take most of our cherries. I wouldn’t mind if they ate them but they just pick a bit out and drop the rest on the ground.’ The boy had gone up the tree, his back towards them, but she introduced him just the same, ‘My son, Christopher.’ He took absolutely no notice. She shrugged as if this was no more than she had expected. ‘You really need to be bird scaring from morning till night. We did last year but I had help then. How do people get staff in this country?’ ‘I understand it’s difficult.’ ‘Do it yourself is what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s not so easy when you’ve got six bedrooms and four children all living at home most of the time. My au pair’s just left me too.’ Christopher suddenly let out a string of startling obscenities and the wasp that had been annoying him zoomed out of the tree and headed for Susan Riding. She ducked, flapped at it with her hand. ‘I hate them. Why on earth did God make wasps?’ ‘To clean it up, I suppose.’ Her puzzled face made him explain. ‘The earth.’ ‘Oh, yes. I really must thank you for giving up your Saturday night to us vulnerable women. I have written to you but I’m afraid I didn’t post the letter till this morning.’ ‘Come on, Mum,’ said the boy in the tree. ‘We’re supposed to be picking the buggers.’ Wexford called out to him, ‘Do you know a girl called Melanie Akande?’ ‘What?’ ‘Melanie Akande. You once had a drink with her. Perhaps you saw her more than once.’ Susan Riding laughed. ‘What is this, Mr Wexford? An interrogation? Is that the girl that’s missing?’ Christopher came down the ladder. ‘Is she missing? I didn’t know.’ He was at least as tall as Wexford. His hands were big and his feet were big, his shoulders ox-like. ‘Melanie disappeared last Tuesday afternoon,’ Wexford said. ‘Had you seen her recently?’ ‘Not for months. I went away last Tuesday morning. I can give you the names of the people I went with if I need an alibi. You can see my air ticket or what remains of it.’ ‘Christopher!’ said his mother. ‘Well, why ask me? I’m the last person. Can I get on with picking these cherries now?’ Wexford said goodbye and walked on. At the corner he looked back and between a gap in the trees could see the house quite clearly, the back of an Italianate villa, white walls, green roof, a tall turret. He could even see the bars on the ground floor windows. Well, Susan Riding was a Woman, Aware! woman, one who would no doubt be prudent. The place looked as if it contained a lot worth stealing. He turned into Eton Grove and went back down the hill. The Riding house was momentarily clearly visible from the road and then, suddenly, it disappeared behind a dense plantation of shrubs in white blossom. He stepped back to look at it once more and lingered for a while before turning left back into Marlborough Gardens and walking the few hundred yards to Harrow Avenue. Donaldson in the driving seat of the parked car was reading the Sun but folded it up when he saw the boss. Wexford read his own paper for ten minutes. A young man with a camera hung round his neck appeared from round the corner and Wexford put his paper away, although this passer-by was clearly not interested in photographing him, hadn’t even noticed him or taken his camera from its case. ‘I’m getting paranoid.’
‘Sir?’ ‘Nothing. Ignore me.’ The car suddenly appeared from nowhere, driven much too fast, sweeping into the drive of 101 and coming to a stop with a squeal of brakes. He had a good look at her as she left the car and went quickly to the front door, her doorkey on the same ring as the car keys. She was a tall slim woman, fairish, wearing black trousers and a sleeveless top. Two minutes after she had gone inside he went up to the front door and rang the bell. She answered it herself. She was younger than he had expected, probably forty but looking less. It struck him that she looked a lot younger than poor Annette. No wedding ring. That was one of the first things he noticed and saw too that she had been used to wearing a ring, for there was a band of white skin on that brown finger. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Won’t you come in?’ Her voice was cultivated, pleasant, with the sort of accent associated with a select girls’ boarding school. Wexford was suddenly and surprisingly aware of how very attractive she was. Her hair was so cut as to transform it into a cap of flaxen coloured feathers. She wore no make-up and her skin was good, smooth, light golden brown, only faintly lined about the eyes. The top she wore was the same sea-blue as her eyes and the brown arms it exposed might have been those of a young girl. He began to ask himself why a man who had this at home, legitimately and honourably, would chase after Annette, but he knew such questions were always vain. Some of it was due to the legitimate and honourable being less attractive than the illicit and forbidden, and some of it to a strange lusting after the sordid and the naughty, after soft porn made flesh. He would guarantee, for instance, that Mrs Snow didn’t wear see- through black and scarlet camisoles, but Calvin Klein briefs and Playtex sports bras. She took him into a large living room with a green velvet carpet, enough sofas and armchairs to accommodate twenty people, and a fireplace of Cotswold stone with a copper hood over it. It was clear she knew why
he had come and that she had her answers ready. She was confident but grim, her movements deliberate, her expression fixed and resolute. He said carefully, ‘I am sure your husband has told you he has been questioned in connection with the death of Annette Bystock.’ She nodded. She put her elbow on the arm of her chair and rested her cheek against her hand. It was a pose of controlled exasperation. ‘That evening, Wednesday, July the seventh, your husband spent the evening at home with you and your son? Is that correct?’ She delayed answering so long that he was on the point of repeating what he had said. Her reply, when it came, was stiff and cold. ‘Whoever gave you that idea? Did he tell you that?’ ‘What do you mean, Mrs Snow? That he wasn’t here?’ The sigh she gave was as heavy and deliberate as the inhaling and exhaling prescribed for the exerciser, a deep intake of breath, a full expulsion of breath. ‘My son wasn’t here. He, my son, Joel, was upstairs in the playroom. He always is in the week evenings, he has a lot of homework, he’s fourteen. We often don’t see him between the time he has his meal and bedtime – and sometimes not then.’ Why was she telling him all this? No one was accusing the boy of the crime. ‘So you and your husband were alone together? In here?’ ‘I asked who gave you that idea? My husband wasn’t here.’ Her expression became unearthly, dreamy, she seemed to gaze into the middle distance as if looking at a perfect
sunset, her lips just parted. Suddenly she turned on him. ‘He often wasn’t on a Wednesday. He worked late on Wednesdays, or didn’t you know?’ This was not at all what he had expected. If he hadn’t been at home with his wife, why had Snow mentioned her? If his dearest wish was to keep the knowledge of his affair with Annette secret from her, why had he produced his wife as his alibi? Surely because he had no choice . . . the last thing he wanted to do was enlighten Carolyn Snow himself as to her husband’s philandering, but it looked as if he would have to. Snow then had chickened out, had lost his nerve, had evaded confession. Or had he? ‘Mrs Snow, you have been told of your husband’s relationship with Annette Bystock?’ No one can whiten under a tan, but her skin contracted and aged her. It hadn’t been a revelation, though. ‘Oh, yes. He told me.’ She stopped looking at him. ‘You understand that I didn’t know until yesterday – no, the day before yesterday. I was in the dark, I’d been kept in the dark.’ A little cold laugh summed up her feelings about such men as Snow, their values, their cowardice. ‘He had to tell me.’ ‘And asked you perhaps to tell me you were with him last Wednesday?’ ‘He didn’t ask me anything,’ she said. ‘He knew better than to ask for favours.’ There was nothing more to say for the moment. It was all very different from what he had anticipated. Until this moment he had never seriously considered Snow as a suspect, as a candidate for murderer. After all, Snow hadn’t been inside the flat at Ladyhall Court. But by that reckoning no one had been in the flat except Annette herself and Ingrid Pamber. There had been no evidence of Edwina Harris’s visit or, more to the point, of the thief who came in at some point and took the television, the video and the radio-cassette player. If that thief had worn gloves, so might Bruce Snow have done. He had spoken to Annette on the Tuesday evening but he might have been lying when he said she told him she was ill and couldn’t meet him the following night. She loved him, she never refused him, she put him first. It was one thing not to go to work, to tell Ingrid she would need shopping done for her, but quite another to cancel a longed-for meeting with Snow on the dubious grounds that she might still be ill twenty-four hours later. But they always met in Snow’s office. Always except for just this once? I’m not well enough to go out, she had perhaps said, but you could come here – won’t you just for once come here? And he had agreed, had gone there, had stayed and stayed, and quarrelled with her at last and killed her. . . . Bob Mole had no intention of telling Vine where the radio came from. All he would say at first was that it had been among a job lot saved from a fire. That there were no burn marks on it meant nothing. These rugs, for instance – had Vine even bothered to look at them? – weren’t burnt. The three dining chairs weren’t burnt. There was plenty of stuff that was and no one was going to buy that from a stall. What did he think, the public were daft? Where did that stain come from, Vine wanted to know. Bob Mole couldn’t account for it. Come to that, why should he account for it and what was Vine getting at? When Vine told him, things changed. It was the word ‘murder’ that did it, specifically the murder of Annette Bystock, Kingsmarkham’s own local murder that was in the daily papers and even on telly. ‘It was hers?’ ‘Looks very much like it.’ Bob Mole, who had gone putty colour, curled back his upper lip. ‘Not blood, is it?’
‘No, it’s not blood.’ Vine wanted to laugh but didn’t. ‘It’s red nail varnish. She spilt it. Now tell me where you got it from.’ ‘It’s like I said, Mr Vine. It was what come out of this fire.’ ‘Sure. I heard you. But who was it rescued it from the flames and put it in your sticky hands?’ ‘My supplier,’ said Bob Mole as if he were a respectable retailer talking about a wholesaler of nationwide repute. ‘You’re sure it’s hers, this Annette that’s dead?’ He dropped his voice on the name and looked from side to side. ‘There’s a TV and a video too,’ said Vine. ‘I never got them, Mr Vine, and that’s the absolute honest truth.’ With another glance to the right and one to the left, Bob Mole leaned towards Vine and whispered, ‘They call him Zack.’ ‘Does he have another name?’ ‘If he does I don’t know it, but I can tell you where he lives.’ Not an address but a description of a place. Bob Mole didn’t know the address. His directions were to go all the way down to the bottom of Glebe Lane, turn down that passage by that place, that sort of church the Methodists used to have but was now a sort of store, go round the back of the used car dump and he lives in the furthest away of the two cottages facing Tiller’s paintbrush works. When Burden heard about it he went on the hunt for Bob Mole’s supplier himself, taking Vine with him. He expected something like Ingrid Pamber’s place but this back corner of Kingsmarkham made hers look like a smart mews. Confusion could hardly have arisen as to which cottage Zack lived in as the nearer to the lane of the two was derelict, its door and windows boarded up. It scarcely seemed like a dwelling house any longer, but more a shed for neglected animals, a dirty brownish hut, the broken tiles on its roof yellow with stonecrop. Zack’s wasn’t much better. Years ago someone had put a pink undercoat on the front door, never painted on top but apparently wiped a brush laden with different coloured paints against its surface. Perhaps this was the work of an employee at the little factory opposite. A broken window had been mended with masking tape. From a rickety trellis hung the tendrils of a climbing plant that had apparently died some years before. ‘The council should do something about this dump,’ Burden said crossly. ‘What do we pay our rates for, I should like to know.’ The young woman who came to the door was thin and pale, no taller than a child of twelve. She carried on one puny hip a boy of about a year who was crying loudly. ‘Yes, what is it?’ ‘Police,’ said Vine. ‘Can we come in?’ ‘Oh, shut up, Clint,’ she said to the child, shaking him in a half-hearted way. She looked with a kind of apathetic distaste from Barry Vine to Burden and back again. ‘I’ll want to see some identification before I let you in.’ ‘Who are you, then?’ said Vine. ‘Kimberley. Ms Pearson to you. He’s not here.’ Warrant cards were produced and she scrutinized them as if to check they weren’t forgeries. ‘Look at the funny photo of the man, Clint,’ she said, pushing the child’s head nearly into Vine’s chest. When Clint understood he couldn’t have the pictures he began crying even more loudly. Kimberley moved him to her other hip. Burden and Vine followed her into what Burden afterwards called one of the worst tips he’d ever been into. Analyzing the smell,
he declared it to be compounded of soiled napkins, urine, fat that chips had been cooked in fifty times, meat kept too long without a refrigerator, cigarette smoke and canned dog food. The linoleum that covered the floor was worn into holes and covered with sticky, hairy patches and dark ring marks. Ashes from last winter’s fires were tumbled about the gra
te which was piled high over them with waste paper and cigarette ends. Two deckchairs faced a huge television set. It was too large to have been Annette’s but the video recorder next to it might have been hers. Kimberley put the child into one of these chairs and gave him a bag of crisps which she produced from one of the many cardboard grocer’s boxes that stood about and served as cupboard, sideboard and larder. Another box provided her with a packet of Silk Cut and matches. ‘What d’you want him for?’ she said, lighting her cigarette. ‘This and that,’ said Vine. ‘Maybe something serious.’ ‘What’s serious mean?’ said Kimberley. She had the very pale green eyes of a white cat. Her skin and hair were luminous with grease. ‘He never done nothing serious.’ She corrected herself. ‘He never done nothing.’ ‘Where is he?’ ‘It’s his signing-on day.’ All ways, as Wexford had thought, led back to the Benefit Office. ‘Where did the video come from, Miss Pearson?’ Burden asked, refusing to have any truck with that ‘Ms’ stuff. ‘My mum give it me.’ Her answer came quick as a flash. That, of course, meant nothing. ‘And it’s Mrs Nelson.’ ‘I see. Miss Pearson to him and Mrs Nelson to me. That his name, is it? Nelson?’ She didn’t answer. Having finished the crisps, Clint set up a renewed roaring. ‘Oh, piss off, Clint,’ she said. Taken from his deckchair and placed on the floor, he crawled over to one of the grocer’s boxes, pulled himself into a standing position and began removing its contents, item by item. Kimberley took no notice. Apropos of nothing that had gone before, she said, ‘They’re going to pull it down, this place.’ ‘Best thing they can do,’ said Vine. ‘Oh, yes, sure, it’s the best bloody thing they can do. What’s going to happen to us? You don’t think of that, do you, when you say . . .’ she mimicked his voice in an exaggerated way, ‘ “it’s the best thing they can do”.’ ‘They’ll have to re-house you.’ ‘You want to bet? In a bed and breakfast maybe. If you want to be re-housed you have to do it yourself. One thing you can say for this dump, the DSS pay the rent. He’ll lose that, won’t he? He’s not had a job in months.’ Outside, Burden inhaled the air, somewhat contaminated though it was with the fumes from paintbrush manufacture. ‘Doesn’t stop them having kids, does it, being out of work? You’ll notice they can always afford to smoke.’ If I lived in that midden I’d smoke myself to death, thought Vine, but he didn’t say it aloud. ‘Did you see them in the paper, it’d have been around last Christmas? I remember the name, Clint. He had something wrong with his heart and they operated on it at Stowerton Infirmary. There were pictures of him and Kimberley Pearson all over the Courier.’ But Burden couldn’t remember. He was sure that somehow they would miss Zack Nelson, that he was a genius at slip-giving. Kimberley had no phone, even if it was possible to phone people waiting to sign on. Burden didn’t know whether it was or not