Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I was at home. I was just at home. Reading, maybe, I don’t remember. Sitting with my wife. I watched television. But it’s no use asking me what I watched, I don’t remember.’ ‘Have you ever seen this girl, Mr Snow?’ Burden showed him a photograph of Sojourner’s twelve-days-dead face. It had been skilfully taken but still it looked like the picture of a dead face and a battered one too. Snow recoiled. ‘Is that Akande’s daughter?’ That mistake again. . . . But Burden wasn’t going to let it pass. ‘What makes you say that?’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake. I’ve never seen her before anyway.’ Her eyes as tragic as if she had suffered a bereavement, Carolyn Snow was asking Wexford to let her go on holiday. Her trip had been booked six months before. When it was made Snow would have been going too but his elder daughter had agreed to take his place. The hotel wouldn’t be able to take them next week, there would be no places on flights, the travel agent’s fee wasn’t refundable. ‘You should have thought of all that before,’ said Wexford, and he showed her the picture of Sojourner, the closed eyes, the bruised skin, the bare patches on the forehead and temples where the hair had begun to fall. ‘Do you know her?’ ‘I’ve never seen her before in my life.’ Instead of flinching, Carolyn peered more closely. ‘Is she coloured? I don’t know any coloured people. Look, I’ve missed my plane but the travel agent says she thinks she could get us on the one tomorrow morning that goes at ten-fifteen.’ ‘Really? Amazing, isn’t it, how much more accommodating to passengers’ needs air services have become?’ ‘You make me bloody sick! You’re just a sadist. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ ‘There’s considerable job satisfaction attached to what I do,’ said Wexford, wondering if the Employment Service would make ‘job satisfaction’ all one word. ‘I have to get something out of it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘All these long hours, unpaid overtime. I’d rather be at home with my wife than stuck in here trying to get the truth out of you.’ ‘Have a good marriage, do you, Chief Inspector? All this has wrecked mine, I hope you know that.’ ‘Your husband has done that, Mrs Snow. Revenge yourself on him if you like. You won’t get revenge on us.’ ‘What do you mean, revenge?’ Wexford drew his chair closer and put his elbows on the table. ‘Isn’t that what you’re doing? You’re revenging yourself on him for his affairs with two women. Deny he was at home that evening, insist he went out at eight and was out two and a half hours, and maybe you won’t only get your house and a big chunk of his income out of him, you’ll have the added satisfaction of seeing him on a murder charge.’ He had got it exactly right, he could see it in her eyes. ‘Was she blackmailing you, Mr Snow?’ said Burden on the other side of the wall. ‘Forget it. I’ve never seen her.’ ‘We know what happens when your wife finds out about your infidelity. We’ve seen. She’s not a forgiving woman, is she? I think you’d have willingly paid up to keep her from finding out and perhaps paid over a long period.’ Overstepping the bounds once more, he said, ‘What on earth did Annette Bystock have to make you go on and on with

  it?’ There was no answer, only a scowl. ‘Still, you did go on. Did you get tired of paying? Did you see there’d never be an end to paying, even if you ended things with Annette? Was killing your blackmailer the only way?’ Beyond the partition, Carolyn Snow said, ‘Everything I’ve said was true but, yes, I’d like to see him come to grief – why not? I’d like to see him pay for those two women with years in prison.’ ‘That’s frank,’ said Wexford. ‘And what about yourself, Mrs Snow? Do you fancy paying for your revenge?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘You seem to be looking at things upside-down. You’ve supposed throughout that we’ve been questioning you to confirm or deny what your husband says were his movements. That it is your husband who is the suspect, your husband who is the only possible candidate for Annette Bystock’s killer. But you’re quite wrong. There is yourself.’ She said it again, but anxiously this time. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘We have only your word for it that you knew nothing about Annette’s role in your husband’s life until after she was dead. I think we know what your word is worth, Mrs Snow. You had a better motive than he for killing her, you had a better motive than anyone.’ She stood up. She had gone quite white. ‘Of course I didn’t kill her! Are you mad? Of course I didn’t!’ Wexford smiled. ‘That’s what they all say.’ ‘I swear to you I didn’t kill her!’ ‘You had motive. You had means. You have no alibi for that Wednesday evening.’ ‘I didn’t kill her! I didn’t know her!’ ‘Perhaps you’d like to make a statement now, Mrs Snow. With your permission we’ll record your statement. And then I can go home.’ She sat down again. She was breathing in short fast gasps, her forehead furrowed, her mouth puckered. Clenching her fists and digging the nails into her palms brought back some of her control. She began to tell the recording machine what had happened, how she had been alone in Harrow Avenue but for her son upstairs, how her husband had gone out at eight and returned at ten-thirty, but she broke off and spoke directly to Wexford. ‘Can I go away tomorrow now?’ ‘I’m afraid not. I don’t want you leaving the country. You can have a few days in Eastbourne, I’ve no objection to that.’ Carolyn Snow began to cry. Tuesday, 20 July In the past Sergeant Vine had spent many a long hour sitting at one of these desks in the area at the back, trying to look like an administrative assistant while he waited for a certain person to show up and sign on. Someone he was after for a spot of petty crime, it usually was, and this was a sure way of running him to earth. Whatever their income from theft, from bag-snatching, receiving, shoplifting, they all wanted their UB as well. So while Wexford and Burden were as newcomers to the Benefit Office, it was familiar territory to Vine. No one got on well with Cyril Leyton while Osman Messaoud was generally unapproachable, but he had an easy relationship with Stanton and the women. Burden, closeted with Leyton and the security officer, left him to get on with it.

  Simisola

  Waiting till Wendy Stowlap was temporarily free, he surveyed the waiting claimants and spotted two he knew. One of them was Broadley, the discoverer of Sojourner’s body, the other Wexford’s elder daughter. He was still trying to think of her name, it must begin with a letter between A and G, when Wendy Stowlap’s client moved away from the desk. She looked up. ‘All these foreign people coming in here, Italians, Spanish, I don’t know what. Why should we keep them on our taxes? The European Union’s got a lot to answer for.’ ‘Surely you don’t have a lot of black claimants, though, do you?’ he said to her. ‘I mean, not out in this neck of the woods.’ ‘Out here in the boondocks, is that what you’re saying?’ Wendy was a native of Kingsmarkham and fiercely proprietorial of her home town. ‘If you don’t like it here why don’t you go back to Berkshire or wherever you come from that’s so lively and sophisticated?’ ‘OK, sorry, but do you?’ ‘Have claimants who are coloured people? You’d be surprised. We’ve more than we did two years ago. Well, we’ve got more claimants than we had two years ago, a lot more. The recession may be ending but unemployment’s still very serious.’ ‘So you wouldn’t specially notice a black girl?’ ‘Woman,’ Wendy corrected him. ‘I don’t call you a boy.’ ‘I should be so lucky,’ said Sergeant Vine. ‘Anyway, I never noticed any black woman speaking specially to Annette. I never noticed that Melanie, as you know. Frankly, I’ve got enough on my plate here on the counter without watching what everyone else is doing.’ Wendy pressed the switch that made the next neon number come up. ‘So if you’ll excuse me I can’t keep my clients waiting any longer.’ Peter Stanton wanted to know if Sojourner was good looking. He said frankly that he often fancied black women, they had such fantastic long legs. He liked their long necks, like black swans, and narrow hands. And the way they walked, as if they carried a heavy jar on their heads. ‘I only saw her when she was dead,’ said Vine. ‘If she made a claim – that is, if she completed an ES 461 – we can find her for you. What’s her name?’ Hayley Gordon also asked Sojourner’s name. The two supervisors asked a lot of pointless questions about whether she was claiming UB or Income Support, had she ever worked, and what kind of job w
as she looking for. Osman Messaoud, off the counter this week and doing his stint at the very desk where Vine had been used to sit and wait, said he closed his mind and sometimes his eyes to young women claimants. If he caught sight of them he forced himself not to look. ‘Your wife doesn’t trust you as far as she can throw you, is that it?’ ‘It is proper for a woman to be possessive,’ said Osman. ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’ An idea came to Vine. He felt around it, trying to put the question delicately. ‘Is your wife . . . er, Indian like yourself?’ ‘I am a British citizen,’ said Osman very coldly. ‘Oh, sorry. And where’s your wife from?’ ‘Bristol.’ The man was really enjoying this, Vine thought. ‘And where did her family come from?’

  ‘I am asking myself what all this can be leading up to. Am I perhaps a suspect in the murder of Miss Bystock? Or perhaps my wife is.’ ‘I only want to know . . .’ Vine gave up and said brutally, ‘if she’s coloured too.’ Messaoud smiled with pleasure at the corner into which he had driven the sergeant. ‘Coloured? What an interesting term. Red perhaps or blue? My wife, Detective Sergeant Vine, is an Afro-Caribbean lady from Trinidad. But she is not on the dole and she has never set foot in this office.’ Eventually Vine was able to extract from the combined Benefit Office staff, at the sacrifice of political correctness on everyone’s part, that a total of four of their claimants were black. They were two men and two women and all of them were over thirty years old.

  Chapter Fifteen Did he know, Sheila asked on the phone, that the BNP had put up a candidate for the Kingsmarkham borough by-election? ‘But that’s next week,’ Wexford said, trying to remember who or what the BNP were. ‘I know. But I’ve only just heard about it. They’ve already got one borough council seat.’ Memory returned. The BNP were the British National Party, committed to a white Britain for the white man. ‘That’s in East London,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit different out here. It’ll be a Tory walkover.’ ‘Racist attacks in Sussex increased sevenfold last year, Pop. That’s fact. You can’t dispute statistics.’ ‘All right, Sheila. You don’t suppose I want a bunch of fascists getting on the council, do you?’ ‘Then you’d better cast your vote for the Liberal Democrat – or Mrs Khoori.’ ‘She’s standing, is she?’ ‘As an Independent Conservative.’ Wexford told her about his encounters with Anouk Khoori and about the garden party. She wanted to know how Sylvia and Neil were getting on. For the first time for many years Sheila was without a man in her life. This lack seemed to have made her a calmer, sadder woman. She was to be Nora in an Edinburgh Festival production of A Doll’s House. Would he and Mother think about coming? Wexford thought about Annette and Sojourner and the missing Melanie and said he was afraid not, he was very much afraid not. Visiting the Akandes for the first time since that scene in the mortuary, he told himself not to be a coward, to face them, he had acted in good faith if carelessly, but for all that he couldn’t eat any breakfast. Coffee he could manage but nothing more. Some lines from Montaigne came into his mind: ‘There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them.’ Who could tell if he was thinking in the right way? After the storms of the weekend, warmer less stuffy weather had come back and it was hot today, the air glass-clear, the sky a bright hard blue. Pink and white lilies had opened in the Akandes’ front garden. He had been able to smell their funereal scent before he even reached the gate. Laurette Akande came to the door. Wexford said, ‘Good morning,’ and waited to have it slammed in his face. Instead, she opened it wider and asked him to come in, though not very graciously. She seemed chastened. The house was quiet. No doubt the son Patrick wasn’t up yet – it was only just after eight. The doctor was in the kitchen, standing up by the table, drinking tea out of a mug. He put the mug down, came up to Wexford and for some reason shook hands with him.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened on Sunday,’ he said. ‘Obviously it was a genuine mistake on your part. We hoped it wouldn’t mean you’d not come and see us any more, didn’t we, Letty?’ Laurette Akande shrugged and looked away. Wexford thought he might make it one of his laws – he had a mental catalogue of Wexford’s first law, second law, and so on – that if after the first two or three expressions of regret you stop apologizing to someone you have offended, they will soon start apologizing to you. ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Akande, ‘oddly enough, it’s rather cheered us up. It’s given us hope. The fact that this girl wasn’t Melanie has really given us grounds for hope that Melanie’s still alive. Perhaps you think that’s foolish?’ He did, but he wasn’t going to say so. They were in the worst position parents could be in, worse than that of those whose child is dead, worse than Sojourner’s parents, if she had any. They were the parents whose child has disappeared and who may never know what her end was, what torment she suffered and what was the nature of her death. ‘I can only tell you I’ve no more idea of what may have happened to Melanie than I had two weeks ago. We shall continue to look for her. We shall never give up looking. As for hope . . .’ ‘A waste of time and energy,’ said Laurette harshly. ‘Excuse me, I have to go to my work now. Patients don’t stop needing nursing just because Sister Akande’s lost her daughter.’ ‘You mustn’t mind my wife,’ the doctor said after she had left. ‘All this is a terrible strain on her.’ ‘I know.’ ‘I’m just thankful I’ve got this quite illogical feeling that Melanie’s alive. It may be ridiculous but I could almost say I know I’ll come home from my rounds one afternoon and find her sitting in there. And she’ll have a perfectly reasonable explanation for where she’s been.’ Such as what? ‘It would be wrong of me to encourage you to hope,’ said Wexford, remembering his resolve to treat the Akandes just like anyone else. ‘We’ve no grounds for believing Melanie is still alive.’ Akande shook his head. ‘Do you know who the . . . the other girl is, the one you thought might be Melanie? I suppose I shouldn’t ask, any more than you’d ask me about a patient.’ ‘I was about to ask you. I was going to ask if you’d ever seen her before.’ ‘You didn’t have much chance, did you? We should have been relieved but we were only angry. I’d never seen her before. Surely it won’t be hard to find who she is? After all, there aren’t many people like us down here. Only one of my patients is black.’ Whether they were connected or not, this second death inevitably meant that all the possible witnesses in the first case must be questioned again in reference to the second. If one of them had seen Sojourner in any connection, recognized her face, remembered her however tenuously, this might provide the link they were looking for. It might go some way to establishing her identity. The worst scenario he could construct was the one in which Sojourner’s body had been brought by car hundreds of miles, perhaps from some northern place where inner-city prostitutes were as likely to be black as white, had no past, certainly no future, and whose disappearance might pass unnoticed. He found he was once more thinking of her tenderly and the forensic report did nothing to mitigate his tenderness. Mavrikiev established her age as no more than

  seventeen. Her injuries were frightful. As well as the arm, two ribs were fractured. Bruising to the inner thighs, old, healed lacerations of the genitals indicated some previous violent sexual assault and on more than one occasion. The pathologist calculated that a violent blow of the fist had sent her sprawling and that in her fall she had struck her head on some hard, sharp object. This it was that had caused her death. Fibres found in the head wound had gone to the lab for analysis. Mavrikiev expressed his opinion that these were wool from a sweater, not from a carpet, but would commit himself no further on this subject which was not his speciality. Wexford read a lab report which confirmed this. The fibres were Shetland wool and mohair, typical components of a knitting yarn. More of this mixture had been found under her fingernails, along with grains of the soil in which she had been buried. But there was no blood under the nails. She had scratched no one in putting up a fight for her life. Embassies, High Commissions, African countries all had those. It was a line of enquiry and he put Pemberton on to it. Karen Malahyde set up enquiries at
the places of education, many of them closed by now, so that meant contacting head teachers, school administrators, college principals and accommodation officers. If Sojourner was only seventeen she might have been still at school. The chances of her having stayed in an hotel immediately prior to her death were slight, but enquiries had to be made at all of them, from the Olive and Dove at one end of the scale to the Glebe Road humblest bed- and-breakfast at the other. Annette had told her cousin that she had something she ought to tell the police, and Wexford asked himself why she hadn’t said those same words to Bruce Snow when he phoned her that same Tuesday evening, the evening before her death. He thought of the relative in Ladyhall Avenue whose existence both Snows denied. And he wondered what a girl as young, as vulnerable and, it seemed, as unwanted as Sojourner could have done to make someone beat her to death. Could he be looking at things back to front? Could the case be, not that Annette had been killed because of what she was told, but that Sojourner was killed because of what Annette said to her? Was Annette herself the repository of some secret, unknown to Snow or Jane Winster or Ingrid Pamber? Meeting Burden outside the Nawab, he said, ‘I couldn’t face breakfast this morning and now I’m feeling that not unpleasant emptiness which is the silent luncheon gong of the soul.’ ‘That’s P. G. Wodehouse.’ Wexford didn’t say anything. This must have been the first time Burden had ever guessed the source of one of his quotations. It was a heart-warming experience, over which the Inspector immediately poured a stream of cold water. He said in the crabbed voice he sometimes used, ‘Messaoud’s got a West Indian wife.’ ‘I’ve got an English wife,’ said Wexford inside the restaurant, ‘but that doesn’t mean she knew Annette Bystock.’ ‘It’s different. You know it’s different.’ Wexford hesitated, took a piece of nan from the plate in front of him. ‘OK, yes, I do know. It is different. I’m sorry. And, incidentally, I’m sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.’ ‘Forget it.’ ‘Not in front of Barry I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.’ Wexford remembered his new law and changed the subject. ‘I like Indian breads, don’t you?’ ‘Better than Indians. Sorry, but that fellow Messaoud is really bad news. But I’ll go and talk to his wife, shall I?’