Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  The businessman’s special they had ordered, the ‘Quickie Thali’, arrived quite quickly. It consisted of practically everything you thought of as Indian food put round the edge of a big plate with a pile of rice in the middle and a poppadom on the side. Wexford poured himself a glass of water. ‘I wish that picture we’ve got didn’t make her look so dead, so long dead, but it can’t be helped. It won’t do any harm to show it around in Ladyhall Avenue. We shall try it on the shopkeepers in the High Street and the shopping centres, the supermarket checkouts.’ ‘The station,’ said Burden, ‘and the bus station. Churches?’ ‘Black people go to church more than white people, so yes – why not?’ ‘Stowerton Industrial Estate? They’d be glad to have someone go missing up there – wouldn’t have to make them redundant. Sorry, a sick joke. It’s worth trying, isn’t it?’ ‘Everything’s worth trying, Mike.’ Wexford sighed. By ‘everything’ he hadn’t meant talking to every black resident of the British Isles. He had really meant proceeding as they would have if Sojourner had been a white schoolgirl. But he knew suddenly that he couldn’t do that, that this wasn’t the way, however apparently ethical. A quick glance at the fax from Myringham Police awaiting him on his desk told him none of the descriptions matched Sojourner’s details. The missing women were categorized according to their ethnic origin, but wasn’t such classification inevitable in a case such as this? He remembered a conversation he had once had with Superintendent Hanlon of Myringham CID on the subject of political correctness. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Hanlon had said, ‘PC means police constable.’ Four women whose forebears were from the Indian sub-continent and an African were on the list. Myringham, with its industry, though now depleted, had attracted far more immigrants than Kingsmarkham or Stowerton, and its two universities were attended by students from all parts of the world. Melanie Akande was not the only alumna of the former Myringham Polytechnic to have gone missing. Here on the list was Demsie Olish from the Gambia, a sociology student, whose home was in a place call Yarbotendo. One of the Indians, Laxmi Rao, was a graduate student at the University of the South. There had been no sign of her since Christmas but it was known she had not returned home. The Sri Lankan Burden had already mentioned to him as the missing restaurateur. The Pakistani, Naseem Kamar, a widow, had been employed as a seamstress in a garment factory until the company which owned it went into receivership in April. With the loss of her job Mrs Kamar disappeared. Darshan Kumari, Myringham Police were nearly sure, had run off with the son of her husband’s best friend. They suspected that Surinder Begh had been killed by her father and uncles for refusing to marry the man of their choice, but they had no evidence to support this theory. These women’s next-of-kin would have to be fetched to the mortuary and try to make an identification. Well, not Mrs Kamar’s. She was thirty-six. And the age of Laxmi Rao, twenty-two, was an unpleasant reminder of the mistake he had already made. The most likely candidate was Demsie Olish. She was nineteen, had gone home to the Gambia in April and returned, had been seen by her landlady, by the two other students living in the house, by numerous students in her year at Myringham – and then, after 4 May, was seen no more. It was a week before she was reported as missing. Everyone who knew her thought she must be somewhere else. The drawback to her being Sojourner was her height, which was given as five feet five. Once these women had been eliminated, they would spread the net further afield. . . .

  He called a conference at five for a pooling of discoveries and offered up Demsie Olish himself. A girl who had been her friend and whose home was in Yorkshire was coming to look at the body next day. To be on the safe side, if no identification was made, Dilip Kumari would be asked to attempt it. His wife was only eighteen. Claudine Messaoud had been as helpful as her husband was obstructive. It sounded as if Burden had liked her, which was something of a triumph for race relations. Though she knew of no black woman between sixteen and twenty who might have gone missing, she put Burden on to the church she attended and which was also attended by other black people. These were the Kingsmarkham Baptists. The minister told Burden that most of Kingsmarkham’s black families had a representative there, usually a middle-aged woman. Even so, they were few. ‘Laurette Akande goes there too,’ he said. ‘So that only leaves four families. I’ve seen one of them but they’re young and their children are only two and four. I thought Karen might feel like talking to the rest.’ ‘Karen?’ said Wexford, turning to her. ‘Sure. I’ll do that tonight. But I suspect I’ve already seen two of them, that is the ones that have kids at the Comprehensive. Two girls of sixteen and a boy of eighteen, all currently at home and available and seen by me.’ ‘That will leave the Lings, I should think,’ said Burden. ‘Mark and Mhonum, M,H,O,N,U,M, in Blakeney Road. He’s from Hong Kong, runs the Moonflower restaurant, she’s black, and the age of their kids isn’t known, or if they have any. She’s the one who is Dr Akande’s only black patient.’ Pemberton had talked to someone at the Gambian High Commission. They were aware of the disappearance of their national, Demsie Olish, and were ‘keeping a close eye’. The numerous other African embassies had even less to offer him. He had narrowed down the women on the national register who came closest to matching Sojourner’s description to five. Next-of-kin and, failing that – that often did fail – friends, would have to be fetched to Kingsmarkham for the weary work of attempting identification. Wexford had calculated that, as far as he could tell, eighteen black people lived in Kingsmarkham, perhaps half a dozen more in Pomfret, Stowerton and the villages. That number included the three Akandes, Mhonum Ling, nine people comprising three of the church-going families, the two male clients at the Benefit Office, a mother and son who were the other Kingsmarkham Baptists, Melanie Akande who was one of their female clients, and the sister of one of the Baptists who was the other. The Epsons, who lived in Stowerton, were the family whose children Sylvia had taken into care. He was black, she was white. A year ago they had gone on holiday to Tenerife, leaving their nine-year-old in charge of their five-year-old. Now it appeared they were away again but when Karen phoned, a childminder answered. The woman sounded jittery and harassed but knew of no missing black girl aged seventeen. ‘Those boys, young men, that hang about outside all the time, I don’t suppose it’s always the same lot, but the day I went there after we found Annette’s body, one of them was black. Dreadlocks and a big knitted cap. We seem to be locating and pigeon-holing every black person in Kingsmarkham, I don’t like it but no doubt it has to be, so what about him? Where does he fit in?’ ‘He wasn’t there today,’ said Barry, and to Archbold, ‘He wasn’t there, was he, Ian?’ ‘I didn’t see him. You’ve got a mother and son on the list – he may be the son.’ ‘He’s probably my eighteen-year-old,’ said Karen.

  ‘Not if yours is still at school, he isn’t. Not unless he’s a full-time truant. He’ll have to be found.’ Wexford glanced from one to the other, suddenly feeling ages older than any of them. The rest of what he was going to say was on the tip of his tongue, but he said it to himself. It’s not so easy, is it? Not all their mothers go to church. Most of them don’t stay on at school or go on to further education. As for embassies, we forget, we always forget, that most of these people are British, are in the law as British as we are. They aren’t on record, they have no dossiers, no cards of identity. And they slip through the net. She was very young and though dark, with an olive skin and long black hair, looked fragile. This was Demsie Olish’s college friend, Yasmin Gavilon from Harrogate, who seemed uncertain what was expected of her, whose shyness was extreme. Wexford would have preferred someone else to take her in there, but this was a task he couldn’t delegate. Still fresh in his mind was what had happened last time. And this girl looked so young, looked far less then her twenty years. He had explained three times now that what she was to see might not be Demsie, was even very probably not Demsie. She must only look and tell him the truth. But looking down into her trusting puzzled face, so seemingly innocent, so untouched by experience, he very nearly told her to go home, get th
e next train back, and he would find someone else to look at Sojourner’s body. The smell of formaldehyde was like a gas. The plastic cover was folded back, the sheet withdrawn. Yasmin looked. The expression on her face changed no more than it had done when she was brought into Wexford’s office and introduced to him. Then she had murmured, ‘Hallo,’ and now she murmured, ‘No. No, it isn’t.’ The tone was the same. Wexford escorted her out. He asked her again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, that isn’t Demsie,’ and then, ‘I’m glad it isn’t.’ She tried to smile, but her face had taken on a greenish pallor, and she said quickly, ‘I want to go to the toilet, please.’ When she had been given hot sweet tea and taken away in a car to the station, Dilip Kumari arrived. If Wexford had seen him in the street, had not been told his name or heard his voice, he would have taken him for a Spaniard. Kumari spoke in the singsong Welsh-sounding but perfect English of the Indian who is Indian-born. He was the assistant manager of the NatWest Bank in Stowerton High Street and he looked all of forty. ‘Your wife is very young,’ said Wexford. ‘Too young for me? Is that what you are saying? You are right. But it didn’t seem so at the time.’ He was philosophical, fatalistic, almost jaunty. It was quickly apparent he was as certain as he could be, without having seen her, that Sojourner was not Darshan Kumari. ‘To the best of my belief, she has run off with a boy of twenty. Of course, if this is she, which I doubt extremely, I will not have the trouble and expense of divorcing her.’ He laughed, perhaps to show Wexford he was not entirely serious. They went inside and Sojourner was once more exhibited. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, indeed,’ and outside once more, ‘Better luck next time. Do you happen to know if you can divorce a woman you can’t find? Perhaps only after five years, alas and alack. I wonder what the law is on this matter? I shall have to find out.’ Which particular net had she slipped through? The same one perhaps as the boy with dreadlocks in the coloured cap who wasn’t outside the Benefit Office when Wexford got down there ten minutes later. The shaven-headed boy was there, this time in a tee-shirt so faded that the dinosaur on it was a ghost of its former self, and the ponytailed boy in

  tracksuit pants, chain smoking. And with them was a very short stout boy with golden curls backcombed to make him look taller and a nondescript spotty boy in shorts. But the black boy with dreadlocks wasn’t there. Two sat on the chipped, stained, rough-surfaced balustrade on the right side and two on the left where there was also a small rubbish tip of empty, caved-in coke cans and crushed cigarette packets. The ponytailed boy was smoking a cigarette he had rolled himself. The spotty boy sat with his feet in a sprawl of cigarette stubs, his toes in the black canvas lace-up boots desultorily making a pattern of circles and loops in the ash. He was chewing the cuticles round his fingernails. His opposite neighbour with the pale dinosaur on his chest, just as Wexford approached, hit on the diverting idea of throwing pieces of gravel, of which he had a handful, at the stack of cans, his aim perhaps being to dislodge the top one and send it rolling into the area below. He took no notice of Wexford. None of them did. He had to say who he was twice before getting anyone’s attention, and then it was the short boy who looked up at him, possibly because he was the only one not otherwise occupied. ‘Where’s your friend?’ ‘You what?’ ‘Where’s your friend? The one in the striped hat?’ That was one way of not having to identify him by ethnic origin. Wexford told himself for God’s sake to stop being needlessly sensitive. ‘The black one with the plaits?’ ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘He means Raffy.’ A stone found its target, the can wobbled and fell. ‘He has to mean Raffy.’ ‘OK, I do. D’you know where he is?’ No one answered. The smoker smoked, concentrating as if it was a study he was engaged in, involving memory and even powers of deduction. The cuticle-biter bit his cuticles and made more rings with his toes in the smoker’s ash. The stone-thrower threw his handful of gravel over his shoulder and produced a packet from which he took a cigarette. Having given Wexford the kind of look one might give a dangerous dog, at present quiescent, the fat golden-haired boy got off the wall and went into the Benefit Office. ‘I asked you if you know where he is?’ ‘Might do,’ said the stone-thrower in the dinosaur tee-shirt. ‘So?’ ‘Might know where his mum is.’ ‘That’ll do for a start.’ It was the cuticle-biter who gave him the information. He spoke as if only a madman, living in a self-created world of schizophrenic fantasy, could be ignorant of this fact. ‘She sees the little kids across at Thomas Proctor, don’t she?’ This sentence, though seemingly obscure, immediately told Wexford, without his having to pause and decipher, that Raffy’s mother was the lollipop lady who, at 9.00 am and 3.30 pm, conducted the children who attended the Thomas Proctor Primary School across the road. He asked the stone-thrower, ‘Has he a sister?’ The thin shoulders rose and dropped again. ‘A girlfriend?’ They looked at each other and started laughing. The golden-haired boy came out and the cuticle-biter whispered something to him. He too laughed and the infectious laughter

  soon had them all convulsed. Wexford shook his head and walked off the way he had come.

  Chapter Sixteen A full moon loomed behind the distorted branches of a cherry tree on which the blossoms were an improbable shade of bright pink. This picture, painted on a bamboo scroll, was repeated all round the walls of the Moonflower Takeaway’s waiting room. It was the only place he’d ever been to, Wexford had once said, where they kept the radio and the television on at the same time. The clientele, waiting for their fried rice and lemon chicken, never looked at the moon and cherry blossom pictures and they only looked at the television when sport was on. This lunch time the radio was playing Michelle Wright singing ‘Baby, Don’t Start With Me’, and the television was showing a re-run of South Pacific. Karen Malahyde walked into the Moonflower just as Mitzi Gaynor, the fierce competition with the country singer, had started to wash that man right out of her hair. Karen went up to the counter where a woman was dispensing orders as they came through from the back. It was a semi-open plan arrangement and Mark Ling could be seen in the gleaming steel kitchen as he conjured with half a dozen woks, while his brother stood talking to him and decanting a sack of rice. Mhonum Ling was a small sturdy woman whose skin was the colour of a coffee bean and whose straightened hair, still faintly crinkled, had the glitter of a seam of coal. Wearing a white coat like a doctor’s, she was dispensing foil containers of chow mein and sweet and sour pork to customers whose numbers came up in red neon above her head. It was a bit like a happier version of the Benefit Office, though the Moonflower’s clients sat on cane chairs, reading Today and Sporting Life. When Karen told her what she wanted, Mhonum Ling beckoned rather peremptorily to her brother-in-law and cocked her head in the direction of the counter. He came at once. She looked at the picture. ‘Who’s this?’ ‘You don’t know? You’ve never seen her before?’ ‘No way. What she done?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Karen carefully. ‘She’s done nothing. She’s dead. You’ve not seen anything about it on TV?’ ‘We got work to do,’ said Mhonum Ling proudly. ‘We’ve no time for watching that.’ With a long plum-red fingernail, she prodded her brother-in-law, who was gossiping with a customer and had failed to see an order of fried rice and bamboo shoots come up behind him. She gave the clients a severe glance. ‘No time for reading papers either.’ ‘OK, so you don’t know her. There’s a boy, maybe eighteen, with Rasta hair, always wears one of those floppy cap things, he’s the only person that looks like that round here, he’s not your son, is he?’ For a moment Karen thought Mhonum was going to say she’d had no time for having children. But, ‘Raffy?’ she said. ‘That sounds like Raffy. Don’t forget the fortune cookies, Johnny. They don’t like going without their fortune cookies.’ ‘Is he a relative, then?’

  ‘Raffy?’ she said. ‘Raffy’s my nephew, my sister’s son. He left school two years ago but he’s never had work. He never will, there aren’t the jobs. My sister Oni, she wanted Mark to give him a job here, just a job helping in the kitchen she said, you could do with another pair of hands, but what’s the use? We don’t need n
o other two hands and we’re not in the charity business, we’re not aid workers in Africa.’ Karen asked where Mhonum’s sister lived and was given an address. ‘But she won’t be home, she’ll be working. She’s got work.’ On the chance of finding Raffy at home, Karen went round to Castlegate, Kingsmarkham’s only tower block, where Oni and Raffy Johnson lived at number twenty-four. It wasn’t much of a tower, a mere eight storeys high, local authority housing which the borough council would have liked to sell off to its tenants, if those tenants had been prepared to buy. Wexford had predicted that soon they would have no option but to pull it down and start afresh. Twenty-four was on the sixth floor and the lift was, as usual, out of order. By the time she got up there Karen was sure Raffy wouldn’t be at home. She was right. What made Wexford think this Raffy could help them? He had no grounds to go on, not the least evidence, just a hunch. You could call it intuition and sometimes, she knew, he intuited spectacularly. She had to have faith and tell herself that if Wexford thought Raffy was worth hunting down because the answer lay with Raffy, it quite possibly did. Sojourner – somehow, in some perhaps tenuous way – was connected to this boy his aunt spoke of so contemptuously. She got back just as Kashyapa Begh’s Jaguar swept on to the forecourt in front of the police station and Wexford asked her to take him into the mortuary. Kashyapa Begh was a shrivelled elderly man with white hair who wore a pinstriped suit and snow-white shirt. The pin in his red silk tie was a large ruby and two small diamonds. He put Karen’s back up by asking her why he was being escorted on this serious business by a woman. She said nothing, remembering that in all likelihood this man and his male relatives had murdered a girl to stop her marrying the man of her choice. Glancing at the body with no attempt to conceal his distaste, Kashyapa Begh said in an outraged tone, ‘That was a complete waste of my time.’ ‘I’m sorry about that, Mr Begh. We have to work on a process of elimination.’ ‘Process of folly,’ said Kashyapa Begh and strutted off towards his car. It was scarcely out of sight before a police car brought Festus Smith, a young Glaswegian, whose seventeen-year-old sister had been missing since March. His reaction to the body was much the same as Begh’s, though he didn’t say travelling 400 miles to see it had been a waste of his time. After him came Mary Sheerman from Nottingham, mother of a missing daughter. Carina Sheerman had disappeared on her way home from work on a Friday in June. She was sixteen and she had gone missing once before just before her fourteenth birthday, but she wasn’t the dead girl in the mortuary. On his way to see Carolyn Snow, Wexford told himself that Sojourner was a local girl, she had lived within the town or its environs. It was not that she had slipped through a net but that her disappearance had never been reported. Because it wasn’t known? Or because whoever would know wanted to keep her absence concealed, as they had once wanted to conceal her existence? Carolyn Snow was in the back garden, sitting on a striped sun lounger and reading just the sort of example of modern fiction from which, he had told Burden, her knowledge of