Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  Simisola

  A curious look, part humiliation, part scorn, came into Raffy’s face, and Wexford understood before he spoke that these children of immigrants were already infected with the English disease. Their blackness had not saved them. ‘It’s like, she’s a different class, in’t she?’ said Raffy. ‘Her dad’s a doctor and all that.’ Race and poverty and a hierarchical system had condemned him to a lonely celibacy, for it seemed never to have crossed his mind to speak to, let alone try to befriend, a white girl. ‘Your mother is from Nigeria, isn’t she?’ ‘Right.’ He looked blankly at Wexford. Raffy had apparently never asked his mother about her native land and no information had been given him unasked. He knew only that she had come here with her sister when they were very young and after her sister had married a Chinese man. Wexford had no interest in the identity of Raffy’s father, if indeed the boy knew it. He seemed to know so little, to be without interests or skills, ambition or hope, but to live from day to day, his only wish to stay alive to wander the streets of the town that had given him nothing. ‘I asked him,’ Wexford said, ‘if he knew why anyone would try to kill his mother. I expected indignation, I expected shock. What I didn’t expect was a sort of nervous smile. He looked at me as if I was having him on. He was almost embarrassed.’ ‘But he takes it seriously now?’ ‘I don’t know. I tried to make him understand that someone had attempted to murder his mother. God knows, he must see murder on television every day of his life, but for him telly is fantasy and life is reality – just what they’re supposed to be, only we’re always being told that young people confuse the two.’ Karen said tentatively, ‘The perpetrator couldn’t have been confused, could he? Mistaken Oni Johnson for Raffy? It wasn’t very light up there.’ ‘Even if it was dark no one could mistake Oni for her son. He’s six inches taller, for one thing. He’s as skinny as a rake and she’s rather plump. No, it was Oni our killer meant to attack and I haven’t the faintest idea why.’ The only other people who lived in Castlegate, a married couple, had been at work at the time. No one had been about in the empty parking areas which surrounded the block. It was as if it had already been abandoned to the demolition squad, the fact that four people still lived in it almost forgotten. Oni Johnson’s attacker could hardly have found a more propitious place to attempt a silent secret murder. Karen’s suggestion had its final dismissal next day when someone made a second attempt on Oni Johnson’s life. Archbold was outside her door all night and Pemberton took over from him in the morning. Nobody could have gone in without being seen by them but they had seen only the hospital staff, doctors, nurses, technicians, and Raffy. It was the staff nurse who told Wexford, a young woman called Stacey Martin. He came into the ward at nine and she met him when he reached the door of Oni’s room where Pemberton was already waiting. ‘Would you come in here, please?’ She took him into the office with ‘Sister’ on the door. ‘I came on at eight this morning,’ she said. ‘The night to day changeover is at eight. Sister had already come on. I went straight in to look at Oni and I thought it was funny, the sheet was pulled up over her hand.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s hot in here, as I expect you’ve noticed. We keep it hot so patients don’t need bedclothes over them. The sheet was covering the back of her hand where the IV line goes in. Well, I pulled it back and the line wasn’t going in. It had been taken out and a clip put on to stop it leaking all over the bed.’ He looked at her and saw shock still on her face. ‘You say “someone” took it out. Could she have done it herself?’ ‘Hardly. I mean, I suppose it’s just possible . . . but why would she?’ Before he could answer, if he could have answered, the door opened and Laurette Akande came in. She eyed him like a headmistress with a troublesome pupil. He realized for the first time how deeply she disliked him. ‘Mr Wexford,’ she said in frosty tones. ‘Can I help you?’ ‘You can tell me what goes through the . . . er, drip on Oni’s arm?’ ‘The intravenous line? Drugs. Quite a cocktail of medication. Why do you want to know that? Oh, I see. Staff Nurse Martin’s been passing on her ridiculous suspicions, has she?’ ‘But the line was pulled out, wasn’t it, Mrs Akande?’ ‘Sister. Unfortunately, it was. That is, it came out. No harm was done, there was no setback in Mrs Johnson’s condition . . .’ She changed her tune abruptly, sending a beaming smile in Stacey Martin’s direction, ‘thanks to Staff Martin’s prompt action.’ The tone became mildly satirical. ‘We must all be very very grateful to her. Come along now, I’ll take you in to see Mrs Johnson.’ She was alone in the room, wearing a white gown, covered only to the waist by a sheet and propped up, not lying flat. One of Raffy’s comics was on the bed table but Raffy wasn’t there. ‘Is she conscious?’ Wexford asked. ‘Can she talk?’ ‘She’s asleep,’ said Laurette Akande. ‘Could the boy have done it?’ ‘Nobody did it, Mr Wexford. Nothing has been done. The IV line came out. It was an unfortunate accident but no harm was done. All right?’ There would be a hospital enquiry, he thought, if he told anyone else of this, if Staff Martin did. It was clear Sister Akande had no intention of telling anyone, for her job would be on the line. And what was the point now? ‘I would like to stay here,’ he said. ‘Inside this room.’ ‘You can’t do that. You’ve an officer outside, that’s the usual procedure.’ ‘I’ll be the best judge of the usual procedure,’ he said. ‘There are curtains round that bed. If there are things to be done it would be improper for me to see, you can draw the curtains.’ ‘I’ve never in all my years of nursing heard of a policeman sitting inside a room in an ICU.’ ‘There’s always a first time,’ said Wexford. He forgot about being polite, sensitive to this woman’s feelings, he even forgot his terrible blunder in the mortuary. ‘I shall create a precedent. If you don’t like it you’ll have to lump it or I go to Mr Cozens for permission.’ She compressed her lips. She folded her arms and looked down at them, controlling the temper of which he had had a previous sample. Then she advanced a step to the bed and peered closely at Oni Johnson. She agitated the IV line for a second or two, eyed the monitor on the wall and stalked out without looking at him again.

  Either he or Burden must stay there, he thought. Barry Vine, perhaps, and Karen Malahyde. No one else. Until she talked and told them what it was she knew she must never be left on her own. He sat down on the uncomfortable chair and after half an hour a nurse he hadn’t seen before, a Thai or Malaysian woman, brought him a cup of tea. They drew the curtains round Oni in the late morning and at one o’clock Algernon Cozens came in with a retinue of housemen, registrars, Staff Nurse Martin and Sister Akande. No one took any notice of Wexford. Laurette Akande must have given some prior explanation for his presence but he would have betted anyone anything it wasn’t the correct one. He called Burden on his cellphone and at three the inspector came in to take over, entering the room simultaneously with a very smartly dressed Mhonum Ling. Her tight high-heeled shoes gave her an added four inches and, with her hair elaborately piled on the top of her head, she had become quite a tall woman. In time-honoured fashion, she had brought grapes, useless to Oni who was still fed intravenously. She seemed glad to see Burden, it was someone to talk to and share the grapes with, though Burden shook his head when they were offered. She had no idea, she said, why anyone would want to kill her sister. Like Raffy, she seemed embarrassed by the question, and glossed over it as soon as she could to begin on a catalogue of Oni’s misfortunes and mistakes, how ill-luck had dogged her since their arrival in Britain, how she always seemed one of life’s victims. She didn’t know how her sister managed always to stay so cheerful. Mhonum had no children and perhaps this was why she cited Raffy as the chief of her sister’s troubles, a problem since the day he was born – since before he was born, since his father disappeared as soon as Oni told him she was pregnant. Raffy had been hopeless at school, had been a chronic truant. He could do nothing, could barely write his name. He would never have a job, would live on benefit all his life. The hard-working and prosperous Mhonum shook her head over Raffy, remarking that the only good thing she could s
ay about him was that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. ‘Does your sister have any enemies?’ Burden asked, rephrasing his question. Mhonum popped a grape into her mouth. ‘Enemies? Oni? She don’t even have friends.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the sedated woman as she spoke. ‘There’s only Mark and me and we’re busy people. We’ve a business to run, right?’ Her voice went down to a whisper. ‘Oni had this boyfriend but he was soon gone, she scared him off. Oh, she was so possessive, you wouldn’t believe, want to own him, right? But he run off like Raffy’s daddy, it’s the same old story all over again.’ ‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to kill Mrs Johnson?’ She licked the tips of her fingers delicately. Burden observed her clothes, what he calculated was five hundred pounds’ worth of turquoise silk trouser suit and cream- coloured Bruno Magli shoes. ‘No one want to kill her,’ she said. ‘They just kill, a person like that. They’re made that way. She was there and they kill, that’s all.’ As if he didn’t know, as if he needed instruction in that particular field. Barry Vine took over from Burden in the evening. He brought with him a computer game belonging to his son and a Spanish exercise book. He was learning Spanish when he managed to make it to the evening class. In response to a peremptory summons Wexford drove himself to Stowerton to see the Chief Constable. The traffic was at its worst in the early evening and he found himself in a slow line approaching the roundabout. In his rear mirror he saw the Epsons’ pink car behind him but no more than a pale glimmer of the driver’s face. It took him all of a further fifteen minutes to get to Freeborn’s house.

  He had described it to Burden as the only even moderately attractive house in ugly little Stowerton. Once it had been the rectory, a sprawling place with several acres of garden. ‘How long is this going to go on, Reg?’ Freeborn wanted to know. ‘Two girls dead and now this woman at death’s door.’ ‘Oni Johnson is recovering,’ Wexford said. ‘More by luck than your activities. Come to think of it, she’s only in the state she is because of your activities.’ Wexford thought that hard. He could have rejoined that if he and Karen had been less prompt she would soon have died, lying there in her own blood on Castlegate’s concrete floor. He didn’t. A quite arbitrary date came into his head and he said he would have worked the whole thing out by the end of next week. Just give him a week. ‘No one been taking any more mugshots of you, I trust?’ Freeborn laughed unpleasantly. ‘I’m scared to look in the paper these days.’ Barry sat all night in Oni’s room and Wexford took over from him in the morning. Sitting there, he watched a doctor come in and draw the bed curtains, a new staff nurse shake the IV line. How could he tell who meant harm to Oni? How would he know if the injection administered by the surgical registrar was beneficial to Oni – or lethal? All he could do was be there and hope the time would soon come when she could talk to him. Raffy came in at mid-morning, as usual wearing his knitted cap, though it was a hot day and hotter in the ward. He looked at the pictures in his comic, got out his cigarettes and, perhaps realizing smoking would be the ultimate solecism, put them away again. He sat there for half an hour before creeping out. Wexford heard him running down the corridor outside. Karen took over in the afternoon, her arrival timing with Raffy’s return. He walked in eating chips out of a greasy paper bag. ‘If she comes round, if she talks, let me know at once.’ ‘Of course I will, sir,’ Karen said. It happened on Sunday while Vine was in the ward. Raffy was the first person Oni’s opening eyes alighted on. She put out her hand, secured his and held it. Wexford found them like that, the boy looking puzzled and somewhat at a loss, Oni clutching his long fingers in her plump stubby ones. She smiled at Wexford and she started talking. Once she had begun, she spoke a lot, about the room she was in, the nurses, the doctors, she spoke to Raffy about the chances of getting a job as a hospital porter. Of what had happened to her at the top of the stairs in Castlegate she had no memory at all. It was only what he had expected. The mind is kind to the body and allows it to heal without the setbacks painful and terrible memories may induce. But he dared not leave her until she had told him everything she knew. If only she knew what it was she knew! God help her if what she knew seemed to her trivial or insignificant or, worse, she had forgotten it. She had emerged as a cheerful and cooperative woman, willing to talk about herself and her life and her son but whose memory now held two segments of recollections, those of the hospital that went back to her waking in the ward on Saturday, and those of her previous life which ended abruptly as she entered Castlegate on Thursday afternoon, walked past the dysfunctional lift and began to climb the stairs. ‘That lift always out of order,’ Oni said. ‘But, you know, I always hope. Always I say to myself, Oni, I say, maybe today they mend it and up you go, sailing up like a bird. But

  no way and I have to go on my own two feet. These things are sent to try us, I’m telling myself, and then all go black and the floor come up in my face and I wake up in here.’ ‘Before you went into the building, can you remember seeing anyone about? Was there anyone about outside?’ ‘Not a soul. He was up there, wasn’t he, waiting to bop me with his great boxer fist.’ ‘And you’ve no idea who “he” might be?’ She shook her head under its thick white bandage. Her own phrase ‘great boxer fist’, which she had used several times, always made her laugh. She had that curious habit, common to Africans and Afro-Caribbeans too but almost incomprehensible to Europeans, of laughing merrily at tragic or terrifying events. Her laughter shook the bed and Wexford looked round, anxious not to alert a nurse who might take Oni’s excitement as a sign to terminate their talk for another day. ‘Has anyone threatened you? Have you quarrelled with anyone?’ His questions elicited giggles, then a casting up of eyes. She looked as her son had looked when asked who would want to kill his mother: embarrassed, suspicious of mockery, determined to treat the situation lightly. Sudden inspiration made Wexford ask, ‘Have you had any quarrel or argument with a car driver, someone you’ve stopped on the crossing?’ It was mad to think of attempting to kill for such a reason, or he would once have thought it mad. Now he knew people did such things. Sane-looking, ordinary men drove the streets of this town and any other, who if reproved by a traffic warden would think nothing of taking savage revenge – especially if it was a woman who had dared upbraid them. Especially if it was a black woman. But there had apparently been no such violent paranoiac in Oni Johnson’s past. Like her sister, she said, ‘He’s a killer, right? Don’t have to have no reason. He kill, he made that way.’ And her brisk summing up of man’s senseless iniquity brought so much fresh cause for laughter that this time the nurse did come over and say that was quite enough for today. It was possibly quite enough for ever. Leaving Barry Vine in the ward and walking back to the lift down the corridor, Wexford asked himself if there was anything more to be got out of Oni, or if she and Mhonum Ling could be right and this was a virtually unmotivated attack by some psychopath; someone who took against black residents or women or mothers or dwellers in tower blocks or even just other people. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Raffy, nothing to do with the Benefit Office and Annette, perhaps there was no connection between Oni and Annette or, come to that, Oni and Melanie Akande. Perhaps Raffy had plucked the IV line out himself because it frightened him or he thought Oni was hurt by it or he was merely trying to shake it the way he had seen done by the hospital staff. Weren’t most killings, after all, committed from motives incomprehensible to ordinary men or from no apparent motive at all? He had been so deep in thought that he missed his way but, finding a staircase ahead of him, walked down it. Here, however, he was really lost, in a part of the hospital he had never been before. He had just registered the words, Department of Paediatrics and Diseases of Children, lettered above the open double doors ahead of him, when a door opened on his left and Swithun Riding, his white coat open over a fawn fuzzy sweater, came out of it with a baby in his arms. Wexford expected to be ignored, but Riding instead gave him a cordial smile and remarked that he was glad to see him, he had intended, next time he did see him, to congratulate him on guessing t
he correct age of those twins at the garden party.

  ‘My wife told me. So much for my expertise, she said. What do you do with the teddy bear, have a childhood regression and cuddle up to it at night?’ Wexford was too interested in Riding’s manner with the baby to think up a clever rejoinder. He said merely, ‘I gave it away,’ and marvelled at the tender way the paediatrician held the child, with such delicacy for one so big, with such gentle firmness, each of his huge hands large enough to contain it like a cradle. And Riding’s expression, normally so elevated and arrogant, the lofty look of the proud possessor of superior intellect and physique, grew soft and almost feminine as he looked down into the tiny round face, the wide blue eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with him, I hope?’ Wexford hazarded. ‘Nothing worse than an umbilical hernia and we’ve seen to that. Not a him, by the way. A lovely little lady. Don’t you adore them? Aren’t they gorgeous?’ It might have been a woman talking, and the words, uttered in a strong baritone, which should have been grotesque, sounded only charming. Riding was transformed, he was for a moment a ‘nice’ man. And Wexford felt it would be possible to ask the way out without risking some crushing putdown. ‘Oh, back the way you’ve come and turn left,’ said the paediatrician. ‘And now I must take this little sweetheart back to Mother or she’ll be fretting and no wonder.’ Telling Dora about it later, Wexford was rather surprised to hear it was no surprise to her. ‘Sylvia was referred to him with Ben, don’t you remember? When Ben broke his arm and had those complications. Oh, it must have been three years ago, soon after the Ridings came here.’ ‘One judges people on the strength of a single unfortunate encounter. It’s a pity but there it is.’ ‘She said he was wonderful with Ben and Ben had quite a crush on him.’ Three years ago when Sylvia had a job and Neil had a job and Dora complained they never saw them. ‘We’re not expecting them tonight, I hope. I mean, any of them.’ ‘No. We’re not expecting them, for what that’s worth. We oughtn’t to talk about our child like that, ought we? It’s wrong of us. I always think I’m tempting Providence and something awful will happen and then think of the guilt I’ll feel.’ Wexford was starting to say that Providence had been tempted enough times by now to have learned how to resist, when the doorbell rang. Sylvia had a key but she also had the sensitivity not to use it when she came unexpectedly. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, thinking on his way to the door of another evening of counsellor-training, job club and polyglot ‘no problems’. But it wasn’t Sylvia and family. It was Anouk Khoori. Again he had to look twice to be sure it was she. Her blonde hair was severely drawn back, her make-up light and she wore the female politician’s favoured pearl ear studs. The skirt of her dark blue linen dress came well below the knee. Her manner was simple and disarming. At first it appeared the best, the least pompous technique a woman of her sort and her appearance could have used. She stepped inside without waiting to be asked. ‘You’ll have guessed. I’ve come to ask you to vote for me.’ He had guessed but only a matter of seconds before. She reminded him suddenly of Ingrid Pamber, a sophisticated and highly accomplished version of Ingrid. And this was strange because she was far from attractive to him, while Ingrid . . . To his surprise, to his distaste, Anouk Khoori tucked her arm into his and led him through his own house unerringly to where Dora was.