by Ruth Rendell
window stood there. He wore shorts and a heavy, very dirty, Aran sweater. His legs and feet were bare. ‘What d’you want?’ ‘To come in.’ ‘You’ll need a warrant for that,’ said Christopher Riding. ‘You’re not coming in here without one. It’s not my property.’ ‘No, it’s the property of Mr and Mrs Epson. Where are they this time? Lanzarote?’ He was a little disconcerted, enough to step back. Wexford, who had the edge on him as far as height went, if not youth, gave him a shove with his elbow and pushed past him into the house. Vine followed, shaking off Riding’s detaining hand. The child began to wail. It was a house of numerous little rooms, a steep staircase climbing up its centre. In the middle of the staircase stood an older child, a grubby soft toy trailing from one hand. It was the brown boy with brown curly hair Wexford had seen come out of Thomas Proctor. When he saw Wexford he turned tail and fled upstairs. The sound of a radio came from behind a closed door. Wexford opened it quietly. On all-fours on the floor, a girl was picking up broken glass – no doubt the remains of the object which they had heard dropped – and putting the pieces on to a folded newspaper. She turned her head at the sound of his careful cough, sprang to her feet and let out a cry. ‘Good morning,’ Wexford said. ‘Melanie Akande, I presume?’ His coolness belied his true feelings. Extreme relief at finding her alive and well and living in Stowerton fought in his mind with anger and a kind of appalled fear for her parents. Suppose Sheila had done this? How would he have felt if his daughter had done this? Christopher Riding leant against the fireplace, a cynical half-amused expression on his face. Having looked at first as if she was going to cry, Melanie had controlled her tears and now sat in an attitude of despair. In her surprise she had cut her finger on one of the pieces of glass and it bled unheeded. Blood trickled on to her bare feet. From upstairs one of the Epson children began to wail. ‘Go and see what he wants, will you?’ Melanie spoke to Riding as if they had been married for years and not too happily. ‘Christ.’ Riding shrugged his shoulders with great drama. The younger boy got hold of his jeans and hung on, burying his face in the back of the man’s knees. Christopher walked off, dragging the child behind him, and banged the door. ‘Where are Mr and Mrs Epson?’ Wexford said. ‘Sicily. They’re coming back tonight.’ ‘And what were you planning to do?’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ The sight of her finger brought the tears back once more to her eyes. She started wrapping a tissue round it. ‘See if they’ll keep me on, I suppose. I don’t know, God knows, sleep on the streets.’ She was dressed exactly as, according to the missing person description, she had been on the day she vanished, in jeans, a white shirt and a long embroidered waistcoat. The look on her face was one of utter disenchantment with the life she found herself in. ‘Do you want to tell me about it here or shall we go to the police station?’ ‘I can’t leave the kids, can I?’
Wexford thought about it. There was a funny side which he might come to see later on. Of course she couldn’t leave the kids. The Epson children were on the Social Services register and had been since their parents were given suspended prison sentences for leaving them in the house alone for a week. But he didn’t fancy fetching out a child care officer, getting a care order made, setting the whole machinery in motion for the sake of removing Melanie Akande for one day. No doubt the Epsons, considerably frightened by what had happened last time, had more or less properly engaged her to look after their two sons. ‘What did you do? Answer an ad in the Job Centre?’ Melanie nodded. ‘Mrs Epson, she said to call her Fiona, she was in there. I’d been talking to the New Claims Officer and when I was done I sort of wandered over into the jobs part and there was this woman standing by the board that advertises jobs for nannies and minders and whatever. I’d never thought of that sort of work but I was looking at it and she said did I want to come and work for her for three weeks. ‘Well, I knew you weren’t supposed to go with people who offer you jobs like that but a woman seemed different. I mean, it’s because of sexual harassment, isn’t it? She said, why not come and see, so I went with her. She had a car in the car park and we went out the side door – that car you saw outside.’ ‘That’s why those boys outside never saw you leave,’ said Vine. ‘Maybe.’ A thought struck her. ‘Have my parents been looking for me?’ ‘The whole country’s been looking for you,’ said Vine. ‘Didn’t you see the papers? Didn’t you see the telly?’ ‘The TV broke down and we didn’t know who to get to come and see to it. I never saw a paper.’ ‘Your mother thought at first you were with Euan Sinclair,’ said Wexford. ‘She feared it was possible. Then she thought you were dead. Mrs Epson brought you here, then? Just like that? She didn’t ask if you wanted to go home first, if you wanted to fetch your things?’ ‘They were going away the next day. They’d more or less decided they’d have to take the kids. I can understand they didn’t want to. They’re awful kids.’ ‘Not surprising, is it?’ said Vine, the conscientious father. Melanie lifted her shoulders. ‘I said to Fiona that I could stay if she wanted. I’d got my things with me, you see . . . well, I’d got enough on account of I’d been going to Laurel’s. But I didn’t want to go there. I had a date with Euan first but I didn’t want to meet him, I didn’t want to hear any more of his lies. This house and being here was just what I wanted. Anyway, I thought so. I’d earn some money that wasn’t a grant or pocket money from Dad. I thought I’d be alone and that was what I wanted, to be alone for a bit. But you’re not alone with kids.’ ‘Christopher Riding wasn’t with you all the time?’ ‘I don’t know where he was. I didn’t know him very well – not then. It was – it was after I’d been here about a week. I was nearly giving up, those kids are so terrible, I had to drive the big one to school, that’s why they left me the car, and Chris saw me, he recognized me, and then he – he followed me back here.’ After she had been there about a week, Wexford thought. That would have been the day or the day after he had talked to Christopher Riding and asked him about Melanie. At least he had been telling the truth then.
‘He thought it was funny,’ Melanie said. ‘I mean, the whole set-up. It sort of fascinated him. He stayed a bit.’ She looked away. ‘I mean, he came and he went. He helped me with the kids. They are awful kids.’ ‘And were you an awful kid, Melanie?’ said Vine. ‘It’s a pretty awful daughter, isn’t it, that goes off, disappears, without a word to her parents? Lets them think she’s dead? She’s been murdered?’ ‘They couldn’t have thought that!’ ‘Of course they did. What stopped you making one phone call?’ She was silent, looking down at the blood-soaked tissue on her finger. Wexford thought of all the people who must have seen her and who did nothing about it, who did nothing because she was always with two black children they took to be her children. Or saw her with Riding, that they took to be the father of the children with them. Wexford had thought a missing black girl should be easy to find because black people were rare here, but the reverse was true. It was for that very reason that she had failed to be recognized. ‘They wouldn’t have let me stay here,’ Melanie said in a voice not much above a whisper. Christopher, who had come back into the room, got a sidelong unhappy look. ‘My mother would have called it being a servant. My father would have come and fetched me home.’ Her voice rose and there was a hysterical edge to it. ‘You don’t know what it’s like at home. No one knows.’ She gave Christopher a bitter look. ‘And I can’t get away if I haven’t got a job and a–a roof.’ She said to Wexford, picking him for some reason, ‘Can I talk to you alone? Just for a minute?’ A shattering scream split the air. It came from upstairs but it might have been in the same room. The scream was followed by a violent crash. Melanie shouted, ‘Oh God!’ and ‘Go and see what he’s doing, Chris, please.’ ‘Go yourself,’ said Christopher, laughing. ‘I can’t go. They want me here.’ ‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve had enough of this. I don’t know what the attraction was in the first place.’ ‘I do!’ ‘It’s wearing thin now at any rate.’ ‘I will go,’ said Barry Vine in stern admonitory tones. Wexford said to Melanie, ‘We’ll go into one of the other rooms.’ A bleak pl
ace that no one seemed to use with a dining table and chairs round it and a bicycle in one corner. A green window blind was pulled down to its fullest extent. Wexford motioned the girl to a chair and sat down opposite her. ‘What did you want to say to me?’ ‘I thought of having a baby,’ she said, ‘just so that the council would give me a place.’ ‘More likely put you up in one of their famous bed and breakfasts.’ ‘That would be better than Ollerton Avenue.’ ‘Really? What’s so bad about it?’ She relaxed quite suddenly. She put her elbows on the table and gave him a look that was conspiratorial, secrets-sharing. Her wry smile made her enormously attractive. She was at once pretty and charming. ‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what they’re really like. You just see the hard-working kindly GP and his beautiful efficient wife. They’re fanatics, those two, they’re obsessed.’ ‘In what respect?’
‘They’re probably better educated than almost anyone in this place. That’s for a start. My mother got a science degree before she started nursing and she’s just about everything you can be as a nurse, she’s got qualifications in everything. Medical and psychiatric, you name it, she’s got it. When we were kids, Patrick and me, we never saw her, she was off all the time getting more certificates. Our gran and our aunties looked after us. My father may be just a GP but he’s a surgeon too, he’s a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, he can do all sorts of surgery, not just take out an appendix. He could easily be as good as Chris’s dad.’ ‘So they were ambitious for you?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ said Melanie. ‘You know what they call people like them? The Ebony Elite. The black crème de la crème. Our futures were all mapped out for us before we were ten. Patrick was to be the great consultant surgeon, a brain surgeon probably – yes, really, that’s not funny to them. And it’s all right for him, that’s what he wants, he’s heading that way. But me? I’m not all that bright, I’m just average. I like singing and dancing, so I did my degree in that, but my parents hated it because it’s what successful black women do, you see. They were glad when I couldn’t get a job, they wanted me to go back to college so long as I could live at home. Or I’d be permitted to get office work and study for business management in the evenings from home. They talk about careers and training and degrees and promotion all the time. And they’re too civilized to actually say it, but they’re both bursting with pride because they found out that the people who wouldn’t live next door to us both left school at sixteen. ‘If I got away they thought I’d get back with Euan or someone like him.’ She twisted her mouth into a bitter shape. ‘And maybe I will now. I can’t have a baby if I haven’t got a man, can I? I wouldn’t let Chris go that far, though that’s what he came for, whatever he says. He only fancies me because I’m black. Charming, isn’t it? I’ve had to fight him off.’ ‘Your parents shouldn’t be kept in ignorance any longer. Not for an hour. They’ve been through a lot. Nothing they’ve done could justify that. They’ve suffered intensely, your father has lost weight, he looks an old man, but they’ve carried on with their work . . .’ ‘They would.’ ‘I’ll tell them you’re safe and then you must see them. Bring the children with you, you haven’t much choice.’ He thought of the waste of police time and resources, the cost of it all, the misery and pain and abuse, her brother’s recall from his Asian journey, his own shame and self-justification. But he relented. Mawkish and sentimental it might be, but he was sorry for her. ‘When do the Epsons get home?’ ‘She said nine or ten.’ ‘We’ll send a car for you at six.’ He got up, preparing to leave, but remembered something. ‘One good turn deserves another. I’ll want to talk to you again. All right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I suppose it was you talked to my officer on the phone when we rang up to enquire about the dead girl?’ She nodded. ‘It gave me a fright. I thought that was it.’ ‘You’d better see to that finger. Have you any plasters in the house?’ ‘Thousands. That’s top priority. Those kids are always wounding themselves and each other.’
Two reports from Pemberton were on his desk waiting for him. The first told him that the Kingsmarkham shoe shop which sold black cloth and rubber half-boots kept close records of their sales. In the past six months four pairs had been sold. An assistant remembered selling one pair to John Ling. She knew him because he was one of only two Chinese men in the town. Another pair had gone to someone she described as a ‘bag lady’, who had come into the shop carrying two bulging carrier bags and looked as if she slept on the street. The purchasers of the other pairs she couldn’t remember. Wexford gave the second report a quick glance and said, ‘I want Pemberton here too.’ The phone in his hand, Burden said, ‘You’ve gone quite red in the face.’ ‘I know. It’s excitement. Listen to this. Kimberley Pearson’s grandmother did die at the beginning of June but she didn’t leave any money, still less any property. She’d been living in one of those council bungalows in Fontaine Road, Stowerton. Mrs Pearson, who was her daughter-in-law, knows nothing about any money coming to Kimberley, not family money that is, there is no family money, they’re all as poor as church mice. ‘Clifton Court, where Kimberley moved after Zack was put on remand, is a block of rented flats – or apartments, as Pemberton mysteriously calls them. And who do you think the company is who owns the freehold of the block?’ ‘Just cut the suspense and tell me.’ ‘None other than Crescent Comestibles, or in other words, Wael Khoori, his brother and our local council candidate, his wife.’ Pemberton came in. ‘You can rent those flats with an option to buy,’ he said. ‘Forty pounds a week and they claim that when the transfer’s made mortgage repayments will amount to the same. Of course, I haven’t talked to Kimberley, I asked her mother not to say a word about any of this. Her mother says she went over to Clifton Court the minute Zack was banged-up, put down a deposit and fixed up to move in next day. She’s bought a whole lot of furniture since then.’ ‘Is she going to buy?’ ‘According to mother, she’s already got a solicitor doing the conveyancing. They were squatting in that cottage at Glebe End, by the way, only nobody cared. It’s no use to the owner, is it? It needs fifty thousand spent on it before anyone would buy it.’ ‘And Crescent Comestibles own that block of flats?’ ‘So the managing agents told me. It’s no secret. They’re building all over Stowerton, wherever there’s a bit of land going or an old house knocked down. It’s the same process everywhere. The flats are cheap by today’s standards. You pay rent while you’re waiting for your mortgage to come through and the mortgage is a hundred per cent with no deposit. Your mortgage repayments are the same as your rent.’ ‘In accordance with Mrs Khoori’s own political standpoint,’ said Wexford slowly. ‘Help the disadvantaged to help themselves. Don’t give it to them but give them the chance to be independent. Not a bad philosophy, I suppose. I wonder if the day will come when someone starts a political party called Conservative Socialists.’ The doctor was told between seeing patients at the medical centre, his wife called to the phone in Intensive Care. Wexford came to the house as Dr Akande arrived home and the pain in his face was as bad as when he thought his daughter was dead. It would be worse if she were dead, immeasurably worse, but this was very bad. To learn that your child is prepared to put you through this, is indifferent as to whether you go through it or not, that
is made bearable only when filtered through anger and Raymond Akande wasn’t angry. He was humiliated. ‘I thought she loved us.’ ‘She acted impulsively, Dr Akande.’ He hadn’t said anything about Christopher Riding. Melanie could do that. ‘She was in Stowerton all the time?’ ‘It looks like it.’ ‘Her mother works just down the road. I was there making my rounds.’ ‘The Epsons left them a car to do the shopping and take the child to school. I don’t suppose she went out much on foot.’ ‘I ought to be down on my knees thanking heaven for all its mercies, I ought to be in a seventh heaven – is that what you’re thinking?’ ‘No,’ said Wexford, and boldly, ‘I know how you feel.’ ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Before he could answer – if he had felt able or inclined to answer – Laurette Akande walked in. Wexford’s first thought was that she looked ten years you
nger, his second that she was brimming with happiness and his third that she was the angriest woman he had seen in years. ‘Where is she?’ ‘A car will bring her at six. She’ll have the children with her. It was either that or making some care arrangement and since the Epsons return tonight . . .’ ‘Where did we go wrong, Laurette?’ ‘Don’t be silly. We didn’t go wrong. Who is this woman, this Mrs Epson, who leaves her children in the care of a totally unqualified person? I hope someone’s going to prosecute her, she should be prosecuted. I am so angry I could kill her. Not Mrs Epson, Melanie. I could kill her.’ ‘Oh, don’t, Letty,’ said the doctor. ‘We thought someone had killed her.’ The car brought Melanie and the boisterous Epson boys a couple of minutes after six. She walked defiantly into the room, her head held high. Her parents, who were sitting down, remained seated, but after a moment or two of silence her father got up and came towards her. He put out a hand and took hers. He pulled her a little towards him and kissed her cheek tentatively. Rather than responding, Melanie allowed this. ‘I’ll leave you,’ Wexford said. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow, Melanie, nine in the morning.’ None of them took any notice of him. He got up and went towards the door. Laurette found a strong determined voice. She no longer seemed angry but only decisive. ‘Well, Melanie, we’ll hear your explanation and then we’ll say no more about it. I think you’d better apply to do a degree in business studies. You might get in in October if you’re quick about it. The University of the South do a good course and that would mean you can live at home. I’ll send away for the forms for you tomorrow and meanwhile Dad might let you temp for the receptionist at the. . . .’ The younger Epson boy began screaming. Wexford let himself out.