Simisola

by Ruth Rendell

  she’s supposed to have been given the pamphlet to read, explaining the Immigration Rules Concession and what to do if she’s ill-treated. But that’s good only so far as it goes. If, as I think, Sojourner came in as a visitor with the family, as a guest, she wouldn’t have any rights and, for all we know, she can’t read. She very likely can’t read English, anyway. ‘Probably she knew very little about the outside world, this England, Kingsmarkham. She was black but she never saw another black person. And then, one day, looking out of a window, she saw Melanie Akande out running . . .’ ‘Reg, that’s pure fantasy.’ ‘It’s intelligent conjecture,’ Wexford retorted. ‘She saw Melanie. Not once only but many times. Nearly every day from the middle of June onwards. She saw a black girl like herself out there, a Nigerian like herself, and maybe she sensed Melanie’s African origins.’ ‘Allowing that that’s true, which I’m not sure I can, so what?’ ‘I think it gave her confidence, Mike. It showed her that escape might be possible and the world wouldn’t be entirely alien. So she ran away, in the dark, knowing nothing else . . .’ ‘No, that won’t do,’ Burden said. ‘That can’t be so. She knew about the ESJ. She knew it was where you went to find work or get money if there was no work . . . Look . . . the march is starting.’ A hundred of them? Like most people, Wexford wasn’t much good at calculating numbers from a rapid glance. He would have to see them in sets of four or eight before he could tell. They were forming up now, four abreast, with a chosen two in the vanguard, holding the banner, both men and both middle-aged. Burden thought he recognized one of them from frequent visits to the Benefit Office. It was then that he had his first sight of the two officers from the uniformed branch, two of whom had suddenly appeared on the Corn Exchange steps. They were a procession now and they began to move. What signal set them off was hard to know. A whispered word perhaps, travelling down the line from one to another, or the banner suddenly upraised. The two officers on the steps went back to their car, parked on the market square flagstones, a white Ford with the scarlet stripe and eagle crest of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary. ‘We’ll follow them too,’ said Wexford. They stood back to let the column pass. Marching was rather slow, as it always is at the start. Speed would pick up when they came out into the main road to Kingsmarkham. Nearly everyone wore jeans, a shirt or tee-shirt, trainers on the feet, the ubiquitous uniform. The oldest person there was a man well into his sixties who could not have hoped for work and must be marching out of public-spiritedness or altruism or even for the fun of it. The youngest was a baby girl in a pushchair, her mother a twin of Kimberley Pearson before she came into a fortune. A second banner brought up the rear: ‘Jobs for All. Is It Too Much to Ask?’ Two women carried it, a pair who looked so much alike they must have been mother and daughter. The column proceeded up the High Street, the police car crawling behind it. Wexford and Burden got back into their car and Donaldson moved out behind the white Ford. ‘Someone must have told her,’ said Wexford stubbornly, answering Burden’s rebuttal as if there had been no break in their conversation. ‘There must have been someone who went there or someone she met who told her the ESJ was the place.’

  ‘Like who?’ Burden was very sure of his ground. ‘And if so, why didn’t this person tell her where it was? Help her to escape, come to that? Tell her how to have recourse to the law?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘If this person told her about jobs and benefit and how to get away, why hasn’t he or she come to us?’ ‘These are minor things, Mike. These questions will be answered. At the moment we don’t know where this beating up happened, where her death happened. But we do know why. Because, getting no help from Annette, she had no choice but to go home. Where else could she go?’ The column turned left into Angel Street and, picking up speed, came to the roundabout. The first exit was for Sewingbury, the second for Kingsmarkham, the third led to the industrial estate where Wexford had been two days before. After passing between the factory sites, it would rejoin the Kingsmarkham road at the pub called the Halfway House. ‘Not much point in that,’ said Burden. ‘Half the industry’s closed down.’ ‘I expect that is the point,’ Wexford said. The sun which had shone quite brightly while they were in Stowerton marketplace had gone in, retreating behind a thin veil of cloud. It had grown white and distant, a mere puddle of light, and the cloud was breaking, the little clouds were edged with darkness. But the heat remained, the heat even increased, and two of the young men among the marchers shed their shirts and tied them round their waists. Reinforcements awaited them on the corner of Southern Drive, half a dozen men and a young woman with a banner of their own, obscurely proclaiming: ‘Yes to Euro-Work’. There is perhaps no more dismal sight in social terms than a row of empty factories. Boarded-up shops have nothing on it. The factories, two of them brand new, had their windows all closed in the heat, their front doors padlocked, and signs either offering the buildings to let or for sale planted in lawns on which untended grass grew long. The members of the column, again at some signal, turned their heads as one to acknowledge these monuments to joblessness as they passed, like a regiment honouring a cenotaph. Not all the factories were closed. One that manufactured machine parts had remained open and another producing herbal cosmetics seemed to be flourishing, while Burden remarked that the printers on the corner of Southern Drive and Sussex Mile had reopened and its presses were once more operating. It was a good sign, a sign of recession ending and prosperity returning, he added. Wexford said nothing. He was thinking, and not just about economic problems. In accordance with its previous behaviour, the column should have cheered but it kept silence. Its members seemed not to share Burden’s optimism. Up the long shallow hill the column went. The distance was a mile, at least a mile, and Wexford would have asked Donaldson to pass and go on ahead but passing was impossible. The road became a narrow country lane, a white pathway between high hedges and giant trees. They met only one car before they reached the turn into the Kingsmarkham road. It stopped and the white Ford stopped too. But before the officer had his door open, the column’s members had shifted, had converted themselves into a single line, the banners held back flat against the hedge. Slowly the car came on and as its occupants came into focus Wexford saw that the driver was Dr Akande, his son beside him in the passenger seat. Akande nodded and raised one hand in the classic gesture of thanks. The hand went down before he saw Wexford, or it might have been that he didn’t see him. The boy next

  to him had a sullen injured expression. That was a family who would never forgive him for warning them to prepare for a daughter’s, a sister’s, death. Traffic on the Kingsmarkham road wasn’t at its heaviest at Friday lunchtime but it wasn’t light either. The white Ford went past the marchers and took up its new position at the head of the column. More joined at the point where the Forby road turned in and they stopped to let a dozen cars coming this way from Kingsmarkham pass by. It was close on a hundred and fifty people now, Wexford calculated. A good many seemed to have decided that this stretch was the place to attach themselves to the marchers, whole families who had abandoned their cars on the grass verges, women with three or four children who looked on this as a fine day out, boys in their teens that Burden said could only be there because they were looking for trouble. ‘We’ll see. Maybe not.’ ‘I meant to tell you. All this slavery stuff put it out of my head. Annette did make a will and who do you think she left her flat to?’ ‘Bruce Snow,’ said Wexford. ‘How did you know? That’s too bad, I was going to astound you.’ ‘I didn’t know. I guessed. You wouldn’t have been so dramatic if it had been the ex- husband or Jane Winster. I hope he’s grateful. He’ll have somewhere to live after his wife’s taken him to the cleaners. Won’t be very comfortable with Diana Graddon on the other side of the street.’ The column was coming up to the outskirts of Kingsmarkham. Like most English country towns, it was approached by roads lined by big houses dating from the mid- and late-nineteenth century, ‘villas’ with high hedges and old-fashioned gardens, a subtly different atmosphere from Winchester Avenue and Ashley Grove. Wealth
hid inside the walls of these houses instead of flaunting itself, concealed under an indifference that almost amounted to shabbiness. A woman came running out of one of the houses, down a long flagged path, to join the march. She might have been employer, employee or employed, it was impossible to tell from her jeans and sleeveless shirt. Would Sylvia stay at home now the need had gone? Or would she join the march, generously campaigning for others? Burden, who had been lost in thought, suddenly said, ‘That case history of yours, does it give the nationality of the employer?’ ‘No. Presumably, the family were British.’ ‘They might be, but Nigerian too.’ Burden was struggling and Wexford didn’t help him. ‘I mean they might have been Nigerian before they were British.’ He gave up. ‘Were they black?’ ‘It’s PC, it doesn’t say.’ Up ahead of them the bridge over the Kingsbrook had come into sight. A massive resistance to the introduction of roundabouts had kept Kingsmarkham town centre, at least to a superficial eye, much as it had always been. But the bottleneck caused by the narrow bridge had resulted in so many traffic hold-ups that the bridge had been widened two years before. It was no longer the shallow stone arch featured on many postcards, but an uncompromising affair of grey-painted steel, overlooked by the motel extension to the Olive and Dove Hotel. The trees were mostly still there, the alders and willows and giant horse chestnuts. It was the favoured beat of teenage boys who ran among traffic stopped by a red light to clean windscreens. The boys were there today but they gave up their thankless and often unwelcome labours to join the march. This side of the bridge a knot of people,

  perhaps a dozen, joined the tail of the column. Among them was Sophie Riding, the girl with the long corn-coloured hair Wexford had first seen waiting her turn in the Benefit Office and whose name he had learned from Melanie Akande. She and a woman with her were carrying a red silk banner, skilfully made and with the words ‘Give Graduates a Chance’ cut out in white and stitched to the silk. The column waited. The policeman on duty waved on the three cars waiting at the lights and when they had passed beckoned the marchers on to the bridge. Wexford saw the drinkers at the tables outside the Olive get to their feet and crane their necks to see the lengthening procession go by. Burden said, ‘By the way, something else I forget to say, Mrs Khoori got in.’ ‘Nobody ever tells me anything,’ said Wexford. ‘With a majority of seven. What you might call a close-run thing.’ ‘D’you want me to follow them, sir?’ Donaldson asked. The marchers intended to turn into Brook Road. The banner-carriers at the head of the column stopped on the far side of the bridge and one of them held up his hand, pointing to the left. Some consensus of opinion, an invisible wave, must have passed along the quadruple line of people, for the message reached him and the column turned, snaking to the left like a train negotiating a sharp curve in the rails. ‘Park opposite the Benefit Office,’ Wexford said. Ahead of them, the marked police car did this too. On the walls between which the steps ran up sat Rossy, Danny and Nige, and Raffy with them. Raffy, without his hat for once, displayed the huge helmet of dreadlocks that crowned his head and tumbled in a cascade down his back. As the procession approached and came to a straggling halt, Danny got down off the wall and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘What happens now?’ Burden said. ‘Some gesture will be made.’ As Wexford spoke, Sophie Riding gave up her end of the ‘Give Graduates a Chance’ banner to the man next her. She detached herself from the column and walked up the steps. In her hand she held a sheet of paper, a petition perhaps or statement. Rossy, Danny, Raffy and Nige stared after her as she disappeared into the Benefit Office. She was inside no more than fifteen seconds. The paper had been handed over and a point had been made. Within moments of her absorption back into the column, the double doors of the Benefit Office opened and Cyril Leyton appeared. He looked from left to right, then directly at the column, which was no longer a column, which had lost its shape and become an amorphous scattered crowd. Leyton scowled. He seemed about to say something and perhaps would have done if he had not, in that moment, caught sight of the police car on the opposite side of the road. The door swung and swung again behind him as he went in. It was the kind that is made, no doubt wisely in the circumstances, to be unslammable. Apparently at no word of command, like a flock of birds whose leader directs them by silent unknown means, the crowd formed into fours once more, swung round – those in the vanguard had no intention of giving up pride of place – and headed back the way it had come. The boys from the wall joined on the end. Sophie Riding took up one end of her banner and the woman with her the other end. As the column turned into the High Street, the clock on St Peter’s church began striking noon.

  Chapter Twenty-Four The heat was like the inside of a rain forest now, or like a sauna. There was no breath of wind. The sun was lost under banks of frothy whiteness that overlaid a sky of dark grey cloud. Thunder had begun to roll but so distantly that its rumblings were lost behind the throb and beat of traffic noise. The march occupied the left-hand lane of Kingsmarkham High Street. Here the High Street was fairly wide and there was room for Stowerton-bound cars to creep past, but those heading for Stowerton were diverted into Queen Street and the long serpentine southern route. The column passed St Peter’s church as the final note of the midday clock chimes died away, and proceeded northwards close to the churchyard wall. At the point where the diversion began two police officers, a man and a woman, cleared space for the column to pass. It had picked up more people at the churchyard gate and, outside the biggest of the High Street supermarkets, a man and a girl who had taken a trolley from the rank on the forecourt abandoned it and tagged on to the end of the procession instead. The police car with the stripe down its side and the crest on its door had turned back and been replaced by an unmarked Vauxhall, driven by PC Stafford from the uniformed branch with PC Rowlands beside him. Wexford and Burden had left theirs on a vacant meter outside the offices of Hawkins and Steele where Bruce Snow worked, but when Stafford put his head out and offered a lift, Wexford shook his head and said they would follow the column on foot. Sophie Riding, who had handed in the petition at the Benefit Office, was two people ahead of them. They were sandwiched between her and her banner and the unmarked police car. That was how they came to witness so entirely what was about to happen. The Range Rover was parked on the right-hand side and facing right on a broken yellow band fifty yards or so ahead of them outside Woolworths. It was an inconvenient place to have parked on this morning of all mornings but its positioning broke no traffic rule. Wexford didn’t recognize the Range Rover, any more than he did the white van behind it and the car in front of it, but he did note the behaviour of its driver and the behaviour of the other drivers in leaving vehicles on that particular spot as antisocial. He noted too its olive green colour and a memory came into his mind of the Women, Aware! meeting and a note passed to him. More interesting at that moment was the sight, far ahead, only accessible to someone as tall as he, of Anouk Khoori crossing the greensward outside the council offices, her arms outspread. She wore a loose flowing garment and she was holding out her arms like a royal personage returning from a goodwill tour, greeting the children from whom she has been parted for a month. Wexford was remarking to Burden that he wondered if she would tell the marchers that she knew they would come, she had had a feeling they would, when the nearside door of the Range Rover opened and Christopher Riding stepped down on to the pavement. The Range Rover was now no more than a car-length ahead of where Wexford and Burden

  were. Its offside door opened and Christopher’s father got out. Things happened very quickly then. Christopher edged round the front of the Range Rover as his sister Sophie came alongside. He and Swithun Riding in a concerted swift movement seized her by the arms and she dropped the banner with a cry. They lifted her off her feet, threw back the car door and slung her inside. Both tall and powerful, with big hands and muscular arms, they swung her in the air, her bright swatch of corn-gold hair flying out, before throwing her into the back seat. The marchers in the immediate vicinity fell back, fanning out. A woman s
creamed. Someone picked up the banner. The column ahead of the girl marched on, unaware of what had happened, but those at its tail stopped to stare. Now Swithun Riding was back in the driver’s seat, his son squeezing himself between the bonnet of the Range Rover and the car in front of it. There must have been a central locking system, for Sophie couldn’t unlock the door and escape. She was beating her fists against the window, she began to scream. Wexford looked back at the unmarked Vauxhall and cocked his head at Stafford. He lunged forward and grabbed the rear door handle, but finding the door locked as he expected, hammered on the glass. Stafford and Rowlands had both left the Vauxhall. This was not what they had expected, this was unprecedented, this in Kingsmarkham? The driver of the car ahead of the Range Rover, knowingly or unwittingly, now reversed an inch or two. It was a dangerous move and made Christopher let out a bellow of rage and fear. The reversing car nearly crushed him, but the driver had braked just in time. Christopher found himself trapped between its rear bumper and the Range Rover’s front fender. The two vehicles made a man trap which pinned his legs. He stood struggling, waving his arms and shouting, ‘Go forward, go forward, you bastard!’ The front of the column, still unaware of the fracas at the rear, marched on, unperturbed. Like a pantomime horse whose hind legs have given up the game, it broke into an ungainly trot for the last final hundred yards of its progress. The rearguard had scattered into a crowd of fascinated spectators. Burden, with a quick nod to Wexford, slipped round the back of the Range Rover and in front of the white van behind it, walked past the imprisoned screaming girl, and wrenched open the passenger door Riding had unlocked for his son. ‘Go back, go back!’ the boy was yelling now. Riding started the engine and had begun to move the shift when Burden put his foot on the step and climbed into the passenger seat. Riding had never seen him before and must have taken him for an interfering member of the public. Without hesitation, he did at once the utterly unexpected, drawing back his right arm like a discus thrower and letting fly with a savage punch to Burden’s jaw. The passenger door swung open. Burden reeled backwards through the empty space. He broke his fall by clutching at the door frame but still half-tumbled to the pavement. The girl screamed more loudly. His passenger door swinging, Riding reversed into the white van, hitting it with a reverberating crash. Then he saw the uniformed policemen. He saw Wexford. Wexford said, ‘Open that door.’ Riding only stared at him. Half the crowd had moved round the Woolworths side of the van. Someone picked Burden up. He staggered, dazed, put a hand up to his head and sat down heavily on the low wall in front of the store. Wexford pushed the boy out of the