by Ruth Rendell
He had long ago ceased to allow hope to triumph over experience. He didn’t suppose that some woman would come forward and say her husband had unexpectedly and inexplicably borrowed the dress from her that Monday evening. Nor did he anticipate any dramatic scene in the hall, a wife screaming or falling into a faint because she recognised the dress and realised simultaneously what recognition implied. No woman harbouring a guilty secret would come there voluntarily. But he did hope for something. Someone would say she had seen the garment on a friend or an acquaintance; someone would admit to having possessed it and then to have given it away or sold it.
No one did. All Friday afternoon they filed along the wooden passage that smelt of hymn books and Boy Scouts, passed into the grim brown hall to sit on the Women’s Fellowship chairs and stare at the posters for coffee mornings and social evenings. Then, one by one, they went behind the screens where Martin and Polly had the dress laid out on a trestle table. One by one they came out with the baulked, rather irritable, look on their faces of do-gooders whom ill-luck had robbed of the chance to be more than negatively helpful.
‘I suppose,’ said Burden, ‘that she could have been picked up by a man in a car. A prearranged pick-up, of course. He might have come from anywhere.’
‘In that case, why take a bus to Sundays and walk across the fields? Mrs Peveril says she saw her go into those fields and her description is so accurate that I think we must believe her. Dawn may have been early for her date—that was the only bus as we’ve said before—gone into the fields to sit down and wait, and then doubled back. But if she did that, she didn’t go far back.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Four people saw her between the time she left her mother’s house and the time she went into those fields, five-thirty. We’ve not been able to find anyone who saw her after five-thirty, though God knows we’ve made enough appeals and questioned enough people. Therefore it’s almost certain she went into some house somewhere just after five-thirty.’
Burden frowned. ‘On the Sundays estate, you mean?’
‘To put it more narrowly than that, in The Pathway. The body was in the quarry, Mike. It was carried or dragged to the quarry, not transported in a car. You know what a job it was to get our own cars down there. When the gates to the drive are locked no car could get in.’ Wexford glanced at his watch. ‘It’s five-thirty and the Olive’s open. Can’t we leave Martin to carry on with this and adjourn for a drink? I’d rather talk all this out sitting down over a pint.’
Burden’s brow creased further and he bit his lip. ‘What about Pat? She’ll have to get her own tea. She’ll have to walk to her dancing lesson. John’ll be all alone.’
In a tone that is usually described as patient but which, in fact indicates an extreme degree of controlled exasperation, Wexford said, ‘He is six feet tall. He is fifteen. By the time he was that age my old dad had been out at work eighteen months. Why can’t he escort his sister to her dancing class? Taking it for granted, of course, that if she walks three hundred yards alone on a bright summer evening, she’s bound to be set on by kidnappers.’
‘I’ll phone them,’ said Burden with a shamefaced grin.
The saloon bar of the Olive and Dove was almost empty, a little gloomy and uninviting as deserted low-ceilinged places always are when the sun shines brightly outside. Wexford carried their drinks into the garden where wooden tables and chairs were arranged under an arbour. Vines and clematises made a leafy roof over their heads. It was the home-going hour, the time when the peace and the quiet of this spot was usually shattered by the sound of brakes and shifting gears as traffic poured over the Kingsbrook bridge.
Today all man-made noise was drowned by the chatter of the swollen river running beside the terraced garden. It was a steady low roar, constant and unchanging, but like all natural sound it was neither tedious to the ear nor a hindrance to conversation. It was soothing. It spoke of timeless forces, pure and untameable, which in a world of ugliness and violence resisted man’s indifferent soiling of the earth. Listening to it, sitting in silence, Wexford thought of that ugliness, the scheme of things in which a girl could be beaten to death, thrown into a bower which had been made and used for love, thrown like garbage.
He shivered. He could never quite get used to it, the appalling things that happened, the waste, the pointlessness. But now he had to think of practical matters, of why and how this particular ugliness had taken place, and when Burden came to the table he said:
‘You’ve talked to the occupants of the other two houses in The Pathway and I haven’t. Would you say we could exclude them?’
‘The Streets are a married couple with four children, all of whom were at home with their parents the whole evening. None of them saw Dawn. Mrs Street saw Miss Mowler come home at eight o’clock. Apart from that, none of them saw any of their neighbours that evening. They heard nothing and they remained in the front of the house from about six till about ten. Mrs Street’s kitchen is in the front.
‘The Robinsons are elderly. He’s bedridden and they have a fiercely respectable old housekeeper. Mr Robinson’s bedroom overlooks Sundays but not the quarry. His wife spent the evening with him in his bedroom as she always does and went to her own room at nine-thirty. She saw and heard nothing. The housekeeper saw Dunsand come home at twenty to seven and Miss Mowler at eight. She didn’t see the Peverils and she herself went to bed at ten.’
Wexford nodded. ‘How about Silk?’
‘Up in London from June sixth to June eighth, making last-minute festival arrangements. Says he left Sundays at about seven on the evening of the sixth.’
‘Can anyone corroborate that?’
‘His wife and his two grown-up children are in Italy. They’ve been there since the end of May and they aren’t back yet. Silk says they always go abroad for two months in the summer, but it looks to me as if they aren’t as keen as he on the pop scene.’
‘And it’s his quarry,’ said Wexford thoughtfully. ‘If anybody had easy access to it, he did. I imagine he’s often in London, too. I don’t suppose he was at school with Dawn, was he?’
‘Hardly, sir,’ said Burden. ‘He’s as old as you.’ He added generously: ‘And looks a good deal more.’
Wexford laughed. ‘I won’t bother to grow my hair, then. It doesn’t seem likely that Dawn would have played around with him, and if she had done she’d have gone straight up to the house, surely, not tried to sneak round by a back way. There was no wife at Sundays for her to hide from.’
‘And no possible reason for her to bring a picnic.’
‘No, I think we can exclude Silk on the grounds of age and general ineligibility. That leaves us with the Peverils, Dunsand and Miss Mowler. But Peveril wasn’t alone in his house at five-thirty and Miss Mowler and Dunsand weren’t even at home. And yet who but the occupants of one of those three houses could have put Dawn’s body in the quarry without being seen?’
Burden glanced surreptitiously at his watch, shifting uneasily. ‘Then we’re saying she doubled back, sir, and was admitted to one of those houses. Somebody let her in. Not Dunsand or Miss Mowler. Peveril or Mrs Peveril, then? That must mean the Peverils are in it up to their necks. In that case, why does Mrs Peveril say she saw the girl at all? Why say anything?’
‘Possibly because she isn’t up to her neck in it at all. Because she did see Dawn go into those fields and didn’t know of any connection between the girl she saw and her husband. Dawn caught that bus because it was the only bus she could catch. She loitered in the fields for two hours—remember how warm and sunny it was—and returned to Peveril’s house after Mrs Peveril had left for her class. D’you want another drink?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Burden quickly. ‘Good heavens, no.’
‘Then we may as well get back to your place. I can’t stand this watch-watching.’
Outside the Baptist church the queues had lengthened. Housewives departing to prepare evening meals had been replaced by working women released fro
m shops and offices.
‘Better get something special for the children’s dinner,’ said conscientious Burden. ‘The Luximart stays open late on Fridays. You eating with us?’
‘No, thanks. My wife’ll have something for me at eight.’
They went into the shop where they were immediately recognised by the manager. He insisted on pointing out to them personally items precisely similar to those Dawn had bought from the six tomatoes in a plastic-covered tray to the bottle of cheap wine. The shop was full and the manager spoke loudly as if anxious to cash in on and reap the benefits of a particularly ghoulish form of advertising.
‘Tomatoes as purchased by our very own murder victim,’ said Wexford disgustedly.
Burden avoided them studiously and averted his eyes from the row of strawberry mousses. ‘You forgot the food in your theory,’ he whispered. ‘Peveril would have already eaten. His wife would have given him his dinner before she went out.’ Regardless of expense, he selected three packages of bœuf bourguignon from the frozen-food trough. ‘She meant to stay overnight too. You forgot that. Or was Peveril going to hide her in his studio when his wife got home at eleven?’
‘Everything all right, sir?’ said the manager. ‘How about a bottle of wine to go with that?’
‘No, thanks.’ Burden paid and they left, their progress watched by a dozen pairs of curious eyes. The sun was still bright, the wind brisk. Martin was fixing a fresh, larger, poster of Dawn’s picture to the church-hall door.
‘Anything yet?’ asked Wexford.
‘We’ve had five hundred women pass through here, sir, and not one of them able to give us a bit of help.’
‘Keep on at it tomorrow.’
They walked the length of the High Street and turned left into Tabard Road. Burden’s step always quickened at this point. Once he had made himself aware that no fire engines or ambulances thronged the street outside his bungalow he relaxed and his breathing became more even.
‘Was Peveril going to keep her hidden all night?’ he said. ‘Or, failing that, maybe she got into Dunsand’s place through the larder window. There’s an idea for you. Poor old Dunsand who has to fend for himself like me, living on frozen food he buys on his way home, no doubt. Miss Mowler must have actually known her—district nurses know everybody. Perhaps Dawn hid in her garden until eight o’clock, keeping herself from boredom by trying on a dress she found hanging in the shed?’
‘I’m the one who asks the derisive questions, not you, remember? All this reversing our roles throws me off balance.’ Wexford raised his eyebrows at the three bicycles leaning against the Burdens’ gate and the moped parked at the kerb. ‘Doesn’t look as if your boy’s moping in solitude,’ he said. ‘Good thing he’s been prudent and shut the windows.’
The six teenagers who were gyrating energetically in Burden’s living room stopped abashed when the policemen came in, and Pat, standing by the record player, pressed the ‘reject’ lever. Vedast’s line, ‘Come once more and be my wife’, groaned away on a dying fall, the last word a melancholy moan.
‘Having your dancing lesson at home tonight, my dear?’ said Wexford, smiling.
The two Burden children began to make hasty excuses while their friends made for the door with the silent speed that looks like treachery but is in fact the loyalty of those accustomed to parental censure and who know it is better faced without an audience. Wexford didn’t think they ought to have to apologise for innocently enjoying themselves and he interrupted Burden’s half-hearted reproaches.
‘Play it again, will you, Pat?’
Expertly she found the right band on the L.P. without having to check with the sleeve and lowered the pick-up arm delicately.
‘I don’t like you doing that,’ said John. ‘You’ll scratch it.’
‘I won’t. I’m more careful with records than you are. So there!’ The Burden children were usually at loggerheads and seldom missed an opportunity to rile each other. ‘It’s a horrible song, anyway. All sloppy love stuff. Folk music ought to have some point to it and Zeno Vedast’s hasn’t any point at all.’
‘What d’you mean by “point”, Pat?’
‘Well, be anti-war, Mr Wexford, or for everybody loving each other not just one stupid girl. Or anti-ugliness and mess like Betti Ho. Zeno Vedast’s songs are all for him, all for self.’
Wexford listened interestedly to this but Burden said sourly, ‘Everybody loving each other! You can talk.’ He sniffed. ‘I don’t hold with all this putting the world right.’
‘Then you shouldn’t be a policeman,’ said Wexford. ‘Play it, Pat.’
The song started with a little grinding scratch which made John frown and purse his lips. Then Vedast’s strings twanged and the clear, unaffected voice began to sing:
‘I don’t miss her smile or the flowers,
I don’t eclipse distance or hours …’
‘He writes his own songs?’ Wexford whispered.
‘Oh, yes, always,’ said John reverently. ‘This one’s two years old but it’s his best.’
‘Boring!’ Pat ducked behind the player to avoid her brother’s wrath.
It wasn’t boring. Listening to the slight, delicate story which the verses and the chorus told, Wexford had a strong sense that the singer was relating a true experience.
Suddenly the backing grew loud and Vedast’s voice bitter, keening:
‘Now she’s gone in the harsh light of day,
When she’ll return the night would not say,
And I am left to vision the time
When once more she’ll come and be mine.
So come by, come nigh,
come try and tell why
some sigh, some cry,
some lie and some di-i-ie.’
Burden broke the silence which followed. ‘I’m going to get this food heated up.’ He went into the kitchen but Wexford lingered.
‘Does he ever write joke songs, John?’
‘Joke songs?’
‘Yes—I mean, well, they’re hardly in the same class, but Haydn and Mozart sometimes wrote jokes into their music. If you’re a joker in private life, joking often comes into your work as well. D’you know the Surprise Symphony?’
Pat said, ‘We did it at school. There’s a sort of soft gentle bit and then a big boom that makes you jump.’
Wexford nodded. ‘I wondered if Vedast …’
‘Some of them are a bit like that,’ said John. ‘Sudden loud bits or a funny change of key. And all his songs are supposed to be somebody’s story or to have a special meaning for a friend.’ He added eagerly: ‘I’ll play you some more, shall I?’
‘Not now.’ Burden came back to lay the table. Pat tried to take the knives and forks out of his hand, but the daughter who had been admonished for showing insufficient love must not be allowed to show it now by helping her father. He kept his hold on the cutlery and shook his head with rather a martyred air. ‘Ready in five minutes. You’d better wash your hands and sit up at the table.’
Wexford followed him into the kitchen.
‘I’ve learnt some interesting facts about our slave-driver. I wonder how long he’s staying in this neck of the woods?’
‘John says indefinitely. You don’t really think he had anything to do with all this?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘He intrigues me. I can’t do what Scott advises and stop mine ear against the singer. His song is beginning to haunt me. I think I’ll buy a single of it tomorrow.’
Burden switched off the oven. ‘We might play it over and over in your office,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Get a couple of the W.P.C.s in and dance. Have ourselves a rave-up. There won’t be anything else to do if no one’s identified that dress.’
‘There will be for me,’ said Wexford, taking his leave. ‘I’m going to London to have another talk with Joan Miall.’
14
Wexford bought a local paper to read in the train. The Kingsmarkham Courier came out on a Friday and Dawn’s body had been found on the previous Mon
day, so that news was stale even by local standards. Harry Wild, the chief reporter, had made what he could of it by giving headline publicity to Wexford’s appeals in connection with the red dress, but by far the greater part of the front page was devoted to Zeno Vedast. A large photograph, taken by a not very expert Courier staff man, showed the singer and the Tates leaning against the bonnet of the golden Rolls. Nell was smiling serenely, one hand caressing the lion ornament. Wild had married his two lead stories by including in his caption to the picture a frank confession from Vedast that he had been at school with Dawn Stonor. Reading it, Wexford felt even more convinced that Vedast could not be involved in Dawn’s death, that he had nothing to hide. But why then was he staying on in Cheriton Forest, staying even though, as the caption stated, he had found and started negotiations for the house he intended to buy? Could it be that he was staying to see the case through, to await the outcome?
Joan Miall’s flat was on the second floor of a tall shabby house between the Earls Court Road and Warwick Road. It wasn’t a shabby flat, but smartly and even adventurously decorated, the ceilings painted in bold dark colours to reduce their height. A close observer could tell that the furniture was mostly secondhand, but the girls had re-covered the armchairs, put new pictures in old frames and filled the shelves with brightly jacketed paperbacks. There were a great many plants, fresh and green from recent watering.