by Ruth Rendell
THE MANAGER OF THE POMFRET BRANCH OF the Anglian-Victorian Bank bore an extraordinary resemblance to Adolf Hitler. This was not only in the small square moustache and the lock of dark hair half covering Mr. Skinner’s forehead. The face was the same face, rather handsome, with large chin and heavy nose and small thick-lidded eyes. But all that would have passed unnoticed without the moustache and the lock of hair, so that it was impossible to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that Mr. Skinner was doing it on purpose. He knew whom he looked like and he enhanced the resemblance. Wexford could only attribute one motive to a bank manager who wants to look like Hitler—a desire to intimidate his clients.
His manner, however, was warm, friendly, and charming. All those, and implacable too. He could not consider either letting Wexford look into Rodney Williams’s bank accounts or disclosing any information about their contents.
“Did you say accounts plural?” said Wexford.
“Yes. Mr. Williams has two current accounts here—and now I’ve probably said more than I should.”
“Two current accounts in the name of Rodney Williams?”
Skinner was standing up with his head slightly on one side, looking like Hitler waiting for Franco’s train at Hendaye. “I said two current accounts, Chief Inspector. We’ll let it go at that, shall we?”
One for his salary to be paid into, Wexford thought as he was driven away, and the other for what? His Kingsmarkham household expenses were drawn from the Kingsmarkham account, which he fed with £500 a month from Pomfret account A. Then what of account B? His wife didn’t know of the existence of account A anyway. It alone was sufficient to keep his resources secret from her. Why did he need a third current bank account?
They were searching for him now on the open land, partly wooded, that lay between Kingsmarkham and Forby. But so far, since the discovery of the bag in Green Pond, nothing further had come to light. He’s dead, Wexford thought, he must be.
Burden had been at Pomfret, talking to the Harmer family, Joy Williams’s sister, brother-in-law, and niece. John Harmer was a pharmacist with a chemist’s shop in the High Street.
“They say Joy was with them that evening,” Burden said, “but I wouldn’t put that much credence on what they say. Not that they’re intentionally lying—they can’t remember. It was seven weeks ago. Besides, Joy often goes over there in the evenings. More or less to sit in front of their television instead of her own, I gather. But I suppose she’s lonely, she wants company. Mrs. Harmer says she was definitely there that evening, Harmer says it must be if his wife says so and the girl doesn’t know. You can’t expect a teenage girl to take much notice of when her aunt comes.”
Wexford told him what he had learned from the telephonist at Sevensmith Harding. “Of course, the girl may be mistaken about the voices or she may have persuaded herself they were the same voice in order to get more drama out of the situation. But it’s more than possible that the woman who phoned Sevensmith Harding the day after Williams left to say he was ill and the woman who phoned three weeks later to inquire as to his whereabouts are one and the same. As we know, the second time was Joy. Now Joy was very keen to have me look for her husband when he first disappeared, but later on much less so—indeed, she was obstructive. That first time I talked to her she said nothing about having gone out herself that evening. That was only mentioned the second time. Joy is devoted to her son Kevin. Her daughter is nothing to her, her son everything … What on earth’s the matter?”
Burden’s face had set and he had gone rather pale. He had taken a hard grip on the arms of his chair. “Nothing. Go on.”
“Well, then—her son always phones on Thursday evenings and that particular Thursday was the first one he had been back at college. Wouldn’t a devoted mother have wanted to know all those things mothers worry about in such circumstances? Did he have a good journey? Was his room all right? Had he settled in? But this devoted mother doesn’t wait in for his call. She goes out—not to some important engagement, some function booked months ahead, but to watch television at her sister’s. What does all this suggest to you?”
Having struggled successfully to overcome whatever it was that had upset him, Burden forced a laugh. “You sound like Sherlock Holmes talking to Watson.” Since his second marriage he occasionally read books, a change in him Wexford couldn’t get used to.
“No,” he said, “more ‘a man of the solid Sussex breed—a breed which covers much good sense under a heavy silent exterior.’”
“I wouldn’t say ‘silent.’ Was that from Sherlock Holmes?”
Wexford nodded. “So what do you make of it?” he said more colloquially.
“That Joy is somehow in cahoots with her husband. There’s a conspiracy going on. What for and why I wouldn’t pretend to know, but it’s got something to do with giving everyone the impression Williams is dead. He left that evening and she went out later to meet him away from the house. Whatever they were planning was done away from the house because it had to be concealed from the daughter Sara as much as from anyone else. Next morning Joy rang
Sevensmith Harding to say her husband was ill. Of course, it’s nonsense to say she didn’t know that he was their marketing manager and the extent of his income. Next he or she typed that letter on a hired typewriter. She probably did that, not knowing what he called Gardner and making the mistake of addressing him as “Mr. Gardner.” The abandoned car, the dumped bag of clothes were all part of a plan to make us think him dead. But the increased police attention frightened Joy, she wanted things to go more at her pace. Hence the obstructiveness. I said I didn’t know why, but it could be an insurance fiddle, couldn’t it?’
“Without a body, Mike? With no more proof of death than a dumped traveling bag? And if you wanted people to think you were dead, aren’t there half a dozen simpler and more convincing ways of doing it?”
“You feel the same as me then? You don’t think he’s dead?”
“I know he’s dead,” said Wexford.
Next day he was proved right.
IT LOOKED LIKE A GRAVE. IT WAS IN THE shape of a grave, as clearly demarcated as if a slab of stone lay upon it, though Edwin Fitzgerald did not at first see this. In spite of its shape he would have passed it by as a mere curiosity, a whim of nature. It was the dog Shep who drew his attention to it.
Edwin Fitzgerald was a retired policeman who had been a dog handler. He lived in Pomfret and had a job as a part-time security guard at a factory complex on Stowerton’s industrial estate. The dog Shep was not a trained dog in the sense of being police-trained—as a “sniffer,” for instance. Fitzgerald had bought him after his last dog died—a wonderful dog that one, more intelligent than any human being, a dog that understood every word he said. Shep could only follow humbly in that dog’s footsteps and was often the subject of unfavorable comparisons. He didn’t understand every word Fitzgerald said, or at any rate behaved as if he didn’t.
On this particular morning in June, a dry one, the first really fine morning of the summer, Shep disregarded all Fitzgerald’s words, ignored the repeated “Leave it, sir” and “Do as you’re told,” and continued his frenetic digging in the corner of what his master saw as a patch of weeds. He dug like a dog possessed. Indeed, Fitzgerald informed him that he was a devil, that he didn’t know what had got into him. He shouted (which a good dog handler should never do) and he shook his fist until he saw what Shep had unearthed and then he stopped.
The dog had dug up a foot.
FITZGERALD HAD BEEN A POLICEMAN, WHICH had the double advantage of having taught him not to be sickened by such a discovery and not to disturb anything in its vicinity. He attached Shep’s lead to his collar and pulled the dog away. This took some doing as Shep was a big young German shepherd intent on worrying at the protruding thing for some hours if possible.
As far as Fitzgerald could see, now he had got the dog clear, the foot was still attached to a limb and the limb probably to a trunk. It was inside a sodden, blackened, slimy shoe cak
ed with mud, and about the ankle clung a bundling of muddy wet cloth, once the hem of a trouser leg. Shep had dug it out from one of the corners of this curious little plot of ground. All around, on this edge of the meadow, grew tall grass ready to be cut for hay, high enough to hide the dog when he plunged in among it, but the rectangle—seven feet by three?—which Shep had found in there and had dug into was covered closely and in a neat rather horticultural way with fresh green plants. Weeds they were, but weeds attractive enough to be called plants, red campion, clover, speedwell, and they covered the oblong patch as precisely as if they had been sown there in a seed bed.
The grass which surrounded it, gone to seed, bearing light feathery seed heads of brown and grayish-cream and silvery-gold, hid it from the sight of anyone who kept to the footpath. It took a dog to plunge in there and find the grave. A day or two of sunshine, Fitzgerald thought, and the farmer would have cut the hay, cut those weeds too without a thought. Shep was a good dog after all, even if he didn’t understand every word Fitzgerald said.
He retraced his steps to the branch of the lane that led to Myfleet and hurried down the hill to his bungalow, where he phoned the police.
7
FROM THE POMFRET ROAD A NARROW LANE winds its way up into the hills and to the verge of the forest. All down the hedges here grows the wayfarer’s tree with its flat creamy bracts of blossom, and beneath, edging the meadows like a fringe of lace, the whiter, finer, more delicate cow parsley. There are houses, Edwin Fitzgerald’s among them, approached by paths, cart tracks, or even smaller narrower lanes, but the lane gives the impression of leading directly to the obelisk on the hill.
It is like downland up here, the trees ceasing until the forest of conifers begins over there to the east, chalk showing in outcroppings and heather on the chalk. And all the way the obelisk looming larger, a needle of granite with its point a tetragon. The road never reaches it. A quarter of a mile this side it swerves, turns east, and divides, one fork making for Myfleet, the other for Pomfret, and soon there are meadows again and the heath is past. It was in one of these meadows, close to the overhang of the forest, traversed by a footpath leading from the road to Myfleet, that the discovery had been made. Over to the west the obelisk stabbed the blue sky, catching a shred of cloud on its point.
The grave was in a triangle formed by the wood, the lane, and the footpath, in a slightly more than right-angled corner of the field. It was near enough to the forest for the air to smell resinous. The soil was light and sandy with an admixture of pine needles.
“Easy enough to dig,” said Wexford to Burden. “Almost anyone not decrepit could dig a grave like that in half an hour. Digging it deep enough would have taken a little longer.”
They were viewing the terrain, the distance of the grave from the road and the footpath, while Sir Hilary Tremlett, the pathologist, stood by with the scene-of-crimes officer to supervise the careful unearthing. Sir Hilary had happened to be at Stowerton when Fitzgerald’s call came in. By a piece of luck he had just arrived at the infirmary to perform a postmortem. It was not yet ten o’clock, a morning of pearly sunshine, the blue sky dotted with innumerable puffs of tiny white cloud. But every man there, the short, portly, august pathologist included, had a raincoat on. It had rained daily for so many weeks that no one was going to take the risk of going without; no one anyway could yet believe his own eyes.
“The rain made the weeds grow like that,” said Wexford. “You can see what happened. It’s rather interesting. All the ground here had grass growing on it, then a patch was dug to receive that. It was covered up again with overturned earth, the weed seeds came and rain, seemingly endless rain, and what grew up on that fertile patch and that patch only were broad-leaved plants. If it had been a dry spring there would have been more grass and it would all have been much less green.”
“And the ground harder. If the ground hadn’t been soft and moist the dog might not have persisted with its digging.”
“The mistake was in not digging the grave deep enough. It makes you wonder why he or she or they didn’t. Laziness? Lack of time? Lack of light? The six-foot rule is a good one because things of this kind do tend to work to the surface.”
“If that’s so,” said Dr. Crocker, coming up to them, “why is it they always have to dig so far down to find ancient cities and temples and so forth?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Wexford. “Ask the dog. He’s the archaeologist. Mind you, we don’t have any lava in Sussex.”
They approached a little nearer to where Detectives Archbold and Bennett were carrying out their delicate spadework. It was apparent now that the corpse of the man that lay in the earth had been neither wrapped nor covered before it was buried. The earth didn’t besmear it as a heavier, clayey soil might have done. It was emerging relatively clean, soaking wet, darkly stained, giving off the awful reek that was familiar to every man there, the sweetish, fishy, breath-catching, gaseous stench of decomposing flesh. That was what the dog had smelt and liked and wanted more of.
“I often think,” said Wexford to the doctor, “that we haven’t much in common with dogs.”
“No, it’s at times like this you know what you’ve always suspected, that they’re not almost human at all.”
The face was pale, stained, bloated, the pale parts the color of a dead fish’s belly. Wexford, not squeamish at all, hardened by the years, decided not to look at the face again until he had to. The big domed forehead, bigger and more domed because the hair had fallen from it, looked like a great mottled stone or lump of fungus. It was that forehead which made him pretty sure this must be Rodney Williams. Of course, he wasn’t going to commit himself at this stage, but he’d have been surprised if it wasn’t Williams.
Sir Hilary, squatting down now, bent closer. Murdoch, the scene-of-crimes officer, was beginning to take measurements, make calculations. He called the photographer over, but Sir Hilary held up a delaying hand.
Wexford wondered how he could stand that stink right up against his face. He seemed rather to enjoy it, the whole thing, the corpse, the atmosphere, the horror, the squalor. Pathologists did, and just as well really. It wouldn’t do if they shied away from it.
The body was subjected to a long and careful scrutiny. Sir Hilary looked at it closely from all angles. He came very close to touching but he did not quite touch. His fingers were plump, clean, the color of a slice of roast pork. He stood up, nodded to Murdoch and the photographer, smiled at Wexford.
“I could have a poke-about at that after lunch,” he said. He always spoke of his autopsies as “having a poke-about.” “Not much doing today. Any idea who it might be?”
“I think I have, Sir Hilary.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Saves a lot of hassle. We’ll smarten him up a bit before his nearest and dearest come for a private view.”
Joy Williams, Wexford thought. No, she shouldn’t be subjected to that. He felt the warmth of the mounting sun kind and soft on his face. He turned his back and looked across the sweep of meadows to the Pomfret road, green hay gold-brushed, dark green hedgerows stitched in like tapestry, sheep on a hillside. All he could see was that face and a wife looking at it. This horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs …
It occurred to him that the nearest point on the main road to this place was the bus stop where Colin Budd had been attacked. Did that mean anything? The lane that passed within yards of the burial place met the road almost opposite the bus stop. But Budd had been stabbed weeks after this man’s death. The brother-in-law might do the identification instead. John Something, the chemist. John Harmer.
HE SEEMED A SENSIBLE MAN. YOUNGER THAN Williams by five or six years, he was one of those tailored people, a neat, well-made, smallish man with regular features and short, crisply wavy hair. He had closed up his dispensary and left the shop in the care of his wife.
Having taken a deep breath, he looked at the body. He looked at the face, his symmetrical features controlled in blankne
ss. He wasn’t going to show anything, not he, no shock, disgust, pity. You could almost hear his mother’s voice saying to a small curly-headed boy: Be a man, John. Don’t cry. Be a man.
Harmer remembered and was a man. But he might have said with Macduff that he must also feel it like a man, for his face gradually paled until it became as sickly greenish white as the corpse’s. His stomach, not his will, had betrayed him. Or threatened to. He came out into the air, into the sunshine, away from charnel-house corpse rot, and smelt the summer noonday, and the bile receded. He nodded to Wexford; he nodded rather more and longer than was necessary.
“Is that your brother-in-law, Rodney Williams?”
“Yes.”
“You are quite certain of that?”
“I’m certain.”
Wexford had thought of asking him to be the bearer of the news to Joy but he had quickly seen Harmer wouldn’t be a suitable, let alone a sympathetic, messenger. He went himself, walking to Alverbury Road, thinking as he walked. There wasn’t much he personally could do until the pathologist’s report came and the lab had been over Williams’s clothes. With distaste he recalled the bloodied mass of cloth that had wrapped the wounds. He felt glad now he had had the lab go over that car so carefully, and at a time when it looked as if Williams might have been guilty of some misdemeanor and have done a moonlight flit.
Those crumbs of plaster in the boot could be vital evidence. At first he had supposed they derived from some routine of Williams’s work. But Gardner had told him there was never a question of Williams having handled the stuff he sold. More likely the truth was that those plaster crumbs had been caught up in the folds of that bloodstained cloth and the body itself had been in the boot of the car …
In the front garden of 31 Alverbury Road someone had mown the bit of lawn and cut the privet hedge. It looked as if both these tasks had been performed with the same pair of blunt shears. Rodney Williams had been in one respect domestically adequate—he had kept his garden trim.