The Copper Peacock

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I thought you were going to say “in your own words”, Mike.’

  He inclined his head a little, not smiling.

  ‘Sorry. Being so miserable makes me bitchy. What is this, therapy?’

  ‘It might be that as well,’ said Burden. He was foraging in his knowledge of the law, thinking of such vague and insubstantial offences as enticement and corruption of a minor. ‘Let me have the facts. I’m not saying we can do anything, I’m sure we can’t, but just tell me what happened, will you?’

  She looked him in the eye. Her own eyes were a startling turquoise blue, large and prominent. It was easy to see why she never wore make-up, she was colourful enough without it, that white and rosy skin, those eyes, flaxen hair straight and shining. A woman with those attributes should have been good-looking but Hilary missed beauty by the length of her face that gave her a horsy look. She was very thin, thinner since this trouble started.

  ‘It really began long before I married Martin,’ she said, ‘perhaps even when Peter and I were divorced five years ago. I didn’t want a divorce, you know, I wanted to stay married for life. I know it sounds self-pitying but it was not my fault, it really wasn’t, I was hard done-by. Peter’s girl friend was pregnant. I still didn’t want a divorce, but how long can you keep on fighting? I knew he’d never come back.

  ‘Sophie was nine. She made a big thing about saying she hated Peter. She told people he’d left “us”, not that he’d left me. She knew about the girl friend Monica and she used to say her father preferred Monica to us. Well, she wouldn’t see Peter for months but gradually she came round. It was the baby, I think. He was her half-brother and she liked the idea of a brother. She started to enjoy spending weekends with Peter and Monica and the baby. I will say for Monica that she was very nice to her and of course it wasn’t the usual situation where a child is jealous of a new sibling.

  ‘I honestly think none of this would have happened if Peter and Monica were still here. I’m sure it’s much more due to their going to America than to me marrying Martin. Peter had this job and no doubt it was the only course for him to take. He was always more or less indifferent to Sophie anyway, Monica was much nicer to her than her father was, and I don’t think it bothered him that he wouldn’t see his daughter for years. He could have afforded to pay her air fare to Washington but he wouldn’t.

  ‘It was a blow to her. It was a second blow. OK, I suppose you’ll say my remarrying was the third. But what’s a woman to do, Mike? I was on my own with Sophie, I had a full-time job and the school holidays were a nightmare. So I got a part-time job and even that was too much for me, and then when things were about as grim as they’d ever been I fell in love with Martin and he fell in love with me. I mean, it was like a dream, it was like something that you daren’t dream about because it just won’t happen, things as good as that don’t happen. But it did. A nice kind clever successful good-looking man was in love with me and wanted to marry me and liked my daughter and thought she could be his daughter, and everything was wonderful.

  ‘And she thought so too, Sophie thought so. She was happy, she was excited. I think she saw Martin as a wonderful new friend, hers as much as mine. Of course we were very careful in front of her, she was thirteen and that’s a very difficult age. For ages I never let Martin even kiss me in her presence and then when he did he’d always kiss her too.

  ‘We got married and she was at the wedding and she loved every minute of it. Next day she started to hate him. She loathed him. She did everything to try to split us up, she told lies to us about the other one, she’d seen Martin out with a woman, she’d heard me call a man “darling” on the phone, she’d heard me telling Jenny I married him for his money. Yes, truly. You wouldn’t credit it, would you? When she saw she couldn’t separate us, she did what she’s done, walked out and went to live with Ann Waterton. That’s where she is and where she intends to stay, she says.

  ‘I’ve pleaded with her, I’ve begged her, I’ve even tried to bribe her to come back. I’ve pleaded with Ann Waterton, I’ve been there, I’ve even set it all down in writing, in letters to her. To do Ann justice, she hasn’t enticed her or anything like that, she’s lonely, she likes Sophie’s company, but she’s told her she ought to go home. Anyway, she says she has. Sophie won’t. She’s got a key to Ann’s house, she comes and goes as she pleases, and she’s very good to Ann, she looks after her. She likes cooking which Ann doesn’t and she cooks special meals for them. She takes Ann her breakfast in bed before she goes to school.

  ‘I’ve asked Ann to change the locks on the door but she won’t, she says Sophie would stay out in the street all night, and I think she’s right, Sophie would do that. She’d wrap herself in blankets and sit on the garden wall or sleep in Ann’s garage.’

  Burden said, ‘Have you asked her what it is she wants?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Hilary Stacey gave a short bitter laugh. ‘I’ve asked her. “Get rid of Martin,” she says, “and then I’ll come home.”’

  *************

  ‘What’s the bugger done to her?’ said Chief Inspector Wexford.

  It was the following day and he and Burden were on their way to London. Donaldson was driving and Wexford and Burden sat in the back of the car. Their mission was to interview two men suspected of being concerned in a break-in at Barclay’s Bank in Kingsmarkham High Street a week before. One lived in Hackney, the other was usually to be found around midday at a pub in Han well. Burden had been relating the story of Sophie Grant.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it. Oh, I know you can’t tell. It’s no good saying, I know the guy, I’ve had a meal in his house, I know he’s not like that. The most unexpected men are like that. But I’d say he just didn’t have time. He didn’t have the time or the opportunity. He and Hilary Grant, as she was, were newly married, sharing a bedroom – that was partly the trouble. Sophie stayed around for three weeks and then she left.’

  ‘But you say she seemed to like the chap before he married her mum?’

  ‘I suppose she just didn’t know, she didn’t realise. She was nearly fourteen but she didn’t realise her mother would be sharing a bed with Martin Stacey. And I expect there was some kissing and cuddling and touching in her presence – well, there was bound to be.’

  ‘She thought it was a marriage for companionship, is that what you’re saying? Yes, I can imagine. The mother was very careful, no doubt, before she was married, no physical contact when the girl was there, definitely no bed-sharing, no good-night kisses. And then, after the wedding, a kind of explosion of sensuality, mother and stepfather having no need to curb their ardour. Because it would be OK, wouldn’t it, they were married, it was respectable, nothing to object to. A shock to the girl, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘According to Hilary it was pretty much like that.’ Burden began assembling in his mind the facts and details as Hilary Stacey had told them. ‘Sophie seems to have given him hell. Screamed at him, insulted him, then refused to speak to him at all. That went on for a week and one evening she just didn’t come home from school. Hilary Stacey didn’t have time to get worried. Sophie phoned her and said she was with Mrs Waterton and there she intended to stay.’

  ‘Why Mrs Waterton?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘That’s rather interesting in itself. Sophie is a very bright child, good at her school work, always in the top three. And does a lot of community service, visiting the elderly and the bereaved, that sort of thing. She does their shopping and sits with them. There’s a blind woman she calls on and reads the newspaper to. As well as this she does baby-sitting – she baby-sits for us – and she used to do a paper round, only her mother stopped that, quite rightly in my view, it’s dangerous even in a place like this.

  ‘Ann Waterton’s in her sixties. She lost her husband in the spring and apparently it hit her very hard. There were no children. Sophie used to go to her house after school, just to talk really. They seem to have got on very well.’

  ‘A girl of that age,’
Wexford said, ‘will often get on a great deal better with an older woman than with her own mother. I take it this Ann Waterton’s no slouch – I mean, she’s got something to give a lively intelligent fourteen-year-old?’

  ‘According to Hilary, she’s a retired teacher. In his last years she and her husband were both studying for Open University degrees but she gave that up when he died. At one time she used to write the nature column for the Kingsmarkham Courier.’

  Wexford looked dubious. The car had joined the queue of vehicles lining up for the toll at the Dartford Tunnel. They were in for a long wait. Burden looked at his watch, a fairly useless exercise.

  ‘One evening about a month after George Waterton died Sophie called round there. It was about nine but light still. She was on her bicycle. Hilary Stacey and Ann Waterton live about a mile apart, Hilary in Glendale Road – you know, the next street to me – and Mrs Waterton in Coulson Gardens. Sophie couldn’t make Mrs Waterton hear but the back door was unlocked and she went in, thinking she would find her fallen asleep over a book or the television.

  ‘She did find her, in an armchair in the living room, and she appeared to be asleep. There was an empty pill bottle on the table beside her and a tumbler which seemed to have contained brandy. Sophie acted with great presence of mind. She phoned for an ambulance and she phoned her mother. Of course Hilary hadn’t yet married Martin Stacey, though she was planning to marry him, the wedding being fixed for August.

  ‘Hilary got there first. She and Sophie managed to get Ann Waterton on to her feet and were walking or dragging her up and down when the ambulance came. As we know, they were in time and Ann Waterton recovered.’

  Wexford said unexpectedly, ‘Was there a suicide note?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hilary didn’t say. Apparently, not. She and Sophie had been very anxious it shouldn’t appear as a suicide attempt but as an accidental taking of an overdose.’

  ‘Bit indiscreet telling you then, wasn’t it?’ said Wexford derisively. ‘Why did she tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Reg. It was all part of the background, I suppose. She knew I wouldn’t broadcast it around.’

  ‘You’ve told me. And Donaldson’s not deaf.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said Donaldson, no doubt indicating his willingness to be the soul of discretion.

  ‘I imagine everybody knew about it,’ said Wexford. ‘Or guessed. And after that she and this Mrs Waterton became fast friends, is that it? The house in Coulson Gardens was the natural place for the girl to decamp to.’ He pondered for a moment or two as the car moved sluggishly towards one of the toll booths. ‘The mother might be able to get a care order made or a supervision order,’ he said. ‘She could try to get her made a Ward of Court. It’s hardly a case for Habeas Corpus.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to do that and who can blame her? She wants the girl back living with her. Sophie is out of control, it’s true, that is her mother can’t control her to the extent of making her come home, but she hasn’t done anything wrong, she’s broken no law.’

  ‘The danger’, said Wexford, ‘with getting a care order for someone who’s out of control might be that it contained a requirement for the subject, that is, Sophie Grant, to reside with a named individual – and suppose that named individual was Ann Waterton?’

  The car began to head for London up the motorway.

  *************

  From the tall rather forbidding curtain wall of stone blocks rose thirteen towers. The arc lamps flooded them with white light and showed up the cloudy smoky texture of the sky behind, purplish, very dark, starless. In the great hall, which had lost its roof some six centuries before, which was open to this heavy rain-threatening sky, a performance of Elizabethan music was under way, was drawing to its close just in time, thought Burden, before the heavens opened. He was there, sitting in the second row, because Jenny was singing in the choir.

  This was the first time he had been to Myland Castle, a type of fortification (according to the programme) innovative in Europe in the twelfth century. It was a huge fortress containing the remains of gateways and garderobes and kitchens and tunnel-vaulted rooms and features called rerearches. Burden was more interested in the castle than the concert. It was too late in the year, in his opinion, for outdoor performances of anything. The evening was damp and raw rather than really cold but it was cold enough. The audience huddled inside sheepskin and anoraks.

  It was a mystery why the organisers had picked on this place. Size alone must account for it, for the acoustics were so bad that the harpsichord was nearly inaudible and the sweet melodious voices seemed carried up into the sky where no doubt they could be clearly heard some two hundred feet in the air. As a soloist began on the final song, ‘Though Amaryllis Dance in Green’, Burden let his eyes rove along the tops of the walls and the catwalk between the towers. From the other side of the curtain wall, where the great buttresses fell steeply away to green slopes and a dry moat, the view across country must be very fine. Perhaps he would come back in the spring and bring Mark. If he didn’t care for the view he would enjoy rolling down the green slopes, kids always did.

  The applause was enthusiastic. Relief, they’re glad it’s all over, thought Burden the Philistine. Jenny, coming up to him, laying an icy hand on his, said, ‘You couldn’t hear, could you?’

  Burden grinned. ‘We couldn’t hear as much as we were meant to.’ He was astonished and pleased to see it was not yet nine. Time had passed slowly. He took his wife’s arm and they ran for it to the car as the rain began.

  The extreme youth of their baby-sitter had worried him the first time she came. That Sophie Grant would phone her mother in the next street if there was any cause for alarm, did a lot to calm his fears. By the time she had sat for them three times he trusted her as entirely as he would have trusted someone three times her age. She might be fourteen but she looked seventeen. It was absurd, he reflected as he walked into his living room, to think of her in the context of care orders, of being in need of supervision or protection.

  She was sitting on the sofa, with her books beside her, writing an essay on unlined paper attached to a clipboard. Her handwriting was strong, clearly legible, slightly forward-sloping. She looked up and said, ‘I haven’t heard a sound from him. I went up three times and he was fast asleep.’ She smiled. ‘With his rabbit. He’s inseparable from that rabbit.’

  ‘D’you want a drink, Sophie?’ Jenny remembered she was a child. It was easy to forget. ‘I mean, hot chocolate or a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘No, thanks, I’d better get off.’

  ‘What do we owe you?’

  ‘Nine pounds, please, Jenny, three hours at three pounds an hour. I started at six-thirty, I think.’ Sophie spoke in a crisp and business-like way, without a hint of diffidence. She took the note and gave Jenny a pound coin.

  Burden fetched her coat. It was a navy blue duffle and in it she immediately shed a few years. She was a schoolgirl again, tall, rather gawky, olive-skinned and dark-haired, the hair long and straight, pushed behind her ears. The shape of her face and the blue eyes were her mother’s, but she was prettier. She packed books and clipboard into a rather battered briefcase.

  ‘I’ll walk you home,’ said Burden. It was only round the corner, but these days you never knew. He had forgotten for the moment where home was for her now. She said, ‘Coulson Gardens. It’s a long walk.’

  Should he dispute it? Argue? ‘I’ll drive you.’

  They were uncomfortable together in the car. Or Burden was uncomfortable. The girl seemed tranquil enough. It was cowardice, he thought, that kept him from speaking. Was he afraid of a fourteen-year-old?

  ‘How long are you going to keep this up, Sophie?’ he said.

  ‘Keep what up?’ She wasn’t going to help him.

  ‘This business of living with Mrs Waterton, of refusing to go home to your mother.’

  For a moment he thought she was going to tell him to mind his own business. She didn’t. ‘I hav
en’t refused to go home,’ she said. ‘I’ve said I’ll go home when he’s not there. When she gets rid of him I’ll go home.’

  ‘Come on, he’s her husband.’

  ‘And I’m her daughter. You’re going past it, Mike, it’s the house with the red gate. She loves him, she doesn’t love me. Why should I go to live with someone who doesn’t care for me?’

  She jumped out of the car before he could open the door for her. A small slim woman with short grey hair was looking out of a front window, the curtain caught on her shoulder. She smiled, gave a little wave, a flutter of fingers. Burden thought, I can’t just leave it, I can’t miss this opportunity.

  ‘What’s Martin Stacey done, Sophie? Why don’t you like him? He’s a nice enough chap, he’s all right.’

  ‘He made her deceive me. They pretended things. They both pretended he was going to look after us and earn money for us and like us both, not just her, not just want to be with her. And she pretended I was the most important person in the world to her. It was all false, all lies. I was nothing. He made me nothing and she liked it.’ She spoke in a low intense voice that was almost a growl. A pause in which she drew a long breath, then, ‘Thanks for the lift, Mike. Good night.’

  She ran up the path and the door opened for her, but the figure of Mrs Waterton was not visible.

  On the way home he thought, it’s as much that woman’s doing as the girl’s. Why does she give her a room? Why does she feed her? She ought to go away for a bit, shut up the house. She would if she had any sense of responsibility. He said something of this to his wife.

  ‘Oh, think, Mike, how Ann Waterton must love it. She was all alone, a widow, no children, probably not many friends. People don’t want to know widows, or so they say. And then suddenly along comes a ready-made granddaughter, someone who actually prefers her over her own mother and her own home. I’m not saying she deliberately encouraged Sophie but I bet you she didn’t make any positive moves to send her home. It must have?’ brought her a new lease of life. Did she look happy?’