Wexford 20 - End In Tears

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to ask them.’ Hilland spoke in an even more ungracious tone than he had up till then. ‘It’s a bore but I suppose they will. They don’t like this sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing would that be?’

  ‘Oh, well, the police and murder and suspects and all that sort of thing, especially when everyone knows it’s some psychopath who’s addicted to porn on the Web that goes for these girls.’

  Wexford didn’t have to remind himself that among ‘these girls’ was the mother of Hilland’s child. He had seldom if ever met a more objectionable young man. A yob from one of the estates, until now categorised at Kingsmarkham police station as ‘lowlife’, was preferable. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d like the name and home address of one of these friends of yours and I’d like it now.’

  Surprised by Wexford’s change of tone, Hilland looked sulky but he gave the Chief Inspector two names, one with an address in Wales, the other nearer home in Lewes.

  ‘When her body was found, a thousand pounds was in her jacket pocket. Have you any idea how she came by such a large sum?’

  Hilland managed to look as if it wasn’t a large sum to him by raising his eyebrows and setting his head on one side. ‘No idea. I never saw her, you know. We split up before the child was born. Not that there was ever much to split.’

  Reminding himself to keep his temper at all costs, Wexford tried asking why she needed money, though he knew very well that need is not a motive relevant to steal ing or any other ways, allowed or illicit, of acquiring it.

  ‘She was going to live in my dad’s flat,’ Hilland said. ‘She’d need something to live on. It’d be different from home with her dad and what’s-her-name? — Diana. Amber hadn’t anything of her own. And before you ask, with censoriousness in every syllable, no, I don’t give her anything. I haven’t anything to give. I’m a student, OK?’

  ‘Right. That’s all,’ said Wexford shortly, glad that the man was feeling the heat, sweat pouring down his face and soaking his armpits. ‘I’d like you to bring your pass port and whatever other documentation you have back here tomorrow morning. You can go now and please don’t park your car in here again.’

  Chapter 9

  Global warming had compelled the management of the Olive and Dove Hotel to install air-conditioning, a rarity in Kingsmarkham. On the grounds that the doors kept opening and shutting, it had not been extended to the public and saloon bars, only to the lounge bar. There Wexford and Burden sat, the television on, the early evening news telling them that the temperature had been thirty-two degrees.

  ‘It’s actually cold in here,’ Burden said, pressing the ‘off’ button on the remote. ‘They can never get it right, can they?’

  ‘It’s OK for an hour or so.’ Wexford took their two drinks proffered by the barman and passed one to Burden. Paying for them, he said, ‘Have one yourself. These glasses are quite cold enough. The day you start putting ice in beer I stop coming in here.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said the barman, ‘as that will never be.’

  When he had gone, Wexford said, ‘That Hilland is a complete little shit. I know you don’t like that word but nothing else quite expresses him: He never once mentioned his child and he talks about Amber as if she were a one-night stand.’

  Burden shrugged. He wasn’t surprised. ‘The mother and the sister gave us a foretaste of how he’d be. An idea has occurred to me that I think we should do something about. That money that was in Amber’s pocket, it must have got there after she went out, right? She wasn’t so butterfly-minded that she went around with a thousand quid on her for days and days.’

  ‘I suppose not. I mean, you’re right.’

  ‘So someone gave it to her that night. Not after she got to the Bling-Bling Club they didn’t. She was with the others all the time and one of them would have noticed. I mean, it not like handing someone a couple of pound coins, is it? Well, we know what time she left home to go to the club but we don’t know what time she got there. No one ‘said, though Samantha Collins said she got there later than usual.’

  ‘You mean, however she’d earned the money, someone gave it to her between the time she left her home and went to the club. There can’t have been much time, Mike.’

  ‘Why can’t there? Diana Marshalson said she left between half-eight and nine. It’s five minutes, if that, to the bus stop and the bus takes twenty minutes to Kingsmarkham. Even allowing for the bus being late and her taking ten minutes to get to the stop and not leaving till ten to nine, she’d still be in Kingsmarkham by nine thirty. With a half-hour for her transaction she could get to the club at ten.’

  ‘Bit late, isn’t it?’

  ‘To you and me, Reg,’ said Burden, ‘it’s very late to go anywhere. It’s more like the time to leave and get home. But not to the young. These places don’t really get going till nearer midnight.’

  ‘OK, we must find out the bus times, whether the bus ran on time, and see if we can get a more precise time of her leaving from George Marshalson. I’m afraid I’d taken it for granted young Hilland was paying her child support. With that and Jobseekers’ Allowance, which she’d presumably take, and child benefit, she’d have been just about all right. Now I’m beginning to see why she needed money’

  ‘I thought she wanted to go on to higher education?’

  ‘Mike, I’m starting to believe that was George Marshalson’s wishful thinking. How could she have? What would she do with Brand?’

  ‘Come to that,’ said Burden, ‘what did she do with him when she went to Thailand?’

  ‘Left him with Dad and Diana, I suppose. But we must find out more about Thailand. It’s possible, of course, that they all went. A family holiday. And we need to have a look at Amber’s bank account, if she had one. The two thousand we’ve found may not be all she had. Shall we have another?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Burden.

  He sat where he was while Wexford went off to fetch their drinks. An idea had come to him. A pretty obvi ous idea, he thought, wondering why he hadn’t seized upon it in the girl’s bedroom. Could she have taken such a risk? Could she have been such a fool? Coming back with a glass in each hand, Wexford said, ‘You look as if you’ve had a shock.’

  ‘If I have I’ve given it to myself. Reg, I think we have to go back to Brimhurst and the Marshalsons and we have to go soon. What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty past eight. ‘What’s come up?’

  ‘When we were going through those drawers in Amber’s bedroom,’ Burden said, ‘we found something we said was spilt talcum powder. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I just accepted it, and then in con junction with the other stuff we’ve found out, I under stood something. Girls her age don’t use talcum powder, they’re never heard of it, they don’t know what it’s for. It’s as out of date as — as — pound notes and phone boxes and gramophone records.’

  ‘So what was it? Oh, yes, I see. . . I’m going to call Marshalson and then get Donaldson to pick us up here in ten minutes.’

  ‘I very much doubt if there was more than, say, fifty pounds in Amber’s account,’ George Marshalson said. ‘I opened it for her’ — he sighed heavily — ‘when she was sixteen. For her sixteenth birthday. With a hundred pounds. I doubt if she added to it. If they make any difficulties at the bank about letting you have access, I’ll willingly give my permission.’

  Wexford thanked him. The house seemed oppressively silent. At nine o’clock Brand had long been in bed. The temperature, though not to be described as ‘the cool of the evening’, had fallen a long way below the un-English heat of noon. Although all the windows were still wide open, a large bumble bee crept up one pane, hopelessly seeking a way of escape. Gnats danced in shadows on the lawn.

  Diana Marshalson was walking about in the garden, watering dying plants from a can. She shook her head at a shrub whose leaves had turned yellow and came towards the house, dropping the empty can and step ping inside by way of the open french window. ‘It’s hopeles
s,’ she said, sinking into a chair. ‘Everything needs a downpour going on all night, not half a can of water. Still’ - she looked at her husband — ‘what does it matter? What does anything really matter now?’

  No one had an answer for that. ‘I see from her pass port’, Wexford said, ‘that Amber went to Thailand last December?’

  ‘We all went,’ Diana said. ‘Well, not Brand. We left him with my sister.’

  A three-month-old baby, Wexford thought indignantly, left with a comparative stranger. Then he told himself sternly to leave it, it wasn’t his business. He was becoming obsessed about this child, sensitive to every possible hint of neglect or indifference. He must stop himself, get a grip. ‘That is, you, your husband and Amber?’

  ‘It was arranged a month before Brand was born,’ Amber’s father said. ‘Amber was all for taking him too but of course she felt differently when the time came. Diana’s sister Laura offered to have him and Amber jumped at the chance.’

  ‘I’d like to have another look at Amber’s bedroom,’ Wexford said.

  Just as they were going, Diana said, for no obvious reason, ‘If you’re interested in Amber’s lifestyle, you may care to know she went on a trip to Frankfurt in May.’

  ‘Did she go alone?’ Burden asked.

  ‘A friend went with her. A girl - I don’t remember her name.’

  Annoyed with himself for asking, Wexford said, ‘Who looked after Brand? Your sister?’

  ‘She wasn’t going to take that on so soon after the first time, was she? I did, of course. The twenty-second of May it was and never mind that I had an important engagement. I’m actually surprised I was excused nurse maid duties and allowed to go to Thailand.’

  ‘Diana,’ said George Marshalson. ‘Please.’ He sounded broken. ‘Poor Amber’s dead.’

  ‘I know, George. I’m sorry. We’re all on edge.’

  A curious way of defining bereavement, as Wexford remarked to Burden when they were upstairs.

  ‘She hated that girl,’ Burden said.

  ‘Yes, but I’m wondering if what she felt for her when she was alive wasn’t nearer indifference and maybe impatience. It was her dying which brought out the hatred because, by dying, she encumbered her with the child.’

  Burden scraped a little of the white powder into a plastic envelope and sealed it. Then, moistening his forefinger, he ran it lightly across the remaining drift and sniffed it. ‘It’s not what you thought and I thought,’ he said. ‘It’s not talcum either. I’ve smelt that smell before, years ago when my son John was at school but God knows what it is.’

  Downstairs they were together in the living room, George lying back in his armchair, his eyes shut, Diana with a laptop on her knees. The screen was filled with the largely turquoise-blue page, bidding users to search the Web. She turned round as they came in.

  Burden said, ‘Mrs Marshalson, perhaps you can tell us. Did Amber have athlete’s foot?’

  ‘How on earth did you know? She thought she picked it up at the new Kingsmarkham swimming pool and she found it humiliating.’

  ‘And I was sure it was cocaine,’ Burden said when they were outside once more. ‘But, of course, our failure so far to discover any evidence of drugs doesn’t mean she wasn’t trafficking. Maybe she was. Maybe that’s where the money came from. By the way, who was the other girl?’

  ‘One of the crowd at the Bling-Bling, I expect, but we shall have to find out.’

  Chapter 10

  The bank in Kingsmarkham High Street made no difficulties about granting access to Amber Marshalson’s bank account. ‘The poor girl’s dead, after all,’ as the manager said. George Marshalson had been wrong but not far wrong. The sum in Amber’s account had swollen to seventy-five pounds. Nothing had been paid in for over two years and nothing had been drawn out.

  ‘Either she didn’t trust banks,’ said Wexford, ‘or, more likely, she hadn’t yet got around to paying that two thousand in. It must all have come to her very recently.’

  ‘She went to Thailand but if she was trafficking she wasn’t paid, so it was probably an innocent holiday.’

  ‘You mean, she didn’t pay whatever she was paid into her bank account. She may have had payment in cash and just spent it. It looks as if she and possibly the friend carried something to Frankfurt - one of the main European hubs, is Frankfurt — and met someone there who carried whatever it was on to its ultimate destination. When she came home she got paid.’

  Wexford knew no more about drugs than any police officer in his position who hadn’t specialised in them but Burden had become an expert, largely through masterminding the big substance abuse purge carried out in Kingsmarkham and the surrounding villages the year before. ‘She carried it?’ he now said. ‘Do we mean carried in her luggage or was she a body packer?’

  The idea of someone swallowing a package of hard drugs and then excreting it at the journey’s end always turned Wexford queasy ‘God, I hope not.’

  ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do in this area. Find who the other girl was. Maybe get a sniffer dog into Clifton. Question all those pals of hers again.’

  In his hot and stuffy little living room, Hannah and Bal were having what Bal cosily called ‘a little chat’ with Henry Nash. In her eyes, the room was just like a section of a museum of bygones. Everything in it, including its owner, was close on a century old and a lot of it much older. The few books, which included a Bible and a Hymns Ancient and Modern, were bound in scuffed black leather and their fellows, with indecipherable titles, in dark green and dark red. Two tinted litho graphs on the wall above Mr Nash’s head were of plump maidens in a Victorian idea of Grecian dress, drooping over draped urns. The carpet was the Turkey kind, very worn, and the chairs of the ‘fireside’ type. One corner was filled by an upright piano, on whose stand rested the music for ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’.

  The telephone was, naturally, nowhere near as old as the piano or the Grecian maidens but it looked to Hannah to date back to the fifties. It was black with, instead of a keypad, a dial of a kind she had never seen before. On this instrument Mr Nash had phoned Kingsmarkham CID to tell them he had important information. But now Hannah and Baljinder were here, he seemed to have no intention of imparting it until he had delivered a diatribe against a number of aspects of modern life. Single parents, fertility treatment, calling the unemployed ‘jobseekers’, benefit fraud, foreigners, particularly those of a different physical appearance and colouring from his own, all came in for vituperation. As Hannah’s resentment mounted, she felt particularly for Bal, though he seemed impervious to such expressions as ‘blackie’ and ‘slant-eyed’, listening with calm patience and smiling slightly.

  Her indignation made her hotter than ever. She felt sweat pricking the skin of her face and a drop actually trickle down, warm and salty, on to her lips. As a post- feminist, she knew very well that she ought to take this in her stride. Hadn’t she as much right to sweat as a man? But she knew, too, that a great gulf is fixed between what we think and what we feel. She had a right as a human being to sweat but she felt Bal would notice and how dreadful it would be if damp patches appeared on her crisp snowy white shirt. Suddenly angry she cut short Mr Nash on the subject of television after the nine-o’clock watershed. ‘You have some information for us.’

  Disgruntled, he frowned at her. ‘I was talking to this young man,’ he said to her fury. ‘You people don’t know the meaning of patience.’

  Bal said, ‘Patience is a luxury, Mr Nash. We haven’t a lot of time.’

  In spite of having insulted his ethnic group five minutes before and suggested that everyone of his origins should go back to ‘them temples and elephants and suchlike where they belong’, Henry Nash now looked at him with new respect. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You have to do your job. I know what work is, unlike some I could name.’ He kept his eyes carefully averted from Hannah, as if he were some kind of ascetic and she a belly dancer. ‘It’s the chap next door. Brooks, he’s called. John Brooks. Must be hundr
eds of folks called John Brooks but there it is.’

  Because he had fallen silent, Hannah said, ‘What about him, Mr Nash?’

  He answered her but he looked at Bal while he was speaking as if it was the man rather than the woman who had asked the question. ‘He goes out in the night time,’ he said on a note of triumph.

  ‘Goes out?’ Bal said. ‘What do you mean, “goes out”? ‘What sort of time? You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I’ve heard his car. He keeps it in the road. Why, you may well ask, when he’s got a bit of concrete at the side. I’ll tell you. Because his wife sleeps in the back. They have separate rooms if you’ve ever heard of such a thing. I sleep in the front and when he starts the car it wakes me up.’

  ‘What time, Mr Nash?’

  'Any time it is, one, two, three, but it’s mostly around one. She won’t hear him in the back She won’t know he’s gone. That’s what comes of separate rooms. No wonder she don’t have no babies. He snores, she says. Yes, I bet he snores. Does it on purpose to get himself in another room.’

  ‘Did he go out on the night Amber Marshalson was killed?’

  ‘Don’t know. I don’t always wake up, not if I’ve got nothing on my mind. Not if I’m not tossing and turning, thinking about the state of the world.’

  The thought of tossing and turning, as against remaining perfectly still, brought a fresh flow of sweat to Hannah’s face. She could feel it on her body a stream of it running down between her breasts. She got up, feeling she might faint if she stayed another minute in that hot and airless room. Outside, in the shade, it was cooler and at least the air felt fresher.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to this Brooks,’ she said, ‘and he won’t be home till the evening. If he was out that night he may have seen something but I can’t see him as the perpetrator. If he wanted to kill Amber he’d hardly have got into his car and driven off somewhere.’