by Ruth Rendell
‘No,’ said Bal, ‘but driving off would give him an alibi and he could sneak back on foot to do the deed.’
‘I suppose he could.’
He was looking hard at her and suddenly she thought how people of what she called ‘Asian subcontinental origin’ — she wouldn’t have objected to being described as of ‘Caucasian-Celtic origin’ herself — were so often as immaculate as if all their clothes were new. A damp patch had definitely appeared across her midriff.
‘You look so hot, Hannah.’ It was the first time he had called her by her given name as against ‘sarge’.
‘Come on, I’ve got sparkling water in a refrigerated bag in the car. That’ll set you up.’
Daniel Hilland’s friends with whom he had spent his Finland holiday had not yet been run to earth. It seemed that they had gone, in Daniel’s own words, on to ‘Iceland or Latvia or somewhere like that’ and the hunt for them was so far unsuccessful. Ben Miller’s alibi, resting solely on his word that he had dropped Amber off on the Myfleet road at twenty minutes to two and reached home ten minutes later, couldn’t be substantiated. Neither his mother nor his sister had heard him come in. He often came home late and had learnt to be silent about it, even taking off his shoes at the foot of the stairs. Mrs Miller’s ‘But I know he came in - what else would he have done?’ was worse than useless.
George and Diana Marshalson alibied each other, an unsatisfactory state of affairs, but in the absence of motive, seeing that Diana, at least, had the best of reasons for wanting to keep Amber alive, this was no line to pursue. Besides, Wexford was sure that George’s love for his daughter was far stronger than what he felt for his wife and if it came to Amber’s murder, he would never consider shielding his wife. That marriage, and what the Marshalsons felt for each other, interested Wexford. He had begun to believe there was some reason for the fading of the love George had once felt, something Diana had done. But that something was certainly not the murder of his only child.
The scrapings from the drawer in Amber’s bedroom were analysed and it was as Burden had thought. This was the usual widely used remedy for athlete’s foot. Did he have to abandon his theory of why Amber had been twice out of the country this year? Not yet. The fashion for drinking bottled water had largely passed Wexford by but now, with the temperature once again moving up through the thirties, he was gulping down glass after glass of it. Sitting opposite Hannah Goldsmith, a bottle of the sparkling kind and a pile of paperwork on the desk between them, he listened while she told him about John Brooks and Henry Nash’s malice.
‘I’m going back,’ she said, ‘when he’s likely to get home.’
‘Be careful what you say if the wife’s there.’
‘Surely it’s best if she knows, guv. A relationship is no more than a sham if the partners aren’t honest with each other.’
“Each other” are the operative words there,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s not for you to be honest with them and they won’t thank you if you are.’
His advice had less than the effect he desired on DS Goldsmith who was planning the direct and brusque words she would use on that womaniser, that two-timing Brooks, in his wife’s presence, when she encountered Bal Bhattacharya downstairs, cool and sweat-free from a thorough though fruitless attempt with Ben Miller’s mother’s neighbours to establish his alibi. Could there be something in that old reactionary belief that people with dark skins were less affected by heat than the fair? She felt a rush of blood to her face, making her even hotter. That had probably been the most racist thought she had ever had!
‘Back to Mill Lane, then, DC Bhattacharya,’ she said sharply, forgetting how he’d called her Hannah so caringly that morning.
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about how to ask the guy without arousing his wife’s suspicions.’
Hannah’s retort that Mrs Brooks’s suspicions should be aroused and soon, faded on her lips. ‘That’s your feeling too, is it? That we should tread a bit softly?’
‘Well, it is. What did you mean by “too”? Did some one else take the same line?’
‘The guv,’ said Hannah.
Sure enough, John Brooks’s red VW was parked in the roadway, just where Henry Nash said it would be. But repeated ringing at the doorbell and rapping on the knocker fetched no one. It was Lydia Burton, her front door wide open to cool the house, who came out to tell them no one was at home. The Brookses were out celebrating their wedding anniversary. A taxi had come to pick them up ten minutes before and take them to a restaurant in Myringham.
‘So John can have a drink, you know,’ said Lydia Burton.
‘It’s really appalling,’ said Hannah when she was out of earshot, ‘how two-faced some people can be. Celebrating your wedding anniversary in the evening and shagging another woman by night, because that’s what he must be doing.’
‘Not so bad as murdering,’ said Baljinder, and then, as if he were the superior officer, ‘“Shagging” is not an attractive word for a beautiful woman to use.’
If anyone else in BaI’s position had reprimanded her, DS Goldsmith would have rounded on him with a sharp scathing phrase, but whether it was being called beautiful that mollified her or simply Bal’s own undeniable beauty and style, she couldn’t tell but she said nothing, only looked at him, hoping he would smile, which suddenly he did.
‘Come along, Sarge,’ he said. ‘There’s a pub down the road called the Lamb and Flag. I’m going to take you in there and buy you a drink.’
He was thinking about going home. Sylvia was coming over, leaving the boys with a sitter. His conscience troubled him over their last meeting. He had been unkind to her (though not as unkind as her mother) and nothing she had done or meant to do excused that. When he saw her he meant to make it up to her, not changing his point of view, of course, but being gentler and more sympathetic. He should be flattered, he should be proud, he told himself, that his daughters actually took notice of what he said. Other people’s daughters, as far as he could see, paid no attention whatever to their fathers’ views.
The temperature was falling. He went to the window and looked down across Kingsmarkham to the west where the drooping sun was sinking through narrow bands of cloud that were almost black. A flock of starlings rose from the water meadows by the Kingsbrook and sailed in perfect formation across the treetops. He heard the door behind him open and turned to see Burden.
‘I was thinking of going home,’ he said.
‘You may think again when I tell you. A girl’s gone missing. She’s twenty-one, works in that souvenir shop in the High Street - Gew-Gaws is it called? - lives with her boyfriend in a flat over the shop. She’s called Megan Bartlow.’
‘Bartlow, Bartlow. . . Where have I heard that name before? It was somewhere quite recently...’
Burden ignored him. ‘We’ve no reason to think there’s any connection between her and Amber Marshalson. This Bartlow girl may just turn up unharmed. It’s a dodgy sort of set-up, no one knowing exactly when she went missing or where she might have gone or even if she’s just run off with another chap. The boyfriend and the mother are downstairs. They came in to report her missing. I don’t know if you’ll want to...’
‘I’ve remembered,’ Wexford interrupted him. ‘Bartlow - it’s not a common name. You were wrong about our having no reason to connect her with Amber Marshalson. She had two friends who were sisters. Lara and Megan Bartlow.’
Chapter 11
Rather than one of the bleak interview rooms, Sergeant Camb had put them into Kingsmarkham police station’s newly set-up ‘family room’. This offspring of the caring society to use Wexford’s own words for it, had been born of an idea of Hannah Goldsmith’s and enthusiastically taken up by the Chief Constable. A former repository of lost property, it measured no more than twelve feet by ten and had only one small casement window, but it made up for what it lacked in space and ventilation by its cheerful furnishings. The hard-wearing cord carpet was a rich emerald green, each of the three small armchairs was a differ
ent primary colour and the fourth striped blue and yellow. A painting large enough to cover one wall almost entirely was a coral and crimson medley Wexford described as looking like a butcher’s block at closing time on a Saturday night. He had suggested to the Chief Constable that the council tax payers of Kingsmarkham should be offered a tour of the place, seeing that they had paid for it. For a moment he thought he had been taken seriously.
He found Megan Bartlow’s boyfriend and her mother sitting side by side, he in the yellow chair, she in the red one, facing the picture across a white plastic table, laden with very old colour supplements from Sunday newspapers. Neither of them had disturbed the neat stack, which still looked the way it had when the family room was opened by a celebrity (a local man who now played for Manchester City) eleven weeks before. The two appeared to be much the same age, late forties. Megan’s mother was a thin haggard woman with dyed blonde hair hanging well below her shoulders and a face coloured as brightly as the furniture and in much the same shades. The boyfriend - a ‘kind of common-law son-in-law’, as Wexford told Burden later - looked as if he had dressed himself up for a fancy dress party as a twenty-first-century villain. His grey hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. He wore half a dozen rings studded through the outer curve of one ear and a silver or white metal cross hanging against the triangle of grey furry chest which his dirty white vest exposed. Ferocious tattoos, red, black and broccoli green, covered his arms. His jeans were skintight with frayed hems and ragged holes on each knee.
Wexford said a courteous ‘Good evening’ to both of them and asked their names.
Megan’s mother seemed to have left Bartlow behind long before and gave hers in some confusion. ‘Lapper, Sandra Lapper,’ she said, and then, ‘Oh God, no, it’s not. I’ve got a memory like a sieve. It Warner now on account of I got married last week. ‘What a fool!’
‘Keith’s my name. Keith Prinsip.’
The man had a deeply lined dark face with a wide but thin mouth and narrow eyes under hood-like lids the colour of black grapes. He lounged in his chair, one leg crossed over the other knee and, lips pursed, appeared to be whistling silently to himself. Mrs Warner rummaged in a black handbag heavily decorated with straps and gilt buckles, and produced a photograph wrapped in cling film. Burden took it from her, studied it and passed it to Wexford. Megan’s looks were the prettiness of youth, her nose large and her chin small. She had the requisite long and straight blonde hair and had followed her mother’s example in the application of make-up.
‘Do you have another daughter called Lara, Mrs Warner?’ Wexford asked.
‘How did you know?’
Police officers never answer that question. ‘Tell me what happened.’ Wexford looked from one to the other, having no preference as to which of them should be the narrator. Sandra Warner looked at Keith Prinsip and Prinsip continued with his soundless whistling but neither said a word. ‘All right,’ Wexford said. ‘Since you and Miss Bartlow live together, Mr Prinsip, perhaps you’d begin.’
‘My dad died,’ Prinsip began. ‘I had to get up there for the funeral and once I was there, see, I stopped over with my sister as my dad lived with, right?’
Restraining an impulse to say it was far from right, Wexford asked him where ‘up there’ was and which day and night he was talking about.
Like many people of his kind, Prinsip seemed to find it incomprehensible that the circumstances of his family and details of his daily life should be unknown to the world at large. Incredulously, he said, ‘Brum, innit? Birmingham, right? Where I come from, where me dad lived. Not yesterday. The day before and the night before yesterday I’m like talking about.’ Desperately, he made a mammoth effort. ‘Like Saturday it was me dad died. I went up there like Monday and the funeral was Tuesday. I come back Wednesday. Yesterday, that is. Yesterday, innit, Sand?’
‘You’re upset, Keithie, and no wonder.’ Sandra Warner said to Wexford, ‘He went up there August thirty-first and he come back yesterday.’
‘Miss Bartlow wasn’t with you?’
‘Meg never got on with my family. Her and my sister, they fought like two cats.’
‘So you left home at what time on Monday? And where was Megan?’ said Burden. This was very hard work. If they relied on this man they would be here all night. ‘Mrs Warner?’ he said.
‘Half-nine you left, Keithie, that’s right, innit? So Megan’d have been at the shop. They open nine. Is that right, Keithie?’
Wexford saw that words had to be put into Prinsip’s mouth or they would get nowhere. He waited while Mrs Warner prompted him again.
‘You’d said goodbye to her and said if Kath wanted you to stop over you’d give her a bell and then she went down to the shop.’
‘Megan works at Gew-Gaws?’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Prinsip, relieved. He made another effort. ‘She works for Jimmy Gawson. I give her a phone around six like on the Tuesday but she got her mobile switched off.?
‘Did you make any more attempts to phone her? I mean,’ said Burden, realising the limitations of his listener, ‘did you try again?’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t no use.’
‘You give me a ring, Keithie. Ever so late it was Tuesday night, like midnight. You know what Lee said? “That Keith wants to remember we’re newly-weds,” he said. “For all he knows I might have been on the job.” Sandra Warner let out a screech of laughter. ‘Hark at me. I’d better get a hold of myself. God knows what may have happened to Megan and there’s me laughing like a drain.’
‘I give Sand a ring like I say and I done it again next day on account of I was getting worried.’ This time Keith Prinsip needed no prompting. ‘I mean, where’d she got to? I got back from Brum round dinnertime yesterday, like twelve-ish, and there wasn’t no sign of her.’
‘There wouldn’t be, though, Keithie. She’d have been at the shop.’
‘She wasn’t, Sand.’ The interview was turning into a conversation between the two of them. ‘First thing I done was go down there. Jimmy as owns the place, he said, “Where’s that Megan, then?” First thing he said to me. “Where’s that Megan, then?”’
‘Keithie come round to ours and had a bit of dinner with Lee. We said, I mean we all said, Lee as well, we’ll give it twenty-four hours, we said, and if she don’t show up, we’ll. . . well, we didn’t know what but we reckoned we’d have to do something.’
Wexford and Burden looked at each other, both bludgeoned into silence by these repetitive and largely useless accounts. Still, Sandra Warner remained the better source of information. It was her Wexford asked if her other daughter, Lara, lived at home with her and if the sisters were close. Meanwhile Burden went to get a missing persons form.
‘What you want to know about my other daughter for? Lara’s not missing, thank God.’
‘She was a friend of the dead girl, Amber Marshalson,’ said Wexford, unable this time to avoid all explanation.
‘Not to say a friend. Not a friend.’ Mrs Warner looked affronted. ‘Friendly, I’ll grant you that.’
Wexford had not the least idea whether what he said was true but he said it just the same. ‘She and Amber went to Frankfurt together.’
Guesswork or inspiration, he was nearly right and thereby absolutely wrong. ‘Not Lara. Megan, and what if she did?’ Sandra Warner was quick to take offence. ‘That’s not a crime, is it? I don’t even know where the bloody place is. Somewhere they use them Euros.’
It may well be a crime, Wexford said to himself. ‘I’d like to talk to Lara tomorrow. What time does she go to work?’
‘She don’t work. She’s in like higher education. Stowerton Business School, only it’s not a school, it’s a college.’
‘I’ll see you and her tomorrow. By then we may have news of Megan.’
Burden came back with the form and stood looking from one to the other, uncertain as to who would claim it.
‘Give it here,’ said Sandra. ‘No good leaving it to Keithie. He’s forgot his glasses.’ She wi
nked ferociously at Burden who interpreted this signal as indicating Keith’s inability to read. Keith himself showed none of the shame typical of the illiterate but resumed his whistling, not silently this time but a vague and soft rendering of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
It was late. Wexford said goodnight to Burden and walked quite slowly home. The girl was dead, he was sure of it, and this knowledge made looking back on the interview with anything like the amusement he would otherwise have felt impossible. She was dead because she had known Amber Marshalson, more specifically because she had been involved in the same traffic as Amber and both of them, somewhere along the line, had talked of exposing those who paid them. Or, he corrected this account, Megan had threatened to tell on those who had been responsible for Amber’s murder. That was most likely. No one went to Frankfurt on holiday. You went there for a conference or a business meeting or to change planes. Amber and Megan had gone there in order to hand over what they, or one of them, was smuggling out of this country and into Germany on its way, probably, to the Far East.
Nothing, it seemed to him, would have much effect on the bovine stupidity of Keith Prinsip - it was a Serbian name, the name of the assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand - but he thought with a kind of dread of its impact on the jolly Sandra Warner, so obviously happy in her new marriage, to whom the worst appeared not to have occurred. It would hit her all the more resoundingly.
He came to his house and saw that Sylvia’s car was still outside. Glad - he couldn’t help that - yet dismayed too, he told himself to go easy with her, be kind, hand out no more reproaches. What, after all, was the use? He let himself into the hall and heard the unwelcome sound of a voice which was neither Sylvia’s nor his wife’s. For a moment he couldn’t place it but he opened the door, went in and found himself shaking hands with Naomi Wyndham whom he had met maybe once before. She was a small slender woman of about thirty- five with the kind of long red hair that would have sent Rossetti into ecstasies. There was something distasteful to Wexford in this present-day matiness of ex-wives with current girlfriends and ex-husbands with their one-time wives’ lovers, yet when he examined what he felt, he had to confess that discord and spite would be far worse.