by Ruth Rendell
He left, his dignified exit slightly marred by bending down to pick up a London Eye, re-created in silver plastic, the hem of his raincoat had swept off a low table. To Burden later he said, ‘Jimmy mentioned a woman called Grace Morgan to me. I know I’ve heard the name and not long ago but I can’t for the life of me think when or where.’
‘I can,’ said Burden. ‘She’s one of our witnesses, or would be if she’d seen anything. She’s ninety-three and she lives in that cottage in the woods where we think whoever chucked the concrete at Amber’s car must have passed by.’
‘She’s also Megan Bartlow’s grandmother.’
‘You mean. .. ? Wait a minute.’
‘We didn’t know that when Hannah and Lynn went to see her. Jimmy wasn’t interested in Megan’s private life but her grandmother may have been.’
‘Yes. Well, we talk to Grace Morgan.’
‘We will. As soon as possible. I don’t want to sound callous but when you’re ninety-three death is an existential hazard, so it really is urgent.’
A soft mist hung low over the fields. Because it had been dry for so long and the trees starved of water, their leaves were turning early. The woods were yellowing before autumn had come and while the sun was still hot. It blazed through the veil of mist, burning it off from everywhere but the shady places and the deep hollows. Wexford and Burden left the car at the top of Yorstone Lane and walked along the footpath that led into the woods. The berries on the Wayfarer’s Tree which grew here in great profusion had turned from green to gold, from gold to red and now were almost black. In the distance a woodpecker could be heard, its beak drilling into a tree trunk.
‘I wonder how long she’s lived here,’ Wexford said. ‘Years, of course. Maybe all her life. And every time she went out and came home she had to walk this path, carrying whatever she had to carry, her children at one time, I expect.’
‘Mm.’ Burden wasn’t much interested.
‘You could bring a car across here. You can see by the ruts that people have. Possibly our man did. And you could take it into the wood - just.’ They were among the trees now and the path had narrowed. ‘The tree trunks are too close together to bring it much farther than this. He could have left it over there.’ Wexford pointed to a grassy space, almost a lawn, overhung with hawthorn and a canopy of brambles. ‘Under that lot it would be almost concealed.’
‘Especially if he wasn’t fussy about his bodywork. Those branches would cover a vehicle with scratches.’
Wexford nodded. ‘The pity is that we didn’t know about this - that is, we had no reason to suspect that the concrete block off the bridge business was an attempt on Amber’s life until her death six weeks later. We thought it was a simple act of vandalism. “Taking revenge on society”, as some people call it, not directed at a specific target.’
It is not uncommon for the homes of very old people to look, to the careless eye, as if they are uninhabited. Their own eyes are no longer able to see dirt and untidiness. Decorating is expensive and DIY is now beyond them. The curtains at their windows, often lace or net and once pristine white, collect dust and hang limp inside fly-spotted glass, and these windows are seldom opened, if by now they can be, for the elderly feel the cold. Mostly, too, they are poor and often proud so that their relatives think this is their chosen way to live, not what it really is, a precarious hanging on to life at whatever cost.
These thoughts passed through Wexford’s mind as Grace Morgan’s house came in sight, a squat, brownish, part-tiled, part-thatched cottage surrounded by a dilapidated picket fence. The front gate had come off its hinges and lay across a slight hollow in the path, placed there evidently to serve as a bridge or ford in wet weather. It was so long since there had been any wet weather that the path itself had dried to dust and the once-green grass of the clearing in which the cottage stood turned yellow like hay.
It was unlikely that any house in the villages from Framhurst to Forby had all its windows closed today.
Except Grace Morgan’s. Their frames looked rotted, as if you could poke your forefinger through the wood work, as if any attempt to open them would cause the whole window to collapse.
‘I suppose she’s out,’ said Burden in a gloomy voice. ‘That comes of having no phone. Everyone’, he added illogically, ‘has a phone.’
‘She’s not out.’ Wexford banged the door knocker hard.
‘If you do that you’ll frighten her to death.’
‘If I don’t,’ said Wexford, ‘she won’t hear.’
They were on the point of giving up when the door was at last answered. Grace Morgan was a tiny woman, shrunk to several inches under five feet, thin, spare and shrivelled. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, cobwebbed and grey as a cobweb is. What remained of her hair was a white wisp screwed up on the top of her head with two long black pins. She looked not in the least disconcerted by the arrival of two tail men she had never seen before. ‘You look like policemen,’ she said.
‘That’s so, Mrs Morgan.’
Burden showed her his warrant card, then Wexford showed his.
‘It’s no good, I can’t see. It’s all a blur. Might be James Mason and Michael Redgrave for all I know.’
After offering this evidence of a distant cinema-going past, Grace Morgan opened the door wider and stepped back to let them in. ‘It was two girls as came last time. DS this and DC that, whatever it means. I don’t hold with girls being policemen. What happens if they get hit or shot?’
Wexford said he hoped that wouldn’t happen and that DS Goldsmith and DC Fancourt were very good officers.
‘That may be but girls do get killed. Look at my granddaughter Megan. She got shot.’
Believing it unnecessary to correct her, Wexford said that was what they had come to talk to her about. They were very sorry about it, it must have been a great shock to Mrs Morgan and a blow. He understood her grand daughter was a frequent visitor to the cottage.
‘Frequent, did you say? Depends what you mean by frequent. I reckon I’d seen her three times since Christmas and Christmas I was at my daughter Sandra’s. Reckon I was bound to see her there. When she came here it was on the scrounge.’
‘The scrounge?’
‘That’s what I said. She knew I never spent all my pensions not living here and having the meals on wheels. There’s a girl comes with it on a bike. If Megan came it was to borrow my pension. Well, “borrow” is what she called it. I never saw it back, that’s for sure. I will say for Sandra, she never knew.’
She had brought them into a dark-brown living room crowded with dark-brown furniture, and smelling of boiled greens and reused fat and camphor, and clothes worn year in and year out without being washed or cleaned. The only thing in the room that looked less than a century old was the television set. Burden said afterwards that he couldn’t understand anyone who had television not also being on the phone but Wexford disagreed. You got entertainment and companionship out of the telly while all you got out of the phone was com plaints and nagging.
‘Mrs Morgan,’ he began, ‘I’ve been wondering if Megan came to see you the evening you were watching for the badgers?’
It was a long shot but when she asked ‘Did she what?’ he repeated it and reminded her that on the evening she had seen the hooded figure in the wood she had only done so because she had been watching for badgers.
‘Better than the telly, they are, if only you can get to see them. If nobody comes along and makes them all skedaddle.’
‘Did Megan do that, Mrs Morgan?’
‘She was upstairs. She wanted fifty pounds off me and I sent her upstairs to fetch it. Get her out of my way while I watched the badgers but they never came that evening.’
‘The man with the hood, Mrs Morgan’ - Wexford felt his heart begin to sink. Had he been wrong again? ‘Could Megan have seen him from upstairs? Did she mention seeing a man?’
‘Not her. There’s two rooms up there. I sent her up to the back. That’s where I keep my pension money, see? I
said to fetch it all down and I’d give her fifty out of it. So she did, after that fellow in the hood had been and gone. She came down with the tin it was in, there was a hundred and thirty-five pounds in there. I give her fifty in five ten-pound notes and she had the nerve to ask for more. Well, mustn’t speak ill of the dead.’
‘How long after that did Megan stay with you?’ Burden asked. He was wearing a new lightweight jacket of light tan seersucker and was beginning to wonder if the smell would adhere to its fibres. More dry-cleaning, he thought. ‘Five minutes? Ten? Longer?’
‘About twenty; I reckon. It was dark. I said, have you got a torch, going back through that wood and she said she’d got the lamp on her bike.’
‘She came on a bicycle?’
‘That’s what I said. She went off. I said to her, don’t you bother coming again if all you want is cash. Mustn’t speak ill of the dead, eh?’
The air in the wood smelt wonderful. Like flowers and new-mown hay and ripe apples, said Burden, uncharacteristically lyrical. They walked back along the path, inhaling the scented air with deep pleasure.
‘What d’you think?’ Burden said, sniffing his jacket as he did after he’d been in a smoke-filled pub.
'What do I think? I think Grace is right when she says Megan couldn’t have seen Hood from upstairs when he was on his way to the bridge but she saw him on his way back. She left her grandmother just about the time he too would have been returning.’
‘If he returned. If he didn’t go on over the bridge.’
‘I think he returned, Mike. He’d have wanted to go back the way he came because going on over the bridge would mean that (a) his vehicle, whatever it was, was parked on the other side and (b) by going on he’d have a detour of at least six miles before finding his way back to his vehicle. No, Megan saw him. That’s what I think. Whether he saw her we don’t know. She saw him and knew him.’
‘How d’you make that out?’
‘Because she found him again. She knew where to look. I’m not saying she knew him better than just knowing him by sight. And then...’
‘You think she blackmailed him?’ said Burden.
‘I think she tried. As Mrs Morgan said, mustn’t speak ill of the dead, but Megan Bartlow wasn’t exactly a nice girl, was she? She borrowed money off her grandmother who seems to have lived on nothing but the state pension, and never gave it back. It may be politically incorrect to say so but I don’t think much of a girl who’s living with a man and gets herself pregnant by someone else. Though we don’t yet know what it was, she was carrying on some illegal trade.’
‘Drug trafficking,’ said Burden.
‘You remind me of that guy in the Roman Senate who used to get on to his feet every day and say “Carthage must be destroyed”. Delenda est Carthago.’
‘And?’
‘Well, it was destroyed finally. End of story.’
Getting into the car where Donaldson sat waiting for them, Burden said triumphantly, ‘There you are, then. That proves my point. It’s drugs.’
Wexford ignored him. ‘I’ve no difficulty in believing she was blackmailing OP.’ The car started and gradually cool air began to pour in. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘The forecast is there’s going to be a storm later. I think she saw him coming back from the bridge, probably saw him getting into his car which he’d very likely left where we thought he had and probably thought no more about it until the crash was in the Courier and Lara told her or Amber told her herself she’d been involved in it. Even then she wouldn’t have thought OP was a murderer, only a normal sort of vandal, the kind of person she’d no doubt associated with all her life.’
‘But when Amber was killed she’d look at it differently.’
‘Exactly. In spite of what Jimmy Gawson says, we’ve no reason to think Megan was a fool. She’d have put two and two together and what she came up with was that Hood had made his first murder attempt with the concrete block off the bridge and that his second was successful.’
‘Does Prinsip know any of this?’
‘I doubt it but we’ll try him. Try Lara and the mother too but blackmailers don’t often confide in what these days we have to call their loved ones or anyone else, come to that. Funny, isn’t it, “loved ones” are usually talked about in connection with families where there’s no love lost. No, Megan knew OP identity and she kept it to herself. ‘When the time was ripe she went to see him and demanded payment for silence. A very risky thing to do, as we know. She made an arrangement to meet him that Tuesday morning. Now we know that she died on site and on that Tuesday morning. She went into Gew-Gaws at nine, put that notice on the door and, knowing Jimmy Gawson never came in before ten, went off to Stowerton on the bus, hoping to be done and back again before ten.’
‘OK. That’s good. I see all that. But that means he could be anyone. Almost anyone could have gone into that house in Victoria Terrace.’
‘Give me a break, Mike,’ said Wexford. ‘Unlike the White Queen, I can’t think of six impossible things before breakfast.’
'Which reminds me, I got to that inquest so early I never had any.’
‘Nor me. I think we should. Vice has changed, hasn’t it. It’s no longer adultery that’s the crime, let alone for fornication. Beat someone up and no matter if he never walks again, you’re out after two years inside. Drunk driving and killing a couple of kids disqualifies you for a bit and sentences you to what amounts to nine months. Smoking dope is “what everybody does” but have a cigarette and you’re a pariah, though that’s nothing to eating a fry-up in a greasy spoon. That’s the ultimate sin. Shall we?’
‘Why not?’ said Burden.
Trying to concentrate on all the paperwork which must be completed before charging John Brooks and his sister with conspiring to pervert the course of justice, Hannah let her thoughts drift back to the previous evening. At the entrance to the Gooseberry Bush she and Bal had almost bumped into the guy, his wife, DI Burden and his wife, an encounter which vaguely embarrassed her. Still, it would have been worse if they had all been there at the same time. Bal had bought drinks and then, touching her hand but not holding it, he’d said, ‘I haven’t taken a vow of celibacy I’m not “saving myself for marriage”, the way this new virginity cult recommends, though I expect my parents would like it if I did. This is nothing to do with them. This is - well, if and when I get into a relationship, I want it to be serious. I don’t want a one-night stand, I don’t want a drifting into something, I don’t want an affair with someone because I’m here and she’s here and we might as well. Do you understand?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah had said.
‘I wish there weren’t so much jargon in use. I’m using it myself, I know I am. I mean, I wish I didn’t have to talk about “commitment” but that does express what I’m on about. What I’m saying is, if I’m going to start seeing someone — you, for instance — I want to get to know you first. I want to know what you like and don’t like, and I want you to know what I like and don’t like. I’d like us to know about each other’s families, what we believe and don’t believe, what we’re aiming at and what we want to avoid. All that sort of thing.’
Hannah said, bracing herself, ‘You mean you don’t want to make love to me till you’ve known me for ages? That way you might never do it.’
He laughed. ‘Not ages. A few weeks, maybe. Is that so terrible?’
‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘This, actually, is a bit embarrassing.’
‘Only because you’re not used to it. I’m not used to it. We’re used to making love to someone the first time we go out if we fancy them. Make love first and talk afterwards. I’ve reached a point where I want it to be the other way round. I want it the other way round with you, dear Sarge, because I’ve got a feeling this may be serious. So will you come to the cinema with me one evening this week?’
Of course she had said she would. He took her home and kissed her but didn’t come in. She went to bed to think about it all but fell asleep be
fore she could. And now she had these forms to do...
Bacon and eggs (which the proprietor of the Queen’s Cafe described, American fashion, as ‘sunny side up’), fried potatoes, fried bread, fried tomatoes (the ‘healthy option’) and fried mushrooms. Wexford hadn’t enjoyed a meal so much for a long time. The only thing that marred it was the possibility of Darren Lovelace coming in for a cappuccino and witnessing his indulgence. Encountering his daughter Sylvia as soon as he and Burden came out into the bright sunshine of Queen Street was far less alarming, though she did immediately remark on the nature of the place he had come out of.
‘Listening to you,’ he said, ‘anyone would think I’d been in a brothel.’
‘Which would probably do less harm to your heart.’
She introduced him to her companion. ‘This is Mary Beaumont. Mary, this is my father and this is Mike Burden.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Mary said, apparently including both of them. ‘Policemen, aren’t you? I don’t care what others say, I think you’re doing a grand job. Grand. It wouldn’t suit me. You could get a knife in you or a bullet through you at any minute.’
‘We’re not used to so much praise,’ Wexford said. ‘Stick is what we usually get but not bullets. Not often, anyway.’
She laid her hand on his arm and smiled broadly up into his face. She was a very plump black woman in her forties in a scarlet dress with large black-and-white flowers all over it and her smile was like an advertisement for cosmetic dentistry. ‘I’m just giving Sylv a hand with her shopping. “I don’t need you, Mary. I’ve got the car,” she said but I said, “So you can take the car into the supermarket? You can take it up the escalator at Marks & Sparks?”’
In a frosty tone, Sylvia (who was never called Sylv) said, ‘Mary has been very kind.’
'And don’t think it’s just because Naomi asked me. It’s my pleasure, you have to know that.’
Wexford and Burden said goodbye and it was nice meeting her. ‘Sandra Warner now, I suppose?’ said Burden.