by Ruth Rendell
A waitress closed and locked the glass doors which led on to the river terrace, giving the day up as a bad job. Wexford ordered for both of them, looked longingly at the wine list and pushed it away.
‘What I’d like to do this afternoon, Mike, is talk to the chap Ross Samphire employs, Colin Fry. See if he really was there with those two on the first of September, see if we can find out more about the brothers from him.’
‘OK, we will.’ Burden said it absently. He was staring across the restaurant at a table where a man of about thirty and a younger man were sitting. He looked away. ‘You know who that is, the guy in the leather jacket?’
‘Should I?’
‘Probably not. I don’t think you’ve ever seen him but that’s John Brooks. Jewel Terrace, right?’
‘If you say so. What of it?’
‘I can see them from here without staring. I wish you could. There’s no doubt the chap with him is his boyfriend. It’s not that they’re touching - though Brooks did put his hand on his shoulder when they came to the table - but the way they look at each other It’s unmistakable.’
Wexford sighed. ‘I may be losing my grip but enlighten me, Mike. Why shouldn’t he be his boyfriend? Practising homosexuality’s been legal for nearly forty years.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Burden impatiently. ‘Brooks is the fellow who accounted for his going out at night by telling Hannah he was visiting his girlfriend and then she turned out to be his sister. Remember?’
‘Now you tell me I do.’
‘Well, that’s why he said it was a woman he visited. Because he’s in the closet and he doesn’t want his wife to know.’
Wexford’s smile became a quiet laugh. ‘We’re not going to do anything about it, are we?’
‘Hannah wants him done for wasting police time - but no,’ said Burden. ‘I think I’ll just say good afternoon.’
And as they passed Brooks’s table, he did. Looking back, Wexford saw that Brooks had flushed a mottled red. Outside, the afternoon was grey, foggy as if a cloud had sunk to the ground and settled there, the kind of day when it seems impossible that the sun will ever show itself again.
Burden expected his discovery of John Brooks’s secret to amuse Hannah and wondered if ‘a generation thing’ was responsible for her look of slightly distasteful con tempt. Surely she, with her sometimes shockingly progressive outlook, wasn’t disgusted? Not Hannah, not she of all people. Baffled, he left her and went back to investigating Ross Samphire’s background.
And Hannah, of course, wasn’t disgusted in the sense he had meant. Her outrage came from finding that a gay man of mature age not a teenager could be so out-of-date, so feeble and pusillanimous, as not only to be in the closet but positively cowering and shivering in its depths under piles of medieval blankets, stifling rugs and freedom-crushing pillows. It wasn’t that he had lied to his wife - men did lie to their wives and wives to their husbands, and this was one of her many objections to marriage - but that he had lied to her, to the police. For such a reason as that! It made you despair of humankind. And just when she was feeling that really people were not so bad, that it was amazing and immensely gratifying just.how intelligent and adaptable and altogether remarkable some people were.
Bal had taken her home to meet his parents. Just for the Saturday night. All the way up to Hereford, where they now lived, she had been imagining them, Rajiv, his father, in that long white garment Indian men wore - it was unforgivable of her not to remember the name of it - and his mother, Parvinder, in a sari, her grey hair in a knot on the back of her head, her neck and arms loaded with jewels. And when they got there, and the house turned out to be a stone cottage in a village, his father was in grey flannels and a zipper jacket and his mother in jeans and a sweater. She was a little disappointed and a little more when dinner wasn’t chicken vindaloo at home but Italian cuisine in a Hereford restaurant. Total disillusionment would have set in if she and Bal had been shown into the same bedroom but she was sent off to sleep at one end of the house and he took his own room at the other. In this, things were no different from what still prevailed in Kingsmarkham and looked like continuing to do so indefinitely.
Chapter 22
Colin Fry lived with his girlfriend in a flat over the dry- cleaners in Glebe Road but he wasn’t at home. The girl friend said Colin had a number of part-time jobs to ‘fill in’ when he wasn’t working for Ross Samphire. She wasn’t sure where he was today but she gave them two addresses in Kingsmarkham. ‘You could give them a go,’ she said. ‘He won’t be being a mechanic today. He may be lawnmowing or maybe window cleaning.’
The flat was a surprise. Wexford told himself he must be a middle-class snob because he had expected some thing like the place Keith Prinsip lived in but without the state-of-the-art equipment. This place reminded him of a suite in a middle-ranking hotel. Not in the Vier Pferde class, a couple of stars lower than that, but very presentable. Pale coffee carpeting covered the floor. The covers and curtains were a darker shade, the furniture well-polished and the pictures on the walls in the Athena Art league. It was tidy and it looked discreet, unlike the girlfriend who, in spite of the temperature, was in red shorts, a white T-shirt with ‘This Bitch Bites’ printed on it in purple, and high-heeled red sandals.
Showing them out, she said, ‘If you can’t find him, he’ll be back here around six and you could catch him then. Only we’ve got to go out at seven, leave the place clear.’ She caught Burden’s eye and winked.
‘What was that about?’ Burden said, going down the stairs.
‘God knows. Surely nothing to do with the matter in hand.’
‘Probably not. It’s not often young women wink at me.’ They got into the car. ‘An intelligent guess would be that after all the rain we’ve had he can’t be lawn-mowing, so he’ll be window cleaning.’
He was. They found him at a house in Ladyhall Road. He was sitting on a windowsill with his back to them three floors up, polishing the sash.
‘When you consider’, said Wexford, ‘the way the health and safety people won’t let children go on swings any more, I wonder they haven’t banned window cleaning altogether. Mr Fry!’
‘That’s me.’ He didn’t turn round.
‘Kingsmarkham CID. May we have a word?’
‘I’ll be down in a minute. I’m just finishing off.’
A weak sun had appeared among the porridge-like clouds. It brought a faint warmth and the mist began to lift. Wexford and Burden sat in the car and presently Colin Fry emerged from the front door, carrying a bucket and a bag of rags. He was a short slight man of about thirty; red-headed and pink-skinned.
‘We can talk in here,’ Burden called out to him.
This was obviously unacceptable to Fry. The prospect of sitting in a police car to talk perhaps reminded him of similar situations in which his role had been less innocent. Whatever it was, he shook his head, said ‘No way’ and invited them into his van. This vehicle looked as if it were used as the repository of all the accumulation of litter and refuse not permitted to sully the flat in Glebe Road: empty cans, cigarette packets, magazines, takeaway packaging, plastic bags and various garments of the sweatshirt-fleece-kagool variety. One of these, Wexford noticed, was a dark-grey fleece with a hood.
‘He’s a good guy is Ross,’ said Colin, echoing Ross’s words about himself. ‘What you’d call a straight kind of guy. Five years I’ve worked for him and never a cross word. I mean, the way he’s been with his brother, you won’t find many guys like that. Bought him his house, you know. Gave him his car. Gave him his mobile and pays for it. There’s not many would do that.’
‘You’ll have followed the two murders, Mr Fry;’ said Wexford. ‘Amber Marshalson and Megan Bartlow. Did you know either of those girls? Did Ross?’
Colin shook his head. ‘Never heard of them before all this.’
‘Tell us where you were on the morning of the first of September, between nine and ten, will you?’
Like Rick’s, h
is response was unsurprised and rapid. It wasn’t natural to answer so promptly. ‘In the old bank building with Ross and Rick.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Look, I just can,’ Colin said. ‘We come in at eight, I went upstairs and Ross and Rick was down below doing the ceiling. Me, I was on the top painting the walls.’
‘Not the kind of job you could leave halfway through,’ said Wexford lightly.
Fry looked at him, puzzled. ‘Not if you’re doing it right. Was there anything else because I’ve got my job to do?’
They followed him as far as Glebe Road, parked and watched him let himself in by a red-painted door next to the dry-cleaners’ window.
‘Did you notice?’ Burden said. ‘Rick said he hadn’t got a mobile but, according to Fry, Ross supplied him with one. It’s a small point, of course.’
‘It shows Rick up as a liar.’
‘Two other things have come out of this that strike me as interesting,’ said Burden. ‘First of all, Fry’s home.
Its condition, I mean. That’s a mystery. Why does it look as if they’re about to show prospective buyers over it? Perhaps they are but I don’t think so. For one thing, I don’t suppose it belongs to them. They’ll rent it. The other is that hooded fleece in the van. Oh, I know the world is full of fleeces with hoods, especially now, but I still think it shouldn’t be ignored.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Wexford. ‘As to Fry’s flat, I think they’re running a knocking shop. Of course, it’s not an offence unless there’s more than one woman on the premises; it’s not brothel keeping.’
'What, you mean a couple rent the place for an evening or a night?’
‘A long evening, I should think. The girlfriend said they were going out, leaving the place clear, and winked at you. You, not me. Maybe she thought you were a likely customer. What else could that wink mean?’
Like almost everyone else in Kingsmarkham and the villages, Burden had seen the feature on Pomfret Hall in the Sunday Times magazine. People in photographs often look worse than reality (fatter, older, shorter) while places look better. Driving up to the front door of this Palladian house, Burden noted that it wasn’t true in this case. The photographs had been impressive; the reality was stunning. Unaccountably, the day was bright and sunny, the sky a radiant blue and Norman Arlen’s house stood out against it as if it might be a palazzo in Italy or an ante bellum mansion in the Deep South. Two balustered staircases mounted its façade to meet at its porticoed front doors. Its statuary reminded him of the sight he had once had, while on holiday, of the Parthenon frieze. He told himself that just as a man might smile and smile and be a villain (as Wexford said) so he might possess one of the handsomest houses in England and be a crook
Having lived in the neighbourhood all his life, he had of course seen the house before. He had seen it in the days when an old baronet lived there, when it was a shabby grey house in wild untended grounds. According to the article, Norman Arlen had spent a fortune on it and was still spending. Where had the money come from? The journalist who wrote the piece had described him as a travel agent and implied he had other irons in the fire. Burden went up the steps on the left- hand side, DC Bhattacharya following him, and tugged at the bell pull.
He expected a butler, at least a maid, but Norman Arlen came himself. Burden recognised him from the photograph in the feature. Although he had had no warning of their arrival, Arlen was gracious, particularly affable to Bal, believing apparently that patronising politeness, accompanied by smiles frequently flashed in his direction, were less racist than indifference. He led them across an enormous hall with a drum ceiling about thirty feet high into a room Burden recognised, the sort of room you expect to see only in great face of it, this had seemed unlikely but Arlen nodded and smiled.
‘The fact is I’ve known both brothers practically all my life. We were boys together, went to school together, as a matter of fact, in south London.’
‘So it’s not unusual for you to meet Rick and the two of you to have a drink together.’
‘Not at all unusual.’ Arlen paused and seemed to be considering the best way to put this. ‘Look, I’ll be honest with you. I’ll be completely frank. Ross and I have a good deal more in common. In fact I’m godfather to his daughter Laura.’
‘So you were having dinner with him at his home on August the tenth?’
‘Yes, indeed. Ross and I had a lot to discuss and I stayed rather late. It must have been after midnight before I left.’ Arlen got up, crossed to a black and gilt table, opened a drawer in it as if looking for some document and closed it again. He turned round with a smile. ‘To get back to Rick. The fact is that, if one has any humanity, one’s sorry for Rick. He’s had a raw deal, been unlucky and, by God, he’s been punished for it. You know what I mean.’
‘Not exactly, Mr Arlen,’ Burden said. ‘If you’re referring to his sojourns as a guest of Her Majesty in Myringham and Brixton prisons, I don’t quite see where the ill luck comes in.’
Arlen’s answer to this was a ruefull laugh that man aged to contain a good deal of sympathy and fellow feeling. He turned to Bal, said, ‘Do go on.’
‘Did you meet him,’ Bal said briskly, ‘in the Mermaid pub in Pomfret on the twenty-fourth of June between eight and nine in the evening?’
‘I did indeed. Let me get the facts absolutely right. I called for him at his home in Potter’s Lane. It would have been about a quarter to eight. As a matter of fact I wanted to take him out to dinner and I had the Cheriton Forest Hotel in mind. Taking him out for a meal is something I in actual fact do from time to time. But poor Rick was rather frightened off by what he saw as the grandeur of the Cheriton Forest, said he hadn’t got the clothes, you can imagine the sort of thing.’
‘A grey fleece with a hood wouldn’t do, I suppose,’ Burden put in.
Arlen smiled uncertainly at this, the first sign he had given of the slightest unease.
‘So you went to the Mermaid at about eight?’
‘That’s exactly right.’ Arlen broke off when a middle- aged woman in a dark dress and ‘sensible’ shoes came into the room. ‘Can I offer you gentlemen any refreshment? Tea? Mineral water? Orange juice?’ In unison Burden and Bal refused. ‘No, thank you, Wendy, not just now. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes, as a matter of fact, I gave the Mermaid a call from Rick’s house and asked them for a table for two in the brasserie. Rick and I had a drink in the bar first and then a meal, nearer supper than dinner, I think you’d call it. The fact is that we were in the Mermaid.’
‘So he wasn’t ten miles away in Yorstone Wood?’
‘Yorstone Wood? Yorstone Wood? Ah, you mean where that dangerous bend is. No, indeed, he was with me in the Mermaid until just after ten.’
The time a man - Rick? - was walking through Yorstone Wood and dropping his lump of concrete off the bridge was covered. Burden would check with the pub but he had no doubt Arlen had been in there with someone. The brasserie staff might remember that but after nearly four months not who it was. And Arlen would have taken care to pay in cash. He got up, said, ‘I may want to see you again Mr Arlen,’ more in vain threat than hope.
'AIways a pleasure, Inspector.’
The feature had mentioned a girlfriend but there was no sign of anyone else in the house beyond Arlen and the woman who was plainly a housekeeper. Arlen conducted them back across the hail.
‘Did you notice how often he talked about “facts”?’ said Bal in the car. ‘We were only there less than ten minutes and he said the word “fact” eight times.’
‘I dare say that’s because he doesn’t know what it means,’ said Burden gloomily.
‘There was another thing. I can’t be sure, it may have been something quite different - but did you notice how he went over to that fancy gilt table and opened the drawer?’
‘I believe so.’
‘When we went in there was something lying on that table and after he’d opened the drawer there wasn’t. He put it away. I could be wrong bu
t it looked like a gun.’
‘We’ll never get a warrant on that evidence,’ said Wexford. ‘We can’t search a man’s house because Bal thinks he may have seen a gun but can’t be sure.’
‘We can bear in mind that it may be there, though.’
‘Yes, we can do that. Of course we will do that. Now the tighter these alibis get and the more unassailable they become, the less anybody can believe them. Yet in court everyone will have to believe them, simply because their statements are watertight, so it’s impossible for us to bring charges. We know before we start that any charges will fail. It’s not natural to produce mates who’ll swear to your being somewhere at a precise time three months ago, yet it’s the only thing that will satisfy the court. Anything else will be shot down in flames.’
‘Bal’s been to the Mermaid,’ said Burden. ‘They know Arlen and they know Rick Samphire. They’ve seen them in there together. But of course they can’t remember if they were in there together on the twenty-fourth of June and not one of them is going to say they weren’t.’
Even more incredible and even less destructible was Rick’s alibi for the night between the tenth and eleventh of August. He had left his ex-wife’s house in Myringham at about eleven fifteen, a time vouched for by Alison Rowley (as she now called herself) and her partner. Wexford thought them reputable witnesses, while asking himself if the reason for his thinking in this way was partly because Alison had left Rick. Hannah Goldsmith liked them for their lifestyle and this in her eyes vindicated their honesty. It was afterwards that the difficulties arose. Rick had come up with this story of his car breaking down and a subsequent encounter with a motorist. Wexford and his team had gone to a great deal of trouble to find this motorist, were on the point of giving up, when a middle-aged man with a bald forehead and large glasses walked into the police station, announced to the duty sergeant that he had been away on holiday for the past two weeks and had only now heard that the police were looking for him.