by Ruth Rendell
“I don’t know,” Cosima said. “I sleep at night.”
“You heard us. I know you did. You called out something to us.”
“‘Fuck off,’ I expect it was.”
Vivien Hilland began to scream at her. “How dare you use that language, you foul-mouthed little slut! And pick up that Coke can. Pick it up, go on.”
Shaking her head slowly from side to side so that briefly she looked like the mature person her mother had optimistically said she was, Cosima passed through the room and, once outside it, crashed up the stairs, as heavy-footed as someone three times her weight. Mrs. Hilland turned on them a forced smile. “Now, is that all?”
“For now,” said Wexford.
Outside, Burden wiped his forehead on an immaculate handkerchief, though it had been cool inside the house. “She’ll be picking up that can now.”
“Pity she wasted her energy on screaming reproaches when it’s ten years too late. Why didn’t Diana Marshalson tell us about the flat?”
“Thought it wasn’t relevant, I dare say. Is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Wexford. He withdrew his hand from the car door with a sharp exclamation; the metal was burning hot. “God, that hurt. Diana, if not her husband, will have been overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the back of Amber, whom she had never really got on with, and the baby she obviously sees as a nuisance.”
“You’re saying this takes away from her any motive for killing Amber. Not that I for one suspected her but she did dislike the girl and she has no alibi.”
“Her husband would have noticed if she’d left the house, surely. Anyway, she didn’t. She had every reason for keeping Amber alive. Let her go to Crenthorne Heath and take Brand with her and maybe they’d hardly see her in the future.
“I wonder,” he said as they got into the car, “if there was some amount of jealous rivalry between the families. The Marshalsons, presumably since Diana left the company, don’t seem to have been too flush with cash. They don’t own a London flat. If they had, Amber and Brand would have been settled in it for a year by now.”
“And she’d be still alive.”
“Maybe. But ‘what ifs’ are useless, aren’t they? We can’t read the book of fate and thank God for it. Chance and contingency rule all. For instance, Donaldson could take us back to Kingsmarkham via the Stowerton bypass or take the B road through Framhurst. If it was the latter we might pass under that bridge where there was the crash back in June and someone might drop a lump of concrete on us. If we take the bypass a truck might come off the slip road without looking and send us all to kingdom come. Who knows?”
“I always take the bypass, sir,” said Donaldson seriously. “But if you’d rather it was Framhurst…?”
“Oh, no, no,” said Wexford, laughing. “We’ll take your way.”
Ben Miller was a tall handsome boy, fair-haired and thin. Hannah and Baljinder had found him alone in his mother’s little end-of-a-terrace house in Myfleet. She was at work, as was his sister, who also lived at home. Ben had been working at his computer, not as Hannah had at first thought playing some game online, but writing a dissertation for his return to university in six weeks’ time.
“You seem to have been the last person to see Amber Marshalson alive,” Hannah said to him after they were all supplied with glasses of water, a necessary prerequisite for any sort of conversation in the heat, which today was climbing to thirty-three Celsius. “Can you tell us about that? In as much detail as you can manage, please.”
“I was at school with Amber,” Ben Miller said. “We’d known each other for years and years. It’s terrible, this thing that’s happened to her. I can still hardly believe it.” He looked genuinely distressed. “What happened that night? Well, I went to the Bling-Bling Club at around nine with my girlfriend. She lives in Kingsmarkham. She’s called Samantha Collins.” Ah, the “Sam” one, a woman after all, thought Hannah. “And after a bit some other people we know joined us. There was Lara, Lara Bartlow. And Chris Williamson came with his girlfriend—what’s she called?—oh, yes, Charlotte, Charlotte Probyn, and then two more girls came, Veryan and Liz. I’ve no idea what their other names are.
“I don’t drink and Amber doesn’t—didn’t, I mean. Horrendous, isn’t it, when you’re talking about someone and you have to change the tense because they’re dead? I was going to drive Sam home and then take Amber on to Brimhurst. God, I wish I’d taken her all the way to her house. It’s just that we often all met in Kingsmarkham and I nearly always took her home—well, I did since her accident. She’d never driven since that happened. But I always dropped her at the end of Mill Lane. I never thought and I don’t think she did…”
“What accident would that be, Ben?” Bal asked.
“When she went into the back of that car in Brimhurst Lane.”
“She drove into the back of a car?”
“You must know about it.” Ben Miller revealed himself to be one of the many who took it for granted that CID knew the details of every traffic accident. “It was when some bastard dropped a lump of concrete off the Yorstone Bridge. It didn’t hit Amber, it hit the car in front of her and she went into the back of it. Well, anyone would have. It shook her up and she wouldn’t drive again. I mean, I expect she would have eventually, but it was early days, the crash only happened in June.”
“And that’s why you drove her home?”
“Did you think it was because she’d been drinking? She never touched alcohol. Or I never saw her. She used to, but she said she gave up before Brand was born, just like she gave up cigarettes.”
Hannah knew that Bal’s nod and slight smile indicated approval. He was well known for his almost pathological hatred of smoking. “Can you remember what time you dropped Amber off?” he asked.
“To the minute. As we were coming along the Myfleet road Amber noticed I’d never put my car clock forward. You know, what we’re supposed to do in March. ‘It’s not twelve-forty,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be later than that,’ and I said, ‘It’s one-forty, I keep forgetting to put the clock on and I’m not going to bother now. It’ll only have to go back again in a couple of months.’ That was just when I pulled up at the Mill Lane turning.”
“Did she stop in the car for a chat or anything?”
Ben Miller looked annoyed. “No, she didn’t. And there wasn’t any ‘anything.’ There never was. I’ve got a girlfriend. She got out, said she’d see me later and that was the last I saw of her. The last forever, my God.”
“She’d see you later?” said Hannah, failing to understand contemporary usage of the word. She was young but just too old for that.
“Next week, she meant.”
“And you drove straight home?”
“It took me maybe ten minutes.”
“Is there anyone who could confirm that?”
“I wouldn’t think so for a moment.”
Back in Kingsmarkham Hannah found Wexford in his office with Burden. “Miller’s sister came home from work as we were leaving. She’s a hairdresser. Pathetic that, isn’t it? The boy’s at university while she’s a hairdresser.”
“You’re a snob, Hannah,” said Burden.
“If you can be an education snob, I expect I am. I’m not a class snob. This woman couldn’t confirm the time Ben got home. She was asleep. She says she never heard him come in. I spoke on the phone to the mother and she said the same. I can’t think why he’d have hit her over the head with a brick, though, guv.”
“No, but we don’t know much about him yet, do we?” said Burden.
“We’re starting to know a good bit about her, though. She was driving one of the cars involved in that crash in Brimhurst Lane when some villain dropped a concrete block off the bridge.”
“Amber Marshalson was?” Wexford got up from his chair and came around the desk. “I was talking about it this morning, Mike, d’you remember? See if you can get something up on the computer, will you, Hannah?”
As usual, Wexford admired the facili
ty with which she did this. He would have got into a mess. He would have got into a hyperlink or inadvertently sent an e-mail attachment. Hannah described what she had found, reading parts of it from the site.
“There were two vehicles involved. A silver Honda and a gray Honda, both the same model. The silver Honda was driven by Amber Marshalson, aged seventeen, the gray Honda by James Andrew Ambrose, aged sixty-two, and his wife, Mavis, sixty, was in the passenger seat.
“The gray Honda was being driven in the direction of Myfleet, as was the silver Honda, which was behind it. A concrete block weighing approximately seventy pounds was dropped from the bridge as the two Hondas passed beneath, striking Ambrose’s car on the windscreen and bonnet, and causing the driver to lose control and collide with a tree. The silver Honda went into the back of the gray one. Amber Marshalson wasn’t hurt but Ambrose sustained serious injuries—of what kind not specified here—and so did Mavis Ambrose, including a number of broken bones and a punctured lung.”
“And Mavis Ambrose has since died,” said Burden gloomily. “We never got anyone for it. All we managed was to find where the concrete block came from. Probably came from, I should say. Off a building site in Stowerton. But we couldn’t trace it after that.”
“At the time,” Wexford said thoughtfully, “we took it that this was just a random piece of violence, what we’re supposed to believe is some deprived person taking revenge on society for his sufferings.” Hannah’s opening her mouth to protest he ignored. “But it wasn’t, was it? It wasn’t random and it wasn’t aimed at James Ambrose. It was aimed at Amber Marshalson, only he confused the two Hondas, one following close upon the other. It was getting dark, too dark to read number plates, and he got the gray when he meant to get the silver.”
“He caused that woman’s death,” said Hannah.
“She died in Amber’s stead. He failed with Amber in June, so he tried again in August and this time,” said Wexford grimly, “he got it right.”
CHAPTER 7
* * *
When they were children, she and her sister, their father had taught them how to convert one temperature scale into another, a useful formula no one had ever mentioned at school. In those days it was always Fahrenheit you wanted to convert into Celsius—or Centigrade as they called it then. Something about multiplying by nine, dividing by five, and subtracting thirty-two. Sylvia thought she ought to teach her boys. But not now. She wanted no encounters with Robin and Ben for at least an hour after what they had put her through. They had gone into the garden where they were playing in an inflatable pool, a grandparent’s gift, and she hoped they would stay there until teatime.
She had told them about the baby. She was showing now and very soon they would notice. So she told them, remembering all those years ago when her mother had told her she was pregnant with Sheila. What had she said in reply? She had a vague idea it was something like, “Will you love me best?” Like a policeman, Robin had said, “Who’s the father?”
No child would have said that when she was his age. She had blushed to hear it. “Dad is.” And when she was Robin’s age no child would have had to hear that either. Of course they wanted her and Neil to get back together. Never mind the two lovers she herself had had, never mind Naomi. They wanted their mother and their father living together again with them. All children wanted that.
“So Dad will be back here with us,” said Ben, a statement of fact, not a question.
“No,” she said. “No.”
This was too much for them. They looked at her. Then Ben got out his Game Boy and held it, staring at it. And now, when it had come to the crunch, she funked it, she chickened out. She couldn’t tell them—not now—that the baby wouldn’t be “theirs” but would go to Neil and Naomi, be put into Naomi’s arms before she could make herself miserable by bonding with it.
“Well, that’s it,” she said. “That’s my news. Now you know.”
They said nothing. What had she meant by saying to herself that they had put her through it? They had hardly said a word. It was her own deepening guilt that put her through it. Every day, nearly every hour. And this evening her parents were coming. She didn’t know what her father would say. She never did know with him.
The young people who Barry Vine and Lynn Fancourt interviewed all told much the same story. Amber had come alone to the Bling-Bling Club “some time around ten” and stayed until a bit after one. Chris Williamson said he didn’t notice the time and Charlotte Probyn said it was later because she and Chris left when Amber, Samantha, and Ben Miller did. Lara Bartlow had already gone with James Sothern. She wasn’t his girlfriend but they lived near each other on the Muriel Campden Estate. It was a puzzle to Sergeant Vine what they went to the club for. Ben, Amber, and Veryan Colgate didn’t drink, Liz Bellamy drank one glass of wine and the others beer. None of them danced because, it appeared, the boys wouldn’t. Lynn Fancourt couldn’t understand Vine’s attitude, but then she was much nearer their age.
“They’re with their mates, aren’t they? They talk, have a bit of a laugh. Then there’s the music.”
“Music,” said Barry who was well known for his preference for the operas of Bellini.
Samantha Collins was more interesting. Her dislike—jealousy?—of Amber was plain from the start of the interview. Unasked, she took a high moral tone. “I always thought it was wrong her going clubbing. I said so often enough to Ben, but he wouldn’t see it my way. She had a year-old baby at home, for God’s sake. I mean, never mind the ins and outs of whether anyone ought to get pregnant at just seventeen, she did and she’d got the baby and she ought to have got a better sense of responsibility, don’t you think?”
Neither Barry nor Lynn had the least intention of saying what they thought and Barry believed in never stopping a possible witness when in full flood.
“I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there’s nothing I’m saying I hadn’t said to her face. I believe in speaking my mind. Those parents of hers—well, her dad. He acted like he was broken-hearted when she told them she was pregnant. He didn’t even like Brand. I’m not saying her and him’d have been unkind to him, but would you leave your baby boy with people who didn’t care for him? To go clubbing? And it wasn’t just once in a blue moon, it was every week. But everything goes right for some people, doesn’t it? You have to admit. I mean, getting the offer of a flat to live in! In London! I should be so lucky. I’d just love to live away from home. Me and Ben’d move in together if we could get a place, but not a hope. Not for years and years with prices the way they are.”
Finding a brief second or two of silence in which to intervene, Lynn asked her to tell them about the evening in question.
“What’s to tell? Ben picked me up and we went to Bling-Bling. She came after around half an hour or a bit after that. She was later than normal, I don’t know why. We all three left together, which actually I never liked. I mean, Ben might have been her friend but he’s my boyfriend and you don’t want a third person there with her ears on stalks when you’re saying good night, do you?”
“What time was that?”
“Maybe one-fifteen, one-twenty. It’s no distance—well, you can see. I’d walk it but not at that hour, no thanks. Besides, why leave those two together? I had to for the drive to Brimhurst, but I didn’t like it, I can tell you. Actually, I may as well be honest with you, I couldn’t wait for her to move into that place of the Hillands.”
“She died before she could do that,” said Barry and if there was admonition in his tone he didn’t care. The interview left him with a strong feeling that the motive for Amber Marshalson’s murder had something to do with the Crenthorne Heath flat.
Wexford, alone in his office, was having much the same idea. He had phoned Vivien Hilland and in the light of what he had learned of the road crash on June 24, asked her when the offer of the flat was first made.
“I don’t know exactly when. But wait a minute—yes, I do. It was some time in June, two or three weeks befo
re Amber’s birthday. Amber was going to be eighteen in July. You know how these days they must have a party when they’re eighteen and probably another when they’re twenty-one. We’d been talking about it and then my husband came in and whispered something. I went out of the room with him and he said to me, why not offer her the flat when Mr. and Mrs. Klein go in October. Well, I went straight back in there and made the offer and she was absolutely ecstatic, said I couldn’t have given her a better birthday present.”
“When was her birthday, Mrs. Hilland?”
“Let me see. July the first, I think. No, July the second.”
“So your conversation about the flat was mid-June?”
“It must have been.”
“Before the car accident Amber was involved in?”
Light dawned. “Oh, yes, of course! It was about a week before.”
So was the attempt to kill her on June 24 made to prevent her having the flat or to make sure she never reached the age of eighteen? It failed. He must find out what happened when Amber was eighteen. Did she inherit money and, in the event of her death, would someone else inherit it? Unlikely, for if she were financially sound she would hardly have needed to avail herself of the Hillands’ offer. Another visit to the Marshalsons shouldn’t be put off for too long. Meanwhile he must scrutinize the file on the concrete block dropped from the bridge and the death of Mrs. Ambrose.
A dearth of witnesses was one of the first things he noticed. James Ambrose remembered hardly anything of what had happened. Mavis Ambrose was dead and so was Amber Marshalson by this time. Approaching the dip under Yorstone Bridge, Ambrose remembered only seeing a figure on the bridge, a vague shape, but man or woman he couldn’t say. He thought the figure, of which he could only see the outline, was wearing a jacket with a hood. Wexford looked up from the file. At first it seemed too good to be true. A man in a hood had been on Yorstone Bridge before the attempt to kill Amber Marshalson and a man in a hood had been seen among the trees in Mill Lane before the successful attempt. Almost certainly the same man? He read on.