by Ruth Rendell
‘The vicar in question was the Reverend Sarah Hussain,’ said Vine, ‘incumbent of St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham.’
Wexford had expected an astonished reaction. There was nothing, no change of colour to that bland smooth face, no sudden frown, no gasp. Gerald Watson said slowly, as if making an effort to recall, ‘I once knew a Sarah Hussain, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years ago. I was living in Reading at the time. It can’t be the same one, this woman was a teacher. You say the woman who was killed was a vicar?’
Vine glanced at Wexford but Wexford shook his head, leaving it to the policeman to speak. It was better that way. Vine said, ‘That’s right, sir. Miss Hussain took holy orders about five years ago. She was living in Kingsmarkham with her daughter Clarissa, aged seventeen.’
And now Watson reacted. He got to his feet, stood in silence staring at Vine and then sat down again. Sat down heavily, said, ‘I don’t hold with women clergy. They’ll be having women bishops next.’
Vine ignored this. But Wexford registered silently, another one. ‘So you had had no contact with the Reverend Sarah Hussain since you last saw her eighteen years ago in Reading?’
‘I’ve told you so.’
In fact, he hadn’t. Now Wexford did speak but again in a courteous tone. ‘Was your parting from Miss Hussain eighteen years ago amicable, sir?’
Watson’s look seemed to say that since Wexford wasn’t a police officer he had no business asking questions. He turned his small grey eyes on Vine and said, ‘A daughter, did you say?’
‘A daughter aged seventeen called Clarissa. You didn’t know?’
‘Seeing I haven’t seen Sarah Hussain for eighteen years, obviously not. And whether our parting was amicable is irrelevant. It was and is private.’
‘This is a murder inquiry, sir. In such an investigation nothing can be called private.’
‘For God’s sake, I haven’t seen the woman for nearly twenty years.’ In twenty years the human voice doesn’t change much, Wexford thought. If it was grating and harsh with a tinny undertone now, so it would have been then. The grey eyes had turned on him and their expression seemed to show that Watson was reading his thoughts. We shall be getting grumbles to the Police Complaints Commission or I’m a chief constable. ‘Is that all?’
‘Not quite, sir,’ said Vine. ‘Perhaps you won’t mind telling us where you were during the afternoon of Thursday October the eleventh.’
‘I would mind very much,’ said Watson. ‘And now I refuse to answer any more questions.’
It was a resolve he probably would have adhered to if his silence when Vine proceeded and asked him if he had ever visited Kingsmarkham, was anything to go by. He spoke once more, to say, ‘That’s enough.’
When they were outside with the prospect of a long drive from Stevenage to Kingsmarkham before them, Vine said, ‘I don’t believe he didn’t know Sarah Hussain was murdered or that she was a vicar. Do you?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Wexford. ‘He knew. But why pretend?’
‘He’s a lawyer,’ Vine said gloomily. ‘I hate having to question lawyers. They’re always too bloody clever by half.’
‘He wasn’t.’
‘No, but he thought he was. Would you mind if I played some bits from The Daughter of the Regiment on the way back?’
Vine was well known to be passionately fond of Donizetti.
‘Mind? I’d love it.’
‘There’s some dodgy things goes on when it comes to property,’ said Maxine in her conversational rather confrontational style, leaning on her mop handle in the fashion of a maid in a Noël Coward comedy. ‘Now it turns out that that man Legg never had no right to rent that place in Peck Road to my Jason. It don’t belong to him, it don’t even belong to his wife, it’s council property and it’s a well-known fact you can’t rent out what you’re renting yourself. Jason never knew. Why would he? Now the wife as was – they was divorced – is coming back from Spain and wants to live there. In Jason’s place in Peck Road, I mean. Don’t think you and Nicky and Isabella can move in with me, I said to him, not while I’ve got your three sisters at home. But he said it wouldn’t come to that as Legg had plans for another place they could go into. And where might that be? I said. Ladysmith Road, he said. It’s not ready yet, he said, but it soon will be and if you go in there you’ll see it’s a hundred times better than Peck Road. Anyway, there’s bound to be a drawback somewhere, I said. There’s always a fly in the ointment. Yes, well, there is, Mum, he says. The rent’s a lot higher. But there’s three bedrooms, he says, and if Nicky has another one, we’re going to need them . . .’
Dora had come into the room by this time. Her husband appeared stupefied, his head sinking against the arm of the sofa and his eyes closing. She spoke in her clearest, briskest voice, ‘Well, that seems to be having a happy outcome, then. Perhaps you’d like to do the dining-room windows before you go.’
‘All right, I’m going to. No problem. I just wanted to pass all that on to Mr Wexford. It’s sort of in his line, isn’t it? I mean, there’s fraud in it somewhere and cheating the council and all sorts of things what shouldn’t go on. I thought he’d see his way to doing something about it or telling those as can . . .’
Wexford woke up, sat up, resisted saying that he wasn’t asleep but had heard everything Maxine said. Rather wildly as he made his escape he called out that he was on his way to passing it all on to those who could do something about it. Out in the street, getting into his car, he saw that he was almost late. He had just seven minutes to get to this conference Burden was calling to survey what progress was being made in the Sarah Hussain investigation. There would be very little attention paid to Jason Sams’s problems.
A greatly enlarged photograph of Sarah was pinned to the noticeboard, and with Karen Malahyde seated at the computer, a clearer and more recent one appeared on the screen. The rather gaunt face and the deep-set eyes that lay in hollows of shadow expressed a powerful intelligence. Wexford, as a committed atheist, had long ago passed through that phase of pondering on the anomaly – for it had seemed an anomaly to him – of brilliant intellectuals finding it possible, indeed imperative, to believe in God. Notable figures, the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, theologians, this woman. He had long come to accept it. They saw or understood or grasped what was denied him. Nor did they ever seem to be turned away from their religious faith when bad things happened to them but rather to see it as strengthened. Sarah Hussain had suffered from the sight of poverty in what was her country as well as England was, had lost a man she had presumably loved, had been raped, given birth to a child who was the result of that rape, and, still committed to God, been murdered. No doubt she had died sending her soul to God.
He realised that he had missed a lot of what was being said. Still, he had heard it all before, knew that Burden still had a sneaking hankering after Duncan Crisp the gardener, his suspicions wandering sometimes to Dennis Cuthbert the vicar’s warden, but was more firmly fixed on those two men who had played known and dramatic parts in Sarah Hussain’s life eighteen years before.
‘We are not going to identify any recognisable sort of motive here,’ he was saying. ‘And searching for a motive, such as jealousy or envy or gain, is only going to hinder any progress we’re making. You, Lynn, suggested that you couldn’t see what possible motive Gerald Watson, for instance, could have had.’ He paused and the picture on the screen changed from Sarah to a head-and-shoulders image of Watson. Where on earth did that come from? Wexford asked himself, almost immediately answering that, these days, by means of technology, you could get hold of pictures of almost anyone you wanted to. ‘Well, I’m saying that it doesn’t matter,’ Burden went on. ‘Human nature is so strange and the human mind so diverse that although a perpetrator will have a motive, it may be so obscure as to be totally hidden from us, buried deep, so to speak, in his psyche.’ Wexford had never heard Burden speak in these terms before. He was impressed but still dubious as to where this might be leading.
‘This, I believe, is the case with Watson. Barry will have something to say about this shortly. Before that, I’d just add that our prime goal today, and maybe for days, is to find the Asian man, last seen in Reading eighteen years ago, who raped Sarah Hussain and is the father of Clarissa Hussain. But there again, when we find him, we are not looking for motive or speculating what that motive might be.’
He sat down. In that coffee-coloured suit and coffee-and-silver tie, he really was, Wexford thought, ‘the glass wherein the noble youth did dress themselves’. Or should have been if this scruffy lot lounging at desks had ever thought of following his example. Barry was one of the worst, the pockets of his imitation leather jacket swollen and split from carrying too many Donizetti CDs about. And I’m as bad, he reflected, in my twenty-year-old suit and open-necked shirt.
Barry was speaking now, airing a theory he had said nothing about on their way back from Stevenage. Watson, he believed, had been obsessed with Sarah Hussain all those years, nursing a bitter resentment. Such an obsession, fuelled with hatred, could easily have culminated in a determination to kill her. Vine, Wexford thought, seemed to have forgotten all about Burden’s instruction to his team to forget about motive. The image on the screen changed to a kind of chart with Sarah Hussain’s name and photograph in the middle of it and various arrows radiating out from it to the names of Georgina Bray, Thora Kilmartin, Duncan Crisp, Dennis Cuthbert, Gerald Watson and, to use Burden’s sobriquet for him, Ahmed X. Clarissa’s name was absent, but when the chart disappeared her face, so beautiful and film-starish, filled the screen.
Burden turned to Wexford and asked him if he had anything to contribute. ‘Not now,’ Wexford said, and when he found himself alone with his friend, ‘I see the apologetic racism is still going strong and the not so apologetic.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Ahmed X.’
‘Are you saying I’m to be deferential to a rapist who was probably an illegal immigrant?’
Wexford’s smile turned into a burst of laughter. ‘Is there any coffee going in this place?’
‘Come upstairs with me and we’ll send for some.’
Burden sulked for a while, said when the coffee came, ‘There’s no pleasing you,’ and stirred two lumps of sugar into his cup. ‘Lynn’s talking to Clarissa now.’
‘Still half-term, is it?’
‘I suppose so. She’s going to ask her about her father. Ask her if she knows who he is. Lynn’s the best person for the job. I’m glad I haven’t got to do it.’
‘Me too,’ said Wexford, re-establishing their amicable relationship.
CHAPTER NINE
DIANE STOW’S HOMECOMING was no longer such a long way off. Fiona wanted to know what had happened to the furniture and equipment which had been in the house in Peck Road when Diane moved out of it. Or, more to the point, when Jeremy moved out of it about a year later and in with her.
‘We’ve got some of it here.’ Jeremy found the whole business profoundly boring. ‘That table over there and wasn’t there a microwave?’
‘There was,’ said Fiona, ‘but you put a tin plate in it and buggered the thing up.’
‘I left a lot there for Jason and what’s-her-name.’
‘Only they’ll take stuff with them and what happens when Diane comes home and finds she hasn’t got a bed to sleep in?’
‘I’ll think about it. Hush up a minute, will you? I’m watching The Voice.’
Relations between Clarissa Hussain and Georgina Bray were far from good. Clarissa would stay until Christmas, or maybe until Christmas was over, she told Lynn Fancourt, but after that . . .
‘I’m supposed to go to Mrs Kilmartin but how can I go to school from where she lives? I’ve got to go to school, I’ve got my A levels next summer. Why can’t I live on my own? I can, I’m over sixteen, and in January I’ll be over eighteen. Why can’t I?’
Lynn was nonplussed. This wasn’t at all what she had anticipated when she had agreed to meet Clarissa in the cafe called Twice because it was situated at 200 Kingsmarkham High Street. In law, at her age, Clarissa could live on her own and where she liked, but Lynn sensed that she would be laying up trouble for herself (not to mention the girl) if she agreed with this proposition.
‘Well, I suppose you could, but where?’
‘In the Vicarage. Why not? It’s empty, no one’s there. Why shouldn’t I live there?’
Lynn was on firm ground there. It was a question to which she very well knew the answer. ‘Because the Church of England wouldn’t allow it. The Vicarage belongs to them and when anything happens to the – well, the incumbent, I’m afraid they take it back. If it’s a spouse and child, like in your mum’s case. Three months, I think, they allow, but I’d have to check that.’
‘That’s so unfair!’
She sounded – and looked, flushing deeply – so young. It wasn’t unfair, of course it wasn’t; it was, Lynn thought philosophically, just the way of the world. She hoped their coffee wouldn’t be long in coming. This encounter wasn’t going at all the way she had hoped. She had to get on to Clarissa’s antecedents but she couldn’t just leave things there. ‘You’ll be going to university next autumn and that means you’ll have somewhere to live. Meanwhile –’ she knew she was ducking the issue – ‘we’ll have to find a place for you.’ She retrieved things. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll ask around.’
Simultaneously with the arrival of the coffee and pastries of a standard Lynn would hardly have thought Twice capable of, Clarissa burst into tears. ‘Why did Mum have to die?’ she sobbed. ‘Why?’
Lynn wanted to get on but she had to make some sort of answer and she could only say that this was something no one knew. To Clarissa’s rejoinder that God should have stopped it only God didn’t exist she could only shrug and shake her head. Clarissa grabbed a handful of paper napkins and scrubbed at her eyes.
‘I’ll be all right now. It’s just that I liked the Vicarage, I loved it, even though Mum died there. But now I know I’ll never live there with Mum again it – well, it breaks my heart.’
‘I can imagine,’ Lynn said, though she couldn’t. She watched Clarissa reach for consolation in the shape of a chocolate eclair, then said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk to you about this but I assure you it’s necessary. Do you ever see your father?’
At any rate, she hadn’t shocked or even astonished the girl. ‘I don’t know who he is.’
Lynn said nothing, just continued to look enquringly at Clarissa.
‘I’ll tell you everything I know but that’s not much. I think he’s still alive, he may not be any older than Mum was. She said she’d tell me when I like got to be eighteen. That’s in January, January the twentieth.’ Clarissa turned away from Lynn, stared at the cafe window. A sob caught at her throat. ‘But I’ll never get there, will I? Not for Mum.’ The tears came fast after and she sobbed into her hands.
Lynn gave her a tissue, then the whole packet. She would have liked to hug her but of course she couldn’t. Unreasonably perhaps, she felt suddenly angry with Sarah Hussain. Keeping the girl in the kind of suspense that now might never end. Clarissa scrubbed at her face with handfuls of tissues, took a deep breath and then gave a long sigh. Crying had made her face swell without disfiguring it.
‘Go on. I’ll be OK now.’
Lynn thought the next question that came to mind was worth a try, though fairly hopeless. She was to be surpised.
‘Gerry Watson? He was always turning up, like a stalker, I suppose you’d say.’
‘The solicitor?’ The one who lives in Stevenage? Are we talking about the same man?’
‘Got a smooth flat face and a very little mouth. Pompous.’
Lynn had never seen him. ‘He came here? He knew who your mother was and what she did?’
‘Sure.’
‘Tell me about him,’ said Lynn.
A lot had happened since yesterday. Those were Burden’s words when he phoned Wexford and invited him to come into the
police station. Wexford wanted to say sarcastically, ‘Not another conference?’ but he restrained himself. No doubt discoveries had been made, perhaps the identity of Clarissa’s father. Even if it had, what good could that be to Burden? Imagining alien motives and mindsets, Wexford tried to picture a rapist who would kill his victim. During or immediately after the attack, yes, that was common, his motive to prevent the woman identifying him, but eighteen years later? Because perhaps he had asked to see his daughter? Why wait all those years? A distant father or putative father might make that request when his child was a baby of two or three years old but when she had become a woman? There might be an explanation for such behaviour (apart from paranoid schizophrenia) but he couldn’t think of one.
As he crossed the police station forecourt, a car swept past him, stopped by a flight of steps leading to the basement and two officers got out, followed by a handcuffed man of about twenty-five. Wexford didn’t recognise him, noting only the preponderance of tattoos on exposed parts of his body, neck, upper chest, arms and the ankles revealed by short loose jeans. A plethora of metal was anchored to his nostrils, eyebrows, ears and lower lip. As he had often thought before, such ironmongery must be very uncomfortable and what would happen when you tried to kiss someone? Did you take it off first or was it perhaps sexually attractive? The two policemen hustled the man down the steps to the door at the foot. Behind that door were interview rooms and Kingsmarkham’s two cells, for one of which the detainee was no doubt destined. The local youth, particularly the Stowerton gangs, hinted darkly that it was behind this door that the torture of suspects was carried out.
‘Sometimes,’ he quoted to himself, ‘these cogitations still amaze the troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.’ Well, it should be the noon’s repose now, a pleasant after-lunch rest with Gibbon. He confessed to himself that he was quite interested in learning what Burden had found out or what Lynn and maybe Barry had found out for him.
Burden was in his office that had once been Wexford’s own office, the room unchanged but for the absence of padded chairs and the rosewood desk which was his own and which he had removed on retirement. In its place was a horror (Wexford kept this description strictly to himself) of stainless steel and very expensive black plastic. More chairs than would ever be needed stood about the room and these, also of some slippery black substance, had narrow seats and high backs with cut-outs in the shape of dotless question marks. In one of these Lynn was sitting.