by Ruth Rendell
Georgina Bray arrived with her husband, a mild-looking man, though appearances of course were deceptive, and behind them Thora Kilmartin. A host of parishioners followed, many of whom Wexford knew by sight, and, rather to his surprise, Mike Burden. The detective superintendent came to sit beside him.
‘What brings you here?’
‘When you had my job,’ said Burden, ‘didn’t you always attend things like this?’
‘I suppose I did.’
As the organist moved on to some Handel Wexford did recognise, the Overture to Scipione, Mrs Morgan of Dragonsdene and her housekeeper Miss Green arrived. Clarissa walked up to the communion rail and then into the chancel, unaccompanied this time by Robin who came to sit down beside Dora. Clarissa was so beautiful, Wexford thought, her loveliness transcending those hideous garments she wore, that the sight of her made him wonder why comely women bothered to spend so much on clothes and so much time choosing them when their own good looks were enough. An old proverb came back to him: good wine needs no bush. She spoke about her mother, how good she had been, a true Christian, a perfect mother, one who, if she had been spared, would have brought many errant souls back to this church. Wexford listened but all the time he was watching the pale-faced man in the front row whose profile he could see from where he sat and whose eyes were fixed on the speaker, who leaned forward and lifted his head the better to devour with his eyes everything about the girl who stood and spoke. Who could he be? Sarah Hussain had had so few men in her life. A cousin? A one-time boyfriend no one knew about? He would ask him, but ask as a private person, not a former police officer.
Clarissa went up into the pulpit and read a poem by George Herbert. The last lines Wexford thought might have applied to Sarah; they were well chosen.
‘I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme
Who plainly say, My God, My King.’
Dennis Cuthbert looked angry. No doubt he expected and would have preferred a passage from the Authorised Version of the Bible. They sang a hymn Wexford didn’t know but Dora did. The rector of the parish of St Cyprian, Myringham, gave a twenty-minute-long tribute, there was a prayer, then another hymn, during which the fair man and old woman in the fur coat left. ‘Slipped out’ would be the phrase, Wexford thought. He attempted to follow them but Dora stopped him. ‘No, darling, you mustn’t, you really mustn’t.’
When it was over and they were all filing out, the woman in the fur coat and the pale man were getting into their car, the Jaguar driver holding the door open for the old woman. He no longer looked surly but solicitous. Wexford heard him say, ‘There you are, Victoria. Take your time,’ as she slowly eased herself into the back seat. He looked for Thora Kilmartin among the departing guests but she had gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT WAS SUNDAY evening when Fiona left Framhurst and drove home. Her mother was much better. Her next-door neighbour would look in next morning and do the necessary shopping. Fiona would of course phone as soon as she got home and if she said she would do it, she would do it. In this respect as in many others she was unlike Jeremy. It was ten minutes to eight when she let herself into the cottage. Jeremy was lying on the hall floor. She dropped down onto her knees beside him and laid her hand on his forehead. It was ice-cold and she didn’t have to feel for a pulse, she knew he was dead. She walked, rather unsteadily, into the living room where she sat down on the sofa and called 999. He was just dead, she thought, a natural death, he hadn’t been strong, he had those sort of fugues and maybe his heart was bad. For a moment she felt a flash of guilt for all the times she had been impatient with him. She was on the phone to her mother, saying she was home, saying nothing about finding Jeremy dead, when an ambulance arrived.
One of the paramedics told her what she already knew, that Jeremy had ‘passed away’, but he added that he didn’t like the look of those bruises on his face and the police should be called. That made her feel rather weak and she had to sit down, fearful she would faint. By this time her pregnancy showed and it was the paramedic who called the police before making her a cup of tea. Jeremy’s body lay where she had found it.
The police came, far more than Fiona expected, photographers, a doctor named Crocker who was retired but called in as a sort of stopgap until the arrival of the pathologist, someone to measure things and someone to put blue-and-white tape round the front garden, and a woman DS called Karen Malahyde, and a DC called Lynn Fancourt. All these women, thought Fiona, what an excellent thing that was. She was feeling better, partly due to the solicitude shown by those two women, both of them anxious for her to take care of herself. Was there anyone they could fetch to be with her?
Fiona said her mother and once she had got over the shock of hearing that her daughter’s partner was dead, Mrs Morrison, coughing and sneezing and with a raised temperature, arrived in a taxi. Dr Crocker gave Fiona a sleeping pill and the two women were eventually left alone.
Next day they had to put up with a police search of the cottage. It was Lynn Fancourt who found Diane Stow’s letter, a threatening letter as Burden interpreted it. Had Diane, or more likely Johann Heinemann, caused the injuries that resulted in Jeremy Legg’s death? Both of them denied having anything to do with it but since they alibied each other their denials were considered unsound.
Wexford, at home reading, knew nothing of this. That Jeremy was dead wasn’t released to the media until the afternoon. As far as anyone knew, as far as the Sams family knew, and they knew it only from Jason, Jeremy had had a richly deserved beating which left him a little the worse for wear but in no danger.
‘Now no one could deny,’ said Maxine, ‘that Isabella would never have had that nasty fit but for her getting a contusion in Legg’s car crash. And she could have another one at any time. Caesars, doctors call them.’ Reminded of the Roman Empire, Wexford laid aside Gibbon, making sure his sigh was silent. ‘No one could blame my Jason,’ she went on. ‘There was a lesson to be learned, as they say, and what he did was to teach him a lesson, make sure he realises what he’s done. He went over to Stringfield and gave Legg a sock on the jaw and then another one, just the two, and then he left him there. Let’s hope Legg’s thinking about what he’s done now. Let’s hope he’s learned that driving with a baby in the car when you’re over the limit just isn’t on.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Wexford neutrally.
Maxine had been hustled away by Dora and urged to clean the silver, leaving Wexford alone with Gibbon for the remainder of her stay. He seemed to be reading about a kind of tsunami. In the second year of the reign of Valentinian and Valens, on the morning of the twenty-first day of July, the greatest part of the Roman world was shaken by a violent and destructive earthquake. The impression was communicated to the waters; the shores of the Mediterranean were left dry, by the sudden retreat of the sea; great quantities of fish were caught with the hand; large vessels were stranded on the mud; and a curious spectator amused his eye, or rather his fancy, by contemplating the various appearance of valleys and mountains, which had never, since the formation of the globe, been exposed to the sun. He was reading of the tide which rolled in and the enormous flood that succeeded it when his phone began to ring. It was Burden.
‘You’ve heard about Jeremy Legg?’
‘Something,’ said Wexford cautiously. ‘He’s had a beating?’
‘He’s been killed. It looks like murder but we’re still waiting for Mavrikiev’s report. Keep it to yourself of course, but his ex-wife and her boyfriend are in line to be suspects. Can you get down here?’
‘Of course,’ said Wexford.
Maxine had never said that the news she imparted to him and Dora was in confidence. She certainly would have done if she had known of Legg’s death. Wexford had been a policeman, she was well aware of that, but he was one no longer and as far as she knew the police never shared their secrets and mysteries with him or he his with them. She had told him of her son’s action in ignorance
and innocence. But now he knew that Jason Sams was responsible for beating up Jeremy Legg he was bound to tell Burden, wasn’t he? For killing Jeremy Legg? Of course he was.
He took his time, not hurrying, thinking, walking quite slowly to the police station. Perhaps he must remember that Maxine had never asked him not to repeat what she told him and he had never promised to keep silent. But he knew it was that ignorance and innocence which led her to confide in him and knew too that she would never have said all those things if she had known he would repeat them to Detective Superintendent Burden. And by the time the police station came in sight, he knew that he must repeat them. He couldn’t let Diane Stow and Johann Heinemann continue as suspects.
At his desk, reading a report Wexford guessed must have come from the pathologist, Burden looked up as he came in and laid the papers aside.
‘If he’d been found sooner,’ he said, ‘if he’d not lain there for so long before his girlfriend came back and found him, it looks as if he might be alive now.’
‘But he died of the beating, didn’t he?’
‘He died of a heart attack. According to Mavrikiev, and whatever you think of him he’s very sound, he had a bad heart, seriously bad. The details are all here. Any trauma (Mavrikiev’s word) would have been enough to trigger a heart attack. Mavrikiev even thinks he had a small one as a result of that car crash. This beating he had was just too much. But you can’t call it murder. Manslaughter perhaps or unlawful killing.’
Wexford was silent. He sat there gazing at a horrible calendar Burden had on the wall, a calendar with photographs of police stations across the United Kingdom, one for each month, old, recent or fairly recent, rustic and urban and one built in the thirties in Hollywood Moderne style. The photograph for December was of a police station in the Yorkshire Wolds thickly covered in snow. He must have turned pale or gone red, something like that, for Burden said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m fine.’
‘What is it?’
‘You know Jason Sams’s mother works for us? She’s our cleaner. Well, of course you know. She talks. I mean, she talks all the time and mostly about Jason Sams and his girlfriend, partner, and the baby Isabella.’
‘And that’s a problem?’
‘I don’t know if what she told me was in confidence. At any rate, I’m sure she didn’t expect me to come running to you. And I don’t want to but I must. Of course I must.’ Most unwillingly, Wexford told Burden what Maxine had told him, the cause of the trouble between Jason Sams and Jeremy Legg, the beating, the abandonment of Jeremy on the floor in his own home.
‘You were quite right to tell me,’ said Burden, ‘but of course you know that.’ He was silent for a moment but it wasn’t Wexford’s kind of silence. He was simply pondering and at last he said, ‘You realise what this does, don’t you? I mean, you realise the effect of this?’
‘Should I?’
‘It puts a different complexion on Jason Sams’s alibi of Duncan Crisp. He is no longer the trustworthy incorruptible store manager whose evidence that Crisp was in the store at the crucial time on the afternoon of October the eleventh is sound. It immediately becomes unsound.’
‘But those two women, Mike, the checkout woman and the supervisor?’
‘I’ll bet you anything you like that their evidence will be more than shaken, will be revoked, when they know that Mr Sams’s can’t be relied on. They’ll both be uncertain of the day. Maybe it was the twelfth or the tenth, they’ll say.’
‘Yes, but wait a minute, beating up a man out of retribution and being an unreliable witness, a liar in fact, are two completely different offences.’
Burden said almost triumphantly, ‘Try saying that in court. Can’t you imagine some lawyer, and not even a very clever lawyer, learning that Duncan Crisp – supposing that he’s charged with Sarah Hussain’s murder – relies for his alibi principally on the word of a man who savagely beats someone with a heart condition and then leaves him alone to die, a man who by this time would doubtless be in prison?’
‘All right, Mike. You win.’
‘In my position, you would have thought just the same.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CRISES OF CONSCIENCE, if that was the way to put them, had never come his way before, or not to such an extent. He had had all that heart-searching and lying awake at night and bad dreams over taking away Thora Kilmartin’s letter and now it was due to happen all over again. Should he tell Maxine that he had imparted to Burden what she had told him? That she might say she understood he had to do that was out of the question, that she might recognise he had a duty to do that was impossible. And yet he had really had no choice. About that business with the letter he had simply told Burden after a night of agony. Now he had to tell Maxine before the sun went down. Or, more realistically, resolve to tell her in the morning in such a way as to make deviating from this decision impossible. There was only one way to do this.
He found his wife in the conservatory, examining one after another of the tired midwinter plants while outside the window a thin drizzle of snow fell.
‘What shall I do?’ he said when he had told her of his dilemma which was almost a dilemma no longer. ‘If I confess to her that I’ve told Mike she’ll almost certainly leave. But I must tell her.’
‘Oh, yes, you must tell her. I shall have to put up with doing without her if that’s what happens. But, darling, I do wish you’d found a way of handling her, like, for instance, getting up and walking out, saying, “I don’t want to hear,” and putting your hands over your ears. Too late now, though.’
His confession in the morning came, unbeknown to him, after DS Karen Malahyde and DC Stephen Ryan had arrived at 123 Ladysmith Road to question Jason Sams. His mother happened to have dropped in on her way to work and heard some of it. By the time she reached Wexford’s house her anger was building up, was simmering, and when he began speaking of how he had been obliged to pass on to the police details of Jason’s attack, she exploded in wrath. It was much worse than he had expected so that he even wondered if she was going to jump on him and, screaming in his face, use her long red nails. He took a step back, saying no more, knowing that anything he said now would make things worse. Her own tears silenced her. First it was noisy sobs, then quiet crying as she sat down in a chair, laid her head on its arm and bathed her face in tears. Dora came in and brought her not brandy or an aspirin but a small glass of Oloroso sherry.
Calmer after the sedating shot of alcohol, Maxine spoke in tragedy queen tones. But, as Wexford told himself, she was a tragedy queen. Her only son was in dire trouble and if tragedy is a fate someone has brought on herself this situation fulfilled the definition perfectly. ‘I can’t go on working here,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen the last of me.’
‘I appreciate that, Maxine,’ said Dora, ‘and I appreciate all you’ve done for us.’
‘There’s nothing you can say to make me change my mind.’
As Wexford said later, they didn’t even make the attempt. Maxine went home to cry some more and to think of ways she could avoid having to tell Jason how the police had known.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ONCE JASON SAMS had appeared in court on a charge of manslaughter, Mrs Wilson, the checkout assistant, and Mrs Khan, the supervisor, were interviewed again. Because there was no way of preventing this happening, both had heard about their store manager’s court appearance and what his offence was alleged to be. It was hard to say if they were affected by this but both changed their evidence. Mrs Wilson said she was confused and she had only said the date she had what she called the ‘ding-dong’ with Duncan Crisp was 11 October because Mr Sams had said so. A man who would beat up another man for no reason except that he’d been driving a car and had a crash, well, he couldn’t be trusted, could he? Mrs Khan now remembered overhearing the noisy row that had taken place in the store on 23 November between Jason Sams and Jeremy Legg, shouting and swearing, and she’d lost all respect for Mr Sams since that date.
She wouldn’t trust him an inch.
Duncan Crisp, who had gone back to work at Dragonsdene, also shouted and swore when the police came to question him again. After calming down he said he had just remembered seeing a young man through the French windows at the back of the Vicarage on 11 October. It was the middle of the afternoon and still light, as it would have been until 6 p.m. before the clocks went back. Why hadn’t he remembered before? You couldn’t account for what you remembered and what you forgot, Crisp said.
‘It’s an eleventh-hour or last-ditch try at getting himself off the hook,’ said Burden when he and Wexford met for lunch at Farewell to the Raj, the Indian restaurant both liked.
‘Did he give a description?’
‘Of the young man? Yes, the kind of thing that might apply to almost any dark-haired male in his thirties. He added what was plainly an afterthought, “One of them Asiatics, most likely.” Crisp is a real racist. The whole thing was trumped up.’
‘Supposing there was such a man,’ said Wexford, ‘could he have seen him from the Dragonsdene garden?’
‘Going for his tea with Mrs Morgan and Miss Green he could have done or coming back from his tea.’