No Man's Nightingale

by Ruth Rendell

  As rigid and as pale as a statue, Clarissa stared at him. Then, staring, she screamed.

  Her screams came quickly, one after another, the classic hysteria. To stop them you were supposed to slap her face. He couldn’t, he dared not. Christian Steyner was aghast. He made a little sound of pain or dismay. Wexford stood up, spoke to the screaming girl but afterwards he couldn’t recall what he had said to her. Someone came to the door, knocked at it, called out, ‘Is everything all right?’ as if it could possibly be.

  ‘There’s a man called Fairfax in reception.’ It was the first time he had ever referred to Robin as a man. ‘Ask him to come here, would you?’

  Clarissa was sobbing now, throwing herself up and down against the back of the armchair she sat in. On an impulse he added, ‘And brandy. Would you bring some brandy?’

  Robin’s footsteps sounded running down the passage. He burst in, drawn by the sound of Clarissa’s crying. ‘What have you done to her?’ he demanded of Wexford as a waiter or barman arrived with a glass of brandy on a tray.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Wexford said, and to Steyner, ‘Let’s go outside somewhere.’

  Clarissa was in Robin’s arms. Wexford led the way out and Steyner followed, visibly shaken. The two of them finding their way to the lounge, he said, ‘I didn’t expect her to take it like that.’

  ‘It’s not every day you’re told by your father that he was presented to your mother in a bottle.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  They sat down. Wexford took his eyes from Steyner’s face. Now, for the first time, and oddly it was when the girl was out of sight, he saw the resemblance. The same blue eyes, but brighter, the same features, the same smooth and rather shiny skin, though hers was darker.

  ‘It was like that, though,’ Steyner said. ‘The bottle, I mean. I never saw her again. She wrote and told me she had had a daughter born on 20 January 1995. She would tell her about her – her origins on her eighteenth birthday. I never had a description of the child, I never had a photograph. But I never wanted any of that. As far as I was concerned, I was just a – well, a producer of a biological constituent. I told no one but my partner and that was years later.’

  Wexford nodded. He could think of nothing to say.

  ‘My partner told me to forget all about it. He advised me not to make contact with the girl, to keep out of it. He said the chances were that Sarah would fabricate some story of a love affair when the time came but I knew Sarah. I knew that wasn’t on. And then Sarah was killed and what was I to do?’

  ‘What you did, evidently,’ said Wexford. ‘Tell me something. If we’d had that meeting you wanted, the one that was to be prior to this one, would you have told me what you told Clarissa?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Wexford shrugged. ‘I’ve never in my life advised anyone to lie but I think that’s the advice I’d have given you. Lie. Say her mother had confided in your mother that she’d had an affair. Something like that. It would have been better than this.’

  ‘It’s too late now.’

  A waitress appeared from somewhere, came up to them and asked Wexford if there was anything she could bring them. An enquiring glance at Steyner fetched only a shake of his head.

  ‘I may as well disappear,’ Steyner said. He took a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘Tim? It’s all over. See you in an hour.’

  It wasn’t until he had gone that Wexford realised Tim might well be a diminutive of Timon. Steyner’s partner had advised him not to make contact with Clarissa. If the outcome of their meeting had been different, if the girl had accepted the test-tube truth of her origins, she might have entered the closed world of their partnership, have become a daughter. Was that what Steyner had hoped for? It sounded as if it was what Timon Arkwright feared. Or had neither of them cared much either way? It might be that, like most people, Arkwright wanted to avoid trouble and change. Lie to her, tell her her father is a one-time lover of her mother, and forget all about the girl who is a purely biological offspring of yours. Now or soon he would be saying to Steyner, You see what all this honesty does, stirs up a can of worms or a glass of sperm.

  He went back to the room where all this had happened but it was empty. Robin and Clarissa had gone out by a back way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE RESULT OF Burden’s house-to-house in Ladysmith Road was the discovery of the room Marty Dennison had rented. It was on the third floor of one of the taller houses in that street. Janet Corbyn-Smith, the woman who had been his landlady, told DI Vine an interesting story. He had given her three hundred pounds in cash as a deposit on the room and said he would want it for six months at £200 per week. He then asked if she had another room his friend could have and when she said no asked if the friend could share his for a week. Miss Corbyn-Smith said that would be OK but it would cost him an extra £200 for that week. The friend was called Arben Birjar. It was a very unusual name which was why she remembered it.

  Birjar arrived a week later in the evening in a white van which he parked outside and drove away before eight thirty next morning when parking restrictions began. She never saw the van or Birjar again but all the rent she was owed was paid by Dennison and the £200 for Birjar’s share of the room even though he had only stayed there one night. Martin Dennison told her he was going away for a week but he wanted to keep the room where he was leaving clothes and other pieces of property. She assumed he would be going abroad because when he paid her he took a handful of notes and papers, among them a credit card and a passport, out of his pocket and put them down on the table while he counted out the money he owed her. He was quite a pleasant fellow, she said, and he needed to be, being so big and powerful and with that tattoo on his right arm. He had a very ‘posh’ voice. Money seemed to be no object with him, he flashed it around in a way you wouldn’t expect from a guy who wore a torn T-shirt and a jacket of mock suede.

  No, she never saw him drive anything. She never saw a green van outside. Apart from Birjar he had no visitors but he had only used the room for a week and a half. Vine and DC Laura Bird went up to the third floor to look at Dennison’s room. The clothes he had left behind would not be missed by a man who threw money about the way Dennison had. It looked as if he had simply dumped them there, the way he had dumped a stack of magazines, a couple of CDs and a very dirty sleeping bag. Fingerprints in the room and on these objects would be taken later in the day, Vine told Miss Corbyn-Smith. Prints on the van had been largely obliterated by its immersion in water and melted snow and ice but some kind of comparison was worth a try.

  Where was Martin Dennison now? Nardelie Mukamba remembered someone telling her that the club where he had been a bouncer was the Anaconda in Brewer Street. Her brother was a waiter in a restaurant nearby. It was he who had told her.

  Barry Vine and Laura Bird found the Anaconda closed. Its windows were covered in white blinds with a discreet silver pattern. In spite of its name, there was no snake logo or motif in evidence. It looked tasteful and even respectable from the exterior.

  ‘There’s never trouble,’ said André Zewnu. ‘It’s always all quiet on the Western Front.’ Mystified, Vine wondered where on earth a Congolese twenty-five-year-old had picked up the phrase. Was there an old film? ‘Course, they don’t open till 11 p.m. and that’s when we’re closing up. May be pandemo-ni-um by midnight. You want to know about Holy Marty? We called him that on account of him having that angel on his arm. He was OK though. What d’you want him for?’

  Laura nearly said, ‘Murder.’ And would have but for a warning glance from Vine. He never answered questions from the public.

  ‘Because if there’d been anything wrong with him, would I have told him the flat above my sister’s was vacant? They thought a lot of him next door. One time I saw the boss stop outside in his Beemer and drop him off.’

  ‘Who would that be then?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. A toff. Typical of next door. Celebland is what I call it. I’ve seen royalty go in there. Princess som
eone and one of them Spice Girls as was.’

  ‘Where d’you think he is now?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Marty? Down your neck of the woods unless he’s moved again. Never stayed long in one place did Marty.’

  ‘And what about the other man?’ asked Laura when they were in the train going home.

  ‘You mean the one with the Albanian name?’

  ‘Is it Albanian?’ Laura was quite excited.

  ‘I looked for it online and there it was, Birjar, Albanian apparently.’

  ‘D’you think he’s an illegal?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Vine.

  ‘He’s left the country,’ said Burden. ‘Why else have his passport lying about at Corbyn-Smith’s place? There was nothing to stop him going. Maybe he and Birjar went together. For all I know they’ll be in Tirana now. It is Tirana, isn’t it?’

  Wexford nodded. ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘when I was a child, that is, you called them “double-barrelled names”. I mean, names like Corbyn-Smith. The possessors of them were upper class or toffs. That’s all changed. Ms Corbyn-Smith is very far from a toff, she’s called that because one of her parents was Corbyn and the other was Smith. What puzzles me is what happens when a Corbyn-Smith has a child by a, say, Morton-Jones. Does the child take all his or her parents’ names? Persephone Corbyn-Smith-Morton-Jones? And if not, which ones do you drop?’

  As usual, Burden was uninterested in speculation of this kind. Wexford averted to it only to annoy. Childish, he told himself severely, don’t do it again. ‘I know you’re not much interested in motive,’ he said, ‘but just the same, you’re not assuming that Martin Dennison and Birjar had any personal reason for killing Sarah Hussain?’

  ‘As things stand at present, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘There’s no evidence, is there, that either of them knew her or had ever been to the Vicarage?’

  ‘No-o,’ said Burden in a tone both grudging and cautious.

  ‘Because you take it that they’re hit men? Or Dennison is the hit man and Arben Birjar his henchman? Good word “henchman”, don’t you think?’ He was doing it again in spite of intending not to. ‘“Accomplice”, I mean.’

  Burden said coldly, ‘I am quite well aware of what the word means.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mike. So are you thinking that poor old Crisp saw one of them through the Vicarage French windows or saw their employer, whoever that may be? Saw and could identify him?’

  ‘No, that’s what you’re thinking.’

  In the ensuing silence, Wexford thought that because of his friend’s continued refusal to recognise that Crisp had been telling the truth about what he saw or if he even saw anyone at all, the dead man had never been asked to describe the man he saw through glass. Once Crisp had been known to have lied about having tea with Mrs Morgan and Miss Green on the relevant afternoon – or, as Wexford preferred to see it, simply forgotten where he had been – Burden had assumed him to be a liar and that nothing he said could be relied upon as truth. But even a habitual liar must in the nature of things more often tell the truth than lie. Besides, though Burden took it for granted that Crisp had invented seeing the man in the Vicarage living room where Sarah Hussain had died, there was no evidence either to prove or disprove that.

  ‘You see,’ Burden said suddenly, ‘I don’t believe, I never have, that a man arrested for a crime, and with no defence or alibi, will remember that he saw a better candidate for that crime at the scene of the crime just when he most needs him.’

  ‘Old men forget.’

  ‘Yes, and I know where that comes from. Henry the Fifth. I googled it. But Henry goes on to say that though they forget a lot of things they won’t forget the battle they fought that makes them heroes. In other words no matter how old they are people don’t forget vital events in their lives, something that makes them heroes or could rescue them from ten years in prison.’

  ‘He did remember eventually.’

  ‘Or invented eventually,’ said Burden.

  ‘Then why did poor old Crisp have his throat cut?’

  ‘I stick to my guns. Because he saw, not one of them, but whoever hired them. According to Ms Corbyn-Smith, Dennison had plenty of money to splash about. He had been paid or partially paid in advance. I should think throat-cutting a revenge activity practised by Albanians, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Who’s a racist now?’ said Burden.

  The house was one of those newspapers call a mansion and carry stories about them as on sale for more than any London house has previously fetched on the market. Twenty million, twenty-five, over thirty. They are bought by sheikhs and IT billionaires, their forty-bedroom interiors sometimes gutted and rebuilt according to a more trendy design than that fashionable when the last makeover took place two years before.

  Emerging from the park at Queen’s Gate and turning into an exquisite street where he knew Chistian Steyner lived, Wexford remembered when the record asking price for a house in London had been twenty thousand pounds. He had been very young and the price of that house had seemed enormous to him. The one he was seeking this morning was so much the finest in the street that he knew which it was long before he reached it. Standing alone, it was that rarity, a West End detached house with front garden and garden surrounding it on all sides, white stucco, Georgian, so-called, but really mid-Victorian with bow windows on each side of the porticoed front door. A pair of amphoras each carrying a February-flowering scarlet camellia stood on the steps. Not wanting to be seen – for he had no intention of calling at the house – he walked past it on the other side, round the block if such a term could be used of this august area, and through the mews at the far end.

  Now it seemed as if he was to be rewarded. A BMW, not the Jaguar that had brought Mrs Steyner and her son to Sarah Hussain’s memorial service and been driven by Timon Arkwright, was parked outside Carroll House. Its driver, a small thin man, could just be seen sitting in the driving seat, and seen, too, to be eating what looked from this distance like a very large sandwich. Wexford had read somewhere that women over fifty pass unnoticed in the street. Could that also be true of men over sixty-five? If the women hated being thus ignored, he would welcome it. Of course, it is generally true that police detectives don’t want to be seen. He wished he had some reason to go into one of the houses opposite where he could watch out of a front window but he had none. Not for the first time, but perhaps more positively and tellingly than before, he was realising how insignificant he had become in the great scheme of law and order, of lawmaking and law-implementing, of having nothing to do in a society where doing things was all-important.

  But still he waited, standing this time a little way down the street outside a huge house which, from the series of bells by the main entrance, seemed to be divided into flats. In case anyone was watching him – in the unlikely event – he put on a small show of impatience, looking at his watch several times and then, as if unable to wait any longer, he took out his mobile phone and made a call. It was to Dora, who spoke rather irritably when he told her what he was doing.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Reg, give it a rest. You’re retired. You don’t have to do it any more.’ Inspiration came to her aid. ‘Gibbon misses you.’

  That made him laugh. ‘Tell him I’ll soon be back.’

  He stopped there. Someone had come out of Carroll House and was walking down the steps between the red camellias. For a moment Wexford didn’t recognise him. Since the memorial service Timon Arkwright had grown a beard, a small dark pointed beard, and it was really only because the man at the wheel of the BMW jumped out and came round to open a rear door for him that Wexford knew who it must be. He was quite a long way off but even from where he stood he could see what a wonderful work of art the suit he wore was. It was the kind of suit billionaires wore (as he knew from photographs in newspapers), smoother, with a softer silkier sheen, a sharper cut, a perfect more creaseless fit than anything he, Wexford, had ever bought or even seen on Burden. Where did they get
them? What insignificant retiring tailor, hiding behind an eighteenth-century window in Savile Row, could produce this creation of genius? He watched the car go and thought he might reverse his intention and venture to ring the bell at Carroll House for the sake of talking to Christian Steyner.

  Crossing the street, he wondered if Arkwright was the kind of man who grows a beard and shaves it off and grows it again. Those who do this are usually very young, he thought, like Robin who had already done it once, and he rang the bell.

  An Asian woman in a dark blue tracksuit came to the door. She showed him into one of the bow-window rooms. It was done up in blue and white and gold and there were white and yellow roses in blue vases. Christian Steyner kept him waiting a very short time. Also in a tracksuit but a light grey one which made him look paler than ever, he was shaking Wexford’s hand almost before he held it out.

  ‘Sit down, please. Do sit down. It’s good of you to come. How is she?’

  He could only mean Clarissa but still Wexford was surprised. ‘I hardly know,’ he said, suddenly aware that this was something he should know. ‘She has a room in my daughter’s house.’ He felt unable to give his support to this engagement story. ‘I’m sure she and my grandson are looking after her.’ He added, because, perhaps unjustifiably, he felt that Clarissa’s highly emotional reaction to Steyner’s revelation shouldn’t be encouraged, ‘She’s not ill, you know.’