THE SCENE-OF-CRIMES OFFICER. DR. CROCKER. Sir Hilary Tremlett fetched out of his bed and wearing a camel-hair coat over pajama top and gray slacks. Burden as neat and cool as at mid-morning. And the rain coming down in summer tempests. They had to rig a sort of tent up over the body.
She had been strangled. With a piece of string or cord perhaps. Wexford himself could see that without reference to Dr. Crocker or Sir Hilary. The photographer’s flash going off made him blink. He didn’t want to look at her any more. It sickened him, though not with physical nausea, he was far beyond that. No pharmacology degree now, no marriage to Richard Cobb, no full flowering of that strange beauty that had been both sultry and remote.
The girls worried him. Eve and Amy, alone in that house with a young girl, a contemporary, dead in the garden. Marion Bayliss had tried to reach their parents but they were at none of the phone numbers the twins could produce. Neighbors shunned the Freeborns. With the families immediately next door they weren’t even on speaking terms. Eve thought of Caroline Peters and it was she who came to the house in Down Road and stayed for the rest of the night. Wexford crawled into bed at around three. There was a note for him from Dora which he read but did not mark or inwardly digest: “A man called Ovington keeps phoning for you.” She was deeply asleep and in sleep she looked young. He lay down beside her and the last thing he remembered before sleeping himself was laying his hand on her still-slender waist.
“SHE’D BEEN DEAD ABOUT TWENTY-FOUR hours,” said Crocker, “which is about what you thought, isn’t it?”
When you don’t get enough sleep, Wexford thought, it’s not so much tired that you feel as weak. Though perhaps they were the same thing. “Strangled with what?” he asked. “Wire? Cord? String? Electric cable?”
“Because it’s easily obtainable and pretty well impossible to break I’d guess the kind of nylon cord you use for hanging pictures. And where were your suspects—” Crocker looked at his watch “—thirty-six hours ago?”
“At home with their daughters, they say.”
Wexford began going through the statement
Burden had taken from Leslie Kitman, the painter. A description of the missing dust sheet was gone into in some detail. Useless now, of course. It was four months since that dust sheet, concealed in a plastic bag, had been removed by the council’s refuse collectors. And the knife as likely as not with it. Somehow he couldn’t believe in Milvey’s knife, he couldn’t take two Milvey coincidences …
The walls had been stained and pitted, Kitman said. He couldn’t remember if the stains had looked any different on the morning of 16 April from the afternoon of 15 April. Some of the holes, he thought, might have been filled in by someone else. He had made good some of the cracks and holes with filler, which, when it dried, left white patches. On 16 April and the morning of the 17th he had lined the walls with wood-chip paper and on the Monday following begun painting over the paper.
Was he going to have those women in again? One of them had killed the girl the night before last. To keep her from confirming their guilt in the matter of the Phanodorm. Only one of them or both? Joy could easily have known where she would be and that she left by the shortcut to the High Street, where she would catch the Pomfret bus.
Burden was late. But then he too had been up and on the go since early yesterday morning, finally getting to bed even later than Wexford. To be up after midnight, thought Wexford, is to be up betimes. He had always liked that, only no one knew what “betimes” meant any more, which rather spoiled the wit of it. Thinking of going to bed reminded him of Dora’s note, and he was about to pick up the phone and get hold of Ovington when Burden walked in.
He didn’t look tired, just about ten years older and a stone thinner. He was wearing his stone-colored suit with a shirt the same shade and a rust tie with narrow chocolate lines on it. Might be going to a wedding, thought Wexford, all he needed was a clove carnation.
“Jenny’s started,” he said. “I took her to the infirmary this morning at eight. There’s not going to be anything doing much yet awhile but they wanted her in promptly.”
“You’d better start your leave as from now.”
“Thanks. I thought you’d say that. I must say these babies do pick their moments. Couldn’t she have waited a week? She’s going to be Mary, by the way.”
“After your grandmothers, no doubt.”
But the coincidence he had related to Wexford had slipped Burden’s memory. “Do you know that never crossed my mind? Perhaps Mary Brown Burden then?”
“Forget it,” said Wexford. “It sounds like an American revivalist preacher. Keep in touch, won’t you, Mike?”
Later in the day, with luck, the pathologist’s report on Paulette Harmer would come and also perhaps something from Forensics on the murder weapon. He had Martin go to a magistrate and swear out a warrant to search the Williams home in Liskeard Avenue, and he wasn’t anticipating any difficulties in getting it. In the meantime he had himself driven to the other Williams home. He didn’t feel up to walking, whatever Crocker might advise.
Sara was mowing the front grass with one of those small electric mowers that cut by means of a line wound on a spool and are principally intended for trimming edges. As he got out of the car the motor whined and stopped cutting, and the girl, crimson with bad temper, up-ended the flimsy machine and began tugging furiously at the line. He heard a hissed repetition of the word Joy disliked so much that she had used of her father’s assault.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“If you do that with the current switched on,” Wexford said, “one day you’re going to cut your hand off.”
She cooled as rapidly as she had become incensed.
“I know. I’ve promised myself I’ll always switch it off before I fiddle with it. But these goddamned things never work for long.” She pulled the prongs out of the socket to oblige him and smiled. An ARRIA tee-shirt today, identical to the one on dead Paulette. “This is the fourth of these spools we’ve had this summer. Do you want to see my mother?”
As yet she couldn’t know about Paulette. He remembered her thinly veiled boasting to her cousin on the phone and he didn’t think she would much care. Nor would she much care when her mother was arrested for the murder. But perhaps it was natural for victims of incest not to care much about anything. He felt a wrench of pity for her.
“I want to talk to you first.”
The garage, now there was no car to occupy it, had become a tool shed and repository for rather battered garden furniture. Sara indicated a deck chair to Wexford. For her part she sat down on an upturned oil drum and set about struggling with the stubborn spool. This looked as if it might go the way of its fellows, three of which lay on a shelf next to a dozen half-used Sevenstar paint cans. He supposed she was busying herself so as not to have to look at him while he talked to her about her father.
At his first mention of incest, a tactful broaching of what her mother had told him, she didn’t flush but turned gradually white. Her skin, always pale, grew milk-like. And he noticed a phenomenon, perhaps peculiar to her. The fine gold down on her forearms erected itself.
He asked her gently when it had first happened. She kept her head bent, with her right hand attempting to rotate the spool while with her left forefinger and thumb she tugged at the slippery red line.
“November,” she said, confirming his own ideas. “November the fifth.” She looked up and down again quickly. “There were only two times. I saw to that.”
“You threatened him?”
She hesitated. “Only with the police.”
“Why didn’t you tell your brother? Or did you? I have a feeling you and your brother are close.”
“Yes, we are. In spite of everything.” She didn’t say in spite of what but he thought he knew. “I couldn’t tell him.” Like a different girl speaking, her face turned away, “I was ashamed.”
And she hates her mother, so it was a pleasure to tell her? She gave a final tug and the line came through, far too much of it, yards of loosely coiled scarlet flex.
Kevin was indoors, having unexpectedly arrived that morning by means of some comfortless and inefficient transport. He was lying spent, exhausted, dirty, and unkempt, on the yellow sofa, his booted feet up on one of its arms. Joy had answered Wexford’s knock with refreshments for Kevin in her hands, a trayful of sandwiches, coffee, something in a carton that was ice cream or yogurt. Wexford shut the door on him, hustled Joy into the kitchen. She was dressed exactly as she had been the day before, even to the head-scarf—had she tied it on to run to the shops for Kevin-provender?—and gave the impression of having never taken her clothes off, of sleeping in them. He told her, quite baldly, about Paulette, but she knew. John Harmer had phoned her while Sara was in the garden. Or that was the explanation she gave Wexford for knowing. He said he would want her later at the police station, she and Wendy. He would send a car for her.
“What’s my son going to do about his evening meal?”
“Give me a tin opener,” said Wexford, “and I’ll teach him how to use it.”
She didn’t observe the irony. She said she supposed he could have something out of a tin for once. At least she didn’t suggest his sister might cook for him, which was an improvement (if that was the way you looked at things) on twenty years ago.
The next stop was Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret. Martin had got his warrant and was there with Archbold and two uniformed men, PC Palmer and PC Allison, Kingsmarkham’s only black policeman. A tearful Wendy was trying to persuade them it wouldn’t be necessary to strip the paper off her living-room walls.
At the glass table sat Veronica. Evidently she had been at work on the hem of a white garment that lay in front of her but had laid down her needle when the policemen arrived. Wexford thought of the girl in the nursery rhyme who sat on a cushion and sewed a fine seam, feeding on strawberries, sugar, and cream. It must have been her dress which suggested it to him, with its pattern of small wild strawberries and green leaves on a creamy ground. Tights again, dark blue this time, white pumps. Another thing that made those girls look alike was the way neither of their faces showed their feelings. They were the faintly melancholy, faintly smug, nearly always impassive faces of madonnas in Florentine paintings.
Wexford’s daughter Sylvia had a cat which uttered soundless mews, going through the mouth-stretching motion of mewing only. Veronica’s “hello” reminded him of that cat, a greeting for a lip-reader, not even as audible as a whisper. Wendy renewed her appeals as he came in, now making them to him only.
“I’m sorry, Wendy. I understand your feelings. We’ll have the room redecorated for you.” Or for someone, he thought but didn’t say aloud. “And there’ll be as little mess as possible.”
And it really was Sevensmith Harding’s Sevenstarker they intended to use for the job, four large cans of it, each labeled in red italic script that this was the slick, sheer, clean way to strip your walls. Wexford found himself hoping this wasn’t too gross an exaggeration.
“But what for?” Wendy kept saying, at the same time, curiously enough, picking up ornaments and pushing them into a wall cupboard, loading a tray.
“That I’m not at liberty to say,” said Wexford, falling back on one of the stock answers of officialese. “But there’s plenty of time. Please clear the room yourself if you want to.”
In silence Veronica picked up her sewing. She threaded her needle, using a small device manufactured for that purpose, and slipped a pink thimble onto her forefinger.
“She’s doing the hem of her tennis dress. She’s playing in the women’s singles final at the club this afternoon.” Wendy spoke in tragic tones, only slightly modified by a faint proud stress on the word “club.”
Kingsmarkham Tennis Club, presumably, or even Mid-Sussex. “We shan’t stop her,” Wexford said.
“You’ll upset her.” She drew him into the kitchen, through the already open doorway.
“You’re not going to say anything to her about you-know-what? I mean you’re not going to go into it?”
“I’m not a social worker,” he said.
“Nothing actually happened anyway. I saw to it nothing happened.”
Impossible, though, not to see Rodney Williams, hitherto no more than liar and conman, as some sort of monster. To make a sexual assault on one daughter was heinous enough, but almost immediately to have designs on her younger half-sister?
“Of course, you wouldn’t have suspected anything might happen if Joy hadn’t warned you.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I never saw the woman till you—introduced us?”
“Something you haven’t told me is how you knew Rodney made sexual advances to Veronica. He didn’t tell you but you knew. Veronica was the young girl living at home with her family you led us a wild goose chase about, wasn’t she?” He closed the door between the rooms and leaned against it.
Wendy nodded, not looking at him.
“How did you know, Wendy? Did you see something? Did you notice something in his behavior when he thought you weren’t looking? Was that after or before Joy warned you?”
She mumbled, “I didn’t see anything. Veronica told me.”
“Veronica? That innocent child in there who’s more like twelve than sixteen? That child you’ve very obviously sheltered from every exposure to life? She interpreted her father’s affectionate kisses, his arm round her, his compliments, as sexual advances?”
A nod. Then a series of vehement nods.
“And yet you say ‘nothing actually happened.’ By that I take it you mean there was no more than a kiss and a touch and a compliment. But she—she—saw this as an incestuous approach?”
Wendy’s response was characteristic. She burst into tears. Wexford pushed up a stool for her to sit on and found a box of tissues, never a difficult task in that house. He returned to the living room, where the carpet was now covered with sheets and from which Veronica had disappeared. Allison was daubing the walls with Sevenstarker, Palmer already at work with a metal stripping tool. The hunch he had about what was under that paper was probably crazy, but besides that it was just possible an analysis of old plaster might show traces of Rodney’s blood. And might not. Anyway, it was work for Leslie Kitman. He could come in next week and put it all back again at the expense of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary.
THE RAIN HAD STARTED AGAIN. THAT WOULD put paid to Veronica’s match in the afternoon, as neither the Kingsmarkham Tennis Club nor the Mid-Sussex County at Myringham had covered courts. Wexford, back in his office though it was Saturday, noted the time. Twelve-thirty. Getting on for three hours since Mike had been in and announced the imminence of his new daughter. Well, it was too soon yet to expect much, early days.
Something kept nagging at the back of his mind, something Wendy had said. About the tennis match, he thought it was. But she hadn’t said anything except that Veronica would be playing that afternoon. Why did he have this curious feeling then that in what she said lay the whole answer to this case? He often had feelings like that about some small thing when a case was about to break, and the small thing always turned out to be vital and his hunch seldom wrong. The difficulty was that he didn’t know what he had a hunch about.
All the available men he had were either at Wendy’s taking her room apart or else, the far greater number of them, conducting a house-to-house in Down Road and interrogating every girl who had been at the ARRIA meeting. A mood of loneliness and isolation enclosed him. Dora had gone to London and to stay the night with Sheila in Hampstead. His elder grandson Robin would be nine today, his birthday party due to begin three hours from now, Crocker played golf all day on Saturdays. Wexford would have liked to sleep, but he found it hard to sleep in the daytime. What the hell was it Wendy had said? What was it? Tremlett was probably still at work on that poor girl’s body … She had got Phanodorm for Joy and threatened to tell that she had. Well, not threatened, warned rather that she would have to, she would be scared not to. Joy had given Rodney the Phanodorm, substituting it for his blood-pressure pills, and it took just the time of a drive to Pomfret to act. Follow him by bus to Wendy’s. He’s asleep when you get there and you look at him and remember what he’s done to you by way of what he’s done to your daughter. Married another woman too, like a bloody sheikh. And the other wife goes along with you, though you hate her. It’s her daughter at risk now since you told her where his tastes lie. Why let him ever wake up again? If there’s a mess she says the room’s going to be decorated tomorrow. And if you hide the body for long enough …
In the morning phone the office, say he’s ill, disguising your voice a bit. She’ll type his letter of resignation for you, she’s got access to a typewriter in a friend’s house that no one’s going to trace. You’re both in it equally, you and she, the two wives of Rodney Williams, for better for worse, till death parts you. She stabbed him too, though you gave him the sleeping pill. You and she together carried the body down that crackpot spiral staircase, through the doorway into the integral garage. Laid him in the car with his traveling bag. She drove because you never learned, but you did most of the grave-digging. Soiling your hands never bothered you the way it did her. Two wives, in it together equally, and whom murder has joined let no man put asunder.
Wexford had got himself under Joy’s skin and he very nearly finished this internal monologue with one of her awful laughs. The chances were Burden wouldn’t phone before evening. And then surely he’d phone him at home. He drove to the Old Cellar and had himself a slice of quiche, broccoli and mushroom, a pleasant novelty, one small glass of Frascati to go with it—it was Saturday, after all, though with nothing to celebrate—and then back again to the estate where the streets were named for Cornish towns, Bodmin, Truro, Redruth, Liskeard. A cold gray rain fell steadily. They were back to the weather they had had between Rodney Williams’s disappearance and the discovery of his body.
In Wendy’s living room considerable progress had been made. Three walls were more or less stripped. It wasn’t what Wexford would have called slick, sheer, and clean, but it wasn’t bad. Martin had got hold of someone from Forensics, a shaggy girl in navy all-in-ones, who nevertheless had the air of an expert and was painstakingly scraping samples of brownish plaster off the walls.
Wendy was downstairs in her sewing-ironing-laundry room or whatever, cutting patterns out of magazines. For therapy, no doubt. Veronica was with her, Miss Muffet on a velvet pouffe. No match for her today, as he had predicted. He suddenly remembered his threat to send a car for Joy “later” and the crisis over Kevin’s dinner this had precipitated. Well, it would have to be much later … Or tomorrow. Or every day on and forever. No, he mustn’t think that way.
Wendy had changed her dress for a linen suit. Perhaps she had been going to watch her daughter play, for Veronica, as though not resigned to cancellation until the last moment, was in her tennis whites, pleated miniskirt—who could imagine her in shorts?—and a top almost too well finished to be called a tee-shirt.
“I suppose they’ll postpone it till Monday night,” said Wendy in a high, rather mad voice, “and that means half the spectators won’t come.”
Down the spiral staircase came the expert with her case of samples, the scraper still in her hand.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” whispered Veronica.
Her mother was all care, all solicitude, jumping up, hastening her to the ground-floor bathroom.
Wexford went back upstairs. Archbold had gone. The expert had gone. Martin was drinking tea from a flask and the other two Coke from cans while they waited for the Sevenstarker on the fourth wall to do its stuff. Wexford felt something very near a qualm. The room, which had been a shell-pink sanctuary, was a nasty mess. A shambles, Martin called it, but a shambles, meaning a slaughter house, was just what Wexford thought it had been used for, the reason for this destruction. Suppose he was wrong? Suppose the killing of Rodney Williams had taken place elsewhere?
Too late now.
The police’s loss would be Kitman’s gain. It is the business of the thinking man, he paraphrased, to give employment to the artisan.
“Let me have one of those, will you?” he said to Martin, pointing to the scrapers. The white patches of plaster among the brown were the areas Wendy herself had filled before Kitman began papering.
It wouldn’t budge the white plaster.
“Want me to have a go, sir?” Allison produced what Wexford thought might be a cold chisel.
“We’ll all have a go.”
It made Allison’s day. He had never before distinguished himself in any way since joining the force two years before. Sometimes he thought—and his wife—that they had taken him on only because he was black and not because he was suitable or any good. They were inverted race snobs. For weeks everyone had bent over backwards to treat him with more kindness, courtesy, and consideration than they would show, for instance, to a millionaire grandfather on his deathbed. That had worn off after a while. He was a bit lonely too in Kingsmarkham, where only his wife, his kids, and two other families were West Indian like him. But today paid for all that. It was what made him in his own eyes an officer of the law.
“Sir, I think I’ve found …” he began.
Wexford was there beside him like a shot. Under his eyes Allison dug in carefully, thanking his stars he’d remembered to put his gloves on. The object was stuck in the fissure wrapped up in newspaper, plastered over. He chipped and dug and then put his hand to it, looking at Wexford, and Wexford nodded.
The knife didn’t clatter out. It was unveiled as reverently as if it were a piece of cut glass. They all looked at it lying there on its wrappings, clean as a whistle and polished bright as a long prism in a chandelier.