IT WAS SELDOM HE COULD GIVE PEOPLE REASSURING news. He was tempted to say no, of course not. The body has been identified. She was holding on to the arms of the chair, rubbing her fingers up and down the wood.
“What is your husband’s name, Mrs. Williams?”
“Rodney John Williams. He’s forty-eight.” She spoke in short, jerky phrases, not waiting for the questions. “Six feet tall. He’s fair going gray. He’s a salesman. It said in the paper a salesman.”
Burden stared, then looked down. She swallowed, made an effort against panic, an effort that concentrated on tensing her muscles.
“Could you … please, I have a photo here.”
Her hands, unlocked from the chair, refused to obey her when first she tried to open her bag. The photograph she handed to Wexford fluttered, she was shaking so. He looked at it, unbelieving.
It was Rodney Williams all right, high domed forehead, crack of a mouth parted in a broad smile. It was a more recent picture than the one Joy had and showed Williams in swimming trunks (flabby hairless chest, spindleshanks, a bit knock-kneed) with this girl in a black bikini and another girl, also bikini’d but no more than twelve years old. Wexford’s eyes returned to the unmistakable face of Williams, to the head you somehow wanted to slap a fringed wig on and so transform it.
She was waiting, watching him. He nodded. She brought a fluttery hand up to her chest, to her heart perhaps, froze for a moment in this tragic pose. Then her eyelids fell and she sagged sideways in the chair.
Afterwards he was to think of it as having been beautifully done but at the time he saw it only as a genuine faint. Burden held her shoulders, bringing her face down onto her knees. Picking up the phone, Wexford asked for a policewoman to come up, Polly Davies or Marion Bayliss, anyone who was around. And someone send a pot of strong tea and don’t forget the sugar basin.
Wendy Williams came out of her faint, sat up, and pressed her face into her hands.
“YOU ARE THE WIFE OF RODNEY JOHN WILLIAMS and you live in Liskeard Avenue, Pomfret?”
She drank the tea sugarless and very hot, at first with her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes and they met his he noticed they were the very clear pale blue of flax flowers. She nodded slowly.
“How long have you been married, Mrs. Williams?”
“Sixteen years. We had our sixteenth wedding anniversary in March.”
He could hardly believe it. Her skin had the clear bloom of an adolescent’s, her hair was baby-soft and the curl in it looked natural. She saw his incredulity and in spite of her emotion was flattered, a little buoyed up. He could tell she was the sort of woman to whom compliments, even unspoken ones, were food and drink. They nourished her. A faint, tremulous smile appeared. He looked again at the photographs.
“My daughter Veronica,” she said. “I got married very young. I was only sixteen. That picture was taken three or four years back.”
A bigamist he had been, then. Not a common or garden wayward husband with a girlfriend living in the next town, not a married man with a sequence of pricey mistresses, but your good old-fashioned true-blue bigamist. There was no doubt in Wexford’s mind that Wendy Williams had as good-looking a marriage certificate as Joy’s, and if hers happened not to be valid she would be the last to know it.
That, then, was why he had taken no change of clothes with him. He had those things in his other home. And more than that, much more.
Wexford now saw the point of those bank accounts: one for his salary to be paid into and two joint accounts to be fed from it, one for each household, R. J. Williams and J. Williams; R. J. Williams and W. Williams. There had been no need to assume a different name on his second marriage—Williams was common enough to make that unnecessary. He had been like a Moslem who keeps strictly to Islamic law and maintains his wives in separate and distinct dwellings. The difference here was that the wives didn’t know of each other’s existence.
That Williams had had another wife, what one might call in fact a chief wife, was something this girl was going to have to be told. And Joy was going to have to be told about her.
“Can you tell me when you last saw Mr. Williams?” Not calling him “your husband” any more was the beginning of breaking the news.
“About two months ago. Just after Easter.”
This wasn’t the time to ask her to account for that eight-week gap. He told her he would come and see her at home that evening. Polly Davies would look after her and see she got home safely.
Something had at last happened to distract Burden temporarily from his private troubles. His expression was as curious and as alert as a little boy’s.
“What did he do at Christmas?” he said. “Easter? What about holidays?”
“No doubt we shall find out. Other bigamists have handled it. He probably had a Bunbury as well.”
“A what?”
“A nonexistent friend or relative to provide him with alibis. My guess is Williams’s Bunbury was an old mother.”
“Did he have an old mother?”
“God knows. Creating one from his imagination wouldn’t have been beyond his capacity, I’m sure. You know what they say, a mother is the invention of necessity.”
Burden winced. “That night he left Alverbury Road, d’you think he went to his other home?”
“I think he set off meaning to go there. Whether he reached it is another matter.”
Fascinated by Williams’s family arrangements, Burden said, “While Joy thought he was traveling for Sevensmith Harding in Ipswich he was with Wendy, and while he was with Joy Wendy thought he was where?”
“I don’t suppose she knew he worked for Sevensmith Harding. He probably told her a total lie about what he did.”
“You’d think he’d have got their names muddled—I mean called Wendy Joy and Joy Wendy.”
“There speaks the innocent monogamist,” said Wexford, casting up his eyes. “How do you think married men with girlfriends manage? Wife and all get called ‘darling.’”
Burden shook his head as if even speculating about it was too much for him. “Do you reckon it was one of them killed him?”
“Carried his body and stuck it in that grave? Williams weighed a good fifteen stone or two hundred and ten pounds or ninety something kilos or whatever we’re supposed to say these days.”
“It might have been Wendy made that phone call.”
“You reckon her voice sounds like Joy’s?”
Burden was obliged to admit that it didn’t. Joy’s was monotonous, accent-free, uninflected; Wendy’s girlish, rather fluting, with a faint lisp. Wexford was talking about voices, about the rather unattractive but nevertheless memorable quality of Joy’s voice, when his phone rang again.
“Another young lady to see me,” he said to Burden, putting the receiver back.
“Bluebeard’s third wife?” It was the first attempt at a joke he had made in two months.
Wexford appreciated that. “Let’s say a fan, rather. Someone who saw me on the telly.”
“Look, why don’t I take Martin and get on over to Wheatley? Then I’ll be able to come to Wendy’s with you tonight.”
“OK, and we’ll take Polly along.”
The girl walked into his room in a breeze of confidence. She was seventeen or eighteen and her name was Eve Freeborn. Apposite names of the Lady Dedlock—Ernest Pontifex—Obadiah Slope kind that Victorian novelists used are in real life less uncommon than is generally supposed. That Eve Freeborn was aptly named Wexford came quickly to understand. She might have been dressed and cast for the role of Spirit of Freedom in a pageant. Her hair was cropped short and dyed purple in parts. She wore stretch jeans, a checked shirt, and thongs.
The story she told Wexford, sitting with legs wide apart, hands linked, forearms making a bridge from the chair arms to rest her chin on, was delivered in a brisk and articulate way. Eve was still at school, had come there straight from school. President of the debating society no doubt, he thought. As she turned her hands outwards, thumbs on her jaw, he noticed the felt-tipped pen drawing on her wrist, a raven with a woman’s head, and then as she moved her arm the shirtsleeve covered it.
“I realized it was my duty as a citizen to come to you. I delayed just long enough to discuss the matter with my boyfriend. He’s at the same school as me—Haldon Finch. In a way he’s involved, you see. We have the sort of relationship where we believe in total openness.”
Wexford gave her an encouraging smile.
“My boyfriend lives in Arnold Road, Myringham. It’s a single-story house, number forty-three.” Opposite Graham Gee, who had reported the presence of poor old Greta, Wexford thought. “His mother and father live there too,” said Eve in a tone that implied enormous condescension and generosity on the part of the boyfriend in allowing his parents to live in their own house. “The point is—and you may not believe this but it’s the honest truth, I promise you—they don’t like him having me to stay the night with him. I mean, not me personally, you could understand that if they didn’t like me, but any girl. So what we do is I come round after he’s gone to bed and get in the window.”
Wexford didn’t gape at her. He merely felt like doing this. He couldn’t resist asking, “Why doesn’t he come to you?”
“I share a room with my sister. Anyway, I was telling you. I went round to his place around ten that Thursday night. There wasn’t all that much space to park and when I was reversing I went into the car behind. I just bashed the wing of it a bit, not much, it wouldn’t have had to have a new wing or anything, but I did think it was my duty to take responsibility and not just leave it, so I …”
“Just a moment. This was the night of April the fifteenth?”
“Right. It was my boyfriend’s birthday.”
And a charming present he must have had, Wexford thought.
“What was this car you went into?”
“A dark blue Ford Granada. It was the car you asked about on TV. I wrote a note and put it on the windscreen, under a wiper. Just with my name and address on and phone number. But it blew away or got lost or something because the car was still there a long while after that and the driver never got in touch with me.”
At ten that night. Greta the Granada had been there at ten but how long had it been there?
“Just as a matter of curiosity, whose car were you driving?”
“My own,” she said, surprised.
“You have your own car?”
“My mother’s technically. But it comes to the same thing.”
No doubt it did. They were amazing, these young people. And the most amazing thing about them was that they had no idea previous generations had not behaved as they did. People got old, of course, became dull and staid, they knew that, but in their day surely teenage girls had slept with their boyfriends, appropriated their parents’ cars, stayed out all night, dyed their hair all colors of the spectrum.
He thanked her for her help and as she got up he saw the little drawing or tattoo again. He realized that he didn’t know which of the local schools Sara Williams attended. And there remained the as yet unknown quantity, Veronica Williams …
“Do you know a girl of your own age called Sara Williams? Is she perhaps at school with you?”
He was positive she hadn’t made the connection before, was making it now for the first time. “Do you mean Sara is the daughter of this man who was murdered?”
“Yes. You go to the same school?”
“No, we don’t,” she said carefully, “but I know her.”
WHEATLEY LIVED ON AN ESTATE OF NEW houses on the Pomfret side of Myringham. They had been built, Burden recalled, by a company so anxious to sell their houses that 100 percent mortgages had been guaranteed with them and a promise given to buy a house back for its purchase price if after two years the occupier was dissatisfied. The place had a raw look, oddly cold in the June sunshine. Wheatley’s pregnant wife came to the door. A child of about three, a girl, was behind her, holding on to her skirt. Burden registered the fact of the pregnancy and the sex of the child with his heightened sensitivity to such matters and then he thought that his wife’s pregnancy might have affected Wheatley’s attitude to the girl he picked up. For instance, he might be sexually frustrated. Burden knew all about that. Wheatley too might have exaggerated the purity of his attitude towards the girl because he dared not risk the possibility of his pregnant wife finding out he was capable of putting his hand on other women’s knees—or, in this instance no doubt, on other women’s breasts.
The third bedroom of this very small house had been turned into a study or office for Wheatley. He was on the phone but rang off within seconds of Burden’s and Martin’s arrival. Yes, he had remembered some more about the girl. He was sure he could give them a more detailed description. There was no question of his remembering more of what the girl had said to him because she hadn’t said any more. “Thanks” and a gasp had been the only sounds that had come from her.
“I told you she was tall for a woman, at least five feet nine. Still in her teens, I’m sure. She had dark brown shoulder-length hair with a fringe, very fair skin, and very white hands. I think I can remember a ring, not a wedding or engagement ring or anything, but one of those big silver rings they wear. I wouldn’t call her pretty, not a bit.” Was that a sop to the wife who had come quietly into the room, carrying the little girl? “Sunglasses, a dark leather shoulder bag. She had blue denim jeans on and a gray cardigan. She was thin—really skinny, I mean.” Another matrimonial sop. “And underneath the cardigan she had a tee-shirt on. It was a white tee-shirt with a crazy picture on it—some sort of bird with a woman’s head.”
“You didn’t mention that before, Mr. Wheatley.”
“I didn’t mention the ring before or what color her clothes were. You asked me to think about it and I thought about it and that’s what I remember. You can take it or leave it. A white tee-shirt with a bird on it with a woman’s face.”
“I DON’T BELIEVE IT!”
She stared at Wexford, her mouth open in an appalled sort of way, her eyelids moving. She brought her hands up and scrabbled at her neck.
“I don’t believe it!” Now there was defiance in her tone. Then, by changing one word, she showed him she accepted, she understood that what he had told her was true. “I won’t believe it!”
Polly Davies was with him, sitting there like a good chaperone, silent but attentive. She glanced at Wexford, got a nod from him.
“I’m afraid it’s true, Mrs. Williams.”
“I don’t—I don’t have a right to be called that, do I?”
“Of course you do. Your name doesn’t depend on a marriage certificate.” Wexford thought of Eve Freeborn. There was a world between her and Wendy Williams, though a mere fourteen years, less than a generation, separated them. Would Eve know such a thing as a marriage certificate existed?
“Mrs. Williams,” said stalwart Polly, “why don’t you and I go and make some coffee? We’d all like coffee, I’m sure. Mr. Wexford will want to ask you some questions but I know he’d like you to have time to get over the shock of this.”
She nodded and got up awkwardly as if her bones were stiff. A glazed look had come across her face. She walked like a sleepwalker and no one now would have mistaken her for a twenty-five-year-old.
Burden shrugged silently as the door closed behind them and subsided into one of his typical morose reveries. Wexford had a look round the room they were sitting in. The house was newer than the Williams home in Kingsmarkham, a small “townhouse” with an integral garage, built probably in the late 1960s. Wendy was a thorough, meticulous, and perhaps fanatical housekeeper. This was a through room with a dining area and it had very recently been redecorated in gleaming white with an undertone of palest pink. One of the colors in the Sevensmith Harding “Ice Cream” range? The carpet was deep strawberry pink, some of the furniture mahogany, some white canework, cushions in various shades of pink and red. It was tasteful, it was a far cry from the stereotyped shabbiness of Joy’s home, but somehow it was also uncomfortable, as if everything had been placed there—hanging baskets, little tables, red Venetian glass—for effect rather than for use.
He remembered that a young girl also lived here. There were no signs of her. But what sign did he expect or would he recognize if he saw it? She had been twelve in the picture …
“My daughter is sixteen now,” Wendy said when the coffee was brought. A slightly defiant note came into her voice as she added, “She was sixteen three weeks ago.”
Her gaze fell. He did some calculations, remembering what she had said about her wedding anniversary taking place in March. So Williams had “married” her three months before the child was born. He had had to wait until she reached the legal age of marriage.
“Where were you married, Mrs. Williams?”
“Myringham Registry Office. My mother wanted us to have a church wedding but—well, for obvious reasons …”
Wexford could imagine one very obvious reason if she had been six months pregnant. The nerve of Williams, a married man, “marrying” this child, as she had been, a mere dozen miles from his home town! The wedding to Joy, Dora had told him, had been at St. Peter’s, Kingsmarkham, the bride in white slipper satin …
Wendy was thrusting a paper at him. He saw it was her marriage certificate.
In the Registration District of Myringham, at the Register Office. Rodney John Williams, aged thirty-two. In some respects, at any rate, he had been honest. Though he could hardly have distorted those facts. They had been on his birth certificate. A Bath address, his brother’s probably, his occupation sales representative. Wendy Ann Rees, aged sixteen, Pelham Street, Myringham, shop assistant. The witnesses had been Norman Rees and Brenda Rees, parents presumably, or brother and sister-in-law.
He handed it back to her. She looked at it herself and her tongue flicked out to moisten her lips. For a moment, from the way she was holding it, he thought she was going to tear the certificate across. But she replaced it in its envelope and laid the envelope on the low white melamine table that was close up against the arm of her chair.
She pressed her knees together and folded her hands in her lap. Her legs were very good, with elongated, slim ankles. To come to the police station she had worn a gray flannel suit with a white blouse. He had a feeling she was a woman who attached importance to being suitably dressed. The suit was changed now for a cotton dress. She was the type who would “save” her clothes, not sit about in a straight skirt or risk a spot on white silk. In her sad, wistful look youth had come back into her face.
“Mrs. Williams,” he began, “I’m sure you won’t mind telling me how it was you weren’t alarmed when your husband was away for so long.”
She did mind. She was reluctant. Patience, simply waiting quietly, succeeded with her where pressing the point might not have.
“Rodney and I …” She paused. It was always “Rodney” with her, Wexford noted, never “Rod.” “We—we quarreled. Well, we had a very serious quarrel. That must have been a few days after Easter. Rodney spent Easter with his mother in Bath. He always spent Christmas and Easter with her. He was an only child, you see, and she’s been in an old people’s home for years and years.”
Wexford carefully avoided looking at Burden. Wendy said, reminded by her own explanation, “Has she been … I mean, has anyone told her?”
Enigmatically, Wexford said that had been taken care of. “Go on please, Mrs. Williams.”
“We quarreled,” she went on. “It was a very private thing we quarreled about. I’ll keep that to myself if you don’t mind. I said to him that—well, I said that if he—if it didn’t stop, if he didn’t promise me faithfully that never—well, I said I’d take Veronica away and he’d never see us again. I—I struck him, I was so angry, so distressed, I can’t tell you—well, he was angry too. He denied it, of course, and then he said I needn’t trouble about leaving him because he’d leave me. He said he couldn’t stand my nagging any more.” She lifted her head and looked Wexford straight in the eye. “I did nag him, I’ll be honest about it. I couldn’t bear it, never seeing him, him always being away. We’d never had a single Christmas together. I always had to go to my parents. We hardly ever had a holiday. I used to beg him …” Her voice faltered and Wexford understood that realization was dawning. She was beginning to see what the real reason was for those absences. “Anyway,” she said, making an effort at control, “he—he calmed down after a while and I suppose I did too. He was going away again and he was due back on the Thursday—the fifteenth, that is. I was still very sore and upset but I said goodbye to him and that I’d see him on Thursday and he said maybe I would and maybe he’d never come back, so you see, I—when he didn’t come back I thought he’d left me.”
It wasn’t a completely convincing explanation. He tried to put himself in her shoes. He tried to think how he would have felt years ago when he and Dora were young if they’d had a row and she, going away to visit her sister, say, had told him maybe she wouldn’t come back. Probably such a thing had actually happened. It did happen in marriages, even in excellent ones. But if she hadn’t come back on the appointed day, if she’d been a couple of hours late even, he’d have started going out of his mind with worry. Of course, much depended on the seriousness of the quarrel and on the reasons for it.
“Tell me what happened that Thursday.”
“In the evening, do you mean?”
“When he didn’t come.”
“I was at work. Thursday’s our late night. I didn’t tell you, did I? I’m manageress of the fashion floor at Jickie’s.”
He was surprised. Somehow he had taken it for granted she didn’t work. “In Myringham?” he asked. “Or the Kingsmarkham branch?”
“Oh, Kingsmarkham. In the Precinct.”
Jickie’s was Kingsmarkham’s biggest department store, and the largest area of the Kingsbrook Shopping Precinct was given over to it. Doubtless Rodney Williams had taken care never to accompany Joy when she went shopping there for a jumper or a pair of tights on a Saturday afternoon. Had he risked walking arm in arm down Kingsmarkham High Street during shopping hours? With his son or daughter in the car, had he risked parking in the precinct car park? It was a tightrope he had walked and no doubt, for such is the nature of people like him, he had enjoyed walking it, but he had fallen off at last. Because of the tightrope or for some entirely different reason?
“We stay open till eight on Thursdays, but I can never get away till nine and it takes me a quarter of an hour to get home. When I did get back Veronica was here but Rodney hadn’t come. I thought there was still a chance he might come but he didn’t and then I knew. Or I thought I knew. I thought he’d left me.”
“And in all the weeks that followed,” Burden put it, “you weren’t anxious? You didn’t wonder what could happen to you and your daughter if he didn’t come back?”
“I’d be all right financially without him. I’ve always had to work and now I’m doing quite well.” There was a note of self-esteem in the little soft voice now. Inside the white and pink and fair curls and underneath the lisp and diffidence, Wexford thought there might be a core of steel. “We had a ninety percent mortgage on this house and up till five years ago it was all Rodney could do to keep us. He got promotion then and things were easier but I kept on working. I needed a life of my own too, he was away so much.”
“Promotion?” hazarded Wexford, feeling his way.
“It’s quite a small company and they haven’t been doing too well lately—bathroom fittings and furniture, that sort of thing. Rodney was made sales manager for this locality.”
Polly Davies picked up the tray and took it away into the kitchen. Wexford thought how easy it was to imagine Rodney Williams—or his idea of Rodney Williams—in his other home but next to impossible to imagine him here. Seated at that glass-topped dining table, for instance, with its bowl of pink and red roses or in one of those pink chintz armchairs. He had been a big, coarse man and everything here had a daintiness like a pink shell or the inside of a rose.
“I have to know what you quarreled about, Mrs. Williams.”
Her tone became prissy, very genteel. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with Rodney’s death.”
“How do you know?”
She looked at him as if this were unfair persecution.
“How could it be? He got killed because he picked up someone hitching a lift and they killed him. Something like that … It’s always happening.”
“That’s an interesting guess but it’s only a guess, isn’t it? You’ve no evidence for it and there’s plenty of evidence against it. The car being returned to Myringham, for instance. A phone call was made to your husband’s employers and a letter of resignation sent to them. Do you think that phone call was made by some homicidal hitchhiker?”
She sat rigid, keeping her eyes obstinately averted. Polly came back.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Williams?”
A nod. An indrawn breath and a sigh.
“What did you quarrel about?”
“I could refuse to tell you.”
“You could. But why take a stand like that when what you tell us will be treated in the strictest confidence? Ask yourself if it’s so awful that we won’t have heard it before. And don’t you think that if you don’t tell us we may come to think it something worse than it really was?”
She sat silent. She wore an expression like someone who expects at any moment to see something nasty and shocking on television. It was an anticlimax when she said almost in a whisper, “There was another girl.”
“You mean your husband had a woman friend he’d been seeing?”
“‘Seeing,’” she said, “I like that expression—‘seeing.’ Yes, he’d been seeing a woman friend. That’s one way of putting it.”
“How would you put it?”
“Oh, like that. The way you do. What else does one say? Something crude, I suppose.” The repressive lid suddenly jumped and let out a dribble of resentment, of bitterness. “I thought no one else but me would ever matter to him. I look young, don’t I? I’m pretty enough, I don’t look my age. People say I look eighteen. What was the matter with him that he … ? Yes, we quarreled about that. About a girl. I wanted him to promise me it would never happen again.”
“He refused?”
“Oh, he promised. I didn’t believe him. I thought it would start up again when he got the chance. I couldn’t stand it, I didn’t want him if he was going to do that. I was glad when he didn’t come back. Don’t you see? I was glad.”
“I’ll have to have this girl’s name.
Quick as a flash: “I don’t know her name.”
“Come now, Mrs. Williams.”
“I don’t know it. He wouldn’t tell me. Just a girl. What does it matter?”
She had said too much already, she was thinking. He could read that, plain in her face, the look in her eyes of being appalled at her own indiscretion. At that moment, before he could say any more, the door opened and a young girl came in. Just before this happened there had been a sound downstairs and footsteps on the stairs—the living room was on the middle floor—but it had all taken place very quickly, within a few seconds. And now, without warning, the girl was here among them.
What first struck Wexford was that although she was not so tall and her hair was shorter she looked exactly like Sara Williams. They might have been twins.