End in Tears (15 page)

Vivien Hilland seemed rather taken aback by his praise of the workmanship, as if she expected policemen to confine their comments entirely to forensic matters. Neither Cosima nor Daniel was anywhere to be seen this morning. With both her children absent, Mrs. Hilland seemed calmer and under less strain. But when Wexford told her that Daniel's friends had provided him with satisfactory alibis for the night of August
10
, instead of relief she showed indignation: “Well, of course. What else would one expect?”

He asked her about the rent of the Crenthorne Heath flat.

“We were charging her a token rent.” She sounded defensive and he understood why when, asking her to be more specific, she said, “Well, actually, a hundred a week.”

“Where was she going to find a hundred a week, Mrs. Hilland?”

No doubt she hadn't much cared for Burden's tone. Her defensiveness was even more marked when she said, “That really wasn't our concern. It was actually about a third of what she would have had to pay for the flat if she'd been let it by anyone else. As a matter of fact her father phoned me to say paying rent meant she couldn't take the flat, but that was all nonsense, that was just him saying anything to stop her going, he was so besotted with her. As for Diana, she's got plenty of money and I think she'd have paid the rent herself just to get rid of the girl. Let me tell you something. I think girls like her need to be taught responsibility and the value of money, and that's exactly what our offer would have done.”

There seemed no more to be said. As both got up to leave, the front-door bell rang. “That will be the men coming back for their tools,” said Mrs. Hilland.

Someone else's footsteps crossed the hall to answer the bell and when Wexford and Burden came out of the room they found Cosima there with a fair ruddy man of about thirty. Wexford, who had expected to see the man called Ross who had been there on a previous occasion, introduced himself and asked him who he was.

“Colin Fry's my name,” said the rugby player, his eyes following Cosima's long legs moving up the stairs.

“You work for Surrage-Samphire?”

“Got it in one,” said Fry.

“Who else does?”

“There's me and Rick and Mr. Samphire. That Megan something, that's what all this is about, is it? If you want to know about that place and the work and all, you want Mr. Samphire. Mr. Ross Samphire. He'll know all about it.”

CHAPTER 16

L
eaving the inquest on Megan Bartlow, Wexford walked down toward Gew-Gaws, the shop where she had worked. When he pushed open the door Jimmy Gawson's bell rang, summoning him from the back regions. Wexford had known Gawson slightly for years, long before the opening of the shop, and rather liked talking to him for the pleasure of hearing an accent so Etonian—or ham actor outrageously overplaying Etonian—that it strained credulity yet never lapsed.

“Ah, good morning, Chief Inspector,” he now said, extending a pale and rather damp hand. “I've told your good people absolutely everything I can about that fateful morning, you know. Which, actually, amounts to very little. I wasn't here and by the time I was here poor little Megan had vanished and her note was on the door.”

“I know. I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about
her.
What you know of her.”

Gawson waved his hand at a seat for Wexford and sat down himself behind a counter laden with plastic models of Big Ben, miniature London buses, stick-on Union flags, photographs of Princess Diana, and nodding-head bulldogs. He took an inhaler off a shelf, inserted a nicotine cartridge and drew heavily on it.

“Just as good as a cig,” he said, “but cheaper and good for you. Marvelous, isn't it? I've been on them for three years now.”

Doubting that Gawson was using his device for quite the purpose it was designed for, Wexford made no comment. “You were going to tell me about Megan.”

“You mean you thought I was going to tell you about Megan. The question is, do I know anything about her? She was most awfully common, you know. The sort of person this government calls socially excluded. Nice expression, that, don't you think? She would certainly have been excluded from any society of mine.”

Wexford knew that if he was rude to the man, he ran the risk of getting no more out of him but he couldn't help himself. “I don't know that I'm much interested in your views on the class system, Jimmy. Apart from being several miles beneath the likes of a purveyor of tourist trash, what sort of a girl was she? Did you like her? Silly question, I suppose. You're too grand for likings.”

“Now come on, my dear. You know all I said was my little joke. Where's your sense of humor? There was no harm in Megan, I suppose. Her accent hurt my ears. I actually believe one of my tympanic membranes was permanently damaged by her assaults on it.”

Wexford watched him take his third or fourth draw on the nicotine inhaler. “Did you ever see her, well, engage in any transactions in here that weren't strictly a matter of flogging mini–Buckingham Palaces to unsuspecting visitors?”

“You mean drugs, don't you? Oh, I know all about it. Who doesn't? You've not exactly made a secret of the great drugs bust you mounted in this burg. But no, I didn't. Frankly, I don't think she'd have had the nous.”

Wexford shook his head. “You'd make me wonder why you employed her, Jimmy, if I didn't know. You were paying her below the minimum wage, weren't you? You needn't answer that. It's too late. But if you take on another assistant, I should watch it. That's all. The boyfriend in here much?”

A rapid succession of puffs had exhausted the cartridge and Jimmy Gawson inserted another. “As I've said, Megan wasn't too bright, but she was Einstein compared to him. I wouldn't have him in here. He tried it on once or twice, but I told Megan no way. Her mama would have fancied dropping in for a chat, but I squashed that too. In fact, my dear, the only one of that family I wouldn't have objected to was Grandma.”

“Grandma?”

“Old Gracie Morgan, that is. Years and years ago when all the world was young, lad, and all the leaves were green, and we Gawsons were Kingsmarkham gentlefolks, and that
meant
something, Gracie used to do for us. She must be over ninety now, as I know from Megan who used to go and see her sometimes. You might say a fondness for old Gracie was the only thing poor little Megan and I had in common.”

“Those things you're sucking on,” said Wexford distantly, “are designed to wean you off smoking, not to supply you with alternative dope.”

He left, his dignified exit slightly marred by bending down to pick up a London Eye, re-created in silver plastic, which the hem of his raincoat had swept off a low table. To Burden later he said, “Jimmy mentioned a woman called Grace Morgan to me. I know I've heard the name and not long ago, but I can't for the life of me think when or where.”

“I can,” said Burden. “She's one of our witnesses, or would be if she'd seen anything. She's ninety-three and she lives in that cottage in the woods where we think whoever chucked the concrete at Amber's car must have passed by.”

“She's also Megan Bartlow's grandmother.”

“You mean…? Wait a minute.”

“We didn't know that when Hannah and Lynn went to see her. Jimmy wasn't interested in Megan's private life but her grandmother may have been.”

“Yes. Well, we should talk to Grace Morgan.”

“We will. As soon as possible. I don't want to sound callous but when you're ninety-three, death is an existential hazard, so it really is urgent.”

 

A soft mist hung low over the fields. Because it had been dry for so long and the trees starved of water, their leaves were turning early. The woods were yellowing before autumn had come and while the sun was still hot. It blazed through the veil of mist, burning it off from everywhere but the shady places and the deep hollows. Wexford and Burden left the car at the top of Yorstone Lane and walked along the footpath that led into the woods. The berries on the wayfaring trees that grew here in great profusion had turned from green to gold, from gold to red and now were almost black. In the distance a woodpecker could be heard, its beak drilling into a tree trunk.

“I wonder how long she's lived here,” Wexford said. “Years, of course. Maybe all her life. And every time she went out and came home she had to walk this path, carrying whatever she had to carry, her children at one time, I expect.”

“Mm.” Burden wasn't much interested.

“You could bring a car across here. You can see by the ruts that people have. Possibly our man did. And you could take it into the wood—just.” They were among the trees now and the path had narrowed. “The tree trunks are too close together to bring it much farther than this. He could have left it over there.” Wexford pointed to a grassy space, almost a lawn, overhung with hawthorn and a canopy of brambles. “Under that lot it would be almost concealed.”

“Especially if he wasn't fussy about his bodywork. Those branches would cover a vehicle with scratches.”

Wexford nodded. “The pity is that we didn't know about this—that is, we had no reason to suspect that the concrete block off the bridge business was an attempt on Amber's life until her death six weeks later. We thought it was a simple act of vandalism. ‘Taking revenge on society,' as some people call it, not directed at a specific target.”

It is not uncommon for the homes of very old people to look, to the careless eye, as if they are uninhabited. Their own eyes are no longer able to see dirt and untidiness. Decorating is expensive and do-it-yourself projects are now beyond them. The curtains at their windows, often lace or net and once pristine white, collect dust and hang limp inside fly-spotted glass, and these windows are seldom opened, if by now they can be, for the elderly feel the cold. Mostly, too, they are poor and often proud so that their relatives think this is their chosen way to live, not what it really is, a precarious hanging on to life at whatever cost.

These thoughts passed through Wexford's mind as Grace Morgan's house came in sight, a squat, brownish, part-tiled, part-thatched cottage surrounded by a dilapidated picket fence. The front gate had come off its hinges and lay across a slight hollow in the path, placed there evidently to serve as a bridge or ford in wet weather. It was so long since there had been any wet weather that the path itself had dried to dust and the once-green grass of the clearing in which the cottage stood had turned yellow like hay.

It was unlikely that any house in the villages from Framhurst to Forby had all its windows closed today. Except Grace Morgan's. Their frames looked rotted, as if you could poke your forefinger through the woodwork, as if any attempt to open them would cause the whole window to collapse.

“I suppose she's out,” said Burden in a gloomy voice. “That comes of having no phone. Everyone,” he added illogically, “has a phone.”

“She's not out.” Wexford banged the door knocker hard.

“If you do that you'll frighten her to death.”

“If I don't,” said Wexford, “she probably won't hear.”

They were on the point of giving up when the door was at last answered. Grace Morgan was a tiny woman, shrunk to several inches under five feet, thin, spare, and shriveled. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, cobwebbed and gray as a cobweb is. What remained of her hair was a white wisp screwed up on the top of her head with two long black pins. She looked not in the least disconcerted by the arrival of two tall men she had never seen before. “You look like policemen,” she said.

“That's so, Mrs. Morgan.”

Burden showed her his warrant card, and then Wexford showed his.

“It's no good, I can't see. It's all a blur. Might be James Mason and Michael Redgrave for all I know.”

After offering this evidence of a distant cinema-going past, Grace Morgan opened the door wider and stepped back to let them in. “It was two girls as came last time. DS this and DC that, whatever it means. I don't hold with girls being policemen. What happens if they get hit or shot?”

Wexford said he hoped that wouldn't happen and that DS Goldsmith and DC Fancourt were very good officers.

“That may be, but girls do get killed. Look at my granddaughter Megan. She got shot.”

Believing it unnecessary to correct her, Wexford said that was what they had come to talk to her about. They were very sorry about it, it must have been a great shock to Mrs. Morgan and a blow. He understood her granddaughter was a frequent visitor to the cottage.

“Frequent, did you say? Depends what you mean by frequent. I reckon I'd seen her three times since Christmas, and Christmas I was at my daughter Sandra's. Reckon I was bound to see her there. When she came here it was on the scrounge.”

“The scrounge?”

“That's what I said. She knew I never spent all my pension, not living here and having the Meals on Wheels. There's a girl comes with it on a bike. If Megan came it was to borrow my pension. Well, ‘borrow' is what she called it. I never saw it back, that's for sure. I will say for Sandra, she never knew.”

She had brought them into a dark brown living room crowded with dark brown furniture, and smelling of boiled greens and reused fat and camphor, and clothes worn year in and year out without being washed or cleaned. The only thing in the room that looked less than a century old was the television set. Burden said afterward that he couldn't understand anyone who had television not also having a phone, but Wexford disagreed. You got entertainment and companionship out of the telly, while all you got out of the phone was complaints and nagging.

“Mrs. Morgan,” he began, “I've been wondering if Megan came to see you the evening you were watching for the badgers?”

It was a long shot, but when she asked “Did she what?” he repeated it and reminded her that on the evening she had seen the hooded figure in the wood she had only done so because she had been watching for badgers.

“Better than the telly, they are, if only you can get to see them. If nobody comes along and makes them all skedaddle.”

“Did Megan do that, Mrs. Morgan?”

“She was upstairs. She wanted fifty pounds off me and I sent her upstairs to fetch it. Get her out of my way while I watched the badgers, but they never came that evening.”

“The man with the hood, Mrs. Morgan”—Wexford felt his heart begin to sink. Had he been wrong again? “Could Megan have seen him from upstairs? Did she mention seeing a man?”

“Not her. There's two rooms up there. I sent her up to the back. That's where I keep my pension money, see? I said to fetch it all down and I'd give her fifty out of it. So she did, after that fellow in the hood had been and gone. She came down with the tin it was in, there was a hundred and thirty-five pounds in there. I give her fifty in five ten-pound notes and she had the nerve to ask for more. Well, mustn't speak ill of the dead.”

“How long after that did Megan stay with you?” Burden asked. He was wearing a new lightweight jacket of light tan seersucker and was beginning to wonder if the smell would adhere to its fibers. More dry-cleaning, he thought. “Five minutes? Ten? Longer?”

“About twenty, I reckon. It was dark. I said, have you got a flashlight, going back through that wood, and she said she'd got the lamp on her bike.”

“She came on a bicycle?”

“That's what I said. She went off. I said to her, don't you bother coming again if all you want is cash. Mustn't speak ill of the dead, eh?”

The air in the wood smelled wonderful. Like flowers and new-mown hay and ripe apples, said Burden, uncharacteristically lyrical. They walked back along the path, inhaling the scented air with deep pleasure.

“What d'you think?” Burden said, sniffing his jacket as he did after he'd been in a smoke-filled pub.

“What do I think? I think Grace is right when she says Megan couldn't have seen Hood from upstairs when he was on his way to the bridge, but she saw him on his way back. She left her grandmother just about the time he too would have been returning.”

“If he returned. If he didn't go on over the bridge.”

“I think he returned, Mike. He'd have wanted to go back the way he came because going on over the bridge would mean that (a) his vehicle, whatever it was, was parked on the other side and (b) by going on he'd have a detour of at least six miles before finding his way back to his vehicle. No, Megan saw him. That's what I think. Whether he saw her we don't know. She saw him and knew him.”