End in Tears (9 page)

“I've remembered,” Wexford interrupted him. “Bartlow—it's not a common name. You were wrong about our having no reason to connect her with Amber Marshalson. She had two friends who were sisters. Lara and Megan Bartlow.”

CHAPTER 11

R
ather than one of the bleak interview rooms, Sergeant Camb had put them into Kingsmarkham police station's newly set-up “family room.” This offspring of the caring society, to use Wexford's own words for it, had been born of an idea of Hannah Goldsmith's and enthusiastically taken up by the Chief Constable. A former repository of lost property, it measured no more than twelve feet by ten and had only one small casement window, but it made up for what it lacked in space and ventilation by its cheerful furnishings. The hard-wearing cord carpet was a rich emerald green, each of the three small armchairs was a different primary color and the fourth striped blue and yellow. A painting large enough to cover one wall almost entirely was a coral and crimson medley Wexford described as looking like a butcher's block at closing time on a Saturday night. He had suggested to the Chief Constable that the council-tax payers of Kingsmarkham should be offered a tour of the place, seeing that they had paid for it. For a moment he thought he had been taken seriously.

He found Megan Bartlow's boyfriend and her mother sitting side by side, he in the yellow chair, she in the red one, facing the picture across a white plastic table laden with very old color supplements from Sunday newspapers. Neither of them had disturbed the neat stack, which still looked the way it had when the family room was opened by a celebrity (a local man who now played for Manchester City) eleven weeks before. The two appeared to be much the same age, late forties. Megan's mother was a thin haggard woman with dyed blond hair hanging well below her shoulders and a face colored as brightly as the furniture and in much the same shades. The boyfriend—a “kind of common-law son-in-law,” as Wexford told Burden later—looked as if he had dressed himself up for a fancy dress party as a twenty-first-century villain. His gray hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. He wore half a dozen rings studded through the outer curve of one ear and a silver or white metal cross hanging against the triangle of gray furry chest which his dirty white vest exposed. Ferocious tattoos, red, black, and broccoli green, covered his arms. His jeans were skintight with frayed hems and ragged holes on each knee.

Wexford said a courteous “Good evening” to both of them and asked their names.

Megan's mother seemed to have left Bartlow behind long before and gave hers in some confusion. “Lapper, Sandra Lapper,” she said, and then, “Oh God, no, it's not. I've got a memory like a sieve. It's Warner now on account of I got married last week. What a fool!”

“Keith's my name. Keith Prinsip.”

The man had a deeply lined dark face with a wide but thin mouth and narrow eyes under hoodlike lids the color of black grapes. He lounged in his chair, one leg crossed over the other knee and, lips pursed, appeared to be whistling silently to himself. Mrs. Warner rummaged in a black handbag heavily decorated with straps and gilt buckles, and produced a photograph covered in plastic wrap. Burden took it from her, studied it and passed it to Wexford. Megan's looks were the prettiness of youth, her nose large and her chin small. She had the requisite long and straight blond hair and had followed her mother's example in the application of makeup.

“Do you have another daughter called Lara, Mrs. Warner?” Wexford asked.

“How did you know?”

Police officers never answer that question. “Tell me what happened.” Wexford looked from one to the other, having no preference as to which of them should be the narrator. Sandra Warner looked at Keith Prinsip, and Prinsip continued with his soundless whistling, but neither said a word. “All right,” Wexford said. “Since you and Miss Bartlow live together, Mr. Prinsip, perhaps you'd begin.”

“My dad died,” Prinsip began. “I had to get up there for the funeral and once I was there, see, I stopped over with my sister as my dad lived with, right?”

Restraining an impulse to say it was far from right, Wexford asked him where “up there” was and which day and night he was talking about.

Like many people of his kind, Prinsip seemed to find it incomprehensible that the circumstances of his family and details of his daily life should be unknown to the world at large. Incredulously, he said, “Brum, innit? Birmingham, right? Where I come from, where me dad lived. Not yesterday. The day before and the night before yesterday I'm like talking about.” Desperately, he made a mammoth effort. “Like Saturday it was me dad died. I went up there like Monday and the funeral was Tuesday. I come back Wednesday. Yesterday, that is. Yesterday, innit, Sand?”

“You're upset, Keithie, and no wonder.” Sandra Warner said to Wexford, “He went up there August thirty-first and he come back yesterday.”

“Miss Bartlow wasn't with you?”

“Meg never got on with my family. Her and my sister, they fought like two cats.”

“So you left home at what time on Monday? And where was Megan?” said Burden. This was very hard work. If they relied on this man they would be here all night. “Mrs. Warner?” he said.

“Half-nine you left, Keithie, that's right, innit? So Megan'd have been at the shop. They open nine. Is that right, Keithie?”

Wexford saw that words had to be put into Prinsip's mouth or they would get nowhere. He waited while Mrs. Warner prompted him again.

“You'd said good-bye to her and said if Kath wanted you to stop over you'd give her a bell and then she went down to the shop.”

“Megan works at Gew-Gaws?”

“Yeah, right,” said Prinsip, relieved. He made another effort. “She works for Jimmy Gawson. I give her a phone around six like on the Tuesday but she got her mobile switched off.”

“Did you make any more attempts to phone her? I mean,” said Burden, realizing the limitations of his listener, “did you try again?”

“Yeah, but it wasn't no use.”

“You give me a ring, Keithie. Ever so late it was Tuesday night, like midnight. You know what Lee said? ‘That Keith wants to remember we're newlyweds,' he said. ‘For all he knows I might have been on the job.'” Sandra Warner let out a screech of laughter. “Hark at me. I'd better get a hold of myself. God knows what may have happened to Megan and there's me laughing like a drain.”

“I give Sand a ring like I say and I done it again the next day on account of I was getting worried.” This time Keith Prinsip needed no prompting. “I mean, where'd she got to? I got back from Brum around dinnertime yesterday, like twelve-ish, and there wasn't no sign of her.”

“There wouldn't be, though, Keithie. She'd have been at the shop.”

“She wasn't, Sand.” The interview was turning into a conversation between the two of them. “First thing I done was go down there. Jimmy as owns the place, he said, ‘Where's that Megan, then?' First thing he said to me. ‘Where's that Megan, then?'”

“Keithie come round to ours and had a bit of dinner with Lee. We said, I mean we all said, Lee as well, we'll give it twenty-four hours, we said, and if she don't show up, we'll…well, we didn't know what but we reckoned we'd have to do something.”

Wexford and Burden looked at each other, both bludgeoned into silence by these repetitive and largely useless accounts. Still, Sandra Warner remained the better source of information. It was her Wexford asked if her other daughter, Lara, lived at home with her and if the sisters were close. Meanwhile Burden went to get a missing persons form.

“What you want to know about my other daughter for? Lara's not missing, thank God.”

“She was a friend of the dead girl, Amber Marshalson,” said Wexford, unable this time to avoid all explanation.

“Not to say a friend. Not a friend.” Mrs. Warner looked affronted. “
Friendly,
I'll grant you that.”

Wexford had not the least idea whether what he said was true but he said it just the same. “She and Amber went to Frankfurt together.”

Guesswork or inspiration, he was nearly right and thereby absolutely wrong. “Not Lara. Megan, and what if she did?” Sandra Warner was quick to take offense. “That's not a crime, is it? I don't even know where the bloody place is. Somewhere they use them euros.”

It may well be a crime, Wexford said to himself. “I'd like to talk to Lara tomorrow. What time does she go to work?”

“She don't work. She's in like higher education. Stowerton Business School, only it's not a school, it's a college.”

“I'll see you and her tomorrow. By then we may have news of Megan.”

Burden came back with the form and stood looking from one to the other, uncertain as to who would claim it.

“Give it here,” said Sandra. “No good leaving it to Keithie. He's forgot his glasses.” She winked ferociously at Burden who interpreted this signal as indicating Keith's inability to read. Keith himself showed none of the shame typical of the illiterate but resumed his whistling, not silently this time but a vague and soft rendering of “Can't Buy Me Love.”

 

It was late. Wexford said good night to Burden and walked quite slowly home. The girl was dead, he was sure of it, and this knowledge made looking back on the interview with anything like the amusement he would otherwise have felt impossible. She was dead because she had known Amber Marshalson, more specifically because she had been involved in the same traffic as Amber and both of them, somewhere along the line, had talked of exposing those who paid them. Or, he corrected this account, Megan had threatened to tell on those who had been responsible for Amber's murder. That was most likely. No one went to Frankfurt on holiday. You went there for a conference or a business meeting or to change planes. Amber and Megan had gone there in order to hand over what they, or one of them, was smuggling out of this country and into Germany on its way, probably, to the Far East.

Nothing, it seemed to him, would have much effect on the bovine stupidity of Keith Prinsip—it was a Serbian name, the name of the assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand—but he thought with a kind of dread of its impact on the jolly Sandra Warner, so obviously happy in her new marriage, to whom the worst appeared not to have occurred. It would hit her all the more resoundingly.

He came to his house and saw that Sylvia's car was still outside. Glad—he couldn't help that—yet dismayed too, he told himself to go easy with her, be kind, hand out no more reproaches. What, after all, was the use? He let himself into the hall and heard the unwelcome sound of a voice that was neither Sylvia's nor his wife's. For a moment he couldn't place it, but he opened the door, went in, and found himself shaking hands with Naomi Wyndham, whom he had met maybe once before. She was a small slender woman of about thirty-five with the kind of long red hair that would have sent Rossetti into ecstasies. There was something distasteful to Wexford in this present-day matiness of ex-wives with current girlfriends and ex-husbands with their one-time wives' lovers, yet when he examined what he felt, he had to confess that discord and spite would be far worse.

Dora felt much more strongly about it than he did. It seemed that she disapproved of her daughter and everyone associated with her daughter. When Wexford walked in she was telling Sylvia in a cold voice that she had better get back and relieve the woman who was sitting with Ben and Robin. She could hardly understand, she said, why Sylvia had come over when it involved the trouble and expense of a sitter. With him she became scathing. “Naomi's so involved with the infant already, Reg, that she's keeping a proprietory eye on Sylvia. Checking she doesn't drink any alcohol and takes all her vitamins, aren't you?”

Sylvia looked displeased, almost stormy.

“You see, I can't help imagining it's me carrying our baby,” said Naomi. “I mean, I know it's not, but I kind of pretend it is. Sylvia's felt it move—well, him or her move, she won't find out its gender, I don't know why not—and I imagine it's me feeling it. Well, it's more than imagination, actually. I really felt a flutter this morning. It was just like a little foot giving me a gentle kick.”

Sylvia said in an unpleasant tone, “Imagination is right. You can't feel it. You don't know what it's like.”

“I know that only too well, Sylvia, and that's my tragedy. But I make up for it by trying to feel what you feel. When you go into labor I bet I'll have the pains.”

“Husbands in the South Seas do that,” said Wexford. “They go off into a hut and simulate their wives' pains. The couvade, it's called.”

“How lovely,” gushed Naomi. “I shall do a couvade when the time comes.”

“Why don't we all have a drink,” said Wexford hastily, expecting Sylvia to say no.

She surprised him with a mutinous, “I'll have a large glass of white wine, please, Dad. Naomi will abstain for me, so she can drive me home.”

After they had gone, he lay back in his armchair by the wide-open French windows. A little breeze had risen, the first for weeks. “Perhaps the weather's changing,” he said. The ice-cold beer glass in his hand reminded him, oddly, of the pleasure of clutching a radiator on a snowy day in January. “That girl would drive me mad if I were Sylvia.”

“She'll go about telling everyone she's doing a couvade now you've put that into her head,” said Dora.

“Where was Neil?”

“Keeping well out of it if he's got any sense.”

Later he lay in bed beside her, covered by no more than a sheet, thinking of the girl who was dead and the girl who was probably dead and the money for which they had paid so much higher a price.

 

Early morning is a beautiful time when the weather is fine but the heat is still hours away. Hannah had been told at school why dew settles on grass on such mornings but she had forgotten what she had learned. In such a long-drawn-out drought, it seemed strange to her that this abundant water should be there sprinkling the grass verges with gleaming drops and lying like rows of pearls along the crossbar of the Brookses' gate.