No Man's Nightingale (11 page)

‘I’ll be all right now. It’s just that I liked the Vicarage, I
loved
it, even though Mum died there. But now I know I’ll never live there with Mum again it – well, it breaks my heart.’

‘I can imagine,’ Lynn said, though she couldn’t. She watched Clarissa reach for consolation in the shape of a chocolate eclair, then said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk to you about this but I assure you it’s necessary. Do you ever see your father?’

At any rate, she hadn’t shocked or even astonished the girl. ‘I don’t know who he is.’

Lynn said nothing, just continued to look enquringly at Clarissa.

‘I’ll tell you everything I know but that’s not much. I think he’s still alive, he may not be any older than Mum was. She said she’d tell me when I like got to be eighteen. That’s in January, January the twentieth.’ Clarissa turned away from Lynn, stared at the cafe window. A sob caught at her throat. ‘But I’ll never get there, will I? Not for Mum.’ The tears came fast after and she sobbed into her hands.

Lynn gave her a tissue, then the whole packet. She would have liked to hug her but of course she couldn’t. Unreasonably perhaps, she felt suddenly angry with Sarah Hussain. Keeping the girl in the kind of suspense that now might never end. Clarissa scrubbed at her face with handfuls of tissues, took a deep breath and then gave a long sigh. Crying had made her face swell without disfiguring it.

‘Go on. I’ll be OK now.’

Lynn thought the next question that came to mind was worth a try, though fairly hopeless. She was to be surpised.

‘Gerry Watson? He was always turning up, like a stalker, I suppose you’d say.’

‘The solicitor?’ The one who lives in Stevenage? Are we talking about the same man?’

‘Got a smooth flat face and a very little mouth. Pompous.’

Lynn had never seen him. ‘He came here? He knew who your mother was and what she did?’

‘Sure.’

‘Tell me about him,’ said Lynn.

A lot had happened since yesterday. Those were Burden’s words when he phoned Wexford and invited him to come into the police station. Wexford wanted to say sarcastically, ‘Not another conference?’ but he restrained himself. No doubt discoveries had been made, perhaps the identity of Clarissa’s father. Even if it had, what good could that be to Burden? Imagining alien motives and mindsets, Wexford tried to picture a rapist who would kill his victim. During or immediately after the attack, yes, that was common, his motive to prevent the woman identifying him, but eighteen years later? Because perhaps he had asked to see his daughter? Why wait all those years? A distant father or putative father might make that request when his child was a baby of two or three years old but when she had become a woman? There might be an explanation for such behaviour (apart from paranoid schizophrenia) but he couldn’t think of one.

As he crossed the police station forecourt, a car swept past him, stopped by a flight of steps leading to the basement and two officers got out, followed by a handcuffed man of about twenty-five. Wexford didn’t recognise him, noting only the preponderance of tattoos on exposed parts of his body, neck, upper chest, arms and the ankles revealed by short loose jeans. A plethora of metal was anchored to his nostrils, eyebrows, ears and lower lip. As he had often thought before, such ironmongery must be very uncomfortable and what would happen when you tried to kiss someone? Did you take it off first or was it perhaps sexually attractive? The two policemen hustled the man down the steps to the door at the foot. Behind that door were interview rooms and Kingsmarkham’s two cells, for one of which the detainee was no doubt destined. The local youth, particularly the Stowerton gangs, hinted darkly that it was behind this door that the torture of suspects was carried out.

‘Sometimes,’ he quoted to himself, ‘these cogitations still amaze the troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.’ Well, it should be the noon’s repose now, a pleasant after-lunch rest with Gibbon. He confessed to himself that he was quite interested in learning what Burden had found out or what Lynn and maybe Barry had found out for him.

Burden was in his office that had once been Wexford’s own office, the room unchanged but for the absence of padded chairs and the rosewood desk which was his own and which he had removed on retirement. In its place was a horror (Wexford kept this description strictly to himself) of stainless steel and very expensive black plastic. More chairs than would ever be needed stood about the room and these, also of some slippery black substance, had narrow seats and high backs with cut-outs in the shape of dotless question marks. In one of these Lynn was sitting.

‘Now Mr Wexford is here,’ said Burden in a mildly scathing tone, ‘perhaps you’d like to start again, Lynn.’

He wasn’t late. He knew he wasn’t. ‘She calls me Reg,’ he said.

Burden said nothing. His expression said for him, ‘She’s not going to call me Mike.’

‘Right.’ Lynn looked from one to the other, as a patient mother might to her two little boys. ‘I didn’t record the conversation I had with Clarissa Hussain. I couldn’t, we were in a cafe. The first part of it is in my report, that’s the stuff about the rapist, the man who we think may be her father. The second part – Mr Burden said you’d like to hear it.’

‘Especially because you and Barry met the man, Reg.’ Burden seemed to have forgotten his previous irritability.

‘Yes, well, I asked her if she knew a man called Watson, Gerald Watson. Frankly, I expected her to say she’d never heard of him. But she actually knew him – well, she knew him by sight. She described him to me, said he had a sort of flat face and very small eyes. She said he was pompous. Is that right?’

‘Exactly right,’ Wexford said.

‘He’d been stalking her mother or something very like it. For about six months before she died. Clarissa said he never came to the Vicarage or as far as she knew he never did, though once he came into the garden through the back lane. She said he drove here. From Stevenage would be quite a long way. I asked her what her mother’s reaction was to these visits but she didn’t really know. Was she frightened? Clarissa said no. They had once been what she called “good friends”. Why had Sarah never invited him to the Vicarage? Clarissa didn’t know and apparently never asked. I suppose when you’re seventeen you’re not interested in the friendships or relationships of your parents. Perhaps she did invite him, perhaps he came and Clarissa never knew. She told me her mother didn’t seem in the least troubled by Watson’s turning up every couple of weeks, just walking past and waving to her or sitting in his car till she came out and calling to her, engaging her in conversation, and that was all. It didn’t worry Sarah and because it didn’t Clarissa wasn’t worried either. “I once called him her stalker,” she said, “and Mum was quite annoyed, said that was an awful thing to say about a perfectly innocent man.”’

‘Do we know where he was at the relevant time?’ Burden asked.

‘Of the murder, sir? It’s in the report.’

Burden had it in front of him. ‘He refused to say? We shall have to see him again. Your talk with Clarissa puts things in a very different light. Perhaps he’ll respond better to you, Lynn.’

‘You could have him in here.’

‘I could try. If he said no there’s nothing I could do. I think I’ll go and see him myself and you could come with me. He knows you.’

‘Yes and it’s quite within the bounds of probability that when he sees me he won’t speak a word.’

In the end they all went, but in two cars in case it was necessary to bring Gerald Watson back with them.

‘Donaldson will drive us,’ Burden said in the tone a fond father uses when promising his small son a visit to a theme park. Donaldson had once been Wexford’s own driver and Wexford acknowledged that he would be pleased to see him. For the first time in their fifteen-year-long association they shook hands and Wexford said he would sit in the front. It amused him, but not in an unkind way, to see that Burden was put out.

In his opinion it was a big entourage to undertake such a mission, the questioning of a man who had done no more than tell a face-saving lie to the police. Burden, of course, was convincing himself that Watson had done more than that. He had a particular hatred of stalkers and he had cast Watson in that role without much evidence for it. Surely the definition of a stalker was one whose attentions annoyed or frightened his victim, but Sarah Hussain seemed to have been on friendly terms with Watson.

It was a long drive. Lynn with Barry Vine got there just ahead of them. They all encountered each other outside the storm-cloud-grey tower where Watson’s office was. Wexford said he would stay in the car, have a chat with Donaldson about times gone by. The look on Burden’s face showed he had plenty to say about that but Wexford knew he wouldn’t in front of the driver. He, Barry and Lynn went through the heavy revolving doors and Donaldson began the tedious process of finding somewhere to park in case they needed to leave the car. The only possibility was underground which made Wexford wonder what it must be like these days to be a claustrophobe. They sat in the car amid concrete pillars, facing a concrete wall, and Wexford asked Donaldson about his wife and children and the clever one who had started at his Oxford college a month before and his mother-in-law’s recovery from cancer and they talked until Burden came on the phone to say Barry and Lynn had already left while he was ready to be picked up and he would be bringing Watson with him.

DORA WAS OUT
somewhere. It wasn’t one of Maxine’s days. Wexford made himself a cheese and tomato sandwich and settled down with Gibbon, the only interruption a phone call from Sylvia to ask him his opinion of her plan to let a room in her house now only she and two of her children were living there.

‘You don’t want my opinion,’ he said. ‘You want me to say you think it’s a good idea.’

‘Well, do you?’

‘I don’t think letting part of your house is ever a good idea unless you need the money.’

After he had ended the call he remembered Clarissa Hussain and Lynn’s half-promise to help her find somewhere to live. And then he thought of Georgina Bray and Thora Kilmartin and asked himself, why stir it? More Gibbon, then a phone call from Burden.

‘Watson’s gone back to Stevenage. Well, I questioned him for a time and then I had him taken back. He cried.’

‘He what?’

‘You heard. I mean, he wept, shed tears. When I got him on to his feelings for Sarah Hussain.’

‘Come round and have a drink.’

Burden arrived looking gloomy and morose. ‘When we were in his office he blustered a bit more. Then he suddenly said, “Oh, what’s the use?” and admitted to being deeply depressed ever since his wife died about a year ago. Well, I knew all about that as you can imagine but somehow I didn’t feel much sympathy.’

Wexford remembered the death of Burden’s first wife and his grief. ‘You said “admitted”,’ he said. ‘You have to
admit
to depression?’

‘His word, not mine. “I admit I was very depressed,” he said.’

‘Admit, I suppose, because to be depressed is seen as weakness.’ Wexford offered him red or white wine or whisky.

‘Better not. I’m driving. That was when I brought him back here. Anyway, he said that Sarah Hussain was the only girlfriend he had ever had before he met his wife and he began thinking of her, wondering where she was, what had happened to her and so forth. Well, he googled her and what he got was St Peter’s website. I was amazed. I didn’t know St Peter’s had a website, did you?’

‘No, but I wouldn’t.’

‘That was when the stalking started if you can call it that. I don’t know. He came down here and sat about in his car outside the church and outside the Vicarage until he saw her.’

‘Why not write to her, or phone her, come to that?’

‘He says he was afraid of a rebuff.’

‘Considering the way he’d treated her I’m not surprised. But eventually he didn’t get a rebuff, is that right?’

‘So he says. And so Clarissa says. Sarah spotted him and came up to his car and spoke to him and apparently he asked her if he could take her out. To dinner or something. She said no. Then he asked if she minded if he sometimes came here just to see her, he told her he was in love with her and always had been. “Have pity on me,” was what he says he said.’

Wexford laughed. ‘Contrary to what the poets tell us, that one never goes down well with women.’

‘When he told me that he started to cry. Lynn fetched him a glass of water. He put his head down on the desk and sobbed. I told him this wouldn’t do and to pull himself together. The result of that was an outpouring of his feelings about Sarah Hussain. On one occasion, he said, she invited him into the Vicarage. They talked and she said his following her and waiting outside to see her must stop but he told her he couldn’t live without her even if that meant just an occasional sight of her. When he left he encountered Clarissa coming home from school and was introduced but he didn’t know and doesn’t know now that she was the result of the rape. He thought Sarah must have had an affair with someone.’

Wexford fetched himself a glass of red wine. ‘You must have decided not to charge him with anything?’

‘I asked him if he would mind our taking fingerprints and he said no, that was all right. After that he said his life was over when he heard she’d been killed. It didn’t occur to him that he might be a suspect, or so he says.’

‘D’you believe that? The man’s a solicitor, for God’s sake.’

‘I don’t know, Reg. I really don’t know.’

Wexford told him about Sylvia’s proposal to let a room in her house. ‘If she decides to do this, and I think she will, would it be out of order for me to suggest Clarissa Hussain as a tenant?’

‘Clarissa’s living with Georgina Bray, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t like it. She wants to be on her own.’

‘I dare say,’ said Burden. ‘Don’t they all? Why shouldn’t you suggest Clarissa? It wouldn’t do if it was my Pat wanted to let a room to her but you’re – well, a private citizen.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose I am.’

Still, he would wait a while. Be sure of Sylvia’s intention first and then check that Clarissa hadn’t changed her mind. Sylvia phoned just after Burden left and Wexford heard Dora talking to her. The subject of their conversation was clear from Dora’s remarks: ‘You surely don’t need the money’ and ‘Will you bring yourself to evict him or her if they wreck your home?’