No Man's Nightingale (25 page)

Wexford went to see him but Jenny refused to let him get past the bedroom door, making his exclusion worse by telling him that at his age he should be careful to avoid infection. He walked home the long way round by way of Ladysmith Road, hoping not to encounter Nicky Sams but not avoiding the area on that account. If he met with another torrent of abuse – well, so be it. But Nicky and Isabella were nowhere to be seen. Instead he found himself approaching a man he recognised as the one he had seen letting himself into Nardelie Mukamba’s house, tall, dark, about forty. They didn’t know each other but still he found himself saying good morning.

The greeting was returned but with a ‘Hi. How are you?’

Not the words but the accent surprised him and he immediately reproached himself for making such a judgement. Had he really taken it for granted that a man who had lived in that part of Stowerton, and now perhaps lived here, wouldn’t speak with the voice of a Cabinet minister?

Burden escaped being sent to hospital and in a day or two he was allowed visitors. Wexford was admitted to what he called the ‘pesthouse’, his friend’s rather beautiful bedroom, as elegant in shades of cream and caramel as its occupant. Burden was up, sitting in an armchair upholstered in autumn-leaf-coloured satin, a fleecy cream blanket over his knees.

‘Crocker’s let me get up because I want to get back to work. He says no to tomorrow but I think he’ll let me back on Thursday.’

‘I haven’t noticed things coming to a standstill without your guiding hand,’ said Wexford.

‘That’s because I’m guiding them from in here. Thank God for technology. I hate to encourage you but your pal Duncan Crisp’s not well. Nothing to do with him being banged up. Apparently, according to Crocker, he’s got cancer. Or he very probably has. At his age it’s more than likely, poor devil.’

‘What sort of cancer?’

‘Prostate,’ said Burden, reaching for the glass of orange juice on his bedside table. ‘They’ll only be sure when they’ve done some tests.’

‘Well, I’m sorry. And even I can’t blame that on remand prison conditions. People call it “prost
rate
”, you know. I’ve heard nurses call it that. And women think they can get it. The other day I heard a woman Dora knows say that a female friend of hers had cancer and they weren’t sure yet but they thought it might be prost
rate.
’

Burden laughed, then stopped as suddenly. ‘D’you know, twenty years ago if anyone had told me I’d be amused by anything to do with cancer I don’t know what I’d have done. Hit him, I think.’

Remembering the death of Burden’s first wife from breast cancer, Wexford said, ‘Why have I escaped that fate?’

‘You told me to get over it but not to laugh,’ said Burden.

‘Are they going to do these tests then?’

‘They are but not inside. Haven’t got the facilities, they say. They’ll have to take him to the Princess Diana in an ambulance, or we will, with a guard.’

‘He’s hardly likely to make a run for it,’ said Wexford as Jenny came in with tea on a tray.

‘Mike looks much better, Reg,’ she said. ‘Must be your therapeutic presence. I can go back to school tomorrow.’

THE DUKAN DIET
– Wexford said it was much the same as the Atkins Diet of twenty or thirty years ago – had changed Sylvia’s appearance so radically that he said untruthfully that if he’d passed her in the street he wouldn’t have known her. It was only, he added, because she was sitting with her mother in the Wexfords’ living room that he recognised her as his daughter.

‘You only say that out of envy, Dad.’

‘If envy means wanting to live on nothing but protein, no thanks.’ Cancer was on his mind. Poor old Crisp. ‘Too much of that and you’ll get bowel cancer.’

‘Oh, Reg, really!’

‘Really what? She doesn’t take any notice of what her father says, anyway. She’d be an unnatural child if she did.’

‘Well, now I’m going to,’ Sylvia said. ‘Clarissa wants you for a go-between, a sort of middleman.’

‘She what?’

Dora got up. ‘I don’t know what this is about but I think we should all have a drink. Something white, some of that Cloudy Bay stuff.’ She went to the kitchen to fetch it.

‘You remember that letter I told you about, the one with the London SW something postmark? Well, she told me it was from someone in her mother’s past. She didn’t say who. Not that it would have meant anything to me so I don’t know why not. Anyway, she wants someone else to meet this person before she does, find out what it’s about, and it’s you she wants to do this. I was amazed, I didn’t know she knew you that well.’

‘Whoever this person is, does he want a go-between? Does he even know there is to be a go-between?’ Wexford paused. ‘If there is.’

Dora came back with the Cloudy Bay.

THE PRISON WHERE
Crisp was held in Myringham was by no means as unpleasant as Wexford had feared. And the sickroom, or ‘san’, for sanatorium, as it was known, was a pleasant enough unit containing five beds, one of which had been occupied by Crisp since he had suffered a haemorrhage a few days before. Consultation between the prison doctor and the urologist at the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital had resulted in a decision to remove Crisp to Stowerton for tests with a view to possible surgery.

Crisp was sixty-nine, not very old by today’s standards, but his stay in the prison had aged him and the prison doctor referred to him as a ‘poor old guy’. His back, never very straight, had become bent, gardening would no longer be possible for him, and it was hard, even for Burden, to imagine him having the strength to strangle a strong woman in the prime of life. It was easier to picture death coming before justice caught up with him. The doctor, a cheerful soul, said that surgery and hormone treatment would very likely make a world of difference to his health and appearance.

The ambulance, driven by one paramedic and carrying another, arrived in Myringham at nine in the morning of Monday 28 January. It was very cold, several degrees below freezing. Not on a stretcher but seated in a wheelchair, Duncan Crisp, wearing a thick wool dressing gown over pyjamas, wool socks and slippers, a woolly hat and wrapped in a blanket, was brought out and lifted, still in the chair, into the ambulance. Accompanying him was a prison officer. The paramedics introduced themselves to Crisp and his guard as Michelle Fox and Keith Turner, the prison officer said his name was Dave Cresswell and for some reason, known to no one but due perhaps to his age or perhaps because he was on remand, presented the prisoner as ‘Mr Crisp’.

Very little snow was lying but the grass verges along the country roads were white with frost. Hoar frost, that Christmas- decoration-like silvering, coated the tree branches, while on the lanes where old melted snow had frozen on the road surface, care had to be taken to avoid skidding. Keith, who was driving, did avoid it, they moved on to the bypass and proceeded in silence towards the Stowerton exit road. Keith and Michelle would have had no objection to a chat but Dave made it plain silence was preferred. Duncan Crisp, swathed in his blanket, had pulled the woolly hat down to cover his eyes and appeared to have fallen asleep. It was more or less at this point that Jeremy Legg had been involved in that collision that resulted (or didn’t result) in Isabella Sams’s fit and ultimately in Jeremy’s death.

Half a mile further on, Keith turned left on to the Stowerton Road. A nondescript green van overtook the ambulance, raced ahead and pulled sharply to the left, creating a barrier across the road. Keith hooted. No notice was taken. He stopped and got down from the cab as Dave moved towards the rear doors. Two men got out of the van, both wearing masks, and one of them wearing gloves. Keith stood still and shouted at them as to what was going on. He said afterwards that he was lucky they didn’t kill him, for before they grabbed him and bundled him into the van, he saw that each had a gun.

Dave too was seized. He was armed but it turned out later that he had never in fact used his weapon. He was not to use it this time, for his wrists were handcuffed behind his back and a sack pulled over his head and upper body. He staggered, fell and was lifted into the van along with Keith. Michelle showed more enterprise than the men, calling 999 and asking for the police before she got down from the ambulance. Using the doctor’s words, she said to the two men with the guns, ‘He’s a poor old guy. He can’t do any harm. You leave him alone.’

They took her phone from her but not before she had told them she’d called the police. One of them, the bigger of the two, punched her in the face, breaking her jaw. She fell on the roadway where they left her, went into the ambulance and brought Crisp out. He was screaming but they didn’t attempt to stop him, pushing his chair to the back of the van. They lifted him out and threw him in along with Keith and Dave. Two miles down the road they turned into a farm track and drove up to a barn. Keith and Dave were taken out and dragged into the barn where they were blindfolded and their ankles bound together with rope. The barn door was slammed shut, but as there was no key or padlock, not locked. The two who had left them there returned to the van and out on to the road.

The police arrived quite quickly and another ambulance. The first thing they did was lift Michelle up from the frozen ground and carry her into the new ambulance, though the one the four had been in was still there, undamaged. Because her jaw was broken she could tell them nothing. The ambulance took her away to the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital where Duncan Crisp should by now have arrived.

At this time, Burden had no fear for Crisp’s life. He wondered what the motive could have been for taking him but reached no conclusion. Crisp had been ‘sprung’, but why? Were the men who had taken him mates of his, the whole thing a set-up? He must be paying them and paying them handsomely. They had guns. They were risking, if not their lives, their liberty. Duncan Crisp had only his pension and what Mrs Morgan paid him and would by now have ceased to pay him.

The snatch was the lead story in the
Evening Standard
and the lead item on the BBC’s regional news at six thirty. By this time it was as dark as midnight and very cold, the frost returning with ferocity. Keith Turner and Dave Cresswell were rescued about ten minutes later by the farmer on whose land the barn was. He had driven down there to fetch a bale of straw for a farrowing sow and found the two men, both of whom were rushed to hospital.

They sat in Burden’s office that had once been Wexford’s office and was now minus the rosewood desk that had been his pride and joy. Its present home was in his house, filling almost a whole wall in the tiny study. Since he was last there Burden had got a new calendar which appeared to be of Cornish pondlife.

‘In this age of technology,’ said Burden, ‘we’ve no need to be here. We might as well be down the pub or at least in the Olive. We might as well be at home. But somehow I know I’d feel guilty if I’m not here awaiting news.’

‘
You can have a drink.
We
can have a drink. We’re not going to drive anywhere. On the last day this office was mine I left a bottle of amontillado in that cupboard. I suppose you’ve drunk it by now.’

‘I certainly have not,’ said Burden. ‘You have a glass if it’s still drinkable. Go on. I won’t. I’ll get someone to bring me a cup of tea.’

‘Potable,’ said Wexford. ‘That means “fit to drink”, doesn’t it? It’s not a term anyone uses any more.’

The bottle was still there and two sherry glasses. As he was pouring the pale golden wine into one of them Burden’s tea arrived. The landline phone was ringing but it was only Karen Malahyde to say that Keith Turner and Dave Cresswell would be fit to talk in half an hour’s time.

There was no news of Duncan Crisp and the green van had not been traced. Wexford said that the sherry was indeed potable, in fact improved by its sojourn in the cupboard. ‘I wish there was something we could do. But short of roaming about the countryside looking in barns and abandoned vehicles and catching hypothermia like those two, there isn’t.’

‘You can go home, Reg. You might as well.’

‘Not yet. I’ll wait a bit longer.’

‘Tell me a story,’ said Burden. ‘Tell me what’s happening with that girl and what she was supposed to be told on her eighteenth birthday. It’s not in the least relevant to Crisp, I’m sure, but it might be a distraction.’

So Wexford told him about Christian Steyner whose partner Timon Arkwright was a wealthy tycoon (or something of that sort) and on the
Sunday Times
Rich List, whose mother was a flirtatious little old woman who lived in Kensington and whose twin brother Leo had been Sarah Hussain’s husband. He told him about the car crash that had killed Leo and his father and that he, Wexford, had learned only that day from talking on the phone to Victoria Steyner that her daughter-in-law had been pregnant when Leo was killed but suffered a miscarriage two days after the accident.

It was Arkwright Burden picked up on. ‘Must be awkward being called Timon. Everyone will call him Simon by mistake and he’ll spend half his life correcting them.’

‘Yes, well, I think Christian wants to tell Clarissa that Leo died in possession of a sum of money left to him by some relative and wanted him to pass this on to Sarah’s child.’

‘But as it happened there wasn’t a child. Or not that child.’

‘No, but maybe he said “Sarah’s child” and that could be stretched to any child.’

‘A bit far-fetched, isn’t it?’

‘You always say my ideas are far-fetched,’ said Wexford.

Burden laughed. ‘Why not make a will?’

‘Why not indeed. Of course he can’t have known he was going to die. He was only about thirty. I may well be wrong. But I can’t think of anything else he could have to tell her.’

‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Burden. ‘People are weird, as we’ve remarked before. It’s good to hear something that has nothing to do with Crisp, though more than anything I want to know where he is. I think I’ll go home now. It’s nearly midnight. Donaldson can drop you off and take me home. I might as well get the enlightening phone call there as here.’