No Man's Nightingale (3 page)

Clarissa’s room was exactly what one would expect of a seventeen-year-old’s, highly coloured, a blind instead of curtains, a duvet without a cover, clusters of photographs on the walls and two posters, Blur on one and Lady Gaga on another. Wexford picked up a framed photograph off the Ikea desk.

‘She was close to her mother?’

‘It would seem so, sir.’

If the daughter looked like a Bollywood star, the mother was more a younger version of Indira Gandhi, the face gaunt, deeply intelligent, dedicated.

‘She looks clever, doesn’t she, sir?’

‘Stop it, Lynn,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m not “sir” to anyone any more. If you can’t bring yourself to call me Reg or, come to that, Mr Wexford, when I was a young copper my contemporaries used to call me Wex.’

Lynn only smiled and they went downstairs.

Burden said to her, ‘Time to get over to Orchard Road. Clarissa’s expecting you. She may feel more able by now to talk about Thursday, how much she knows of what happened that day starting with breakfast.’

‘I’d like to go with her,’ Wexford said rather tentatively. ‘It’s on my way home.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Burden said. ‘I don’t have to warn you to go easy with her, I know that.’

Except that saying it was itself a warning. Their route took them along Vicarage Lane past a big house called Dragonsdene whose garden, Burden said, abutted on the Vicarage garden. There were no others nearby. ‘At first I thought the way everyone else did, certainly the way the media did, that this was the work of some lunatic-at-large, some nut without a motive. The kind of character newspapers love who go about the country killing women and elderly couples, the people who leave their doors unlocked because nothing ever happens in the country, the country is safe. And it may be so but I’m not thinking that way any more. She wasn’t that sort of victim, her past was too – what shall I say? – too involved, too exotic.’

‘You’re going to tell me more tomorrow?’

‘I am,’ said Burden, leaving them to return to the police station.

The woman who opened the door of number 14 Orchard Road had been crying and began crying again as soon as she saw them. Not the best kind of carer for an orphan whose mother had just been murdered, Wexford thought, but he could be wrong. This kind of overflowing sympathy might be just what the girl needed.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Georgina Bray. ‘I can’t seem to stop crying. It’s all so awful. Clarissa’s in here, she doesn’t cry, I really wish she would.’

Sarah Hussain’s daughter was at least as beautiful as her portraits. She had a calm, still face, perfect features and ivory skin. Nodding to Lynn, she turned her large blue eyes on Wexford.

He glanced from one woman to the other. ‘I’m not a police officer, though I used to be. If you’d rather I wasn’t present when DC Fancourt talks to you I can easily go.’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have to put up with me.’

‘No, please stay.’ Georgina Bray looked at Clarissa and Clarissa nodded her head once more.

Suddenly, having been absolutely silent, she spoke. ‘It’s not just that it’s devastating, what happened to my mother, not just that it’s so horrible but that it’s so
unfair.
She’d had such a hard life, such a lot of things to make her unhappy. Now she was like due for some sort of
compensation
and what she got was being – being choked to death . . .’

Whatever those things were that had happened to Sarah Hussain, he thought, now was not the time to ask about them. But perhaps Lynn or Burden or Karen Malahyde knew already. Lynn was waiting as if she knew Clarissa would go on talking, that she would need no prompting, and she was right.

‘I don’t believe in God. I haven’t for years, though I never told Mum. I didn’t want to make her unhappy, not now when she’d come here and was – well, she called it serving God. It didn’t matter her getting those filthy letters and being told she wasn’t fit to be a priest and her parishioners turning their backs on her and that man Cuthbert disapproving of her, she could bear all that because she had the love of God.’ Tears welled in the girl’s eyes but her voice remained steady. ‘She thought God had deserted her when her parents died and then when her husband died and then more awful things happened, but God came back and told her to study theology and get ordained and she did and she was happy at last because God loved her. But He didn’t, did He? He doesn’t love anyone. He never told her anything because He doesn’t exist.’ Wexford thought the tears would come now and overflow but they didn’t. Her face had grown stony white and hard as marble. ‘I was the one good thing in her life apart from God.’ She turned to Georgina. ‘I think I’ll go up to my room now. I’m tired, I’m tired all the time.’

They sat in silence as she left the room and closed the door quietly behind her.

Wexford was the first to speak. ‘Ms Hussain was a good friend of yours, Ms Bray?’

Wexford didn’t really know if they were Miss or Mrs or one of each but he seemed to have got it right as Georgina didn’t correct him. Her eyes were wet but the weeping had stopped. ‘I met her at university. That was thirty years ago and we lost touch, sent each other Christmas cards, that sort of thing. Her coming here to St Peter’s was a bit of a coincidence, she’d no previous connection with Kingsmarkham, and I was living here because my husband’s work is here. I don’t go to church but I do take part in local activities and we met at the Mothers’ Union.’ She stared defiantly at Wexford. ‘Don’t laugh. The Mothers’ Union does lots of good work especially in the area of domestic violence, something I know a lot about.’

‘I wasn’t going to laugh,’ said Wexford mildly. ‘You campaign against domestic violence?’

‘I don’t campaign against anything. I just know about it.’

The way she said it made her seem personally involved. Wexford thought he had said enough for now and left the field to Lynn.

‘You said last time I saw you that you were her only friend.’

‘That was what
she
said, though she did have a friend in Reading where she once lived. Oh, and she said she seemed to have missed out on the knack of making friends. She didn’t know how it was done but I did, she said, and our reunion came about through me. But still I felt guilty. I’ve got a husband, as you know, and three children, but they’re grown up and gone. I do voluntary work. I didn’t have the time for her I should have had. I keep saying to myself that I should have been at the Vicarage that afternoon, I should have been with her, poor darling Sarah . . .’

‘You had made no arrangement to call in at the Vicarage, had you?’ For a moment Lynn hoped she might be on to a lead.

‘Oh, no, no. If only I had. I would have been there and none of it would have happened. I shouldn’t blame myself but I do, I do.’ And Georgina Bray burst into noisy tears, soaking handfuls of the tissues.

When he walked in Dora was at home and Maxine, on the point of leaving, never a swift process, was telling her the tale of his perfidy. ‘Well, like I said, I’m sure I’m very sorry but I couldn’t clean the bathroom. If you find a nasty tidemark round the bath Mr Wexford has only himself to blame. Mind you, the idea of having a bath when you’ve got two showers in the house seems very peculiar to me, not to say weird. But to cut a long story short, I went upstairs with the Mr Muscle and the sponge et cetera and found the door shut as I expected. He’d been a long time in the bath but if people are going to use all that water when we’ve got a drought on the horizon, they may as well make the most of it, is what I say.’ Here a long stare at Wexford, lips temporarily compressed. ‘Well, I went back after a good twenty minutes and the door was still shut. Locked, I suppose, though I wasn’t going to try it, was I?’

‘I don’t know why not,’ interrupted Wexford.

A humourless laugh and, ‘Well, if you don’t know I’m certainly not going to tell you.’ Maxine proceeded to do so. ‘Naturally, I presumed you was in there in the altogether, though I must say an hour and a half had gone by. It was all of twelve, past midday, and then Mrs Wexford come in and I felt I was called upon to explain, not that she did call upon me. I hope I know my duty, that’s all.’

Dora placated her, checked that she had taken her money, exchanging those smiles of wonder and exasperation women typically produce at the incomprehensible behaviour of men, and hurried her out.

‘Why did you have a bath at ten thirty in the morning?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t. I said I was going to. But maybe I will on Maxine’s days in future. If I hadn’t escaped I think I’d have sacked her.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t do that, Reg.’

Maxine spent ten minutes chatting without respite to Dr and Mrs Crocker while they tried to watch a DVD of
Mad Men
, season three. She had given them a biographical account of her son Jason from his breech birth – an agonising labour, they nearly lost him and her – until the present day, so now embarked on her horrible discovery at St Peter’s Vicarage. Dr Crocker was an altogether tougher customer than Wexford when it came to being forceful with women and told her to get on with her work, he and his wife were concentrating on the television. Maxine left them alone for about a quarter of an hour, she had to while she swept leaves from the front path and the patio, but then returned to remark that there were some people who said you shouldn’t watch TV in the daytime, it was bad for your health, not to mention your eyesight, and she’d never allowed her kids to watch it before 6 p.m.

‘I’m the health expert, not you,’ said Dr Crocker. ‘You leave our eyesight to me. Now off you go and shut the door behind you.’

It wasn’t the way she was accustomed to her clients talking to her, as she told Jason and Nicky when she dropped in on them on her way home.

‘Is that what you call them? Clients?’ Nicky didn’t dislike her mother-in-law – well, as good as a mother-in-law or as bad as – but she kept up a mild feud with her because you weren’t supposed to get on with your husband’s mother, it was a well-known fact. ‘That’s really weird.’

Maxine was a worthy adversary for she too approved of mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law discord. ‘Don’t you use words like that to me. I happen to know you left school without no GCSEs.’

‘Knock it off, Mum,’ said Jason. He was watching television with Isabella on his knees. ‘Weird’s not a bad word. Nicky wouldn’t use one of them in front of Issy. Go on about Dr Crocker.’

So Maxine went on about Dr Crocker, her audience expressing the opinion that his conduct was very likely the onset of Alzheimer’s, the same applying to Wexford when the tale was told of his bath or non-bath.

‘I saw him this morning when I was out with Issy. He’s aged since he retired. Going into the churchyard he was with a cop and a lady cop and then on to take a look at the Vicarage, I reckon. Well, I don’t know but that’s what it looked like, didn’t it, Issy?’

‘Dada, Dada,’ said Isabella, repeating the only word she so far knew.

‘That’s my sweetheart,’ said Jason, kissing the top of her head. ‘She’s talking very early. It’s a sign of intelligence. I’ll not be surprised if she gets to uni, maybe Oxford. Unless she does modelling. Why not both?’

No one argued. This was a subject on which they were unanimous. ‘Time for bed, my honey,’ said Jason and took her upstairs himself. ‘Mum will come up and say goodnight.’

Left alone with Nicky, Maxine reinstituted the bickering. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, getting hold of a fella like him. You don’t have to do a stroke for that baby.’

‘Leave it out, will you?’

Nicky went off upstairs to say goodnight to Isabella and without waiting for either of them to come down, Maxine started for home. On the corner of Peck Road and Khouri Avenue (named after a local council leader of Asian parentage) she met Jeremy Legg who was Jason and Nicky’s landlord. They had never been on good terms – no one except his girlfriend was on good terms with Legg – but they spoke, they even maintained a show of politeness.

‘Good evening,’ said Maxine. It was a form of greeting uttered in a scathing tone that she wouldn’t have used to anyone else.

‘Hiya,’ said Legg. ‘Been to see your son, have you?’

‘There’s a broken window in the front bedroom needs seeing to. Little job for you when you can spare the time from your busy schedule.’

Everyone knew that Legg, who had suffered from a mysterious back complaint since he was twenty-nine, subsisted on the Disability Living Allowance, his rents and his girlfiend’s income. ‘Tenant does repairs, not landlord,’ he said, remembering to limp a bit before getting into his car. He drove home to Stringfield and Fiona’s cottage.

THE ONE PROPERTY
Jeremy Legg owned was in Ladysmith Road and had been left him by his mother when she died five years before. This was let to an immigrant couple. His other house, the one in Peck Road, was not his at all but belonged to Kingsmarkham Borough Council. He had lived there for years with his wife, now long departed with another man. No more social housing was available in Kingsmarkham or the villages or was likely to be in future, so the sole recourse open to young couples who could only dream of getting a mortgage to buy a house, was to rent. The pretty cottage he lived in with Fiona Morrison belonged to her. They had met in a pub where Fiona was drinking whisky and Jeremy orange juice. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t drink or smoke while she did both. She had drunk so much that night that he’d had to drive her home. He was quite a bit older than her, nothing special to look at, and he had that limp which came and went when it suited him, but she fell in love with him. That also suited Jeremy. If he could move in with her he could let the Peck Road house he was living in on the Muriel Campden Estate. He could and he did.

Fiona had it all worked out. She wanted a baby and at forty-one she reckoned she had about three years left in which to conceive. Jeremy was the ideal partner and putative father of this dream-child. He had his Disability Living Allowance plus two lots of rent, each of which amounted to about twice as much as the DLA, he had a car and – this was as important as anything – he stayed at home, was a house husband, idle, and had no desire ever to get a job. And as a result, she could return to her work as an optician’s receptionist after the baby was born. In a property-owning nation, as the United Kingdom once was and possibly still was, it was inevitable that a great many people lived in houses or flats which had become theirs when their parents died.