Put on by Cunning (19 page)

‘Not a thing. Only what I said, a woman was drowned. Well, it was a young woman, a girl really, I do know that, and I reckon I heard she was on holiday here from the East somewhere.’

‘You hafta talk to the cops over to San Luis,’ said Tom.

‘Wait a minute, though – George Janveer was lifeguard here then, wasn’t he, Tom? I reckon you could talk to George.’

‘Why don’t I call George right now?’ said Tom.

He was dissuaded from this by his wife since it was only just after eight. They would phone George at nine. Wexford wasn’t pressed for time, was he? No, he wasn’t, not really, he had all day. He had a 200 mile drive ahead of him, of course, but that was nothing here. Edith Sessamy said she knew what he meant, it was nothing here.

He walked slowly back. At last a clear pattern was emerging from the confusion. The pieces fluttered and dropped into a design as the coloured fragments do when you shake a kaleidoscope. Camargue too had been drowned, he thought.

Just after nine he went back and paid his bill. Tom said apologetically that he had phoned George Janveer’s home and talked to Mrs Janveer who said George had gone to Grover City but she expected him back by eleven.

‘Oughta’ve called him at eight like I said,’ said Tom.

Wexford and Dora put the cases in the car and went to explore what they hadn’t yet seen of Santa Xavierita. Wouldn’t it be best, Wexfrod asked himself, to head straight for San Luis Obispo and call on the police there and see what facts he could get out of them? But suppose he couldn’t get any? Suppose, before they imparted anything to him, they required proof of who he was and what he was doing there? He could prove his identity, of course, and present them with bona fides but it would all take time and he hadn’t much left. He had to be at Los Angeles international airport by six in time for their flight home at seven. Better wait for Janveer who would know as much as the police did and would almost certainly talk to him.

Mrs Janveer was as thin as Edith Sessamy was fat. She was in her kitchen baking something she called devil’s food and her overweight black Labrador was sitting at her feet, hoping to lick out the bowl.

It was after eleven and her husband still hadn’t come back from Grover City. Maybe he had met a friend and they had got drinking. Mrs Janveer did not say this in a shrewish or condemnatory way or even as if there were anything to be defensive about. She said it in exactly the same tone, casual, indifferent, even slightly complacent, she would have used to say he had met the mayor or gone to a meeting of the Lions.

Wexford was driven to ask her if she remembered anything about the drowned woman. Mrs Janveer put the tin of chocolate cake mixture into the oven. The dog’s tail began to thump the floor. No, she couldn’t say she remembered much about it at all, except the woman’s first name had been Theresa, she recalled that because it was hers too, and after the drowning some of her relations had come out to Santa Xavierita, from Boston, she thought it was, and stayed at the Ramada Inn. She put the mixing bowl under the tap and her hand to the tap. The dog let out a piteous squeal. Mrs Janveer shrugged, looking upset, and slapped the bowl down in front of the dog with a cross exclamation.

Wexford waited until half-past eleven. Janveer still hadn’t come. ‘Considering what I know now,’ he said to Dora, ‘they’re bound to send me back here. It’s only time I need.’

‘It’s a shame, darling, it’s such bad luck.’

He drove quickly out of the town, heading for the Pacific Highway.

The difference between California and Kingsmarkham was a matter of colour as well as temperature. The one was blue and gold, the sun burning the grass to its own colour; the other was grey and green, the lush green of foliage watered daily by those massy clouds. Wexford went to work, not yet used to seeing grass verges instead of daisy lawns, shivering a little because the temperature was precisely what Tom Sessamy had told him it could fall to in Santa Xavierita in December.

Burden was waiting for him in his office. He had on a lightweight silky suit in a shade of taupe and a beige silk shirt. No one could possibly have taken him for a policeman or even a policeman in disguise. Wexford, who had been considering telling him at once what he had found out in California, now decided not to and instead asked him to close the window.

‘I opened it because it’s such a muggy stuffy sort of day,’ said Burden. ‘Not cold, are you?’

‘Yes, I am. Very cold.’

‘Jet lag. Did you have a good time?’

Wexford grunted. He wished he had the nerve to start the central heating. It probably wouldn’t start, though, not in July. For all he knew, the chief constable had to come over himself on 1 November and personally press a button on the boiler. ‘I don’t suppose there’ve been any developments while I was away?’ he said.

Burden sat down. ‘Well, yes, there have. That’s what I’m doing in here. I thought I ought to tell you first thing. Jane Zoffany has disappeared.’

Zoffany had not reported her missing until she had been gone a week. His story, said Burden, was that he and his wife had been staying at Sterries with their friend Natalie Arno, and on the evening of Friday, 27 June his wife had gone out alone for a walk and had never come back. Zoffany, when pressed, admitted that immediately prior to this he and his wife had quarrelled over an affair he had had with another woman. She had said she was going to leave him, she could never live with him again, and had left the house. Zoffany himself had left soon after, taking the 10.05 p.m. train to Victoria. He believed his wife would have gone home by an earlier train.

However, when he got to De Beauvoir Place she wasn’t there. Nor did she appear the next day. He concluded she had gone to her sister in Horsham. This had apparently happened once before after a quarrel. But Friday 4 July had been Jane Zoffany’s birthday, her thirty-fifth, and a birthday card came for her from her sister. Zoffany then knew he had been wrong and he went to his local police station.

Where no one had shown much interest, Burden said. Why should they? That a young woman should temporarily leave her husband after a quarrel over his infidelity was hardly noteworthy. It happened all the time. And of course she wouldn’t tell him where she had gone, that was the last thing she had wanted him to know. Burden only got to hear of it when Zoffany also reported his wire’s disappearance to the Kingsmarkham police. He seemed genuinely worried. It would not be putting it too strongly to say he was distraught.

‘Guilt,’ said Wexford, and as he pronounced the word he felt it himself. It was even possible he was the last person – the last but one – to have seen Jane Zoffany alive. And he had let her go. Because he was off on holiday, because he didn’t want to inconvenience Dora or upset arrangements. Of course she hadn’t taken refuge with her sister or some friend. She had had no handbag, no money. He had let her go, overwrought as she was, to walk away into the dusk of Ploughman’s Lane – to go back to Sterries and Natalie Arno.

‘I has a feeling we ought to take it a bit more seriously,’ Burden said. ‘I mean, I wasn’t really alarmed but I couldn’t help thinking abut poor old Camargue. We’ve got our own ideas about what kind of a death that was, haven’t we? I talked to Zoffany myself, I got him to give me the names of people she could possibly have gone to. There weren’t many and we checked on them all.’

‘And what about Natalie? Have you talked to her?’

‘I thought I’d leave that to you.’

‘We’ll have to drag the lake,’ said Wexford, ‘and dig up the garden if necessary. But I’ll talk to her first.’

The effect of her inherited wealth was now displayed. A new hatchback Opel, mustard-coloured, automatic transmission, stood on the gravel circle outside the front door. Looking at her, staring almost, Wexford remembered the skirt Jane Zoffany had mended, the old blanket coat. Natalie wore a dress of some thin clinging jersey material in bright egg-yellow with a tight bodice and full skirt. Around her small neat waist was tied a belt of yellow with red, blue and purple stripes. It was startling and effective and very fashionable. Her hair hung loose in a glossy black bell. There was a white gold watch on one wrist and a bracelet of woven white gold threads on the other. The mysterious lady from Boston, he thought, and he wondered how you felt when you knew your relatives, parents maybe, and your friends thought you were dead and grieved for you while in fact you were alive and living in the lap of luxury.

‘But Mr Wexford,’ she said with her faint accent – a New England accent? ‘But, Mr Wexford, Jane never came back here that night.’ She smiled in the way a model does when her mouth and not her eyes are to show in the toothpaste ad. ‘Her things are still in the room she and Ivan used. Would you like to see?’

He nodded. He followed her down to the spare rooms. On the carved teak chest stood a Chinese bowl full of Peace roses. They went into the room where he had once before seen Jane Zoffany standing before the long mirror and fastening the collar of a Persian lamb coat. Her suitcase lay open on the top of a chest of drawers. There was a folded nightdress inside it, a pair of sandals placed heel to toe and a paperback edition of Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
. On the black-backed hairbrush on the dressing table and the box of talcum powder lay a fine scattering of dust.

‘Has Mrs Hicks left you?’

‘In the spirit if not the flesh yet, Mr Wexford. She and Ted are going to Uncle Philip.’ She added, as if in explanation to someone who could not be expected to know intimate family usage, ‘Philip Cory, that is. He was just crazy to have them and it’s made him so happy. Meanwhile this place is rather neglected while they get ready to leave. They’ve sold their house and I think I’ve sold this one at last. Well, practically sold it. Contracts have been exchanged.’ She chatted on, straightening the lemon floral duvet, opening a window, for all the word as if he too were a prospective purchaser rather than a policeman investigating an ominous disappearance. ‘I’m having some of the furniture put in store and the rest will go to the flat I’ve bought in London. Then I’m thinking of going off on vacation somewhere.’

He glanced into the adjoining bathroom. It had evidently been cleaned before Muriel Hicks withdrew her services. The yellow bath and basin were immaculate and fresh honey-coloured towels hung on the rail. Without waiting for permission, he made his way into the next room, the one Natalie had rejected in favour of using Camargue’s very private and personal territory.

There were no immediately obvious signs that this room had ever been occupied since Camargue’s death. In fact, it seemed likely that the last people to have slept here were Dinah Sternhold’s parents when they stayed with Camargue at Christmas. But Wexford, peering quickly, pinched from the frill that edged one of the green and blue flowered pillows, a hair. It was black but it was not from Natalie’s head, being wavy and no more than three inches long.

This bathroom too lacked the pristine neatness and cleanliness of the other. A man no more than ordinarily observant might have noticed nothing, but Wexford was almost certain that one of the blue towels had been used. On the basin, under the cold tap, was a small patch of tide mark. He turned as Natalie came up softly behind him. She was not the kind of person one much fancied creeping up on one, and he thought, as he had done when he first met her, of a snake.

‘That night,’ he said, ‘Mrs Zoffany ran out of the house and then afterwards her husband left. How long afterwards?’

‘Twenty minutes, twenty-five. Shall we say twenty-two and a half minutes, Mr Wexford, to be on the safe side?’

He gave no sign that he had noticed the implicit mockery. ‘He walked to the station, did he?’

‘I gave him a lift in my car.’

Of course. Now he remembered that he had seen them. ‘And after that you never saw Mrs Zoffany again?’

‘Never.’ She looked innocently at Wexford, her black eyes very large and clear, the lashes lifted and motionless. ‘It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever came across in my life.’

Considering what he knew of her life, Wexford doubted this statement. ‘I should like our consent to our dragging the lake,’ he said.

‘That’s just a polite way of saying you’re going to drag it anyway, isn’t it?’

‘Pretty well,’ he said. ‘It’ll save time if you give your permission.’

Out of the lake came a quantity of blanket weed, sour green and sour smelling; two car tyres, a bicycle lamp, half a dozen cans and a broken wrought-iron gate as well as a lot of miscellaneous rubbish of the nuts and bolts and nails variety. They also found Sir Manuel Camargue’s missing glove, but there was no trace of Jane Zoffany. Wexford wondered if he had chosen the lake as the first possible place to search because of the other drownings associated with Natalie Arno.

It was, of course, stretching a point to touch the garden at all. But the temptation to tell the men to dig up the flowerbed between the lake and the circular forecourt was very great. It was, after all, no more than three or four yards from the edge of the lake and the soil in it looked suspiciously freshly turned and the bedding plants as if they had been there no more than a day or two. Who would put out bedding plants in July? They dug. They dug to about three feet down and then even Wexford had to admit no body was buried there. Ted Hicks, who had been watching them for hours, now said that he had dug the bed over a week ago and planted out a dozen biennials. Asked why he hadn’t said so before, he said he hadn’t thought it his place to interfere. By then it was too late to do any more, nine on a typical English July evening, twilight, greyish, damp and cool.

Wexford’s phone was ringing when he got in. The chief constable. Mrs Arno had complained that he was digging up the grounds of her house without her permission and without a warrant.

‘True,’ said Wexfrod, because it was and it seemed easier to confess than to get involved in the ramifications of explaining. A scalding lecture exploded at him from the mouthpiece. Once again he was overstepping the bounds of his duty and his rights, once again he was allowing an obsession to warp his judgement. And this time the obsession looked as if it were taking the form of a vindictive campaign against Mrs Arno.