Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (3 page)

She was like the room they were in, small and overdressed in bright colours and none too clean. The stretch nylon covers on her chairs were of a slightly duller yellow than the tight dress she wore, and unlike it, they were badly marked with cigarette burns. But all were disfigured with the same sort of liquor splashes and food stains. Mrs Crown’s hair was of the same colour and texture as the dried grasses that stood everywhere in green and yellow vases, pale and thin and brittle but defiantly gold. She lit a cigarette and left it hanging in her mouth which was painted, as her niece’s had been, to match her fingernails.

‘I haven’t yet been able to inform your brother,’ Wexford said. ‘It would appear he’s not up to it.’

‘Brother-inlaw, if you don’t mind,’ said Mrs Crown. ‘He’s not my brother, the old devil.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Wexford. ‘Now, Mrs Crown, it’s getting late and I don’t want to keep you up, but I’d like to know what you can tell me of Miss Comfrey’s movements yesterday.'

She stared at him, blowing smoke through her sharp nose. ‘What’s that got to do with some maniac stabbing her? Killed her for her money, didn’t he? She was always loaded, was Rhoda.’ Horrifyingly, she added, with a Wife of Bath look, remembering the old dance, ‘Wouldn’t be for sex, not so likely.’

Wexford didn’t take her up on that one. He said repressively, ‘You saw her yesterday?’

‘She phoned me on Friday to say she’d be coming. Thought I might get bothered if I saw lights on next door, not expecting anyone to be there, if you see what I mean. God knows why she put herself out. I was amazed. Picked up the phone and she says, “Hallo, Lilian. I wonder if you know who this is?” Of course I knew. I’d know that deep voice of hers anywhere and that put-on accent. She never got that from her mum and dad. But you don’t want to know all that. She came in a taxi yesterday about one. All dressed-up she was, but miserable as sin. She was always down in the mouth when she came here, made no secret she hated the place, far cry from the way she sounded on the phone, all cocky, if you know what I mean. Sure you won’t have a drink? I think I’ll have a drop more.’

A good deal more than a drop of neat gin in her glass, Lilian Crown perched on the sofa arm and swung her legs. The calves were shapeless with varicose veins, but she still kept the high instep, the dancing foot, of one who has led a riotous youth. ‘She never came in here till a quarter past six. “Feel like coming with me, Lilian?” she said, knowing damn well I wouldn’t. I told her I’d got a date with my gentleman friend, which was the honest truth, but I could tell she didn’t like it, always was jealous. “When’ll you be back?” she said. “I’ll come in and tell you how he is.” “All right,” I said, doing my best to be pleasant, though I never had any time for him or her after my poor sister went. “I’ll be in by ten,” I said, but she never came and no lights came on. Gone straight back to London, I thought, knowing her, never dreaming a thing like that had happened.’

Wexford nodded. ‘I’ll very likely want to speak to you again, Mrs Crown. In the meantime, would you give me Miss Comfrey’s London address?’

‘I haven’t got it.’

‘You mean you don’t know it?’

‘That’s what I mean. Look, I live next door to the old devil, sure I do, but that’s convenience, that is. I came here for my sister’s sake and after she went I just stopped on. But that doesn’t mean we were close. As a matter of fact, him and me, we weren’t on speaking terms. As for Rhoda - well, I won’t speak ill of the dead. She was my sister’s girl, when all’s said and done, but we never did get on. She left home must be twenty years ago, and if I’ve set eyes on her a dozen times since, that’s it. She’d no call to give me her address or her phone number, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have asked for it. Look, if I’d got it I’d give it you, wouldn’t I? I’d have no call not to.’

‘At least, I suppose, you know what she did for a living?’

‘In business, she was,’ said Lilian Crown. ‘Got her own business.’ Bitterness pinched her face. ‘Money stuck to Rhoda, always did. And she hung on to it. None of it came my way or his. He’s a proper old devil but he’s her dad, isn’t he?’

A woman who had said she wouldn’t speak ill of the dead . . . Wexford went home, building up in his mind a picture of what Rhoda Comfrey had been. A middle-aged, well-off, successful woman, probably self-employed; a woman who had disliked the town of her origins because it held for her painful associations; who liked her privacy and had kept, in so far as she could, her address to herself; a clever, cynical, hard-bitten woman, indifferent to this country world’s opinion, and owing to her unpleasant old father no more than a bare duty. Still, it was too early for this sort of speculation. In the morning they would have a warrant to search Mr Comfrey’s house, the address, the nature of her business, would be discovered; and Rhoda Comfrey’s life unfold. Already Wexford had a feeling - one of those illogical intuitive feelings the Chief Constable so much disliked - that the motive for her murder lay in that London life.

Kingsmarkham Police station had been built about fifteen years before, and the conservative townsfolk had been shocked by the appearance of this stark white box with its flat roof and wide picture windows. But a decade and a half had tripled the size of the saplings around it so that now its severity was half-screened by birches and laburnums. Wexford had his office on the second floor; buttercup-yellow walls with maps on them and a decorous calendar of Sussex views, a new blue carpet, his own desk of dark red rosewood that belonged to him personally and not to the Mid-Sussex Constabulary. The big window afforded him a fine view of the High Street, of higgledy-piggledy rooftops, of green meadows beyond. This morning, Wednesday, August tenth, it was wide open and the air-conditioning switched off.

Another lovely day, exactly what the clear sky and stars and bright moon of the previous night had promised. Since he had looked in first thing in the morning and left again for Stowerton Royal Infirmary, the clothes Rhoda Comfrey had been wearing had been sent up and left on the desk. Wexford threw down beside them the early editions of the evening papers he had just picked up. Middle-aged spinsters, even when stabbed to death, were apparently not news, and neither paper had allotted to this murder more than a couple of paragraphs on an inside page. He sat down by the window to cool down, for the front aspect of the police station was still in shade.

James Albert Comfrey. They had drawn cretonne curtains printed with flowers round the old man’s bed. His hands moved like crabs, gnarled and crooked, across the sheet. Sometimes they plucked at a tuft of wool on the red blanket, then they parted and crawled back, only to begin again on their journey. His mouth was open, he breathed stertorously. In the strong, tough yet enfeebled face, Wexford had seen the lineaments of the daughter, the big nose, long upper lip and cliff-like chin.

‘Like I said,’ said Sister Lynch, ‘it never meant a thing to him when I passed on the news. There’s little that registers at all.’

‘Mr Comfrey,’ said Wexford, approaching the bed.

‘Sure, and you may as well save your breath.’

‘I’d like to have a look in that locker.’ .

‘I can’t have that,’ said Sister Lynch.

‘I have a warrant to search his house.’ Wexford was beginning to lose his patience. ‘D’you think I couldn’t get one to search a cupboard?’

‘What’s my position going to be if there’s a comeback?’

‘You mean he’s going to complain to the hospital board?’

Without wasting any more time, Wexford had opened the lower part of the locker. It contained nothing but a pair of slippers and a rolled-up dressing-gown. Irish are making itself apparent behind him in sharp exhalations, he shook out the dressing-gown and felt in its pockets. Nothing. He rolled it up again. An infringement of privacy? he thought. The gown was made of red towelling with ‘Stowerton Infirmary’ worked in white cotton on its hem. Perhaps James Comfrey no longer possessed anything of his own. He did. In the drawer above the cupboard was a set of dentures in a plastic box and a pair of glasses. Impossible to imagine this man owning an address book. There was nothing of that sort in the drawer, nothing else at all but a scrap of folded tissue.

So he had come away, baulked and wondering. But the house itself would yield that address, and if it didn’t those newspaper accounts, meagre as they were, would rouse the London friends and acquaintances, employers of employees, who must by now have missed her. He turned his attention to the clothes. It was going to be a day of groping through other people’s possessions - such closets to search, such alcoves to importune! 

Rhoda Comfrey’s dress and jacket, shoes and underwear, were unremarkable, the medium-priced garments of a woman who had retained a taste for bright colours and fussy trimmings into middle age. The shoes were a little distorted by feet that had spread. No perfume clung to the fabric of dress and slip. He was examining labels which told him only that the shoes came from one of a chain of shops whose name had been a household word for a quarter of a century, that the clothes might have been bought in any Oxford Street or Knightsbridge emporium, when there came a knock at the door.

The head of Dr Crocker appeared. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ said the doctor very breezily.

They were lifelong friends, having known each other since their schooldays when Leonard Crocker had been in the first form and Reginald Wexford in the sixth. And it had sometimes been Wexford’s job - how he had loathed it! - to shepherd home to the street next his own in Pomfret the mischievous recalcitrant infant. Now they were both getting on in years, but the mischievousness remained. Wexford was in no mood for it this morning.

‘What d’you think?’ he growled. ‘Guess.’

Crocker walked over to the desk and picked up one of the shoes. ‘The old man’s my patient, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know. And I hope to God you haven’t come here just to be mysterious about it. I’ve had some of that nonsense from you before. “The secrets of the confessional” and “a doctor’s like a priest” and all that rubbish.’

Crocker ignored this. ‘Old Comfrey used to come to my surgery regularly every Tuesday night. Nothing wrong with him bar old age till he broke his hip. These old people, they like to come in for a chat. I just thought you might be interested.’

‘I am, of course, if it’s interesting.’

‘Well, it’s the daughter that’s dead and he was always on about his daughter. How she’d left him all on his own since her mother died and neglected him and didn’t come to see him from one year’s end to the next. He was really quite articulate about it. Now, how did he describe her?’

‘A thwart disnatured torment?’

The doctor raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s good, but it doesn’t sound old Comfrey’s style. I’ve heard it somewhere before.’

‘Mm,’ said Wexford. ‘No doubt you have. But let’s not go into the comminations of Lear on his thankless child. You will, of course, know the thankless child’s address.’

‘London.’

‘Oh, really! If anyone else says that to me I’ll put them on a charge for obstruction. You mean even you don’t know where in London? For God’s sake, Len, this old boy’s eighty-five. Suppose you’d been called out to him and found him at death’s door? How would you have got in touch with his next of kin?’

‘He wasn’t at death’s door. People don’t have deathbeds like that any more, Reg. They get ill, they linger, they go into hospital. The majority of people die in hospital these days. During the whole long painful process we’d have got her address.’

‘Well, you didn’t,’ Wexford snapped. ‘The hospital haven’t got it now. How about that? I have to have that address.’

‘It’ll be at old Comfrey’s place,’ said Crocker easily.

‘I just hope so. I’m going over there now to find it if it’s findable.’

The doctor jumped down from his perch on the edge of the desk. With one of those flashbacks to his youth, to his schooldays, he said on an eager note, ‘Can I come too?’

‘I suppose so. But I don’t want you cavorting about and getting in everyone’s way.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Crocker in mock dudgeon. ‘Who do you think the popularity polls show to be the most respected members of the community? General practitioners.’

‘I knew it wasn’t cops,’ said Wexford.

The house smelt as he had thought it would, of the old person’s animal-vegetable-mineral smell, sweat, cabbage and camphor.

‘What did moths live on before man wore woollen clothes?’

‘Sheep, I suppose,’ said the doctor.

‘But do sheep have moths?’

‘God knows. This place is a real tip, isn’t it?’

They were turning out drawers in the two downstairs rooms. Broken pens and pencils, dried-out ink bottles, sticking plaster, little glass jars full of pins, dead matches, nails, nuts and bolts, screws of thread; an assortment of keys, a pair of dirty socks full of holes, pennies and threepenny bits from the old currency, pieces of string, a broken watch, some marbles and some dried peas; a five-amp electric plug, milk bottle tops, the lid of a paint tin encrusted with blue from the front door, cigarette cards, picture hangers and an ancient shaving brush.

‘Nice little breeding ground for anthrax,’ said Crocker, and he pocketed a dozen or so boxes and bottles of pills that were ranged on top of the chest. I may as well dispose of this lot while I’m here. They won’t chuck them out, no matter how often you tell them. Though why they should be so saving when they get them for free in the first place, I never will know.’

The footfalls of Burden, Loring and Gates could be heard overhead. Wexford knelt down, opened the bottom drawer. Underneath a lot of scattered mothballs, more socks redolent of cheesy mustiness, and a half-empty packet of birdseed, he found an oval picture frame lying face-downwards. He turned it over and looked at a photograph of a young woman with short dark hair, strong jaw, long upper lip, biggish nose.

‘I suppose that’s her,’ he said to the doctor.

‘Wouldn’t know. I never saw her till she was dead and she didn’t look much like that then. It’s the spitting image of the old man, though, isn’t it? It’s her all right.’