Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (10 page)

   He knew he wouldn’t rest or have a moment’s peace if he went now. He dropped down off the steps and stood knee deep in weeds and brambles. The cisterns, if cisterns there were, wouldn’t be up here by the house but as near as possible to the fountain plinths.

   In the first place, these plinths were hard to find. Burden cut himself an elder branch with his penknife and pruned off its twigs. Then he began lifting away the dead and dying growth. In places the tangle seemed immovable and he had almost decided this was an impossible task when his stick struck some thing metallic and gave off a dull ring. Using his bare hands now, he tore away first ivy and under it a tenacious healthy plant to reveal a bronze disc with a hole in its centre. He closed his eyes, thought back and remembered that the boy had stood here, the girl in a similar position on the other side of the drive.

   Now where would the cistern be? Not surely between the plinth and the drive, but on the other side. Again he used his stick. It hadn’t rained for two or three weeks and the ground beneath the jungle of weeds was as hard as stone. No use going by feel, unless he felt with his feet. Accordingly, he shuffled slowly along the not very clear passage his stick was making.

   He was looking down all the time, but still he stumbled when his left toe struck what felt like a stone ridge or step. Probing with the stick, he found the ridge and then traced a rectangular outline. He squatted down and worked with his hands until he had cleared away all the growth and revealed a slate slab the size and shape of a gravestone. Just as he had thought, the fountain cistern. Would it be possible to raise that slab? He tried and it came up easily be fore he had time to brace himself against the shock of what he might find inside.

   The cistern was quite empty. Dry, he thought, for half a century. Not even a spider or a woodlouse had penetrated its stone fastness.

   Well, there was another one, wasn’t there? Another cistern to feed the fountain on the opposite side? No difficulty, at any rate, about finding it. He paced out the distance and cleared the second slab. Was it his imagination or did the growth seem newer here? There were no dense brambles, anyway, only the soft sappy weeds that die away entirely in winter. The slab looked just like its fellow, silvery black and here and there greened with lichen.

   Burden’s fingers were torn and bleeding. He wiped them on his handkerchief, raised the slab and, with a rasping intake of breath, looked down at the body in the cistern.

Harry Wild knocked out his pipe into the ashtray on Camb’s counter. “Well, are you going to tell me?”

   “I don’t know anything, Harry, and that’s a fact.

   They sent for Mr. Wexford off the golf course and he just about tore in here. You’ll have to wait till he’s got a moment to spare. We’re all at sixes and sevens. I don’t remember a Sunday like it all my time in the force.”

   The phone rang. Camb lifted the receiver and said, “You’ve seen John Lawrence in Brighton, madam? One moment while I put you through to the officers who are dealing with this information.” He sighed. “That,” he said to Wild, “makes thirty calls today from people who claim to have seen that kid.” 

   “He’s dead. My informant who’s very reliable says he’s dead. Burden found his body this morning and that’s why I’m working on a Sunday.” Wild watched to see how this affected Camb, and then added, “I just want confirmation from Wexford and then I’m off to interview the mother.”

   “Rather you than me,” said Camb. “By gum, I wouldn’t have your job for all the tea in China.”

   Not at all abashed, Wild re-lit his pipe. “Talking of tea, I don’t suppose there’s any going?”

   Camb didn’t answer him. His phone was ringing again. When he had dealt with a man who claimed to have found a blue sweater answering to the description of the one John Lawrence had been wearing he looked up and saw the lift doors open. “Here’s Mr. Wexford now,” he said, “and Mr. Burden. On their way to the mortuary to see what Dr. Crocker’s come up with, I daresay.”

   “Ah, Mr. Burden,” Wild said, “the very man I want to see. What’s all this about finding the body of the lost kid?”

   Burden gave him an icy stare, then turned on his heel, but Wexford snapped, “What d’you want to know for, anyway? That rag of yours doesn’t go to press till Thursday.”

   “Excuse me, sir,” said Camb, “but Mr. Wild wants to send the stories to the London papers.”

   “Oh, linage. I see. Well, far be it from me to keep a journalist from earning an honest penny on the Sabbath. Mr. Burden did find a body this morning, in one of the fountain cisterns at Saltram House. You can say foul play is suspected. The body is that . . .” He paused and then went on more quickly, “of a female child, aged about twelve, so far unidentified.”

   “It’s Stella Rivers, isn’t it?” said Wild greedily. “Come on, give a working man a break. This could be the biggest story of my career. Missing child found dead in ruins. No clue yet to lost boy. Is Kingsmarkham an other Cannock Chase? I can see it all, I can . . .”

   Wexford had great self-control. He also had two daughters and a grandson. He loved children with a passionate tenderness and his self-control broke down.

   “Get out of here!” he roared. “You back-street death reporter! You revolting ghoulish hack! Get out!”

   Wild got out.

A gloom settles on policemen and on their police station when the body of a child has been found. Later they hunt for a child’s killer with zeal, but at first, when the crime is discovered, they are aghast and sick at heart. For this is the crime most against nature, most life-denying and least forgivable.

   Not at all ashamed of his castigation of Harry Wild, Wexford made his way to the mortuary where Dr. Crocker and Burden stood on either side of the sheeted body.

   “I’ve sent Loring to fetch Ivor Swan, sir,” said Burden. “Better have him do it than the mother.”

   Wexford nodded. “How did she die?”

   “The body’s been there for God knows how many months,” said Crocker. “The path experts will have to get working on it. I’d say, at a guess, asphyxiation. Violent pressure on the windpipe. There are no wounds or anything like that and she wasn’t strangled. No sexual interference.”

   “We knew,” said Wexford quietly, “that she must have been dead. It oughtn’t to seem so horrible. It oughtn’t to be such a shock. I hope she wasn’t too frightened, that’s all.” He turned away. “I hope it was quick,” he said.

   “That,” said Crocker, “is the kind of thing you’d expect her parents to say, not a tough old nut like you, Reg.”

   “Oh, shut up. Maybe it’s because I know her parents won’t say it that I’m saying it. Look at you, you bloody half-baked quack, you don’t even care.”

   “Now, steady on . . .”

   “Here’s Mr. Swan,” said Burden.

   He came in with Loring. Dr. Crocker lifted the sheet. Swan looked and went white. “That’s Stella,” he said. “The hair, the clothes . . . God, how horrible!”

   “You’re sure.”

   “Oh, yes. I’d like to sit down, I’ve never seen a dead person before.”

   Wexford took him into one of the interview rooms on the ground floor.

   Swan asked for a glass of water and didn’t speak again until he had drunk it.

   “What a ghastly sight! I’m glad Roz didn’t see it. I thought I was going to pass out in there.” He wiped his face with his handkerchief and sat staring at nothing but as if he were still seeing the child’s body. Wexford thought his horror was occasioned only by the sight of what eight months underground had done to Stella Rivers and not by personal grief, an impression that wasn’t much weakened when Swan said, “I was fond of her, you know. I mean, it wasn’t as if she was my own but I’d got quite attached to her.”

   “We’ve been into all that before, Mr. Swan. How well do you know the grounds of Saltram House?”

    "That's where she was found, isn't it? I don't even know where it is."

   And yet you must have passed the house every time you drove Stella to Equita.”

   “D’you mean that ruin you can see from the road?”

   Wexford nodded, watching the other man carefully. Swan looked at the walls, the floor, anywhere but at the chief inspector. Then he said in the tone a man uses when his car keeps breaking down, “I don’t know why this sort of thing has to happen to me.”

   “What d’you mean, ‘this sort of thing?”

   “Oh, nothing. Can I go now?”

   “Nobody’s detaining you, Mr. Swan,” said Wexford.

Half an hour later he and Burden were sitting on the crumbling wall watching half a dozen men at work in the cistern, photographing, measuring, examining. The sun was still hot and its brilliance gave to the place an air of classical antiquity. Broken columns showed here and there among the long grass and the investigations had turned up fragments of pottery.

   It might have been an archaeological dig they were supervising rather than a hunt for clues in a murder case. They had failed to find any trace of the male statue, but the figure of the girl lay as Burden had left her, lay like a dead thing, her faced buried in ivy, her sculpted metal hair gleaming in the sun as gold as the hair of Stella Rivers in life.

   “You’ll think me a fanciful old fool,” said Wexford musingly, “but I can’t help seeing the analogy. It’s like an omen.” He pointed to the statue and looked quizzically at Burden. “The girl’s dead. The boy has disappeared, someone has taken him away.” He shrugged “In life,” he said. “In bronze. And somewhere maybe the thief has set the boy up in pleasant surroundings, taken care of him. I mean the statue, of course.”

   “Well, sure, what else? More likely used what was useful and chucked the rest out.”

   “Christ . . .” Wexford saw the inspector had no idea what he had meant and gave up. He ought to have known, he reflected, that it was no use going into flights of fancy with Mike. “Whoever put her in there,” he said more practically, “knew the place better than you do. You didn’t even know there were any cisterns.”

   “I’ve only been here in summer. The slabs wouldn’t be so overgrown in wintertime.”

   “I wonder?” Wexford called Peach over. “You were with the search parties in February, Peach. Did you notice the cisterns?”

   “We covered this ground the day after Stella went missing, sir. The Friday, it was. It poured with rain all the previous night and it was raining hard when we were here. The whole of this area was a sea of mud. I don’t reckon you could have guessed the cistern slabs were there.”

   “I think we’ll go and have a word with Mrs. Fenn.” She was a small fair woman, anxious to help, appalled at the discovery which had been made less than a quarter of a mile from her home.

   “She was the most promising pupil I had,” she said in a quiet voice with an edge of horror to it. “I used to boast about her to my friends. Stella Rivers, I used to say - er Stella Swan, you never knew which was her right name - Stella Rivers will be a first-class show jumper one day. She won’t, will she? God, it’s so awful. I’ll never forgive myself for letting her go off on her own that day. I should have phoned Mr. Swan. I knew he was a bit absent-minded. That wasn’t the first time he’d let her down and forgotten to come.”

   “You mustn’t blame yourself,” said Wexford. “Tell me, did you know those fountains had cisterns? If you knew, it means other local people would know.”

   “Of course I knew.” Mrs. Fenn looked puzzled. “Oh you mean they get overgrown in summer?” Her brow cleared. “I often ride up there in dry weather and take my guests for walks or on picnics. I know I’ve pointed out the fountains to people because the statues are so pretty, aren’t they?” With a little tremor in her voice she said, “I shan’t feel like going there ever again?’ She shook her head with a kind of shudder. “After heavy rain the slabs might get covered, especially if a lot of earth got washed down from the side of the house.”

   They were carrying the slab out to the waiting van now. It would go to the lab for extensive tests.

   “If he left any prints,” said Wexford, “all the mud and water will have got rid of them. The weather was on his side, wasn’t it? What’s the matter? Had an idea?”

   “I’m afraid not.” Burden contemplated the quiet lane and the surrounding meadows. He didn’t look back at the house but he felt its blind empty eyes on him. “I was wondering about Mrs. Lawrence’ he said. “I mean, ought I to go and . . .”

   Wexford snapped off the sentence in his scissors voice. “Martin’s been. I sent him to Fontaine Road as soon as we heard what you’d found. It wouldn’t do for her to hear we’d found a body and not know whose.”

   “That’s what I thought.”

   “So you needn’t bother with her tonight. She won’t want coppers hanging around her place all the time. Let her have a bit of peace. Besides, she said she’d got a friend corning down from London.”

   He needn’t bother with her tonight . . . Burden wondered who the friend was. Man or woman? Actress? Artist? Maybe someone who would listen avidly while Gemma told her about the kiss she had received from a sex-starved policeman. No, he needn’t go there again tonight or any other night come to that. The Stella Rivers case would take up all his time and it would be better that way. Far better, said Burden firmly to himself.

The national press had arrived in force on Sunday evening, and Wexford, most unwillingly, had held a conference. He didn’t like reporters, but they had their uses. On the whole, he supposed, the publicity they gave to pain and horror did more good than harm. Their stories would be inaccurate, with most of the names spelt wrong - a national daily had once repeatedly referred to him as Police Chief Waterford - but the public would be alerted, someone might come up with something helpful. Certainly there would be hundreds of phone calls and, no doubt, more anonymous letters of the kind that this morning had sent Martin, Gates and Loring to keep a date in Cheriton Forest.

   Wexford had left home before his morning paper arrived, and now, at nine, he entered Braddon’s to buy all the dailies. The shop had only just opened, but there was someone ahead of him. Wexford sighed. He knew that round grizzled head, that short spare figure. Even now, when innocently purchasing sixty Number Six, the man had an air of lurking.