Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then (22 page)

   “Where he is. That house he’s on the gate of.”

   Ungrammatical but explanatory. “You needn’t tell him I was asking.” Wexford produced a coin which he knew he wouldn’t get back out of expenses.

   “What shall I say, then?”

   “Come, come. You’re a resourceful girl. Say I was a strange man.”

   Now was not the time. He must wait until all the children were in bed. When the Piebald Pony opened he went into the saloon bar and ordered sandwiches and half a bitter. Any minute now, he thought, Monkey and Mr. Casaubon would come in. Delighted to see him in their local, they would try to ascertain how near they were to getting their hands on that two thousand, and it would give him much pleasure to tell them, they had never been farther from it. He would even be indiscreet and reveal his innermost conviction, that Swan was guiltless of any crime but that of indifference.

   But nobody came. It was seven when Wexford left the Piebald Pony and walked three-quarters of the length of quiet, dimly-lit Sparta Grove.

He tapped on the door of number 16. No lights showed. Everyone of those children must now be safely in bed. In this house the golden-headed boy would be sleeping. From the look of the place - no blue-white glow of a television screen showed behind the drawn curtains his parents had gone out and left him alone. Wexford had a low opinion of parents who did that, especially now, especially here. He knocked again, harder this time.

   To a sensitive astute person an empty house has a different feel from a house which simply appears to be empty but which, in reality, contains someone who is unwilling to answer a door. Wexford sensed that there was life somewhere in that darkness, conscious tingling life, not just a sleeping child. Someone was there, a tense someone, listening to the sound of the knocker and hoping the knocks would cease and the caller go away. He made his way carefully through the side entrance and round to the back. The Fosters’ house next door was well lit but all the doors and windows were shut. A yellow radiance from Mrs. Foster’s kitchen showed him that number 16 was a well-kept house, its path swept and its back doorstep polished red. The little boy’s tricycle and a man’s bike leaned against the wall and both were covered by a sheet of transparent plastic.

   He hammered on the back door with his fist. Silence. Then he tried the handle very stealthily, but the door was locked. No getting in here without a warrant, he thought, and there was no hope of getting one on the meagre evidence he had.

   Treading softly, he began to move round to the back of the house, feeling moist turf under his feet. Then, suddenly, a flare of light caught him from behind and he heard Mrs. Foster say, as audibly as if she were standing beside his ear, “You won’t forget to put the bin out, will you, dear? We don’t want to miss the dust men two weeks running.”

   Just as he thought. Every word spoken in the garden of number 14 could be heard in this garden. Mrs. Foster hadn’t seen him. He waited until she had retreated into her kitchen before moving on.

   Then he saw it, a thin shaft of light, narrower than the beam from a pencil torch, stretching across the grass from a french window. Tiptoeing, he approached the source of this light, a tiny gap between drawn curtains.

   It was difficult to see anything at all. Then he saw that right in the middle of the window the edge of the curtain had been caught up on a bolt. He squatted down but still he couldn’t see in. There was nothing for it but to lie down flat. Thank God there was no one to see him or observe how hard he found it to perform what should have been one of man’s most natural actions.

   Flat on his belly now, he got one eye up against the uncurtained triangle. The room unfolded itself before him. It was small and neat and conventionally furnished by a house-proud wife with a red three-piece suite, a nest of tables, wax gladioli and carnations whose petals were wiped each day with a damp cloth.

   The man who sat writing at a desk was quite relaxed now and intent on his task. The importunate caller had gone away at last and left him to the special peace and privacy he demanded. It would show in his face, Wexford thought, that concentration, that terrible solitary egotism, but he couldn’t see his face, only the bare legs and feet, and sense the man’s rapt absorption. He suspected that under the fur coat he wore he was quite naked.

   Wexford watched him for some minutes, watched him pause occasionally in his writing and pass the thick furry sleeve across nose and mouth. It made him shiver, for he knew he was eavesdropping on something more private than secret speech or love making or the confessional. This man was not alone with himself, but alone with his other self, a separate personality which perhaps no one else had ever seen until now.

   To witness this phenomenon, this intense private fantasising in a room which epitomised conformity, seemed to Wexford an outrageous intrusion. Then he remembered those fruitless trysts in the forest and Gemma Lawrence’s hope and despair. Anger drove out shame. He pulled himself on to his feet and rapped hard on the glass.

In his anxiety to reach the lift, Burden shoved Harry Wild out of the way.

   “Manners,” said the reporter, “There’s no need to push. I’ve a right to come in here and ask questions if I . . .”

   The sliding door cut off the rest of his remarks which would perhaps have been to the effect that, but for his modesty and fondness for the quiet life, he would have been exercising his rights in loftier portals than those of Kingsmarkham police station. Burden didn’t want to hear. He only wanted Harry’s statement, that they had found the boy, confirmed or denied.

   “What’s this about a special court?” he demanded, bursting into Wexford’s office,

   The chief inspector looked tired this morning. When he was tired his skin took on a grey matteness and his eyes looked smaller than ever, but still steel-bright, Under the puffy lids.

   “Last night,” he said. “I found our letter-writer, a certain Arnold Charles Bishop.”

   “But not the boy?” Burden said breathlessly.

   “Of course not the boy.” Burden didn’t like it when Wexford sneered like that. His eyes seemed to be drilling two neat holes into the inspector’s already aching head. “He’s never even seen the boy. I found him at his home in Sparta Grove where he was occupied in writing another letter to me. His wife was out at her evening class, his children were in bed. Oh, yes, he has children, two boys. It was from the head of one of them that he cut the hair while the kid was asleep.”

   “Oh God,” said Burden.

   “He’s a fur fetishist, Want me to read his statement?”

   Burden nodded.

   “ ‘I have never seen John Lawrence or his mother. I did not take him away from the care of his mother, his legal guardian. On October 16, at about 6 p.m., I overheard my neighbour, Mrs. Foster, tell her husband that John Lawrence was missing and that search parties would probably be arranged. I went to Fontaine Road on my bicycle and joined one of these search parties.' ”

   “ 'On three subsequent occasions in October and November I wrote three letters to Chief Inspector Wexford. I did not sign them. I made one telephone call to him. I do not know why I did these things. Something came over me and I had to do them. I am a happily married man with two children of my own. I would never harm a child and I do not own a car. When I wrote about the rabbits I did this because I like fur. I have three fur coats but my wife does not know this. She knows nothing of what I have done. When she goes out and the children are asleep I often put one of my coats on and feel the fur.' ”

   “ 'I read in the paper that Mrs. Lawrence had red hair and John Lawrence fair hair. I cut a piece of hair from the head of my son Raymond and sent it to the police. I cannot explain why I did this or any of it except by saying that I had to do it.' ”

   Burden said hoarsely, “The maximum he can get is six months for obstructing the police.”

   “Well, what would you charge him with? Mental torture? The man’s sick. I was angry too last night, but not anymore. Unless you’re a brute or a moron you can’t be angry with a man who’s going through life with a sickness as grotesque as Bishop’s.”

   Burden muttered something about it being all right for those who weren’t personally involved, but Wexford ignored it. “Coming over to the court in about half an hour?”

   “To go through all that muck again?”

   “A great deal of our work consists of muck, as you call it. Clearing muck, cleaning up, learning what muck is and where it lives.” Wexford rose and leaned heavily on his desk. “If you don’t come, what are you going to do? Sit here mooning all day? Delegating? Passing the buck? Mike, I have to say this. It’s time I said it. I’m tired. I’m trying to solve this case all on my own because I can’t count on you any more. I can’t talk to you. We used to thrash things out together, sift the muck, if you like. Talking to you now - well, it’s like trying to have a rational conversation with a zombie."

   Burden looked up at him. For a moment Wexford thought he wasn’t going to answer or defend himself. He just stared, a dead empty stare, as if he had been interrogated for many days and many sleepless nights and could no longer sort out the painful twisted threads that contributed to his unhappiness. But he knew, for all that, that the time for fobbing Wexford off was long gone by, and he brought it all out in a series of clipped sentences.

   “Grace is leaving me. I don’t know what to do about the kids. My personal life’s a mess. I can’t do my job.” A cry he hadn’t meant to utter broke out. “Why did she have to die?’ And then, because he couldn’t help himself, because tears which no one must see were burning his eyelids, he sank his head into his hands.

   The room was very still. Soon I must lift my head, Burden thought, and take away my hands and see his derision. He didn’t move except to press his fingers harder against his eyes. Then he felt Wexford’s heavy hand on his shoulder.

   “Mike, my dear old friend . . .”

An emotional scene between two normally unemotional men usually has its aftermath of deep miserable embarrassment. When Burden had recovered he felt very embarrassed, but Wexford neither blustered heartily nor made one of those maladroit efforts to change the subject.

   “You’re due to be off this weekend, aren’t you, Mike?”

   “How can I take time off now?”

   “Don’t be a bloody fool. You’re worse than useless the state you’re in. Make it a long weekend, starting on Thursday.”

   “Grace is taking the children down to Eastbourne . . .”

   “Go with them. See if you can’t make her change her mind about leaving. There are ways, Mike, aren’t there? And now - my God, look at the time! - I’ll be late for the court if I don’t get cracking.”

   Burden opened the window and stood by it, letting the thin morning mist cool his face. It seemed to him that with the arrest of Bishop their last hope - or his last fear? - of finding John Lawrence had gone. He wouldn’t disturb Gemma with it and she had never read the local papers. The mist, floating white and translucent, washed him gently and calmed him. He thought of the mist by the seaside and the long bare beaches, deserted in November. Once there, he would tell the children and Grace and his mother about Gemma, that he was to be married again.

   He wondered why the idea of this chilled him more than the cold touch of the autumnal air. Because she was the strangest successor to Jean he could have picked in all his world? In the past he had marvelled at men who, in their selflessness or their temporary infatuation, marry crippled or blind women. Wasn’t he contemplating doing just that, marrying a woman who was crippled in her heart and her personality? And that was the only way he knew her. How would she be if her deformity were healed?

   Ludicrously, monstrous, to think of Gemma as deformed. Tenderly and with an ache of longing, he recalled her beauty and their lovemaking. Then, closing the window sharply, he knew he wouldn’t be going down to Eastbourne with Grace.

Bishop was remanded for a medical report. The head shrinkers would get to work on him, Wexford thought. Maybe that would do some good, more likely it wouldn’t. If he had had any faith in psychiatrists he would have recommended Burden to attend one. Still, their recent confrontation had done something to clear the air. Wexford felt the better for it and he hoped Burden did too. Now, at any rate, he was out on his own. Single-handed he must find the children’s killer - or fall back on the Yard.

   The events of the past twenty-four hours had distracted his mind from Mr. and Mrs. Rushworth. Now he considered them again. Rushworth was in the habit of wearing a duffel coat, Rushworth was suspected of molesting a child, but surely, if he had been the loiterer in the swings field, Mrs. Mitchell would have recognised him as one of her neighbours? Moreover, at the time of John’s disappearance, every man within a quarter-mile radius of Fontaine Road had been closely investigated, Rushworth included.

   Wexford delved once more among the reports. On the afternoon of October 16th Rushworth claimed to have been in Sewingbury where he had a date to show a client over a house. The client, Wexford saw, hadn’t turned up. Back in February Rushworth hadn’t even been questioned. Why should he have been? Nothing pointed to a connection between him and Stella Rivers and no one knew then that he was the owner of the rented cottage in Mill Lane. At the time the ownership of that cottage had seemed irrelevant.

   He wouldn’t see Rushworth yet. First he needed enlightenment as to the man’s character and veracity.

“To get away from this house!” Gemma said. “Just to get away for a little while.” She put her arms round Burden’s neck and clung to him. “Where shall we go?”

   “You decide.”

   “I’d like London. You can lose yourself there, be just one in a lovely enormous crowd. And there are lights all night and things going on and . . .” She paused, biting her lip, perhaps at the look of horror on Burden’s face. “No, you’d hate it. We aren’t much alike, are we, Mike?”

   He didn’t answer that. He wasn’t going to admit it aloud. “Why’ not somewhere on the coast?” he said.