Wolf to the Slaughter (18 page)

‘Who knows?’ Wexford pushed aside his empty plate. ‘It fits. Kirkpatrick comes into it only as a rival and all his worries are genuinely caused by fear of his wife’s revenge.

It was at this point that Burden, reaching for the pepper, saw Drayton. ‘Then we can nip that little intrigue in the bud,’ he said.

‘Before he gets carried away, eh?’ Wexford stood up. ‘Yes, we’ll accept Kirkpatrick’s story for the timebeing. I don’t fancy Griswold will consider Smith a new suspect, do you?’ How preoccupied Drayton looked, almost entranced. ‘I don’t know that I want my young men amorously involved with a Grover, except in the line of business.’ He crossed to the cash desk to pay the bill and dropped on one knee to tie his shoelace. Beneath the tablecloth he saw a long bare leg pressed against Drayton’s knee. Playing footsie, he said to himself. He took his change and, approaching the two in the corner, gave a slight cough. Drayton lifted his face and instead of cold efficiency Wexford saw a dreamy rapture. ‘Feel like a trip to Sewingbury, Drayton?’

The boy was on his feet before the words were out and once more the mask was assumed.

‘I’m just coming, sir.’

‘Finish your coffee.’ By God, that girl was a beauty! The kind that bloomed for half a dozen years and then shrivelled like straw before they were thirty, the golden kind that came to dust.

Geoffrey Smith’s flat was one of four in a converted mansion on the far side of Sewingbury, a gracious Georgian house built perhaps at the same time as St Catherine’s convent on to which it backed. A stately staircase took them up to a gallery. The wall facing them had once contained several doors but these had been boarded up and now only two remained, the entrances to flats one and two. Number two was on the left. Wexford rang the bell.

The grandeur of the place scarcely fitted in with Burden’s theory of a knife or a razor. On the other hand, a customer of Mr Scatcherd’s might well live here. All the same, Burden was not prepared for the lofty space which opened before them when the door swung inwards, and for a moment he looked not at the woman who stood on the threshold, but at the vast apartment behind her which led into another as large and ended finally in a pair of immense windows. It was more like a picture gallery – but for its bare walls – than a flat. Light fell from the windows in two huge twin rectangles and she stood in the darker split between them.

As soon as he met her eyes Burden knew that he had seen her before. She was the woman who had tried to sell her jewels to Knobby Clark.

‘Mrs Smith?’ Wexford said.

Burden had scarcely expected her to welcome them, but her reaction astonished him. There was shock and horror in her eyes. It was as if, he thought, analysing, she had been tortured for years and then, just as the respite had come, someone had threatened her with a renewal of torment.

‘
What do you mean?
’ she said, and she enunciated each word separately and slowly.

‘I asked you if you are Mrs Smith, Mrs Geoffrey Smith?’

Her tired, once pretty face grew hard. ‘Please go,’ she said tightly. Wexford gave her one of his tough implacable looks and showed her his card. It had seldom evoked so gratifying a response. The hard look went with a gasp of relief. She smiled wryly, then laughed. ‘You’d better come in.’ Suddenly she was cordial, the ladylike creature Burden had seen in Knobby Clark’s shop. ‘I can’t think what you want,’ she said. He was sure she had not recognised him. ‘But I’m evidently not in danger from you. I mean – well, before I knew who you were, I thought you were rather a lot of strange men for a lone woman to let into her home.’

A thin excuse for such a display of disgusted horror. In spite of the sun it was cold inside the flat. In winter it would be unbearable. They could see no sign of a radiator as they tramped through the first huge room and came into the place where the long windows were. Ivory-coloured double doors, the pain chipped on their mouldings, closed behind them. The furniture was much too small and much too new, but not new enough to be smart. No attempt had been made to achieve harmony between furniture and a noble decor. The elegant gleaming windows towered and shone between skimped bits of flowered cotton like society women fallen on evil days.

‘I’d like to see Mr Smith. When do you expect him back?’

‘I’d like to see him too.’ Now her brown-skinned curly face was alight with a curious half-amused rue. The glasses bobbed on her short nose. Since she had discovered who they were all her fear had gone and she looked like a woman infinitely capable of laughter, a great deal of which might be directed against herself. ‘Geoffrey divorced me five years ago,’ she said.

‘Do you know where he is now, Mrs Smith?’

‘Not Mrs Smith, Mrs Anstey. Noreen Anstey. I married again.’ She gave Wexford a wise elderly look, a look of wide and perhaps unpleasant experience. ‘I think you might tell me why you want him.’

‘Routine enquiries, Mrs Anstey.’ She was the last woman in the world to be fobbed off with that one, he thought. Her eyes clouded with reproach.

‘It must be something very mild,’ she said, the gentle mocking smile sending sharp wrinkles up around her eyes. ‘Geoff is one of the most honest people I ever met. Don’t you think he looks honest?’

Wexford was greedy for the photograph and when it was handed to him, a large studio portrait, he almost grabbed it. A swarthy, pleasant face, black hair, a pipe in the mouth. The Chief Inspector was too old a hand at the game to give opinions as to honesty on this evidence. He was still studying it when Burden said:

‘Have you ever seen this before?’ He put the lighter into her hands. They shook a little as she took it and she gave a gasp of delight, bringing it close to her face. ‘My lighter!’ He stared at her. ‘And I thought it had gone for ever!’ She tried to make it ignite, shrugged, her face still radiant. ‘Where did you find it? this is wonderful! Won’t you have a cup of tea? Do let me make you some tea.’

She sat on the edge of her chair and she reminded Wexford of a child on Christmas morning. Smith’s photograph was in her lap, the lighter in her hand. He had guessed her age at thirty-eight or thirty-nine but suddenly she looked much younger. There was a wedding ring on each hand. One was chased and patterned rather like the lighter she held, the other more like a Woolworth curtain ring.

‘Now, let’s get this clear,’ Wexford said. ‘This lighter is yours? You said your name was Noreen.’

‘So it is.’ He was sure he could believe her. Every word she spoke had the clear ring of honesty. ‘Noreen Ann Anstey. I always used to be known as Ann. First I was Ann Greystock and that was fine; then Ann Smith which is dull but not so bad. But Ann Anstey? It’s terrible, it’s like a stammer. So I use my first name.’

‘Your first husband gave you the lighter?’ Burden put in.

‘For Christmas. Let me see – nineteen fifty-eight it must have been.’ She hesitated and her smile was rueful. ‘We were getting on fine in those days. I lit his life.’

‘How did you come to lose it?’

‘How does one lose anything? It was last November. I had a handbag with a faulty clasp. I always carried it about with me even though I can’t afford to smoke these days.’ Wexford just glanced at the bare shabby furniture and then was sorry he had done so. Very little escaped her and now she was hurt.

With a brief frown, she went on, ‘One day the lighter was there and the next it wasn’t, I’d lost a necklace, a silver thing, the week before. Same old way. Some of us never learn.’ She fingered the lighter lovingly and met Burden’s censorious eye. ‘Oh, I know it’s valuable,’ she said hastily. ‘Everything Geoff gave me was pretty valuable. He isn’t rich but he’s the soul of generosity. I was his wife and nothing was too good for me. I’ve sold most of the other stuff . . .’ Pausing, she glanced at him again and he knew she was remembering their encounter. ‘I’ve had to,’ she said. ‘I’m a teacher at St Catherine’s, but I don’t manage very well. I don’t know why I kept this.’ She lifted her shoulders in the manner of one who regrets but regards regret as a waste of time. ‘Perhaps because it was so very personal.’ Her sudden smile was a flash of philosophy. ‘Ah, well, it’s nice to have been loved and remember it when it’s gone.’

You didn’t lose it, Wexford thought. Don’t strain my credulity too far. You may have lost it and Anita Margolis may have lost it, but you didn’t both lose it and within six months of each other.

‘Mrs Anstey,’ he said, ‘as his divorced wife, you must know where Mr Smith is now.’

‘He never paid me – what-d’you-call-it? – alimony. It was enough for me that he gave us the flat to live in.’ She caught her lower lip in small white teeth. ‘Ah, I see why you want him. Some tax thing because he’s an accountant. Well, if anyone’s been fiddling his returns it’s nothing to do with Geoff.’

‘Where can we find him?’

‘Black where you come from, Kingsmarkham.’ Wexford listened incredulously, recalling the visits they had paid to every Geoff Smith in the district. ‘Twenty-two, Kingsbrook Road, Old Kingsbrook Road, that is. He lived in Kingsmarkham before we were married and after the divorce he went back there.’

‘Have you ever heard him speak of a Miss Anita Margolis?’

The mention of another woman’s name did not please her. He could see that by the way the eager smile faded and her hands came tightly together. But she had an answer, an antidote, he thought, for every hint of poison. ‘Is she the girl who’s been fiddling her tax?’

‘Mrs Anstey, has your ex-husband a key to this flat?’

He wrinkled the already lined brown forehead. Her eyes were teak-colourd but glowing with life. It wouldn’t matter what she wore, Wexford reflected, you’d never notice. Her personality, her vitality – for Ann who lights my life – made of her clothes something she put on to keep her warm. For the first time he observed them, a pullover and an old pleated skirt.

‘A key?’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised. If he has, he doesn’t use it. Sometimes . . .’ She looked up at him under lowered lashes, but not coyly, not artfully, rather as if she doubted his ability to understand. ‘Sometimes I wish he would,’ she said. ‘One doesn’t care to mess up someone else’s life. It doesn’t matter about me. Contrary to the general opinion, there’s a whole heap of consolation in knowing one’s only getting what one thoroughly deserves. Geoff deserved the best and he got a kick in the teeth. I’d like to know thing had got better for him, that’s all.’ She had been lost and now she seemed to recollect the company she was in. ‘You must think I’m crazy talking to you like this. Sorry. When you’re alone a lot you get garrulous with visitors. Sure you won’t have that tea?’

‘Quite sure, thank you.’

‘When you see him,’ she said, ‘you might give him my – er, best wishes. Still, may be you don’t carry messages and may be he’s forgotten the past.’ Her face was full of tiny crinkles, a map of experience, and not all those lines, Wexford thought, were capable of being shrugged away.

‘For Ann who messed my life,’ said Burden when they were in the car. ‘What did he do, sir, come back and nick the lighter because he’d found a girl who might appreciate it?’

‘Let’s not sentimentalise him, shall we? He made a nasty mess himself – out of the girl he did give it to. I suppose he remembered that he’d once given a present to his wife that was highly appropriate as a gift to another Ann. Not all that generous and high-minded, is he, if he sneaked back to his ex-wife’s flat and stole it?’

‘At any rate, we don’t have to worry about him giving it to Anita Margolis nine years ago. He needn’t have given it to her till a few months ago. Probably didn’t even meet her till then.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Wexford. ‘I go along with that, don’t you, Drayton?’

Burden looked offended that Drayton had been considered worthy of consultation. ‘I daresay he killed her with one of those flick knives from Grover’s shop,’ he said sourly. Drayton’s back grew if anything slightly more rigid. Faintly amused, Wexford cleared his throat.

‘Take the Stowerton Road,’ he said to Drayton. ‘We’ll show this photo to Ruby Branch.’

She contemplated it and Wexford knew that it was hopeless. Too much time had passed, too many faces had been brought to her notice. The identity parade which should have settled things had merely unsettled her. She gave Wexford the photograph, shaking her ginger curls, and said:

‘How many more of you are going to come calling?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Ruby shifted on the blue and red sofa and stared bitterly at the uncarpeted floor.

‘Fellow called Martin,’ she said, ‘he’s only been gone ten minutes. He’s one of your lot, isn’t he?’ Wexford nodded, mystified. ‘First there comes this great big car, pink and mauve with letters on it and this fellow gets out . . .’

‘What fellow?’ Not Martin, he thought. What the hell was going on?

‘No, no, that chap with the red tie in your parade. As soon as I saw his car I remembered where I’d seen him before. Twice I saw him on that Tuesday night. Outside Cawthorne’s he was when I went by at ten past eight and I saw him again at eleven, sitting in his car, staring at everyone, like he was going off his head. But I told your bloke Martin all that just now.’

It was all Wexford could do to quell the laugh that rose in his throat. Ruby’s painted face was pink with indignation. Trying to sound severe, Wexford said:

‘You wouldn’t be saying all this because Mr Kirkpatrick asked you to, would you? You wouldn’t be led into temptation by a nifty rope of rhinestones?’

‘Me?’ Ruby drew herself up virtuously. ‘I never even spoke to him. He was just getting out of that daft car of his when your man drives up. Back he nips like one o’clock and off down the street. That Martin,’ she said, very aggrieved, ‘he was nasty to me. Some would call it threatening.’

‘And others,’ said Wexford, ‘would call it saving weaker vessels from their baser instincts.’

At Stowerton crossroads Cawthorne was nowhere to be seen, but his wife, bony knees displayed and earrings big as Christmas tree baubles dangling beneath yellow curls, had perched herself on a diesel pump to flirt with an attendant. In the launderette the portholes still whirled.