No Man's Nightingale (16 page)

‘Never mind the gloves,’ said Burden. ‘Never mind the faulty memories of those women at Dragonsdene House. You might ask why Crisp never mentioned this Questo business before.’

‘I was just going to,’ said Wexford.

‘Well, he says he didn’t forget, he just thought it would show him up in a bad light as a troublemaker.’

‘OK, I can believe it,’ said Wexford. ‘As a matter of fact Jason’s mother told me the story weeks ago but without the names.’ He met the astonished eyes of the two officers. ‘People are strange,’ he said and he thought of the Emperor Valentinian and Innocence the bear.

AND WHEN NEXT
she came to Wexford’s house, Jason’s mother began telling him the story all over again, albeit in a slightly different version. Jason was now a hero. He had mended his ways when his daughter was born but it was only now that he had made a positive move to ally himself with the law. Or ‘work with the police’, as Maxine put it.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they made him a special constable,’ she began, ‘but you’d know more about that than me.’ This was certainly true, Wexford thought, laying aside Gibbon for politeness’ sake. ‘He went to Mr Burden of his own accord, you know, went to volunteer what he knew would be vital information. Out of the goodness of his heart it was, no one told him he ought to do it, nothing like that. What’s more, that fella Crisp had caused him a load of trouble, bringing the whole store to a standstill. Anyone else wouldn’t have stood up for Crisp the way Jason did, they’d have left him to stew in his own juice. Now he’ll have to take the stand in court and give a testimonial but Jason will do it. There’s many as would flinch but not Jason. He’s a tough nut.’

Wexford was aware that he ought to set Maxine right. There was of course no prospect of Jason going into a witness box and giving evidence either for or against Duncan Crisp. Crisp hadn’t done it, Crisp was innocent and free (like the bear) but he couldn’t face telling all that to Maxine, couldn’t face the argument that would ensue. He had never yet argued with Maxine and he didn’t want to start now. Besides, he had an appointment with Georgina Bray.

He walked to her house, noting that Christmas decorations were already going up inside houses and one of his neighbours had a Chistmas tree, as yet undecorated. Mrs Bray, too, had put up a few dispirited paper chains, the old-fasioned kind that people used to make themselves out of coloured paper strips. Wexford, taking a seat under one such chain, remembered making one for his children years ago, licking the end of the strip and linking it with the previous one.

‘I think it’s a pity to buy everything ready-made, don’t you?’ said Georgina. ‘The things you make yourself are unique, after all, and much prettier.’

Wexford couldn’t agree and again didn’t want to start an argument. Any Christmas decorations he made would be a disaster, he thought. Still, it was a relief to be able to talk to this woman without being sworn at or begged for forgiveness.

‘My husband,’ she said, ‘says it’s ridiculous putting up decorations when you’re not religious but I like to do it for old times’ sake.’

Having no idea what she meant, Wexford only smiled, then said, ‘You were a close friend of Sarah Hussain’s but you’re not a churchgoer yourself?’

‘None of us are, not me, not my husband or the children. Sarah didn’t seem to care. She and my husband had long talks about theology. They were quite close – too close, I sometimes thought, though there was nothing in it.’ She gave a shrill laugh. ‘He said he liked talking to an intelligent woman for a change.’

Was this the verbal abuse she had mentioned? Perhaps. ‘Mrs Bray – or do you prefer Ms?’

‘Oh, call me what you like. So long as you don’t call me too late for breakfast, as my father used to say.’

He was rather taken aback, wondering why on earth Sarah Hussain had chosen this woman for a friend. Loneliness? Any port in a storm, as
his
father used to say? ‘Mrs Bray, would you tell me what you know of Sarah’s family? And her husband’s family. And what Clarissa knows – if in fact you know that.’

‘What a lot of “knows”,’ said Georgina with a giggle. ‘If you want a family tree I can’t do that. Anyway, when people get into third cousins once removed and all that stuff, I’m lost.’

‘So am I,’ Wexford said. ‘I don’t want that sort of thing. How about her husband? I don’t even know what he was called apart from Leo.’

Georgina was silent for a moment. As her face grew pensive so she seemed to become more intelligent. And when at last she spoke, she sounded like the close friend she had claimed to be. ‘His father was killed in the crash. His mother was still alive when Sarah came here. He had a twin brother, an identical twin in point of fact. He was called Christian, and when she told me I thought, with a name like that and being
identical
you’d think she might have taken up with him, but when I suggested it – maybe I shouldn’t have – she got really angry.

‘She talked about Leo a lot when I first knew her. That was four years ago. She had just come here and she seemed to need a friend. Well, I was that friend. I expect you’re thinking we didn’t have much in common, her so brainy and me, well, not so brainy.’ He might well have been thinking along those lines, but he hadn’t been. His thoughts were centred briefly on this woman having once told him that she had met Sarah not four years before but at university. ‘She had really adored him,’ Georgina went on. ‘But I expect you’ve heard that already. His name was Leo Steyner. I’ll write it down for you because it’s got a weird spelling.’ She fetched a sheet of paper from a desk in the corner of the room and wrote Sarah Hussain’s husband’s name down in large block letters.

For about five minutes Georgina digressed into a long and very repetitive description of Sarah’s grief, the poetry she wrote, all for Leo, the diary she had kept throughout her short married life and frequently reread, his mother she kept in touch with, often staying with her – all this coming to an end when Clarissa was born.

‘But you didn’t know her then, did you?’

‘She told me.’ It seemed to Wexford that Georgina explained herself rather too hastily. ‘She said she didn’t talk about her husband any more. She thought about him just as much but she no longer talked about him. When I got to know her really well I asked her how Clarissa had – well, how she came to exist. Leo, her husband, had died years before. She looked me straight in the eye and said she’d prefer not to say. She liked to be open and honest about things but there were some things that just had to stay private. There were questions I wanted to ask but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, I felt too awkward. I’m sure I was blushing all the time.’

Wexford thanked her and left. Sylvia had invited him to lunch, it being her day off. The altercation over Robin and Clarissa apparently forgotten, she had been doing rather a lot of this lately and he thought it was therapy for what she must consider an idle life. Poor old Dad, not enough to do, often at a loose end, give him one of his favourite unhealthy dishes, perk him up. It need not happen more than, say, once a fortnight. She mentioned her son and his girlfriend only to say that they had been busying themselves in arranging Sarah Hussain’s memorial service.

The dish today was lamb’s liver and bacon, mashed potatoes and peas that had once been frozen but tasted like the fresh kind. Women, he thought, were no longer prepared to sit down with a colander and shell peas. It puzzled him that they had done it for so long. Ever since Georgina had told him about Sarah’s insistence on privacy and how she, Georgina, had blushed as if she detected something to her unmentionable, he had been silently speculating. Now he brought it out into the open.

‘Have you ever known anyone who inseminated herself?’

‘Who
what
?’

‘Come on, Sylvia, you heard. Have you?’

‘The thing is to use a turkey baster, I believe, but I’m not really sure what that is. I never needed that kind of thing myself.’

‘Don’t pull your rank,’ said Wexford.

She laughed. ‘I heard of someone doing it and she chose a gay friend to be the donor. Apparently, he was very good-looking and had a nice personality.’

He left it, moving on to another enquiry. He thought he’d better ask even if she bit his head off. ‘What news on the Robin–Clarissa front?’

‘It’s still going strong.’ There was to be no severing of heads. ‘I wouldn’t tell Mother, she’d be shocked, but I bought a whole lot of packets of condoms for Robin. The pharmacist did a double take in case I might be a transvestite but he sold them to me. Robin was
grateful.’

‘So I should think would Clarissa be.’

‘I wasn’t bothered about her,’said Sylvia, bringing in the Eve’s pudding. ‘I don’t want to be a grandmother just yet.’

Happy to be on good terms with his daughter once again, Wexford walked home by a circuitous route and one which took him along Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham’s millionaires’ row, from the heights of which he could have a panoramic view of Cheriton Forest and the Downs. Such walks were not so much for his health and his figure as for thought. He had sometimes read of writers and artists giving interviews in which they said how much more fruitful a walk was for thoughts and the working out of problems than sitting at a desk or standing at an easel, where you only fell asleep. Falling asleep was not possible even while taking a break by sitting on the bench at the crown of the hill. It was a day of sudden gusts of wind which would blow you awake if you momentarily dozed off.

There was no one on the bench just as he had met no one while climbing the hill. The citizens of Kingsmarkham were not inclined to walking, especially in December. A good many of them had gone by in their cars.

The thoughts and observations that had gone through his mind in the past quarter of an hour were mainly concerned with Georgina Bray and brought him to the conclusion that she was a fantasist. Or ‘fabulist’, which he thought an even better word for it. She invented events but she also embroidered. He was sure about her mentioning the meeting at university. He wouldn’t have been mistaken about that. Was the woman’s motive to impress her hearer, to make that hearer believe that she was cleverer (‘brainier’ as she would put it) than might be assumed from her conversation? In that case, why tell him her intelligence was so inferior to Sarah Hussain’s? When he had been a working policeman and interrogating a suspect or just a potential witness, he had put probable liars to the test by asking them to repeat the story they had just told him. It was rare for such people to succeed in repeating the same narrative in accurate detail. But he could hardly ask Georgina Bray to do that. He was a policeman no longer.

If she was lying – ‘fantasising’ would be the kinder term – there was the implication that everything she had told him was untrue. No doubt Sarah’s husband really was called Leo Steyner and he really had died in a car crash but had he a an identical twin brother? Was he called Christian? He took out of his pocket the piece of paper on which Georgina Bray had written Leo’s name: Leo Steyner. Why did he want to know it anyway? It was of no use. Would there be any point in finding Christian Steyner, a man no doubt long married and probably a father, a man who by now had half forgotten Sarah Hussain?

Perhaps he could put all this to the test by trying it out on Thora Kilmartin. Thora he could trust. She was, of course, lumbered with that difficult husband. But there was a way of circumventing him. One of the advantages of the mobile phone, he sometimes thought, was that the chances were that when you made a call on it you were sure of the identity of the woman or man who answered. Possibly there were instances of someone lending her phone to someone else but they must be rare. At any rate, he knew that when he called Thora’s number it would be she who answered and not Tony Kilmartin.

He completed his homeward walk thinking of Jason Sams and his intervention in the case of Duncan Crisp, made no doubt not, as Jason’s mother thought, out of public-spiritedness or respect for the law but just to look well with the police. Laughing at Maxine’s tales of Jason and his partner, child and siblings had been suspended around the time of Jeremy Legg’s car accident but he and Dora had revived it again once danger seemed past. After all, the prospect of another anecdote of Jason’s business succees, wild estimate of Isabella’s future or comment on Nicky’s good fortune in having such a partner, had been something to mitigate the presence of Maxine in the house. Now, cautiously, they could start being amused again.

Thora Kilmartin he called when he got home. Their parting had been friendly in a cold sort of way but now she seemed genuinely pleased to hear his voice. Of course they must meet again but she would be coming to Kingsmarkham for Sarah’s memorial service. Would he be there? He had forgotten about the memorial service but now he knew it was taking place he would. Perhaps they could talk afterwards. Thora said her husband wouldn’t be with her, and from her tone when she mentioned the man’s name, he could almost see the distortion of her face and the casting up of eyes.

Wexford and Dora had their shared laughter and their amused mulling over Maxine’s narrative of the morning – they had it just once. Although they didn’t know it, the laughter was due to stop. Almost from this moment Jason Sams was no longer funny. It would not be an exaggeration to call Jason Sams a figure of tragedy. For them it began with Maxine not coming in to work and not phoning to explain why not, an almost unheard-of happening.

‘Lost her mobile, I expect,’ said Dora.

‘Hasn’t she looked down the back of the sofa?’

Maxine hadn’t lost her phone. She was not thinking about phones except of their use as a means of summoning medical help and this had been done within two minutes of Jason going into his daughter’s bedroom at seven thirty in the morning. In spite of Nicky’s telling him to leave her alone, be thankful for a bit of peace, he had been surprised by no sound coming from Isabella’s room, no crying or shouting and no sudden appearance of the child calling out for Daddy. She was still in her cot and she was jerking up and down, her whole body making violent rhythmic movements. Jason called her name, ‘Isabella!’