No Man's Nightingale (26 page)

NO PHONE CALL
came, enlightening or otherwise. Karen Malahyde kept what Turner and Cresswell had to tell her until the following morning when she passed it on to Burden face-to-face. He wanted to know what the men who had taken them away looked like but Turner and Cresswell had only been able to say that they wore masks and one of them was very tall and heavy. She had a better result from her visit to Michelle Fox who was still unable to speak but put down some interesting information on a sheet of paper.

The one that punched me has a tattoo on his right wrist. He lifted his arm to punch me and I tried to duck but still I saw the tattoo. It is of a woman in a long dress with a hat on and sort of rays coming out of it, maybe supposed to be an angel.

Karen read it to Burden and then handed him the sheet of paper. ‘They’re going to operate to mend the jaw today but it’ll be a day or two before she can talk.’

‘Have any of these people you’ve seen got a clue or a theory as to why anyone would want to snatch Crisp?’

‘Not that they told me and of course I did ask them.’

A search had started. Not just for the green van, but for Crisp himself, ‘the poor old guy’, as everyone now called him, even though he had been awaiting trial for murder. As many officers as Burden could muster were set to search every barn, garage and outhouse in an area of about sixty square miles, a gargantuan task.

Wexford had his own idea of the reason for the snatch. It had nothing to do with setting free a man whom many people thought innocent. These were no just deliverers and they were no friends of Crisp’s. His own idea was a grim one but he told no one. What would be the point of telling Burden? Everything was being done to find Crisp and revealing a theory the detective superintendent would only call far-fetched would do nothing to aid the search. Michelle’s note was read to him over the phone and he got himself into a bad temper by brooding on the way people thought angels were female – the influence of Hollywood, no doubt.

A chance meeting with Dr Crocker in the high street had resulted in an invitation to call in for coffee. It would be something to do with his blood pressure, Wexford thought, for although Len Crocker was retired and Wexford was registered with a young GP, his old friend still took a keen interest in his health. In accepting, Wexford had forgotten Maxine still worked for the Crockers, but even if he had remembered he wouldn’t have avoided the house in Wessex Road. That was no way to live. Such hazards had to be faced up to and a confrontation, if it came, taken in one’s stride.

It came sooner than he expected. He walked up the Crockers’ front path, admiring the Christmas roses and the daphne in the borders, and rang the bell. The door was answered by Maxine. The anticipated torrent of abuse or even spittle never came. She stood staring at him in silence. He said nothing. She stood aside and moved back, holding the door open for him to pass into the hall. By this time Dr Crocker had appeared from the living room. Wexford said, because it amused him to say it, confronted by Maxine’s stony face, ‘Mrs Sams and I are not on speaking terms.’

Maxine made a snorting sound. Inside the living room, the door closed, Dr Crocker asked what ‘all that was about’.

‘I revealed to the law something about her son she thought she had told me in confidence and maybe she had.’

‘Oh dear. Would you rather have a drink than coffee even though it is only midday?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ve been thinking how much easier police work must be in a warm climate than here, for instance. Not to mention in Scandinavia, so fashionable at the moment for crime and crime TV and crime fiction. I’ll tell you what I mean.’

‘I’ll take your blood pressure first.’ The doctor was waving his sphygmomanometer about. ‘Before you raise it with alcohol.’

His blood pressure satisfactorily showing a measurement of 130 over 70, Wexford went on, ‘In California, for instance, or practically anywhere in southern Europe, not to mention Africa, people have big areas of skin exposed. They wear vests or T-shirts with short sleeves, women have bare legs and short skirts. While here, from October till May everyone except teenagers covers up. Scars are hidden, hairiness is hidden and tattoos are.’

‘It’s worse in Muslim countries,’ said Crocker, bringing him a glass of Cloudy Bay. ‘Women veiled from head to foot with only the eyes exposed. What’s the point of this anyway?’

‘A tattoo,’ said Wexford. ‘You’ll have seen about the abduction of a man who was in prison on remand.’

‘Crisp, yes. Poor old guy.’

‘Well, the paramedic who got punched in the face saw a tattoo on the arm of one of the men who took him. A picture of some saint or madonna, it sounds like. She only saw it because, although it was freezing cold, he rolled up his sleeve before he hit her. The chances are this tattoo would be hidden all through the winter. I suppose he forgot about it.’

If Wexford had hoped that Crocker would say, Why, yes, he knew who that was, it was one of his patients, he was disappointed. In fact, he thought he had seen the telltale arm somewhere himself, exposed in some setting where the cold wouldn’t be felt, but he couldn’t remember where. He had tried and tried but couldn’t remember.

‘What do you think this madonna man has done with Crisp?’

‘Nothing, I hope,’ said Wexford. ‘But where is he? We always bear in mind that it’s much harder to hide a living man than a dead body. He’s been gone two days now.’

It was Dr Crocker who saw him to the front door and let him out. There was no sign of Maxine.

Clarissa had told Robin all about the coming meeting with Christian Steyner, his grandfather’s role in the encounter and details of her speculations as to what this could be about. Wexford had given her no clue as to his theory of the matter Steyner might wish to impart to her. He was possibly wrong anyway. He had suggested to Clarissa that he and she should meet in advance of Friday 8 February, the scheduled date, but he hadn’t expected she would bring Robin with her. He should have known, he told himself. Those two did everything together, being apart only for Clarissa to go to school and Robin to stack shelves.

‘Have you like any idea what it’s about?’ This was Clarissa. ‘It would be good to have – well, a clue.’

‘I know nothing as yet,’ Wexford said, dispensing wine. ‘We have to wait and see. If I were to suggest anything it would only be guesswork.’

‘You mustn’t worry,’ Robin said, putting his arm round Clarissa. ‘Remember, I’ll be there.’

‘I’m afraid you won’t,’ said his grandfather. ‘We don’t know this man, we know very little about him, but we do know that he wants just Clarissa to be there and one witness or arbiter, and that’s me. Sorry, but that’s the arrangement.’

‘You’ll be able to wait outside or just downstairs.’ She gazed adoringly into Robin’s eyes. ‘There’ll only be a wall and a staircase – well, a lift – between us.’

‘So Tesco are going to pay you for taking the day off, are they?’

‘I’ll take the day off pay or no pay,’ said Robin, the unpleasant look he gave his grandfather making Wexford laugh.

He saw them out, on their way to Kingsmarkham’s only club, and remembered suggestions he had heard of matchmaking. It was highly probable that Robin and Clarissa had never thought of marriage in connection with themselves, that if they thought of it at all, it was as something for ‘old’ people, those in their thirties, for instance. Any money that might come to Clarissa as a result of Friday’s disclosure, she would very likely think of as useful for buying a flat after she had graduated from university while her counterpart of fifty years before might have contemplated sharing it with the funds of a husband-to-be.

He put them and the ways of youth behind him and set his mind on Duncan Crisp, what they wanted him for and what they had done with him. If things were the way he believed they were, the madonna-tattoo man and the one with him would want Crisp dead. Alive he was always a threat and that threat increased as the time of his trial approached. They would want him dead for their revenge and their protection.

He had seen that tattoo somewhere. But where and when? Since October certainly and that meant that when he had seen it the weather had been cold. Only foolhardy teenagers needing to prove how cool they were went about in vests or T-shirts when there was snow on the ground, and this man was no adolescent. So where had he seen him? Sleep on it, he thought, and he went to join Dora who was riveted to a television programme about childbirth. Men are parents as much as women but few men want to watch babies being born on film while the woman who doesn’t is an exception. Wexford fell asleep after two minutes of it.

‘You talked in your sleep,’ Dora said when he woke. ‘D’you want to know what you said?’

‘Tell me.’ Maybe it was the name or even the address of the madonna-tattoo man.

‘You said, “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live.”’

‘Did I really?

‘Spare me the funeral service next time I’m watching TV.’

In the morning he remembered something about the man and the tattoo but not enough. For some unknown reason he connected it with Mrs Mukamba, the young and pretty Congolese woman who lived in a poor and run-down area of Stowerton. A house in Oval Road it was. If necessary he would knock or ring at all the doors in the street. It wasn’t necessary. He knew the house as soon as he saw it from the bags of rubbish and the two broken-down bikes in what had once been a front garden. Nardelie was her name, as pretty as she was. Nardelie Mukamba, the pious young woman who had attended Sarah Hussain’s memorial service. What decree or rule (or chance rather) had set Victoria Steyner in charming and elegant Kensington and Nardelie Mukamba here in this tip? Still, it was probably an improvement on backstreet Kinshasa. The bell being missing, he clattered the letter box. She came to the door, as lovely as ever in a thick woolly cardigan over her floral dress, with a fat baby on her hip and holding a toddler by the hand.

‘Good morning,’ she said, all smiles. ‘We have met. How are you?’

Wexford said he was very well, he hoped she was and what beautiful children she had.

‘A handful,’ she said and laughed. ‘A lovely handful. Please come in.’

It must be the wrong house, he thought as he followed her into a living room cluttered with toys. That man has no place here. It was very clean and the room was warmed by a single mobile electric radiator. The only warm room in the house in February, he guessed. She began to talk about the new vicar. She liked him, he had told her to bring her children to church if she liked and if they ran about a bit and made a noise – well, they were children, weren’t they? What did the people expect? But she liked to bring them up right. They must keep quiet and be good when she told them.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Wexford said. ‘I don’t even know if this is the right house but one day a couple of months ago I called here – I think – it was very cold. A man came up to the door and opened it with a key. His arms must have been bare because I saw a tattoo of a woman, a saint with a halo maybe, on his right wrist. I really do need to know who he is but I don’t suppose you can help me.’

She was laughing by now. ‘He lived upstairs. Not a good man, but a lovely voice he had, and my boys loved what they called “the lady”. You did, Jacques, didn’t you?’ The little boy nodded enthusiastically. ‘What was it? Do you remember?’

Jacques said promptly, ‘St Catherine, the man said.’

‘That’s right.’ Nardelie showed no dislike or disapproval. ‘Good boy. He’d been a bouncer in a nightclub, he told me. I was glad when he left, went to somewhere in Kingsmarkham. There was always people coming here, up and down the stairs. After drugs, I think, and I didn’t like that around my boys.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

‘Marty,’ said Jacques. ‘He said, you call me Marty.’

‘Martin Dennison, he was called, but everyone called him Marty.’

So he had been a dealer. Or had he? Wexford, walking back to his car, thought that he would not have jumped to that conclusion just from a number of visitors to the upper floor, though he might have done if he had had small children. A parking ticket on his windscreen caught his eye almost before the car itself did. What had he done or left undone? Stowerton still used old-fashioned parking meters and he had duly put in two exorbitant pound coins. But it hadn’t been enough. It was the first time ever that he had received a parking ticket and remembering a lifetime of being protected from such persecution made him laugh. Well, he would pay the fine, of course he would.

At any rate he wasn’t going to risk another by somehow parking in the wrong place outside the police station. He drove home and decided to walk to the high street.

‘A call came for you, Reg,’ Dora told him. ‘A Mr Steyner. Why use the landline?’

‘God knows. I didn’t know he had the number.’

Maybe he got it from his mother. Dora had written down the number Steyner left and Wexford called it but from his mobile.

‘Very good of you to call back.’ The voice was upper class. The kind of voice Marty Dennison had? More a superior banker’s voice, Wexford thought, though he didn’t know if banking was Steyner’s occupation. He also detected in it an undercurrent of nervousness. It was very slight but it was there, trepidation rather than rank fear. ‘I wonder if I may ask you a great favour?’

Wexford’s reaction to this sort of thing was always an abrupt or stiff reply. This time it was a cold ‘Of course’.

‘I believe you and I are due to meet Miss Hussain, Clarissa Hussain, on Friday.’

He knew very well they were. Wexford said nothing.

‘It seems rather awkward meeting like that, all strangers to each other, as I don’t imagine you know Miss Hussain very well.’

‘That isn’t so,’ Wexford said. ‘Clarissa rents a room in my daughter’s house. I’ve known her for nearly four months. She chose me to be present at this meeting.’

This Steyner ignored. ‘So I thought it might be a good idea for you and me to meet first. I mean prior to the three of us meeting. I could come to you in Kingsmarkham and we could have a talk about what I have to tell her.’